Jealousy

Total sense:

In the beginning...

... was the cunt.  And by cunt I mean the entire female reproductive system since it is unhelpful to wield the anatomist’s knife and divide that apparatus into its constituent parts. When looking at origins, both personal and communal, that is the one known fact.  We were all conceived in the womb of a woman, grew and were nurtured there.  In the cunt we developed from an undifferentiated group of cells into the living breathing creatures that we are.  From the cunt, normally through the muscular contractions of the mother but often, especially nowadays, with the help of a surgeon’s knife, we were born.  Regardless of the exact details of our delivery, in the cunt we were made.  I cannot stress this enough.  However deep we dig into embryology, however much we know of the cultural traditions surrounding conception, gestation and childbirth, all that knowledge is created and stored in brains that were formed within our mother’s cunt.  It is the source of our entire being.   Contrary to the Gospel of John, it is by, and in, the cunt that all things are made.

And, in English, cunt is the word which, like God to the Jews, must not be spoken.  It is taboo.    Vilified it may be, and cunt is still more acceptable as a grave insult than it is as an anatomical term, but its taboo nature provides strong evidence of sacred mystery.  For men, and I am one, the mystery is deepened.  We came from a cunt but we do not possess one.   We are outsiders to the sacred mystery.  We look on but cannot participate in the strange and cyclical nature of the lives of women.  Like our genitals our experience is teleological – we think in a straight line – from beginning to end.  From Alpha to Omega.  Genesis to Apocalypse. It is also fundamentally dualistic.   Women are, and always will be, the other that we are not.  And never can be.  We can, should we feel the need, through surgery and hormones alter the outside of our bodies to correspond to the gender we feel ourselves to be but even then cannot replicate within ourselves the full experience of being a biological woman.

Men are estranged.  They are split off from their source.  Deep down, we are aware of this and resent it deeply.  It is impossible to determine just when and where human beings became aware of the male role in reproduction but we know there are still cultures surviving where this role was unknown until very recently.  In their book, Sex at Dawn Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá [1] cite anthropological studies of many societies in which it is believed that the input from multiple men is required.  Even here in the scientific West, the exact roles of egg and sperm were unknown until very recently and we still have much to learn.  Of which I will be writing later.  And even the scientific facts as we now understand them have no real impact on our emotional responses.  We see women’s bellies swell; we can maybe put our hand on them and feel the kicking.   We know that inside that dark and wet space a baby is developing.  Our real part in the process, however, was brief and long ago. However much we may love our children they have ever been apart from us and never a part of us.  Barring the occasional hospital mishap, the maternity of a child is certain.  Prior to genetic testing, the paternity has always been a matter of doubt. Hence laws and customs have arisen in many, but not all, cultures which aim to eliminate the possibility of alien seed.  An aim that no society, however, severe the consequences may be to the women who “stray”, has ever achieved.  Or can ever achieve.  It is an impossible goal.  And, deep down, we know it to be.

Nevertheless, there is much importance in our culture on “bloodlines”.  Many books have been written, for example, concerning the possible bloodline from Jesus – whose own ancestral bloodline forms a major part of this book.  The most popular, albeit by far the least valuable, of these being, of course, the execrable Da Vinci Code.  Such bloodlines, however, are absurd since they are only concerned with the father line.  It would only take one woman in this line to have “played away” for the entire bloodline to come to an abrupt end.  The chances of such an adulterous liaison having occurred sometime in a long line of mothers are beyond my power to calculate but they seem very large.  Matrilineal bloodlines, however, make perfect sense.

Much of our culture, therefore, is based on an absurdity. From the monarch to the serf patrilineal descent forms the basis of inheritance law.  Many companies style themselves to be So-and-so and Sons, more in pious hope than certainty.  All this is not to denigrate and condemn women, as so many have and still do; it is simply a recognition of reality. It is the knowledge of that reality that has led men to segregate and control women.  To list all the ways this has been would be beyond the scope of this book although there will be many examples herein.  There is no blame attached to any particular man, although the injustice and cruelties are egregious and continuing.  Blame is not the point.  The problem is structural and so must the solution be.  Furthermore, the structure was designed and built by men – albeit with the collusion of women.  We, in the West,  are currently in the process of tinkering with the structure and making it more “woman-friendly”  but this does not address the fundamental issue.  We may be adding more toilets and crèches so that women can occupy a more equal place in the workforce but that does not mean equality since in order to succeed in that workplace women must adopt the rules that men have imposed to suit their own needs. 

In order to discern the nature of the structure it is necessary to begin at the beginning.  We have not evolved from apes.  No, we ARE apes.  No cosmic hand fashioned us from clay and set us up in dominion.  Whatever dominion we may have has been asserted by force.  We have killed or displaced other species in order to achieve the dominant position we now hold.   The history of humanity is a history written in blood.  It is also, however, a history written in music, dance, painting and poetry.  It is a history written in the search to understand the patterns of the universe we inhabit.  It is a story, above all, written in love and co-operation.  For without the last two qualities we would never have spread from our African homeland.  

We do not, however, generally erect statues to commemorate the achievements of people working collectively and co-operatively.  Such statues are built to honour the warrior – in whatever field.  And such statues are mainly men.  There is no statue to those who conquered fire, first learnt to make pots, cook food, dress skins or weave cloth.  They are forgotten, and yet human expansion would have been impossible without them.  On the other hand, Admiral Nelson, to take one example, is honoured extravagantly in the centre of London yet his major contribution to history was killing human beings more efficiently than others of his time.  From the viewpoint of the imagined Martian, who has contributed more to human welfare? 

(this is an excerpt from the book on which I am working) 

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Having returned to this blog, I have begun to reread earlier posts and cringed at some of  what I wrote then.  Tempted briefly to delete or edit them, I have decided to let them stay.  Whether I agree with what I said then or whether I feel I could have worded things better is, in the end, irrelevant.  They were said and I do not wish them unsaid.  For that would be lying.  I felt them to be true at the time of writing and my later opinion is irrelevant to that.  To delete them would, I feel, be akin to the doctoring of photographs that occurred in the Soviet Union or to the more recent wholesale deletion of previous statements and promises on the UK Conservative Party website.  If anyone is moved to trawl through the archives they will inevitably discover weakesses in argument inconsistencies and contradictions.  When and if you do, I would be grateful to have them brought to my attention.  I am aware that I am more than capable of triviality, superficiality, bullshit and cant and I would appreciate the opportunity either to defend my position or, as is very likely would need to be the case, be given the opportunity to acknowledge it and move on.  Conversely, if you find anything of value I would like to be told of that as well.  My ego loves flattery!

That being said, one thing remains constant.  I felt then and still feel impelled to tell the story of Inanna.  I have lived with it for well over a decade now and have, in too many ways to count, found echoes it in my own life.  Descent and ascent, descent and ascent etc have been constant.  No sooner do I think that I have it sorted than something happens that throws me into another repetition of the cycle.  At least I know what is happening now.  That much have I learnt.  Inanna's stories are not for the time and place of ancient Sumer - they are stories of a deep truth to human existence. That my experience and interpretation of that truth changes over time is a clear indication of only one thing; that I am alive - for only the dead cease to grow.

So I return here.  And have determined to continue to write my current understanding.  I hope to find readers but will not be dettered by their lack.  It is a forum for me to explore and express my feelings and beliefs.  And I will use it as such.

After a very long hiatus, I am re-activating this blog.  I do not expect to have retained many, if any, readers so these words will probably fall on the stoney ground.  Nevertheless, I will write them.

For a long time now my online presence has mainly centred on Facebook.  I have found it, and still found it, an invaluable space to meet people and interact with them.  I enjoy the immediate feedback and the insights it gives me.  However, it is not really a space for writing in a long form or for writing that I would like to keep.  It is too ephemeral and the necessity to scroll through masses of information in order to find a nugget, be it of gold or dross, is too daunting. 

I have three pages.  One is the personal page.  There is also a page on which I will post about my thoughts and practice with the Motherpeace tarot dack.  I have named this "A Light in the Labyrinth" The third is linked more directly to this blog and is called "Inanna Emergent". 

From now on, I will be posting here regularly and having links, when appropriate from these FB pages.  I hope that those who may venture here from FB will browse the archive and comment.