House of Inanna

Website

2011-07-22T17:09:00.003+02:00

Have not been doing much writing lately - nor updating the blog. The thing is that I hve been busy trying to master the software to get a website up. It now is - although by no means complete. Please visit it: http://www.houseofinanna.co.uk

2011-06-08T00:25:00.004+02:00

Last night someting happened. I was talking to K and in the course of it I realised many things. Foremost among these was that I had forgotten the vision that took me to Hungary. The details of how I arrived at this are not really relevant - they were a synchronicity of events over which I had no control. But I felt a return of the vision, of the deep conviction that I had to move there; that there was work for me to do.

And the most important thing is that the work was largely unstarted by the time I left. For what happened was that I became overwhelmed at the scale of what I had seen and lost all confidence that I could even approach realising it. It seemed so damn big and I felt so damn small. Not only that but I felt frightened. i felt that I was hubristic, particularly as my own personal life was in such a mess -purely as a result of my actions. So I aimed small and tucked the vision into a neat little pocket in my consciousness where I always hide away the uncomfortable truths that I do not wish to face. And forgot it.

What became clear last night was, however, that this forgetting may have been a necessary part of the process. For I had to realise who I am and what I have been called to do. In order to do this, I had to aim low and fail. Now I know that I must aim high for only then can I hope to hit the distant target. I must remember the vision and keep that in my sights.

For the vision was real, and it still is. This is what I learned last night. It came to me; I did not seek it. It has, in different forms, been with me as long as I can remember. Sometimes, it has been clear and direct, as it was that day when I first went to Dobogöko and saw the Danube hundreds of metres below. Memories of a time when I had been there before flooded into me and I felt both at home and thorougly alien. It was strange and it was exhilarating. Until the doubts set in and I came face to face with my own imperfections - my petty hurts and grievances - and I enacted them. By turns grandiose and self-effacing, I struggled in the day-to-day and sank ever deeper into despair, losing all that I had previously held dear in the process. And returned, feeling defeated, to England.

The operative word here, however, is "feeling". For I was not, in fact, defeated. I am still here and yesterday realised that so is the vision. It has not gone. I cannot fully articulate it yet, but the time is soon approaching that I can. I will, Inanna willing, return to Hungary to take aim again. But I will be stronger and more determined; less limited by fear and uncertainty. I will own the vision and the source of that vision. For it did not come from me. I did not seek it. I fled it. But I could not escape it. Now I must learn to embrace it

Tenderness

2011-05-30T15:38:00.002+02:00

Shortly after I posted my last piece, a friend took me to task a little for not mentioning tenderness - which was, after all, Lawrence's original title for Lady Chatterley's Lover. She was right to have done so, and my only defence is that I was writing in passion, not in any considered way, as a reaction to the idealisation of sex.

I think, when I originally wrote about the "interplay of vulnerabilities" it was tenderness I had in mind, but this was not exactly made clear. In an intimate relationship each partner reveals to the other(s) certain aspects of her or his self which would otherwise be kept hidden. It is in the acceptance of these aspects that tenderness emerges. We are all vulnerable, for we are all mortal and there is, I believe, a dread of annihilation deep within all of us. So we look for the tender touch of someone who accepts us in our frailty. Or we over-compensate in games of power and despair in which we hide our vulnerability behind a facade of mastery and performance.

I am aware that this needs a little expansion so I will try to explain what I mean by that. I have, over the years, watched quite a lot of pornography. However, I have found very little that i find truly erotic. For it is all about mastery and performance. Erections never fail. Women always reach orgasm - or, very badly, pretend they have. Never do any of the participants suddenly realise that their muscles have cramped - never does a clumsy movement of elbow or knee result in the abrupt disappearance of desire. Never, above all, in all the detailed and energetic genital stimulation does tenderness enter. Never do they laugh. It is all taken so bloody seriously. It is the inverse side of the abstracted, idealised, non-physical sexuality that the men in the video were lauding. In neither case is the full humanity of the participants recognised.

For we are not just bodies and we are not just spiritual beings, we are human. We may aspire but we often fail. We have fears and insecurities that can manifest at any time. Erections fail and desire can vanish. This is a fact. Gay or straight, we need comfort and reassurance when the night seems just too dark. We need to know that we are loved when our bodies fail to perform as we would like. We need to laugh and we need to cry at our frailties. We need to be loved as we are and not as we would like to be or, worse, what we imagine the other would like us to be. We exist not as angels or demons but as a mixture of the two with one or the other being dominant at any one time. I feel that it is not for our perfection that we can be truly loved but for those myriad imperfections that make us human.

I think that all this was in Lawrence's mind when he wrote. In many ways he failed for he had his own unresolved issues, but this is not really relevant. The intent and the attempt was honest, sincere and revolutionary. Connie and Mellors are human beings, meeting and loving in a space of vulnerability. In a space of tenderness. In the rain and under the sky.

The divine feminine

2011-05-28T21:48:00.005+02:00

I have strayed back into the blogosphere yet again. I suppose it is because I feel the need to connect with my passions. For a while now, I have been trying to get past a very severe case of writer's block in the book I am writing about Inanna. For I have been having problems with reconciling two approaches. First, I have been striving to be as academically rigorous as I can, being very careful not to make any assertions that I cannot support from established and accepted sources. However, this has made for a very dull read. Furthermore, it does not take account of my own journey and the very personal relatinship I have with Her and why I feel she is deeply relevant to today.

So I thought perhaps it would be a good thing for a while to come back to this blog. To reconnect. To work through some stuff and become more authentic and less concerned with the judgements of putative readers. And, almost immediately, I found my ire raised and my hear pumping. I checked onto one of the most informative blogs, Medusa Coils and found a video from a group of men who expressed a love of the divine feminine.

It made me angry and I posted a comment which may or may not be approved by the blogger. So, immediately, I was reconnected with my passions. And this is good. for I am, first and foremost, passionate. I realise now as I write that what angered me the most was the total lack of any passion within these men. They spoke as the embodiment of reason. They spoke of their desire to worship but did not mention their desire to fuck. Sexual desire is not reasonable, it is messy. Within it, at least as far as I am concerned, are drives to both dominate and be dominated. Within sex, there are sweat and bodily fluids, groaning and panting. It is, above all, physical and emotional. It is the interplay of vulnerabilities and, when it is at its best, the loss of control and ego. And, most importantly, it does not depend on the union of male and female "energies" but can express itself in any configuration of genders. Desire is wholly unreasonable. It is one of our deepest drives, second only to survival.

Of course, it must be tempered and mediated by reason. There must be full consent between both, or all, parties. Without such consent, the interplays are lost. It is a game, and laughter may well occur - as well may tears. It is deadly serious, for vulnerabilities are revealed and may be exploited. On either,both, or all, sides. It is, above all, always risky. Or it should be. Pushing the participants beyond the zone of comfort into a deeper understanding of themselves. Which can, at times, be unpleasant.

None of this figured in the video. Desire was abstracted. The physicality, despite the talk of the divine nature of women's bodies, was not really there. They spoke of "woman" in the abstract - of male and female as "energies". Sure, on one level this is true, but there is also the level of a shared humanity. In sex, it is human bodies and their sensations that are involved. In the songs of the sacred marriage, Inanna does not abstract into the energetic. Rather, she calls on Dumuzzi to plough her vulva. She brings the act into the physical realm. For it is, first and foremost, a physical act.

My own puberty coincided with the Lady Chatterley trial and I remember taking the copy of the paperback, sneakily borrowed from my mother's and stepfather's bedroom, into the bathroom. It prompted my first ever ejaculation. Lawrence had many faults, but what i remember to this day was that both participants were portrayed as human. "Tha shits and tha pisses" said Mellors, "tha'rt a real woman". The divine feminine does neither.

A year of change. And now.....

2010-11-09T12:18:00.002+01:00

It has been well over a year since I last entered the blogosphere in any meaningful way. And it has been a year of major change. For one thing, I had to leave Hungary as it had become unfeasible for me to remain there. It was time to give up the apparently unending struggle to survive and keep a roof over my head and return to Britain. Which I did.

I seem ever to walk on the edge of crisis, sometimes tipping over. Then I fall into a darkness which seems to be all-encompassing and have to inch forward step-by-step until I reach the point where the darkness begins to dim. And then clear. Until the next time. i am not complaining. This is the way things are.

I walked again into the labyrinth and all was stripped away. No longer teacher or priest, I was just a man. Lost and afraid. With no label to cling to. Only the need somehow to survive and get through.

The thing is that, athough very painful and frightening at the time, the whole process has been liberating. Life was reduced to basic simplicities. There was no need to theorise or to explain. All that I could do was to accept the situation and slowly climb back up. And heal. And then begin again.

So I returned to basics. After a time of head-clearing and easy routine I then remembered what Inanna had told me in the dream which has impelled this last decade. It was a simple, one-sentence, statement. All She said was, "I want you to tell my story". Just that. No more. No whys or wherefores. No frills or buttons. Just telling a story.

So that is what I am doing. And that, I now know is why I went to Hungary. It was there that so many facets of the story came clear. No longer was I able to spark ideas with another and allow the them to dissipate into speeech. Language problems and the simple fact of being alone precluded that. So the ideas remained inside where they mixed and fermented and a narrative began to emerge in which I could see that rather than being absent for three thousand years She has been present beneath and within the dominant discourse of our civilisation. Hidden, maybe, but ever there. The rise of Yahweh and then of Christianity may have eclipsed Her for a while but eclipses are nothing but temporary shadow or obstruction. They move away and the radiance behind then shines again. Besides which, the eclipse was never total for the obstruction was and is riddled with holes.

Now times are still not easy. But they are better. And the story is being written. I have no idea what the future holds but hope pray that I will finish what I have begun. And not get lost again in ego and label.

Miracles every day

2009-10-12T18:12:00.004+02:00

We are all miracles. The fact that we are alive and conscious is highly improbable. But what is even more improbable is love. And love surrounds us - it is the sea in which we swim, even when we do not know it. The world in which we live and the bodies we inhabit are intrinsically objects of joy and delight. This is our birthright.

And yet, for a huge proportion of the people living on this wonderful planet, this birthright is denied. And it has been for a very long time. Jesus is reported to have said that the poor are always with us and the history of the last few thousand years seems certainly to have fulfilled this prophecy. Some of us, and I include myself in this number, are privileged and wealthy beyond the dreams of our ancestors. Others, and these are perhaps in the majority, are poorer now than they have ever been.

There is a myth, a very powerful myth, of progress. This is a myth that is very useful to those of us who have benefited materially from what can only be called the thefts of our ancestors. They thought that they had a divine mandate to acquire more than their share of the world's resources. Far more, in reality, than they could actually use. I have just poured myself a glass of wine. A small thing and not, in this wine-growing country, very expensive. But, as I drink it, I know that there will be someone dying of thirst or water-borne disease.

What is the appropriate response? This is a serious question and one to which I have given thought for most of my life. I could deny myself this pleasure - wear a hair shirt and live lice-ridden in some penitential purgatory, revelling in my own virtue as I preach sermons on the virtues of poverty. In the meantime, however, people will still starve and kill one another in the name of some transcendental being or other who has ordained that his word is supreme. They will say that they alone have the truth - that if all "men" should follow them then paradise will be the reward. Thus, they decree that the unsaved must repent or perish - or often repent and perish. For the reward is not of this "fallen" world but is of the next - the one we will enter. Paradise.

I was watching a young child the other day. I was waiting in line at a supermarket checkout and she was in front of me. Most times I get deeply impatient and misanthropic in these circumstances - everyone is moving too slowly and there is a part of me that wants to kill. This time, however, I was glad to wait. For this young girl was exploring her foot. She was totally focussed on it. Touching it with her hands then and putting to her mouth. We made eye contact and she invited me to share her joy and delight in her discovery of her body. She communicated her pleasure to me and I responded with my eyes and face. No words. For she was not yet verbal. She did not yet know that such things were to be measured and judged.

But a lesson soon followed. Her mother replaced the shoe the child had been wearing. Shoes she did not need for walking wasn't an option at the time. she was strapped into a buggy. The child protested. Sne cried but was unheard. Her mother was busy, as all adults are, and did not see how important her naked foot was to the child. The door to delight closed as all such doors do as we grow up. Shoes are important, aren't they? As are all clothes. We must hide ourselves behind them and not let the world intrude. Our masks. This we learn from incidents like this. And pass it on to our children.

The child did not know me and we will never meet again. But she reminded me of something I had forgotten. Buried. A time of original innocence before I was taught that I was wrong to be as I was. A child with a whole new world to explore and experience. A miracle.

There is a story in the founding myth of christianity in which in which children flocked to Jesus and his disciples tried to stop and control them. What he is alleged to have said was very curious: "suffer little children to come unto me and forbid them not - for of such is the kingdom of heaven". In the many years in which I tried to be a christian these words haunted me. Because what they say is vrey important - that children are naturally attracted to love and that what is important is that barriers are not put in their way. And yet, the doctrine of original sin was conceived that fundamentally contradicted the words of the putative founder of the religion that came to dominate the old Roman Empire and then much of the world. In the name of Jesus the words he is alleged to have spoken were denied and perverted. Children had to forced to the truth - and schools were created whose sole purpose was to break this natural urge to move to delight and love and force them to bend their knees to will of old and woman-denying men. Sterile and without grace that the man they purported to worship proclaimed to be the natural inheritance of all.

And thus the Roman Empire with its love of death and war - its delight in conquest and the father right - adopted and distorted the vision of its putative founder. With the results we now see all around us. Whether Jesus was a historical figure or not - and I have my doubts on this - what he said in that sentence and others attributed to him are the words of a child of the Goddess - a man who, according to the Gospels was anointed as Priest or King by a woman- some say Magdalen.

They were the words of one who knew that all human life was a miracle - and who spoke ofthose who denied the divinity of human beings and their natural instinct to move towards truth thus:

It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones

.

Children do not need to be saved. They already partake of divinity. Whether they be born in New York or in Africa, they are equally valuable. And so are we all. We are all children of Goddess, whether we born to Islam, Judaism, Christianity or any other of the institutions of power, hatred and control that have been erected to destroy the divine spark that is born within each of us.

In this there is hope. What human beings have created - this web of deceit and division - can also be overcome by human beings. Within us all, original innocence lies sleeping and can be reawakened. The first thing is to recognise the basic lie - original sin. Then we can begin to leave it behind and recognise the basic human drive for love and delight.

Doors closing

2009-09-27T17:45:00.002+02:00

It is a time of change. I have just finished my final weekend teaching on the Priest/ess of Danu training course here in Budapest. I have been doing this for three years, helping a very wonderful woman, Kriszta Veres, develop a group of women and men devoted to the indigenous goddesses of the Carpathian Basin and the River Danube which runs through it. It has been highly rewarding - watching as people grow in their knowledge and experience of Goddess- finding their innate power and learning how to express it. It has been, literally, a labour of love.

But now it is time to move on. For six years, first in Glastonbury/Avalon and now in Budapest, I have been co-teaching - following to a certain degree the visions of others. I have also, to be frank, had certain reservations and fears concerning my suitability as a heterosexual man to be teaching people who would be predominantly female. I was worried about many things - not least the issue of power. I feared that I would be replicating the old story of men talking and women having to listen. I feared my own desire - that I would misuse this power - sexually and emotionally. There have been all too many precedents for this, including from myself. So I sat in a secondary sort of role - supporting but not really leading - deferring often to my co-teacher. I do not regret this. It has taught me a lot. It has been a very good apprenticeship.

However, over the past year or so, I have felt an ever-strengthening call to teach according to the vision and the call I have received from Inanna. To address directly those issues of power and desire and use them to explore how sexuality can develop in a spirituality centred on the Goddess. I am aware of my own desire and am no longer ashamed of it and am no longer frightened that I will allow it to dominate how I interact with students. I know that there are dangers - I have been burnt before - but also know that this is the work I am called to do. I am called to confront the old morality, based as it is upon power and property right, and explore a new morality based on the simple premise of the equality of all human beings and their right to decide what they do with their bodies.

I do not know what form this morality will take. I do not believe that it can be captured in any collection of words- engraved in stone or otherwise. I doubt, in fact, that I will be able to live by it - conditioned as I am by the Abrahamic nightmare from which we are only now emerging. But that does not matter. I am now approaching my third 21st birthday and facing the real possibility that sexual misconduct may well become physically problematic in the foreseeable future (which I hope is long delayed). I am, in any case, entering the final phase of my life. The changes that need to happen will probably take far longer than I can realistically expect to live.

The work, however, must begin now. I believe that the perversion of the beauty and power of sexuality we now call morality lies at the very base of the problems of our civilisation. If we are to have any hope of survival then there is no time to lose. Freedom and autonomy are the rewards ahead. Subjection and slavery are the reality now - however they are currently dressed in democratic clothes.

So doors close. I cannot go back. I must go forward and trust that other doors will open.

scripts, scripts, scripts

2009-09-19T19:20:00.004+02:00

The last few weeks have been very difficult. It had been building up for a long time. Someone i love very much was getting married in the UK and I really wanted to be there. My life choice, however, has resulted in my living here and surviving on an income far below the poverty level in Britain. I am not complaining about this. After three years of preparation things here are opening up for me and I know why I came.

This opening up - to my regret- came too late for the wedding. The very successful workshop that I ran in August gave me just enough to cover outstanding utility bills. No more. But a beginning. The workshop was wonderful - I cannot express how I felt when the participants fed back their experiences. And, for me, it was a confirmation that I am on the right path and that doors are opening. Inanna is guiding me.

When, however, my elation started to subside and I looked at the financial impossibility of my flying to Britain I began to move into a state of despair. And, more importantly, shame. I was ashamed that I was poor. I became aware that, no matter how much I may have intellectually and, perhaps, spiritually accepted my path that I was still ashamed of my failure to be a success in the only way that my parents knew. Financially. The old script was activated and completely overwhelmed me. I used my old tactics of evasion and denial, hoping against hope that some sort of intervention would come that would enable me to attend. And then a family member offered to pay my fare. I felt great. I would be able to go! I then started planning my trip. Unfortunately, I had ignored one important issue. Where would I sleep? I thought it was a minor problem but it turned out that there was no room for me.

I was hurt. I was angry. But most of all I was bitterly disappointed. Crushed. My pride then kicked in. I did not want to trumpet my, to British eyes, extreme poverty. I did not want to sleep in a bus station without enough to buy a cup of tea. Neither did I want to say "Hey, you know, I will arrive with nothing in my pocket. Can you help me out? Lend me the money for a place for the nights? Spare change?"

As I say, pride. One of the seven deadly sins, I am told by the ever-proud and arrogant who preach from gilded thrones in the cathedrals of self-indulgence. Maybe so. Maybe it is deadly. I must confess that I felt it so. My heart yearned to be somewhere but my pride prevented me from asking for the degree of help I needed.

So I decided not to try further. And immediately my mood changed. Relief took the place of desperation and helplessness. Deep sorrow remained. But I felt better. That is the only way to describe it. I accepted myself and my own fallibility - my own incompetence in some areas of life. I stopped tormenting myself with the scripts of old. I accepted that I could not go

On my facebook page I wrote of this feeling of relief. That was unwise. It was misinterpreted as an expression of relief that I was not going. That is not what I meant, but that is the way it was taken. A very abusive email came immediately to me from someone and I replied equally angrily. For which I wish to make no apology. I expressed an anger rooted deep in the past that I had suppressed for over three decades. And it was an anger that would have been better expressed at the time. Whatever the rights and wrongs from an outside objective viewpoint, I felt that I had been injured by this person and had suppressed that feeling - through fear that it might lead to further injury. In two sentences I said what I had then feared to say. I felt, and still feel, cleansed. Purged of past scripts. Free of a bully, within and without.

I wondered for a long time why all this was happening. I was very angry at Inanna for putting me in this situation - for leading me here and leaving me adrift. I was also very angry at myself. And this is perhaps at the root of it all. For most of my life I have avoided confrontation with what I believe to be wrong, I have taken the line of least resistance. I have been, in short, a coward. In the process, I have hurt those who loved me and those whom I loved. I have not stood and said "This is me - and I will not compromise myself to fit an image of how I (or you) think I should be". This was the realisation that came to me with a terrifying clarity not so long ago. I have only recently begun to be authentic.

And at the age of 62, this is rather late. It is only in recent years that I have become aware of how much shame has ruled me. Shame about my sexuality - my very being - my right to walk on this planet, free and joyful. So, painful as it has been, for me and, perhaps, others, I am glad that I have been given this insight. As I start to be a teacher - whatever that might mean - it is vital that I am made aware of my own fallibility. My own deep hurts and wounds. My own sources of rage. I knew when Inanna called me that She was not calling me to an easy primrose path but one that would force me to confront those things I most feared about myself.

And now, I have felt the fear of pressing "PUBLISH POST". I fear your judgement. But I will do it just the same.

Budapest Pride 2009

2009-09-06T14:46:00.009+02:00

Yesterday, I went on my second Gay Pride Parade in Budapest. Whereas last year this was an experience which I found very strong. For almost the entire walk we were pelted with eggs, tomatoes and a few stones from those to whom the whole thing was an affront to what they believed was the nature of being "Hungarian". I was physically frightened for much of the time, knowing that, had the protesters succeeded in bypassing the very tight cordon of riot police then serious injury was a real possibility. This did not happen - although there were running fights between right wing crazies and police, tear gas, and a few petrol bombs at places outside the line of the march. Most shattering of all for me, however, was the sheer irrational hatred of those who protested. I could not comprehend their motivation - for how could the expression of love between human beings possibly be a threat to them? But clearly it was.

This year, however, passed without such incidents. Last year, only the direct route of the march was cordoned off but this year the cordon was extended to city blocks. In fact, much of the centre of Pest was a no-go zone for anyone apart from police. Metro lines were closed and dedicated trains provided to transport the people on the parade. Nowhere we went were there any protesters to be seen or heard - apart from a few token ones at the beginning of the march. These latter were, perhaps, allowed in order to give the ex-prime minister Gyurcsany a chance for a good photo-op as he strode up to them, smiling, stood for a while accepting their abuse and then disappeared as fast as he had come, surrounded by a bevy of bodyguards. (I may be overly-cynical here but I think not. During his time in office Gyurcsany took full advantage of the threat of rising neo-nazism in order to maintain his own authority.)

Well, the parade took place in empty streets - the only witnesses being the police, press and television, and a few waiters and other employees whose fashionable places of business had been temporarily closed.

Terrifying as the last event had been for me there was, at least, a sense of reality to it. This year simply felt very strange. It was like walking through a ghost city, guarded by faceless and silent phantoms in riot gear. After the parade finished we entered the major metro station in Pest past lines of these phantoms and boarded the train to the place where we could disperse safely and merge into the general population. Anti -climax does not fully express what I felt. It was eerie - like being in a zombie movie of some sort.

However, the fact is that the authorities were in a dilemma. They had to guarantee the safety of the participants. But what it meant, in practice, was that in order to protect the freedom of assembly of a comparative few they had to curtail the freedom of movement of a substantially greater number of others. They were under, furthermore, international scrutiny - many embassies of major countries, including the US, having pledged support for the parade. My worry about all this, and it was expressed by others, is that the net result could present the rabid right with a major propaganda opportunity. Discontent here has led to the electoral success in the EU elections for a far-right party dedicated to restoring their particular vision of Hungarian identity. On the other hand, to have disallowed the parade would have given a green light to the bullies and bigots.

Others felt the parade to have been a complete success. The fact that it happened at all being the main thing. Those people whose sexuality is unacceptable to a vocal and violent minority have asserted their right to full and equal citizenship and had this right defended, at great financial cost, by the state of which they are citizens. That, however strange and slightly unsettling the parade was to me, is the most important fact.

Photos from Ukgaynews.org where a further report can be read

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

2009-09-02T20:15:00.005+02:00

When I was in school in sleepy and complacent old England - back in the days when the world seemed simpler - with Nazism and fascism having been defeated and a neat cold war divide imposed - my history teacher asked us to memorise the American Declaration of Independence. I did so willingly for it encapsulated so much of what I already believed. I will quote it here before I get down to the substance of this post.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

My history teacher, although I did not know it then,, was clearly a radical. We were still children of the British Empire - stuffed with the sterile and out-dated ideas of the Victorian age. This was, to me, a call to action. I now know how much of this declaration was due to the thinking of Tom Paine - the apostle of liberty against tyranny. Be that as it may, I was and remained inspired by the words therein enshrined. Later, as I became more aware, i felt uneasy about the exclusion of women from this vision and the realisation that Jefferson, among others among the signatories, was a slave owner and that they saw no problem with this. The words, however, remained and served as a founding statement of my own beliefs. I can still recite them.

Which makes the recent history of the US deeply painful to me. It was founded on the principle of the equality of all human beings. The fact that the blindness of the time and privilege of the founders denied some human beings those rights is, in fact, irrelevant. The document remains. And yet, so many in the US seem to be unaware of its implications. Nowhere does it say that US citizens have more rights than any other human beings. Nowhere does it say that some people are less worthy to pursue happiness and enjoy life and liberty than others. And yet, both within and without the territory of the US this declaration is more honoured in the breach than the observance. Imperial wars - of the kind that Tom Paine condemned so fiercely are now - and arguably have been since the settlement of the West - being openly fought. From a fierce resistance to tyranny, the USA has evolved to become the tyrant most of the world fears. George III could only have dreamed of the imperial dominance now exercised, arbitrarily and brazenly, by the descendants of those who fought for liberty from him.

I was reminded of this on a recent youtube video of protesters accusing Obama of defying the US Constitution with his proposed health care reforms - none of which seem to me to be highly radical. Many of the protesters and commenters talked of property rights and said that a democratically elected government had no business levying taxes in order to provide health care for those who could not provide it for themselves. These people accused Obama of being fascist, Nazi, communist and muslim.

The thing is, the declaration says that the sole purpose of government is to secure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This is the statement of principle with which the USA declared itself to be a new thing in the world. But none of the principles declared to self -evident can apply when - according to the US census bureau 15.8% of American citizens are uninsured and therefore not eligible for full health care. All three principles are violated here. It is a scandal. It must be addressed.

And yet the rhetoric of the US proclaims itself as the champion of human rights around the world. This is the justification for the terror it has created in so many regions. And, at the same time, it is violating the very principles on which it was founded. As far as I can read, Obama's reform is not that radical. And yet it has provoked such bile and hatred that I have begun to despair of the USA.

I am not anti-American. I am, as Tom Paine, Washington, Jefferson and Adams, anti-imperialist and anti-injustice. The USA has lost its way. I pray to Inanna it will find it again.

Fear and love - a time for change.

2009-09-01T07:12:00.005+02:00

My silence on this blog of late has, I've realised, not been because I have nothing to say but because I have wanted to say too much. Much as I delighted in the idea of blogging when I first started, I have now found it rather limiting. It has been good to react to items in the news and give my own personal take and also to reflect on my own journey with Inanna. I am glad to have had that opportunity.

Lately, however, I've found that whenever I sit to write here I do not know where to start. My personal journey is interesting to me but often repetitious. I go through the same old scripts and come up with insights which, although they have struck me with new force and clarity, appear very much the same as older ones. My life is not a linear thing but more of a spiral - ever returning to what appears from one viewpoint to be the same place but which to me is entirely new. Words are two dimensional - or at least my ability to use them is - and cannot adequately distinguish between one point on the spiral and a later point which, superficially, seems identical. It is thus that after my last posting, I have remained silent.

There is also the fact that world events, although appearing new and fresh when first seen on the news, are in fact no such thing. The crisis of gangster capitalism that has engulfed the world is not new. Such crises have happened in the past and will do so again. And the result of it will be that some will grow immensely richer but that innumerable others will sink into deep poverty. But this is of the nature of capitalism - it depends on the concentration of wealth in a very small elite class. In its mission to succeed in this task, however, it was previously constrained by an ideological struggle with its mirror image and bastard child, Soviet communism. With the fall of the Soviet Union fetters were removed and the vultures of the money markets free to circle the world identifying the vulnerable and then directing their energies - and their minions in politics and armies - into destroying economies and societies so that they can then land and devour the corpses.

Which they have done. Recently, there has been what at first glance seems to be a crisis in that capitalism. The world recession is not however the crisis it appears. It is a blip in which some bloated vultures have expired but most rescued by further infusions of blood from those on whom they prey. All the rest is spin.

Here, of course, I realise that I have been maligning vultures. In reality these birds fulfil the essential role of disposing of the dead. They have nothing to do with the creation of the situations that have caused those deaths. This is not the case with those who, by their deliberate policies, caused the banks to crash and have to be rescued with the use of tax raised from the people from whom they have plundered unhindered for decades. The very economists whose policies enabled the vast and unsustainable accumulation of personal debt are still in their positions of influence and thereby ensuring that only a select few of the wealthy who profited lose anything real apart from the minor inconvenience of public "mea culpas" followed by business as usual. The funds that enable this business not coming, of course, from their own large pockets but from the taxpayers.

It is a huge con job. Bernard Madoff goes to prison because his greed was more naked than most. Others, equally if not more corrupt, remain. Scapegoats are needed and they are found. The public is encouraged to celebrate their demise and then to go on its way reassured that its masters (and they are, mostly, men) have cleaned up their act and all will, eventually, be well. We all just have to weather the storm. The green shoots of the recovery, if not yet visible, are just about to break the surface. So we are told - and it may well be true. Until the next time.

For, after all, customers are needed - people who are willing to buy the unnecessities, as well as the essentials of food, clothing and housing, that we are told will fill the emptiness inside us. A form of prosperity will return but the numbers who appear to share in that prosperity will be fewer. There will be more who have been deprived of the essentials. More homeless people on the streets. More queuing for food from soup kitchens. More gated communities hiding from the mass of the dispossessed. More women and children forced into servicing the needs and desires of the wealthy in order that they may survive. More illegal immigrants - publicly condemned but privately welcomed - prepared to do the essential, but unpleasant, jobs for wages that resident populations would not accept. Such immigrants, moreover, provide convenient whipping boys whenever discontent may appear to threaten the interests of the powerful few. Here, in Hungary, that role is taken by the Roma - who, although they have been here for many generations, are seen as an alien and hostile presence, preying upon the law-abiding majority population. The venal and corrupt political class that, after enriching itself from the privatisation of state assets after the fall of communism, has been in control is only too happy that they have such a convenient target for the very justifiable anger of the general population - who see very many homeless, ethnically Hungarian, people rooting through their bins in search of food that is not too putrid and have parents and grandparents whose retirement - previously guaranteed to be sustainable if not luxurious - is now under threat of real privation. Many such people are, understandably if wrongly, angered when they see the very modest amounts of money and effort that are diverted to alleviate the deep poverty of the "gypsies".

What underpins the present system is one emotion. Fear. Without fear it cannot operate. I was reminded of this the other day when watching a discussion about the US use of torture. The debate seemed to centre on whether any good and reliable intelligence had been obtained by these methods. Some say yes and some say no. I have no way of knowing which is right. Perhaps, as Cheney maintains, some people have given information they would not otherwise have done. Perhaps, as others maintain, none have done so. A former CIA field agent interviewed on the Rachel Maddow show said that such interrogations would be better performed by the FBI - the CIA's job being that of running field agents etc and not of obtaining intelligence from unwilling prisoners. I have been impressed by Rachel in the past and was surprised that she accepted this disingenuous argument. The CIA's use of torture is well documented and predates Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition and all the familiar litany of excess by many decades.

Moreover, the belief that torture is committed in order to gain information is naive. The purpose of torture is to break the spirit of the victims and thereby instil fear in the population from which the victims come. Any useful information obtained is a by-product of this. The real purpose of the Inquisition was not, in fact, to determine the real beliefs of those they tortured but to impose an outward conformity on the rest of the population. Similarly, the CIA trained torturers in Pinochet's Chile, the Junta's Argentina -and so ad nauseam - were engaged not in real intelligence gathering but in maintaining a climate of terror which would stifle internal dissent. No one would want to be next.

George W announced that he was declaring "A War on Terror". The military strategy used in the attack on Iraq was, quite accurately, called "Shock and Awe". I cannot think of a better definition of terror than those three words. In adopting terror as official policy, the US has, literally, declared itself to be a terrorist nation. Torture is simply own weapon in the arsenal of terror. The incessant bombardment of populations, the cutting off of essential services, the imprisonment of them as they shelter wherever they can, the constant awareness of the proximity of death by random and arbitrary acts of violence is torture at a macro level. It is designed to strip away all sense of identity, purpose and self-determination from a population just as the tortured prisoner loses hers or his.

Where they have, disastrously, miscalculated, however is that they have now used these tactics on populations for whom terror is nothing new. It has, in fact, been part of their lives for decades. They have learnt to cope and to fight back. And they have learnt from those who terrorised them how the dynamics of terror work. When Pinochet took control of Chile, he took over a nation with a democratic tradition - his targets were intellectuals, artists, workers - all of whom expected some rules of decent human conduct to be, generally, applicable. The people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran are under no such illusions. They had learned from experts that tyranny knows no such rules. Iraq and Iran learned their lessons from tyrants installed - and supported, with their secret police trained - by the US. In Afghanistan, they learned from the Russians. In order to maintain a sense of identity they have adopted a form of their religion in which their persecution is a test of their devotion and to fight back a divinely ordained duty.

The world is a mess of greed and corruption. On one level - and this is the level presented daily to the Western world by the media. Whether the media be governmentally or corporately controlled is irrelevant since there is little if no difference between them. Politicians move seamlessly into corporate posts when they leave office and business leaders are awarded governmental posts. The effect of the constant diet of fear is to cause the populations to be living in constant state of anxiety as they worry about jobs and mortgages and rising crime rates and the ever present, if remote, chance of death at the hands of an "Islamic terrorist". In the meantime, the corporate asset strippers continue unchecked in their depredations.

There is, however, more than a chink of light. An unprecedented 2,000,000 people marched in London to oppose the Iraq war. Schoolchildren spontaneously left their classrooms and marched in the street. People are growing ever more reluctant to cast their vote in favour of one gang of criminals against another, slightly more palatable, one. Obama's rhetoric - if not, so far, his actions - articulated this growing sense that there is something deeply rotten in the state of corporate affairs. Lies are now beginning to be seen for what they are. People are wanting a society ruled by love and not fear. They may not yet know how to get to there from here, but they are searching. In this there is great hope.

Waiting for the miracle - Leonard Cohen

2009-08-11T18:38:00.001+02:00

re the last post - Leonard Cohen - Anthem

2009-08-11T18:16:00.002+02:00

Readiness

2009-08-11T17:09:00.006+02:00

It has been a long time since I posted here. I am not sure why - there has certainly been a lot happening about which I could have written. Somehow, the urge to write has not been there, however. Perhaps it is because there has been so much happening that I have been silent. It is as if I have not wanted to "fix" anything in writing while it all seemed so fluid. That I wanted the process to flow freely - leading me where it may - and not interrupt it until it reached a place where I could feel confident that the changes were there to stay. That place is now reached.

It is now 9 months, or thereabouts, since I initiated as Priest of Inanna. I did not really know then what that meant or entailed - I just knew that I was called to do it. I have given up theorising about what the word "call" means - there is really no point to that, since I can never know. A call is what it was. And I will leave it at that. Nine months - a normal gestation. And here I am. Not the same as I was but different in ways that I am only just becoming aware of.

I am feeling more confident, for a start. Although "confident" may not be the best word. "Certain" is closer. I am reluctant to use it because it is not a constant - my brain can get in the way and then the certainty slips a little. Doubt - a constant companion in my life - still remains. I am glad of this, however. It is healthy and causes me to question things and not accept them at face value. It has caused me to test my perceptions. And those perceptions have passed the tests - have survived the internal questions. And I now know that Inanna has called me. I know that it is not an illusion but a simple fact. Who or what Inanna is, I really have no idea. I have applied Occam's razor and have realised that She is the simplest answer. I have heard Her voice and feel Her presence. I am still rational and have a grip on the reality of the world. I can go about my daily business as effectively as I ever have. In fact, in many ways more effectively since I am less concerned about the opinion of others than before. Less, I say, for the concern still remains. What it does not do is rule.

There is work that She wants me to do. That, I know for a fact. I am not being grandiose when I say that it is work that only I can do. I am acknowledging that I, as all human beings are, am unique. There is no other human being that has my mind and my experience. She called me as I am, faults and virtues alike, not some other person whom I might aspire to be.

I have stopped waiting to be perfect. This, to me, is huge. There are some lines by Leonard Cohen that sum up the conclusion that I have reached.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a hole in everything
That's how the light gets in

Sometimes, when singing this, I subconsciously replace "light" with "rain" and the words still remain true. Perfection, as perceived in our received spiritual traditions, has an impermeable quality. It is not human. And I am. And glad to be. I do not wish for more. I simply seek to become more fully who I am - and not bend and contort to what I see as the expectations of others or even myself. And this, surely, is true perfection.

With this in mind, the Priest/ess of Inanna training course is starting this coming Samhain. The time is now - there is no other. Taking another song from Cohen, I am not "waiting for the miracle" of some notional readiness to come. It is already here.

I do not know, nor wish to know, what the future will hold. That would spoil the journey. When I read tarot it is as a guide to now - and the decisions that the moment brings. The areas of current strength and current weakness. The future is in the hands of Inanna - if I am correct in my perception that I am being called to Her work then She will make it possible for me to do it. My part is simply to stop farting around, to get the word out and leave the rest to Her.

If I am wrong, then so be it. But I do not believe I am.

What the .....!?

2009-06-25T20:32:00.005+02:00

I had just edited the last post and a dialogue box popped up on my edit page from somebody telling me that their god loves me and inviting me to click on a button to enter their website to say a prayer or something What arrogance impels them thus to intrude on my privacy? I write what I write in a public way for the people who choose to read it - the many millions out there mainly totally ignore it. That is ok. They have the freedom to read or not. I would not dream of invading anyone's private space - what gives these people the right to invade mine with their toxic propaganda?

If they have anything sensible to say they are free to comment underneath.

and god divided...

2009-06-25T16:01:00.010+02:00

I was born in 1947. My early days were lived out in the memory of the war, from which my father had returned from a long period of being besieged in Malta a year or so before I was conceived. I remember having my first cigarettes - at the age of five -in an old air raid shelter and I also remember the acres of urban wasteland, courtesy of the Luftwaffe, that we would pass on the tram journey from our suburb into central Birmingham in order. I remember playing in one of the bombed out houses that were around. I do not know what had happened to the occupants - I hope they were in shelter when the bombs fell- but in those days I did not really have any concept of death. It was unreal, far from the perceived realities of my relatively comfortable - and completely mono-cultural - middle class existence.

The Second World War, however, formed a constant background against which my life developed. For my father it seemed to be where his life had most meaning. He finished the war a sergeant-major and would always awaken his children with the command, "On Parade!" and use army slang constantly in his discourse. Later, in some of the few conversations I had with him, it was clear that, apart from the hours on the Rugby pitch, his army years had been, despite the considerable danger and privation, the most meaningful of his life.

It was therefore perhaps inevitable that I should want to understand the war, its causes and effects. In School, European history stopped in 1914- with the outbreak of World War 1. From the perspective of the text books we had, focussing as they did on the networks of alliances and the emergence of nationalism in the decaying parts of the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, there was a ghastly inevitability to it all. And there were also patent injustices in the treaties that followed the victory of the western powers.

It was with this background that I began my study of Nazism in my late teens. I immersed myself in it, for I could see no way to understand from the outside - I had to become a Nazi - insofar as that was possible. And so I was, for about a year when I was 17. I read Mein Kampf then and can still remember feelings of empathy as I read Hitler's account of his early years. I devoured every book I could find on the Reich. By this time, I was living in a deeply conservative town in the East of England, Huntingdon, steeped in the history of Oliver Cromwell, who had attended the same school as I, and the simple certainties of bible-based Protestantism. I had myself, however, recently converted from the nominal Anglicanism of my upbringing to Catholicism. (This was, I am glad to say, to last no longer than my Nazism - although its echoes rang for an agonisingly long time.)

Concurrent with my studies in Nazism, however, there was the counter narrative of Zionism which came to me largely through the works of Leon Uris. As I said above, my life had been totally mono-cultural- apart from trivial transactions such as paying my bus fare , I had never encountered a person of colour. Even more remote from my experience, being somewhat more invisible, were Jews. And yet, these people, the ancient enemies of the "Aryan race", emerged from Uris' pages as deeply heroic. Romantic as well for within the books there was always sex "behind the barricades". So I moved from Nazism to Zionism - a move that seemed seamless then and still does now. For they were and are akin.

Beneath both Nazism and Zionism is the assumption of divine mandate. Zionism, however, had the advantage that the Jews had long been the whipping boys of Europe and their fight for recognition and respect accordingly seemed more justified. The return to Eretz Israel and the subsequent fight for the survival of the new Jewish was therefore both just and heroic.

I applauded this state as it expanded its borders during the six day war in 1967. I was, by this time, quite unequivocal in my support. The Jews seemed, at last, to be secure in their ancient homeland and freed from the millennia of persecution by Christendom. As the 70s progressed, however, I became ever more perturbed by the growing closeness between Israel and apartheid South Africa. I could no longer ignore the implicit racism within the very concept of Zionism. For this has its roots in the Abrahamic convenant - the very idea that any particular people can have a divine mandate. I had also, by this time, read the biblical accounts of divinely sanctioned genocide - something that was a sharp spur that impelled my eventual parting from any adherence to christianity. Or either of the other faiths that derive their claims to legitimacy from the pernicious myth of the Abrahamic covenant.

Starhawk writes, as ever, movingly and powerfully about the myth that underlies the foundation of Israel. It is a beautiful and powerful myth and I was held captive by it - although I am not, unlike Starhawk, Jewish. This captivity was however to a romance - the heroic underdog surviving terrible adversity and surviving to create a new, redeemed, world. Despite my deeply held political convictions, I held to this myth for a long time. I justified Israeli excesses by constant reference back to the holocaust. I could not, however, forever ignore the realities that were so evident in the 80s. The close cooperation with South Africa, for one example - the realities on the ground for the descendants of the dsplaced people who had occupied the land before western guilt had chosen them for scapegoats and ceded that land to the survivors of the genocide committed by a nation that was in many ways the exemplar of advanced European civilisation. The people of Palestine were decreed, in an explicitly racist manner, to be less worthy to occupy their homeland than those upon whom whom European civilisation had unleashed the horrors of Holocaust. Their vote was cast by the colonial power, Britain. They had none of their own. They do not, in any meaningful use of the word, have a real vote today.

There are two questions here. The first is "Do Jewish people have the right to live and thrive without persecution?" The answer is a clear and unequivocal "YES!" The second, however, is less easy to answer and that is "how can this right be defended?" The post-holocaust answer to the second question was the establishment of a Jewish State built in a part of the ruins of the old, previously defeated, Ottoman Empire. Europe could then wash its collective hands clean of the stain of pogrom. Neglected in this decision were the rights of those who lived there already. Between 1933 and 1945 one "divinely mandated" nation, Germany, had striven to eradicate another "divinely mandated" people, the Jews, while the rest of the world was, by and large, unconcerned if not actively complicit. In Mein Kampf, Hitler was quite explicit about his aims. And yet, until his armies marched into Poland, he was given a free hand. Many, on both left and right, applauded the rise of the new Germany - albeit with a little hand wringing at some over-zealous excesses. None seemed to have read the book, or, if they had, not seemed to have noticed what it said. For anti-semitism was not restricted to Germany. Anyone who has read the literature of the period can see the same pathology in other countries - certainly in Britain. The pseudo-science of eugenics - the purification and perfectability of the "race" was, far from being an aberration, mainstream. In many ways it still is. See, for example, the forcible sterilisation of those considered to be less than worthy - which has persisted to this day, most recently with Roma women in Eastern Europe.

I am a radical. I believe we need to look to the roots of the problem - not its branches. And it is in the dominant myth that these roots can be seen. Here is the beginning of the first chapter of Genesis- because of personal familiarity I use the King James version:

1In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
3 And God said, "Let there be light:" and there was light.
4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6 And God said, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters."
7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
9 And God said, "Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear:" and it was so.
10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
11 And God said, "Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth:" and it was so.
12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.
14 And God said, "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15 "And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth:" and it was so.
16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
.

What is noticeable here is the word "divide". God, according to this myth, divides. Just as Marduk divided the goddess Tiamat in the Babylonian myth, of which this is an echo, and created the universe from her corpse. The god of the bible does not create ex nihilo but from a pre-existing "deep" which he divides.

Thus was the template for our patriarchal civilisation drawn. Although the goddess Tiamat is not named in the biblical story She is there - in the image of the deep - the chaotic process of life and death - growth and decay. Throughout the rest of the bible, this process of division continues -Jews and Gentiles, sheep and goats - and then continues into the present day. And at each point one pole of these binaries is privileged. Catholic, heretic, Muslim, Christian, Nazi, Zionist. An infinity of mirrors - each reflecting the other and shielding us from the true, apparently chaotic, fecund, reality of life. It can be scarey to be without these things - for then we are faced with the chaos of emotions and impulses that are a necessary component of our physical being. It is far easier to identify an other who can embody these things and thus deny them in ourselves. It is in dividing us one from another that patriarchy has maintained control over our very souls and beings. Depending on what our core assumptions might be - the frightened 18 year-old Israeli soldier exercising apparently arbitrary power at a checkpoint in the West Bank is a heroic defender or a cruel oppressor. The suicide bomber martyr or monster.

All these categories are a complete fiction. But they are fictions that have the power to eradicate all such categories apart from that of charred and rotting corpses returning to their constituent elements and merging again with the earth that gave them birth. As a species we seem determined to pursue this process of division by unleashing eventually the power gained from dividing the basic constituents of matter. This would truly fulfil the claim of the ever-divisive god of the bible that he is the alpha and the omega - the beginning and the end.

There is time to reverse this urge to collective suicide - this constant process of othering - of division. We can embrace the apparently chaotic diversity of life and of our species. We can revel in ambiguity and uncertainty and the joys and also the pains of the journey from birth to death. Or we can remain in the illusory certainty of our categories and of our judgements. And therefore die by them. Or we can return to Goddess. The choice is ours.

More on gay, albeit penguin, marriage

2009-06-03T20:46:00.004+02:00

One of the epithets levelled at LGBT people is that they are transgressing the laws of nature. That they are, in some way, unnatural. And yet, such variations are not unique to human beings. Some years ago it was reported in the British press that two male swans had set up home together in the swannery in Abbotsbury in Dorset and were behaving exactly in the same way as other pairs of swans.

Today, there is a report from Bremerhaven zoo in Northern Germany of two male penguins who were given an egg rejected by its natural parents and have hatched it and begun to raise it. The zoo has three male homosexual penguin couples who had been observed attempting to mate with each other and to hatch offspring from stones,

The couple who were given the egg are, according to the zoo:

"behaving just as you would expect a heterosexual couple to do. The two happy fathers spend their days attentively protecting, caring for and feeding their adopted offspring."

The report goes on to say

"Homosexuality is nothing unusual among animals," Bremerhaven zoo said on Wednesday.

"Sex and coupling up in our world do not necessarily have anything to do with reproduction."

Are penguins and other animals, then, unnatural? Or are the moralists who use such language merely wilfully, and maliciously, ignorant?

The murder of Dr Tiller

2009-06-02T22:33:00.003+02:00

There is a very good post about this on The Wild Hunt to which I have nothing of real value to add so recommend people to read it.

The murderer, however, is not a lone nutter but has been encouraged in his action by bigoted hate mongers in the media. Keith Olbermann, as he often does, points an accurate finger.

Unreality shows

2009-06-01T18:04:00.005+02:00

I am not a great watcher of television - here it would be pretty pointless as I would understand very little. Even when I was living in the UK, however, I did not watch very much. One thing that I just did not get, and still do not, is the whole reality show phenomenon. I was puzzled that people whom I admired greatly would cut short what they were doing so that they could get home in time to watch the latest episode of Big Brother. I therefore decided to see what they liked so much about it and watched an episode. Well, to be more accurate, watched half an episode. After that, I turned it off. I then returned, periodically, to see whether it grew on me. Each viewing left me feeling more and more certain that there was something deeply wrong about the whole concept.

I have never liked blood sports. Boxing actively repels me but at least, in that, there is an honest encounter between two individuals who have chosen to be there and have undergone long training in order to prepare themselves for it. They know what the game is and know the risks they take. The encounter, moreover, is for a limited period in a highly controlled and formalised environment after which they can return to their homes and families.

There is no blood in Big Brother - nor in the rash of similar shows that followed in in its wake. What goes on there is potentially far more damaging to the participants than being knocked about in a ring. What I saw in my periodic dips into it were groups of people being actively encouraged to compete in a knockout competition for the votes of the viewing public. What is more, as the programme moved from series to series, the individuals involved seemed to become ever more unpleasant. From what i saw, I would have paid good money to avoid spending any time with any of them.

Once, many years ago, I lived in a house with a dozen or so others. It was, we told ourselves in our oh-so-naive way, a commune. We had got together as a result of an advertisement placed in the underground press by a psychologist from the Esalen Institute in California - who, if I remember rightly, advanced us some money to get started. Be that as it may, we were a rather ill-assorted bunch that he had got together. So we set up the houses and moved in. For a while, it was great. Fuelled by liberal amounts of hashish, acid and amphetamine, we started to party. Visitors would come - for our address had appeared in some centre of which we knew nothing as a working commune who would welcome such visitors. It was all very strange, but at times amusing. We took pleasure in winding such visitors up.

Anyway, eventually, things got difficult - the party came to an end - and heroin replaced hashish for many of us. The whole thing folded and most went their separate ways.

What none of us knew, and I cannot remember now how I found this out, was that one of us had been making regular reports back to the psychologist who had introduced us to each other. We were, it appeared, an experiment. And it is one that I find ethically dubious, to say the least.

But at least we were not televised. At least our dysfunctions and interactions did not become public property - to be debated and dissected ad nauseam in the tabloid press. We may perhaps have appeared, anonymised, in some learned journal but that is far from the mass prurience encouraged by reality TV.

For prurience is what it is. And what is more is that it is manipulated prurience. For what it is not is "reality". First of all, it is highly edited - 24 hours in several people's lives edited down to 30 minutes. No way can that be objective - the tv company is, after all, looking for "good television". This imperative for good television must also determine the behaviour of the contestants, who are all competing for public favour. Thus, in no way can it be anything other than an artefact. Its very concept is a fraud.

I know that the contestants are volunteers and that they compete for the chance to be exhibited in these latter day freak shows. They have volunteered to have their characters examined and dissected for the delight of strangers upon whose votes they depend for the opportunity to display themselves more in a perverse sort of psychological gladiatorial contest in which there will only be one left standing at the end.

One of the things that most disturbs me is that some of those whom I know watch such programmes describe themselves as being opposed to pornography - describing it as exploitative, demeaning to the humanity of those involved - reducing them to nothing more than objects to be gazed at. It also coarsens and demeans, they say, the societies that tolerate it. All these charges can be levelled, and to a far greater degree, at Reality TV.

More on the name change

2009-06-01T12:29:00.003+02:00

The last few weeks have largely - and strangely - been devoid of the desire to post anything. It is not that I have not felt indignant, inspired, happy, angry etc at events and thoughts that have occurred during that time. My internal life has certainly been active and I have also been busy doing things. But a desire to share any of these on this blog has not been present.

I think much of this is due to the name change. I have felt strange and found this strangeness difficult to articulate. It has been a sort of limbo - suspended between identities neither of which seems completely fixed. And neither of which seems completely me.

Medusa, in a comment to an earlier post, mentions that some people reserve their new name for spiritual and creative work and retain their old one for other purposes. There is a lot of sense in this and there are many ways in which it would be a lot easier. For example, when signing a birthday present for a friend, I found myself writing Brian. Which is hardly surprising - I had, after all, been Brian for 62 years. Idris, although a given name, was hardly ever articulated. In fact, it was often almost hidden and denied - an occasion for mockery at school and outright hostility from my stepfather at home. So to hear myself addressed as Idris, as my partner does, is strange. It will take a bit of getting used to.

Perhaps, I never will get used to it. In this case, I may find myself simply using Idris as a magical name. And as such it would remain on this blog and other written works. I am not sure. I have a very real feeling that a complete change is necessary. This may be due simply to the fact that I am a quadruple Aries and have in many ways an all or nothing outlook on life. This has certain virtues but there are also associated difficulties. For one thing, it has meant that the (possibly necessary) compromises of the day-to-day are very difficult for me to make and I have often fled from the necessity to do so into a depressed and alienated state. The emptiness that this entailed then would become filled with a sterile self-reproach which would then feed into even further inaction. Not a healthy, and certainly not a happy, state of affairs but one with which I have been horribly familiar.

As I mentioned in the post referred to above, one of the first things that happened after the ceremony in which I claimed my new name was the loss of my glasses. I thought I knew where they had fallen and when I returned to that place looked all around but could not find them. A few notices were then placed around but no response. Then, last weekend, a full two weeks later, as I was coming home from the shops I glanced at a low wall and found that someone had placed my glasses there. They were undamaged and yet the place where they had been lost was a verge where many cars were parked. I could see comfortably again.

Like Medusa in her comments, I saw the initial loss as a sort of sign or commentary and certainly I slipped into a period of unseeing - in which all was fairly indistinct. And in the week since finding them I have found that many things have become clearer. Something new has entered my life. Vague and indistinct still - but definitely there.

Problems remain. My financial situation in particular is pretty dire and this causes an occasional bout of fear. And yet, the amount of money involved is very small on a global scale and even on the level in which I live. One successful workshop or a dozen or so tarot readings will sort it. That is all.

And here is where the name change is important. I know how Brian used to react to such difficulties and I do not want this to be an option any more. There is too much to do.

Sex with ducks...

2009-05-30T13:51:00.002+02:00

... is, according to Pat Robertson, the inevitable result of allowing gay marriage. Would this be a bad thing? Perhaps not. Garfunkel and Oates welcome the prospect:

I am really pleased to have discovered these two women. Very funny.

A long overdue and incomplete report...

2009-05-20T18:06:00.003+02:00

...has just been released into the decades of abuse perpetrated on children by clergy and nuns in Ireland. Its conclusion is that the abuse, far from being an aberration, was endemic. Thousands of children were affected. I remember meeting a man some years ago. He was in his 50s and still emotionally wrecked by his experiences in the "care" of the Christian Brothers in Ireland. He told me of the recent suicide of a childhood friend and of a memory he had of standing in front of the desk of one of these men of god and seeing blood running down the the back of his friend's legs. They were both eight. He did not say why the blood was flowing.

He spoke about needing to keep the curtains drawn so that paedophiles could not look in and see his children when they came to visit. He lived on the 9th floor of an isolated tower block.

He was not one of the over 2000 who have been to the authorities. He is too scared still.

And yet, the report names no names. Many of the perpetrators are dead but some still survive and will not have to answer for the atrocities they committed. Neither will those members of the hierarchies, both clerical and lay, who colluded with and enabled the abuse. As head of the congregation of the doctrine of the faith, this current pope is culpable as he was in the position to investigate the allegations and report culprits to the secular authorities. He chose neither but threatened any who did so report with excommunication. His recent apology is both highly belated and inadequate. He speaks now of wnating to see the abusers punished. It will not happen and his past actions have ensured that.

When the current furore dies down, as it will, what guarantees can he give that the abuse will not resume? On his past form there are none. Can we trust anything this terminally corrupt corporation says?

I do not think so. And I feel sad for the many honest and caring individuals within the church whose good work has been betrayed by the hierarchy under whose rule they serve. I trust that their innate love, compassion and goodness will enable them to continue to strive for the betterment of others despite the cynicism and realpolitiking of their church. I have met many such and admire them greatly. I cannot understand how they continue within the organisation of whom they are so openly and vehemently critical. But they do.

And that is part of the wonder of being human - and a partial antidote to the poison that has been spread throughout the world, not just Ireland. But it is only partial.

And it can be no more. The church is built upon a false premise and that cannot be remedied.

It can only be abandoned.

please help to save Troy Davis...

2009-05-18T13:10:00.002+02:00

... who was sentenced to death in the State of Georgia for the murder of a policeman. He probably did not commit the crime but has been refused a reprieve.

There is still time to petition the Governor of Georgia to show clemency. Please visit Amnesty International USA and add your support.

Sometimes I feel like I am pissing in the wind

2009-05-17T21:08:00.004+02:00

Well, maybe I am. The last two posts have one factor in common and that is that militant Christianity still, all these centuries after Constantine, has command of the forces of aggression and coercion. In the name of the Christian god of love, gays in Moscow are beaten up and children, women and men in Iraq are killed in their hundreds of thousands. All praise the Lord! Allelujah! He has done a mighty work.

This god of the desert, in his three incarnations, is very strange. I listened to the end of a BBC World service radio programme today in which there was a basic assumption that written, divinely-inspired, scriptures were a good thing, Through them, the presenter was saying, we can engage with the divine - in whatever form he takes. And the word "he" is important here. In the Abrahamic traditions, the "lord" intervenes in history and makes his desire known in sacred books - which must, perforce, since language is always changing, be interpreted by experts. To take one example, a woman koranic scholar maintained that in the injunction that enjoined men to beat their wives the ancient Arabic word used also has the meaning "walk away from". A male scholar denied this. Even a native speaker of modern Arabic needs help with the 7th century language. How many English speakers can, for example, read Chaucer with ease? Most have trouble with Shakespeare who language is only 400 years old.

The programme said, however, that the true meaning emerges from the debates and conflicts between interpretations. Leaving aside the fact that this sounds very much like history b eing written by the victors, it also glosses over the fact that these disputes arfe settled in the blood of those who are perceived to be heretical. And also that the atrocities committed are in a very real sense justified by the books. And the exact opposite is true - the validity of the books is attested to by the bodies of the victims - those who could not accept the meanings that served those who held power.

There is real danger in the written word. For, to paraphrase Omar Khayam, once written and read it cannot be unwritten. I remember many years ago reading a book by Mick Farren called "The Texts of Festival". In this, the central conceit was of a post-apocalyptic world in which the central sacrament was the Rock Festival, at which the few surviving tapes would be played and treated as Holy Writ. Many of the songs were,of course, Bob Dylan and the meaning, say, "Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" would be explained by the- rather wasted - elite. It is a long time ago, and I have not given the book any thought for at least three decades, but Farren had a valid point to make. There is a real human tendency to seek some written formula with which to direct our lives.

If that was where it stopped, there would be no real problem. People have the right to be as wrong - or right - headed as they wish. The problem comes when the book acquires an army and a police force. Then there is a real and present danger for all those who do not accept the stories written therein, or even the particular interpretations put on those stories by those who command the armies and the police forces.

And their armies are big. Those who believe, or pretend to believe, in the values they think the books teach, control most of the media and the legislatures and the universities etc etc.

So, here I am. Pissing into the tempest of intolerance and hatred whipped up by the believers in the books. Everyday, things seem to get worse. I sometimes feel I am wasting my time and would be better to tend my own garden. This is not, however, true. My voice may be small, but I much speak my truth. I must speak to what I believe to be right. I must speak the message I hear from Inanna. That is the least I can do. For there are others also writing - other voices -speaking from their own souls - their own hearts. And the voice of the heart is the only answer to the voices of hatred and division that seem set to drown out the world.

Onward Christian Soldiers..

2009-05-17T19:12:00.007+02:00

Hats off to GQ for finding space for this. Periodically, in the build-up to the Iraq war and during it, Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon would prepare a digest of the latest intelligence to be given, often from Rumsfeld's own, bloodstained hands, to GW Bush. These would have selected bible quotes prominently displayed on the cover. Leaving aside such trivialities as the constitutional division of church and state, it is a question worthy to be asked how the US media would treat similar reports adorned with prominent quotes from the Koran. Probably as signs of Islamic fundamentalist fanaticism and irrationality and further evidence that we should invade and civiltse them. Motes and beams come to mind...

Anyway, see for yourself

Gay protest violently suppressed in Moscow

2009-05-16T18:01:00.003+02:00

Just what is it about some people that they get all upset and violent about how other human beings find love? I cannot understand it, and never have. According to Moscow mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, a planned Pride parade was "satanic". It was accordingly banned by the authorities, who nevertheless allowed an anti-pride parade to take place. Some LGBT activists including, Peter Tatchell from the UK, gathered to protest the ban and were dragged away by police.

Better news from Riga, Latvia, where the first Baltic Pride parade went ahead after world wide protests persuaded the authorities to cancel an earlier ban. A couple of friends who travelled from Budapest foe this event have emailed saying that, despite the presence of anti-gay protesters, they had a wonderful time.

I am reminded of last year's Pride parade in Budapest, in which we walked between two lines of riot-suited police on roads and were subjected to violent abuse and pelted with eggs and tomatoes from some very angry protesters - and there were also others engaged in violent clashes with the police elsewhere in the city as they tried to prevent the parade from reaching its agreed destination. It was one of the most frightening experiences of my life - not so much the actual violence as the sheer hatred that was evident. I was in little doubt that, were it not for the protection by the police, very serious violence - up to and including murder - would have ensued.

I cannot understand, and have tried, what motivates such hatred. I can theorise and speak of repression etc but cannot say that anything has been persuasive. My main emotion now, away from immediate danger, is a deep sadness at what I can only see as the emptiness of the lives of those who feel threatened by difference. They are deeply wounded and insecure. That does not, however, make them any less dangerous.

Earliest Goddess pendant found

2009-05-14T10:44:00.003+02:00

From today's New York Times comes this image of a figure found in a cave in South Western Germany last September.

Nicholas J. Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tübingen, in Germany, who found the small carving in a cave last year, said it was at least 35,000 years old, “one of the oldest known examples of figurative art” in the world. It is about 5,000 years older than some other so-called Venus artifacts made by early populations of Homo sapiens in Europe
In the place of her head, there is a ring - almost certaibly there to accommodate a string or thong. We can only speculate who would have worn her and why.

Day one

2009-05-12T11:56:00.001+02:00

I don’t know what I expected to happen after the events of Sunday. Perhaps nothing. A huge anti-climax – a sort of “so what?” The flatness of no real change.

But that was not to be. Various things happened. The first, and least important, was that my coffee machine short- circuited and is now useless. I was not, however, in any way upset – just calmly accepted its loss. That is new.

Then, later in the morning, I was surprised by a sudden upwelling of grief. It seemed to have no bottom and emerged from my throat as a sort of howl. I am tempted to continue using the word “seem” to describe what it felt like but will not. “Seemed” contains a sort of provisionality – a doubt as to the reality and validity of experience. Or a not taking responsibility for my own perception – for my own experience. So it did not seem – it was the mourning for a whole life – for all those whom I have loved and who have loved me. And there have been many of each. It was an acknowledgement and expression of the pain that is within me for my inability to love as fully and deeply as they deserved. For the insecurity and fear that always lurked – causing me to keep a part of me aloof and unaffected. Not to be fully myself – but to hide.

But it was not as negative as the previous few lines describe. For at the root of the pain that I felt was the knowledge that, despite these things, love lies in the centre of my being. Otherwise these failings would not hurt as much. Changing my name, even though the process is far from complete, has given me a new perspective. The old patterns and habits are all associated with the name Brian. None of them, as yet, apply to Idris. Brian was loved and Brian loved. Mingled with the grief was the fear that such love would not be something that I could now find within me. I do not now think that this is so. Love still remains and I can now begin to learn to express it better – give it more time in the open air. More freely give and more freely receive with fewer reservations and provisos.

This is what I felt at the end of the expression of grief. For it did end – for now at least- although I am sure there will be further visits. I felt calm and at peace with myself. I spent the afternoon talking with a former lover, whom I have not seen to really speak to for several months, and that was wonderful. The hurts that had been between us had gone and all that remained was a strong, undemanding and realistic affection and respect.

Then, I discovered that I had lost my glasses. Irreplaceable in the current state of my finances. I had got used to wearing them –they were varifocal for close and medium close work. They were very helpful. I was pissed off. But not overly so. The loss is, in a very real way, unimportant. For close work I still have reading glasses – cheaply obtained in any supermarket. For small print on the computer, I now have to lean forward. To compose this, I am using 200% zoom – so my back is spared. The loss is inconvenient – no more. And I do not berate myself – an old and persistent habit.

Small things, but new things. The decision to change my name was born out of the desire to realise facets of my being that were being hidden and obscured by the effects of decades of negative self-statements. I am not certain that it will work. But it is worth a try.

A major change

2009-05-10T20:49:00.003+02:00

As I said yesterday, I was planning to make a major change today. Well, it is done. I have changed my name. Or, more, accurately, I have decided to use my second given name for most purposes - on its own, without family name. There is a long story behind this and it really started the first time I came to Hungary and was brought to a place called Dobogókő - in the Pilis Hills, close to Budapest. An incredibly beautiful place which overlooks the Danube bend - where the river makes a sharp right hand turn to the south. According to the Dalai Lama, this is the site of the heart chakra of the planet. Having come from Glastonbury, which also has claims to this distinction, I was, I confess, somewhat sceptical before arriving. This scepticism was, however, soon put away when I realised that- despite my very little competence in geomancy - both claims were correct and that there was a very strong link, amounting to an identity, between the two. It was then that I knew that, for good or ill, my destiny lay in Hungary.

It was also then that i felt a very strong call to change my name. I resisted, thinking that it was pretentious and unnecessary - my old sceptic reasserting himself. Over the years, however, in ceremony, prayer and meditation, the conviction that this is what I should do, would enter my head - only for me to try to push it down and bury it.

Over the last few weeks, however, it has come back with renewed strength On one list i am on, several people wrote about changing their names. I started thinking again. The, a few days ago, a very dear priestess friend telephoned me from England and in the course of a very long conversation i told her something of what has happened in my life since I initiated as Priest of Inanna. She then asked me what name I had taken. And I realised that this was an important part of the process that I had neglected. The conversation then convinced me that I must remedy that at the first opportunity. Then, the next day, i was invited to a ceremonial day out in the Pilis hills. So this seemed the perfect opportunity. So I began, seriously, to think about it.

As usual, the sceptic stepped in and repeated his old, old story. So I started to speak to people and all I spoke to were encouraging. I asked for signs and they came multifold. My sceptic, battered and bruised though he was, however, did not totally give up the fight and the final decision was still postponed this morning. I did not properly know where we were going and when we pulled into the car park in the vlllage of Dobogókő I just felt that things turned full circle and the process of arriving to claim my new being was finished.

I was told we we were walking to Rám Hill. i have no idea what this means in Hungarian but to someone who has sun, moon, mars and mercury in aries - there seemed to be some significance. Then, after a long ad beautiful walk , punctuated with ceremony, we arrived at the top of a hill. And there was the rock the village had been named after - "the drum stone" which is said to throb with the heartbeat of the planet. I had not bee before. I put my head against the rock and did not hear the beat but was aware that it was vibrating. The stone is situated above a very steep cliff and we sat for a while, resting in the hot sun after our exertions. A final test, I thought, and pulled out my Motherpeace tarot and, with eyes firm closed, pulled a card. The Fool. Not in fact, in Motherpeace stepping over the cliff, however, so that did not seem the right option. Stepping into the unknown, on the other hand, was.

So that was it. A ceremony went ahead and I claimed my name. It is a name of power - in Welsh legend, he was a wizard and giant after whom is named the second largest mountain in Wales. In Welsh, it means "fiery lord". Three times it is mentioned as tbe name of a prophet in the Koran. It has been alleged by some it derives originally from Osiris.

It has always been part of my name, but most of the timeunspoken. Now it will be voiced. It will take time to establish fully and there my well be those who insist on addressing me as Brian. That is OK.

I do not know how or who I will be. I know who Brian is - with good and bad qualities. Most of those may well remain. But there will be something new - qualities that have long been buried. But with the new name, some other qualities will emerge. Old habits ad patternswill lose their power to bind me. They will begin to fade as the new man, the priest and messenger of Inanna, emerges into view.

This, although long contemplated, is all very new. There are doubtless many things that I have not fully considered. For example, Facebook and search engines. Will tose who look for me still find me. I have no idea. OK - I have changed the profile here, for example, and dscovered that all the old posts are now signed Idris. Can that be changed? I will investigate.

Anyway, i will close and it will be signed as I now am

Blessings

Idris

Things are moving.. (a bit of a teaser)

2009-05-09T19:58:00.003+02:00

... and I am seriously contemplating a major change. this is why I have not posted as much as I anticipated when I got back online. I am thinking of doing this tomorrow. Wil let you all know when it is done. (or if it is not)

A wonderful ad for a bank...

2009-05-09T19:40:00.003+02:00

... much as I have grave difficulties with them, I must praise this one for its promotion of acceptance of human difference.

Thanks to Aspasia of La Libertine's Salon for bringing this to my attention

Pots and kettles..-hypocrisy alert

2009-05-09T19:16:00.004+02:00

The pope has called upon Muslims to against the misuse of religion for political ends. Well, I suppose he should know -the multinational corporation he heads is, after all, the acknowledged world expert in these matters and has been honing its skills since at least the time of Constantine.

There is little more to say about this - so I will just indulge in a small, hollow, laugh.

my name is brian and i am ....

2009-05-03T17:22:00.008+02:00

...a sex addict?

There is a very good article about this here
. Which has got me thinking.

I think about sex a lot. Sometimes, particularly when physical sex with a partner for whatever reason is not available I look at porn. This has, in the past, been associated with shame and guilt. I have striven to hide it. I had read many arguments that such a taste is abusive and akin to rape. For a long time, I accepted these and therefore felt at war with an important part of myself - my own sexuality. Trying to fight it only made it stronger and, I must confess, potentially more abusive. I say this because the attempted suppression gave rise to feelings of anger and aggression. I was denying an important part of myself and was in great danger of transferring the anger that this caused to the objects of my desire, women.

By and large, however, this anger was directed inwards. At myself as a man. For a long time, I saw my desire as intrinsically abusive - for, after all, I wished to hold and to penetrate - to lose myself in a woman's embrace - to feel her body enfolding me. I wanted to gaze upon a lover - to smell her and to taste her - to celebrate her and to celebrate the desire that arose within me. I wanted to feel totally and completely alive. And this I felt, at a deep level, was wrong.

This conflict stayed with me for a very long time and only began to be resolved in recent years. It may seem paradoxical but the more I have accepted the reality of the Goddess, the more I have accepted my own sexuality as a man and the freer I have felt to express it. Shame is, day by day, becoming less and less strong and I am becoming more and more real - no longer hiding in the shadows but accepting my place in the sun.

And yes, I still think about sex. A lot. And make love as often as I can - glad beyond measure that my body still works as it should. Sometimes, I look at pictures of naked women. Does this, to get back to the start of this posting, make me an addict? I think not, but if I am, then I really do not give a damn. I refuse to continue carrying any bullshit patriarchal shame, even when given a feminist, or psychotherapeutic, gloss.

From the very small beginnings in Akron, Ohio, when the two co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous first met, there has been a huge growth in the addiction industry. It has spread its tentacles into almost every human activity. I myself spent ten years in AA and learned a lot from it. Addiction can kill or seriously impair life- that is a fact. People die from drink and drugs. And addiction can occur in other areas, be they gambling or food. Or sex.

I remember hearing in AA from people who thought that their desire for a couple of whiskies at night was a problem. I could see that they considered it so but could not for the life of me understand why. They could afford it. Neither their health nor their ability to lead a functional life seemed in any to be impaired. So what was the problem?

There is a real desire in our culture to have some sort of pathology. A label. I have felt it myself. When I said, "My name is Brian and I am an alcoholic", I felt part of an in-group - defining myself as something other than the rest of humanity. It was, strangely, a feeling of liberation. I had a disease and was no longer alone but had found a group with whom I could identify. I had, at long last, a label. No longer a simple oddball, I had a diagnosis.

And at that point -when my physical condition was severe - that diagnosis was appropriate. It, literally, saved my life. I was able to grow - to find meaning outside the bottle. I was able to find love for and from another and to build a sense of self worth that had hitherto been absent. I had been, literally, an addict to alcohol.

There is, however, a hell of a lot of nonsense spoken nowadays about dependence. I remember being struck with this when a mother was accused of being "co-dependent" because she wanted to see her only child off at the airport when there was a real chance that the child would decide not to return to the UK. The only word for this is "crap". And dangerous crap.

To love your daughter is not a pathology. And neither is the desire for sex. Human bodies contain receptors which react to external stimuli and create physical and psychological responses. In some people these reactions are stronger than in others. For just as the ability to sing in tune varies from person to person so does a capacity for sexual desire. Some people are perhaps natural celibates and others are like butcher's dogs. This is simply human variety and should be more a cause of celebration than distress. For a very small minority excessive and obsessive desire may create major problems. For such there should be help. Perhaps for them the diagnosis of addiction could be appropriate.

My belief, however, is that the disease model, borrowed from AA, has simply become the latest incarnation of the vile anti-sex doctrines of patriarchal religion. It is anti-life and anti-joy. It is especially pernicious in that it has appropriated much feminist and humanist discourse. It is nevertheless nothing more nor less than Augustinian puritanism. And, as such, is totally contrary to the freedom and joy which, as children of the Goddess, is our birthright.

I'm back...

2009-05-03T16:50:00.002+02:00

... and it is good to be so. It has been a strange month and in some ways rather rewarding. For one thing, I have not felt the self-imposed imperative to publish something and then to wait - often fruitlessly - for reaction. I have read some books. I have spent time thinking rather than reacting. My partner has seen more of my eyes and less of the back of my head. All this has been good. But I am glad to be back.

There is a lot that I have wanted to write about and this will appear, - all being well - over the next few days.

bit of a break...

2009-04-10T19:34:00.002+02:00

... forced on me by adverse financial circumstances. No workable internet access at home at moment. Hope this does not last long - I feel bereft!

Of torture and murder

2009-04-02T22:12:00.006+02:00

I will return to the subject of my last couple of posts very soon - I have certainly been thinking much about them - but now I would like to talk about something that has been troubling me vaguely for about a month. It was then i received a message on my facebook page concerning a crime that had horrified the British nation some years ago. In February 1993 a toddler called James Bulger was abducted, tortured and murdered by two ten-year-old children. The message that had ben forwarded to me was a hoax, asking me to sign a petition to prevent the release of the perpetrators - who had been, in fact, released several years before. There are many such hoaxes about and many people who unwittingly forward them. What disturbed me, however, was the covering message which asserted that if I ignored it I was "seriously fucked in the head".

This angered me. For one thing, I knew that the perpetrators had already been released but more importantly it revealed, as far as I could see, a terrifying blindness to reality. What happened to this child was horrifying and I would make no attempts to minimise it. But the perpetrators were themselves also children - both aged 10 - below the age of criminal responsibility in many jurisdictions. That means something - they are not expected to realise the full implications of their actions. They were tried and convicted, however, and were taken into custody and eventually deemed to be no longer a threat. Being unacquainted with the full details of their cases I cannot possibly comment on the virtues of their release and subsequent reintroduction into society. I do know, however, that the tabloid press went to town on it.

The crime was horrifying. I do not know what went through the minds of those who committed it nor how they have come to terms with it now they are adults. I hope that they have, however, and that their life is full and rewarding. James Bulger cannot be brought back to life.

The tabloid press, however, so vigilant in its demand for justice to be served on children is strangely silent on other issues. For a large part of the 1950s and 60s the CIA funded an eminent psychiatrist in Canada, Ewen Cameron, in his research on how to delete the human personality. As his subjects this man of science used patients who were experiencing such things as post-partum depression. This scientific moron believed that if he could eradicate all past experience he could rebuild a healthy human being. To this end he used sensory deprivation, extreme disorientation, all manner of drugs, electric shocks and other methods. His funders, however, were not so naive, they did not expect any therapeutic results - their interest was simply in how to disintegrate the human personality. The results of this research, although long practised covertly, were legitimised in the Bush regime and have still not been renounced by Obama, who seems unlikely to pursue the torturers and prosecute those who gave the green light to them.

I am not surprised and expected nothing less. Whatever virtues Obama may have, and they may indeed be many, he is in the service of a nation and a system which has prospered through the use of torture. Which has prospered through deliberate mass murder. Those who own the tabloid press - the Murdochs of this world - have fostered this ideology of theft, greed, murder, rape and torture. They have feted the ideologues who gave an intellectual gloss to naked and unabashed greed - in particular Milton Friedman and his disciples. These, oh-so-dainty and respectable academic apologists for cruelty and greed are still presiding over the deliberations of the politicians whose souls they have bought - including the current incumbents of both Downing Street and the White House. And the latest G20 farce in London.

And nobody seems to care. They are too busy telling me that I am "seriously fucked in the head" if I do not join the lynch mob baying for the blood of a couple of ten-year-olds.

Terror, immanence, metaphor and destiny

2009-04-01T20:59:00.008+02:00

(This post is rather rambling and I am not sure how much sense it makes - I would like in many ways to polish it - but am posting it as is - without censorship or judgement. I hope to follow up the themes in later posts and welcome any constructive comments)

I was very surprised to find that my first reaction after the last post talking about the time I spent in Wycoller was completely negative. The following day, I went for a walk in the Buda Hills and returned feeling very tired. I realised how unfit I am after the long winter. But I came home and felt, I thought, pretty good and started to compose a post. Because one of the things I had been doing whilst walking was to think of some very clever things to say. All about transcendence and immanence and how Goddess confounds all such categories. It was all very clever. And is all now deleted.

For what happened then was that my partner came home and I discovered that I was deeply angry. She could do nothing right - I believed that everything she said and did was a personal attack. Some of this was purely due to lack of a common language. But not all - that lack has been present since the first time we met about two and a half years ago - and is in any event getting less acute as my knowledge of Hungarian grows. The thing is, I was not really interested in working out what she was saying - but was more prepared to take it all as attack. It was the first time in our relationship that I had behaved in such a way and it scared me. And the more scared I became, the worse I behaved. Until eventually, we went to sleep and I was beset by nightmares.

But, eventually, I awoke and a new day started and things began to clarify. I realised that the previous evening had been dominated by fear and that the fear was related to the memories of which I had spoken in the post. Slowly, I started to remember things that I had not acknowledged originally. Because there was a background to my time in Wycoller. I came there as a fugitive. That is the only word that fits. I was running and I was hiding. I had changed my name. For I believed that I was in danger of being committed - that the powers that be had determined that I should be locked away and zapped with drugs or electricity. That I had been diagnosed as mad.

I do not to this day know the truth of this. I was told later that the diagnosis was paranoid schizophrenia. I was told then that it was psychopathy. The former now seems more likely but there may have in fact been no diagnosis at all - for I was never told directly. And that doesn't really matter - the point is that I believed that I was in imminent danger of incarceration under the mental health act - which would have effectively denied me the right of consent to any treatment - I would have become a legal infant - unable to refuse the most invasive and drastic of interventions.

I believed then, and still believe, that what was at stake then was my soul. I believed that it was on a journey towards fulfilment and that there was a grave danger that this journey would be interrupted and, with the best of intentions, aborted. For there is no doubt that I was very distressed. Terrified is a better word. Every day i believed that at any time the gates of hell would open to swallow me. This is not - to get back to the title of the post - metaphorical. It was, at some point in every day, a literal expectation. And at those times all I could do was to hang on and eventually the world would become solid again and I would believe that I would see the evening. And the ever present huge fear that if I told anyone what i feared then that fear would become, through the act of telling, a concrete reality that I would never, in all eternity, escape So I could not tell. So I ran.

And this was the underlying reality of my time in Wycoller. In fleeing from the official asylum I had, ironically, found true asylum A place of safety. A place to be me. And all the experiences that I spoke about in the original post gave me the grounding and strength that I needed in order to continue on the path that I had started.

My brain is pretty good. I have, for what it is worth, a very high IQ. For most of my life, I have seen this a curse. In many ways I still do. Throughout my life, I have yearned to be able to accept the world that was set before me. But I never could. Always there was a ineradicable conviction that there was something that I had to do before I died. The fact that, intellectually, I knew that this conviction was irrational, helped in no way. In fact, it made it worse because it meant that I was ever splintered.

In more recent years I have clung to the idea of metaphor and that, ultimately, goddess is a more functional metaphor. In this way, I was able to speak about the Goddess without totally committing myself to Her as a living reality. I was, if you like, trying to preserve my credentials as an intellectual. There is a lot of validity to this approach and I would not have any problem with it if it were not for the fact that I do not experience Her that way.

For She is not just a metaphor but is, to me, a living breathing reality I feel Her presence physically - She is both within me and without me. I can at times, smell Her. At times, I feel a real physical desire for Her. At other times, a deep asexual knowledge that all is Ok. I see and feel Her in the roots of my being and in the presence and the body of my lover. She is the kindness of strangers and the calling of the birds. She is the bursting of bud and the rotting of the leaves. She is my birth and She is my death when it arrives. She is songs by Leonard Cohen and PJ Harvey. She is Mahler, Bartok, Mozart, Blake and Shakespeare. She is there under my feet as I walk, holding me. She caresses me as I lie on Her and breathe the scent of the soil. She is my heart singing in gratitude. She is my fear in the darker reaches of the night.

And all this is what I found in Wycoller. And what I have carried into my later life. I know that I have a destiny and that is to serve Her and those that She has called to Herself. I know, at a deep level that i do not always acknowledge, that I am Her priest and Her prophet. This is the destiny that I felt when I was young and from which I have fled for most of my life.

I do not know what lies ahead, Inanna will lead me - all I must do is learn to trust.

Time out to remember

2009-03-29T15:58:00.016+02:00

A book I am currently reading has taken my mind back to a place I lived in with my then partner some 37 years ago. A small wooded valley on the Lancashire side of the Yorkshire moors, Wycoller was at that time mainly empty. Abandoned by the hand loom weavers as the nearby industrialised textile mills took over the trade in the early 19th century, many of its houses lay open and deserted. Over the beck which flowed through the village were several very old stone bridges. This is the pack horse bridge, about 800 years old:

And this, the clam bridge, some claim to be neolithic -dating back 10000 years- although most simply claim it to be over 1000 years old.

There in the middle of the village was the ruined Wycoller Hall, reputed to be the inspiration for Ferndean Manor in Jane Eyre

Much of my time while living in Wycoller was spent exploring the moors above. Empty spaces now inhabited mainly by sheep and the birds that soared overhead, or hovered, circling, looking for prey. The sky there was big and open and the winds always present. Sometimes, I would roam as far as the old ruined farm of Top Withens, reputed to be the setting for Wuthering Heights In the winter, a cold and desolate spot. Inhospitable and unforgiving. A place where death could seem very imminent and there were constant reminders of its presence - such as the stinking carcases of dead ewes.

In the distance, from the trailer we were living in, could always be seen the brooding shape of Pendle Hill -where during the early years of the Society of Friends, also known as Quakers, their founder George Fox experienced a vision, and which was the locus for one of the most famous English witch trials.

In the early 70s, however, these things were not a matter of dry historical record. Witches still existed and were active in people's lives. This was not in a neo-Pagan, Gardnerian, sense of the term, however, but a much older one. I remember the farmer on whose land we were living coming down to the trailer one day and asking me to find an excuse to visit in about 40 minutes and then not to leave the kitchen after I had entered. He did not explain why, but I duly did what he had asked. He was not alone in the kitchen when I entered, there was a woman with him - who did not seem too pleased to see me. I stayed, however, and after a while she left. Joe then explained that she was a local witch and that she fancied him but the last man to turn her down had died suddenly. So he needed me to be there so that he di not have to turn her down. He was not kidding. He believed this. He was, literally, frightened for his life if she felt slighted. He was not in any way a New Ager, but a hard-working hill farmer, devoted to his family. And also, for the short time I knew him, a friend.

There were other signs of such beliefs, such as figurines placed in streams. This was all unspoken - the closest that it ever came to being openly acknowledged in my presence was a nod and what was close to a wink - some things are not spoken about, they just are, and human lives have to adjust to take account of them. A general sense of deeper powers that had to be acknowledged and honoured was prevalent even among those who attended church regularly. The uncanny was ever present. Often it was just a feeling - a sort of knowledge that there was something lurking just beyond the border of awareness - like shapes glimpsed from the corner of the eye. It seemed that there were other beings, other awarenesses, just slightly out of reach There were times, however, when worlds seemed to meet. Once, we were walking on the hill overlooking the trailer and heard the music of a flute. We followed the sound to its apparent source, the other side of a rock formation known as Foster's Leap. Just as we came up to it, the music stopped. Nowhere was there any sign of a musician.

It was here I first became aware of Goddess. A vision, while sitting in the ruins of the old hall, of a place where women were free to be who they are and not conform to the old and sterile expectations and that my life purpose was to help bring this about. I knew this absolutely - a clear certainty permeated the picture I saw. Even today, after so many years. I can still see and feel it. I did not have the vocabulary then to speak of Goddess but know now that it was then She first spoke to me.

This was the land of Brigantia and of the people who became known, disparagingly, as brigands. The Pennines, now known as the backbone of England, retain in their very name the memory of a time when English was not heard. "Pen" - head, mountain, hill. It is even clearer in the name of nearby hill - "Pen Y Ghent" - pure Welsh. All around seemed then to be a place in which history, although it had of course passed, had followed a different course and the attitudes of the city and adherence to the cult of reason had not really penetrated. The people I met then were strong and independent and, to my surprise, seemed totally acceptant of a southern-accented city refugee such as me. I felt, for the first time in my life, that I fully belonged and did not have to bend and twist myself to fit another's expectation. I was welcomed, and it seemed to be a full and unequivocal welcome. I was welcome as me - and I did not have to do anything to earn that welcome.

This is how it seemed to me then, and still does now. I wanted to stay there and never leave but this turned out to be impossible. The time there was a time out of time - a time to rest and feel the roots of the land that had birthed me. It was a time in which I was able to rest and gain the strength I would need for the often nightmare that lay ahead. It was my first true experience of a real, tangible, immanent presence which I can now call Goddess. I felt that presence every day and She never fully left me. A seed was planted then that was slow to grow and is only now beginning to flower

Then, I now know, I felt the presence of Brigantia. Later, the Lady of Avalon was to call me through the mists and teach me so much. Now, I hear Her voice as that of Inanna, whose messenger I am. For this is what I heard Her say, clearly and unambiguously, one evening when I was alone in the Budapest Goddess Temple.

This post follows some in which i have looked out at the activities of others. I needed to look inside, to reminisce, to remember - and to see where my own vision was and how it has developed over the years. And I found that there is a consistency and continuity to it - even when I thought that I had wandered up blind alleys and into dark. forsaken, places. It was all part of the path to which I have been called and of which my first real taste was given to me all those years ago in Wycoller.

I went back there a few years ago and all had changed. Twee and cute are the words i would use to describe the now country park with its craft centre and waymarked walks. ( BTW, whoever wrote the copy on the craft centre's website does not even seem to have read the very books that they are marketing - referring not to Mr Rochester, but Lord Rochester - a very different character indeed, whose poetry, if written here, might well get me flagged!). Of course, it could not have continued as it was - hill farming was getting less and less viable and places of beauty and peace have a market value - even though the very act of marketing destroys or at least distorts the beauty and peace that is marketed. I was reluctant to leave all those years ago, but am glad that I did since I avoided seeing the decline that is termed progress. I was both lucky and blessed to have been able to experience all that I did in the short time I was there. There, I was given the strength and the vision that still informs and inspires me.

Please sign this

2009-03-27T09:30:00.003+01:00

End the "corrective" rape of lesbian women in South Africa

More on Kyle Payne

2009-03-24T21:18:00.010+01:00

I have been hesitant to post any more on this affair because I wondered whether it would serve any useful purpose. Certain things have moved forward - Kyle has posted this disclaimer on all feminism-related posts:

DISCLAIMER: This post is rooted in a feminist/pro-feminist analysis, and as a result, it may lead readers to assume certain things about me politically and personally (e.g. that I am living, have lived, and will continue to live a responsible, pro-feminist lifestyle). The fact is, I committed a crime in January 2007, sexually violating a woman who was under my care as a resident advisor in college. I ask that you keep this information in mind when evaluating my comments in this post, as well as if you engage me in dialogue. Please read this post (listed as “Because you deserve to know” on the “All Posts” page) for more information.

So. This does go some way towards minimising the possibility that any naive person coming across his blog would assume that he is someone to be trusted. He has made a public statement that he is a sexual offender. I commend him at least for this But I am still puzzled as to why he feels his posts are valuable enough to be reposted. Sure, they were fairly well written but did not really offer any fresh insights into feminist theory. They were simply restatements of what had been said before. What made them remotely special was that they were written by a man. Here, they claimed, was a man who had seen the light and was aware enough of patriarchal conditioning to transcend it. He could, in support of his sisters, oppose the rape culture in which we live. He presented himself as living proof of the ability of awareness to change behaviour.

And yet, even while writing the original posts, he was aware that he was himself a sexual predator. He was a campaigner against pornography who sneaked into at least one student's room in order to molest her and carry away a short video which he used for sexual gratification. I do not condemn him in any way for desiring to look at women - what is deeply troubling is that he felt it right to campaign against consensual display while secretly enjoying the photograph he had sneaked from an unconscious woman. Why, if he desired so much to look at the bodies of naked women, could he not simply buy a copy of Hustler, or if that is too extreme, Playboy?

This, I feel, is where Kyle could, if he so chooses, begin to make a real and honest contribution. There were reasons he chose the public path he did as an ally of radical feminists, a rape counsellor and anti-porn campaigner. There were also reasons he chose to molest and photograph an unconscious woman. There is a real dissonance here. Kyle is certainly not unintelligent and has revealed that he can think analytically - albeit in the derivative way one would expect of an undergraduate. Now, however, he has seen in his own life a disconnect between theory and practice. He has seen how understanding of one cannot affect the other. There are other, deeper, motivations. Demons, if you will, inhabit the human psyche and no amount of analysis can rid us of them.

Thus, I can, at times, feel an urge to dominate and even to cause pain. I can feel my old wounds calling for revenge - on any woman who is in the way. I can feel my need for human touch to be so great that it seems that it would overwhelm me. I can be fully aware of the historical sources of these desires but this does not, in fact, negate them. They are still there. And they are powerful.

And here is where it all gets horribly messy. Because it is hard to acknowledge such feelings. For not only are they acknowledgements of weakness, they are also politically dubious. If I have a desire to dominate a woman sexually, albeit only in play, then there is a strong part of me that wants to censor that - because it reeks of patriarchal privilege. There are times when I yearn to be dominated and yet i can suspect that to be equally a product of patriarchy. Which it well may be but that knowledge does not make it go away - it simply manifests itself in shame and denial as I refuse to own that part of me and, guess what, it then grows and festers and manifests in anger. Against women? Against myself? Both or neither, it does not really matter - the anger remains. It was not until I began to see, and accept, te desire for both domination and submission as parts of my make-up that the anger began to diminish. And the desires began to lose any power they may have had to rule my actions. Or inaction would perhaps be a more appropriate word, for that was the result.

I cannot fit my desires into a box. i am aware that they are not pure. I wish to penetrate - to enter - to be enfolded. However it is defined it is a real and ineradicable desire (so far, although i get older every day so who knows what tomorrow will bring?) I cannot guarantee that my desires will be "safe" or free from the taint of privilege. All I can do is to ensure consent - being able to recognise the "no", however it is expressed. Reluctance is a "no". Hesitation is, perhaps, a "maybe" but is never "yes". And "no" can come at any time and is an absolute. To ignore the "no" or to ensure that it cannot be expressed is to rape.

Somehow, Kyle decided to override that possibility of "no". It is in his act - or acts, for we can never know the truth - that Kyle's contribution to discourse has the potential to be unique and valuable. He is a perpetrator who is also fluent in feminist theory. Did he feel the dissonance? If so, how did he reconcile theory with his personal practice. More to the point, what did he feel when he had that woman, or women, in his power - unconscious before his gaze. I am not talking about a theoretical, intellectual, analysis here - simply an account of how it felt. What emotions were there? How dd he feel in his body? What emotions were there when the incident was replayed on his computer? Was he aroused? How did feminist theory and the reality of those emotions sit inside the psyche of an intelligent man in his very early 20s? Where did arousal fit into the pattern of his thought? How now does he feel about arousal? It is in these questions that he can begin to make a contribution to feminist discourse - albeit as perhaps a cautionary tale. The self-congratulatory stuff he has reposted to his blog - even with the disclaimer, is in fact empty and totally meaningless as it had no grounding in practice.

The art of sheep

2009-03-23T13:05:00.002+01:00

As a complete change from recent postings, I love this!

Kyle Payne, consent and consequences

2009-03-21T21:21:00.006+01:00

An amymous commenter to my post on Kyle Payne, claims to be the male radical feministe crusader himself. I checked the traffic and the writer appears to have come from Iowa and the writing style seems very similar to his. Therefore, I assume that he is the man himself. If so, it seems that he is indeed hoping to take up exactly where he left off - as if nothing had happened. After trying to put a quotation in context and giving, without any apparent sense of irony, a lecture on ethics he finishes by stating:

I am very sorry for the misunderstanding, especially to anyone who has confided in me. I did not consider fully the implications of what I was writing in this post. In the future, however, I will be much more careful and respectful.

Careful and respectful to whom, Kyle? The women whom you hope will, in future, pour out the details of the abuse they have undergone into your receptive ear? Why should they trust you? Because you are struggling with the effects of your patriarchal upbringing and past abuse? I have news for you Kyle. Other people have also had similar experiences.- They don't, however, write articles celebrating their own sensitivity to and empathy with the feelings of abused women just weeks before copping a plea bargain and admitting to abusing a drunk and unconscious woman.

The fact that you do not see that you cannot expect to be trusted is in itself evidence that you cannot be trusted. You abused a woman. You did not seek her consent for her breast to be photographed. And yet you are proud of picketing a place where men look at the breasts of women who have consented. Isn't there something very dissonant about this? You claim that the women who work in the sex industry are incapable of consent even when they insist that they are fully responsible for their choices. But you did not give a young student uninvolved in the sex trade the opportunity to give consent. Does the concept of consent have any meaning to you? When the women confided in you, were they aware that you prowled into at least one female student's room and photographed her unconscious body? Did you tell them? - for if consent is to be valid it must be informed. Did they know that your desire to gaze at women's breasts was so strong before they spoke of what some other men did to their breasts?

If I came across a drunk and unconscious woman revealing naked flesh, my first response would undoubtedly be to look. Patriarchal conditioning or not, this is part of my make up and I doubt it will change now. But this would, also undoubtedly, be a very short look because my next response would be, and has been in the past, to cover her. For by becoming drunk she did not give consent for all and sundry to gaze at her, even though she might, unconsciously, have enabled them to do so. And most men I know, all of whom are conditioned by patriarchy, many of whom have been abused, and very few of whom would identify as feminist, would do exactly the same.

Kyle, you did not. And neither did you stumble upon her by accident and then become overtaken by a sudden impulse. You entered her room. You sought her out. You had a camera with you. This was a deliberate act. How can any of the women you seem to hope to counsel be sure that they are not your next target? The answer is that they cannot - for you have not shown any sign that you understand the consequences of your actions. Therefore, there is a very good chance that you will re-offend. And why, given the way you have behaved in the past do you want to go back? Do you have a need to peer inside the minds and souls of troubled women? Do you, in fact, get off on it? Does it simply turn you on? Did you lie in bed at night and imagine being those men. When you ejaculated, which orifice were you in? What did you like better - when they fought or when they froze in terror?

Such questions may, perhaps, be unjust, but they will be asked. And with cause. Your actions gave cause to them. Your apparent lack of any real insight reinforces that cause. It was not patriarchy or past abuse that prompted your actions. It was, unless you have serious mental health problems, a result of choice. You gave yourself permission to do what you did. You gave consent to the act and she could not. And these actions have consequences - such as the questions in the last paragraph.

(By the way, it would be entirely ethical to publish a book such as the one you fantasised about writing providing you obtained the consent of the women concerned. That did not seem to be a factor in your later disclaimer. Why not?)

Agency

2009-03-19T08:19:00.006+01:00

I was involved in a bit of an exchange a while back with someone who seems to me to have problems with her anger. In the course of a long "rant" against people she identified (wrongly, as it happens) as being of the far left she spoke of being "driven to considerable rage" about a certain issue. One of her principal accusations was that "far lefties" were angry people and used this in order to dismiss them as unworthy of consideration. She also said that for those who agree with her there was such a thing as "legitimate and natural outrage". She, on the other hand, was a "spiritual" person and was therefore able to sermonise about how destructive anger is.

I pointed out to her that her choice of words indicated that she was angry herself. This she denied emphatically, eventually saying that when she wrote "I am driven to considerable rage" she really meant to say something along the lines of "were I the sort of person who gave way to anger my moral disapproval of this person's actions could cause me to do so excessively".

OK. Perhaps I am being pedantic but I do not see how the words she wrote could mean anything other than an admission that she felt angry. With which I would have absolutely no problem. People are entitled to be angry - it is often the most appropriate response to what happens. But no. Because of some bullshit notion of spirituality she could not accept that anger played any significant part in her life.

OK. It is her blog and she is entitled to say whatever she feels on it. I suppose I may be being unfair to her so I have linked above in order that others may see the post for themselves. There is a lot more about it which worries me - such as the contempt she expresses for others, but I will leave that aside.

What really got me thinking and has prompted this post was the phrase "I am driven to considerable anger". The passive voice. It implies helplessness and lack of agency. A passenger in a car, unable to reach the steering wheel or brake, or an animal being driven to market. She is not alone in this use - it is common and I know that I have used and will use in the future, similar constructions. Because, sometimes, it seems my emotions overwhelm me and impel me towards some behaviour that is outside my control. This is scary and, in an attempt to cope with them, I invoke an outside agency. "I was moved to tears by the plight of the orphan", I might say when, in fact, what happened was that I saw the orphan's plight and my response to that was an emotion that produced tears. It was my emotion and they were my tears - they did not come from outside but from within. They were mine. But their apparent power can be terrifying.

I do not think I am nit-picking here. I feel that this is important. If the emotion is mine, then I have choice. I have agency. I can choose whether or not to feel it - or, more exactly, having felt it I can choose how to act on that emotion. If am angry at someone, whatever they have done, my anger belongs to me and I can choose what to do with it. Anger then becomes a creative energy. If, however, I perceive anger as something that is caused by the actions of others then I lose agency and the consequent ability to use the anger creatively.

I remember when I was a child and my mother smacked me, she sometimes said, "now look what you made me do". I think I have used similar phrases - for which, at this late date, I can only apologise. The thing is, I did not force her to smack me - that impulse came from within her. Whatever I had done - and, in fact, I cannot remember any of those childhood misdemeanors - she, ultimately had a choice in how she reacted. The effect, however, was twofold. I bore the pain of the smack and also the blame for causing the loss of my mother's self-control. I am, I must add, in no way talking child abuse here, just normal 1950s childrearing. Whatever childhood traumas have affected me, and they are certainly not relevant here, my mother's disciplinary methods are way down the list.

But the belief in lack of agency that my mother expressed can have effects in all areas of life. I can say that I am turned on, or another similar phrase, by somebody I desire. A seemingly innocuous expression. And it normally is. But, however, if I turn the metaphor into a simile, it becomes clear that I am saying that she has activated me like an electrical appliance. There is, therefore, an assumption within this that my desire is her responsibility not mine. Her experience, her perceptions and desires are irrelevant to this, for she is the active agent - she turned me on. I am the machine that has been activated -I do not think I need to elaborate on the potential consequences of such thinking. If, however, I accept that it is my desire then it becomes my responsibility. It may be reciprocated or it may not. Either way, my desire is mine - not hers.

Just as my anger, my sorrow, my joy and every other part of my being is mine. They are all my responsibility. I must choose what to do with them. When I learn this trick, and that often seems a long way off, then I can become fully myself. For the path that I am on, which I identify with Inanna, is not the path of trying to suppress or transcend the emotions of my humanity but is the path of acceptance of them in their totality and thereby finding my true being and agency. Perfection is not something that lies ahead and can only be reached after a long path of discipline and denial. It is here and it is now - all I need to do is to reach for it. And why I haven't done that is a whole other story...

A final word on the troll

2009-03-18T19:11:00.003+01:00

Just one set of statistics missing. Mr Troll alleged that most PARENTAL killings are committed by mothers. So I typed parental murder into google and this is what came up:

"Killings of children by a natural parent are committed in roughly equal proportions by mothers (47%) and fathers (53%), but that where the child is killed by someone other than a parent, males strongly predominate" 15 .
Brookman and Maguire (2003) Reducing homicide: a review of the possibilities (PDF) London: Home Office. p.16.

It isn't so hard to find the truth, Mr Truthseeker

And that really is that - just wanted to tie up a loose end.

A road no one should travel..

2009-03-18T17:43:00.007+01:00

Strip clubs, along with the sex industry as a whole, support a system in which women’s bodies are literally bought and sold. For many women working in the sex industry, their participation is not by choice, or it is based on unjust circumstances. For a woman whose livelihood is based on playing into men’s sexual fantasies, that means internalizing the message that men have the right to control her body and that she has the duty to serve them.

So why would SAVE protest at a strip club? Because we don’t support the buying and selling of women’s bodies. We don’t support a system of patriarchal oppression in which women are deemed commodities to be controlled by men. Whether the outcome of such a system is domestic violence, date rape, or any other act of hatred committed against women, SAVE wants to make the message clear that we do not support it, especially at a time when pop culture seems to celebrate sexism.

The above comes from a blog posting dated March 11 2009. It is reprinted from a letter to a magazine in April 2006.

One day I’ll write a book. Well, hopefully several. But this book in particular will be a compilation of all the stories shared with me by survivors. Women (of a variety of different backgrounds) raped, beaten, groped, stalked, threatened, drugged, coerced, tortured, pissed on, and emotionally abused by men (of a variety of different backgrounds). It always strikes me, when listing these abuses, that the words are almost meaningless out of context. Maybe that’s part of the problem. Why would we take men’s violence seriously if we cannot begin to understand, on an emotional level, its effects on the lived experiences of women?

And that from a post on the same blog dated May 6 2008

A good feminist man and an ally of exploited women, one might think. And this is what he would have us believe. But there is a slight problem with that picture. Because, you see, on August 25 2008 Kyle Payne, the owner of the blog, The Road Less Travelled, was sentenced to six months for entering the room of a drunken and unconscious student to whom he was counsellor, exposing her breast and videoing it. He pleaded guilty to having done this in order to obtain sexual gratification. He said it was a passing impulse. So passing that he uploaded it onto his computer?

He has now served his time and his blog is active again where he still poses as a radical, anti-pornography feminist man. That may be so, Kyle, but can you expect to be trusted so soon after the event? You choose to become a rape counsellor and you choose to listen to the intimate secrets of women. You fantasise about writing a book based on such secrets. You then choose to molest an unconscious woman and keep a trophy for your later pleasure. It seems to me that you are a voyeur, Kyle. Accept it. Live with it. It is not so bad. Enjoy pornography - for that is clearly your thing. The video proves it. The women who were stripping at the club you were so proud you had picketed had chosen to do it - however restricted and conditioned you may say their choices have been. The woman you molested, the women you are so proud of counselling, did not have such choices. If you want to hear about being pissed on, beaten etc, then there are, I am sure, phone lines you can ring, books you can read - or even willing partners to meet your fantasies. You might well find a happy and fulfilled life.

I cannot pretend that my own sexual conduct over the years has always been as good as I would like but it has always been consensual. What Kyle did cannot be called that, The fact that the young woman was unconscious means that no-one - particularly the woman he molested - can be sure that photography was all that he did. Neither can anyone be sure that it was the only such occasion. He speaks in his statement, which is, to be fair, on the blog, of his bewilderment at what he did. A while in the wilderness reflecting on his actions and motivations is far more appropriate than his current attempts to re-establish himself in the environment he so blatantly took advantage of not so long ago..

I do not normally take part in campaigns against private individuals. I think this is the first and I hope it is the last. If he had remained private, or simply started a blog without trumpeting his own, now severely tattered, radical feminist credentials, I would certainly have left him alone. But this is not what he has done. He does not seem, therefore, to have taken on board that he was well out of order and that trust, if it ever returns, will take a long time to come.

A Poison Tree- William Blake

2009-03-18T12:24:00.002+01:00

I cannot pretend that I have delved all the meaning in this poem - well, I doubt that I ever will delve all the meaning in any of Blake's work - even the most apparently simple. It seems, however, highly appropriate to my last posting. Read and enjoy.

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright,
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine -

And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning, glad, I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

Anger and Spirituality

2009-03-17T23:10:00.002+01:00

I have been feeling angry the last few days. This is probably evident to anyone who has read the blog. I do not apologise for this. In fact, I am glad that I have, since I have also felt particularly creative. As is also evident. I hope that others will appreciate reading the last few posts but that really does not matter - the fact is that I needed to express how I felt and this is now done. Some of the language has been intemperate and, again, I have no problem with this.

Anger is nothing new to me. It is something that has been with me for much of my life. For most of that time, however, I have not acknowledged it. I felt that it was a negative emotion and a sign of my own lack of development. I had to be cool. And all the energy locked up in the anger just whirled around inside me - eating away my creativity and self-esteem. I tried to erase it with pills and drown it in alcohol - but still it lurked, not going away just becoming less visible. Hiding.

And it was not only the anger which was hiding but me. For my anger is born of me and partakes of my energy. It is part of my being and cannot be erased without violence to that being. It is my fire. Or at least, it is that aspect of my fire that exists in order to protect and impel the defense mechanisms but had to be switched off in order that others would not punish or reject me. For anger, in a hierarchical system, cannot be expressed against those in higher position - be they parents, teachers or employers. So I learnt to hide the fire - to hide myself.

For anger is of the will to life. It is the fight or flight energy we need in order to meet threats. It is the energy that will enable a mother to lift a car away from her child. It is goddess-given. It is there to impel action - to move us, and others, out of danger. It is beautiful. If you doubt this, look at, say, Picasso's Guernica or much of Goya - to take two, Spanish, examples.

But we are taught that it is wrong. We are taught that spirituality consists of erasing such passions. Anger is, we are told, one of the seven deadly sins. So we learn to pretend that we do not have it. We become adept at hiding it in words and smiles. We pretend that it is not ours but that others have driven us to it, that they make us angry. "Look what you made me do!" Then we can even learn to hide it altogether - even from ourselves.

And in this hiding I became depressed - unable to move - eventually unable, really, to feel. A half-man, I thought that I was alive. But I wasn't - for my fire was absent. Because in order to hide my anger I had to hide my fire. And without that fire I am not alive.

It still scares me but I am determined to allow my fire to burn. And this, to me, is spirituality - to become fully and completely myself. Only then will I cease to be a prisoner of my passions. When they are allowed to flow freely then I will be free. For anger is not the whole, or even a major, part of my fire - but it cannot be separated from it.

I could not let him slither away..

2009-03-17T12:28:00.014+01:00

...until I had eliminated all chance that he might be an honest troll. So, I have been to the source he later directed me to - the US Centre for Disease Control. And yes, there are indeed statistics which show a majority of infanticides being committed by the mothers. However, these figures only relate to 9.1% of all child killings -those in the first week of life, 82.6% of which occurred on the first day. 95% of these births took place outside hospital and the majority of the mothers were adolescents with histories of mental health problems. So, a frightened, mentally distressed child gives birth alone- perhaps not even knowing (due to inadequate sex education) that she has been pregnant. She then smothers the child. Tragic indeed but, I would argue, deserving more of compassion and care than censure and in no way representative of the female population at large.

Such a selective use of statistics to support an allegation that most child killings are committed by single mothers is nothing other than a poisonous lie.

I then turned to a research paper, by Murray A Strauss, which is published on a web site called batteredmen.com. This, the troll alleges, proves that women are equally, if not more, culpable in domestic violence. The first thing that became evident is that this seems to be a sound piece of work. The second thing was that it does not offer support to the assumption behind the name of the website. To quote Strauss, "for men, the risk of injury and therefore fear of injury, is relatively low." He stresses that there is a real, quantitive and qualititive, difference between a slap and a beating - although both are legally assaults. Furthermore, he ends with this statement:

I believe humanity needs research inspired by the moral agenda and perspective of those who focus on the oppression of women, regardless of whether the oppression is physical, sexual, psychological or economic; and also research inspired by the moral agenda of those who focus on physical assault, regardless of whether the assault is by a man, woman or child. I even dare to hope that the controversy will be resolved by recognizing the need for both perspectives, and that this will bring an end to attempts to discredit those whose agenda and professional role requires a different approach and different perspective.

This is hardly a stinging indictment of feminist theory - indeed, it calls for a further application of it. Strauss does not question the reality of the oppression of women but accepts it as a given. The fact that he calls for research to take other factors into account does not affect this and I would not argue with him.

The troll's attempt to cite this paper as evidence supporting his contention that men are equal, or greater, victims seems, at best, disingenuous. As far as I can make out at first glance , Strauss simply does not say it. "Battered" men are not as equal in number or significance to battered women.

But I certainly do not expect a troll to worry about evidence - since all facts can be twisted to serve his agenda. A slap to him is the moral equivalent of a kicking and a frightened and bewildered child is a vicious murderer.

This set of values seems deeply sick. And yet, I fear, it pervades much society.

Some facts for the troll, before I let him settle back into his hole

2009-03-16T23:15:00.013+01:00

Before I left the troll completely behind, I wanted to check on one of his allegations - which was that women, particularly single mothers, are responsible for the majority of child killings. I had a feeling that this was not true but was in any case not going to click onto the male rights activist blog that he cited as evidence for his claim. Then I got to thinking. Was my gut feeling wrong - because it is, after all, women who are in the most contact with children and are thus perhaps the ones more likely to lose the plot - they certainly would have far more opportunity to commit the crimes.

So I decided to check and went to the US Department of Justice where I found the statistics which show that, despite women having, in general, the responsibility of caring for the young and therefore more opportunity and, feasibly, more motive, 60% of all infant homicides are committed by men. Furthermore, when it comes to the elderly, where again the responsibility for care falls mainly on women, the proportion of male offenders is even higher - 85%.

This did not take long to find. Any troll could do so. But, of course, he will not - why spoil a fervent hatred with facts. I do not think, for any sane individual, the USDOJ is a hotbed of feminist ideologues - so I cannot see how these figures can be argued with. I would imagine that similar figures will be replicated for most western countries.

So there is no support here for his contention. It is born of his hatred towards and fear of women, pure and simple.

Goddess Pages now online...

2009-03-16T22:25:00.002+01:00

The Spring issue is now online - with much free content. If you have not done so in the past, check it out now and also be sure to check the back issues in which all content up to and including Spring 2008 is free. There is a wealth of material to read and enjoy - including learned articles, artwork and some wonderful poetry.

Just click here and enjoy

Madoff, 56bn and free enterprise - a few reflections

2009-03-16T12:32:00.009+01:00

Where the hell has that money gone? Down behind the cushions of the sofa? Hidden under a mattress? There is a limit as to how much anyone can spend on their homes in the Hamptons, New York, Mayfair and elsewhere, even including the three yachts. Perhaps a billion or so could be blown on them. The rest?

Where is it? I admit that finance at this level makes very little sense to me, but once upon a time there were individuals who put their savings into financial institutions which then put that money into this Ponzi scheme. So the money working people put aside from their wages in order to provide for their old age is no longer there. It has gone. It seemed to be real once - a measure of the reward for service rendered. Now it seems to have evaporated. At each point in this process of rendering cash into steam various individuals took fees and many earned bonuses. Most of these transactions, until the end, were probably legal. But something apparently magical has happened as what was once real has become unreal - contrary to Newtonian physics.

But it is not magic, however, for the money was never real in the first place. It never has had any reality - all it is is a set of agreements - nowadays represented in binary code and never existing outside those electronic impulses. Those who understand this language of unreal agreements grow rich and generally escape the ultimate consequences of their actions, while those who produce the goods and services measured in this language of agreements reached on the poker tables of international finance find themselves in unexpected poverty in their old age. Unable to meet the bills for essential services. Perhaps unable to have the medical treatments that could keep them healthy for longer. Sure, there are some, like Madoff who cross the line from legality to illegality but this seems to me to be simply a question of degree not of substance.

This is not the first bubble and it will not be the last - unless some other way of ensuring distribution of goods and services is found. The Soviet model did not work - neither, patently, does the Freidmanite free market - which has ended up, ironically, by fulfilling the dream of early 20th century socialism, the nationalisation of banks.

There is often an amazing apparent symmetry of events, however, and there was an early indication of where we were heading. Early in Margaret Thatcher's premiership a ferry was delivered to Townsend Thoresen and began its operations on the cross - channel route. it was one of three and their names reflected the triumphant ideology of both the Tory leader and her friend Reagan - Free Enterprise. On March 6, 1987, one of these, the Herald of Free Enterprise, sank as it was leaving Zeebrugge harbour. The official enquiry concluded:
…

.a full investigation into the circumstances of the disaster leads inexorably to the conclusion that the underlying or cardinal faults lay higher up in the Company. The Board of Directors did not appreciate their responsibility for the safe management of their ships. They did not apply their minds to the question: What orders should be given for the safety or our ships?

This seems to me to epitomise the whole ethos of the ideology of Free Enterprise - maximisation of profit with no thought of social responsibility. Early in its unholy career this fact was "heralded" in Zeebrugge harbour. Lest anyone claim that this criminal corporate negligence was a one-off, there had been an even worse indication a few years earlier in Bhopal, India, when spillage from the Union Carbide works killed and maimed thousands. Here, even the most basic safety measures had been cost-cut out . No-one in authority in corporations seemed to learn any lessons from such events- they simply campaigned, successfully, for even less regulation. The safety and livelihoods of human beings seem forever to take second place to the search for greater and greater profits for the corporate few.

We have now seen the results of this culture of greed and have an opportunity to rethink. I pray we take it

Feeding the trolls

2009-03-16T09:11:00.011+01:00

I should know better than to do so - but there is no fool like an old fool. Besides, they can be amusing at times as they caper about, trying to appear rational. Seriously, however, Mr Anonymous is perfectly entitled to his opinions but I wish that he and his ilk had the personal courage to write their own blogs rather than, like a burglar shitting in someone's living room, deposit their bile in spaces other people provide. Still, he has given me a glimpse into a particular pathology - albeit a little exaggerated and caricatured.

For this I am grateful to him - even though on a rational level it horrifies me. The world he inhabits seems to be a complete inversion of the one I know. He speaks of "pregnant couples". What strange branch of biology is this? He contradicts himself and when challenged says that I knew what he meant. So he evidently also considers himself a telepath. I may be strange in this but when English-speaking people address me in English I assume that they have chosen their words and that they are using the same general dictionary - and not, like Humpty Dumpty, assigning new meanings as they go along and then expecting others to keep up with this.

Most of all, I am grateful to him for this gem:

there's a reason why universities didn't offer degrees for women. It's because women generally are less critical and not as innovative or intellectually daring as men. Sad to say but it's true. Women are more collective and want to please authority figures such as teachers, instead of critically engage with the material and question academic dogma

many women in universities today are there for the social benefits. They like social bonding, communication, gratifying their own egos. Sadly many men are becoming like them instead of pursuing Truth

This is so crazy it is risible. On the one hand he complains about feminist scholarship and on the other he says that women are incapable of engaging critically with received wisdom. Therefore, whatever women do, unless it is darning his socks or being an incubator serving his divine right to be a FATHER, it is wrong. Because, of course, men have always pushed the boundaries and have never used their time at school and University simply as a means of making contacts for later life but always as a place for the pursuit of Truth. Haven't they? Well..... no. And of course, as we all know, men are devoid of the desire to seek ego gratification.

And yet, although he seems a caricature, this man does, I fear, represent quite a large body of opinion. There are many who feel a sense of grievance as they perceive their own easy privilege slipping away and their lazy, self-serving assumptions challenged. Secretly, or maybe not so secretly, they would love to emulate the Taleban. For them, the world of The Handmaid's Tale is a Utopia. I hope their numbers are dwindling but there are times when I fear that the contrary is happening. Particularly as we move into difficult economic times.

When anybody starts capitalising "Truth" - whoever they be - part of me wants to run for cover. For often they will have guns and the will to use them to assert and impose this Truth. The other part of me, however, is determined to refuse to allow them to bully me into submission.

So, I am amending my comment policy. Any abuse from any "Anonymous" and for which there is no link back will be deleted automatically, without being read. I have heard such verminous garbage many times before and do not intend to provide a resource for cowards, who lack the courage to put themselves on the line, to propagate their hate.

I am no fan of bloodsports, but...

2009-03-14T17:23:00.005+01:00

... I have loved the battle between Jon Stewart and the CNBC network and its share tipster, Jim Cramer. Like nothing I have seen so far, it uncovers what is, at best, the incompetence and, at worst, criminality of those who cheerled the CEOs, the traders and hedge fund managers as their greed for short term and unsustainable profits led to meltdown of the financial institutions and poverty for those who trusted the advice given.

For those who have missed this display of impeccable comic timing coupled with controlled outrage I did have the videos here, but I am afraid that they were too much for my computer - which decided to go on strike every time I turned to this page. So here is the link to the website.

Feeling really good...

2009-03-14T14:14:00.004+01:00

I am feeling a renewed enthusiasm about blogging. Lately, I have at times been wondering whether to discontinue, thinking that I may have nothing relevant or new to say. Or, perhaps, it has been more that I have been blogging for about six months now and the novelty and excitement had worn off.

But now passion has returned, courtesy of "Anonymous". His comment reminded me of just how warped and isolated the world view of some human beings can be and how vital it is to keep banging away and presenting alternative visions. Of which mine is just one among many. I neither expect nor want to convert anyone to my way of thinking. This is, in any case, impossible since that way of thinking has developed over many years and has its roots in experiences which are unique to me. Uniformity of thought is the aim of totalitarians of both right and left and I will oppose it to the best of my ability. At best, I hope that I stimulate critical thought. Such thought, however, to have any real validity, should be grounded in experience and observable reality - not in received dogma and prejudice.

I accept that many men have suffered at the hands - or even fists - of the women in their lives. Any such assaults should be taken seriously. No argument. But then some men assert that such assaults are at least as endemic as men's assaults on women. Just yesterday, a London taxi driver was convicted on 12 counts of drugging and attacking women passengers. All in a matter of about a year. So his average is about attack a month - and that is just those of which he has been convicted.

I do not know his motives. He testified that "he craved female attention in the wake of a series of failed relationships". And yet he drugged them into unconsciousness - a strange way to gain "attention". It sounds more like revenge. Perhaps he sees himself as a victim of uncaring and predatory women and this was his way of getting back at them. I don't know. What i do know is that I have, in both professional and personal life, heard many men express such deep anger. I have also heard and read women who have expressed similar anger against men. Their response, however, seems to consist of withdrawing from relationships with men - not seeking them out, drugging them and sexually assaulting them. That is solely the preserve of the out-of-control, angry and inadequate man.

Of course, this taxi-driver is an exception. Very few men behave like that. Just as there are few Peter Sutcliffes or Ted Bundys. A list of serial killers shows, however, that they overwhelmingly male and that their victims were predominantly female. And that there have been frighteningly many of them.

I was just looking at the US Dept of Justice statistics on intimate partner murders and came across something very interesting. In 1976 the sexes were fairly evenly balanced with male victims numbering 1,304 and female victims 1,587. Over the next 28 years, however, the gap widens until in 2005 the figures are 329 men to 1181 women. It is interesting to speculate about the reasons for this trend. Perhaps it is something to do with the rise of feminism and an easier access to divorce and women generally preferring to terminate a relationship and set up on their own in a less lethal way than men. And that, of course, leads to further speculation as to why men prefer a dead partner to a divorced one. One immediate thought is that it is bound up with notions of ownership and men preferring to destroy their property rather than lose it - especially to another.

I do not know the answers to such questions but I have opinions. Many of these will, undoubtedly, be wrong. I hope that when people disagree they comment, preferably without resorting to personal abuse. I will not delete any comment, however abusive, unless that abuse extends to any other person or it becomes purely repetitive. I will not, however, directly answer anybody who lacks the courage to sign such abuse and reserve the right to express my utter and complete contempt for any such coward.

WHIPPED ? - I think not

2009-03-13T21:46:00.006+01:00

I am not going to deal in any detail with the attack on me a couple of posts ago. Anyone who is interested can see it in the comments to that post . However, in the strange and inverted pseudo-logic the anonymous wingnut uses he alludes to an expression that is common in misogynist discourse- "pussy-whipped". To me this typifies the nonsensical nature of the world these people inhabit. How can any woman's genitals actually whip anyone? Tell me please.

I am not saying that genitals cannot be used to hit people. The sjambok, a whip used by the apartheid police in South Africa has been alleged to have been made at times from rhinocerous penis. Whether this is true or not the bull pizzle whip has been used in Europe at least from early modern times - being referenced in Henry IV. Many men, and women, have been whipped by penises, but, as far as I know, no pussy has ever whipped anybody. Perhaps I am wrong. If I am, please provide me with references

So misogynist men accuse men who do not share their particular pathology of having undergone a physically impossible assault - ignoring the physical realities of male and female. This puts into a clear perspective their allegations of the victim status they claim which is in similar blatant denial of any objective reality outside their perverse imaginations.

Recognition at last?

2009-03-13T12:51:00.006+01:00

Well, it has at last happened and a nutter has dropped from the trees - or, as is more likely, emerged from under a stone - and left a torrent of abuse as a comment to my last post. Grateful as I am for the positive feedback and intelligent comments I have had, this anonymous - of course - "person" has really made my day!

Irony?

2009-03-10T22:02:00.004+01:00

I heard the BBC news today and it spoke of a government initiative to fast-track teachers' qualifications for suitably qualified professionals. Fair enough. I thought. And then in the next breath the reporter mentioned mathematicians who had previously been employed by the banks.

And I wondered whether these were really the sort of "experts" that we wished to let loose on our children - people who can devise intricate ways to profit from financial disaster?

I laughed uncontrollably for a few minutes. It was the only thing I could do. And then, I wondered whether i should have wept.

The Fruit of the Poison Tree

2009-03-08T19:52:00.006+01:00

I was listening to a BBC programme in which a presenter spoke about being on the Haj and then gushing about being in the same place where Abraham did something or other, I cannot remember what. And then I realised that I just did not give a shit about Abraham - nor the various religions of his putative descendants

I am sick and tired of the assumption that these things are important. So many times, I have seen and heard Goddess followers trying to be inclusive - to find a way that they can accommodate those who have a residual attachment to the religions in which they were brought up. I do not see it. Whatever Abraham was or was not, he is the idol of an ideology which has exulted in its triumphs over the religion it superseded - the religion in which Goddess was honoured. He is the embodiment of monotheistic, patriarchal triumphalism and is seen as the ancestor of the pernicious creeds that have brought the inhabitants of this planet to the brink of destruction. He represents the fulcrum of history where the balance shifted and the power/over paradigm took the high ground.

For what is the story of Abraham and Isaac about but the whole concept of father- right. As father abraham defers to the superdaddy, Yahweh, who, vampire-like thirsts for the blood of younger men in order for him to feel fulfilled. The religions and ideologies which have metaphorically sprang from the loins of this arrogant psychopath are the very same ones that have their fingers on various nuclear triggers. They are the ones that claim the moral authority to destroy all life on this planet.

And I am expected to kowtow to this sick conception of divinity! I reject such expectation. For this religion is fundamentally and irrevocably flawed. Far from being the blessing that we have been led to believe, it is a pernicious lie whose effect is to rob human beings of their integrity. Thus, having been told for millennnia that their desire was the gateway to the Fall of humanity, women are then told that they can see themselves honoured in the figure of the Virgin - forever inviolate - even after giving birth

It is, pure and simply, a lie.

I cannot think of any other way to describe this. Dress it up in whatever theology we like it is nothing other than a lie. Even within most protestantism this lie is repeated. For at its base is the recognition that the Abrahamic covenant depends upon the denial of women's true agency. And at the base of this is the true and certain knowledge that paternity is always ultimately doubtful. Thus, Mary has to be a perpetual virgin, for otherwise Jesus may be a bastard - and that would give the lie to the father right which underpins the Abrahamic covernant.

And yet, according to the myth, Jesus was nothing more nor less than a bastard. He was conceived out of wedlock and was not the son of the putative father. A patsy, Joseph, had to be found in order for the child to be "legitimate". A convenient legal fiction, really - however it may be dressed up. If Jesus was not the product, under Judaic law, of the congress of man and wife he was a bastard. He was outwith the rights of inheritance and acceptance. He was outwith the Abrahamic covenant - remember what happened to the son of Abraham's concubine, Hagar. He could not, therefore be the Messiah. Unless he was somehow freed from the normal route of conception. A miracle must therefore be proclaimed

For this is what happens when you tell a lie. You must spin ever more lies in order for the first lie not to be caught out. And the lies get ever more ornate and complicated as they have to account for more and more anomalies. Thus dogma is born as ordinances are given that it is a sin to question these lies. Lie builds on lie.

And yet many within the Goddess movement strive to accommodate such lies. We are told of the Magdalen who blessed the Messiah and ordained him as priest before crucifixion. She was, we are told by many, a priestess of the Goddess and had undergone the sacred marriage with him - even perhaps bearing his child. A male child, lest it be forgot.

Thus the Abrahamists strive to include the new awareness of Goddess and incorporate Her into the Abrahamic lie. There is little evidence that Jesus ever existed and even less that he was an initiate in the mysteries of the Goddess and there is even less than that little that he fathered a child whose descendants would come to reign in France. Perhaps he did. But it can only ever be perhaps. And what the hell does it matter?

Because the Abrahamic lie is based upon the patently false notion that any man can be certain of paternity. A large section of the bible is devoted to trying to prove descent from one man to another. All it needs is one woman - just one among many- to have managed to hide her "indiscretion" for all such lineages to fall to pieces - they mean, literally, nothing. They are a lie. Or, at best, a pious and futile hope. For it is inevitable, thank Goddess, that somewhere along the line, the assumptions of the patriarchs will not have been fulfilled and a new and unknown DNA sequence be introduced into the line of descent.

For the only possible certainty is of motherhood. None of us can be certain of paternity - short of scientific testing that is only now available. The whole logic of the Bible is in defiance of this certain fact. And this defiance of reality is enough to invalidate whatever nebulous claim it may have to allegiance.

US jurisprudence has,unlike its ancestor in the UK, the delightful concept of "the fruit of the poison tree". Under this doctrine, evidence which is obtained illegally or from dubious sources cannot be offered in court. The Bible is a poison tree. Instead of trying, from very creditable motives, to find a way in which Goddess awareness can conform to christian or other expectations and find a home in the bible, I feel it would be better to leave the bible - and, more importantly, messianic expectations, completely behind. Yes, there is much wisdom to be found within its pages - but such wisdom can also be found elsewhere. And, most importantly, when it is found elsewhere, it will be free of the taint of the poison tree.

..and more synchronicity...

2009-03-07T21:30:00.003+01:00

..in this article on Alternet - a few days old but I have only connected with it now. A short quote from a very good article:

this vulva gallery therefore is so simple yet so inspired -- an art show we carry around and never look at.

The differences are profound and lovely -- some are drapey and flowerlike, some have bigger labia, some are spare and simple, and frankly there are more hair variations than at the Westminster dog show.

Synchronicity.

2009-03-07T19:45:00.006+01:00

Strange - I had just posted my last piece when I saw on Medusa Coils this posting from Lydia Ruyle concerning the earliest ever Sheela na Gig . Must be something in the air...

cutting out the shame

2009-03-07T18:21:00.005+01:00

Livia Indica posted a comment to my last post which spoke about some rather extreme genital modifications. I looked at the link she supplied and, although I felt physically repelled by many of the images, would not want to say that such things should not be allowed. But there is a strong proviso to this and that is that such drastic procedures are undergone with full, informed, consent. If an adult woman or a man has made a free and conscious decision to mutilate themselves - for whatever reason- then that is a matter for them and whoever wields the knife. The fact that I cannot understand - and am repelled by it - is neither here nor there.

The people who choose undergo such modifications, however, do so in the full knowledge that they are deviating from the norm - however that is defined. They know that what they are doing is transgressive and have chosen that way in order to express themselves. They have that right. This is very different from the message being promulgated by plastic surgeons whose profits depend upon the instillation of anxiety in women who fear that their entirely normal genitals are in some way pathological and repulsive. For this feeds into the state of chronic shame that rules our culture and of which women are the main recipients and transmitters. Shame, with its mythological origin in Eden, is located within the genitals in general but in women's in particular. It is women who are the recipients of the language of shame - a man may be a "rotten prick" but this in no way carries the same weight as "filthy cunt".

For there is a perceived intrinsic wrongness about the vulva that does not pertain to the penis. A man may indeed be anxious about size but this is a question of degree and comparison, not of essence. Culturally and liguistically, the cunt is taboo. It is the source of pollution. It is, intrinsically, pollute. It secretes. It bleeds. And it is from where we all have emerged.

It reminds us that we are human. And mortal. We were born and we will die. Womb and tomb may only rhyme in English but there is a strong correlation. Long barrows, to give just one example, are modelled on the female body. it was, I think, for this reason that Sheela-na-gigs were carved on churches. "Gaze", they invite," upon your beginning and upon your end. The Alpha and the Omega. Before both, you are powerless".

Barry Long. in at least one of his tapes, speaks disparagingly of cunt power and of the "fiendess". There is a sort of equation between the two. And both emerge because of the failuire of men to exercise their natural authority. He says. I am not sure what he means but I wonder to what extent his ideas are rooted in his fear of the cunt - in his fear of women's power which he sees as having its roots in hell. But, of course, his fear is, in this case, not surprising and in a sense rational for Hell is a goddess.

There is no way that I can see of avoiding the accusation of essentialism. Our culture is predicated upon genital difference and the privileging of one set - the male - over the other - the female. However it is glossed, this still applies. And the privilege and the taboo have their origin in one inescapable fact and that is that all human life emerges from between a woman's legs. Sure, men have their part to play - but that can seem trivial and minor when compared with birth. Besides which, how many men can relate the child with any specific physical action of theirs? How many men can be 100% certain - without the very new science of DNA testing - it was an act of theirs? We cannot. And this, I feel, has a major part to play in the way we have acted to denigrate and revile women.

In order to control women, we have striven to deny their ownership of their own sexuality. In our fear of the power we perceive, which we see as cunt-power and demonic, we have told women that their genitals are filthy pits of disease and decay (lest you think I exaggerate. read some of the church fathers). Such language can seem out of place in our modern world - but the message is still there in such practices as labioplasty, where young women, who have absorbed the wordless shame which underpins our civilisation, are encouraged to have that shame cut (literally!) out.

baffled !! - NSFW!!!

2009-03-05T23:53:00.005+01:00

I wondered whether my previous posts had been a bit over the top - exaggerating something that is not really happening. Then, today, I typed "labia" into google and found this site - within the first five hits - it is from a cosmetic surgeon.

My question is: can anybody tell me what was wrong with the vulvas before surgery? I just cannot see it. But I am a man so may be missing something. Please tell me if I am, because - as I said- I just cannot see it.

Irony - or racist hypocrisy?

2009-03-02T21:49:00.007+01:00

I was just in the kitchen and listening to the BBC World Service - ah, it is good to hear fluent English! - and there was an item about female genital mutilation in Africa and how campaigns to raise awareness are having concrete effects.

And yet, as I posted yesterday, in the UK a mainstream television programme can advocate a similar procedure. Sure, it is not done with broken glass and without anaesthetics and it goes by the reassuringly latin name of labioplasty but it is nevertheless mutilation. Certainly it is not as extreme but I cannot help but feel that the same impulse underlies both. For example, any surgical procedure leaves a scar and I do not see how scar tissue can have the same sensitivity as normal tissue. I am not a woman but my experience would indicate that the labia are sensitive to pleasurable stimulation. Any surgical procedure must diminish this pleasure. Maybe not to anything near the same extent as in Africa, but the impulse is the same - women must be mutilated, and thereby lose some capacity for pleasure, in order to attract men. That is the bottom line.

So, in Ethiopia and other places, young girls are held down and mutilated so that they can conform to a cultural norm. In the west, television programmes will induce them to volunteer to so conform - telling them that their normal vulva is, in fact ugly, abnormal and pathological and must be cut in order to be acceptable.

So the same media outlets that condemn genital mutilation when performed in Africa will promote it in the UK. This is both racist and hypocritical. I cannot see it as anything other.

Words fail me....

2009-03-01T09:34:00.006+01:00

When Inanna gazed at her vulva she saw it as wondrous. She applauded herself. We do not know how it looked, but that is totally irrelevant for no two vulvas are the same. Each is as individual as the woman who possesses it. And I have never seen one that was not beautiful. And I doubt that that I ever will. Which is why I found this article very disturbing. In a UK television programme a young woman, concerned that her vulva is abnormal is referred by her GP for labioplasty. I have not seen the programme but the writer states that there was no medical justification for this procedure since the woman's vulva was well within the range of normality. The woman had not complained of any discomfort but was only worried that it looked wrong.

The writer is very concerned not only about the completely unnecessary operation but about the message it sends to other young women who watch the programme and decide that their vulvas are abnormal and ugly. If the account is true, I feel that Channel 4 have been almost criminally negligent in allowing the programme to air. Was it sponsored by some seedy cosmetic surgeon who sees a whole new market for his/her knife? If so, the programme had the desired effect, to judge from some of comments quoted from its message board. Here are a few:

I

’m 15 and i thought I was fine, but since I ve watched the programme I ve become worried, as mine seem larger than the girl who had hers made surgically smaller! it doesnt make any difference to my life, but i worry now that when I’m older and start having sex I might have problems?!

i saw the program and i think i have this i thought it was a little werd befor the program and now i dntno what to dooo….help someone

im 15 and i thought that it was actually quite normal but i was watching this programme and a girl had a promblem with this, and it has really made me parranode.

So young women, trusting that the television would not misinform them, have now been led to believe that they are abnormal and should be trimmed to fit some sort of ideal.

Sometimes, I think that we have come some way towards building up the self-esteem and confidence of young women. And then I read about crap like this being dished up.

I cannot find the words to express the anger I feel.

I am posting a link to the Vulval Health Awareness Campaign for anyone concerned that they may be abnormal.

shell shock

2009-02-28T18:00:00.005+01:00

The BBc website tells of the accusation by Britain's highest decorated serving soldier that the mental health needs of veterans are not being given enough priority. Having worked with veterans of the Falklands adventure this is no surprise to me. What stood out in the account however, was this statement:

"You spend six months on the battlefield and you have to defend yourself every day and then you come back to normal life and go to Tesco and someone runs into your trolley.

"You have to stop and think - it is only a trolley, you are not on the battlefield."

Simple and direct. It made me stop and think. And imagine. And then wonder what sort of civilisation it is that makes such demands of people. What is going on here? There is a fundamental wrongness in a world in which vast amounts of money and ingenuity are expended in the mission to discover new and better ways to destroy each other. Not only that but there are large organised groups of human beings whose one function is, ultimately, to kill other human beings. They are trained in the most effective ways to do this. They are honoured when they do it well. Their leaders are given statues in public places and schoolchildren are taught of the battles. Flags are carried and waved and the tunes of glory played.

We are told that this is human nature. That may indeed be so, but I do not believe it. If it were human nature then PTSD would not exist. Its very existence reveals that such behaviour runs counter to our nature. It is a perversion of all that makes us human. And the result of our culture's addiction to this perversion is the ranks of veterans who sleep, traumatised and alone, in the streets of our cities.

Of course, there are no statues to them - the people who are actually on the battlefield. That honour is reserved for those who send them to kill and to die. None of them are likely to be subject to PTSD. That honour is reserved for the poor - those who are, ultimately disposable.

PTSD was first called by the far simpler and more understandable name "shell-shock". It was rampant among those in the trenches of the first world war for whom constant artillery barrages and the sight of their friends and comrades literally vanishing in a shower of blood and formless human tissue was shocking. That is, normal and not psychopathic human beings. It affected both officers and men - at least those junior officers who were not shielded by the chain of command. When diagnosed, it was treated in two ways. In one, there was the invitation to talk about the trauma and to make some sort of sense of it. In the other, electric shocks were given to counteract the physical symptoms of paralysis or tremor. The aim, of course, was simply to return them to their units for more of the same. Both were, perhaps, equally effective to that end. The first, however, was given to officers and the second to enlisted men.

Now, we know so much more, do we not? No. We have not learnt a thing. Shell-shock, a simple and easy to understand term has given way over the years to the unwieldy and latinate post-traumatic-stress-disorder. Apart from that, treatments have not really improved. And still they are dependent on class - the officer being far more likely to get it, whereas the enlisted man more likely to be medically discharged out onto the street.

In the meantime, even the fairly functional returning soldier has to contend with the problems of adjusting to a situation where a sudden movement in the peripheral vision is not the taleban but the next door neighbour running to get the washing in and that sudden sound is her cat knocking over a milk bottle. Where does all that adrenaline go? How does he prevent it from impelling him to action? Often he doesn't and then, well there is always the prison.

Until the madness of armies and weapons is erased, then this will continue. Human beings were not designed, or have not evolved. to be under constant threat. And the ingenuity of our brains has devised so many ways of creating and maintaining this threat - from cruise missiles to CCTV - that we are perhaps all heading into a chronic low-level shell shock.

Unless we wake up and say "No".

This is love

2009-02-28T17:32:00.004+01:00

It has been a while since I posted anything by the wonderful PJ Harvey.

After the last post, I felt that I wanted to add show something raw, honest and powerful. The lipsynch is crap, but she is brilliant- here it is:

A reluctance to write

2009-02-28T14:53:00.003+01:00

For much of yesterday I spent my time here at the computer. I had, when I sat down, every intention of writing. My head was buzzing with things I wanted to say. I did not write a word. I surfed and frittered away the time with games and stuff. This morning, I put my Facebook status as "wondering why I am reluctant to write".

My head is still buzzing today but I have remained reluctant. I now think, however, that this reluctance may be due to the fact that my head is buzzing and that I have not been able to determine which among the many ideas are the ones I want to focus on. It has been as if I was fearful that if I selected one topic then all the others would evaporate and I would never retrieve them.

This is, of course, nonsense. If the ideas are of any value they will not vanish. In fact, the very act of writing may help me to realise which are the really valuable ones. Prominent in my thoughts, and alluded to in previous posts, is InannaTantra. There is a real need to begin to give this idea some form and structure - to develop it and allow it to grow and take root in the world. This is, however, probably not a subject for a blog. It needs more time and space than is really available here. So I can put it to one side for now. For one thing, I need to get a website up. The domain has already been obtained but I have not found a hosting service. Part of the problem here being that I do not have any way of paying for stuff online - my own personal credit crunch having occurred several years ago. This, however, can easily be remedied. And must be very soon. Then I can upload the several articles I have written and InannaTantra will continue towards full manifestation. There are now actions I must take.

One of my displacement activities over the last couple of days has been reading all the posts in an ongoing flame war concerning the status of BDSM. If interested go here and move back. I do not want to join in on that forum as much that I would want to say has been said very eloquently by others. It is clear that passions are being stirred. Many people find the whole idea of submission/domination to be deeply offensive and a product of patriarchy> They are angered by descriptions of sado-masochistic practices and do not see them as anything other than abusive and therefore contrary to feminist principles.

On the other hand there are the thoughts of those who are active practitioners of BDSM. They claim that by so doing they are being true to their own nature and are involved in consensual activities in which both parties are expressing love and truly honouring their partners. (this could be a vast over-simplification - if it is, I apologise - but that is how I read it). It is therefore not intrinsically contrary to either the letter or the spirit of feminism.

I can see where both sides are coming from. But this is a question where I have to take a stand. To me it is axiomatic that the grotesque value systems within patriarchy have distorted human relationships. There are few, if any, who have been undamaged by it - be they of whatever gender or orientation. I do not see that any can claim that there way of being human and real within this admittedly warped system can claim the moral authority to judge the strategies of others. What I find difficult to accept is that no matter how much somebody may claim to have consented she can be told that she has not truly done so. She is told that she has been tortured and abused for the pleasure of another despite her eloquence in describing the pleasure and satisfaction that she gained. She is not, in fact, heard. Theory taking precedence over practice.

There are certainly many men who desire to dominate women. Perhaps it is a universal male trait - I have no idea. I know that it can be strong within me. There are also times when I want to be dominated. There are times - for either or both parties - when what would normally be perceived as pain becomes exquisite pleasure. I know that my desire can never fully fit into any ideological mould - it can never be politically correct. Which is why I can respect - although not agree with - those who decide to opt out of the whole desire firestorm into some sort of notion of purity- be they monks or nuns or separatist feminists. That is their choice and it is a choice they have the right to make.

I cannot know what has informed such choices. Often, reading what some of them have written, there seems to have been a history of abuse. Given such histories, their subsequent choice can appear totally reasonable. What I cannot accept, however, is when they castigate other women who had undergone similar abuse when their later choices differed. Millions of people, of all genders, have been abused. This is part of patriarchy. We are all warped by it. Many do not survive - drug addiction and despair being just two of the consequences. Many however, do survive in patriarchy and in order to so have adopted varying strategies. As long as these strategies are fully and mutually consensual they are, frankly, no business of anyone else. Psychoanalalytic and other theories can attempt to explain away such manifestations as BDSM as a result of trauma but so, equally, can be explained the desire to mould the world to accord to one's own vision. To make it all safe. This desire for control and safety, is ultimately, at the root of patriarchy. The female submissive who is consciously choosing to explore that aspect of herself is, to my mind, more in accordance with the primary impulse of feminism than the neo-moralists who tell her that it is sinful - although they would avoid that word.

Life is not safe and never be. It is messy. Some choose to explore that messiness and danger consciously. Some choose to opt out and look for purity and certainty. Both are choices. Neither is necessarily wrong. Or better. But in the argument on the blog I have linked to, I stand with those who are into BDSM. And, now that I am finishing this post, I realise that my reluctance to write has its roots in my fear of taking a stand. But I can no longer avoid doing so.

Revolutionary road.

2009-02-26T19:06:00.004+01:00

A friend today asked me, having read some of my earlier postings, whether I am an activist and whether I belong to any activist groups. I do have a fairly loose association with Amnesty and other groups but, as for being active, I was not sure that I qualified when compared with many others I know. Much of my focus recently has been in the temple and in my new relationship and also in the development of InannaTantra.

So for a very short time I did not know how to answer the question. And, I must confess, for a couple of seconds felt vaguely guilty. Perhaps I should be doing more to remedy the many injustices in the world today?

And then I realised that the question was, in fact, irrelevant. For what could be more revolutionary than working for the spread of Goddess consciousness in the world? By this I mean not a switch to a sort of god in skirts, where the name and putative gender has changed but underlying attitudes have remained constant. Not a restatement in terms perhaps more acceptable of old morals. Not a new set of "Thou Shalt Nots" to be memorised and practised. Not a new set of arbitrary and small-minded restrictions. This is not how I see Goddess. To me, She is and has always been, freedom to be simply oneself.

And this is the true revolution. As a younger man, I identified as an anarchist - and still do in many ways - but this I found to be deeply inadequate. I was impressed by Kropotkin, Malatesta, Emma Goldman and the rest and read avidly of the Spanish Civil War. I read the analyses of the failure of the Soviet Revolution and argued with Maoists and Trotskyites. The people were betrayed, I declared in the full wisdom of my 20-odd years, by ideologues, bureaucrats and opportunists. In the pure revolution we would be able to sweep aside all these obstacles and create a true anarchist paradise of mutual aid and fraternity.

The problem was that I could nowhere see Liberty, Equality and Fraternity being practised. I have written earlier of a period when I feared for my life because someone I had considered a "comrade" felt that I might be ideologically suspect. And he was right. I was and will remain forever suspect. Because I found that I could not relinquish a belief that there was something beyond, beneath and within the physical world that animated it and gave it coherence and purpose. I could not see that any human category could ever define the human soul. I could not bring myself to believe that there was no soul and that there was no divinity. And I could not see how human beings could find meaning without some sense of the divine being articulated. Sure, there are many who say that they do not need such a sense in order to find their own meaning. But even they defer to something transpersonal - science, reason or whatever other name they give. Family. Work. All are greater than the individual. And all give meaning to the individual

And it is the word "individual" which tripped me up. For within the ideologies of the left there was almost inevitably an implicit assumption, even within anarchism, that the individual was subject to and was of lesser importance than the collective. This, of course, was also replicated in many of the ideologies of the right. This I could not accept. I could not accept any ideology which did not honour the wealth and variety of the human soul. I cherished Bakunin's statement to the effect that when all bourgeois arts are destroyed he would defend Beethoven's 9th Symphony. And I realised that within this statement lay the contradiction that would never be reconciled by revolutionary theory. For it is a recognition of the sublime - something that lay beyond and transcended human categories. It was a recognition, for want of a better word, the sacred.

So I turned my back on active anarchism and retreated into a sort of mystical fog. A journey of discovery. Which took decades and led me to many places. Always in my mind was a vision of what Louis MacNeice described as:

.

...a possible land,
Not of sleepwalkers, not of angry puppets,
But where both heart and brain can understand
The movements of our fellows
Where life is a choice of instruments and none
Is debarred his natural music..."

But this vision was not to be seen within the tired and irrevocably compromised world of Judeo-Christianity - corrupt as it was from its birth in the denial of the sacrality of the female. When half the human race is deemed less than fully human, it is impossible for freedom to take root - it is impossible to find "our natural music". When threat of damnation is held over human souls they can only ever grow stunted and malformed.

And the political theories I was trying to navigate were all born from that mindset. Therein lay the cause of their failures. Even the word revolution carries within it the idea that all will return to the same place. The world turns upside down for a while and then completes the circle. The liberator becomes, in turn, the oppressor - how many times has this been proven?

No the vision has no hope of being fulfilled within a value system ruled by the Abrahamic absolutes where the grand old man in the sky, the thunder god with the short temper and arbitrary demands, holds court surrounded by sycophants and frightened vassals. For he is very adept at disguise and will appear anew at each turn of the wheel of history - reasserting power/over. And so it goes...

The only radical alternative is Goddess - by whatever names. For where she is truly honoured, power-over cannot be present. She thrives on power -with. The more power is truly devolved to individual soul, the more Goddess is present. She is the flowering and the rooting of all being. And none can truly shine in their full glory if they deny others the chance to shine. For what diminishes you, diminishes me and what diminishes us, diminishes Goddess.

I am still an activist when I work to increase awareness of Her. For She can only grow when human beings begin to realise their full potential and beauty. She cannot thrive where restriction reigns. She is in the conscious exercise of choice where that choice allows the choice of others. She is in the recognition that each human being is sovereign and has the right to choose what they do with their lives and their bodies- as long as they recognise the rights of others to do the same. Virgin and whore are equal in Her eyes. Free and informed choice and consent for all are the only paramount values. None can deny another the exercise of her or his free choice as long as that choice does not restrict the choice of others.

So I am still at base an anarchist. Or a libertarian. Right or left is of no real importance since those absolutes are a function of the patriarchs whose real and lasting skill is to divide. That they have practised for millennnia. And, looking around, we can see the results of their handiwork in every soldier of every army. Everyone of us who lives in fear and under compulsion is a subject of the patriarch. Every time we judge another not for what they have DONE but for what they ARE we perpetuate the oppression. Every time we call "slut" and "whore" we deny the full beauty of Goddess.

A walk in the woods

2009-02-25T19:01:00.008+01:00

I had forgotten how tiring it is to walk in the snow. And how slow it can be. But I am glad I went. It was beautiful.

Anyway, I have been lent a digital camera so here are some photos:

<>

good for a laugh

2009-02-22T13:43:00.000+01:00

Important Things with Demetri MartinWed 10:30pm / 9:30c

Power - Creedocide

Joke of the Day
Stand-Up Comedy

Free Online Games
More Funny Videos

Desire and shame

2009-02-22T09:49:00.003+01:00

Yesterday, I wrote about an experience of desire when I was definitely pre-adolescent. The memory has stayed with me ever since. But, until recently, it was a source of shame - not something that I wanted others to know about. Now, I publish it openly for anyone to read if they are interested. And if they do not wish to read, fine. I would, of course, like my words to be read by thousands. My ego would be very gratified to see hundreds of comments appearing under each post. Fame and celebrity does appeal. But the reality is that my readers can be counted in tens - and some days less than that. But be it one or a thousand who read, I am no longer ashamed of my desire - whether that of the boy or the man now.

This is very recent. Not so long ago, the possibility that a minor sexual indiscretion would be made public caused me for a while to seriously consider suicide. Even though that route did not appeal, my response was to hide in a deep depression. What I did was wrong, but not grievously so - certainly not worth the pain that I caused myself and those who loved me. But I was powerless to be honest because such honesty would entail allowing myself to be seen as human and fallible. The irony is that the act of trying to hide simply increased my fallibility and made it even more plain to others.

This is how shame works. Far from diminishing desire, it distorts it and forces it to manifest in ways that are unhealthy. It is a distorting mirror in which we see our blemishes magnified and our beauty diminished. It is distinguished from guilt because guilt is felt for ones actions whereas shame is about one's very being. It is, if you like, a disease of the soul. My own actions a few years ago were a cause for guilt. They were wrong. But my response was that I was wrong - fundamentally and irretrievably - and that all i could do was try to ensure that no-one saw that. Thus I hid, even from the one I loved best. My desire, I believed, was simply wrong.

"You should be ashamed of yourself!" These words, from the woman with whom I had had a very brief liaison, were enough to trigger a spiral towards despair. I descended and stayed there a long time. Nothing and no-one could truly reach me. I had been ashamed of myself for a long time before she said those words - they merely served to confirm the shame and make it concrete. I felt stripped of all defences and naked to the world. I hid.

What I wanted to hide, however, was not what I had done although that was the effect. What I wanted to hide was the desire that had led to it. I wanted to hide the fact that I was human and subject to desire and that this desire should be made public. Not the act. The desire.

How sick that is! I do not for one moment believe that I am unique in this. In the founding Christian myth, after eating the apple Adam and Eve cover their nakedness and hide. "Who told you you were naked?" is the question asked and one to which there has been a deafening lack of reply. The institutions of the Church have, for the millennia of its pernicious existence, been at pains to ensure that shame continues to rule. In the story of Inanna, the older myth- predating Genesis by a couple of millennia - we see an entirely different message under the apple tree. Look left on this blog. No shame here. No hiding. "She applauded herself". Her vulva is wondrous and so, in other songs, is the penis of her lover, erect and proud. The joys of the bed are hymned - the desire is, in and of itself, sacred.

Which is, undeniably, the actual state of affairs. You, I, all of humanity, is here as a direct result of this desire. If life has any sanctity then what has caused it to be and what sustains must of itself be sacred. If however, life is not intrinsically sacred but a "vale of tears" that must be endured in order to attain "true life", then shame is possibly appropriate. To be incarnate, in this world view, is to be less than perfect. Christianity, despite the contorted logic of many of its theologians has never freed itself of the dualism from which it was born. It is, in fact, Manicheean in effect if not always in doctrine. The world and the flesh unite with the devil in an unholy trinity engaged in a constant war against the holy one of father, son and holy spirit.

And this holy trinity, be it noted, is one from which sexuality is absent. Three males - Pope Benedict has recently reasserted this against such gender neutral terms as "parent" - untainted by any female. And the one female who is allowed in - although denied entry in Protestantism - is miraculously free from the taint of desire - even that of her parents. Forever virgin, she alone of all humanity from the Fall, was conceived without sin. Immaculately. This has to be true since how could the perfect son be born of any normal woman? That would be a cause of shame - for women possess and transmit that shame to their offspring. "The woman did give me and I did eat", Adam pleads in his own defence. So, it was not really his fault, was it? And it is, I think, this attempt to displace shame onto the woman that lies at the root of patriarchy. I would like to ask Adam, "well, did you enjoy the taste of that apple?" I suspect the answer would be "Yes".

For, yes, I enjoyed the sex that later triggered so much shame. I would not have done it otherwise. I enjoy sex and want to explore it for as long as my body desires it and there is someone willing to explore with me. I love the company of women and always have done.

Which brings me back to the childish fantasy I described yesterday. Would I have felt so much shame had it been a fantasy of conquest - enemies slain or scoring the winning try for Wales against England at Cardiff Arms Park? Of course not. For that, like the ambition of Alexander, is considered an appropriate fantasy for a boy. It is to be a man in a man's world. Somehow, this never really appealed to me. There was a deep irony in the fact that my natural inclinations towards poetry and love and the company of women led to accusations that I was gay. I am not. It is strange that my father's lifelong love of the company of men in the close physical contact of the rugby field and the subsequent communal bath did not lead to similar accusations.

Ah well, go figure. As they say. The world in which we live and the species of which we are part are full of paradox and wonder. For which I can only breathe a fervent "Thank Goddess". None fit into neat boxes - no categorisation can fully determine a human being. Original sin is a lie preached by those who are ashamed of their own vulnerability and desire. For desire makes us vulnerable. That is its beauty and its power. But original sin is a potent lie which adopts many guises and manifests in shame.

No one told us we are naked. For we all are. That is the wonder and the awe. We are naked in the face of the universe. And the goal is to be unashamed. To allow others to see us. To be vulnerable - for in our vulnerability is our strength. In this sense, our sense of shame can be a guide. For where we feel shame is the place of our power and it is through embracing and loving that place of shame that we can come to knowledge of our soul and our power.

Early desire...

2009-02-21T19:57:00.003+01:00

I have spent a large proportion of my life thinking about sex. This goes back long before puberty. I remember lying in our back garden in a tent. I remember the particular garden and it was of a house I left when I was 12. This was long before my first pubic hair and even longer before any need to shave. I was a boy - with the undeveloped genitals of a boy - with absolutely idea of how a woman's genitals were formed byond a vague extrapolation from my younger sister. But I lay in the tent and imagined naked women. it was raining and this added to the magic of the moment. I cannot remember how I imagined vulvas - I think there was a sort of vague mist in that area- a feeling of unknowing and mystery. All that was clear was the shape of the buttocks and the hips. What I remember was a desire to kiss. That is all. I wanted to kiss the area of mystery. To honour it with my lips.

I suppose I was about 11 and this period of my life was deeply traumatic. I was very unhappy and stayed that way for many years. Although adult desire was not yet a part of my own experience I was aware of its power as my mother had fallen deeply and passionately in love with a man who was not my father and this effectively destroyed my own security. Although in those repressed and distorted days of the mid 50s, sexuality was unspoken - at least in the polite, uptight and hypocritical middle class environment in which I grew up - I was to become fully aware of its power. My mother glowed and shone with the desire that this new man had awoken. i could see that although I had no way of knowing the whys and hows.

After all these years I cannot recall the exact chronology but am sure that the evening in the tent - the details of which are still vivid - happened around the time that this affair blossomed and before my father knew about it.

I lay in the tent. And imagined naked women. Not girls - women. And wanted to kiss them in that vague and undefined area between their legs. I did not even know of pubic hair - the area was shrouded in mystery. I had seen, at that point, no porn of any description. That was to come much later. But, at that moment, I knew my desire was fixed. I lay there, listening to the rain beating against the canvas and knew something deeply important about myself and that was that i was fascinated by women and wished to spend my life striving to find out more.

It is strange to look back now after more than half a century and realise that I am still that boy. Sure, I am not as ignorant of basic anatomy as I was then, but the emotional drive remains the same. Very, very little has changed. What i had then was not, and could not be, a desire to penetrate and to possess. I did not even know what there was to penetrate. What I felt was a desire to kiss. That still remains and will, I trust stay until the coffin is nailed down. Yes, now I know how it feels to be enfolded and have had my share of sexual experience. But deep down I am still the boy in the tent in the rain in the garden who simply wanted to press his lips on an undefined but wonderful area.

Further thoughts...

2009-02-20T22:22:00.005+01:00

I have been wondering why I felt it necessary to spend my time considering the thoughts of another man - who is now dead and unable to defend himself. Part of me felt that perhaps I was displacing part of my own process onto him - that I was using him in order to avoid looking at my own stuff. There is a partial truth to this - but only a partial truth. I do not feel that my last posting was in any way inappropriate or unjustified, but I do accept that some of my reactions to the tapes I heard was conditioned by my own stuff. Part of which is a male resistance to the strictures propounded by another male. There were certainly times when childhood buttons of a defensive reaction to the authoritarian male were pushed. Times when the particular details of my own biography predisposed me to certain reactions. There were times when, listening to his voice on the tape took me back to times when male voices spoke to me of my own inadequacies. All this is true.

And this is part of my unease at the tone of his message - and. to be fair, the message of most other proponents of patriarchal thought in all its manifestations - from the Pope to the Ayatollahs to anti-porn feminist crusaders. In a nutshell, what they are all saying is that they alone - and those who agree with them - are in possession of the truth and that all that is necessary is that they are listened to and followed.

I reject all such claims. I can accept the authority of teachers who speak from their own lives - who tell of how they have struggled - who speak of their experience - but not those who, without any hint of humour and irony - proclaim that they have an indisputable truth.

Patriarchal thought does not allow of the personal. It speaks of absolutes - it speaks of what we must believe and do in order to be saved. It is based on authority and does not allow any denial or demurral. It does not admit to any possibility of fallibility - proclaiming instead divine authority for every word spoken. This is what I heard in Long's declarations = not reflections on experience but a formula for life.

Why should I accept this? What evidence does he produce apart from unsubstantiatable assertion? None at all. And, to be fair, none is possible. He is speaking of areas of human experience in which empirical method does not apply. It is, of necessity, beyond such discourse - being totally within the realms of subjective, non-verifiable, experience. You can either believe or disbelieve - neither choice being capable of justification or verification by any objective criteria.

I have no problem with such uncertainty. To me, it is a given that I cannot speak for anybody else's experience and that I really have no idea what is best for them. This is totally OK. Goddess forbid that I should begin to believe that I should presume to speak for another. Her or his experience is not mine and can never be. All I can do is to listen and try to understand or empathise. I cannot KNOW and can never KNOW.

Which is, as far as I understand it, absolutely OK. If this makes for a world hopelessly relativistic, so be it. That is a fact of life. Each and every one of us is different and there can be no one-size-fits-all spirituality - no off-the-shelf nostrums that will cure all our ills. There is no spiritual huckster who can deliver the universal snake oil no matter how much it may be desired. And such remedies are certainly desired - for few really feel comfortable with the responsibility that self- determination and true sovereignty and autonomy demand. It is far more comfortable to hand it all over to some authority that will tell us how we can be saved - particularly if that voice is male.

What is difficult is the place of growth - of self-realisation that Goddess calls us to, For here there is no easy formula - no rules to blindly follow. She calls us to take full responsibility for who we are - to owning our history and our responses and not judging them by criteria that are not our own. This is a difficult and uncomfortable place of uncertainty and doubt. But it is so very human. And it is the place She meets us.

Barry Long - a personal reflection on a couple of his tapes

2009-02-20T16:32:00.005+01:00

A friend has asked me to listen to some tapes she has by a man called Barry Long. Although I had heard people speak favourably of him in the past, I had never actually heard him before. I cannot remember the name of the first tape I heard but it was all about what he called the "noble Man". There was a lot of talk of purification of the lance of the noble man and the fight against the beast within. Today, I listened to a talk about how to have sex. Which is, and here I sum up his teaching in my own, partial, way, by eliminating emotion and the imagination and approaching union with woman in perfect love. Which seems to mean for him, perfect rationality.

Woman and man. These are the words he uses. His talk is of absolutes. There is nothing of the individual here - of the wide variety women and men and there widely differing experiences and personalities. Penis in vagina - that to him seems the measure of love. Ideally, there should be no foreplay - for that is of the imagination - it is a distraction from the perfection of penis in vagina. No masturbation - for that of necessity involves imagination. If a man's urge to masturbate cannot be resisted, he cautions against imagining the loved one and focussing the imagination on a generic set of women's genitals.

There is no room in his universe, it seems, for homosexual desire - penis in vagina is the measure of all. But then, in reality there is little room for desire. Love and desire seem to be, for him, mutually exclusive. He says, in fact, that it is preferable for the penis not to erect before entry into the vagina. In this, he strikes me as a true descendant of Augustine of Hippo, who stated that before the Fall, sexual union occurred without any other desire than to perform the will of his god and reproduce the species. An act of perfect love - to quote Long.

Underneath all this talk of man and woman there is a deep misogyny that I find disturbing. In many ways, his diagnosis of the current unsatisfactory nature of the relationship between the sexes is very accurate. But his solution rests upon an extreme essentialist assumption that the nature of woman is love. (I am here, I think, quoting him directly). It is the nature of woman to be receptive - to open herself to the man - providing, of course, that he has "purified his lance".

I confess to feeling profoundly uneasy at a rhetoric that relies upon the imagery of chivalry. Knights, however much romance tries to hide the fact, are killers. The codes of chivalry, devised by such luminaries as Bernard of Clairvaux, were attempts to place the essential homicidal function of the knight into some sort of christian framework. This of course during the time of the mass murderous adventures of the Crusades. Codes of knighthood, far from noble, were a PR stunt - very successful and lasting to this day - Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and much else of modern culture being saturated with it. In both the sagas mentioned, there is little concern for those who are on the "dark side" - be they Imperial Stormtroopers or orcs. The latter are killed in their thousands and are killed with an exultant glee. Such glee was in earlier times reserved for accounts of the killing of, say Muslims in Palestine.

It is here where Long's talk about the beast becomes, to my mind, both sinister and dangerous. The noble man, to use his phrase, has to subdue the beast. The beast consists of the emotions, the passions - the shadow world within us. It consists of our fears and desires, our jealousies and our disappointments. It consists of our imagination. It is, in fact, an intrinsic part of us. If we try to deny it, and this is where I fear his argument takes us, then we drive it underground. We wish to be noble but, deep within, are only too well aware of how short we fall from nobility. That knowledge, however, cannot be articulated so the beast is then transferred from us to the other - however defined. Jew, Moslem, socialist, capitalist, man, woman, homosexual, BDSM, black, white, - the list goes on. The other becomes the repository for the beast and we can only maintain our nobility by overcoming that other.

It is not without significance that the Sanskrit for "noble" is "Aryan". I am not deterred by Godwin's Law from looking at the roots of Nazism. Adherents of the law assert that Nazism was a total aberration - that it is, somehow, ahistorical and born of the very particular circumstances of post Versailles Germany and the particular psychopathology of Hitler and the Nazis. This is, I fear, a pious hope rather than a reality. There is a long and terrifying history of refusal to face our own shadows and the subsequent displacement onto the Other- who can then carry the burden of our own shame at being human into the wilderness.

For, in the end, we are human. I am not, nor do I want to be, a "Noble Man". I am often venal. Very rarely am I noble and unselfish. Even in my most noble of actions there is a high degree of self-interest. There is something I want - even if it is only the good opinion of others. I am OK with this and do not aspire to any purity. I am ok with having a shadow and not being pure light. I am ok with the fact that the tapes I heard have awoken an anger within me. I am also ok with the fact that I am convinced that a large part of my this anger is a response to the anger I heard expressed - but unacknowledged- by Long. The tone of his voice was oftne harsh and confrontational. That is fine and I have no problem with other people being angry. What I have a problem with is when people are angry but then deny it - which seemed to me to underly much of what Long had to say. When someone tells me, in an angry-sounding tone to overcome my anger, my mind turns to beams in eyes and I no longer listen.

Long claimed to be a Tantric guru. That may be true. But if it is, then what I practise is not tantra - which to me involves a recognition and celebration of one's total being. What I heard was the dualism of the Zoroastrians, some of the Gnostics and much of Augustinian christianity. I heard Calvin and Pope Benedict. I did not hear liberation. I realise that his followers will tell me that my feelings are an indication of just how unenlightened I am. So be it. I do not want an enlightenment which leaves me with the repressed anger I heard on the tape that spoke of the noble man.

Petition to prosecute Tony Blair for war crimes

2009-02-17T17:36:00.003+01:00

If you think it is wrong to wage an illegal war after telling lies in an attempt to justify it and particularly if you are a citizen of the UK, please sign here

Back again!

2009-02-16T18:56:00.005+01:00

It was with a great sense of relief that I pressed the button saying "new post" just now. It is not that I have had nothing to say for the last week, it is just that I have been too busy to take the time out to say it on the blog.

On Saturday, I gave a presentation on InannaTantra at a Love Festival here in Budapest. InannaTantra is something that has been gestating for a while and was only given a name a few weeks ago after my initiation. I will be getting the website up very soon so will not go into too much detail - a reading of some of my earlier posts will give an indication of the general way I am going and a glance to the left hand column of this blog will reveal my starting point.

The presentation went very well. There were times I lost my thread and there was much that I now realise could have been better explained and some things that were, frankly, irrelevant distractions. There was also a point when the next step on the journey became clear. I cannot turn back. And neither do I want to.

I came away feeling very empowered - and I knew that something had shifted within me. This is not the first time since such shifts have been coming at intervals ever since the initiation. I know that I am now doing what I was created to do. I know that the inarticulate feelings of "there is something that I have to do" that so bedevilled my life for so many years have now been vindicated. I was not deluded but aware of something that could only be called destiny.

Which, as i write it, sounds hopelessly grandiose. But it is, in fact, the only word that applies. Rightly or wrongly, I have ever been convinced that I had a role to play - but had no idea what it was. It was not a pleasant conviction. I was, for much of the time, absolutely terrified of it and tried to run away from it. This did not make it easy for those who were close to me. I did not know why I behaved as I did and neither did I know how to change it for the better. I did not even know what "better" meant. I still do not. What I do know, however, is what "more authentic" feels like. I know what it is to feel fully and completely myself, faults and all, without apology or disguise. There were points in the day when the old fears kicked in and I sat wondering what people would think of me. these were not pleasant points but they reminded me of how much of my life I had been ruled by such fears. And then, I just felt free to be me. Not perfect - a bit of piss-head at times and an insensitive arsehole at others- often one hell of a misanthrope - but also someone who genuinely delights in seeing others being themselves. Not perfect in the sterile and dead way that our culture defines perfection, But perfect in being themselves - unique and beautiful faces of the Goddess.

For the secret is that there is no secret. Many people earn a fortune saying that they hold the keys to wealth or salvation. But they are lying. The only answer lies within each individual - it is only to be reached for and embraced. No amount of meditation nor good works will bring it if it is still sought from without. It can only come from the recognition of who we are and that whatever and whoever we are we cannot change it. We are each unique and in the embracing of this uniqueness lies the only true salvation.

It is really good just to be writing again without thought of purpose beyond the writing. This last couple of weeks has, of necessity, been dominated by a sense of purpose. Now that has been fulfilled and I can again play here.

Just to conclude this post with something strange that has happened. All my life I have, when i bothered to comb it, parted my hair on the right. yesterday morning, without thinking, I brushed my hair and found that it no longer lies in the way it did and now parts to the left. I felt a bit like Alice - back to front - especially when K and I went out to a friend's for dinner and i realised that I felt the cold wind on a new part of my head. Dont know what, if anything, it means - but it is interesting.

Abrahamic religion in a nutshell

2009-02-16T18:50:00.003+01:00

I do not know if this is original with him but I have never heard it before. From Last week's BBC Radio4 programme "The News Quiz" comes this gem from the great Jeremy Hardy.
"... Christianity and Islam - just Judaism with the jokes taken out".

I cannot fault this definition.

More about Dionysus

2009-02-09T18:20:00.004+01:00

It has been over a week since I last posted. I think this represents some sort of record but cannot be bothered to check. I do not know how this has happened - it is not as if my life is without incident at the moment. Neither is it that it is just too busy to take time out. It has just happened. That is all.

In my last posting I spoke of Dionysus and he is still fairly dominant in my thoughts. I find that I am still reluctant to speak about him and this is because he is not politically sound. Desire never has been and never will be. I remember long periods of agonising about the inappropriateness of my own desire. It intrudes into all areas of my life. I enjoy the company of women and my chosen - or chosen for me?- spiritual path of necessity involves interacting with women, often very closely. Desire has inevitably been present in many of these interactions. I say "inevitably" because I do not see how, as I am a mainly heterosexual man, it can be avoided. I see the curve of a breast or feel the touch of a hand and find that my desire is present in that moment.

For a while I felt that this was intrinsically abusive. The woman with whom I was interacting had no intention or desire to meet me on a sexual level but nevertheless sexual desire was present - albeit one-sided. I felt a sort of guilt - as if I had intruded my own desire where it was not wanted - as if, somehow, I had assaulted her. There were times when I wished that I were gay and free from such intrusions and therefore able to interact in a more "appropriate" way. There was even an occasion when the discovery of a lump in my testicles caused me to wonder whether I would be required to surrender that part of my being - as the priests of Cybele did.

Absolute nonsense, of course. I know that now. But the fears and the guilt and shame were very present for a while. I had read such writers as Andrea Dworkin and could see the logic of their position - just as I fully accepted the logic of feminist separatism. It seemed to me, and still seems, to have a simple purity - the creation of spaces in which no penis has penetrated and never will. Those women who opt for that have my complete and unequivocal support. I have no desire to be where I am unwelcome.

Such simple purities, however, are not for everyone. Heterosexual women, for example, actively desire the company of men and no amount of theorising or political analysis seems to have any effect on that - apart from inculcating a degree of angst and, I fear, a feeling of inadequacy on the part of women who still desire men. For they are sleeping with the enemy.

Life is not simple. Neither is it pure. Everyday, in so many ways, compromise and imperfection are a necessary part of human existence. And such messinesses occur very often when desire becomes a part of the scene. For desire cannot forever be tamed and domesticated. It will erupt in unexpected and uncontrolled ways. It certainly did in my life - causing havoc and pain, not only to me but those who love me. Castration did not seem unwelcome for a while - I could understand those men who cut off what they saw as the cause of their alienation and confusion and dedicated themselves to the service of the Goddess.

But that path is not for me. i am not transexual. Neither am I gay, although desire for men is not totally absent from my life. I am a lover of women. They are the predominant focus of my desire. And of my delight. This I cannot change.

But neither do I want to. Now. This much has changed in the last couple of years - I am now happy with my desire and accept it. But this is the point - it is MY desire. It is MY responsibility. No-one else's. I feel this is crucial - my desire does not belong to anyone else. If i desire anyone, it is not because of anything she has done to me - it is simply a physical response mediated by hormones etc and is totally mine. She need not even be aware of it if the time and occasion is not right. I can enjoy it without imposing it on her. Then, I can let it pass and just enjoy the company. No strings and no expectation. Desire entered and I enjoyed, now it can go. If that makes sense.

If not, it does not matter. For there is little - if any - sense in desire- it is life lusting for itself and for expression. It is born in the swamps of the primeval and partakes of its nature. It is not for nothing that rationalists of all hues from Plato through Augustine to Lenin have shied away from celebrating it. It does not fit into any theory. It dances in ecstasy - it shifts its shape - disappearing and reappearing in new guises. And disguises. Never is it safe

Which brings me back to Dionysus. He is not safe and never can be domesticated. He dances and does not think - he is not paralysed with guilt nor inhibited by expectation. Neither does he judge - the desire of others must be as free as his. He delights in however it is expressed.

Freedom cannot be controlled. Neither can it be safe. that is self-evident.

It can only be expressed and enjoyed.

Coming out of the closet

2009-01-31T21:16:00.007+01:00

Today I have been teaching in the Goddess Temple all day, and during one of the long periods when my co-teacher was leading and the conversation was way beyond my limited Hungarian, I drifted off into reverie for a bit and remembered a walk I had last weekend in the Buda Hills. I meant to blog about it at the time but things got in the way. More accurately, my new relationship got in the way. Which has been something I have not written about before and yet it is a major part of my life. In fact, it has been central to my life for the last four weeks.

So I started to wonder why I have not mentioned it before. I am not normally reticent to talk about myself. On the contrary, I sometimes feel that I may be a little too self-revelatory and should adopt a more impersonal, objective, academic approach. And yet I have remained silent about this. I am not going to mention her name nor give any details for there is no reason to do so. So her privacy is, at least to those who do not know either of us personally, guaranteed.

No, the reason I have not written is more personal. And it is born from fear - the fear that the relationship will not last and so is better not mentioned. And that fear is born of many things but foremost among them is a deep-seated belief that I do not deserve love. One of the themes of this weekend's training is healing the wounds received in childhood. Which is where this fear was born. I am not going into the details here - for they are, in fact, irrelevant. The message I received was identical to the message so many people I know have received - or, at least, as near as damn-it identical. It is that there is, in my fundamental being, a wrongness and that eventually this wrongness will become evident and that the inevitable rejection - the "depart from me, thou cursed one, into the place prepared for you" will be pronounced and an eternity of alienation from the possibility of love would follow.

This script has been very active in my recent life. It was partly, although by no means totally, behind my move here. Again, details are not necessary but behaviour that, although wrong, would on any rational scale of seriousness rate very low became an occasion of shame so great that it came close to destroying me and was a cause of great pain elsewhere. Even today it reverberates and much of me would wish to turn back the clock and act otherwise. That this is impossible has been, and still is, something that grieves me greatly.

However, from all of it there have been gains. I have been able to delve deeper into myself and see myself more clearly - that I am simply human and fallible and do not have to apologise for that. I still act badly and selfishly at times and hurt others by that. For actions or inaction I will apologise. I will, however, no longer apologise for being me. For that I cannot change - I will be me until the day I die and, after that, who knows? In fact, the more fully I can become myself then the less I will hurt others for what I have learnt is that it is not so much what I do, nor who I am, that hurts but the lies and evasions I have used to try to hide who I am. Not least from myself.

For it is in the lies to myself that all the other lies have their genesis. In a recent email exchange in which I was talking of models for masculinity, I was asked why I had not mentioned Dionysus. And I hadn't. In fact, in all the posts on this blog there has been no mention of him. "The elephant in the room", I replied. To which the answer came "bloody big elephant". Bloody huge!.

For this is what has sent me running into hiding so often in my life. It is what I have tried to deny to myself and to others. For, warring with the Dionysian there has ever been an Apollonian overlay and I seem always to have oscillated between the orgiast and the intellectual - never being totally one nor the other but always an angry and frustrated being who felt torn between the two. I feel that I have long inhabited the no-man's-land between two armies in a war of attrition. A very uncomfortable place.

The thing is, I can be pretty good at the intellectual stuff. I really do enjoy it. I love playing with ideas and seeing where they lead. I loved, and still deeply miss, conversations in which I could share the delight I feel in such games -where mind met mind without, it seemed, any need for an interpreter. Or even, sometimes, a body. I do not have that here. Which is perhaps the reason I started blogging. For here, I always need an interpreter and this is slow. So I have been forced to write and hope that my words are received with understanding and, at times, appreciation. I will get better. All my life, I have spoken of wanting to write but - apart from University - have not really done so until I came here.

Which brings me back to my new relationship. This cannot involve playing with words and ideas for she speaks no English and I, as yet, very little Hungarian. This latter will have to, of course, be remedied for two of us scrabbling around in dictionaries makes even the simplest conversation - such as when to meet or what to eat - difficult (I exaggerate a little - my Hungarian can just about manage that - but not by much.) So for the communication of ideas there is still only writing here and elsewhere.

Which is not to say that the relationship is orgiastic - that would be one hell of an exaggeration - but it is largely non-verbal. And this is very new. Somehow, and I do not quite know how, we communicate. And in this communication where there are no words I fear that I misunderstand and misinterpret. And this feeds my deeper fear of ultimate rejection - that she is only with me because she does not know what I am and when she knows more will reject me.

So, I have kept the blog and my private life separate and not mentioned her. I have written of love but not mentioned those that I love now and those that I have loved in the past. Which is a form of lying - for by doing so I can omit to mention those many ways in which I have fallen short of the love they have held for me. I can paint myself in brighter colours and try to appear as someone who has reconciled the inner conflict between intellect and body. But this I have not previously been able to do because I have not dared to name Dionysus and to claim his kinship. I have written much about Inanna but little of Dumuzzi except to lightly mock him. This I will now begin to remedy. One of the things that I said today, in response to a question, was that I no longer feel the need to apologise for being a man and a sexual being. And I realised as I said it that it is the truth but it is also true that for the bulk of my life until very recently - perhaps yesterday, I don't know - I have felt an inner need to apologise - or hide. I am no longer willing to do so. Dionysus is coming out of the closet.

"Not simply war criminals, they are fools"

2009-01-31T21:06:00.003+01:00

This condemnation of the Israeli authorities comes from Gerald Kaufmann MP - raised "an orthodox Jew and a Zionist". Movingly, but calmly, he denounces the current actions of the country some of whose previous leaders he names as friends. He does use the "cheap gut shot" of comparison to Nazism but relates this to the murder of his grandmother as she lay ill in bed. I will write no more commentary but leave you to listen for yourself:

BBC bans disaster appeal

2009-01-29T12:36:00.004+01:00

The Disasters Emergency Committee, made up of a large range of aid charities, has made an appeal to the British public for donations to aid the victims of the fighting in Gaza. Or, to be more accurate, it has tried to. The BBC and Sky television, citing the need for "impartiality" has refused to air it. In the meantime, the people of Gaza die.

Here is the appeal:

I cannot see how this ban can be justified. That people are suffering is undeniable and the appeal does not make any statement of support for Hamas nor does it comdemn Istrael. All it says is that children, women and men who have neither the responsibility for the devastation nor the power to stop it are in desperate need of help.

This help is what the BBC is denying.

Tony Benn, as ever, gets to the heart of the matter.

Are comparisons alway odious?

2009-01-24T18:07:00.003+01:00

Renegade Evolution has declared that she will not allow unchallenged accusations that someone or other is like the Nazis to appear on her blog. She writes:

If in your comment you compare anyone or anything to Hitler or the Nazis, you will either NOT be published OR I will mock the ever living fuck out of you.

WHY? Because one, invoking the Nazis or Hitler is a cheap, emotional gut shot and is rarely germane to the actual discussion at hand. It is a cheap argument with no solid footing. Comparing anyone or anything to a man and a group of people who killed millions of marginalized people is a total shit argument. One person is akin to Hitler- and that would be Hitler...got it? Same goes for similar comparisions to Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, so on.

If you have a point or an argument to make, make it, but do it on your own, with facts and proof, and not the emotional gut shot tactic of comparing everyone and every thing to people responsible for the deaths, torture, and suffering of millions of people.

Got it? Good.

She has a very good point to make here and in the comments section there are other points that are equally valid. I recommend all to read them.

There is indeed a form of lazy rhetoric in which anything with which one disagrees is likened to such extreme movements. The term "feminazi" comes immediately to mind - as does the use of the word "holocaust" when used by anti-abortionists. Such is nothing more than flaming and as such should not be taken seriously - the delete button being designed for just such idiocies. I fully agree with Ren's policy in such cases.

Although Ren can, of course, set whatever rules she likes for her own blog, I would be wary of a blanket ban such as she proposes. Because there is an underlying assumption that Nazism was an aberration and a unique event. I fear that it was not. It is certainly true, as commenters have said on Ren's blog, Nazism has so far been the only ideology which has had as its central tenet the eradication of a particular group of people. It is also true that this occurred as result of a particular set of historical events that will, we hope, never be replicated. It is probably true that, modern neo-nazis notwithstanding, we will not see a significant political party that could be called Nazi.

Nazism, although shaped and given spurious legitimacy to the German people by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and the subsequent travails of the Weimar Republic, was not, however, born from them. It drew upon a long-standing tradition in European thought. For example, there was an Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain who married Wagner's daughter. In 1900 he published "The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century" in which he exhorted the "pure" German people to embrace their destiny as "lords of the world" by defeating and suppressing the German Jews. He was only one voice among many. Anti-semitism was the cultural norm - as a reading of John Buchan and Evelyn Waugh among many others will soon demonstrate.

The feelings, beliefs and emotions that fuelled Nazism were not new and neither have they been eradicated from our culture. And it is for this reason that I am wary of a blanket ban on comparisons with Nazism. Hitler himself will not return, but the disease he exploited is still here, ready for anyone else. It is based on the notion that some human beings are more worthy of consideration than others - and that, in fact some people are less human than others. It was the justification for the eradication of the native Americans and for the expansion of the European Empires. The disease is manifest in our popular tabloids with their rampant xenophobia. It is manifest in anti-gay rhetoric and other hate-speech. It is in the pronouncements of both the Israeli Government and Hamas. It is endemic to our civilisation and must be named whenever it is detected

Ren is right, however, that name cannot be Nazi. But a comparison may be justified.

A tale of two chakras - among other wandering

2009-01-23T22:23:00.005+01:00

Have had a very frustrating evening trying to watch a DVD. My machine has been erratic to say the least for a while but now seems to have decided to call it a day. It has been freezing for long periods and then jumping scenes. Now it is refusing to recognise any disc I put into it. This is infuriating, particularly as I had decided to give myself a night off from thinking.

And there is a lot to think about. I am both excited and scared by the life ahead of me. It is a time when I am moving into very unknown territory. I know that I can no longer maintain myself through teaching English. It is too demanding of time and energy and leaves me little of either to spare so that I can do the work I feel I have been called to do. So I must trust in Inanna to provide my needs. My phone has just been cut off - which is ok, I will be able to pay the bill next week and my broadband is on a separate contract. I will have my rent next month and can pay gas and electricity. But what then?

This issue of trust is a big one. On the one hand I believe that I am on the right path but on the other I am often beset with doubt. This doubt tells me - as I have said before - that I am kidding myself, that I am delusionary and that I will end up on the street. Or worse. It tells me that what I perceive as a call is merely hubris and hence nemesis will come, as night follows day.

But as I write this, I realise that I do not believe it. That if I did I would not be here now. Still hanging in. Which I am. I will be able to eat until the end of the month - it is only a week or so now. I am not alone but have people who care about me. And I know that She has a purpose for me and will enable me to fulfil it.

Where Earth's Heart Throbs by *AgiVega on deviant ART

The first time I came to Hungary, I was taken up to a place called Dobogókő (the "pulsing, or drum, stone"- up the Danube from Budapest. A very heautiful and magical place which has been referred to as the heart chakra of the planet by no less an authority than the Dalai Lama. I was told but the woman who was guiding me that there had been a connection of some sort between Shambala, Avalon and Dobogókő but that this had been broken in the 13 century due to some lapses on the Hungarian part. Having come from Avalon, I felt that this was not in fact the case but that perhaps it was the awareness that had been broken. For I felt the same there as I felt in Glastonbury/Avalon, another reputed site for the heart chakra. And I had a vision of a healing ceremony, with drummers from every nation in Europe drumming for the wounds and the generations of blood that had been shed - much of it in the land I was standing in. In the centre - the heart - of the continent so stained with blood. This is still my vision, and I believe it will happen.

The point is, that I complain that I do not know where I am going - nor do I know, I say, what She wants me to do. Which is bullshit. For She tells me - in simple and direct language - or in a picture, a feeling, which is unsummoned and comes out of the blue. What I am not given is a road map, just a picture of the destination and the general direction I must take to get there. The rest is just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other and keeping going when things do not seem easy.

To get back to Dobogókő. I must confess, that having lived and worked in Glastonbury, I was taken somewhat aback when I first heard that there was another claimant for the heart chakra position and was, at first, inclined to pooh-pooh it. That is, until I stood there and felt the power for myself. It is real. There is a stone where, if one places one's ear on it, the earth's pulse can be heard. I did not hear it and last time I went could not recall the exact stone. But that does not matter. What I felt still remains strong in my memory - and is so very similar to what I felt in Glastonbury that it is well-nigh identical.

I know very little about geomancy and its technical details - geometry, sacred or otherwise, was not one of my best subjects at school. I have seen lovely pictures of the earth chakra system from English-speaking websites - which do not include Hungary as an integral part of this system. But the Shaolin monks, for example, have a monastery close to Dobogókő, and the Dalai Lama has spoken favourably of Dobogókő. And the woman who guided me on that first, fateful, visit spoke of the ancient psychic link between Shambalah, Avalon, and Glastonbury. And I do know how I felt when I first stood there , and still feel whenever I go there. Does each chakra have to be singular? Can they not manifest in several places? Or do they, perhaps, move? I have no idea but would welcome suggestions.

The fact remains, however, that I must hold true to the original vision and all those that have followed, and must not give way to fear. In Hungary I first learnt that the five elements are earth, air, fire, water and love. In tantra I have learnt that there are only two emotions, love and fear and that what is not love is fear - by whatever name we call it. The path that led me to Glastonbury has now led me here. Much of the time, my primary emotion has been fear. I have run, as a deer flees the hunt. I must now learn to trust in love. That what I need will be provided.

A rambling post, I know. This is how my brain is operating at the moment. Ever since I initiated as Priest of Inanna I have felt a huge change within me. But at times, my brain starts to question. Which was why I did not want to post today, preferring to lose myself in a film - ironically "Kundun" - the story of the Dalai Lama. I managed half and then the player went on strike. So, here I am, using this forum to try and sort out the various voices in my head and order priorities. Not too sure what it all means and do not really care. I may never reach the end, but the journey is interesting.

PS to the last posting...

2009-01-23T09:13:00.001+01:00

A short advertisement for peace and understanding.

An open letter to the new president

2009-01-21T19:03:00.007+01:00

I listened to your address yesterday, Mr President, and was impressed by your mastery of rhetoric and the concern you expressed that this should now be the beginning of a new relationship between your country and the rest of humanity. I am hopeful that this may be the case. I am glad that you have taken immediate steps to close down Guantanamo and hope that the innocent inmates will receive fitting compensation for the agonies they endured. This is a vital first step. But it must not be the last.

I can well appreciate the desire to draw a line under the irregularities of the last eight years and begin anew. I understand your desire to move on and not look back and try to lay blame. This cannot be done, however. Leaving aside the, if not wilful then at least incompetent, misleading of Congress and the American people in order to invade Iraq, thereby giving Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld's corporate buddies an opportunity to obtain billions of taxpayer's dollars out of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and over 4000 American soldiers and the maiming of tens of thousands more, your predecessor and his vice-president are on record as having authorised torture This is criminal. Pure and simple. It is a war crime and the techniques authorised by these men were the cause of execution in the trials held after world war two.

Can such wanton disregard for international law be unprosecuted? If it is, then it gravely imperils your hope for a new relationship with the world. You spoke fluently of despotic foreign governments and their disregard for basic human rights. How can you, therefore, ignore the gross, blatant and unapologetic violations of human rights authorised by your predecessors? Did torture take place under Bush's watch? Yes - undeniably. Did he and Cheney authorise it? They have said as much on television. If torture is a crime then they are criminals. If any have died as a result of the torture they have authorised, then they are murderers. You as a lawyer must surely acknowledge that.

If you do not take action against the manifest crimes of the Bush regime and bring the perpetrators before the courts, Mr President then, to quote the scriptures you follow , your fine and inspiring words yesterday are naught but "as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal". They will mean nothing to those who have directly suffered as a result of the actions of the US over the last few years. They will mean nothing to those of good will who hope that the US will return to the values that informed its revolution and of which you spoke so eloquently.

There can be no immunity for torturers - however eminent they may be. Pinochet discovered that. Do not leave it up to a prosecutor from, say, Spain, to issue the warrant for the arrest of Bush or Cheney on charges of war crimes, do it yourself and show the world that this really is a new era and not simply a reality show cosmetic makeover.

A mystery solved?

2009-01-19T10:18:00.004+01:00

In my time, I have heard many explanations as to how the great stone circles such as Stonehenge were built. They have include using sound, levitation, mana, snow, etc. I have always tried to use Occam's Razor and look for the simplest explanation for any phenomenon. Sometimes, that simplest explanation can indeed be what we call magic. More often, however, it is not. I received this video on my Facebook page and it strikes me as utterly credible that very simple, mechanical, methods identical or similar to these may have been used by our ancestors.

Donovan -An often underestimated musician

2009-01-19T08:25:00.005+01:00

A welcome honour for an musician who has never got the full recognition that he should have done. In the early 60s, Donovan suffered from being promoted and marketed as "The British Bob Dylan", which he wasn't and never could be. Now, he is referred to as a "hippy icon". What on earth does that mean? A label that is meaningless beyond the lazy cardboard stereotypes of tabloid journalism - here evident on the BBC website. It relegates an original and substantial song writer to a period curiosity.

The French Ministry of Culture, however, has given him a medal in honour of his outstanding contribution to culture.

A very early song

Men, heterosexuality, and the embodiment of Goddess

2009-01-18T14:21:00.004+01:00

Laughing Medusa wrote this on her blog a few days ago in response to earlier posts of mine:

But my question remains. When I turned to the Goddess some years later, I did not feel that I needed to approach an unapproachable Being and state my case. I felt I already belonged. I did not even feel that I had to petition for love. It seemed automatic to listen to myself as an innately embodied Goddess energy. I even came to know that what I termed Goddess was already a part of me, I just didn’t recognize it. How this differs from my Christian “conversion” is stark. Approaching a male God as a separate entity is a far cry from realizing that I am essentially Goddess myself; as are all men and women. Now, when Brian describes his encounter with Inanna, he too uses language of separation from the Divine. But I’m not sure if I’m interpreting that correctly. I am curious to know whether the limitations I felt coming to the God are the same for men coming to the Goddess

This is a question to which I have been trying to find an answer ever since I found myself on the Goddess path. Can a man embody Goddess in the same way as a woman can? I do not know - since I cannot partake of her experience. Neither can I speak for other men. I can only speak of my experience. LM says that I am using the language of separation and I can see what she means. "Language of separation", however, seems to me to have a harsh quality to it - implying some sort of existential angst. Which is, sometimes, how I have felt. But then, I can simply breathe and feel her presence. Not within but neither without. Perhaps the word is simply "with" me. She is immanent and I feel Her and breathe Her. But I am not Her. She is something other than I. For when total awareness of Her presence is there, then there is no "I" to be separate. I, as a separate entity, have ceased to be. There is an awareness of a being called Brian and an awareness of Goddess as everything there is - including that being called Brian. Such moments are not the stuff of the everyday, however.
In the everyday I do not feel a separation. It is more like an otherness which shows me my completeness - or, to put it better, allows me to see my completeness and, fully and without judgement, accept myself in that totality as partaking of Her divinity. Language is wholly inadequate to describe what I mean but I will continue to try.

I like to dance to dance the 5 rhythms. I like to allow music to enter my body and move it. When this happens, my head gets out of the way and allows me to be fully myself and fully in the moment. Then, when I find myself dancing with a partner, the movements can become effortlessly co-ordinated and the dance an expression of an encounter between two aspects of the divine. A perfect meeting for the minute or two that it takes - and then on to another perfect meeting. In these meetings, there is a feeling that the separation between two strangers no longer exists - that they are both aspects of the One.

This does not yet seem to be answering LM's question. Is my experience, as a man, of the immanent presence different from that of a woman? I think, perhaps, it is and it must be. I have many images of goddesses - some fat, some thin, old, young and coming from many cultures. Whatever the details of their physical shape, they all possess breasts, vulvas, wombs etc. I do not. I am therefore, in that sense, other. We talk of maiden, mother, crone - these are marked to a large extent by the workings of the female reproductive system. I am a man and, although I am now entering the final stages of life, have never experienced the onset of blood nor its cessation. I have brought up a child on my own but never experienced one in my belly, nor one sucking at my breast. Neither have I had such things as even the remotest possibility. They are and always have been completely absent from my life.

I cannot, with Inanna, call on Dumuzzi to "plough my vulva". In this story the only possible being I can embody is Dumuzzi. Dumuzzi, however, is mortal and is raised to divine or semi-divine status only through his union with Inanna. In another story, Inanna flirtaceously entices Enki, the god of wisdom, to get drunk and then takes all the gifts of civilisation that he, in his cups, showers upon and flees back to Her own city. But it is Enki, long after his hangover has subsided, who has the wisdom to see the necessity and value of Her descent and provides the element of empathy necessary to effect her return. Where she sets the demons on Dumuzzi - eventually giving him the gift of insight into his own inner darkness and thus allowing him access to total being - which he had never known before. Wonderful stories - but with Inanna calling all the shots and the males answering to her needs.

There is a lot more to be written about this - I feel that I am just starting. I do not feel that I can answer LM's question. I do not see an identity between her earlier experience of Jesus and my experience of Inanna but I do feel that it is impossible for me to embody Goddess. I am heterosexual and my relationship with the female body includes a large element of desire. I cannot escape it, and neither do I want to. Desire is sacred and must be honoured even when, and this is most of the time, not acted upon. I do not know how a gay man relates to Goddess. I do not even know how another heterosexual man does. They would have to say. To me, She is other but She is what makes me complete within myself. If that makes any sense.

I will be returning to this subject again and again - it is a journey of discovery for me and no final statement can be made. I am looking forward with delight to road ahead.

Can our will be free?

2009-01-15T22:33:00.007+01:00

Reg, in his comments to my last post, has asked again for some clarifications. I am certainly not averse to acceding to this request.

The first question regards Glastonbury and my training as priest of Avalon and how that relates to my identification of a voice I perceived as genderless as that of the Goddess. The first time I had even heard of Glastonbury was in the late 60s in an article in an an underground magazine called "Gandalf's Garden". In it, there was an explicit reference to the Tor being the "yoni of the landscape goddess". This caused a literal physical shiver and an inner "of course!" I had never read of the Goddess as a living entity before - there had only been charming but irrelevant (as I then saw them) stories from Greece and Rome. But, at that moment, I seemed thoroughly to assimilate this entirely new perception. And, despite many strange alleyways in the future, it never entirely left me, although I buried it deep at times.

Thus Glastonbury and Goddess were inextricably linked together. Even though it would take over 25 years before I first visited the town, I always knew that it would someday be important to me. And so it was - for a long time being the centre of my universe. So, when I decided to become a priest, it was not the immediate response to the voice but a delayed one. When I heard the voice in the kitchen I had little concept of a personal deity - a vague and amorphous and definitely genderless presence was all. But when I answered the call, it was to the Goddess I dedicated myself. The call and my answer, although separated by a couple or so years, were linked. That is the best I can do here - although Avalon/Glastonbury is certainly worth many posts in the future.

Reg goes on to say:

I think that there is ultimate reality, and that it is our perception of it which is so malleable. Just because we are essentially subjective beings who have no chance of knowing true reality from a hole in the head, doesn't mean that reality is itself an illusion.

I think that I agree with Reg but that is only a belief. I have no real evidence for it beyond a subjective feeling that it must all somehow make some sort of sense. In this, I may be wrong, however, and it may all be totally random and meaningless. What I am wary of, however, is putting Goddess - or God - or the flying spaghetti monster- or Science- or whatever else - into a box labelled "ultimate reality". Perhaps there is only chaos and a reality truly "without form and void (with) darkness on the face of the deep". I suppose that I am looking for a spirituality which will embrace all possibility and not exclude any.

I am not sure whether I am clarifying or further muddying - but am enjoying the process so will continue.

And I come to a question about Imagination. Reg asks:

I'm somewhat confused about existence as "imagination". Would this be our imagination or something else's? If something else's, I don't know how you could have a sense of being a "player"; you would be a puppet rather wouldn't you, whose free will was also an illusion.

This is the question that has stimulated me most today. When I wrote about this in my last post, the passage he refers to just seemed to write itself - I did not give much thought to it. And looking back, I cannot find anything I wrote that I would edit out now. So, just what did I mean by imagination?

This is a word I associate with William Blake - a man of whose thought and genius I am only just beginning to have any sort of understanding. I do not see Imagination as the property of anyone - neither human nor divine. One way I often look at it is as an unchoreographed but coordinating dance - where all move in harmony even though each moves according to their own nature and as an expression of it. Or, perhaps, like a good jam session, where each musician expresses their own skill and personality but remains aware of the needs of the larger whole - the music. Therefore, they move from lead to backing to silence to lead again - each ceding place to the other. None of them sacrificing their own ego in the process but realising that the full expression of their own music needs them to be aware of and accommodate themselves to the music of others. For only then can the full music be heard. In these circumstances, which of the musicians owns or controls the music? None. Which musicians have lost autonomy? Again none. Who has lost? None. Who has gained? All - for music has its own rules. As does imagination - it is not a zero sum game. It is not either-or but both-and. It is beyond duality. It is not for nothing that the most hidebound fundamentalists - of all the Abrahamic faiths - have had a major problem with music!

I would like to spend a bit of space looking at the question of free will versus predestination which Reg has raised and extend it a bit. And personalise it. I cannot speak in the abstractions of academia in which the word "I" is almost heresy. I must use it - for all I know is gleaned from perceptions filtered through the mesh of personality.

For most of my life I, in fact, had little free will. I reacted to external events in ways that had been determined and laid down very early in my own socialisation process. I inherited from my family a set of given responses and internalised a whole galaxy of assumptions about myself and my capabilities. And these acted on the unconscious level. I was not really aware why I behaved in the way I did. Patterns were set - so that, like Pavlov's dogs, I would react to stimuli in conditioned ways. Despite having relatively few obvious external constraints, I was as free as a monkey in a cage - or a laboratory rat. I was powerless to change my responses to stimuli. Action/ reaction was all. My own inner censor ensured this through the imposition of shame concerning all and any manifestation of true spontaneity.

It is only recently that I have begun to see the full extent of this enslavement to reflex/reaction. And it is only now that I am beginning to see the paradox intrinsic to this. Free will is only gained through knowledge and acceptance that one aspect of personality is a collection of impulses and reflexes that have been acquired from others. I may never fully eradicate these and that is really no problem. Again and again, I may find myself repeating the same pattern. Furthermore, the more I fight the pattern, the more entrenched it becomes and the less free will I possess.

The paradox is that it is only through not fighting for self- assertion and not striving for an unachievable perfection that i am beginning to see what free will means. My free will is part of a larger will - a larger music - a larger Imagination. I can keep it locked up in my cell of shame or i can allow it to fly - to soar in the summer sun - and winter snows - and to sing its true song> A song that is in harmony with all other true songs. My will has been locked away - and I must free it. I am only just now beginning to.

So my answer is that I see free will as something that cannot exist until there is awareness that one is enslaved to the past. After that awareness, and only then, can free will even have a chance of existing. How can my will be free when I do not even know what it is?

For me, Inanna is the courage to exercise free will. To demand it. At each stage of Her descent, she demands entrance. She has "turned her ear to the Great Below" and will not be diverted from Her course. She has chosen the path of conscious choice as opposed to the path predestined.

I will close here, because it is late and I am tired. I welcome all and any comments - providing they are polite - and wil return to this subject later.

The world a stage?

2009-01-13T21:51:00.007+01:00

In his comments to yesterday's post, Reg asks me a question:

Concerning the individual's "experience", a friend describes Goddess Energy as "general female energy". Whereas you refer specifically to the "will of the Goddess", as of an individual divine entity, with a "voice", telling you to do certain things.
What are your thoughts on the divine as an individual, and the divine as general spiritual force?
If the individual divinity has real existence for you, is she one among many, or does each person who is aware of her or him have their own version of what is essentially the same thing?

I would here like to attempt an answer- and hope that in so doing i might invite further questions.

I do indeed speak of Her "voice" because that is what I heard. As clearly and distinctly as I hear any sound. With a very specific message - "I want you to be a priest". It was while I was at University - and working as a cook in order to keep semi-solvent. I was chopping onions and the voice came from behind me. Clear and strong. I looked around. Nobody to be seen. That was it. No choirs. No angels. A voice like any other - but genderless. I do not remember any indication whether the voice was male or female. In fact, having left the Goddess path for a while, I even wondered whether I was being called to be a Christian priest and went to see the local vicar, who suggested that I attended church. Well, two Sundays were enough- they quickly reminded me of why I had left!

I could not forget the voice, however. And, eventually, I found myself strongly drawn to the Priest/ess of Avalon training in Glastonbury, taught by Kathy Jones. And knew that I had come home. I then knew that the voice I had heard had been that of Goddess. For a while, I thought that perhaps She was the Lady of Avalon - and maybe she was for that while - but soon it became clear that She was, and is, Inanna.

There were other times when I heard Her. And there were occasions of dream and vision which seemed highly significant. Of Inanna identifying Herself to me in a very visual dream - and then seeing the dream replicated in detail in the initiation ceremony as Priest of Inanna last November. There were others, but these will do for now.

So what does this tell me about Her nature? Not, in fact, very much. For they are deeply personal and are mediated through a consciousness that I know to be fallible. My first acid trip was enough to show me how malleable reality is. And subsequent events left me for a long time with little concept of any possibility of stable identity and an even greater difficulty than before in living in the world.

As a human being, I edit and editorialise my perception. Every second, I am bombarded with a universe of sensory information and my response is to select a small proportion and reject the bulk of this. Thus, any conclusion I may reach is based on partial (in both senses of the word) information because I may well have ignored any that did not accord with my own preconceptions.

So the only answer that I can truly give is that I do not know. To me, She is personal and individual with a quirky sense of humour. She is part trickster, part lover, part mother, part daughter, part this part that. She cannot be labelled or pinned like a butterfly in any display cabinet. I cannot say She is this or She is that for she is both, and neither. I can only speak of my experience of Her.

So I cannot speak of another's experience of the divine because I simply cannot know what that is. All I do know is that whatever form She - for to me that is the correct pronoun - takes, it can neither confine nor define Her. She is far larger than any box we can put Her in. I name her Inanna - others see Her in different forms. I also see Her in other human beings - they fully embody Her and yet remain uniquely themselves. In fact, the more they are fully and uniquely themselves, the more they embody Her.

I am reluctant to use the word "energy" because that seems to deny agency and also to disembody. "Energy" is nice and clean - does not have the inconveniences of physical form such as blood, sweat and shit. Energy does not feel pain and grief and neither does it feel love nor joy. Energy does not feel anything - that takes matter. Energy is what is experienced by matter and without matter there would no experience. Energy would be formless. It is matter that gives it form. There is no gender to energy - it is undifferentiated. For gender demands form and form demands matter. You, I and the universe are, ultimately, undifferentiated energy swirling in a void. We are imagination. Maya. This was Buddha's great insight. But he made a judgement and privileged the void. Or, to be fair, his followers did. This perhaps is an error.

"All this world is but a play,
Be thou the joyful player"
Incredible String Band

Perhaps the trick is to recognise the part we have to play and then play it. Some might call it fate. But perhaps it is some sort of cosmic script - a working out of some great huge drama whose final scene we cannot foresee - only take "our exits and our entrances" and "strut and fret our hours upon the stage". But finding the joy of so doing.

This has rambled a lot from your question, Reg. I will get back to the substance and say that I simply have no idea and am trying to stop asking. As an actor, I love the script and find joy when I follow it with heart and soul. My terror is of drying - losing, literally, the plot. To me, Inanna is becoming ever more as real and as individual as any human being. And She is present in them all - she is what makes them all unique and beautiful. She is both immanent and transcendent and she is what eliminates any such distinction. When others invoke Isis, or Artemis or any of the other thousands of names, I cannot know what they mean nor what they perceive. But the universal is infinite and cannot be bounded by any human perception. Thus each and every manifestation and sincerely expressed perception can merely be a thread in the tapestry - a small, but essential and beautiful, part of the whole.

What aspiration could be more beautiful,

Jewish voices for peace

2009-01-13T14:30:00.007+01:00

.... are many. Despite the actions of the Israeli Government and the unthinking support of the US and other western governments, they are a very sizeable minority - if not an actual majority - of Jewish people both inside and outside Israel. This is despite such obscene sentiments as are expressed in the pro-Israel New York rally shown in this video here.

Last Saturday there was a demonstration in Budapest to protest against the actions in Gaza. I was unable to attend, but would have left very quickly because, from all accounts, it was hi-jacked by the extreme right in order to express their racist hatred. This is deeply and tragically ironic. For had it not been for the ideological forebears of these people it is highly doubtful that the state of Israel would ever have been created. It was born of Nazism - and, I fear, has been infected by the same virus of hate, fear and scapegoat hunting that lay behind Nazism. Certainly some of the comments on the video could have come direct from Goebbels - such as the reference to "cutting out a cancer". It is terrifying that the Gaza action has served to further the legitimation of Neo-Nazism, at least here in Hungary but I am sure elsewhere.

There is never any justification for the wholesale slaughter of human beings in pursuance of ideology or religion, no matter who commits it.

In the article that accompanies the video linked to above, there is an extract from “The Holocaust Is Over, We Must Rise From Its Ashes,” which is described as a powerful new book by former Israeli Knesset speaker and Jewish National Fund chairman Avraham Burg:

“If you are a bad person, a whining enemy or a strong-arm occupier, you are not my brother, even if you are circumcised, observe the Sabbath, and do mitzvahs. If your scarf covers every hair on your head for modest, you give alms and do charity, but what is under your scarf is dedicated to the sanctity of Jewish land, taking precedence over the sanctity of human life, whosever life that is, then your are not my sister. You might be my enemy. A good Arab or a righteous gentile will be a brother or sister to me. A wicked man, even of Jewish descent, is my adversary, and I would stand on the other side of the barricade and fight him to the end.”

Just one of the voices we do not hear.

More things in heaven and earth

2009-01-12T20:34:00.007+01:00

In her prologue in the Canterbury Tales, The Wife of Bath states:

1: Experience, though noon auctoritee
2: Were in this world, is right ynogh for me

and for those who are not familiar with Middle English:

Experience, though no authority
Were in this world, were good enough for me,

She then goes on to relate this statement to marriage in particular and it is clear that Chaucer's purpose here is anti-feminist, albeit very entertaining. I am, however, particularly interested in the claim she makes of the equivalent values of authority and experience, particularly as relating to my last post about academia and personal experience. In many of the posts I read, and there too many to link to, there appeared to be a disdain for certain elements of pagan practice and belief because of a perceived lack of "rigour". I confess that there have been many occasions, and may well in the future, when I have made similar disparaging remarks. I apologise to any I may have offended.

The thing is, I know nothing of spellcraft, for example - never having practised it. Nor, to be frank, have I ever really wanted to- it seems to much like hard work to get it all right. So I have nothing of real value to say about its efficacy. I have, however, a fairly wide experience of ceremony and that has convinced me that it works. Subjective and anecdotal? Yes. By its very nature it must be. I would find it very difficult to devise any meaningful ceremony that would meet laboratory conditions. Nor could I replicate it. Any ceremony is dependent on the conditions of the time - the season, the people present, phase of the moon, the weather, international and local events, personal mood - not to mention the will of the Goddess. Almost an infinity of variables. There is not, thank Goddess, any fixed liturgy yet that can be parroted and mumbled by rote.

I see the inadequacies of this but do not see any way to avoid them. In order to have the possibility of real meaning to all concerned, ceremonies must - as far as I can see - be fluid. A general direction and plan may well be essential but these must always be provisional, ready to be adapted or abandoned in response to need. Not all ceremonies will be equally successful - there are some that I have thought rather lacklustre both facilitated by myself and others. And yet, I have heard others speak of how moved they were by these same ceremonies and how they found hope, courage and comfort within them. Who am I to call them liars?

If this makes me sound hopelessly relativistic, so be it. I have no real problem with this label. In fact, in many ways I rather embrace it. I have found myself returning, over the last couple of days, to a subject with which I was struggling before I abandoned my MA course. It was concerning the pivotal cultural position of Hamlet and I cannot go into the details here because, on the one hand, they never became too clear, and on the other, they are not strictly relevant. But integral to them was the oft-quoted lines from Act 1 Sc 5:

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

Another quote has just come into my mind, this time from RD Laing, Politics of Experience, chapter 1

I cannot experience your experience. You cannot experience my experience. We are both invisible men. All men are invisible to one another. Experience used to be called The Soul.

I am not too sure why both these quotes came into my mind at the same time. I think it is because they both pertain to the invisibility of the Soul, of the individual human experience to the scrutiny of others. My beliefs are to a large extent a result of my own, unreplicatable experience. They cannot be measured and neither are they really accessible to reason. Reason can only be a tool in the process of forming belief but never can reason dictate belief because even the conviction that human reason can explain everything is, in itself, a belief.

Philosophy is a wonderful tool - but nowhere near a full answer to the woes of humanity. Most of us do not live in those elevated spheres- whether they be in the academia of today or of ancient Athens - in which the labour was done by others and philosophers had leisure and security to ply their trade. Most of the world does not have that luxury and has to live in a world of unrewarding and unstimulating labour with all the compromises with power that this entails. They live in the world of experience and the irrationality of emotion. And they are prone to be ruled by that emotion. We will never fully understand how it happened but we must never forget that a nation of high intellectual and philosophical calibre - Germany - fell prey to one of the most insane and irrational ideologies to ever hit this planet - with many of the intellectual elite scrambling on board the Nazi runaway train. Perhaps they thought they were immune and therefore rationalised their own irrationality.

It is folly to separate soul (for want of a better metaphor) and brain and then privilege one over the other. The only healthy option is to give each equal consideration. Some individuals, of course, will be naturally inclined to one sphere and some to the other. Both must be honoured. Experience without "authority" is formless, authority without experience, lifeless.

Then, of course, we have to include the body. A tricky factor in this civilisation. And one I will return to again and again

Growing out of paganism?

2009-01-10T19:29:00.005+01:00

There has been quite a debate about this recently. Some people who were, apparently, prominent in the "community" as podcasters have closed down their site because they consider themselves to be no longer pagan. This has prompted a lot of responses which can be read here, many of them highly articulate and interesting with their talk of philosophy and academic rigour. I can see where they are coming from and appreciate what they have to say.

I am, however, puzzled that so much time and effort can be expended over the decision of two human beings that their path had deviated from one route to another. Surely this is what has happened to most self-identified pagans at some time in their lives - otherwise they would still be christians, jews, atheists or whatever. That it should happen again to some is surely no surprise. And, in the end, is no loss. For surely it is better that people be honest and open than they should stick to a lying appearance of consistency in order to remain in a perceived community? It is painful to break from those with whom one was once very close and strike off into unknown territory - but it is something that may become essential. I wish these two individuals, of whom I have never previously heard, joy in their future explorations.

And , in many ways, I can see where they are coming from. It took me decades before I could admit to myself that I was a follower of the Goddess and another few years before I could say that She was, in particular, Inanna. I am aware that my experience of Inanna may lack academic rigour - that is one of the reasons I was so reluctant to articulate it. My experience in Higher Education is limited to a first class degree in English as a mature student and an abortive attempt, (I was unable to combine study, aged 50, with a full time job in a night shelter), to gain an MA. But this limited experience of academia was enough to give me a deal of respect for the virtues of the academic method. And I am aware that, if challenged on my own perceptions of Goddess, of Inanna, then I must ultimately retreat into the realm of personal experience. Put simply, I heard Her voice. More than once. Telling me that She wanted me to do certain things. That is what overrode all the scepticism with which I was all too abundantly supplied.

So I was left with two possible conclusions. The first, which dominated my life for a very long time, was that I was simply mad. Deluded. I ran from the voice and hid in drugs and alcohol. The latter I can still do. The second was that, perhaps, the call was real and the voice I heard was Hers. This was, in fact, the more functional conclusion. When I accept it and refuse to listen to the inner sceptic then life becomes simpler and I feel happier and more empowered. And doors open in my life. When I reject it, telling myself I am being "realistic", then I feel diminished, small and depressed. The evidence leads me, therefore, to the conclusion that She is a real presence in my life and one that cannot be explained or philosophised away.

I am aware that there may be all sorts of psychological explanations for the way I am but I really do not care. I may simply have an "imaginary friend", as Dawkins would say, but so what? Acknowledging Her has made me a happier human being and therefore one who is more likely to survive -therefore, assuming I were still fertile (which I am not) - more likely to reproduce. Which in Darwinian terms is what the whole thing is about.

I do not tend to call myself a pagan - for many reasons, but primarily because I am purely focussed on Goddess and have no real concept of the God. But I will use it for the sake of simplicity and because that is historically what I would have been called by the Christians. In this sense, it has taken me very many years to grow into paganism. I cannot see myself growing out of it.

Support the Shministim

2009-01-08T16:13:00.003+01:00

Another cut and paste job:

From the Jewish Voice for Peace

Shministim. Have you heard of them? I have - just now. And once I heard about them, I had to do something.

The Shministim - all about ages 16, 17, 18 and in the 12th grade - are a new breed of conscientious objectors in Israel and right now they are taking a stand. They believe in a better, more peaceful future for themselves and for Israelis and Palestinians, and they are refusing to join the Israeli army. They're in jail, holding strong against immense pressure from family, friends and the Israeli government. They need our support and they need it today.

The Shministim have asked Jewish Voice for Peace to reach out to people like us to let the Israeli government know we are watching, and that we support their courage. They're hoping to receive hundreds of thousands of postcards to be delivered to the Israeli Minister of Defense. Especially now-while bombs rain down on Gaza and we are reminded that when the soldiers say no, there will be no more deaths.

The Shministim are hoping to stand strong representing not only the thousands of refuseniks who came before them, not only the many young people to whom they are an example of a better world, but also to represent us. They have asked you, me, and every person who strives for peace to support them. I will.

Please add your signature, as I have,
in support of Israelis, who refuse to comply with their government's anti-humanitarian policy.

Will you join me? It's simple. Sign a letter. Click here:

Israel, Palestine - the tragedy unfolds

2009-01-08T00:21:00.007+01:00

A few days ago, I cut and pasted a long email from Starhawk. I said then that any comment would be superfluous and I am not really deviating from that statement. I would urge any who have not read it to do so now.

For a while now, my attention has been focussed on developments in my private life. I may comment on these later but they are outside the scope of this post. I have, however, been aware of developments in the larger world. And one of these is the tragedy of Gaza. Milton wrote in "Samson Agonistes" of being "Eyeless in Gaza" and this seems to be still the case. There is a wilful blindness here.

Starhawk wrote this:

"

I don’t get how my own people can be doing this. Or rather, I do get it. I am a Jew, by birth and upbringing, born six years after the Holocaust ended, raised on the myth and hope of Israel. The myth goes like this:

“For two thousand years we wandered in exile, homeless and persecuted, nearly destroyed utterly by the Nazis. But out of that suffering was born one good thing—the homeland that we have come back to, our own land at last, where we can be safe, and proud, and strong.”

That’s a powerful story, a moving story. There’s only one problem with it—it leaves the Palestinians out. It has to leave them out, for if we were to admit that the homeland belonged to another people, well, that spoils the story."

Herein lies the problem. And it goes back millennia. It goes back to the pernicious nonsense of the "chosen people" and their "promised land". Because the land that the Israelites coveted was not uninhabited. It was already the home of a highly sophisticated civilisation when the wanderers from the desert overran it with, according to the bible, genocidal efficiency and attempted to assert their own, sterile, religion upon it. The same divine sanction is still claimed by those who defend the State of Israel. It goes something like this:
"We are the chosen people and thus every one of us worth infinitely more than those who are not so chosen. We are not, therefore, subject to the rules that apply to the rest of humanity". I would refer any curious reader to the bible for compelling -and nauseating - evidence of this.

This, lest I be accused of anti-semitism, is not a feature of Judaism alone. On the contrary, it has infected all those civilisations of "the book" which are in dominance today. Could the state of Israel have existed without the guilt of those who had ignored the plight of European Jews in the 30s? Somehow, I think not.

There is absolutely no doubt about the horrors attendant on European anti-semitism. However, since 1948 this problem has been displaced to the peoples of the Middle East who had played absolutely no part in the horrors of the Tsarist pogroms or the Nazi holocaust. And. lest it be forgot, these were not committed by Moslems but by nominal Christian nations. Who then, confronted in 1945 with the full horror of the logical extension of their own belief systems, decided to create the state of Israel. It was not as if this was inevitable. Along the line, other territories had been considered, including Madagascar.

What these territories had in common was that they were the "property" of European powers. Israel was, and is a
still, a European imperial project, It is not without significance thar Israel has long been a contestant in the Eurovision Song Contest. It is deeply and tragically ironic that Israel has inherited the manifest destiny ideology of those powers that for so so long persecuted Jews. The very "non-person" attitudes of 20th century racist ideology are all too obvious in the justifications that apologists give for the latest killings in Gaza.

My point is that the only way forward is to accept that people have the right to enjoy and gain full benefit from the place in which they were born and in which they subsequently raise their families, colour of skin or putative divine promises notwithstanding. If a Jewish farmer wishes to till her or his land and bring forth crops, I can see no reason to restrict her or his rights to do so. If however, the exercise of this right infringes the rights of others then I would hope for an impartial adjudication.

This, however, is not the case. I fear that the blood guilt of the European Powers, justified as it undoubtedly is by history, has now been transferred to the Palestinians. This has resulted in belief that an Israeli life is intrinsically more valuable than the life of a Palestinian. Thus it is now the Palestinians who are bearing the costs of pain and trauma that centuries of European anti-semitism have perpetrated, But they have brown skins and are therefore, according to the racist ideology that is still highly prevalent, less worthy of respect and consideration.

The Palestinians are not, by any stretch of the imagination, responsible for the situation today. That is the result of a combination of euro-=American guilt and the legacy of Empire. Except to the most warped, Auschwitz had revealed the true horror of the rampant anti-semitism that underpinned so much European thought. Where better to displace this anti-semitism than onto the brown-skinned Arabs? Thus, the ruling classes of "the West" can now sit and pontificate on the shortcomings of those people who were displaced in order to make the victims of horror and atrocity feel safe. For one thing, it enabled those who had funded the death camps to feel safe and free from investigation.

And in the end who lost as a result of this collective euro-american guilt? Well, certainly not the principals because they still make profits. And those very profits prove, according to the prevailing economic theories, that whatever caused that profit is in and of itself virtuous. Thus, if the latest incursion into Gaza results in profits to the shareholders then it is economically justifiable. Death, in these circumstances,is just one small part of the equation.

The state of Israel exists and its citizens have the right to life and liberty. They have the right to bear children and earn a living. Those facts are undeniable. But so do the Palestinians. They are equally human. This fact seems to get lost somewhere in the rhetoric. Starhawk makes a telling point when she writes:

Golda Meir said, “The Palestinians, who are they? They don’t exist.” We hear, “There is no partner for peace,” “There is no one to talk to.”

And so Israel, a modern state with high standards of hygiene, a state rooted in a religion that requires washing your hands before you eat and regular, ritual baths, builds settlements that don’t bother to construct sewage treatment plants. They just dump raw sewage onto the Palestinian fields across the fence, somewhat like a spaceship ejecting its wastes into the void. I am truly not making this up—I’ve seen it, smelled it, and it’s a known though shameful fact. But if the Palestinians aren’t really real—who are they? They don’t exist!—then the land they inhabit becomes a kind of void in the psyche, and it isn’t really real, either

This kind of disregard for others is truly horrifying.

Save Lascaux Cave Art

2009-01-06T07:30:00.003+01:00

Apparently there is danger that these uniquely important paintings may be destroyed forever. Please sign this petition asking the French government to ensure their survival.

To swear or not to swear- that is the question

2009-01-05T12:40:00.007+01:00

A while back, Livia wrote a post in which she listed her pet peeves. I considered doing so but was unsure of what to write, since I have so many. However, I came across something just now that really annoyed me whenever it happens. The author had written "d*ck-head". It could just as easily been f***ing or c**t, and my point would be the same. These words exist - the latter two are certainly in the Oxford English Dictionary - although cunt had to wait until 1928 (If I remember aright). They are not, however, essential parts of the language - there are many euphemisms, medical terms, insults, intensifiers etc available to the writer. Their use, therefore, is intentional. It seems strange to me, that having chosen to use the words, writers then attempt to mitigate potential offence by not writing them.

My plea to writers is, "Please. If you want to say "fuck", write "fuck". If you don't want to say it, then don't. There is no half-way point when you are neither swearing nor not swearing." It is a bit like a child hiding from others by hiding her eyes. I would be no less offended if I were called a f***ing d*ckhead than I would be if the words were written in full.

I would, however, have a deal less respect for the accuser.

A letter from Starhawk

2009-01-04T20:16:00.004+01:00

I have never before cut and pasted a complete posting but I will here do so. No comment of mine could add anything to this.

Dear friends,

All day I’ve been thinking about Gaza, listening to reports on NPR, following the news on the internet when I can spare a moment. I’ve been thinking about the friends I made there four years ago, and wondering how they are faring, and imagining their terror as the bombs fall on that giant, open-air prison.

The Israeli ambassador speaks movingly of the terror felt by Israeli children as Hamas rockets explode in the night. I agree with him—that no child should have her sleep menaced by rocket fire, or wake in the night fearing death.

But I can’t help but remember one night on the Rafah border, sleeping in a house close to the line, watching the children dive for cover as bullets thudded into the walls. There was a shell-hole in the back room they liked to jump through into the garden, which at that time still held fruit trees and chickens. Their mother fed me eggs, and their grandmother stuffed oranges into my pockets with the shy pride every gardener shares.

That house is gone, now, along with all of its neighbors. Those children wake in the night, every night of their lives, in terror. I don’t know if they have survived the hunger, the lack of medical supplies, the bombs. I only know that they are children, too.

I’ve ridden on busses in Israel. I understand that gnawing fear, the squirrely feeling in the pit or your stomach, how you eye your fellow passengers wondering if any of them are too thick around the middle. Could that portly fellow be wearing a suicide belt, or just too many late night snacks of hummus? That’s no way to live.

But I’ve also walked the pock-marked streets of Rafah, where every house bears the scars of Israeli snipers, where tanks prowled the border every night, where children played in the rubble, sometimes under fire, and this was all four years ago, when things were much, much better there.

And I just don’t get it. I mean, I get why suicide bombs and homemade rockets that kill innocent civilians are wrong. I just don’t get why bombs from F16s that kill far more innocent civilians are right. Why a kid from the ghetto who shoots a cop is a criminal, but a pilot who bombs a police station from the air is a hero.

Is it a distance thing? Does the air or the altitude confer a purifying effect? Or is it a matter of scale? Individual murder is vile, but mass murder, carried out by a state as an aspect of national policy, that’s a fine and noble thing?

I don’t get how my own people can be doing this. Or rather, I do get it. I am a Jew, by birth and upbringing, born six years after the Holocaust ended, raised on the myth and hope of Israel. The myth goes like this:

“For two thousand years we wandered in exile, homeless and persecuted, nearly destroyed utterly by the Nazis. But out of that suffering was born one good thing—the homeland that we have come back to, our own land at last, where we can be safe, and proud, and strong.”

That’s a powerful story, a moving story. There’s only one problem with it—it leaves the Palestinians out. It has to leave them out, for if we were to admit that the homeland belonged to another people, well, that spoils the story.

The result is a kind of psychic blind spot where the Palestinians are concerned. If you are truly invested in Israel as the Jewish homeland, the Jewish state, then you can’t let the Palestinians be real to you. It’s like you can’t really focus on them. Golda Meir said, “The Palestinians, who are they? They don’t exist.” We hear, “There is no partner for peace,” “There is no one to talk to.”

And so Israel, a modern state with high standards of hygiene, a state rooted in a religion that requires washing your hands before you eat and regular, ritual baths, builds settlements that don’t bother to construct sewage treatment plants. They just dump raw sewage onto the Palestinian fields across the fence, somewhat like a spaceship ejecting its wastes into the void. I am truly not making this up—I’ve seen it, smelled it, and it’s a known though shameful fact. But if the Palestinians aren’t really real—who are they? They don’t exist!—then the land they inhabit becomes a kind of void in the psyche, and it isn’t really real, either. At times, in those border villages, walking the fencelines of settlements, you feel like you have slipped into a science fiction movie, where parallel universes exist in the same space, but in different strands of reality, that never touch.

When I was on the West Bank, during Israeli incursions the Israeli military would often take over a Palestinian house to billet their soldiers. Many times, they would simply lock the family who owned it into one room, and keep them there, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days—parents, grandparents, kids and all. I’ve sat with a family, singing to the children while soldiers trashed their house, and I’ve been detained by a group of soldiers playing cards in the kitchen with a family locked in the other room. (I got out of that one—but that’s another story.)

It’s a kind of uneasy feeling, having something locked away in a room in your house that you can’t look at. Ever caught a mouse in a glue trap? And you can’t bear to watch it suffer, so you leave the room and close the door and don’t come back until it’s really, really dead.

Like a horrific fractal, the locked room repeats on different scales. The Israelis have built a wall to lock away the West Bank. And Gaza itself is one huge, locked room. Close the borders, keep food and medical supplies and necessities from getting through, and perhaps they will just quietly fade out of existence and stop spoiling our story.

“All we want is a return to calm,” the Israeli ambassador says. “All we want is peace.”

One way to get peace is to exterminate what threatens you. In fact, that may be the prime directive of the last few thousand years.

But attempts to exterminate pests breed resistance, whether you’re dealing with insects or bacteria or people. The more insecticides you pour on a field, the more pests you have to deal with—because insecticides are always more potent at killing the beneficial bugs than the pesky ones.

The harshness, the crackdowns, the border closings, the checkpoints, the assassinations, the incursions, the building of settlements deep into Palestinian territory, all the daily frustrations and humiliations of occupation, have been breeding the conditions for Hamas, or something like it, to thrive. If Israel truly wants peace, there’s a more subtle, a more intelligent and more effective strategy to pursue than simply trying to kill the enemy and anyone else who happens to be in the vicinity.

It’s this—instead of killing what threatens you, feed what you want to grow. Consider in what conditions peace can thrive, and create them, just as you would prepare the bed for the crops you want to plant. Find those among your opponents who also want peace, and support them. Make alliances. Offer your enemies incentives to change, and reward your friends.

Of course, to follow such a strategy, you must actually see and know your enemy. If they are nothing to you but cartoon characters of terrorists, you will not be able to tell one from another, to discern the religious fanatic from the guy muttering under his breath, “F-ing Hammas, they closed the cinema again!”

And you must be willing to give something up. No one gets peace if your basic bargaining position is, “I get everything I want, and you eat my shit.” You might get a temporary victory, but it will never be a peaceful one.

To know and see the enemy, you must let them into the story. They must become real to you, nuanced, distinctive as individuals.

But when we let the Palestinians into the story, it changes. Oh, how painfully it changes! For there is no way to tell a new story, one that includes both peoples of the land, without starting like this:

“In our yearning for a homeland, in our attempts as a threatened and traumatized people to find safety and power, we have done a great wrong to another people, and now we must atone.”

Just try saying it. If you, like me, were raised on that other story, just try this one out. Say it three times. It hurts, yes, but it might also bring a great, liberating sense of relief with it.

And if you’re not Jewish, if you’re American, if you’re white, if you’re German, if you’re a thousand other things, really, if you’re a human being, there’s probably some version of that story that is true for you.

Out of our own great need and fear and pain, we have often done great harm, and we are called to atone. To atone is to be at one—to stop drawing a circle that includes our tribe and excludes the other, and start drawing a larger circle that takes everyone in.

How do we atone? Open your eyes. Look into the face of the enemy, and see a human being, flawed, distinct, unique and precious. Stop killing. Start talking. Compost the shit and the rot and feed the olive trees.

Act. Cross the line. There are Israelis who do it all the time, joining with Palestinians on the West Bank to protest the wall, watching at checkpoints, refusing to serve in the occupying army, standing for peace. Thousands have demonstrated this week in Tel Aviv.

There are Palestinians who advocate nonviolent resistance, who have organized their villages to protest the wall, who face tear gas, beatings, arrests, rubber bullets and real bullets to make their stand.

There are internationals who have put themselves on the line—like the boatload of human rights activists, journalists and doctors on board the Dignity, the ship from the Free Gaza movement that was rammed and fired on by the Israeli navy yesterday as it attempted to reach Gaza with humanitarian aid.

Maybe we can’t all do that. But we can all write a letter, make a phone call, send an email. We can make the Palestinian people visible to us, and to the world. When we do so, we make a world that is safer for every child.

Below is a good summary of some of the actions we can take.

Please feel free to repost this. In fact, send it to someone you think will disagree with it.
Starhawk

www.starhawk.org

Don't die of ignorance!

2009-01-02T22:57:00.005+01:00

Way back, when I still watched television, there was an advertising campaign on UK television which featured icebergs in the ocean, The slogan was the above - "Don't die of ignorance!" There is an apocryphal story of a child who had decided, because his teacher had exasperatedly called him ignorant, decided that he must therefore have a fatal disease. He was both wrong and, potentially, right. The campaign was to do with AIDS and the need for people to be informed of risk. Admirable. But nowhere, really, did it mention sex - that was too taboo. Icebergs. Very sophisticated and very artistic. But WAY off the point. But the prime imperative was observed - nothing, not even the AIDS epidemic, must offend mealy-mouthed Christian morality. All measures to address such a crisis must address the sensibilities of bigoted moralists and body haters.

I was reminded of this by a post today by Aspasia. She links to a survey which reveals that, due to the puritanical nature of abstinence-only sex education, many young people are convinced that anal sex carries no risk of disease. This is surely putting them at risk of death through ignorance.

I have written before about the inadequacy of sex education the UK. I am admittedly getting on in years but must say that at no time in my primary or secondary education did I receive anything that could be remotely described as sex education. Even today, I believe, parents can opt their children out of on conscientious grounds. This is all in the name of the protection of "innocence". WTF does this mean? Obama was accused of a dangerous liberal agenda for his support of a programme which introduced young children to the concepts of "good touch" and "bad touch"! This is astounding. Who, apart from those who prey on chldren, could possibly object to those children being taught how to protect themselves?

I don't know. But the scale of the opposition to sex education causes me a high degree of unease. Recently, I listened to an interview with a senior police officer who was in charge of the investigation of allegations of serious, organised, sexual abuse of children on the island of Jersey. In it - I would link but the interview is no longer available online - he speaks of a high-level conspiracy to undermine and ultimately discredit both his investigation and his professional integrity. I do not, and cannot, know the full facts of this case but, I am afraid, have a horrible conviction that his allegations are right. Particularly as the allegations are merely the latest in a series of child abuse scandals that have afflicted the "childcare" system over the last couple of decades or so - on both sides of the Irish Sea.

There is much hysteria against predatory paedophiles in the UK and has been for some years. There was even a case reported of someone's house being torched because people had heard she was a paediatrician. Such hysteria is fanned by the popular press. Who also run vitriolic campaigns against "liberal" sex education - particularly when it is concerned with variations of sexuality. I have asked the question before and ask it again now. In whose interest are children kept ignorant? Only those who woud prey on them. Only those who would not want them to know that daddy's or uncle john's "affectionate" cuddles have crossed a line that should not, in any civilised society, be crossed.

But this is a line that is crossed every day. While editorials and news pages cry of the "dirty old men" who haunt the playgrounds with sweets and kind words, the majority of sexual abuse is being carried out in respectable families every day - or perhaps, more accurately, night. But the "family" and its values are sacrosanct. Thus parents can opt out of giving children the information they need to protect themselves. While I am in no way alleging that all, or even most, of the parents who do this are abusive they are nevertheless simply enabling, however devoutly, the abuse to continue. Just as Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict did when he instructed the bishops to keep a lid on accusations of clerical abuse. He forgot one of the injunctions of the putative founder of his church:

Luke 17:2 (King James Version)

It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.

The stranglehold that Christianity exercises on such things must be broken. Surely two millennia are enough? How much more evidence is needed of the total inability of the institutions to police themselves in this regard? How much longer will they be allowed to prevent children from accessing the information they need to protect themselves from abuse?

I do not know. But I do know that children are the only hope humanity has. If we do not empower them, we do not deserve to survive.

Puzzled....

2009-01-02T16:01:00.002+01:00

Looking over my stats, I have noticed something very strange. At first glance, the number of hits appears to be fairly constant but on looking deeper I find that over the last few days the bulk of hits appears to come from only one isp, somewhere in Essex. Not only that but there are many page hits from this source. So, my question is this, is it only one person reading me again and again or is it that somehow many others are routed through this isp? I just don't know. But I am curious.