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Wednesday, August 29, 2012

No Talk, No Action

"Do you think you can take over the universe and improve upon it?
The universe is sacred.
You cannot improve it.
In the pursuit of learning,
every day something is acquired.
In the pursuit of Tao, every day
something is dropped.
Less and less is done
Until non-action is achieved.
Tao abides in non-action,
yet nothing is left undone."

- Tao Te Ching

All Talk, All Action

"One of the most important shifts required in [a] new way of viewing conversation is to re-evaluate our traditional view that talk and action are separate activities. We... [suggest] that we consider revising our traditional views of talk and action, seeing them as a single integrated whole rather than as separate activities. What if, when conversations are highly energized and relevant, you are already in the action phase? What if it's not talking and discovery followed by action planning and implementation in the linear way we in the West think about it?"


....


"Perhaps the whole process is part of a single action cycle - reflection/insight/harvesting/action planning/implementation/feedback - in which conversation is a lively core process every step of the way. We're discovering that when people care about the questions they are working on and when their conversations are truly alive, participants naturally want to organize themselves to do whatever has to done, discovering who cares about what and who will take accountability for next steps. Perhaps my eighty-four-year-old mom said it best when she shared a fundamental insight from her lifetime of organizational work... "You see," she mused, "conversation is action. You can think things and you can feel things but it doesn't become 'real' until you express it. Then it begins to germinate. Other people hear it, other people begin to feel it, you share ideas together - and if it's important enough, relevant action becomes just a natural thing that happens.'"

- Juanita Brown w/ David Isaacs,
from World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations that Matter, pg 37, 38

Saturday, August 18, 2012

How close can you get without having sex

Many straight American men acknowledge (and perhaps on some level problematize) the conflation of closeness/intimacy and sex when find themselves expressing feelings often constructed as "gay" towards other straight men that they want to be or are close with. These identity crises create tensions that are often released through irony and humor or violence. See terms like "bromance" and "bromosexual," and the plethora of internet clips or personal narratives of straight men (often younger, often comedians) dancing right up to, and sometimes tiptoe-ing across, with varying degrees of awkwardness, that line of sexual intimacy.

I found this scene from the movie Superbad of two straight male friends expressing their love for each other to balance tenderness and humor quite well. The top comment right now on youtube for this scene is "Bromance is the truest form of love!"



Speaking of "bromance," consider the incest taboo - a cultural norm whose existence and vehement enforcement suggests again an acknowledgment of the distinct possibility of a conceptual blurring of intimacy and sexual attraction. 

To be close, to know somebody as well as family members or best friends know each other - how is that possible without having sex? One common distinction between these relationships and sexual/romantic relationships is the perception of the speed at which they usually develop. A family's intimacy comes over time, is almost measured as a percentage of your entire lifetime. So too with best friends (with the possible exception of "my new best friend" - often an expression used to mark out a character or person as shallow or childish).

Yet, in a recent interview, David Jay, the founder of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), and subject of a new documentary, (A)sexual, says:
Yes, [I date] sort of. In the past I had a series of close relationships with women that weren’t sexual. And we didn't know exactly what that meant. A lot of times they also had boyfriends but they were much more emotionally intimate with me. And their boyfriends didn’t know what to do with that—they got really jealous. It was a mess. And it was a mess because there were no words for a really close friendship that didn’t involve sex or sexuality. There was no status for it.
Implicit in this narrative is that the friendships with these women developed along a timeline similar to dating, one that is generally faster than becoming family or best friends. There's something particularly unsettling about this when it happens between two straight men as well, as captured in a recent episode of Louie, reviewed here on Slate. That reviewer notes:
in order to dramatize the way straight white American men stupidly struggle with—and even refuse—a certain kind of intimacy, C.K. presents a scenario that reads as gay as possible. It keeps you guessing at what’s really going on, and wondering where the episode might be headed. 
I don't really have a conclusion for this post, but this topic is something that continues to interest me. Speaking of lacking conclusions, I'm reading Judtih Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure right now. Maybe I'll write about that next.

Friday, August 17, 2012

Tyrant

The Tyrant Father
Nothing is ever good enough for him.
Bully, big bully who
Makes ammo out of the innocuous...
Battles his Son
Acting out of his own woundedness
The ongoing war he must fight;
Those demons that just won't leave.

But Tyrant-as-Victim
is also too convenient a tale to tell
So much sympathy we can muster
"Everyone has a Story"
And so what? Tyrant may be forgiven, yet
Tyrant must still be held accountable for Tyranny

Even if this means: The Tyrant must lose his Son

Thursday, August 2, 2012

An Obsessional Yin-Yang Dialectic








An Obsessional Yin-Yang Dialectic




So, typically, the assumption is that

yin = shadow = female = feminine = black half of the symbol

and

yang = light = male = masculine = white half of the symbol







and that this symbol represents their primordial interplay, which gives rise to the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, water) and the ten-thousand things (all of manifest phenomena).




From wikipedia:

"In Daoist philosophy, dark and light () yin and yang, arrives in the dàodéjīng (道德經) at Chapter 42.[3] It becomes sensible from an initial quiescence or emptiness (wuji, sometimes symbolized by an empty circle), and continues moving until quiescence is reached again. For instance, dropping a stone in a calm pool of water will simultaneously raise waves and lower troughs between them, and this alternation of high and low points in the water will radiate outward until the movement dissipates and the pool is calm once more. Yin and yang thus are always opposite and equal qualities. Further, whenever one quality reaches its peak, it will naturally begin to transform into the opposite quality: for example, grain that reaches its full height in summer (fully yang) will produce seeds and die back in winter (fully yin) in an endless cycle."




Here, the concept of "Primordial Interplay":


Concretely:

Their co-arising





Subtly:

Their interdependent meaning...
Their co-creation / co-definition of one other

(giving rise to the elements and all phenomena)...




And even then... once more:

Their co-existence within each other
(the white dot within the black half, the black dot within the white half...)

Yang within Yin... Yin within Yang


Before the stone is dropped into the water, so that a distinction between waves and troughs is discerned, both waves and troughs are 'integrated' in the stillness of the water...

Already embedded within the constitution of the one is the very totality of its 'other.'
The names assigned to either 'wave' or 'trough' are arbitrary, and these forms themselves are constantly splitting and dissolving into their essential essencelessness.


Back to stillness.



What is the stone that is thrown?


When we are completely strong, we will find also our brokenness.
When we are completely thrown into our weakness, there we will find our greatest strength.
Hot enough, we sweat our own coolness...
And cold, we shiver up our own deepest heat.

Full of rage, we discover our love.
And full of loving intensity, we will find our lingering resentments.



To reach equilibrium, yes, but even that imposes arbitrary 'disorder' on a territory that can never be unbalanced. (neither balanced, nor unbalanced... the ephemeral Tao)


"The Way (Tao) that can be deviated from is not the True Way"
- ? Confucius ?



Here, my motivation:
An exploration of a dynamism that underlies and overlays all my movement and stasis...



Yin and Yang
Play and Justice
Love and Anger
Artist and Activist
Ultimate Truth and Relative Truth
Oxytocin-Serotonin and Dopamine-Noradrenaline


Wednesday, August 1, 2012

A Sketch of an Interview project

So.

It seems a lot of blog posts, in general, are monological: They involve the voice of one writer who paraphrases, or summarises things that they've read.
I'm interested in the sense of meaning-making that comes from dialogical accounts. Conversations that happen between people. "Interviews," would be one format, but the other is the sense of the voice of two or more people involved in generating topical ideas.

The proposal:
To dialogue with friends here in Australia about issues/topics we find interesting. Time limit our conversations to 45 minutes. Record the conversations. Transcribe the conversations. And then put them up online so that there is an availability of English-language primary documents from Australia on a variety of different ideas/discourses that are usually more North-American / European-dominated.

Some ideas of topics I'd like to cover:
Integral Theory
Gender/Sexuality
Race, Racism, and Whiteness
Aboriginal issues
Disability and Theology
Futures Studies
Environmental issues and Climate Change
Queer futures

I'd likely publish these dialogues on a separate site... Details to come!