Abstinence from Porn

It is amazing how so many men in general are colonised by porn.

A friend of mine (who does not watch porn) told me about a recent sexual encounter of his, with another gorgeous younger man. This younger man, in his early 20s, was unable to reach orgasm with the conventional, lovingly hot sex they were having, and then later confessed, "Well... I really need to watch porn in order to cum."

As Marnia Robinson has reflected (her husband's thoughts) about it in her piece on Sexual Superabundance:
"an Internet user can see more hot babes (or whatever gets him going) in an afternoon than his ancestors saw in a lifetime."

This level of habituation to such a myriad of partners means that many consumers of porn are gaining HAREMS of sexual partners in their minds, and then losing the capacity to experience fulfillment with even just one...

Now I am not against multiple sexual partnerships per se, but the incapacity to be present with a single partner seems like a sorry place to begin one's forays into multiple ones... I am thus not 'anti-porn' in the sense of wanting to ban it or destroy it, similarly to how I am not anti-sugar... However, there is something a little bit sinister, for example, about the globalisation of high-sugar Coca-Cola (and the concurrent obesity-anorexia pandemic), just as it is with pornographic colonisation of our minds with high-speed internet access...

(incidentally, for an exploration of 'sexual anorexia' metaphor as pertaining to porn consumption, check out a link to this New York magazine article, "He's Just Not That Into Anyone"...)


Anti-porn, Pro-porn

I think we need to be more critical about how the ways we consume sexual imagery can and DO impact how we relate to others in real life. It is also pitiful that the debate on porn (to the extent that the average person is engaged in any debate about it at all) is polarised into the 'anti-sex/anti-porn' and the 'pro-sex/pro-porn' camps. While I recognise that these are but straw-people whose arguments against or in favour of porn are far more complex than my diluted reflections would indicate, I still think it is helpful to paint these broad brushstrokes to understand why I take the position I do (my attempted "Middle Way" view).

Anti-porn arguments are varied, of course, but, at their best, typically include feminist and anti-colonial objections to how the structure of the industry as it stands typically degrades and humiliates women (and men/women of colour). For a multi-billion dollar global industry, it is disproportionately owned and run by (white) men who control female labour (and that of workers of colour). Men do the hiring, men control the cameras, and men make up the bulk of porn's consumer base. Then, of course, there are the equally important criticisms of the contents of pornographic imagery, which disproportionately fetishise depictions of the subjugation and humiliation of women, the exoticism of people of colour, phallocentrism, and the privileging of male ejaculatory orgasm (as the 'culmination' of sexual interactions). These are, of course, important criticisms of porn, but these are but limited criticisms, as I will explore in a moment, and in future posts.

Sex-positive pro-porn arguments, at their best, tend to defend porn as a medium of sexual expression, arguing that while the porn industry may be, currently, disproportionately run by men in exploitation of women's bodies, this patriarchal structure is certainly not LIMITED to the porn industry, nor is it ubiquitous in ALL visual depictions of graphic sexuality for the purpose of titillation (which, for now, is my working definition of pornography). Indeed, there are plenty of far more egalitarian gay and queer porn, as well as women-owned pornographic enterprises. There is also the democratisation of pornography, to wrest it away from big producers into the hands of 'amateurs' who simply want to document their sex lives and post reflections of their fragmented exhilarations on sites like XTube. There are some ways that porn can be and has been used to assist in the exploration of sexuality for 'average' people with 'average' bodies, for people with non-normative bodies, and people with marginalised or non-normative sexual expressions. For both reclaimant producers, as well as renegade consumers, porn may well be very empowering in these ways.

To a limited extent, I would agree with both these basic (Marxist-feminist) anti-porn critiques, as well as these (queer, sex-positive) pro-porn stances. However, they are still both limited in that they focus disproportionately either on abolition or on reclamation of the pornographic enterprise (these days, arguments tend to veer toward reclamation), or else the arguments that I have delineated are primarily about "Western" or Euro-centric pornography, which is most of the porn that I have consumed (I include ALL porn that is accessible in the "West" in this delineation, including Asian porn featuring Asian bodies, as they have been made available through the filters of my liberal democratic nation-state's internet providers). We need to consider on more morally-neutral, and even compassionate ground, the correlation between pornography and Addiction.

In other words, while I see porn (particularly mainstream, heterosexual porn), especially problematic as an institution of cultural production, and while I simultaneously ALSO believe there may be a value in exploring our own desires through the use of porn (thank you basic psychoanalytic theory), the fact of the matter is that these considerations and introspections are not typically encouraged by porn producers. Indeed, it is in their very best interests to discourage the studious or mindful engagement with porn, either during, or retrospectively, for this would surely undermine pornography's basic project: To Increase Desire.


Intimacy

This sort of dualism, of having to 'pick' between anti-porn and pro-porn stances in the consideration of how or whether to consume porn, does no justice to the reality of the complexity of the relationship between consumer and product. To put it another way, I am not so much anti-porn or pro-porn, as I am pro-intimacy.

From a Buddhist perspective then, pornography is de facto problematic, in that it is constructed to capitalise not only on our existing desires, but also to produce more desire, with the neuro-biological and social consequences of building up levels of insatiability. We can be hooked onto a computer screen or magazine, not only without ever having to interact with the human beings who facilitate the arising of our desires, but also by actively severing the link between sexual desire and interpersonal communication/physical touch.

This is a truly unfortunate amputation.

For me, anyway, part of the joy of sex lies in the pleasure of mutuality, of the bonds that come from gaining familiarity with another's sexual Being (through speech, touch, and the cadences of relationship), who in turn practices reciprocity and learns the naunces of our own libidinal waves... The oxytocinic nature of interpersonal sexual bliss. There is a sublime quality to this process of mutual education (learning and teaching by doing) that is cut off when we distill the sexual encounter to more dopaminergic drives (the encouragement, as porn does, of novelty rather than familiarity, distance rather than closeness, and the laziness of No-Relation rather than the hard work of Relationship (no matter its form; casual, romantic, short-term, or long)).

For more information on the neurochemical underpinnings of this, check out Marnia Robinson's writing
Porn and Perception: Is Your Limbic Brain Distorting Your Vision?

To those who may pick up on a hint of sex-negativity behind my rejection of porn, I will link you to an article I wrote back in university on Phone Sex, which stresses the sublime-ness of interpersonal sexuality, even without direct physical contact. I want to reiterate: I am not against Simulacral Reality; but I am intentionally stressing the hierarchical nature of sexual development. Porn is a sort of 'base' sexual pleasure. Not 'wrong' (once again, not a moral judgement), just a less sophisticated way of engaging our sexual selfhood.

I'll probably write a future critique of Marnia Robinson's uncritical acceptance of monogamy- and hetero-normative views in the structure of her own critique of pornography, but for now, her insights into the neuro-chemical bases for porn's contribution to sexual disharmony and disequilibrium are pretty sound, in my opinion.

In my own experience, my consumption of porn in my life has compromised my capacity to be intimate with a man... I begin to compare what I am doing with someone in person with what I've seen in porn... Which may not be bad, as far as demonstrably loving depictions of sex may go, but becomes particularly problematic given the 'escalating' nature of pornography (as sexual-methodology) normalises mindlessness and diversity over one-pointed concentration and remaining present with your partner(s). The longer I go without watching and getting off to porn, the more free I feel to be in the Flow of the What Is of partnership.

I love myself more, my own body is beautiful; Men around me are more radiant. My energy levels are up. I do not automatically leap to the sexualisation of all men I meet in person, and instead feel freer, energetically, to simply 'play' with my interactions in real life. I am more harmlessly flirtatious (rather than lost in self-recriminations for not being hot enough). I feel more sensitive to my partners' pleasures. I slowly wean myself off of other addictive behaviours, other sexual compulsions. My heart is more open. My capacity to love another is deepened.


Final Iterations

I have no intention of ever advocating for banning pornography or judging others (in a moral sense) for using it. In a sense, I see porn in a similar way to drugs... It can enable pleasure, and insight, but not without negative consequences, and it certainly need not be the exclusive or primary catalyst for these pleasures and insights. I personally am opting for an abstinent approach (difficult as this is, and relapses do happen), but I honestly think that we need to, particularly within self-professed 'liberal' spaces, start considering a harm reduction approach to the use of porn, one which does not simply assume a consequence-less-ness to its use, or an uncritical acceptance of its sex-positive qualities.

The more aware we are of the ways we have been conditioned by sex-repression AND by its reactionary sex-positive expressions, the more we can decolonise ourselves from the false advertising that is pornography.

Reach out and touch somebody, and allow ourselves to be so touched in return.

Clinging and Desire

The Distinction Between Clinging and Desire

"At a... conference in New York City... some-one asked the writer and Buddhist scholar Stephen Batchelor about this issue:
"I have no trouble understanding the idea of non-attachment in meditation,” the questioner said, “but when it comes to my marriage and family, I don’t get it. Why is non-attachment even a positive thing to aspire to?” Attachment, even desire, seemed to the questioner like something to be supported in the inter-personal realm, not something to be overcome.

Stephen motioned to his wife, Martine, who was just coming into the room. “My wife says it is like holding a coin,” he said, and he held out one arm with his palm up and his fist closed. “We can hold it like this,” and he emphasized the closed nature of his fist, “or we can hold it like this,” and he opened his hand to show the coin sitting in the center of his palm. “The closed fist is like clinging,” he said. “But with my hand open, I still hold the coin.” Buddhism, Stephen seemed to be implying actually imagines that desire can be held lightly. The distinction between the closed and the open fist is the distinction between clinging and desire."

- quoted from Mark Epstein's "Open to Desire"



Four Noble Truths

The Buddha's Four Noble Truths are:

1. Life is Duḥkha (suffering/unsatisfactoriness)
2. Duḥkha (Suffering/Unsatisfactoriness) is caused by Tṛṣṇā (thirst/clinging [to conditioned things])
3. The Cessation of Tṛṣṇā leads to the cessation of Duḥkha, and this Cessation is known as Nirvāṇa (extinction, as in a candle flame)
4. There is a Marga (path) that leads to this Cessation

Epstein's rendering of the term Tṛṣṇā requires a differentiation that we do not typically make: which is the distinction between Clinging and Desire.

Desire itself is not the problem, which is the argument Epstein makes in his book, and which I agree with. It is when desire itself cannot be lightly held, when it turns into a grasping, a clinging, that problems arise.


Instead of a Coin, A Butterfly

If it were, say, a butterfly instead of a coin in Bachelor's metaphor, any literal grasping would also be a literal death of the very object which we were attempting to possess. The butterfly is killed by our clinging.

On the other hand, to have open palms signifies both our capacity to receive, and is also itself an act of giving (of space, of freedom, of 'allowing'). It is in this open palmed version of beholding and apprehension, that the butterfly is not killed; it is free to come and to go, and we become but the temporary beholders and beneficiaries of its beauty, with nothing destroyed.

This is, to me, the basic building block of spiritual growth. We first apprehend our motivations, and our ambitions. This act of apprehension is itself the cultivation of the union of both wisdom and compassion. Simple as it is, it is a radical departure from the severe world-denying and beauty-shunning asceticism that characterises much of false and/or institutionalised spirituality...

Of course, it is understandable why this falsity exists in the first place.

After all, the act of apprehension itself is difficult. Far easier to have closed palms in the first place, than to have beauty settle upon then but to then be refused the opportunity to hold onto it. One cannot grasp the sublime, and so any beauty that can settle upon our own impermanent lives is tinged with sadness.

However, I believe that this is easily remedied.


Right Understanding

To take the analogy of the coin one step further: Many of us are afraid. Given our circumstances and our conditioning, perhaps we are even correct in assuming that if we opened our palms, all we have cultivated or earned would vanish from us, as in what would happen if we had our hands clasped tight with our palms faced down.

However, I believe that with Right Understanding, by 'holding' our desire correctly, palms faced up, with proper understanding of the distinction between craving/clinging and desire itself, it is like unclasping our hands, and noting with sure relief that the coin does not fall...

Public art

A chalk mandala? Rockridge BART

Filthy Tissues

I
sift through a crowd of all my world...

On some other side,
or perhaps in some clearing,
I find my guts wrapped in plastic bags,
fluids mopped up in tissue,
and I have no choice but to
eat them, in front of
a thousand hysterical eyes...
some faces screwed up in disgust or pity,
some vomit up reminders of their own humanity
at the sight of my bouquet feastitude.

I swallow the last of my innards
and feel strong.

I look at each of the faces in the surrounding mob,
and soak in their embarrassment,
their anger,
their bewilderment, amusement, and disdain

and breathe back to them all my love...
not even forgiveness, for there is no wrong
they have committed,
no crime in them that I have witnessed.

I leave behind empty bags and filthy tissues
and it seems
some of the crowd
are eager
to have themselves a taste.

"Modern Day Gender Equality – Uniting or Alienating?" panel discussion @ University of Sydney

What a privilege!

I was invited to speak at the University on a panel on "Modern Day Gender Equality - Uniting or Alienating?" It was hosted by the Women's Collective at the University of Sydney, and I was one of 5 panelists.

It was a real honour! I was sharing a stage with several remarkable people:

Professor Raewyn Connell, from the University of Sydney, an absurdly prolific writer on gender relations (and recently on masculinity) and international professor,

casual professor and media spokesperson Jane Caro

Alan Cinis, a Greens Council member for the district of Leichardt,

and

Nina Funnell, who is a journalist and researcher at the University of NSW (at the moment, I think she is working on a project on "sexting," or cell phone sex-text messaging, among young girls).


***

I had 3 main initial observations of the evening as the scene was set and began to unfold...

1. The audience was composed mostly of young people, presumably university students.

2. Amazingly, while a majority of the audience was female, a good quarter of the room was male (as far as gender-reading goes, anyway)! It was amazing! It has never been my experience, when I was at university, to see that large a proportion of men interested in an intellectual discussion on gender.

3. I was, as far as I know, the only queer person and person of colour on the panel, Les Sigh...

[16/08/11 update: Professor Connell is a trans-woman... my apologies for my cis-gender presumptiveness!]


***

The panel discussion was arranged in a Q&A style, with the facilitators Kate & Georgina posing questions for us as panellists, and then us choosing to respond or not.

A variety of issues were discussed...


Raewyn Connell



Professor Connell was quietly intellectual. While she contributed the least in terms of stage time, I felt that she always had incisive points to make. In particular, I was really pleased at her continuous nudging toward an intersectional (in terms of sexuality, class, region, etc.) and global (transnational) understanding of gender equity.



Jane Caro



Caro focussed primarily on the continued work that needs to be done (in the name of feminism) in order to achieve full equity for women, particularly in the public-professional domains, where women are still underrepresented in positions of high political power. While I definitely appreciated her important re-emphasis on the work that needs to be done in particular around the reclamation of the identity politic of 'feminism' away from stereotypes around 'man-hating' and 'bra-burning,' etc. (especially given my current professional work on young gay men's issues, and most of my social circle being men), I did take issue with one of her points around feminism being the world's MOST noble cause. I chipped in with my two cents about anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, etc. social justice issues. Caro, quite charitably, responded with an acknowledgement of the extremity of her polemic (she used to work in advertising). Then she also spoke out about the specific, somewhat unique nobility about feminist, and gay and lesbian social justice causes, as they involve often having to speak out against the oppression that is often perpetuated by our own very loved ones, our immediate family (rather than, say, an oppressive boss, or slave owner, etc.). She called this challenge the unique 'nobility' of gender- and sexuality-based social justice movements.

I suppose I tentatively concur.



Nina Funnell



I related well with Nina, in part because I'd actually worked with her previously on a Men and Feminism workshop that we co-presented at last year's "F Conference" (on Feminism) in Sydney, and in part because she is also my contemporary in terms of age. She talked about the meaning of 'mainstream media' and her support of affirmative action, women's autonomous spaces, and the ways that we might consider moving away from conceptions of the 'media' as a strictly monolithic entity.



Alan Cinis



I must admit that I did not relate to Alan's words quite as much as I would have liked; I think this was in part because, as he himself admitted, that he had some trouble hearing or understanding the questions, but I suspect it's in part because I disagreed with the fundamental position he was taking, which was encouraging a sort of individualism... In response to the question posed "Does affirmative action around gender work?" his response was Yes and No (true enough), but that we best understand it by looking at the individual merits of people, rather than simply through gendered lens (somewhat true... but of course the point here, one that he did not address, was the problem of both unconscious and structural sexism, so that the very merits we supposedly herald in all persons are ignored or passed over when they are traits exhibited by women applicants, if any even apply at all!).

At the same time, it was really good to be in the presence of another man who was at least willing and wanting to engage on the issue of gender in a way that was critically self-reflexive (he talked about his relationship to a former acting career, and the specific sorts of expectations of male as compared to female actors).



Me



When I first spoke, I first acknowledged my very real nervousness around being surrounded by quite conventionally 'successful' individuals (two university professors, a politician, and a journalist). Whew! But fortunately, I felt like my area of interest and focus was on the role of men in feminism, something which most of the other panellists had not categorically prepared talks around.

My 3 main points:

1. Our role as men is to listen to the concerns of women, and to engage and support feminist projects which are about the emancipation of all people from oppressive gendered systems (which, as they stand under patriarchy, disproportionately disenfranchise women and materially privilege men).

2. Part of this engagement is also about rehabilitating ourselves from problematic conceptions of masculinity. I mentioned the importance of male 'safe spaces' where we can allow ourselves to love other men without alcohol, and without homophobic/heteronormative qualifications (i.e. without the "No Homo" bullshit).

3. Not to misattribute our alienation as men to the important work that feminists have historically done (which, indeed, have paved the way for us to have language around this very alienation).

I also talked a little bit about the profit-driven industry of pornography and its role in enslaving men by commoditising our sexual desires, selling them back to us (i.e. selling us DESIRE itself), and then numbing us to relationships (rendering us socially awkward) by habituating ourselves to levels of stimulation that are usually unmatched by our interactions with others in-person.

This was also the first time I have EVER spoken about porn in this way in a public/group setting. It was an interesting exercise in humility, and also some good training for how I might want to bring it up in the future (without coming across as anti-sex, anti-depictions of sexuality, anti-pleasure, etc. etc.) Anyway, I think I did a decent job of conveying this point, and this was my covert anti-capitalist critique of the evening...

Professor Connell very wisely raised that these 'crises of masculinity' (of which my fretting about porn was but one example) have been going on for a long time in history, and that it is not uniquely in the age of feminism that men have started worrying in this way. I did suggest, in response, that while men have obviously waxed lyrical about our concerns which were unique to us as men across history, I don't think that we have, trans-historically, framed these concerns in emancipatory language (about our liberation as men from the problems of our socialisation into male gender, as gender, and as part of a larger project of gender equality and full liberation per se).

Also, inspired by Martin Luther King's rhetoric on extremism ("What kind of extremists will we be?"), I discussed the problem of assuming that "unity" is necessarily better than "alienation," when indeed, to be unified in support of oppressive systems (e.g. heteronormative patriarchy) is a LESSER unity, requiring first that we be, correctly, alienated, in order to then later unify under something more grand (e.g. queer-/feminism), which itself will be a unity that will meet its limits (e.g. racist/classist/nationalist assumptions, etc.), require a later alienation, followed by broader unity (e.g. under intersectional, self-reflexivity), meet its limits (e.g. impotent immobility), unify under something more grand etc. etc. ad infinitum.

And throughout all this, never compromising on the insights gained from previous unities and alienations...

We pick our alienations, and then we work with them accordingly. I suppose this was my attempt at speaking 'integrally' (integratively) without strictly using the language of Integral Theory (fucking trademark).

Lastly, in response to an audience member's question-comment on how men have been stunted because of a lack of clarity around changing gender relations, Nina first spoke out and said "Yes, these are some of the ways that patriarchy has crippled men."

And I responded to the question-comment by recalling this incident:

In Wynyard (the 'yuppie central' financial district of Sydney), last year, there was a photographic exhibition featuring the works of a female photographer who had travelled to different parts of the world taking pictures of different people. The exhibition was held in a public space, and also featured some inspirational quotes and captions under some of the photographs.

One of the photographs featured full frontal nudity of smiling black children. This was obviously considered unproblematic enough by the City of Sydney that the exhibition would go ahead without reprieve.

What I expressed to the audience about my experience with this exhibition was that:

1. What if the photographer had been a man?
2. What if the children had been white?

A great blog post by Ray Harris explores just this very issue:
The Naked Child in Art : Ethnographic Photography


Conclusive Reflections?

All in all, it was a really fantastic evening, with some really interesting and stimulating conversation, and I was very much honoured and grateful to have been invited to speak. As often, we never get to share all that we would have liked, and it is sometimes really challenging to cater a set of really complex perceptions and queries to a mixed audience... I personally would have appreciated an Acknowledgement of Country (of the traditional Aboriginal owners of the land upon which our gathering was held), but I think I lacked the political tact to know how to bring it up after the fact of the event's formal commencement.

It does feel incredibly good to be able to share some of my thoughts on feminism, gender and manhood. I feel especially good that I did not speak from a place of ultra Reactionariness (in terms of aggressive ranting about white privilege, heteronormativity, etc.).

It has been precisely 6 years since I graduated from university with a degree in Gender Studies, and I really cherish these opportunities to be able to speak on, educate and learn more about these issues, especially since I have had WAY more life experience since university!

Muchos Gracias to the University of Sydney Women's Collective!

Skyy vodka: get drunk instead of objectifying women

An affirming message for alcoholic feminists. Market st. San francisco.

Testing

I posted this using my smartphone. How pomo is that?

Awakening in Urbanity

The current question on my mind is:

How can we design spaces that are more conducive to Awakening?
And by Awakening I mean: psycho-spiritual growth, critical thinking, positive health behaviours, mindful engagement with community and polity, etc.

I want to investigate this.

Religion 'versus' Rationalism

a Response to Sam Harris' piece "Killing the Buddha"


Creating a Kalachakra Sand Mandala in Kathmandu

Killing the Buddha requires us first to have a concept of "Buddha." While "Buddha" is expedient, tentative (like the raft we use to cross the river of suffering), and is yet another concept to be abandoned, it is nonetheless an important exercise in humility to pay homage to our teachers.

I must admit that I am ambivalent about the idea that we should abandon religion, or perhaps, more violently, 'Kill Buddhism,' in the way that Sam Harris has written about it. It is not that I do not find this metaphor powerful, compelling, perhaps even 'correct,' in its own way and on its own terms.

Rather, the problem lies precisely here: That I must accept these very terms... As Harris has written, "While it may be true enough to say (as many Buddhist practitioners allege) that “Buddhism is not a religion,” most Buddhists worldwide practice it as such, in many of the naive, petitionary, and superstitious ways in which all religions are practiced. Needless to say, all non-Buddhists believe Buddhism to be a religion—and, what is more, they are quite certain that it is the wrong religion."

There is a peculiar arrogance in assuming that all devotional practice or adherences to non-rational doctrines are somehow inferior in quality to the rationalist and materialist approach(es) espoused by Harris. It is also somewhat ironic (though completely understandable) that he is so pained by others' negative views of Buddhism because of its religious associations, given that he is so quick to eschew association with Buddhism itself, for the sake of a non-sectarian, rationalist project.

However, as per any discourse on the emancipation either of minoritarian, marginalised and/or misunderstood communities, is incredibly problematic to assume that, simply because "all non-Buddhists believe Buddhism to be a religion," that it is therefore somehow strictly Buddhists' responsibility to correct these (mis-)perceptions. To be sure, to the extent that there ARE misperceptions about the MANY presentations of Buddhism 'proper,' it should indeed be the co-responsibility of Buddhist and non-Buddhist persons alike to engage and disspell these misperceptions. One option, which is the one Harris is suggesting (wise on its own terms), is to disconnect Buddhism (or the Buddha's teachings) from "religion," thus killing "Buddhism" per se.

Another option, which is one I would like to propose, is to question the way that Harris erroneously attributes certain characteristics to "religion" itself: Dogmatism, close-mindedness, irrationality, naivete etc.

It seems to me that the problem with religions (including religious Buddhists) has more to do with grasping onto doctrines/ritualism as it has anything to do with what the doctrines/rituals are themslves. But this problem is as much rife in the cultures of religious traditionalists and tribal/mythic-membership cultures, etc. as it is in rationalist cultures (particularly the one espoused by Harris, and the one he most certainly belongs to) whose worldviews are rooted in in a post-Abrahamic, secular physics and cosmology (in this case, the doctrine of the world ONLY as material, without transcendental substrate, and the heavily policed, anti-phenomenological rituals of rational debate).

In response to this problem, I employ a quintessentially Buddhistic dialectic.
The Buddha may well have taught: For those attached to irrationality, I teach rationality.
For those attached to rationality, I teach Crazy Wisdom (or the employing of trans-rational means in order to jolt one into understanding, beyond rational argument).

(and, just for fun: For those attached to crazy wisdom, "Who is it who is attached to what wisdom?")

The distinction that Harris delineates, between contemplative science/rationality and religion, is illusory, particularly when we consider his criticism of religious people's/institution's dogmatism, a dogmatism shared by scientific materialist "leaps of faith", in the assumption that phenomenological events are reducible to material causes. At the height of a Buddhistic, "post-structuralist" rationalism, we can only conclude that all meditative/psychological/spiritual phenomena are at best, highly correlated with material conditions (rather than causes)... This is an important dialectical distinction which is, unfortunately by definition, absent from a reductive scientific materialist worldview... Many babies lost along with the bathwater here.

The distinction between science/rationality and religion is especially misleading when we consider Buddhism in its multiple forms, either preceding contact or contemporaneous with Western rationalism. This distinction may be especially dangerous if we consider the Buddhist goal of the emancipation of all living beings from suffering, a goal shared by Harris. I would agree that, given our current global cultural and historical climate, scientific and rational methodologies are some of the most superior (and indeed, powerful) ways of elucidating the truth of the way things are. I would suggest that all phenomena should indeed be subject to scientific methodological validation and rational scrutiny. However, I would simultaneously suggest that while scientific and material explanations for phenomena are important arbiters of any route to truth, they are methodologically distinct from the realm of ethics, phenomenology and hermeneutics, and that the conclusions derived from all the latter are best integrated into scientific study, rather than summarily dismissed. The dismissal would not be either the most effective, developmentally appropriate, nor wise way for all peoples at all times across all of history to engage the Truth of the way things are.

Sure, some folks may believe that Guru Rinpoche, or this or that Bodhisattva was literally born in a Lotus, and that these views may leave a whole lot to be desired... but 'literalism' is itself an invented demon of rationalism, perhaps a shadow of its own repressed drive to transcendence. It is important to note that a lot of secular, rational-minded folks also believe a whole ton of garbage from popular science writing, political manipulation, and unexamined privilege.

To reiterate: Dogma and ignorance are no more exclusively in the province of religious tribal/traditionalist/mythic-membership societies as they are in secular scientific/rationalist ones.

The problem here is Dogma itself, and the corrupt institutions that sustain dogmatism, in all their guises; Rationality is one of the best tools for slicing through dogma, of course, but it can sometimes also be one of the ways that we reify dogmatic and oppressive systems in the name of ideology, particularly when we lack psychological and spiritual insight (think: the ‘logic’ of free markets, the slavery that is demanded from an aggressive and unfettered global capitalism, the violent Communist regimes of the Eastern bloc, the racist rationalism underpinning Nazism, etc. etc.).

I see the kind of Rationality that Harris heralds as similar to Nuclear Power. Developmentally, it is AWESOME as the most sophisticated route to knowledge/power in the whole history of humanity. In a sense, it has ‘always existed’ as potential, but we have lacked the necessary social and cultural foundations for it to become far more normative.

However, just like for Nuclear Power, it will take a while yet before we will be ready to understand the implications of wielding the power of Rationalism.

Rationalist institutions are young. And their members, like many young people, are full of a vigour, intellect, passion, and vision that is as admirable as it is (apparently) unsurpassable. But, if we compare this membership to those of the many institutions such as Buddhist monastic sanghas, erected over hundreds of generations in the wisdom traditions, rationalist institutions are barely in their infancy.

To extend the metaphor, on the one hand, I am in favour of youth empowerment. On the other hand, as an adult, I also see the ways that young people need to be socialised into spaces which help generate their own inherent wisdom to become leaders of their communities. This process of socialisation MAY involve the abolition of superstructures created by generations of Adults. Just as plausibly, it will also involve collaboration, synthesis, and mutual growth... What eventuates, inevitably, in that collaboration which is the joint project of young people and adults, is an order that will likely look nothing like what either of them had envisioned.

So I agree: "Buddhists" would best let go of the "Buddhism" or "Religion" we once knew, in allowance of the tremendous power and growth potential enabled by scientific and rational thinking. But Harris might want to note that what eventuates from this historic encounter may not look anything like the dogma of Rationalism he clings so tightly onto either.

Nature and the World Order

Environmentalism is over. The time for setting aside a portion of our awareness, efforts and resources to maintain a nominal sense of the primacy of nature, to try to save the planet, is over. The mindset persists: we haven't given up on the still-unsolved material and ecological problems. Rather, environmentalism has diffused into the matrix of civilization. At the same time, its potency has decayed, like the weak guilt that accompanies but ultimately allows indulging an addiction. The language of reducing environmental impacts has become a deception, a tool for ensuring the steady continuation of the very trends it was meant to push back against.

How do we make our way in the desert of decayed language? How do we communicate that there's still a real need for fundamental shifts in our ways of life—communicate in a manner that doesn't undermine the very possibility of that change?

1.
To my knowledge, the concept of environmental protection would not exist outside the context of an environmentally threatening industrial economy. In this context, the planetary environment has generally been thought of as a finite system in a state of approximate equilibrium, with some finite capacity for resilience. Unrestrained human industrial activity is then an intervention that disturbs and harms the environment. It's a model that's accurate enough to account for real problems like fishery collapse, acid rain, anthropogenic climate change, etc.

Slavoj Žižek says that this view underlies a mystification of ecological problems; that it is "a secular version of the religious story of the fall." There can be two answers: that we are part of nature—there is no fall—or that there is no nature. (To be clear, he answers that there is no nature.)

The first answer is very compelling for a lot of folks, and Žižek is right to identify an ideological current that can be traced to a mystified ecology. Much can be said about the worldview in which we're "one with nature," but I just want to point out that it has very directly informed some responses to the global material crisis. There's the dream of "going back to nature" to a retro-utopian world as it was before industrialization, which still has its determined off-the-grid adherents. And there are movements to revitalize the ancient wisdom of indigenous peoples, promoting proven ecologically effective practices. Some truly marginalized people work hard to embody these ideas, and I have the utmost respect for them.

I want to compare those proposals with another popular way to frame the global material crisis: that our methods of production, consumption, transportation, etc. are not correctly designed to render economic activity free of harm to the natural environment, and that it's possible to redesign them. For some people, including many of the folks that I work with, this framing leads to the visionary goal of transformative technological and social change (evolution, or revolution), which eliminates the negative environmental effects of the industrial economy.

I can't generalize about all people who believe in a future fueled by renewable energy, built using cradle-to-cradle renewable materials, underpinned by green design or biomimicry... But if I had to guess, I would say that such people think we have something to learn from nature through science, and that by putting scientific insights about nature into practice, we can create the verdant future. Therefore, I suggest that both the former, more mystical visions and the latter, more technocratic vision, share a sense of achieving fruitful coexistence with nature. This is basically Žižek's first answer: a reconciliation, after the fall from grace due to human hubris.

Yet, these two kinds of visions differ as greatly as possible on their approaches to something very deep at the source of environmental problems: a global economy based on industrialized consumerism. A self-sufficient subsistence farmer wants nothing to do with that, while a photovoltaic technology visionary would leverage it to sell everyone their own clean solar power source. What I'm getting at is that the narrative of co-existence with nature doesn't imply just one "right" approach to the fundamental problem of the global order.

In other words, being "one with nature" probably isn't the mythical salvation we're seeking. For the many other deep problems besides environmental ones (e.g. poverty, oppression, brainwashing), I would suggest that resolving the dualism between humankind and nature enters only obliquely, or even tangentially, into imaginable solutions.

2.
The environmentalist narrative is limited, but maybe it's still useful for getting people to deal with pollution, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and related crises. That was probably true for a while, early in the "Silent Spring" era. And it would be ridiculous for me to deny that there has been progress toward ecologically safer industrial systems, and improvements in public awareness and effort.

But over time, the environmentalist plea has undergone a semantic drift. We now see environmentalist language and ideas used boldly, and even legally owned, by the very actors who profit from the most ecologically destructive activities. What has occurred more broadly, in the middle ground between the BPs of the world and the local "green" dry cleaners, is that environmental protection has become a normative element in the construction of meaning. All that the environmentalists needed to do was establish that green is a virtue, if you can afford it; capitalists followed quickly with the corollary that you're being good by buying this product, even if it's really just slightly less bad.

And that's why environmentalists need to constantly fight to keep their language relevant (e.g. by diligently producing scientific criticism of every bogus green claim on the market), to keep it from simply supporting normative inaction.

Completing the semantic push-pull, scientific materialists who share the vision of green technology constantly must respond to a demand to express their messages in terms of market economics. To be most persuasive, they must intertwine the message of sustainability with the fiction of the consumer economy. Environmental protection is being reformulated as a way of valuing ecosystem services: the wetlands aren't just sitting there, they're providing a water filtration service that's worth a certain dollar amount on the market. I've seen several talks by the authors of the landmark book "Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice," and the two points they always seem to push the strongest are: it's science; and it will make money.

3.
Sustainably or not, through the process of living we take what we can from the universe, and we make from it something of our own.

At some point since the emergence of homo sapiens in the holocene, a notional boundary between nature and humanity was established, and it is now being dismantled. The same can be said of notional distinctions between humanity and technology, or technology and nature. The current geological epoch is unofficially being called the anthropocene. (To me, this makes it clear that the concept of "nature conservation" is obsolete.) Did the line between humanity and nature gradually move all the way from one side to the other, or is it more like the line between past and future: an abstraction from our way of seeing, but technically inexplicable and illusory?

Žižek thinks we should throw out the idea that we are rooted in nature, and forget the imperative to cultivate our connectedness with the balanced whole of ecology. From what I understand, this is because the idea of a natural equilibrium—the idea that "the existing world is the best possible world"—is false in the first place; and because this false idea has become a conservative ideology, a force that resists change. Let me try to tease apart this tight argument, because I find some of it troubling.

I'm not troubled by the falsehood of the self-sustaining optimized equilibrium of nature, but I'm slightly disappointed that Žižek calls this "the implicit premise of ecology." The ecology that he talks about sounds more like the "Gaia hypothesis" of Lovelock and Margulis, and he is probably referring to popular environmentalist ecology that has abstracted simple, compelling ideas from the science. I'm no ecologist, but I thought we had already realized that the earth is in a constant dynamic non-equilibrium state. We know that the conditions of this planet are subject to global and often catastrophic change due to biogeochemical, solar and cosmic processes. Among those processes are the evolution of biological life (which radically changed the chemical composition of the earth's crust and atmosphere), and the evolution of technology (which is doing that again).

But recognizing that "nature is a series of unimaginable catastrophes" does not, to me, mean that we can't learn anything more from ecology. Actually, that is something we've learned from ecology. We now have to look at the favourable, human life-supporting environmental conditions in the holocene epoch as an inherently impermanent condition, and we can ask any number of non-mystical questions about how to continue to support biological life in the next epoch.

The dominant ecological ideology is problematic, Žižek says, because it is "the voice which warns us not to trespass against an invisible limit." I agree that any ideology (e.g. religion, capitalism) deserves to be scrutinized, but if Žižek's challenge here is that there is no idealized nature and therefore there are no invisible limits, then I think he's mistaken. There may be no mystical nature, but there are theoretical planetary system thresholds, in effect invisible limits predicted by science, that correspond to the boundary conditions outside of which the system rapidly becomes hostile to human life. In other words, I see a scientific justification for the conservative role of environmentalist thinking: we actually cannot simply accept any change to the earth system as simply a matter of course, or else we may actually perish.

I've now placed myself in the dubious series of people who have claimed scientific justification for ways of thinking that could be seen from another angle as ideology. But I have to stand my ground, because science is the way I'm best equipped to communicate the need for radical shifts toward sustainable modes of living.

4.
Godfrey Reggio's film Naqöyqatsi is a beautiful documentation of the disappearance of that vanished sense of nature, and the complete transformation of reality through technology. I find it incredibly inspiring, although it is by no means an easy film to watch.

What I'm trying to offer with all my tiresome critical energy here is a way to dig out the last green offshoot of the trampled environmentalist movement, and transplant it into a more fertile substrate of ideas. The word "radical" comes from the Latin word for root, radix. Radical action needs space to grow, and I want to transpose the environmentalist ethic from enclosed "nature" into the treacherously imaginative space where we must now struggle and work creatively to build a better world order.

Sufjan Knits

A role model for boys.

The Soteriology of Cocoa

a cup of almond milk hot chocolate from Gracias Madre, a vegan Mexican restaurant in San Francisco

Cocoa as salvific!

I have been abstaining from coffee and tea for awhile now, mostly because of my aversion to the hyperactivity elicited by the copious amounts of caffeine in all coffees, as well as in black, green and white teas.

The first few days of caffeine abstinence were, of course, characteristically and typically difficult. Lack of motivation, headaches, mild depression, cravings for caffeine, social isolation, increased misanthropic thoughts (ugh, other people are so judgemental), etc. Very typical of stimulant withdrawals...

Recurrent thoughts:
Will I ever be able to hang out with anyone ever again off of the influence of coffee? What about being Chinese, or Asian more broadly speaking, with our ubiquitous pouring of tea (oolong, sencha, macha, and other ochas more generally) with most meals?

And what about work? What if I become less productive and am able to do less of what is demanded of me?

And what about the cool factor of coffee that I must also leave behind? The mad culture of hip baristas and perfect espresso foam from coffee oils perfectly brewed and bubbled? What about mid-day cafe breaks with friends and acquaintances, opportunities for deepening relationships in the throes of afternoon lulls?

Well.

Hot cocoa has saved me.

I mean of the dark chocolate variety, without dairy.
Chocolate; the beverage once exclusively fit for Aztec royalty, now made for the masses!

Cocoa as brain stimulant, heart rush, sexual rejuvenator.
The new catalyst of mateship and intimacy.
And the crash? Not so much ...
Especially without copious amounts of sugar.

Theobroma Cacao
The Oats (or food: bromos) of the Gods (theos)
With theobromine and phenethylamine... Mmm check out their chemical profiles on wikipedia!

I highly recommend it!

Drink hot cocoa with almond milk, and a teaspoon of honey in the morning, for a daylong trip into ridiculous happiness. Tell your friends.
Share with loved ones.

Looking at the stars

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
Oscar Wilde

Tattoos as Purpose

Tattoos as a reason to keep on going.

As in: Seriously. Not simply as a 'hobby,' or as an incidental, fortunate possibility of bourgeois excess, true these may well be... but also as a Purpose for Living.

This requires me to conceptualise the Tattoo as legitimate art.
To only see my tattoos as either potential helps or hindrances to getting 'real jobs'... Forget it!
My paid jobs exist to help me survive, sure,
but they also fund that other real goal of my life,
which is to conceptualise and enact Art.

And tattoos can be art which is etched out through a transmutation of an individual's history through triumphs and crises... crises of ecology, gender, capitalism, nation states, sexuality, slavery, nuclear meltdowns, crises of faith, flatulence, and fury.

Tattoos as art, co-created by (at least) two people: The tattoo artist, and the person whose body will become tattooed...
I do not mind parading my own body as a piece of art, a sacred temple;
a temple created not (only) as testament to a deep narcissism (true this may well be)
but also far more deeply as the physical manifestation of an ever-evolving testament to clear, metamorphosis of life's ongoing Vision, which creates (and co-creates) and sacralises as it proceeds...

Tattoo as commitments to progression, passage, recognition of impermanence and integration, wabi-sabi... because I tattoo one or a few things at a time over the passage of my life. Thus, it is a never-ending art project that ends in complete disintegration upon the death of the body... And in the meantime? I may become the strange man with tattoos aplenty, but I will love having this piece of sacred art with me, everywhere I go, till I gasp my last breath.

Extremism and Fundamentalism

Ah... quoted by the beautiful Jay Smooth, or "Illdoc" (Ill Doctrine), an incredibly sexy, progressive, mix-race African American New York-based hip hop radio host and political commentator...

My deepest condolences to those of us who victimise with or are victimised by false extremisms, which co-opt our spirit in service of the closed, the dualistic and the ethnocentric over and above the porous, the integrative and the trans-communal.

What kind of extremism is needed in today's day and age?
What kind of extremists will we be?




Slavoj Zizek's take on fundamentalism

"...are the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the U.S.: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers' way of life. If today's so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns him. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist's search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated by the sinful life of non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful Other, they are fighting their own temptation. These so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalists are a disgrace to true fundamentalism."

- Slavoj Zizek from "Violence"

The Cleaning of Slates...

"Our body is the Bodhi tree,
Our mind is a bright mirror with stand,
Diligently we wipe them all the time,
And let no dust alight."
- Shin Shau

"There is no Bodhi Tree
Nor stand of a mirror bright,
Since all is Voidness,
Where can dust alight?"
- Hui Neng (6th Patriarch of Ch'an/Zen)


It is Hui Neng who becomes 6th Patriarch of Ch'an, Hui Neng whose explosive realisation cuts through Shin Shau's dualism. Yet Hui Neng's proposition (on Voidness) exists because of the form Shin Shau's proposition took...

Hui Neng's verse alone, un-juxtaposed upon the former verse which it is negating, is itself meaningless... Thesis, Antithesis, and the retrospective Synthesis of seeing both verses together... To see even the non-duality of Hui Neng and Shin Shau.

There remains:
The Dharma that is no-Dharma...
The realisation that is no-realisation...
No creed, nor point, nor path...
Nor any sentient beings to save

This elucidates precisely that which cannot be understood.
Further commentary is pointless.

Unimaginable

I have not watched any of the videos of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and have even avoided looking at most photos, except the ones that happen to accompany the occasional news article that I read. Most of the news I have gotten about what happened has come from public radio. I prefer to hear description rather than see footage, prefer to receive analysis rather than breathless commentary.

A friend of mine has called some of the videos taken of the events "disaster porn". It seems this term was circulating at least since the early 2000s, and probably well before.

Like "traditional porn", "disaster porn" makes events in which huge amounts of human life and effort is lost into a just another visual confection in our oversaturated visual environment, and not a particularly layered one, at that. It performs the many functions of porn: commodification, desensitization, rendering virtual rather than real, titillation, fascination. Rather than allowing for reflection and genuine emotion, disaster porn, with its breathlessness and repetitiveness, promotes hysteria and numbness.

I invite anybody who has the experience of watching pornography and having sex to reflect on the difference between the two. Then think - how has pornography affected your sex life? Now ask - how does disaster porn affect the way societies prepare for and react to natural and human disasters?

creating change by transcending paradigms

beautiful passages from Donella Meadows, "Thinking in Systems" (2008).


There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm. That is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realize that no paradigm is "true," that every one, including the one that sweetly shapes your own worldview, is a tremendously limited understanding of an immense and amazing universe that is far beyond human comprehension. It is to "get" at a gut level the paradigm that there are paradigms, and to see that that itself is a paradigm, and to regard that whole realization as devastatingly funny. It is to let go into not-knowing, into what Buddhists call enlightenment.

People who cling to paradigms (which means just about all of us) take one look at the spacious possibility that everything they think is guaranteed to be nonsense and pedal rapidly in the opposite direction. [...] But, in fact, everyone who has managed to entertain that idea, for a moment or for a lifetime, has found it to be the basis for radical empowerment. [...] It is in this space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia.

...

The higher the leverage point, the more the system will resist changing it—that's why societies often rub out truly enlightened beings. [...] In the end, it seems that mastery [of creating systemic change] has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly, letting go and dancing with the system.

Little poems

A fiery seed in a bursting pod's spray.
One brilliant silver fish in a flashing crowd,
Or a lonely, silent stranger, wanting to be held.

Metropolis

The city challenges our individual vanity. Its edifices, incidents and crowds constantly remind us of the people who have come before us, those who are with us now, and those who have yet to come. In other words, our species across time and space.

The city is the abandoned cigarettes by the entrance to the subway, perhaps from smokers who ran down the stairs to catch the train just before this one, the one I, being neither a smoker nor in a hurry, am not forced to abandon my lit cigarette to catch.

The city is the word "mustache" carefully inked in black cursive on the upper lip of an airbrushed actress in a poster advertising Hollywood's latest misogynist, homophobic propaganda disguised as romance. The word is a wittier, braver, more absurd, more illegal response to this invasion of our public mental and emotional space than I would have been able to muster in the ten minutes I spent staring at that damned poster. Beneath the paving stones, the beach?

The city presents us with certain tensions - where the shock of difference makes our selves, identities, and personal histories at once more familiar and comforting, and more alien.

The city is a restaurant where I share with a friend a meal of beef rendang, sambal kangkong, and oh chien (oyster omelette), whose smells and tastes remind me of being small and silent, protected and warm. After the meal we return, loudly chatting, shivering extravagantly, to the freezing, gusty, dark street.

The city is a law school where I sit, fighting off jetlag, while all around me other lawyers are talking, about matters that they and most of us consider very important. I notice most of them are white, and many of them display a self-assurance that, while impressive, still betrays its hard-won nature. I wonder if I'll ever be as convincing. I wonder if I already have been. Afterwards over lunch I discover that, like me, one of these colleagues worries about how to date, and I feel more free.

The humanity of a city is inhuman in scope.

The city is hundreds upon hundreds of new faces every hour. The city is a mother caressing and examining her sleeping daughter's braids on the train. The city is a wiry man with full sleeve tattoos watching Saturday Night Live reruns while doing bicep curls at the gym. The city is a tiny brown haired girl who stares at me from her stroller, sucking thoughtfully on a lollipop, while her mother negotiates for a table. The city is a storekeeper watching a Cantonese soap opera, who takes my money with a quick "thank you." Hundreds and hundreds of vaguely significant encounters with people I will never see again. It brings me to life. It is absolutely unbearable.

Her Morning Elegance

on solitude...

...amidst the ongoing strife of daily obligations... professional, romantic, platonic, domestic, there is a room:
where, laying inert but breathing, and deeply,
smiling so sweetly,
is where I have been this whole time,
dreaming my chaos into existence...

I will meet from this place.

How to Be Alone

Fractals Fractals!

Immense Gorgeousness

Surface detail from subBlue on Vimeo.

Mandelbox Zoom from hömpörgő on Vimeo.

1000 Awesome Things

... is a truly exquisite blog, expressing gratitude for the small things in life...

1000 Awesome Things . Com

Sufjan Stevens - Too Much

For The Widows In Paradise, For The Fatherless In Ypsilanti

Sufjan Stevens - For The Widows In Paradise, For The Fatherless In Ypsilanti

After my visit to Tasmania...

Nature, as opposed to... culture?

What is a 'retreat' to nature, unless there was a place I was retreating from? A normative space;- Urban, anthropocentric and 'technological,' as opposed to 'natural'...

Nature as a space for hiking, camping, sight-seeing; A fetishisation of a world which has elsewhere been thoroughly colonised. Colonisation: The process of imagining and reifying duality and separateness of the Human and the Natural.

World heritage areas, national parks, etc. etc., land that is 'owned' by the government... Although they are technically permitted (by her Nation-state owners) for recreational use to all, it is almost exclusively accessible only to those who meet certain conditions of privilege (able-bodied, with spare time, capital, access to a vehicle, etc.).

Another condition of privilege is the acculturalisation into an Ownership Mentality... the ability to imagine that this land is mine, free to be explored...

But here, I renounce my cynicism.

To imagine the possibility of the 'pristine-ness,' 'untouchedness,' 'unspoiled-ness' of a land may well come from destructive drives... or from a quest for the sacred, driven by a thirst to be touched by the sacred, and in turn, a thirst to sacralise. On the one hand, sacralisation in either direction can occur only if I believe that this land is under the jurisdiction of my God, my political and spiritual convictions; that I have the RIGHT to be here, and that I am blessed with the authority to sacralise a space or my body through imagination.

On the other hand, the retreat to nature (or a space designated 'the natural') can be seen as a form of catharsis for those caught up in anthropocentric dualism; a cathartic healing from the ordination to a human worldsphere that is 'fallen.' A catharsis born from the attachment to Original Sin (we have been expelled from the pristine Garden, and enslaved to our quintessentially human reliance on technology to survive). A catharsis that is a short relief from the mundane taxation of human relations (contrasted with the solitude I seek from the Natural).

Part of the healing, therefore, is to dissolve this very distinction, this duality between the "Cultural/Technological/Un-Natural" and the "Natural," and the duality between the "Anthropocentric-Repressive" and "Catharsis." I may do this by continuing to fetishise the Natural, or I may do this by locating what it is from the Natural that I have disavowed from my participation in the Cultural/Technological/Un-Natural, what it is that I have projected upon the Natural, and begin to understand and (re)create its presence already here, already now, already present. Wherever I am.

Solitude, freedom, solace, purity, purification, spaciousness... My own mind is clear sky and still lake; my own body is protective tree and unshakeable mountain; my own breath is fresh breeze.

What am I retreating from?

postglobal manifesto (version 0.1)

in the tradition of art movement manifestos, but with the intent to more broadly transform tradition.

the making of culture is an activity that has so far survived the liberations and catastrophes of globalization.

questions about the meaning of cultural origins are relevant because the irreversible interaction of the world’s peoples is spreading, deepening, and perhaps poised to develop into a globally connected culture, the character of which we are now determining.

do we defend and preserve our origins? do we exchange origins? do we give them up?

new creators of culture must face tradition and identity from the holarchic perspective of our epoch, the anthropocene: we have already co-created a physical and spiritual condition on the planetary scale.

we engage this rapidly changing condition by creating culture in synergy with technology.

basic materials (sound, word, image, narrative, etc.) are free to interact without taboo, passing through the unbroken lines of canonical cultural identities (national, generational, ethnic, etc.).

cultural frames of reference cannot be assumed, but a basis for communication is necessary.

the integrity of established cultural origins is not necessarily at stake, but is also not necessarily protected or morally defensible.

we must take the moral position of addressing all people as the new origins.


a collaborative document. version 0.1, 02011-01-01.

On Being Called Upon To Speak Mandarin

A white colleague asked me today for what she called a "totally non-gay favor." Intrigued and always eager to please (or at least eager to appear eager to please) I said sure, what is it?

She had, she said, during her casual carpool, met a man who was facing some problems at work, possibly because of his race or language. He had also, during the car ride, been speaking with another passenger in some kind of Chinese dialect. When she asked him whether he had been speaking in Mandarin or Cantonese (because she could not tell the difference), he told her he had been speaking both.

"You speak Mandarin, right?" she asked me.

I felt a kind of fear rising in me. Being asked whether I speak Mandarin or another Chinese dialect is a fraught question and to me always carries overtones (intended or not, conscious or not) of "you're actually Chinese, aren't you?" Not only that, but even after being told by the man that he had spoken in both Cantonese and Mandarin, my colleague continued to assert that she did not know what dialect he was speaking. BOTH! I wanted to shout. JUST LIKE HE TOLD YOU! Instead I said "sometimes my parents speak in a mixture of dialects, or switch between them. Cantonese and Hokkien." I also felt that I should say that I didn't really speak Cantonese. Just to manage expectations, you know.

She said it seemed to her that he was not that comfortable speaking with her in English and would I speak with him in Chinese and give him contact information for some organizations she had found that might help him (two API legal organizations in California).

Umm sure I said.

Did I want to make the call together at my desk or at her desk?

In fact my first feeling was that I didn't want to make the call together at all. I hate being watched as I speak Mandarin, whether by a speaker of Mandarin or not. I feel like my very identity as a Chinese person is under examination. Maybe, I wanted to say, you could just give me his number and I could call him in my own time, by myself. I didn't say that, though. Instead I said let's make the call in my office.

Before that, though, we had a series of meetings to attend. I was distracted throughout, rehearsing in my head my Mandarin vocabulary, unable to completely focus on the subject of the meetings. What would I say? How would I say it? How would I not appear completely "Americanized" (which is to say white, which is to say unable to fluently speak Mandarin) in front of this stranger and my colleague? In short - how would I preserve and defend my image and identity as an ethnically Chinese immigrant from an Asian country?

We prepared for the call, sitting together in my office. I suggested that it would probably be best if my colleague spoke first so he wouldn't have the experience of a complete stranger calling him seemingly out of the blue. Also I wanted to have a little time to read his accent and determine the various things one sometimes "read" in an accent - native dialect, class, fluency with English.

As I listened to the ringtone, my senses keened. Everything in the room came into sharp focus. Sounds were crisper and clearer, and time itself seemed to slow down. I was acutely aware of my colleague's expression, the information on my computer screen, the papers on my desk, the feel of my new t-shirt on my chest.

He picked up, and my colleague introduced herself as the person whom he had met in casual carpool. Then I introduced myself as Ming and said I was her colleague. What's your surname, he asked. Wong, I said (or Huang, since we were speaking Mandarin). I quickly transitioned into giving him the information my colleague had prepared, unable to really make small talk, and again, aware the whole time of my colleague watching and listening to me. I started out with a disused bicycle feeling. Wobbly, uncertain. It got a little better as his reactions to my speech seemed to be comprehension and some amount of attentiveness. When he told me a bit more about his situation, I was surprised by how much I understood. Will there be people at these organizations who speak Chinese, he asked. I told him I was pretty sure there would be. He ended the call by thanking us in Mandarin and English (overly profusely, I thought, but maybe that's an immigrant trait coming out. I'm actually sure I do the much same thing - being unreasonably grateful for the smallest and most incompetently rendered of favors).

After the call, my colleague said she had learned the words for "zero" and "five" (digits that were repeated in the phone numbers I gave him), and that she guessed the word for "Yes" was "dui." I explained that I didn't think there was a direct gloss for "yes" in Mandarin, and that there were at least three distinct words, "dui," "shi" and "hao" that conveyed different aspects of what the word "yes" conveyed in English. I then summarized what I had talked about with the man. We went back to our day. I was flushed, relieved. I felt I had passed. Passed as Chinese enough. At least for the day.

Yes.

Little Death

The French rendering of the orgasm as 'les petite mort,' or the 'little death.'

Within a discourse of heterosexual reproduction as the normative vision of Life's pursuit of immortality... "I" begets "I" in genetic replication, through heterosexual union, pregnancy, enjoining of seed and egg, sperm and ovum, strands of DNA mixing only superficially from two parents... more expansively, each zygote inherits the entire history of its genetic ancestry from infinite number of parents of parents of parents stringing all the way back, all of which involved the jizz of so many little male ejaculatory deaths.

Perhaps then, this reproductive, orgasmic rendering of sexuality is both heteronormative and somewhat counterintuitive to true immortality or longevity. Each satiation post-orgasm is not truly satisfactory. Some of us become more needy for affection, some of us simply roll over and snore. The affliction here is the sudden death of motivation; Here the pleasure principle meets the death drive and the cycle becomes addictive. Addiction to pleasure, or addiction to a subtle masochism of many little deaths with a myriad of partners (or images), while each way along the way, immortality (or the permanence of the reified Self) remains elusive......


Immortality

I believe that this primordial drive for immortality (in part symbolised by the fetishism of fertility in Goddess cults, or in fundamentalist obsessions with the heteronormative centrality of reproduction in the sexual encounter) is made possible only because we intuit the plausibility of immortality in our experience of living.

Who has not experienced the tantalising, timeless eternity of erotic tension, the 'enlivening' (and hence, 'longevitising') rush of passion, inspiration and poetry from the lavish promise of union? Most of us too, have tasted the joys of youth, with its lush fields of seemingly limitless libidinal drive and infinite possibility, the 'forever'-ness of many days and nights, pregnant with potential...

It is for these and many more reasons that immortality is conceptually possible. Even if it is only ever lived vicariously through our children, our children's children, or the memory of our own youth... These are reminders of the 'forever-ness' of one's self through Legacy and Melancholy...


Libidinal Alchemy

But what if... There was the possibility to experiment with a different vision of immortality...? One that is neither contingent on romanticising the past (with more libidinal drive) nor clinging to hope for better futures (where we may nurture our progeny as products of our drive)? Instead, what if there was the opportunity to simply work, alchemically, with the drive itself?

Instead of assuming that the only logical outcome of the libido is its culmination in a little death, I want instead to experiment with Daoist theories of circulation, recharge, share and exchange... Rather than the end goal of orgasm as an outcome of the libidinal drive, I instead relish the beauty of my partner(s) indefinitely, without goal, simply to cherish the pleasure of their Being without grasping onto the simulacral reality of pornographic "fucking" and "seeding"... A greater goal awaits... A Mission, a Purpose;- One to Beauty itself, one to Divinity it/her/him/themself(ves), made manifest in the world through so many beautiful people, the interplay of order and chaos...

I do not intend for Catholic repression of sex, but I do not wish either for the false liberation of sexual excess... I intend for a Buddhist middle, a post-modernist, post-colonial, Madhyamikan transmogrification of libido into more careful consumption, where one focuses on subtlety of taste, the company of friends, and the fresh virtue of cuisine, rather than the utilitarian, capitalist obsession with nutritional content, speed, novelty, and planned obsolescence.

Faeries, Bears, and Leathermen

I am currently reading a book that my friend J lent me, called "Faeries, Bears, and Leathermen: Men in Community Queering the Masculine" by Peter Hennen.

The basic idea is that three uniquely gay/queer male cultures, in particular the Radical Faeries, the Bears, and the Leathermen cultures, have partially been constructed as responses to, reactions against, and/or repudiations of the ways that gay male sexuality has historically been linked with effeminacy.

These three groups engage the 'problem' of stereotypic gay male effeminacy in three different ways. For the Radical Faeries, it has been through a deep embrace of the feminine through adorning dresses, communal-Goddess worship, female-kitsch (e.g. the sacralisation of Barbie dolls), etc. For the Bears, it has been the embrace of a 'regular joe' type of masculinity, with the fetishisation of larger, hairier, beer-drinking bodies, and with the Leathermen, it has been through the re-appropriation of costumes and sometimes sado-masochistic impulses historically associated with violent masculinity.

Hennen is careful to avoid pathologising any one of these response-styles, and is quite clearly grateful for having been given the opportunity to participate in the various social spaces and rituals of belonging that each community has constructed for its members. At the same time, Hennen hints at a deeply troubling dialectic that underlies the ways that these gay male communities and identities have been constructed. In particular, with regard to the fact that they, at least in his North American experience, these three groups tend to be disproportionately White, and are concurrent with many other male-centric movements that organise around the 'reclamation' or glamourisation of masculinity without either questioning the fear of the feminine or any other unconscious roots of their undying loyalty.

I am personally troubled by hegemonic masculinism in gay culture(s). I am nervous about the way that gay male culture in general has conflated manhood with the repudiation of the feminine, and indeed, with the repudiation of even our own association with 'gay,' as it has historically been linked with effeminacy. Thus the ubiquity of "str8-acting" as a self-descriptor or as an identity deeply invested with gay male desire.

Secondarily, I am also interested in the way that whiteness is also hegemonic in these communities in the USA which, unlike masculinity, Hennen has largely not interrogated. White masculinity seems far less rooted in ironic play or reclamation.

Questions/Crises of masculinity have occupied me for awhile. In a Euro-centric hierarchy of masculinity, the Grecian male model has been somewhere at the top, whereas, in my experience, the hairless Asian body has been feminised and placed somewhere at the bottom.

I long for spaces I might comfortably exist in. Spaces which do justice to my gendered/racialised identity and body, and in which I can explore a self-communal expression with others in a shared, sacralised experience of sexuality. Spaces which allow for and embrace my capacity & need for critical awareness...

A monastery for colonised whores?

Buddho-Erotik

an old post...

1
Dancing as religious ritual, the slow uprooting of anxieties (self-consciousness, other-consciousness) into endorphin blissful rush of collapsing dualisms. Drug-free Ecstasis! Body as its own narcotic, all capacity for empowerment and godhead rushing forth from within, neither monotheistic nor pantheistic, neither solely under the jurisdiction of aboriginal cosmologies nor postmodern psychonautic fetishisms of altered states of consciousness. Dance as the primordial movement, the Soul (if indeed, it is YOUR convenient metaphor) as shaken And stirred. Drink That!

2
Or else the surprise a man has, after 20 years of marriage, in finding out his wife has professional, emotional, spiritual, and yes perhaps even Sexual desires beyond his capacity to fulfill. The tragic misnomer of (civil)Marriage mistakenly Romanticised without thought to its materialist history (woman as property of man, man as 'breadwinner,' utilitarian legalisms with little care for the romance behind courtship). Forget MARRIAGE, we need a generation of Lovers!

3
The phenomenon of wanting to know more about a porn star: When objectification (primarily root-chakra sexual orientation) isn't enough. When personality needs to be thrown in the mix. When love must become involved. Or worship. Porn stars as our contemporary Gods and Goddesses, sex celebrities, all springing forth from the same imaginations that created Zeus, Inanna, Kali.
Ejaculation as the Anti-climax, if indeed there was no Play prior, nor love between lovers. Surely we are not only bodies, as we are not only minds, nor even only souls. Dissolve dissolve, and we no more need porn stars as we might need a caffeine fix (some addiction necessary to fuel some other addiction, to Manhood? Productivity? Or even our attachments to secret shame!); Forget it! We might imagine a new myth!

4
Music as love making, the melding of players that transcends Sexual orientation. Instead, music taps into the latent masculinities/femininities hidden under sexed bodies, transmutes the urge to orgasm into lovemaking. Plays on aggression and submission, sound and silence, assertions and refrains, repetitions and innovations... Hence: The Bliss of making music as PROCESS, rather than performative product. Nothing wrong with theatre, clearly, for indeed that is a catharsis in its own right. But within the privacy of a relationship, there is generative power in music as interpersonal communication, rather than preparation for Objective display. "Let's jam!" I say, from the Me that is Lovemaker-Sage... I let the Bard speak his truth at some other convenient time.

5
"The Matrix" as theology. Neo as Bodhisattva figure, realizing the futility of samsaric existence within The Matrix of the mundane. Morpheus as Buddha-figure (the first to discover the truth of samsaric-Matrix), transmitting his teaching to those who may be prepared to forgo this illusory world for the higher consciousness, breaking free from the bonds of cyclic existence. BUT THIS IS NOT BLISS! Neo is not Happier with Truth, simply Ennoblised by this. But is this ENOUGH? Like the dude who WANTS to return, to taste the steak, to feed on illusion; We too are addicted, we forgo truth everytime, no matter what our intuitions may tell us, simply because it is TOO DAMN HARD. What support might we look for? How may we Re-program, so we too might dodge bullets with ease?

6
Language is the original colonizer, with its grammatical pressures, its dogmatic vocabularies, its limits within the technologies of throat or papyrus. We must learn to speak if we are to interact, but then we forever lose our touch with the solitude of silence. But even here I have been thoroughly colonized, for that I have even a CONCEPTION of silence is conditioned by my capacity for Language. There is no PRE, no prior, no before language. And any mystic would dare tell us that there is no During, nor After, even. Language itself cannot be spoken of (nor kept silent on) without continued inculcations into further illusion. So forget the goal, and just play with poetry!

7
Where does loneliness reside in the body? Is it in the heart? Or perhaps in clammy extremeties, hands wrung in nervous tics, The Longing to Grasp, without the wisdom to learn the freedom of the Ungrasp (for there is nothing beautiful to be Held without our fathoming equally the beauty of Letting Go). The foolishness in us that wants a Love Permanent is the same foolishness in us that takes all we already have for granted!
Unconditional Love? There is no-thing unconditioned, no-thing without cause. I cannot HAVE unconditional love for another; I can only invest, indefinitely, in creating the causes and conditions from and in which love might more easily arise, 'effortlessly'! I must not, however, mistake those rare, precious moments of spontaneity as springing from some romantic Unconditioned!

8
In a prior life, I was a Diamond. But a single carbon atom wanted individuation, wanted to break free from the boring familiar, wanting to procreate instead with exotic elements, wanting to form new molecular civilizations, wanting new bondage (double-bondage? triple?).

9
Why make love? Love can make itself! My only job is to breathe as much as I can, consciously, until finally I expire.

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

The Solution indicates the Problem

I love this video.

In it, Zizek suggests that the systems we have created around charity are contingent not only on 'working with' the existing capitalist economic superstructure which sustains inequities in the first place, but indeed, in a significant way, may well strengthen or support this very system!

I am reminded of this event:
I occasionally sit Zazen and do walking meditations at the Zen Open Circle, a Zen meditation/discussion group based in Camperdown on Friday nights.

One evening, the teacher Susan spoke about the non-duality of Good and Evil (something I believe Zizek is hinting at), and the importance of non-attachment to either extreme in this respect. Any idea of the Good is intimately dependent on an idea of the Evil, and the two are thus inseparable.

One of the group members then raised the question or paedophilia. About how there is no way, absolutely no way whatsoever, to think of a "paedophile" as someone with any redeeming qualities. Immediately, the group was triggered into this chaotic groupthink of uncritical agreement.

"Paedophiles are disgusting."

"Sick."

and so on.

Now, I have no love for paedophilia as such, but I feel far less hateful toward the "paedophile." In Buddhist terms, all phenomena are empty of their own inherent existence, and require the right causes and conditions before they can even arise. Concerning paedophilia, and this is a line of thought first brought to my attention by manoverbored, I started to wonder about the causes and conditions which sustain paedophilia, and the ways that we are complicit in maintaining these causes and conditions.

For example, here in the industrialised, Anglo-phonic "first world" (Australia, USA, as examples where the authors now live), if any of us WEARS SHOES, then the chances are very high that these shoes were made possible through the exploitation of child labour. The factories and, of course, the wider global economic structure that gives rise to these factories (for example through the outsourcing of labour from American shoe companies), have incredibly fucked up and problematic conditions which exploit the bodies of children.

Is this NOT paedophilia? If I wear shoes, does this not make me complicit in the tragedy of the exploitation of children's bodies for the purposes of my own (adult) consumption?

So what is Zizek's proposed solution?



Non-duality of Solution and Problem

From a Zen perspective, a first step is to break out of the victim-perpetrator dualism... Of course victimisation happens, and there are people who perpetrate victimising attitudes and behaviours that impact all of us very negatively.
At the same time, it is important to do the hard, spiritual labour of dancing between identification and dis-identification with the solution and problem, victim and perpetrator. There are no ultimate victims as such, nor ultimate perpetrators.

Thich Nhat Hanh clarifies this point in his poem "Call Me By My True Names"...


Call Me By My True Names
by Thich Nhat Hanh

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow
because even today I still arrive.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second
to be a bud on a spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
in order to fear and to hope.
The rhythm of my heart is the birth and
death of all that are alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,
and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time
to eat the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,
and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,
feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,
and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to
Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea
pirate,
and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and
loving.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my
hands,
and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to, my
people,
dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all
walks of life.
My pain is like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart can be left open,
the door of compassion.

Suicide and alienation

The pattern of young queer suicides continues in the news, a deadly erratic drumbeat, summoning... what?

It seems to me these suicides are an extreme form of the escapism and self harm that homophobia and transphobia drive us to. It seems to me these suicides are an inevitable result of the alienating machinery of patriarchal capitalism and colonialism, a social human sacrifice, that our culture believes is acceptable and necessary to keep the gears of production and reproduction moving. It is the same hand that ties nooses around our children's necks, that pushes them out of airplanes into war, that chains them to factory floors performing endless muscle tearing tasks, that hands them their first and, much later, their last cigarette, that pumps them full of desire and disease, that slams them against walls and humiliates them for something they've said or thought, that closes the door on them in forgotten cells in forgotten islands for long forgotten reasons.

Unlike the acceptable escapisms of consumerism, alcohol, narcotics, overwork, and beating your children, suicide is a clarion crisis call. Its fatality is its fatal flaw. If one could survive suicide, it would be just, as the expression goes, another cry for help. And what, we wonder, stops children from literally crying for help, and what, we should ask, stops us from hearing those cries?

No form of escape is as illusory as suicide, though they are all illusory. Suicide also holds out another promise - that of real change, which is not an illusion, but is nevertheless tragic in its implication.

Those who commit suicide successfully will never see the better world they could catalyze. The classic fantasy, to be present at one's own funeral post-suicide, neatly captures this paradoxical but human desire. To make them sorry, to wake people up from the inhuman devaluing of young life that doesn't quite fit into the the machine, this is another desire imperfectly expressed through suicide. To be a martyr means never making it to the promised land. For the suicides to stop, we must need no more martyrs, and we must instead seek only miracles.

What kinds of miracles are needed? Compassion is one, and hope is another. Compassion for the suffering of the bullied and the bullying, who, regardless of age, are as much victims as those they target. Hope for each other that refuses to die, despite our seemingly individual failures, and despite the overwhelming omnipresence of the machine. Because of course, that machine is us, and, as, one by one, erratically, we withdraw our consent, its cruel grinding will stop, and there will be no more young bodies, there will be no need for the blunt instrument of the ultimate "no."

Coffee at Night

A naughty pleasure:
Coffee at Night...

Coffee in the morning has the quality of a 'maintenance' drug... One drinks it in order to be productive: I wake up, drink coffee, go to work, behave as an upright citizen would...

But coffee at night? Ah...
that is for ruminating, scheming,
poetry...
Coffee at night is for old friends,
acquaintances,
new lovers.
Coffee at night is for imagination,
music and mayhem...

Coffee at night is a guilty pleasure,
but how quickly my guilt fades as inspiration spills clear thoughts
onto a canvas made of darkened skies.

respect

my mind draws a blank.

no need to judge. no need to rush thoughts. no need to force inspiration. still... there is the fear... the wish to impress. my spiritual colleagues. my brother. my friends. the fraternity inside my mind whose approval i seek.

in my mind is a posse of intellectual gangsters who watch from Foucaultian panopticons that are buried deep in bubbling, murky waters of my eternal subconscious. they discipline and punish me with royal pronouncements threatening Action, if i do not participate in self-imposed, self-flagellatory hazing rituals of ever-smart delivery...

who are these bullies? they are my internalised patriarch, voice of my 1st generation university educated father: hard-hearted, strict, punishing. they are my scientist-mother: exacting, skeptical. they are my university peers, the queers who battled politics while drunk on booze and skunk. they are the san francisco hipsters who always had more tattoos than me. they are the suburban white kids who blitz bmezine.com with a litany of lazy canadian cool... they are my older brother whose grades were always higher, more gifted, whose smarts set the benchmark for years of my own savvy teenage angst.

these are the bullies that elicit both my awe and my envy...
and in turn, i move beyond their panoptic gaze when i transmute this emotional fizz into respect. respect. respect.

to cultivate respect from awe
and respect from envy.
to rejoice in my own gifts
and not succumb to defeatedness... this is the goal of this erotic psychonaut. whose project is to see that my talent and my need for improvement are not two, not two. to see that these bullies and my own subjectivity are not two, not two.

that poetic transformation of raw drivel into Truth comes from the drive of this warrior, this witch, this wuss. these are not three, not three... they are but a few facets of me.

come in and see!