Tag: Friday Night at 8

From Yin &Yang and the I-Ching written by Kelly L. Ross, Ph.D.:

Yin originally meant “shady, secret, dark, mysterious, cold.”  It thus could mean the shaded, north side of a mountain or the shaded, south bank of a river.

Yang in turn meant “clear, bright, the sun, heat,” the opposite of yin and so the lit, south side of a mountain or the lit, north bank of a river.

From these basic opposites, a complete system of opposites was elaborated.

Yin represents everything about the world that is dark, hidden, passive, receptive, yielding, cool, soft, and feminine.

Yang represents everything about the world that is illuminated, evident, active, aggressive, controlling, hot, hard, and masculine.

Everything in the world can be identified with either yin or yang. Earth is the ultimate yin object. Heaven is the ultimate yang object. Of the two basic Chinese “Ways,” Confucianism is identified with the yang aspect, Taoism with the yin aspect

Yin should not be confused with gender, by the way.

Although it is correct to see yin as feminine and yang as masculine, everything in the world is really a mixture of the two, which means that female beings may actually be mostly yang and male beings may actually be mostly yin. Because of that, things that we might expect to be female or male because they clearly represent yin or yang, may turn out to be the opposite instead.

So I go to the little straight NYC after hour mafia run dive where I am queen by virtue of the fact few women go there and I meet this porn actress, Precious, we play for the crowd pretending to be vying for dominance but really I’m just fascinated because I’ve never met a porn lady before and she was so pretty.  (This was, by the way, during the tail end of the era in NYC when the most hard core gay male sex clubs were fashionable for many famous hipsters and bored rich folks who wanted to go slumming.)

Eventually I just started talking with Precious, my curiosity winning out over giving the club some performance art (as I saw it) and she, I don’t know, didn’t have much to say and somehow we ended up taking a cab to a very straight sex club called Plato’s Retreat.  There was a chain of them, don’t know if they’re still around.  She said she could get me in for free.

And I’m really wanting this to be fascinating, here I am with a porn star!  Woo hoo, a chapter in my one day best selling novel!

(Lou Reed & Velvet Underground, “Venus in Furs,” courtesy YouTuber melgallagher)

In the Wilhelm translation of the I-Ching, in the hexagram of “Grace,” there’s a line that always fascinated me.

Love is the content, justice the form.

I’m probably paraphrasing that, but am too dulled out from the Big Apple Cold Snap of 2009 to go look it up.

Love is the content, justice the form.

I’ve written a lot about justice, about social justice, about accountability for the crooks who stole power in the US, all that.

Haven’t written a lot about love, though, about why justice has anything to do with love.  What it is we’re trying to create in our culture, our society, our government, that we can love?  Hard to even imagine loving anything right now about our laws and how they are enforced, about politicians, the media, so hard to see through the “chatter” of our corporate run discourse what is really going on, what there is to love.

And why is it, I wonder, that I can be so moved in my heart by love, by caring about my neighbors, my brothers, my sisters, and then someone says something hateful or does something destructive and that bright light of love is so easily overshadowed and replaced by pain and rage?

Love is the content, justice the form.

And why is it, I wonder, that such a seemingly small thing as that bright point of love, surrounded too often in a sea of hatred and destructiveness, why does it keep returning just as I despair of ever feeling it again?  How can something be that strong, so strong against even annihilation, destruction?

(Key to the Highway, Eric Clapton, 1991 courtesy of YouTuber rajiobaka)

In practicing solidarity, some strange things happen!

Well I am not even going to try to generalize because I can’t.

So I’ll do this first person singular.  It’s all about MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Hee.

I haven’t read Martin Luther King or Ghandi so I am pretty ignorant of the training involved to gain a state of mind where you know how to resist and how to yield.  How to confront violence with awareness and respond to it in a way that is not violent even when physical.

Physical violence.  That seems astonishing, the ability to stand there without choosing either fear or anger when someone is trying to physically harm you … I can hardly imagine that but I know this is a state of mind that can be attained because too many of my brothers and sisters have attained it and written about it and such.

But anyway, I am not near there, so I won’t write about confronting physical violence.  My typical response to physical violence is as a graduate of the Three Stooges School of Self-Defense and not very practical in large groups!

I’ll speak to a far more shallow aspect that millions of Americans have been experiencing for a long time now, arguments, in conversation with friends, family, etc., that have been aggressive in a very hurtful way — if you get hurt it hurts and if you are the hurter, that hurts, too!

Meh.

I remember when Bill Clinton got elected, one of his first acts was to reverse the international “gag order” on family planning.

After 12 years of Reaganomics, oh I was so unbelievably happy to see sanity restored.

I know there are various views of Clinton here, both positive and negative.   And simply mentioning his name usually calls forth comments to that effect.

But this essay isn’t about Bill Clinton.

This essay is really just a bunch of disconnected thoughts.  Hearing one of Obama’s first moves was to reverse the international “gag order” gave me the strangest feeling of deja vu and brought up my recollection of how happy I felt back in January of 1992.

So this time around, I wasn’t as euphoric.

Regardless of how good I feel about Obama, this essay isn’t about him either.

“Shake a Hand,” made famous by Faye Adams (not allowed to embed),  here sung by LaVerne Baker and Jackie Wilson, courtesy of YouTuber sandfordway)

Sometimes while prowling back alleys you find things that don’t bear the light of day, brass ritual cymbal turns out to be a trashcan cover, exotic seafood dinner is really rotten fish guts.

Yet perhaps there’s some truth to these lies.

Here in NYC the sun has gone down.  That’s the time to prowl.

There is a revolution of the seasons, winter turns to spring, spring to summer.  There are revolutions in the course of humankind, kings and queens are replaced by other kings and queens.

And then there is a revolution in consciousness.  No, not evolution, revolution.  First you gotta get the bad stuff out, clean the muddied well, then you can go to the evolution part!

What makes someone a leader?

When I was a little girl, I had the usual fantasies of big strong male leaders who were heroes, yeah, I mixed up leaders and famous comic-book type heroes and that was foolish — because usually heroes worked alone (usually in strange costumes) to halt villains and stuff and that’s why they were called heroes, using raw power and all.

I was married to a jazz musician who was the leader of his jazz quintet.  I found that leadership in this case was pretty much doing all the boring work of checking contracts, dealing with surly club owners and constantly making sure the musicians and singer got to the gigs on time and would show up at a rehearsal or two.  He was a good leader – the musicians dug his original compositions and his playing.  But they showed up to play, they’d do rehearsals for free, but they didn’t do all of the rest of it.

I guess my biggest leadership role in meatspace was when I managed a transcription service.  That was pretty much the same story … I had to make sure all the work was done correctly, and basically I had to allow myself to be hated a lot whenever the temp workers were in a bad mood.  Naturally, an authority figure is always a prime target for the woes we don’t want to take responsiblity for, and there I was, as I worked right alongside my transcribers.  For the most part they did respect me … but oh brother, they would sometimes eat me alive if the mood was cooking up that kind of a storm.

So to me, a leader is someone who does the work, first and foremost, who shows up and does the work.  If they do their work well, most often they find people will gather around them and pitch in.  It’s a kind of vibe, I guess.

We have leaders in our government, at least that’s what they call themselves.  I think that’s mistaken, though, as what they really are is holders of power, the power that the folks who elected them vested in them by their vote.

So they have power.  But do they lead?  These last eight years … eh, not so much.  We all know the disconnect that has occurred between our elected representatives and the folks who elected them.  And we’ve seen the grave consequences of this.

Can individual citizens be leaders?  I mean just regular folks, like us.  Can we be leaders?

I think we can and in many cases we are.

I’ve been gratified by the good response in the blogosphere to the Petition for a Special Prosecutor.

I believe most people, if they take even the smallest bit of time to find out the extent to which human rights abuses and crimes against humanity have occurred via torture, promulgated by this misAdministration and admitted to freely by Dick Cheney, know the right thing to do is to give them a fair trial, which means an investigation and, if proven guilty, conviction and the full penalties of the law for those who were involved,  no matter at how high a level of power.

Even the folks who have made comments saying they are against holding those in power accountable do not deny crimes took place.

Yet there are obstacles, and I’m not speaking of the usual obstacles of the media and those in power.  There are obstacles within the minds of the citizens of the United States of America.

Give Bush and Cheney a fair trial — something they have not bothered with since they stole office.

It’s funny how the powers that be in the media and government are running around with their big fat excuses as to why we can’t hold these criminals accountable for their crimes.  It all boils down to “It’s too hard!!!”

It’s too hard.  It would affect too many people.  It would interfere with the crucial work of restoring our economy.  Blah blah blah.  Not one of these folks say, however, that no crime has been committed, no law has been broken.  No one says that.

I find that stunning.  We all know, at least those of us who have been paying attention, that Bush and his crew of crooks have broken the law over and over again.

And Cheney says “What you gonna do about it?”  And Cheney says “oh, the Dems knew about this and approved it, hell they wanted us to be even tougher than we were!”

And we should believe Cheney … why?

I looked up the etymology of torture, it’s from the French, and among other descriptions I noticed the word “twisting.”

Try to put aside for just a brief moment any outrage, fear, anger, any high emotion that automatically occurs when the subject of torture, and more specifically, institutionalized torture a’la Yoo/Cheney, etc. comes to mind.

Just for a brief moment.

Twisting.  For some reason that makes me think of someone taking a beautiful sacred mesa and brutally mining it so that it is utterly destroyed.

I recently read a wild book by Whitley Streiber, 2012, a Philip K. Dickian paranoia trip with some interesting notions, one being that there are monster people (somewhat lizard like but who can mimic human beings if necessary) who want to enslave our souls and the sacred spots on the planet were put there to keep the monsters’ giant “lenses” from working and stealing every human’s soul with a weird sparkly light that when poured over a person basically turns them into a zombie.

Well, that’s a terrible review, but I found the notion interesting in the sense that we have sacred places on our planet for a real reason, not just some mumbo jumbo hooie or sentimental “tree hugging’ motive.  Winter Rabbit, among others, has enlightened me to the reality of why human beings need sacred spaces.  And Streiber just gave a jazzed up high tech paranoid illustration of that in his book.  But for me, the conclusion is the same.  Sacred places, the word “sacred” itself, is a part of our human condition, and can be a very instructive teacher if we open ourselves to learn.  I’m sure all of us here have experienced the sacred, but the word itself is either laughed at or “twisted” by fundamentalists of every stripe into something awful.

When we raze mountaintops and destroy sacred spaces, we are twisting something valuable into something not only useless but dangerous and toxic.

The irony of backalley blogging on the FP has already been noted.  As has this:

Sometimes while prowling back alleys you find things that don’t bear the light of day, brass ritual cymbal turns out to be a trashcan cover, exotic seafood dinner is really rotten fish guts.

Yet perhaps there’s some truth to these lies.

Here in NYC the sun has gone down.  That’s the time to prowl.

With no apparent purpose, I will say that from an artistic view I’ve been frustrated by folks characterizing the far left as a given known group.  Ever since I started hearing the stories of the hippies from the 60s and their adventures, I don’t see how they are ever truly portrayed in our political discourse and yet I would maintain they are the true left who inherited the real mantle from the same folks who worked for social justice in the 30s and 40s, those who came from Eastern Europe for good or ill who had a real revolutionary vision of equality and human rights which was passed through the wild American filter culminating in a generation of visionaries who to this day have not received their true (and well deserved) portrait in our album of history.  I’ve also, in recent years, come to both meet and read about some of the fierce young people who have that same spirit but in a far more difficult environment, they hop trains and live on the street and protest from sheer howling passion, and these kids have not had their portrait included either.  Anyway, just had to get that off my chest.  

I think about all those folks in power, the bankers and the media and the politicians, to name a few, and they want not just to keep their money but also are desperate to retain the one thing they believe money can buy and that is prestige.  When you’re rich, you’re treated better by the tradesmen, you have clout and can have things the way you want them … ultimately, you end up living in a bubble.  Now that bubble is breaking, not only because of the recent election and the recent wake-up call to all Americans over the hard times ahead, but because of overwhelming change, historic change, that is sweeping across our world.

I’m in a bubble, too … got a job, a roof over my head, enough to eat, clothes, all the necessities of life.  I’m white and heterosexual and still benefit from the unearned privilege that brings, I don’t get stopped by cops just because of my looks, storekeepers and landlords treat me well, all that jazz.

So, lots of bubbles.  No shortage of bubbles.

So there’s all these folks in power who want to narrow the odds so they stay on top.  It is very likely they aren’t even aware of that but instead talk themselves into believing they are acting in the best interests of rationality and intelligence and integrity.  Ha ha.

I’ve learned from the diversosphere and here at Docudharma, particularly from Winter Rabbit, Jessical and Robyn, a very different view of our present state.