VI Creations are Meditations

When I began drawing this piece in my sketchpad I had no intention of doing it for any specific purpose, but the character I saw in the cross-dressing old man inspired me to illustrate a world of visual metaphors around him. The text began as journal-like notes on ideas in an interview I was watching, and then I later turned it into more of a focus on yin and yang as the drawing accidentally lead into looking like a boy and girl in the question mark tunnel the character seems to be ignoring behind him. There are more things to interpret out of it with a closer look, and it might be up for improvements.

Sociology was a new field to me, and it really helped me make some connections between things like philosophy and psychology. The result was the abstract clash of ideas that ended up under each prompt. Reflecting on gender, I never looked at it as conquering a specific sociological field, but as an overall meditation and exploration of the concept of the yin and yang--two forces whose inability to live with or without each other creates the paradox where arguably all social difficulties and entertainments.

http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/visionary/

This is a link to samples of the sort of symbolic art I enjoy collecting and producing. I see no use in a creation, personally, unless it has some insights to share or perhaps accidentally produce for me. Food for thought, even if the artist-audience gap of interpretation can only be half-shared. I hope it isn't too esoteric, but I feel the best way to approach these sorts of important issues is not by preaching theories but using them as a background for honest, casual, occasionally Socratic discussion.

The game of philosophizing is a tiger's tail. Once you head down the road of metaphors and artistic reference, there's no end to the possibilities...a lot like the endlessness of seeing a therapist. But living as a student of the world is a healthy way to live in the moment and continue to grow. This has been a surprisingly therapeutic process of expression, visiting a side of myself I normally would not in any other sort of class.
The first entry was an explosion of everything that was associating in my mind with the topic, and the second dug deeper into my psyche. The third and fifth entries took on slightly morbid topics, but as I said, I see the purpose of the negative as a way to sharpen focus on the positive (which leads around back to yin and yang, the impact of abstract philosophy on practical topics, etc...). The third was perhaps at the center of my mind, considering the personal side to what either comforts or challenges us. On an even deeper level, this class has both opened new doors and confirmed parts of my identity by creating that space to reflect on these themes. It's very healthy to put a face on one's studies, to get a chance to bridge knowledge and creativity and take them to a new level in oneself.

This type of joining work and play reminds me of the way Einstein approached understanding a subject, performing mental experiments that sound more like games (imaginig himself riding a photon at the speed of light, etc...). He also once explained in an interview how his uncle first introduced him to mathematics by making an analogy between the answer to a problem and the target of a hunt, like a deer. What ever interests, delights, and illuminates is fair game.
"When we talk about understanding, surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely - the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears- when you give your whole attention to it." -J. Krishnamurti
How better to devote attention than by viscerally expressing the most subtle aspects that interest one about a subject through artwork? It's hard, if not impossible, to know anything for sure, especially in the realm of gender and other forms of identity or subscribed beliefs. But as surely as we know anything, it is through our reactions to the things around us that we find a meaningful grasp on what ever is there. Though art and abstract philosophical connections tell little in concrete terms, it is a process of trying to touch the different parts of the elephant we are all blind to (as in the parable of three blind men who disagree on how to describe the animal based on the different parts they feel). Just as surely as my dog has valid intuitive feelings about certain things, art has something to say on all topics. And I hope what I had to say was relevant to an audience larger than myself.

V The Man

Take a good look at these young men and women. They are staring back in defiance against the Man. In this case, the unsympathetic authority is a teacher who is about to give them perhaps the biggest life lesson possible. This is a screenshot from the Japanese film called Battle Royale, which plunges the viewer into a horrifying scenario with 40 students who are forced to fight each other to the death. In this alternate reality, education officials and the government have come to loathe all things "childish," and so instituted an annual ritual of sending a select group of students to an island for this graduation rite of passage. Three days after being turned loose, it is expected that only one survivor will remain. If not, everyone remaining will be executed by remote-controlled explosives in their fitted collars.
Such a bloodcurdling theme turns most audiences away, but I think those who remain seated do so because of morbid fascination with the truth. Much like in the "Saw" films, these situations push the protagonists to face themselves on such an extreme level that by the end, they have matured decades beyond where they were in the beginning. So what can we learn from this situation, and what could it ever have to do with gender? In a survival situation, some core traits of the self often surface. So, in gendered terms, what sorts of things surface in Battle Royale?

There are themes of love and true friendship, but it's also the stereotypical dynamics of how it works: for one, that the man is nothing but a goal-constructing devotee to beauty who finds weapons, and secures a territorial perimeter around his damsel. Meanwhile, the damsel is always nurturing herself and guarding her womb, at least metaphorically, loving a man for either his protection or the places he will take her. The idea is that men are the standard of work because there is nothing else they are good for, while being a woman is a full time job. But the same goes for men in other cases. A man similarly loves a woman who pats his ego and bears children that carry on his legacy, but he also wants a gorgeous prize, someone sacred enough to deserve his hard work and give it meaning.

On the island, two veteran alumni students are sent to join the survival game, to stir things up. One tells his story of how he and his girlfriend ended up being the last two survivors. Since it's only one or neither of them who will be allowed to win, they are forced to stab at each other. Out of chance, the girl is the one to receive a mortal wound, but she dies with a smile on her face, in her beau's arms. By the end of the film, he comes to the conclusion that her smile was of gratitude to have been so in love with someone, to have gone through so much together and to merely be the first one to take the plunge into the other side. Was she sacrificing herself to him? Was he not a proper gentleman, or does "ladies first" apply in all situations? Perhaps the more pressing subject is the effect that outside forces had on their relationship--did they grow stronger together because of it? In the end of the film, the three remaining survivors are this veteran, and a boy and girl. Over the course of the three days, the young boy receives several injuries, but accumulates a lot of weapons. He finally finds the girl he has always tried to impress, but admits he is rather useless besides the weapons he can give her. I saw this as a touching metaphor for the common theme of a man acknowledging his imperfections but promising security. In the end, they become close, and the trio finds a way to break the rules, survive, and kill the schoolmaster.

No specific guidelines can be drawn on what natural gender binary is supposed to be like. The ways that cultures approach the division varies as much as religious customs. But it seems to me that the constructions a society creates are equally dependent on the environment they are adapting to, as much as the extent of their imagination or taste in customs. Institutions are built to make these customs solid, so that we can focus on higher goals beyond survival: a domesticating reality with paradigms that are at least easier to adapt to than the wild. But the original institution we are all trying to adapt to and rationalize is nature. Authorities in this film reach such a totalitarian level that it begins to look like nothing more than a cruel synecdoche for life and evolution. It's something we are supposed to have put behind us, yet it will be around long after we go extinct. In whatever situation of pressure, life will find diverse ways to adapt.

So in survivalist/capitalist mentality, people react in different ways--mainly to either fend for oneself and protect what one has, or to band together. In the Arab world, this context has led to rigid institutionalization of a certain survivalism in the desert world, where deviance is historically viewed as dangerously wandering away from the tried and true values of conquerors who worked hard to carve out a living (as detailed in the writings of Ibn Kaldun). For example, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei publicly declared in response to the Iranian election protests that, “Anybody who drives the society toward insecurity and disorder is a hated person in the view of the Iranian nation, whoever he is.” This is still an isolationist and individualistic survival strategy, but in a more collective group sense. The idea is to protect the dynasty and stay loyal to our customs, but be skeptical of all others. This is one reason women are treated as they are in Islam, because it has become accepted that this is the way to survive here, and men will do what works, and the women will go along or die (by execution mostly now, but the executions are a product of neurotic prevention of death—taboos leading to anarchy). It’s a way of protecting the metaphorical oasis of society, the extracted cup of water that must not be spilled. Purity and preservation are the chief values, even preserving by masking the fact you have anything to boast of. So women are kept pure and sacred by refusing to celebrate their beauty publicly.

I feel the best way to undermine a harmful institution is to understand where it is coming from, and then to demonstrate why its methods are ultimately not as productive as they think. But institutions have kept the peace and order in situations where it may have been more costly to lose. We must learn the rules before we can break them, instead of relying on groups in a game where everybody has to face death alone anyway. By refusing to accept fear, by facing reality ourselves and learning to play the game without help, we can be more tolerant and more true to ourselves.

IV Secular Gender

Yoko Ono has become a living metaphor for the girl who destroys a male friendship. A large portion of Beatles fans almost form a political faction in this view on her effect on the breakup of the super-group. Did she put a spell on John Lennon that drew him away from the intimate artistic relationship he had with George, Ringo, and especially Paul? Or was it simply a perfect segue for him out of an already dying partnership? Is there such a thing as cheating on a platonic friend?

In novelist Michael Chabon's first non-fiction collection of essays, Manhood for Amateurs, he asks these questions in the chapter "The Ghost of Irene Adler." It begins with an encounter he once had with a woman who had read one of his short stories, called "Millionaires." The main theme was of two young, successful men who could share everything except for a female friend (Irene). As he explains, his intended moral was that love is not something which can be contained, owned, or valued in the same way as every other product of financial success. Just like an identity or life, love cannot be put into concrete terms, neither created nor preserved. But "Alexis from Texas," the reader, managed throw the author off balance in concluding, "Everybody knows guys like that. Of course, it's all abut them really being in love with eachother." Could the real moral of his story actually be that jealousy is a sign of love? Chabon launches into self-dialogue, analyzing the meaning of a story he wrote about a situation he experienced himself, one of which he thought he had already extracted of all its meaning. He eventually brings it around to the fact that much or all the problems of understanding in the world are a result of lacking imagination.

When the Woman enters the life of the Holmes to whom you have always served as Watson, and vice versa, it's not simply that you can't or won't imagine what he sees in her. It's that you aren't meant to understand...That's what gives the process of losing a friendship over a woman such a lasting sense of distress and confusion: The loss obliges you to confront the fundamental mystery of another man, one whom you believed you knew as well a you knew yourself. But there is something in the guy, something crucial and irreducible, that you do not understand at all, and She is the proof...in turn, this leads you to question everything you ever thought you knew, not only about him but about the man you thought you knew as well as you knew your best friend—yourself (p109).

And here was the ghost of this feeling coming back through a simple comment from a reader with only a different perspective. He ends the chapter in saying:

What became of that friendship is what became of your heart in love: You lost it...That's what makes her the Woman; that's what makes the keeping of an old friend through all the vicissitudes of love and fortune such a rare and wonderful or an empty and terrible thing. Either you and your old friend encountered the black box at each other's core, with its scatter of mystery particles on which the invisible forces of love and fate operate, and by some miraculous luck, you imagined or muddled your way past, beyond, or around that mystery; or, tragically, you were never obliged to encounter it at all.

His revisited moral here being that a friendship is true for the same reasons romantic love can be. It is an intimate, shared subjectivity that can only be shared with both eyes on the same horizon. Without it being tested, the two can never be fully assured or move any deeper in sharing that vision. And when one changes direction and the other fails to follow, the love that was there is left to tragic mystery whether one of them has poor taste or imagination.

I was once in this situation with my best friends, who didn't approve of me having a relationship with a girl I met online. Looking back, I think Chabon was right. I never fully agreed with their gut reactions, even after the puppy love was gone, and since then my trajectory has strayed in a similar direction. Whatever you call it, the feelings were mine; they were honest even if naive. But is any relationship ever a clearly rational decision, whether in person or online? I still defend the concept of web dating, even though I haven't pursued it since then. Sure, you can't physically communicate (in whatever ways) with them, or know they are truly like in person until a meeting is set up, but I still cherish the idea of people having a chance to delve into intimate aspects of each other that otherwise may have never surfaced. Think of the boost to the imagination, the expansion of the heart that would take place when a young man would be sent off to war. He and his sweetheart he left behind would be forced to write letters to each other, pouring out their affections and daily thoughts through a new medium, ending up in a pile of memories for both so long as he survives. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but I would say it also deepens the extent one can imagine loving anything.

The point I am trying to make relates to my primary focus of study, religion. It doesn’t have to be a girl or boy that comes between friends; it can be any number of factors in taste. The phenomenon of estrangement takes many forms, sometimes even when a friend develops either stronger religiosity than his friends or cancels his subscription a belief system they have. Regardless of established religions, I see anything from being a Star “Trekkie” to a homophobe as a symptom of the same phenomena of controversy over values relating back to the self. What are we to do when our identity is threatened by opposing views we are not ready to face? Are there many paths up the mountain, or is pluralism a luxury society may never be able to afford?

Emile Durkheim is credited with first theorizing about social construction, but Peter Berger perhaps articulates it best in his work. In The Sacred Canopy, he discusses the origins of religion as a reaction to what he calls anomy, a personal crisis both felt by the individual and society collectively in the absence of a domesticated environment. Due to the fact that our adaptations have not dictated a specific role for us to play in the world (i.e. the lack of free will and subsequent responsibility a shark has), we must invent society and our roles in it so that we might have meaning and a direction for our efforts. Once we have objectified these roles and some ground rules (or “values”), that is theoretically labeled nomos. I see this concept as extending into all aspects of human life—that it even comes down to relationships. Little assurances (“Tell me you love me”) are legitimations of that nomos, our sense of order, of our sense of reality as the dreams we hope and strive to objectify and experience viscerally.

After internet dating (we did talk on the phone too!), my first real girlfriend forced me to face that gap between individual nomoi to such an extent that I credit it as the reason I chose to study religion in college. She didn’t force or expect me to do anything, but the relationship faced me with so much contrast to the previous that I had to figure things out for my own sake. In fact, the lack of expectations, the relative detachment is why it caused so much trouble for me. That aura of “puppy love,” (as those reinforcing their identity as mature adults like to patronizingly say) dissipated, the bubble never felt fully formed to even have the potential of bursting. One night, halfway through our year-long relationship, she casually told me she considered herself bisexual. It probably would not have bothered me very much if this had been a planned admission between the two of us, but it was thrown at me out of the blue, off the cuff, after a long night of drinking, without eye contact, in separate rows of car seating, while my other friend was driving us home. There was no remorse, no cheating to admit of, but also no reason I could see for her to have hidden this about herself until now, in this way.

We are still close, if not best friends to this day, and I never imagined love could take the complex form it has for me in this friendship. Both of us know on some level that the feeling is mutual, but the way it is mutual continues to baffle me. We argued about things like puppy love and detached/mature love in everything from taste in music to the friends we surround ourselves with. Mainly the disagreements were about things like either plunging deep into the rabbit hole of a favorite band/friendship, or priding oneself on having an eclectic taste. In a way that seems to both contradict and verify Chabon’s point, I feel like our friendship has grown stronger by trying to bridge that gap of understanding or sharing each other’s experiences, yet we still have not reconciled or made sense of the other’s taste and identity. It’s almost as if that crisis of separation, the ghost of Irene Adler which came between us, stirred sympathy on both sides so that our failure to solve that test of our commonality only strengthened some sort of intangible bond.

Each encounter we have with something that is foreign to our world is an implied challenge to the validity of that world. We may choose to “live and let live,” but I see relativism as something that cannot be taken as an end in itself. The fact that time, beauty, beliefs, and moral proscriptions are relative to the context or person does not necessitate that it be turned into a social creed. Similarly, we all know that death is an inevitable fact of life, but that does not mean we might as well commit suicide once we discover this. We are here and lucky to be here, to be alive, to have briefly stumbled into existence for a short while. It’s as if each of us is a mistake, a whim similar to “puppy love” that nature gets over with sooner or later. Secularism and relativism are branches of the same sense of objective detachment required to safely regulate the paths of different identities or beliefs. But to take on relativism as a motto is to fail in acknowledging what it is that is relative in the first place, to forget that we have checks and balances in society to ensure that someone’s bubble isn’t popping someone else’s—not to eliminate the natural tendency for people to believe in something.

The bit of meaning I am trying to squeeze out here is that our identities apply to everything we do. Even if we take on the task of telling homophobes they are wrong to judge, we are also taking on the act of judging. The shift into postmodernism has, I think in many minds, created a climate of paranoid aversion to any situation that might lead to someone giving them a Nuremburg trial. Nobody wants to be pointed out as being or supporting “the Man.” Don’t worry, I have homosexual friends, and I won’t even attempt to delve into interpreting or pinning down a label on my own sexuality for you right now, but I see the differences that surround us as part of such a vast mosaic that it is better to feel our way through, instead of separating and inventing justifications for the way other people feel. I don’t know how the reader feels, but can only express my feelings as they are informed by how other people express theirs to me. We can only truly celebrate diversity by being our diverse selves, not by fetishizing other cultures or ways of being and renouncing our own. To love everyone, as they say, is to love no one in any true sense of the word, but we can still choose to include the rest of the world in the background of the picture, so to speak. This is a lesson in accepting diversity without getting lost in it. We do not have to give equal devotion of energies and affection to everyone we encounter, but we can still respect them and keep in mind that they are someone else’s son, daughter, or lover—that our identity is indeed a choice as everyone else’s is, and if someone has chosen a certain path, they have their own reasons just as you do. And you can show your love by trying to meet them in the middle, and/or respecting their choices as if they were an alternate incarnation of yourself.

III Matter Undermind

Joseph Merrick was a spectacle to behold, a fascinating case study on the man behind the mask of extreme physical deformity. This is a screenshot from David Lynch’s 1980 film drama which told the story of “The Elephant Man.” In this scene, Anthony Hopkins is portraying the character of a surgeon, Frederick Treves, who discovered the specimen at a local London freak show. Merrick stands on a wheeled platform, and a curtain is drawn to display his abnormal growths in full nude view to the 19th century scientific community. The last note he makes on anatomy, which struck me as odd, is that despite looking nearly inhuman, his genitals are quite normal.

Almost an innumerable number of topics can be discussed on the implications of this man’s life, but perhaps the most important is how the situation affected his personality. Being rescued did not change the fact he would always be a spectacle, but for the brief time he was allowed to live in the hospital, he was given an opportunity to find fame and friends for different reasons. Soon after the scientific community began buzzing about the case, he became a bit of a celebrity and learned to articulate his speech. A tear-jerking theme continually brought up in the film is his relations to women, and how movie stars and the queen treat him with respect for his noble personality when every other woman since his birth has run away in absolute horror. The pain he experienced somehow taught him to love instead of hate. He never received more than a kiss on the cheek, but such a thing can mean the world depending on perspective.

Jokes and morbid curiosity lurk in our culture about the life situations of the disabled. In Family Guy, for example, there is a running joke of the paraplegic neighbor who is unable to make love to his wife. How do people in these life circumstances cope without the things we all take for granted? While they have a right to regard themselves in what ever terms they choose, I have grown to see disability as more of a state of mind in regard to myself and others. Sean Stephenson is a dating expert, who gives talks to guys around the country on how to pick up the most beautiful girl in the bar from his experience. However one feels about his profession, he has achieved this success despite being born with a condition that leaves him at three feet tall, and stuck in a wheelchair. Motivational speaker Tony Robbins talks about his friend (and there are plenty other living examples) who escaped death twice, the second time in a plane crash which left him totally disfigured from the flames. Of course today he’s back on top without having to settle on anything, married the girl of his dreams, yadayadayada. So to what extent are we limited by our bodies?

I was not born with any abnormalities that I am aware of, except for being the quiet kid in school. I still bear a bit of a mental scar from an 8th grade class collage put together by the yearbook committee and posted on the hall wall, with the only picture of me blushing awkwardly with a certain girl’s arm around me. It caught me off guard in my insecurity, sitting next to a girl I had a crush on since the 5th grade, when suddenly her friend has the idea to take a picture of the two of us. She reaches over the side of her desk, puts her arm around me and giggles for the camera in a way that gave me the impression it was a mockery. I had braces, acne, glasses, a bony thin body, and spent most of my time hanging out with the chess club kids. I will never know if the friendly terms we are on now were always there to begin with, or if she changed her mind as we grew up, but in that moment I almost felt like the elephant man, even if it was all in my head the whole time.

Today I dress a little better, don’t get acne, wear contacts usually, and have generally grown to love myself for who I am, but there is always a confusing dynamic between how you see yourself and how others see you. I could grow my hair out longer, put it in a pony tail and some people would think I look “cool” while others might think I’m gay. And while I can still gross out some of my friends with how thin I am, I know some people inevitably envy me for it. I don’t starve myself; I just don’t like eating fattening foods or exercising. So choice comes down not only on how one regards “what God gave them,” but the daily choices of how to behave also define who we are. The small examples are too vast to count, but one can notice the occasional awkwardness even of a group of guys ordering ice cream at a restaurant, and one asks for strawberry, which is sometimes less masculine than chocolate or coffee, ect… The way I sit, cross my legs at the table, the way I dig that spoon in and bring it to my mouth, even the way I react to the flavor can be seen as indicative of my masculinity or lack thereof.

Gender is definitely tied to our bodies. Anatomy is the primary separator of the sexes, but we all choose how to express it. As I mentioned, I have been influenced by the mannerisms of people I look up to, both celebrities and acquaintances. The trick is to be free to take the things you like from others without limiting yourself to directly mimicking them. Although, it is strange to reflect on these things outside of expressing them because it is not an intellectual matter. The purpose of the title I chose is to play on the words “mind over matter,” but to include the approach that the matter we are given can be undermined by how we choose to use it. While Joseph Merrick suffered physically and mentally in ways we likely could never imagine, he was able to receive a level of fame and warm acceptance that many of us similarly can’t imagine ourselves receiving. I in no way intend to project my judgment onto how he should have seen his life situation, but merely point out the ironic fact that stories of people like him often have elements of realized fantasy that “normal” people never have. There is a sense of going through hell, and yet having heaven all around you.

In a TED talk given by Daniel Gilbert, on what makes us happy, he jokes about the facts that the way to find happiness in your life is to A) become a paraplegic, B) serve a lengthy sentence in jail for a crime you didn’t commit, and/or C) NEVER join a group like the Beatles. He is talking about the facts that paraplegics and lottery winners rate their level of happiness as the same one year after the event. And like the Count of Monte Cristo or monks who spend years in meditation, some wrongly accused prisoners come out with a feeling of gratitude for the experience. And lastly, Pete Best claims he is happier today than he would have been if we were not replaced by Ringo! This seems to be synthetic rationalizing of happiness, but Gilbert argues (and I agree) that synthetic happiness is no different from real happiness. Wealth only makes someone happy if they continue with the perspective of being poor, and the poor are only unhappy so long as they don’t value what they have or the choice they have to make the best of the situation. Once again, we shouldn’t judge someone if they feel sorry for themselves, but we also shouldn’t judge ourselves for the limitations we perceive in ourselves. Sometimes they were never there anyway.

II Engendering

The 1960s were—and are remembered as—a splash of color in world culture. They were marked by revolution, celebration of life and love, of “togetherness” in naked expression, in all senses of the term. Psychedelic experimentation and importing of Eastern spiritual philosophy created such an awakening that people were left in such a new and uncharted space that many didn’t know what to do with it. For some, nothing was taboo anymore. Love, peace, planted the seeds of modern multiculturalism, but what do we do when the structure of society, the backbone of everything we have ever known is turned to jelly?

T.C. Boyle refreshes the spirit of the initial flowering of these sentiments in "hippy" culture--a label which I think has come to throw the philosophical baby out with the bathwater. However, an ideology refutes its own weaknesses through the most extreme adherents. In Drop City, Boyle takes us to a nudist hippy commune to face these warts on a sunny nostalgia. In the absence of institutions, we have to create identities for ourselves. Free love was a rejection of institution like marriage, and the discovery of its equally ugly twin. Anarchy isn’t necessarily the idealistic alternative to fascism, but it often takes experience to fully come to terms with this fact.

Pan was in the middle of an elaborate story about a free concert in Central Park and the good and bad drugs he’d done that night…when Sally, the skinny-legged fourteen-year-old runaway in the patched jeans and stretch top cried out. Or she screamed actually. ‘Get off me, you freak!’ she let out in a piping wild adolescent vibrato that shot up the scale like feedback, and Ronnie glanced away from his story to see Lester simultaneously pinning her down and going at her breasts with both hands and the pink slab of his tongue, and Sky Dog—Sky Dog, Mr. Mellow Peace-and-Love himself—stripped to his tanned buttocks and working hard to peel her jeans down the flailing sticks of her legs...He tried to focus, tried to focus, tried to bring up the image of that girl on the floor in the back of the house, but the only thing that came to his mind was a phrase he’d used a thousand times, two truncated monosyllabic words that did nobody or no thing justice at all: Free Love (p32-33).

One of the Eastern traditions which influenced hippy culture was Buddhism. Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha, is remembered as a great teacher, but one who only became enlightened because he began in absolute naivety as an Indian prince. In his youth, he witnessed the pain of those outside the gates, and it disturbed him so much that he chose to find the meaning of suffering. First, he took on the suffering he had always been protected from by becoming an ascetic yogi. He and his peers strived to find spiritual release from pain by conquering it. Some refused to sit or lie down for the rest of their lives, others wrestled wild animals or exposed themselves to extreme temperatures regularly to test their resilience. Siddartha starved himself, I believe. But at a certain point, he realized this was not getting him anywhere and realized that life is about balance, not either extreme isolation from or exposure to pain. I believe this is something we have had to deal with in regard to sexuality as well, reflecting on the lessons of the explosive ‘60s.

In forming my identity, I have done a lot of observing, consciously and unconsciously, of my idols. In many ways, I identify with the spirit and ideas characteristic of the ‘60s more than that of my own generation. I’m a musician because of the inspiration I have received from groups like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, but it’s more than the music. I always had an intuitive sense that the incredible impact this artwork had on me was indicative of something in the artist’s personality, something that seemed to be cosmically aligned within them. At least to my taste, it’s as if they reached enlightenment and then expressed their personalities fully through the liberation of whatever wisdom. And so I got into studying their eccentricities, what made them who they were on and off stage. Jimmy Page, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney displayed a wardrobe that bent the rules of masculine clothing. Page would wear velvet pants with long curly hair and frilly Victorian-looking shirts (he also apparently had a taste for wild parties and transsexuals). The Beatles maybe only went so far as wearing colorful Indian garb, but it was also something about the whole Mick Jagger, British rock star effeminacy in mannerisms and the way you cross your legs at the knee.

Was it that they were so masculine, such incredibly wide-appealing sex symbols that they could do whatever they wanted and get away with it? Or was that relaxed ambiguity indicative of some personality trait that was responsible for their fame? At the time I started noticing these things about them, it seemed revolutionary, whereas today it just seems like they were doing whatever felt comfortable and at the same time artistically exciting. Many of us try on different masks in youth to experiment with the line between what is exciting because it’s revolutionary and what simply feels right. But what examples of gender identity do we have for modern generations? A point raised, on those among confused youth of today, is the rise of internet pornography, and how it is a source of sexual education for some. The hyperbolically arousing nature that sells the product sends a skewed message to children wanting to know how it is that adults do this thing called sex. Needless to say, not all who watch pornography assume anything beyond the entertainment value, but the taboo nature of the topic leaves huge empty spaces for a child to make all sorts of assumptions. I can’t claim to know to what extent other children are influenced in the ways I was myself, but this style of spectacle seems to be rampant, indeed a staple of modern popular music and culture. Reality shows of washed up celebrities, music videos about the gangsta lifestyle or frustrations of metal band members, and 24-hour news that preys on sensational but meaningless stories may be sending the wrong messages.

What is it to be human? How do we create identity when so much, if not all of it has already been done before? Warhol seems to be right about the 15 minutes of fame phenomenon, and I feel like it devalues both the stars and the spectators in the process—in a new way, yet similar to “Free Love.” Television has turned into a voyeuristic medium, and our society is the subject. On top of that the subject is now aware of the situation, and it seems to be assumed there is no way out of this and no reason to fight it, so subjects put on airs and play up whatever they think the audience is expecting. The entertainment side of art has almost taken over the entire meaning of the word. I think our gender identities should be formed out of personal taste, but that taste is more than a whimsical thing. If it creates meaning in your life, brings you closer to your deepest dreams, then by all means, be that person! But there should also be a measure of caution in clarifying what our dreams are about, and that reaching your dreams is not characterized by excess, as the Buddha discovered: it is about that middle path between what creates deep meaning and what celebrates it.

I What about Gender?

*The first six entries to this blog are written as a class assignment, but I think I have strayed far enough to appeal to both my instructor and any other audience equally.*
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What about gender? Depending on your inflection, you might be raising a worthy topic or dismissing it. You're born with your gender, then you get married, what else is there to it? And if you start questioning it, wouldn't that open a can of worms? It’s like questioning something as basic as morals, right? But on the other side, isn't categorizing someone's feelings or personality demeaning? And what would be the purpose of it all, to assign more meaningless labels to natural things? What kind of person studies gender?
...What do we mean by gender, as opposed to sex? In sociological terms, gender is more about one's identity, while sex deals with the anatomical level. The concepts of gender have continually shifted like any social issue, and the information age has pushed us into the open to take a look at ourselves closer than ever before. Why? When we recognize awkwardness, cognitive dissonance between independent norms, we have made the first step of truly understanding: confusion.

As for a little relevant news, the Washington Post recently published this story:

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington said Wednesday that it will be unable to continue the social service programs it runs for the District if the city doesn't change a proposed same-sex marriage law, a threat that could affect tens of thousands of people the church helps with adoption, homelessness and health care.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/11/AR2009111116943.html

Perhaps fortunately, city officials claim the Church is not indispensible, even though it pours millions of dollars into city programs and “serves 68,000 people in the city, including the one-third of Washington's homeless people who go to city-owned shelters managed by the church.” But how can pride become an obstacle for charity? This is the same institution that insists God must be on our currency, and the Ten Commandments be posted in our courts, because morality depends on it. If they insist on calling it immoral or silly, didn’t Jesus love sinners and children? Since when has withdrawing charity ever preserved the moral fiber of society? It’s a fairly moot point to judge institutionalized religion against the original teachings of its prophet, but the hypocrisy and hate won’t go away by letting it go. How do we reconcile this clash between traditional definitions of masculinity and femininity and the new interpretations? It ultimately seems to come down to what works, and (for better or worse) the former has a track record and postmodernism does not. How can we trust something that has never been done before to work out? An equally important question is whether status quo can really be trusted to carry us through a totally new era.

There is an image stuck in my head of a friend who used to play on local recreational league soccer teams for years when we were growing up. He kicked like a sissy, as they say, whatever that means. He would always be on defense, and go at the ball on his toes, arms up in a chicken posture, and never really made powerful kicks. I don’t remember what sort of, if any, flack he might have received for this, but I certainly got scowls and heckling for behaving like him. I didn’t dance around it like he did, and he would admit he did, but I always tried to wrestle the ball away from the incoming offensive line. He didn’t take most things seriously, but I tried to be dexterous because I took it too seriously. “Boot it out of there!” parents and teammates would yell at me, infuriated that I was somehow being unorthodox for my field position. And yet most of the time it looked impossible, from my position, to punt a ball being dribbled between the feet of someone running at full speed—that is, without accidentally kicking his leg, breaking his knee, and being called out for a foul. It was infuriating to have teammates looking at me as if I was trying to lose the game, and the coach and sideline crowd giving half-hearted encouragement as if I just didn’t know any better. Why blow up on someone if you can’t explain the problem? Who had the better perspective of my playing, the crowd or those on the field?
These frustrations made a lasting impression on me, and I will never know whether they were assuming something or I was the one being blind. But this is the point of doing your best to articulate what you feel, instead of letting opinions run loose and unchecked. This brings us to sociology, religious studies, philosophy, and the questions they ask about regulating humans and their different ways of living. So once again, why study gender or morals? The point is institutions have never been united, at least in the sense that there are dozens of them that have independently risen on different continents. There is nothing to preserve if what we have is a set of religious and cultural perspectives that are not only autonomous, but assume their correctness extends beyond their own borders. If we are to live in the inevitable, rapidly globalizing world of 21st century communication, we have to find ways to reconcile differences and find truth instead of claiming it in the face of contradictions. Is the Catholic diocese in Washington D.C. more morally correct than those who campaign for gay rights? If I let the ball go by, was it my fault or was I a victim of circumstance? Perhaps the better sorts of questions are: how are both sides right and wrong, and can both sides agree on any higher ends?
One reason I have a hard time drawing lines between theories or fields of study is that I generally agree with the views of Indian intellectuals like Jiddu Krishnamurti, who says things like,

Hitler and Mussolini were only the primary spokesmen for the attitude of domination and craving for power that are in the heart of almost everyone. Until the source is cleared, there will always be confusion and hate, wars and class antagonisms.

And once I begin quoting him, there’s no end to the relating meaning between other quotes of his:

A consistent thinker is a thoughtless person, because he conforms to a pattern; he repeats phrases and thinks in a groove.

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.

You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it. That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies, that is why you must sing and dance, and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life.

And perhaps more relevantly,

What is needed, rather than running away or controlling or suppressing or any other resistance, is understanding fear; that means, watch it, learn about it, come directly into contact with it. We are to learn about fear, not how to escape from it.

A problem is not solved by the solution itself. A fire hose didn’t save your house from burning to the ground, it was the firefighters and their efforts that should be thanked. By the same token, a gun doesn’t need to be put on trial for murder, the human who used it should be. Could a murder take place, or a house be dowsed without the help of these tools? It’s certainly possible by different means because humans invented guns and hoses to begin with. So why is it that many people fail to see the extent that this principle applies to other areas in our lives? The gap between a philosopher’s world and the lay audience is chiefly in the latter’s unwillingness to believe in the interrelatedness of all things without having a bridge built for them between each individual thing.
But certainly things like society, law, science, religion, music, murder, sports, or even pornography are non-overlapping magisteria, right? If I were to only compare religion and science, one could argue the separateness for a while, as Steven Jay Gould did. But it seems the longer the list grows, the list of excuses to discriminate becomes shorter. Similarities can be picked out between law and science, or law and religion, for example. Science explains our past in terms of evolution, the origin of our instincts and sexual drives, but then what could pornography ever have to do with religion? An uncle of mine, who studied in a Catholic seminary and is as averse to Indian philosophy as anyone I know, cherishes the quote of G.K. Chesterton: “Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God [in the wrong place].” The chart below explains the logic of transcendental meditation, where one can at least supposedly gain control over one’s mind and thoughts by drifting down (whichever verb and prepositional combination you prefer) to the essential, intangible, indescribable place from which all things come. One way to explain would be that the dot at the base of physics is the “Big Bang,” and the dot under consciousness is enlightenment.


It presents the dichotomy between all things (yin and yang, inductive and deductive, expression and concentration, etc…). But in fully understanding both dispositions, one can learn to apply both depending on the context. I believe the wider your perspective, the more connected you will be to everything and everyone around you, and from there you are better qualified to spot what is truly the source of problems or interrupting the flow of what is ultimately valuable. And yet, anyone who lets themselves get stuck in that wide perspective will never truly understand the subjective feelings of another person’s inner world. So the best perspective on truth isn’t necessarily the widest and most inclusive. It manifests itself as a paradox, applying to higher dimensions as fractals have shown us. One must able to see how we are even smaller than a grain of sand on a beach; that even our galaxy is smaller in the scale of our universe and who knows how many other universes there are? But equally important is the ability to see the universe or infinity within a grain of sand. The world can be either perceived objectively in a removed sense, or subjectively in an experientially. As Bruce Lee said, “Knowing is not enough, we must do,” and we must not only theorize and objectify things into terms as concrete as a cup, but be like water and conform to situations as they are, like a cup.
We dissect and compare beliefs or gender identities in sociology not because of the sort of curiosity that kills cats, but the sort of curiosity that leads people to understanding and loving each other. The campaign for gay marriage is not the result of selfish indignance in defense of whims, but an outcry by human beings asking for permission to be who they are and feel what they feel without being ashamed or illegitimized. By the same token, the very same religious institutions that oppose “deviant” sexuality defend themselves from the criticism of atheists by claiming science is (philosophically) as much a matter of faith as religion is, and that people should be allowed to cling to whatever beliefs get them through the day or their miserable lives (I have watched a considerable number of high profile debates on this subject and challenge anyone who claims this is anything less than a summation of all apologetics). If believing in an afterlife gets you through the day, I have no right to step on your beliefs—yet the inescapable implication is that those who don’t share your faith will be going to hell. We study to understand, not to objectify. Truth isn’t something magical to be used like a “ring to rule them all,” but rather something we can share, like the view of a sunset. Now comes the hard part: determining where the sun is. But doesn’t that take us back to the question I asked in the beginning? Once again, I return to Krishnamurti, who claims the first step is the last step. If you were to finally understand something fully, having it in clear view, it would then become a situation where it’s almost as if the world is staring back at you, waiting for you do make a move: “Whatcha gonna do now that you know it all?” And in the other case we are pursuing clarity in the dark, facing indecision because we can’t see how anything relates in any big picture. If the first step is the same as the last step, the differences between us may be just on which foot we take that step.