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Yogic Aphrodite/action

During a conversation one of my close friends, who often calls me Aphrodite, pointed out that the Greek goddess in her original configuration is pretty neurotic and therefore not befitting my intentions for either my art or my life.

Playfully having chosen Aphrodite as my email name and, more importantly, writing about her in my work, I saw that her capriciousness, vanity, and ill temper, her neurotic tendencies, clog the intention of my project, which is to advocate for beauty, especially in the forms of creativity, love, and eros. Also, Aphrodite never grows older, and I do! Lightheartedly, my friend addressed me as “Yogic Aphrodite,” and I thank her for her humor and insight. Yogic Aphrodite is a more complex, useful, and satisfying model than is the sometimes spleenful ancient goddess. Read more

Belly

I saddened when I read Eve Ensler’s The Good Body, published in 2004, because it is exemplary of women’s self-hatred. Unlike lots of women, I found The Vagina Monologues, the play by Ensler through which she became famous and which was first performed in 1996, disappointing for the same reason–the clearly stated and unremitting repugnance that women feel for their bodies. Read more

Removed/refreshed

I deleted my Facebook account last week. I’d been wondering for a while what to do with it.

I opened the account in December 2008 thinking that Facebook would be fun professionally more than personally. I said to friends soon after I’d begun that it was “fascinating and dorky.” Read more

Setting sex right

“Remedies for sexual activity” read a recent email subject heading. Surely someone was selling Viagra or another remedy for a real or imagined sexual disorder or dysfunction, but the syntactical impairment had me laughing. Hmm, sexual activity itself linguistically rendered as a malady.

Within the miseries of romantic love, the initial requiting of sexual longing can run afoul of fantasy, or so I’ve heard, consequently turning sexual activity into an overworked and/or under-satisfied body governed by a consciousness that lingers in a void of unfulfilled desires cum ambitions.

I don’t believe it, that sexual fantasy is better than actual sex, having experienced lovemaking with one and another man that exceeded my fantasies preceding our first time together. (I also have tolerated literally nauseating disappointments.) Nonetheless, the displeasure of sexual underachievement in a culture whose forceful marketplaces sell sexual achievement as a kind of good and as a kind of both essential and luxury goods might mean that the subject heading “Remedies for sexual activity” is both syntactically and conceptually correct.

The play “Coming in Hot”

Tenderness is not what I expected from a play based on a book by women soldiers. Yet tenderness is the quality that has most stayed with me from Coming in Hot. The actor Jeanmarie Simpson delivered the work as a monologue that propelled into the audience the individual emotional atmosphere of 14 “characters,” the authors who had served in the United States military .

On a bare, shallow stage the script from which Simpson read sat on a black music stand while next to her the sound artist Vicki Brown, on viola, played her own music, whose ethereal eeriness functioned to paradoxically lift many of the stories from grimness, such as corpses described in detail and a fellow soldier/rapist eluded, and to ground those stories in tonal roots. I heard angelic music. I heard the music of soil, of death, of passions confined, plundered, gushing.

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Kathleen Williamson’s “Casa Shtetl”

An arrow into my heart–Kathleen Williamson’s wild wit and wisdom. Yay! for the beauty of a radical thinker who is an artist and who dares to be a deeply aware human being.

Williamson is a poet, a songwriter, a singer, a Ph.D. anthropologist, and a lawyer–and all of those callings blend with ease in her performance titled Casa Shtetl, which she debuted, in what she’d call an experimental form, the other night. Read more

Mary Daly died

Mary Daly, the extraordinarily creative feminist theologian, philosopher, and theorist, died yesterday. She expanded the minds of feminist academics, whether they acknowledged her or not in their work or their hearts, whether they agreed with her ideas or not. She was controversial to the nth degree.

After Daly’s most famous book, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, came out in 1978, I remember talking with my friend the art critic Arlene Raven about how the book changed our lives and how our writing would never be the same.

Daly’s work is fearless. That adjective can be applied to the publications of VERY few scholars. Other applicable adjectives: stunning, poetic, passionate, exploratory. And out of this world . . . of tame, tamed, and taming “right” ways to be a scholar.

In a short post at http://catholicanarchy.org/, its author Mary Hunt reminds the reader that Daly “always advised women to throw our lives as far as they would go.” Mary Daly, thank you for helping me to travel much farther than the conventions of professions, sex, and gender tend to take a woman.

Maiden elder

A regular reader of this blog, a younger woman who hasn’t yet posted anything, wrote me a long and eloquent email about women, beauty, and age. She included a request:

I’d love to read your take, and others’, on the tremendous soul-accepting difference between “looking younger” and “looking more beautiful.”

Immediately, an essay that I wrote recently and haven’t yet published jumped to mind. It’s called “Maiden Elder,” and I think that the excerpt, below, that I quote from it, initiates some satisfaction to her request.

“Maiden Elder” excerpt

In Issai Chozanshi’s The Demon’s Sermon on the Martial Arts, a philosophical “guidebook” for samurai written in the eighteenth century, the demon in the title advises a swordsman, “When you follow your own true character and are not a slave to your passions and desires, your spirit will not be troubled.” Speaking from my own true character, feminism works for the freedom of all human beings, glamour grows from a person’s knowing herself and following that knowledge, and maiden and elder have little to do with a woman’s age and everything to do with her exceeding their culturally determined boundaries, such as limitations on her self-representation and self-creation, both of which I equate with self-discovery. Self-representation is an external manifestation of one’s own true character. My definitions of glamour and feminism are intended to stir the imagination. Maiden elder is a term of endearment.

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Memorable voices

When I was taking voice lessons in the early 1970s, my teacher gave me an essay titled “The Voice.” It had been copied from a typed text, not one printed in a book. I’ve kept the essay all these years because it affected me profoundly when I first read it; and each time I’ve read it since, which has been as long as several years between reads, the effect has been equally deep. “The Voice” wakes me up to the sacred powers and dimensions of the human voice.

My teacher’s name was Everett Clarke. I realized long ago that he was a master, one of those sages that you come across in yogic, Taoist, and Sufi writings. He had me doing yoga postures in his studio, he suggested readings, such as books by P.D. Ouspensky, the Russian thinker whose writings interweave philosophy and psychology with a focus on consciousness, and as part of the instruction Everett had me read aloud passages from the art criticism that I’d begun to publish. I was learning, without having to contemplate the matter, that one’s voice is all of oneself and that everything a person does creates the voice that one has. Everett had one of the most mesmerizing voices I’ve ever heard, full of heart, soul, and intelligence, full-bodied and -spirited. (I write about Everett in “Mouth Piece,” which is published in my books Erotic Faculties and Clairvoyance, and in “The Primacy of Pleasure” in Monster/Beauty.)

No author’s name appeared anywhere in the 6 pages of “The Voice,” and every once in a while over these decades I’ve wanted to know who wrote it but I didn’t do any research. Well, last week I discovered the author! It’s Hazrat Inayat Khan, a Sufi whose first expert practice was Indian classical music. He lived from 1882 till 1927, and I see that he wrote much much more, about sound and music, and about beauty, happiness, and love. Fourteen volumes, all part of The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan. You’ll find “The Voice” at http://www.sufimessage.com/music/the-voice.html.

Incandescence

Celebrities interest me very little, though lately I’ve been reading about the phenomenon of celebrity. Such as David Haven Blake’s Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity, from which the reader learns about the construction of fame in 19th-century America, and through that, facts about the foundation of today’s fame-as-the-manipulation-of-people, both the celebrity and the public. The worship of personality, the invasion of a so-called personality’s privacy, the publication of supposedly intimate details about celebrities’ lives,  and the embodiment of greatness or talent in the celebrity body–nothing new. And all of it historically as now accompanied by–dependent upon?–frequent disinterest in and even ignorance of the artistic, intellectual, or other skills and talents that supposedly generated the “greatness” of the celebrity; and, more in line with the celebrity as star, skills and talents that presumably generated the celebrity’s brilliant luminosity.

At its absolute height, the star’s brightness is incandescence.

INCANDESCENCE. It describes Rita Hayworth in Gilda, which I watched again a couple weeks ago. Gilda is one of my favorite movies, and I can count them on one hand.

hayworth:gilda

As a star and as an actress, Hayworth got Hollywood-ized up the wazoo. But it isn’t that she’s hot, it isn’t that she’s gorgeous. Here’s what she IS in Gilda: transporting. She transports me–deep within myself. There, and only there, I might learn to flame, glow, and sparkle mightily. She is an impetus towards radiance, and I am grateful to her self-creation in the midst of the film industry’s artifice.

Incandescence is a noun, so may seem static, but Hayworth’s incandescence within me operates as a verb. Incandescence is an idea about radiance, which is always in the making.

hayworth:portrait

 
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