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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

Battlestar Galactica–bodies

How could anyone watching Battlestar Galactica, the TV series that ran from 2003 through 2009, not eye the bodies of the actors? Many of the men and women looking similar to one another with very toned, not-too-large muscles? An androgynously styled body, especially in the unisex military gear.

The androgyny appealed to me, but the bodies looked ridiculous in their generic redundancy. From my early 30s until a couple years ago I worked out in the gym–other kinds of movement for strength and aesthetics have replaced my weight training–and I’ve written about female bodybuilders with great respect, discussing their beauty and courage. (See the pertinent essays in Monster/Beauty and my contributions to Picturing the Modern Amazon, which I co-edited with 2 other women, an art historian and a bodybuilder.) Considering my past scholarly and somatic interests, my response to the Battlestar bodies surprised me, because I like the look (and the feel) of muscle that is simultaneously light and strong. Those Battlestar bodies–too much of a good thing? Or fascinatingly (or boringly) absurd? Because the similarity to one another of bodies in Battlestar, created to fit an overtly fashionable type, displaces the human corporeal panoply, so that I’m looking at bodies that, rather than dazzling me with their sensuality, render that sensuality comical.

Battlestar Galactica–an anxiety, a clearing

“This is my mission for the summer!” I joked with the guy in the video store as I walked out with 4 more DVDs of Battlestar Galactica. I’d already watched 4 or 8 of them, and July had just begun. Battlestar Galactica, the new series (in distinction from the classic one), began its 4 seasons in December, 2003 and ended its run in March, 2009. This past June one of my best friends recommended it. Her husband and 2 kids had started watching and were hooked, and she’d also become an addict. Clearly, I had too! Read more

Charles Alexander’s “Pushing Water 52″

Charles Alexander’s poem “Pushing Water 52″ is gorgeous. Over and over as I read it, I pause, my mind empties of distractions. The lines take me way within myself and so far into the world that nothing at all is worrisome and gathering beauty is as easy as giving it away.

When I heard him read the poem, 1 phrase in particular held me for days and still does. I say held, because I couldn’t let it go, yet I’m  letting it free me, like a loved one’s spacious embrace, from fear of stasis and endings: “a stop is an invitation.” Stop as a gentle measure. Stop as an opening to pleasure, for we generally extend invitations to happenings that pleasurably engage or sometimes enlighten us, such as celebrations, cultural events, and quiet dinners. Hearing Charles speak the phrase, I thought of how a period at the end of a sentence invites another sentence, of how the quiet after someone has spoken invites another person to speak or invites both parties into loving silence or invites an action, and mostly of this: when we stop an action or a series of actions, we invite others to act, to feel, to relax. Stop, as an invitation, is itself a generous act.

“Pushing Water 52″ is part of Pushing Water, which is a long sequence to be published in Charles’s next book–he says that may be a year and a half away. The poem will also appear in an anthology of contemporary American poetry which is a special issue of the Duke University Press journal boundary 2.

Besides being a poet, Charles is the director and founder of Chax Press, which, as its website, chax.org, states, publishes poetry that is “experimental” and “humanist.” See the website and also chax.org/blog.

Gently radical changing 2

My experience of the silent meditation retreat that I attended (see October 18, 2009, Gently radical changing 1) encompasses much more than my blog response, and uniqueness describes each individual’s involvement, so please take my words as inadequately explanatory and not at all definitive.

However, I do want to state 2 facts clearly and to suggest a reading if you’d like to know more. First, the Vipassana practice that I learned is not connected with any religion. The method and concepts adhere to the Buddha’s teachings, but the practice is not Buddhist. Second, retreat participants pay nothing, for food, accomodations, instruction. Nothing. That in itself attracted me, the purity of giving, as did the separateness from any religion. The reading is Paul Fleischman’s essay, “Vipassana Meditation: A Unique Contribution to Mental Health,” in his book Karma and Chaos, published by Vipassana Research Publications. I know you can find it at pariyatti.org. If the term “mental health” sends you reeling into mild nausea, as it does me–something creepily clinical and institutionalizing about it–don’t worry. The essay is friendly, human, and engaging.

Girldrive

I just bought Girldrive: Criss-Crossing America, Redefining Feminism by Nona Willis Aronowitz and Emma Bee Bernstein–not only because Nona writes about me and they include a photo by Emma in which I’m lying on my Dionysian bed. I’ve been excited to travel with them–a road trip into the hearts and thoughts of women, mostly younger, throughout the country. A dream trip full of love and curiosity, the ardor of youthful questioning, and the profundity of all who care about LIVING.

www.girl-drive.com