Saturday, June 17, 2006

experiment (metapost)

An Individual-Personal History

I thought I would try to make the experiment of reviewing my own past through the lens of Individual-Personhood and of relating this to the reader. Of course the goal in doing this is to help in coordinating my own healing with that of others (the reader in this case) and the world as a whole. I am still very conscious of the almost inherent phoniness and treacherousness of the act of “publishing” anything really, in a prevailing culture in which one-sidedness is the norm. Such a culture of apartness cannot really deal with the paradoxes of a real human life but must always take either the “decent person” or the “shadow”, for the whole person. Moreover I am still unfortunately, struggling to find reasons to think that any of my readers are capable of being a real friend either to me or to themselves, or of understanding or appreciating the living, paradoxical equality that alone makes friendship possible. (I say this because Its hard not to suspect that the lack of any direct personal engagement with me by the majority of those who read my blogs means that that majority remains in the passive, anonymous alienated-spectator mode from which praise or blame might ultimately be expected --cheering and booing-- but certainly no help at all.)

 Since the simple fact that there is “good and evil” (health and sickness) in everyone, and that these exist in relative proportions that are always changing from moment of moment, still seems to be something people want to deny in favor of simplistic “good guy”/”bad guy”, “inferior/superior” narratives, I imagine that I am getting myself into trouble with what I write in this Blog in general and with this post in particular. Moreover, this trouble comes as much from those who “cheer” as from those who “boo” since both are equally responding from a place of apart-ness and alienation (maybe even more trouble can be expected ultimately from the cheering section). The point however, is not to avoid the trouble but how to make it “good trouble”; how to make it trouble that potentially leads to healing both inwardly and outwardly.  I am not really sure how best to make it so, but I know it wouldn’t do for me to help the inevitable one-sidedness by either pretending to being either especially “good” and “strong” or especially “evil” and “weak” (relative to my situation), at any greater frequency than anybody else is relative to theirs.

So far, I think I might have tended to err (because of the details of my own sick culture) on the self-deprecating side. I suffer from “arrogance” (by which I mean a fear of vulnerability to the judgments of others which tends to lead to verbalized or unverbalized “preemptive strikes”) and when people who suffer from this try to be honest about themselves it usually comes off as an exaggerated “mea culpa” about things that a person who didn’t have this particular problem would just take in stride as relatively innocuous evidence that they are human like everybody else.  Such tedious “confessions” are of course not any less one-sided than a lot of uncritical bragging, and I want to take the opportunity of writing this to strive for some kind of balanced account that doesn’t go off the deep end one way or another.
 
Just in case I haven’t succeeded in what follows (I’m not sure if in most of it I’ve not just been “confessing” again), I want to assure the reader that I am quite aware that in many ways, and most of the time, I am an extremely strong, intelligent (in some ways even brilliant), courageous, creative, discerning, and good natured person and that what is behind my life is Love much more often than it is fear.

As an Individual (mind/hear/body/soul)

The culture of apart-ness first manifested in my body in an inguinal hernia at birth and a subsequent longer than usual stay in the hospital. I was given, I suppose, whatever the standard treatment was, in 1965 for such an eventuality. I recall being told about having been placed in some kind of artificial environment (an oxygen tent?) and I imagine I was given some kind of anesthesia when I was operated on. I relate this event to my later relative introversion and a general compensatory reliance on heart, mind, and intuition over body despite some very sensual and practical aspects of my nature. Perhaps also, the anesthesia I received in such a traumatic context had the subconscious homeopathic effect of making me less attracted to or curious about anesthetic substances later.

Of course these things need not be reductively understood. Certain metaphysical teachings would say that I chose this birth experience just because it would help engender tendencies that would weaken my socialization and so help me attain the perspective necessary to achieve my life task. Such an explanation appeals to me for various reasons, some of which have to do with things I remember feeling/knowing at from a very young age.

Whatever the causes, my introversion did lead to a need for glasses at an early age as a result of much too much reading in bad postures. Previous to needing and getting glasses I can remember an intensely and utterly vivid experience of the visual material world—of the whole of sensual existence really-- and an equally intense and joyful appreciation of this, which is hard to relate. I don’t know how unusual or not it was but just being in the world would just sort of knock me out. I don’t think that temporarily losing contact with this childlike joy was solely a function of getting glasses, but it always seemed related somehow and ultimately, after unconsciously losing and then having to replace innumerable pairs, I rejected glasses altogether as just a bad idea and started doing eye exercises which, however I have always had trouble continuing with. Nevertheless, I have never gone back to glasses my and eye-sight varies to this day but the majority of the time in which it is substandard is more than counter balanced by the occasions when that unmediated and intensely vivid beauty of the visual world returns for a while.

Still, neither the glasses nor the going without them did much to diminish a growing self-consciousness and disaffection from society that, on retrospect, has turned out to be something of a blessing.

Notwithstanding my hernia at birth, I always had—and have always had—a very strong constitution and can remember few times (none really—though I’m sure there were some in early childhood) when I was ever sick to the point of having to take to bed. Although I was addicted to my share of junk food as a child I remember always liking the meals my mother made for us—a lot of it from our garden--much better. The only problem was that that stuff took so long to make relatively speaking.  It actually seemed good to me to have to take caster oil—which I somehow both liked and didn’t like. I was always aware that junk food was junk food, and some part of me liked the justice and the aesthetic readjustment that the anti-junk food of the castor oil seemed to be. Its like I never really identified with the part of myself (the part of me that likes junk food) that it tasted so bad to. This is still true today, not only with food but with all the various kinds of sick culture I still periodically suffer from. I still much prefer things that are good for me and tend to get addicted to other things only because the good things are not available for various reasons. 

I suppose I’ve dwelled a little disproportionately on the physical part of my individuality in this account. Perhaps the emotional, mental, intuitive aspects will be better revealed as they immerge in the context of the other venues of Individual-Personhood.         
 
As a Family-member

If a detached perspective was what I needed to accomplish my purpose, then I think I also chose the right Familial venue. With me being the youngest of four kids the others being 7 (my brother) 4 (my sister) and 2 (my other sister) at my birth, saved me from what I imagine would be the intense socialization of an only child. Of course I craved attention, affection and appreciation like any child (much more from my mother than from my father) but at some point (perhaps it was around three or four) realized that this was not forth coming in any form or to any degree that mattered, from either parent. My parents (who stayed together until my father died long after I had left home) seemed to think that they had done enough for me just by feeding me and keeping me physically safe. I have thought since that, in a traditional African village, where the whole tribe raises the kids, this would have been more or less true and I would have likely found the attention, encouragement and affection I “needed” from any number of other people and the elders would have taken care of my initiation/socialization with only a little help from them. At any rate, considering how much they themselves were suffering from sick culture (my father was an alcoholic and my mother had suffered from some problems growing up that I'm not sure she'd want me to go into here), they did the best they could.

Recently I have began to see something symbolic about the house we lived in during my childhood—or at least about the placement of our apartment in it (it was an apartment house). We lived with 2 other families and what was the front door to the house was the door to the apartment on the 1st floor. To get to our apartment you had to go around back and up 2 flights of stars. It was kind of a disconnected, inward-turning setting, and the room I shared with my brother was even further removed from the street on the 3rd floor. The best things about the house itself were probably my mother’s vegetable garden, the big side yard with its pine and hemlock trees, where kids from the neighborhood would come to play softball or touch football, and the big mulberry tree that hung over from a neighbors side of the fence.

I had a “best friend” Johnny, who lived on the ground floor of my apartment house, from around the age of 8 or so until I left home at 18. Maybe hanging out with him saved me from being a totally alienated misanthrope. He was two years younger than me so I was more often than not the leader of the playing we did together. He was the more aggressively friendly of us and I think it must have helped my self-esteem to have him coming to the door so often wanting me to come and hang out. This friendship was set only at home really since we never went to the same schools and would have been in different grades if we did. Consequently I am sure we had great times lying to each other about our various exploits.

As a Neighbor

The house was a pretty old one in an old Jewish suburb called Madisonville in Hamilton County, Cincinnati Ohio. Of course it wasn’t a Jewish community when I lived there—“white flight” had long since occurred—accept for this cool old guy named Mr. Grocery who used to cut his grass with an old-fashioned mower and was quite friendly and talkative. Since it was a somewhat old suburb it wasn’t so bad, for example, we still had sidewalks and corner stores and my grade school, junior high and, as it turned out even my high school, were in walking distance. There was even a little bit of undeveloped woods around my junior high which I latter spent a lot of time in.

Still my neighborhood was far from being a place that nurtures real neighborliness. How could it be? For one thing it was, like most American “neighborhoods” are, totally disconnected from any agricultural base or any real sense of place, inhabited by car-addicted and alienated consumers suffering from sick culture. Outside of frequent visits to the library and the woods, I never explored my neighborhood socially or even physically much. I never got a car or even used a bicycle much when I was too young to drive. I think that deep down I had already rejected most of the infrastructure of my culture and what it was doing to the world, by the age of say, 4. I was not impressed, to say the least, by the human-made world around me (accept for books) and was already taking refuge in them and in solitude at a very early age.

The most important event in my childhood I think was the a vow I made one day to the woods near what was going to be my junior high school. I remember standing in the woods that were struggling under the weight of discarded tires, rusting refrigerators and other garbage, and essentially taking its side against my whole crazy species vowing—in the really solemn way that children are sometimes capable of—to be on its side to the death.  I spoke this vow aloud to nature, to the green leaves, to the light, to the spirit of the woods, of wildness, of mystery of Life really,,, and it was like some part of me that wasn’t a boy at all had recognized itself and was saying it with me …The whole thing felt obviously momentous and even somewhat supernatural since I really felt that something was listening when I spoke and accepted what I had said. I have since experienced what I think is that same "Spirit" or mood--always comforting and healing--in various  forms and in greater and lesser degrees of intensity, on "vision dances" (life-dance vision quests), in many wild and natural places, and even once in the middle of a city. It is like with that vow I started, or just acknowledged, a life-long (or longer than lifelong) relationship...
 
As Citizen-of-the-world

Of course as a kid most strangers I saw were white people on TV. For a few years also the apartment next to ours was rented by a white family from—I think it was West Virginia but they weren’t strangers after a while. As I grew older I guess the alienated part of me had its choice between race, gender, religion, and class, as to which identity uniform to wear in the social game of “us vs. them”. I never had much of a sense of being part of a “nation”, and although my family was poor (my father was a taxi driver) I never really cared about money much and had opted out of social competition at an early age. I also stopped calling myself a Christian at about the age of 11 or 12.

What kept me from feeling like an Individual-person so far as the outer world went, was mostly race followed by gender. Through adolescence and early adulthood I was pretty much tormented by what I began to think of much later (with no intended offence to the real persons behind the names) as my “inner Malcolm X” (my reactionary race-pride and, at least theoretical, hatred of “white people”), and my “Inner Marvin Gaye” (a precocious tendency toward romantic and increasingly erotic, sentimentality). Even then I knew that these were archetypal perils that I was susceptible to, identity-traps that I could enter, but that would only lead me further away from my real self and my real purpose for coming into the world. I was so aware of this purpose (though on a completely emotional/intuitive rather than intellectual level) and of this danger to its realization, that I unconsciously performed the following example of cultural and psychic aikido in self-defense:

What I did was choose to go to the almost all white high school to which I had received a scholarship as a result of my scores on one of the routine tests of the time. Since, as I recall, my family did not at all encourage me in going to this private, almost all white, school, some part of me must have known that my own true identity would not have survived my being bussed to the big, mostly black high school that others from my neighborhood were going to. I seemed to know intuitively that, if I had done that my inner “Malcolm x” and my inner “Marvin Gaye” would have been able to double-team me in a way that, at the time, I felt unable to resist. I felt sure that if I had gone to such a school I would have betrayed myself by acting on the hand-me-down, default, identity-uniform of anyone with my culturally defined physical and social characteristics. Instead of becoming my own Individual-Person I would have “lived” a short confused and miserable life as a figment of other peoples stereotyped imaginations.

Instead, I put Malcolm and Marvin at loggerheads by going to this white private school. All during high school lust battled hatred (well probably it was just extreme anger and frustration—with most of that as much because the people I went to school with were likely to become parts of “the machine” as that they were “white” per se) while I endeavored to hide both of these contradictory feelings behind a façade of wit and intellect. I had a few white friends even a few white women friends. Even a few attractive and attracted white women friends. I remained a virgin (Actually, my female friends were virgins too for the most part, but we didn’t really talk about sex so much as hint and joke about it. Unlike them however, I remained a virgin until the age of 38, when I and another experimented for a time with Taoist/Tantric forms of sexual healing in the context of Healthy Culture). These high school “friendships” were by no means “Living Friendships” (and maybe they would not have existed at all it weren’t for Marvin’s persistent struggles against the prohibitions of Malcolm), but at times there was really a kind of freedom there, when factional identities of both race and gender fell away and real gestures of Friendship and compassion as something like Individual-Persons could happen.

That of course did not keep the stress of the whole, barely tenable, situation from nearly killing me. As I recall, the year after my graduation was the year of my suicide attempts. I guess the stress of actively having to disguise the struggle that was going on in me, while at the same time actually trying to figure out who I really was and what was really going on (so that, among other things I could keep the promise of my childhood) was almost fatal. Some part of me had just become intolerably numb—it was “a Bell Jar” kind of thing. There was probably also a submerged despondency as to my extremely uncertain future since I had refused to actually go to college (I am probably the only person in the history of that school to do this) and had no Idea what I was going to do.

I am not sure if I was ever in any real danger though. The attempts were both of them pretty lame, though somewhat poetic.   



As a Soul

   I announced I was no longer a Christian to my family at around the age of twelve and began refusing to go to church (I am still pretty amazed at how my parents more or less accepted both this and the sort of moral intensity which made me announce it at all rather then just play along). I had been a sincere Christian and had read the gospels (as I recall, the whole bible) by that time and had become so mad at Christians that dropping out of the church was actually much less than I wanted to do. If I had been a more assertive (courageous?) person I would have probably told off both my parents and the congregation. As it was, I was still under my parent’s psychological thumb so far as out and out mutiny went. Besides we really didn’t have many really two-way conversations about much by this time.

    Though I had stopped being a Christian because of digging the Christ of the Gospels and in protest against the lameness of the Church rather than out of some atheistic or even agnostic skepticism, I was always also interested in science and in other religions as well, so I suppose that from the age of 12 till about the age of 24 I was on some kind of philosophic and spiritual quest. I suppose the first big influence besides the Tao Te Ching, was Krishnamurti. Or maybe Allen Watts came first. Chang Tzu. Buddhist studies. Hindu stuff like “Patanjali and “Autobiography of a Yogi”, The Cloud of Unknowing, The Divine Horsemen, The story of Quetzalquatl, The book “Black Elk Speaks” made an absolutely indelible impression on me as did the works of Carlos Casteneda. Western Philosophers never impressed me much although I enjoyed reading the works of Plato and even Aristotle. Gurdjieff. Wendell Berry. Masenobu Fukuoka. Spenglers, “The Decline of the West”. Rene Dubos’ the “Mirage of Health”. Pretty much everything by Ivan Illich. Victor Hugo. Louis Mumford. Blake and various other Poets, Musicians and Songwriters (I have always been into Poetry and Song). Mantak and Maneewan Chia. Rupert Sheldrake. “Democracy in America”. R.A. Schwaller De Lubicz. Carl Jung.  Stanley Diamond. David Bohm. Christopher Alexander. Tolstoy. Thoreau.  Credo Mutwa. Anne Wilson Schaef.  There are a few others, like Severen Shaeffer, Malidoma and Sobonfu Some, Weston Price, Derek Jensen, Susan Campbell who I have since encountered and been encouraged by to varying degrees.

Some of this “research” was happening through high school, some was during the time I was bumming around the country, visiting intentional communities, being “homeless” or living in garrets. By then I had given up the whole Idea of “trying to survive”, and in fact, without saying it even to myself in so many words, I had given up even the meager security of membership in my family of birth, and was pretty much obsessed by this time with "Truth". But I wasn’t obsessed with the prospect of finding out any real answers in books even though it may seem like that. What I wanted was the kind of answers that I could Live and that would actually begin diagnosing and treating our collective situation in real, practical and useful ways, and I had no reason to think that that was going to come from books. What I was really obsessed with was the necessity of doing something that would keep me occupied and out of the system until I could give birth to the answers I felt somehow already pregnant with.

All of this time I had felt strong intuitive a inarticulable “certainties”. I had felt that this intuitive part of me was alone  “unconditioned”, as Krishnamurti would have put it, by my culture and that I could trust neither ready-made answers nor even the language they came in (after, all—said the Malcolm part of me--, as a “black person”, my language as well as my whole culture was some ersatz travesty forced on me and my ancestors by crazy white people and not my real language and culture at all). Anyway, however mixed were my reasons for clinging to it, I felt that this pre and post-verbal, intuitive part of me was pregnant with not only the appropriate diagnosis but also the appropriate prescription. You could say that it was the only part of me I really identified with as actually being me. The rest was more or less an act, a halfhearted improvisation of a bad role in a bad play that I despised and knew I had to  eventually rewrite.  Until then all I had to do was sort of filibuster or stall and not do anything to kill this real part of me, such as acting with “common sense” and getting myself initiated into the culture in certain key ways such as having sex, trying to make money, or spending too much time with…well anybody. I suppose I also had to learn how to be a good midwife and help birth these brainchildren and prepare them to survive in this culture. For that I had to be able to dress them up in words and concepts that others could understand and so effectively “get to” modern culture before it “got to” me. So maybe that was what all the reading was about in addition to being something to do to keep me out of trouble.

As an Individual-Person

Anyway, at the age of 24, in a garret in Portland Oregon, the first of these “brainchildren” (they are equally “heart” and “soul” children) was born in the form of what eventually became the essay “Good Sense and the Meaning of Life” among other things. Later (that was 16 years ago) other children were born and the whole of the Idea and Practice of Healthy Culture and the Life-dance (such as it currently is) came together.  These ideas are still being born and growing and changing, but it was only since that first birth that I have been (at least consciously) like a kind of single-parent trying to keep them healthy, to find a good home for them and, even trying to “marry off’ the more mature ones to suitably healthy aspects of whatever else good is trying to happen in the world. But such a metaphor wears thin really. What I am basically giving birth to is myself as healing Individual-Person and so to whatever of healthy culture that I can manifest though my best attempts at the dance of Life and Togetherness that is its practice.

That Practice and the various experiments and gestures that constitute it has continued though periods of homelessness, living in garrets, and various attempts to find a home for Healthy Culture  in various intentional communities of which Twin Oaks is the most recent. And of course these blogs themselves are part of that practice…

Though this has all been imminently worthwhile, it is also more difficult and precarious even than it may sound, and my life has more than its share of the reversals, the embarrassing failures that come from trying at all, and the resulting despondency. Everything is still very up in the air; I still have not found any “Life-Dance partners”, any real friends in the sense that I mean. Perhaps I will end up leaving Twin Oaks to continue drifting.  I suppose I could still end up betraying myself, either though literal suicide of by selling out in some way.  Things are still devolving in the same way there were when I first showed up in the world. Healthy Culture is still, so far as I know, the pathetically small cultural pilot project---the stubborn obsession really--of a somewhat comical person with a weird name in the boondocks of Virginia whom nobody’s ever heard of. Well, like Gandalf says in the movie “there never was very much hope” anyway. There’s more than enough meaning though, more than enough Life, more than enough to be grateful for in just being able to really recognize and fight the good fight, however things turn out. If nothing else, it’s a good story…

Thanks and Welcome,

Piankhy

Ps: The seeming success story of my individuation does not mean “Malcolm” and “Marvin” are extinguished in me (and, I want to repeat that by choosing those names for certain of my shadow aspects I mean no disrespect to their original holders since I have a great deal of affection for “them” in whatever sense I can be said to even know anything about “them” at all). They—or more accurately my own tendencies toward factional identity around race and gender/sexual lines---are still a part of me just as is the tendency to occasionally succumb to the temptation of junk food. I have not been “cured” so much as I have invented and entered into a kind of “twelve-step” program.

“Cure” in some one-sided absolute and final sense is really in this case, not only unnecessary but even un-desirable. All it would do is make friendship, equality, and the healthy culture between myself and the reader, that much more difficult, since I would then be a “superior” rather then a sometimes alienated Individual-Person just like you. You would cease to have real and equal responsibility with me for Healthy Culture and its good sense, Life-logical ways and could hide in exaggerated and childish passivity, behind the “uniform” implied by your lesser “rank”. That would only mean that we would then just have recreated the same rigid intolerable phoniness of sick culture all over again.  Since I am not interested in “followers” but in Friends and “collaborators” (Life-Dance partners) I don’t have to cover up the extent to which I am still a dope (though I still do cover up some extent of it, which is dopey in itself, but I trust that my friends will help me with this). As it stands, I’m sure I’ll give you more than enough chance to show some Life-Logical Goodsense, responsible Good Will and critical Good faith (not to mention creative Good Taste) toward me…that way you’ll feel more justified in showing them toward yourself… All of this   takes a good deal of unnecessary and counter productive pressure off what already amounts in some ways to a raid on the impossible as it is. Of course I’ll still be consciously working on my Dance, (I’ll certainly keep trying not to “fall off the wagon” of Healthy Culture altogether) but this will not be happening out of the need to keep up some kind of image, but for its own sake and for the sake of the Living Friendship that by then have been born between us.
 
   

posted by: piankhy | 16:10 | comments