Monday, December 31, 2012

DAILY POEM Follow Your Schlange*

Movie Sketch
from the Travelling Sketchbook of
Andy Goldsworthy, environmental artist
"We often forget that WE ARE NATURE"

"The dream wants a dream" - Russell Lockhart,
Words As Eggs

near and far
elaboration
is nesting


© 2012 mythopoetry.com  stephanie pope “Follow Your Schlange”
     Monsters and Bugs, Selected Poems


first publication ©2012 A Hudson View Poetry Digest, Summer,2012,  Victoria Valentine Skyline Publications, WaterForest Press, New York, p. 41



notes

*schlange- "snake" 

twaiku -a poetic form suitable for tweeting; micropoetry

About
Andy Goldsworthyessay-blog by Stuart Kendall -Andy Goldsworthy: An Aesthetics of Sustainable Living

Saturday, December 29, 2012

MICROPOETRY: "TWAIKU-ing"

two doves in the rain on the branch of a ginko tree
1910 color woodblock print, private collection
Ohara Koson (1877-1945)

two doves close
on a treebranch sit
high-cooing

© 2012 mythopoetry.com  stephanie pope, "TWAIKU-ing"

notes

twaiku - a haiku posted on twitter;  poetic form in microblogging; micropoetry 

Sunday, December 23, 2012

YEA, 2013! OUT WITH THE OLD IN WITH THE NEW!!!

SUNDAY COMICS
Hi Folks,  mythopoetry.com went on line waaay back in 2001 on December 26th. December christmastide henceforth has been a great timeframe to clean house; out with the old and in with the new!  What does that mean? Well, so glad you asked that question!

Beginning in 2013, Mythopoetry Facebook, Mythopoetry Scholar eZine Facebook, all the posts and columns you love will  begin to appear regularly right here on Mythopoetics In Culture Blog. Yep! Time to exercise some google +.  I'm a little early but ready to spread some Santa cheer sooo enjoy! And we'll keep it comin' in 2013!


 

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

DAILY POEM Turning Sandy In The Desert of the Real

 
 Fabricating Altercations & Pinking Shears ( )

He stopped writing her when he fell in love with another; love is big fabric.She suffered a kind of falling out; this to its own space poetic silence shored in, spilt; rusting trust; lovers, eX-ed. Pink is the milkmaid’s drowned sunset, ragged the shoreline…

nothing carries the weight of such sheared stain. Where sunset split formless and sublunary“nesses” a wine-darkened, moon-lit emptiness everywhere and nowhere, does it not still?
In sheared space―( ), she cradles Acis…

a fluid, intricate evasion invasive in as-form― her private place
pink pitcher pitched parenthetically O…
will have embodied his image-remainder, poetic lovers parting

by external altercation ―( ). Her blood-milk waxes the infant slant through a woman within, without
and love divides in the interval called woman
pinking her lower down. She will always be two…

And as if she were another, a woman stoppered, Galatea opens through desire the unstoppered
disturbance within the same undead nature. And she tends it dearly. Space rains within, disturbed
and without, disturbed. This imparts a great swirl watering the living girl with the underground nature

love wets the dry… the sole… ensouls; a psyche’s psyche begets itself a second time, underground.
A frayed but unafraid soul ensouls because something big will have happened to someone’s looking
―within and around, from within and, without; from time into time.

A woman falls out of every girling pierced by night formations where the sun-eyed ate
maids-a-milking.
Now psyche’s lover carries this very big pink disposition, beatitudes, each, outed
in... for which to
reposition dissed positions made after maiden milk poetizes love. Pink Psyche

is a match for that divinity…the formless, sublunary-sensed “nesses”
where gods work away & DIS
appear in the as-form within, without.

The sheared, pinking woman without will bi-focus perspective’s “space” within its own space
as if ‘woman’ falls back upon a landscape edging her edges saw-notched
in maiden gone-nesses, the god

appearing in the space of her having fallen… open…. The realm under her
is her. She is expecting… difference… perhaps, shaded in something even more ”pinked”; something
in the here-to-for unknown great expanse under renovation opening the darkness , something

sheared, under new management, having itself fallen open in the pinked space golder than gold
pinking sheers…. She is like a woman falling totally O; O as in a mariage blanc-ode
a bigger begetting in the trusted rust of lovers eX-ed starlit and ( ).

©2012 mythopoetry.com stephanie pope  Fabricating Altercations & Pinking Shears




  
 

Thursday, December 13, 2012

SEEING ACROSS THE LIGHT YEARS IN THE DESERT OF THE REAL


The Hubble Ultra Deep Field   ~Image courtesy
NASA, ESA and R. Thompson (Univ. Arizona)



horses grazing
in the warm June

night
gardening

how not to speak
speaking

not too
and
not two
speaking to
the as if

as if
it were also

not too
one

******

a wholly
speaking:

in photons
that defy
description
photon to photon
hoof to mouth

the goblet,
hippocrene

******

spoon fed, be fed
a pablum of starzzzzz
lips and hands and
I'zzzzz, an instinct
touched by mana

in tender waking
our physical significance
surpassed
and no more,
we are

light years
to come


©2012 O Wholly Night Or When In The Desert of the Real, See Across The Light Years stephaniepope mythopoetry.com


notes

Main Entry:
light-year function: noun

etymology: light / from PIE *leuk- "light, brightness" (cf. Sanskrit rocate "shines;" Armenian lois "light," lusin "moon;" Greek leukos "bright, shining, white;" Latin lucere "to shine," lux "light," lucidus "clear;" Old Church Slavonic luci "light;" Lithuanian laukas "pale;" Welsh llug "gleam, glimmer;" Old Irish loche "lightning," luchair "brightness;" Hittite lukezi "is bright").

definition: A unit of length in interstellar astronomy equal to the distance that light travels in one year in a vacuum, or 5,878,000,000,000 miles.

A light-year, then, is not a unit of time, but a unit of distance that’s based on light having a speed limit.

"light years" as metaphoric of something: a metaphor for the limits of our knowledges and what they know and therefore the limits of  "knowing ourselves". 

the horse's fountain/ the poetic inspiration as a way of knowing that goes beyond the self-limitations of the sol consciousness; sublunary, intuited, poetizing language taking over gleaming brighter than sol/ the realm of dark matter/dark energy reflecting itself to consciousness

Mythopoetics In Philosophical Imagination
Re-imagining  Unio Mundus Throughout PostModern Mythology: Using "The Matrix" and "The Matrix Reloaded"

Friday, November 23, 2012

DAILY POEM / Felt Sense

Rodin's "Hands", Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese"

To E.M.

and then drew
wild geese between them
what is loved


©2012 Auguste Rodin’s “Hands” &  Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”
                      
stephanie pope mythopoetry.com

Sunday, November 18, 2012

DAILY POEM Creating From "Scratch"

photo credits: www.sun-gazing.com
Fruit From The Azure Vault ~©1986 stephanie pope

In exoteric Taoist thought, cultivation of Yin (lunar) energy is vital for good health, long life, and a richer experience of life beyond the social roles of the daylight world. ~ Dave Alber,  "Myths and Moon Cakes: The Cosmological Symbolism of the Zhou Revolution"


So now this rhythm of arisen rises
through the old gold, mist of numen-hissing movement
and railing rattler prattle in a long-gone run-on logos groaning
through the trailing tailor of the on and on and so-in-so’s in tales.
Who sewed this soul in souls; who sold the Eve’n souls;
what tailing tattler tempted?

All is well that ends, you know… that myth of motherhood
that seems to like us damned and stone
for owning; who will roll this stone away?

I’m busy in the kitchen cracking egg into an Om-let
you know that couplet, don’t you? A father/son and
whole wheat toasting, made such a substance, god
in a heaven hostess twinkle…you know, not quite a food

created equal;
creating sweet and low
like sugar in a con

substantial? No
creating something sweeter and lower
in down-going, something held natural to her
nature or like something sweet held eternally
something made in mooncake on a midnight tree


©1986 Fruit From The Azure Vault stephanie pope ©2012 mythopoetry.com

For an interesting essay on the Taiwan Moon Festival and myth see
Dave Alber's fine essay: Myths and Moon Cakes: The Cosmological Symbolism of the Zhou Revolution

Friday, November 16, 2012

DAILY POEM/ The Uncut Version


Soul-Making The Uncut Version by stephanie pope
The uncut making
not-making capably not

makes up the enjambed body…
…now whose metaphors encode wounded in-sides
precisely recorded in the round version?


The uncut lines are mute rock singing rocked insides
and rock mutes the fluid markers
precisely un-incised; they

play the word in play playing me playing likenesses
(i.e. you know ones recording even the static)


especially the static, wounded lines precisely stuck
in a record on a turntable.

And we call the record “broken” because it
won’t quit playing; but it’s not, it's
not. It’s where the treasure lies.

Friday, November 2, 2012

BURNING THE MIDNIGHT OIL

image credit: SHOPPEDorNOT.com



the fleshed night
burnt by the hour
shining her



oiled hair;
she who burns away
shines darkly



when throwing
h’s on the wall
behind me

©2012 Midnight In Oil stephanie pope mythopoetry.com





Thursday, October 4, 2012

PT.3 VAGINA-SPEAK: THE MAKE-BELIEVE OF MEN

Glaringly absent from Missouri Republican Todd Akin's remarks is the image "woman". Akins speaks *about* woman not *to* woman. In a magical way it is *as if* the treatment of her vagina-speak is a fantasy creature itself and the comment, a tale of make-believe and myth-making.


WHAT MEN SAY *ABOUT* WOMAN

How Did It Get This Way?


Remember, if you grew up in the 1950's, the article shared in part one of this three part exploration into what men say about "woman" shows what is more likely the road Dad took to rule his 'head of the house' status in marriage. Oral contraception, ie the pill, developed and marketed by women for women, is what spoke *to* wmn's true and deep concern: unequal citizenship status under the law. For there is a myth of woman in lieu of a history of women already on record.


The time is past due to uncover the covering. -stephanie pope

PANDORA & POLIS

The concern in woman and women for *wmn* and *mnwmn* is age-old and is an inheritance in antiquity through both Christian and Greek mythic patterns of thought (one-god/many gods) in relation to one side of the divine, *wmn* and its treatment in the religious and social imagination shaping the racial archetype.

In Greek antiquity in Athens, in the story shaping polis, (polis means ancient Greek citystate) the myth of Pandora indicates in lieu of equality “women were given” *marriage*; given in marriage is one thing but given to marriage, often to settle disputes fought over in war, obscures, blurs and collapses a necessary distinction made between *her sex* and the good with female sex as “the goods.” Her sex, now objectified as “the goods” settles distracting yet ideological disputes when it come to the business of the state in the statement operating in self-paternalism.

Placed behind a symbol, the veil, she is her sex, an object of trade ― the veil given woman appropriates her voice and does away with her right to speak otherwise. Standing in for her, the veil is a means in speaking *about her* while not speaking *to her*. There is an avoidance of unveiling what "she” embodies. Her "space" is thrown into negation in the very supposed act of speaking "on her behalf".  In other words, her “vagina speak” is placed in a stoppered condition. You don't see what it embodies and represents and this "right of representation" is appropriated. She is spoken *about* in speaking *for* her without representing her point of view about herself.  If you think I am kidding, you can trace the three meanings for the Greek term, "veil" just as did I in an earlier essay. Hidden behind the veil and by looking at the Greek term for “veil”, krêdemnon, I uncover three meanings at work. This manner of uncovering a covering is aletheia.  Aletheia is truth revealed by unsealing a seal intending to conceal. Let me borrow a quote from that essay to unveil this insight.

Although the image, woman is at once caught between the fantasy birth and the historically crafted image of autochthony, I begin to note that our deepest inheritance as ‘woman’ is not erased when it is silenced in the allegorical memory of our history as a people—nay planet! It is handed down in the down-handed symbolic hand-me-down mneme contained within the belly of the human story that simultaneously names woman in an ‘us’ which does not represent her. The Athenians had a word that expressed this symbolic image-idea which inheres woman to culture thusly. It is krêdemnon and it means ‘veil’. The term signifies a “headbinder,” and in as much as the body of a woman represents the polis itself, the veil signifies the battlements that crown the city and fortifying the city against invasion. So the krêdemnon that means veil or ‘headbinder’ also means the battlements that protect a city against invasion.

Her own face and body are made to hide and be the hide itself covering over that which is unrepresentable, the existence of *wmn*. Thusly, the third sense the early Athenians had for the veil is likened to the stopper of a bottle, a ‘cap”, capping the volcanic force and tapping its energy…her “sexuality”, seizing her “property”,  the sexual energies proper to her person.

Among these 'energetics' would be her own mind's mythic pattern, its own style of being present in determining family planning, gynacological care, care of the health of bodily processes, etc., in essence, her self-determined, self-paternal, citizen status. This status is the right to life that is being violated in Todd Akins comment suggesting there is a form of legitimate rape.  It is the rape of womb rights. How so?

Inherent in the psyche of this thinking is the metaphorical recognition how rape-- the rape of "wmn", the feminine face of the divine formation of *us* justifies as moral this religious imagination in its even more insidious assault on polis. It cannot be just today, not at least since the 18thC, the way it once lays claim in antiquity. Not if the Constitution is still the law of the land. Life, representable as it is, female and citizen challenges that it is never right to rape that which is representable as it is, her equal status as an American citizen. the individually female individual is guaranteed by the Constitution the equally inalienable right to determine her own life's well-being. Her own "representation" suffers a tyranny of paternalism if, in being spoken for, she is cut out of self-representation in polis. 

Now it seems to me what has been going on since 2010 in Congress when Congress speaks has more to do with silencing the variant and individualy female citizenry of women's voices speaking "wmn" for itself.  It also seems to me these folks are messin' where they've not got the right. That is a misuse of public trust. Sadly, female citizen status itself now lacks equality in representation under current law reform when it comes to womb rights, one of which is the right to an abortion. In her currency of exchange, woman has been spoken *about* not *to*.
That is a heads up to you my American fellowhood of lass and lad dealing with the so-called well-meaning todd akin type folk trying to put you in *your* place. They are as good as saying you are to be governed and are not fit to self-govern in shaping polis. They are denying you the right to participate in consensual self-paternalism. Now go a step further. Apply that to this big attempt today by the Christian social conservative thrust to redefine *marriage* as that between a *man* and a *woman*. Think about to whom and to what special interests this (self) is in service. It is about sex. It is about dumbing-down meanings related to citizen status.
Alas, once more Mr. Speaker! You don't speak *to* my vagina, you can only speak *about* it. Vagina-speak knows better than you how no means no.

Such no-ing is a big *NO*, too, because what operates in the social rule when one's majority rule passes into law laws without respect for individual rights as equal rights can do so only by appropriating toward its own citizen status privilege. This is how paternalism gets out and reigns. This is how its currents destroy democracy in the name of “god” who is not *gd*.

Just a little something more to think about before November elections.





Sunday, September 23, 2012

MORE VAGINA SPEAK: IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER

THINGS MEN SAY *ABOUT * WOMAN : PT.2
Foster Friess, a prominent backer of Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, demonstrating the versatility of aspiring.  The non-medical SuperPac funder very early in 2012 suggests that aspirin is great at developing the muscles around the knees and thus  prevents unwanted pregnancies. -Mock, Paper Scissors 


The last two years have been pretty tough on women when it comes to things men say *about* them. Most people know by now where this attitude is coming from.  So I won't mention the Republican presidential platform when it comes to social issues nor the litany of early candidates for president  pushing a religious conservatism so far right of today's  consensus on social issues it truly fits a categorical nonrepresentative political bloc whose outcomes are creating undue chaos and derision that continues to reek havoc with the well-being of women  unbalancing with an intent to topple their true social consent.  Let the example speak for itself and listen to the unbelievable moment Foster Friess  undoes a truly stunned Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC. 

 

Paternalism


"Paternalism" comes from the Latin pater, meaning to act like a father, or to treat another person like a child. ("Parentalism" is a gender-neutral anagram of "paternalism".) In modern philosophy and jurisprudence, it is to act for the good of another person without that person's consent, as parents do for children.

                     –Peter Suber, “Paternalism”

Paternalism when applied to the citizen status of women, if it appropriates a woman’s citizen right to participate equally in self-government, for example, passing laws which may not reflect social self-consent to control access to abortion, oral contraception, gynecological healthcare insurance, etc., may reflect not consensual self-paternalism but rather minoritarian or majoritarian tyranny. There is a difference between government and self-government in shaping the laws you and I will go on to live by. Consider this important insight from Peter Suber’s essay,

In a democracy, paternalism in the criminal law can to some extent be construed as self-paternalism. If "we" made the laws against usury and gambling, then "we" are restraining only ourselves. Before we justify these laws as self-paternalism, however, we must ask whether we are describing our democracy accurately or platitudinously. If laws to protect citizens from themselves were made by one non-representative faction, class, or bloc, or if the electoral process is distorted so that the outcomes of elections do not represent true social consent, then we may be dealing less with consensual self-paternalism than with majoritarian (or even minoritarian) tyranny. To overlook this possibility would justify paternalism by turning a blind eye to one of its most objectionable features.

In an even larger way, you can see an example of paternalism’s conceit operating right now in Mitt Romney’s remarks regarding “the 47%.” Paternalism works unfairly a redistribution of power over all citizenship status, not just female status. In western psyche’s mythic inheritance paternalism’s moral code seems to begin in a religious philosophy of kings and prophets (not to mention profits). And then, as times moved on, times changed. Or, to say this another way, *gd* took on the image of god, the creator likened to that of “clockmaker”.

When *gd* Was a Clockmaker

Set within this context the Constitution underwent shaping in the 18thC giving face and body to the law of our land. The Constitution is not grounded in the Bible per say. Ideas forming constitutional language are influenced by the image of god as clockmaker inherent in mythic patterns of deism in an epoch of enlightenment and work between images of many gods not merely the one god of monotheism. (see http://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/age-jefferson-andmadisonreligion/essays/thomas-jefferson-and-deism#_ftn1). These images of the many gods are none other than inborn patterns of the racial archetype of the specie. You don’t have to be a deist, nor believe in deism over Christianity or vice versa, for these inborn patterns in the psyche to be operating or for their affects to have effect. One resultant constitutional effect is the upholding of separation of church and state. Within it is the premise that when majority rules take shape, the lawgivers must protect the interest of minority rights to life and to liberty and to preserve citizen ability to pursue a happy life to the fullest extent.

Once more let me say it. The Constitution is grounded in the idea that whoever rules must work on behalf the equal rights of all the people not just their own preferred kind (religion, business interest, cultural ethnicity, age group, city, neighborhood, etc) The idea that underlies the Constitution, something the President, before he/she can take office must vow to uphold, is based in majority rule with respect the citizen status rights of the minority; these rights are guaranteed equal under the law. Congress, under the sway of the 2012 tea party entrance into lawmaking, has been using the tactic that redefines what a term means to narrow meaning and pass law that does not respect certain citizens’ rights to equal representation. They are appropriating and speaking on your behalf against your right to equal coverage to health insurance, opportunities for meaningful work, equal access to affordable education, etc.


UP NEXT PT.3  But, How Did It Get This Way?





Friday, September 21, 2012

MORE VAGINA-SPEAK















THINGS MEN SAY *ABOUT * WOMAN : Pt 1
If you grew up in the 1950's, the attitude published in the New York Daily Mirror article was prevalent among American men.  But, the old form daddy knows best in that old time religion is no answer to today’s currents of social, spiritual and economic distemper. Nor, judging by the antics of conservative Christian politics in America these days, should it be.  I use the term “Christian” loosely because the religious politic of the Christian right gives body and face nationally to what seems an ailing imitatio Christi dragging behind it a terrible lack in ethical compassion for what ails us as a people. At root, an image of psyche, it cannot represent all of Christianity itself nor the wholly psyche and Jung may be right when he says, “In the long run we worship as a divine example a man who embodied the deepest meaning of life, and then, out of sheer imitation, we forget to make real our own deepest meaning―self-realization….”[i] If I and Daddy are one in our deepest most meaningful form governing forms, the governing form nearest to this may well be at work in terms of a consensual self-paternalism reshaping the American cultural myth. The shadow in it would be working, too. And that tyranny would be well worth challenging. That said,  I know as I sort among senses for things as they are in the soul of the American polis, "man", alone, (meaning "men") can never speak *to*  the idea, “woman" anyways.

What Did She Just Say?


I mean “man”, in terms of male gender, cannot define what woman is and wants for herself as a self-determined kind in body, spirit and soul. He can only speak *about* woman and woman here takes on the meaning of *an image* he has of what all women ought to be, i.e. a gender construct. But, she is the boss of “she”; he is not the boss of “she”. In other words, “he and she” in their belonging together will not work as an oppositionalism anymore. *They* want to build in life something else together these days.

I’m talking about soul, of course. Today both men and women want better soul-making. You see, in terms of material imagination and archetype, just as *an image* of god cannot contain all of what is meant by the word, *god*, so, too, what is *man* and what is *woman* cannot be contained by the image one has or the image one’s society has for all that *man/woman* is. Should you appropriate what speaks *to woman* to speak about her you will have already dumbed down and appropriated her voice speaking for itself.


To Form A More Perfect Union

If one does this in religion, i.e. dumb down the image of god to lay claim to all god means one is practicing idolatry. Therefore, and to avoid doing that in the name of religion, the religious imagination rewrites god by spelling god’s name thusly: “gd” [as in the Hebraic inheritance, JHWH.] Missing letters help to make this point stick and written thusly help us to remember it. One’s own “god-image” cannot speak all *gd* is and means.

Something like this is true for you and I now as we struggle together on national concerns relating to each other how best to (re)form a more perfect national union. Just as woman is not man and cannot speak for all he is, man is not woman and cannot speak on her behalf but must represent her voice fairly and equally and likewise must a woman do this in Congress or the Presidency if elected to represent him. That is because “a man” is not "man", the metaphor  and “a woman” is not “woman”, the metaphor.  The meaning carried in metaphorical language representing "sex" and sexual union to our specie as carried in the biological archetype as metaphors open to reveal themselves is much harder to grasp. So let’s write woman, *wmn* and man, *mn* and the one citizen body lets write *mnwmn* to keep this awareness affirmed.

Furthermore, the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness in our Constitution is what representation in citizen body vows to uphold. It is not the individual implicit bias of a man or a woman's interpretation once elected to office or superegos of special interests, religious Christian groups notwithstanding. Any time folks try to dumb down and redefine terms to coalesce governing powers in the hands of special interests to pass law that does not reflect true social consent their thinking is guilty of paternalism. There are different kinds and paternalism in and of itself i.e. consensual, self-paternalism seems to me to fall closest to the notion, self-government.

UP NEXT: Pt 2  of "Vagina-Speak" 

[i] C.G. Jung. CW volume 13  Alchemical Studies. New Jersey: Princeton, 1967, p 53.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

The Giving Body: When Absence Helps

credits: see fb/Melissa La Flamme post Tuesday, September 11, 2012
For Charles McNeill

Fur to amber, vagina speak is like a rubbing stone
and in a kind of fixative, the artist’s heart
to a necessary kind is hair
but with the h-sound marking her invisible scent―
an inaudible absence-presence
right where one feels one’s own
standing on end waiting for thunder.

Pole to pole electrons carry in such "nesses" what’s missing
static magnetics, language presenced h’ard and h’art ―the un
“heard heart” shot through not hit and not hit, the deep image
unknown, carries in the air and in the opening h-space an “e”
[as in ecstasy] longed for and missing...X'd [...]; it marks the spot.

And when absence helps, missing letters untouchable

this heart of hers relinquished to what's hers
her own pleasure...and unowned!
behold it in the air
and in her beheld
be held beautifully.

******************************************

It’s no secret why Zeus spent so much of himself
weighting on a woman; poets can only know secrets
already known in the soul, left unuttered and nakedly hanging
like scents in [h]air where thunder cracked.



©2012 Cracked stephanie pope matter & beauty poetry series, mythopoetry.com

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

PECKSNIFFIAN!

                 CC0 WikiMedia Commons

Are you wondering what the word title means?  A real attention grabber right? Good!  Now listen up!  Today's blog is about the dumbing down of meanings operating in our language that word important ideas to which the words we use in discourse refer.  I'm thinking about the word "government" and the word "politician" and a third term you cannot see operating in between these two ideas, "pecksniffian."

This may just be the right descriptive adjective for this tyranny going on that thinks systematically toward a political dismantling of representative democracy in America!  It is always to be majority rule with respect for minority rights. One elected to serve must honor the will of the people and do so by protecting equally the inalienable rights of every individual citizen.   But Arizona's leadership under Jan Brewer are pecksniffian in their approch to civic responsibilities.

PECKSNIFFIAN / [pronunciation: (p k-sn f - n)] adjective: Hypocritically and smugly affecting benevolence or high moral principles. After Seth Pecksniff, a character in Martin Chuzzlewit, a novel by Charles Dickens. To gather a sense for what I mean, compare today's Arizona Republic headlines (1.) with  AZ REP headlines this past March (2.)

(1.) Brewer Urged To Halt Medical-Marijuana Program; County Attorneys Say Licensing Will Defy Law. -by Yvonne Wingett Sanchez July 30, 2012 @ 10:59pm  The Republic azcentral.com

(2.) Arizona Seeking Pacts With Other States To Defy Federal Government. -by Ginger Rough Mar. 9, 2011 12:00 AM The Republic azcentral.com

The number two headline concerns more than just the  national, attention-getting and controversial immigration defiance as this excerpt shows...

Arizona lawmakers are working to create alliances with other states on controversial issues such as health care, immigration and firearms regulation in a growing effort to challenge the authority of the federal government.

Now my own thought here yields the notion that for these two picturings to operate opening a window framing the margins in seeing between March and the edge of August this election year, there must also be operating in the mind of the Arizona Republican party leadership currently in power in this state something between sense and nonsense swinging the pendulum of the collective governing civic mind of these folks that privately desires to dismantle the authority of We, The People in the process, something that dumbs down what government is to “mean”.

What is the meaning of government?  What is it to adopt a politically "pecksniffian" manner?  Who benefits if excluding participation of  SOME KINDS OF PEOPLES OVER OTHER KINDS OF PEOPLES OF AMERICA in SELF-GOVERNMENT were to be the normative principle of the day?  What if your story when you are old is to tell your great grandchildren how it was to be alive during the days of the Great Suppression? How is it the same group of politicians defy laws they don't want to obey against the mandate of people they are elected to serve? Pecksniffian is the attitude of the current legal campaign taking shape under the guidance of thirteen county attorneys and Jan Brewer's office. 

These same folks want us to believe their political responses are legitimate where they defy  the public mandate in what We, The People of the state which elected them to office mandate in passing this law.  Sadly, folks, they are not!  Politicians and other elected state officials (not to mention officials of high professional stature in private practices working closely with public leadership)  on the one hand build legal briefs to challenge and violate federal law due to the federal government's failure to act. On the other hand, the same, local, elected leadership in concert with county attorneys usurp the will of the people to self-govern in the face of federal law, which they now hide behind in a failure to act. Yes, folks, all that is in deed, acting!  They act like they are acting, which they indeed are, but poorly! Because it is in civic terms that the political actor masks his failure. The tragedy is doubly tragic for state elected officials fail to act on behalf  We, The People! 

Exclusions and divisions, exclusivity and derisions continue in Arizona splitting in two what kind of civic people hold power.  One must now vote with an eye for reclaiming one’s civic right to govern! VOTE with an eye for WE, THE PEOPLE as opposed to the politician 's pecksniffian approach to government.

Friday, July 20, 2012

HERA'S EYES


                                                1963 etching by Salvador Dali
First published in
"Like A Woman Falling" ©2004, the following poem, inspired by a dream, is based upon the myth of IO as told by Ovid in "Metamorphoses".

IN A DREAM SHE LAY STILL


inside what she couldn't see one thousand eyed in two or three
the egg hatched when the eagle maid
in black, remade in gold...

Last night She dreamt an alchemy, She dreamt
neither me nor mine. She dreamt
herself and when that died
She left her eyes behind. He said
This forest burns
burns high in the heavens, see
every tree is blackened
to its tips. He said

Pick that up
and so, someone leaned over the edge and reached
high in the heavens low
and picked from the tallest tips of the blackened pines
someone looking just like me pitched out
and thus drew in two boughs, two boughs, both dead
one black, one gold, one ash and one
whose blossoming did hold. They are dead
someone looking just like me then said.

He said, "Separate them!" And, I did, while he went on
and on and on―an on-to-say, a story. The fires de-story
everything tis true, as this fire, this terrific fire did you
but look what you now hold. Downwardlooking

I lifted two boughs, both were dead
once.
He said

Separation changes things. Now that you know this
you will, too. Now you must get away quickly...
(is this a quickening a-go?) Go!
Get away with this saying-thing! And so

I jumped into a heap between two gents
a father and a son. What a mess!
that leap, this heap, these men
the son was driving
(too close to the edge)
the father's face kept changing―he had three!
(none of which I liked) but, that
didn't stop me from interacting
and all the while we were climbing.

And, we kept climbing, up a slippery slope
conforming to its curl, the dash tilting such
that water kept flowing toward us while curving
to the dash. The son was driving
on the outside where the three of us sat...
and the cab began leaking...from the in-side out.

Everything's a mess, I thought, yet,
is adhering so. The boy
reached out and slurped a sliding slip of a sip
from the dash. It was a mad dash! Such a bad water
a mad-lad, sad-bad water!
Turns out dad hauls manure.
(It was his truck the boy was driving.)
"Are you sure he knows how," I asked
just as we parked.

I got out as quick as I could
parked like we were on that iffy cliff
cleft with crevices and rocks and a high house
built upon stone. Some folks were home
a girlfriend I knew came out
we rushed into each other's arms
and each other's laughter. Oh, the things
you have been saying, she said.

I know. Don't you love it, the things I say?
They want to know how on earth
you do it, get away with that say. They want
to learn those sayings, too. I said

Oh, that is simple
then I showed them all. You let IT
form the picture. You let IT do the work.
Let it as IT, and IT will let you.

It opened then in the work they were
working on them. All the right colors bled, too
in the one I drew, which I used in example

I let the paint do its own painting, I said.
Then we watched and we saw that the paint did.
IT showed up and showed through and showed
quite a show―My! All those eyes!

Which formed into forms that died dry
in a day scene. But, just before they did...
in the center of the seen a black thing formed
and it began to grow

and this black thing formed into a bird
a bird in flight rising from a
red, red sorry sort of spot
surrounded in a circularity of gold
from where it hatched.

Seems eggs hatch when we
return a story.

And so, no body's sorry
about jumping into that
truckload of sh-sh...stuff
nor about exposing people
to all those black things bleeding
through their own red-dead, dead red
sorry messes
nor about
messin' with those guys...even though

(somebody still thinks that driver needs lessons)


Hera's Eyes, stephanie pope from 
 "Like A Woman Falling" ©2004








Sunday, June 17, 2012

MR SPEAKER, "VAGINA" IS NOT A DIRTY WORD!

Pejorative Movement
The moment the gavel came down we knew. Mr Speaker's gavel carried the sense of it in a thud. Mr Thudly Do-Right-Speaker set the doo-doo tone in the gavel's voice; the movement pejorative, the sound of it doo-doing something very wrong. What the gavel did in the downward-moving hand of Mr Speaker was underscore a sinister attitude of paternalism prevailing on the floor of Congress which intends systematically to disparage the citizenship status of all female body by silencing both female and male bodies speaking before Congress on behalf gender equality in the constitutionally guaranteed female citizen-body status-rights to life liberty and pursuit of a happy life. 

You see, Mr Speaker, you cannot gavel away vagina-speak speaking for more than itself through what is no longer working (religiously I might add) in its attempt to return "woman" to a second class citizenship status!  Furthermore, Mr Speaker, vagina-speak speaks for more than just it's own female body; it is speaking for freedom of religion, too. 

To understand what I mean, you, the reader need to view the actual content of the address Mr Speaker gavels in which the legitimately dignified medical term, "vagina" is used.


And now that you see it and hear it, believe it. Congresswoman Lisa Brown is Jewish. And what got gaveled hid the truth that is called into legitimate question.  Namely that Judaism asserts when it comes to abortion, the status of the fetus as human life DOES NOT EQUAL THAT OF THE MOTHER. What is protested in Congresswoman Brown's address is the blurring of the line between religion and government (wrong number one) to difference (as in defer the meaning in the action and delay its recognition) an unequal citizenship status for all women based on gender. (wrong number two) No amount of fixing the economy will matter until this pejorative movement's attempt to pass into law said inequality is rendered impotent.

"The matter" where something is definitely THE matter, is what Thomas Jefferson referred to as “this loathsome combination of church and state” (see the Virgina Statute of Religious Freedom) having shared sentiments with James Madison's view (see James Madison on Separation of Church and State that “the civil Government, though bereft of everything like an associated hierarchy, possesses the requisite stability, and performs its functions with complete success, whilst the number, the industry, and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people, have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the Church from the State.” 

You see more than any other framer of the Constitution, James Madison's view shaped the first amendment civil liberty on religious freedom. What Madison believes that is at work in the First Amendment, ie what the term "religion" "is" and "means" must be allowed to survive on its own merits based in what individual citizens truly have faith in.  And that reveals a certain something important. There is a difference in "faith" and "belief".  You cannot use these terms interchangeably to mean the same thing.  People in high places put alot of spin on religious beliefs to legitimate doing some very wrong things like the doo-doing gavel of Mr Speaker did this week. Mr Speaker, what you did this week is a moral outrage!


Mr. Speaker, you would do well to take heed  Lisa Brown's faith-based history lesson applying Madison's view exercising  her freedom of speech as well as sharing her religion's view which asks what gives folks in Congress the right to ask any citizen to uphold religious views of others against their own religious views and practices let alone ask them to pass laws to this effect?

Congresswoman Brown underscores the violation of the citizen trust persons in Congress represent when they take the oath of office to uphold the Constitution of these United States of America and then vote to violate every woman's god-given right to life, to exercise her Constitutional First Amendment right to practice her own religion freely as an American Citizen and her right to self-govern her own body and oversee its well-being. 

Ms. Brown's vagina address is more statesman-like than your gavel, Mr. Speaker, because it upholds how she was elected to speak as a statesman. And you, Mr Speaker, need to take her lead and heed the challenge in her vagina address calling for an exercise of law which maintains separation of powers between religion and government.

My vagina, Mr Speaker, has spoken.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

'Sluts' Over 'Nuts'










Getty Images/ Political commentator Rush Limbaugh, left, and Sandra Fluke, a third-year law student at Georgetown University and former president of the Students for Reproductive Justice group there, are shown in these file photos.


Today is Mother's Day, 2012, the same year as election year, the same year women's concerns over reproductive freedoms, healthcare coverage, economic equity in pay, etc. are under attack. A war on women? An attempt to relocate the notion as a war between women?

Today I read Huffington Post's article by Pauline Arrillaga titled 'War On Women' 2012: Amid Controversy, Women Ponder How They Became Campaign Issue  which recaptures a good deal of the imagery and energetic that swirls around what many women and men thought a non-issue, something as a nation we've already determined and a matter for families to decide privately and for women to shoulder responsibly and without invasive coercion from outside by dominator forms of religious and government imposition.

The article recaps "Susan G. Komen ending cancer-screening grants to Planned Parenthood (quickly reversed). And disputes over laws designed to protect women against wage discrimination (Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker last month signed a repeal of his state's equal pay law, while a U.S. Senate candidate in Michigan called a federal equal pay law a 'nuisance')" along with bringing back into the fray the very evident assault on abortion rights. I note the article articulates how, what many thought was an issue already decided, returned with "the historic Republican gains during the tea party-driven 'red tide' of 2010." Although someone else may have already made this connection, this is the first time I've seen in print what I intuitively already understand.

Now it appears the 2010 red tide "teaparty-bringing" activism to culture in socio-political surfaces in a "war on women" has become a "tea garden"but written, "teegarden" as in Karen Teegarden, the woman who launched UniteWomen.org. Its mission statement: "Help defend women's rights and pursuit of equality." Her activism comes to the fore in the infamous and insensitive Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke slut-calling fiasco.  Teegarden's response comes at a critical juncture in a larger call to social activism for men and women.

If you didn't know it, Teegarden's UniteWomen.org used social media and internet to organize protests in cities across the country on April 28th, 2012. My locale, Phoenix, took part where coat hangers were on display featuring a plea: "Keep Abortion Safe & Legal."  Photos of coat hangers inudated Govenor Jan Brewers office in protest to the Govenor's signing of a bill, HB 2800, unfunding Planned Parenthood. She did this at a gathering of the Susan B Anthony List, a grassroot activist organization intending the systematic defunding of Planned Parenthood. No "war on women," eh? Or "the only 'war on women' is the one being waged by the left," eh?  Saying such things to we, the people is called gaslighting, telling people what they really see isn't really going on. But, who's nuts?

Of central importance is supporting and sustaining Planned Parenthood as an important, primary source of women's healthcare and it must not be covered over, something I think the phrase " 'Sluts' over 'Nuts' " taken as metaphor and turned diaphorically, suggests. My thought is that an amplification of the mythologem which underlies this notion may dwell within its “depth-nature” and “godding power”archetypally. And, I think a turning over of the phrase in another kind of therapy of soul is possible by re-turning the phraseology laying it aside David Miller's "Why Men are Mad: Nothing-Envy and the Fascration Complex," Spring 51, p77 sorting out a few of the 'nuts'.

David's remarkable thought, by extension, suggests we, too, might now apply at this critical juncture, a "therapy of ideas" to what ails our “national” soul. David's ideas say in essence, you have to let “the nothingness of words” get into you. That is, you have to wake up to the way mythos (the storytelling from psyche's point of view) coming from the inner experiences of people,"the nothingnesses," (particularly the nothingnesses of women, in this instance,) operates in the logos (the meanings that mean) suspending what is being conveyed to hear beyond egoic and superegoic points of view. One is to try to hear operating in our assertions in culture and politics what the alterity of being has to say. 

In "Three Faces of God",(p.3) theologian, Miller also conveys his sense for the practice of ego theology, something going on right now in the christian, religious, arrogance of a very paternalistic attempt by a social, christian, conservative thrust in politics wishing to seize government control over the female citizen's body processes against their individual alterity in individuating will.

Miller (w)rites in Three Faces of God: Traces of Trinity In Literature and Life (Fortress Press, Philadelphia: 1986, p.3), "Both doctrinal and pietistic theologizing tend to deny or defend against the depths of religious meaning, its fundamental mystery and ambiguity, its terror and grace, its autonomous nature that comes and goes as it will, like the Holy Ghost wandering over the face of the deep." You have to let THIS NOTHINGNESS get into you, the voice of a depth experience operating in what operates openly.

There is a call to awaken the heroic nature within the feminine (life-giving, regenerative) principle in both men and women returning this to its own ground of authority and reshaping its poetic turn, its embodying power in soul and body"female" as bodies that matter (voices themselves that stand in for their own representational authority as opposed to bodies spoken for against their own alterity of difference.)

Something has risen up and embued national soul in the Limbaugh/Fluke moment shining through in "sluts" who are not "sluts" addressing a body  that matters (a Democratic committee) acting out of bodies that matterboth individual and female, (Sandra Fluke) as well as collective and feminine (Students for Reproductive Justice)bodies charged with the inner life's visionary soul-making in manner much like the christic, feminine "annuciated" body, the mythologem, "Mary".

It is this embodying power which is enlivened with divinity in the vision intuiting "The Annuciation" and/as in both men and women of good will. The and/as space is newly forming and carries the will that expresses alterity of free being like a spirit moving over the face of the deep. (!)

Strikingly, within each new form of livliness grows an alterity of being which authors/fathers its own stories (the personal mythos of a heroine's adventure, Psyche's "soul") in relation to the on-going  egoic theology's storytelling by un-doing and re-doing what attempts to picture "femininity" using  2012's campaign politicisms through genderpaternalisms, which are "nuts", meaning both crazy and too masculine in their works thus far nationally, if the Pew Institute's stat on which voter block (white, Protestant, evangelical and Republican) is really behind the return of what most Americans thought already decided when it comes to women's reproductive rights, rights most believe belong to a specific ground where such things are to be worked through, ie within families themselves.

Clearly the practice of religious freedom does not mean unlimited freedom to practice your religion through government seizure of someone else's body processes and colonizing these processes for your own purposes, religious and political will not withstanding, nor targeting a highly reputable and collective body held in high esteem such as is Planned Parenthood. For, as David Miller also wrote in the passage quoted above, "Ego theology is a defense mechanism which banalizes religion." Meaning  a socio-political practice meant to merely reinstate an ego theology is what is really nuts. One thing the new refrain is not to sing is "give me that old time religion."

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