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.

'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 matter―both 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 gender―paternalisms, 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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MARCH AND MAD

WOMEN, COMEDY & HUMOR

Well, Horsey's political cartoon, appearing in the  LA Times March 5th, 2012, caused me to make a new connection to women and humor and comedy because women weren't and aren't laughing at this yet women's humor is working in the soul here. The soul of the political cartoon expresses a feminine activism in which all men and women in the national soul participate. The metaphor for this soul is "citizen body".

So, two things come alive to me. Sandra Fluke, in addressing Congress just before the Blunt-Rubio bill goes to vote, is participating in a body that matters and thus is now behaving “woman-body” before a body that matters, congress, a woman who is shaper of citizen body. This is new and big and out of line with the old, western, mythic, Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian inheritance that once upheld the fantasy story for the way we are to behave our collectively held imaginal forms about how men and women are to live together.

The national psyche is disturbed by events of last week. This is only the material cause causing something, an image of psyche our tacit presuppositions hold unconsciously to (re)surface a bit more consciously. The secret cause is archetypal and imaginal and it’s signaled a change in national soul around what fathers want for their daughters.

This past week’s seeming seams the old image in the Greek myth of Pandora, which links the female sex veiled in sexy sex as somehow “evil” sex, to what's going on in the collective soul today in how women behave themselves in public. And so the Limbaugh fantasy playing to the traditions of the old fathering side is restating ―as in repeating or mime-ing― the old way inner, mythic figures in inherited western fantasy once soul formation(s) of national soul. But something is changed in the collectively held psyche of our national soul and the daughter side is playing its role in a new way.

Remember this early Greek myth oppresses “female” and “sex” and therefore, the female sex herself is a “vessel-image”. “Woman” “as vessel” within which the Greek woman, it was fantasized, is to carry herself into marriage, operates on the tacit presupposition of a masculine divinity’s desire for male maternity. Zeus wants to give birth to a daughter. She is this vessel carrying the wisdom of the national endowment, the treasury of Zeus.  Hence, the "play" is carried differently. And this difference is what came to the fore this week.

The vessel (pithos or dolium it was called) that traditionally and literally accompanied each woman into marriage belonged to all Greek wedding rites as much as did the veil given the new bride to wear. Both signified “marriage”; the bride as a sexual vessel and the vessel as her role in lieu of citizen status on the one hand and the veil, “marriage” as that body behind which in public she was to (dis)appear. Marriage is given woman’s “sex” in lieu of a citizenship status equal to that of men’s “sex” who may both literally appear in public but whose sexual fantasy about male maternity may  also make its fantasy appearance visibly "public" as well.  Such it is that inferential as statement: “sex”  specifically as “male” + “sexual” +“fantasy” is what now as it once was in days of old that which may address "citizen body" as what is allowed to be talked about. It is what appears before bodies that matter and addresses such bodies as it once did the Greek forum as citizen.

In the Pandora myth the Greek female citizen is given in marriage, spoken for and ceases to speak for herself. The prostitute, working outside marriage, carries the image negation. So “clean sex” and “dirty sex” and both represented as “Pandora” veil the repression of “sex” itself behind male maternity fantasies.

That is the first thing and it is a big thing. It is big because when our young women have the courage to step from outside this fantasy operating unconsciously in the national soul they are behaving the wise fool―and the old comic seriousness seriously. They play it as it leaps in a fresh way and from out the deep zone at that!

The second thing is I suddenly realized when I saw this political cartoon, female images are used to bring together our worst fears and our best jokes because they –ie women, themselves aren't supposed to have a sense of humor (which is a felt sense for the comic in the soul) And they are up against this tacit presupposition that the entire imaginary making up the national life’s story must reenact the story of a fantasy of male maternity, when they do.

But if myths are to work in a mythoclastic manner, they are to be reworked and re-enacted mythopoetically, not literally portrayed but psychically overturned so that one functions from one’s own individual body-psyche contributing collectively to the treasury of national soul how soul matters for real its 2012 national psyche. I think that is what will go into the voting booth this November.

So that finally, this is what I've been exploring this morning I should be doing other things. If you are interested in this line of exploration regarding women and humor see the work of Nancy A Walker (for one/ her book, "A Very Serious Thing"? is on women and humor.) And here is an interesting paper exploring the humor in the soul of Emily Dickinson's writing. http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/464206?uid=3739256&sid=55861244623.

So that you will continue to think about some of the images that psyche mattered this mad month of March, let me leave you with an Emily poem, "They Shut Me Up In Prose"...

They shut me up in Prose-
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet-
Because they like me "still"-

Still! Could themself have peeped-
And seen my Brain-go round-
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason-in the Pound-

Himself has but to will
And easy as a Star
+ Abolish his-Captivity-
And laugh-No more have I-


Editor Note: I would like to thank Ric Williams and the rest of the mythopoetry facebook community who provided me some much-needed talk-therapy to work this up.  Thanks, folks!

Shadow: What Does It Know

The big story in the Washington Post online Friday September 8, 2006 reveals the decision by the Bush administration to move fourteen detainees from undisclosed locations around the globe to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Shackled, sedated and hooded, “their arrival marks the end of a five-year effort by the Bush administration to conceal as many as 100 al-Qaeda suspects from the world and to shield the agency's interrogation tactics and facilities from public scrutiny”, writes Washington Post staff writers Dafna Linzer and Glenn Kessler. A shadowy picture accompanies the text. This morning I can’t help thinking about shadows.

One of the more famous shadows of my childhood I inherit from my father. My father was a dramatic actor in his youth and trained in voice and broadcasting in college. He was the star in the senior play in high school and wanted to be a radio news announcer until the practical side of life took over and he, as a young father with a dynamically growing family, took a job with the U.S. government. This brings me to the early 1950’s and my childhood inheritance from my father’s side. Dad loved the old-time mystery radio shows of his own childhood lived in the days before television. The one famous line he would dramatize went, “Only the shadow knows!” The line I recall never really happened that way in the original radio program, Detective Story whose debut in radio ocurrs in August of 1930. The program’s actual opening line is “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” The line made the shadow character so popular the show eventually was renamed, “The Shadow.” The gifted nature of his shadowy ability allows “The Shadow” to overcome any of his enemies. I checked him out with mystery.net. Sure enough The Shadow…


"a figure never seen only heard, was an invincible crime fighter. Besides his tremendous strength, he could defy gravity, speak any language, unravel any code, and become invisible with his famous ability to “cloud men’s minds.”


If I keep in mind the idea of a radio show where we have to imagine the shadow image like the one I’ve provided this essay, I believe I can understand why The Shadow is never seen and only “heard.” But, this kind of shadow the image of this kind of shadowy nature of psyche revalues and reimagines today has a much harder time being heard in our present day. How aware of shadow are we?

Today we see the shadows of others without recognizing ourselves in them. We know with the known being kept under guard and unknown. Our shadows remain in shadow themselves. They are all one thin color. They can’t be identified as me and you. The message is clear. The shadow must remain alien and apart. It must remain an enemy and foreign. We are not to see anything other than the existence of the shadow (and see it as other than and separate from ourselves in what we claim we are). The shadow is to have no voice and to deliver no message of its own. The image the shadow is now made to wear says not that it fights evil nor that it will help us fight evil, but that it is evil.

The Washington Post article refers to such facilities that maintain the apartness of the shadow as “black sites”; these sites, like the detainees, are kept from public scrutiny. They, too, remain invisible. It seems we are allowed to see the shadow but not what the shadow sees. Thusly, we come to know only of the shadow and not what the shadow knows. Part of the collective problem of the shadow dwells in our being swallowed by it. We are in it. How do we get out from within the shadow?

Like a sound bite, the shadow remains a shallow surface with ghastly consequences in allusion. Sequestered unheard, without rights of even closer scrutiny and critique, our empowered collective shadow has permission to abuse and the abuse may be held secret and in high places for a long, long time. Projected back onto surfaces, the evil the shadow knows is always “out there.” To this John Goldhammer remarks, “Yes!” For Goldhammer suggests we are seeing the shadow of fudamentalism at work.

But, the shadow marks a kind of vacuous space. This may be what Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig (henceforth, AGC) tries to speak to when he writes, The Emptied Soul and then goes on to talk about this emptiness. As AGC notes the companion traits of The Shadow, he attempts to separate and define our notions of the eros and the aggression as distinct from The Shadow itself. The Shadow consists of several different levels. It harbors elements we cannot identify with or that are repressed because of education, culture, or value system. It can be individual or collective. I’ve been thinking about the collective shadow this morning. This shadow is the one the entire culture represses. That’s why I have said our collective problem is that we are in it. We cannot see it because we are in it. How do we get out?

I like what AGC has to say about The Shadow. You’ve got to begin by knowing something about the existence of these black shadow sites imaginally. They are part of the experience of experiencing what is missing. What soul lacks soul? And when the shadow lacks its soul what is it that has been lost? The shadow, says AGC, is a complex matter. As a complex it has an archetypal core, one distinguishable from the instinct of self-assertion, what you and I think of as aggression, and the shadow element of psychic destructiveness. (Emptied,136)

And, there you have it, one man’s insight, but a pretty good one. The empty element in the shadow soul is an element of psychic destructiveness. It portends the absence of eros.

AGC notes that this absence of eros can appear in quite charming people. This means charm is as much a claim to the presence of such absence as to the presence of eros. We have reached a season of shadow. We are in it. That morning I began thinking of it as if it were like the fall equinox. This season of shadow is a season of spectacular change. Like the fall equinox we will have had to overcome ideas about being special and the center of what matters just to begin to get to know what we didn’t know about the season of shadows we are experiencing today. That was no small effort on our part then and it will take no small effort on are part today. To know what a shadow knows means we will have had to dare to think new thoughts like we once did autumnally...perhaps, about things only our shadows can share.

Essay first published by mythopoetry.com September 8, 2006 @ 10:07am