"Time to learn how to become a grownup"--hey now, wait just a minute

A week ago, I got a big fairly important teaching/mentoring award from the art school. It's one of the big things that is given away on the Honors and Awards night they do annually each spring.

I described the whole experience in a Facebook status, which reminds me that for most of 2012 and up to the present, I've been writing over there much more, MUCH more, like I write over here. There has definitely been an importation of content, and style also, but not with the hard darkness that sometimes characterizes my writing over here.

I'll summarize the award ceremony: I knew in advance this was coming, through email, and the award is given by students recommending faculty for the honor, so that was awesome. But the room was full of all of the students getting any kind of scholarship or award or anything, and as many faculty as could make it, so pretty full, definitely over 200 people, I'd say. I an named for the award, and the room goes BALLISTIC, for I have many fans in there, and the award is, like I said, a big deal. Many of my students on one side of the room are standing, and I feel that they're going to do the wave any second. And as I could see this award coming, I was torn between reactions like pride/humility, as if I wasn't sure how to handle a public spotlight on what I do in classrooms.

And that's the rub of the whole thing: an INSTITUTIONAL award, essentially provided by my students, by our somewhat private relationships (although my reputation runs far and wide in that building, and I know that).

It put me in a pretty Foucault state of mind: am I being surveilled? Is this publicity normalizing? Do I need to do less sexy and racy stuff in class now? No, wait, that's all nonsense. I got this BECAUSE of that, not despite it. But I couldn't quite process the public/private line, the line between institutional appreciation and actual lived personal AFFECTIVE EXCHANGE. It's like getting an award for your relationship.

When I told J about this emotional situation, she said, "Looks like it's time that you accepted that you're a grownup," or words closely to that effect, I can't quite remember them precisely. She was there to see the whole thing.

And I understand what she means: a "grownup" has a home in the social, is a "person" in public life, has a career, has a public face, "matters." I get that.

But if we look at my emotional reaction, we don't see anxiety about that, not about that specifically. We see that I've made affective relating into my career, as much as I can. See the Abject Art class or the intense advising/personal relating that I do in the theory course with all of the MFA students, or the seniors in the Capstone class. It's high-affect, in all of those cases, and like I said, getting an award for that kind of advising/mentoring, EVEN THOUGH THAT IS PART OF WHY AND HOW THIS AWARD IS GIVEN, is like getting an award for your relationship.

So for me, the wiggly bit is "public recognition of high affect." And this is a combination of the fact that I teach about Mapplethorpe, and Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelly mining adolescence for anxiety, and Serrano's photos of women with horses and such, but it's ALSO about the sheer intensity possible in intense advising, like asking someone what that work is about and finding out that it's about mom, and saying "Oedipus" and all of that and really GETTING INTO the work, or telling writers that this one document, a "capstone paper" is their public identity, and yet, identity can be rewritten, flexes, and oh, here's a tangent to French theory...

I think that "advising and mentoring" is understood, particularly recently, as about job preparation, about professional life, and when I do advising and mentoring, at least in any way that matters to me, I do it about personality, who a person is or can become; I want DOORS OPENED, even if the person isn't ready to go there. If I can get it, I don't want just the art or the project or career, but the REAL LIFE, the REAL CONCERNS of that person, and whatever I need to do to get in there, I want to do.

So being a "grownup" does mean the social, the social FACE, but if we look at my Capricorn ascendant for a minute, at least according to Steven Forrest's book, we see that Cap is the sign of INTEGRITY in that the outer and inner lives match, and are not distorted by fame. The Capricorn persona knows who it is and wishes to keep that first above all else. So my public/private split in self-perception can be chalked up directly to this. I know who I am in a classroom, not in the sense of "I have this affect," but in the sense of "hey let's all do this." It isn't actually about who I am (is that "teacher-centered" learning?) but about my game, the games that I suggest and that I run. These games are not me, they are organized by me. And I run high on intuition (Aries moon) and I get, more often than not, a fairly juicy interpersonal environment, and I like it that way. It isn't clean and neat and with a big fat divider between "me" and "them" but I prefer that; you can't have a good conversation with everyone lying back far away.

And so getting that award IS, on a certain level, like getting an award for my relationship. But as a few people have said to me, "Students like you because you live your truth in front of them."

And that is what this blog does; not that it AIMS TO DO, but that it ACTUALLY DOES, before I can even think about it, or more like, in a way that I do not need to think about. I never REALLY question my voice here, even when I set out to do so. My Facebook posting has become more like me since I imported a big chunk of my tone from writing here. More sincere (not in the sense of non-ironic, don't get me started on that) in the sense of more like me, more like the voice that I use with myself when I'm trying to look at a thing with directness, when I am not faking anything to myself.

I do not "set out" to be true to myself with people, there is no meta-layer in it.

I estimate a situation's honesty to itself (a classroom, a night with J, a coffeehouse conversation, other) and I play to the honesty level, always re-estimating as the conversation changes. Sometimes I will want a thing or take a risk, and see how/if that changes anything. Sometimes I have a goal, sometimes not. Sometimes I just listen and interact and it's loose and it's great, even random hellos at gas stations.

And doing that, in that it can and did get me a public award from an institution for doing that as the face of "advisor/teacher," is "being a grownup." And this means the social face, the social recognition, or if you will, "making a difference." "Having an effect." "Not just playing around."

But this is all so anti-ludic, that sense of "grownup," and this has always been my problem with it. One can do serious play (this is also, a bit differently, my current long-duration argument with J). I make a difference by playing, in play, as play, and sure, it's work, but interpersonal relating is definitely play, a risky and intense game, but I'm down for it, I pursue it, I like it.

But I'm not going to be some cheezy fool who says, "if you like your job, work is play." Because that's nonsense and at best it makes people who slave at hard jobs, jealous or angry, and that's not my point, that comparison. I don't want any part of that. I don't define my job as "work" because "work" makes me think of Marxist analysis. Nothing is "work" in my subjectivity. But I do have a subjective understanding of "play," and I look for play in most anything I do, but I do not try to TURN THINGS INTO play. Those are different and it's essential, for me, that people understand this.

For example, a lot of childcare is playful and childish, but it isn't ludic (properly PLAYFUL) to me because it isn't social, it doesn't sort of "undo" culture with play, doesn't create a sort of Dada relationship with the social where unludic "reality" can be LUDIFIED. Childcare is defined by culture (unless you're paid to do it with other people's children, in which case it's work) AS PLAY. And because it is so defined, what I want is to make cultural "playtime" ACTUALLY PLAYFUL, I want to sort of play with the lived cultural power of definition, and THAT for me is play.

This is why my classroom is so snarky; it is snarky TO ITSELF as an environment, so that we can play with the notion of what a classroom is. We can uproot it from cultural identity to the LIVED LUDIC.

My question is, "what are the playful potentials here?" on the level of GIVEN UNDERSTANDINGS, which means that my sense of play is based on seeing play within a context of work or something else the GIVEN SENSE of which is "not playful." This is different from BEING A PLAYER (for example, Tom Hanks as the grownup body with the kid's mind). What I am after is sort of ENVISIONING PLAY WHERE CULTURE SAYS THERE ISN'T ANY.

It has, on a certain level, nothing to do with me. I don't necessarily enjoy the game that is played, I enjoy the POSSIBLITY of the game, and when the game is played, the possibility is enacted, and THAT ENACTMENT is what I enjoy about play. Class discussions are fantastic when they're run on this ethic.

In this sense, I suppose I should have LET students do the wave if they'd wanted to.

But the embarassment and awkwardness were not about being in control, they were about being celebrated and spotlit for this what-is-technically-subversive degree of affect and "touch" that I commit in classes.

I felt like the institution could not POSSIBLY understand what I do, or else it would not have celebrated. But the institution, let's remember, took recommendations from students, and asked them no doubt to describe things in certain terms, and in that sense, this is just like when I tell seniors how to manage their shifting of their own personalities in language, in job applications.

And that isn't about understanding someone's TRUTH in an essential way, but about conveying the truth of the RELATION between a candidate and a job or a candidate and an award. It is relational and a very narrow kind of affective. And in that sense it IS an award for a relationahip.

I guess what I mean is, I'm not in this for the prizes. Capricorn isn't in this for the fame.

I think J also said, "People love you and it's ok to accept that." That may have been the basis of the award, and the effect in the room, but that affect was narrowed for the "institutional rhetoric." Just like a job application, but the lived affect carries through.

The overall effect, as I have discovered in the yoga room also, is that I was not quite ready to accept the fruits of my labors, as I don't labor for the fruits, and in fact, I can't really predict what the fruits will even be. One is tempted to say, "I'm just a..." whatever. No, that won't do either, that's also prefabricated. But no speaking part was involved, and so I just had to absorb the appreciation, and that was great, but louder and more than I expected, like when you're high and get paranoid. It was great and I wasn't REALLY paranoid, but it was like, THEY FOUND ME, YE GODS! in a way that's very funny. As if I do not ACTUALLY do what I do in a classroom, a sort of emotional proof that it's not about me/player, it's about us/game.

Yes, that's it. Our understandings, mine and my institution's, are simply different. My classrooms are immediately game fields, locker rooms, whatever. No weirdly awkward junior high flashbacks are intended. But my institution still thinks about teachers AND students, in pairs, what some would maybe call Education 1.0.

But should we change awards for this, should we give what, CLASSROOMS awards? Of course not, no need to go that far with Education 2.0.

So it isn't about "becoming" a grownup or "accepting the grownup world" or anything like that, or even the gentler "realizing you live in a grownup world." It's about an award for being what I DEFINE AS MATURE, which is the ability to relate with authority, power, intensity, generosity, and friendliness.

Strategizing.

Like in a military operation. But of course interpersonal relating isn't a military operation, and so this is pointless, but what, no one ever wrote anything pointless?

1. You cannot assume that your primary relationship will be about sympathy. You're two different people with two different lives, and you simply cannot assume, not knowing what his/her/whoever's day or life has been about, that that person will be in sympathy with you when you meet however long for whatever reason.

2. Sex is never guaranteed to happen, never guaranteed to bring intimacy, never guaranteed to be close, and never guaranteed to forge anything special between you. But it'll happen now and then anyway.

3. The whole point of a relationship might, just MIGHT be, to not let the other person die existentially alone. This should be taught to 10-year-olds.

4. It should be illegal to get married during the salad days. If you're in the salad days, you don't know anything. Only people who understand how you can be in love and still hate each other once in a while, should be allowed to get a marriage license.

5. Love and monogamy have nothing to do with each other, which means that all of the cultural phenomena which are created to celebrate monogamy, are crap. To restrict love to monogamy is like restricting the knife to the avocado.

6. Children don't bring you closer, and parenting doesn't make your relationship special. Parenting is like having too much work to do, to care about each other. That's what it is.

7. So "having a relationship," despite all the press about how unique and special it is, really means nothing. Now, we live in a culture that really enjoys existential crises, because they can be mined for drama. So for a minute, and ONLY for a minute, let that statement be painful. But then turn it around into "everything," the way that having a garden or a car, also means nothing. Do you feel intimate with your car repairs? No, we think that's weird. Sure, maybe people feel that, but we think it's weird, not "normal and everyday." So relationships are the same. Your relationship is your garden, your car, your having to scrape paint off the garage, your need to put a bill payment in an envelope. And you'll say, "but you can't have sex with a bill payment!" but that just means you haven't had sex that's as consequential as a bill payment. When that happens, and it will (although if it was within my power to wish you to avoid that experience, I might), you'll understand perfectly.

8. Relationships are life, nothing more, nothing less. They are as frustrating, mundane, non-magical, un-special, non-unique, non-celebratory, trite, conflict-ridden, undesirable, non-enchanting, and ordinary as washing dishes or cleaning the gutters. So you'll want to treat your relationship partner well, because she or he is basically just cleaning the gutters by being with you. But that person will be moody or preoccupied or not in the mood for your company....or that person will be demanding, attention-mongering, and wanting your time when you can't give it. Either or. THAT is the truth of relating. Nothing else is true. Nothing enchanting is true. Sure, enchantment happens once in a while, but it's not the truth.

The Basic Situation.

There's been a lot of emotional adventure since I last posted here. But I hate narrative, as that's not how life is actually experienced, and I'm wary of "creating a thread" for those adventures in narrative terms, so I'm going to do this instead.

The basic situation in my household is that neither party has emotional time or space or energy for the other one. We are both overworked, both over-anxietied from our respective jobs, both finding parenting difficult (in different ways) and both feeling put upon by the relationship (in different and in fact oppositional, ways). So we do not have emotional empathy to share with the other one. We're overtaxed in that department. The effect of this is that there is no, if you will, empathic "lubricant" to grease the wheels of the relationship engine, and friction and sparks are the result. The "safe" choice is to only very slowly, roll the wheels of the relationship engine, or to put the relationship in freeze-frame (same way you do with a televisual image; you still see it, and the machine is still on, it's just that the image is no longer moving).

I'm going to expect that some readers will find that familiar but that others will think it's from some faraway galaxy. "Wait, wait, you put the relationship ON HOLD because you have demanding JOBS? Are you two fucked in the head?" I myself am from that line of thinking. And it was not J's intention to get over-dosed with stress and to do this.

I believe her thinking and process was something like this:
a) my job (in 2008) is becoming my whole life, and that sucks! Quick, I need a BIG PROJECT!
b) oh no, tenure's coming up and I can't do research because this art school doesn't pay for foreign travel which is the only way I can get that research, oh no!
c) HEY I could work in administration; that cuts down my teaching requirement and makes me unable to do research, and so could be a way to get tenure and not get thrown out of my job
d) HEY I could become a parent, that would provide a big life goal that isn't work
e) OH WAIT is this going to have repercussions in my relationship? Ahhh, we'll figure it out.

So now she's a tenured administrator and parent who has no emotional energy to spare for her relationship.

Now, on my side, I had no firm job in 2008 when we got pregnant, and I panicked. And as J reminded me, I hadn't been terribly content for two years prior to that either, having to write the dissertation and then do the job search (and fail) and pay off loans (and would have failed, without the help of family and friends) and there was really no job-money solidity in my life until fall 2010 when I got the current job. So my emotional energy during that time was given COMPLETELY to self-preservation, fight or flight. So that's not sexy on either of our counts.

And

In March I undertook a program that a friend of mine and I are now calling "#riskcourage" (the hashtag has nothing to do with Twitter, but is used to indicate the presence of "riskcourage, or, as another friend puts it, "the hashtag is a sort of filing system." "File this under riskcourage").

Riskcourage was essentially the idea that I was going to get EMOTIONALLY FINE with being denied sex or attention by J, but in order to GET that "fine," I would have to ask for said affection and be denied it. So this program came with RISK and it came with COURAGE and that's why it's called that.

Riskcourage worked on numerous levels, which was both great and suprising. First, it really did let me say, "ok cool" to J's denial, without having a week-long neurotic breakdown about "omg you don't love me" or some such emo bullshit. And that was great. That was my real success. In fact, last week sometime I decided (again, with a friend's help in the processing) that I would just "toss the Precious into the fire" and stop NEEDING SOMEONE ELSE to prop me up emotionally. Or, if you will, that emotional need is just a piece of light paper. It's been hard to do that (said paper sure does pretend it's heavy) but it's working, and I think the more often it works, the easier it will get.

Riskcourage also created a lot of sex in March, comparatively speaking. I think we committed that activity almost a double-digit number of times, which is 2-3 YEARS WORTH in our prior mathematics, so that was exciting also.

But the big discovery THERE is that sex does NOT, repeat DOES NOT, create long-duration emotional intimacy between us. J would commit, she would give me a bit of that emotional closeness, the "fusion" that those acts create, and then as soon as we were done in whatever fashion connoted "done," she would pull entirely back and "re-become" her functional day-to-day self. So there was no "wakeup," no "realization," in short no Surrealist revolution of pure love against the social, no turning the everyday into a dream. Oh well.

And this made sex less interesting (although she was at a conference for some of the first week in April and denied me sex before she left but granted it when she came back, and that was just fantastic, in quality terms) and there hasn't been either as much #riskcourage in April nor as much success (in fact there hasn't been ANY since the start of the month) and it's because I don't want just the sexual experience, I want the long-duration fusion, the constantly-present love, that is promised but not granted, by sexual activity.

And the grudging acceptance to be had there, is that THIS is the reality of relationships, and THAT is just something that can happen within it. And this is why people levy such praise on youth and the "honeymoon phase" and all of that, it's all about mourning for the days of magic and love and fusion, and having to surrender them to the days of everydayness, work, parenting and the rest of non-sexy, non-magic, non-intense life.

BUT

I've also been thinking that American culture promises us bliss only in the ROOT CHAKRA. This is complicated and up for debate, I'm sure, as it is purely my intimation, but this is the thinking:

This culture promises us bliss by food, by sex, by commodity. Open a magazine or look at TV for ten minutes and you'll see this promise made. Now the NATURE of the bliss is often rainfall or a beautiful sunset or the mountaintop or something (you know, "symbols of cosmic contentment" or something like that), but the MODE OF ACCESS to bliss/enlightenment/whatever is always consumption. And that is always root chakra concerns, the big drives, the root needs. It's like you can only become fully human (or if you like, "enlightened," see again the mountaintop your SUV can take you to, right?) by INDULGING THE INNER ANIMAL. Food tastes "divine," right? Something is "better than sex," right? Language of this sort.

And so the real challenges of this culture are interpersonal relationships that aren't "sex first" (i.e., heart chakra over root chakra, not to discount root chakra) and pratyahara (sense withdrawal). And what I'm starting to learn is that interpersonal relating has ENORMOUS power (in large part I'm learning that from my yoga room), and that said power is not sexual, not about the root chakra specifically, and from that, I'm deriving the idea (along of course with my Marxist leanings in cultural analysis) that American culture likes to promise imaginary enlightenment by indulging the consumption of "root" drives.

How Does One Manifest in the World?

This too is a variation on the "communication" post.

Recently through a complicated emotional transit that happened by accident, I got much less risk-averse to relating to J, in part because we finally had a version of The Conversation about how we relate now that we're overworked and overtired parents with hard jobs. There is a hell of a lot more to it but I can't write it with any coherence so I'm not going to just yet. I expect it will be expressing here and there for probably the duration of the blog from this point on.

In any case.

I got less risk-averse, and have been much more forward in expressing love and desire for her, and really, in practice, this has changed absolutely nothing that I can see. This is both completely fine and totally frustrating, and this is the emotional mechanism of my title question here.

There was great deliciousness the morning after the night of this big conversation, but she started it and so it is still hooked into her "now and then, spontaneously, and at random" schedule of when she wants love and affection. I have not been able to get anything going no matter how forward and affectionate I've been, and this is all clear between us. She told me straight up that she's very tired, overworked, has no time to let her imagination have freedom to run around, and therefore does not imagine or spend much time thinking about love and affection. Clear as a bell.

But J is not always to be trusted when she says, "This is how a thing works." When I try to do that, I try to speak as universally and big-scale as possible, but J might be talking about "this week" or "this month" or "this is how I feel right now." She is not lying, but she isn't necessarily talking in cosmic time-scale either. I have learned this through much experience with her. So AS OF THE WEEKEND, she was too tired and uninspired. But next week during Spring Break, that might all change as we have fewer obligations and I intend to send her down to Bloomington to go on a big nature hike solo and such.

At the point when I had the big emotional turnover, and basically decided to accept (on an EMOTIONAL LEVEL) ambiguity and risk and "no" and past emotional pain and a lot of other things, I realized that this was all basically FOR ME, not for us, not for the world. It was possible, it seemed, that being less risk-averse might lead to clearer conversation and even more frequent and intense love and affection, but that hasn't happened, HOWEVER, putting more and clearer energy into a relationship that is highly stressed might have some future payoff, like throwing a boomerang that takes five years to return. By the time it returns, you forgot you even threw it in the first place. Bhagavad Gita lessons.

So I'm frustrated at my relationship's unchanging low energy, and that I cannot MANIFEST more love and affection in it (although we did agree that if I just climb on her first thing, I can "access her" through her body without needing to pass through emotional squishiness), as if changes in my inner life can't do a damn thing about changing my outer life.

BUT

What about all of this "be the change you wish to see in the world" and "evolving consciousness" and all of that, the entire idea that yoga is a "political activity"? This to me is the same inner world/outer world question as above, just in larger terms, macro terms. If the yoga works me/us/you over as to our INNER STUFF, you know, if it cages the ego, expresses the emotions, and such, sort of clears out our shit to varying degrees, then WHEN and HOW as AS WHAT does it express itself in the macro, in the socius, and this is perhaps the most clumsy question, AS THE POLITICAL? Can a bunch of people with more-clearly-expressed emotions and caged-egos, going up to say Marichyasana D or Kapotasana or whatever, become any kind of coherent political/social presence? This question seems to me to be total madness. "I am chipping away at my ego in this big backbend, and it makes me want to volunteer at soup kitchens." Does that sort of thing EVER HAPPEN? I feel that I'm parodying and misunderstanding the terms of the question, but really, I can't see any clear way for a "community" of yoga practitioners (and in the West, can that even be established?) to become any kind of coherent social or political force, I simply cannot understand how that would ever become anything social other than a cult under the leadership of some "most evolved" demagogue.

But I have, as I've said here before, demagogue-cult leader tendencies, and so maybe in my own yoga community, I have foreclosed these possibilities. I mean, we do have group tea after practice, and we do hang out and get to know each other, and I've done astrological reads for a few of my students, and there are some very tight relationships among that membership, but it would seem laughably absurd for us to go around calling ourselves "evolvers" or pretending we're some kind of political force.

*****

J will often say, "If you'd read happier things or hung out with happier people, you'd have greater happiness right now," which seems so much about "be the change you wish to see in the world." There is a sense of "she's right," to this, but almost all the time that she says that to me, I answer, "THERE WEREN'T ANY" and that comes with anger, resentment, bitterness, regret. There is much to accept there.

I look back at, say, the little town I grew up in. Who was happier, who was "right" to hang out with? The holistic Christian kids who were as repressed as any of us? The sporty cliques which excluded by definition? Who? Who were these happy people? Or college: who were they? The well-financed daughters of the NYC elite who sent their kids to private colleges? Were those women happy? Were the crew team members happy? Were the track parties where your first vomiting episode "made you a man" happy? Were the three metalheads who virginity-shamed me for nine months "happy?" Were the deadheads who vanished into their tape collections "happy"? Who the fuck were these happy people I was supposed to find? WHO THE FUCK WERE THEY??????

So I wasn't looking for happy, I was looking for people who could help raise me after my parents stopped connecting to me emotionally at age 13. They still loved me, to be sure, but they were guarded at 13. And they stayed guarded until they felt that I had "figured it out" at somewhere in my early 20s, and of course nothing got figured out. My crazy uncle who had me help him tar driveways and work in his garden and who taught me to cook. He was brilliant but he too never went there, just said, "have that girl you're friends with, come over and you guys can spend the weekend here." Ah, but you see sir, that's not a girlfriend, that's just a "happy friend" of mine who isn't pure angst. I never touched her, not then, not now, not ever. Because touch was pain and toxicity and abandonment and a whole ton of other shit I'd have to process if I ever engaged in it. Better and easier to just keep that emotional closet door shut and not have to face the demons. On what woman would I possibly visit all of that horror, all of that neediness? Who can face such vulnerability, who could ever have done it?

So when I found Kafka at 20, in the summer sun in Norwich, Vermont, when someone gave me a copy of The Metamorphosis and said, "This is weird, you'd like it," I found a peer, an emotional helper, someone who knew me, finally, someone who could help me without being destroyed by the so-heavy weight I felt I carried around, too heavy for humans, too heavy for college girls, I would feel terrible laying that weight on some random sex partner, guilty, apologizing for ever. When that happened at 23 all of the disaster came and communication can never, not ever, be re-established there. But we both survived.

I was still sad about that emotional experience TEN YEARS LATER.

"Why didn't you just hang out with happier people?" Because I was not raised in the world, my body was not put in the world, my mind was not linked to this body, that's why. Because I was not made whole in this life, that's why. Because I could not go to a beach without desire and regret and sadness and a desperate need to purge all that anxiety BUT with an accompanying fear and terror about liberating all of that emotional weight, and no one on whom or by whose hand to let it go. Happier people wouldn't have done a goddamn thing to that mechanism. I wanted Kali, I wanted wisdom, experience, depth, engagement. I suppose what I really wanted was therapy, but I was highly, HIGHLY allergic to any idea of "being fixed" or "being made normal" and that too was part of the emotional closet. SO. MUCH. FEAR.

This emotional release, the conscious decision to embrace ambiguity and fear and emotional discomfort, this is exactly the same mechanism. A straight line connects my relationship with J to puberty and what I progressively refer to as my total emotional abandonment by the social. J said, in our big conversation that night, "What do you mean by social, the social?" and I said, "There was no force for socialization when I was an adolescent that wasn't essentially a form of abuse. So I ran around it, figured out ways to relate to people that didn't take social paths. The only way that I ever choose sex partners is by intelligence, by a state of deep communion with whatever is inside my head. There is no other way, has never been any other way."

What I felt was the abandonment BY the social led to a ferociously angry and long-term abandonment OF the social. This is the great magic act, the key to understanding my entire life on this planet so far, in emotional terms.

And I am far--FAR--from the only person to ever do that. "Oh society is crappy, I'm gonna go my own way." It's that formula. But added to it is amazing quantities of fear and also amazing quantities of determination, and an equally amazing amount of blindness and of binary dualistic thinking. I went very, very, VERY far indeed down the anti-social road, but not with gothiness or emo self-pity or any niche identity, in fact with pretty much no identity at all. Who are you? I don't know. I am the fear of engaging with others. I am the lack of the social. I am bad socialization itself, floating without landing, no negative form, no positive form. I am disengagement. I am observation without participation. I am terror, such terror, but only for myself, an internalized impossibility, a schism and a split that can't imagine ever being healed by anything. I cannot land. I have no feet.

This anti-persona landed ten months later in another relationship, another disaster, but less disastrous than the first. More eager now, a bit more able, to relate to the social. Then two months later that anti-persona got involved for seven years with a rape survivor who hadn't processed her stuff and that was poison and Catholic destruction of agency and masculinity issues and pain, such incredible pain and frustration. Even less groundedness. Even more schismatic mind-body experiences. One could have called it a Plutonic experience but I failed it, didn't achieve transformation through it. It just deepened everything that was wounded in me to begin with, and with the same weaponry. But now that came with more engaged anger. I was 30 by the time that sadness and regret and rage really turned to engagement, and it took a few years of heavily disengaged near-alcoholism for that to really turn around. No amount of numbness could cut through that nagging neurotic pain, and I woke up at 30 and did something about it.

And that is the point at which we enter the world of real relating, it leads directly to the divorce at 32 and that leads to climbing and that leads to yoga and alongside all of that is the increasing coursework that I still teach, and so there is ANOTHER direct line, from 30 to 42, now nearly 43.

But just because your life turns on with avid color doesn't mean your long rotting history of fear in that dark closet goes away, and that's what I learned in the big conversation. So I opened that closet and let everything in it grow, and it's very uncomfortable. Shame and fear and anxiety and lust that never met an end, disembodied frustrations by the thousand, dreams unrealized, desires for hundreds of partners never acted on, a positive ocean, a world-drowing rain of regret and fear, grows in my emotional garden. Ten thousand body delights gone, never to be realized. Remmbered in keen details, thousands of them. How hair looks like it might feel, how big eyes are, how jeans fit, ten billion lusts and loves and unrequited universes of unsolveable agony. All of the refused, all of the gone, all of the missed, all of the pointless, all of close conversation never had, billions of people I could have been and will never be, three thousand love scenes from movies, never enacted, youth wasted on me, totally and utterly wasted in God's own agnostic pointlessness.

And now a relationship where, for nearly five years, I can "access her body if I'm direct about it and before she needs to sleep" but otherwise am busy taking no and too tired, as an answer.

This is ok, it's not the same as the other. These circumstances are actually concrete, embodied, and lived in the world. Just because they are frustrating does not mean that they are THAT KIND of frustrating. That was fear. This is just stress, embodied lived stress.

And so indeed, what is it to be concrete in the world, to live embodiedly and to have feet and to put them on the ground? Indeed.

Not What I'd Intended (but still on deck with that): Planetary Half-Returns instead of Communication

I have a thing that I've been waiting almost two weeks to write, on communication, which is about sort of ideal communications, individuals, communities, and forging communities (or not), and it has a whole bunch of fun snark in it about gurus and wisdom and so forth and so on. But the longer it sits, the bigger it gets, and the less time this phenomenally stressful month has for me to write it.

So more quickly, because less processedly:

The planetary half-returns. These are astrological transits, and much is written about them with little objectivity (can anything astrological be written about with objectivity? Perhaps)

At or around age 30, the Saturn "half-return" happens, where Saturn is opposite its position in the natal chart, and this is generally held to mean that one sees greater "material reality" since Saturn is the planet of dealing with WHAT EXISTS.

At or around age 40, the Uranus "half-return" happens, which is the same thing with a different planet, but Uranus is the planet of individuality, explosion, novelty, experimentation, avant-gardism. This event is almost always read as the "mid-life crisis."

Let us quickly look at events in my life at these times:

When I was 30, I decided that my ongoing marriage was definitively not for me. 30 was the year that I stopped running and looked around and decided, THIS. THIS MUST GO. It took two full years for me to get to the end of it, but I made that decision at 30.

Now, is that "material reality"? Not really. It's emotional reality, and it's certainly TRUE, as in, that IS what I was doing, but it's not material in the sense of greed or craving material goods. If anything, my divorce made me quite poor and desperate for quite a few years.

But I have Saturn conjunct with my Sun and Mercury in the Fourth House, the House of Home, which despite all the babble about "making yourself a home," for me almost CERTAINLY means the inner house, the self. I have had heavy "what is this" considerations about who I am, for time immemorial. Saturn is also the ruler of my ascendant, Capricorn (and my Sun and that package are in Taurus, another earth sign), so I'm generally described, astrologically, as materialistic, but that's hardly true. I don't value money, I don't wear stuff that's in vogue, I don't really manifest materialism very much at all (if anything I value style over materialism, but that's a mode of communication in me, which I think is about that big Neptune singleton in the 11th house, house of Friends, but let's not get THAT off topic yet, shall we?).

Anyway.

So I think "Saturn half-return" was about self-realization, a very hard, very hard realization about the, if you will, ACTUAL situation of the self.

But then Uranus half-return happens when I'm 40, in 2010 (or thereabouts). Two perhaps-unrelated events sit in about that time period. We get pregnant in late 2008. The boy is born in mid-2009. I am practicing HARD yoga until April 2010 when I overcrank a shoulder. The yoga room suddenly gets permanently popular (to the present, anyway) in February 2011. NONE of those are about some "radical increase in my individuality."

ALL of those events are about increasing duty, community, and groundedness. GROUNDEDNESS? In the half-return of the God of Randomness? What the hell, Uranus?

But if we read it the same way, in emotional terms and in terms of the self (and more on this in a minute), we get answers. Uranus in in the 9th house, the house of beliefs and of Travels Over Water. My half-return of Uranus means that it is in the 3rd House, the house of the acquisition and use of language. My moon, which is opposite my natal Uranus, is in the third house. It is conjunct with Chiron, the planetoid that is called the "Wounded Healer." Where Chiron appears, one has stuff to reckon with, and it Chiron is pointy when ignored but apparently helpful when engaged. Also, my Third House is in Aries, the fire sign of the Ram, the challenger, the conqueror of obstacles, the stress-seeker.

I read somewhere that Chiron opposite Uranus means that one feels the FULL POWER of the Uranian energies, and those cerebral self-randomizing energies are opposite my emotional (lunar) communication, and all on a sea of firey stress-seeking-unto-conquest. Doesn't THAT sound like a barrel of monkeys?

How I usually read that, is that I was a shy kid, now an avid extrovert BUT ONLY WHEN I'M COMFORTABLE AROUND PEOPLE, and with a crazy hard-to-balance tendency (recall that the 9th house in me is in Libra, the Scales) between emotional honesty and oblique citation-laden clever communication which most people find dense and evasive. I want to be deeply straight with people but I can't be, because I don't trust them with my business which so, so wants to be stated (there will be more of this in the later post).

So Uranus half-return lands in the middle of this.

What does it bring? TOTAL EMOTIONAL CHAOS. But also opportunities to teach and to have honest communication. Now, it's hard for me to strictly lay the chaos on Uranus, because at the same time, Pluto moved into Capricorn, my ascendant (my way of being in the world), in 2008, so I was having what Fran, my original chart reader, called some "seriously deep hellish shadow work" going on in the self.

But back to Uranus and then over to Pluto.

Uranus lands on the moon, and the house of emotional communication. While that's happening, I'm the parent of a new child and I'm a teacher in what will soon be a popular yoga room. The parenting NUKES MY RELATIONSHIP OUT OF EXISTENCE, about which I have written a great deal, and creates a level of emotional pain that I absolutely cannot define in language. I crank up the yoga practice in order to have GROUNDEDNESS, some connection to the past, so I don't go insane. And then I overcrank the shoulder, and it's gone. I surrender. There is nothing to surrender to except the unintelligible demands of daily life, and so I do that, and I engage the parenting, and it is the emotional equivalent of swimming a sea of fire.

My partner and I STILL do not have good communication. There is long-term dual misunderstanding, accusation and rough feelings about how the parenting went and how little the other one empathizes with each person's relative experiences. We got pregnant FOUR AND A HALF YEARS AGO and still this is not resolving, but its intensity is fading with time. Our relationship is not the wordless miscomprehension it used to be, but it's not pleasant yet either. There's greater friendliness but on a totally random and unpredictable basis and mostly we just never talk about the hot spots and you can tell they're still hot and edgy, although we're both slowly, SLOWLY mellowing out about what we perceive as the unforgiveable oversights, weaknesses, and failures of the other party.

So what Uranus half-return seems to have done is to kick me right in the lunar emotions. Right in the wounded place, which finally set off a degree of healing those places (the easiest manifestation is in the slow, begrudged but productive forgiveness of the partner for becoming THAT PERSON when parenting happened), which is what Chiron is supposed to do there. This, again (and the communication post will ALSO be about this) is more about communication and emotion than it is about sex, although it of course (as I've mentioned here ENDLESS times) easier to see it on the surface as aggro sex disagreement than it is about communication, but as we all know from Cosmo, "it's all about communication" (said in campiest Valley Girl voice available). That's not the kind I mean. I mean that still-cheezy-sounding "I feel thing X." That kind of communication, with empathy and forgiveness, that's going to be where the magic will come in.

Now then, Pluto.

Forrest says that Capricorn is the "sea-goat," the patient achiever of anything, climber of peaks. Like a cat stalking prey. Totally still, patient, but completely locked on target, and about to pounce any second. To have Pluto there, what a friend of mine calls the "Great Roto-Rooter" of the astrological world, could mean any number of things. It could mean driving to the depths of a thing. The greatest possible focus on a goal. It could mean buggering my whole approach to the social (because the ascending sign is one's approach to the social). It could mean deep introspection (because our friend Saturn is the ruler of Capricorn, remember) on how I do the social. It could be other things.

Pluto moved into Capricorn in 2008. Pregnancy, check. Birth, check. Hellish emotional storm, check. Death of Larry Schultz, Feb 2011, check. Death of my father in May 2011, check. Birth of Indy ashtanga scene, Feb 2011, check. End of hard yoga practice, April 2010, check. Slight but random improvements in joy episodes in relationship, slowly randomly ongoing since October 2012, check. Big increase in post-practice tea and discussion in ashtanga community after Sunday class, check, late 2012 to the present. Big increase in people asking me about energetic, emotional and other experiences in practice, check, later 2012 to the present. Find permanent job that allows me to stay with relationship, 2010, check. Abject art course, Jan 2012, check.

Pluto seems to be to be turning up the Saturn, the groundedness, in multiple ways. Grow ashtanga community. Roots: become teacher. Establish non-bullshit (but still snarky) repartee with multiple students. Increased communication. I am ALWAYS very chilled out when I come back from the Sunday yoga. ALWAYS. Such good communication, great scene, good people. Then home is often chaotic hell, but so be it, something has to be. Pluto is cranking up the Saturn rulership of Capricorn. I commit DEEPLY to work, DEEPLY to family even when it's just pain and overtired crying fits and all of that, DEEPLY to the yoga scene, and all of that has followup snark about things that are wrong, like ethically wrong, or stupid, or personally offensive to me, in all of those scenes. Like Western yoga carrying on about "bliss." You want a free rant from me that sets fire to the world? Say "bliss" in my presence and I will hit you with a fucking asteroid. Like corporate ownership of education, which I see quite a few posts about on Facebook. That's serious bullshit and my art school isn't exempt from those pressures, especially since we're a state school. Like people abusing their kids or dogs or just being fucking assholes to other sentient life. I don't even watch dark art films anymore, not that I'm turning all sunshine and light (that's the LAST damn thing I would do), but I'm not in the mood to be in any way aligned with such a world that doesn't feed and clothe and fucking take care of its kids. I complain pretty much non-stop here about family and how fucking difficult it is, and I don't think I've said more than about ten positive words about it on this blog EVER, but its major effect on my life is to open up compassion for other people, like students worried about graduation and the future, and grad students who want to know if they're making "good work" and all of this. I want to level out people's anxieties, hear about people's energy (yoga students/art students), and, basically, establish communication, particularly private communication in a NON-PRIVATE environment, by which I mean a non-therapeutic environment, a non-"reserved space" environment. A "nowhere special." My classrooms at the art school are taking on more and more of this, I see it clearly this semester.

But my relationship is not doing this, in large part because I need to voice some frustration and I also live with an almost pathologically introverted introvert who likes me but doesn't tell me any of her internal business unless she feels ABSOLUTELY safe, which never happens in conversations about our relationship because we both know what trench warfare that became between 2009 and 2011 or so. Eventually green grass will grow there again. It's just that her tendency is to go about her business and then partake of relating if I start it and if she has any energy to commit to it. My tendency is to work out how much energy there is for the relationship, through verbality and sharing, and then to ACTUALLY COMMIT that much energy. Her method is floopy-floppy random ambiguous unpredictable air sign/water sign "go with the flow," which is actually what my astrological destiny here is, so I DO SEE that value in adopting that. My current method by comparison probably looks like math and accounting: "how much energy do we have? Great. Let's share that daily in these discrete units." I crack myself up sometimes, because her method sounds so much like what I think my personality is, and I usually have so much snark for people who come on in the way that I just paraphrased my own relationship thinking.

Yes: Saturn. Uranus. Pluto. Life.

"...everything I believe and no longer believe."--Nietzsche

Nietzsche once wrote that he wanted to make a list of everything he believed and everything he no longer believed. I think he was looking for his own tendencies and history, sort of doing a genealogy with his own life. But if I could remember better what book that sentence appears in, we'd know better which Nietzsche it is (he has phases as he writes).

My actual mission in this post is to completely undermine and destroy everything that I no longer wish to believe about western sexual culture (under the idea that discourses about sexuality in this culture make up what I believe). There are some Foucauldian premises in such a task. For one, I believe that the things I believe about sexual activity are all cultural and constructed and not inborn, and sex science people could and would likely debate that. I also believe that a lot of my beliefs come from cultural promises, and essentially from what I will call the "capitalization" (making into capital, into exchange) of sexual energy. I also believe that the whole Reichian idea of "sexual energy" is a ruse, and it's hard to give that up, because it sounds so progressive and wonderful, but I cannot liberate myself from this crap if I keep that cornerstone, so it goes. In short, I wish to reveal my beliefs about the "promise" and "goal" of sexual activity, to be wholesale reduceable to cultural discourses (which can be ignored, or critiqued, or actively denied) and energetic configurations (my own neurotic shit, which can be altered because it's mine). In short, I wish to undercut and make baseless, in short, to totally vanquish, all of my beliefs about why sex is good or necessary or why I should have however much of it. I wish to totally cut this boat loose and set it afloat.

This is not about practice. I do not wish to "come out asexual." It isn't about what I ACTUALLY DO, it's about what I ACTUALLY BELIEVE about what I and others do. It's headgames, mind games, nothing else. I wish to reveal it to myself, once and for all, as the smoke and mirrors it is.

I wasn't raised with openness about what bodies do, and I wasn't raised in the 90s when you could just go to the 'net and find out. You had to participate in Sites of Shame like buying magazines at store counters or finding other people's hidden stashes or looking at the back pages of "what's happening" zines in cities. You had to imagine what women looked like under clothes, because there was no easy way to find out. You had to fetishize anything that touched the skin of women, because it was as is perfume or clothing could TELL YOU SECRETS. It was as if animism was real, or you could pick up the secret vibrations of femininity itself (it should be obvious that I'm describing a heterosexual scenario here, but it might well apply to other orientations also). But that's already nonsense, because in my early fantasy life I switched genders and subjectivities at will (and I still do). So it wasn't about femininity, it was about touch and relating (duh). But touch was horribly, terribly impossible, because there were minds and parents and shame and judgment and "being abusive" (recall that the 1980s had a lot of disembodied "antiporn feminism" in the water, and because it was detached from its own history, it turned into this weird "you're a rapist you just don't know it yet" message that couldn't be analyzed because it couldn't be historicized).

In short, a desire that culture likes to describe as "perfectly healthy" wound up coded with shame, perversion, abuse, rape, transgression, crime, and a whole underground economy. My libidinal economies have never failed to have an underground character, and if someone wanted to line up my interest in Surrealism and Bataille with that, it would be direct and obvious.

No one would tell me "how the game worked" other than college guys who simply said, "if you learn how to play it, it's easy." That was useless. I wanted a whole meta-cognitive map of how "the game" is played, but it wasn't a game, either, it was just that I wanted touch and love like everyone does, you know, just like the Smiths song goes. And now it was all "gaming" and capitalist acquisition and "how many" and "how much" and "which ways" and all that? What planet was this?

So it was perverse, but it wasn't actively, self-possessedly perverse, and this has always profoundly bothered me about Western sexuality. It's like we do it within patterns and ways that we didn't, ourselves, establish. What the hell? "Oh I'm monogamous and I desire it this often." Huh? How the hell do you know that, and why does that matter? Why is identity phrased LIKE THAT? "Oh if someone touches me there, I do this and that and such happens." Huh? What, like some robot in a prime time sci-fi drama? Danger, Will Robinson? Excitement, Will Robinson? But who the fuck ARE WE? Does this activity answer that question, does it reveal us to ourselves, can we learn about the world with it?

"You ask the wrong questions. You're overthinking it." Same answers that peers and older people always gave me to everything. Oh ok, I guess I live in a culture that doesn't give a damn if I ever figure out who I am, then. Well fuck you guys too.

So when I discovered the 60s and consciousness-raising and all of that when I was 19ish or so, I eventually discovered all of this Woodstockian sex-in-the-mud transgression and hippie love joy, but that was useless in the actual lived social of the late 1980s and early 1990s. What I learned is that I had authentically transgressive interest in who I was, enacted in a bodily way, and I wasn't allowed to figure out who I was, and I wasn't allowed to figure it out with bodies. But I couldn't do it in a shallow way and "just get some" (advice that was given to me a billion times) because I was locked into this mechanism where I wanted to experience deep truth from a relationship that would both permit it and pursue it. I could conceive of interpersonal depth but I couldn't practice it and I was terrified of trying because I felt like a lion inside and I looked like a lamb outside and I couldn't understand how things got so damn dichotomous and I couldn't figure out how to fix them.

I mean, my come-on line would have been, "Hi there, let's figure out who we are through deep sustained embodiment and mutuality." I didn't have any idea how to relate socially with heterosexuality because the only rhetoric I could get about heterosexuality was "girls are good to have." Nothing about depth except some stupid cheezy bullshit about how people love each other for decades and this is to be valued, and you can only get that through monogamy. But but but, How the Fuck did people Get the Decades? What the fuck is the PASSWORD for the ENTRY DOOR?????

This kind of frustration made me a neurotic.

Early experiences were emotional disaster.

Disenchantment 1: Sex does NOT bring you interpersonal knowledge, or if it does, it brings you interpersonal knowledge wrapped up in so much pain that you might never unwrap it.

After that, I got obsessed with interpersonal knowledge through experience, and pursued experience in depth (i.e., the salad days), trying to sustain depth of experience until self-knowledge occurred.

Disenchantment 2: Sex does NOT bring you interpersonal knowledge through depth of experience. It can bring you bragging rights or fun stories, but knowing that situation Q turns you on, is worthless for interpersonal knowledge.

I tried out a sizeable number of transgressive activities and identities, because transgression is not only hot, it's based in knowledge, I figured. I mean, if you KNOW you like a certain transgression, you've figured something out, right?

Disenchantment 3: Sex does NOT bring you interpersonal knowledge through transgression, first because transgression does NOT, contrary to some of its reputation, come with consciousness, and second, there is NO LINK AT ALL between a person's sexual transgressions or taste for transgression, and their larger self-knowledge. Little boxes of privation can still be the rule, so you can get heavily transgressive people who still think chick flicks are the model of ideal relationships. I'm not kidding. Those people exist. So transgression is just another "we do it this way, we're so hot, and we're better than you." There's no difference (emotionally, and in terms of self knowledge) between bondage and a high school jock who puts you down in public.

Then I fell crazily in love with a lady and we had long salad days and good conversation and then our relationship got impermanent and I radically didn't know who I was again.

Disenchantment 4: Long-term sex with love is great, but it's crap for self-knowledge. It's like being an alcoholic for years and then going cold turkey. When the hallucinations wear off, you're older and you still have all your shit to sort out. It doesn't matter how much intimacy you get or how many orgasms you share, sex doesn't touch self-knowledge, it just doesn't have a goddamn thing to do with it. There is no connection there. The gauzy shadows we see on screen are nothing but a praise and wish for abiding love and maybe a few minutes of mind silence. But the thoughts you continue to have are your own. The song you hear in your ear while it's all going on, isn't the one she hears. Milan Kundera is the writer who best captures this truth in its full bittersweetness. It's not a failure or a dealbreaker, unless you want self-knowledge from love, because there isn't any.

Stupid people who are monogamous and/or afraid will sometimes say, "oh, s/he has a past" when they figure out you or he or she has "experimented" or "been around" or "had an adventurous youth" or the many many other stupid euphemisms they use, to blame you for their jealousy. Yeah, fuck you stupid people. Fuck you guys until you burst into righteous flames.

Disenchantment 5: Sharing "the past" or finding out "her past" is thrilling and can lead to interesting adventures in bed, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with self-knowledge. Are you your dalliance, or even your transgression, no matter how deeply felt it is? You are not. That's like believing you're a submarine sandwich just because you love them. In theory terms, this is Foucault's idea that we have made sex into the secret-holder, the thing to unlock, when actually, it is very much like having lunch. Is sharing lunch wonderful? Sure. Is sharing lunch the key to enlightenment? Not damn likely. So when you're on that 37th submarine sandwich this year (in case you count, you know), and you're wondering why you don't understand yourself any better, it's because only a mystic could understand her/himself by looking at a sandwich. And sex is the same way.

So Wilhelm Reich was this guy who said, among other things, that frustration of sexual energy leads to fascism, and that fascists are "sexual cripples." He's wonderful, but he was also hetero-centric and he said that sexual energy (orgone energy) could cure cancer, which it might (who knows, man?) and he was also opposed to Weimar decadence, and he was also a therapy guy who essentially believed that one could release one's shit through bodily movement, which I believe a regular yoga practice also proves.

Disenchantment 6: You can politicize your sex, or participate in politicized sex (everyone who's not straight and narrow knows this), but sex isn't politics, it's a field of discourse where politics happens. Sex is too fragile and delicate, like thin glass, to bear a whole political discourse. You relate to that person and you can talk up "we're stickin' it to the man!" all day and you can "undo" your repression and all of that, but later when the conversation is awkward, or she just gets up to wash dishes, daily life seems so much louder than your political rantings. Even at parties it does: who cares who is tied to a cross or how much liberation there is? Everyone winds up panting and red-cheeked like they've run six miles, and daily life is still louder than you are, and not a goddamn thing has changed. Maybe through doing what looks like abuse, you learn that you're not an abusive asshole. Maybe you can undo a little nonsense discourse through a non-nonsense discourse. But even that's not guaranteed. And self-knowledge? Real discovery? Who would burden genitalia with that? What idiot thinks that can be done, or even should be?

I wish, loudly and insistently, that when I'm close to you, we could create real self-knowledge, I really do. That frustrated neurotic wants it, wants "access" to create "transformation." Such a deeply held belief. And always at this door. "Just let me in, just for a minute, and I'll be a changed man!" Like an alcoholic who wants one more shot. And when it doesn't work, "Well I just need to go deeper, that door, that door over there!" And the same pleading and the same participation (just one more!) and the same disappointment. Because he was made in the mode of capitalist participation, which never grants fullness first because its promise is hollow and second because it can't anyway. It's not just that capitalism lies to you once, it lies to you twice, and it lies in ways that create permanent neurosis.

Disenchantment 7: The sex "drive" to the degree that there is such a thing, is pure capitalism. That is not an exaggeration. Love and desire do not modify this. What, you never loved a pair of shoes or pants? You never loved your car? "It's not the same." Sure it is. Now, let's not misunderstand and hear me as saying that your loved one is a commodity. I'm not doing that: I'm doing the ENERGY part of the equation. The drive for sex, which as a science person would tell you is not a drive because you don't die of deprivation when you don't get fulfillment, exists SEPARATELY from love and SEPARATELY from self-knowledge. It might FEEL like those things come as a package deal, and there's a whole lot of cultural stupidity about "is it love or JUST sex" and all that idiotic rot, but the ACTUAL REALITY of sexual desire in the West is that its energy has been capitalized. Look at how we (culturally, not individually: this is about discourse, not behavior) think about sex. We crave it, need it, need more of it, have temporary satisfaction, want it again, and so on. AT BEST this is like buying soap tablets for your dishwasher. You need clean dishes, right? So you buy soap and ta-da, clean dishes. You don't do this neurotically (well unless you're neurotic about cleanliness, which many westerners certainly are). But now imagine that you're a sex neurotic. This is like buying shoes, then more shoes, then different shoes, and OMG DID YOU SEE HER SHOES? It becomes THE LENS THROUGH WHICH YOU EXPERIENCE PEOPLE, until you get sick of your neurosis, then you try to put it down, and it's STILL the lens through which you experience people, but you peel a corner of it aside so you can see what ELSE they are. You try to peel your obfuscating sex-neurosis aside and down, so you can actually HAVE ACCESS TO YOUR LIFE. And it LITERALLY FEELS like alcoholism (or choose your own addiction) when someone is sexually available. You want to cry with the frustration of wanting the joy and goodness but risking all the false beliefs and lies and re-building the neurotic wall and falling in line with that neurosis that governs all your energy and drives you into relationships and out of relationships and then you wake up in a bed somewhere after going cold turkey and you say I'LL NEVER DO THAT AGAIN.

So wait, are you a sex addict?

No, nope, I'm not. I'm a neurotic. From what I understand about sex addiction, it's about having, needing, never "arriving," which is in a way neurotic behavior also. But what I am always seeking in sexual experience and other experiences also is self-knowledge, that's all I really ever wanted, and I live in a culture that says I can have it if I just become happily monogamous and commit to a deep relationship, as if relationships are deep (to say nothing of healthy) by definition. This culture treats self-knowledge like a commodity: just OWN THIS and you can have it, because it comes along. It doesn't.

I keep thinking that maybe people will be unguarded in sex, a sort of total honesty unto enlightenment, like the interpersonal skies will crack open, and that's the last thing that happens in sexual experience. Knowledge isn't something you stumble across until you're well down a mystical road. You have to crack it with effort at the start, and sex just doeasn't do that. If sex is enlightening and mystical, it's because you did the mystical work elsewhere. And in that case, once again, your access to mysticality isn't sex, it's the work you've done elsewhere.

So the main benefit here?

The main benefit here is that when you can't get sex, it doesn't matter. Nothing important is missing from your life because nothing important lives there to begin with.

One could do worse than say, your sex is as good as your self-knowledge. Not the other way around.

But the other main point is that those two don't have anything to do with each other. But we live in a culture that insists that they do, which is a trap. The same way that doing capitalist desire for self-knowledge makes EVERY object into a trap, because self-knowledge isn't a commodity and if you approach it with commodity energy, you miss it.

The shadow side of capitalist energy is that it turns humanity into a pack of hungry dogs leaping up to get campsite food tied to a tree branch in a sheet, and we just jump until we fall over dead with exhaustion and nothing has been learned and no questions have been asked. Everything approached with capitalist energy is senseless death.

But the upswing of this is that when we decapitalize sex, we can make it into anything we want. We can honor it the same way we honor the dishes we wash or the cat we feed. It's just another thing you honor in daily life, like your morning coffee. You can go on about how good it feels or how fantastic it is, but apparently you've never really grooved on washing a dish or having morning coffee. You dig?

Astrology Lessons with Me as an Example.

Got a copy of Forrest's THE INNER SKY. Makes looking at one's chart more confusing, less obvious, but makes it more compelling also.

Let's use me as an example with as much of SF's vocabulary as I can clearly import (as to what is what, and how it works, not just copping his actual writing tone):

Sun, Moon, Ascendant: the power triad

Sun: Taurus
Moon: Aries
Ascendant: Capricorn

Taurus likes to sit still, the musician, the silent one. No words, stillness.

Aries is the fire sign between these two earth signs. It confronts obstacles and makes them up when it doesn't have them. Fire is challenge, overcoming: warrior, pioneer, daredevil, survivor.

Capricorn is the "Sea-Goat," the hermit, father, prime minister. Willpower, integrity, solitude. The marriage of inner life and outer job/work/career/life.

The sun is the ego, the moon the emotions, the ascendant the "way of acting in the world."

HOUSES:

Taurus sun in 4th house, "house of home." The self and the domicile. The achievement of domestic "peace" and wordlessness (or music) will be done within (i.e., the "soul's home").

Aries moon in 3rd house, the "house of communication." Perceiving and being perceived; relating to others, feelings, irrationality (or better, post-rationality). This is all coded with fire from the Aries. There is challenge and effort in communication, not in the sense of "I am challenged," but in the sense of "I will conquer this."

Capricorn ascendant lies between 12th and 1st houses (it always does, it's the ascendant) and means that the way the ego will achieve peace and the moon achieve communication is by linking the outer life to the inner life, achieving "integrity." The obvious obstacles to that are fear and lack of self-acceptance. The ego must be very strong to do this, but the risk with THAT is obstinance, failure to grow and to interact, stubbornness, and so on.

FOCALIZERS:

What gets big attention in the chart? These things do.

STELLIUM: three planets in one house. Sun is conjunct (close to, same as, shares with) Mercury and Saturn in 4th house. This gives those three planets enormous power in the chart. Mercury is intelligence and quickness, but Saturn is strength, depth, slowness, patience and potentially melancholy and loneliness. Mercury and Saturn are opposite tendencies, here coexisting intensely with the ego itself.

SINGLETONS: single planets in a quadrant of the chart. This chart has two of them. The Moon is the only planet in Houses 1-3 (barring Chiron, but Forrest's book doesn't bring up Chiron). Neptune is the only planet in Houses 10-12. This means the "ego houses" (1-3) are all marked by the energy of that Aries moon, which would explain why this person feels so much fire throughout all of his innermost self-stuff. Neptune is the planet of ambiguous dreaming, and it likewise characterizes all of the spiritual/social/self-overcoming stuff of Houses 10-12: "something in us does not identify with identity." This would explain in part why this person is so resistant to community (although the 11th house placement of Neptune is the House of Friends) and finds almost all markers of social "self" (gender, orientation, age, social class) to be fluff.

HEMISPHERES: ten planets are recognized (sun, moon, and eight planets). This chart has 6 planets below the ascendant/descendant horizon, and that includes both sun and moon, so it is a "subjective" vs. an "objective" chart: inner life is louder than outer life. Also, this chart has 8 (eight!) planets on the west side of the midheaven/nadir vertical horizon, which means a "fate/going with the flow" chart instead of a "freedom/free will" chart. Note, however, how hard the Aries moon in the ego quadrant (which is a "freedom" quadrant) works against this.

ANGULAR PLANETS: the first, fourth, seventh and tenth houses have these horizon angles, the ascendant (1), descendant (7), nadir (4) and midheaven (10). Jupiter is conjunct Midheaven, which means Jupiter, a very uplifting and "faithful" force in the chart, has great power, and the midheaven is career, future, and destiny. To have Jupiter conjunct the midheaven might mean that if this personality can figure out WHO it is and WHY it's here, it can have whatever it desires, it can make desire reality.

RULER OF THE ASCENDANT: each sign is ruled by a planet. The ruler of Capricorn is Saturn, so we have a sort of double Saturn in this chart; it's both conjunct with the Sun in the 4th house, which means intense, deep introspection, and it's also the ruler of the ascendant, so the drive to have integrity is going to be marked with heaviness and strength, and when that integrity arrives, particularly given that Saturn is in the ego AND the ascendant, it will be of unbreakable strength. It's also worth saying that all that Saturn explains why this person loathes shallowness and why, although identifying (and working energetically) as an extrovert, this personality is also very choosy about it's company and doesn't in the least mind doing things alone, particularly things it finds empowering.

HIGHLY CONNECTED PLANETS: this is a bit of a tossup. Mars is conjunct Venus in the 5th (the House of Play: to have Venus (beauty) and Mars (warriordom) there would make an easy and frequent lover, were that not all dampened down to seriousness by Saturn), the Moon is also linked to everything, in particular a Uranus opposition (about which more in a minute), and then BOTH Moon and Uranus are square (in rough relationship toward) the Ascendant, and Neptune is opposite Mars, Mercury, AND Venus. There is a lot of competition here for "who is the best-connected planet."

Let's make this make some non-jargony sense.

This personality is very considered and deep and has been pretty much since birth. It can also be given to melancholy or depression as part of that, or it can roll around endlessly in existential crisis. But there is also a lot of fire here, both in how this personality feels (experiences feelings, and expresses them also), and in how keen its intelligence is. Coupled with that is a very intense drive to communicate, both with skill and with depth--at least three different elements in the chart are about this specifically. Zipping colorfully above the giant introspective depths is a perennial aurora borealis of curiosity, information and conveyance, perception and being perceived. But there is also a dreaminess and disconnection-from-reality here, both in that the nervous system is highly strung and easily stressed, and in that this personality can and will imagine communities that don't exist, and then blame the extant world for not having them. This is a very deeply subjective persona and it prefers its inner world to the outer world, but can't accept that the outer world is NOT the inner world. The desire for transformation, which is very keenly felt, both stokes the nervous tension and prevents the personality from relaxing into a task or train of thought, which is really what it desires in the first place. Self-esteem in this personality looks manic-depressive, which gets smoother with age: many things in this personality smooth with age. A consummate late bloomer. There is a desire to always have the levels high, but with consonance, and that is very hard to achieve. The nerves want to feel everything with exquisite sensitivity, but not to the point of overload, panic, or shutdown (with booze or something else). There is immense, electric spontaneity and randomness, which needs resolution particularly with emotional balance, but also both of those elements need to be integrated into the wider "integrity" project (inner and outer world balance) that this personality pursues, and that project is pursued both within/personally and very much without/socially, and those two realms do not easily cooperate for easy nerves here. This is a machine built for balance and made out of chaos.

**JARGONY TRANSLATION

Neptune is in the 11th house (community, friends), just barely in Scorpio and very close to Sagittarius. It is a singleton over there, so its dreaminess and expansiveness (Neptune is "consciousness" itself) color considerations of career, metaphysics, and community. It is opposite three of the "personal planets" in houses four ("home") and five ("play or children") which means some hard reckoning either with communities that include speech, beauty and sport/fierceness or with imagined outcomes for those qualities. The real fight here seems to be between the inner and outer worlds, where the outer world Never Lives Up To the inner world but Can't Stop Being Asked To.

The Moon, our other singleton here, is opposite Uranus which is in Libra in the 9th house ("House of Long Travels over Water"--also house of individuality). Libra is balance but it is also feeling, purity, intensity. It is not "balance for things" but "things put in balance" and it requires effort to establish this balance. To have Uranus here, the planet of spontaneity and zig-zagging, is almost funny. To have opposition tension between Uranus and the Moon, when the moon is a singleton casting fire throughout the ego quadrant of the chart, is very powerful, challenging magic. The emotions are fiery and have no other governance than the Moon, and Uranus sits opposite them, throwing down lightning bolts. Libra asks for balance. Uranus is also energetically friendly with Mars-and-Venus (conjunct 5th) AND with Neptune in the 11th, and of course those energies are opposites also. A massive work of coherence-making, and high-end balance, is to be done here.

Heaviness. Never forget how core-central Saturn is here. If the self-disciplining Saturn work is done, not even a solar flare can shake this vehicle down. Also, two of the "power triad" signs are earth signs, which sit on the ground and find wisdom in the very material of existence. The shadows which include flightiness, randomness, violent emotions, fire and lightning (in short, a Wagner opera for an internal life) can all be grounded without being harmed, by wise application of Taurean and Capricornian "dirt reality," Saturnian discipline, Libran balance, and Settling Into Task (this persona's interest in "flow states" is telling, there).

No Pluto? Pluto sits up there in its ruled house (the only planet in the chart that does so), the 8th, in Virgo, and the South Node is up there too. The shadow there is over-analysis, perfectionism (more in social relationships that in self-esteem), manipulation which would be community but isn't clear enough to be, and general relationship darkness and intimacy-lack panic (Pluto and Neptune are friendly). But the more interesting thing about Pluto is that it's been in Capricorn since 2008, when this chart-owner became a parent, and it's going to be there until about 2023. That time period also, for this persona, includes the loss of three father figures including an actual father, and the radical change in relationship/intimacy/sex stuff, which is high-neurotic territory linked utterly to energy in the Moon and Neptune configurations. In Capricorn, Pluto ramps up the "integrity" project, makes it work harder and deeper than it ever has. In this time, we see the interest in the "affective classroom" (i.e., emotionalized learning space, and in part, learning by and with emotions, but not in a way that is therapy) appear.

The Future: if this persona can get its balancing act together (is it a pun that in practice this means hanging from the roof of climbing caves, and doing headstands?), then Jupiter's "faith-giving" conjunction with the Midheaven (the sky's high point) awaits. The North Node is right in the center of Pisces, the dreamer, the Godhead sign, in the second house. Through minutiae, you discover everything. Just like the Zen water-carrier.

Complexity and Ambiguity.

I live with a woman who is a rationalist by training, a skeptic by nature, and who has a very high tolerance for ambiguity, who likes things with space and fuzziness around them so that they can move and turn into different things.

I pursue complexity, both by nature and by training, and I have a downright distaste for ambiguity, can't stand that stuff. But whereas for her, ambiguity is sort of a cosmic truth, a point to which rationality can't go, for me complexity is a cosmic truth, a point which can only be reached and seen properly when all the damn ambiguity is gotten the hell out of the way.

What we disagree on is not cosmic truth but the use and limits of rationality.

She is actually more rational than I am, but sets limits on rationality, not wanting to turn the world into some scientific specimen, butterfly pinned to a table. This makes sense to both of us: keep the thing alive.

I mistrust rationality because it doesn't allow for the truth of irrationality, and some truths can only be reached by irrational means. So I am less rational, but I still pursue complexity through and into the irrational, which has a rationalist flavor to it, a sort of scientific project, a truth-pursuit project, a non-greying project, a disambiguation project.

She lets rationality blur into ambiguity, where archetypes and fairytale truths float around, but where nothing needs to be precisely specific or clear. This isn't a land of contradiction or paradox or questing or drive; it's a seal doing somersaults underwater. She is happiest in this state, and achieves it on solo nature hikes and the like.

I am drive, drive, drive. I am crash-that-fucking-car-into-the-wall-until-the-wall-breaks. I am a forest fire, lava running quickly downhill, demagoguery and cult leadership, contagion, FIRE! I want everything made into questions and answers, material for my quest to understand, on a cosmic level, everything. Not "sense" in the rationalist usage, but maybe in the Surrealist usage (but truer than they were capable of, less Freudian, but out in directions they indicated). In this sense, I never have the contentment she seeks and finds in ambiguity, because I refuse to rest there, by definition.

This is, in fairly precise language, our disagreement about "being happy."

I'm not aiming to be "happy" in understanding the world; most of the time, I don't give a damn about happiness if I can have comprehension. If I can dig deep into a thing and get a big, amazing, mind-dazzling complexity, I can sit for a moment with the incredibly beauty of mind-stopping complexity, and that passes for happy, but it's not an active happiness, it's like the dog finally sleeping after playing frisbee for three hours straight.

I think I'm on to something about understanding myself, with this.

For example, I climb walls or do backbends until I get what some people have described as a sort of energy orgasm. Until something just crests over and I can lie on the floor or stand up and just have totally immersive dizziness. Some immersive, mind-stopping quality. Blood pounding, forearms pumped, spine radiating glowing energy, this kind of thing. It's not the degree of sensation, it's the kind of sensation.

In sexual experience, which I will be perjorative about later, this is more frequently what happens in the MIDDLE rather than at the END. Sure, that's lovely, the collapse and the immersion and the open space, and that IS a version of what I'm talking about, but the sort of empty space in the middle, movement but without thought, action but without narrative, nothing to create, nowhere to go, just a sort of hammock rocking in the sun, there's weird, truly weird contentment there. Action/stillness. In touch with everything that's going on, but it's running you. Conversation and mutuality, but so tactile that it's under language, truer than language, clear, unconfused. There is a "seal doing somersaults" quality to it, but THEN and THERE for me, it is not ambiguous, not fuzzy, not "needing to be solved" (perhaps my problem with ambiguity is not with ambiguity, but with my NEED TO SOLVE IT, eh?).

When I was a young person (and this means up to about age, oh, say, 32), I was always around people who told me these things:

THAT'S HOW IT IS
THAT'S HOW THE COOKIE CRUMBLES
WELL THAT'S TOO BAD
STOP OVERTHINKING THINGS
YOU TAKE STUFF TOO SERIOUSLY/TOO FAR
YOU CAN'T THINK LIKE THAT
THAT'S NOT HOW THE WORLD WORKS
YOU CAN'T ESCAPE YOUR STUFF
endless etc.

And I never quite wanted to be RIGHT, I wanted to be LISTENED to. I wanted a COLLABORATOR.

Well why can't I question that? Why can't I send my mind there? What are these limits, exactly? I mean, can we have a discussion? I just, what, "CAN'T" go there? Why not? Are there damn guardians or something? Is a piano going to fall on my head? What the fuck? Well go on, answer my damn questions: WHY CAN'T I GO THERE?

And now so, so, so many years later, I see that the answers were almost always these:

I DON'T KNOW
I'm AFRAID
I DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT
THAT'S UNCOMFORTABLE
THAT'S NOT A PLACE I GO

I didn't mean to hurt or scare or provoke any of you, but you never gave me an answer that was, well, AN ANSWER. You always, all of you, just told me to stay here and not look over there. What the hell did you expect? Ok ok, how else could you have put it, really? What did I expect, ok, yes, right. But I thought since you were either my age or my elder, you'd know something or join me or at least listen.

So I'm sorry for all the times that all of our relationships were harshened by this.

How were we to have understood each other?

In any case, now the tables have profoundly turned. Now it's Surrealist buttocks and four months of Abject Art and putting feet behind heads and digging into the dark energy and seeking whatever I want through whatever means I deem are ethically fit for said search.

There is less resistance, almost no resistance. Can one define one's own ethics as resistance?

I could have understood my family better if I'd chosen to understand myself less well. How's that for an ethical situation?

But lay Catholicism was deadly, DEADLY toxic to me, and I was in no mood to understand this toxin, I was in a mood to put a fucking end to its existence, but I was afraid to step that far away from my people, but I did anyway. Now I crisscross the linse of my own fear on climbing walls and yoga mats and classroom floors, all the time, but without the ethical price of not knowing why people don't want me to do something and only finding out after having done it, done it in some cases with blindness to context (admittedly, none of you helped me see anything, there was darkness there you placed for comfort that I HAD TO CROSS, it wasn't a trespass...or it was, but I didn't mean it to offend or injure, it simply had to be done, in a way I suppose it was me or you...)

In any case.

I've been wondering if just turning up my sensitivity could provide a sort of never-ending complexity--is this a thing meditation provides, a phase it goes through? I get seated "blackness" sometimes, quiet blackness, like being a hollow plastic toy on a shelf, which I like. Had a taste of it with Matthew and have pursued it, I like it. There's neither ambiguity nor complexity in it, just a really comfortable space-ness.

Complexity comes sooner, faster, more easily in simpler things, as I get older, more patient, more sensitive, less combative, less restrained, less frustrated, less afraid. Bodies are complex, emotions are complex, talking to oeople about those things is complex. Sharing beta about boulder problems is nicely interpersonal, you learn so much about someone from their slang, whether and how they talk with their hands, interpersonal as complexity, especially with a head full of ideas about temporality and Henri Bergson and French theory.

Fear makes the engines of neurosis turn quickly in me; it is the fuel of everything negative in me. As strongly characterized as I am and can be by anger, FEAR is the enemy, the bad energy. Anger I can alchemize; sure, it takes over a lot, runs my snark, shows up here in spades, but fear is the real neurosis engine, because fear goes back to these old relationships and shame and anxiety and self-definition. It is fear that runs decades deep and turns up the volume of all the old ghosts.

Anger helped me break things that needed breaking, even if it wasn't nice for people or made relationships permanently different or impossible. At times anger fell in with fear, was organized by fear, and then wastes of time happened, raging about social phenomena instead of speaking to a girl, sure, decades of that. But other times, anger got its Lion Teeth into fear and tore it apart and opened the world.

I have a lot of what Nietzsche called "ressentiment" about the old restraints. Feeling a thing again. Living through old tests, like a favorite movie. I'm sure this drives some of the questing for greater complexity, the going to abject places and questing for an ever-deepening interpersonal universe with whoever will volunteer membership. The great challenge of setting limits. Easy to do with consent because I have consent vocabulary; very difficult to do with energy, because my energy is a forest fire.

As far as I can tell, she does not have neurotic fear. She has introvert fear and is afraid of phone calls, but that's not nearly the same animal. Less neurotic energy than I have, less neurosis overall than I have. This is a large part of why and how we get along; we don't have complimentary neuroses, so we don't 'ramp each other up' and we don't fight with our neuroses as swords or shields.

How much of the quest to understand complexly is drive AGAINST THE PAST, and how much is sincere? How much of a seeker am I, versus how much of a neurotic? Or are there other factors all spread throughout that (how complexly can one understand THIS VERY LINE OF QUESTIONING...)

When she is ambiguous about things where I'm neurotic, I get fear. Then I resent having to handle that fear and I blame her ambiguity for "putting it there." Simple head game. I'm anxious about a thing and want her to "make it better" and she doesn't, because she either doesn't care to or won't lie to me just to make me comfortable.

The only situation where I get "mind-stoppage" (which could easily be called a symptom of a "flow state" from ACTUAL COMPLEXITY is from reading French theory or a really chewy book, like Pynchon's stuff. Backbends aren't intellect-style complexity so much as they are a very loud sensory conversation with a massive dose of endorphins. Same for climbing walls, same for that "middle" I spoke of earlier. Those aren't complexity of anything except the sheer mass of nerve signals.

But there is energetic alchemy there, almost always of fear, of neurosis. Long-established frustrations and doubt, old identities put to the fire, over and over and over. You are not strong, you are not powerful, you are not a sexual agent. Put them in the fire and feel them burn. "I can't remember to forget you."

There is old pain there that I can't figure out (with my head) how to cathart (if this is a verb). We move from Uranus (forest fire 9th house transformation junkie) to its opposite, my third house Aries Moon-conjunct-Chiron, the wounded healer, conversation house, moist emotional center. Little-known territory for me. Uneven, unlanguaged, dangerous, threatening, dark, squishy. The Uranus-Pluto warrior I inhabit so readily has no damn idea what to do over there.

I started, with the seventh series and then the deathfest of 2011, just "feeling the emotions." I don't have much of a plan beyond that. I don't have the slightest idea how to handle emotions, I don't even know the sport that is committed there. Does one juggle? Does one dance? What the hell is this world about? I like much of the Buddhist stuff that I've read about emotions, what they are, how one can see a seed of something useful in even the most abject emotional storm.

I think there might be evenness to be had by going there, if I just had any clue what vessel, what terrain, what anything. In any case, one more astrological note: South Node Virgo, 8th house. Where my Pluto is also. Analysis, precision, cutting edge. So typical of my whole intellectual makeup, lifetime. North Node, Pisces, 2nd house. Totally foreign territory. Mysticism, acceptance, compassion, universe, eternity.

I don't think or expect that proceeding there will end up with her style of ambiguity, but it might chill out the lava flow of endless precise clarity unto crystalline complexity. But there's even a beauty to that, a cosmic truth. Same quest, additional means, maybe. Start with "additional means" and see if the quest changes nature.

Readers, Mysore-Style, Guns, Nudity and More.

If you're new here, welcome to my taste in titles.

Two weeks ago, approximately, I met a student who's been away for a long time, doing workshops for a certification, and she'd met a guy who reads here and apparently is a big fan, so hello Bill, nice to know you're out there :)

As much writing as I've done strictly for myself here, the purgative phase particularly, I feel more inclined to write if I know people are reading. How contrary to the usual vibe I use here. I don't have any processing on that right now, and nothing seems to be coming up for either question or solution, so that just gets to hang. I mean, in school terms, I'm developing writers in a senior seminar and I'm also developing MFA students in theory classes (and being asked to do guest critiques for students who aren't mine yet, or in some cases, never will be at all), so there is something about me interpersonally and academically that people find compelling. But how to translate that into My Own writing project, the why's and what's, that's not easy.

Facebook remains fascinating. Annoying a lot of the time in ways, but irresistible a lot of the time, in different ways. Examples: there was, predictably and of course, a lot said about guns, and the ways that comments fell in strict (what politicos call) party lines, was suprising. It was an opportunity for what I consider a double realization. On the one hand, political forces (which were not strictly party lines but more like a generalized left-right ideological split, as if the citizenry of the country is polarizing not around parties but around ideological groupings themselves, which is often read as party irrelevance, but that asks the question about why we continue to vote two-party politics, and the answer is often because third parties just allow someone to win the two-party gig, but that doesn't answer the question...) were clearly aligned with long- and deep-held causes. Gun control over there, gun liberty over there. Simple enough.

Both of those ideologies are full of affect; you're supposed to feel, and believe, and desire, rather than to think, or better said, you're supposed to think what you feel. Abortion debate is a clearer example of this. And I noticed that I was actually thinking before I felt, or that my thinking had separated from my feeling. So I had some weird clarity on how ideologically "clear" the two sides were, versus how messy the actual Newtown event was. No one was talking about reality and THEN guns, everyone was talking about guns in their ready-schemes and the reality was falling out. Sure, there was all kinds of reference to "how horrible" and "don't take my gun" and such, but all of that pre-dated Newtown and Newtown didn't seem to change any of it. It's as if the real event were used for ideological feed, but couldn't change the stated ideologies. So that was realization one.

The double realization came through the massive social media repetition of these same viewpoints, only rarely tweaked by "users" of social media ("users" is a funny term, with resonances to drug use and to video game players, and all you need is the tiniest bit of Baudrillard and suddenly you can become your own disempowerment). People who are left-committed posted articles and sometimes petitions to sign, or generally pro-control language. I have hardly any social media friends on the right, so I didn't see much of that rhetoric, except for when it was posted for parody or mockery or question, and that's fine. What I found truly fascinating was that people posted articles about topics like the racist Tweets about Obama's football-interrupting address, or thinking about guns that wasn't strictly ideologically binary. THIS was very interesting commentary, and posted publicly for sharing or not (some people still don't understand that about social media), and so there was both a public "re-stating" of well-worn ideological platforms AND a weirdly and slightly unpredictable murmur (Baudrillard's "silent majorities" perhaps) underneath it of what some people might call the real citizenry.

This was the second realization. We can say the words "Arab Spring" all day long, but the real PRACTICE of social media, particularly within the first-world West (and I mean that to imply that sections of the West are more like the third world, as we sort of create a third world within our first world) is aort of unconscious, more than unpredictable. There is a weird testament to power there (in Foucault's sense, an inchoate power, a power "field") which can't quite be used (yet??) as any kind of power that would change the surrounding socius. Social media aren't totally locked down and passive (like many would say about television), but they aren't up and cracking the socius open either (despite how often people who want to be activists say "Arab Spring"). Fascinating stuff, this long-distance interpersonality.

I sometimes read site named Taboo Jive. It's on Facebook, but you can also find it by attaching dot-com to its name and heading over there. I read them because an anti-homophobia page asked me to like them, so I did. Often much of what they post on social media is a bit annoying or oversimplified, like a person with a Tumblr feed who wants your attention all the time so asks these politically pointy or slightly saucy poll questions.

Recently they apparently did a "what do you think of nudist recreation" poll, and their two major findings (according to them) were that Americans (for TJ comes from the States, I think it comes from Georgia, to be precise) are, first and foremost, unwilling to do such recreation because of SELF-ESTEEM. Second, most Americans (according to TJ's work, which probably wasn't, you know, peer-reviewed or anything) find that nudity is absolutely associated with sexuality. This, I was annoyed by, because to me, that's one of the Great American Stupidities, and I was sad to see it apparently enthusiastically up and running, still. *sigh*

Now, self-esteem and being naked with people. This makes sense, on the one hand, but it points to real interesting body stuff on the other. If we can generalize at all from what TJ thinks its results are (and that's already guessing, we're generalizing about a generalization because we don't know the sample), then we can say that Americans don't like their bodies, No Matter What They Look Like. This is in part because we have an unrealizably-perfect thing going on in our media, and also because we have a this-is-about-me take-it-personally thing going on in our relationship to such media. It's not right to criticize the first without criticizing the second.

This it-AND-ME approach I think is key to understanding anything "body" in American media culture. We have a perfection complex, and of course no one can say what "perfect" is, but we've located it culturally, and it changes sometimes. Perfection in the States tends to be young, sporty, and treated photographically to "enhance" and "erase imperfections." So one could do a massive book-length treatment of this, a history of it, in Foucauldian terms (Susan Bordo used to do this kind of work, and I think she was brilliant at it). It's already been discovered that many cover models have humanly unrealizable bodies, and this was widely discussed in eating disorder circles. BUT there is, to me, a second thing at work, which is that we are sort of taught to go into these images undefended, uncritically, or at least not critically enough to engage with them critically ON AN AFFECTIVE LEVEL.

This is the great mind-body problem which perhaps was noble in Descartes' day but now is just another re-re-re-resurrected postmodern zombie. Rehash central; you want eggs with that? Body image and desire in American media are given to us basically "with critique" now, we are all already snarky hipsters and we can say, "OMG that is so 'Shopped, that's not me, that's just media perfection bullshit." We can and we do say this. BUT we don't fail to believe the promise, some promise, some golden cow, that we won't easily or willingly slay. And I think that even with long refusal to absorb such media, the virus just waits, it waits for a relationship or a TV program or a Netflix account subscription or in some cases, a visit to parents, or something like that. And then the body image guilt or hatred or lust or something else erupts anew. We can criticize images and read theory and refuse to watch television All Day Long, but we can't seem to effectively wrestle AFFECTIVELY with that virus (for that's where it lives) without some serious life change, and this needs to be effected.

By affect I mean something like emotional power, but I do NOT (emphatically NOT) mean that I'm proposing some cheezy-ass "love yourself!" bullshit. You cannot "love yourself" into a post-viral media relationship. By virus, I'm ripping off William S. Burroughs, but the virus I mean is this sort of "I'm not worthy" virus that seems to come automatically with having a body in the States (can't speak for Europe or the wider West, but in America, this seems standard issue). I would recommend these for potential ways to break in, the basic formula being "become comfortable in a place where you're fairly certain you won't; put the virus to the fire."

a. long-term ashtanga vinyasa practice. Until you become notably stronger, more flexible, happier, and/or unidentifiable to yourself. If you still know who you are, the virus will carry over.

b. with a person or people you trust, engage in either edgy (whatever your edge is) sexual activity or edgy psychedelic activity (do NOT underestimate the change potential of those chemicals) or edgy interpersonal activity (NOT just conversation; I mean like therapy work or rock-climbing, I mean like RISK OF DEATH stuff).

The idea is to Settle Deeply into the body, not to "have a body" but to erase even the line of "being" a body, because that still has mind-body in it. Establish a Flow State and stay in it a long, long time. Try for balance there (hint: surfing a flow state is like surfing water; if you don't move, it does).

c. Meditation to the point that the body is a hollow shell, like a plastic toy, BUT you're still in it, a consciousness pressing from inside, the way light presses on windowpanes. You cannot achieve that degree of presence with the virus intact. But you can deceive yourself about it, with the virus intact, so please see (a) and (b).

The virus is nothing you kill, like the ego. You don't "kill" your ego, anyone who says that is a fool who needs to read about how the Buddhists think incarnation works.

So when TJ comes on saying that nudity (I'm turning "Nudism" into nudity, because first it's easier for me and second, I think it's accurate) is about self-esteem, and then further about it being "always sexual," I immediately think of this.

We come across as guilty, self-hating horndogs, particularly men (and of course TJ gendered it, so that men think nudity is "more sexual" than women do.....BORING...). And have you seen the recently-popular image of the topless woman with the sign, "STILL NOT ASKING FOR IT"? The idea being that even a woman half-dressed is not asking for sexual attention, violent or otherwise? There is wonderful commentary in the attached text, which says, among other things, "Just because someone is cooking food doesn't mean you get to eat. Just because a banker is counting bills doesn't mean you get free money." I think that's BRILLIANT. In a way that is directly and empathically about consent, ethics and making conscious choices, it points out the whole conundrum of what some would call "rape culture." Right: the banker's money is for you, sure, IF YOU TAKE IT AT GUNPOINT. The food is for you, sure, IF YOU'RE A PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE ASS or if you STEAL IT WITH FORCE.

So America, do yourself a favor and get un-sick.

Get un-sick about your self-esteem and get un-sick about your sexual culture. Quit your emo whining about "how do I get it, meow meow" and ask someone if they'd like to cook a meal together. "But I'm not worthy!" Take the risk, motherfucker. You might just grow into someone who disagrees with that.

Briefly now, after the novel, about Mysore-style. I have four different students who are in various stages of consideration about visiting the homeland (going to Mysore). I've talked it up here and there and told stories about the old days and pointed people to videos and so forth, and everyone knows I've not gone, I don't fake that at all. I'm an American-made ashtangi, and sure, I've been to a number of Mysore rooms in the USA and I am fashioning my own on Sunday afternoons, and it's working, but I've not been and I'm not inclined to go soon. Right now I think my function in this city is to create THIS. These rooms, these students, to be a place and a conversation and such where people can dig in, where they are sort of mirrored and pointed back to dig into their stuff. This is my life of late. Hey, let's dig in a bit more! It's all inner life, because as far as family goes, my outer life is my inner life. Dharma, in a fashion. It doesn't come from without or from within, or if it does, you can't tell which. And that right now doesn't need to be far from the "ground of service." Not even to whatever, "get a better practice," or "learn the real method" or whatever. Not now. You can say, "well you're underestimating the transformative potential." Oh? Have you ever done seventh series? Have you? Then you know to Shut The Fuck Up, don't you? Good. No Westerner on this earth who isn't a parent, EVER gets to tell me a goddamn thing about transformation, unless I solicit it. You can feel hurt or think that's pretentious, but again, if you're not a parent? Shut it. Now, I DO realize that for some people, parenting is all about self-realization and bliss and they've "arrived" and all that cheeseball sky-gazing bullshit, but for me it's hard, bone-cracking work, and a level of emotional torment that is positively unique. It's not that I'm more valuable than you are, or that I don't love you all, and least of all is it ever about "my trials are harder than yours" (what crap!), but it's in the comparison that I hear in your words. If you're going to tell me what's transformative and what's "good for me," and you don't understand my situation, then you are talking through your hat. And you know that, you know it even while you open your mouth. Hell yes, trust me, I make this error all the time.

So I'm open to more teaching, or more learning, but it's not coming; no workshops look good, everything looks expensive and far from the "ground" I inhabit here. This ground is hard nourishment, daring and full of potential. For a while, I want to dig in here and see how it is.