EVERY TIME I FEEL THE SPIRIT. . .A

Ever since I started really thinking about the split between a “feeling of the sacred” (which goes back to Eliade in 1978), and began to think about “religion” as institutions complete with bureaucracies, internal hierarchies, and a lot of other trouble-making aspects, like war-mongering, I’ve put my energy into the question of how to summon the feeling of present holiness.  

As we put it in seminary, “Can you call the Holy Spirit?”  Mostly, as the tradition says, it bloweth where it listeth in that big metaphor of wide open spaces like deserts, prairies and skies.  Now and then someone describes it as being like struck by lightning, but many have told about lesser versions of the same thing, more like turning on a light in a dark room.  Evidently the spirit appreciates a little space and time, but can also interrupt.

Out of fairness I should think more about religious institutions, which often claim they “own” Sacredness and have it in a bottle.  Plainly they don’t.  What do they have?  Advantage.  Privilege.

To what end?  Survival.  As a generalization, belonging faithfully to a religious institution that has a good plan for survival, a way of life that is likely to keep you happy, whole, and in the midst of friends, will keep you alive.

Unless the larger conditions change radically.  In that way, a religious institution is just a species, an arrangement that will serve a specific ecological niche.  Sometimes the times change so radically that the institutions are no longer an advantage.  We seem to be in one of those times.

Bob Scriver used to tell a story about the difference between farm chickens and prairie chickens, a kind of grouse.  If you came around a corner and there was a flock of, let’s say, buff orpingtons, in the road, they would stick together so that you would either miss them or run over them en masse.  This is because when you feed a flock of chickens, they all run together to get the food.  The ones that don’t will die of starvation.  But with prairie chickens, the idea is to scatter to find their food independently and to scatter to avoid predators.  If you’re driving a car, it will be hard to avoid crushing at least one of them, but the species will survive.

The strange thing about Christian institutions is that they insist that they are ALL Christian, each in their own way, scattered to suit their circumstances.  To avoid outright war, our unspoken agreement is to just call them denominations.  In fact, some will assert that Judaism, Native American beliefs, Hinduism, and whatever else you’ve got are actually kinds of Christian, denominations.  A distinction becomes so inclusive it is no longer distinct.

“Lefties,” liberals, democratically based institutions, free thinkers, non-conformists, and other labeled “species” of people are prairie chickens.  The biggest problem is that they scatter.  The Unitarians go in and out of Universalism, the Unitarians go in and out of just about every sub-category of life-styles there are, the Humanists go in and out of super-rational Unitarianism, but the Pagans, Feminists, Blacks, Gays all build adjunct institutions though few of them ever achieve critical mass big enough to get recognition as religious from the uber-institutional government.  Like “tax-free”.  

This is like the special treatment of NA tribes who struggle over the profits of gambling.  Strangely few American Indians get very invested in free-thinking organizations.  Maybe they prefer the spiritual side.  Maybe they just don’t have a tradition of individual thought and academic/written culture.  Most of the “left” religionists tend to be individuals and print-based, neither of which is very good for building a consensus group, much less a functioning institution.

The forces that hold a liberal group together are compassion, justice, a canon from the past, socio-economic norms, and aesthetics, though the last is much neglected recently.  Indeed, it appears to have been captured by the commodifiers.

The commodifiers are now so powerful that they subsume everything else, even owning people to one degree or another, the extremes becoming destroyers of survival.  I’m talking about trafficking, oppressive labor, famine, and war.  No longer do they bother much about dressing-up these practices with supernatural spirituality.  They just want what they want and the rest of us are yard chickens, walking dollar bills on the bookkeeping lists.

You’d think that the liberals/free thinkers/minority-justice people would find this so atrocious that they would band together against such predators.  But they don’t.  They turn away.  To survive.

Because the very thing that gave them freedom to read, travel, learn, qualify for good jobs, establish quiet safe homes, is now too precious to give up.  It’s easier to just not know.  I always think of the year we spent re-writing the Portland, OR, animal control laws.  Though the enforcement agency had to deal with cases of bestiality, there were no legal guidelines because the people who wrote the law didn’t conceive of such acts.  It was hard for the more tender members of the panel to face such things.  Today the inconceivable acts are as likely to be against children as animals.  (The tough among us have known this all along.)

But now we realize — thanks to science and thinking that escapes the suppressive mega-corporation commodifications — that humans are not privileged unless they fight for it.  And if the environment around them, their anchors in cultural and environmental ecology, are destroyed, then humans will be eliminated.  Our survival is no longer about family, about institutions, about nations (which are institutions), but about our ability to understand and accommodate the whole planet, because we’re connected to the whole shebang — to the depths of the sea, to the thinnest layer of atmosphere, to the far reaches of the solar system.  Even the butterflies count.

Though commodification has protected science to some degree, and though many groups have found more than enough critical mass to work for survival of the many through the few, it’s hard work.  (I think of Medicins Sans Frontieres)  Restoration of the spirit is key and real, or the inspired will exhaust themselves. 

Dominant cultural institutions will try to control containers of the Sacred but they can’t put the wind in a bag, nor can they prevent the Spiritual from turning demonic.  If they could, they would have by now.  The Demonic is gaining, strong among us.  But the spirituality of the Demonic is not necessarily a bad thing — it can crack the walls of prisons.  This takes us back to the individual versus the group — add the element of Evil and it’s easy to see that an Individual against a group is defined relatively, according to whether one privileges the group or single human.  Sometimes one and many are aligned.  Then we survive.

AN IRRESPONSIBLE MEDITATION

SOME USEFUL DEFINITIONS FOR IRRESPONSIBLE MEDITATION:

Sacredness is direct unmediated contact with the universe, not by-passing the senses but a chord, a symphony, a melody.  It is felt holistically.

Religion is produced by cultural evolution, beginning with hunting/gathering people.  Religion is an institution that claims the sacred but is NOT sacred.

“Institutions are identified with a social purpose, transcending individuals and intentions by mediating the rules that govern living behavior. The term "institution" commonly applies to a custom or behavior pattern important to a society, and to particular formal organizations of the government and public services.”  (By the secret author at Wikipedia — I always wish I knew who they are so I could read more of their thinking.)

So it begins with a superstition, a lucky hat, a little chant to call the prey but repel the predator.  Connected to the hunting grounds.  Maybe accompanied by a bribe, a sacrifice.

Then comes the beginnings of control: domestication, which means being able to locate and kill animals at will; and gardens or fields.  Swidden agriculture means clearing forest or jungle, growing crops that can’t be stored, like yams, or crops that need extraordinary preparation like sago palm pulp.  But grain agriculture means storage, surplus, value for trade, the necessity of guarding.  Math for defining territories.  The concept of “owning.”  Community/towns.  This is the root of institutional religion.

The social purpose of everything is survival, transcending individuals.  This means that individuals are subsumed, consumed, and even sacrificed physically and horribly for the benefit of the whole.  These are religious institutions, even if today they are thinned and paled, except in some places they are not.  Instead they have reverted to blood sacrifice.

If a religious institution becomes too cruel, too destructive, another institution based on resistance will begin to form.  Now we have “Game of Thrones.”  Except that there is an alternative, which is Asian Evasion. (The art of turning forceful oppression back on the oppressor.)  The appearance of some seemingly un-formed institution that carries the resistance.  (Guerrilla warfare.)  

Saturn eating his children -- Goya

Now we have the arts.  The arts don’t support institutions, but the culture can form institutions that pretend to say that the arts are marked by sacredness and therefore institutions should protect them.  These institutions are only pretending, providing ways to institutionalize free thought.  They are the opposite of sacrifice in their own instititional existence but often sacrifice the artists as a means of control.

Government, like agriculture, is territory-based, in terms of owning which is called “patriotism” which is a form of religion.  It is capable of inventing the equivalent of land, food, shelter, walls and wars and printing it all on paper called money or contracts.  Government is a religious institution.  It is not sacred.

Science is also a religious, community-based, resource-using institution.  Its walls are negotiable, its products are technological, and occasionally it touches the sacred.  Not the sacred as defined by the priests (though scientists can be considered parallel) but as defined by direct contact with the universe.  Awe, wonder, humility, exaltation.

Science tells us that our brains and bodies work according to code that can be perceived and measured as electrochemical pulses and molecular interactions.  They are the sum of evolution that began with eukaryotes, one-celled creatures, who in their hunger and willingness to discard (sacrifice) developed a gastro-intestinal tract capable of passing the environment through them in a self-nurturing way.  Because they were meiotic, that is, capable of code-exchange that produced varied offspring, producing enough variation for winnowing.  They kept morphing over the millennia.  Until now.

Having achieved consciousness and control, humans now institutionalize what is familiar and manageable.  They no longer discard what is not good for them, but try to hoard resources, swelling up their institutions and governments until they are paralyzed.  This will kill them.  Only the few, the nimble, the Asian evasive (turning the force of the oppressors back on them), the autochthonous, the indigenous, the artistic, will survive -- mammals slipping between the toes of the dinosaurs.  Maybe a predator drone has no pilot who is at risk because he or she is far away from deadly fire — but the global corporation fantasists who think they are greater than nations and entitled to all resources are doomed.  They cannot escape their own drones.

I can only wish this were true.  But maybe it is.  I now turn away from institutions except for my small town, which provides the infrastructure of water, fuel, food.  I’m a lousy gardener and don’t want to give up time away from the keyboard, so I need a store.  I’m a gluten glutton, adapted to grain and dairy.  I could easily take to alcohol except that it interferes with my thinking.

When institutions discovered writing, it was as though they had discovered alcohol.  I mean they stopped thinking and started wanting.  They didn’t have to memorize anymore.  (Too bad for Islam schools where the Koran is memorized, now the action is in schools that teach the reading of the Torah.)  Writing is such an aid to preventing change.  Now there can be law books.  But of course a new kind of priest is invented, to interpret what the writing “really” says or decide when it is too old-fashioned to use anymore.  But it’s hard to purge law.  And universities now study advertising.

Imagine an institution without writing.  No by-laws.  No instructions.  No record of boundaries to register down at the court house.  Birth, marriage and death all uncertified.  No diplomas.  No post office.  No texting.  No internet.  No list of in/out or who's in charge.

No treaties, no United Nation accords.  But what does it matter?  Even when they were signed, they were disregarded.  Writing is a tool and it can be a deception.  It’s arbitrary, a matter of social agreement.  Even the alphabet.  It’s a great revelation to some that different languages use different alphabets.  They don’t use different numbers, right?  They DO use different numbers, different bases, different symbols.  Consider zero.  Consider the algorithm.  Think about standard deviations.

To realize that symbols are not realities is to begin to step away from institutions as reality.  They are not sacred.  Even reality is not sacred, no matter how precious the bud, how glorious the sunrise.  Reality is the carrier of the sacred and not all humans can receive it.  

It cannot be defined in writing but only in experience.  It is a “felt” meaning.  Artists work with felt meaning.  A priest is an institutionally identified artist who works in a symbol system that is used by that institution, regardless of the ethics, the social consequences, the attempts to prevent change.  The task is to make people “feel” sacredness in a way that benefits the institution.  

If it crushes the individual, that is called a necessary sacrifice.  They are the animal on the altar with their throats cut before they are burned.  They forget that the sacred moment spared the child.

Abraham's ram

IMMOLATION

On "Game of Thrones" everyone loved the Blackwater Bay "wild fire" scene, 

so much like napalm.

The truth is that the professional fiction versions of immolations are much more chilling than the ones produced by some terrorist techie who doesn’t understand how to photograph fire.  Accidental immolations are often photographed these days but with someone’s smart phone or by a person with a decent camera who is blinking through tear gas and shoved hard by crowds or threatened by cops.  Anyway, it’s a well-known aesthetic principle that the most horrible stuff is that which is imagined or reflected in the faces of onlookers.  Take “Game of Thrones” -- the wild fire destroying ships and sending sailors in pieces flying everywhere -- is not as horrible as the charred hanging bodies of the farmer’s two little sons, killed to mislead the enemies of two little princes.  THAT’s horrible.  But the critics LOVED the explosion.

Bill Moyers’ reaction to outrage over the death of the Jordanian pilot was to show an American version of the same thing, except the American version was a youth unjustly accused a little over a century ago.  

http://billmoyers.com/2015/02/05/isis-brutality-burning-lynching/

“Jesse Washington was just one black man to die horribly at the hands of white death squads. Between 1882 and 1968 — 1968! — there were 4,743 recorded lynchings in the US. About a quarter of them were white people, many of whom had been killed for sympathizing with black folks.”  They tortured him for two hours, raising and lowering him over a fire.  Fantasy about sex was involved and they cut off his testicles.

In the Middle East and India it is COMMON to burn women alive to get rid of them or to make women in general realize they should be obedient or suffer.  A death by fire looks very bad because the muscles shriveling in the heat make the body writhe long after consciousness is gone.  And then there is the demon-black body.

People don’t need to be prevented from seeing such atrocities -- they love’em.  There’s a computer program that will let you seemingly set anything on fire.  People just like to pretend that they are shocked in real life, sometimes for political reasons, sometimes so their Mama won’t be faced with the reality of -- not the fire -- our own charred heart-corners.  Don’t forget I’ve done cruelty investigations.

The fire that sticks in my mind most vividly was in NW Portland, which is the warehouse district -- in those days deserted at night.  (Today there are a lot of galleries and so on, using the big abandoned spaces.)  I had been out very late -- like 2AM -- and was headed home when ahead in the intersection I saw a car, “totally engulfed” as they say.  Out there where street lights were dim and abandoned railway lines shone in the firelight, there was no sound.  I stopped in the middle of the road -- there were no other cars.  I finally deciphered that the burning car had crashed into a hydrant and bent it over, but it had not broken.  Next to it was a photographer with a big 4X5 camera on a massive tripod, calmly working away.  

I thought maybe it was a stunt or something for a movie, but then there would be a crew.  No other people were around.  There seemed to be no one in the car.  I walked over to the man with the camera,  “Is there anyone in the car?"  I didn’t break his concentration.  “Someone in the backseat,” he said in a monotone.  Suddenly the fire looked horrifying.  

Probably they had been drunk.  Probably the man had been driving, maybe his partner was a sexworker who had passed out.  I didn’t know that, except that the driver had left the scene which meant he was only saving himself.  Or maybe it was a woman. Then I heard sirens, got in my van and went home.  The police would only question me, suspect me, and I already felt guilty.  It was one of the rare occasions when I’d had a couple of drinks.  When I checked the papers all the rest of the week, there was nothing.  Probably the editor suppressed it.  Probably the photographer could only sell his photos to a tabloid.

When I was an animal control officer, the worst thing I ever saw was a puppy who tried to get into a garbage can that belonged to a Vietnam veteran who had rigged it with a napalm booby trap.  It took a day to find and catch the puppy, still alive though it was very badly burned.  We didn’t euthanize it right away because we photographed it oozing pus and blood, shaking, blind, ears and tail burned off, nearly unconscious.  We charged the guy who was damned lucky it was not a neighbor kid who got into his garbage, but I don’t recall that he was convicted or even taken to court.  Nothing in the paper.

In the Sixties the county sheriff decided he would discourage people from drinking and driving by creating a bulletin board display of wrecks.  One was a teenager still seated behind the wheel of his burned out pickup, himself charred and contracted.  We know what burned bodies look like because some prop man somewhere has studied them in order to create fiberglass replicas, maybe exaggerated a little bit.  Movie companies must have a whole storage unit devoted to imitation corpses.  Finally, the burned driver’s mother demanded that the photo be removed which the sheriff sheepishly did, at last realizing he was dealing with a human life connected to a lot of other human lives.

But someone, probably the Montana Highway Patrol, brought in a movie to show in the high school -- mangled bodies of people we didn’t know.  At one point we saw the body of an infant with tire tracks running across its crushed middle.  Everyone laughed.  It’s a way of handling it.  The hilarity and eroticism of the fragile human body.  I’d tell you not to read the book that makes a sexual event out of car crashes, but you’d run out and buy it.  The library probably won’t have it.  "Crash," is the title and I think it was also a movie.

We’re emotion-eaters, we crave intense emotion, and the way we are wired in our brains means that putting a man in a cage and burning him is not anything we can turn away from, though we might be grateful if it’s only a photographed version.  Imagined versions make our brains work at it, not leave it alone.  I'm still wondering decades later about that burning car, because brains are built to resolve ambiguity, but the ambiguity of what it feels like to burn to death can’t be resolved.

Chickens burned in Asia because of a avian flu plague.

A few years ago I blogged about a photo of chickens in Asia being burned in a big pile because they had or might have bird flu.  Some of the birds were still alive and there was a spectacular photo of a rooster escaping in flames.  I tried to relate it to the ballet of “The Firebird” and the legend of the Phoenix.

In the Taliban territories the old men try to forbid all pleasure because, like European versions of those types, they think that they can only control the people by constantly pounding on hell, apocalypse, judgment.  Fear. punishment, obedience.  They forbid music, kites and pigeons.  Homing pigeons are among the small but wonderful comforts of young men.  They don’t cost much, but they are beautiful, require skillful care, allow for competition and pride.  One can put a hutch on a roof and have an excuse for being up there with them, watching them tumble and slide across the sky and then come home.

So the old men, trying to control those youngsters, have been finding their pigeon hutches, jamming the birds into sacks and burning them in front of their keepers, then killing the keepers.  It’s the same as the hideous killing of a man’s family while he watches and then killing him.  Maybe he is grateful to die.  Maybe he flies with his loved ones to paradise.

But the old men have probably gone too far.  The killing of small, beautiful,  beloved and innocent birds might trigger refusal of a system so dependent on destruction.  We can get our minds around pigeons.  We care about birds more than about brides.

A CRUCIAL DISTINCTION (3rd part of a 3 part sequence on pedophilia)

Somehow computers have made it legitimate to deal with forbidden topics so long as they are in terms of statistics, like “one in six men will be sexually molested in their lifetime”.  Or lab research produces charts like the one above by putting a pleismograph on a number of men’s penises to see what images they physically respond to.  (Which might not be what they think they desire.)  But also, more quietly, men have been openly testifying about what happened to them and the consequences of abuse.  Even the children are telling their stories.

http://sexresearchhoneypot.blogspot.com/2011/02/do-gay-men-have-more-sexual-interest-in.html#more

This chart separates out people who are sexually aroused by different age groups.  Also, the scientists were looking for differences between the desires of “heterosexuals” versus “homosexuals,” though the two categories are becoming pretty blurry.  

(Are two ninety-year-old women who are married sitting in their wheelchairs, wearing pink, and after forty years of sharing a household, really like an Act-Up parade of randy naked young men?)   “Gay” begins to seem more and more about specific kinds of activities and locations than about the nature of desire, which seems less and less binary.  But the researchers were hoping to break down the association of homosexuality and pedophilia as society understands them, and in that they probably succeeded.

But the most marked and significant difference I hear when I read the stories of children who have been used to satisfy sexual desire is never even noted.  That’s between those who mix sex with something like nurturing and those who mix sex with violence (possibly deadly).  Street boys doing survival sex for pay report that they will be paid extra if they forego safety measures like condoms (barebacking), but also that they will sometimes be paid even more if they will allow themselves to be beaten up or even tortured.  Some clients don’t ask or pay -- they just do it.  Some seem to replace coitus with violence and others mix the two, one fueling the other.  (The boys cope by using drugs.)

Similar reports come from those abused by family members, esp. step-fathers but even biological fathers.  Why isn’t the difference between inappropriate but non-damaging sexual use and violent, emergency-room level sexual abuse (often fueled by drugs) more discussed and studied?

It seems to me that pedophiles who actually love the children they desire and even try to please them, to “turn them on,” establish an empathic connection with the child that keeps them from physically harming the child.  But they don’t have enough awareness to know they may be mentally and psychologically confusing and crippling a developing child.

The other kind of pedophiles need a different name:  they seem not to realize that a child is a human being, so their desire is not for the child but for the opportunity to torture and oppress, to get a reaction.  It's a cruelty-philia.  The fact that the victim is a child is only about the inability of the child to escape, like a small animal or a weak woman.  It's not about sexual desire at all, but about rage, invasion, power.  And the scariest kind are the ones who sit idle and bored on the sofa, watching tv alongside a child and a dog, when suddenly they have an impulse to make something happen and reach over to press the burning end of the cigarette into either the child or the dog.  Is there any sexual component to that?

rough sex

I started thinking about the opposite: "maternal men," who will feed, comfort, reassure, guide and love children WITHOUT sexual elements -- innocently.  Even if they are desirous.  I think of Walt Whitman at the bedside of young suffering and dying soldiers, treating them as a mother would.  One would hope pediatricians were like this.  But at another point I was googling for images of “grabbed by the back of the neck”  (cats and rabbits do this to hold the female in place) and kept coming across the little motto above that had been repeated in different fonts and backgrounds.  It’s a celebration of rough sex, a frank inability to feel anything that isn’t violent.  If a person has conflated sex with violence, then they likely would be looking for someone whom they could treat violently.  

That still doesn't account for the man who leaves his wife sleeping in their bed in order to cross the hall to rape his small son -- though he created that child by fucking the woman he now deserts.  What kind of displacement is that?

Why is this cute?

Pedophile priests seem to desire transgression per se.  Not the kind of zombie-producing transgression where jungle maniacs force children to have intercourse with their parents and then kill the parents before their eyes and cut off the hands of the child.  But just indecent liberties -- fumbling, inviting sucking, pushing aside clothing.  This is NOT sexual desire for a child's body so much as wanting the knowledge of doing what is forbidden and knowing they can do it with impunity, that they will be protected in order to save the reputation of the church.  

Maybe it makes them seem to themselves more important or effective.  Maybe they feel they are being diddled by God.  The world of ministry, like the world of social work or teaching, is always frustrating.  One is constantly hitting limits of what one can do and constantly having to respond to trivialities that people could resolve for themselves if they tried.  Priests work alone far more than teachers or social workers.  It's not just a matter of not having sex with a wife, but also the comforting domestic life and ego support provided by a wife.

Ashes.

Researchers claim that one in six men is sexually abused over a lifetime.  I suppose mostly as children, but also as adults.  I wonder why EVERYONE is not abused?  What keeps the other five-sixths from being abused?  Is there some marker on the ones who are molested?   They say there is -- esp. after the first incident.  A stigma.  Maybe cringing or resentment.  Maybe false bravado.  Or maybe they felt it was a compliment, a privilege.  Maybe they just look confused, paralyzed like a bird in front of a snake.  Researching such markers is too close to blaming the victim.  But bruises, broken bones, STD’s, personality changes, are certainly markers that the victim neither plans nor enjoys.  Even if the predator takes care not to mark a face, behavior patterns can be giveaways.

In fact, it could be argued that the emotional confusion is the real damage. The distorted brain matrixes that keep people from intimacy, trust, joy, are harder to treat and heal than even broken bones or burst organs.  Yet emotional cruelty -- belittling, berating, bullying, mocking -- is so accepted and pervasive that it’s hard to convince people that it’s not normal and not harmless.  It is an effective way to control others, esp. children and dependents.

I read and think more about male victims partly because it gives me a bit of distance but also because I just like boys.  I have two brothers.  It’s not harder to think more about male than female perpetrators because most of them are male.  That’s who is more likely to mix violence with coition, indeed require violence in order to be aroused.  If they are grown men, equals, and in the SM context, they may share a universe of sensation that the rest of us would just as soon ignore.  The biochemical parameters and components of that have been investigated to some degree.  It’s pretty clear that transgression is a component -- doing socially forbidden things -- but within the intimacy.  

"Last Tango in Paris"

Probably there are accounts of sexual violence against children somewhere.  The most compelling accounts of NON-violent but physical desire for a child might be “Lolita” or “Death in Venice.”  Two films show men tenderly bathing “daughters” they are using sexually:  “Last Tango in Paris” and “Butterfly.”  The women are technically adult but have hebephilic personas.  At no point are they beaten up, there is no blood-letting, and they are not confined.  (Terrifying case histories in daily newspapers tell of girls being shut into boxes, tied into chairs for YEARS, raped and forced to give birth without medical help.)

These heads are made of cake and frosting for a joke wedding cake.

Our culture in general is so violent that I was surprised anyone was shocked by vids of public beheadings of journalists.  The movies show heads rolling around as freely as billiard balls on a pool table.  The technical ability to show recognizable heads on pikes means there must be prototypes on many storage shelves in Hollywood.  Kid gamers commonly watch beheading with great gouts of blood, and spectacular immolations that leave shriveled black remains.  We see people raped on television every evening, often represented as deserved punishment.  Blaming the victim.

What the kids themselves, esp. the ones with enough self-awareness to market their own bodies (NOT their desire) describe is nothing so spectacular.  What they say is that they feel invisible, non-existent, shadowy, immersed in depression, alien.  They long for love, the kind of intimacy that makes marionettes and velveteen rabbits come to life.  Why not real boys?