DESIRE AMONG THE VECTORS

It’s almost a half century since gender has been taken out of the closet in all three aspects:  desire, identity, and social role.  It’s been almost as long since a virus came out of the African jungles to devastate the demographic category of “gay men” and then slowly ooze out over the rest of the world until now most AIDS victims are heterosexual, including children.

It’s about six centuries since Europeans found the American continents and started the traffic back and forth across the Atlantic -- loot, slaves and disease.  Early cases of smallpox among the indigenes were recorded almost immediately.  Smallpox, and many other zoonoses, are thought to have originated ten thousand years ago in Africa near the Mediterranean, the consequence of domesticating animals so that they were kept in enclosures near enough to transmit viruses and bacterias to their owners.  North Americans had no defenses and were decimated.

Not long ago smallpox was eradicated (sort of, since hidden samples are suspected) and now they claim that an effective vaccine for malaria exists.  The cause of malaria is a plasmodium (one-celled parasite) that uses mosquitoes as a vector syringe.  It is also an African organism, thought to have originated in primates. 

Human beings are the most effective vectoring entity from Africa.  The cross-over diseases not only were stored in the bodies of the African people but were also carried worldwide by them.  These human-transported parasites have endangered other living beings, but the humans themselves are parasites on the whole balance of the planet.  Some believe the only “cure” is to fly to another planet where there are no living beings -- a sort of clean slate.  But a spaceship is a vector of the problem -- us, we are the mosquitoes -- or are we the plasmodia in the mosquito?

Syphilis, which no one knows the original cause of, is bacterial.  Sheep have been mentioned, but the main origin is humans indigenous to America, going back across the Atlantic.  Recent research seems to clarify (and it's only fair) that Columbus took syphilis back to Europe with his crew.  And we finally acknowledge that every member of the Lewis and Clark party was infected except Clark.  A few died of it right away, some later, and pretty certainly Lewis was one of those victims, dying in agony and psychosis before he had a chance to edit his journals.

Meriweather Lewis

“Genocide” by Tim Barrus is an anthology of short stories considering these demographic disease issues and society's reaction, mixing male same-gender bonding with indigenous American peoples, with World War concentration camps disguised as carnivals, and space travel in a spaceship so anthropomorphic that it wants to know about sex.  The concentration camps are to hold HIV-infected persons -- the model is leprosy.  In reality it was actually suggested in regard to HIV and currently practiced to confine Ebola.

There’s one more element: the needled syringe, the proboscis of the human insect which made it possible to penetrate directly into blood, as a mosquito does, by-passing the acid bath and molecular-parting-out protective metabolism of the digestive system.  The visionary sci-fi epic of “Dune” took on drugs in terms of early versions of LSD, as something to put in the mouth (watching in cowboy country, the movie version of "spice" looks a little like “snoose”) rather than the injectables of today.  

Our times have addressed consciousness in the most brutal and invasive of ways, from electroshock to solitary confinement to surgery on intimate parts.  We have neglected the aesthetic power and lyric savagery of life itself.  Somehow it has been reduced to chemically triggered fucking, plastic credit cards and 3D video.  Now ebola comes, requiring a brutal response -- shrouded attendants drenched in bleach who only bury the dead because once more we must struggle to find a cure.  But we haven’t yet cured HIV and now realize there is a whole family of filoviruses out there, each waiting its turn.

The universal element of this story is, of course, humans.  It’s not just the medical dimension of confronting disease, but also defining our response as “fighting a war”, thus leaving refugees and creating stigma.  Truth be told, someone is “getting off” on the control, the blaming, the playing at heroics, the secret conviction that it’s related to virtue and that the people with the money are the virtuous ones and therefore justified in not spending it on the infected, because surely it must be their fault somehow.  They should pay.

Blood cells under attack

This means that the fruits of war include sexual ownership of the vulnerable, esp. children, and for some tastes, esp. boys, who don’t get pregnant (though they can be infected).  Boys can be partly controlled by the hope of someday themselves growing into warriors, as though being a victim were preparation for being anything but a bully.

The motor of this social system is ignorance that there is any other way of organizing a culture, which is why the indigenous and historical contexts are so valuable.

I don’t read much gay literature and haven’t really been very deep into sci-fi since I was a kid -- so long ago that Heinlein was new.  But I did read H.G. Wells and understood that he was doing cultural criticism, trying to suggest alternatives or at least thinking about many worlds rising into consciousness as they did in the 19th century. It’s the root of “Star Trek” and all the time travel tales.

The Starship Enterprise

“Desire, identity and social role” are characteristics of individuals, but the culture as a whole must be responsible for supporting the survival of individuals, who exist in reciprocity with all other humans plus the other beings and circumstances of the planet.  Otherwise, it all collapses. The idea of taking on the predicaments of suffering people everywhere across the planet is pretty daunting, and yet we come up with shelters and food for them.  Why can’t we do that for our own boys right here in America?

“Genocide,” the Barrus anthology, is poetic riffs on “desire, identity, and social role”.  Metaphor, narrative, and theatrical climax.  He could defend it as experience, but that’s dancing too close to bull-fighting with the well-dressed Puritans who live in airport bathroom stalls, passing judgment and gas.

My sci-fi (if you choose to call it that -- some say there’s not enough sci) is feminist, I guess:  that of Ursula LeGuin (more than Atwood) because the Pacific archipelago of Puget Sound is a place I know.  Her portrait of the cultures is almost stronger than the desire and identity, but Ged wears the monk robe, confronts the wind, and is infected with a small black scuttling thing that could be taken as a disease.  He’s a boy, the essence of boy, and finds a niche rather than aspiring to a throne.  He relates to both the small clinging companion in his hood and to the dragons that climb the skies as though they were rockets.

Ged

“Genocide” was copyrighted in 1988.  It is defiantly and erotically obscene and not a chronological narrative, but vividly the product of one haunted mind in a devastating time.  The latest work, “Just Before the Cure” probably cannot be copyrighted, though it is composed, written, and filmed mostly in 2015 by a group of boys.  It is a pastiche, a jumble, remembered nightmares colliding, the product of argument among boys about things they know, a harangue, a tantrum, and a love story (inevitably). Photos, videos and music smash into bitter surrealism.  A lot has happened in the 27 years since Genocide, but not enough.  One thing that has happened is that Barrus has been pushed by activism from a “solitary genius” sort of mode into this group performance that is both much older and much newer.

IN LIKE SKIN

Carrying death on our backs

Everyone has a fine time talking about Sin and Evil and Why Bad Things Happen.  Where’s the discussion of Desire, Delight, and Intimacy?  Getting outside of your own skin in a good way.  A real way. This is NOT about sex.  Nor is it about the abyss that faces us.

This post about three things:

1.  Crossing the skin barrier with senses, which is the first step towards meaning.

2.  Crossing the skin barrier with empathy, which is the fifth step toward meaning
        (2,3,4 are brain processing functions.  See earlier posts.)

3.  Escaping the skin barrier with wonder, mysticism, virtual worlds -- which isn’t a “step” but something that happens.

Lesley Hazleton

Let me start with a story from a blog I read which is by a hard-headed female international journalist living on a houseboat in Seattle.  She told about an experience that was either funny or tragic, depending on how you look at it.  It’s on the line between mysticism and science, one literal “point of view” unaccountable and another a test-able explanation.   (You could google for it.  Try “sky phenomena” for starters.)

Here’s a severely edited version of Lesley Hazleton’s account.  To get to know her, try her TED talk:  http://www.ted.com/talks/lesley_hazleton_the_doubt_essential_to_faith  Her blog is Accidentaltheologist.com/  She posted this story on Oct.23, 2014, and called it “Sun Dog.”

“People experience awe in very different ways. One person’s exhilarating glimpse of something infinitely grand can be another’s nightmare, to be denied, even exiled from consciousness.

“. . .The sun began to rise over the mountains to the east – a large, fuzzy sun, the color of a white daffodil. Mesmerized by its slow ascent, I waited for the moment when it would detach itself from the mountain ridges and assume a perfect, independent roundness. Except it didn’t. Just when I expected to see clear sky between sun and mountains, there seemed instead to be something beneath the sun, pushing it upward, and I realized that there were now two suns rising — two suns of equal size, conjoined, one on top of the other. “A sun dog!” I shouted.

“My friend came running up from below, took one look, and froze. “That shouldn’t be happening. That can’t be happening,” he shouted, adamantly refusing to believe the testimony of his own eyes. “That’s impossible!”

“. . . Something awful is happening, against all the laws of nature.” . . . But he only dashed back down into the cabin for shelter from the sky, leaving me alone to watch as it became still more extraordinary. The lower sun assumed a deeper color and more definite form as it rose, and as the upper one faded, a thick pillar of white light took shape between the remaining sun – the real sun — and the mountaintops. It occurred to me that it may have been as well that my friend was below deck: a pillar of light was so damn biblical. And then that in turn gave way to a huge double rainbow in an ellipse around the risen sun, and I could only stand there shaking my head and laughing, tears in my eyes, knowing that I would never again witness a sunrise as stunningly eerie and beautiful and grand as this.”

More conventional depiction of a sun dog (parhelion) often seen around here in winter.  

Some say it's what the ancients called "Elijah's Chariot Wheel of Fire."

So Lesley, open to her own senses, was able to accept this sky phenomenon while her companion, a preacher’s son, was so conditioned to think that anything out of the ordinary must be perverse, became terrified and rejecting.  Happens all the time.  Institutional religion is forever afraid it will sail over the edge of the world.

Especially here on the east slope of the Rockies where Pacific moisture, basically little prism droplets, meet the dry, windy, often very hot or cold, light-bending air of the prairies and creates something like a chandelier.  I need several metaphors.   

Our sky canopy is full of ruffles and tucks that we can’t see until they are beaded with water.  Enough airplanes leak or deliberately dump volatile fuel, possibly burning, that exhaust plumes add embroidery and spangles.  Wind shear can twist it into knots.  We know that the aurora borealis with its transparent chiffon veil dances is really ions from the Sun, which doesn’t make them any less miraculous-looking.  

To change the metaphor, it is as if the sky were the underside of a crystal geodesic dome against which someone is pointing laser lights, making shining pillars and flaring rainbows.  Some people don’t want to know what the display “really” is -- they’d rather let their imaginations play -- but others (probably the same ones who want to know how movie effects are made) only feel enriched by understanding the behavior of light refraction.  

When musicians play certain chords exactly in tune, a note that isn’t played at all will be heard.  They’re called “overtones” and can be described and predicted by the physics of vibration, particularly with strings and columns of air.  Something like overtones exists in the human brain and perhaps it is an explanation of mysticism, the perception of something imperceptible -- that is, to ordinary senses.  

If one has rich experiences and is open to what is mysterious, exalting, and gorgeous, it’s not hard to imagine angels and aliens.  Why discourage this?  Aesthetics is a kind of morality, a guide to rewarding behavior, sometimes shared -- maybe not.  Lesley is a person who has traveled the world, studied other religious systems, seen terrifying and horrible violence.  Yet she is capable of amazement at beauty.  She knows it is a kind of redemption.

We struggle to survive as individuals and as groups, but why?   What is the name of “the force that through the green fuse drives” but desire.  It’s desire that pulls us through the narrative trajectory of our lives, both the suffering and the bliss.  Sometimes the world opens around us like a jeweled rose blooming and other times the torment of dark, cold, suffocation, plummeting is overwhelming.  They say that the worst outcome of torture is the loss of desire -- no longer wanting, no longer remembering, no longer even feeling.  It is separation from Being Itself.

In our struggle to preserve ourselves and others who are too different to understand, at least in the terms we know, we push those others off the edge of the world.  No room!  No room!  Not enough food!  You scare us!  Foolishness.  This planet is a sphere.  If you push the others out, they’ll just travel around and come up behind you to bite you in the butt.

Sorry this is mono-sexual.

I’ve moved my understanding of the basis of salvation away from virtue and into participation.  To participate in the webbed life of the planet, the movement of air and water, the dance of creation, the surprises and efforts -- these are what make life worth living, worth the survival.  It IS survival, no matter the length of your life, how rewarded your gifts, the magnificence of your status.  If you were there, you saw, you figured it out, that’s enough.  You did your part for the group and yourself. 

As a compliment, some people are described as being “comfortable in their skins,” meaning that they are neither pretentious nor shrinking and therefore good to be around.  Some say that one of the important characteristics of humans is that they can enjoy the creation, wherever it came from, and know that they belong in it, even if only as observers.

This post is a birthday message to a close friend.

NEUROLITURGY

Liminal space or dissociation?

Over and over for decades I’ve been rewriting and extending research on the design of liturgy/worship or whatever you personally call your time that is set aside for focus, reflection, awareness of higher powers, or however else you refill the aquifers of your personhood.  The short version of this is what we students asked in seminary:  “Can you call the Holy Spirit?”  The long version was my attempted thesis which I could NOT get past the seminary faculty but could not lay aside either.

When one researches this field, one soon realizes that a person can go to the library and check out an entire worship service printed on paper, even the music written out and when to stand or ring a bell.   (It's not likely to set your hair on fire.) Therefore, an academic sees writing and words (if you allow musical notes to be “words”) as what liturgy “is.”  No shaman ever thinks that.  Likewise, theology is about words and a certain kind of reasoning.  No shaman bothers with those.

Lately researchers for religion have been fussing that people keep searching for “spirituality” and don’t like institutions.  The trouble is that few seminaries really teach “spirituality,” though some of them are liturgical.  The troubles at General Theological Seminary in Chelsea, Manhattan, can easily be interpreted as the upside-down situation of a lawyer/social scrambler president, who thinks theology is like law, colliding with a student body young enough to want the spiritual content of beloved liturgy.  One clue is his tone-deaf decision to reschedule morning worship from 8AM to 10AM.  It’s a way to start the day, dummy!  Not just another class-like gathering.  He has succeeded in converting a dedicated community into a corporation court trial.

New Guinea peoples keep the bodies of their loved ones.

It was clear to me even when I first gathered my bizarre set of thesis examples (cannibalism in the Andes, New Guinea ceremonies, a wedding with a dead groom) that there were certain “givens” to spiritually transforming or supporting events.  The concept of liminality, for instance -- the creation of a sequestered and safe place where normal social constraints had been removed and emotion could erupt or simply well up -- is a solid indicator.  But words or even an authority figure were not necessary.  I saw that “spirituality” was a function of the pre- sub- un- conscious  and that it was more a matter of art than reason.  It is FELT.  But it is full of MEANING, which some conflate with words, forgetting that “a poem must not mean but be.”  More like dreams.  Metaphors.  Psychoanalysis.  Interpretive dance.

So I feel joyfully entitled to claim the little corner of the current tsunami of thought about neuro-research that I now label “neuro-liturgy.”  I’m not claiming to account for mystical experiences, which is the way the subject has been approached in some literature.  (I googled.)  I want to know what we should keep in mind when designing an effective experience in ANY human context.  How do we call the “unconscious” since it is not cognizant in a spoken way but certainly aware (conscious in a felt way) of anything inside the skin, including those anatomical structures meant to reach out to whatever it is “out-skin.”   How do we discover the nature of DESIRE, which Mark Solms tells us is what Freud concluded drives human life, the key life-force that gives rise to everything else, particularly survival?  

Human identity is an emergent phenomenon dependent on the richness of in-skin experience gathered by the entire body in the course of interaction with the “reality” that is “out-skin.”  Human brain anatomy is “cumulative” which means that each evolved or mutated ability must be built on and come to terms with whatever the brain was doing earlier.  The two main divisions are between the autonomic and limbic systems that are shared with all mammals (some parts of the system with all vertebrates) and those abilities acquired in the course of developing the cortex.  This later part is -- beyond everything else -- responsive, always rebuilding itself in terms of actual tissue.

1.  The sensorium

The single simplest and most potent thing a person can do to strengthen spirituality is to expand consciousness, both knowledge of the sights, sounds, tastes, temperatures, textures, smells of the world and awareness of how they interact, what they symbolize, how they are drawn from the natural world -- and awareness of one’s inner world, how one is “feeling,” in terms of affect but also bodily comfort or tension.  

2.  Maps and Metaphors

There is simply no possible way to keep “in mind” everything the body is capable of sensing, so we have evolved ways to sort and bundle information.  On the surface of the cortex there are evidently at least two maps.  One is a grid (supported by specific cells that note where the body is in space -- “out-skin”) and another is the homuncular map of the body that records the amount of neuron space devoted to intake from any specific point “in-skin.”

Memories are filed according to the emotional “vibe” and the sensory records of the moment, but they are not preserved as remembered units.  Rather, when they are called up they are gathered back together from separate records.  The process of memory can go wrong in ways that have not entirely been explained so far.  Suppressed memory, mistaken memories, memories based on erroneous information, and memories that hijack the emotional system are all being investigated.

The brain connectome

3.  The Connectome

Somewhat similarly, at any given moment the brain is connecting clusters of neurons in a kind of “chord” or pattern of interaction.  These patterns shift according to the task being presented, and represent what is felt as meaning as well as awareness of a certain cognizance.  A common transition to use as reference is “going to sleep” which is sort of semi-conscious but can happen without any intention.  Waking up is an opposite but parallel phenomenon -- not consciously intended but easily conditioned.  But so are many of the things that happen in sleep and a high proportion of what happens when awake.

Oh, yeah?

4.  Expression

Voluntary and involuntary kinds of expression include facial cues on up a scale of intention, control and inspiration to fine arts.  Expression in all ways possible are often guided and powered by feeling, the pre- un- sub- functioning of the brain.  This produces meaning as well as expressing it.

This meaning is often recorded "outskin" either purposely or naively as material culture: clothing, instruments, music, architecture, painting, toys, decoration.  These things are “containers” for meaning.

5.  Community

It appears that the brain functions on several distinct levels, one being the thalamic limbic system of animal desire to survive (which, since we are not up-tight Viennese patriarchs, we can consider a GOOD thing), and the other being the cortex, esp. the prefrontal cortex.  In addition to the small structures or organelles of hippocampus and whatever, there are also individual kinds of cells that specialize in specific awareness.  They are a reminder that we are essentially a colony of collaborating one-celled animals united within a skin.

One of these cell specialties is empathy, which is clearly transpersonal and a way to join human awareness into community.  This is the point where private prayer and devotion meets the congregation that sings, prays, orally or physically responds, and listens together.  It remains a function of the individual human mind.  The generous will extend the ability to all mammals.

When the community of “boys at risk” expresses what they most yearn for, what their lifeforce desire might be, they speak of two modes:  one is the “beloved community” that provides shelter and supports identity (they know who you are and will help you), and the other is deep intimacy with another person.  These are “emergent” survival-based desires that when satisfied create meaning and transcendent experience.  Those of us who try to understand need great attentiveness to persons, the world, and ourselves.

http://www.digitalamherst.org/items/show/81

Keep me from going to sleep too soon
Or if I go to sleep too soon
Come wake me up. Come any hour
Of night. Come whistling up the road.
Stomp on the porch. Bang on the door.
Make me get out of bed and come
And let you in and light a light.
Tell me the northern lights are on
And make me look. Or tell me clouds
Are doing something to the moon
They never did before, and show me.
See that I see. Talk to me till
I'm half as wide awake as you
And start to dress wondering why
I ever went to bed at all.
Tell me the walking is superb.
Not only tell me but persuade me.
You know I'm not too hard persuaded. 

-- Robert Francis