The Orthodoxy of Embodiment: Gender Heresy/Gender Magick in Human Culture

Or: The Shifting Roles of Gender-Benders, Crossers or (insert other verbal noun here) in the Ongoing Drama of Civilization, and the phenomenological "Which-craft" of the Destabilization of Fundamental Ontological Categories That Such People Perennially (and with a multitude of variable effects) Enact Within Their Mother-Cultures

…In which I discuss the strange, magical and often counter-intuitive phenomenon of how (in my limited experience and humble opinions) the people most "accepting" of gender-heretics are people who live like Americans lived 200 years ago. I also speculate on why this is so.

You can only "bend" gender in a system that's too rigid to begin with

-Paraphrase of a thought by Leslie Feinberg

Humans are social, visually oriented creatures and gender is one of the sets of signs by which we communicate. But gender is not merely an arbitrary assemblage of signs, it is in a way a special sign (or perhaps "signing") that occasions a vast repertoire of more mundane significations. Thus it is a platform or interface, existing as a hypostasis of meanings from which other meanings emanate. It is a "ground of many signs" if not of all signs. Because of its coupling with the flesh (and not just coupling with patterns of behavior, as with the construction of sexual orientation) I think "gender" deserves special critical attention, especially when discussing to what extent it is socially constructed.

*First, a necessary disclaimer. It won't do to simply claim that gender is either a social construction or that it is a product of biological determinism. There is no easy answer. First of all, to denigrate the idea of social construction and its value is to miss the critical point that for humans, things that "exist" largely in the realms of language, symbol and process are NO LESS REAL than material things (again, as far as humans are concerned. Other animals, that's another story). We are humans, social mammals of a high order, and so to say that something is "socially constructed" is not actually to say that it's "not real", "fake", "less real" or that it is "bad". Such appraisals and value judgements are actually the result of projecting one's own conservative, misguided assumptions onto the discussion. In actual fact, to say something is socially or culturally constructed is to acknowledge its incredible power and leverage in human life and experience. Therefore, the joke is on you if you reject social constructivism out of hand. Just a word of warning because I've been there. ;)

I must emphasize that I for one am not interested in implicating or shaming others through a discussion about how we should "all" abandon gender, whatever that means. What follows is not some pretentious, political call to action, (although it might consist of one I direct at myself, which is of course my own business). Rather it is philosophy, it is questioning as worship of the perennial trickster-deities of myth, magic and mysticism. It is not cynical exposition or muckraking, as critiques of capitalism or other hegemonic systems are often seen, but rather it is a curious homily, a reverent, open discovering, necessarily iconoclastic because nothing is sacred other than the pursuit of revealing what is hidden, at least where possible (through the subjective experiences of the ones who are "othered"), and compassion for all oppressed peoples. Just to get this out of the way, I don't believe that we can live without categories, unless we devolved into marsupials or fish or something that doesn't have complex language. Categories create necessarily tensions, including categories that deal with gender and sex. Without identity there can be no identity crisis. And neither one is better or more desirable than the other. Which is better, the crest of a wave or the trough? It's a ridiculous question—they are both inter-complementary components of the waveform. So it is with categories. Nature creates the corporeal 'category' of species, which even then is not fixed, and often that category acts as a platform for deviation or mutation. Then after a long time, perhaps the category has moved, perhaps it encompasses other flesh, other boundaries. It is the eternal swing dance of entropy. But the category, however fuzzy its borders are, is never eradicated, and no one is saying it should be. But people ARE saying that we should see categories for what they are, in the course of cultural, historical, and even (in the case of biological categories) geological time. I write about this, about the category of gender, because being a person with non typical gender presentation (and identity) in the world I live in today is a fascinating journey that constantly yields unpredictable discoveries for both myself and those around me, as I pilot this somatic vehicle through human space. It also yields many questions about about cultural history, particularly the history of "gender liminality", which has yet to be fully written. Many people seem to believe that transgender is a "new" thing. Like it's a new social trend that has developed out of gay liberation. I guess that's easy to think if you watch too much TV and have never thought about it before (many of us). In reality, like with many identities, new spaces have been created—or found—in society that allow transgender identities to exist and (re)invent themselves, but as with gay/lesbian identity, the *behaviors* have existed as far back as the historical records take us. But the behaviors are often occluded, hidden behind the comprehensive labels we stick on top of them. It is such naming systems that are modern, and culturally derived—and that indeed accounts for a lot, because words are important. We take for granted these days entire concepts about what the self is and can be, but modern Western personhood, and the things it consists of (like "identities", hobbies, career, gender, life goals etc.) has not always been what it is today. I find this idea endlessly thought-provoking.

I just read the essay My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage by Susan Stryker, a transsexual woman. Written in 1994, it is a foundational text in the trans-disciplinary (and also "post-normal" in the sense of breaking down barriers between the academy and activism) field of transgender studies. I’m just beginning to realize how many radical queer warrior-poets she’s influenced, including some of my favorite lyric essays like "Monster Trans" by Boots Potential and the poem "The Seam of Skin and Scales" by the blogger Little Light (the authors are either genderqueer or transgender). Stryker's essay is simply iconic (and iconoclastic!) and totally transcends the (often classist)boundaries of academic writing… as it very much should. For anyone not familiar with it, it is an intensely moving and bold manifesto reclaiming and subverting “monster” (and, also “creature” as this previously self-defined Earthling/Faun-kin was delighted to find) as identities from which authentic, unpredictable, non-deterministic and integral consciousness emerges—upending heteronormative and cis-sexist assumptions about what these "monstrous" or corporeally-heterodox beings are supposed to be like. And that consciousness has a few things to say about the orthodoxy of the flesh… :) At its time of writing it was a complete inversion of the at times hateful criticism that transsexuals were getting from the first-world feminist movement, which explicitly described the monstrousness of the "constructed" transsexual body as a sinister arm of the patriarchy, as well as a symptom of its derangement. To some feminists, the transsexual, particularly the male-to-female transsexual, represented an ultimately "patriarchal" attempt in an oblique and masked way to infiltrate and control women's space. This is of course, a ridiculous set of claims, and such hate and audacity from the most privileged group (of the oppressed)—white first-world cisgender woman feminists is enough to make any transgender person's blood boil. Styker made darn the sure boiling of her own blood would fuel one of the most amazing pieces of writing I've ever read. She wastes no time getting straight to the point in the first paragraph of the monologue:

"The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster's as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.

I am not the first to link Frankenstein's monster and the transsexual body. Mary Daly makes the connection explicit by discussing transsexuality in "Boundary Violation and the Frankenstein Phenomenon," in which she characterizes transsexuals as the agents of a "necrophilic invasion" of female space (69-72). Janice Raymond, who acknowledges Daly as a formative influence, is less direct when she says that "the problem of transsexuality would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence," but in this statement she nevertheless echoes Victor Frankenstein's feelings toward the monster: "Begone, vile insect, or rather, stay, that I may trample you to dust. You reproach me with your creation" (Raymond 178; Shelley 95). It is a commonplace of literary criticism to note that Frankenstein's monster is his own dark, romantic double, the alien Other he constructs and upon which he projects all he cannot accept in himself; indeed, Frankenstein calls the monster "my own vampire, my own spirit set loose from the grave" (Shelley 74). Might I suggest that Daly, Raymond and others of their ilk similarly construct the transsexual as their own particular golem? (1)"

Well, that's what I call "bringing it". She saw your "monster" and your "transsexual menace" and raised ya' a manifesto by an expert on the subject.

And now for some earthling pride:

“A creature, after all, in the dominant tradition of Western European culture, is nothing other than a created being, a made thing. The affront you humans take at being called a “creature” results from the threat the term poses to your status as “lords of creation,” beings elevated above mere material existence. As in the case of being called “it,” being called a “creature” suggests the lack or loss of a superior personhood. I find no shame, however, in acknowledging my egalitarian relationship with non-human material Being; everything emerges from the same matrix of possibilities.

…Hearken unto me, fellow creatures. I who have dwelt in a form unmatched with my desire, I whose flesh has become an assemblage of incongruous anatomical parts, I who achieve the similitude of a natural body only through an unnatural process, I offer you this warning: the Nature you bedevil me with is a lie. Do not trust it to protect you from what I represent, for it is a fabrication that cloaks the groundlessness of the privilege you seek to maintain for yourself at my expense. You are as constructed as me; the same anarchic Womb has birthed us both. I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself. “

(emphasis mine)

Ah yes. (I write this in 21st century Los Angeles, having migrated here from a little shire town in the tundra so I can attend graduate school) And I don't know about where you are from, dear reader, but here in America, here in Generation Y, we are all cyborgs, monsters, mythical beasts that have been exploded and put back together again by the fragmentation inflicted on our bodies and minds by culture, by media, by texts and hyper-texts and biomedical technology and by the collapse of space and time. Even if we think of ourselves as heterosexual and completely gender-conforming, well, we've still "suffered" the fulfillment of Marxist prophecy. (I use "suffer" in its antiquarian meaning, analogous to the Latin "passio", "to experience"). I will come back to this point later in this essay. By the way, I strongly encourage you to read the whole thing when you get the chance. It's not long, but it is a deep, and alive text. Every paragraph is delightfully electrifying and fur-bristling.

Stryker's meditations unleashed and legitimated a whole mountain, whole ecologies of thoughts within me, both academic and personal, as I've been wrestling with the demons (or self-styled priests, perhaps) of what I'll call "orthodox embodiment" for much of my life, definitely all of what might be called my "adult life". Naming myself as transgender, though empowering and productive, has not seen the demise of this battle, because now there is a whole new set of problems, a whole new "orthodoxy" to contend with. But I want to be free of orthodoxy, completely! I want my position in the "religion of gender" to match my spiritual position, which is, I am a mystic, one who walks that razor edge between saint and heretic, ecstasy and agitation, sacred and profane. Others define such people in relation to the binary spectrum of Orthodoxy/Heresy after the fact, in acts of retroactive continuity. Mystic/heretics don't define themselves in relation to it—that's not how they articulate their own, lived personhood. I am not attached to neither "orthodoxy" nor "heresy", because in all spheres those are merely constructed categories, devised by and meant for people who control lots of other people, not for humble little me. I continue to re-emerge to myself as a creature who, yes, is transgender, but NO, does not want to be "cured", because if society sees me as male, I sure will be a weird, effeminate male. I face the reality, both terrifying and liberating, of being in a space of gender ambiguity and fluidity and "transition" perhaps for my whole life, but not out of confusion. Not at all. But because there are some people who really are somewhere between male and female… and even if I ever look completely male on the "outside", I will, essentially, have an "intersex" body. There is no way some aspect of hybridity can ever be eradicated. And I, as well as a whole new generation of transgender youth, don't want to eradicate it.

There is an undeniable sense in which the appearance of ambiguous or "transgressive" gender presentations or bodies in our visual field actually has the power to change us, and to do so in fundamental ways. This is achieved though the manipulation of cues that normally act as signifying anchors, suspending each person, and indeed, whole societies, in a relational gel that has the feeling of being fixed. Whether we like it or not, the bodies of other humans, in the course of our perception, act as referents to aspects of both other selves and OUR selves. Thus, viewing bodies (any bodies, not just "non-normative" ones) can occasion breakdowns of barriers between subject and object that usually remain relatively solid and do not belie much plasticity or permeability. Indeed, this subject/object "wave-particle collapse" (to borrow a term from quantum physics) has been explored by neuroscientists in studies of the neurological correlates of empathy and imitation. There is an extent to which, when viewing others perform a certain physical action, neural pathways corresponding to the motor performance of that action are activated in primates (and ostensibly humans) without them actually performing that action. In other words, when we view another body performing a distinct action (especially a meaningful one, like reaching for food or mating) our brains simulate that action. Our brains similarly respond when viewing physical pain be inflicted on others, though the intensity of the felt empathy is modulated by circumstances like if we know the person or how much we like or dislike them. Additionally, there is evidence that similar mirroring occurs when viewing basic emotions (in facial expressions), even able to be traced to micro contractions in our own facial muscles. Much of this mirroring is automatic and we don't have control over it. Mimicry and mirroring is literally built into us, from the level of the neuron to our physical movements.
There is a sense in which we—the human family—are all one flesh. And our brains know it.

Inter-sexed, cross-dressing, and androgynous beings (or chimeric beings that transgress species boundaries) have long represented shamanic or super-natural power in both mythologic and ritualistic dimensions. Such bodies are indisputably sites of rupture. The potential benefit, danger, or other utility of such rupture has been evaluated in a whole range of ways by different human cultures and civilizations. I want press the point that there really is a sense in which people have seen, interpreted, imagined or even felt such bodies—shapeshifting, gender-crossing, hermaphroditic or monstrous bodies— as having causal effects on the world and on other beings. Being able to be more than one thing or contain more than one essence, in the course of much of our history (where we believed in souls, spirits and other essentializing substances) has indicated a concomitant ability to possess unique perceptual abilities or to be able to receive a wider spectrum of sensory or ethereal information (i.e. see into other dimensions or have mystical visions). Or, on the negative side, it could be interpreted as demon possession.

But maybe these fantasies of magical power and material causation are grounded in the phenomenology of the crisis of encountering a "monstrous" or mixed body, and naturally relating oneself to it in all the ways that we are wont to do. No wonder gender non conforming or gender-crossing folk have been variably called "witch" or "saint", "miracle" or "monstrosity", depending on who is doing the name calling! An imperative question is, of course, who gets to profit off of these "sites of rupture", to name them as either sacred or profane? Is it a transgender person themselves? Is it their family, kin group or tribe, or their persecutors? Is it the ones who "cure" them—whether it is exorcising a demon or administering medical care?

Kate Bornstein discusses this anxiety or "identity crisis" (that is simultaneously a double crisis of naming both the self and the other) in her description of the scene in the film The Crying Game where, on seeing the body of his lover revealed for the first time as transsexual, one of the protagonists vomits due to shock, as he previously did not know of his love object's transsexuality. Bornstein shrewdly notes that despite the hype surrounding the film, no one gave a critical glance at this intensely visceral scene, perhaps "because it would draw focus to the other side of revulsion: desire" (237, The Transgender Studies Reader). She continues:

"His vomiting can be seen not so much as a sign of revulsion as an admission of attraction, and the consequential upheaval of his gender identity and sexual orientation." (ibid.)

In the proverbial encounter with the transsexual or androgynous body, I suspect that the more fixed our notions of identity are, perhaps the more disruptive (for better or worse) such an encounter can be. As Foucault and others have shown, fixed identity categories like gay, lesbian or heterosexual are only there in the first place due to civilizing structures that are largely historically contingent. So long as such identities are understood to be fixed, essential, cosmically orienting (and thus containing soteriological possibilities), and self-contained behind the skin of each individual (that is, non-collective), encounters with such bodies will run the risk of being experienced and framed as potentially threatening, more so because what exactly is being threatened is often not understood due to psychological and linguistic barriers that are culturally upheld. I wonder, especially after mulling over Susan Stryker's monster manifesto, if a visual encounter with the transsexual body (and/or transsexual subjectivity) not so much symbolizes to the viewer the crisis of fragmentation of the self, but in fact represents a resolution of that fragmentation. In an ironic turn of events, within a society undergoing social change faster than can be psychologically accommodated, where fragmentation of identity—ALL our identities, whether normative or not—is both seeded and profited off of by capitalist society, the stitched-together, DIY transsexual body both represents a sought-after or nostalgic integrity AND simultaneously parodies it. Either way it is easy to see how it becomes an ideal target for derision.

In Transgender Liberation, Feinberg focuses on the societal/collective manifestation of this identity anxiety in her survey of historical campaigns of oppression and violent persecution waged on gender non-conforming people by imperial authorities and institutions. In this essay—foundational to transgender studies as well as transgender consciousness in the U.S.— Feinberg engages in a Marxist analysis of the treatment of gender-different individuals, and alludes to just some of the ways in which they have long been the casualties of the game of empire building. Records of such attitudes date back over two thousand years, and some of the first extant evidence of such persecution exists in the book of Deuteronomy (c. 7th century B.C.E.) Gender nonconforming people, while even celebrated and valued in communal, pastoral, often polytheistic contexts, become targets of the regulatory and organizational agendas of centralized governments that are the colonizers of less socially complex and less hierarchical societies. Since such bodies represent rupture on multiple ontological dimensions, what they signify is contested and can be inverted on a dime by those who are in charge of the means of production (of meaning).

"A glance at human history proves that when societies were not ruled by exploiting classes that rely on divide-and-conquer tactics, "cross-gendered" youth, women and men on all continents were respected members of their communities." (p. 207, from the Transgender Studies Reader)

A gender nonconforming person in a more closed, small scale (and by that fact more egalitarian, even if only in a strictly statistical sense) society could be valued for their difference (where deviance from the norm is seen as potentially conferring strategic benefits to the whole group). However, such a person can be seen as a liability by a more hierarchical, large-scale and centralized society. This seems especially true of societies whose size, complexity, goals (or a combination thereof) lead them to deploy religious or moral ideologies as homogenizing mediums. Ironically, in imperial or colonial situations, gender variance, and the possibility of more fluid roles, could epitomize to the hegemony the fear of insurrection. Feinberg emphasizes that for much of European history, the moving target of "witch" has often rested on women who engaged in gender-transgressive behavior (for their time, not necessarily behavior which we would today see as gender transgressive). Such behavior could include but was not limited to a woman who was not a consecrated virgin, anchoress (or otherwise connected to the Church) living alone, not marrying, practicing herbalism, cross-dressing or having same-sex relationships.

I've experienced surprising acceptance among rural folks in New England. I've met and have known lots of folks that, while I'm not sure would be considered "rednecks" according to the popular representations, are definitely considered the ecologically-minded equivalent, (we call them green-necks in Vermont). They are people who don't have much or any experience living in urban environments and have little or no connection to television and/or representations that come out of Hollywood. Usually living in geographically remote places, saltwater farms or cabins in the Green Mountains, they live somewhere on the continuum of "off the grid" that encompasses symbolic and social disconnect from greater pop culture and corporate entities to, say, a literal disconnect from the electric grid. They are pragmatic and utilitarian people, survivors, people you wouldn't normally think would look kindly on mohawks, tattoos, piercings and gender ambiguity, much less all rolled into one person! Then again, I grew up in rural Vermont and have spent my whole life there up until recently, so that has supplied me with some cultural access that I perhaps couldn't otherwise have if I'd grown up in an urban environment. I'll never forget the time when I was volunteering at Northeast Animal Power Field Days in Tunbridge, Vermont. This is a multi-day gathering, on historic old fairgrounds, of teamsters who work with oxen, horses and mules. There is an emphasis on people who do it not just for hobby, but who actually run their farms or woodlots on draft power. It's chock full of educational workshops as well as field demonstrations and vendor exhibits, pretty much everything you'd expect from a proper old-school ag fair. At this gathering, octogenarian libertarians, conservative families with kids in 4H programs, Vermont secessionists, and young progressive college or graduate age activists on the front lines of the new "back to the land" movement all mingle with each other out of common joys and passions. The political undertones are there, expressed on countless bumper stickers with slogans like "Oil is Over", or "Oil: The Original 'Alternative' Energy", but such views are neither overt or pretentious nor ignored or disputed. No one is threatened by anyone else. If you can't tell, this amazing intersectional social, political, and productive space is one of my happy places. I think that was either the first or second gathering ever, and I saw license plates from all over the northeast and eastern seaboard. But anyways, one of the most amazing demonstrations I saw was by a fellow from Connecticut, definitely well into his 80's, who brought his team of oxen up to Vermont with him for the Field Days. When I encountered him he had them yoked to a cart and on display for all to see. As they stood there, epitomizing the sublime blend of tranquility and raw power that bovines do, he lectured about his experiences raising and training them. I specifically remember him detailing the painstaking and artful process by which their horns are weighted and capped so as to not inflict injuries on themselves or their driver. Afterwards, when he was receiving questions from the crowd, I went up to tell him how his oxen were the most beautiful I'd ever seen and to express my interest in oxen driving. At that point, I'd had several years of farm jobs behind me, mostly at small-scale operations where the only machine around was, other than the vacuum pump that ran the milking machines, the occasional and often antique tractor. And more specifically I had some amateur experience driving horses and mules on a mostly draft-powered dairy farm I'd apprenticed at in Upstate NY, a summer for which I am forever grateful. As I related my experiences to this fellow (I forget what question or questions I actually did ask) I'll never forget the grace and friendliness in his demeanor. It was more than just being polite. I mean he didn't blink, and I perhaps only then started to realize how much I wasn't used to people in that generation and from a rural background completely looking past my appearance, effortlessly, no less. Our interaction was one between two farmers, two people whose identities, albeit in very different cultural settings, had been so much shaped by a relationship to the land. Not just ay relationship either, but an embodied one, one that was expressed through direct physical interaction with ecologies and with big, powerful, beautiful animals that were our partners in stewardship. In my case of course that relationship was not something that I was born into or inherited from my family, but something I sought out, and yes, often with a hint of romance. But this guy didn't have any hint of a smirk in his smile (it's funny when you define your interactions with folk by what they DON'T do, but such is the life of some of us), and for one of the first and most memorable (but not only) times in such an interaction, I felt seen.

Since then, I've had many more such interactions, not just with people entrenched in an agrarian world, but also in the spaces I've wandered into through my still nascent journey into the "primitive" skills community, where often quite solitary and stoic folks—hunters and trappers and First Nation people—of the Baby Boomer generation or older rub shoulders with young, politically charged (and needless to say privileged!) people like myself. These experiences have given me a great deal of humility… something that I think is explicitly NOT achieved by exclusionary or elitist attitudes that paradoxically probably come from the same desire (to instill a measure of respect in an 'ignorant' or ostensibly misguided younger generation).

It took me a while to figure these dynamics out, because sometimes I'd feel, and do feel, that in cities, urban and suburban environments I get more stares and weird looks than in rural areas. People are more defensive, wary perhaps. This seems so counter intuitive because cities are supposed to be hotbeds of "diversity", right? Vermont and Maine are some of the whitest states in the union… people don't "understand" diversity there. Right? …Wrong. I think much of it has to do with a particular brand of [Yankee] libertarian ethics that predominate among rural people of particularly northern Appalachia. The key is that many such people are, in libertarian fashion, fiscally conservative but socially liberal. They are against government regulation, not just in the realm of markets, but in all realms. I think this really has an effect, whether conscious or not (I suspect not) on the ethics and aesthetics of identity and personhood, in some positive ways I think. The essential anti-government and anti-state intervention stance and the constellation of resulting outlooks that it precipitates effect a kind of self-reliance and rejection of all language of empire, including that which serves to constrain non-heteronomative expression. Why is this so? I suspect that it has much to do with the resulting subjective position in which such people are not principally self-identified or objectified as consuming units, because of their distal (in terms of both space and ideology) relationship with large-scale hierarchical social, political or economic structures. For many of these people, their senses of self are intimately connected to production, not consumption. And I don't mean production in a consumerist context, I mean production of things for their own use or for the use of close kin or local community. Production in this sense is not just production of children or of labor-time vaulted by some abstract overarching economic system, but production of food, skills, soil (fuck yeah compost), and whatever things necessary to maintain traditions of cultural and ecological stewardship. Ironically, when our prime job is to consume, it is easier to cling to and unconsciously "protect" the only primal production left to us—childbirth and parenting, which are in the dominant society represented optimally in conjunction with heterosexuality, marriage and monogamy. This is definitely changing, but still to a large extent true. You might be thinking that I'm mistaken, and I'm just talking about wealthy back-the-the-landers and hobby farmers. But I'm not. I'm talking about working class people, who I often would only call "privileged" in the sense that they are blessed with the knowledge of how to live a self-sufficient rural life, which didn't used to be a privilege, it used to be a fucking birthright.

I've found difference and diversity is valued more at the level of smaller communities. I'm not saying urban, more consumerist environments are less tolerant per se, but I've found that in small, close-knit communities difference is valued more readily, and it is less prone to being categorized or labeled as something before being valued. This isn't just true of times long gone, as in autonomous pre-modern tribes of pastoral herding communities in the mountains of Europe (as Feinberg alludes to) but also just in certain contemporary rural settings, too. I think there is an evolutionary explanation for this. I think that at a small group level, especially when that group is relatively regionally isolated, the skill set of the group is very important. Differences, as long as they do not cause physical illness or severe disability, are tacitly understood to present possible unpredictable expansions of that skill set. Examples of this are non-neurotypical individuals like people who are hypersensitive to sensory input—such people could become empaths, psychics or soothsayers. People with visionary propensities or ambiguous genders could be shamans or priests, people with attention "disorders" or "compulsions" could be the best plant identifiers or animal trackers you've ever met because of their indexical and categorizing brains and attention to detail. When you are a small community trying to survive, or just trying to thrive, difference and diversity equal novelty, and you want the maximum chance to benefit from novelty, so to make the most of your environment and situatedness. After all, nature herself is a freak for diversity, and without it not only would we not have the complex ecologies that we do, but intelligence would have never evolved past a certain point.

But, as soon as a ruling elite gains sovereignty over a wide range of such smaller groups, such difference is no longer an asset, but a liability. The key is that the one doing the appraising of what proper (=useful) expression or behavior is shifts from the subjectivity of the group to that of the empire. From a distant position of theoretical top-down control, heirarchs can deploy homogenizing and regulatory ideologies and technologies, and ideas (manifested in universal ethical and moral codes) take the place of face to face speech, which flows two ways and is naturally more democratic—indeed, the true ground for human negotiation. When centralized civilization occurs, and this civilization is concerned with its nationality, with its national identity, naturally inclining to the aspiration of "alpha nation", differences that might otherwise be valued or valuable become monstrous. This reflects the perceived power of "monsters", "freaks" and "heretics" as insurrectionary agents who could potentially weaken the structuring of empire.
For an army to be successful, maximum uniformity and conformity at the level of individual soldiers is critical for the success of the chosen endeavors of the commander-in-chief. It is, in fact, a top-down will and intent that must be expressed through the coordination of many individual agents. This takes a really high level of organization, and its truly hard to not admire it, however awful it could potentially be (and I don't think it always has to be awful). In many ways though, the success and prospering of civilization has necessarily involved a deliberate reversal of organic ecological principles of bottom-up evolution of systems. Even cultural systems that have evolved in that bottom-up fashion (economies) still get appropriated in terms of top-down, hegemonic goals.

The Paradoxes of Post-Industrial Individualism

What follows is a hopefully minimally disjointed series of thoughts about capitalism, American society, and the irony of the (high fructose corn syrup) fruits it has yielded. Indeed, such fruits are a mixed blessings… and to what exact extent, the jury is still out…

One of the most remarkable observations about post-industrial America is alluded to in the amazing essay "Capitalism and Gay Identity" by John D'Emilio. It is essentially this: Industrial and post-industrial capitalism have weakened the utility of the nuclear family while at the same time idealizing it, targeting it as primary unit of consumption. As a result, heterosexuality and its relationship to the "family" has become ideological, another commodity to be bought and sold. Ancillary to this is the scapegoating of gay, lesbian, transgender and gender-nonconforming people by popular discourse—framing them as emblematizing the dark side of modern society, i.e. what happens when family values fail or when people have too much freedom (?!) This is nothing less than the pot calling the kettle black, because we are indeed all victims of capitalism—in its historic, psychological, and physical/architectural forms—whether we are gay or straight, and whether we are monogamous or not. What this is is the policing of freedom; only one kind of freedom is "okay" and acceptable in America: political and economic freedom, the kind of freedom that allows the little guy to get a nice healthy piece of the pie through a ruthless and often bordering on sociopathic discourse of individualism. But what about the kind of freedom that might allow him, because of historical changes in ways of living and working and socializing that our culture has undergone in the last 200 years, to love another man? No, that kind of freedom is not allowed. This is of course, the epitome of hypocrisy, made more sinister by the fact that those who fight for "traditional family values" are sucking on the teat of corrupt capitalism just as much if not more than anyone else, without any awareness that they are doing so.

As Jonathan Katz (essay: The Invention of Heterosexuality, I don't agree with all of it) and John D'Emilio show in his aforementioned essay, the historical transition of the nuclear family from self-sufficient producing unit (in a colonial economy) to consuming unit (in a capitalist free labor market) caused many changes in daily life that in turn reshaped sexual behavior and consciousness, and more precisely created new spaces and possibilities for those things that were not there before. As Katz notes, this economic shift to increased consumerism changed ideological notions of what one's body was for (is it for producing or consuming?), and in a more concrete sense created new possibilities for social and sexual activity, through the dislocation of workers from their homes as well as the sex segregation potentiated by the wartime economy for both men and women (during World War 2). In D'Emilio's essay we see that urbanization (and its relationship to the growth of industry) also played an important part in the creation of sexual identities and urban subcultures in America. This touches on the trans-historical phenomenon of city-building and its associated social ramifications, to which we should be careful not to ascribe a certain historicism. In other words: city-states have risen and fallen cyclically for thousands of years and there have been indeed "mini globalizations" that have similarly created ecologies of identity and social revolution. For example, the urban centers of the Late Roman Republic fomented liberationist ideologies (Christianity and other mystery cults) that ultimately reframed then-contemporary notions about identity and family. It is not just capitalism, but the urban environment that contributes to a different attitude toward the self and creates new possibilities for identity (of all sorts, not just sexual). Capital is then a new and efficient imperial medium. The relationship between sexual identity and capitalist urbanism indeed seems culturally and historically specific in America, but interestingly the phenomenon of urban culture serving to ideologically undermine or change notions of kinship and/or ideas about the self is not… it is as old as civilization.

In the epilogue of her book "The Way We Never Were", family historian Stephanie Coontz notes that sociobiologists and psychologists have offered theories to justify the social isolation felt by many in the wake of the "Second Gilded Age" (her term for the conservative and market-oriented 1980's) with its effects on socio-economic macro and micro structures, world view and individual morale. In her survey of the shifting political climates of the 60's, 70's and 80's, she describes the rising of a conservative religious right in the late 70's and early 80's, reacting to the achievements and zeitgeist of the civil rights and gay liberation movements. The new conservative movement championed the rhetoric of a return to traditional family values and, especially in the wake of the perceived "materialism" of the later 80's, the merits of a return to a simple, private family life. The notion arose in popular culture that private was better, and activism and public involvement futile, mis-guided, but also dangerously undermined the sanctity and integrity (and obviously, identity) of the heterosexual nuclear family. In the early 90's (preceding the publication of Coontz' book) certain sociobiologists offered the argument that humans only have limited energy for altruistic behavior, so the scope of collectivity and cooperation is (and must be) necessarily constrained to our family. Similarly, one Freudian psychologist claimed that humans are "instinctually" antisocial, and the family is the means by which the antisocial condition is kept in check. However, Coontz has demonstrated that the concept "family" (along with the connected concepts of "ideal" and non-ideal family), seemingly one of our most concrete ontological categories, is not irreducible, but a social construct that has fluctuated greatly in the last two hundred years. The views expressed by these particular "scientific" camps are capitalist apologies as well as "crap psychology", and poorly represent the illuminative potential of those fields. The cultural contributions of such sciences as evolutionary psych & sociobiology occupy contested space. This is because science (theoretically anyways) is a tool, and therefore neutral, but this is never usually the case because a tool is always held in someone's hand. In other words, the research questions, and moreover the ways that experiments are designed and the results framed, are always in danger of—and never completely immune to—the effects of the cultural narratives and social fabric which constrain the epistemologies of actual scientists. The theories that Coontz cites in the beginning of her epilogue are perfect examples of "science" justifying "how things are", as if they are "supposed" to be that way, which is part of the very pattern of tautological justification that Coontz has been demonstrating in her book! Politically questionable science often talks about the brain in terms of it being "hardwired", when really it is more like "soft-wired".

Coontz rightly insists though, that "we are social animals" (p. 284). Yet our propensity for solidarity and coalition building, because of the individualistic economic and civic environments we find ourselves in (where functional moral connections to the encompassing community and public are lacking) are recruited towards a detrimental sort of tribalism. To paraphrase one of my favorite scientists, the primatologist Frans de Waal, the definitive dilemma of our time is the globalization of a tribal species (us). "Tribalism" is not automatically negative, although the word is often used in a derogatory sense. "The tribe" is a method, and the important question that will truly allow us to appraise the success or failure of this method is: what is our sociality in service of? We are unequivocally social animals; we must next accept that such a nature is deeply plastic and our environments are its ultimate sculptors. A political problem that Coontz' work seems to suggest to me is that if coalitional behavior and needs for solidarity are met predominantly in an environment of mutual disenchantment and pessimism, then xenophobia and suspicion will come to be the dominant hermeneutics. As Coontz' work implies to me, (and as current sociobiological and evolutionary theory would corroborate), the desire to get politically and socially involved is connected to the intrinsic desire for working and problem-solving toward a common goal with a non-kin group of manageable cognitive size, and attaining the pleasure and meaning and motivation that one derives from that experience. The ability to effect change in one's proximal environment through the activity of coalitions and groups seems to be a critical way we form positive meanings about ourselves (for one thing). A powerful critique of the relationship between post-industrial capitalism and personal ethics comes from a statement by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation:

"In capitalism, it is difficult to construct a relationship of respect, even between two individuals, and that much more difficult in collectivity."

Indeed. They continue, asserting

"the only real guarantee of individuality, of subjectivity, is the collective."

In other words, maximally coherent identity is formed through the interaction within a collective and between an individual and that collective… when the subject is isolated from frames of references, paradoxically individual identity can fragment and disintegrate.

Lately I've been feeding my obsession with Constantinople/Istanbul by reading 1453, an amazingly woven together account of the fateful Ottoman capture of a Christian city that was seen as unconquerable, its walls unbreached by foreign armies for over a thousand years. From a geological and human ecological analysis, one finds that one primary reason for the longevity of Byzantium, if one could be located, is its location and proximity to various key natural resources. Eight out of twelve miles of perimeter were comprised by shoreline, an ideal combination of swift-moving deep waters plus the respite of a natural harbor afforded by the Great Horn. Then there was the formidable four mile land wall, built in the early 5th century under Theodosios, which was 100 feet high from moat to inner wall and 200 feet thick (including empty space), and represented the apotheosis of military defense in the age of medieval siege technology. Among other things this wonderfully written book, both meditative homily, historical analysis and adventure story, has just made me marvel at the specific architectural, political and economic strategies necessary to maintain the integrity of a fortified city, much less one that embodies the ultimate strategic position at the nexus of three continents, two seas, and crossroads of countless cultures. And it is not just the structural and political integrity that must be ensured, but at the same there must be enabled swift and safe flow of goods into and out this vast creature of stone, marble and smoke. The flesh of the Late Antique and Medieval city must be both permeable and impermeable, able to hermetically seal itself at a moment's notice. The management of such an organism is quite something to ponder, and if this seems formidable, how in the world can we hope to understand the ways in which nations are managed today? We can't, which is why so much of it takes place in the ethereal world of the semio-sphere, in transactions of data, distributed across hot server farms, running on oil and rare earth metals. We cannot see how anything works, and yes, I'm not afraid to admit, it's scary.

I live in Los Angeles right now, which itself represents a pinnacle, or at least a particular apogee of a civilization. But one big different between LA and Constantinople is that there are no city walls here. Everything is just open… or at least it looks that way to the eye. But where are the walls? Where did they go? They must have gone somewhere. I suppose the easy answer is that they are the U.S. borders, the one to the north and the one to the south, and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. But that can't be all. Today each person, in a way, has become a fortified city. In our urban studio apartments, little cross stitches on a sprawling carpet of concrete that drapes the landscape, we recapitulate the architecture of the city-state in our domestic lives. Not that it's our fault—it's not. No one is at fault. It's more complicated than that, and I won't take the easy way out and "blame the victim". (That would be a misunderstanding of Marxism.) But again, just like in ancient Rome, the household is a microcosm of empire, and could it ever be any other way? Has it ever, truly, since the dawn of civilization, or does the appearance merely change? As above so below… is that the rule, true no matter what is "above" or "below"? Should we actually live in a fortified city, or embody one? Which is safer? Which will prolong death longer? And if it does, will it do so at the expense of purpose?

Because of the expectations pressing on us in today's world as both worker and consumer, sociality has come to be associated with leisure, which is deeply problematic, one effect of the commodification and division of time. But if the social is integral to human attitudes, and more specifically to human optimism, then sociality must have multiple functions, including ones fundamental to municipal citizenship and local community. Sociality must have pragmatic and utilitarian benefits that firmly anchor it into a coupled relationship with local economic and political activity. This is indeed just the sort of politics that Murray Bookchin (author of "The Ecology of Freedom") proposes. As the feminist battle cry goes, "the personal is political"… that may be true, but until we live in environments whose invisible and physical structures are actually built with that in mind, we will be fighting a frustrating uphill battle.

I think there's an important distinction to make when critiquing this particular socio-economic/political system. I do not see the problem as being within the jurisdiction nor responsibility of the "end-user" (consumer) to solve. I.e. the premise that "we" (you and I) continually create the problem of capitalism by consuming is false, and I'm not one of those people who's like "the problem is us! Look how much we consume, it's disgusting!". Maybe that claim has its place somewhere, but I'm certain that we cannot "consume" our way out of the problem (i.e. through a mere shift to a 'greener' or green-washed economy). Therefore agency as consumer is actually, against all appearances, severely limited, and resembles nothing I would describe using the words "freedom" or "liberty", which I try not to use anyways. The consumer is neither sinner not savior. The problem is systemic and it outsources its symptoms onto the consumer. The consumer is one half of a coupled phenomenon, that of the producer-consumer relation. Therefore the consumer can not be at sole fault, nor can it be implicated as an isolated or autonomous node or step on a causal chain without considering that which forms its ecological (dare I use that word?) habitat. Truly, the ecological is everywhere, even where you don't see "nature". Ecology is the true matrix of reality. That said, I'm not afraid to admit that I don't know exactly how to "solve" these systemic problems. But I think that open-ended discourse about it, keeping an ethic of humility and cooperation and more emphasis on questions than answers, is the way forward.

*One observation that adds a twist to a discussion about the radical overhaul of society and public and private space that is the legacy of industrial capitalism is the possibility that social media and telecommunication technology are shifting the domain of public space. What IS public space today, and how does this crisis of definition effect the 'dichotomy' of public vs private agency?

The Gospel of Goa - A Homily to a Technoshamanism

And now, a brief interlude from the "classical learning" and austere monasticism of the academy to meditate on its opposite: ecstasy, collectivity, and the profane fusion of fiction and reality.

Often I find myself in dire need of psytrance, a favorite spiritual aid, to empty the brain of thoughts…. much needed in the business of sense-making.

As many know, there is no worthwhile productivity and sustainable creativity without contemplation of and within a realm beyond words, things and meanings… where there is only form, and pattern…

Perhaps I could call psy-trancing a yogic practice -- a process by which mind, body and cosmos are harmonized, if even for an instant, before being plunged back into a more logical existence. Psychedelic trance, or Goa trance is the eternally underground music of the cybernetic heir to the drum circle, representing a strange, always-peripheral cultural project where technology’s highest purpose is shamanic divination and the re-invention of the vision quest.

The word “rave” enters naught into the culture of psychedelic trance. These are not raves, they are more political than that. But they are also less political than that. Raves are urban phenomena, constructed by the city… Psytrance festivals ARE cities, alternative, ephemeral cities in the proverbial desert or in the wilderness. They are socio-political spiritual experiments, training grounds for post-modern magicians, experimental technophilic liturgies, bionic passion plays, meditations on creation and destruction, parodies of culture, functional engines of art in which people are the fuel, the means is the end, combustion is the point. They are mappa mundi, navels of the world that pop up like mushrooms; the fleeting fruiting bodies of a whimsical subterranean intelligence…thus they also subvert the idea of a center, of a temple, of Mecca. They are the sacred grove of the Druids, existing in both the Edenic past and the apocalyptic future. They are open source mythology, allowing users to create their own content. (Garden of Eden Creation Kit anyone?) They both renounce the world and embrace it. They connect Atman to Brahman… they continually comment upon themselves, giving you no room to complete a thought. They wink and urge you to forget what they’ve just said. There is no performer, even the DJ is just the mediator of the divine word: the beat. And the word is pure form, Pythagorean mysteries inscribed with ink drawn from the entire palette of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the scribe’s medium is flesh—not vellum, but your living flesh, the interpreter of the signal, your body is an integral part of biological semiosis: Nature’s ongoing contemplation of itself, it’s offering of itself to itself, which began long ago with the first Sign… some say that the most fundamental recognition of a sign involves the perception of pattern, and concomitantly the ability to perceive the space between, the Nothing. And so is not the beat of the drum, our choral response to the mystery of our own heartbeat, the primal mimicry of the punctuation of life with oxygen, blood, semen… is that not the most elemental form of worship of all? Baptism, sacrifice, consumption, ordination all become one. Darshan, both seeing and being seen by the deity simultaneously, is the rule of the dancefloor, where hundreds of animated statues apprehend each other, and speak in a kinetic language of libations, but there is no center, no most holy icon. Mundane objects become icons. There is a theophany of the everyday, the quotidean, and this vision will never leave you, it will dart out occasionally into your unsuspecting surroundings, and out of the corner of your eye the concrete world will dance, as the trees do, as worlds are supposed to. You will meet Pan on the dancefloor and he will have now the face of a demon, now the face of an angel. He’s almost too intense for you—you get the sense watching him that if it’s possible for him to die he will die on the dancefloor, slain by the Word, burst apart at the atomic seams, because having a body obstructs the perfect dance, which is unity, immolation. How to possibly appease such a God? But your terror wanes into the realization that he is a veritable monk of the dance: he is merely carrying out his cosmic function, his duty to all creation. Time passes and he continues to keep the vigil, somehow, guarding his people from demons and evil spirits.

You turn towards the same altar, for the thousandth time.

(By the way… He felt the same way about you, too.)

Who would have guessed that the sound of the angelic choir is so machine-like? But this machine is a sub-woofing Ark, a weapon of mass instruction, a praying-mantis midwife with metal hands that gives birth to the world anew at the flip of a switch, it breaks down the dichotomy of good and evil, human and machine, organic and inorganic for a living, and it takes you along with it.

"There is no such thing as fiction"

-Alex Grey

Memetics, Religion & the Ancient Greco-Roman World

This semester (the first semester of a Master's program) I'm taking two classes in the early (first millennium) history of Christianity and a class on New Testament Greek - so thus far my brain has essentially been bathing in a vat of history, anthropology and semiotics of the late Roman Empire. The environment on which this intellectual activity rests is characterized by my recent relocation from rural Vermont to Los Angeles county, home to one of the strangest urban 'empires' in the modern world. As some may know, studying ancient cities, especially the ones in the area of the Mediterranean and Near East where three continents meet, is an amazing way to sort of study 'everything at once' (with respect to human ecology), or to at least train yourself how to think critically about urban civilization—Indeed, the city is one of the defining creatures of the Holocene period, for better or worse...

I've been realizing that study of the ancient Greco-Roman world is also an amazing arena in which to think about and test theories of memetics - or the transmission of ideas. At the height of Roman rule, trade and travel throughout the empire were easy and safe, and also were possible over a more expansive geographical area than ever before. Travel from Britain to Jerusalem (approximately 2,500 miles) among wealthier pilgrims was well documented, if not routine. You have to remember that this was highly anomalous in the course of settled civilization (or before for that matter), and indeed European people would never enjoy such ease of travel again until the 19th century. The Empire at its fullest extent (1st and 2nd centuries C.E.) completely enclosed both the coastlines of the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea to the Northeast. Port cities were central urban nodes in the network, travel was be quick by ancient standards.

As a side note, the Roman Empire's size, along with the economy that it enabled, was certainly comparable to the contemporaneous Han Dynasty in China (206 BCE - 220 CE). Both empires spanned an area that enabled them access to (and trade of) a vast range of natural resources due to the diversity of constituent biomes and unique ecological niches that lay within the empire's borders. Although the Roman Empire is unique because of its enclosure of a sizable sea (two, actually), which as I mentioned completely accounted for the way trade routes were established and on which the [quickest] lines of communication (idea pipelines) were hence based. The land area of the Roman Empire at its height and the Han Dynasty at its height are remarkably comparable: 6,500,000 square kilometers for the Roman Empire (c. 117 CE) and 6,000,000 for the Han (c. 50 BCE). However, I unfortunately know very little about Chinese history, other than having the general sense that it is a really badass culture that had little direct contact with the Hellenistic world B.C.E with the notable exception of the trade of silk. Btw, if anyone is interested I found this cool gif on Wikipedia that shows the morphing geographic map of the Chinese Dynasties over the last couple of thousand years! Very helpful indeed.

I don't think it would be silly to say that the Roman Empire represented one of the first instances of globalization of the culture of the dear great ape.

A tribal species, mind you. As such we still remain. And the inoculation of this social animal, this creature of the tribe and the clan, into an ancient Greco-Roman city was perhaps even more antithetical to our evolutionary programming than is habitation of the urban built environment today. The population density of Antioch in Syria, for example, is estimated to have been over 150 inhabitants per acre. That is within a fortified city a few square miles in size, with not much vertical development (20 meters at the very highest). Moreover, much of the area of ancient cities (as much as 30%) was taken up by civic buildings and structures, like stadiums, amphitheaters and temples, that were not inhabited. Shit was crowded!

It was in this ecology - that of the Greco-Roman city, that Christianity—that curious, viral compendium of ideas, the "religion" that would come to define all religions—was born. It was a cult of the urban underground.

Christianity was a new beast in the ecology of the ancient Mediterranean world because it was a sacred cosmology that quickly became based on, and fully comprised of, ideas and philosophy, not ritual, ethnicity, nationality, tribal identity or ecology (many have compared it to Buddhism in this regard, which began on the Indian subcontinent around the 5th century BCE). Indeed there were cosmological, philosophy-based religions preceding it in the ancient Near East like Zoroastrianism, but what I'm trying to get at here is the semiotic ecology from which Christianity directly emerged. There was no similar idea-based religion or philosophy of salvation seeking to universalize itself that characterized the landscape of the ancient G.R. world. Christianity quickly became "disembedded" from the Jewish cultural topography from which it had sprung—philosopher of religion Daniel Boyarin explains that it was the polemical need to distinguish the Jesus movement from encompassing traditional Rabbinical/Temple religion that constructed the idea of the "Jewish religion" in the modern sense, and even the conceptual category of "religion" itself! An interesting reference point: The word "Judaism" or Iudaismos was almost never used before the 1st century (per the historical record and all that it implies of course). In any case, it becomes very clear when studying the development of the Christian religion that as with all identity, collective or individual, the construction of Christian identity involved the concomitant construction of what it was not. And thus in the act of naming the other, the opponent, the not-us, we actually inaugurate a new phase in the evolution of that identity... a project which in many cases quickly leaves the hands of the namer and is undertaken by the group that is named (Judith Butler articulates the "violence of naming" quite well). Daniel Boyarin mentions that the followers of Jesus themselves were first called Christians in Antioch by non-Christians, and it is implied that the term was objectifying and derogatory.

The history of the initial spread of Christianity, through its legalization by Constantine in 313 for essentially imperial and military purposes, its later adoption as the official religion of the republic by Theodosius in 380, to the fascinating ways in which it fused with Germanic and Saxon culture is a very thought provoking meditation on the nature of cultural transmission. The mingling of Roman and Germanic cultures in particular, despite the common conception of Christianity "winning" over "barbarian" or "pagan" religion, subjected Christianity it to a dynamic, reciprocal morphology which trickled back to have top-down effects on the development of Catholic liturgy in particular. It made Roman Catholicism and for that matter all Protestant developments what they are today.

Part of what makes the fusion of Roman and Germanic culture so interesting (and the attempts by the ruling classes to reconcile the differing world-views) is that 4th and 5th century Germanic world could not be more different from the Roman world. Just a disclaimer, I'm going to engage in gross generalizations here, but luckily the point will still remain, as there is no question about the vast differences in values and cosmology between these "two" cultures. The very fabric of society was woven differently: the peoples living north of the Danube River were a largely clan-based, rural, often land-locked society, totally decentralized compared to Rome. They were a boreal forest-dwelling warrior-culture, to whom warfare (raiding) was a routine part of their economy and self-protection. Additionally in-group and family solidarity was high — unlike in the increasingly specialized world of the Roman city, where the symbolic systems of writing and money colonized and organized life, there existed a veritable marketplace of religious ideas and philosophies that naturally were divisive, and also Roman girls were often married as young as 12. Group solidarity in Germanic society was maintained through multiple social structures and mechanisms—the family or kin group, the local warrior-group or "company", and the relationship between each man and their Chieftain. The patronage system provided comparable (but much weaker, or not as empowering to smaller groups of people, in my opinion) social glue in Roman society, as it only operated in a vertical fashion, tying one person to a wealthier one who was in turn indebted to an aristocrat of even higher status, all the way up to the Emperor (theoretically). Although, this system was built on the proto-globalized financial structure of the empire - that is, it was concerned with the vertical flow or "trickle down" of symbolic prestige and did not incorporate mechanisms for "horizontal" group cohesion. Of course, much of this simply represents the natural differences in the valuation paradigms of "city-dwellers" that live within a very large system that naturally necessitates widely-deployed complex symbolic framework in order to function, and pastoral people who occupy loosely connected islands or pockets that are much smaller, more easily "closed" systems.

One fascinating reference point for the syncretism between Germanic and Roman cultures, and the task at hand therein, is the Heliand, an amalgamation of the four Christian gospels into a 6,000 line epic poem. It was written in Old Saxon in the 9th century and to the modern reader would perhaps be redolent of Beowulf, the famous Germanic saga from around the same time period. The Heliand is a tacit (though not overt) re-interpretation of the gospel story since the author took great care to present the story in a meta-language familiar to the cosmography and cosmology of his audience. Like Beowulf the Heliand (Old Saxon for "Savior") is the story of a great warrior, although in this case it is a warrior of peace: Christ. He is repeatedly referred to in the Heliand as "Chieftain" and has many epithets including the Champion of mankind, the Ruler's Child, the Guardian of the Land, The Land's herdsman, the Healer, and the Rescuer.
The twelve apostles are pictured as Christ's loyal band of warriors ("fighting men"), temples are referred to as shrines, the last supper and wedding at Cana take place at great mead-halls, and Christ is hanged on a tree (a "criminal tree"), to name just some of the amazing native imagery evoked by the Heliand poet. After Christ's 40 days in the desert, it is out of the "deep woods" from which he emerges - echoing the sacred ecology of the Germanic people. It is an important comment on the way environment, especially ecology, become small-scale maps of the entire cosmos, particularly in the "pre-modern" world (although the cognitive vestiges of this world-mapping I believe are very much still with us).

Runic magic also exerts its presence in the text; the author of the Heliand begins the first "song" (or verse) by explaining that sacred knowledge of "God's spells" was exclusively passed on to the four evangelists - thus it was them who were able to write and "chant" the true gospel. Here the word of God, or Christ's deeds, is also described as the "secret runes". A footnote by translator and commentator G. Ronald Murphy elucidates:

giruni. The word not only implies that the gospel is a secret mystery, but that it is of the power of the magic spells and charms written in the Runes of the Northern world. This same rich expression, giruni, will be used by the author to introduce the 'secret runes' of the Lord's Prayer.

Also alluding to runic power, the song which retells the story of the last supper is titled "The words of Christ give great powers to the bread and wine".

The Heliand is haunting and enchanting thing to read, especially I think for those with Anglo-Saxon heritage or who have grown up in a similar bioregion to that which was the setting for the Heliand. It may be one of the most beautiful texts in the Christian West.

I'm going somewhere with all this, I promise! I suppose what fascinates me in the study of the "epidemiology" of a belief system is the continual reminder that in the mechanics of idea transmission within and between cultures and the "world-view revolutions" that sometimes result, no one ever creates a new ontological category. Ever. An ontological category is a cognitive designation into which a thing or object falls, and coupled with each ontological category (I speculate) is the subject-object relation that category of thing implies (in other words: its functional relationship to the one perceiving).

If a brand new concept is created that does not "fit", even awkwardly, into a pre-existing ontological category, that idea or meme rarely survives. In the same way, nature doesn't ever create a brand new kind of organism with no evolutionary antecedent, and perhaps the closest nature comes to doing that is in the case of extreme mutations, most of which are crippling to the organism and result in its death. Ideas, too, must evolve -- and I am talking specifically about epistemological ideas—ideas constitutive of one's world-view. The question is, how much can an ontological category be stretched—or have its rules bent—before it ceases to be that category? It seems to me that concepts can be re-shaped to surprising degrees but must retain their essential categorical functionality. This is related to the idea in the cognitive science of religion of minimally-counterintuitive concepts.

"Conversion" is an illusory concept that in its more abrupt and propaganda-friendly form is merely an incredibly sped up (and also retroactively understood) paradigm shift. Even such conversion does not constitute the creation of new ontological categories, it merely fills to the brim categories that were almost so withered or atrophied as to be unknown, or replaces almost everything within an ontological category with new parts (still not creating something ex nihilo). "Conversion" never happens en masse on a phenomenological level, but rather it takes on the same pattern as scientific revolution as outlined by Thomas Kuhn (although some tellers of history with theological agendas would have us believe the former). As one of my classmates said of colonial religions that often spread initially forcibly throughout new cultures, Christianity is often "as wide as the sea but only an inch deep".

Christian ideas, particularly with regard to the persons of Christ and Mary, have been re-made century after century— their nature and character at any given time, in any given "text", simply the current manifestation of the cognitive history of an entire ontological category. Their relationships with or relations to human devotees are re-conceptualized and I am convinced are as numerous as are ecological niches throughout the world. This is no coincidence, as sacred presence (if not "religion") is an ecological category - even in the urban landscape where the "ecology" is a concrete, geometric, mostly inorganic one. That environment too creates its own God, creates its own unique definition of the sacred. The Christianization of the warrior-God Odin or Woden (and also to a lesser extent the Saxonization of Christ) merely represents one of the first most monumental acheivements in the history of globalization: the fusion of two very different concepts that shared an ontological category—or if you like the mutation of the Christ meme, resulting in it emerging more 'virulent' and successful. This is why its important to study religion, and why it can't just be ignored or deemed a 'cognitive delusion'. That charge misses the mark. The history and morphology of the idea of what is sacred form a snaking path through the complicated, messy story of the homo sapien: and every link in the chain is like a crystal ball at each vertex of Indra's net: simultaneously reflecting the entire encompassing world at that instant and also condensing that same world into a shimmering semiotic amulet, a sigil whose footnote is a view of the entire universe from a very specific place within it.

Was at Occupy Los Angeles today, in solidarity.

Today was a historic day. I can't even quite comprehend the magnitude of what is going on right now in the world. If nothing else, people are realizing their power.... they are realizing the truth that power comes from everywhere, and it can never be given, only taken.

I come home tonight with a renewed resolve to persevere on the mission to walk the line between scholarship and activism - to be an ambiguous mystic, straddling those two words, refusing to be confined by either one. Unfortunately I'm learning the system is configured to prevent exactly that. Fellow academics: Postmodern thought is a tool to be wielded very carefully, for as John Zerzan warns, after the human subject is completely obliterated and designated as a product of history, “who or what is left to achieve a liberation, or is that just one more pipe dream?” No, it’s not a pipe dream.

Us queers and freeqs within the academy shall not let postmodern rhetoric get out of hand. It shall not replicate like a virus, colonizing all of our thoughts, even our thoughts about ourSELVES. That’s what the corporate powers that fund university research are hoping will happen to the humanities — weakening them even more than they already have been. Rein it in. Postmodern thought has allowed many great insights to be established within the great Conversation: And yes, there are many truths, and yes, everything should be examined in context, and per its situadedness - but ecology and its related fields are just as good a framework for that ethic.

Just don’t take it to the point where YOU are the “subject” that is destroyed.

Don’t let universities work for the corporate state — recognize that many of them already are and consciously make the choice to resist — don’t be afraid of living in this world and advocating for social change.

To paraphrase part of Ghandi's philosophy: Knowledge without character, and science (including social science) without humanity... are some of the greatest dangers to human virtue.

A series on growing up as a queer mystic: Part one

This forthcoming content will be far more personal than is the norm for this blog, but I've realized I have to be open to this blog evolving as I do. The last two years have been rough personally for me, and I'm finally in a place where I feel like I can safely share some of the "stuff" that was really congesting my heart and soul during that time. I've lagged a bit with this blog during that time, and I deeply miss the celebration of life and ideas that this blog used to allow me on a more regular basis. So here goes attempting to integrate parts of myself that have been more compartmentalized in the past: I’m going to write a little series of stories about growing up/coming of age “queer”, which will help elucidate what “queer” means to me. A few weeks ago I journaled about this a lot and was able to see a lot of my history in a new way. Part of this clarity has come with moving across the country from where I grew up, cliche as that is. So I’m going to transcribe the story so far here and break it up into several posts. Enjoy, and thank you all for reading! Peace.

***

In high school and for much of college I lacked motivation, and also self respect. I had no vision of my future—particularly of my future self. Would I grow up to be a man or a woman? It was to me an obvious question (though not an obvious answer) because I really felt like neither girl nor boy. Perhaps boy more than girl, but my body (especially increasingly after puberty) certainly did not match that vision. So I felt ashamed because secretly I would entertain what I saw as a delusion… I saw my cross-gender identification as childish and fantastical. Thus at low points later in my life I felt a strange, unexplainable revulsion at daydreaming and unabashed use of the imagination. I think right before I found the language to describe how I felt, it was the worst. And I love imagination, it is the birthplace of magic and so central to our humanity… but I had developed a love/hate relationship with it, and something had to give…

I finally finished college. It barely seemed like a triumph, because although I’d had some amazingly formative experiences in the realm of the intellect, I did not have much to show for emotional development. During semesters I took off from school, it actually felt good to prolong the inevitable—that college would end and I would be thrust into the adult world, still feeling like a child—perhaps an intellectually intelligent one, but that hardly mattered, I realized. I don’t even know how much I subscribed to the idea that the end of college marks some kind of entry into a world more “real” than any other. But the residue from that myth, created like a cloud in the cultural ether, still weighed on me, and caused me to be afraid.

It ended up that I took to academia. Other than being fulfilling and stimulating mentally and thus (for me) socially, I took great comfort in the almost monastic, disembodied ritual of it. At my best, I thrive there, and at worst, perhaps hide from the world of people, consumerism, popular media and thus… gender roles.

Also there was a strange solidarity to be found in the scholarly realm. Not queer or transgender per se (for, I admit with some regret that befriending people who I shared that with was “not my thing” at the time—I was confused about where I belonged, to say the least). Rather, the solidarity I found there was one that tacitly implied some sort of outcast or “freak” self-identification on the part of us scholars. I repeat those epithets of course in their empowered, liberatory forms. Us queers-of-the-mind… we studied human culture, the human body and the human condition, and somehow this discipline seemed to help many of us cope with our own feelings of alienation from that mysterious subject… that confusing and messy text: humanity.

Academia is a sort of ascetic discipline. Especially grad school and especially the humanities… because it’s text, text, text all the time, that we ingest, and digest, and excrete. We bleed text, like the ancient desert father of Christianity did with respect to scripture. Athletes of the mind… or the soul, or your disembodied self of choice.

To be clear, this is no criticism of academia—far from it! Indeed I think that some semblance of these feelings are what drives scholarship and research forward. Maybe its simply “nerd solidarity”, but whatever it was, it helped me feel like I fit in somewhere.

Gradually I’ve learned how people leverage that positionality in as healthy a way as they can, and use that focus on “anything but the self” to help solve some of the world’s greatest mysteries and problems.

These people are scholars, professors, teachers, and doctors, to name some. High-level nerds, geeks and warlocks-of-the-word (and also not to forget the lifelong scholars—the "freelance gnostics" (term coined by Erik Davis) who work outside of the institution of academia, and these people are often the most graceful hackers and scientists-artists of all). Anyhow, I welcomed the opportunity to lose myself in the annals of history and anthropology, as if I was an alien from another planet, studying homo sapiens and their semiotic legacy.

If I didn’t have this academic rubric that concentrated my focus and took it away from myself, it seemed I would slip away on a cloud of fantasy, obsessing about things I felt I couldn’t change.

Scholarship —more precisely Christian history and the history of asceticism— is my magic wand. Magical items are just things that concentrate the attention, like light through a prismatic crystal, and beam it toward something specific.

I guess what connects me to the humans who founded mystical and ascetic theology thousands of years ago is this: We develop armaments of the mind, and they keep demons away. Define demons however you wish, but the method is tried and true, and in a world where many say that “God is dead”, it’s still working for me.

How is my quest for knowledge so different from those of the ancient past, who lived before universities existed? The impulse is the same…it is the human semiotic drive, and no one can escape its allure, not atheists, nuclear physicists, computer programmers, naturalists, nor people of faith. The mystery of the symbol is far too powerful. As I like to say, in the beginning was the Sign…and the sign was…

(To be continued…)

Survival Trip (Part 1) and a foreword about environmentalism

The first day of our wilderness survival trip (Saturday the 11th of June), we were to meet at the parking lot of the school at 7 AM, whereupon our three instructors would take us by car to an undisclosed location. This would be the location of our 4-night/5 day survival trip, for which we’d undergo “pocket checks” to make sure we weren’t bringing anything but the clothes we were wearing. Yes, this is actually what we signed up for!

Of course, having known “the rules” in advance, we were able to strategize a little bit by wearing several layers, top and bottom, including (hopefully) rain gear. Rain gear—along with the synthetic clothes some of us were wearing—are not admittedly neolithic, but this was at the same time quite a bit closer to that reality than many of us had ever gotten. We were all very, very pumped.

We ended up experiencing one of the wettest and coldest trips that our instructors had sent out (although we were only the third such group) — but in the end, the rewards only multiplied in the face of such adversity. Over the next few posts I’ll try to recount the highlights of the trip — which will tie in to the class of which it was a part, and in turn the larger social movement of re-skilling and stewarding ancient living skills of which that class is a part…

We were incredibly lucky to be a group of 7 very independent, upbeat people who were all really motivated to learn these skills. Together we took a 9 month course in which we learned the foundations of wilderness survival—including but not limited to what was needed for a “successful” 4 night survival trip in June in Vermont (a time of year where Mother Earth would be predictably generous—within a certain range of possibility, of course). Successful here means (true to the genre), simply surviving, not necessarily thriving (but trying to!) We met approximately one weekend a month, with a longer meeting in the beginning, and lots of homework in between, on everything from primitive hunting weapons (throwing mostly) to plant identification, to martial-artist-like perception and awareness training. It was hard to keep up with the homework, especially because of the contrast between the group solidarity and isolation from the civilized world we enjoyed during our weekends—very conducive to focused study and practice—and the clock-and-work driven life that we inevitably led plugged into the grid of the modern world. The latter, I came to realize, introduced its own brand of loneliness and isolation. In the living forest, with a few present and good-hearted people, or even no other humans at all, one can somehow never feel lonely or bored… especially when you have a task at hand, for which out of necessity you must in some way or other merge with your environment.

Over the year we studied, constructed and slept in several different forms of primitive shelter for short-term (or emergency) use, including tight little burrow-like debris huts that slept one person, quincys (snow shelters), and the teepee-style group shelter that would most likely be our home on the survival trip (unless unforeseen circumstances forced us to go with a quicker, less optimal structure). One of the core relationships we cultivated as a group and as individuals was with fire—preparing the way for it, making it, stewarding it and keeping it alive to cook for us and boil us water. In some ways primitive fire seemed to be the backbone of our training, as it is quite literally the hearth that makes a home, however temporary that home may be…

We mainly focused on two methods of firemaking: Bow drill and hand drill. Bow drill consists of five parts, hand drill of only two, but bow drill is significantly easier to get a coal if all the parts are tweaked right; the success of hand drill is more contingent on individual skill. Thus emphasis was placed on the former (although by myself I have been stoked to get a lot of great practice in with hand drill — and there is nothing like starting a fire that will spit roast an animal for your whole family just using your hands and two sticks!), and as a group we graduated through many challenges throughout the class whereupon we would be asked to procure a bow drill kit and make a fire using less and less modern amenities (like a knife or a modern string for the bow), and with more and more parts for the kit sourced on-demand from the woods, where you have to work more with what the forest gives you and things might be wet or partially rotten. Finally, in a few hours we could make an entire kit, get a coal and turn it into a fire using no modern technology at all — just local stone that we knapped into something approximating a blade.

We also learned water-skills — finding springs, making primitive filters with charcoal, moss and sand to eradicate chemical contaminants as well as of course boiling, which for us was done by carefully skinning the bark of young white pines to make origami-like watertight vessels. In these vessels we would boil water by transporting glowing-hot rocks from our fire, using a green branch as tongs (on the survival trip I found a cow or moose scapula that worked like a dream!) If you get enough large rocks that are hot enough, you can boil almost a quart of water in like three minutes. Neolithic technology can literally can beat my MSR backpacking stove!

10,000 years ago getting water would have been as simple as finding a clear-looking stream. Now, because of pollution and animal agriculture, very little surface water is safe to drink, and in a true survival situation the last thing you want is diarrhea. Like, really. Springs that bring water to the surface from deep aquifers are the only reliable sources of clean water, where in some cases the water bubbling up has not seen the sun in a thousand years. That there is one of the most valuable things I know of - ancient water.

Just an aside that is worth mentioning: You won’t see me demonize “civilization” or the like in these pages, or anywhere where I express my experiences as an earthling discovering the possibilities and limits of what it is to be human. I may be an anarcho-primitivist of sorts, but I don’t hate modernity or modern technology, and I don’t blame individual people—historical or living—for “not being connected to nature” or whatever, and I don’t think very highly of deep ecology or any environmentalist philosophy where humans are considered a “cancer” on this planet. I think we are all connected to something and it is our intense propensity for connection—through many modalities both sensuous and subtle—that makes us both experience suffering and joy, separation and oneness. When I’m at school working on a big term paper, my human nature allows me to be almost completely connected within a very tightly-wound ecology consisting of my computer, desk, a stack of books and a word document… so much that for a time my whole world is made up of those things; mantras of academic text flow through my mind at random, and what I sense and perceive is often filtered on some level through the creative work going on within me. The sensory “deprivation” of a white-walled room takes the experience to new, often unexamined heights of mental trance.

It is this same capacity for connection that can connect us to the earth and has evolved to sustain our life and allow us to survive. As humans in today’s world, our environments can be so radically different from one place or culture to another that it is hard to grasp that the manner in which we merge with our surroundings always has the same mechanism. The forest, unlike a classroom, is exceedingly multi-dimensional, extending in all directions; moreover almost everything you look at is alive! The forest sucks your consciousness into it, beckons your awareness to expand into its every crevice, whereas being isolated in a small, geometric man-made chamber can do the opposite: keep your awareness inside of you. This isn’t a bad thing, because sometimes it might be necessary to get a job done. But it behooves us to know about this way of the mind - this respiration of consciousness, so that we may navigate our way on this undulating sea, avoiding storms and making use of winds and waves. The type and quality of the connection merely shifts with our attention and focus — or lack thereof. We have an amazing ability to connect with and synergize with many different types of complex dynamical systems. Whether the yields of such symbioses are “good” or “bad” is not up to me to judge. What I see is evidence of potential.

Hate and cynicism (and most emotions) are not the ways in which I like to approach the world in which I live. Mostly the things I feel about the world are curiosity, and sometimes a kind of sadness that actually feels a lot like love… I’ve thought a lot about that ineffable feeling, in myself, in others and in history, and one way I understand it for myself is that it is the feeling of beauty and harmony imprinting itself on our neural and limbic systems. It is sad because it is very often fleeting, and even the feeling itself quickly becomes indistinguishable from its own shadow. I digress, but to return to my original point: As an anarcho-primitivist (but also a humanist and believer in social ecology) Love for natural ecologies, animals and wildness does not create inversely proportional hate for “civilization”… because “nature” and “culture” are not opposites (and neither are hate and love for that matter). I think that dichotomy, like many we create, is worth deconstructing.

Stay tuned … there’s so much more to tell, and although my wilderness survival class is now over, in the institutional sense, the warrior’s journey has really just begun.