I had underlined these sentences in Robert Graves’ introduction to The Greek Myths, when I was a freshman at Columbia College in 1964-65. Graves’ book was a secondary resource for making sense of ancient stories studied in the Humanities course that was required to be taken by every College student. I’m not sure Graves’ narrative has stood the test of time among anthropologists, even mythologists–it may be, in itself, myth not science. But for an eighteen year old (boy) from a small town in mid-America, this speculation certainly opened my mind to wondering about gender and culture in a way I never imagined. Here I am today wondering whether or not an epochal transformation is once again going to happen in the cultural/social relations of the sexes. Fortunately for me, too, I had enjoyed a wondrous summer of sexual play with the first woman I ever loved before I encountered university studies about the matter. I recalled, when I read these sentences, the power of the female over me, the male.

“Ancient Europe had no gods. The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought. She took lovers, but for pleasure, not to provide her children with a father. Men feared, adored and obeyed the matriarch: the hearth which she tended in a cave or hut being their earliest social centre, and motherhood their prime mystery…. There is however, no evidence that, even when women were sovereign in religious matters, men were denied fields in which they might act without female supervision, though it may well be thought that they adopted many of the ‘weaker-sex’ characteristics hitherto thought to be entrusted to man. They could be trusted to hunt, fish, gather certain foods, mind flocks and herds, and help defend the tribal territory against intruders, so long as they did not transgress matriarchal law.”

My intention is to live the remainder of my life as a loving man who wants nothing more than to witness the world become more sustainable and justly inclusive because wonderful, powerful, and loving women lead in transforming it.

(written on November 7, 2009, early in the morning)

She ran barefoot through cold wet leaves
weighing down winter stained grass in her front yard.
A morning rain fell in thin lines from windless clouds
not far above the reach of barely branching walnut trees
rooted along a damp blackened front road.
She had been watching from the window
where she’d sat a night gowned vigil waiting for him to appear.

As he told her he would, he returned finally from the city
by train then walked from the station to where she had made a place for herself.
Without an umbrella he was rain soaked when
he dropped his bag of clothes and embraced her at the end of the driveway.
The sweet words of their affection and longing were roundly muffled
in mouths covered with long breathless kisses.

Without speaking the words they knew were true–
his home was with her where she breathed and laughed–
they embraced the fertile truth of being a couple of possibilities
in the midst of a winter morning’s scape
of chilly barren land and gray sky.

return to poetic stuff

(or, mental amusement before seeing the light of day)

I am older than the selves of life leap-frogging along the making of time and place.

I am before the restless generations of becoming and dying and becoming. Before the chaos, the watery womanly demos of unthinking flesh and bone generating the moon time. Before the history of fallings from the womb and returnings to its vaginal elections. Before the breeding laying beneath the seeing of me alone unpartnered, uncoupled from the frenzy of fucking before corpses of stone deadly silence.

No music without the knowing nothing drumming, knowing everything in the dance. The eros of engorging, the nippled firming of magical wands, then seed spewing and lactation. Who understands the middle churning between the alpha and omega, the bearing of souls from wet wombs spasming the vibrating stream of being in and out of touching its accordian stops and starts. Attuning done by ear in darkness, not seeing measurement in light.

What withstands the onslaught of viral memories of how to suck the energy out of nothing and be being begun. Rosy redness sainted nick clauses of coded connection, spitting of flakes of blood frozen in falling from night sky of the womb, here and not here, there and not there. Which is it after all?

return to poetic stuff

I received an interesting promotion from the Media Education Foundation in this morning’s email for a DVD made by University of Massachusetts’ economics professor Richard Wolff, titled Capitalism Hits the Fan. The MEF website provides a brief video introduction to Professor Wolff’s DVD’d presentation, a full-length, but video-hampered preview, and the following written description:

With breathtaking clarity, renowned University of Massachusetts Economics Professor Richard Wolff breaks down the root causes of today’s economic crisis, showing how it was decades in the making and in fact reflects seismic failures within the structures of American-style capitalism itself. Wolff traces the source of the economic crisis to the 1970s, when wages began to stagnate and American workers were forced into a dysfunctional spiral of borrowing and debt that ultimately exploded in the mortgage meltdown. By placing the crisis within this larger historical and systemic frame, Wolff argues convincingly that the proposed government “bailouts,” stimulus packages, and calls for increased market regulation will not be enough to address the real causes of the crisis, in the end suggesting that far more fundamental change will be necessary to avoid future catastrophes. Richly illustrated with motion graphics, this is a superb introduction designed to help ordinary citizens understand, and react to, the unraveling economic crisis.

It seems to me that educators might better introduce the study of economics to their students based on a timely and relevant presentation such as Wolff’s, than on a more abstract, textbook-101 introduction. By watching the full-length preview, I’ve gained an overarching view of how the American and other economies have stumbled into the unsustainable mess they’re in.

Tonight’s (2/20/2009) broadcast of Bill Moyers Journal features a wonderful interview of Parker Palmer. Here’s a link to the PBS page where a video of the interview can be found. I suspect that you’re going to appreciate listening to what Palmer has to say about himself and how to recover from the various kinds of “brokenness” Americans are experiencing in their lives and from the various cultural illusions that have diminished us personally and socially.

How did Naomi Klein become Naomi Klein?

Take a look at what Wikipedia has to say about the family (educational) culture from which she emerged:

Klein was brought up in a Jewish family with a history of left-wing activism, as was her husband, Avi Lewis. Her paternal grandparents were Marxists who began to turn against the Soviet Union after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and had abandoned Communism entirely by 1956. Her grandfather, an artist, was fired from Disney for labour organizing. Her father Michael, a physician, was a Vietnam War resister (her parents moved from the US to Canada to avoid the draft) and a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her mother, film-maker Bonnie Sherr Klein, directed and scripted the anti-pornography documentary film, Not a Love Story. Her brother Seth is director of the British Columbia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Her in-laws are Michele Landsberg and Stephen Lewis, son of David Lewis. (1)

What life work/study would you suspect might be impelled by the cultural opportunity made possible to Naomi Klein by her immediate family? Yep, you’re right.

Among her writings, two books: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism and an earlier No Logo: Taking Aim at Brand Bullies. In addition, her activism worldwide which confronts oppressively undemocratic and unsustainably exploitative socioeconomic behavior of a powerfully few.

Here’s a link to Naomi Klein’s website. Below is a YouTube video of her discussing The Shock Doctrine:

Naomi Klein is no Chris Langan–the no-account “genius” (loser?) whom Malcolm Gladwell contrasts with the outlier Robert Oppenheimer in the Outliers. But does Naomi Klein conveniently fit in Gladwell’s all-male club of celebrated/celebrity outliers? Let me explain.

Albert Einstein is quoted as saying, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers is “simpler” by Einstein’s measure than it need be. A friend Nancy’s use of the phrase “alignment of the stars” seems an appropriate description of Gladwell’s explanation of why extreme “success” happens; in my view, Gladwell seems more an astrologer than astronomer, more mythologist than scientist.

Perhaps inadvertently, Gladwell purveys to parents/educators hungering for confirmation that pushing their children/students through a schooling culture of competitive credential accumulation is what’s really best for them. Take advantage of (and ace) training opportunities and hold your own self-promotionally when encountering gatekeepers and you’ll get to work in somebody’s big house and out of the field working as a lowly hand. The more time and effort you devote to making yourself useful and to gaining the appreciation of your superiors/clients, the greater you’ll see your success (narcissistically) in their mirrors. Where’s the personally, uniquely creative dimension in this male-dominated scrum for fame and fortune?

In a world where the 44 richest people (all men) have acquired as much wealth as the poorest 2,500,000,000, do you think that Gladwell’s “astrological” account is as sufficiently explanatory about the reality of a variety of less conspicuous and less fanfared forms of real success (on-the-ground?), and even outliers’ success itself? It seems to me that there is a scientific account based on testable, simply stated principles, akin to an evo-devo explanation of “natural selection,” which broadly explains social success of human groups and the individuals who are identifiable within them.

What happens when you mix:
an American organizational theorist, consultant, and Anheuser-Busch Professor Emeritus of Management Science at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, who is a pioneer in the field of operations research, systems thinking and management science,
and
the founder in 1968 of a place where people decide for themselves how to spend their days; where students of all ages determine what they will do, as well as when, how, and where they will do it; which belongs to the students as their right, not to be violated?

They write a book collaboratively in 2008 which is titled Turning Learning Right Side Up.

Russell L. Ackoff and Daniel Greenberg are the volatile mix of exceptionally non-conforming, playfully democratic, and value-driven minds.

Both of these “wild and crazy guys” have been intellectual-activist heroes of mine for a long time–separately in his own field. Each of them has remarkable organizational and personal development results to show for their unconventional professional thinking and efforts.

Thanks very much to a friend of mine Mike for pointing out the book. I just ordered a copy of it.

Have you read Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House by Ken Goffman (a.k.a. R. U. Sirius)? Great fun in telling the story of the culturally verboten and politically incorrect! (For example, Goffman sees the insurrectionist Boston Tea Party as the epitome of playful outrageousness–the kind, however, that gets the American revolutionary spirit through to the political mind of the populace.)

While I liked Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, her Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism better celebrates the most cherished and legitimately historical Enlightenment tradition in the U.S. republic which has been challenged from the beginning by Counter-Enlightenment cultural “pushbacks” of various kinds–religiously/culturally antidemocratic (socially hierarchical) at base and narrowly opportunistic in their effects on social and economic development.

Last month over about a week’s time, I read Jonathan I. Israel’s (tome) Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752. First, it makes the case that revolutionary ideas in elites’ and peoples’ heads matter more than a mere marxian-like ripeness of socioeconomic dysfunctions in whether or not people act to overthrow ancien regimes and assume popular sovereignty. Also, Israel argues cogently that what actually is the contention between two Enlightenment traditions, one Radical, the other moderate–not their contention (as though they were seemingly one) against a persistent Counter-Enlightenment–is key to understanding modernity. Those who find their philosophical/moral roots in Spinoza and Bayle (monist radicals who welcome today’s “embodied” philosophers like Lakeoff and Rorty and the overwhelming majority of today’s neuroscientists) continue to contend with moderate dualists who find Leibniz, Newton, Locke, Voltaire, and others who are quite comfortable with Descartes’ accommodating split of the natural and the supernatural. Perhaps my favorite book on this contention between the radically and the moderately enlightened is Matthew Stewart’s The Courtier and Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World. Stewart has written several great reads about modernity, but this one tops them all in cutting to the heart of what’s at issue in democratically re-forming our minds, moral direction, and political-cultural world. (Besides, it’s half about Baruch de Spinoza, whom I consider the most misunderstood, underestimated, and important thinker of all time. But then, that’s my opinion, not gospel.)