The Cerebral Mum

While I was getting ready for university this morning, I had CNN on in the background. Blah blah… Pope mobile… Blah blah… Sexual abuse scandal… Blah blah… White House… And then Bush says…

“…end the Dictatorship of Relativism…”

WTF?

So off I go to school, with my course readings for today’s philosophy tutorial, wondering if Bush has any idea what that phrase means, and if he thinks we need a War Against Relativism to complement the War Against Drugs and the War Against Terrorism. (Although, if the enemy of his enemy is his friend, he could join forces with the terrorists for this new fight.)

On the train, I start my reading… about Plato’s Theory of Forms and the philosophical life. After weeks of struggling to engage with a text full of unacceptable premises and metaphysics, there was some meat there of more interest than “rational” arguments for the immortality of the soul. And my head was full of ideas (I think I sketched out 3 different books in my head during my reading) so…

I miss my train station and go all the way into the city.

Okay. No drama there. The tram I switch to goes through the city anyway and I’d left early. I board and begin reading the supplementary text. It is painful. Reductive, meaningless quibbles about words, pretending to elucidate while saying nothing. Yawn. So I throw that back in my bag and pull out Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Ahh… Nihilism: That other alternative to the absolutism of Plato and of the 2 millenia that followed…

I go 20 minutes further down the tracks than I am supposed to.

I get to my history lecture on time. Why do we always pay attention to the Hollywood Ten rather than the 1000s of civil servants who got the same treatment under McCarthyism? I reckon there is a thesis in the little, unsexy people. Oh, and Gary Cooper was a dickwad.

Anyway.

I move on to my philosophy tutorial, to discuss The Forms - those pure essences which cannot be perceived with human senses and which the objects and qualities we experience in our “reality” are but shadows of. We talk about Beauty. If two people disagree about an object’s beauty, can both be right? According to Plato, no. Beauty exists as an absolute. If one cannot recognise it where it exists, it is a failure of the mind. Someone must be wrong. According to most of us - living, as we apparently do, under the Dictatorship of Relativism - beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

(Curiously enough, that proverb is a bastardisation of Plato’s words in The Symposium - “beholding beauty with the eye of the mind” - where he was saying anything but what we mean by it today.)

After a quick trip to the library to get some reference materials for my research paper, I get on the tram - which is late, then slow - but I manage to get off at the right stop and board my train. Which is late and then, almost home, stops altogether. Between stations.

Through the window in the dark I see the driver on the tracks, then the police. Great. After a while we move on to the next station. The police walk passed the carriages toward the driver and we hear an announcement…

“We apologise for the delay. We had.”

Er? Whatever the problem is, I guess it’s none of my business.

I make a phone call. B will come and pick me up so I disembark. Over a policewoman’s radio I hear, “…man on top of the woman…” Curiouser and curiouser. An ambulance is parked on the verge of the tracks and a police car is blocking the road. An announcement is made that the train has stopped in order to divide the carriages. (Yeah, right.)

B arrives, and I go home, still wondering about the contextless Dictatorship of Relativism. So I look for a transcript online and discover the phrase is not Bush’s, but The Rat’s. (Note: choosing to respect people’s private beliefs does not necessitate respect for the Papacy.)

Ratzinger said in 2005…

Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine”, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.

So, to escape my relativist, liberal freedom (which, apparently, is a perversion of the idea of redemption) should I go with Plato’s Forms, or Ratzinger’s Christ? (And don’t those possessives speak to how much I currently suffer under The Dictatorship?)

Also interesting, given today’s history lecture on the Cold War, are the passages there (and in an earlier address) about the particular “winds of doctrine”. Methinks someone is still suffering from a Red Scare.

To sum up though, I went to university then came home.

Who the hell knows where Bush was going.

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I have had the very worst of days but this is a piece I wrote a few days ago for a meme I think I’ll be participating in every now and then.

[Fiction] Friday

You can click on the link above to find out more about it but the basic principle is to write for at least 5 minutes and do no editing. (So I have not edited it.)

It is a good way, I think, to open up my writing, similar to what I did with my 30 Poems Clearing House post. But it’s prose instead, which is my greatest love. And when I say that, I’m not just talking about types of writing. It’s my greatest love in life, animal, mineral or vegetable. With the one exception of Caspar. When it comes to choosing between fiction and people, fiction comes first, not because I don’t love reality. It’s just that reality only makes sense through fiction.

It’s also a way for me to add a little prose fiction here: With the exception of that small extract from An Eloquent Sleep, I haven’t yet done so because the pieces I would like to show are too large for a blog.

The last reason why I think this is a good semi-regular meme for me, is that it is very easy to get entirely sick of yourself when you’re writing a personal blog. I get exhausted squaring off with this depression. So this is my chance to switch persona, to write from the 3rd person. And that can tell me as much about what is going on in my head as my dreams, or my reason can.

So without any further ado…

This Week’s Theme: Your evil villain wants to rule the world. Write about her (or his) reasons.

She wants to see the intricacies of people moving like ants in and out of each other’s lives. She wants to twitch delicately at their puppet strings, avoiding collisions and bruises. She wants to say no. She wants to say stop.

Sometimes she wants to crash people together, odd people, just to make them wake up, to startle them into change and growth. She wants to confuse everyone with shoes, to make them see differently. She wants to overhear conversations, especially the silent ones people have in the heads. She wants to make everything alright. She wants to tear everything down.

She wants to rapidly cycle through seasons of contentment and destruction according to her mood. She wants her anger to achieve something. She wants to send waves of electricity through her puppet strings and shock people. She wants to be lightning.

And spring rain.

She wants everyone to feel electric when the heavens open up and the floods come, and the plagues. She wants everyone to move in spirals.

She wants them to recognise their idiocy, the way their lives move in that petty pace from day to day. She wants to shake the globe, thunderously, violently, and let them all fall where they may. She wants to tear everyone to shreds, get at the truth of them. She wants to make the world explode.

She has little hope of her puppets. She will push them with a cattle prod until they burn or die.

She wants them to burn while she dances to the rhythm of the music of the Tower of Babel. She wants to turn the volume up and make them sing while she drinks tea with Ereshkigal.

NB: The out-of-my-niche guest post I wrote is now up. Drop by Life in the Country and have a read, especially you old Myrtleford friends. It’s a happy one.

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I don’t even know what to do any more. And I don’t even want to write this. I want to be doing a million trivial things but I can’t get a grip on any of them. I am physically restraining myself, sitting here, but I don’t know that I would be able to get these bees out from under my skin even if I let them go.

I don’t know how to deal with this. It’s different. It’s not like in the past when I had big, big pains too large to be held in; pains that I released in writing, that I cut out of me, literally and figuratively, that I starved and binged and purged myself to control. All of that made sense and none of this does. And it was so long ago. And nothing I learned seems to fit.

More and more, I begin to think that there is something “chemical” going on. It is not outside the bounds of reason, considering my previous lifestyle and a pregnancy. Maybe it is that simple. Then again, what is simple about that? I don’t like things I can’t understand. I don’t like feeling as though something is out of my hands. It makes no sense to me, philosophically. I can’t unify the knowledge of the biological nature of human thought (what little we have) with the metaphysics of it all.

I can’t let go of my ultimate responsibility, but I can’t avoid the knowledge that I cannot be right or be wrong. I cannot make a moral choice. So this is checkmate.

Oh, I know that the two are not sliced so cleanly. I know. Normally that knowledge comforts me. It removes the basis for all those ignorant hatreds in this world, removes the rights and lefts and radical oppositions. But it leaves more difficult philosophical questions in its wake. The same questions, yes, but the paths extending from them are multiplied and too entangled to unravel. Has anyone unravelled them? Are there any philosophers left?

I read an opinion the other day which I objected to.

A woman is not born a woman. She becomes one.

It pissed me off, this cheap sloganeering that insulted women while pretending to make them free. I did not even recognise it as a quote from Simone de Beauvoir, whom I respect. It was out of context, certainly, but it is also out of it’s time. This brilliant thinker has been reduced to an anachronism.

I know when I was writing Polar seasons… the other day, I wrote lengthy passages about genetics and society’s poor understanding of it and the ridiculousness of the nature/nurture dichotomy given what contemporary science is learning. (I think I removed most of it. I’m not sure. I couldn’t proofread it clearly, and still can’t. I don’t know what I was saying. I am worried that I said something offensive.)

I truly believe the line between biology and experience has all but disappeared, that each part has a powerful effect upon the other, that what we are and how we live is so closely intertwined that we can no longer see these things divided.

But I don’t know what that means.

I have strong views about individual responsibility. My concept of it is the foundation of all my principles. I loathe what Kant called our non-age. I loathe what Sartre called bad faith. I loathe what I call abdication. I rebel against “the unreasonable silence of the world” and strive for meaning anyway, strive for Truth in spite of what will be my ultimate and necessary failure.

Biology confuses all of this.

What about this is the product of my behaviour and thoughts? What about this is illness? How much has illness created my thoughts? How much have my thoughts created illness? These questions cannot be answered.

Some people are ill. Some people know that they are ill, and they are qualified to judge. Some people are too ill to make that judgement and someone else makes it for them, rightly or wrongly. Some people make themselves ill and absolve themselves of their responsibility. Some people have a greater potential for illness but remain free from disease their whole lives. Some people set off the chain of disease by their choices. Some people are made ill by events in their lives which they have no control over. Some people…

No. No answers can be found there. If I am ill because of my own action, I must take ownership of it. If I am ill because of my biology, I must disabuse myself of my responsibility. Everything in between is unsolvable.

I cannot untangle it.

I cannot.

I cannot.

I cannot.

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So, today sucks. I shouldn’t be sitting at this chair, and I hate my blog. In fact, right now, I am finding it as excruciating as my back. Instead of feeling like this is a place to clear out all the negative junk in my head, I have succeeded in projecting my worm-eating mentality onto it. The move to cerebralmum.com, my Christmas present to myself, hasn’t helped.

In spite of the irrelevance of things like Technorati ranking and hit counts and click throughs the dive in those numbers have left me feeling a little alone. Like nobody wants to talk to me. I realise the utter ridiculousness of this but for some reason, I seem to care right now what everybody, and anybody, thinks of me. Even people I don’t know. Even people who are imaginary.

I don’t think this is a new phenomenon for me but it isn’t something I have always made myself a victim of. I used to be entirely oblivious to it. There is one thing that has slowly worn me down though, and that is gossip. I’ve been on the receiving end often and I don’t like it. In fact, you could probably say I’m afraid of it. In fact, I am probably so afraid of it that not only does what people have said about me cut me down but what people might say about me, or even think about me, leaves me frozen.

Right now, I worry that my posts are all over the place and this blog makes no sense, that this blog isn’t interesting, or insightful, or that it has no personality. I worry that by talking about such personal things, my opinions on particular issues are undermined.

Oh, she’s that poor little victim girl.

Oh, she’s depressed and has no perspective.

Vulnerability and authority do not go hand in hand in people’s perceptions, regardless of how commonplace those vulnerabilities are, so I worry about the image of me that is presented here. I worry about how divergent it is from my own self-image. I worry about how much fuel I am giving to people who will use it to diminish me, to reduce me, to misinterpret me. And yes, I know I shouldn’t.

But I do.

The truth is, I have always been misinterpreted. (Yes, everyone has, but hey… This blog is about me.) My self-image and the things people perceive have always been widely divergent. The things that are most central to who I am are my writing and my critical thinking and my exploration of human behaviour. Those things are my identity. Those things are not very visible to the human eye. So what is it that people see? And what do they talk about behind my back?

One thing that has always been “seen”, and caused much gossip, is my sexuality. Or some fictitious version of it, anyway. I have never understood why, but even when I was young, I was considered to be the girl most likely to “lose it” first. The truth is, I didn’t lose it until 2 months before I turned 20 and and at that stage, I had only ever kissed 4 boys, mostly under pressure. The truth is, my sexuality is more like that of an ice queen. I don’t think about it, I’m usually not aware it and I have never played with it as a way of relating to the world and the people around me. I was always, and I still am to a certain extent, sexually naive. In spite of that, I am frequently perceived as a slut or a vamp or a sexual predator. And boy, is that some fodder for gossip.

I have often wondered why I am seen that way. I don’t have the answer. Part of it is probably because of the way I dressed. I wore costumes, I played dress ups. I took pleasure in the artistry of the self the same way that a painter colurs his blank canvas. Perhaps some people perceived that “art” as pornography. Perhaps my lack of inhibition, my complete lack of awareness for the social rules of dressing, sent mixed signals.

Or perhaps beneath my naivete there has always been a certain “vibe” I was unaware of because I was sexualised at an early age. Perhaps beneath my strengths there was always that Marilyn Monroe kind of vulnerability, that little girl lost which in our society is seen as a sexual cue. I have often wondered about that.

Whatever it is though, it has been the basis of much gossip about me and I do not like it. I do not like being attacked by other women. It offends me, as a feminist. And it offends my sexuality which is extremely private and shared sparingly. And I do not like being made a target of the “hunters” which, as well as giving other women more cause to bitch, has always seemed vaguely insulting. What makes a man come on to someone they have never spoken to? What attracts them? It certainly isn’t Me. To be attracted to Me, you have speak to me.

And then there are the people who have been part of my life who have cherished an abiding loathing while I continued on, blithely unsuspecting, until someone did me the courtesy (kindly or not) of informing me of it. And the dirty looks, and the doors literally slammed in my face and the great, big gossip merry-go-round of twisted facts or completely made-up facts used to influence others to respond to me negatively, to view me negatively.

Some friends have explained this away as jealousy, but I have never been comfortable with that. It seems like such a reactionary self-validation. Really, how many people need to perceive you in a certain way in order to make you question whether or not they are right and you are wrong? How many times were those perceptions thrust at me like knives before I lost my blitheness?

I want it back. I want to be however large I am, even if it is too large. I want to dress however I dress, and talk about the things I want to talk about, oblivious to the petty stereotypes of people who lack imagination. I want to revel again in the artistry of self, without feeling like an offense. I want to feel confident in my vulnerabilities. I want to be comforted again by the truth of them, instead of hiding from them and fearing them, and fearing the people who feed on them.

Perhaps the history of gossip which has surrounded me, and the betrayals of trust, and the dishonesty of those who have spoken behind my back and left me defenceless should be deleted from the equation altogether. Actually, that’s not even a perhaps. They need to be deleted. I need to escape from their clutches. But while I have said that I am arrogant time and time again, I have never been arrogant enough to comfortably say that I am better than someone else.

Why do I even think of it that way? That is not critical thinking. It is not arrogant to say that you know better than anyone else the truth about yourself. So that is one wrong thought process gone. But what else traps me there?

Injustice. Gossip is unjust. I rail against it and that leaves me arguing in circles with clouds of myself which slowly scatter from the gusts of a hollow, echoing wind. It is hard for me to let that go. To let injustice stand. I am the type who would stand silent in front of the firing squad. I really am. I am a martyr type. I would die on principle. When principles are so deeply offended, how do you let them go?

And another trap for me? The fear of hurting others. If my mere existence reduces people to maliciousness and cowardly attacks, aren’t they defensive behaviours? What are they defending themselves from? What is it about me that hurts them? I don’t want to be responsible for other people’s pain. Perhaps it is the martyr in me again, but how do I resolve my conscience with another person’s pain, regardless of how destructively they wield it?

Riddle me that.

Then perhaps I’ll find a way to no longer victimise myself with the gossipers’ mirages.

This post is a Hump Day Hmm, very appropriate for someone who hates their blog right now. This week’s subject was The Gossip Game and, strangely enough, I like my blog better now I’ve written it. If you want to take part, visit Julie Pippert and follow the instructions. There’s a new topic every Wednesday.

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I’m in a foul mood. Last week a muscle seized in my shoulder and I was walking around with my head immobile and angled like a zombie. This week, my lower back is excruciating and I can’t sit, or lie down without excruciating pain and I can’t walk upright. I feel like crying, because there is nothing else I can do.

I have had lower back pain on and off since having Caspar but this is the worst and it really worries me because of what my sister has gone through with her ruptured disc and years immobile and surgery which only returned some of her functioning. I don’t want that to happen.

On top of that, I was planning on going to see my doctor tomorrow and now I am in too much pain to go. It is a two hour trip for me and I just can’t do it. I can’t even see a doctor out here because they are either terrible or don’t bulk bill and I don’t have the money to pay for an appointment even if I get most of the fee refunded by Medicare.

It just plain sucks and I’m just plain miserable.

Right now, I even hate my blog. I hate everything. I’m sick of everything. I just want everything to go away. I already had limited resources to cope with the simplest tasks, like doing the dishes or having a shower. Now I have nothing. Just a pain in my back. I can’t even twist to wipe my ass when I go to the toilet.

Seriously? Is this exactly what I needed right now? To feel even less capable and less functional.

I hate everything. I just want to give up.

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Two results of me realising I’m depressed. I am seriously pissed off. And I am even more exhausted. Depression thinks it is useful. It defends itself. Cas has just gone down for his afternoon nap. I slept through his morning one and my body is screaming to sleep again. Maybe I will. Maybe I can’t do this. Is that what my body is trying to tell me? Well, it can get stuffed. Because I’m being attacked on two fronts, physically and mentally. My brain is trying to to undermine me, but it’s angry, and anger is energy. So here, brain, have your say…

Ahh, and now it’s gone all shy and is pretending to be calmly rational again. But I have scribbled evidence on the notepad in front of me to use against it:

So here I am. Self-diagnosed and totally fucking furious about it.

Why? Because I am arrogant and should not have allowed myself to devolve into this state.

Why? Because I have done this before and resent having to do this again.

I resent being a statistic…

I am pissed off because I do not want to engender sympathy and support…

I am pissed off because I am not dramatically depressed. I am not depressed in an interesting, theatrical way. Not in a creative way. I’m just stale and this depression is the commonplace, pedestrian kind that 1 in 5 (or whatever the damn statistic is) people experience. I think I’m too good for it. But no.

There is no rending of garments, no throwing of teacups, no hiding in closets, no cutting myself, no starving myself, no throwing up my food, no shaving off all my hair. No words words words like swords. Just this dead person I think I’m too good to be. Ennui is boring Lassitude is sloth. There is no gaping, wounded emptiness for all the world to see, no catharsis.

Just nothing.

And it is my fault, my fault, my fault. Because I thought I was so clever that I thought I was done. I know everything, like a teenager. I know the secrets of the world. I know the Truth. I know that I am exceptional. And here I am. Not exceptional. With no excuse.

There is no excuse for being here. Not for me. Because I’m clever. Clever in the most clever way. I have the ability to make connections, to see the connections between things that seem unconnected. I have the ability to make the world make sense. Paradox and insanity are my best friends. Like most of my best friends, I haven’t been paying much attention to them.

I’ve just been hiding and wallowing and shrinking and shirking my duty. It’s my duty to know myself, my duty to be myself. That is my moral code. It should be everyone’s, but me? Secretly, I like the rebelliousness of it. I like revolt. I think I’m special.

I let my high opinion of myself absolve me of that duty I haven’t been performing for years. That’s pathetic.

I am arrogant. And I like my arrogance. And I am paradoxical. I am proud of my big pains, my glaring, gaping wounds that no one could make shut up, even when it exhausted everyone around me. Oh, yes, being hurt in dramatic, theatrical ways makes you special too. I am so fucking arrogant that I thought I could, and would, handle everything life threw at me, that I was never a “victim” - that I would never be a “victim” - that I didn’t even bother to deal with the new shit that came my way.

That quiet, nagging shit, of people who wanted me to be smaller. That quiet, nagging shit of having to do meaningless work and conform and dress right and and pay bills. And eat and sleep like a “normal” person. Stupid fucking me just slowly crumbled beneath the weight of feathers.

That’s pathetic.

And the other thing that is pathetic: There’s a bigger thing that got to me, a few years ago. A bigger something outside of me that I had no control over. A bigger thing that was done to me, that, knowing all I know, should not have made me a victim. And I made myself a victim of it anyway.

That stupid boss whom I thought was my friend who grabbed me in the kitchen, and undid my top and restrained me from behind and grabbed my naked breast and made me scared because I couldn’t find away to make it stop. That guy was a fuckhead. I reported it to the police. After months, he got a fine and no conviction.

What pisses me off was not that it happened, was not the lost job, not the talk behind my back, not the warnings that me taking action would give me a bad reputation and make me unemployable. I knew what consequences there would be. What pisses me off is that all the resources I had within myself to deal with such a thing weren’t used. If I had worked my way through it, no matter how long it took and no matter how much I fucked up along the way, I would now be proud of myself.

What did I do instead, with all my brains and all my skills? I just left.

I just left it alone.

And that’s pathetic.

See, brain. You did have something to say.

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There is something I hinted in The fable my tattoo tells me… which I never intended to talk about in detail here. It isn’t what this blog is about. I’m thirty four and my history is history. I don’t know whether the subject will come up again but it has today so I’m writing it. I don’t know if you will want to read it.

But I’m writing it.

As a child I was sexually abused by my adoptive father. This information is for “back story” only. It is not something I feel the need to get off my chest. To be specific about the nature of that abuse; I was not raped. The majority of the abuse was what, as adults, we might call sexual harassment. Groping and sexual comments made to appear as jokes but with a real intention to intimidate and shame. My memories are sketchy but these are a few.

In Grade 3, I ask him if he would like a cup of coffee. He says, “No, but you can give me a head job.”

In Grade 5, being punished for something, I am made to take off all my clothes and stand against the wall. I stand there for an hour, waiting to be smacked. He just looks.

16 years old. My mother is away. He has been drinking and comes home. I have a male friend visiting. My friend leaves. I go to my bed. He comes into my room. For six hours he sits on my bed in the dark, talking about sex. The conversation begins as a warning against being seduced. It becomes a conversation about how wonderful it is to be seduced. He says, “I am sexually attracted to you.”

Not long after that, I leave home.

Perhaps this doesn’t seem particularly abusive to you in the scheme of things. There was no bruising. I have no scars. It is difficult to describe the pall over our house, the tension that arose in all of us when it was nearing the time he would be home.

Every day, he would play with himself on the couch while we watched TV. He would masturbate the dog.

He was an alcoholic; unpredicatable, irrational, aggressive and insecure and there were sexual overtones in everything he did. I lived in sexual fear throughout my childhood. That threat hung over me before I could even understand what it was.

The reason why I have written this is because a few days ago while looking for Australian blog carnivals as a way to promote my site, I came across a blog about child protection called Imaginif.

I didn’t want to read it.

I said earlier that my history is history but it never as simple as that. In my life I have spent a lot of time thinking about child sexual abuse, studying child sexual abuse, talking about child sexual abuse. I have spent a lot of time getting angry and getting better. I understood all that could be understood. I was done with it.

I don’t consider myself a survivor. That term reduces me to circumstance and traps me in the past. The events of your childhood, good or bad, provide the language through which you understand the world. They are like a desert wash, a dry stream bed, and when it rains, when life happens, the water naturally flows there and the channels deepen. If you listen to the currents, your childhood is the symbolic key to the map of your present self.

Tonight, I found out something about a young girl I know, which I cannot discuss here, and my stream bed flooded. I felt sick and voiceless and trapped and I was forced to travel through the physical memories of my past again. I recognised the echoes of my own pain and I reclaimed my anger.

I have spoken a lot here about not knowing who I am, about being nobody. There are many pressures in this world for us to reduce ourselves, to not feel too largely, to live passionlessly. To deny everything.

Not wanting to read that blog on a subject I was once passionate about, one that everyone would be passionate about if it wasn’t so unseemly, was just such a denial and I am voiceless because of it.

Tonight I remember the language of my childhood and I remember why I should never stop speaking.

Shrinking yourself to an inoffensive nothing is not just self-harm. If we do that, who will speak for those unable to? Who will cry for those who cannot? Who will guide those who are drowning in their childhood to safety?

__________________________________________

This post, Imagine if…, has received a Perfect Post Award. My humble gratitude to Musing Woman who nominated it. If you would like to read the other award winning posts for September ‘07, click here.

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