Many-headed Gender

Doing a lot of work with "ideal" womanhood in class....and by, association, the romanticizing of this "ideal" as something more complete than the masculine.

I just found this line in the book we're reading this week (James Carroll's An American Requiem): "In recalling the power of that first ideal in which virtue was not the opposite of masculinity but the essence of it, I recognize that the man I still long to be is the one I first thought my father was."

This statement is not only one of the most poignant things I've ever read, but also one of great insight. It leaves me with that feeling akin to "Ah ha". Though I have not quite gotten to the Ah Ha yet, something is about to occur to me, and it could be brilliant.

The first thing that comes to mind for me is personal and completely non-academic. I thought of my grandfathers. I can't explain the virtue/masculinity connection in them, just that the idea resonated with their presence. These men were of the same generation as Carroll's father, so I wonder if there was something about this "Greatest Generation" perception of masculinity that (while arguably detrimental in a great many ways) we should be paying more attention to in this moment.

My second associations are questions: In what way is virtue the essence of masculinity? In what way is it now the opposite? ...and did a vocal feminist movement have anything to do with this?
I will get to these questions later/sometime.

First, I'd like to try to get to the bottom what it is that's been bugging me in our late 20th century readings of feminist-theory inflected spirituality. As wonderful as these things have been, I have to question balance. There are a few things to consider here.
1) Feminine power was in serious need of reclaiming throughout the last...oh...lots of centuries. I'm not going to argue that.

2) The breaking point with the lack of feminine power definitely rose to the top on several occasions throughout world history, but none quite so dramatically as with focused "civil rights"/humanist/feminist movements of the 60s. A decade of great reaction all around.

3) Things did change. For example: When my mother went away to college, it was still rather expected that she would only go to meet a husband, and she may or may not work once she met this man. When I went away to school, I was going to enrich myself. I have heard similar stories from many friends with mothers who share a generation with mine.

4) Things did not change enough, and there came a crop of certain writers (probably beginning in the late 60s, early 70s) who began to use Goddess imagery to advance the cause of woman on earth. I find this tendency especially prevalent in writings of self-discovery and spiritual journey published in the late 80s and early 90s. (It could be that I began seeking such books for my own personal journey in the mid-90s as a confused adolescent who really wanted to find something positive in her femininity. 'cause the world still wasn't selling it to me.) aaanyway....
There is a commonality--a trope almost--among these writers to claim that we must all experience the divine feminine, for only She is complete. (This is massively over simplified again....)

Most recently, I read it in Jean Houston, as it relates to the Hero's Journey as embodied by Odysseus. Odysseus often finds himself in caves, and--as any good dabbler in ancient religions knows--caves are places of feminine initiation. You're crawling back into the earth-womb when you take on a cave, baby.
And Odysseus has got to do this in order find his completeness. The HERO in general, must always get in touch with his feminine side, it seems.

I found myself asking: As a woman, how do I find the same balance? (Balance is all-important. There was a reason androgyny finds such power in old stories...) Do I feel like a complete and creating being that someone else should emulate? In what way do I experience the masculine? Do I have to run with the deer? Experience the year-hunt? Come back with blood on my hands and be anointed? What is it?

This then...is where everything seems to tie together in my brain. If as recently as the 50s we could still make the connection between virtue and masculinity, maybe we haven't been out of balance for as long as this crop of writers in the late 20th century would have us think. After all, they're all writing after the period of overthrow that sheds a different light on the gender roles of the first half of the century and earlier.

Now, of course, is when I start to wonder if I'm advocating that I stop working, go home and have babies right now dammit. No. That's not what I'm after. And I know that. Heck, I'm grateful for that choice, but somewhere on the path to this choice...something changed in a way that I'm not entirely sure is good. Yes, we lost a very obvious power imbalance, but perhaps the subtle undercurrent of power imbalance that remains is even more damaging.

We give a lot of lip-service to gender equality, but I don't think it's there. A lot of women--myself included--still have trouble figuring out what's great about being a girl. Also, I think we have tried to move towards a masculine-identified equality. (My brain just exploded as the personal and the wider world collided...hold on....)
Women, in relationships have a tendency to be the ones doing a lot of the work on self within the relationship. I, currently, must keep raptor-eyeball on myself to monitor if I'm warping too much towards what DB wants, away from pieces of myself. And part of me wonders if, as a gender, we made the same mistake in working ourselves toward an equality that was defined by men.
Men...being less likely to work on themselves (not across the board, but in general), may have reacted in a regressive way, rather than an accepting way. ...widening the gap, and we have yet to mend it.

I found this in a review for E. Anthony Rotundo's book American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era: "...by the end of the 19th century, men (with Theodore Roosevelt as paradigm) were seen as overgrown boys, their boyish impulses being their best part." This is even earlier than I was thinking for my above statements, but still...we have one half of the world, working analyzing, growing and the other half operating on impulse.
That's not virtue. It's also the sort of thing that obviously sets the stage for a certain type of theorist to say: "You are incomplete. You must get in touch with your feminine side. You must have the initiation of the goddess." Perhaps, what is really meant is: "You must accept your mind and its growth. You must work at adulthood--be less reactive. Live with purpose--like your life depends on it because you don't want to be dependent."

This bring me back to: What is my initiation in the god then? Do I need to remember not to take things so seriously? Is that man's gift?

I once read a fantasy novel in which there is a quest for a crown--which turns out to be as much a state of mind as it is a physical object, neither here nor there--with which the only the True King can be crowned. On this quest, the seekers visit 7 lakes. Each lake has a lesson. At one, the seekers must learn to play. The character with whom I most identified had a hard time with this one. He felt himself very much above the splashing and otter-like stone sliding.

Maybe I need to stop pushing so hard for soul-searching in myself and let my child-self experience for a while.


I think I have raised more questions than I answered, but this may only be an introduction...
This topic is a hydra.

More to come.

Harvest

Today is the equinox. Ms. Amos wrote once:

"We move into a state of perfect balance today.
As much Light
As much Dark...
A new cycle is in motion, and we have chosen to move with it....
The harvest has come in. Whatever that is. Gathering in and getting rid of that which will not serve me in the coming months..." (reprinted at Here In My Head)

What is my harvest right now? What do I gather to myself? And what do I part with?

I have already posted about potential for my new cycle, but there is something about the concept of "gathering in" that I want to play with.
The other day, I was talking to my sister about autumn, and how it has always been my favorite time of year. I waxed rather poetic about the colorful leaves being the pyre of the Year King in his passing, though this is not a time of mourning. If the periods of stasis are beneficial personally, surely the earth needs this time just as much. This is the time the earth gathers itself together; it rests, like the Judeo-Christian god after creation.
Autumn, and the move into the dark season, is the world's/gods'/Creation's gift to us. As the earth pulls its energy inwards, so too, can we. We can turn the energy that has been focused on others, focused on work, focused on anything but our own lives as creative beings, and turn that energy inwards for a time.  

I am very aware of the fine balance one must keep in terms of "looking in" v "turning energy in."  Looking in can be more like stewing, the dangerous over-analysis that is not useful, and not healthy.  This is what I can cast from myself at this time.  Instead, I commit to myself in balance. I make my connection to my own lights and darks, while dispelling their governing influence.  

I also cast from myself (though this will take more doing than just saying it) grasping, envious behaviors.  I gather in compassion and self-larger-than-self. 

 A new cycle IS in motion, and I choose to move with it.  

Initiation--brain bookmarking

As previously mentioned, I'm reading a book about the Odyssey and the ways one can expand the story of Odysseus' trials into one vast, mushy metaphor for one's own life muck. ...I'm buying it in bulk.
I always feel a lot like I should be dressing (and perhaps speaking) like Prof. Trelawny in the Potter movies when I find myself flailing in recognition while reading things that might be rejected as New Age tripe by more logical minds, but I have never really credited myself with a logical mind. Also, I imagine at 50, I will be THAT woman....with the large jewelry, funky glasses on a beaded chain and floaty clothes, so perhaps it is entirely appropriate that I am already identifying with that particular earth motherly archetype.
Moving right along...
This book has me thinking about the ways the trials of my life have been nothing but preparation for initiation into the possibility for a whole new me...a whole new stage of self. (There are about 900 layers of this. Bear with me.)

I'm beginning to come up with a reason to accept what is happening to my marriage. I don't have to like it, but I am coming up with reason.
My Odyssean trials--my Cyclops, poor winds, Scylla, Charybdis, death of my crew, etc--are (aligned with no particular image):

• reaching the end of my undergraduate career, drowning in doubt as I realize/decide that what I thought I wanted is not what I want...and thus nearly failing every class my senior year because I ceased to have direction;
• a hereditary mental illness that decided right in the middle of all this crap was a great time to kick it into high gear,
• the dissolution of friendships that had been important to me,
• and a complete lack of faith in my ability to get into grad school or do anything important with myself for fear that my head would just eat me alive again.

Into the vortex of Charybdis I go, clinging to pieces of my ship--my raft: my relationship with DB. It is at this point, I spend my seven years on Calypso's island. ...in the form of what I thought was a nearly idyllic relationship (ok...in my case 7 years was more like 9). Still with me? No? Damn. Moving forward anyway.

Jean Houston writes of Odysseus: "So, battered, naked, stripped of all his symbolic veneer, the brilliant "man of many ways" lands on Calypso's womblike island, dead to his former self.... [Calypso] provides him with a regular daily life in which he has no need for the cunning and wily qualities that saw him through the Trojan victory and his subsequent adventures. Instead, he must learn to use the qualities of sensory enjoyment and emotional relationship."

This is where I started underlining just about every other sentence. Post HU (part 1?) I was lost...in need of a serious Restyle of Self. I rested in my relationship with DB, content to have one person with whom I was most intimate, content with the quiet in my life. I learned things about compassion in this time. I learned things about selflessness. I learned about sharing myself in my most unbound states. It was comfortable, and I was completely different from the girl who dove headlong at knowledge for fortune and glory, eschewing all personal attachments. This was not, as it sometimes felt, a stuck place, this may actually have been a period of "hibernation...presaging a fundamental renewal or restructuring of personality." (Houston again)

Now, though I may not like the way in which it is occurring, I may be ending my time on Calypso's island of rest and renewal. DB may have done what he was supposed to do in my life, and now I am ready to return to Ithaca (school, intellectual life, my abandoned "path"?) with less ego and true humility.

The difficult thing, but potentially the most selfless thing, is to realize that I might be the same thing in DB's life. Even though his movement does not look like "forward" movement looks to me, it might be.
(Now is the part of the show when I start mixing my spiritualities with as much verve as the Swedish Chef...)
It is very human to hang on to things you have seen as yours, but attachment causes suffering, right? And if there is an end to suffering, one must let go.
Insert applicable quote here:
"How do you let go of things? This means you leave them as they are; it does not mean you annihilate them or throw them away. It is more like setting down and letting them be. " (from Buddhanet)
And this is very much what I have been trying to practice in this situation, even as I come to look at DB as my teacher in the ways of various mysteries...as someone I may have to leave in order to take on what's next.

Not that any of this zenning makes what I'm going through any less painful. It is, in its own way, a set of trials. It is nice, in the midst of turmoil, to have this way of viewing what has been, and it does not feel false in any way.

Ways of Knowing #1

Of all the classrooms, in all the universities in the country, I had to walk into this one. And it was right! Sure...it's going to be some pretty fluffy learnin', but I've got a BA in English. I remember fluffy learnin'.

In which you read something and sit around a table and talk about it for several hours. I found myself writing down things JN was saying just because, not even because they were necessarily going to be pertinent. This, I feel, must be a good sign.

The difficulty I already know I'm going to have with this course--a course about "Great Stories", archetypes and "restorying" the world--will be keeping a healthy distance from it. So far, the things we have been assigned to read have felt like things I would choose to self-therapy my way through my current personal situation as well as all the build up from the past. (Using the phrase 'build up' makes me feel like my life is hair that has been overly styled.)

There were times, the other night, as I listened to my classmates speak in wise and complex sentences, that I felt just as I had in my philosophy of religion course as a first year in college: in over my head with nothing to add but overly personal details.

This is going to be good for me. Whoa what? Yes. This will, in fact, be good for me.

I have, in the past, approached education from the back of a draft horse. I am lookin' down on the world, 'cause I'm such a big fat smarty pants. Education was what I did. I looked for knowledge as a way to set myself apart from (and often above) the unbathed masses. (Holy hubris Batman!) This time around, the feeling is different. I am entering into a something very purposefully. I am driven by a goal that feels like something beyond myself. This, of course, also sounds New Age-tastic, but it's the only way I can phrase it right now.

I am beginning to understand the concept of Call. I still thumb my nose at the church-hiring process, (the concept of "receiving a call" as though from god, and not from a bunch of men and women sitting around a table in a church basement), but as I begin my religion-studying, I find the word popping into my brain more often with less sneering.

It is because I would like, someday, to be able to sit down with someone and lead them through their own personal version of Inanna's story--or Christ's--leading someone out of their own underworld. 'cause if I can get off my own damn meat hook/cross/tree of life/what-have-you, I can only hope to give someone else the spiritual/archetypal tools to do the same.

But this set of thoughts is exactly why keeping a healthy distance from the material is going to be difficult. It will be hard to discuss the archetypical importance of Odysseus' journey when I'm thinking very obviously of my own seven years lost on Calypso's island.

It will take focus, but focus has been distinctly lacking as of late. I look forward to it.