…as part of a breathing, living whole.

I woke up today with an unusual thought on my mind: that of how completely and continuously we are integrated with our environment through the simple act of breathing.

Why do we breathe? It seems to confer organisms no particular advantage that they must rely on aerobic metabolism to survive. We could have come into being a different way. Yet every living creature I can think of relies on some variation of this basic process: the intake and expelling of air, water or some other substance as a sustainer of life.

To breathe reminds me of how inseparable I am from the world around me. It is not even just that “I” rely on this world to live; the very life processes that go on in my body rely on the action of outside elements, such as oxygen. Cut off completely from all that is external to me, I would die within, quite literally, a matter of seconds. The simple act of breathing renders “my body” part of one giant body; for if our body is all that is inside a certain boundary, how can the constant flow of oxygen into my lungs and bloodstream, and carbon dioxide out therefrom, not be considered “part of my body”? Which part of my red blood cells is part of me: the whole, or only that part that does not consist of oxygen from outside?

As I see it, it’s all part of my body. If the oxygen is “less my body” because it enters and leaves so quickly, are my skin cells, which rapidly die and are replaced, or the blood cells themselves, which live for an average of four months, also not my body? It seems to me that breathing is one way in which the fact that we exist as part of a giant networked organism is conveyed to us.

Maybe eating is another. Though it can be argued that a lot of the food we eat is taken from nature nonconsensually, some food is created specifically for the purpose of supporting life. Consider, for example, the fruit, which, unlike some plants that defend themselves from predators by tasting unpleasant, secreting poison, or dressing themselves in barbs and thorns, is specifically designed to appeal to the senses and to nourish the animal body, and which is in many cases cut off deliberately from its body (the tree or bush) when in a perfect condition to be eaten. The fruit, of course, and the consumption thereof, is an essential reproduction strategy for the plant; the seeds contained within survive their trip through the animal’s digestive system and pass unharmed out the other end, far from the host plant and already surrounded by their own natural fertiliser.

Sounds unpleasant, I know, but it works for the plant, and it keeps the animal alive. It’s hard to argue that the fruit was not invented by nature for the purposes of being eaten by animals, and thus is an entirely guilt-free food. We are meant, at least at this stage in evolution, to interact with our environment through eating, and to this end nature has given us sweet-tasting, nutritious foods that fulfil their purposes, both for the plant and for the animal, only when consumed.

Think again of the function of the fruit, too: reproduction. When an animal carries a fruit within its stomach, it acts practically as a surrogate mother for the plant. It’s quite unusual, when you think about it, and another example of the intricate interconnectedness of all life. We are, in many ways that we don’t even recognise, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, to many other things on this planet, in this universe. Many factors aided in our creation, and we will aid in the creation of many other things. That’s not just fluff: it’s simple scientific fact. Yet it is also a wondrous thing. Why should we not marvel at it?

This got a bit rambly and meandering, but….

So I keep thinking about these little issues to do with the suggestions of feminists, race-equality activists, etc. when they call for the more privileged (I’ve talked about the use of this word before and how I don’t necessarily think it’s appropriate, but it is part of the accepted discourse of the movement(s), and so I will continue to use it here for convenience’s sake) to act in particular ways to steer us further towards equality. And I often hope that no one’s thinking that by making all these arguments I’m implying that I don’t support equality, or even that I don’t support the privileged actively striving to examine their privileges and working to fight -isms starting with their own actions. I do support these things.

But partly because I do support these things, I think that when suggestions are made in favour of them that have flaws or issues, it’s good to examine those fairly– and the activist circles tend to shut down on that sort of thing, saying it distracts from the topic at hand. Personally, I think that can lead to problems of any suggestion in your favour blindly being passed without thinking about the impact it might have on others or getting to examine why reasonable, thoughtful people might not do that thing, so I like to deconstruct those things. And it’s not even always about coming down on the side of “this thing you’re asking of us privileged people is unreasonable”; a lot of the time, it’s really about “I can see why you want this, and I’d like to find a way for you to have it, but understand that a lot of people will find it hard”, or “yes, it’s right for you to have this, but here’s a little side issue that I think it’s fair to also address, because I don’t think it’s bad for people to have this contradictory thing, either, and we need to find a solution”.

This particular discussion is along the latter lines.

Specifically, I want to talk about the role of human curiosity in treatment of minority groups. Because a lot of complaints about privileged people from non-white racial groups, disabled people, and other groups whose physical appearance or behaviour is in the minority involve actions that, I think, stem from simple curiosity: asking to touch hair, or about the origin of clothing or jewellery, is a common one, but also quoted, especially by disabled people, is staring.

We’re taught as children not to stare at others, even (especially) if they catch our attention. It’s simply not seen as polite, and for a good reason: no one wants to feel like their actions and appearance are being scrutinised. We are capable of gathering en masse and not being hugely socially uncomfortable because, in a crowd, everyone tacitly agrees to more or less ignore everyone else.

But how does this balance with the desire to satiate curiosity?

I know this must sound very strange: as if someone’s curiosity could ever outweigh the right of someone, especially someone who probably gets constant attention because of their appearance, to be left alone. It doesn’t really upset anyone to not satisfy their curiosity; at worst they might be a little disappointed. The black or disabled person, however, might feel the weight of a hundred stares per day, perhaps more, and this could be profoundly upsetting for them. Shouldn’t we do our best to alleviate that burden, not intensify it?

I do generally tend to think so, and because I know that in practice it’s extremely difficult to clarify to someone whether you’re staring in a good or a bad way, and that even if you could an overburdened person might not care, I try not to stare at people I’m curious about. But I also think that there’s something that’s being missed here: most human curiosity, when it comes to unusual-looking people, is not vicious or mean-spirited. It isn’t looking for flaws to point at and mock. It just wants to know. People have an inherent drive to learn which is triggered when they encounter something outside their experience.

I’m just wondering idly if, in an ideal world, people who wished to satiate that drive harmlessly could be allowed to do it. I don’t like making people feel uncomfortable, but I don’t like the fact that in order for society to go smoothly we have to pretend a lot of the time that we don’t care about things we do care about, or vice versa. I hold the ideological perspective that it should generally be okay for us to be ourselves, and that if we’re not explicitly seeking to cause harm, it would be ideal if society were better able to accept our lack of harmful intent (obviously depending on the circumstances: “I didn’t mean to cause harm by pushing that burning oil drum off a building onto that grandmothers’ convention” is not the same as “I didn’t mean to cause harm by asking about your father when I didn’t know he was dead”).

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take care with our words and actions, because right now we do live in a society where many of us have been conditioned to be easily upset, and we do need to be mindful of others’ feelings. But I suppose I dream of a society where people who have no animosity in mind can be honest, without causing offence. I’m thinking I’d like it to be okay for someone to be curious about someone’s physical appearance, and be able to look at them, possibly even admire them, and have that not bother the person. And I know that’s not really possible in this world right now; but at the very least what I would like is this, and basically, for all that I’ve waffled above this is my main point:

I’d like for it to be acknowledged ideologically that curiosity is okay, that it’s not a bad thing, and that even if we shouldn’t practice it in some circumstances for the sake of people’s happiness, it’s still a shame and a loss that we can’t.

Maybe it’s not a big loss. Maybe it doesn’t outweigh the desires of others to be left alone. But it’s still not ideal that society is this way.

(This brought to you, incidentally, by spending the last leg of my recent flight back to England next to a boy who, despite having only one arm and that being deformed, was still able to play his DS. I thought that was pretty awesome.)

Oppression hurts the oppressors: a theory.

So I’ve been thinking lately about the idea that wrongdoing (of the type that involves harm to others and does not involve obvious harm to the self) ultimately hurts the person bringing it about as well as the victim of the wrongdoing. I specifically say “as well as” instead of “as much as”; I think measuring hurt in quantities is not really possible except in the most extreme of cases (a pricked finger versus losing a limb/one’s whole life’s work and reputation/one’s life), is only ever really applicable when we speak of physical injuries, which we are not doing here (as the impact of an incident, whether seemingly large or seemingly small, on any given person’s mind is not measurable and differs wildly between people– some people might not react strongly to being kidnapped and held at gunpoint, yet a casual slur could echo in their minds for years), and is ultimately not useful in that it tends to bring about the very problem that plagues this entire situation: the feeling that one person in the scenario has been “more hurt”, or that their hurt is more legitimate, because they were not the one who set out to do the hurting.

There’s a very strong feeling in our society*– so strong that it’s almost impossible to escape from– that the “victim” in any given scenario, the one who did not intend to take part in it, is the only one whose hurt is worth treating, caring about or even acknowledging. By contrast, we don’t attempt to heal the perpetrator of a wrongdoing, typically (and if we do, it is usually for the sake of making society safer from their wrongdoings, not for the perpetrator themselves, and puts definite emphasis on their being a criminal who needs reform rather than a victim). Instead, we often hurt them, restricting their freedoms or otherwise inconveniencing them in some way. This is so standardised in our society that we don’t even think twice about it, typically. Even if we don’t believe in punishment, it still feels natural to most people that there is only one victim of a wrongdoing and only one person whose injuries from it deserve treatment. The reasoning for this is probably twofold: firstly, the feeling that the perpetrator of a wrongdoing did what they did willingly, and so any injury that comes to them because of it is “their own fault”; and secondly, the lack of recognition, in general, that committing a wrongdoing could ever harm anyone.

But I think it does harm. In my opinion as a layperson when it comes to psychology, in the case of the non-sociopathic individual (that is, someone who is capable of feeling remorse for their wrongdoings), there will likely be any combination of emotional conflict, guilt, worry, fear, sadness, self-hatred, and self-doubt working their way through a person as a result of any wrongdoing they have committed. There will also possibly be, because of these pains, a tendency to escape these burdening feelings by redefining the wrongdoing as an acceptable thing in their mind, thus pushing a person further away from a mindset in which they are inclined to examine their morality. One could argue that “they brought this on themselves”, but when one commits a wrongdoing, do they really understand the full extent to which it can damage them? Furthermore, does not the idea that it is “their own fault” suggest a person who from the outset is naturally amoral, who has not been subject to negative influence from their environment but is simply inclined to be bad? And if even if the above two conditions were the case, does it then follow that it is wrong to help the person or to see them as injured when they are? If a cruel person were the victim of a wrongdoing in which they played no part, would we not still treat them as the victim?

I think because wrongdoing harms, that harm should be cared for and treated in all cases, not followed with more harm, leading to ever more twisted and corrupt individuals who feel outcast and unloved by society, falling ever further from its embrace. This goes against people’s natural tendencies very strongly; the victims of wrongdoing often feel that to be kind to the wrongdoer is an outrage, because their hurts are legitimate (i.e. in a form recognised by society; for example, we recognise that being the victim of violent crime often traumatises people) and they did nothing to deserve it (implying that it is morally good that those who do harm receive harm in return), and, perhaps, ultimately, because to treat the wrongdoer as someone in the same position as them, “on the same side” as them, when this person has clearly made themselves The Enemy to the victim, seems abhorrent.

But if we are to progress as a society we must abandon the idea of an enemy: of a human whose existence, whose health and wellbeing, are in opposition to ours and whose happiness is of insufficient concern that they can be freely mistreated. One’s opinions, one’s actions, might be in opposition to ours or even a threat to our very lives, but if we do not seek to recognise, consistently, that no human’s inherent being is in opposition to ours, that we are all on the same side in life, that we all deserve to live and be happy, the idea that the wellbeing of anyone who opposes you should be ignored will continue to propagate, and that is an entirely arbitrary and wrongheaded notion– as one should know the second they realise it immediately applies to each “side” in the eyes of the other. The inward flinching we feel at the thought of our “enemies” being cared for is a vengeful, divisive notion. The idea that it matters “who was hurt more” is a vengeful, divisive notion. There was hurt, and it should be repaired, that all humans may live better lives.

I heard once– sadly I can’t remember where– of a society where those who commit actions that the law defines as criminal are brought into a circle of their peers and told, by each, of their good deeds and the good things about their nature. Apparently, this society has a very low crime rate. When we continue to wound those who are already wounded enough that their sense of empathy does not hold them back from doing harm, do we really think we are going to save them, or are we condemning them immediately, categorising them as criminals and cutting them off from kindness, no longer conscious of their humanity or caring if they become better people? Have we already decided that they have broken the rules and thus are outcast?

Furthermore, is this morally good? If it is wrong to hurt, to take from another’s human freedoms, to punish, to imprison, is it ever right to do those things to anyone, at any time, regardless of what they have done to others? Is it right to do those things just because you’re the government? Is it right, ever?

Furthermore– and this is more a (rhetorical) question for me personally than anything else– is it spiritually right, by my beliefs? Is it right to divide people into “criminal” and “victim”? Is it right to perpetuate notions that humankind can be split into enemy groups, to perpetuate the idea that it is rightful for the victim to feel resentment and anger when the perpetrator of a crime is well-treated, to pit human against human and thus parts of the universe against itself– to say that opposing groups are not worthy of love, are not worthy of understanding, from each other, and that we should not attempt to facilitate this, that it is a lost cause? Is that not to deny that the very nature of the universe is a united whole?

*By which I mean Generic Western English-Speaking Society that I don’t really have a word for.

Narrative, and why “it’s okay to be gay” is sometimes a counterproductive plot.

The other day I found myself looking for children’s books dealing with non-traditional families on Amazon; at first I was simply curious as to what was out there, wondering how things had improved, if at all, since Heather Has Two Mommies, but the more I read the more I really wanted more of these books to get into the hands of children, and saved several titles for possible later purchase and surreptitious Bookcrossing. Among them, if you’re curious, were The Different Dragon (which sounds like an absolutely wonderful story in general; who wouldn’t have wanted, as a child, a story that told them “people think dragons are supposed to be mean and aggressive, but sometimes they just want to be nice, and that’s a good thing”? It seems like it sends a lovely message about stereotypes, individuality, cruelty as “acceptable” versus gentleheartedness as “wimpy” and maladaptive, and, of course, dragons.) and Uncle Bobby’s Wedding.

I picked these two for a specific reason, one that struck me as an important criterion while searching through the available books: they present the non-standard families as incidental, rather than the focus being on the gay or lesbian family and how most people think they’re “strange” but it’s eventually revealed that it’s okay to be different. While I think this message may be valid and useful in some contexts– I think it’s positive, as in the case of The Different Dragon, to tell children “some people might expect you to be tough and strong, but it’s really actually fine if you’re not and you shouldn’t feel social pressure to be so”– I think that GLBTBBQ literature for children runs the risk of overdoing it to the point where a child might feel, “wait, you keep saying it’s okay but it also definitely seems like it’s strange and a lot of people don’t like it; this is kind of discomforting”. I’m trying to put my finger on the difference between the two, and I think it’s that if a child is capable of taking away the message that X thing is okay without a demonstration that a lot of people don’t think it is, then there shouldn’t be such a demonstration. If you just portray a character who’s gentle and kind and liked by others for being so in a young children’s book, children might not take away the message that it’s okay to be gentle and kind– it’s too subtle for them– and they probably won’t feel too comforted when those who think they’re weak for it bully them. But if a book shows that a character has two mommies, that’s all it needs to do; you don’t need to point out to the child that having two mommies is non-standard. If other kids in the playground say “having two mommies is weird”, the child will think back to the book, where it seemed normal enough. I suppose it’s the difference between a character trait, which a child is less likely to pick up on, and a physical difference that is very obvious; two mommies are obviously two mommies and not a mommy and daddy, but a young child might not be able to grasp the concept of “this character is gentle, and therefore it’s okay to be” without some context.

Anyway, my ultimate feeling on this is that framing a behaviour or lifestyle you want a child to think is okay as “abnormal but still okay” should be avoided where possible. And I tend to dislike seeing it in adult literature, too, partly because the “everyone hates us because we’re female/gay/etc.” story has been done so many times before, and partly because in these stories, the marginalised group is still marginalised, at least at the beginning. And I don’t know about you, but I really prefer to read stories where the groups I’m part of are accepted and normative than ones that re-represent the struggle we’ve already gone through to be recognised; if I’m part of a group that’s misunderstood, I already know that we’re misunderstood, have already heard the story and been upset by it, and would prefer to explore different options and possibilities rather than retreading what I already know is true (usually followed by Marginalised Group A becoming non-marginalised, but only at the expense of the Oppressor group and a lot of “we told you so!” crowing, or worse). This sort of fantasy is probably cathartic for some people, but I really don’t enjoy the sort of vicarious vengeful smugness we’re supposed to take from it, and I think it engenders a backlash response that I don’t think is any more useful than the original prejudice. I’d rather explore completely different solutions to the problem, or imagine worlds where the problem doesn’t exist and see what we can learn from those to apply to our own situation.

(I also want to say that I feel it’s more female-positive to write about a society where gender is treated as incidental than to write about one where the undervalued female class must wage war, but I admit that I don’t really have the right to define what counts as “female-positive”. I would like your thoughts on the matter, though.)

God created Adam and Eve, not Jonathan and Da– oh, wait….

(…I just typed that as “Adamn and Eve”; Freudian slip much? I think it’s pretty clear where the majority of Christian denominations think I’d be going. )

This is not the essay the title might be leading you to expect: I’m not about to argue the case for Jonathan and David (or Ruth and Naomi, for that matter) having been a Biblical representation of loving homosexual relationships. Many have done that before me, many have done it better, and in truth I’m not even sure where I stand on the idea that Jonathan and David were non-platonic, nor is it really of huge concern to me. (I have read some of the evidence, and I do admit that the majority of the sane evidence seems to point to them having been a romantic and sexual couple, but as with trying to determine the true meaning of anything written in a culture vastly different from our own, it’s not conclusive.) What is clear even if one takes the story in the most conservative of lights, however– even allowing for all the ridiculousness involving a passage translated in most Bibles as “they kissed each other” being papered over with the obviously fake “they sadly shook hands”*, and talk about distorting the supposedly infallible word of God, by the way– is that they were two men whose bond of love for each other surpassed their love for anyone else in their lives. 1 Sam. 18:1 tells us that “the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.” In 1 Sam. 20:4, “Jonathan made a covenant with the house of David, saying, ‘May the LORD seek out the enemies of David.’ Jonathan made David swear again by his love for him; for he loved him as he loved his own life.” And so on, and so forth. You can look it up yourself.

So with that in mind, I have a modest proposal (no, not that kind, though I can’t deny there’s a hint of satire lurking here) to make to those who would have the laws of the United States be rooted in sound Biblical teaching. Putting aside the fact for the moment that I find it abhorrent that any nation’s laws should be based on religious doctrine** rather than common sense questions of whether we can know an action to be harmful, I’d like to see a law supporting– or perhaps more ideally, the lack of a law excluding– those individuals who, feeling the bonds of intense friendship and devotion towards one another, wish to set up a household and/or be considered significant to one another for the purposes of such things as, say, hospital visitation rights, and other social and legal acknowledgements that a particular person is “close enough” to another person for that bond to be accorded serious weight. I would like to see close, serious friendships treated as a vital part of a person’s life and “chosen family”; I would like it to be acknowledged that those who share in such friendships can face serious emotional anguish if their mutual contributions to each other’s lives are not taken into account, for example in decisions of who counts as significant enough to that person to be allowed to be close to them at crucial times of their lives. I would like it if it were acknowledged that, for some people, a close friendship might be the primary bond in their lives, or at least a highly central one, and should be treated as seriously as a bond of marriage or blood. We could call it, say, the “Jonathan and David law”.***

Now here’s an interesting question: how many Christians who believe the Bible is the inerrant and unchanging word of God, and who are currently fiercely promoting measures to make their interpretations of certain parts of the Bible (such as the moral repugnance of abortion) part of a legal code, would embrace a proposal for such a law? I’m willing to bet that the majority of right-wing, fundamentalist campaigners would feel uncomfortable with this law. Some might accept that it’s Biblical, but would not latch onto it passionately; I am highly confident that very few if any of the people asked, in this hypothetical scenario, would immediately put their weight behind such a law in the same way as they do laws regarding abortion (which have a very shaky, if perhaps non-existant, Biblical basis). If they’re truly passionate about what the Bible says, though, they should. If they really want to make the word of God law in their country, they should be feeling as intensely about the rights of today’s Jonathans and Davids, about the Bible’s touching story of a bond between two men so strong that it surpasses “the love of women”, as they do about people’s rights to uphold any other principle that the Bible supposedly favours. (Let’s quietly skim over “slavery” for now.) But there are very few if any people out there who aren’t also engaged in GLBT rights advocacy who are using this story to make any kind of case. Why not? It’s right there in black and white. If the Bible is your holy book, your inerrant statement from your deity, you should be reading it cover to cover and vehemently defending every idea in it.

Jonathan and David’s story is one of the most controversial parts of the Bible today; so controversial it’s been censored by some translators. Few people want to devote themselves to embracing what it tells us, and few except the liberal ever even talk about it. Yet if the Bible is the rich, beautiful message from divinity that is claimed, isn’t it wrong to ignore, overlook or feel ashamed of any part of it? Isn’t it wrong to censor it? Isn’t it wrong to not look at the guidelines it’s supposed to be laying out for our lives and put all weight possible behind making sure that people have the right to live by those guidelines?

Again, please note that I’m far from a supporter of religion-based legislation; this is all hypothetical. But it’s something to think about, isn’t it?

*Maybe in the Harmonian translation….

**At least in worlds where said religious suppositions merely remain suppositions and not known truths. Harmonia is a theocracy for reasons that go far beyond conjecture.

***Edit: Actually, the more research I do the more it seems that Ruth and Naomi’s story is actually an even better inspiration for this hypothetical law. “Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me.” Can any Bible believer read this passage and doubt that friends should have the right to be seen as priorities in each others’ lives?

Why, if you think you don’t understand the spiritual, it might just be that: thinking you don’t understand.

I’ve been reading this article, on an interview with Philip Pullman. What strikes me about it is that Pullman says he has “the greatest difficulty in understanding what is meant by the words ’spiritual’ or ’spirituality’”; yet his stories are absolutely full of it. They are soaked through with it. The His Dark Materials trilogy might be, from what I’ve recently re-read of the first book and remember of the other two (I’m preparing for the upcoming movie), one of the most deeply spiritual series I’ve read; and when I say “deeply” I mean “meaningfully, significantly”, and in that sense it is rich because the spirituality it contains is thoughtful, considered, not arbitrarily concocted, in alignment with the principles of our universe.

A lot of Pullman’s ideas have parallels in quantum mechanics, a singularly scientific subject. Yet what the books deal with is spirituality as we know it, because quantum ideas are used– as quantum theorists are using them today– to illustrate a conscious universe, a feeling universe, a universe where love is powerful and a compass can tell truth and you can talk to your soul. The question of whether the universe is conscious or not may one day– one day soon!– be a scientific question, or it may be one that science can never answer; but the idea of the universe as living, breathing, feeling will always be a spiritual one, even if it is proven. It will always touch that part of us that seeks the transcendent.

“Spiritual” does not just mean “concerned with things we can’t prove yet”. It also means “concerned with things we can’t reach or touch physically”. The former definition exists in part because we cannot prove the existence of things we can’t reach or touch physically. The latter category of things does not vanish if the former one does, and discovering the transcendent exists, or things about how it works, does not mean reducing it to a set of lifeless mechanical processes; indeed, if what we discover is the fact itself that the very universe is a living thing, how can it? If the spiritual exists, if the transcendent exists, then by its definition it is irreducible to a mechanical process without meaning; its very existence provides meaning and consciousness to the universe. An intricately mechanical process with meaning, certainly; but not without.

In short, if scientific discoveries back up the spiritual, those things will not cease to be spiritual, in that they will not eliminate the power of the spiritual to fulfil spiritual needs; unless, that is, you define “spiritual need” as “need to believe in something whose existence we cannot verify”, and I do not think that most religious people would define spirituality as something that loses its value once you actually know it’s true. In fact, I’m sure the vast majority of the religious community would be overjoyed to see a sign of deific existence, even if many of them would attempt to interpret it in terms of their holy books instead of evaluating it on its own terms. (A tip in advance, people, if the Second Coming ever happens: realise the existence of multiple conflicting holy books and start listening to the big glowy thing in front of you that you know is going to be right. I’ve heard far too many jokes about sects who’d have the reincarnation of their messiah lynched if he/she/it ever walked the surface of this earth again, and sadly the idea rings all too true to my ears. I highly doubt, that said, that any revelation about the nature of the universe is going to come in the form of a large sparkly humanoid, but that is my hypothetical perspective on the situation none the less.)

But back to Pullman. As I’ve said, his books are full of spiritual concepts; both ones based on current quantum theories, and some more esoteric ones, like daemons. He argues that he doesn’t understand spirituality, but what I think he really doesn’t understand is religion. His books are anti-religious, but they are nothing if not spiritual. He describes Lyra’s reading of the alethiometer in the same terms that I would describe searching for spiritual knowledge:

[S]he found that she could sink more and more readily into the calm state in which the symbol-meanings clarified themselves, and those great mountain-ranges touched by sunlight emerged into vision.

She struggled to explain to Farder Coram what it felt like.

“It’s almost like talking to someone, only you can’t quite hear them, and you feel kind of stupid because they’re cleverer than you, only they don’t get cross or anything… And they know such a lot, Farder Coram! As if they knew everything, almost! Mrs Coulter was clever, she knew ever such a lot, but this is a different kind of knowing… It’s like understanding, I suppose…”

“A different kind of knowing”, a kind that is more assured, more fundamental, than knowledge deduced from experiential evidence; “as if they knew everything”, a wellspring of seemingly limitless knowledge and patience; “great mountain-ranges touched by sunlight”, “sink[ing...] into a calm state” in which meaning clarifies…. these are similar to words I would use and have used to describe the very things I do and feel in the name of spirituality. This description did not arise in a vacuum. Philip Pullman does not write to me like someone who doesn’t know the first thing about spirituality.

He just doesn’t know that he knows. Because he thinks spirituality is equatable with religion. Because he thinks it must be something other than the things he makes up, that of course if there were something really, truly spiritual out there it wouldn’t be anything like the ideas that flow from his pen, despite the fact that those ideas resonate with him. Because he thinks that it is a mystery wholly separated from the workings of the world, when any true spirituality could not but be bound up with the inherent nature, qualities and forces of the world. Because he thinks that spirituality means going to church and believing in and fearing a God who will strike you down if you misbehave, and because he feels empathy and resonance with none of this. If that is what he thinks spirituality is, then he will never find it, or rather he will never think he has found it. But a man who provides us with quotes like:

But that doesn’t mean we should give up and surrender. . . . I think we should act as if. I think we should read books, and tell children stories, and take them to the theatre, and learn poems, and play music, as if it would make a difference. . . . We should act as if the universe were listening to us and responding. We should act as if life were going to win.

is far less blind to spirituality than the average individual. He doesn’t believe in it; he doesn’t think it’s going to win. But he embraces it.

If you think you can’t understand “the spiritual”, try not thinking of the spiritual as mysticism, as some altogether alien force that you’ll surely know when you see it. Instead realise that if we live in an inherently spiritual world, then the very fabric of who and what we are, and what we interact with every day, is shot through with the spiritual, derives from the spiritual, and we would hardly recognise the spiritual apart from what we know. The spiritual is love and caring and laughter and dreams and intuitions and consciousness and conscience and beauty and fascination. The spiritual is the hope in our hearts for fantasy and magic and wonder and our occasional brushes against it, something we can delve deeper into with meditation and focus and loving-kindness and sometimes even psychoactive substances directed in the right way. The spiritual is the fact that you exist at all, the wonder of life and the universe and everything in it. The spiritual is not strange. The spiritual is the most normal thing there is.

We need to stop looking at the spiritual as “the supernatural”, at “the natural” as if it were distinct from the spiritual; as if anything that had been “proven to be natural” was automatically outside the realm of the spiritual, as if because we can prove that our emotions are chemical and evolutionary things they suddenly cease to be spiritual things. Existence has many dimensions and many facets. A lot of things have more than one meaning, a place in more than one structure. Atoms, chemicals and evolution explain one aspect of things. The spiritual covers the same ground from another angle. It’s like looking at a painting and saying “this is a painting of cows” or “this is an Impressionist painting” or “this painting has a lot of black and white in it” or “this painting captures a sense of bucolic tranquility”. None of these things excludes the others.

Q: Where do atheists get their morals? A: The same place everyone else does.

A couple of musings floating around in my head, today… (I’ve been reading this blog, and I had to stop to think: can they literally be said to be in my head? My thoughts on how much each of soul and body is involved in terms of where consciousness resides are a little shaky; an entry for another day, perhaps.)

In any case, first off, I saw this quote/question mentioned on a friend of a friend’s blog (actually, it was mentioned by the friend of a friend as having first appeared on the blog of a friend of one of their friends, meaning it originated on a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend’s blog, assuming no incidental closer relationship between any of the friends involved that would shortcut this chain; but that’s getting quite aside the point, now):

For the atheists/agnostics: where do you turn for moral guidance?

The person in question, being an atheist, responded as one might expect, if you’ve seen such questions put to atheists before: my morality comes from my own personal conscience, from my evaluation of the world and perception of what seems to be right and wrong based on that, from my instinct and gut feeling on such matters. But for the first time here I noticed the phrasing of the question, and realised it assumed something that, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised it assumed, but was: that those who believe in a deity derive their morality from (suppositions about) that deity.

I am a deeply spiritual person, as I’m sure anyone reading this at time of posting knows. “Deeply” is perhaps an understatement; my spirituality is intricately threaded into every aspect of my life. I’ve been described by others as spending a good portion of my waking life in a meditative state. I am perhaps one of the most spiritually-minded people I know. But I would not say that I derive my morality from my spirituality. In fact, I consider the two to be quite necessarily separate. In part this is due to the way in which I perceive the spiritual– as something fundamentally good, tending towards goodness for all, yet often operating on a timescale and order of magnitude from which it is difficult to derive laws and tenets that are applicable to the details of human interaction. Spirituality, for me, is about the workings of existence, and I derive my morality from it about as much as I derive it from science. However, given what I know about how most religious people treat spirituality– not as something to be searched for within and through the self, but as something read in a book and taken as, well, gospel, hence the phrase– I find this thought a particularly unpleasant one; particularly when it is combined, as it so often is, with the idea that a religious morality is superior to a morality derived from within.

I do not subscribe to the teaching of many religions that the morality within one’s own heart is inherently sinful and flawed, and thus we must look to a deific source for our morals. I do not believe that any of the holy books that claim to provide a moral framework laid down by God are much more than the writings of humans. I believe that the morality we find inside ourselves– and, indeed, the spirituality we find inside ourselves, by searching through our own minds and bodies, as opposed to through belief in writings and doctrines as absolute– is the only morality we have and the only one we need. I do not think a legitimate morality can come without self-examination, without cross-referencing with the self– the internal conscience, the pulls and cords of the heart. I do not think it can be lifted, wholesale, from a book. I think it is dangerous to try, and doubly dangerous to assume that such a “God-derived” morality is superior to an internal one.

I found myself idly wondering this morning: what is it, aside from personal morality, that keeps people from committing crimes? Specifically, is it social or legal consequences that offer the greatest deterrent to crime?

My vague theory is that, in practice, it is actually a fear of shame and social ostracism that keeps people from committing many (particularly smaller) crimes, as opposed to the threat of legal repercussion. For example, we would be extremely embarrassed if we were caught stealing from a store; yet we are much more likely to “steal” music from the safety of our own computers, where no one can see us (except possibly the RIAA) and in a context that society generally considers acceptable (you are much more likely to be thought poorly of for stealing a loaf of bread than for downloading a song). Some people, admittedly, might have moral objections to stealing from stores where physical items are taken, as opposed to theft of software where no physical item is actually lost because only data is being taken, but my feeling is that most people don’t think it through that much. It could also be the case that people realise that online music theft is much less likely to result in prosecution than actual theft. But still, I can’t help wondering if one of the main reasons crime does not run rampant is that people are ashamed to be criminals, rather than that they fear legal consequences; if it is interpersonal, rather than political, glue that holds the structure of society together.

There is no dark magic.

Recently, my dear friend Catherine and I have been trying to promote our photographic work a little on Flickr; we are quite proud of the images we’ve created and the messages behind them, and have been hoping to get them seen and appreciated by more people.

So we have been submitting our pictures to subject-appropriate groups, and in the process of searching came across this one.

We spent time debating whether our photographs were actually suited for this group. We had specifically created these images in order to showcase magic as a thing of light and beauty, to tap into the fascination many of us had with it as children as a thing that could fulfil all of our deep-held yearnings, and reawaken that in the adult, and the description of the group, “Women of the Darker Arts”, specifically seemed to contradict that. Ultimately we decided that it would be a positive thing to have them there in order to present an image of magic that contrasts with the “gothic and shadowy” associations it seems to have in the mainstream nowadays; but we would not consider any of the images we have created of magic to be representative of anything we would call “the Darker Arts”.

I do not think I would know, precisely, what those “Darker Arts” were. As someone who works with magic, I consider that I work only with light. Do not mistake that statement for an attempt to draw any kind of dichotomy regarding kinds of magic; I am not arguing, as some do, that “while others may use ‘black magic’, my art is of the light”. I am arguing that there is no such thing, to my mind, to my experience, as “black magic”. It is all light.

Magic is a skill that is inherently lifeful. To practice magic one interacts with and directly guides the forces of existence, and being that the ultimate progenitor of the forces of existence, the One Force behind them all, is that which can variously be thought of as Goodness, Love, and Life, magic is drawing from an inherently good emanation. There are no “dark forces”, no evil deities. Even if magic is put to a cruel end, the wellspring from which it bubbles forth is one of goodness.

In these times, it seems people like to paint magic as a shadowy art; something left of centre, hidden and obscure for good reasons, dark and disturbing– the stuff of tales told late in the evening to terrify children, edgy, exciting. Of course, this stems somewhat from the days when “witches” were considered purely evil, and burnt at the stake or ducked. Magic has never entirely lost its sinister associations, and those who find glamour and fascination in that which has overtones of cruelty, for whatever reason, cleave to that part of it. But there is no darkness, no evil in magic; magic is light itself, and this power, a gift given to us by existence, not wrenched from it, not misappropriated– for who could steal from existence what it does not wish taken?– is a beauty, a positive. And those who seek or claim to wield it for the purposes of looking impressive and intimidating, as a superficial boost to their ego or reputation, will not find much of anything magical in this world.

They do not have the dedication to look; they are searching for a quick fix, extravagance brought into being by a few easy chants or the burning of a candle. To them, the ritual is all; the structure behind it is not thought of, and so not called upon, even if they say a few token words to their chosen deity-image or bring them to mind. Magic is as much about ritual as weddings are about dresses and rings; they are useful in as much as they provide a mood, a context, aid in bringing on a certain mindset and making things feel appropriate and properly respected, and in that sense they are good, but no one would argue that going to a church and enacting a “wedding ritual” is the only thing involved in marriage, the reason for it, the structure behind it, and similarly the rituals of magic are not the enactment of the magic itself. Just as a marriage ceremony is performed to confirm and solemnify something that already exists, a magical ritual is a solemnity entered into to make magic feel more appropriate and provide a mindset that aids in the flowing of it. One can enact magic perfectly well without a ritual, just as one can marry at a registry office; it is merely that some people find value, beauty and an appropiate state of mind in the ritual, and so for them it is useful. It is not, however, magic.

Moreover, they do not possess the state of mind required to find magic; the love for it, the concern, the wonder. To them, magic is only a tool, a means to an end; and as birds and butterflies generally only alight on the hands and shoulders of the gentle-souled, so magic will flow to where it is loved.

Treating magic as a tool will not allow you to know the full extent of magic. Treating magic as a force with sinister, horrid origins will not allow you to know the full extent of magic. Seeking magic for power, for superficial glamour, as a quick means to a formidable reputation, will not allow you to know the full extent of magic. Only love for magic and an honest heart’s desire to understand magic will allow you to know the full extent of magic.

That said, I do not in any way wish to paint magic as an exclusive art, the stuff of cults and cabals. To those who have not experienced it and do not know how to begin (and admittedly, teaching how to begin, to those who do not have it in them already, is a little like trying to teach someone to wiggle their ears. It can be done, surely, but it takes time and dedication and triggering of connections between parts of the mind that have never been used before, and certainly much more than words over the Internet), it seems mysterious; but what needs to be internalised about magic is that it does not arise from any shadowy corner of existence, any unnatural wellspring, any dark and unusual place. The lifeblood of magic is in the world all around us. It is the world all around us. What you might call the force behind magic, for magic is the art of working with that force and not properly the force itself, is nothing less than the fabric, the energy, the life of which existence is made. It is not some strange, unearthly thing. It is what we interact with, in some way, every moment we exist, whether breathing or thinking or talking or moving– the stuff of life. It is merely a different way of looking at it, manipulating it. There is no dark power waiting to be discovered. It is the exact same power that causes you to be able to breathe in and out, causes existence to hold together. It is normal, natural and good.

Even people who only imagine magic have recorded it as such in their writings and art. You cannot depict magic without showing light, sparkles, an aura, a glow. If magic is truly darkness, why is it not impressed in the collective consciousness as an absence of light, as shadows, as an entity that absorbs and negates light in the area where it exists– instead of, even in the darkest and most gothic imagery, as glittering and shining, twisting ropes and threads of multicoloured light? It is surely not because that would be harder to draw, because shadows are just as easy to draw as light is. From a fantastical perspective, a dark cloud that seems to draw in light from the area around it is more interesting than light; we see light reflecting off and shining on things all the time, and if you attend any nightclub or modern drinking venue you will see light and smoke in various hues all around you. Yet almost universally, even the eyes of supposedly demonic creatures are not black pits or empty sockets, but bright, glowing orbs. The awareness of magic as light is within us; yet we rarely reflect closely on what this might mean.

I know that to those entirely unfamiliar with a worldview that includes magic, these sound strange things to simply state as truths, to say as definitively as if I am telling my experiences of a recent trip, or my fondness for strawberry soda. But these feelings do come from something much stronger and more solid to me than idle imaginings, fancy about how I would like magic to be. They come from the fact that I constantly experience the world through the filter of this awareness. There is not a day goes by when I do not feel I have seen something new and wondrous, however small, that has been revealed to me through means other than observing the physical. When I speak of the light of the world, I do feel that I speak from experience that gives me cause to feel strongly that this way of seeing the world has truth to it. I know in some respects I must sound like every self-declared New Age guru and proselytiser imaginable; I can only say that I believe there is a reason there are so many of us.

A thought that blossomed into an essay.

I was thinking today about how one of the problems, perhaps, with society is that people have difficult recognising the significance of the non-physical. I am not, here, referring strictly to the spiritual; I think that if one has the idea in mind that there is a spiritual, non-physical component to life, one might be less likely to act in ways which disparage other non-physical parts of existence, which will be the topic of this essay and which I’ll get to in a moment. However, that certainly always isn’t the case, and “spiritual” people can be as hypocritical, and atheists as sensitive and aware, as anyone. (I put “spiritual” in quotes here because I think a part of true spirituality does involve awareness and pushing through ignorance. Hypocrisy, willing or unwilling blindness, and reluctance to give things consideration are at odds with spirituality.)

There are many components of our human experience that are non-physical, ones recognised as existing by the vast majority of humans, such as the emotions and the conscience. (There is also intuition, though that walks a line between being accepted and being written off as whimsy.) While we can argue that emotions have a chemical basis and thus are technically “physical” (though it is more difficult to pinpoint from whence the conscience comes), this is not my point. Rather, my point is that we do not see their physical effects or origins.

When a physical thing changes state, we can perceive it through our senses, which we believe to be objective and to relate directly to what is before us. Though most people know that the senses can be fooled, we have enough experience with physical objects to have formulated a set of rules for how they behave relative to how they appear. We can make sense of them, and we can say with relative confidence that if we see a green frog in front of us, then the being that we refer to as “a green frog” is present, and that we can interact with it as we would expect to interact with a frog (green or otherwise, most likely). As such, the existence of a frog is something hard to write off, muddle the purpose of, pretend “isn’t really a frog”, or dismiss if the frog is relevant to us. (For example, if we were looking for a frog, and we saw this frog, we could not so easily say to ourselves any more, “we’ve lost our frog”. The frog is right there, and most sane people would recognise that and act accordingly.)

A frog isn’t an especially good example, though. Not many people care whether or not a frog is present at any given time. Let’s take a more drastic example: a knife. If we are swinging a knife around carelessly, and we hit someone with the knife, we’ll feel very bad. Even if it’s only a small cut, we’ve done damage. We’ll probably panic and rush to attend to it even if the damage is really less than it seems, all the while profusely apologising. We find it extremely hard to pierce or cut someone intentionally, even only a little. To stab someone in the arm or slash them across the chest, a wound that they will likely recover from, is something that most people could never bring themselves to do. Our visceral horror at the idea is too strong, and part of the reason for this is that the harm is visible. We know what the outpouring of blood means for humans. We are instinctively revolted by wounds. There can be no question in our minds that we have caused pain to another being.

However, the same person who would never dream of stabbing another human, who would consider that that would make them a psychopath, might easily be able to yell and scream at them and fling painful insults. Most people don’t attack their friends with knives, but almost all of us at some point have wielded a sharp word. You can cut someone’s skin with a knife and in a week or so there’ll be no sign that you’ve touched them; in a year they probably won’t even remember that you were being a little careless in the kitchen while showing off your mid-air vegetable dicing technique, and scratched their arm a little. But fling one insult and it may stick with that person for life, if they don’t take steps to recover. You can stab someone and they’ll be better in a few months, but if you wound someone’s emotional self, that damage can alter the way they think. It can be repaired, but it’s so much harder. (This statement is not, of course, meant as a condoning of physical violence. It is rather a condemning of emotional violence.)

We wield words so much more carelessly than we wield knives, but we consider it much worse to do the latter– to the point that we consider drawing blood to be “violence”, when we rate movies and television shows as being suitable for certain age groups, but we very rarely consider a scene of one person verbally abusing another to be so. We don’t viscerally react to others’ emotional pain in the same way. And I think part of the reason we don’t react is that we can’t see it– see tears, yes, outward manifestations of it, but we cannot see the damage itself in the same way that we can see mangled flesh and outpourings of blood. We don’t see the state change, cannot observe a clear transformation in another being from happy mind to scared, confused, injured mind. We see a physical wound and we shudder, because we think that someone’s very person has been compromised, their internal structure harmed. But an emotional wound is a much deeper blow, much closer to the core of the person than any physical harm could be. Our emotions are seen as ephemeral, fickle, half-there things that can easily be warped and changed as we please; an emotional wound is seen as a lighter wound, something that can be shrugged off much more easily. Yet they are far and away the most fragile parts of us. (The only real exception to this assumption seems to be sexual assault, which I think is treated– in society; in all of this essay I am referring to what I think are the perceptions of the average person, not the legal system– as much worse than regular assault specifically because of the emotional factor. However, I think the damage that arises from sexual assault is perceived to be significant only for falling into a specific narrow category; somehow, we have managed to internalise that it leaves lasting scars and horrible memories for someone to be maltreated sexually, but have not allowed that conviction to spread to other forms of emotional abuse, which is what sexual abuse, physical harm notwithstanding, essentially is. Someone who verbally assaults a person, even if the verbal abuse is humiliating and hurtful, is not seen as nearly so vile, or as having done nearly as great a wrong, as someone who sexually assaults, whether physical harm was done or not.)

If we thought that every time we said a cruel word, we were doing much worse than sticking a knife in someone, would we be more careful with our words? If we realised that the things we say to each other now might last a person’s lifetime, would we do more to recompense for the times when we are thoughtless? We all act on instinct sometimes, say careless things in the heat of the moment, and we should no more wallow in guilt over than than over having accidentally swung a knife and nicked a finger; we can make efforts to be less careless, but our own emotions are also a difficult thing to control, and we should not be too hard on ourselves if we slip. Sometimes we may say things that hurt without it being intended for them to, and that too is not to be faulted. But we can avoid, at least, stabbing people deliberately, and if we are of the mindset that we should not physically lash out because we do not want to wound, then we should not emotionally lash out, either.

There is truth in your fiction and fiction in your truth.

A somewhat aimless piece of writing, but they were thoughts that were on my mind.

It seems to me that the major problem with a lot of people’s spirituality is that they get it from books.

Now if you are someone who finds deep meaning in fiction, and I know a lot of you here are, know that I’m not for a moment slandering that fact. I myself do the same. I certainly think fiction can be a valuable, for some people even indispendable tool for discovering the transcendent. The problem I perceive is not in finding meaning in books, but in finding no meaning in books and abiding by them anyway.

People use their holy books as if they were textbooks; “turn to page 367, chapter 5, subheading 1.2: Dealing With Prodigal Sons”. Literally, we quote chapter and verse and read up on specific passages as if we are trying to find how to take the derivative of a polynomial, not connect with the infinite (insert your own joke about infinity here, those more mathematically-minded than I). Even from the perspective of these books themselves (the Bible notes that it contains a lot of parables), much of them is fiction, an elaborate story woven around a few core truths to serve various purposes: to present messages in allegorical form to people not used to contemplating the spiritual or the moral, to personify the nebulous that calls to people and make it seem more “authentic”, and, later, to justify the whims of various kings, sects and leaderships by claiming divine accord.

If the divine ever wanted its words recorded in books– and I do not particularly believe there is any god who has ever said to a man, “Go, and describe these visions and perceptions I have given you in your human language, which is ill fit to contain them, and over the centuries allow them to be copied and re-transcribed and littered with errors, not even accounting for those your own limited perception will have introduced, and then translated into vastly different languages eliminating a good deal of the nuances and leaving people to argue about which one is right”– then it was so that people might look upon them, be inspired, and seek the message behind them for themselves; through the intuition of their own hearts and minds. This is the only way the transcendent will ever be reached, not through reading dry words and obeying without feeling but through seeking that which by its nature cannot be put in words; not through the mind but through the heart. For what is like the spiritual, that thing beyond the grasp of scientific measure, but the emotions?– what is impossible to quantify yet known to be real and true, but the emotions? Surely if we are to find this thing at all we must start with something alike to it in nature.

The human nature yearns for the infinite, and has since the dawn of human history. And it is no mere delusion; many have indeed found it, or at the very least some glimpse of it. From our earliest days we have felt and known, found ourselves guided right when we went by our intuitions, experienced unseen hands in our lives that guided us in the most statistically improbable ways; yet because this is a thing we cannot pin down with scientific doctrine alone, the more rational-thinking disregard this part of our experience as sentient beings entirely, while the more spiritual weave analogies around it to illustrate it that, over generations, become entangled with the core message in people’s minds such that those blinded by it swallow brutality and foolishness whole in the name of higher seeking, and those astute enough to see that the stories themselves are just that write the whole thing off.

To say that the human being is not a wholly rational being should not be seen as a slur, an admission of weakness. That part of us which is not rational is not “irrational” but transcendent– grasping at something beyond the explanations of words, as yet beyond the structure of our understanding, yet no less a part of a structured existence because of it. There is that which we can measure with rulers and weighing-scales and set-squares and compasses, and there is that which speaks to us in our hearts and souls and guts; and if we are to dismiss this latter part of ourselves as biological impulse, to dismiss love as a chemical imbalance and the spiritual as our own solution to a wishful ache, then we must also dismiss the seat of our morality, our conscience, and say it has no meaning; for it is no less embedded in the intuitive as opposed to the measurable. And if we are to do that, then we may as well not be human, nor animal, for if animals do not have conscience then at the least they are guided by ingrained instinct to act sanely, and our instinct as a species is a thing weakened and made meaningless by civilisation.

The universal experience of oneness.

Isn’t it interesting that whenever people report experiences of meditation, trance, altered consciousness and the like– whether through deliberate self-inducement, drug use, or something else– there is almost always some reference to feelings of “everything being alive” and “becoming one with the universe”? Encounters with fond and friendly creatures who wish to help people reach a “higher state of being” or just show affection are also common. It interests me that the creatures in this encounter were indentified perfectly by the wise woman whom the author visited thereafter, that through drugs and meditation respectively both were put in touch with a very similar phenomenon.

I am, for future reference, not one to approve of chemicals as a way of seeking the spiritual, though I respect people’s right to use them. The times I have tried alcohol it has always made me feel more out of touch with existence than in touch with it, and as such I don’t drink. To be disconnected from feeling my place in existence is frightening, and since I am perfectly capable of having experiences of greater connectedness without drugs I do not see fit to put myself through experiences I feel might mangle this communication as much as, or even more than, they enhance it. That is just personal preference, but it feels like the way I am meant to approach things, and so I do. However, that does not keep me from finding what happens to people during these experiences interesting, from a spiritual perspective.

(To note, I did not set out to write this essay as an argument for or against drug use; you may certainly feel free to discuss it, but it was not my intention in writing it, so I hope it doesn’t overshadow the main point– that is, that people approaching the transcendent from wildly different pathways often seem to find the same core experiences. My disclaimer was purely that, a disclaimer that I do not endorse these things, though neither do I censure them.)

Till I see it common for you to walk hand in hand.

As a result of feeling rather out of sorts, the other night I had a dream which brought to mind an interesting topic to discuss. About a year ago, I was sick in a rather distressing way; a group of us were out camping far from immediate access to medical help, and it wasn’t something that a doctor would have been brought out for in any case but just something that had to pass, but I was experiencing unsettling hallucinations and distortions of perception, and I really could not bear to be alone– I felt extremely distanced from everything and very small, there were periods where visually nothing was making sense, and night was closing in. My closest friend at the time spent that night wrapped in blankets with me, keeping me feeling warm and, perhaps more importantly to me at the time, secure. When I was incoherent and distressed, he held me and brushed the hair out of my eyes and tried to keep me from getting too hot or too cold, and kept me pressed close like a child when I expressed how much it was bothering me that I felt detached from everything around me, to keep that sensation from becoming unbearable. The thing I remember most clearly from that time is how much of a help that was, how much worse of a state I surely would have been in without it, no matter how much I tried to reassure myself that it was only the sickness making me feel so.

We made ourselves very emotionally vulnerable to each other during that incident: two people clinging to each other in the middle of a freezing field, one of them babbling like a five-year-old and the other reassuring them as if they were. Our friendship had always been a close one, but it was only after that, when things we’d revealed could not be un-revealed, that we realised how deep of a bond we had; in particular, how much he cared for me and how happy I was to have that.

Stop me if this sounds like bad slash fiction. Because it isn’t. And, furthermore, I have said absolutely nothing that might have logically implied that a relationship of that nature developed between us. Indeed, the ending to this story is that I discovered he had considered me as close as family for quite a while, and since my blood family have all been (not through any especial fault of their own) estranged from me for most of my life, I appreciated that bond, and since I have always shared a lot with him it didn’t feel awkward to acknowledge this closeness. Neither of us misunderstood the other as wanting something other than we did, which was genuinely nice.

I haven’t been sick in quite a while, and something about being so must have reminded me of the incident, because I did indeed dream about it the other night, and it brought up something I wanted to discuss in general; namely how a deep expressed affection for someone, particularly one that includes a comfort with or even desire for physical closeness such as hugs, is almost always correlated with the existence of sexual feelings– and I think we would be much happier as a species if these two concepts were treated separately.

Emotional closeness and caring does not necessarily equate to sensuality, and I think a lot of people reject the strength of closeness they feel for others because they think that expressing it implies a physical kind of closeness that they don’t feel interested in having. And that’s a shame, because if they didn’t feel it had to imply that, if those who did not necessarily feel sexually for each other but nonetheless loved were able to express the depth of their feelings without fear of being misunderstood, I feel that people would be… well, a lot closer. Even outside of distressing situations, children like hugs and closeness, and adults are no different; they perhaps are a little less forward about desiring such, but I assume most adults still generally appreciate it much as children do, as a soothing and bonding experience. Spending time lying curled up close to a friend isn’t something most cultures normally invite, but if it feels appropriate for both parties, what could be the harm in it? Just because it crosses arbitrarily-drawn boundary lines about what friendships might allow, what sibling or sibling-like closeness might allow, and what sexual relationships might allow, does not invalidate the fact that it is not a sexual experience in and of itself and that people might find it bonding in a way that does not touch on that aspect of life. Similarly, one might desire to write effusive letters detailing the good qualities of a friend and telling them that they are loved, without either considering them a parent- or child-figure or a sexual partner.

To say, as some people do, that a person could not possibly want to share physical closeness and warmth with another human being– we are social animals, after all– without having some “ulterior motive” for doing so, is, I feel, a very limited and distorted view of how people work. It puts caring into such a limited box. Indeed, it puts caring into a box focused on short-term gratification, and I don’t think that is a helpful way to look at it at all. Not that I have anything against sexual intimacy outright; not that I would demean its value. It just seems very wrong to think of it as the ultimate reason for wanting any kind of closeness.

I make distinctions between “sexual relationship” and “romantic relationship” throughout this post specifically because I believe one can have the latter without having the former; and certainly it is not an unfamiliar concept to most people that one can have the former without having the latter. I also do not think that all friendships in which one desires or allows physical closeness, or effusion, or any other such thing necessarily need to be termed, or ought to be termed, “romantic”. For the record, the friend in question is not someone I would generally seek out to cuddle with, though I would certainly not feel uncomfortable if, for example, during a trip we ended up sharing sleeping space. However, that does not mean that I might not find that appropriate in another friendship. There are, I believe, as many diverse and individual ways to relate to people as there are people, and putting them into boxes marked “friend”, “lover”, and “family” hardly does justice to the full expression of these relationships.

Do we ever, indeed, love two people in the same way? For those who have had a number of romantic-and-sexual relationships (I could have used the word “relationships” alone here and most of you would have understood what I meant, yet if I had meant another type of relationship I would have had to specify, a testimony to the monopoly this type of relationship has over the word. I would like to think I have “relationships” with all my friends and even acquaintances, that I “relate” to them in a meaningful and identifiable way. Can we not reclaim the base form of this term?), did you love all of those people identically, or was each a unique feeling and expression of affection for that person’s individual qualities?

There are other people I feel this way for too. I have a friend in particular whom I love dearly, but I’ve found that culture is a barrier to conveying that easily. In this culture, you cannot easily say you love someone without being misinterpreted and, if the person does not return your feelings, inviting a possible future of awkward interactions– all based on the assumption that you are implying this expectation of sexual closeness. What hope do those have who might not ever wish to be sexually intimate but wish to bond deeply with others none the less? If they have no close family, must they spend their entire lives without any real human contact other than the occasional hug in greeting or accidental touch? Children deprived of physical contact frequently develop psychological problems in adult life, and while once we have made the transition to adulthood this comfort becomes less essential if we have had our sufficiency in infancy, it is still a vital part of our makeup. It is a sad thought that those so inclined might especially suffer for, ironically, being presumed to be the exact opposite of what they are. I rather wish more of society understood this perspective.

Further to this entry, a powerful and poignant website on the history of deep friendship.

The more I read the articles on this site, the more I find it distressing and absurd that society has fallen to a state where genuine, tender affection between human beings is variously ridiculed, censured, seen as little more than window-dressing for a particular specialised kind of intimacy, and confined to those only in specific roles. Until recently the kind of closeness that these days requires lengthy essays and websites just to explain was a cheerful norm. What have we deprived ourselves, and our society, of by this isolation?

I would also consider this website required viewing for slash writers. I have no objection whatsoever to people who wish to write about gay relationships– goodness knows they are stigmatised enough as it is– but if it is merely closeness between two individuals that these people seek to explore, there are other, less overused, options in need of exploration and exposure.

Things too easily written off. (On meat-eating, but mostly on the power of memes in general.)

Through thoughtful discussion with others and through attempting to put into words those things that I myself see and experience, I have been noticing lately how so many things that people so easily write off are actually, if one does stop to examine them and truly reflect upon them, not so easily dismissable at all; or rather, to put these phrases in the order which ought to be most surprising, how so many truly valuable insights are so easily dismissed.

For example, the eating of meat. Now I do not wish to be offensive to any person reading this who eats meat; nor am I trying to get people to change their ways; rather only to encourage thought. (And the very fact that I do have to include such a disclaimer, that I cannot bring this topic up in this way without fear that my words might seem hostile, says something of my following point, I believe.) I had, until very recently, gone the entirety of my life thus far without ever once questioning meat-eating; certainly I had never felt horrified by the taste and texture of cooked flesh in my mouth. (And that phrase sounds so terrible, now, to my ears. I am not trying to invoke sympathy or disgust with loaded words; it is flesh. One can say no more or less about it.) Even those who appreciate the reasons for vegetarianism in others never seem to truly take them to heart; and I say this speaking as someone who felt this way myself; that is, we hear phrases such as “what poor creature died, so that you could experience this brief sensory pleasure?”, and nod, absently, seemingly understandingly. It seems, on the surface, a fairly reasonable thing to say. But we do not internalise that thought, do not truly dwell on it. We think no more of it than “well, it sounds reasonable”, and move on. We cannot do and continue to act as we do. I did not. And in less tolerant circles, “what once-living thing had to die so you could eat that?” is brushed off as a slogan of the fanatical, the wild-eyed, activists who bomb the homes of the families of cousins of best friends of people who might once have worked for a company whose profits are tied in with animal experimentation.

Even, I believe, a good number of vegetarians themselves do not abstain from eating meat because they are truly emotionally horrified by taking animal life. Rather, they do it because they have been raised to do it, or because certain animals are “cute” (thinking not to the objective value of life but to its subjective appeal to humans; a less cute animal is worth less, to some minds), or because on some level they consider it a good thing to do; but not because it truly bothers them on a deep level.

There are so many of these little phrases in our lives that have become pat, rejected by reflex rather than by thought, because they have become associated with the fringe fanatic, those whose perspective on the situation is unbalanced in entirely the opposite direction. We consider that because the majority live their lives like this, then it must be okay. But if we actually stop to consider these phrases for a moment, might they actually have value? Might they once have been born from a reasonable train of thought, only to have been tainted over time by association until we assume that they can no longer have any real meaning whatsoever?

I very recently saw, in association with an article on a particular restaurant, an image of a whole cooked pig. It was perfectly recognisable as the animal that it had once been; but its skin was turned to a seared, brittle shell. It did not look any different from a human whose skin had been burned, in terms of that, and if we were to accidentally look upon an image of a human all-over burnt, their flesh darkened and charred, we would instantly wince and turn away. We could not stare upon it for long. It would be the same if we saw a dog in such a condition. We would feel sick. Yet this image of a pig is not considered shocking. Why does this not upset us the same way? It horrifies me, now. But for my whole life I have been looking at roasted pig’s heads and similar things and feeling no sorrow, no remorse. It is curious, how the power of collective acceptance can be a total emotional blinder to these things. I was not supposed to think of it as horrible, therefore I did not. It might even have made me hungry. We need to recognise that cultural memes have such power to affect us and condition us, to change our very basic emotions, to alter them completely and totally; not just this one but many, many others.

Once again, this post is not an attack on those who eat meat; not a disdaining of them as callous. I am not raising myself above anyone; we are all susceptible to it. In fact I have arguably done more unpleasant things in my life than most because of cultural acceptance of the things I did; I am not one to preach or judge, and I will not. Indeed that is partly my point; that we as a culture have internalised these ideas such (and my culture is no different) that they have lost their capacity to shock unless analysed very closely. When something has been stripped of any potential to upset by having been a presence in human lives since the dawn of the species (and back then, a necessary one), we are not to be considered unreasonably cruel if we are not moved by it. However, we should at least consider it our duty to contemplate these things, to look beyond layers of cultural conditioning, not just at this one thing but at everything that we take for granted in our lives, to ensure our actions are based on conscious awareness, not acceptance of the status quo. If you do consider this entry offensive to you, please, before being upset by it, ask yourself why. That was the point of my making it, after all; just to provoke thought on a topic that few people are comfortable with provoking thought on, precisely because it is such a sensitive one.

On beauty, and gender-based norms regarding appreciation thereof.

One thing I have been made aware of about this culture– and by “this culture” I mean the primarily-English-speaking culture of what is thought of commonly as “the Western world”, of this present day and age– is how male children are not, generally speaking, taught and encouraged to appreciate beauty. This is fairly obvious. When with female children, parents will emphasize how pretty this or that thing is; oh, you look so pretty, you would look beautiful in those clothes, isn’t that a pretty flower, isn’t that elegant, isn’t that nice? Rarely do we see young boys being spoken to in such a manner; indeed in many social circles men are disdained and treated with horrific cruelty for showing sensitivity or appreciation of beauty, none moreso than, if my reading and the experience of some of you is anything to go by, and I am sure that it is, the school system, which, entered into at the most fundamental period of our lives for learning (obviously), has a huge influence over what we come to internalise as “normal”.

And what is this love of beauty replaced with?; what is it that boys are taught to focus on? There have been several studies conducted to confirm that, when people are given babies to hold dressed in clothing that, in this era and culture, indicates they are probably male, they are engaged in more active, rough-and-tumble play by their caretakers, whereas those indicated to be female are treated more tenderly, told stories rather than encouraged to be physically expressive. Neither of these things would be bad, I feel, if it were not for the extremes; active, athletic play is shaped into war games, and encouraged; reading and appreciation of beauty are turned into a disdain for physical self-expression. Beauty is replaced with war; self-awareness and physical interaction with the world, with nature as something more than flowers in a picturebook, replaced with squeamishness towards “rough” and “ugly” things.

Why do we socialise children differently? We are all human, all equally capable of appreciating the various aspects of the world if only we are shown how to, have the love of them instilled in us from childhood so that we do not have to grope for it blindly in adulthood, blindly and in utter defiance of all we have been taught. Here in this culture we have the capacity, in terms of intelligence, in terms of self-awareness and species-awareness, collective understanding of what makes us tick, to consciously move beyond our unthinking subservience to our biological origins, as warriors and nurturers, hunters and homemakers. Our society doesn’t need it, our brains do not need it– many societies and cultures operate outside this arbitrary set of roles successfully– and our personalities are injured by it. If there is any perceived need for it left in us, let us strive to cast it aside, however hard it may be, in the quest to become truly civilised, truly balanced, as a society.

I was, incidentally, not raised with such a cultural bias against my appreciating beauty; indeed my native culture reveres art almost as much as it does deity, and both men and women are encouraged to take an active interest in the arts, in theatre, in architecture, in literature. I was not given much overt instruction as to my play, to be fair; most of it was conducted alone, out of doors, away from the influence of guardians. But I was taught to be courteous and mannered, to be respectful in my dealings with others and neat in my dress, and I am sure that I was given more incentive to care for beauty than not to; I cannot imagine having been encouraged not to. In this culture, some people– I do not think people like those who read this journal, but a good portion of people outside that group– would see the behaviour that my upbringing has tended me towards as “effeminate”, the very choice of word suggesting that it is only appropriate for females. Why is finding beauty in the world not an appropriate thing for men to engage in? I suppose if the argument is that it makes me “less of a man”, then I look at the traits typically ascribed to being “a man” as opposed to “a woman”, and think that perhaps they are right, for generally I want no part in them; I want to be nurturing and protective and kind and compassionate; I do not want to be domineering or emotionless or even “acceptably” aggressive, for I do not find any part of being aggressive acceptable. (What is my identity as a man comprised of, then?; for I would never have said I thought of myself as anything but. Is it a subtler thing than this? Is it merely a result of my associations with the body I was born into? I feel as if it runs deeper than that; but I could well be questioning it too little. It is an interesting question, and I do not think that I know how to answer it just yet; I have never really thought about it before. But it is something I will dwell upon.)

I do wonder; before people knew explicitly of my gender, how did I read to you?

On stages of clarity.

There is a common assumption that with knowledge about the world, with clarity, comes cynicism. Indeed, this is a truth in part, borne out by the practical experiences of many people. However, it is also an assumption based on the idea that those who are cynical know everything there is to know, or that further knowledge would only be of the variety that would drive them more deeply into cynicism.

We begin as children exploring and learning about the world, wide-eyed at its possibilities. When all is new to us, most is joy; there is pain and suffering, yes, but the thrill of the newness of life unfolding absorbs the attention; the childhood years are frequently remembered as times of discovery and pleasure, even if the childhood was not otherwise an ideal one.

As we grow older these pleasures fade, and responsibilities and burdens loom large. Furthermore, we have a greater capacity to philosophise about life, and in particular, knowing little of the truth of existence and having mostly, as a species, neglected and renounced our intuitions as meaningless– and those who do still possess them in rudiment follow them only to find themselves confronted with a lack of what they seek, the feeling of having hit a ceiling that bounds off anything meaningful– we suffer from that malaise of the human condition, existential angst (which does not mean what you might think it means, but rather to suffer from terror and uncertainty derived from not knowing whether your life has a purpose, what happens when physical life ends, and so forth). We have forgotten how to see all the goodness in life, and now confronted with the darkness of it, we look back on the child we were as hopelessly naïve. That child, who could not philosophise, who could know nothing of adult burdens or sufferings, who had not yet the capacity to contemplate existence, was completely unknowledged, and as knowledged people we look upon them as obviously deluded. The name for this feeling is, commonly, disillusionment.

However, few words could be less apt descriptors of this condition, for in my opinion it is in fact a profound illusionment, perhaps the greatest illusion there ever was. There is a knowledge beyond the glass ceiling; it is a knowledge that can be acquired at least in part through simple contemplation of the world, through appreciation of the fact that for every sorrow there are a thousand beautiful things that must necessarily exist for it to even be possible– for life to end, to fear, to doubt, there must be life, and all its wonders, the miracle of the complex anatomy of the living being, and beautiful things to fear the loss of, and magnificent hopes and truths to doubt, and things that we strive for that we fear we cannot have but nevertheless exist, and countless things before our eyes that would consume our attentions for our whole lifespan if we were only to sit and marvel on how truly wondrous and detailed they are; while sorrows are but shallow and transient things, the pattern of life, the continued creation of new beings to laugh and live and love and learn, to stretch up to the sky and feel the sun against them, to create and hope and dream and know, is eternal. As we touch the true nature of existence, we are awed by it anew; for there is so much more for us to know that we ever might have dreamt, so much complexity and wonder to see even in the structure of the things we can observe, and rarely-told wonders hinted at in that which we cannot.

So, no, perfect knowledge does not necessarily induce cynicism. Rather, an intermediate state of knowledge that is assumed to be perfect knowledge induces cynicism, which is really a longing for something more that cannot be found because the person, after some attempts, has resigned themselves to its nonexistence and embraces this in an attempt at comforting the self. Turning in on themselves, binding themselves up in themselves, they renounce the world. But the world calls. It is not a simple thing to reach, for collective illusion in the form of each other’s expectation bounds, but it is there. None need give up hope: begin to find marvels in the small things around you, reflecting on the joy and complexity inherent in a single leaf, and change your thinking thus; and the big things will begin to take care of themselves.

(Or, to sum up all the above into a single comic strip: knowledge that transcends cynicism can be found in many walks of life.)