August 26, 2009 at 4:45 P.M. My Internet connection from my home computer is obstructed. I am posting this notice from a public computer. I will try to continue writing from public computers. None of my opinions have changed. Please see, "Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba" and "Law and Ethics in the Soprano State." I cannot say whether, where, or when I will write again. I will try to restore my home Internet connection.
June Singer, Androgyny: Toward a New Theory of Sexuality (New York: Anchor, 1977).
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage, 1979).
Reynolds Price, Three Gospels (New York: Touchstone, 1996).
Cynthia Freeland, "The Women Who Loved Jesus: Suffering and the Traditional Feminine Role," in Jorge J.E. Gracia, ed., Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), p. 151.
James Lawler, "God and Man Separated No More: Hegel Overcomes the Unhappy Consciousness of Gibson's Christianity," in Mel Gibson's Passion and Philosophy, at p. 62.
Raymond Plant, Hegel (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 18.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York & London, 1990 & 1999), pp. 18-33 (especially, "Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary, and Beyond").
H.D., Pilate's Wife (New York: New Directions, 2000), (original date of manuscript, 1929).
Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (New York & London: Penguin, 2005).
Errol E. Harris, The Reality of Time (New York: SUNY, 1988).
I am unable to post images in my blog today, but I refuse to be silenced. As I type these words, I have no idea whether they will find their way on to the blog/group or disappear into the electronic ether. My refusal to alter my opinions or to refrain from expressing them is only confirmed and reinforced by these encounters with hackers, viruses and spyware. I have lost count of my passwords at this point. I am running a scan right now, though it doesn't seem to do much good. It helps me to think that it is always the fifteenth round when I log in and try to write something. My recently posted short story, "God is Texting Me!" was altered overnight. I believe that I have made all necessary corrections, for now.
I can't be intimidated at this stage in my life. I am weirdly unafraid of anything and determined to persist in my struggle. I hope to face people who have harmed me -- along with many others -- also to find someone I love. I may not succeed in my effort to do these things. I promise you that, if I don't succeed, I will at least die trying to do them.
My review of The Da Vinci Code has generated a lot of controversy, including responses from persons who think of that novel as a kind of Gospel. Frightening. I am considering whether to include a revised and expanded version of the review in my forthcoming essay collection, which will make a lovely Christmas gift for one and all. Regrettably, my book will not be sent to online book-sellers. ("How Censorship Works in America" and "Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey.")
I wish to reaffirm my commitment to the sanctity of same-sex love and equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians. You cannot beat up ideas. You do not prevail in discussions by censoring or suppressing the speech of adversaries. My quotations from Professor Boswell's book concerning Christ and St. John remain accurate. The continuing experience of censorship and violations of privacy is deeply painful to me, personally, but much more wounding to the Constitution of the United States of America. Someday, all of us will enjoy freedom of expression in America. ("Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?" and "Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me,'" then "American Hypocrisy and Luis Posada Carriles.")
Readers have expressed an interest in my comment concerning the "two Marys." Mary Magdalene and Mary the Mother of Jesus are aspects of the "eternal feminine" in Christianity that are always in relation. They should be seen to constitute a kind of dialectic. A stupid misreading of this idea is to believe that I am suggesting something like a crude Freudian dichotomy between madonna and whore, the mother/prostitute bifurcation appropriately detested by feminists. Some feminists' solution is to create an even more crude division between "good" (feminine) and "evil" (masculine), as evidenced by several responses to my essay-review of The Da Vinci Code.
Take a look at your son, if you have one, then tell me that every male child is inherently evil by virtue of his genitals, then explain -- in your next breath -- why it is wrong to judge women on the basis of their reproductive equipment. Such ludicrous forms of knee-jerk, sophomoric "femi-Nazism" are as loathsome as the sexism and misogyny they oppose. In fact, hatred of men is a kind of sexism.
The relation between the two "Marys" (I am told that "Maria" is too "ethnic") in Christian symbolism (there is no such thing as "symbology") is temporal as well as thematic. It is an attempt to articulate -- in the language of archetypes and images -- the idea that a woman's identity encompasses roles governed by the "biological clock" as well as culture, not to mention freedom or choice in reacting to or interpreting those roles, with love. What do those roles mean today? Wife? Mother? Daughter?
The crucifixion depicts a man suffering on the cross; but there is another crucifixion, usually unappreciated, taking place at the foot of the man on the cross. It is the suffering of women depicted in a mother's pain at the agony of a son, who is dying before her eyes; and a woman's pain at the suffering of a man she loves, from whom she is parted and whose extreme agony she knows very well -- since she is also LIVING IT -- and she has no choice about sharing in this agony. Among the sufferings of women forming traditional subjects in mythology and folklore is the absence of choice, powerlessness, the struggle against fate. I urge you to visit the Smithsonian Institute to see Leonardo's "Ginevra Di Benci." I will never regret or relent in my commitment to the women I love. ("The Soldier and the Ballerina" and "God is Texting Me!")
It is essential to woman's love, especially, that what happens to the beloved also happens to oneself. "Christianity thus advocates," Cynthia Freeland suggests, "typically female behaviors of caring, love, [empathy,] ... and compassion." The point being made by Professor Freeland is metaphorical. She is alluding to what is done by women, mostly, in our world, which is healing and repairing our moral wounds. Professor Freeland is also appealing to what is female in everyone, a quality that recognizes this need to comfort and care for others. The ritual of washing the feet at Easter is symbolic of this traditionally powerless role for women and others deemed "like" women, which is morally empowering for persons in such positions, who shall "inherit the earth." ("'The Reader': A Movie Review" and see the duality between Susan Sarandon's and Kate Winslet's characters, which are really one woman, in "Romance and Cigarettes.")
I invite you to read my short stories "The Soldier and the Ballerina" and "Pieta," then consider which character in each story is playing a more feminine role? Don't be fooled by what French critics describe as a literary character's "costume." ("The Taming of Somebody" and "Beauty and the Beast.")
See the faces of mothers whose sons return in body bags from war; look at the wives and sisters of those dead soldiers. Do they not suffer just as much or more than those wounded or dying men? I think so. Notice how those women cling to one another. Now I ask that you read my essay: "What is it like to be tortured?" How does a Jew become Mengele, Terry Tuchin? How can anyone bring about such suffering because it is "interesting" or because you can "learn from it" or for a "fee"? ("What is it like to be tortured?")
The two "Marys" are made one by embodying women's pains in this world at the sufferings of men they love, which adds to their own sufferings, in a way that no man's pain for a wife or mother equals. It works the other way too: Men hurt when women they love suffer. I can attest to that. Yet it is women who seem to have a special aptitude for suffering in this world since they are (usually) burdened with greater poverty and much less power than men.
Among important philosophers, the recent writings of Martha Nussbaum should be mentioned because she is concerned with these questions regarding the feminization of war and poverty. The part of me that suffers or hurts "for" others -- I know that this is paradoxical -- is feminine. Think of child-birth, joy at pain in giving life to another, an experience which is reflective of the ultimate paradox in all human life. The joy and sweetness we experience is always, partly, a result of life's fleeting character and the pain of loss in life.
Feminine identity is essentially relational, social, communal (Hegel); masculine identity is more individualistic, alienated, autonomous (Kant). These identities are choices or options for everyone. They are cultural phenomena and not necessarily biological. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory," see also an essay which has been vandalized many times, "'Shoot 'Em Up": A Movie Review" as well as "'Holy Smoke': A Movie Review.")
This feminine aspect of "empathetic imagination" is also found in most men, including those who are unaware of it. Empathy is a feminine attribute: by hurting "for" others, men can find their feminine sides more easily. This takes courage. Admitting to such feelings takes even more courage for heterosexual men in sexist societies. These archetypal representations of feminine and masculine forms of suffering are within each of us. To divide the world into one good and another bad gender is to live in a highly simplistic and false setting. Worse, to deny half of your nature is to maim your own sensibilities and affective capacities.
"Female" is a concept equal to many things, including the unity of love and death in the paradox of identity as self-giving: Kenosis. ("'The American': A Movie Review.")
"Were not the Hegelians justified," writes Donald McKinnon, "in construing the Noli me Tangere of the risen Christ to Mary Magdalene in the record of the fourth Gospel as a concrete mythical expression of the demand that Christians discard the bondage of a false attachment to the details of a particular history, and adhere within themselves to a way of life which they must realize in circumstances altogether strange to those who first listened to Jesus?"
A woman's identity includes roles as lover and wife, mother and matriarch at different points in a life's journey. Identity for a woman is inclusive of eros, caritas, filia on a daily basis. Hence, what or who a woman is must be more complex and much more intersubjective than identity for a man.
Every woman you know will be both "Marys" -- the Magdalene and Virgin -- every day (at different moments) and, certainly, over her lifetime. These are points on a spectrum. The analogy to "acting" a role in life, Shakespeare's great metaphor, should be obvious. ("What you will ..." and "Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
The Hegelian "reaching-out" to others as social identity (Stillichkeit) can result in absorption of the other (masculine domination) or celebration of otherness (feminine pluralism). Both are human and universal. Which option do you like? ("'The French Lieutenant's Woman': A Review Essay" and "'Holy Smoke': A Movie Review.")
Women are the keepers of lived-time. Bergson's "time as duration" is a woman. Women weaving the texts of our lives is a common motif in world mythology: Woman is language-giver, time-keeper, nurturer and healer, companion at birth and death. Philosophical explorations of the concept of time have been better at recording time's feminine identity as opposed to scientific discussions of time's reduction to what is objectively discussable. Contrast Brian Greene, "The Frozen River," in The Fabric of the Cosmos (New York & London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 127-142 with Errol E. Harris, "Biological Time," in The Reality of Time (New York: SUNY, 1988), pp. 61-79. (Not surprisingly, the hour glass is a universal symbol of the womb and 9 month cycle of gestation.) ("A Review of the T.V. Show 'Alice.'")
Love the women in your life. Surprise her with a gift or a rose, make her laugh, sprinkle a little stardust into her evening. And don't forget to get the toilet paper and throw out the garbage while you're at it. And don't be home too late.
