The Original Snub...reclaiming the Wild
I realise that in the poor upkeep of this blog over the past two years I have neglected to record some of the threads that have been weaving together my experiences and worldviews, which topple and turve during the "interesting" times in which we live, but beneath which the search for deep undercurrents of the recurrent, the unified, the 'true', continues apace, and in a gainful fashion. Today, we hear that welfare cuts and an annual benefits cap that will push many families into greater poverty and hardship face likely approval despite bristling from the Lords, with David Cameron's party at its most popular since before the general election. There's something crazy, stupid, about the tendency of the people majority to swallow the messages of the power party: that people on benefits are lazy, scroungers, feckless: a new witch-hunt that ignores the power-hunger and profiteering at the top that has ripped the underbelly from our welfare system and economic prowess. Our Ipods are made by the underaged and underpaid of China, in an absolutely MAD juggernaut of resource depletion, flows of goods and capital and rampant consumerism, money being the liquid that feeds our souls. The materialism of arguments about welfare payments is a sad truth, of the linking of income with life outcomes: while money certainly doesn't equal happiness, the link between a fulfilling life and contribution to society and income is a plain reality for many. One Littlewoods advert garnered complaints during the run-up to Christmas for its pantomime of children singing praises to their mums for the x-boxes and marvellous other plastically packaged goodies they were to receive. Ok, so most people were bothered by its suggestion that Santa doesn't exist (shit, so mums DO bear the burden of consumerism...better keep that one quiet) but mothers on low incomes feel constantly pressured to be good consumers and providers of STUFF in order to be good mums. This is a rather long-winded introduction to the theme of this blog, the Original Snub, or the expulsion of 'disorderly' women, the women that don't fit the dominant categories of proper womanhood of the day. Chris Knight's analysis of the Sleeping Beauty motif and womens' menstruation ritual, my reading of The Red Tent and The Women Who Run With the Wolves and interest in cycles of history, mental archaeologies of repeated mistakes and cumulative exclusions to meet this particular point of history, lead me to try and summarise it, linking this expulsive and illusory depiction and desecration of women to the current punishments being dealt out to families. I'm aware of perhaps an overweighting on womens' issues, but it goes without saying that I'm not talking about two classes of people but a feminine, an aspect of multiplicity that is denied men in our culture too.
I discovered the Original Snub in yesterday's reading about the planet Eris. I'd been to visit my lovely friend Jess, who's just given birth and is searching for a name for her 3 week old treasure. She wants a name that reflects meaning- we looked at Gaia, and Maya, and Jeremiah (I liked it, her dad wasn't pleased)...she likes Erin, and it was on the return from Haverfordwest that I heard the Brain of Britain presenter speak of the planet Eris. Having just bought Dava Sobel's 'The Planets', synchronicities were telling me that it's time to learn more about the world and the power of naming. Tenuous links, like Comedy Dave: disorderly, a touch of glossolalia but hey, I don't understand it all. I know nada, and I have to trust that it's not my brain's fault that stuff goes out the other ear, but that it's all out there in the morphic field and we just have to tap into it. So hear goes.
Eris is the dwarf planet that threw our idea of a nine-planet solar system into disarray. Larger than Pluto, some argued that Eris should be named as a tenth planet; others that Pluto was too small to constitute a planet at all (ultimately is was voted that only eight planets should be included.) It's a beautiful piece of naming. In Greek mythology, Eris was the goddess of disorder, whose exclusion from the marriage of Peleus and Thetis led her to toss the Apple of Discord into the party, sparking the Trojan War...in our own celestial infighting, Eris threw scientists into a debate of nomenclature that led to Pluto's exclusion, and ensuing debates, petitions and...well, disorder. Eris is the matron deity of Discordianism, a "non-prophet irreligious disorganisation" centered on the idea that both order and disorder are illusions imposed on the universe by the human nervous system, and that neither of these illusions of apparent order and disorder are any more accurate or objectively true than the other. Her daughter, Dysnomia ('lawlessness') lends her name to her mother's moon (an interesting piece of resonance-for-namer in Mike Brown's choice of name: see Wiki entry). The refusal to dominant notions of order streams through the other recurrent stories in my thinking today: Jay Griffith's Wild and PipPip, critiques of the way nature and time have been strictured by language, compartmentalised and parcelled up and both broken and homogenised by forces of missionary, colonial and globalising interference that's characterised recent centuries. She aligns herself to the flux of moments in depicting places and people that retain their sense of the wild, the beauty and ineffability of both change and continuity in nature's cycles. This all sounds a bit wishy-washy. But fuck it, the idea of cycles as opposed to linear progress as dominates Judeo-Christian thought and action brings me to my thinking about women's natural cycles and the shift from women communing to women competing. Anita Diamant's The Red Tent describes womens' lives during Biblical times, as the wives of Jacob struggle to defend their spiritual connections to the land through their ritual and sharing of secrets. Womens work is diverse and vital, and stops at the start of the new moon, when the red tent becomes a place of healing and vital respite. Women share in the birthing and raising of children...my friend Jess has just moved back to her parents' place to get the support she needs in raising her baby, and historically this is not so unusual. What is unusual is contemporary women's separation, both from their own natural cycles through contraception and from each other in idealised nuclear family arrangements. I'm on rocky ground here- the anthropologist in me quakes at my unquestioned use of the idea of 'natural' anything, and my intuition during the writing of my dissertation that the nuclear family ideal surrounding family planning discourse does not match the complexity and confusions of womens' sexual and economic lives...it did not meet standards of academic rigour. But here, I am letting my intuition out, free from the limitations of academic writing, while recognising the recklessness and potential danger of such freeformation. Chris Knight is one academic who has indeed been ousted for his outspoken views, and has no shortage of enemies. His talk at last year's Festival of Life on the origins of fairy tales was brought back to me by the figure of Eris and the Original Snub- he delved beneath the Disney layers to look at the non-invitation of the 13th wise woman, the link between this and 13 lunar cycles, the need for female knowledge, the figure of the 'witch' and the vicious movements to quell her influence as one major root of the problems in our world today, ruled by greedy men and lacking a sense of the cyclical. This is getting rather long so I shall leave this here, but I would like to tease out the connection here between womens struggles, environmental concerns and today's social movements: while acknowledging the ridiculousness of the welfare cuts in my thought-realms, I am compelled by arguments that what is missing is a spiritual element, a shift in consciousness, an embracing of the Zen-like disorder that underlies our neat versions of 'reality'....
I discovered the Original Snub in yesterday's reading about the planet Eris. I'd been to visit my lovely friend Jess, who's just given birth and is searching for a name for her 3 week old treasure. She wants a name that reflects meaning- we looked at Gaia, and Maya, and Jeremiah (I liked it, her dad wasn't pleased)...she likes Erin, and it was on the return from Haverfordwest that I heard the Brain of Britain presenter speak of the planet Eris. Having just bought Dava Sobel's 'The Planets', synchronicities were telling me that it's time to learn more about the world and the power of naming. Tenuous links, like Comedy Dave: disorderly, a touch of glossolalia but hey, I don't understand it all. I know nada, and I have to trust that it's not my brain's fault that stuff goes out the other ear, but that it's all out there in the morphic field and we just have to tap into it. So hear goes.
Eris is the dwarf planet that threw our idea of a nine-planet solar system into disarray. Larger than Pluto, some argued that Eris should be named as a tenth planet; others that Pluto was too small to constitute a planet at all (ultimately is was voted that only eight planets should be included.) It's a beautiful piece of naming. In Greek mythology, Eris was the goddess of disorder, whose exclusion from the marriage of Peleus and Thetis led her to toss the Apple of Discord into the party, sparking the Trojan War...in our own celestial infighting, Eris threw scientists into a debate of nomenclature that led to Pluto's exclusion, and ensuing debates, petitions and...well, disorder. Eris is the matron deity of Discordianism, a "non-prophet irreligious disorganisation" centered on the idea that both order and disorder are illusions imposed on the universe by the human nervous system, and that neither of these illusions of apparent order and disorder are any more accurate or objectively true than the other. Her daughter, Dysnomia ('lawlessness') lends her name to her mother's moon (an interesting piece of resonance-for-namer in Mike Brown's choice of name: see Wiki entry). The refusal to dominant notions of order streams through the other recurrent stories in my thinking today: Jay Griffith's Wild and PipPip, critiques of the way nature and time have been strictured by language, compartmentalised and parcelled up and both broken and homogenised by forces of missionary, colonial and globalising interference that's characterised recent centuries. She aligns herself to the flux of moments in depicting places and people that retain their sense of the wild, the beauty and ineffability of both change and continuity in nature's cycles. This all sounds a bit wishy-washy. But fuck it, the idea of cycles as opposed to linear progress as dominates Judeo-Christian thought and action brings me to my thinking about women's natural cycles and the shift from women communing to women competing. Anita Diamant's The Red Tent describes womens' lives during Biblical times, as the wives of Jacob struggle to defend their spiritual connections to the land through their ritual and sharing of secrets. Womens work is diverse and vital, and stops at the start of the new moon, when the red tent becomes a place of healing and vital respite. Women share in the birthing and raising of children...my friend Jess has just moved back to her parents' place to get the support she needs in raising her baby, and historically this is not so unusual. What is unusual is contemporary women's separation, both from their own natural cycles through contraception and from each other in idealised nuclear family arrangements. I'm on rocky ground here- the anthropologist in me quakes at my unquestioned use of the idea of 'natural' anything, and my intuition during the writing of my dissertation that the nuclear family ideal surrounding family planning discourse does not match the complexity and confusions of womens' sexual and economic lives...it did not meet standards of academic rigour. But here, I am letting my intuition out, free from the limitations of academic writing, while recognising the recklessness and potential danger of such freeformation. Chris Knight is one academic who has indeed been ousted for his outspoken views, and has no shortage of enemies. His talk at last year's Festival of Life on the origins of fairy tales was brought back to me by the figure of Eris and the Original Snub- he delved beneath the Disney layers to look at the non-invitation of the 13th wise woman, the link between this and 13 lunar cycles, the need for female knowledge, the figure of the 'witch' and the vicious movements to quell her influence as one major root of the problems in our world today, ruled by greedy men and lacking a sense of the cyclical. This is getting rather long so I shall leave this here, but I would like to tease out the connection here between womens struggles, environmental concerns and today's social movements: while acknowledging the ridiculousness of the welfare cuts in my thought-realms, I am compelled by arguments that what is missing is a spiritual element, a shift in consciousness, an embracing of the Zen-like disorder that underlies our neat versions of 'reality'....