On Beauty

Note: In putting the final touches on The Sentiments, I came across this short essay, “On Beauty”, and considered tacking it on the end of the collection. Knowing that it would be somewhat of an anomaly, as it is an essay, not a short story, I’ve decided not to include it in the book, but feel compelled to share it here, at least. This was written in 2007, apparently, and I vaguely remember writing it during a period when I was waging a slow, personal war against the hectic pace of modern civilization. Long-standing frustration and anger with the compulsive consumerism and financial obsessions of the first world had given away to a resignation not to participate; my “war” was and continues to be one of opting out, as much as I could, from the unnecessary stresses of a hyperpaced society. In opting out, I began to relax into my own being, and realized that the true nature of work is not enforced by external rewards, but driven by internal needs and desires. Where before I had been forced or had forced myself to participate in the hourly wages or salaries of the market economy, with this new resignation to ultra-minimal income, I began to work in a way that had been denied for a long time. With relaxation came flowing routines; not forced, but patterned like the natural fractals of chaos. I found my element. I began to work. This essay is an early piece of that work.

We suffer in our culture from a profound lack of appreciation of beauty.  Beauty is not lacking, that’s for certain.  Most days, anyone can see and experience beauty, as subjective as it is, in many different ways: through meetings and chance encounters with beautiful people, through the appreciation of plants and animals, the flow of water, through human design and architecture.  We are fortunate to live in lands of great natural beauty, in societies of material abundance and possibility for wealth; yet so many people speed through their days in a blaze of caffeinated competition and delirious, excessive consumption, failing all the while to ever take a moment to really rest.  Even on breaks from work, people too often devour food, not savoring; run errands for various essentials and inessentials; or simply deny themselves the full experience of a short siesta.

Beauty replenishes our spirits and feeds our capacity to love.  The more I recognize beauty and the pleasures of the senses, the clearer it becomes: beauty is all around us, even in garbage, weeds, menacing storm clouds.  Yet we must consciously intend to be receptive of beauty, to let it work on us and play through our essences.

I am fortunate to be at a point in my life where I am able to take plenty of time to slow down, to enjoy walks and the warmth of sunshine on my skin, to take care of myself and my partner and our animal companions and our home.  In the past, when I have felt compelled by culture or circumstance to “work” at a pace that is unsuitable for my body, mind, and spirit, I have felt bankrupt, numb, devoid of much feeling at all, simply performing a string of automatic motions threaded together in a grueling daily routine that paid off in some amount of cash.  For me, living this way is a sin.  Living driven along by the omnipresent cultural urgings to consume and work more, I find myself trapped in a life that lacks substance and any kind of joy.  Sure, I may in such times experience moments of happiness, laughter, or appreciation, but those moments pass quickly, leaving in their wake once again the underlying strain of emptiness and discontent.

People are not meant to work like machines.  We are meant to work, definitely, but to our capacity and no more, and we are meant to work with joy and loving devotion.  Work also should not define us.  We should define our work; work should flow from our personalities naturally, like language, laughter, or perhaps, at times, sweat.  To work compulsively for money, status, or other societal achievements is to become a slave.  Indeed, in a true free society, individuals would not feel the pressure of achievement and the strain of financial struggles.  Am I suggesting utopia?  Perhaps, although I do believe what I envision is possible.  What we lack and so desperately need in our individual lives are qualities like trust and love.

These essential human soul foods–trust, love, beauty, a search for truth, communion–are all to be found by creating and establishing community.  Western society is deprived of community.  Impoverished by our lack of connection with others, we strive boldly and brazenly to build walls and create fortresses or islands in which we can live.  Sometimes we may invite others into these fortresses and share our resources with them, but this we only offer to a select few, and never really those who need it most. Often  motivated by status, career, culture, or religion, we chose carefully who we invite into our inner circle.

I believe that we should all be choosing carefully who we invite into our inner circles, but that our care should be based on qualities of establishing relationships, of sharing love, of giving of ourselves but also receiving from others.  When people are in relationships of trust and love, the walls begin to grow thin.  Doors open, small holes appear, someone opens a window.  In doing so, and in giving and receiving not necessarily material goods but the great intangibles–smiles, hugs, kisses, laughter; friendship, security, honesty–we strengthen ourselves and other individuals. We strengthen community.

Many Native American or Indian peoples find it essential to “walk in beauty.”  Beauty is of course not fashion (although it may be complemented by fashion), not to be found in idealized patriarchal images of women’s and men’s bodies.  I believe that appreciation of beauty, immersion in beauty, and outward expression in beauty must be desired, found, and explored by each individual in our collective communities.  Then by sharing our joyful beauty with others–the colors, the tones, the music and shapes and forms of beauty–we create positive cultural feedback.  Other may derive aesthetic and sensual pleasure from our sharing; they may be inspired to great beauty themselves.

A question I ask myself now is, “Does beauty have the power to transform the world?”  I think it is an important, essential quality, and I do believe that without the appreciation of beauty in our communities, the world will continue to be lacking in substance.  Material things, of course, only last so long.  Beauty, like life, is born and breathing anew in every moment. Beauty moves, and so must we. We must change ourselves and our attitudes to be truly beautiful, and in doing so–in embodying and knowing and appreciating beauty–we contribute to the harmony and peace of this miracle planet that we have been blessed to come into service upon.

Latest Illustration from The Sentiments collection: “Progress”

This illustration goes along with the “Progress” story in the forthcoming Sentiments collection. I think it does the trick:

Click on the image to be taken to deviantart, where you can buy prints, puzzles, mugs, coasters, mouse pads, and other items featuring this illustration.

Publishing Industry? I’ll Pass, but I’ll Take an Extra Helping of Publishing Communities, Please.

Understanding Media, first published in 1964, focuses on the media effects that permeate society and culture, but McLuhan’s starting point is always the individual, because he defines media as technological extensions of the body.

-from Terence Gordon’s short biography of Marshall McLuhan

Social media is transforming media. That’s a simple statement, yet rather profound in its implications. In a flashback, I am reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s ideas, presented in the 1960s, about the Medium being the Message.

The revolutionary nature of social media and the internet is to be found in its unprecedented connectivity. Unlike books or television, the new media of internet communication technology allows individuals to connect directly with hundreds, thousands, or any number they can possibly stand, of other internetized individuals. What you get is a virtual sea full of media consumers and producers.

Let’s take a look at those two aspects of the internetized individual: on the one hand, the role of media consumer, which is an old role for all of us, has been revolutionized by the way which we access and consume media. Each internetized individual has unprecedented access and control over multiple streams of information. For me personally, this has been incredibly liberating. I grew up in an era when the older media of television, newspapers, and books–all of which present information as a lecturer does to an audience–was prolific. Television is the most intimidating and overpowering form of this kind of presentational media: the viewer becomes sedentary, opening up her eyes and ears to the hypnotic patterns coming from the tube.  Televised news is the most terrible and terrorizing form of this. Think of the presentation, both the content and message being received from the viewer of television news:

*dramatic, even martial theme music plays*
Welcome to the jungle news. It’s terrible, by the way, the news. Oh yes, the world is in bad shape. Let me tell you about murders, rapes, wars, natural disasters, and pollution, all of which are, as you know, signs of impending global cataclysm. That means doom. But first, we need to go to commercial.
*a series of intense and emotionally-manipulative moving images and soundtracks are broadcast into the pliant vessels sitting on couches, stoking unnecessary desires*

And perceive this with McLuhan’s view of the media itself being the message: in each of those older media forms, the consumer of media chooses to submit herself to the influence of the media form and presentation. Now this is still the case with internet technology, but I believe that the situation is different in at least two ways. The first way in which an individual’s experience in the connective virtual world of the internet is different from that of the older forms of media comes with the general ease of access (once one establishes an internet connection, which I recognize is not a universal human experience, by far) to a variety of media forms as well as a much wider variety of content than could previously be experienced in a given window of time. The second way in which media consumption differs in the 21st century than in the 20th has to do with the quantity of information of available combined with the ease of access; the result of this is that, if I as a media consumer, am dissatisfied with or distrust what is being broadcast at me by all the major television news networks and newspapers, I now can not only choose to not watch them, but can completely redirect my attention so that I am focused on new media outlets which I feel are more accurate, responsible, or simply more representative of and sympathetic to my personal ideologies. I can disconnect my television, cancel my newspaper subscriptions, sign up for all sorts of e-mail lists, and then simply monitor my inbox for headlines that concern me. The unwanted bombardment of discordant media messages and advertising is reduced dramatically, and I am able to filter my media consumption in a way that feeds my moral and social needs, rather than antagonizes them.

Let’s switch the angle and perspective a bit. Before the advent of the internet as a tool of mass communication (not at all that long ago), if someone wanted to learn about butterflies, they would have a couple of options. First, they could go down to the library or bookstore and acquire a selection of books on butterflies; or they could subscribe to a selection of magazines on the topic. Newspapers are not likely to have been a source of much usefulness for the individual interested in the varieties and life-cycles of butterflies, unless the newspaper was very peculiar.

Switch now to the internet and research the same topic. Immediately, one is presented with an index page of sources, complete with illustrations. On that one page is access to images, a wikipedia article, posters, software, a page from an institution of higher learning, and a news result about butterflies in space. Butterflies is space–oh, I could get distracted by that. In addition, you can choose to click at the top of the page and find videos (of course, Michael Jackson’s song “Butterflies” is the top video), maps,  more images and news results (note that butterflies cannot fly in space; is anyone really that surprised? GO SCIENCE!), and even shopping. A multi-media experience is presented to you with incredible accessibility.*

From there, you, as the media consumer, take control.

The other, and I believe more fundamental way, in which the internet and social media are transforming our lives and consciousness, comes from the new ease with which each internetized individual may produce media. One only has to take a cursory look at the virtual landscape that has been built over the past decade to see the burgeoning possibilities: youtube and the variety of similar services; myspace, facebook, twitter, tumblr; blogger, wordpress, livejournal, and other free blogging software; deviantart, redbubble, artspan, etsy, and other accessible sites for visual artists; all of these present unprecedented opportunities for anyone with access to the internet to become the media.

I’m no economist, and the thought of corporate capitalism makes me throw up a little in my mouth. Yet it’s clear that global economics is a broken idea, both in theory and practice. I’d like to suggest that the reason for this breakage, which has the developed world sick with anxiety and fear, comes from a lack of connection between the practice of economics–which somehow became an arcane discipline akin to astrology, full of unknowns and dire predictions of cataclysms, as well as breathless divinations of golden cities and incredible fortunes just past the next bend in the road of material progress–and the real economies of communities, which are rather simple. The real economies of communities are rooted in food, shelter, clothing, medicine, education, arts and crafts, and less tangible products called social events: religious rituals and ceremonies, community meetings, games and sports, parenting and childcare, parties. Real economies are rooted in place, in communities, and grow from those places; they are not imposed from outside by other countries, by the World Bank or IMF, and they certainly don’t come from textbooks, contorted logarithms, financial projections, and closed-door academic meetings far-removed from the source of economics, which is the local community.

There’s plenty of material in the above paragraph for later digression and further extrapolation, and please feel free to run with it. Right now, I’m afraid I’ll get away from my point, which I haven’t really come to yet, and which is about a very specific type of community, and one that we don’t hear enough about, but which I think is emerging thanks to the social media landscape. I’m talking about the publishing community. Sure, most people are familiar with the idea of the publishing industry, but how many of us are aware of a publishing community? Multiple publishing communities? Not many, I’d wager, and that’s because we haven’t yet taken our power as artists, writers, and publishers of media away from the arbiters of taste and sales, the publishing industry, which is very much a dependent subsidiary of the economics of globalization and corporate capitalism.

In the coming weeks, I am going to be thinking and writing on the emergence of publishing communities, and would love to discuss with other self/indie-publishers what the sudden viability of print-on-demand and other accessible publishing services means for writers and artists. From my perspective, I see it as a great opportunity for media producers to have creative control of their products, to bypass industry editors and other arbiters of taste and style and acceptability. It also seems to me that these tools have the potential to help may different authors, collectives, artists, and groups of all kinds diversify the landscape of culture. A non-linear and non-hierarchical structure can emerge from all of this; more correctly, multiple non-hierarchical structures, all interconnected, will emerge. The arbiters of taste and style may choose to cough into their sleeves derisively as the landscape of their “industry” is transformed by those they may have viewed as plebes, or they can come to their senses and join the party, move into a community. For communities are not only rooted in physical space, in location–although there is something very powerful and important about that type of community–but also now occur at the virtual interstices of ideas, passions, conversations, and creativity that are being held in the connectivity of our new social media spaces.

Interesting times? Yeah.

Note:
*Of course, the down-side of this ease of access is that one rarely needs to leave the house. Sure, you still have to get out every once in a while to buy milk, bread, beer, cheetohs, and hamburger meat, and to make actual money to buy all those staples, but you no longer need to drive or walk to the book store or library so much.

Presenting: CreaTheater

Leftunder Books has begun work on an open-source role-playing game:

Creatheater is intended as the first step in developing an original fantasy role-playing game. This game takes its inspiration from the RPGs of the late 1970s and ’80s, mythology in all its forms, literature, comic books, horror, and fantasy illustration. The game concept and mechanics are being initially developed by Charles Dickey, although collaboration with other designers is sought. Creatheater is intended to be a unique system with emphasis on character development and player character-driven stories, and is offered as a departure from the combat-heavy miniatures-style game systems that seem to have come to dominate RPGs in the past decade.

This project will be updated frequently as development continues.

Quiet Settles into Leftunder Land: a Journal Entry from the Interior Wiring of the Brand

I’ve been fading into the background of our farmhouse lately, disconnecting the USB cable from the back of my neck and contemplating my next move. Watching the stats of Fiercely Interdependent peak and flatline and peak again, this time with a smaller peak, and then burp and fizzle and meander, I listen to the autumn rain steadily soak the pastures as a goat, separated from his flock, his herd, his gaggle, his posse–whatever a goat social group is called–as he mournfully bleats at the moon and his loss and the mud and for someone (that would be me and my wife, the farmer/goatherd having gone home or somewhere else for the night, and not picking up his phone), someone to please help, I am struck by how good my life is right now. That despite–despite? or in conjunction with?–not holding a straight job at the moment. Life is good. So says my mug of coffee, sitting to my left as I type this, tepidly warm, with a graphic design dog that’s fetched a newspaper printed on it (a sort of magic in its own right, that technology allows people to mass produce ceramic items like mugs with crisply-defined images on them as if they were pieces of paper or posterboard). On the reverse side of this mug, if there is such a thing to a cylinder, is the proclamation:  ”Do what you like. Like what you do.”

That was once a novel idea to me, but now I am actively making it my reality. A trickle of income from online book sales and a lot of time to read and create, that’s what I’ve got. That’s my work. Granted, I could still use a straight job for steady income and stability, but let’s be honest here, straight jobs don’t fit me very well. I could try to fool you and act the part, but I think we all need to see something novel, creative, beautiful or startling, alive and vital, not just another straight job cog in the crunching machine of consumer and corporate capitalist culture. Besides, when I’m that cog, I’m a disgruntled, passionless, and bitter cog.

So instead, these days I’m reading Chinweizu’s The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers and the African Elite (published in 1975; review forthcoming), and thinking, apart from the “life is good” sentiments of my individual existence, that the world is just as, if not more, fucked-up than I always intuitively felt it was. Granted, “always” is always an exaggeration (even now); a more accurate statement would be to say that the diseased state of the world, which suffers from short-sighted technological humans, continues to disturb and concern me, and as I learn more about the foibiles and willful injustices of Euro-centric history, I occasionally still despair and cuss at the arrogance of “culture”.  On a lighter note, I’m also reading Best New Horror 4 (published in 1993, but full of horror from 1992; it’s not new at all, but that’s the title and we’re sticking to it; no review planned), discovering Poppy Z. Brite and Thomas Ligotti and their excellent stories “How to Get Ahead in New York” and “The Glamour”, respectively, within its pages. And with both these books in my hands, I’m seeking some balance between these ever-present social concerns of justice, self-determination, equality, liberty–you know, our shared American values, right?–and my deepening need for this farmhouse and this room and the rural space and my pens and imagination and books and the space here where all of that converges in a matrix of music and dancing self-actualization, and I’m all like, “Damn, who has time for a job? There’s so much work to do!”

The Sentiments and other stories is slated for an early 2010 release. This is intentionally vague; I have a more specific goal in mind, but as much as I plan to hold myself to that deadline, I know myself and my need to approach projects with an open attitude towards time. I could create schedules made of blocks and watch parts, but then I’d just end up throwing said schedule against the wall and yelling at it resentfully. No need for that. Through time and experience, I’ve come to trust myself to enter into a process and emerge with a product. I recognize that my products will be more satisfying all-around and better quality if I don’t imprison them within false constructs like: “This needs to be done now,” or “I suck because I should be doing that right now but instead I’m thinking about donuts and watching the dust collect on my cat,” or “If I don’t do four illustrations a month, I’ll never get this project done in time.”

The illustrations are getting done. A foul-language version of an illustration for the title story is hiding behind a “mature content warning” over at LuB’s deviantart page. This will probably be included in the print edition, but I may edit out some of the fucks and fuckin’ fuck fucks. Sometimes I get carried away, but I wanted to visually show the burden of self-loathing and extreme self-consciousness that causes Charley to have the physical symptoms that he does and the associated powers/curses that come with those.

Currently on the painting board is a watercolor illustration of Mandolin from the “Invisible Dead” story; it’s Jay the Toke’s dream vision of her:

Mandolin in Jay the Toke's Dream work in progress

I’ve also produced a watercolor portrait of Jay, which is not an illustration as much as a character study. I’m not satisfied with it; his cheeks are too bony-looking and it kinda looks like someone broke his jaw. The colors are nice, though, with a bit of a 1970s flavor, and it was a fun piece to do.

Jay the Toke

If you are wondering who these characters are, you can meet them in “In the Wilderness with the Invisible Dead” which you can read in the free preview edition of The Sentiments and other stories on BookBuzzr, or if you prefer, you can download it freely from lulu.com or createspace.com.  The illustrated print edition will be available in early 2010. I already mentioned that, but it’s worth mentioning again.

Volcanic Landscape (Again)

Here’s the latest and perhaps last version of the “Volcanic Landscape” piece I’ve been working on for Illustrator’s Workshop.  As of now, I’ve taken it off my drawing/painting board and have moved onto actually working on the illustrations for the print edition of The Sentiments and other stories.

 

Guest Post: Nick Kristof’s Half the Sky: Finally a glimpse of the whole of the moon for women worldwide?

This review of Nick Kristof’s book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide was written by Jutta Tobias and originally posted to her blog, From Washington to DC, on Thursday, September 10th, 2009.  Jutta is a psychologist and a traveler, trying to help improve the status quo, and currently working in DC as a lobbyist with only social science as ammunition to influence (some) Congressional staffers. She is proud to have had a couple of lines of legislative language included in the behemoth health care reform bills, making them even less environmentally-friendly to print out. Her heart belongs to the rocks and skies and seas of the American Northwest, so she may keep oscillating between Washington and DC for a while yet.

Nick Kristof had me at hello, so to speak, years ago. Not that I really met him before today, and I cannot even say that I genuinely met him this afternoon. Though we did exchange some polite words after his book launch event at the Woodrow Wilson Center, of the most readable Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. And thankfully I only figuratively fancied the man anyway; his wife Sheryl WuDunn, co-author of the book, was also there – and she is everything any sane woman would shudder to get into competition with: beautiful, eloquent, elegant, a super-smart Pulizer-prize winning philanthropist investment advisor, but it gets worse still: she may even be extremely warm, nice and funny, judging from her remarks at the event.

The reason why I’ve liked Nick Kristof for years now is that he’s simply a brilliant New York Times columnist who reports on what I most like to know more about: people in countries all over the world, especially those in upheaval and unrest, and what we in the northwestern hemisphere can do about it. And then, about three years ago, he started the annual tradition of taking a lucky young person with him on a reporting trip to Africa, after a selection process that involves writing an eloquent application essay (google ‘win a trip with nick kristof’ to apply). I had just come back from my first trip to Rwanda when I found out about this amazing opportunity, and applied, knowing that I hardly had a chance, utterly independent of my writing style – because of my extreme luck, having already spent a summer in Central Africa meant that I would not have selected me. But in my application essay, I urged Nick Kristof to take a woman with him, independent of who he’d choose. I had the sense that young women in the US would have fewer opportunities to go and experience real Africa, and that the multiplier effect of a chance to travel with Nick Kristof would somehow be greater if he chose a woman as his travel companion. No idea if he ever read my essay, or took to heart what I had to say. Yet he did make the perfect selection: he took Casey Parks with him, a young woman from an underprivileged background who hadn’t spent much time outside the US and who had all the potential that all underprivileged women hold. It’s almost unnecessary to say that Casey Parks shined her way through the 2-week trip, reporting back to us in a beautiful style that brought into full limelight her great talent.

And then Nick and his wife Sheryl wrote this book on women’s empowerment and achievement, despite all the extraordinary challenges they face, especially in developing and transition countries. The stories are colourful and moving, and they make us want to help more women, get them to believe in themselves and claim their rights. It makes so much sense to support women in development, from a humanitarian standpoint, and also from an investment perspective. Women are much safer to invest in than men, Sheryl says. Sheryl and Nick also talked about the sad fact that in so many places, women don’t have the confidence to speak up about their needs, and so their rights come last, time and again. We need to support these women in developing a voice, perhaps by speaking on their behalf until they feel safe to do this themselves (in addition to all the things they do day in, day out, to keep families and communities together and functioning).

Yet the clincher for me, and for my continued cultivation of my Nick Kristof cult, was that Nick’s first comment at the book launch was on making our advocacy on behalf of women worldwide more effective – and he referred to some of the great social psychology insights that are, sadly, underused by the humanitarian community. That made my social psychologist’s heart sing. Nick and Sheryl’s book is so moving because it allows us to make an emotional connection with the people in the stories, and in this way it helps build emotional commitment within the reader “to do something”. Nick says, the humanitarian organisations ignore the fact that people don’t get moved by issues pertaining to groups (and it’s true, even just 2 people are considered a group – so the personal connection with their individual strife is lost right there and then). And, we want to be part of something that’s successful, rather than being presented with a cosmic problem that is far too complex for us to wrap our head round (gives me a headache just to think about that one). So Nick and Sheryl, in their book, focus on different stories of different individuals (in addition to presenting all the facts and figures that would help with grant-writing and official reporting) – because they know that it’s the personal story, and the emotional bond that it creates with us, that motivates us to get involved. Sheryl was right in pointing out that the corporate world has been using this little trick so very profitably for decades, by “selling from the right side of the brain”.

These tactics can be used ethically, and help promote pro-social causes, and they don’t require expansive advertising budgets. The main thing that’s required here is a mental shift from trying to persuade an audience with lengthy, logical arguments, to appealing to the values and feelings that we all share in this world. Compassion, concern, commitment. I’ve recently created a brief summary of this type of advocacy message re-framing, available here.

Social change agents with a mission, listen up. Use the methods Sheryl and Nick apply so effectively, and grab a piece of that sky for your cause.

Free e-day is Coming on December 1st

The first edition of the Free-e-day brochure was published on October 1st.  Free-e-day is “The World’s biggest celebration of Indie Culture” and you can find out more about it by visiting the Free-e-day website.  The e-book edition of The Sentiments & other stories will be part of this celebration, but you don’t have to wait until December 1st to download and read the collection.  You can do it now!  Simply click on the image below to go directly to the download page for The Sentiments & other stories.  Once there, click the big blue button that says “Download” to get the .pdf file.  Also check out the first edition of the Free-e-day brochure for other free pieces of culture.

Advocating for a Revolutionary Consciousness: bell hooks’ Feminist Theory from margin to center

Twenty-five years ago, bell hooks offered this book to the public, her insights plain on the page and capable of blazing a trail through the minds of those with a capacity for critical consciousness.  Perhaps it’s natural that a book like this molders in the public sphere, buried under the millions of volumes of books of every genre and academic discipline and popular trend that our society, bloated on information and entertainment, produces.  Or perhaps that’s not what happened to this book at all; a quick search on amazon.com shows that the 2nd edition of this book, published in 2000, is currently ranked “#21,539 in Books”, which is actually quite good, considering amazon’s cataloged rankings reach down to 6 or 7 million.  Why then have the critical and incredibly insightful passages of this book not manifested in our shared public life?  Where is the “Revolutionary Parenting” called for in chapter 10?  How come we have still not rethought the nature of work as a society (chapter 7)?  Why do we still think largely of revolutions as critical moments in time or in terms of violence, when in her conclusive chapter 12 hooks has voiced what we all should know to be true:

Revolutions can be and usually are initiated by violent overthrow of an existing political structure.  In the United States, women and men committed to feminist struggle know that we are far outpowered by our opponents, that they not only have access to every type of weaponry known to humankind, but they have both the learned consciousness to do and accept violence as well as the skill to perpetuate it.  Therefore, this cannot be the basis for feminist revolution in this society.  Our emphasis must be on cultural transformation: destroying dualism, eradicating systems of domination.  Our struggle will be gradual and protracted.  Any effort to make feminist revolution here can be aided by the example of liberation struggles led by oppressed people globally who resist formidable powers.

Our society is as fragmented, competitive, and unable to meet human needs as ever.  When we look around us in 2009, we see a variation on the same post-WW II, post-Vietnam theme that plagued us when hooks first published this book in 1984.  An overwhelming crunch of information, entertainment, and compulsive consumerism perpetuates the atomization of the individual and works to keep us alienated and isolated from any meaningful sense of community; moreover, it holds us as slaves of a kind to an unjust economic order.  hooks wrote the book on countering our alienation, beginning to struggle against that atomization, and working together towards an emancipation of ourselves along with all people–and this is that book.  Reading it is not enough.  We must act to bring about social change, and before we can act intelligently and strategically, we must communicate meaningfully with each other.  To do that, we could take our cues from early feminist consciousness-raising groups.

Yet even in 2009, after all of the gains of the 1970s and the solidification of those gains in our culture, feminist movement remains at the margin of society.  The type of feminist movement that hooks advocates in this volume is revolutionary in the sense of that protracted struggle mentioned in the quote above.   It is revolutionary in its character of never arriving, but always recognizing that there is more work to do to create a joyful, creative, and just society.  In the following passage, hooks offers a perspective on parenting that I think generalizes out to our culture of authority and domination, which whether it includes women in its hierarchies of exploitation and force or not, remains the same:

Many parents teach children that violence is the easiest way (if not the most acceptable way) to end a conflict and assert power.  By saying things like “I’m only doing this because I love you” while they are using physical abuse to control children, parents are not only equating violence with love, they are also offering a notion of love synonymous with passive acceptance, the absence of explanation, and discussions.  In many homes small children and teenagers find their desire to discuss issues with parents sometimes viewed as a challenge to parental authority or power, as an act of “unlove.”  Force is used by the parent to meet the perceived challenge or threat.  Again, it needs to be emphasized that the idea that it is correct to use abuse to maintain authority is taught to individuals by church, school, and other institutions.”

The expectation of “passive acceptance, the absence of explanation, and discussions” is on full display in the corporate capitalist culture of America, and it is even further displayed outward through the imposition of that model across the globe as international corporations continue to “develop” the world, profiting as they do so.  But I digress.

The point hooks makes with this collection of essays is that, while the gains of feminism may be clear and visible to white, middle- or upper-class professional women who desire to participate in an economics rooted in corporate capitalism, the failures of feminist movement are clear and visible to women of color and lower-class women, and possibly to men of color and lower-class, or otherwise marginalized men.  Feminism, as hooks perceived it back in 1984, had largely become a movement whereby privileged white women declared their independence from men in order to self-actualize as individuals striving within a competitive culture–and this remains true today.  Feminism, in short, has been stalled; feminism became stunted and has been easily incorporated into the existing economic structures of hierarchy, which it began its career rebelling against.

hooks suggests that feminist movement needs to be rethought and re-engaged, and encourages us  to build an inclusive movement in which “revolutionary impulses must freely inform our theory and practice” so that we can come to come together as women and men, and as human beings opposed to classism, racism, sexism, and all forms of violence, “to transform our present reality.”

cross-posted at Deeply Problematic and Radical Readers & Feminisms for Dummies

Illustration work-in-progress: Volcanic Landscape Inked

Here’s the next image in this work-in-progress series.  I put down a layer of ink line work, using the pencil sketch under the watercolors as a rough guide, to give more definition to the mountains and add some shading to the dust plumes.  The next image will be a continuation of this line work, using finer pens to etch in some more details.