Mining Nuggets: It's my pleasure

Quotes for today:

... from one of my favorite books, The Birth of Pleasure by Carol Gilligan:

I have been following the voice of pleasure, and it has lead me into a discussion of trauma ... but it was with girls that I saw most deeply into how the ability to trust one's experience can be systematically undermined and, at the extremes, broken as an inner compass gives way to an outer reading that is at once adaptive and misleading.

Read historically, the Garden of Eden story records the move into patriarchy; we see its hierarchy being established; God over Adam, Adam over Eve, the serpent at the bottom. It is hierarchy secured by the prohibition against knowing what you know through experience, a prohibition that creates the need for a priesthood. In the beginning, in the opening of Genesis, God is ruach - a breath, a wind, a voice, a spirit that pervades the universe. God has no image, no body, no sex, no place in the human world of male and female. Once God becomes "He," melech - king of the universe, or Father - we know we are in patriarchy.

The tale of Psyche and Cupid ends with the birth of a daughter named Pleasure. Her birth becomes a moment of epiphany when we read the myth as showing a way out of patriarchy, because a daughter holds the promise of transformation, and pleasure lies at its center. The essence of love is love, and love by its very nature is free. Freeing love means releasing it to find its own form. Like wind and water, love crosses borders and boundaries; when we fall in love, we fall into relationship and out of categories, because love is always particular. This person.

Collectively we have moved to the edge of possibility; it has become possible to envision a democracy that is not patriarchal; it is more difficult to imagine a love that is passionate without becoming tragic.

Leaving patriarchy for love or democracy sounds easy, even inviting, but it is psychically as well as politically risky; at least at first, it seems to mean giving up power and control. Hope is the most dangerous emotion; it invites us to imagine an escape from tragedy, it tempts what we have come to think of as fate. The hope of the new, the nakedness of standing without a frame heightens our awareness of vulnerability and, with it, the temptation to return at whatever cost to the known. The birth of Pleasure, like any new life, is an invitation to creativity.

Maybe love is like rain. Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential, flooding, eroding, joyful, steady, filling the earth, collecting in underground springs. When it rains, when we love, life grows. To say there are two roads, one leading to life and one to death and therefore choose life, is to say in effect: choose love. We have a map. We know the way.

There ...

... with a deep sigh, breathing in and out slowly and surely, ...

... I rest my case ...

Comments

Oh yes!

"Like wind and water, love crosses borders and boundaries; when we fall in love, we fall into relationship and out of categories, because love is always particular. This person."

That's wonderful!

Posted by: MB | August 05, 2006 at 01:04 PM