Jay Sennett's Blog, page 7
March 16, 2017
No One is Natural
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The not-natural panic defense is back. You know the one.
“Transsexualism in unnatural!” or “God made two genders only!”
When trans-hating people throw down these phrases, they are toting big guns. Woman as Womb! Gaia as Mother! Woman as Nurture! Science is Bad! God is Great!
Right.
I have a few clarifying questions for the trans-haters.
Do you use a phone? Check.
A toilet piped into a sewer line? Check.
A car? Bike? Public transportation? Check. Check. and Check.
That’s kind of unnatural, don’t you think? If we’re going to go natural, we ought to stand outside, yell really loudly, hoping our Grandma in Poughkeepsie will hear us. Then we should take a dump in the back yard and walk from wherever to Poughkeepsie to visit Grandma.
That’s natural.
Trans-haters are just as unnatural as I am.
Yes, we choose to modify our bodies, our pronouns, our names, our lives.
Trans-haters do, too. All the time. The insulin they take for diabetes, the vitamins and herbal extractions they ingest for health, the performance-enhanced running shoes they wear for weight loss, body modifications.
Antibiotics, tetanus shots, cholesterol-reducing drugs, vicodin, valium, all modifications.
Trans-haters change their names. Trans-haters change their bodies, for what is a nip and tuck or hair color or pierced ears but yet different types of body modification.
Either we’re all unnatural or none of us are. Vomiting out hypocrisy won’t change that fact.
February 24, 2017
A Fascinating Truth About Privilege
Sometime back in the late 90s I realized I had privilege and did not have privilege. How is such a thing possible? A good question given how we’ve come to characterize privilege: it is something some people have all the time, everywhere, and others do not, all the time, everywhere. But privilege exists only in context. If you stand or sit in a room by yourself, who oppresses you? Perhaps the...
Privilege and Not Privilege
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Sometime back in the late 90s I realized I had privilege and I did not have privilege.
How is such a thing possible, you might ask?
A good question given how we’ve come to characterize privilege: it is something some people have all the time, everywhere, and others do not, all the time, everywhere.
But privilege exists only in context.
If you stand or sit in a room by yourself, who oppresses you? Perhaps the voices in your head? If that is true, who then oppresses who?
Neither privilege nor oppression exists like air, all the time, everywhere.
In some contexts I have a privilege. When I interact with people in these contexts, they treat me with deference and assume I’m rich/intelligent and so on. Being white and male does this.
How do I know? People did not treat me deferentially when I lived as a woman.
These deferences I now experience remain conditional. If people know I have a past as a woman, perhaps they will retract their deference. Instead of being a white man, I become another category, another type of human being, one that can be treated without kindness or respect, potentially.
That potential becomes a possibility I must manage, always. Whether it is the TSA or an unexpected visit to the ER I can never expect the kindness of strangers. 1
Now I grant that while I perceive these possibilities as potential threats, not every transman does.
And that is okay. He isn’t wrong, nor am I. How he manages these potential threats or even if he views them as threats at all, does not diminish the possibility of the threat’s existence.
This is why the token argument – a transman isn’t threatened so you’re whining! – is just stupid.
Within every human interaction exists potentials for a range of behaviors from kindness to indifference to disgust.
Within every human interaction varieties of privilege and not privilege play out between actors.
The job of every person in a privileged position within these interactions is to enhance kindness and concern and reduce dismissive or threatening behavior.
Why? Because chances are we will find ourselves in positions where we are not privileged, and we must hope for kindness and prepare for disgust, or worse.
Namaste.
February 23, 2017
America’s First Protest Against Slavery
In 1688 four men formally protested slavery in the then American colony of Pennsylvania.
The document is short and direct.
At a Germantown monthly meeting four German Quakers, Garret henderich, derick up de graeff, Francis daniell Pastorius, and Abraham up Den grief, wrote into the minutes of the meeting the following:
There is a saying that we shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are. And those who steal or robb men, and those who buy or purchase them, are they not all alike? Here is liberty of conscience wch is right and reasonable; here ought to be liberty of ye body, except of evil-doers,wch is an other case. 1
In 1688, seven years after William Penn had received his charter to create a territory of religious freedom and tolerance, William Penn and other Quakers bought and sold slaves.
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We don’t think of Quakers as slave owners, but they were, and for quite a long while. The protest outlined by these four men was forwarded to the Quarterly meeting of Friends, then onto the yearly meeting, where it was tabled.
Quakers continued to buy and sell human beings in Pennsylvania until 1780, when the Pennsylvania Assembly passed a law calling for the gradual emancipation of slaves. All adults would continue their lives in bondage, children in slavery would do so until they were 28.
Only those unborn children would be free.
Why did Quakers take so long to end slavery?
In the early 1600s, the Delaware Valley was an outlying region of the New Netherland colony on the Hudson, governed by the Dutch West India Company and populated by Dutch and Swedes more interested in fur trapping than farming. It faced the same labor shortage that plagued New Netherland, and it found the same solution. African slaves were working there as early as 1639. In 1664, the Delaware settlers contracted the West India Company “to transport hither a lot of Negroes for agricultural purposes.”
The demand for slaves continued when the English assumed rule in 1664. The town magistrates of New Castle (in modern Delaware), then the major settlement of the region, petitioned “that liberty of trade may be granted us with the neighboring colony of Maryland for the supplying us with Negroes … without which we cannot subsist.” 2
Penn and others faced entrenched labor shortages. Slaves seemed like a solution. But they could have chosen free men and paid them.
But I think they may have not wanted to do that. Profit drives humans to do strange and repugnant acts. Why pay anyone when you can make more through human bondage?
William Penn was granted his colony in Pennsylvania in 1681, and added Delaware to it in 1682. Though he flooded the “Holy Experiment” with Quakers whose descendants would later find their faith incompatible with slaveholding, the original Quakers had no qualms about it. Penn himself owned slaves, and used them to work his estate, Pennsbury. He wrote that he preferred them to white indentured servants, “for then a man has them while they live.” 3
Also, Christianity is not inherently radical nor is it inherently conservative.
In fact, it is both. Penn wanted religious tolerance between white men and looked to Christianity to support this position. Remember Protestants and Catholics and Muslims slaughtered one another for centuries. Catholics required Jews to convert or face expulsion or worse.
Penn’s desire to create a place of religious tolerance was, in the context of the centuries-fought religious wars in Europe and the Middle East, quite provocative and radical.
But Penn, like countless other white colonists, could not extend his radical form of Christianity to blacks. At that point his radical Christianity became conservative.
So for the four men to argue that slavery was un-Christian was quite radical and unusual, particularly in 1688, when America’s foremost Quaker wanted slave labor, not free labor.
Penn’s contradictory actions reflect a very ordinary aspect of white people’s behavior in America. I’m not saying it is correct. But we will see this contradictory impulse throughout our history, and even in our own actions today.
We might be believe in a radical history of women in the U.S. and see an ongoing animus directed and enveloping women while simultaneously not possessing any understanding of how white women, particularly middle- and upper-middle-class white women, might possess an animus toward black Americans.
Both of these beliefs can, and are, true.
For white Americans to heal from the folly and lunacy of slavery’s impact on our psyche, we must teach ourselves to hold these two contradictory thoughts and remain calm.
We must also understand this contradiction makes us who we are as white americans.
Namaste.
February 22, 2017
Buddha Lives in Versailles & Dog Dung
Paris exists as a city of wild contradictions.
Versailles, the Louvre, Chanel, Monet, Manet, Haute Couture arises from the same sidewalks upon which thriving piles of dog dung live.
Some of them reside in Paris’ 1st Arrondissement, home to the Louvre, the Ritz and Place de la Concorde. Money and dog poo together.
The trash and now constant stream of pedestrians ogling their phones like bar denizens at 2 am and dog dung can frustrate.
But then Paris does what only Paris can do: Reward your side-stepping-dog-dung efforts with a magnificent – and often humble – gesture. The way the sun casts a shadow across an old boulangerie, a jaw-dropping sculpture tucked into a tiny park not found on any map, a woman dancing to a flamenco guitarist in Montmartre.
[image error]A woman dances with a red cape in Montmartre. Shot with an iPhone 6.
The profane and the sublime together, two sides of the same thing.
An exquisite leg of duck roasted just so can only be exquisite because it’s not dog dung or trash or iPhone oglers.
Conversely trash and dog piles can only be nasty and stinking and fear-inducing because they aren’t exquisite nor refined nor symbols of wealth.
One must have the other.
I was reminded on my last trip to Paris how good and evil live within one another; and how we’ve all co-created Donald Trump. This sounds like heresy, I know.
We’ve made a blood-sport out of proving how vastly inhuman Trump is, at least as compared to us.
But we’ve all lied, blustered, bullied, engaged in degrading/unthinking/stupid behaviors against classes of people different from us, denied personal responsibility and culpability. All of it. We’ve all done all of it at some point in our lives.
These actions writ large and into the Presidency of the United States do terrify me. Yet making Trump somehow different from me, like making the dog dung into some existential travesty, solves nothing and serves no one.
A country that enshrined slavery and the disenfranchisement of women in its founding document will occasionally throw out a Trump.
It’s good to be reminded of who we are and where we came from.
If we believe we are Versailles or Manet or that exquisite leg of roasted duck, it’s good to remember we need some dung in our lives to prop us up and make us shine a little brighter.
Namaste.
Buddha Lives in Versailles & Dog Crap
Paris exists as a city of wild contradictions.
Versailles, the Louvre, Chanel, Monet, Manet, Haute Couture arises from the same sidewalks upon which thriving piles of dog shit live.
Some of them reside in Paris’ 1st Arrondissement, home to the Louvre, the Ritz and Place de la Concorde. Money and dog poo together.
The trash and now constant stream of pedestrians ogling their phones like bar denizens at 2 am and dog shit can frustrate.
But then Paris does what only Paris can do: Reward your side-stepping-dog-shit efforts with a magnificent – and often humble – gesture. The way the sun casts a shadow across an old boulangerie, a jaw-dropping sculpture tucked into a tiny park not found on any map, a woman dancing to a flamenco guitarist in Montmartre.
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The profane and the sublime together, two sides of the same thing.
An exquisite leg of duck roasted just so can only be exquisite because it is not dog shit or trash or iPhone oglers.
Conversely trash and dog piles can only be nasty and stinking and fear-inducing because they aren’t exquisite nor refined nor symbols of wealth.
One must have the other.
I was reminded on my last trip to Paris how good and evil live within one another; and how we’ve all co-created Donald Trump. This sounds like heresy, I know.
We’ve made a blood-sport out of proving how vastly inhuman Trump is, at least as compared to us.
But we’ve all lied, blustered, bullied, engaged in degrading/unthinking/stupid behaviors against classes of people different from us, denied personal responsibility and culpability. All of it. We’ve all done all of it at some point in our lives.
These actions writ large and into the Presidency of the United States do terrify me. Yet making Trump somehow different from me, like making the dog shit into some existential travesty, solves nothing and serves no one.
A country that enshrined slavery and the disenfranchisement of women in its founding document will occasionally throw out a Trump.
It’s good to be reminded of who we are and where we came from. If we believe we are Versailles or Manet or that exquisite leg of roasted duck, it’s good to remember we need some shit in our lives to prop us up and make us shine a little brighter.
Namaste.
October 21, 2016
Novels are Themes
Call me late to the party on this one.
Themes drive stories, particularly novels and memoirs. Who knew?
Clearly I didn’t. And I can now see why both my fiction and memoir efforts have failed, miserably.
Last week I had the opportunity to attend “Emerging Writers Workshop,” an ongoing workshop for writers convened by the Ann Arbor District Library.
Alex Kourvo and Bethany Neal spent almost two hours discussing what theme is, how it works in conjunction with plot, and how epic bestsellers may not be well-written but, in the words of Ms. Kourvo, “the author’s nail their themes.”
Think “50 Shades of Grey” and you’ll know exactly what Ms. Kourvo and Ms. Neal mean.
If it were possible to be a writer and not know about basic writing mechanics, such as the difference between plot and theme, I am that writer. The fact that I have missed the forest has meant I am very good at the trees of writing, word choice, tense, point-of-view.
But how do I use those tools in the service of a good story?
I had not a clue until this workshop. What I did have was a vague sense that my writing meandered and bored the reader. (H/T to Ms. H. who has offered constructive feedback over the years. But not once has she ever said my writing was boring.)
October 20, 2016
Hot Cross Buns on the Way
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October 19, 2016
The Viewfinder
Consider the lowly viewfinder.
I often don’t. And I think my photography suffers for it.
Too often I just snap at what is in front of me and forget one very important fact about the lowly viewfinder: Through it we have the power to frame a subject in innovative or extraordinary ways. Instead we too often become focused on the subject of the photo and nothing else.
Framing is about as fundamental design principle as exists in photography. Will the subject be in the center of the picture? Lower third? Upper third?
Through the viewfinder we take the everything that confronts us and snap that something that makes a photo.
How many of us consider the edges of the viewfinder when we compose a shot? It is through the viewfinder – whether a traditional eyepiece over the lens or the screen of an iPhone – where we create a photo.
The viewfinder offers us a photo’s boundaries. But these edges need not constrict us. Rather the viewfinder’s edges offer us opportunities to see the world in novel and exciting ways.
Play with what is included or excluded by the viewfinder.
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As a photographer I am enchanted with what happens just beyond the viewfinder. If a viewfinder is a frame, what lies just beyond it? As viewers we fill in what is happening. Whether this photo works as a photo, I am not sure. I offer it as a way to push notions of the viewfinder.
Artistic implications
Amateurs include unwanted or unnecessary information in a photograph. Professionals do not. Through practice professional photographers use their viewfinder and their sense of design to exclude unwanted detail and emphasize only those pictorial components that support the subject matter.
Professionals move, using their viewfinders and their feet to shoot a subject from a variety of perspectives.
I’m training myself to do is MOVE THE VIEWFINDER!! Gosh I can’t tell you how many photos I’ve taken where I take just one photo. Different angles bring different perspectives. The several photos below are all of the same scene. In all of them I’ve moved the viewfinder.
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