A.R. Williams's Blog, page 27

Faith & Fragility

My ex husband and I had a cross cultural, intra-faith relationship.  And by intra-faith, I mean he identified with one of the big 4 religions and I have my own idiosyncratic belief system.  He hated it when I asked questions.  I made him feel stupid.  At least that’s what he said.  I think it’s more likely that my questions made him uncomfortable.

Because what ever my question (usually starting with “why”) the answer was always that someone else – namely a religious figure of whatever stature or influence – had said this was the way it was.  He had read his holy text, but he’d never thought it through for himself.  And my questions about his belief system did not help in the effort to stay married.

It didn’t help when, standing in the shower together, I asked him if he would face judgement when God came back.

“Yes.”

“And you’ll get asked about your life and your choices, right?”

“Yes.”

“And is your religious authority of choice going to raise his hand from the back of the crowd and say ‘wait, wait, God Almighty, I got this one’ and speak for you?”

Silence.

“Well, if that isn’t how its going to go down, don’t you think you’d better come up with answers that you can stand behind?”

Silence.

Yeah.  We’ll call that a nail in the coffin of the marriage.

He could have asked me all kinds of questions about what I believe, and I could have answered them.  It wouldn’t have bothered me, because he couldn’t have pushed me any harder to come up with a defensible belief system than I pushed myself.  I know why I believe what I believe, I know why I do what I do.  My belief system isn’t so fragile that it can’t withstand a reasoned discussion.  If I had a holy text (which I don’t) you could burn that if you felt the need.  What does your act of rage have to do with my faith?

I think the more degrees of separation we have standing between ourselves and the things we believe – people, interpretative texts, cultural norms, traditions that no one questions – the more anxious and defensive we get about our faith.  When you’re confident that you can stand at judgement day (or any other day for that matter) and take complete ownership of the path that you’ve taken, then it really doesn’t matter what other people do or think.  Your direct connection to the divine/universe/source/G-d/Allah/whatever is not dependent on an external entity.

When your connection is based on rumor, hearsay, tradition, interpretation, etc…  how can you not be anxious?  If your belief system is dependent on any number of unknown external entities, then maybe the guy’s opinion down the street is a legitimate threat.  Maybe this book being burned, or that film being made, or that gay couple getting married, maybe all of that is relevant.  How would you know what mattered, or who could upend your world if your relationship to the divine wasn’t a monogamous arrangement?

Maybe it’s judgmental, but whenever I hear someone squawking about what other people are up to, I pretty much assume that the reason they’re so bothered is because their connection to their belief system isn’t intrinsic and organic, it’s a super-imposed structure that they can neither inhabit, defend, or explain.  When your belief system is organic and intrinsic, then what other people do with their free time isn’t relevant.

The further you get from owning your faith, the more fragile you are.

Just my two cents.

Enough

Enough is a crap measure.

Just sayin’

Umami

You’ve heard about the five flavors, right?  Salty, sweet, bitter, sour, and Umami.

Umami is a Japanese term for that flavor you can’t exactly define, but it’s deepens the other flavors, adds complexity, and makes everything better.  Chemically, it’s known as L-glutamate, and it was only discovered in the 1800′s.

All my favorite people have Umami.  There are no real words for it, just approximations and words about the thing itself.  Maybe “old soul” is close to what I mean, but it’s more than that.  People with layers, complexity, depth, imagination.  People that you don’t have to talk to in order for them to understand what you mean.   People that make everything just a little better, even camping in the rain.  People who laugh with you when it’s all gotten so un-funny that it’s hysterical.

Umami.

Cut Out

Generally speaking, I don’t add many people to my circle of friends.  It isn’t that I’m a snob, but I’m not for everyone and not everyone is for me.  Besides, the people I do associate with are people with whom I have meaningful connections, mutually established loyalty, and a shared sense of oddball humor.

So cutting people out of my life is an unusual experience.  So it’s twice as strange that I’ve got both a drifter and someone I’ve actively cut out all in the same year.  I don’t know how I feel about it.

In friendships where the “I’d do anything for you” clause is in place, I’ve never had it turned into an expectation of “you’ll do everything for me.”   Obviously that is a bit of an exaggeration, but it isn’t stretching it too far to say that this individual has taken and taken and taken some more, been informed of incidents where she’s pushed my boundaries too far, and has subsequently pushed them too far again.  And today I told her that, since she won’t respect my limits, I am left with no choice but to enforce them.  And then I put her phone number in the “go directly to hang up” list on my phone.

I don’t feel good about this action, but I’m in no mood to retract it either.  I’m done.

As for the drifter, I’m a little less clear.  For my part, there was a healthy dose of shame involved after a particularly disastrous interview. I didn’t mean to eff it up so badly, but I did, and I was ashamed and embarrassed.  She helped me to secure the interview in the first place and I’m sure she was not pleased that it went so far sideways either.  That makes for a healthy dose of awkward.     I’m not mad, there are no hard feelings, but with everything else that has been going on, I really don’t have the resources  to pursue it.

(Incidentally, it turns out that it is a good thing that position didn’t come my way.)

Anyone want to comment on legitimate reasons to cut off a friendship?

We Are The Opposite of People…

… We are actors.

I’ve been thinking about this in relationship to some of the writing I’ve been doing.  The opening lines are a Tom Stoppard quote.  The scene originates with The Player complaining that he has been deprived of the one thing that gives his life meaning: an audience.

So much of who we are is defined by an audience.  If no one is looking, are we rude or polite?  Powerful or weak?  Victim or perpetrator?  All of these roles, these traits, they require agreement between two people at the bare minimum.

Power in particular, is an agreement.  The monster/banker/lover says “I’m in charge,” and somewhere, we must agree.   If nothing else, our fear is an agreement that there is a cause for fear.

Defiance isn’t an answer.  Defiance exists within the paradigm and just confirms the original agreement.  Defiance depends on the relationship with the opposed: to maintain opposition, you much have the other.

What happens when our identities are dependent, both on what we defy and the expectation of an audience?  What happens to the Stock Broker when no one is there to confirm that his money matters?  This hoard of people who want to be famous, or who are famous for little more than living in the limelight and their trips in and out of jail?  I propose that obtaining identity from the notion that someone somewhere is watching, that someone somewhere cares is a fragile foundation.  They are the weakest possible example of humanity, because who they are is entirely dependent on an audience.  They say to the world “I am interesting,” and the world agrees.

Then they go home and make dinner and love their kids and play with their partners and turn their attention to things that matter and the “fascinating” individual is left on stage with not a damn person in sight.

In theory, this adds up to an opportunity to re-examine the agreements you’ve made.  What happens when you rescind your agreement that the office bully is in charge?  When you decide that the judgmental voice in your head is no longer allowed to dictate your sense of what is possible?  It isn’t just external entities that we make these agreements with.  The voice in my head that says “I’ll never run a marathon,” is only right for as long as I agree with her assessment of my possibilities.  Granted, running 26.3 miles just to prove that I can doesn’t seem like a sensible thing to do, but it illustrates the point.

Make your agreements carefully.  Walk away from your dependence on the notion of an audience.  Rely on those things you know that do not require another’s agreement.  I could be wrong, but I think we’d all be a little more stable in our own umami if we could focus on something other than the hope/fear that someone is watching.

Free Stuff

Starting at Midnight, there’s a 24-hour period in which you can find out what exactly Le Amour Prep is all about … for free.  It won’t be the last chance at getting this story for free, but it is the first chance to meet Janice, our intrepid porn school student.

I’m Not Right

So the latest release is out.

Janice, the only virgin at porn school, doesn’t really fit in.  After a disastrous day in  Madame Kandinski’s Choreographing the Blow Job class, Janice gets signed up for an internship at Demetria’s Dungeon.  With a new haircut and a black corset, Janice finds herself immersed in a world where sexual power isn’t all that it seems.

Yes, you read that right.

Yes, I know things are a little wonky between my ears.  Yes, we can add this to the list of things I hope my family *doesn’t* read.

In my defense, this isn’t exactly 50 Shades of Gray: Janice gets to be in charge.  I also hope it’s different in being funny, not laughable.

I’ll post again when I’ve set up my “free days” on Amazon…  If you’re too impatient for that (or are not bothered by the $.99 price tag) you can head on over to Amazon now.

Just substitute “America” for “Australia”

Excerpted from “Why Australia Hates Thinkers“

Perhaps there’s a link between the myth of Australian egalitarianism and anti-intellectualism. Australian history is popularly told as a story of democracy, equality and classlessness that broke from England’s stuffy, poncy, aristocratic elitism. We’re a place where hard yakka, not birth, will earn you success and by hard yakka we don’t mean intellectual labour. Although, of course, equality is a great goal, we’ve interpreted it to mean cultural conformity rather than a redistribution of wealth and power. The lowest common denominator exerts a tyrannical sway and tall poppies are lopped with blood-soaked scythes. Children learn from an early age that being clever is a source of shame. Ignorance is cool.

You Are More Beautiful Than You Know

Reblogged from Scott Williams:

The Dove Real Beauty Campaign... powerful

Be nice to yourself today.

Confessional

Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton pretty much revolutionized poetry in the 1950′s with their confessional style.  It was a revelation at the time, almost a revolution that the interior life of a woman might be worth setting down onto paper.  Somehow, it is always brand new when a woman has something to say that other people want to hear.  See Jane Austin and Virginia Woolf.

Among the female poets that I know, and I know primarily female poets, there is this ongoing struggle with subject matter and legitimacy.  The things they want to talk about are domestic in nature, the devil in the details, so to speak.  And they (we) struggle with what exactly poetry means, what it should do.  In the broader context, I think poetry is like photography.  It is an emotionally- accessible,  endlessly subject to interpretation bit of documentation about how it was right here, right now.   We’re social creatures and what one of us says is important takes on a bit more importance for everyone.

Let’s stick with this photography metaphor for a minute.  Back when photography was a brand new option, it was borderline revolutionary that someone might choose to spend time and resources documenting someone of African descent.  As disposable as we may think of an image as being today, each time a black person was depicted in photographs, it was a small step in the direction of equality.  As much as we now deplore the early representations of black people in movies, having someone of African descent on screen at all was a political statement.  And those political statements were added onto each other layer by layer.  The very first photograph of a black person was a shift in the heading of a giant cultural ship.  It changed everything, even though the person taking the picture couldn’t possibly know the ramifications.

Poetry shares similar traits.  Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath dedicating ink to what it was to be inside their skin was a beginning.  From Sexton and Plath, we got Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Tori Amos, and now Sara Bareilles.

See, this all started at the Sara Bareilles concert last night.  I like Sara Bareilles.  She’s got an amazing voice and lyrics that generally don’t insult the intelligence.  But I was sitting there – admittedly not in the best frame of mind – thinking about the necessity of self-involvement for an Artist, whatever the genre, and also hating it.

I’ve stopped writing poetry.  Taking photographs too, for that matter.  Not entirely, but mostly.  As an adolescent, I was by far the most interesting topic I could think of and I could write REAMS of the stuff documenting my angst.  Now, not so much.  Frankly, I bore myself.  Now I want philosophy, the structure underneath the surface, the muchness at the center of everything.  Which is a surprisingly difficult topic to get to in any kind of writing.

So I’m stuck between a fierce defense of the poets that I know who write about their lives and a kind of annoyance at the singer/songwriters of the world who can’t seem to broach any topic but themselves: their angst, their deserving, their hurt.

Maybe this is the difference:  The poets I know are writing without judgement.  They are kind of emotional journalists, achingly present in their own lives with a curiosity that has its origins somewhere before the knowledge and defense of self.  They treat the facts of their lives as an anthropologist might – documenting the nuances as a third party, unwilling to speak to right or wrong.  There’s a compassion there, for everything.  And its done without posturing, without a wink to the audience to make sure we all know how clever this turn of phrase is.  It’s the difference between feigned humility and the real thing, which is always a little bewildered to come to someone else’s notice.  It isn’t that they believe themselves to be so interesting, but that these are the subjects that they can touch and taste and struggle to get right in words: mortality, laundry, fidelity, motherhood, light, shadow, laundry, love.

Which is neither here nor there, and is in no way intended to diminish Ms. Bareilles’ talent, but simply to say that there are those whose company I’d pick first: Alison, Naomi, Jacqueline, Dfiza, Miriam…  Actually, honestly, I’d trade any number of nights in Ms. Bareilles’ company for one night with any of the above.