Animal Earth Right

Who are the walking dead

2011-10-31T16:11:00.000-07:00

I totally get walking through cemeteries at Halloween to get into the scary mood.
What I don’t get are all these people on TV going to places like Sanatoriums and prisons in search of ghosts. If I went there I would feel sad when I saw all the devices and isolation rooms that caused so much suffering to so many people.
This aspect seems to be lost on these ‘thrill seekers’, who use this horror to satisfy their own desires. Is it too much to say that people who feed off the misery of others,(even from their past) who see it as an opportunity to satisfy themselves participate in a form of human (spirit) cannibalism? Just who are playing the part of the ‘monsters’ on this day?. Would any one entertain the idea of going through the Auschwitz camp in search of ghostly thrills? Yet Auschwitz exists in the form of slaughterhouses, factory farms (and all farms that murder animals) and our supermarkets are filled with body parts like morgues. These are the things that haunt me.

Tom Otterness and vegan transformative Justice

2011-10-17T18:51:00.000-07:00

• In 1977 artist Tom Otterness adopted a dog from a shelter, tied it to a fence, and killed it with a gun. He recorded this event and made it into a continuous 30 second loop. He called it “Shot Dog Film”.
• Tom went on to create ‘whimsical’ sculptures which are on display in many cities.
• In 2007 his “Shot Dog Film” came back into the limelight and Art facilities came under protest (by the public and by animal interest groups) for buying or considering to contract for his art. Otterness issued an apology for the first time and an gave an ‘explanation’:

"Thirty years ago when I was 25 years old, I made a film in which I shot a dog. It was an indefensible act that I am deeply sorry for. Many of us have experienced profound emotional turmoil and despair. Few have made the mistake I made. I hope people can find it in their hearts to forgive me.”
He called also called it “an indefensible act …“inexcusable,” the product of “convoluted logic,” and something he did out of “anger at [him]self and at the world.” He has asserted that it was influenced by “the context of the times and the scene I was in.”

• Many animal rights activists believe that we should not focus/limit our protest, education, and demands for change around specific or ‘single’ animal issues. Rather we should take every opportunity available to focus on the issue of *all use* of *all animals* by human beings, challenging, transforming, and doing away with the ‘domination ideology’ that any of them are resources for human ends. This would lead to our recognizing and respecting all nonhuman sentient beings as individuals with their own equal and inherent value.
• I’m not going into too deep a discussion here as to whether I agree and accept all of the concepts and assumptions that I think are made regarding the single issue debate. But in the case of the artist vs. the protesters I do feel that two 'single issue' criticisms pertain.
• I have seen several essays and comment sections that (rightly) point out the ethical inconsistency of singling out this incident as different than the practice of the exploitation and killing of animals for food, clothing, cosmetics, entertainment and any other unnecessary( can be replaced by other resources or done without) human end. This is not to lend any legitimacy to the dog killing by burying it amongst 'accepted' killing, but an opportunity to reflect on the rationality of any killing.People are consumers who are complicit in the hiring of others to kill animals for no (truly) justifiable reasons.Their consumption of animal products are the reason animal industries exist.The belief systems that we as humans hold onto regarding our 'relations' with animals rationalize our continued exploitation of them.
. I am not interested in labeling those who both eat animals and protest the treatment of others as 'hypocrites'.There is a socialized disconnect that needs to be rectified. I also do not accept the arguement that only practicing ethical vegans have the right to make claims that intentional and unnecessary harm to all animals is wrong.The truth lies in the principles, not the practitioner's behavior. Thus flesh-eaters that say it is wrong to shoot helpless dogs are still right. What is vital is that animal rights advocates start with people's care about dogs and expand on that to include all animals. Likewise use 'disgust' and expand upon that (without resorting to a welfare-improvement conclusion).
• The criticisms of single issues include 1- making it appear that one particular exploited species is more deserving of our intervention- petified animals, seals, dolphins, whales etc and 2-that the abuse in question is more reprehensible on a moral scale than other creatures’ abuses.
• So in the case of Otterness, we have the situation outlined as heinous based on the fact that it was a dog and that it was for art.
• Point one-It was a dog, an animal that is labeled, recognized, and legitimized in our society as a valued member, making its death seem *more* immoral than the deaths of other species.
• Point two-The end goal was for art, as if this end goal made the act of killing the dog *more* immoral.
• Regarding the first point -The temptation and the danger for animal rights advocates is to fall into the mindset trap and align too quickly with 'general public' protesters-the majority of them quite likely to be flesh-eating, skin-wearing, circus-going individuals that happen to be mad that a petified animal was ‘needlessly killed’ and that the individual should be set apart from them and held accountable. They want Otterness to be labeled something that draws a line between their use and his use, labeling his behavior ‘sociopathic’ and criminal while their behavior is preserved as normal, natural, and necessary. An alignment with this would do nothing to challenge the status quo.This is also true when we single out a person in the animal industry who 'extra abuses' animals, punching them on the way to dehorning, debeaking, and slaughter. Once we rid of this 'abuser', the status quo animal processors go about their sanctioned business.
• Regarding the second point, I think the implication is that, because the dog was killed for art, and ‘merely art’, that the killing was somehow more inexcusable. This points to the speciesist notion that his death was more of a ‘waste’. It is comparable to when people say what a waste it is to only use the shark’s fin and throw the body overboard, vs. the more comprehensive use of a cow’s body. The notion is that it served both a limited purpose and that the purpose (ends) somehow did not justify the means (shark fin soup,killing of the dog for art).
• A vegan philosophy does not see animals as resources and thus rejects any view that their various uses should be seen on a continuum of wasteful to non wasteful exploitation.
• Relatedly people have implied that it is more inexcusable and wasteful because it served no greater purpose beyond ‘self-expression’ which is equated with personal indulgence, *unlike* killing for a communal purpose –clothing ,feeding, and safely medicating society via animal testing. Yet exploiting animals for these ends if and when they are achievable by other methods is likewise a narcissistic indulgence.
• How do we define art and self-expression? Many call cooking meals an art, or designing fashion clothes artistic expression-all of which are done at great and prolonged suffering of animals, where a single gunshot would be a merciful alternative. How many artists use brushes made of animal hair, or use paints containing gelatin and other animal products? Art is not merely self expression, but communication to others, to stir something within. Its goal is not usually limited to self-stimulation. I do take issue with ‘artistic license’ that seeks to see and use any and all resources as a-moral fashion fodder, or ‘fair game’ to create/break boundaries in their artistic, humancentric works. But it is important to remember that ‘Normal’ people, artists and cooks alike, use animals and the earth as their resources and ‘ingredients’.
• How many animals live out their lives in misery after their value as ‘actors’ in the entertainment industry (commercials, movies, Sea World).Several films have been made that include animal suffering and killing for our entertainment (Animal Planet, Survivor, Man vs.wild, Apocalypse Now, The Color Of Pomegranates). How many people seek entertainment from actions that have visible signs of animal suffering- Bullfights, rodeo wrangling of calves, snake feeding time at zoos? Do people obtain pleasure from the knowledge of the pain in these animals or do they look past it by calling the animals ‘athletes and competitors”?

http://98bowery.com/punkyears/punk-art-catalogue-section-three.php

• Otterness stated that his behaviors were a part of the ‘times and contexts’ of those days. He was a part of the 1977 art-punk movement-challenging the status quo like all ‘punk’ was meant to do. Otterness chose (at the expense of the innocent dog) to focus on the human social relations around him. He sought to out-punk the punks: Be rejected by the rejecters and make *them* appear to be the status quo for doing so. (They were right to renounce this violent work and maintain a standard). He did something that many vegans and animal rights people are accused of regularly- going to the ‘extreme’ to challenge the very concept of the ‘boundaries’.He did so at the expense of a life. However animal rights challenges the type of boundaries that unfairly bind non humans from their freedom of expression and flourishing.When the art guild rejected Tom's film, they were not being the 'status quo', they were upholding a baseline of morality. Likewise, animal rights attempts to uphold this basic line and help people to step back from the status quo/normalized extremism of animal exploitation.
• It is possible that Otterness 1-used the dog as a symbol of ‘man’s best friend’ 2- used the dog as an ingredient or step towards a bigger goal (therefore looking past the dog as focus) 3- which was to create another scene of violent reaction - disgust in the audience watching the film to 4- then photograph the reaction and cause yet another *live* reaction via the ‘assault’ of the waiting photographers. The art ‘piece’ could go on living…transcending itself via the continued camera recording of each reactionary reverberation. Each new recording of the last filming would/could become the next ‘art’ piece. Charles Patterson in his book 'Eternal Treblinka' noted that what we do to animals, we do to ourselves. Our violent ways with each other has its roots in violence and domination of animals (throughout history). The Otterness film condenses this into a sequential series of violence that starts with an animal and extends to humans...both are objectified and assaulted.
• Otterness used the camera as well as his ‘anger’ to reduce his connection and empathy for others, just as we look at animals behind a societal lens that serves to distance us, objectify them , and do terrible things for some ‘larger goal’. Thus vivisectors, slaughterhouse workers, medical research students, fur farmers all numb themselves in some way in order to do what they do and still see themselves as ‘good people’.
• I find it more disturbing that ‘good’ 'happy meat' farming people can raise animals, name them, give them good lives, and then one day, when the animal walks up to greet them, they are met with a knife across the throat. That is calculated betrayal that is not the result of anger, and perhaps is even more 'unforgivable'.
• In this regard, at least Otterness was perhaps a bit more honest in his self assessment that his empathy was disconnected by his anger and egocentricism. We need to learn to stop seeing the world through the lens, put down the 'camera', not be a product of the multigenerational “times and contexts” (as Otterness explained it) and use rebellion in the service of responsibility.
• What Otterness perhaps later recognized was that he was really being propelled by the energy of open-ended anger and delayed developmental rebellion. His calculated steps to set up “Shot Dog Film” required a type of pro-active (vs. reactionary) aggression resulting in convoluted, masochistic and sadomasochistic behavior shared with and reinforced with his perceived ‘peers’.
• I believe Michael Vick shared a similar story in that he explained his behavior as a socialization process beginning in his childhood. He went on to gain his personal brand of pleasure at the expense of an animals just as we get our personal brand of pleasure at their expense as well.
• It is not enough to see (or dismiss) their behavior as the product of their own local brand of ‘neighborhood culturization', (although we are all socialized into our animal-exploiting behaviors). Both Vick and Otterness grew up in a society that sees dog torture and killing as wrong. Our society’s love affair with dogs makes criminals of those who would ‘cruelly’ exploit them. You can try and hold these two accountable on the fact that they were raised in the larger culture that would see their behavior as deviant. One could try to say that Otterness was more consciously negligent because of his cognizance of our norms with dogs and the fact that (unapproved) cruelty toward them is considered criminal by law…. Although there are many abuses towards animals that are considered ‘lawful’ that do not make such practices ethical.
• At this point however I should mention that although we have spent time with dogs to see their individual personalities (something that cows and pigs have also) our society does in fact exploit dogs in terrible ways, as ultimately they are viewed as and legally regarded to be property (whether loved beyond such a limited view or not)- they are experimented on in all manner of ways. I have seen pictures of dogs as research subjects that rival the worst of Vick’s dogs, and they number in the hundreds of thousands. They are trained for war duties, getting injured, killed and ultimately left behind or euthanized when the war/usefulness is over. Then there were the Greyhound races. Dogs have always been bred to serve some function for mankind.
• How a culture informs our relations with animal others (food or pets) does not address the primary wrongness of using animals in and of itself. If there were green and red slaves, and our country loved red slaves while another country ate them but loved green slaves, it would not be enough to settle it with an explanation of ‘cultural preference’. The slavery itself should be questioned, just as the murder, mutilation, and enslavement of humans all over the world via cultural belief systems should be.
• I can’t say that I wouldn’t protest current art works that cause animal suffering. In San Francisco an artist filmed a goat being bludgeoned ( he later justified it by saying that it was going to be killed anyways) and an artist in Spain chained a dog to a wall, allowing it to starve to death and called it ‘art’. I know that I would still use that protest to make an appeal for generalized vegan ethics.
• It is impossible to look into the soul of Tom Otterness to know whether his apology is genuine. His subsequent art does not appear to reflect any exploitation themes. Yet people are calling for a boycott on his works, disavowal of his potential contracts with art agencies, and even a proposal that he donate some of his earnings to dog shelters.

• There is an idea that Otterness should pay some sort of restitution (restorative justice) for his crime against the dog. Then there could be “closure and healing”. I don’t know if there would be closure or healing if someone simply pays a financial sum. I don’t want to see a closure if it means closing an opportunity to challenge the status quo, or cover up a ‘wound’ on a fault line that divides us between our moral selves and the animals caught within. There are boundaries that need to remain broken, so that all animals have the chance to be valued as individuals and no longer be the subjects of betrayal. This can become the opportunity for transformative justice, to first see how we all discriminate, all use our privilege over others, all participate in violence, the type of emanating violence that the Otterness project hinted at. Let’s help life stop imitating this art.

Aftershock quotes Pt 4

2011-09-03T18:31:00.001-07:00

• The elements of rescue for traumatized people—sanctuary, memory and mourning, connection, and making peace—also apply to traumatized and traumatizing societies.
• At some level, we all know that it is connection rather than separation that will save us.
• Memory is a kind of connection. Remembering is the opposite of dismembering. Just like traumatized individuals, traumatized societies need to recall to themselves their lost or disowned parts.
• To get there, we’ll need to restore all of our severed connections, including those within ourselves.
• I struggle with shame, which is a feeling that makes you want to disown yourself. As long as I exempted aspects of myself from compassion, I could not be trusted. Always, there would be the risk of dumping the despised aspects of myself onto somebody else.
• I realized something we all need to know: Empathy begins at home. In order to truly empathize with others, you have to be able to make contact with yourself. And yet, because our emotions are so social, the ability to have empathy for yourself often depends on upon getting empathy from others. So, the problem and the solution are circular.
• As usual with such problems, the answer to the question, “Where to start?” is: Anywhere. You can enter a roundabout at any point and be assured of eventually getting to where you need to go.
• This is where hope resides—in the moments when cycles of violence begin to give way to circles of empathy.
• ...it’s easy to see that the violence won’t stop until people are healed, but that people can’t be healed until the violence stops….traumatized people live in traumatizing material and cultural circumstances.
• In the absence of genuine connections to each other and the ecosystem, it’s easy to trick us into doing violence on behalf of constructed collective entities.
• …unlike trauma, the strenuous exercise of facing the truth always leaves you stronger. Whatever energy has been wasted by evading the truth comes back to you.
• If you or people like you have been dehumanized or “treated like an animal”, it may be particularly difficult for you to think about yourself as an animal or recognize your own power over animals as unjust.
• Over time, not-being-an-animal can come to feel like a very important aspect of both personal and group identity…..the issue of power over others is so problematic, especially for those of us who have unjust power in some areas of life, but are unjustly disempowered in others.
• I was asking the victims of one form of oppression (sexism) to recognize themselves as perpetrators of another (racism). It’s a tricky task to see yourself in both positions at once. It’s particularly difficult to see yourself as an oppressor if you’ve been the victim of a hate crime…
• I think that every white woman knows in her bones…that she is both hurt and helped by racism.
• …thinking of themselves and almost everybody else as being in a mixed position- held back by poverty but given a leg up by whiteness, stomped down by both racism and homophobia but still having male privilege..
• What a sickening feeling to be the oppressor when one has felt the lash oneself! Fear of that feeling keeps us from facing our complicity in all kinds of atrocities, including those perpetrated by people on our nonhuman kin.
• Any energy used to hide from or distort the truth is energy not available for activism and other reparative endeavors. Any gaps or warps in our view of the truth make our analysis less valid and our activities less likely to achieve their aims.
• When we split ourselves off from vivisected animals, we distance ourselves from their helplessness. We say: It could never happen to me. But it could.
• Our denial of our animal vulnerability forces us to turn our backs on tortured creatures also prevents us from doing what we need to do to protect ourselves and other people from such atrocities.
• Nobody can work on all of the problems that plague us. But we can all work within an integrated approach that understands how racism, sexism, and speciesism are interconnected.
• We can all make sure that our efforts on behalf of some of our fellow animals are not undercut by our behavior towards others. That means…that feminists ought not to be eating hamburgers and animal liberationists ought not to be wearing shoes sewn in sweatshops.
• Most of us, for good reasons, set aside some of the things we used to believe. That process of undoing destructive socialization ought to be active, ongoing, and deliberate.

Aftershock quotes Pt 3 (of 4)

2011-09-02T06:41:00.000-07:00

• By ‘breaking’ children and then encouraging them to fear and forget their own wild feelings, we discourage their natural empathy for other animals, thereby socializing them into the exploitation of animals.
• This traumatic process of suppression of empathy leads children to become the kind of adults who can wear clothes sewn in sweatshops, enjoy tax breaks paid for by cuts in social services to needy children…thus, trauma leads to more trauma.
• At the heart of the problem is alienation, separation, and disassociation. We are cut off from the earth, other animals, each other, and ourselves.
• This disconnection allows us to do terrible things (which) increases the distance between us and within ourselves…and the cycle of traumatic violence continues.
• “Social construction” is the …process by which people collectively create categories, like gender or species, and then come to perceive those categories as natural.
• The idea that animals are objects, and thus need not to be consulted before breaking their bodies, is a social construct that dates back to the days when all daughters were the property of their fathers.
• A structure founded upon the fault line of a lie cannot help but be inherently unstable and dangerous. As long as such lies define our societies, we will continue to be unconsciously cruel to one another, as well as reckless with our own bodies and the resources we need to survive.
• Environmental catastrophe may have started the trauma cycle back in prehistory. Traumatized communities tend to embrace cultural practices that are bound to reproduce the trauma across generations. They also export trauma to other communities by means of invasion and other forms of violation.
• …A defense mechanism called ‘identification with the aggressor’…the child who is hurt, or sees another hurt, consciously or unconsciously allies herself with the aggressor in order to share his power. This understandable antidote to the feelings of helplessness has driven much of recorded human history.
• …The majority of us side with the butcher rather than risk being made into meat. Through such identifications, we construct our characters and our cultures.
• Traumatized cultures tend to forget the calamities that brought them into being, burying the memories along with the bodies. In order to make sure the bodies stay buried, trauma culture tends to make knowledge itself a kind of sin.
• Dissociation is division. In trauma culture, people are so cut off from each other, their feelings, and their own empathy for themselves that they truly do not feel, or even perceive, the impact of their actions upon others. They numbly go about their days, not noticing the pain they inflict on others.
• Fear is foundational to trauma culture. Traumatized people often alternate between numbness and overstimulation, both which are reactions to fear.
• Overstimulation…can take the form of frenetic attention to distractions such as patriotism or consumption.
• Numbness includes not only insensitivity to feelings, but also a tendency to freeze in the face of emergencies.
• As communities and individuals, we are at once overstimulated and underactive…expressed as the same behavior, as when frantic getting and spending of money precludes the possibility of meaningful activity.
• …imagine the cumulative cognitive impact of growing up in a traumatically chaotic environment…my students say that they feel helpless…in relation to the problems that face their communities and the wider world. Senselessness and helplessness are key elements of trauma culture.
• When the world makes sense to people and they feel that their efforts might make a difference, then they act.
. Confusion combined with a sense that action is futile understandably leads to passivity.

Aftershock quotes Pt.2

2011-08-29T05:53:00.000-07:00

• You can see that your body-yourself- is literally made up of things that used to be outside of you.
• The interactions between nature and nurture begin before you are born, multiplying each other so their effects cannot be untangled.
• Besides being physical, emotions are always social. Your very first feelings were signals to other people and were experienced by you in the context of other people. Their reactions became part of you, helping to determine how you would feel about your feelings as well as how you would express them. We are used to thinking of our feelings as private property rather than social processes…
• …your nervous system was and continues to be shaped in part by other people. This is one more reason to see people as systems of relationships rather than isolated individuals.
• We use words to weave our experiences into a story that makes sense. When you do not or cannot put something into words, it hangs around outside the story of your life. Tales that are not integrated into the story of your life can’t become part of your past.
• Traumatic memories tend to stand alone, disconnected from their contexts and from other memories. They are more strongly sensory and much more difficult to express accurately in words.
• When we find words for traumatic memories that are stored as somatic sensations, we move the memory from one place to another in the brain.
• …healing processes of reintegration …require an empathic and attentive audience.
• We don’t want to hear those cries. Fear of feelings is at work in two ways here. First, because we’ve numbed ourselves both to the pain of those upon whose exploitation our pleasures depend on and to our consequent loneliness, we’re used to just not seeing suffering. When we do catch a glimpse, we turn away for fear that sympathy with suffering might lead to a flood of forgotten feelings.
• Secondly, we’re afraid of our own helplessness. We don’t want to be reminded that things done to others could be done to us too. We don’t want to confront our own relative powerlessness in relation to the amoral profiteers who currently rule the world. To act is to risk failure, shame, sadness, and rage.

Aftershock quotes part 1

2011-08-23T07:16:00.000-07:00

I've decided to post some quotes from Pattrice Jones' book "Aftershock-Confronting trauma in a violent world". I'll probably do it in two or three sections.

• …this book explores the culture of trauma that people have created through our violent exploitation of the earth, other animals, and each other.
• We fear our feelings because they remind us of our animal selves. In elevating ourselves over other animals and out of the world, we’ve created schisms within ourselves as well as between ourselves and the rest of the natural world.
• Three years into my research, I found myself back in prehistory, looking at the intersection of patriarchy (male rule) and pastoralism (animal herding) and trying to explain how and why some people became so crazy as to believe themselves to be different than and thus superior to all other animals.
• You become who you are by making choices rather than because of some pre-existing nature….No, you can’t be a peaceful person who happens to act violently.
• Since your choices not only determine who you are but also help create the world in which other people live, they ought not to be taken lightly.
• When we refuse to recognize our own physical limitations or expect ourselves to be exempt from the emotional factors that affect other animals, we come dangerously close to the mind over matter mentality that leads to biotechnology and other efforts to reshape the natural world according to our fantasies of omnipotence and control.
• Often, activists hesitate to talk or even think about their own feelings because the suffering of others is comparatively so much greater.
• Confronting danger, hostility, or the injury of others over and over again can cause stress to accumulate in the muscles and the mind. These cannot be wished away by comparison to the greater sorrows of others.
• The first step is to remember that you are an animal and that animals have feelings. The feelings associated with post-traumatic stress and depression are the normal responses of an organism subjected to unnatural stress.
• People are open systems, meaning that we are constantly changing in response to external forces, as well as relentlessly taking in and letting go of elements…
• After a loss or dreadful awakening, we may feel nostalgic sorrow for who we were before we endured or learned a terrible thing. At the same time, the fact of constant change means that hope is always possible.
• Like flowering plants and pollinating bees, we have our own identities but are not possible without the aid of other beings.
• Most of us like to think of ourselves as unitary beings with clear boundaries. You may find it unsettling and liberating to realize that you are a process rather than an object.
• When we affirm that we are our bodies but deny that our bodies are property, we undermine one of the most destructive ideas in history; that people are something other than animals.
• When we affirm that our bodies are systems within systems, we undermine another dangerously divisive idea; that people can and should be separate from the rest of the world.
• ..unnatural divisions are both causes and effects of trauma. Ruptured relations create conditions that lead to trauma. Trauma creates further fractures, both within and between people and their natural and social environments.
• The isolation of human animals from their enveloping ecosystems leads to pollution and manipulation of nature by people.
• The self-deception and suppression of natural sympathy required to perpetrate or enjoy the products of such cruelties leaves people lonely and out of touch with themselves.
• What we believe about human nature delimits what we believe to be possible for ourselves, others, and the world we share. If we believe that people are ‘naturally’ this way or that, we will be unlikely to try and get people to change their ways…
• Ideas about human nature can become self-fulfilling prophecies…the myth that war is part of human nature...leads people to be less likely to join efforts to stop war. So it is very important for us to interrogate our ideas about human nature.
• The idea that we are an especially special species is widespread. We are so determined to set ourselves apart that we make up stories and distort reality.

.•When, where, and why did some people decide that they were something more special than every other species of animal? What led them to sever their kinship ties with other creatures, setting themselves apart as isolated and would-be rulers of the earth? The first people to "break" or "domesticate" didn't leave written records to let us know what they were thinking. But the enviromental evidence suggests a simple answer : trauma.

. At different times in different places, people have responded to catastrophe by protectively exempting themselves from the rules that govern the rest of the world.
• How many economic crashes have resulted from the bizarre belief that unlimited growth is possible?

Single and central issues

2011-08-15T14:53:00.001-07:00

Perhaps there doesn't have to be such thing as a 'single issue'. Instead, look at each as a single piece of a puzzle or a fragment that can be put (back)together with a vegan-organizing mind. The whole picture will be a composite of all animals.

It is said that going after single issues is like batting down leaves, and without striking the roots, new 'leaves' of exploitation will grow. But if you strike down enough leaves, the tree also weakens. It is good to work in tandem at both.

'Steps' no matter how big or small, should only be called such if they are part of a progressive, ethical direction. Otherwise,they may be (at best) lower carbon foot prints and singular dents on the surface of injustice.

On the beaten path

2011-08-15T14:48:00.001-07:00

Excusitarians minimize their behavior by placing it on a continuum of 'greater' vices. "at least I don't do heroin,...abuse my children" etc. Its no different with "at least i don't eat meat from factory farms...". Then they tag veganism on the other far end with the word 'purist', again to make their behavior look like a balanced compromise. Its all to detract from taking responsibility for changing actions that cause unnecessary and unjust harm to others.

Taste the love

2011-08-15T14:45:00.001-07:00

The happy meat producers claim that they raise their animals with love and care before ending their lives and cutting up their flesh. Sometimes they even name them. But do they really ever see them as individuals, knowing from the beginning how their lives will be cut short. Is it a different 'care' seperate from the love they have love their dogs, cats, and parrots.Is the love different by degree? They can see personality in all animals, yet they can kill one while continuing to love the other.

If they really claim that care and love for both meat and pet animals is possible, then they should be able to be alright with the concept of raising cats, dogs, and parrots in ways that meets their needs( companionship, play etc), and then killing them so they can sell their 'happy meat' to people in countries who eat cats, dogs, and parrots but don't want factory farmed flesh.

Kindred spirits

2011-08-15T14:43:00.001-07:00

In Miyazaki's movie "Spirited Away", Chihiro's parents are transformed into pigs by a witch. She cannot distinguish them from the crowd of other pigs (destined for slaughter) and they cannot communicate to Chihiro. Any of those pigs could contain her parents. It raises the central issue - to first acknowledge that someone special exists within any of those animals, causing us to hesitate to do anything harmful to them. Then we come to see that, beyond the personal attachment to the human personality contained within, we recognize the potential attachment to a personality that the animal possesses. Thirdly, we can come to see that each animal is the subject of its own life beyond anything that we (have to )form an attachment to ,in order to understand and appreciate.
We should be just as aware, sensitive, and respectful of each being as if each contained a person special to us. This is not being anthropomorphic. Just as we should respect fellow human strangers whom have their own lives, we should do the same for beings different in body and voice, but similar in their desire to live. The spell is not cast over other beings, but cast over us by society , clouding our minds from seeing them clearly for who they are and what we already share.

A bird in the hand

2011-06-20T13:02:00.001-07:00

• I don’t live an extraordinary life. I really don’t have the freedoms to pursue and create interfaces with animal-human rights. I live a normal life and my hands are full with children, work, and all kinds of responsibilities and scheduled tasks. I’m OK with that (for now).
• I find it useful in the sense that as a ‘regular’ person; I still encounter situations that reflect both what I would do as part of my character (i.e. before becoming officially vegan) and the incorporation and normalization of vegan living. I would want everyone and anyone to be able to identify with that, not just people who have spent time reading animal rights theory or in social circles with other vegan people, or have those opportunities to be involved in more profound animal advocacy.
• Reaching people ‘where they are at’ with animal relations (and use)sometimes comes from a common encounter from which you draw out the depth. ‘Common’ experiences have become more profound in their sensory/visceral/moral input as the vegan way of living becomes the reflexive way of knowing . I am thankful for this ‘burden’ as part of it involves the challenge of integrating, interfacing, and transacting with the normal life-space of others with my life-space encounter as a vegan. Because I only have access to normal encounters, I also make the most of them by writing about them.
• I live through the depth of the encounter in immediate time, yet through a process later of writing it down; it may seem to the reader that I ‘added’ depth later to the situation. In some ways the depth becomes clearer (to me) as I articulate it in words, so yes, it does expand via description in some ways.
• I’m sure that the following ‘encounter’ is a universal one and the emergent nature of it helped me to confirm that my pre and current vegan foundation was immediately at work in my perceptions, feelings, and behaviors in the lived, unfolding moments.
• One of our students brought a baby bird to school. He had it curled up in the shirt he was wearing, pulling the bottom half of his shirt up to form a small pouch. He said that he had rescued the baby from his cat the night before. It wasn’t a newborn, for her eyes were open and its feathers had progressed slightly beyond the downy stage.
• The bird was young and did not resist our touch or act scared. Yet it is this first primary encounter between human and nonhuman animal that always strikes me the same way: When wild animals ‘face off’ with humans (deer, foxes.) it’s as if two worlds that don’t go together have an awkward encounter. This uneasy encounter feels more normal when one is outdoors, just walking about. It was fairly regular when I was a child in my backyard. Where the interface feels even less normal and exceedingly ridiculous is when we try to interface with animals as if it was as natural for us to be there or be 'like them'. If we could hear their thoughts they would probably wonder why we are pretending/mimicing their actions towards one another where it 'belongs'. They would say "What do you think you are doing? We have to eat each other.What is your excuse?"
. It continues to look and feel more unnatural and immature as we age, as if *we* as a race resist leaving the nest and continue in an immature dependency upon animals for sustenance. I think that this is where I feel most comfortable understanding the connection between animal use and adult perpetrators (this connection hidden from view by society of course). We put on animal masks and pretend to be a part of their (survival) world, when we have no business being there. The eye to eye contacts with wild animals and the fumbling interactions tell me all I need to know and feel about this. I perceive this no differently with other animals that look seemingly entrenched in our man made enclosures-aquariums, farms, and zoos.
• I knew that a bird this young was perhaps still being fed by a mother. This was a primary thought central to my figuring out how to proceed with my emotional/cognitive preparedness for her life and /or death.
• Throughout all of this I was already thinking about the bird’s likely demise. This thinking through the management of its life and death as an adult vs. a child is pivotal. I wonder if we use/misappropriate this coping/stewardship mechanism to allow us to accept the “place” of death and ‘life cycle’ in the use of animals as our food.
• I put it in a box and she accepted a few drops of water from a spoon. This was encouraging that perhaps it would accept food, should I discover its type. I knew that this bird needed to eat soon and continuously in order to have the small chance of living. The problem was that I didn’t know if this bird was a seed or insect eater. I put the bird in my office, and another staff got a scarf and placed the chick on top of it. It seemed to settle in better after this.

• One of the hardest decisions was whether to gather some worms to feed it, should it turn out to be an insect eater. I don’t have animals in my house that require live food, and yet here I needed to figure out whose life mattered more. Another staff person went outside and had gathered in a styrofoam cup an earthworm, a caterpillar, and a slug.

• I mashed up a garbonzo bean with some water and offered it on a spoon to the baby, who promptly rejected it. A staff offered to try and feed it a worm, but it was not successful. They suggested that the worm be cut up, but I couldn’t bring myself to do this or leave it to another person to do. Luckily, the exhausted chick went to sleep which put off having to decide anything.

• In the time that the bird was sleeping, I left and came back to my office to see all three creatures in the cup crawling across the rim in search of a way out. Their lives had been disrupted due to this event; they in their moment of displacement looked no different than the bird sleeping in the box next to them.

• When the baby bird woke up I felt some urgency in getting her fed, and against one aspect of my being I did try to spoon the worm into her mouth. She opened her mouth and I did feel some happiness/hope. She did not swallow however and the worm kept falling out.

• In those next brief moments that I re-tried to feed her, the bird’s energy seemed to drop. When I tried to sit her up, I noticed that her legs did not respond, and then I had the comprehension that life was leaving her body. She died in the following moments.

• I had a mix of relief and apprehension. Even in my good intentions I wondered if my actions of trying to feed her hastened her to a stressful death vs. letting her quietly expire through starving.

• It was during this wondering that I recalled my cockatiel’s death 10 years ago. I had Kahlil for 23 years and now he was sick and fragile. The vet had given me a nebulizer to administer to him that morning following a trip to the animal hospital the night before. That morning he was near his lamp light and looking comfortable. The stress I put him through in the next few minutes (to get the nebulizer treatment done) probably led to his dying that day. It was too much for his heart. Now here again my fumbling attempts to intervene made her final moments come prematurely and stressfully.

• I took the bird home and buried her that weekend. While it felt normal to put her back into nature where she belonged, once Kahlil was buried it bothered me on cold rainy nights to think of him out there in the elements. Yet Kahlil as a bird in his own right should not have ever needed my relationship, had human beings decided not to pet-ify animals. My experiential encounter with both birds should (in a right world) have been the same.

• Three weeks prior to the baby bird encounter, I found a ‘pet’ mouse walking along the edge of a building. It was fairly beaten up and very hungry/thirsty. I brought him home and gave him all the comforts a domestic mouse could want. He died several days after the baby bird encounter, and it looked like a heart attack since he had been quite busy on his wheel the night before. In all three cases I can only take solace in that I had tried to do the right thing for them, and I continue to try and make things right for any animal I encounter. People seem willing to do this for animals hurt or in need crossing the road, but they don’t connect it to the animal on their plate when they get home.

• Wild or domesticated, all animals need our current attention because contrived circumstances have made them dependent on our actions, whether we directly transact with them or not.. We need to bring back the existentially awkward interface between humans and animals, especially in light of their continued domestication and exploitation. Away from the human house, the cockatiel, baby robin, and mouse all share the common ground.

Quest...

2011-06-17T14:01:00.000-07:00

OK, I'm back....

I read "Question everything" by Nicole Arciello Berhaupt and it got me thinking (again).

http://blog.timesunion.com/animalrights/what-questions-do-you-ask-yourself/3522/

• At first I thought that ‘examine’ everything was better than questioning everything, because using questioning as your ongoing,primary approach/baseline to everything, one might begin to erode and lose any sense of internal/external foundation, permanence, and peace let alone ‘truth’ (whatever that may be).
• But then I thought that questioning and examination could be considered separate, even if one leads to the other in circular fashion.
• Questions often provide the meaning and focus of an examination, but sometimes one should question the very ‘giveness’ of the thing being examined. Therefore, the type of question is as important as the call to question itself.
• I think that questioning speaks/calls to a more powerful stake in the ‘giveness’ of life, asking what claim, legitimacy, essence, and elements are at work in what we are experiencing and living.
• Questioning gives us a space to separate ‘I’ from the ‘other’. I question, therefore I am. Not just as a human, but this particular ‘me’.
• Questioning requires a stepping back (to somewhere) and looking at those binding givens that have held us and carried us, which I refer to as ‘cradle concepts’, socialized into our consciousness since birth.
• Questioning and examination may lead to a reaffirmation, renewal, and most importantly a genuine opportunity to choose or reach and understanding, whereby one continues on by one’s own footsteps.
• Once I have questioned and reached certain grounding through a path of logical and critical thinking, I may continue to examine those concepts without calling into question their basic legitimacy. I do not have to question again whether unnecessary harm to children or animals is wrong, but I will continue to examine them in the context of my lived experiences.
• Questioning is about maintaining integrity, honesty, and centeredness. It requires freedom, consent, an active vs. passive mind, taking personal control and responsibility, and courage to confront the potential for fear and grief entwined in letting go of previously held beliefs and perspectives.
• Questioning does not necessarily involve a negative tearing asunder of ideas and meanings (or the people who were part of establishing them in us). It does not require a fundamental mistrust, detachment, noncommittment, skeptical, rejecting, disrespectful, or selfish stance.
• As we question and examine, certain givens and structures may be torn down or seemingly fall away on their own. What will remain standing, and will it be on a ground that cultivates further growth & further righting of wrongs?
• Hopefully what remains and is consistently revealed (in our continued journey of questioning, examining, and self discovery), is an interconnectedness that supports and directs us to community, to a balance, and a flourishing presence that also respects every other’s individual right to live their lives too.

Addendum :
• Question via an observational stance. Seated within your own self, look at everything that is before you / in front of you. See it as a screen or surface, and then go in deeper as if descending with a oxygen tank that lets you ‘breathe’ a lifeline to your observing grounded self, and dwell in a place that, while familiar by habit, now takes on a’ first time’ approach.
• How and why is the activity in front of you constructed? What is the intention, agenda, assumptions in play, driving the relations? What others are involved and as individuals, how are they affected by it? How are you *supposed* to be involved and what beliefs planted and carried within you assist to sustain the givens of the current activity?
• Does the standing back perspective help you see others as separate, and are they attached to the activity/context via their own free will, choice, and personal life-space in which to process the event?
• The ability and need to question may be linked to our potential as co-creators. We are stakeholders and stewards in the meaning and direction of numerous worldly dimensions. Yet we must take into account (and stand back far enough to see) that other beings may already have their dimensions worked out. There may be ‘givens’ outside of ourselves that should be respected and help us map out our path. Our ‘creative’ endeavors should not entail the deconstruction/displacement/exploitation of their dimensions. Again, the world is not merely resources for us, and we are not resources for other’s self-absorbed gains. Questioning and examining must be driven by more than the intellect, but guided also by the giveness of empathy, and (selfless)care.

My Mother's Earth Pt 3

2011-02-25T06:51:00.001-08:00

Adding on to this one all day (2-25-11)...

My mother has always been a ‘sun worshipper’ and being active outside has always been important to her, especially after my father died. A couple of years ago she mentioned that fall makes her feel depressed, and I was especially worried that being forced to remain inside this winter would take its toll on her mind and spirit.
Being confined inside would drive her into her own ‘inside’, since her orientation to her dwelling remained foreign and made her feel displaced into the world. When outside, she could be sustained by a familiarity with nature, a phenomenological reduction or minimalism that still afforded her a binded sense of self. It was still my mother’s earth.
When she was still living at her home, the breaking-down effects of time were more noticeable in a dual process sort of way- the shell of her body, of the house, of dwelling ‘inside’ (both the structure and internally) combined with being alone most of the time.
It was if she and her surroundings were becoming more alike in a process of mutual return to the earth’s physical properties. As the dimension occupied by a person’s social relatedness breaks down, one sees the world as a separate entity, as a ‘just is’ physicality.
One then looks at ones own physicality (especially as it breaks down, hurts, immobilizes) and sees that the vehicle (body) and the earth are becoming one (again), and the personhood within takes a back seat. So perhaps no matter what diversity is entailed between cultures and ideologies, towards the end of the journey it all narrows down to more a universal, common ground between self and the earth that one is physically made of.
Sometimes at night, when everyone is asleep, I will be downstairs with no lights on. The moon will cast its light into the house, bathing everything in a blue-white stillness. The inside of the house looks like a stage, embodying a present , a past, and a comprehension that all that I am looking at will be long gone. It is the structure that operates in the background at all times, as does my body. In this moment, my body and the objects and the house are the dominant inter-connection. For my mother, this connection is becoming more pervasive. She can observe as much as ever, but what she is observing is dictated more by the process of separation of self from world as social relatedness, and more as world of physical , impersonal containment, the ‘just is’.

The medical field is set up to respond to the physical aspects of our being, so as the body develops a need, one is carried into another building and room and people respond as trained to attend to these physical aspects. As one becomes aged and perhaps less autonomous/communicative, those ‘trained’ people become increasingly affiliated with the outside looking * at* rather than *in*, where personhood peers out of, but is realized in the dimension that exists outside of physical bodies.
We begin life being carried by others, physically and mentally while all the time developing our own individual ‘selfs’, until we can carry ourselves through the world. We always have some sort of personal dependency on others and the physical world, but we are generally under our own volition until our bodies wear down towards the end(with the exception of early tragedies). Like a community of sea dwelling creatures in their prime, we move about in the waters until we wear down, when the currents get to influence our direction more and more. Thus we are again carried more and more by the tide’s momentum, eventually getting beached on the same universal shore as the tide (Mother Nature Ocean) recedes. I’ve often hoped to be in touch with that universal shore long before I am washed up onto it at the end, feeling its firmness and having mutual recognition with others who dwell on this beachhead (well before their end).
With nonhuman animals, we skip over the personhood within from the very beginning and treat them as objects of the physical-object world. Even if given a space and earth environment, it is all within a larger human container of designs upon them-we see their flesh. They are seen as other-object, and this relationship defines us (the alleged caretakers) more as objects affiliated with the physical world than as persons affiliated with the social dimension and the openness towards life.
When we talk about my mother’s heart problems, we are talking about her but also differentiating her from a physical, universal organ, her heart. When ‘happy meat’ farmers name and raise their animals, they butcher them and talk about how they prepare “Roxie’s ribs”. This is different than talking about mom’s heart. I think that when we look at and talk about a person’s physical parts, this separation never intersects with or threatens personhood, thus protecting one from being reduced .We carry them and keep their personhood above this reduction and separation. Roxie however, was always affiliated more with the physical than the shared personhood. They were reduced before they were physically reduced. They are seen as part of the earth in a mirrored yet opposite way that I want to experience an affinity-association with the earth’s ‘shore’. Their lives are stamped and defined as having a relationship with the world closer to what my mother is experiencing- a social recognition and social holding bond breaking down towards a more impersonal yet universal physical affiliation of elements.

My mother's earth PT 2 (of 3 or 4)

2011-02-22T08:52:00.000-08:00

Now in general, after I would begin my visit with her, my mom seemed quite normal in ‘real time’. She could carry on a conversation quite well, especially if talking about general philosophy, psychology, and technology applied to today’s issues. She was less successful talking about her current life situation because it was difficult to grasp and integrate. Since she was having trouble building any forward-based memory (or life), I began to consider different ways to engage with her. My thought was that she needed to experience herself as real, which is difficult if you cannot sustain or move forward with people in a social dimension (due to memory lack). She also needed to have positive visceral experiences which would remain and be memorized by her body/emotions after the visit: a sort of sensation one has after a massage, but on a different level. I also felt that she would and could build on these experiences even if they were not retrievable upon ‘command’. That associations and growth could occur that would hold her and see her through between visits, and would build upon our bond.What I began to do was have her talk about her experiences 'growing up'from childhood to the last several years. This afforded her several hours of continuous, focused concentration and an extended sense of self/familiarity. She felt positive, contributory, and in charge of the course of the conversation. I followed up visits with photographs of her hometown, ice skating on the frozen Milwaukee river, and a dancing club she frequented with my father.
My mother was an only child, and had experienced the world in an alone type way early on. Talking about growing up alone connected with her current being alone in the world, but different in that she was sharing it with me. This conversation was not entirely 'designed' by me, for my sincere interest in knowing more about her life helped forge a new development in our relationship that was not dictated soley by circumstances beyond control.

I have come to see this phase with her as a 3 fold beginning: for her, for me, and for the relationship between us.
For me, it was the beginning of a new phase of relating and comprehending:

1-My own understanding and acceptance of her changes - bio/emo/socio(and trying to separate out what was subjective and objective about my grasping of the contents of this/her life-phase). This would help inform my consideration of her needs and my role in getting those needs met.

2- Her understanding of what was happening to her life-perceptually, socially (offspring response/support), contextually, along with the psycho-emotional aspects.

3- My comprehension of these life-space ‘overlays’ and the connections to all beings and their ‘being- in- the- world’ needs.

My mother had been losing her memory and thus a grasp of being-in-the-world continuity while she was living ather home. This abrupt change in living space(the heart rehab. and then the senior living center) still left her unable to comprehend, work through, or accept this change. She regularly described the experience as being suddenly picked up and dropped into another place without any reference points to understand where she was or how she got there. She only had a window to look out of without knowing where in the world she was. Very little could be done to help her retain the information provided. I am sure she used to stare out the window of her home, perhaps seeing the world as she knew it change into just ‘the world’. Helping her work through grieving to acceptance was nearly impossible given that she could not retain the memory of these discussions, so she was stuck in a ‘shock’ phase and left to try and comprehend the meaning/permanence of her new surroundings.

This change in her being in the world (being in, relating to, recognizing, adapting) was also a change for me. I realized that I was trying to grasp the world as well and felt a displacement and a grasping for relatedness and relationship-holding between my mother and me. My mother felt most comfortable and spent most of her time in her ‘new’ senior living center outside, sitting in the grassy courtyard patio. Here she could relate to ‘permanence’ – the sun, grass, birds, clouds etc. The rest of her orientation to her surroundings was minimal. She could have been in the courtyard of any place in the world.
Since she had loved feeding and watching birds outside her window at home (a hobby I had helped start 30 years ago by buying her a birdfeeder), I bought her a feeder to hang outside her apartment window. She was able to relate this love-object for some sense of continuity in the present. I came to see that with each of my visits, refilling the feeder with seed was like restarting a sand timer- noting the passage of time and all of us in it, and also lending a visibility to it.
Although my mother’s recall of recent events was poor, I did notice that she could pull things together after some length into our visit. While she would initially not remember the last time I visited, she could shortly recall certain details I had provided over the course of many visits-they just were stored in places not reachable by personal decision. Her memory acted in kaleidoscope fashion, with certain aspects coming into focus for fleeting moments. Adding visual artifacts of our visit helped, such as a supply of snacks between visits, a pumpkin in October, and pictures openly displayed. We had moved some of her treasured items from home to the apartment, which gave her some sign that this was permanent.

I became familiar with a ‘predictable’ sequence of events in our visits. This ‘growth of predictability’ aspect alone afforded me a refection on my own movement through the (internal/external) relationship changes.
When I first arrived at each visit, my mother seemed to need time to come out of the world she dwelled in (when we were not there). Within 10 minutes or so she seemed more orientated and ‘herself’.
She spent some time each visit describing the difficulty of dwelling in a perpetual state of displacement, a separation from her recent, previous life of living in her home. It was an idyllic recall (because we know that she had been struggling to stay connected and independently functioning). She wondered if and when she could have her car again, go home, go shopping, or take care of her yard.
I too wondered about her potential. I wondered because I too did not know the parameters of her life. I wrote these to my siblings:

Letter one-“We all should be involved and (more or less) on the same page as mom needs consistency in order to maximize her potential throughout her aging. She will not benefit if our beliefs, which dictate our actions with her, are too disparate. I think that my beliefs *must be* anchored in objective, ongoing professional assessments, *should be* examined in relation to what I desire in my personal relationship with mom, and *ought to be* obligated/committed to helping mom live a quality of life that she can choose to the best of her capacities. If these life issues are depending on the multi-serving relationship that I know I want to provide for her, I would like her closer so that these contacts can happen with the needed frequency”.

Letter two-She said "I have to say that some of my difficulty in understanding all of this and what is asked of me has to do with denial on my part”. I concurred that sometimes we all tend to minimize things to protect ourselves from anxiety or keep the status quo as long as possible. None of us like to face losing independence, and try to hang on to it every way that we can. I asked her in what ways would she like to enrich her life. She said that she “hadn’t thought about it much”.

• How do we work together to arrive at achieving the primary goal that should drive our efforts/focus, which is - what is the best for mom? How do we communicate and work as a team to build upon all the efforts that we as individuals have accomplished so far? Professional literature all suggest that sibling meet often, delegate responsibilities, work through conflicts, compromise. If we are not all recognized as stakeholders with influence in mom’s care, why not?
• What perspectives, frames of reference drive our efforts. Where is each of us trying to get to? Are we looking ahead, looking to settle within the present, looking to see if there is something more than what we have arrived at?
• Are we struggling/ accepting/maintaining ‘what is’, (and is ‘what is’ really the reality or a form of personal denial, grief, guilt, making ourselves feel good about us, etc).• Mom speaks of suddenly not having her life as she has known it anymore. She sees herself as ready to ‘check out’ and is alright with that (one dimension of achieved acceptance that she has said for years). She is like a ghost now in relation to her former self and life, locked into seeing that ‘past life’ by virtue of long term memory, but unable to let go and see a new life. Like a ghost, can’t get her hands on her car, her home, and cannot get grounded with us. She doesn’t know if we can really hear her. My hard question to each of us: are we in any way contributing to this ghost- like perception of hers?. Are we looking past mom? Are we looking through her, beyond her in our striving to gain/regain something in our own lives- a return to normalcy, independence, some sort of undisclosed benefit, a moving on? What in particular is informing our agendas and dictating our behaviors, and is it truly balanced with a ‘mom-centeredness’ and is it objective in the most altruistic way? Is mom getting all that can be provided, now and in the (as much as we can plan) future.•

Letter three-Perhaps Mom’s living quarters, her dwellings, her world is only as big or small as our own mindset. The size and depth of how we think and perceive becomes the concrete reality of mom’s life. The more we are open to exploration at this juncture, to look at seeing ***if it is even possible**** to build onto all the foundations that have been established so far, to not feel threatened or defensive by these intentions. If someone asks how I could think like this, I must say (when it comes to putting mom first) how can we not?

My Mother's Earth Pt. 1

2011-02-15T05:43:00.000-08:00

It’s been almost a year of going through many ‘aging’ experiences with my mother, so it is time to reflect a bit and make connections to the world and living it through a perspective that ties in a vegan connection.The 'vegan' connections will show up in latter parts...

• I knew that my mother’s memory had been declining in recent years. Since my father died 16 years ago she had continued to live in the house alone and had forged her own comfortable niche as far as I could tell.
• She is an only child that married into an Italian household with many siblings. My mother is loving and social but not an initiator. I have always ended conversations/time together with “I love you”. She always said it back with genuineness, but she was not one to say it first.
• With my father’s passing mostly she returned to her state of relation independence, which is dually a state of dependence on others to have her join in relating.
• She spent most of her ‘prime’ parenting and being a spouse. She was not employed in the conventional sense, so this added to her ‘stay at home-ness’ following my father’s death.
• Although her five children have never moved far away and stayed in touch via occasional visits, she was mainly alone over the last decade and a half. As with all parent-child relationships, we have each forged different experiences and relations with her.
• With the increasing decline in short term memory and some additional physical symptoms; she was diagnosed with arterial complications that were impacting oxygen flow to the brain (and thus the rapidity of her memory loss symptoms).
• The short term memory became one of not remembering the last time she saw one of her children even if it was the day before. There was also some suspicion that she was becoming disorientated between leaving the house and trying to remember where/why she was going. She had lived in the town for over forty years. Adding to this was her severe hearing problems, which had added to her, disconnect (even in social situations).
• My mother had heart valve replacement surgery following an acute dizzy spell. Her recovery involved several weeks in a residential rehab center. It was concluded that her physical and memory care needs would require her moving to a senior living center about an hour from her home.
• *** This has been the brief, factual summary of the situation. As with anyone moving through this ‘phase of the personal/family life cycle’, the depth is in the interactions- social, emotional, and psychological as well as the impact they have on the actual life-space of the person (in this case my mother).
• It is through this process that I relate and learn how these components and elements emanate to and link with issues (in this case, animal rights).
• My mother had established her routine since my father’s death, but she was generally not active in a community-social way. I am sure that numerous hours passed without too much to occupy them.

My siblings and I had been talking about my mother and directly with my mother about moving into supportive housing on the other side of town rather than staying in her large home. She had difficulty processing this cognitively and emotionally (although she claimed no emotional attachment to the house she raised us in). She was attached to her routine however, as well as her view of the outdoors and nature. There was a large pond across the street and her birdfeeders in the front yard.
Leaving the visual anchor or center of where one lives (esp. given her age and amount of time living there) as well as the marked change in life circumstances would be daunting for a lot of people. She had acknowledged that the day would come for all of this, but seemed to struggle with it as a present actuality. It was becoming clear however, that her ability to navigate through her outside world was being compromised by internal changes- the wearing away of memory retention, intermittent orientation to time and place, and the infrequency of communication with others. I look at it as a type of psycho-social ‘autism’, an increasing state of cut-off, both internally and externally.

Although my mom was scheduled for vascular surgery, her dizzy spell the day after her birthday resulted in an emergency room visit followed by a hospitalization for the procedure. The scope of her short term memory difficulties became even more apparent as she could not recall conversations we had with her even hours after they happened.
We all spent as much time with her as possible beforehand since the surgery and her surviving it were both at moderate risk level.
Her immediate post-operation functioning/state, while normal to the professional staff, was harrowing to her children to say the least. Her pain, confusion, inability to communicate (due to respirator) and utter displacement into a strange setting was hard to bear. I did my best, with some success to bring some comfort and stability to her as she progressed through stages of recovery. We knew that between the drugs and her cognitive functioning that she would not remember much if any of these events, including our efforts to get her through it.

1-At this juncture I began to recognize and process the severity of her memory problems and the impact that it was having (on multiple levels) on her life. I also began to realize and deal with the impact that her functioning would have on me, especially in terms of coming to acknowledge and change with her changes.

2-It was also through this dawning revelation that I began to really note the naked life similarities between our lives and nonhuman lives - the needs, attachments, ethics, and intentions of all who play a part in each other’s lives.

My mother was out of the hospital and placed in a rehabilitative center, which was still like a hospital room in some respects. Although she was on a stringent plan to assist in her physical recovery, she seemed to ignore recommendations. I think that part of it was that these changes were not habitual, but also she didn’t remember being told them. She covered her memory problems like she had covered up her hearing difficulties- making it appear that the staff was underestimating her abilities.

One of the first telling signs I saw about the depth of her memory problems occurred when I went to visit her at the recovery center. When I entered the room I would usually see her sitting in a chair looking out the window. When she saw me it would take a fleeting yet noticeable moment for her to comprehend my being there. It was if she had to come out of her focus, her world, and her thoughts to be ‘present’ again. The comprehension was followed by an exhilarated expression of joy and the words “you found me!”…you always find me no matter where I end up”. This continued to be the response each time I visited her. My thought was…how difficult it must be for her to not remember our last visit, and without the memory to comfort her,(after a brief time) she is left with the feeling and perception that no one she knows has been to see her or knows her whereabouts. This is the beginning of her *new* life in the world, abruptly displaced from all that she knew (which was itself fading too) and also the beginning of my relationship with her in many respects.

Finding ourselves in our own skin.

2011-02-08T13:02:00.001-08:00

"Wear Your Own Skin" (click on to enlarge)

I wanted to take some time to talk about one of my paintings. It is not meant to be an exercise in self-indulgence, but as a reference point to discuss issues that the painting has context with. I know that some art is supposed to be finished or utilized in the observer, thus allowing the work to be transactional and transcendent. I think that there will still be room for that, given that I am only one person and limiting as such.

My early formation ideas involved creating a human that had features (to the observer) of a skinned animal without looking traumatized. I wanted to show an expression that revealed a disconnect from the behavior and effect on animals (replaced by prideful or nonchalant look) but also an objective horror of what we see as the result. The humanoid would have had a fleshy white appearance and a fixed stare, monstrous and pathetic as both abuser and victim.
I decided not to go with the negative caricature of the human, as I wished not to continue a demeaning process, one that results in the stripping of animals of their wholeness and beauty. People just get defensive when they are portrayed as monsters. This is where an opportunity for redemption must come into play.
Speaking of victims and monsters, another challenge I had was to decide how to not label women as the main perpetrators/consumers of the ‘skin trade’. As a result I was going to go with an androgynous figure.(she still ended up predominately female...) I decided to go with a bald figure to help with this, as well as leave out any obvious breast formation. The idea of leaving the gender embodiment of the person indeterminate also acknowledges the need to appreciate the identity going on beyond/behind the skin (human-nonhuman continuum) and the role/response society has in it.
The hairless body with the obvious baldness also represent a sort of infancy (and the head can also be seen as a ‘shell’) signifying a rebirth of the person as they shed the societal sheath of animal skin., and perhaps any other ‘skin’ that is fabricated by society that shapes and gives form to an identity that each of us may not yet have lain an authentic claim to.
I was also conscious of the fact that women are equated with fur use and I was torn about trying to include leather as part of the ‘wear your own skin’ title. I tried to compensate somewhat by putting in a background of leather upholstery. One thing I might have changed is that, as it gets higher up, I would have had the upholstery subtly loosen and become petal-like as it neared the bottom edge of the flower painting.
I was concerned about putting too much in the picture, in my attempt to being fair and balanced about the issue. I thought about doing a series of pictures that focus on different types of skin use.
Returning to the human body, the white, unblemished, new skin represents the birth of the person as previously noted. This pulling away of the skin fur and the emerging body one can see a vaginal birth with upward and out rather than the usual downward and out direction. I considered accentuating the look of the fur-skin to have more of a vaginal look but opted to stay with the fur peeling (partly due to my talent limitations).
I also was concerned about focusing too much on the violent act and the (very real) sexually-focused aggression that often comes with acts of domination/exploitation.

The stripping of fur away needed to capture the shocking injustice done to animals for the sake of human vanity. The beautiful person (I know...Societally labeled ‘beauty’) was presented as emerging from this horror rather than accentuating beauty because of the fur coat. Thus the fur could be seen as a cocoon in which the transforming person is arising, coming into their own, in beautiful in their own skin. This metamorphosis connection is further solidified when you draw your attention to the painting behind the person. One sees the painting and notes that it is present after the curtains have been drawn back (from our eyes). You can see that she is bending back, actually ‘bending her ear’ to listen to the caterpillar who is whispering something in her ear. She is smiling in response to whatever is being said to her, and perhaps one can draw some conclusions based on the butterfly on the opposite side of the painting.
The painting acts much like a screen, capturing both permanence, age (notice the cracked surface) and process/activity (interactive caterpillar, the procreative symbol of flowers, the progression of time and its relation to change). Stages of growth are a process of appearance and disappearance- As the German Philosopher Hegel said “The synthesis of being and nothing is becoming”. However we don’t need to show up in the world wearing items that caused a life to disappear, to be extinguished.
The presence of the rabbit and the fox reflect the fact that they are exploited for their fur. Again, fur is not the only skin stolen from various animals, but one painting cannot always capture all representatives. It should be noted that in nature fox eat rabbits, but here, in almost Eden like fashion, they appear to put aside their ‘differences’ or relations and come together under a common theme-to recognize a greater aggressor (humans). Likewise we can set aside our focus on differences with other animals for a common good not based on exploitation. We are not locked into nature and can create new ways of being while respecting other being’s way of life.. The fox and the rabbit act as stand- ins for nature being exploited by a species that needs to grow and transcend its destructive self and relationships. We need to find our own skin, and let others keep theirs.

Construction begins with recovery

2011-02-03T13:46:00.000-08:00

First, some personal response-interpretations to an essay about object relations:

“To obtain the parents' love the child comes to ‘do’ what he thinks the parents value.”

* “love”-what that feels like physically, emotionally.
*‘Do’ means thinking, perceiving, behaving, in ways that the child thinks ‘fits’ in with the social/love context of the child-parent relationship.
* Understanding what ‘value’ is, looks (observation of parents and self), and feels like. How and what the parents respond to in the behaviors of the child and how that makes the child feel.

"Internalizing these values the child forms an ego ideal. This ego ideal contains rules for good behavior and standards of excellence toward which the ego has to strive".

The 'ideal' is a drive ‘organ’ that finds form in concrete expressions, but itself cannot (being a drive) find itself in final, concrete, complete form. It provides the impetus for chasing ‘betterment’ and rewards for approximations in external life. It is channeled through and given some of its form through social subjectivities.
So a mental machine in its development ( which takes in nuts and bolts in its quest to identify and align with the larger parental unit) might on some (essentialist-intuitive) level perceive some of the parental unit bolts to be defective( the parental unit (actually or perceptually)falls short of keeping the child unit’s homeostasis intact for some period. It knows that it cannot mentally work into its own developing machinery a 'defective bolt', so the child unit’s machinery counters with a protective sheath placed over the defective bolt, thus producing an ‘analogue bolt’. This defective bolt however requires continued sheath maintenance for regulation, by (subconsciously) idealized-sheath inventing/projecting and then (consciously) consuming bolts that compliment/mirror the parental derived acquisitions. This defect-maintenance relationship has systemic impact on the development of the rest of the child unit over time, essentially creating an over all machine that asserts itself through a protective, quarantining outlook that, for maintenance purposes, is not readily available for reflective scrutiny. This becomes a pseudo-essentialist way of perceiving ego life – one cannot remove this bolt because like the heart, it is vital to the being’s definition to be human and alive. I must add that a 'defective bolt' is not necessarily inherently defective, but one that threatens the self-made structure. Thus an experience that objectively is very positive but (thus) creates potential conflict/devisiveness may be interpreted as 'defective'.

Internalizing-Associations that are imbued with pleasant sensations become imprinted. External and internal symbiotic alliances are made within relational learning/dependency contexts.

"When the child cannot bear ambivalence between the real self and the ego ideal and defenses are used too often, it is called pathologic. Freud called this situation secondary narcissism, because the ego itself is idealized".

The ego is idealized, thereby taking a non-concrete presence. It some ways the ego, being experienced more as a drive than a solid state, is a type of nothingness. It is always known through process and not ground. Being that comes from this ego-nothingness must come in the form of transient identifications. It is only through an (dependent) otherness that it identifies with, not something to set its ‘boundaries of self’ against. This is why it is narcissism, because otherness, interconnectedness, is only taken in to gain a process-type of self continuance. A self permanence is not gleaned from recognizing the separateness of the other, or recognizing ‘an in itself’ entity.

"Idealization of others besides the self was explained both in drive theory as well as in object-relation theory. From the viewpoint of libidinal drives, idealization of other people is a "flowing-over" of narcissistic libido onto the object; from the viewpoint of self-object relations, the object representations (like that of the caregivers) were made more beautiful than they really were".

“Beautiful” is a subjective word, and also a cultural embodiment. Marketing imagery exploits this by using art/sketches of people as stand-ins for the ideal body. People have a sketchy image in which to emulate, but is not attainable and keeps the drive /direction towards it (to somehow procure it) alive.
The fragmented, disconnected, re-worked embodiment-witnessed as food (or narcissistic supply) is really a stand-in for our self .Removed from the whole, it (and we ) stands as an in itself, but its identification really draws from the larger , fabricated context/landscape. The beautiful looking food is a constructed visual/visceral arrangement of fragmented others. But the veins and fat are still potential cracks in the shell of our protective embodiment, allowing a light source to be detected 1- as coming through a wall in front and around us 2- as coming from our self or the shell that embodies our self…going outward. We may seek to explore or cover up this phenomenon up. We are not sure that there is ground or structure once the fragmentation, wherever the location, is initiated, and this can become a source of deeply felt anxiety (which may then enlist further protective defenses.

Part two...

• As long as there is some presence of psychological/emotional nurturing (of the self) and it is associated with and attached to an ‘object’, the person will imprint and thrive. It is a mix of drives and relatedness that propel the person forward through the world.
• There is an intertwining of good enough, if intermittent associative experiences that form recognition and continuity of the self. Before we can gaze inward at a self, we gaze outward at an ‘other/object’ which nurtures.
• The nurturing relationship from the ‘object/other’ is able to do so because they themselves have good enough supports in which to operate out from.
• These outward supports that sustain the parent-to-child relationship are societal, in terms of physical and symbolic scaffoldings.
• The transmission of symbolic scaffoldings (culture/ideology) may come from pleasure/pain drives and strategies. A child may, out of fear of abandonment or fear of self-dissolution (both are instances of abandonment/loss) find compliance (even if it is wrapped in a cognitively pleasing sheath) act and embrace certain compliances. This is different from acting on a fundamentally honest respect and desire to please/emulate what is seen and felt in other observed, positive relations.
• The scaffoldings form a supportive fabric, a second skin that both holds together and individuates the person as a distinct self (that also) fits in via acceptance, familiarity, and conditions –to-thrive.
• Fear is mitigated by mechanisms that control and dominate it. The domination mechanism , if acknowledged could create inner anxiety, (thus threatening inner balance) so it is fronted by a pleasing/soothing set of relatedness and projected onto the social world of human and nonhuman relations. The constructed façade of inner balance with outer world balance and order maintains the homeostasis necessary to remain intact and thriving (stave of Thanatos of the self).
• When an infant cries it is responding to stress (lack of some comfort). The parents and perhaps the people around are not alarmed, and may smile in mutually soothing acknowledgement (of an overseeing cognition) that ‘this is life’.
• This same response may occur when an animal being used in the human world is struggling against harm. Like the crying baby, people respond with an overriding soothing/swaddling mechanism that this animal’s struggles are ‘a part of life’. Thus their own dependence/vulnerability anxieties are minimized and replaced with a parental, patriarchic, and ‘organic’. This melding together of behaviors, sights, and sounds reminds of the sounds of alarm and crisis from birds in the woods, or sirens in the city. Life space becomes co-constructed to make suffering easier to not see or feel, to ignore or move past. We can change a channel, continue to buy products, and follow the creature comforts of the visual and visceral status quo.
• They (beings under siege) are wholes that are removed from a context of full life and trafficked. Human and nonhuman animals are ‘kidnapped’, relabeled, marketed, and customized to fit with the fabric of consumerist (oral configured) identity.
• They are absorbed/mitigated by other, dominating life-spaces and the process of compartmentalization that is used to reconfigure them. By identifying with the familiar and communal sheath that offers protective holding under the guise of existential competence, the ‘crack’ is melded, and the abyss avoided.
• The ‘abyss’ confronting embodied selfhood is actually an opportunity to free fall into being, into becoming. If one would allow for the initial disconnect, the falling would be replaced with finding one’s feet-running under ones own volition, directing their own course and seeing the integrity of each beings right to pursue their own course without the drive/need to sabotage others. This is authentic self-agency and the foundation that supports it.
• Certain identifications are made that make it easy to recognize and fit in. Gender identity is based on the physical and social aspects of male and female. It is complimentary-mirrored otherness. Transgender-isms do not easily allow a state of inhabitation to fit with the internal/external supported self. Transhumanism and the borders that define what it is to ‘be’ in a world will find equal amounts challenges.
• The question , tension, and possibilities inherent in the issue of ‘fit’ and ‘formation’ do not only offer the potential to forge a path, but to uncover a readymade ground underneath the fabricated sheath.

Structures and Boundaries

2011-01-28T13:15:00.000-08:00

Structures and boundaries is a complicated topic-how to define them, how they define what ‘separate’ and ‘unified’ means, and how such descriptions are useful to understanding , improving, and relating. I don’t know if what I write about is anything more than descriptive (vs. prescriptive), but I hope that I can use these concepts to illuminate coherence, directions, and pathways. When are ‘boundaries’ –barriers or containers, and under what circumstances are either of these useful or detrimental. When are ‘continuums’ pathways to understanding or slippery slopes to nihilism? I will try and (soon)add some sketches to this post to bring a grounding image to some of my thoughts.

I will try to use these as 1- ‘tools’ – instrumental in building connections and 2- ‘signifiers’- the coming upon and recognition of structures that exist in and of themselves that don’t necessarily derive their being from my existence. That way they illuminate other spheres that are similar via their ‘in and of themselves’ status. This goes to the heart of the struggle- everyone wants relatedness as long as it doesn’t mean automatic dependency. People are threatened by relatedness if it appears (to threaten) to compromise their container –that which holds together their sense of self apart from an potentially undifferentiated mass( or a mass of societal bombardments that threatens to induce personal anomie). We like when the universal and individual occupy the same space- which requires some form of binding (safe) container/coherence.

For vegans it is important to recognize how humans and nonhuman animals co-exist in the world with boundaries and similarities that do not ‘threaten’ each others individual sense of existence. When and where does ‘continuum’ and ‘other’ help or hurt? It is clear that people create containers that *appear* to uphold a’ relatedness’ of mutual benefit, such as a farm, but it is really just an instrumental arrangement designed to benefit humans, and thus the overarching boundary is harmful to a pre-designated ‘other’.

One goal that I always try and keep in mind on my phenomenological-anthropological journey, is to be able to share and verify my observations with others, and to experience both validation and improvements to living others as a result. So in the end, I am using my experiences as a tool, not just a passive expressionism.

In that regard I will try and move away as often as I can from too much abstract scaffolding descriptions of the mind-world encounters, and ‘bring it home’ to everyday accessibility rather than stand alone (and thus vacuous) descriptions. I find it rather challenging to not get caught up in describing the ‘blueprint’ perspective as opposed to the lived in experience within…In the next post I will spend some time talking about ‘observational distance’ and its relation to the observer and observed. I will add that what we take in is partly determined by mental and physical proximity. What objects within that container ‘pop out’ will be partly determined by the status of the mind-body relationship of the observer. One who perceives less self-determination within the circumstance may perceive a closer, perceptual, relational allegiance with physical ‘inanimates’ is surrounding them. When one’s identity becomes vague, fleeting, or weakened, one may find affinity with the solid, less mutable surroundings of objects. The solidity as ‘other’ is both sameness and difference that gives the self a sense of separateness and boundary. This may be extended to how things play out regarding how one has or currently sees nonhuman beings (closer to inanimates at least at one point). This will be explored further.

So here I begin with an observation that I made while standing in the library with my mother, talking with one another as we looked out the window. The outside scene contained a river winding through some trees and then some buildings in the distant horizon:

• Looking outward/outside from within a structure, (e.g. a building, a room) one’s range or boundary of experience still may be mostly contained and emanate from within the relationship context in that moment. The ‘view’ is a view that takes into consideration/creation the two people’s life-space. My attention is on the personal transaction and the mental content much more than the relatively inanimate landscape that we are both staring at as we talk.

• If one watches a movie, one may drift from the intended focus/activity/content and observe the surrounding landscape (the landscape is usually intended to be incorporated, however not in the detached, real way that it is being perceived if one is following my focus here).
• Like the movie, one can also ‘transcend’ a moment of looking at a landscape from within a structure/context, to one of looking at the landscape separate from the imposed structure, a sort of view that would be had prior to the actual building of the structure.
• By connecting with the pre-building view of the land, the context of the moment and the relationship itself is transcended in time and place. It becomes a moment in the greater flow of time (backwards and forwards). One can acknowledge that all that is contained within this moment will be ‘dust in the wind’. One can place/link that comprehension moment (of the passage of time=history) in the context and history of the actual ‘here-and-now’ relationship. One can also place the moment of the relationship or its whole history in a link with *all relations* activities. An “All relations” link can have an effect of amplification or plasticity comprehension of being in the world that borders on dissolution/nihilism or universal oneness. This is not meant to be taken as a cryptic/passing notion. One can look at an art piece and see the intentional reworking and reshaping of familiar objects. We also wonder how and what nonhuman animals perceive about the world. Visually we can have perceptions that reconfigure the phenomena in front of us. A familiar road becomes enmeshed with a road we traveled on years ago, then turning into a road (and us) existing somewhere in the world. It is a form of phenomenon/existential amnesia, which then begins to collapse other habitualized ‘givens’ of form/function into a present moment comprehension that ‘all of this’ *is* mostly because we have come to know it as such. ‘All of this’ is just one planet’s construct happening for me right now in a moment within an eternity of past and future nothingness. It is the simple ‘thumbs up’ or ‘breath’ imbued with a significance that we recognize, uncover, and partially construct. That is not to say that it’s importance is solely derived from human comprehension (human-centric view of the universe). Murray Bookchin once said that the earth would be less interesting if humans weren’t here, but that in itself is a human’s perspective. Nonhuman being’s existence, even if they do not achieve what humans see as more sophisticated expressions of the life force, are no less complete and self-defining. It is perhaps the same perspective that feminist writers mean when they work to describe the completeness of female without needing to reference maleness.

• One can also view the relationship itself as a ‘room’ with an inner and outer context, much like one’s inner mental life can present like a ‘room’, permeable as it is.
• Walking on a beach at night, one is on the ‘outside looking in’ at individual rooms of a condominium. The people in each apartment space are (at least visually) unaware of the bigger picture view held by the passersby. Each in their room is bound to the context of their physical structure.
• Similar to the condo view I occupy a cubicle in a building, while the plane above sees the bigger picture of many buildings containing people focused on their immediate life space.
• I can extrapolate from within (and beyond) my space. I can incorporate/uncover the contents of this extrapolation as part of the given moment. The extrapolation includes the idea that I am one (in a seeming collective of) person in a continuum of persons through time and location in the world, in a social context, in something held together by custom and by creative work between the minds.
• The ‘outside looking in’ view can involve one stepping away from the usual inside transactions one normally occupies. This can add to the moment’s elucidation and depth of the view …embedding/uncovering its (shared) wider, universal, and timeless nature.
1- I can step outside onto the deck or yard at night and look into a window at the activity of my family.
2- Looking through the window can take on the character of looking at my family as if I am looking back at a past moment, or a time when I am no longer there, or when we all are no longer here.
3- I can join this visual view with a universal ‘any family in any home somewhere in the world, somewhere in time’.
4- Looking at individual family members through the glass I can hone in on their specific lives, rather than viewing the larger composite. I can wonder if and how well I am contributing to each of their lives.
5- I can also be inside looking out at the darkness. Which suspends time and place outside-it is like gazing at a darkened theatre/stage awaiting the next scene to illuminate or come forward to the glass surface.

• Using these applications brings a ‘deeper’ experience of the current moment-my relations with my family, an appreciation and urgency to make the most of our time and the weight of decisions and interactions.
• Summary-I go beyond the inside moment and connect with the outside environment, bringing that into the current moment’s ‘make-up’. I can take further outward steps from each context-looking in or at from an outside (peripheral) position. Each view becomes an observation of looking through or into a screen, mirror, portal that encompasses a physical structure (borders, edges) than can be part of the meaning of the content observed. Nonhuman animals are their own container, a way of being in the world that needs no comparison or approximation of human experience to garner legitimacy and respect. Upon inspection, introspection, and penetrable comprehension, human experience itself is subject to a variation that it is not so definable, stable, or meaningful so as to be more central. This is in keeping with the notion that human beings are not separated/defined from nonhumans by their moral ableness because morality itself is not well defined amongst humans. It is a line/boundary/structure that is assumed but not really more than the ‘slippery slope’.
• Looking through a door frame, over the edge of a casket, a window, or peering through a mask adds to or defines the meaning of the viewing content and the looker themselves. Looking ‘towards’ may involve a process of drawing forth and embedding a reflection response/experience: seeing something through the ‘eyes’ or gateway frame of a prior experience. I noted recently that someone was peering into a casket in the morning and then into a crib that afternoon. They made a connection both with the content and with the edge (crib & coffin) .It is not unlike a median in the road, a simple line drawn that separates each side by inches, yet each side’s content is profoundly registering a different place. (unless it is an infant’s body in the casket, combining new life and death. This sad visualization occurs in everyday life when one peers into a tin foil casket and sees 'veal' or some other young animal body).
• The body one inhabits (developmentally, physically, and behaviorally) can be viewed/related to from the outside (other persons). If the self inhabits a ‘broken physique’ or a socially stereotyped body, people may react in certain ways. It may be as if the self was in a box, and that box was carried somewhere and no matter how much the person peering out pounds, reacts, and feels, the person on the outside does not or is unable to acknowledge the self within that box.
• The impasse may be due to the outside person relating to the other with some manner of societal or experiential filter/lens.
• The Miyazaki film “Spirited Away”, the daughter is unable to recognize or differentiate which pigs in the herd are her transformed parents. She must treat each one as if they house her parents (the parent-child relationship). People cannot know the inside self’s experience. The other can peer out of their body enclosure and hope to be recognized. Our building enclosures house a sometimes limited relational immediacy, attaching the view outside within that context only.
• It is vital to peer at the source (from out to in). It is important to see the potential limits of an enclosure when taking in all that can encompass the layers (concentric circles) of inner and outer. This often requires empathy-based familiarity.
• Peering over a defined edge, an edge of a container or segment meant to contain a certain content and meaning. Still, the surface of the content may have a depth, and this depth has something to do with what is present on the surface and what is meant to reflect back to the person. What appears to be a container with shallow ‘water’ may contain a greater depth of meaning. This container may be whatever is in front of you, but one may be able to access a depth previously undetected.
• The interesting thing about phenomenology is its focus on object (inner, outer, internalized representation etc) in order for there to be awareness of consciousness (as object). The detection of finitude (the nothing) is experienced through objects (the something). The nothing background gives structure, depth, and definition to the something, just as a tangible object (door frame) contributes to the meaningful visualization of the object within its structure.
• Certainly some structures are incidental and not pre-tied to the content. One is accidentally trapped in some sort of confining situation and this may be juxtaposed against the scene outside. This can work to a creative’ advantage, when two seemingly unrelated contents interface across their respective borders.
• We can be in between surfaces- one below our ‘waist’ and one just above our heads or in front of our face.
• The betta fish that exists in water but relies on air, which had a second chance to re-animate his life(when I rescued it from its small glass bowl at school, he livened up after several days), a life of containment that was never ‘chosen’ or natural to it.. When he became sicker he stayed just below the surface, breathing to sustain, just the way his life had started prior to his rescue, but now getting the respectful care that any living being should have(I remember the quiet, professional nurse that took care of my mother-in-law in her final days...) I was glad for the opportunities I had afforded it, and sad that this arrangement as petified being happens in the first place.
• We are all just below the surface, just as animals are below the surface (of our awareness/care) even as we use them. Is our breathing becoming so slowed and do we notice that we are (as authentic individuals) jacked just below the surface, and on the other side is the universe of which our non-being will be part of? How much do we allow ourselves to be contained within a small segment of ‘life-water’?
• The fish breathing is slowed and its imminent death is both a center/anchor and a contrast to the on goings of life. His slowness made all the much deeper because of the richer life he had been afforded by the heart. We spend hours involved in our lives, and each minute of the dying is spent one breath after the other, like a sick person who just lives each moment with nothing but the sickness.
• I take with me into other places the fishes state of dying. I get outside but the fishes impact on my being comes with me, just as any one who is important and is of concern colors one’s being-in-the-world wherever they go.
• The slow breaths, anchored by the rich life- like the significance of 'thumbs up' following an accident recovery, such as the recent shooting of the congresswoman. The significance of a ‘sign’ is not just its assigned meaning, but the circumstances around it. However the recognition of a simple sign that we ‘empathize with’ can cut through circumstantial distracters and ‘naked life’ in its response is affirmed. We ‘take for granted’ breathing until we see someone with an oxygen tank. Breathing is both profound and normal and then profound again in certain circumstances. Each individual animal that is embedded into the human world projects looks, behavior, and meaningful expressions that are as profound in each instance as any gesture or movement from a human being in those circumstances (and beyond).•

I was watching "50 First Dates" and there was a scene where the young man approached the woman's father and brother to ask for their blessing to date the daughter. That alone was a timeless milstone moment. It was made all the richer in its tie to the beginning of the universe because the daughter (due to an accident) could not remember one day to the next, so each day was a new beginning. The timelessness of the moment(including the presence of love and reaching out), tied itself to a shared connection of all things when they were new or original. It helped me to experience life from the daughter's perspective, but also my own existence and the world's existence from a mutual re-birth point of view.When universally recognized milestones (steeped in nature and culture) happen, it is if the world of being itself is introduced/reified. It refreshes, reclaims, and also establishes the wholeness-integrity of the individual-universal dialectic. When the individual (re)joins the universal and the universal is instantiated in the individual. The observing person is not at a distance from this as the relations of understanding and the emotion involved actually fuse the witness with the being and the situation.
• When the milestone event is occurring, the moment illuminates and connects with both the being of first-time-ness and of each and any being-in-the-world. It is the moment of being, between being and nothing- the introductory welcoming of each object as existing (as recognized by the ‘other’) in the universe.
• This experience can be likened to the initial feelings of early love -an early bonding throwback as well as its embodiment/ current version of new relationship passion.
.•This entry into a milestone experience (e.g. first time greeting your future wife's family) can also share a common ground with an exit experience-whereby the people and the surroundings involved are lit up by a connecting future 'gathering' : Likened to a lit -up reunion at the time life terminates.

This point is worth noting because people tend to compartmentalize this passion as an unbalanced, simplified, biological, hormonal etc ‘phase’. Yet it can also serve as a gateway to seeing the most profound, deep, honest, authentic connectivity with being in the world/universe. A mix of developed senses and the primordial.

To care and be carried PT 2

2011-01-17T06:52:00.000-08:00

Raw field notes that I am publishing- a lot of reworking to be done before coherence and vegan relatedness become more apparent. Thought formations in action. Enjoy.

• The mind-body- world attachment is an interaction that creates a dimension that cannot be segregated or reduced towards a ‘better’ understanding.
• The mind and body’s actions/reactions have effects upon one another. They do not always follow a ‘first cause’ sequence.
• It can appear as though a mind or body symptom arises from its respective source, but it is not always clear. The body’s chemistry can affect mood and thought, and the mind can create a bodily response.
• We can have something seated in the subconscious effect one physically, and therefore believe that its source is physical.
• Even if physical tests yield nothing, it doesn’t mean that it is psychological. Perhaps there hasn’t been enough done to detect the physical source.
• Physical and psychological factors can be concurrent yet separate. There may be a secondary relationship that is established between the two, but not necessarily primary in terms of (original) etiology.
• An encounter in the environment can impact mind and body at the same time, but in different ways.
• There is bodily indifference, or non reactivity rather than a subjective state that engenders/registers a cognitive ‘I don’t care’.
• It is not a subjective depression, but one of suppression, perhaps biologically induced. One’s arousal is progressively neutralized; one’s mood (the interface of emotion and cognition) is shortened or stressed.
• It is ego-dystonic in that the self does not integrate or agree with the sensations that it is experiencing with regards to their life situation, values, and meaning (family, work, sense of self).
• The progressive inertia, detachment from the activities and interactions that nourish the self begin to create experiences of alienation, or (via cognitive dissonance) configurations that ‘support’ and integrate the person and environment (with not always positive results).
• Sometimes the development can give us insight into the treatment of non human animals with regards to how it affects us as well as the beings that we subjugate.
• Is there a fundamental attachment or ‘nature’ in humans that is based in a pre-experienced foundation? Is this nature frustrated despite being born with adaptive potential, and into a culture that gives societal legitimacy to actions?
• Does this society give us an inauthentic analogue chemistry that pushes us along, arouses us to actions that we believe we cannot choose, individuate from, or live without? Is it akin to moving along in a line-‘carried’ with little room for stepping back or creative anxiety?
• What is the nature of the homeostasis that we are born into, maintain, supplement, and grow into? Is it like being born (almost) addicted, where ‘pleasure/balance’ becomes the absence of pain rather than the presence of pleasure? Is it where the being must ‘ingest’ (from without) some supplementing analogue (physical or psychological) to maintain a systemic balance?
• Does one feel a threat to the homeostasis (experienced as sustaining the life of the self-physically, psychologically, relationship-wise)?
• Look at homeostasis needs in people in maladaptive environments (abuse/neglect/violent) and effects on future.

• The change in the biochemical level means that there is no bio-marker for arousal for any particular/past situation-association.
• Experiencing the world fully sometimes involves certain levels of a conscious presence of emotion. It is an aspect of intelligence and another organ of knowing/comprehending. The decrease in the arousal system of emotions may then deprive one of fully comprehending, thinking, experiencing, and participating in a lived experience-with resultant consequences for the individual.
• If my psychological self does not relate successfully or adapt well to the change in bio-functioning, it may eventually lead to a condition of deprivation and disconnect.
• An abrupt change (changeover) in adaptive homeostasis can be like a change from breathing air to breathing water. There can be a struggle, an instinct to protect the self.
• One is born into and maintained via a secondary gestation (the parent-child bond) but the homeostasis is constantly challenged by an unfriendly (larger) environment- one must find success in integration and develop an immune system that does not cause cut-off. Likewise this immune system should not auto-defensively cut off a person from connecting from potentially nurturing environments that assist in growth (initially perceived as threat to the system).
• As we ‘naturally’ age, must we see the changes always as ‘decline’, or do the changes reveal hidden components that come of age and open up/ unfold new ways of seeing, and new things (now revealed by the internal changes)?
• Trying to frame healthy V.S. unhealthy- homeostasis- if we are transactional beings that incorporate outside sources (glasses, medicines) to supplement ‘deficits’.
• How do we define deficits-biological against some ideal biological state? There are some bodily deformities that are unhealthy for the general bio-system, and there are degrees, such as blurred vision or brain processing that affects learning such as reading comprehension. When we use adaptive tools-glasses, books on tape, the individual can achieve bio-social homeostasis and health.
• Is there a category for ‘moral health’? If we look at animal use like some people use heroin to achieve homeostasis, is this a false balance that will eventually cause decline in the overall system (personal health, environment etc). The end results do not determine the right/wrongness of the behavior, but provide a physical marker of the foundational rift.
• People become addicted to chemicals that they must add to their system in order to maintain a balance-‘balance’ in this case meaning more of an absence of pain. An internal reward system imprints a trigger to be activated. If the internal system breaks down, the trigger no longer works (circuit break) although it is still recognized as a trigger for some time. Imprinting does not define all however. Once we begin attaching, we can comprehend ‘attachment’ visibly as itself- an apriori. It is reaching then for its foundation and its identification with Being, then bringing forth the pre-experienced world into the current moment’s inception.
• One may regress to an earlier version of homeostasis-conjuring up prior modes of experiencing the world.
• Anhedonia is the experienced decline/ absence of attachment to the world (micro or macro contexts).The valued objects/relations remains internalized and externalized; however the arousal system to stay connected and remain in a pro-creative liaison, is lost.
• Due to a disconnect, out of reach experience of negation, one does not experience the arousal aspects of anger, sadness, or general care with regards to this change and its effects on the ‘loop’ of object relations, yet one intellectually knows that this is ‘undesirable’(ego-dystonic).
• One can intellectually override the gap and work towards resolving the break.
• The motivation is one that is stimulated by the loss or break with ones center, and sense of self. The longer one is cut off from sense of self (in my view society via parent-child relations begins the cut-off from authentic self in infancy), the more it is replaced with an ideal/protective shell seeking homeostasis (object relations with other selective inauthentic manifestations) in order to maintain a status quo of control/system integrity. The shell goes with the flow of society, never ‘beaching’ with real life foundations.
• This protective exterior houses the real self within, bound but not exterminated, whose plug is never pulled, trying to find a way out.
• Having a baseline, one that moves with you and carries you can be a source of holding, binding. This can feel positive and preferred as one is rewarded by having an orientation that provides societal, relationship (positive) responsiveness and buildup. That is if society and relations recognize, approve, and support the groundedness. A break in this binding, carrying orientation can provide an eye-opening view- seeing life without being propelled (non-control) there by biological autopilots.
• One experiences both their groundedness (perhaps foundational being itself prior to individuation- sexual, existential) along side a rift or break with societal groundedness. Their life has always been experienced as rift/polarity, and a subsequent failure to thrive in relation to potential. They may not even be able to conceptualize ‘potential’ under these deprived circumstances.
• Feelings/perceptions of being born in the wrong body follow a societal incarnation about polarities-male and female. Can a female identity originate and thrive independent of parental or societal identification, *and* exist within a male body and still be ‘at home’ without societal limits determining perception of ‘what is’?
• The perception of fixedness, no matter what its orientation/relationship to society, is important to the continuity of the self. Even if what is ‘fixed’ is the perception that the self is fluid in comparison to the solidity of others, of what is normalized.
• “Wrong body’ inhabitation follows societal gender identification –entrapment. A fluid open society that accepts all versions (acceptance itself being a provision of structure) legitimizes plasticity and accommodates when this respects the principle of no-discrimination.
. We need to look at the societally derived 'wrong body' implications for nonhuman animals to understand and connect with general discrimination/justice issues. What carries us and carries care for others, something that grounds both the seperate and social self.One that recognizes a change not as a (limiting) loss but as an opportunity to reconnect in a new and more embracing way of being. One that comes to recognize the legitimate ground of other forms of 'otherness'and sparks an arousal that is both fundamental and pro-creative.

To Care and be Carried PT. 1

2011-01-07T20:09:00.000-08:00

This post will be a work in progress, detailing some changes that I have been experiencing internally. I suspect some biochemical-rooted changes going on which have provided me some insights.

• It is as if there was a weakening of the ties that deliver the energy to the person (and thus to the needs of the situation).
• Intellectually one knows and values involvement in life situations and this may not change. What changes is the complimentary and necessary biological system that delivers the impetus to make these valued cognitions become actions with observable results.
• Once the ties weaken or break, the person is running on a reservoir of intellect, commitment, and habit/conditioning.

• This reservior is not self-sustaining or generating (in the long run). It is not a replacement or adaptive mechanism.
• Therefore it is not a lack of energy as a first step cause; it is a breakdown in the links that deliver the energy (psychic or bio). The system of links is not working properly due to some component ‘compromise’, and one must look at the systemics (and how much to encompass) that contribute or sustain the imbalance.
• Libido is viewed as a general life-energy. It branches out into different parts of the person as they strive for their potential and flourish in each situation or context where each expression of libido is utilized. Thus, biological ‘arousal’ includes motivation and drives for, and use in all aspects of life. Decreased life libido means decreased life arousal.
• One does not necessarily experience a presence of depressive thoughts and harmful drives, but rather the felt absence of impetus.
• Over time the (biological) systemic disconnect or cut off can contribute to other facets of shutdown, including experiences of mental/social stress, depression etc.
• Physical aspects of arousal assist in structuring, selecting, and conditioning pairings through one’s life. Biological drives ‘carry’ the person and provide certain foundations. I.E: One does not typically choose sexual orientation.
• If a loss of arousal associated with gender driven sexuality occurs, one may experience this as not being aroused or physically attracted to the gender that they have been used to being attracted to. This does not necessarily mean that because they no longer are attracted to their traditional gender preference, that they are now ‘open-ended’ to attach to a different gender.

• The arousal-neutral state, while being a biological experience, can open one up to comprehending relations past the drives that carry a person to a certain orientation. The lack of a biological arousal state is itself a condition of ‘no control’ for the person, but it does offer opportunity for that person to experience what remains, as well as what can creatively or potentially be (with what remains) when biologically prescribed/determined circumstances change.

• The change (in this case a loss) of the carrying state (the influence of life-libido) can place a person ‘between worlds’ which I have been posting about. Perhaps this helps in our understanding of others who experience this ‘in-between-ness’ due to gender identity 'struggles' and finding a place in the world internally and externally.

• Gender/trans dimensions (the transpersonal meanings of inhabiting a body) share the concerns for non human animal justice issues as well when we talk about all sentient beings’ right to be in the world and the legitimacy of whatever form or process of bodily inhabitation that they occupy. It doesn’t have to be legitimized by others to lay claim for its reality or occupancy in a sustaining life space (social or otherwise).

• Libidnal life energy, recognized as élan vital, is a core trunk that expands outward in branches including sexual and social identifications, among others. If a significant breech in the biological component that is part of the delivery system (the hormone sap?) occurs in the ‘trunk’, the plug in effect is pulled and momentum begins to wane. With the loss of momentum comes less interaction, furthering the frequency of stillness and inertia in many areas. The values, importance, and cognitive desire remain, but the impetus needed to carry them out is absent/stalled.
• A break in the flow means a break with specific associations. Without a drive (or pangs of deprivation) sometimes we can seem be ‘free’ to look at our behaviors apart from such drives or ‘autopilot’ mechanisms. This window of opportunity provided by an otherwise a negative experience, still yields insights and connections about ourselves and others.

• If the foundation of being is anything like the hormonal chemistry needed for libidinal life, we can see the importance of remaining connected to the vital flow at its root rather than just an effected branch. A breakdown or cut off from this anchor -base would result in a lessening ability to believe in our ability to care. We could forfeit our arousal to seek and remain connected-to life and the lives who share and are carried by this drive.

Attention Deficit Disorder in my vegan life PT 3

2010-12-30T06:29:00.000-08:00

I posted about how increased focus/attention on animal exploitation-sensory, emotionally, intellectually, socially, etc had all the appearances of attention deficit disorder when it came to being ‘present’ with the world. It also has some of the features of post traumatic stress disorder in that one is exposed to ‘war-like’ scenes of destruction intertwined with a ‘normalcy’ of such scenes as part of everyday society. Almost every facet of one’s being becomes ‘caught between worlds’ much like a veteran/trauma victim trying to establish relations following a foundation-shaking experience (that remains present in everyday encounters). The constant ‘distraction’ of thoughts and emotions associated with animal exploitation makes it difficult to find solidity and continuity.

Next I posted about my experiences with the ‘machinery’ of ADD in terms of its foundation in a person’s make-up as well as the effects on relations and relating.

Another important aspect of any ‘disabling’ mind/body experience, is what it can tell us about ability in general and what 'type' of ability is societally valued,including attention, focus, relatedness, and very importantly, the effects of social norms on our attention(what we are conditioned to focus on).
I compared biologically seated ADD to a conveyer belt in the brain, where the object – (the present moment and its important attributes) is quickly passed by as if one’s mind cannot stop and focus long enough for one to 'be with' the living frame and all that occupies it. The mind quickly (and without immediate notice) gets caught up in a side current and goes streaming down and away from the thing that we wanted to remain focused on. To be clear, my inability to fixate is like an internal current which cannot hold the moment in front of me. Due to this, the moment itself also passes before me, and opportunities may be lost.

The constant ‘distraction’ of thoughts and emotions related to what we are comprehending (animal use/suffering behind and embedded within the current scene before us)makes it appear that it is *us* when it is really the societal enculturation of violence that is the source of the ‘problem’ People are attention-deficit in relation to being able to focus on seeing this exploitation long enough to consider its implications.

A river presents several attributes for the human mind. It can look like a still presence on the surface, but we know that there is an aspect of constant change due to the flow of water. Any given moment that we engage/focus on (e.g. gathering to eat supper, a perception-connection to timelessness, ) involves an (under ground) orchestration and flow of components and facets. So even if one is aware and attends to the multifacets, there are times when one must still be present in a ‘simple’, river surface way, so as to not be or appear distracted and carried away.So I try and overcome my emotional distraction brought on by animal exploitation (e.g. being at my daughter’s basketball game and not focusing on someone’s leather/fur garment,or how much people are enjoying their surface moment of eating chicken nuggets at the hidden-underflow expense of animal lives... which leads to more animal-connected contemplation).I try and be present for my kids so that they experience my full attention on their moment. That way they can develop an inner empathy for what it feels like to be the recipient of (and then) the giver of presence/focus/value for another being (human or otherwise).

Sometimes what I am experiencing in any given moment is not so much a distraction but an add-on. It amplifies the depth and encompasses more than what the immediate ‘screen’ in front of me presents. I don’t intentionally add it on, it presents itself in and as part of the fabric of the moment. My job is to not let it ‘tunnel’ my vision and attention when it is meant to broaden and enhance my opportunity to relate/give to my children more love and responsiveness. When I see so much that it becomes too big (and thus incompatible in size) for the needs of the moment, I must find a way to file it and contemplate/process/incorporate it at a later time.

There are times when being present and taking in all that is before me also means looking at it through a multi-dimensional lens. As a social worker (and in work mode) I take inventory of the dynamics, variables, needs, and goals along with an immediate responsive presence in tandem with the person(s) and environment. It all fits within a framework of training, experience, and personal contribution. In this light, the situation is not one of multiple distractibility, but one of fluidity and focus with a self-awareness that remains front and center in the service of others.
I hope to bring this type of focus to the justice issues of non human beings, the way I have been able to with the people I assist.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger once said that we exist (and have self-identity) via our ‘thrown-ness’ into the world. Thrust forward and embedded into being, we exist through an ‘otherness’. In this sense our attention and intention is always on some object (inner or outer) out and ahead in the world.It seems that more often than not, we grow into a life that accelerates its requirements on us to react. Heidegger’s ‘thrown-ness’ becomes more recognizable once we are past the incremental acquisition of developmental milestones in our infancy. Our attention is cultivated, reinforced, and shared in a collective recognition. Our sense of self and the binding social contexts that mirror this cohesion keep the flow going. When we talk about the dynamics of factory farms, we hear that people get desensitized to animal pain partly because of the pressure on them for output. Pressure makes us do things that, given time to think and feel, we wouldn’t necessarily do. Parenting a child can involve moments of pressure where we ‘react’ in desensitized ways to their needs. Children in turn, may not often experience (or thus internalize) what it means to slow down and reflect on behaviors. There are pressures to accept the nature of the flow, including the unquestioning use of animals. Psychological adaptive skills come to overlay/bridge the gap between authentic consistency and self-survival consistency (as dependent children).
I believe that there is an (apriori) embedded authentic being rather than a ‘blank slate’ view of the developing human mind.

I believe that attention deficit is a real disorder with an etiology that is both biological and psychological. I also believe that we have been raised to ignore/bury a form of attention that is grounded in an immutable foundation shared with all living beings. We are attention deprived in these areas just as animals are deprived of their natures and their opportunity to thrive freely. We are distracted away from thinking and living outside the locked box of belief system fueled ‘circle of life’ connectivity.

I have described/compared my inner focusing machinery to that of a flowing river, where staying with a ‘here and now’ moment is no more likely than a leaf staying put on the river’s surface. I also compared our conscious lives like that river: we get used to fixating on and going with a flow. The current is the only thing that ‘remains the same’ because it is something that we are used to recognizing and gives back to us a sense of self, of focus, of belonging, and success. This sense of self is also ‘fluid’, and in the negative sense, it makes it difficult for us to fixate on what is solid and not by necessity a part of the flow (animals).

I observe my own incapacity to stop my attention from wandering downstream and away from a location that I wish to remain in. I can step back and see this river/conveyer belt like machinery at work. I can see that people are also going with a flow and the difficulty they experience being able to focus their attention and stay with a location and foundation long enough to consider/reflect/change.
But I also notice something else in the flow. I can look under the current in any given moment and see ‘stone’. I can see that underneath the surface there is something immutable and I can lock into that. There is a solid foundation under every current that resonates with my solid resolve to make things right, that animal others do not have to be carried down the river like part of some logging operation. (Yes, I do know that rocks are inevitably altered by the current, but perhaps this is we should see how an unnecessary/contrived/outmoded current is wearing away the earth in terms of its real and cosmic foundation).

The motion inside of me is sometimes incongruent with the movement and opportunities of the situation before me. At other times it is Ok to be thinking of other things while those around me are busy and not requiring my full attention. The important thing is to be able to acquire enough control over my attention) so as to exercise actions and responses that *add* to the quality and rightfulness that the situation presents/requires. This will also sustain my sense of solid self. Animal use issues requires our full attention.

I believe that my ADD helped me to *not* get indoctrinated early in my life because I was not able to focus my attention on social cues and reinforcements. I was not able (or willing for that matter) to fixate on rewards for conformity and I did experience some forms of ‘failure to thrive’ that, when looking back, were hurtful and helpful in my personal growth. Reading philosophy books (in my bachelors program and personal pursuit for organizing what I was experiencing, I was unable to really focus on the meanings without huge effort and repetition. I am glad of that now because it actually forced me to stay on course with listening/seeing/interpreting the solid state of being that was always there in front of me.

My disability enabled me to see how we disable animal others (and ourselves)from allowing potential and seperateness to *stand*.

I can stand in front of a mirror and not fixate my attention on some aspect of my flesh as society has trained me to do and see. After staring at the body in front of my consciousness for several unaltered, unblinking, fully undistracted moments, I can see below the current/flow of societal shaping and rejoin with the solidity of sustained, fixed, yet open being in the world.

This is the same world that animals as distinct, solid entities occupy and deserve to live in, free from our attention as objects to be exploited.

Attention Deficit Pt. 2 (of 3)

2010-12-23T13:20:00.000-08:00

Nothing tying in ADD to my vegan life in this part of the essay, but Pt 3 may reveal some connections (to be posted very soon). Continuing now from the previous post:

If the attention deficit disorder has an influence the overall relating style of the person, then it can have a continuum of influences that impact the make-up of any interpersonal transaction. ‘Undivided attention’ is often unreachable as there are so many uncontrolled divisions and side tracks that break up the potential for a fixed presence or mindfulness.

I want to spend some time describing/validating the presence of the disordered machinery itself, apart from other influences that go into making up what ADD *is *(i.e. a social systems component, a symptom of the times etc). This is important because we are talking so much about flux, and there is fixedness to this disorder that is behind some of this flux. This disorder’s phenomenological description can also be used to open up and add to windows of perception on reality. Thus one does not have to conclude that if the machinery is ‘broken’, so are the observations. Different conditions elicit useful contributions to other/shared aspects of reality. It is also (probably) one of the reasons that I convey thoughts better when I have time to reflect vs. explaining to someone in a given moment. It is all ‘up there’ and with practice I get better, but I still rely on having time to get it all down.

The presence of the ADD machinery is most noticeable when all other stimuli and distractions are minimized. Lying in bed at night I can ‘test’ its presence. The brain machinery is most like a stream or conveyer belt in constant motion. This motion is not noticeable or the center of focus until one drops the thought or word down and observes the inability to lock in on it. So, if one drops a word or series of words down in front of one’s mind, it moves forward like a leaf being dropped into a stream. It does not stay long enough in full frontal view and concentration to capture or feel its meaning. One does not get the ‘weight’ of each word no matter how many times it is dropped down in front (repeated). It is not always a single-path stream either, there can be many side streams that take one of course. The interesting thing here is that the word or moment of focus (a sustained living snapshot) is not actually moving away, it is the thought-movement that carries the self away from the ‘still’ moment at hand (that everyone else is able to occupy).

For example, I can be reciting the Lord’s Prayer in my head but not feeling like I am being genuine to the spirit of the prayer and wonder... ‘is it me’? Then I notice the same phenomenon happens for any thoughtful word, and came to detect the motion of the machinery. At some other time, one can think and feel the meaning of the words in a more abstract place in the mind, but what is missing is being able to retain the stillness needed in a current moment to feel the depth of each word. Undetected, one can easily ‘beat oneself up’ over the *perception* of one’s failure to take meanings ‘seriously’ no matter how thoughtful one thinks of ones self. This can also be behind the extra work it takes to pick up meanings in books. I have to re-read passages and words before the grasp actually holds.

The effort involved in trying to force the word/picture/thought/etc to stay becomes the focus in and of itself, thus defeating the goal of making the content the focus. I have also at times found that there are forms of over- focus or undivided attention to certain attributes or particulars of the transaction. This over focus on one attribute/view usually means that other components are not being attended to, so that the ‘whole’ is not sustained in a here and now comprehension (which can be at odds with the needs of the moment-to see the whole being presented ‘as whole’). So, like the 'leaf' that gets dropped down and quickly moves on, so too do entire 'here-and-now' life spaces (i.e. a conversation in the kitchen with one or more family members) get lost downstream as my machinery cannot hold me or the moment in mutual presence.

Under certain circumstances one can mentally note the specific clarity of a ‘visual fixedness’. It is like suddenly detecting the presence of silence *and* perhaps the noise the preceded it only after there as been a drastic change in one or the other.
The ability to focus and the visual content that is revealed by it is akin to putting on a pair of glasses and really seeing what is in front of you. It may not just mean ‘seeing’ in the visual sense, but comprehending certain aspects of the present moment. Part of the clarity and staying with it means that there are no distracting variables coming into play that are not constitutive of that moment. (There may be variables but they are not distracting).
I’ll use an example of a social gathering with members of my family. Often there is a ‘fleeting’ style of transaction comparable to the ‘rush’ of everyday life where we barely take/have the time to really listen and focus in on a particular person, even if we see them every day. I do this with my own extended family members for years of seeing them intermittently. Then one day after years of coasting on a style of combined visual, cognitive, relational, emotional processing plus the ADD distraction features, this saturated context suddenly reduces/stops for an experience of sustained attention.
The sustained attention is noted following the experience of seeing my nephew’s facial features ‘stand out’, which then connects to other features standing out in a fixed way so that I can devote ‘real’ attention. Then my second thought-observation is that I haven’t really ‘seen’ my nephew in many years (in such a clear light), and look at how much he has grown up. He is this separate person (and separate from how I have been experiencing him). I see the maturing contours of his face, the deeper voice, the complexity of his words and thoughts, the meaningfulness of his developmental life issues. Thus, maintaining a visual anchor of fixedness, I am also able to listen to his words and take in their meaning beyond a ‘fleeting’ concentration. I can further ‘stop’ time and place this moment within a shared, *larger context without this process becoming a distraction to my concentration on my nephew. It is all part of a comprehensive taking in.

This same point of stopping the 'coasting' consciousness can often be applied when we are able to 'stop' and see animals for what they are (outside of our societal mind-flow). We jettison our societal-conditioned attention deficit and really *see*.

(* larger contexts meaning the awareness of the passage/progress of our lives, his life stage, etc).

Attention Deficit Disorder In my (vegan) life Pt 1 of 3

2010-12-03T20:32:00.000-08:00

In my most recent posts I talked about the phenomena of dwelling ‘in between worlds’.

* One generally develops by means of stable, predictable forces that nurture our developing individualities and abilities to relate and process all that encompasses the ‘internal and external’.

* We develop within these stable processes, which encompass and pass on ideological systems, values, and behaviors. These become habitual as well as the commerce by which we maintain our multi-dimensional (economic, social, political etc) relatedness.

* We can experience a ‘break’ with both the societal, normative ground and the behaviors that are associated with it. This can be discovered as we grow (the black child that learns about/experiences discrimination) or sudden (watching a video of animal abuse/slaughter). It can be a combination of both.

* This ‘break’ can change our internal and external world perceptions with effects that sometimes are associated with stress or trauma, even if the ‘break’ and the changes that follow are perceived as positive.

* Following this (and any break) the need for relatedness still continues, and contributes to the direction and cooperation that is required to respect the lives of all beings and maintain the life of this planet.

• Now, relating back to the opening statement, it is fair to say that we all live and have to focus our attention in and between ‘worlds’ as we grow in the roles of parent, child, worker, athlete etc. Through it all we maintain a fairly stable sense of self-identity (if we are overall healthy and functioning from birth on). The challenge of *how* and *what* we focus on can be ongoing as the steady and complex stream of life seems to move our lives and decisions along quickly. However thoughtful we may be, there are (layers of) invisible norms and structures that make it convenient for us to perceive and accept a good deal of life as ‘just the way things are’. This is no truer than within the idea of speciesism.

I my previous post, I talked about animal rights issues as my ‘attention deficit disorder’ due to the :

1- Duration and intensity of attention, perception, and interpretation that such realizations have on my (already) uber-focusing personality make-up.
2- The incidence of these thoughts overtaking (hijacking?) my attention on other matters (out of the blue or somehow getting linked) or staying with animal-thoughts long after another set of circumstances requires my focus.

What I would like to also address is the fact that I have had attention deficit ‘disorder’ for as long as I remember. It went undiagnosed for a long time and is something that I live with. It has certainly played a role in my perceptual and social relations, and I am going to take some time here to lay out my own phenomenological observations and descriptions. I do see it as having made significant contributions to my life, and possibly ways to experience and see the living world in ways that could ‘matter’ to others (which is what my investment in living is all about).

When there is attention deficit, it is difficult to:

1- Maintain focus and concentration on the matter at hand.
2- Move on to focusing on the next matter of hand.

So it is a state of my consciousness always (statically) being in between or in flux, so that there is rarely a life space situation that I am fully attending to (a movie, a conversation in the car, a meeting, cooking with family members etc).

Each ‘present’ does not get the full focus of pure awareness because my attention is still experiencing the residuals of the last exchange, or some trigger in the present gets me thinking of something else. This results in present information being missed, and I am always a step behind.

Now add to this: Even if one is trying to be fully present, distractions and derailments occur in a way that sends one from the present *back* to a previous experience, or *forward* to some other dwelling place:

1- Thought associations – When a subject is talked about it reminds of another (linked/similar) subject which then becomes the object of attention, rather than the current ‘present-time’ subject.
2- Object association – When some particular attribute in the current situation becomes a trigger or gateway to a thought association linked with another separate event (a memory). One may stay ‘daydreaming’ about that event or go off on a series of further associations.
3- Emotional association – the subject matter of the present provokes an emotional response that gets linked to another situation that has/had a similar emotion chain. If it is something that is being currently dealt with/impacting ones emotional resources, it can insert itself into the present and draw the person back into the personal issue.

There is of course often a benefit that can be noted, which is that the present can often be imbued with phenomena gleaned from a past experience. However if this particular addition becomes the primary focus of attention rather than the whole, one is again not fully present.

If the attention deficit has, over time, influenced the overall relating style, it can impart a subtle influence on the make-up of any interpersonal transaction. This manifests itself as an invisible fluidity upon any given moment. Undivided attention is often unreachable as there are so many divisions that break up the potential for a fixed presence or mindfulness.

Vegan at 14

2010-11-28T17:37:00.000-08:00

Thoughts from my daughter ...

At first I look like a normal student. I get off the bus, walk into school, drop off my sports bag in the locker room and then meet up with my friends so we can hang out before our classes start. I go to my first two classes, then in the middle of the third I go to lunch. That’s where suddenly I am not normal anymore. I bring my lunch everyday but that isn’t the reason I’m not normal, it’s because my lunch does not contain any meat; I am a vegetarian. High school is hard enough to begin with, but even harder when you’re treated like an alien and constantly questioned about what you believe in. Yes of course I’m proud of my vegetarianism but sometimes it can be tricky. A lot of people make jokes or tease me because apparently it is so unbelievable to some of my classmates that anybody can ‘live the way I do’. I brush off the jokes because they don’t bother me, I’m proud to be different in that way. I love when people ask questions, it shows that they may be questioning themselves and the way they see eating animals. The only thing that is hard is trying to justify my answers or defend myself without getting ‘shut out’. Recently I was in one of my classes debating hunting with my teacher. Before I could even reach my point or even finish a sentence he would cut me off and begin to tell me why I was wrong. Sometimes it’s practically me against my entire class, I try to come off as strong, confident and calm but, sometimes, inside I can’t help feeling alienated and alone. There aren’t really any vegetarians in my school. (At least none that I know of.) I guess my brother and I are ‘the most famous ones’. Some people refer to me as ‘the vegetarian girl’ or ‘the vegan girl’. Not a bad title but it just makes me seem so abnormal and that can be frustrating. My friends have taken the time to get to know me; they don’t see me as this person who doesn’t eat meat, just as their friend. It’s good that people are aware of my presence but I don’t think I should be seen as ‘not normal’, at least not in a bad way. As frustrating as it can be I always hold my head high, I’m a very social person and I’m fun to be around which is why a lot of people are able to accept me and are open to what I believe in. I hope that as I go through school I plant a seed in the heads of my classmates. Maybe when they’re enjoying their dinners with their families I just might pop into their heads or conversations, and make them take an honest look at their plates.

Universe/Universal PT 4

2010-11-22T15:15:00.000-08:00

As our awarenss increases,animal exploitation in all of its forms goes from invisible to more visible (slaughter, entertainment, clothing, food). Ideology, customs, economic forces, agendas to promote use, and other dynamics become more visible as well.

As one disengages from this use, aspects of this now receding life become more transparent, and it thereby loses its anchor , continuity, and tangibility for that person (via the senses, cognition, emotion, behavior, socialization, and memory).New experiences come to take their place.

One may not frequent the same restaurants, engage differently with friends, and maintain the same hobbies, especially where (in each of these interactions) animal use is a part of it. People may see us as becoming less visible as actual contact lessens, or there is less participation in previously common grounds.

The disengagement/reengagement ‘process’ can have fluctuations, abruptness, back and forthness. There can be a distinct marker in one’s life as a ‘before and after’ animal use, akin to a single but marked event such as getting cancer, a death in the family, or winning the lottery (events not usually within the normative milestones, such as marriage or graduation). I experienced this when my daughter had become gravely ill. The depth of this event created a rift that defined our life as the 1-before sickness 2- everything afterwards. Later as she got better and with the passage of time, these two 'sides' melded back together..

Even a person’s previous memories can now be looked at differently since the change. Future plans may be altered. Much can be in flux as we try to figure out what we can and can’t maintain, control, and change internally and externally.

Animal use is often such a fundamental part of the fabric of life internally and externally that when it is changed/ altered/jettisoned, one’s sense of self can also experience ‘shaky ground’, even if the change itself is seen largely as a positive.

Transitions don’t always have an obvious beginning and end that is labeled and visible, yet we go through a process that sometimes can be compared to stages of death.
Mourning animals has a place in society usually reserved for pet-ified or other attachment-sanctioned animal relations. We need to be able to mourn any change – ‘out with the old, in with the new’. Without this outlet, the trauma involved in becoming aware and managing the awareness of animal exploitation along with the isolating qualities can worsen. We don’t have a societal supportive context for grieving animals killed and displayed in markets. It isn’t easy to have friendships begin to fade enter conflict. We don’t have outlets or supports for our own life changes. Our own memories that were once held as fond (gathering around the Thanksgiving turkey) may now be seen differently. All of these are a form of loss, and should be worked through for ourselves and for the animals.

Animals (even those bred for use) are said to have their own nature, their own needs, and an environment that supports those needs being met. Often these ‘properties’ are invisible to us in the context of their commodification. Whatever environment they become accustomed to, an abrupt change in their familiarity can lead to stress. It is here where relationships and the capacity to recognize relatedness mean so much to the self’s ability to remain organized, sustained, and flourishing.

An object relations perspective on the development of the self is something that is useful here. Among O.R. theorists,Ronald Fairbairn espoused that the self is whole at the outset as opposed to a conglomeration of experiences. Like Fairbairn,I do not believe in a groundless ground that is subject only to the contributions of ideologies passed through relationships with significant others.

http://www.columbia.edu/~rr322/FAIRBAIRN.html

As always in almost every post, I must mention the cosmological ground that has always been present for me and which I sought out all my life to understand and make 'use' of. This whole has been my ground for object relations and has nurtured me together along with my nurturing parents:

I believe that there is a solid yet flowing cosmological ground that is an extension of the Big Bang, the idea that everything came from nothing, and that all ‘being’ came from (and continues to emanate from). Since it is in everything, each current‘thing’ holds the original Big Bang, and the current moment's given meaning/visibilty can be ignited through a connection with this . This ignition can make the 'possibilities' of each thing or phenomena 'hang' as part of the infinite. It also mirrors a continuity and a familiar 'at home' sharing with this original setting event. Thus any given moment can reveal(fit in with)the original setting event as well as the infinite freedom of individuation made possible by the Big Bang birth.We bring the ‘ignition’ to each thing/encounter via a seeing/grasping (and then enacting) stimulus. That stimulus/ingredient is our mental/emotional comprehension of finitude. Finitude is the human mind embodiment of the Big Bang's initiation that connects us to the current thing/moment’s relation with all ‘Being’. It is the essence of relatedness, ground, potential, and the drive to be (vs. intentional or reckless negation). It is our grasp/piece of the original nothing from which the comprehension of all things can emanate. It connects here and now encounters with the oneness and originality of the Big Bang,as well as the onward procreation of that encounters 'potential'

In keeping with Fairbairn,it is fair to say that while we are whole, we still need to have this core brought out through our relationship with a nurturing other. The relationship sets up both our sense of self and our sense of others (human and nonhuman), and including our sense of the world.

The infant’s early consciousness is fairly undifferentiated (internally or externally) from bodily needs, but a sense of others (in connection with needs being met) grows.

As internal organization and sophistication develops along with the soothing qualities of nurturing. A sense of self and recognition of others helps to bring about continuity, control, and striving. Both the holding and the facial features of the nurturing other bring a sense of containment and positive sensate contact. One can then orient themselves inwardly as well as outwardly, bringing order and connectedness between themselves and the world in a life long process.
It is this (early developmental)organization of the self through the ‘trusted’ other that helps keep the rest of one’s perception of the world around them orientated and familiar. It can also further serve to keep one’s own centeredness i.e. linked through something familiar and reliable - “I know and remember who I am”
This basic process can still be enacted throughout life (e.g. looking for a familiar face in a crowd or unknown city). It is the same process used when we find ourselves on ‘shaky ground’; when the world around us seems to change and we enter the alternative universe of normatized animal exploitation and the potentially isolating developments when disengage from it.

I have recently seen the basic object relations of self/world anchoring occur in situations with individuals in my life. I took one of our dogs to the vet for a procedure, and he is a very anxious creature in novel situations. I was in the examining room with him and several staff were there going about their work. He kept a fixed gaze on me the whole time, and the staff recognized this and reassured him that ‘dad is right here’. It was obvious that his surroundings were in flux and I was his anchor or lifeboat through all of this.In the vet room we were all(on some level) equal as 'beings', recognizing and resonating in the universal 'familiar'... the affirming of the 'nakedness' of need, support, and relatedness to get through it all. When he later had to have procedures done without my presence I was told that he did fine, and perhaps my initial being there for him was enough to help him with the initial acclimation. When visiting the animal shelter I have noticed the searching, yet fleeting eye contact that dogs make with each person who passes by the cage. Many seem to have trouble locking in sustained eye contact or interest, perhaps due to the sheer number of people coming through. It becomes difficult or mundane to maintain a sustained interest or hope after a certain number of people (in their now strange/unreliable world) have come and gone.
This searching for familiarity to sustain one’s life and sense of self I the world is heartbreakingly documented when horses are sent to a slaughterhouse. Within the facility and knowing that their lives are in danger, they begin running from human to human, looking for any sign of comfort or affection in their facial expressions.

The psycho-social bond , understood through object relations dynamics,1- takes ourselves 2-our surroundings, 3-our place between both, and puts it back together, sometimes in a way that enables/allows for change.

My mother underwent cardio surgery, and when I went to visit her the next day in the ICU, I found her flailing and glassy eyed with an intubated air hose. As I stood by her side and she turned her head towards me, she slowly comprehended who I was. This brought her back from of a world of confusion and perhaps non relatedness.
Interestingly, the nurses seemed to respond to my presence as well, and assisted my mother. Now, it’s possible that the nurses, being familiar with this situation on a daily basis, were much calmer and (professionally) used to this patient behavior. Its possible though, that the presence of this patient’s son made them see/remember that this patient is someone’s mother, that they too have mothers, and that this infusion of clarity and familiarity inspired them to more humane responses.They see a mother and not just a patient, just as vegans hope that people will come to see all beings as individuals, not just things and resources.(And yes, for the nurses perhaps it was because they did not want service complaints). It should be added that my world was ‘rocked’ as well, and I looked to the nursing staff’s expressions and behaviors for reassurance that they were being responsive, compassionate, and genuine.

My mother continues to struggle with the onset of memory and progressive dementia, and relies on visits with family members to help ‘bring her back’.Just as she was the smiling face I encountered as an infant, that brought forth internal and external organization and comfort, now I bring the smiling face to her, accomplishing the same results. If only for awhile, she is able to be the person she knows, and live in the world that she had always lived in, anchored by the ‘lighthouse’ of our presence and companionship. She, like myself when I am living between worlds and transitions, must figure out the ‘ground’ that we can call home, that we can recognize as coexistence (more on her in relation to veganism in upcoming posts).

When the farmed 'meat' rabbit is freed and is set upon grass for the first time, its encounter with this world is initially one of confusion and pulling back. But shortly afterwards its paws connect with its natural counterpart, the grass. Strange and then familiar, and then understood as something that was always deeply familiar.We will go through this same process. For us, we must wrestle ourselves away from the confining embrace of society. Released from the all too comforting hold of conformist/carnist (M.Joy) ideology, we free-fall down to a difficult yet honest terrain.Transparency is honesty that cuts through all layers, allowing for no compartmentalization.Forgoing the impermanance of self-serving ends, a solid place with and amongst all other beings will be forged. This is what the vegan ground opens us up to, and when enough of us gather on it we will find strength and natural focus and then alter the landscape from a torrent of violent incarceration to a place of peace and affirmation.

Like the infant, dog, or struggling mother, we may need to look for something to fix on, so as to anchor ourselves amidst the in 'between-ness'of our universes as we seek the universal. The transformations-the losses, the changes, the novelty....look to other vegans, to acts of unconditonal regard, to the moon and the sun if you must. They have been here since the beginning, artifacts of the Big Bang, the point when all became possible, providing the same light that has been present to shine upon the whole of history. This same universal light serves to illuminate (and timelessly substaniate)each and every instance of a being's right to discover, unfold, and fulfill their own meaning and place in the world.

Universe/Universal PT 3 (of 4)

2010-11-20T16:48:00.000-08:00

Bringing the plight of animals into the ‘here and now’ visible of daily experience, plus the renewal/recovery of my focus qualities meant that the ‘other life’ I had been leading would have some differences in terms of overlapping qualities. I wished to (obviously) continue in my current life as father, husband, worker, etc. but now I have almost multiple dimensions to occupy. What makes it seem like living *in between* these dimensions currently remains how the mental, physical, emotional, and relational focusing activities culminate in conflicts as well as benefit from one another.

As with any life-altering change, one must try to incorporate the experience(s) into one’s life. I have often called animal issues my attention deficit disorder. Since the inception of vegan activism following my broken ankle, I have spent most of my waking hours thinking about animal/earth/justice/inequality etc. This is no exaggeration at all. Its been three years of daily (and more often than not) hourly focus. It would not be very ‘vegan’ of me to spent countless hours thinking and doing animal-related things at the expense of my children’s or wife’s needs. Thinking itself is an activity that must be prioritized and divided up. That is not to say that I don’t incessantly catch myself thinking about animal issues when I *shouldn’t* be, given the needs of the moment.
Almost every experience is thought of in relation to animals and by extension the foray into deep experiencing of the kind that I have always done. Animal/human/earth/cosmological relations serve as bidirectional triggers for each other.
One of the products of this activity is to illuminate my natural propensity for looking at life before me (observer-participant).

For example, I went to a concert with thousands of people in attendance. Instead of focusing on just the purpose of being there, i was still thinking of the plight of animals. At one point I looked at all those thousands of people below in unison, and I thought of each one having in their stomachs some flesh from an animal. I watched their bodies swarming and swaying and they reminded me of ants or maggots and the way that they feed on corpses en' mass.

This is how people who have a combination of insight, freedom, and some degree of animal exploitation trauma begin to process life events.

I have always had to be mindful of not allowing myself to become too much like a ‘ghost’, traipsing across the living world and being grounded in a current moment that is in between ( and does not differentiate )the past, present, and future. I intentionally use that process to plan 'overlaps' which magnify each particular perspective or life-space experience.

An example : I take the immediacy of 1-laying in my bed in pitch black creates an opportunity for an 'openess-disorientation' whereby i can use that immediacy to join with a re-created(from memory) perception that I am also right now 2- laying in my bed in my parents home and it is 40 years ago. I can then combined this with 3- I am resting in a nursing home bed in my future. These overlaps create/culminate in occupying (a very real) time and space moment called 'immediacy 4', and it gives me and my surrounding life-space a timeless sensation. I can add further types of immediacy layers if I desire or they can emerge on their own, but I will not elaborate on them now. This 'immediacy 4' life-space then supports/illuminates other aspects of life quite spontaneously- be they thoughts,sounds, or emotions. Now all of this is occurring while my wife sleeps next to me quite unaware, or perhaps she is awake but is not really occupying this space in a shared-mind sort of way unless we practice/communicate a mutual effort to 'get there'.

So a bit of a summary on this is that

1- I already had a way of perception/feeling/orientation towards life (since birth) that seemed somewhat different than what most people dwell on or in.So I was already occupying a space that seemed set up away from regular mainstream outlook/engagement.

2- I left some of that thinking intensity and focus behind as I created a life with marriage, work, and kids, but also became a veganized consumer within that period.

3- When I had a break from the heavy routine I allowed more awareness of animal suffering and its relation to the regular mainstream. The regular world was shaken, and as if waking to find a bombed out world around me as well as the intact world I had been making a life in, I found myself outside once again yet also reunited with my former intense focusing, renewed with a sense of purpose.

4- The new struggle is trying to maintain a 'being there' with my regular world and those in it with my new and all-consuming focus... the meaning embedded in being alive as well as the question of the animal other-now my primary focus along with other (yet related) existential, phenomenological issues.My regular life (and those in it) have benefitted form my renewed passion as well as suffered at times (e.g. "dad, are you even listening to me?")Sometimes it is hard to stay motivted to live one's life as planned when an obvious war/devastation lies all around me/us. It as if a war has disrupted life as it was known.

Universe/Universal PT 2 (of 4)

2010-11-19T17:07:00.000-08:00

During my broken ankle recovery, I watched my ‘first’ animal misuse/abuse video (Meet your Meat). I hadn’t watched one before, telling myself that I already knew how bad it was for animals. The immediacy of their experience (and now mine as observer) both gripped and ripped me, like watching video footage of death and suffering in Vietnam that I saw as a boy(only worse-more graphic).Back then I had incorporated those disturbing war pictures into my immediate daily experience, and the world became unpredictable and potentially unsafe at any moment (like a feeling of dread that lightening would strike me in any given storm). Because of the draft at the time I silently believed for years that males automatically had to go into the military and I grew to be anxious and regretfull that i was a male. Likewise being very young during the civil rights unrest led me to be vigilant: i had images that a bus could pull up anytime and black 'rioters' might unload and run towards me.Likewise in the present my world was again 'rocked' by the images of animal slaughter and its incorporation into daily life.

My original/life long strong focus orientation to experiencing the world (mode and content) returned via the strong content (triggered by the animal exploitation film scenes). Exploitation was made all the more real, visible, visceral, and on par (in terms of the strength and depth) with the strong encounters with the phenomenal world I had been growing up with. Perhaps it was hidden/softened to others (in the day to day march) yet it had always pulled on me to maintain an attachment to and pursuit of wherever it led.

Reengaging my own senses/orientation and identity with this powerful reality of the world also brought an answer that had been nagging on me in the past two years. I had started to wonder if I and my attributes would have any particular contribution to make in this world. I hadn’t really felt that I had done anything with my life to make it significant in relation to my orientation, or whether there was any design/special plan to sometime unfold. I am not sure at all about the possibility of earthly/cosmic ‘plans’, but I never preclude anything like that 100%.

I found my answer via the most direct meeting between my phenomenological tools, skills, grounding in finitude, and the plight of animal others on this planet. I felt as if I could utilize my nature even further than how I had been using it to assist people in my social work/psychology occupations over the past 25 years. This injustice and extreme sufferage wrapped within the 'normal' of people/societies around the world and through all of history is also a pathology and a derision on all manner of levels. The impending death of life itself (due to humans) is a course that can be altered through a grasp and use of death's mirror opposite,finitude.Veganism provides the gateway.

When I realized that I could focus, incorporate,cultivate and devote my life-space attachment to the world with animal/world activism, i had my answer to the question of my life's greater purpose. Upon understanding this, i then saw an image of my own grave. I understood this coming-into-focus image to signify the meaning and place of my life and its work between the now and the end of 'me'. Occasionally I still see my grave, idle yet there for me while I go about my work.

After watching some more videos such as ‘Earthlings’ and having them incorporated into my consciousness of the lived world before me, I certainly went through a ‘transformation’.

It was if I woke up in the morning and looked outside and saw a world with bombed out surroundings overlaid upon and in between ‘normal’ life (including my own). If one’s whole ‘life as they knew it’ came to a halt because of an interruption so vast, a tear in the fabric so irreparable, an invasion so alien, and a disaster so overwhelming to the senses.

Even if one saw the gradual evidence of war was presenting around them over several months it would still be difficult to process the personal- life stopping experiences (like a Jewish captive in a train bound for a concentration camp, passing by the city he grew up and seeing his future as a husband, father, and worker pass by as well.(more on that aspect later).

One of the particular differences and difficulties of this phenomenon is that categorizing and compartmentalizing is absent. The shock of war, accidents, murder, and other human tragedies has a normative support /response system. We know what it ‘looks like’ relative to the norm, even if we haven’t been through it personally.

The tragedies that I will refer are experienced on (at least) two levels: 1-the harmful action itself, 2- the (tragic) acceptance in normative terms of the harmful action. People are the victims of racist, sexist, ageist actions, and also find out those societal structures through history to the present, supports/contribute to the imbalance (segregation, unfair wages, stereotyped marketing images etc).

The tragedy of animal exploitation is covered in this, as well as being a *magnified* version of those two levels: 1- the eating of flesh, painful experimentation, skin used for clothing, (all non consensual) is itself severe. 2-The normative acceptance of such severe actions is more entrenched in society than other discriminatory ‘isms’.

These two levels combined create a life-space that appeared to exist in a place of overlapping dimensions with unique trauma implications.

Universe /Universal PT. 1

2010-11-11T05:51:00.000-08:00

Ok, I've decided that this essay is going to have to be a continous add-on for awhile versus submitting a whole, finished product.Perhaps it will further motivate me to get this (important to me) piece finished (i'll tell you when it is).

I can say with good confidence that I was born into this world a participant - by observation. This is not to say that I am detached, but actually attached in a way that always seemed different. The world of experiences happens before my eyes and senses, as opposed to making connections and then seeing things by learning about their origins. I began looking upon the world very early. I can remember having my diaper changed by my mother when I was an infant, and waking up from a nightmare when I was in my crib.
I had always loved nature, but in my young life I was at times not kind to some insects. This was also true of worms placed on a hook, although their wriggling did make me feel uncomfortable enough to want to get it over with. I was not indifferent to more ‘sophisticated’ beings such as frogs, lizards (either wild or as ‘pets’), but I was mostly unfazed/trumped by curiosity when mice were found dead in traps. All of this happened along side ‘normal’ boy stuff like blowing up models with firecrackers, using slingshots, etc.

I wonder if some of this insensitivity and power role was due to the overlap of normative experiences where flies were swatted, mice were trapped, and wasps were sprayed. I’m not sure about eating flesh, because of the visual disconnect with the whole, living animal. I know (see previous post) that the ‘whole animal’ began to creep back into my interactions/experiences with flesh-as-food beginning around age 15. One thing is for sure, my parents were just not all that aware of my doings, or they might have corrected me or had more discussions. I do know that I have those kinds of conversations with my vegan children, with respect to their behavior and thoughts towards living things.

I have always and continue to be perplexed, and otherwise not fully ‘past’ the idea/experience of being alive in the universe. It was like a certain rawness that remained unprocessed and in the back of my mind, impassable. My first true comprehension of my imminent death occurred when I was very young and discovered our dead hamster. I was very upset that this was going to be my fate, and it took many days to find comfort in the words “but you have a very long life ahead of you”. My emphasis on death and of things ending led me to sit at the dining room table with my parents sometime in the late 80’s. I told them that it was hard for me to live with the fact that they would someday die. As perplexed as they were by this announcement, they were very reassuring that I would be alright and I took their meaning to be that I was somehow emotionally dependent on them. This was not the case, and I was really trying to just be honest about the existential situation and appreciation for the ‘way things are’ with mortal human beings. I was never really socially adept and integrated until late high school. College was kinder and more open for me for learning and relationships. I continued to pursue my queries into how the mind worked and what I was experiencing. I moved from psychology to philosophy fairly quickly to try and bring organization and understanding to what was happening before me, in me, and around me.

I continued to have a love for nature and pictures of flora/fauna rivaled much of what I could create in my mind. Since youth I have loved art, monsters, and science fiction as well, most likely because they offered different, imaginative takes on life.

I have always tried to pursue the underpinnings of this world and the immediacy of the ‘root’ comprehension of being alive. The shapes of nature, of my own hands and body, while ‘fixed’ nonetheless acquiesce to my comprehension that they are mere instantiations of what could be. In that instant they lose some of their given-ness and ties to a familiar ‘base’, which then moves outward to other ‘objects’ and ‘knowing’. Yet always there is this foundation that has served to orient my way to and through the world. Yet, up until recently in my life, I had not found a genuine direction or function, what I was supposed to do with this foundation and my place in it.

I went on to use my grounded- ness in the ‘unfamiliar-familiar’ to help those who struggle with it from societally disadvantaged position- mentally and emotionally disturbed individuals-children through adults.

But, to stay to the theme of this post, I wish to convey (at this point) that I was born with a sensory -strong, somewhat predetermined, and perhaps unconventional disposition that put me in a relation with being-in-the-world that had lended itself to both neurosis-cultivation and creativity. At the same time this universe was also full of conventional experiences and actions as I made my way through life.

One of the factors that led to the ‘putting aside’ of my focus/ my sense of self in existential world exploration was the increasing demands of family-raising, work, maintaining a house etc. Veganized consumer purchases continued- strongest with regards to food and clothing but waning with household products. My commitment to ‘always do more’ was succumbing to convenience again.

When I broke my ankle at work several years ago, it had the effect of knocking me out of my scheduled flow of activities and responsibilities. Lying on my back for two weeks provided me with the opportunity to read, and I dug through some of my old philosophy books. I chose to read (again, as i had studied it in an ethics class back in 81') Singer’s ‘animal liberation’, and honestly I had in recent months been thinking more about animal rights again. Reading it (and getting back to in depth critical thinking in general) began to revitalize and awaken parts of myself that had been left ‘waiting’ almost 15 years ago when family matters took up most of my time.

Crème de la crème

2010-10-01T07:40:00.000-07:00

I often find that my lines of thinking begin with a somewhat spontaneous experience from which I then make connections or ‘see’ via the paradigm from which I bind meanings.
When I was younger I began seeing the veins, fat, and cartilage embedded in the ‘meat’ I was eating. I would pull the meat out of my sandwich and commence to pull that stuff out before returning the cleaned meat to the bread. I continued to get more put off by the texture/sight of the meat and turned to either tuna or cheese sandwiches, eventually becoming vegan after passing cows in the pasture and seeing them (truly) for the whole beings that they are. I’d passed cows thousands of times before, but this time I must have been ‘ready’ due to my steady conditioning to become unconditioned (a series of visual contacts with flesh in sandwiches, restaurants that ‘just happened’).

Behold a different version of the sandwich- the cookie with the ‘crème filling’. For a long time I had taken to removing this filling (to reduce calories) and one day I discovered just how residually greasy it is when run under cold water and smeared on one’s hands. I suppose one’s body heat dissolves this ‘crème’ and it (and the issue) is hidden from view once swallowed.

In my previous post, I suggested that the end product ‘before our eyes’ goes through a series of production stages internally (bio/psychological) and externally (manufactured, elements of nature…).

Thus, the crème filled cookie is an end-product with *intended* shared, recognizable qualities, much like the ‘usual’ turkey sandwich. These intended features often are a composite, shaped through a societal process that disembowled living beings who had their own recognizable and whole life-contexts.

We also overlay a set of qualities upon the surface features of a person, for example-seeing them as mommy/daddy. This overlay is actually, in a certain dimension, a bi-intentional, transactional construct between parent and child. From the child’s point of view however, they end up with a visualization of the parenting person that does not recognize the individualized parent person as a separate entity. If we are able to remove/alter certain features of the gestalt that holds together the cookie, or person as parent, then 1- what is different about us 2- what grounds are operating that still holds us/it together in this other form 3 – what is significant about the object in front of us 4- what particulars about us were featured as part of the change-over.

Most of my in depth thinking starts with a surface, an encounter in everyday life that gives me pause to make connections and dissolve connections. Usually a symbolic meaning embedded in an experience of 'something', of an object (even a conversation content can have a certain object-center of focus). It ‘shows up’ as a ‘door’ of sorts, or a light.If I have experienced a loss, then certain features in the environment may stand out, such as a vase of withering flowers, that complement what I am going through. One time I sailed through a stop sign, straight across a normally busy intersection. The rest of the morning at work I felt like a ghost there, somewhat seperated (and by most rights should not be alive to be there). For many days after... chipped plates, broken glasses 'stood out' to me, illuminating the kindred notion that my life, my kids life, was almost 'shattered'by that moment in the intersection.

Most embeddedness means that in general...immediate experiences are manufactured, shaped into being via brain function, personal history, emotion, socialization, values, and technology . When there is a change in our focus or in the arrangement of the manufactured given, things look different (more real, less real, further connected etc). If the change is profound enough, we can look/be distracted and approach a ‘depersonalization’ regarding the world as we knew it. That will be the topic of another post soon.

Our culture begins the ‘cookbook’ process by objectifying. Perceiving ‘resources’ in objects such as plants and animals employs a disconnect within the perceiver to disconnect(take apart) and extract the ingredients from the whole (being).

We often rework these beings (conditioning ourselves) into unbecoming portraits to be ‘improved upon’ or salvaged into something more desirable-the end result being self-gratification, incorporation and subsequent focus elsewhere(now that needs have been met).

This is a reworking into a more digestible sustenance that fits into the fabric of our immediate (yet mediated) surroundings. It copies the process of self transformation and self-maintenance of the societal self: Culture picks out certain features which show up when we look in the mirror. These features may be labeled (and thus perceived) as less desirable and become the subject of a ‘makeover’. This reworking serves to reduce separateness (now associated with a negative feeling) and delivers a sense of belonging, approval, and continuity in the here and now. While we perceive a gain in being part of a whole, the process actually relies on a focus that breaks down, separates us from, or covers over actual ‘wholes’ that pre-existed prior to the inception (whole persons, animals as parents, environments that self-sustain).

The final product is actually compartmentalized bits attached to/embedded in whole societal contexts. So too are we fragmented bits, attached to contexualized wholes that keep us from sliding back together to form a complete, unified awareness, a seperateness based on wholeness, a perspective by which to identify other whole beings equally divided into bits by the process of exploitation.

The early (original) object-relations between humans (again) serves as a model by which all current ‘cookbook process’ (transformation) operate from and derive their recognition, familiarity, and sense of belonging from.

1- Our consciousness, identity, relations and perceptions to others begins simply like a cell dividing into two. While externally the whole may be greater than the parts, it is a part- by- part process that leads the self up to recognizing ( and itself being)a whole (in both outer perception and inner reflection).
2- Unlike the body which accelerates the division of cells to form a growing whole, the psychological self moves more slowly. Our minds remain for awhile in a split state and process experiences (outer and inner as such)in this manner until more complex divisions(perspectives) add to the growing kaliedoscope of mind/person/experiences of other persons and objects. In early self development,a psychological immune-defense system, to protect the growing self, mirrors the (early) two-split state of affairs.
3- The most ideal conditions/environment must be maintained by the self (and immune system) during this vulnerable time. The immune defense must maintain the most pure, simple, yet fortified ‘membrane’ between self and world as the mind develops via symbiosis with others.
4- These conditions within the mind keep out threatening conflicts that could ‘go viral’ and potentially dissipate the growing self.
5- If an unmanageable conflict ensues when the self is at a higher level of development, the self may ‘sound the alarm’ and regress to a previous(successful) level of defense via recreating a protective sense of ideal conditions.
6- The sense of purity, experienced as need satisfaction and inner cohesion can be maintained by the psychological immune response. Like white blood cells that attack viral intruders, the self sends out platelets of mirrors that attach themselves to the threatening object.
7- The object is covered with mirrors that reflect back to the self idealized images, images that were ingrained when drives were being met (smiling faces, warm skin contact, sweet sensory sustenance). The self regains a comforting sense of holding, contact, ground rather than falling, space, aloneness.

An overlay of idealization occurs to bind together and create a surface image and consciousness of positivity- both in the endowed object and in the sense of self. Since this idealization comes from an internal need to hang onto purity, the internal mechanism must be maintained with out being obvious to the self as an internal fabrication.
The defenses employ means (projection) that makes the self believe that the purity and goodness are originating from without, so that the self is ‘facing forward’ and perceiving a good object accurately and genuinely.
Projection becomes a mode of production in maintaining this purity, and society also mirrors these conditions, serving up to the self all manner of ‘goods’ that uphold the projective/protective defenses. Thus’ modes of production’ both inner and outer, serve to maintain this idealized (and fundamentalist) state at the expense of the real outside environment and the other beings who live in it.

Due to the pressures and rewards in maintaining this internal and societal protective façade (the* end product* perceived as here and now reality) it becomes truly difficult to see the outside world (as it is, could be, needs to be), as well as reach a higher state of both symbiosis and recognition of separateness.

As we grow more aware of the modes of production (and suffering)that go into an end product, our perception of the product begins to change. The once positive object begins to come apart and reveal the 'ingredients' of the suffering. It serves as a portal, an opening to the conflictual world once hidden from/by us.

As the world as we knew it begins to crack at its (fabricated) seams, and we begin to see just went into the composed objects before us, both we and the objects begin to lose some of their structure. Like an 'ice cream cone' that melts back into breastmilk, the cupcake that begins to 'bleed out' its cream filling, the lost leather glove that lays outside, fading and decomposing back into the soil, an honesty returns.

We learn a great deal about production costs (of ‘reality end products’) when there is a breakdown/breach somewhere and we are made aware of it on some level. We are less likely to acknowledge a pathway to the environmental threat when it is serving to maintain our sense of protected self. This is why we are more receptive to animal welfare (reduce suffering-animals and our guilt) rather than animal rights (the freedom just to be, and to be one with a personally-derived foundation in the universe).

Animal welfare is a way of maintaining the principle that 'no one must suffer' while maintaining the relation *over* others so that the self does not suffer conflict. This is a projection of the inner struggle - keeping the door closed on the authentic self's right to exist without conditions....conditions that could have been maintained with other available choices (such as vegan choices that protect both animals and authentic selves...)

It is a guilt that never had to be, for it is not ones fault for abandoning the foundational self to maintain survival ties to parents.

We are afraid to recognize and let go of habituated self-survival skills that conditioned us to believe that we needed them (then as well as now) to keep our sense of self together, as a whole, as an end-product.
This habituated self was born under false pretenses, by societal memes that run counter to the true earth integrity shared amongst all living beings. This integrity is instinctive to us, yet forced to be split off during our upbringing, and executed (over and over again) so as to maintain loyalty/survival ties with our parents when we needed them so very much.

It may feel like our sense of self would dissipate and melt away should we break through the protective membrane that holds our universe together. We are afraid to expose ourselves to potential untenable feelings of resentment towards our parents and ourselves when the conflict/rift began so long ago, the feelings that sculpted us into seeing ourselves as both victim and monster. But it is time to mend and make bridges. We must break down the machine that maintains the chasm. Then there will be no chasm to fall into, and our fear will dissipate, uncovering the real world beneath, pure and beautiful in its own design. We must allow the mirrors of happiness to melt off of the animals that we subugate and reveal the beauty of them in their (already) whole state.

There is an alternative universe ready and needing to be creatively uncovered. We must risk the implosion of the fabricated self to avert an explosion of the world which is being used up to fuel the internal, false mechanism that cannot be maintained much longer.

Sound of the Sun Pt. 3 (final)

2010-08-15T21:01:00.000-07:00

Sun,Tree, Big Bang,Tunnel leading to the light,the spread of an idea, the formation of an experience starting from the core and moving outward...

Gestalt utilizes the ideas of whole and parts. Forms rely on each other to exist (as separate/distinct).

Reification is the destructive or generative aspect of perception, by which the experienced percept contains more explicit spatial information than the sensory stimulus on which it is based.

• We don’t see gravitational forces or wind; we detect them through the movements of other objects. We may not see a source of light, but we can detect its presence through what it illuminates. We may ask what are the component essences at work behind the ‘end result’. What qualifies it to be an end and not a phase?
• When we talk of things, of wholes that are more than their parts, this means that you cannot always grasp the thing if you try to locate it via ‘dissection’ or a mechanistic view.
• We are born with minds that begin with simple arrangements and develop complexities as we grow. Our sense of self and relations to others also grow in outward, more complex arrangements.Various cultures, ideologies, and political systems reflect a complex composite that give rise to how we structure reality and our sense of self. We often ‘compose’ concepts, ideas, and rely on familiar patterns that are shared with others (i.e. we all may generally see/talk of the same thing).

• As human beings we generally share a set of senses that separate out and help us organize reality. Sight is separate from taste, and taste is distinct from touch. We may taste, touch and see a fruit, giving us a composite experience. Each component part creates a whole end product experience.

• It is important to remember that personal life space compositions are ‘generated’ and not to be assumed to be fixed realities. We come to see things through a series of repetitions, but that doesn’t mean that we cannot know the thing very differently at another time, and see that a bundled set of components and the end result is not necessarily fixed or natural or independent. The state of knowing something has systemic ties, so knowing something differently also changes the system, or allows *any given* components to express themselves in a different way as well. This different way could potentially be a way that is *more* in keeping with the spirit of a foundational being of creative existence, rather than locked in a context-use.

• We can experience a change in the way we know a particular end product ‘given’, a given whose presence is acknowledged around the world and is a part of each person’s world. If the object is constant yet changed within our experience of it, it may systemically resonate a change, an upheaval, a realignment, an acknowledgement of the temporal nature as well as the infinite creative potential that is always ‘there’, ready to be uncovered and taken up by the new sensing of it.

• Synesthesia is said to be the overlapping of senses, whose ‘end product’ is experienced as an in itself (vs. conjured up by the person’s intentionality).The person is a passive observer of phenomena that occur of their own accord. This is said to be not a true/normal end product, but the experience of the parts before they can be put into their proper/normal organized place. For each synesthist, the overlapped sense experiences are consistent over time. No two synesthists experience something the same way however.

• The synesthetic experience is accompanied by emotional qualities, and it is thought that the locations of the emotional and sense components are in the limbic part of the brain, a more core, and primitive area. The limbic and the cerebral cortex work together in an ‘outward’ direction to meet up with outer, worldly objects, so that the sweetness of an apple is located in the taste zone, while the redness is located in the sight zone, and so on.

Richard Cytowic has researched and written extensively on synesthesia. Here are some excerpts from this document:

http://webpub.allegheny.edu/employee/a/adale/p108/Synesthesia%20Phenomenology%20And%20Neuropsychology.htm

“We often think of the flow of neural impulses as linear, and emphasize its terminal locus - i.e., we classically think of perception, an action, or an utterance as the terminal stage of some process whose locus is somewhere in the cortex. We think of perception as a one-way street, traveling from the outside world inwards, dispatching a linear stream of neural impulses from one relay to ever more complex ones, so that the process is metaphorically like a conveyor belt running through stations in a factory, until a perception rolls off the end as the finished product.”

Instead of fixating on the terminal event, suppose we turned our attention to some earlier stage of neural transformation? When looking for relationships on any family tree, we find that members closer to the trunk resemble each other much more than members out on distal branches do. This is why family resemblances are more apparent in offspring when they are young children than when they are grown-up. Even in the case of different species, a human infant and a chimp infant look strikingly alike while the adult members call attention to their disparity. Regarding synesthesia, we conclude that all intervening transformations between the eye and the visual cortex are possible candidates for processes that are closer to the trunk of perception than a completed (and presumably cortically-situated) visual image is.
By analogy, the consensual image we see on the screen when watching television is the terminal stage of the broadcast. Someone able to intercept the transmission anywhere between the studio camera and the TV screen would be like a synesthete, sampling the transmission before it reached the screen, fully elaborated. Presumably, their experience would be different from those of us viewing the screen.
This implies that we are all synesthetic, and that only a handful of people are consciously aware of the holistic nature of perception.

Below the level of mammals, the limbic system is not seen in its developed form, but once we reach the mammalian line it undergoes robust elaboration. This development, however, occurs in tandem with that of the neocortex. Some mammals emerge higher in one dimension than another: rabbits for example have well-develop limbic brains compared to their neocortical development, whereas monkeys show the opposite trend. Humans are unique among mammals in being well-developed in both limbic and neocortical dimensions. In humans, the relationship between cortex and subcortical brain is not one of dominance and hierarchy, therefore, but of multiplex reciprocity and interdependence.

While we think that the cortex contains our representations (or models) of reality - what exists outside ourselves - it is the limbic brain that determines the salience of that information. Therefore, it is an emotional evaluation, not a reasoned one that ultimately informs our behavior.
Emotion did not get left behind in evolution. Reason and emotion evolved together and their neural substrates are densely interconnected. Yet each concerns itself with a different task. The word "salience", which means to "leap up" or "stick out", describes how the limbic brain alerts us to what is meaningful. We might say that the emotional brain deals with qualitatively significant information.

The limbic brain's use of common structures for different functions such as memory, emotion, and attention may partly explain why humans excel at making decisions based on incomplete information, "acting on our hunches." We know more than we think we know.
When we think of our brains, we usually think of a computer, a reasoning machine in our heads that runs things. This is consistent with the hierarchical model. But emotion - which word I use to include irrational, a-rational, and non-verbal knowledge and cognition - is what actually directs our thoughts and actions. Like the Wizard of Oz, it is our a-rational inner life that pulls the levers behind the curtain. Our inner knowledge behind the curtain is largely inaccessible to introspective language, which means that what we feel about something is more valid than what we think or say about that something.
Reason is just the endless paperwork of the mind. The heart of our creativity is our direct experience and the salience that our limbic brain gives it. Allowing it to be that does not stop us from overlaying rational considerations on it - after which we can talk, recount, explain, interpret, and analyze to our heart's content.”

What Cytowic confirms for me, is that we can experience any moment in life that draws from limbic, foundational, early ‘stem’ (later concentric circles forming the trunk) and primarily *Big Bang* initial components.We don't have to let societal ideologies dictate the final perceptual product on which we base many decisions.If emotion recovers its rightful place in informing us what knowledge is, emotion can include AGAPE or altruistic love (not just what/who falls under life-space attachment)

It has been said that when we experience a milestone or something basic and profound in life, we see what/who really matters, what really stands out and what recedes to the background. What goes into making/sustaining something as ‘stand out’…part of the contribution is an accompaniment of strong emotion.

• If the experience of ‘what really matters’ is said to resonate with a simpler , core experience, then perhaps the final product that is cut through is more of an intentional, ideological fabrication, and the core, single sensates are more natural and of their own accord. Can we intentionally work on recovering a natural synesthesia that is a forum for being in the world, an arrangement of its own accord that then systemically resonates and lights up other possibilities.

• We get sense input overlapping with prior experiences, the sight of fall leaves may remind us of a certain touch or smell, and something may taste like the smell of something else.

• A gestalt whole is created by a concert, a kaleidoscope of aspects and contributions that, in the final product, can be ascribed as ‘coming from’.

• We can see and feel the sun but I would suggest that the sun produces a sound. While it cannot be heard every time one encounters the sun, the point is that you can hear it when certain components are in place. The sound is real, not contrived in imagination. It is detected once one understands the relationship. It reflects a natural synesthesia, recovered from a culture that separates our unifying experiences into categorical living and seeing. Once we become open again to the way our senses inform us (of ourselves and of others, other phenomenon) we will be free to dwell limbically and cerebrally.

• The sound of the sun can be heard in the humming drone of insects- crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas in the trees. They are alive because of the sun, and they are an extension of it. Art emanates from the mind and finds a place/meaning in the world (and in other minds) rather than being ‘located’ in the brain.

• One could say that all living sounds are due to the sun, so therefore any of those sounds could be considered the ‘sound’ that the sun makes. However I *choose* to say that I think that the sun sounds more like the drone for several reasons. Consider the simple relation that the sun has a creative part in making life possible. The purity, the direct relatedness of this can be reflected in the pure, functional sound of the hum, which is designed for mating/creative/extending life.

• The sustained sound just seems to match the enduring presence of the light. Even when the sun has gone for the night, its presence is heard in the beauty of the cricket’s whir. It is similar to saying that we experience the presence of parents through their children, even after the parents are gone. In the winter or when I am in a store, I can see the sun and know that there is a sound that emanates from it. It is a sort of grounding beacon that , when experienced in its unique way, also affords anything that it is lighting up a different (and perhaps very foundational)look.

• This is new way of knowing something that for so long was known another way, and that opens up systemic connections to other ways of experiencing our lived moments, encounters, and environments.

• It is a ‘from this day forward’ change in the way we see and relate. It is a ‘check and connect’ way, at any given moment, to see *everything* under the light of the sun because the sun itself has changed for us. It has changed for us because we have changed the way we sense, which can now detect a different way for the world, which both pre-existed but also now exists again presently because of our ‘link’ in the concerted effort.

• Once our senses are opened beyond that which confined them, we can look for other ways that the world can be presented to us without unnecessary confines.

• Being vegan lets nature ‘be’ without unneeded harms imposed by us. There are foundational parts of the world that resonate with being allowed to stand on their own terms. We should unlearn only seeing the world from the farthest emanations. We can operate from a basis that knows 1-a core touch, 2-a creative hum, 3-a sight that is simple yet intact and complete. We can build onto those pre-bundled forms while retaining their individual integrity.

Sound of the Sun Pt 2

2010-08-14T19:02:00.000-07:00

I know that some of my topics aren’t always *directly* related to Vegan aspects of the human-nonhuman relationship, however one of my main goals in these types of posts is to introduce ideas (and ways to experience) that will in the end have a systemic effect. Introducing even a small change at a (simple) core level can have an effect on the outer (complex) level. Altering the identity of the human may change the way they transact with the ‘world’. This may in turn alter the way non humans are seen and related to. This ‘alteration’ does not result in another form of confinement, but of individual growth that also releases them from unnecessary and exploitative relations towards others. There are many variations on the spectrum of human functioning and identity. The make- up of a genius or an autistic person has an influence on the way they view and impact the world. Non humans are also on a spectrum of variation. Their way of being in the world also adds to the depth of just how (seemingly infinite) existence can express itself.
Interestingly enough, humans can grasp these wholes and also look at these variations from an overly/selectively simple view. A simplified view can be constructive or destructive for those whose ‘variation’ fails to be looked/acted upon with a dignified, respected reverence. This latter purview is the domain of human cognition, who’s ‘failings’ could stand to be rectified for the benefit of all.

The foundational anchor to ‘being alive in the world’ is partly tied to a life form’s sense organs of some configuration, and often contributes to maintaining their life cycle. Different beings have different senses, many of which we do not share and may go undetected. As humans we spend a good deal of time trying to build bridges of empathy and respect by finding commonalties rather than finding enough through the diversity. Some people need this juncture in order to make associations and bridges on the human and nonhuman continuum.

In the service of propagation, there are interdependent wholes created through an orchestration of life form senses. Plants detect favorable conditions to produce flowers, which are detected by insects, which are in turn detected by bats, and so on.

The senses provide feedback to the ‘entity’ about the world/context/surroundings. The senses however may deliver feedback that is incorrectly interpreted as ‘reality’ (e.g. a case of mistaken identity). The subject’s interpretation of the sensory input can be influenced from a variety of sources. Adding to this fact is that human beings experience sensations that fall into the category of ‘activities of the mind’ appearing beyond the role of biological necessity. We ‘see’ the world through paradigms; utilize abstract thinking and artistic vision. While our sense of sight, touch, taste, and smell contribute to the interactions and fabrications of our lived world, we have other senses that are not seemingly located in any one biological location. We overlap our senses when we materialize the taste of victory, a sense of justice, the touch of compassion. Our experienced sense of love and fairness may have a chemical component as we are bodily grounded in a material world. That doesn’t mean that love and fairness are reducible to molecules. Our own consciousness is difficult to locate and explain as *only* material matter.

• The phenomenological reduction allows a field of view, to see things as they ‘are’, still connected to us through the constructs of our mind (yet less so) as they are sustained by something other than our *contribution* to them.

• Human constructs are still a part of nature, yet are perceived as separate or “second nature”. They can be tools, pathways. How do we use the revealed illumination…what is revealed? “Use” can be part of the very foundation of being (we use all experiences/phenomena in some way to make sense of the world). Its *how* we use that is a question.

• View what is before you while not losing/changing your observing ego that still defines you by some boundary and cohesion. Are we a composite that is self-aware *because* we exist as a composite, an organizing center which owes to the components. “I am a composite therefore I am”.

• Are human beings ‘creative contributors’ to the concert of a construct? The world is interdependent to create a unifying chain, in which ‘consciousness of’ is both an observing act and a contributing act, one version of unification.

• If this one version assumes dominance, it can dissociate and morph its own meta-genetic code, destroying the body of the earth, in which the very (one version) is grounded in. It is beyond cognitive dissonance, it is bio-centric dissonance.

• One version of a unifying) may be akin to a human’s contribution to the apple’s being in the world, what it can become (it’s an addition to the kaleidoscope).

• The sweetness and redness and texture of an apple may be very specific to human experience. Our sense faculties help create (if not detect) the qualities and put them into the world. The apple may be more (in the world) than what it was now that a human or a nonhuman has interacted with and brought out/added some aspect to it. “Redness”, ‘sweetness’ may not exist in the apple as such, but becomes a part of it or is released from it through our presence/interaction with it.

• The apple may be considered complete in its simply being, apart from any other living being’s encounter with it. Seeing it within the context of ‘complex’ or ‘simple’ assumes that there is a way of seeing that is grounded in a foundation that gives rise to both ( as well as observer/observed).

• The interdependence needed to exist ‘kaleidoscopically’, to participate*more* (and not necessarily higher) in the emanations of the Big Bang suggests that some things exist ‘in between’ dimensions. One cannot experience ‘justice’ , ‘democracy’ or ‘love’ in its essence form, yet we know that it ‘exists’ when certain conditions(in concert) embody it, giving it form and concrete being in the world ( like ‘sweetness’, a child's kiss).

We work so hard to prove a physiological marker for the presence of psychologically seated pain and pleasure. Scientists are forever looking to prove causal relations between that which presents itself in the mind as being founded in the body. Having success at cutting off feelings of love by manipulating chemicals, they conclude that love is fundamentally a chemical/ molecular arrangement. They fail to see that, although we are anchored to this world by a body, and that concepts of (and feelings related to) peace, love, forgiveness etc can be interfered/influenced by our state of physical health, it does not necessarily follow that these (subjectively experienced) concepts are no more than the molecules themselves.

Somewhere in the continuum, in the interaction between mind, body, and world…love, pain, peace, and justice come to be. It is not reducible to any one component. Perhaps it is meant to be that way with fish as well. Subjective/psychological experiences of their pain and pleasure remain plausible, yet not provable by (or reducible to) human measures. It is this *recognition* of openness, of the symbiosis inherent in knowing/preserving something, that can serve as a marker for continued (human) evolutionary development of peace, justice, and altruism. I think that is what Gandhi meant by ‘our progress is measured by our treatment of others who are not like us’ (e.g. non-human beings).

The sound of the sun Pt 1

2010-08-14T06:24:00.000-07:00

Without a doubt this post is a mess of technical, obscure, idiosyncratic words and ideas which I will continue to work out. So I will offer a semblance of the end product right up front, and let the reader decide if they want to stick around and read the thought processes that led around to it.

1-Our brains are made up of several systems including the limbic area which is responsible for emotion and our senses. It is considered a primitive area (evolutionary-wise) and is shared with many nonhuman animals. We also have a cerebrum area that allows for intellectual/symbolic thinking. These two areas intertwine as we comprehend experience and call it knowledge.

2- Synesthesia is a condition in which people experience an overlapping of at least two senses, resulting in cognitive phenomena that are beyond their control. They taste colors, see sounds etc. Research suggests that these people are experiencing a level of limbic/cerebral intertwining that are not fully integrated, yet reaching consciousness as an ‘end product’.

3- I believe that societal norms and ideologies (via child socialization of experience) perform an integration of experience that imposes on an otherwise legitimate not ‘underdeveloped’ way of knowing life synesthetically. It is tied more to a limbic (emotional, luminous, shared, and naturally grounded) being in the world that is more earth-friendly overall.

4- I like to find cognitive restructuring ‘gateways’ to assist an individual to see and interact with the world in a way that is naturally grounded, *already happening* and systemically opens up a field that is defined by its shared-ness with others (human and nonhuman), infused with emotion that sharpens, not clouds our judgment.

5- One synesthetic gateway ‘positively exploits’ a universal presence (the sun) that is ‘always there’, central to life, a wellspring for symbolic knowing and a guiding light in which to see other experiences from this wellspring vantage point.

6- The sun has a sound that emanates from it by extension. You can hear what previously was only seen and felt. When you hear the sun, this change in sensing has a rippling effect on how you sense in general. You will detect and make other connections, cognitively, emotionally, and socially from that experience forward. The world should never be quite the same after. The limbic power of perception will be re-instated into experience and knowledge.

7- The reverberation is akin to (an example I have read) of unplucked violin strings that suddenly ‘come to life’ and vibrate due to movement from some source nearby. Just as a group of animals ‘react as one’ in response to one member’s initiation of a shared quality ( I can think of a nest of bees or a flock of birds), the limbic resonance offers a lighting up of both neural and earth-foundational pathways.

8- One can hear the ‘sound of the sun’ via the drone of summer insects, whose sustained hum signifies the pure, unadulterated, procreative drive to ‘be’ and continue in this universe. The shrill key is as unbroken as the light coming down, and like all sense experience, it is a concert of different relations that are not located/reducible to any one place. The light itself shows up everywhere, only differently now. The people that can dwell in the world differently too, separate yet as legitimate as the animal that is integrated and connected to the world in potentially undetectable terms.

9- Undeveloped in this post yet important to consider is the idea of finitude as a sense organ of the cerebrum: a basic part of the way the field of experience is organized (yet covered up by societal conventions). This will be explored in another post. So here is the rest of the story….

Chicken Project Revisted

2010-07-31T19:14:00.000-07:00

The school chicken project is 'dead', but I thought I'd share the letter that I wrote to the board who was reviewing whether or not to keep it going in light of some of the controversies that had arisen.It was an 'ecology' course where students raised and killed chickens to 'see how their food is made'. At times I took a welfarist slant (e.g.CAK) hoping that it would have a better chance of ending the class completely. The project was ended when the school was found to be out of compliance with State education regulations.Most of the chickens being raised at the school were brought to Farm Sanctuary in various states of ill health.

http://www.farmsanctuary.org/rescue/rescues/2008/canandaigua.html

My Letter-

As educators, it is always important to have a continuous understanding and appreciation for adolescent development when exposing them to course content and decision-making. Since we are talking about a class that involves theory and practice ( in this case the raising and killing of an animal) it is important to consider the profile of a normal adolescent mind.
Recent developments in neuroscience have revealed that cognitive maturity, separate from mental and physical growth occurs in a person’s mid-twenties. Cognitive maturity involves eleven areas. The first five include mature judgment, seeing into the future, connecting behavior to future outcomes, associating cause and effect, and moral intelligence. 1
The upshot of this is, when we expose young people to situations and choices that they take personal responsibility for, we must consider their cognitive capacity to give mature consent as well as psychological management. Going into an experience with an assumed level of judgment can result in types of distress that are not always obvious in a step-by step continuum. The ‘opt-out’ option may not afford everyone the timing and the protective factors necessary since they took part in the raising (i.e.: a part of them goes with the animal). These feelings may not be fully recognized right away or be something that adolescents would necessarily share with adults.
There is another aspect of your students that merits consideration: the life experience- backgrounds and emotional make-up of young people. These two elements are what they bring to and are influenced by with regards to the classroom experience. These personal, individual aspects are generally unknown to most teaching staff even if there is documentation of a psychological nature. While young people are considered responsible for their choices it is again imperative that we consider the complexities and potential impact of the material that is being delivered to them. It follows that, given the life-taking component of the course, it is important to consider what factors may A) attract students to the course and B) affect student’s later decisions in future contexts.
The Humane Society Of The United States released findings on animal cruelty statistics in America, reporting that “teen offenders continue to have a significant presence among reported cases….animal protection groups have recognized the connection between animal cruelty and human violence for some time, and others, including the FBI, see its validity” 2 Many criminals including the young shooters at Columbine, have a history of cruelty towards animals in their younger years before turning their violence onto people.
Now, one of the objections you may have is any potential characterization of the chicken slaughter as cruel. Your school would never condone overtly abusive actions which are all too prevalent of factory farms. However, cognitive immaturity and unknown background experiences of the youth should be considered with respect to cruelty : abuse, in the form of domestic violence, rape, or even serial killing has a universal component. It is commonly accepted that these acts are connected to a need by the abuser to exercise power and control over the victim(s). Thus, over and above the specific actions it is the relations created by the abuser that bring satisfaction to their needs.3
Considering that most of these power struggles begin in early life experiences and are carried out when future situations/opportunities present themselves, the story of Senator Robert Kerrey becomes relevant. His reflections are made all the more poignant given that the current course (in the taking of life) is rooted in the principles of farm life. Kerrey was a Navy Seal in Vietnam and participated in a 1969 incident in Thanh Phong in which thirteen women and children were massacred. Kerrey attempted to frame the horror of war by relating his experience to routine farm practice:
“Around the farm, there is an activity that no one likes to do, yet it is sometimes necessary. When a cat gives birth to kittens that aren’t needed, the kittens must be destroyed. There is a moment when you are holding a kitten under water when you know that if you bring that kitten back above the water it will live, and if you don’t bring it back in that instant it will be dead. This, for me, is a perfect metaphor for those dreadful moments in war when you do not quite do what you previously thought you would do” 4
A component of the chicken project provides young people with the direct experience of the power to hold life and death in their hands, as well as the expectation that they do indeed take it. Given the actual and potential make-up of the students, this practice may inadvertently form a continuum between past and future relationships of power and control. There are many theories that portray mankind’s need to have power and control over nature as the reason we are in the midst of an ecological crisis. Many people would agree that global warming is reflective of our unrestrained and miscalculated dominion. This power relationship over nature is amplified when the animal’s life and death are created and controlled in concert between staff and students. Our need to learn how to both manage and widen our circle of stewardship (to benefit the whole) may become confused and mitigated by this micro-model course of action, which cements the power relationship.
Another point to consider has to do with the method of slaughter used in the course. The school’s mission admirably states the desire to provide a world-class education for every student. In order to accomplish this, you should know that the future of humane chicken demise is controlled atmosphere killing (CAK). 5 Canada is the most recent country to announce it’s embracement of this method. The animals remain in cages that pass through a chamber and die in a gentler manner. Workers have less contact with them beforehand, resulting in minimal physical and emotional trauma. In light of these developments, it must be pointed out that the methods that the course is using will be considered markedly less humane than industry standards in the foreseeable future.
The rest of this paper will focus on addressing the ideas and concepts illustrated in the “Controversial chicken project” post on the Canandaigua Academy link.

1-“…we will make certain that our curricular goals, activities, and projects are offering students the information they need to make beneficial decisions as adult consumers.”

The emphasis here is on framing a course which labels the student a consumer and a focus/goal on how they can benefit. From an ecological (disaster) perspective, isn’t this vision as the primary goal potentially counter- productive? We need to teach young people to see and interact with the world from a non-consumerist perspective as well. As David Elkind has pointed out “Along with parenting, our industrialized and product-oriented schools are the second dynamic of hurrying. Education today is…a preparation for the workforce rather than a preparation for life”. 6 Nurturing the balance of life by changing our notions of consumer status is good practice for character- building. Transforming a life into a commodity and supporting a practice that restricts and consequently negates this lesson is not ultimately beneficial in the ecological context of the curriculum.

2- “...making certain that all sides of every controversial issue are offered to our students.”

When you put this educational value together with the current practice of leading students to kill animals, it creates inconsistencies. You are offering all sides, but the end result follows a narrow, predetermined process and outcome that has a profound set of consequences for one set of lives. The ecological web of events that take place render it not so much an ‘offering’ as a rite of passage into consumerist commodification practices.

3- “The purpose of the Chicken Project is to teach students about the process by which meat is brought from its source to our plates.”

To use the word ‘our’ suggests an assumption that everyone eats meat. While you know this not to be true, one has to be careful in an ecology class to remain conscientious of the value of diversity. This pertains to the diversity of consumers as well as to the processes that bring various forms of food to our plates. As previously mentioned, the word ‘process’ contains multiple levels/dynamics that are at work in this course.

4- “Our modern urban culture has caused most of us to be disconnected from this process.”

It is true that an urban existence can separate people from just about any kind of production awareness. With regards to meat, culture may not have created this disconnect so much as corporate industry and its successful concealment of factory farming. This disconnect also extends to the lives of animals, who are treated as dairy, egg, and meat machines. The course design does little to change this perspective, when it could challenge the ‘process’ by which we become desensitized, conditioned, and assimilated into mainstream consumerism. Mr. Thomas would counter this by explaining that the students “…build a relationship with the bird in the sense that a farmer builds a relationship…” 7 The bottom line and biggest difference is however, that the farmer is an adult with the cognitive capacity to place these relationships into a perspective that does not carry the same concerns already brought up earlier.. (The farmer-bird perspective still ultimately views the animals as commodities). The second difference is that the farmer is running a multifaceted operation that includes business/family responsibilities. The intimacies of the classroom do not assimilate the maturity-gains of the larger business context. This intimate setting, in combination with the limited cognitive capacities to manage internal as well as external affairs, actually necessitates a form of protective disconnect. The forms of coping that develop out of this are not always healthy.
Two articles that speak to this private assimilation during youth towards farming experiences can be found in “The Pig Farmer” by John Robbins 8 and “A Farmer’s Call To Mercy” by Harold Brown 9. Lastly, it is important to remember that the differences between rural and urban culture are decreasing as our global community widens via technology and the internet.

5- “…recognizing the energies and costs associated with humane animal husbandry”

It is good to know that the course is providing an understanding of the impetus behind organic and humane farming practices. Consumers are becoming more sensitive to and requesting the humanely (and costlier) raised food. The challenges remain vast however, on how to ensure that products labeled ‘humane’ (likewise labeled natural/organic) truly are what they say. The larger question also remains as to whether any form of animal agriculture, humane or otherwise, can meet the demands of our growing population while maintaining environmental integrity. Currently, cage-free chicken production holds just one percent of the market. 10 Micro- farming has yet to be proven economically viable: “There are a lot of small, family-run organic farmers, but their share of the organic crop in this country is miniscule…almost all of the organic food in this country comes out of California, and five or six big California farms dominate the whole industry”.11 So the questions are, is it currently worth the cost of animals lives, the moving ahead of training students in such practices, and the potential costs and energies that may go into the student’s coping (with the experiences associated with taking life), justifiable given the unclear and fledgling developments in the market?

6- “Students also learn the large environmental impacts that industrial scale animal husbandry exacts, and that our culture currently accepts…they also explore the complex ethical issues…”

In keeping with the aforementioned ‘disconnect to the process’, it’s unclear on what level consumers are aware of the grievous procedures employed in factory farming (or even so-called ‘organic’ factory farming). Awareness and acceptance are interrelated. It is also just coming to light in mainstream consciousness the connection between factory farming and environmental degradation. Finally, more is done in this course than to ‘explore ethical issues’. The predetermined measures to terminate the animals’ lives are itself an overriding ethical decision. This ethical exclusivity and the ensuing actions add to the current ecological impact that a profiteering/self-serving modus operandi has.
As John Stuart Mills said “When considering the consequences of any action, one must weigh those consequences in their largest capacity.” 12

7- “Students may opt out of this admittedly difficult day”.

This perhaps best captures the ambivalence surrounding the assumed necessity of the life-taking component. By adding the opt-out, you have recognized and legitimized a form of disconnect (from one process). Shouldn’t it be difficult to take the life away from something, particularly at that young age? Labeling it as meat, meal, or commodity beforehand may help mediate the experience, but then again there is the emphasis on relationship building. In the developing mind of the young person this can create a conflict or confusion that a temporary removal cannot always relieve. This difficult day is really embedded from the first day of the course, as the complexities of attachment and detachment are activated. Adolescence is already filled with turmoil regarding the pursuit of independence and the realignment of attached relationships. ‘Finding oneself’ is a particularly vulnerable time in which power and control, and vital empathy development require the right mix of support and structure. This course carries a potentially confusing message- get involved, but not too involved in your caring attitudes and responsibilities. Doubtless educators are aware of the school-based pregnancy prevention programs whereby adolescents are given computerized baby dolls to care for. In one study, the program, after running for just four days, resulted in students expressing regret in having to give up the babies.13 if students can form attachments in this short period to artificial lives, imagine what can occur with living creatures that they care for from birth to ten weeks.

8- “…select the technique that they determine most humane.”

If there is a ‘humane’ method of slaughter, it is one that does not cause any level of fear and pain. For chickens, this would possibly be the CAK method. The unavailability of this technology to you does not legitimize using the next available one at your disposal. There is really no other method that can be considered as gentle. Matthew Scully, a conservative republican, Christian, and speech writer for president George Bush, made the following comment with regard to animal slaughter: “…however adamantly we might care to defend certain practices, to press on requires a certain hardness, and it sounds more and more strained to describe the things we do and permit it in the language of morality” 14

9- “Because of their in-depth understanding…when meals are consumed, the students have no illusions about the…hard road involved…”

I’m not so sure that by the end of this process, an illusion hasn’t been maintained in some respects. The majority of people in our society derive their protein from animal sources. Children are raised to support and love animals. When they question why it is ok to love them but also eat them they are told that “it is part of the cycle of things” 15 they accept these explanations as they trust their parents and teachers, as well as require their approval. Trust is an end in itself, yet when it becomes part of the commodification process, it can create inner conflict. “Tamara Murphy, the chef at Brasa in Seattle, visited her piglets weekly starting the day after their birth, and accompanied them to the slaughterhouse before serving them up for dinner. ‘The hardest part of the slaughter was the betrayal’ she said.”16 The pigs go along through the process of loading based on the trust they have built. Canandaigua student Dalton Mack said in an interview with 13 WHAM news “…But when it comes to the time they’re like ‘alright, well, we have to do it and it’s just going to teach us to get over it’” 17 this value, this perspective starts in the family, well before the classroom. Children can see the contradictions early on and when that ‘difficult moment’ is coming again (through the course) the answer is, according to Mack, to participate in ‘a will-building process’. I believe that this is the continuation of a will-building to overcome an innate compassion that we have for all living things. This may transform into desensitization and perpetuate a belief that we can place all of nature (and sometimes one another) under our will. A course containing certain practices that endorse the overcoming of our young people’s capacity for sustained empathy (to ‘get over it’) can have potentially grave results. Perhaps society will have to make some concessions to its place at the top if it is to preserve a sustainable ecosystem. We are not tied to a food chain. We are free to make creative choices. Responding to and increasing these connections is a way of being humane to ourselves as well as to others. It requires fostering the kind of clarity and will that supports diversity over dominion, conscience over commodification. It is my hope that your school will continue to fashion a course that preserves this message in its applied practices. For, ecologically speaking, many lives on many levels hang in the balance.

Bibliography

1- On their level: maturation of the teenage brain. www.ontheirlevel.org
2- HSUS puts the spotlight on teen animal cruelty offenders. www.hsus.org/press_and_publications/press_releases/hsus_puts_spotlight_on_teen_cruelty_offenders
3- Domestic violence. www.moondog.org/obgyn/disorders/domesticviolence.html
4- Interview with Senator Robert Kerrey. New York Times Magazine Section, april 29,2001(p. 133)
5- CAK www.downbound.com/Humane_Poultry_Slaughter_s/231.html www.abcnews.go.com/business/wirestory?id=4990848
6- Elkind, David. The hurried child(1988)New York: Addison-Wesley (pp.47-64)
7- The Chicken project Put On Hold www.13wham.com
8- Robbins, John. The Pig Farmer. www.foodrevolution.org
9- Brown, Harold. A Farmer’s call To Mercy. www.abolitionist-online.com/07r_brown.shtml
10- Fast Food Embracing Animal Welfare. www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/05/eveningnews/main582028.shtml
11- Is Whole Foods Wholesome? www.slate.com/id/2138176
12- John Stuart Mill: An Overview.
13- Pregnancy prevention using computerized dolls. www.cals.ncsu.edu. /agcom/magazine/spring02/babies/html
14- Quote from A farmer’s call to mercy- Harold Brown
15- Children’s questionnaire regarding farming life. Iowa State University. June 1995, vol.33, no#3
16- Chef’s new goal: looking dinner in the eye. www.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/dining/16anim.html
17- The chicken project put on hold.www.13wham.com

Room With a View Pt. 2

2010-07-28T13:40:00.000-07:00

Going back to my mother’s house over the years since living on my own has brought changes (noted in perception) which have been touched on in previous posts. More recent developments in her health have accelerated the developments.
Rooms and objects are embedded with a familiarity. One familiarity involves the attributes of personal history (e.g. my personal cup in the cupboard) and the other is the universal quality (cups in a cupboard).My connection to this home and all in it began through my connection with my mother/father. As I left and when eventually she dies, the familiars will become more of an in itself ‘universal’. Imbued qualities will recede from the surface of the objects, revealing their own stand alone structure. These structures will be overlaid (with meaning and purpose) once again by the next potential family, or whatever materials they replace them with.
The philosopher Hegel once noted that “the synthesis of being and nothing is becoming”. The household objects, either forged from natural or synthetic materials, are melded into a ‘useful’ or otherwise ‘fitted’ form. The object is perceived and used in a manner that gives it (and the person interacting with it) a sense or place of being in the world. Yet what is it when it is no longer used in a particular way?

The most important point is this:

Even if materials have been assembled by humans into a form for purposes of use, it does not mean that, once in the world, it cannot exist with a meaning separate from the context in which it was created for. “Pop art” takes items that served a particular societal purpose and changes it so that it no longer ‘fits into the fabric’. When removed/freed from the use, the object is seen as a stand alone ‘in itself’. (E.g. a ten foot door key). We have created certain animals (as well as certain perceptions of them) and see them through a ‘use’ lens, but they can be freed by personal changes within us. Seeing them as whole beings increases their ‘size’ and puts them beyond usability. They will then be recognized and respected as separate ‘works of art’ of nature/world (non-anthropocentrically speaking).So, when a certain dependency relationship with a living being dies, all involved beings undergo change. I can see animals as 'in themselves' as my dependency relations change/disengage.

I see household items in my mother’s house that look simultaneously different and the same- meaning that I notice how much I have changed and the object looks different because my relation to it is different. The intriguing part of this extends to the fact that it is not just objects that look different and separate to me. My own siblings look different when I bring their faces into a sustained focus. Just like the childhood artifacts have a depth without the context of my use of them, so do my sibling’s faces (as well as other subject/objects in my life) have a presence that I have never seen before, that have come into their own in the ‘light’ (that illuminates certain aspects) that is emanating from the context of my mother’s (and our family’s as we have known it) end.

While it is within the context of the imminent nothing/non-existence of my mother, that these illuminations come into being, one does not have to associate death, which is attached to an object (person, etc) with accessing some exclusive dimension. Finitude is always with us through life, shaping what we can see and giving direction. It is immediately available, not at some end stage. It is always tied to beginnings and foundations.

Some of the most intense moments come when I can meld an individual/observation with another a larger (yet familiar) ‘look’. For instance, I was walking up parent’s steps to the house one night. I saw the house through the subjective, personal history lens, but I could also see the house and myself in the anonymous ‘any person-any house’ universal mode as well. I looked up at a second story window of the neighbor’s house, remembering the figures from the past that had occupied it. I then saw both the parents and neighbor’s house take on a ‘look’, shared in the look of hotels (and the individual windows and figures inside) that I had seen while walking on beaches at night. I felt as though I was in two places at once, but more importantly the experience triggered/ the dimension of foundation - the ability to occupy a place that is characterized (no more and no less) of simply, deeply being-in-the-world. The ‘looking up’ vantage point (child like, basement like, grave like) and the feel of timeless ocean on one’s feet, ( like the rain waters running over my feet at the gas station) were brought to bear on the view of my parent’s house (New York) in a context of shared, continuous ‘oneness’.

I have had the benefit of watching the building of our own house. We stood on the land, walked on the concrete foundation, and stood amongst the wooden frames of the rooms. 16 years later I can be present in these rooms, noting whatever activity is happening there.
Pregnant with our son.
My son 16 years later.

I can also at the same time ‘see’ and be grounded in the scaffolding structure behind the walls, the ‘container’ of whatever is going on inside at that moment. I see my children’s activities against a backdrop of the house’s wood frame instead of the painted drywall. I can bring to this present moment the past sounds of the wind blowing through the skeletal form of our house, the grass that existed where the foundation is now built. I can then think to a future place down stream when we will be gone, and bring that into the current moment. This presence of the past and future sometimes helps me to respond to the members of my family in that current moment.

In some ways I (myself)am aware of and part of the stand –alone ‘in itself’ of the house (just like I recognized those objects at my mothers) serving a purpose and meaning to my children like the tip of an iceberg. Only one part of the tip is showing itself to them, while a larger whole sits below the surface (such as my life separate from them) .However, while the parenting tip is ‘above ground’, my children also know the connection to the bigger love, larger whole that exists below the surface of the daily interactions. They ‘see’ those deeper extensions (by association) in the world providing I give them the proper objects that represent this continuity. It is up to the mature significant other to assist the growing self to fuse/associate the felt depth (between them) with the proper outside world ‘objects’. If we fuse love/depth with exploitative, narcissistic relations with nature (fishing, eating flesh,, wearing skin) it will be difficult for the self to see other beings beyond a ‘tip’ ,and as separate while maintaining that particular fusion of love and existential attachment/orientation. This is why my own vegan incremental ‘rebirth’ caused such an overt (also incremental) visual accompaniment of detaching and separating out from parts and wholes, self from surroundings, use and nurture. (Although I have always been an observer by nature). It is seeing the world ‘as coming from itself’ outside of a set of confines (that had once deprived/focused the senses).

The tip or topside of the world is what we experience daily, and the ‘rest’ sits below the surface, and is akin to the basement room and foundation, as well as the parent. Amazingly, while I suggest the basement as a ‘precursor to a grave’ to mark a beginning/change in relating to the world ,'topside society' has establised the surface as open graves for animals (supermarket morgues). One may take the view that flesh consumers are the 'walking dead' above ground, disconnected from an essential life affirming foundation.

I sense the other beings in the house, the children and the animals that live there, depending on me, though they are separate. I can feel my heart beating and I know that it is connected and circulating a life blood between all of us, helping to sustain their lives (physical, psychological, emotional) at this time. I lay in bed at night at times as if it is the final resting place, much like the ‘underground’ of the basement, using both rooms and the connection to finitude as a view towards living.

A Room With a View Pt. 1

2010-07-26T13:10:00.000-07:00

I was in my basement the other day, and looking out the window I noticed how much the lush ground cover was beginning to creep around and overlap the frame. It was interesting because the angle provided a view as if from the plant’s perspective. I was below the plant, looking up at the sky. With a slight step up, I could see the driveway, the kids playing basketball, and the dog stopping near the window to smell something. The dog towered above me and I got to see more of his point of view when he looks up at humans. (This is also true of a child’s view).
All of life was going on outside, incognizant of my observations. It occurred to me that I could look at this window as a ‘screen’, replaying some point in their (and my) life-two days ago, two years, two generations. Given those timelines, the room and the angle it provides can serve as a symbolic ‘grave’, with the privilege of me waking up and being able to look out. Sometimes we hear of people spending time in a cemetery to contemplate their life, or lying down in a coffin in some morbidly humorous act of defying/accepting death. This room offers more than a view or a limited physical position, but a basis on which to recognize, contemplate and ‘frame’ what is important in life. It also can intersect and connect with other viewings, different times in one’s life, and what is presented before us on the ‘screen’.
Not only is the view important, but the meaning of the space in terms of size. The underground space that I now occupy (basement) and the space that I will occupy (grave) gives me pause to consider how wide the dimensions still are/can be furthered if I use my life to create larger ‘spaces’ on the surface with the living. Every day that I am alive means that I am not yet locked in, confined, or unable to create influence (coffin). In effect, my own earth-bound being (as container) can still serve as a procreative, boundless womb rather than a constricted tomb itself (or a tomb for animals, for that matter).
My basement serves as a reminder for what will be my container someday, and it also serves to tell me that right now I have lots of room/space to think and act. I can presently leave and return to it, to look at the outside world and contemplate the meaning of my actions today.
Each room within a building may have a view to the outside, and have certain attached meanings to the type of room it is. While the basement may come to symbolize the imminent end of life, it can also serve to remind of beginnings/roots of one’s life. It serves as the foundation of the home, and to the child it is the scary playground of the developing mind, where instinct and the unconscious fight or flee fearful ‘predators’.
Looking up through the window makes one feel small again.
This past weekend my siblings and I were at the house that I had the benefit of growing up in for 20 years. I went to the cellar to have a look around, and looked out the window the same way I have in my own home. There was an instant connection in timelines between then and now, and staring at this screen created a real-time present that was both a ‘then’ and ‘now’ for my sense of being in the world. I could look out and see the world 1- as the one still holding my child-ness, back in that time and 2- as an in-itself, as it always had been before, during, and after my growing up there. In addition, from inhabiting my child perspective, I could use the vantage point (that I didn’t have back then) to see out the window and review my ‘future’ life.
I carry my history in a dual consciousness, held together by a present sense of self-being. It is carried into other rooms of my mother’s house. As I sit at the table with my siblings, I am aware of a thick flow of images from my/our past, coursing around me.. They are there and active as the rest of my siblings and I talk in the collective present. This thick flow of ancient activities was formed in layers upon layers through the years. Some are at my feet in keeping with a younger age, and some are higher up and closer to the present.
In a related vision, just earlier (on my way to this gathering) I had stepped out of the car to fill the tank with gas. The hard rain had caused currents of water (like the torrents of early memories)to run over the pavement at my feet. I thought about the flow of time,the fleeting presence of humankind on this earth, and the eventual reworking/reclaiming of it by the elements (now at our feet but in time rising).
I was in a place to see my own siblings looking out through a window as the light from it shone in on them. It was an observable moment that (all by itself) was already captured as living picture in my mind, infused with both its present-ness as well as if in a past (now being revisited).
Our personal histories began with an ‘explosion’ of birth, grounded in this home, emanating out into actions that become memories. Within these emanating rings is embedded the original ‘big bang’ of mothering, the context that draws us to this home now and gives a special illumination to the perspectival observations. I look at this image as it is occurring with the same context of the water running over the pavement and my shoes, noting that our entire lives including these moments will cease entirely and become a part of unfolding eternity. This last thought gets included into the ‘building’ of the imagery/meaning of the moment my siblings were looking out the window of our mother’s house. A moment that will join a history that will be included into a time when the house will not be ours to dwell in, we will all be gone, the house and the neighborhood will return to dust, and so on. This can all be grasped and be a part of (as well as help define) any given moment. This is one of the procreative gifts of finitude.

Crossing Over Pt 2

2010-07-21T19:40:00.000-07:00

We know that the sentient being whose bit of skin and flesh we come into contact with was anchored to this world. It was quite capable of suffering when its physical and mental nature was thwarted, frustrated, and endangered.

There may have been a time in our early life when we felt in danger but found ways to buffer ourselves from it. We may not recognize or remember because our protective numbness/disassociation. We may actually not have any experience of seeing/knowing the violence done to animal others. Our authentic self, like animal others, was subject to repression,confinement, abandonment, and repeated neglect.Either way, we have an opportunity to override the security system (internal or societal) and become united with animal others (in a flesh and blood manner), via a make up that we share/anchors us to the world in so many ways.

We can re-sensitize ourselves, reopen our empathy pathway via an experience of the flesh...beginning with our own and ending with a shared experiential understanding of what the ‘animal other’ endured.This 'excercise' can be for those transitioning to veganism, on the continuum to non-animal exploitation...

1- We need to take the bit of skin or flesh, no matter how it was superficially transformed by society (a stick of ‘beef jerky’, a ‘leather handbag’)You shouldn't buy flesh/skin for this excercise...find another way.

2- We then expose ourselves to a circumstance (talked about in part 1) that elicits a bit of the danger signal within us (just enough but not so far as to put ourselves in harm’s way).

3- Our flesh then records/resonates with some semblance of what the flesh in our hand went through in terms of the pull and the anchored desire to stay in the world.

4- We come into contact with the pull of life, the encounter with the pure strength of Nature and our bond with remaining alive in the universe.it appears to be a form of (negative)operant conditoning to align our bodies and minds with the body part in our hands.That animal's body and being actually/obviously went through the negative experiences to which we are now subjectively attuned to. It is not so much(new)operant learning as it is a dis-conditioning, re-associating, and re-connecting.

5- The experience may also awaken at first the original conditions that our early, dependent identity went through to remain connected -the pull that was felt to avoid becoming non-existent(to our parent figure and thus our self). What may follow is an experience of an anxiety-provoking free fall followed by a ‘re-birth’ of the authentic self when it lands on the solid foundational ground of Being. We can then look back and see where we were dwelling: in a protective fabrication-a ‘womb’ or child-parent lock-in. It was initially to avoid death of the self, and moved to seeking the ‘holding comfort’ of existential significance in an world and universe (whose ground was felt to be a dangerously slippery slope).

6- As we experience the danger signal, we come to see ourselves and the nonhuman animal in a shared experience of desire and will. We must also extend from there what it must have been like for the animal to be pushed into the free fall terror of the abyss of dying. We have been pushing the animal other (and the authentic self whom it has a similar bond with) into the abattoir to ‘save ourselves’ from a perceived experience of some greater abyss. It is time to recognize that the dark hole is just a throwback to an earlier anxiety, one created by generations of passing along the rift created by the self’s alienation from a foundational being in the world. A rift that is carried out unnecessarily between human and nonhuman animals. If we raise the flesh closer to our mouths, we feel the growing intensity of danger that a boundary is about to be broken that could feel like a terrible break between ourselves and the world. The ethical pressure is felt, that we are about to take something that doesn’t belong to us.

7- We must now no longer respond to the danger signal by fleeing (via rationalizations etc.). We must use our ‘fight’ response to reclaim for ourselves and for the animal others what unites us- a desire and a right to exist in this world, a world we are anchored to and exists before us and within us.

I had initial thoughts about getting ourselves resensitized to the otherwise objectified animal that we were not connected to, as it was presented to us in societally-altered and fragmented parts. This realignment could be reactivated by experiencing our own flesh-stored memories 1-(near death of the authentic self in early identity formation) 2- real world encounters/thoughts of potential bodily destruction that signaled both danger and its gateway to comprehending the intense, affirmative pull of life. Creating a direct association between our flesh reactions and the piece of flesh before us would resonate and restore both the conditions and the incentive to fight to end exploitation and destruction of any being who values/seeks to live.

This began as a reaction to accounts of people deliberately causing animals pain and suffering because it made their flesh ‘taste better’. My response was to find a way (per above) to get the ‘taste’ of suffering via ‘ingesting’ (via empathy ) the mutuality in the pull of life/resistance to death that all beings are subject to and gives them a moral claim to their lives where possible.(it is ‘possible’ for humans because we can make choices. Animals cannot choose their behaviors towards other animals).

“Making choices” brings us back to the ducks in the road. Most people would have tried to avoid hitting this family if conditions were different, but straight to the point human beings deliberately ‘throw animals under the wheels and drive over them’ by the billions each year on the ‘road’ of food and products production.

Frankly, we destroy these families because we had to 'choose' early on between 1-maintaining survival loyalty to parent (and significance of self), and 2-the unconditional foundation of Being (also occupied by animals) apriori recognized early in our identity development. We run them over to repeat/maintain the repression of this forced choice rift.

If animal agriculture had glass walls like glass windshields, one would see the direction ahead of us and anguish of animal families as they are scattered and crushed (male chicks are thrown into a grinder alive) in the machines of manufacturing. We proceed to drive right over them on ‘autopilot’ following each generation before us like the ducklings following their siblings (in a bid to stay alive) but leading into destruction. Unlike that horrible situation that everyone was locked into on that rainy day, we have choices to ‘drive around’ the destruction of animal lives. We don’t have to pave the roads of humanity right through and over their lives. We also don't have to let society pave over our lives and send us scattered and crushed with generations of oncoming memes/ideologies. Adult others may have unwittingly paved the way for this harm to be set up early in our formation, but we can stop it from continuing to run others (human and nonhuman) down.

The pull of life can assist us to instinctively and sharply swerve out of the way.When one sees the car ahead of us run over an animal, and sees it writhing in pain, there is a thought to run over it again to end its pain. Most people still instinctively swerve, but the point is that the impulse to end the animal's suffering (because we know what it is to suffer)by driving over it a second time is what animal welfare is all about. A quick death with minimum pain. Yet we don't question the 'given' that animals should be initially aimed at and driven over for our own ends.

Just as the ducks tried to hold on to life, just as we feel pulled back by life if we get too close to the road, so can we recognize the common anchor that drives us to stay alive in the universe.

We can as a collective of beings follow each other’s lead in an affirmation and continuance of life.
We can all as earthlings cross over safely and still get to where we want to go.

Crossing Over Pt 1

2010-07-19T21:06:00.000-07:00

All beings tremble before violence. All fear death, all love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt? What harm can you do?" -Buddha

I was driving home on the thruway last week in the rain. Both lanes were full of vehicles moving at 50 miles per hour. Across and just ahead of me in the left lane I saw a car suddenly veer a bit. In the next two seconds I saw a lifetime. In the middle of that lane of traffic and rain there was a mother duck and her babies. The mother was frantically flapping and trying to get to/redirect her young, who were both scattered and robotically following their siblings in whatever confused direction any one of them was going. Several chicks around them were already crushed. It was a scene of terror, mayhem, and desperation. Looking over my shoulder, there was a Mack truck coming up the lane. I’m sure that all the lives were obliterated. When I got home one of my thoughts (which continued into the next day) was wondering about the other travelers and their memory/feelings about that scene. I felt part of an unspoken, unreachable collective, sewn together by witnessing that tragic fate of the mother and babies.
I thought about those chicks, and how they had learned to stick together… “each the other’s world entire” as well as for their mother. In those terror filled seconds their instinct to live remained locked and dependent in their attachment to each other. The mother’s instinct to save her baby’s lives, traumatically turning from this one to that amidst the onslaught of cars also showed how foundational that will and attachment is.

We don’t often experience the primordial roots of this foundation unless it comes to us in the form of some immediately threatening event. However, in that context, the pull of life seems to be comprehended as the will ‘to not die’, and we are focused on whatever actions are necessary to avoid or fight back some *particular* outer destructive situation. The emotions that accompany such times are usually one of fear and anxiety. Contrast this to finding a pure experience of life affirmation that is a ‘pull’ experienced without a ‘push’.
The avoidance of annihilation or the affirmation of living also presumes some connection between self and world, and the vital elements that form the tether between them. If the self fails to register a life-affirming connection to a given element, a potential detachment (leading to loss of life) may continue.
The will to remain in this world is anchored in an ‘invisible’ force, a magnetism that is not always apprehended by the mind, which finds identity and definition in relation to objects (people or otherwise) in a life-space.
Some of this magnetism may be based in the very foundation of Being-as-existence, an attachment to the world through consciousness (apriori to ‘what’ we are conscious of).
Imagining or experiencing some threat to our continuation/anchor in the world is often when we experience the counter-force of life holding us back or escaping from danger. However, we do not want to feel our bond to living only by way of pain avoidance. Our anchor to life has a base in and of itself; one that can be deeply encountered. An ethical or altruistic base that increases the strength of life’s pull, to stay in the world and continue its ‘work’ is also worth considering. In a way, the survival of our empathic self, to not let it ‘die’, may also crop up so as to disturb the numbing detachment that befalls us, a detachment that creates pathology and a toll upon nonhuman animals, which feel and share their own deep and natural attachment to life.

Being in contact with our own ‘human’ life-affirming base (beyond a negative-narcissistic definition) is contingent on ethical behavior towards others if we are to stay on track with our potential growth (positive narcissism). To do this we need to re-establish our bodily empathy as well as our cognitive capacity to recognize the legitimacy of the life pull in and for others.
Other’s bodies/lives are indeed being exploited and killed, and we need our own bodily sensations as a conduit to re-establish empathy and an energy will that once again take up (not derail) the earth’s élan vital.
When one goes through a stressful experience, the body often responds in a way unique to the type of stressor. Like memory, the body stores the experience/sensation deep within the physique. Our physical and mental systems interact in the face of potential, imagined, or real danger. As such, we do not give in easily to danger and the ‘will to live’ can be readily conjured up as one of the primary sensation/realizations that define the experience. These sensations can become ingrained into the ‘fiber’ of one’s being and carried into future situations, to be awakened if conditions trigger it. Post traumatic stress disorders often have this feature, so even if the objective situation isn’t life threatening, it can be perceived as such due to the type of physical and/or mental arousal that is (for whatever reason) provoked. The reaction is often reducible to being seen as a ‘fight’ or ‘flight’ response in order to maintain control and keep a ‘hold’ on life.

If those ducklings had survived, they may have programmed an immediate response to any future encounter with a road or vehicle, however objectively benign those variables might be. Any encounter, even coming up to a gentle country road or might provoke the strong sensation/presence of the pull of life (from a fear context).

For the human infant, their conscious awareness of the presence of a parent figure makes them become aware of themselves. Their visual/ mental focus on the parent awakens their self consciousness. Like regaining sensation in an appendage following paralysis, Awareness of the significant other clears out the internal undifferentiation: “I see you therefore I am, and continue to thrive in your presence”. During these earlier stages, when the significant other leaves, the infant’s sense of self also leaves. This sudden sensation of space, of nothingness, can be experienced as self-annihilation- a peaceful or fearful experience depending on how much physical needs were satiated.

This is a crucial juncture. This experience of space, of nothingness, gets ingrained positively or negatively into the mind and body. The experience of space does not (by necessity) mean physical space. It can be a parting between child and parent on an emotional level.Later in our development, when we can understand our finitude, the experience of our understanding of it may be colored by the pos./neg. early experiences of nothingness/non-existence of the self. If we interpret finitude through a sensation-association of 'death of the (infant)self' we will lose the procreative possibilitiies of finitude in our scramble to avoid an unpleasant feeling.

Later on the infant develops an inner representation of the sig. other, which sustains their sense of self, even in the real absence of the other. They are still vulnerable to sensations related to abandonment and how that relates to the threat of the self’s survival. They will do what is necessary to maintain a life link to the sig. other(even if the significant other exhibits 'actions'- animal exploitation that counters the authentic self's sense of rootedness in a universal foundation (also shared between animals). They will do this even if it means imprisoning the ‘real’ self and creating a false self (internally and externally functional).

This self acts as link to the sig. other and to the sig. other's world. The self must remain anchored in the significant other's world view to stay with them. It becomes the arbiter of how one encounters/experiences/interprets the ‘pull of life’, and is usually provoked by (unconscious) primitive threat (to the survival relationship) rather than mature positive affirmation of a real world occupied by 'stand alone' 'in itself' other beings. That is why it is so difficult to get people to see things differently, they instinctively hold on to beliefs because they feel a 'pull' which is tied to early self- survival needs

What is interesting is the fact that, even under these circumstances, the authentic self’s tie to the foundation of being and the constant threat to that tie is rallied against. The 'other' pull to stay ‘existent’ in the world/universe results in authentic contacts that seep out between the prison bars, requiring much effort by the false self to subjugate (often with measures designed to buffer existential guilt, sadness, longing, incompleteness) them.

1- The unconditional relations (that lead to existential fulfillment) are (for now) best represented by an ‘other’ - the nonhuman animal. The nonhuman animal’s seamless ties to “Mother” Nature, while not steeped in ethical relations, nevertheless shows a ‘fit’ in the world that is elusive to humans.Animals may have a seamless tie/fit within ‘big nature’.
People’s approximation of a seamless tie lies in the interface between person and society. What is in front of our eyes is a familiarity, a continuum. We feel a binding, holding context. Sometimes it is recognition, a satiation of a want. But are we farmed into these contexts- to think that we need certain commodities, an exploitation based on perceptions/feelings of incompleteness (itself fabricated by norms of regulated/marketed fulfillment). The outside ‘wall’ is designed to greet us, relieve us from the maladies or tempt us with affirmations that are often built upon the (hidden) toils of animal misery.

2- The nonhuman animal‘s ties to the unconditional foundation of Being resonates with the developing child’s sense of self, who has the potential to have a seamless tie the same foundation (but with the added benefits of finitude awareness).The child experiences universal integrity and life affirmation in observing animal’s displays (non-anthropomorphic) of loyalty, courage, and dedication within their ‘element’, as well as in their own interface with ‘petified’ animals.

3- When the child’s significant other (the stand-in for Mother Nature in form if not substance) embraces (counterintuitive) speciesism, the child must, due to physical and mental dependency ties to parent,...‘choose’.
4- This ‘choice’ involves a trauma ingrained into the very flesh of the child, who must split off the authentic self (that was developing nicely/blissfully) to create a false self (that mirrors the parent’s choices) for purposes of survival/continuation. These conditions become the pull of life that the false self (as the only real self to be acknowledged) responds to.
5- The child is enraged with having to create this split, but it cannot afford to feel enraged at the parent for fear of abandonment (annihilation). So the child neutralizes (by splitting off) this rage as well and develops an idealized representation of the parent (false) as well as a child self (also false) to go along with it. The rage gets redirected towards the true self (and its counterpart-animals) as a defense in the form of reaction formation, projected (unconsciously) out onto the Natural world as ‘something to be dominated and controlled’ for survival/loyalty purposes. Nonhuman animals are seen as ‘lesser’ to maintain good working order of the idealized constructs.
6- The false self, present in both child and parent forms, is tied seamlessly to idealized ‘Mother society’ as an analogue to how nonhuman animals are tied to Nature.
7- We then create ideologies that use continuums and splits between humans and nonhumans wherever needed to maintain survival-proximity ties that were established in the trauma of early relations. (i.e. ‘they are like us/they are not like us)We allow a certain amount of empathy so long as it does not create a threat to the false self’s ties with these conditions. Too much empathy would create the ‘pull of life’ danger signal to the self’s ties with the world (a world created/projected forth from the trauma).
8- The false self also (re) creates a holding sensation (child-parent) experienced as ‘oneness’ in a remarkable attempt to integrate the split between (false) exploitive humans and nature. This is where soothing rationalizations such as ‘cycle of life’ are used.
9- The split off/containment of authentic, real self and its foundation in the Being/Nothing/Becoming elements of the primordial world, mean that humans don’t have full access to the existentially creative aspects of finitude. Humankind gets caught up in fears of being insignificant (alone) and meaningless if it is not connected to something ‘bigger’ and ‘greater’, something that signifies the continued life of the self. This is very much a stand-in metaphor for the dilemma of the child‘s fears of parental abandonment (signaling the death of the self whom is still dependent on parent for continuation).

There are ways to repair the split between real self and world, which will save nonhumans from being exploited in the service of survival ties (set up under false pretenses in the human child-parent relationship).

People do learn through life to associate certain sensations of impending doom/threats to life with specific activities and circumstances, often becoming deeply anchored/memorized in our mind and body. We can ‘use’ the negative associations (putting the positive associations on hold for the time being) to get in a basic sensate touch with the magnetic pull of life, the urge of remaining in-life (without actually putting ourselves in harms way!).
So, for instance, I may walk on the edge of the road and entertain the image of running out in front of a car, or I can stand at the edge of a waterfall and imagine jumping off. Each time I push my thoughts closer to the edge of the image, I feel the pull/boundary of life that keeps me grounded/bound here. The closer think about inching my car to a railroad track/passing train, or approaching a railing in a high rise, the more my body experiences an uneasy feeling. There are mental and bodily signals that put me in touch with my rooted-ness in the world, and my will to want to stay. They serve as protective factors and even help me refresh my appreciation of being alive. I do not seek them out to refresh me in an addictive manner, pushing the limits to ‘feel the thrill sensation’.
It can be easy for the mind and body to forget or get disconnected from its center given the daily movement of life and how we come into contact with the things that are woven into the fabric- food, clothing, technologies….we are often projecting ourselves forward on autopilot save for some of the milestones that ignite us again-marriage, birth, and death. There is much joy and pain behind a lot of day to day, generation to generation labor in the maintenance of consumer society. We may be unaware or numb to, and yet with empathy as our touchstone ‘putting ourselves in another’s place’ could inspire us to move in different directions. These different directions can help change the circumstances that cause others to experience the life force instinct to the degree that they are tortured by it, pulled apart mentally and physically like an eternal Treblinka.
Speaking of food and clothing, we often only know the end product. We are not easily reminded that the beef patty is/was the muscle tissue of a living, sentient animal. When we try on a pair of shoes we do not think of the creature (who was skinned for it) living its life. I would go as far as to say that perhaps many people don’t care. They could care, if they chose to be in touch with the life force that is shared among all beings. We often accomplish this affirmation when we have positive relations with animals that we have come to be attached to. Our bodies and minds experience good things. We are terribly sad when they die. And yet, the remains of an animal are on the same person’s plate, or lining their shoe, and those animals may have never felt the magnetism of life by way of joy or freedom, or connectedness. We become fragmented, dismembered from the whole in ways that the nonhuman animal parts (can)become a reminder of.

What has become an ‘object’ or ‘piece’ of food does not generally provoke feelings or perceptions of life force other than ‘we must eat to live’. Some people go to farm sanctuaries and get to know/bond with the animals so as to form a connection, and change their transactional way of being in the world.

I would also propose another strategy...in part two.

Navigating By Starlight

2010-07-13T17:48:00.001-07:00

The ‘night time’ sky when it is full of stars lets we know that we and the earth are suspended in a great, infinite cosmos. The universe is dark save for the stars that emanate light outward from within themselves. This darkness is revealed as the larger state of things when the temporal light of day is gone. We grow up distinguishing night from day as well as the ‘sun’ from stars, even though we know scientifically that the sun is a star. Sun light and starlight are experienced as different, owing much to proximity. Comparatively, we feel the heat, see the amount of light, and orient ourselves by the distance. Each has its history and imagery in culture, society, scientific knowledge, and of course, direct experience and meaning in our individual lives.

There is often a transition from knowledge to ‘direct experience’ of that knowledge. We can, quite suddenly and with full import, have an experience that seems to mirror the very origin of its descriptive word .It is often accompanied, if not also co-defined by a psychological and emotional arousal. In this moment of recognition and origin, the mind is not distracted internally or externally by anything else. Anything (thoughts, activiries)that enters or leaves the moment does not become *the* focus, lest contact be broken....because it is more than focus, it is both a procreative experience and revealed experience. The person is both participant and observer, and is in symbiotic relationship with the ‘moment’ at hand. The immediacy of experience has to do with proximity to (what feels like) the very origin of the definition . For example I may have been aware of the concept of forgiveness and may have experienced it numerous times imbedded in situations, but there may be an ‘encounter’ which seems to capture the very definition of the word.
Sometimes this foundational procreative moment becomes incorporated (in some way) into ongoing experience of the normative kind, forever changing the way we ‘experience’ it: “Once we know it, we cannot not know it”.We do not have to constantly search to recapture it in its birth moment, because it merges with us.

***************************

I know that the sun is a star, but I experience stars as points of light in a night time sky.
I have grown up ‘knowing’ and experiencing the sun in an ideological, encultured, day to day manner. Lately however I have incorporated the ‘sun as a star’ into my immediate ongoing experience of sunlight. It is more than an abstract application placed upon some independent phenomenon. My experience of sunlight has changed and continues to remain changed days and weeks past my initial realization. My encounter with this view of the light sees the light as if it was always occurring in this (its own) manner, like some river running its course (unchanged) before and after a human’s first encounter with it.
Before I continue with the potentials of this encounter with first (foundationally-defined) phenomena, I will elaborate on a further description of the light and what it illuminates.

As stated earlier, the knowledge that sunlight is actually starlight is a scientific given, but subjectively the two lights appear/are experienced in very separate contexts. This is no longer the case for me.

• The sun is a star, therefore the light that emanates, lighting our world and providing life, is starlight. There really is no such thing as sunlight because the name that we give to the star is ‘sun’.
• Once one perceives the world being lit up by an intense form of starlight, it takes on a different look and a different depth in relation to the cosmos, each and every moment of every day.
• It is a matter of holding the presence of many relations together in a Gestalt. Our planet exists within an infinitely dark cosmos. This darkness is not temporary as night and day changes would make it appear. It is cosmologically ever present and surrounding us. The star’s light comes down upon the space we dwell pushing the dark away from view.

Imagine if we could have a daytime world but have the sky show its celestial universe instead of the blue ( now and then).

Think of how we would be more connected to our sense of and place in the galaxy. Our 'sun' would take its visual place amongst the rest of the stars.

Think of the whole perimeter of your visual plane during the day.

Imagine that it is all under the lights of a stadium at night.

The starlight of the sun is like the stadium light, shining down and iluminating our 'day world' and while keeping the celestial darkness hovering in the outlying perimeter.Look at the places and spaces before your eyes today using this reframe.

Think about the light and warmth in the world as sitting near a campfire, who's light forms a globe around us ,directing its beams over and upon us for a finite amount of time. The ‘campfire’ light is an especially poignant metaphor, as most earthlings huddle around it to sustain their existence from the cold surrounding universe. This ‘gathering’ should serve as a common ground for supporting every being’s right to be there.
Think of being inside a lit up house while simultaneously knowing of the night just outside. Each lit room or defined parameter that we occupy can be seen as a container,a 3-dimensional stage, floating through space (if we use just some imagination).The light will someday go out, and the dark will envelop once again. Each event, activity, interaction, perhaps with our loved ones, can be seen(as part of the now) as ‘already come and gone, a pinhead of illuminated activity in an eternity prior and after we are long gone by billions of years. In fact, this realization can contribute to the visual and interactive dimensions of what is being witnessed. It can provide infinite depth, created meaning, and amplification of present thoughts and emotions (such as love). The moment is lit up and the light of that moment now carries it…passing/traveling into history and space, just like the star light that is reaching our eyes now. Perhaps that starlight as well is coming from a place that illuminated some little or big moments in other worlds millions of years ago.

• The starlight illuminates the world’s day time in a more cosmological way, as well as the activities occurring in it because of its life-giving warmth. This life is not unlike the nocturnal activity we notice that is drawn to light. In effect, we are cosmologically nocturnal creatures gathering in the light. Like standing outside at night on a cliff, looking at city lights nearby and the bustle of ‘night life’. Taking this twinkling view into the outer space, we see the lights of the world on the ‘night side’of the world. If we focused on just these pinpoints, it looks the same as if staring at the stars in space: a mirroring back and forth between lights in the universe.

Our being does not only reverberates via light, but also defines/aligns itself as one with the *larger* background of the black ‘ink’ of the outer banks. Our being is connected and therefore constantly aware of the ‘other’ presence, black and encrusted with stars and just behind the veil of blue atmosphere. Each being’s time and structure in the universe is somehow connected to this presence of the outer space.
• The awareness of the constant presence of the blackness connects us to the larger, deeper infinity of space. This awareness, instead of going merely outwards, also rebounds and brings back to (earth) a different way and meaning of lighting up our life-space and life time.
• Each context, each person, each life-space that we bear witness to then is imbued with as much depth as that which can be (individually) comprehended when regarding the depth of space and orientation to (the ever present) infinite cosmos(see point 3) This depth of space does not become a vacuum that sucks away all meaning. It becomes quite the opposite, as a ‘nothing’ of infinite contemplation that all the more imbues the ‘something’ as far as we can go.

The divide between night and day becomes less a part of consciousness, one that is waking to the simultaneous presence/influence of both on each moment in time. It is just another continuum in which we then (subjectively, culturally) impose certain dividers on, just as we do on the continuum of living beings. Integrating a continuum perspective need not blur boundaries that contribute to uniqueness. It is the opening up of a wider perspective so as to uncover pre-existing conditions (that were hidden) by a focus that was narrowed by experience, knowledge, and conditioning, to name a few.

Waking up to a star-lit day-world is a reframe of one of the most basic foundational contexts that we live within. We can then extend this neu-orientation base to the *what* that is illuminated, revealing new facets to the known, and uncovering undiscovered views.

With some time, this light and its connection to the larger cosmos will come to be experienced as a self-sustaining given, requiring no perspectival effort to bring it into being. The universe will no longer be hidden by the day, and will be free to light your way to a cosmos surrounding and giving depth to any given moment.

The end of...The Road (Pt 4)

2010-07-08T12:46:00.000-07:00

In light of concerns about earth’s future if humankind continues on its ‘path’, “The Road’s immediacy provides an opportunity to step back and perhaps hover over the terrain and observe the transformations that are occurring in the world (as related to the end-vision described in the book) . As beings with internal and external structures/environments that affect (and are affected by) other beings and environments, it is important to talk about health, pathology, responsibility, creativity, and power to name a few.

If nothing else, the book/movie’s visual deprivation has an effect when you walk back out into the ‘real’ world. To me, after seeing the Road’s apocalyptic portrayal of the uselessness of money and most commodities strewn about, everything (back outside) seems so constructed, temporary, and perhaps illusory( but in ways also lush). The Road’s bleakness and reductionist vision asks us to consider ‘what’s really important, what must survive to keep life itself going. Is it ‘love’, relationships, community, and respect for *all* life forms that reflect these…? Murray Bookchin once said that the universe would be a lot less interesting without humankind. While this may be true, the current version of humankind (in general) is making the world not only less ‘interesting’, but less viable for all.

It is this (book’s) image of the world as BECOMING NOTHING that keeps me hovering around it and speaking to it, consistent with the themes/foundations on which my philosophical views lie.

While I speak a good deal about psychological pathology and its effects on the authentic self, on animals, and on the earth in general, this ground of illness is not the deepest root cause. The psychological/developmental pathologies are an expression of our existential disassociativeness. The deeper roots lie at a more foundational level of our own causal relationship to Being and Nothing, beginning and centered with the Big Bang of the universe: That all that ‘is’ came from a state of prior, immaterial nothing. We have not yet learned to see and harness the human incarnation of the creative forces/dynamics of this ‘explosion’ retained and still emanating inside and outside of our selves,( as the original explosion continues to this day to move outwards) and knowing of the potential of the infinite (being) coming from the finite (nothing). At this time we have it quite in reverse/mirror opposite, and are causing nothing (in the form of death) to come from being (the way we live).

“The Road’ portrays the end of things if we continue to live/act in this reversal manner. It speaks to the way the world *already* exists- barren, exploited, a graveyard - for the authentic self, for it’s projected counterpart-animals, and for all those (nature included) subjugated by dynamics organized by fear (of death/annihilation/ abandonment/existential insignificance) vs. dynamics organized by embracing the creative potential of finitude. It speaks to domination and its relation to consumption, to maintain control of ties to survival, rather than knowing how to move on, separate, and exist with a sense of identity past this (and truly see others as ends/separate in themselves). "The Road" offers a unique vantage point of looking at and moving through an outside world of ruin via the inside world (co-existing/sustained through a parent-child alliance).

The boy in “The Road” may have certain advantages towards maintaining an authentic self in the outside world, harsh as it is. He has never seen or formed a relationship with an animal, a creature that could mirror a natural and unconditional (i.e. free of judgment) existence like his own. He knows the unconditional love of his parent, and has not had to deal with the conflicts of resolving how an unconditional parent could exploit an unconditional non-human animal *and* expect his unconditional (yet deeply dependent) child to comprehend/accept this without existential fears for his own innocent identity building up. He can accept how his parent could harm other humans who mean to harm them or deprive them, but he still ‘checks in’ with his moral concerns with his father in these situations. When a question about a dog or a non-cannibalistic human does arise, he wants assurance from his father that he would not harm them (needlessly) because they are the ‘good guys’. Even good guys would starve to death before eating human flesh. The boy only has other humans to go by when measuring the lengths of ethical consistency. I wonder what the boy would have said if they came across a rabbit, cow, or other societal-labeled ‘food’ animal. Animals generally pose no threat to human beings like other humans do. Without the context of survival or necessity a real question posed is: should the moral impetus really be predicated on if it is a human or nonhuman animal? Since we have evolved beyond that survival context, are we not obligated to leave other sentient lives alone, to find all that we need from each other without the conflicts of subjugation? If we continue on that road will we not destroy ourselves along with the world? If we are running a marathon/carrying the fire to deliver a message that democracy and freedom is important to continued survival, how can that democracy be reserved for the ‘few’ (the human species) and still secure the earth’s survival? Have we not already created the 'road' for innocent children, who see their parents put baby beings on the spit, who learn that self-identity survival means surviving within a societally-created 'lush holocaust'?
Commodification and ownership as means to extend a sense of self, of significance, of primordial identity-survival, will only end up killing the host (earth)along with its dependents. We cannot destroy the authentic, natural self, so we contrive all sorts of prisons and facades to hide it away.

In doing so we ironically, we ensure our own enslavement to a machine that exploits our survival insecurities and milks/bleeds the earth for as long as it can hold out. Kronos cannibalized his children to imprison them and protect himself. Likewise we consume our authentic self to imprison it, and eat animal others as a projection of this struggle. The father found and offered his son a can of coke (not Pepsi). Coca-cola used to contain cocaine, and perhaps this product represents the opiate of modern day consumerism. It is last remnant of (the first) 'apple' of Eden that the father offers, whose sweetness belies the seeds of destruction. Like the trick played by Prometheus for the benefit of humankind, we wrap up/cloak the innocent beauty of beings in societal labels of dumb, ugly, and lowly animal. We hide animals away to exploit them more easily. We hide our own ugly personas (animal/earth cruelty) behind outward appearances /labels of beauty( itself commodified) and ideas of 'progress'.

"The Road" Pt 3

2010-07-06T21:18:00.001-07:00

The Road presents a world that has been reduced. It has been depleted, consumed, and has little or nothing to sustain itself or its inhabitants. It no longer works as a system or in a state of symbiosis. Environmentally minded people warn us all the time about humankind’s ‘activities’ and the impact on the earth’s ‘resources’. I have talked about the human-centric aspects of speciesism and how it relates to a pathological narcissism that begins in early object relations (see recent posts). The natural symbiotic relationship between self and ‘other’ *and* where things go awry is a constant question ( for many disciplines) . This begs the question as to whether there even exists/extends a ‘natural’ symbiotic relationship between humans and the earth, and just where the nonhuman animal has come into play.

There is much to consider in terms of representational ‘objects’ and their interrelationships throughout the movie/book. The question of what constitutes cannibalism is posed when considering the idea that there is a continuum and multiplicity within and between ‘species’. As the (so called) boundaries/abilities/capacities between human and nonhuman animals are becoming less delineated, so does ‘membership’ and ‘other’ become less reliable in terms of the self’s definition/identity. Kant surmised that human beings ( including their minds) are made of the same ‘stuff’ as the rest of the world, and so we are constitutionally able to ascertain apriori access to ‘direct’ experience/knowledge of its reality. So if the human race is but one extension of the world , then other animal races are not so ‘other’ (any more than parents are truly/completely an other when it comes to identity formation).
When we eat/exploit animal ‘others’ we are already practicing a form of ‘self’ cannibalism (via our animal other representations). When we consume ‘everything’ in the continuum of the world, “The Road” points out that we will be left with nothing but our *immediate* selves to consume. In several ways, we have already reached the world of “The Road”, but outward-as-other appearances
Our society (and the societal self) already (cyclically) generates and consumes our authentic child selves, represented by infant’s body on the spit (in the book). It locks the authentic self underground (the basement cellar/the subconscious). In an act of cannibalism, the Titan god Kronos ate his own children (save for Zeus) to prevent them from overtaking and ruining his ‘golden age’ of rule, much like our patriarchic dominating society seeks to maintain control and power of the narcissistic supplies of the world, consuming and trapping its children within the complex.
This patriarchic force is what makes the father /son emphasis so central to the themes of “The Road”. The mother, perhaps representing earth/Gaia, has the internal intuition that life is over and there is really nothing left but (more of the same) rape and consumption. The early developmental object relations between father-parent and son are made clear : “each the other’s world entirety” . Psychoanalytic and object relations theories are still in their infancy; as they explore the paternal meaning/impact on child development, although Freud clearly delegated the role of the father to provide the superego function of conscience. The ‘road’ that a father and son are on mirrors and regenerates several trappings and dynamics that play out and can have severe consequences (especially for animals).”The Road” speaks to testing the merits of the superego’s potential rigidity of rules and ethics: the boy demands honesty and forthrightness (of the relationship), yet the father must at times weigh the potential consequences of telling him things that he himself is not sure of. As the story progresses, the boy begins to show his developmental metamorphosis, an individuation as well as a role reversal, becoming the stronger conscience when the father is making decisions. The boy wants them to remain ‘the good guys’, especially towards individuals are just trying to get by. Curiously, at one point they come across an elderly blind man that (for me) represents Oedipus Rex (bringing the Oedipal conflict context to the father/son place on their ‘road’).Without a female figure to compete over (and eventually covet) a discussion ensues as to whether to have the old man join with them. To recoup the unavailable female, they substitute in the Oedipal figure- using pet/ownership language in arguing about “keeping him”. Animals are used for all manner of human ends. In this setting there is suggested a similar continuum of (now human animal) commodification and ownership- enslavement, food production (cooked infants), and petification (keeping old men). Females were/are often treated much the same way animals are treated-as property to be appropriated by (competing) males. It serves as another indicator as to what might have brought about the end of the world in “The Road”.

If the mother (Gaia) earthly bond with child is intensely internal, the father (Uranus) universe bond is intensely external. Thus the child seeks to both ground and transcend itself.
As posted in earlier object relations essays, I maintain that the child, in fearing parental abandonment (and thus self annilation) splits off the authentic self and sides with the parent/societal hierarchical view of non humans as lesser ‘other’.

In her paper “Fundamentalism, Father and Son, and Vertical Desire” Ruth Stein further elaborates on the father/son object relations as it ties into the roots of a religious- fundamentalist world view (and the behavior that it inspires). The quest of the child becomes twofold:
1 -To set order and security against vagueness and chaos (and the associated rage), the child entrenches an all good, ego ideal perception of the father (with an accompanying idealized version of the child’s self).
2- To escape father-superego persecution/fear of punishment, the self also uses the ego-ideal as a vertical ‘road’ to achieve oneness with a pure version and pure ideal love of father (projected onto a deity ).

Cormac McCarthy writes :

"He (the son)tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn't forget...the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time"

This quest for oneness with father-God requires a continual intrapsychic process of self-purification, which also requires both a sloughing off of ‘the bad’ and embattlement with and ranking of ‘lower’ forms of being –animals become disavowed aspects of the threateningly 'bad' authentic self. The feelings and pressures of persecution are never completely abolished, as evidenced by the father in "The Road" accusing people he encounters of ‘following him”.

Stein writes:

“Whereas the sense of the sacred and transcendent is precious and many of us would agree that life is all the poorer without it, fundamentalism is the self-rejecting submission to an ideal authority that finally turns out to be submission to an alienated (projected), horrifying aspect of oneself”.

It can be asserted that we have already created the world of “the Road” for animals, and by history any ‘lesser group’…or nature itself.

We place our selves on top of so as to be closer to what must be cast as a loving (vs. destroying) godhead.There is the human race, and then there is 'the other'. Due to this divine affiliation,we are special as well; far from the ‘sinful’ perception that we are alone,abandoned, enraged, insignificant or that nothing exists between us and eternal death in a cold universe.

Stein :

"The attempt to magically annihilate suffering and feelings of badness about oneself, the attempt to exterminate defilement and infidelity, eventuates in the necessity to die together with the killing of others, as if the boundary between life and death, self and other, has been completely obliterated and swamped by the total destruction of all materiality. It seems that in the process of projecting the bad parts of the self to the Infidels and the idealized parts of the self to God, nothing is left… eventually by merging with God in a cataclysm of purifying fire. Becoming ashes is the ultimate act of purification and spiritualization: there is no more".

It is fundamentalist-based terrorism against 'lower', souless-outsider, animal 'others'(and the disavowed human aspects that are projected into them) and the planet when human pathology seeks to purify itself by elevating the false self (infected with the disease of existential fear and consumerism) to unreachable heights and claims upon the universe.
This is the fire and ashes world of “The Road”, a ‘Tartarus’ for the living who have sinned against the ‘Gods’ of the golden age of harmony between all beings.

The Road Pt. 2

2010-07-05T08:13:00.000-07:00

'Tartarus'

The theme of fire is predominate in “The Road” and one can consider it as a metaphor for destruction, purification, baptism, trial by fire, anger, desire, punishment, early man/cooking, power, religion(burning heart/bush), and apocalypse. I find it very interesting that, with all the destruction by fire that occurred in the world of ‘The Road’, the boy asks/needs to believe that he and his father still “carry the fire” within themselves. While it may be obvious that by ‘fire’ they mean the human spirit, it is also possible that human spirit ((a speciesist-centric version) may contain the seeds/embers of destruction, carried to all corners of the globe.
Delving into the historic roots of ‘fire carrier’ I happened upon the Greek Myth of Prometheus, which has some interesting parallels to ‘The Road’. Prometheus was a Titan God and championed the cause of human beings to establish their own place/power in the universe (seeds of human centralism already at work).His father was Iapetus, the god of mortal life. His grandparents were Gaia, the mother of the world, and Uranus, the god of the universe. With the help of his brother he created mankind out of earth (clay) and wanted to give humans the ‘power’ of fire. I read that this fire power was meant to give humans the upper hand over animals (and the earth in general). Adding to this human centric vantage was Prometheus’ role in tricking Zeus out of animal flesh and giving it to humans. He hid tasty animal flesh in an (outwardly ugly) stomach sack which Zeus passed up for an outwardly attractive package of worthless bones.Humans were then only required to burn the bones in sacrificial thanks to the Gods.
Prometheus stole fire from Zeus by hiding it in a stalk of fennel. ‘Fennel’ in Greek means ‘marathon’, a city in Greece where a great battle was won to defeat the Persian invaders and uphold democracy.
The story as told by Plutarch (a philosopher who wrote some famous animal-supportive messages) spoke of Pheidippides, who ran from Marathon to Greece twice. Once to get help and again to bring the message of victory to Athens. Apparently to second run was too much for him and he died of exhaustion upon reaching his destination. The story is ingrained in the carrying of the fire (Mt. Olympus) for the Olympic Games.
Thus, the ‘road’ they travel is also type of marathon where the carriers of the fire must continually keep moving to deliver (their) message of hope, democracy, and humanity. They bring themselves (flesh/made of clay) to the ocean (mother of life) in hopes of procreating a renewed ‘good guy’ continuance. Lest we forget, Zeus brought his revenge in the form of the Pandora, an (outwardly) beautiful woman who opened a box and let out all manner of vice upon the world (with the exception of the last of its contents: ‘hope’).

In the movie version of this story, the outward appearance is one of tempting hope, but whose inner workings may be suspect). The boy discovers a beetle, which then flies up and away. The bug represents renewal of(earth) life but also serves as a symbol of humankind, a creature that begins/lives much of its life as a carnivorous larvae underground (referenced by the father/son living off the bourgeois supplies in the shelter) who’s only true mission above ground is to procreate. The second ‘outwardly hopeful’ message appears in the form of family who rescues the boy 3 days after his father succumbs ( 3 days as in the Christian account of the resurrection). The family represents the *familiar hierarchy*, including the presence/place of a dog. The dog is the animal that is generally favored by humankind as a loyal, companion ‘pet’. It is an animal that by nature is hierarchical, and thus serves to further delineate the message of ambivalence for the earth’s future if ‘overrun’ by hierarchical, speciesist – thinking humans again.
The book offers no beetle or family-based dog in its story, and thus seems to draw a more direct tie to humankind’s finality/consequences for the earth. This to me is a preferable message for the audience of the present. If we believe that the earth can ‘bounce back’ from anything, we may be less motivated to try and change the course and strength of our actions. In one part of the book, cannibalistic humans were keeping other humans captive in locked (underground) storage. One being, whom they cut off one appendage at a time for consumption, was afforded a mattress. This is symbolic of animal welfare measures that people use to rationalize continued exploitation, a ‘buffer’ or 'outward appearance' that will only result in revealing within the bones of humanity itself, so frequently presented in the book as burnt caricatures. These charred bones serve as a symbol of the god’s revenge for being tricked by the humancentric, fire and meat-affording Prometheus, who initially made it possible for humans to limit their thanks to the gods by burning sacrificial bones..

The Road Pt 1

2010-06-30T06:20:00.000-07:00

“The Road”, a novel by Cormac McCarthy (and now a movie), has a good deal for ethical vegans and environmentalists alike to think about. I saw the movie one time and have just started the book, which is not all that different (yet). So my thoughts are based considerably on first impressions. People can easily obtain a synopsis of the story so I won’t go into too much of that here. The world seems to be at its lowest point years after some (presumably) human-made disaster occurred. There is no ‘environment’ of flora or fauna, and the remaining humans are reduced to hunter/gatherer modes of sustenance (hunting other humans for their flesh, and relying on the remnants of industrial era produce). In the approximate 10 or 12 years that have gone by, there are no signs of beginning a new agricultural era, save for some humans working together to increase their chances for survival.

It is unclear if there can be a beginning at all, or if we are witnessing the tail end just prior to complete extinction. Throughout the movie I looked for clues indicating either direction, as well as how this situation came to be. This latter consideration is most important in that it can point to certain ideologies that operate as root cause/contributors to ecological disaster. This opens up the question as to whether the human mind (assuming it is part of the same evolutionary forces) develops pathologies or is in ‘essence’ pathological. What gets carried into the future can also damn the future (one that relies on all the living beings working in productive symbiosis).

The remaining humans are dealing with getting basic needs met, which pertains much of the time (naturally) to the physical. For the main characters, (father and son) the basic needs also revolve around the emotional/psychological bond, also crucial to the son’s (and humankind in general) survival.

It is within this interplay of meeting basic physical and emotional needs, that evolutionary forces, nature vs. nurture, survival of the fittest vs. survival of the nicest get attention in ‘The Road’. Survival of the nicest gets special emphasis in that the ‘good guys’ are distinguished from the ‘bad guys’ based on whether they eat people.(more about consuming animals later). If you are not seen as food or some exploitable resource, you can ban together with like-minded people towards some goal. One wonders if a ‘niceness’ meme will carry itself and shape the possible future. Ethical vegans may be left to wonder if this (speciesist) selective form of good vs. bad isn’t what got the world destroyed in the first place; thus becoming part of a cycle of destruction. ‘Nicest’ to who is the question. How much of the ‘whole’ is inscribed into the meme/genetic code of human beings to ensure survival of all. In this world’s past, ‘nice guys’ may have been the same ones who depleted the earth. The current batches of human beings are consuming all available natural resources at an alarming rate. My recent post mentioned the violence of consumerism, and the movie points to this in several ways. A shopping cart figures prominently throughout the story, serving current society as a repository for ‘essentials’ in a continuum from the richest to the poorest. Another (and essentially deeply symbolic) highlight comes when the father discovers and underground survival shelter, presumably built prior to the disaster. This subterranean space serves as a container for all manner/layers of meaning pivotal to the storyline. Themes to be mined include: the subconscious, caveman dwellings, Hades, the womb, the tomb, a prison, subjugation, gestation, and the root of human nature. When the father wants to hide the discovery, he chooses to place a mattress over the opening. The mattress serves as an important signifier, as both conception and death occur on top of it.
The shelter is stocked with supplies that sustain life, but the type of supplies is most interesting in that they represent western mass society’s preoccupation with both superficial and hierarchical commodities: Cheetos, cigarettes, liquor, and Spam are the patriarchic ‘seeds’ of destruction deposited within the chamber, shaping and giving (gestational) form and substance to the human lives within. It does not take long for the father to reintroduce himself to these ‘simple luxuries’ after years of hunter/gatherer mode of survival. This ‘addiction’ is exemplified when the father, presumably dying of some lung ailment, persists in inhaling smoke (despite a painful cough). In the movie the father goes so far as to dress up in a sport jacket and slicked back hair, showcasing a caricature (and curse)of 'high society'. Perhaps it is capitalist society that shapes and gives birth to such beings, but the underground setting raises the question as to whether there exists at the ‘root’ of humanity a proclivity to seek out pleasures at the cost of human and earth health. If this is so, then perhaps this womb also serves as mankind’s tomb (the mattress atop signifies the death bed), if not an imposed prison. This damning behavior occurring ‘underground’ suggests the idea of hell, notably linked with the destructive fires occurring on the surface. All is ash above, as if humans have brought hell to earth.

People are animal serial killers Pt. 3

2010-05-20T19:25:00.000-07:00

Continuing from the essay :

http://michael-miller.wiki.uml.edu/file/view/Monster%27s+Inc.+Serial+Killers+and+Consumer+Culture.pdf

“…it could be argued that serial killing is not so much a radical departure from normal codes of civilized behavior as it is an intensification of hegemonic masculine ideals. For the serial killer the murder is a means to an end and that end intersects in places with socially sanctioned definitions of masculine identity… the serial killer is driven by he desire to achieve mastery, virility and control: his objective is to dominate and possess the body and the mind of his victims”.

1- At the Oedipal phase,The authentic father figure (and a real representation of unconditional, foundational love along with the mother) could have steered the authentic child self towards further independence and respect towards the ‘other’/mother figure in terms of mutual needs, boundaries, and rights. 2- there is a demand to construct a self to maintain (survival) ties with the father who infuses the father/child ‘womb’ with societal ideologies that run counter to *** universal***nonviolent, life affirming, an authentic modes of being in the world. 3- The survival need drives the self to create an inner representation of (the ideal) of masculinity as espoused by the ‘societal father’. The societal father actually shares/steers the developing self towards dominating the mother (earth) in an incestous path of controlling oneness. Societal values favor domination and hierarchy, and the need to use these dynamics to dominate , split off, and confine the real self serve to mirror and justify(not feel guilty about) these reactions (e.g. ‘domination is necessary and natural’)both inside and outside. 4- The trade off for maintaining this (self-identity) survival mode is to go on seeing and organizing life/others without progression past an early form /identification of (controlling), oral dependency. 5- The ‘real’ world is judged by, and made to align with the inside, constructed, ego-ideal world. Forever chained to maintaining the internal homeostasis that preserves this sense of (false-idealized) self, all energies go into maintaining the submission of the split off (real) self. This entails continuous (serial) acts of domination and ingestion of the disavowed animal, the figure that represents *all* that threatened the (now false self's) continued survival ties and continued sense of existing in the world. However, since it is a false self, it can never achieve inner object constancy, fullness of identity, and sense of independence, nor see others (animals) as independent. All are ‘resources’ of narcissistic supply, seen in the same way as an infant would see a mother (in parts that provide the ‘good’).

“Post-mortem the murderer will often take fetish objects from his victim. These totems function as testimony to his continuing domination of a dead body which exhibits an extreme form of the passivity which patriarchy seeks to assign to the feminine”.

The totem can serve both as trophy and transitional object, a piece of the mother/dead authentic self that serves as a representational object (of constancy) in their absence, anchoring the false self in the world of primal attachment.

“While serial killing is both literally and symbolically a male affair, the paradigmatic
consumer is of course female. From the late 19th and for much of the
20th century, women were the primary target of advertising, particularly in the fields
of beauty and fashion”.

The self is conditioned into an ‘awareness identity’ via the mirror. They focus on what they are conditioned to look for. The most outlying boundary of the body (skin, clothing) becomes a two-way membrane between inner and outer (societal) self image. It is a way of observing ones self in the world when it ‘belongs’ with, meets the expectations of, its surroundings

“Beneath the patina of positivity, this bombardment aimed to promote an anxious policing of the female body – how the body looked and felt, what went over, into and came out of it. The covert imperative of
this advertising was to manufacture that sense of inadequacy and self-dissatisfaction which is the essential psychological prerequisite for luxury purchases”.

The fluidity (osmosis) between self and society is based upon *conditional* love and acceptance, creating anxiety/fear of rejection/self dissatisfaction and ensuing preoccupations of reaching(chasing) an idealization. This is the same conditions put upon them to forsake the unconditional (animal) part of self formation. Anything ‘ugly’, or made out to be ugly, is made the target of reproach.People (and animals )are deemed ‘Fat’ cow, ‘ugly’ pig, ‘scared’ chicken, and receive the least of the empathic pockets remaining after the false self builds up it’s defensive, yet interactional ‘skin’. Even the 'ugly' animals are 'policed' into an anthropocentric makeover to assuage the human's need for beauty. Happy cows, enthusiatic chickens, laughing pigs, provocative, sexually charged animal figures (see Carol J. Adams-The Pornography Of Meat).

“… there has been a massive worldwide increase in sales of male fashion accessories, cosmetics and related products. In the context of this erosion of gender polarities within consumer culture, it is noticeable that representations of the serial killer often involve androgyny and gender crisis. The killer is typically feminized by association with consumer subjectivity”.

That which has been associated with the energy to create/give birth to life (feminine) is conditioned to consume/ingest/allow penetration of, not only itself, but the world before it. This ‘androgynous’ relationship, this blurring of recognizable boundaries, allows the human being to be at once eater and eaten, dominant and passive. That is why some serial killers are relieved to be captured or want to die themselves : to relinquish the (only)part of themselves that *is* animal – the lack of power to access ethical, conscience-based choices – that which makes us human. Humans that can actually peacefully co-exist with nonhuman beings.

“The feminization of the commodity is structurally integrated with the commodification of the feminine and the serial killer aims to assert mastery over both spheres. The violence of serial homicide might even be diagnosed as a nostalgic mode of production (of corpses and fetish objects) for the anxious male subject”.

Certainly the feminization of the ‘commodity’ (the object of procurement/ ingestion) is ‘structurally integrated’ via the dynamics of early object relations, as the early self seeks out mothering figures to provide physical and psychological sustenance. When stuck at this level of relating/organizing, all desirable objects become ‘feminized’. Animals become objectified and separated from the self early in the process. Thus the ‘commodification of the feminine’ includes using procreation (of animals) for labor and products (the most obvious being milk).

“Gumb (Silence of the Lambs) succumbs to mass media fantasy and advertising which have trained him to feel incomplete and anxious while promising magical metamorphoses on consumption of the ideal (feminized) commodity. The dreams of the serial killer and the serial consumer converge: reinventing the self through bodily transformation and transcendence”.

‘Mass media training’ begins in the transference (between parent and child) of societal beliefs, focus and actions. The splitting that ensues results in the inception of ‘incomplete and anxious’ feelings, and ends with the false self being born. This self invents an idealized, permanent feminine in order not to feel anxious (fear of abandonment and death). Remaining with the oral-ideal and negating the subjectivity of the ‘other’ (via commodification-ownership) , the self ‘reinvents’ (procreates) to mirror and gain survival ties. Society in turn is geared to prey upon these reinvented, false ‘selves’. In essence, individuals are ‘factory farmed’ in a serial manner and programmed (fed) the *dream* (and the products) necessary to transcend ‘lesser’ modes of being (inc. non human beings). They are fattened up with dreams of attaining societal engineered ideals.These ideals are appealing because 'idealization', from early development, is a familiar mode of self identity.

Regarding the above, Jarvis writes:

“Consumption, Baudrillard (1998: 31) reminds us, ‘is governed by a form of magical thinking’. Numerous case studies have concluded that serial killers are prone to hyperactive fantasy lives (see Seltzer, 1998; Vronsky, 2004). The violence is a means of sustaining the fantasy. By the same token, the practice and pathology of serial consumerism are driven by fantasies that cannot be fulfilled and so are compulsively repeated”.

“Images of the deconstructed body are everywhere in the infantile fantasies of
consumer culture: perfect legs, perfect breasts, perfect hair, perfect teeth, bodies
endlessly dismembered in the ceaseless strafing of advertising imagery. Sherman’s
photography foregrounds the rhetoric of advertising: the dissection of the body by
fashion, fitness and beauty industries into fragmentary fetishes”.

‘Infantile fantasies’ and idealized parts of the body belong to an early stage of development, where comprehension of the ‘all good mother’ is limited to the parts that provide pleasure/relief from pain. If the self remains grounded in this oral stage of self-identity, individual others are never experienced beyond the narcissistic view of parts (relative to their ‘usefulness’). One can even see this played out when oil spills and downed cows are perceived primarily from food supply perspectives.

“Mannequins epitomize the ideal of 1980s body fascism: tall, youthful, slim, impervious
to wrinkles, scars and blemishes, untouched by illness and aging. According to Benjamin (1999b),
the fashion mannequin is a token from the realm of the dead . . . the model for
imitation . . . Just as the much-admired mannequin has detachable parts, so
fashion encourages the fetishist fragmentation of the living body".

The mannequin can be a symbol for the false self, striving to maintain an inner world of fantasy and control, which is projected out into the world. Like the mannequin, the false self is adorned on the outside, its bodily terrain segmented into parts that resonate with particular market domains. The false self may be unaware of this connection; however it uses the mannequin dynamic to control, objectify, and fragment the authentic self.
Seeing animals as as both a container for the disavowed real self, and a symbol for the survival choice that was made, humans are compelled to turn them into into mannequin-like objects dotting the marketplace. They are killed, cut up, packaged, ingested , and defecated (to complete the control cycle). Dogs in chinese market.

“The horrific practices of these fictional killers find their everyday analogue in the slow serial torture
of the consumer’s body by capital: the injections and invasions of cosmetic surgery, the poisonings, pollutions and detoxifications, the over-consumption and dieting, the leisure rituals and compulsive exercise’.

Likewise we use the lives and bodies of animals as disposable resources to act out the need for status and self-importance. We inject, poison and pollute them repeatedly beyond any rational necessity.

“The killer in Kiss the Girls (1997), like Jame Gumb,
collects his victims and hordes them underground. Similarly, in The Cell, the killer locks
his victims in underground storage before using them to build a collection of human
dolls. Although the killer in The Bone Collector is only interested in accumulating
skeletal fragments, his activities similarly require subterranean investigations”.

Animal exploitation is often hidden from the public view. We also repeatedly kill and bury the real self far below the surface of our psyche. Our stomachs are graveyards for animals, but also for the authentic self for which animals become the absent referent for.

Jarvis writes:

"Irrespective of the object, ‘what you really collect is always yourself’ (Baudrillard,
1996: 91).

Serial killing, like consumerism, is driven by a sense of lack. Psychological
profiles of serial killers typically diagnose the cause of the subject’s compulsive behavior
as a profound sense of incompletion (see Seltzer, 1998)."

Animal serial killers part- 2

2010-05-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

Dog skull in Dahmer's back yard

In an effort to get back to posting, I will have to do this through a series of contributions. Each post under this current heading may also be altered if I can do better by it once I have re-read the passages.

My last post ended with a nod towards consumerist culture, and it's contribution to the narcissism of the (animal and human)serial killer persona. This post will continue in that vein. We tend to think of these killers in the human to human framework, yet the essay from which I will reference makes important connections between 1- serial killer predation, collecting, and consumption and 2- 'normal' consumers in society. The author more often cites serial killers from movies than actual criminals. This serves my theoretical purposes well in that the self, in its inauthentic, false mode both creates and inhabits (projects itself into) a world that is cinemagraphic, choreographed, and an ideological mirror representation of object relations conflicts.These projections still occur and affect the real inhabitants (animals, environment)who are unwilling and unwitting players in the predatory, consumerist 'hall of mirrors' way of being in the world.Thus the normalized behavior of killing/consuming nonhuman beings will be more readily linked to the serial killer modus operandi.

Here is the original essay of which I will work from:

http://michael-miller.wiki.uml.edu/file/view/Monster%27s+Inc.+Serial+Killers+and+Consumer+Culture.pdf

“The main contention is that the commodification of violence in popular culture is structurally integrated with the violence of commodification itself”.

Is ‘commodification’ a process/activity/transformation that is inherently/necessarlily violent? One must define violence in ways that are meaningful. We can be violent towards plants, animals, and ecosystems in our quest to commodify, objectify, market, and otherwise reach certain goals. Living things may be the target or ‘in the way’ of the target in the process of commodification.

“Starting with the rather obvious ways in which violent crime is marketed as a spectacle to be consumed…”

“A spectacle to be consumed” denotes an inherent detachment as the spectacle ‘before us’ is seen/interpreted and then ‘taken in’ to resonate/ meet certain needs. Much like my early post which speaks about life events occurring (as a movie does) before us . our self is at once spectator and participator, thrown into the moment and out of our ‘seat,’ - the place where “I” can find a more fundamental ground. This violence is connected to oral-pleasure as well as anal-destructive relations between the child –parent developmental identity in the individual. The ‘violence’ at this level occurred between child and parent, and then within the child themselves, stemming from the aftermath of animals ‘transformed’ into food, (a violence in and of itself). This whole transformation is a ’spectacle’ that must be ingested/incorporated, and defines the identity of the consumer/consumed. Life events then become spectacles of reinforced and marketed products (via societal ideologies)connecting to the false self.

“…this article then attempts to uncover less transparent links between the normal desires which circulate within consumer society and monstrous violence. In ‘Monsters Inc.’, the serial killer is unmasked as a gothic double of the serial consumer”.

‘Normalized’ desires (to include objects of desire?) circulating within consumer society can be inherently violent, even without the consumer knowing it like that. Violence is often hidden- explained and woven into the fabric of societal consciousness. Even if we witness/cause something to die, we may only feel our own feelings depending on our purpose and context. This is different than trying to capture (what the dying being was experiencing ) through our own feelings (empathy).
‘Serial’ has come to denotes repetition, for comfort, familiarity, habit, or pressure. My purposes are directly related to the understanding of death/consumption/reabsorbtion, Once a loyalty /self survival mode takes effect, there is a compulsion to repeat activities which ‘kill’ , fragment, and consume the authentic self in order to control it from entering consciousness. It is a ‘kill or be killed’ dynamic tied to an early developmental relation where the ‘self’‘s very conscious life was tied to identifying with and maintaining a perfect and pleasing child/parent tie. Thus a fundamental ground is given up/buried/incarcerated (violently acted upon) to survive and align with the parent-based source of ‘fundamental life’ which also includes animal death. Repetitious consumption of any animal-as-resource becomes ingrained and familiar based on the (familiar) defensive drive to subjugate the relations between authentic self and its place in the world.

“Mark Seltzer (1998: 129) has offered a compelling critique of the virtualization of violence:
‘fascination with scenes of a spectacularized bodily violence is inseparable from the
binding of violence to scene, spectacle, and representation’.”

Our ‘serial’ penchant for violence as a visual, spectacular ‘scene’ before us is mirrored in a photo/movie representation that reinforces our ‘into the movie’ feel. The “I” feels real when it identifies (feeds off of) an object relation representation of the parent (a representation developed during a volatile ‘separation’-possibly emotional, physical) . The binding is actually a bonding.

“The engine which drives this process is primarily economic”.

Economic forces are *not* the only engine(creator) of this visual violence bond. From the individual’s perspective, the media is the(autopilot) transportation container that gets them to (ideologically-fused) places without much interaction with the objective ‘outside’. For those who are invested in propagating the theatrical enterprise, the bottom line and driving force may be dollars. The engine bond may also involve the drives/needs of the self caught up in the seriality of ideological indoctrination. In other words, personal demand may be at least magnified by market availability. This indoctrination is reflective of the transference of meaning and bonding between the self and adult caregivers to (societal belonging as extended caregiver). In summary, interpersonal and psychodynamic meaning can create ideological contexts, which both mirror and feed consumer seriality. Ths seriality is focused on killing and consuming the authentic self via animals/environment in an attempt to maintain survival ties from an earlier developmental period of the self’s formation/relation to a (parenting/mirroring) ‘other’. The current 'other' remains the 'feeder' which is fulfilled by a 'parentified' view of mass-culture society, all too willing to accomodate the idealized image that the societal self seeks to pattern itself after(like a duckling imprinting it's attachment with a mother figure).

“Most people could confidently identify a serial killer, but definitions are more elusive. One of the most conspicuous commonplaces in the popular discourses of serial killing concerns the terrifying normality of the murderer. Rather than appearing monstrously different, the serial killer displays a likeness that disturbs the dominant culture. The violence of consumerism is similarly hidden beneath a façade of healthy normality. The glossy phantasmagoria of youth and beauty, freedom and pleasure, obscures widespread devastation and suffering”.

In this case the violence and suffering done to animals is hidden,interwoven into ‘normal ‘ everyday experiences that we ingest as effortlessly as the flesh and body parts(dismemberment and reassembly into coveted items). Miller goes on to make this connection….

“The consumation of contemporary consumer capitalism assumes multiple forms: pollution, waste and the ravaging of non-renewable resources, bio-diversity and endangered species; the slaughter of animals for food, clothing and medicine…”

Society’s consumer ideology of exploitation ravages all manner of life in a calculated, serial way both mirroring and setting up the conditions for generations of humans for narcissistic fixations.

‘In American Psycho the word
“consume” is used in all of its possible meanings: purchasing, eating and destroying’.
Each brand of consumption is described in the same flat, affectless tone to underscore Bateman’s perception of everything in the world as a series of consumables arranged for his delectation.
Patrick Bateman thus represents a gothic projection of consumer pathology. In
this respect, although his name echoes Norman Bates from Hitchcock’s Psycho,
Bateman can be seen as a Yuppie analogue to the aristocratic Hannibal Lecter. Both
killers coolly collect and consume body parts and can boast an intimate familiarity
with fashionable commodities".

Here's more...

"The second serial killer in Silence of the Lambs is similarly doubled with the consumer and associated with animal imagery. While Lecter hunts for food, the predatory Buffalo Bill hunts for clothing. After the chase, Buffalo Bill deprives his prey of subjectivity and treats them like livestock: victims are penned, fed and then flayed for their skins".

I would qualify the speciesist remark ‘treated like livestock’ with treats people the way livestock animals are treated. The inauthentic self lacks foundational substance, and must find it’s (societal) form (analogue) through a cloak of animal skin and animal flesh. It is the process that defines the self more than the product however. The false self is the pseudo version of the ‘something from nothing’ process that defines the Big Bang foundation of becoming(see post 8/25/09). It remains empty because it is a ‘nothing’ derived from a destructive rift/abyss caused by the abandonment/isolation that occurred when the true self was confronted by the ‘choose parent over the animal’ in an earlier phase of “I” development. Consequently, the false self must create meaning from it’s wellspring of nothingness. While it creates, it consumes, and this consummation is destruction.

Sexuality (creativity) and death(destruction) become equated.

Miller writes:

“Etymology is instructive in this regard: to ‘consume’ is to
devour and destroy, to waste and obliterate. With this definition in mind, Baudrillard
(1998: 43) has traced a provocative genealogy between contemporary capitalism
and tribal potlatch: ‘consumerism may go so far as consumation, pure and simple destruction’.

"…in David Fincher’s “Seven”, the victims … exemplify some of the capital vices and anxieties exploited by consumerism: the ‘Gluttony’ victim is guilty of over-eating; the ‘Pride’ victim is a fashion model guilty of acute narcissism; the ‘Sloth’ victim, according to Richard Dyer (1999: 40), is a case study in the dangers of under-exercising; the ‘Lust’ victim embodies a hardcore version of mainstream desires and fetishes. By foregrounding ‘sins’ that are central to consumerism and by naming the murderer ‘John Doe’, Seven hints at the hyper-normality of serial killer pathology”.

We use diminishing labels on nonhuman animals, making it easier to exploit them, as we are compelled to aspire to reach perfect (parental/societal) oneness. It is a process of internal discrimination/separation/confinement(turned outward) that protects us from the ‘anxiety-by-association’ as well as ‘anger-by association’ implications of our (relational and existential) fears, vulnerability, and rage set into motion early in our lives. We ingest the normative concepts fed to us and the output involves seeing nonhuman others with societally-disavowed attributes (eat like pigs, act like sheep, big as a cow). The (oral to anal) implications of this power and control are clear. To both the animals and to the authentic self, we are murderers who must repeat the tracking, confining, and ingesting the ‘fix’ that protects us from the anxiety of the abyss. The false self continues to try and grow,to transform itself into what it believes the society wants for it, mirrors for it.This self looks for its reflection in society to know/feel that it 'exists'.

“ Key aspects of consumer sensibility intersect with the trademark features of serial killer psychology: anxious and aggressive narcissism, the compulsive collection of fetish objects and fantasies of self-transformation”.

Looking at the transformation (development) of the self, narcissism occupies a part of the normal growth stage. It is a phase characterized by perceptions, experiences, interpretations that are geared towards internal “I” homeostasis. The self looks outward from an inward needs perspective. It is not self-serving as limited to/equated with ‘gluttony’. It is closer to the concept of anthropocentric thinking, ascribing human traits and meanings to qualia that might not be inherent to it. Immanuel Kant asserted that all ‘knowing’ is confined to a human’s version of apprehending the ‘object’, which might add , detract, complete, or otherwise alter it. This interaction, if it can be called that, may have a quality of purpose, whether symbiotic or singular, conscious or sublimated, for the individual. If the individual is bringing intentions and meaning to the transaction, they may be interpreted on a continuum from selfless to self-serving. As such an individual may or may not know the degree of their self-centered perspective and actions, and how these are affecting the transaction. The level of their connectivity is relevant. One who looks out for their own goals may not consider the perspective, feelings, and consequences to others (beyond their own vantage point). These others may present to them as mere ‘collectible’resources that supply their narcissistic way of being.

Why we call people 'animal serial killers'...Pt. 1

2010-03-23T19:38:00.000-07:00

I will continue on now with the development of the self in infancy and how pathological dynamics develop. I am incorporating a theory of how such pathologies interact and are sustained through domination of nature, particularly animals. These projections upon the world are toxic to the very environment that inevitably sustains all life.

In somewhat haphazard fashion (depending on how I am organizing/fleshing out my written notes), I will present information about the object relations perspective that explains how serial killers develop and what dynamics sustain their behavior. I will interpret this dynamic along the lines of animal exploitation already outlined in earlier posts…

The original article is from here :

http://samvak.tripod.com/serialkillers.html

"The onset of pathological narcissism is in infancy, childhood and early adolescence. It is commonly attributed to childhood abuse and trauma inflicted by parents, authority figures, or even peers. Pathological narcissism is a defense mechanism intended to deflect hurt and trauma from the victim's "True Self" into a “False self” which is omnipotent, invulnerable, and omniscient."

Trauma’ can include conflicts arising in the self initiated by parental ‘betrayal’ messages about animals. Other traumas not associated with this conflict can still trigger violence towards animals (often moving on to humans). The societal-false self, with its feature of omnipotence, presents as speciesism.

"The narcissist uses the False Self to regulate his or her labile sense of self-worth by extracting from his environment narcissistic supply (any form of attention, both positive and negative)."

The false self then uses animals to project disavowed aspects of the true self to maintain self-survival relations with the immediate parent (later transferred to parental symbols-society, and parental attachment experiences-oneness). After projected disavowment, the animal-other is then (re) ingested for both narcissistic supply and domination (protective imprisonment of the true self).

"Killing the victim is a form of exerting unmitigated, absolute, and irreversible control over it. The serial killer aspires to "freeze time" in the still perfection that he has choreographed. The victim is motionless and defenseless. The killer attains long sought "object permanence". The victim is unlikely to run on him or vanish as earlier objects (e.g., his parents) have done."

The self begins with experiencing(others/itself) in parts, then gathers enough ( via memory, integration)to make a composite whole, but then sees the whole reduced to parts again (familiar traits are seen via relationships, in others). Trauma can occur when the whole parent does something that causes a rift or fragmentation in how the self was experiencing them (and thus their own selves).*This rift is caused when the unconditonal true self and its animal +(B.Bang see post dated 8/25/09 for Big Bang essay) counterpart is wounded.* To regain/maintain a vision of whole parent (equals whole self) the true self/animal other must become the polar opposite- reduced, incapacitated, and disassembled into ‘digestible’ supplies existing outside in the world. Digestibility involves seeking an otherness (in object form) that we have been conditioned to see (i.e.: flesh as consumable/meat). The societal self’s view of objects must stay connected to the societal (parental) view in order to maintain a sense of realness, permanency, and survival. The false self thus maintains pseudo individuation as well as pseudo oneness with the world. This oneness is really an experience of self-fixedness at the infant-parent stage. Flesh (no longer living, whole and belonging to a being separate in its life and able to move away from him) and its consumption ( orally and consciously)‘freezes’ this protective, oral stage, giving the self a sensation of continuity and inner balance. This is mirrored with the larger society as an approved form of relating.

"The killer is trying desperately to avoid a painful relationship with his object of desire. He is terrified of being abandoned or humiliated, exposed for what he is and then discarded. Many killers often have sex - the ultimate form of intimacy - with the corpses. Objectification and mutilation allow for unchallenged possession."

Human beings become ‘killers’ on a continuum of imposing their will over nature, determined in part by their individual differences/experiences and( level of) suppression of empathy. The object of the self’s desire is really a whole sense of self and a parent in keeping with that. The conflict involves choosing (to be alone with) a self which aligns with a perceived unconditional relationship and a self which aligns with the parental/societal approach that objectifies/splits others into objects/supplies of narcissism. The sexual component of flesh appropriation (tapped into by Carol J. Adams) can be viewed as reflecting the early, intimate psychosexual stage of orality. That these images surface in mainstream society mirrors the collusion (symbiotic relationship) between ideology (with its real world constructions) and internal dynamics. Mutilation in this context refers to reducing the being into (psychologically) digestible, containable, and false self-sustainable fodder.

"Many serial killers believe that killing is the way of the world. Everyone would kill if they could or were given the chance to do so. Such killers are convinced that they are more honest and open about their desires and, thus, morally superior. They hold others in contempt for being conforming hypocrites, cowed into submission by an overweening establishment or society."

Locovore mythology holds that an individual consumer can free themselves of the anomie tied to ‘industrialized spoon feeding’ (the ambivalent laden individuation process related to societal indoctrination initiated via parent). Being more intimate with their animals as whole subjects of (the same) objectification and subjugation, individuals have more of a hand (via consumerist violence) in the domination of their own true self potential. They are no more removed from the indoctrination, just closer up to the societal mirror, the dying face juxtaposed behind the smiling face of the early parent encounter.

People who have taken to killing their own 'food animals", taking on the challenge of 'looking their food in the eye'. They are really looking into the eyes of the aspect of their own self that they wish to dominate.Such killing is symbolic of the need to repress the authentic self. The (backyard)living chicken is really a referent for the the pedestrian butcher's true, whole self, seperate from society. The pedestrian butcher's attempts to rebel/individuate from society(that is spoon feeding her) by being a 'locovore'.However, her real self never becomes independent or comes to life because she embraces society's view of animals as food. Carol Adams speaks of the absent referent, the animal that is not there (even in our minds) because we only see the parts/as food. When the pedestrian butcher kills the chicken she removes the reference to animal (defeathered). But in addition her own true self (potentiality) is reduced to an absent referent as well, re-absorbed into society as the pedestrian butcher connects with the dead female's body as merely the familiar(societal)visual of 'food'. *Another missed opportunity to show up in the world as a real self.* The societal self continues to reign.
One extra observation i've been making of what locovores 'accomplish'with getting their own 'meat'and eggs. They love to fantasize that they are freeing themselves of the pallid reliance on urbanity. What they really accomplish is tantamount to kids camping out in their parents backyard, enjoying a little sense of freedom and excitement but never being very far from the reassuring light of their parent's home(societal indocrination). Aside from the 'camping kids'comparison, locovore pedestrians are in fact, society's own backyard chickens.A little more room in their mind cage.

"Serial killers represent a dual failure - of their own development as authentic, productive individuals - and of the self-serving, consumerist culture and society they grow in. Such societies breed malignant objectifiers - people devoid of empathy - also known as "narcissists"."

Free to Discriminate Part 2

2010-02-26T15:13:00.000-08:00

The poster (see my previous entry) was not clear that it was about Gay marriage except for one subtle photo. The title of the post was “Discrimination”. Gay marriage was never mentioned. The very short post referenced animal-human relationships in terms respect, unconditional love, and equality. The post ends with the question “…how is it there are people who think …they can actually decide what race/religion/sexual orientation, etc. is right or wrong, good or bad? Why does anyone have to fight for equality?”
I suggested looking for discrimination that is not always recognizable (in our daily lives) or accepted, but is universal in its form nonetheless. When other commenters framed the position I brought as “another agenda” it separated and isolated my message from them. Some people, whom I assume want to know more about how/why inequality and discrimination occur, ended up embodying the very thing they wished to understand. I was trying to integrate ideas, and yet I experienced segregation (by some).Non-normative concepts (i.e.: gay rights, womens rights, civil rights, animal rights, etc) shake up the status quo of thinking/power/normalcy and some will retaliate with discriminatory measures.

We need to recognize and dismantle discrimination until there is no “other” deemed lesser and less deserving of a full life.
We should all fight for equality and freedom, and be consistent in actions towards all living beings. There is no moral justification based on what’s *convenient* to uphold. No ‘one’s fate should be in the hands of those who appoint themselves ‘all that’, ‘higher’ or justify some trait as qualifying a free moral pass for them to exploit/deprive sentient beings of their full lives.
People want to have freedom of choice/opinion…yet we would never uphold this for those of the opinion that it is their ‘right’ to intentionally harm others for their own benefit. Any sentient “others”.

Of course we need to take care of the animals that we have brought into the world. To imply that we should set them all free would be severely neglectful. They are our responsibility. The poster does a wonderful job with the animals that she clearly loves, and seems to do her best to let them lead their full lives. Most of the animals they we have contact with are here because we ‘utilize’ them in some fashion. They are considered property, whether we love them or spill their blood. They are, according to our belief system, not included in the circle of moral consideration (as ends in themselves, protected from exploitation) even though they are sentient like us.

Say a group wants to talk about the institution of marriage and issues of inequality. Perhaps an individual wants to approach that group about marriage as a foundation that should recognize universal love, and feels that gay marriage should be included in that definition of unconditional love. What if that group said ‘we are referring to heterosexual marriage, preserved and reserved by our belief system and bringing your ‘agenda’ under the auspices of unconditional respect has no place here”. Added stereotyped attributes and assumptions to the person and their viewpoint attempts even further neutralization.
Sometimes we want to see others as so different, to justify the status quo (and the needs met by it). Sometimes it is due to misinformation, fear, guilt, loyalty, etc.
The example of heterosexual marriage exclusivity and the biases that protect it are not different from the dynamics which also shut out non human beings from the circle of equity. It is thus ‘conditional’ unconditional love and respect based on human-centric (like hetero-centric) biases. Don’t let your listening and love be conditional, when to do so continues injustice and subjugation of others.

To quote Stephanie Ernst :

“We are compelled to engage in this struggle because it’s right, because what’s happening every second of every day to millions of animals is wrong, because it has to change, and because we were once where you are, and we know that you have kind souls and the capacity to get where we are now, to a place of compassion, a place where you can envision a more peaceful way of living.
The struggle… isn’t about winning something for ourselves… power, politics, or money. It’s not about exerting control, violence, or superiority. It’s certainly not about what people think of us. This struggle on behalf of nonhuman animals is about love and compassion and living in a way that is peaceful and just and without contradictions. It’s about opening our eyes and hearts to the possibility of a new and better world, new and better not just for the nonhuman animals on this planet, ***but for us too.*** There is a better, less violent, more loving and peaceable world out there, and we’re just trying to get to it. And maybe that is a possibility and a goal worth considering and investigating rather than attacking and dismissing”.

I would like to add that Ernst speaks about the reasons to include animals, not just as a benefit to them, but to our own striving to evolve as human beings that seek to remove discrimination in all of its forms from our behavior.
People could look at Gay marriage inequalities/discrimination as a ’single issue’ (like looking at animal rights as a single issue or 'fur' as a single issue within animal rights) instead of branch of the tree of universal discrimination, and we need to look at what keeps the tree growing (by exposing its roots, and what it is rooted in). Examining this will hopefully move us closer to answering the poster’s universal question: “Why does anyone have to fight for equality?”

The poster finally comes clean:

Okay…here’s my take at this point in time in my life : Me – Darwin/Spencer – “Survival of the Fittest”. I live in the country and witness nature on a daily basis. Humans are natural predators, we have canine teeth….we are not ruminants. Choosing to be vegan/vegetarian is a choice, certainly, but doubtful any of us would be here discussing this today had our ancestors been vegans.
The day I see a coyote choose berries instead of a rabbit for lunch or a bird ignore a worm or a delicious bug for food, is the day I will discuss this further. I don’t see the logic in asking humans not to discriminate against animals, when animals don’t discriminate. Humans are animals.
Animals/emotions, certainly, but to compare an animal’s thoughts to a human’s is wrong. Animals think differently – that coyote isn’t thinking, “oh..I’m making that bunny cry”. I am easily the guilty of applying human/thoughts feelings to animals. It’s easy to do, it makes us feel good – heck, we all do it. I recognize that I do it. But ME….I will not say that animals are equal to humans. I don’t see it. I see nothing wrong with having, loving, training, showing, rescuing, and being compassionate about animals. I think educating folks about animals, especially children – ESPECIALLY hands on, is very important. I think animals teach us MANY wonderful lessons, including patience and appreciation. And I am easily guilty of picking and choosing what I think and do. No, not everything is on the same level. No cut and dry for me".

So the poster adheres to the following convienient rationale :

Why do we predate on animals? "because we are like them".
Why do animals not fall under our moral considerations? "because we are not like them"

So the poster is a wolf when she wants to choose to consume/exploit, and a person when she chooses to have a love relationship.

"I am easily guilty of picking and choosing what I think and do"

The poster gets to 'pick and choose'(one of the cornerstones of discrimination) just like society picks and chooses what is legitimate and what is not-what is 'lawful' to do to others.

"No cut and dry for me"

No 'cut and dry' for her? She has made it cut and dry that she uses speciesist privlidge to pick and choose which human -animal relations she wants to have : companionship for some, food for others.I think that it is cut and dry that unconditonal love, peace and non violence is valid. That killing innocent beings for our ends is wrong. That discrimination in any form must be uncovered and relinquished.We don't get to pick and choose if we wish to be ethically consistent.By not recognizing discrimination where it's *inconvenient*, you make it black and white, thus perpetuating it .
I really like another commentator's response to this :

"I don’t mean to be argumentative and I understand your point. I’m not expecting you to change your stance based on what one or two anonymous commenters write. First, you say that humans are just like animals in that we are predators, so we shouldn’t feel bad about eating other animals. Then, you say we’re nothing like animals and comparing a human's feelings to an animal's feelings is wrong. Do you see the contradiction there?

As for the ancestor comment… I hear that one a lot and honestly do not see the logic. We aren’t our ancestors. We don’t need meat to survive. Why does what our ancestors did hundreds of years ago have any bearing on what we should do now? Our ancestors kept slaves, too. Just because it used to be one way, or tradition says it must be one way, does not mean it always has to be that way.

The logic in asking humans to discriminate is because we have the ability to ask and we have the ability to choose. Other animals can’t – they don’t have the intellect or the capacity to contemplate those choices. They just do. But humans… we’re different, like you said. We don’t just “do.” We don’t kill someone when we disagree with them because they pissed us off. We don’t steal from others if we want what they have. We choose to make better decisions because we have the mental and moral capacity to do so. No, a wolf doesn’t think about hurting a rabbit… but if you had to slit a rabbits throat, wouldn’t the thought of that rabbit’s fear and pain cross your mind?

I agree that animals can be wonderful learning tools. I think what you do at your farm is wonderful. But so many farms aren’t like that. So many animals aren’t treated with the respect you give your animals. You say you don’t think animals are equal to humans, but do you afford your animals compassion? Of course you do – because at some level, you recognize that they deserve it, as living, feeling creatures. I don’t think animals and humans are all at the same level. But I do think all living things deserve respect. To me, killing and eating something just because I want to (and don’t need to) is not respectful or compassionate, and I honestly don’t see how it could be viewed as such by anyone".

Free To Discriminate Part 1

2010-02-23T20:41:00.000-08:00

Taking a momentary sidetrack to post about an exchange I had on a blog. This person has a 'farm' where she keeps llamas, chickens, horses, and the like. Not sure if she raises any for their flesh. Here is her post:

“Not sure where to start with this post, but I’ve had things on my mind and it’s time to make note.
Yes, I have a farm with animals. I am kind to them. I respect them and they respect me. I provide love, food, and yes…health care. All the animals are treated equally; it’s easy, it’s the right thing.
I believe in a higher power, sometimes I call it God, sometimes I’m not sure. The only thing I’m sure of is that I’m not it. Knowing you’re not God, or some higher power….well then who are you, who am I, to ever judge?
Bad people aside (please don’t make me define bad people), the general thought should be “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. I just cannot fathom why there are still folks blind to that idea.
So then, how is it there are people who think they are so ‘that’ – they can actually decide what race/religion/sexual orientation, etc. is right or wrong, good or bad? Why does anyone have to fight for equality?
Sometimes when I leave the goodness and unconditional love of the barns, and read the paper or watch the news, I’m just disgusted with the way some people in this world are.”

To which I responded:

“You say that you love the animals…If you view animals in a way that *also* allows you to use them/take their lives from them (their breast milk, their muscle tissue), how is this not a form of descrimination, of exceptionalism to ‘unconditional’ love, respect, equality, not playing ‘God’ with their lives? My tone is not hostile in writing these words, actually more hopeful that we can (all) have a good exchange”.

To which the poster replied :

“I admit I had to ponder this one a bit. I had hoped that this post would be concentrating on the issue of equal rights for humans, and hope it still will…I expect talking of my animals opened the door for your comment. However, you made your point and I respect that. I also appreciate that you spoke nicely.
In your eyes as well as others with like views, it would appear that I am a hypocrite. I run my life to the best of my ability and in a way that I’ve chosen. There are those who also might think that I exploit animals, including my dogs – the ones I’ve used for volunteer therapy work for almost ten years. My dogs have brought great distraction to children getting treatment for cancer, children learning to read, children struggling with disabilities, and senior citizens get to delve into soft fur and reminisce about dogs from their pasts. There are people who think animals shouldn’t be used for ‘a purpose’, any purpose – meat, milk, therapy, sports, enjoyment, etc.
I can’t agree.
I do feel that discussing human rights is in a different playing field”.

My response:

“Different how though? What justifies this separation that does not involve discrimination? It’s not just about the animals in and of themselves here, but consistency as human beings. As you already know, the qualities that we share with nonhuman beings are more relevant (than those we don’t share) in terms of moral consideration and respect. They don’t need to be ‘equal’ to humans to have the right to be *not used*. To be treated as ends in themselves, just as human animals wish for themselves.Speciesism relies on the *same* justifications that other ‘isms’ use to separate one group from another and justify a whole continuum of domination (use). To be ‘a work in progress’ towards more moral consistency, I would suggest eliminating animals as food and clothing (superficial uses at best)”.

Poster :

“Again, I appreciate your comment; however, I need to agree to disagree on this issue”.

Me:

“You can agree to disagree (without explaining your disagreement).I cannot however *agree* to that, as my disagreement recognizes that animals have justice needs far beyond the privilege of a ‘closed circle’ discourse between humans.
And (to another commenter), I’m glad for the animals that the poster (or anyone)provides love and respect to, but selecting which animals will get the full respect and which animals will be on their plate, clothing, etc is a societal, ideological, and moral problem. The poster's therapy dogs bring warmth and healing to people, and it would seem horrible if we retired them to the grill afterwards, yet any animal can be a source for the heart, and it makes no *more* sense to exploit them as food, clothing, business, etc than it would for a ‘petified’ animal in your home. You seem willing to defend the heart (of the poster), so extend it to all living beings in this short life.

Then the commenters started:

1. “…this started out as a thread about marriage equity that was on a nice little roll until you jumped in and tried to take it in a direction that suited your own purposes solely on the basis of the poster’s residence on a farm and her comment that the animals there loved unconditionally. I for one don’t appreciate your close-minded zealotry. If you’d care to opine on the topic at hand, have at it”.

2. “There are people at dog shows that go around opening the crates and chasing to free the dogs. These people think as you do…I think your group has shot itself in the foot.”

3. “People who are for “animal rights” frequently don’t care about the animal’s health, ability to survive without human care, etc. So, before everyone gets crazy, remember to take it from who it comes. Also, people who hijack blog threads for their own agendas have a name on the internet. They’re called trolls. And we all know that we’re not supposed to feed the trolls”.

4. “I believe to each their own and other people’s choice are just that, their own… If the topic is animal rights, then yes he/she has a valid reason to voice their opinion. If it becomes an almost politician-like attempt to bend any conversation to their agenda-well, lets take a bit of advice from dear ol’ mom… Lets just ignore the bully”.

5. “There are more appropriate places for discussions pertaining to the end use of animals and this particular post isn’t it.
I did read (between the lines, perhaps) that (John C) feels exploiting animals in any way is wrong. I don’t feel that I’m wrong to keep my animals, wear clothing made of wool, and drink milk”.

6. “..your blog is always thought-provoking, so you must know that some of the thoughts it provokes will not agree with yours. Don’t let the troll thoughts get you sidetracked; ignore them and they will wither and die from lack of attention. Readers, much as it will gall you to ignore the ignorant, do it. The post was timely and thoughtful and has nothing to do with PETA, animal rights, veganism, or any other animal rights cause. Sorry, John C, but you don’t get it”.

7. “I support same sex marriage, gay rights, animal rights and my right to express my opinion… Extremists all to often can only see their point of view and forget its ok to have a differing point of view…”

Under the blog’s title of “discrimination” I attempted to address the poster’s original question : “Why does anyone have to fight for equality?”
I introduced the idea that discrimination can be a *universal*, if often hidden dynamic in the way we relate to all living beings. When people got defensive, I became the subject of the very thing that they were trying to understand and overcome : Negatively labeled, marginalized, dismissed, grouped into a stereotype of ‘animal rights people’ and ‘their’ actions/thinking, and extremist. It’s as if I had entered their conservative, pristine town proposing integration (which I was)starting with themselves and the consequences of their beliefs, and was met with... segregation.

My response:

"We wish to understand why human beings discriminate against each other – use *differences* to establish unfair/unequal dynamics. Race, sex, and sexual orientation become labels, a way to group individuals in a way that somehow justifies (unfair) treatment. Discrimination ignores the similarities that should make us equal in terms of respect and access to freedoms. But why do we group like this? Why must we pursue dominion over others, see them as lesser and less deserving of rights that would afford them a complete life of their own choosing? Is it fearing of the unknown, of losing direction, significance, familiarity? Is it self-serving goals, satiation of power and security? What is wrong with being unconditionally accepting of ‘otherness’ of others who share the gifts of love, pain, heartache, will to live, parenting, socialness….
In order to heal this rift amongst humans, to liberate ourselves from narrow confines of discrimination, we must look (inwards) towards our own selves first: Look for ways that we ourselves indulge in discrimination hidden amongst the norms/assumptions of societal mores.
Many believe, as I do, that (human to human) domination and discrimination has its roots in human-animal relations, which continues to this day. Every time we divide up naked life into categories (sex, race, species) that (along with some loving) justify treating others as means to our own ends/assumptions, we are supporting (often unintentionally) discrimination. That is why I believe my posts are relevant here. Beings who were/are viewed as property-women, children, Africans, will always suffer, and nonhuman beings are no exception (as the poster knows first hand with some of her llama inductees, suffering from neglect). Human liberation requires self-examination of generational norms of discrimination. Unconditional love should know no boundaries. If that is ‘extremism’ so be it".

Different points of view are fine, but a view that leads to others being victimized is not one to be protected under 'freedom of expression' or 'choice'.

Dogs, Pigs and Self Preservation

2010-02-12T08:54:00.000-08:00

In keeping with my latest thoughts on the psychological function of animal exploitation, here is an article by R. Cohen followed by my interpretation using some of the concepts that I have been talking about.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/opinion/05iht-edcohen.html

By ROGER COHEN
Published: February 4, 2010 ( a bit of editing from me)

NEW YORK — "I see the Beckhams, David and Victoria (Posh), have acquired a couple of “micro pigs” as pets...perhaps Beckham is heeding Churchill, who had a penchant for pigs. The great man’s verdict: “Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig. He just looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.”
Churchill’s view has some scientific basis. Pigs are smart and sociable. They’ve had a pretty bad rap, however. Generally, the notion of pigs as pets seems bizarre or repellent.
Why? There’s nothing rational about the view that taking a pig for a walk on a leash is weird, while eating a pork chop, if you so choose, is reasonable. But then, after a visit to China, it seems to me that reason has little or nothing to do with the way we view animals and food.
The Chinese, for example, eat dog (as well as cats).Now, we are appalled in the West at the notion of eating dog while considering it natural to have a dog as a pet — I own a Beagle myself (“Ned”) and I’m very fond of him. This is the inverse of the preponderant Western view of pigs: fine to eat (religious objections aside) but not to pet.
But do pigs have any more or less of a soul than dogs? Are they any more or less sentient? Do they suffer any more or less in death? Are they any more or less part of the mysterious unity of life? I think not.
There is a rational, and for some people a spiritual, case for being a vegetarian: Killing animals is wrong. However I cannot see a rational argument for saying eating dogs or cats is barbaric while eating pork or beef is fine. If you eat meat you cannot logically find it morally or ethically repugnant to eat a particular meat (I’m setting cannibalism aside here.)
That’s the theory at least. Yet I must confess I’ve been having a hard time. My bout of anguish began a few weeks back on a wintry night in central China, in the restless megalopolis of Chongqing. I was cold, wet and seeking refuge.
“What’s that?” I asked my resourceful interpreter, Xiyun Yang, pointing to a steamy, crowded establishment with a big red neon sign (the Chinese approach is, when in doubt, make it gaudy).
“You don’t want to know.”
“I think I do.”
“It’s a dog restaurant.”
Images of Ned (and his floppy ears) popped into my head, as well as thoughts of what I’d tell my daughter, but I’d come to admire Xiyun’s gastronomic antennae (particularly for Sichuan noodles) and I tend to adhere to the I’ll-try-anything-once school. In we went.
Dog was not easy for me. The memory has proved hard to digest.
I’m not happy that I ate dog. But I’m happy China eats dog. It so proclaims both a particularity to be prized in a homogenizing world and its rationality. Anyone who doesn’t want China to eat dog must logically embrace pigs as pets.
But, as I’ve learned, logic has its limits. It’s the heart not the head that governs this world under the sway of the dizzy gods."

As children we are dependent on our parents for mental and emotional well-being. For awhile the love in unconditional, and this is also mirrored/experienced in the child’s relations with nature and household animals. All of these experiences become part of the self.
When adults begin the societal indoctrination of children that animals are ‘food’, there comes a conflict, a rift 1-within the self and 2-between the self and parents.
The child must maintain ties with the parent for all aspects of self-survival, and thus splits off and confines the universal and basic love aspects of itself in order to contain the conflict safely.
Unconditional love is replaced with unconditional ambivalence that can be utilized at any time to protect the self from experiences of isolation and potential ‘annihilation’.
The animal thus contains projected and disavowed aspects of the self, and becomes the subject (symbol) of domination by the survival defenses.
The developing child continues to grow and absorb the societal self, all the while ritually killing/eating (reabsorbing) the animal (disavowed aspects) to maintain dominance/control over the splitting experience. This repetitive restoration of balance is experienced as the ‘comforting’ cycle of life.
Cohen is reacquainted with this original struggle in his encounter with the the micro pig as pet (intelligence/love/attachment VS. food) and later while ‘seeking refuge’ in China. He describes himself as isolated much like his original rift experience.
The predictable outcome is to instinctively protect himself by enlisting the defensive ambivalence to its fullest. In China, he consumes ‘a dog’ while also consuming (via simultaneous memories) his own dog as well as the disavowed aspects of himself.
This form of intrapychic cannibalism proves “difficult to digest” , yet he is successful because he maintains(survival) ties to the parental/societal union aspects of his self. By interchangeably seeing the pig/dog as either pet or food, he maintains the societal commodifcation /ownership embedded in both views. This results in continuing to confine and dominate both the animal and his split off self, rather than (both) living free and whole.

Cohen wonders what he will tell his daughter. Here it is, fittingly just before deciding on the act of ingestion/consumption. His own societal self, with it's need for self preservation, will most likely continue the parent-to-child (splitting) cycle with her, and she may need to choose her self survival tied with parental love/approval *over* the unconditional self, associated with the animal.

Object Relations In Animal Exploitation Part 2

2010-02-12T08:30:00.000-08:00

In a broad sense, then, transference may be understood as a mechanism allowing energies and affects that had been bound to inner objects to become attached to objects in the external world. Nunberg speaks of the urge to "establish identity of perception through repetition of past experience."

Freud saw transference itself as a naturally occurring phenomenon. The ‘energies and affect’ are used to confine the inner objects- authentic self along with it’s counterpart, the unconditional animal/other, and is projected onto and attached to the external world via animal exploitation/relations. This ‘splits off and preserves’ within oneself, the ideal parent image along with the child’s self image attached to it. The consistency of inner with outer (for the sake of mirrored balance) is retained via repetitive consuming (in all manner of ways)of this projected upon and riddled animal/other.

The subject constantly seeks to push inner mental contents outward; to separate and to become released from internal objects; to draw energy away from infantile objects in order to make this energy available for action in the external world. Human beings constantly are projecting fantasies into social reality.

The energy is made available for action in the outside world, however the external object/goal retains the fantasy/ dependency needs of the infant, based on the splitting( of love objects) conditions during early relations development.The outside energy/actions therefore, still focus on animal subjugation.

Brown states that culture—like the transference—is created by the repetition compulsion and constantly produces "new editions of the infantile conflicts." Culture thus may be viewed as "one vast arena in which the logic of the transference works itself out." The infantile fantasies that create the human neurosis, Brown says, cannot be directly apprehended or mastered, "but their derivatives in human culture can."

Thus we have mass media messages displaying flesh-eating/animal use as ‘manly’, ‘desirable’, ‘natural’ (see Carol J. Adams’ book ‘The Sexual Politics of Meat). “Mother Earth” is the ultimate female symbol to be exploited/dominated by orally fixated fantasies of ‘being one’ with the larger/parental whole.

Ideologies exist within societies as modus operandi allowing members of society to express and articulate their shared fantasies. To explain a specific ideology, therefore, we seek to identify the nature of the shared desires and fantasies that are its source.

To explain the specific ideology (as one facet ) of animal use, we must look at the *nature/source* of the shared fantasies.

Central to Zizek's theory : Political ideologies provide subjects with a way of seeing the world organized around "Great" or Transcendent objects… as "Real Things" precisely insofar as they "stand out from the reality of ordinary things and events."

Seeing animals in a hierarchical manner (lower) allows us to see ourselves as higher and closer to (e.g. God). ‘God’ as greater power may be the substitute for parental-relationship symbols and the original need for the self identity to stay ‘as one’ with them. This societal/ideological foundation overlays the original foundation of Being from which one is actually split from.

Matthew Sharpe suggests that these sublime objects intimate to subjects a "beyond." "Master signifiers" such as "God" or "the people" or "the Jews" or "the bourgeois" are precisely objects that no subject can ever quite "place in the fabric of his/her usual phenomenological self-experience," yet which are "taken by them to be what gives meaning and unity to the entire field."

This fabric and the self within it is indeed shrouded in ambivalence, precisely because it is a defensive (self-preserving) function to contain the authentic self within non-threatening (guilt-free)confines while making the societal self feel good/just/whole. This is practiced in the repetitious use of animals.

What Zizek calls "sublime objects" I call "omnipotent objects." These are cultural ideas into which the subject's fantasy that omnipotence exists on the face of the earth has been projected. Omnipotent objects constitute the central "terms" of an ideology: those fantasy objects around which everything else revolves. Hitler's ideology, for example, derived from two principle terms or omnipotent objects: "Germany" and "the Jew." Hitler built a political movement—in fact an entire culture—based on fantasies that he and the German people projected into these words.

The associated comparisons/images of holocausts in the human and animal spheres finds context and meaning here. “to the animal, every person is a Nazi for them it is eternal Treblinka”. Animals and Jews were/are the subjects of holocaust conditions for different reasons, and therefore (historically) they need not be matched up on that account. What matters is that ideologically, they are in that position to ‘serve’ the notion/justifications of subjective agendas labeled as ‘higher’, ‘special’, etc. When in reality the ideology is a shared fantasy projection of the original split/conflict in which psychological domination defenses are in association with omniscience (the early infantile need-state).

Nazi ideology revolved around the idea of Germany as a gigantic body politic consisting of people as "cells" of this body. Jews were conceived as "bacteria" whose continued presence within the body politic would lead to its demise. Genocide represented the acting out of the fantasy contained within the ideology. The Final Solution was undertaken in order to destroy the source of the nation's disease and thereby to "save the life" of Germany.

The societal self confines the authentic self as it is a ‘bacteria’ that threatens the ties/security/existence of the self with the parent. The parent actually introduced the ‘toxin’ to the original relations of the self (via animal exploitation). The self simply split off the component of its self (associated with animal unconditional love) and labeled it the ‘bacteria’ (a ‘lower’ form of life).Placing it in ‘quarantine’ and away from its empathic reach, the self saves its own life. Repetitious animal genocide (becoming even more a part of the actualized/ideologicalfabric) via concentration (camp) animal intensive farming is the projected struggle for mastery ‘writ large’ as a societal given.

Lee Harris …observes that when an individual is caught up in his own, idiosyncratic fantasy, rarely does this fantasy impact upon reality. But what happens, Harris asks, when it is not an individual who is caught up in his fantasy but an "entire group, or a people, or even a nation." That such a thing can happen is "obvious from a glance at history."

This displays the roots of speciesism. An entire group (as species) believes/needs in its own specialness, and justifying/needing to enact it via the subjugation of ‘lower’ others.

Ideologies may be understood, then, as societally defined structures of thought that human beings have invented in order to perform psychological work. Ideologies allow human beings to project their fantasies into the external world, where they may be "seen" and manipulated. Energies that had been attached to infantile objects are "released" by virtue of the capacity for "sublime objects of ideology" to substitute for infantile objects.