Reclaiming the Art of Conversation........Sherry Turkle

Over the years I've ranted so often about the loss of conversation, the way I experience, in spite of the "connecting" of the internet, an increasing  loss of "communion", at least within my own species. I still enjoy the company of cats and trees.   I especially seem to rant about the loss of the "conversation coffee shop", places where you could go in and maybe encounter a stimulating talk.........now you encounter a wall of laptops, as impregnable as the Berlin Wall in the Cold War. 

But that's true everywhere else as well.  When I began renting rooms in the house I inherited, I had visions of groups of people sitting around the table drinking coffee and eating scones, and lively talks ensuring.  That has happened sometimes, but mostly I've learned that, well,  people rise with their Smartphones and go to bed with their Laptops.   And I am entirely invisible - good preparation, no doubt, for a future incarnation as a poltergeist.

Currently, for example, I have a young intern here for a few weeks.  Last night we were both in the kitchen, me making a salad and her waiting to make tea.  Immediately she pulled out her phone, as she stood not 3 feet from me, and was lost in cyberspace.  When someone pulls out a phone, or even has one in the visual proximity, as Sherry Turkle demonstrates, they are communicating that "you are as interesting to me as a turnip, and  not important enough for me to give you my attention".  A first rate conversation stopper there......

I left the room without even saying goodbye.  I did not offer her any of the salad.  She didn't notice.

I remember a few years ago I went with a group of friends to a fancy Indian restaurant, one with sitar music in the background and lots of Ambience.   We noticed a nicely dressed  couple at a nearby table - both had their smartphones in their hands, head bent over the flickering lights, with of course, the flickering light of a candle and wine glasses between then.  They didn't stop, and we were amazed - being somewhat intoxicated, we started to imagine what they were doing.  Talking to each other?  Ordering?  Having phone sex?  Lucky for us, they didn't notice us either.

My friends often rant about the same loss of interpersonal communication as well, and because most of us were young adults in America B.C. (before Computers) we've variously attributed this loss of Conversation to being older, everyone being too busy,  we're all mostly without families, or we're  much more boring now,    Resignation has set in, and one can always go home and watch Netflix with the cat.  So when I discovered Ms. Turkle's book, and then was able to enjoy this interview on an  interview site I subscribe to, I was delighted to hear her articulate what I've so often felt.  

owned by your phone?

“Technology doesn’t just change what we do, it changes who we are.”

Ever wonder what your mobile device is really doing to your relationships, your happiness…your life?

Today’s guest, famed MIT Professor, bestselling author and researcher on how technology affects the human condition,Sherry Turkle, has been studying questions like this for decades.  In her new book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, she looks at what phones and the technology that rides inside them are doing not just for us, but to us. Put your cell phone on the table when your with someone else, she offers, you’ve just destroyed the possibility of deep conversation. Without even realizing it, everything gets superficial. You don’t go deeper, because you want to be able to scratch the near-addictive phone-checking itch. And that’s okay when the convo is light, but not when it gets real.

We also talk about how apps and texting are destroying empathy and  making it harder and harder to develop real relationships.  We talk about what computers and mobile devices do to classrooms and learning, seeing how some professors who at first welcomed them are now banning them and why. 

 https://soundcloud.com/goodlifeproject/sherry-turkle

Death in the "City of Isis"

 AP/Jerome Delay

"Three terrorists believed in their own minds that they were holy warriors who would die "martyred" in their holy war and that they would live on in Paradise.One of the terrorists, Cherif Kouachi ........told French investigators that "the wise leaders in Islam told him and his friends that if they die as martyrs in jihad they would go to heaven" and "that martyrs would be greeted by more than 60 virgins in a big palace in heaven." This refers to the hadith, or saying of the Prophet Mohammed, that martyrs will enjoy the favor of 72 virgins."

           Peter Bergen

http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/13/opinion/bergen-islam-terrorism/index.html

As I, with so many people around the world, mourn those  who died in Paris, I cannot avoid a  grim synchronicity that accompanies this latest act of  murder in the name of a "god" (and no, I will not capitalize the name of this murderous  patriarchal god, who  has had so many violent names in so many violent eras of human his-story.)   

My friends in the Women's Spirituality community, the Fellowship of Isis, and women and men  concerned with mythology and archetypal psychology,  have been disturbed that ISIS, the group claiming responsibility for this latest atrocity,  has been given, ironically, the name of the great Mother Goddess of ancient Egypt (I.S.I.S.).  

Isis with Her infant Horus, believed by many to be the origin of the famous Black Madonnas at pilgrimage sites throughout Europe; winged Isis who may also be the earliest "angel".   This  Mother Goddess was beloved for a millenia in Egypt.  In the later days of the Roman Empire Isis was imported to Rome,  and temples were built to Her, including those found at an outpost in Gaul named for  Her.    Many people do not know that  Paris, par Isis, once meant "city of Isis".

The attack on Paris by Islamic extremists who have taken, ironically, the name of this Great Goddess of the ancient world is paradoxical.  The Divine Feminine throughout world cultures is about serving and nurturing life.  These religious fanatics are about co-opting those powers to serve the subjugation of women, and  death to all  who don't "believe" in the absolute  authority of their "god" .  

A further synchronicity  occurs that they chose Friday the 13th, no doubt because that day is long considered unlucky.  But  if considered from the viewpoint of  Europe before monotheism,  quite the opposite is true.  Friday the 13th was sacred to the Goddess - first, because Friday is named for the Norse Goddesses Freya/Frigga, representing love, sexuality, and child bearing, and second,  because  the number 13 has been associated with women since prehistoric times.  There are 13 lunations in a year, and 13 menstrual cycles.  Hence (not unlike  the long mythic descent of Mary Magdalene from disciple or wife  of the historical Jesus  to reformed whore)  a day once devoted to a Goddess became co-opted as  "bad luck".  

I remember a conversation I shared once  with Dorit Bat Shalom, an Israeli artist I know  who brought Israeli and Palestine women together in “Peace Tents” to share their stories  in the 1990's.  Just before the invasion of Iraq, Dorit said : "How can there be  peace  without the Goddess?"  The Shekinah is the feminine aspect of God in Judaism. Dorit went on to say "The Shekinah has been driven away from the holy lands. We cannot heal without her ." 

Indeed, endless strife takes place in the very heart of what was once the fertile homeland of the Great Mother, of Inanna, Astarte, Isis,  Asheroth.   The question Dorit asked stayed with me.  How indeed can there be peace, in the Mideast or elsewhere, when deity, and human values, are personified and polarized as almost exclusively male? A mythos that denies the feminine half of humanity, in Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and elsewhere......has left us a humanity divided against itself , and the more polarized the society, the greater the violence.  The male archetype carried to its ultimate extreme,  unbalanced and unmitigated,  is a killer.  

The "return of the Goddess" means,  to me,   restoring Balance to the profoundly divided collective spirit of the human race.   When half the human race is disenfranchised, enslaved, hidden,  that means that half of the collective mind of humanity is split off from itself.   Whenever we pray to "Him", regardless of which patriarchal religion we are aligned with, we are inwardly  reflecting that split, right there in what we literally say is Holy/Wholly  and, by omission, what is not Holy/Wholly.  The disenfranchisement of the Divine Feminine and corresponding feminine values, taken to its greatest extreme, results in violent cultures that worship war,  and entitlements that enslave and degrade women.    Every  fascist and genocidal culture, from Nazi Germany to the Taliban,  has from its very inception taken away the rights of women,  every single one.    

But so few people see how important the arising of the Goddess energy is to the psyche of humanity, and as the Dalai Lama himself pointed out in his famous comment, to preserving the world itself.   So few people can see how  much patriarchal culture has co-opted Her life-giving energies.  Perhaps this is the reason I notice such synchronicities, in the midst of such great tragedy.  This is what Clarissa Pinkola Estes called "the River beneath the River of the world", the collective Dream of humanity, the mythic language.

References:

1) "the Legend of Isis"  
 http://isisclinicdubai.com/?page_id=78

In ancient Egyptian mythology, Isis was the symbol of healing and the protector of children.

Often represented breast-feeding her son Horus, the legend of Egypt crossed the Mediterranean sea to influence the Phoenicians in Byblos (Jbeil), Lebanon, Greek and Roman civilizations.

Isis of Paris

As early as the 15th century AD, many Parisian historians believed that the city of Paris owed its name to the Egyptian goddess Isis. There are various manuscripts from around 1402AD at the “Bibliothèque Nationale” in Paris which contains drawings of the goddess Isis garbed as a medieval noblewoman seen arriving by boat to Paris and where she is greeted by nobles and clergymen under the caption “The very ancient Isis, goddess and queen of the Egyptians”.

In the 14th Century, Jacques Le Grant wrote: “In the days of Charlemagne (8th century AD) there was a city named Iseos, so named because of the goddess Isis who was venerated there. Now it is called Melun. Paris owes its name to the same circumstances, Parisius is said to be similar to Iseos (quasi par Iseos) because it is located on the river Seine in the same manner as Melun”.

After his return from Egypt in 1799, Napoleon was to develop a curious interest in the Egyptian goddess Isis, and eventually set up a special commission headed by the scholar Louis Petit-Radel in order to verify whether or not the claims made by Gilles Corrozet and others that Isis was the true tutelary goddess of Paris was tenable. After sometimes, Radel reported to Napoleon that the evidence he had examined supported the claim that the “Boat of Isis” was the very same as the “Boat of Paris”. Impressed by Radel’s report, Napoleon issued written instructions on the 20 January 1811 to the effect that the Egyptian goddess and her star be included on the coat-of-arms of the French capital city.

2)  Dorit Bat Shalom:  http://celebrationoflife.cz/guides/dorit-bat-shalom/

3)  Moon Goddess stone and  Yoni receptacle at heart of Mecca:  

http://threadsofspiderwoman.blogspot.com/2012/12/half-sky-and-yonis.html

November and Thanks Giving

I have failed, in the course of pursuing my threads and poetics about November, to add that November is also the month of Thanksgiving. And that makes sense to me ~ how can we talk about the closing of the year, going "into the dark", and honoring ancestral strands ~ without, finally, arriving at GRATITUDE? Gratitude is the soil, the enzyme, the only appropriate medium to plant any seed in.

  Starfish
    
by Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, "Last night,
the channel was full of starfish."  And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

"Where Have All The Artists Gone?"

Recently I made a trip to a little town in New Mexico that I used to live in, Truth or Consequences, along the Rio Grande, once called New Mexico Hot Springs (how it got its name from the 1950's game show is another story).

When I started visiting there 15 years ago I was drawn to it because it was inexpensive to live there, had a friendly, eccentric community of older artists, mystics, alternative healers, poets, and dreamers, and a main street with little artist run galleries.  The pace was New Mexico slow, which meant, shops tended to be open if they felt like it, and all the food was "slow food", but good when it finally arrived.  There was a juice bar called Little Sprout that featured juice and art on the wall, and a big pink former apartment building with inexpensive studios for artists to rent (I ended up renting one for a season).  My dream was to be a New Mexico artist there, and for one season, until family illness forced my return to Tucson, I was.  I even had a show in a local gallery.

I love hot springs,  finding them sacred places that not only heal, but can open "the doors of perception" in various ways. The hot springs at T or C, once called New Mexico Hot Springs, and by other unknown names by earlier native inhabitants, were considered sacred ground - Apache, Mimbres, various other Pueblo peoples, and wandering Yaqui  could go there to heal without fear of  war.  Geronimo and Cochise went there.

 I also love rivers, and the Rio Grande, a turquoise ribbon in the red-brown expanse also brought me there.  A big draw in T or C  was the River Bend, a hostel ($20.00 a night with  more expensive private rooms with a shared kitchen and common area if desired).  They had a number of pools built over the Rio Grande (some of them were built by volunteers who worked there in exchange for free "rent").  It was a pleasure to go to the pools every day at dawn or sunset,  where you could always be inspired by the view and the interesting people you met while soaking  there.  For example, I remember meeting a German man who was biking across the country while writing a book, various kinds of healers and mystics, travelling writers, poets and artists, a group living in an old style bus who were building straw bale houses, an artist who had some unusual theories about the Pleides,,,,,,,,,,,,the pools, and T or C, were an interesting, friendly haven for travelers, eccentrics, artists, and  visionaries without a lot of financial clout, in other words.

I went back to T or C a few weeks ago, and was dismayed by how much it has changed.  Gone are all of the galleries on main street (except Rio Bravo, which has an endowment), including that of eccentric, big hearted Ruth.   (T or C, like most small American towns, long ago lost the prosperity of its old downtown to Walmart and the big box stores on the outskirts.  But it felt much more impoverished now than it did a decade ago.).  Main street now has a lot more empty storefronts, and the galleries have been replaced with junk stores....it's sad looking.  The big pink artists studios complex is now just another hotel.  The Black Cat Bookstore is still there, and still hosts poetry readings once a week in season, but the Little Sprout is gone.  There are a few of the "old time  health spas" from T or C's era as a place where people went to "take the cure", but many have been converted into much more gentrified hot spring spas that  are expensive and, to me,  resemble gated communities in the midst of some  pretty obvious New Mexico poverty.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment to me is the River Bend.  Because the pools looked out over the Rio Grande, affording a chance to watch the sunset or sunrise on the river, and because its original layout had a large common area, even a campground along the river, it was a real community gathering place.  It began as a hostel, and although it had more expensive rooms (with a common area to cook) it retained two mobile homes with bunkbeds.

When the original owner retired its character completely changed. The mobile homes were hauled off, the building with a common area became private suites, the campgrounds were plowed over and new private casitas built.   It is a gated community indeed now, with big locked artistic metal walls that make any visibility into that once open courtyard impossible.  Rates begin at $85.00 a night and go up from there, no shared anything, and, on a personal note, an unfriendly  staff that looked at me suspiciously when I inquired about renting a pool to soak in for an hour (I had come off the road, and looked rather disheveled no doubt).

They are prosperous,  obviously, and that prosperity is gated away, physically and spiritually, from the rest of the community. The waters remain the same, but the demographics have changed.  Yes, it is the American Dream - if you can make money, make it.  People like me, who  it might be said brought energy and interest to the place in the beginning,  now stand before a hostile staff and an economically barred gate.  No one seems to notice that something, other than generosity and a sense of community, have been lost along the way.  It's just the "way it is", isn't it?  And "old hippies" like me are relics of the past, along with communes and love-ins.



Spa Landia

A friend called the gentrification of  places we remember as small  enclaves for "artists, cultural creatives, mystics, and soulful eccentrics" Spa Land.  Another word for such interesting, colorful, and messy communities of people and places (before they become Spa Land)  might be "innovation", something that is never very profitable in the beginning, especially if you are in the arts.

It may sound unrealistic in our capitalist society, but many of us aging "cultural creatives"  feel cheated.  We can't afford to do our thing anymore.   We're the people who made these places interesting in the first place, raising the energy with our creativity, while real estate agents followed behind with calculators and teal green formulas for making money off  that attractive glow that was developing where  we landed.  We're displaced - not exactly homeless, but studio-less, gallery-less, arts community-less.

People not unlike us brought our studios and food Co-ops and poetry readings and Reiki classes and crystal sculptures  to Sedona (yes, I remember when crystal dealers sat on the side of the road there with card tables, and there was no such thing as a Teal Green MacDonalds, and people made medicine wheels at the entrance to Boynton Canyon, before there was an exclusive tennis resort and all those "keep out" signs)........to T or C, or Bisbee, or  for that matter the Haight Ashbury, Soho, the East Village and the Left Banke. 

I've seen it happen everywhere  since more fortunate times  - watching artists warehouses and galleries and small theatres close down  to become restaurants, expensive "live work" condos, or chain stores.   And sadly, no one seems to notice this particular kind of impoverishment, but impoverishment it is.  It's as if people can't tell the difference between a small theatre hosting local playrights .........and Starbucks.  As Ursula Leguin wrote in one of her novels, "no one can tell the difference any more between the true Azure and blue mud."  

I've also seen the ironic other end of the phenomenon:    empty storefronts  waiting for the high rent that property management people feel is "market price", places that previously were lively generators of energy (like the former Muse Community Arts Center) reduced to disposible    "investment property".  What about "investing" in cultural creativity?

Tucson is a good example - there is literature about Tucson's "art district", but compared to what I remember in the 80's, I don't know where it is.   Art galleries  generally don't make money, especially if they are showing experimental or innovative work, and especially now, when so many small businesses are leaving the planet as Walmart and Monsanto become the new global Monarchy.  Without subsidizing rent for an "arts district" in some way now, or at least having some kind of rent control,  it's just not going to happen.

Cafe Trieste, early 60's, North Beach, San Francisco.  

Artists and their Communities as Cultural Incubators

"Yet part of the reason for our collective ignorance about the critical importance of the arts is because we believe that the innovation in the lab — something we can monetize and quantify — is worlds apart from the experimentation in the studio."  

Sarah Lewis, SALON, "Scientists aren't the only innovators!  We really need Artists"

I've kind of reached an age (66, the age of being a cranky old lady, a dirty job but someone has to do it)  where I have no patience for the "why we need arts" argument, as if the human experience was somehow about making money and science, and  human creativity and expression was entertainment or an elective.  

Rainier Maria Rilke, Van Gogh, Herman Melville, Tesla, Edgar Allen Poe, Oscar Wilde, Paul Gaugain, Egon Schiele, Franze Schubert, William Blake, Vermeer, most of the Impressionists, Cezanne, Rothko, Pollock, and most of the Abstract Expressionists and Post Modernists........and so on..........

What does this august lineup of historically extraordinary people so celebrated in the arts and the development of Western civilization share in common?

Cheap rent.  Along with poverty in their time.  

Would there have been an Impressionist Movement if there had not been creative but cheap lodging in Paris, and cafes to hang out in and share their ideas? Would there have been Post-Modernism, Abstract Expressionism, a Rothko and a Jackson Pollock,  if there had not been big cheap spaces to rent in Soho's warehouse district?  Would there have been the Beat Poets, the Summer of Love, the Visionary Arts Movement, and all the accompanying social, spiritual, and even technological innovation that came out of that place and time , if there had not been cheap tenements to rent in Haight Ashbury?

Here's something interesting about displacement, by the way, from Bill Moyers, "When the Rich Took Over Our Neighborhood".

http://billmoyers.com/2015/11/05/when-the-rich-took-over-our-neighborhood/#at_pco=cfd-1.0

Everyday Goddesses.........

Our Lady of the Green Heart (2015)

Lately I've begun to paint again, tentatively and trying to find my hand again.  It used to be so easy!
Everything I make is an Icon, in one way or another.  And I also think, as I create portraits of people I know, that the Goddesses are great universal archetypes that belong to the Collective Sacred Mythos, etc., but............they also live right here, in the contemporary here and now, in real women.  

And thinking that, synchronistically, women have turned up who seem to embody those Goddesses - I snap pictures of them, and the Goddess looks out at me from them, smiling and at ease in the 21st Century just as much as 500 B.C.  A young Chinese doctor is staying at my house, and a Quan Yin mask is evolving from her compassionate face.  A beautiful German nurse is renting my guesthouse, and as she walks with such kind, lush, and un-selfconscious  beauty, I see Freya in scrubs, Goddess of love and healing and beauty.  

Green Heart (2009)

Anyway..........the first painting I have done, rusty as it is, wants to be called "Our Lady of the Green Heart".  But maybe she is also Gaia.

I wanted to make a better version of a self-portrait I did years ago (on right), but, although (I confess) I did use a younger picture of myself, the painting evolved in a whole new way, much more Iconic, and the expression, I like to think, both intelligent, joyful, and Ironic.   In other words, not without a great sense of humor about all of it.

Go figure.

This month has brought quite a few meltdowns, internally, for me,  A lot of endings, a lot of internal work, revelation, change.  Hecate seems to have been working with me indeed, and we're not out of the underground yet.  This is become my own "Winter of Listening", and I sink into the dark and quiet of November with deep gratitude.

But, and I think this is why I write this entry in this journal, I realize that it's important to listen to what the painting has been saying as well.  The beauty of art making is that the Conversation is not always visible at first, but it is always there.  And the painting, even as I enter a truly incubating time, is an Invocation for the future!  Even as I go underground in November, I see that I have painted a hope for the seeds of my spring.    And I say this without modesty, but gladly!

May we all be incubating Everyday Goddesses and Everyday Gods.

Hecate (1997)

The Feast of Samhain 2015

I love creating the Altar of the Beloved Dead and the Feast of Samhain........and after the Feast, I always take a day or so before I deconstruct the party.  After all, the Spirits do seem to enjoy the party.  So I lit it up tonight as well.

Samhain Blessings to all!

2 Poems for the Season

         Last Days

by Mary Oliver

Things are  changing; 
things are starting to    

     spin, snap, fly off into     
     the blue sleeve of the long  
        afternoon. 

    Oh and ooh
    come whistling
    outof the perished mouth 
    of the grass, as things

turn soft, boil back  
into substance and hue.

 As everything,   
   forgetting its own enchantment,
   whispers:      

    I too love oblivion why not 
    it is full    
      of second chances. 

Now,
hiss the bright curls of the leaves. 
Now!   
 booms the muscle
of the wind.

      A Blessing

May my mind come alive today
To the invisible geography
That invites us to new frontiers
To break the dead shell of yesterdays
To risk being disturbed and changed.
May I have the courage today
To live the life that I would love,
To postpone my dream no longer
But do at last what I came here for
And waste my heart on fear no more.
                                   

 John O'Donohue