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GREEN PARADISE LOST |
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10. A New View of the Body The sea is in an incredible boil this afternoon. The sun is still shining warmly. But the breeze which earlier sped countless sailboats across the open horizon has turned into a giant phantom hand which is slapping the water into pounding surfing waves. The air is punctuated with the excited screams of children body-surfing and with the powerful slaps of the surf on the beach. Whitecaps streak the water off the outer islands, and in our cove white water cascades down the beach and over the rocks on either side. I am reminded of the complexity of the waves at Point Lobos as I watch the waves work on the outer rocks. The foam spray shoots up into the air from one wave just as another dark wave crests behind it. Now the entire beach is white with one long wave which looms like a white cliff and then falls, subsiding into a froth of boiling, bubbling, eddying foam. Our son is cresting the waves on a surfboard while the sailboats at their moorings wobble crazily back and forth on the swells. For a while each wave seems higher than the last, and the spray now shoots over the outer rocks in tall fountains of airy cascading water. And from the breakers there rises stronger than usual the moist rich smell of the sea. For our usually protected cove, it is a very special time. It is a wonderfully physical and vigorous afternoon which, like a strong lover, is full of contradictions. It is a vignette of California ocean transported to the Northeast. Its winds and waves are fit for storms but still the sun shines. Psychic Celibacy Eugene Bianchi is a former Jesuit priest and theologian who now teaches at a Protestant theological school. He writes of emerging from the cocoon of religious celibacy and makes this startling comment about the life of the secular male in today's culture: For a long time I thought that celibacy was a prerogative unique to the Catholic clergy and nuns. Now I realize that celibacy is deeply rooted in our society at large. Does this sound preposterous in the age of Hugh Hefner, the pill and permissiveness? Maybe it will help if I distinguish between physical and psychic celibacy. The physical celibate renounces sexual contact with the opposite sex or with another of one's own sex. Rules for Catholic religious professionals still insist on this kind of celibacy, although the post-Vatican Council II environment threatens old restrictions. Psychic celibacy consists in keeping women mentally and affectionally at arm's length. It is in fact the core dogma of our patriarchal era. Women can be exalted as wife, virgin, mother, or deprecated (and enjoyed) as temptress, playmate, whore. In whatever way this male projection works woman is object, nonequal, manipulated, distanced. Such a world is profoundly celibate .... Deliberation and decision at the top take place in a male lodge where the cultural myths of masculinity reign supreme. [1] (Emphasis added.) • • • Woman's place is one of enforced psychic celibacy. She is not encountered as a contributing equal to men in occupational and civic life .... On the level of mind and decision in the public sphere there is little or no intercourse between men and women. In this realm our performance and profit society is as celibate as a Trappist monastery. Unwritten but very real "Cloister" signs hang outside the board rooms, menacing excommunication (subtle and crass discriminations) for trespassing.... Women as wives, daughters, sisters, lovers are the working nuns of America; they clear a way and a time for their high priests to attend to sacred priorities. The woman widowed by weekend TV football is a symptom of the psychic celibacy syndrome. That many women refuse to recognize their situation is not surprising. Having internalized the system, they find derivative self-worth by imitation of the master class and enjoyment of material pacifiers. [2] This ascetic aspect of the business ethos is not surprising. Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch and R. H. Tawney (among others) have written about the role of ascetic Protestantism in the rise of capitalism: the heirs of Calvin, redirecting the sense of "calling" and the devotion and concern of the monasteries, worked in the world and in business with the same devotion and concern for proving they were God's elect and their immortal souls were saved. And on such a rigorous footrace for salvation, the body and sexuality must not distract one from the prize of salvation or success, which is strained toward with every breath of dedication. So when either Church or Corporation says, "You must put my demands before your family's," it does not seem strange. And when male business society is as cloistered psychically from women as a monastery, it does not seem strange. Such is the life of the ascetic. And once you have joined the race, coveted the prize, and internalized the rules, it does not seem strange at all. From her research in historical theology the Roman Catholic theologian Rosemary Ruether supplies us with another piece of our jigsaw puzzle: In ascetic cultures, sex hardly disappears as a fact of life. But it must be debased into a depersonalized sphere where it can make no spiritual demands. The body is objectified as an alien, dangerous force that must be crushed into submission. What this means is that the realm of bodily experience becomes separated out as a "lower realm" where one might capitulate to this force, but in a way that cannot be integrated into the moral and responsible self. Concubinage for the celibate priest and prostitution for the puritanical Victorians were the "underworld" created to compensate for the work of sublimated idealism. We must see that a power relationship of supra- and subordination between men and women is essential to this schism of mind and body. Only by making one person in the relationship inferior, dependent and "purely carnal," can one assure a sexuality without the challenge of interpersonalism. By making woman "carnal," one does not have to relate to her as a person. Asceticism does not have the effect of preventing the ascetic from having any sexual experiences. Rather it assures that whatever experiences he has will always be treated as "sin." [3] To Enjoy the Body or To Master It? Wait. I can hear you saying that in our culture men and boys enjoy their bodies. They are the ones who are so physical, who spend their time in sports, who compete. Exactly! -- who compete. The absorption of the American male in bodily sports is not for enjoyment but for competition. There is enjoyment, but the absorption is in proving himself a man against other men. The body is for controlling, for subduing, for training to run faster or longer or better than others. The body is not for enjoying, for stroking, for responding. All this is for the genitals but not for the body as a whole. The body is for mastering and for mastering others. The genitals are an interesting exception. Every man knows that his penis is the one part of his body which he fondles with the old tenderness and feeling which he had as a baby. Now as he masterbates or "has sex" he can "mother" himself with good feelings for his penis. Only here where he is unquestionably male does he allow himself to cherish his body. Herb Goldberg, the author of The Hazards of Being Male, is clear how men relate to their bodies in general: "Most men operate as masochists and are constantly involved in proving something. They do little that feels good." Goldberg explains that men have body-destroying macho traits. They try to prove they can stand pain. They force themselves to be hyperactive and to resist or not admit fatigue. Men decline to seek a doctor's help. Men repress their emotions and are therefore vulnerable to alcohol, drugs and psychosomatic disorders. And their fear of their own bodily vulnerability keeps them from paying attention to their bodies. [4] Rosemary Ruether notes that Freud as the founder of modern psychotherapy was not very helpful in changing our view of the body and sexuality. "He believed that culture creates a split between the tender, affectionate feelings and the sensual feelings, making it impossible to be fully sensual with those whom one respects, while making it necessary to degrade socially and morally those with whom one permits oneself free sensual activity. Freud held out little hope that this tendency could be overcome. For him sexual intercourse and the genitals were intrinsically disgusting and bestial to refined tastes; and so the tendency to split sensual from humane feelings was an almost inevitable casualty of culture. He notes curiously that this tendency appears primarily in men." [5] Body/Self Dynamics in Maledom "My long schooling in maledom has successfully separated my head from my body," writes Eugene Bianchi. [6] What does this separation do to the self? When men degrade their bodies, they in a strange way also degrade their own selfhood. Dorothy Dinnerstein speaks of "the animal center of self-respect: the brute sense of bodily prerogative, of having a right to one's bodily feelings." She sees that "a conviction that physical urges which one cannot help having are unjustified, undignified, presumptuous, undercuts the deepest, oldest basis for a sense of worth; it contaminates the original wellspring of subjective autonomy." [7] When men degrade their bodies, they cut themselves off from this "original wellspring of subjective autonomy" and thus render their Real Self more fragile and insecure. This is what women sense and label as "the fragile male ego." Those body/self dynamics seem an extension of the male's early problem relating to his mother. All those good bodily feelings of being close, sucking the breast, being fed and warmed and loved all over -- all those good body-feelings must be rejected as he seeks to pull away in order to establish that male ego which he will devote great energies to preserving and defending throughout his life. Look at the male's situation through the categories of psychoanalyst Karen Horney once again (see chapter 5). Her analysis suggests that the male has left his infant Real Self -- where his autonomy was related to and rooted in strong bodily feelings -- back at his mother's breast in order to pursue an illusory Idealized Self laid upon him by our culture. When as a very small boy he started trying "not to cry" and "not to be a sissy," this involved his beginning to conform himself to an idealized model of what boys -- and men -- are supposed to be in our culture. It was not enough that he had been born with a penis (though one's masculinity might well be considered to have been given along with one's gender!). But when one's culture does not perceive it that way, then to be a man he must become a man -- attain the strong, heroic, virile, almost Platonic ideal of masculinity which is presented by male socialization and the Masculine Mystique. Because no actual human male can ever be this Idealized Male, each actual individual is never validated as having arrived, as having accomplished all that was required. A middle-aged husband in a Weber cartoon sees this when he tells his wife plaintively, "You expect too much from me. Basically, I'm just a dopey little kid from Mechanic Street, in Minneapolis, who happened to hit fifty." Because of this lack of match between actual life history and the Idealized male Self, the man must try to prove himself daily, denying any pains or fears which as a human being with nerve-endings he may be feeling. Ironically, the more he approximates that Idealized male Self, the more he comes to have an identity separated from his body. He has thus drained his identity and selfhood of the power which would arise from real contact with his emotions and bodily feelings. This self-alienation is then projected onto social relationships. Rosemary Ruether sees alienated and oppressive relations between people beginning "in self-alienation, experienced as an alienation between self and the body." The alienated oppressive relationship of man to woman is essentially a social projection of the self-alienation that translates certain initial biological advantages into a power relationship. This power relationship is totalized in social structures and modes of cultural formation that eliminate woman's autonomous personhood to define her solely in terms of male needs. In classical times this took the form of an identification of women with the lower half of self-alienated experience. Woman was stultifying matter opposing male spirituality. Woman was emotionality and sexuality opposing male spirituality. Woman was the power of the past, the immanent, the static, opposing male mobility and transcendence. These images become self-fulfilling prophecies by socially incarnating and culturally enforcing them by excluding women from education and participation in public life and by immobilizing them in the home. By forbidding enlarging cultural experiences woman internalizes these images in herself. One shapes her to be what she symbolizes in the eye of self-alienated male perception. Women become the victims of that very process by which the male seeks to triumph over the conflict represented by these dualities. Women were limited and repressed into that very sphere of immanence and materiality the male sought to escape, transcend and dominate. [8] It is clear to me that men will never make it to centeredness and wholeness until they can claim as a part of themselves their own bodies and feelings. Men must come to grips with the symbols and psychic processes by which they have consciously or subconsciously pushed Body, Flesh, Carnality and Mortality away from themselves and onto Woman. We will never get over these particular hang-ups, Dorothy Dinnerstein suggests, until our sexual arrangements are changed and both men and women mutually and equally nurture children. Bringing Body Reality to the Self There has to be some strange irony that when I am ready to write this about our bodies and our selves, I am suddenly seized with a stomach virus and must collapse into bed for two days with severe abdominal discomfort. Am I being reminded that, as I present this new view of the body, I must include not only our enjoyment of the body-life but also the pain and suffering of body-life, and the limitations and aging of our bodies? "Do not idealize the body," my aching abdomen reminds me. As I wrestle with the twin angels of inspiration and disease I realize that I don't want to idealize the body but to bring body-reality to the self. For too long we have deluded ourselves about our proper human identity. We have pretended our selfhood was only "clothed" in body, "dwelling" in body, unjustly "imprisoned" in body, while our immortal souls, our vast and beautiful selfhoods, could soar off to higher realms where baths were not necessary and where illness and pain, aging and dying, did not exist. What illusion! What pretension! What folly! All our loftiest dreams and most grand abstractions, as well as the most exquisite and intimate ecstasies of personhood -- all are products of nerve endings, atoms and energy. "It is my belief," writes psychologist Herb Goldberg, "that an individual, in rhythm with his body and its needs, will thrive, and that 'the terrain is everything,' meaning the ability to listen to, respect, and respond to the demands of the body.'' [9] Such listening to our own bodies is a part of claiming our wholeness -- accepting our flesh and our nerve endings instead of rejecting them, claiming our natural selves as a gift and not a curse. A Broadly Sensuous and Erotic Encounter What would it be like to appreciate our bodies, to live in the bodily dimensions of our personhoods as ones who cherish our creation as skin and muscle, hair and bone? Can we imagine ourselves into a space of understanding the goodness of our bodily creation as proclaimed by God in the Genesis account? Can we imagine ourselves "into" our bodies in a dimension that provides a whole new way of relating to the earth? Let us begin by looking again at Penelope Washbourn's classic statement: I begin with my body.... my body is me. I can think of my body as a porous membrane, not separated from the world, as an organic body pulsing ... opening and closing ... taking in and giving out. It is like a flower as it turns to the sun, responds to light, growing, absorbing, expelling.... I am breathing gently and with such ease ... until something happens to tense me, and my breath becomes shallow and labored. My skin is open, each of my cells in hair and skin is intimately connected to air, moisture, sun, dirt, hot and cold. [10] Here is body as organism, not machine. Here is body open, not closed. Here is body intimately connected to all that surrounds it. The metaphor is openness and responsiveness rather than control or mastery. I find in this passage by Penelope Washbourn a sensuousness of body awareness which suggests a way of relating ourselves beyond ourselves to our surroundings, our environment, our earth. The openness of nerve endings in skin and pores, in nose and ears and eyes, creates a dialogue with sun and wind, earth and water, in a highly interactive two-way process of non-verbal communication. The sun feels to me, the wind feels to me, the earth feels to me, the water feels to me. And as it feels, I respond, I enjoy, I take in and give out. I move and adapt to what I see and hear and feel and smell and sense. It is like a lover's dialogue; it needs no words in order to stroke and affirm, entice and arouse, assure and reassure. As I write these words the sun and wind are caressing my entire body, while the plaintive cries of the gulls and the steady sound of waves reassure my ears of the continuities of the sea. The sand is rough and warm to my touch, and like ballet dancers the sea grasses wave and bend for my pleasure. The butterfly over the beach roses, the child digging on the beach, my son dipping and swaying as the sailboat planes in the magnificent breeze: -- I am in non-verbal communication through my senses, through all of them. "With all people and all things, we shall be as relatives." Kinship with brother earth and sister moon -- St. Francis glimpsed it, but we have ignored that glimpse. Perhaps we could not love ourselves as bodies enough in that age to imagine this new organ of perception -- the body. Perhaps it was historically necessary to wait for the contemporary hedonism of sexual liberation to shatter the old body-denying mind-sets before we could conceive the possibility of communicating with the earth through the sensuousness of our bodies. Is it possible that this sensuality is the basic metaphor for the environmental ethic our culture has been missing? Is it possible that our fully sensuous body is the erotic connection to our world which we have been lacking? We know our living is part of the earth's living systems -- that we are rooted in the earth and sensually in dialogue with it. Is it possible that intuitive wholistic awareness has as nerve endings our human skin? I like the phrase I have heard attributed to Norman O. Brown, "the erotic sense of reality." Just suppose reality is at its heart truly erotic! Why else the symphonies of sight and sound and color and feeling which spell out creation well beyond what is necessary or useful? I am using the word "erotic" not in the genital-arousing sense but in the over-all and deeply sensual sense of generalized and heightened responsiveness and sensitivity. The poem "For Warmth," by Elise Maclay, suggests the body-to-body eroticism in the varied tactile appreciations of an elderly person's earthy experiences of temperature. To my mind, it is deeply sensuous and erotic.
Thanks, God, for warmth. If reality is erotic, perhaps we can only glimpse its heart with our own erotic nature. Perhaps our body is the only communicator we have for this sort of non-verbal love play with the body of the earth. Perhaps cherishing the earth means participating in a broadly sensuous encounter between the body of the earth and our own bodies. And perhaps as process theology suggests, the cosmos is the body of God. Snow The tall lithe figure of the young skier came whipping over the crest. His legs were together, his skis parallel, his knees constantly flexing as he jumped from mogul to mogul, rhythmically turning again and again as he sped down the slope. It was a magnificent skiing day -- several inches of fresh white powder, bright sunlight and blue skies after the snow the previous night. But the most startling thing was the sound. The skier was singing, exulting and exuberant, as he skied. The coordination of his body, its instant responses to the changes in the terrain beneath his skis, made him feel in dialogue with the earth as it changed its shape beneath him. And the brightness of the day, the freshness of the snow, the perfectness of the ski conditions, the beauty of the mountains -- all evoked exuberant singing as he went. It was a time of dialogue and he knew it. It was a time of rejoicing and he knew it. It was an unforgettable moment. He was my son and he told me when he returned: "It was just an excellent day for skiing, Mom, and I sang all the way down." Wind and Rain One of my husband's great joys is to go out in our small sailboat when the wind is blowing whitecaps onto the crests of waves. The boat is slender and fast, its sails converting the wind of successive gusts into swift motion. The boat and sails bend under the wind, the boat tilts even as he secures his toes under a hiking strap and leans far, far out to windward until his hair and back are skimming inches above the waves and his stomach muscles are aching. They are in the wind's embrace, the boat and he, and they are active lovers. His every pore is wet, his eyeglasses starred with salt and spray. But there is no need to see. He can feel the surge of the hull against the waves, feel the lift of the hull as it heels up beneath him even as he feels an increased intensity of wind tingling his flesh all over. When the wind heightens and the boat heels like this, he can take the boat and the sails slightly closer to his lover wind and crest the waves just slightly differently. Pressures of the wind upon the hull and tiller and waves and sails ease at his changed response, and they fly on. But then the gust's intensity abates, and lover-like he moves to return to the full embrace. He and the boat "bear off" enough to keep the sails solid, the movement of the boat in the waves and wind firm, and the dialogue of responsiveness alive. [12] "In some strange sense," we read in The Tao of Physics, "the universe is a participatory universe." [13] What an incredible idea! The universe relates back to us even as we respond to it. But it all happens without words, in "body-language" if you will. And if you don't speak body-language, if you understand only the code of spoken language and the abstractions of print and the written word, how will you ever play this love-game with the world? • • • Your name is called in the middle of the night. You wake, unexpectedly, answering automatically to that strange call whispered in childhood, sung in adolescence, echoed in adulthood. You rise to the window with the same excitement, so strangely understood yet unspoken, that you felt on these early morning childhood journeys bound for places still nameless, still memoryless. Rain, soft and sibilant, calls you in the middle of the night. It calls you, passenger of the night, to witness the world awash with rain. You watch a world made new, a work declaring itself sovereign. You pause there at the window which frames the garden in darkness. Softened by the rain, the garden breathes as gently, as rhythmically as those who still are fast asleep. Like a nocturnal fruit cracked open and cleansed by the rain, the earth emits an extravagance of smells, living in memory, hidden by day and scorned by season. In the rain, rock and root yield a ransom of smells from the bankrupt garden: fresh cucumber, washed woodbine, perfumed muskrose, tart orange. In the darkness, smells thicken into colors. A profusion of orange blossoms become a moving, muted orange which swells in the air; the wild mint, so indiscriminate in its homesteading, spins and stings with greenness; and the pears, heavy with their own scent, burn golden in the darkness of night. All week you stood at this same window and conjured up water images in a rainless sky. The sun had flickered in that sky like a young salmon whose silver scales shine and darken, quicken and quiver with the undulation of its movements. Then darkness had set in. The sky you thought looked like the gray bottom of a boat moored close above the earth. Water images in a rainless sky. What use were they when the sky felt scalded, the air parched, the earth cracked? That night when you went to bed, your hands strangely smelt of salt. And now, hours later, rain has united sky and earth, stitching them together with fine filaments of sound. In the darkness, rain has become both sound and silence. Moment and memory, waking and sleeping self are united by this liquid language. Syllables of rain publish themselves in the garden. You lift your face skywards. The air faintly smells of melon. You smile; your face as grateful as a prayer. You give silent thanks for the rain, this epiphany, this euphony. [14] Life as Love-Game and Erotic Embrace The Hebrews had a sense of this knowing without words, this love-game of life in which world and self and loved companion become present, revealed, known, and fondly savored. In Hebrew, a single word, yada, meant both "to make sexual love" and "to know." This Old Testament usage would puzzle recent generations more used to casual sex. Rosemary Ruether has said of recent trends, "One makes love with genitals, not selves." [15] Recently I have come to suspect that the splitting of sex and love for the sake of ennobling "love" and "respect for women" is really a cultural lie that covers up what it is we really fear most. I suspect that what males (who have been the cultural shapers of these attitudes) fear most is not sexual experience but rather ego-vulnerability through communication of the inner self.... Masculinist society segregates itself from women so profoundly that even in the sexual act it is difficult to express real interpersonalism. The male operates within a self-enclosed world that reduces the woman sexually to a vehicle for himself, rather than being a fellow person. Sex depersonalized allows the male to avoid the challenge of using his total self, uniting energies with personal identities, to present and communicate one to another. • • • Self-surrender is treated by the male as a threat to control of "his world," rather than a potential release into a larger world than the monistic self. This seems to me to be the dynamics that cause men to hold back from real self- disclosure in sexual experience. The self is split from the body, and the body then can be manipulated as an external instrument of domination in a way that does not threaten to dissolve the defenses of the ego.... To open oneself to deep vulnerability and communication is profoundly terrifying, especially when it is unified with sexual experience as a total body-potential that transforms communion into ecstasy. [16] It is this deep self-disclosure and communication which the Old Testament calls "sexual knowing." This may indeed be the sort of knowing by which the body of a person resonates with the body of the earth, by which communion becomes ecstasy, and by which both knower and known reveal themselves and the depths of their connectedness. Note that in this knowing and intercourse, it is not intercourse as patriarchal male culture has structured it, in which there is an active one and a passive one, a penetrator and a penetrated. Nor is such intercourse focused, as males have tended to, solely upon the genitals. Rather, this intercourse is diffused and evokes the sensuality of both bodies, and is incredibly mutual, dynamically interactive, and responsive. Perhaps in order to know the reality of our earthy universe we must know sexuality in this way -- where there is no separation between the active one and the passive one, the penetrator and the penetrated, but where lovers in each others' embrace are resonant with one another in a sensuous and deeply erotic union which is mutually dynamic and responsive. And finally perhaps in the liberating "knowing" of the earth, we may come to know ourselves, male and female, in a finally liberated way. Perhaps when we honor our bodies and the body of the earth, we shall honor women and all life in a new way.
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