Aaack!  We’ll try this again.  I had this almost finished
when my browser crashed.  Anything worth doing is worth doing
over, right?  We shall see how “worth it” this turns out to be.

My son Doug is creating a Tarot deck with symbols from Ragnarok Online,
an RPG he plays.  I have, naturally enough, been acting as his
Tarot consultant.  In addition to my knowledge and experience, he
has at hand my collection of Tarot decks.  This week as he asked
me about various cards, and as I looked at some of the old cards he
pulled out for reference and at the new ones as he made them, those
images melded with the other thoughts on my mind, about my primary
relationship, about beliefs, heresy, orthodoxy, etc.  This is the
result:

In
the Tarot, Major Arcanum number 6 (The Lovers), symbolizes male/female
interaction.  Some think it is about love and marriage. 
Those things do fall within the scope of this card, but there is more
to it than that.  Along with the other 21 Major Arcana, it
represents a step, stage, or phase on the Initiate’s Path to
Enlightenment.  It is said that the prototypes of these images
were brought to Egypt from Atlantis, and that before they were made
into cards for portability they existed as murals on the walls of a
temple.  Existing cards may bear little or no resemblance to those
prototypes.  Every culture that has taken the Tarot into itself
has made its own imprint on the symbolism.  Each artist who draws
a new set of images puts some of him or herself into them.

In Doug’s Tarot deck, the young lovers affectionately hold
hands and gaze into each other’s eyes.  Such symbolism is not
uncommon in so-called “New Age” decks.  In my far from humble
opinion, though, it is not truly an Aquarian Age arrangement.  It
relates more to the mid- to late-Piscean Age philosophies found in
Courtly Love, Romance, fairy tales and soap opera.  I don’t think
it represented the true state of affairs for most couples in the Middle
Ages any more than it would for most today.  It symbolizes
someone’s fantasy, an ideal relationship where both partners are
focused on and absorbed in each other.  Never mind that not much
work would get done and the offspring of such a union would be
neglected while the parents obsessed on each other… as I said, it’s a
fantasy.

I see a more workable arrangement, and to me a more attractive one, in Maya Britan’s I Am One
Tarot.  It is also, I think, much more truly Aquarian Age in
philosophy than any other I’ve seen.  And well it might be, its symbolism having
been channelled from Spirit  in a series of Ouija Board sessions
during the big outer planet alignment around the end of the 1960s that
many astrologers feel marked the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

 The card is called Unity here, not Lovers.  The pair are not
absorbed in each other, but both face upward, arranged in a circular
pattern to indicate cyclic movement and flow.  The woman on top
with a wand in her hand and the man below holding flowers, symbolize a
reversal of traditional gender roles, but the circle implies that no
one is “on top” all the time.  Roles shift.

Another significant difference in symbolism between the past age and
the new age relates to clothing.  We’re becoming more open,
sharing more,  keeping less hidden, so nudity takes over from the
robed and garbed figures of the past.

The Visconti-Sforza Tarot, a Renaissance deck bearing the distinction
of being not the oldest extant deck but the most complete of the old
decks still in existence, shows a couple with their right hands
clasped, standing before a winged angel-figure.  Those elements
are fairly standard among Medieval Church-inspired Tarot decks. 
The Medieval Roman Church “inspired” a number of Tarot decks by
persecuting and executing a number of people who carried and used the
older pagan symbol decks.  The Tarot became bastardized and
bowdlerized in self-defense.  In that crop of decks, the man gazes
adoringly upward at God or His angel, while the woman gazes lovingly at
the Man.

This deck was made to celebrate and commemorate the joining of two
Italian families.  The Sforzas were merchant princes.  The
Visconti family produced more than one Pope.  I have read that the
picture on this card is a wedding portrait of the couple whose marriage
joined the two families.  The symbolic meaning of the blindfold on
the angel escapes me.

What I know of Mediaeval and Renaissance European culture suggests that
this symbolism relates to an ideal marriage, not to the actual reality
of the time.  In reality, I think we’d see a man in armor focused
on war and a woman looking in a mirror while being tugged this way and
that by the children surrounding her.

If we were to symbolize an actual modern marriage, rather than an
ideal one or an archetypal one, I think the man would be focused on
something symbolizing his work (perhaps a pile of money) and the woman would be
focused on two and a half children… reflected in her mirror.

My Google image search turned up an anime-inspired deck
with the man looking at a watch while the woman anxiously or sadly
watches him.  I think that pretty well sums up some of the
relationships I’ve been reading about here on Xanga.

I did mention, didn’t I, that artists reveal things about themselves
and their cultures when they draw Tarot decks?  In Brian Raiter’s Cynical-Literalist Tarot,
the Magician is doing a sleight-of-hand card trick, and the Hermit is a
scruffy-looking nude dude flipping us his middle finger.  Having
stopped shaving my legs in the 1960s, around the same time I stopped
wearing bras, I know that hairy legs are not found only on men. 
Nevertheless, this pair of lovers looks to me like a couple of guys
coupling.

Mr. Raiter says he didn’t study any traditional Tarot symbolism, but
only created his cards from what the titles of the Major Arcana
suggested to him.  His inspiration was a box of business cards
with an obsolete address on them.  His hope, he says, was that by
expressing his cynicism in a time of depression, it might help relieve
him of the cynicism and the depression.  He had at least partial
success in that.

The prize for most interesting, intriguing, disturbing “Lovers” image goes to John Bergin.

 I was so intrigued by the hooded, manacled, and wired-up couple
and the shot-in-the-head angel with the serpent-and-apple around its
neck, that I Googled the artist.  I think I found two John Bergins.  The one calling himself John Bergin III
works with a needle, doing some distinctive skin art.  He also
does flash-book work  for other tattoo artists to copy, as well as
“fine art” paintings.

This other John Bergin writes and illustrates “comics”:  graphic stories, and is also a musician who goes by the name C17H19NO3,
the chemical formula for morphine.  Interesting man, with what
appears to be a most interesting love/sex life, to gauge by his
images… that’s “interesting” in the sense of the old Chines curse,
“May you live in interesting times.”

More than one thing on my plate today…

I had a blog in mind, a first draft for something that will be edited later for inclusion in the FAQ collection at KaiOaty
but as often happens, when I got here I found comments I want to
respond to.  I’ll do that first, post it and then work on the
Tarot blog.

RaLuvsMeat got a healthy laugh out of me with this one:

What makes it really funny is that Bill W., one of the founders of AA,
called the program a “spiritual kindergarten.”  Many, probably
most, of the drunks and dope fiends at those meetings Greyfox and I
attend enter the programs without a spiritual foundation and with an
emotional IQ that would make most healthy five-year-olds seem
mature.  Intellectually, many of us are above average, but
spiritual neglect and emotional damage often lead to drug use, just as
the lifestyle of a hard-core addict leads to more emotional
damage.  At meetings, I see and hear many signs of emotional
immaturity… but I pick up on that here on Xanga, too, as well as just
“out there” in the world.  It’s everywhere.

Both programs seem to make a big deal out of the tokens given out to
mark milestones:  24 hours, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, six months,
nine months, a year, 18 months (in NA, but not AA), and multiples of
years.  Probably not coincidentally, the “critical periods” of
sobriety, when people are most likely to relapse, come at 30 days, 60
days, etc.  In AA, they give medallions, coins, called “chips”,
which are carried concealed in keeping with the tradition of anonymity
(to a lot of AAs, anonymity is synonymous with secrecy).  I’ve
never seen an AA baseball cap, jacket or t-shirt, but NA has them, and
the NA tokens are plastic tags with a key ring attached.  Some
members choose to keep theirs concealed, while others show them off
proudly.  I let mine hang out.   I’ve mentioned before that
if I could afford an NA jacket, I’d wear one.  I keep hoping to
find one in a thrift store.

zera wrote:

Well, zero, what made you think I wrote it for you, or that you had to
read it?  To answer your question, neither A option nor B option
fits.  I’ll take option C:  I often do things I’d prefer not
to do because they need to be done, but never out of guilt.  As
for fear, I’ve transcended my fears of death, of public speaking, of
fire, snakes, spiders and men.  I got over caring whether anyone
liked me or not, over thirty years ago, when I went through
therapy.  I like myself, so what does it matter what anyone else
thinks of me?

 I’ve seen your name in my comments before, and so I must conclude
that you’ve either forgotten who I am or you habitually read and think
superficially and so have never found out who I am.  “More than
you want to know,” could by my tagline here.  “In your face,”
“take it or leave it,” “like it or lump it,” are also
possibilities. 

Perhaps you were reading things into my blog that I didn’t put there,
projecting some of your own attitudes onto me.  That’s the only
way I can understand that bit about letting “other people’s ‘things’
get you down.”  Did I really seem “down” about that?  I was
UP, ready to confront my partner on his NPD, which is what I have
contracted to do in this therapeutic relationship.  I don’t do
that because I like doing it, either, but I am very glad that I have
the skill and strength to do it, because it needs to be done and there
is no one else in a position to do it.  In that way, it is similar
to some of my other volunteer work, such as driving the rehab van or
holding the two NA service positions I hold.  When someone comes
along to take that work off my hands, I’ll step aside.  Meanwhile,
I’m on the job.

The only thing that gets me down at all any more is this damned
disease, the myalgic encephalomyelopathy / chronic fatigue
immunodysfunction syndrome that makes simple little tasks turn into big
chores or impossible feats.

If you had bothered to read and understand that blog, you’d know that I
could not step around the mess.  I had made the mess because, in a
confined space, I brushed against his pile of clothes and knocked it
down.  To me, it is ludicrous even to consider walking ON a mess I
made, even if I’d made it by springing a trap set by someone
else.   That would be immature, destructive,
counterproductive to my goal of keeping order in this space I inhabit.

I find it laughable that you advise me to “Do what gives you joy and peace and the ‘heck’ with the rest.”  To hell with that shit!  That
is the way of the irresponsible coward, not my way.  I enjoy
fixing things that aren’t right, and my self-esteem would suffer if I
just turned my back on a mess or made it worse by walking on it. 
Also, I find joy in many things that are not peaceful at all–”joy and
peace” are not necessarily a pair for me.  Inner peace often comes
at the price of outward, interpersonal conflict.  Did you ever
notice this in my left module?

Can you even begin to understand someone who would seek a challenge and
take pleasure in conflict?  That’s me.  I don’t do conflict
for its own sake–don’t get me wrong.  I confront bullshit, chaos
and pathology.  I don’t bang my head against brick walls,
either.  I stand up to bullshit and shout it down.  The joy
comes when the bullshit stops, when I see the light of comprehension
and know I have helped someone transcend delusion or denial.  I
would get no joy from “walking over or around” my husband’s personality
disorder, and he would get no healing if I did it that way.

I take pleasure and satisfaction from facts such as these:  NPD
has a very poor prognosis because there is no drug treatment for it,
the patients often walk away from talk therapy because their disorder
hurts others more than it hurts them, and therapists often quit because
the patients are such assholes.  My husband is not walking out on
me because he’s just crazy, not stupid.  I’m not quitting because
I’m winning.  We are seeing results.  Sure, if I were an
insecure little nonentity who needed a man to validate and coddle me,
I’d be miserable in this relationship.  But I’m not.  I’m an
old soul with a strong karmic bond to a man who challenges and inspires
me to ever greater achievements.  That works for me.

Oh, and by the way, life may seem short when viewed from your
perspective.  I’m coming up on sixty years old in a few months
(that’s this lifetime–I recall many other lives from up to thousands
of years ago), and from here life looks looong.  In my experience,
the most common usage of that phrase, “life is too short to…” is as
an excuse not to do something.  I don’t need excuses.

Beware!

From Go-Quiz.com

From Go-Quiz.com 

NPD
is included in the Cluster B personality disorders. Antisocial,
borderline, and histrionic personality disorders are also part of this
cluster. All of the cluster B personality disorders have an excessive
sense of how important they are. Their demands upon others is excessive
in that they expect admiration and thrive on praise. None of these
personality disorders have the capacity to see other’s perspectives.

Out of the list of 31 Behaviors of the Narcissist, these are some that I’ve been banging into today:

Overly
dramatic presentation of emotion: could well be known as the “drama”
queen or king (negative emotions), exaggerates the importance of his
experiences

Inappropriate
attempts to dominate and control others: a narcissist is demanding,
expects to be treated “special,” and thinks everyone should immediately
stop what they are doing to do what he wants them to do.

Selfishness: he thinks of himself first, gets what he wants, and the heck with anyone else

Lack of practicality: a narcissist does not know what the word practical means

Shallow: in depth conversations are impossible with a narcissist. The narcissist’s conversations center around himself.

Lack of interest in and empathy with others: don’t expect him to feel sorry for you no matter what he does to you

Lazy: expects others to do for him what he could do for himself

Problems with aging or disabilities: a narcissist has difficulty with being confined

Today,
the weather (wind and rain) conspired with the wife of one potential
customer and the father of another (they “queered the deal”) to ruin
business.  Cell phone transmission and/or reception were worse
than usual, keeping the conversation mercifully brief.

The following is from an email I received from Sam Vaknin:

NPD Differential Diagnosis

NPD
Relationships with narcissists peter out slowly and tortuously.
Narcissists do not provide closure. They stalk. They cajole, beg,
promise, persuade, and, ultimately, succeed in doing the impossible yet
again: sweep you off your feet, though you know better than to succumb
to their spurious and superficial charms. So, you go back to your
“relationship” and hope for a better ending. You walk on eggshells. You
become the epitome of submissiveness, a perfect source of narcissistic
supply, the ideal mate or spouse or partner or colleague. You keep your
fingers crossed. But how does the narcissist react to the resurrection
of the bond? It depends on whether you have re-entered the liaison from
a position or strength – or of vulnerability and weakness. The
narcissist casts all interactions with other people in terms of
conflicts or competitions to be won. He does not regard you as a
partner – but as an adversary to be subjugated and defeated. Thus, as
far as he is concerned, your return to the fold is a triumph, proof of
his superiority and irresistibility. If he perceives you as autonomous,
dangerously independent, and capable of bailing out and abandoning him
- the narcissist acts the part of the sensitive, loving, compassionate,
and empathic counterpart.

Narcissists respect strength, they are awed by it. As long as you
maintain a “no nonsense” attitude, placing the narcissist on probation,
he is likely to behave himself. If, on the other hand, you have resumed
contact because you have capitulated to his threats or because you are
manifestly dependent on him financially or emotionally – the narcissist
will pounce on your frailty and exploit your fragility to the maximum.
Following a perfunctory honeymoon, he will immediately seek to control
and abuse you. In both cases, the narcissist’s thespian reserves are
exhausted and his true nature and feelings emerge. The facade crumbles
and beneath it lurks the same old heartless falsity that is the
narcissist. His gleeful smugness at having bent you to his wishes and
rules, his all-consuming sense of entitlement, his sexual depravity,
his aggression, pathological envy, and rage – all erupt uncontrollably.

The prognosis for the renewed affair is far worse if it follows a
lengthy separation in which you have made a life for yourself with your
own interests, pursuits, set of friends, needs, wishes, plans, and
obligations, independent of your narcissistic ex and unrelated to him.
The narcissist cannot countenance your separateness. To him, you are a
mere instrument of gratification or an extension of his bloated False
Self. He resents your pecuniary wherewithal, is insanely jealous of
your friends, refuses to accept your preferences or compromise his own,
in envious and dismissive of your accomplishments. Ultimately, the very
fact that you have survived without his constant presence seems to deny
him his much-needed narcissistic supply. He rides the inevitable cycle
of idealization and devaluation. He berates you, humiliates you
publicly, threatens you, destabilizes you by behaving unpredictably,
fosters ambient abuse, and uses others to intimidate and humble you
(“abuse by proxy”). You are then faced with a tough choice: To leave
again and give up all the emotional and financial investments that went
into your attempt to resurrect the relationship – or to go on trying,
subject to daily abuse and worse? It is a well-known landscape. You
have been here before. But this familiarity doesn’t make it less
nightmarish.

BP-I mania
The manic phase of Bipolar I Disorder is often misdiagnosed as
Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Bipolar patients in the manic
phase exhibit many of the signs and symptoms of pathological narcissism
- hyperactivity, self-centeredness, lack of empathy, and control
freakery. During this recurring chapter of the disease, the patient is
euphoric, has grandiose fantasies, spins unrealistic schemes, and has
frequent rage attacks (is irritable) if her or his wishes and plans are
(inevitably) frustrated. The manic phases of the bipolar disorder,
however, are limited in time – NPD is not. Furthermore, the mania is
followed by – usually protracted – depressive episodes. The narcissist
is also frequently dysphoric. But whereas the bipolar sinks into deep
self-deprecation, self-devaluation, unbounded pessimism, all-pervasive
guilt and anhedonia – the narcissist, even when depressed, never
forgoes his narcissism: his grandiosity, sense of entitlement,
haughtiness, and lack of empathy.

Narcissistic dysphorias are much shorter and reactive – they constitute
a response to the Grandiosity Gap. In plain words, the narcissist is
dejected when confronted with the abyss between his inflated self-image
and grandiose fantasies – and the drab reality of his life: his
failures, lack of accomplishments, disintegrating interpersonal
relationships, and low status. Yet, one dose of Narcissistic Supply is
enough to elevate the narcissists from the depth of misery to the
heights of manic euphoria. Not so with the bipolar. The source of her
or his mood swings is assumed to be brain biochemistry – not the
availability of Narcissistic Supply.

Whereas the narcissist is in full control of his faculties, even when
maximally agitated, the bipolar often feels that s/he has lost control
of his/her brain (“flight of ideas”), his/her speech, his/her attention
span (distractibility), and his/her motor functions. The bipolar is
prone to reckless behaviors and substance abuse only during the manic
phase. The narcissist does drugs, drinks, gambles, shops on credit,
indulges in unsafe sex or in other compulsive behaviors both when
elated and when deflated. As a rule, the bipolar’s manic phase
interferes with his/her social and occupational functioning. Many
narcissists, in contrast, reach the highest rungs of their community,
church, firm, or voluntary organization. Most of the time, they
function flawlessly – though the inevitable blowups and the grating
extortion of Narcissistic Supply usually put an end to the narcissist’s
career and social liaisons.

The manic phase of bipolar sometimes requires hospitalization and -
more frequently than admitted – involves psychotic features.
Narcissists are never hospitalized as the risk for self-harm is minute.
Moreover, psychotic microepisodes in narcissism are decompensatory in
nature and appear only under unendurable stress (e.g., in intensive
therapy). The bipolar’s mania provokes discomfort in both strangers and
in the patient’s nearest and dearest. His/her constant cheer and
compulsive insistence on interpersonal, sexual, and occupational, or
professional interactions engenders unease and repulsion. Her/his
lability of mood – rapid shifts between uncontrollable rage and
unnatural good spirits – is downright intimidating. The narcissist’s
gregariousness, by comparison, is calculated, “cold”, controlled, and
goal-orientated (the extraction of Narcissistic Supply). His cycles of
mood and affect are far less pronounced and less rapid. The bipolar’s
swollen self-esteem, overstated self-confidence, obvious grandiosity,
and delusional fantasies are akin to the narcissist’s and are the
source of the diagnostic confusion.

Both types of patients purport to give advice, carry out an assignment,
accomplish a mission, or embark on an enterprise for which they are
uniquely unqualified and lack the talents, skills, knowledge, or
experience required. But the bipolar’s bombast is far more delusional
than the narcissist’s. Ideas of reference and magical thinking are
common and, in this sense, the bipolar is closer to the schizotypal
than to the narcissistic. There are other differentiating symptoms:
Sleep disorders – notably acute insomnia – are common in the manic
phase of bipolar and uncommon in narcissism. So is “manic speech” -
pressured, uninterruptible, loud, rapid, dramatic (includes singing and
humorous asides), sometimes incomprehensible, incoherent, chaotic, and
lasts for hours. It reflects the bipolar’s inner turmoil and his/her
inability to control his/her racing and kaleidoscopic thoughts.

As opposed to narcissists, bipolar in the manic phase are often
distracted by the slightest stimuli, are unable to focus on relevant
data, or to maintain the thread of conversation. They are “all over the
place” – simulta neously initiating numerous business ventures, joining
a myriad organization, writing umpteen letters, contacting hundreds of
friends and perfect strangers, acting in a domineering, demanding, and
intrusive manner, totally disregarding the needs and emotions of the
unfortunate recipients of their unwanted attentions. They rarely follow
up on their projects. The transformation is so marked that the bipolar
is often described by his/her closest as “not himself/herself”. Indeed,
some bipolars relocate, change name and appearance, and lose contact
with their “former life”. Antisocial or even criminal behavior is not
uncommon and aggression is marked, directed at both others (assault)
and oneself (suicide).

Some biploars describe an acuteness of the senses, akin to experiences
recounted by drug users: smells, sounds, and sights are accentuated and
attain an unearthly quality. As opposed to narcissists, bipolars regret
their misdeeds following the manic phase and try to atone for their
actions. They realize and accept that “something is wrong with them”
and seek help. During the depressive phase they are ego-dystonic and
their defenses are autoplastic (they blame themselves for their
defeats, failures, and mishaps). Finally, pathological narcissism is
already discernible in early adolescence. The full-fledged bipolar
disorder – including a manic phase – rarely occurs before the age of
20. The narcissist is consistent in his pathology – not so the bipolar.
The onset of the manic episode is fast and furious and results in a
conspicuous metamorphosis of the patient. More about this topic here:
Stormberg, D., Roningstam, E., Gunderson, J., & Tohen, M.
(1998) Pathological Narcissism in Bipolar Disorder Patients. Journal of
Personality Disorders, 12, 179-185 Roningstam, E. (1996), Pathological
Narcissism and Narcissistic Personality Disorder in Axis I Disorders.
Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 3, 326-340

Asperger’s
(The use of gender pronouns in this article reflects the clinical
facts: most narcissists and most Asperger’s patients are male.)
Asperger’s Disorder is often misdiagnosed as Narcissistic Personality
Disorder (NPD), though evident as early as age 3 (while pathological
narcissism cannot be safely diagnosed prior to early adolescence). In
both cases, the patient is self-centered and engrossed in a narrow
range of interests and activities. Social and occupational interactions
are severely hampered and conversational skills (the give and take of
verbal intercourse) are primitive. The Asperger’s patient body language
- eye to eye gaze, body posture, facial expressions – is constricted
and artificial, akin to the narcissist’s. Nonverbal cues are virtually
absent and their interpretation in others lacking. Yet, the gulf
between Asperger’s and pathological narcissism is vast. The narcissist
switches between social agility and social impairment voluntarily. His
social dysfunctioning is the outcome of conscious haughtiness and the
reluctance to invest scarce mental energy in cultivating relationships
with inferior and unworthy others. When confronted with potential
Sources of Narcissistic Supply, however, the narcissist easily regains
his social skills, his charm, and his gregariousness.

Many narcissists reach the highest rungs of their community, church,
firm, or voluntary organization. Most of the time, they function
flawlessly – though the inevitable blowups and the grating extortion of
Narcissistic Supply usually put an end to the narcissist’s career and
social liaisons. The Asperger’s patient often wants to be accepted
socially, to have friends, to marry, to be sexually active, and to sire
offspring. He just doesn’t have a clue how to go about it. His affect
is limited. His initiative – for instance, to share his experiences
with nearest and dearest or to engage in foreplay – is thwarted. His
ability to divulge his emotions stilted. He is incapable or
reciprocating and is largely unaware of the wishes, needs, and feelings
of his interlocutors or counterparties.

Inevitably, Asperger’s patients are perceived by others to be cold,
eccentric, insensitive, indifferent, repulsive, exploitative or
emotionally-absent. To avoid the pain of rejection, they confine
themselves to solitary activities – but, unlike the schizoid, not by
choice. They limit their world to a single topic, hobby, or person and
dive in with the greatest, all-consuming intensity, excluding all other
matters and everyone else. It is a form of hurt-control and pain
regulation. Thus, while the narcissist avoids pain by excluding,
devaluing, and discarding others – the Asperger’s patient achieves the
same result by withdrawing and by passionately incorporating in his
universe only one or two people and one or two subjects of interest.
Both narcissists and Asperger’s patients are prone to react with
depression to perceived slights and injuries – but Asperger’s patients
are far more at risk of self-harm and suicide.

The use of language is another differentiating factor. The narcissist
is a skilled communicator. He uses language as an instrument to obtain
Narcissistic Supply or as a weapon to obliterate his “enemies” and
discarded sources with. Cerebral narcissists derive Narcissistic Supply
from the consummate use they make of their innate verbosity. Not so the
Asperger’s patient. He is equally verbose at times (and taciturn on
other occasions) but his topics are few and, thus, tediously
repetitive. He is unlikely to obey conversational rules and etiquette
(for instance, to let others speak in turn). Nor is the Asperger’s
patient able to decipher nonverbal cues and gestures or to monitor his
own misbehavior on such occasions. Narcissists are similarly
inconsiderate – but only towards those who cannot possibly serve as
Sources of Narcissistic Supply. More about Autism Spectrum Disorders
here: McDowell, Maxson J. (2002) The Image of the Mother’s Eye: Autism
and Early Narcissistic Injury , Behavioral and Brain Sciences
(Submitted) Benis, Anthony – “Toward Self & Sanity: On the
Genetic Origins of the Human Character” – Narcissistic-Perfectionist
Personality Type (NP) with special reference to infantile autism
Stringer, Kathi (2003) An Object Relations Approach to Understanding
Unusual Behaviors and Disturbances James Robert Brasic, MD, MPH (2003)
Pervasive Developmental Disorder: Asperger Syndrome

For
the record, I’m not submissive.  I confront.  Narcissists
have a poor prognosis in therapy.  If they bother to keep showing
up, eventually the therapist may quit in disgust. Ns seek narcissistic
supply everywhere, even from the therapist who’s trying to help them
over it.  Like many forms of psychopathology, NPD tends to come
out very strongly in times of stress. 

Greyfox
has been stressed on a number of fronts lately.  One year is one
of the “critical periods” in addiction recovery.  Our entire
family is going through exacerbations of our fibromyalgia and chronic
fatigue at the same time, so that nobody is really in top shape to take
over anyone else’s chores.  Greyfox’s latest gun show was
disappointing.  With travel expenses, etc., he barely broke
even.  Wet weather and a sluggish local economy have given him
more zero-sales days and low-income days at the roadside stand than he
is used to.

This
might explain, but does not excuse, his behavior.  My exhaustion
explains my reluctance to jump in and confront, confront, confront his
behavior, but it won’t excuse me, either.  The only way to
have  a semblance of peace around here is to submit, humor and
placate him, but that’s not in our contract.  If the cell phone
keeps breaking up and cutting off our conversations, I’ll probably have
to go down there and jump on him.

It’s Friday.

That means yesterday was Thursday, my day to go down the valley to
Wasilla.   I got  my one-year Narcotics Anonymous
key-tag.  It’s neat–glows in the dark.  I was all “Wow!” (at
my disingenuous best) over that, holding it in my cupped hands, peeking
in at it.  Made a lot of people laugh.  What is it, I wonder,
that makes me delight so over playing the awestruck little girl? 
When I was a little girl, I used to try to play it cool.  Maybe
now I’m making up for lost awe.

After Greyfox closed his stand, I went back to the cabin with him while
he got ready for the meeting.  I noticed a couple of Blockbuster
boxes on a shelf and took a closer look.  He had Trainspotting,
and I’d been wanting to see it for years.  He said he’d be happy
to watch it again, because a lot of the dialog had escaped him due to
the actors’ Scots brogue, so we agreed to go back to the cabin and see
the movie after we did our grocery shopping, after our dinner, after
the meeting.

But before the meeting, we still had an hour and a half and he wanted
to hit his favorite thrift shop.  I wanted to go out the highway
almost to Palmer, to the warehouse food outlet, the only place I know
of in the valley to get Doug’s favorite microwavable geek food,
barbecue “rib” sandwiches.  I took a route toward Palmer that took
me to within a block of his thrift shop, dropped him at the corner, and
then went back and did a little thrift shopping, too, before the
meeting.  Greyfox found some socks, a fluorescent pink cap (wants
to be as visible as possible at his roadside stand), and a nice silk
shirt.  I found a Pyrex lid that just fits my Corelle soup/cereal
bowls (for microwaving), a 25 cent flower pot, and two more pieces of
“diner” tableware for my collection:  a heavy Buffalo China bowl
and an Anchor Hocking water tumbler.  The total was $3.50.

The incongruity of these two old dope fiends watching that film about
young Scottish heroin addicts after an NA meeting hit us both at the
same time. We laughed, and he said he’d like to watch it with one of
the other members, a man who is big on the “people, places and things”
dogma.  That is, in AA and NA, we’re told to avoid the people,
places and things that remind us of when we were in active addiction
and might lead to relapse.  But it was a fine flick.  Several
times Greyfox asked, “What did he say?”.  I’d repeat the line, in
my own best Scots brogue.  He’d give me a dirty look, and then I’d
translate for him.  For me, seeing the pain and chaos that others
put themselves through for and because of drugs helps reinforce my
abstinence.

No more
darkness here for us for a few months.  Last night dusk lasted
until dawn.  The movie made me a couple of hours later getting
home than usual, and about the time I was wondering if it would get
dark I noticed it was starting to grow lighter.

As I unloaded the groceries, I could hear several loons calling back
and forth.  One near me had sort of an alto voice, and it would be
answered in the distance by one with a higher pitch, and then one out
on the muskeg with a slightly different cadence would answer.  I
stood out there and let the mosquitoes have a shot at me, just for the
joy of hearing the loons.

This morning a shaft of sunlight was hitting the pots of pig squeak and
I recalled that I’d said I’d take more pics as they grew and the
flowers opened.  There they are.  As I looked at the flowers,
I noticed some small bulbous white growths (I thought), maybe some
parasitic cysts or something.

On closer inspection, they turned out to be the abdomens of some really
beautiful spiders.  They are creamy white, their legs are
translucent gray, and each side of their abdomens has a lavender racing
stripe about the same color as
the flowers.  Since Bergensia is not native to this area, and
presumably the spiders are, I’m guessing that they like to hang out in
fireweed flowers, since they’re about the same color as these flowers.

There are three spiders visible in the shot at right.  I guess I
should make that, “in frame,” because they’re doing their best to be
invisible.  Two are the big bulbous creamy ones, and the third is
a tiny, thin and quick, dark one.  Can you find them?

Hint:  one of the big creamy ones is near the bottom of the
picture, right of center.  The little dark one is above it and to
the left a bit, and the other big one is near the top of that flower
cluster.

Okay,
here’s a closer look.  The easiest one to see is on the top right
edge of the larger of the two clusters at the bottom, just above the
stem of the smaller cluster of flowers.  See the racing
stripe?  The little guy is on one of the flowers above the cluster
where the big one is, behind the main stem–and I guess I cropped the
third one out of this shot.

That camera won’t focus closer than 18 inches away, drattit.  I
know I’ve said it before:  gotta get the new fair-weather Fuji out
and quit takin’ it easy with the old point and shoot Kodak.  It’s
not just that I’m lazy and changing lenses, etc., is a hassle.  
It’s partly an economic issue.  I need to buy a new AC power
adapter before I can save my Fuji images to the hard drive, because the
one that came with the camera fell apart–more than just fell apart or
I’d put it back together.  An internal part that holds it all
together broke.  Sales have been abysmally slow at Greyfox’s
stand.  That money issue is another reason, besides my fatigue and
other ME symptoms, for my cutting back to only one town trip a
week.  We are hoping for good weather over this long weekend, and
vigorous business.

One last parting shot:  Koji checking his peemail.

Suddenly GREEN

I’ve been
avoiding going out lately.  It was either raining or the
mosquitoes were too thick to breathe.  Today the sun came out and
the wind came up and made life hard for the skeeters.

Yaay!  That makes it easier for me.

A week of rainy days has turned the trees and undergrowth green, but it still has that light, yellowish spring tint to it.

This first shot, on the left, is my backyard.

On the right:
The cup-shaped polypore on this old stump on the north side of the
house has collected a load of twigs, leaves and assorted debris. 
Sorta reminds me of the corner near the woodbox, inside the house.

I did some housecleaning today.  My energy ran dry after picking
up the litter of old newspapers off the floors, and gathering up a
winter’s accumulation of empty cat food bags out of the hallway. 
Then I got Doug to take them out… tomorrow is trash pickup day.

Doug
also changed a flat tire on Streak Subaru today.  He had never
changed a flat before.   I was too short of breath even to
try, but I thought I’d at least supervise.  I sent him out to get
the spare out, find the jack, and loosen the lug nuts.  I caught
my breath, used my asthma inhaler, got my shoes on, and went out to
supervise.  He had the owner’s manual out, the nuts loose, the car
jacked up, and was doing fine without me.

He said, “What I don’t know about cars would fill a book.  That’s
why they make those manuals.”   Great guy, good with techie
stuff–when we got the computer, one of the first things he taught me
was RTFM.

 I
had cause to resort to the Subaru owner’s manual on a recent trip to
town.  Going down the road, suddenly a red light on the intstument
panel came on.  Not too informative, it just said, “EGR” (if I
recall correctly).  I pulled over immediately and looked it up in
the book. I found that it means “exhaust gas recirculation” or
something like that.  It comes on when the odometer turns over a
certain number of miles.  I made a mental note to call Morg, the
Subaru specialist, after Greyfox’s car is fixed, to get the system
checked and the light turned off. 

Meanwhile, since that red light was distracting me, I dug a bandaid out
of my purse and stuck it over the light.  That worked okay during
the day, but after dark the red light shone through the translucent
bandage.  Greyfox gave me a snippet of black electrical tape
before I left for home that night, and I stuck that over my bandaid.

Next time Doug rode in the car, of course he noticed the bandaid with
the electrical tape over it and asked me about it.  I told him it
was covering an annoyingly distracting idiot light.  He said it
sounded like that story  one of the NA members told, about how,
when he was in active addiction, if his car would start making a new
noise, he’d turn up the radio to drown it out.  I think I might
have gotten a tiny bit defensive, explaining that I couldn’t put my car
in the shop until Greyfox had his back in running condition.

The pic up there on the right is bunchberries in bloom.  All the
recent rain followed by this sunshine has brought out a lot of them.

The shot at left is of little rosebuds on the wild Sitka roses.

I even got some “wildlife” to sit still for a picture (on the right).  It’s a ladybug.

While I
was out there, I heard songs and birdcalls from at least four different
species of bird.  The only sound I recognized was a hawk.  I
didn’t see it.  I did see one of the other songbirds, but it moved
fast and all I can say about it is that it was about the size of a
sparrow.

After moseying around the yard taking those pics, I leaned on a fender
and caught my breath, then started out toward the cul de sac.

Pidney doesn’t think her primate can handle the out of doors all by
herself.  When I go for a walk, she goes with me.  She
“mrrraps,”  “meeps,” and goes “ack” at me the whole time we’re out
there.  She’s the mouthy one, the only highly vocal cat out of
these three who came with this housesitting gig.  We don’t really
speak her language, but over the years we’ve figured out that she
misses her Raoul and wants us to give her a map and a motor scooter so
she can go to Krakow and look for him… or to Rio… that dirty dog
moves around.

Today,
Pidney was focused on our walk and on the birds and bugs and the scents
on the wind.  She stretched and slinked and rolled in the dirt.

All the way out to the end of the cul de sac she kept complaining about
something.  She simply seemed uneasy because I was out there, like
a fussy old dueña trying to keep her charge in line and hurry her back
to the safety of home.  As soon as I turned around and started
back, she stopped complaining. 

For a while she disappeared into the weeds and brush at the edge of the
muskeg, after something.   Whatever it was, got away.  I
guess it could have been a frog.  I haven’t heard any frogs out
there for a week or more.  I suppose they all found their mates or
met a different fate in the jaws of one predator or another.  It’s
a food chain out there.

This morning Doug packed a lunch and put the head harness on Koji (the
Gentle Leader makes our husky easier to control on a leash.  With
just a collar on, he pulls… and pulls–sled dog, y’know?) and they
walked down to the Su River (the Susitna).  Straight-line, on the
map, it’s a mile from the highway to the nearer bank of the river–and
its braided channels make its course a mile wide in this part of the
valley. 
The trail along the bluff is probably between 3 and 4 miles, with all
the ups, downs and cutbacks where erosion has taken chunks out of the
bluff.

I’ve not often seen Koji as relaxed as he has been all afternoon… nor
as excited as he was this morning as Doug prepared for the hike. 
The dog knew something was up and that it involved him.   He
wore himself out, with all that excitement and then the walk. 
He’s stretched on my bed, belly up, asleep now.

The pic here on the right and the one below, left, are the muskeg
across the road.  Y’seen one swamp, you’ve seen them all, no? 

No is right.  You won’t see any mangroves, nor Spanish moss hanging in the trees
here like you would in the Southeast U.S., nor any of the palos verdes,
cattails, or mistletoe you’d see around a cienega in the Southwest.

This
shot shows how the swamp grass is coming up fresh and green.  It’s
growing fast and will probably have hidden the water in a week or so.

That threatening gray sky is to the north.  The vista in the other direction is completely different.

The next shot here on the right was taken when the sun was behind a cloud.

The last pic down there below is an angle on the margin of woods and
muskeg that I photograph almost every time I’m out there.  The bit
of muskeg up around the bend beyond those trees on the right is the
place I walked last winter along the snowmobile trail, just to see what
was around the bend.  What’s out there is more of the same and
another bend in the trail.

There is one man I’ve been thinking about since 1962.  His name is
Larry Joe Turner.  I wonder what ever happened to him.

I used to dance…

I am not dancing today.  I woke this morning thinking about
dancing.  Yesterday, walking was problematic.  By
midafternoon every muscle I used was spasming each time I used
it.  If I lifted a water jug the arms and shoulders would go rock
hard and
unresponsive.  If I took a step, the calf or thigh or both would
seize up.  I gave up on keyboarding and the PS2 controller after
making a series of spastic mistakes and earning myself a persistent
burning sensation through hands and arms, across shoulders and the back
of my neck.  I crawled in bed with a book
and gave up early on page turning, just went to sleep. 

There are neural sensations associated with the spasms.  Most
people would call it “pain”.  That’s judgmental and defeatist, so
I just call it a sensation, tell my body I got the message, massage
away the sensation (yesterday, the massage would create new sensations
in cascades) and go on.  But I resist all temptation to dance.

I used to dance through life.  A decade ago, I’d clip my Walkman
onto my belt and dance while working in the garden.  I didn’t
plant a garden this year, nor the last, nor the one before that…. A
lot of the time now, I stumble and fumble through life, but at least
I’m alive.  It sure beats the alternative.  The body balks
and fumbles, and the mind is not always as sharp as it once was, but
there is still some function there.  Life goes on.

In my twenties and early thirties I danced for a living.  I
hesitate to say I was a professional dancer because that brings to mind
(my mind, at least) a theater, a chorus line, or corps de ballet. 
In one of my past lives I did work in a corps de ballet, but not this
time around.    I danced topless in tittie bars.  I
bared my breasts in California in the ‘sixties, in a bikini bottom and
white go go boots.  My stage was a narrow box next to the
jukebox.  After I got out of prison in the ‘seventies I worked a
couple of bars in Oklahoma City, where bare nipples are taboo and I had
to wear pasties.  Obscene things, those, unnatural, uncomfortable,
uncool.

I could never have been a great success at that work.  For one
thing, as with my writing and my living in general, I dance for myself
primarily, not my audience.  My boobs
are not big enough to make me a “great” topless dancer (cosmetic surgery? NEVER!), and my style of
dance was never
really suited to the milieu.  Oh, I can and do bump and grind when
the urge strikes me (and a song like Led Zep’s “Black Dog”, can really
bring that out), but my dancing style is like Isadora Duncan’s: 
natural, flowing, not pole-humping.  This pic I found online is
Lori Belilove, of the Isadora Duncan Foundation for Contemporary Dance, doing The Spirit of Isadora.  When my body is being cooperative, that’s how I like to move.

The body is being only minimally cooperative today, so I’m writing
about dancing, and not dancing.  I came over here from my bed to
vent a bit of physical frustration, and found a crop of comments to my
“Heresy” blog to respond to.

Greyfox
was home for a brief visit yesterday.  He did his laundry and mine
and spent a little time at the computer.  His comment, in part:

I honestly don’t know where circumcision fits in that whole business,
and I’m not going to pursue it.  Genital mutilation is one of my
husband’s obsessions, for some reason.

Ren said, again in part:

…well well, I’m hurt   I asked you to blog on religion a year ago and you wouldn’t. 

I definitely like that Pelagius dude…and have long, long believed
that Yeshua’s message has been bastardized by the church. I also don’t
believe that most of the “quotes” of Jesus, [same same], bear much
resemblance to his real words.  Again, just more man-made crap. Legends
and parables, just as any “religion” or culture have used to explain
the unexplainable since the beginning of time….I don’t like St
Paul…not one bit.

As a slightly different slant, I don’t believe that Jesus suffered
on the cross either.  That is not to say that I don’t believe that he
was executed, I do.  But I don’t believe that he felt pain or that he
suffered [this, from recently reading an article on “The Passion of The
Christ,” because he “got it”…he knew that we aren’t bodies….and had
no guilt. I’m fairly convinced that without guilt, there can be no
pain.

Shit!  You had to go and remind me.  Insofar as I have
any religion at all beyond my gnostic awareness of divine guidance (and, pointedly, not Gnostic with
a capital G–just as Greyfox and I practice shamanism, not Shamanism), I follow some of the tenets
of the Urantia Book. 
It teaches against proselytizing and says we should not attack
another’s faith, not say anything to take away from, but only add to,
someone’s faith.  I know I’m skating dangerously close to
sophistry when I differentiate between faith and belief and go on to
attack beliefs.  I always make an effort to do it on the basis of
knowledge, not opposing one set of beliefs against another. 

I must disagree with the contention about pain and guilt.  I
see no causal connection between guilt and physical sensation, and
suspect that there is some magical thinking or other superstition
behind that contention.  Suffering, on the other hand, also has no
real, inextricable connection to “pain”.  Buddha said that pain is
part of life, but suffering is optional.  Having freed myself of
guilt, and being well along on the way to transcending suffering (two
different things but both connected to “enlightenment” and the practice
of universal unconditional love), pain
is still part of life, though now only a fleeting sensation, a physical
warning to beware
whatever’s causing it.  As the unnamed physiology prof of one of
my correspondents said, “Pain is a negative response to a positive
stimulus.”

What the Urantia Book says about the crucifixion

might interest you, Ren.  In part, it says that the
quotation, “…why hast thou forsaken me?” was not as often
interpreted, an expression of the Master’s despair, but rather his
recitation of Judaic scriptures as a distraction and diversion from the
pain.  If I recall correctly, that one was from Job.

In her unique, inimitable way, Melody managed to ridicule and confirm St. Ambrose’s contentions about women, all at once:

*low
maniacal chuckling* So basically, we women are just so damn sexy that
we MUST be evil. The part of my mind that is flattered by this notion
is the “lead” that I’m trying to purify in my experiments. WHOO…and
all that talk of bondage and flagellation is makin’ me horny.

At least pipsqueak (“A little in the deep end today…”) didn’t say off the deep end.

My own quest to transcend belief entirely is still in
progress.  I have made some progress, enough that it can be
irritating or discomfiting to have someone who has not begun such a
quest either state his opinion as fact or characterize my
knowledge as belief.  No one who has not done it can understand
the process of questioning every one of one’s own thoughts, examining
their origins, eliminating denial and delusion….  I no longer
kid myself.  When I want to
believe that something is true, it is in those terms that I think of it
and talk of it, if at all, and usually I just recognize such a desire
as bullshit and drop the whole thing.

…and I shall dance again, I think.

As recently as a few months ago, I spent some of my scant and
precious physical energy on a bit of dancing around my living
room.  Once last summer, during my latest remission, I went to a
community dance and boogied myself all sweaty and out of breath. 
The course of this disease has always been up and down, off and on,
relapsing and remitting.  I have good cause to think that there
will come another time when I can dance.  I know that if it comes,
I will twirl and kick up my heels.

More Heresy


My feelings about history are
love/hate.  I’m very much interested in what went on in the
past.  History does not always record that.  Histories are
written by the victors in wars or by scholars under the patronage of
rich and powerful men.  Another subject that has always interested
me is religion.  It used to astound me how little knowledge
Christians (adherents of the only religion with which I had any contact
during my youth) had of the history of their religion.  I was
naive then, thinking that everyone was like me.  Now Greyfox has helped me to see and understand just
how little the average person knows, or wants to know, about anything.

I have always wanted to know… anything, everything, whatever.  I
have come to value my associations with others who likewise want to
know.  I learn from them, and I try to pass along some of what
I’ve learned elsewhere to them.  This is part of such an effort,
and was instigated by krisinluck. 
I made a start on it a few days ago, and when I realized what a big job
it would be, I allowed myself to go off on a personal tangent and put
off the big task.  I would not feel right about
putting this off any longer, but it’s a
chore.  Reading it may be a chore as well.  This will be long
and information-dense.  Most of this blog will be transcription,
not simply
keyboarding to record my own thoughts.  The mechanical aspect of
this is laborious to me. 

I spent a couple of days searching the
web, hoping to find some suitable texts I could copy and paste
here.  I found translations of some original sources at Fordham
University’s Internet Medieval Sourcebook. 
However, the translations are often stilted and obscure, and extracting
the points I wish to make from original sources is another laborious
chore.  I mention the sourcebook for those scholars who wish to
consult primary sources. 

To make my point and fulfill my
commitment to say more about the arguments between Pelagius (and other first millennium heretics) and the
fathers of Monasticism and modern Christianity, I find it simpler to quote secondary sources
(the works of historians) and, first of all, a summation of the
case from a (well-researched) work of fiction.  The passage begins
with a Roman legate just returned to Britain from Rome, speaking to his uncle:

    “…Are you familiar with Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo?”
    Again, I felt a sense of things of import crossing
my horizons.  I shook my head.  “No, not at all.  Tell
me about him, too.”
    “Well,” he went on, with a barely discernible
hesitation that was emphasized by its briefness, “Augustine is one of
the most respected scholars of the Church.  A very wise and
learned man and a famed interpreter of the Word of God.”
    “Oh!  One of those.  That sounds ominous.  Go on.”
    “Augustine, whom most men call a saintly man, has
come into conflict with Pelagius–or, rather, it’s the other way
around.  Pelagius has locked horns with Augustine.”
    “So?  What’s the problem of the saintly Augustine?”
    “Pelagius thinks he is a hypocrite and a liar.”
    I whistled to myself.  “Has he told him so?”
    “He has told the entire world.”
    “Why?  For what reasons?”  In spite of
myself, in spite of the fact that I knew nothing of this Pelagius, I
felt dismayed by this last statement of Picus’s.  “If, as you say,
everyone thinks Augustine is a saintly man, your Pelagius runs a very
real risk of being thought a madman, or a trouble-maker.”
    …”Quite so,” he said.  “But it is bigger than
that.  Augustine is the champion of the theory of divine
grace.  He is a man of God.  A bishop.  But in his youth
he was a notorious womanizer….  Anyway, he has a prayer that has
become notorious… that God would send him the grace to find
chastity… but not yet!  …Augustine believes that man is
incapable of finding or winning redemption without divine help. 
He believes that man is born damned, in mortal sin.  Only baptism
will wash away that sin, and only divine grace can enable man to stay
away from sin thereafter.  He believes that all of life is a
temptation and that man should spend his life in prayer, abandoning
himself to God’s mercy in bestowing grace upon him.”
    I nodded.  “That, my young friend, is the view
one tends to get from an ecclesia.  That is what all the priests
say.  There’s nothing new in what you’ve told me, except the
saintly bishop’s own example….  And you say Pelagius finds fault
with this?”  He nodded.  “How?”
    “Totally.  Pelagius believes that the entire
concept of grace is a man-made device invented by the Church to keep
all men in bondage.”
    “Hah!  Come on now, your friend Pelagius is
beginning to sound like one of those old women who sees a rapist behind
every bush.  How can divine help keep men in bondage?”
    “It works by making men forget that they are made in
the image of God Himself, and therefore able to determine between right
and wrong.”
    I saw the flaw immediately.  “But that’s not possible.  Your man is
mad!  Men have known the difference between right and wrong since
Eve ate the apple.  The knowledge of good and evil.  Men have
always known the difference.”
    “Exactly, Uncle.  That’s what Pelagius says….
Pelagius argues that man, made in the image of God, knows the
difference between good and evil, and has the ability to choose between
them, and has always done so, even before the time of the Christ. 
Even barbarians have their moral laws, unwritten though they may
be.  Pelagius sees this divine grace as an instrument of men,
designed to keep all other men in subjugation and reliant on the Church
as the only intermediary between God and man.  He sees Original
Sin as an invention foisted upon men by other men to make all men
guilty at birth, and therefore incapable of freedom of choice from the
outset….
    “It comes down all the way to personal
responsibility.  Carried to its logical conclusion, the concept of
divine grace destroys the basis of law.  …in the absence of
grace the fault for crime can be laid right at God’s door.
    “…Pelagius believes, as the Scripture tells us,
that God made man in his own image.  If man has the attributes of
God, he says, then man must have free will.  The majority of men
know that society demands certain rules for the governance of property,
sanity, decency and dignity.  Those rules constitute the
law.  Pelagius maintains that a man–any man–born with the divine
spark is free to choose between good and evil as defined by both Church
and society.  If he chooses to go against the law, be it divine or
human, that choice is his own and he has to be prepared to accept the
responsibility for his choice in the eyes of God and in the eyes of his
fellow men.”
    “It takes a lot of nerve to go against the
Church.  I’d never heard of this fellow Pelagius before this
morning, but he makes sense to me, too.  How far has this argument
between them gone?”
    “A long way.  It’s the talk of Rome.”
    “Sound’s like it might become the talk of all the world.  And you say this bishop is powerful?”
    “Extremely.  He has powerful friends, great influence.  Some say he should be Pope.”
    “Sounds like your friend Pelagius is spitting into
the wind.  Will they reach an agreement?  Some kind of
compromise?”
    “How can they?  They’re like day and night.”
    “Aye, and darkness is falling quickly, it would
seem.  Does Pelagius have any support within the Church?  Or
is everyone convinced he is possessed by evil spirits?”
    “He has support.  In plenty.  Many of the most powerful espouse his cause.”
    “How many? In terms of odds, I mean.  Is there an even match?”
    “Perhaps.  There could be.  If we were
dealing only in numbers…. The question here is one of basic
policy.  An army mutineer may have some right on his side in terms
of the conditions that drove him to mutiny.  But he has to die for
his mutiny, no matter how laudable his cause might have been, no matter
how understandable and sympthetic his motives.  Mutiny cannot be
condoned, no matter what the justification.  To condone one
instance of mutiny would be to invite, and to incite, the eventual and
inevitable destruction of all the armies.  So it is with
Pelagius.  He has to lose, or overthrow five hundred years of a
Church established by the Christ Himself, with all its rules and
methods.  Pelagius knows this, Publius, he is not a stupid
man.  He is not challenging the Christ’s Church but men’s
corruption of it, yet he knows he is too late to alter what others,
stronger than he, have been building for centuries with a view to
making it eternal.  You see, Pelagius’s doctrine, if you want to
call it that, destroys the need for a Church just as surely as
Augustine’s doctrine destroys the need for the law.  Pelagius is
saying that every man carries the Church within his heart, and that he
can commune directly with God by simply meditating!  Augustine is
saying that man is absolutely nothing without the Christian Church,
which has as its symbol the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven.  The
Church already speaks for God.  Pelagius speaks for man. 
Therefore, Pelagius must be defeated in this struggle.”

The Singing Sword
by Jack Whyte

One of Ambrose’s most significant legacies to the Middle
Ages and the medieval church was his fierce hatred of women. Like many
other bishops, he felt several pressures urging the church to gender
equality. On the one hand were communities of virgin nuns who were held
up as the highest exemplars of spiritual life; on the other hand, the
Gnostic religions, including Gnostic Christian religions, accorded
women something approaching gender equality. Yet still there was Paul
of Tarsus, who claimed that women shouldn’t speak on matters of
doctrine. So Ambrose concluded that church offices, ie, the priesthood,
should be completely closed off to women. It wasn’t enough to assert
this; Ambrose had to prove why women were insufficient to occupy
priestly offices.

   He argued that women were fundamentally flawed, especially
in the area of sexual control. He believed that women were destined,
through their sexuality, to always tempt men as Eve had tempted Adam.
This was not the fault of men but rather the fault of women’s lack of
sexual control. In many ways, Ambrose’s exclusion of women from church
office reflected the Roman exclusion of women from offices. Ambrose,
however, introduced a radically new element to Roman misogyny—he linked
female inferiority to female sexuality. It was female sexuality that
was the threat and the fundamental flaw of women; this was the logic
that explained such paradoxical views as holding up virgin nuns as
being the highest examples of spirituality while at the same time
denying women any official role in the church. One cannot overestimate
the influence of Ambrose’s linking of misogyny with female sexuality—it
is the single most dominant aspect of gender relations from Ambrose to
our time.

   Perhaps more disastrous was Ambrose’s religious
intolerance and his legitimation of this intolerance. Throughout the
early years of Christianity, the religion lived alongside a multitude
of other religions. On the one hand was Roman and Greek paganism, the
official religion of the empire; on the other hand were a multitude of
other religions, from ethnic religions such as Judaism to mystery
religions such as Gnosticism and Mithraism. Not only did Christians
live side by side with these religions, but they often crossed over and
sometimes incorporated elements of these other religions into their own.

   When the Emperor Gratian (375-383) signalled that the
state religion would not be paganism by removing the statue of Victory
from the Roman Senate, Ambrose formulated an argument that if were Rome
were a Christian empire, no other religion, including paganism, could
be tolerated. In his debate in the Roman Senate with Ambrose, the pagan
Symmachus argue eloquently for religious tolerance, but Ambrose argued
that there was one and only one correct religion and all others should
be stamped out.

   This position soon became the church’s position and had
two far-reaching consequences. From the fourth century onwards, one of
the principal characteristics of Christianity was its intolerance—in
fact, often extremely homicidal intolerance—of other religions. For
Rome, however, this religious intolerance was one of the central
reasons for the disintegration of the Roman Empire. In many ways, the
Roman Empire held together because of its religious tolerance. Subject
states did not enjoy being under the empire, but the cultural and
religious freedom that they had at least made it bearable. When the
Christian Empire began to suppress native religions, areas under Roman
control soon rebelled. These rebellions fractured the empire in pieces
at a point in time when migrating Europeans were invading the frontiers.

Monasticism
        The triumph of the church resulted in
problematic changes to the church. Ambrose, as noted above, began a
trend of reconceiving clerical office as something more along the lines
of secular offices. The Roman concern with practical administration
drained much of the spiritual mission of the early church. The
Patristic writings departed significantly from the spirituality of the
earliest Christian texts; in the place of faith and insight they
offered only rationality and arguments. This secularization of the
clergy and the church as well as the rationalization of Christian
discourse led to the growth of a new Christian phenomenon, monasticism.

   The earliest monks were not clergy, but ordinary
individuals who fled the poverty of the church to live spiritually
dedicated lives while suffering extreme poverty and self-affliction.
Seeing the church as too worldly and too materialistic, they lived
solitary lives of severe ascetism, or “world denial.” This form of
monasticism in which an individual ascetic lives alone is called
eremetic monasticism, that is, the monasticism of a hermit.

   Monasticism first appeared in the eastern reaches of
Christianity in the third century when the Roman Empire seemed to be
falling apart; in this sense, monasticism was related to the anxiety
and uncertainty of the age. It did not really spread, however, until
after the conversion of Constantine and the realignment of the church
along more material and political lines. At that point, the practice
spread throughout the east to Egypt and North Africa. The extreme forms
of eremeticism are legendary; these ascetic monks soon were sought out
by Christians who literally worshipped them and the various material
that came in contact with them—or came out of them.

   In the fourth century, monasticism soon adopted a communal
form. Again, monks were not clergy but rather laymen that came together
in a community to remove themselves from the world. This form of
monasticism, called cenobitic monasticism, was most successfully
implemented by Basil (330-379), who, after a time as a hermit monk,
came out from the wilderness to found a community of other monks.

   The most essential difference between the communal
monasticism of Basil and the eremetic monasticism practiced before was
the nature of self-discipline and rejection of the world. The eremetic
monks would discipline themselves to reject the world by engaging in
self-torture, sometimes bordering on the psychotic. Basil, however,
believed that one could discipline one’s body and will as well as
reject the world through constant labor rather than self-torture. So
the community of monks he set up engaged in constant physical and
spiritual labor; this would become the pattern for both Western and
Eastern monasticism.

 Now, I think it’s obvious that where Saul of Tarsus,
Ambrose, and their ilk erred was in ignorance.  They did not know,
and if they had been told they would have rejected the idea, that like
other animals humans are subject to hormones, pheromones and other
neurochemicals.  The chemistry of sex is not all that different
from the chemistry of addiction.  Oh, some of the chemicals are
different (dopamine is one that is the same), but their profound effect
on the minds in the bodies those chemicals are controlling are
practically identical.  Just as the founders of Alcoholics
Anonymous eighty-some years ago and the founders of Narcotics Anonymous
fifty years ago didn’t know about the neurochemistry of addiction, the
early Church Fathers knew nothing of the neurochemistry of sex. 

They saw women in thrall to their natural reproductive urges using
every wile at their disposal to attract men to father children for them
and to hold them there to support those families they produced. 
They themselves felt the effects of the women’s pheromones on their own
hormones, and they blamed the women.  Of course… who else were
they going to blame, God?  Not hardly!  He was the Big Guy,
and you know you don’t go picking on the Big Guy when there’s a little
person around you can pick on.  The same dynamic goes on today in
households where men bring home their frustrations with the government
or their employers, and release them in domestic violence against their
wives and children.

Now, from Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization, Volume 4, The Age of Faith:

It began in the spiritual hunger of men and women harassed with
poverty, wearied with conflict, awed by mystery, or fearful of death.
To millions of souls the Church brought a faith and hope that inspired
and canceled death. That faith became their most precious possession,
for which they would die or kill; and on that rock of hope the Church
was built. It was at first a simple association of believers, an ecclesia or gathering. Each ecclesia or church chose one or more presbyteroi–elders,
priests–to lead them, and one or more readers, acolytes, subdeacons,
and deacons to assist the priest. As the worshipers grew in number, and
their affairs became more complex, the congregations chose a priest or
layman in each city to be an episcopos–overseer,
bishop–to coordinate their functioning.  As the number of bishops
grew, they in turn required supervision and coordination; in the fourth
century we hear of archbishops, metropolitans, or primates governing
the bishops and the churches of a province.  Over all these grades
of clergy patriarchs held sway at Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem,
Alexandria, and Rome.  At the call of a patriarch or an emperor
the bishops and archbishops convened in synods or councils.  If a
council represented only a province it was called provincial; if it
represented; if it represented only the East or the West it was called
plenary; if both, it was general;  if its decrees were accepted as
binding upon all Christians, it was ecumenical–i.e., applying to the oikoumene,
or (total Christian) inhabited world.  The occasionally resultant
unity gave the Church its name of Catholic, or universal.

This organization, whose power rested at
last upon belief and prestige, required some regulation of the
ecclestical life.  In the first three centuries of Christianity,
celibacy was not required of a priest.  He might keep a wife whom
he had married before ordiantion, but he must not marry after taking
holy orders; and no man could be ordained who had married two wives, or
a widow, a divorcee, or a concubine.  Like most societies, the
Church was harassed with expremists.  In reaction against the
sexual license of pagan morals, some Christian enthusiasts concluded
from a passage in St. Paul (I Cor. VII, 32), that any commerce between
the sexes was sinful;  they denounced all marriage, and trembled at the abomination of a married priest.  The provincial council of Gengra (circa 362) condemned these views as heretical,
[emphasis added] but the Church increasingly demanded celibacy in her
priests..  Property was being left in rising amounts to individual
churches; now and then a married priest had the bequest written in his
name and transmitted it to his children.  Clerical marriage
sometimes led to adultery or other scandal, and lowered the respect of
the people for the priest.  A Roman synod of 386 advised the
complet continence of the clergy; and a year later Pope Siricius
ordered the unfrocking of any priest who married, or continued to live
with his wife.  Jerome, Ambrose,
and Augustine supported this decree with their triple power; and after
a generation of sporadic resistance it was enforced with transient
success in the West. [more added emphasis]

The gravest problem of the Chruch, next to reconciling her ideals with her continuance,
[yeah, this is me again calling your attention to a select portion of
Durant's text--just assume that any boldface type is my doing and all
within brackets is my addition, okay?] was to find a way of living with
the state.  The rise of an ecclesiastical organization side by
side with the officials of the government created a struggle for power
in which the accepted subjection of one to the other was the
prerequisite of peace.  In the East the Church became subordinate
to the state; in the West she fought for independence, then for
mastery.  In either case the union of Church and state involved a profound modification of Christian ethics.  Tertullian, Origen, and Lactantius [following the teachings of the Christ] had
taught that war is always unlawful;  the Church, now protected by
the state, resigned herself to such wars as she deemed necessary to
protect either the state or the Church.  She had not in herself
the means of force; but when force seemed desirable she could appeal to
the “secular arm” to implement her will.  She received from the
state, and from individuals, splendid gifts of money, temples, or
lands; she grew rich, and needed the state to protect her in all the
rights of property.  Even when the state fell she kept her wealth;
the barbarian conquerers, however heretical, seldom robbed the
Church.  The authority of the word so soon rivaled the power of
the sword.

II. THE HERETICS
The most unpleasant task of ecclesiastical organization was to prevent
a fragmentation of the Church through the multiplication of
heresies–i.e., doctrines contrary to conciliar definitions of the
Christian creed.  Once triumphant, the Church ceased to preach
toleration; she looked with the same hostile eye upon individualism in
belief as the state upon secession or revolt.  Neither the Church
nor the heretics thought of heresy in purely theological terms. 
The heresy was in many cases the ideological flag of a rebellious
locality seeking liberation from the imperial power;  so the
Monophysites wished to free Syria and Egypt from Constantinople; the
Donatists hoped to free Africa from Rome; and as Church and state were
now united, the rebellion was against both.  Orthodoxy opposed
nationalism, heresy defended it; the Church labored for centralization
and unity, the heretics for local independence and liberty.

…

(ellipsis)

We cannot
interest ourselves today in the many winds of doctrine that agitated
the Church in this period–Eunomians, Anomeans, Apollinarians,
Macedonians, Sabellians, Massalians, Novatians, Priscillianists; we can
only mourn over the absurdities for which men have died, and
will.  Manicheanism was not so much a Christian heresy as a
Persian dualism of God and Satan, Good and Evil, Light and Darkness; it
thought to reconcile Christianity and Zoroastrianism, and was bitterly
buffeted by both.  It faced withunusual candor the problem of
evil, the strnage abundance of apparently unmerited suffering in a
world providentially ruled; and felt compelled to postulate an Evil
Spirit coeternal with the Good.  During the fourth century
Manicheism mad many converts in East and West.  Several of the
emperors use ruthless measures against it; Justinian made it a capital
crime; gradually it faded out, but it left its influence on such later
heretics as the Paulicians, Bogomiles, and Albigensians.  In 385,
a Spanish bishop, Priscillian, was accused of preaching Manicheism and
universal celibacy; he denied the charges; he was tried before the
usurping Emperor Maximus at Trier, two bishops being his accusers; he
was condemned; and over the protests of St. Ambrose and St. Martin he
and several of his companions were burned to death. (385).

I tire of this transcription
process, although I’ll never grow weary of the subject.  I did
have a bit more copy-and-paste, some excerpts of letters from “Saint”
Jerome, illustrating my contention that he was a dirty old dog in the
manger, but my browser crashed and I lost it (so glad I’d saved the
rest already), and I think I’ve already made this so long I doubt
anyone will read it.

Anniversaries

I let
my second Xangaversary slip by unremarked on MayDay, because I’d
planned something to mark it and then had not followed through. 
That plan is still pending, to go back and compile a list of links to
the blogs of my healing journey that started with my first post here
two years ago.  Anybody got a round tuit?  I could use a couple of them, actually.

Tomorrow
will be my dog Koji’s fourth birthday.  He hasn’t changed much,
outwardly, since I took this pic on his last birthday.  In
behavior he has mellowed some, and learned important things such as how
to walk back around that tree in the yard when he winds his chain
around it.  He’s my buddy.

One year ago yesterday, a Wednesday, I wrote:

He didn’t call that day, or the next.  I was
okay with that.  I have never enjoyed talking to him when he was
drunk, and I was fed up with thirteen years of addictive relapses and
broken promises.  When he had rented his little cabin there at the
flea market strip we were not yet calling Felony Flats, Doug and I had
felt relief at having him out of our house.

Then on Friday, that Voice Within that I’ve always referred to
either as “Spirit” or “my Guides” (and have recently begun calling HP
or my Higher Power in NA and AA meetings) told me Greyfox was in
trouble.  My response was, “Yeah, so what?”  Then I went on
about what I was doing, taking pics of my buddy Koji and blogging about
him.

God kept nagging me, and piqued my curiosity.  I tried to tune
in on Greyfox’s psychic energy and got nothing.  That’s unusual in
itself.  We have a tight connection, my soulmate and I, and I
usually know without trying how things are going with him.  As
usual when I want to know something and the knowledge isn’t coming on a
direct channel, I picked up an oracle.

The nearest one to hand that day as I sat here at the computer was a
bag of runes.  I asked the Norns (pulled three runes) if Greyfox
was alive.  The way the runes came up was, yes-no-maybe, one
upright, one reversed, and one that is the same both ways.  The
Norns are like that, so I stood up to reach my Crystal Oracle and
resolve the ambiguity.  The gist of my reading was that his life
was hanging in the balance.  Nobody else would save him and it was
up to me.  Personally, I was ready to let him go.  I carried
a lot of hurt and resentment over his narcissistic abuse, not just of
me but of Doug, the cats, the dog, and everyone.  Narcissitic
personality disorder does not make nice people.

The thought (not “mine”, I am convinced, but a flash of divine
inspiration) that impelled me to throw on some clothes and jump in the
car was, “You’d do this for a stranger, wouldn’t you… for just anyone
in need?”  “Yes, I would–so then why not for my soulmate, the man
I love?” was my answering thought.

That led to this, that, and the other thing,
and to Greyfox’s diagnosing his own NPD and starting to work at
transcending it.  He dropped that “one day at a time” crap that
had left open the door to his many alcoholic relapses, and made a
lifetime commitment to living clean and serene.  Having quit
alcohol, tobacco and marijuana all on the same day (May 23, 2003) with
the help of the amino acid supplements that I’d been using to transcend
my sugar addiction, he became happier and a lot easier to live
with. 

I won’t be going into town tomorrow and I don’t know if he plans
to go to a meeting to commemorate his AA/NA “birthday”–if the weather
is good he’ll probably work.  He’ll pick up his aluminum one year
coin next time he attends an AA meeting, and we will both get our
little plastic NA key tags next time we go to a meeting.  My AA
sobriety date is December, 1992, and my AA coin is bronze with a big XI
on it.  I wasn’t in the program that long, but I was
“grandfathered” in, as a 12-Step “legacy”.  My father and my
mother’s brother Roy were AAs.  I learned a lot from them, and a
generic magazine article on 12-step groups that I read while in prison
was instrumental in my kicking alcohol and hard drugs in the ‘seventies.

My own life is lots better now, especially since I’m not living with
the paranoia of growing weed to satisfy his need.  That had been
an economic choice I always had problems with.  We really couldn’t
afford to buy the stuff.   I love growing things, but I happen to
be allergic to hemp and couldn’t work around the plants without getting
a rash on my hands and arms… and then there’s the fact that it’s
illegal, too.  But I don’t need to concern myself with that any more.

Something I need to share (dump):


Rough afternoon here, full of ups and downs.  A couple of brief
power outages lost me unsaved writing on the computer and some unsaved
gaming time on the PS2 where I’d gone for a break after losing my work
at the computer.

Then, a definite up.  I had been unable for unknown reasons to
send or receive email for several days.  The problem started the
day Greyfox had been home and had blogged.  Doug and I just
figured it was the Niels Bohr effect (Greyfox’s “Mr. Breakit”
talent–I’m Ms. Fixit), and either it would fix itself or one of us
would gird the loins and call tech support.  When I restarted the
comp after the outage, email worked.

After that, I got a bump that sent me in a different direction,
sideways I suppose.  Regular readers here might have noticed that
I sometimes quote Brian Kenny or repost announcements or articles that
I’ve received from him in his Got Caliche? newsletter of Southwestern
Archaeology.  The only way I can appropriately share this “misc
note” from the backed-up flood of email that just came in is in its
entirety.

My own experiences in prison and among outlaw bikers confirm
Brian’s conclusion about how easy it is to dehumanize others. 
We’ve seen it recently at Abu Ghraib prison and in the video of Nick
Berg’s beheading.  We’re animals, yes?  Maybe some of you
have the luxury of denying it, but I’ve had the beast brought out in
me.  I know how close to the surface it lurks.