Category: Just Shelley

Categories
Just Shelley

On being a sensualist

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The world that lieth in wickedness, the sensualist, has no taste nor relish for that bread which cometh down from God out of heaven, and nourisheth the soul up unto eternal life.

Thomas Lechtworth, They that wait upon the Lord

Roget’s Thesaurus defines a sensualist as a person devoted to pleasure and luxury, a hedonist or sybarite. Merriam-Webster defines the sensualist as a person in “…persistent or excessive pursuit of sensual pleasures and interests.”

Weighed down with this association to addiction of earthly delights, the sensualist has been cast as the wanton, the wicked, and the antithesis of both the intellectual and the spiritual throughout history.

Eyes and fingers speak in its favor, visual evidence and palpableness do, too: this strikes an age with fundamentally plebian tastes as fascinating, persuasive, and convincing – after all, it follows instinctively the canon of truth of eternally popular sensualism.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Small wonder that I’ve spent most of my life trying to deny my own sensualist nature; first wearing the misty face of the spiritualist, and later donning a mask showing the placid wisdom of the intellectual. It’s only been recently that I’ve stripped away all such self-doubting foolishness, and have felt confident enough, or perhaps indifferent enough, to show myself.

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards is a rejection of all standards, and mere antinomianism; and the bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Being a sensualist doesn’t mean I run into the street, tackling every man I see – a modern day succubus. With laptop.

Nor does this mean that I am not capable of intellectual pursuits or appreciation of same. And if my spirituality is tempered, it is more so by the intellectual aspect of my personality rather than that part of me that is sensual.

Being a sensualist just means that I’m highly attuned to and very aware of my senses, to the point of defying conventional behavior at times.

Helen woke up in the middle of the night wearing someone else’s breasts. Not her own insignificant, almost non-existent bumps, but huge, pendulous, full ones. Breasts whose only master was gravity, whose creases ached in bands across her ribs, whose weight cascaded irrepressibly onto her lap. Breasts that could round shoulders and cave in chests. “Damn,” she murmured to herself, “it’s begun,” and then went back to sleep.

Barbara Hodgson, The Sensualist

I will stop to listen to a bird, or alter my course to follow an intriguing smell. I hesitantly place a hand on shoulder or arm when in conversation with another – being aware of the possibility of giving offense with said action.

I love sparkly sidewalks.

 

i love sidewalks that are all sparkly. i can’t imagine why a city would not get sparkly sidewalks. the sidewalk company says, “ok, 50 new sidewalks…. you want sparkles with that?” and the city says, “nah, we’ll take the ones with black, dried up chewing gum on them, instead.”

eggstone 2000

Being a sensualist also does not make me a sentimentalist. As much as I appreciate subtle and complex emotional interplay there is nothing I abhor more than maudlin, contrived sentimentality.

The movie Titanic would have been best served by sinking the ship in the first ten minutes, and taking the Bridges of Madison County with it. Debbie Boone singing “You light up my life” or Helen Reddy’s “I don’t know how to love him” generate an almost overwhelming revulsion in me. Yet the Andrew Sisters World War II classic, I’ll be with you in apple blossom time never fails to move me.

Yeah, okay, fine – and I did cry when I watched Old Yeller.

As for writing, there is some writing that is so sensual and that invokes such strong mental imagery that I have to put the material down; there is no room left within my mind for processing the letters into words and the words into sentences.

Categories
Just Shelley

Shallows

In the shallows, in soft, soft sand, you can stand very still and 
the little fishies will nibble at your toes.

In the shallows, in soft, soft sand, you can look down through clear, 
clear water and be master of all you see.

In the shallows, in soft, soft sand, you can laugh at tiny ripples of 
water lapping ineffectually at your ankles.

In the shallows, in soft, soft sand, you are God.

Until a big goddamn wave comes along and sucks you in, and you’re pushed here and there at the mercy of energies beyond your control with Big Fishies wanting to do more than nibble at your toes in water that’s murky and dark, and you think to yourself, “Holy shit! What just happened!?!”, as your only hope is to ride along, follow the current and stay afloat, looking for an escape…

...back to the shallows, and the soft, soft sand.
Categories
Weblogging Writing

The world’s smallest postings

Steve Himmer (or should that be Opt Himmer? 5 Himmer?) subtly started something yesterday* that was intriguing to say the least:

Is brevity really the soul of wit? Or, more precisely, am I capable of saying anything without rattling and rambling for 1000 words at a time?

Included with this paragraph is a link to a new weblog, OneWordMeal, containing one word attached to a link to another weblog:

gumshoe

Gumshoe? Gumshoe.

According to dictionary.com gumshoe is defined as:

gum·shoe (gmsh)
n.
A sneaker or rubber overshoe.
Slang. An investigator, especially a detective.

Was Steve’s use of “gumshoe” in reference to the other weblog author’s travels through Argentina (travels – walking – shoe – sneaker – gumshoe)? Or was it in reference to the term “closed room” mentioned in several of the postings (closed room – mystery – detective – gumshoe)?

Possibly it was a subtle connection to the weblog author’s literary discussions threaded throughout the weblog (literature – book – type of book – detective book – detective – gumshoe).

By linking to the weblog with the one word, Steve is pushing the limits of our ability to fill in the gaps and make the necessary connections, all within a context that lacks both shared experiences and environment.

For instance, I can point to something and say one word, and my roommate will easily deduce what I’m saying, fill in all of the verbs and adjectives and nouns, develop the appropriate mental image and link all of this back to the one word. But then, my roommate and I have both a shared history as well as home: all the ‘clues’ are in place.

Can Steve do the same in weblogging? I’m not sure, but the concept is fascinating, to say the least (pun not intended). I eagerly await the next entry in OneWordMeal.

*or Steve was in a mood of wimsey yesterday and the weblog and the posting was all a joke, using gumshoe because he stepped in some gum and got it on his shoe, but then I called the idea both intriguing and fascinating and now he has to follow through, which will teach him not to fool with Mother Blogger.

Categories
Just Shelley

The value of anger

To get my degree in psychology, I had to establish a specific hypothesis and then design and conduct experiments to either prove or disprove it. I based my hypothesis on the work conducted by Dr. Martin Seligman on Learned Helplessness.

Dr. Seligman’s theory is that an organism (dogs, rats, college sophomores, or other), when exposed to circumstances beyond their control will eventually give up trying to effect change. That doesn’t sound remarkable – why try to change your circumstances when they’re beyond your control? What is interesting, though, is that even when circumstances change and the organism can effect change, they don’t because they no longer have the ability to even recognize that they now have control. They have literally learned how to be helpless.

The end results of learned helplessness can run the extremes of resigned acceptance and indifference to incompetence and burnout to severe personal depression.

Dr. Seligman and others continued this research and further expanded the theory to conclude that the level of helplessness a person experienced was directly dependent on how much they internalized the cause of the helplessness. In other words, if a person attributed the lack of control to something within themselves, they’re going to experience learned helplessness at its most extreme. They’re going to get severely depressed.

For my work, my hypothesis was that the degree of helplessness a person experiences can be mitigated by another emotion – anger. The way to cure helplessness? Piss the person off.

Sorry. I know you all wanted me to say something along the lines of “learned optimism”, enabling personal empowerment, love, joy, or some other form of positive emotionalism. No can do. In the work I conducted as a senior in college and in my own experience, I have found that, at times, there is no healthier or more motivating emotion than anger. And anger, more than any other emotion, is the one most suppressed by society.

Is a loved one ill? Accept that it’s God’s will. Job sucks? Accept that only a few people have good jobs. Has a disaster hit? Accept that it’s a result of bad karma. Don’t waste your time trying to fight back and, whatever you do, control your temper – you’ll live longer if you do.

Anger has become socially unacceptable.

Well, that’s just bullshit.

Revolution isn’t based on calm reason, but the fact that enough people became angry at the status quo and fight to effect change.

People don’t fight injustice because, in a moment of love for humanity, they decided to devote time to fighting the injustice. The people saw something that made them angry, and their love of humanity helped channel that anger into positive results.

If we all followed the dictate of “accepting God’s will” as an explanation for illness, we wouldn’t have doctors – we’d have more priests. And a lot more dead people.

Now, anger can be destructive, as we witnessed recently with the shootings at LAX. Usually, though, this type of out of control anger is based on the very thing that we’re fighting – learned helplessness. Except, instead of becoming internally self-destructive, the person externalizes the destruction, literally going ballistic.

Healthy anger isn’t out of control – it’s not red-faced screaming accompanied by acts of unpurposeful destruction. Healthy anger is not shooting innocent people at a ticket counter, nor is it road rage, or abuse of loved ones.

Healthy anger is passion and purpose, determination, and change.

Anger led to the Civil Rights movement and stopped the Vietnam war. Anger prevents corporate monopolies and brings down corrupt politicians. And anger can heal.

Anger applied effectively and appropriately, is not only healthy for an individual – it’s necessary for a thriving society. If it’s angry people that forge a new society, it’s the gently melancholic, the intellectually pessimistic, and the complacent and indifferent people that destroy it.

Go ahead, get mad. You’ll feel better.

An archive of this page, with comments, is at the Wayback Machine

Categories
Just Shelley

Rocks

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

As some of you know, I collect rare minerals, in traditional crystalline habit, thumbnail sized, and with matrix.

All of which is just a fancy way of saying that I collect crystals.

I started the collection years and years ago with a watermelon tourmaline cross-section, soon joined by dioptase, azurite, rhodochrosite, barite, cinnabar, and so on. I now have what is a fairly impressive collection for an amateur.

Barite

Now collecting crystals isn’t as easy as it might sound; the crystal collector is faced with two major obstacles – the Rip-off Artist and the Mystic.

The RO-Artist is the person who solemnly assures you that Herkimer Diamonds are the Real Thing, when you know that they are nothing more than a commonly occurring variety of quartz. They’ll sell you glass and call it topaz, or push lab-grown crystals as natural.

Azurite

My favorite RO-Artist experience was at the 2001 Tucson Gem & Mineral show. I forayed into the small sideshows held in the motels throughout town, an experience not for the neophyte collector as anything goes — anything — in the sideshows.

In one motel room, I was negotiating for a nice rhodonite crystal when a man appeared in the doorway with a small micro-mount containing, as he assured one and all, a piece of the Moon. He then entered into spirited negotiations with mine host of the rhodonite for the price of the specimen.

Apophyllite

After a bit of haggling back and forth, mine host had to decline the $1500.00 asking price with a sad comment about “…it being worth ten times the price”. At which point both gentlemen fell into an expectant and hopeful silence.

Excuse me, but do I have rube printed in big bold letters across my back? I bought the rhodonite and left.

Fluorite

Of course, I wasn’t always the victor in these little encounters, and I have several specimens of dubious heritage in my collection. However, I’m particularly fond of these little mistakes, because each is a celebration of my willingness to take a chance, to explore outside the safe confines of the main show – to risk possible failure in the hopes of finding that one special gem, that one important piece.

If the RO-Artist is a unique and interesting challenge, they at least entertain rather than irritate, and that brings me to the Mystic.

In one rock shop, I was examining a lovely rose quartz cluster when a woman next to me started telling me about the mystical powers associated with rose quartz.

“Rose quartz will strengthen the bonds of love.”

It’s a rock.

“Rose quartz also has healing energies, particularly if your illness results from a loss or special sadness in your life.”

It’s a rock.

“I have a special rose quartz crystal that I keep beside my bed at night.”

It’s a …. lady, you need to get a life.

Rose Quartz

For the most part, I tolerated the Mystic because they had the best intentions at heart, however there was one encounter with a Mystic that left me cold.

A friend of mine, Joan, was (and is) into every New Age gimmick in the world – crystals, astral photography, pyramids, the whole bit. Because she is my friend, I also supported her in these little adventures because they were harmless and brought her joy. What’s a little mystical power of crystals between friends?

However, several years ago, events took a darker turn when Joan was diagnosed with breast cancer.

In the midst of her traditional medical treatment, including chemo-therapy and surgery, Joan discovered a Mystic who recommended a retreat, fasting, and several unusual and potentially dangerous sounding treatments. In alarm, I insisted on going with my friend the next time she met with this “miracle worker”.

The Mystic seemed ordinary enough and at first she didn’t say anything unusual or harmful – the necessity of peaceful surroundings, extra sleep, spring water, eating more of certain types of foods known to be high in anti-oxidants. However, as the conversation progressed, she started getting into the need for Joan to undergo unusual procedures such as daily colonics, week-long fastings to achieve a “pure” state, and so on. At that point, I intervened.

“Why must Joan fast for a week?”

She must rid her body of the pollutants that are interfering with her healing process.

“Isn’t it dangerous for Joan, already in a weakened state, to go without food of any form for a week?”

She would be given herbal teas, and participate in group meditation, which would give her strength.

“What’s contained in the teas?”

Various healing and soothing herbs.

“What herbs, and how will the group meditation give her strength?”

At this point, the Mystic, sensing an unbeliever answered with the response all charlatans have used since the dawn of time: the experience is spiritual one and I, as an outsider, couldn’t possibly understand.

I pulled an Older Sister/Close Friend routine and got my friend the hell out of there. When I got home, I took my favorite dioptase crystal – the beauty of my collection and my pride and joy – and put it into a small, hand-painted wooden box lined with cotton. Giving it to Joan, I told her that this crystal had special powers. In the darkest moments of fear, I told her to take the crystal out of the box and to hold it tight and remember that it represented the most healing power of all – love.

Several months later Joan gave me back the dioptase, telling me that she no longer needed it. She was going to be just fine.

Dioptase