Archive for the 1 Category

THE GIFT

Posted in 1 with tags , , , , on July 22, 2010 by josieemery

Inner Sydney is a world of contrasts. The well-heeled, the survivors, the creative, and those who have fallen between the cracks in the social cement all mingle on the same pavement. It doesn’t take much to have those cracks appear. One minute you think you are in charge of your life and then…you’ve fallen through.

I’d noticed her whilst we’d been having our regular Women’s and Girls Emergency Centre Sub-committee meeting at my local pub. The pub is close to a major hospital. There’s a residential hotel next door. She had the look of someone from out of town. From the bush. She was eating dinner alone. After the rest of the committee left with their action plans I asked her if I could join her. She was grateful for the company.

She was a teacher from the central west. Her husband was a farmer. But he was in the city now for a triple-bypass. Her life had been the close-knit community of the country. She was floundering now. She asked about my group and I told her that we were involved with an organization providing support for inner-city women who had nowhere to live. No homes. Seemingly no hope. But, if you could just reach out and offer these women a sense of hope, of community, a chance to reach through the social cracks and get back on their feet…then hope was reborn and life could be seen to flower again.

Our steak and chips came. We ate.

She said how distressed she’d been to see such women as she wandered the streets whilst her husband lay in theatre: his chest open. She’d not seen women reduced to homelessness before. It was foreign, alien, to her conception of a world where people helped each other. It was so hard for her to conceive of a woman living in fear and confusion.

Her own daughters were scattered across the land: having families, having careers. Her own focus kept coming back to the rising generations: children needing a chance to become adults and make a mark in the world. And now seeing women who had tried their best…only to see it all come undone.

“I want to give you something,” she said.

She opened her purse and pulled out her cheque-book and wrote a cheque to WAGEC. She gave it to me. We looked at each other.

“I just want to do something.” she said, “Something for other women.”

We touched cheeks in the way women who don’t really know each other do.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you so much. I hope he’ll be fine.”

“He will,” she said. “He’s a survivor.”

We went out into the night together. An ambulance wailed by and swept down to the hospital entrance.

“All the best,” I said.

“And you,” she said. “And your organization.”

“Thank you.”

She smiled and I smiled back and we went our separate ways.

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Looking Into The Fire

Posted in 1 with tags , on July 5, 2010 by josieemery

He was about 8, a chubby, serious child with a look of abstracted inwardness that I remembered from my own childhood. The dreamer. He was with his mother and grandmother on one of the leather settees in the parlor at our local pub. I’d come down there too for the gas fire. It was cold winter. The flames curled around the imitation logs in a fair copy of a real log fire. Except that no logs diminished. Coals did not form and glow and shimmer: no red, gold, blue. No figures appearing in their depths. No fairy folk or trolls.

He stretched across a seat and stared into the shallow face of his iphone. He had a game up and running. Planes chasing planes. Explosions. Battles. Beside him an arc of real flames hissed and flared. He didn’t glance at it. He didn’t seek pictures in its heart. His pictures were before him: structured, ordered, accessible anywhere. Always the same pictures over and over. You can go deeper into the game but the game has always been defined. It will never take you anywhere not predetermined.

I remembered those cold nights in the farmhouse and the magic of the coals. I looked deep into them and watched those fairyland figures evolve. They suggested stories to me and I felt the stories unravel in my mind. Unlike the coals my mind’s fire did not consume itself. It fed deeper and deeper. It suggested more and other worlds beyond the first world of the fire and the second world of the images. Beyond a third world of stories were other possible worlds also waiting to be called into being. Waiting.

His dad came back with a tray of drinks and a fatherly joke for him. Dad admired the game. His back to the fire as well. Only I watched it. I wanted it to begin to consume itself and – in its slow, lingering death throes – create the possibility of pictures. The fire was always a dance between that self-consumption and the steadying hand of the fire-feeder who would stoke it.

The planes went down in the game as he played. I wondered about his mind and where it would go. How would it it feed and grow? Precise and structured, like a game, like the digital world that was as natural to him as the farmhouse fire had been to me. The pictures in my world had been analogs. From them I inferred a personal world of the imagination. The pictures in his world were digital. From them he would learn a series of actions.

For me it seemed natural to believe that the world was far, far bigger than anything I could imagine – because in my mind I could see all those misty worlds beyond worlds behind the images in the fire. There would always be characters out there yet unrealized, unborn, come to haunt me in my nights. But if the game contained all that ever could be imagined, where could the mind go in search of the beyond? And how could it go there? What inner techniques could he discover that would take him on such journeys?

Are we closing down our minds now? And if so: why? What is it that we are afraid to let imagination call up, turning instead to the predigested simulacra of the games? A world of rules and outcomes; inputs and outputs; where the only possibility of a world beyond the code is contained in that cryptic phrase: ‘error message’.

An error is a crack through which another reality strives to enter the world of rules.

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TAKING A TABLET IS NOT THE ANSWER!

Posted in 1 with tags , , , , , , on April 13, 2010 by josieemery

I’m noticing how book publishers and newspaper moguls are hailing the iPad as a possible ‘saviour’ of their hitherto paper-based industries. Rupert Murdoch, in particular, sees it as a way to get his closed-garden of print behind a paywall that will trickle-feed the empire.

He and the others are missing the real change that has happened. It’s a change I don’t care for myself. I’ve resisted it as best I can, but there comes a time you just have to accept that your old way of life is over. In the case of the paper-based product it will linger because the generations brought up on these media will also take a while to die off. But they will. Death IS the one thing we are sure about.

They speak as if ‘the newspaper’ and ‘the book’ are not technological and cultural artefacts but are somehow naturally-occurring substances which the human organism has been genetically hard-wired to read and absorb. They cite the figures that show we all ‘consume’ more and more print online than we once did offline. (Yes but we ‘consume’ it in a far different way to how we may have ‘consumed’ Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’.)

The idea of ‘consuming’ Tolstoy or Dostoyevski is pretty alarming. ‘Relate to’, ‘empathize with’, ‘are challenged by’, ‘have spiritual revelations…’ but ‘consume’? What does that mean?

We all know the story of Gutenburg’s printing press and the rise of reading culture – and the rise of both religious and political revolution that followed as the serfs and peasants allegedly learnt to read. Martin Luther and Karl Marx both used the written manifesto to ignite their cultural fires. Critical theology began shortly after the bible was both translated into the common tongue and churned off the first printing presses. As long as it was in Latin and no one could read it, the old theology was safe from scrutiny. In the Vulgate, it just didn’t make sense.

The whole problem for the ruling classes as reading exploded in the 18th-19th Century was to contain it to a level where workers could be instructed, managers could be informed, the gentry could converse…but no one could join the dots. Censorship became a necessity for social control. But it kept breaking down.

Folk tales and Romances were massaged into a brand new shape: the novel. The first novels were often written as exchanges of letters or as first person reports. (A new form always borrows content from an existing form.) This entertainment medium proved ideal for leisured ladies. It kept them quietly at home absorbed in fantasy…which was fine until they themselves started playing with the form: from Mme de Stael to Virginia Woolf via Jane Austen…and then Germaine Greer.

The newspaper took advantage of the next technological innovation – from hand-set press to linotype. The word ‘News’ was invented from the names of the four cardinal directions: North East West South. The newspaper was one of the major products of the Industrial Revolution. Everything about its production was about the division of labor and mechanized process.

When I was a freelance journalist in the 1980s, newspaper Union rules would not allow me to file my copy directly. No. I had to write my piece out and then dictate it over the phone to a ‘copy-taker’, who then typed it into the system. A sub-editor would then cut it to fit the space available and assign a suitably inflammatory headline.

The book business was similarly mechanized and divided. Writer and printer never met. It’s still that way. Writers Unions, Guilds and Societies still carry on as if writers and publishers were labor and management in a vicious factory system.

All this as if human society was an unchanging entity and technological advance was simply reinforcing the old ways of doing things. The primacy of print. The elevation of reading over others modes of perception. A belief that the novel was the ultimate form of human expression – that long-form, written and read, story was the key to culture.

What had escaped notice was that much of the world couldn’t read. That the Marxist and Maoist revolutions owed as much (maybe more) to the power of the visual. The Communists seized upon the old church method of using a visual Icon to ‘tell a story’. Political poster imagery reached its zenith through the Great Cultural Revolution in China in the 1960s. Much of the technical and artistic innovation in film-making was driven by the Russian revolution getting its story told via silent movies. Thank you Serge Eisenstein.

And what about the rise of radio? My generation, the ‘60s generation, embraced radio to consolidate our cross-cultural identities. The transistor fueled our rebellion. The novel as a form of identity-building began to fall against the onslaught of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, John Lennon, et al. In post World War 2 civil wars and rebellions, the radio station became number one target to be silenced.

The old print culture – newspapers and then paperback novels – depended upon another technical innovation to be promulgated. The rapid, efficient, nation-building system of railroad tracks. The train was an essential part of print culture. The rise of the news-stand at the station.

I love Bram Stoker’s, ‘Dracula’, as a book that brought all this together. First person narration by a dozen different people – all using leading-edge technology; typewriter, Edison phonograph, dictaphone – and the plot hingeing on the efficient railway timetabling of all Europe and England. The supernatural met the Industrial Revolution and exploded!

What sort of people benefitted most from this culture? Obviously they were not dyslectic. They were not visually acute. They weren’t dancers or musicians. Old-form print culture benefitted people like myself: short-sighted introverts with powerful memories and a facility with long-form written language (a highly artificial skill, when you think of it) and a particular form of reality processing and thinking. Our preoccupations became the heart of culture. And yet we were only a small percentage of the word’s population. Heartbreakingly, the extremely short-sighted (almost blind) Aldous Huxley was assigned the task of writing Mr Magoo scripts in Hollywood.

Those skills need constant learning, rehearsing and practice. For people without a natural facility in the reading medium if another way of communicating should arise that suits their skills better, they’ll take it.

Visual communication has been growing and growing at the expense of long form written story (and newspaper feature). Visual communication is more ‘natural’ than long form story. First we hear, then we see, then we speak, and finally we may read.

Yes, we do absorb more print online now than ever before. But look at how we absorb it! And look at how much sound, vision, color and movement accompanies it. How do you teach a 13 year old to read a novel when they are constantly absorbing 2 minute Youtube posts? That’s where the synaptic links are being laid down for future communications skills. That’s why newspaper and book buying is dying. What is the point of rewriting either ‘The Catcher In The Rye’ or ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’? That form of communication has had its day. Now we learn who we are by Googling our needs and desires. That’s what I did when I began to think that I was transgendered. I didn’t need a book. I needed a Chat Room.

To communicate now we do not need a publishing factory, a railway system, and a minutely divided structure of labor and management. That’s why the old publishing/newspaper system is dying. Where is the first place news organizations go for pictures of the latest calamity? Flickr! Facebook! They pull the images and the information down and poke them through the factory and maybe 12 hours later they’re available on the street…but they’ve already done the rounds of mobile devices. The latest ‘news’ is always old news.

Newspaper barons are like the old railroad barons. Their time has passed. Putting their content up on an iPad is like screening a movie on the bridge of the Titanic (a form of mass transport made redundant by the DC3). You could have done it, but the lifeboat was probably the better option.

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KING SOLOMON’S DATA MINES

Posted in 1 with tags , , , , on March 7, 2010 by josieemery

I’ve been on the road the last week. From Sydney to Brisbane and Brisbane to Melbourne. All of it responding to calls for story consultancy on media projects from downloadable locative games to a feature comedy movie. My seminar at State Library of Queensland’s new Digital space – The Edge – in Brisbane, with Jason Nelson, got me dreaming. We were ostensibly talking about using online archives as a basis for games. But we got into a riff about creativity and media and I was away.

We’ve been using archives as the basis for creative and scholarly work forever. Karl Marx wrote, ‘Das Kapitas’, sitting in the British Museum, calling up books and MS from their wondrous collection. Armchair cultural anthropologists from JG Fraser and his ‘The Golden Bough’ through Joseph Campbell’s, ‘The Masks of God’ series to Carlos Castenada’s ‘Don Juan’ books all pull their power from the library and the archive.

As we sat there in the new concrete and glass space, surrounded by leading-edge technology (with only the occasional glitch), I had a flash to the Library of Ashurbanipal: thousands of baked clay tablets accumulated in the Akkadian empire. They preserve the Epic of Gilgamesh, perhaps the first fiction narrative the world had known. It was preserved because the technology of pressing a metal stylus onto a clay brick to record the events in Pictographic language – and then baking the bricks – created an almost indestructible record. The library even had meta-tags. Smaller baked clay tablets summarized the contents of various sections of the library. But early archeaologists and scavengers totally mixed all the tablets up, so that it has been almost impossible to reconstruct the stories. All that data and no system.

In 1974 the sponsor of our seminar – the State Library of Queensland – had 80% of its stock damaged by floodwaters and silt. Queensland is a very flood-prone state and paper is a very water-damageable recording medium.

There are many cultures of which we know nothing because their data management systems involved such organic and destructible mediums as bark, wood, hide or reeds beaten to a pulp. Other cultures recorded some of their data in stone (Easter Island) but we have no way of reading those enigmatic records. There are scripts like the Cypro-Minoan which still defy interpretation. In these enigmatic spaces fictions, myths and fables have grown like rich, wondrous plants that tell us much about human dreams but little about the cultures whose data we cannot analyze.

Classical Athens and the era of the great Playwrights. We know that every year new plays were written and performed at the festivals. There must have been dozens of playwrights, scores of plays, maybe hundreds. There are references to many. But only the works of 4 remain. Why? Because they were recorded on scrolls, on paper. On materials that broke down in humid climes. Many perished in the great fire that destroyed the Library of Alexandria. Those that remain and bequeath us our ‘Classical Literature’ did so purely by chance. Our understanding of Classical Greece is randomised: as if someone spun a wheel and called out a number and the lucky winner got his play recorded on the list. And we got to create our cultural mythos from those scraps.

In my very first ‘real job’ Geologists Assistant at a desert gold-mine, one of my tasks was to log all the core samples obtained from deep drilling. They lay like long slabs of salami in metal trays, all identified by little wooden tags beside them that showed the bore hole and the depth. That salami contained gold, copper, rare earths and uranium. We had a very rare cyclonic flood and it swept through my core-sample shed and washed out all those little wooden tags before I could log them. I had a shed full of useless data.

Jump back to the days of the Homeric Epics: The Iliad, The Odyssey. Such stories were told and retold by skilled Bards with prodigious memories, using mnemonic devices and stylistic tricks to call up the stories and recast them anew for each audience – much like a Rap singer might use a system for rhythmic and rhyming loops to keep rolling out his/her stories. Or a Blues singer repeating their four-bar phrase whilst groping for the resolving phrase in the final four.

So the Homeric epics stayed because they were embedded not on frail paper but in human memory that was constantly rehearsing and recalling the tales to ensure that passage from generation to generation was precise and unchanged. As to are the dances and songs of Indigenous Australia.

Now we have a flood, a tsunami of data. So much of it that no one person or organization can grasp its totality. Data mining is the new frontier. Forget gold, copper, uranium…this is the real treasure. It will never be destroyed by flood or fire. It will go on accumulating. It’s more than a flood or a wave for they eventually recede, but this phenomenon shows no sign of ever abating.

And that leaves us as artists and storytellers to contemplate how we play with this wondrous stuff. No work of fiction springs from emptiness. Somewhere, somehow, a piece of data elicited a response in a human mind. Several pieces of previously unrelated data suddenly came together and from their juncture a new idea – a new story – erupted.

Feeling myself sailing so nervously on the surface of this flood I felt a shock, a transformation of my own consciousness.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

John Keats recording his response to a new translation of the Homeric tales in 1816.

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PRAGMATIC SPIRITUALITY AND VISIONARY ATHEISM

Posted in 1 with tags , , on February 21, 2010 by josieemery

I have lived all my life with an ongoing set of inner experiences that have enriched me, guided me, and sometimes terrified me. The experiences come in the form of startling dreams and night-time visions; a clear personal voice that guides me; encounters with ghosts and other emanations from a seemingly Other world; clear visions of lives I have previously lived; and moments of powerfully transcendent joy where I experience the Oneness of all…well, of all Creation.

Those moments of clarity are filled with a sense that this world of which I am a living, growing, dying part is also living and growing. I do not sense its death – though I do sense its transformation. I sense that my personal death, too, is also a transformation – even if only a transformation into decaying flesh that becomes worm-food and from which something else will gain the sustenance to further its own growth.

I recognise that this way of being in the world is called “spiritual”. I do not cultivate it; don’t go out looking for it; don’t go on vision quests or take psychotropic drugs. It is just there. It’s not a matter of ‘believing’ in a spiritual world, but of accepting that it is part of my reality.

Right now the world is torn by a debate between something called ‘atheism’ and something else calling itself ‘religion’. The spiritual is a victim of the crossfire.

Proponents of religion often distance themselves from those of us calling ourselves spiritual. The Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, recently carefully spelt out his sense of the moral superiority of a Christian approach to living in this spirit thing from ‘mere spirituality’. See …ARCHBISHOP.

And those of us with a sense of a spiritual essence to our lives have historically been real thorns in the side (or pains in the ass) for organised religion. Declared heretic we’ve often been killed, exiled, excommunicated or just plain ignored as we’ve argued for our own personal and direct experience of the Numinous without the gatekeeping of priests.

Now we’re getting it from the other side, too. The atheists, the skeptics, the rationalists find much to fault in our descriptions of our lived essence.

What we are in agreement on is that the world is in real, physical danger. But we trade insults over who or what is at fault and how ridding the world of religion, spirituality, or atheism is the first necessary step to saving it.

But the world is in far too much real danger for those of us with a desire to save it to spend time quarreling over our different modes of perception: our different ways of being in the world.

How does living with a consciousness of this thing called ‘spiritual’ measure up against people who live with a consciousness of a thing called ‘atheism’? How do the two seemingly opposed groups communicate and co-create life on earth? How do these two seemingly opposed groups work together to overcome the global crisis facing us?

Can we reach agreement on, as a starter, working to rid the world of licensed murder, mutilation and exploitation – whether in the name of politics or of religion? Can we just put a stop to the practices, and quarrel about the philosophies as we go? Can we also reach agreement on ceasing the pollution of the earth before we agree on the ultimate causes of that pollution? Can we set aside these differences to solve world hunger and poverty?

How do we start a global dialogue between people who experience the world in such vastly different ways? Can we do it by first acknowledging that our own perception of the world is not the final version? The world is bigger than any one person’s perception of it.

Can we find a way to share our spirituality and our atheism, our rationality and our visions?

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FEEL THE CHANGE COMING

Posted in 1 with tags , , on February 12, 2010 by josieemery

My dream last night was of a ghost town with a cemetery overgrown with wild grass.
A meditative space I wanted to go and stand within and listen to the wind in the grass.
But I was warned that the field was full of snakes
grown sleek on eating what lay in the graves beneath that soil.

Awake I remember the last time I meditated and was roused by the sound of wind in the grass.
I was sitting on a sand-dune near the beach
my life at a very low ebb.
Opening my eyes I found myself
eye to eye with a snake rustling through the sand.

It passed by my bare feet, its glittering eye on mine.

The sun was setting over the ocean
shafting through the rain clouds on the horizon
and I knew that I was
in the presence of the All
and all was being transformed.

A new world story is being born.
The old lies rustling in the wind
the crisp, flaking dead skin abandoned by the moving snake.

So many times, as a child, I picked up those
delicate membranes
and looked across the paddock
to see that sleek, shining
new-fleshed serpent.

The thrill of fear and awe as it slid across my path.

Deconstructing ‘team-building’

We don’t need a ‘team’, we need an interconnected network
that can operate in a constantly changing environment
with a constantly changing set of rules
constantly assessing self/environment/universe/ purpose
ready to shed the old skin and evolve the new
thriving on change
thriving on multiplicity
feeling the interconnectedness of all things.

Ask not, “What is wrong with the world?”

Ask: “How have we come to see the world as we see it?”
Ask it personally and ask it corporately and ask it of your world.

Ask where is the power in this world?
Ask where is the love in this world?
And bring them together.

Ask each: “What is the wisdom you have discovered?”

Together, write a story about what really matters to us all.

Listen for the rustling of the snakes through the sighing grasses
over the graves of all that went before.

The snake listens with its belly, feeling the earth’s vibrations
as menace approaches. Feel with your belly what you fear
for the future.

Feel what it is you want to happen.

Feel for joy, for it is there
in the grass, in the air,
shimmering with expectation.

Choose it and work to make it happen.

Shafting sunlight through storm clouds
purple and gold and the running sea
and the grey sand and the light fading.

And we are together on the beach.

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AVATAR, ARCHETYPES AND FOOLISH HEROES

Posted in 1 with tags , , , on February 8, 2010 by josieemery

I went to see Avatar not expecting much more than a spectacle. After all, it was a ‘Disney Picture’, and Disney pictures have a baked cookie-cutter storyline to them, with characters and situations cut from the Hero’s Journey mold, haven’t they?

The first 20 minutes confirmed my dark suspicions. A crippled marine in place of a child as hero, alone in a mocking adult world, but offered the chance to redeem himself and save his world. But then the story got interesting. The Hero’s Journey became the Fool’s Journey from the Tarot. The Patriarchy became the enemy and the dark, beautiful and treacherous world of Pandora became the only way to save the planet and our souls. The Masculine confronted the Feminine, and the Feminine won.

THE HOLY FOOL. Jake Sully

( ‘Sully’, verb, ‘to soil, to make dirty’)

An interesting name for a clean-cut American hero, yes? He’s come not to clean things up but to make them dirtier!

He’s wounded in the legs – the appropriate symbolic wound for the Fisher King of 12th Century Romances. He cannot be healed and his lands cannot be renewed until a perfect Knight asks the right questions. In this story he must ask himself the questions. In the end he must shame himself by admitting to his treachery. Only then can he begin his Healing journey.

He’s a fool with a strong heart. The Goddess gifts him constantly but he will not recognize the gifts. He makes inappropriate jokes at the wrong moment. He acts, ‘the fool’.

Contrast his buddy who has slavishly learnt everything about the Na”vi’ and yet does not have the blundering fool’s ability to make a mess of things – as when Jake first wakes up in the lab and disregards everyone’s call for him to be cautious. ‘A bull in a China shop’.

Assigned to the team as a security guard/soldier, he wanders off and becomes entranced by the flowers and plants. He fails to understand the threats hurled at him and incorrectly attributes his survival to his own Machismo. Pure Fool!

THE WARRIOR. The Colonel. The dark side of the warrior. Given his orders, he follows them relentlessly. Patriarchal thinking is about confrontation, winning and losing. Compare the actions of the women in Avatar with the actions of the women in Clint Eastwood’s, Unforgiven. The latter can only express their needs through the crippled language of the Patriarchs.

A woman’s world vs a man’s world. In the former, woman is strong, seer, teacher, partner, warrior. In the latter she is a whore and victim who calls up the Dark Warrior in an act of vengeance when the Law refuses to help. The two worlds could not contrast more.

Similarly with Cormac McCarthy’s depressing, masculine world of The Road. A story that begins with the author-induced suicide of the mother figure so that he can develop his world of bleak masculinity. I wonder how that story would have played if Doris Lessing, Jeanette Winterson or Margaret Atwood had written it? Would they have envisaged a mother killing herself rather than staying to fight for her child?

THE HEALING GODDESS GAIA. Neytiri is an ‘Avatar’ of her, as too is her mother, the Seer/Shaman. In Avatar acknowledgment is given both to the healing power of the earth and to the reality of death as part of the cycle of life.

I was intrigued why the planet was called ‘Pandora’? Was the use of a name that has become synonymous with ’women’s treachery’ the beginning of a campaign to reclaim women’s stories and return them to their original meanings? Was it a way of presaging a world built not on conflict but on cooperation? Even if we stay with the corrupted version of Pandora’s story that we have been bequeathed, we are still left with “Hope”. It is the first thing we need before we move to change the world.

Pandora? CLICK HERE.

Avatar is not a complete revision of the patriarchal hero’s journey by any means. It’s still a Disney Picture. Despite the tribal culture, nuclear family values are upheld. Neytiri obeys her parents. Women are given in marriage. It’s not a matrilineal culture. In the end the current cultural need to resolve conflict through a fight to the death between two Heroes is acted out. (But with an interesting twist if you think who it is that delivers the final, killing blow. The story has come a long way since the heroine twisted her ankle as she ran from the villain in her high heels…and was saved at the last gasp by the Hero.)

People have told me they found Avatar boring/irritating because they found the ‘story’ predictable and cliche-ridden. I always like to differentiate between ‘story’, ‘plot’ and ‘narrative’. The story of Avatar was sort of predictable to a point. The point being when he changed sides. The plot was intriguing. A hero fights most of his quest whilst in a coma and, in the end, embraces the Coma World as the real world. In his last fight he is defenseless whilst his Avatar does battle for him. Then he dies and is reborn as his Avatar.

Narrative? To me ‘narrative’ is the engagement between the audience and their values and wishes and the world of the film they are watching.This is what generates box office. It doesn’t matter how good the ‘story’ is if people’s narratives are not engaged.To me the narrative was one of engagement with the earth’s forces and the empowerment of individuals to live their personal values and to risk all to save their world.

And for me, personally, it was to revalue my own Fool’s Journey – and the fact that I, like Jake Sully, became my own Avatar and changed sides – and the way I value Pandora’s Hope as my constant companion through the darkness.

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THE HERO’S JOURNEY IS OVER

Posted in 1 with tags , , , on January 15, 2010 by josieemery

The story so far…
It is 3 am. She lies sleepless on her bed, staring into…nothing. It is not fear, or terror, or sorrow that transfixes her. She stares into the heart of nothingness. She realizes that, for the first time in her long life, she has no story to tell herself.
There was a time when the Hero’s Journey was everything to her. Decades after Joseph Campbell crystallized it into “The Hero With a Thousand Faces” it was seized upon by such screenwriting mentors as Christopher Vogler in “The Writers Journey, Mythic Structures for Writers.” She was such a writer and she not only wrote the Hero’s Journey, she lived it.
In short: the human mind is hard-wired to respond to a story of an orphaned loner who goes on a quest into the wilderness (after first refusing the call). He has a wise old man as a guide. He is tempted by Woman. He descends into the Underworld to confront monsters. Down there he will win the boon that will save his world. He will return to triumphant accolades.
The Hero’s Journey received the thumbs up from George Lucas, who had enthusiastically applied it in the Star Wars movies to great box office success. Disney and Warners and Paramount ran the Hero’s template over all their scripts.
But times change. The idea that we are hard-wired for a particular type of story passed out of vogue as post-modernism and brain plasticity studies took centre stage. Really what the Hero needed was CBT & NLP. Change his way of looking at the world and all his (self-created) problems would vanish.
The Hero was beginning to find that his services were no longer required. Perhaps it was time for him, like Odysseus, to pick up his oar and disappear into a foreign land?
Or to sleep in his mountain cave.
Or to lie transfixed in her bed, not knowing which way was forward and which was back. Where was Up? Was that Down? She had set out on her own Hero’s Journey as a foolish young man. The Fool, in fact, from the Tarot.
“With all his worldly possessions in one small pack, the Fool travels he knows not where. So filled with visions and daydreams is he, that he doesn’t see the cliff he is likely to fall over. At his heel, a small dog harries him – or perhaps tries to warn him of a possible misstep? But he takes no heed.”
He has no idea of what lies ahead and where his adventure will take him. And now she is his lived Avatar. Everything he both feared and desired in life has been granted him. He IS no more. She exists. And no one can tell her what to do next.
Joseph Campbell in, ‘The Hero With a Thousand Faces’.
“The third wonder of the Bodhisattva myth is that the first wonder (namely, the bisexual form) is symbolical of the second (the identity of eternity and time)….This is the meaning of those Tibetan images of the union of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas with their own feminine aspects…the union of the two is productive of the world in which all things are at once temporal and eternal, created in the image of this self-knowing male-female God.”
I had reached a point beyond which no stories from my culture could penetrate. All the guides had shown me how to go down to the final confrontation with my feminine Self. None showed me the way back into the world. There are no manuals, primers, pamphlets or FAQs on how one lives beyond this momentous change. It is seen as merely physical when it is the real essence of our metaphysics. The sexual and the spiritual are one.
I had no story any more. No guiding myth.
Trickster (in Lewis Hyde’s, Trickster Makes This World) called to me. He mocked the hero and the Hero’s Journey. There were times in his story when he did play the female – but only for a moment, to avoid capture – and then would revert to his own masculine groundedness. But he brought out ambiguity and sexuality and the earthy fragility of the human body and its desires in contrast to the hero’s airy detachment from such things. He did suggest the possibility of shape-shifting but not the reality of a life lived as mental flesh that coalesces into physical being. Trickster was Coyote: the dog who snaps at the heels of the Fool.

It bothered Lewis Hyde that he could find so little evidence for female Tricksters. As he so neatly said, “The classical hermaphrodite is born of the union of Hermes and Aphrodite; to say the figure represents Hermes is an insult to Aphrodite.” He did find some female Trickster stories amongst the Hopi and wondered if their matrilineal culture lay behind them. Was the paucity of such stories a reflection of rampant patriarchy? he wondered.
So why had he not read Walter Williams’ study of cross-gender lives in Native America? (The Spirit and the Flesh.) In particular, the role of the Berdache in Hopi society? Was it just the blinkered vision of science, where an answer to a question in one discipline lies just across the road in another, but the chicken never crosses that road and never picks it up?
“The berdache receives respect partly as a result of being a mediator. Somewhere between the status of women and men, berdaches not only mediate between the sexes but between the psychic and the physical—between the spirit and the flesh. Since they mix the characteristics of both men and women, they possess the vision of both. They have double vision, with the ability to see more clearly than a single gender perspective can provide. This is why they are often referred to as “seer,” one whose eyes can see beyond the blinders that restrict the average person. Viewing things from outside the usual perspective, they are able to achieve a creative and objective viewpoint that is seldom available to ordinary people. By the Indian view, someone who is different offers advantages to society precisely because she or he is freed from the restrictions of the usual. It is a different window from which to view the world…”
“Proceeding from the view that a person’s different character is a reflection of her or his closeness to the spiritual, berdaches are often associated with shamanism and sacredness. Such spiritual abilities mean that berdaches may take on specific ceremonial tasks that are recognized as specifically their own. Whether in blessing ceremonies, providing lucky names, offering spiritual protection, or predicting the future, berdaches are both respected and feared for their qualities of strength and power.”

Hyde’s study also embraced some of Hindu culture…but not all. Where were the Hijra? And where was Ardhanarishvara.

(Thank you Wikipedia.)
“Ardhanarishvara is one of the most prevalent forms of the Divine in Indian art for the last several thousand years.
The term is a combination of three words- ‘ardha’, ‘nari’ and ‘ishvara’, meaning respectively, ‘half’, ‘woman’ and ‘Lord’ or ‘God’, That is, Ardhanarishvara is the Lord whose half is woman, or who is half woman. Some scholars interpret the term as meaning ‘the half male’ who is Shiva and ‘the half female’ who is Parvati. Such interpretations are suggestive of dvaita, the duality of existence…
…Besides its emphasis on the unity of the outward duality, the Rigveda acclaims, ‘He, who is described as male, is as much the female and the penetrating eye does not fail to see it’. The Rigvedic assertion is explicitly defined. The male is only so much male as much he is female and vice versa the female is only as much female as much she is male. The maleness and femaleness are the attributes contained in one frame.”

There were times when I was in transition that I would go into the Art Gallery of NSW and stand and stare at the much broken statue of Ardhanarishvara there – and wander amongst the feminine grace of the Tibetan Buddhas. But I did not want to give up my own culture and embrace a foreign one. I agreed with Jung that exotic religions and cultures are too easy an escape. The exoticism distracts from the painful reality of lived lives. I felt this in Thailand – seeing the daily struggle for existence that had shaped the outline of the deities there. I prayed to them and they stared back at me and I could not meet their gaze for I had not lived in their world. Whatever it was I sought lay within me and within my own history.
Yet here I lay, so needful to be as fully woman as I could. Must I re-embrace this dreadful duality that I had fought all my life to overcome? From spiritual woman and physical man to physical woman and spiritual…who?
I lay there and I felt a presence near me. I surrendered to it and felt him place his hands on me. He was Hermes. He was The     Trickster. Orpheus. Monkey. I felt Coyote’s hot breath. Outcaste dweller at the crossroads, as I dwelt here at my own crossroads.
I prayed to him. How would he answer me?
“Pick a card,” he whispered, with a grin. “Any card.”
I knew he would cheat me. I knew he would lie, but the deck was so enticing and I selected a many-thumbed piece of cardboard and laid it down. It was, Card 21: The World, the Fool Reborn.
“A woman or hermaphrodite dancing, a wreath in the shape of a Yoni (the female sex), two wands, a cherub, an eagle, a lion, a bull.”


The end of the Tarot Hero’s journey. My life lived in a deck of cards. The dancer at the end of time. I had always been a Fool and I would continue to be. Trickster would go on mocking me. He was the little dog yapping at my heels. But I was the Fool who lived her foolishness and made it her story. I would go on living in discomfort and ambiguity. I wasn’t a Hero. I had no certainty. I danced between Yes and No and it was that dance which made the pattern of my story and the pattern of my life.
In the darkness and the nothingness I began to laugh at myself. I threw the card back at him and he vanished with a mocking grin. I got wearily up and made a pot of tea and sat and watched the hopeful dawn.

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Post operative reactions

Posted in 1 with tags , , on November 7, 2009 by josieemery

When the surgeon was marking me up for breast surgery with his felt-tip pen and a little plastic ruler he apologized for the time he was taking.
“That’s fine,” I said. “As my father would say, ‘Measure twice and cut once’!”
“Your father was a surgeon?”
“No. He was a carpenter.”
He laughed and told me that his grandfather had been a timber-cutter (lumberjack). His own best and favorite subjects at High School were maths and sciences, and woodwork and technical drawing. The first cluster, of course, put him in the “A stream”: scientists and doctors. The second were the students who became carpenters and plumbers. I admired the creativity with which he had resolved this dilemma. Now he could draw, cut, and practice medical science all on the same day.
The guy who did my sex change surgery was not as approachable. But he, too, was a great technician and the vagina he built me is a biotechnological marvel.
I chose a third surgeon to do my face and I chose with extreme care. I found him in Thailand. A great technician, a fine sculptor, and a wonderful human being.
Yet not one of these fine technicians showed any real understanding or appreciation of the hardest part of these procedures for the recipient of their skills. Pain relief, physical healing…all fine. But not the mental trauma, the psychic stress and shock. The Thai came closest. He insisted his patients remain in his care for 3 weeks daily post-op. nursing. But he was genuinely puzzled by my obvious mental distress after 10 hours of bone removal, cutting and slicing. My sex-change surgeon gave me a brochure that cheerfully informed me I could, “resume sexual activity within 12 weeks…”
My partner had left me because of my decision. I had not attempted to have sex as a woman before in my life. My only memories of penetration had to do with childhood sexual abuse. At 12 weeks I was alone, in pain, confused and suffering (without knowing it) a PTSD that really encompassed all of my life.
I had those three surgeries within a two-year period. I wanted them. I never regretted them. But in those two years I have had to relearn how to live my life. I’ve had to grieve the rejection of all my family, loss of my partner, and now the added difficulty of trying to find work as a woman.
Anyhow, point of the story. A few weeks before the second anniversary of my sex-change surgery I began manifesting a very profound depression. It reached its culmination on that second anniversary. Only then did I realize that I was in the midst of a major “anniversary reaction”. I regularly see a counsellor and she was able to keep me on track. I also saw a sex therapist who trained me in how a vagina works. (Believe it or not it is different to a penis!)
I discovered a significant online library of “anniversary reactions” to all sorts of events (but not to sex-change surgery). The searches helped me resolve the depression/anxiety/insomnia/suicidality. I cried as I read stories of young women’s reactions to the loss of a baby; older women and hysterectomy; the shock of divorce; a loved one’s death; veterans talking about the seemingly inexplicable revisiting of battle-stress years after the event.
And I came back to remembering being discharged from those various biotechnological institutes with my brand-new body parts, some pills, a brochure and a set of plastic dildos.
This is both a warning and a plea. A warning to those of us who have any life-changing/life-saving surgery. Be prepared for post-op. depression and take it very seriously. You lost more than you may have acknowledged in that surgery.
The plea? Let us work to ensure that proper psychological/life care is part of any major surgical intervention. Let us redefine successful surgery as a surgery that is successfully integrated into the recipient’s whole of life and insist that the post-op. care plan include ongoing and meaningful support: not just a brochure and the pills.

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MY MEDIA JOURNEY

Posted in 1 with tags on September 27, 2009 by josieemery

Now that I’m a month into taking The Real Possibility of Joy to the world – or at least to those editors/producers who feel it may be on interest to their audience – what are the themes emerging?

First is that no one knows anything about gender transition except those of us upon whom it has been thrust. This is important news. It is too easy to lock yourself into your own little world and think that, somehow, the wider world understands it. Nope. Ain’t so. I have had to take many a deep breath and count to three before patiently explaining that a transsexual woman is not a transvestite – and even that ‘transsexual’ is an adjective and not a noun. There are both transsexual men and transsexual women.

My hate mail has brought me back to that hoary old cliche that a transsexual woman is simply a gay man without the balls to admit that he is gay. (Joke intended.) C’mon! Gay men do not want to be women. OK? Gay men are men. Lesbians are women. People are people.

BTW. The numbers (when kept accurately, as in Sweden) indicate that there are as many transsexual men around as there are transsexual women.

No, I didn’t go through all this just so I’d feel comfortable in designer frocks. There are plenty of TS women who choose not to dress like I do. And, whilst on the subject of what may have made me make the change…it WASN’T because I was sexually abused as a small child. Lots of us had quite benign childhoods. Mine was nasty, but that was just the luck of the draw. It may have affected my sexual preference and my ability to relate, but it didn’t affect my gender identity.

Mostly, though, what comes through is the astonishing and beautiful acceptance of my story, of my life. All my life I had anticipated rejection, so to suddenly find acceptance is the most precious thing. That it took me so long to achieve is my only sadness.the launch

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