“Whether youʼre a human being, an insect, a microbe, or a stone, this verse is true. Everyone knows on an intellectual level that Change is inevitable. But many people don’t feel it on an emotional level. And so they create gods, supernatural authority figures, to stand between them and Change — big-daddy-God, big-cop-God, big-king-God. For many people, God is just another name for whatever makes them feel special and protected. Earthseed deals with ongoing reality, not with supernatural authority figures.” — Octavia E. Butler
If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.
— The Combahee River Collective (1977)
I watched Mad Max: Fury Road again last week. Imagine: the power of the world in the palm of your hands. All of the earth’s water, an infinite and ungovernable resource, is made scarce to be owned and operated by you, one man in a tower. Society is built on gas, war, and fear. Water is shared whenever you feel like it. It is by your hand people will live or die. What has that kind of power? Is it a man or is it a god? Men go to war and women are bred to produce and sustain an army of men built for war. There's no life. Only death. The men, all sons and brothers, are your faithful servants. The cause? Preservation of power. For who? You. Daddy. Daddy’s approval is god’s approval. You are the world's redeemer. The earth is sour. Our bones are poisoned. Now, there’s no such thing as death by natural causes. We die in the name of or by the hand of abusive power.
This is happening.
I wish I could remember the general public feeling when this movie released. I don't remember my thoughts about the film at the time other than my boner for the cinematography, the score, the action and Charlize. 2015 me wasn't as aware of her body then as she is now. I've learned how to broadly and intimately identify patriarchal violence since then. What I know now has come with age, some reading, and some sex.
Similar to what bell hooks has said about love, our personal attitudes about sex are tied to our culture's politics and what our nation says is important. Patriarchy and every oppressive 'ism' are the foundation of our culture's politics. The foundation we learn about the most in childhood is patriarchy. “We, individuals,” she says, “uphold a system that undermines our mental health when we enforce an unspoken rule in the culture as a whole to protect the rule of the father.” Our unconscious marriages to patriarchal thinking and action creates a form of deadness.
Patriarchal thinking demands that all decision making power—your's, mine, everybody’s—yield to the rule of the father, capital G god or the nearest man in the room. Whether we believe god is a woman or we understand god as Spirit, consciousness, or Source, we are in peril as long as powerful men and those who admire them believe God is an all-powerful father figure who gave birth to themselves, mini gods, perfect in every way.
History says the role of men is to be gods and fathers not people.
That’s scary and it’s our world.
"Patriarchal methods of organizing nations, especially the insistence on violence as a means of social control, has actually led to the slaughter of millions of people on the planet."
— bell hooks
Majority of which carried out in the name of Dad.
To which I ask, what exactly is the role of the father? Anybody know?
Is it to be a god or is it to be a person?
Is it to tend to the needs of the spirit?
Is it to help us see life directly, clearly for ourselves?
We’ll put a pin in that.
"If men are to reclaim the essential goodness of male being, if they are to regain the space of openheartedness and emotional expressiveness that is the foundation of well-being, we must envision alternatives to patriarchal masculinity. We must all change."
— bell hooks
There is the force of nature and there is the force of discontent and powerlessness engineered by patriarchal violence. We’ve been shaped and molded by both. Direct confrontation with patriarchy divorces strength from violence.
How we understand sex, the act, is shaped by our beliefs about god, men, women, and children. What we believe about god is a reproductive justice issue. A nation's identity is bound to how I use my own Black and woman body. My relationship with my body requires regime change; that's crazy to me. Sex is taboo because the more you know the more power you have over your life, your body, and your future which is disruptive in cultures of domination. Sex is normal. Gender is fluid. God is change. These are my points of view.
Esther Perel said in her monthly live workshop the life force and the death wish have a relationship. An antidote to deadness—a remedy or medicine taken or given to counteract dimming, numbing, disconnecting, dissociating—affirms life. Affirms! Life! Because we live in a culture of deadness, promoting immortality for a ruling class and killing the poor, I ask myself, how can I resist deadness and embrace death? How do I own my life force and my death wish? How do I accept that all of it is me? How do I get in touch with the life force, like Audre Lorde says, that moves me toward living in a fundamental way? These are medicine cabinet inquiries.
I read an email about a 'pandemic-era' film described as miraculously having ‘no Covid-talk’. I watched the trailer. One of the best American films I've seen in ages? Wholly original, subversive, and universally relatable? Really? Glossy reviews. I don’t need to see the film to know it’s bad, but you know what? I think the lead was languishing. Esther's colleague, an organizational psychologist, used the term ‘languishing’ to describe pandemic dissociation. I won’t lie. I started watching his TED talk and asked the screen out loud if it was a white man thing.
He said languishing is a feeling of muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. It is the opposite of flow which is an active participation in the real world. It’s stagnation, emptiness, ennui. I got that. Normal people stuff. Except he noticed when he was languishing he wasn’t depressed. He still had hope. He wasn’t burnt out. He still had energy. He wasn’t lonely. He was with his family. He just felt a little bit aimless and a little bit joyless. Chile. How does an existence like that get made in a pandemic? No depression? No burn out? No loneliness? None? Sounds white to me.
He describes it as a void between depression and flourishing. Instead of survival fears like am I going to eat? Am I going to end up homeless? How am I going to pay my rent? It's existential. Am I making progress? Does any of this matter? He claimed the term was the dominant mood of the year, and it appeared in a headline as a synonym for ‘pandemic apathy’ which was startling to me.
Why languishing and not grief?
I look around and I see grief. But feelings of ‘meh’ and ‘blah’ are possible when you are not in direct contact with an ongoing reality of surviving and/or raising self determined children in an anti-Black, anti-sex, anti-trans world with no infrastructure or social support in a pandemic, a depression, on a normal day, whatever. Different lives. Different worlds.
The uses of fear in the world will always outweigh my own. I want to know the difference between legitimate fear, which is informing in deep ways, and illegitimate guilt which is a side effect of a culture that promotes deadness and denies every person a dignified death experience. A centuries long attempt to eradicate difference, variance, and change.
Paraphrasing Audre, to act against oppression is integral with self and motivated from within. We give up deadness, senseless suffering, numbness, and self betrayal. We don’t accept resignation, despair, self denial and powerlessness as native states of being. We hold the power to recognize our deepest feelings and honor them with our lives. We accept change and shape change1.
“All that you touch you Change
All that you Change
Changes you
The only lasting truth is Change
God is Change”
— Octavia E. Butler