Creation and Liberation

Liberation – one of the predominant metaphors of the therapeutic professions, and certainly one of the guiding influences within popular psychology and the self-help movement. A strong religious tradition, a particularly Western religious tradition embedded in biblical narratives such as the Old Testament exodus story. The liberation story insists that there is a “right” party, which is also an oppressed party, held captive through strong and destructive forces and people. In this posting I compare the liberation story with another narrative, one which also carries a religious lineage with it, but one which has not been as influential in the therapeutic culture. That is the tradition of creation. In the worlds of creation various possibilities for life are created -- communally formed or produced. In the liberation tradition oppressive ways of life are identified, fought against, and escaped from.

Why must our liberations so often insist that the only way toward an affirmation of one is through the negation of the other?

Why must our liberations so often insist that there must be a victim and a victimizer... and that this distinction between victim and victimizer be clear and unequivocal?

Why must our liberations so often minimize those many times in our daily lives, and amidst our daily relationships, where we live in ways other than the victim/victimizer roles?

Why must our liberations repeatedly amplify and enhance those very powers which produce cruelty?

Why must our liberations, when they do permit a recognition of our powers, insist that these powers be primarily tied to the victim/victimizer story?

Why must our liberations so often direct and limit our options regarding our sense of identity?

Can we instead tell tales of love, of influence, of laughter, of beautiful and powerful relationships?

Can we tell tales of creation, of together making worlds with joy, with response, with difference, with openings of understanding?

Can we tell tales of mischief, of the creation of Nomad War Machines, of the creation of powers which refuse to be limited by the institutions and influences at play?

Can our creative powers be given precedence over our needs for liberation? For any movement to more loving, connected and responsible worlds must be created, made by hands and minds, feet and voices. Perhaps these acts are more works of creation than they are works of escape. And these are always acts of joint creation -- even when the creative partners might not be easily evident.

Our creative movements are powerful. We must be aware of these powers. These powers have the potential of being destructive just as they can also be loving or funny or hopeful.

When we use our powers to create tales of liberation, can we remember the influence of these creations? When we generate tales of liberation, can we remember that we are creating worlds dominated by victims and victimizers? Can we remember that these created worlds are not simply pure and innocent? They can produce the powers of violence as easily as they can of love.

Can we remember that Nazi-thought necessitated an identification of a certain people as victims? Can we also remember that the creation of Nazi-like worlds also necessitate a victimizer? Arguably, the world’s greatest horrors have been generated through the creation of such victim/victimizer relations.

Could it be that much of the violence we encounter occurs when a person, or a people see themselves as being victimized by another group or another person? Could it be that much of the violence we encounter is an attempt to liberate, an attempt to ensure justice?

This is an invitation to create... to create worlds where many gifts become evident, where they grow, where they spread outside of limited identities, where they create connections , abundant and life-giving connections, rather than separations, boundaries and clarified distinctions.

Talking Alive

Nietzsche and the Affirmation of Life



I have developed a certain passion for the thinking of Nietzsche in recent years. He appears to me as a thinker who searches for ways to put aside the influences of those structures, institutions, and ideas which impose upon life, remove us from the nuances of movement which life brings. Yet, at the same time, he creates -- he finds ways to join with life in the very act of making, creating -- specifically he creates ways of living and thinking (becoming) which enable life to be met close to its own terms.

Nietzsche repeatedly exceeds the reputation many ascribe to him. For example, he said much more than "God is dead!" Ironically, in spite of his defiance against religion, against all those influences which impose upon life, he spoke most highly of the thoughts in the gospels. He loved the Christ of the gospels. And, he certainly considered himself continuing a line of thinking, a way of engaging with the world which he saw within the words and actions of the New Testament Christ.

A couple of Nietzsche's aphorisms here... simple thoughts about life and relationships which reveal a very different side of Nietzsche to the idol-tossing, table-turning, God-is-dead thinker for which he seems to be most known.


First he speaks of love.

Love and Honour -- Love desires, fear avoids. That is why one cannot be loved and honoured by the same person, at least not at the same time. For he who honours recognises power -- that is to say, he fears it, he is in a state of reverential fear. But love recognises no power, nothing that divides, detaches, superordinates, or subordinates. Because it does not honour them, ambitious people secretly or openly resent being loved.

And Nietzsche talks of the-many, of things akin to abundance...

Philosophically Minded -- We usually endeavour to acquire one attitude of mind, one set of opinions for all situations and events of life -- it is mostly called being philosophically minded. But for the acquisition of knowledge it may be of greater importance not to make ourselves thus uniform, but to hearken to the low voice of the different situations in life; these bring their own opinions with them. We thus take an intelligent interest in the life and nature of many persons by not treating ourselves as rigid, persistent single individuals.




Life lived with love, outside of those things which separate, which make higher or lower, and life lived amidst the multiple -- this was, at least in part, the way life was seen and encountered by Nietzsche. In the nineteenth century, an awakening to the Alive was occurring, what Deleuze more recently called a "radical empiricism," and Nietzsche was a part of this awakening, along with the likes of William Blake, Walt Whitman, George Eliot, Lewis Caroll, Henri Bergson, and of course, many, many others.

The Orchid and the Wasp

Old Darwin awoke a new world. His book, Origin of Species, is a thing of beauty -- he paid attention to finches and tortoises, all manner of life; he endeavoured to listen, to hear that “roar on the other side of silence” which George Eliot talked of. And a roar it was, an earth shattering roar, toppling many an artifice. He attended to creation, not authorities, and, in turn, he created, he formed thoughts which themselves evolved into an idea which transformed the world.

And yet there were some things he left out of his listening and his creating. But maybe these things were left out because things are always left out, they must be left out. These overlooked things awaited other ears, other creators.

Watch the dandelion in its momentary joining with the butterfly. The dandelion and the butterfly both evolved for just such a moment. Flowering plants and flying insects evolved together. Neither is able to survive without the other, and neither existed prior to the other. They evolved not just cooperatively, but they evolved to require each other, to desire each other in a way that is akin to the sexual. In fact, for the flower, this moment is a sexual act, for it is through the butterfly that the plant is able to be pollinated. The touch of sex for the plant is the connection with the body of the insect. And it is this act, this moment, which insures a continuation of genetic flows through generations.

Darwin seemed to overlook this evolution through attractions. For Darwin it was mostly about competition, survival of the fittest, tooth and fang. However, Gregory Bateson understood this process. He saw many levels of communication not only between like-organisms, but between species. He discussed the relation between the horse’s hooves and the development of the prairie sod – neither can exist without the other. And, Deleuze also saw such a movement through time, only he decried Darwin’s non-evocative “theory” in favour of a “becoming”, something akin to a love-affair, something imbued with poetics. He talked of the orchid and the wasp. He mentioned how every orchid contains within it the shape of a wasp, a form which is inclusive of the flying insect. And the same with the wasp -- the orchid’s form is a very real part of the wasp. Deleuze called these “becomings”, rather than evolution, suggesting a process that necessitates a mutuality, a communal dance of sorts, and it is this shared dance which invites change, movement, rather than simply a force, such as evolution.

The dance becomes complicated, utterly abundant... for, because of such becomings between flower and flying insect, orchid and wasp, most everything we as humans require for nutrition (with the exception of those things which come from the sea) is dependent upon this relation. The relation between insect and the flowering plant ensures that we are able to have grains, seeds, nuts, fruits, green vegetables, root vegetables, tubers. And not just us, but most terrestrial animals are dependent upon this relationship --even the meat we eat requires it, for animal protein forms as a result of consuming the products of such flowering plants.

Evolution is not simply a process of survival of the fittest, of competition. Much of life, terrestrial life, is dependent upon the becomings of something akin to a love-affair between insect and flower. This mutuality between insect and flower created a basis from which birds and mammals were able to enter into the flows of life.

And I ask, is our work with people any different? We certainly don’t become/change/evolve on our own. No, we create spaces within ourselves for the Other, for a multitude of Others. We create room within our lives and our words for the gifts which others bring, and they also do such for us. We repeatedly honour the gifts of the Other by allowing our own lives to be formed to the contours of such gifts. Is it not through such processes whereby we all shift and move? And, while we can certainly experience the movements of life amidst our day-to-day interactions, those most significant changes, do they not also, as in the evolution of flower and insect, occur through generations, many generations?

It appears to me that the becomings of life might often bear much similarity whether the relation is between insect and flower or between person and person, people and people. We always become together. Dare I say -- there is no other way to become.

Celebrating Walt Whitman

I have been quite taken recently in my revisiting of the American poet, Walt Whitman, in his book, Leaves of Grass. Thought I would share just a few of Whitman’s thoughts.



All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
(What is less or more than a touch?)

Logic and sermon never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper in the soul

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars...
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.


The words of the true poem give you more than poems,
They give you to form for yourself poems, religions, politics, war, peace, behaviour, histories, essays, daily life, and everything else,
They balance ranks, colors, races, creeds, and the sexes,
They do not seek beauty, they are sought,
Forever touching them or close upon them follows beauty, longing, fain, love-sick.

Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre-figure of all,
From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light,
But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light,
From my hand from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever.

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know nothing else but miracles...

Mathematics

When the world appears empty

Just count...

The imperfections on a leaf
Swallows passing over the chimney
Stabs of light on the surface of the creek
Plastic toys on an August beach

Angels in disguise
Devils in details
Heartbeats of fear
Warm breaths of lovemaking

Lawyers in the phonebook
Judges in the newspaper
Politicians speaking their masters’ words
Construction workers who curse at politicians

Reunions at the airport
While on the bus -- eyes which must never meet
In the park -- Hands held, fingers entwined
Parents hovering over toddlers in the playground

Pores in the skin of the cheek
Stones on the side of the road
Weavings in a bed sheet
Vibrations in the purr of a cat

Just count...

Touch

Encircling and colliding
Around a me and a you

That’s what they do

I learn to love these loves
Love their gifts
Simple in their surprises
Love their impossibilities
Which are never truly revealed
Love their wordlessness
Even their meaninglessness
I learn to love these loves
For they are just a touch
Pure touch
And only touch
A touch across mountains
Across seas
Across rooms
Across differences

Touching
Through the wetness of the sand
Through the crispness of a snowdrift
Through the mystery of the eye
Through the honesty of the hand
Through the excess of a digitizing universe
Dissolving the flesh of words
(For that is what living words can only be)
Into ten million pieces which
Reappear congeal re-form
In unseen places
A resurrection is confirmed
Through fingertips on plastic

Fingertips on fingertips
Lips to cheek
Palms warm and comforting
The touch of a friend
Of a lover
Of no category
A touch undefined
Unfiltered.

A touch of something lost
No completion

The touch of a child’s hand
My own child
Holding my arm in utter confidence
But we know
And dare not say
That one day even this touch will cease
Or will it?
Yes No
I will postpone the tears

But what presumption
I am a fool
Tears arrive
Uninvited
For in this very moment
My arm is still held
The confidence is still palpable
In the memories and dreams of this night

A joy
An indescribable joy
(Joy can never be described)
Touches upon the shoulder
Tenderly like the moon upon the sea
For that is what a touch is
Our loves our joys must be
Can only be

A brushing-over
A lingering

There is no grasping
In such a touch

Nietzsche Talked

Nietzsche talked of
The strong and the powerful
If only he had not been understood by a reading of history backwards
If only Nazi and Nazi-like establishments had not revoltingly
Tied themselves to such a free and contrary spirit
Such bandits of life
To manipulate the dead

And just a reminder
Nazis (both new and old) don’t read
They can spell (perhaps)
And they can certainly count
But they are not able to read
And they never are able to read Nietzsche

The strong and the powerful for Nietzsche
Bear no resemblance to imperial war-machines
The strong and the powerful
Never lay down to rest

In the safety of nations
Or schools or churches
In idea-regimes
Or systems of clinical precision

Rather
The strong and the powerful
Come into life
Through an incessant walking of the hills
In the common and available
In fields and hedgerows

The strong and the powerful for Nietzsche
Never come to be
In methods and technologies
Never in philosophy
Even less in theology
Never in a forcing of thinking into rigid lines
Never in a forcing of anything

No clarity
Just thought upon thought
Step upon step
Stone upon stone
Aphorism upon aphorism
The strong and the powerful
Appearing through additions
Not reductions

Through a heaping of thought
A squirming of bodies
Through an endless dispersion
Rhizome movements of
Mind and flesh

Perhaps the strong and the powerful
For Nietzsche
Never come to be
Whatsoever

Just a becoming
Forever a becoming

Through shifting and moving
Like summer breeze
Always surfacing on winds
And tides and currents
On the evolutions
And revolutions
Of earth
Of sky and water
Of life