I have said several times in these pages that I do not find change difficult. I did, however, find the change asked of me in Reeducation difficult. This task involved changing my focus in life from joy and pleasure to suffering and pain. I did not want to take this plunge and it was very difficult to do. It was also very difficult to find my way back, even though when I finally did, it was almost instantaneous – as though I had clicked my heels together like Dorothy, and been transported home.
Without the burden of Reeducation the days are so easy, it is hard to believe. I almost want to pinch myself, to make sure it is not a dream. There is an empty space where pain used to live. It used to be filled with work and pleasure but I have not yet filled it, as this seems downright decadent. I stand and look at it. I am amazed at its size and also its emptiness, its way of not dragging on me. I had become so used to limitations that I have not yet expanded again to fill that space.
In Reeducation, “acceptance” was a major value. We were to accept that reality was a dark and dreary place. We were to accept that we were more guilty than we could know, more flawed than we could see. We were to accept a very small future. We were to accept everything except ourselves. This was one of the logical contradictions, the fatal flaws in the entire enterprise. Now, just being able to breathe without attending yoga classes to do it, and not to carry being oneself as a burden, makes the world very much lighter than it recently was.
Reeducation thought I should not be an intellectual. It became very difficult to be one for a long time for that reason. Creativity was interdicted. Nothing but drudgery was left. And now I fly through that. I seem to do things with one hand, as if from an Olympian height. There is so much that is so easy.
***
This was written on an excellent day in summer. Today as we approach the Equinox life does not seem so easy but what it says is still essentially true. And my most common spam comments still point out to me that since this is an intelligent weblog and I am not a famous professor, the quality of my writing here misrepresents me. But I challenge anyone to reveal as much of themselves as I have in these pages, or to say so much that is true.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Maybe I’ve been having some equinoctial issues too. But somehow this energized me.
How do they mean that the quality of your writing misrepresents you? Are they saying that you have no right to say what you are saying until you become famous?
Tom – good, I always fear the posts in this vein are a bit self-indulgent.
“Are they saying that you have no right to say what you are saying until you become famous?”
Basically, yes. I think it is someone I know and who is jealous because I have traffic. He uses aliases and goes through anonymizers, so that the comments appear to come from .au, .za and so on. He warns readers that they should not consider anything I say to be insightful because I appear to be brighter than my Academic Record might indicate. He appears to believe this weblog is intended to represent me as a fancier person than I am, and that I am in this way defrauding readers.
(That is very funny logic, I know. But if this is who I think it is, and I think it has to be, he wanted to keep dating – that is what is behind all of this – and I decided blogging was more interesting, thence the jealousy of the blog. I’ve spammed most of the aliases and IP addresses, so now more veiled comments along these lines appear on sites where I comment – if said sites are by professors. Some of said sites, although anonymous, are actually by professors I know IRL, which makes it sort of amusing.)
Yeah, sounds like someone who wants to bring you down for personal reasons. The eternal myth of dysfunctional males is that is only they could rob you of your self esteem, you’d have no reason not to fall for them. This is the specious ‘reasoning” behing the everlasting gender wars, which are started by dysfunctional men (and often kept going by them, too).
The secret I have found lurking behind the structures of patriarchy is that gender discrimination is not based up male superiority or on merit but upon the dirty little secret that so many men have, that they are not worth taking up female time because they’re men. The attacks on feminist and other women’s blog are a way for these men to try to persuade themselves that the reason for their lack of self esteem is actually linked to their being somehow superior in a number of ways.
“The eternal myth of dysfunctional males is that is only they could rob you of your self esteem, you’d have no reason not to fall for them.”
Yes indeed – also on the strange linking of low self esteem and superiority. I suppose it is really rough having to delink from intuition so as to “be a man” … and it seems to make them jealous of women in general.
I had an interesting conversation with my friend the psychic ex-prisoner, who is quite unique. He said that in order to have his visions come in clearly he had to drop the male identity he had been socialized into. He saw this but was stumped about how to do it for a while, until he realized he would not have to drop masculinity per se, i.e. his whole identity, just the part of socialization that shuts off intuition. And he does in fact give off an unusual gender vibe and not a gay one – more Tiresias-like.
The funny thing is that most of the men at the gym (I can’t think of one who doesn’t) runs on “intuition”. In a true animal sense, this is the true masculinity. There was a reason that Lacan and others speak of castration as applying to all men who identify with society. To separate from your intuition in order to belong IS castration. But those who are attractive for themselves (and not for their image, position in society, or car they drive) are the uncastrated ones, who will not disappoint women, and therefore will not NEED to rely upon maintaining the artifices of patriarchy in order to find pleasure in and with women.