Tag: No place for sheep

Watch out for the undertow

This morning someone used the towel which hangs
in the bathroom, the one I claim for myself.  I’m not so much critical of the fact that someone else used
my towel – these things happen – but more the fact that when I went to dry myself,
the cold wet of an already damp towel jarred and left me in ill spirits on an
otherwise perfectly fine morning. 
Or is it a perfectly fine morning? 
Today I have promised one of
daughters that I will help her with an essay on the topic of fear and anxiety.  
We all know fear : that cliff
you’re about to drive over, that near miss on the road, that accidental slip of
the knife.  Fear, actual and
intense that sets off your adrenaline big time and leaves your underarms prickling with
sweat and a racing heart. 
But anxiety is worse.  Anxiety is insidious.  Something out there, sometimes you know
not what, sets your heart racing, your pulse soaring and all you know is that
you feel a deep sense of dread. 
The old fight/flight response to fear kicks in but it doesn’t budge.  It hangs around.  
When I feel anxious there’s nothing clear cut to
fight.  There’s nothing obvious to
flee and so I’m stuck, bathed in these hormones with a vague sense of what
might be troubling me but an inability to shift it because it is not what
might be called real. 
Even now I can feel it.  I try to attach it to something: that
talk I’m to give to a group of post grad students at the end of the week,
rehearsal anxiety, free-floating fear of the unknown, but is that enough? 
I’ve prepared for the talk.  It should be okay.  Is that enough? 
For me sometimes even thinking about
anxiety can make me anxious.  And
anxiety is contagious.  I pick it
up from other people, quick smart, especially from those who are near and dear
to me. 
It’s also the stuff of terrorism, the
ways in which certain people play on our fears to divide and conquer. 
In Thomas Keneally’s novel, Flying
Hero Class, the narrator anticipates the
hijacking of a plane and makes a plea for solidarity among the passengers.
What they will do these hijackers,
he says, is to select a few of us for special treatment – cruel treatment.  Those selected will be chosen for some
fault of their history, culture or some such thing.  They will be isolated and punished.  Basically they will be punished in
order to split up the rest of the group. 
It’s an old technique.  Those not selected will gradually find
themselves withdrawing from these victims.  Gradually those not selected will feel a sense of blame
towards these others, a sense of their badness.  And all of this will emerge out of a sense of not having
been chosen. 
We must avoid the process at all
cost, the narrator argues.  Solidarity will help
us.  Black and white, Jew and
gentile must come together to avoid the divisiveness of the hijackers. 
On the other side there are Helen Garner’s thoughts from The First Stone.
‘I’ve seen hesitant people
bludgeoned by an appeal to solidarity,’ she writes.  ‘Solidarity can be used to mock genuine doubt, to blur a
fatal skid in reasoning.  Run the
flag up the pole and see who salutes. 
Whenever I feel in myself the warm emotional rush of righteousness of
belonging, that accompanies the word solidarity, I try to remember to stop and
wait till the rush subsides so I can have a harder look at what has provoked
it.’
I too can feel the clash of anxiety,
alongside my wish to belong when I press the send button to make a comment on
that controversial blog, No Place for Sheep, where people can be very generous and thoughtful and yet a other times they might brawl on line
about important topics and some actually abuse one another. 
But I am drawn to this anxiety, too, like
a toddler to an open socket.  I’m
drawn to the excitement of it, the kick-in of hormones that can leave me
feeling more alive.  
Without
anxiety life might become too drab and ordinary.   But watch out for the underto, or the ‘under toad’ as the young Walt, a character in John Irving’s novel, The world According to Garp, calls it.  
Anxiety needs to be optimal to inspire and fire you up.  But too much anxiety and you wind up paralysed.  

War, sex and babies.

One of my daughters tells me I am too inward looking and that I do not engage with the world in any meaningful way. I do not know what is going on beyond a four kilometre radius of my home, she says.

She may be right. I am, as they say, out of touch.

It is hard to put things together.

This is the closest I can get to an image for this post: Mealtime and four cats – the tabby male, the others female, momentarily in harmony.

Today I listened to the radio as I drove around that four kilometre radius of my home, dropping off one daughter here, and shopping there. Food for the table.

When I reached home, I pulled my car into the driveway but did not stop the engine until the programme was over.

A certain Dr Christopher Ryan was talking about sex, but not in the way I’m used to hearing people talk about sex on the radio, not in that nudge-nudge, wink-wink sort of way, or that other, worse still censorious way, where the likes of artists like Bill Henson get hauled over the coals for indecency.

In a nutshell, Ryan talked about the way in which there is a connection between the aggression that gives rise to war and the repression of our sexuality. He cited research that demonstrates a correlation between the length of time babies are held and nurtured along with the amount of latitude offered to adolescents in exploring their sexuality and peaceful societies.

He contrasts certain other societies – which Ryan fears are on the rise – where children are not held for long as infants, nor fed maximally, nor nurtured in warm loving environments and where adolescents are discouraged from expressing their sexuality, with a warrior mentality that leads to war.

Earlier on the radio I had heard a snippet of live footage from a journalist who walked through the streets of Kabul with an Afghani woman to experience first hand what life is like for women there. Apparently the streets are typically filled with men and boys. The number of women outdoors is negligible. Women do not dare to venture out for fear of being harassed and sure enough it happened before the journalist’s very eyes.

The woman he travelled with was grabbed by a man who pulled at her breasts and groped her body.
‘They think a woman on the streets, any woman, is a prostitute,’ she said ‘ and deserves to be treated so.’

Which brings me to my third muddled point. I’ve mentioned before Jennifer Wilson’s blog No Place for Sheep, in which she argues against a political lobbyist, Melinda Tankard Reist who is opposed to pornography and the sexualization of young girls, a laudable concern you might think, but this concern travels hand in hand with Tankard Reist’s religious background which she is apparently reluctant to discuss in public.

Jennifer Wilson’s beef is two fold. She believes that any one who is active as a lobbyist for public behaviour and morality should at least declare their orientation, whether from a religious background, a political background, whatever.

Further and perhaps more importantly, the reason for the brouhaha, Tankard Reist’s lawyers have issued a defamation threat to Wilson if she does not retract her statements. Wilson refuses to be silenced.

Politics and emotions and sex and babies and war all come together and my poor brain cannot tease out the threads in this battle over sexual repression or expression. Can yours?