The Feminine Mystique: my mother, Betty.

Loving Woman
Edvard Munch 1894

all that I am, I will not deny.....it's the core of me

I was one month shy of turning two when The Feminine Mystique first came out. I have never read Betty Friedan's classic call to arms and growing up in the tyranny of distant Australia, it was Melbourne's own Germaine Greer who I was most familiar with.  Although I didn't come to an interest in reading any of her books until I was in my late 40s and, even now, I have yet to read one of her books all the way through.

I have lived for over 50 years.  I was there.  I don't need to really read about what I experienced although it helps to see myself a part of a greater cycle.  It soothes the ancient hurts to know that it wasn't personal after all.  There was no particular dislike of me, only my femininity.  It still astonishes me though that in 20th Century Australia, I was met by attitudes that I had no idea were the subtext of my life.  I, and my generation, were a little too young; born to be kept dumb.

Pluto in Virgo: the Bridge generation.  Trolls beneath, scapegoats crossing.  Aye, I can live with that imagery.....a beautiful bridge over an old old stream.

It was the 1970s glossy woman's magazine, Cleo, which provided bite-size morsels from the front-lines of the Women's Liberation Movement for my generation to puzzle over.  Born in 1961, I was only 16 when feminism reached fever-pitch in Melbourne and I was too adolescent to know what the core issues were, yet I was the right age to absorb the ideas, that zeitgest which was being generated by those fierce women, who themselves had been surged forth by the fierce women before them.  Those unknown and nameless pioneers, the women who blazed a path for their grand-daughters and great-grand-daughters to follow.

We all feel those pioneers. Their stories hum in our genes, their legacies of flesh and blood gaze back at us from every mirror, the contours of their lives dwell in the Void of ours.....waiting. 

Anticipating joyfully our visitations; for our thoughts to alight on them like feathers from our dreams.  Their eyes the eyes behind ours wondering at hemlines, clucking over 1001 tales of what we think their lives were really like. 

How little we know. 
How much they love us. 
The notion of us...

We owe it to our ancestors to put right that which they did in-advisedly.  We owe it to our ancestors to look back with kindness and compassion and say:  Do not be afraid.  I know you that you were not aware of that which you were doing.  It is enough that I know what to do and that I remember you well,  and in the remembering, all shall be well.  All is well.

I am one of Betty Friedan's spiritual daughters. 
We are all the children of Ceres,
Siblings to Persephone


Further Reading:
The Feminine Mystique’: ‘All that I am I will not deny’
Looking Back at a Domestic Cri de Coeur

For Kaspar: the ninth wave

 In The Handmaiden’s Tale, Margaret Attwood wrote of such people:

“We were the people who were not in the papers.

We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print…

We lived in gaps between the stories.”

I rose and rose through the skies and reached the outer reaches of the earth. Nothing could bring me down.....

The thing with Schizophrenia is that sometimes you will get these sort of manic phases where everything seems to revolve around you. My delusions feed into this since today it seems like everything has happened for a reason. Every little thing on my way today was put there by the gods, or the suits behind the scenery, and I know it seems weird but that's what I feel like. I know it's not true and I dont believe in fate but today it certainly seems like the entire world revolves around me and only me.

When I get like this I go so high that I loose touch with earth. I go farther than my life support can handle and that's when the fall kicks in.

 

A seemingly endless fall triggered by the fact that your brain is so full of signals to interpret that it just shuts down. The entire overjoyed state of mind shifts and turns into depression and sends you falling faster than anyone can catch you. I know because I've been here before. I've gone through this countless times already. Being so manic and happy thinking that everything is put in your way for a reason. Spending tons of cash on pointless things because you get a wicked impulse in your brain that tells you that you have to have this now and that it won't be there next month when you can actually afford it.

 

People with schizophrenia often act on impulse a lot and I am very guilty of that. It makes me fun to be around as I'll get weird ideas in the middle of the night and act on them, but it's dangerous for me as it's not just like an idea that pops up into my mind. It's a need or a craving for something that I can't ignore.

 

For instance. When I've gone to bed and cant sleep all of a sudden I will get this idea that I need food. I'm not really hungry or anything I just want to eat. So instead of ignoring that and getting a good nights sleep I get out of bed and cook not because I want to but because I have to.

 

Otherwise bad stuff will happen.

I've been to many record stores and bought a ton of vinyls that I couldnt afford simply because my brain was telling me that I need to get theese things otherwise something will happen.

Sourced from theendlessfall: a story


The author of this blog has not written since July 2012.  In his last post, Kaspar wrote: the mortality rate for people with schizophrenia is frightening...up to 13% successfully kill themselves while a staggering 60% of all males suffering have attempted suicide one time or more.

I think in total I've had about 10 suicide attempts.....1 or 2 of which were more serious than just attempting.


I feel in my heart that this articulate young man has......... left the building.


 

The Orthopedic Position

 

 

 

In a novel I read long ago, an intern said he had put an obnoxious patient’s bed in “the orthopedic position.” When asked what that meant, he said:

.... "you put the bed as high as it will go and hope the patient will fall out and break something so you can transfer them to the orthopedic service and be rid of them".


That was fiction, but the reality is that every doctor has difficult patients he dreads seeing on his appointment list, sometimes because they are obnoxious but often because their symptoms are stubbornly resistant to treatment and he knows he has nothing more to offer them. Referring them to an acupuncturist would be an easy way out, a way to reduce stress and to avoid guilt feelings for being unable to help those people.

Surely that is a natural temptation.

“Integrative” medicine is another tempting way out. When science-based medicine has little or nothing to offer, the “integrative medicine” concept is seductive. It allows you to step outside the constraints of the scientific arena. In CAM there are no rules because there’s no solid evidence to base rules on; you can pretty much try anything that occurs to you, and just make things up as you go.

~ Harriet Hall, MD
Science-Based Medicine





Lilith on Luke 13:11-13

Abraham took Isaac's hand
And led him to the lonesome hill
While his daughter hid and watched
She dare not breathe; she was so still

Just as an angel cried for the slaughter
Abraham’s daughter raised her voice

Then the angel asked her what her name was
She said, "I have none."
Then he asked, "How can this be?"
"My father never gave me one."

And with his sword up raised for the slaughter
Abraham’s daughter raised her bow
"How darest you, child, defy your father?"
"You better let young Isaac go."

 

~ lyrics Arcade Fire,

 

 

¹¹ And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself.

¹² And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.

¹³ And he laid his hands on her: and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God.

Jaysus Christ on a piece of toast,

Thank God for that!!

Now I can get my legs up over my head again

and go back to work as a

Whore!

Tha's nowt so Queer as Folk

My parents entertained seldom, being shy, very, but most people in our road were just like them only with bigger or littler noses and hopes the same way.  They woke then worked.  Then they ate and admired sunsets. The same sunsets.

It was the ridiculously simple routine of daily life that sent my mum crazy; she took Bex, Aspros and Vincent's Powders that she slid pinkly down her teeth mixed with Myra Plum Jam 'to take the taste away', and fled the dreary scene that way with some more fascinating interior view of existence that got flattened out flatter than the pikelets she made on a flour-board made of tough white plastic.

My main memory of the growing-up teenage years is of her baking lots of moist or very dry fruitcakes, depending upon what drugs she was taking and their influence.  Her good ones required lots of hard vigour; here's how she did them thirty-five years back.

First she got big bowls out and rinsed them very clean with lots of boiling hot water.  Then she dried each with a crisp tea towel until each was gleaming in its way, with a kind of sparkle. She rested the bowls on the stainless steel sink and patted down a few clean pages of The Herald newspaper on her limited work-bench.  Upon this she set the packets of O-So-Lite Flour.


Extract from Unparalleled Sorrow by Barry Dickens.

In the Last Hour of 2012

Unidentified Grocer's shop, Darnell, Sheffield, South Yorkshire

 

 

 

The Lord of Thunder went out one day

To ride on his favourite filly

I’m Thor he cried

And the horse replied,

“You’ve forgotten your thaddle, thilly.”

 

 





The Butcher's Bill

Unidentified blacksmith's shop, Sheffield

In the Great War, my paternal grampus Bill served in the Royal Garrison Artillery. Bill was injured after being kicked by a horse. After the Armistice, the brigade was kept in France and informed they were now going to be sent to Russia to fight on the side of the White Russians against the Red Bolsheviks (a futile cause as we now know).


After being told of this new posting, most of the brigade, including Bill (and his brothers), deserted and made their way back to England; knowing well that if they were caught, they would be shot. The authorities later caught up with some of the deserters and although they were not court-martialled, because public opinion was against British involvement in the Russian War, they were denied the right to return to their pre-war employment and they never received their war medals.


It is thought that Bill was a mere Porter with the Grand Central Railway before the war, becoming a Guard after completing his war service. Perhaps Bill joined under the GCR "colours" although I would think this detail of  branded a deserter may mean that his name is expunged from any GCR records.

Seems unfair that he was denied his medal in recognition of the service he did perform, but such is the bloody-mindedness of the English authorities and unwillingness to admit the cause was futile.

Several young lads from Sheffield were executed for "desertion".

The Execution of Sheffield Soldiers in the First World War.

C. Thompson, Butcher, most probably Colin Thompson of Totley Rise & Dore, Sheffield

 

Honey, have you seen where I left my anvil?

Vulcan - Sheffield Town Hall, Yorkshire

Shamanic Process is an integral, relational and inclusive way of living, and by that definition, of, by and with the spirits and not 'religious' or spiritual',but merely Spiritist. We live in a holographic universe in which we are connected and interconnected at pan-dimensional levels, the Shamanic life is one by which we appreciate, relate and journey at those levels.


At times our incarnate selves 'loses the plot' and becomes distracted or lost and our spiritual connection gets 'interference' or becomes 'disconnected'. This 'disconnection' can be a result of physical, emotional, mental or spiritual trauma. Our soul being fractures and those fractured parts or essences, disaffiliate, becoming lost or exiled from us.


At this point our lives can become seemingly pointless or without direction and we wander from physical experience to physical experience searching for connection and meaning. And all the while our spirit, our soul is calling and searching for us, yearning for return.

 

Sheffield Snow: a Frosty Pact

Clumber Park - Sheffield, South Yorkshire

 

 

The Undutiful Daughter  recounted the tale of how the daughter of a wealthy London gentleman was tempated by the Devil to poison her parents. She was spoilt and capricious and after one display of disobedience her father decided to punish her by confining her to her room. As she sat sulking one night:

 

The Devil to her appear did straight,

In human shape and manner like a man;

And then he seem’d to take her by the hand.

He said, fair creature, why do you lament?

What is it fills your heart with discontent?

She said my parents cruel are to me,

And keep me here to starve in misery.

He said then if you will be rul’d by me,

Revenged of them thou shall quickly be …

 

 

The Devil’s pact may have been portrayed primarily as a physical contract, a deliberate appeal to the Devil, but religious teaching implied that the committing of sin was in essence a tacit pact as well - a concept that was well embedded in eighteenth-century religious education, as evident in Anglican catechisms and the responses of child witnesses at the Old Bailey. Unlike the confessions of accused witches who said they were beaten by, married to, or slept with the Devil, people, primarily men, actually attempted to make written pacts with Satan in the tradition of Faust.

(Excerpt from Talk of the Devil: Crime and Satanic Inspiration in 18th Century England
by Owen Davies, Cunningfolk)

Image by Carlie167, stolen from Sheffield History Photo Gallery, Winter
.