vostoklake

I have trouble with the concept of grace, and its close cousin, forgiveness. I am, as most of you will know, a control freak. To quote the board of the Very Big Corporation from Monty Python's Meaning of Life, I am continuously disturbed by how much of the universe doesn't recognize me as its overlord yet.

*ahem* Yeah, it sounds hilarious now, but for most of my life I was bedeviled with the idea that a) becoming such an important person in the world that I could change it by my own efforts of will was not only possible, but indeed the only hope for a future; b) that if I didn't do so the world was doomed and I personally would probably end up on a street corner with a sign saying WILL DROP PANTS FOR FOOD, if not dead or behind bars.

Todd Rundgren appears to have hit this stage by the time of his Initiation album - "I can't let the world die / because no-one would try". This of course was the outcome of growing up as something of a "child prodigy" in a very chaotic and emotionally unsafe environment, of being told that just about everything bad that happened was my fault and that it would stop happening if I could just be good. Of course, I could never be good enough. (Todd Rundgren was of course also a prodigy.) For a long time I preferred to believe that I was "bad" inside, because the idea of being a good person who sometimes did things which hurt others was intolerable. I would have to ask for forgiveness, an unforgivable weakness which would never be forthcoming. Far better to have a fantasy of control, where I could always make my life worse whereas making my life better required risk. "You know where you stand in a hellhole", indeed.

Grace and forgiveness are both concepts which are based on a fundamental relinquishing of control. They are based on the idea that you just can't make the world, or even your portion of it, "right" by your own efforts. If you've done something wrong, and you know it (and who hasn't?), and you can't personally put it right, all you can hope is that the person you've wronged, or God, or the credit card company or the District Attorney, will decide that you don't have to pay the debt you ran up. Otherwise, you will have to deal with the consequences forever and there ain't nothing you can do about it.

But believing in things like grace or forgiveness are the only things which make what we would know as revolutionary action possible. Believing that you are not necessarily to blame if things go wrong makes it tolerable for things to go wrong. Being able to handle the fact that you ballsed things up and possibly made things worse is the only thing that makes it possible to handle ballsing things up. And it's the only way that one can handle love. Control issues in relationships kill the heart-opening bliss quicker than anything. If you understand that you can't change your partner, that's one step; the next is understanding that you can't change yourself any more than you can lift yourself up by your bootstraps. Of course you can always change your behaviour, but that's not the same thing.

It's always better to act than not to act, because acting at least allows the possibility that Grace might enter the world, that we might actually be forgiven our debts as we forgive our debtors.

Here's what Robert Fripp has to say on the subject (scroll down to where he starts talking about the Chief Rabbi).

 I've been so incredibly good with the old saving and buying essentials this year that I haven't been able to pick up the following glorious works by my favourite artists:

• Kate Bush, Director's Cut and 50 Words For Snow
• Gary Numan, Dead Son Rising
• Yes, Fly From Here

... or this book. Any appropriate vouchers would also help.

 

In the past twenty years, from time to time I have found myself wishing for:

• the opportunity to perform on a regular basis to a sympathetic audience and not have to pay for the privilege;
• a modest income doing something which uses my skills and talents but still allows me space for creativity;
• to live by myself.

Yeah, I achieved all those goals. Why aren't I deliriously happy yet? Perhaps I should aim bigger next time.

Google "serendip LLC" to see how hard-assed my personal musical heroine, the original synth herself, Wendy Carlos, is about enforcing her copyrights, taking her stuff down off YouTube etc. One can argue whether this is counterproductive and Canute-like in the current era. One cannot argue that she has the legal right to do so.

Interestingly enough, they've also gone around interfering with eBay and other online second-hand sales from people who get her name wrong. Now you might think that the more Wendy does this the more it will provoke the trolls and insensitive gobshites out there, and that a better idea might be just to ignore that bullshit. But what is not tolerable is that the response of the broader intarwebz to this is to start deliberately getting her name wrong and unleash the most disgusting transphobic nonsense. I had to stop reading the documentation myself because it was triggering me pretty freakin' badly.

Some dude on Facebook was surprised the other day when I pointed out that it's extremely rude to be using Wendy's birth name. You know, I thought it was accepted in this day and age that that's just common courtesy - but then, when some people get pissed off, they think they have the right to hit their opponent anywhere that they think it'll hurt.

The other issue is that East Side Digital appears no longer to be selling Wendy's CDs so there is currently no legal way to get her hands on her stuff new. So you have all these guys selling her stuff second-hand - and many of them get her name wrong, perhaps out of ignorance, perhaps out of sheer dickishness. Perhaps that's why Wendy hasn't updated her website in the last couple of years - she's trying to sort that out. But maybe the anger and meanness leaking out of this whole bullshit is the more cogent reason.

I have been motivated so long by a sheer horror of the concept that anyone might disapprove of me. The rule was that I could only feel safe if everyone around me was completely uncritical and complimentary at all times. Which meant, of course, that I could never feel safe. The only goal of my whole life was, since no-one could possibly like me, to make all others admire me. Hence the perfectionism, the self-hatred for not being Noam Chomsky, Frank Zappa, Joan of Arc and Luke Skywalker all rolled into one.

This goes along with an overweening pride in my intellect. Not surprising, considering that the constant message all through my childhood was that my intellect was the only thing that wasn't completely foul and wrong about me. Add the two together: I thought it was my destiny to be the great genius who would single-handedly figure out what was wrong with the world and be revered as the Great Teacher by future generations.

The only solution is love; love for myself even if I fail or am despised, love for the world even with its cruelties.

"As the café emptied of its last patrons, the multi-coloured tinsel suit lay under a chair, discarded and forgotten. As a bored waitress swept the floor and wiped the tables, the suit transformed into a large stuffed rabbit. It's unclear if anyone noticed."

(Yeah, I know. But the stuff you get from dreams is free.)

The other week, I came to help out at a political street stall for the first time in ages. To my embarrassment, I was totally disabled by a full-blown panic attack - pulse pounding, hyperventilating, even difficult to open my eyes. The whole thing.

This didn't use to happen to me. I used to be able to happily stand behind a stall and hand out leaflets, even ask people to buy amateurishly but enthusiastically produced socialist newsletters. Sometimes they even said yes. So what went wrong?

( extremely long and perhaps half-baked ponderings )

So, what am I left with? The strong conviction that - while anyone who doesn't attempt to fight for what is right at this point of planetary upheaval is pretty much a contributing factor to impending eco-social catastrophe - I am of no use to anyone in the struggle. That because of who I am, my particular strengths, weaknesses and background, I am unwanted by anyone or anything, except to the extent that I am prepared to offer myself as cheap or free labour for someone else's agenda.

Let's end by attempting to break out of the cycle of personalisation. Perhaps this isn't an issue for me, a question of my own personal weakness, of my own need to either "take a spoon of concrete and harden up" or simply admit my own uselessness to a struggle for a better world. Perhaps other people have similar experiences, and perhaps self-described groups of revolutionaries have to consider whom they might be excluding - to their detriment. On the other hand, perhaps I (as I am now) really am politically useless.

I dreamed last night that I was going exploring some deep, dark, dank tunnels underneath the place where I live. Eventually we got to a place where there was a huge underground river. The people I was with (mainly people I went to university with) happily stripped to their underwear and went swimming. I was kind of reluctant to put my head under the water, because I was worried it might be filthy and poisonous, but my companions encouraged me to relax and just let myself swim.

The interpretation of this dream should be clear to anyone who knows anything about transpersonal psychology. I have been getting in touch with very deep, powerful and clean parts of my psyche... but am still hanging back a bit from actually trusting what I've found.

===

My anger controls me still. To be more precise: the issue is not that I get angry, but the rational, adult part of my psyche has no control over what happens when I get angry. The time it takes the adult part of me to regain control has shortened from days to a few minutes in the last decade or so, but that's still long enough to - for example - say something hurtful to someone I love, to run in blind panic from a dangerous situation, or post something truly stupid on teh intarwebz.

The panic bit is possibly the most problematic. If you avoid scary things, then eventually the world will become one big scary thing, and my life is so much narrower and less lulzy/exciting than it could be precisely because I avoid situations where fear or anger might overwhelm me.

Mt Albert-Ponsonby 1 - 0 Beachlands Maraetai

A top of the table clash to be relished! I was back from suspension but our two fast centre-backs / holding mids were away for personal reasons, so we had to repurpose our fast winger. We expected it to be a tough, hard match, but in the first 20 minutes we made it look easy. We had been guilty of not waking up for the first 5 minutes in previous games, but our passing game today was fine from the get go. For the first time in ages, the other keeper got all the exercise in the first twenty minutes. And then our left back curled in an absolutely stunning corner which went past everyone and into the net. This we did not expect.

They got a bit fierce after that. Like many teams in our league, their game plan seemed to be simple: "through balls to our Star Striker" at every opportunity. I was kind of dreading how our ladies would shut down the Star Striker, but despite giving away a yard of pace and three boatloads of ANGRY, they stuck with her throughout the game.

Which is not to say I had an easy life. In fact, I think my game sucked. I had to come on runs to the edge of the area, or even out of it, on a regular occasion, but my feet just couldn't be persuaded to clear the ball properly. Thankfully the opposition couldn't take advantage - even the one time I had to run all the way out of my area and then jockey with an opposition striker, she couldn't put the ball past me straight. Coach gave me the hard word at half time to JUST DIVE ON IT.

They had a fine deadball specialist, but I managed to keep her out. I palmed a pretty fierce header over the bar just before half time. Soon after half-time, they got a free kick on the edge of the box. It went over the wall, and then dipped suddenly so it bounced right in front of me. I flailed at it, somehow got a glove to it, and once again it got over the bar.

The chatter got rowdier as the game went on - clearly the Beachlands ladies, who had been pretty much owning the league up until now, were not used to being behind. And it wasn't just us who copped it - they really were not best pleased with the reffing. Their Star Striker and our Tough Defender had a few words at one point, and I caught the tail end of the conversation...

SS: (something about what a sh*t team we are)
TD: Remind me what the score is again?
SS: Lucky goal!

Yeah, and I'll admit I had a couple of lucky saves, and a couple of lucky escapes from shocking clearances. And our team had clearly not been pushed that hard in a while, and we were not fit. We owned the first twenty minutes, and then it took all our luck and doggedness to keep them out for the next sixty. Thankfully, their one plan of through balls to the Star Striker couldn't work when their through balls were being intercepted and their Star Striker was marked out of the game.

So... I don't think I've been so amazed and relieved to hear a final whistle before. We are now 6 points clear at the top of the league (although Beachlands will have a game in hand). Can we hold it out until the end of the season and get promoted? Does my team really want to play in Div 1? We'll find out.

Next week: v Manukau City at home. Manukau City were until two weeks ago playing in Div 4, where their record read: played 5, won 5, 63 goals for, 2 against. Including one 24-0 win. Someone clearly f**ked up the grading the first time.

1. I am sorry if sometimes I change lanes without indicating properly. This is usually because:

a) unlike you, I can't brake and indicate at the same time, especially going downhill in wet conditions on my heavy bike.
b) I am avoiding the potholes that the council has kindly left in the road for us, and if I hit a pothole and fell in front of your vehicle we would all be worse off.

2. Yelling abuse (I think your precise words were "fucking idiot") out the window of a 3-ton petrol-driven death machine towards a woman on a reasonably fragile 20kg sustainable transport appliance tends to provoke the old cliche pick on someone your own size. But, then, yelling abuse from the window of a moving vehicle indicates an unwillingness to accept responsibility for the consequences of one's own negativity, so maybe that's the wider issue.

3. Maybe I should grow my hair long again. If you're more obviously female you get less abuse.

4. It really is a lose-lose situations for cyclists. Either we are a menace because we are in front of you and you can't overtake; or we try to avoid being in front of you, weaving through lanes of traffic, which also gets us declared a menace. Some of you are at least honest enough to admit that you don't think we have the right to share the public highway with you, but that opens another debate, about this culture's granting of a sense of entitlement to those on fossil fuel-driven transport.

5. I don't obey the road rules all the time. Neither do you. I try to avoid hurling abuse at you for your mistakes. May we forgive others as we forgive ourselves.