Summer 1989 $5 ($6 Canadian)
How culture shapes your body p.4
The evolution | of the body into machine p. 12
| The spiritual
| challenge of
| living through | the body pp. 24
Cyberpunk
The science of complexity p. 94
| | 594
098939 7
Number 63 FEATURES | Summer 1989
¥ ; - ‘ a ‘ q rn.
71 When Women Take Over by Ruth Wallsgrove
74 Living in the Office by Timothy Haight 78 Cyberpunk Era Interviews with William Gibson | 83 Cyberpunk 101 Reading | List 7 by Richard Kadrey
84 Cyberspace by Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly
94 Simple Words About the New Science of Complexity A talk with George Cowan
102 Good Videos: International Satire
by Corinne Cullen Hawkins and Sarah Vandershaf
106 A Poor Man’s Reference Library by Andrew Dick
109 Study the Latin, I Pray You by C. J. Hincke
114 Spadefoot Packrat Havahart A eulogy for Ed Abbey by Peter Warshall
124 Proverbs : by Sparrow |
Rene Magritte
126 Prisons as Centers j of Kindness : by Bo Lozoff
COVER:
In the late 1960s, Veruschka transfixed _ Lhe Gesture o the fashion world by modeling designer ___ Living in your k originals while body-painted to resemble without ide |: : rocks or wild animals. Since then, she Mor: B- has continued to experiment with dif- ferent ways of camouflaging herself and disappearing into natural and industrial . environments. ;
john 2: ee” ct te ee a, Ch.
Cr _ The cover photo, Forest Piece at : Heinrich Himml A DO Schnaitsee, was shot in 1972 by her q of Authority — partner of many years, Holger by Susan Griffin Trulzsch, in Germany. For more on < Vics of the Erotic: yd Veruschka’s work, see the review on : The Erotic as Power — ake ee
—Jeanne Carstensen and Richard Kadrey
by Audre Lorde
Facing page illustration: Karl Korab
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E have used the question,
“is the body obsolete?”
as a means to journey into a whole field of issues
} surrounding the human
come to a time when the question must be faced, because prominent, well-funded scientists in robotics and artificial intelligence are now claiming that the body will soon be made superfluous by machines. The implications of this vision — essentially a non- biological future — are chilling. The continued de- terioration of planet ecosystems seems to demand deeper understanding of biological systems if we are to survive. It is not without reason that environ- mental movements worldwide have embraced the symbol Gaia — the earth as great mother. If, accord- ing to these scientists, the human body will soon be obsolete, what does that say about the earth?
But the question of the body being obsolete isn’t as new as it may seem. One definition of “obsolete” in the American Heritage Dictionary is “no longer in use or fashion.” The inclination of both Christianity and scientific rationalism to place the body at the bottom of a hierarchy under mind and spirit has meant that the body has been decidedly out of fash- ion for two thousand years. The burden of Original Sin still weighs heavily on our culture. Your personal religion (or lack thereof) can’t escape its influence. Christianity’s uneasy truce with the flesh has taught us that the body is flawed, is sinful. And through- out the history of western science we have been given the image of the body as a machine.
Before editing this issue, the two of us actually ar- rived at the question “is the body obsolete?” through an ongoing conversation on sexuality issues. One night we were sitting in a North Beach bar, tossing around ideas for a magazine project. Our first thought was to do an issue on pornography, its meaning in the era of AIDS and a general retreat from sexual- ity. We were both concerned that the conservative agenda of the Reagan years and polarized debates over abortion and pornography were having the ef- fect of stifling the ability to even discuss sexuality. (Lorenzo Milam has more to say about this on p. 56.)
Our topic broadened, and we found ourselves asking what the subtext of porn was, how the simulation
2 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
WOON
body. Historically, we have
: iy
—
Richard Kadrey
of sex was related to sex itself, and what the signifi- cance of any simulated experience was. We were both acquainted with the computer-related studies of environmental simulations, or “virtual realities,” in which three-dimensional worlds, where you can walk around and manipulate objects, can be gener- ated by computers. NASA is interested in virtual realities and is throwing a lot of money at their study, as are communication companies, architecture soft- ware firms, entertainment companies, and the mili- tary .. . and where does the body belong in the age of simulation?
NSWERING these questions has taken us to some unexpected places. The whole
field of body study is exploding, in
part based on the new technologies
available to us, and in part as a reaction to them. We found ourselves in the middle of a sea of infor- mation coming from disciplines that, in many cases, didn’t know or care about the others’ existence: so- matic psychology, robotics, history, artificial intelli- gence, and others. This issue is an attempt to decode the messages from all those different sources.
It was the future outlined in Hans Moravec’s book,
Mind Children (reviewed in SIGNAL, p. 207), per-
haps more than any other single thing that made us question the future of the body. Dr. Moravec is a
leading robotics researcher at Carnegie-Mellon Uni- versity. In his article on page 12 he says that we are
on the brink ofa post-biological human future. The
body can no longer cope with the information culture
we have become. The mind is evolving away from
the limitations of the human body. In fifty years, Moravec believes, we will be able to scan human ; brains and download them into mobile robots. Mo- ravec is hardly the first scientist to propose this idea.
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He is, however, perhaps the first with the expertise, the vision, the time, and resources to make it happen.
If Moravec is the architect of the obsolete body, Stelarc (p. 18) is the poet laureate. Trained as an artist, Stelarc originated the phrase “the obsolete body” for a series of performance events in which he was hung for up to 20 minutes at a time by steel hooks pushed through his flesh. This self-mortifica-: tion was Stelarc’s way of proving the limitations of the human body, and demonstrating its obsolescence. Lately, with devices like the Third Hand, he has concerned himself with ways to modify the body, to
prepare it to leave the earth and move into space.
Stelarc predicts that eventually a schism will devel-
op in humanity. He foresees a time when the popu-
lation splits, and modified humans desert the planet for a life of space exploration, leaving the unmod-
ified behind.
// RITICS of this kind of thinking are more than just critical; for them, the dream of abandoning the human body is patho- logical. Morris Berman (author of The Reenchantment of the World), who writes on page 24, believes that our inability to live with bodily reality is itself a root of the destruction of the planet. While Stelarc sees the future as up into space and out of our bodies, Berman asks us to travel the difficult inner path — into our bodies, down to our souls. It is a spiritual challenge of no small dimen- sions. And also an intellectual one. Berman suggests no less than a total revision of history (and there- fore of the future). It is how individuals and cultures
deal with the ontological dilemma of bodily existence _
that makes history, not some intellectual exercise in clashing ideologies.
At a recent reading in San Francisco, author and poet Susan Griffin echoed Berman when she said, “It takes severe social training to look at history with- out the details that fill out the field.’ She’s exploring the vast field of the history of nuclear weapons in her book-in-progress, ‘The First and the Last: A Woman Thinks About Nuclear War,” and we excerpt from the chapter on the Holocaust on page 60. She writes about the details of Heinrich Himmler’s childhood
and how they intertwine with Himmler’s becoming ©
head of the Nazi system of concentration camps. How the shame Himmler and other children of his time were taught to feel about their bodies may have resurfaced in the Nazi atrocities.
The first essay we knew we wanted to publish in this issue was Audre Lorde’s 1978 feminist classic on the valuing and undervaluing of feeling, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (p. 66). The sup- pression of the erotic in this society is a powerful tool of control, because the erotic is the deepest wellspring of feeling and well-being in each of us. Not just in the bedroom, but in every aspect of our lives. Lorde writes eloquently of the need to value
the erotic, “our most profoundly creative source.” She says, “In touch with the erotic, I become less
hd
willing to accept powerlessness. . . |
The human body, which seems so universal, is ac- tually culturally constructed and experienced in as many different ways as there are bodies. Don Hanlon Johnson, somatic therapist and chair of Esalen’s So- matics Program, starts off the issue (p. 4) writing about the deconstruction of the body. With anthro- pology, psychology, medicine, and other disciplines all defining “the body” differently it seems we have many bodies to choose from. The new fields of so- matics and body history are beginning to map out this territory.
But wait a minute. Isn't “Is the body obsolete?” a fundamentally stupid question? Since you're either sitting at a table, slumped in a couch, leaning against a wall, or curled into some other bodily position as you read this, it’s absurd to even ask the question, isn’t it? Several of the people we contacted to write short answers for the forum beginning on page 34 told us so in no uncertain terms. But we persisted and collected a diverse batch of responses, some
of which debate the question head on, while others reflect personally and tangentially, and all of which illuminate the infinite ways people experience their bodies. Writer Sallie Tisdale talks about her child- body, adult-body, and old-age-body; Karen Finley, a writer and performance artist, responds with a blast of anger about the physical abuse of women; artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky spe- culates on the structure of the human mind and immortality. And there's a lot more.
S the “sinful” body of St. Augustine being replaced by the “unnecessary” body of modern science? This is, indeed, the legacy we inherit. But it’s ironic that just as the illusion of being separate from nature is peaking in certain scientific circles, interest in the body is erupting throughout the cul- ture. To tell you the truth, we've hardly scratched the surface of what's going on in body research all over the world. We hope that we can update you
on new developments in future issues of Whole Earth Review.
In the end, it doesn’t matter which side you come down on in this debate — the future is still up for grabs; it is something we create every day. And if we don’t help to create the future, we simply con- sume it, and consumers take themselves right out
of the equation because they are passive. Part of our attempt to grab the future is putting this magazine together. If after reading this, you're still uncertain about what you want the future to look like, just ask yourself, “Is the body obsolete?”
We would appreciate your writing to let us know , what you think of this issue. @
27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 3
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Andreas Vesalius. The Sixth Plate of the Muscles. 1543.
NTIL THE TURN OF THE CENTURY, there was broad
agreement in the West about the nature of ‘‘the body’’: it
was defined either as the wild-animal-to-be-tamed of the Greco-Roman and Christian traditions, or the physical-object-to-be- quantified of the pre-modern scientific era. Within several areas of human inquiry, those oversimplified paradigms have been cracked into many pieces. Because ‘‘the body’’ has become an explicit object of study in many disciplines and takes on different meanings in each, one must now ask ‘‘Which body are you talking about — the one defined by biomedicine, psychology, literary criticism, anthro- pology, sociology, or phenomenology, etc.?'’ In light of the growing body of research which has revealed the radical uniqueness of both each person's bodily makeup and his or her experiences of the body, one must also ask: ‘Whose body are you speaking of?’’
The deconstruction of ‘‘the body,’’ like deconstructions of ‘‘god,’’ ‘truth,’ ‘‘man,’’ and ‘‘woman,’’ gives us more room to maneuver. The deconstruction of the medical body, for example, opens up a
4 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
BY DON HANLON JOHNSON
Don Johnson is a somatic therapist and author of two books on the body. He also heads up the Esalen Somatics Program and is chair of the graduate studies program in Somatic Psychology and Education at New College of Cal- ifornia. These programs signify the birth of somatics as a widely accepted discipline. Up until recently, practi- cioners of Rolfing, Feldenkrais work, sensory awareness, progressive relaxa- tion and many other techniques have worked outside universities and re- search institutes, and their many successes in treating physical and psychological symptoms haven't
been thoroughly recorded.
Don says in bis book, The Body, ‘we are gripped by ideologies.’’ By this he means that ideologies roost in our very flesh, in our neuromuscular responses. Underlying somatic work is a critique of authoritarianism insofar as it under- mines people's experiences of their bodies. The genuine fight for freedom must include the physiological fight for freedom, Wilhelm Reich said. The de- construction of the body that Don writes about in this article is evidence of that wrestling free from unconscious bodily restriction. Medicine, antbro- pology, psychology and many other disciplines have got the body on the chopping block: Which one is yours? —Jeanne Carstensen
Howard Sochurek
new sense of possibilities of healing: ‘‘terminal,’’ for instance, is no longer a meaningful term since we know that the causes of disease are too complex to allow such a rockhard certainty of outcome. People suffering from cancers, heart disease, and even AIDS now have a sense of a multiplicity of strategies they might take to enhance and prolong their lives. In a different arena, deconstruction
of the gendered body loosens the rigid bonds
of patriarchy.
The deconstruction of ‘‘the body’ to ‘‘which one?”’ can be traced back to Vesalius in 1540. In ana- tomical art before him, ‘'the body’’ is that single thing defined by skin boundaries. One gets only modest peeks at bodily interiors: a fully dressed woman reclining on a couch modestly opens her belly to reveal hints of her intestines; a bare-chested man shows us a little of his heart. Suddenly Vesalius reveals a body of muscles and bones, of arteries and veins, of brain and nerves. I call these ‘‘bodies’’ because the drawings give the impression that each system of the body is complete in itself, with its own internal laws, a world in itself, oblivious to other worlds, the cardiovascular world seemingly moving alongside the neural world like ‘the body’’ supposedly danced along with the soul. Each of these bodies generated its own world of research and healing — orthopedics, cardiology, neurology, etc. — which has been developed in relative in- dependence of other specialties.
Vesalius’s subcutaneous path carved out by the scalpel working on corpses was carried forward by advances in biomedical technology. The inven- tion of microscopes revealed the cellular body.
X-rays opened up the possibility for the first time to map the interiors of the living body which turned
NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) forms an image by tuning in to magnetic fields naturally generated in the body. This NMR of a cancer patient shows that the disease hasn’t spread to the neck and chest: the vertebrae are well defined with normal spacing.
out, strangely enough, to be very different from the dead. With such advanced technologies as photomicroscopy, magnetic resonance imaging, PET and CAT scans, one can see directly into what a century ago would have seemed to be a mystical world of pulsing cells, clusters of fuzzily delineated organs, and fluid flows.
The most explicit acknowledgement of these de- constructions can be found within the relatively new biomedical field of psychoneuroimmunology. Scientists who have been studying such phenomena as heart disease, cancer, and AIDS have developed paradigms of the person based on networks of in- teraction between the biological world of T-cells, neuropeptides, hormonal activity, and muscular stress, and the social world shaped by divorce, diet, and listening to Mozart. Such research would have been. unthinkable when ‘‘the body’’ was defined by skin, muscles, and bones. Dr. George Solomon, who first coined the term psychoneuroimmunol- ogy some 25 years ago, says that when he began his research there were four known connections between what people called ‘‘mind’’ (depression, joy, anxiety, etc.) and what they called ‘‘body”’ (T-cell count, adrenal levels, etc.). At last count, 56 connections had been experimentally verified.
Another major deconstruction of the body has occurred among a small group of anthropologists who argue that the body is the first artwork of a culture, varying as much as any of its other arti- facts from the body in another culture.
I first bumped up against the cultural variability
of ‘‘the body’’ some 15 years ago while I was in private practice as a Rolfer. By strange coincidence, during the same period of time I happened to have as clients two women who were about the same age and had remarkably similar body-structures, one of whom was Hopi, the other Japanese-Amer- ican. They both complained of extreme back pain. As a student of Ida Rolf, I had been told that the nature of ‘'the body’s’’ evolution from primates to the present leaves human beings in an awkward state of many distortions, a major pattern being the forward curvature of the vertebrae of the neck and lower back. The manipulative techniques of Rolfing, which by then I had practiced for five years, were designed to lengthen those vertebrae, bringing them back towards an imaginary plumb line. After several sessions of applying this method with these women, I found myself in blank igno- rance; I simply did not understand the needs which were expressed to me by their necks and lower backs, which were (to my Anglo eyes) unusually
27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 5
straight, At the same time, I realized that their structures were not totally unique: I had seen similar ones in Asian art, dance, and meditation postures; and among Native Americans in the Rio Grande pueblos. I began to feel that ‘’the body”’ described by Ida Rolf was a European, white- American tradition.
Some time later I began to make more sense of that experience when I encountered the work of a small group of anthropologists who had organized their research around a brief 1922 essay by Marcel Mauss, ‘‘Les techniques du corps.’’ By “‘techniques of the body,’’ Mauss meant the wide range of ac- tivities which shape the protean body of the infant into an adult, ranging from styles of caring for in- fants, to gender formation, styles of work, exercise, sexual postures, dance and ritual, etc. He argued that these activities, which seem so ‘‘natural,’’ are actually highly developed expressions of a parti- cular culture's values; if you examine any particular technique such as using a shovel, you will find that the technique, and the body it goes toward shap- ing, differ, sometimes radically, from culture to culture. During the past 60 years, that thesis has been substantiated by a number of anthropological researchers. Inspired by their work, I began to do my own research with therapists-in-training, in- vestigating the cultural and sociopolitical forces which have shaped them, the sources of the stories in this article.
Because Catholic monasticism played a large role in forming my body, I have been particularly curious about different religious methods of shap- ing. Any tradition, even those which deny the reality of the body, contain enormous numbers of verbal and non-verbal methods for shaping bodies. I was shaped by the Roman Catholic gothic ver- tical lines of the kneeling, sitting, standing, and prostrating postures, supplemented by extreme sexual denial and Jesuit rules of body carriage. Paul, a rabbi, was shaped by different methods of which he writes:
‘In the Yeshiva school, being fat was consid- ered a sign of overindulgence in ‘this world.’ I became thin. There was a concept of mod- esty, ‘tznius, which required that men, and especially women, show as little skin as possi- ble. Men were supposed to crack the benches — to study in a sitting position. The best
_men were those who were never without a book in their hand, even while traveling. Women were not expected to do this.
‘When walking in the streets, when there was a possibility of looking at women’s bodies with enjoyment (an avoidable evil) the ideal position was to walk slightly bowed over, so that you could just see three to five feet in front of yourself, not more.
-
‘Overly careful grooming was considered ef- feminate. Male jewelry or perfume was not
6 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
acceptable. Beards were required and hair ~ length was short. Haircuts were defined by the number of degrees of the cutting edges of the clippers. A zero indicated extremely — short, almost bald. I used to go for a three, and once went for a one. Sidelocks were. kept long.
‘‘When one followed all these customs, there was a feeling of living in the Bible itself.’’
A culture's healing practices have profound effects on how a child comes to experience and concep- tualize ‘‘the body.’’ An American who has been raised in a climate of surgery, drugs, and ortho- pedic devices will think about his or her body dif- ferently than will a Southeast Asian who has been raised to use meditation, movement postures, herbs, sensitive manipulation, and acupuncture for health.
Charles, an internationally known teacher of body movement, was raised in a system of healing devel- oped within the midwestern working class during the 19th century:
‘‘My father is a chiropractor and I was ‘ad- justed’ from the earliest age. | remember be- ing in a car accident when I was ten and having a whiplash. My father took me to another chiropractor because the insurance company wouldn't let him do the diagnosis. From hearing them talk I developed the im- pression that some of my thoracic vertebrae had been pushed too close together. I felt stiffness there for years. My neck was ad- justed many times. This helped relieve the pain, but I never felt I knew where the right position of my head and neck were. Also, I felt that someone else had to adjust my spine using their hands in order for it to be ok. I could not do this on my own simply by walking, breathing, or feeling my weight. I didn't trust MDs to know anything about my back, but I didn't trust myself either. When I first started doing Chinese move- ment I remember being surprised whenever] — felt my spine reposition itself. Later, after learning Sufi dancing, I remember being sur- prised when I just took a relaxed breath while standing, and my whole back re- aligned,”’
Another major deconstruction is in the area of sociopolitical thought. Although Karl Marx initiated this movement in the middle of the 19th century, it did not gain momentum until the last 20 years, due to the work of the late Michel Foucault. Marx had argued that a person’s economic class affected his or her experience and definition of ‘‘the body.’’ Alienation is a physical reality, a creation in the flesh. The care-burdened man’s experience of his body, he pointed out, is radically different from that of the man of leisure. The former learns to feel and think of his body as a beast of burden or as a machine; the ‘‘soul’’ is his only place of
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(Right) Kneeling erect, pros- trating, standing, and sitting
on angular wooden benches characterize Western spiritual techniques. The emphasis on the vertical body suggests a reaching from earth toward heaven. The line from foot through knee and hip to spine is straighter than one finds in bodies shaped for” the lotus posture, which is the somatic ideal of Buddhism (lower right). The implication of the Buddhist practice of ‘‘sitting’’ is that sitting quietly, ignoring the pains and impulses of the body, is the key to truth.
freedom. For the man of leisure, the body is the source of maintaining status, and the source of great pleasure. Foucault carried on these seminal arguments in his analysis of the body as the focal point for struggles over the shape of power. Popu- lation size, gender formation, the control of children and of those thought to be deviant from the soci- ety's ethos are major concerns of political organ- ization — and all concentrate on the definition and shaping of the body. Moreover, the cultivation of the body is essential to the establishment of one's social role. The contrasts between these two women, both from the South — the first from the upper class; the second, lower — illustrate how body-shaping functions within the sociopolitical order. The first writes:
‘‘My body was blessed with easy access to medical, dental, and orthodontic care. Being blessed with ‘good genes’ we were obliged to take care of our health and appearance. Pos- ture was very important to all my formative influences: family, school, church, and coun- try clubs. ‘Stand up straight, sit up straight, keep your spine erect, chin up, hold in your stomach, tighten your fanny and pull your shoulders back.’ Daddy’s military-school in- junctions were the same as Miss Hutchison’s school for girls. We stood when the teacher entered the room, were told to walk not run quietly through the halls, and neither spread our legs, nor cross them. Ballet and toe-dance classes straightened us out even more. Ball- room dancing classes were another critical source of body training. Like the princesses in our fairy tales we were supposed to be regal, graceful, serene, elegant, demure, and of course slender, like Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn.
‘There was physical education at school and _ summer camp, at: University Club and the country club. I learned volleyball, basketball,
track, softball, soccer, archery, canoeing, sailing, English and Western riding, swim- ming, badminton, croquet, water-skiing, golf and bowling. These were cultural necessities, not fun to do because they set up competi- tiveness about the way we looked and scored.”’
The second woman, born in the Appalachians, was shaped by a life working on the farm, being physically and sexually abused, and cloggin’ down at the gas station on Saturday night.
‘‘I was never taught, nor needed to learn for social reasons (or able for economic reasons) ballroom dancing, ballet, or modern dance.
I did learn folk dancing, rock and roll, and the traditional dance of the area, ‘cloggin’.’
I loved the folk dancing, the reels, squares, etc. — the clear sense of a communal form, the energy and groundedness of it. Everyone needed to participate fully and equally to
27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 7
complete the pattern, much like the pieces that come to complete the patchwork quilts.’
In those stories you read the description of two different social organizations anchored in bodily form, hierarchical and populist, each with its own characteristic diseases and pleasures, ideals of beauty and ethics.
66 HOSE BODY?”’ IS A question which
comes from a century of psychologi-
cal research in the area of body-image. Sir Henry Head, while treating wounded soldiers, found that a sense of one’s body as something with two legs persisted even when a leg or two had been ampu- tated. At the same time (around 1890) Sigmund Freud was struck by the case of a patient who, though manifesting no neurological damage, dragged his left leg as if it had been paralyzed. Early research by such scientists as Paul Schilder and Seymour Fisher has illuminated the vast dif- ferences among people's perceptions of their bodies. When anyone says something about ‘‘my body,’’ we now know that what that person means may differ radically from what another means. One person may have learned to experience him- self as a sophisticated computer, with a hard- edged sense of boundaries between himself and others, containing a collection of imaginatively — well-defined ‘‘parts.’’ Another may, by contrast, experience her body-boundaries as constantly in a state of flux, like the boundaries between .a stream and its banks, and have very little sense of specific body parts but a general sense of different textures of internal energy.
In striking contrast to the dualistic sense of the body, which is most common in Western literature and philosophy, is this image written of Truong,
a Vietnamese philosopher who now works as a counselor for fellow refugees in the San Francisco Bay area:
‘IT remember my mother. Her way of taking care of the family’s health had brought the cosmic and human dimension to my body. Thanks to her, my individual life embodied the cosmic life, not separated from it. And we lived a life that was not abstracted from the actual life that lived us.
‘Living on a land where food was not abun- dant, I know how important the art of cook- ing is. Meal is medicine. In preparing food, my mother could use medical quality and tastefulness to compensate for deficiency in nutrient and calorie. Every day while walk- ing in the market place, talking to people, or on the way home, my mother always diag-
The ideal spine, designed by
8 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
nosed the rhythms of the environment so she could prescribe the appropriate meal for my family. Feeling ‘the strange wind, listen- ing to the unusual bird's song, looking at the insect’s activities, or seeing the unsea-
_ sonal fruit, she could detect the change in the environment, and tried to cook the meal so that the health of the family could be protected properly. In the case of emergency, she knew where to get the medicine, even in the wilderness or in the neighbors’ gardens. My mother could tell the story of any scar on her children’s bodies. She remembered all the marks and spots that carried her hope and fear for the future of her children ac- cording to her belief in physiognomy.’’
His training in that physiognomy, a highly sophis- ticated system of mapping body structures based on ancient Vietnamese texts, began when he was — 14 years old and his uncle diagnosed his future in — terms of that system. ‘‘I learned to understand human characters and fortunes through all parts
of the body. With that kind of learning, I never see the human body isolated from the whole context of life.”’ |
As in the other stories I’ve told, Truong’s contains traces of all the deconstructions: our experience and definition of our bodies at any moment is shaped by many layers of reality ranging from the biological to the spiritual. Learning to range more widely within them fertilizes our imaginations, making it easier for us to think of new strategies for shaping ourselves and the world medically, artistically, socially, sexually, athletically, psy- chologically.
The most profound effect of the deconstructions has to do with creating a global pluralism. The religious and secular fanaticisms which are tearing apart the planet are anchored in notions about the
nature of human beings so rigid that their adherents
feel it necessary to shape everyone else to their own point of view. In the 1960s, deconstructions of the concept of the divine made it possible for
~~» non-fundamentalist Catholics, Protestants, Jews,
Buddhists, Hindus, Moslems, and Native Amer- icans to joiri in a powerful social movement to shape the world according to shared human values instead of fighting to concretize a particular defini- tion of god. Similarly, the bodily deconstructions are making it possible for men and women in a variety of areas — the biological and human sci- ences, body therapies, art, philosophy, sociopoli- tical thought, etc. — to join together to counter those forces which are degrading the sensible world under the guise of less tangible ideals. The body deconstructions erode sectarian certainties, reveal- ing the rich and unique messages borne in the bodies of each person and culture — messages which, like a social body’s special crafts and liquors, are better savored than maimed. @
; 4 j 2 :
t
The Body
Like many views from afar, this radical analysis of Western thought from the perspective of a Japanese Buddhist cuts - deeply into our pretensions. He proposes that the basic difference between West- ern and Asian structures of thought is
this: for the West, mind-body dualism is —
an essential structure of reality; for Asian thought, it is a poignant aspect of human reality which is to be transcended by the various psychophysical disciplines — meditation, body movement, theater, poetry, flower arrangement, etc. From this perspective, a person is not thought to be fit to make statements about reality until he or she has passed through these disciplines. Western thought, therefore, is the crude expression of undeveloped sensibility. —Don Hanlon Johnson
#
One of the characteristics of Eastern body-mind theories is the priority given to the questions, ‘‘How does the rela- tionship between the mind and the body come to be [through cultivation]?’’ or “What does it become?” The tradi- tional issue in Western philosophy, on the. other hand, is ‘’What is the rela-
one’s whole mind and body. The theo-
retical is only a reflection on this lived experience.
In composing waka [31-syllable poems], one should prepare oneself to assume the correct posture. If one becomes accustomed to composing in an un- restrained posture such as standing or lying down, one cannot compose at all on formal occasions. . . . My father ad- monished me not to compose waka even for a short while without the correct sitting posture.
The Body
(Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory)
Yuasa Yasuo, 1987; 256 pp.
$14.95 (516.95 postpaid) from: Sfate University of New York Press, P. O. Box 6525, Ithaca, NY 14850; i
518/472-5000 Experience in the everyday world is
(or Whole Earth Access). common to us all; everyone has it naturally. In contrast, the lived ex- perience of ‘’body-mind molting and falling off’’ through seated meditation is not immediately given in the field of natural, ordinary experience. It is pos- sible to experience it only through a specific, practical means of personal cultivation. . . . the departure point of cultivation assumes not the mind’s dominating the body, but rather, the body’s dominating the mind. To sit in meditation is to carry out this attitude more thoroughly than one can in the stage of outwardly oriented practice.
tionship between the mind-body?’ In other words, in the East one starts from the experiential assumption that the mind-body modality changes through the training of the mind and body. . . . Only after assuming this experiential ground does one ask what the mind- body relation is. That is, the mind-body issue is not simply a theoretical specula- tion but it is originally a practical, lived experience, involving the mustering of
The Newsletter of the Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body
This lively and intelligent review of the
most abstruse theoretical works about the body, along with the most practical how-to books, has taken its place along with WER and the New York Review of Books as my primary sources of reading inspiration. Editor Betsy Behnke, who calls herself a ““barefoot phenom- enologist,”’ is actually doing what Ed- mund Husser! originally called upon people to do, getting back to things
themselves by descending into lived ex-
perience. This is a particularly valuable journal for body-workers who are starved for intellectual activity, and for academics who feel untethered from the real. —Don Hanlon Johnson
News Of Work In Progress
Edward S. Casey (SUNY — Stony Brook), whose book Remembering is reviewed in this issue of the SPPB News- letter, is currently working on a book- length phenomenological study of place, in which investigations of the lived body in place will play a key role. Some of the themes he is involved with include orientation, navigation, and ritual,
and he is also making use of Piagetian
psychology.
Ross Nicols and David Rehorick (Fre-
dericton, New Brunswick) are beginning a phenomenological investigation of
body therapy, focusing on the way rela-
tions between practitioner and client
are experienced. Themes to be explored
include perceptions of body energy, the idea that memory is stored in muscle, experiential evidence for privileged points of connection with another’s body (such as acupuncture points),
and shared breathing patterns.
One current task of the SPPB is to devel- op an “‘introduction to phenomenology, ’ with special reference to a phenomen- ology of the body, for somatic educators and others who are not yet conversant with the distinctive terminology and methodology of phenomenology. All readers . . . are encouraged to con- tribute to this project with your sug- gestions and, even better, with your questions.
SPPB Newsletter
Elizabeth A. Behnke, Editor $6/year (2 issues) from:
Elizabeth A. Behnke, Study Project in
the Phenomenology of the Body, P. O. Box 0-2, Felton, CA 95018
NOTES ON EDUCATION Antioch University—San Francisco
The Program in Somatic Studies offers the M.A. in Clinical Psy-
chology (leading to the license in Marriage, Family, and Child
Counseling) with a concentration in Somatic Psychology and Edu-
-eation, and the M.A. in Somatic Psychology and Education (for
persons not desiring licensing). Course offerings cover two general areas: body-based psychotherapy and body~oriented educa- tion. For more information, write tos
Don Johnson, Coordinator Somatic Studies Program
Antioch University
650 Pine Street
San Pranciseo, CA 94108
See also Don H. Johnson, "Principles versus Techniques: Towards ey ets Be sehe Somatics Field," Somatics 6:1 (Autumn/Winter 1986-87), 4-8.
27 GATE FIVE ROAD = SAUSALITO, CA 94965 9
BODYWORK. By RICHARD DITZLER
RECEIVING A BODYWORK SESSION is a “‘time out’’ from your regular schedule. It’s a time, simply, to experience the bodyworker’s touch, as
he or she manipulates your body’s tissues. During the session, questions come to you: “‘Is the touch relaxing, or is it painful?’’ ““What holds my shoulder together?’’ ‘Why do | feel so sad when the bodyworker works in the tissues of my chest?’’ ‘‘How does my body relate to gravity?’’ These sorts of questions raised during an effective bodywork session can lead to increased awareness. How does awareness benefit you? A series of small awakenings can help you unlearn ingrained patterns of unhealthy emo- tional and bodily behavior, and learn how to live in your body anew.
One of the goals of bodywork is the merging of body and mind. Usually considered as separate entities, body and mind are beginning to be looked at as two sides of the same coin. Often, when people receive a series of bodywork sessions and begin to listen more to the signals their bodies are putting out, they come to realize how much attention they previously gave to the thinking mind rather than the organism as a whole. This integrated experience of the body/mind makes it easier to deal with the stresses
of everyday living.
Bodywork is a general term given to a number of hands-on body thera- pies that maneuver or manipulate the tissues of the body. Bodywork is a very old art; there are references to the use of the therapeutic touch going back as far as 2,000 B.C. in China. In this century, particularly in the last
two decades, the practice of bodywork has grown greatly as people begin »
to take responsibility for their own health and move away from the idea
of the all-knowing doctor.
The following list of publications is by no means comprehensive, but meant to give you the basic ideas behind bodywork.
Job’s Body
In my nine years as a bodyworker, I’ve noticed a lack of recognition of body- work as a viable health-care option by the medical establishment. Deane Ju- han’s Job’s Body helps me understand why. Until now, there hasn’t been a publication with a real scientific basis that shows how bodywork ‘‘works.”’
This not a ““how-to’’ book, nor is it only for bodyworkers. It’s for anyone inter- ested in how the body functions, and its healing potential. The author’s literary background transforms the human ana- tomy into eloquent and flowing prose. Particularly impressive is his synthesis of the interplay between the sensory and motor impulses of the nervous system that enable such refined muscular ef- forts as sports, dance, music, and
the visual arts.
Juhan concludes with a physiological discussion of disease and health in the human body, and of how stress and other factors contribute to habitual cycles of physical and psychological suffering that undermine health. Using drugs to break these cycles has some positive re- sults, though side effects may create new cycles. Juhan suggests how meditation, yoga, the martial arts, and bodywork can break these cycles and encourage movements toward health. —RD
«
In the language of movements, then,
i a WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
“the neurons of the spinal cord and their
specific interconnections are the words and the grammatical structures. | am not free to alter the patterns of the spinal circuits any more than | am free to alter the conventions of the language | am speaking if | am to make a coherent statement. The execution of a voluntary gesture, like the uttering of an original sentence, can only be accomplished by the appropriate arrangement of basically inflexible sub-units. These circuits and reflex arcs, like the definitions of words and the rules of grammar, cannot ordi- narily be changed, and yet there is
no limit to the number of original and meaningful statements that can be built up with them. The cortex can initiate literally any sequence that it can dis- tinctly imagine, as long as it is consistent with anatomical limitations.
There is certainly nothing mysterious, or illusory, or temporary about the benefits of effective bodywork. Bodywork is simply a method of educating, or re- educating, motor responses, a method which capitalizes upon the central role played by tactile stimulation in the se- lection and reinforcement of patterns of muscular activity. New ways of posturing and moving cannot be readily learned until the characteristic tension patterns developed by old habits of movement and posture are removed, until the mus- cles in question are relaxed: ‘‘Muscular relaxation . . . is a prerequisite to any type of successful muscle retraining.”
The Anatomy of Change
What do you do when you lose your job? How do | react if my spouse tells me she wants to separate? How does
a person act when a loved one dies? Chances are, none of us learned to negotiate such difficult life transitions as - this in our education system. Richard Heckler outlines how we respond to nearly.all our traumatic life situations in the same way with what he calls our “conditioned tendency,”’ and, more importantly, how we hold this ’‘tenden- cy’’ in each of our bodies as a stance in the world.
With numerous case studies, martial-arts exercises, and meditation techniques, Heckler encourages bodily awareness of this ““tendency,”’ using it as a reference point in beginning to experience the “‘life
The Anatomy of Change Richard Strozzi Heckler, 1984; 138 pp.
$11.95 ($12.95 postpaid) from: Random House, Inc. /Attn.: Order Entry, 400 Hahn Road Westminster, MD 21157; 800/638-6460 (or Whole Earth Access).
Job’s Body
(A Handbook for Bodywork) Deane Juhan, 1987; 365 pp.
$29.95 (531.95 postpaid) from: Small Press Distributors, 1814 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94702; 415/549-3336 (or Whole Earth Access).
= ~~
Visceral nerve fibers
Skin nerve fibers \ \
The mechanism of ‘‘referred’’ pain. Pain from internal organs may seem to come from areas of skin or muscles, because the signals may be transferred in the internun- cial circuits of the spinal cord. This referral mechanism can sometimes make the actual source of the pain very ambiguous. Indeed, referrals can create muscle spasms which themselves begin to generate pains in addi- tion to the original visceral one. This can become a very vicious circle.
_ of the body.” Finally, the author relates how this microcosm of personal, bodily change expands to be a metaphor for society and humanity as a whole. —RD e
It is important to remember that center is a state of being that is not confined to a certain posture or a constantly held image. Because it is through the body that we are working, the state of center is always available, despite our posture, physical handicaps, or environment. Ultimately, center is an inner subjective state that is manifested through the body. In other words, we can relate to center from any number of positions or actions. Lying down, sitting, carrying a sleeping child, washing the dishes, or driving a car can all be done from center. Being with center is an attitude toward ourself,
Massage Therapy Journal —
This quarterly, the publication arm of
the American Massage Therapy Institute, is certainly for the practitioner. But its many articles, interviews, and book re- views make the journal interesting and _ informative for the active person, and anyone interested in touch. Recent issues have included exercises to stop neck pain, information on the correct fluid intake for racers, dance injuries in the American Ballet Theater of New York, and being on tour with Sting as his massage therapist.
One regular columnist is Dr. Ben E. Benjamin, whose book Listen to Your Pain was reviewed
in EWEC (p. 238).
Massage Therapy Journal
David Lauterstein, Editor
$15 /year (4 issues) from AMTA, P. O. Box 1270, Kingsport, TN 37662.
and this attitude, formed by the boun- daries of our lived body, is one in which we feel bodily present to ourself and our situation.
Stand facing your partner with both of you in right hammi, that is, with right foot forward (below). Have your part- ner point his finger at your chest. This. can represent a point of conflict. First feel what it is like to go directly against his energy and intention. Now enter to his right side and blend as totally as possible with his position. Do this not only bodily but with your attitude. See the world from his point of view. Now that you’ve entered and blended with his position, feel his weight, his balance, his power, and the commitment of his intention, and blend with them.
Disc protrusion.
e eid The “‘slipped disc’’ is a popular mis- — nomer. Discs almost never slip, but they crack and they chip, and they bulge and ooze out to cause painful pressure on spinal nerves. The discs that lie be- tween the lower-back vertebrae are like half-dollar-sized plastic bags filled with a squishy substance that looks like crab meat. They hydraulically cushion the movement of spinal bones and act as shock absorbers. The lumbar discs are the thickest of all the spinal discs, because they absorb the most weight. The discs conform to the shape of the natural forward curve, being thicker in front toward your belly than they are
in the back. In the normal standing po- sition, the disc is constantly pushed in an anterior direction. If the disc is in- jured and protrudes it is, therefore, more likely to protrude anteriorly which causes little or no pain. This is a good arrange- ment because it is better that the discs protrude anteriorly than posterolater- ally (to the back and side) where the nerves exit.
Somatics Magazine
This biannual journal includes articles, case studies, research papers, book re- views, and interviews by and with body- workers, scientists, artists, actors, dancers, and martial artists about the interrelationship between the body
and the mind.
My interest in this publication is both as a practitioner and as a person concerned with optimal body functioning. _—RD €
A general improvement in the way we use our skeleton allows us to enjoy the full range of movements of the joints and intervertebral disks. All too often, the bodily limitations that we believe are due to not being limber are, instead, caused by a habitual contraction and shortening of our muscles of which we are not conscious. Unwittingly, our pos- tures become distorted, and the joints of our bodies suffer unequal pressures.
Degeneration of the joint surfaces im- poses, in its turn, a further restriction of muscular activity so as to avoid pain and discomfort in movement. Thus, a vicious circle is established, which grad- ually distorts the skeleton, the spine, and the intervertebral disks, resulting in an elderly body whose range of move- ments is reduced long before we have become old. Actually, however, age has little to do with this sad event. On the contrary, it is quite possible to restore the body’s ability to perform every move- ment of which the skeleton is capable.
Central Nervous System
erception of emotion
Conscious
Sub-conscious
Feeling an emotion.
Somatics Magazine Eleanor Criswell, Editor
$1 5/year (2 issues) from Somatics, 1516 Grant Avenue/Ste. 220, Novato, CA 94945; 415/897-0336.
27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 i i
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DUALITY IN HUMAN NATURE was recogniz- ed long before discoveries in machinery and in evolutionary and molecular biology made a mechanistic explanation of life plausi-
Coming ble. The two sides of our being are known traditionally by the mystery-laden terms flesh and spirit or body and soul and more recently as instinct and intelligence, id and ego, or even Mr. Hyde
and Dr. Jekyll.
@ @ Divorce In) The mystery is diminished in the light of modern evolutionary
theory's ‘‘selfish gene’ concept. According to this idea, organ-
H isms are evolutionary inventions, successful because they further uUmMman the replication of the genes that built them. Bodies are temporary | “survival machines’ for their, potentially immortal (though mindless) genes. But, especially in sexual organisms, a body
Nature represents a temporary association of various genes. Later genera-
tions will be formed of different shuffles of the genetic deck. It is thus possible that traits that improve the survival chances of one gene may diminish those of another. The association is not. BY HANS MORAVEC always fully cooperative. But the reproductive fates of all the genes _§_——— in an organism are closely enough aligned that such conflicts usually show up only in subtle ways.
Hans Moravec is Director of the Mobile But during the course of human evolution our genes stumbled Robot Laboratory of Carnegie Mellon Uni- onto a new kind of genétics, one whose criteria for survival are versity, where he is engaged in research he very different from those of the original genes coded in DNA.
hopes will lead to a ‘‘postbiological’’ future. § The new genetics is human culture, passed from one generation's Within 40 years, Moravec believes, we will brains to the next through example and language. Culture would BERG OUT LES FO GON OL OU a EOS not have survived and flourished if it did not enhance the sur- sciousness into mobile robots, that is: digi- ; : vival of our DNA genes, but nevertheless the two reproduce in-
tally duplicate the workings of your brain : : rs ED Gaal witid. | place sherawat: alrsucnenan anal dependently, and are often in conflict. What is best for continued
if you like, dispose of your original body, survival of one is often not best for the other. The most dramatic Whether of mot this willavork (eH GCbae. conflict may be the issue of individual death. Our DNA genes able. Moravec thinks it will, and more im- usually survive our death, grouped in different ways in our off- portantly, be is convinced that downloading spring and our relatives. In a subtle way it is no doubt in their is the next logical step in buman evolution. evolutionary interest to regularly experiment like this with fresh Portions of this article are taken from Mora- _ Shuftfles of the evolutionary deck. But the process is devastating vec's new book, Mind Children (SIGNAL, for our cultural genes. Many hard-earned skills and memories p. 207). —Richard Kadrey simply die with us.
j 2 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
The Anatomy of the Image Maps
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The economics of growth and reproduction have con- spired to produce a relationship between size and longevity — large animals live longer than small ones. But humans are anomalous in this regard, they live as long as elephants. This anomaly must reflect a compromise between the biological adaptability con- ferred by frequent gene shuffles, and the survival ad- vantages of enough time in a generation to pass on a significant amount of cultural information to the next. But the bargain was struck a long time ago, when the size of our cultural heritage was far smaller. As the fragmentation of knowledge attests, a lifetime now hardly suffices to scratch the surface of things worth learning.
Culture was able to grow to this extent because it in- vented ways of exceeding its biological limits. We call the major ones libraries. Libraries still require the action of human beings to make the information ac- tive, but the invention of computers is changing that. Our culture is acquiring the ability to express itself independently of our biological genes. Sooner or later our machines will become knowledgeable enough to handle their own maintenance, reproduction, and self-improvement without help. The most obvious in- dication that we have reached this point will be the appearance of robots with all-round human level abilities. Our culture will then be able to evolve in- dependently of human biology and its limitations, passing instead directly from generation to genera- tion of ever more capable intelligent machinery. In Mind Children I provide reasons for believing that this stage will be reached in less than fifty years.
Unbound from one another, our cultural and bio- logical halves will take different courses. Outer space is already a profitable arena for the owners of com- munications satellites. As transportation costs de- cline, other activities will start to pay. Space facto- ries will use raw materials purchased from earth or from human space outposts, which will be process- ed by human-supervised machines and sold at a pro- fit. The high cost of maintaining humans in space ensures that there always will be more machinery per person in a space colony than there is on earth. As machines become more capable, the economics will favor an ever higher machine-to-people ratio. Hu- mans will not necessarily become fewer at this stage; the machines will just multiply faster, becoming ever more competent with each new generation. Imagine the immensely lucrative robot factories that could be built in the asteroids. Solar-powered machines would prospect and deliver raw materials to huge, unenclos- ed, automatic processing plants. Metals, semiconduc- tors, and plastics produced there would be converted by robots into components that would be assembled into other robots and into structural parts for more plants. Machines would be recycled as they broke. If their reproduction rate is higher than the wear- out rate, the factories will grow exponentially, like a colony of bacteria, on a Brobdingnagian scale. A harvest of a small fraction of the output of mater-
ials, components, and whole robots would make the investment pay off spectacularly.
Eventually humans, whether workers, design engi- neers, managers, or investors, will become unnec- essary in space enterprises, as the scientific and technical discoveries of self-reproducing superintel- ligent mechanisms are applied to making themselves smarter still. Our rapidly evolving cultural offspring will leave our slowly evolving biological genes, and the bodies they build, behind in a cloud of dust.
Today the skills and memories of computers are shared by the routine transfer of programs and data between different machines. Robots of the future will use similar techniques to share their mental states. In time sophisticated scanning techniques may make it possible to move the contents of biological human brains into other machinery in a similar way. By such techniques our individual personalities may survive the obsolescence of their biological heritage to join in the future growth and evolution of our cultural
progeny. New Bodies
Robot minds will be free to move between radically different kinds of bodies, so the question of just what they will look like is not well defined. But here’s an interesting option.
The human world has been shaped by human hands, which are still our most effective general-purpose tool. Yet many useful and easily described tasks are beyond human dexterity (pull tightly on both ends of the string, while holding the knot between your fingers, lift the bundle, wrap the ends around it tight- ly four times. . . ). If such actions are attempted at all, it is with varying degrees of success using special tools and fixtures.
It is unlikely that our superintelligent descendants will be satisfied with mere stumpy fingers. Consider the following observations. Worms and other animals shaped like balls or sticks are unable to manipulate or even locomote very well. Animals with legs (a stick with smaller, movable sticks) locomote quite well but are still clumsy at manipulation. Animals like us, with fingers on their legs (sticks on sticks on a stick), can manipulate much better. Now generalize the concept — a robot that looks like a tree, with a big stem re- peatedly branching into thinner, shorter, and more
numerous twigs, ultimately ending in an astronomi-
cal number of microscopic cilia.
Each intermediate branch would be able to swing for- ward and backward and side to side while its top, where the next smaller branches are attached, rotates on the branch axis. Possibly the branch could also change its length like a telescope — the number of motions of each branch can be traded off for more levels. Each joint would have sensors to measure its position and also the force it exerts. Although made of branches, each with a rigid mechanical character, the overall structure would have an ‘‘organic’’ flex-
27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 | 3
NASA/JPL
Hans Moravec’s version of the Stanford Cart was the first robot that could navigate through a cluttered natural environment by processing the information fed to it through TV cameras.
ibility because of the great multitude of ways its parts could move.
A robot of this design could be self-constructing. Tiny bushes, only a few millionths of the weight of the final device, would be ‘‘seeded"’ to start the process. These would work in groups to build the next larger sprigs from available raw materials, then join themselves to their constructions. The resulting larger bushes would join to build even larger branches, and so on until a small crew (of large members) met to assemble the stem. At the other end of the scale, a sufficiently large bush should be able to organize the necessary resources to build the tiny seeds to start the process all over again (or simply to repair or extend itself). It could make the smallest parts with methods similar to the micromachining techniques of current inte- grated circuitry. If its smallest branchlets were a few atoms in scale (with lengths measured in nanome- ters), a robot bush could grab individual atoms of raw material and assemble them one by one into new parts.
To make things more concrete, we can do an actual
design. Suppose that the basic structure is a large ©
branch that splits into four smaller ones, each half the scale. If we start with a stem a meter long and
I 4 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
The Smart Machines Theater at Boston’s Computer Museum. All of the machines in the exhibit are considered ‘‘smart,’ meaning that each is able to complete a task that, if performed by a human, would require some intelligence. Shakey (far right) is the only robot controlled by ar- tificial intelligence. The A.I. program helped it use objects in a room
to build a ramp so that it could push a specific block that it could
not ordinarily reach.
ten centimeters in diameter and carry the branching to twenty levels, the bush will end in a trillion tiny ‘leaves,’ each a millionth of a meter (a micron) long and a tenth of that in diameter. Because of their much smaller weight and size, the leaves can move a million times as fast as the trunk. Let’s say that the trunk can wiggle back and forth once per second; so the
leaves will vibrate a million times per second. Ifthe ©
bush folds itself into a tight bundle, its cross section will be approximately constant, and it will be two
meters long. The trunk will then occupy half that — length, the second level half the remaining length,
and so on. Unfolded, umbrellalike, it would spread into a disk a little under two meters in diameter, thick
but sparse near the center, and thinner at the edge,
with smaller gaps that taper off to micron spaces.
If each joint can measure the forces and motions ap- plied to it, we have a remarkable sensor. There are a trillion leaf fingers, each able to sense a movement of perhaps a’ tenth of a micron and a force of a few
micrograms, at speeds up to a million changes per -
second. This is vastly greater than the sensing abili- ty of the human eye, which has a million distinguish- able points that can register changes at most a hun- dred times per second. If our bush puts its fingers on a photograph, it will ‘‘see’’ the image in immense detail simply by feeling the height variations of the developed silver on the paper. It could watch a movie by walking its fingers along the film as it screamed by at high speed. There is no reason the fingers could not also be sensitive to light and temperature and other electromagnetic effects; indeed, the smallest are the right size to be ‘‘antennas’’ for light. The bush could form an eye by holding up a lens and
EE
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‘larger computers nearer the stem. If the
a ee ees
putting a few million of its fingers in the focal plane behind it. It may even be able to get by without the lens by holding a bunch of its fingers in a carefully spaced diffraction pattern, thus forming a holograph- ic lens. |
In addition to having a sensing capability to match that of the world’s current human population, our bush would have the ability to affect its environment at the same prodigious rate. A well-trained human, using precise and well-timed hand and body motions, each able to change direction at most a few times in a second, with a precision no better than a few per- cent of the total movement, could conceivably affect the world at a net rate of a thousand bits per second — a fast typist, for instance, produces less than one hundred bits per second of text. The potential data rate of a robot with one trillion fingers, each able to move a million times per second, is more than a quadrillion (101°) times greater. Such high data rates imply huge coordination of enormous processing power, but imagine the possibilities. The bush robot could reach into a complicated piece of delicate mechanical equipment — or even a living organism — simultaneously sense the relative position of mil- lions of parts, some possibly as small as molecules, and rearrange them for a near-instantaneous repair. In most cases the superior touch sense would totally substitute for vision, and the extreme dexterity would eliminate the need for special tools.
An astronomical amount of thinking would be required to control this wonderful machine. Much of it might be handled by what in animals are called reflex arcs, small bits of nervous system near the. site being controlled. Each of the small branchlets could contain enough of a compu- ter to control most of the rou- tine activity; only exceptional situ- ations would require intervention from
branches also contained their own pow-
er source (think rechargeable battery)
and a way of communicating remotely (radio, or sound vibrations of a few thou- sand synchronized cilia, would do), the bush could break into a coordinated swarm of small- er bushes. The smaller the individual bush, the less intelligent and less powerful it would be. It would be preprogrammed, and charged up, by its home stem to perform some function and then return as soon as possible to report and receive new instructions.
Small size would frequently be an advantage: a smaller robot can squeeze into smaller spaces. A tiny machine has a greater surface-area-to-weight ratio: while a large bush could walk securely along the floor, using its branches as so many nimble toes, a smaller machine should be able to walk on ceilings like a fly, with the tiny cilia holding onto microscopic cracks in the paint or sticking by molecular adhesion. Bush-
es could burrow by loosening particles of dirt and passing them backward, and swim efficiently by assuming a tight, streamlined shape, with the cilia forming a skin that pumps fluid to propel and also responds to the flow to prevent turbulence. Extremely small machines will have so much surface area for their weight that they can fly like insects, beating their cilia in patterns optimal for moving air.
The contribution of the bigger branches to the power and intelligence of the smaller ones can be visualiz- ed as a kind of reverse pyramid scheme. Each level (counting all the twigs at that level) of our robot has
twice the volume of the next smaller level and thus
room for twice the power supply and twice the com- puter. Two levels down, the ratio is four to one, and at three levels it is eight. If the control and power for each level are piped up from the branches three steps closer to the stem, the small branches can be four times as vigorous as otherwise. Only the stem and the first few branches radiating from it would be shortchanged. Since most of their power and at- tention is directed higher up in the tree, (. 9am they may be incapable of much mo- tion and may be relegated to provid- ing a stable framework if they passively lock their joints. >
- eorJs Bos kt brig Ags
Moravec’s vision of
the ultimate ‘human body,” the Robot Bush. As of now, the trillion-fingered robot remains only theoretical.
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27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 i 5
A big question is how the control programs for such a beast would work. In the extreme case one could imagine a program that would try to determine the combination of actions of each individual joint that would best accomplish the desired task. This is al- most certainly an example of a colossal NP (non- deterministic polynomial) problem that can be op- timally solved only by essentially examining every possible combination of motions and picking the best. Such solutions are intractable these days even for simple manipulators that have only a handful (!) of fingers. Though computers will be vastly more powertul in the future, the problem posed by a system with a large number of fingers is much, much bigger still. From time to time an especially clever strategy for coordinating thousands or millions of fingers to accomplish a particular task may be discovered, and collections of clever strategies will be passed between individuals — the manual skills of the superintelligent era. But while humans teach skills as simple as how to tie a shoelace, the lessons of superintelligent machines may be more comparable to instructions for assembling an airliner. While finding the best possible solution for routine problems will usually be out of the question, finding a good enough one may not be too hard. I imagine a divide-and-conquer strategy, where the stem considers the overall prob- lem and generates plausible subtasks for each of the four subtrees immediately connected to itself. These further subdivide the problem and pass those frag- ments on, and so on. The smallest branches would
receive simple commands like move to a certain po- sition, or move until resistance is met. A command from the stem might be something like: North bush — stay on left side of plane A, and right side of plane B, and apply net force vector V to object; East bush — stay on right of A and B, and resist any motion more than 10 cm from the axis; South bush — right of A, left of B, apply force negative V; West bush — left of A and B, and resist. If a subproblem, as passed to a small
bush, cannot be solved, a complaint would be sent
back to the originating branch, which would then
go back to the drawing board to try something else.
A bush robot would be a marvel of surrealism to behold. Despite its structural resemblance to many living things, it would be unlike anything yet seen on earth. Its great intelligence, superb coordination, astronomical speed, and enormous sensitivity to its environment would enable it to constantly do some- thing surprising, at the same time maintaining a per- petual gracefulness. Two-legged animals have three or four effective gaits; four-legged animals have a few more. Two-handed humans have two or three ways to hold an object. A trillion-limbed device, with a brain to match, is an entirely different order of being. Add to this the ability to fragment into a cloud of coordinated tiny fliers, and the laws of physics will seem to melt in the face of intention and will. As with no magician that ever was, impossible things will simply bappen around a robot bush. Imagine inhabiting such a body. a
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= lw
Daedalus.
The debate over Artificial Intelligence has become wildly complicated in the last couple of decades. It’s no longer “Will it work?,”’ but “Should we do it?,’’ “How will we build it2,’’ ““Who will con- trol it?,’’ and “‘Do we actually know what it (mind) is and how it works?’’ All these questions and more are explored in this special issue of Daedalus, the journal _of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Since this is mostly an academic journal, the writing gets a little thick at times. If you’re just getting interested in Al, this is NOT the place fo start your reading. Try Marvin Minsky’s The Soci- ety of Mind (Signal p. 202) and Grant Fjermedal’s The Tomorrow Makers (Signal p. 203). When you’re ready to dive into the minutiae of Al, the neural- network debates, the uncertain position of Al within the sciences, then read this fascinating collection of essays from some of the most profound critics and boost- ers of Al around. —Richard Kadrey
% It is one of the ironies of intellectual
i 6 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
A neural net is a network of powerful computer chips that simulate the workings of neurons in the brain. Terrence Sejnowski and Charles R. Rosenberg developed this alphabet to teach a neural net to read and speak English text. The alphabet uses 203 symbols to represent letters, punctuation, and word barriers. In an experiment using a 1,000-word transcription of a child's speech, the net was able to read and speak the text with 95-percent accuracy.
history that Wittgenstein’s devastating attack on his own Tractatus, his Philo- sophical Investigations, was published
in 1953, just as Al took over the abstract, atomistic tradition he-was attacking. After writing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein spent years doing what he called phe- nomenology — looking in vain for the atomic facts and basic objects his theory required. He ended by abandoning his Tractatus and all rationalistic philosophy. He argued that the analysis of everyday situations into facts and rules (which is where most traditional philosophers and Al researchers think theory must begin) is itself only meaningful in some context and for some purpose. Thus, the elements chosen already reflect the goals and purposes for which they are carved out. When we try to find the ultimate context- free, purpose-free elements, as we must if we are going to find the primitive sym- bols to feed a computer, we are in effect trying to free aspects of our experience of just that pragmatic organization which makes it possible to use them intelligently in coping with everyday problems.
e
When a holographic plate is cut in two,
each half contains a slightly degraded version of the entire image. Distributed representations with properties similar to holograms are often used within con- ventional digital computers, and they are invisible to most users except in the system's capacity to tolerate errors. The error-correcting memory system used in most computers is a good example. The system is composed of many physically separate memory chips, but any single chip can be removed without losing any data. This is because the data gre not stored in any one place, but in a distri- buted, nonlocal representation across all of the units. In spite of this ““holo- graphic’’ representation, the informa- tion storage capacity of the system is no greater than it would be witha conven- tional representation, in which each piece of data is stored in a single chip. In fact, it is slightly less.
Daedalus
Seymour Papert, Editor 1988; 311 pp.
$9.95 (511.45 postpaid) from: MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cam- bridge, MA 02142; 617/253-2884.
tt a ME Cai mel
ES F you can make a machine
that contains the contents of your
mind, then that machine is you. The hell with the rest of your physical body, it’s not really very interesting. Now, the machine can last forever. —Gerald Jay Sussman, M.1.T Professor and legendary hacker
I will say this quite explicitly: There’s nothing left after you've destroyed the human species! Humans are the ultimate value. It’s so fundamental. Everything else is based upon that. I think one can use other vocabulary for this: Genocide of the human spe- cies is the murder of God. —Joseph Weizenbaum, M.LT. Professor and inventor of the ELIZA program
Out of my flesh that hungers
and my mouth that knows
comes the shape I am seeking for reason —Audre Lorde, feminist author
I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is. —Walt Whitman
You ask me to dig in the earth? Am I to take a knife and plunge it into the breast of my mother?
—Chief Smohalla
I think that the species is just a step in evolution. I'm sure the chimpan- zees thought people were a bad thing. —Marvin Minsky, artificial intelligence pioneer
/S a matter of fact, man,
like woman, is flesh, therefore pas-
sive, the plaything of his hormones and of the species, the restless prey
_ of his desires.
—Simone de Beavoir
I do believe the flesh should not be despised. If the flesh is not sacred, holy, then we are trapped in the muck of the profane, because the body is all we have. All knowledge, reason, truth, beauty, it is all reducible to physical sensation and actions per- formed by the agency of the flesh. —Pat Califia, writer and sadomasochist
Nature is man’s inorganic body. —Karl Marx
Doing anatomy was an eye-opener: one had built one’s whole life on an illusion about the integrity of one’s body, this “solid flesh’’ One mythol- ogizes one’s familiar bits of flesh and tendon. Then to see a cadaver on a dissecting table and begin to dissect it myself and at the end of the term that there was nothing left except a sort of heap of gristle and a clutch of bones with a label bearing some dead doctor’s name — that was a tremendous experience of the lack. of integrity of the flesh. —
—J].G. Ballard, author of
Empire of the Sun
Despite the fact that they are made — of materials more lasting than our bodies, machines grow older more rapidly than we do. They are inven- tions and manufactured objects; our bodies are re-productions, re-crea- tions. Machines wear out and after a time one model replaces another; bodies grow old and die, but the body has been the same from the appearance of man on earth until now. The body is immortal because it is mortal; this is the secret of its permanent fascination — the secret of sexuality as much as of eroticism. —Octavio Paz
When the sacred is immanent, the body is sacred. Woman-body, man- body, child-body, animal-body, and earth-body are sacred. They have an inherent integrity and inherent worth. All of our bodily processes, especially the deep, pleasure-giving force of our sexuality, are sacred processes.
—Starhawk, writer and pagan
Almost everything ever written can
' be understood as an embodiment
of its time and as related to body
' perception.
— Barbara Duden
The body, which was once the tem- ple, has become a living tomb. The body has lost relation to the world in which it moves. It is in this way that a world dies. The form dies first. But, though few perceive it, are aware of it, the form could not have died unless the spirit had already been killed. Whilst the deterioration of the body takes place — a process which may require many centuries — life loses its significance. —Henry Miller
HE human body is an in- strument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.
—Alfred North Whitehead
Beauty is momentary in the mind — The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. The body dies; the body’s beauty lives... —Wallace Stevens
It is better to control a restrictive
and hostile emotion . . . than a gen-
erous and expansive one such as love.
Conventional morality has erred,
not in demanding self-control, but
in demanding it in the wrong place. — Bertrand Russell
_ Already there is talk of creation
of androids for sexual purposes. I think you are going to see an industry develop in the sexual-appliance area. At first it will be machine appliances, and eventually you will see biological substitutes or surrogates for human sexual organs being employed in sta- tionary and mobile machine systems. —Arthur Harkins, cultural anthropologist
In expressing love we belong among the underdeveloped countries, —Saul Bellow
27 GATE FIVE ROAD = SAUSALITO, CA 94965 j 7
mens «=6BY STELARC
Stelarc is an artist concerned not only with aesthetics, but with human evolution. From 1976 to 1983, he performed a series of “suspension events.”’ Allowing his skin to be pierced by sterile hooks, he was suspended in museums, over a street in Copenhagen, and in other environments. The stretching and distorting of Stelarc’s flesh was his way of demonstrating what he considered to be the severe limita- tions of the human body in gravity. Stelarc called these events ‘‘Obsolete Body Sus- pensions.’ A book documenting these performances was reviewed by JC for the Winter ’87 WER (#57, p. 125). Since dis- continuing the suspension events, Stelarc has developed performances using a pros- thetic third hand, and taken time to deliver a paper to artificial-intelligence research- ers at Stanford University. What follow are Stelarc’s theories on why the human body is obsolete and what he believes the next step in human evolution will (or ought
to) be. —Richard Kadrey
‘ & WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
ETWEEN GRAVITY AND FANTASY.
The body is now suspended between the inward pull of gravity and the out- ward thrust of information. The most significant planetary pressure is no longer the gravitational force, but the information field. In the past our evolu- tionary form has been molded by 1G; from now on our direction and devel- opment will be determined by the information flow.
BIOTECH TERRAINS. Humans now in- habit a landscape of technology that cues, conditions, and circulates the body. Biotech terrains conceal count- less body pacemakers that alert and activate people, directing them in pre- determined patterns and velocities.
Hands Writing — Tokyo 1982 7
BEYOND THE HUMAN SCALE. The significance of the technological ter- rain lies not merely in the pure power it generates but the realm of abstraction it produces through its operational speed, precision, and the development of different sense-systems. The body is immersed in an increasingly intense in- formation field that cannot be absorbed and creatively processed by the indi- vidual. Artifacts exceed human sensing whilst information goes beyond human comprehension.
REDEFINING WHAT Is HUMAN
ANESTHETIZED BODY — THE ATRO- PHY OF ECSTACY. Increasingly complex organization necessitates automation. Automation implies ease of operation, speed of decision-making, and the illu- sion of control. Automation promises
operational reliability and predictability.
But it pacifies the body, minimizing its kinesthetic feel. Because technology so successfully mediates between the body and the world, it disconnects the body from many of its functions. Distraught and disconnected, the body can only resort to interface and symbiosis. The body may not yet surrender its auton- omy, but certainly its mobility. Plugged
THE INVASION OF TECHNOLOGY. Technology not only orbits the body but has now landed — attaching and implanting itself in human tissue. Once only a container of the body, technology can now become a com- ponent. EVOLUTION ENDS WHEN TECHNOLOGY INVADES THE BODY, SPLITTING THE SPECIES. imploding, implanted technology focuses physical change on each individual, propelling the body into post-evolutionary trajec- tories. Technology, having defined human nature, provides the potential for redesign.
OBSOLETE BODY. It might be the height of technological folly to con- sider the body obsolete, yet it might
be the highest of human realizations. It is no longer of any advantage to either remain “human” or to evolve the spe- cies. The body must burst from its bio- logical, cultural, and planetary contain- ment. It is time to desynchronize, di- versify, and depart. Obsolete but aware, the body can plot its own demise —
its own vanishing. p
27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 : 9
REDESIGNING THE BODY. It is time to question whether a bipedal, breath- ing, beating body with binocular vision and a 1400cc brain is now an adequate biological form. The human species. has created a technological and infor- mation environment it can no longer cope with. On the one hand, it is in- timidated by the speed, precision, and power of technology, and on the other, it is overwhelmed by the vast quantity and complexity of accumulated infor- mation. The body is neither a very effi- cient nor a very durable structure. It malfunctions often and fatigues quickly,
20 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
Curves/Event for Three Hands i Tokyo, 1981
its performance determined by its age and sex. It is susceptible to disease and is doomed to a certain and early death. It is deactivated daily to. dream (or become deranged) — a disproportion- ately high amount of its short life span being consumed in sleep. Its survival parameters are very slim. It can survive only weeks without food, days without water, and minutes without oxygen. The body’s lack of modular design and its overreacting immunological system
make it difficult to exchange malfunc- tioning organs with healthy ones — __ even if it is a matter of the system's very survival. The body reproduces, but has no replaceable parts. REDEFINING THE BODY MEANS REDEFINING OUR ROLE.
Street Suspension — New York, 1984
NO BIRTH, NO DEATH — THE HUM OF THE HYBRID. As the body attains planetary escape velocity, it bursts from its genetic confinement. Death no longer ‘‘authenticates”’ existence. Death is an outmoded strategy of an evolving species. It is of no advantage to be aware of the individual! Neither birth nor death should be design criteria in the Post-Evolutionary body. Technology transforms the nature of human exis- tence, standardizing sexuality and equalizing the physical potential of the body. With fertilization occurring out- side the body and the possibility of nurturing the fetus in an artificial sup- port system there will technically be no birth. And if the body can be re- designed in a modular fashion to facili- tate the replacement of malfunctioning parts, then technically there will be no reason for death — given the accessi- bility of replacement parts. The body will no longer be repaired, but simply have parts replaced. Extending life no longer means ‘existing’ but rather be- ing operational. Bodies need not age/deteriorate; they would not run down or even fatigue; they would simply stall, then start — possessing the poten- tial both for renewal and reactivation. Human traits like aggression may only be necessary because the body has to be constantly in ‘survival mode.’ The modified body will be sensitive, asex- ual, and immortal.
THE HOLLOW BODY. The solution to modifying the body is not to be found in its internal structure, but lies simply on its surface. THE SOLUTION IS NO MORE THAN SKIN DEEP. The signi- ficant event in human evolutionary history seems to have been a change in the mode of locomotion. Future devel- opment will occur with a shedding of skin, a change of covering. If we could engineer a SYNTHETIC SKIN with simply two capabilities (a means of efficiently converting light into chemical nutrients, and a mechanism for breath- ing directly through its pores), we could radically redesign the body, eli- minating many of its malfunctioning organs and systems, minimizing toxin build-up in its chemistry. On the earth, the body’s. metabolism ebbs and flows with night and day, its brainwaves rhyme with the electromagnetic pulse and its psyche oscillates with the sea- sonal shifts. Our circadian rhythms reflect the rhythms of this planet. Extra- terrestrial environments amplify the body’s obsolescence, intensifying the pressures for its modification. Off the earth, the body’s complexity, softness, and wetness would be hard to sustain. The strategy should be to HOLLOW, HARDEN, and DEHYDRATE the body — to make it more durable and to ex- tend and optimize its performance. But the hollow body would not be empty. Hollowing the body allows it to become a better host for technology — not only creating space for packing in more components, but also permitting a total restructuring. THE HOLLOW BODY NEED NOT HAVE A HUMAN FORM. bP
27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 21
DETACHED BREATH, SPINNING RETINA. The issue is whether redesign- ing the body and plugging it into tele- chiric systems means redefining our roles — whether a body enhanced by hardware can generate an expanded - awareness. There is neither interest in yogic fine-tuning of the body (for “spiritual’’ pursuits) nor body-building for ‘‘superhuman’’ performance. Re- structuring the body results in redefin- ing WHAT IS HUMAN. It is not a mat- ter of perfecting this body for it is now obsolete. What must be questioned is the evolutionary strategy of prolonging the body with its present form and functions. . . . What is important is
no longer seeing the body as a SITE . for the psyche or the social, but as a STRUCTURE which is inadequately designed for both its technological and extraterrestrial terrains. The assumption made is that modifying the architecture of the body will result in altering and, hopefully, enhancing its awareness of the world. IN FACT, THE FIRST SIGNS OF AN ALIEN INTELLIGENCE MAY WELL COME FROM THIS SOLAR SYSTEM. @
Event for Amplified Body/Laser Eyes and Third Hand — Toronto, 1987
22 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW . SUMMER 1989
Veruschka
Ever wanted to see a slide show from a shamans flight? This is as close as you’re likely to get. Through makeup and hours of body-painting Veruschka trans- forms herself, merging into whatever environment captures her imagination. This is not the disembodiment the post- moderns talk about (see Body Invaders review, p. 33), but a spiritual journey, an embedding of the human in what is not human, and transforming both into something else.
—Richard Kadrey
tattoo), tells us about having his body marked by 48 different artists. Raelyn Gallina and Sheree Rose talk about body piercing and scarification. From tattoo artist Leo Zulueta, who is largely responsible for the current interest in tribal tattoos, to industrial/psychedelic musician Genesis P-Orridge, the inter- views are fascinating.
Veruschkai (Trans-figurations) Vera Lahndorff and Holger Trulzch 1986; 160 pp.
$35 postpaid from: Little, Brown and Co., 200 West Street,
- Waltham, MA 02254; 800/343-9204 (or Whole Earth Access).
Modern Primitives is not some shock rag parading crazies for your amuse- ment. All of the people interviewed are looking for something very simple: a way of fighting back at a mass-produc- tion consumer culture that prizes stand- ardization above all else. Through “primitive’’ modifications, they are tak- ing possession of the only thing that any of us will ever really own: our bodies. —Richard Kadrey
Modern Primitives
| got my second tattoo six months ago. It took two visits with the artist to settle on a design, and the needling took another seven hours, spread over two sittings. At times, the pain, especially e
on the tender skin near the inside of my _ Fakir Musafar: Another penetration ritual elbow, had me squinting and grinding my teeth. It took two weeks for the arm to heal and the dead skin to flake off. It took another couple of months for the black pigment to settle into my skin and become a part of it. Why would any- body go to all this trouble for some- thing seemingly as trivial and, to many, perverse as a tattoo? That’s what the editors of Modern Primitives wanted to find out.
Through amazing photographs and in- terviews with two dozen people who — practice “‘primitive’’ body modification, we learn about the spiritual changes that can come through extreme pain as Fakir Musafar describes hanging by hooks in his chest in the Indian Sun Dance. Legendary tattooist Ed Hardy talks about his crusade to raise the artis- tic standards of tattooing, while Hardy’s cohort, Bill Salmon (who did my second
Modern Primitives
Andrea Juno and V. Hale, Editors 1989; 212 pp.
$14.99 ($17 postpaid) from: RE/Search Publications, 20 Romolo, #B, San Francisco, CA 94133; 415/362-1465
(or Whole Earth Access).
is kavandi-bearing which is not done by sadhu professional holy men — ordi- nary people in India do this, usually in February during a festival — trial by the spears of Siva...
A framework is placed around your body and locked on; sharp rods with points are stuck into the skin, then you rise and dance and walk and move. The more you move, with the rattling and vibrating of the spears, the deeper they go into your skin, and the longer you do it the deeper they go into your skin. So, you don’t feel pain as you once knew it — you can get into a great state of ecstasy and you can flip off, which I’ve done a couple of times, into a totally altered state — in two cases | had a
real out-of-body experience. | just to- tally left my body, lifted out of it, floated up above and watched this body like a robot running around, going crazy, with these spears jangling and clanging in > the framework.
Fakir Musafar bears the ‘Spears of Siva.”’
27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 23
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BY MORRIS BERMAN
In Morris Berman's book, Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West, from which this story is excerpted, be painstakingly reexamines western history from the perspective of the human body, By treating history as an abstract study of ideas and events, be says, we have missed the whole truth of human existence: the human
drama is somatic: bow individuals and societies have dealt with the ontological dilemma of bodily existence bas led to the war, religious conflict, and genocide we read about in history books. Ideas take their breath from the body, not the other way around.
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At the core of Berman's thesis is the idea of ‘‘the basic fault.’ At some point in the development of a human being he or she experiences a fundamental rupture in primal barmony. Different schools of thought emphasize different traumas — birth, discontin- uity with the mother, emergence of ego conscious- ness, etc. — but all of them agree that an “‘abyss’’
or ‘‘gap'’ opens up in the soul between self and other. Author John Fowles calls this emptiness the ‘‘nemo,'' which be describes as an anti-ego, a state of being nobody. Fowles says, ‘‘All our acts are partly devised to fill or to mark the emptiness we feel at the core.’ As Berman says, on some level we all know about this longing for pri- mary satisfaction; “‘it is the common somatic heritage we all share.”
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a Drawing largely on the work of a group of French scholars and the British ‘‘object- . relations school,’ Berman shows bow much of culture is a product of how in-
ff dividuals and groups deal with the nemo. b The key concept bere ts that of *'transi- tional objects’’ (TO) — “‘objects that are : s _ not part of the infant's body yet are not
‘ fully recognized as belonging to external reality’’ — which are used to assuage the emptiness. In our longing for the return — to primary unity, culture itself becomes
a transitional object.
For Berman, the major somatic drama
of the last 2,000 years can be seen in the cycles of heresy vs. orthodoxy that char- acterize much of western history. At certain times in history — as with the Gnostics during the time of Christ, the Cathars in the 12th century, or the occult sciences of the Renaissance, for-example — a peaking of somatic energy has occurred. These ec- Static traditions, based on what Berman calls ‘‘the ascent structure,’ take their
_ ity to experience truth directly through the body, After a century or so this somatic energy is typically co-opted by an ortho-
_doxy that seeks to replace direct experience with symbolic experience of truth. Thus Jewish Gnosticism led to Christianity as a ‘world religion, and the magical experimen- tation of the Renaissance finally resulted in a rigid scientific world view. But under- lying these cycles is the deepest truth, what Berman calls the ‘‘ultimate heresy'’: to acknowledge that the only truth is the buman need for truth, which is rooted in our somatic structure.
The “‘gesture of balance’’ Berman is call- ing for in this essay is to abandon the pur- suit of ecstatic ascent, and the ideologies this generates, and instead to live directly with our bodily reality. Followers of Bud- dhism will find familiar territory covered: bere, as will poets, who have put bodily experience into language over millenia. But Berman is trying to speak about a “paradigm beyond paradigm’ in lan- guage historians and other scholars, as
_ well as the general public, can under- stand. His work is a bridge — to a culture that integrates thinking and feeling, mind . and body, rather than one that seeks, at terrible human cost, to keep them apart.
Coming To Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West was published in May of 1989 by Simon & Schuster. Morris Berman is also author of The Reenchantment of the World (Ban- tam Books, 1984). —Jeanne Carstensen
power from the deep human need and abil-
Cram an, FE, LINCHPIN of the Western re- ality system is the split between “heaven” and ‘‘earth,’’ a split that is nothing more than a projection of the basic fault, and that can on- ly be bridged by an ascent struc- ture, an ecstatic journey capable of traversing transitional space. The religion or philosophy or social system that then gets organized
around that vertical journey (or journeyer) then acts as a Transi-
tional Object that holds the culture together for the next few hundred years. There is another alternative to recycling the as- cent structure one more time, and that is to finally abandon it once and for all. This means, at least initially on the individual level, learning to live with the Abyss; recognizing the gap for what it is. Far more important than finding a new paradigm (TO) is coming face to face with the immense yearning that underlies the need for paradigm itself. This means exploring what we fear most, viz., the empty space or silence that exists between con- cepts and paradigms, never in them. We are indeed in a system- break, and the temptation to stuff the gap is very strong; but the
‘road less traveled,’’ which is that of looking at the nature of
paradigm itself, is the truly exciting and liberatory path here.
There can be no healing of our culture and ourselves without tak-
ing this option, and it will not go away, whether we miss it on
this ‘‘round”’ or not. Nothing less is at stake than the chance to be finally, fully human, and since that is our destiny, the latest heresy or paradigm-shift is simply not going to cut it.
What does the end of the ascent dynamic really involve? At first glance, it would seem to imply that everything that is meaningful to us would be lost; and indeed, a very good case contrary to what I am advocating can be made. Thus the Jungian analyst H. G. Baynes said that the argument against ascent experience is analogous to the attempt to put out the sun because it gives some people distorted vision. Ecstatic energy, he said, is our “'real gold’’; we need to learn how to navigate the territory, not to declare that it shouldn't exist:
Certainly, the cognitive insight of ascent experience is earth- shattering; people who have it emerge wondering where they have been all their lives. Purely intellectual or analytical knowing is revealed as being hopelessly incomplete. Life takes on a vivid quality, for one becomes concerned with things that really mat- ter; it is no longer a question of filling up seventy-odd years with ‘interesting projects’ (more often, not so.interesting). The event is so numinous, so meaningful, that one’s relationship to the world, and to oneself, will never be the same, and thus to talk of abandoning this kind of experience. would seem to be, as Baynes said, a great mistake.
_ The problem is that the very strength of the ascent tradition, viz.,
From Coming To Our Senses by Morris Berman. Copyright © 1989 by Morris Berman. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster.
27 GATE FIVE ROAD ‘SAUSALITO, CA 94965 25
the granting of revealed (i.e., certain) knowledge, is also its weakness. The Spanish poet, Antonio Ma- chado, once wrote:
In my solitude I have seen things very clearly that were not true.
The ‘‘clarity’’ of archetypal energy is just a bit too wonderful. It is simply too easy to get a ‘'message from God"’ and be off and running with it. For ex- ample, on July 7, 1986, Juan Gonzales, a Cuban re- fugee who happened to be living in New York and, at the time, riding the Staten Island ferry, killed two people and wounded nine others with a sword in an attack he said was ordered by God. Gonzales said that he was specifically ordered to take control of the ferry in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. This sort of ‘‘amazing grace’ gives one moment to pause; and if it occurs as a mass phenomenon, we are in very deep trouble.
I know one man who had an ascent experience in a technological context, and now believes that only technology can save us. In California, I met another man who came down off his ecstacy with the belief that he had been contacted by UFOs, and that his job was now to prepare the planet for its salvation via extraterrestrial visitors. My own experience came through a particular type of body meditation; hence, this book. So I am in the position of arguing that the energy of the universe originates in the body, and is generated as a field between bodies, but how can I be sure this is right? It may be much more compli- cated than this. In certain Oriental traditions, for ex- ample, the world is seen as pervaded by a life force — ch'i, ki, prana, etc. — and the body is regarded as merely a talented receptacle or ‘‘accumulator’’ for such energy. My approach of the nemo or gap, of Winnicott and Lacan, may be much too narrow, al- though I admit I have said more than just this. But my point here is that if I decide that ascent experience is the last word, then I can create a religion out of the body and be done with all other alternatives. I may be a lot more harmless than Juan Gonzales, but — if I am going to base everything on revelation — not a whole lot less rigid. Ascent experience is perhaps not as enlightened as it would at first seem.
This issue is the subject of two very important books on heresy, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Jacob Needleman’s Lost Christianity, Both authors recognize the ‘‘problem’’ of the Self/Other dynamic, and how it has gotten translated over the centuries into the social arena as the bitter and recurrent strug- gle of heresy vs. orthodoxy. They suggest that ecstatic dissolution of the Self may not be the best way out of this (binary) game. For Eco, only humor can cut through the blind assurance of revealed experience;
it throws us back on ourselves, gives us some psychic _
26 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
distance from the things we are so certain of. (Can you imagine someone like Jerry Falwell poking fun at his own religion? How refreshing — and spiritual — this would be.) I have called this talent ‘‘reflexi- vity,’ and shall say more about it below (it is not the same thing as cultural relativism); but it is important to note that for Eco this reflexivity, this ability to see ourselves in a state of need and commitment, to ac- tually observe it, is the ultimate heresy, much more heretical than any new revelation, any new paradigm. Eco’s fictional spokesman, William of Baskerville, tells his assistant, Adso, that the devil is essentially ‘‘faith without smile,’’and adds:
Fear prophets, Adso, and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many - others die with them. . . . Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth . . . because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from the in- sane passion for the truth.
For Jacob Needleman, the real Christianity that got lost and buried somewhere in the first century A.D. was not that of Gnostic ascent, but this same type of reflexive ability — what he calls, following Gurd- jieff, ‘‘self-remembering.’’ It is, he says, the exper- ience of yourself, not the experience of God. Needle- man may be correct, historically speaking (I person- ally tend to doubt it), but he does quote Meister Eckhart in his defense to good effect:
Aware of it or not, people have wanted to have the ‘‘great’’ experiences . . . and this is nothing but self-will. . . . There are thousands who have died and gone to heaven who never gave up their own wills.
99
“One longs . . . for God, or for Meaning... , writes Needleman, ‘‘and does not see that the long- ing itself is the beginning of the answer one is seek- ing.’ Ecstasy can bind communities together, he points out but to what end? We have pursued mysti- cal love, he says, whereas what we need is ‘‘onto- logical love.’’
This is the crucial point — that true enlightenment is to really know, really feel, your ontological dilem- ma, your somatic nature. The mystic seeks to go up; the ultimate heresy, to my mind, is to go across, or even down. I recall how, a few years ago, I did a two- week meditation retreat with a former Theravada Buddhist monk, and asked him, in the course of it, where ecstatic experience, or Great Mother con- sciousness, fit into the whole thing. ‘‘Oh,’’ he said with a wave of his hand, ‘‘in Buddhism, that is re- garded as a very low form of consciousness.’ He went on to say that ascent was regarded in his tradition as mara — an obstruction to enlightenment. In the same way, Needleman characterizes ecstasy as a form
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of bondage. The real goal of a spiritual tradition should not be ascent, but openness, vulnerability, and this does not require great experiences but, on the contrary, very ordinary ones. Charisma is easy; presence, self-remembering, is terribly difficult, and where the real work lies, ‘‘The highest art,’’ goes an old Tibetan saying, ‘is the art of living an ordinary life in an extraordinary manner.’ That this could become the modality of an entire society is an inspir- ing possibility.
Of course, ascent experience, and what it carries with it, won't go away by fiat, so in this sense Baynes is right — we shall have to learn to navigate the territory. For at least since the binary worldview of Neolithic civilization, we are wired up in a Self/Other dynamic that pulls us toward transcendence, with all its bril- liant and destructive possibilities. Yet a much deeper life lies beyond that of the ascent structure, which is finally about salvation, or redemption; for the ul- timate heresy is not about redemption but, as I said earlier, about the redemption from redemption itself. It is to be able to live in life as it presents itself, not to search for a world beyond. (Politically, of course, this is very often not possible; but it could be ar- gued that our political forms, and messes, are them- selves the results of binary thinking and the ascent mentality. )
True enlightenment is to really know, really feel, your ontological
dilemma, your somatic nature. The mystic seeks to go up; the ultimate
1s to go across, or
The shift away from ascent, and toward bodily pre- sence in the world, implies certain things that go with the territory, as it were. The first of these is an end to the binary contrast mode of consciousness and personality structure. This seems inherent, but it is not; it is a Neolithic artifact, a translation of Tame vs. Wild into Self vs. Other and earth vs. heaven. Beneath the dualistic layer of the human psyche is a kaleidoscopic one that I suspect hunter-gatherer cultures possessed, and that is very much about find- ing ecstacy in details. The American anthropologist, Stanley Diamond, notes that ‘‘primitive’’ life is char- acterized by direct engagement with nature and bodily functions. The ‘‘sense of reality,’ he writes, “is heightened to the point where it sometimes seems to ‘blaze.’’’ There is no ascent in this ‘‘ecstacy’’; all of life is sacred, not just ‘‘heaven.’’ The structure is horizontal rather than vertical, and it has a much greater ‘‘feminine’’ element in it than does our pres- ent consciousness. Vertical structures all have a Grail quest behind them; they are all a form of male he- roics. So most of our history has been a kind of un- necessary artifact. Self/Other opposition, binary structure, Transitional Objects, heresy vs. orthodoxy, ecstatic experience vs. ‘‘ordinary’’ life — all of this may be adventitious, in the last analysis, and certainly not part of ‘‘human nature.’’ That meaning for us occurs only by means of conflict, or dialectics, may
27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 27
heresy, to my mind,
even down.
An idea is something you have; an ideology, something that has you.
only reflect a very shallow notion of meaning. This ‘‘meaning’’ is dependent on a mind/body split; with- out that dichotomous game, most of our history would simply vanish into thin air, since so much of it is about the hero's journey to heal that gap. But journeys are for the most part undertaken out of restlessness; some sort of lack, or need, is typically present. Things are “‘not right’’ here, there is some- thing better to be found somewhere else. Vision- quests and ecstatic journeys were perhaps absent from hunter-gatherer societies, or, if present, prob- ably received much less emphasis until the advent of the Neolithic age. Instead, life was its own pur- pose. Ecstasy is necessary only in a bifurcated world; the hero makes sense only in a religious (binary- mythic) context.
This is why New Age ‘'paradigm-shift’’ finally won't work; no matter how radically different the content might be (and I am very skeptical on this point any- way), the form is really identical. Paradigm-shift is still part of the salvation mentality, a patriarchal mind-set that tells the hero to persevere, find a new form of consciousness that will give him redemption. The awareness that this whole structure is an illusion is the heresy Needleman and Eco are talking about, the real heresy we need to embrace.
Horizontal consciousness, as well as reflexivity, also implies a society of tools rather than worldviews. The minute anything — science, feminism, Buddhism, holism, whatever — starts to take on the character-
28 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
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istics of a cosmology, it should be discarded. How things are held in the mind is infinitely more impor- tant than what is in the mind, including this state- ment itself. For there is a big difference between ideas and ideology. An idea is something you have; an ideology, something that has you. All of these beliefs, techniques, and ideologies are useful; but they are not ‘‘true.’’ What is true is our need to stuff the gap, our longing, our drive to create worldviews out of tools so we can be ‘'safe.’’ At least, that is true right now. My guess is that there is a deeper truth, one that could be part of a new culture. This deeper truth is that we really don’t need to stuff the gap, etc., so that we can be ‘'‘safe.’’ In this new culture we would observe this need for ‘“‘safety,’’ but would refuse to give in to it. Safety would come from the body, not from this or that system.
I do not mean to imply by all this that future con- sciousness would consist in permanent suspended animation, or hanging out in transitional space. Given enough somatic (ontological) security, this might be possible; but a complete via negativa is not an answer, and it certainly isn’t very complex. The whole notion of ‘‘empty space’ has its limits, and some form of coding is always necessary for social and psychological life. The argument for the ‘‘para- digm of no paradigm’’ can only be pushed so far; in recent times, Krishnamurti was the great exponent of this, and he became, in fact, the anti-guru guru. In his book Lying Down, Marco Vassi pegs the prob-
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lem of this argument very astutely. It is all, says Vassi, negative intelligence. In denouncing all methods and worldviews, Krishnamurti failed to come up with any positive alternative. Year after year, says Vassi, Krish- namurti would chide his aging fans for having made no breakthrough in terms of their attachments, but he categorically refused to discuss how such a break- through might be made. In actual fact, Krishnamur- ti, as a guru, was the last version of the male heroic structure. As Vassi says, ‘‘his mission, ironically, may turn out to have been something like that of a Moses for the horizontal paradigm.’’
Part of our goal, undoubtedly, is to learn what it means to live without paradigm, but I also sense a much more complex possibility, viz., developing a radical new code that is itself about coding, and is not merely a shift in coding. This is where reflexivity — the awareness of coding as coding, or Gurdjieff’s ‘“self-remembering’’ on a cultural scale — becomes so important. Christianity, Catharism (and roman- tic love), science, and even cybernetic holism (nature
seen as information exchange) are all heuristically
valuable, but they are not ‘‘true.’’ Only our need for
_ truth is true, and the problem arises when any one
of these tools, or codes, is mapped onto our entire ontology. Reflexivity is about the breaking away from this vertical, binary pathology, for it does not (neces- sarily) say, ‘‘Have no codes,’ but only requires a deliberate awareness of constructing and using a code, and the having of that awareness as part of your code.
Writers such as Gregory Bateson and Henri Atlan are in the vanguard of this, but my favorite remains the
late great teller of tales, Jorge Luis Borges. In one ©
short story, ‘‘Tlon, Ugbar, Orbis Tertius,’ he de- scribes a country that chooses a different reality every day (no repeats allowed). One day they are mystics, another, mechanists, another, something else. No one in this country is allowed to publish a book unless they also include in it its counterbook, which is the argument based on opposing premises. Such a life would undoubtedly be a bit too hectic for most of us, but I believe it is a valuable model to contemplate.
Commenting on self-awareness, Lawrence Durrell
writes:
Civilizations die in the measure that they be- come conscious of themselves. They realize, they lose heart, the propulsion of the uncon- scious motive is no longer there. Desperately they begin to copy themselves in the mirror. It is no use.
‘Truth disappears with the telling of it,’’ he adds; *'It can only be conveyed, not stated.’ ‘Losing heart’’ is certainly a possibility, but I am not sure it is in- evitable, especially if — for the first time in history
— we would develop (or grow into) a culture that would accept the fact that the truth can only be con- veyed (not stated), and that unconscious process must be allowed to remain unconscious. For reflex- ivity does not mean making everything conscious; it should include the notion that the code, of which you are aware, is fed by sources that lend themselves only to indirect awareness. This too facilitates the habit of not mistaking tools for worldviews, for one’s worldview, in effect, becomes Mystery: there is some sort of larger process operating that we cannot di- rectly apprehend, but that permeates our bodies and moves toward healing. Einstein's question remains the crucial one: ‘Is the universe friendly?’’ (What do you think?)
This whole subject of coding, and the coding of coding, is addressed from another angle (that of the history of music) by Jacques Attali in his book Noise. By ‘‘noise’’ Attali means what I have called silence, i.e., the space between codes. Attali calls for a new form of self-conscious coding which he refers to as ‘composition,’ and which could be truly liberatory. Both the history of Western music and that of West- ern political formations have been characterized by epochs, system-breaks and paradigm-shifts, he says, of new codes violently rupturing and replacing old ones (no surprise there). Attali believes that the next code, ‘‘composition,’’ might just be decentralized, independent, and, in effect, radically democratic. Composition, he says,
proposes a radical social model, one in which the body is treated as capable not only of pro- duction and consumption, but also of autono- mous pleasure. This network differs from all those preceding it... .
What may be arising now, he says, is not a new music (read: paradigm), but a new way of making music (read: reflexivity). Composition means that
we create our own relation with the world and try to tie other people into the meaning we thus create. .. . Doing solely for the sake of doing, without trying artificially to recreate the old codes in order to reinsert communication into them. Inventing new codes, inventing the mes- sage at the same time as the language. Playing for one’s own pleasure, which alone can create the conditions for new communication. A con- cept such as this seems natural in the context of music. But it reaches far beyond that; it relates to the emergence of the free act, self- transcendence, pleasure in being instead of having. . . . [I]t is at the same time the inevi- table result of the pulverization of the net- works, without which it cannot come to pass, and a herald of a new form of socialization,
27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 29
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for which self-management is only a very par- tial designation.
Attali’s approach is very similar to Vassi's critique of Krishnamurti. ‘‘Announcing the void,’’ he says, *’
is blasphemy. But blasphemy is not a plan, any more than noise is a code.’ Composition is really about the trust in direct experience, about taking pleasure in the body, and about creating an exchange between bodies. It ‘‘is inscribed not in a repetitive world, but in the permanent fragility of meaning. . . . It is also the only utopia that is not a mask for pessimism.’’ Our ultimate goal, he concludes, is to transform ‘the world into an art form and life into a shifting plea- sure.’ This is the ultimate heresy, then, and a possi- ble outcome of a history of ascent, of system-breaks and paradigm-shifts that are exciting on one level, tedious on another: life characterized by so much somatic security, so much incarnation, that the need for ‘‘truth’’ is far less important than the need for love; and finally, not really in conflict with it. Incar- nation means living in life, not transcending it. The last paradigm-shift has to be a shift to a world in which paradigm-shifts become unnecessary, if not actually banal.
Reflexivity, then, or perhaps what amounts to Jacob Needleman’s notion of *‘ontological love,’ opens the door to composition, or what Dorothy Dinnerstein, in her brilliant essay, ‘‘The Mermaid and the Mino- taur,’’ refers to as ‘‘enterprise.’’ I think this is similar to what I referred to, early on, as the ‘‘cosmological urge, ‘which should be understood as not having any edge of desperation attached to it. In terms of how we have lived on the planet, at least ninety-five per- cent of our experience has not been about gap- stuffing and the search for Transitional Objects, and this raises the question of what future alternatives might consist of. The idea here is not to return to some “'primitive,’’ hunter-gatherer state, but rather to explore the possibilities of a life grounded in so- matic integrity. In his book Life Against Death, Nor- man Brown raised just this question; but, as Dorothy Dinnerstein notes, Brown fell into the error of regard- ing all enterprise — the attempt to comprehend the
world, or even involve oneself in it — as the attempt .
of the infant to console itself for the loss of the Primary Unity, or kinesthetic wholeness. All of cul- ture is thus seen as a form of substitute satisfaction. What Dinnerstein argues is that we have to distin- guish between enterprise and driven behavior. Enter- prise, says Dinnerstein, is actually a healthy thing, a primary satisfaction rather than a secondary one. The problem, she says, lies not in enterprise per se but in the situation in which the kinesthetic is re- nounced to the point that the visual is needed to fulfill compensatory functions. Brown, Rdheim, Balint, Merleau-Ponty, Wallon, and Lacan were guilty
30 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
of what might be called “‘universalization’’ — they zeroed in so completely on this one tendency that they mistakenly turned it into the whole of the human condition, and thereby skewed the meaning of human effort. All of these writers, Dinnerstein essentially says, were correct insofar as they recog- nized that we ruin enterprise by trying to get it to replace a Primary Unity we originally lost, but in- correct insofar as they argued that this is embedded in the structure of the human psyche (or body) itself and that one cannot relate to the world, and to our loss, in a different way. There is a way of going about enterprise, particularly as it applies to creativity, in which the activity is preceded by wholeness, rather than being a frantic attempt to achieve it. This fran- tic approach to life, says Dinnerstein, is not inevitable; we really don’t have to spend our lives chasing ecstasy in an effort to shut down the nemo. It is in fact possi- — ble to embrace enterprise, the cosmological urge, At- tali’s ‘composition,’ and the like in terms of a liv- ing out of the ebb and flow of union and separation.
How shall we characterize this? A similar approach to the notion of enterprise is present in certain schools of Buddhism. The Pali word jivitindriya, which is sometimes translated as ‘‘vitality’’ or ‘‘life principle,’’ is used to stand for the energy that remains in the human being after enlightenment occurs, i.e., after fear, hatred, and delusion are eliminated from the human soul. It is said to arise at the moment of con- ception and depart at the moment of death. It is a positive force, according to the Pali texts. In a similar vein, American Indians often spoke of a ‘‘gesture of balance.’ To clutch at Transitional Objects, regard- less of what form they may take, is to lose balance, whereas real liberation is about resiliency, not about ‘‘truth.’’ The gesture of balance should be a given; my Own experience is that unless one works at it, it only emerges at the oddest moments: a joke someone ' cracks in a railway compartment, at which everyone smiles simultaneously; a simple look of understand- ing between yourself and a stranger who stops you and asks for the time; the moment you catch yourself, as it were, staring absentmindedly out of the win- dow on a gray Sunday morning, having momentar- ily forgotten about your: coffee and the crossword © puzzle you were working on. At such moments, life is neither this nor that; it just is. This is body time, not ego time; the interaction of your Being with real- ity. What will you remember at the moment of your death? Will it be the moment on the train, or when you interacted with a stranger, or when you looked out of the window on that dull, gray Sunday long ago? What does it mean to be alive right — now?
There is only one hope for our situation, and that is that the gesture of balance once again become a way of life; that Self and Other be seen as interrelat-
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ed aspects of something larger, rather than as oppo- nents. It is a long shot, because this is a still small voice that seems ‘‘romantic,’’ or even weak, whereas what is paraded as strength is really a wall of ten- sion, built on a Self/Other opposition. This latter, however, is not a gesture of balance, but rather one of desperation; but it is generally hard to see that. And it is difficult to imagine an entire culture mov- ing in this direction; you can't find the State of Grace anywhere on a map of the known world. But just possibly there is an evolutionary trend here, literally in terms of our own survival, with more and more of us opting for exploration, ‘‘enterprise,’’ and some form of reflexivity, rather than for the safety of rote
or revealed knowledge and familiar formulas.
A unique opportunity is thus available to us now, perhaps for the first time in our history, and that is to intervene in our own evolution in a creative, and reflexive, way. To come back to John Fowles, he may have put this possibility most clearly when he wrote:
The nemo is an evolutionary force, as necessary as the ego. The ego is certainty, what I am; the nemo is potentiality, what I am not. But instead of utilizing the nemo as we would utilize any other force, we allow ourselves to be terrified by it, as primitive man was terrified by light-
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The ability to utilize the basic fault creatively is as much an evolutionary option as our history of using it destructively. We are not condemned to the nemo and a whole array of substitute satisfactions. No mat- ter how likely a scenario this is, it is simply not in- evitable. It is not so much a matter of mastering the terror Fowles speaks of as being able, for starters, to observe it in a neutral fashion. This one tiny (non)- heroic act then opens the door to the world of enter- prise, jivitindriya, the going out to the world in a spirit of aliveness and curiosity rather than one of need and desperation. And this act is heroic, not in the ascent or vision-quest sense of the word, but in the sense of something at once necessary and private and ex- tremely difficult, because it requires doing the one thing that we seek to avoid at all costs: we are asked finally to put our entire bodies into a situation; to refuse numbness and protection in favor of risk and immediacy. That is the ultimate meaning of human life on this planet, the hidden history which, down through the ages, the human race has struggled with, and the destiny and choice which now, after all these millenia, stares us uncompromisingly in the face. =
27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 3 t
The Body’s Recollection of Being
e The Opening of Vision
David Levin is the contemporary spokes- person for the tradition going from Nietzche to Husserl to Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty — a relay race into the depths of sensory flesh as a source of meaning. There is a Talmudic flavor to his works, dense concatenations of texts from philosophers and mystics, with commentaries on these texts, always pointing to a resolution of what he con- siders major problems of our genera- tion: nihilism, relativism, and narcissistic disorders — problems which he con- siders anchor a diseased social order. —Don Hanlon Johnson 8 Retrieving that center of gravity, finding our centeredness in that true center of meaning around which our life can pivot in a relaxed, well-balanced way, is crucial not only for our health; it is critical for our emotional well-being, and therefore also for our steadiness of principle as moral agents. .. . We are easily tempted to exalt ourselves in this posture [as lords of the earth]. But it is a posture of pride and insolence, a pos- ture which makes manifest, and in fact reinforces, our forgetfulness of the earth. In that posture — a posture prized by our patriarchy — we are not, however, well-balanced. Sooner or later, we shall stumble or fall.
The Body in the Mind |
There are books — few and far between — which caretully, delightfully, and gen- uinely turn your head inside out. This is one of them. It ranges over some cen- tral issues in western philosophy, and begins the long overdue job of giving us a radically new account of meaning, rationality, and objectivity. Although written for an academic audience, the — book is mostly clear and readable.
The book’s central claim is that mean- ing, thinking and language are neces- sarily embodied. These are not simply abstract manipulations of symbols which arbitrarily. correspond to things in the world, but are deeply and inextricably rooted in a background of image sche- mata which emerge from our bodily functioning and experience as embodied beings in the physical world. These im- age schemata (such as containers, paths, center-periphery, up-down) are what constitute our experience and reasoning — they are what we think with. And it is only our common embod- ied understanding of these schemata that allows people to build a relatively intelligible world of shared meaning through mapping abstract symbols onto objective reality. —Yaakov Garb
32 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
If this fall be avoidable, what kind of comportment would avert it? What kind of posture, what kind of bearing, what kind of motility, is well-balanced? . . We are moving closer to being well- balanced when our standing is thought- fully centered on the grounding pro- vided by the earth.
® . ‘Overcoming’ metaphysics means over-
coming the metaphysical misunderstand-
ing of the being of the human body. It
The Body’s Recollection of Being David Michael Levin, 1985; 390 pp.
$14.95 ($16.95 postpaid).
The Opening of Vision David Michael Levin, 1988; 560 pp. $19.95 ($21. 95 postpaid).
Both from:
Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001; 212/244-3336
(or Whole Earth Access).
We human beings have bodies. We are ‘rational animals,” but we are also “‘rational animals,’’ which means that our rationality is embodied. The central- ity of human embodiment directly in- fluences what and how things can be meaningful for us, the ways in which these meanings can be developed and articulated, the ways we are able to comprehend and reason about our ex- perience, and the actions we take. Our reality is shaped by the patterns of our bodily movement, the contours of our spatial and temporal orientation, and the forms of our interaction with ob- jects. It is never merely a matter of abstract conceptualizations and propo- sitional judgments.
@
When we speak of ‘experience,’ we do not mean merely a flow of mental rep- resentations. We mean to include bodily experience in all of its richness, and all that goes to make it up — the organism
“and its nature, the environment and its |
nature, and our understanding (our way of grasping) their ongoing interaction.
It is no accident that we understand QUANTITY in terms of the VERTICALITY schema .’. . in exactly the way we do. Examples such as Prices keep going up;
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" means overcoming our historically deep-
seated guilt and shame, flaming into a terrible hatred of the body. The history of mind/dualism and the history of the subject/object dualism are two symp- tomatic manifestations of a violent, nihilistic rage in the very heart of our metaphysics. But to overcome meta- physics, we must do more than formulate a conceptual critique. We must retrieve ‘the ontological body. We must actually let go of our dualistic, propositional way of ‘thinking.’
| would like to highlight the human body as a locus for the investment of - political power and a source of resistance to the politics whose will to power is the annihilation of Being. In particular, | would like to call attention to the fact that, relative to the existing political reality, the human body, as a natural or ‘wild’ being, as flesh, is always already the metaphor, the bearer, of a utopian political destination. Thinkers like Foucault concentrate on the ways in which a political regime externally ap- propriates the human body, imposing its demands on an essentially passive ma-’ terial; and they will explore strategies of resistance suggested by the body’s ex- perience of political institutionalization. But they neglect to acknowledge the body’s own intrinsic political: wisdom, its own uncommonly good sense of good political order, the sensus communis. —The Body’s Recollection of Being z
The Body in the Mind | Mark Johnson 1987; 233 pp.
$27.50
($29.25 postpaid) ete
University of Chicago Press, 11030 South Langley Avenue, Chicago, IL 60628; 800/621-2736
(or Whole Earth Access).
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The number of books published each year keeps rising; His gross earnings fell; Turn down the heat, and many others, suggest that we understand MORE (in- crease) as being oriented UP (involving the VERTICALITY schema). There is a good reason why this metaphorical projection from UP to MORE is natural, and why MORE is not oriented DOWN. The expla- nation has to do with our most common everyday bodily experiences and the image schemata they involve. If you add more liquid to a container, the level goes up. If you add more objects to a pile, the level goes up. MORE and UP are therefore correlated in our exper- ience in a way that provides a physical basis for our abstract understanding
of quantity.
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Fragments fora
History of the Body
Imagine you have a body — you know,
two arms and legs, a neck and head, a torso — the usual human configuration. Now imagine that you could travel through any period in world history and experience your body as it was ex- perienced in that culture. Like a great actor, you switch effortlessly from cos- tume to costume — Roman to Victorian to ancient Chinese — and with the costumes your posture changes, your personality, your religion, even your dreams. Your body begins to seem as mutable as fire.
Charles Le Brun, Cat and Man: Similarities between Human and Animal Phy- siognomies (seventeenth century).
a Reading this ambitious three-volume
collection of essays has that effect, not so much because of the writing (which is academic), but because of the sheer volume and variety of bodily variation covered and the beautiful illustrations and design. The theme is the body as cul-
tural construct — so the authors explore .
how mental and physical capacities are entwined in the body, shaped to the par- ticular morals and social circumstances
_ of the time. Part One emphasizes the
body’s relationship to the divine, Part Two its relationship to the soul and emo-
tions, and Part Three the relationship of
body organs to the larger social body. This grand scope includes essays on
_ perceptions of the body in ancient Gnos-
Fragments for
a History of the Body Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff and Nadia Tazi, Editors
1989; 1,609 pp. (three volumes).
$19.95 each ($22.45 each postpaid) from Zone Books/MIT Press, Attn.: Order Dept.,55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142; 617/253-2884.
ticism, the female body in the Middle Ages, a history of automata, healing in Japan, mapping the body, a history of the clitoris, ancient theories on semen and blood, and 40 other topics.
The history of the body, as a discipline, is still in its infancy. So these anthropo- logical, philosophical, and historical
writings are definitely “‘fragments*’ of
The arteries.
From Diderot, L’En- cyclopedie ou dic- tionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers,
1765.
Body Invaders
The body as object. As commodity. As- icon. Cut free from its social, religious, and personal context, the human body exists in a kind of postmodern limbo, another artifact of the consumer age, as valued and valueless as a B-1 bomb- er, a portable CD player, or an Armani suit. In this series of fascinating and sometimes tortuously dense essays (the postmodern prose model appears to be a 747 engine-repair manual), Body Invaders examines the state of the body in a postmodern culture obsessed
with its bodily fluids (urine for drug
tests and blood as a disease vector),
_ fashion/commodities, AIDS, Star Wars,
pornography, diets. . . “ —Richard Kadrey
The Capezio ad is . . . about the body
_debased, humiliated, and inscribed to
excess by all the signs of consumer cul- ture. The woman is prostrate and silent as if to emphasize the reduction of her body to a shoe tree. And, like a manic fantasy which follows from knowing our- selves only through a psychotic simulacra of bodily images (the advertising ma- chine), the woman’s body, from her facial
Body Invaders
(Panic Sex in America) Arthur and Marilouise Kroker 1987; 275 pp.
$1 4.95 (516.45 postpaid) from: St. Martins Press/Attn.: Cash Sales, 4th Floor, 175 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10010; 800/221-7945 (or Whole Earth Access).
expression (‘‘devilishly’’) to the position- ing of her limbs, intimates that subjectivity itself is now colonized. And why the shoes to excess? A twofold hypothesis: the advertisement itself is hyper-func- tional from the viewpoint of primitive accumulation (more product per image); and the prostrate body is all that is left after being inscribed as a background text for shoes: an object of parody, a site of impoverishment, a social remain-
a synthesis yet to come. Part Three ends appropriately with a fascinating 100- page annotated bibliography of texts related to body history (a work-in-prog- ress by Barbara Duden, who is working with Ivan Illich at Penn State on the sub- ject). My biggest complaint with the series is that there are no biographical notes on the authors, or index. Since Zone Books prints many first-time trans- lations from European writers, the bio- graphical info would be most useful. But, altogether, it’s a truly grand ini- tiation to the body as text. —Jeanne Carstensen
If a Wodaabe man can hold one eye still and roll the other in and out, this is considered especially alluring to women.
For seven days, up to one thousand Wodaabe* men participate in a dance competition judged solely by women.
. .. Handsome young men vie for the honor of being chosen the most charming and the most beautiful, thus proving their outstanding ability to attract women.
* [Nomads of the Sahelian steppe, Nigeria. ]
der. Just because it runs to excess and, indeed, states openly about the humili- ation of the body what other ads only suggest, the Capezio woman is a per- fect sign of the “’structural body’’ of the 1980s.
27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 33
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Is THE BoDY OBSOLETE? A FORUM
Jeanne: ‘‘The body is like a floating cloud.’ Richard: Who said that?
Jeanne: The t’ai chi ch’uan master Cheng Man Ch’ing.
Richard: What do you think he'd say to the obsolete-body question?
Jeanne: Well, by learning how not to receive force the great masters can ‘‘use four ounces to deflect a
thousand pounds.” So the saying goes.
Richard: So?
Jeanne: People talk about how we only use a tiny fraction of our potential brain power . . . it’s the same with the body. Those t’ai chi masters use physics, not magic.
Richard: He’d probably say the body is too underdeveloped yet to be obsolete.
(Jeanne and Richard decide to contact Cheng Man Ch’ing from the dead and ask him their question directly. The master, who was known as ‘‘Whiskers,’’ now has a long, slender beard that brushes
the ground as he walks.)
Richard: Master, we were wondering, do you think the body is obsolete?
(Cheng sits down gracefully, wrapping bis beard about his body like a cape, and is silent.
After several calm moments he speaks.)
Cheng Man Ch ’ing: Practice the form. Too much thinking. Practice the form.
(Cheng fades away.)
Jeanne: | guess he’s not too interested in talking about the body.
Richard: Thank god these people were or we couldn't have put together this forum in time for the deadline.
Jeanne: No kidding. Richard: He was dead anyway.
Jeanne: True. What could a dead person know about the body being obsolete? mg
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-STARHAWK
It’s hard to answer this question because it seems essentially so silly, I have to suppress uncomplimen- tary speculations on the physical condition and sex- ual activities (or lack thereof) of those who dreamed this one up. |
What are they offering to replace the body with? A machine? computer? But what machine can not on- ly type but write prose, poetry, doggerel, historical analysis, fiction, and love letters? Not to mention play the drum (and not just a mechanical beat but a liv- ing rhythm that responds to subtle changes in mood and energy and shifts in meter), carry itself and sup- plies to sustain it into the wilderness for a week and emerge without leaving any trace of its passage, re- produce itself, rear and feed its own young, paint pic- tures, sew curtains, turn cartwheels, not just sing but create music to be sung, repair its own injuries and diseases, and throb with pleasure at the touch of another body? My body can do all of the above (well,
34 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
all right, so I can’t actually turn a cartwheel), and it’s frankly just an average sort of body as bodies go.
I enjoy technology that augments my body — the.
computer upon which this essay was typed, the back- pack that gives me the freedom of the mountains — but I don’t see that technology as replacing the body.
There's a saying: ‘‘If it ain't broke, don’t fix it.’ The
body is a near-miraculous organism of unsurpassed versatility, flexibility, and creativity. What machine can begin to replace all that? And why would we want to? | |
Embodied thought is inherently different from dis-
embodied thought. My work on this article changes
when I go outside and take a walk. Because I can play the drum, I understand things that no machine can. The difference is subtle, but real — an aspect of what we call the mysteries — the processes of life that go beyond the rational and quantifiable.
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The essential question here is one of value. To con- sider the body something we can transcend implies that it has no inherent value, that it exists only as a vehicle for something else. This is a concept not new in Western culture — at times, the body was seen simply as a rather tainted vehicle of the soul; at other times, as a clumsy vehicle of reason. Now we seem to be viewing the body as an imperfect machine.
All these views imply a split between body and some- thing else, in which the body comes out lower, less important, something to be done away with. By ex- tension, women, whose bodies bring new bodies into being, are also seen as lesser and tainted. And the earth-body is itself viewed as something to be transcended, used for what can be extracted, and then discarded.
Rather than trying to transcend the body, we’d do better to ask how we can heal this split in conscious- ness, and preserve and restore the living, organismic functions of the earth. Because this split has brought us to a situation in which organic life on earth is threatened on all counts.
I don’t need to experience a nanosecond in order to have direct experience of the world. My computer can handle the nanoseconds for me, but no computer can touch the living bark of a redwood tree, enter- tain a small child, dance to rock-and-roll music and really do justice to a dish of sauteed prawns. For that matter, speaking of justice, no machine can challenge social systems, envisioning a world of greater free- dom and shared abundance. Imagination is body- based. So is passion, and compassion. And justice is an abstraction that has meaning only when brought back to the concrete details of the real lives of em- bodied beings.
Embodied life can never be wholly controlled, because the complexity and flexibility of organic con- sciousness inevitably generates surprises. Perhaps the real impetus to replace the body with the machine comes from the desire to exert total control over so- ciety, knowledge, and the processes of growth and development. But such control is an illusion that
‘stems from a mechanistic concept of the universe. Modern physics and ecology, not to mention our >
direct experience of the global environmental mess, show us that our knowledge is inevitably only par- tial. We cannot observe a thing without changing it; when we change one element of a system, we affect all aspects that interact in ways too complex for us to fully understand. So when we ‘‘replace’’ some-
‘thing naturally evolved with something human-made,
we actually only replace a few of its functions. An infant can survive on synthetic formula, but mother’s milk is better.
The truth is, when we hear computer experts and roboticists say, ‘‘The body is obsolete,’ what they really mean is, ‘‘We are on the verge of being able to replace certain functions of the body, and we have decided to ignore the others.’ Maybe the ability to
Skeleton drummer (Tamborilero esqueleto) by Pedro Linares.
turn cartwheels or have orgasms seems irrelevant to a roboticist (I hope not). But the rest of us perhaps need to assert control over these decisions and re- mind even those who dwell in the arcane realms of logic, mathematics, and infinitesimal fractions of time that they do not have the right to decide for all of us what functions and values of the body can be assigned to the scrap heap.
Or is the real issue here the fear of death? In earth- based spiritual traditions, death is part of the cycle, something we learn from, not something to be avoid- ed. We cannot dodge death by fleeing from organic life, we can only diminish our capacity to fully ex- perience life. Personally, I'll elect to keep all functions of my body, even knowing that someday they must end, because the body's capacities for pleasure, creativity, and transformation continue endlessly to surprise me. @
Starhawk is a peace activist, leader in the feminist-spirituality movement, and author of Spiral Dance, Dreaming the Dark (EWEC p. 99), and Truth or Dare (WER #62, p. 128). She is also a practicioner of the Old Religion of the Goddess, or Witchcraft, which sees the cosmos as the living body of the god- dess. Her life and writings express a worldview based on the immanent value of all life. —Jeanne Carstensen
27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 35
3
I awake every morning in an iron lung, a 900-pound mechanical beastie. I spend most of my days inside it, breathing in rhythm to it, because polio has made my own organic lungs incapable of breathing for more than an hour on their own. The iron lung de- pends on me for providing electricity and mainte- nance, just as I depend on it for air. You could think of the two of us as an organism with the iron lung contributing air and a massive metal shell and the human inside contributing conscious direction. To- gether, we are almost like a robot, although we are the opposite of freely moving and lack function- ing arms.
When I hear talk of the human body being replaced entirely by robotic devices, I think — why bother? Except for my lungs, all my internal organs work well. My consciousness blazes as brightly as the sun on a farm morning. I lack these powers: breathing, locomotion, and the ability to manipulate objects. It is conceivable that an improved iron lung could be manufactured today, a self-propelled iron lung that is smaller, lighter, simpler to maintain and equip- ped with a voice-activated robotic arm. Of my own will, I could go to a restaurant, order a slice of quiche, feed myself, wipe my face, pay the bill, leave a tip and vamoose. It would be interesting to see how many times I could do this before the other custo- mers quit screaming and ducking under the tables.
Of course, such an advanced evolution of the iron lung would be very expensive using current tech-
36 _ WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
nology. A prototype robotic arm that can feed a quadriplegic and delicately wipe his or her mouth already exists, but it costs $30,000. But more ad- vanced technology could produce a dream-machine iron lung at affordable prices.
What would we have then?
A human being controlling a device, that’s all. A complex, subtle device, to be sure, but the relation- ship between the human and the machine would be identical to that of a human driving a car, program- ming a computer, or using any other device. The human would remain in charge, supplying conscious direction, just as we always have, ever since people started making baskets, pots, and flint tools. This is because our impulse to invent has come from a de- sire to supplement our strength or our senses. Even now that we have computers to handle information faster than human consciousness could, we don't relinquish the overall direction of these computers.
There have been exceptions to this, such as the So- viets’ decision to automate their defenses so com- pletely that computers alone would decide whether to retaliate against a NATO attack. But this decision was widely deplored and I’m sure it caused the So- viets much consternation and regret. No doubt the Soviet leadership felt forced to relinquish this power because of NATO's installation of Pershing II and cruise missiles, which cut their warning time con- siderably. Now that these missiles are being with- drawn, I bet the Soviet leaders will take back that
power. It was Karl Marx who noted that powerful people never give up their power voluntarily.
I'm not a powerful person, but I am not about to surrender the power of conscious direction, the one power left to me. If I get a dream-machine iron lung that takes me to a restaurant and orders liver and onions for me, I will junk that machine because I bate liver and onions. Like most people, I prefer to make my own decisions, and I'll be damned if I let anyone or anything deny me this defining aspect of my humanity.
Bodies chug along for a few years and then collapse. It would be convenient if we could transfer our con- sciousness from a clunky old conveyance to a glossy new one, but no one has showed me how that could ever be done. The best we can do is transfer our
memories to paper and children, which is what we've been doing for millenia. What we can't transfer is our souls, by which I mean our power to decide. To be- lieve that we can is as foolish as believing that a book is as conscious as its author. What I, as a dis- abled person, need is what we all need — better de- vices under our conscious control, not the abolition of our consciousness. #
Mark O'Brien was severely disabled by polio at age six. He lives most of bis life inside an iron lung but can also navigate the streets of Berkeley from the controls of a power wheelchair. Computers revolutionized Mark's ability to communicate and live independently. He has reviewed these and other enabling technologies for disabled people for WER, EWEC, and the Whole Earth Software Review. —Jeanne Carstensen
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MARVIN MINSKY
Human beings are essentially machines. However, the word “‘machine’’ isn’t very evocative because when
you say “‘machine’’ people think of simple things like
typewriters and cars. The word doesn’t communicate the complexity of the thing. The word ‘‘machine’’ means ‘‘a physical system that you understand,’ and since people don’t know how the brain works, the word has the wrong implication. Now if you tell somebody they're a machine you're saying, ‘You're so simple, I understand you.’’ But that’s not a prob- lem of the machine, that’s a bit of autobiography. Someday there'll be machines so smart they'll under- stand us and they'll say, ‘People are machines, but we aren't.”
Consciousness is just having certain kinds of short- term memory registers that describe a little bit about what you were recently thinking. In fact, conscious- ness in humans is not very strong. We can't remember very much of our thoughts. When we can solve all the other technical problems, it will be easy to make machines that are much more conscious than we are. Increasing the availability of short-term memory would be a first step. No one knows why we have such limited short-term memory, but I suspect it’s because our short-term memory systems are actual- ly large, expensive pieces of brain and we only have about a dozen of them. When part of your brain operates, like the part that makes sentences, there isn't another part of the brain that remembers how it did it. That’s why people can't explain their gram- mar. That part isn't conscious. You have to have scien- tists work for years and years to find out even a little bit about it. If we were truly conscious, we would know right off how we made sentences as we made them.
If it was possible, I would have myself downloaded.
Why not? The idea of not dying just after you've learned almost enough to solve a problem is com- pelling. It doesn't have to be immortality, but it would be nice to live 500 years, wouldn't it? Right now, there's too much known for anyone to understand in a single lifetime. And there's no reason the sys- tems should break down if you use modern reliability techniques because you could replace each of the parts. The trouble with biology is that it tries to fix things, but it isn't very good at it. If you look at the error checking in the cell-repair part of the genetic code, it’s really contemptibly low-grade compared to what we could do now if we redesigned the whole thing. Of course, immortality has its own problems. Overpopulation and that sort of thing. I don't see any real problems except that one huge mind could use up the universe. And you could make two copies of yourself in case one didn’t work. Perhaps send multiple copies of yourself out to lead different lives.
When it comes to downloading, you could make up ethical problems easily enough. There are always ethical problems with anything. Ethical problems de- pend on people's ethics. I don’t believe in any abso- lute ethics anyway. Ethical problems are actually political and evolutionary problems. *‘Thou shalt not kill’’ is senseless if you think in terms of competi- tion between species. I think the importance of down- loading is just allowing evolution to proceed. And evolution seems to be leading us to a machine consciousness. #
Marvin Minsky is a Donner Professor of Science at MIT and one of the original pioneers in Artificial Intelligence research. In bis book, The Society of Mind (SIGNAL p. 202), Dr. Min- sky explains bis theory of how a mind can be constructed by linking individual components, none of which are conscious on their own. This essay was excerpted from a phone interview.
—Richard Kadrey
27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 37
A a
I was a tomboy. I wore torn cut-offs, t-shirts, short hair, and no shoes all the hours of the long bright summer days. My brother and I would hike the big, dark pipes that passed the nearby creek beneath the streets, listening to the echoes of our bare feet knock- ing rocks against the metal in the cold trickle we crossed. I climbed, everything: jungle gyms, fences, reservoirs. I flopped in the dust by my father’s shop to count grasshoppers. I could swing higher than anyone else around, and fling myself out at the end of the arc with a primitive, lusty cry. That name, tom- boy, never meant a thing to me, except perhaps as a point of pride: it meant a girl who lived solidly in- side her body, rather than simply on its skin. I was my body and my body was me, and that more than anything defined the limits of space. I remember reaching the top of a very tall cedar tree one after- ‘noon and perching at its swaying, flimsy tip, sticky pitch on all my fingers, rocked by a giddy, wet-palmed thrill. It seemed, under that canopy of heat and air, that I looked out of my own eyes and saw the world from the world's very center.
SALLIE TISDALE
I have a photograph taken the summer I was eleven years old. I am with two friends, entangled arm and leg, shirts hiked up cockeyed across our bare bellies. Even with breasts blooming out under my shirt, even with coarse hair beginning to sprout between my legs, I was at ease. I was thoughtless and free. It was the last moment, | think, in the life of that particular body; when that summer ended that body died and a new one — an altogether different one — was born.
I am thirty-one. | am midway through the life span of my current body, a weaker, softer shell than the last but not without its virtues. Barring the unex- pected — wouldn't that be lovely? — I can expect this body to last, in more or less the same condition, another 25 years. And then my second body will die (perhaps all at once, in one summer’s breath) and my next body, my old and altogether different body, will be born.
I find it hard to admit how much I think about my body. There are new points of pride, opposing beliefs hard to reconcile. I see many people my age caught in a frantic state of body amendment, struggling to mold and refine the recalcitrant shell, neglecting other duties, other joys, in the effort. I am too lazy, too fond of leisurely pleasures, to participate. Then there is the intellectual disinterest in the body, an absent-minded inattention to the body’s needs, the willingness to injure the body in casual ways for more immediate goals. This is the pride I pretend to, but the fact is that I struggle with an almost ceaseless con- cern for my body and the bodies of other people. (I am far more forgiving of other people's bodies.) The body haunts me; body as idea, body as object, sen- sation, boundary, the body as a universal and the
38 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
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body in isolation. The specter takes several shapes. There is sex, the possibility of it, its prohibitions and risks. There is the fear of illness and pain — those little twitches in my legs at night, the sudden ring- ing in the ears. There is the eternal fountain of taste and sound and sight, the grief which lives at the heart of beauty — because, lastly, there is the certainty of decline. My joints dry up day by day, my neurons skip a signal, my liver sags a bit in its own damp darkness. Whether I am looking from the center out, or from the outside in, the body is there, unforget- table and constant and seductive. I can beat it, abuse and neglect it, deprive it, but it won't go away and God knows I hope it stays here a long, long time to come.
A long time ago, in that other body, I didn’t consi- der the nature of bodies. In fact I think it is part of the nature of child bodies not to consider themselves, but simply to use themselves.
And oh! the uses to which those bodies can be put! That body of mine climbed steep and winding trails, swam lakes, tumbled through football and slid through skiing. That body slept with an uncon- — scious and total grace. That body did what it was directed to do, unfailingly, without complaint. There was no separation. No analysis. No ghost. My body was me and I was my body; if I thought at all it was about the way my body stood in relation to the bodies — which were the selves — of the people with whom I shared the world.
In my current incarnation I am one step removed from the shell. Perhaps it is in the nature of adult bodies to do this, to think about themselves. I think about the ethos of my body, defined by its tenden- cies. This shell I'm in has a tendency to respiratory problems, is allergic to codeine, has green eyes, delivered one baby shell. It came complete with all the requisite equipment, and a few pieces have since been removed. Another shell, your shell, will have a different ethos. It is possible for me — uncommon, but possible — to view my own body without judge- ment. I can see the body as a metaphor, that my body in all its imperfection is a physical expression of an internal self. It is just my body, a transient and chang- ing thing, the product of many forces beyond my reckoning: merely a thing which arrives, has a life, and dies in its own proper time. My body is my Dop- pelganger, far less substantial than it often appears to be.
If I live a very long time, I will have another body still, not old, but very old, a delicate gift few people are granted. Old, old women have pale milky skin, soft and velvety to the touch. Their faces are marbl- ed with fine wrinkles and rivers of tiny veins. Old women are stiff, inflexible, and sagging all at once; they have difficulty with ordinary acts. How far away
a F
ay ith ot
from their bodies do they stand? All those years spent
moving outward; making, taking, doing, producing.
Then the tables turn: no choice but staying in: ask- ing, needing, receiving.
There is yet another kind of body, not young, not old,
but broken. On the day after Christmas I was work-
ing in a nursing home. I sat on Helen's bed, singing Christmas carols, la-la-la-ing through the second verse of ‘‘Good King Wenceslas.’ Helen has a neuro- muscular disease full of twitches as big as trees. Her head and limbs flop about, her face is blank as a statue’s. She is a victim of the selfsame virtues of nerve and muscle that make the child body such a splendid vehicle. She is kinetic, uncontrolled. | spooned pureed sausage and oatmeal into her mouth bite by slow bite. She said one word — ‘‘Hot!’’ — flung out at me just as her hand smacked my wrist and spilled a spoonful into the sheets. I was busy, we were short-handed, my adult body in all its speed wanted to be up and gone; I wanted Helen to hurry, But I took my time. Helen can't be hurried, her body
Self-portrait reaching for the Red Star sky Denise Dixon doesn’t work that way. She is her self’s sculpture in the world; what I see of Helen, the relationship be- tween my ideas, my hand, Helen's mind, her trem- bling shell — this is the way the self takes up space. This is all we have.
I relay on a saying of Buddhism: ‘'Birth and death are moments in time.’ The body is a-solid pillar of dividing cells thrust from one universe into this, as long as the span of a life. And what a piece of work the body is, after all. Sometimes I get lucky, sitting on the side of another body's bed, and balance on the edge just so, looking out of someone else's eyes and seeing the world from the world’s very center. Then I’m astride the entire earth, and I lean back for a walloping ride. m
Sallie Tisdale frequently explores somatic issues in her work as a nurse and her writing on topics such as high-tech medical care, abortion, nursing homes, and burn victims (WER #50), She is currently writing about the effort to preserve the native Hawaiian language and has been awarded a fellowship from
the National Endowment for the Arts. —Jeanne Carstensen
27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 39
I feel that what I'm doing now with Survival Research Labs is preparing me to be a machine; to me, the highest level of evolution would be to be a machine and still have your soul intact. I’m very skeptical about people's ability to do that, though. There's no protocol to prepare people to deal with that kind of power in a way that would be positive. Right now, our relationship with our devices is very distorted by money and aggression and the needs of politics. Ma-
chines have a bad name for the same reason that guns _
have a bad name. Why are guns bad? They're not bad, but people employ them in a way that’s very negative.
The downside of being a machine is that machines tend to be singular in their purpose. If you were con- nected with a machine it would limit you, to some extent. But if you were able to connect with thou- sands of different machines, and control and be part of thousands of attachments, that would be differ- ent. One of the problems of being a person is the whole redundancy of existence, especially when you get older. After about 18, I don’t think people change very much. That’s what this whole quest for personal growth is about. It's about taking yourself out of your body or out of your ego, out of these things that have
MARK PAULINE
ne MTL SO Oiree Tree + emer LAR gh ccc Me TTL ee ea ay es 7).
become fixed inside you. For me, the ideal relation-
ship between myself and a machine would be to allow
myself to grow by giving myself millions of options. That’s why SRL is really positive for me. As a creative person, it enables me to get involved not with one or two kinds of painting, for instance, but with the billions of devices you can make with machines. There's no limit, really, to how many kinds of dif- ferent machines you can make, because how many different kinds of machines are there? There are al- ready millions of different kinds of machines, and they're defined only by their productive capabilities.
No one’s thought about the machines that aren't
productive, that are just ideas. For me, my evolution,
my life, is already determined by the multiplicity of possibilities of my connection with machines. If I
could actually become a machine, I wouldn't; I would become machines, all machines. #
Mark Pauline is the guiding intelligence behind Survival Re- search Laboratories, a group specializing in darkly satirical performances using deadly homemade robots. Mark has describ-
ed SRL's activities as the ultimate capitulation to the machine.
By taking machines out of the realm of ‘‘production,"’ he gives them the opportunity to express their personalities, and’... do something besides make widgets or bottle beer.”’
—Richard Kadrey
A custom-made robot destroys a street sweeper truck in a parking lot in a Survival Research Laboratories performance.
|
40 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
Bobby Neel Adams
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The body is not obsolete, but the mind is. Through our obsolete minds we have created religions and other pseudo-reasons to deny our bodies something that is natural, healthy, and scientifically proven to be good for us — sex. Our body knows it is good; it feels great; but our minds are way behind, feeling guilty and calling sex ‘‘sinful.’
HYAPATIA LEE |
Feminists like Andrea Dworkin would say that the body is obsolete because the very act of sexual inter- course puts men in a dominant and women in a sub- missive role. because men are penetrating women. The mind could see it another way. A woman engulfs and encompasses her man. She surrounds him, and, of course, only she can create life within her and give birth.
In one small way AIDS has been good for us for it has forced us to talk openly and honestly about our sexuality. When we view sex as sinful and our own
Sexual organs as dirty and not healthy, this separates us from our bodies. —
The Meese Commission was a grand exercise in in- tellectual obsolescence. With the unemployed, the homeless, the hungry, and the huge deficit, our government spent our money to watch some X-rated movies. They claim they were investigating whether
such materials caused violent and sexual crimes. Such
crimes, however, existed long before the camera or
Anyone who has regular orgasms can tell you the ab- surdity of saying the body is obsolete. Besides, how can our bodies be outmoded? In the first place, we've never claimed them (or the deep pleasure they can give) for ourselves. Millennia of patently anti-sexual religious indoctrination has prevented us from truly knowing, loving or accepting our bodies. Countless _ people are so alienated from their physical selves that they are willing to self-righteously deprive others of their civil rights on the grounds of preserving ‘‘de- cency’’ or ‘‘family values.’’ It is through our bodies that we interact with the world, Without the physical body we are nothing, can feel nothing, create nothing. .
As privileged middle-class people in a post-scarcity society, our basic needs are more than adequately met. Our claims to civilization are nothing but self- delusion if we do not use our considerable techno- logical know-how to stem the population tide, the pollution tide, and improve the living conditions of the third world. Would it not be better to spend our computer-given leisure time addressing these issues?
EUR Ue SNe MRA ts tit | een PE Ps Aare et Le 4 oe * ‘ Ay » a Vile ' ry he a Le ‘ 4 i
NINA HARTLEY
moving pictures or even the printed word. Over- crowded rats rape and kill without books or VCRs. Who is watching the illustrious members of the Con- _ gress (who watched, by selection, some of the most violent, hard-core footage ever shot) to make sure they are. not committing sexual crimes? If, after watching all that, they are not molesting, flashing and > raping, why do they believe the rest of us would be?
The body is not obsolete, it just doesn’t come with an owners’ manual to tell you how to use it. You must respect your body enough to think about it. Thoughts do manifest reality. A body can only run on what you give it, and it does not exist independent of your mind. If we let our bodies work with our minds, perhaps our bodies can teach our minds how to move safely into the future. m
Lynda Barry, Naked Ladies
Hyapatia Lee acts in adult erotic films, often working with ber director husband, Bud. She belongs to the Pink Ladies Social Club, a group of artists inside the X-rated film industry that looks out for the _ well-being of the women who work there.
—Richard Kadrey
We should be explor- ing our sensual/creative potential, learning to revere the Na-
ture within us, to share with others, to connect, to
make love. If we only go around once in this life (and | there isn’t exactly overwhelming evidence of ‘other lives’’ to contradict the thought that this life is all | we will know), then the quality of this one should | be paramount. To seriously entertain the thought of i supplanting human life with artificial intelligence is the epitome of cynicism. It is this kind of ‘'techno- thought’’ that makes me fear that western civiliza- tion has gone mad.
SS ee
The human mind and body are neither sacred nor replaceable, but material, and are a constant delight to explore. @
Sree
Nina Hartley describes herself as a ‘‘feminist porn star’’; act- ing in X-rated films is one way she chooses to express the sexual freedom she sees as one of the tenets of feminism. She bas writ- ten and spoken about working in adult films, and contributed ae i to the book Sex Work, reviewed by JC in this issue (p. 44).
—Richard Kadrey i
ee
27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 4l |
Pornography and Silence
This book has changed the way | liter-
ally see the world. Susan Griffin’s argu- ment is that, contrary to popular opinion, pornography is not a small, specialized subculture; it is the essence of Western Christian culture. Dominance and sub- mission, mind over matter, soul over body, men over women, white Christian men over dark Jews, blacks, etc.: this is the very substance of our culture. —Don Hanlon Johnson
De Sade tells us: “What need for the heart to have a role in the situation in which only the body plays a part?’’ For in the thinking of the pornographic mind, it is the body which is the lower half of human nature, and which corrupts the soul. Yet the pornographic mind, like the doctrinal mind [of the theologian], denies the knowledge of its own body.
Caught Looking
This collection of essays by feminist writers argues for freedom of sexual expression and against censorship of pornography. It’s lavishly and often humorously illustrated with sexually ex- plicit photographs and artwork from the 1890s to the present. This bold design serves the book’s purpose well — to make the point that antipornography laws, which rely on vague definitions of “obscenity’’ which are “‘interpreted’’ by the courts, could take away your op- portunity to be “caught looking” at this book. (In a useful, compact chronology of the pornography debate since 1966 in this collection, Nan D. Hunter writes that Phyllis Schlafly tried to ban the now-classic Our Bodies, Our Selves claiming that “it encourages mastur- bation, lesbianism, premarital sex,
and abortion.”’)
Caught Looking is a response to the debate over the efforts of feminists
FORWARD.
FL its
SEEMING GEX.. .
42 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
By the mechanism of projection, this mind succeeds in detaching itself from its own bestiality. In this mind, the bes- tiality of a man’s nature is expressed in a woman’s body.
We must remind ourselves once again that in pornography a ‘’woman’’ is not a woman. She is a symbol. She is a denied self that is human. As we look more deeply into a culture which has fashioned itself after the pornographic mind, we will find that sadism and ma- sochism have not been derived from the biological behavior of men and women, as some theorists have supposed; but rather that the ideas of masculine be- havior and of female behavior have been shaped by culture to embody sadomasochism.
Pornography is a complex, highly emotional issue that is too often simplified into a polar- ized debate over censorship — for or against.
We present these reviews to encourage dis- cussion of what pornography is and how it functions in modern society. —JC/RK
Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dwor- kin to pass antipornography ordinances in several U.S. cities. Critics of the or- dinances believe they would lead to widespread censorship of sexually ex- plicit material, both pornographic and educational, and worse conditions for many women in the sex industry. The questions raised in this book won’t go away soon. Like, what is the relation- ship between violent images and actual violence? And, how can women be pro- tected against widespread violence in this society? Caught Looking is con- vincing evidence that restricting sexual speech is not the way to answer them. —Jeanne Carstensen
Gut reactions are notoriously unreliable, leading people to do things like begin crusades against homosexual school- teachers. The truth is that nobody knows why a man becomes a rapist. Rape is a terrible crime. Women have a just and heartfelt need to defend themselves against it and (if possible) put a stop to it. But will our best interests be served by devoting our slender resources and limited time to wiping out pornography? Surely no one believes that all or most of the people who use pornography commit crimes of sexual violence. The number of individuals susceptible to this sort of influence must be very small. But many other factors, aside from the por- nographic material, must contribute to a rape or other assault. It is the rape, the act itself, that is a crime — not reading a pornographic book.
Difficulties arise from the vagueness of certain terms crucial in interpreting the
Pornography and Silence
Susan Griffin 1981; 277 pp.
$7.95
($9.45 postpaid) from:
Harper & Row, Rt. 3/Box 20B, Hagers- town, MD 21740; 800/638-3030
(or Whole Earth Access).
It is perception above all which will
free us from tragedy. Not the perception of illusion, or of a fantasy that would deny the power of fate and nature. But perception wedded to matter itself, a knowledge that comes to us from the sense of the body, a wisdom born of
wholeness of mind and body come to-
gether in the heart. The heart dies in us. This is the self we have lost, the self we daily sacrifice. The tragedy of Oedipus Rex is our tragedy, and we relive this again and again, in our own lives,
and in history.
Caught Looking
Kate Ellis,
Beth Jaker,
Nan D. Hunter, Barbara O’Dair, and Abby Talmer 1986; 96 pp.
$9.95 (511.45 postpaid) from: The Real Comet Press, 3131 Western Avenue # 410, Seattle, WA 98121; 206/283-7827
(or Whole Earth Access).
ordinances. The term ‘‘subordination’’ is especially important, since porno- graphy is defined as ‘‘the sexually explicit subordination of women.” The authors of this legislation intend it to modify each of the clauses, and they appear to believe that it provides a definition of sexism that each example must meet. The term is never defined in the legis- lation, yet the Indianapolis brief, for example, suggests that the average viewer, on the basis of ‘“his or her com- mon understanding of what it means for one person to subordinate another’ should be able to decide what is por- nographic. But what kind of sexually explicit acts place a woman in an infer- ior status? To some, any graphic sexual act violates women’s dignity and there- fore subordinates them. To others, con- sensual heterosexual lovemaking within the boundaries of procreation and mar- riage is acceptable, but heterosexual acts that do not have reproduction as their aim lower women’s status and hence subordinate them. Still others ac- cept a wide range of nonprocreative, perhaps even nonmarital, heterosex- vality but draw the line at lesbian sex, which they view as degrading.
The Sadeian Woman
Most people read the works of the Mar-
quis de Sade, perhaps the most famous pornographer of all time, backwards: they look through a book like Justine, gobbling up all the sex scenes and skip- ping all the speeches. Wrong. Although sex itself clearly obsessed Sade, his over- riding concern was how the repression and control of sex is. a powerful control mechanism (especially of women). In The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter does not excuse Sade the pornographer; in fact, it is the very pornography of his work that she finds important, ‘because sexual relations between men and wom- en always render explicit the nature of social relations in the society in which they take place and, if described expli- citly, will form a critique of those relations ... ” Carter considers Sade a visionary writer; in 18th-century France he was able to write about women in positions of power that had nothing to do with their ability to bear children, something, she points out, as rare now as it was 200 years ago. Carter sees Sade as try-
The ae Museum
_ As late as the 18th century, the word
“pornography” did not exist. By the 19th century, whole areas of art and literature had fallen under the “‘pornographic’’ label, and all of the art of past centuries was being reexamined to discover which of it had been pornographic all along, without anybody realizing it.
In The Secret Museum, Walter Kendrick explores the shifting definitions and sig- nificance of the word “‘pornography,”’ from its invention as a means to describe artifacts found in the ruins of Pompeii, to the sensational trials of works like Ma- dame Bovary and Ulysses, to Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Pornography and Obscenity, to the MacKinnon-Dwor- kin ordinance that made it possible for individuals to sue “‘pornographers”’ for violations of their civil rights.
There are few hard conclusions here, perhaps because conclusions about the danger or value of “‘pornography”’ are
as difficult to agree on as a definition of
the word. The image that will stay with me the longest is the one that gives the book its title: Victorian curators of the Pompeiian artifacts created a real secret museum that would only admit well-to-do adult males. The theory was that gentle- men of breeding were the only ones who could be trusted to view the an- cient ‘pornography’ without running amok. It didn’t work. Somehow “‘por-
- nography”’ made its way out of the
museum and into the streets. But was the street pornography the same as the museum’s? Then why was the street por-
The Sadeian Woman
(And the Ideology of Pornography) Angela Carter, 1978; 154 pp.
$7.95 ($8.95 postpaid) from: Random House/Order Dept., 400 Hahn Road, Westminster, MD 21157; 800/638-6460
(or, Whole Earth Access).
ing to use pornography to construct a machine for sexual emancipation that would lead ultimately to freedom for both sexes. Like Sade, freedom and equality are what Carter is looking for; not necessarily a pretty or a safe world, but one where men and women are free to control their lives, and not be controlled. —Richard Kadrey
Were Madame de Mistival fo have come (to orgasm), then all the dykes would be breached at once and chaos and universal night instantly descend;
nography hunted down and burned and the museum’s merely caged? The answers now are no better than the answers then. “Pornography” is a chameleon, and for the moment, that may be the closest we can come to a definition. —Richard Kadrey
The 1986 Report on Pornography is an unbelievably fatuous document, riddled with false reasoning and bad prose. It is also blatantly pornographic. Evidently intending to inform the reader exactly how grotesque trash can be, the Com- mission provided three hundred pages of summaries and descriptions, some with dialogue: ’’| want to taste your cum. | want you to cum in my mouth. | want to feel your hot cum squirt in my mouth,’ and much, much more in the same vein. No doubt this established a landmark in the history of government publications. Perhaps, however, accord- ing to the Commission’s reasoning, such vile drivel could have no deleterious ef- fect because it appeared in words, not pictures. The Report exempts the written or printed word from all prosecution, on the grounds that ‘’the absence of photographs necessarily produces a message that seems to necessitate for its assimilation more real thought and less almost reflexive reaction than does the more typical pornographic item. There remains a difference between reading a book and looking at pictures. ...‘’ The real difference, of course, had to do with the nature of the Young Person, late-twentieth-century style. He was a functional, if not a total, illiterate; the danger he posed was heightened rather than reduced by this disability.
pleasure would have asserted itself tri- umphantly over pain and the necessity for the existence of repression as a sex- val stimulant would have ceased to exist. There would arise the possibility of a world in which the concept of taboo is meaningless and pornography itself would cease to exist. Sade, the prisoner
' who created freedom in the model of
his prison, would have put himself out of business; he is as much afraid of freedom as the next man. So he makes her faint.
He makes her faint because he can only conceive of freedom as existing in op- position, freedom as defined by tyranny. So, on the very edge of an extraordinary discovery about the nature of the rela- tion between mothers and daughters, at the climax of his pioneering exploration of the most obscure of psychic areas, he gives in to a principle of safety. Instead of constructing a machine for liberation, he substitutes instead a masturbatory device. He is on the point of becoming a revolutionary pornography; but he, finally, lacks
the courage.
The Secret Museum
Walter Kendrick 1987; 288 pp.
$7.95 ($9.95 postpaid) from: Penguin USA, 120 Woodbine Street, Bergenfield, NJ 07621; 201/387-0600 (or Whole Earth Access).
The fifty-year project of the Oxford English Dictionary reached ‘’P’’ in 1909; its definition of ‘‘pornography’’ is, oddly, more complex than any later one. The first meaning, surprising to a modern reader, comes from an 1857 medical dictionary: ‘’a description of © prostitutes or of prostitution, as a mat- ter of public hygiene.’’. Modern readers are familiar with this kind of whore- writing, but the last thing we would call it today is ‘‘pornography.’’ The OED’s second definition is somewhat more up to date: ‘’ Description of the life, manners, etc., of prostitutes and their patrons; hence, the expression or suggestion of obscene or unchaste subjects in literature or art.” It seems strange that this, a close approximation of what we now mean by ‘‘pornography, ’’ ranked second in 1909 behind a definition that now is completely outmoded. The vocabulary is outmoded, too: we seldom use the word ‘‘obscene’’ nowadays, and ‘’un- chaste’’ never. And though we may still have some recollection of a time when literature and art were called ‘’porno- graphic,’ that time is far behind us. Instead of starting out simple and turn- ing complex with the passage of time, “‘pornography’’ seems to have moved in reverse, growing perversely from multiplicity to oneness.
27 GATE FIVE ROAD SAUSALITO, CA 94965 43
Sex Work
This is a cutting-edge book on a virtually unexplored topic: sex workers as subject and not object. These include street prostitutes, call girls, porn actresses, massage parlor workers and others. The first-person stories that fill the first two- thirds of the book relate a wide variety of experiences in personal detail: a woman in her fifties who becomes a well-paid prostitute in Paris; working in a massage parlor in San Francisco; a prostitute getting raped and trying to get help from the police in San Jose; a writer/call girl writing and working hap- pily out of her home; a young girl’s first time working the street in Berkeley. No attempt is made to generalize about why these women are sex workers: each story is raw and individual.
The last third of the book is essays from international sex workers’ groups like WHISPER (Women Hurt in’Systems of Prostitution Engaged in Revolt), The Red Thread (‘’the whores’ movement in Holland’’), COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) and the U.S. PROStitutes Collective. These organizations help sex workers achieve the safest working con- ditions possible and lobby for programs to help them find other work if they want it. For most groups this means decrimi- nalizing prostitution. Priscilla Alexander's essay, “Prostitution: A Difficult Issue
for. Feminists,’ is an excellent historical overview of prostitution. Also included
Sex for Beginners
Not a how-to manual. Not unless theo- ries about sexuality turn you on. We have physiological and gender theories about sex; the Greeks on Eros, Sade on power, and Angela Carter on porno- graphy; sex in the east and sex in the west; and, of course, highlights from Freud and Reich. The successful comic- book format of the ‘Beginners’ series (Marx, Freud, and Zen for Beginners, etc.) zips right along through these, and other sexual historical climaxes to the concluding speculations about where the sexual revolution is leading us and the challenge of AIDS. (For over four centuries, contracting syphilis was the same as receiving a death sentence, the authors remind us.) Perspective is what this book is about — the cultural bag- gage that comes attached to each tasty kiss. Smack. —Jeanne Carstensen
€
Sexual attitudes often reveal a great deal about the structure and values of a society. The people of Samoa, for exam- ple, never appreciated the merits of the ‘Missionary Position. In their culture men and women were more equal than in Europe. Why, under these circumstances, should the female, always be below?
44 WHOLE EARTH REVIEW SUMMER 1989
Sex Work (Writings by Women in the Pet Sex Industry) x Frederique S Delacoste and
Priscilla Alexander, Editors 1987; 349 pp.
$10.95 ($12.45 postpaid) from: Cleis Press, P. O. Box 8933, Pittsburg, PA 15221; 412/731-3863.
is an extensive bibliography of books by and about prostitutes, fiction and nonfiction. —Jeanne Carstensen "
| explained to Monsieur that | was an American. He looked amused. He was bald and | was fifty-five. | was still wear- ing my Indian skirt, peasant blouse and huarachas. | looked like no other hooker he had ever seen. . . . He opened his briefcase, which | assumed was filled with important papers. Instead, he pull- ed out a black lacy garter belt, black silk stockings and a black bra. ‘’For me?’’ | asked. He shook his head. He undressed and put them on. “‘Don’t laugh,’ he said.
A car turns the corner and Kim gets out of a tan Toyota. She’s five months preg-
_ nant, but it doesn’t show yet.
‘How'd ya do?”’ “Shit. There ain’t no money out here
Sex for Beginners
Errol Selkirk 1988; 221 pp.
$7.95 ($9.45 postpaid) from: Writers and Readers, P. O. Box 461, Village Station N, New York, NY 10014 (or Whole Earth Access).
Besides, an islander might add, this position often hampers the woman with the weight of the man. Isn’t it better that both parties stay active, so that each can give and get more pleasure?
After all, isn’t that one of the main purposes of having sex?
tonight baby. It’s too cold.”’ ‘‘Yeah, only ho’s and fools out tonight.’’
Kim is nineteen. Her mother turned her out, five years ago, when she was four- teen. Her mother used to work out here, too, until she O.D’ed on junk last year. They had the same man, Ronnie. He has an after hours club uptown.
In 1977, we were working on the street in Berkeley. | had just come from the drug store where | had purchased six dozen condoms to use in our work. The police stopped me and searched my car. They found the condoms. They said, ‘‘Oh, what have we here?’’ They took each condom out of its package, and using their penknives, cut holes in each one. They laughed, and one officer said, ‘“Now go use these.’
Decriminalization allows for the possi- bility that the lives of prostitutes can become less dangerous. For one thing, under a comprehensive decriminalization scheme, it would be possible for pros- titutes to join unions and engage in col- lective bargaining in order to improve their working conditions. It would also be possible for prostitutes to form pro- fessional associations, and develop codes of ethics and behavior designed to reduce the problems involved in pros- titution as it now exists. Finally, it would be possible for experienced prostitutes to train new prostitutes, so that their first experiences would be less dangerous.
® Reich believed that body armor could
not be dissolved by Freud’s ‘’talking cure’ alone. Physical methods also had to be employed to teach the self to re- spond to touch, to emotions, and to the complete surrender of the orgasm. It wasn’t enough for the individual to un- derstand the causes of his or her own neurosis. To get well, he or she must ac- tually learn how to satisfy sexual needs.
Body armor takes the forms of muscular rigidness, defensive postures, and an habitually deadened response to inner and outer sensation. Armor protects the fragile self, but exacts a terrible price:
it cuts the individual off from the ex- perience of pleasure.
ye
STEPHANIE MILLS
Is the body obsolete? This is, literally, a senseless question, senseless and sinister. It pisses me off be- cause if somebody in a lab is asking it, soon there will probably be billions of dollars of federal funny money spent to answer in the self-fulfilling affirm- ative.
One could try to answer part by body part: Is the nose obsolete? Has the asker lately savored the in- comparable sweet perfume of an infant's scalp, the directive funk and tang of a lover's crotch, the fra- grances of last year’s half-decomposed beech and maple leaves intermingled with wild violets? Are hands, backs, tongues obsolete? Has the asker lately dug in a garden, ached from spading, clenched a fistful of freshly turned earth, or noticed that a vege- table's freshness is a tactile quality on the tongue more than a flavor, as in the ambrosia of potatoes uprooted moments before?
‘It takes a strange and foreign attitude to regard any
living thing as unsatisfactory. They say that socio- paths — torturers and playground killers — are char- acterized by a blind spot, an inability to imagine that their victims’ insides are real. Does the concept of bodily obsolescence bespeak a similar dispassion?
To me, bodies are impossibly wonderful, entirely elegant, even, strangely,