Ways of Seeing - Waterlillies on a Pool
John Berger, an art critic, published his seminal book called Ways of Seeing in 1972, and when I was into recreating myself, at least in the eyes of the world, his insights were invaluable. For a taste of it I found this on the net.
If you are into gender, illusion, how we create our worlds and so on, this is a good read. I keep lending my copy to someone or other, which means that I keep giving it away, so I had to hit amazon again to find another. If you get hold of a copy, the good stuff is in section 3. This was one source of the secrets that put me on the track to understanding how to recreate my own gender at home, to my particular taste. It's all just waterlillies on a pool; fascinating, floating on reflections of the sky.
Persia West
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Illusions for Lunch
Yesterday, a wonderful warm end of April day when for sure winter is gone and we have the days filled with light, Janie and I sat outside a café in the North Laines here in Brighton and had lunch in the sunshine. It felt like paradise.
Then the young men – student age is how I saw them - sitting on the other tables began to bellow to each other. They were jostling for airtime, and one of them, who kept sitting down when the others stood sometimes, was the leader. They had some plan, which was terribly clever, and of no interest to me, so I didn’t try to understand what it was.
At some stage a couple of young women came up and sat at the table of the leader. They showed skin where they could, and teeth when they smiled, which was all the time. Smiling, smiling is a form of supplication, but it also removes individuality in a way, to me at least. It’s a way of being attractive, looking pleasing, and men do it less. When you do see it is when two gay men meet and have something going on, and they smile smile smile while keeping eye contact. Men are attracted to what they see, which is why gay men often spend more time on their appearance, why they smile more.
More Emperor's New Clothes
The Guardian on April 15th had no less than four pieces which together told almost the whole of the story of gender, the lunatic tale of unquestioned perceptions, delusions and power that is the essence of gender at work in our world.
Oops, there I go again, telling it as I see it. The Emperor has no clothes! Gender is mad. Those who created and maintain the delusions of gender unconsciousness won’t like it. Oh, well,I’ve got nothing to lose. I've already lost it, thank god.
Back to the Guardian, which I once swore I would never read again because of what they printed about my kind, and now read regularly. It’s a great paper, when it is. Last week it gave enough on my favoured subject to keep me going for a year.
First was a great piece about testosterone and making and losing money, you can read that here
Then we have the venerable Polly Toynbee despairing over the girlification of young women and the dissolution of hope, which you can read here
Followed by the matter of women in their forties losing out in comparison to their male counterparts in the money they are rewarded with, and, inherent within that measure, how they are valued less, although we don’t say that. It’s never the men I speak to, incidentally, it’s the others. Read that here
And all this awful stuff is followed by some brighter news from Spain, where Senor Zapatero, Mr Shoemaker, the premier, has created a majority of women in his cabinet. It appears that some men don’t like this. Good grief, they’ll be driving cars next. Read that one here.
The first piece is about the effect of testosterone on making, then losing money
Gardens of the Mind, Genders of the Mind
In the early nineties, when I was going through the major identity shift of my life and struggling to keep sane, I went back to school and began learning about horticulture, landscaping and design. It just about saved my life, put me on the ground, made me work with what is real - weather, soil, plants, water. And I discovered that I could draw, I began to be a designer.
A new life opened in front of me, a different person in a different world. One of my first commissions was for a large garden in Surrey, and the design I came up with was great. Well, it looked that way sometimes. Other times it looked mad. Who could I ask about this, who would tell me if I was on track or way off?
The answer came when I was reading a magazine in bed, which had an article on Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, who was being interviewed because he was re-publishing a book he had written some years before - Jung and the Art of Landscape, A Personal Experience. He was described as the leading landscape artist of the 20th century. Jellicoe was at that time in his nineties and was still working, which meant he'd been working at his art for more than seventy years.
The Mind in the Hand in the Glove
The guests at last week's Gender at Work Forum were all men. This surprised me, because the norm at events with the word gender in the title is women, with a scattering of nice guys, the sort who get it. This means that we are talking of the kind of men who are friends with their own feminine aspect - more integrated, perhaps, in the way I hope to be when I grow up
We talked of the dominance of the masculine in hierachical organisations, where competitiiveness is rewarded. When it works, that is. In other words, it works for the people who are good at competition. The mystery is that in this way of valuing people, it is assumed that the guys (and occasional woman) who can fight and win are also best at decision making, creating visions, dealing with other people and so on. Makes no sense to me. But this seems to run the world.