The source for this is from http://www.boredpanda.com/diary-of-a-volatile-14/
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The source for this is from http://www.boredpanda.com/diary-of-a-volatile-14/
You need to be a member of David Brazier at La Ville au Roi (Eleusis) to add comments!
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Poem by A.A,Milne (1924) "The World of Christopher Robin"
There's a cavern in the mountain where the old men meet
Hammer, hammer, hammer,
Hammer, hammer, hammer...
They make gold slippers for my lady's feet
Hammer, hammer, hammer,
Hammer, hammer, hammer...
My lady is marrying her own true knight
White her gown and her veil is white,
But she must have slippers on her dainty feet,
Hammer, hammer, hammer,
Hammer.
There's a cottage by the river where the old wives meet
Chatter, chatter, chatter,
Chatter, chatter, chatter,
They weave gold stockings for my lady's feet
Chatter, chatter, chatter,
Chatter, chatter, chatter,
My lady is going to her own true man,
Youth to youth since the world began
But she must have stocking on her dainty feet,
Chatter, chatter, chatter,
Chatter,
I agree Elja. I believe we've lost something in trying to be too equal. We are different, whether by nature or nurture and I think we do best to celebrate and take a lively interest in that.
Elja Stoel said:
hmmm one thing I learned from neuroscience that has helped me greatly to live with my loving male partner concerns how men and women process language differently. As we see above women can be deeply flushed with anger, fear, any powerful emotion and still find language to speak. Our language centres are connected, if I have the information correctly, to pathways involving the centres for primitive emotions.
Men don't. Their pathways involve being silent as soon as large emotion hits. They need time to process their feelings, and then talk about them. When a man walks away it's because he's reading his internal signals to fight rather than flee and he's making the wise choice. It may seem to him he's just keeping a calm head and he is but it's because his response to powerful emotion coming at him and igniting him is to fight or flee, not talk.
I've found since knowing this that if I do two things around communication it helps. First if I have to say something I figure out a way to say it in twenty minutes or less. That way I go into the communication saying to him, "Honey I need your undivided attention for about twenty minutes, no more." This brings his anxiety down because men generally feel a deep pit opening in their stomachs when their beloved wants "to talk." Unspecified amounts of time in this talking signal to him that nothing good can come of this.
He may have learned that "to talk" means she needs to talk and all he has to do is listen but that's a very high level skill for anyone.
The second habit I've learned to adopt concerns what I expect from him. Especially when our emotions have been triggered and that resounding silence resonates in the house, I remind myself, "He is thinking about this and he will get back to me, whenever he is ready." I discipline myself to not make reference to "it", to not demand he respond on my time line.
What ideas and skills have you learned about communicating with each other?
Yes, thank you, Annette. I think you and Carol will always have plenty to talk about which bodes well. I love reading your comments - very clear and challenging.
Ideals & Realities
Although Annette and I are saying different things, I don't think that this necessarily means that we are contradicting each other (though we might be) or opposing one another, except in the sense that opposite pillars of a bridge oppose one another. The bridge could not be built without such tension. The reason I say this is because Annette is taking on the job of trying to clarify and refine the ideal while I am clarifying and trying to understand the reality as we find it. Of course, the two tasks come together eventually in Annette's final question which is about whether the ideal is achievable or realistic, which all depends upon what the reality actually turns out to be. I don't think that reality is necessarily "static and narrow".
Different Ideals
Both of these tasks are important and valuable and it is useful for us to share our ideals. I am sure we all have ideals and that these are not the same as each other's. Sharing may help.
Merger or Difference
I would like to ask Annette to explain further how the "womanhood-manhood" entity that she aspires to fits with the idea of identity of woman springing from the alterity of man. On the face of it it appears to be asserting two mutually contradictory principles. In my own case, I certainly do value developing both "feminine" and "masculine" capacities, yet recognise that some come more readily than others and a lot goes on unconsciously, but I don't have a wish to be a man-woman. I'm quite happy being a man.
The Little Matter of Love
As for love, of course, we all know that the Greeks had at least three and perhaps as many as six words for it and in my book Love and Its Disappointment I never even tried to define it. Love might involve the totality of the body (and mind and spirit) but it is also capable of destroying all three. This morning we have been reading poems from Charles Bukowski's anthology called "Love is a Dog from Hell".
A New Vision of Myself, the Other and the World
This, perhaps, takes us back to the first paragraph. Is the best vision the one closest to reality or the one that asks for the greatest change? What is the ideal vision? that men be men and women be women or that we give birth to something "totally new, unexpected and difficult"? And what do these three terms mean? In the last century quite new ideals of man-woman relations have emerged as a result of changing technology, falling birth rates, contraception and the monetarisation of many social relations and questions of value, but I have the feeling that the resulting dilemmas are far from having been solved.
This discussion could go on endlessly calling upon science, history, anthropology, sociology, so called "facts of life" etc. However, I feel the core of the problem lies elsewhere. First of all one always reflects from the standpoint of one's personal experience - thank you very much Carol for making us aware of that in a wonderfl way - My reflection is always singular (this "man " and this "woman") because it springs from my unique and singular relation with Dad, Mum, my partner(s) Therefore I also insist on the idea of relation. My identity as a woman emerges from my confrontation with the alterity, the otherness of a man. This relation is vital. -notice the number of people involved here on the subject! Therefore I am surprised that nobody sofar has come up with the notion of love which is probably the only relation involving the totality of our body - the "taboo" lies perhaps in the modern misundestanding of sex and its narrowing down - mind, intellect,, aspiration. I object to the idea of being locked up in some static and narrow reality of being a man/woman.I would like to break through this so-called reality and invent something totally new, unexpected, difficult, full of pitfalls which could be called "womanhood/manhood". It should bring about a new vision of myself, the other and the world. Am I an incorrigible dreamer?
Clearly there is a large area of overlap, but I suggest that there is a observable tendency for men to be one way and women to be another. There has never been a woman world chess champion, though some women do become grandmasters in the game. Some men are good at babycare, but women are better cut out for it on the whole. I think that the fact that one can cite instances of overlap where some women are more masculine than some men or some men are more feminine than some women does not eliminate the meaning from the terms masculine and feminine nor mean that these terms are not, broadly speaking, correctly identified with their respective genders. I think that there is a resistance in our culture to discussing the issue nowadays - a resistance that did not exist fifty years ago, but is a product of a kind of political correctness. Vive la difference is not a slogan that one hears much these days.
The idea of focussing on the relationship is surely also productive, but, as surely, not an alternative. A relationship is an encounter between two or more and if the two are identical then there is not much of a relationship. It is surely the difference that generates the dynamic and interest. Harmony is a matching of contrasting elements in a way that produces something that neither could offer alone.
For myself, I certainly get all the connection with others that I need - perhaps a bit more than I need. I'm not sure that connection in itself per se is important. Some connections are productive and fertile and some are inhibiting and sterile. Aloneness is also important.
Carol asks "Can we open up space for a conversation without prejudging or needing to agree ahead of time about what we will find?" - I imagine that the conversation about what we would fine would be the conversation. I also guess that we do all prejudge this issue and one of the most interesting things could be to tease out what those prejudgements are. In the contemporary cultural context, however, that might feel to be quite a dangerous thing to do.
The whole thing, therefore, does feel to me to be a bit shrouded in taboo.
But men and women are two separate entities... Sometimes I think one of the problems is that we try to hard to be like each other while we are different. I am interested in the difference between men and women... I want to see the quality 'male' and 'female' again, to see how these qualities complete each other. I have the feeling that especially woman are 'pushed' to adapt to a 'male society.'
Tamuly Annette said:
I think that one has to put the emp)hasis more on the relationship than on men and women as two separate entities. I always like to rhink about the notion of androgyne (see Plato) We are born as wounded and incomplete creatures longing for fullness and harmony with the other (gender) but also within ourself as being both masculine and feminine. .
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