12/11/2006
A lot of people new to the use of magic are very interested in the ethics of what is and is not allowed. It seems to me, though, that these questions are often a way of glossing over other, more important, issues.
Someone asked me the other day, “Under what circumstances is it ethical to do a healing spell without permission?” A question like that envisions a universe in which there are XYZ allowed circumstances, and ABC disallowed circumstances. A rulebook.
Now, I could say “there is no rulebook,” or I could approximate the rulebook, and give you an extensive list of hypotheticals, but all of that is beside the point. There are other, more important questions to ask before we even get into a bunch of ethical what-ifs.
Why don’t you have permission? If it’s someone you aren’t comfortable communicating with, why are you doing magic for them? Is your magical connection going to be effective if you can’t even have a conversation with them? How much can you even know about the illness if you haven’t discussed healing it? If you don’t have permission because they disapprove of magic, isn’t that something of a barrier to your work? Won’t you be thinking about that disapproval while you work?
Under most circumstances, in the absence of other information, it is ethical to assume that people want to be well. Absent a DNR (Do Not Resucitate order), medical professionals assume that an unconscious patient would wish to be resucitated. In other words, you don’t need a Do Resucitate order, because that’s the default.
But chances are, you’re not talking about doing magic in an Emergency Room. You’re probably talking about a chronic or active but non-emergent condition. And in that case, your question shouldn’t be ethical at all; it should be practical and interpersonal.
Before healing, what you want to know is, who is this person? What is our connection? What is this illness? Securing permission is one way to answer all these questions. A problem securing permission could indicate a problem in knowing what needs to be known in order to be an effective healer.
12/8/2006
On the surface, I’m doing an acrostic puzzle. But really, I’m with Nana.
The acrostic is in a Simon & Schuster spiral bound book of “Crostic” puzzles edited by Thomas Middleton. I am doing this puzzle at the kitchen table, but the binding and the flat, hard cardboard cover make it easy to sit in bed and do these puzzles on my knees.
Like Nana did.
When Nana would come to stay with us, she would have a suitcase full of mysteries and Middleton Crostics. She would read and do puzzles. She used sharp pencils, deadly, blood-drawing sharp pencils, always long. She never seemed to have stubby pencils. And I would get in bed with her, and she would teach me how to do the puzzles. (more…)
10/20/2006
I saw a bumpersticker tonight that said
The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom
…and I thought, Wow, that’s just about everything that’s wrong with religion today.*
Now, this quote probably originates in an older meaning of “fear.” Something more like “awe” was probably intended. And indeed, awe can be the beginning of wisdom. The left hand of awe is humility; the understanding that there are things we cannot understand, things greater than us, and that our answers are not the be all end all of answers.
But y’know, I think that’s not what the mini-van driver meant by it.
Fear of the Lord drives the kind of religious thought that is based in obedience. Doing what God wants and avoiding what God objects to. Because of the fear. Because you might get your ass spiritually kicked. “I’ll be good, God! Don’t kick my humble ass! PUH-LEEZE!”
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10/5/2006
Here’s my take on the whole Foley thing: It’s not a coincidence.
It’s not a bizarre coincidence that the co-chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children is also a pedophile. And it’s not just a coincidence that it’s mostly (not exclusively, but mostly, and by an impressive margin) Conservatives who are being knocked down like tenpins by sex scandals. Yeah, part of it is that power corrupts, and the consolidation of power that has increased dramatically in Washington these past five years has been massively corrupting, particularly of Conservatives.
But it’s not just that. It’s that it’s built into the system.
When you suppress, suppress, suppress, you create a pressure cooker. Pressure cookers only do the one thing, yet everyone is all suprised by the explosion. In terms of psychology, you generally only suppresssuppresssuppress when you have something serious that needs suppressing, and you generally only blame everyone else for being a perv when you need to avoid blaming yourself. It’s called “projection.” Look it up.
These Conservative freaks with their constant and intense fascination with Teh Gay and Teh Sex and Teh Dildoes, who want to make laws about my bedroom and yours, my marriage and yours, my orgasm and yours, what do you think is on their minds? This morning, while I was deciding if I should go back to using an alarm clock, and thinking about a writing project, and making coffee, and thinking about t-shirts (I swear by the Goddess, I was thinking about t-shirts), the Foleys and Dawn Edens and Santorums and Fred Phelpses of the world were thinking about gay gay naughty gay sex with boys how naughty how gay I must write a column to denounce that oh look I have a woody.
That’s how it works.
Two things: (1) If you’re a sick motherfucker, you have a higher tendency to denounce everyone else for being a sick motherfucker. (2) If you have natural, normal urges, ’cause you’re, lemme think…human, that you suppresssuppresssuppress, those urges, when inevitably expressed, won’t be expressed in the nice, normal way they started.
I’ve written about this before. Suppression is not only a bad model, but it’s had a good long test run, and people should have figured out by now that it’s not working.
10/2/2006
The Long Riders (1980) 7/10
Jesse and Frank James (James and Stacy Keach) ride with the Younger brothers (David, Keith, and Robert Carradine) and Clell Miller (Randy Quaid), robbing banks and being pursued by the Pinkertons.
The Long Riders is stylish and earthy. It feels authentic and sticks fairly close to history. It is a sweeping celebration of outlaw machismo, a pure boy sort of experience. This movie is so obsessed with the idea of brothers—real brothers—that the fourth Younger brother, John, is here called a cousin, presumably because there wasn’t a fourth Carradine to play him. (The brothers motif continues into Dennis Quaid playing Ed Miller, and Christopher and Nicholas Guest playing the Ford brothers.)
David Carradine gives one of his most relaxed performances. He’s terrific, and the performances in general are good. The complex history of the Civil War guerrilla actions that took place on the Missouri/Kansas border; important to the story of these men, is lost, but then, it is complex, and it’s not the story the movie chooses to tell.
I have lately been fascinated by Westerns. I find them terribly sexy—not in an artificial fetishistic Midnight Cowboy sort of way, but in a cool, silent, scary Man With No Name sort of way; although I suppose that, too, is fetishistic. They are washed, rinsed, and wiped down in testosterone; stark, iconic, and dramatic. They rely on silence, restraint, and very cool costumes.
So naturally, they are usually sexist.
(more…)
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