Hello, Pakistan

Someone visited this blog today from Pakistan for the first time. It is fascinating to me that this can happen. I believe that my wonder at this must resemble my father's amazement that he can get into a plane in one city, then step out of it in another.

It is part of being old, I guess. Still, I want to say hello to the person from Pakistan if he or she is still visiting the blog. Thank you for coming. Feel free to make a comment.

I wish I had thought to greet each person or each country as it came along, but today is a new day. Do I sound like Scarlet? Do I give a damn?

I taught my children not to swear unless they were making a direct reference or quotation. That backfired when they started finding many sources of profanity and quoting them to me.

So, I check every day to see if someone from a previously unrepresented country has visited my blog. If not, I wonder why I check. What difference does it make? It is the internet. Of course people from other countries come.

Then, when I get a visit from someplace new, I remember why I check. I am thrilled.  On the blog about writing I have listed the countries. This is the list, Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Barbados, Belgium, Canada, Cameroon, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Germany, Honduras, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Lithuania, Malaysia, Moldova, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Pakistan, Romania, Russia, Saudia Arabia, Serbia, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Thailand, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Ukraine.

Isabel Reviews an Israeli Film

Isabel Shayle on the film Late Marriage חתונה מאוחרת‎

Dover Koshashvili's Late Marriage just ended for me. It gave me a slap in the face that I did not expect.  Sobering. What happened?

Everything was fine, the story was moving from scene to scene. All I needed was for the protagonist, Zaza, to be bigger and better than his identity would allow. Is that what the world wants from me, too? Will I only be acceptable if I become more of a fantasy and less real?

Women, beware. In real life, if he is not ready today, he will not be ready in five years. Men, beware, is more like it. Right? This man believed that he would have a relationship with himself or with his parents in the future with a dynamic other than what he currently has. That is not how life is. People do not grow and change. Well, if they do, someone should write a book about them, because they are rare.

So, I watched this movie, and when it ended realistically I hoped that the protagonist would wake up from the nightmare that is real life. Then the credits rolled, and I wondered whether I needed to wake from my real life.

No. No, that's not right. Everything is great, but I have PMS. It is such a tricky thing to have a human body. I am living the dream, but I have forgotten this truth because I am hormonally unbalanced.

Why does Zaza make the choices that he makes? Who would want a man like that? The reason that the film made me sad was that Zaza reminds me of everyone in the world, and so do his awful parents.

Brilliant film. I will have to see it again.


 

The Other Way (sex that is not bad)

Pleasant Sex

So, in my previous post, I explained sex as I understood it by the time I reached marrying age--my thirties. Okay, and into later years.

One day, however, after having recalibrated with the understanding of the limits of physical experience as a human woman, I chased a rabbit into a hole not unlike Alice's and found myself in sexual ecstasy. Yes, ecstasy. Now, if you read my previous post, you know that I thought such concepts were pure fiction. Well, I am here to tell you that there is another kind of sex. There is that kind that you thought men pretended women experienced so that they would not feel guilty. It turns out that women do experience pleasure.

I know. I am as surprised as you are. That is one of the reasons I wrote it all down. How could I have made it this far into adulthood without having known joy like this?

Deciding what to do, having experienced this sensation, is the big question. After all, is it necessary to repeat? Is it like having gone to a wonderful restaurant and tasted the food? Can I just enjoy home cooking now? I know what is good for me.

I think I do.

Why Sex is Not Great

When my friends tell me that a movie is the funniest or best one they have ever seen, I tend to be disappointed. If I had expected nothing, I might have liked the movie.

Sex and weddings are like that. From the time we are little girls we look forward to our wedding day. That is the day that we will be a princess. We will wear a gown and spend the day preparing and the whole kingdom will attend. The menu is planned months in advance and the coronation music is also selected well in advance.

But then it comes. Oh, here are the flowers I picked out. They just look like flowers. The groom is the same guy I have been spending time with. He has not transformed into a prince. he is the one I was able to attract. He is fantastic, but I do not love him enough for this gigantic event. Where is his princess? He deserves a real princess. He is getting me. I am putting on a princess costume and stopping him from finding his true one. I have stolen him and brought about all of the misery that he will experience as an adult.

Oh, sex. Sex is that great movie that you save and save and save for a special night. Then you do it, and you know you must not have the instructions right, because it is not that great of a movie.

Are we all going to pretend that this is good? Is there nothing else?

I hope that there is time travel, or an opportunity for international well-funded espionage.

Who dreamed this "sex" thing up? P.T. Barnum?

Isabel on Prophets

In Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, Bill and Ted had to be careful when they saw themselves in travels to the past. Once they got the hang of it, they were able to confront various iterations of themselves that knew more or less than they respectively did.

In time travel movies it is dangerous to interact with a future or past self.

Some people do not see that we are mixing with our past and future selves constantly on earth. It is embarrassing to say to someone, "I used to be you."

When a woman says to a girl, "I used to have a figure like yours," what is the girl supposed to say?

"Oh, shit. Am I going to get fat and old? Are you sure you looked this good? You probably do not remember."  (That would not be polite, but what girl would not think it?)

Some people fear Islamic fundamentalists without recognizing themselves. Holy smokes. It makes more sense than I realized. Old women fear young women. It is the youth of girls that makes women aware of their age and their loss.

Muslims full of fervor resemble Christians at the time of Martin Luther and before. Martin Luther, after all, called on leaders to kill his followers when he saw them making secular demands. He called them instruments of Satan. He said the same of the papacy, where he saw the devil.

As Jews we are so old, some of us, and have gone through so much reform that we do not see ourselves at all in these others. Well, we always did murmur, did we not? Does that mean that we never had what the Muslims have and the Christians did have? Did we not feel the actual spiritual presence of good and evil around us? Was it just a way to think? No, no. That is just my family. Some Jewish people feel a great and powerful presence of the Shekhina and God. It is the practice that brings it back to us.

There are those, of course, who have been cynical all along. And with them, what's the sense talking?

"The promised land was a huge pain in the ass. All we wanted was our melons and garlic and fleshpots. Take us back to Egypt," we said. "Did you bring us out here to die in the desert? Walking in circles for forty years and eating manna is no one's idea of a picnic. And the manna is not delicious, no matter what you say. It might have the flavor of the food I like, but the texture is not right. I would like a better miracle. When will Miracle Whip be invented? How about some of that?"

Okay, so it is easy to see that Islam now is the same as Christianity 600 years ago. Is it harder to see where the children of Israel fit in because one has such a hard time recognizing the self?

Well, this is embarrassing. I hope that with this I have united Christians and Muslims forever, and that you love each other from now on, and that you let us continue with our tikkun olam. Oh, I am selling us short. I sound as if I want the lowly status of the Ottoman Empire again. "Don't mind us. We are just picking up the shards that God broke when he created the world. He probably should not have contracted so much."

 I wonder if He new to optimize after the contraction.

Oh, well. It is too late now. Omniscience should have covered that, anyhow.

 

Isabel on Clara Barton

 

 

Why do people lie?

According to her biographer, Clara Barton colored her hair. She made a point of telling people that her black hair was natural. Why did Clara Barton lie about this? Was there something lost that she could reclaim by virtue of being a woman who never went gray?

I think that Clara was like me in how she felt about herself--not about her hair--but in general. She learned how to put leeches on her brother when that was the treatment for his illness. He allowed no one but her to do this for him. She made herself valuable by doing something awful. She valued herself so little that she had nothing to lose when she went to aid the Civil War wounded. Why is that like me? O woe is me--is that what you mean? Pauvre Isabel. I think that she was in a constant state of passive suicidal ideation.

Ignored and unimportant, Clara Barton did not even possess a birthday. 

We lie, Clara and I, when we think that the truth about us is not good enough. We are not good enough. Don't feel sorry for me. I do not think that you are good enough, either. The way that Mencius extends jen from the bonds of Confucianism I extend disappointment with the self to disappointment with all of existence. Bitter? No. Resigned.

Clara and I both lied about lost mittens. Actually, Clara's lie differed in that she pretended that her mittens still fit. I did not want to be known as a person who lost her mittens. I did not want replacement mittens, because I wanted my mother to believe that I still had my mittens. I wanted her to be proud of me. Clara feared that her mittens would not be replaced. She knew that her parents would not get her new mittens. She never let them know that she had outgrown her gloves. That way she would not have to face the awful truth that her parents did not love her. They could not be bothered getting her another pair of gloves or mittens.

It was not Clara who was unloved by her parents. They loved no one but themselves. She took it personally, and allowed her self-esteem to suffer. She thought that her identity prevented them from caring about her. I guess I should feel better about myself, now that I am matching myself up with Clara. I cannot use my parents to reflect a picture of me, because they do not see me. Clara was amazing. She changed public school, brought medicine to the needy, and started the American branch of the Red Cross. None of that mattered, because she was not important enough to clothe and celebrate in basic ways.  Isabel, stop whining. We always dressed you. You are the one who did not dress well. That is your own fault. My parents did buy me nice clothes, but I did not do anything special like Clara Barton. I have no excuse. Why do you think you became such a failure, Isabel?



 

Martin Luther's Mistake in Isabel's terms.

What was the matter with Procopius and Martin Luther?

(opinions of Isabel Shayle, who has her own issues)


 Martin Luther said that he wanted to become a ghost and hang around just to give bishops a hard time for eternity-- totally not what Jesus would have him do.

Haunting and bothering would be bad. How did Martin Luther go so wrong ? 

He was human. When you are human, learning and knowing do not change you.  To learn is one thing. To change, another. His humanity--it is this that fascinates me about Martin Luther. I see myself, and everyone else, in Martin Luther's inability to see where his identiy limits his potential to act. Moses could not get to the promised land. Luther stands in his own way. We all are self-limiting. Luther continues to see the world through the original filter that shaped his earliest understandings. He gets pretty far, as we know, but he still ends up right where he started. He cannot leave himself behind.

Luther told the secular rulers of Europe that they should put down the rebellion of the peasants by killing the men as if they were wild dogs. He described the peasants as Satan's workers. The leaders thought that Luther's words were too strong, but they went ahead and killed the peasants in great numbers.

This was not a case of power corrupting a man. Instead, it was an example of a corrupted brain, full of brilliance and information--some false, some true. He could not help being a product of his time and of his education.


Martin Luther, raised during a period of time when the Catholic Church taught people to fear an angry Jesus Christ, believed that the only way to get to heaven was to burn your sins off in purgatory. Martin Luther took this seriously. When he confessed, he felt that he was not truly sorry for what he had done, and so he would go back to confess again.

 Procopius saw a world where Good was at war against Evil, too. He was pretty sure that Justinian and Theodora were demons. These were times when people saw the world in spiritual terms that were not abstract. Martin Luther saw Satan and the work of the devil in Rome. He used strong language because he found the situation alarming. He did not want anyone to mistake the pope or the bishops for good men.

Martin Luther's childhood demons and ideas of Satan would emerge in whomever he identified as his enemies. He knew that he wanted good. In his simple way of seeing the world, anything against him was bad. Among these were the leaders of the Church in Rome, the peasants who would fight for social and economic freedom, and anyone whose actions seemed antagonistic to what he believed was right. Later, this would be the Jews.

  Martin Luther stuck with his idea. He did not mean for it to take him where he ultimately went. He did not intend for it to take Christianity or Europe where he led them. (That does not mean Hegel was wrong. Hegel said that Luther as an individual changed the course of history. Was it coming and the Zeitgeist was simply on its way? I think that it is more of a close call than Hegel suggests. I do not want to go down the path and make my own determination about Caesar, after all. Oh, shit. Do I?

Let's just finish up with Martin Luther, shall we?)

There he was, minding his own business, reading his scripture. He was a leader in his community and did not want the people to go to hell.

The people thumbed their noses at him. They held up the pieces of paper that they had purchased. Their purchases would pay for contruction of beautiful buildings in Rome that Pope Leo wanted completed.

"We do not have to come to church. These are our 'get out of purgatory free' cards. We can sin as we please for the rest of our lives," the people said. They had bought papal indulgences.

Luther felt that these souls were his responsibility. He could not let the falsehoods of the papacy doom his community to purgatory. He recognized the pope and the bishops as Satan's minyans.

"Hey!" he told the people of his village. "You are still going to burn in fiery torment. Get back in church."

Tough love.