SEX ETHICS

                              rocks on



I just now saw something on facebook about somebody being a great "sex ethicist." I don't even want to know what that means. I like wondering. It's an oxymoron, like good grief. If it's not an oxymoron, I can't imagine what it might be. Maybe it's the title of a Surrealist sculpture. I suppose it has to do with behavior such as date rape being against the rules. Or does it propose an etiquette for date rape? Though the more it stays in my mind, the more I'm able to make sense of it. Considering that I grew up in fundamentalist baptist middle-America, deny it and it doesn't exist, everything I learned about sex during teenage years was from boy talk, inexperienced kids talking like they know all about it. The 4 Fs: find em, feel em, fuck em, forget em. That's the sex ethics I was raised on. It's not what I did, but it was what I was told by an experienced adult man. At the time, I didn't take it for sound counsel, but he said it with the conviction that he knew what he was saying. I supposed it was his conclusion after years of much experience that never worked out to his advantage. At the age I am now, looking back at his advice, I wonder what kind of issues he had with his mother. Or it might have been just telling a dumb joke to somebody he hadn't told it to already. Big man talk.



Like John Lee Hooker's song, "Let me be your little wheel, baby, tell you all the big wheel talk." Lying and denial seem to be the approaches to sex ethics when I was growing up, the 1950s. By the time I started dating, the other guys had filled my head up with so much trash about totally ignoring the individual I'm with, who is also another person, not just an inflatable doll. I have to say, I needed a course in sex ethics at school. At home, it was, No, Don't, and You Better Not! At church it was the fire in hell for eternity. I've an idea this is getting close to what is meant by sex ethics. Anything that is pertinent and sensible beats a morality of denial. One thing about it, in this time when girls in high school get pregnant and go on in school, have the baby and keep on going to school as a single mom, feels a whole lot more healthy to me than going to another town to have the baby, give it up for adoption, get a coat hanger abortion, and feel shamed for life. These are tremendous sorrows for a woman to live with.



I'd say sex ethics have to do for one's whole life instead of only the early experience. It can get complex continuing to think about it. Extra-marital, what a big one that is! Things like that happen mostly against the will, so whatever "ethics" or morality or what-have-you is involved, forget all of it. It's going to be what it's going to be. That's when the brain between the legs takes over and the other brain shuts down but for automatic pilot. Then there are the marital sex games of control and whatever else comes up. Some of those games could use a book of etiquette. Disease transmission is another need for some sex ethics. Like if you have a disease, don't pass it on. There too, a great need. I've heard tale after tale over the years of people who get a fatal disease and hate being singled out so much by the apparent random chance of it, they pass it on to as many as they can. That's not ethical.



Ethical seems largely to have to do with what interacts well with others, considers others, is not totally self-centered. Sex is as one-on-one (sometimes) and as other-oriented as anything can be, but I'd bet an awful lot of women would say their men don't give them consideration, it's all about self. Then to say sex is focused on others is not necessarily so. The other is about getting oneself off. Then, sex being a self-centered act to the max, it needs some understanding around ethics. Like a life lived ethically is a good life, sex done ethically is good sex. In the history of Christendom, we've not allowed sex to have any consideration where ethics are concerned. The answer to all questions: No, Don't, and You Better Not! That's no answer to any question, really.



Now that preachers don't have the social power they once had, used to be they were the morality police, and their policing had no ethics or morality about it, just No, Don't, and You Better Not! It's the same tack our government takes distributing contraceptives for disease and pregnancy protection at home and in 3rd World countries. A bunch of preachers in Kansas don't approve, so No, Don't, and You Better Not! is government policy in the world Rupert Murdoch created. Of course, our government is in need of not just sex ethics, but any kind of kindergarten ethics, a starting place. Sex is a good starting place, it keeps the earth abundant. I've about convinced myself to go look up this guy who is the sex ethicist and see what he has to say. I've talked myself into believing there is something to this strange oxymoron that is starting to make sense to me.



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HERE NOW

                                 tectonic plates microcosm



Big bad tsunami in Japan, earthquake, skyscrapers swaying, three tectonic plates with complex interactions that make them unpredictable. It's hard to let my mind imagine what so many people went through along the coast where the tsunami tore up about as much as the earthquake did. I don't get concerned about the dead. They're in the next world. The people remaining in this world to clean up the mess and carry on are the ones I tend to think about. I haven't heard a great deal of it on the news, but got some of it. Heard about a man photographing the tsunami getting swept out to sea.



Out the window I see a lone chickadee at the birdfeeder, pecking in a hurry. No snowbirds around at the moment, giving the chickadee time for all she can eat. Another chickadee flew down and landed beside her. She flew away. The second bird flew away after her. It goes on being cold. This morning the ground was covered with snow crystals the size of salt grains, barely perceptible, like a thin frosting. Heard later that it made the ground white at Laurel Springs, about 20 minutes west of here by road, and it's not a fast road. Different parts of the county have different weather patterns. Here, where my house sits is a low place between two ridges to the north and the south, and two ridges to the east and west. They direct big wind up over where I am, shaking the trees on the tops of the ridges so they sound like an endlessly long train going by.



Down here out of the wind, the windchimes don't even play. The coldest night of the year a wind blows up the road from the west right through the house. It is not a tight house. I don't want a tight house. I like a house that breathes. I've not thought of the way I live being rugged, but when I am around people visiting here from cities, I feel practically feral. People around me tend to only like sunny days tshirt temperature and complain about all other weathers. I love all the weathers, slants of light, fog, mud, snow, rain, sunny, overcast. These mountains are beautiful to my eyes every minute of every day of the year. I don't care if it's raining or snowing. They are good for the ground water, which has become a serious concern in our part of the mountains with all the wells tapping the water into septic tanks. I'm afraid we'll be a desert before American unconsciousness toward the waste of water becomes conscious.



It's daylight, but the shadows are lengthening and the great shadow of the ridge the sun sets behind is crawling slowly across the ground. The snowbirds must have headed for their roosting places. The chickadee is back at the birdfeeder, alone at the trough. Only 3 kinds of birds come to the feeder this winter, the snowbirds and 4, thereabouts, chickadees and maybe 4 titmice. I take it that they're the same ones over and over, when there may be a dozen or more. This birdfeeder is made of wood, probably bought at Walmart before they all became plastic, maybe 20 years old. It's the kind with a pair of glass panels the birdseed fits in between so the amount of seed can is visible. It looks like a simple little Zen temple in the mountains, a shelter and meditation place for monks walking through the mountains. It has some lichen on the roof and the wood is old and gray, a part of the landscape. The lone chickadee will be warm inside through this night considerably below freezing.



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THE MYSTERY OF THE OBVIOUS

                                            still life



Rain this morning, sun this afternoon, temperature just above freezing, Caterpillar sitting in the open doorway, open just enough for her to sit and survey the outdoors, watch the snowbirds, anything that moves, especially dogs. She likes to sit and look for awhile before she goes out. The dog may not be in sight now, but may show up from the woods across the road, the back of the house, anywhere but above. That's where the hawks and owls are. When you're cat size, there is an awful lot in this world your size and bigger. Like a cat can pounce on a mouse, an eagle that spots a cat out in an open field can pounce on the cat. Caterpillar learned to be wary outside when she was a kitten. Now that two dogs are just outside the door most days and some nights, Caterpillar only goes out after dark now, well after dark, up in the night. Then she'll go out for quite awhile, half hour or so. The rest of the time she stays in the house. When I'm here, she stays in sight or is off in a sleeping place. She doesn't have much fun since I deconed the mice. She looks for them, but they never appear. She didn't catch them, anyway. Just watched them.



The movie I saw yesterday, THAT EVENING SUN, stays with me, esp the Hal Holbrook character. I see him what I'm becoming, a cantankerous old shit. I don't see myself having a time in a nursing home. Don't see myself going on that long. I see for myself a quick dying, like fainting. Going along, get light-headed, no bed to lie down on, and relax to the ground. I see no problem with it. Only the mess I'm leaving somebody to clean up that I ought to be cleaning up myself. That's the only part that bothers me. I don't want to leave Caterpillar alone. But I could slip away like a bird in flight any moment and be satisfied. It's not like I'm looking forward to it, because I'm kind of used to this life, and have a good one by practical assessment, no major issues, no major complaints except for the direction I've seen USA going over the last 30 years. Nothing I can do about it, but I have the satisfaction that I won't have to live here in the time of post-denial corporate police state when it's out in the open with concentration camps and the US Army aimed at the working class, when the whole country can be called a Penal Colony. That's not another word for penis. Though it has a great deal to do with getting shafted, any place, any time, for any reason. Sexually, it's called rape. Politically, it's called law and order.



Television is the great propaganda machine and everybody, like 99%, is anesthetized by it. I don't see American people rising to anything. Television keeps them glued to the recliners, their history the history as told by propaganda. I mourn continually as the man of constant sorrow seeing my country passing through Aldous Huxley's vision of the future, and now entering George Orwell's vision of the future, 1984---the year Reagan was re-elected. Today I heard Hilary Clinton, Secretary of State, saying they're working toward the kind of democracy in Egypt "we want." Of course, we want. Doesn't matter a bit what the Egyptians want for themselves. That's not democracy. Only democracy enforced by American military will be the kind "we want." Bases. If we can have bases all over Egypt, then they have the kind of democracy "we want." My objection with her is different from the Republican reaction to her. I see her too much a Republican. I see Obama a Republican. I hate it when somebody says to me the Democrats and Republicans are the same. Much as it galls me, I have to agree. They are. Every time the Republicans took a step to the right, the Democrats took the step with them, all along the way.



I don't like thinking about the near future for USA, because I see only one thing: police state, which we already have, just more out in the open. If you're not doing anything wrong, what do you have to worry about? Adam Liptak has a good article in the NY Times, Wed April 23, 2008, US Prison Population Dwarfs That Of Other Nations. He tells it that one in one hundred adults in America is in prison. Where prison population statistics are concerned, we're an embarrassment to the rest of the world, and ought to be to ourselves, but we're not. So what? It's been noted on television several times in different places, but there it's forgotten one second after it's spoken, like everything else.



This is where my mind has dwelled today, seeing the democracy I grew up believing in, systematically rendered unconstitutional by the Reagan-Bush Supreme Court and corporate legislation by lobby dollars. I've outlived my culture, the culture that believed in democracy in America. Since 1968 under Johnson I've been seeing the step-by-step illegalization of democracy over, largely, racism. It's no question by now that this is the most racist country on earth, except for places like Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, the man with 9 degrees. In the 50s and 60s Progress was the big word; everything and everybody bowed to Progress. Now the only progress I see is toward out in the open police state. And it will be immensely popular, like it is now.



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THAT EVENING SUN THE MOVIE

refresh


Today's movie a big surprise. American film made in eastern Tennessee instead of Hollywood. The surprise was an American film without everybody looking like the Pillsbury Dough Boy and a script that came from experience with country people instead of urban script writers who know nothing of country people. It was made from a short story by American writer William Gay. He is someone I'll be googling soon to learn about. I already see he is one hell of a good writer. Tells a good story and writes it well. The director Scott Teems wrote the script from the story, but I can see the original words in much of what was said. Like the the kind of line you don't hear much from Hollywood, "I don't have a long life ahead of me and it's not meandering. It's a short straight line like a poison-tipped arrow." That's a Southern writer. I look forward to discovering his writing.



Hal Holbrook is an old farmer of actually western Tennessee, though it was filmed in eastern Tennessee around Knoxville. As soon as it started I knew it was in this part of the world, mountains in the background, looking to me like the Cumberland Plateau somewhere in Tennessee. The part of Tennessee where the story took place doesn't have mountains. That threw me until at the end I saw in the credits it was the Knoxville area, quite a different geography. At the beginning, this 80 yr old man in a nursing home bored out of his mind packed his bag, walked out of the place and hired a cab to take him to the homeplace. His lawyer son had leased it to the county's lowlife redneck who lived on disability and drank beer leaving cans about. The old man was a farmer of the old ways, the old way of thinking, which no one around him understood except an old neighbor. He refused to be thrown off his own land. His son, the lawyer, had power of attorney and took it away from him when he went into the nursing home. It got real complex in that it was his land, his house, his farm he had spent his life working and worked it well enough to send his ungrateful son through law school.



It turned into a testosterone match between two roosters, the old man and the redneck who would be of grandson generation to the old man. We had 3 generations of men in this changing time, the old farmer of the old way of thinking that everything fell down around him, his son the lawyer with too much on his mind and too much of a schedule to worry over the cantankerous old turd, his dad. The old man knew the redneck's daddy and him and didn't like either one of them, couldn't tolerate this lowlife sleeping in the bed he and his wife had slept in. The two roosters went to war and it took some very bizarre twists. Those twists were wrung from the seething hatred growing between them from scene to scene.



It was a particular story as a kind of allegory of growing old in a time of change in a world the old boy helped build. He grew old and everything turned on him. Confinement to a nursing home was more than an old farmer could bear. The story addresses the fact that nearly every person in those places is not there by choice. The rest of the world doesn't get it that an old farmer can be an intelligent man. He may not talk with self-conscious erudition or know how to dress for success, which makes him all the more alone in this world. He has the intelligence and knowledge to know what's going on around him, but nobody is listening, he's old. He gets mad. He is a cantankerous old turd who doesn't mind what he says to anybody. He's tired of being talked down to, directed about like he doesn't have a mind of his own and can't take care of himself. Alas, the struggle is all inside himself and he can't get out of it, it's him. He becomes consumed by his own hatred and locked down. It's one of those deals where everybody is right in their own way. And everybody is wrong. Wrong because they don't approach the issue with reason. They throw reason aside and go entirely on emotion, the old way, hatred taking charge.


The lawyer son in the middle attempts to operate from reason, but learns from the start there's no place for reason in this mix. The old man of an Age before reason, who lived his life more emotionally, of the heart, than rationally, of the mind. The mind in his time was for figuring things out. The heart was what you lived by. The redneck guy grew up poor, quit school and quit paying attention a long time before that, so he missed his chance with reason too. In this time when we live more by the mind than we did in the 19th century and the last hundred years have been the transition, these kinds of conflicts are pretty much the order of the day. The old man's mind was ok. The redneck's mind was ok. It's just that they clashed and clashed hard. Their mind games they threw at each other were like clashing swords in kung-fu movies, clang, clang, swipe. Their swords were on full alert. The story actually had tension in it that action movies fail to achieve, because they don't go so deep emotionally. This story dove way deep into the sea of emotions in a testosterone storm. Two men that hate each other and want to kill each other, but neither of them has what it takes to go that far.



All the way through it, I was appreciating William Gay's writing. I want to read some of his stories. This had a whole lot of scenes for a short story, but some short stories are long. Sometimes watching a movie, I get to appreciating the writing of the script, this time more than any. Of course, it was rewritten, but the original is still there and the rewriting was masterful too. It brought to mind David Lynch's film, THE STRAIGHT STORY, the story of an old retired truckdriver who'd lost his drivers license to too much drunk driving. Another great film THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL is the story of an old farm woman in a small Texas town, Bountiful, in the 1930s taken by her son to the city where she has to live as house keeper for him and his hothouse flower wife.



THAT EVENING SUN is another story of the tribulations of old people whose culture has died away from them and they're in a world where the morality is upside down from that they'd lived their lives by. It made me grateful that I had what it took to help Jr in his last years keeping him out of the nursing home so he could die in his own bed. It was important to him. The old man in the story had no one who understood what he was going through. This was the problem he had with his son the lawyer, who didn't get it that it was important to him to die at home. He was a cantankerous old shit because he was alone in the world and shut out. He got himself a barking dog just so they'd have to hear him. The story took us through his thoughts and feelings such that it became the illustration of his feelings. I loved that about it. He became not just a character in a movie, but a living man. 



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