My sister came home last night from five months of galavanting overseas, and in the course of our couple of hours together she suggested that the two of us take a four-month cycling trip in Europe next summer. Which is so so so so tempting. Part of me says ‘FUCK YEEEEAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!’ because I have a latent travel urge that I think most folks can relate to – I truly love my city, the people in it, and the things I see myself doing in the future, but I always feel so alive when I’m thrown into a different place. Going to San Francisco this winter woke me up and made me appreciate what’s OUT THERE, waiting to be seen, so much.
But then there is the overwhelming part of me that has a tendency to overthink everything. This part of me is focusing on the issues:
(1) I just adopted a cat and I absolutely refuse to relinquish her back to the shelter, because that’s pretty cruel. Finding someone to cat-sit for more than a weekend could be tough.
(2) I would like to apply to schools for next fall, in which case I’ll be needing my meagre savings. Along with tens of thousands of dollars in student loans. So maybe traveling right now is a tad impractical.
(3) Travel itself. Especially over large distances, by plane, with a high associated cost. I feel like traveling overseas is a huge marker of privilege, something I can only do because I am who I am, born in Canada, in my particular family. It’s environmentally suspect to traverse oceans, and I’m no longer at a place where I can justify this with “It’s ok because I live so sustainably on a daily basis”. So I need to suss out how I feel about this and decide whether I want to break some of my own rules by doing something frivolous, expensive and wasteful.
(4) My whip-crackin’ ways these days. I do certainly take time out every week to do fun things for myself and with friends, but I feel intense guilt when I’m not being productive or doing something that can benefit someone else. I also tend to burn myself out regularly, working like crazy on a bunch of different things until I crack and then spend a week or two pissing away my evenings. So maybe a break is what I need before I get down to a really, really intense part of my life.
There are probably other things. Logistically, the cat is the biggest issue. Her name is Neko, by the way. Surprise! She’s a babe.
On another note, it’s been a while! I like that I can always come back here and write things semi-publicly when I want to. See you again. Perhaps in less than four-five months time.
Wow. Today somebody out there found my blog by searching for it by title. This is a first in the animal’s blogging career. It makes me feel that there is now some pressure on me to start writing properly and expressing real opinions rather than reiterating what other intelligent internet entities have said. That’s part of what blogging is about, I guess, but since I have a brain which functions fairly well, I should probably use it from time to time. No promises, because I tend to break those, but I would love to start writing more about birth and pregnancy and sexual health, and how we think about women’s bodies in all of these contexts – for that matter, how we think about men and their bodies in these contexts, because they are often overlooked. I would love to give myself some leeway to write frivolous things about fiddling (as in, playing the violin, you dirty bastards) and books and cats and my little prairie life. It’s a pretty great life with some pretty great people in it. So try not to mind if I occasionally remove the stick from my ass to talk about the things that make me happy to be in the world, rather than all the things I wish were different.
Thanks for making my morning, Google user.
I’ve decided to submit myself to a new reading routine: read, then write down some of my thoughts on said readings, which I hope will allow me to speak about them more intelligently later on. Also just to hold on to things for my own sake.
Today I got through the introduction and first chapter of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the streets: a history of collective joy. My aunt talked about it a year or two ago when she was describing a flash mob-style protest she helped organize in San Francisco, and the title’s been in my head ever since. Hence my trip to the library of last Friday, and the addition of two more books to the enormous heap next to my bed. I’m in a bad habit of starting things I might never finish…
On to discussion…
Ehrenreich introduces the book by discussing the colonial reaction to what she calls ecstatic ritual in Africa, the Americas, India, Australia, and anywhere else white folks decided should be theirs for the taking. Ecstatic ritual includes such ’savage’ acts as dancing to heavy beats while costumed and painted, singing, the “manipulation of symbolic objects” (11) and sometimes trance. Most of the intro is devoted to how Western ethnographers/anthropologists have discussed the ecstatic rituals of conquered and enslaved peoples; it is probably unsurprising that most of this discussion aims to maintain a strict distance between the native populations in question, and the white Europeans who settled on their land. We get to talk about Freud a little bit (gag) along with psychology generally in its attempt to explain the phenomenon of ecstatic ritual. I love that this book opens with a frank recognition of the racism inherent in (some) ethnography and anthropology, and that Ehrenreich does not shy away from politicizing joy and the intellectual traditions which strive to understand it. She states that she aims to “speak seriously of the largely ignored and perhaps incommunicable thrill of the group deliberately united in joy and exaltation.” (16) We’re good at talking about ‘dyadic love’ between two human beings, she says, using psychology; we can use sociological analyses to discuss the collective. However, both of these fail when it comes to experiences of collective love.
The first chapter, ‘The Archaic Roots of Ecstasy,’ gets into possible evolutionary explanations for the universality of dance and other forms of collective ecstasy. She draws from a number of other authors who hypothesize that taking pleasure in collective activities like dance was as important to human survival as the pleasure we derive from food or sex. The pleasure we get from sex ensures that we’ll want to keep doing it and, in heterosexual relationships, we will likely reproduce. The pleasure we derive from dancing in groups, these folks believe, helped to form optimally sized groups of humans for purposes of hunting and defense. Ehrenreich takes this a step further and states that perhaps syncronized dance steps had their own purpose in allowing groups of people to appear as one gigantic being, thus scaring off potential predators. (Aside: this woman writes hilarious footnotes, like the one that came with this section that proposed an experiment using lions and/or leopards, facing off against a big group of people moving in different ways, to test her theory. Awesome.) She goes on to discuss some mythology, and makes it very clear that one of the West’s most ‘civilized’ societies, the Greeks, had some of the most outrageous ecstatic rituals. Reading about the maenads, the lady cult of Dionysus, was pretty awesome; running up into the hills, wearing buckskins and killing animals with our bare hands? Girls, let’s get our asses out of this shithole “civilization” and go have some Bacchanalian fun!
The quote I used in my title is on page 26. It comes just after Ehrenreich discusses marching, dancing, or otherwise engaging in rhythmic, synchronous group activities and the intense thrill they bring about. This makes me think about the first time I realized how much I loved to dance, when I was 18 years old. More recently, and perhaps more relevantly, I can relate this to the full-chested intensity I experience during a march like Take Back the Night. Walking as a part of a larger body which seems to breathe together, chant together, step together, laugh together; I’ve only participated in two of these marches, but I think I might be addicted to that brightness in my heart. If nothing else, this kind of action can let participants feel unified, and so much stronger for their unification. Intellectually, that march is about protesting sexual violence against women and our displacement from our city’s public spaces; perhaps more importantly, though, it is about women feeling their strength when they come together. This goes for any marginalized group.
Here I go again, talking about marginalization and colonialism and blah fucking blah blah blah. Whatever. I love it. I think this book will prove to be excellent, so stay tuned… anybody? I don’t think this thing gets read, ever. But I shall continue to write.
All quotes, and all thoughts, from Dancing in the streets: a history of collective joy, Barbara Ehrenreich, 2006, H.B. Fenn and Company Ltd.
ps: I am no longer in university on a full time basis and, as such, I don’t give a shit whether or not I’m citing this thing properly. I’m giving credit where it’s due and that’s all that matters. Let’s call this the Animal/fast ‘n loose school of citation.
… I just went to see Whip It with my mom and my sister… and we are so joining the roller derby league of our locale…
There are some excellent videos on YouTube that depict some marvelously gory moments. I’ve played water polo since I was nine and, as my mom articulated last week at a family dinner, it’s definitely given me a good venue for aggression. As she pointed out, women/girls are generally supposed to be more passive and less… aggressive… Um, bad rhymes aside, I feel like this coulde be another really fun opportunity to work out some of that aggression in a positive way… Ha. By slamming other women into a guardrail. Excellent.
If I do get into this, and if I get any bloody noses, I’ll be sure to post the pictures here. Just think of the fishnets I’ll get to wear… My elbows are itching for a bit of rib.
