Does Anyone Beat Your Heart for You

by Melissa S. Green | crossposted at Bent Alaska

does anyone beat your heart for you —
oh yes I know there are some who
will quicken it
or slow it at their leaving —
but when you are alone at night
and sleeping, dreamless . . .
it is there . . . beating —
it will be there . . . beating —
till you die

does anyone beat your heart for you
does anyone live your life for you
do you cast a vote — plea for
intercession
do you hasten your death by forgetting

do you close your eyes and believe
what others say you see

[January 9, 1982]

About this poem

I spoke this poem today at the Community Building for Alaska workshop sponsored by the Alaska Community Foundation & Alaska Pacific University, after a morning’s discussion.  It’s not possible to walk together in community as anyone other than who we are, carrying our own minds, hearts, souls.

I wrote this poem many many years ago, mostly in my head, one day walking across my home town of Columbia Falls, Montana, & thinking about people who seem to need to have other people tell them what to think, what to believe — or even to know who they are. But how can you know who you are, unless you discover it for yourself?  How can others know you unless you are yourself?  How can any other person have the arrogance or violence of spirit to claim better knowledge of you than you have of yourself?  To do so is a violation of your very integrity.

This is the second time I’ve posted this poem on my blog. The first time was in the summer of 2009, during the height of the public hearings on the Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO-64. You can read here about the occasion of my posting it then.

Related posts:

1. Does Anyone Beat Your Heart for You (poem)
2. I won’t abandon my integrity, even if you abandon me
3. Buddha in the coffee shop

I feel like talking about the Book of Job again. This might be because a month ago I was asked to speak at Anchorage Unitarian Universalist Fellowship (AUUF) on June 26, which coincides with the end of Alaska PrideFest, on the “need for liberal religious people to reach out to the LGBTQ community,” and today I was asked for the name I wanted to give my talk so it could be printed in the AUUF’s bulletin.

I told Beatrice — that’s Beatrice Hitchcock, AAUF’s interim minister — to title my talk “Take it to Heart: Faith & LGBT Youth.” “The first half of that title,” I told her, “is based on a poem I wrote, called ‘Sermon,’ which I plan to begin my presentation with” — that’s a poem based on the Book of Job — and went on to explain,

I will probably continue the presentation after the poem with Job: the idea of holding on to one’s integrity, in line with the UU principle of “the inherent dignity and worth of every person” and how members of liberal faiths needs not only to teach that to “their own” but also to reach out to people who have been taught to internalize self-hate & give them new heart… as it were.

(Yes, I’ve been reading a bit about Unitarian Universalism. I’m not a member, stubborn non-joiner me — but I am in profound agreement with the Unitarian Universalist 7 principles, the first of which — “The inherent worth and dignity of every person” — I relate to all that I think about that so-important-to-me word, integrity.)

And then again, I might want to talk about the Book of Job because I’ve been delving deeply into my email-retentive archives. The archives, in particular, of an email discussion list I belonged to during the latter half of 1998, when I was reeling from the loss of a relationship & the betrayal I felt over it.  As it happened, my partner & I later came back together — but in 1998 I didn’t know that would happen, & in 1998 I was hurting. Hurting like Hell.  And anyone who was on that list knows just exactly the double-sense in which I mean that word.

(Parenthetical: The character Hell from my portion of the shared story I crafted on that list has been renamed Helvetti in the novel form of the story, which is called Mistress of Woodland. Which I am working on again.  Which is why I’m delving into the email archive, because it holds much of the raw material of which Mistress of Woodland is made. Helvetti is Finnish for hell.)

In 1998, the Book of Job was already important to me.  I had, after all, already written that poem “Sermon.”  But now it took on new meanings, stemming from my visceral sense of being like Job: innocent, yet suffering.  And, moreover, being told that my suffering was my own damn fault. Which false accusation, of course, added to my suffering.

I’d say that Job walked into my thinking when a demand was made of me, early in the breakup period, that I felt incapable of meeting, without utterly compromising & losing myself — even though not to meet the demand could possibly mean losing the one I loved out of my life altogether. Which at the time seemed a distinct possibility.

But what’s the choice, really?  I wrote back to her, an email in which I quoted the Job poem — “Sermon” –

“I must abandon my integrity / or you abandon me.”

And then I said,

Well… I won’t abandon my integrity, not even for you.  Not even if you abandon me.

And I cried.  Long days of summer I cried.  Because it goes like this: call it your Self, or call it your Integrity — either way, it’s like a pole at the center of you, that you can grab onto in a high wind; or it’s an axis like the Earth’s axis, around which you spin.  If you keep a firm grip on that pole at the center of you, through even the worst storm, you’ll know where you are.  You’ll know who you are. But it won’t keep the bad shit from hurting you.

But if you let go of it, you’re lost. You’ll go kiting off into that storm, & you’ll be a long time finding yourself again, if ever you do.

That hurts worse.

I’ll have more to say about the Book of Job, both the stuff I learned back then, & the stuff I keep learning now.  But this is enough for tonight.

(I’m trying to learn how to write the reasonable-sized blog posts that other people write, instead of the long-winded posts that are my usual.  How’d I do?)

Related posts:

1. Sermon (a poem)
2. No Questions, Questions (poem)
3. Integrity, violation, healing

Crossposted at Bent Alaska

A couple of years ago, Bent Alaska announced a LGBTQ panel at University of Alaska Anchorage, an institution of which I am both an employee & an alumna.  So on April 1, 2009, I attended the panel which held in the Consortium Library just upstairs from my department.  After I got home that night, I even started drafting a blog post about it.  Then I forgot all about it…until I discovered it hidden away amongst my old drafts.

This post is that post, completed.

Some of the discussion at that two-years-ago panel revolved around improving the kind of support that LGBTQ students, faculty, & staff receive at UAA, whether through the existing student organization The Family, or institutionally through expanding the Women’s Studies Program (which sponsored the event) to be a Women’s and Gender Studies Program; through other institutional means at UAA or the University of Alaska statewide, such as a nondiscrimination policy; or through strengthening the connections between the university LGBTQ & the larger Anchorage LGBTQ community, including ally organizations like Anchorage PFLAG.

(Just a few weeks ago, the UA Board of Regents finally passed a policy on February 18, 2011 which added sexual orientation to the University of Alaska’s nondiscrimination policy.  It is as yet unclear whether the Regents intend this policy to also cover gender identity/expression.)

But there was also a lot of discussion about the whole gender identity/expression and sexual orientation thing, and how we had variously experienced it. We had gay folks, lesbian folks,  male-to-female and female-to-male transfolk, a Samoan fa’afafine alum, a PFLAG mother of a lesbian, another mother of a daughter who might actually be her son (i.e., trans).  We had students, a couple of staff members including me, a faculty member, and a number of people from the community.  We had various ages from college student age all the way to people in their 50s and 60s.

What really stuck out for me was the common experience most of us (all except the “allies”) had of pushing through to be ourselves in the face of huge pressure to conform to other people’s expectations about how we should dress, how we should act, who we should love, how we should be defined in arbitrary cultural ways by the genitals we were born with. How painful it was to not be accepted simply for who we were and are.

Well, sure— I’ve lived through plenty of that myself. It’s just (usually) not quite so visceral to me anymore because it’s been many years since I came out, and I’ve been openly lesbian for most of that time.

But damned if I don’t remember the pressure to wear dresses that I never felt comfortable in, to be “feminine.” Or the fear I felt as a sophomore in college when an acquaintance wanted to talk with me about being lesbian and I frantically counted the very few friends who knew about me — who told her?

As I wrote in another post in 2009, shortly after the veto of the Anchorage equal rights ordinance AO-64, about coming out when I was in college,

It was scary, it was painful, & it was a slow long job to learn who I could or could not trust with this important aspect of who I am.  And as hateful as the “Truth is Not Hate” hate speech that we heard constantly spewed from the mouths of red-shirted ordinance opponents over the course of the summer, the sentiments they expressed were not so different from the conventional wisdom of the majority of my peers in the East Coast women’s liberal arts college I attended from 1977 to 1981. Yes: the same college that Hillary Rodham Clinton attended, a supposed bastion of liberalism.

Sitting in that meeting, I was sent back into those memories, and began to feel worse.  In April 2009, when I started writing this post, I was just coming out of a lengthy period in the cave — the cave being my name for one of the varieties of “depression” (or sometimes plain old despair) I sometimes experience.  The cave is probably why I didn’t finish the post at the time: I was afraid I’d go back into it.  I was coming face to face, for the first time in a long time, with how deeply I was scarred by all that shit of a lifetime in homophobia-land, all the fear and distrust I had for the people around me simply because of who and what I was.

As far as I’ve come along from the all of that, I still have the scars. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve struggled with despair/depression off & on all my adult life — actually, dating back to my last couple of years of high school. For almost as long, I’ve tried to figure out what it was about, where it came from. There are other strands in my background that I can point to — most prominently, the effect on my mother, and through her me, of her having grown up with an alcoholic father — but the effect of growing up in a society that actively hated my difference, well… its hard to measure exactly.  But it’s there.

And it goes far beyond me.  How many friends have I had who’ve suffered similarly because the church, or their family, or their friends, or some combination of all of the above and then some, has been unable or unwilling to accept them on their own terms?

Bob, a coparticipant of mine in a high school enrichment program at University of Wyoming who, at age 17,  jumped to his death from the 9th floor of White Hall, after having reportedly being harassed by other participants about being a “faggot.” My friend in college who was raped after a male visitor to our campus learned she was a lesbian.  My friend up here in Alaska who at age 20 was gang-raped by eight men in his Army unit, then further raped with a broken bottle, for no other reason than that he was gay. Other friends and acquaintances who have gotten lost in drugs or booze, like my namesake Melissa who died of a heroin overdose in July 1983 just a few months after I arrived in Alaska.  Other friends or acquaintances who have attempted, or succeeded with, suicide — at least two women in the Anchorage lesbian community that I can think of off the top of my head, and undoubtedly more.  Other people I never knew but might have, had they not been murdered, like Raymond Barker, murdered by Charles Cole and Matthew Decker in April 1985; Oscar Jackson, murdered by William M. Justice in December 1984; or Peter Dispirito, murdered in August 1974 by Gary Lee Starbard, who received a sentence of just one year for — in the judge’s words — the “unfortunate accident — incident” that led to his victim’s death. (Dispirito is still remembered through a public service award bestowed annually by the Imperial Court of All Alaska.)  By circumstance, this post follows the publication last night on Bent Alaska of Johnathan Jones’ post on the death of his foster sister by suicide. I share, we all share, his grief.

Self-hatred: it’s harm at the very center of us.

And it doesn’t only enter us due to overt acts of hatred against us, or even from hatred at all. I’d say in fact that the most common harm any human faces — the one that most harmed me — come from people who care about us. People who, well-intended, attempt to pressure and coerce us to behave according to arbitrary standards, rather than according to our integrity, our selfhoods as human beings. Strip away all the warnings about God’s commandments or What will Grandma and Grandpa, our friends, the neighbors, your schoolmates, the people at church think? — strip way all the reassurances that We’re saying this because we love you and It’s in your best interests: in the final analysis, it’s the harm that says: Your own account of yourself is meaningless; your feelings don’t count; you don’t count.

Who does not despair, violated in that way in the very core of who we are?

But if the harm is at our center, then so is the cure. The foundational step towards finding a way for myself that didn’t involve killing myself or hating myself was coming out and accepting and loving myself as a lesbian. I was 19 when I did that, a sophomore at Wellesley College.  It took me a few years after that, but that first foundation ultimately gave me the strength to give up self-hatred altogether.

Love others as you love yourself.  But first: love yourself.  Trust yourself.  Respect yourself. Walk easy in your skin. Let no one convince you to do otherwise.

Related posts:

1. Coming out
2. Ode to Alcohol (poem)
3. Letter to a Straight Friend — a poem for Pride

Editor’s note: A couple of days ago in “Jane Doe, Finnish style” I wrote about how Rachel Meikäläinen, originally a character in my novel-in-progress Mistress of Woodland, became a philosophical antecedent & historical figure in the fictional Consensus society in the story universe of Long Dark & Cold.  I also said that she might be writing some guest posts “because so much of her stuff about integrity and violation is relevant to the ways the Real World we live in screws with us too; & also how we keep it together.”  The following, excerpted from a work of hers tentatively titled Whole Numbers, would have a major impact on the Long Dark character Esti Gusev when she read it as a ward of Mars Authority at Apollineris at the age of 14 years, about two years after the destruction of  the New Nazareth armed cult at Gusev Crater, where she had been born. – Mel

The root of the word integrity, is the Latin integer, which means, literally, untouched.  And so an integer is a number that hasn’t been broken or fractionated.  It is complete, a whole number.  Something which is integral is something which is essential to completeness, something which is integrated, which is to say, something which has been incorporated into a functioning and unified whole.  And so to have integrity is to have wholeness, completion, undividedness. But if integrity is undivided, unbroken, untouched — then what, in this context, is it to be touched?

Touch is not a bad thing, usually — but in this context, to be touched is to be breached, broken, violated.  That’s at its worst, anyway. But the worst happens, over and over.  Even when no harm is intended, harm often comes; and very often, of course, harm is intended.  The harms may be physical; the harms may be emotional or spiritual.  Abuse.  Coercion.  The most common harm of all to human beings — the one that most harmed me — was the simple and common harm of those who convince themselves that they are well-intended when they attempt to coerce an individual into behaving according to their arbitrary standards, rather than according to the individual’s integrity — to what should properly be understood as that individual’s true selfhood.

Integrity is whole.  The root of the word whole is the Old English word hal, which is also the root or closely related to the roots of the words heal, hale, holy.  To be truly whole, to be fully and completely healed, would be as though one had not been touched by the harm that had touched one.  But you have been touched, so how, then, can you become untouched again?  Here’s the strange contradiction of it: you must incorporate the experience of that touch, that harm, into yourself.  Meaning literally — because incorporate comes in part from the Latin root corpus meaning body — that you make that touch, that hurt, part of your body: but in a hale, healing way.  How?  When you eat an apple, does it stay an apple inside your stomach and gut?  No, it transforms: your body transforms it with its acids and enzymes into nutrients for your body, while expelling the waste. If  someone has poisoned the apple, you might not survive it, true — but otherwise, all but its waste products become part of your body.  Call it incorporation, call it integration: transformation comes with the territory of it.  You have no choice about the harms that others inflict upon you: but if they haven’t actually killed you, you usually still have the choice to transform those harms within yourself to integrate them into a new whole, a new integrity.  You are not exactly the same self you began with; but you are still your own self.  The Self itself is change.

Related posts:

1. Jane Doe, Finnish style
2. Buddha in the coffee shop
3. Building Consensus

Consensus as the form of government in my fiction came about from a combination of personal experience with consensus used in a collaborative project (in this case, Wikipedia) & the influence of another science fiction story, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars).  I’m doing a lot of reading nowadays about consensus, collaborative decisionmaking, sociocracy, etc. as background research for my writing.  I’m also becoming convinced that those forms of decisionmaking are our best means of recreating our own society & government into one that really is of, by, & for the people.

But for now: just the story of how I decided on Consensus to begin with.

Storymind

When I first decided to write Cold for NaNoWriMo 2007, I didn’t know much at all about the government or society in which my characters lived.  I only knew that the story began with a question — What does cold feel like? — out of which emerged the story’s setting & first characters: a planet in the late stages of terraformation, and two young women, one who had never lived outside the enclosed habitats of her space-born society, & one who had.  These two characters, Bai & Boleyn, are the center of the story of Cold; but of course there is a world in which they live, a society in which they live, more questions to be answered.  For instance, how did Boleyn come to have experience outside the closed biosphere?  Okay, her family was exiled for a time to a remote facility.  But why?  How?  Where?  And so on.  Well, that’s storymaking, to me: it’s about asking a question, & trying out answers until you come up with one that you like, which will generate more questions, more what ifs.

I made the decision to do NaNoWriMo 2007 in about February of that year.  But I had to constrain myself from actually writing it until November, when NaNo actually began.  Didn’t stop me from thinking about it, though; & so what I call storymind became engaged pretty continually.  For instance, I remember walking across the UAA campus one day on a work-related errand. It must’ve been February or March, still winter, so I stuck that day to what we at UAA informally call the “spine” — the enclosed walkways that make it possible to walk most of the way across campus without going outside.  And I thought, hmm, wouldn’t the closed habitats on my story’s planet be build in a modular style, with closed in walkways like the ones I’m walking in now to connect them?  Why, of course they would. Thus in my storymind I began to design the structure of the enclosed community that I later named Turnbull, which is essentially a collection of several enclosed habitats called Commons that are connected together with “tubes” aboveground & tunnels belowground.

(Turnbull itself is named after Margaret Turnbull, one of the two astronomers who compiled the Catalog of Nearby Habitable Systems (HabCat) to narrow down the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), obviously useful in the search for systems with potentially habitable extrasolar planets like the one my characters were terraforming. The other HabCat compiler was Jill Tarter, who was the inspiration for the main character in Carl Sagan’s novel Contact, played in the movie by Jodie Foster.)

The battle of the Battle of Washita River

Cold wasn’t all I was thinking about over the course of 2007.  Life stuff, of course, including a trip to Seattle & Spokane to visit family.  Also, I got heavily involved in active editing of Wikipedia.  This began more-or-less by accident when I discovered that the Wikipedia article about the Dena’ina elder & writer Peter Kalifornsky indicated he was alive.  Hold on, I thought, didn’t I recall him having died sometime within the past few years?  Yep, about four years previously — so next thing I knew I was researching him, correcting the article, & doing even more research… on an article which even now I haven’t completed (!!!).  But I sure learned a lot along the way about Dena’ina language, culture, & history (Anchorage is situated in Dena’ina country) — some of which entered storymind to influence some aspects of Cold.  But of course I also got pulled to other Wikipedia articles, & pretty soon Wikipedia editing became a major focus that largely drew me away from my writing life (at least in terms of writing my stuff) until November, when NaNoWriMo helped me to break that fixation.  Nowadays, I do Wikipedia editing only here & there.  (Though it would really be nice if I finished that Peter Kalifornsky article!)

But my Wikipedia experience went into storymind too.  Of particular relevance: I got caught up in huge dispute on a particular article (the Battle of Washita River, if you want to know) with a certain editor with strong anti-Indian bigotry who wanted to paint the Cheyenne people in general & the Cheyenne chief Black Kettle in particular as unqualifiedly evil, & George Armstrong Custer (this editor’s personal hero) as unqualifiedly good & wonderful & perfect.  Never mind historical facts; & never mind Wikipedia policies of neutral point of view (commonly abbreviated in Wikipedia background discussions as NPOV), “no original research” (NOR), & verifiability — policies that are intended to protect Wikipedia’s integrity as an encyclopedia by founding its articles on reliable sources, verifiable facts, & neutral presentation of all sides of contentious issues instead of presenting only “one side of the story.”

Battle of Washita River as depicted in Harper's Weekly for December 19, 1868, three weeks after the event on November 27. Through Wikimedia Commons.

Dealing with this dispute was a big learning experience.  Given my lifetime of socialization in 20th & 21st century U.S.A., my first reaction in dealing with a clearly biased “one side of the story” breaker of rules was to look for an authority figure to whom I could appeal to bring this editor into line: Someone is breaking the law: where are the cops, the judges, can’t we ban this guy?

The closest thing you have to “authority figures” on Wikipedia are admins… but it doesn’t take long on Wikipedia to discover that an admin is not, in fact, a cop.  Wikipedia governs itself by processes of consensus: if you appeal to an admin about a dispute on an article, the admin isn’t going to automatically kick someone’s butt unless there are clearcut problems like edit-warring or personal attacks.  But if the disputes are over content & bias, the admin is going to advise you to discuss the problem on the article’s discussion page, & try to come to a consensus.  Yes, there we go: consensus, one of Wikipedia’s six core policies regarding personal conduct, which also include a demand for civility and no personal attacks, refraining from edit warring, welcoming everyone to edit (assuming they abide by Wikipedia’s core policies, including the conduct policies), & collaboration on, rather than individual “ownership” of, articles.

Okay, but we’ve got a content dispute with a biased editor here, & we’ve been told to take our dispute to the article’s talk page & come to consensus.  But what if agreement can’t be reached there?  Then there are additional processes used in Wikipedia through which disputes can be worked through, some of which might result in sanctions against problematic “I refuse to abide by Wikipedia’s policies” type editors (like the guy we were dealing with).  Our problem guy did get the occasional sanction for edit warring & personal attacks (as did one of the folks supposedly on the “right side” of the content dispute, who has since gone on to a long career in getting banned for incivility & edit warring under a variety of different sockpuppet usernames), but it took us a long time to bring the content dispute into some kind of control, just a couple of months before NaNoWriMo 2007 took me out of the Wikipedia biz.

If you’re curious, check out the Talk page & its archives for Battle of Washita River to see all the crap I & my fellow editors had to go through.  Especially see the RfC (Request for Coments) on the article itself & the related RfCs on our two problem editors.  (I’m the user Yksin.)  It took us two months to move from the article being locked down in a biased & inaccurate form to be able to edit it again after the disputes had been more-or-less settled.  It took a long time, but we did it right.  If you think I’m being a naive idealist when I talk about the need to be civil in discussing Sarah Palin, then read through this stuff, & try to convince me that civil, factual discussion doesn’t, in the end, win out over the kind of offal that our problem editors were continually unloading on us.  Patience helps.  I’m proud of the way I handled myself throughout.

Wikipedia was a great experiential education for me in at least some of the possibilities of consensus.  It was also instructive about how “knowledge” is constructed.  I grew to have a great deal of respect for Wikipedia as a source of information — as long as you know how it works & how to evaluate the information there.  (I typically look not only at the articles themselves, but also their edit histories & talk pages.  But I also never consider a Wikipedia page the last word on a topic.  I still sometimes log in & correct typos or misstatements of fact, or to revert vandalism.)

If you’re interested in seeing how consensus operates in a huge collaborative project like this, you can do like I had to do: go into the behind-the-scenes of Wikipedia. See how editors & admins & bureaucrats (another level of Wikipedia adminship) talk with each other about articles & the processes by which articles are written.  Look at article talk pages & see how disputes over content are resolves.  Check out the process called Request for Adminship, or RfA by which admins become admins & bureaucrats become bureaucrats — which is partially what Cold‘s process of Examination is based upon.  There’s a lot there.   And it’s very geeky but also very cool.  I still think very highly of the numerous people who work really hard to make Wikipedia a good encyclopedia.

A constitution on Mars

Mars Global Surveyor image of Pavonis Mons, a broad shield volcano (similar to the volcanoes of Hawaii) located on the martian equator at 113°W. The volcano summit is near 14 km (~8.7 mi) above the martian datum (0 elevation); the central caldera (crater near center of image) is about 45 km (~28 mi.) across and about 4.5 km (~2.8 mi.) deep. Pavonis Mons is the site of a settlement in Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Blue Mars where the Martian Constitution was written. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems via JPL Photojournal.

At the same time in 2007 that I got caught up in Wikipedia editing, I was following my friend Chris’ advice to read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Hugo & Nebula-award winning Mars trilogy — Red Mars, Green Mars, & Blue Mars — because of one of its overall themes, the terraformation of Mars.  But, as I wrote the other day, I also discovered another them theme —

the long & arduous struggle of Robinson’s Martian colonists for freedom from the political & economic domination of Earth. Freedom not only from Earth’s numerous governments — but especially from Earth’s corporations, which have become so powerful that they are in many ways more powerful than governments themselves, both on Earth & on Mars.

The Wikipedia article about Kim Stanley Robinson observes,

Robinson’s work often explores alternatives to modern capitalism. In the Mars trilogy, it is argued that capitalism is an outgrowth of feudalism, which could be replaced in the future by a more democratic economic system. Worker ownership and cooperatives Green Mars and Blue Mars as a replacement for traditional corporations….

Robinson’s work often portrays characters struggling to preserve and enhance the world around them in an environment characterized by individualism and entrepreneurialism, often facing the political and economic authoritarianism of corporate power acting within this environment. Robinson has been described as anti-capitalist, and his work often portrays a form of frontier capitalism that promotes ideals that closely resemble anarcho-syndicalist and socialist systems, and faced with a capitalism that is staunched by entrenched hegemonic corporations. In particular, his Martian Constitution draws upon social democratic ideals explicitly emphasizing a community-participation element in political and economic life, while a persistent threat to social democracy is embodied by transnational corporations, the characteristics of which resemble those predicted by institutionalist and socialist economists such as Ted Wheelwright and Karl Marx.

It should be no surprise to anyone, given my already vociferous criticism of contemporary corporatism (not to mention the foolishness of granting corporations the legal fiction of “personhood”)  that I like this about Kim Stanley Robinson.  A lot.

Wikipedia goes on to say,

The environmental, economic, and social themes in Robinson’s oeuvre stand in marked contrast to the right-wing Libertarian streak prevalent in much of science fiction…  and his work has been called the most successful attempt to reach a mass audience with a left-wing libertarian and anti-capitalist utopian vision since Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel, The Dispossessed.

Ursula K!!!  What greater recommend could there be for Kim Stanley Robinson than that?  And The Disposessed is a great novel — thanks, Wiki editors, for the reminder to read it again. If all I am at the moment is a barely-published writer of only a couple of things here & there, still, let it be known — I aspire to stand in their tradition.

(Though I hesitate to call either of their visions as utopian.  I think societies such as they’ve invented are possible & desirable.  But it’ll take us to make them.)

By the beginning of the last book of Robinson’s trilogy, Blue Mars, the Martian colonists have finally succeeded in kicking the corporations off-planet (by means of the trilogy’s Second Martian Revolution in the year 2127); but in order to maintain their independence from Earth governments & Earth-based corporations, they decide they need to adopt their own constitution & government.  Thus, a congress is convened in a settlement at Pavonis Mons — one of Mars’ great volcanoes — where the new Martian Constitution is drafted, later to be ratifiied by 78% of Martians who voted (the novel says that 95% of eligible voters voted).  (Tip o’ the nib to MangalaWiki, a wiki-based encyclopedia on the Robinson’s works, which helped me keep my facts on track.)

Here’s where Robinson & Wikipedia collided in my storymind: the people who did the actual drafting of the constitution at Pavonis Mons worked collaboratively — &, of course, using computers. —

“At least the points are there to discuss,” Nadia said.  And along with them, on everyone’s screen, were the blank constitutions with their sections headings, suggesting all by themselves the many problems they were going to have to come to grips with: “Structure of Government, Executive; Structure of Government, Legislative; Structure of Government, Judicial; Rights of Citizens; Military and Police… [and so on]. (my paperback copy of Blue Mars, p. 125)

Later, after they complete their work, they attach all the numerous written documents & discussions that had been generated during the process for reference by courts, historians, & other interpreters who wanted a better understanding of the framers’ intent.  (Much as Alaskans can refer to the minutes of the Alaska Constitutional Convention in order to better understand the Alaska Constitution & its framers’ intent.)

And I thought, what if they actually used wiki-type software, similar to what Wikipedia itself uses,  to draft their constitution?  That way, there would always be a running record of the proceedings (at least, any that were in written form) — edit histories, talk pages to discuss differences & disagreements about difference, & to develop agreement & consensus — the full gamut.

I’m not sure exactly the moment this stuff germinated to such an extent that it fledged itself fully into my story’s Consensus government — but I had it by November 1, 2007, when I did my first day’s writing on Cold — the same writing that became, with not as many revisions as you’d think, the short story “Cold” published in Crossed Genres Issue #12 exactly two years later.

But come to think of it — there was also a third influence in the mix, which I’ll call —

Influence of the Self

— the Self in this case being myself & my beliefs, especially the content of my beliefs with regard to selfhood.

Best expressed by some of my writing about halfway into NaNoWriMo 2007, when I was reading Robinson’s The Martians, which collects a lot of stories & sketches related to his trilogy & its characters.  Among them were some pieces about the Constitution of Mars, with commentary from one of Robinson’s fictional constitutional framers. These pieces led me to additional thinking about Consensus in my story.  On November 19, 2007, I wrote in part,

Two chief principles exist in dialectic, as can be encapsulated in the statement held to by one of the spiritual movements within Consensus: Harming none, do as you will.  I think what I’m getting to is some of my own deepseated beliefs, which that statement plays a large part in.  Basically, whether at the individual level or the community and government level, the  principle of sovereignty over one’s own actions (“do as you will”, self-government) is always balanced against the the principle of nonharm: the recognition and respecting of the rights and autonomy of others.   Consensus has as one of its fundamental principles, which is legal, moral, and spiritual all at once, that the integrity of the Self is paramount, whether that Self be an individual or a body of individuals joined together into a family, a community, or a large body of society.  Violation of such integrity or wholeness through the causing of harm is conceived of, legally, as crime; morally and spiritually, it may be considered sin.  The principle is established in the very name of this type of government: Consensus, indicating the consent of those who make it up.  Government, rather than being something imposed, often coercively, upon the people by a hierarchy above them, is made up of all of the people in a very direct way.

Later that same day —

There is no such thing, in Consensus philosophy and culture, as a government separate from the people.  Everything begins with the Self, the first Self that is each individual human being.  Inasmuch as humans as biological beings are also social beings, Self is also expressed in the yearning for Other, which finds a home in relationship, each relationship or group of relationships themselves forming their own Selves: friendship, sexual pairing and partnership, family, community, Consensus.  Because all levels of society begin with that fundamental Self of each individual, therefore the Self is sacrosanct; its autonomy is the first building block of society.  To violate the Selfhood of an individual is like the breaking open an atom: it’s the beginning of destruction.  The Self, of course, is much more fragile than the atom: it took until the 20th century C.E. for humans to learn how to split the atom; but it didn’t take us long at all to come up with all manner of ways to cleave the human soul, and the chain reaction from that has never ended.  Only some have learned to restore it, only some have learned ways of living with one another in such ways that the violation of soul and Self isn’t inextricably a part of human education, of human “conditioning.”  Even the most intelligent and soul-preserving societies make mistakes.

Consensus begins by recognizing those two aspects of what it is to be human: Self, and Other, in which each Other is also a Self. Society, culture, government is nothing more and nothing less than the provisional solution humans have come to in any given time and place to balance between Self and Other; or shall we say, the multiplicity of Selves, each with its own sacrosanct Integrity.  Thus, the laws of Consensus begin with the laws intended to protect the Self at its most basic level, that of the individual.  Everything else flows upward from that.

And now here I am reading more about consensus & related ideas — collaborative decisionmaking, collective intelligence, sociocracy — all of which reflect the ethic that I was writing about: the idea that every individual has value, & that the integrity & selfhood of every individual must be protected.

But the books I’m reading are taking me even one step beyond that: recognition that each & every individual, without exception, must have a say in any decision that affects her or his life. Government not through the coercion of the powerful over the less-powerful, but government by the consent of all.

Not only are these books helping me to articulate this, but they’re also teaching me the techniques & strategies that can make it possible.  Both in my stories, & in the Real World of which we all are part.

Needless to say, I’ll be writing more about this.

Related posts:

1. Good for my worldbuilding, bad for my world
2. Writing life
3. Terraforming notes

This is not actually my cover of the classic Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens) album Buddha And The Chocolate Box originally issued in April 1974 when I was still in junior high. It is, rather, a simple observation of what I saw today, what in fact I see almost every Saturday, when I got to Side Street Espresso to write: a Buddha in the coffee shop. He’s been hanging out there for several months.

He weighs nearly 700 pounds and is about 40 inches tall (sitting, of course — I’m not sure how tall he’d be if he stood up), and he was handcarved of white-grey marble in the Quang Nam Province of Vietnam. He was purchased there and brought to Alaska by Suel Jones, a former U.S. Marine who fought in Vietnam.

Mr. Jones is offering him for sale for $3,500 as a fundraiser for Veterans for Peace, & I hope somebody will pick him up (being very careful of their backs, of course), because it’s a good organization — including veterans both male & female of all eras and duty stations from the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 to the conflicts going on now in Iraq & Afghanistan & everything in between — & it’s doing good work — drawing on the personal experiences & perspectives of its members to raise public awareness about the true costs & consequences of militarism & war, and seeking peaceful, effective alternatives.

Here’s a closer look at him.

You can see him for yourself at Side Street Espresso at 412 G Street in downtown Anchorage, phone (907) 258-9055. Side Street is open Monday through Saturday from 7:00 AM to 3:00 PM.

He’s so beautiful — if I could afford him, & had the space, I would bring him home myself. But at least I have this orange round-bellied little guy, who I picked up in the antique shop below my apartment when I lived in Seattle in the late ’80s. (I bought the oranges & cinnamon & beads considerably later.)

I was pretty tired this morning because I’d stayed up quite late, so I didn’t get much writing done today. Nor, I’m afraid, did Barbara — because I was gabbing away pretty heavily. About all kinds of stuff. I was tired, but I felt good, and the Vietnamese Buddha made me feel all the better, because the peace & balance within him was so demonstrative of the thing I was thinking about most as I talked, about Job — yeah, that one, the guy in the Bible — & his integrity— the integrity that he held onto all through the storm of his hurts, & the accusations of his “comforters” who repeatedly insisted that all the harms that had befallen him & his children were because of some sin they were sure he must have committed—but he hadn’t. He hung onto his integrity like someone holding onto a pole in the midst of a great storm, & ultimately the Voice from the Whirlwind vindicated him.

I look at the Vietnamese Buddha, sitting stately & serene & upright, & I think, were he beset by his own storms, that balance & integrity & inner peace would see him through, too.

Though the storm would probably mess up his clothes & his hair, at least if they weren’t made out of grey-white marble.

Well, Job’s been an important figure to me for a long time. I’ve got a couple of poems based on him, one of which — “Sermon” — I’ve posted here. I’ll have to find the other. Maybe some of the other stuff I’ve written about him too.

[Update 1/9/10: I've now posted the other poem, "Job 42.13."]

It has been a good day, despite my not getting as much sleep as I should, & despite it being quite cold — hovering around 0 degrees Fahrenheit today (-17 Celsius), depending on what part of town you’re in. This sweet little puppy tied up outside one of the shops on G Street near Side Street was shivering some in spite of its fur —

– but I was dressed well for the weather, & enjoyed my walk along 36th Avenue & C Street after I got done with my bank errand down on 36th (I took a bus there after Side Street). It was beautiful out. Here’s the pictures to prove it.

Besides, I was on my way to Barnes & Noble.

I wisely bypassed all the 30%-off copies of Palinocchio’s book of lies & got some books on Tibet & Nepal. Research, don’tcha know — environments with low atmospheric pressure (compared to sea level) are what I need to know about for the story I’m working on right now, which is called “Breathe,” & is about Pina Chomko, the first person in 3 centuries in the Project of which she is part to breathe the free, if thin, air of a planet. Cool stuff. Or rather, Cold stuff.

Then I came home and rowed for the first time since last May, lazy butt that I’ve been. Rowed 50K. Erg.

Feel great.

Related posts:

1. Side Street Mel
2. Side Street’s George Gee
3. I won’t abandon my integrity, even if you abandon me

Dan Froomkin, formerly of WashingtonPost.com, where he wrote a web-only column from January 2004 to June 2009 called White House Watch (originally White House Briefing). Modified from an original photograph by JD Lasica (jdlasica); used under a Creative Commons license. Click on photo to get full licensing info.

I’ve been catching up somewhat on stuff in the wider political world outside the Anchorage equal rights ordinance battle. Having been so focused on AO 2009-64, it wasn’t until early this morning that I learned Dan Froomkin had been fired from the Washington Post — more properly, from its online version at washingtonpost.com —  & wrote his last White House Watch web column today.

I’ve followed Froomkin’s column, originally called White House Briefing, off & on since it started in January 2004, especially in the run-up to the November 2004 presidential election .  I’m sad to see it go. White House Briefing/White House Watch was one of the most important watchdogs & fact-checkers on the numerous abuses and lies of the Bush Administration, & that kind of work is still needed.  As Froomkin wrote in his final column,

Obama is nowhere in Bush’s league when it comes to issues of credibility, but his every action nevertheless needs to be carefully scrutinized by the media, and he must be held accountable. We should be holding him to the highest standards – and there are plenty of places where we should be pushing back. Just for starters, there are a lot of hugely important but unanswered questions about his Afghanistan policy, his financial rescue plans, and his turnaround on transparency.

There’s some disagreement as to why WaPo dumped Froomkin — with some saying it was for political/ideological reasons, & others say for economic reasons.  The latter is the opinion of Erik Wemple of the Washington City Paper — Froomkin just hasn’t been generating enough hits since the end of the Bush Administration.  Wemple writes:

The Obama administration has offered a less juicy target, in part because it hasn’t had quite as much time to screw things up. In the past six months, accordingly, hits on White House Watch have dropped to the point that Post officials cite traffic as a reason for bagging the column.

Though Wemple goes on to say,

The Froomkin axing is a red-letter event in Post history because it’s the first time that a major personnel decision has hinged so squarely on Web hits. For years, the orthodoxy from Post leaders is that the paper produces journalism that it believes in—mass popularity be damned. Perhaps that’s no longer the case. Questions on this matter were sent to newspaper spokesperson Kris Coratti but went unanswered.

So maybe Froomkin’s column was no longer journalism that WaPo believes in? — or at least not enough to overcome the paper’s economic considerations.  If so, that argues for ideology being a component, if perhaps not the biggest component, behind WaPo’s decision to sack Froomkin.

Regardless, it wouldn’t be the first time that a newspaper’s overall excellence in journalism has leaked away due to decisions that are based in some part on economics.  Witness our own paper-of-record, the Anchorage Daily News, which has lost a lot of ground both economically & in overall quality of coverage over the past few years.  From stuff I’ve read over the last several months, both about the ADN in particular & the newspapers in general, the papers are being hit hard by loss of revenues from classified ads as more people turn to free online ad solutions like Craigslist, not to mention the public’s increasing dependence upon online sources — including blogs — to get their news.  And then there’s just the economic downturn itself.  And there’s blogs, many of which have stepped into the journalistic realm formerly reserved for traditional media like newspapers and broadcast news to take on stories that traditional media either don’t know enough about or don’t dare to report on.  Think: who first broke the story last year about what became known as Troopergate?  Not any of Alaska’s newspapers or news stations: it was Andrew Halcro on his blog.  Who took the lead in giving the rest of the country needed perspective on Sarah Palin when she became John McCain’s running mate?  It wasn’t the Alaska mainstream press: it was Alaska’s progressive bloggers. It’s been an adjustment, & the traditional media are still adjusting.

But wait: I was talking about Froomkin.  “I remain a big believer in the ‘traditional media,’” he wrote in his final column,  “especially when it sticks to traditional journalistic values.” But he also gave every evidence of respecting & making use of the new (blogger) media — at least when it adhered to the same values, identified in his essay Why “playing it safe” is killing American newspapers thusly:

The right way to reinvent ourselves online would be to do precisely what journalists were put on this green earth to do: Seek the truth, hold the powerful accountable, expose the B.S., explain how things really work, introduce people to each other, and tell compelling stories. And we should do all those things passionately and courageously — not hiding who we are, but rather engaging in a very public expression of our journalistic values.

His entire series for Niemen Journalism Lab on the future of news journalism is worth a read.  For political bloggers, too.

Some quotes about Froomkin from other people:

Equivocation, hedging, shading, tiptoeing—none of those turn up in Froomkin’s toolkit.

— Erik Wemple, “Why Did the Washington Post Sack Dan Froomkin?” (Washington City Paper)

Providing ample proof of why he couldn’t coexist with the go-along ethos of High Broderism. He reads, and links to, bloggers! He’s intellectually consistent, willing to criticize both Republicans and Democrats! That’s perhaps the rarest commodity in a Village that seeks at all times a political equilibrium that won’t endanger its cocktail circuit invite.

— McJoan,  “Froomkin’s Last WaPo Stand” (DailyKOS)

Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.

— Dan Froomkin himself, “White House Watched”, his last “White House Watch” column for WashingtonPost.com

What I found in Froomkin’s work was:

• He researched thoroughly, gave his sources, & based his opinions on facts;
• He was, as McJoan on DailyKOS said, intellectually consistent, & didn’t pull punches with what he saw.

Nor do I expect he’ll change in the future (he’ll be taking some time off, then launching in some new direction he’ll announce at whitehousewatch.com).

* * *

Plenty of lessons in how Froomkin for Alaska, I think.

For one: the Anchorage Daily News is Alaska’s principal statewide newspaper-of-record — Anchorage’s Washington Post, if you will.  But for whatever reasons — & it seems ever more so over the past few months & years — the ADN  often acts as the same kind of “stenographer to liars” that Froomkin criticized in his final column.  Which isn’t to say the ADN is all bad — but it’s struggling in this environment, & all-too-obviously doesn’t have the first idea of what to do about the independent bloggers springing up all around it, or how to balance its own strengths with theirs.

Which is why, for Anchorage, the Anchorage Press, web-based newspapers like the Alaska Dispatch & Alaska Report and independent bloggers like the Mudflats, Celtic Diva’s Blue Oasis, Progressive Alaska, Shannyn Moore: Just a Girl from Homer, Immoral Minority, Alaska Commons, SOSAnchorage.net (the factchecker version) — just to names some of those I follow — are so very crucial.  Especially if they do their jobs wisely & well, with the same kind of integrity that Froomkin displayed in his column.

I should say, if we do our jobs wisely & well, because I’ve become part of it too, at least when the public sphere of the polis is what I’m writing about, as with Wayne Anthony Ross’ nomination for Alaska attorney general back in April, as with the Anchorage equal rights ordinance & the activities of Jerry Prevo now.  As I wrote in the introduction to my anti-WAR letter to Alaska legislators,

I’m a writer-blogger, not a political blogger — though I did try it out a little last fall after Palin became a vice-presidential candidate. But it proved too emotionally exhausting for me, & other Alaska progressive bloggers were doing it better. Sometimes, though, you gotta take a stand on something.

But I want to be honest & based in factual reality when I do.

Integrity is a big word with me — central to my own spiritual worldview. It’s what Job had when his friends so-called were “comforting” him in his losses by telling him that the horrible things that happened to the people he cared about, & to himself, wouldn’t have come down on him if he hadn’t sinned. Except that he hadn’t. I often think of integrity as being like a pole at the center of oneself — in one part a navigational aid, in another something to hang tightly to in the midst of the storm. If you let go of your integrity, you lose your way, you lose your Self. If you hold to it, you always know where you are & who you are. It can still be plenty damn painful, but it’s far less painful then letting go & losing your Self.

The hard part of doing what any of us who write about the stuff  in the political world is knowing when to withhold judgment — because we don’t know all the facts — & when to apply judgment. “Stenographer” reporting is not so much reporting as simply copying: dutifully getting on record “both sides” of any question, but never having the moral courage to go in there & make a judgment: are the sources reliable? what might their agendas be? what’s the context, what else is in play? But then there’s the other bad way to do it: judging willy-nilly, without ever bothering to seek out the facts, depending only on what what feels or believes: truthiness not truth.

But then there’s what I believe Dan Froomkin did, & what we are all called to do: to ask questions.  And, if necessary, to make judgments.  To hold those who claim authority over our lives accountable.  No matter how damn painful it is — holding on to our integrity all the way.

Here’s some good stuff I know about because of Dan Froomkin:

• Niemen Watchdog: Questions the press should ask. A site for & about watchdog journalism, from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Froomkin is deputy editor of this site.
• Niemen Journalism Lab. “a collaborative attempt to figure out how quality journalism can survive and thrive in the Internet age.” Also from the Nieman Foundation’s
• whitehousewatch.com. The site where Froomkin will announce what he’s going to do next. Also links to archives of his columns on the Bush Administration and Obama Administration.

Tip o’ the nib to Amanda Coyne of Alaska Dispatch, relevant discussion with whom coincided with news of Froomkin’s firing.

Related posts:

1. Chuffed
2. Three things I did at lunchtime
3. A word about our friends

Does Anyone Beat Your Heart for You

does anyone beat your heart for you —
oh yes I know there are some who
will quicken it
or slow it at their leaving —
but when you are alone at night
and sleeping, dreamless . . .
it is there . . . beating —
it will be there . . . beating —
till you die

does anyone beat your heart for you
does anyone live your life for you
do you cast a vote — plea for
intercession
do you hasten your death by forgetting

do you close your eyes and believe
what others say you see

[January 9, 1982]

About this poem

I wrote this poem many many years ago, mostly in my head, one day walking across my home town of Columbia Falls, Montana, & thinking about people who seem to need to have other people tell them what to think & believe. Much of last night’s testimony against the Anchorage equal rights ordinance reminded me of this, as did the sight of the numerous teenagers bused in from Anchorage Christian Schools (affiliated with Anchorage Baptist Temple) to picket against the proposed ordinance along 36th Avenue — another use of kids as billboards to advertise the prejudices of adults.

I wonder if their classes in school gave these kids extra credit for waving their preprinted signs for Prevo? I wonder how many of them might actually be gay or lesbian or trans, but can’t tell anyone, & fight earnestly inside themselves against it because the adults in their lives teach them to distrust their own self-understandings?

Update: At first I thought the kids in the wine-colored shirts were from Anchorage Baptist Temple — but they’re not. from the Mississippi Avenue Baptist Church (MABC) of Aurora, Colorado, which visited Anchorage from June 14–22, 2009 for their Youth Mission 2009. On two of the days of their visit, June 16 and 17, the Anchorage Assembly was hearing public testimony on the Anchorage equal rights ordinance. So what did the adult leadership from their church have these kids from another state do during their youth mission? – Wave signs urging permitting continued discrimination against citizens of a different city in another state than they even live in.

The MABC youth mission was was hosted by the Anchorage Baptist Temple, whose pastor, Jerry Prevo, is a principal leader in opposition to the Anchorage equal rights ordinance. They were bused to the Loussac Library by ABT, and the signs they carried were printed by Alaska Family Council.

Related posts:

1. Does Anyone Beat Your Heart for You
2. Happy wedding! (for John & Heather)
3. The noise begins