The Narrative Within

Prediction or Prevention

Posted on August 31, 2022 by Art for Housewives

When the notorious Calabrian criminal Giuseppe Villella died, Cesare Lombroso, Italian criminologist and physician, performed a post mortem on him. Lombroso discovered that Villella had an indentation at the back of his skull similar to those found in apes. Like an epiphany that takes your life in a new direction, Lombroso wrote: “At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal – an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.” And with one skull, Lombroso concluded that some people were born with an inclination towards crime as they were savage throwbacks to early man.

Lombroso, today known as the father of modern criminology, began making a list of those characteristics he felt were typical of born criminals such as an asymmetrical face, drooping eyes, excessively long arms, big ears, large jaws, and protruding chins. The painter Edgar Degas was fascinated by Lombroso’s theories and found them a stimulus for his artwork.

Degas was fixated with young ballerinas. And looking at the paintings he made of them, one initially gets the impression that their lives were full of grace and glamour. On stage they were magnifique but once the curtain came down, these young girls returned to their life of poverty, exploitation, and hazardous working conditions.

The younger dancers were often known as “petits rats” and often expected to offer themselves sexually to the wealthy male subscribers of the Paris Opera. One of these dancers was Marie van Goethem. History might have totally forgotten her had it not been for Degas. Degas often used her as a model but it is the sculpture he made of her that’s most remembered.

The title of the sculpture is La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (Little Dancer of Fourteen Years). Time has mellowed out its impact but when it was first exhibited, it shocked the public. Her protruding chin was, according to Lombrosian Theory, a clear indication of depravity. Furthermore, the statue had been placed under glass as if a medical specimen.

Poor little Marie, once she lost her little girl look, patrons of the Paris Opera were no longer interested in her and, more than likely, she finished her life as a prostitute.

In the late 1970s, about a hundred years later after Lombroso’s “epiphany”, the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit began studying psychopaths and serial killers. John Edward Douglas, Robert K. Ressler, and Ann W. Burgess were part of the original team. The intent was to find out what common characteristics criminals had in order to predict their next move. And to do so, they interviewed criminals and invented a method of documenting those personal characteristics that probably led them towards crime. The childhood of these criminals shared many common denominators: trauma, abuse, dysfunctional families, poverty and the humiliation it produced. In other words, emotional malnourishment seemed to be the leading factor in creating a criminal.

Whereas Degas was painting young girls with creepy undertones, his friend and fellow painter, Mary Cassatt, was celebrating mothers and children. Cassatt’s paintings are about capturing everyday moments full of tenderness and love. In the painting above, a mother lovingly bathes her child permitting them to share an intimate moment of mutual nourishment. Isn’t this what childhood should be about?

Instead of fixating on predicting criminal behaviour, wouldn’t it be better to focus on preventing it? If we know that a dysfunctional childhood can provoke criminal behaviour, shouldn’t we as a society try to ensure that all our children have the same condition of possibility to lead a healthy life both physically and psychologically? Instead of investing in prisons, shouldn’t we be investing in our schools where qualified professionals are present to be on the lookout for children at risk? And knowing that a child’s home life plays a major role in his psychological development, shouldn’t we try to help those parents drowning in their own psychological despair and inadequacy that they are unable to help their own children because they can’t even help themselves?

We should be less concerned with punishment and more with prevention. And the best way to do this is by providing care for a wounded psyche before a scar is formed.

An adult can never escape his childhood because your childhood follows you wherever you go.

-30-

Related: The Story Behind Degas’ ‘Little Dancer’ Is Disturbing, But Not In the Way You Expect + A short history of the modern western jaw: from Aristotle’s physiognomy to facial biometrics + The ‘born criminal’? Lombroso and the origins of modern criminology + CESARE LOMBROSO: THEORY OF CRIME, CRIMINAL MAN, AND ATAVISM + The Impact of Criminal Anthropology in Britain (1880-1918) + What Type of Criminal Are You? 19th-Century Doctors Claimed to Know by Your Face + Criminal Physiognomies by Edward Degas reproduction found HERE + Ballerina: Sex, Scandal and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection book review + Degas’s dancers are studies in cruel reality. But don’t go thinking he felt compassion for them + Iconographic Interpretations +

Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit + Crazy, Not Insane, movie book, Dorothy Otnow Lewis + ‘They were not born evil’: inside a troubling film on why people kill + criminologist Dr Adrian Raine, From Abused Child to Serial Killer + Jim Fallon, Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath + The criminal gene: the link between MAOA and aggression

Almost Three Quarters of US States Have More Prisons and Jails than Degree-Granting Colleges + The US has more jails than colleges (WAPO) + incarceration is not proving to be the solution, Arrests for Low-Level Crimes Climb Under NYC Mayor Eric Adams

Posted in Art Narratives, Conditions of Possibility, female consciousness | Tagged Cesare Lombroso, childhood, criminal profiler, criminology, Edgar Degas, FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, Marie van Goethem, Mary Cassatt, Mindhunters, Paris Opera | 2 Comments

Centered

Posted on August 30, 2022 by Art for Housewives

Many years ago I participated in a Parian exhibition based on mythology. Using recycled materials, I made the above painting about Omphale and Hercules. The text is rewritten below:

Ομφαλός.

Hercules’ first home was his mother’s body. But once the cord was cut, he strayed and lost his way. The gods sent him to Omphale for the cure. Omphale made Hercules dress like a woman (because wisdom is in her body she said). And Hercules laboured to learn how to hear the Oracle within. Because Delphi lives inside us all. So learn to be a god: keep yourself centered.

Omphale, Queen of Lydia, although not recognized as a goddess, has an undisputed connection with the omphalos.

Omphlos, which in Greek means “navel”, refers to the center of the world. In Greece, the center was in Delphi.

But not everyone has the center in the same place.

Connie is my friend and part-time neighbour. Every year our friendship renews itself towards the end of spring and mid-summer when we are neighbors again. She is funny, wise, an avid reader, and a generous book lender. Naturally, when together, we often talk about books.

This year Connie was particularly hyped-up about Joan Didion. A few years ago I’d tried reading Didion but found her froideur too uninviting. But Connie, who likes science fiction, gothic and most anything dark in literature, didn’t have any problems with Didion. To the contrary.

One day, while talking about current events (we both share American roots) and how helter-skelter the world’s become, Connie brought up Didion. She insisted that I read Didion’s “Slouching towards Bethlehem” regarding how “The center was not holding”.

Although inspired by W. B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming”, whereas Yeats had written about the aftermath of WWI Didion, who’d recently moved to California, had written about the Haight-Ashbury of 1967.

Didion writes of her new surroundings:

It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misplaced even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing persons’ reports, then moved on themselves.

Yeats, too, had worried how when “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

And here, in 2022, we find that our center, which acts like gravity to keep us anchored, is once again shrinking away. Chaos is in command and those forces that should keep us centered are failing to do so.

The center has become the periphery and we are falling apart.

Rhea was the daughter of the earth and of the sky. Her husband and King of the Underworld, Cronus, had been warned by his mother that he would be overthrown by one of his sons. So, every time Rhea and Cronus had a son, Cronus would gobble him up. Rhea couldn’t bear seeing her sons annihilated. After giving birth to Zeus, she hid him in a cave. When Cronus showed up demanding his son, Rhea gave him a stone wrapped in a blanket pretending it was their baby. This stone came to be identified as the Omphalos at Delphi.

All of us, male and female, have their own omphalos, their own navel that is a constant reminder that, via an umbilical cord, we were once attached to our mothers to keep us alive. Although the cord may have been cut, its memory will always remain.

-30-

Related: Slouching toward Bethlehem + William Butler Yeats “The Second Coming” +

Posted in Art Narratives, Books, People | Tagged Connie, Delphi, Hercules, Joan Didion, Omphale, Omphlos, Rhea, the Center, W. B. Yeats | Leave a comment

Sacred Threshold

Posted on August 27, 2022 by Art for Housewives

Although it may appear just as a circle with a line cutting through it, the above is an abstract representation of the vulva. It’s made from the molar of a mammoth and found in a shaman’s tomb in Moravia

The vulva was a highly common image found in Palaeolithic art. Examples of it as a conceptualized symbol can be found all over Europe.

Another prehistoric vulva representation, pictured above, is made of quartz sandstone. It was found at a Lepenski vir archaeological site in Serbia.

The Vulva petroglyph La Ferrassie pictured above is from Savignac-de-Miremont, Dordogne, France and was carved onto an existing rock wall.

These are just three examples of an indefinite number discovered and still yet to be discovered vulva icons.

The female body in ancient times was perceived, says archaeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas, as “parthenogenetic, that is, creating life out of itself.” And the icon of the vulva symbolizes this life–the basis of civilization. The womb was a mysterious cave where somehow life was created by the mother-magician. But to exist in the outside world, life had to cross that sacred threshold, the vulva.

And just as today the cross is a sacred symbol for Christians, the vulva was a sacred symbol for life.

But that all ended with patriarchy. And with time, the vulva lost its sacredness. Even its name was spit upon and transformed into “c*nt”.

Recently I saw an internet video of a group of people, male and female, singing “Donald Trump is a Fucking C*nt” and I cringed. How can you criticize Trump for saying “Grab ’em by the pussy” and then sing something like this? And, unfortunately I see it everywhere—to insult someone you called them a c*nt or bitch or pussy instead of a dick or a bastard or a scrotum.

And that’s possible simply because that’s the way the patriarchal mind sees women. As c*nts. Women no longer have authority over their own bodies (overturning of Wade vs. Roe) even if she needs an abortion to save her own life such as the woman carrying a fetus with no skull. And what about the 10 year old rape victim whose home state refused her the possibility of a safe and legal abortion? And so fixated with controlling a woman’s body that Texas has $10,000 for its Bounty Hunter Abortion Ban but whines about bailing out student loans of the same amount.

It’s estimated that, in the US alone, every day three women are murdered by a man who once told them “I love you”. But no one seems to be making a big deal about that. After all, apparently we women are just c*unts and deserve whatever the dudes do to us.

Please ladies, let’s not enslaves ourselves to patriarchal standards and accept the names for female genitals as insults. If men want to insult someone, they can use their own genitals to do so.

Respect that sacred threshold that’s a basic part of our being. To be complacent with the use of c*nt as an insult is a lack of self-worth and perpetuates misogynist norms.

Related: Marija and the Goddesses + My home starts with my body + World’s Oldest Venus? + Venus figurine + Censored! + Louise Bourgeois and the Venus of Lespugue + The Vulva in Stone Age Art + Resources for the study of Palaeolithic / Paleolithic European, Russian and Australian Archaeology / Archeology by Dan Hitchcock + The Underwater Civilization That Changed History Books Forever + “The Icon of the Vulva, A Basis of Civilization” by Starr Goode pdf +

Misogyny is fueling the country’s gun violence epidemic, experts say + Misogyny, Extremism, and Gun Violence

Beware of microphallic monsters…they are cacafuegos and dangerous!

“May Your Genitals Sprout Wings and Fly Away” Terry Pratchett

Posted in art, Beauty, female consciousness, politics | Tagged archeology, Lepenski vir, Marija Gimbutas, Palaeolithic art, petroglyphs, vulva, Wade vs. Roe | 12 Comments

Ways of Knowing

Posted on August 25, 2022 by Art for Housewives

Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict between Word and Image is a fascinating read about how writing reconfigured the human brain. Shlain says that preliterate agricultural cultures venerating female values used mainly the right half of the hemisphere thus tended to be holistic. But once writing was introduced, there was a shift towards linear left brain thinking. This shift introduced a patriarchal society with all its misogynist evils.

Virginia Woolf also writes of the brain’s duality. While recognizing that the one side is male whereas the other female, she says that “If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect and a woman must also have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties.”

It is the right side of the brain that develops first. Older thus wiser than the left, it is better at negotiating. The right side, says Shlain, “contributes a field-awareness to consciousness, synthesizing multiple converging determinants so that the mind can grasp the senses’ input all-at-once.”

Being non-verbal, the right hemisphere is not an orator. But that doesn’t keep it from expressing the notion of being.

Says Shlain: “The right brain perceives the world concretely” as it absorbs what is there without trying to translate it into words. Thus right brains (women) are more concrete than the abstract left brains (men).

The earliest known writing is that of the Sumerians invented c. 3400 BC.* The alphabet had not yet been created so pictographs were drawn onto clay tablets with a pointed object. The writing was not intended for poetry or for expressing feelings. It was meant for bureaucratic accounting such as documenting personal property and business agreements. It was meant for the material world and very left brain oriented.

The right hemisphere, quoting Shlain, is “the portal leading to the world of the invisible. It is the realm of altered states of consciousness where faith and mystery rule over logic. There is compelling evidence that dreaming occurs primarily in the right brain.”

The main difference between the two hemispheres is that the right side is concerned with being whereas the left side is concerned with doing.

The side of the brain we use the most will influence our ways of knowing what we know.

Most mornings we go to the beach near our house for a quick swim. It is not unusual to see a group of elderly Parian women in the water together talking away. Most of them wear hats for protection so, being several meters away from the shore, you can only see their hats bobbing around as they talk. These ladies are Olympic champions when it comes to treading water because they can be out there tranquilly talking for a very long time.

This morning I was alone in the water when one of my neighbors who was paddling around alone came quite close to me. Being polite, we said Hello and started a typical conventional conversation. Soon we were talking about a bunch of stuff including mutual health concerns.

There are many ways to know about things such as the use of the senses, of reasoning, of imagination, etc. And books of course. But some of the best knowledge I’ve acquired has come from talking with others. Some examples: after my son was born, my girlfriends who were already mothers gave me the best practical advice. And when we came to Paros, girlfriends once again were the ones telling me how to deal with local bureaucracy. And when my mom had to go to the hospital, once again my girlfriends were telling me how to deal with the insurance companies. They were all sharing their own experiences with me to make my life easier.

Everyone we know has something to teach us. We just need to observe and listen.

-30-

*The oldest known Chinese writing dates to 3600 years ago. The writing was found on animal bones known as oracle bones.

Related: 5,000-year-old primitive writing generates debate in China

Posted in Books, female consciousness, Paros | Tagged interconnecting, Ζωοδόχου Πηγής, Leonard Shlain, sharing, Sumerians, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, Virgina Woolf, ways of knowing, writing | 2 Comments

Dancing in Finland

Posted on August 23, 2022 by Art for Housewives

Knowing how to interact with the world around you is essential for one’s well-being. It is a knowledge of particular importance when dealing with conflict. Unfortunately, it seems many people are addicted to conflict and feel that the only way to resolve this conflict is with aggressive, violent behaviour. Violence breeds violence so the conflict becomes never-ending.

To get out of this loop, I decided to experiment using Twitter comments. When something controversial is posted, I try to comment in an alternative way. For example: recently the Finnish Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, was at a party and, while dancing she was filmed and the footage posted on social media. The world went crazy. One morning every other post on Twitter was about her. So, in reply to a post related to Marin’s dancing, I wrote: “Is dancing illegal in Finland?” Immediately I started getting one like after another for this comment (much to my surprise) then someone responded “Not since 1945” and that response got even more likes than my initial reply. Wondering why there was so much enthusiasm for this comment, I did a quick search and discovered that dancing had actually been banned in Finland during WWII. Police went around to control and anyone caught dancing was punished. Of course the majority of the people caught dancing were women.

Why would anyone want to ban dancing? The Finnish logic was that dancing often meant touching your dance partner and such contact could provoke excitement leading to immoral behaviour. And of course, since the beginnings of patriarchal societies, women were always to blame whenever morality was the problem.

So, taking all of this into consideration, Marin’s dance video has other implications. And no wonder, in response to the controversy, Finnish women began posting videos of themselves dancing. Not just in support of Marin but also a reminder than women were free and independent and no longer subjected to patriarchal standards.

If Marin should be criticized for something, it shouldn’t be for dancing but for the actions taken as a Prime Minister. For example, the Finnish betrayal of the Kurds who moved to Finland hoping to find a safe place to live as it was considered to be a neutral country. But now, feeling the need to join NATO, Marin has agreed to the extradition of the Kurds as requested by Erdogan who told the Finns he would vote against their acceptance into NATO otherwise. And what do you think will happen to these Kurds once sent back to Turkey?

But let’s get back to dance.

Dancing has been around for a very long time. Some scholar say as far back as 1.5 million years ago. So we can easily conclude that dancing is a basic need. In my publication “Bebina Bunny’s Cabinet of Curiosities” I wrote about dance and will reprint that excerpt here:

Movement is medicine.

If you don’t move, you become stagnant and lose your flow.

Music can help because it gives your body a rhythm and changes your brainwave frequencies. And changing your frequencies means changing your mood. But, more importantly, when your body responds to music, you don’t have any other choice than to get up and move. And we call this movement dance.

Dance synchronizes mind with body and maybe it’s why it helps prevent Alzheimer’s.

Dancing makes you shift your weight. Weight-shift, an important element in Classical Greek art, is also known as “contrapposto”. A figure twists on its own vertical axis permitting the weight of one part of the body to counterbalance the other.

Often you lose your symmetry just to keep your balance.

Weight-shifting helps you flow. Stand up and shift your weight from one side to the next and feel yourself sway.

When one side gets tired, we shift our weight and let the other side take its turn. Maybe it’s a technique we should use mentally as well.

Dancing has been around for a long time. In ancient times, dancing ceremonies were a means of worshipping Mother Earth as well as a means of bonding members of the community.

The circle is the oldest known dance formation and many ancient depictions show women dancing alone or in circles. The circle symbolizes infinity, unity and wholeness. It also symbolizes Mother Earth, the womb and the seasons.

Dancing in a circle was popular even in Jesus’ time. In the Acts of John, mention is made of Jesus’ participating in a circle dance before his arrest. And, in Ecclesiastes 3, we’re told there’s a time for dancing: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven ….a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.”

Just rock it out.

There is something magical and calming about the rocking motion. Just think of babies who are rocked to sleep. The rocking recreates the rhythm of the womb.

Studies show that rocking is good for the elderly, too, especially those suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

President JFK suffered from chronic back pain. So his doctor told him to sit and rock out the pain. Since a spinal cord can work in only one direction at a time, if you rock in a chair, your brain, because you’re using your legs, sends impulses to the spinal cord thus blocking impulses to the back muscles. Your back, not incited, can thus relax.

Sometimes all it takes is just shaking your head. Like a bottle of salad dressing, you need motion to get the ingredients interrelating again.

Rock ‘n Roll.

The term “rock and roll” was originally a nautical term with “rock” indicating fore & aft motion and “roll” indicating sideway motion. The term was also used during WII by aircraft mechanics to indicate an engine in good condition. These mechanics liked the term so much that, when on leave having a good time, they said they were “rocking and rolling.”

About this time, black spiritual singers developed a music called “rhythm and blues” but whites were prohibited from listening to black music. So DJ Alan Freed, in order to play “rhythm and blues” on his radio show, simply called it “rock and roll.”

Dancing can put you in a trance. Take, for example, the Whirling Dance of the Sufi. The dancers spin around so much that they hyperventilate and enter into a state of altered consciousness. The body is meant to act as a spinning wheel because spinning is a fundamental condition for existence—just think of atoms and chakras.

Dating back 40,000 years, trance dancing was considered a spiritual practice because it gave the body and soul a chance to reunite.

The use of the body as a means of altering reality was also noticed by psychological anthropologist, Felicitas Goodman. She discovered that certain prehistoric statues seemed to be in yoga positions. After much research, she came to the conclusion that certain body postures caused one to experience trance inducing physiological changes…

So, in the words of singer Vivien Green, “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”