WATER

Set in 1936 India, the film WATER explores the lives of widows, another horrid story of female oppression. I hadn't known about this tradition but it reminded me again of humans' darkest side, our ability to shut out others based on sex. And so I sobbed through this film before walking over to my neighbor's for a little visit, and she sent me home with an antidote, another movie titled KINKY BOOTS with a very similar theme, actually, though this time with a cross-dressing man in London as a central character and a more cheerful ending. Only now did the similarity between the two films strike me.

Which, I suppose, takes me to the value of writing (which I have a regular argument within myself about).

I'm a huge fan of Derrick Jensen's writing because he has broken through so many taboos about what can be written about (and writes with such courage about aspects of his own life), which has literally saved my life before because I can relate to his descriptions of how civilization silences us on so many levels.

I attended a conference recently where a great many brilliant, mostly younger (around my daughter's age) people met to talk about the era we're in----I'll use the title of a Jensen book to describe it----ENDGAME-----and how best to be the activists and proponents for Earth (as opposed to civilization).

Of course everyone at first acknowledged the elephant in the room, and then proceeded to speak the veiled language one must use when one must be super sensitive to how that language could be interpreted by someone unfriendly to one's causes. This lent an air of unreality to the entire scene that made me feel as if I were, indeed, playing a game, while at the same time knowing it wasn't.

And so, it was difficult for me to maintain focus on the tasks at hand because I wanted to discuss the "meta-" characteristics (i.e., situated behind or beyond; more comprehensive: transcending—usually used with the name of a discipline to designate a new but related discipline designed to deal critically with the original one) of what I observed at the event and of civilization in general, which is one of Jensen's themes that most interests me, how people are silenced, how we learn to self-censor. To quote from A LANGUAGE OLDER THAN WORDS, "Underlying the different forms of coercison is a unifying factor: silence" (p. 263). Also, a bit further on, he states that "in order to maintain our current mode of being, we must ignore a tremendous amount of information" (p. 303). And, of course, "to ignore" is to repress, to silence. I'd jotted down this additional quote (and I may have truncated it) but don't know which Jensen text I took it from: "Abusive systems (whether personal or political) work best when the victims police themselves (through internalizing their helplessness in the face of 'invincible abusers')."

And so, I overheard in a nearby group one young woman wearing dark sunglasses in this bright room say, "I'm a hermit; I'm very shy; this is hard for me," and I could only praise her in my mind for being so brave in coming to the event, but I wondered whether she'd find what she was seeking----a relief from silence.

My own experience in one of the groups was more silencing----someone who said that the "personal" should be withheld and instead the political task at hand, a prompt, should be the focus of the discussion.

That's what made me realize I was in the wrong place for what I desired----there wasn't enough room for me to dip water from this stream. I see most things as personal (and definitely value the personal over the political). After all, without people who feel connected and trusting of one another, how far can the political take us?