Notes on Bell Hook's All About Love

 7/18/22

Bell Hooks

A few notes

Thinking of love as an action not a feeling is a good start. It generates accountability. Actions shape feelings. Love is as love does.

The heart of justice is telling the truth and seeing ourselves and the world the way it is not the way we want it to be

In our culture lies are told about the most insignificant aspects of daily life. People lie to avoid conflict and / or to spare someone's feelings. Many learn to lie in childhood to avoid punishment or disappointing or hurting adults. We're taught that telling the truth will cause pain. Lying becomes a way of preventing being hurt or hurting others. Lying fascinates kids because it has power over adults.

In The Mermaid And The Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements And Human Malaise  Dorothy Dinnerstein says that when boys feel powerless over their mothers, lying enables them to manipulate her and that boys learn to lie to obtain power. Of course women lie too and also we lie to pretend powerlessness.

Harriet Lerner says “Men tend to lie more and with more devastating consequences. Often men who would never lie in the workplace lie in intimate relationships. The Patriarchy helps them get away with it. They are taught that to be honest is “soft.” (tragic)

Victor Seidler in his book Recovering Masculinity says “When we learn to use language, boys quickly learn how to conceal themselves in order to master the world. Often in a trance state estranged to feelings, men utilize strategies they learned as boys. Their inability to truly connect causes an inability to be accountable for truly causing pain. Many men see themselves as victims of lovelessness and lying expresses their ongoing rage at the failure of love's promise.

“Where the will to power is dominant, love will be lacking.” CJ Jung

Men use lying and omission to subjugate women. 

Trust is the foundation of intimacy. When lies and omission erode trust, intimacy cannot grow or live.

(Personally I find this terribly sad and trust with all my heart that it will not end here)

Justice between people is perhaps the most important connection people can have.

Thanks Pronoia

 MIRABILIA

What are mirabilia? They're phenomena that inspire wonder, winsome curiosities, small marvels, eccentric enchantments. Here are a few:

* The National Center for Atmospheric Research reports that the average cloud is the same weight as 100 elephants.

* The average river requires a million years to move a grain of sand 100 miles.

* With every dawn, when first light penetrates the sea, many seahorse colonies perform a dance to the sun.

* A seven-year-old Minnesota boy received patent number 6,368,227 for a new method of swinging on a swing.

* Clown fish can alter their gender as their social status rises.

* In the Hindu epic the Mahabharata, the hero and heroine fall in love without ever gazing upon each other, simply by hearing tales about each other's good deeds.

* Twelve percent of the population believes that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.

* The closest modern relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex may be the chicken.

* Kind people are more likely than mean people to yawn when someone near them does.

* Singing Gregorian chants can cure dyslexia.

* All the gold ever mined could be molded into a 60-foot bust of your mom.

* The moon smells like exploded firecrackers.

* The most frequently shoplifted book in America is the Bible.

* Black sheep have a better sense of smell than white sheep.

* There are about 60,000 miles of blood vessels in your body. Every square inch of your body has an average of 32 million bacteria on it.

* The seeds of some trees are so tightly compacted within their protective covering that only the intense heat of a forest fire can free them, allowing them to sprout.

* Anthropologists say that in every culture in history, children have played the game hide and seek.

* Robust singing skill is correlated with a strong immune system in songbirds. Male birds with the most extensive repertoire of tunes also have the largest spleens, a key measure of immune system health.

* In an apparent attempt to raise their volume above the prevailing human din, some nightingales in big cities have learned to unleash 95-decibel songs, matching the loudness of a chainsaw.

* There is a statistically significant probability of world-class athletes and military leaders being born when Mars is rising in the sky.

* Some piranhas are vegetarians

* In the pueblos of New Mexico, bricks still measure 33 by 15 by 10 centimeters, proportions that almost exactly match those of the bricks used to build Egypt's Temple of Hatshepsut 3,500 years ago.

* Bees perform a valuable service for the flowers from which they steal.

* Revlon makes 177 different shades of lipstick.

* Scientists believe they'll be able to figure out why cancer cells are virtually immortal, and then apply the secret to keeping normal cells alive much longer, thereby dramatically expanding the human life span.

* Thirty-eight percent of North America is wilderness.

* There are about nine million people on earth who were born the same day as you.

* Your body contains so much iron that you could make a spike out of it, and that spike would be strong enough to hold you up.

* Very few raindrops are actually raindrop-shaped. A far greater number take the form of doughnuts

Yaletown June

 

Let's Talk About Death with Michelle Dante

 

Puerto Penasco Birthday Celebration

 

Kissing In Vietnamese

Kissing in Vietnamese 

My grandmother kisses

as if bombs are bursting in the backyard,

where mint and jasmine lace their perfumes

through the kitchen window,

as if somewhere, a body is falling apart

and flames are making their way back

through the vessels in a young boys thigh,

as if to walk out the door, your torso 

would dance with exit wounds. 

When my grandmother kisses, there would be no flashy smooching, no western music 

of pursed lips, she kisses as if to breathe 

you inside her, nose press to cheek 

so that your sent pearls into drops of gold inside her lungs, as if while she holds you, death also, is clutching your wrist.

My grandmother kisses as if history 

never ended, as if somewhere, 

a body is still falling apart

Ocean Vuong

More Poems

Jesus Never Understood My Grandmother's Prayers

My grandmother never learned Spanish

was afraid of forgetting her gods

was afraid of waking up in the morning

without the prodigals of her offspring in her memory.

My grandmother believed that you could only

talk to the wind in Zoque

but she kneeled before the saints

and prayed with more fervor than anyone.

Jesus never heard her

my grandmother's tongue

smelled like rose apples

and her eyes lit up when she sang

with the brightness of a star.

Saint Michael Archangel never heard her

my grandmother's prayers were sometimes blasphemies

jukis'tyt she said and the pain stopped

patsoke she yelled and time paused beneath her bed.

In that same bed she birthed her seven sons.

 Mikeas Sanchez

(Translated by David Shook)

....

(Thanks Nina)

The Two-Headed Calf

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass. And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.

– Laura Gilpin

...

Something beautiful from Alison Luterman for today:

I Confess

I stalked her

in the grocery store: her crown

of snowy braids held in place by a great silver clip,

her erect bearing, radiating tenderness,

watching

the way she placed yogurt and avocados in her

basket,

beaming peace like the North Star.

I wanted to ask,"What aisle did you find

your serenity in, do you know 

how to be married for fifty years or how to live

alone,

excuse me for interrupting, but you seem to

possess

some knowledge that makes the earth turn and

burn on its axis --"

But we don't request such things from strangers

nowadays. So I said, "I love your hair."

....

I no longer pray—now I drink dark chocolate and let the moon sing to me.

I no longer pray—I let my ancestors dance through my hips at the slightest provocation.

I no longer pray—I go to the river and howl my ancient pain into the current.

I no longer pray—I ache, I desire, I say “yes” to my longing.

I no longer pray as I was taught but as the stars crawl onto my lap like soft animals at nighttime and God tucks my hair behind my ears with the gentle fingers of her wind and a new intimacy is uncovered in everything, perhaps it’s that I’m finally learning how to pray.

— Chelan Harkin

...

The worst thing we ever did was put God in the sky out of reach pulling the divinity from the leaf, sifting out the holy from our bones, insisting God isn’t bursting dazzlement through everything we’ve made a hard commitment to see as ordinary, stripping the sacred from everywhere to put in a cloud man elsewhere, prying closeness from your heart.

The worst thing we ever did was take the dance and the song out of prayer made it sit up straight and cross its legs removed it of rejoicing wiped clean its hip sway, its questions, its ecstatic yowl, its tears.

The worst thing we ever did is pretend God isn’t the easiest thing in this Universe available to every soulin every breath.

Chelan Harkin

...

If you think the Eccentric God who made the octopus is gonna judge you for your sins, I’m afraid you’ve missed the mark.

If you think this Wild God that spins galaxies as a pastime cares to get fussy about your mistakes or has ever made anything that wasn’t born perfect and luminous, you might need to repent.

If you can’t yet admit how lovable and infinitely worthy the fullness of your human nature is and if you think God wants to do anything but perpetually pour an abundance of love gifts upon you, well, my dear, your soul just might need to go to confession.

Chelan Harkin

National Poetry Month

 Happy National Poetry month, friends. Here's one from Raymond Carver for today ...

Grief

Woke up early this morning and from my bed

looked far across the Strait to see

a small boat moving through the choppy water,

a single running light on. Remembered

my friend who used to shout 

his dead wife's name from hilltops

around Perugia. Who set a plate

for her at his simple table long after

she was gone. And opened the windows

so she could have fresh air. Such display 

I found embarrassing. So did his other 

friends. I couldn't see it. 

Not until this morning.