For Discussion – Gryphon's Aerie

At Sinai – A poem about the State of Israel

I stand now at Sinai:

There is no sign of Moses or God. It is dark and cold. My people have barely escaped destruction once again.

“Here! Here is your savior! The state of Israel will bring you out of bondage. You must pledge your self to it, and it will keep you and your children safe.”

Around me, people give over their gold to be melted down. My people turn their back on Sinai. They put their faith in a construct of their own hands.

It is dark and cold. The mountain is silent.

I wrote this in November of ’23, after someone told me ‘We’re Jews, we have to support Israel’. I’ve posted it on social media a time or two since then, but I think it’s time it had a permanent home.

I wonder — and fear — what that person thinks now?

Aphantasia: I think in shape-feels

I am one of the estimated 1-3% of people who are not able to think visually. To conjure mental images. I cannot remember what your face looks like because I cannot remember what anything looks like. I cannot picture a summer day, or the setting of my story, or the last time I saw my mother.

Until a few years ago, I thought this was normal. I thought people talking about ‘picturing’ things in their mind were speaking metaphorically.

That was when I first learned about ‘aphantasia’. Which is a fancy way of saying ‘lack of mind-pictures.’ That’s me. I lack mind pictures.

I learned about aphantasia on the Fediverse a few years ago when someone I was following ran a short poll related to it. Asked folks ‘what do you see when you close your eyes and try to picture a red heart’ or something similar.

And one of the options was ‘I see a red heart.’

I stopped and stared a moment.

My brain froze as I tried to assimilate… some people literally see ‘a red heart’.
I’ve tried to call up visual images before. Often when trying to figure out what my characters look like or remember a person’s face. Trying to picture a red heart worked the same as all those other attempts — a… sense of a line being traced, the feeling of the outline of a heart being drawn. And in the wake of that tracing an… almost image? A grey-on-grey (except not grey, because it’s not an image at all?) outline of a heart that is more felt than seen, but if it was visual it would be… like ultraviolet? Not part of the visual spectrum, but sensed in some way that I didn’t have words for so I used the words of sight because I didn’t have anything else.

Confused?

I sure was.

I was even more confused when I submitted my answer to the poll and found that the majority of respondents literally saw a red heart. Like, wtf? You people seriously do that?!?!

Apparently?

I’ve gone through this background because I want the phantasmic folks reading this (which probably are most of you?) to understand how shocking having actual pictures in your head is to me.

I want you to understand that what I’m going to try to put words to next is my normal. I have trouble putting words to it because the words don’t exist. But as strange as this will (apparently) sound to you, to me it’s y’all’s visual thoughts that are strange and kind of disturbing. What follows is just… me.

Kinesthesia

Kinesthesia is the sense of our bodies and physical space. Knowing how to touch your nose with your eyes closed is kinesthesia. So is knowing without looking if your hand is clenched or loose.

People with high levels of kinesthesia can build a mental picture of the space around them so they can navigate it better. Say, trace a maze with their eyes closed or predict where a ball will land. Athletes tend to be highly kinesthetic.

There is, of course, a reason I am talking about kinesthesia.

My thoughts are not visual, they are kinesthetic. Or, as I prefer to call them, ‘shape-feels.’

Well, some of my thoughts are verbal. But that verbalness is just for my surface-level thoughts. Everything else? Shape-feels.

Shape-feels

Every idea or concept I know has a shape-feel. For concrete things, the shape-feel is representative. The shape-feel for ‘chair’ is a kinesthetic sense of a basic wooden chair. Imagine the feel of running your hands over a wooden chair — the back, the supports, the seat, the legs — now put those feelings together into one coherent tactile sense of a chair. That’s my thought ‘chair’.

Abstract ideas… well, let me give two examples. Love (the feeling) is a warm cloud (with a fuzzy-blanket texture) wrapped around me. Loving (as in ‘love is a verb’) is a sense of two different things growing together to create something new. Again, the tactile feel of these things.

If I close my eyes and think of the room I am in right now, it’s almost like an echolocation thing? A sense-feel combining how far furniture, walls, etc are from my body and the shape of those things to form a tactile ‘picture’ of the room.

Some shape-feels are completely abstract and impossible to describe. My shape-fell for myself is one of those. It’s… the best I can describe it is there is a warmth in my center that is the essence of ‘Jess’. It is vaguely ball-shaped, but only in the sense that enough warmth radiating out of anything becomes ball-shaped eventually. I could hold it in my cupped hands. It has layers. Sort of. But those aren’t anything about what it is. What it is is me. In some essential way that words don’t encompass.

I don’t see colors, of course. But my memories can be color-coded. Like a paint-by-number picture, my shape-feels can sometimes be labeled ‘this is red, this is green,’ etc.

Of course, when I am thinking, a lot of thoughts and concepts can happen in a short time. I rarely have time to be aware of a large number of discrete shape-feels. Instead, it’s more like a tactile version of those timelapse videos of clouds passing across the sky. One shape-feel shifting into another, forming a coherent thought process that I (often) automatically translate into words, because habit.

Intentional thought often comes in words, verbally. ‘Talking to myself’ thinking that just about everyone is familiar with. But often as I am ‘talking to myself’ I’ll hit a point that I don’t have words for. And then I let the shape-feel fill in for the words I don’t have and move on.

If we are talking and I stop and say ‘words…’ (as I tend to do) it’s because I don’t know how to turn the shape-feel thoughts into words.

When Words Don’t

I have said elsewhere that I am more comfortable being nonverbal than verbal — that being nonverbal feels more natural to me. I think this is why. Because all verbalness is a kind of masking. It’s translating the essence of my thoughts into a language I can more easily manipulate and others can understand. Autistic people in general are more likely to be aphantasmic, so there is a possible correlation between aphantasmic thinking and being nonverbal. One of the many things I wish there was more information about, but won’t be because most researchers are assholes.

Nothing I don’t have a shape-feel for is really… real to me. This has come up in two contexts recently. Once discussing programming. I struggle with programming in part becasue programming ideas (function, in that case) are just words. It doesn’t matter how often I read the definitions (more words), if I can’t formulate a shape-feel for a concept I don’t understand it. The idea, based only in the word, feels unanchored, floaty, ephemeral. I need a shape to anchor it in, to explore, run my hands over, internalize, to understand something.

The second time was a Twitter convo where I was trying to start a conversation about what it means to be a nonbinary dominant. Baffling to me at the time, no one else seemed interested in discussing it. One friend asked me why we needed to discuss it? Why do we need to define it? Isn’t it enough to have the label and live it?

For most people it is, I guess. For me… having something that is/should be one of my identities being just words, being this ephemeral, floaty nothing that I can’t wrap my mental hands around… it’s incredibly uncomfortable. It leaves me off balance and kind of flailing when I think about that part of myself.

I have to say, for all they can be a pain in the ass, these past months putting words to how my thinking works have left me incredibly grateful that words are a thing. I’ve come to suspect that if mindreading or telepathy ever do being a thing, they will be a supremely useless thing in many cases. If I were to be able to put my thoughts — my shape-feels — in your head, you would likely be more confused, not less. And visual people putting their thoughts in my head? Like, could I even perceive visual thoughts sent to me telepathically? How would that work even?

Scientists doing the whole ‘mind-reading computer thing’ have their work cut out for them, that’s for sure.

How can relationships successfully deal with the issue of grudging consent?

Note: This is based on an answer I wrote on Quora a number of years ago. The original question was from a monogamous person grudgingly agreeing to a polyamorous relationship, but my response resonated with people in a variety of circumstances. It was one of my popular Quora answers, as well as one of the most personally meaningful.

I’m going to take a stab at this. On the one hand, I agree with many folks who say that grudging consent is not consent. On the other hand, I am in a relationship where resentment and grudgingly dealing with shit is a regular part of our day. Not because of polyamory but because of disability. So I have a slightly different perspective on relationships that include resentment and grudging going-along-with than most people.

So, some background. My partner was not disabled when we entered a relationship together. They were working, had some ongoing health problems. While we had the normal ups and downs, we did okay.

They became disabled over a year, gradually getting worse, then suddenly getting worse, getting better for a little while then getting worse again. We’ve worked hard to keep our relationship going, but it’s been a struggle. I can’t leave them alone with the baby, which means I NEVER go anywhere without the baby. Half the time they can’t wash their own hair, so I need to wash their hair for them. And there are only so many times a day you can be asked to interrupt what you are doing to get someone else a drink before it starts to grate on you.

We’ve been together for about 7 years now. Their health has varied a great deal over that period: including one hospitalization, numerous ER trips, and brief periods when they’ve been able to put their cane away, watch the kid while I worked a night job, or help with the housework.

I love them, I am happy to be in a relationship with them, and I resent the hell out of their disability and the demands it makes of me every fucking day.

Obviously, every relationship is different. As I always say: take what is useful, ignore what is not.

Every day you choose. This is the most important thing of all relationships—every day you choose to be in that relationship. You didn’t say “yes” once, and that was the end of it. Every day you either choose “I’m in this relationship and I’m going to make it work,” or you choose “I can’t/won’t/don’t want to make this work anymore.” Sometimes you need to say “I’m in this relationship, but I need to take care of myself today, so I’m going to step back and will get back in the harness of making this relationship work tomorrow.” That’s okay. But every day you choose. If everyone involved in a relationship says every day, “I’m going to make this relationship work,” the relationship can last through just about anything.

If the relationship stops being healthy for you, it’s time to choose to stop making it work. Don’t force a relationship to work at the expense of your own health and well-being.

Focus on the good things. Living with and taking care of a disabled partner is its own kind of hell. Especially when you don’t have a diagnosis and have no idea if your partner is suffering from a chronic condition or if they are dying and you don’t even know it. You can’t think about it too much, or you will drive yourself crazy. Similarly, a mono partner in mono/poly can’t focus on dates and fears that their poly partner will “find someone better” or other negatives of mono/poly. Focus on the good in your relationship. (Etc for other kinds of relationships.)
(They make me laugh. No one ever made me laugh like this before. They understand me, my depression, my anxiety, my PTSD, and they accept all of it. And they try. Always, they try to do better and be better. Some days, I’m afraid they’ll break themself trying but better, so much better, that they try than that they give up.)

Find ways to adapt. How does disability (poly) change your relationship? How can you change your routines and expectations to work with, rather than against, those changes?

Trust. I need to trust that my partner is doing everything he can. That when they tell me they can’t get to the kitchen to get themself a glass of water, they really are in that much pain. That when they say they can’t wash their hair, they really can’t reach their arms over their head. A mono partner needs to trust that when their poly partner says, “I love you and I won’t leave you,” they mean it. That a poly partner who says “Having sex with someone else doesn’t change how I feel about you,” is telling the truth. The mono partner may not understand how their poly partner can feel this way, but they need to trust that it is true. (Etc for other kinds of relationships.)

I never consented to life with disability. I live with my partner’s disability grudgingly, resentfully, and sometimes painfully. But I love my partner, we are good together, and to be with them I put up with their disability. We talk about it. I cry on their shoulder about how I resent it and how much it demands of me, and they don’t blame me or get defensive because they understand. Sometimes they cry on my shoulder about how they hate hurting me, how they feel like I should leave them and be with someone better because I deserve more. And I hold them and tell them I love them, and being with them is worth all this and more.

I can’t tell you how to turn grudging consent into acceptance. I’m still trying to find the trick to that myself. But I hope this helps.

Just remember, every day you choose. And if there is often something to be celebrated in choosing to continue a difficult relationship, there is no shame in deciding that you can’t anymore. We can only give so much without harming ourselves, after all.

Personal update: I wrote this answer over 8 years ago, and a lot has happened since then. I mentioned in this answer that we didn’t have a diagnosis and so didn’t know if my partner was dealing with a chronic condition or something life-threatening. It turned out to be a whole constellation of different problems: some chronic, some treatable. One of the treatable ones was life-threatening, but since it was treatable, that’s not a concern anymore (thank god!) They are still disabled, and so am I now, but we are still choosing each other every day.

A Cousin’s Blood

The ritual was simple, as all new rituals are. It was based on an older tradition – one that long ago ceased to be simple, but retained a simple core.

Teach them to your children.

Rachel and Chana prepared while the children gathered around. The grandparents waited in the background, eyes shining as they remembered the early years when they had prepared so, the fear and the hope and the promise to do what must be done.

“Why is this day different from other days?” asked Nathan. He was twelve that year, about to be b’mitzvah and take on responsibility for his own actions. The next year, if he chose, he could begin training to join his parents when he turned eighteen.

“How is this day different?” Chana responded.

“Most days, we go out together, but today you leave your children home.”

“Today, we go where it may not be safe,” Chana said as she checked the balance of her shield.

“How is this day different?” Rachel asked.

“Other days, you go out for dressed peace; today, you go out dressed for fighting.”

“Other days, we go out for our own reasons; today, we go out to guard our cousins.” As Rachel spoke, she locked her phone in a portable Faraday cage and packed it in her emergency medical bag.

“Why do we guard our cousins today?” asked Yiska, the youngest.

Rachel and Chana paused their preparations in surprise. Yiska did not have part in this ritual, she was too young. But the question was right and the answer was important.

Chana knelt down and chucked Yiska’s chin. “God commands that we are responsible for our siblings. We must never stand by while our siblings’ blood is spilled.

“Our cousins are not siblings, but they are still family. God surely did not mean for us to guard our siblings and ignore our cousins. So we guard them when they need it. And they guard us when we do.”

It was an idea centuries old, born of the Blood Libel and the pogroms, when the Jews of Europe’s ghettos needed to always be ready to defend themselves. Today it was repurposed for a new age. Across the city, but especially in homes clustered around the city’s synagogues, people prepared riot shields and bullhorns, medicine and bandages.

No one remembered who began the tradition or even what city it started in. Perhaps it had begun in many places at once, as needed things sometimes do. But in every city and town where the cousins lived side by side, the practice was honored and cherished.

Rachel and Chana finished preparing and the family ended the ritual with song, because all holy days must have songs. They sang new songs to go with the new ritual. We will build this world with love, the song said, and God will build this world with love.

Then Rachel and Chana thanked their parents for watching the children, and left. As they stepped out the door, they murmured a brucha. “Blessed are You, Lord our God, ruler of the Universe, who has commanded us to protect our family.”

As the call to prayer went out across cell phones and radios, they came. Some in kippah or tichel or snood, others bare-headed, the Hebraic Community Defense teams gathered around the mosques of the city. None came barehanded. Inside, their cousins would pray in peace, undisturbed by whatever the day might bring.

The guardians expected a quiet day. Their cousins would share their feast and they would spend the time exchanging news of family and friends, making plans for the new year, and even playing games. But still, they would watch, and when their cousins finished praying and emerged, the guardians would greet them with a song. All holy days must have songs.

Tomorrow night, as the shofar rang out across the city, the Islamic Community Defense teams, in keffiyeh or hijab or neither, would stand guard over the synagogues.

It had been 20 years and more since the last major attack on a house of worship. The most they guarded against today was petty vandalism and hecklers. But still, for each holy day, they gathered. Still, they taught their children why.

Lest a cousin’s blood be spilled.

I wrote this the summer of ’23, for a market requesting visions of a better future. Ironic considering how much worse the near future actually was. But no matter how bad things get, they can always get better. May a better future come soon for all of us.

Fiction and A Conflict Centered World View

I don’t know as much as I’d like to, but I’ve noticed something. Conflict centered stories became the ‘one twue way’ around the same time that nationalism was at its height and white supremacy was being taught as ‘science’ in most colleges and universities.

This is me combining a bit of knowledge to come up with a lot of ideas. ‘Essay’ I was told in school means ‘I think.’ This is a bit of what I think, backed by what facts I have, on a topic far more complicated and in-depth than I have the personal resources to explore.

Conflict and…

Christianity

Most of the folks involved in the creation of the ‘all stories are conflict’ myth were Christian. (I know of one who wasn’t. I think.) When you stop to think about it, that culture and ideas show through. Christian culture and worldview are also conflict-centered.

The Christian worldview revolves around four conflicts:
God vs Devil
Devil vs. Good Christians
Good Christians vs. Bad Unbelievers
Good Christians vs. Themselves

While some churches have moved away from talk of the Devil and toned down the ‘Bad Unbelievers’ rhetoric, many haven’t. And those churches which have, have often doubled down on the internal conflict — especially in this age of rising atheism and people leaving the Churches. The party line is that lacking a sense of connection to God is not a sign of a problem in your worldview/beliefs/actions, but rather a personal test to be overcome through greater commitment and belief.

Conflict is so central to Christianity that it is part of the most sacred prayer.
“And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.”
Every day observant Christians acknowledge that conflict (internal and external) is central to their lives and ask God’s protection from it.

Contrary to what many Christians believe, this is not a common worldview. I don’t know as much as I’d like about other religious traditions, but I do know enough to know that. The only other religions I know that have anything like this are closely related to Christianity and also have a ‘Devil’ figure (also rare in world traditions) — Islam and Zoroastrianism. Other religions may acknowledge that conflict is a part of life and can be part of spiritual growth, but nowhere near so central a thing.

White Supremacy

This is where I get into stuff I don’t know as well as I’d like. My understanding is that Christianity had a huge influence on the development of White Supremacy. White supremacy also has a conflict-centered world which posits white people as under assault (literal and spiritual) from nonwhite people. The so-called ‘White man’s burden’ is a well-known example of this: white men going out to bring the other races to enlightenment — forcibly if necessary.

Of course, conflict-centered stories ideally figure not ‘just’ a protagonist, but a hero. A hero who in concept reflects all the virtues white supremacy ascribes to the White Man going forth to conquer the world.

The generic ‘hero’ of Anglo cultures is a big, buff, white man strong enough to defeat scores of mooks single-handedly. The hero is the hero because he, like the White man, brings peace and prosperity (or at least a happy ending).

Don’t believe me? Take a look at the early comic book heroes — the ones created around the same time that conflict-centered writing was becoming the end-all, be-all of English literature.

Our idea of heroes has evolved since then, but still, the White Savior looms over all, cape flapping in the breeze.

Imperialism

Western Imperialism comes from Rome. Every Empire of Europe for 2000 years has claimed to be Rome’s successor or the ‘new’ Rome. The label has been given to the US as well, and frequently. ‘Fascist’ comes from the Roman ‘fasces’ — a bundle of sticks with an ax sticking out. It’s been a symbol of government power for well over 2000 years. You can see that bundle on government seals across the ‘Western’ world, invoking the authority of ancient Rome.

The very word “Imperialism” comes from Rome — from “imperare”: “to command.” One might say that imperialism is the belief in the right of empire to command.

The history of Western thought is contained in the unholy alliance Constantine forged: Roman Imperialism given the imprimatur of Christian sanctity. “God is with us!” cried the Catholic armies of the Holy Roman Empire during the 30 Years’ War. Their Protestant enemies responded with similar claims of divine favor. Together they watered the fields of Central Europe with blood for decades.

In the Americas, Catholic Spain and Protestant England exported Roman Imperialism and Christian sanctity to a so-called ‘New World.’

Imperialism cannot exist without conflict, because imperialism requires the borders and powers of empire to be ever-expanding. We measure the greatness of an empire by the /furthest extent/ of its borders. An empire’s collapse begins the moment it stops expanding. To pull back, to dig in and hold is to admit weakness, the ultimate sin of empire.

And Stories

Here is where knowledge fails and I’m in realms of speculation. The facts as we know them:

During the early 20th century, Britain was the Empire the sun never set on and the US was celebrating ‘Manifest Destiny’, supported and buttressed by Christian evangelism and white supremacy. And an idea arose in the heart of English literary philosophy. The idea that all stories are conflict-centered, and plots are defined by their central conflict. Out of this idea came the claim that all stories /must have/ a singular protagonist and an antagonist opposing the protagonist. The antagonist acts as a foil for the protagonist’s hero-dom to be displayed against.

(Antagonist, by the way, is unrelated to ‘protagonist.’ It originated in battle or sport, not literature.)

Outside of English literature, stories that did not fit the 3 or 5-act conflict-centered straight jacket continued as before. Say what you with about Dostoevsky, but his stories did not center on conflict. Nor, I am told, did most other Russian novelists. In East Asia, the many variations on 4-act structure (best known in the US by the Japanese version, ki-sho-ten-ketsu) continued. It was first introduced to English-language audiences through anime and manga. (Hayao Miyazaki is a master of the form.) Hakawati continue to be told and celebrated in Western Asia. And thousands more story-forms I could not learn in a very long lifetime. Contrary to the old saw there are not 7 plots, there are millions.

Stories that don’t center conflict have survived in English literature, but only on the margins. On the one hand, you have Jack Kerouac and other beat/post-modern/literary/etc authors who ‘experiment’ with the limits of the genre. They wrote in ways (it is implied) more mundane writers can’t. On the other hand, you have slice-of-life stories. These were long ago relegated to the ‘chick lit’ section of the store, less respected even than romance, which at least has a ‘proper’ genre and place on the shelves.

But in schools and workshops and writers groups around the country, these are ignored. “You need conflict” writers are told. As if a story suddenly stops being a story because there aren’t enough heroes and villains in it.

A chance of timing? The relatively new popularity of English novels and short stories may have led to a new consideration of literary theory right at the time these conflict-centered worldviews believed they had succeeded in subduing the world.

Maybe I’m missing something. (I’m probably missing a lot of some things.)

But I think — I /feel/ — there is a connection here. Even if I don’t have the words to frame the connection — or even the necessary questions.

In the meantime, I hope I got you thinking.

(As always, credit and thanks to Kim Yoon Mi and her giant-ass essay on story structure. Thanks also to Marcia X for long threads and treasured conversations on the history of White supremacy and colonialism.)

Am I Writing a Bigoted Story? – The importance of checking ourselves

I read a story once. It was a good story in the sense of being well written, engaging, with no major plot holes.

The author put a note in the beginning, explaining that this story was set in a fantasy version of the bronze age. This meant (of course) that there were slaves and women were not treated equal to men. That doesn’t make the author or the story sexist, it’s just a setting!

I think the author meant it. I think he had no intention of writing a sexist story. He was just (as far as he was concerned) writing a story in which sexism happened and slavery happened. He wasn’t endorsing these things, he just wanted to tell a story.

That story was Demon’s Gate by Steve White and it, more than anything else, taught me the danger of unexamined biases. And the importance of asking, “Am I creating a bigoted story?”

We, as creators, cannot afford to let our biases or our creations go unanalyzed, uncritiqued.

For instance…

A nobleman and his loyal slave discover something hinky at the palace. As they investigate they discover a group of noblewomen who are tired of being treated as, well, women. (You know, second class citizens, property of men, that kind of thing.) These women are fomenting some kind of plot against the empire. Except the (male) leader of their little cult is a demon in disguise who has tricked them into opening a gate into the demon’s realm. Once the gate is opened it will flood reality with demons who will turn the world into a literal hell on earth forever more.

The nobleman (and his loyal slave) break the cult by convincing one of the young women that the cult was wrong. The women needed to accept their place, not rebel against the status quo. This woman realizes she needs to tell the nobleman everything she can about the cult. The climax is an epic race against time to stop the women’s cult from opening the gate to the other world and a battle for the fate of mankind. The members of the cult are either killed or imprisoned. The demon is banished with the help of the one woman who is permitted to be a power in her own right (religious figure) and everyone lives happily ever after.

The premise of this story can be boiled down to “a bunch of women form a support group to try to better their lives and nearly bring about the end of the world.”

Just to highlight a few points:

1) Women trying to fight against oppression nearly destroy the world (literally)

2) Women only get the idea to fight against oppression when a man (or demon pretending to be a man) urges them to. Even in fighting against oppression, they follow the leadership of a man

3) Protagonist is a privileged slave owner who is a hero because he is fighting to preserve a corrupt, oppressive empire

The 1920s want their anti-suffragette memes back. And Dixie wants to know where the General Lee doppelganger got to.

But Realism!

There are a lot of issues with the endless calls for realism — especially in SFF! But that’s a tangent, because….

You can write stories in slave societies, in sexist societies, in elitist societies, in racist societies, and not have your story be bigoted!

David Freer does a not-horrible job of this in A Mankind Witch. By the end of the story, the Prince of the Holy Roman Empire gets some of his self-satisfied religious bigotry knocked out of him, a Nordic princess learns that putting a slave collar on a man doesn’t strip away his basic humanity, and a Berber pirate learns that there are things he cares about more than money and the next ransom. All while fighting free of a troll queen, outwitting dwarves, and solving a crime that nearly ends the fragile peace between the Northlands and the Holy Roman Empire.

Awesome story, I recommend it and the rest of the series.

Anyway, as creatives, we need to check ourselves and our work. It isn’t as simple as ‘if there is bigotry in your work it is bigoted’. Life doesn’t work that way.

We need stories that portray bigotry. We A) need to not erase bigotry from history (or current events) and B) we need to have stories celebrating people who triumph over bigotry.

Even if we didn’t need those stories, we still wouldn’t want to shut down all stories portraying bigotry – that would eliminate stories about the lived experiences of most people who have ever existed.

But we need to do the work to portray them well. We can create those stories without reinforcing the bigotry, without resurrecting bigoted ideas and tropes that should have died a century ago.

And we can damn well make our heroes people who are fighting against bigotry or learning important lessons about not being bigoted. Not bigots who are proved right by the stories we tell!

If you like fantasy in a Bronze-age setting, check out my websieral Planting Life in a Dying City, about building family in the face of loss and trauma.

bell hooks and Being a Respectful Eavesdropper

My biggest personal takeaway from bell hooks’ Outlaw Culture (and I emphasize /personal/ takeaway — I’ve got a LOT of political takeaways I’m still processing) is the idea of being an invited ‘eavesdropper’. I’ve long felt, reading work by hooks and Davis and other womanist thinkers, a bit uncomfortable. It was clear they weren’t speaking to me. That I, as a white person, am not part of the audience they address. It felt like I was intruding, actually. Like I didn’t belong here.

So it was almost as if hooks /was/ speaking to me — or at least, my concerns — when she said in Outlaw Culture that she is writing for a black audience, and views white people who read who her work as eavesdroppers. Welcome ones, but eavesdroppers. (I believe this was in chapter three, during the interview with Marie-France Alderman. Unfortunately, audiobooks are difficult to cite and nearly impossible to look up a reference in.)

For the first time, I have permission to enter and engage with hooks’ work, and perhaps the work of other black writers addressing black audiences.

But what does it mean to be an invited eavesdropper?

What Is an Eavesdropper?

An invited eavesdropper is a very odd thing. Because eavesdropping, in its basic conception, is a violation. When hooks first referred to white readers as ‘eavesdroppers’ I had one moment of ‘Yes! That is what I’ve been feeling like’ and a second moment of ‘Oh… that’s not good, is it?’

hooks put that second thought to rest quickly enough. Probably intentionally, given her awareness of the many white people who did and do read her work. But that idea of violation still needs to be addressed. Or — not violation, but what is being violated:

Privacy.

An eavesdropper is someone who violates /privacy/, and who takes away the safety privacy creates, from the people eavesdropped on.

In saying that white readers are eavesdroppers, hooks is laying a firm boundary — we (white people) do not belong here. She chooses to allow us, but we do not belong. And our presence is a hindrance to the safety and security of the conversation she and other black people are trying to have.

This may sound strange to white people who only know hooks as someone who has written on racism and sexism. We are used to being the audience when it comes to racism. After all, we’re the ones who /are/ racist, right?

But that’s not what hooks is about. hooks isn’t talking about white people being racist. She takes living in a white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist society as a given (and always the three are linked for her). hooks is talking about how racism affects black families, how black people can respond to racism, the intersection of internalized (black) racism and sexism, the way black men are harmed by sexism.

Conversations that — I’ll agree with hooks — we (white people) don’t belong in. Those are intra-community conversations, /not/ inter-community. The difference is important and far too often neglected.

Still, hooks welcomes us — as eavesdroppers.

Can I Be a Respectful Eavesdropper?

I have a lot of thoughts here, but I’m having trouble finding words for them. The heading captures the main idea pretty well — if I am going to be eavesdropping on conversations not meant for me, even with invitation, how can I do it respectfully?

I don’t have a complete answer, but I’ve figured a few things out.

1) Recognize lack of context —

Because I am not hooks’ intended audience, I am missing context. Her audience is a community she is part of and she addresses her audience — other Black Americans — assuming certain knowledge, cultural context, and history that I don’t have and probably never will have.

I need to recognize this lack of context and the way it will make it harder for me to understand some of what hooks says. It will be easier for me to misunderstand or accidentally ascribe incorrect interpretations. I need to do more work to understand than the folks hooks is speaking to, and if I don’t or can’t do that work, then I need to accept that I may never understand.

2) Don’t insert myself between hooks and her audience

I have no business telling Black folks what hooks says, means, intends, etc. If they care, they can listen themselves, if they don’t care it’s not my business. If someone /asks/, that’s one thing, I can answer to the best of my ability, acknowledge where I recognize a lack of understanding, and direct them to where in hooks’ work I learned something. But it is sure as hell not my place to be going around ‘educating’ Black folks about hooks (or any other Black thinkers).

2a) What about educating other white folks?

Good question. I’m of two minds. On the one hand, educating other white folks about racism (and sexism and all the other stuff hooks talks about) is a major way we can help fight back against white supremacy. On the other hand, there’s that whole ‘lack of context’ thing and the risk of sharing wrong or misleading answers

Obviously, I’ve decided I’m okay discussing some of hooks’ work and my reaction to it, but you’ll notice I’m talking about how I engage with/respond to hooks work in one area that affects/addresses me.

I’m figuring this shit out.

3) Intra- vs inter-community

Any engagement I have with hooks work is by definition inter-community, when hooks was writing intra (within) her own community. I’ve mentioned this before. There are times and places that intra-community discussions must and should move into inter-community forums. And there are times they shouldn’t. I can assume, given hooks’ acceptance of ‘eavesdroppers’ that she anticipates and accepts her own work will end up as part of inter-community conversations.

But I think understanding the way intra- and inter-community conversations differ and the harm that can be done by carelessly dragging intra-community discussions inter-community — /especially/ the harm that can be done by an outsider doing that dragging — needs to happen before an eavesdropper has any business /responding/ to hooks writing.

Engage with it personally? Sure. Share reactions to it? Usually. Respond to it? ie, critique it? Nope. I’m nowhere near a place I can do that respectfully. And neither are the vast majority of white folks.

What Is Harm?

I was drafting a ‘Teshuva procedure’ (the traditional Jewish version of a ‘restorative justice process’) for my synagogue when I ran into a small problem. How could I define the situations the procedure was designed to address and the types it wasn’t. Easy to say ‘harm and harassment,’ but what is harm?

For all the discourse around harm reduction, restorative justice, etc., I realized that I’ve never seen anyone talking about this important question. What is harm?

How do we define it?

Many people in leftist spaces have defaulted to an ‘I know it when I see it’ view of harm. Which anyone familiar with history knows won’t work as a practical definition. It inevitably ends up as a silencing and oppression tactic. After all, if I know harm when I see it and I don’t recognize harm being done to people I see as ‘other’… at best, I don’t have power over them, and they will need to argue for recognition of the harm they have experienced. At worst, I have do power over them and can silence them directly.

Another popular approach (not just in leftist spaces) is to self-define harm. If someone says they are harmed, then they are harmed. This sounds like a fine system — until someone says that your existence makes them uncomfortable and you are harming them by existing. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem like a very workable definition.

Other discussions are happening now, discussions that talk around the question ‘what is harm.’ This discussion on Tumblr, for instance, talks about the problems with equating ‘uncomfortable’ with ‘harm’. If you stare out of the corner of your eye, you can see the fuzzy edges of other definitions taking form.

But as an autistic person, I have been burned by these kinds of fuzzy, not-defined-but-understood social weirdnesses before. I really dislike this way of defining a thing.

I want to see actual discourse. What is harm? What does it mean when we say someone or some group has been harmed? Is all harm the same?

What Is Harm?

We’ll never going to come up with a perfect definition of ‘harm.’ Language is not only ever-evolving but inherently imprecise. That doesn’t mean we can’t try for a good-enough definition.

No one person will be able to come up with a good-enough definition on their own. We need to see lots of discussion and debate to reach a comprehensive, widely applicable definition.

(Let me acknowledge here that I’m sure these discussions have been happening in scholarly circles. But those discussions and definitions haven’t filtered out into mainstream use, which is where they are needed.)

But I’ll put in my two bits and see if anyone wants to riff off them:

‘Harm’ is action that interferes with or prevents full access to personal autonomy or public spaces.

If someone breaks my leg, then both my personal autonomy (ability to choose where to go and when, financial autonomy [paying for medical bills], etc) and my access to many public spaces are restricted. If the TSA takes away someone’s mobility device, their personal autonomy (ability to choose where to go and when etc) and access to public spaces are restricted. Both of these are harm – even if my leg will heal and the mobility device will (hopefully) be returned.
Harm must be an action (including speech actions). It cannot be thought, idea, or intention. However, intention to harm can be an ethical violation in and of itself, even if no harm is caused.
Harm can be accidental or even done without awareness of causing harm.
Any entity can cause harm – who takes the action is not part of the definition and should not be.
Preventing access to other people’s private spaces (without other consequences) is not harm. I do not harm you by blocking you from my blog or not letting you in my home.
Harm is not always unethical. A dentist pulling my tooth is harming me (pain bad enough to interfere with daily life, restrictions on eating, potential long-term dental issues). But if my tooth is damaged enough then the harm of pulling it may be necessary to protect my long-term health. If someone attacks me and I punch them to defend myself, I have harmed them. But they would not have been harmed if they had not acted with intent to harm me first.
Harm can be consented to. I can consent to having my tooth pulled, to ‘extreme’ sports, to kink without safe words, etc. This consent (like all consent) can be withdrawn.

What do you think?

How would you modify this definition?

Or what alternative definition would you propose?

This definition fails to address some harm beyond the individual level. What about ‘harm to the environment’ or ‘harm to the community’? Or broad-scale harms like cultural appropriation. I have no idea how to fix this, do you?