Richard Jeffrey Newman

I just shared this on Face­book – via Upwor­thy–but I am also post­ing it here. You should watch. Here’s the copy from Rebecca Eisenberg’s post:

One bil­lion women across the globe will be raped or beaten in their life­times. That’s a really depress­ing sta­tis­tic. So on the 15^th anniver­sary of V-Day, Feb. 14, 2013, the One Bil­lion Ris­ing cam­paign is invit­ing one bil­lion women (and those who love them) to stand up and dance — to DEMAND an end to vio­lence against women. It’s an invi­ta­tion to woman and men to put an end to the sta­tus quo, it’s an act of sol­i­dar­ity, and it’s a refusal to accept vio­lence against women and girls as a given. On Feb. 14, I’ll be danc­ing with a bil­lion other peo­ple. Will you?

Trig­ger Warn­ing: Uh, pretty much all of them in the first minute and a half. Jump to 1:30 for the inspi­ra­tional, won­der­ful, chill-inducing, and empow­er­ing stuff.

It speaks for itself. It’s part of the Not Ever campaign.

One of eight major works that can reli­ably be ascribed to Attar, Ilahi-Nama (Book of God or, some­times, Divine Book) has, accord­ing to Ency­clo­pe­dia Iran­ica, been trans­lated once into Eng­lish, by John A. Boyle in 1976, and once into French, by F. Rouhani in 1961. Four of Attar’s eight works—Ilahi-Nama is part of this sub­set — are mys­ti­cal nar­ra­tives, each one deal­ing with a dif­fer­ent aspect of Sufi thought and expe­ri­ence. Ilahi-Nama’s sub­ject is zuhd, or asceti­cism, which Sufis under­stand to mean a dis­ci­plined stance of detach­ment and indif­fer­ence towards one’s desires so that one will not be ruled by them. This focus on the inte­rior world of human emo­tion dif­fer­en­ti­ates Ilahi-Nama from the other of Attar’s poems with which it is often com­pared, Man­teq al-tayr (Con­fer­ence of the Birds), his best known work in Eng­lish. The two poems are sim­i­lar in form (they are each frame sto­ries) and mes­sage (the key to enlight­en­ment exists within each human being, not in the exter­nal world), but the fram­ing nar­ra­tive of Man­teq al-tayr, an alle­gory about a group of birds in search of a king, is essen­tially a cri­tique of people’s need to find a mas­ter who will lead them on the path to true under­stand­ing. Ilahi-Nama, on the other hand, is about learn­ing to mas­ter oneself.

The fram­ing nar­ra­tive of Ilahi-Nama is about a caliph who asks his six sons what they desire most. The first son says he wants the daugh­ter of the king of the peris (faeries); the sec­ond wants to learn the art of magic; the third son desires Jamshid’s cup because it will reveal to him the secrets of the world; the fourth seeks the water of life; the fifth son cov­ets the ring Solomon used to con­trol demons; and the sixth son wants to mas­ter alchemy. As each son gives his answer, the father tells sto­ries to illus­trate, first, how shal­low and mate­ri­al­is­tic the son is for want­ing what he wants and, sec­ond, how the son should under­stand his desire so he can use it on the path to enlight­en­ment. None of the sons, how­ever, accept their father’s lessons at face value, argu­ing that he has mis­un­der­stood their desires and that the lessons he wants them to learn, there­fore, are mis­guided. When the father tells his first son what has come to be known as “The Tale of Mar­juma,” for exam­ple — about a beau­ti­ful and right­eous woman who, after her hus­band leaves on pil­grim­age to Mecca, must fend off a series of men who are so over­come with lust when they glimpse her beauty that they will stop at noth­ing to have her — the son accuses his father of want­ing to elim­i­nate sex. “God for­bid[!]” the father replies, explain­ing that “The Tale of Mar­juma” illus­trates how sex, prop­erly com­pre­hended and entered into, is a first step on the path to enlightenment:

But when your desire achieves apoth­e­o­sis,
sex gives birth to a love with­out lim­its;
and when this love is pushed by pas­sion to the edge
of its strength, spir­i­tual love emerges; and when
spir­i­tual love can grow no fur­ther, your soul
will van­ish into the Beloved’s end­less­ness. (My translation)

Given that the sur­face of the nar­ra­tive in “The Tale of Mar­juma” feels more like a Perils-of-Pauline-type story in which the depraved and debauched men get their come­up­pance than one about the spir­i­tual nature of sex­u­al­ity, the son’s mis­read­ing of the tale is an easy one to fall into. Such a read­ing, how­ever, fails to account for, among other things, the fact that not all the men who try to pos­sess the woman give in to their desires with­out a strug­gle. They are, in other words, nei­ther evil nor merely slaves to their desires; they are human and flawed and, more to the point, they are, in the end, able and will­ing to repent. Indeed, they must repent, for God has pun­ished them with a paral­y­sis from which — in an irony that is at the core of the story’s mean­ing — they can be healed only by con­fess­ing to the woman every­thing they did to her. » Read the rest of this entry «

Recent events in my life[1. I have moved this post over from my other blog, and I will even­tu­ally move Part 2 here as well. This way, when I finally get around to writ­ing Parts 3 and 4, they will all be in the same place. I see each post in this series as one sec­tion of a sin­gle piece of writ­ing, not as a dis­crete essay unto itself. As a result, while each sec­tion may con­tain its own argu­ment, it is not really pos­si­ble to know whether an issue that you feel is impor­tant will or will not be left out of the argu­ment made by the entire piece if you’ve only read a part of the series. I cer­tainly do not mean this caveat to be, in any way, an inoc­u­la­tion against cri­tique, but given the mod­u­lar nature of post­ing to blogs and of how blogs are read, it is a caveat I’d like you to keep in mind if you find your­self won­der­ing, and com­ment­ing on, why I have not addressed some­thing you feel needs to be addressed. Thanks. Also, to pro­tect the pri­vacy of the indi­vid­u­als involved, some names have been changed and some iden­ti­fy­ing details have been fic­tion­al­ized.] have started me think­ing deeply, for the first time in many years, about con­doms and what it means to use them. Not that I have failed to take con­doms seri­ously. I have worn them when I needed to, refused to have inter­course when they were not avail­able, and I have a ten-year-old son who knows what con­doms are and why, all else being equal, every­one who has sex should use them. I am, though, also old enough to remem­ber (and boy does it feel strange to use that expres­sion) when safe sex was pretty much exclu­sively about birth con­trol. I might have learned that using con­doms would help keep me from catch­ing or trans­mit­ting gon­or­rhea or syphilis, the only two STDs I knew about at the time, but I’m not sure. Instead, the focus in my sex­ual edu­ca­tion when I reached puberty was on the need for a young cou­ple plan­ning to have non-procreational sex to do every­thing they could to pre­vent the woman from becom­ing preg­nant, and that meant, for men, being will­ing to wear a con­dom unless the woman was on the pill, using a diaphragm or had an IUD.

It did not occur to me that there might be more to pre-AIDS male het­ero­sex­ual respon­si­bil­ity than sim­ply keep­ing a bar­rier between my semen and the body of the woman in whom I would oth­er­wise have left it until I was hav­ing sex reg­u­larly with a woman I thought I was falling in love with – we were each in our early 20s and using only con­doms – and I real­ized I did not know what she would do, or even what she thought she would do, if she became preg­nant. Con­doms, after all, do fail. I was as cer­tain as I could be that I did not want to become a father, but I was also cer­tain that the ulti­mate choice of what to do if she did become preg­nant was hers. So, if a con­dom did fail, it sud­denly occurred to me, and she decided not to have an abor­tion, I would be a father whether I wanted to or not. I knew I’d do my best to live up to the respon­si­bil­i­ties that father­hood would bring with it, but I did not think my rela­tion­ship with that woman would sur­vive. Not only would I have resented her for hav­ing made the deci­sion that made me a father, but I did not yet know if the love I was begin­ning to feel for her was, as they say, a love that would last, and hav­ing to be par­ents to a child – for­get whether or not we would have, or could have, got­ten mar­ried – was not the cir­cum­stance under which I wanted to find out.

I will not retell here the story of what hap­pened when I tried to talk to my girl­friend about my con­cerns, except to say that I was com­pletely unpre­pared for her to tell me she had no idea what she would do if she got preg­nant. It wasn’t that I expected her to know with 100% cer­tainty what action she would take, or that I was look­ing for some kind of con­trac­tual agree­ment that would insu­late me if she at first said she would have an abor­tion and then changed her mind; nor was I think­ing that the only answer accept­able to me was the one I hoped she would give, i.e., that she would have an abor­tion. What I wanted, first and fore­most, was that we should talk, openly and hon­estly, and then, once each of us knew where the other stood, we could make a deci­sion about what we should do in response. It had never entered my mind, though, that the per­son who would be preg­nant if preg­nancy hap­pened would even think about start­ing to have sex with­out some sense of what she would do.

Given that my girl­friend had not thought about this, or at the very least was unwill­ing to tell me what she thought about this, I did not see how we could con­tinue hav­ing sex, or, to be more pre­cise, how I could con­tinue hav­ing sex, know­ing first that our fuck­ing put me at risk of becom­ing an unwill­ing father and, sec­ond, that if I did become an unwill­ing father, it would prob­a­bly mean the end of our rela­tion­ship. I’d been very happy with the sex we were hav­ing before we started fuck­ing; I assumed my girl­friend felt the same way; and I saw noth­ing wrong with rolling things back to our pre-intercourse days until we were able to talk about this. I wanted to be with her, plain and sim­ple, and that desire far out­weighed for me the plea­sures of putting my latex-covered penis in her vagina. So, more or less – at my insis­tence, not hers – we stopped fuck­ing. » Read the rest of this entry «