POETRY OF WOMEN'S HAIR. Via TKB.

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A FREE BEAUTY: Dappled Things, the Catholic literary magazine which accepted many of my earliest published short stories, really needs your financial help to continue. If you like what I write, just think how many other Catholic writers and artists are out there for you to discover! Daniel Mitsui, whose intricate black-and-white illustrations are like Graeme Chapman* + MC Escher = icons, is also offering an artwork exclusively for DT donors. (Uh, or at least he was last time I checked. You should ask them!)

[* ETA: Oh LOL! Graeme Base. Clearly my memory is pining for the fjords.]

I know with the economy so bad, it's tempting to neglect the arts in your giving. But you could, for example, get the Mitsui print or a DT subscription as a Christmas gift, thus feathering two birds with one dollar! And all of us need beauty, too, in order to live.

Survival is the least of my desires.
--Dorothy Allison

The last bus I missed to Maudlin Street,
so you drove me home in the van
saying, "Women only watch me
for my blogs..."

Sean Collins says more or less what I thought about Danica Novgorodoff's Slow Storm comic... except that he was easier on white-$#@!up Ursa than I was. But yeah, the art is amazing.

Maggie Gallagher on Ricky Gervais vs. Oscar Wilde (yeah, you have to fight through some partisanage, but it's worth it--scroll until you hit the Wildery if you have to).

Mark Shea on converts vs. cradle Catholics--yeah, I think this is a good assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of all us messed-up popish folk.

THREE DEFENSES OF THE BUTCH MANTILLA: This is not a post about sincerism!

But in my previous vast post on the subject, I said this:

My strong impression is that sincerism is connected to a belief that ethical discourse is the only valid philosophical discourse. Talk of right/wrong always trumps talk of beautiful/banal. (I hope this formulation indicates that I do think sincerity--like ethics-talk!--is frequently appropriate.) If you say, "Women covering their heads in church is just another sign of Paul's misogyny!", and I drawlingly reply, "Well hmmm, I'd rather see a bulldyke in a mantilla than a nun in a pantsuit"... I've stepped out of the ethical discourse into the aesthetic, and therefore forfeited my right to be taken sincerely/seriously.

(And I mean it, too! I'd clip a daggone diaper to my head if it meant that most women would wear actual pretty lace to church instead of board shorts!)

which, understandably, led some readers to say that they were not willing to get on the "misogyny is okay if it's pretty!" train I seemed to be conducting.

So here are three defenses of my position, in order from least to most persuasive-to-me.

#1. Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty? In any case where we're negotiating a tradeoff between beauty and equality, I'll defend the practice of asking, "How much beauty for how much equality?" In this case the beauty is obvious--those headscarves and church hats are lovely!, and the various kludges women used when they were caught short without their headcoverings (such as bobby-pinning the church bulletin to their hair) strike me as charmingly humiliating and wry. Meanwhile the equality is quite minor and fairly unsettling--neither men nor women would be expected to wear some symbol of their submission to God.

However, this argument does fail to meet a major objection, which I hinted at in the Hamlet (/Ophelia) quote. The mantilla can be understood to imply that women need more signs of submission to God than men do. This is a subspecies of the "outsourcing their spiritual lives to the womenfolk" that I decried here. If we understand the mantilla this way, we oppose its beauty not only to truth but also to men's submission to God. Both of these oppositions seem to me to be much harder cases than beauty v. equality, and I'd be hard-pressed to take beauty's side here.

So ultimately I think the "tradeoff" argument fails, though the fact that I consider it a strong argument should give some sense of how I approach these issues.

#2. Spending time, nowadays it's equal, nice, it's paradise.... I might be more amenable to ditching the mantilla if it really meant that women would be equal! But it never does, you know? Ridding ourselves of these ways in which tradition beautifies our subordination never ends the subordination (and often doesn't even mitigate it); it simply replaces beautiful subordination with banal.

I note that the solution is always to ditch the specifically feminine symbols of submission, rather than universalizing them--nobody ever says that men should wear the mantilla. Julia Serano might have some sharp words about why that happens.

#3. The Man-Mary, again. If we look for ways to express both the spiritual equality of men and women, and gender difference, we may find ourselves in dangerous territory! Since I doubt adopting the yarmulke will win many friends among Our Elder Brothers in the Faith, we must look around for specifically Catholic forms of submission which are restricted to men, as the mantilla is restricted to women. Guess what we find?

IN WHICH I STILL DON'T QUOTE OSCAR WILDE!: EDITED 9/28 to fix a ridiculously stupid mistake! ...I've gotten two terrific pushbacks on my big post about sincerism. You can find Camassia's here. And Miss Ogilvy emailed me thusly:

Just a quick question in reply to your recent "sincerism" posts: where and how does a gay self-identity (as opposed to a queer self-identity, which is a bit more flexible and maybe less self-serious) fit into your arguments against sincerism? I think one could use your definition of sincerism ("requiring a sincere, authentic, honest accounting of one's thoughts and emotions," which entails wrongheaded "assumptions about our ability to know ourselves") to diagnose a gay identity as a symptom of sincerism or subservience to the sincerist ideal. Would love to hear your thoughts on this question.

And where and how does a Christian identity fit into your arguments against sincerism? What would a Christian apology for irony look like? Might be interesting to try on the following proposition for size: Protestantism serves the sincerist ideal; Catholicism does not.

Am feeling very sincerist myself as I sort through Gay Christian Whatnot. But I agree with you that the sincerist ideal is a mess.

I think it makes the most sense to reply to both at once. What follows will be so scattershot, it'll make a blunderbuss look like a laser. But I never promised you a precision garden!

From stupid through cute and maybe eventually ending up in worthwhile, let's proceed with our education, one and all....

1) I would never have cited journalism as a sincerist profession! But then my genealogy of the profession looks like "Journalism in Tennessee" --> SOMETHING ELSE AWESOME TK --> the New York Post. I suspect that there are other valid genealogies!

2) Maybe helpful: My problem is not with sincerity. I've seen women at the pregnancy center do amazing work through transparent personal sincerity. (It may be relevant to Camassia's comments that the woman I'm especially thinking of here is black? But I've also seen white women make amazing impacts, forging incredible connections with women who clearly wanted a sincere and heartfelt woman to talk to. In my own counseling, I try to shift between more heartfelt and self-revealing talk as vs. more complicit and nudge-wink talk based on what the client seems to be open to. More on cultures and subcultures, and leadership, in a bit.) My beef is with the attitude that sincerity is always better than other modes of self-presentation. And this I think is a desperately American form of crudeness and anti-aesthetic, democratic/majoritarian well-meaning callowness. More on this in what follows.

3) Camassia's point about anti-sincere strategies serving minority communities in their internal communiques against outside understanding or this-bridge-called-my-back-building is fantastic. I never would've thought of that, actually, and I really take to heart her defense of translation even though I think I still partly disagree.

Some things need to be universally translatable, like the Gospel. But does everything need to translate? Can we preserve some turf where the translator is still a traitor, and if you want to learn the language you'd better be ready to go native?

And what does it mean to be a Christian if your answer to those questions--like mine is, right now--is "no" and "yes"?

I'm not sure, and I think Camassia and Miss Ogilvy are both on to something supremely important. All I can really say in response is that I suspect that sincerism, like boboism ("bourgeois bohemianism"), attempts to assimilate the minority into the majority and translate in that direction--whereas Christian translation should work, I think, the other way. In other words, in the translation from Pepper LaBeija's language to Peter Sprigg's, a Christian should seek to translate Spriggish into LaBeijan rather than visa-va-va-versa.

I am open to accusations that this contrapposto stance simply reflects my own need to shore up my bohemian self-image. (She said, with a hipshot grin.)

4) I'm tempted to second Miss Ogilvy by saying that the Protestant denigration of "repetitive prayer" is a sincerist stance. I'm not sure if that's true really, because believe me, Protestantism is something I understand about as much as I understand the higher math. But here's something I wrote about repetitive prayer. Confession seems to work (for me, anyway?) somewhat similarly, in that the practice is so humiliating that it makes it unnecessary to dig the awl of self-scrutiny too far in: If I weren't really sorry I WOULDN'T BE HERE, ZOMG.

I think Miss O's suggestion that coming out is an inherently sincerist act is totally fascinating, since of course the gay subculture has traditionally (!) been one of the least sincerist, and yet I totally take her point about how coming out to oneself feels. Anyone have comments? I am at a loss!

5) I can think of two main categories of experience which prompted me to articulate why I think sincerism so often provokes bien-pensant stupidity on one hand, and cruelty-with-the-tweezers on the other. I have a hard time talking about sincerism because I find it much easier to point at than to define, and therefore it's easy to pat myself on the back for identifying examples. There's a way in which rationalism, for all its obvious falsehoods, is humbler than prudence, which requires so much trust in one's own perceptions. (Even if the examples are taken from my own life, there's still a showiness in the decision to display them in the light of my current better judgment.)

But here are the experiences. First, when I've been in a leadership position I've dealt with women (always women... I'm going to say this is cultural, and the guys would've framed their objections to my leadership this way if they'd thought it would win them masculinity points) who thought that the mask of command, as such, was inauthentic. Presenting a different persona when in leadership meant lying.

I think this is wrong on both rationalist grounds (I chose my leadership persona, so doesn't that choice incorporate the persona into my "self"?) and, obviously, aesthetic grounds. Leadership is an aesthetic act. It isn't rationalist, because there's always another syllogism, or an alternative premise, you can pose against the syllogism which would require of you something you don't want to do in the service of someone or Someone you don't love. It is leadership which guides you to the beauty or Beauty you could love enough to choose one set of syllogisms over another equally consistent.

So um yeah. I will, if necessary, pay for your trust by sharing some deep dark painful secret--but I'll respect you a lot less in the morning. I should be able to lead you without groveling for your pitying endorsement of my perspective.

b) I've several times tried to "relate" on a deep dark authentic level with someone going through a kind of suffering I can't share. I've tried to ask How You're Doing. I've tried to Be Real.

In no case has this ever been the right thing to do.

I get that people with much more sophisticated senses of how to be in the world (like Camassia) understand that what you do, when you're dealing with another person's desperation, is listen and be there and try to roll with what they give you, and not push. I don't think any of that is sincerism, even though it's sincere. But I do think sincerism is what I believed when I thought it was right to press my fingers against other people's bruises. I didn't think I was really acting as their friend unless I poked. I could not have been more wrong.

So that's where I'm coming from, on this question.

6) I'm not sure I want to overphilosophize here, since really I'm not sure what exactly sincerism is--like I said, it's easier to point at than to anatomize. But I am tempted to argue that sincerism is a part or a result of two philosophical tendencies I abhor anyway. ("You want a second opinion? Okay, you're ugly!")

a) My strong impression is that sincerism is connected to a belief that ethical discourse is the only valid philosophical discourse. Talk of right/wrong always trumps talk of beautiful/banal. (I hope this formulation indicates that I do think sincerity--like ethics-talk!--is frequently appropriate.) If you say, "Women covering their heads in church is just another sign of Paul's misogyny!", and I drawlingly reply, "Well hmmm, I'd rather see a bulldyke in a mantilla than a nun in a pantsuit"... I've stepped out of the ethical discourse into the aesthetic, and therefore forfeited my right to be taken sincerely/seriously.

(And I mean it, too! I'd clip a daggone diaper to my head if it meant that most women would wear actual pretty lace to church instead of board shorts!)

b) And on a deeper level, I really think sincerism is a subset of the Heideggerian fetish for authenticity and commitment. In this worldview, on the top level, Truth is found within--it's self-expression. I know that there is no philosophy without some level of self-trust. A radical skeptic can purchase bread, even though he knows it might be a hallucination, but he can never practice philosophy, because Sophia is nothing if she isn't real. (Even Derrida ETA 9/28 DESCARTES!!! "knew that he existed, and that he spoke French"!) But it is possible to distinguish between a philosophy of expressing the God within and a philosophy in which the self strives to recognize and love the God without--a philosophy in which recognition takes the place of expression, and submission is another word for love.

On the lower level, of course, "my real true deep self" becomes simply whatever my culture/subculture/biology/some complex interaction of all three tells me to value. That's one reason Heidegger's Rector's Address (which I used to be able to quote, as a party trick) is actually a valid conclusion from his premises. The naivete of sincerism is that it assumes that the self expressed will come pre-tamed.

Miss Manners knows better.

REFUSIONISM: So at a wedding over the weekend, I ended up in the perennial right-wing debate: Is fusionism a tactic, a political philosophy, or a scam?

What I say in this post is my interpretation of my experience; other people may have had other experiences, or interpreted them differently, and I'd really like to hear about that. But from my perspective, "trads" aka conservatives seem to interact with libertarians and their arguments in a very different way from the way libertarians interact with trads and trad arguments.

From my perspective, I see trads accepting libertarians as allies on criminal-justice/Fourth Amendment/"Leave Us Alone Coalition"/big govt vs. the "little platoons" issues, whereas libertarians tend to view trads as dinosaurs who don't believe in dinosaurs. (Keep in mind that I'm only talking about people in both camps who think a lot about their positions and have some degree of philosophical depth. Because I persist in my evidence-free belief that these people's conversations matter.) Trads seem to me more open to libertarian arguments on police power as state expansion than libertarians are to trad arguments on family and charity as the foundations of a free society. Trads seem to me able to grok libertarian arguments which invoke justice much more than libertarians can grok trad arguments which invoke beauty.

From these perhaps-wrong observations I move to a more general observation, behind which I'll stand all the way: American political and cultural discourse is devastated by our inability to speak politically about beauty. We let anything trump beauty--even choice. Even equality, for pity's sake! Thus we're desperately stupid about sex, about urban policy, about technology, about hierarchy and tradition. (Yes, I promise to cash out some of that list soon, but don't let that stop you from emailing me!)

And now back to a much more tentative question: We hear a lot about psych studies which purport to show that self-identified conservatives have a much stronger sense of "disgust" than soi-disant liberals. I wonder to what extent that is really true (who is more disgusted by images of physical pain, the devastation of war, torture, or--for one example in which I side with the right-wingers--skinning a rabbit?), but certainly a huge amount of liberal rhetoric is directed toward exalting reason at the expense of disgust. I dislike both of these terms! "Reason" too often becomes a nickname for naivete (rational = what my culture and disposition allow me to understand), when it isn't a nickname for power-worship (let the clever rule the weak). And "disgust" has all the class-based problems of shame, in which we recoil from the weak because of their weakness, as well as all the problems of good-person talk.

But I still wonder... if liberalism diminishes disgust (which I'm not convinced it does--I suspect liberals simply call their disgust another name, like "compassion"), is that why it also diminishes our ability to stand up for beauty? And does that mean we can't speak politically about beauty without reviving disgust?

I hope not. But beauty has so often been deployed against weakness (see: Paglia, Camille) that people on my side of the argument need to reckon with the moral passions we seek to unleash.

FLOWERS IN THE DUSTBIN:

Green and beautiful low-income housing? This sounds like an oxymoron. The usual standard for housing for the poor has been cheap and functional. But only this year came Intervale Green, a low-income apartment building in the South Bronx that might just be a model for developers. ...

Welcome to Intervale Green Apartments. Quietly but clearly it engages in a dialogue with the old psychology and social policies that say the poor don't need beauty--just basics. But Biberman understands that beautiful places change people's attitudes, reduce stress, improve productivity, and also give people hope.

more (I forget where I found this)

COME TO PAPA: More on mintiness. So after I'd done my growling about the Pope, I found some really lovely, inspiring accounts of Benedict XVI's visit. I'm going to keep these in mind the next time I'm tempted to skid from a historical, cautious mintiness into a defensive callousness. It's beautiful, in itself, to be able to see the beauty of the Bride of Christ in the person of the Pope.

scroll down to "a personal reflection"

I can't ever make posts like this without gay references