From Isobel Wren's Twitter stream:

Had a dream that I stabbed someone to death w a paintbrush and the bloodspatter turned into mural paintings of wild rose vines.

After the murder I was astonished by how beautiful it was. They moved slowly on the walls and ceiling as though they were alive in there.

I work at home, and I work for a company 200 miles away. I go there for major meetings (the ones that we can't do over the phone), or when clients or potential clients want to meet me, or for major company events like the Christmas party. Usually, unless I've already had my hair cut recently, I cut my hair before going down, so I can look all professional and respectable and shit.

But this year they've avoided having meetings, because they can't afford to fly people in from far away. (My train ride isn't that expensive, but some people need to fly in from the other side of the country.) And there haven't been many new potential clients. And the old clients are preoccupied with other things. And they canceled the Christmas party to save money.

So I haven't had a haircut in like six months. Ideally, I like my hair off my ears and off my collar. Right now it's about an inch below my ear lobes and a good two thirds of the way down my neck. Damn, I hope the stimulus plan works!

He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord:

But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife.

– I Corinthians 7:32-33

It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that love – in the sense of an exclusive caring relationship between two individuals – is morally wrong. As to explaining why I think so, I’m not sure I can improve on what the Apostle has already said. But I’ll try putting the case in my own words.

It appears to be universally true, or nearly so, that people are willing to make much more severe moral compromises on behalf of loved ones than on behalf of themselves. So much so that love can make good people into evil people. If you take two good and generous people, who are concerned for the general good of mankind, and you put them in a loving relationship, you end up with a couple that, while still individually warm and giving, is, as a collective unit, extremely selfish. Two rights make a wrong.

And it seems to me that this is not just an odd observation about human nature but a problem inherent in the concept of love. If you’re not willing to make moral compromises for your loved one – compromises that you would never make for yourself alone – then you don’t really love that person. If you’re not willing to give up part of your soul to help your loved one in need, just as you might give up part of your dinner if that person were hungry, then you don’t really love them.

It’s a horrible fact of life but a fact nonetheless. And the inescapable implication is that, by entering into a loving relationship in the first place, you are committing yourself to becoming a less moral person than you would otherwise be. If you choose to be in a loving relationship, or if you fall in love unintentionally and choose not to run away, you are making a moral choice and choosing evil over good.

So here’s my dilemma: should I be for or against gay marriage? I don’t think that homosexuality is immoral – not in the least. But marriage – marriage is definitely immoral. Marriage is an institution that consecrates and encourages the type of loving relationship that turns saints into monsters. And seeing that marriage is evil, can one in good conscience support the expansion of it? The gay marriage issue gets to the heart of the matter, because, technically, homosexuals can get married: they just can’t get married to someone with whom they are in love. So here we are talking about marriage specifically as the consecration of a loving relationship and not about marriage as merely a formal institution.

Is it unfair that one segment of the population does not have the option of engaging in this immoral act, while the rest do? Was it unfair that people in the Northern US were not allowed to hold slaves, while Southerners (or, after the Emancipation Proclamation, only those in border states) were, before the 13th Amendment abolished slavery entirely? Can it possibly be the case that the expansion of an immoral institution, however “fair” that expansion might be, is a good thing?

It was minutes, perhaps seconds, before the life was to pass from her completely. She wasn’t dead yet, and we didn’t know she was dying. She had been weak, after losing nearly half her body mass through various infections that had wasted her and taken away her appetite. She had been getting weaker, and the previous day we had found a trail of urine which broke just before it reached her litter box.

For all her months of illness, through the dreadful emaciation, as an agile and lively carnivore was transformed into little more than a skeleton with fur, I had avoided becoming emotional. My wife had supplied all the necessary tears.

But it was that moment, when she suddenly became so weak that she couldn’t even sit up and could barely even move a muscle. It was that moment that I broke down. I couldn’t stand to see her that way, her last modicum of strength failing. I cried, and I cried, and I cried.

I didn’t know she was dying. I collected myself just enough to put her into her carrier as my wife called the 24-hour veterinary emergency center. The cat had been spending a lot of time in the security of her carrier lately, and it seemed to me she was trying to walk in but just couldn’t even get a muscle to move. I lifted her in, and it seemed to me that she lay down, but perhaps her body just collapsed. For all I know now, she may already have been dead.

We didn’t know she was dying. We rushed her to the clinic, and the nurse said she would take her in back to take a look. My wife had barely begun filling out the intake form when the nurse returned, “She’s gone.”

We don’t know what caused her death. From our description, the nurse thought it might have been her heart. I can imagine that months of weakening and weight loss and several courses of antibiotics hadn’t left her heart in very good condition. And I don’t imagine that the special food we fed her to help her gain weight – the high-calorie mixture that had made our bathroom walls smell of liver after months of force-feeding – helped matters in that regard. Anyhow, for whatever reason, she was no longer alive.

It’s Monday now. Ten years ago, when our last cat died, I took the next day off from work. That wasn’t an option this time, because I work at home now, and there are things that need to be done. But nothing will get done very efficiently. The edges of my nostrils are sore, the way they get when you’ve had a cold for several days. My nose has bled three times in the past four hours. I think that’s a record.

If you spend your life trying to create beauty using some kind of inanimate medium (or media), people call you deep, and they forgive you for being temperamental and self-important. If you spend your life trying to create beauty using your physical self as the medium, people call you shallow, and if you're temperamental and self-important, they call you a stuck-up bitch.

In keeping with my new policy of putting my long-winded responses to Isobel Wren's videos on LiveJournal instead of YouTube, I'm responding here to the latest video, with reference to Samantha Grace's video from last week. I decided to use my own LiveJournal this time instead of the isobellezza community, but I'll link back from there.
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Actually three separate topics (but don't they sound good together?) from my responses to Isobel Wren's video and text blogs.

My opinion -- shared by many, I think -- is that the recent Virginia Supreme Court Decision striking down Virginia's anti-spam law constitutes the affirmation of a Constitutional right to commit fraud in certain cases. My argument is here.

Most people seem to think of “karma” as the idea that the good things and bad things you do eventually come back to you. I don’t think that’s right. Because who is this “you” that they eventually come back to? Buddhism teaches that there is no self. There is no “you.”

Here’s a thought experiment that should make clear the limitations of the concept of self. ( Read more... )

T minus 6 days and counting:  destination is official.

It’s a post by Isobel Wren (isobelwren) in a ModelMayhem forum in a thread called “embarassed about being a glamour model?” (June 23, 2007)

When I tell people I model they tend to give me a once over and say, "YOU model?" or become scarily familiar with me, asking too many questions or assuming that I'm an easy lay b/c I'm a model (that's not why I'm an easy lay). All my relatives think I'm a MUA (even though I'm effin HOPELESS with makeup [which BTW isn’t true, if I am correctly informed that she did her own makeup for this picture] ) b/c my parents are too embarrassed to tell them and that seems to work so I've started telling people I'm a MUA or that I write porno scripts.

I'm not embarrassed by what I do, I love what I do. I'm embarrassed by people's reactions to what I do. I feel bad lying to them (I hate lying) but until society is more accepting of glamour models I'm going to lie b/c I don't feel like having to explain myself to someone when it's nonna their damn business.

I can understand why she lies, but it makes me sad. It sounds like living in hiding.

Her words, written and spoken:
all her words that I’ve read and heard;
Her pictures, still and moving,
still moving and moving still;
The information that describes her
and everyone around her and her relations to them;
The knowledge of what she’s done and where she’s been
and thoughts of what she may do and where she may be someday;
Her possessions, current and past (and maybe future),
such as I know and such as I imagine;
What I can imagine of how she experiences the world
and how and what she feels and thinks –
and how she might feel
and what she might do
and how she might act
and what she might say
in various imagined situations:
This is everything she can be to me.

And sometimes I feel as if this everything that is her to me
Is like a pool of water
And I’m a sponge
thoroughly immersed in that pool:
Only the sponge has completely disintegrated;
Every fiber of it has been replaced by water,
And it has only a sort of virtual existence:
A memory of where it was,
Where it is, only now it’s completely made of water;
Or else it’s just a point within the water,
Zero in every dimension;
Or dissolved in the water,
dispersed throughout the water
and indistinguishable from the water itself.

Sometimes I feel that

And sometimes I don’t feel that.

Saturday night my wife and I were eating in a restaurant, and there was a couple nearby who reminded me of us when we were younger. I really don’t wish I were young again. Maybe if I were someone else. But I don’t want to relive the last 20 years. And I don’t want to be the person I was 20 years ago. I think I was happier then than I am now. But I have none of the feeling of “Nessun maggior dolore” like Dante’s Francesca in Hell remembering her time of happiness. It’s more like Socrates and the pig.

It’s so strange. Sometimes it seems silly that I ever cared at all about Isobel, and other times I’m so in love with her that it makes me cry to look at her picture. Je ne comprends pas.

For a while last night I didn’t care about Isobel. As if I were seeing myself from outside and thinking, “It’s silly to care about this girl who hardly knows you, and even sillier to worship her. Why are you doing all these silly things?” At the same time I had this sort of “mad scientist” feeling that I sometimes get. Like, “When I complete my plans, I shall rule the world!” Not clear exactly what those plans are, but that’s the best way I know to describe the feeling. I guess the psychological term is “hypomania.” Basically, I had gone from worshiping Isobel to worshiping myself. Echo had become Narcissus.

The short version of this argument was just long enough for a Twitter update, but I’ll expand it a little here.

My first premise is that our culture regards individualism as masculine.  (This is true in the US anyhow; I’m not sure how much it’s true in other countries.)  The ideal of masculinity is the John Wayne character who does things his own way and refuses to be constrained by the expectations that society has of him.

My second premise is that our culture values unambiguous sexual identity.  It wants men to be masculine and women to be feminine.  A man who isn’t sufficiently masculine is a wuss.  A women who isn’t sufficiently feminine is – I’m not sure what the epithet is, but being a butch chick is uncool.

So if you’re a man and you choose to be masculine, you’re doing what society expects of you.  Thus you are a conformist, not an individualist.  Therefore you’re unmasculine.  Being masculine makes you unmasculine.  Our culture’s concept of masculinity contradicts itself.

Hopefully this is enough to show that our culture’s concepts of sexual identity are inherently absurd.

Isobel Wren is leaving Boston, and it hurts. It hurts like hell, and I don’t know why. It’s not as if I would see her very often (or, for that matter, at all) if she stayed in the Boston area. And it’s not as if I will never get a chance to meet her because she’s moving away. (She’s going to be back to visit now and then.) But I feel like Echo, wasting away until I have nothing left but a voice, and my voice can only repeat what has been said by others. (If you listen closely, you’ll hear me say “Turning and turning in the widening gyre” or “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.”).

...nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Ne la miseria...


So I guess I'm lucky that my life has sucked all along...

I'm standing in line for "The Last Mistress" (English title; I won't give the French title because I'm sure to spell it wrong) at the Boston MFA. On Saturday night (as I now remember from last year) there is always a long line of ticketholders waiting for the last film to get out. I could be studying Dante (checking the text of Canto V of the Inferno for a YouTube video I plan to do), but playing with a Blackberry turns out to be easier (at least easier on my aging eyes, because the Blackberry is lighted, and Dante isn't). It looks like the previous film is letting out now, and my wife is here. More later.

UPDATE: We're sitting in the movie theatre now, and a question occurs to me: when they say to turn off cell phones, does that mean really turn them off or just set them not to ring? And if the latter, how loud a vibration is acceptable, if any?

EDIT: Now home. Fixed some typos above.

Seeing that I’m married, I have no business falling in love with somebody else.  But if you’re going to fall in love with someone besides your spouse, it’s always better if it’s someone with whom you have no chance of ever having a relationship.  So I don’t feel too bad about the moral implications.  I mean, it hurts, but it’s sort of a good kind of pain.
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