Notes from Hypnotherapy Session #2

From the Energy Reading:

• Two Chakras most depleted are the throat and sacral. The throat is responsible for creativity and voice; the sacral is responsible for groundedness. Hips also depleted, left more than right.
• There's a strong disconnect between my head and heart (mind and body). The mind often acts out of fear; the heart out of love and light.
• My purpose is to spread light and love, to make a difference in people's lives simply by sending out positive energy to them (which must replace the energy of fear and anger I currently send out).
• I have a "guide"; his name is Joseph, and I should ask for his help to meditate. I should choose a word (like "one" or "home") to repeat, keep a pen and paper nearby to write down anything that persists, try to get to silence.
• I have grounding issues. Meditating light into my sacral Chakra (tailbone) and connecting it to the earth will help with feelings of scatteredness; eating root veggies and peanuts, putting my hands in the dirt, and hugging or rubbing my back against a tree will also help me feel grounded. My biggest challenge right now is finding the ground because I'm floating, unanchored.
• The five words she "heard" most often during her energy reading of my body were anger, fear, humiliation, abandonment, and frozen trauma.

From the Hypnotherapy session. The following are mantras we came up with during the session:

• I have important things to say
• I'm doing the right thing, whatever I'm doing
• I want to do what brings me pleasure and brings me joy
• My body is strong
• I can do whatever I put my mind to
• I am a powerful being of light.

[My first word when I was a baby was light.]

Can't Read, So Write

I've sat down 4 times now to read for class Tuesday and can't seem to get focused. My mind keeps going back to a mental image accompanied by a panoply of sounds, none of which are related to the mental image, vertiginous in that its space is out of sync with its sounds.

The Space

It's the conference room in Morrill Hall, the English Department conference room, and I'm there to listen to two ABDs deliver pieces from their dissertation. Only three professors showed up; the rest were PhD students. Small talk, mostly; noncommittal, mostly avoiding eye contact (though not with every single one of them), topics I've already forgotten. In my mental image, it's as though a camera is looking down from the front of the room, ceiling-level, centered onto the room which has three rows of officey chairs in an arc before a podium upon a table. There I am, last row, third chair from the door.

The Sounds

The night before, Thursday, another student and I met with a professor in her office in the evening as we do twice a month to discuss the last 2 books we've read. That night, we were supposed to have been discussing excerpts from one book, which I had painstakingly taken an hour to PDF for the professor so that she could print them out 5 minutes before our meeting. The last time we met, she finished the meeting by telling me that I needed to stop "performing not-knowing" and begin "performing knowing," by which she meant that, in class and in meetings and anywhere when I'm around other English students and professors, I should speak only when I'm sure of what I'm saying, but otherwise, I should remain quiet and absorb what I can from the conversation. If the conversation steers toward a book I've never read, for example, it's bad form to say, during that conversation, that I've never read the book. I'm to refrain from speaking at all until I have something worthwhile to contribute. But this is a tricky situation, because if I don't know anything about what we're talking about, then when the professor calls on me to give an answer, instead of being my articulate self, speculating as to why I think it might be... I'm completely cut off from language, and I blurt out something asinine, because, in my mind, during the entire conversation leading up to this moment, instead of thinking to myself, "how can I put my voice into this conversation," I've been telling myself, "don't try to say anything; absorb what you can." So that when she calls on me, I'm not prepared to talk because, as she's told me to do, I'm refraining from speaking when I know nothing... and now she wants me to talk?

It's madness in my mind when I'm around her. I can't think for thinking about what I'm thinking about, and I can't talk for thinking about what I'm talking about and how it's working in the conversation, and where it might take us, and if I'm prepared, then, to go there as well.........

Stifling.

Anyway.

It is the comment about "performing knowing" that I've excerpted from its time and space 3 weeks ago and it now accompanies the image of the conference room from yesterday. But it's only one layer of sound. The other layer comes from this most recent meeting the three of us had, from last night. In that meeting, after feeling completely closed in upon myself the entire time, fearing that every word out of my mouth would be attacked as too stupid, as not thoughtful enough, as not informed enough, as performing the wrong thing or even performing the right thing for the wrong reason, at the end of the meeting, the student asked the professor if she was coming to the Faculty vs. Student bowling thing this weekend; the prof said she couldn't, the exchanged some sentiments about it. The student turned to me and asked if I was going. She knows from having talked to me a dozen times or so about it that I loathe attending those events, and the more "professionalized" we all become, the worse it gets. So, I turned to her and said exactly what was on my mind: "Ooh, a room full of English professors? Where do I sign up?" And then I walked away.

That moment is another sound byte extracted from its original context and laid over the image of the conference room. One layer yet to go.

The third sound byte might actually help contextualize the last, flippant remark I made to the professor and the student that might otherwise come across as undue bitchiness (it is bitchiness, but it's due). In just this last week, I've had two cases of food poisoning, 3 days apart. Just as I was recovering from one, the other hit. Because of this, I had to make some difficult choices about what to read and what to skip. One of the things I chose to skip was an article for the professor's class that we ended up talking about the entire three hours. When I arrived to the prof's office that evening for the meeting, I began by apologizing, explaining to her the food poisoning situation and having to skip another class at the last minute, and she crucified me by saying the most obvious statement in the world: you know you should have brought the text with you to class. Yes, I know that I should have brought it with me to class, but I didn't. I brought the wrong book. Yes, I know it's not a smooth move for a PhD to come to class without having done the reading. Yes, I know I'm scum for having one off day the entire semester. Yuck. In the last year, I've had exactly one interaction with this woman that was agreeable; the rest have been caustic, aggressive punishment after punishment because she's sadistic, and she'll admit to that (she studies sadism). Her whole agenda is to shape people into these "professionals" who pretend to know things they don't so that they set themselves up to get embarrassed later when it's revealed that they, in fact, don't know. I'd rather just say I don't know and get it over with.

I wanted to say, "I didn't bring the article, but you should know from past experience that I'm a good student who will have a very good reason for not having brought the article." But she treated me like a shitty student who pulls those kinds of tricks every single class period. I don't, but she likes to make students feel like they're just not good enough, they don't know enough, or they don't know well enough how to pretend that they know. It's sickening to me.

So there are the three sound layers:

• You need to stop performing "not knowing" and begin performing "knowing."
• "Ooh, a room full of English professors? Where do I sign up?"
• "You know you should have brought it with you to class."

I'm no longer sick from food poisoning, but my stomach is in knots about this whole situation. The Others seem to be handling it just fine; they all perform whateverthefuck the professor wants them to perform, and gladly. They look exhausted from it. :( But the more they morph into the professors they're going to someday be--the personas they're adopting presently as defense mechanisms against the professors who think grad school is basic combat training--I like them less and less. I don't want to become that. I threw that flippant, bitchy statement in there in hopes of jarring them out of their little bubble for a second to see that the masks they wear make them difficult to be around and impossible to feel relaxed and comfortable around. Why in the world would anyone want to spend extra time with that when they're not required to? Then in addition, the professors are now going to police our behaviors outside of the university? No thank you. For people who study binary oppositions and how our belief and perpetuation of them maintains the current patriarchal (Oedipal) mindframe of the world, they certainly spread the hegemony pretty thick themselves.

Am I wrong to assume that if I'm not cutting it in this field, someone will tell me straight up instead of letting me write a dissertation and then not give me a PhD? I mean, they are really into punishment, so wouldn't the ultimate one be to let me get all the way "through" and then prevent me from calling myself Doctor?

Dorky, Geeky Civil War ephemera

In 1939, the film Gone With the Wind premiered in Atlanta, Georgia. The legendary novel on which it was based had appeared three years earlier, and its author, Margaret Mitchell, was a fierce defender of the traditional South. Indeed, as a child she had happily assumed that the Confederacy had won the Civil War. The theaters in Atlanta were segregated in 1939, and Hattie McDaniel, who was to win an Oscar for her role in Gone With the Wind, was forbidden to enter the privileged whites-only theaters. Even so, some African-American children were permitted to see Gone With the Wind in this venue. Dressed in "pickaninny" costumes, they were on stage as part of the entertainment for the white audience. Martin Luther King, Jr., then ten years old, was among them.

-- Stimpson, in "Series Editor's Foreword," Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War (U Chicago P, 1999).

This anecdote brings it all together: the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement.... ties it all together with a nice King-sized bow.

A Truly Non-linear Rant, for a change...

I'd only been there for about 15 minutes. The entire time, he had been chatty; rapid-fire questions like Been married? How many kids? Your boyfriend come over and hang out with you? I did what I went there to do, and I didn't mind hanging out with him, listening to him talk, watching him lie to try to impress me. But then the conversation turned. Ever thought about getting your card? Are you a resident? You might want to consider getting a card... see, me and a buddy...

I felt creeped out, and then when he started making short, coded phone calls to some man on the phone, hinting that he wanted to see my other tattoos, something inside calmly said, "get up and go, right now." So I got out of there.

I've been experiencing something kind of interesting lately. It's a long story. As you know, faithful reader, I had been, for a few months, quite addicted to LOST. I ended up watching seasons 1-5 at least 4 times, possibly 5, I lost count. I watched the final season only once. The thing I liked most and the reason I found time in my day to watch LOST was because the characters were, imo, so rich and fascinating, and the actors who played them did such a great job. I felt, after watching so much, that I could identify with and probably even speak on behalf of many of the characters, haven gotten to know them so well.

Then, one day, in a fit of nostalgia, I got on Netflix and ordered North and South, the television miniseries from 1985 starring Patrick Swayze. The acting was terrible, the plot was thin and flaky, and there were a number of other issues I won't go into here, but I will say this: I found myself invested in the fate of these people during the Civil War, and I remembered why I loved studying the nineteenth century during my MA program. Romance. The sentimentality, the pathos, the dripping-with-foreshadowing, star-crossed lovers... The characters in nineteenth-century American fiction have a way of seeing the world that goes beyond a pre-9/11 mindset, which is saying a lot; they had a pre-Civil-War mindset, and how that kind of mind worked is fascinating to me. While North and South told the Civil War story in terms of its battles and politics, I found myself interested more in the war characters--John Brown, Stonewall Jackson, and Abe-the-man-himself-Lincoln--than I was with the fictional Mains and Hazards of John Jakes' creation.

North and South disrupted my LOST repetition compulsion cycle, but it did nothing to really try to represent the world as it was in 1840, 1860, 1870... while rewatching the miniseries reminded me of my love for the romance, I knew that it was an incomplete, white, bourgeois, homogenizing, and hegemonic version of history told through a microcosm. So I started watching the Ken Burns Civil War documentary. I'm just now in 1862. I cried this morning when Stonewall Jackson died.

So, in my thoughts, I've been trying as hard as I can to get into this other era--this other space in time and thought and American (r)evolution. As I was driving back home tonight, I started seeing the scenes before me on the side of the road as the "era" we're in now: as a photo essay of Americana in the twenty-first century. I started out in a ghettoized part of town, so I noticed lots of cars alongside the street and in driveways, packed in as close as they could get together, some with windows down, others with various stickers and decals. Run-down. Dark. Apartments lining the streets. When I turned onto a main road, I noticed an industrial scenescape. More signage posted alongside the road; houses and apartments turned into neon-sign-lined 24/7 convenience stores, plopped down alongside an elementary school, a 2-story house, a church. Then there were 4 lanes with signs overhead telling me to go this way, do what we say, and everything will be okay. And all of us got between dotted lines in our sign-inflected cans of tin, rubber, and plastic and toed the line, regardless of whether we had "Al Gore in '94", "Obama 2008", "W", "Buy Local", or "Toyota" stuck to our cars. But along with this industrialized, machine-like part of town came a dark scariness. If one person decided to rebel against the dotted lines or ignore the bright red light hung from lines above us, it could mean death. It could mean that some of us don't finish our delightful drive home. It could mean I never walked back in to my apartment tonight. The scary, dark, and Schroedingerrean feeling of driving through this gothic part of town was, however, quickly forgotten when it turned out into this brightly-lit area of town with an increasing number of people on the streets. Individuals, individuals running with their dogs, groups of girls with black tights and white tee shirts running, groups of boys in long brown coats walking, girls in Uggs, girls in Uggs, girls in Uggs. People everywhere, and no dark dankness, no cars lining the street... yet the same sameness. The same falling into line, doing as we're supposed to do pervades all of these different spaces. Even this one.

Driving from his house to mine, in my condition, proved to be an intellectually and physically stimulating experience. I've been trying to think about the term "romanticism" in a broad, broad way (too broadly for some, probably). Maybe I'm trying to open out the term "romanticism" to include myriad responses to the question, "What do you mean by 'romanticism'?" I mean a lot of things by it. I mean the nineteenth-century American literary period/era/movement; I mean the set assumptions that comes with a label like "romantic comedy"; I mean...

I mean to ask "how is sexual violence romanticized?" or maybe "how does sexual violence function in 'romance'?" Or maybe some combination/relation of those two questions. From there, pending I'm right and it does play a role, I want to explore how it's being represented during the Civil War (and possibly the broader antebellum-bellum-reconstruction years, 1830-188? or 189? -- not sure of cutoff date). I want to compare that representation of sexual violence to another representation (of a representation) of sexual violence: the resurgence of interest in the Civil War during the 1990s. I choose this second time because it was a cultural phenomenon that changed the way the world has "known" the Civil War and therefore the Civil War's representation of sexual violence. I assume I'll find several types of effacement or sublimation of sexual violence in the more recent depictions, but I also suspect that if, as I hope to prove, sexual violence is a cornerstone/lynchpin of "romance" (broadly defined), it should manifest itself in even today's configurations of "romance," though it will likely be hidden or effaced (perhaps to degrees and according to intended audience/situation).

I've eaten half-a-box of Little Debbie cakes just thinking about it.

Recurring Dream... with a Twist

About a month ago, I had a dream that I was living in a small rental apartment (kind of like the one I have now but with some differences). In the kitchen of this space, next to the water heater, was a door that I apparently hadn't asked about or even noticed when I first moved into the apartment. But months after I had moved in, the door suddenly made itself known to me, and after that, I just had to go through it. When I did, I found a basement which connected to the main house that the apartment was in. In going through the door, I immediately found myself in a room with carpet and dank walls, like someone had been sitting in there for years smoking. Through another door, the rest of the basement was what you'd expect: concrete floors and walls with years and years of stored-up junk and memories lining the walls, stuffed into overhead compartments constructed of plywood.

This was the basement in the dream from a month ago. I remember leaving the basement space, going back into my apartment, and closing the cream-colored door and locking it.

In last night's dream, the cream-colored door was ajar, and there was a sizable gap between the bottom of the door and the floor which wasn't there the month before. Through this gap between door and floor, two tiny kittens had crawled. When I opened the door to throw the kitties back into the basement, instead of entering into the dank room from the previous month, instead there was a set of stairs that went even further down into a sub-basement space. I tried to put the kitties back on the stairs and close the door between me and them, but the latch that holds the door to the frame was busted. I eventually wedged a mattress pad under the door to both prevent the kitties from re-entering and the door from hanging open.

I could still hear the kitties meowing from the other side of the door. :(

Consummation

Lately, I've heard it said a number of times: "It's not real until you put it on Facebook."

Posting it has become the consummate act. Gone are the days of telling it to your girlfriend whilst huddled in the corner of the room, as far away from the phone and your parents as the curly, twisty cord would allow. It's no longer shared over coffee between two, chatty women or gay men at 90mph, words slurring into a language slowly crafted by decades of rapid-fire-back-and-forth.

For me, it is no longer told to Shannon.

For years, nothing was real for me until Shannon knew about it. I thought, during those years, that my inner core was connected to her inner core as though by a chord or chain. That connection assumed that I had, at some point, felt confident that I'd accessed that inner-most entity and found it to be like mine, and I'm sure that that's exactly what I thought happened a time or two; but as time has shown me, to assume that there's a singular, unified inner self is not sensible considering how much and often people change over the course of a lifetime. The part of me that I thought had connected to a part of her... those parts existed in and for that moment. There may be traces of past parts, loosely connected for a time, but even that's a residue and not a real, live, breathing, thinking, evolving person. To access that would be... wow... something else entirely. But to believe that I connected to something solid and permanent in another person is a belief I now recognize as flawed.

But to connect is exactly what I crave because I'm human. So are you. It's this need to connect to something solid and permanent that has led humans to construct God. You and me, reader, are probably connected in some way. I probably feel, at times, like telling you something makes it real, makes me real. You probably fill (or are now filling) that role for me at times and in ways. But I know you know what I'm talking about when I say I want a deep connection. I'm talking about penetrating--yes, penetrating--to the uttermost sanctum and deepest interiority of another's being. Some call it a "soul mate."

Notice that so far I'm talking in metaphysical abstractions. I do that. I do that here because I don't really want the body enveloping that inner core. Sure, I think I'd like "a body" now and then, but not "the" body for life--the one body that will be with my one body while we try to penetrate each other's sanctums. I mean, maybe I do want the body, but from all my experiences with lots of other bodies... I don't know. All I know is this: I once thought I wanted to be with bodies, so I did what I was supposed to do and experienced lots of boy/men bodies. When that failed to satisfy me, I switched sides and experienced lots of female bodies. Now that that's not getting it either, I find myself in a paradox: I want another mind but not another body.

John Locke on LOST hired a phone sex operator for this very purpose. But even he, eventually, bought two plane tickets, one for him, and one for "Helen."

Maybe someday the "right" kind of person will come along. I'm not sure at this point if the mind will arrive in a man or a woman, but his or her body will have to turn me on as much as his or her mind does; otherwise, game's over. I guess I'm looking for someone who's pretty intense, like me. Someone who likes to listen and to talk, who speaks freely about what s/he's thinking and feeling and has the intellectual perception to distinguish between and among those feelings in order to articulate them. Someone who likes to analyze and play around with the thoughts that arise from such sport as people watching, reading, watching TV, listening to music, exercising, having sex, drinking wine, eating, traveling, dreaming.

Not that I really anticipate his or her arrival. I guess I'm just saying this because It's not real till I tell someone else. Not yet, anyway.