The Mirror Crack’d (By A Spear): Sex, Love & War At The Unitarian Universalist Society

This Sunday, PoemAlley and participants from the regional poetry community share their thoughts on gender relations, inequality and related topics clustering about that all-too ubiquitous (yet fatalistically under-examined) institution of organized mass violence, which has become the roaring hearth of American society over the last twelve years.

Part of the Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford’s series of lay-led summer services, "Sex, Love & War" will be hosted by Ralph Nazareth and feature readings from himself and fourteen other poets, including Robin Kurtz, Lisa Labazzo,  Bob Sanders and Ronna Schenkerman, with guest readings by Neil Silberblatt (organizer of the popular state-wide Voices of Poetry series), Middlebury-based poetry therapist Marianela Medrano and Jane Wickham.

In sympathy with the issues raised by such cases as Lynddie England's haunting, romantically-entangled stint at Abu Ghraib, as well as the more recent focus on the prevalence of rape and sexual assault in the military, this Sunday’s presentation will use a combination of music, words and video, both during and in the UU Social Room afterwards, to suggest how war distorts love and loyalty and how sex and masculine identity are mis-defined to validate endless armed conflict as normative.

While the 2012 documentary, The Invisible War (see trailer below under "Additional Information")  is laudable for campaigning against widespread sexual abuse within the American armed services, the question lingers as to how realistic it is to implement reform without first acknowledging such conduct as a byproduct of a belligerent foreign policy and the overtones of martial authoritarianism and privilege that permeate domestic entertainment, sports and culture--ranging from interrogation via sexual degradation at Guantanamo, the rape of an unconscious teen by Steubenville High football team members, jingoistic films (click here for a recent critique of Zero Dark Thirty), the "doing the Lynndie" photo craze following the aformentioned England 2004 scandal, not to mention the misogynistic half-time mascot theatrics seen in college and professional sports:

On the hopeful side, if the supposedly universal allure of conflict and power seem a timeless head-scratcher rooted inviolably in our nature or genes, maybe it only seems that way due to a lack of honesty to investigate its origins, because the toddlers from this 2010 Yale study of innate empathy sure don’t have trouble defying it:

Where:
Unitarian Universalist Society in Stamford
20 Forest Street (right across from the Avon Theatre)

When:

10 AM, Sunday, July 28, 2013

Contact:

203-348-0708/www.uusis.org

____
Additional Information:

War and Sex: ABrief History of Men's Urge for Battle

John V. H. Dippel
Prometheus Books, 2010

The People's History of World War II
Marc Favreau, editor

The New Press, 2011

On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
Dave Grossman
Back Bay Books, 2009

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined 

Steven Pinker

Viking Adult, 2011

Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden
BenBella Books, 2010

Invisible War (2012) trailer:

Sharing Privacy

Death, sex, love, and guilty deeds and thought: these four are private, death because it is the rarest event, occurring only once to each of us, and normally in seclusion; sex because we seek privacy to avoid embarrassment and foster intimacy; love because it exists in internal feeling, sensation, and imagination the individual desires to share with only one other; and guilty deeds and thoughts because they spontaneously seek secrecy in order to avoid humiliation, degradation, exclusion, and loss of opportunity.

 Religion traditionally seeks control of these four experiences. Religion encourages us to regard our own retention of these four in privacy as intrinsically injurious because we cut ourselves off from the commonality of experience-ignoring the implications of the fact that others cut us off from sharing their own tightly held experience. It would have us believe that we cannot prosper as individuals because our consciousness is too meager to support us cut off from intimacy with others in their own private experiences of death, sex, love, and guilt. The goal of both religion and literature is to help us acquire or regain unimpeded access to the totality of experience freed of the restrictions and blindness created by concealment of our own and others’ death, sex, love, and guilt, but religion and literature face different obstacles in this effort.    

Getty images

Literature, as the art form that shares an individual’s private experience across space and time with other individuals, is uniquely appropriate to supplement the deficiencies of individual experience that religion addresses without the controls religion places on individuals.

Literature improves on religion in a second way: it offers readers access to the privacy of others while religion shunts others’ experience away from us into the social dead end of confession. The primary defect of literature in this task of replacing religion is its lack of reciprocity: the author normally does not read the reader’s response nor the reader’s own expression of private experience. But reciprocal and mutual sharing, the ideal of religion, has rarely existed in religion anyway in recent times: a Catholic may share private experience with a priest, but the priest, rather than reciprocating, just symbolically readmits one to the realm of common experience (communion) on the premise that relieving oneself of one’s isolation from the priest, and thus supposedly from the deity, can supplant the need to share experience with the rest of the congregation, or humanity. The cleric is an interloper in the process of reconciliation: instead of having the community bond directly, he offers some relief from the pain of isolation as a pretext for creating dependency on the church.

Literature seeks to eliminate the mediation of the cleric and church by letting the reader know at least one person shares something of his or her private experience without demanding the price of conformity and obedience.

One cannot immediately fill the void of literature’s lack of reciprocity and mutuality. But the sustained habit of writing and exchanging writing and responses with friends can begin to remedy this deficiency. For writers who know and share with other writers, some communion develops within the group that can, to some extent, will itself to remain open to others. If that reciprocity and mutuality could remain open, for the members the desired functions of religion could be served.

                   
Richard Duffee 
December 28, 2011