mea culpa - refusing mimetic expectations of behavior... or, I've been a very bad girl

In my search for obscure texts to stimulate my writing, I came across the philosophy behind generative anthropology.

This ability to make meanings, this mimesis, makes us learn from others in order to remove that source of learning as a threat or to redefine that source. If that's the case, for philosophers working in generative anthropology, Western Culture might be seen as the ultimate example (i.e. "melting pot"), taking ideas from the individuals present, consuming them and regurgitating a new, clean version, sometimes without the persons present.

In some ways, in dealing with an issue with my daughter, I directly think of what my mother did and, adding some of my ideals and the feminist liberal thinking I brainwash into my daughter, inevitably do something near opposite my mother's example.

I love this idea, even if it seems to argue with itself - isn't activism a constant revolution in the mind, where we live in the world of dominance but end up tearing it away? I suppose I could go Audre Lorde here and say we cannot tear down the master's house with his tools, but there is something in Plato's idea that poets don't tell truths, they are guided by madness, inspiration (when we are lucky) - they reorganize mimetic ideas to retell, redefine what is viewed. Well, maybe he just didn't like poets - he did place philosophers as the highest ranking citizens. Hmmm.

I am saying all this, and its in my mind because I've been trying to write about the politics, around food sources, energy sources, individuals, etc - but hate that I always seem to write better when I'm getting laid. How high-minded is that? It's like I can't focus - my mind so busy I need something to just settle me down.

I have been reading the santeria stories of Oya. I'm still working on that play in poem form and came across one where Yemaya (orisha of the ocean, mother) tricked Oya (orisha of the cemetary, warrior, lover) into trading her the ocean for the cemetary. Oya, angry over being tricked, still ended up in charge of the winds, of abrupt change, of fire and earth and renewal.

I like staying in that space. It allows me to trick myself into writing and, if I fail and just get laid instead, it allows me to find the power through that doorway. No guilt here. Guilt implies conflict and, if I am creating, there is no conflict, only joy. Sheer, immense joy at accessing freedom.