Saturday, May 29, 2004

I need to get back to theology

Just a quick thought. I've put up so much news and the like on this site I must refrain.
I'm writing a paper comparing the narritive of Judges 4 to the poetry of Judges 5. I'm thinking Judges 5 may well be an older, feminine, oral tradition.
I have 3 papers which need to be written by the monday after this one, and I have to get ready for a test on the martyrdom of Ali in the Shi'ite Islamic tradition.
The fan is still broken on the computer, or at least it is still making really funny sounds, so this is about as long as I'll go.
Peace,
Chris

PS Here is a paper I wrote about Emma Goldman.

The ideas and deeds of Emma Goldman
By Chris Halverson
There is a phrase that may or may not have been coined by Barbara Tuchman “the idea and the deed.” This term expresses a discontinuity in anarchism; there is a huge chasm between the ideas supposed by Anarchist theorists and the deeds committed by Anarchist practitioners. An example of these disconnects between anarchist intelligentsia and propaganda of the deed can be found by contrasting the message of Emma Goldman with the Attentäte of Leon Czolgosz. When all is said and done, while Emma defends Czolgosz’s murder of President McKinley, she saw his actions as “impelled, not by the teachings of Anarchism, but by the tremendous pressure of conditions.” In this essay I will use the term the idea and the deed as well, but I will use it with a slight twist, and an ironic edge. My use of the idea and the deed can be best exemplified by the Attentäte of “Sasha” Berkman, one of Emma’s lovers. His idea was to kill the chairman of the board at Carnegie Steel, Henry Clay Frick, to set off a workers revolution, but his deed failed and the very workers who he intended to liberate subdued him. As the old joke goes the difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference, but in practice there is.
Emma Goldman’s life can be summed up as the clash of her ideas and ideals against her realities and deeds. Her life straddled the line between theory and practice. In short, she dreamed dreams, yet still had to wake up, look beside her, and see that her lover, Ben Reitman, was sleeping next to her, or more likely was away sleeping with another woman.
Emma Goldman wrote many essays and gave many speeches. She advocated many ideas and championed many causes, yet the ideas which stood the test of time were not her radical political ideas, such as being anti-suffrage and anti-property, but her radical, now we might call them modern, social views. The two defining ideas of Emma Goldman were the idea of free love and the idea that women should use contraceptives so they would only have children that would be loved. Born out of these public ideas, or maybe more appropriately, aborted from these ideas, were her private deeds. Emma advocated free love, yet was plagued with a weak and unfaithful lover who she was beholden to. While she endorsed contraception she seems to have yearned to be a mother and never became one.
Emma’s feelings about the relations between the sexes were formed very early. Her father was an uncompassionate and cold man who went so far as to blame her for being raped. She was also influenced by Vera Pavlovna, a character in Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done?, who was “unencumbered by the restrictions of her sex, who could love freely outside the confines of marriage.” With this kind of upbringing there is little wonder her ideas would one day come to focus on free love.
Emma started off her essay “Marriage and Love” writing, “Marriage and love have nothing in common.” She sees the institution of marriage to be a bastardization of love. It changes love from a thing full of freedom, as well as a thing freely chosen, into an economic bargain leading to capitalistic bondage; a girl’s “dreams are not of moonlight and kisses,” but of “shopping tours and bargain counters.” Emma also sees a definite double standard between men and women. Men can “follow the call of the wild,” but women must keep chaste. Her solution to both of these problems is free love, an open, unfettered, and uninstitutionalized coupling where both sexes could love multiple partners.
How did her private life, her deeds, live up to this idea of free love? She did have many lovers, but so often she found herself in love with one person, Ben Reitman, and loving him, “with the intensity of life itself,” yet he was unfaithful to her, and it hurt her. Not only did she end up seeing herself as weak she also began to loathe one of her most popular lectures, “Marriage and Love” because it “emphasized the distance between her vision and reality.” She also ended up refining and redefining free love as something different than promiscuity. This disconnect between her ideas and her deeds was definitely obvious, even to Emma. It was a lot more obvious than the divide between her want of motherhood and her ideas about contraception.
Emma’s idea of the “unloved child” comes from her own childhood. Her father, Abraham Goldman, had wanted a boy, and was therefor disappointed with the birth of Emma. Augmenting this feeling of alienation and being unloved Emma was sent away to live with her grandmother at age eight. Her grandmother then abandoned her to her cruel aunt and uncle. Unsurprisingly, all of this caused Emma to carry, “the fear of abandonment into the rest of her life.”
Responding to her experience of being an abandoned and unloved child Emma Goldman decided the solution was the idea of free motherhood. To empower women, and keep other children from being born unloved and feeling the alienation she felt, women needed to use contraception. Through free motherhood they were refusing “the indiscriminate breeding of children,” and instead producing, “fewer, better children.”
Her idea leans toward the rejection of motherhood, or at least a choice of motherhood on the mother’s own terms. Emma’s deeds, though, tells a story of a longing for motherhood. She played the role of a surrogate mother to a plethora of people. Ben constantly referred to her as “mother” or “his blue-eyed mommy,” as did, a lover of both Ben and “Sasha,” “Fitzi,” Almeda, a prostitute, and Senya Fleshine, an anarchist photographer, and Mollie Steimer, his companion. She also sees Mother Earth, the title itself suggesting her motherly attributes and longings, as “a child born of love,” and “my love child.” Finally, some things in Emma’s life are very suggestive of a want of children; they almost seem like huge Freudian slips. For example, one time to escape from police Emma claimed to be pregnant. Further, Ben named his son Brutus, because he felt he had betrayed her ideals by settling down and having a child, yet Emma “loved Brutus as if he” was her own. Finally, Emma said of the Spanish Anarchist movement’s loss, “It’s as though you had wanted a child all your life, and at last, when you had almost given up hoping, it had been given to you—only to die soon after it was born.” It seems, to err on the side of caution, quite probable, that Emma wanted children. Still, it is not as if there is no continuity between her theory and her practice, her idea and deed. She decided to choose quality over quantity, and, knowing that her life was too chaotic to ensure that the child would be loved, she chose to have no children.
Publicly Emma Goldman went throughout the country advocating her ideas of free love and free motherhood to thousands of people. Privately though “she would ‘be torn between the yearning for a personal life and the need of giving all to [her] ideal.” Her deeds were just as real as her ideas. She could, condemn “the institution of marriage for stifling love in a misguided attempt to enforce stability and fidelity,” yet find herself, “bruised from all the wounds of the lack of stability” with Ben. She could promote contraception and still yearn for a child. Emma Goldman rejected Sasha’s assertion that he was a revolutionist first and human second. Instead, for her, “the two aspects of life were intertwined, although occasionally at war.” Like the situation between “Sasha” and the workers at Carnegie Steel the idea and the deed diverged.

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