Stoned.

I remember lying on a pebbly beach somewhere, and they were throwing rocks at me.  And I didn’t move, but I could hear them calling things like: ‘Can he hear us?’ and  ‘He isn’t moving.’

Is that a memory of how a previous life ended?  Perhaps that is why it has stuck so clearly in my memory.  Perhaps that is why, at the time, it seemed frighteningly familiar.  Perhaps that was why I was unable to move or speak, but just lie there while they threw rocks, till they stopped.

The way I now remember it, I was with some other Boy Scouts.  I guess we were a Patrol.  I wasn’t particularly friendly with anyone.  I participated in everything without additional conversation with anyone.  We were on a beach somewhere.  In bathing suits.  For years afterwards I was haunted by the sight of one of the guys in black speedos.  I wanted to look like that, and tried for years, but never succeeded.  Anyhow, at the moment of my memory, like a snapshot in time, they were sitting together a short distance away, while I was lying on the sand that was mostly rocks, facing away and trying to ignore them and hoping they would all go away.  They eventually did, but not before doing everything to arouse me from apparent slumber.

A Couple of Mates

Let us call him James.  He went with, let you and I call him Don, to Tasmania bush-walking.  James was accomplished and did it often, abseiling and rock-climbing to reach magnificent, inaccessible places.  I was envious because I would have liked to be taken, though now I think of it, I never asked.  They came back rather faster than anticipated, and stayed at my place so no one in their home town would know they hadn’t stayed as long as planned.  I knew another guy years ago, from that same town but no connection, who had taken a job in a lighthouse, promising us all that he looked forward to the solitude; he returned after a couple of weeks and joined the Army!!

It was always my suspicion that something had happened between them.  A few years earlier, James had kissed me.  Once, sensuously but briefly, before glided away and we never spoke of it again.  I wondered if the same sort of thing had happened while they were in the bush.  Don managed to be unobtrusively heterosexual in a non-aggressive, non-macho way.  It was at a time when people were just learning how to raise the collective consciousness of social gatherings.  It may have been a New Year’s Eve late last Century when both James and I floated past each other, briefly alighting on a pile of coats and scarves on a bed in the dark. 

James, as we are calling him, had a Mother from Pakistan.  I believe he inherited the Sensuousness that pervades many cultures in the Middle East as portrayed in the 1001 Nights and Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat.  Pleasurable physical contact between people need not be sexual.  In countries with total and strict gender segregation, many men behave as do many other men do in prisons or on ships – for the duration.  After a time, he married a charming lady from Scandinavia, who must have found him exotic, though born and raised in Australia and being half Anglo-Celtic he was also like an average local

It was so long ago that I didn’t know what I was, or indeed that I could be anything in particular at all.  Looking back with present knowledge at times long past can be revealing.  Don was well ahead of his time.  In today’s contexts, he could have been gay or straight, it was hard to tell.  Certainly, he displayed none of the overt masculine behaviour of flirting, and certainly never inappropriate behaviour, though he did move in early, liberated political circles.  It was only many years later, but still many years ago, that I returned to the town for a reunion and a party and saw Don in the arms of a woman.  When I commented on it, all the other women in the room laughed and I was told that they had all been one of Don’s ‘conquests’ at one time or another, he was just very, very discreet.  They had all found out a couple of years previously when he invited them all to his birthday party, I won’t reveal which one, and he gave them each a rose and owned up to his infidelities.  

Did I mention that Don was little bloke who didn’t say much, but who was really good at football, all codes, as well as ball games played with sticks or balls and hoops?  He was very popular and had no enemies, so all the husbands, brothers, fathers and sons of the ladies with whom he dallied accepted it as quite natural that it should be so, and were pleased their wives, sisters, daughters and mothers were included.  The only women missing were the visible girl-friends that he had been known to occasionally and briefly have tragically ended relationships, but they had not been at that party nor the one I was attending.  Might I also mention that little Don also worked at the Tax Department, so he probably knew everything about everyone, but was very discreet about that too?

It's a women's world.

It always strikes me as inconsistent with human nature than so many Xian or ex-Xian women want to make their entire lives part of the wider world inhabited by men and totally reject any type of feminine seperatism as suression and isolation.

I have experienced a few different cultures where men were excluded from the women's world, mostly in the home, where little bubbles of testosterone-free tranquility reigns.  There is a genuine sisterhood, with a hierarchy based on age and experience, not competition.  As a man, I have only seen glimpses of it, but I was prililaged to be invited into some family homes when I was living in rural Utrakhand in the central Himalayas, where there is an annual "Women's Festival" barred to and unknown to men; I watched its procession from across the river with all the men of the village who all professed utter ignorance of what it meant as none of their mothers, sisters, wives or daughters would tell them anything, since the days of the Puranas.  But I digress. 

Washing Socks, deserves reblogging, what ever that means.

I have lived through the sexual revolution.  When I was young (that sounds so sad;-) there were just people, undifferentiated by sexual orientation.  Then the idea was promulgated and generally accepted that some people are biologically born to be homosexual, and they deserve full rights.  Homosexuality used to be a behaviour but now it is an ontological state, and is part of who someone is, not what they do.  However laudable this movement is, it has now largely run its course.  It is generally accepted that for homosexual, "gay" people of both genders to indulge in homosexual behaviour.  It is assumed that other people will not want to, but this is false.  I don't know about women, but I do know that many adolescent males, not only in Australia, indulge in private homosexual behaviour, sometimes going all the way, which is seen by them as just mucking around, and not real sex as there are no women involved.  They do it very secretly and believe themselves to be the only people who are doing that sort of thing.  What ever the present level of actual homosexual activity between heterosexual men, in a few years it will start to be socially acceptable for "straight" men to play round with each other in a sexual way, without actually being "homosexual" or "gay".  This was the situation in some ancient societies including the well documented Classical Greeks, hence the term "greek love".  Possibly, religious, moral or even legal sanctions will come back into play to minimise this social trend, even if it remains acceptable for registered and "out" homosexual people, perhaps after a genetic test, are permitted to openly live a homosexual lifestyle with full social benefits, etc.

Does morality move in waves?  With a trend towards more or less social control over individual behaviour, gradually over time in a particular culture, with gradual influence across national and regional boundaries, so the waves are out of phase.  Personally, I favour greater personal freedom.  I lived in India for about a year, a few decades and a couple of lifetimes ago, and everyone lived a very public life, by our Western standards, Families all slept in one big bed in the attic, and public nudity was generally avoided but tolerated or ignored.  But I do think the elevation of freedom of speech to a sacrosanct level is wrong, especially the proposed removal of 18C that stops anti-Semitism.

[To Xians: we didn't kill your deity, Rome did that.  When Rome became the centre of the Church, blame had to be deflected.  The present Roman Catholic Church is the direct continuation of the old Roman Empire, just changed a lot.  The religious head is still the Pontifex Maximus.  The psychological implications of the guilt they must feel for being the very people who killed their own deity must be enormous.  They have gone to great lengths to cover it up and blame us Jews.  How long can they hold out against the forces of reason and continue to believe their ancient mythologies?  It looks like it will still be a very long time, but with these things everything can suddenly change, like a mathematical catastrophe, so who knows?  I may live to see it.]