Here is something I wrote a little while ago

...you see, I sort of think that in Christian theology the trickster is Christ. He takes on earthly form, just like the raven, and the coyote, in various western-hemispheric religions, then he plays the funniest trick of all where he "dies" and really has everyone there but they go to visit his corpse (forgive me, I don't know the story all that well) and it is gone...this is where he discloses that his "life" has been a trick, albeit a meaningful one intended to teach those on earth.

and humans get stronger by being able to laugh at their own mortality

Well here is what playwrite Tomson Highway says about the Trickster in the notes leading up to his play "The Rez"
"A Note on Nanabush

The dream world of North American Indian mythology is inhabited by the most fantastic creatures, beings, and events. Foremost among these beings is the 'Trickster' as pivotal and important a figure in the Native world as Christ is in the realm of Christian mythology. 'Weesageechack' in Cree, 'Nanabush' in Ojibway, 'Raven' in others, 'Coyote' in still others, this Trickster goes by many names and many guises. In fact, he can assume any guise he chooses. Essentially a comic, clownish sort of character, he teaches us about the nature and meaning of existence on the planet earth; he straddles the consciousness of man and that of God, the Great Spirit." (HighwayXII:1988)

Christ's resurrection happens at easter, ayostar, ostara...the spring equinox...symbolizing rebirth, or passover which symbolizes freedom in the Jewish religion
freedom from slavery, freedom from earthly existence, freedom from winter

I have a better chart I think than the one I did before

in the beggining
water/river
dragon

then this separates into

unknown/known
nature/ancestors
earth,moon/ sun,stars, sky,air
emotion/ reason
body/ mind

and then reconnects at

trickster
sexuality
art
fire

yaaaaahhhh...my second-most recent post, one I wrote earlier this evening, has ended up underneath the one I wrote yesterday and is marked as 'February 11'

don't ask me how I managed to post them like this

I guess this is what happens when you are going insane

interesting, somehow my feb 15 post ended up as more recent than my feb 16 post that I just wrote a little while ago

this, like everything else, makes absolutely no sense

this was one interesting psychology course I took...I only took the intro to Maps of Meaning, though, his second-year course

http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/~peterson/mom.htm

but I read the book
and my disclaimer will say that there is a good chance that I have completely misunderstood Dr. Peterson, if you want to know what he really thinks, go to his website...

it seemed to me that his approach to religion had some important cornerstones

one; the feminine aspects of god are as important as the masculine

two; the "evil" aspects of existence are just as godly as the "good"...

I came up with my own chart...it's a bad use of the four elements, I know...

in the beginning
air and water
chaos


earth /sun
mother/ father
nature/ ancestors
body / mind
emotion /reason
unknown /known

fire
child
sexuality
trickster
life
christ/devil..."twins"

of course not all sexuality is procreative- (that would get kind of ridiculous, don't you think?)
to take this literally would be fairly sexist and heterosexist indeed


BUT it may have some mythological significance


nature and ancestry give birth to procreation

the physical and the psychological give birth to the sexual

a mind connected to a body is life


Peterson talks about the importance of the "father" as a guiding figure but also the importance of his not becoming over-rigid and forbidding the influence of the "mother" as a regenerative figure

(if the "father/mother" element is bothersome feel more than free to substitute non-gendered terms, I just can't think of any right now)

in a sense, it is important that old kings die and make way for new kings
and that the mother continue to bear new kings

Peterson also talks about how Christ and the Devil are necessarily intimately connected- they are not really antagonists, they are more like brothers...however the first is willing to admit his weaknesses and learn from them while the other is not, and hence becomes not just flawed but intentionally evil

it seems to me that Christ/Devil is one manifestation of the Trickster, like Anansi or Coyote...

and Peterson's main claim seems to be that this is how monotheism was intended to be practised

wow

what happened?

Somewhere it seems that the feminine aspects of god were at the very least disregarded...Mary plays a role in the New Testament but it is limited, and the Old Testament is not necessarily better in this regard

and sometimes they were even outright persecuted, look at the way witchcraft was treated after patriarchial monotheism took hold in Europe

Also, the Devil was banished from heaven, of course...and not only did HE ignore his weaknesses but large masses of people were instructed to ignore HIM...


Interestingly...one of the pagan gods was/is often represented as having horns...


According to Peterson, people who ignore the evil aspects of human experience are chosing to be themselves evil

or perhaps there were but few evil people controlling the society by taking from them the means with which to control themselves...this gets a little Foucault's Power/Knowledge, I know...I have very few original thoughts

this is interesting to me after taking classes in post-colonial theory and also sexual diversity theory

why do heterosexual european men have such a history of doing horrible things to others?
(it may be good to note that the vast majority of people I have met in the above categories are actually wonderful people...)

...European "myth" did not stop having evil and unknown elements, just that these were transposed onto other people...women, the colonized- how convenient then that it was the feminine aspects of god being ignored...and these HUMANS were treated in the same way that European myth had come to dictate that these ELEMENTS OF HUMAN EXISTENCE should be treated

and sexuality, with its necessary influence of nature, became evil

whatever, I am still trying to figure out what art has to do with all of this

it may be that art stands in the midpoint between emotion and reason- sort of like sexuality
and is a way to regenerate the known with the unknown, essentially, making it a little bit evil, like sexuality...

I am trying to write an essay about art, and why it is often either trivialized or viewed with suspicion

At the end of madness and civilization Foucault comes to a few interesting conclusions, on eof them seems to me to be that the difference between a mad person and an artist is simply whether or not he or she produces art

so, the artist channels madness into something we all can use...this is both a very important and very dangerous position to be in, especially when a society does not view this regenerative process in a particularly positive light...

aaaahhh it's not pacific time over here and for me in these past couple months this hour has become known as late at night....

Well, I am still trying to hammer this one out, I think there may still be some hope here

"Ruse and new triumph of madness: the world that thought to measure and justify madness through psychology must justify itself before madness, since in its struggles and agonies it measures itself by the excess of works like those of Nietzche, of Van Gogh, of Artaud." Foucault Madness and Civilization p289

"Nietzche's last cry, proclaiming himself both Christ and Dionysos, is not on the border of reason and unreason, in the perspective of the work of art...it is the very annihlation of the work of art, the point where it becomes impossible and where it must fall silent; the hammer has just fallen from the philosopher's hands." Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p.287

"To write is to communicate, express, witness, impose, instruct, redeem, or save- at any rate to send out an unambiguous message...Obscurity is an imposition on the reader. True, but beware when you cross railroad tracks for one train may hide another train...To write "clearly," one must incessantly prune, eliminate, forbid, purge, purify..."(Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Woman Native Other, pp16-17)


Who, then, communicates what we don't have words for? The artists, of course...

I am interested in Foucault's connection between art and madness and then madness and civiliztion

often a binary is drawn to include wilderness along with the feminine and civilization with the masculine but I believe this to be a misuse of that binary...

for a civilization to work it must be constanly drawing new knowledge from the unknown and getting rid of ideas that are no longer useful

and perhaps there is no such thing as wilderness really, because even the forest and the jungle have a very clear order

but for a population to be controlled, the means of available communication must be "pruned, eliminated, forbidden, purged, purified,"

what is Foucault's connection between madness and disease, anyway...at the beginning he talks about how in the middle ages insanity came to replace leprosy in the minds of Europeans

a powerful way to control people is by fear of disease...if insanity is seen as a disease...

but I am still sort of spinning in binaries...fear of the unknown leading to fear of disease

this is where I found the existence of groups like Pivot (try googling PivotLegal) in terms of all the groups covered under its umbrella

is there an "other" really or are all these people just unified by a common enemy?

that shows what state my brain was in after staring at the computer for so long

it's redefining prostitution as sex work

does not define sex work as slavery, that's the whole point

blah

well if anyone's reading this and I just perplexed you, sorry

but jo bindman seems pretty interesting

Caught in Traffick

oh why oh why won't my links work?

jo bindman wrote an article called "redefining sex work as slavery on the international agenda" which should be available either by googling her name or the title of the article, (sorry, I just could not get any links to work so google it'll have to be)

this also somehow links to walnet and was written in collaboration with Anti-Slavery International and the Network of Sex Work Projects, both of these organizations have websites that I think are worth a look)

oh, I first heard of Jo Bindman when I was reading Global Sex Workers: Rights Resistance and Redefinition which is a compilation edited by Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema. An interesting point is that Kamala Kempadoo, though she was teaching in Colorado when she wrote this, is now a Women's Studies professor at York University, right here in Toronto.

on the issue of trafficking, I had usually thought of it as something that happens across borders but I have just learned that it can happen within borders, too

try googling

department of justice canada human trafficking

and

rcmp frequently asked questions on human trafficking

try this

http://www.icclr.law.ubc.ca/Publications/Reports/human_trafficking_2005.pdf

or google the International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy, once there, the sidebar has a what's new section, click on it, then scroll to where it says 7/28/2005- Human Trafficking, A Reference Guide for Canadian Law Enforcement, click on it then scroll to the bottom where again it says Human Trafficking, A Reference Guide for Canadian Law Enforcement, click on this and you will be in a 72-pg report. Pgs 8-10 has some intro and definitions and pgs 64-68 has a questionnaire which seems to outline the issues well as most people probably don't have time to read the whole thing.

posting links on my myspace blog has not been working for me so I am going to try it here

http://sec.sa.utoronto.ca

I have not worked there for a few years, but this led to where I am now working, Guelph-Wellington Women In Crisis

http://www.gwwomenincrisis.org/

I also found some organizations that seem to share a similar ideology

I will apologize if the links don't work, try googling the title of the organization, which unless otherwise specified is the main part of the url

Here's Toronto Public Health's sexual health section

http://www.toronto.ca/health/sexualhealth/index.htm
and for more resources here, try "more info"

the community centre at 519 church st.

http://www.the519.org/

Planned Parenthood Toronto

http://www.ppt.on.ca/
Sadly I am too old for The House, but I always found it useful when I wasn't too old, try 'programs and services'

also try

http://www.hasslefreeclinic.org/

http://www.ontarioearlyyears.org

this organization is called Education Wife Assault;

http://www.womanabuseprevention.com/html/
they have some interesting links in the 'links' section that don't seem limited to wife assault

here is a legal activism site in Vancouver
http://www.pivotlegal.org/

and finally

http://www.walnet.org/

http://spoc.ca