Polyamory and Sex Could Save the Planet, Author Argues

Tinamarie Bernard on Modern Love Examiner

At first glance, sex and the environment don’t make obvious bedfellows. How can the answer to our environmental problems – global warming, access to fresh water, ecological sustainability, and the use of fossil fuels – possibly be found between the satin sheets of lovers? According to a growing number of greenies, free love may just save the world. In her newest book, Gaia: The New Politics of Love, author Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio attempts to lay the groundwork for this premise.

        

         Can pushing our comfort 

         zones about love be the 

         answer to world peace? 

       Image: Rene Magritte

Read more in  Modern Love Examiner

March 17, 2010

 

Science of Gaia: What Does it Say about Polyamory and Sexual Freedom?

Hi everyone!  

It was a pleasure to interview with Sean Hardin, a journalist who runs a podcast called Truther. He was a terrific listener and gave the interviewee, yours truly, all the time necessary to explain the connections between Gaia, the scientific concept of an interrelated planetary ecosystem, and practices of sexual freedom, including polyamory.

The interview was posted on April 9th, 2010, and runs about two hours.  It's roughly divided in three sections.  

The interview begins with a discussion of the science of Gaia, including its implications for human life, planetary ecology, and world peace.  This section continues with a discussion of the new paradigm for knowledge that Gaia science proposes, why this paradigm represents the only possible sustainable future for humanity and why it is still considered dissident. 

The subsequent section focuses on the Gaian principle that we humans, like all other parts of the biota, are already always related.  A relationships can therefore be considered a simple actualization of the potential implied in a given relatedness.  The challenge of creating healthy relationships is that of actualizing this potential with balance and authenticity. 

The final section discusses Gaia science in the context of other scientific theories that are still met with disagreement because they oppose common beliefs, including interpretations of AIDS that emphasize the ecosystemic aspects of the disease.  The section emphasizes the need to verify the accuracy of a scientific hypothesis before using it as a basis for legislation and regulation of behavior.  It concludes with a perspective on social spaces where one can experience practices of love that involve multiple participants in safe, positive, and self-empowering ways. 

Interview with Serena Anderlini - Truther/Sean Hardin on Vimeo

Whether you agree with yours truly's views or not, don't miss this interview!  It opens up vistas for significant interconnections from both scientific and humanistic viewpoints.  Hardin does a terrific job of plugging in all the main references, including scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, humanists like Gore Vidal, Deborah Anapol, and Suzann Robins, organizations like World Polyamory Association and others.

  

Truther on Facebook 

The most curious and brightest of you will want to know more about what Gaia means for polyamory and sexual freedom in general.  The book upon which the interview based is Gaia and the New Politics of Love.  Rush to get your own copy while it's still on discount! 

Place your order on Amazon.com

If interested in the holistic health aspects of Gaia science and theory, you can check a recent edition of The Gary Null Show where yours truly is a guest speaker.  The segment starts at the 45th minute. 

March 24, 2010 - Interview on The Gary Null Show

Last but not least, stay tuned for more information about upcoming events and features.  Please post your comments too.  It's unmonitored and free!  Yours truly is very active and energized by all the new connections her work is generating. 

In faith,

Serena

A "Masterpiece?" OMG . . . I'm humbled. Really? - Review of Gaia and the New Politics of Love - The Journal of Bisexuality

Bi Book Review by Hudi Shorr
will appear in Bisexuality and Spirituality, a special-topics issues of 
The Journal of Bisexuality, edited by Loraine Hutchins
pre-published with permission

Gaia and The New Politics of Love: Notes for a Poly Planet

Serena Anderlini D’Onofrio,

North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA, 2009

Reviewed by Yuhudis (Hudi) Schorr

Our world is in crisis amidst wars.

Military wars are robbing mothers’ of their children, and people of their land.  Political wars are pitting the people of our nation against one another, forcing them to take positions that may make the boundaries between those who have and those who cannot afford to have, more clear and defined than ever before. 

Religious wars are abundant around the globe, attempting to justify the denial of basic rights of freedom as the word of God.  The Earth has been catapulted into a state of chaos; the wars that we are waging upon her have taken their toll. Never before have we witnessed such levels of increased poverty and environmental degradation. In our time, the human species has acquired the capability to destroy both human life and the biosphere that hosts it.

Gaia and the New Politics of Love: Notes for a Poly Planet is a masterpiece by Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio that offers us a chance to transform crises into opportunity.  Using science and nature as her backdrop, Anderlini-D’Onofrio constructs a new politics of Gaian symbiosis that affirms love as the force with which we must affect change in our universe, if we, as a species, are to survive our current state of environmental and political chaos.

In three sequential and interconnected parts Anderlini-D’Onofrio outlines a practical strategy to combat the toxic forces we have inflicted upon our planet.  Using feminist ecological epistemology she offers an entirely new way of thinking about love, based upon teachings learned from bisexual and polyamorous communities that can offer a fresh perspective with which we can begin to repair the damage done to the biota that currently sustains us.  If we are to survive the trauma to the Earth that we have caused, we must rethink our current conceptions of what that Earth is and the forces that we use to negotiate our way through it. We must expand beyond our currently limited definitions of love and family in order to include entire communities and the ecosphere that we inhabit. If we continue on our path of obsessive consumption of resources without regard to the harm we are causing, the biota will transform and survive, while our species will become one of the many extinct species that have at one point inhabited her live body.

Anderlini-D’Onofrio ominously warms us: if we continue to mistake Gaia for an assemblage of useable resources, we will kill ourselves, not her. It is now more than ever that we need her messages of warning, and instructions of repair.  

I.  Gaia in Feminist Science

Anderlini-D’Onofrio begins by placing her Gaian philosophy within a framework of feminist ecology.  Ecofeminism postulates that Gaia, the Earth, has a life of its own.  It has a consciousness like an animated, self-regulating organism. In ecofeminism, subject and object are largely the same, and control is replaced by more symbiotic dialogue and collaboration. This feminist epistemology effectively defeats the logic of either/or, and embraces a more inclusive logic of both/and.  In this way, feminist ecologies debunk the myth of distinction between that which is “human” and that which is “nature”.  A Gaian philosophy implies giving up our sense of entitlement as a species deluded to thinking that the biota is a resource to be exploited by us. 

“If we humans can come back to viewing ourselves as a resource among other resources with no special entitlement to occupying the position of subject in opposition to a “natural world” that becomes objectified as existing for the sole purpose of meeting our needs, then we can find again forms of coexistence with each other and the planet that hosts our lives.” (Intro, xxii)

Symbiotic reason indicates that while there are no mere resources, every cell in Gaia’s body can function as a resource for another cell. Symbiosis is the practice of sharing bodies in which both symbionts, the host and the guest, benefit.  We only have to look to nature to see examples all around us: the cow who hosts the bacteria in order to make her food, the womb that hosts the fetus to nurture its survival.  All parts of the equation are beneficiaries of the give and take relationship, without losing their individual identities in the process.  We: humans, animals, minerals, the very Earth herself are all part of the greater whole of Gaia, the process of life.  The pain we inflict on nature is in fact pain we experience as a species, the growth we experience as individuals affects the world at large.  A symbiotic logic requires us to view this bigger picture, and begins to develop lines of communication between the now disparate pieces that make up Gaia in order to find a more symbiotic harmony amongst them. 

Symbiotic reason is more apt than individual reason to understand life as an interrelated web in which each individual is a small node that exists thanks to others’ presence.  The author points to the behavior of growth among trees and roots.  Our ecosystem contains two kinds of intricate growth processes amongst vegetation.  There are the arborescent plants: treelike growths organized as individual trees that sprout from a seed and grow vertically by sinking their roots deeply in the soil, and the rhizomes, such as gingerroots and potatoes which operate as subterranean root networks that grow sideways, store resources within the soil, and intermittently sprout interrelated plants across the terrain where the rhizome is present.  A tree species may have strong individuals who grow to be taller and more powerful than any plant sprouting from a rhizome, but the rhizome in itself is more resilient to adversity and ecological changes due to their numerous points of entry.  For Anderlini-D’Onofrio, the rhizome can represent the Gaian principle of evolution by symbiogenesis, the symbiotic process by which a species acquires the genes of its symbionts into its own DNA.  This process is more horizontal. Anderlini-D’Onofrio argues that all life is symbiotic because biology shows that without exchanges between interrelated beings, there would be no life at all.  It is within this reasoning that she has developed her new politics of love.

II.  Politics of Love

            Anderlini-D’Onofrio’s politics of love is new way of looking at love that draws from ancient teachings of a sacred feminine to postmodern understandings of health.  Our current notions of health are monopolized by allopathic discourse that views health as the absence of disease and medicine a war against its attacks.  It ignores the fact that perhaps disease is not a foreign attack on the body, rather a part of the body itself, crying out for repair.  Holistic discourse on the other hand realizes a symbiotic alignment of an ecosystem’s dynamic parts.  Disease is viewed as a message from the body that demands a change in its ecology. Gaian awareness compels us to shift our current paradigms of health from an overwhelming allopathic discourse to more holistic notions of health, all the while invoking symbiotic reasoning to encourage dialogue between the allopathic and holistic health collectives. 

The AIDS crisis played a massive role in positioning love on the side of disease.  Through criminalizing loving communities, a rhetoric of fear was born, which produced a social energy that linked erotic expression with fear.  A new politics of love seeks to reverse this trend by transforming its negative social energy into a positive one that reconnects erotic expression with safety and well-being.  Hypothesizing Gaia helps the world shed needless fears from current dogmas of love as a crime or a disease. 

            In a holistic perspective, players are encouraged to enhance the health practices that strengthen their immunity and hence their health.  This follows the Gaian principle that the health of Gaia’s body is proportionate to the health of each of her cells.  Conventional allopathic medicine tends to attack the symptoms that express the body’s problem, and may neglect to seriously investigate its causes (63).  As Anderlini-D’Onofrio posits: if an individual is a cell in a super organism, his/her disease cannot be a foreign agent, for all agents are part of the larger entity of which that individual is an element.  Disease in the elements of a super organism is a force that manifests a crisis in its life.  Disease is thus read as a message that can help the living ecosystem deal with the crisis and reconfigure itself (71). 

The AIDS epidemic can be read as a crisis within Gaia, and as such, a signal for systemic change.  Excessive emphasis on allopathic hypotheses in sexual health has kept the world stuck in a mode of fear. Anderlini-D’Onofrio’s Gaia hypothesis postulates that the planet Earth is a web of interconnected organisms with a life of its own, a postmodern perspective that reverberates with indigenous, ecofeminist, pre-modern, and symbiotic cultural elements (102).  In Gaian post modernity, “sex” is an erotic expression, the joy of taking and giving, and the orgiastic revitalizing pleasures of bacteria.  It is the art of loving that lives in the wider space of the arts of healing, and as an art, is shy of any normativity (110). Western masculinity emphasizes control over intimacy.  It acts like a cultural imperative that dominates modern philosophical discourse reflected in Western modernity’s obsession with the mastery of nature.  The idea that humans can master nature is but a myth of modernity.  The reality is that humans cannot master nature, and there is no reason why they should (113).

Reconfigured as ecological erotic orientations, the love styles that correspond to former perversions are found to have a positive effect on Gaia’s health for various reasons: They multiply the possibilities of love; they help expand the boundaries of the loving arts; and they contribute to establishing regimes of love that help in the sharing of resources and the creation of sustainable emotional communities (123-4).  Love is free, and it can be multiplied at will.  Anderlini-D’Onofrio defines it as “a renewable resource that saves one from the trappings of useless consumerism” (125).  The healing arts emphasize practices of the body that redeem people from modernity’s secular materialism.  They are effective in empowering people and communities to heal themselves by creating a more symbiotic understanding of us as individuals, without losing the connectivity to each other and our Mother Gaia.  As Anderlini-D’Onofrio so eloquently writes, “this may not instantly resolve all global problems, but the perspective it puts things in vastly improves the prospects for healthy global ecologies” (127). 

III. The Arts of Loving

            In this part of her book, Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio articulates why she feels that bisexual and polyamorous communities provide the framework to actualize a Gaian awareness of living. Bi/Poly communities generate areas of stability of erotic awareness and emotional sustainability that free the imagination from needless fears and create the emotional and ecological abundance that Gaia needs (152). Because of their heavy reliance on touch, connectedness, non-violence, and a subtle knowledge and practice of intimacy, the styles of love invented by poly and bi people promote the activation of the hormonal cycle of Oxytocin (137).   Oxytocin is the hormone responsible for states of emotional calm and connectedness that often fills the aural and inner spaces of bi and poly societies.  Oxytocin becomes a social lubricant within these communities where playfulness is key.  It is the gentle playfulness produced by these arts of loving that enable emotional negotiations and agreements that would otherwise be impossible in an environment without it.

 The styles of love practiced in bi and poly communities help build the trust necessary to overcome fears and are often intentionally designed to break down people’s defensive identities, body armors and egos, so that all players can enjoy the free circulations of amorous energies.  It is this symbiotic reason that transforms scarcity into abundance. 

Consumer society can be visualized as an extensive orgy inasmuch as it is organized as a continuum orgiastic display of material temptations that induce desire for things we often don’t need or want (163). Anderlini-D’Onofrio writes that the combined practices of bi and poly love have the power to allow individual players to become part of the “flow of the orgy”, to consciously navigate its flow and become consensually immersed into the movement of the symbiotic energy generated by our aural, astral, and physical bodies at play (163).  This results in sustainability, balance, and renewability of resources for all involved, and it maximizes a player’s ability to give and receive love.  She writes:

“As players learn to navigate this emotional/erotic space, the dialogue between the emotional and erotic realms enables them to maximize the love energy they can share.  This sharing of emotional resources generates symbiotic energy fields between players, and enables the creation of emotional sustainability that result in symbiotic plateaus of enhanced awareness.  These plateaus involve crises that manifest at certain points in the network, and whose collective management can productively turn them into opportunities for deeper levels of symbiosis.  This growth and change can move the entire network on a higher level of awareness that enables more focused and productive experiments in the management of shared emotional resources and the symbioses therefore.  The network thus functions like a sustainable ecosystem for all of these interpersonal energies.  It generates the sustainability, balance, and renewability of resources for all involved” (165).   

Applied on a global scale, this turns scarcity into abundance, fear into hope, and hatred into love.  This transformation happens when we players lose our intense sense of entitlement to the resources that surround us in our ecosphere.  The tools of this transformation can be found in the schools of bisexual and polyamorous philosophy where intentional communities are formed by people who consciously choose to live by a shared utopian vision, motivated by Gaian principles. They share an expansive sense of love and sexual expression that involves consensual sharing of emotional and erotic resources and can be learned at their schools (154).

Anderlini-D’Onofrio proposes a journey to these schools to learn the tools of the loving arts, regardless of one’s orientation or identity. These philosophies of both/and/all include and cherish all points in every continuum.  They celebrate our diversities and encourage us to recognize each other and harmonize ourselves with Earth’s symbiotic ecosystem.  If we can take from them the ability to think of love as an art whose forms of expressions is infinite, then perhaps we can incorporate those healing and loving arts to stave off ecological catastrophes caused by our irresponsible behavior as a species. 

Imagine A Better World

We must begin to imagine a world that is better than the current one we inhabit, where wars are beings waged, and fear is abundant.  Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio has directed us upon a path that might open our imagination to new and thrilling ideas that, if we allow ourselves to be open enough to consider them, can restore our planet to a place of homeostatic symbiosis; a world where we both give and take from what and whom is around us instead of stripping all of their available resources and leaving desolation in our wake.  Gaia and the New Politics of Love offers us a glimpse as to what a world without animosity, soaked in selfish consumption might look like: a place where differences and individuals thrive together while dedicating themselves to the health of Gaia, that which came before us and will sustain herself after we pass. 

Perhaps with this new model emphasizing non-violent, loving sustainability we might do our part in ending the wars and restoring Gaia to her harmonic balance, thus ushering in the new era of planetary peace and health, based on mutual respect and love, that our world surely needs today.                                                                              

Connecting More Dots: Shutter Island and The Shock Doctrine

A while after the conversations of 'What's in a Name?' G and I resume our calls.  We talk about movies.  'T is the season, after all.

"Teaching film helps," G says as soon as we connect.

"Why is that?" I ask.

"Well, when you go to the movies, you activate a little mechanism in your brain and it helps you to connect the dots . . ."

"Dots? What dots?"

"Dots between movies and books you've read, for example."

"As in?"

"As in, Shutter Island and The Shock Doctrine, for example."

"Shutter Island, Marin Scorsese's latest, and Naomi Klein's book about the Chicago School and it break-the-economy-and-control-the-people-politics?"

"Uhu."

"Tell me more . . . "

"Let me tell you the whole story then."

"Ok."

"So yesterday we were bound to see Crazy Heart in San Juan, and the Fine Arts Theater, when we find out that the program has changed and we need to adjust our plans."

"Who was your company?"

"Melvin, the leader of my Area Oeste LGBT friends group here, a sophisticated speaker, a discussant, a great facilitator.  I'm so happy to have his company, you know, it's ok to go to the movies by oneself, but the company of a sensitive person makes puts the experience on a completely different level."

"Sure."

"So of course we watch the whole film then we try to figure out if Teddy/Lewaddis is really honest and sane or really insane and a criminal."

"Yes . . . "

"It's a story about an asylum on this island off of Massachusetts where apparently some human experiments were going on in the 1950s, on human brains: how to treat them with electroshock therapy and lobotomy, how to persuade sane people that they are not only insane, but also criminals with a shady history of murders whose memory they are trying to push away.  The idea is that these therapies will persuade the patients not only to adopt the life stories and identities that psychiatrists are fabricating for them, but also that they will go along and help those in charge to play the game."

                                           (Leonardo DiCaprio and Ben Kingsley in Shutter Island)

"OMG! And is this based on fact?  Is the film some kind of documentary?  Did anything like this really happen?"

"Well, the film is based on a novel, which of course is likely to be a fictionalization of some historical event or combination of events reconfigured in some recombined way.  The time when lobotomies were a common clinical practice is appropriate. Same goes for electroshock therapy."

"How do you know?"

"Well, I read about Tennessee Williams, the famous American playwright of the mid Twentieth Century, who was also gay--closeted at the time of course.  His sister was lobotomized because as kids she and her brother were playing some innocent games that were at the time considered completely out of bounds.  The family became worried about her.  Lobotomy was recommended for women whose sexuality was unruly."

"Oh, and how did she respond?"

"I don't really know a lot of specifics, but she became a zombie like most people whose pre-frontal cortex has been removed.  That, as we know now, is not a superfluous part of the brain.  It's the seat of creative intelligence, of the imagination, of desire, of ideas, of what makes you capable to think the world in a different way."

"Of genius, you mean . . ."

"Yeah, that's one way to put it."

"And another way?"

"Another way is in what my bi and poly friends typically will say: That one's biggest sexual organ is between one's ears, not one's legs."

"If you lobotomize the imagination, then the desire for pleasure goes away," I comment.

"Exactly!"

"Must have been terrible for her."

"And for him as well, he always felt guilty that his creative intelligence was still alive while hers had been so cruelly excised.  Many of his nostalgic, tender female characters are based on her."

"Like Blanche Dubois, in Streetcar Named Desire?"I ask.

"Like Blanche Dubois."

"So then, going back to Shutter Island, what was the point of practicing lobotomy there?" I continue with my questions.

"The film presents this as part of a model asylum for the rehabilitation of criminals who are mental patients, and are treated humanely.  The place is actually a penitentiary, but it doesn't look like one: It looks more like a manor in the midst of manicured gardens, until you look more closely and find out that food, smokes, water are all drugged with sedatives that make the patients practically incapable to think for themselves.  And then you also find out that the people there are not really criminals, but rather victims of this human experiment in which a team of psychiatrists is trying to figure out how to control human brains."

"Inventing mental illnesses they don't have, as causes of crimes they never committed?" I comment.

"Yes."

"Sounds a bit like Nazi Germany, or Stalin's USSR, for that matter."

"Sure, and indeed the Leonardo di Caprio character is an American who fought in World War II, killed at Dachau, and is horrified at the idea that Nazi methods might have migrated to the US.  He is incensed by some uncertainty he has abut a fire that burned his home and killed his wife.  He is a US Marshall, and gets to be assigned to the job of investigating the disappearance of a patient to figure out what's going on."

"This happens of course when J. Edgar Hoover is head of the CIA, the famous McCarthyite who was a closet gay and instigated the activities of the House of Un-American Activities back then," I add.

"Yes, and Hoover gets mentioned once in the movie," G confirms.

"So what's the connection with The Shock Doctrine?"

"Well, you know that Klein claims that the whole idea of engineering a crisis in order to break people's resistance and then take control started in the medical profession.  In other words, it was psychiatrists who used electroshock and lobotomy that first experimented with these forms of shock therapy to reduce people to patients--and patients to blank slates whose personalities, minds, and memories were now empty and could be filled with whatever content the dominant ideology wanted to implant," G explains, in her typical professorial tone.

"And how does she claim that the practice transfers from psychiatry to the economy?" I ask, a bit shyly.

"Well, the political powers make some shady allies and, say, create an atmosphere of panic where everyone is afraid that a terrorist cell is conspiring next door.  This makes every one feel fearful and out of control.  It crushes the economy because no one wants to invest any more.  Then a new political class takes over and establishes a regime of total control."

"Like what happened in Chile with Pinochet?" I ask?

"Yeah, you got it.  And many other cases. Klein examines the wave of interventions by so-called 'Chicago boys,' economists from the school of Milton Friedman, who precisely promoted the ideology that public assets are a nuisance to be sold away, and privatization will resolve all financial problems. These interventions happened in South America, then the wave moved to East Asia, then to Russia and Eastern Europe, then eventually, with Bush II, to the United States."

"But the character in Shutter Island thinks what happens in the asylum is part of a Nazi plot."

"Well, not exactly: He is aware of how some ideas migrated, as the people who held them managed to smuggle themselves over to the US shores when the Nazi house of cards fell to the floor."

"You mean that after World War II some Nazi ideology made it into the US?"

"Some ideologues made it, and their ideas came with them."

"Did your friend Melvin know about lobotomies?" I asked, curious.

"Surprisingly, he didn't know too much about them.  We talked about it, and I explained about the pre-frontal cortex, the fact that a lobotomized person initially seems to be ok, just a little more tranquil and sedated then before.  Then one realizes that this person has lost the capability to learn new things, ideas, actions, because s/he has lost the power of the imagination, s/he cannot put things together in any new way, s/he can only repeat mechanically things that s/he has done before."

"OMG! And how come the pre-frontal cortex is so important?" I keep pressing on with my questions.

"That's what I learn from Up From Dragons, Dorion Sagan's co-authored study of human intelligence.  In the evolution of the brain, across species, the pre-frontal cortex is the last section that evolved.  Reptilian brains don't have it.  They're reactive brains.  They respond, but do not invent.  Also, in any human person, the pre-frontal cortex is the last one to become completely formed, with the process ending at about 25 years old."

"Got it.  And, had your friend heard about other lobotomies?"

"I don't think so.  I did tell him about Rose Kennedy, the sister of the three beautiful brothers who died for the ideals of American politics. She had been lobotomized as well.  The family was a bit shy and shameful about it.  Of course, when this happened, nobody really knew the consequences.  They were victims of human experiments, those patients."

"How terrible!"

"I agree.  Do you see now the connection?"

"Yes, of course.  Scorsese is trying to send a message.  Perhaps he has read Naomi Klein."

"Perhaps, yet Klein is a lot more adamant than Scorsese ever will be."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, at the end of the story, one finds out that the hero, Edward, really could be Lewaddis, the criminal he is trying to connect with, to ask questions from, the guy who set fire to his house and killed his wife after she had drowned the three children they had."

"How is that?"

"Well, there are all these nightmares, these memories that parse the film, memories of Dachau, of fires, of family, of children crying for help."

"Memories?"

"Yes, it's the Leonardo di Caprio character, he has these nightmares. And in the end, when the new criminal/insane personality has been implanted into his brain by the psychiatrist team, it all jells up together that he is actually the criminal he is seeking--a bit like in Oedipus."

"Oh, the Oedipal syndrome, uh?"

"Yes, of course, we live in an Oedipal world where parents own their children and the nuclear family is the norm.  We still don't know very well how to expand family beyond kinship and biology, do we?" G asks, facetious.

"Some of us try."

"Yes, queer families, poly families--but they're the exception."

"Sure.  Still the exception, unfortunately.  How was the acting, the direction, BTW.  Did you guys enjoy?"

"A Scorsese film is always enjoyable.  Those stylish frames, wide stroke backgrounds, mysterious settings, ominous clouds, ferocious storms, cliffs that require acrobatic performances.  Swagger male characters who walk the fine line between hero and outlaw, cops who turn out allies of criminal gangs.  It's staple.  And all done with Italian bravado and elegance impervious to the situation.  It's impressive.  Suspense that works: it's not sensation per se, it's the right measure of sensation to achieve the desired effect."  

"And what exactly would that effect be?" I interrupt the rhapsodic tone: The Italian stuff always gets G carried away.

"Well, what about instilling the shadow of a doubt that conspiracy is really possible? That it's not just a theory stored in minds of those with psychological problems."

"You mean of those profiled that way."

"Yes. With Scorsese you get the message that laboratories for human experiments to control our minds could be just next door."

"That's the film's political effect, you mean?"

"Yes, the visual version of Naomi Klein's theory."

"Visual, uh?"

"Yes, I have become more and more impressed with cinema's ability to convey ideas in images on a large scale.  As I taught cinema over the years, I have become aware of how, for the new generations, cinema  holds the promise of visual effects that mark the collective consciousness of a culture as objective correlatives of the emotions people have difficulty expressing in other ways."

"A bit like Michael Moore's documentaries?"

"Exactly."

"What about the acting?  How was it?" I asked, to change the subject.

"I hadn't seen Leonardo di Caprio since Titanic.  Had heard bad things about his subsequent movies--lack of environmental respect in the shooting process.  I liked him at the time, though.  He did embody that rugged instinct, that trust in one's good luck I tend to admire in people.  He has matured a lot.  Makes me think of how fast time goes by for us all."

"Yes, as Ronsard puts it," I interject,

"'le temps s'en va, le temps s'en va, madame.' (time passes, away, time passes away, my lady)

'le temps non, mais nous nous en allons, et bientot seront sous la lame.' (time doesn't, but we pass away and soon will be under the stone)

How about his looks?"

"Oh, those are much better.  He is not what I'd call a beauty.  Not enough sensual for that, to my taste.  A tad too intense.  But his looks have improved because now he knows what to do with what nature gave him much better than before."

"So, it was a nice evening after all."

"It was great.  We spent time discussing the movie, figuring out the plot, the various hypotheses for interpretation, put our brains together to figure out what we saw."

"Did you miss Crazy Heart?"

"I did. A bit.  I explained my friend why I wanted to see it and we agreed to stay tuned.  Talked about our emotions, what's happening in our lives and what feelings are dominating. I always find movies good for that. We made plans for more movie days next weekend."

"Until that time then," I said as we prepared to end the call.

"Arrivederci."

"Arrivederci, my Italian friend, arrivederci."

Dinner Talk - World Polyamory Association - Harbin Hot Springs, CA - June 25-27, 2010

Annual Conference

World Polyamory Association





with Sasha and Janet Lessin and Deborah Taj Anapol

Harbin Hot Springs, California, June 25-27, 2010

Experience full immersion in the ecstasy of WPA's tantric community!
Sign up now to secure best accommodations! Only $ 327 per person until April 30!

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Dinner Talk:

Gaia Science: Path to Love, Health, Relatedness

The Gaia Hypothesis is probably the most important scientific hypothesis of our time.  It is the foundation for the paradigm shift toward the new system of knowledge that will enable humanity to make peace with Gaia, the third planet.  The hypothesis is based on the science of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis.  It this hypothesis is true, then the entire web of life, including ourselves, is a live body made of symbiotic, interconnected elements.  This means that we humans are all already always related.  What is a healthy way to do relationships in this context?  It is the most natural way to connect to that already existing relatedness and allow its potential to become actualized in the most authentic form.  So, Gaia science indicates a path to love, health, and relatedness that honors polyamory as a style of love conducive of the paradigm shift nature- and peace-loving people want to create. 

Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio gave the keynote address at the 2007 Loving More and World Polyamory Association conferences.  She has been interviewed on Italian public TV about her books on practices of love that include bisexuality and polyamory.  She is an academic, an activist, a writer and a healer.  Her numerous books include Gaia and the New Politics of Love (2009), Lambda finalist Eros (2007), Plural Loves (2005), Women and Bisexuality (2005), and Bisexuality and Queer  Theory (2010).  She leads workshops on Gaia, Eros, & the Sacred.  She has been published in and peer-reviews for several journals.  She is a professor of humanities at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, and lives in Cabo Rojo, Western Puerto Rico.

Podcast - Gaia Science: Path to Human Love, Health, Relatedness

Listen to Podcast 03/24/10 - Start Serena's Segment at 44th Minute HERE

Now the story!

PRN, or Progressive Radio Network, describes itself as "The # 1 Radio Station for Progressive Minds."  It's also known as "the thinking person's forum."  I found out I was invited as a guest to talk about how Gaia science impacts human emotions.  "Wooow!" I thought, "your first time live on a radio show, Serena. You better make sure you know what's you're saying as your voice goes on the air."

I looked up my hosts.  PRN does indeed live up to its descriptions as far as I know.  On the Progressive Radio Network archives page I saw a whole range of interesting radio shows, with topics including energy, news, community, politics, writing, women, consumers, animals, health, and more, all in the context of critical thinking and presented in the form of debates.  "Great!" I thought, "this seems like the kind of place where one finds like minded people who have not stopped asking questions, regardless of how out of fashion critical thinking might be at the moment.  How refreshing!" 

One is Gary Null, who describes himself as the radio host who "takes on the real issues that the mainstream media is afraid to tackle."  His show covers a wide range of topics, including local and global ecology, the environment, science, religion, spirituality, nutrition, health, and human relationships.  He welcomes a stream of interesting guests, including scholars, professors, reporters, and other kinds of experts.  He heard of my new book, Gaia and the New Politics of Love, and invited me to speak of the Gaia Hypothesis and what it means for relationships among humans and those with other species.  "How wonderful," I thought, "I can't wait!"

"You studied the Gaia Hypothesis" Gary said, "Can you tell us what it is and how can it help us better understand human relationships? Relationships with other species?" he asked.

"The Gaia Hypothesis is the most important scientific hypothesis of our time," I explained, "because it is the foundation for the paradigm shift toward the new system of knowledge that will enable humanity to make peace with Gaia, the third planet, rather than commit suicide on it."  I gave the references to James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, on whose science the hypothesis is based.  "If this hypothesis is true, then all of the biota, including atmosphere, biosphere, and, of course, ourselves, is a body of interconnected life made of symbiotic elements.  This means that we are all already always related.  So developing healthy relationships is simply allowing this relatedness to actualize its potential in the most authentic form." 

Gary asked me about dissident science, including AIDS science.  "I have the highest respect for science that differs from commonly accepted knowledge because without these differences knowledge cannot evolve.  For example, Gaia science is still a form of 'dissident' science, since the Gaia Hypothesis is not the prevalent paradigm upon which today's accepted knowledge is based."

I then proceeded to explain how for myself I have chosen a vegetarian path to health and a holistic one as well.  In a Gaian context, one's health is a result of the health of the symbiotic elements with which one chooses to surround oneself.  For me, time-tested indigenous remedies make more sense than recently invented pharmaceutical drugs, especially when used regularly.  When something has been used from generation to generation, its impact on the body's balance is known.

It was a pleasure to be a guest on this program.  There were many more questions I would have been happy to address, and I would welcome another invitation.  It was great to have my work recognized by a host of Gary's experience and courage.  I hope more listeners become aware of how Gaia and the New Politics of Love can be a resource for them.

Listen to Podcast 03/24/10 - Start Serena's Segment at 44th Minute HERE 

Stay tuned for more PODCASTS featuring Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio

Shutter Island and The Shock Doctrine: Connecting the Dots

I saw Shutter Island yesterday with a friend, and at the end we were sorting out the various parts of the plot to make sure that both versions were equally plausible, as in good Scorsese fashion, where by tradition fiction and reality, subconscious and performance inevitably blur.  The two stories being that Edward is either really the US Marshall with the mission to investigate the criminal asylum where Lewaddis, the man who set his house and wife on fire is held, or that he is a fool in denial of the fact that Lewaddis and himself are actually the same person.

As I saw the film I kept thinking of Naomi Klein's political theory book, The Shock Doctrine, which claims that the project of wrecking an economy as motive to activate a politics of privatization and wholesale of public assets, is actually a practice that started in psychiatric hospitals, when electroshock and lobotomies were common medical practices in mental hospitals.  The famous 'Chicago Boys,' the Milton Freedman acolytes who engineered the various economic crises in question in the subsequent decades, learned their trade from psychiatry.  They succeeded, according to Klein, in generating the kind of panic and terror that broke people resistance and gave political advocates of privatization a blank slate.

It is interesting to me that a director like Scorsese would pick up Klein's message in some roundabout way and create the concrete images that bring the message home for the next generation, which visually oriented and whose collective consciousness responds to cinema that way.

My friend and I enjoyed the movie even though we realize that the ambivalence of the plot might baffle some spectators.  To us, that ambivalence is a bonus not just because it is the hallmark of Scorsese, but rather because it reflects the confusion present in reality itself, the fact that if human experiments intended to control your brain are happening next door, it could very well be that will never, for sure, know. 

Leonardo di Caprio, whom I hadn't seen since Titanic (I miss a lot of movies), was in the part, I felt, his rugged charm improved with maturity.

I am a writer and an activist and a professor, and I blog about movies and other topics at

http://polyplanet.blogspot.com/