Before you speak, stop, breathe, and consider if what you are about to say will improve upon the silence.
Allan Lokos, “Skillful Speech”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Sunday, April 16, 2023
Via Daily Dharma: Speaking Skillfully
Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - April 16, 2023 💌
Death is very much a part of life, and it has cycles like leaves falling in autumn. It has touch, taste, sound, feeling. Think about being in a culture where death is not seen as a failure or an enemy, but as a stage of life.
- Ram Dass -
Via White Crane Institute // Gay Wisdom - LEO BERSANI
1931 -
LEO BERSANI was an American academic, born on this date (d: 2022), known for his contributions to French literary criticism and queer theory. He was known for his 1987 essay "Is the Rectum a Grave?" and his 1995 book Homos.
Bersani was born in the Bronx. He studied at Harvard University, graduating in 1952 with a bachelor’s in Romance languages, and with a Ph.D. in comparative literature in 1958. He taught at Wellesley College and Rutgers University before joining University of California, Berkeley in 1972, where he'd remain for the rest of his career, assuming emeritus status in 1996. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992. He met Sam Geraci in 1992. They married in 2014.
Male homosexuality is not the mirror image of heterosexuality, he argued, but something radically different, lacking many of the patriarchal inequalities that he said defined straight life.
“Far from apologizing for their promiscuity as a failure to maintain a loving relationship,” he wrote, “gay men should ceaselessly lament the practical necessity, now, of such relations, should resist being drawn into mimicking the unrelenting warfare between men and women.”
He followed nearly a decade later, with “Homos” (1995), a book-length critique of the emerging field of queer theory, and in particular of its leading figure, Judith Butler.
He taught that the whole point of being a homosexual man is that you disrupted the experience of possession, ownership, fidelity, consistency, safety, and you allowed sexuality to be what it really is, which is disruptive, disorienting, shattering, limit-violating and boundary-breaking.
An early and avid proponent of the post-structuralist theories coming from France in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Dr. Bersani was particularly taken with the work of the philosopher Michel Foucault, who became a close friend, and whom he brought to Berkeley as a visiting professor.
Like Dr. Bersani, Mr. Foucault critiqued what he called “the will to know,” to grasp the interiority of a subject and assert power over it, and instead looked for nonaggressive, noninvasive ways of engaging with other people — akin, he said, to the way one might look at a painting in a gallery.
“Foucault asked the question, ‘Why can’t we live our lives like a work of art?’ and Leo was just fascinated by that,” John Paul Ricco, an art historian at the University of Toronto, said in an interview.
Dr. Bersani’s later work, starting in the late 1990s, was especially taken with this project of showing that we can encounter something — an artwork, another person, the world itself — without dominating it, or even understanding it.
“He was an absolutely brilliant reader at taking what seemed to be the knots, or the impenetrability, or the downright insanity of a piece of writing, and just saying, ‘Hey, guys, that’s the point,’” Dr. Rose said.
Though Dr. Bersani trained as a literary scholar, his last works focused on art and film, from assessments of Assyrian palace reliefs to the work of the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. He took emeritus status in 1996 but continued to teach and write; he published his final book, “Receptive Bodies,” in 2018.
Despite the apparent disjunction between Dr. Bersani’s literary criticism and his work on gay identity, there are themes running through both. He found in gay life a living instance of the sort of “swerve” and aesthetic frivolity that he called for in art and literature; for example, he praised gay bath houses for the casual sexual encounters they encouraged.
“He was interested in sort of lighter ways of sharing the world,” Dr. Tuhkanen said. “Just moving along and sharing rhythms and having anonymous sex where we don’t need to have knowledge of the other person, but we can share a kind of bodily moment and a pleasurable moment. And maybe have a chat afterward.”
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute
"With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson
Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989!
www.whitecraneinstitute.org
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Saturday, April 15, 2023
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Effort: Maintaining Arisen Healthy States
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Via Daily Dharma: Getting From Here to There
Our
destination is our vow to do good, to do no harm, and to seek awakening
for ourselves and others. Our starting point is accepting and embracing
all of our qualities, good, bad, and neutral.
Mark Herrick, “You Can Get There from Here”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via Tricycle // You Can Get There from Here
You Can Get There from Here
By Mark Herrick
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Via Gay White Crane Institute // Gay Wisdom
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| This Day in Gay History | |||
April 15Born 
1452 -
LEONARDO DA VINCI, Italian Renaissance polymath was born (d. 1519); How much of what is known about the sexuality of this greatest of history’s geniuses is fact and how much is speculation? Here's what we know: (1) When he was 23 and working in Verocchio’s workshop, Leonardo was accused of having committed homosexual acts with one Jacopo Saltarelli, aged seventeen, and described as “a boy of ill-repute.” (2) He complained in his notebooks of his attachment to his student Andrea Salaino, whom he nicknamed “Salai” “(“little devil”). Calling Salai a liar and a thief, he was nonetheless obsessed with the handsome young man to have left him a good portion of his estate. (3) Francesco Melzi, Salai’s replacement as Leonardo’s assistant, was left the larger part of the master’s estate. These are the known facts. That Leonardo chose his students for their looks is contemporary gossip. That all his female subjects were painted from young male models is speculation. That the Mona Lisa is actually a man is a pretty giggly idea. Thirty years ago, the then-daring Sexology magazine attempted to prove this assertion by dressing up the famous painting with a boy’s haircut and clothing. Without knowing it, Sexology actually came up with definite proof that the Mona Lisa is really Julie Andrews.
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Gay Wisdom for Daily Living from White Crane Institute "With the increasing commodification of gay news, views, and culture by powerful corporate interests, having a strong independent voice in our community is all the more important. White Crane is one of the last brave standouts in this bland new world... a triumph over the looming mediocrity of the mainstream Gay world." - Mark Thompson Exploring Gay Wisdom & Culture since 1989! |8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8|O|8
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Friday, April 14, 2023
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Living: Abstaining from Intoxication
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Via Daily Dharma: Seeing Nonself
Nonself
only begins to be clear when the illusion of seamlessness disappears
and we experience the gaps in the continuity, when we actually see the
mind and its object arising and dying together from instant to instant.
Cynthia Thatcher, “Disconnect the Dots”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Thursday, April 13, 2023
Via Daily Dharma: Seeking Well-Being Within
We
are always seeking something from the outside and forgetting that our
fundamental well-being and strength depend on how we relate to our own
minds.
Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, “Old Relationships, New Possibilities”
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE
Via Dhamma Wheel | Right Action: Reflecting upon Social Action
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