Last we left off, Signor Guarino placed shame amongst the Virtues, a sister of Honesty, for the female kind.
Sh
Shame is happening
Shhhh
She’s here.
Part two. Pages 41-51
Ari replies with relief that Gua spared him with his sharp wit but carries on the road to define shame through his lens. He explains there are three fears and that once again shame is the fear of infamy. So his argument is….I said so. Cute, how manly of him.
Ari: Therefore, a species is not opposite to its father, the kind, but it is opposite to its sister species. In fact, if we observe closely, we shall see that their differences are not so great as some might think:
shame is not any less cold than fear, and fear is not any less hot than shame because shame burns on the outside, while fear burns on the inside. Fear drains heat and blood from the external regions, and shame drains all warmth from the most internal regions — and so, as you see, the two are differently similar.
So he wants to link fear and shame together forever, through their oppositional kinship of shared origin. & I would agree that most people probably fear shame more than they shame fear. That looking at shame through the lens of fear is easy, comfortable, & conditioned into us…but is it accurate? That’s what we are seeking here. So is shame this dreadful fear of…what was it again? infamy?
& what does infamy mean again? Being well known for a bad quality or deed.
Well…according to whoms definition of bad, I must ask? Ari? The white man? The guy who has no empathy and thinks the cartisian split advanced our species instead of sealing away our unconsciousable acts into the shadow in our skulls?
Maybe he’s onto something, but who gets to determine what deeds are good and bad depends on the culture, & currently I live in the remenants of the culture spoken of in this play; extremely sexist, shamefully forcing females to become women and be praised for their submission to the violence of the arrogant, ignorant male who is now man, the prototype, the original.
It’s backwards by the way. We know this now. This corrupted masculine perspective has gaslit the world for centuries, projecting its shameful incompetence onto anyone or thing else.
Okay back to the play, sorry for my tangent I just really hate this culture & I want to meet people who want to actually walk away from it, not just vent about it. Which means seeing it fully and knowing my own complicity and also my own skill set outside of this corruption.
Ari: …Now, the soul is linked to the body by such a mighty knot that the body cannot move one step without pulling the soul along with it. Because of this, as the soul races in this or that direction, she carries off with her the bodily spirits and the blood, which she uses as her ministers in the deployment of her actions.…
Hey so I am a board certified blood scientist. I can tell you more about the blood than most other people. The idea of the soul using the blood to animate the body is a BOSS idea. I love it, and I am taking it now.
Thankfully Cas, the dutiful student, was paying attention when I wasn’t.
Cas: If I am not mistaken, you intend to conclude that the iciness of fear occurs when nature, armed with blood and spirits, runs to the deepest regions, taking with her all color and heat; whereas, in shame, nature emerges from the more secret regions thus heating and coloring the body through an abundance of spirits.
Thanks for summing all that up for us, & his question about why some fears hide the soul and others reveal it is an interesting one. I feel this is a relevant question even in this day and age, 400 years later. Why do we run and hide sometimes, but reveal our character during others? & that character we are revealing, is it us, our soul? or our role? >_o
Ari mansplains some more and please do feel free to read it, I am waiting for my guy, gua.
& I am not disappointed to have Gua once again highlight shame to the she.
Gua: It was just so — in corroboration of your statement — that Icarus first devised the icon of shame as the figure of a woman with her face covered. He drew it from Penelope, his own daughter. Having been asked whether she wanted to remain with him, or follow her husband Ulysses, Penelope only answered by pulling a hem of her gown over her face. The father recognized the virtue of her blush and, having said his good-byes to her, he erected a temple on that place. Within that temple, he built an image and an altar to shame
Within the confines of an extremely opppressive and violent society, a female forced into becoing a man-made object called a woman, blushed to avoid saying anything to her dad about wanting sex, and the dad went, “My daughter fucks, let’s build a shrine.”
You know what? If my daddy woulda done that for me, maybe I woulda kept him in my life. Where’s my temple to my compliance to this system huh? I got nothing. Lame.
If it is not abundantly clear to you yet. Females are currently operating with centuries of ancestral shame within our collective, bearing the burden for everyone. Even if you don’t believe in that kind of stuff, the shadow, the unconscious, or underbelly of who we are under all that thinking about who we are; is intergenerational shame, undigested, unmetabolized, unprocessed, unintegrated. An umbilical cord of compliance to the cancer that is the patriarchal rule with western reductionism and sex based discrimination we call gender binding us into digestable identities we can be marketed to because of. Got all that? Cool, let’s move along with the play.
This cute little exchange reminds me of my family, how insults were considered terms of endearment.
Gua: You have begun to reap your way into my fields, Signor Castello; I do not know with what right.
Cas: The sower is wealthy enough to look favorably upon my poor harvest and to help me fulfill the needs of my age and my education.
Gua: You speak in modesty where I spoke in jest. Please continue, for, as you well know, you are my absolute master and the owner of all that is mine.
Cas: You are too kind; but please let’s leave these terms behind — the ship of your reason risks to sink in the sea of your courtesy.
Ari: I was also waiting to see where your nice words were leading, Signor Castello. Do they use these niceties in the court of the Parnassus?
Cas: Mocking tongue. You would do better to answer my questions.
Ari then gets to manolog again. This time describing it a little better but still, ugh. I will give you time here to read pages 44-46 on your own, or put it into chatgpt and get a summary, I don’t care what you do with your life. I’m not a teacher, I’m literally doing this for fun. This is fun for me, are you having fun yet?
My guy, gua was certainly having fun, waiting for Ari to finally decompress the bloat of his speech to reorient us back to the simple conclusion that shame is a virtue.
Gua: We can surely conclude that shame is a virtue, since we hear its praises sung all day. And, if this is true, then we can also easily conclude that shame is not at all a feeling, as you said. Further, insofar as our feelings are naturally planted within our souls, and insofar as they are among the things that are given to us by nature, then, by common agreement, we can neither praise nor fault them.
Ari Responds
Ari: I can tell that you speak only for the fun of tempting me.
This is how I feel about most comments on social media lol. Myself included.
Ari then explains the corporate structure of the soul for our benefit.
Ari: I see that I need to give you another example, so let me say this: as I have already said, if we were to look within our soul, we would see an excellent form of regal government. We would see reason rule as queen over nature and dominate all the faculties of the soul. We would see her reign over them lovingly, governing prudently, and commanding with her sovereign authority. As for these faculties, we would see them serve their lady obediently, according to their duties.…
Remind you, this is a socially constructed ideaology that has integrated itself into the flesh of our social codes and customs. Thinking our ration and logic is above our body and soul has been harming our species for centuries.
Ari concludes by trying to say shame is NOT a virtue by the lack of certain conditions being met. Gua inquires and Ari admits that shame lacks prudence and capacity to produce action (very untrue) and then mansplains to us yet again while dropping this line,
“ARI: I say nothing of free will as it is clear that shame is born on her own, without permission from our will, and in fact, sometimes, even as we do not realize it, shame is born against our own will, in the manner of all the other affects. I dare any man to choose to feel shame or not to feel shame in the same way that he can choose to be or not to be just.“
Then later he adds
“Do you wish to see even more clearly (if it is possible for it to be any clearer) that shame is not a habit but a feeling? Look at your bodies and see how they can change slightly. This only happens because our sensitive soul, whose appetencies are the springs of our feelings, dominates the body so completely that it is obliged to move in accordance with her movements and to share in her passions; and conversely, because of their reciprocal bond, the soul sometimes shares in the pains of the body.”
Then Gua adds at he end of his reply,
“In truth, if a habit is only an old and well-established custom of doing something, then, a soul well-born and better raised in the love of honesty and the hate of its contrary could, after a long period, grow used to feeling shame on every instance, in every place, and with every person who made it necessary. Who could truthfully say then that this was not a habit, a virtuous habit, and thus a thing to be praised”
Indeed we could, and have built a society on shame.
This play is highlighting the rationale used to normalize our culture. We were not the first humans, & we will not be the last humans, but we will be the human species known for its use of shame to script entire industries and events that never needed to take place. It is amazing what we’ve done to ourselves, with ourselves. This blood boiling our soul into our flesh with our actions colors our every day interactions.
So why shame in particular? Let’s go back to the introduction for a minute. Shame is an affect, innate, biological, not purely social, but very involved in our social interactions. Nathanson went as far as calling Shame a compass of scripts designed to; attack self, attack other, withdrawl, avoidance. Sounds pretty like….culuturally conditioned by a violent aggressive emotionally repressive society, to me. Is shame a compass, or has homo sapiens sapiens forced it into that shape due to its desire to force everything into a categorized position within its understanding. If only we could recreate the entire planet in a business model, THEN our species will be safe.
I think shame is innately neutral. This may be controversial but shame, as an affect, a modulator that turns on when there is an incomplete reduction in positive affect aka an increase in density (postive affect is a reduction in system denisty), it makes no logical sense to have it be such a negative, painful emotion that triggers defensive, offensive, & reductive scripts within us. The pain from the generations of shamed homo sapiens sapiens before us have found a home in our daily rituals to try to keep this sham of a system circulating around us.
Shame is the tool we use to access OURSELVES, our inner selves, our inner compass of abilities, capacity, & past experiences. Shame would be better cultivated as an internal pause, much like surprise-startle is to external awareness, shame brings inner awareness.
Spend 5 seconds thinking about that & you will see the roots of the rot of our society. We do not use shame this way. We use shame to avoid that tactic of self growth. Our society is setup to help us avoid this work as well, because when you do it, it’s really hard to stay in society, support the planet being destroyed & having so much distraction laced with plastic poison everywhere. Our species is very sick, & I think shame is one major reason why. It limits our ability to self-reflect, the way THIS culture, this society, this worldwild normalization of a very limited way of living, has normalized our development, conditioning, and purpose/pattern of life is shame-avoidant driven. We use shame to program society into you, instead of you discovering yourself. Then, the next time you feel shame, you pull up the record you have of you being a bassass instead of the time you failed a test.
Let’s stop the play at page 51 for now. Think about it a bit & let me know what you think. But personally I am glad this play never got wider exposure, imagine if more people realized how powerful the tool shame is on others. how weak our species is, how successful shame was to create women, how if you just talk talk talk enough and sound smart you can cognitively exhaust others & then get your way. Imagine if more people knew shame was variably conditioned into us via the gender system where we teach two different norms & that shame has been used for centuries to condition women, shamelessness to condition men. Neither one of these states are natural or normal for females or males, but to create women and men, we must condition the female and male to be something different than itself. That pesky nature we have inside of us that our logic and reason must discipline…
Bitch, that wild nature is the BEST part of me. I’m working towards letting her go wild & free.
How about you?
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