Welcome to JOYTOBEWILD by &

The document I’ve linked above is a copy of a translated play written in the 16th century by Annibale Pocaterra, an Italian physician, & an Aquarius. (I am not sharing it to distribute copyrighted material but I found it for free & am sharing it with anyone who wants to discuss it with me) The work was in part translated by Donald Nathanson, the author of, “Shame and Pride.” His book inspired me to also read this play & now also share this with anyone interested…

…which is probably not many of you. I know that. But if you are interested in the topic of shame, especially in regards to societal issues, or even just your own personal life, please consider giving it a read or reading my summary.

But for those of you who can persist in the topic of shame with me, let us dissect this play together. I recently finished my first reading of it in May 2025, having finished ‘S&P’ last month. (& Just for reference: My next targeted book on this topic is another that Nathanson mentioned, “The Mask of Shame” which can be read for free at https://archive.org/details/maskofshame0000wurm)

So let’s start with the play, if you have not read the book Shame & Pride, Nathanson sums up his synthesis of thoughts in the introduction of the play. It is a worth while read even if you find it difficult, please take your time to digest the material because it becomes very relevant to my expansion of Nathansons “compass of shame” that he mentions in this intro and in his book.

I invite you now to read Nathanson’s Monologue on shame…

Finished it yet?

Confused as hell?

Slightly inspired but perspiring?

Great!

Now before you get ahead of yourself, please take a moment to pause with me.

That’s a lot of information about shame.

But…not much about pride, honor, & dignity.

In his book, “Shame & Pride”

Pride is hardly discussed. It is clear Nathanson had a laser focus on shame to the point he forgot to include a comparable compass of pride, despite stating the outcome of the development of shame is pride, he failed to link his compass to the positive outcome of shame.

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I think I know why

That “compass” is the programing of our current modern society. This behavior, weaved into every subtle social situation, IS the conditioning that so many of us feel was forced, beaten, and disingenuously complimented into our flesh so that we remain compliant to this system that needs to be continuously conditioned into our species every generation. It’s not that you feel shame constantly in your daily life, but that shame is the tool of social conditioning, in this current society; specifically unprocessed shame that is not integrated into a sense of pride for ones actions, but a condioned response to the external social conditioning, regardless if it makes sense for the external present moment stimulus. Everytime you choose social programming instead of being present, you are running an unmetabolized shamefully socially condioned script. Metabolizing the shame means integrating your shadow into yourself & becoming your authentic self…even if you don’t like them very much at first. (My less shameful self loves more solitude & quiet than I expected)

The roots of this programming run deep. There is a corrupt cancerous society on our planet that has destroyed any other way of being to carry out it’s desire to have compliant, controllable, docile, domesticated consumers of it’s perversions.

We call it the patriarchy.

Patriarchs look at humans like objects. He calls these objects man & woman.

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He uses shame to dehumanize us into consumers of his corruption.

Pocaterra excavates the origins of how shame is distilled into an effective tool of control, as we will discover through our read. He then cleanly aligns them next to the reductionist perspectives that the patriarchs use to corrupt humanity.

Now, onto the play. We are going to digest up to page 40 in this first part so feel free to read that now and come back to read along my summary & analysis of the text.

& yes I skipped werner’s intro, but also feel free to read it, it’s funny as hell. He roasted Pocaterra’s writing style for adding too many &&&&&&&&&&&&& I enjoyed that greatly. I feel it bonded me further to Pocaterra and with that said, let us dive into the play itself.

Primo Dialogo Della Vergogna

I am going to assume you have the play up and along side my summary here to read along or have read it already, so I will not replicate much of the contents here but discuss some of it, giving my summaries and understandings of the material.

The first page introduces two characters, Castello (Cas) and Ariosto (Ari). Ari calls Cas out for being in love, assuring Cas that his secret love was safe with him.

“Cas: So I was right, you have come armed with your usual barbs. I think that during the day you must accept your nightly dreams as facts and try to pass them off as truth.”

Cas claps back with this banger of a line that still lands 400 years later. Good job Pocaterra.

The next page, Cas is asking Ari to explain how he came to these wild conclusions and the final character is introduced, Guarino (gua) who will provide some very useful commentary on the topic.

“Gua: Indeed I saw him blush earlier, but if that was due to shame or some other cause, I could not say. I would not want to run the risk to appear such a poor fortuneteller as you, Signor Ariosto.”

Another bangin’ line on this topic.

Okay so now that we have all of our characters introduced, the topic is if Cas is blushing due to shame, due to guilt, due to love, or rage:

“Gua: If, as you say, a lover blushes in the presence of his beloved, how is it possible for Signor Castello not to be always blushing, since she is always with him?

Ari: How can you say that?

Gua: I can say that because a man in love always feels the presence of the thing he loves, and takes the thing with him everywhere he goes. The external image is merely a shadow, but the image that lives in his heart is truer than life….”

Ari insists his position is still accurate after Gua’s spiritual message but hesitates to explain it fully until Cas says that he will follow Ari the entire day if he has to, to hear Ari reveal his logic. They plan their cute little bro date on the spot & head towards Montagnuola. Now that they are on their way, Cas brings the conversation back to how could he feel shame for the love that was found out.

Ari rambles on, explaining there is a time & a place for love and enjoyment. Cas continues to want to hear more and Ari agrees, although he calls himself an untrustworthy guide. Make a note of this for later when Ari’s position becomes more clear.

“Ari: This time you have chosen an untrustworthy guide, Signor Castello. But since you so desire, let us move on, for your wish is my pleasure. Let us go: I want to be your guide to your own self. So, to begin, what do you think shame is? And by shame I intend what causes us to blush, not what is disgrace or insult brought on by others”

Cas gives him the verbal equivalent of a blank stare:

“Cas: Truly, I could not say. If I had known that I already knew, I would not have proposed, as I have done, to discover it with your help. But if I were to say what I believed it might be, I would say that shame is nothing but a bitter self-acknowledgement and the regret felt for having behaved badly.

Ari: You have painted a good semblance but you have not used the right colors.

Cas: And what is the importance of the right colors?

Ari: I mean that you defined shame by describing what comes before and after it, rather than what constitutes its true being.

Cas: I begin to understand, but not completely; though that is my fault.”

Honestly Cas, it’s okay. I’m a little confused too. I think we all are.

It’s okay though, Ari is here to save the day with this explanation:

“Ari: I say that recognition precedes shame because we cannot feel shame unless we first acknowledge our fault. Repentance follows shame because, after shame, we feel anguish at the thought of our fault, and would eagerly retract our guilty action, if this were only possible. Thus, from recognition comes shame, and from shame repentance; one being its father, the other its son. If you are still somewhat in the dark about the nature of shame, consider this: those who feel shame recognize their fault, as you said, and repent; but, conversely, not all those who repent and recognize their fault feel shame.
Those whose faults are hidden from the eyes of the world often recognize their faults and even repent, but, having nobody to condemn them for their actions, they do not blush.”

Cas is agreeable and wants to learn even more. Now we are onto the next page & Gua is staring at the scenery, giving us a wonderful description of 16th century Italy:

“Gua: When I look at this place, I am completely taken by its beauty. How it shines with the munificence of its lord. It seems as though art and nature were competing in his honor to beautify it; as though a prize were to be awarded to the one who did the most to adorn it. Consider this park, filled with every kind of animal, how pleasant, yet how grand! And here are most beautiful gardens and lawns painted with a thousand varieties of flowers. Here are fertile vineyards, here splendid woods — both cultivated and wild — artificially planted with innumerable trees, all beautiful and beautifully pruned.
Who has ever seen longer, wider, straighter avenues? As a matter of fact, though I am used to this sight it still inspires great wonder in me. Consider then this happy hill dressed in spring that, like a queen, stands off to the side, raised above all things; how it towers and rules above all else. And is she not perhaps crowned, if with a diadem of green limes and orange trees which, bejeweled with fruits and flowers, bring double delight to the eyes and the sense of smell? Seeing her so clean and well adorned, I would swear that she was in love too.”

Cas brings us back to humanity, talking about the people who ornament the land as they go on their bro hike and putz around for a bit until they find a place to sit and get back to their discussion. I am sure their movements were riveting to the king who got this play as a gift to read. Let’s get back to the topic at hand:

“Cas: If I am not mistaken, it had been proposed to investigate what shame was.

Ari: Now wait. It is a fact that those things that we harbor within ourselves are powers, passions, or habits. So then, to which of these can we reduce shame, according to you?

Cas: I am not sure if we can reduce it to an affect or to a habit, but I think that it might be an affect seeing as I do, that the soul changes together with the body.

Ari: Well said. But if it were a passion, where would you place it among the principal, that is among the better-known and more common passions?”

Cas: I would say that it could be reduced to anguish [dolore], if anguish is in fact an affect. You have already shown me that repentance is not the same as shame, but that it follows shame as the shadow follows the body. I would say that it can be grouped together with ire, because that one who feels shame does not feel anger against his transgression but, in a manner, he feels outrage at his own self. Yet, from what I can see, this is not the case. Ire is ferocious and combative, mixing daring and dare to, while shame is humble and contrite, shy rather than bold.

This is the first time that we know in history that shame has been described in such a manner. This is what drove Nathanson to find and translate this play. Now why is this so important? To understand that shame is rooted so deeply into our body and what exactly IS shame in the first place that it required Ari to drop this mini monolog on us:

Ari: As far as I can see we are halfway there. Let’s move on then. Shame is fear; now, one fears evils, but not all evils, only those that are to come, because the present ones bring anguish but not fear. So, if the ashamed fears — and he cannot fear any good thing — what does he then fear? Death, the evil of all evils? No, because the subject of death never caused anyone to blush, though it has caused many to pale and almost die without death. And, besides, men most often feel ashamed of some small shortcoming which would hardly be punishable by death, if punishable at all.

For example, one might be ashamed of speaking in public or in the presence of the Prince. But what could this man fear? Blows, wounds, illness or some bad stroke of luck aimed at his children or parents? It is a fact that men often fear such things, but they never feel ashamed of them, not unless they are in some way connected to some shameful thing. So, then, what shall we say is the fear of one who is ashamed? If we consider carefully, we find that the ashamed can only fear the presence of that person who is somehow aware of his shortcomings. After all, wouldn’t it be horrible to meet the eyes of one such man, especially if one were connected to him by a bloodline or love bond or even ties of goodwill? Or if that person was venerable by reasons of age or outstanding virtue?

It is in the presence of such people that one feels most often feels shame. One has to admit then that one does not fear the external appearance, but the internal opinion of these individuals — a thing, which, in itself, is not truly frightening. Not frightening, I should say, until it receives the seed of our error, because it then conceives, carries and gives birth to infamy — a horrible monster, most feared by those wellborn. Infamy is, without a doubt, what one fears, and with great reason, since it is the destroyer of that great good, of that most precious treasure that is honor. Who would rid the world of infamy would rid the world of shame. So, to link the beginning of this discussion to its end, I could conclude that shame is nothing more than fear of infamy.

Of course a privileged man in the middle ages with alabaster skin and over a thousand years of patriachal support for his lifestyle would only have one thing to fear, and only one thing to feel ashamed about. Infamy. If only that were true for the rest of us. I am on team Gua:

Gua: I am not as taken by your theories, Signor Ariosto, as Castello was. Perhaps this is because my weak eyes do not see the light well and so your portrayal does not appear to me as true or as vivid as it does to him.

Ari: It is a question of subtlety, not of poor eyesight: he who doubts the most sees the most.…

Lol

Thank god I am not a phd and I can comment on this for fun because honestly, it’s kinda funny at times. The play continues with Ari & Cas communicating more about shame & now honor:

Ari: …Now let’s see if you can tell me what brings infamy.

Cas: The same thing that brings honor.

Ari: And what could that be?

Cas: Public opinion, I think.

Ari: I think you are right, although I know that there are some wise and widely respected men, men of great fame, who share a different opinion. Some day we shall be privileged and delighted to hear it.

Cas: I know a dear friend of ours who holds this same view; I do not know if you speak of him.

Ari: I mean none other than the unique Signor Guarino.

Cas: And I speak of that friend of ours who so bitterly complained of his bitter fate as we walked along the Giovecca the other night.

Ari: He is a man to be trusted, but I did not know that he was of that opinion. Are we then to assume that they might agree with each other’s opinion?

Cas: I could not tell you because I have never heard them discuss their views; it might be a good thing if they met. I, for my part, do not believe it. I can tell you this much: I once told this friend of ours how surprised I was that others might have such an opinion of honor and he answered: “You should be even more surprised that not everyone is of this opinion, and that the world has for so long fooled itself into believing that true honor is founded on the elusive and changeable opinion of man, which is like a great palace of diamond erected on foundations of glass.”

Did I mention yet I am Team Gua? Not only is he 16th century autistic coded, he can see straight through the dominant cultural narrative of his time. Yay.

Now back to Ari & Cas who have rounded back to the discussion of shame:

Cas: In that case, no. Because not all kinds of love are good. We are only speaking of virtuous love not of that dirty thing which undeservedly goes by the name of love. That kind of love cannot be said to be good, or legitimate, or worthy of praise.

That dirty thing being physical sex without a spiritual connection. So Cas here is slut shamming while discussing love.

Ari: Thus we discover duplicity and ambiguity in the word love, as it can be interpreted in both a good and a bad sense. It can happen, and in fact it often does, that people choose the negative interpretation over the positive one, giving rise to that bad opinion which is the cause of our shame. And hasn’t the world of today been corrupted by evil ways? It has degenerated so, my dear Signor Castello, that not even a good or excellent thing can be recognized in its natural guise any more. This is much the manner of those who, looking at the world through tinted glasses, cannot see things in their natural colors, but are forced to see them red or green, depending on the color of their lenses.The majority of the men of this century do much the same, and, following the base ways of the populace, they cannot recognize gentle and virtuous love. It is no wonder then that a kind lover might sometimes suspect that his legitimate love is inspiring less than legitimate thoughts in the minds of men; therefore, he might fear infamy and, through this, feel shame

Ari drops this flowery statement and acts as if he didn’t just call everyone in his era sheeple with biased negative perspectives which is still true 400 years later. The need others have for control over your internal narrative drives so much of social interaction, no matter the label of the space, the same actions and behaviors persist while the language revolves around the same tension. After all, if you were truly radical, you’d be destroyed already. That’s how this society still operates, with my country, the USA, not so secretly slaughtering people on the daily, kidnapping journalists, arresting judges while masked armed men roam around under the guise of authorization to harm anyone who questions their shamefully hidden face. Don’t want anyone to see them blush perhaps, at the vile actions they are complict in.

The increase in oppression of my era is not my motivating reason for unpacking shame. The judgement and control of so called allies, activists, & queers is. I am not shocked that conservatives act the way they do. I am surprised so many people who on paper should get along, fail to form healthy communities due to unprocessed trauma that manifests as a costume of performative allyship that hurts true authentic soul level expression, in my opinion of course.

What I have noticed within these spaces is that if I express personal pride outside of the established community narrative, I am rejected. If I have thoughts that are more radical against the establishment, they are rejected (particularly about gender & how I am coming to the conclusion that gender is the tool in which we wedge our species apart to install the conditioning using shame in particular to keep people immature by not allowing them to fully process their shame but corrupted it into social norms-if that seems too radical for you, good. It’s not even my most radical stance I’ve taken this week!)

I believe this happens mostly because of shame; unprocessed, unintegrated, immature shame. Our species has been corrupted for thousands of years enforced by the cartisian split; an analogue of man’s removal of himself from the female, subjugating females into man-made objects; women. This split from man vs nature and man vs woman, has been normalized for centuries…but it isn’t healthy. Not for me. Maybe I’m just too queer but much of the modern queer movement relies on this split to still (this split leads to Identity instead of Being) to exist & indeed most social functions require us to separate ourselves from each other, from nature, & from our inner selves which furthers the illusion of separation & continues to wreck our species from the inside out.

Good news however, I am here to help.

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I am happy to inform you that shame can be tamed, integrated and used to craft a narrative of triumph, honor,

&

Pride

Now back to the play:

Gua: I have little to contribute; my feat will be to abandon the battlefield of shame without suffering shame, although I would always consider it to my glory to lose at the hands of Signor Guarino.

Ari: What a good tactic on your part, Signor Guarino. To exalt your adversary in order to garner greater glory from your victory. Oh, the self-serving prodigality of man. I am neither so blind, Signor Guarino, nor so poor in judgment, as not to take notice of your tricks.

Cas: I do not know what to make of your tricks, but it seems to me that this kind of contention is better left to courtiers of princes, than to Muses like yourselves.For my part I would much rather hear you subtly examine the matter at hand than hear you exchange formalities.

Ari: It’s Guarino’s fault; he was the first to challenge.

Razor sharp discernment, Cas has here. But I am still team Gua. Ari also sounds like a little whiny baby pointing fingers. Even if you don’t care about shame, this play is actually kinda funny no matter the century.

Gua doubts shame is fear of infamy & for goood reason.

Gua:…Several different reasons inspire me to doubt that shame is, in fact, fear. Mainly this one: it seems that opposites fight under the same standard and the same captain, that is, they are placed under the same orders. So, black and white both fall under color, and bitter and sweet under taste. Yet if a thing were necessarily what it seemed, it would have to be said that impudence was also fear while, in fact, this is far from the truth. Furthermore, if I am correct, a species cannot be dissimilar and certainly not opposite to the order that produces it, and it possesses nothing that cannot be traced back to the parental legacy. If we assume this to be true, and if we also assume that fear is a cold feeling while shame is hot, how can it be that fear is shame and that a daughter of fire is born from a father of ice?

A few lines later, we have the crux of the piece:

Gua: To continue, I say that shame is a virtue; and as such she is an equal, perhaps even a sister of honesty, both being warriors of chastity. Listen to the proof.

Full armed with her did all the sisters stand,
The Virtues, arrayed in a mighty line;
And two by two they held each other’s hand.
Honesty and shame came first, of all divine
Virtues, they are the noblest and most fair,
And make her proud above all womankind.

The praise lavished upon modest and bashful women offers further and undeniable proof of this truth. It then cannot be denied that shame is a virtue and thus a habit, whereas fear is not a habit but an affect — so it follows that shame is not fear.

Guarino is clear here that shame placed upon women is valid and virtuous. It is more proof that shame is specifically the tool that has been used to harass, oppress, & destroy femininity (Nature) by enslaving the female sex of our species into that, once again man-made object we currently call women.

For the record, I do not currently believe there is liberation in expansion of the binary sex based gender system we currently operate under. I believe the only way to heal this shame upon women is to stop identifying with sex-based gender completely (sorry to the trans people who value this system yet want to claim liberation [I am trans adjacent myself], it’s not that you aren’t valid in your transition, it’s just you went from one corrupted limited expression of humanity to another corrupted limited expression of humanity, not a lot of room for actualizing our true human potential for me) & create alternative societal function based gender. This is my theory and pet project but if you are interested in talking about it with me, feel free to email me. ampersand @ joy to be wild dot com

Here is where we will pause in our summary of the play for now. There is plenty more but I feel this is a good stopping ground to digest the idea that shame is a virtue, & that we cannot be too unlike our parental legacy. Nor unlike the birds flying between trees, dropping seeds, & living free while man destroys the world around him trying to justify that gap in his head, between the eyes, that he uses to slice himself in two, one rational, one disgustingly natural & avoided for internal review.

So,

Is shame a virtue?

Is it a tool?

Or does wondering about anything other than your present moment, make you a fool?

Shame, the raw affect is quiet complex enough on its own. A physical reoil, a blush of the face, a downward cast expression. Nathanson quoted Tomkins as calling it the painful incomplete reduction of a positive affect. Nathanson then added the compass of scripts concept to this painful reduction yet failed to translate that to a compass of pride; the allegedly healthy outcome of shame.

He also mentioned laughter as a cure for shame, but not much else. Perhaps the weight of the topic made him unable to fully picture the other side of the tunnel; a society of humans not shamefully beaten & broken by insecure, probably malignant people who forced their way onto the world, refusing to feel shame for their destruction of countless cultures devoted to their connection to the planet.

Instead, we do the capitalizm & we like it, or we die.

What if we did have a compass of pride within ourselves however? & each time shame was launched from an offender onto us, hoping it lands in our psyche so they can avoid their own, we had a perfectly posed personal script that maintained our peace while rejecting to internalize the other persons unprocessed emotional turmoil. Over the decades and centuries, we could teach future humans how to be trumans; not man, not woman, but true to themselves.

See ya next time