“The writing down of history turned out to be a self-perpetuating activity. Anytime kids asked questions, adults would yell, ‘READ THE FUCKING MANUAL!’ (later shortened to ‘BECAUSE I SAID SO’). These kids, when they grew up, tended to reproduce this behavior. This was called culture.”
“Armed with priestly justifications, and supported by good people, political leaders could finally begin going beyond mere intentions and retcons and actually begin inventing history. They were no longer limited to merely encountering it in the form of unpleasant surprises, and reacting to it on an improvised case-by-case basis. The ability to separately define ‘good’ and ‘people’ allowed history writing to become truly predictable, proactive, scalable and deployable to large populations. Sometimes history could even be written before it happened.”
“Rasputin had convinced [Tsarina] Alexandra of his holiness, and no amount of evidence could turn her against him. All warnings about Rasputin came to seem like attacks on the family, and further isolated them from the people who wanted to help.” — Keith Gessen
“An abuser may claim to be disliked by the friends and family of their partner and use this as a reason for not letting their partner associate with them. Often abusers will withhold phone calls and messages from family members and friends as a form of isolation. An abuser will generally attempt to gain control by cutting off supportive figures in their partner’s life.”
That absolutely fits how Rasputin blocked the Tsar and Tsarina from the rest of the Russian government (minus sycophants). Although it’s unclear whether the “Mad Monk” carried out his maneuvers intentionally, he successfully became the dominant figure in the Romanov family’s lives.
The most interesting unsolved mystery is how Rasputin soothed Alexei Nikolaevich, Russia’s young Tsarevich. The boy suffered from debilitating hemophilia, and apparently no one but Rasputin could alleviate his excruciating pain. Gessen addresses this in the Guardian article linked above:
“[Rasputin] was recommended to the family by their confessor, who had been impressed by his mixture of smelliness and religious fervour. Then it turned out that he seemed able to stop Alexis’s bleeding. Exactly what Rasputin did has been the subject of medical dispute. During bleeding episodes, Rasputin would talk to the boy, tell him stories, calm him down — this may have lowered the heir’s blood pressure, easing the bleeding. Contemporaries claimed that Rasputin could hypnotise people with his eyes, and it’s possible he hypnotised Alexis, with the same calming effect.”
I don’t find those proposed mechanisms convincing, to be honest. Is charisma really that powerful?
Here’s something I’ve been told about depression, both personally and generally: “It’s not your fault.” This sentiment is usually extended to any kind of mental illness. From one perspective, it’s true. We are all products — or rather victims — of brain chemistry and circumstance. No one gets to choose their genetics or how they’re treated by other people.
You gotta roll with the punches. Unfortunately, some of us are bad at rolling. Just because. We didn’t decide to default to stupid coping methods, and most of us can’t change our patterns without help. That’s normal and okay, positivity, blah blah blah, etc. The availability of help is crucial. Without health insurance, I would be sleeping on the streets, or dead, which is a cliche so I’m not sure how to state it with enough impact.
As a mentally ill person, I know the experience of suffering because your mind is beyond your control. (I’m tempted to say “formerly mentally ill”, because of ~stigma~, but it’s not something that goes away when the pills are working.) And yet… I have also human agency. To some degree my emotional experience is my fault, at least according to common ideas about how society works.
Author Alexandra Erin noted on Twitter, “So many systems that make up whatever you want to call ‘civilization’ depend on the participants abiding by certain minimal expectations.” It’s hard to blunder into abiding by such expectations, especially en masse — we do it on purpose, and we’re proud of that. Our species is smitten with the semblance of free will. I feel like I make choices.
“You’re born with particular DNA programming, which determines how you perceive and process outside stimuli, thus shaping your progress as a person, as a human psycho-physiological entity. Nature is what determines your reaction to nurture, and you don’t have any control over either. They both affect you, certainly, but not in a way that you can manipulate independently of who you already are… it gets circular. [Bold added.]
And yet we think that we have the power to decide things without reference to our formative contexts. Regardless of my philosophical position, my brain is convinced that it is reasonable. Accordingly, society is built on the idea of responsibility for one’s actions. I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be! As far as I can tell there’s no alternative. But how interesting, that the entire system of civilization is constructed around a logical fallacy.”
On the one hand, this is sort of freeing. “I’m not responsible for being useless and sad all the time!” On the other hand, if nothing is your fault, then you also don’t have any choices.
Battered spouses are often told that they didn’t choose to stay with their abusers after the first incidence of violence (whether emotional or physical). Victims are counselled not to blame themselves. Safety expert Gavin de Becker finds this rhetoric harmful, as he explains in The Gift of Fear. Most advocates contend that abusers forcibly shape reality for their targets, until escape options become invisible. In his book, de Becker argues that this attitude is problematic. If it’s not a choice to stay, then it can’t be a choice to leave. He suggests that empowering abuse survivors requires encouraging accountability for a person’s own abuse. That’s very tricky to do in a non-toxic way.
Are you responsible for your history? Which events and experiences can be traced to your decisions, and which can’t?
“It says you are powerless, that your destiny is entirely determined by the luck of the draw, that the only chance you have of winning the game lies in following the rules, and accepting the cards as they come. Who wants to grow up in that kind of universe?”
Really, that’s the only universe we can grow up in. My friend Adam Brinklow commented on Facebook, “I assumed the real lesson [of Candy Land] was to cheat. Cheating being the only means of affecting the outcome.” I wish that cheating were more than a predictable reaction to stimuli… exactly like all other actions.
I used to worry about seizing the zeitgeist. Okay, I still worry about it: I need to write relevant things that people want to read. But it’s not hard. A couple of quotes from Heaping Torso got a bunch of reblogs on Tumblr so I’m probably pretty good, right? I don’t need to check for trending hashtags or survey the tastemakers, those nebulous powerful nobodies, in order to make art. I just have to work on things that interest me, and hope I’m naturally cool enough for other people to be interested too. I’m anxious to push to the front of the pack but it’s better to be on the side investigating something that most people haven’t touched. God, I’m gonna have a fucking panic attack. I can’t do that. I can’t be original.
Sometimes I consider moving to some irrelevant small town in Central Valley and being the beginning of an art scene, paying cheap rent and living through the glory days that my heroes talk about. San Francisco before the AIDS crisis and the tech boom. (Hopefully the cultural shortcut conveys what I mean.) I want to create a ground floor for myself to get in on. My dream is that twenty years from now I’ll be mentoring new versions of myself in a town whose name we don’t know yet.
I mentioned this fantasy to my cousin and he warned me not to dismiss what’s already in these small towns. They’re not San Francisco or Oakland, places with exciting histories and mainstream recognition, but they’re not nothing. Fair criticism; he was right to contradict me. You can’t go into a place expecting to be better than everyone else and have them embrace you; pride goeth before a fall.
But I don’t think I’m entirely wrong. Have you been to these rural towns? There’s nothing there. Fucking nothing. No bookstores, no cafes, not even churches. It’s full of Americana to romanticize, grazing horses and old rusty cars in every yard, but there’s a reason why everyone moves to cities instead of the other way around.
I bought Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers from Pioneers Press for $4. They are currently out of stock, but you can buy a copy directly from Last Word Press, and it appears that you can read the entire text on Anarcha Library.
At first I didn’t connect the Barbara Ehrenreich who co-authored this pamphlet with the Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed. She explains on the biography page of her website:
“With the birth of my first child in 1970, I underwent a political, as well as a personal, transformation. Bit by bit, I got involved with what we then called the ‘women’s health movement,’ advocating for better health care for women and greater access to health information than we had at that time. This new concern led to the ‘underground bestseller,’ a little pamphlet called Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, co-authored by my friend Deirdre English.”
Whaddaya know, huh? I assume that Last Word Press reprinted the zine without permission from the original authors, especially since there’s an Amazon listing as well. But I haven’t verified that so don’t quote me on it. Regardless I feel okay-ish because there’s no way that Last Word is making a profit. However, I wouldn’t have bought the pamphlet if I realized that it was a bootleg.
Anyway, parts of my review are directed toward this particular printing:
Need. Bigger. Font. NEED BIGGER FONT. Generally I won’t even read something smaller than 12-point Times New Roman (sorry, Dangerous Damsels), but I made an exception because I was really interested in the content of Witches, Midwives, and Nurses. Plus I already bought it. But the small text still annoyed me.
The pictures would have been much more informative if they had been printed larger and captioned consistently. I don’t know if the images were added by Last Word Press or if they were part of the original zine, but either way my comment stands. An illustration is pointless if I can hardly see it.
As for the main content, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses was well-researched and fascinating, with a delightfully anarchist slant. The zine examines the intersection of patriarchy and medicine, focusing on “two important phases in the male takeover of health care: suppression of witches in medieval Europe and the rise of the male medical profession in the United States” (according to the blurb). Recommended, as long as you have a magnifying glass to aid in your reading. My only complaint about the writing is that I wanted more of it; specific examples from individual lives would have enhanced the academic narrative.
Another zine related to witches and reproductive health: Little Cloud #1, “Borders, Boundaries, and Barriers”, available for $2 at Portland Button Works. Different vibe but same general topic.
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