Reading Change From A Turtle's Perspective

Deborah Yarock With Turtle

Deborah Yarock, MFT
Oakland, CA
(510) 214-6951
http://deborahyarockmft.com/contact/

Rilke: You must change your life
Foucault: You must change the way you think.

Foucault - Straddling the Abyss

The turtle carries all possessions around with it. 

It is inseparable from its shelter. 

The turtle lumbers on land and lays its eggs there. 

Then leaves them. 

Some get eaten, some hatch and then get eaten. 

Some make it to the water to swim, to live. 

On land the turtle survives. 

It is an ancient species that owes its longevity to its conservatism, its perfect inability to change. 

In this way it survives a thousand years, another thousand, and another and another, a very ancient species. 

The turtle does not change but it continues in its static life. 

It does not risk, it endures. It survives
but it does not live. 

It does not migrate far nor seek other lands that might be happier climes. 

It remains where it is until some impossibility forces it elsewhere.

And some people prefer to do the same.

Are you one of them?

Or do you want to change your life?

Do you want to change the way you think?

Do you want to challenge yourself, to risk what is sure with the unknown?

Are you possessed with the Nietzschean "will to know?"

Are you driven by this "will to know?"

This inner longing for Other?

Agnes Martin Painting - Grid;The Matrix

Cynthis Ozick wrote an article in The New Yorker once. She shocked by taking Otto Frank to task for causing his daughter Anne's death.

Because he had the means and the knowledge to get out of Europe in time.

Instead he moved his family into an attic, with their furniture and belongings

to set up the same life they had had.

Ozick says that he could not leave his bourgeois life

to flee into the unknown

so they all perished save himself. 

-Like the turtle he carried his possessions on his back- 

up the stairs to the attic

until flight to more hospitable climes became impossible,

and he could no longer even endure.

These are questions to be asked.

What are your answers?

The world is not continuous, progressive, historical. The world is ruled by EVENTS! Events come from nowhere. They are unpredictable. They cannot be anticipated. They surprise us. They have consequences, and these consequences have additional consequences. You cannot be prepared for Events. They just happen. 

Pearl Harbor

The death of a loved one.

9-11

The loss of your health.

Meeting someone you never expected to know and love.

An escape from Death.

And these moments of Kairos where your historical life and your Destiny cross will change your life.

Are you ready for them?

Can you welcome them?

Can you come out of your shell and embrace the Other?

Mark Tansey - Continental Divide
I once shared an office with someone who experimented on turtles. He kept them in a large tank.
One day I just stood and watched them swimming in the tank.
Their grace stunned me as they moved their legs and feet/hands waving them, circling, and they looked like birds flying in the sky. Effortless. Joyful. Just playing. Living. Weightless.

Freud: 

Play is the work of the child. Work is the play of the adult. 

Is this true for you?

Do you want it to be?

If you can imagine it, you can desire it.

If you can desire it, you can live it.

By Maria Spelterini
I'll Hold Your Hand

I'll be your balancing pole.

PARRHESIA: Reading Snowden Through Foucault's Fearless Speech Part 4

Edward Snowden - Parrhesiastes

A parrhesiastes is a person who practices parrhesia - truth-telling. A parrhesiastes differs from a whistle-blower -  which is a nice sounding sort of euphemism for tattle-tale. A conscientious objector resonates with Thoreau and civil disobedience, a practice most often associated with the Quakers's method of opposing violence. In these previous essays I have argued that Snowden is a parrhesiastes, not a whistle-blower and not a conscientious objector, but a person who practices parrhesia. I think distinctions in words are important, else why have different words.

Here are the previous essays and here, on the historical precedents and evolution of parrhesia and some of its genealogy connected with Snowden, all indebted to Foucault's book Fearless Speech, from which I quote profusely.

Plato: The Laws. Trans. Thomas L. Pangle, Book VIII,835c

....what is required, in all probability, is some daring human being, who by giving honor to outspokeness (parrhesia) will say what in his opinion is best for the city and the citizens. Speaking before an audience of corrupt souls, he will order what is fitting and becoming to the whole political regime; opposing the greatest desires, and having no human ally, all alone will he follow reason alone.

Chapter Four: Parrhesia in the Care of the Self begins with Socratic parrhesia and to demonstrate Foucault selects Plato's dialogue Laches.

First, this parrhesia is philosophical:

1. the philosopher had to discover and to teach certain truths about the world, nature, etc.
2. taking a stand towards the city, the laws, political institutions, etc required a political role
3. parrhesiastic activity also endeavored to elaborate the nature of the relationships between truth and one's style of life, or truth and an ethics and aesthetics of the self.

Parrhesia in this domain of Greco-Roman culture is not a concept or theme, but a practice, which tries to shape the specific relations individuals have to themselves....the decisive criterion which identifies the parrhesiastes is not to be found in his birth, nor in his citizenship, nor in his intellectual competence, but in the harmony which exists between his logos and his bios.

Reading Snowden through this paragraph of Foucault's, does Snowden meet these requirements? 

Secondly (back to Foucault again) the target of this new parrhesia is not to persuade the assembly, but to convince someone that he must take care of himself and of others; and this means that he must change his life. This theme of changing one's life, of conversion, becomes very important from the Fourth Century B. C. to the beginnings of Christianity. (And here we see Foucault's approach at about this time to Habermas and the Frankfurt School.)

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise

the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life. 

Rainer Maria Rilke

...it is no longer just a matter of altering one's belief or opinion, but of changing one's style of life, one's relation to others, and one's relation to oneself. (FS p.106)

Thirdly these new parrhesiastic practices imply a complex set of connections between the self and truth. For not only are these practices supposed to endow the individual with self-knowledge, this self-knowledge in turn is supposed to grant access to truth and further knowledge.
And a final point...about this philosophical parrhesia is that it has recourse to numerous techniques quite different from the techniques of persuasive discourse previously utilized; and it is no longer specifically linked to the agora, or to the king's court, but can now be utilized in numerous diverse places. (FS p.107)