Traumear

These are not abstract studies but demonstrations of where gender resides, how it begins and where it leads. The reader allow himself to become involved in the process and discovers his own generic insights, so as to make a habit of gender wisdom. In both of these essays we specifically set ourselves the task of defining gender from the point of view of mature human nature while we search for the roots of it in sexual human being. We base our inquiry on experience, such as of parental communication with children and immature adults. Also we hope to confirm the feeling, or feel, (tact) we have for gender, as distinct from conception and thought, not so that we can build some logical scheme based on this feeling but in order to explore and describe it sufficiently for eventual physical recognition. Equally of interest are the essays Sexual Attraction and the Procreative Urge (2019) and The Sexual Mood, both available as booklets.

An Elegy in eleven parts. The language is straightforward, the thought is precise and the feeling mature.

One hundred pages, each page carefully crafted to help make sense of some aspect of the world. One growth-cycle, that arrives, step by step, at a new insight, a new truth to add on to others. It may be helpful to remind that a symbol works long before we know how or why it works.

Physiology is a science of bodies. But we cannot understand these unless, in conjunction with them, we understand the body. And for the sake of this conjunction we require perception and sensibility. So the science of bodies nourishes itself, so to speak, through perception and sensation of the body. This perception and sensation will in our present case be verbal and on occasion poetic. It will be artful in terms of poetry. But it will not be literary, because its main reason for being will not reside in itself but in its service to our science, to the knowledge for the sake of our understanding of bodies.

As a gift, speech is whatever we say, in the interest, specifically, of our greater human being, which implies an ongoing change of heart, so that everything that makes a difference to us makes a difference at the same time to the seat of our emotions and will, and so that enough makes a difference to us to prevent ourselves from stagnating and to keep our heart from hardening, incapable of adaptation and response. As an achievement, speech is a case of our giving vocal utterance to what would otherwise occur to us as stupidity, which we will wish to be rid of, so first we have to identify it. We are spurred on to do this by the acquired insight into every case and instance of stupidity as potential speech, given the sort of understanding we intend to develop here. Some of our science will therefore depend on a thoroughgoing analysis of various symptoms of stupidity and on the critique of it - of necessity a very gentle critique - as the seedbed of practical occasions and particular acts of speech.

Physiology is a science of bodies. But we cannot understand these unless, in conjunction with them, we understand the body. And for the sake of this conjunction we require perception and sensibility. So the science of bodies nourishes itself, so to speak, through perception and sensation of the body. This perception and sensation will in our present case be verbal and on occasion poetic. It will be artful in terms of poetry. But it will not be literary, because its main reason for being will not reside in itself but in its service to our science, to the knowledge for the sake of our understanding of bodies.

These verses are taken from the book: Physiology - the Live Science. They document the same growth cycle that is demonstrated by that book.

Sixteen concentrated, thought-provoking prose pieces treating a variety of topics.

Morphology is the study of our virtues, but also a description of these virtues in action and the knowledge of their effects. I intend that this book should continue immediately where the 'Physiology' leaves off, so that a familiarity with the fundamental virtue of fear and unfear is taken for granted. Also the double-edged effectiveness of every virtue is anticipated, and the fourfold root or substructure of our emotional human being as horror and terror, shame and guilt is taken as read in that book. I do not intend to preach, neither to the converted nor to the unconverted, but simply to observe the shape of things to come, pleasant or unpleasant, interesting or boring, with an eye only to the changing pattern of appearances and with an ear to the spirit of reality's sound advice.

As a gift, speech is whatever we say, in the interest, specifically, of our greater human being, which implies an ongoing change of heart, so that everything that makes a difference to us makes a difference at the same time to the seat of our emotions and will, and so that enough makes a difference to us to prevent ourselves from stagnating and to keep our heart from hardening, incapable of adaptation and response. As an achievement, speech is a case of our giving vocal utterance to what would otherwise occur to us as stupidity, which we will wish to be rid of, so first we have to identify it. We are spurred on to do this by the acquired insight into every case and instance of stupidity as potential speech, given the sort of understanding we intend to develop here. Some of our science will therefore depend on a thoroughgoing analysis of various symptoms of stupidity and on the critique of it - of necessity a very gentle critique - as the seedbed of practical occasions and particular acts of speech.

The reader is invited to experience and understand an aspect of the transition from modern to contemporary in terms of a governed population. What is described is how growth becomes organic rather than merely economic, how the modern tensions are not resisted but absorbed creatively and how a politician can, by changing his modern attitudes, influence a population in the direction of thriving community even as he learns from those members of the community who embrace the communal spirit - which spirit cannot be stopped but only welcome creatively or resisted with dire consequences.

The important essays are 'An Irrational Ethic' and 'Emotion and emotions'. 'The Nerve' is a bit of a lark. 'An Imaginative Proposal' is an intentionally na ve comparison of the European Community to a contemporary community. 'Why We Feel Diminished' is a response to a remark by the politician Rory Stewart on one of his Ted Talks.

We are modern to the extent that we understand the world as tragically flawed but we resist the truth that would allow us to construct our world after the manner of our personal desires and needs. We are anxious that the truth, by revealing itself to us, will show us that the tragic flaw resides in us and then we will have to drop all our laboriously manufactured excuses and justifications for consisting in two halves rather than being whole. And the truth is a person, is someone of whom we are ashamed. We find him objectionable because he reminds us both of our inhumanity and of our human-natural capacity for maturity and growth.

Symbolic thought presented as a series of 310 quintains.

Method and world, for all practical intents and purposes, are really interchangeable terms; one without the other is inconceivable. Just as we have no conception, no experience of world, no personal contact with it, until and unless we develop for ourselves a world view - because until then we take world on hearsay and repeat opinion on it, parroting other people's superstitions and falling in with their fears - so can we similarly not gain any knowledge, nor any understanding, of method, unless we acquaint ourselves, in the flesh, with the life of mankind, indeed until we familiarize ourselves personally and progressively with the whole range of sympathetic and compassionate being, especially of a contemporary order, otherwise we will forever fish in murky waters, mistaking the dubious for the genuine on account of our popularity and confusing questionable artifice with certain reality for the lack of a trustworthy comparison.

Method and world, for all practical intents and purposes, are really interchangeable terms; one without the other is inconceivable. Just as we have no conception, no experience of world, no personal contact with it, until and unless we develop for ourselves a world view - because until then we take world on hearsay and repeat opinion on it, parroting other people's superstitions and falling in with their fears - so can we similarly not gain any knowledge, nor any understanding, of method, unless we acquaint ourselves, in the flesh, with the life of mankind, indeed until we familiarize ourselves personally and progressively with the whole range of sympathetic and compassionate being, especially of a contemporary order, otherwise we will forever fish in murky waters, mistaking the dubious for the genuine on account of our popularity and confusing questionable artifice with certain reality for the lack of a trustworthy comparison.

We may be familiar with the concept 'eternal life' and we may wonder how such life compares with our daily existence from time to time. We may also be familiar with the Christian notion of eternal life and with the various supernatural and other-worldly ideas in connection with it. In this little essay I make a comparison with human development and evolution to show how eternal life here and now, in time, is what we enjoy once we have developed to the point of evolution; in other words once we are sufficiently mature to cooperate in the process of our resurrection.

These little essays document my thought during a time when I participated in the daily work of a school and had diverse opportunities for acquainting myself with the concerns and aims of parents, teachers and pupils.I took an especial interest in the education of our own three children, who became acquainted with both State Education and some home schooling. The youngest, for a few years, attended at a Waldorf School, where I myself participated as a parent. I was able to compare what went on there with State Education and my thinking about education grew to some extent out of that variety of experience.Some of the topics: Teacher authority, Creative education, How to admit guilt, Instruction for Religion, the Good child, Teacher training.

These live sciences, like the present one, are works of transition from development to evolution. When a human being evolves he has to cope somehow with the fact that 'everything changes', even the meaning of 'everything' and of 'change'. How he goes about this, necessarily with the help of the spirit of truth, depends on his constitution and on his gifts or talents - in other words on what he brought with him into the world at his birth. Of course he must discover - and it will partly be revealed to him - how he is to work and what kind of work he is to do during his evolution. He is to die to the old world and to build up his endless world. Works which arise from such initial evolutionary impulses, such these live sciences like the present, will then stimulate and facilitate the transition in some others who are ready to evolve.

- For those who know how to behavein the presence of the poetic spirit. -*As human beings we develop and evolve. Poets have the gift to make this intelligible, especially if we understand development as 'development against'. By means of verse a poet can give us a running commentary of his own growth and to the extent that he lives among us his work, in this genre, can ease our own passage through the contemporary doldrums. Verse can be a handy technique for explaining personal reality in terms of experience. Those who accept the poetic gift will find the present work helpful in that direction and to that end.