entelechy: mind & culture

love AND power Fall/Winter 06-07, no. 8

Make love not war.
Click to watch a video on the project.

Most people understand 'sex and power', but 'love and power'? Here's my take on it, but the people at www.globalorgasm.org have a much better one. It's about sex and power, yes, but also love and power. Their mission? Global Orgasm hopes "to effect change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy....[with] the First Annual Solstice Synchronized Global Orgasm for Peace." And there's real science that goes along with it (see Princeton's Global Consciousness Project). And evolutionary psychological theory behind it, too. Says Entelechy's poetry editor Tim Horvath:
"It's sort of surprising that there isn't a holiday that's built around sex, so maybe this is fulfilling some sort of species-need — immaculate conceptions can only take you so far."
This 8th issue of Entelechy is about the connection between these forces of nature (love and power).

pax,
Alice Andrews, publisher/editor

poetry

Undreaming

jalina mhyana

You ask me to undream you now

that things have taken a turn, your wife’s hand

willing us back to the wish state,

un-truing us.

So I’ll play along, imagine reversing

the course of events, a remote control

in her green hand rewinding the past three months

making love backwards

in fast motion on the

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His Lifelong Study of Women stephen mounkhall

He collected arcane

Examples of suffering,

Pinned and mounted them

In his butterfly display case.

Why?

Not really the right question,

But to answer it will not

Take us overly far from the scope

Of this sequence.

He appreciated the apparent rigor

Of the scientific method, but he

Could not finish anything

Satisfactorily before the grandkids

Interrupted his

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Evolution katherine abbott

Listen, Love.

The winds are blowing over the hills starting avalanches of air.
They bury the shaken trees in dislodged gusts
so they seem to be wading ankle deep in heavy atoms.
With slanting light on their snow, the hills glower like the golden,
dusty hills of Utah.

There are spaces opening where the winds blow
in this valley, among the large, close houses.
When I was in the west last summer, I missed you.
Driving with my sister, a tent, canned soup
that we could not heat for fear of forest fires,
I learned why you dislike telephones.

She was asleep when I called you, from the

stories


The Poet, the Rapist, and the Cops robert perchan In three years in Seoul, fully seven women had come out and told him they had been violated by strangers or men they knew. Eight, if you counted Hee-jung and the Dutch woman missionary. The American sometimes wondered if there weren’t something in his character, some subtle display of empathy operating on a level he was unaware of, that eased the delivery of such confidences.

By the time the album of polaroid snapshots reached Rookie Patrolman Pak it had already passed through the hands of everyone above him in his Section and more than half a dozen of the fifty-odd photos had disappeared. This did not surprise Rookie Patrolman Pak. Some of the snapshots were said to be “better” than the others. The poses, of course, were pretty much the same: the young woman in each lay sprawled on the back seat of the taxi, her skirt or dress hiked above her waist, her panties gone, her legs spread wide enough to reveal the wet pink of a violated cleft, her face puffy but relaxed with the zoned-out look of the drugged and the occasional thread of drool oozing from the

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Red Love alice andrews In complete eros there is no will to power; in will to power there is no eros.

There is a phenomenon known well to train riders called saccade. Without will, the central foveal area of the retinal field detects an object—a sacccadia—and then another. Karina watched this changing of focus from one point to another as she rode the number one train south. She watched as the passengers’ eyes danced involuntarily left, right, left, right—their eyes catching the large station numbers on the tiled walls—

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photo: jim andrews

discourse


Love and Fear marnia robinson & gary wilson

Various spiritual teachings say that there are only two fundamental emotions: love and fear. For the body, this is true. All mammals, including humans, have two opposing hormonal responses to stimuli. Threatening stimuli cause an increase of stress hormones—adrenaline and cortisol. Soothing or reassuring stimuli cause an increase in oxytocin.

A sudden threat triggers the fight-or-flight response associated with adrenaline. Adrenaline steps up heart rate, increases respiration, activates muscles, and promotes hyper-alertness. Longer-term stress (from a few minutes to days and weeks) increases a different stress hormone: cortisol. Cortisol, too, makes us hyper-vigilant, but its evolutionary functions are quite different than the temporary jolt of


All We Need is Love? Venus and Adonis; Francois Lemoyne, 1729 david pearce

Grand meta-narratives currently aren't very fashionable. History can indeed seem like one damn thing after another. The nearest we get these days to some kind of plot or story about where life on earth is heading usually adds up to some simple-minded technological determinism. Nevertheless, a sketch of one possible route by which all sources of negative value will be purged from the world is set out here. And here's what I think will become of love: Fragile self-esteem and shaky self-images will be beautified and recrystallised afresh. For

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reviews


The Nature of Literature A REVIEW OF MADAME BOVARY'S OVARIES michelle scalise sugiyama

photo: nick sugiyama

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a dissertation prospectus in which I dared to suggest that there was such a thing as human nature, that this human nature was the equivalent of evolved human psychology, that literary characters were representations of this evolved psychology, and that literary analysis should therefore be founded on an understanding of evolutionary psychology. These ideas were seen by the literary establishment as being racist, sexist, and—worst of all—reductionistic. It took me over a year to find three people in the UC Santa Barbara English Department who were willing to serve on my dissertation committee.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, a handful of other literary renegades had reached the same conclusion regarding literature, psychology, and human evolution: Joe Carroll in

Dr. Bush's Fail-proof Infidelity Elixir

A REVIEW OF INTIMACY AFTER INFIDELITY

julienne mullette

Evolutionary psychologists might well say we can't help it, that it's in our genes, especially in the genes of males. But some neuroscientists say that this is like saying, "the Devil made me do it!" — a refusal to take responsibility for being more than a knee-jerk response to biology.

The authors claim this is a how-to book — how to avoid the pain of another infidelity by understanding why "he" was unfaithful. I trudged through the first 40 pages of this book — feeling it ought to be called, "Infidelity for Dummies." So many

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Romancing the Science

A REVIEW OF WHY WE LOVE

amy gilliland

“I don’t know whether to be enraged to find out that I’m like everyone else or relieved that I finally understand what’s happened to me.” The words leaped out from my student’s paper – her desire to be unique in her passion conflicted with her quest for a deeper understanding of her own experience of love. This comment exemplifies one of the strong responses to Fisher’s latest book, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love. Fisher tells the story of her latest quest to understand our behavior through hormone and MRI

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