10 December 2009
other ways of living
Lara writes another very interesting response to the book (there's so much I want to respond to in her posts lately I don't know where to begin). But just quickly on this point:
One lot of people Nina doesn’t talk about are nuns and priests who, in my experience, do live pretty revolutionarily in same-sex non-sex (in principle anyway) households where labour is shared (well, ok, labour is sometimes parcelled down to a youngster or a woman, I admit) and life is shared almost completely. Nina talks a lot more about sex and a man called Otto Muhl who sounds like he had a great time in 1970s Germany shagging for, well, Germany. But it sounds like Otto, in his own way, did seek to go beyond what Nina calls the ‘current many-then-one model’ even if it did land him in the slammer eventually. But what about nuns and priests Nina? or anyone? They do a fine job of living in small groups together.
One of my early preoccupations on the blog, or at least at the time I began the blog was with the idea of a secular nunnery. I suspect it was more a product of the chaos in my head at the time than any coherent idea, and, besides, my vision was one-sidedly isolationist, as if nunneries and monasteries were somehow places filled with individual penitents/intellectuals rather than collectives. Anyway, point is, Lara is right to raise the issue of 'living in small groups together': the kibbutzim I talk about in the book were mostly chosen because of their politics rather than anything else (indeed, someone somewhere online has pulled me up on this, must come back to it), but nuns and priests will do perfectly. Perhaps my favourite of all the films in The Good Old Naughty Days is the one where the nuns and the priests sit down to a shared meal before the action starts: it's very sweet and friendly and collective. We are none of us good enough to one another, nor to ourselves.
One lot of people Nina doesn’t talk about are nuns and priests who, in my experience, do live pretty revolutionarily in same-sex non-sex (in principle anyway) households where labour is shared (well, ok, labour is sometimes parcelled down to a youngster or a woman, I admit) and life is shared almost completely. Nina talks a lot more about sex and a man called Otto Muhl who sounds like he had a great time in 1970s Germany shagging for, well, Germany. But it sounds like Otto, in his own way, did seek to go beyond what Nina calls the ‘current many-then-one model’ even if it did land him in the slammer eventually. But what about nuns and priests Nina? or anyone? They do a fine job of living in small groups together.
One of my early preoccupations on the blog, or at least at the time I began the blog was with the idea of a secular nunnery. I suspect it was more a product of the chaos in my head at the time than any coherent idea, and, besides, my vision was one-sidedly isolationist, as if nunneries and monasteries were somehow places filled with individual penitents/intellectuals rather than collectives. Anyway, point is, Lara is right to raise the issue of 'living in small groups together': the kibbutzim I talk about in the book were mostly chosen because of their politics rather than anything else (indeed, someone somewhere online has pulled me up on this, must come back to it), but nuns and priests will do perfectly. Perhaps my favourite of all the films in The Good Old Naughty Days is the one where the nuns and the priests sit down to a shared meal before the action starts: it's very sweet and friendly and collective. We are none of us good enough to one another, nor to ourselves.
