Studying After A Long Gap Quotes

And it’s no accident, I’d add, that the transsexual is the only thing that trans can describe that queer can’t. The transsexual is not queer; this is the best thing about her. Take Agnes, the pseudonymous transsexual woman who famously posed as intersex at UCLA’s Gender Identity Clinic in the late fifties in order to obtain access to vaginoplasty. Agnes’s case was chronicled by Harold Garfinkel in an article that’s now taught in trans studies courses. Agnes is regularly celebrated as some kind of gender ninja: savvy, tactical, carefully conning the medical-industrial complex into giving her what she wants. What no one wants to talk about is what she actually wanted: a cunt, a man, a house, and normal fucking life. Whatever intuition she may not have had about gender as a “managed achievement” was put toward a down payment on a new dishwasher. If there’s anything Agnes “reveals” about gender, it’s that actually existing normativity is, strictly speaking, impossible. Norms, as such, do not exist. (If Gender Trouble knew this, it did a poor job explaining it.) That doesn’t mean that norms don’t structure people’s desires; what it means is that the desire for the norm consists, in terms of its lived content, in nonnormative attempts at normativity. Agnes was a nonnormative subject, but that wasn’t because she was “against” the norm; on the contrary, her nonnormativity was what wanting to be normal actually looked like. Like most of us, Agnes was making do in the gap between what she wanted and what wanting it got her. We can argue, and people have, about whether queer theory is possible without antinormativity. But whatever comes after trans studies—can I suggest transsexual theory?—will be impossible with antinormativity. The most powerful intervention scholars working in trans studies can make, at this juncture within the academy, is to defend the claim that transness requires that we understand, as we never have before, what it means to be attached to a norm—by desire, by habit, by survival.

For a long time I felt cut off from the world, a billiard ball in a Cartesian space, and a gulf separated me from the fish, animals, trees, and people—my mind was not content or whole. There were symptoms, such as having more thoughts than I could possibly use at any given moment, and clumsiness with people, but probably the main symptom was of being shut out of the magic in things. I worried at the problem, studying animals and plants and noticing that all the steps I took did not help. Then one day the gap wasn’t there anymore. After the gap disappeared, I could let a situation tell me what it was about, let people reveal themselves to me, without finding a problem. Sometimes wholeness is just given. It has to be given actually, because effort leads to effort, not to wholeness.

These experiences, called “psychic” or psi, suggest the presence of deep, invisible interconnections among people, and between objects and people. The most curious aspect of psi experiences is that they seem to transcend the usual boundaries of time and space. For over a century, these very same experiences have been systematically dismissed as impossible, or ridiculed as delusionary, by a small group of influential academics and journalists who have assumed that existing scientific theories are inviolate and complete. This has created a paradox. Many people believe in psi because of their experiences, and yet the defenders of the status quo have insisted that this belief is unjustified. Paradoxes are extremely important because they point out logical contradictions in assumptions. The first cousins of paradoxes are anomalies, those unexplained oddities that crop up now and again in science. Like paradoxes, anomalies are useful for revealing possible gaps in prevailing theories. Sometimes the gaps and contradictions are resolved peacefully and the old theories are shown to accommodate the oddities after all. But that is not always the case, so paradoxes and anomalies are not much liked by scientists who have built their careers on conventional theories. Anomalies present annoying challenges to established ways of thinking, and because theories tend to take on a life of their own, no theory is going to lie down and die without putting up a strenuous fight. Though anomalies may be seen as nuisances, the history of science shows that each anomaly carries a seed of potential revolution. If the seed can withstand the herbicides of repeated scrutiny, skepticism, and prejudice, it may germinate. It may then provoke a major breakthrough that reshapes the scientific landscape, allowing new technological and sociological concepts to bloom into a fresh vision of “common sense.” A long-held, commonsense assumption is that the worlds of the subjective and the objective are distinct, with absolutely no overlap. Subjective is “here, in the head,” and objective is “there, out in the world.” Psi phenomena suggest that the strict subjective-objective dichotomy may instead be part of a continuous spectrum, and that the usual assumptions about space and time are probably too restrictive. The anomalies fall into three general categories: ESP (extrasensory perception), PK (psychokinesis, or mind-matter interaction), and phenomena suggestive of survival after bodily death, including near-death experiences, apparitions, and reincarnation (see the following definitions and figure 1.1). Most scientists who study psi today expect that further research will eventually explain these anomalies in scientific terms. It isn’t clear, though, whether they can be fully understood without significant, possibly revolutionary, expansions of the current state of scientific knowledge.

or he will become frustrated because he cannot provide this special intimacy with her. Only God can fill this gap in the relationship. He is still a personal God and although He allows us to share everything about our relationship with Him with others in the deepest koinonia (communion by intimate participation); there is still a special intimacy that He has reserved for us and us alone where our love for Him and His for us is consummated. No one can share in the fruit of that for that belongs to God and no one else. He is, after all, a jealous God, who longs for a special, intimate time with each one of us that is shared with no one else, just as a husband and wife share an intimacy with each other that no one else in the world will share. We enter into this intimacy with God through the blood of Jesus Christ and it is through His blood that we can eat of this forbidden fruit because only through the complete cleansing of the blood of Jesus are we worthy to partake in this most intimate fruit to be shared with God alone and no one else. There is a Biblical expression that I found also uses the word “chamed” which is appropriate to end this study; “Va-yelekh belo chemdah” I will take my leave without anyone regretting my departure.