Detail of one of the three red cave bears skillfully rendered by an Ice Age artist over 30,000 years ago in the Chauvet cave, France (reddit.com)
(Submitted by Michael Kelly.)
How to Break Up with Integrity: Rilke on Unwounding Separation and the Difficult Art of Recalibrating Broken Relationships
By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)
We speak of love as a gift, but although it may come at first unbidden, as what Percy Shelley called a “speechless swoon of joy,” true intimacy between two people is a difficult achievement — a hard-earned glory with stakes so high that the prospect of collapse is absolutely devastating. When collapse does happen — when intimacy is severed by some disorienting swirl of chance and choice — the measure of a love is whether and to what extent the kernel of connection can be salvaged as the shell cracks, how willing each partner is to remain openhearted while brokenhearted, how much mutual care and kindness the two who have loved each other can extend in the almost superhuman endeavor of redeeming closeness after separation.
How to do this with maximal integrity, in a way that embodies Adrienne Rich’s definition of honorable human relationships, is what the poet Rainer Maria Rilke(December 4, 1875–December 29, 1926) explores in one of his staggeringly insightful letters, included in the posthumous collection Letters on Life (public library), edited and translated from German by Ulrich Baer.
1902 portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke by Helmuth Westhoff, Rilke’s brother-in-law
The day after Christmas 1921, nearly two decades after he asserted that “for one human being to love another… is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation,” and four years after the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay modeled the art of the kind, clean breakup, Rilke writes in a letter to the German painter Reinhold Rudolf Junghanns — a close friend struggling through separation and aching with the loss of love:
As soon as two people have resolved to give up their togetherness, the resulting pain with its heaviness or particularity is already so completely part of the life of each individual that the other has to sternly deny himself to become sentimental and feel pity. The beginning of the agreed-upon separation is marked precisely by this pain, and its first challenge will be that this pain already belongs separately to each of the two individuals. This pain is an essential condition of what the now solitary and most lonely individual will have to create in the future out of his reclaimed life.
He considers the measure of a “good breakup” — a separation that, however painful in its immediate loss, is a long-term gain for both partners, individually and together:
Drawings by Reinhold Rudolf Junghanns
Four weeks later, as Junghanns continues to struggle with letting go of his lover, Rilke admonishes against the painful elasticity of on-again/off-again relationships, in which the short-term alleviation of longing and loss comes at the price of ongoing mutual wounding:
Rilke emphasizes the importance of an initial period of distance in order to properly recalibrate a romantic relationship into a real friendship — a period which requires a tremendous leap of faith toward an uncertain but possibly immensely rewarding new mode of connection:
Etching by Reinhold Rudolf Junghanns
That autumn, Rilke counsels another brokenhearted friend — this time a woman — through a similar predicament. Noting that “our confusions have always been part of our riches,” he reiterates that whatever the pull toward reunion may be, it is crucial to take distance in order to gain a clearer perspective on saving what is worth saving of the relationship. In a mirror-image complement to his wisdom on challenging necessity of giving space in love, he insists on the difficult, necessary art of taking space after love:
Rilke cautions against the temptation to turn a willfully blind eye toward all the factors that have rendered the romantic relationship unfeasible and to reunite — a choice that, rather than healing, only retraumataizes and perpetuates the cycle of mutual disappointment:
There is a symmetry, both sad and beautiful, between Rilke’s faith in the redemptive power of distance in saving love after a breakup and his insistence that “the highest task of a bond between two people [is] that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other” — as within romance, so beyond romance.
Complement this particular portion of the immeasurably wise and consolatory Letters on Life with Epictetus on love and loss and Adam Phillips on why frustration is necessary for satisfaction in love, then revisit Rilke on what it really means to love, the combinatorial nature of inspiration, the lonely patience of creative work, what it takes to be an artist, and how hardship enlarges us.
TRANSLATION ADVENTURE – 9/30/18
Translators: Hanz Bolen, Bo Lebo, Heather Williams
SENSE TESTIMONY: Cultural conditioning of male/female is outdated and dangerous.
5th Step Conclusions:
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Truth is the shelter and sustenance of being, touching all there is. Truth is the ever-present parent-child, safely strongly guarding each and every individuation. Truth is Graciously valuing and celebrating all there is. Truth shelters, sustains, celebrates and guides all.
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Truthful social agreements are all inclusive, thus the TRUTH of male/female fulfillment is Here Now available to all.
-
…to come
Andrew Sullivan on the True Meaning of the Word “Conservatism”
America Desperately Needs a Healthy Conservatism
by Andrew Sullivan
In these fetid times, it’s easy to know what you’re against. And I’ve spent many diaries assailing the dueling Trump and “social justice” cults on the illiberal right and left these past several months. But what am I for?
That’s a harder question but a useful one to ask yourself from time to time. You don’t defeat something with nothing. So I thought I’d take a brief detour from the tribal abyss, and go back to some first principles. I remain a conservative, pretty much where I’ve always been, with the exception of foreign policy where I’ve seen the folly of interventionism in the wake of Iraq. By conservative, I do not mean Republican. To my mind, the Republican Party has become — and not just recently — a cancer on this particular strain of Western thought. To those who believe that this is a cop-out, or a version of the “all true conservatives” gambit, I offer a new book, which sure buoyed my spirits, and helped me regain my bearings. Reading it, for me, was like feeling an unexpectedly cool, dry breeze on a stiflingly humid day.
The book is called Conservatism: An Introduction to the Great Tradition, and it’s by arguably the most acute conservative thinker of his generation, Roger Scruton. It’s a slim, concise monograph, and it begins with the truth that conservatism is a branch of liberalism, and not its enemy. It is the branch that tries to conserve the liberal democratic state against the corrosive effects and flaws of liberalism itself (not to speak of leftism and reactionism, which seek to overthrow liberalism entirely). More to the point, it does not defend liberalism as a function of natural rights, or of human rights, or self-evident truths, but simply as the inheritance of a particular place in a particular sliver of human history: the Anglo-American world in the last two and a half centuries.
Conservatism defends the individual against the state as an evolving tradition born in the English common law from the 12th century onward, a tradition that came to be embedded in the American justice system. What distinguished the American Revolution, conservatives argue, was that it was rooted in a defense of the rights of Englishmen against a monarch’s whims, as much as a novus ordo seclorum. It was not only a liberal revolution, but also a conservative one, seeking to defend a preexisting state of affairs, and buttressing a new egalitarianism with deep conservative safeguards against majoritarianism, mob rule, and direct democracy. The alternative type of revolution — the one that took place in France — was based on a complete erasure of what had gone before, a rupture in time and culture and regime, and one that led, as all such ruptures must, to murderous tyranny. When all tradition and inherited institutions and norms are abolished, there is only raw power to occupy the vacuum.
Conservatism began then as a defense of America and a critique of France — which is the essence of Edmund Burke’s formative argument. He saw the advent of democracy as a challenge — which demanded acute attention as hierarchies collapsed, and society changed, in order to ensure that too much of value wasn’t thrown away. And so it emphasized the importance of a vibrant and autonomous civil society (independent of government), the centrality of federalism, local community, and voluntary association of the kind that Tocqueville marveled at and saw as the indispensable complement to the atomizing, destabilizing forces that America had also unleashed.
Conservatism’s defense of the free market and free trade was therefore never absolute. In fact, there’s more protectionism in conservatism’s past than many would like to admit. But these market mechanisms were nonetheless the least worst way to discern the value of things traded and sold, and were never supposed to be ends in themselves or to be advanced regardless of the impact on society. In fact, for conservatism, society is for no end and no purpose; it is valuable simply in itself, as the combination of traditions, landscapes, communities, and customs that define a nation, bind us together as citizens, and make us feel at home.
And yes, that feeling of being at home is nebulous. It is in many ways sub-rational. Ask ordinary people to describe it and they will often not be articulate. Sometimes, it manifests itself as bigotry, yes. Most of the time, it is about loss, and mourning it, while understanding that change is inevitable. Burke famously saw society not as a contract between individuals, but as a contract between generations: to pass on to the future the good and viable things we inherited from the past. This emphatically does not mean resistance to all change. In fact, it understands some change as critical to conservation. And perhaps that’s where American conservatism began to go wrong. The goal is not to stand athwart history and cry “Stop!”, as William F. Buckley put it. It’s to be part of the stream of history and say: slow it down a bit, will you?
In Scruton’s account, the list of conservative intellectuals is long and distinguished. The respective geniuses of Burke and Hume and Hegel are integral to its formation; they were succeeded by the Romantic era that urged a corrective to mass industrialization, and a hedge to the Enlightenment’s preference for theoretical reason over the practical wisdom that works, as Adam Smith saw it, as an invisible hand in guiding society. Tradition, conservatives believe, is a form of collective knowledge. It can contain wisdom that reason simply cannot grasp.
As a temperament, conservatives are prone to obey as passionately as liberals are prone to rebel. They prefer order to change, stability to upheaval, authority to anarchy. And so a conservative is likely to see, say, the flag as an object of veneration, the Constitution as something to be protected rather than altered, the nation as demanding a loyalty before all other claims, especially those of ideology, tribe, gender, or race. The conservative immediately saw why Fascism and Communism were evil; they were intent on obliterating settled ways of life, destroying the individual in favor of a collective, empowering the state so that it destroyed the civil society that made liberalism thrive. No conservative ever wants to purify anything. It’s the human mess that we love, with its intimations of how to improve it.
And so conservatism became the resistance to socialism, to government planning, and to the abuse of the English language so that it could be forced to reflect an ideology, rather than a lived reality. (In this sense, Scruton shrewdly notes, Orwell was a conservative.) It saw all too well how the good intentions of liberalism could lead to its unraveling. It abhors war as the ultimate change-maker and disrupter; it despises concepts of race or gender that eradicate the uniqueness of the individual; it defends high culture against philistinism and mediocrity; it cherishes norms. It values the particular over the general, prefers present laughter to utopian bliss, relishes humor in all its forms, defends art as an apolitical force, and respects religion as a separate avenue for the search for ultimate truth, and a critical component of the civil and moral society that enables government to be small and limited.
In today’s America, this conservatism is completely under siege. The left will increasingly tolerate nothing that gets in the way of what it calls “social justice,” which far too often reduces individuals to their racial or class or gender identities rather than their merits, or character, or talents. The conservative approach to a multicultural and multiracial society is to keep our focus on the individual and do what’s best to help every individual, regardless of their race, gender, or whatever, to be part of our shared liberal democratic inheritance. Conservatism is about enfolding the new into the old, sustaining a society’s coherence and cohesion, while being extremely tough on particular injustices against particular individuals, vigilant about corruption, and anguished when the criminal justice system loses legitimacy, because of embedded racism.
But conservatism is more deeply besieged by the Republican Party, its alleged harbor. If you consider the themes I’ve emphasized above, it becomes clearer that the GOP is not only not conservative, but actually dedicated to destroying that tradition. Republicans pursue the ideology of free markets and lower and lower taxation, regardless of its brutal assault on fiscal solvency, human dignity, social cohesion, and community life. They have nominated and protected a president who assaults the norms that conservatives revere, has contempt for existing institutions and sees the rule of law as a means to advance his own interests, rather than that of the society as a whole.
This is a man and a party that has such disdain for conserving anything that it is actively despoiling our landscape, enabling a climate catastrophe. It is a party that has generated crippling and everlasting debt — even in good economic times — in a way that makes a mockery of any compact between generations. It is a party that actively endorses cruelty as a policy tool, deploys fear as its prime political weapon, and insists that the opposite party has no legitimate right to govern at all. It is the party of torture, the absolute nemesis of the liberal inheritance, the party of corruption, propaganda, vote suppression, and barely masked bigotry.
I despise it because I am a conservative. I don’t believe that conservatism can be revived on the right (it has been thankfully sustained, by default, by the Democrats in recent decades) until this hateful philistine would-be despot and his know-nothing cult is gone. And by revived, I do not mean a return to neoconservatism abroad or supply side crack-pottery at home. The 1980s and 1990s are over. I mean a conservatism that can tackle soaring social and economic inequality as a way to save capitalism, restore the financial sector as an aid to free markets and not their corrupting parasite, a conservatism that will end our unending wars, rid the criminal justice system of its racial blind spots, defend liberal education and high culture against the barbarians of postmodernism and the well-intentioned toxins of affirmative action, pay down the debt, reform the corruption of religious faith, protect our physical landscape, invest in non-carbon energy, and begin at the local level to rebuild community and the spirit of American civil association.
I also believe we need to slow the pace of demographic and cultural change. It is happening too fast, even for America, to sustain our society’s coherence and cohesion. The elite indifference to mass immigration — especially the illegal kind — is an ugly pact between Republican elites, eager for cheap, exploitable labor, and Democratic elites, who cynically encourage it because they think it will give them a reliable voting bloc. When the foreign-born population is at a proportion last seen in 1910, and as the raw numbers are higher than ever before, it is not inherently racist to seek to slow the pace to integrate the newcomers better, to defuse racial conflict and resentment. A nation has to mean something; to survive, it needs a conservative weaving of past, present, and future, as Burke saw it. And you cannot do that if you see this country as a blight on the face of the earth and an instrument of eternal oppression; or if you replace a healthy, self-critical patriotism with an ugly, racist nationalism that aims to restore the very worst of this country’s past, rather than preserve its extraordinary and near-unique achievements.
I know there’s no place for this in our current political climate. And that is why I believe this country is in as grave a crisis as any since the 1850s. Without a healthy conservatism, liberalism will degenerate. Without liberalism, conservatism has no inheritance to defend. And both rich veins in Western moderation are now under assault from the ideological left and the authoritarian right. We have to brave this pincer attack, conservatives and liberals together, or we will die together.
— from his diary entry of September 14, 2018 for New York Magazine .
*
My Own Thoughts and Observations
Rather than out of any agreement with Mr Sullivan (though there’s much here with which to agree…) or out of any difference of opinion (though there’s much here with which at least to quibble…), I’m posting this piece because it outlines a clear and concise definition of the what the word “conservative” really means – especially its origins and a brief outline of its history – and why so many today who claim to be “conservatives” are anything but.
Though it’s hardly an original thought on my part (as Sullivan mentions, Orwell was saying much the same thing over seventy years ago…), I’ve long felt that the quality of our social/political discourse has been horribly diminished due to the misuse of many words which originally had, and probably still should have, at least reasonably clear definitions. Usage, to be sure, has a very strong influence on meaning in the realm of vocabulary, but when it’s advertisers and politicians who are doing the using, and doing it in such a manner as to shift the meanings of words around every which way – always so as to suit their own often questionable ends – that’s another matter altogether. It seems to me that, in recent years, the terms of the discourse have become so obscure, so garbled, that true conversation has become as difficult as chopping one’s way through a jungle swamp.
Perhaps the most radical thing anyone can do right now is to try to re-seize, to recapture, and indeed to re-establish, the original clear meanings of the basic terms of social/political discourse. In the above piece, Sullivan strikes a mighty blow for that cause.
1 Corinthians 13 on love
13 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing.
3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.
4 Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
5 Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
7 Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
8 Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
12 For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
13 And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
SUNDAY NIGHT TRANSLATION GROUP – 9/30/18
Translators: Mike Zonta, Melissa Goodnight, Richard Branam, Hanz Bolen
SENSE TESTIMONY: When people are hurt and not believed it creates ongoing problems.
5th Step Conclusions:
1) Truth is the personification of Oneness in unbroken trust of and with Itself; believing all, welcoming all to a problemless existence.
2) One Infinite, Consciousness Beingness, is always presently at hand, creating the perfect trustworthy solution, that reveals absolutely pristine integrity, of each and every individuation.
3) The vitality and guidance of All One Truth is clearly self evidently powerful, self evidently knowing and self evidently present in each and every individuation now, everywhere, always.
4) Truth Parents itself, is All Embracing Inclusivity, Fully instantiated formulation, believing itself as Purely Consciousness Aware I am I, Individuated permission, Androgynously making love, Superbly reproducing Itself.
The Word “Fuck”
Five Points in Five Minutes
A first in California: Berkeley opens large-scale universal locker room
By Gretchen Kell, Media relations|
Like many transgender students at UC Berkeley, Juniperangelica Cordova would get anxious each time she considered a workout at the campus gym.
(UC Berkeley video by Perla Shaheen, Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally)
“I wondered, ‘Am I going to use the locker room? Take a shower?’” says the ethnic studies major. “I like to work out, but I’d often avoid the locker room and go home with dirty clothes, or not go to the gym at all.”
While Cordova says Berkeley has become “a safer place for trans people to voice our needs and concerns,” she adds that students can’t fully participate in college life if there are places where they fear stares and harassment.
Get a 360-degree look at the universal locker room. (UC Berkeley photo by Stephen McNally)
The opening tomorrow (Sept. 26) of a 4,500-square-foot universal locker room at the campus’s Recreational Sports Facility (RSF) — it’s believed to be the first large-scale collegiate universal locker room in California and one of just a few in the nation — will help change that experience. Any students or other RSF members needing more privacy, including those who are transgender, non-binary or have disabilities or body image struggles, will find a welcoming facility next door to the men’s and women’s locker rooms.
The RSF’s new $2.7 million universal locker room opens Wednesday, Sept. 26. Students voted to pay for it themselves over the course of 30 years. (UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)
The $2.7 million locker room has its own entrance, 400 lockers, 16 individual changing rooms, seven private showers, five private toilets and four shared sinks. It also leads to Spieker Pool, which, in the past, some students avoided, since it was only accessible through the existing locker rooms.
“Our belief is that this will be a very popular place,” says Brigitte Lossing, Berkeley Rec Sports interim associate director, of the new locker room. “We’d heard from some students who were uncomfortable, we knew there were more, and we spoke with colleagues who work with those populations. We’re here to serve everyone; we’re always thinking of ways to remove barriers to fitness and wellness.”
For students with disabilities, access also is a “huge issue, and space for them isn’t always taken into account,” says Martha Velasquez, associate director of the campus’s Disabled Students’ Program. “Now, those who might have automatically assumed they couldn’t use the RSF locker room will feel welcome.”
A student-funded project
Remarkably, the new space is being paid for entirely by students. In a 2015 Wellness Referendum, the student body voted to impose an annual fee of $146 upon themselves — the fee contains a built-in escalator tied to inflation and is currently $160 — for 30 years. Those fees go into a Wellness Fund that, according to the fund’s website, is for “new, innovative mind-body services” that “address the concerning rise of mental health complications on campus and provide new support for minority student groups.”
From left, William Morrow, former ASUC president; RSF Interim Associate Director Brigitte Lossing and Trineice Durst, former RSF associate director, look at renderings of the new facility. (UC Berkeley photo by Jeremy Snowden)
So far, the fund has provided for initiatives that include counseling services for historically under-resourced student communities, medical care for student survivors of sexual violence and a pilot program for emergency housing.
For many years, Rec Sports staff and student leaders were aware of students who felt the gym wasn’t a service for them. Small accommodations, such as a few shower curtains for privacy, were made at the RSF, but funds were lacking for what then was called a “gender inclusive” locker room.
Project team
Contractor: James R. Griffin, Inc.
Architect: ELS Architecture and Urban Design
Project management: UC Berkeley Capital Projects
On-site construction coordinator: Chris Lochtefeld, James R. Griffin, Inc.
Then, during the 2014-15 school year, a group of student leaders — concerned about growing student enrollment and the inability of health and wellness services to keep pace — designed the referendum. It passed overwhelmingly, and one of the first requests to the resulting Wellness Fund was from Rec Sports, for a study to explore the size and scope of a third locker room for under-served populations.
Funding was approved, and in 2016, William Morrow, then-president of the Associated Students of the University of California (ASUC) and Trineice Durst, then-Rec Sports associate director, led the creation of a proposal for the project — financially self-sustaining and free of the need for state or campus dollars — and submitted it to the Wellness Fee Advisory Committee and campus administrators.
Morrow (left), Durst and Lossing each played a major role in making the new universal locker room a reality. (UC Berkeley photo by Jeremy Snowden)
“As we started describing the type of design for the locker room, it became clear there were others who would benefit,” including students, staff and faculty with disabilities, says Billy Curtis, director of Berkeley’s Gender Equity Resource Center. A consultant for the project, he suggested the new facility be called a “universal” locker room.
“’Universal’ is the term today,” Curtis explains. “It says everyone.”
The committee passed the proposal in fall 2016, and in June 2017, the campus’s chief financial officer provided an interest-free loan to Rec Sports to fund the project; the loan will be repaid over 15 years through students’ Wellness Fees.
Student Yongqi Gan, committee chair, says the locker room initiative “was a matter of equity and access.” It also was the most costly proposal the committee has funded and included an important benefit for all three RSF locker rooms — ADA standards of accessibility.
An intentional step forward
Ben Perez remembers being a new student at Berkeley in 2007 and how it felt to suddenly be faced with sharing a residence hall bathroom and showers with 25 other students. After a spinal cord injury at age 16, he has used wheelchairs, including a special one for bathing.
“
Every and any moment in which the university identifies and proactively moves an access barrier to make spaces more inclusive is a big moment. Every time we do so without a mandate, but with intention, is an especially important moment, because it sets a tone.
– Ben Perez, manager of Campus Access Services
“My disability life had been a private thing,” says Perez. “My parents were involved, my two closest friends and my caretakers. I cannot tell you how mortified I was. I didn’t want to look disabled at that time. I would have valued a little bit of space to learn how to be comfortable with myself.”
Ben Perez, manager of Campus Access Services, checks out the new universal locker room. (UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)
Today, as manager of Berkeley’s Campus Access Services, Perez is the point person for advice on making programs, services and activities either accessible or more so for those on campus with disabilities. While he says Berkeley “has more work to do,” he adds that it continues its “long history of building accessible spaces, and of students coming to occupy them.” For example, the campus for several years has been installing gender-inclusive restrooms, many of them ADA-accessible, in dozens of buildings.
Perez says the RSF, like its satellite fitness center at Memorial Stadium, is “the most accessible gym I can imagine. We might not have every piece of equipment for everyone’s disability needs, but it’s a facility that checks a lot of boxes, a lot of those needs are met. And with the new locker room, our students will take advantage of it.”
The new locker room has 400 lockers, 16 individual changing rooms, seven private showers and five private toilets. (UC Berkeley photo by Brittany Hosea-Small)
The new RSF facility also has a private room with an adult changing table that exceeds ADA requirements, says Lossing, and high-quality, slip-resistant flooring that, like the locker room’s paint and other materials, is free of toxic chemicals that can create fumes.
Among those who may value the universal locker room are individuals who are “on the spectrum, have PTSD, or other psychological disabilities. Some may have a sensory disability and need a more private space to change,” says Velasquez, adding that some 2,500 students are registered with the Disabled Students’ Program.
“For people with anxiety,” adds Perez, “changing into gym clothes is a huge source of discomfort; some people don’t go to the gym because they don’t want to be seen getting ready. Our social fabric contains a really specific and narrow vision of what someone who goes to a gym should look like.”
A 360-degree look at a shower for people with disabilities (UC Berkeley photo by Stephen McNally)
Cordova, a former ASUC senator who is working on a transgender student wellness initiative as an intern with the campus’s Multicultural Community Center, says the physical privacy of the new locker room will take worry out of her fitness routine.
But more than that, she explains, the space is “a step forward for the campus and the atmosphere for trans students; the powerful part of this is the intentionality behind it.”
At its foundation, says Stephen E. Sutton, vice chancellor for the Division of Students Affairs, “are Berkeley’s values of diversity, equity, inclusion and social justice.”
“Every and any moment in which the university identifies and proactively moves an access barrier to make spaces more inclusive is a big moment,” adds Perez. “Every time we do so without a mandate, but with intention, is an especially important moment, because it sets a tone.”
More information about the universal locker room can be found here.
This is not an obscenity. This is art.
L’Origine du monde (“The Origin of the World”) is a picture painted in oil on canvas by the French artist Gustave Courbet in 1866. It is a close-up view of the genitals and abdomen of a naked woman, lying on a bed with legs spread. The framing of the nude body, with head, arms and lower legs outside of view, emphasizes the eroticism of the work. Wikipedia
Artist: Gustave Courbet (June 10, 1819 – December 31, 1877)
Location: Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France (since 1995)
Medium: Oil paint
Created: 1866