Tekst og musik: Flemming Oppenhagen Behrend

How gender is created

It is a common belief that gender is a given. I do not believe this is the case at all.  I just received the latest "American Girl" which is owned by the Mattel Co. since 1998. Mattel must somehow know that I have 4 granddaughters in the right consumer age for their product. I smell facebook here. Mattel which is behind the policies of American Girl have great interest in promoting a streamlined gender type who will buy their products and in doing so they are supporting an outdated gender model which runs contrary to the understanding of gender fluidity. In the new catalogue all the dolls have long shiny hair and the color pink is all over each page:

The all American Girl is not supposed to do anything meaningful other than house chores or tending to the babies:

And when they go camping it is not to hike Mount Baker but to stand by the portable kitchen camper

and cook for guess who!

After the all American Girl comes back from camping she has house chores to do so obviously she has to get back into the kitchen:

 and do the laundry!

Not so for the NEW doll in the all American Girl line up. The boy doll Logan does not have to do any chores or anything actually, but he is pictured playing the drums!!!!!!

That is how Mattel creates gender and how gender is sold to the public and it sells like crazy. No wonder equality is only to be found somewhere in a future world.

The well maidens.

Maybe it would have been better if we had kept our projections on the medieval understanding of the gods because we would have recognized the demons much easier. Back then our projections were attached to external powers and they could not hide from us, they were seen, named and feared. Today, however,  the gods and goddesses, the demons and the trolls have moved inside our psyche and we are not so quick to point them out. For example, the president was (is) a womanizer but his supporters don’t care because they know that they can also be perpetrators.  After all, it is in all of us right, so it’s not so bad.  Thus a perpetrator is voted into the White House.  That is one part of the story: Psyche works in amazing ways. All of a sudden,  women began to wake up and walk into the open saying “No more.” One by one,  the sexual predators were outed and exposed by their former victims. Most of those accused of crimes against women, call it a witch hunt. But history will witness better. This is exactly what the collective unconscious does and how it works. The truth of these men who preyed on women will be obvious and in the light of day because women are fed up with male misbehavior. It is symbolically the archetypal image of the well maidens from Camelot who are stepping into the light of this century to say “No more rape of the feminine.” This is the new hope for our times, a new era of consciousness coming into being in the light of day.   The restoration of the feminine can signal  the abandonment of the sick patriarchal system which has now run its course. 

Noget om kraft. Flemming Oppenhagen Behrend synger Halfdan Rasmussen viser

https://youtu.be/cpAsKfCEZAg

RadCo performing: at the Washington Center for the Performing Arts

Pilgrim Mors 2017. By: Flemming Oppenhagen Behrend

Summer has gone.

Summer has gone.

I walk down everyday paths

on my morning rounds,

watching the leaves fall.

So too does the summer

and our hopes 

and the last sense 

of dignity 

this country had. 

The polarisation

of the masses

and the fall 

of innocence 

and bronze statues 

of uniformed

narrow minded white men

comes down.

Their cause forgotten

but overnight remembered.

The country recently united 

falls apart in embarrassment.

It doesn’t take much

to fall.

To free fall 

into nothing. 

Understanding the dream

Regret

To regret: Should we forget or remember?

The definition of regret is to feel sad, repentant or disappointed over something that has happened or been done, especially a loss or missed opportunity.  I was thinking about that a couple of days ago when I overheard a conversation at a coffee shop.  A woman was saying to her friend,  “I have no regrets, I have lived my life to the fullest and don’t think I’ve missed anything.”  She went on to tell how she had left two marriages and two teenage kids in Europe. She had started a new life in America, married her boss to  become a legal permanent resident and settled down for her retirement.

To me, it sounded as though her “No regrets” meant, “I don’t want to remember all the horrible mistakes I have made in my life.”   Not remembering, not having regrets leaves no place for redemption. As a young man in my twenties I went on a motorcycle adventure with a classmate on a trip to Alsace Lorraine. We came to a small town tucked away in a big forest between rolling hills. There was a museum inside an old stone tower which had once been the town’s jail house. My friend and I went to check it out and one of the exhibits made a deep impression on me. There was a large wooden cross leaning against the wall. The wood was oily from a preservative coating and it smelled of old varnish.  A sign on the wall told the story behind the big cross. 

That story began a hundred years ago when a local farm hand had killed a young woman in a fit of jealousy. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Upon his release from prison, he had a heavy iron ball cuffed to one of his feet for the rest of his life.  If that weren’t enough, he took it upon himself to carry around a large heavy wooden cross wherever he walked. He regretted the harm he had done and sought penance by voluntarily suffering as long as he lived. 

For some reason, I always come back to this story. Was he supposed to “get over” the harm he had caused another person? Too often we hear the same attitude from progressive therapist or counsellors. This seemingly new age philosophy is about getting past the pain and getting on with your life. Some actions are not forgivable and regret is a healthy way of staying on track with what we either failed to do or missed or the harm we caused others.

Germany hopefully carries regret over the mass murder of innocent Jews, as should Serbia from slaughtering over eight thousand of young Bosnian men in Srebrenica, just to mention regret on a collective scale. Regret has a direct connection with remembrance and is crucial for the ability to change. Not a change into a “Getting over it” but to an honest willingness to live with what we have done or not paid attention to when we should have. There lies the true healing of the tormented psyche, the ability to carry our own trespasses and regrets as a conscious knowledge of who we also are. To remember and not to repeat.  

Hvem er egentlig "De nye danske?"

Det nye højreorienterede politiske parti, De nye danske, er alt andet end nye. Hvis de virkelig var de “nye danske” så ville de stå frem som et parti af medlemmer med blandet etnisk baggrund. De virkelige nye danske er på trods af intolerancen på Kristiansborg nemlig mennesker som er kommet her fra hele kloden i håb om at leve i fred og finde arbejde og leve side om side med de allerede herboende danskere. At tale om et “Hvidt” Danmark er simpelthen et racistisk synspunkt som ikke hører hjemme i vores Danmark af i dag. Vores land vil aldrig igen blive som det var i halvtredserne, gud ske lov! Det er vildt overraskende at der er en samfundsdebat om “Hvad det vil sige at vœre dansk,” noget som jeg troede kun hørte hjemme i den nazistiske propaganda før anden verdenskrig. 

At vœre en rigtig Arie, en dansk dansker eller en œgte tysker!!!! Det betyder så at en person hvis far eller mor kom fra Somalia ikke har en chance for at sige han er dansk selvom han måske var født og opvokset i Gentofte kommune. 

Det at han ser chokoladebrun ud og ka li at spise ged istedet for svinekød er imod hvad “De nye danske” kalder for etnisk “rent”. Al forandring er selvfølgelig ikke nem. Det er vanskeligt for de fleste danskere at tolerere når deres naboer på villavejen har en anden opfattelse af “Hygge” Og “Gud i Himlen”hvoffor sœtter de ikke lys i vinduerne den 4 maj? Hvis man er dansk statsborger skulle det vœre nok til at kalde sig dansker og ikke skulle vœre tvunget til at kunne li frikadeller eller kransekage for at blive accepteret i det danske samfund. At modsœtte sig forandring er at modsœtte sig selve livet, den drivkraft som hjœlper os fremad. Danskerne kan og vil, med eller uden deres vilje leve i et multi etnisk samfund for det er simpelthen den vej verden drejer i øjeblikket. Hvis vi skal overleve som samfund må vi vende os til at rage mindre til os og dele mere. Vi må vende os til at verden forandrede sig og at det er OK. 

Is God inside out, or outside in?

I grew up being introduced to Christianity through the Danish State Lutheran Church. I went to Sunday school with my sister and I sang in the children's choir. I learned that God was a man and I prayed to this all male father god in the Lord’s Prayer over and over again. I was like most other children my age. I wanted to know everything. The answers I got were sometimes puzzling but I accepted them since my parents told me “it was so.” As I started school the teachers told me “it was so,” and when I was put into a private Catholic school because my parents did not believe in the public school system, our Jesuit teachers told me “it was so”. 

God was a father and the prayer went : Our father who art in heaven…Clearly, God was pretty far away and the first creation to reach heaven was a dog named Laika. As a child, I believed that the stars were angels and I would sit with my mom and wave to them. Later in my teens, I projected my longing for God unto the statue of the holy virgin in my parish  church and lit candles. In my twenties, I spent a lot of time in a small Cistercian monastery and experienced for the first time the voice of the holy, which did not come from outside, but from a combination of both the outside and the inside. I experienced a glimpse of the numinous sitting in silence, and by listening to that silence in quiet meditation.

The traditional projection unto a God “out there” creates a real psychological problem which wasn’t solved until the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung came up with a new paradigm, a new way of incorporating God into our individual reality through what he called the Collective Unconscious. He figured out that this great spirit which we called God was actually not somewhere out in space separated from us, but inside our minds creating our innermost Self. Jung even concluded that God was not gendered as a man but was completely unimaginable working through our deep psyche. Christ in Jung’s universe became more than love, he became the human holy, suspended between good and evil in the center of the cross.  Jung’s message was that if we in our consciousness communicated with, or tried to understand this greater Self of ours, we could actually achieve a higher consciousness and understanding of, what the Christian church called God! Up until the revolution of modern psychology brought into life by Freud and Jung, God remained what Jung called : a projection of our imaginations. This projection was brought on by religion and had kept the Christian faithful in complete separation from the inner understanding of the holy. In fact, it is my belief that the church most often has taught people obedience instead of teaching them how to explore. Understanding how Jung unfolds and opens up Christianity, makes it again possible for me to access the mysterious, because it is no longer “out there” but it is in myself, in the dreams I have and in the being that I am, walking on the surface of this planet. It is up to me to discover the universe inside of me which does not need to be held prisoner by a projection. This is where the real story not ends but begins. Carl Jung is a universe in himself to be explored over and over again. He was no saint and did not claim to be one. His ideas were not meant to start a new religion. Religion to Jung meant dealing with the archetypal forces and processes of the psyche. Jung was purely out to explore the numinous and our relationship to the great mystery of our souls. I believe that he got as close to an answer about this as anyone has so far. His writings clearly tells the story about a God who is not separated from us, but who is everywhere, outside as well as inside our own personal universes. This is why, when Carl Jung was once asked if he believed in God his short answer was “I don’t believe, I know.” His own understanding and gnosis, his Anima-Sofia was enough for him to exist in harmony with the Numinous. 

The archetype of miniature making.

Did you know that the famous rock star Rod Stewart spend a lot of his time building miniature railroad landscapes? He does, and he is just one of millions of people on this planet who looks at the world through miniatures. There are clubs for miniature Fairy Gardens, and people like, Matthew Albanese who create fantastic sceneries, all in model scale to make stunning life like photos as if it was all real. 

From antiquity Cyprus goddess clay figures to First Nation Kachina dolls, human beings simply have a fascination for the small scale. There seem  to be an archetypal need for us to scale things down in order to understand them. I remember my own fondness of the medieval miniature model city in front of the Copenhagen City Museum as a child.

 The display which was outside the building ( see picture ) was on my way to and from school. I would stop and gaze at it almost every day and imagine myself living in or walking the streets of the old city just by looking at the model display. The Copenhagen display however was tiny, compared to the later big model cities of Rome or Shanghai.

 Is it because the tiny worlds makes us feel like Gods? Is it a matter of feeling in control or just a matter of understanding a larger context by minimizing it? I believe it is a little bit of both. When the early people of my country Denmark created a model of a horse pulling the sun, they understood the concept of the “Sun-wagon”. The sun clearly moved because it was pulled by a horse named Hrimfaxi. 

I, like many other people have my own miniature displays at my home in form of Ikons, crucifixes and Buddha statuettes. Little reminders of much larger concepts. They are the small scale items which leads my thoughts to something much bigger such as the Numinous which so huge and is beyond my understanding. By looking at them though, I get a glimpse, an idea of the real thing.