27 June

I have come to the conclusion that our society is a shame-based society. We live shame or non-shame based lives. We live saturated with shame, although we do not relish it; it is from young age thrust upon us. Our lips turn down when we kiss; we think: I must justify my existance. And we cannot. We cannot justify our existance! If the measure of justification is the impact on the world outside of us (for we are not, in and of ourselves, our own justification: this is a contradiction in terms.) So few of us can justify the fact of us being alive except by purely selfish standards. We very often discover others in agreement with this sentiment: I do not, by my being myself, alive, justify the toll that I take on you, on humans, on the environment; that we are expected to "pull our own weight" and have failed. As humans, we are shams. Thus shame.

But we do not love shame, we only live in it. We live in shame; we do not live in the things that we love. We know this because the objects to which we feel the most attachment, the most protective instinct, are the shameless creatures (children? animals?). Their existances are justified by their joy, by their shamelessness; for them there was no Eden, no provocative infiltrating fruit. Animals do not hide from any part of themselves or each other, they do not clothe themselves, their expectations of the world are not misplaced. They have not been taught shame (perhaps this is because they have no incriminators; their chief parent and teacher is God, whose cup is not one of shame.)

It also interests me that Eve, object of Satan's particular vengeance, has (in general) such a particular fascination with clothing, the manifestation of our shame. We wallow in it, the occasional beauty of it, ingrain it into our identities; we carry it, embodiment of our shame, around with us like a pet, as integral to who we are as skin or a kidney. Why?

Why can't we strip ourselves of it? Why is it that no one can identify it, and actually rid themselves of it? Even we who have done no great garrulous thing wrong, whose deprecation comes from the injustifiableness of our existance, that the scale of our contribution is tipped away from our favor? Is that how family is supposed to be, do we always have to live this way? Can we shed it like a superfluous skin? Oh, Lord. I have no idea.