Puppetry
"What if we imagined wealth as consisting of joy, beauty, friendship, community, closeness to flourishing nature, to clean air and water, to good food produced without abuse of labor or nature? And security, in our own environments and societies, along with confidence in a viable future?" -Rebecca Solnit: Climate of Abundance.
The steel puppet shown in the photograph is a Golem character I created to explore what it would be like if the a Golem was held accountable for the violence it carried out. The creation of a Golem is primarily a meditative process. Aryeh Kaplan writes "The Kabbalists call Keter [The highest level of consciousness] the level of nothingness (ayin). It is on this level that the laws of nature cease to exist, and can therefore be altered." Breath is at the heart of the Sefer Yetzirah and puppetry. From Breath comes life. From breath comes patience and control. From breath comes the ability to shape the world we live in and the future we want to live in.
"A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war." - Gloria Anzaldúa, 1987
Puppetry will not bring an end to violence. Treating violence as a contagious disease and using public health methodology for treating this contagious disease has proven to bring an end to violence. Check out the work of Gary Slutnik and Cure Violence Global (CVG).
"CVG's method entails analyzing violence clusters and transmission dynamics and uses paraprofessional health workers who are culturally sensitive credible messengers to interrupt transmission and change community norms around the use of violence." **
"Exposure to violence involves many parts of the brain. You are exposed to violence when you witness it. You become infected when a neural system makes a copy of the behavior you witness and encodes that script into your brain, where it may lay dormant for a period of time. That infection turns into a full blown symptomatic disease when something causes you to consciously (or more commonly unconsciously) activate that violent script to provide relief from physical, social or emotional pain." ***
"Norms inform how we handle exposure and our scripts guide the specific behavior." ***
My use of steel puppets is an exploration into rewriting rigid scripts of masculinity handed down to me that have normalized violence.
In addition, "puppets are very useful in popular education, a bottom-up form of learning where people from low -income and other marginalized communities make connections between their personal experiences and larger social issues. Popular education with puppets helps communities come together to build worlds, play out different situations, explore the root causes of their experiences, and organize for social change." ****
Collectively, we have a lot power. Let's continue with the uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness.
- J-Cup
** https://cvg.org/what-we-do/ - Cure Violence Global
*** The End of Violence - Gary Slutkin
**** Bread and Roses Zine #'s 1 and 2