So Narrative Form is the Masculine way pt. 2

When you set out to study story structure, at least in much of the West, what you run across is Narrative Form. It's structure—the archetypal structure that's always existed in stories from the very beginning, discovered in all the myths and fairy tales etc and expounded by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

It's an active, forward-driven, result-oriented approach, very masculine. In fact it's based on the Hero's Journey. But as you move into the literary end of things, or look at stories from other cultures that value the feminine more, you start to see something very different. I've had trouble trying to learn about it, and I think that's because it's something that must be done intuitively. It isn't structured, it isn't focused on forward drive and result, it's meditative and transcendent. It eschews the inciting incident, the turning points and rising action, the climax followed by descending action. It doesn't seem to be patterned after the masculine part of the sex act, or the masculine experiences of hunting, war, fighting, achievement, or anything else along those lines. It's everything that's left out of that hard-driving, focused approach.

Here's an excerpt from an article about Yin and Yang that discusses the exact same dichotomy:

"Nothing in the universe can exist without these elements, which are opposite but also dependent on one another. But what are Yin and Yang exactly?​

According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of Yin is:
"[T]he feminine passive principle in nature that in Chinese cosmology is exhibited in darkness, cold, or wetness and that combines with [Y]ang to produce all that comes to be"

The definition of Yang is:
"[T]he masculine active principle in nature that in Chinese cosmology is exhibited in light, heat, or dryness and that combines with [Y]in to produce all that comes to be"​

Yin and Yang complement and balance each other via four aspects, which define the relationship between them. These are the four aspects of the relationship between Yin and Yang:

• Opposition of Yin and Yang
• Interdependence of Yin and Yang
• Mutual consumption of Yin and Yang
• Inter-transformation of Yin and Yang

Yin and Yang are opposite, but one cannot exist without the other, which means they are also interdependent. Just as day transforms into night, Yin constantly transforms into Yang. As Yin and Yang change balance, it makes an impact at the individual and big picture levels.

The first word represents the category, while the second word corresponds to Yin, and the third word corresponds to Yang:

Sky: Moon-Sun
Time: Midnight-Midday
Season: Winter-Summer
Temperature: Cold-Heat
Humidity: Wet-Dry
Spectrum: Dark-Luminous
World: Hidden-Evident
Solidity: Dense-Porous
Texture: Hard-Soft
Mass: Heavy-Light
Stage: Forming-Transformer
Shape: Material Substance-Subtle Influence​

The fundamentals of Yin and Yang
In summary, these are the most important aspects to remember about the concepts of Yin and Yang:

• Yin Yang is the most important theory in Traditional Chinese Medicine, underlying all physiology, pathology and treatment
• Yin has a component of Yang, and Yang has a component of Yin, represented by the dots in the Yin-Yang symbol
• Yin and Yang are constantly changing and cyclical

​

I'm starting to fit these ideas together, and the broadest category they fall under is Order and Chaos.

I don't say order vs chaos, though in a sense it is that, but there's more to it. They aren't completely opposed to each other, they're complementary. Each contains what the other lacks, which is also true of masculinity and femininity. So many dichotomies fall into this pattern. In a sense Order is the conscious mind—the logical order-seeking left brain that works in linear fashion, uses language, and strives to see arrangement in everything. Chaos is the unconscious, doesn't divide everything into pairs of opposites (dichotomies), doesn't use language, works holistically rather than linearly, so it can process multiple threads of thought at once, and is diffuse rather than focused.

I'm not sure yet whether the feminine is what I formerly called the Poetic, or if it's a subset of it. Poetic story can drop right out of the human reference entirely, into the animal world, the world of pure nature, as if experienced by the mind of an animal with no conscious apparatus to process it into order.

I think part of what's confusing me is that when I look up info on the Feminine Gaze (usually called the Female Gaze) it's always tied in with the specifically human, with the plight of women and their differences from men. I think that's a red herring though. All the videos and articles I've found deal with it as a part of Feminist Theory, and that's more limited and limiting than the Yin/Yang categories, which are far more philosophical.

That's the level Jung thought at—he would never have allowed himself to be limited by a political or sociocultural ideology. A big part of the reason is that you then fall prey to the biases of the ideology—it ends up being framed, consciously or unconsciously, in terms of men bad, women good. Well that's a violation of what I consider the first principle of philosophical thought, to not fall into identification with one camp and start name-calling. To do that is to lose sight of the larger perspective.

In meditation you lose the masculine conscious mind, let it be subsumed by the feminine unconscious, and rather than think in terms of verbs you just let yourself be. Pure existence, rising and falling with nature's rhythms, as if drifting on the tide. In fact in Eastern traditions you find a great honoring of the feminine, a seeking of the feminine state even for men, and it's not considered a loss of masculinity.

Sorry if this is rough around the edges. I chunked it together from several journal entries and haven't smoothed it all down. I think it gets across the ideas quite clearly though.