but she’ll make light of it all (as elusive nymphs & muses always do)

Sweet Billy Pilgrim - Kalypso

© Tim Elsenburg


The tide will tug at my hips
And the salt will dry upon my collar
I’ll have splinters for oars
And I’ll break her heart in fourteen places

She’ll make light of it all
As I lay her low

Oh Kalypso – Tell me to go

We’ll sleep to the creaking of timbers
The pitch and yaw of empty vessels
I’ll plot points on a curve
Over all her tender navigations

Oh my mutinous heart
I can’t overthrow

Oh Kalypso – Tell me to go

Maps that end where they begin
Will guide us through these bitter winds
Through seven years of sad goodbyes
Two tiny ships on vast horizons

Video directed by Phil Hopkins

the untamed

Well, well. Despite all its restraint and austerity, every now and then R. S. Thomas's poetry unexpectedly yields to fleeting, precious moments of... unrestraint. Here is a favourite one - in a walled garden, the classic locus of sexual rites of passage.


The Untamed

My garden is the wild
Sea of the grass. Her garden
Shelters between walls.
The tide could break in;
I should be sorry for this.

There is peace there of a kind,
Though not the deep peace
Of wild places. Her care
For green life has enabled
The weak things to grow.

Despite my first love,
I take sometimes her hand,
Following straight paths
Between flowers, the nostril
Clogged with their thick scent.

The old softness of lawns
Persuading the slow foot
Leads to defection; the silence
Holds with its gloved hand
The wild hawk of the mind.

But not for long, windows,
Opening in the trees
Call the mind back
To its true eyrie; I stoop
Here only in play.


R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems (J M Dent, 1993).

Manafon (2)

"Half life
She moves in a half life
Imperfect"


Resuming my recent peroration on David Sylvian's new album, I cannot but single out and fully endorse Sylvian's following comment in the aforementioned interview:


[R. S. Thomas] was a man with a strong but complicated personal faith. Does that resonate with you?

It's a matter of defining for oneself what gives one's own life its shape and form, what are its defining characteristics, its sense of purpose? By and large, we're all free to determine what these might be. With Thomas, the poet and the priest are inseparable but for me it's the poetry which best gives his life its true definition. The freedom, ability, and the process to openly question aspects of his own faith, which I can only assume helped his personal growth in some manner (in Hinduism they might say this was his sadhana, his personal means for developing his spiritual awareness), must've acted as a considerable release for him.
As a man of faith, as rector, his approach might have been too austere, out of touch, to the degree that it alienated people (by all accounts) but his poetry expresses his humanity which, at its best, rises above the specifics of faith and national identity to speak of the universality of the human condition. He dug deep into his own soul, as corroded and damaged as it might've been, and spoke with as true a voice as he could muster. This happens frequently in Beckett's work. These heavily handicapped individuals are merely reflections of ourselves.
In a sense Thomas might, on the one hand, represent some of the higher aspirations of the human spirit but, on the other, indicate how heavily handicapped each one of us is individually and what effort of will it takes to overcome that. Some of us bear heavier handicaps than others but as J.G. Bennett once said in a quote that is sampled on Robert Fripp's album 'exposure' "if you know you have an unpleasant nature and dislike people, this is no obstacle for work". Which I take to mean that, despite the most inhibiting of handicaps, work on oneself, in the spiritually disciplined sense, is always available to you. And again, same source; "it is impossible to achieve the aim without suffering". The cause of this suffering is of course, generally speaking, ourselves.


A timely reminder to those who too simplistically conflate the man and the work under the same harsh, snap value judgements, failing to realise how the redeeming power of art lies precisely in this: in personal salvation, in finding in art a haven that makes suffering and the inability to live and to love and to like most people less intolerable. How some deeply flawed individuals can only find life bearable via the written or sung word. How happy, balanced, well adjusted people seldom give birth to art that is worth the name of... art.

And, to (provisionally) conclude, here's the lyrics of that other song from Manafon that has struck the deepest chord with me:


SNOW WHITE IN APPALACHIA

Half life
She moves in a half life
Imperfect

From her place on the stairs
Or sat in the backseat
Sometimes you're only a passenger
In the time of your life

And there's snow on the mattress
Blown in from the doorway
It would take pack mules and provisions
To get out alive

There were concerts and car crashes
There were kids she'd attended
And discreet indiscretions
For which she'd once made amends

And there's ice on the windshield
And the wipers are wasted
And the metal is flying
Between her and her friends

She'd abandoned them there
In the hills of Appalachia
She threw off the sandbags
To lighten the load

As soon as the sun rose
The keys were in the ignition
Following the tyre tracks
Of the truck sanding the road

There had to be drugs
Running through the girl's body
There had to be drugs
And they too had a name

And the adrenalin rush
Had left her exhausted
When under the blue sky
Nothing need be explained

And there is no maker
Just inexhaustible indifference
And there's comfort in that
So you feel unafraid

And the radio falls silent
But for short bursts of static
And she sleeps in a house
That once too had a name

(Source: http://www.davidsylvian.com/texts/lyrics_and_poetry/manafon_lyrics.html)

questions...

Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, In Bed: The Kiss (1892)

What is a bed for? Is there no repose
in the small hours? No proofing of sleep's
stuff against the fretting of stars, thoughts?
Tell me, then, after the night's toil
of loving or praying, is there nothing
to do but to rise tired and be made
away with, yawning, into the day's dream?


from R. S. Thomas, "Questions", in Collected Poems (J M Dent, 1993).

there were fathoms in her

Salvador Dalí, The Broken Bridge

Inspired by a recent listening experience, I have just retrieved my dog-eared copy of R. S. Thomas's Collected Poems, stacked up, half lost, in a now uncared for shelf in a forsaken home. It doesn't take me long to find an old favourite.

"He and She" is one of those poems that at once baffles and moves me. A rare love poem within an oeuvre extremely reluctant to any open displays of affection, it is both touching in its restrained tenderness, in its attempt to bridge the abyss that separates the poet from his female companion and from women in general, towards whom he felt a deep-seated anxiety and fear (and, as usual, there is a well-meant but possessive, smothering mother behind all this ambivalence and unease towards the feminine), and unsettling in its recognition, hinted at in the final lines, that the gap may never be fully bridged nor he ever unconditionally welcomed and welcoming - only just "not repulsed".

When he came in, she was there.
When she looked at him,
he smiled. There were lights
in time's wave breaking
on an eternal shore.

Seated at the table -
no need for the fracture
of the room's silence ; noiselessly
they conversed. Thoughts mingling
were lit up, gold
particles in the mind's stream.

Were there currents between them ?
Why, when he thought darkly,
would the nerves play
at her lips' brim ? What was the heart's depth ?
There were fathoms in her,
too, and sometimes he crossed
them and landed and was not repulsed.


R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems (J M Dent, 1993).

(IN)U-topia...

At last I find a native of this country who has the good sense to take some time off and enjoy life. A most unusual and uplifting sight.

Halloween (and beyond) dilemmas...

After having witnessed, in dismay, the local children's Halloween parade yesterday, I cannot but vividly recommend this useful video to their parents.

Actually, I recommend it to the moms of all Japanese little boys & young men, regardless of their age and whether it's Halloween or not... There you are. ";oP


How To Find A Masculine Halloween Costume For Your Effeminate Son




(Link stolen from Mark Simpson's post "Halloween Dilemmas", with thanks.)

another small key...

... this time from R. S. Thomas.


... I was in prison
Until you came; your voice was a key
Turning the enormous lock
Of hopelessness. Did the door open
To let me out or yourselves in?


from "A Welsh Testament", in Collected Poems (J M Dent, 1993).

Manafon (1)

"You can’t help but notice
A near absence of tenderness
And who wants to live like that?"


I have been listening, spellbound, to David Sylvian's latest album. As with all the previous albums I know, it constitutes a unique experience, but this time for reasons which are themselves pretty unique: not only for its openly experimental amalgam of genres and aesthetics, but also for the overwhelming, looming, austere, cantankerous, intractable presence of a Welsh poet I greatly admire, R. S. Thomas.

As Sylvian himself acknowledges in a recent interview, it is not so much the question of Thomas's direct influence on his work that is relevant here as the poet's predicament and struggle with philosophical, moral and faith issues that run through all the songs and inform their grave, melancholic reflection on our contemporary condition:

There's such a rich complexity there [in R. S. Thomas] and we're only scratching the surface. These contradictions, this multifaceted character, although something of an anachronism in his own time, in some ways anticipates a contemporary predicament. On what does one ground one's own life? In a world that's rudderless when it comes to issues of morality, life values, where all is relative, where does one root oneself? It's a philosophical question that we, at some point in our lives, and the earlier the better, have to begin to ask ourselves. While it might be liberating to be freed from dogma and, for example, the rules of the church, as a society we hand much of that power over to government which steps in as surrogate patriarch and plays the enforcer. This will lead, I'm certain, to outbreaks of violence against societal laws and strictures. If a nation doesn't have a shared moral code how can it manage to order itself and maintain peaceful co-habitation without tighter and tighter reins being applied? With the death of god (as I recently read someplace, shot in the back of the head) on what energy field is the moral compass based? I feel that with the death of the notion of an external god, a necessary step in our evolution perhaps, to some extent we've also done away with the notion of ourselves as spiritual beings, as something more than flesh and blood. This imbalance will need correcting if we're to continue to evolve holistically.


It is almost unfair to single out a track, as they all require to be listened to as a sort of continuum within the album, but there are two songs that deeply touched me from the very first listening, for reasons I don't even dare verbalize. Here is the first one, "emily dickinson", about which Sylvian says, in reply to a question about Thomas:

R. S. Thomas isn’t an “easy” poet. He and his wife lived in the same house, but at opposite ends. They hardly ever spoke to each other, and only met at meal times. Yet after Elsi’s death, all these amazing poems started pouring out. Does love, or the notion of it and its difficulties, influence your own work? If so, how?

I would say the necessity and desire for love is an important underlying theme for me. This issue lies at the heart of a piece such as 'emily dickinson'. It's a fact of life that not everyone experiences unconditional love, finds themselves or others un-loveable, aren't willing to give, to sacrifice for the sake of love. Some simply cut themselves off from it. Withdraw. Yes, the theme of love or its absence is a constant preoccupation. To paraphrase the artist agnes martin, art is a celebration of the beauty in life or a protest against its absence.

Even though the song is not as yet available online, and it is sinful indeed to present it like this, uprooted, I cannot resist transcribing the lyrics, kindly provided by the artist's website:


Emily Dickinson

She was no longer a user
Don't think she realised we knew that
Not one to make a fuss
Why this and not something else
Wasn't it obvious?

She made such a hash of it
You can’t help but notice
A near absence of tenderness
And who wants to live like that?

And friends turned their backs on her
She, no longer a user
And she wanted to stay home
With a box full of postcards
And no place to send them
Live like Emily Dickinson
Without so much as a kiss
Or the comfort of strangers
Withdrawing into herself
But why this and not something else?

modern slavery

One of the things I abhor in this country is how very often work becomes a convenient excuse for not having a life. A tragic and small-minded distortion of priorities, at once escapism and self-denial.

But what scares the most is how unwittingly one falls into these traps, after having committed oneself, time and again, to struggle against such senseless schizophrenic boundaries. How modern slavery grips you slyly in its spell...

this I'd meant to tell you (if you ever listened)

Max Ernst, Cage, Forest and Black Sun, 1927.

How then should I your true love know
from another one?

A voice, a message, a promise,
a wrong to be righted, a future.
Moving in the forest at night
towards a conclusion, and an end to oppression.

May he reach you from the ends of the earth,
humming-bird caught in his hair.


from "Shining Cliff", by Peter Riley.
Source (and full poem): http://www.aprileye.co.uk/shiningcliff.html.


(and I still mean to, I still. Listen.)

another cri de coeur...

... without further comments - neither time nor will to elaborate further.
Heaven knows I'm miserable now indeed, damn...

I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour
But heaven knows I'm miserable now

I was looking for a job, and then I found a job
And heaven knows I'm miserable now

In my life
Why do I give valuable time
To people who don't care if I live or die?

Two lovers entwined pass me by
And heaven knows I'm miserable now

I was looking for a job, and then I found a job
And heaven knows I'm miserable now

In my life
Oh, why do I give valuable time
To people who don't care if I live or die?

What she asked of me at the end of the day
Caligula would have blushed

"You've been in the house too long," she said
And I (naturally) fled

In my life
Why do I smile
At people who I'd much rather kick in the eye?

I was happy in the haze of a drunken hour
But heaven knows I'm miserable now

"Oh, you've been in the house too long," she said
And I (naturally) fled

In my life
Oh, why do I give valuable time
To people who don't care if I live or die?...


"Heaven knows I'm miserable now", The Smiths / Morrissey & Marr.

There is a better world, there must be...

Another tiring day, another song to match...


Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
I'm tired and I
I want to go to bed

Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
And then leave me alone
Don't try to wake me in the morning
'Cause I will be gone
Don't feel bad for me
I want you to know
Deep in the cell of my heart
I will feel so glad to go

Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
I don't want to wake up
On my own anymore

Sing to me
Sing to me
I don't want to wake up
On my own anymore

Don't feel bad for me
I want you to know
Deep in the cell of my heart
I really want to go

There is another world
There is a better world
Well, there must be
Well, there must be
Well, there must be
Well, there must be
Well ...


"Asleep", The Smiths / Morrisey & Marr

a little paradise on my doorstep (2)

... brings another restful and quiet afternoon. Reading, studying, walking, thinking.

And where better to read a book on trees than among them, close to the water, between the earth and the sky?...

Paradise, paradise: so far away, so near...

Sengawa, Tokyo
18 October 2009

a little paradise on my doorstep (1)

... brings me the first intimations of autumn (though my beloved momiji are still clad in lush green).

Sengawa, Tokyo
18 October 2009

yes, even the soul has a syntax of its own

"Man is a foreign body whose centre of gravity is not in himself. Our soul is transitive. It needs an object that affects it, as its direct object. This is the gravest of all relationships (not of having but of being)."

Francis Ponge, cited in Robert Dumas, Tratado da Árvore: Ensaio de Uma Filosofia Ocidental, trans. by Maria Jorge V. de Figueiredo (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2007), p. 18. [translated by DK from the Portuguese translation. And many thanks to Vítor for this wonderful reading suggestion.]

glooms & solitudes

A restful afternoon, despite a disappointing and altogether forgettable event.

The soothing effect of an art garden - walking through its delicate paths reconciles me with life's essentials, with the ability to place things and people into perspective, with no illusions nor evasions.

Being here and now, accepting the distance between us while yearning, longing for it to happen. Knowing you are not here, might well never be, yet not giving up on... well, never mind, never mind.

Ian H. Finlay was so very right: the best gardens are composed of Glooms and Solitudes and not of plants and trees. So is life, so are we. But maybe there is some sort of hopefulness in our hopelessness and loss.

Maybe, maybe.

let yourself lose yourself...

The perfect song at the end of a wearisome, draining week, when you long to be elsewhere - far, far away from this world. La vie est ailleurs...


All the lies that you make up
What's at the back of your mind ?
Oh, your face I can see
And it's desperately kind
But what's at the back of your mind ?

Two icy-cold hands conducting the way
It's the eskimo blood in my veins
Amid concrete and clay
And general decay
Nature must still find a way

So ignore all the codes of the day
Let your juvenile impulses sway
This way and that way
This way, that way
God, how sex implores you
To let yourself lose yourself...

Stretch out and wait
Stretch out and wait
Let your puny body, lie down, lie down
As we lie, you say
As we lie, you say
Stretch out and ...
Stretch out and wait
Stretch out and wait
Let your puny body lie down, lie down

As we lie, you say :
Will the world end in the night time ?
(I really don't know)
Or will the world end in the day time ?
(I really don't know)
And is there any point ever having children ?
(Oh, I don't know)
All I do know is we're Here and it's Now...

So stretch out and wait
Stretch out and wait
There is no debate, no debate, no debate
How can you conciously contemplate
When there's no debate, no debate ?
Stretch out and wait
Stretch out and wait
Stretch out and wait
Wait
Wait
Wait
Wait
Oh ...


The Smiths / Morrissey and Marr

world-weariness... (4)

There are moments when I suddenly realise how far I have moved from my "salad-days"-belief in the power of literature to change and save the world, or some other grandiloquent design.

All in all, I belief in the power of literature to save myself, to preserve a sanctuary of sanity, lucidity, freedom, away from the senseless chitter-chatter outside, away from the shallowness of most people you are forced to put up with on a daily basis. A space I cherish more and more as time goes by and there is less and less time for this precious shelter that makes no demands on life - only on emotion and the imagination. A place where you can "goldenly stagnate in the sun, like a murky pond surrounded by flowers, lost among larger things", as Pessoa put it.

Call it escapism, cowardice, daydreaming, whatever. To me it has always been life-sustaining (more literally than you can think). And it will remain so. Always.


===================================================

To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarate, and the performing arts (such as acting and dancing) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning it into a slumber. The other arts make no such retreat - some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.

This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story that never was, and a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expressionn of ideas or feelings in a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.

. . .

All literature is an attempt to make life real. As all of us know, even when we don't act on what we know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are all absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary.

Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel and not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say he was on the verge of tears, say not 'I feel like crying,' which is what an adult, i.e. an idiot, would say, but rather, 'I feel like tears.' And this phrase - so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it - decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. . . .

To say! To know what to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming - like worms when a rock is lifted - under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith (Penguin, 2002), pp. 107-08.

=====================================================

Indeed: "to be no more, have no more, want no more"... - neither happy nor sad, without burden or destination...

the uselessness of labels, or: the mind's eye

Yesterday I went to see a fine exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Mind’s Eye: Photographs by Koichi Inakoshi, who passed away last February.

There is always something ghostly about photography, but this exhibition had the particularity of having been prepared when the photographer was still alive, which reinforced the eerie feeling as you moved through the chronologically ordered series and came to realize the contrast between his early inhabited cityscapes and the final natural landscapes, blurred and devoid of all human presence.

What struck me, however, as I was walking along the neat walls was that, apart from the sparse titles of the various series - from the first maybe, maybe (1971) to the the final never-seen-before China (2008) and basho-kei - the photographs had no captions (you had to refer to the catalogue to identify the various locations). I was reminded of a recent conversation with an artist friend, who confessed that one of the things that most upsets her is when visitors to her exhibitions focus their attention mainly on the captions, having only a cursory look at the works of art, or virtually disregarding them.

And I thought this might be precisely why there were no captions under the exhibits yesterday. To encourage each viewer to judge by her/himself, by walking along, being responsive to the images and their worlds, imagi(ni)ng, establishing lines, continuities, differences. Following the "mind's eye", not some pre-arranged script. Refusing ready-made labels. Preferring the soft tentativeness and ambiguity of a "maybe, maybe" to the harshness of biased judgements and snap decisions.

I was thereby also reminded of the hallmark of the best, most powerful works of art: their ability to draw us to a unique world, to extend to us a subtle invitation that is much more than visual, requiring a total response. And, most important to me personally, a timely reminder that in life & love & passion (whatever...), as in art, labels and rigid scripts do more harm than good, and that there is nothing like an unencumbered intuition allowing in-formation to freely, gradually flow to the "mind's eye" from all the senses, to paraphrase a dear poet.


Maybe, maybe...

more or less the same?...

Photo: Jim Brandenburg

On my way home today, I heard in passing this old tune by Simon & Garfunkel in the air somewhere, and could not help conjuring up the verses that made the song so memorable to many:

Now the years are rolling by me, they are rockin' even me
I am older than I once was, and younger than I'll be, that's not unusual
No, it isn't strange, after changes upon changes, we are more or less the same...

... and musing, once again, on how true and, at the same time, untrue they are.

Our inner experience of time and distance, as well as the entailing perception we have of change and sameness, continuity and transformation, will always remain philosophical puzzles, mainly because we can never look at our interior life from an 'outer' perspective, as it were, or else it would no longer be 'inner'... (though in these tittle-tattle times when nearly everything, everyone is on continuous display, having an interior life of your own seems almost an eccentricity).

Happily (?) trapped within my own foolish subjectivity, whenever I look back on... er... life, I see only a puzzling amalgam of change and continuity, tiny shards of a mirror upon which I glimpse vaguely familiar stills from a film I will never be able to restore to its wholeness. And perhaps this is how it's meant to be (growing old, that is): you gradually learn to live without a master narrative, but accept the at once melancolic and epiphanic quality of fragments, moments, instants - the beyond-repairedness of the mirror. You become more and more open to change, unpredictability, uncertainty, yet keep longing for stability, safety, firm ground.

But, all in all, the greatest and most fascinating puzzle remains: people, especially those that become meaningful to you, and that you choose - because they choose you - as close friends or/and lovers (can you always draw the line?...). Are those you love and are attracted to over the years absolutely unique in their personalities, idiosyncrasies, physique, or just ever-changing embodiments of abstract qualities you have always, consciously or unconsciously, cherished: gentleness, sensitivity, kindness, fragility, reticence, secretiveness, ambiguity?... And to which extent do these feelings and these persons change you or just confirm you in your changelessness over the years?...

The (provisional) answer is: both, I guess - or perhaps none. What a bore life would be without mysteries & enigmas...

a small key...

... despondently offered to a recalcitrant friend who has a heart of water, but persists in behaving like stone.


Make a key, however small,
enter the house.
Allow yourself the tenderness, have mercy
on the matter of dreams and birds.

Summon the fire, clarity, the music
in the groin.
Do not say stone, say window.
Do not be like a shadow.

Say man, say child, say star.
Repeat the syllables
where light is happy and lingers.

Say it again: man, woman, child.
Where beauty is newer.


from Eugenio de Andrade, "Faz uma Chave", in Branco no Branco / White on White (freely translated from the Portuguese).

world-weariness... (3)

In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our ability to dream, to analyze and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest.

Whatever is real in our sensations is precisely what they have that isn't ours. The sensations common to us all are what constitute reality. Our sensations' individuality, therefore, lies in whatever they have that's erroneous. What joy it would give me to see a scarlet-coloured sun! How totally and exclusively mine it would be!


I never let my feelings know what I'm going to make them feel. I play with my sensations like a bored princess with her large, viciously agile cats.

I slam doors within me where certain sensations were about to pass in order to be realized. I quickly clear their path of mental objects that might cause them to make gestures.


Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith (Penguin, 2002), pp. 304-05.

a journey through a wilderness

The best thing is to walk. We should follow the Chinese poet Li Po in 'the hardships of travel and the many branchings of the way'. For life is a journey through a wilderness. This concept, universal to the point of banality, could not have survived unless it were biologically true.

I know this may sound farfetched,' I said to Elizabeth Vrba, 'but if I were asked, "What is the big brain for"?, I would be tempted to say, "For singing our way through the wilderness."'


Bruce Chatwin, Winding Paths: Photographs by Bruce Chatwin (London: Jonathan Cape, 1999), pp. 23-24.

world-weariness... (2)

Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Apollo and Muses and a River God (1652)

The value of art is that it takes us away from here.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith (Penguin, 2002), p. 300.


(Afterthought: Art takes us away from here, while making us pitifully realise, in the same movement, that we are here, alas...)

world-weariness... (1)

No one understands anyone else. We are, as the poet said, islands in the sea of life; between us flows the sea that defines and separates us. However much one soul strives to know another, he can know only what is told him by a word - a shapeless shadow on the ground of his understanding.


Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ed. and trans. by Richard Zenith (Penguin, 2002), p. 298.

self-reliance, again

Living alone and being a woman in a foreign country (and, in a sense, all countries are foreign), you always find yourself pondering on the issue, negotiating boundaries, lowering sights, relying more and more on your inner resources and intuition, rather than expecting much from other people or from seemingly promising new situations.

While there is a lonely tranquility, a melancholic acceptance in it all, there is also the increasing strength that comes from the awareness that if you have survived so much so far, then you can survive anything, anything, and cope with uncertainty, with the inability to solve and explain everything, to change those you wish were otherwise, to put everything into little watertight compartments and feel good about it. And, above all, there is the realisation you can only see and (thus) know where you now walk, guided by your own clarity alone. In the most essential things you are irretrievably alone (though not necessarily adrift), indeed.

Perhaps this is what Keats meant by his famous negative capability: when one is is "capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason"... Or, as Carolee Schneemann put it in a much rawer, assertingly feminine note:

. . . where you might expect
understanding and appreciation you must expect NOTHING
then enjoy whatever gives-to-you
as long as it does and however
and NEVER justify yourself just do what
you feel carry it strongly yourself

from Interior Scroll, Performance, 1975, in Carolee Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 157.


I couldn't agree more with the absolute necessity of this daily struggle with an intractable, merciless, stone-hard world.

a different kind of intimacy

Again: I guess I'll never be able to solve that relationship of fascination-distaste I have with Karen Finley's work. Yet (or thus?) I find myself returning to her writings over and over again, discovering beautiful, moving moments that redeem it all and reinforce what I have written here apropos another artist I deeply admire.

Indeed, even though I usually dislike putting people & things into little boxes or categories, there is for me a clear-cut distinction between porn - or occasional, no-strings-attached sex between strangers, for that matter - and the sense of an actual lived and shared experience, with all the intense emotional and sexual bonds created within it.

The body does know the difference between that which inhabits it, however fleetingly, however precariously, in the dark, or in the half-light, and that which is just inconsequential, self-gratifying froth.


=========================================================

The lights are out, but we make our way with touch, something velvet and maroon, like bedroom slippers. I take your arm and glide your skin against my thigh. I light the candle of lemon magnolia, and we pass the cedar closet where the towels are kept. Outside is a lake. Our eyes are used to the darkness and a faint new moon, we only met yesterday and still managed to get here. We find the bathroom, it is a room with only a tub, and the hot water still works. You are behind me and you hold my gingham skirt. I left my white cotton panties at the beach. I turn on the water and let the rust wash out and make the water as hot as possible. I pull your linen shirt off of you and your pants down and I run my hands across your chest. In a bottle are sage green salts and I put them in the water. In my skirt are petals of summer roses and orange peel, which I add to your bath. I help you into the water and let you sit and I get on my knees and use the lavender soap. I lather and massage your back and skin. I make a lather and wash your thighs and feet and toes and neck and fingers. I come down to your cock and I massage and let it grow. I keep doing it as I kiss you all wet, as you lay back, and I have your balls in my other hand, holding tight and firm, and the smoothness of your skin - I want to eat you. I push firmly on your cock so it is straight up against your firm belly. I need to touch you now like no other time and I hold the top of your cock and move fast and then slow, so very slow, so very slow, I keep doing it, for you don't want me to stop, and I never will.

Karen Finley, A Different Kind of Intimacy: The Collected Writings of Karen Finley (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000), p. 331.

no truth, only smiles...

Sweet Billy Pilgrim - Truth Only Smiles
@ Tim Elsenburg (Copyright Control)

Out here amongst the spit and hiss
Of dreams all black and pistol whipped
They crawl towards the morning with a sigh

With easy grace and needy hands
They murdered love's sweet circumstance
And calmly fashioned flawless alibis

Chorus:
Tell me we're leaving all this far behind us
Tell me the lights still flicker when we kiss
No doubts or denials
No truth, only smiles

On his eyes the pennies hide
The bruises of a sleepless night
As light comes crashing in from high above
He tries to speak of pain and loss
But on his lips her finger falls
When putting things in order ain't enough

Chorus
...to greet me when I get home
Darkness pricks me
Something's wrong
Please say something
Anything
Take me away


Source: http://www.sweetbillypilgrim.com/lyrics/truth_only_smiles.html

stars spill out of paper cups...

Another song that means (how I see) the world - and much more. So much more.

Sweet Billy Pilgrim - Stars Spill Out of Cups
© Tim Elsenburg (Copyright Control)


When beauty falls it finds me here
In summer’s bright and dusty smear
It breaks my heart like photographs

The air is thick with needful things
Alive with final reckonings
And shaken trees drop memories

Fortune fits me like a hat
It spins off like an acrobat
Despite the bliss
It comes to this

And it all falls down around us
To have but not to hold
And it slips a little more each day
Til it slips away

A shallow breath begat the lie
With hands to rule the heart’s desires
We’ll come to know the letting go

When beauty falls it fills me up
And stars spill out of paper cups
A better guess than happiness

And when you go – go with grace
Try to take it with you
You can’t take it with you


Source: http://www.sweetbillypilgrim.com/lyrics/stars_spill_out_of_cups.html

un-labelling (4)

The gaps in our knowledge about the specific links between gender and desire raise a broader and even more perplexing question: If you are someone who responds to the person and not his or her gender, then where does your gender fit in? In other words, does fluidity in sexual desire extend to fluidity in gender identity?

Gender identity is defined as an individual's internal psychological experience of being male or female, regardless of how masculine or feminine he or she might appear to other people. The association between sexual orientation and gender identity is a complex and controversial one. [...] Individuals whose gender identities are discordant with their biological sex - that is, women who feel that they are really male, or men who feel that they are really female - are transexuals, not homosexuals. In recent years, the broader term "transgender" has been increasingly used to denote the total spectrum of individuals who experience their gender identity as somewhat fluid, or who experience various degrees of discordance between their gender identities and their physical bodies. [...]

[Fluidity - with respect to both gender and sexuality - raises a dilemma] for all people, female, male, and otherwise. Namely, how do you live a noncategorical life in a rigidly categorical world? [...] No matter how much you might resist putting your identity and your desires into neat and tidy boxes, society still wants you to do so. It is more acceptable to be a man trapped in the body of a woman [or vice-versa!] than to be neither male nor female, neither gay nor straight. [...] [People] who challenge those categories every time they step outside the front door, pay a dear price for their insistence on a different path and a different truth. But they would have it no other way.

Lisa M. Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2008), pp. 193; 201. [my emphases]

un-labelling (3)

Another possibility [for rethinking sexual orientation in light of person-based attractions] is not a fourth form of sexual orientation but rather an independent characteristic that all individuals possess, in greater or less degrees. To understand how this might work, consider sex drive as an analogy. Among heterosexual and lesbian/gay/bisexual individuals, there are those with strong sex drives and those with weaker sex drives. Having a stong or weak sex drive is not a separate type of orientation; nor does it reveal anything about a person's orientation - it is simply an additional source of variation among people.

Perhaps the capacity for person-based attractions operates in the same way. In other words, maybe there are different types of heterosexual, bisexual, and lesbian/gay individuals - some for whom gender is extremely important, and some for whom it is not. So, for example, a lesbian woman [...] might generally be attracted only to women, but her person-based attractions might periodically trigger attractions to men. Other lesbians might not possess such a capacity, in which case even their closest, most wonderful male friends would do nothing for them sexually. [...]

We can imagine the same distinction among heterosexual women. For [heterosexual] women [with a tendency to form person-based attractions], the development of a robust emotional bond to a female friend can spark unexpected feelings of physical desire that are specific to that friend. Other heterosexual women might never have such an experience, no matter how deep their same-sex friendships.

Lisa M. Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2008), pp. 188-89.

"a desperate desire to capture the passionate things of life"...

Just read the phrase in passing, but all of a sudden it struck a deep chord, reminding me how every so often life forces seemingly small but momentous decisions upon you.

It must be the old survival instinct or som'such which resurfaces unexpectedly and tells you that to maintain your inner strength & balance, your will to live passionately, to avoid unnecessary suffering & fatal mistakes, to seek pleasure above all things, you must - sometimes against your most ingrained tendencies and desires - forsake those who hinder or block out the "passionate things of life". An inner imperative I listen and respond to more and more. Increased self-knowledge, perhaps?... (I dare not say "wisdom", though)

Not easy at first, to tackle the painful sense of loss & regret at how-good-it-might-have-been-if, if only..., but life goes on and always finds new ways of surprising you. "I can't go on - I will go on"... And I always do, against all odds & disappointments. Always.

There you are.

un-labelling (2)

How can we rethink sexual orientation in light of person-based attractions? I can imagine two possibilities. One is that the capacity for person-based attractions might actually be an independent form of sexual orientation. In other words, whereas the present categories of heterosexual, lesbian/gay, and bisexual presume that gender is important to everyone, and that the key differences simply concern which gender a person desires, perhaps there is a fourth category of individuals for whom gender is irrelevant.

Such individuals would necessarily possess the capacity for attractions to either gender, though this does not necessarily mean that they would think of themselves as bisexual. Rather, like some of the women in my study, they might adopt alternative labels such as "queer," a term that is increasingly used to signify a form of sexuality that resists rigid categorization. As one woman noted, "I used to identify as bisexual, and I wasn't sure whether or not I wanted to be with men or women. Now I feel like my sexuality is more fluid, and I call myself queer because it includes all genders. It's a better term; it pretty much conveys the fact that I'm not attracted to a man or a woman based on their gender, but who they are."

Many women with person-based attractions reported that this was a longstanding pattern for them, which often first manifested itself in early adolescence as a persistent ambiguity between love and friendship. Their experiences support the notion of a gender-neutral orientation. As one women noted, "I have a really blurry line between friendship and crushes - I always tend to like people and not distinguish whether I like them as a friend or more than a friend." [...] Many people develop passionate attachments to childhood friends that appear to disregard gender. As we grow older, we typically come to distinguish between liking somebody "as a friend" and liking that person as a potential lover. Perhaps part of the uniqueness of having person-based attractions is not just that you are insensitive to gender as a basis for attraction, but also that you have more fluid boundaries between love and friendship.

This raises the inevitable question of how the rest of us come to acquire and internalize such distinctions. [...] How do we begin to draw boundaries around certain types of emotional intimacy? Developmental timing may play a role. [...] Many researchers have argued that not until late adolescence do we fully integrate a sense of gender into our sexual desires. As John Gagnon argued, "It is quite clear that during the ages of 12 to 17 the gender aspects of the 'who' in the sexual scripts that are being formed are not fixed. . . A deeper complication is that it is not obvious whether it is the gender aspects of the 'who' that have provoked the nascent desire or even if the desire is linked to a 'who' at all." Perhaps, then, an orientation toward person-based attractions represents a deeper form of gender-neutrality, in which our sexual scripts remain fundamentally open with regard to the sex of the person to whom we are attracted.


Lisa M. Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2008), pp. 186-88. [my emphases]

Why I am all at sea again...

Some songs are so powerful that they just say everything, everything (without saying too much), about certain states of mind, certain moods, certains moments in life - and spare us the agony of trying to find the right, impossible words.

Sweet Billy Pilgrim - Future Perfect Tense
© Tim Elsenburg (Copyright Control)

Friend – rouse yourself
Cause the tide has carried me away
There are fraying and knotted ropes for me to blame
But we know better
Why I am all at sea again

So much for California
So long to everything

Friend – as the mercury blooms
So cold inside my chest
Tell my kin of a noble death upon the waves
Beyond all salvage
Barely worth the life and limb

So much for California
I lost my way again

Like an empty promise
A sail becomes a shroud
And the sky is falling down

Source: http://www.sweetbillypilgrim.com/lyrics/future_perfect_tense.html

un-labelling (1)

A most interesting book that offers a radically new understanding of female sexuality, by proposing to break the stalemate in which feminism as well as gay, lesbian & queer studies are still locked, and to go beyond the old dichotomies informing them: essentialism versus social constructionism, nature versus culture, straight versus gay...

In view of my w(e)ariness concerning certain (sch)isms, rigid categories & labels recently vented here, I couldn't agree more with Diamond's argument that, for some women - and for some men, I should add! - love and desire are not rigidly heterosexual or homosexual [or perhaps not even bisexual] but fluid, changing as [they] move through the stages of life, various social groups, and, most important, different love relationships. She raises thus key questions about the role of gender in structuring our basic experiences of desire, by showing that very often our sexual attractions are person-based - linked to personality, emotional qualities, etc. - and not necessarily gender-related. This is to say that some people can respond erotically to anyone with a desirable personality or with whom they have a strong personal connection, regardless of that person's gender: they typically describe themselves as being attracted to "the person, not the gender". Hence this "gender-free" eroticism challenges, or even undermines, the very distinction between "same-sex" and "other-sex" attractions which is still at the basis of conventional models of sexuality.


Hum, promising indeed... An appetizer (more to follow soon, if/when time allows...):

[Prevailing] assumptions hold that an individual's sexual predisposition for the same sex or the other sex is an early-developing and stable trait that has a consistent effect on that person's attractions, fantasies, and romantic feelings over the lifespan. What few people realize, however, is that these assumptions are based primarily on men's experiences because most research on sexual orientation has been conducted on men. Although this model of sexual orientation describes men fairly accurately, it does not always apply so well to women.

Historically, women who deviate from this model by reporting shifts in their sexuality over time - heterosexual women falling in love with female friends, lesbian women periodically dating men - were presumed few in number and exceptional in nature. In other words, they were just inconvenient noise cluttering up the real data on sexual orientation. Yet as research on female sexuality has increased over the years, these "exceptional" cases now appear to be more common than previously thought. In short, the current conventional wisdom about the nature and development of sexual orientation provides an incomplete picture of women's experiences. Researchers now openly acknowledge that despite significant advances in the science of sexuality over the past twenty years, "female sexual orientation is, for the time being, poorly understood."

This situation is now changing. As scientists have begun investigating female and male sexual orientation as distinct phenomena instead of two sides of the same coin, consensus is gradually building on why women appear so different from men. Specifically, we have found that one of the fundamental, defining features of female sexual orientation is its fluidity. We are now on the brink of a revolutionary understanding of female sexuality that has profound scientific and social implications.

Sexual fluidity, quite simply, means situation-dependent flexibility in women's sexual responsiveness. This flexibility makes it possible for some women to experience desires for either men or women under certain circumstances, regardless of their overall sexual orientation. In other words, though women - like men - appear to be born with distinct sexual orientations, these orientations do not provide the last word on their sexual attractions and experiences.

Lisa M. Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2008), pp. 2-3.

que sera, sera...

Echigo-Tsumari, Niigata
August-September 2009

Enchanted (and enchanting) forests, amazing art, new (& old) friends, stimulating conversations & ideas, new projects in the pipeline, hundreds of photographs, travelling & walking incessantly... These past few weeks have been almost too good to be true. But if my head is in the clouds, as always, the feet are firmly on the ground and there are bound to be hard times ahead, with a new full-time job and plenty of uncharted territory to explore & mark out... Can hardly wait to get started, though. After all, it's just another form of "walking the line", isn't it?...

[Cher] lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!, please bear with me if I'm not as prolific as usual in the next few weeks or so...

Aomori, Bense Wetlands
September 2009

nosce te ipsum...

Weary of all these -isms popping out everywhere - essentialisms, constructionisms, feminisms, lesbianisms, whatever - I wonder if they don't just constitute extreme and more sophisticated versions of that most tragic tendency of ours. The simplifying, psychologically comforting tendency to be fixated on abstractions, concepts, images, genders, sexual orientations, identities, stereotypes - instead of dealing with real, unique, imperfect persons, a much more difficult enterprise, for sure.

Unwittingly compelled by narcissistic desires and lacks, we chase abstract ideas of 'masculinity' or 'femininity', and neglect the concrete realities in front of our eyes, realities that hardly ever conform to our expectations and ideals. In fact, more often than not they confound these expectations and ideals, and seem thus so much scarier and baffling in their unpredictability, in their uncontainability under familiar categories. And hence we go on chasing shadows that forever elude us, representing ourselves - to ourselves and to others - as 'happy', 'contented', 'comfortable', 'balanced', 'well adjusted', etc., etc. And life slips by... So fast, so tragically fast.

a(n) (un)familiar story...

... that most certainly does not explain everything, but it does explain a lot. I, for one, have never for a moment believed in "gay-brain" spurious theories - nor in the "homosexuality-as-choice" advocated by Christian rightists, for that matter.
There may be other causes, of course, but as far as this particular issue is concerned, certain mothers can indeed be fatal to their sons.

A sensitive boy is born into a family of jocks. He is shy and dreamy from the start. His father is uncomfortable with him, and his brothers are harsh and impatient. But he is his mother's special favorite, almost from the moment he is born. He and she are more alike. Repelled by male roughhousing, he is drawn to his mother's and sisters' quietness and delicacy. He becomes his mother's confidant against her prosaic husband, a half-eroticized relationship that may last a lifetime and block the son from adult contacts with women.

He is fascinated by his mother's rituals of the boudoir, her hypnotic focus on the mirror as she applies magic unguents from vials of vivid colour, like paints and palette. He loves her closet, not because he covets her clothes but because they are made of gourgeous, sensuous fabrics, patterns, and hues denied men in this post-aristocratic age. Later, he feels like an outsider in the schoolyard. There is no male bonding; he tries to join in but never fully merges with the group. Masculinity is something beautiful but "out there"; it is not in him, and he knows he is feigning it. He longs for approval from the other boys, and his nascent sexual energies begin to flow in that direction, pursuing what he cannot have. He will always be hungry for and awed by the masculine, even if and when, through bodybuilding and the leather scene, he adopts its accoutrements.

Thus homosexuality, in my view, is an adaptation, not an inborn trait. When they claim they are gay "as far back as I can remember," gay men are remembering their isolation and alienation, their differentness, which is a function of their special gifts. Such protestations are of little value in any case, since it is unlikely that much can be recalled before age three, when sexual orientation may be already fixed. Heaven help the American boy born with a talent for ballet. In this culture, he is mocked and hounded and never wins the respect of masculine men. Yet this desperation deepens his artistic insight and expressiveness. Thus gay men create civilization by fulfilling the pattern of Coleridge's prophesying, ostracized poet, dancing alone with "flashing eyes" and "floating hair."

Other patterns of homosexual ethiology certainly exist, including one of hatred toward and revulsion from women. But that ambivalence may already be built into the story I have sketched, since the mother who turns away from her dull spouse to make a subliminally incestuous marriage with her sensitive son may be suffocating the boy and stunting his development.

Camille Paglia, 'No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality', in Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (London: Viking, 1995), pp. 75-76.

jumping to conclusions (2)

Often on a trip, I seem to be alive in a hallucinatory vision of difference, the highly colored unreality of foreigness, where I am vividly aware (as in most dreams) that I don't belong; yet I am floating, an idle anonymous visitor among busy people, an utter stranger. When you're strange, as the song goes, no one remembers your name.

Travel can induce such a distinct and nameless feeling of strangeness and disconnection in me that I feel insubstantial, like a puff of smoke, merely a ghost, a creepy revenant from the underworld, unobserved and watchful among real people, wandering, listening while remaining unseen. Being invisible - the usual condition of the older traveler - is much more useful than being obvious. You see more, you are not interrupted, you are ignored. Such a traveler isn't in a hurry, which is why you might mistake him for a bum. Hating schedules, depending on chance encounters, I am attracted by travel's slow tempo.

Ghosts have all the time in the world, another pleasure of long-distance aimlessness. And this ghostliness, I was to find, was also an effect of the journey I had chosen, returning to places I had known many years ago. It is almost impossible to return to an early scene in your traveling life and not feel like a specter. And many places I saw were themselves sad and spectral, others big and hectic, while I was the haunting presence, the eavesdropping shadow on the east train.


Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 2.

jumping to conclusions (1)

On the eve of another trip, the first of a series planned for this month, I find myself re-reading Theroux - and agreeing with him all the way:

You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy - being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders. The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the mythomania bordering on the pathological. This is why a traveler's worst nightmare is not the secret police or the witch doctors or malaria, but rather the prospect of meeting another traveler.

Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous, the thinnest, most transparent monologuing. Little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics, and chronic posturing, much of it distorted with Muncheausen syndrome.

Of course, it's much harder to stay at home and be polite to people and face things, but where's the book in that? . . .

Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 1.