never too much to repeat to yourself, like a mantra... (1)

Walking and waiting, waiting and seeking, patience and despair, movement and stillness, silence and song are closer than one might think. Well, at least to me they are part of the same continuum of perception and desire. And being in transit is precisely this: walking, negotiating the boundaries that at once comfort and constrain you, constantly searching for something that forever eludes you and turns into something else. Arriving at seemingly new, unexpected places that turn out to be familiar ones, even though transfigured beyond hope or reach. Encountering people that nearly always reveal themselves a baffling amalgam of promise and disappointment, shallowness and depth, suspicion and trust, distance and intimacy. The mystery remains and deepens in the course of time, however, since it is impossible to separate all those things from one another. Everything sticks together like a dough.

People unfold themselves slowly (but never completely) like a long, heavy, intricate tapestry, recoiling at times in fear, but eventually stretching out towards a fuller shape, in a process that requires time and space, patience and waiting. Yet, (and there we go again), most people, in their hectic, mechanical, self-absorbed routines, seem to have less and less time and space for the other(s). Magnificent tapestries may never unfold, alas. Such a waste.

Anyway, there is nothing else to do in the meantime but walking and waiting, waiting and searching. Stirring stillness. "Walking is a mobile form of waiting", indeed, as Thomas A. Clark so rightly puts it.


(Originally posted in December 2008.)

Fuses, or: inhabited bodies

Until we solve the mystery of sexuality, contemplation of kaleidoscopic genitalia - from glossy and nubile to lank and withered - will remain an interesting and important exercise in human self-discovery. . . .

Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of its romantic veneer. No one can claim to be an expert in gender studies who is uncomfortable with pornography, which focuses on our primal identity, our rude and crude animality. Porn dreams of eternal fires of desire, without fatigue, incapacity, aging or death. What feminists denounce as woman's humiliating total accessibility in porn is actually her elevation to high priestess of a pagan paradise garden, where the body has become a bountiful fruit tree and where growth and harvest are simultaneous. "Dirt" is contamination to the Christian but fertile loam to the pagan. The most squalid images in porn are shock devices to break down bourgeois norms of decorum, reserve, and tidiness.

The Dionysian body fluids, fully released to coat every gleaming surface, return us to the full-body sensuality of the infant condition. In crowded orgy tableaux, like those on Hindu temples, matter and energy melt. In the cave spaces of porn, camera lights are torches of the Eleusinian Mysteries, giving us flashes of nature's secrets.


Camille Paglia, 'No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality', in Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (London: Viking, 1995), pp. 66-67.

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


While I do acknowledge the cogency of Paglia's argument - porn has no doubt a 'ritualistic' and didactic role to play and will always exist and be in great demand - there is something about it that deeply upsets me because so impoverishing. Sex seen in the crudest of lights and stripped of everything that makes it meaningful and worthwhile: intimacy, tenderness, the ambiguous play of light and shadow, the sense of an actual lived and shared life. A fully inhabited body. There is indeed a huge difference between something done to you or something that you do to someone and something you do with someone.

For a glimpse into the sheer beauty of the joyful chaos, naturalness, emotional and sensuous intensity of meaningful, inhabited sex - an inhabitedness no amount of porn or occasional intercourse between strangers will ever, ever replace - I can only vividly recommend Carolee Schneemann's Fuses [click to watch], an experimental erotic film that should figure prominently in every history of avant-garde and feminist film.

Fuses, 1964-67.
Film still.

A silent film of collaged and painted sequences of lovemaking between Schneemann and her then partner, composer James Tenney; observed by the cat, Kitch.

"...I wanted to see if the experience of what I saw would have any correspondence to what I felt-- the intimacy of the lovemaking... And I wanted to put into that materiality of film the energies of the body, so that the film itself dissolves and recombines and is transparent and dense-- as one feels during lovemaking... It is different from any pornographic work that you've ever seen-- that's why people are still looking at it! And there's no objectification or fetishization of the woman." –Carolee Schneemann

Source: http://www.caroleeschneemann.com/fuses.html

advice to a friend (and to myself)

Goya, Saturn Devouring his Infants (1821-23)

Yes, you who must leave everything
That you cannot control
It begins with your family
But soon it comes round to your soul. . . .


Listening to Leonard Cohen's good old Sisters of Mercy, I feel tempted to add that there is a time when you must leave behind those who, with the best of intentions, block out your daylight, suck your very lifeblood, your will to live and seek a little happiness and self-reliance, devouring you alive.

It's whether you or them, no matter how painful or cruel it might seem to others - and especially to yourself. The most important choices have never been easy, never. But there are times when we must summon the strength and turn the tables. The turning might take very long, or perhaps not. The important thing is that it happens because you prepared yourself for it and need it in the same way that you need fresh air to breathe properly. No one can live under the water for that long.

And, yes, remember: sometimes, to find yourself, you have to get rid of yourself...

'somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond'...

On the eve of travelling somewhere, amidst all the hectic preparations, I spare a moment to think that a voyage always takes you elsewhere different from what you were expecting.

The most interesting things are the unpredictable, the unexpected, the unrehearsed - those unscripted moments that change everything, and in relation to which all preparations are in vain.

A word, a gesture, a way of walking, a light, a smell, a sound you have never heard before - even a different silence can so utterly change you.

the delicate boy (2)

When he was five his kindergarten teacher wore silk stockings and he sat next to her as she read and with his boy hand felt her legs. The legs felt so smooth and soft and he kept his hand on her leg and slowly moved up her leg. He had small hands and he loved to touch soft things, because he was never touched at home. He loved his kitty. He loved his blankie. This was the first time he had been away from his mother, and sitting next to the soft legs, stroking the legs, was like holding a wild animal, it was like holding himself, because it was he who needed to be held. The reading and the softness of her voice. The timing, the rhythm like a hearbeat, a breath, and he wanted to touch and be touched so much.

The teacher didn't pull away, but allowed the boy to hold and stroke her leg. Later, she called the boy's parents and told them that there was something wrong with their son. No longer was there anything wrong with the mother, but now there was something wrong with the boy.

From then on the boy desired legs. He was so fascinated, so curious about them.

Whenever I see you I always wear stockings with garters and seams, French hosiery with velvet cutouts of lacy patterns, black teasers with seams that go up my ass with garters and white lacy frills, shoes black and pointy and heels that dig and penetrate and make my long legs longer.

I let you fuck me standing up under a peach tree against a brick wall in the courtyard of an Irish tavern, next to a church called St. Dymphna. And I can feel you for a week and then you are gone.


Karen Finley, from Shut Up and Love Me, in A Different Kind of Intimacy: The Collected Writings of Karen Finley (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000), p. 306-07.

the delicate boy (1)

I have mixed feelings about Karen Finley's work, and all too often find that overflow of female rawness and rage and despair in her texts and performances way over the top. Some of her works, however, deeply move me and bring a moment's respite from all the cringemaking excesses. Here is a favourite one:



DELICATE BOY

The boy, delicate and good and fair, blue-eyed and laughing and sensitive. His mother stopped touching him when he was two. For she had hit him. He did something that children will do. But her hand went out of control and she had hit him, in a way that she woke up and went to sleep with, and after that she never held her son. The boy was never held, never touched, never cuddled, never stroked, never cooed too, never kissed, never shown love.

When I see you, there are moments I want to be your mother and hold your head on my lap and stroke your hair while the moon rises, and it is a full moon, and I will rub the small of your back and hold your feet like little cookies and take little bites of toes. I'll roll you into a ball and hold you on my belly and rub and smooth your shoulders, and I'll kiss your forehead and tell you you are the sweetest boy, the loveliest boy, there is no other boy like you, no other boy I love as much as you. I will rock you in my arms and coo in your ears and make the monsters go away, the creepies go away to places far away, and you're safe in my arms, and my bosom breathes deeply, and you may cry if you like. I hold you, my child. I hold you til morning light and kiss your cheek, for it is day now and my boy has woken and I wash his face and behind his ears and bathe him gently with softening scents that loosen the sand in ears, and I wash his hair and massage his scalp and I wait for him to make his pee while I gather up the big bath towel that is bigger than he is, and I dry my boy down and I tickle him. We fall to the floor laughing, giggling. I love my boy. I love my boy. I love my boy.

Karen Finley, from Shut Up and Love Me, in A Different Kind of Intimacy: The Collected Writings of Karen Finley (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000), p. 306.

shut up

It might be a sign of growing up, of growing old, or of going mad, I don't know. What I do know is that I increasingly find myself returning to the same poems over and over again. And the number is getting smaller with time. Precious. They are like a gentle mantra you recite, strangely disquieting, strangely consoling. So here it is, once again:


Shut up. Shut up. There’s nobody here.
If you think you hear somebody knocking
On the other side of the words, pay
No attention. It will be only
The great creature that thumps its tail
On silence on the other side.
If you do not even hear that
I’ll give the beast a quick skelp
And through Art you’ll hear it yelp.

The beast that lives on silence takes
Its bite out of either side.
It pads and sniffs between us. Now
It comes and laps my meaning up.
Call it over. Call it across
This curious necessary space.
Get off, you terrible inhabiter
Of silence. I’ll not have it. Get
Away to whoever it is will have you.

He’s gone and if he’s gone to you
That’s fair enough. For on this side
Of the words it’s late. The heavy moth
Bangs on the pane. The whole house
Is sleeping and I remember
I am not here, only the space
I sent the terrible beast across.
Watch. He bites. Listen gently
To any song he snorts or growls
And give him food. He means neither
Well or ill towards you. Above
All, shut up. Give him your love.


W. S. Graham, 'The Beast in the Space', from 'Malcom Mooney's Land' (1970), in Collected Poems, 1942-1977 (London: Faber, 1979), pp. 147-48.

'Can women ever be whole?'...

Max Ernst, The Word or Woman-Bird (1921)

...'Can mothers and daughters ever be united in a sacramental "mother-and-daughterhood" without going back to the womb?', asks Mary Jacobus in First Things, in an interesting essay on memory and feminist nostalgia.

Adrienne Rich responds in a poem full of loss, longing, unsatisfied desire. While I've never been able to identify much with this brand of lesbian feminism that always seems in need for consolation and self-victimization, and by far prefer more raw and combative approaches, the poem does mean a lot to me, for reasons I can't even begin to verbalize - here in particular:

But in fact we were always like this,
rootless, dismembered: knowing it makes the difference.
Birth stripped our birthright from us
so early on
and the whole chorus throbbing at our ears
like midges, told us nothing, nothing
of origins, nothing we needed
to know, nothing that could re-member us.

Adrienne Rich, from 'Transcendental Étude' in The Dream of a Common Language (New York: Norton, 1978).


Knowing it might make the difference indeed, but nostalgia and regret are all too often a dead end. They change nothing, nothing.

brass-balls feminism (2)

I have always relished intelligent provocations and iconoclasms, and seldom miss a chance for one. In this respect, Camille Paglia remains at the top of my list, no matter what others might say about her being well past her prime. Some books are immortal indeed, and I know of no other woman who has managed to piss off so many know-nothings and their politically correct pieties and complacencies and empty rhetoric at the same time - mainstream feminist scholars, queer theorists, gays, lesbians, conservatives, liberals, and so on.
Here's an all-time favourite passage, which breaks all anti-PC records at a stroke. Needless to say, I endorse each and every line:


Is gay identity so fragile that it cannot bear the thought that some people may not wish to be gay? The difficulties in changing sexual orientation do not spring from its genetic innateness. Sexuality is highly fluid, and reversals are possible. However, habit is refractory, once the sensory paths have been blazed and deepened by repetition - a phenomenon obvious in the struggle with obesity, smoking, alcoholism, or drug addiction.

The injustice and impracticality are in trying to 'convert' totally from homosexuality to heterosexuality, an opposition I think false. However, helping gays learn how to function heterosexually, if they so wish, is a perfectly worthy aim. We should be honest enough to consider whether homosexuality may not indeed be a pausing at the prepubescent stage when children anxiously band together by gender. Indeed, the instantly recognizable house voice of many gay men - thin, reedy, and pinched - dates from that pre-adult period. . . .

Gay men should confront the elements of haphazard choice in their erotic history, which began in the confusion, shame, and inarticulateness of childhood. Judeo-Christian morality, following the Bible, would call for a renunciation of all homosexual behaviour. I don't agree. Why shouldn't all avenues of pleasure remain open? But is is worthwhile for gays to retrace their developmental steps and, if possible, to investigate and resolve the burden of love-hate they still carry for the opposite-sex parent. Behaviour may not change, but self-knowledge - Socrates' motto - is a philosophic value in its own right.

If a gay man wants to marry and sire children [with the opposite sex], why should he be harassed by gay activists accusing him of 'self-hatred'? He is more mature than they are, for he knows woman's power cannot be ignored. And if a married man wants to pursue beautiful young men from time to time, why shouldn't he have the same freedom of sexual self-determination as husbands who patronize whores? Why must he be charged with vacillation or evasion, when his eroticism is the most fully developed? If counselling can allow a gay man to respond sexually to women, it should be encouraged and applauded, not strafed by gay artillery fire of reverse moralism. Heterosexual love, as Hindu symbolism dramatizes, is in sync with cosmic forces. Not everyone as the stomach for daily war with nature.

It is much easier for women to live bisexually, since their erotic performance is not measured by the unforgiving yardstick of erection and ejaculation. Men who shrink from penetration of the female body are paralyzed by justifiable apprehension, since they are returning to our uncanny site of origin. Lingering on the unconscious level in every act of heterosexual intercourse are two male terrors: that when the penis goes in, it won't come out again; and second that as he approaches the womb, a man will, as in a nightmare, be sucked back to boyhood and infancy and be reabsorbed into the maternal body.

These fantasies, detectable in the vampire legends of world mythology, have led me to argue that 'mysogyny' is one of feminism's more useless ideas. It is not male hatred of women but male fear of women that is the great universal. Gay activists who spout feminist rhetoric are usually the most mysogynous, for they love the idea of woman as victim, small, passive, and in need of their help. Such men, of course, are usually helplessly dominated by imposing mothers.

Camille Paglia, 'No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality', in Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (London: Viking, 1995), pp. 78-79.

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

*It is worth adding that she finishes off the essay by proposing bisexual responsiveness as 'our best hope of escape from the animosities and false polarities of the current sex wars', and a 'pagan education' as the philosophy that 'would sharpen the mind, steel the will, and seduce the senses'. A philosophy that should be 'both contemplative and pugilistic, admitting aggression (as Christianity does not) as central to our mythology':

The beasts of passion must be confronted, and the laws of nature understood. Conflict cannot be avoided, but perhaps it can be confined to a mental theater. In the imperial arena, there is no law but imagination. (p. 94)

Again, I'm with her all the way...

tsukimi

An unexpected moon-viewing moment last night conjured up these lovely lines by Thomas A. Clark which I cling on to more than ever:

Into an economy of desires, the arrogance of the days, the compromises and complacencies, is introduced a silver light, a delicate stream of irony.

To come out of the house, to come out of yourself, to be subtle, clear, extensive, is the moon's invitation.

Darkness is not closed but open.

The impatience with which we seek the confirmations of light is a flight from information brought by all the senses to the evidence of the eyes alone.

When you see a new moon, uncover your head, turn over the penny in your pocket, and lay yourself open for inspection.

Anything that is secretly glad comes under the auspices of the moon.

Who has the courage to go into the dark places where there is nothing but feeling?

Thomas A. Clark, 'A Walk by Moonlight' in Distance & Proximity (Edinburgh: Pocketbooks, 2000), pp. 77-80.

Image: Caspar David Friedrich, Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (1824).

between worlds, or: a profoundly uncomfortable place to be

Photo: Jim Brandenburg

This recent post has brought me back to another short text I posted a while ago here, in response to a poem by Lorine Niedecker:

Fog thick morning –
I see only
where I now walk. I carry
my clarity
with me.

--Lorine Niedecker


Reading this poem by Niedecker reminds and reassures me of something I all too often tend to forget. That the things you most long for, such as warmth, clarity, or the very sense of home, do not exist in themselves. They are carried around with you and overflow, emanate from you whenever some thing, some place, someone responds and sparks them to life.
I suppose that is the meaning of finding a place for yourself in the world without depending too much on unrealistic expectations or on others. It is also the meaning of true, tranquil friendliness and affection.

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

The view still holds true for me, no doubt, but I would perhaps add that such things allow you to find roots wherever you go, in places where you were not born and did not live for long (or did not live at all).

That's the appeal of travel (physical, mental, literal, metaphorical), I guess: you escape the confines of a fixed identity - geographical, national, gender, sexual - and gradually learn to live in and love the interstices between worlds.

Because the most improbable places and people are the most lovely. Or, as my favourite anthropologist, Tim Ingold, puts it, 'home is often a profoundly uncomfortable place to be'.

replying to a friend who has recently scolded me for not being on Facebook

Vanitas, by Peter Claesz

While I usually shun the moralistic, self-righteous voices of religion, especially Catholic ones, I couldn't agree more with the preachers on this one. Spot on. Call me old square, stick-in-the-mud, whatever, but I'm with the Archbishop: there's nothing like an old-fashioned rendezvous and the hardships and ups & downs of genuine friendship.

(By the way, and in reply to a recent invitation to become Facebook "friends" with a so-so-friend: I would never, but never accept an invitation to become virtual "friends" with someone who doesn't have time for a lunch or a coffee, nor even for, say, a miserable three-line how-are-you-doing e-mail, but who wastes hours & days narcissistically compiling meaningless lists of "friends." Capisce?)

Sic transit gloria mundi...

Facebook criticised by Archbishop

Social networking websites, texting and e-mails are undermining community life, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales has warned.

Archbishop Vincent Nichols said MySpace and Facebook led young people to seek "transient" friendships, with quantity becoming more important than quality.

He said a key factor in suicide among young people was the trauma caused when such loose relationships collapsed.

"Friendship is not a commodity," he told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper.

He added: "Friendship is something that is hard work and enduring when it's right".

'Transient relationships'
Archbishop Nichols said society was losing some of its ability to build communities through inter-personal communication, as the result of excessive use of texts and e-mails rather than face-to-face meetings or telephone conversations.

He said skills such as reading a person's mood and body language were in decline, and that exclusive use of electronic information had a "dehumanising" effect on community life.

Archbishop Nichols said that social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace encouraged a form of communication that was not in his words "rounded", and would not therefore build rounded communities.

The Archbishop also warned of the danger of suicide among young people who threw themselves into a network of friendships that could easily collapse.

He said young people were being encouraged to build up collections of friends as commodities, and were left desolate when these transient relationships broke down.

"Facebook and MySpace might contribute towards communities, but I'm wary about it," he told the newspaper.

"Among young people often a key factor in their committing suicide is the trauma of transient relationships.

"They throw themselves into a friendship or network of friendships, then it collapses and they're desolate.

"It's an all-or-nothing syndrome that you have to have in an attempt to shore up an identity; a collection of friends about whom you can talk and even boast."


Source: BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8180115.stm

no one loves a smart woman (2)

A recent article on The Guardian, sensibly titled 'Don't tell women how to give birth' , has reminded me of another powerful piece by Karen Finley on an experience that, as a woman and as a mother, has changed me forever. An experience that has all too often been de-sexualised and sanitized by being regarded from a coldly clinical standpoint.

THE RELAXATION ROOM

TODAY, MOTHERS-TO-be are expected to attain the 'perfect birth'. The expectant mother is made to feel that she is responsible for this, her baby's first experience of the world. The reality is that so much happens in the pregnancy and birth process that is beyond anyone's control - no matter how aware, responsible, and healthy a woman is. Nevertheless, if a woman has one glass of wine or one cup of coffee during pregnancy then she is made to feel that she is ruining her child's health. She must deny herself totally and give everything to the child. And if she has a C-section, she is made to feel that somehow she didn't do her best. I think this is a backlash, a punitive response to the fact that women increasingly have been putting off childbirth in favor of their careers.

And pregnant women today are given extensive instructions and coaching geared toward allowing them to give birth without expressing pain. There are relaxation exercises, Lamaze techniques, yoga, meditation. The idea of being serene and relaxed during childbirth is absurd to me. Labor was the most excruciating, painful experience my body has ever gone through. I had a natural childbirth and I broke my tailbone pushing my nine-pound daughter out of the birth canal. The idea that pain should not be expressed during childbirth is a cultural misogyny, a way of trying to control women's emotions.

After giving birth, I wanted to push the image of childbirth in my art. I realized that there aren't many images of childbirth in this culture. There are plenty of magazines where you can see a woman's pussy, of course, but you're are not going to see a baby coming out of it. I wanted to do a piece that would expose the sexuality of childbirth, and that would confront viewers with the P-U-S-S-Y - that would say, 'This is what it can do'. I wanted something that would be visceral and vivid, like Frida Kahlo's childbirth paintings, but I wanted it to be a real picture, and I wanted it to be big.

My good friend Dr. Virginia Reath, a gynecologist, had found some photos of childbirth. She gave me three of them and I blew them up to 4 x 6 feet. They were graphic images of a baby's head crowning and emerging from the mother's vagina.

I hung the photos side by side in a room at the SFAI, near the 'Moral History' installation. I stuck 'Post-Its' with relaxation instructions ('Pretend you are floating on a cloud'. 'Picture yourself on the beach with your favourite beach towel'. 'Stay relaxed. This is for your baby'.) all over the photos. I found these instructions so paternal, so patronizing, and under that, I felt there was fear: fear of the female expressing her emotions.

This installation, 'The Relaxation Room', also included a video of me squirting breast milk onto black velvet. I am in my studio, and I take my 40D milk-laden breasts out of my smock and lactate on to the velvet in an abstract pattern. It's hysterical. It is my response to Jackson's Pollock's film I am Nature.


Karen Finley, from A Different Kind of Intimacy, pp. 187-89.

Image: Frida Kahlo, My Birth.

changing beds

Every time I move to a new house (as I'll be doing today), with all the initial idealism and fuss and excitement and expectation for the new, I come to my senses when recalling Baudelaire's predicament, which I fully share:

This life is a hospital in which each sick man is possessed by a desire to change beds. One would prefer to suffer by the stove. Another believes he would recover if he sat by the window.

I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.

Charles Baudelaire, "Any Where Out of this World!"

motto

No, there is no contradiction whatsoever in the idea that sometimes you have to get rid of yourself to find yourself.

my own pillow book...

Were I a contemporary version of that wittiest lady-in-waiting, Sei Shonagon, painstakingly penning my lists of likings & dislikes, loves & hates, under the entry "Hateful Things" (or "Things for Which I Have No-Patience-Whatsoever") I would no doubt begin with the following:

Crybabies. People who constantly blame others - be it civilisation, society, country, patriarchy, gender, sexual orientation, race, upbringing, their parents, their neighbours, their enemies, whatever, whoever - for their own failures, their spiritlessness, their inability to live & love open-heartedly, taking life's many blows without flinching.

People who conceal themselves behind a shield of evasions, untruths, manipulations, delusions, lame excuses, and take these things - and expect you to take them - for the truth, the one and only truth. People who, for the sake of self-justifying and protecting themselves, picture the world in black & white, criminally leaving out all the manifold colours, possibilities and nuances in between.

As if one's moral fibre didn't show itself precisely in the ability to overcome social, sexual or racial prejudices and predicaments - and to stop grumbling about everything and everyone, for god's sake, when you are, first and foremost, the one to blame.

As if victimology were some sort of vocation. As if the shadows projected onto one's dank cave were reality itself. Sheltered lives.

How far can one take self-absorption and blind refusal? How far can one waste one's life inside a protective shell, when life is so short, so pitifully short...?

to all the 'soshokukeis' & co. of the world... [5]

It's been ages since I have read D. H. Lawrence with any attention, but of late I keep discovering hidden gems not only in his poetry, but also in his less well-known criticism. Here is an extract from a thought-provoking piece on "maleness and femaleness in art":

The body it is which attaches us directly to the female. Sex, as we call it, is only the point where the dual stream begins to divide, where it is nearly together, almost one. An infant is of no very determinate sex: that is, it is of both. Only at adolescence is there a real differentiation, the one is singled out to predominate. In what we call happy natures, in the lazy, contented people, there is a fairly equable balance of sex. There is sufficient of the female in the body of such a man as to leave him fairly free. He does not suffer the torture of desire of a more male being. It is obvious even from the physique of such a man that in him there is a proper proportion between male and female, so that he can be easy, balanced and without excess. The Greek sculptors of the "best" period, Phidias and then Sophocles, Alcibiades, then Horace, must have been fairly well-balanced men, not passionate to any excess, tending to voluptousness rather than to passion. So also Victor Hugo and Schiller and Tennyson. The real voluptuary is a man who is female as well as male, and who lives according to the female side of his nature, like Lord Byron.

The pure male is himself almost an abstraction, almost bodiless, like Shelley or Edmund Spenser. But, as we know humanity, this condition comes of an ommission of some vital part. In the ordinary sense, Shelley never lived. He transcended life. But we do not want to transcend life, since we are of life. [. . .]

I can think of no being in the world so transcendentally male as Shelley. He is phenomenal. The rest of us have bodies which contain the male and the female. If we were so singled out as Shelley, we should not belong to life, as he did not belong to life. But it were impious to be like the angels. So long as mankind exists it must exist in the body, and so long must each body pertain both to the male and the female. [. . .]

A man who is well balanced between male and female, in his own nature, is, as a rule, happy, easy to mate, easy to satisfy, and content to exist. It is only a disproportion, or a dissatisfaction, which makes the man struggle into articulation. And the articulation is of two sorts, the cry of desire or the cry of realisation, the effort to prolong the sense of satisfaction, to prolong the moment of consummation.

D. H. Lawrence, from "Study of Thomas Hardy (Male and Femaleness in Art)" in Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (NY: Viking Press, 1956), pp. 70-71.

(But perhaps the happy, well-balanced, easy to satisfy, contented people are usually not that interesting. Well, they certainly don't tend to produce great art or great literature or great thoughts, which nearly always stem from excess and imbalance, from that struggle for articulation - that cry or desire for more, much more than life and "contented" people can give us.)

Image: Apollo Belvedere.

... and yet another favourite, with same dedication

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric furr, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh....And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you so quite new


e. e. cummings, from & (1925)

an all-time favourite, with implicit dedication

my girl's tall with hard long eyes
as she stands, with her long hard hands keeping
silence on her dress, good for sleeping
is her long hard body filled with surprise
like a white shocking wire, when she smiles
a hard long smile it sometimes makes
gaily go clean through me tickling aches,
and the weak noise of her eyes easily files
my impatience to an edge--my girl's tall
and taut, with thin legs just like a vine
that's spent all of its life on a garden-wall,
and is going to die. When we grimly go to bed
with these legs she begins to heave and twine
about me, and to kiss my face and head.

e. e. cummings

secret assembly

At dusk, after rain, all the birds from the neighbourhood seem to gather on the wires opposite my window, with some secret, unfathomable design (or maybe none in particular). They hang there for half an hour or so producing a deafening chirp and all of a sudden the flashmob disperses and everybody goes their separate ways.

Odd birds.

I wonder if they communicate by SMS or are on Facebook or maybe Twitter... They do twitter a lot indeed, the little bastards.

'a feeling of hanging in the air, of having nothing firm under the feet'...

There is perhaps no art more faithful to life's endless absurdities, perplexities, incongruencies, discrepancies and unpredicability than contemporary performance.

Here are a few priceless gems by a unique Chinese performance artist I worship, Li Wei, interspersed with some of his words of wisdom.

Bright Apex (Beijing, 2007)

[Li Wei] says that much of his work is about change: 'there is a feeling of losing a grip on things, an uncertainty about the morrow. It’s a feeling of hanging in the air, of having nothing firm under the feet'.

Li Wei Falls to the Como Lake (Italy, 2004)

About the Fall photographs, Li Wei says, 'this feeling of having fallen headfirst into something and of having nothing firm under the feet is familiar to everyone. One doesn’t have to fall from another planet to feel it'.

Love at the High Place (Beijing, 2004)

Li has said that much of his work involves the symbolic balancing act between personal freedom and emotional security, such as that of the family.

A Pause for Humanity (Beijing, 2005)

Source, including photographs and captions: http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/2008/apr/30/photography.chinaarts2008?picture=333839247

'this unromantic land'...

One more selected passage from a book to which I keep returning over and over again, Donald Richie's The Inland Sea. The most thoughtful, thought-provoking and movingly honest book about Japan as a place and as a state of mind I have ever read.

*       *       *

The Japanese are resolutely of the here and the now, and this, to be sure, limits them. In the same way, one of the ways they have learned to survive in a sometimes quaking, ocasionally flooded, and always overcrowded archipelago is to prepare themselves, daily, continually, for the worst. If it does not come, they have had a good day. I have always wondered why Seneca is not a best seller here. His stoic admonitions would find, I should think, one hundred million pairs of willing ears. Do not fear the future - if it is too terrible, you will die; if you do not die, it could not have been too terrible. Such thoughts, so very Asian-sounding, might, one would believe, find a ready audience.

That they do not is largely because the Japanese - different in this from the Indians, from the Chinese - are not self-conscious except in the lowest and most social sense. They are literally not conscious of self and they literally have no conscience - Western man's pride and pain - at all. Thus Ruth Benedict's conclusion that they have an abundance of social shame but not a shred of private guilt is probably true. A thing is not a crime unless you are caught; nothing is bad except something that fails - and even then there is always the sense of shikata ga nai* to fall back on.

One can imagine what a Dostoievski or a Melville would have made of such a place. Here the very conflict that gives all meaning to Western life does not exist. It is not merely ironed out or hidden. It quite literally does not exist, has never even been imagined. Its mysterious attractions may be felt in whatever little a Japanese derives from a reading of Crime and Punishment, but, unless he is so awed by the idea of Literature that his mind numbs, I can imagine him first asking himself what was the matter with Raskolnikov, to carry on so about his crime when no one but himself knew anything about it and it would never have been known if only he had kept his mouth shut.

One can imagine, with more pleasure, what a Henry Fielding or a Jane Austen would have made of the country. Both would have criticized. He would have exposed, in the midst of laughter, the most awful discrepancies and she would have observed with her loving but cutting irony many an abyss between intention and fact.


Donald Richie, The Inland Sea (1971; Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2002), pp. 41-42.


*The link is to another must-read, a fine piece by Hugh Cortazzi on the fatalistic and passive 'shikata ga nai' (it can't be helped) mentality and its dangers in a supposedly 'democratic' society.

the power of reading

Boy reading newspaper, New York, 1944
Photograph: The Estate of André Kertész/Courtesy of Stephen Bulger Gallery

A generous tribute to the power of words and reading - and to the work of a great, great photographer.

The power of reading
Blake Morrison on André Kertész's photographic celebration of the joy of the written word

Blake Morrison
The Guardian, Thursday 23 July 2009

One of my favourite André Kertész photographs shows two young men sitting with their backs to a tree, each absorbed in a book. Both are wearing glasses; both use their thighs as a lectern; the one facing forwards is black, the other, in profile (a dead ringer for Woody Allen), is white. Their proximity suggests they know each other and are friends. And given the time and place of the composition, the photo could serve as an icon of the civil rights movement – racial harmony as observed in Washington Square, New York City, 1969. What's equally striking, though, is how separate the two men are, how oblivious to each other's presence (and to the camera). They might be friends but their real companions are their books. [see photo here]

The Budapest-born Kertész enjoyed a long life (1894-1985), visited many countries and was involved in several different artistic movements. But wherever he went and whatever the commission, a constant preoccupation was with people reading. In one of his earliest and most moving images, three small boys (two of them barefoot) crouch over a book in a Hungarian street in 1915; in one of the last, a young woman stands reading in the shadow of a vast Henry Moore statue. Ferocious concentration is common to both. The act of reading involves no action, beyond turning the page. But the mental activity is intense, and it's this that fascinates Kertész.

When paintings and sculptures depict a man or woman with a book, this usually signifies that they are studious, saintly, noble and wise – persons of substance. Kertész's approach is different. Apart from one semi-surrealist shot of Peggy Guggenheim, with an open book in the foreground, he has no interest in the great and good. The Bowery bum retrieving a newspaper from a wastebin; a woman kneeling over a text in a Manila market; gondoliers, circus performers and street vendors snatching time between work duties to peruse a book or magazine – Kertész's subjects are often people you wouldn't expect to see reading. What the camera captures is their thirst for knowledge or hunger to escape their circumstances. One memorable image features a boy sitting in a New York doorway in 1944, amid a heap of newspapers left there to alleviate the wartime shortage ("Paper is needed now! Bring it at any time," reads the poster behind him). Times are hard yet the boy looks perfectly happy: amid the detritus, he has found a page of comic strips.

Whereas books are traditionally thought of as an indoor pursuit, most of Kertész's subjects are caught reading outdoors. The venues aren't just parks and beaches. There's a whole sequence of images taken in Greenwich Village in the 1960s and 70s, showing people reading high above the street, on tenement rooftops, penthouse balconies, metal stair-ladders and window ledges. Enrapt as they are, the readers seem indifferent to the chimneys, ventilation pipes and washing lines that surround them: away from the crowds, each has found a space to be alone. The setting is tough and urban. Yet there's a spiritual quality, too – reading as a stairway to heaven.

Portrait painters evoke the spiritual intensity of reading by coming in tight on the face and body: the lowered eyes, the meditative brow, the hands piously folded under the spine of the text. The illustrations in Alberto Manguel's wonderful book A History of Reading include countless examples of this, not least the painting which serves as its cover, Gustav Adolph Hennig's Reading Girl. In Kertész's photos, by contrast, the perspectives are longer and the subjects unaware that they are subjects: he shoots from a distance, so that we see the surrounding environment rather than the title of the book that's being read. The lack of close-ups isn't an obstacle, since the faces of readers give nothing away: their only engagement is with the book. The light and shade emphasise the transcendental power of reading. Here are people on an inner journey, while physically remaining still.

Kertész didn't live to see the age of the internet or to hear the funeral rites for the age of print. But his photos of readers aren't just a historical document or an exercise in nostalgia. The essential image he works with is timeless: human interaction with the written word. The physical forms in which we receive the word may be changing. But even when ebooks and Blackberries have taken over, that central image will remain: a text held in the hand and a head bowed over it. Andre Kertész, On Reading, is at the Photographers' Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies St, London W1 until 4 October.


Source (incl. photo): http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/jul/23/andre-kertesz-photography-reading

to all the 'soshokukeis' & co. of the world... [4]

Films of the mating behavior of most other species . . . demonstrate that the female chooses. Males pursue, show off, brawl, scuffle, and make general fools of themselves for love. A major failing of most feminist ideology is its dumb, ungenerous stereotyping of men as tyrants and abusers, when in fact . . . men are tormented by women's flirtatiousness and hemming and hawing, their manipulations and changeableness, their humiliating rejections. Cock teasing is a universal reality. It is part of women's merciless testing and cold-eyed comparison shopping for potential mates. Men will do anything to win the favor of women. Women literally size up men -- "what can you show me?" -- in bed and out. If middle-class feminists think they conduct their love lives perfectly rationally, without any instinctual influences from biology, they are imbeciles.

Camille Paglia, "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", in Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (London: Viking, 1995), p. 35.

day and night

Day and night, M. C. Escher

Yes, I know. You could have been looked at from different angles, but I, with my impatience, cast a cold analytic light and set you down in black and white.

And you, knowing though I could have been looked at from different points of view, picked up one, the least flattering one, and stuck to it, never seeming to veer again. White and black.

So here we are, two frozen images fixed in a fake pose, staring at each other from an impossibly awkward angle. Sparing words, unforgiving, obstinate, icy. Who will thaw and say 'sorry', 'never mind', etc., first? Will we... ever?... Before it gets too late.

(Or maybe it's already too late. Maybe.)

to those who read too literally, a timely reminder and caveat...

A love poem cannot be simplistically read as a literal, journalistic record of an event or relationship; there is always some fictive reshaping of reality for dramatic or psychological ends. A love poem is secondary rather than primary experience; as an imaginative construction, it invites detached contemplation of the spectacle of sex.

We must be particularly cautious when dealing with controversial forms of eroticism like homosexuality. Poems are unrealiable historical evidence about any society; they may reflect the consciousness of only one exceptional person. Furthermore, homoerotic images or fantasies in poetry must not be confused with concrete homosexual practice. We may speak of tastes or tendencies in early poets but not of sexual orientation: this is a modern idea.

[. . .]
The history of European love poetry begins with the Greek lyric poets of the Archaic age (7th-6th centuries B.C.). Archilochus, Mimnermus, Sappho, and Alcaeus turn poetry away from the grand epic style toward the quiet personal voice, attentive to mood and emotion. [. . .] Sappho and Alcaeus were active on Lesbos, an affluent island off the Aeolian coast of Asia Minor, where aristocratic women apparently had more freedom than later in classical Athens. Sappho is primarily a love poet, uninterested in politics or metaphysics.

Sappho and Erinne in the Garden of Mythilene, Simeon Solomon, 1864

The nature of her love has caused much controversy and many fabrications, some by major scholars. Sappho was married, and she had a daughter, but her poetry suggests that she fell in love with a series of beautiful girls, who moved in and out of her coterie (not a school, club or cult). There is yet no evidence, however, that she had physical relations with women. Even the ancients, who had her complete works, were divided about her sexuality.

Sappho shows that love poetry is how Western personality defines itself. The beloved is passionately perceived but also replaceable; he or she may exist primarily as a focus of the poet's consciousness.

Camille Paglia, 'Love Poetry', in Vamps & Tramps, pp. 317-18.

brass-balls feminism

Franz von Stucks's Amazon

. . . or an ever-invigorating antidote to the dead end of victimology, political sloganeering and puritanical know-nothingness.

Sex in our age has become gladiatorial, with male and female, gay and straight whipping and goading each other for position. This is our lot. We must accept it and devise a simple new rule book and training regime that puts combatants on equal footing. Neither women nor gays should plead for special protections or preferential treatment. The arena is the social realm, marked off from nature but ritually formalizing nature's aggressions. My libertarian position is that, in the absence of physical violence, sexual conduct cannot and must not be legislated from above, that all intrusion by authority figures into sex is totalitarian.
The ultimate law of the sexual arena is personal responsibility and self-defense. We must be prepared to go it alone, without the infantilizing assurances of external supports like trauma counselors, grievance committees, and law courts. I say to women: get down in the dirt, in the realm of the senses. Fight for your territory, hour by hour. Take your blows like men. I exalt the pagan personae of athlete and warrior . . . whose ethic is candor, discipline, vigilance and valor.


Camille Paglia, "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", in Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (London: Viking, 1995), pp. 23-24.

'soshokukei danshi', or: the upgraded Japanese version of the metrosexual...

I have already elaborated at length on these new perplexing forms of masculinity and their... erm... idiosyncrasies here and here. I can't resist, however, reproducing this recent article from The Japan Times.

It is interesting, indeed, that sexuality - or what passes for it - is now all about merchandising, consumerism, patterns of consumption and 'lifestyles' (oh, well, and what isn't these days?...). Also noteworthy is the fact that the old dichotomies continue, but with an ironic, dramatic twist: the guys are now 'herbivorous' / soshokukei danshi - friendly, home-oriented, chummy with their moms, uninterested in sex (except online, of course), non-aggressive, and unambitious (except, of course, for their impeccable, well-groomed looks) - whereas the ladies are 'carnivorous' / nikushokukei joshi and pursue 'an active lifestyle'. My, my, where are we heading for?... Can hardly wait to see...

'Herbivorous men' are new consumer kings
By TOMOKO ARIMA
Kyodo News

Japan's newly dominant consumer is likely to be in his 20s to 30s, favors cosmetics over deluxe cars and enjoys eating sweets with his parents at home rather than treating his girlfriend to fancy eateries.

Such men are called "soshokukei danshi," or "herbivorous men." The phrase is generally applicable to men who are friendly and home-oriented, and not aggressive toward women, love and marriage. Its opposite is "nikushokukei joshi," or "carnivorous women," who pursue an active lifestyle.
Some manufacturers are beginning to cater to those born in the late 1970s and after who are changing patterns of consumption with their emphasis on reasonably priced goods.
Koji Munemori, 34, of the Tokyo branch of the Daimaru department store chain, said he did not imagine that men would line up to buy macaroons made by Pierre Herme Paris on "White Day," a holiday one month after Valentine's Day when men give gifts to their girlfriends in return for presents they have received.
He said he hadn't thought men were so familiar with sweets and was taken by surprise to find out how knowledgeable they were, adding that sales were up 40 percent from last year.
A 30-year-old salaryman from Shiga Prefecture is one of these men with a sweet tooth. He stops by a big-name store to buy cakes every time he pays a visit home and enjoys eating them with his mother.
He neither drinks alcohol nor smokes cigarettes and lives in a clean, neatly kept room.
"Since they've never been part of an economic boom, they don't like to spend money out of vanity. They might even feel guilty if they purchase expensive goods," said writer Megumi Ushikubo, 41, who has written about the soshokukei phenomenon.
These men make heavy use of information available and buy seemingly valuable merchandise at reasonable prices, she said. They may buy goods carrying price tags ranging from several thousand to several tens of thousands of yen, but they do not buy automobiles and houses.
Ushikubo said soshokukei men are generally content with reasonable salaries and working hours but are overly sensitive to criticism and tend to be told what to do.
Major cosmetics maker Shiseido Co. has a range of cosmetics for men under the brand name Shiseido Men, including eye cream and skin care lotion.
It has been posting annual double-digit increases in sales since it first marketed the cosmetics in 2004.
"Men's obsessions have shifted from automobiles and shoes to their own appearance," a company employee in charge of men's cosmetics said.
Meanwhile, Suntory Ltd., maker of alcoholic beverages and soft drinks, in March started selling Protein Water for young men seeking a slender and muscular body. In one month, it sold half of the total it had planned to sell in a year.
Standard men's underwear previously was conservatively colored and priced at ¥1,000 for a set of three. Now, those with printed patterns in a variety of colors, including red and pink, are popular at Hankyu Men's department store in Osaka. Sales of imported underwear priced at ¥4,000 to ¥5,000 each are also doing well.
"The reason companies cannot sell their products to young people is because middle-aged executives are critical of soshokukei people and do not sell merchandise for them," said Toshihiro Ota of Itochu Fashion System Co. "If they listened to the opinions of young soshokukei employees, they would know what kind of merchandise sells well."

Source (incl. image): The Japan Times: Thursday, July 16, 2009

*An afterthought: The journalist got the title wrong, though, me thinks. She should have written more appropriately: 'Herbivorous men are new consumer queens'... There you are. ";oP

stepping into the shadows

Photo: Jim Brandenburg

How I cherish these moments in life when we are compelled to withdraw into the shadows, into periodical concealment, against the grain of an age where everything, everyone is on continuous display, nothing is witheld, in an incessant, senseless chitter-chatter. When we step back into the shade and recover all the lost, banished things - tenderness, reticence, silence, kindness, patience, gentleness, innocence, depth, groundedness. Intimacy.

every fruit has its secret...

Having a sweet tooth, I adore figs - and find it a shame that they are so outrageously expensive in Japan (￥800 / 6.00 Euros for a little box with three - three! - figs...). Fresh figs are not just the summer fruit par excellence; there is also something enticingly self-indulgent, sensual and erotic about this Mediterranean fruit that from time immemorial has converted it into a powerful symbol, literary and otherwise. I, for one, have never looked at figs in the same way after reading this wonderful poem:


Figs

The proper way to eat a fig, in society,
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.

Then you throw away the skin
Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,
After you have taken off the blossom with your lips.

But the vulgar way
Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the flesh in one bite.

Every fruit has its secret.

The fig is a very secretive fruit.
As you see it standing growing, you feel at once it is symbolic:
And it seems male.
But when you come to know it better, you agree with the Romans, it is female.

The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part; the fig-fruit:
The fissure, the yoni,
The wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre.

Involved,
Inturned,
The flowering all inward and womb-fibrilled;
And but one orifice.

The fig, the horse-shoe, the squash-blossom.
Symbols.

There was a flower that flowered inward, womb-ward;
Now there is a fruit like a ripe womb.

It was always a secret.
That's how it should be, the female should always be secret.

There never was any standing aloft and unfolded on a bough
Like other flowers, in a revelation of petals;
Silver-pink peach, venetian green glass of medlars and sorb-apples,
Shallow wine-cups on short, bulging stems
Opening pledging heaven:
Here's to the thorn in flower! Here is to Utterance!
The brave, adventurous rosaceae.

Folded upon itself, and secret unutterable,
The milky-sapped, sap that curdles milk and makes ricotta,
Sap that smells strange on your fingers, that even goats won't taste it;
Folded upon itself, enclosed like any Mohammedan woman,
Its nakedness all within-walls, its flowering forever unseen,
One small way of access only, and this close-curtained from the light;
Fig, fruit of the female mystery, covert and inward,
Mediterranean fruit, with your covert nakedness,
Where everything happens invisible, flowering and fertilization, and fruiting
In the inwardness of your you, that eye will never see
Till it's finished, and you're over-ripe, and you burst to give up your ghost.

Till the drop of ripeness exudes,
And the year is over.

And then the fig has kept her secret long enough.
So it explodes, and you see through the fissure the scarlet.
And the fig is finished, the year is over.

That's how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the purple slit
Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.
Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her secret.

That's how women die too.

The year is fallen over-ripe,
The year of our women.
The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.
The secret is laid bare.
And rottenness soon sets in.
The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.

When Eve once knew in her mind that she was naked
She quickly sewed fig-leaves, and sewed the same for the man.
She'd been naked all her days before,
But till then, till that apple of knowledge, she hadn't had the fact on her mind.

She got the fact on her mind, and quickly sewed fig leaves.
And women have been sewing ever since.
But now they stitch to adorn the bursten fig, not to cover it.
They have their nakedness more than ever on their mind,
And they won't let us forget it.

Now, the secret
Becomes an affirmation through moist, scarlet lips
That laugh at the Lord's indignation.

What then, good Lord! cry the women.
We have kept our secret long enough.
We are a ripe fig.
Let us burst into affirmation.

They forget, ripe figs won't keep.
Ripe figs won't keep.
Honey-white figs of the north, black figs with scarlet inside, of the south.
Ripe figs won't keep, won't keep in any clime.
What then, when women the world over have all bursten into self-assurance?
And bursten figs won't keep?

D. H. Lawrence, from Birds, Beasts and Flowers, in Selected Poems, pp. 96-99.

so true, so very true... (2)

Good husbands make unhappy wives
so do bad husbands, just as often;
but the unhappiness of a wife with a good husband
is much more devastating
than the unhappiness of a wife with a bad husband.

D. H. Lawrence, from Pansies, Selected Poems (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 199.

speaking of strong men...

I have just read, half-perplexed and half-amused, this article on BBC news:

Life without men

Scientists claim to have grown human sperm in a lab, and columnists and bloggers are musing on the possibility of a world where men are no longer needed.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8142104.stm

One blogger, cited in the article, wonders (and I with her/him):

A world without men. Would that be possible in the future? Maybe. Scientists have created Human Sperm from stem cells. That means men can become redundant in the human productive cycle and the end of male infertility. But for the ladies, I think we should keep a few of them around just for fun. And for those anti-gay, it is an efficient way to cure male homosexuality: abolish men.

to all the 'soshokukeis' of the world... [3]

Masculine identity is embattled and fragile. In the absence of opportunity for heroic physical action, as in the modern office world, women's goodwill is crucial for preserving the male ego, which requires, alas, daily maintenance. It is in the best interests of the human race, and of women themselves, for men to be strong. Inspired by my Italian heritage, with its blazingly assertive personae, I call for strong men and strong women, not strong women and castrated men. Hot sex and healthy children cannot be produced by eunuchs. Women, the stronger sex from birth to death, better get their priorities straight. Male swagger is erotic.

Camille Paglia, "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", in Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (London: Viking, 1995), pp. 85-86.

so true, so very true

Narcissism is important, as long as one doesn't get lost in one's reflection.

French performance artist Orlan

no one loves a smart woman

. . . I'm hurt, abused. I slice me.
I burn me. I hit me. I want this body to die. I want to be
old and undesired.
I want my body back -
society, culture and history
media, entertainment and art
I'm more than a hole
But you hate us because we can have babies and you
can't.
I'm more than a hole
But you envy us because we have children who
love us unconditionally.
I'm more than a set of tits
But if I don't have the right size for you
I'm never enough for you
So, we make implants and surgery just for you.
We create a woman that never existed.
It's survival of the female species.
And I'm more than a pair of legs
But if they don't do more than walk
I'm a dog.
If I nurse and my tits sag
And I'm told you won't desire me
You can't be a mother and a whore
No one loves a smart woman
I'm more than a piece of ass, a good fuck and lay
For the woman - our society only relates and values
you for your desirability.
The Woman is Private Property.


Karen Finley, from We Keep Our Victims Ready, in A Different Kind of Intimacy: The Collected Writings of Karen Finley (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000), pp. 95-96.

to all the 'kokoro-no-semai soshokukeis' of the world... - and to those 'damn Buddhists', as the poet called them... [2]

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom;
The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction;
One law for the lion and ox is oppression . . .


William Blake, 'Proverbs of Hell', from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

to all the 'kokoro-no-semai soshokukeis' of the world...

Touch comes when the white mind sleeps
and only then.
Touch comes slowly, if ever; it seeps
slowly up in the blood of men and women.

Soft slow sympathy
of the blood in me, of the blood in here
rises and flushes insidiously
over the conscious personality
of each of us, and covers us
with a soft one warmth, and a generous
kindled togertheness, so we go
into each other as tides flow
under a moon they do no know.

Personalities exist apart;
and personal intimacy has no heart.
Touch is of the blood
uncontaminated, the unmental flood.

When again in us
the soft blood softly flows together
towards touch, then this delirious
day of mental welter and belter
will be passing away, we shall cease to fuss.


D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Poems.

‘noli me tangere', or: random thoughts from exile (2)

‘Give me the democracy of touch, the resurrection of the body!’ Thus exclaims one of the characters in D. H. Lawrence’s (in)famous Lady Chatterley’s Lover, echoing the author’s stress on the importance of touch and his apology for a new relation with the body, which he envisaged as perforce physical. Direct human touch and its mysteries.

Speaking of which, here goes another mystery - and one which puzzles me perhaps even more than the  prevalent ‘kokoro no semasa’ in this land of the setting sun: most people’s extreme reluctance to touch others, to kiss, to hug, to cuddle. If you are a tactile and affectionate person, then you are bound to feel utterly forlorn and inadequate amidst all the social ice. Not to mention that you have to constantly refrain your natural impulses, lest you scare the living daylights out of some poor guy with an impromptu social kiss or a slight hand touch. I, for one, feel so deprived of human touch among native folks that every time I return to Europe I have to hold back tears of happiness whenever I can unrestrainedly touch hands with or kiss another human being. What a joy, what a relief!

Little wonder, then, that Japan is considered ‘the world’s least sexy nation’. Or that a recent survey has revealed that more than 80 percent (!) of new recruits would choose to work if asked to do overtime rather than go out on a date. Or that most urban single young men are ‘not interested in dating girls [nor boys, I presume...], having relationships, or even having sex’, and that they are much more – or exclusively - interested in themselves, that is to say, in fashion & shopping and, of course, in wanking online. In Europe we call these narcissistic young fellows 'metrosexuals’ or ‘mirror men’; in Japan, they are soshokukei, ‘herbivorous’ or ‘herbivores’. Why say more?...

Hail, brave new world! Brave new world indeed.

Or, as one of Japan's leading feminist thinkers, Chizuko Ueno, has famously coined it, a transvestite patriarchy of seemingly soft, tender, kind, and 'effeminate' men - greatly assisted by an army of domineering mothers who spoil their little brats, esp. the males, beyond hope (and mothers can indeed be fatal to their sons. Fatal.) - that is in reality deeply sexist and misogynistic.

Good ladies, wake up!