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.

morning walk

Feet on the ground, head in the clouds - but heart under the water, as usual, this morning. Under the water.

Kiyosato, Yamanashi

31 August 2009

never too much to repeat to yourself, like a mantra... (2)

Taking the lids off things (and off people)


Nothing is, I feel, more vital than this. And, at the same time, nothing is more difficult to incorporate into our habits of thought, attitudes, actions, rhetoric, routines, relationships. Yet, despite ourselves, we do it all the time: while differentiating certain things and people, we do not - we cannot - really separate them; we mix up everything, because every thing is a 'going on', as Tim Ingold puts it. I cannot separate what I am from what I am thinking and saying and doing, because:

"The wind is its blowing. Similarly, the stream is the running of water. And so too, I am what I am doing. "

If things occur, as entanglements within a texture, rather than existing as discrete, self-contained entities, then as we follow the materials from one thing to another we cross no boundary. Some critics may find this hard to understand. I myself have been accused of 'conflationism', of muddling everything into everything else. Surely, it is argued, a first prerequisite for any kind of action in the world is that the actor is able to tell one thing from another, or to distinguish a phenomenon, P, from what is not P. How could anyone who did not recognise such distinctions get on with their lives? They would be forever adrift in blundering confusion. The mistake, here, is to assume that differentiation implies separation, that to recognise the difference between A and B is to place them on opposite sides of a categorical boundary. Let us suppose that A and B are places, and that we take a trip from one to the other. We know that we are at A when we start out, and at B when we arrive. But if, somewhere en route, I were to stop and ask 'are we still in A or have we crossed over to B?', you could reasonably reply that there is no cross-over point, no boundary, but that we will be in B once we get there. For each place is identified not by its contents, enclosed within a perimeter, but by its positioning within a field of relations that continually unfolds in the course of people's inter-place movements.

[...]

I think it may be more helpful to imagine the world not as a giant museum or department store but as a huge kitchen, well stocked with ingredients of all sorts, and where things are continually on the boil. In the kitchen, stuff is mixed together in all sorts of combinations, generating new materials in the process which will in turn become mixed with other things in an endless process of transformation. To cook, containers have to be opened, and their contents poured out. We have to take the lids off things. Indeed, faced with the anarchic proclivities of his materials, the cook has to struggle to retain some semblance of control over what is going on. So does the gardener have to struggle to prevent the garden from turning into a jungle. However much we try, through feats of engineering, to construct a world that conforms to our expectations - that is, a world of discrete, well-ordered objects - our intentions are confounded by the life's refusal to be contained. We think that objects have outer surfaces, but wherever there are surfaces life depends on the continual exchange of materials across them. If, by 'surfacing' the earth - as in the construction of a paved road - we block that exchange, then nothing can live. In practice, however, such blockages can never be more than provisional. Attacked by roots from below, and the action of wind, rain and frost from above, the surface eventually cracks, allowing plant growth to mingle and bind once again with the light, air and moisture of the atmosphere.

Tim Ingold, in Overcoming the Modern Invention of Material Culture, eds. Vítor O. Jorge and Julian Thomas (Porto: ADECAP, 2006/2007), pp. 315-17. Emphases added in the second excerpt.

Image source: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/07/cracks.html


(Originally posted in January 2009.)

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!"