You can, of course.
You can focus a topic, leave things out, be evasive, not say things. But you cannot exist with less than your full life, you can only exclude things, create a focus that leaves things out.
"A blog about my teaching, practice and other life stuff." Written in 2007; if only I'd had any idea.
It is August, 2012. One way of expressing this temporal state is to say that in one month, it will be four years since my partner essentially stopped paying attention to me. September 2008-2012. But what good is this? Some achievement is met by that date? Better to chart the changes.
I used to get into sexual relationships to go deep, to really meet another person, to achieve a nearly unique intimacy, even amongst past partners. To achieve something mystical, to find the mystical aspect. Now I think it's all lies and deception. "Hey babeh, wanna fuck each other up emotionally? It's free and easy!" That to me now is the sexual come on. I am interested in fostering DEEP non-sexual relationships, and I am very, very interested in this. Leave all your adjectives at home, let's just hang out and sip coffee or beer and develop a killer relationship.
J and I have, in a way, a relationship that is non-sexual, but of course my memory will not let me forget or forgo other things, and the days of lust that will not be answered are stress and agony. Too much so, to handle anything else. I cannot sustain the dharma and want those days back. And now, I choose the dharma over that, but those days will not be refused, but they will also not reappear. Agony. No answer. You might think, hey, just get the endorphins by yourself, get some peace, do the work. It doesn't function in that way: you get the endorphins, the lust wants more, you get more, it wants more. Endless appetite. Better never to have gone there. No handling, no dharma, household fail. Frustration. Makes it hotter and worse, no answer, no way out. Die trying.
"But it feels good!" Death. Death is your paycheck. Think again. Grow aware.
So I am interested in deep non-sexual relationships, where I do not need to be crucified with no miracle and no testament. Artaud's signalling through the flames. It's not as noble as you'd think.
I wrote something deep on the Facebook (I write a lot of deep shit there, because it's advertising-proof and feels both subversive and sincere) about the recent scandalous speech about "legitimate rape," declaring that Gaspar Noe's 2002 film about rape (Google it if you're unaware, you have the power) creates an ethical situation not IN THAT the film gives us violence but BECAUSE the film gives us violence. If the film hurts us, it awakens us to the ETHICAL NEED, a sort of shock the bourgeoisie with a mission.
A commenter said, "Well just think of the good side, just stay in the light," or words to that effect, and it reminded me that this is what I do not do, this is my crime in writing and teaching and existing. I do not just channel the light. But wait, isn't that what the Sutras say, also? Sow light where you see dark, in more developed language? So what is my story?
J says that too. "Why aren't you happy?" Because happiness is no goal. Impermanence and contentment are a goal. Fuck all this bliss and happiness and joy and all that shit, all that impermanent noise. "Some day you will die," that's how the bit from Guishan begins, the very beginning. I too begin there; you think I've learned nothing from the last three years, now nearly four?
Lies! All that joy and sexual bliss of five years relationship; betrayal and lies! You will lose all of that joy, all of that ecstasy, all of that depth and connection. She (or he) will depart from you, become impersonal, not let you keep the post-orgasmic connection anymore, not let your sweat be mutual anymore, deny the very moment of ecstasy ("I don't work"), not let you have the moment, not let you both have the moment; all of this will leave, all of this will go without you, all of this will depart and leave you and you will be alone and together and you will suffer that paradox and you will seek some answer and not find it. Or you'll find it intellectually and you won't manifest it or find it manifest emotionally and it will be death. Death, death, death. Pain and death and loss and complaints and looking elsewhere and finding ecstasy which decays into the same death, the same pool of pain, over and over, ever over, again and again, until you too become death, sameness, undifferentiated, to emerge again, play the game again.
This is why I don't look at the bright side and simply "stay positive."
The worst answer to "Why don't you love me anymore" is perhaps "I still do," is it not? To sustain hope and to sustain pain, to never let it settle, never let it become memory. Or to do these gestures with NO communication, to simply make it understood. To make "I still love you" into some endless agony. What crime that is to commit. The only way out is differentiation, individualization, to stand off while standing close, but never to walk in, to lean in, to need anything....but who can need nothing? Who can want NOTHING from a partner who still loves us but cannot show it, is too busy, guarantees....what? That something, someday? Some future? What future? Is s/he listening to impermanence, watching its approach? In what and how are we to have faith? Better to die and be certain....
"When he's old enough we can get to know each other again." That and "Well you missed the snuggly part of the night, because you were asleep." "Well let me know when it is, and I'll set an alarm." "Oh it varies." Oh, OK. Old ENOUGH? When is that? Some untold future, which may never be told, so there is no future. It varies. Great, are you going to wake me up so it matters? No? Then it doesn't, and there is nothing.
A woman whose hips turn me into a puddle of desirous jelly, like some Salvador Dali painting. And she knows this but cannot know it, so I cannot know it, but I do. Some transgressive knowlege on which one can never act. No love, no affirmation, no joy, no nothing, can cross this line. Why and how should one "stay positive"?
But I can still teach, can still read the book for my book review, can still theorize, can still talk ideas, can still communicate to people, can still create some affective, communicative room, can still make eye contact, can still provoke students into confronting questions, can still have some social effect, can still manipulate ideas in public space. It's not post-coital quiet with continuing union, maybe, but it's sometimes close, and certainly related.
And there, death is just a given, not a requirement (well, it is no less required, but it seems more optional, because the relationship does not create it). For 75 minutes to three hours, we communicate about ideas; the academic classroom. This is a precious space.
The morning yoga room, with its group of 2-3, miniscule. All modified, limited practices, tired, early, determined. Discoveries that "practice can be random," nothing more.
Ever since Seattle I have felt that my practice is under a wet blanket. I never scored even ONE jumpback all the time I was there. Usually I can do two dozen jumpbacks before I even have to think about it. But nothing: slow, heavy, tired, uninspiring rooms, little apartments in the middle of some city that doesn't care. My little Indy room has significantly more magic and power than the Seattle rooms and that's damn bizarre. Sure, people come and do harder practice in Seattle (a bunch of third series, both in Troy's place and Sarah's also) but my room is warmer, more alive, friendlier, more communal.
I came back on August the 2. On August the 23, at noon, I did ten sun salutations and they were better than any in the prior three weeks; even at Matthew's place those salutations were inferior, more nervous, more anticipatory. These on the 23rd had nothing to gain and nothing to lose, so they were completely real.
Matthew has a new relationship and so is all happy and Shaktified and all about living life and affirmation and joy. Understandably, we did not get energetically along on this point. Also, Matthew had subjected his tendency to intellctualize and conceptualize, to the same "Shakti sensation" world, so now he is all emotions and squishiness and feeling and gentleness and "therapeutic sequencing" and keeping people practicing, and I am a disciplined, ascetic militant, who does traditional sequencing until tears come, over and over, until juiciness replaces them, well, if it ever does, again. We do not match.
And we do not match in ways that matter: I use my intellectualism ALONG with affect and feeling, in a unified field of approach to things. To have it cut off, to have someone tell me to emphasize feeling over thinking, in a programmatic way, and to simply "love life," that's ideological crap and I can't help but think of it that way. I see it conceptually as a thing one can believe in and probably a happy path, and I have no doubts that Matthew has been there and done that on impermanence, but this happy "love life" crap is not for me. Not yet, not today, cannot speak about the future.
Perhaps oddly, I do not intend this post as a depression session. A realism session, maybe.
So, what teacher? Matthew whose energy is so very different, who seems to know my blues but on a certain level, won't let me live in them? Kino, who saw my 2008 fabulousness, the depth of practice, but now sees only my weakness and tears, my total inability to be that practitioner? Who? How? What?
Who teaches me? The method; I teach myself, or better, I learn from my own practice, the ways my own practice is now. I can't authoritatively teach anyone pranayama or meditation as I don't regularly do either one with any sustained effort, but I can teach energetic pathways and emotional shit as well as anyone on this earth.
I can teach pain and agony and death and dying and the rationale of existential survival when there is no fucking point at all. I can teach you how to practice when you hate it. I can teach you how to practice into tears and through them.
I suppose I'm lying when I say this isn't a depression session, but I really feel that it isn't. Reality is like this. This is the real. The impermanence of joy, and the Sutras say this, the famous sutra in Pada II that says something like, to one of discrimination, all pleasure is pain.
It's too late and I'm too tired to process something I'd like to say about ethics, presentness and horror, about compassion and the way that our enemies' impermanence is the basis of compassion, impermanence being the death of everything, and realizing mortality is the cause of compassion, all of that, but I cannot get it out of my head now, cannot keep my eyes open.
I do not intend to be all offputtingly Death death death, Kali Kali Kali, but then, I suppose that I do. But I do not intend it to be OFFPUTTING.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
Sunday, August 12, 2012
The Impossibility of Balance.
Balance is a lovely idea, especially when seen dynamically (status in time, delta d) and accompanied (in still image, of course) by a pithy euphemism.
But where is it in lived time?
Choose any bipolarities that might be balanced, that might achieve this mystical state offered in our pop culture and in our dreams of what is right:
Job and play? Youth and age? Conservative and liberal? Authoritarian and permissive? Extrovert and introvert? Hedonist and ascetic? Inhale and exhale?
Can you leave your job at 5 and really put it down? What manner and quantity of play then "balances" work? How many pints? How much company? How many orgasms? Or what? In what units is "balance" measured? Some mysterious contentment, measured in what, santoshagrams? "I'll have 417 santoshagrams for my week, thanks."
What does it require for contentment (is that balance? a wholly different question...) with aging which inevitably opens the door to mortality? Do we wish to have begun practice earlier, to age gracefully, to die in our sleep, what? And what happens if we know we can't guarantee any of that? What is it to REALLY face impermanence, not just to nod in its direction and pass it off?
But look the other way, also...
What is discontentment, and how should one react to it, in lived time? How unsatisfactory does a relationship NEED TO BECOME before one acts on it? In what units are those measured? Are unsatisfied people just insufficiently Buddhist (life is suffering)? Short of abuse, which even while psychoemotionally complicated, can be understood to be such, and to be a legal dealbreaker, how much dissatisfaction is action-worthy? Or is comprehension, discussion and compassion the way through? How does one tell? What if one can choose a road which the partner makes unavailable or unbearably difficult? How then does one act, how does one re-choose?
How NOW does one achieve this mystical "balance" upon which we levy praise?
What about lived experience's inherent instability?
For instability is the truth, and balance is just a pretty picture.
Coherence and relative lack of pain is simply luck and privilege.
There is nothing natural there, nothing human nature there, nothing desire there, nothing there, nothing.
Structured luck and privilege. Power and culture and dynamics built to establish certain pleasures and prevent certain pains. Let it be known that "pleasure and pain" is attraction and aversion in Patanjali. Contentment, this culture does not establish, is not interested in. But pain and pleasure, yes. So balance? An individual matter, perhaps negotiable in relationships, but only in relationships where negotiation exists.
If the information contained in self-help books were common knowledge, there would be no self-help books. A conspiracy theorist would say that the void comes with the medicine; it's snake oil with two thirds of a circle of completeness, and you keep buying books and going on retreats in order to complete a circle that never comes.
Metaphysically speaking, mortality is this gap that can never be closed. "I have it!" Then you lose it, no matter what it is.
Santosha in my formulation (in lived time, up to now, flawed doubtlessly but in no way that I can yet see) is this:
a) I need nothing (impossible to believe; just keep repeating it);
b) I can give you something (easily provable in almost all circumstances).
This is wisdom that does not praise balance, does not need balance, lives in imbalance. If something comes, great. If something goes, great. "What great luck!" the people declared. "Maybe," said the farmer. It is a matter not of hearing this story and feeling happy for two minutes, but of embodying this story all the time, repeatedly, in lived time. Over and over and over. Until we really do need nothing.
Need ruins all balance. Inevitably and without fail.
But where is it in lived time?
Choose any bipolarities that might be balanced, that might achieve this mystical state offered in our pop culture and in our dreams of what is right:
Job and play? Youth and age? Conservative and liberal? Authoritarian and permissive? Extrovert and introvert? Hedonist and ascetic? Inhale and exhale?
Can you leave your job at 5 and really put it down? What manner and quantity of play then "balances" work? How many pints? How much company? How many orgasms? Or what? In what units is "balance" measured? Some mysterious contentment, measured in what, santoshagrams? "I'll have 417 santoshagrams for my week, thanks."
What does it require for contentment (is that balance? a wholly different question...) with aging which inevitably opens the door to mortality? Do we wish to have begun practice earlier, to age gracefully, to die in our sleep, what? And what happens if we know we can't guarantee any of that? What is it to REALLY face impermanence, not just to nod in its direction and pass it off?
But look the other way, also...
What is discontentment, and how should one react to it, in lived time? How unsatisfactory does a relationship NEED TO BECOME before one acts on it? In what units are those measured? Are unsatisfied people just insufficiently Buddhist (life is suffering)? Short of abuse, which even while psychoemotionally complicated, can be understood to be such, and to be a legal dealbreaker, how much dissatisfaction is action-worthy? Or is comprehension, discussion and compassion the way through? How does one tell? What if one can choose a road which the partner makes unavailable or unbearably difficult? How then does one act, how does one re-choose?
How NOW does one achieve this mystical "balance" upon which we levy praise?
What about lived experience's inherent instability?
For instability is the truth, and balance is just a pretty picture.
Coherence and relative lack of pain is simply luck and privilege.
There is nothing natural there, nothing human nature there, nothing desire there, nothing there, nothing.
Structured luck and privilege. Power and culture and dynamics built to establish certain pleasures and prevent certain pains. Let it be known that "pleasure and pain" is attraction and aversion in Patanjali. Contentment, this culture does not establish, is not interested in. But pain and pleasure, yes. So balance? An individual matter, perhaps negotiable in relationships, but only in relationships where negotiation exists.
If the information contained in self-help books were common knowledge, there would be no self-help books. A conspiracy theorist would say that the void comes with the medicine; it's snake oil with two thirds of a circle of completeness, and you keep buying books and going on retreats in order to complete a circle that never comes.
Metaphysically speaking, mortality is this gap that can never be closed. "I have it!" Then you lose it, no matter what it is.
Santosha in my formulation (in lived time, up to now, flawed doubtlessly but in no way that I can yet see) is this:
a) I need nothing (impossible to believe; just keep repeating it);
b) I can give you something (easily provable in almost all circumstances).
This is wisdom that does not praise balance, does not need balance, lives in imbalance. If something comes, great. If something goes, great. "What great luck!" the people declared. "Maybe," said the farmer. It is a matter not of hearing this story and feeling happy for two minutes, but of embodying this story all the time, repeatedly, in lived time. Over and over and over. Until we really do need nothing.
Need ruins all balance. Inevitably and without fail.
Monday, August 6, 2012
Quantum Physics.
Not actual quantum physics. I mean I could put in a bunch of random Dada-esque "quark!" and such which break up the word flow and sort of polarize and atomize the writing, and that'd be quantum Dada performance, right?
But no, no actual physics.
This afternoon I was at the nearby supermarket, which really demonstrates the poverty and beat-downness of this part of the city. Vietnam veterans with too-thick glasses I'm certain they can't see out of and teeth missing, a hugely large pro-football-sized guy with a shirt reading, "All I Need to Know About Islam I learned on 9/11: God Bless America," college-age-ish women (with the strange attractiveness of that age and demographic, which seems to override virtually all other considerations) who were yet, by means of lacy strappiness and footwear, and also accented speech, marked as blue-collarish, posers of the Ivy League fallout on which the type is modeled. A further word on this: how do I manage to stereotype like that based on class? I went to college with Ivy League fallout, because that private institution in Connecticut really IS for Ivy League fallout (those who for whatever reason couldn't get into the top-notch school, which is itself an arbitrary ranking and an even more arbitrary ideology, but that's another essay). Ivy League fallout college women will dress on the model of their (often, not always) trophy wife mothers. Tans, precisely cared for teeth, carefully and correctly applied makeup, a look for every occasion, all always correct and accurate. Messy only when drunk, and even then, so soaked with availability that one nearly forgives them the discourtesy of their speech and manners. You can see which class they will belong to, whom they will marry and how the facts (not the actual depth, the inner life, but the gross external facts) of life will play out, as long as they do not manage to break out of that cozy (again, materially; no guarantee, emotionally) safety net. This, to me, is the spectacular (in Guy Debord's sense; the theatrical, the put-on) image to which all college age women aspire. Not to look like future trophy wives, not to inherit the destiny (although maybe...), but to inherit the power of the image. That correctness, that power, that strange untouchability until availability, or the weird blessing of permission, says otherwise. And the attendant respect, almost a fear, which is balanced (ideally, probably never in practice) with conversation guaranteed by the attractiveness the image grants (again, perhaps not in practice).
This is all just my suspicion, and not really related to my topic here, except that I was at the supermarket when a stream of thought broke out at volume.
Although tangentially I'd also like to say that those women are probably also big readers of the infamous "Gray" series we're all hearing so much about. And on that for a moment: poorly written S/M erotica. There is a lot of S/M erotica in the world, and has been for over a century. Let's not count the Marquis de Sade: as some French theorist said, he doesn't write erotica, he writes something else. A dark Enlightenment project. Series and repetitions; a scientific study like genetic studies done with fruit flies, except now it's young children, excrement and murder. But let's do by all means count Pauline Reage and Leopold von Sacher Masoch and those "birch beating" pulp fiction pieces and drawings that apparently James Joyce and such had access too in the early twentieth century. Georges Bataille, also. And so on. For me, the popularity of the "Grays" has nothing to do with some kind of S/M novelty, because none of that is novel. Pat Califia, for chrissakes. The popularity of the "Grays" has everything to do with Reader Access: written in Twilight-ese (if you've ever tried to make it through an unbearably eighth-grade-if-that page of Twilight, you know what I mean), this brings S/M erotica, if you will, "out of the closet" (because you don't, for example, have to order the Grays from Cleis Press) not in terms of subject matter but in terms of accessibility both literary and popular.
I doubt many housewives were hunting through the literature and philosophy sections of Barnes and Noble to find Bataille's Story of the Eye. Similarly, I don't think many people who didn't consider themselves "sex radicals" (or groupies for sex radicals, or would-be sex radicals, or frustrated people who really wished they could be sex radicals) were wandering across Macho Sluts or Carol Queen's stuff on femmes. In large part that's because those texts belong (in terms of access) to queer communities, to marginal communities, and to get them, you would have to "go over to that place" and risk being marked by your appearance there. On a college campus, you don't have to worry about this, but if you're in your 30s in the suburbs and have a family, you can't just randomly drop by the local GLBT community to see if there's a book with short stories about floggers and same-sex fisting. No, it's like a story I heard on NPR yesterday about HIV testing in Indiana: people do not want to Go To a Clinic; they want it easy, local, and un-marked. Can, for example, CVS carry HIV test kits? Hell, one could be going in there for *anything*...
The erotica market for the "Grays" found this. There is much talk already about the access of the trilogy on digital media and tablets, and the apparently scandalous (in that way in which America thinks any public sexuality is scandalous) ability of women (and men, but mostly women in these stories: audience manufacture, anyone?) to read erotica in public. An (again apparent) enjoyment of transgression, getting away with it (another classic American nugget). And predictably the attendant thrill of the person next to you seeing what you're reading and remaining decorously silent while no doubt wondering about your physiological status and almost but not quite unconsciously wishing to know what your undergarments were thinking right now.
Accessibility: written in consummately readable text, with no markers for community or social class, the "Grays" achieve multiple (hah! multiple!) weeks on the best-seller list. This is the testament to their magical triple-blend, like a scotch or a coffee, of literary accessibility (style), digital accessibility (public privacy, if you like) and content accessibility (unqueer S/M that you don't have to marginalize yourself to find). The same way that college students (used to?) fetishize the film "8 1/2 Weeks." What I find predictable and disappointing is that there is no erotica market being produced by the readers: where are all the stories about new marriage adventures, the reader turned writer: where is what Foucault would call the PRODUCTIVE aspect of this cultural phenomenon? All I see now and then is married men claiming that the "Grays" changed their lives forever for the better. How utterly boring. Woman acts, and man describes (I'm looking at YOU, with the "pov" camera, planning to submit your footage...). That is the formula for all boring erotica, and not unrelated to male ego where sexuality is concerned. Not "who am I" questions, but "here's what I did" didacticism; how to climb the ego ladder and give cause to emulate to all your listeners and viewers. Here's what I did. A colonial statement in a way, stick a flag in it. Man on the moon! Indeed. "Mommy I want to be an astronaut when I grow up!"
I was walking back to the car, with a grocery cart full of big things that would have been clumsily carried by hand, and the cart jammed, the way that they will electronically "stop rolling" if taken beyond the parking lot (the loss of carts in this way is apparently epidemic in Indiana). But I had not taken it beyond the lot; I figured out with some pushing and jamming of wheels that the front wheels seemed stuck. So be it; I climb walls; I picked up the front of the cart, worked it into a Wheelie (tm) position and pulled it to the car, where I unloaded it. All the while that this was happening, I was thinking about phenomenological questions where sexual relationships are concerned. One is "satisifed," one is "frustrated," a relationship is "good," it is not: where does a person end and a relationship begin? At what point do "I" turn into a relationship, when I have one with another person? Not in terms of limits or my ability to reach into another's life, but this question of satisfaction, for example? Can a relationship feel, or be, or have, satisfaction? What verb should it properly use? Does a relationship have an ontology, a being? Or sex acts, a sexual "relationship": those are acts, yes, ontologically provable, if you will, yes? We can document them, discuss them, show them, enact how they go, agree that they, if you will, "exist"? Then what are they, in relationship? Is a sexual relationship about what you do, or who does what, or the sort of in-relationship of what is done by whom in what conditions, the internal mechanisms of the acted in lived time? In short, what does sexual activity MEAN?
Think briefly about this and you realize that this is how pornographic films work: actors do activities, and the films are inevitably named by either the actor/body qualities (old, young, fat, skinny, big, small, huge, and the variously more provocative adjectives with which we're all familiar), identity qualities (teen, milf, slut, girlfriend, ex, and so on, and all fairly predictably about the female actor), or act itself (this act, that act, this position, she does x and then she gets y'd, blah blah blah, and in this is sometimes included some film qualities such as pov or close up). One could almost generate a "porn act randomizer" out of those three lists, which might come up with things like MASSIVELY HUNG EX MILF DOGGIE SANCHEZ.
In any case.
I reflected on the obsessiveness with which I work these questions and lines of thinking when I am sexually frustrated, and then I wondered what I do when I'm much less frustrated: what do I do with all of this thinking THEN? One would expect that I would process this material in the relationship, really find it to be a laboratory for exploration, very meta-, levels within levels. But when I'm having a lot of sex with a partner, I actually abandon most of that and turn sort of "emotional foodie," sampling the delicacies with savor and delight. The deep stillwater chill of sharing endorphins with someone, that closely; color swirls, crossed eyes and sweat. To have affection almost, so very nearly, without neurosis. Neurosis volume at its lowest. There's no frenzied thinking there, no dialectics; oh they return quickly enough, but in that stillness, which chilled me out even to relive enough to write here, there is no frenzy of analysis.
So were they right, long, long ago? Emo ironists, would-be revolutionaries, my college friends from my junior year, their frosh year. We talked relationships (first people I ever talked relationships with; none in high school, none for two years, none til 20, and predictably, my parents relationship advice was "don't do that!" and then later, around 17, "why aren't you dating?" which could properly and steelingly have been answered, "because of your fear," but never was) and I harshly disdained all emotionality, all vulnerable softness, because men in my experience (well, those my age; when does one stop calling them boys?) used vulnerability to crush you and step on your head on their way to some unannounced top which was known only by its superiority to your position: more monied, more laid, more popular, more spotlit, faster, stronger, superior to you, more steeled than you, more metallic than you, more fascist than you, more unfeeling than you, more invulnerable than you, more armored than you.
I hadn't been readied for masculinity as I was to experience it. To return to our story: I disdained squishiness, vulnerability, openness; a relationship was to be world revolution! Couple against the universe: witch doctor, warrior priestess, spell-casters, magicians, Luke and Leia, the relationships you know exist but can never play out in D&D, Katharine Hepburn, Liquid Sky, and just stop asking yourself why action heroes (it was, after all, the late 1980s, early 1990s) never have sexual relationships. Don't go there! Hey, John McClane is married, right?
Yes, world revolution. Not quiet stillwater affection, but a new world, the Surrealist imperative: change life. They asked me, "Ok, you think one-night stands are cheap and capitalist" (that was, indeed, my lingo, even at 20) "so do you just want a relationship?" No, no, no no no, none of that soft fluffy anti-intellectualism, no! You can't conquer the fucking universe with fluffy taffeta!
But were they RIGHT? I've tried being a sex radical; I have gone sex radical places and done sex radical things, and I've read some of the right books and know the names of all of the other ones. I just did not LOVE sex radicality and it wasn't native to me; like a leftist who really wants to join the Party but just can't get the right taste for it. "Am I still a Leftist?" So I dropped the flogger and picked up a climbing wall and found a very similar satisfaction; better even, because climbing endorphins come from, if you will, the relationship between you and god. So, ideally, can they come in that form in any relationship or situation, but I wasn't able to access them there in RadicalLand. None of the radicals were for me, and I did not fall in intense love with the scene or the possibility or the actions and events, and I tried hard to stick and be stuck, to take a stance and BE FOUND there, to have a self there, and there was not enough friction; impermanence and memory. But if I am not this, who am I? I climb, I get the stillness and the temporary paradise (to which one can always return, maybe as a comet returns, but nonetheless...), but even with a climbing partner, trading those experiences, food and drink and conversation and movies...something is missing...that no climbing woman can provide, because I want a relationship with the WALL...
I've said that Catholicism was something that I had to go through, and along with Star Wars and D&D, it was an essential ingredient in my relationship stew, where I managed to confuse my lived experience with metaphysical questions (or is that not actually how life works?). I saw an ideal (never a real, but then, when you've not experienced something in the real, can you imagine it there?) relationship as a sort of mutual warriordom, against repression, against puritanism, against stupid capitalist commodification; relationship, and specifically sexual relationship, as MYSTICAL VESSEL. After all, why were the Catholic laity so scared of the stuff if it didn't lead directly to the eye of God? But the teenagers wanting to be Madonna, with all the colored bangles and bra straps they wanted to show but wanted to cover up, those were not the partners for the mystical trip; nor the attractive but shy women who worked also at the campus center information desk; easy enough with flirtation or some shallow questions, but where was the Decadent Temple Priestess who would show me the way? Ma Kali, Demian's mother, Goldmund's earth-embodied loves, these faces and fingers and crevices and secrets and tongues of the Mother Goddess, the Way, the Path and the Knowledge? Where was THAT? In the Ivy League fallout of trophy wives from New York suburbs? It was not. There was no engulfing, swallowing digesting resurrection of me into infinite power and wisdom that would change life. There was fear, weakness, shaming and perversion, sure; those are always easy. I developed a stout asceticism, a refusal that was in large part fear, but was in equal parts anger. It did not go well; as a conversation with J pointed out to me earlier this evening, it might not be that men are rational moreso than women, but that men are (perhaps by culture) emotionally held back, taught to hold themselves back, to keep away from that voodoo, and then empowered in gendered culture to valorize their half-selves and lionize that halfness into world conquest. Just like Theweleit says, you have to keep the sticky stuff under hard armor or it'll eat you up, you and the world you've created. In my great 2003 relationship (well, to be honest, the first of them; there were three in a way, within eight months, and all of them were simultaneous and everyone involved knew that; those were dizzy days) I cried out long-held stuff one afternoon from 1993, something painful and wrong that happened inexplicably but was too much for a different Us to handle back then. Summer memories ever-colored with the dolorous anxiety, nameless, like doom that does not come limned with joy; surrender and realization of the fragility of life when one wants armor instead; you lay on another coat and find that it's an acid that eats away your defenses, from yourself, from other people, pink and bare you shrivel away toward the dark to not engage, but keep engaging because desire is irresistible, more and more pink, more and more bare, never painful, just horrifying, too honest, TOO damn HONEST....
And so you wind up with humanity. Don't forget to make your archetypes dance. "Were they right?" Sure, maybe, why not: what's the opposite of being in a relationship, being a warrior, being hard? Do you sound too much like a big fan of the Smiths if you say you just want to be loved? We finesse it with fancy language so that our solitude doesn't come with us: emotional foodie-ism. Like in an online dating site self-description (did that for two and half years also, back in the first years of this century, back when women were feminist and angry and the Bush presidency was an aberrance and we weren't about to take this shit...) and that is valid, totally valid. In some theaters, Life happens on stage; not all lying to yourself is deception; some of it is creation. You become what you pretend you are. Or you devolve by doing what you're not, until there's only the doing and the done and no doer, or the doer does but isn't, has no being, and still does things. Indeed, what verb does it properly use? When I'm well-loved, or well-loaded on endorphins, as from climbing or hard asana practice, I don't live in my angst, and I don't use those states to answer it, solve it, dialectically viscerate it. Yet I believe, catch myself believing (not the same thing, the latter denies the former) that the angst just waits, is a setting for "normal." Who persuades us, who permits us, to do these things...
What if it was not? Immediately, we declare that no one can live in bliss, we become terrified that someone might be achieving this and raising our bar...quickly, see who's having the best time on that porn site or that YouTube yoga video, see who has the Most Bliss...No, what if life were not bliss, not angst, but in a way, not Anything? What if the "normal" setting were exactly --- ? Derridean dashes cancel out the word you can still read, but this line has no scale, creates no graph, does not play games, does not hold thought, cannot be walked on by any concept. Holds no weight, has no mass, like Life, like being alive, the table still exists, the monitor, but what is my mood, who am I, this my, this I, the window is to my right, the room's corner...perspectival vision, the printer, off...is this angst, is this bliss? I can conceptualize the warmth I feel in the room, the contentment of writing (writing that is for once not like needing to vomit, a totally different mode), close my eyes and turn it to sensations, colors, invisible but tactile pulse of the eyelids, more felt than seen, can one see Darkness?...and I begin to wonder if angst is something I pursue, a chase, even a clinging, a hugging close (does it struggle away? or not?). What would it be to say, I want more love in my relationship and I can't have it right now and it makes me unhappy, and to leave it there? I wish we would speak more, I wish we would love more, I wish we would share a mind more, a body more, maybe what was ever an illusion (but one you don't deny) of that stillwater afternoon or morning or middle of night that never went away, but was probably invisible, even at bagel shops or on commutes; not a private, a secret-ed, sexual world, Boschian garden paradise or hell (is there a difference, really?), but simply an untold thing, unnarrated, undescribed; left alone, let be; hands open, on knees; air cools, eyes close.
But no, no actual physics.
This afternoon I was at the nearby supermarket, which really demonstrates the poverty and beat-downness of this part of the city. Vietnam veterans with too-thick glasses I'm certain they can't see out of and teeth missing, a hugely large pro-football-sized guy with a shirt reading, "All I Need to Know About Islam I learned on 9/11: God Bless America," college-age-ish women (with the strange attractiveness of that age and demographic, which seems to override virtually all other considerations) who were yet, by means of lacy strappiness and footwear, and also accented speech, marked as blue-collarish, posers of the Ivy League fallout on which the type is modeled. A further word on this: how do I manage to stereotype like that based on class? I went to college with Ivy League fallout, because that private institution in Connecticut really IS for Ivy League fallout (those who for whatever reason couldn't get into the top-notch school, which is itself an arbitrary ranking and an even more arbitrary ideology, but that's another essay). Ivy League fallout college women will dress on the model of their (often, not always) trophy wife mothers. Tans, precisely cared for teeth, carefully and correctly applied makeup, a look for every occasion, all always correct and accurate. Messy only when drunk, and even then, so soaked with availability that one nearly forgives them the discourtesy of their speech and manners. You can see which class they will belong to, whom they will marry and how the facts (not the actual depth, the inner life, but the gross external facts) of life will play out, as long as they do not manage to break out of that cozy (again, materially; no guarantee, emotionally) safety net. This, to me, is the spectacular (in Guy Debord's sense; the theatrical, the put-on) image to which all college age women aspire. Not to look like future trophy wives, not to inherit the destiny (although maybe...), but to inherit the power of the image. That correctness, that power, that strange untouchability until availability, or the weird blessing of permission, says otherwise. And the attendant respect, almost a fear, which is balanced (ideally, probably never in practice) with conversation guaranteed by the attractiveness the image grants (again, perhaps not in practice).
This is all just my suspicion, and not really related to my topic here, except that I was at the supermarket when a stream of thought broke out at volume.
Although tangentially I'd also like to say that those women are probably also big readers of the infamous "Gray" series we're all hearing so much about. And on that for a moment: poorly written S/M erotica. There is a lot of S/M erotica in the world, and has been for over a century. Let's not count the Marquis de Sade: as some French theorist said, he doesn't write erotica, he writes something else. A dark Enlightenment project. Series and repetitions; a scientific study like genetic studies done with fruit flies, except now it's young children, excrement and murder. But let's do by all means count Pauline Reage and Leopold von Sacher Masoch and those "birch beating" pulp fiction pieces and drawings that apparently James Joyce and such had access too in the early twentieth century. Georges Bataille, also. And so on. For me, the popularity of the "Grays" has nothing to do with some kind of S/M novelty, because none of that is novel. Pat Califia, for chrissakes. The popularity of the "Grays" has everything to do with Reader Access: written in Twilight-ese (if you've ever tried to make it through an unbearably eighth-grade-if-that page of Twilight, you know what I mean), this brings S/M erotica, if you will, "out of the closet" (because you don't, for example, have to order the Grays from Cleis Press) not in terms of subject matter but in terms of accessibility both literary and popular.
I doubt many housewives were hunting through the literature and philosophy sections of Barnes and Noble to find Bataille's Story of the Eye. Similarly, I don't think many people who didn't consider themselves "sex radicals" (or groupies for sex radicals, or would-be sex radicals, or frustrated people who really wished they could be sex radicals) were wandering across Macho Sluts or Carol Queen's stuff on femmes. In large part that's because those texts belong (in terms of access) to queer communities, to marginal communities, and to get them, you would have to "go over to that place" and risk being marked by your appearance there. On a college campus, you don't have to worry about this, but if you're in your 30s in the suburbs and have a family, you can't just randomly drop by the local GLBT community to see if there's a book with short stories about floggers and same-sex fisting. No, it's like a story I heard on NPR yesterday about HIV testing in Indiana: people do not want to Go To a Clinic; they want it easy, local, and un-marked. Can, for example, CVS carry HIV test kits? Hell, one could be going in there for *anything*...
The erotica market for the "Grays" found this. There is much talk already about the access of the trilogy on digital media and tablets, and the apparently scandalous (in that way in which America thinks any public sexuality is scandalous) ability of women (and men, but mostly women in these stories: audience manufacture, anyone?) to read erotica in public. An (again apparent) enjoyment of transgression, getting away with it (another classic American nugget). And predictably the attendant thrill of the person next to you seeing what you're reading and remaining decorously silent while no doubt wondering about your physiological status and almost but not quite unconsciously wishing to know what your undergarments were thinking right now.
Accessibility: written in consummately readable text, with no markers for community or social class, the "Grays" achieve multiple (hah! multiple!) weeks on the best-seller list. This is the testament to their magical triple-blend, like a scotch or a coffee, of literary accessibility (style), digital accessibility (public privacy, if you like) and content accessibility (unqueer S/M that you don't have to marginalize yourself to find). The same way that college students (used to?) fetishize the film "8 1/2 Weeks." What I find predictable and disappointing is that there is no erotica market being produced by the readers: where are all the stories about new marriage adventures, the reader turned writer: where is what Foucault would call the PRODUCTIVE aspect of this cultural phenomenon? All I see now and then is married men claiming that the "Grays" changed their lives forever for the better. How utterly boring. Woman acts, and man describes (I'm looking at YOU, with the "pov" camera, planning to submit your footage...). That is the formula for all boring erotica, and not unrelated to male ego where sexuality is concerned. Not "who am I" questions, but "here's what I did" didacticism; how to climb the ego ladder and give cause to emulate to all your listeners and viewers. Here's what I did. A colonial statement in a way, stick a flag in it. Man on the moon! Indeed. "Mommy I want to be an astronaut when I grow up!"
I was walking back to the car, with a grocery cart full of big things that would have been clumsily carried by hand, and the cart jammed, the way that they will electronically "stop rolling" if taken beyond the parking lot (the loss of carts in this way is apparently epidemic in Indiana). But I had not taken it beyond the lot; I figured out with some pushing and jamming of wheels that the front wheels seemed stuck. So be it; I climb walls; I picked up the front of the cart, worked it into a Wheelie (tm) position and pulled it to the car, where I unloaded it. All the while that this was happening, I was thinking about phenomenological questions where sexual relationships are concerned. One is "satisifed," one is "frustrated," a relationship is "good," it is not: where does a person end and a relationship begin? At what point do "I" turn into a relationship, when I have one with another person? Not in terms of limits or my ability to reach into another's life, but this question of satisfaction, for example? Can a relationship feel, or be, or have, satisfaction? What verb should it properly use? Does a relationship have an ontology, a being? Or sex acts, a sexual "relationship": those are acts, yes, ontologically provable, if you will, yes? We can document them, discuss them, show them, enact how they go, agree that they, if you will, "exist"? Then what are they, in relationship? Is a sexual relationship about what you do, or who does what, or the sort of in-relationship of what is done by whom in what conditions, the internal mechanisms of the acted in lived time? In short, what does sexual activity MEAN?
Think briefly about this and you realize that this is how pornographic films work: actors do activities, and the films are inevitably named by either the actor/body qualities (old, young, fat, skinny, big, small, huge, and the variously more provocative adjectives with which we're all familiar), identity qualities (teen, milf, slut, girlfriend, ex, and so on, and all fairly predictably about the female actor), or act itself (this act, that act, this position, she does x and then she gets y'd, blah blah blah, and in this is sometimes included some film qualities such as pov or close up). One could almost generate a "porn act randomizer" out of those three lists, which might come up with things like MASSIVELY HUNG EX MILF DOGGIE SANCHEZ.
In any case.
I reflected on the obsessiveness with which I work these questions and lines of thinking when I am sexually frustrated, and then I wondered what I do when I'm much less frustrated: what do I do with all of this thinking THEN? One would expect that I would process this material in the relationship, really find it to be a laboratory for exploration, very meta-, levels within levels. But when I'm having a lot of sex with a partner, I actually abandon most of that and turn sort of "emotional foodie," sampling the delicacies with savor and delight. The deep stillwater chill of sharing endorphins with someone, that closely; color swirls, crossed eyes and sweat. To have affection almost, so very nearly, without neurosis. Neurosis volume at its lowest. There's no frenzied thinking there, no dialectics; oh they return quickly enough, but in that stillness, which chilled me out even to relive enough to write here, there is no frenzy of analysis.
So were they right, long, long ago? Emo ironists, would-be revolutionaries, my college friends from my junior year, their frosh year. We talked relationships (first people I ever talked relationships with; none in high school, none for two years, none til 20, and predictably, my parents relationship advice was "don't do that!" and then later, around 17, "why aren't you dating?" which could properly and steelingly have been answered, "because of your fear," but never was) and I harshly disdained all emotionality, all vulnerable softness, because men in my experience (well, those my age; when does one stop calling them boys?) used vulnerability to crush you and step on your head on their way to some unannounced top which was known only by its superiority to your position: more monied, more laid, more popular, more spotlit, faster, stronger, superior to you, more steeled than you, more metallic than you, more fascist than you, more unfeeling than you, more invulnerable than you, more armored than you.
I hadn't been readied for masculinity as I was to experience it. To return to our story: I disdained squishiness, vulnerability, openness; a relationship was to be world revolution! Couple against the universe: witch doctor, warrior priestess, spell-casters, magicians, Luke and Leia, the relationships you know exist but can never play out in D&D, Katharine Hepburn, Liquid Sky, and just stop asking yourself why action heroes (it was, after all, the late 1980s, early 1990s) never have sexual relationships. Don't go there! Hey, John McClane is married, right?
Yes, world revolution. Not quiet stillwater affection, but a new world, the Surrealist imperative: change life. They asked me, "Ok, you think one-night stands are cheap and capitalist" (that was, indeed, my lingo, even at 20) "so do you just want a relationship?" No, no, no no no, none of that soft fluffy anti-intellectualism, no! You can't conquer the fucking universe with fluffy taffeta!
But were they RIGHT? I've tried being a sex radical; I have gone sex radical places and done sex radical things, and I've read some of the right books and know the names of all of the other ones. I just did not LOVE sex radicality and it wasn't native to me; like a leftist who really wants to join the Party but just can't get the right taste for it. "Am I still a Leftist?" So I dropped the flogger and picked up a climbing wall and found a very similar satisfaction; better even, because climbing endorphins come from, if you will, the relationship between you and god. So, ideally, can they come in that form in any relationship or situation, but I wasn't able to access them there in RadicalLand. None of the radicals were for me, and I did not fall in intense love with the scene or the possibility or the actions and events, and I tried hard to stick and be stuck, to take a stance and BE FOUND there, to have a self there, and there was not enough friction; impermanence and memory. But if I am not this, who am I? I climb, I get the stillness and the temporary paradise (to which one can always return, maybe as a comet returns, but nonetheless...), but even with a climbing partner, trading those experiences, food and drink and conversation and movies...something is missing...that no climbing woman can provide, because I want a relationship with the WALL...
I've said that Catholicism was something that I had to go through, and along with Star Wars and D&D, it was an essential ingredient in my relationship stew, where I managed to confuse my lived experience with metaphysical questions (or is that not actually how life works?). I saw an ideal (never a real, but then, when you've not experienced something in the real, can you imagine it there?) relationship as a sort of mutual warriordom, against repression, against puritanism, against stupid capitalist commodification; relationship, and specifically sexual relationship, as MYSTICAL VESSEL. After all, why were the Catholic laity so scared of the stuff if it didn't lead directly to the eye of God? But the teenagers wanting to be Madonna, with all the colored bangles and bra straps they wanted to show but wanted to cover up, those were not the partners for the mystical trip; nor the attractive but shy women who worked also at the campus center information desk; easy enough with flirtation or some shallow questions, but where was the Decadent Temple Priestess who would show me the way? Ma Kali, Demian's mother, Goldmund's earth-embodied loves, these faces and fingers and crevices and secrets and tongues of the Mother Goddess, the Way, the Path and the Knowledge? Where was THAT? In the Ivy League fallout of trophy wives from New York suburbs? It was not. There was no engulfing, swallowing digesting resurrection of me into infinite power and wisdom that would change life. There was fear, weakness, shaming and perversion, sure; those are always easy. I developed a stout asceticism, a refusal that was in large part fear, but was in equal parts anger. It did not go well; as a conversation with J pointed out to me earlier this evening, it might not be that men are rational moreso than women, but that men are (perhaps by culture) emotionally held back, taught to hold themselves back, to keep away from that voodoo, and then empowered in gendered culture to valorize their half-selves and lionize that halfness into world conquest. Just like Theweleit says, you have to keep the sticky stuff under hard armor or it'll eat you up, you and the world you've created. In my great 2003 relationship (well, to be honest, the first of them; there were three in a way, within eight months, and all of them were simultaneous and everyone involved knew that; those were dizzy days) I cried out long-held stuff one afternoon from 1993, something painful and wrong that happened inexplicably but was too much for a different Us to handle back then. Summer memories ever-colored with the dolorous anxiety, nameless, like doom that does not come limned with joy; surrender and realization of the fragility of life when one wants armor instead; you lay on another coat and find that it's an acid that eats away your defenses, from yourself, from other people, pink and bare you shrivel away toward the dark to not engage, but keep engaging because desire is irresistible, more and more pink, more and more bare, never painful, just horrifying, too honest, TOO damn HONEST....
And so you wind up with humanity. Don't forget to make your archetypes dance. "Were they right?" Sure, maybe, why not: what's the opposite of being in a relationship, being a warrior, being hard? Do you sound too much like a big fan of the Smiths if you say you just want to be loved? We finesse it with fancy language so that our solitude doesn't come with us: emotional foodie-ism. Like in an online dating site self-description (did that for two and half years also, back in the first years of this century, back when women were feminist and angry and the Bush presidency was an aberrance and we weren't about to take this shit...) and that is valid, totally valid. In some theaters, Life happens on stage; not all lying to yourself is deception; some of it is creation. You become what you pretend you are. Or you devolve by doing what you're not, until there's only the doing and the done and no doer, or the doer does but isn't, has no being, and still does things. Indeed, what verb does it properly use? When I'm well-loved, or well-loaded on endorphins, as from climbing or hard asana practice, I don't live in my angst, and I don't use those states to answer it, solve it, dialectically viscerate it. Yet I believe, catch myself believing (not the same thing, the latter denies the former) that the angst just waits, is a setting for "normal." Who persuades us, who permits us, to do these things...
What if it was not? Immediately, we declare that no one can live in bliss, we become terrified that someone might be achieving this and raising our bar...quickly, see who's having the best time on that porn site or that YouTube yoga video, see who has the Most Bliss...No, what if life were not bliss, not angst, but in a way, not Anything? What if the "normal" setting were exactly --- ? Derridean dashes cancel out the word you can still read, but this line has no scale, creates no graph, does not play games, does not hold thought, cannot be walked on by any concept. Holds no weight, has no mass, like Life, like being alive, the table still exists, the monitor, but what is my mood, who am I, this my, this I, the window is to my right, the room's corner...perspectival vision, the printer, off...is this angst, is this bliss? I can conceptualize the warmth I feel in the room, the contentment of writing (writing that is for once not like needing to vomit, a totally different mode), close my eyes and turn it to sensations, colors, invisible but tactile pulse of the eyelids, more felt than seen, can one see Darkness?...and I begin to wonder if angst is something I pursue, a chase, even a clinging, a hugging close (does it struggle away? or not?). What would it be to say, I want more love in my relationship and I can't have it right now and it makes me unhappy, and to leave it there? I wish we would speak more, I wish we would love more, I wish we would share a mind more, a body more, maybe what was ever an illusion (but one you don't deny) of that stillwater afternoon or morning or middle of night that never went away, but was probably invisible, even at bagel shops or on commutes; not a private, a secret-ed, sexual world, Boschian garden paradise or hell (is there a difference, really?), but simply an untold thing, unnarrated, undescribed; left alone, let be; hands open, on knees; air cools, eyes close.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)