Addendum: Dreams (H)

 

 

Warmth, friends, women,men, or somewhere in between or somewhere else, warm and breathing and heart-beating all around me. We are respectful of each other’s space to learn, to grow, to make mistakes, to figure out our own paths, and we are reflexively generous. With our ears, with our hands, with embraces, sympathy, support, sharing of experiences and food and our soft old clothes. We practice gratitude; we apologize; we acknowledge each others strengths outloud, bolstering them. When one is having a rough time, we gather around her, each in our own way, with offerings: text message jokes, a night out, a quiet cup of tea, a dog-eared book. When one of has a triumph–it can be big, or simply the daily triumph of an interview that goes well, a project completed, an act of bravery–we celebrate. Joy is bounced off of one face and reflected in and off each other, and it builds and and bubbles and leaves us ecstatic and full. Sometimes it becomes so much that we have to dance, and we do, laughing, and when we are spent we fall asleep, some on the couch, some in the bed. We are familiar with each other’s breathing and bodies, whether there has been sex or not, we know and hold each other in our gazes.

Addendum: Nonsense (H)

“Am I good enough at x?”

The thing is, whatever the variable, whatever the guise, it’s almost never a question about skill. It’s a question about whatever soul is shorthand for. And it’s a nonsense question, and therefore, unanswerable. I’ve already quoted Jack, so let me refer to Ani here:

when you don’t ask the right questions/
every answer seems wrong

But knowing it’s a nonsense question doesn’t stop it from being day-in, day-out background music. My sense is that the way to drop the question has to do with community, with fitting. That it’s not issue to be solved intellectually, cognitively, or emotionally, but relationally.  Questions about soul are questions about love, or the lack there of, and when you have it, you don’t need to ask anymore.

and/or “Angry Friends” (I)

Writing of Camus, Susan Sontag once said that the most dangerous emotion a writer’s texts can evoke from the reader is love. That’s because, she went on, when we fall out of love with a writer, we feel betrayed; we feel that, indeed, we were fools ever to have been taken in by them in the first place… [O]nce we are through with a writer whose work we once honestly and directly loved, we really are through. If we do go back to those texts, it’s only to explore the more or less painful (or, indeed, sometimes charming; but always, ultimately, unsatisfactory) traces of our earlier vulnerability, naïveté, and immaturity. And that writer’s new works, to the extent they have not grown as fast (or in the same direction) as we have, return us to all the torture of our own earlier failings and blindnesses.

-Samuel R. Delany, 1984: Selected Letters, p. 224

Part of a letter Chip wrote to his friend Mog, in response to a letter she wrote saying that their friendship was becoming more painful than pleasurable and that maybe they should declare “a moratorium” on it. He had included her name in the dedication of his most recent book, dealing directly with the then-recent outbreak of AIDS, a book which had not yet gone to press, and she had taken issue with some of what he’d said in the book and wasn’t sure she wanted her name in the dedication.

His response is an impassioned and (true to Delany’s form) very lengthy sharing of all his relationships that have ended during his writing career, and how surprisingly violent the endings have been. The saddest, and the one that hits closest to home, was this :

Well, there were people who asked to be disassociated from Dhalgren too, because they Didn’t Approve. While I was working on the middle drafts in the Albert Hotel, I had one friend whom I saw almost every other day for nearly a year. He kept insisting – often when I would urge him not to, because I thought he was forgetting his own concerns for the sake of my book – on reading all my new pages, and discussing them, and being very supporting and offering many helpful criticisms. (I was using his last name as the book’s title, back then, though there was nothing of his character in the book, save an exchange he’d once told me about between him and his therapist, which I’d changed some…) One night, as I frequently did back then, I took him out to dinner at a little Greek restaurant above 14th Street. I thought we’d had a perfectly pleasant time. But the next morning, I found a letter waiting for me at the hotel desk. He wanted to break off all relations with me, disassociate himself from the book, and wanted me not to use his name as the title. He felt that I was sapping all his energies from his own life and his own work. Though I wrote a letter back, bowing to his wishes, I was very hurt. As I had often told him, I would have been quite willing to do without his reading and criticism, but the withdrawal of his friendship was wounding. For the next three-and-a-half years, he refused to see me again or speak to me – though several times, I later learned, when he found himself outside a mutual friend’s loft apartment door and he heard my voice inside (and several other times when he only thought he heard it), he turned around and left. (p. 219-220)

Among the rest:

A friend’s lover. The lover accused Delany of never having liked his work as much as the friend’s, and having always condescended to him. And as much as Delany swore, honestly, that he’d always found the lover to be the better writer, the lover would only believe Delany was lying. He and the lover still had no contact, despite Delany staying close with the friend.

Fellow sci-fi writer Thomas Disch. He stated after the publishing of a certain of Delany’s books that, if they were to remain friends, he needed to never read any more of Delany’s work.

Multiple editors and publishers. A recurring theme was people demanding to know, what, just what was this book (whichever new book it happened to be) about? People, usually people who had loved Chip’s earlier books, seemed offended by a newer work, could not fathom where he was going with his career, and often thought he was ruining himself, or becoming an arrogant navel-gazer.

After laying all this groundwork, he got to his point with Mog:

I don’t wonder if – I know that – rehearsing all this, here, now, is a self-protective strategy on my part. But to write about anything at all, Mog, is to risk losing people who are close to you – because you’re not writing the right things about it; while the new audience you get comes to you precisely because you’re writing about that and not something else, regardless of what specifically you are saying about it. Indeed, the new audience is as happy to disagree as to agree; that’s what makes you a rich writer for them.

I care, deeply, about the world; about AIDS; about language…; about art. And no doubt because of what I care about, I pick friends who care deeply about the world, AIDS, language, and art too. I write what I can, and I bust my ass doing it. And part of the ass-busting means being as honest as I can bear to be with myself. And that’s often painful. (Where you read “self-critical” in my various discussions of series stories, if you want, you can simply substitute “personal agony” and/or “angry friends.”) I do the very little I can do – write the very little I can write – because I care (and because I couldn’t stand not to); but because my friends also care so much, and because they would like to see it done their way (and often those would be very good ways), what I do has always been painful to them. Part of my own pain, if you will, is to listen to their angry and articulate criticisms and, the ones that I can understand down in my language pit…, try to do something about them, even if it means forcing myself to grow into a different kind of person… (p. 223-224)

Not all creative relationships are collaborations. I’ve known many artists and many brilliant creative people of other stripes as well, but in only one relationship has art, and the making of things, been absolutely central to our friendship. We rarely made things together, but we’d known each other more than half our lifetimes, discovered that we wanted to be creative people in each others’ presence, and shared everything we were working on with each other in a kind of peer review. I would say that the reasons we became who we are now, both in terms of being, both of us, artists, and in the rest of it as well, had much to do with each other.

Relationships where creativity travels back and forth, one feeding on and into the other, are relationships built on a kind of tension. Between one person and the other, between friendship and creativity, and between what you make and everything else. You get your art into your friendship and your friendship into your art.

The breaking point is the moment at which you stop growing in the same directions, but keep growing.

I’m no expert, but I feel like these tensions are at the heart of some of the most famous creative collaborations we know, like Lennon and McCartney. Reading about how vitriolic The Beatles became during the Let It Be sessions, I see four brilliant people who used to feed off of each other, but somewhere they became less of a unit, turned into four individuals, and doing what they used to do became agonizing. They brought their wives and girlfriends into the studio for the first time, because those were the relationships that mattered to them now. Those bands that snap, years later they maybe have a reunion, and the only way the reunion can happen is with that tension gone.

At least, that’s a way of looking at it.

Objects under tension eventually (usually, maybe not always) break or go slack. Too many stories of bands that put out brilliant music and lead pained, miserable lives. The first album where they say “for the first time, it’s coming easily, we’re all getting along, it’s all coming out so fast and so free,” that’s always the album where something integral is missing from the music. They went slack.

Mine broke. And I felt like it nearly killed me.

Sometimes I wonder if I can still call myself an artist. Because I doubt, if situated again between what I make and who I care for, that I would choose the art over the relationship. And I feel that may be why I invariably work alone; when I’m in a collaborative situation I do not assert my perspective, I pick a subject that neither side is terribly invested in, and I try, mostly, to make the other party content with what we made together. It’s easy, because there’s very little at stake, and what is made in the end doesn’t have “my stamp” on it.

But I question whether I can go it alone forever. Something will probably have to change, and it will change when I accept that it may mean more breaks along the way. So the time would be now to cultivate a skill at maintaining a perfect tension, one that doesn’t break, but doesn’t bend.

(He wrote me a letter. He wants to come to Providence. We shall see how this goes.)

Why My Friends Rock (H)

‘Cause they send me stuff like this.

From Nick:

…I will send you this Gandhi quote that I’m absolutely loving:

“Truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence, and gave up the use of the phrase ‘passive resistance’, in connection with it, so much so that even in English writing we often avoided it and used instead the word ‘satyagraha.’”

I’m head over heals for the idea that the very word “truth” implies love. Seriously, this is all my mind has been focused on for the last 48 hours.

Also this:

“I have also called it love-force or soul-force. In the application of satyagraha, I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and compassion. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on oneself.”

Addendum: The Warrior (H)

I’ve been reading a great blog written by a friend-of-a-friend, and generally I appreciate her insight but was a little taken a back by a couple entries about “warriors“. The warrior is one of the male archetypes that our culture most glorifies and celebrates, which is by (a quarter of an inch of) extension celebrating the will to power and the will to do violence. But the idea that you can condone or celebrate that out there and not bring it back here just doesn’t make sense–not that it’s okay to do violence out there, either.

This is from Shepherd Bliss’s essay, “My War Story“:

The warrior image has damaged us. As we move into the twenty-first century we need to mature beyond wars and warriors. I disagree with those men’s movement writers and activists who speak so highly of the warrior. I appreciate some of his traits–like courage, teamwork, loyalty–but the archetype itself is bankrupt at this point in history. We surely need guardians, boundary-setters, husbandmen, and citizens. If we are to survive on this planet, so threatened by war and warriors, we must get beyond the obsolete archetype of the warrior and value images such as the peacemaker, the partner, and the husbandman who cares for the earth and animals.

Letting go of a rape culture, hierarchy, violence, means celebrating men who fill roles other than “the warrior”. The process of self-re-creation and the revolutions in self-imaging are greatly supported by alternate images and archetypes that aver our new aspirations. After all, the brain doesn’t get rid of neural pathways, but it can create new ones.

So–Yes! Guardians, boundary-setters, husbandmen. I especially like the last, the farmer (in my mind, vegetable farmer) who tends the land, nurtures growth, knows the balance of active and receptive, work and rest, shows patience, persistence. This concept of tending is key–caring for, supporting, rather than controlling or forcing. And what about the dancer who has an exquisite ability to respond to circumstance, bending when the moment calls for it, and staying firm when that is what is needed? The dancer works with energy, resilience, and grace; grace being, as Pablo puts it, “… the balancing opposite of power. It means rolling away and landing on your feet instead of bruised ribs, and small hand movements letting a stronger person tie themselves up when they try to hit you.” In other words, resilience, self-protection and disarmament that are firm and assertive, but not aggressive. And there is the healer, touching, mending, with the courage to open to great suffering. Again this theme of working with, supporting, rather than controlling, or being even a “benevolent patriarch”. And there is the poet whose work is the honoring of the inner life and creation of language; the teacher who is a guide to and within new knowledge; the bread-maker who creates and then relinquishes his creation, day after day, to nourish self and others. These are just a few in a plethora of alternative roles we can imagine self-actualized people of any gender filling–the seeker, the student, the scientist, the lover, to name a few more. Showcasing and celebrating these roles, creating them in our conceptual, social, and visual imaginations, is one important way that art and social media can work as a forces for positive social change.

Addendum: Giving Use (H)

I’m reading Cornell West’s Race Matters, and find a passage I want to copy. I pull out a notebook, and a piece of paper is falling out, edges crinkled, and I almost toss it aside. I pause, smooth the creases, put my pen to it. When I am done, I tape it to the wall. This is what I mean when I equate loving and giving use to–to make use of, to allow someone (or something) to be of use, of service, is to acknowledge the person’s (or thing’s) worth. This is not treating someone instrumentally, but giving him or her the space to work to capacity–what bell defines as joy. We are loving by not allowing emotions, skills, capacities, objects, to go to waste.

And being of use affirms and can even create our belonging to or with another person or community. Giving use in the name of creation or rest to land, paint, mugs and chairs and hammers and pencils and beds and foot trails, creates belonging between us and the inanimate world.

***

This was the passage from Race Matters, p. 29:

Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must by conquered by a turning of one’s soul. This turning is done through one’s own affirmation of one’s worth–an affirmation fueled by the concern of others. A love ethic must be at the center of a politics of conversion.

Addendum: Paternalism (H)

bell hooks, in The Will to Change, p. 113-115:

Many of the New Age models created by men reconfigure old sexist paradigms while making it seem as thought they are offering a different script of gender relations. Often the men’s movement resisted macho patriarchal models while upholding a vision of benevolent patriarchy, one in which the father is the ruler who rules with tenderness and kindness, but he is still in control…

Clearly men need new models of self-assertion that do not require construction of the enemy “other”, be it a woman or the symbolic feminine, for them to define themselves against…

Undoubtedly, one of the first revolutionary acts of visionary feminism must be to restore maleness and masculinity as an ethical biological category divorced from the dominator model… we must define maleness as a state of being rather than as performance. Male being, maleness, masculinity must stand for the essential core goodness of self, of the human body that has a penis. Many of the critics who have written about masculinity suggest that we need to do away with the term, that we need “an end to manhood.” Yet such a stance furthers the notion that there is something inherently evil, bad, or unworthy about maleness.

It is a stance that seems more a reaction to patriarchal masculinity than a creative loving response that can separate maleness and manhood from all the identifying traits patriarchy has imposed on the self who has a penis. Our work of love should be to reclaim masculinity and not allow it to be held hostage to patriarchal domination… those of us who committing to ending patriarchy can touch real men where they live, not by demanding that they give up manhood of maleness, but by asking that they allow its meaning to be transformed, that they become disloyal to patriarchal masculinity in order to find a place for the masculine that does not  make it synonymous with domination or the will to do violence.

Strength Campaign (H)

I saw these My Strength posters around Brown campus a few years back, and that line–”Mi fuerza no es para  lastimar” or “My strength is not for hurting“–stuck in my head.

And my first reaction is to love them. Yes! A call to integrity without moralizing, and without shaming, which is disenabling. One answer to the need for alternatives to patriarchal conceptions of masculinity, the need to embrace strength, ability, positive visions of men, rather than demonize all “masculinity” and power exercised by men. A better answer to the question of power for what? There is an affirmation of masculine power as something to be used for good, as something protective of others rather than defensive or against.

But now I wonder–does working on the old patriarchal ideals of masculinity lead to anything better than paternalism? And paternalistic masculinity values care, protection, gentleness–but also infantalizes women, is still a system of power-over, a class system, competition between men, men struggling to protect their property. Maybe kinder, gentler versions of patriarchy are necessary stop-gap measures in the struggle for our collective liberation, but ultimately gender as a role or performance seems irredeemably problematic.

***

Channeling Kate Bornstein: “Sex is fucking. Everything else is gender.”

Transforming Desire (H)

Yeah, I’m a little behind the times, but I finally got my hands on some music by Lily Allen. This song is catchy, and I admit I’m a sucker for her accent. But it’s got the same old themes: nice guys finish last, nice guys are no good in bed, the total cultural sexualization of domination and oppression that makes some women think that only guys who treat them like shit can be good lovers…

bell hooks writes about the need to decolonize our minds–to get out of this attraction dynamic that she admits to being stuck in for a long time. In “Seduced by Violence No More” she writes:

…the courageous brothers who do, who rethink masculinity, who reject patriarchy and rape culture, often find that they cannot get any play–that the very same women who may critique macho male nonsense contradict themselves by making it clear that they find the “unconscious brothers” more appealing… Their black female peers confirm that they do indeed hold contradictory desires. They desire men not to be sexist, even as they say, “But I want him to be masculine.” When pushed to define “masculine,” they fall back on sexist representations. I was surprised by the number of young black women who repudiated the notion of male domination, but who would then go on to insist that they could not desire a brother who could not take charge, take care of business, be in control.

Their responses suggest that a major obstacle preventing us from transforming rape culture is that heterosexual women have not unlearned a heterosexist-based “eroticism” that constructs desire in such a way that many of us can only respond erotically to male behavior that has already been coded as masculine within the sexist framework…

Years passed before I found a man who respected those rights [to say no] in a feminist manner…While I liked his alternative behavior, I felt a loss of control–the kind we experience when we are no longer acting  within the socialized framework of both acceptable and familiar heterosexual behavior. I worried the he did not really find me desirable. Then I asked myself whether that aggressive emphasis on his desire, on his need for “the pussy” would have reassured me. It seemed to me, then, that I needed to rethink the nature of black female heterosexual eroticism, particularly in relation to black culture.

Critically interrogating my responses, I confronted the reality that despite all my years of opposing patriarchy, I had not fully questioned or transformed the structure of my desire. By allowing my erotic desire to still be determined to any extent by sexist constructions, I was acting in complicity with patriarchal thinking. Resisting patriarchal culture meant that I had to reconstruct myself as a heterosexual, desiring subject in manner that would make it possible for me to be fully aroused by male behavior that was not phallocentric. In basic terms, I had to learn how to be sexual with a man in a context where his pleasure and his hard-on is decentered and mutual pleasure is centered instead…

Concurrently, when heterosexual women are no longer attracted to macho men, the message sent to men would at least be consistent and clear. That would be a major intervention in the overall effort to transform rape culture.

In other words: talking feminism and anti-oppression is good and well, but if you’re still dating/ fucking guys who act out the myths of seduction through coercion and domination (does our entire culture have Stockholm syndrome?), you’re contradicting and undermining the message.

And I know that desire can change because I’ve seen mine change, expand from attraction solely to caucasians to people of varied ethnic/racial backgrounds. And a friend of mine, after becoming a feminist, noticed that the sorts of female bodies he was attracted to changed and broadened after the conceptual shift. I know sexuality is plastic, but how plastic? And how does one go about changing one’s desires and responses? Can knowledge alone accomplish the shift?

bell also writes about BDSM (which, despite superficial resemblances, is distinct from the mating’n'dating rituals referred to above) as inherently problematic, as does Audre Lorde. The orientation towards certain dynamics or psychological themes can be an axis of desire as central, important, and as gender orientation. But is it even mutable? Or is Dan Savage right that our kinks are here to stay?

intro: Jean Vanier (H)

In Jean Vanier’s interview with Krista Tippett for Speaking of Faith, they speak about this passage from the New Testament gospel of John, chapter 21:14-18 (New Revised Standard Version):

This was now the third time that Jesus appeared to the disciples after he was raised from the dead. When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you. ” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs. ” A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you. ” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep. ” He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you. ” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.”

Here’s the excerpt from the interview:

Mr. Vanier: Yes, I come back to the reality of pleasure and to the reality of what is my deepest desire and what is your deepest desire. And what — and somewhere, the deepest desire for us all is to be appreciated, to be loved, to be seen as somebody of value. But not just seen — and Aristotle makes a difference between being admired and being loved. When you admire people, you put them on pedestals. When you love people, you want to be together. So really, the first meeting I had with people with disabilities, what touched me was their cry for relationship. Some of them had been in a psychiatric hospital. Others — all of them had lived pain and the pain of rejection. One of the words of Jesus to the, to Peter —and you find this at the end of the gospel of Saint John — “Do you love me?”

Ms. Tippett: “Do you love me?”

Mr. Vanier: So, thus, the cry of God saying, “Do you love me?” and the cry of people who have been wounded, put aside, who have lost trust in themselves, they’ve been considered as mad and all the rest. And their cry is, “Do you love me?” And it’s these two cries that come together.

Ms. Tippett: Not just in the context of disabilities, you know, you’ve posed this question, you know, the whole — you’ve said the whole question is, how do we stand before pain?

Mr. Vanier: Yeah.

Ms. Tippett: All kinds of pain and weakness are difficult for us as human beings. Why is that so excruciating? Why do we such a bad job with it?

Mr. Vanier: I think there are so many elements. First of all, we don’t know what to do with our own pain, so what to do with the pain of others? We don’t know what to do with our own weakness except hide it or pretend it doesn’t exist. So how can we welcome fully the weakness of another if we haven’t welcomed our own weakness? There are very strong words of Martin Luther King. His question was always, how is it that one group — the white group — can despise another group, which is the black group? And will it always be like this? Will we always be having an elite condemning or pushing down others that they consider not worthy? And he says something, which is quite, what I find extremely beautiful and strong, is that we will continue to despise people until we have recognized, loved, and accepted what is despicable in ourselves. So that, then we go down, what is it that is despicable in ourselves? And there are some elements despicable in ourselves, which we don’t want to look at, but which are part of our natures, that we are mortal.

I’d have read Jesus’s cry perhaps as a challenge, or a call for loyalty–Are you capable of loving me when I am in pain, can you do it? Do you love me still, even now? Or perhaps it was a call to remember that love is about action, not merely sentiment. Jean Vanier reads it as a sincere request for love or reassurance of love, as a sign that even God (at least, when he is embodied as a human) needs to receive love.