i guess i'm really disappointed. i always knew that you didn't trust people, but now i realise that this extends to me too. and i can't handle that.
i defend your manner to others. i say that you're really a sweet person, you're just a bit abrasive, that's all. and i think of moments when you reveal yourself to me, as lovely, gentle and somewhat fragile, and i take this as evidence that you're one of my people. but are you?
these last few days you've suggested (and shown) that you consider people based on how useful they are to you. you take what you can get, then you walk away. i've seen this in how you interact with your previous friends. when things get too familiar, when you're drawn into that space of sharing yourself with someone, you leave. you find something new.
i guess i shouldn't feel at liberty to criticise you in such ways, as you've pointed out. but isn't that what brothers do? these are things i would like to hear about myself too, even if they are hard to swallow. but they come from a space of love.
you're young, you're scared, you're more fragile than you care to admit. and for such reasons i excuse your cruelty. i've never been a parent before. i would've prefered to be your brother, but it seems you don't want that either. which leaves me at a loss, because i'm not sure we can be friends. in friendship i need more.
i assume you won't read this. if you do, you should know that i write this because i'm trying to process my anger. you should know that my anger is not directed at you but at that difficult space between us.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Saturday, March 5, 2011
happy mardi gras?
saturday is my slow day. sleeping in, reading, several breakfasts, spinning records, J dropping in for a chat, cat on my lap, me sinking into the bed, the bath, the couch. i like saturdays.
i finished reading Patti Smith's just kids. i spilled some tears into the bath.
despite loving it, it left me a bit angry. because it's another story of another dead homo. such a familiar story. it's another HIV/AIDS tragi-drama, this time beginning and ending with Robert Mapplethorpe's death. it's another death that arrives too early. it's another incomprehensible loss (for author and reader).
the book is more that this too. the book is powerful in reminding me of the need to rebel, to push on, to make art, and to make life happen. throughout the book there's an almighty sense of anger. and beauty (writing and art) spills from this anger. and that's somewhat validating for my own anger. and so the early death is fitting in this context, as it generates more fuel for creating life/art.
only beautiful writing can move me to tears. and the dead homo narrative is a powerful generator of tears because it reflects a pain familiar to me. not because i've lost someone to HIV/AIDS - i've never been to one those funerals - but because i've experienced much art and literature that arises from it. i often find myself reading the work of dead homos and getting upset at my loss. the sense of injustice is not only theirs, but mine/ours, because we have to learn to live without more of their work.
i'm angry that i'll never get to read a 4th volume of Foucault's history of sexuality. i'm angry that Patti Smith had to watch her friend die. i'm angry about Keith Haring. i wept all the way through Timothy Conigrave's holding the man. i've shed many tears for AIDS-related death, and i'll keep shedding. and no doubt i'll keep wanting to punch holes in walls, in the hope to bust through to a place where there's no more loss. but people still die, so it goes on.
and perhaps every homo reader, or coffin-bearer, thinks 'that could've been me'.
yet the story of the dead homo, killed before his time, and because of his circumstances, stretches long before HIV/AIDS. i read those books too, and i cry some more. i punch another wall. perhaps because i start to think that it's the homo's lot to suffer. he must fall, in death or in misery. cast out or down, in a casket or on his knees, he embodies the eternally sad pervert.
and maybe that's why so many of them want to get married - to break the curse of the tragi-fag narrative. but possibly only creating another sad narrative of the tragic hetero-fag, as helen razer so beautifully points out.
tonight is the mardi gras parade. i guess if i had my way the crowd would be marching from a place of anger, frustration, and a need to tear down institutions (like marriage). and i can't help hearing many whispers from many graves, and the echoes of much art and activism, all saying "that's not what we fought for".
i finished reading Patti Smith's just kids. i spilled some tears into the bath.
despite loving it, it left me a bit angry. because it's another story of another dead homo. such a familiar story. it's another HIV/AIDS tragi-drama, this time beginning and ending with Robert Mapplethorpe's death. it's another death that arrives too early. it's another incomprehensible loss (for author and reader).
the book is more that this too. the book is powerful in reminding me of the need to rebel, to push on, to make art, and to make life happen. throughout the book there's an almighty sense of anger. and beauty (writing and art) spills from this anger. and that's somewhat validating for my own anger. and so the early death is fitting in this context, as it generates more fuel for creating life/art.
only beautiful writing can move me to tears. and the dead homo narrative is a powerful generator of tears because it reflects a pain familiar to me. not because i've lost someone to HIV/AIDS - i've never been to one those funerals - but because i've experienced much art and literature that arises from it. i often find myself reading the work of dead homos and getting upset at my loss. the sense of injustice is not only theirs, but mine/ours, because we have to learn to live without more of their work.
i'm angry that i'll never get to read a 4th volume of Foucault's history of sexuality. i'm angry that Patti Smith had to watch her friend die. i'm angry about Keith Haring. i wept all the way through Timothy Conigrave's holding the man. i've shed many tears for AIDS-related death, and i'll keep shedding. and no doubt i'll keep wanting to punch holes in walls, in the hope to bust through to a place where there's no more loss. but people still die, so it goes on.
and perhaps every homo reader, or coffin-bearer, thinks 'that could've been me'.
yet the story of the dead homo, killed before his time, and because of his circumstances, stretches long before HIV/AIDS. i read those books too, and i cry some more. i punch another wall. perhaps because i start to think that it's the homo's lot to suffer. he must fall, in death or in misery. cast out or down, in a casket or on his knees, he embodies the eternally sad pervert.
and maybe that's why so many of them want to get married - to break the curse of the tragi-fag narrative. but possibly only creating another sad narrative of the tragic hetero-fag, as helen razer so beautifully points out.
tonight is the mardi gras parade. i guess if i had my way the crowd would be marching from a place of anger, frustration, and a need to tear down institutions (like marriage). and i can't help hearing many whispers from many graves, and the echoes of much art and activism, all saying "that's not what we fought for".
Thursday, March 3, 2011
interlude
this morning J and i gave a paper to the arts organisation we've been working with. i was unprepared and planned what i'd say on the train trip over. i surprised myself by having a lot to say and saying it with ease.
this afternoon i taught 28 first year undergrads. week one. we talked about discourse. but mostly we talked about our favourite films, tv, books etc, and i encouraged them to argue with each other. they're pretty feisty, so it worked. now we have a semester's worth of material and in-jokes to draw upon.
now i'm lying in bed. resting, napping, recharging.
later i'll have a drink with that guy from bondi. when he mentioned that he rides a motorbike i felt something stir inside me. i forgot myself and became michelle pfeiffer's character in grease 2.
next week we'll be tearing down the highway, 100 mph, leaving this goddamn city that strips your bones from your back. we gotta get out while we're young...
this afternoon i taught 28 first year undergrads. week one. we talked about discourse. but mostly we talked about our favourite films, tv, books etc, and i encouraged them to argue with each other. they're pretty feisty, so it worked. now we have a semester's worth of material and in-jokes to draw upon.
now i'm lying in bed. resting, napping, recharging.
later i'll have a drink with that guy from bondi. when he mentioned that he rides a motorbike i felt something stir inside me. i forgot myself and became michelle pfeiffer's character in grease 2.
next week we'll be tearing down the highway, 100 mph, leaving this goddamn city that strips your bones from your back. we gotta get out while we're young...
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
inter-generational schooling
i said thank you. i nodded. i stood and left the meeting room.
my new 20 year old friend sends text messages asking me where to find particular buildings on campus. i either send him to the wrong place or i don't know. today i didn't know. today he suggests we have coffee so i can debrief about my meeting. how could i refuse this? it felt so perverse that it felt right. we met by the library and moved off campus, further away from the crowds and the meeting that just took place. and there i am in a café talking about it all to someone i'd not yet met; someone who could easily be a student in my tutorials. or maybe i'm perverse for making this seem perverse, because maybe it's fine to communicate with another adult person who just happens to be young. because he's quite lovely and interesting, despite my pre-judgements of 'those young people'. but there i am, sipping coffee with a man who's undecided about what to do for his 21st which is coming up. i'm supposed to be in a better place than him (with all my experience, wisdom, and learning), but something tells me i'm probably not.
we'll meet up again next week.
my new 20 year old friend sends text messages asking me where to find particular buildings on campus. i either send him to the wrong place or i don't know. today i didn't know. today he suggests we have coffee so i can debrief about my meeting. how could i refuse this? it felt so perverse that it felt right. we met by the library and moved off campus, further away from the crowds and the meeting that just took place. and there i am in a café talking about it all to someone i'd not yet met; someone who could easily be a student in my tutorials. or maybe i'm perverse for making this seem perverse, because maybe it's fine to communicate with another adult person who just happens to be young. because he's quite lovely and interesting, despite my pre-judgements of 'those young people'. but there i am, sipping coffee with a man who's undecided about what to do for his 21st which is coming up. i'm supposed to be in a better place than him (with all my experience, wisdom, and learning), but something tells me i'm probably not.
we'll meet up again next week.
taking responsibility
and i actually have a smile on my face. because i see what's happened as ridiculous. it's official: my research progress is unsatisfactory.
S3 is the first of my supervisors to speak and she says she hasn't seen me take responsibility for... i'm not sure what, because i was too amused by her use of the R word. she's putting her hand in the box of keywords and wielding the words that infantilise me. this matches my research arguments about what happens when researchers and health promoters talk about young people needing to be 'more responsible'. the utterance is an action and that action is an infantilisation whose only response is akin to 'fuck off. what would you know anyway.' i argue that it's an unfair action, because it disregards what's there, the practices in place, the efforts and concerns already operating in/around the subject deemed irresponsible. it's a swipe that re-installs a hierarchy. and it's stupid. but good on her, because it worked. the panel took hold of such keywords and in the end, echoed everything my disgruntled supervisors had to say. quel surprise!
tomorrow is payday. drinks are on them!
S3 is the first of my supervisors to speak and she says she hasn't seen me take responsibility for... i'm not sure what, because i was too amused by her use of the R word. she's putting her hand in the box of keywords and wielding the words that infantilise me. this matches my research arguments about what happens when researchers and health promoters talk about young people needing to be 'more responsible'. the utterance is an action and that action is an infantilisation whose only response is akin to 'fuck off. what would you know anyway.' i argue that it's an unfair action, because it disregards what's there, the practices in place, the efforts and concerns already operating in/around the subject deemed irresponsible. it's a swipe that re-installs a hierarchy. and it's stupid. but good on her, because it worked. the panel took hold of such keywords and in the end, echoed everything my disgruntled supervisors had to say. quel surprise!
tomorrow is payday. drinks are on them!
Sunday, February 27, 2011
narcissus
the project continues.
today i wrote this, then i sent it to my fictional lover.
The tragedy reaches a higher level when Narcissus, at the moment when his tears disturb the pool, realizes not only that the loved image is his own, but furthermore that it can disappear.
(Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, 104)
At that small half-oval kitchen table in Paris, my tears were part of a realisation that this image was about to disappear. In realising that the object of my love was an image that I had created, I knew that it would soon be destroyed. I would soon be dragged away from that site of reflection. That is, the place by the river where I intersect with Paris and with JB. That is, a place of love.
Ripples, like words of an email where he says we cannot meet again. My image shatters. In the days leading to this moment I’d been increasingly drawn to the water’s edge, to the image, to the love I was fostering. Unlike Narcissus I knew that the image was my own creation and therefore believed I could not fall. Armoured with knowledge, I thought myself invincible. I continued to look at the image, to revisit that place, to conjure feelings that I knew were fictions. Yet no armour shielded my eyes which continued to drink from the water.
And then this day, at that table, the water ripples and the image is lost and the loss surges within me to bring forth tears. My tears offer another layer of disruption because they conceal not only the image, but the absence of the image. But still, this double erasure leaves me mourning a loss that is greater than an image, for it is a loss of self.
These tears might also be armour, for they blurred my vision and created bodily convulsions that distracted me from the focal point of my loss. In this moment my attention shifted from an external love object to an internal chasm. While I could not see the absence I could certainly feel it. My loss was not physical, because the absence of his body and mine had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was the loss of a reflection (of my self) that I had come to love. At this moment I stopped, I faltered, I cried. I did not see my tears, nor did I feel their hot and cold on my skin, because at this moment I had no external presence or surface. With closed eyes, sobs erupt from within. Convulsions, sounds, tears, but none of this happens through physical consciousness.
The intensity of the loss was superseded by the intensity of these bodily eruptions. I was aware of the chair beneath me, the music around me, and the light from the window, but I had no awareness of my external presence in that room. A mess of emotion and bodily tissue, I was uncontained and spilling outward. Most present were the internal passages through which my sorrow pulsed, raged, and erupted in tears and gasps for air. When suffocating, there is only internal struggle. I forget his lips and his hands. My need for air (that is, for life) rises and seizes me. I mourn a loss at the same time that I clutch at life. I am feeling something that engraves itself into my soul and will be written there forever. This is not a ‘something’ that I can easily give words to, because it’s nothing that is familiar to me. And it is not locatable, because it puts itself everywhere, in and around me. It’s a feeling. It’s a moment and a spasm that I will never again feel in its entirety. It was here, but now it’s over there.
From here to there is a journey I cannot trace for I’m too busy living, breathing, and writing myself into the next chapter. I lift myself from the chair, I dry myself off, and I walk into another room. I am met with a silence that is beautiful; made tranquil through the absence of bodily spasm. This is not unlike a post-orgasm transformation. In fucking, my body has a saturating presence where I am all skin and touched surfaces. This physicality reaches its peak at orgasm and then falls away, like water sucked back into the ocean. I am left with quiet bliss. My body melts into the bed and absorbs everything; the pleasures receding into some internal cavern. I lie still as the sediment settles, deeper and deeper into a place I cannot fathom. I no longer have a body. Or rather, it was over there, but now it’s here.
I sleep so that I can forget. I fuck so that I can forget. I fall in love again and again so I can etch over these old words with something new; like waves that continuously renew the shoreline. I fall because I have to. I forget most of what I know about reflections and fantasies. Forgetting is necessary so that one day I can return to the river to reflect.
today i wrote this, then i sent it to my fictional lover.
The tragedy reaches a higher level when Narcissus, at the moment when his tears disturb the pool, realizes not only that the loved image is his own, but furthermore that it can disappear.
(Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, 104)
At that small half-oval kitchen table in Paris, my tears were part of a realisation that this image was about to disappear. In realising that the object of my love was an image that I had created, I knew that it would soon be destroyed. I would soon be dragged away from that site of reflection. That is, the place by the river where I intersect with Paris and with JB. That is, a place of love.
Ripples, like words of an email where he says we cannot meet again. My image shatters. In the days leading to this moment I’d been increasingly drawn to the water’s edge, to the image, to the love I was fostering. Unlike Narcissus I knew that the image was my own creation and therefore believed I could not fall. Armoured with knowledge, I thought myself invincible. I continued to look at the image, to revisit that place, to conjure feelings that I knew were fictions. Yet no armour shielded my eyes which continued to drink from the water.
And then this day, at that table, the water ripples and the image is lost and the loss surges within me to bring forth tears. My tears offer another layer of disruption because they conceal not only the image, but the absence of the image. But still, this double erasure leaves me mourning a loss that is greater than an image, for it is a loss of self.
These tears might also be armour, for they blurred my vision and created bodily convulsions that distracted me from the focal point of my loss. In this moment my attention shifted from an external love object to an internal chasm. While I could not see the absence I could certainly feel it. My loss was not physical, because the absence of his body and mine had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was the loss of a reflection (of my self) that I had come to love. At this moment I stopped, I faltered, I cried. I did not see my tears, nor did I feel their hot and cold on my skin, because at this moment I had no external presence or surface. With closed eyes, sobs erupt from within. Convulsions, sounds, tears, but none of this happens through physical consciousness.
The intensity of the loss was superseded by the intensity of these bodily eruptions. I was aware of the chair beneath me, the music around me, and the light from the window, but I had no awareness of my external presence in that room. A mess of emotion and bodily tissue, I was uncontained and spilling outward. Most present were the internal passages through which my sorrow pulsed, raged, and erupted in tears and gasps for air. When suffocating, there is only internal struggle. I forget his lips and his hands. My need for air (that is, for life) rises and seizes me. I mourn a loss at the same time that I clutch at life. I am feeling something that engraves itself into my soul and will be written there forever. This is not a ‘something’ that I can easily give words to, because it’s nothing that is familiar to me. And it is not locatable, because it puts itself everywhere, in and around me. It’s a feeling. It’s a moment and a spasm that I will never again feel in its entirety. It was here, but now it’s over there.
From here to there is a journey I cannot trace for I’m too busy living, breathing, and writing myself into the next chapter. I lift myself from the chair, I dry myself off, and I walk into another room. I am met with a silence that is beautiful; made tranquil through the absence of bodily spasm. This is not unlike a post-orgasm transformation. In fucking, my body has a saturating presence where I am all skin and touched surfaces. This physicality reaches its peak at orgasm and then falls away, like water sucked back into the ocean. I am left with quiet bliss. My body melts into the bed and absorbs everything; the pleasures receding into some internal cavern. I lie still as the sediment settles, deeper and deeper into a place I cannot fathom. I no longer have a body. Or rather, it was over there, but now it’s here.
I sleep so that I can forget. I fuck so that I can forget. I fall in love again and again so I can etch over these old words with something new; like waves that continuously renew the shoreline. I fall because I have to. I forget most of what I know about reflections and fantasies. Forgetting is necessary so that one day I can return to the river to reflect.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)