Tagged: freedom
Summons
Definition
As an act of bravery, love cannot be sentimental; as an act of freedom, it must not serve as a pretext for manipulation. It must generate other acts of freedom; otherwise, it is not love.
Photo: ‘Enrique’
“Moby Dick can be read as the world’s best how-to book.”*
Most “therapies” are corrective/punitive merely focused on what’s “wrong”/”fixing” you (or, worse still, somehow “magically” visualizing your way to fortune). There’s no “recovery,” and precious little movement/change, you’re still stuck with the idée fixe of yourself. You will find—pleasure yourself—all the more, reading. “What are you reading?” (and steer clear of the onerous “self-help” crap).
Then again, I may just be “addicted” to good reads.
Alberto Manguel postulates, “But the best guides, I believe, are the reader’s whims—trust in pleasure and faith in haphazardness—which sometimes leads us into a makeshift state of grace, allowing us to spin gold out of flax.”
Photos: Random Guy, doortoriver/Ruthanne Reid on flickr [click images to enlarge]
Treasuring 10
A man must live through his life’s duration with his own little set of fears and angers, suspicions and vanities, and his appetites, spiritual and carnal.
Life is built of them and he is built of life.
The umbilical cord is a long, long rope of blood that had swung him as an aerialist on an all but endless Trapeze, oh, such a long, long way, from the first living organism that gave birth to another.
Define it as the passion to create which is all that we know of God.
Is that an agnostic thing to say? I think not.
Perhaps you will accede to my claim of exceptional honesty, both as writer and man. And if you knew me outside of this book, you would find me a man who values kindness and patience with others.
Most of my life has been spent with intimate companions of a complex and difficult nature. It is only recently that I have learned how to accept the bargain, by which I mean to treasure the lovely aspects of their natures, which all have possessed, and to stoically live through their abrasive humors. After all, none have them have found me exactly easy to exist, and travel about, with.
For two and a half years I have been companioned by a stormy young man, given to verbal abuse in the lingo that he acquired during his military service in Southeast Asia. He says that he loves me. I ask myself, “How could he?”
If he should leave me today, I would have the deep satisfaction of knowing that while he lived with me he had completed two of the most distinguished modern novels that I have read.
If he should leave me today—but I don’t think he will . . .
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, Memoirs. with an introduction by John Waters ; New York : New Directions, 2006.
Photo: Carl Van Vechten’s portrait of Brando during the run of Streetcar, 1948.
At the point
“to read, hear and see what we want”
“Because when you get more information about your own sexuality, the quality of your life improves immediately. When you free your body from the invisible control of church and state, you not only challenge some of the most evil authoritarian institutions in the world, you have more fun and better orgasms.”*
“Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.”**
The [Australian] law says that any depiction of a child under the age of 16 that ‘offends a reasonable adult’ is child pornography and must be banned.
The publications that Australian Customs have currently targeted include Kevin Esser’s novel STREETBOY DREAMS, the now defunct journal PAIDIKA, the Dutch magazine KOINOS, Fidelity Publishing’s SCUM, Gay Sunshine Press’ FLESH, and Alyson publication’s MY FIRST TIME. All of which (apart from Koinos) have been readily available in bookshops in Australia and grace many of our own bookshelves.
These publications do look at sexual relationships between men and under-age males. But describing, depicting, writing about or discussing a relationship is not necessarily the same as “promoting”or condoning that relationship. Although even that should not be illegal. In Australia we have a constitutional right (of sorts) to freedom of political expression. This should include the right to discuss our sexualities in a positive way, and to call for the abolition of pointless anti-sex laws. And by this, I include “age of consent” laws, which are arbitrary, impractical and obviously do not protect children from rape.
We are burying our heads in the sand if we try to pretend that loving, gay, intergenerational relationships do not occur. Unfortunately, it has been a tactic of the child-abuse industry to suppress any discussion that opposes their own rigid analysis of young people’s sexuality. But, as is clear to anyone who has been abused, burying a problem will not make it go away. Ask any child.
emu NUGENT, Is it Child Abuse, Gay Porn or Our Literary Heritage?, Library Two, June 2002.
Or ask the ultimate keeper/burier of secrets, the Rat Pope. They tried to give Obama shit about starting sex education in kindergarten. I truly believe the first two words out of a child’s mouth, even before mommy or dada, should be “body” and “mine.”
*Pat Califia, **Derek Jarman
Captive/bound
One cannot always tell what it is that keeps us shut in, confines us, seems to bury us, but still one feels certain barriers, certain gates, certain walls. Is all this imagination, fantasy? I do not think so. And then one asks: My God! Is it for long, is it for ever, is it for eternity? Do you know what frees one from this captivity? It is very deep serious affection. Being friends, being brothers, love, that is what opens the prison by supreme power, by some magic force.
VINCENT VAN GOGH, letter to his brother, July 1880
Sometimes I just need to hear it. A reminder. So I’ll call Don Pyle or my friend Joseph and when they pick up and I hear their voice on the other end, I’m instantly reminded. Nothing else. That’s all. Or I’ll call my sweet and ask “What does boy need to hear?” And he says, “LOTS!” And boy laughs.
Photo: “steve,bound3” originally uploaded by romeosghost79
Flag bearer
Stuffing
~
Utah state senator and gay marriage opponent Chris Buttars
said he would support some housing rights for gays but that
he did not approve of gay and lesbian activism. “I don’t
want them stuffing it down my throat all the time,” he said.
“Certainly not in my kid’s face.“
~
It was
revealed that the two smiling children shown in ads for
Richard Dawkins‘s pro-atheist organization are the son and
daughter of an evangelical Christian. “Obviously,” said
their father, “they were searching for images of children
that looked happy and free.”
This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country
Begins as attachment to our own field of action
And comes to find that action of little importance
Tough never indifferent. History may be servitude,
History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,
The faces and places, with the self, which, as it could, loved them,
To be renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
T.S. ELIOT, from Little Gidding (No.4 of ‘Four Quartets’)
Dictate v. debate
But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight.
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
T. S. ELIOT, from the fifth part of The Dry Salvages
I can’t imagine a better prescription for what ails us: Prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action. Beyond these things, life consists of hints and guesses, and perhaps those unattended moments when we hear something lovely, or smell something odd or memorable, or stumble on a line of poetry that sticks, or meet someone who moves us, or discover in the patterns of nature the lineaments of our own spirit.
I would mark especially the last word in Eliot’s prescription: action. “And right action is freedom,” he says. Right action leads to “freedom/From past and future.” This freedom is the ultimate liberation, betokening release from the wheel of time. Right action must be subject to the individual conscience as well as communal norms. One comes to action last, as Eliot notes, having moved through prayer, observance, discipline, and thought. Without the previous four things, right action is difficult of access, perhaps impossible to discern. And right action, always, occurs in time, as choices are made, paths taken or refused.
JAY PARINI, Why Poetry Matters ; New Haven, CT : Yale UP, 2008.
This book was yet another gift I received while doing my placement at Northern Secondary in Toronto with a generously knowledgeable teacher-librarian, Geoff Vanek.
, originally uploaded by [ج.] [ر.] [ك.].
Necessary
Librarians believe in intellectual freedom because it is as natural to us, and as necessary to us, as the air that we breathe. Censorship is anathema to us because it inhibits our role in life—to make the recorded knowledge and information of humankind freely available to everyone, regardless of faith or the lack of it, ethnicity, gender, age, or any other of the categories that divide us one from the other. I strongly believe we should hold fast to intellectual freedom and carry out our tasks without reference to our own opinions or the opinions of those who want to restrict free access to knowledge.
MICHAEL GORMAN, Our Enduring Values: Librarianship in the 21st Century Chicago : ALA, 2000.
Two of Suzanne’s favourite sayings covertly expressing her motherly views were, “Are you sure?” or “I don’t think that’s really necessary.”
All I can say is that I’m forever grateful that as a boy of fifteen (circa 1974) at Rogers High School in Toledo, Ohio, our library carried a subscription to The Village Voice where I finely combed the personals for any reference to “GWM” and counted on the small print ad appearing in every issue for The Adonis ALL-MALE Cinema where the tiny line drawing of a naked male torso fueled my fantasies and launched me towards my first grand adventure as a gay teen in search of…
Books are offensive.
“Freedom of expression is an integral part of the freedom of thought. I believe that all opinions must be accepted. Otherwise, there is no freedom. Freedom can find its own limits, but to impose them from outside is contrary to its nature and risks destroying it.”*
The decision to get rid of a book, or restrict access to it, goes to the very heart of a public library. “Policies should not unjustly exclude materials and resources even if they are offensive to the librarian or the user,’’ says the Web site of the American Library Association, which adds, “Toleration is meaningless without tolerance for what some may consider detestable.”
“A Library’s Approach to Books that Offend” by Alison Leigh Cowan, New York Times – City Room (blog); August 19, 2009.
Freedom to Read
Artist: JENNY HOLZER, Protect Protect
Thanks Amalia.
*“We must open the doors for the freedom of thought without any restrictions at all, even if one wants to deny the existence of God.” – Gamal Al-Banna
Fuck that
baby i feel LIBERATED today.
i own myself, i own my art, and i make SEXY art people. that’s what it’s about, it’s an intrinsic part of it and i think i’ve been pretending that’s not true so i can strive for some form of legitimacy in the worlds i’m familiar with. fuck that, done. over.
i’m a faggot-pop-pinup-porny-burlesquy-videomaker.
this is what i do:
RICHERT SCHNORR, in Graphic Glory
Photo: Richert Schnorr, REGULARMOTION.net
