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Just married

Damon D’Oliveira & Maxime Desmons, Bastille Day 2009, Wards Island, Toronto

What is all this juice and all this joy?

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Nature has a very simple way of amazing us—

First leather.

I think all happiness depends on having the energy to assume the mask of some other self; that all joyous or creative life is a rebirth as something not oneself — something created in a moment and perpetually renewed; in playing a game like that of a child where one loses the infinite pain of self-realization, a grotesque or solemn painted face put on that one may haste from the terrors of judgement.

W. B. YEATS

Eternity

And the crowning blow Out of joy, I became a fabulous opera.

ARTHUR RIMBAUD, from Rimbaud Complete, Translated, Edited, and with an Introduction by Wyatt Mason. New York: Modern Library, 2002.

The world has just gotten bigger.

Photo: NYTimes

I cannot cure myself of my heart.

I have lived recklessly off beauty: eternal bread.

I cannot live outside beauty. This is what makes me weak in the presence of certain people.

A world in which there is no more room for human beings, for joy, for active leisure, is a world that should die. No people can live outside beauty. It can live on after itself for a time and that is all.

ALBERT CAMUS, Carnets, 1942-1951

Pictured: Maurizimo @ dudesnude

In choosing my “destruction,” I’ll choose joy.*

With the greatest enthusiasm, I suggest we embrace the very threatening principle of joy. The poet Audre Lorde once said that sexuality stems from a deep wellspring of joy. Gay people are by definition, and in my experience, joyous people. We have found a way to turn everything into a celebration; in our lives dancing resembles a sacred act. We should not look at this as a sign of moral weakness, as our enemies and the more self-hating among us do; we should consider this gay impulse toward pleasure to be a central part of the gay and lesbian character. The disdain of some gay activists toward what Michael Bronski has termed “the pleasure impulse” reflects our adoption of straight morality’s condescending attitude toward pleasure, joy, and desire. But in gay life pleasure serves a very different role. We do not fear it; we embrace it, ritualize it, and are transformed by its power.

URVASHI VAID, Virtual Equality

Yes, I’m asking you to become a sex radical. It’s the best sort of radical to be. 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.

PAT [now Patrick] CALIFIA, Forbidden Passages: Writings Banned in Canada

To be homosexual [in America] is to have learned to resist one particularly powerful form of societal conditioning. Some of us take that lesson much further, questioning all manner of conditioned behaviour. Unfortunately, being gay or HIV+ guarantees nothing about one’s readiness to shed conditioned thoughts. Consider how many gay men continue to whine about the display of flesh at pride celebrations. Their letters of complaint appear in gay papers and in the mainstream media. Why must we show our dark side to the world, they ask. Maybe these people miss the point because it’s so simple: some of us have no respect for societal taboos about nudity and sexual expression. We feel that a society that cannot accept a naked human being walking down the street is rotten to the core.

TOM ACE, Diseased Pariah News, No. 8.

Artists: MICHAEL BAKER and PHILIP HARE @ Propeller through July 6th. (Opening Reception, June 26th, 7pm.) OTHER PRIDE PICKS: Will Munro’s Vazaleen/Shame Party at Wrongbar, June 27th (sold out). The Hidden Cameras South Stage (Church Street), June 28th, 10pm. Free.

* Kirby, Letters. Xtra. January 8, 2004.

We were talking about desire,

how sometimes only an image,
a surface compels us:*

. . . I have for hours
believed—without judgment, without condemnation—
that in each body, however obscured or recast,

is the divine body—common, habitable—
the way in a field of sunflowers
you can see every bloom’s

the multiple expression
of a single shining idea,
which is the face hammered into joy.

MARK DOTY, from Homo Will Not Inherit

*from To Cavafy

Body, Remember . . .

 

Body, remember not only how much you were loved,
not only the beds on which you lay,
but also those desires for you
that glowed plainly in the eyes,
and trembled in the voice—and some
chance obstacle made futile.
Now that all of them belong to the past,
it almost seems as if you had yielded
to those desires—how they glowed,
remember, in the eyes gazing at you;
how they trembled in the voice, for you, remember, body.

___

FAR OFF

I should like to relate this memory . . .
but it is so faded now . . . scarcely anything is left—
because it lies far off, in the years of my early manhood.

A skin as if made of jasmine . . .
that night in August—was it August?—that night . . .
I can barely remeber the eyes; they were, I think blue . . .
Ah yes, blue; a sapphire blue.

___

SO MUCH I GAZED

So much I gazed on beauty,
my vision is alive with it.

Contours of the body. Red lips. Voluptuous limbs.
Hair as if taken from Greek statues;
always beautiful, even when uncombed,
and it falls, a little, over the white temples.
Faces of love, exactly as my poetry
desired them . . . in the nights of my young manhood,
deep in my nights, in secret, encountered . . .

___

ONE NIGHT

The room was poor and squalid,
hidden above the dubious tavern.
From the window you could see the alley
filthy and narrow. From below
came the voices of some workmen
playing cards and carousing.

And there on the much-used, lowly bed
I had the body of love, I had the lips,
the voluptuous and rosy lips of ecstasy—
rosy lips of such ecstasy, that even now
as I write, after so many years!
in my solitary house, I am drunk again.

___

HE SWEARS

Every so often he swears to start a finer life.
But when night comes with its own counsels,
its compromises, and its promises;
but when night comes with its own vigor
of the body, craving and seeking, he returns,
forlorn, to the same fatal joy.

___

I WENT

I did not tether myself. I let go entirely and went,
I went into the luminous night,
to those pleasures that were half real,
and half wheeling in my brain.
And I drank of potent wines, as only the
valiant of voluptuousness drink.

___

VERY SELDOM

He is an old man. Worn out and stooped,
maimed by the years, and by abuses,
with slow steps he crosses the narrow street.
And yet as he enters his door to hide
his wretchedness and his old age, he meditates
on the share he still has of youth.

Now young people recite his verses.
In their lively eyes his facies pass.
Their sound, voluptuous minds,
their shapely, firm flesh
are stirred by his expression of beauty.

___

HE CAME TO READ

He came to read. Two or three volumes
are open; historians and poets.
But he had barely read for ten minutes,
when he laid them aside. He is dozing
on the sofa. He is entirely devoted to books—
but he is twenty-three years old, and he is very handsome;
and this afternoon love passed
through his ideal flesh, his lips.
Through his flesh that is sheer beauty,
the fever of love passed; without
his feeling derisive shame for the form of his enjoyment . . .

___

DESIRES

Like beautiful bodies of the dead who had not grown old
and they shut them, with tears, in a magnificent mausoleum,
with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet—
that is how desires look that have passed
without fulfillment; without one of them having achieved
a night of sensual delight, or a moonlit morn.

___

RETURN

Return often and take me
beloved sensation, return and take me—
when the memory of the body awakens,
and old desire again runs through the blood;
when the lips and the skin remember,
and the hands feel as if they touch again.

Return often and take me at night,
when the lips and the skin remember . . .

C. P. CAVAFY [trans. Rae Dalven]