Last-minute bliss

Pretty-pretty. Peace bowls (also in “Love” & “Joy”) exclusively at
ORBITAL ARTS, 275 Augusta Avenue, Kensington Market. $20

Kensington Market Festival of Lights, Monday December 21, 6PM

Fructifying

Our happiness together remains one of my most vivid and fructifying memories; when we are young and literary, we often experience things in the present with a nostalgia-in-advance, but we seldom guess what we will truly prize years from now. I always placed a high value on friendship, but even I had no way of guessing back then that it was more fun to get drunk with a friend than with a lover. Love is a source of anxiety until it is a source of boredom; only friendship feeds the spirit. Love raises great expectations in us that it never satisfies; the hopes based on friendship are milder and in the present, and they exist only because they have already been rewarded. Love is a script about just a few repeated themes we have a hard time following, though we make every effort to conform to its tone. Friendship is a permis de séjour that enables us to go anywhere and do anything exactly as our whims dictate.

EDMUND WHITE, from City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and 70s, New York : Bloomsbury, 2009.

Broken

“Poverty is prison without bars.”

I think it’s a fight we need to have.

And I think the American people accept those

values —

But there are some people on the right who don’t.

They look at

At society as a. . . .

In Darwinian terms.

If you succeed in life because you had advantages

God wanted you to succeed

And if you fail

It’s your own fault —

And if it’s your own fault

Why should anybody else have to help you?

And I reject that

I reject that.

It’s inconsistent with my values.

I disagree very strongly with it.*

_____

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH (to Bill Moyers): Let Me Down Easy is about grace and kindness in a world that lacks that often. Not always. And a winner take all world, where we think about, you know, the people who, we don’t think about the people who are losing. We don’t think about the people who are abandoned by jobs or governments or lovers or mothers or fathers. And a call for that kind of grace and kindness and consideration and the metaphor I think of death as the ultimate form of loss, possibly, possibly in our greatest fear the ultimate form of abandonment. And that in this country we have a hard time looking at death and we have a hard time looking at loss and we have a hard time looking at losing. And I think that doesn’t help us be the most caring environment. Let me just tell you quickly—you know that, when I was, I went to Washington to do my, what I thought was my last interview with Congressman Waxman. And I thought, “You know, on the way I should stop in Baltimore and talk to my Aunt Lorraine, who’s the only woman living on my mother’s side of the family. My grandmother had eight children. And while I and my assistant were waiting in the lobby to see my aunt in her apartment, a man, an older man but with a very good walk came down to the lobby with some medicine in his hand. And he couldn’t read it and he was crying. And we were just beside ourselves. You know, he was so, so in such despair. Could we help him? And of course we read what he needed to know. And he had to go give it to his wife. And he burst out crying as he turned his back on us. And he goes, “We’re just living too long in this country. We’re just living too long.” And as he hit the elevator button he said, “I need a gun.” And it just broke my heart that we, with all of our achievements, and all of the things that we can do, all of our technology and all of our money, that we feel morally that we can afford to leave people so alone.

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH in Let Me Down Easy now at Second Stage (extended through Dec 6th).

Photo: American Landscape – South Central LA, jsdart on flickr
*The Health Care Monologues

“in the presence of the Other”

Alas, why does my mind, even in its best days, never possess but a particle of the assimilative powers of the body?

I used to once believe that a certain feeling for beauty would serve me in place of virtue, and would render me immune from solicitations of the coarsest kind. But I was mistaken. The lover of beauty ends by finding it everywhere about him, a vein of gold in the basest of ores; by handling fragmentary masterpieces, though stained or broken, he comes to know a collector’s pleasure in being the sole seeker after pottery which is commonly passed by.

The cynics and the moralists agree in placing the pleasures of love among the enjoyments termed gross, that is, between the desire for drinking and the need for eating, though at the same time they call love less indispensable, since it is something which, they assert, one can go without. I expect about anything from the moralist, but am astonished that the cynic should go thus astray. Probably both fear their own demons, whether resisting or surrendering to them, and they oblige themselves to scorn their pleasure in order to reduce its almost terrifying power, which overwhelms them, and its strange mystery, wherein they feel lost. I shall never believe in the classification of love among the purely physical joys (supposing that any such things exist) until I see a gourmet sobbing with delight over his favorite dish like a lover gasping on a young shoulder. Of all our games, love’s play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul, and is also the only one in which the player has to abandon himself to the body’s ecstasy. To put reason aside is not indispensable for a drinker, but the lover who leaves reason in control does not follow his god to the end. In every act save that of love, abstinence and excess alike involve but one person; any step in the direction of sensuality, however, places us in the presence of the Other, and involves us in the demands and servitudes to which our choice binds us. I know no decision which a man makes for simpler and more inevitable reasons, where the object chosen is weighed more exactly for its balance of sheer pleasure, or where the seeker after truth has a better chance to judge the naked human being. Each time, from a stripping down as absolute as that of death, and from a humility which surpasses that of defeat and of prayer, I marvel to see again reforming the complex web of experiences shared and refused, of mutual responsibilities, awkward avowals, transparent lies, and passionate compromises between my pleasures and those of the Other, so many bonds impossible to break but nevertheless so quickly loosened. The mysterious play which extends from love of a body to love of an entire person has seemed to me noble enough to consecrate to it one part of my life. Words for it are deceiving, since the word for pleasure covers contradictory realities comprising notions of warmth, sweetness, and intimacy of bodies, but also feelings of violence and agony, and the sound of a cry. The short and obscene sentence of Poseidonius about the rubbing together of two small pieces of flesh, which I have seen you copy in your exercise books with the application of a good schoolboy, does no more to define the phenomenon of love than the taut cord touched by the finger accounts for the infinite miracle of sounds. Such a dictum is less an insult to pleasure than to the flesh itself, that amazing instrument of muscles, blood, and skin, that red-tinged cloud whose lightning is the soul.



MARGUERITE YOURCENAR, Memoirs of Hadrian New York : Farrar, 2005.

Less than twenty pages into it and already wanting to quote/read you the book in its entirety, the above being but a paragraph and a bit. Lucid gems illumine every page. Thank you for the gift, Warren.

Photo: Pakonectar

“Every bliss achieved is a masterpiece.”

. . . and what is the act of love, itself, if not a moment of passionate attention on the part of the body?*

It is not a question of sublimation, which is itself a very unfortunate term and one that insults the body, but a dark perception that love for a particular person, so poignant, is often only a beautiful fleeting accident, less real in a way than the predispositions and choices that preceded it and that will follow.

MARGUERITE YOURCENAR, Fires

*from Memoirs of Hadrian

Photo: Pleasure

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’)

Divine

I understand it so well, and know what you must have suffered. I have been through similar storms and trials myself. I suppose we gain something from them. Would the person one loves ever seem divine if there were no difficulty in winning their love? How wonderful when the Gods appear to us poor mortals—even in the faces and figures of those who say Farewell to us!

EDWARD CARPENTER, responding to a friend’s distress about a thwarted love for another man.

Nicholas, originally uploaded by snoopvac.

Deeply subversive

Boys Holding Hands During Gay-Rights March, originally uploaded by markdworthen.

I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning.

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.

VASILY GROSSMAN, Life and Fate

Worthy

“…only he who is willing to give his body for the sake of the world is fit to be entrusted with the world. Only he who can do it with love is worthy of being the steward of the world.”

-Tao Te Ching

Pictured: “ifun” @ dudesnude

Firsts

Everybody loves the first glimpse of naked love

Everybody’s story is the most thrilling in the world

Everybody tells their best friend their tale of the raw behind

First time they discovered an open heart with their pants down.

ALLEN GINSBERG, on the back cover of WADS: True Homosexual Experiences from S.T.H. Writers, Vol. 6, Edited by Boyd McDonald ; San Francisco : Gay Sunshine Press, 1985.