Protected: 3 jacks

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: Angles

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Charmer

Photo: flickr

“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

The BIG Show

done

A constant dilemma

acd378, originally uploaded by haloloop.

By the time I get on the plane, he’s recomposed in my imagination. Now he’s coated with that charge of longing and excitement that makes me say yet again that I love him. This isn’t an illusion, I tell myself, merely the clearer vision of distance. As flawed as our relationship is, I’m living out a basic homosexual dream. Current gay politics have covered up the fact that homosexuality is submission to a constant dilemma. The maleness toward which our sexuality is directed is—culturally at least—defined by heterosexuality. No one admits it anymore, but successful gay couples often play a constant game of switching. Each takes turns playing “the man,” while the other temporarily enjoys this sociological projection of masculinity. Those who don’t do this seem to become denatured Bobbsey Twins, unmarried “sisters” living together. I’ve made a different choice, which some would call “unliberated.” Everything attractive about Romulus stems from his heterosexuality, and of course, that’s the very quality that prevents me from possessing him entirely. Well, maybe I’m on a more honest path of homosexual desire.

BRUCE BENDERSON, from The Romanian: Story of an Obsession. New York : Tarcher/Penguin, 2006.

Play for me.

 

     ‘Yes, I understand exactly where you are. It won’t be easy, but you can do it. Definitely, you can do it. Let’s start with the Britten. Play it again, just the first movement, and then we’ll talk. We can work through this together, a little at a time.’

     When he heard this, he felt an impulse just to pack away his instrument and leave. But then some other instinct — perhaps it was simply curiosity, perhaps something deeper — overcame his pride and compelled him to start playing again the piece she had requested. When after several bars she stopped him and began to talk, he again felt the urge to leave. He resolved, just out of politeness, to endure this uninvited tutorial for at most another five minutes. But he found himself staying a little longer, then longer again. He played some more, she talked again. Her words would always strike him initially as pretentious and far too abstract, but when he tried to accommodate their thrust into his playing, he was surprised by the effect. Before he realised, another hour had gone by.

     ‘I could suddenly see something,’ he explained to us. ‘A garden I’d not yet entered. There it was in the distance. There were things in the way. But for the first time, there it was. A garden I’d never seen before.’

     The sun had almost set when he finally left the hotel, crossed the piazza to the cafe tables, and allowed himself the luxury of an almond cake with whipped cream, his sense of elation barely contained.

 

KAZUO ISHIGURO, from “Cellists” from Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall  Knopf Canada, 2009.

To my careful instructors Fred Hammer and Kenneth Holland. In remembrance of my dad, Wally (on this, his birthday), who took me and sat outside the door listening to every lesson. And for Darrell, who plays and listens (and inspires) still.

Photo: Michael Baker

At bat

 

So I have a ball cap fetish.

RAYS v. JAYS —Rogers Centre 1:07PM

Happy Canada Day

In the wee-wee hours

 

Tom of Finland (circa 1949)

Entry

 

If to record is to love the world,

let this be an entry.

 

                                               – Roo Borson