Queer Art Show in New York City

I was very pleased to participate in this Qweer Arts gallery show in New York City, that was put on by the gallery and RFD Magazine, in celebration of the magazine's new issue featuring lots and lots of great art. I have artwork in the magazine as well (look for Dragon), which is why I was invited to participate in the gallery show. I'm very glad for the opportunity, and very glad I was able to participate.

I sent six works of homoerotic photography and digital art for the gallery show. One work was purchased at the gallery opening, which is very exciting.

So I regard the RFD Magazine "Qweer Arts" show to be a big success. Six prints of my photo-based digital artwork were shown in a gallery in New York City, and one of them was sold! Adding these elements to my artist's resumé brings me a lot of joy.

Thank you.

This is the third gallery show that my work has been shown in, in 2013. I hope this might be viewed as a good omen of Things To Come.

Calamus

In making a poster for National Poetry Month, using Wordle word clouds made from my own homoerotic poems, followed up by another version using one of my typewriters, the idea was suggested to make something using Walt Whitman's most well-known homoerotic poems: the "Calamus" section of Leaves of Grass. May is the month of Whitman's birthday, so it seems appropriate to make some art in his honor this month.

So, I've made some Wordle versions of the complete text of "Calamus" from the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, the most complete and most explicit version of these poems that Whitman ever published. The 1860 edition, it is agreed by many scholars, to be the peak of Whitman's brilliance, the peak of his sexually-explicit writing, and perhaps his best overall edition. After 1860 Whitman began a long process of self-censoring his poems, of rewriting them to be more acceptable to the general reader. He left many poems out, and by the "death bed" edition of 1891-92, he had rewritten many poems to be more mainstream and bowdlerized entire sections of Leaves to be more neutral and less provocative.

You can do your comparisons of the various editions of Leaves by cruising through The Walt Whitman Archive, one of the best, most thorough, and most complete of any poet's archives on the Internet. You can examine the complete texts of every edition, and view and download scans of the actual printed pages, covers, and supplementary materials published by Whitman during and after his lifetime. This is an invaluable, highly useful tool for any Whitman scholar, from the most casual to the most scrupulous.





I note how the word that appears largest in these Calammus word clouds is "love." That's entirely appropriate, as that is the theme of Whitman's Calamus, after all.



And I've made another poster idea, too, based on combining these Calamus word clouds with images from the Whitman Archives. Elements include pages from the Calamus section of the 1860 edition, the distinctive green cover of Leaves of Grass, a portrait of Whitman by artist Thomas Eakins, and also Eakins famous painting The Swimming Hole, which legend has it was inspired by Whitman's poetry.


Click on image for larger version.

So, Happy Birthday, Walt!

Papier-Maché Art Bowls

Another new direction for my art-making. I've been thinking hard about how to break out of the two-dimensional limitation of most visual art, especially the photographic print. I have several ideas that combine photographic prints with sculpture, with multimedia, with multiple displays of parallel work. That combine imagery with form, that break out of the two-dimensional frame into the realm of sculpture, and of multimedia.

I've always liked paper arts. I've long been interested in hand-made paper, art books, and hand-printing. I haven't pursued this interest very deeply before now, although at times I've wanted to make my own paper; and I think I may be able to explore that craft this winter. I have been setting up a crafts worktable in the basement, to be able work on several projects as time permits, from woodcarving, to paper arts, to candlemaking, and more.

Someday I would like to make an art book. I want to make the paper myself, print my written words on the hand-made paper, sew the binding, make the covers. In other words, a completely hand-made art book, containing original images and poems. Obviously, like most art-books, a limited edition. A lot work to make, and not intended to be mass-produced.

My artist friend A. had the idea to explore papier-maché recently, which I felt immediately enthusiastic about. I sought out some gluten-free recipes online for making paste—most papier-maché is, like wallpaper paste, a combination of flour paste and water—the most effective one being made from white glue, like the famous Elmer's Glue-All seen in many schoolrooms, mixed with water. (Two parts white glue to one or one-and-a-half parts water.)

That very night, lit on fire with the idea of making a paper art bowl—decorative, artistic, not for food, certainly not waterproof—I made two. I have a stash of really good art papers, most of them designed to run through a printer. I've made some laser-printed art-books with some of this paper, publishing a limited run a few years ago.




I tore this purple paper stock into strips, and made two papier-maché art bowls. I have a set of three or four blown-glass bowls made by another artist friend of mine, when she was working in the University of Wisconsin glass lab. I used two of these glass bowls as molds. I followed the instructions of one of the papier-maché recipes I had found, and lined the mold bowls with petroleum jelly. This worked well, but had the downside of leaving some traces of petroleum jelly on the bowls, which took a while to get off, after the bowls had dried.



To make a paper bowl like this, you tear paper into strips, soak it in the bonding material (the white glue with water, or paste) for a minute or two, till the paper is pliable, then form the strips into the mold. After making the paper bowl in the mold, you can sop up the extra wetness with a paper towel. The bowls need to dry for a minimum of 24 hours, typically, before they can come out of the molds without falling apart. Once out of the mold, it usually takes another day or two before they're completely dry. Once dry, they are quite firm, strong enough to hold shape, even strong enough to be containers for other materials. (Not food!)



All in all, for a first effort, I'm very satisfied. I'm still learning what I'm doing. I expect to do several more simple bowls, while I learn what I'm doing, then move on to other forms. Perhaps some plates, platters, and other forms that have relief could make interesting molds. I have seen some square Japanese plates, for example, that might make very interesting forms. Maybe even something like a wall sculpture.




Next, I made two more experimental bowls, made from strips torn up from old photo-prints of mine. I have several boxes full of laser-prints on paper, made from my photographs and digital art. Most of these I made when I was working at various graphic arts jobs which happened to have printers that they let me use. Laser prints, while quite crisp and permanent, are on standard printer paper, not photographic paper. That means I can't really sell them as photo prints. So what am I to do with them? Why, recycle them into other art.

So I made two more bowls from these laser photo prints. The interesting thing about using the photo prints this way is that I can make different images inside and outside; so you can make a themed piece of art using more than one static image.

I tried lining the molds with plastic wrap rather than petroleum jelly this time. This worked very well, as the finished bowls popped right out of the molds after drying, and the plastic wrap left nothing behind, unlike the petroleum jelly. A day more of drying, and the bowls look very good. Abstract yet representational.

One of this second group of bowls uses photos I've made of my small collection of vintage typewriters; the outside of the bowl is typewriter keys, while the inside uses photos of other parts of the typewriter.



Bowl of Type

The second bowl uses photos I've made of nudes in nature—part of an ongoing series of photographs of the nude male form in natural settings, which I began in 2000 and still continues. The photos used for this bowl were made over two or three years of camping in northern Minnesota. The different models were all friends who agreed to pose for me.



Bowl of Eros

As i said, i view these as experiments. This is brand new art for me, although I have been intrigued by paper arts for several years. I've seen lots of beautiful paper-arts pieces over the years, which can be sewn as well as glued, containing swatches of fabric, of woven paper, of feathers, and other materials. There is potential here for making something more shamanic, as well. I find myself also moving towards abstraction rather than representation; even the bowls made from paper would be cubist, or refracted, not perfectly pictured. Layers and nuanced complexities and resonant associations of image, word, meaning, context.

What I Like About David Hockney

He's always exploring. He doesn't settle into one style and repeat himself endlessly. He plays. Not everything that results is good, or good art, but it's always interesting. His interests keep expanding. His style as an artist keeps changing. As a viewer of his art, he keeps me guessing, and makes me think.

He sometimes leaves part of a drawing or painting unfinished. He allows an outline of a figure or shape to remain an outline. He's not attached to absolute realism. Thus, his paintings and drawings evoke emotion and memory because they become iconic, presenting just enough detail to relate to a specific personal experience, and leaving out the details that would force the art into being purely biographical rather than universal.

His homoerotic drawings, etchings, and paintings. I like the way he paints the male nude, but often only suggests rather than explcitily renders. There are subtleties and reflections in this way of suggesting a nuide's form. His nudes can be highly charged, highly erotic, but they stay this side of the line of explicit pornography. They are about the people inhabiting the flesh, not just about the flesh. This might be the result of using friends as models, rather than strangers. You can see similar looking for the person inside the flesh in the art of other artists who use friends as models.

The way he frames a painting, it's often like a snapshot from a camera, rather casual, even apparently accidental. I like the way things are often not formallly framed, but go out past the edges. Going outside the frame gives a composition energy, as though the story continues beyond the edge of the picture, or the end of the book. It is the conventions of closed narrative that habituate us to tidy endings, neat resolutions, and definite ends to stories. Hockney de-habituates us from our expectations of formal compositions and tidy endings by giving us untidy snapshots and voyeuristically casual compositions. It's almost as if the composition didn't matter: yet one can be certain that Hockney was very thoughtful and careful about it, and worked towards that effect.





Probably his most famous paintings are his swimming pool paintings. But they're only one style and one period from his larger body of work. They're iconic in part because of their subject matter, and how he treats that subject, but they're not his most original work.





Cubism shows up most strongly in his photo collages. He has frequently stated that Cubism was an important and powerful influence on his art. Yet I think his most Cubistic innovations lie in his assembled photo collages. These are often Polaroid pieces, many individual shots taken of a scene from multiple viewpoints, then arranged evocatively. This is a technique for collage in photography that I have used myself, and I admit to a Hockney influence here, among others. I find Cubist-inspired photography to be very fertile precisely because it allows me to step outside of narrative and tell about some person or place from simultaneous multiple viewpoints outside normal time. You're able to see everything all at once: when you re-arrange spatial perception you inevitably re-arrange your awareness of time as well, because they are inextricably linked.





I like many of his drawings for their graphic sense: design, layout, overall scale and arrangement. As a painter he isn't afraid of white space. White space seems to terrify most people, including artists and graphic designers. In commercial publication, white space comes as a premium: each inch of paper that can contain info or advertising usually does, as that's how you make a profit from your publication, by packing it in. There can be an artistry to dense-packing, but one of the key differences between commercial art and fine art is their intentions. Hockney sometimes plays with this tension, as does Robert Rauschenberg, by toying with the tension between dense-packing and an evocation of openness. One reason some of Hockney's California paintings are so popular, including the swimming pool paintings, is that they evoke the archetype of the open spaces of the West, which is linked to our mythologies of open spaces, the open road, endless travel, and the psychology of openness that underlies all this which is based on the heroic individuality of free choice. One thing I like about camping out in the wild areas of the West is the silence: unfortunately, just as white space comes at a premium in visual design, so too has our aural space become increasingly constantly filled with noise: silence too comes at a premium. I think most people are afraid of silence; of emptiness; of the void; of white space; and do everything they can to fill it in rather than just let it be. Hockney's iconic California paintings evoke a high-class (lifestyles of the rich and famous) aesthetic experience because they are both visually quiet and seem to be silent. There's a silence and tranquility present, even in the double portraits wherein there is depicted tensions in the relationships between the people being portrayed, and between the subjects and the objects that surround them in the painting. Hockney seems at times quite playful in his depiction of an artificial stillness that we all know is a fiction.

for Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy

at the thrift store today
a new old typewriter
ancient Underwood portable
saw it a few days ago
still there still unsold
bought it brought it home
cleaned it up ribbon
still works some of the keys
stick the X key sticks
watched a documentary
about Christopher Isherwood
and Don Bachardy lovers
thirty years age difference
didn't matter didn't ever matter
why would it why should it
if it's love it doesn't matter
older younger mentor student
father son mistaken by some to be
what mattered was the words and images
the old writer and the young artist
the artist stopped drawing anyone else
for the last six months of the writer's dying
then spent all day drawing his corpse
the sunny day after he died
Christopher eyes closed jaw slack
skin folded in wasted away not much hair
everything gone pale and faded
pose in repose drawn again and again
while the artist kept looking
and seeing seeing clearly even if eyes clouded
the last look of the body of the writer
in pose and repose looking exactly

the same my father did in the hour after he too died
two years ago today

Prayers

Prayers (2008), arrangement of photographs and digital prints

December 1st is World AIDS Day. Honoring this day is as much about ending prejudice against those who are living with HIV (we all know someone who is) as it is about education and prevention. The Red Ribbon symbol is everywhere, and if you see it now, you'll know why.

I was invited to submit my artwork to a World AIDS Day art and education gallery exhibit in Madison, WI, and six works were accepted. The connection was made by a friend of mine who is an artist, and who has lived with HIV some several years. He encouraged me to submit my work, and he also has some large oil paintings in the show as well.

The show is sponsored by the UW Health HIV/AIDS Comprehensive Care Program at UW Hospital and Clinics in Madison, Wisconsin, and is part of AIDS Action 2008. The exhibit is described as: "The featured event of AIDS Action will be a community art exhibit relating to the personal, political and social aspects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic." The exhibition will be shown from December 1 thru 5, at Common Wealth Gallery, Madison Enterprise Center, 100 S. Baldwin St., Madison, WI. There's an artists' reception the last day of the exhibit, Friday evening, December 5, during which some members of Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus of Madison will perform a small group of unaccompanied songs.


Prayers

I've been photographing friends and acquaintances since 2000, as part of my nudes in nature series. I realized in going through artwork and photographs to submit to this show, that one thing that tied together many of my male nudes in natural settings was an attitude of prayer, of contemplation, of connection. I've never concealed the truth that much of my art contains mystical and transpersonal content; I've never pretended that I wasn't interested in mysticism, shamanism, and depth psychology. Naturally, your interested show up in your artwork. Yet as I was going through images to present for the exhibition, I realized that a great number of these photographs were thematically related, and the theme was prayer. So I gathered several prints together, arranging them intuitively until everything felt just right. The title of this new piece came so easily, it was almost comical in its obviousness: Prayers.

This is one of six pieces of mine that were accepted for the exhibit, and are now on display in the gallery.

•

One of Joni Mitchell's most memorable songs of recent years, for me, is Sex Kills from her album Turbulent Indigo, itself one of her best albums. Mitchell is known for her razor-sharp insights into world issues such as environmental degradation, social injustice, and violence. Sex Kills is a song about AIDS, about how love turns to death, about how the rich get richer while the poor die because they can't afford healthcare; and much more. It's a summation, a snapshot of evil, of how by our selfishness we destroy each other and the world we live on. Here is the song's first verse and chorus:

I pulled up behind a Cadillac,
We were waiting for the light,
And I took a look at his license plate,
It said, JUST ICE.
Is justice just ice?
Governed by greed and lust?
Just the strong doing what they can
And the weak suffering what they must?

And the gas leaks
And the oil spills
And sex sells everything
And sex kills
Sex kills

The anger in the song is, as usual for Mitchell, wound together with love. The observation of degradation is bound up with compassion. Surely we can do better than this; surely we can care for each other more deeply, and more sanely. Sex Kills is not just about AIDS, but AIDS is included in there.

•

I wrote a short poem some years ago, in which the dead and the living coexist, merge, and meet one another. I've posted this poem before, but I want to repeat it here, today, in honor of the circa 33 million who are now living with AIDS, and the over 25 million who have died from it, making HIV one of the greatest pandemics in human history.

involuntary words

little prayers we say,
little strings of words
like pearls around the necks of the dead,
little automatic movements of the eye
flicking towards half-seen things on the peripheries of vision,
hands curling around in warding signs;
out of darkness come the white trees, suddenly there—
we give a little exclamation, a puff of exiled breath,
and riding out with it float the white tongues of fear;
shimmering in green light,
the hummingbird floats above the pool,
we give a soft cry of pleasure
as its flickering iridescence vanishes;
small red leaves swirl about the mossy shelf above the water,
stirred by children’s unseen hands, little girl ghosts
who watch from the shadows and giggle;
alone and silent
while rain comes weeping down,
we speak quiet words over the stone,
pearls strung together by song,
a little laughter, a small child’s wide eyes;
and you, beneath the stone,
do you hear it? those little prayers
and unnoticed sighs; they ring for you through the silence,
the darkness, the silence, the voices of the soil,
the sounds of the living,
given to the dead.

The Boy, the Flower, and the Typewriter

In my basement I have a small collection of vintage and antique typewriters. About half of them are portables, complete with travel cases; some of the cases are leather, others are wood boxes, still others with plastic travel cases. I have an old Underwood; a couple or Royals; portable Remingtons and Smith-Coronas.

I don't collect a lot of things—vintage typewriters, lapel pins from national and state parks I've visited, books—although I do admit some things mass more than others. I'm not a collector the way some collectors are; and I'm a recovering packrat, finally cured of that tendency by the many months it took to go through the crap in my parents' house after they passed on; so I don't really care to gather too many chattels into my possession. I'm also not a "serious collector" in that these old typewriters have often stumbled my way, without having to seek them out. I don't spend a lot of time or money on the things I do collect. My Underwood, which weighs a ton, was the only one I went out of my way to acquire; but I still paid less than twenty dollars for it.

My tastes are also rather monastic, when it comes to decorative objects. I like examples of functional, elegant design; an exquisite, simple Michael Graves teakettle is far more attractive to me than any Victorian silver tea service. I am drawn more towards simplicity and Minimalism, in architecture, than I am to the Baroque and over-decorated. Visual clutter leads to mental clutter, to being distracted and scattered. I keep my house clean, and put things away when I'm done with them, including dishes, because I'm more vulnerable than ever to being derailed from my purpose, thanks to the life-changing events of recent years, which I'm still recovering from. A clean house is one way of coping with a lack of focus elsewhere.

In going back over my design and illustration work, because I'm starting over, I have been digging through new and old artwork alike. I found this image, originally made in 2003, I think, and have pulled it out again to use in my self-marketing.

This image is iconic, for me, and speaks to lots of the reasons I get pleasure from art-making, graphic design, illustration, and photography.

I made a Photoshop collage of a male nude, photographed in the studio, and a flower, also shot in the studio, under careful lighting. I printed the finished Photoshop collage, then inserted it into one of my antique typewriters, rolling it like a page of typescript around the typewriter's platen, as though the typewriter were producing the art.

To me, this symbolizes a convergence of old and new; the old printing technology meeting the newest; the digital meeting the analog; the natural and organic meeting the mechanical; the chaotic (nude and flower) meeting the orderly (mechanical precision of engineering, in technology). The finished artwork, for me, symbolizes how the digital emerges from the old, too: the digital image scrolling up from the keyboard; I thought about this very often, in my earlier days of doing graphics and typesetting work on computers. The technologies are recursive, curving back around to support each other in new and surprising ways.

I enjoy the fact that all the different technologies, old and new together, go to produce a single finished artwork. Old and new tech are not in conflict; the one doesn't replace the other, rather it provides a new palette of artistic choices. I often go back and use older tech in my music and art-making. I've recorded flute improvisations, a bamboo or cane flute being one of the oldest musical technologies on the planet, directly onto my laptop.

I've used my typewriters in more than one photo shoot. I have some other images like the one shown here, which are similarly iconic. I also have a set of close-ups I've been thinking of marketing as a CD of royalty-free images for other designers to buy and use.

I've also used my typewriters for the design purpose which I originally intended: to illustrate my catalog of original typefaces. I run White Dragon Type Foundry, a mostly amateur business, in which I give most of my work away. I design typefaces. I design them for fun, and because I'm fascinated by the history of letterforms. But I've also designed typefaces professionally, and occasionally lucratively. My font pages contain a wide range of my type design work, and several examples of the often-whimsical artwork I've made using my old typewriters.

I've been too busy moving and sorting through other belongings—and traveling—these past few months, to really do much more with my typewriters. But I might still add to the collection, if the write instrument comes along. Most of my typewriters still work, too; I've thought off and on about doing some type design based on their built-in forms. I could type out a phrase, digitize it, and go to work. (The old and new merging together again, as in the piece I talked about above.)

I did actually do this, once already, sort of, with my typeface Smith&Wesson Corona. I took this same typewriter and photographed it, with a sheet rolled onto the platen, as above, with sheet this time being the typeface's own sample-sheet. A fun bit of recursive illustration.



And I might set up all the vintage typewriters to be photographed again. I do find that re-doing the same subject, years later, gives one a different perspective on it. I don't like to repeat myself, artistically or personally. But revisiting old friends is not the same thing at all.

Erotica vs. Pornography

The old ironic joke goes: The difference between pornography and erotica is the lighting. As far as that goes, it's true. The question lies in trying to draw distinctions between the two: where do you draw the line? There are subjective elements to making judgments about erotica and porn, but to say that the entire enterprise is subjective goes too far, especially in regard to the creative arts. I think it's certain that judgmentalism about pornography is usually subjective, relative, and culturally-bound. It's less certain that erotica is always porn: because after all eros is after all the life-force itself, and without eroticism there would be no sexuality, no perpetuation of the species, no prostitution, sacred or otherwise, and no millenia of art. Animals rut, and so do many humans; but humans also make art about it all.

I've been having this or similar discussions with other poets and artists lately, because I write homerotic texts, and make homoerotic photos and artwork. I can tell you my personal working definition of where the line lies between eroticism and porn, but that's just mine, nothing definitive.

(Can music be homoerotic? That's the question posed by two compilations of older recordings recently released on CRI, titled Gay American Composers, Vols. I and II. They are excellent compilations, by the way, and have returned to print some of my old favorite vinyl recordings from CRI's back catalogue; CRI is a label devoted entirely to new music, a genuine rarity in the music biz. Composers included on the two CDs include: Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, Samuel Barber, Marc Blitzstein, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Ben Weber, John Cage, Alwin Nikolais, Robert Helps, Lee Hoiby, Lou Harrison, Chester Biscardi, Ned Rorem, David Del Tredici, Robert Maggio, Conrad Cummings, William Hibbard, Jerry Hunt. The question of homoeroticism in music is implicit more than explicit, yet several of the composers echo my ideas in their artist's statements: these are composers who happen to be gay, rather than "gay composers." On the other hand, if every gay artist, composer, and writer in America suddenly decided to stop working for a week, all at once, there would be a vast echoing silence. Broadway would shut down, so would several TV networks, concert halls, and magazines—and not just the obvious ones. Think about it.)

The problem with commonplace definitions of eroticism and pornography is that they are socially-driven, not artistically. All such socially-driven definitions will remain vague and equivocal in a pluralistic society, wherever diversity is present and not legislated against, and thus rarely be of any real use. The old legal standard of I don't know what pornography is, but I know it when I see it can only carry us so far. In the face of conformist pressure, there is always a tendency to take one's desires underground, into the shadows; which may not serve them in the most healthy way.

I tend to look at eros and pornography through the eyes of an artist. As a photographer, I could say that there is some truth to the joke about lighting, and that would be true. As a writer, I don't find reading pron to be very interesting—it can even be unintentionally hilarious, when it's really badly written. Nothing makes pornography wilt like derisive laughter. On the other hand, eros maintains space for the laughter of joy and pllay. It's easy to define porn as demeaning, as objectifying, as sterile. Yet the Venus de Milo is universal, an objectified vision of the goddess of love (at least that is the meaning accrued to this statue whose origins remain veiled); and other art that includes sexuality, that is considered great art, can demean its subjects, or objectify them, or be emotionally sterile. Perhaps the main difference between erotica and porn is in how you use them, or the amount of emotional connection you feel to the person(s) being represente in the art itself.

As a creative artist:

• I am unable to define anything as pornographic that brings more compassion (love, eros) into the world.

• I am unable to condemn any artwork that brings more lust into the world, if that lust is uplifting (putz aside) rather than exploitative or coercive.

• I am unable to define as pornography anything that heals or enhances relations between persons, or between persons and the world; as opposed to anything that increases alienation or emotional distance from the other.

• I am able to define as pornography that which inspires a misdirection of love/compassion, in the forms of greed, avarice, or pride, or the desire to possess, use, manipulate, and coerce.

As you might deduce, my definitions are contextual and relational, and refer to how the art is used rather than what it contains. Intention matters more than content per se.

As such, these defintions can apply to more than art, and its products. They can apply to science, religion, politics, and everyday life. Is your job erotic (does it enhance your life and compassion) or is it pornographic (does it reduce, demean, or stifle the growth of your personhood)?

The problem of definition lies directly in the lack of clarity between the many uses in English of the word "love." Eros, itself a Greek root word, is also about life-force, the power under life; it does not refer only to sexuality, or sensuality, as is commonly assumed. The Greeks had multiple words for "love," in its different manifestations, including some with unavoidable overlap: eros, agape, storge, philokalia, and more. These words are discussed in theology regularly, but poetry rarely; that theological arguments often underlie attacks on pornography should come as no surprise. In theology, the Greek roots are often defined as sexual love (eros), family love (storge), brotherly or companionship love (philokalia), and spiritual or altruistic love (agape). I think you can safely bet which ones are emphasized as the best forms of love in most Abrahmaic theological writings.

But there are other Greek words applicable to this topic: pragma (pragmatic, expedient love), ludus (playful love, and also joyous love), mania (in which the lover is possessed by being in love, unstable, highly emotional—what in Western culture is taken as romantic love, courtly love, obsessive love).

Ludus applies to erotic art, perhaps, while mania might more often apply to pornography: the desire to possess the love-object, or the sexual experience. Ludus is child-like, open to experimentation, and exploratory; I know of people involved in the bondage/discipline/sado-masochism scene who I would call ludus lovers, because their attitudes are entirely open and pleasure-seeking and, well, joyous. (It ain't my scene, personally, but I have friends who are deeply into it, and we've talked about it regularly.) Frankly, mania is given far too much ink in our culture already, because it umbrellas everything from adolescently-impassioned love-letters to stalker movies. This is the legacy of The Art of Courtly Love, and how the assumptions in that model of romantic love continue to play out in our times. (cf. Gail and Snell Putney, The Adjusted American: Normal neuoroses in the individual and society, 1964)

The confusion around mania, as opposed to eros, may lie at the very root of this question of the difference between eroticism and pornography.

The thing to remember about Eros is that it refers to more than sexual love: it is eros that drives us in life. When someone turns to business entrepeneurship, and derives emotional sustenance and fulfillment from it, that person is responding to an erotic urge—although some of those same theologians would call it a misplaced erotic urge, because it is not being used to fuel agape. (This point is highly contestable: in most Western theologies agape is priveleged over all other forms of love, because it brings us closer to God—which is based on the assumption that we are separated from God—whereas the panentheistic mystical tradition, which is a parallel stream in Christianity, says that there is no separation, everything is in God, and everything is God. So, eros is agape, and agape can be expressed via eros. Virtually all of the Christian mystics, as well as mystics from other religious traditions, say this. Then again, most mainstream theologians are bean-counters rather than genuine mystics.) Eros can be responsible for passionate activity in any arena, when we love what we are doing, when we are inspired and completely dedicated to the task at hand. Writing poetry (making music)—the creative act—is itself an erotic activity. For myself, I feel some of my nature/visionary poems are erotically charged, even though they have nothing at all to do with sex or sexuality. Yet they are charged with eros, with passion, with com-passion. Through our voices, we give birth to the words that make the world.

Mania, by contrast, is obsessive and possessive. It cannot let go, and does not want to let go, of the love-object. And I use the word "love-object" deliberately, because mania is always a projection: some image from our own undeveloped self projected onto the "perfect love," "perfect mate," and/or "perfect date" or "perfect romantic partner." Something we think is lacking in ourselves, a lack in us that can only be soothed by possessing the other person or object. Sexuality as a form of empowerment—but never self-empowerment, because mania is always a projection, thus, the maniac is always looking outside themselves to aquire their self-esteem. "My life can only be complete if I acquire the perfecet mate, the perfect kids, the perfect house, the perfect car." Rather than looking within to accomplish the sacred marriage or opposites within one's own self, the maniac looks to others, looks outward, and never looks within.

The maniac is indeed looking outward, but he sees only himself, in that he sees only what he projects, rather than what is actually there. So, in that sense, the maniac is looking inward, because it's all about self-gratification. Different partners every night amounts to masturbation-with-help. All that the sex maniac sees is reflections of his own desire: a world of mirrors.

But the maniac is not looking inward in any genuine way, because this outward projection and mirroring is the only way in which the maniac know himself. Genuine self-contemplation, self-reflection, and self-knowledge are precluded, because to this person all knowledge (and self-worth, and even self-love) come from outside himself, even if all he can see outside himself is the mirrors. The genuine inward journey begins by discarding what we think we know of the world, and giving up those masks and mirrors and projections we place onto the world. Genuine self-knowledge begins with removing those outer masks, and seeing what's actually there. At which point, the person realizes that they are not who they thought they were, and must go inside themselves to see what's really in there, rather than what they assumed was there. It is often a painful and difficult odyssey, because it begins with discovering we are not who we thought we are, and it will reveal to our inner eye every wound we have taken in life—but also every wound we have inflicted on others during our lifetime.

Mania is truly eros defiled, or misdirected love and compassion. Mania leads to power over others, while eros leads to power with. As the saying goes, which would you choose: The love of power, or the power of love?

I can define as pornographic anything that seeks power-over, that enhances the love of power, that projects completion of the sacred marriage onto anything outside the self. Pornography replicates the self via projection. Pornography truly does not see the Other, but only the projected self.

I can define as erotic anything that seeks power-with, that is an appreciation of beauty, that does not seek to own the other but to unite with them as equals, and/or to help them become more fully and beautifully who they already are. Eroticism enhances the self via engagement.

Mania is what drives pornography. Eros is what drives eroticism.

So, it seems to me that part of the confusion around erotica vs. pornography lies in the dearth of useful language with which to talk about it. The I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it test is not, in the end, either useful or pragmatic, since it invites relativism over concensus, and opinion over discourse.

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A further distinction between eros and pornography lies in the arena of assumptions about spirit and flesh. An erotic viewpoint tends to view spirit and flesh as one. A pornographic viewpoint tends to view spirit and flesh as separate, and even in battle with one another; this is the legacy of the body-hating, Christian theological, dichotomous worldview templated onto Western culture by Augustine and Paul, although it has its roots in older Platonic Greek thought, and reached its ultimate formulation in Cartesian dualism. Ultimately, in this worldview, since spirit and flesh are not one, flesh is just another form of matter to be exploited. There is no holiness, no sacredness in pornography. The great irony in this is that Christianity was meant to be a religion of inclusive love, not one of hatred, separation, and dualism. But by making spirit holy and flesh unholy, Christian theologians created the very conditions that spawned the pornographic industry so many of them object to.

Matthew Fox says it clearly, I think:

I wonder how many Christians have been invited to meditate on the fact that the word carnal is at the heart of their primary doctrine of Incarnation. Our culture, having been poisoned by negative attitudes toward flesh, is ill at ease with the notion. Indeed, a religious faith that claims to believe that "the word was made flesh" actually denigrates flesh and has turned "flesh" over to the pornographic industries rather than sanctifying it and including it in our spiritual practice. It is time for the ambivalence towards flesh to cease. Either flesh is sacred or it is not. Either the divine is present, incarnated (which literally means "made flesh"), or it is not. If it is not, it is time that worship and education became enfleshed, incarnated, in order to provide a proper home (eikos) for the Divine, which is clearly biased in favor of flesh, having, after all, made it. Our very language is biased agains the flesh: Webster's Dictionary says that the antonym or opposite of carnal is spiritual or intellectual. Here we are, two thousand years after the Incarnation of Jesus, and our language still doesn't get it: that flesh and spirit are one. . . .

The textual revolution that marked the modern era, which began with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, has not been kind to the flesh. Text is not fleshy, but context is. Flesh's brilliance is not easily illuminated on the printed page. Flesh is too colorful for that, too tactile, too full of breath, too soft and yielding to the touch. During the modern era flesh became denigrated in whole new ways—its glory is not of a mathematical and quantitative kind. Flesh is qualitative. Body counts soared during the modern era. Flesh became expendable: human flesh in human wars but also animal flesh and bird flesh and what flesh and fish flesh and soil flesh and forest flesh.

As the modern era's preoccupation with text yields to a postmodern concern for context, perhaps flesh can score a comeback. Perhaps humans can learn to love their flesh anew—and with it the flesh of others on whom we are so dependent and interdependent. —Matthew Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Lessons for transforming evil in soul and society, p. 57 ff.

When the body is denigrated and demeaned, so is sexuality and eroticism, and that is what opens the door to pornography. Ironically, without a culturally-proscribed hatred of the flesh, there would be no pornography. Pornography is highly dependent on religion, even when it is explicitly blasphemous.

But eros celebrates. Eros embodies, and sanctifies, and makes holy. Thus, erotic art is celebratory, and erotic poetry is a poetry of praise.