Disaffection: a deconstruction of lyric

I move as slow as geology the morning after a long day of music,
walks, making photos. It's raining, just a little spit on the window,
which always slows and dampens the mood. It's called a comforter
because you curl up in it, get warm, be comforted. But I'm alone.

Which is no comfort. Nobody love me. Nobody wants to. The inane,
almost comical voice of self-pity, as sincere as a five-year-old
that fearful morning before the first day of school. That voice inside,
no matter how old you grow up, still there. We can always revert.

A man says he wants to come meet me, maybe for a sensual date.
When do I tell him the things that inevitably turn them all away
from my doorstep, the truths of suffering and ecstasy
that have become my new daily life? Rejection seems inevitable.

No one wants to play around an ostomy bag. I try not to blame them,
but damnit I do. Now that I have my life back, scarred as it's become,
I have fifteen years of damaged libido to make up for. Freud no doubt
would have something pithy to say, but I stopped listening years ago.

Sexuality and surgery lurk on the same playing field. My skin
is full of holes, meteoric pockmarks, troughs and long grazes
of near-misses of the familiar scythe. I can objectify; can you?
I'm going to spend this morning, like every morning, alone.

It's not that you had to leave so early. It's that you never stayed.
How can I regret last night when it never happens? No chances
to linger over theory. The minute they find out about the scar
and the shitbag they suddenly remember a forgotten appointment.

With destiny, I suppose. It drives them away. Do you expect sympathy?
From most men the most you ever get is mutual temporary lust.
Asking for deepset, durable, rooted emotion, you need a bard.
Or a shaman. Just not that hero, with his thousand faces turned away.

Some monsters he won't conquer. I feel some mornings a grendel,
a wyvern, a manticore. Some cold nights the sensations are more wendigo.
Anything to make the hunger stop. You eat out of the freezer while
there's still time. Hunger become emotional purge, a twisted balm.

Ask a bard. Only someone who's seen the world, and maybe seen my skin
unscarred, can see it that way again. Maybe he can ignore the bag.
It's certain no one else will. I expect to be celibate for a very long time.
It's good I can still love my own skin, despite all scars and meteors.

Gates of Sleep

Some late night wondering about where I'm going
and where I've been, tied up in fragments rather than knots,
made into a weaving that at last ties together all the various
threads of a life that seems unraveled and directionless.
And then I can't help but wonder if the men I've loved
had anything to do with it. I carry a photo of Ganesha
in the truck, tucked up in the overhead sunshade. And on
the dashboard I have a small pewter necklace bead of Ganesha,
which I had once tied to the rear view mirror, but which has fallen
loose. Some morning, doing truck chores, I'll get a piece of wire
and reattach the Remover of Obstacles to the view. Meanwhile,
I've put most considerations, worries, and nightmares on hold.
It takes all my energy to like these plans for summer. It keeps me
going, though. Somewhere along the road I lost some necessary
element, some attraction or attractiveness. Now, no matter where
I turn, there isn't anyone to spend the night with, not even in
the desert heat with long distances between stops, roads, and hotels.
Back now from long southwestern roads, back from the heat,
back into the freezing rain, these nights seem lonelier than ever.
Rain on the tin cap over the fireplace is both soothing and desolate.
It's late at night. The world seems to have come to an end,
except for the small circle around this lamp, this flickering early moth.
I invoke sleep under the sign of the wrathful deities.
The many moods of Mahakala, all of them fatal to illusion
and disrepair. I'm more drawn to the wrathful deities, they seem
more real, more connected to life's regular disruptions and rocky trails.
Kicking a stone off the cliff-edge path with steel-toed boots, you know not
to go chasing its fall down that steep abyss. Below you, a million acres
of empty air filling the canyon from rim to rim. One step, and you fall.
The photo of Ganesha in the truck is the elephant-headed deity
in his rare wrathful aspect, black-bodied, golden-eyed, golden-trunked,
a rare Nepalese statue seen in an art museum of the god in flames,
dancing for all the world in a ring of fire like his father, Shiva the Destroyer.
Dancing the world in and out of existence a billion times a second,
the rite of Shiva, blood on the plains, blood on the stones of the canyon.
Wrathful Ganesha serves to wake you up, even if you'd rather stay asleep.
All of the wrathful deities are about slapping you awake. I admit I find
most of the peaceful deities dull, sleep-inducing, their tranquil meditations
soothing but disconnected from my own life. Too much drama for that
dull grace. The slaps on both cheeks from the black-skinned,
tiger-robed, corpse-dancing wakers serves me best. I guess I'm thick.
I suppose I should wake into some higher life, but all I really want to do
right now is find another lover. Prospects are few. Hopes are dim.
Somehow you go on, even when it's pointless. Insomnia.
That's the real weight of living, this going-on that serves no purpose.
Where's the Remover of Obstacles, the Opener of Roads, when you really
need to find someone to sleep with? Not even for sex, just for the warmth
of a body in bed next to yours. I remember Fernando, from Peru,
joyous dark-skinned man with the generous heart and stunning smile.
Nights and weekends we spent together, naked, sleeping, kissing,
making love naked in the hidden back yard hot tub. Nights we slept,
mornings when I woke feeling completely satisfied, completely one
with the person next to me, waking to feel breath on my chest hairs,
hearing his heartbeat through my jaw. Where's my new sleeper?
Sleepers joining hands across the world, distances dissolved by
that elephant-headed guardian of roads, travel, and historians.
Remove the obstacles between me my love. Between me and restful sleep.
Remove the dancing from my legs, my jaw, my itching hide.
I'm going on, anyway, even if I never wanted to go on.
We made love on the rug on the floor. Now we want to meet again.
Make these roads collapse, Lord, into connection.


Shiva, Dance All Night

Aubade of the Poet and the Candlemaker

The impoverished saint, rising from his bed of love,
walks naked to the shower, sheathed in last night's memories.
Can you start life as a poet? Is it learned? He can at least start the day.
Writing words of love on the fogged bathroom mirror,
finger calligraphy on warm glass. His touch on shoulder,
tracing lines on shin with the poet-calligrapher's loving touch.

To shave or not to shave? Maybe tomorrow.
A day's scruffiness won't kill anything.
Lips feel almost bruised from heavy kissing.
Herons behind those lips taken to himself, taken wing.
Morning rituals. A slight whatever.

The problem is he thinks too much. Turns everything into words,
even before he's finished living it. Thinks of lines while lips are on thighs,
wants to write them down, wants to write them, instead commits them
to memory, while writing ideograms with spit on skin.
At least as sensual as pen, as brush, as tongue.

Last night's candles, some burned down to shapeless puddles,
still everywhere, on every flat surface in the apartment.
Massive clean-up. Some wax on the rug. Dammit.
Shortcut to heating a home: a hundred candles,
and two bodies together.

Resurrection

a Spiral Dance essay

A woodpecker taps in my fruit tree behind the porch, as I sit quietly in the morning. Loud geese fly over at the same moment.

Easter morning. Have I come back to life? “He is risen, indeed.” That’s how I feel. I feel like this is my personal Easter, not a traditional religious one. I went to bed at midnight, and woke early today. Last night I set large candles burning outside the front door, like a stone door’s path into darkness and back into light. I make little rituals intuitively, not always knowing what I’m doing, even later. Last night was a candlelit night throughout the house. The two candles marking the path to my door marked a return of spirit: the trail to the entrance: the way back home, and into the kingdom of heaven. This all sounds so inflated and pretentious, but I feel very humble before the act itself. Words can betray us because they make something visceral into a mere abstraction of itself: the sign that stands in for the thing is not itself the thing. I haven’t listened to any music yet today, yet what I hear in my head is Fauré’s Requiem, which ends with a sublime “In Paradisum.” In Paradise we return home to ourselves, to our oneness with the divine.

A part of the day is waiting. Waiting till I need to leave home to go do what I’m supposed to do. Waiting to come back to life. In the meantime, we sit and contemplate our lives. I can feel the eros moving in me, like a tide of energy that reaches to the ends of each limb; but I feel no need to express it sexually in any usual way today; I am not drawn to physical sex, this morning, even as I feel the tingle of eros everywhere. This is neither denial nor transcendence of sexuality: I neither repress nor exalt. It’s the expression of pansexuality.

Watching a red-headed woodpecker tap his head against the fruit tree’s mid-level branches this morning was an erotic experience, as was hearing the Canadian geese flying north immediately above my roof-beam. Drinking hot sweet tea as I nibbled at fresh warm cinnamon toast dripping with melted butter was an erotic experience. Chickadees bounce in the spruce branches, filled with the quick fire of living. The robins have been around for awhile, but now I am hearing the territorial call of a redwing blackbird, which for me is the true sign of spring’s return. The world is coming back to life, and under every feather and flower bud pulses a white glow and spark of life-force like a river of sunlight fire running across the nerves and veins of the created world. The surfaces of things are the illusion; the fire within is what’s real. Matter is only slow energy—everything is in vibration, even what we consider to be dead.

It is easy to be drawn into simple adoration of the life-force today, the contemplation of the everyday ecstatic awareness. I spend many days with these feelings running through; they become an ordinary experience of the extraordinary. Mostly you must keep silent about it: let it play out, throughout the day, without drawing special attention to it. Nothing dissipates ecstasy like overly-dramatized awe. Sometimes it’s a relief to step into one’s head, and just be notionally rational for awhile. Yet when this awareness of the eros is upon you, it is an affirmation of life, of the return to life, after days spent in the valley of the shadow of death.

The truth of illusion, of maya, of the illusion of existence, is that what we take to be real isn’t, and what we have been taught to dismiss is what’s far more real and solid than we are ourselves. What we take to be real is but a dream, while what we assume to be Dreamtime is more real than anything we can trip over in waking life. Some mornings you see all the sparks flowing, the tracks and patterns of the white light that is the constituent force of being, the inner-visual representation of the vibratory force of living. We know now from the new physics that everything we believe to be solid and material is made of living light: matter is energy, and energy forms into matter. The world is made of light, which strobes in and out of existence nine billion times a second.

I sit comfortably nude on my porch, feeling the sunlight on my thighs, and the soft fabric of the chair against my backside. The wind is christening the tree branches with early pollen. A squirrel jumps up and down on a spruce branch making a small cloud of fog from loosened dust.

Sexuality is a celebration of the life-force, of the eros. Flowers are the sexual organs of plants. Humans expressing sexual union are flowering, and orgasm is the explosion of blooms that emerge from the soil and muck of our lives. We are the healthy roses that grow from the shit and blood.

There is a known and well-practiced sensuality of going through the day naked, physically if not emotionally. Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his Journals of the necessity to wear fine fabrics against the skin, to be sensual and embodied, to live in chambers draped with fine colors and textures, to eat and drink fine foods and beverages; in short, to stimulate the senses so that the mind too is full, sensually alive and aware. I do my morning chores without bothering to get dressed, I sit and write in the morning before dressing. I feel very much alive, although not at the moment explicitly, actively sexual. There is sometimes no need to express sexually the erotics of everyday life. If we focus too much on the orgasm we can miss how the rest of existence is equally orgiastic. Three male robins are chasing each other through my trees, games of territory and dominance, loudly chirping the whole time.

Anoint the body with fine oils and lotions, as depicted in the Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s. How ironic the paradox of body-hating anti-sensualist clerics whose own scared texts are themselves so sensual; perhaps this paradox can help explain another paradox, that of clerical sexual misconduct. Any good depth psychologist will remind you that what you repress here will emerge over there, twice as strong, often distorted and laced with shadows. The origins of the oppression of others must logically lie in repression of the self: telling others how to behave is but a reflection of one’s deep inner knowledge of one’s own inner misbehavior. What we judge in others is what we hate most in ourselves. What we hide from ourselves won’t leave us alone.

The morning has been clear and sunny, yet now braided clouds are moving in. The winds chase them into whorls of gray ink. The clouds are layered, thick with strange shapes and patterns. A storm could arise at any time.

Too easily we divert eros in orgasm, we go for the payoff and forget to enjoy the journey. I am a very sensual person, a very sex-positive person, and I judge no-one for what they do when they make love. The only sin I can perceive in sexuality is coercion without consent: forcing one’s ego-will upon another person without their agreement. Making love increases the eros, the life-force, it brings more light into the Universe, and if only for a moment slows down the inevitable heat-death at the end of time. Entropy is our great myth of modern times, replacing the doctrines that no longer give us stories we can embrace or believe in. Making love is anentropic. Coercion is entropic. Sin is entropic: it brings about the great death that much sooner. Hatred and unforgiveness are entropic, contradictions of the life-force itself: those who claim to be fighting against the Adversary often do the Adversary’s work when they become humorless and ideologically fixed. The Adversary’s game-plan is to convince you he does not exist; that death and despair are the reality of existence, and that there is no love. But the Adversary’s failing is that in its pride it cannot love: it runs away from the eros, the life-force, it cannot abide genuine love. When you make love, when you anoint the beloved, as in the Songs of Songs, the Divine is what is present. The eros brings us back to life, and closer to life. Entropy is what tries to convince us life isn’t worth living.

Despair is a theology of material rationality without spiritual content. Dry and deadly dull academic literature is a theology of grammar: but all the artistic craft in the world is useless if you have no subject, if you have nothing to say. Subject-subject consciousness, as defined by Harry Hay, and developed by a couple of generations of Radical Faeries in his wake, makes the Other into the Self: we are One. “The spear in my brother’s heart is the spear in my own heart.” If we are all subjects, all one, there can be no separation between us. We may celebrate diversity as many manifestations of the One. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” The masks of god are endless and endlessly strange. Anoint the body of your beloved, as you are anointed yourself by the Beloved. “The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me.” So said Meister Eckhart, the 14th century mystic.

The 20th century mystic, Thomas Merton, who came into his full flowering after encountering the Zen of Meister Eckhart, and the Zen of Zen, wrote, “It is not true that the saints and the great contemplatives never loved created things, and had no understanding or appreciation of the world, with its sights and sounds and the people living in it. They loved everything and everyone.” A Tungus shaman sang a chant, recorded by a 19th century anthropologist, the repeated refrain of which was, “Everything that is, is alive.” It’s a horrible, tragic mistake to denigrate created things, ti divide and dismiss them from spirit. It is human hubris to imagine that anything created by a loving God could be less than perfect, and less than loved. Spirit that moves in all things, the living spirit, is the same as that living electricity that we can see flowing in the world today, that living fire, the light of creation, the light that is Creation. What is material is not other than spiritual: just as matter and energy are known to be one by the physicists, spirit and flesh are known to be one by the mystics and saints.

Despair is an aspect of hubris, an extreme aspect of self-love: it can see only itself, it cannot see outside the box it finds itself in. Despair says, because we lack the strength to do what we wish to do, we must give up before we even make the attempt. Despair says, why bother? There is no humility in this: no humble acceptance that all of life is greater than I. I see the sparks of eros moving through even the floorboards of my house today, and I know I am only part of a much greater circuit. The electricity that I see moving in all things, and in my self, is all part of a much greater interconnected circuit; I am only one eddy in that greater river, and everything I can perceive is only one bend of that river that flows endlessly on, circling the world, far beyond my sight.

When we say that “god is dead” what we mean is that we can’t find the eros of everyday life. Dryness of spirit, like abuse of power, comes as no surprise. When Nietzsche first proclaimed that “God is dead!” he meant that the old, sterile, facile images of god (imago dei) were all used up and dried out. Nietzsche meant to proclaim this as a liberation, a falling away of the old and sterile in order that something new and very much alive might take its place. Far too many people have misunderstood: Nietzche was not in fact proclaiming the beginning of despair, but it’s end-point. “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” Destroy all images you have of god so that the authentic living Godhead might come in to replace them. Meister Eckhart proclaimed, some centuries before Nietzche, “I pray to God to rid me of God.” He meant that the facile, easy images of the gods that we carry around in us and call upon without much thought, are all false gods. Thomas Merton wrote, “To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.” Love is eros, love is the life-force, love is life: we swim in a sea of lifelove, if only we would take notice. Here is the cardinal pair that lives in my pines, come to stand in the wind on the lawn, and peck after fallen pine-nuts, before swooping crazily home. Everything that is, is alive.

In three days of strange hot afternoons that have come far too early in the year the lawn is green, the flowers have exploded into bloom, and everywhere birds are doing their mating dances. The sap is rising in the trees. In three days, the trees have budded out. In the woods what was dry and brown and gray and sterile is now misted with yellow-green, the tips and fronds of shrubs and trees alike suddenly haloed with new life. The sap is rising in everything that is enfleshed. Anoint the body, the sap is rising. We are all coming back to life, at last.

•

(Previous Spiral Dance essays can be found here.)

James Baldwin on the Mirror of the Self

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with their own pain.

•

Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality.

•

Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.

•

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time.

•

No one can possibly know what is about to happen: it is happening, each time, for the first time, for the only time.

•

Pessimists are the people who have no hope for themselves or for others. Pessimists are also people who think the human race is beneath their notice, that they're better than other human beings.

•

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.

•

The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.

•

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.

•

You know, it's not the world that was my oppressor, because what the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself.

•

There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.

•

James Baldwin made a point of being positive, rather than negative, even when he was angry. His voice, as part of the civil rights movement, was an essential voice. He preferred peace to war, he preferred love to hate. But he was not afraid to speak out against social injustice, institutionalized racism, and many other forms of oppression.

What strikes me now, in reading through Baldwin's published works, as well as in his public speeches, interviews, and occasional op-ed pieces, is that he continually emphasized that the worst forms of oppression are internalized oppression: what people do to themselves, often unconsciously. He was famous for being an outspoken Black civil rights activist and speaker; but even within the civil rights movement, he was not affirmed for being gay. He never apologized, and he never took shelter in the closet; nonetheless, in his lifetime he was never a "famous Black gay writer," but rather a "famous Black writer." The Black community still has difficulty with loving its gay sons.

I think of Baldwin whenever I hear rhetoric from the leaders of a civil rights group say, First we have to fix this problem, before we can address that other problem. Don't they realize that they are intertwined? that they cannot be separated? I think of Baldwin whenever I encounter rhetoric that denies that civil rights, and the human freedom to simply be openly and freely oneself, are at the core of every human experience: that to become truly human we must all free each other as well as ourselves. I think of Baldwin whenever I see a group-within-a-group being quietly moved off the center of the stage because their identity complicates the singular quest for a singular civil goal.

But people are complicated, not single-issue automatons. You can't exclude parts of yourself from your quest to be free, and still be a whole person. You can't ignore others who make you uncomfortable without creating division where there ought to be unity. The rhetoric of civil rights must include genuine diversity, or it will fail because of its own hypocrisy. In truth, hiding aspects of oneself ties up a lot of energy that could fruitfully be used if harnessed.

Liberty is not liberty if it is only partial liberty.

In this, I freely admit to being a Jeffersonian at heart. (As, I think, Baldwin was.) There is an element of pragmatism involved, of course: one has to pick one's battles. So I saw Baldwin at times focusing on one aspect of a rights campaign, and not talking about the rest. But almost as often his discussion were inclusive, and made connections between the necessity of personal liberty and the necessity of respecting the liberty of others. We are all very much the same: unique.

Over and over again, Baldwin reminds us that to be free we must be honest about who and what we are. We must know ourselves well enough to know where we have taken on the role of the oppressor, and taken it upon ourselves to censor ourselves before others can. We do the work of our oppressors for them, by stopping ourselves from speaking out in the face of censure. We hide in plain sight. We pretend to be powerless. We become invisible, ignored, safe.

But in doing so, in giving away ourselves, we lose everything.

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.

•

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.

The Practicalities of Critique & Criticism 3: Gender

Can you tell if a poem is written by a woman? or a man? Can you tell if a critique is by a man? or a woman? (This applies to general writing life, not just online, I believe.) Do men and women have innately different writing and critique styles? "You have your Robert Frost, and I my Emily Dickenson."

It's a question that comes up every so often. It's based on some underlying assumptions about gender innateness that are problematic, if not downright questionable. Whenever these gender-based discussions come up, I have to bite my tongue a lot, as no matter what I say it tends to start a firestorm. But to be blunt, I think gender determinations in these matters are a load of bollocks. Most assumptions regarding gender determinism are questionable, in fact.

As a poet whose writing is often perceived as experimental, wild, and creative, by this criterion, according to some of these usual assumptions about gender, I'm a woman writer. I get a lot of pedantic "corrections" about grammar and punctuation practically every time I submit a poem for critique. Granted, these mostly come from folks unfamiliar with my writing; and there are many poets, men and women both, who have far more formalist views about punctuation, poetic form, and grammar, than I do myself. (My usual reply to questions of grammar: you can safely assume that my use of punctuation is conscious and deliberate, not haphazard; you can also safely assume that if I break any rules of prose grammar—which haven't a damn thing to do with poetry, anyway—that it was deliberate.) Questions about punctuation and grammar in my poems seem to come equally from men and women critiquers. So much for gender determination.

Having lived in more than one non-Western culture in my lifetime, I have to say (again) that our ideas about gender roles are a load of stereotypes. Back in the pre-technological days, which is where many of these stereotypes originate, there may have been a point to them: men do have greater upper-body strength, and women do have stronger lower bodies; that's self-evident biology. But in this technical era, it's perfectly possible for men and women to be equally adept at, and have equal attitudes about, their activities, because many work-related activities are no longer directly tied to physical ability. It seems obvious that this includes writers—writing if anything, is a cerebral, largely non-physical occupation, so it may be even less likely to be gender-determined. (I'm sorry, but all that neurophysiological theory about gender differences in the brain remains unproven, still only theory.) So, logically, any lingering differences between the sexes, in the critiques they give and the poems they write, are purely cultural and no longer biological (if they ever really were). Most gender differences that have been cited as biologically-based, even as recently as 50 years ago, are in fact cultural rather than innate. My experience living in non-Western cultures has led me to believe that nurture means more than nature, in these and many other situations; because the "rules" about gender roles and actions in non-Western cultures, are incredibly diverse and different. If our women have different intellectual approaches to reading and writing poetry, it's because of the way our culture raises our children. Period.

I see the positioning of "creativity, wild abandon, the original voice of the poet" as itself setting up a gender stereotype, in that it positions the "male critic" as the one most likely to object to the wild, original voice of the poet: in other words, the patriarchy is inherently conservative. Whitman was certainly wild and original; he received many criticisms along these lines, in addition to praise. Since virtually all the published poets writing reviews and critiques at Whitman's time, that seems to imply that some feminine men praised him (Emerson) while others derided him (I'd have to look those names up, as they're largely forgotten). I question if this is an accurate portrayal of literary critiquers, even statistically, since it may well be a case of an observer being sensitized to a trend to the point of exaggeration. (For example, for years I drove a sedan; when I switched to a pickup truck, I suddenly noticed how many trucks were on the road, what make they were, what color, etc. In other words, prior to owning a truck, I was not paying attention to them, even though they were surely there all along. This is a kind of cognitive sorting, of tagged awareness.)

I think the reality here is that critiques do not come from a gender bias except where gender bias overlaps with gender stereotypes. The truth is that grammatical pedantry, for example, comes from a mindset that has little to do with gender, and much more to do with issues relating to self-esteem, personal happiness and security and safety, and fear of the unknown and undiscovered. (I will bite my tongue here, for now, although I have much more to say on this particular aspect of the argument.)

I think that Jung was correct when he said that the fully-human, fully-developed person has integrated both masculine and feminine personality traits in him or herself. To be fully-human, fully-integrated means having both male and female aspects to one's personality, and being in balance with them so that they arise spontaneously and appropriately in whatever situation one finds oneself. Thus, an integrated man can be nurturing caregiver, and an integrated woman can be a take-charge business executive.

Many of my closest friends could be called "third gender" people, even the heterosexual ones, and I mean that in several different ways: for example, one close friend is a straight metrosexual man who is a professional musician and pretty good at interior decorating, and he likes purple (and is not gay); several others are what you'd call "butch fairies," i.e. gay men who know who to use chain saws, lesbians who drive pickup trucks; a few others are what you'd call "femme," effeminate, soft, non-athletic. As a gay-identified pansexual/bisexual male, I drive a pickup truck, know how to use a chainsaw, and yet by the criterion of gender-stereotyped literary criticism I write mostly feminine poetry! So much for gender stereotypes. We all contain contradictions: the path to personal integration is to resolve those contradictions into balanced coexistence.

Perhaps it takes encountering "third gender" alternative(s) first-hand to realize that the binary polarity of male-female roles is itself a reified, cultural construction, and not inherently biological. Nevertheless, it seems obvious to me that binary-polarity gender roles are far more fluid and far less fixed than generally presumed; numerous studies in recent decades validate this concept.

So, while one might indeed believe that there is a difference in the way men and women write, and critique, it is not an essential(ist) one, but rather a cultural one. In other words, the culture produces "subject positions" that we inhabit, or not, in various ways. Simultaneously, even given that there is male privilege in our culture, a sense of entitlement, that is still learned behavior, not something innate about men. Some men happen to enact that entitlement more strongly than others—perhaps because they are more tightly-bound to their tribal upbringings—and they often do so quite unconsciously, assuming that is just the way things are, without ever questioning their upbringing. But I don't think that there is anything inherent to gender that leads to these differences in behavior: this is the hinge-point of the distinction between biological gender and culturally-enacted gender roles.

Rude and harsh critiques are not exclusively male styles of critique; whether they come from a man or a woman poet, they have everything to do with that person's lack of social graces, and their probable lack of self-confidence as poet and critic. If there is any gender difference involved, again it's cultural, because women in Western culture have traditionally been taught to keep such rude thoughts to themselves because it's not "ladylike."

Books like John Gray's Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus series are a load of bollocks because all he does is recycle and re-emphasize culturally-based "traditional" gender stereotypes. I've read two of his books, and although he makes pains to say that his ideas are based on observation rather than a priori assumption, he cops out by providing not a single androgynous alternative, but only replays all the existing stereotypes. His observations are of those who are already inculcated in gender stereotypes, and his conclusions are therefore culturally normative and culturally reaffirming. He remains locked in binary-polarity thinking about gender, and ignores the broader range of gender enactment that Kinsey and others actually observed. This is what makes Gray's books regressive: despite his protestations to the contrary, they are ideological, not analytical. On the other hand, if you desire to have on hand a detailed list of normative cultural gender stereotypes, for research purposes, Gray's books are useful.

The cultural assumptions about gender obscure what is actually present in sexual difference, in its purely biological sense: sexual dimorphism, the biological observation that there are two and only two sexes—thus must be only two genders. In fact, this is demonstrably not the case. Sex is governed by several factors: genital, gonadal, hormonal, chromosomal, etc. There is, therefore, more of a spectrum, or continuum, to sexuality than we normally imagine. In John Gray's recycling of cultural assumptions (and not only in his), most people think that there are only two sexes; two only, and never the twain shall meet. (The whole point of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus to achieve communication between two opposites who cannot normally communicate with each other.) This assumption about dimorphic, bipolar gender arises because of the cultural conditioning that begins with early infancy, and is mandatorily reinforced in most educational settings. By the time we reach adulthood, we are thoroughly conditioned to see things this way—and books like Gray's depend on this conditioning for their existence, but also reinforce it. Only a few individuals escape this conditioning unscathed, and they are usually outcasts in some way or another—sexually, culturally, tribally, familially, etc.

It may be argued at this point that I am demonstrating the triumph of the idea of cultural constructivism over essentialism. That is true, as far as it goes. Yet I note that most gender theorists who argue for essentialism have little or no experience living in or studying other (non-Western) cultures, or even third-gender cultures within their own home culture.

Here's a few books I recommend for those interested in pursuing third-gender or alternative-gender studies, as an antidote to the strong bipolar bias most arguments about gender fall into:

Tim Bergling: Sissyphobia: Gay men and effeminate behavior

Suzanne Pharr: Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism

David Lowenthal: The Past is a Foreign Country

In the end this may be all about the poet's voice. The voice has many elements, only some of which may be assignable to gender.

Keeping in mind the constructions of culture: with that caveat, maybe some themes or motifs are more feminine, while others are more masculine. But a feminine or masculine motif can be expressed in any poetic voice. Flowers and baby things might be assumed to be culturally feminine, but any voice can express them. Perhaps, then, voice in poetry has no gender, although individual motifs might.

It’s been said that it takes many years to find your own unique voice as a writer, as a poet. The voice, when found, may be as likely to contain one element of poetry as any another: as likely to be lyrical as narrative, urban as pastoral, broadly satiric as confessional.

No two mature poetic voices are likely to be the same, whether they are two men or two women, or man and woman.