Virtue lies twixt the extremes

Enough of everything, not too much of anything.

Semi-Augustinian musings on memory, truth and sex

Visited the website where B first contacted me and made me laugh. God, how he could make me laugh. His profile is removed now. The original link broken.

Another bright sunny September morn in Chinatown, but I can hear the foghorn from the Golden Gate Bridge. It is five miles away, but when that horn blows, you think it's in your living room. Very Daschiell Hammett.

Speaking of which, one of the things you have to work through when you've spent a lot of time with an ex- lover is that his "fingerprints" so to speak, are on so many things. The cafe where we first met is half a block from my house. Or Take Hammett. When B and I first went out together, I mean actually went out on the town rather than meeting in our homes, he took me to a downstairs French restaurant for my birthday and then when we were back up on the street, showed me the plaque high up on the wall outside about The Maltese Falcon. I have a vast hoard of these memories (the jewels that can turn to shrapnel), so in a lot of ways, even though I have not spoken to him in almost a month, I keep bumping into B all over town.

With my coffee this morning, I am in the mood to think what a tragic wasted opportunity we were. So much possibility turned down. That's what friend Bill keeps say, "Such a sad waste of love." I sometimes think B really had no conception of what I was experiencing, being with him. I wish I didn't have such a trove of such happy memories. Part of me will never understand it. Although I'd bet large money that what happened to us is as common as dust. Hey, it keeps the music industry alive!

Speaking of industries, I thought the other day of the irony of journalists, moviemakers and professors who love to go on and on about corporate iniquity. The media, Hollywood, academia: these are not corporations? And iniquitous, to boot! Reminds me of the format you see so often nowadays of actors or other media performers being interviewed by a silent off-camera mystery interviewer. (Ty Pennington, the Extreme Makeover guy, is the king of this game.) But it's simply a scripted commercial in the form a faux interview. So much for the moral outrage of the aforementioned iniquitous types.

On FB, a friend of a friend, a theological type, had some good critical things to say about queer hermeneutics which wind up trying to show that Jesus was in favor of same-sex marriage. Good luck with that. But at the end, he, a straight man, wondered if any kind of sexuality at all was redeemable, including his own, such a mess the whole thing was. Well, in my current state it would be easy to take on that kind of attitude. But the fault is not in our genitals, dear Brutus, but in ourselves. I recognize the volcanic and highly ambiguous nature of sex. I am no naive hippy about it. But, as my sister says, it is what it is and we have to deal with it. Certainly in my own life, Eros has made a fool of me more than once or twice, but, hey, he's just doing his job. If you are going to swear off sex as the great source of evil, then you'd better start asking yourself about power and money and status and...well, everything we underlings do. Because a thing (or a man) is imperfect does not make it worthless. Conservatism is all about loving and protecting the imperfect...cause it's all we got.

I've always thought of sex as a sponge, protean in a way. It can be a vehicle for so much. Although it is not divine, but a creature sharing in the beautiful flaws of this creation, I believe it can be sacramental. It can also be a ton of other things, some not so helpful, of course. Like I said, it keeps the music industry alive.

Ups and downs

I'm near the end of my bottle of Connemara Peated Single Malt. Sometimes just sniffing it in the bottle is enough. Like sex in the nose. Some smells, remaining smells, almost become like fine food, intoxicating aroma turning to rich palate filling taste. This whiskey. The man who gave it to me.

Roller coaster seems to be slowing. A little. My stomach is calmer. Can't say I'm happy or even OK, but there are moments when I don't feel like I'm in the middle of a bad dream.

One of the major challenges for a Five like me is to let myself take emotional risks, know intimacy, experience rather than observe, let people in. Unfortunately, I think I've taken those challenges on pretty robustly! Individuation don't come cheap. I've got the scars.

Watching NCIS. I used to hate the character Kate, who came to them from White House security. Brought to mind the C-word. Was glad when Ari offed her. Now her replacement, the Israeli agent Ziva, her I like. Tough as nails, dangerous to know, with a sense of humor, a heart. And she likes men, sees them as fellow humans. Ziva is a strong woman who knows what suffering is; Kate was merely a feminist who faced opposition.

Real Housewives of New Jersey aka Vampires on Parade. (Men sleep with that?!)

A lot of animals in my house today. Sonny the old blind cat came in for his usual pet and nap. Juanita the shorn Australian sheepdog had separation anxiety and had to sit with me and whine for an hour til her master came home. Then Bill came with Mauli, Missy and Rocky in tow. Lots of dogbones and licking.

I still haven't killed the wasps.

Free at last! Uh, no?

The Democrat governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, is being taken to task for expressing regret that America is a free country. I'm pleased that it was a Democrat who said it, otherwise it would be all over the news. I hope he suffers for it.

But it was a slip of the tongue that a lot of people could make. To imagine that human beings are naturally comfortable with people they dislike getting a chance to speak and gather and act, etc. is beyond naive. How many "free countries" have there been in history and how long does that freedom last? That is no accident.

The American political structure is quite particular and it requires indoctrination into a particular way of looking at people and the world. We all want to be free ourselves, but very few of us who are honest or not nihilists really enjoy that fact that we have to put up with all sorts of other people acting freely. Things like the Bill of Rights actually stress human nature. Liberals are very big on certain kinds of freedom, certain kinds of First Amendment stuff (except "hate speech") but would be very happy if the Second Amendment never happened.

That's why I have said that it would be very hard to find another group of people in history aside from Anglo-Saxon Protestants who could have pulled it off. It requires, in fact, a kind of intellectual effort and a personal asceticism to really subscribe to the Constitutional arrangement that our Founding Fathers left us.

If I were King of America, believe me, things would be different. Not necessarily better, but different! But I assume that those old dead white males were smarter and better men than I am and we will all be spared my monarchy. Whether the Republic will survive the massive demographic and cultural changes this country is undergoing is an open question. Deval Patrick is not the only person who wishes America weren't a free country.

Private vice, civic virtue

Not only am I ramping my number of posts, but I ran out of cigars way ahead of my usual schedule. Had to head up to Portola to restock this morning. It's pretty warm today, but brilliant sunshine and that striking blue sky we have...God, what a beautiful city this can be. Took the 37 up there and walked a few blocks, then took the 48 down to Noe Valley, switched to the J Church Street car.

So many different glimpses of this beautiful place. The hills and winding streets with all the houses jammed up against each other, trees and flowers...far more affecting than the usual Alamo Square Painted Ladies. In a way, it's like wandering thru Venice, where turning every corner brings some new pleasure to the eye. Or some Italian hill town, but where everything is made not from stone but from wood.

Alien(ating) encounters

"The ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration: to see human beings liberated from their alienation... The individual will reach total consciousness as a social being, which is equivalent to the full realization as a human creature, once the chains of alienation are broken. This will be translated concretely into the reconquering of one's true nature through liberated labor, and the expression of one's own human condition through culture and art."

--Che Guevara

Really. There needs to be a special Hell for people who write this kind of stuff.  Even aside from all the terrible things this man promoted and did, just for writing that, he deserves eternal damnation.

Alienation. Estrangement. Becoming a stranger to what you ought to feel attached to and familiar with.

It is a weird and unsettling experience.  When I first moved to the Castro almost 20 years ago, it felt like a kind of homeground to me. Over the years now, I often find myself moving through it as if it were someone else's neighborhood.

As the prophet Billy Joel wrote:

Well we all fall in love
But we disregard the danger
Though we share so many secrets
There are some we never tell
Why were you so surprised
That you never saw the stranger
Did you ever let your lover see
The stranger in yourself?

Once I used to believe
I was such a great romancer
Then I came home to a woman
That I could not recognize
When I pressed her for a reason
She refused to even answer
It was then I felt the stranger
Kick me right between the eyes

Creatures who can attach can un-attach.

Who says

white people can't dance?

Not a big dancer myself...though I did a lot of it in the 80's...Stuff like this (and this! so cool!*) makes me smile.



And one of the finest, smilingest, sexiest videos ever made.

*And the lyrics are apropos!

Structure and rhythm

I prefer my archangels without wings. They only get in the way.

Murder

I am thinking of committing murder. No, not him. Well, ok, not murder, insect-icide. Against wasps. Not the much maligned White AngloSaxon Protestants who created and made this country great. (Ask yourself: what other group could have done it?) No. Two families of paper wasps have taken up residence on my back porch, in nests made of hexagons, like the Devil's Post Pile.

I left them alone because they left me alone. But there are more of them now and I am getting a little resentful of having to share the small space I have out there. I did knock down the smaller and more open nest the other day. Just a few in there and they flew away. But the bigger group, about a dozen or so, live inside the lantern right outside my back door. They've had some decent insect life and will die off, except the queen, when it gets cold...I may do them in tonight and take back my porch.

Re my usual murder prospect. I am clearer and a little saner, --my mom was surprisingly kind and helpful on the phone this morning--but I still watch the merry-go-round of feelings that breaking it off with B has provoked. One of them is surely anger. And one form of the anger is for letting me experience so much happiness but then always putting a limit on it.

 B's spirit animal. Really.

Maybe it should be mine, too. 
I think I've earned it.

I know what it is to have resentment against a lover, former lover, for being actively hateful. What makes me so mad about B sometimes is that he was elusive.

September 1

I just read WH Auden's poem on Germany's invasion of Poland, September 1, 1939. Sections of it have become rather famous.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

In his mature and later years, however, he refused to allow publishers to print it, deciding that "it was trash and that he was ashamed to have written it." The oft-quoted phrase, "We must love one another or die" he changed to "We must love one another and die." He knew hope, but not optimism. He remained both a homosexual and a Christian throughout his life, heterodox about both, and maintained a long and very unmonogamous relationship with a younger man, the librettist Chester Kallman, until his death. One of my very minor fears in life is that as I aged, I would get wrinkly in the face like Auden. Here he is as he was at my current age.

I think I'm doing ok by comparison, but it's incentive to keep going to the gym!

After wading into yet another online gay discussion on "homosexual homophobia", I got the punishment I deserved. I had to read it. I am pretty sure that anyone who uses the phrases "bigot" "our rights" "oppression" and "hater" in a single paragraph has not thought, at all, in years. Huge amounts of energy are devoted to protecting the swishy queen. Homosexual men who appear to be conventionally masculine are almost always accused of overcompensation.  The message is that you can never be too femmy but if you're too butch, your membership in the Gay Club is in question. Been down that road before, alas.

I am afraid that too many gay men are stuck in the archetypal world of the hermaphrodite, a kind of hodgepodge of the masculine and the feminine. In the archetypal androgyne, you can have an integration of both sides.

The date, the time of the morning, Auden, the gay screeching...leads me to wonder once again what homosexual men are for.Why does nature and God keep making us? For those who think of samesex eros as wrong, you might as well ask why nature and God keep making schizophrenics. Many men of homosexual bent seem to wind up involved in decorating or mentoring. From great artists (who are always few in number) to the armies of clothing and interior designers. And the number of us in teaching and the clergy has never been small. Jung wrote of such men that they possess

a finely differentiated Eros instead of, or in addition
to, homosexuality. This gives him a great capacity
for friendship, which often creates ties of
astonishing tenderness between men and may even rescue
friendship between the sexes from the limbo of the
impossible. He may have good taste and an aesthetic
streak which are fostered by the presence of a
feminine streak. Then he may be supremely gifted as a
teacher because of his almost feminine insight and
tact… Often he is endowed with a wealth of
religious feelings which help him bring the ecclesia
spiritualis into reality, and a spiritual receptivity
which makes him responsive to revelation.”

 Someone like Auden sort of melds ornament and meaning, a great artist but of words (the province of teachers and priests) rather than plastic images. Then there is the smaller but persistent cadre of homosexual men who are drawn to the military or the police, those classical descendants of the original bands of hunters.
What about magicians and tricksters?

Speaking of which, as I become clearer and clearer that I can't go back to "the way we were" with B, I still miss the many small daily rituals of play and affection between us that provoked so much smiling and laughing. A better playmate I never had.

The Express Checkout with PayPhrase that amazon.com's computer has given me today is "Stephen's Finite Ironies." Perceptive machine!