Under The Earth

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth
and when he does
let him be laughing
there ough to be a banner over us,
unlike all the others
all the poor fuckers before you
don't be afraid to call it love
i see you again and again
do you see me
i long to speak to you
to touch you again
to set you as a seal on my arm
and lay you down gently by my side

Lushness and Lustiness

Saint Hildegard spoke of veridance, Greenness. This was what she, as an artist, called the spiritual life. The Holy Spirit, as a mother, send down her rain and made us lush with creativity. That is something that resonates with me as a Catholic and an artist. Great is the temptation to be a workhorse and to forsake the cycle of prayer. Everything I do comes from a gift, comes from this greenness, this lush life. All my work is prayer and celebration.

Related to lushness I think is the idea of lustiness, of the sensual. In the West religion has had a problem with earthiness and desire. As a queer I don't have the option of ignoring that. It seems that especially nowadays Catholicism in America has become increasingly Protestant, penitent and sexless. As someone passionately devoted to... well, passion, I cannot accept this. Many religions have had a problem with the flesh, with sex. The original Buddhists intended to leave the world by being monks. Sex was not an issue. But as Buddhism became a very real faith to be lived in the world, sex, the goodness, the sacredness of the flesh reasserted itself. This is not the same thing as those people who excuse disrespect for their bodies or lack of self control by saying "Sex is natural". This goes further by saying our sexuality is natural and nature is suffused with the sacred. The Great Mother. In Buddhism several of the female saints rescue the faith from being too cerebral. From reminding us that spirituality is in the skin, in the groin as well as the head.

Christianity, of course, began as an apocalyptic faith. We weren't supposed to stick around and so sex wasn't supposed to be much a part of us either. But we have been around and for us the chief saint who reminds us of our earthiness, of the sacredness of our bodies, is the lush Mary Magdalene, Our Lady Under the Earth. She has little to say in the Bible, but her example and the images of her are the ideas of lushness, of the melding of sexiness and sanctity.

What do the lush saints say? That sanctity is between our legs as well as between our ears. That the heart and not just the head is the wellspring of God. There are many people who write off holiness and treat their sexuality very glibly. For them there is only temptation, dirtiness, the devil talking to the groin. The lush saints remind us that down below is an Otherworld, not just an Underworld. Angels speak to our bowels, our wombs, and our balls, not just our minds.

The Flaying of Marsyas

Titian has a painting titled The Flaying of Marsyas. The story: the satyr Marsyas challenges the god Apollo to a contest of the arts, whoever wins is allowed to flay the other. Marsyas, challenging the gods, that is to say, going beyond himself loses, and he is being flayed in the painting, all of his skin exposed, Apollo gently takes off his flesh, almost lovingly.

In Michelangelo's painting of the Last Judgment, Saint Bartholomew rides up to Christ. Bartholomew who himself was flayed alive. He is holding up his skin, but anyone who knows art a little realizes that this empty flesh, the flayed flesh in not that of Bartholomew, but of Michelangelo. It is his grey, stripped face, his stonemason's body represented in the hanging skin.

So this is a theme in art. Here is a question for the artist to ask: I ask it myself. Around this question comes many, many troubling revelations which assault our assumption about success. Most of the people we will ever meet are fully prepared to be mediocre. If you would succeed at all times you can only do that which you are sure of doing flawlessly.

But now so the artist. We must always go beyond ourselves and in a way. Whether we hold up the flesh to Christ, or are flayed by Apollo, we always challenge the God within, we always respond to that call, and in some way, we always lose. So winning is not really the question. The question the consummate artists must ask is this: have I offered myself up? Have I gone beyond and ripped off the skin? Have I been merciless on myself and gone into myself? Surely this is the only way. Have I been flayed?

Believe it or not, the only answer that brings peace and rest is, "yes."

Alright,
already
i'd put you out of my head
my head never did much for me
anyway
and dreams are so often
thwarted
and who believes in all
that love anyway
only ever since
i've made myself
alright with
thought of
never seeing you
i can't stop
seeing you
you turn up every
where

From a distance I saw you
queer and slim
and dark and sweet
somber pretty
looking down
i waved to you
but you didn't see me
and i
i can't stop
seeing you
sweet desire--
goddamn!
even when i close my eyes
there you are
sweetly there!

I heard it said of Hildegard of Bingen that she was prone to great sicknesses until she spoke of her visions. Then she recovered. The commentator said, “It is our secrets that make us sick.” And I remember someone who was ill everyday and kept a bottle of pills with him. He thought, “It is because I am smoking that I am always sick.” But I think it was the other way around. The lies and secrets he held onto, the visions he would not explore built up and built up and made him heal. Of Von Bingen it was said that her writing and her creativity became her health.
That is how it was with me. Toni Morrison revealed that the reason she wrote was because if she didn’t, then she would die. Coming out of college I found this same urgency. It was really a matter of life and death. I write down visions and voices because I must. Not writing them they build up and I am ill.

For the Queer, for the Woman, for the priest and priestess writing is not the cerebral thing that Americans, predominately American men, predominately American white men have made it out to be. A think of reason. It is utterly a visceral experience. It comes out of the body, from the bowels. Storytelling is a bloody business. Helene Cixous once told of a woman who came up to her and told her of the kingdoms, the imaginary worlds she formed through, yes, masturbation. Cixous wished the woman would develop those worlds, write of them. This seems strange to a straight man or maybe straight people in general. That world is based on a sort of dissatisfaction. You are half of something.

The White Life Books are permeated with masturbation not only because they are about five young men, but because they are about self exploration. I don’t care what straight people say—I REALLY DON’T CARE WHAT STRAIGHT PEOPLE SAY—someone who is afraid to touch his own body, who treats that with disdain is disdaining himself and lives without accurate self knowledge. My aunt used to cook chitterlings—pig intestines for Thanksgiving—and with good reason I didn’t eat them and certainly didn’t touch them. And there is a good reason for steering clear of certain places near where you live. But to treat your body like a chitterling or like a bad neighborhood you’d rather not visit…. That is a sad thing. From the exploration comes all the true knowledge of what we really are, what we really want, which is why I say that though we may have tons and tons of books on Queer Study we don’t have anything on straights because, as of yet, for the most part, they themselves do not know what they are.

I was talking to my friend and he said that masturbation couldn’t be as good as sex. But of course he was thinking like a straight man. If you have been taught that sex with a woman is the best thing you can have and touching yourself is a very distant second then of course it will be. And straightness hinges on the fact that you must find a body unlike your own and it will make you happy. When straight men talk about sex it ends up, “She said it was great. She said I gave her eight”—it is always eight, I don’t know why—“consecutive orgasms.” In my book the sex that someone else has to tell you is good does not matter.

Women and Queers often talk about the fact that being with yourself can be better than being with someone else and I know that I wasn’t with Ben for this very reason. As far as we got I knew I could please myself better and be happier in my own company. When we lie down with ourselves we have the body we desire already and are exploring it, not running from it, not thinking it isn’t good enough unless someone of the opposite gender is pleasuring it. Straight men rely on the chance to learn a woman’s body. When Ben decided he was straight he couldn’t help telling me all about the birth control the girl he was with was using, how strange her body was…. How disinterested I was, and how sad it was that he didn’t know his own and probably didn’t find it very lovable. But every creative work I have done has come, believe it or not, from some corner, some overturned place in the labyrinths of my body, some wet place hitherto unexplored, and that I was afraid to explore. I approach my body and my blank screen for writing the same way the prophets approached God… with fear and trembling.

A Glass Half Full

The person I was with while I was writing the last white life book, or at least for the first four chapters of writing Redux wanted to be a writer. While I drifted into sleep he sat up, the glow of the laptop on his face, clicking away, clicking hard, trying to chisel something. I don’t think he got very far and he wasn’t very good. The why is very simple. He wanted to use very big words, words he himself didn’t know the meaning of. I said to him once, in a moment of kindness, the different between your writing and mine is that I reveal and you obfuscate. The energy and passion that ought to have been expended in telling the story was wasted in running from it to tell something much more comforting to him and ultimately much less satifying. But really this is the difference between the good and the bad. A writer ought to be courageous. I know from my own experience that all through the entire dark journey, but especially at the very beginning, when I worked on Virgins there was the internal voice saying, “Don’t tell that.” “Don’t go there.” For most of us the temptation to lie, to evade life in all of its… bigness and ambiguity and even sexiness is a great one. We want to keep things bitesize, handle-able and that includes ourselves. The lamb in the twenty-third psalm says the Lord “maketh my to cup overflow.” Well, we don’t want a mess on our hands and are often content with a glass half full.

Maybe fiction is a word that has been damaged. It sets forth the idea that writers are liars and that by intense imagination and fleeing reality we turn out stories. But what a good writer does is really much more connected to the words mystery, myth, mystic, which come from the Greek, to look at things through half shut eyes, that is to look at them both like a man going to sleep, and like someone who is peering deeply into a truth, staring at it. Rosario Castellanos said of herself she was an eye, and I’ll add to that a witness. It would be nice to say we tell it like it is if we are good, but I think it’s better just to say a write tells is as best she can, as truthful as she can be.

The problem with young writers, especially young males, especially young white males is that of truth. If you are red or brown or black all over then part of your coloring is centuries of having been bruised by other people’s versions of the truth, having your mouth taped shut. There is an urgency to tell, if not THE TRUTH then your truth. If you have breasts, if our breasts desire other breasts, if you are queer, then no one hears you and so in your writing you want to shout a little. But there is a lie in whiteness and straightness. Especially if you have balls. Namely that if you are bleached out enough, that is white enough, and pulled straight enough, all of your kinks worked out, then you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by evasion. And so white men evade. We have agreed for so long that they have it all. They don’t, and as they learn that, as Addison and Tommy and Matt learn it, I suspect we will hear more desperate and honest voices from them. Why is it so important for the writer to tell the truth, and why is this truth telling so terrible? Why does what I write here reflect who I am? Judge who I am? Because it shapes me. Because, as Anzaldua said: When we write we are carving our own faces.

ABOUT HIS ASS


How you wore those jeans today--
Dear God my prayer is for more days when I can stand behind you--
Was a tribute to your ass
Denim encasing
Lacing The tops of your thighs
Making that crease of indentation and bump
That is a dream
That with the setting of your shoulders and
Your stride
Let me know you were one of mine
It was all right to look
And not an idle dreaming
Even now my thoughts are teeming
With prayers to athletic thighs
Hymns to gently rounded bodies
humble bulges,
Bells ringing
Angels singing
For the incarnation
Of the sacred
In that sweetly silent
ass

When I write I feel like I'm carving bone.It feels like I'm creating my own face, my own heart... My souls makes itself through the creative act. It is constantly remaking and giving birth to itself through my body...
-Gloria Anzaldua

Flannery O'Connor described the South as not Christian, but rather Christ haunted. She said this was the spirit of evangleicalism and extreme Protestantism that characterized the part of the country she lived in. Divorced from the first fifteen hudnred years of christianity and any real tradition it had the sort of outlines and wisps of Christianity.

Almost fifty years later I am agreeing with her and saying that it is all of America, Christ haunted, sort of thinking it knows about Christianity, attempting to make things simpler than they are--which was the source of Greg's question earlier on--having been brought up in a very watered down and unimaginative religion. We see this lack of appreciation for complexity whenever someone says, "I was Catholic, but then I realized I was too sexual and left the Church," or "I was a Christian, but I wanted to be a scientist so..." It is best seen in questions which state polarities that don't exist: "How can you be a Baptist AND a Democrat?" "How can you be pagan and Protestant?" "How can you be a queer Catholic?" So on and so on.

Only in America, the land of the simple and the home of the watered down do questions like this get asked about religion.

I hope we become truly American as time goes by, I mean in step with the Latin world down south. As they become more politcally and financially stable and learn from us, culturally and religiously we might want to learn from them. I think it would shock many American Catholics (and especially evangelicals and Protestants) to know that in Brazil devout Catholics hold festivals by the sea to worship the goddess of the sea every year, or that Indians in North and South America still pray to their ancestors and their tribal gods even as they go to Mass. Some people call this blasphemy--what is is not forsaking what you come from, not throwing the old away when you take on the new. If we can learn this from the Christians down south maybe they can learn from the growing pangs in the Catholic Church and new reforms among mainline Protestants how to accept queers in all their forms. Latin America is still horrible with the rights of the female and queer.

Like many little boys who grow up to be pagans or queers, as a child I was given to making up my own religious rituals and stories, going that extra blasphemous and familiar mile that my mother called "playing with God." She'd say "Don't play with God!" She had what many people have--a great fear of God. You came to HIM--always a HIM through the rituals set down by the minister, the priest, someone who knew better. Not on your own, not with a light heart, not with your own rituals, not listening to the voice inside or the voices without.

But playing with God is just that. God wants us to play, to expand, to reimagine. To run away from every faith where the small minded and bigoted enter, to take the words of foolish people for gospel truth and denigrate a whole religion because of that is foolish. There are Catholics who speak in ignorance of fear about the queer. There are evangelicals and Protestants who flat out hate us. And there are pagans, Hindus and Buddhists who do the same. As well as--yes--atheists. So there is no running away.

I am reminded of several groups of Catholic women who have restored the practice of laybrinth walking and coming together in sisterhood. There are women who, with raisin bread and wine gather in circles and practice the Eucharist away from men and the narrow interpretations of the Vatican. Maverick priests and nuns who plan out and perform elaborate and beautiful gay and lesbian weddings. These people are called fighters. They are fighting for their rights to be real Catholics. Real Christian. Ah, but I knwo what fighting is. It is exhausting and bitter work and love runs out quickly from it. They are not fighting. They are playing.

There is no running away. Don't run away.
Play.

For the artist who would be a prophet, and we are a dying number, the problem to be faced is one of what is known as afluenza, the sickness of having too much. It is like children in ghettoes fat and undernourished all at once because the only food they have is trash. Nowadays all we know to do is make money and be discontent. We are drowning in shit and none of it satisfies, holding off any trace of happiness till tomorrow. Everyone is bitter and sarcastic because bitterness and sarcasm are the fruits of despair and no one knows the way, has learned the right moves to climb out of all the shit. We are like the crew in Coleridge's Mariner: "Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink..."

Ben


I wonder how many people have changed the dedications on their books or looked at a dedication and shaken their heads.

For me changing the dedication to White Life was incredibly healing. It set a lot of things in order. Someone saw the dedication before it went on the market and laughed, saying, "Yes, you definitely should change it."

I thought that it would be big and expansive to keep it to Ben--someone who is semi illiterate anyway and exhausted every goddamned drop of love I had for him. I would have proven to myself how big I could be.... Shit like that. False shit.

I brought up Ben and a friend said, "If you see him again you should punch him in the jaw." Now, my usual response is a little laugh or, sometimes revulsion to that idea, but in the last few days anger has crept up. I think a great deal of punching him in the jaw. I spent twenty minutes thinking about it the other day. Time does not heal all wounds. Time is full of shit. Sometimes what happened years ago can be closer to you than the moment it happened.

I check my feelings about him because I check my feelings about every relationship I've come out of no matter what its nature--and certainly this was one of the stranger natures. The thing that shocks me is the lack of love I have, the zero affection, the fact that I don't look back on any time in those ten months and say, "Ah, but I miss that." Even the good times were twinged with something wretched, his sullenness, his laziness, the passive aggression that led to nothing except his eventual eviction, his endless schizophrenic shifts from how he had so many friends to how he had no one, how he wanted desperately desperately to be loved to how he didn't need anyone at all. How he was so needy that he wanted to love one person, fuck another and when I showed any sign of not wanting him that was a cause for immediate resentment. He was so consuming.

No one lied like Ben. No one lied badly and inconsistently. No one changed the truth of a story with such hairpin wildness as Ben. One minute he'd never had a real relationship, the next he'd had several great ones. He was gay, he was straight, he hated people and was a robot, he sat up in the middle of the night wailing about his loneliness. He hated his own company so much you could never leave him alone. He was only fit to be left alone.

I look back. To be that consuming one must be clever and interesting. One has to be doing something, have a magnetic personality, be engaging. Ben was none of those things and when love and affection died for him it like a bell jar landing over a candle and sucking all oxygen away.

I keep racking my head looking for another way. Looking for someway I could be who I am now, learn what I have learned without having had to go through Ben. It's as if when I learn this way I can retrace those last ten months, erase Ben.

But of course there is no erasing him.

Somewhere between exhaustion and boredom laced with shooting arteries of hatred is how he feel about the son of a bitch who taught me so much about love and brought me to where I am now.

Night is upon us, deep night nearly to the place where it is early morning and before the moon hung in the sky high and yellow. Full. I want to lock myself up here. I came home from the coffee shop and stayed alone, drinking my own coffee, smoking cigarettes, listening to Kenneth Brannagh read someone's book on a CD until I was ready to work on my own. The night would not be complete until I could be at peace to write. As much as I love other people the peace of my own solitude with my own work cannot be matched and the ones I treasure most are those who know this.

What can I say about writing, about our writing the writing we do? We, yes, the secret sister and brotherhood a few of who I know. Everyone around you wants very badly to make a dollar. Dollars are nice. I like them, and when I am broke and doing something I don't like then I will worry about making them too. But there is this idea of the starving artists and that we are it because we are not Anne Rice, because we are not... whoever is being paid a half a million dollars or more to write a book, and of course all of your friends, everyone you know is telling you about these people. Comparing you to them. Not knowing you have made it already.

Nor are we the artists with the NEA endowments. Endowments are nice. They are wonderful, but don't think you deserve them! Grants are good things, maybe we'll get them, maybe not. But it is a poor thing to follow in the footsteps of the writers that America has now. The ones the professors like or the ones the people in the checkout aisles like. There are enough of them, but I know you wanted to be something else because so did I.

You heard of the ones who were exiled from their home and country, who died, of the ones who made printing presses in their basement and did a new thing from the ground up, who had to write and said to hell with the old thing, the status quo. You heard of magicians who wished to changed the world and gave up all wealth, all bullshit for that gift. You heard of enchanters who spun up worlds with their words. That's what you wanted, who had fire in their blood.

I know.

I want these things too.

It is late when I am saying these things to you. Nearly two in the morning.

When we think of those gone before us we think of those poets and storytellers who did not work for their own glory, but gave of their very flesh and blood food to those who needed it. In America who is willing to do that? Or, for that matter, how many people need it? Need to read? I trust there are a few and we are for them. We and our priesthood.

For me writing is knowing life. Writing is the real living. There is no fantasy even in the fantasizing. Four years now I have done the serious writing I always wanted to do, to the tune of two completed novels and now it seems as if it has always been like cutting through a dense forest with a machete until I finally find some light, a bit of a path. And the forest I was cutting through, cutting to, turned out to be me.

WHITE LIFE

Poet:
You are the seed that dies to be reborn
You are the warm field piled heavy with
The harvest wheat
Waiting to be shorn
You are the woman who lies down to give herself again
You are the grain king
Sex, seed and meat
Bread, wine and blood
You give
I came back out of hell for this
Swept up out of the whale
Cut her belly open with my teeth
To tell you this
Battled the farthest places with my
Invisible twin
Passed through the dead again:
Everything you see
Came to you in purgatory
Every love you had
Was a crown of thorns
Every aubade you sing
Stings
Because
You are beautiful
You are yielding
You are inexhaustible gift

Two dozen gods stood, naked in full stone… I’d never been so glad to be excluded… but preferred to just exist among them… not noticed… I turned away…

and slowly melted into the corner… not wanting to expose… my dick… still unripe.
I never once looked directly… NEVER. All images were flashed-in from peripheral vision… black patches, toned lines, the nether ‘V’… all left to my quiet imaginings and musings… set to re-emerge in the dark, perhaps…

That boy. He was my Zeus…

a force of fire… so easy to strike me down… that acid tongue and gargantuan cock… a deadly double dose… it thrilled me.


At night I poured myself out in libation… offering him… myself.

-Ben Barton http://www.benbarton.co.uk

LIVING


I think about how we should live. That is: how men like us should live, men who are queer—I won’t say gay because far too many of us are tired and angry and pissed off. Not happy at all. The happiness is often an elaborate farce, exhausting to maintain and exacting in price.

I am twenty-nine with small but expendable income, no desire to raise children and, though there is the desire to meet a man, no desire to commit to him and establish a thing like a marriage. I look to someone years younger, in Oxford blue shirt and grey pants, married with a child, preparing to pay the mortgage, playing grown-up. I cannot envy this.

But I’ve heard it brought up several times that we should. That we should mimic the lives of other men. I will not say straight men. I will say other men. And I have heard it said that we—as if we are from another planet—should take on the values of the “straight world.” There is no such place or rather that place has been ill defined. Nor should we pretend that the current values of this society are as they have always been. Though there are a few mainstays for the last five thousand years.

Mainstay 1. Men marry women to produce children.
Mainstay 2. Men and women come together to uphold society by means of the family unit.

These are the two mainstays and here are the mainstays we—as queer—violate:

1.That the happiness and uniqueness of the individual should be subjugated to the group

And:

2. That people should come together from love and desire. (Contrary to what we are told up until now love and desire has had nothing to do with people coming together in sexual union, hence the reason that up until now there has been no queer culture… or for that matter, much of a genuinely heterosexual one.)


It would be better to ask not, should the queer take on the values of the straight world? But rather how much any of wishes to take on the sexual and social values which have guided our societies for these last four to five millennia. I remember when Ben used to talk about being married, about wanting a wife and a child. Even the fact that he was gay couldn’t stoop him from wanting these things, made him go off and find a woman. When I said I had no desire for marriage or children he looked at me with shock and astonishment, like I’d spoken a blasphemy, the way I ought to have looked at him when he said he didn’t believe in God, or committed sex in a long term relationship, or abstinence from drugs, or eating meat or…. There wasn’t a lot Ben believed in. But he believed in marriage and family and maturity and “being a man”—which meant being distant and cold.. I believe in something else, and I’m trying to describe the shape of that. Sketching it as I write. Maybe all my writing is sketching it.