pig-angel
so yes, there's a deep current of silliness in what I write, which i need to be careful of. sometimes it might undermine the real seriousness of what i'm actually wanting to say. it's a defence mechanism i suppose, like a nervous giggle. on some level, i am, in my writing, a comic who wants to make people laugh so that they don't notice (and i don't notice) that there's an eagle plucking my internal organs out one by one. is this typically queer?
can i write about this body-shame seriously? do i want to? this shame of being gay which has, for most of my life, made me expect the punishment of getting AIDS? it's the shame of the closet. and i may be out, but i'm clearly still in it, after all. or poking my head out.
so i'm using comedic tropes in my writing as avoidance strategies in the same way that i used to entertain myself with cruising, or with intensive (read spasmic/catatonic/epileptic) daydreaming ('diddying' as my parents used to call it) or latterly with sexploits on webcam - it was all to avoid the work of being in the here and now. it's not laziness. essentially, it's not libido either. it's FEAR. the fear of not being good enough to be able to do the real things that i have to do. it's about hiding, running, flight, and pretending that i don't exist. because from very early on i realised that the 'real me' didn't match up to the 'ideal me' i'd created in my head, and which i assumed everyone else was expecting to see. (they weren't)
sorry for the therapy sesh. how un-english to expose one's neuroses like this! but i almost feel a duty to say all this publicly, just in case someone else out there reads this and recognises this. things like this are NEVER said out loud, usually. (you're probably thinking yes, and there's a reason for that! it's self-obsessive! it's boring!) but though i too hate that american post-therapy victim-culture, it IS, surely, better to say this stuff out loud. and at least if i do i'm not tempted to put it in my poems! at least not directly.
anyway, through meditation i hope i'm dismantling this ideal me and acquiring, albeit very slowly, some self-acceptance - though entrenched mental structures are hard to shift. i thorougly recommend ACEM meditation. been doing it for a year now. no mysticism. no guru. no hippy xenophilia. no crap. just restructuring yourself, incrementally, like a bodybuilder restructures his muscles and works hard, day by day, kilogram by kilogram, to change his shape...
want to know how stupid i get? all last easter i had a flu bug and got depressed - thinking, stupidly, pathetically, that i must be hiv+ and that it wasn't flu but pneumonia or tuberculosis. there must be millions of gay men around the world who drag themselves through the same thought patterns. it's the expecting/wanting punishment thing.
because pleasure is wrong, right?
the body is wrong, right?
because sinners get punished and the virtuous (for virtuous read 'normal') always skip down a petal-strewn path to Heaven, right?
fuck off!
the decision to find out our hiv status was, ironically, forced on us by the 'girls' (unbeknowst to them) because they wanted R to be a sperm donor again. we had to check we weren't passing anything on. and thankfully, we were given the all-clear. god, the waiting is horrible. i remember my first test, at oxford, in 1991. i didn't tell a soul. gay men don't even confide in each other about all this unsayable shit. there's no community, in this sense. only quips, beats, glitter...
a poet's job is to renovate and extend the house of the sayable. isn't it?
i have to write my way through into a new space. i want to face the magic of the body and, simultaneously, the grossness and the betrayal of the body and to find there - in the facing - in the poetry which comes out of the facing - some new kind of ugliness-beauty and some new kind of guilt-grace.
Angel-pig.
Euphoric stink.
The Apollonian body - the efficiency, the fixedness, the containedness, the logical harmoniousness of it - is a seductive lie. The invulnerability of it is a seductive lie. it's a lie like lipstick is a lie. it's theatre to avert the eyes from the hairy hole.
necessary theatre. seductive theatre. but theatre.
but a lie.
and all the manifestations of the Apollonian body, from Greek statuary to 'David' to film icons, pornstars and pin-ups - are lies.
i think i'm projecting onto the Apollonian body my own ideal self (straight boy / good son / good citizen)
all the shame i've dragged along with me this last forty years like a sack of stinking roadkill has been because of the falling short from this Apollonian body.
but my falling short has not been the problem.
the problem has been the Apollonian body.
one mustn't go looking for any kind of ideal or transcendence. there's only the immanence of the body, and the poem, and the eyes and the breath which connect the two.
only the body. only the poem. (and, of the two, the poem is the most important, because it can cheat Death, carried in the boats of children's minds, and their children's minds, and their children's minds, downstream forever... except this, too, is a kind of dream of transcendence, is it not? maybe there's only the body. only the poem. and only the body saying the poem. there. then. like that. one time only. never to be repeated. dada. but where's the community in that? there has to be a passing on of culture, through time, or no one learns anything, everyone tries to reinvent the wheel..)
i dreampt i was on the river trent in a tiny motorised dinghy, near beeston lock, and having loads of fun zipping up and down on the water. there were people everywhere having fun. beeston's where i grew up. then i remember hugging n's new boyfriend whom i've never seen (n is my ex from seven years ago, with whom i split up to be with R, acrimoniously). seem's my psyche's still bothered by unfinished business from this little narrative of mine.
then. i keep saying 'then' - as if there's a logic and a chonology. then someone was telling me how to handle a snake (slowly, i think, and by holding the head). for whatever reason i mishandled it and it bit me. i yelped and jerked in my sleep. so R told me. and i woke up.
then i was fell asleep again. i was riding a motorbike with my dad on the back. i skidded and came off it. i couldn't see dad anywhere. i knocked on the door of the nearest house. they had a dog who found dad lying under a bush, unharmed. we were invited in for dinner.
they were portuguese.
pig-angel. pig-angel. euphroric stink.
thanks for reading,
rich x
