Sacred Disorder | Cliff Bostock's blog – 'Finally, I came to regard as sacred the disorder of my mind' (Rimbaud)

Archive for "Nov 01 2008"

Woman remains tranquil while interviewing snake

I don’t watch TV. It’s nothing elitist; I’ve just never been into it, even as a child. I know I miss a lot.

I do however listen to the radio in my car, mainly Air America, and I long ago chose (Dr.) Rachel Maddow as my favorite host there. She now has her own TV show on MSNBC.

The video below is linked in a post on the fabulous T Rex’s site. In it she interviews the disgusting David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter and National Review Online writer, who has declared himself a kind of moral exemplar of proper Republican behavior. He is condescending and just plain stupid in his attempt to establish moral equivalence between Rachel’s wit and the ad hominem invective of McCain-Palin supporters.

Just look at that face!

How she mantains her composure, much less her smile, is mystifying to me. I would have come unglued on the spot. I want her to rip his head off, but she is polite and focused, so that in the end he comes off like a shifty-eye impersonator of Richard Nixon. You see quite clearly that while he distances himself from the rhetoric of McCain, Palin and Dubya, he is in fact just a calmer spouter of the same bile.

Police harassment of gays: blaming the reporter and the victim

Ever since sodomy became legal, the police have had to dream up new harassment charges against gay men who dare to behave sexually outside the home. The New York police have been hard at work seducing gay men in video stores, then offering them money for sex and then, whether they accept the money or not, arresting them for prostitution.

Duncan Osbourne of Gay City News has the full story here. The article is linked by Joe My God.

What I found most interesting about Duncan’s report is the response of readers on both sites. While most of course object to the police action, there are the usual few who (a) question whether Duncan has reported the story in full detail (i.e. truthfully) and (b) blame the victims for even considering hooking up in a video store.

Duncan responds on Joe My God by inviting the doubters to check out the police report for themselves. He also points to the absurdity of the accusation that, for example, European visitors staying at the Astor on the Park Hotel entered a video store in order to make $20 by having anal sex.

A familiar story…

For the years I wrote a biweekly gay column here in Atlanta, I heard the same kind of thing constantly from a readers: “If gay men act out in public, they deserve to be arrested.” I always pointed out that the 1986 Supreme Court ruling in Bowers v. Hardwick authorized the police to arrest a man for sodomy in his own home. Arresting someone for sodomy authorizes something quite different from arresting him for public indecency or disorderly conduct.

I suspect the police are using the prostitution charge since there’s not even anything like public indecency involved in these encounters. Moreover, the definition of public space remains inexact, to say the least. For many gay men, any sexual behavior outside the the home, in a gym sauna or even in a video booth, is wrong. When you ask exactly what’s wrong with it, you usually hear something about the behavior making all gay men “look bad.” You know, like the leather guys and drag queens in Pride parades.

What it’s really about of course is closeting sexual expression, which still causes many people a great deal of shame and embarrassment. But can you really call sex between two men in a video booth as public as sex by a straight couple on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras? Nobody’s generalizing about straight people on the basis of the latter very common sight. In fact, nobody’s generalizing about heterosexuality on the basis of prostitution. You do know most prostitutes and their customers are straight, right?

Internalized what?

So these objections by gay men are really about their internal experience. I don’t like that expression, “internalized homophobia,” since I’m not sure it’s possible to go through the coming-out process in our culture without having to come to grips, painfully, with a very real double standard. The anger and judgment during this stage of coming out is unpleasant to be around, to say the least, but usually transitional.

I’ve repeatedly had the experience of people who read my gay column 10 years ago tell me that, now, they completely agree with both my indifference to so-called public sex and my refusal to believe we must serve as public relations reps for one another.

But we are never far from the reanimation of shame. The behavior of the New York police is steeply rooted in the power dynamics of humiliation. Indeed, it has a homoerotic undertone. The police know very well that most of the men are going to plead guilty to a lesser charge and, at the meta-level, they re-assert the authority of heterosexual men while engaging in psychological frottage with other men. It’s a tedious but ancient game.

(Illustration: Public domain from Wikimedia. A knight and his squire are burned together at the stake on sodomy charges. From an illustration dated 1482.)

Día de los Muertos and the virtue of playing with the dead

Hoy es el Día de los Muertos. Today is the Day of the Dead in Mexico.

Yesterday was Halloween in America. For us, encounters with the dead are a scary phenomenon, even if a somewhat compelling one. In Mexico, Day of the Dead is an opportunity to honor and communicate with ancestors. It’s not very scary.

The two events do have humor in common, but it’s of a different sort. Halloween humor calls on that childhood part of us that loves to be scared by the “spooky” stuff of fantasy. It’s the part of us that compels us to see horror movies. In Mexico, the humor seems less restrained to me. The universal symbol of the day is candy in the form of a smiling sugar skull. There are all kinds of toys featuring every form of life in its skeletal guise, going about ordinary activities. I have a couple of cool wood assemblages that you can crank to cause the inhabiting skeletons, including members of a mariachi band, to jiggle. (Thank god it doesn’t include sound.)

I’m not sure that both celebrations aren’t driven by the same unconscious effort to come to terms with death. It may be that in our culture, that effort is more repressed, so that actual contemplation of the dead takes on a more defended guise. Halloween reminds us of the cemetery, our own eventual destination, but it’s not a cheerful image.

On Day of the Dead, however, people go to the cemeteries to decorate their relatives’ graves with marigolds, candles, incense and, sometimes, the dead person’s favorite food. People also create ofrendas at home — basically altars honoring dead relatives.

This aesthetic aspect of Day of the Dead particularly fascinates me. It’s illustrative, I think, of the premise behind imaginal psychology — that the psyche expresses itself through images. (Jung said “psyche is image.”) The same is very true in Sevilla during Semana Santa, when images of Christ’s passion and the grieving Virgin Mary are paraded through the streets, accompanied by costumed penitents and bands playing mournful flamenco. This ritual replicates an ancient pagan one, as do Day of the Dead and Halloween. All three are carnival-like and all three deal with death with varying degrees of openness.

Usually, we look at these holidays as breaks from the routine, but I think they mainly function as rituals that involve images in near archetypal form. They not only remind us of our eventual fate and call to mind our ancestors. They also replicate the literal style of the presentation of psychic reality.

James Hillman notes, for example, that the fundamental quality of images is their movement. If an image comes to mind, and you focus attention on it, you’ll see that it morphs, staying in motion, until it finally comes to rest or disappears. During Semana Santa, this process is literally externalized. People are partying in the streets when there’s a sudden blare of a horn or powerful whiff of incense. An enormous float, hundreds of years old, comes into view and the partying stops. The float, borne by dozens of men hidden under it, lumbers down the street, occasionally stopping to literally dance to the music its accompanying band is playing. People reach out to touch the float in silence. Then it passes, and the partying resumes. It’s a mysteriously compelling aesthetic ritual — in Sevilla the city literally becomes a theater — that demonstrates how death requires our acknowledgment, even in the most pleasurable moments of life. It’s also about the way the transcendental visits us, even if we don’t set out to visit it. Images have autonomy. We cannot control them.

Day of the Dead serves much the same function, although there’s the more conscious intention of contacting our personal ancestors. Both my parents died in the last few years and it amazes me how often I find myself thinking about them and actually conversing with them during reverie or dreams. With my mother, the process is mainly pleasant. With my father, who disinherited me, it’s painful. I keep asking why he did that and get no response. This month will be a year since he died and not a day passes that I still don’t feel the stabbing pain of his rejection.

I don’t really believe in a literal afterlife. I feel that spirits are personal images of archetypes whose function is to reveal psychic reality to us. The sting of my father’s rejection — and it was a lifelong rejection, although I don’t doubt that part of him also loved me — informs me in ways too complex to take up in this post.

My point here is that it seems to be natural not to just remember the dead, but to interact with them through the imagination. Coming face-to-face with the underworld, to use Hillman’s term, makes life sweeter.

(By the way Malcolm Lowry’s book Under the Volcano is a fascinating tale of an alcoholic’s experience during Day of the Dead. The movie, directed by John Huston, is good too.)

 

Essentials

Meta

Pages

Categories