Shangophobia?

Here's another example of why framing questions through religion is a bad idea.

On Thursday, NPR aired this poetry podcast.  The poem itself was pretty meh, but it was put into a  troubling context by the announcer, the poet Tracy K. Smith.

My sister visited Cuba once with a friend, and spent part of their time among followers of Santeria, people who take the Orisha, or Yoruban gods and goddesses, quite seriously.  Back at home, over drinks with her travel companion, my sister brushed off the half-joking request to pour out a little of her mojito as an offering to Shango.  Later that night, driving home in a thunderstorm, my sister's car suffered a broken axle.  She ended up having to replace the car with a new vehicle altogether.  She now tells the story as if it was all just a strange coincidence, but that very same weekend, for good measure, she laid out an offering of cornmeal and rum for the aggrieved deity.

In the Yoruba tradition, Shango is the god of thunder and lightning.  He is known for his strength, formidable anger,and love of justice, as well as for his prodigious appetite.  In the Americas, his strength was called up to bolster Africans who were brought to the New World in chains.  In today's poem, "On the D Train," Jacqueline Johnson, the speaker imagines seeing Shango all around her: on the subway, or walking city streets on his way to work.  Inevitably, the poem brings my sister's Shango kerfluffle to my mind.  

But in a more serious way, the poem also asks me to take a better look at the black men around me, moving through their days at work and rest.  Aligning men like this with the figure of Shango urges me to acknowledge the honor, respect, and even the awe that ought to be their everyday due.  Black men are misjudged and mischaracterized every day.  This poem offers a powerful antidote to that tendency.

Since the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, I've decided that it's time to criticize and oppose religion more aggressively.  I've been collecting material for several months now, yet I've hesitated to pull it together and write about it, for reasons I can't quite identify.  I don't think it's just because the subject is religion.  I've written critically about religion often before, and I have a backlog of other topics I've been blocked on.  Whatever the reason, this podcast broke the logjam.

The popularity of "phobia" to refer to almost any kind of opposition or criticism needs to be challenged.  It's sort of like the way the suffix -gate for any scandal, large or small, has metastatized since the 1970s - it makes great clickbait.  The invention of phobias is part of the general medicalization of all areas of contemporary life.  Now, I admit that many people do exhibit strong emotional affect toward competing religions that could loosely be called "phobic," but I don't think most people who speak of "Islamophobia" realize that they're using a metaphor, and a problematic one at that.  After all, different Muslim sectarians display the same sort of "phobic" hostility to each other that some outsiders display toward Islam generally; so do sectarians in other religions.  I suppose one could speak of Shi'aphobia or Sunniphobia, but why bother?  As with genders, the alleged phobias would multiply ad infinitum, and a clinician with access to professional journals can easily invent or appropriate new ones, in hopes that they will make it into the DSM and become billable for insurance.

That way lies madness, though, and it's bound to backfire.  Liberals and progressives who furiously denounce conservative Christians are going to be diagnosed with Christianophobia, Catholophobia, or Evangelophobia, getting into trouble on social media as they are accused of racism.  Since such people tend to racialize evangelical Christianity as white even though a sizable proportion of American evangelicals are black, and growing numbers are Asian or Latino, the accusation would have teeth.  It doesn't help that most Christians are biblically and religiously illiterate, so their hostility to competing sects is driven by emotion rather than information.  The same is true of most atheists.  Right-wing Christians have already borrowed diversity-management and culture-of-therapy rhetoric to present themselves as the victims of prejudice by liberals, and weaponized diagnoses of Evangelophobia are bound to show up if they haven't already.

As an atheist, I reject all religions.  Am I religio-phobic?  I don't think so, and not just because the term is basically meaningless.  Am I bigoted against religion?  I don't think so.  I'm certainly more knowledgeable about religion than most atheists and most believers, and I'm happy to learn more; if I'm wrong factually or am overgeneralizing, I welcome correction.  I know, and insist, that religious believers vary among themselves, and I also insist that they are not as different from atheists or competing cults as they like to believe.  But as with other belief systems, I find that believers who hope to educate me rarely know as much as I do, and are misinformed about their own sects.

In this case I'm relying on the NPR podcaster for the account of Orisha and Shango that I'm responding to; if I get anything wrong, blame her.  I listened to the episode with mounting bafflement.  She doesn't exactly claim that Shango broke the axle of her sister's car because she failed to pour out a libation; I suppose she was aiming for plausible deniability.  Religionists of other stripes, including Christians, do the same thing.

But really, I thought, I'm supposed to see Shango as a positive deity?  With his "strength, formidable anger, and love of justice, as well as ... his prodigious appetite," this "god of thunder and lightning" sounds like a dead ringer for Yahweh, the god of the "Abrahamic" religions.  The great historian Morton Smith once referred to Yahweh, as the Hebrew Bible describes him, as "a North Arabian mountain god who traveled in thunderstorms and liked the smell of burning fat."  I'm sure that's just a strange coincidence.  Many of Yahweh's devotees also like to blame misfortunes large and small, national and personal, on us, for not spending enough time on our knees and building up his tender ego.  The offerings we give are of terrible quality, and such small portions.  And so on: this earth-based Yoruba deity is not as different from Yahweh as people like to think.  Having a small-time hood offering protection is not an improvement on a more megalomanic one ("Nice little car you have there, Missy; be a shame if something happened to it...").

What good does Shango's protection really do?  Where was he while Africans were being brought to the New World in chains?  Probably getting high and watching Internet porn, like his competitors; sorry about that, guys.  I've seen the same pattern among neo-pagans and Native Americans: their gods were out to lunch while the rapacious Christians were conquering the world.  As he's described here, Shango is also a god of toxic masculinity, again a lot like Yahweh.  Thanks, but I'm not buying it.  And he's not a good role model for African-American men, who need more respect and care, as black women and everyone else does; being "aligned ... with the figure of Shango" is one of the last things they need.  As for "awe," forget it.

This isn't a question of facts, of course: Shango, like Yahweh or any other deity, doesn't exist, so any traits ascribed to him are lies. I'm making a judgment, and anyone is welcome to disagree with me.  I'd be interested to see what kinds of arguments they could offer.  Meanwhile, I see no reason to respect Santeria any more than I do Christianity.  I suppose someone could re-interpret Shango, as Christians do with Jesus, to make him more attractive, but he'd still be a fiction.  Is it phobic of me to say so?  Not unless it's phobic to object to "so-called Christians" on the right, as liberal Christians do all the time.  I'm not interested in hearing about new phobias, I'd like to have some more intelligent, informed, thoughtful discussion of these questions.  I'm not holding my breath.

Found Poem from an Online Review of a Book on Poetry and Pottery

The book met most of my expectations
                                                                        except
for having a written inscription
                                                               on the first page
I was not informed about.

This was an oversight and
                                                I would not
                                                                      have ordered it
if I had known.

Sermon Style

Things have been hectic lately, and they don't promise to be any less so.  I hope to have some more time to write this week while I'm traveling.

Right now I'm rereading May Sarton's Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year (Norton, 1993).  Sarton's later journals have a certain amount of intrinsic interest insofar as they describe her struggle with bad health and her reflections on aging.  She had a relatively easy time of it nevertheless, with a large and faithful support network, who enabled her to live at home and by herself (more or less, if you overlook the many people passing through with food and entertainment, assisting with cleaning and gardening and transcribing the journals (after her stroke she began dictating them): most never-married old people don't have that.  And even so, the later journals often read like thank-you notes to her friends and helpers and caretakers and other people she interacted with, as if she unconsciously feared that failing to name every benefactor and helper would result in a loss of their support.  But maybe I'm just imagining that.

She also discusses art, politics, and culture, and as often as not I disagree with her.  One of her correspondents

had the kindness to copy out, from a book by Piero Ferrucci called Inevitable Grace, something which goes right to the state of myself, my health and my life, in a marvelous way.  The beginning of the quotation from Ferrucci is "Empathy, however, is no solitary event.  On the contrary, it is that which permits artists to feel and express the most concealed needs, pains and dreams  of a whole society.  The aim of the poet, says Pablo Neruda, is to embody hope for the people, to be one leaf in the great tree of humanity."  Then Ferrucci quotes from Neruda: "'My reward is the momentous occasion when, from the depths of a coal mine, a man came up out of the tunnel into the full sunlight and the fiery nitrate field as if rising out of hell, his face disfigured by his work, his eyes inflamed by the dust and, stretching his rough hands out to me, a hand whose callouses and lines traced the map of the pampas.  He said to me, his eyes shining, "I have known you for a long time, my brother!" That is the laurel crown of my poetry, that opening in the bleak pampas from which a worker emerges, who has been told often by the wind in the night and the stars of Chile: you are not alone, there is a poet whose thoughts are with you in your suffering.'"  And back to Ferrucci: "Empathy then is an expansion of consciousness.  Through the faculty we are able to become one with trees and ants and elephants, birds, rivers and seas, children and old people, men and women, suffering and joyful people, rainbows and galaxies.  Thus we become able to breathe and live in other things or to find them within ourselves, as in a living microcosm in the most unlikely face, in the strangest of situations, in the remotest places, we discover ourselves and once we reach this point there need never again be the feeling that we are strangers in a strange land."  It is a good Sunday sermon, isn't it?  [24-25]

It's a sermon, all right, but I don't think it's a good one.  I suspect the trouble may lie partly in the translation, as I presume Ferrucci writes in Italian.  (He's a philosopher and psychotherapist who's evidently lived all his life in Italy.)  So it might be that "Empathy, however, is no solitary event" should be something like "no isolated event", in the sense of being a process rather than a one-time event.  Whatever.  Of course empathy is a relation between two or more people, so it could hardly be solitary.

I don't believe that writers are necessarily particularly empathetic as writers -- many of us are ferociously egoistic, which is necessary to find the time to be solitary and construct our faery castles of words.  (Sarton herself doesn't seem very empathetic.)  Nor do I believe that the response of their readers has much to do with empathy, from either end.  When a reader feels directly addressed by a work, is that because the author empathized with him or her?  Or did the writer dig into him or herself, and find feelings and traits that he or she turns out to have in common with others?  I vote for the latter.  I'm no Neruda, but my experience is that when I've written most personally and idiosyncratically, that's when other people tell me they felt addressed by my work.  For that reason I don't suppose that when I feel that something could have been written about me, the author must have been thinking about me.  That experience has improved my own capacity for empathy, I think, when it took the next step and realized that feelings that I thought were unique to me, that isolated me, were really feelings I share with much or most of humanity.

Did that miner really know Neruda?  I doubt it.  Is that conviction that a stranger (maybe a long-dead stranger, or one in another country writing in another language) knows you, really about empathy?  Sarton and other writers have had reason to complain about readers who showed up at their doorstep without advance notice, demanding personal attention and mothering, because they felt that the work was about and for them, commanding them to make an appearance.  (A recurring theme in Sarton's journals is her guilt at not being able to answer all the letters she receives from fans.)  Sometimes these fans were indignant when the writer had a schedule of his or her own, needs of his or her own, and couldn't give them what they thought they were entitled to.  Is that knowing?  Is it empathy?  I don't believe so.  It looks like self-absorption to me, and like a child's insistence that his mother give him all her attention.  That's understandable in children, not in adults.  Sarton also complained that many of her readers misunderstand her journals as celebrations of her own strength, self-sufficiency, and tranquility, even though she worked hard to describe her anger, depression, loneliness, and anguish when the Muse failed her.

Can I, as a writer or as a reader, really empathize with rainbows and galaxies?  Not, it seems to me, without doing violence to the word empathy.  A rainbow can't empathize with us; it has no mind.  We have enough to be getting on with just empathizing with other human beings.

Sarton said in her journals and in her interviews that she thought her work had value because it had affected the lives of her readers, and I'll go along with that.  I read her myself, after all, for insights into aging, the single life, and other topics that matter to me personally; not for her prose style or her formal brilliance.  That's true for other writers I'm fond of too.  But I look for other things in art as well.  One of Marge Piercy's characters says in Woman on the Edge of Time that no single work can tell all truth -- that's for the whole culture to try to do.  Some writers I read for the beauty of their sentences, for example, though I'm also glad when those beautiful sentences move me and seem to speak about my life.  As a writer I hope to convey something to my readers, but I don't know what it will be; sometimes they find something in what I've written that I didn't intend, or didn't know I was putting into it.

A Brief for the Prosecution

An old friend, a poet herself, linked today to this poem.  Just the part of it that showed in the preview pressed certain buttons in me.  After acknowledging "Sorrow everywhere.  Slaughter everywhere", the poet declared "But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants."  No no no, I thought.  Not today, not this week, not this year, not this century, I will not let this one pass unchallenged.  So I took a deep breath and commented: "'Defense' of what? I'm sorry, but that thing is vile."

(And that was before I'd read the lines "If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down / we should give thanks that the end had magnitude", which confirmed my contempt for the performance: if the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, there's no magnitude in our end, we're just one more caterpillar on the tracks.) 

The person who'd posted the poem on his tumblr (not the poet himself, who died in 2012), replied in a few minutes:

The poem isn't a defense but a kind of preparation. I don't think it is vile. It admits the world is filled with horrors but says we cannot give ourselves over that entirely, that we have to live and love despite ourselves, despite the awfulness in the world.

I'm not sure what "a kind of preparation" is supposed to mean, but his response strikes me as the lowest kind of apologetics.  (Where, after all, does "the awfulness in the world" come from?  Who fills the world with horrors?  That's why I object to the bit about "the locomotive of the Lord" -- it appears that the poet accepted exactly the kind of theodicy I have no use for.)  I also think he's misreading the poem in terms of his own preconceptions -- what Walter Kaufmann called the exegetical fallacy, reading your beliefs into a text and getting them back endowed with its authority.  I replied:

If it's not a defense, it needs a different title. But what struck me as vile was the line "we enjoy ourselves because that's what God wants." Which god? According to every orthodox theology I know of, and most non-orthodox ones besides, suffering is something that God wants, either because we've brought it on ourselves or because God wants to test us, or because God works in mysterious ways, or other such nonsense. If I want to read good poetry about human suffering, I'll read the Book of Job. Or Marge Piercy, who's written some good poetry on this subject over the years.

To which he replied,

Okay, be angry and carry on. Jack Gilbert is one of the great poets of the 20th Century, and this poem is one of his most beloved. But no one is forcing anyone to read it. --- shared it as many people have today.

Great poets have been known to write great garbage.  They are not above criticism, and indeed it's all the more important to criticize them when they say something stupid or evil.

I confess I'd never heard of Jack Gilbert before today. According to his obituary in the New York Times, "Brief for the Defense" (quoted in its entirety there) is one of his best-known poems.  Because I haven't read anything else by him, and I'm not going to start now, I have no context for the statements in this poem, though I find it hard to imagine what context could make them anything but malignant.

Then my poet friend chimed in:

My only comment is to note that the word "risk" is in this poem for a reason.

That's exactly the kind of use of words like "risk" I object to.  (It reminds me of "intervention," which also sets off alarms for me.)  Of course the word is in the poem for a reason; I just don't think it's a good reason.  I think it's posturing, preaching to the choir: like Marilynne Robinson daringly declaring herself a liberal and a Christian, like Greg Louganis telling gay audiences that he knows It's not a choice, like Barack Obama telling his fans that if Wall Street wants a fight, that's a fight he's willing to have, like black conservatives denouncing the Civil Rights Movement in front of white Republican audiences.  Risk without cost, risk without risk.

And what kind of "risk" is involved in "delight"?  I speculate it's the "risk" that it won't last forever but will pass.  Maybe that really does deter some people.  But that delight will pass is not a risk, it's a certainty.  I see the wish to escape transience as one of the main impulses (and errors) behind much religion, born of a wish to achieve bliss that will never end.  I understand that wish -- how could I not? -- but it's never going to be fulfilled.

I'm not surprised that the poem is well-loved by the kind of people who sentimentalize the smiles and laughter of the destitute from a safe distance, admiring and praising the big smile of your ragged shoeshine boy before you go back to your comfortable hotel room and, ultimately, to your suburb.

I was amused by her friend's dismissive "be angry and carry on" -- as if anger were a bad thing.  But then a lot of people think it is.  (At least, other people's anger is a bad thing; their own is worn with pride.)

Of course I wasn't forced to read the poem.  But I respect my friend, which means I take what she puts on Facebook more seriously than I do what many other people I know post.  (Except for the cat-related material.)  I'm not saying she should not have posted the poem, but having seen it and read it, I won't be told I should not respond to it.  (And to be fair to her, let me stress that it was not she but her friend who got all spitty about my reaction.)

That's always a difficult question in a place like Facebook.  On one hand, you've got people who have conniptions at seeing anything they dislike.  On the other, you've got people who think that freedom of expression means no one is entitled to disagree with anything they post.  My friend is a librarian as well as a poet, and committed as most librarians are to freedom of expression, even when it's offensive or disturbing or unpleasant.  Most of what I disagree with on Facebook I don't respond to.  When I do comment, I do so carefully and I hope thoughtfully.  Often I decide not to comment after all, and cancel what I began to write; sometimes I bring my complaints here.

According to my friend's friend, it would seem that "Brief for the Defense" is being used to express the feelings of a lot of people lately; perhaps because of Robin Williams's suicide, because of the summary execution by police of a young black man in St. Louis and the subsequent repression of community objections to the slaying, perhaps because of the latest Israeli blitzkrieg in Gaza, perhaps because of the renewed civil war in Iraq, perhaps the combination of all these things and so much more.  It was because of all these things and more that I found the poem a wrong-headed statement, and chose to say so.

I suspect that my reaction to this poem and all that it represents is a matter of temperament.  I would prefer that there's no god, No One out there, rather than Someone watching the world and doing nothing about it except shedding great salt tears.  I know that there are many who'd disagree with me, and I suppose "Brief for the Defense" speaks to them.

It's probably not out of place to add that I agree with part of the poem, the idea that people somehow find reasons to go on living and celebrating their lives in the face of the horrors they suffer.  Where I differ is in the poet's declaration that God wants them to do so.  I don't believe in gods, but if they exist, their wishes don't determine what I think or do.  If we "risk delight," it's not because of the gods, but despite them.  (The "risk," if any, in most theologies would be that the gods don't want us to be happy, and will punish us for daring to be so.  Compare C. S. Lewis's very orthodox claim that Yahweh makes people suffer because they've had it too easy, and "The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered.")  It would be altogether right to go on living in flat defiance of their wishes, and to curse them and the locomotive they rode in on.

Whimsy with Teeth

 

Since I'm so often a cranky curmudgeon, it seems important to mention when I find something that I like outright.  Right now I'm reading Pot Shots at Poetry by Robert Francis (1901-1987), whom I discovered when May Sarton quoted some of his poems in her journal After the Stroke.  I was taken by them, which doesn't happen to me often enough with poetry these days, so I looked him up on the local library catalogs.  I decided to start with Pot Shots, which is a collection of short essays on poetry (plus a tale and an interview) published by the Michigan Poets on Poetry Series in 1980.  Some of the essays are apparently from an earlier collection, The Satirical Rogue on Poetry; the second half of this collection, The Satirical Rogue Again, is the sequel to that one.

The essays charmed me right away.  The Poetry Foundation bio calls Francis's poetry "often charmingly whimsical," and that describes these essays, though I'd add "often mischievous."  Here's one of them in its entirety (page 39):

Somebody -- Nobody

Somebody, hearing that Emily had called herself a Nobody, decided to be a Nobody too -- not just any Nobody but a Nobody who really was a Somebody, like Emily.

His tone is always (deceptively) light, and his barbs are often directed at himself, as in "The Satirical Rogue" (85):

I asked the Irish poet if he would be surprised to hear that I was one-quarter Irish myself.  Could he tell by looking at me?

After scrutinizing me for a moment, he remarked: "There's something humorous in your right eye."

"My right eye?" I cried.  "What about my left?"

"That one's more serious," he assured me.

Obviously Francis isn't for everybody, but I feel he's a kindred spirit.  Cute, too.  Odd I've never encountered his work before.

Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012

The poet and critic Adrienne Rich died a couple of days ago, one more casualty in my parents' generation. Her poetry, I confess, never mattered to me as much as it did to many other people, but I always read it anyway. I'm attached to a few of her poems, like "The Middle Aged," which describes the faults that underlie the seemingly stable marriage of an older couple from the viewpoint of a young married woman. The poems in Diving Into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978) had their moments, especially the twenty-one love poems to another woman in the latter, though they weren't as unprecedented as some people now seem to want to remember: her younger contemporary Audre Lorde went there before, and had helped make Rich's effort possible. She wasn't even the first important white lesbian poet, or the first lesbian Yale Younger Poet -- I much prefer Muriel Rukeyser's poetry, who won that honor in 1935, to Rich's.

But this is all personal taste; I don't feel competent to make critical judgments of poetry. And I remember hearing Rich give a reading at IU in 1979, which I can date accurately because I brought with me a new copy of her first volume of essays, On Lies, Secrets and Silences (1979), for her to autograph. She did, saying in mild surprise, "Oh -- it's out already." A friend got me into a faculty and graduate student reception / party afterward, and I took the opportunity to tell her how much I liked hearing her longer poems read aloud, that I thought they worked better that way than when I read them from the page. That comment seemed to please her, and I was happy to be there to make it because most of the men present, mainly faculty, were hostile and misogynist, and hardly anybody else present seemed to know her work. All too typical, especially in those days.

Rich's prose affected me much more deeply than her poetry. Of Woman Born (1976) had some serious flaws, but it was still a powerful and moving work. I'd already read her "Woman and Lying: Notes on Honor" when it was published as a chapbook, and liked it a great deal. Her other essays in On Lies, Secrets and Silences, especially those on Charlotte Bronte and Emily Dickinson, influenced my reading and thinking forever after. I read all of Bronte, especially, as a result, and explored Dickinson's work more than I had before.

What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993) is a great book on poetry, up there with Rukeyser's The Life of Poetry (1949); it sent me back to poetry as a reader at a time when I wasn't reading much. The examples and commentaries she provided gave me direction and ideas for more reading. (When I reread it a decade later, I still liked it but a little less; maybe I'll write more about that sometime, this isn't the place for it.) And I was struck by her insistence on the importance of poetry, her pointing out that in other societies poetry is taken much more seriously: it's hard to imagine a poet being jailed or murdered simply as a poet in the United States, as has happened in other countries.

I also honor her refusal of a National Medal for the Arts from Bill Clinton in 1997. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she didn't mistake Clinton for a liberal.

A commenter on her obituary at the New York Times wrote, "This kind of politicized verse, beloved of every ism-loving poetaster, is condemned to a quick and dusty death on the shelves. No one will read this kind of thing a century hence; nor 30 years hence." Most poetry, whether it's politicized or not, goes unread a century or even thirty years after it was published. But "Diving into the Wreck" is still being read, and still has meaning, for many people after almost forty years. No one can foresee the future of literary reputation, but I'd say Rich has a shot at being remembered for a good long time.

For the Love of D-g

Two new posts at Lambda Literary got my attention today, though the newsletter has been in my inbox for a few days. Both touch on sexuality and spirituality, and I wonder if the site editors noticed that they almost cancel each other out.

The first was an interview by Christopher Hennessey with the editors of two recent anthologies of gay and lesbian poetry with "spiritual" ambitions. One collection, Milk and Honey (Midsummer Night’s Press), edited by Julie Enszer, is devoted to poetry by Jewish women; the other, Kevin Simmonds's Collective Brightness (Sibling Rivalry Press), collects "LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion and Spirituality." I haven't read either one of them, though I might if the library gets copies; some of the poems described in the interviews sound interesting.

The other article was a review by Jeffrey Escoffier of a new biography of the gay S&M filmmaker and theorist Fred Halsted. I've never seen any of Halsted's films, partly because I'm not interested in S&M, but reading Escoffier's history of gay male film and video pornography Bigger Than Life has made me want to try to track down some of the classics. Many of them are available on DVD. But for now, I'm concerned with something Escoffier wrote in this review:

The one area of Halsted’s life that Jones doesn’t explore sufficiently is Halsted’s radical philosophy of sex. Several years ago Patrick Moore devoted a chapter to Halsted in Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality. Halsted believed that the erotic is transgressive and sacramental, that it is inherently violent and involves acts of violation. “Sex is not ‘coming,’ that is superficial sex,” he once explained. “Mine is personal cinema. I don’t fuck to get my rocks off. In the best scenes I’ve ever had, I haven’t come. I am not interesting in coming. … I am interested in getting my head off, my emotions off—and if I get my dick off, my rocks off, it really doesn’t matter that much to me. … I am interested in emotional satisfaction and intellectual satisfaction.” In some ways, Halsted seems to have anticipated Foucault’s view of S/M as a “creative enterprise” which imagined “the desexualization of pleasure.”

"Foucault's view of S/M as a 'creative enterprise'" reminds me of what Brian Eno, and others, have said about art as self-expression: that you express yourself every morning when you choose your clothes for the day. Anything can be a creative enterprise, from cooking to deciding how to organize your personal library, so it's no stretch to include sadomasochism in the list. I've also run across the notion that sex is "inherently violent and includes acts of violation." Sex, like most human activities, isn't "inherently" anything. One of our most troubling tendencies as human beings is the desire to define our personal tastes and quirks as the essence of the realms in which they occur; such ex cathedra claims can almost always be translated as the speaker's description of how he or she experiences something. For Halsted sex is is one thing; for someone else, it will be something different.

This is just as true of spirituality. (I'll bet you saw that coming.) It's virtually a cliche that the spiritually-minded person finds God (or whatever) everywhere. As William Blake put it:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

I've seen this quatrain on wall posters illustrated with pretty pictures of green blades of grass, crystal-clear drops of water, and other beauties of nature. But everything, and I do mean everything, has a spiritual dimension: self-mutilation, fasting, flagellation, the extremes of asceticism; but also highly oppressive social systems, which are of course ordained by the gods; wars and other forms of human sacrifice. The Bhagavad-Gita, for example, spiritualizes war: Krishna tells Arjuna that the warrior slaughters his opponents not for self-glorification or bloodlust, but in the service of one's temporal duty, so go get 'em champ! And Arjuna did. As the Gita's American admirer "Winthrop Sargeant explains, 'In the model presented by the Bhagavad Gītā, every aspect of life is in fact a way of salvation.'" As the Gita itself put it: "No work stains a man who is pure, who is in harmony, who is master of his life, whose soul is one with the soul of all." Such a man could be a torturer, could drop napalm on children, could set fire to bums, as long as he stayed pure. (I'm not being cynical: see my remarks on the New Age teacher Chris Griscom here.)

Spiritual aspirants have also contemplated mortality, decay, rot, the yucky stuff of life; as well they ought. There was a guy Margot Adler mentioned in her survey of American neo-paganism, Drawing Down the Moon (I read the 1986 revised edition published by Beacon Press; Adler has updated the book several times since then), who argued that there were gods of cities as well as of the countryside, and pagans should acknowledge them; but he was the only person she wrote about who thought so. It seems to me that the kind of spirituality with the most commercial potential among educated (and mostly white) Americans today tries to ignore these matters, presenting a cleaned-up, sanitized product. That's not all there is to spirituality, including the ancient sources it invokes to give it authority.

If Halsted and others sought transcendence through an erotic theater of abjection, abasement, explicit power relations, costumes, and paraphernalia, including "acts of violation," fine for them. They could do much worse. But they have no more business legislating this as the essence of sex for everybody than an evangelical Christian has legislating his or her peculiar interpretation of the Jesus cult as normative for everybody.

As with many spiritualistas, I'm skeptical about the effectiveness of Halsted's praxis. He was, says Escoffier, "alcoholic and tortured by self-doubt and insecurities that undermined his public persona as the ultra top—the role he chose to play in his own movies." Like every god I know of, Halsted's failed him; it couldn't stop him from destroying himself. But then I remind myself that self-destructive tendencies are common among religious seekers and teachers; think of St. Francis of Assisi, who died of complications from stigmata, eye disease, and fasting at the age of 45. Halsted was 47 when he died by his own hand, of an overdose of sleeping pills. It's not exactly news that the spiritual quest isn't necessarily good for the body.

To her credit, Julie Enzser resists the boxes her interviewer tries to put her into.

Sensuality and the lesbian body are big themes in my own writing and in what I love to read. I’m drawn to poetry that includes erotic writing about lesbian experiences; I am interested how we write about our bodies and the physical and sensual experiences of our bodies. Although I would like to say that I think that this is a hallmark of Jewish lesbian poetry, I think it is more of an idiosyncratic characteristic of me as a reader and editor.

She also acknowledges that some of the poems' spirituality, or even Jewishness, emerges mainly in the context of the anthology. By analogy, if I sing a set of songs which explicitly express romantic love between men, then sing one which is ambiguous, you're more likely to hear it as a song of romantic love between men than you would if you heard it in a heterosexual context. (Unless you're absolutely determined to hear heterosexuality except when homosexuality is explicitly invoked.) What presumably makes these poems "spiritual" is that they are labeled so. Hennessey asks her at one point, "Eleanor Lerman’s poem’s ending really complicates what we think about God" (because she writes "God" instead "G-d", as religious Jews often do), and as usual my first reaction was "What do you mean 'we'?"

Once again, trying to subsume all kinds of religious (or other) experience under one word -- "spiritual," in this case, which functions along with "faith" nowadays much as "gender" does with regard to "sex" or "ethnicity" to "race", and "identity" does with just about everything -- ends up homogenizing difference into grey mush. Judaism is historically a religion about practice, not faith, doctrine, or even "spirituality." I don't say that to imply that it's a deficiency (or as some Jewish partisans would infer, a superiority); it's just a difference.

Poetry Friday (Slight Return) - No Exit

No Exit

Here at the center of the universe
there is no movement; in the higher spheres,
however, all things turn from bad to worse,
and he is impotent who interferes.

But you and I are here, perfect, in stasis:
the Unmoved Movers, the Pleroma, who've
eternities in which no moment passes.
(Asleep, you stir. Awake, I cannot move.)

I cannot make you come, I cannot make
you come to bed again with me. In pain,
stagnant with longing, I will hold daybreak
away: Verweile doch, Du bist so schön!

-- and win a victory I did not intend:
This night, too short, too long, will never end.

(1983-1984)

I still haven't found the remaining poems I meant to post, so I'm putting this one up. It's the last poem I completed. If the missing folder ever turns up, I'll post those poems, but for now ...

Poetry Friday - Great Oz

You are not, nor were meant to be, Great Oz.
On such a scale, of course, you count for nothing.
Still it must mean something that because
of you I've known such sorrow and self-loathing.
Years will pass, of course they will erase
the pain somewhat. Of course. No doubt
in time I'll lose the memory of your face.
It's not a thing I care to do without,
but time goes on. You'll dwindle till you're small,
then smaller, till you're lost to sight. I'm sure
I'll wonder why I wrote these lines at all --
how unimportant, actually, you were.
And when I write my memoirs, I will laugh,
and sum you all up in a paragraph.

-----
Memoirs? Hah. Not bloody likely.
I think it was about this poem that a friend, on reading it, asked me in surprise, "Duncan -- do you want me to tell you how ambivalent that poem is?" Which let me know that I'd achieved what I was trying to do in it. I still wonder sometimes about his reaction, though: Are poems not allowed to be this ambivalent?
Anyway, it dates from 1979 or 1980.

Poetry Friday - A sonnet is a diving bell

A sonnet is a diving bell in which
my ego safely may descend into
my id: a dark and silent region rich
with life, a home to things I never knew
existed -- creatures with voracious jaws
but little else, shy darting wisps too nervous
to observe, and all subject to laws
ignored by us who live above the surface.
Hermetically sealed in against immense
and crushing pressure, I must temper my
ascent in order to avoid the bends,
or like my sunken cousins I might die.
And yet repeatedly I brave that pressure,
hoping to return with sunken treasure.

---
From 1979 or so, with a nod to Adrienne Rich, whose "Diving into the Wreck" gave me the idea.

Poetry Friday - Don't ask dumb questions ...

Don't ask dumb questions, kid: get into bed!
I'll help you with your clothes. The sheets are fresh
as virgin foolscap laid, their blankness spread
to take impressions of the word made flesh.
Hold up! the point we're driving at we'll come
to soon. I know these postures are absurd,
but sometimes artists have to pose, and some
of ours may give rise to the flesh made word.
When words collide, when poets rub together,
they generate between them heat and light:
the clash of symbols, straining self-tied tethers,
the pseudo-war of wills where Might makes Write.
The pen (hee, hee!) is mightier than the sword:
the heart is pierced, but never ever bored.
----

Though I've never been to a poetry slam, nor much wanted to, I've been to my share of poetry readings. One night in the early 1980s (I think) I went to an open mic reading in the dorm where I work, and listened to a cute boy trying to be raunchy and tough to a girl in his poem. I recognized the manner all too well, but it gave me an idea. That sort of aggressive come-on has never been my style, but I thought it would be fun to turn it around, and put a male on the receiving end, so to speak, of the aggression. I'm not sure I succeeded, because it quickly turned into something else, as you can see; but I think it is fun, and a welcome change from the laments of unrequited love that I and other poets have ground out in excessive numbers.

Anyway, at the next reading, the same cute boy was in the group, and I had this poem with me, ready to share with the world or that small part of it. I didn't say that he'd inspired it, nor did I single him out by eye contact as I read it, but it seemed to me that he squirmed uncomfortably during the reading. (The same way boys reacted when I read this one.) I'd like to think he recognized the manner I was parodying, but it was probably just homophobia. And no, nothing came of it. This poem was prophetic in that regard.

Poetry Friday - resonance

resonance

you shake me, man, you make me lie awake,
you make me walk the streets at night until
i stagger sideways and my eyeballs ache.
it's useless staying home. i can't sit still.
i turn the pages but my eyes won't read.
i put on records but my ears won't hear.
my head is hollowed out but not by speed.
my brain's wide open and my need is clear.
the light is on and though it burns my eyes
i wouldn't turn it off if i knew how.
without the glare i couldn't recognize
the need that ties me tighter than a vow.
there's joy in the extremity you bring.
i vibrate to you like a singing string.

May 25, 1980

Poetry Friday -- Voodoo Doll

This poem is not unlike a voodoo doll.
See how I seek the form: I croon and coo
caressingly to it, to you. I call
it by your name. I think it looks like you.

How do you like your likeness? Is it apt?
Not flattering, unfair perhaps a hint
of malice in the lines? I have you trapped
at last: in ink, perhaps someday in print.

I knead my memories of you into the page --
such memories I have of you, my friend! --
long-simmered in my helplessness and rage,
which until now I lacked the means to end.

No matter where you go, you'll feel the twinge,
the pinch, the bite, the burn of my revenge.

---
From sometime in the late 70s. I'd been reading Sylvia Plath again, and was trying to get some of her fury into my own work. But it wasn't completely sincere -- more trying on the anger, to see if saying these things would let me know that I felt them. I found I didn't, and the poem ends up being hollow because of it. Still, I think it turned out well technically, and maybe some other person might find that it expressed his or her feelings more than it expressed mine.

Poetry Friday - Common Ground

common ground

i root thru sex in darkness as a mole
avoids the surface of the earth, where eye
must squint and ear be cocked for danger: hole
is safety, earth is warmth, and worm is my
companion as i grub with nose and claw
for sustenance, snuffling, wordless, unthinking
save in backbrain, shunning who would draw
me up to daylight, struggling and blinking.
where sunlight reaches is no home for me.
i want the depths, where heat provides a glow
that doesn't hurt my eyes, by which i see
where i had long forgotten i could go:
a meeting place where tunnels intersect,
a common ground where you and i connect.

--
Sometime around 1980, I think -- it was published in Ian Young's anthology Son of the Male Muse by the Crossing Press in 1982.

Poetry Friday - My former lovers

My former lovers all are gaining weight
or going bald, it seems. Time lurches on,
they fall in step; but I procrastinate,
as usual. Just call me Dorian.
It can't be from clean living or pure thoughts.
I've seen the sun come up uncounted times
with sundry friends and strangers, sans culottes
when possible, after unnatural crimes.
Sometimes I scan my mirrored face for signs
of wear and tear, at least -- it hasn't been
all party, heaven knows. The only lines
so far are when I smile. What does that mean?
Not that I'm in a hurry, for it seems
I've drifted through my life wrapped up in dreams.

----
From sometime in the early Eighties. Since then, of course, I've fallen into step with Time myself.

Poetry Friday - The Cavaliers (Toronto)

The Cavaliers (Toronto)

This hothouse forces odd loves into bloom:
the smoke, the noise, the semi-darkness stunt
the growth of shoots cramped by too little room
to start with. Each survivor is a runt.
Some mutants do thrive in this ambience --
their native habitat? Others, which sprout
better in less outré environments --
one's backyard garden, say -- get crowded out.
Though I admire the lush flamboyant growth
of tropic loves, I also want to praise
the homely ones. There should be room for both,
exotic blossoms and perennial gays.
My love for you's the hardiest of weeds:
a bit of earth and sky are all it needs.

------
Written during my first visit to Toronto in 1980. With only a week to find others like myself, I attended a gay men's discussion group; visited the office of The Body Politic, Canada's great gay-liberation magazine of the period; shopped in Glad Day Bookstore; and went to a few bars. My favorite was The Barn, a leather bar with a good DJ, and a friendlier tone than other leather bars I've been to, but I also liked The Cavaliers, a piano bar with (as I recall -- it has been 29 years since I was there!) potted plants for decoration. I was staying in an older YMCA building in the center of the city, which turned out to be cruisy (surprise!), but I wasn't quite sure how to relate to it. Though I didn't get laid during that visit, I still enjoyed the city and wished I could have moved there.

"The Cavaliers (Toronto)" has, I realize, an uncomfortably familiar pre-Stonewall literary vibe, of the gay bar as a stifling, unhealthy milieu. I confess my sin, but I still think there's enough truth in it to sustain the poem, and I still like the small twists I put in. The Cavalier drew an older crowd anyway, and I think that even today many gay men cultivate a sort of demi-monde sensibility in their gathering places. Others just ignore the dominant mood and use the bars or other sites to get what they want, and that's good too. I've also come to realize how important bars have been as community sites on their own terms. After nearly thirty years, though, this poem is now a period piece anyway.

Poetry Friday - If I neglect ...

If I neglect, in these my recollections,
the more pleasant side of our relations,
if I leave out the moments of affection,
of respect, of warmth, in my narration,
if all too often it appears the bad
outweighs the good in my account of you,
if I forget the good times we have had,
it's just because they were so bloody few!
And anyhow I'd rather not profane
those good times, since they were so rare, by mention;
but lest I seem to be so wracked by pain
that they have never come to my attention,
it may, therefore, be timely to proclaim:
though years go by, the Muse remains the same.

May 22, 1979

And still does, thirty years later.

Poetry Friday -- remote transmission

remote transmission

I always realized you were done with wires
and regiments of photons in a void;
but then illusion, to succeed, requires
suspense of disbelief to be enjoyed.
I watched you like a picture on a screen,
the way teenagers moon for tv stars.
It seemed my reach could bridge the space between;
in fact, you were no less remote than Mars.
I thought where there’s an image there must be
its model somewhere, so I searched for that.
But our encounters were illusory,
You always seemed so indistinct and flat.
And I’d muse, What an interesting kid.
I’d like to meet him … But I never did.

May 21, 1979

Poetry Friday - To want what won't be given

To want what won't be given is a foolish
thing, since life so often makes us wait,
then gives us nothing, but we are a mulish
species. Stubborn is a human trait.

I save myself in hopes of some great task:
I count my steps, I study deprivation,
I circumscribe even my dreams. I ask
for nothing, yet I hope for my salvation.

Some love is keeping faith. Some faces haunt
us for a lifetime, flouting reasoning
and teaching us humility. To want
what won't be given is a human thing:

to aim at targets we can't even see,
succeed or fail, but never bend the knee.

21 May 1979

Poetry Friday - Circus

Circus

Come one and all, to witness the renowned
and shocking marriage torture, set by mandate,
in which two people let themselves be bound
together for as long as they can stand it.

Observe behind the female player's veil
her staring eyes, her strained and wooden smile;
observe likewise the trembling of the male
participant as she comes down the aisle.

And now all eyes are on the referee,
who cautions one and all before the bout:
The time is now, before this company,
to speak if any one feels any doubt.

And now the gathered crowd draws in its breath.
Will there be blood? For this one's to the death.

1 June 1979
25 June 1979