who?
september twenty second | nine post meridiem
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This is my great-great-great-great-grandpa, James Edward S----. I don't know when this was taken, or anything else about him except that he's buried somewhere in Belfast. My grandpa, who gave me this print today, doesn't know anything about him either; he found this in a box full of old photographs that his 85 year old cousin was about to throw away. From the expression on his face, I suspect that, while the photographer was busy under his curtain, James was silently planning the one man overthrow of years of English tyranny. Our sartorial tastes are strikingly similar.
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Do I think about sex too much? This is rhetorical, or at least self-directed; I'm not expecting an answer. Throughout college I flirted with Zen Buddhism, though in retrospect the appeal was always more aesthetic than spiritual. I went to zazen every other week or so (it was cheaper than yoga), and enjoyed the resulting calmness that sometimes verged on euphoria. I wasn't very committed, but I thought I was certain that prone navel-sniffing was something I was perfectly suited for. So the three days I spent at the Vipassana retreat before bailing last August came as a huge shock. I didn't Learn Things About Myself during those three days so much as have things I thought were the opposite of Who I Was emphatically asserted: I really, really, really liked the things that were supposedly oppressing and isolating me. I liked the constant chatter running through my head, I liked constant external stimulation (for the most part), I liked not being able to keep my mind on a conversation because damn there's a girl over there (with long brown hair). I found that weaknesses like this were better dealt with by isolating and exaggerating them in idiosyncratic and private ways. When I come across passages like this, from The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (which I just finished, in a blaze of light), I solemnly nod my assent:As warriors besieging a fortress will try one ruse after another to have that object so long before their eyes fall at last into their hands, so the Athenian lover engages in a war of words, surrounds his beloved with arguments that hem him in like soldiers. And the things he says are not just crude gallantries but the first blazing precursors of what one day, using a Greek word without remembering its origin, will be called metaphysics. The notion that thought derives from erotic dialogue is, for the great Athenians, true in the most straightforward, literal sense. Indeed, that link between a body to be captured like a fortress and the flight of metaphysics is, for Plato, the very image of eros.
I'm not sure what to make of this, of the role excessive desire plays in my life, and I'm not going to assay an answer right now. I certainly don't want to dissolve it in a lotus-bedecked puddle, like I thought I once did. I don't think I've ever felt more in control of -- and more controlled by -- The (hem hem) Word and My Immanent Mastery Thereof, of which unfathomable desire is I think an important motivating factor. But just the fact that I'm even raising the question makes me think there might be something missing (i.e., actual sex haha). Despite its joking nature, this is actually one of the more serious entries I've written lately. As in, what am I supposed to do with this? When my cuppeth doth spilleth over, whereto shouldst I direct the stains? Just to be clear: this isn't a complaint that I'm not, right now, at this moment, getting any. It's a question about the nature of the gadfly that continually tickles my nads no matter how satiated I happen to be.
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Tangentially related: the other day I wanted to accuse two people, male and female, of being cowards in a colorful way. I stumbled over the phrase, "They don't have the err reproductive organs to go through with it�" when I realized how easy it is, even amongst unmanly men such as myself, to use "balls" as a dysphemism for courage, and "pussy" for weakness. If you think about it, this is completely assbassackwardsass. The scrotum is possibly the weakest, most ineffectual, and most delicate part of the human body, whereas we all know that (and I realize I'm getting into bad comedian territory here) pussy rules the world. Come on, how long would we men continue in our misguided scientific, warlike, subduing ways if you hooches could get it together for once and have a worldwide sex strike? Then it'd be up to the Queers to oppress us all, and Lord knows they're too busy pounding each others' rectums until crystal meth comes out their ears to even notice the sudden lack of available quim. So from now on I'm switching it around and using "pussy" to connote strength and "balls" weakness and fragility. Take that, Patriarchy!