Society

Society at large and as we know it is a rather rigidly constructed thing. Greater and lesser things interweave: male-female, old-young, high status-low status, rich-poor, beautiful-plain, intelligent-dull, owner-worker, master-slave, and on and on. Boundaries are set and we usually know which side we are on. We manage to learn the behavior appropriate to our place; and, though the complexities of the interweaving can at times lead to the inaction of confusion, society advances. I am writing an anti-social thing.

Differences collapse in the heat of the sameness of homo-ness. It's head-spinning; no wonder people are against it. We all want to know where we stand. In this faggot writing you will never find that out. And here transcendence mingles so intimately with immanence that … well, it's embarrassing to watch. There are, therefore, herms erected all along the way to ward you off. The god of boundaries is here. Hand over your intellectual capital and you may pass. This is the place of the Nexus. This is the place of that little dash setting off the great pairs. I have written a socially negligible thing. The dead thing left on the altar. I am the old crawling up your lovely smooth skin. What history was is at hand.

This writing is sufficient unto itself. A self-creating god is in here. The dead Christian god you ate as a boy. Or have I taken liberties? Rhetorically, words come and go, mingle and cling together, advance and reach a full stop; and nothing much is said. Still, the truth of it all is extra-sentential (do you like that word?) and it will leave these sentences and follow you to your bed. Where you will fall into the Nowhere between all the neatly laid out differences.

Just how we should understand all that is a matter of sweet contention. Often sickeningly sweet. I am not speaking of a union of opposites, but I sort of am. I am not speaking of neither this, neither that, but it's not that either. It is dialectical, for sure, but dialectics is a transcendent way of arguing and it's unclear if there is such a thing. It leads to where the Third Man lives, or refused to live, before he moved in here as just bad philosophy. It’s a gay thing that wants to erase its difference from everyone else and just be one of the boys. In the process he simply erases himself. Or almost. His newfound ordinariness is just too ordinary and he still sticks out. So here I am sticking out. But few are looking. A just this has taken on the form of one of the Great Forms and I see it. You see it. But there are only a few who are looking and tasting this wisdom. The connection is too fine. The nexus breaks too easily. Like all sugary confection.

The gods have returned. Jesus, save us, we dance on your cheek.

Philosophy is phenomenological, which is to say that it is studious about the appearance of what appears. That definition is, however, is as unclear as the word "phenomenological" is long. The Forms exist; we see them. The bare particular exists; we see it. The nexus is right there; we see it with the eye of our eyes. Or do we? We see them and we don't. Or rather, yes, we do see them with our philosophical eyes, but not with our ordinary, everyday eyes. Which is, I suppose, a way of saying nothing at all. Except that we do see those mystical things. The seeing is not difficult, but it is seemingly impossible for those who don't see. What's up here? Are we built differently? Probably. Some of us see the one thing; some of us see the one thing shattered. Some of us feel the presence of that One Thing; some of us feel its absence. The one/the many, presence/absence, seeing/not seeing, mystical/schmystical.

I have hung out most of my life with those who have run after the One Boy that is in all boys. Perhaps that kind of mind really does, as Sartre says, centripetally trip along. Those same ones would gladly worship that god with lavishments that surely wouldn't cost any more than they are already spending on that one boy here who is no more than a hopeless tease. We see the many: we see the one thing. We experience the many; we experience the One Thing. But the many is nothing without the one. We see, we experience, the one in the many – the Act! But the intensity and the head swirling frustration of not having, at times that are not in time, leaves us alone with just the one thing. The god appears in our desperation. And he was always there. It's a divine entanglement. The heart aches. We have escaped the act of thought itself to be out there with that – the goal.

The spirit of these writings does go against these democratically circumspect times. It does not display any humility that one should gain from having spent weighty time considering all sides in the matter at hand. No personal reservations, no hesitation in the face of great difficulty, no seemly unease before the deity of peer judgment, no halting cadence is present to indicate the force of the guarded expression. I do not ostentatiously defer to them. I write my own words filled with my own desire. Words I insolently admit were forced into my possession by that Autocrat. He has made himself mine. My love for Him is perforce boundless. The demos be damned. What you or I may think or want is irrelevant. Love is the watchword, not respect. Suffocating closeness, not the airy independence of equals.

In the same spirit my words remain gendered. He is constantly there. It is not the case that he and she disappear together into It. There is no mutual destruction in the union of opposites. Matter and anti-matter do not embrace and annihilate themselves. The neuter does not finally gain center ground, a floating unground. Finally there is only he and he and he and he and he … which is to say He is there. He fills the "there is". Il y a. Il ne disparait point.

Except that under my caressing hand he becomes his own her and then it just lies there. The body as though a dead thing excites. It's a common experience; I hardly need to remind you of it. You have it just outside the door of memory always. Frightening things. He is that. No annihilation, but super-being. In my transcendent unthinking he becomes the thing out there in my gaze. I write and he and he and he and he disappear … sublimate … into He is.

You, of course, cannot follow the logic of this; no one can. But as in a dream super-logic prevails - or is it just my unseemly dis-ease before truth? In India I have watched unwilling boys willingly act out the part of Sati, Siva in religious drag. Nothing much fit together there either, though I fidgeted and understood it perfectly. The masculine God was all around. He obviously did not want to liberal out in the more considerate, non-sexist sway of the Demos. The boy was taken, and God in this ancient and newfound youth was strange.

This writing is a constant back-looking at what I have written and it disappears into that. Little remains. Publishers don't publish mirrors reflecting only mirrors. Narcissus and Orpheus and even Psyche, looking so unadvisedly, never made it far. Gaze upon gaze. And Socrates, "Know thyself" – mad advise. I am a cultured, well-read thing. A post-post-modern writer. Queerly queer.