The shattered self. We each try to present a strong and vibrant self to the world, to our friends, and especially to the one we would have as a lover. We struggle to make it visible. And we, moreover, have no objection to another's attempt to do the same. We are a moral people trying to lift each other up, for the most part. Things seldom turn out right. We are misunderstood, greatly misunderstood. The vibrancy dissipates and we appear dull and boring. We express ourselves weakly. The self is shattered. It seems that the one wanted as beloved now looks on with contempt. We resolve to try again, to be better prepared, to succeed. Moments of hope come. We fail again. Miserably. The lover, the beautiful lover is finally gone. Shattering, shattering. One can almost hear the sound of the breaking.
After many shatterings, the aesthetic self awakens. The now seen to be inevitable collapse of thought and will becomes the true face of the world. One is now able to crawl out from the rubble and ruins of the self and walk about in a world equally shattered. Gentle touching. Close breathing. Configurations of the sublime.
Elemental things, eternal and universal things, float by. The awareness held in fixed suspension. Beyond the total break-up. In a shimmering peace beyond understanding. And a great knowing that is a windy unknowing.
After long nights and days of searching and dreaming in weakness of chest and fullness of doubt the questions stop. The when and the where of his arrival are answered in the nowhere and the never of some non-appearing pure light. A strange lightness of being quickens your mental stride up over the things at hand out onto the plains of pure form. And you fall so easily in among all the things that simply are. A timeless time and a placeless place. And you can so intimately feel the arm going around your waist.
The shattering of the self. The shattering of the world of selves. The timeless time at the end of liberality and the beginning of the tyranny of love. The young man sits alone watching as they enter. He has been here forever eyeing those who would be his lovers. Always the one lover again and again. The repetition of the same. Always the slight difference that is the same falling away into the falling away into the falling into the same falling away. He nods in another's direction. The same nod. The same returning recognition of the same. The one thing is there. And there with itself as the other. An otherness that is occasion for the same. Love has him by the throat. That thickness rises up again. He sits, unable to move.
Another arrives. The blue of his shirt contrasts sharply with the blond of his hair. And another. His reaching down to place his book aright is such a lithesome reaching. And another. Why that quick move of his head as though an invisible dance partner just pulled him back? The wind on the street blows eddies in. The air disentangles itself momentarily and the young men sit down to become the common watching. No one is there. The One Thing is there repeating and repeating and repeating.
The young men cruise each other ever waiting to see yet once again that one beauty. Though they themselves get old and no one looks at them again, they continue looking and waiting and again finding him momentarily and that is said to be enough. They pretend amiability to each other. They are awaiting the destruction and the final uniting.
A friend asked me if the gay mind is really like this. But it's a useless question. It's not a lover's question, but that of a scientist and for him the answer is obvious: No, it isn't; a real person is much more complicated and there is no way to unify all who would call themselves gay into one such tightly boxed-in form. I'm not writing either psychology or phenomenology. I am writing the terrible constrictions of love and in that nowhere no question is so disinterested. The lover urgently and silently begs: Where, where is that one I love? When will he come and make this pain cease? Questions not fit for the conversations of the everyday. Without answer, they are always the same questions. So, my friend asks, Do gay minds always have such useless obsessive unanswerable questions on their mind? I answer Yes, and I say No, the gay mind is much more complicated (and sane) than that. Although the inward turning questions of love and the useless answers ring falsely in ordinary conversation, they in fact contain the very truth. Scientific, empirical evidence reveals little of the world and an insignificant part at that.
To say that the gay mind doesn't fit well with the strong individualism of liberal democracy is only to say that he is ever more concerned with disappearing into the one eternal Form. He, together with all Its other exemplifications here and here and there, will vanish into Him. The simple repetitions speak only of That and he and he and he are not. Only He is. A lover that takes his breath away. There's little else to say about the gay mind; all else is pretense and a biding of one's time until It happens. The shattering that is love.
Gay people will tell you that they want to become a real part of human society, equals among equals - and why not? We are waiting. But we really want it all to end and for Him to come at last, and we will be gone. Until then, why not?
The gay mind is always turning turning turning inward into the One Thing. No one can take that religion from us. This god at the center of our dervish dance will surely come.
A new number is announced and he rushes to see if that one will reveal to him that one Form that he has longed for forever. In his mind there is ever a strong pull away from the individual toward the eternal thing. Finally no person stands there before him. And he himself becomes lost to himself. Around about there are only exemplifications of the universals. That fragrance of the far away. The taste of elemental things.
He lounges with his friends and bantering fills the air. Incessant talk. It comes to nothing. Each secretly had an eye out for Him. Time was wasted waiting for yet another sighting. Until the clamor arises and there is general acknowledgement that He is on his way. Each, even now, feels the transcendental shattering. The self vanishes into the Self of the self. Eyes lower. The night begins.
There is nothing personal going on. Gossip gossip gossip is just cheap talk about made up lives – nothing – only the waiting is real. The Form fills their minds. They were never truly here. The Real is intensely real and devastating. And the waiting.
These modern and post-modern boys are back at the Sultan's court, at the Sufi teke, in the air around Rumi and Shams-al-Din-i-Tabriz. Nothing has changed, the universal forms inform the mind as always, the remembering is complete. Persons and individuals have vanished. God dances with Himself. The ever-new number. The One. In his room full of mirrors.
The queer mind is not just like every other mind except for one little insignificant piece. The differences between minds and types of thinking are momentous and vast and this difference is of the highest spiritual significance. The attempt to make homos blend into the crowd of shared humanity and disappear is (I am tempted to say a damned conspiratorial plot by straight people) homophobia on the part of homos themselves. We are different, we think differently, Being itself shutters at the difference. Still, for all that tactical hyperbole, we are the non-people of sameness and the difference between us is only a supplement toward a radical oneness; and that is what makes us strategically different from straight folk and their far-flung families. Thought teeters on edge of the precipice. The straight person will object and insist that we are all indeed one big family and that differences necessarily complement each other – such is hetero-think. With Bersani, we struggle to maintain the right to be queer and have the dignity that word confers. We are in danger of being sucked into the regime of the normal.
I feel like a Shi'a cleric trying to insist that he is not one of George Bush's Western liberal democrats, that band of happy individualists, and that he doesn't want to be lovingly held in the lap of humanity. The only difference I and probably that cleric see between the liberals and the conservatives is that while the liberals want to gently persuade us to be that and nurture it along, the conservatives are going to force us to the same thing with their might. Call it cross-cultural appreciation or call it business, it's the same thing.
These writings are a sexual playfulness. The self is shattered. The things of the world disappear and the eternal things that never were here are now here. Tumbling tumbling tumbling inward to the All Things. One thought. Boundaries dissolve. The act contemplates itself. Logico-mathematics is a gigantic thing and there is no way we can stand and be just our individual selves in its presence. We dissolve into this Logos Lover. It's an erotic thing. A sexual playful destructiveness.
Every dissolution of the self into God is erotic. The same with the same. God does not take into Himself what is not identical with Himself already. A vortex and a head-swirling compression. The too close. The vanishing of boundaries. The Forms are themselves. We are that. And the One.
Who am I that I
might write so off-handedly of the great philosophical ideas that rule our
spiritual intellectual life. I sit in
this little room in
We and the unworld of the gods are entangled in this world composed of fractured light and teeth that bite behind red lips so desirable.
It is said that some of the angels laughed and played while Jesus was being crucified either because they didn't get it or they were little philosophers, which comes to about the same thing. Society's concern is not my concern, and I feel somewhat uneasy about that. I secretly think it's no one's concern. We are all already out of here in spirit. Or have I misunderstood? Am I alone in going to the chamber of this god? Is that fair shoulder to be mine alone? Am I alone in this trembling?
______________________
I have written openly about the shattering of thought by love and the fierce image of divine beauty all along the form of that one I am staring at. I have spoken the truth of things. I have laid out the undoing of the world into something that is finally unspeakable. I suppose I should go back to participating in the Grand Lie that Plato spoke of and reassure the world that all is fine, or would be if only this and that were slightly changed. I could drop this aesthetico-religious view of things and take up the moralistic view of the Right and the Left.
_______________________________________________________________
I do not want to be misunderstood; by railing against the Great Individualism all around me, I am not thereby saying that I am advocating a greater identification with the group. On the contrary, all that inter-relating, that constant concern with personal encounters, the solicitous caring for and about the thoughts of others and of how oneself is received or not received by them, is (here paradoxically) not what I am all about. I am writing of something away from any such entanglement. All of which is not to say that I live away from such. One's material and social place is not the place where one's spirit freely roams. The life of the individual (great or servile) within a group is a moral affair. And, though the moralistic viewpoint is all-prevalent today, there really is much more within the high arches of Being.
The problem I have is that philosophers have often misunderstood the Universal to be the class. Eg. The Form of Rose to be the class of all roses, or the Number Three to be the class of all triplets. They have then seen only two possibilities: one talks about a class or an individual member of a class. Thus when I talk of the Lover or Love or Beauty, they see the social group (class) of lovers and love affairs and the many beautiful faces. I see it otherwise. I see the Forms separate from both the individual and any group of individuals. And those words "separate from" makes them roll their eyes and mutter "Platonism" and dismiss it out of hand (probably because of that damned homo-eroticism that it inevitably leads to). If I were to try to speak my ideas in class-talk I would describe the individuals in it smudging together into one rotating blur – a somewhat alluring image for me, but too crammed full and finally clogged.
However, let's say I am talking about a standing-around of beauties or an abjection of lovers. That is sort of a group, but not really. That is a mere repetition of the one Form in the shattered mirror of matter. It's a literary and a philosophical thing; don't worry about it. It is the form of thought in these writings, though; and I do so love to write.
Sartre writes, "Evil is the systematic substitution of the abstract for the concrete." I think with that he is referring to those times in life when we find ourselves growing nervous and uncomfortable because we are increasingly confronted by some quiet awful twilight and its enduring presence becomes unendurable. And citing a rosary of intellectual understandings, we try to spirit it away. In the place of immanent danger, we intellectualize, we theorize, in prayerful contemplation of scientific abstractions.
In my own case, because I have written about Being itself, which for the human mind is frightening when confronted head on, I deal in nothing but abstractions. Away from all support that life's various beings might give, I reel before the very Real. And I know the feel of the abstractness of the abstractions. I intimately know the looming emptiness. And I speak as casually as I can. Pretense and sham fill my speaking. Vast languorous, clangorous stretches of non-thought resound and I repeatedly lie unmoving in my own mind. Slowly those abstractions become the smooth and luscious skin of a lover. The concrete and the abstract coalesce, evil and beauty, the ugly and the good. Boundaries disappear.
It's a curious thing that in English the word "property" refers to both the universal exemplified by a particular and a piece of land or material thing that one owns. And if friends own each other then each is a piece of property of the other; even unto saying that I am my friend. That idea is cause for concern. There is great danger all about the idea of ownership, because it seems inevitable, in this world, that one will come to lose the thing owned; the tie, the nexus, will be broken. The friend will move away, misunderstandings will corrode trust, livelihoods will vanish, the strong material support of body will be loosened and things will slowly begin to fall apart into nothing, and finally illness will kill. Or did I jump from idea to idea too fast? I'm looking for the Jolt. My concern here has been to speak about, not the making of, but the breaking of the connection between particular and universal, owner and owned.
In Platonism the universal becomes loosened from the particular and flies free. Perhaps it really does then try to fly where there is no material support of air for its wings and it falls; perhaps it is just then in free fall forever. The loosening, for us, does occur. We inevitably loose the material support of all that we own, including, of course, our own bodies, and we suffer the giddiness of falling. Unless there comes a strong hand to hold us, we are overwhelmed with anxiety.
The separation of the Forms that is the mark of Platonism is known and felt in those moments of greatest danger. Obviously also included in that are all those extreme moments of falling in love when loss and the overwhelming are close at hand. Giddy anxiety. And when the break up occurs that it seems must occur, and the lover's material substance is gone and the abstracted Lover comes, then we become philosophers. The still perfection beyond life and existence is intimately known. It is known in spite of not being sought.