When Silence Speaks

Portrait of John Boswell by Robert Giard, 1987

I used to be a professor of medieval studies, but usually my academic writing isn't relevant here. Now I'm making an exception because, well, I'm just so pleased to be finished with a book I worked on for four years--and because it's about recovering part of the history of men loving men long before Stonewall. We need a past we can live with in order to build a future we can live toward. 

John Boswell knew that when he published Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality in 1980. It was an ambitious, dauntingly footnoted monograph about the medieval past, but it was a best seller to a surprisingly broad audience. The gay literary and current affairs review Christopher Street ran a cartoon in which one guy sitting at a bar asked another, "How about coming back to my place for a little Christianity, social tolerance, and homosexuality?" Among the notes of appreciation sent to Boswell by readers, one included the questions, "Do you have a boyfriend? And if so, would you consider dumping him?"

For my part, by the time I wrote Queering Medieval Latin Rhetoric: Silence, Subversion, and Sexual Heterodoxy, I’d spent thirty years loitering in the margins of medieval texts–squinting in the half-light, as it were, for signs of mutual recognition, like the sodomites of Dante’s Seventh Circle.

But sometimes the guesswork of cruising is even more engaging than any ensuing hook-up. On the subject of same-sex desire and expression, it took me a long time to realize that I find what medieval authors don’t say–and how they don’t say it–even more fascinating than what they make clear.

Paradoxically, a lot of queer historical scholarship in the 1990s was obsessed with driving a wedge between pre-modern texts and the desire of modern readers to reclaim the past. Since no one could have named homosexuality in modern terms in the twelfth century, or the fifteenth, or indeed before the word’s mid-nineteenth-century coinage, it basically wasn’t there at all, so the argument ran.

A lot was sacrificed in the more extreme versions of this critique. The drive to find one’s own gay experience mirrored by generations long gone, albeit in a glass darkly, was dismissed as naïve–from the left by queer theorists, but also by socially conservative scholars invested in shutting down any serious consideration of deviant medieval sexualities.

What I set out to do with this book was to listen to the different ways that medieval writers didn't talk about gay sex. Silence isn't just one thing. Some silences speak volumes: they point directly to what they claim they're not talking about. The right kind of silence can hint at desires that can’t be directly named. That was true in the Middle Ages, as it was true in mid-twentieth-century America--and as it still is today, in places like the state of Florida. (Thank you, Ron DeSantis.)

We need a queer past to make sense of our experience, as much as we need a queer future to work towards. We need GLBTQ ancestors whose promise and potential we can apppropriate to ourselves. Sometimes, we have to look for them between the lines, in unspoken hints and oblique innuendo.

If the only prayer you said was Thank you...

 

...that would be enough.

--Meister Eckhart

At the Sistine Body Shop

Yes, this is camp. And somehow, also tender, sexy, playful, and profound. 

With thanks, as so often, to Hoppergrass for the link to this image by photographer Freddy Fabris.

The Goal

 

The goal of an erotic spiritual practice isn't satisfaction.

The goal is to embrace desire as Life's unbounded and endless longing for Itself.

To take it as a teacher. 

To see that what you have, you cannot possess.

To see that what you lack, you already have.

Like Rome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Forum

 

I don't remember where it is that Freud says that the mind is like Rome. Or maybe that's not exactly the way he puts it. Maybe my memory is playing a trick: building something new on top of what's buried further down. (OK, Google settled this almost instantly: it's from Civilization and Its Discontents--but as far as I'm concerned, that's not only cheating, it short-circuits the fertile pleasures of not knowing for sure.)

Beneath the streets we travel, beneath the gardens we plant, beneath the houses we build: a past that may disappear beneath the surface but doesn't go away. The underground stream that rises up into a basement. The sinkhole that opens when the roof of a buried chamber collapses. The thud of stone against the shovel in the garden. The three columns that remain of an ancient temple, beside a six-lane thoroughfare. The amphitheater capped by apartments and TV antennae. The expressway that follows the route of a 2000-year-old road. That's what the complexity of our minds is like, Freud says. 

Except that the state of our mind isn't just like Rome in the present moment: every period of its history is alive and vibrating in the here and now. As though the Rome of six-lane avenues and electric lines were also, simultaneously, the Rome of Caesar and Cicero, of the Empire in decline, of the Renaissance Popes, of the Risorgimento, of Mussolini, of Fellini. You can buy holographic postcards in Rome of the principal ancient monuments and watch them oscillate back and forth, as you tilt them up and down, between a photograph of the ruins and a reconstruction of the buildings' original state. 

That's a little more like our minds, in the complex indeterminacy of the relation between our conscious awareness and the unconscious or forgotten layers that complicate and enrich our experience. Except that our minds contain strata upon strata, not just two. Think of the times you've gone back to your family of origin and found that suddenly, once again, you're fifteen years old. Or six. Or ten. Or (perhaps happily, perhaps hellishly) all of the above.

St. Augustine likened our memory to an inexhaustible storehouse. Julian of Norwich called our souls a noble city in the midst of which God's throne is set. Buddhist masters like Thich Nhat Hanh and Pema Chödrön talk about befriending our feelings and learning to care for them, rather than brushing them aside and neglecting them, or else projecting them outwards as though those around us bore responsibility for them. Among contemporary queer authors who get this, graphic novelist Allison Bechdel stands out for her two memoirs of her relationships with her father and mother, respectively: Fun Home and Are You My Mother?

Coming to know our own minds better, to wander around and descend through the complexity of those layers, is one of life's great adventures. The best practices of psychotherapy are driven by lively excitement to know ourselves, rather than by the misery that may have brought us to our shrink in the first place--by the desire to make friends with our unconscious, rather than trying to hunt it down and kill it. The best practices of mindful erotic self-awareness are also about lively curiosity and acceptance of who we are, and how we came to be who we are, as something wondrous and worthy of curiosity and respect, as well as celebration. Impatience, shame, and judgment are the adversaries of genuine insight and growth. 

In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." It's the water that flows underground that sustains our gardens.