Two Days of Embodied Joy

Twenty-two years ago, a Body Electric workshop changed my life for good.

One spring weekend in 2002, "Celebrating the Body Erotic" worked its indelible magic on my body, heart, and soul. Twenty-two men met one another as nervous strangers at 8:45 on Saturday morning. By 7 Sunday night, we were a band united and transformed in "the dear love of comrades," as Walt Whitman might well have put it.

I learned to breathe as though making friends with my lungs for the first time. I leaned to touch myself with a level of pleasure and unashamed abandon that I wish had been available to me--as it should have been--at my adolescent awakening over thirty years earlier. I learned to share those gifts with the men with whom I'd embarked on this two-day adventure. With astonishing speed and ease, we built for each other  a space of safety and unconditional acceptance, where we could all flourish. We reached out to each other with delight and respect. I experienced, with a shattering intensity, the presence of the Sacred in my own body, and in the bodies of the other men who bared their souls and flesh. It left me weeping tears of joy, at the oddest and most upredictable moments, for weeks afterwards.

For forty years, the Body Electric School has offered a precious, life-giving vessel of deep erotic wisdom, a source of healing and growth, self-discovery and community. Its mission began amidst the physical, psychological, and spiritual trauma of the AIDS crisis. In the mid-1980's, founder Joseph Kramer extended a lifeline to men struggling to affirm the wholeness of their erotic selves in the face of that threat. Over the years, its programming has widened in scope to include workshops open to multiple genders and orientations--while continuing to offer single-gender workshops that provide safe space for men who need to do the work of erotic, emotional, and spiritual self-realization with one another.

The School's centre of gravity has always been in the US, and its presence in Canada limited by comparison. Celebrating the Body Erotic was last offered in Toronto in 2016. Happily, it will return there this fall, the weekend of November 22-24. 

If you've never experienced the work of Body Electric, or if you're ready to return, and if you live within traveling distance, you couldn't spend a weekend in better service to your one wild and precious life.

Our Only Holiness

Photograph by Andrew Graham

"Our only holiness is by participation and surrender to the Body of Love, and not by any private performance."

--Richard Rohr

The Moon Sings to the Stream

Philip Gladstone, "The Twenty"

I am the unity on high,

I am the multiple in the pond.

looking up to me from the stream

my image, my double.

I am the truth on high,

I am the fabrication in the pond

looking up to me from the stream

my image, in its fated deception.

Above--I am enwrapped in silence,

whispering, singing, in the pond.

On high I am divine,

in the stream, I am the prayer.

--Leah Goldberg (1911-1970)

5785

 

LISTEN!

What do you hear?

A wake-up call at dawn?

An animal in pain?

An air-raid siren?

The cry of an injured child?

The wail of a mourner?

The sound of the world being born?

Dude. You're So Ripped.

 Holy. Living. Fuck.

Desire is a Horse

"Desire is a horse that wants to take you on a journey to spirit."

--Malidoma Somé, quoted by Don Shewey, in Daddy Lover God: A Sacred Intimate Journey

Reparative Fantasy

 

Echo and Narcissus. John William Waterhouse, 1903

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

Stuck in the past. Or caught in the future's web of illusions.

Sometimes erotic fantasy becomes a retreat from the reality of the here and now. I've seen this happen to others. I've seen it happen to myself.

But not always.

Every fantasy begins with a longing for something unfulfilled.

Somewhere behind the longing lies grief, for something that never was.

The longing is a desire to heal a wound. To close a gap in the self.

The snare comes with imagining, "If I could only have this, I'd be complete. I'd be healed."

Facing that the wound can't be undone, only transformed, would mean giving up all hope for a better past.

Or put differently:  admitting that the wound can't be undone is a step toward forgiving the past for being what it was. And more importantly, for what it still is, within us.

Can fantasy turn around to look more directly, with wisdom and compassion,  at the wound that's it's struggling to repair? Can my fantasy then help me recognize that the longed-for object it conjures is somehow already active within my own psyche? That along with the wound, there's grown a strength that I can carry forward in my life?

Can fantasy thus help repair the soul after all?

You Gotta Love David Sedaris

In this week's New Yorker, on his audience with the Pope.

Yes, the Pope.

"My feeling is that if you want a church that is a hundred per cent gay-friendly, go join one--there are plenty to be had--or start your own. 'Yes, but I want Our Lady of Sorrows to celebrate Pride Month,' I can hear someone whining.

"It's like going to Burger King and demanding a Big Mac. If you want a Big Mac, go across the street to McDonald's. Jesus."

Bating Your Prayer, Praying Your Bate

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Sympathy for the Devil

Feeling empathy for J.D. Vance this morning has left me feeling a little freaked out.

The New York Times website today posted a profile of how he converted to conservative Catholicism in his mid-30's. It's a religious world-view I couldn't be much more at odds with. I've rubbed shoulders with enough of its proponents over the years--eager young intellectuals in grad school convinced that Thomas Aquinas more or less said it all, and what he didn't say can be extrapolated from his writings--to know just how dangerously repressive and exclusionary a world view it is. I've listened to the juggernauts of Catholic Truth steam rolling over the lived experience of others in conversation because, well, Correct Faith is Correct Faith, everyone else's feelings and experiences be damned. More or less literally.

But I can also relate to the younger Vance's longing for certainty in reaction to the chaotic upbringing he described in his memoir. I can understand the pull of an ancient faith and its dramatic rituals, for someone who's experienced precious little stability in his previous life, and who desperately craves solid ground on which to stand. God knows, I've been there myself, before my karma ran over my dogma.

It can take decades to wear the inhuman edges off some people's pivotal religious experiences. If it ever happens at all. As the gifted comic novelist Stephen McCauley quips in Alternatives to Sex, "I'm sure there's a place for religious conviction, but on the whole, freedom of religion pales in importance next to freedom from it." 

Somewhere inside the carapace of Vance's militant, masculinist version of virtue, of his hostility and inflammatory, antifeminist, homophobic and transphobic rhetoric, there's a desire to belong, to find meaning in life, to connect to something larger and more authentic than the self-absorbed preoccupations of American materialism. And then somewhere along the way, that desire took a hateful wrong turn.

I don't know exactly what I'm feeling toward Vance. Not forgiveness, exactly, for the choice he made to sell his soul to the narcissistic huckster, serial abuser, and aspiring dictator to whom he is now running mate. But awareness of something at the core of his life that isn't erased by the shitty choices he's making.

Maybe it's my own edges that are getting worn down.

 

Infinite Needs, Finite Lifetime

 "Humans can create infinite needs. The market dominates us, and it robs us of our lives. Humanity needs to work less, have more free time, and be more grounded. Why so much garbage? Why do you have to change your car? Change the refrigerator? There is only one life and it ends. You have to give meaning to it. Fight for happiness, not just for wealth."

--Pepe Mujica, former president of Uruguay, as quoted in The New York Times

What is Essential

"Know that a person needs to cross a very, very narrow bridge, and what is essential is that one should not be overcome by fear."

--Rabbi Nachman of Bratislav

L'dor V'dor

 From generation to generation...

Becoming the Mandala

 Twelve men gathered around a twelve-petalled lotus

In Praise of Dayspring

"I get asked sometimes in interviews, 'Are you Christian?' And I'm like, 'You tell me. Here's the book I wrote.... Here's the answer I came up with.... I don't know how much of this I believe, but I'm still squatting in the ruins of it'."

Anthony Oliveira is as brilliant, funny, and moving in his interview on Matt Baume's podcast The Sewers of Paris as he is in his recently published Dayspring (Strange Light, 2023). 

Is the book a novel? Its multiple subtitles--a poem in themselves--suggest something far more genre-bending: 

the disciple whom he loved

neaniskos

notes toward a revelation

the young man in white

a chapbook

a theophany

a gospel

a great blasphemy

against the heretic cerinthus

a breviary

a hymnal

a memoir

a work of plagiarism

an account of the word made flesh

A joyously, unapologetically queer retelling of the Christian Gospels, it oscillates between the first century and the twenty-first, between Palestine and Portuguese Toronto, between the Old Testament love story of David and Jonathan and the life of Teresa of Avila, between lyrical evocation and word-for-word extracts from Calvin, Julian of Norwich, and a panoply of others--sometimes with attribution, sometimes without. 

More often than not, the turn of the page offers a new freestanding fragment: a poem, generally with minimal punctuation and language piled up to defy ordinary prose syntax; paraphrase of sayings of Jesus, printed in red and laid out on just a few lines with staggered margins; a monologue of the never-directly-named Beloved reminiscing to the narrator about childhood miracles performed as pranks; occasionally a longer excursus of several pages, retelling at greater length an episode familiar from the Gospels, but with surprising turns.

At one point in Baume's interview, Oliveira says he intended the book as "a magpie assemblage" of what is most queer, most unapologetically enfleshed, in the Christian tradition--"a resource" and "an anthology of texts" to support the survival of the presence of same-sex desire--as incontrovertible as it is suppressed--at the heart of Christianity. "So much of history is about corroding the places we pretty visibly were," he observes (at about 34:00 in the podcast).

Oliveira doesn't wear his erudition on this sleeve, but it's there on every page--digested into raucous but loving, devout humour and poignant longing, as when he pokes fun at "matt" for his love of prophecy, deconstructing the Gospel of Matthew's account of Palm Sunday with its absurdly doubled donkey ("on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of an ass"). His Ph.D. in seventeenth-century literature only begins to explain his implicit but constantly evident knowledge of biblical scholarship and the history of Christian theology. But the book requires of the reader no prior conversance with most of the references submerged in its obliquely told story of finding God in sex, and sex in God.

"I don't know when I lost my sense of shame," Oliveira laughingly tells Baume--the line that gives the podcast episode its title. "I've forbidden my mother to read it." Yet he petitioned the Catholic Archbishop of Toronto to grant the book official approval, not once but three times--a triple denial that Oliveira gleefully points out has its own biblical parallel.

When the never-directly-named Jesus of Dayspring denounces the hypocrites, Pharisees, and whitewashed sepulchres of the Gospels. it's abundantly clear that he's talking about the powerbrokers of present-day homophobic Christian institutions: the media personality pastors of American "prosperity gospel" megachurches, the functionaries of churchly hierarchies. Oliveira isn't pleading for a place at the Christian table for gay spirituality. He's shamelessly asserting that the whole damn banquet is queer. 

The Voyage Out: On the Paintings of Daniel Barkley

The model stands nonchalantly in three-quarters view, arms crossed; hips thrust forward to accentuate the weight of his balls and mildly tumescent cock, eyes focused on nothing in particular, the relaxed, netural expression on his face suggesting unselfconscious acceptance of the artist's gaze, and, by extension, mine.  The erotic charge is in my beholder's mind, not in his pose. Or else: the erotic charge is there precisely because, in the presence of my gaze, he appears entirely at home in himself, in his own skin. It's not that I'm stealing a look at him for which I'd be shamed if he recognized it. It's that he shows no anxiety about the possibility of being seen. It's the absence of anxiety that I find sexy. It's my sense of his entitlement to stand thus that calls forth in me a longing that's probably more about wanting to be him than wanting to have him.

 Grant (arms crossed), 2000

My long admiration for the work of Montreal artist Daniel Barkley, starting with an exhibit in Toronto in 2007, has always entailed the eroticism of casual nakedness that I experience in so much of it--as also in the work of Thomas Eakins, and in the photography of John Dugdale. But as with Dugdale in particular, that erotic charge is bound up with the layered cultural references and submerged narratives implicit in the work.

A nude man sits backwards in profile in the prow of a dinghy, hands clasped between his thighs, facing a bicycle pointed towards him from the stern. Focusing on a means of conveyance no longer useful? Looking backwards in wistful recollection of the last time he was on land? In denial of the voyage on which he's embarked?--though no means of propulsion is visible, nor anyone who might employ it other than the lone seated figure. 

Étude pour Petit nuage a l'horizon, 2004

A boy of ten or eleven stands in white briefs in front of an abstract grisaille background, looking self-assuredly off to his right, grasping in both hands the bentwood ribs of a set of canvas wings strapped to his back: an Icarus oblivious to the hazards of rising too confidently into the sky. In other paintings in the series, he stands in profile, just as confident, just as indifferent to the dangers ahead. 

Daredevil, 2004

Icarus II, 2003

In "Road to Bethesda," eleven figures--men, women, a small boy looking forward apprehensively--move through a snow-covered landscape--walking, crawling convulsively, one carried on the back of another, one curled in fetal position on a barrow. In "Ship of Fools I" an infant, adolescents, and adults crowd a narrow boat riding precariously low in the water. 

Road to Bethesda, 1997

Ship of Fools I, 1996

I'm haunted by Barkley's allegories of mortality in these and other paintings--as in an intergenerational grouping of six male figures portaging yet another boat overhead, barefoot along a rocky shore, three of them hoisting the keel while a prepubescent boy and an old man carry the oars, and the sixth figure trails behind him a length of canvas slung over his shoulder. 

Embarcation II, 2003

Barkley's most recent painting, now on exhibit in Montreal as part of the XL6 exposition at the Maison de la Culture Plateau-Mont-Royal, carries forward motifs that he's long variously explored. A monumental intergenerational grouping of seventeen figures gathers around and upon a rock in shallow water, some nude, some partially dressed, some draped in the translucent plastic that figures in many other paintings as well. A bicycle again cryptically appears in knee-deep water, the man astride it looking off to the right. At the summit of the pyramidal composition a bearded man gazes, with evident longing and perhaps with grief, in the opposite direction, his hands braced against the back of a man whose cheek is pressed against his midriff. Scraps of magenta plastic float surrealistically in front of a boy who, alone among the grouping, looks directly toward the viewer.

Déluge magenta, 2023

Here as in Barkley's earlier work, I'm summoned to witness his implicit juxtapositions of eros and death, these indices of a common humanity, and an ultimately common fate. Nowhere do we see any sign of a ferryman who will convey these poignantly embodied souls to the farther shore. For the moment, they are glorious in their vulnerability, as they acknowledge it, and as they don't.