Bating Your Prayer, Praying Your Bate

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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.

Your Inner Temple: Deepening Male Self-Pleasure

 "Self-pleasuring is the foundation of our potential to love and be loved.... Whether we are aware of it or not, whenever we play with ourselves genitally, we are worshipping the divine."

--Barnaby Barratt, Sexual Health and Erotic Freedom

I'm delighted at the prospect of co-facilitating an intimate residential workshop with Pono Stewart, at his beautiful Skyclad Retreat Centre north of Victoria BC, August 16-19. 

In a safe, confidential space of mindful mutual consent, limited to nine registrants, we’ll explore the wonders of self-pleasure and create rituals to celebrate the unity of body and spirit. If you’re a cis-gendered man who wants your experience of masturbation to be bigger and more meaningful than just physical release, this four-day journey into deeper self-awareness is for you.

Let go of inhibition in a safe and welcoming space. Trust-building exercises will establish a strong, secure container for our experience. Sharing circles, solo and paired exercises, guided meditations, and instructions in technique will open doors into a deeper realm where body and soul are one--where desire and curiosity can blossom into wisdom and compassion.

Rejoicing in the expansive pleasure we're capable of generating within ourselves is our foundational, universal birthright. It transcends divisions of age, religion, sexual orientation, cultural and ethnic origins. 

For a full description of the workshop, follow this link.

Photo by Andrew Graham

At the Full Moon

 

Pledge; Token; Warrant; Assurance; Keepsake; Proof

The other morning, I stood admiring the rug at the foot of the bed.

Its tight, even weave; the rich colors. The thought of the days or weeks of labor that went into its creation, by whatever artisan produced it before our friend G bought it. Then, the memory of where it hung on the wall of his stairwell, before he passed it on to us--along with some wonderful ceramics, when he was emptying the house he'd lovingly repaired, remodelled, and maintained with his own hands over the forty years he owned it.

It was his garden that mattered most to me. I spent a ridiculous amount having a hinoki cypress from his back courtyard transplanted. What an absurdity: I could have bought one directly from the nursery for less. And it was the best money I ever spent.

As a teenager and into my early adulthood, I endured impatiently my mother's rehearsals of the stories behind some of the objects in her house. The memories that went with them weren't my memories. Her increasingly persistent efforts to instill them into me sparked a sometimes poorly suppressed annoyance.  I came to think of these occasions as the Litany of the China Cabinet. Now I understand better what was at stake for her. She was the custodian of other people's lives. Passing on the story of who had owned what meant keeping the dead among us. And with it, a reassurance that her own memory would endure. 

When she died, I carted far more out of her house than I needed to hang onto. I realized soon enough that I had no use for the poster bed that had belonged to her aunt--whom I also knew and adored in my teens. The pegs in the sidepieces are set up for stringing ropes to support a featherbed. The frame is an inch too short for a modern double mattress. Over twenty years later, it's still the albatross around my neck--or rather, the obstacle at the side of the furnace room. What I prize most: the hickory cutting board from my grandmother's kitchen, marked by fifty years of scorching and sharp knives. What I regret most: that none of the cowslips from my mother's garden now grow in mine. By oral tradition, they were descended from ones carried by her grandparents from Stuttgart to Indiana in 1871.

As I approach the age of 70, the question is on the horizon--where does all this stuff go next? Not to a next generation by blood. Perhaps, in some few cases, to younger friends who will remember these things not because of their extended provenance, but principally because they came from me. 

When one of my undergraduate professors retired--a "confirmed bachelor" who took me under his wing in his last years of teaching--he gifted me his Greek dictionary. At my own retirement, I passed it on to one of my students. And was overjoyed when another student picked out about a hundred books fom my office library just before she packed up to move to her first full-time teaching job.

In many cultures, the history of objects is as important as the genealogy of families--histories that sometimes strengthen lines of blood relations, but sometimes cut across them to map out the web of other, equally important bonds. We've lost much of that in capiitalist society, with its commodification of nearly everything. Once, there was your grandfather's writing desk. Now, there is IKEA. 

The love of objects isn't necessarily symptomatic of greed. Sometimes, it's born of the sense that they're infused with human memory and a thick texture of relationship. They become an extension of who we are, and a tangible sign of our connection to others. Their meaning needs to keep circulating. A gift economy isn't about acquiring and relinquishing stuff. It's about the value and the bonds that are created by the act of exchange itself.

Latin has a flexible word, pignus, that sums all this up. It can mean a pledge, or a token, or an assurance, or a keepsake, or a proof. In the usage of the medieval Christian church, it came to refer to the relics of the saints. The Veil of the Virgin Mary at Chartres Cathedral (which miraculously survived a fire in 1194). The Crown of Thorns at Nôtre Dame in Paris (which survived the fire of 2019). The Shroud of Turin. Or if you will: the shawl given to Harriet Tubman by Queen Victoria, now in the African American Museum in Washington, DC, along with Nat Turner's Bible. The shamanic staff that has passed down through a lineage of mentors and apprentices. The ancestral photographs on a Mexican family ofrenda. The beads that some random beautiful boy put around your neck in the middle of Mardi Gras, when you were everything in the world to each other for three minutes, before the crowd moved on.