Writer's Block in a Glass Bubble

Here are the first two entries in the "Kaleidoscope" train of thought:

Glass Bubble

For a while, earlier this year, Kirk, Simon, Nelly and Josiah and I were playing an online game called Legends of Elveron. As happens when geeks gather in one place, we got to storytelling about old D&D campaigns. In telling the story of my favorite gaming character, Max Forger, I started talking about living in Seattle at the turn of the millennium. This is what I wrote:

I've promised myself that if I ever manage to teach myself to write again and graduate, I'm going to write an Eighteenth Brumaire of George W. Bush. I owe him and his men so much of what I learned about the limits of democracy, rationality and, indeed, how under the right circumstances how an adroit politician may shape, no—virtually sculpt public opinion like so much clay. There was so much to talk about then. We were not yet desensitized to horror, as we are now. Truly these were the last days of my youth.

We drank a good deal together and had a lot of fun. One of the greatest blessings in my life was that Simon lived very close to me. He and his girlfriend Nelly, with whom I also became very good friends, hardly passed a day when we didn't bump into one another, if we hadn't planned on meeting. While I've never smoked tobacco, Nelly and Simon did, and we all drank coffee in the upstairs room at Cafe Allegro. We'd drink coffee and play cards and philosophize. We played this delightful Russian card game Nelly taught us called Durak, which Simon dubbed "Russian Ratfuck." It's the perfect salon game. As it was the game of nobility, Nelly and I decided that everyone should have a title. As Nelly was my courtly lover, we ripped off Les Liasons Dangereuses and she became the Marquise and I became the Vicomte. Simon became the Duke. I forget what title we gave Peter Hovde. Ru became the Pirate King (despite the fact that in my mind, Simon has always been the Pirate King). We talked and talked and talked. We lived in a glass bubble in the storm that engulfed the nation. Outside, the storm raged on and we were hardly senseless to it, after all, the bubble was made of glass. But I never realized until now how safe the bubble was and how beautiful. I was too stupid to realize it at the time, but it was one of the greatest blessings of my life.

Nelly and Simon were here over the past view days. We had such a good time just talking. I miss them both so dearly. Seattle lost much of its charm for me when they left. But whether or not they were here to lend it charm, Seattle has been a safe, glass bubble for me. There is virtually no place else in America in which it is easier to be an out queer than Seattle. This town has been good to me.

We’ve had a heat wave in Seattle (90+ degrees for several days—we aren’t designed to weather this sort of thing here). Nelly needed to buy a summer dress, as she had no idea that she’d need one here. So Simon and I left her to shop at Alderwood mall and we browsed through different geek-oriented stores. We came to a knife shop and Simon wanted to go in, so we did. I saw a particularly lethal looking knife blade there. This is the closest image I could find, but it’s a good deal scarier that this one:

Looking at this knife in the store’s cut-up, a thought that has been growing in my mind began to crystallize. I’m not going to live in a glass bubble forever. Looking at the knife, so clearly designed to disembowel upon exit, I could see human hatred. It takes a certain mind to objectify a person enough to create a knife like that. That person is out there. Odds are that person hates queers. Well, I’m a loudmouth queer. And I’m not going shut up either. I need to learn to defend myself and my partner. I can’t live in a glass bubble for the rest of my life. I’m going to graduate and probably have to leave Seattle. I need to start getting real. I believe in democratic political order, but there are plenty of people involved in creating democratic political order who don’t believe in me or mine.

I think I want to take a karate class when Craig and I get back from Tel Aviv.

Writer’s Block

In a recent e-mail, one of you guys asked:

It's curious in your blog you talk about how you have difficulty writing but then you write these very long thoughtful emails to me.

I could say that it’s a very different type of writing. That is technically true. It is totally different to spew at someone in a conversation (hockey again) then to write an intellectual argumentative essay (football). The differences between the structural demands of both types of writing couldn’t be more stark. The difficulty with that claim is that it is emotionally dishonest. I think I have, after many years now, figured out how to break the job into parts and conquer it. There remain technical challenges, of course, but I know that this is something I can handle. Something else is wrong.

The something else is that I have writer’s block, because I know that I will never again experience writing as euphoria. A while ago, I did a blog entry on a piece I read by Talal Amin (the other Talal in the social sciences, the one whose name some other social scientist might actually recognize). This was the passage that set me off:

Johann Sulzer, a theorist of the fine arts, wrote in more general terms: “All artists of any genius claim that from time to time they experience a state of extraordinary psychic intensity which makes work unusually easy, images arising without great effort and the best ideas flowing in such profusion as if they were the gift of some higher power. This is without doubt what is called inspiration. If an artist experiences this condition, his object appears to him in an unusual light; his genius, as if guided by a divine power, invents without effort, shaping his invention in the most suitable form without strain; the finest ideas and images occur unbidden in floods to the inspired poet; the orator judges with the greatest acumen, feels with the greatest intensity, and the strongest and most vividly expressive words rise to his tongue.” Such statements, Flaherty argues, are strongly reminiscent of accounts of shamanism—in this case of a shaman described not skeptically but in wonderment. They employ the idea of inspiration metaphorically—as control of an “instrument” from outside the person, or as a “gift” from a “higher power.” But these remain metaphors, covering an inability to explain a this-worldly phenomenon in natural terms.

Before I got sick, writing was always that way for me. I’ve always had a powerful imagination. Before the fateful autumn of ’99 when I had the really nasty attack that gave me optic neuritis, my frontal lobes were capable of processing many, many steps at the same time and I could keep up with the flood of images coming into my brain. I loved writing because it was the highest experience of creative power I knew. I loved it even more than singing. That’s why I became a scholar, not a tenor. The reason I have writer’s block is because I know that I will never feel that power again and my heart and soul hates that fact. Like a child, I refuse to accept what is hateful.

When my niece Valerie was very young, she would often refuse to come along with me when the appointed hour for leaving the McDonald’s playland to go home or leaving the television to go to her bath or her sleep. I would look down at her (as my niece at the age of four was much shorter than me) and say, “Niece. You have two options. You can come along with dignity or without dignity. But you’re coming along. So which will it be?”

At this point Valerie would usually stare up at me in resignation and sigh, “Dignity” and come along. On occasion, however, she would clench her jaw, stare up angrily and say, “NO DIGNITY!” This was boundlessly entertaining and I would laugh, scoop her off the floor and carry her to the next exotic port of call.

I am not a four year-old niece. I am a nearly forty year-old uncle. As much as my subconscious has been screaming “NO DIGNITY!” lately, it is not charming or entertaining. It is unacceptable. I must accept that writing will be plodding and not euphoria. This isn’t cooking. I can punt cooking. I have things I want to say, damn it. I can’t punt writing. Damn it, I’m a scholar. Scholars produce scholarship. This is not negotiable.

I need to make tables, lay out tasks, make check marks and I need to do write everyday, just like I work out every day. I need to accept that change will happen slowly, that I’ll never be directly satisfied with a day’s work, that I cannot measure my life in immediately visible results. Writing will never again be ecstasy, because it will never happen quickly enough to overload my senses. Of all the limitations, this hurts the most, for I wrote once with divine inspiration and will not write that way again. But I have to write every day from now on. This won’t work otherwise.

Reclaiming Pure Yang Energy

I found this presentation of male and female powers arrayed within the individual person to be very captivating. If I take Ian's framework and apply it to my life, before I was sick, my major problem was that I was overbalanced in pure yang. I approached the world with too much power, too much coerciveness. I was overly willful, so willful that the force of that will warped my perception of the world and its violence created very active resistance to my presence. I had rather little of the female aspect of the yang. I was indeed impatient and unstable. After MS, I lost almost all capacity for the purely male part of the yang. I have been aimless, wandering, indecisive and scattered. In my disability, I have, however, developed the female aspect of the yang. I am able to hold a safer, non-judgmental space for myself and for others. I have an energy within me that makes me worthy of life, without tasks and feats to prove that worth. My male yang sensibility was never able to rest long enough for the female aspect of the yang to get any practice. I loved the male aspect of the yang. I still do.

The queer likes cock. Now there's a surprise.

If I was to learn to develop the female aspect of the yang, the male aspect had to be taken off the table. It's my favorite tool (hardy-har-har). I'll use it if I can. So God gave me a decade without it. The restriction worked. The female yang is what allows me to be a good teacher. It grew. But it doesn't do a goddamned thing for writing my dissertation. And because I was so willful and the restrictions had to be so strict to get me to develop the female aspect of the yang, I'm now frightened to try. It took every failure of the male yang that my eviscerated frontal lobes could muster to keep me on task in learning the female yang. The illness was the tool that I needed to overcome the defects in my nature. Such is the economy of God that illness can be a blessing. But my stubbornness is now once more my undoing. Before, I was too stubborn to learn to develop the female yang. It took every single failure to teach me to use a different tool. Now I am afraid to try to use the male yang energy again, for fear that I will fail once more. The price of vanquishing my stubbornness was this fear, which now I must learn to master.

Writing was once an ecstatic experience of creative power for me. It can never be that again. I have to learn to write again without feeling this loss so keenly. I relied on the ecstasy to keep me motivated through all of the hardships of the task. I now have to draw on the patience of the female yang to bear with the plodding, for I will certainly plod. But I need to take charge and start shaping the world around me. I will never do it as well as I once did. But I need to start doing it again.

An Answer for Fiona

Fiona just posted a question to me that deserved a little detail for its answer. So, here goes.

I don't think love, sex, child-bearing or child-rearing is any different here than anywhere else. Life is all about finding a place where you can be yourself.

This is a decidedly modern viewpoint, one that I have to disagree with. Tradition is very inflexible. Child-rearing and child-bearing are markedly different from place to place.

The rules genuinely matter. Indeed, they are all that matters.

Finding a place where you can be yourself is a thing that has only very recently become possible for human beings. This is one of the gifts of capitalism.

If you can find someone to share it with, so much the better. It's a lot easier for me in that regard, and I'm not just talking about the red-necked homophobic tendencies here. I found love before I got here. Makes it a little easier than trying to find someone from scratch.

But you have a choice. This is a novel and precious thing, quite remarkable, and still not common in much of the world. Most of my cousins have had arranged marriages. I don’t think that anyone in my father’s family has been forced to marry someone they generally did not like, but this is nothing like finding someone and falling in love.

OK, I have to ask: What's wrong with dating Arabs? I ask out of pure ignorance, having never had the pleasure myself.

Not Arabs per se, as much as any male from a deeply traditional society. Traditional masculinity is a cumbersome and, yet, fragile façade. For a man to be powerful, so much rests on a woman’s obedience. Indeed, no one can emasculate a man as well and so easily, as the façade rests so entirely on a woman’s cooperation.

There’s a great movie in Arabic and Hebrew called A Wedding in Galilee. A Druze Palestinian family living under the occupation want to have a wedding for their son `Adil and his fiancé, Samiyya. Of course, free assembly is strictly governed by the Israelis and the family must apply to the local military governor for permission to host so large an event. `Adil’s father is the village mukhtar, a traditional mayoral title antedating the San Remo settlement in 1920. Being called mukhtar is still a token of respect. Anyway, Abu `Adil (Arab men are given a name after their eldest son, Abu `Adil means “Father of Adil”) goes to the military governor to ask for permission.

The Israeli governor thinks he’s going to be clever, and decides to tell Abu `Adil that they can hold the wedding if the Israeli military governor can attend. Abu `Adil is in a complete bind. The military governor is clearly his enemy, however, Abu `Adil is a traditional Arab. No true Arab refuses a request for hospitality. He naturally replies, “Please stay with me until the very end of the wedding.”

The Israeli military commander and his entourage attending this wedding is of course the central conflict in the very complicated plot. It’s a great movie (crappy production values, but great characters and plot). But `Adil, an ardent Palestinian nationalist, is outraged by his father’s decision to show hospitality to Israeli soldiers occupying their land. But he wants to get married (it’s not like you get any before marriage in the Arab world), so it’s a catch-22.

Well apparently, the Druze have a custom where the bride and groom consummate on the wedding night and the sheet with the blood stain from the woman’s hymen is displayed for all to see. No Muslim or Christian Arabs I’ve ever heard of have this custom, so I found it novel. At any rate, Abu `Adil needs to display the sheet. But `Adil is so choked up that he goes impotent. Dad is going berserk and cousin Khalid, the sensible one, tells his uncle, “Look. We’ll get a sheet, make a small cut on the cow, get a blood stain and show the people. Then tomorrow, we take `Adil to the doctor.” Dad will have none of this, so `Adil and Samiyya are stuck in the room and the people are beginning to talk. Samiyya says, “Look, clearly this isn’t happening tonight.” `Adil won’t come out, but, on the other hand, he’s not getting it up either.

Samiyya realizes that something has to be done to save male honor, so pressing the sheet into her vagina, she says, “I take my virginity with my own hand.” `Adil throws his face into her lap sobbing.

Masculinity, that kind of masculinity, is so fragile. It’s not just the Arabs. There’s a great gay movie called Wedding Banquet about a gay man from Hong Kong named Wai-Tung who is an immigrant success story in Manhattan. The catch is that he’s gay and has an American partner named Simon. His parents don’t know and are determined that he will marry. Wai-Tung and Simon have a mainland Chinese tenant, a starving artist named Wei-Wei. Wei-Wei is about to be deported. So they concoct the perfect solution. Wai-Tung marries Wei-Wei enabling her to stay in the country and allowing him to get his parents off his back. The comedy of errors begins.

But in both movies, the women make sacrifices for the men’s honor. Except in Wedding Banquet, Simon gets to be one of the women. I saw the movie early in the process of coming out and decided that I was not Simon. Hence, I never dated Arab men, not that there are that many to meet at your average gay bar.