Around 1:38 in the morning, I’m saying to Ma, “I should write all this out for you." We were talking about love in open relationships. Since she is my mother, she was earnestly listening to me talk about how her daughter leads her life, or rather, how her daughter finds and maintains her relationships, particularly relationships in love and especially mine, which she understands to be incredibly potent and intimate. Therein, our conversation ended up as less a back and forth conversation and more of a dialogue about my ideas on love and spirituality.
I bathe and fill myself in and out with a kind of love and openness that is radical to some and total nonsense to many more. With men and women alike, I have fostered and maintained relationships that glide on a foundation of trust that is other-worldly. We support each other, no matter the heuristic or ballistic philosophy one of us may be touting today or tomorrow, wherein we watch each other grow and heal from a great many things. Writing this feels a bit contrived. My words and the resultant sentence definitely sound bloated, but as many have reflected to themselves and their readership, sometimes the words write themselves. It will take years to write the whole book, including relevant poetry and important cinematic text, and honestly for me, the spirituality of love has less to do with thinking than it has to do with feeling.
I will, however, start by citing William Blake as my prophet. His poetry was the first that really struck me with its fullness and earnestness. A kind of poetry that went beyond just earnest aesthetics and wavy themes. William Blake writes with a sincerity such that his poems grant an experience that goes well beyond their form as simple poems. In reading his Songs of Innocence and Experience, I came across more than just the potent image of a Tyger, Tyger burning bright / in the forest of the night, I found a spiritual ideology that is tantamount to the radical love politics that Lauren Berlant formulates in her conversation with Lee Edelman for the book, Sex or The Unbearable. Berlant structures as ethics of love and sexuality around phenomenology, giving voice to acknowledgment as being more than just a verb. She believes it to be an ethical praxis that defies itself as a word on a page or a verb being used in a conversation. Acknowledgment means seeing the other and her/his/its/their sexuality as something other than the self (at one point, Berlant and Edelman spend an entire 30 pages discussing a cartoon of a donkey and the implication of its many forms, representation of many ways of seeing ‘other'ness, and the nature of its being a sexuality being) and recognizing the other as something different than the self). Unfortunately, I left the book at the Best Friend House, up in Medford, MASS, so I cannot quote and comment specifically to Berlant’s thesis, but I will, however, comment on the method of both Berlant and Edelman’s theory production. They have a conversation with one another and listen to one another, that is all. Sex or the Unbearable is unique given the conversation is the method for theory production. As for Berlant’s side of things in the book, her thoughts turn out to perform in the shadow of Edelman’s rigorous, somewhat overly verbose to the point of being confusing, dialogues about homographisis and the deconstruction of normative sexual forms and ideal representations. Though, by the end of the book, similar to the end of William Blake’s book of poetry, I was struck by Berlant’s ideas, those that at first read seem passive or too general. In reading and living and loving, I have found Blake and Berlant incredibly sensitive to the ethics of love and openness that bring people, including myself, into a passionate ethics such that compassion is passion fulfilled. And so, there I conclude with a poem that I wrote for Blake, Compassion is passion, fulfilled.
I shared this line with my mother last night. I also ran my metaphor about intimacy between people and intimacy with blades of grass with her. In thinking those words out, I remember; I was in bed with my partner at the time. It was dark, and he had already gone to sleep, all the while I was in fits trying to write poetry in my head. Visualizing a blade of grass and wondering how could I feel the same level of intimacy with a blade of grass as I had just done while performing sex with my partner. Then, I connected my thinking on intimacy and my metaphor of a blade of grass with Blake. Finally, it came to me in a single line, the one I shared with my mother last night. By the end, she understood me completely. She got off the bed, so I could turn over and sleep. She hadn’t even turned on her sound machine before I started my first dream.
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