GLACIERS
I love all things glacial, anything derived from glaciers, anything extremely cold. Up until now my life has been dominated by the existence of glaciers, which have given my life its sole purpose and meaning, so, when I heard that they were disappearing . . .
GLOBAL WARMING
Upon hearing from an international team of geological surveyors that the Alps were melting, the Swiss government immediately organized an army of 10,000 boys dressed in skin-tight lederhosen. Group leaders marched the boys to the rim of the Alps, promptly ordering them to get down on all fours and to start drinking the ice-cold water.
GOD
Some say God was just a gleaner, collecting bit by bit. You'd always see him down at the garbage dump, finding treasure in goods discarded by others. He saw beauty in broken-down washing machines, in mattresses covered in semen and tea stains. Found buried pleasure in the waste of accumulation.
But others say he came from a relatively bourgeois background and started off with stamps; a prim little boy, he was a run-of-the-mill stamp collector. He moved on to baseball cards. From there, on to buttons (his mother worried he was a homosexual).
Then he began to collect anything and everything: suns and floppy sun-hats, hair ribbons and sex, dreams and silver drains, Holocausts and hubcaps, desire and desire, species, species, species. He was a regular at Christie's. He was a rabid collector, collecting rare things until he was foaming at the mouth with categories.
Until one day he legally had enough objects to constitute a world.
GODMOTHERS
My godmother, Mrs. Ida Pearson, lived two doors down from us. She was born in Sheffield, a city situated in the north of England, and she told me that everything was softer there—the accent, the grass, even the water—perhaps to compensate for the difficulty of life in the region.
Sheffield is known for its factories that make silverware, the kind you use only on special occasions. From the age of twelve, my godmother worked in one of these factories. At first she was on the production line that made forks. Then she moved over to the production line that dealt with knives. She said she came to understand how different forks were from knives.
One day when she was fourteen, as the workday was nearing its end, a knife flew into her left eye and blinded her. A doctor took out the ruined eye and replaced it with a glass eye, fashioned from thick glass, like the kind used to make fishbowls, and this eye was unblinking like that of a fish.
My godmother said she could see God much better through her glass eye. She told me that it was like having a window in her, and she was always standing at this window, looking at God, who was constantly lurking just outside the window, looking in at her.
She told me that afterwards she thought she would never marry, and that she would have to get used to living alone in a world with one God and one eye. After all, she said, what man dreams of a one-eyed bride?
But eventually she did marry a man by the name of John Pearson.
Mr. Pearson did not believe in God. He was profoundly deaf, and if I went over to the house when only he was there, he would not answer the door, as he could not hear their musical doorbell. Whenever I visited, Mrs. Pearson would give me fruitcake from a gold tin that was very scratched; we'd drink tea out of dusty, dainty teacups. Mr. Pearson never joined us. He would sit by himself, either in their gloomy living room or out on the sunnier enclosed back porch. From the porch he'd watch as my godmother and I wandered aimlessly around in the backyard amongst the pear trees and the fruit flies.
GOETHE, JOHANN WOLFGANG VON
When Goethe heard they were building a concentration camp around his favorite oak tree, the tree he loved to rest against and think beneath, the tree he hoped would provide a little shade for future generations, he quickly wrote a four-volume work in response titled On the Ruthlessness of Trees. But as he worked, the sound of all the hammering got to him. So he went to the woodshed and fetched an ax. Fully intending to cut the tree down, Goethe set out on foot, at night, silently promising that no one would ever think another thought beneath his tree's shade. But somewhere along the way he became distracted and paused, admiring the ease with which the ax trapped the moonlight.
GOSSIP
I thought I had stopped believing in God, probably when I turned fourteen. Yet twenty years later, I find myself having lengthy discussions with him, usually at night, when my boyfriend's away and I'm in bed by myself, just after turning off the bedside lamp.
When I speak to God the quality of my voice is quite particular: hushed yet deep. It's like I'm having phone-sex and trying to sound sexier than I actually am. It's my God-sex voice, a voice I use for no one else. His voice is a little hoarse. Nietzsche made a dramatic mistake: God is not dead, he is just laid low with a cold. Sometimes I think I can hear God sucking on cough lozenges, but very quietly.
All this makes me realize that one never really stops believing in God: it is not a question of belief; one simply stops talking to him.
It is very interesting, then, to pick up the thread of the conversation so many years later. How strange—yet how sweetly predictable! And despite the time that has passed, it feels surprisingly natural, quite convivial. I gossip and chat away with God, just like my mother gossiped with her sister Helen on our olive green telephone.
GRAFFITI
Lately I find that I have little interest in anything, except for graffiti. In Los Angeles, one of the most scenic sections of graffiti can be found along that stretch of the L.A. River that separates downtown from East L.A.
This panorama is best viewed when taking a northbound train from Union Station, preferably when undertaking a journey by oneself, just as I did recently. Graffiti lines the steep, gray concrete walls of the river for a good mile or two. The overall effect is so enthralling that you forget the river; the river becomes secondary (in the future, people will talk not of the L.A. River, but of the L.A. graffiti; they will refer to the river disparagingly, how it is an eyesore, ruining the sublime beauty of the graffiti, and they will form committees strategizing as to how to get rid of the river). In fact, as I rode the train and, with my face pressed up against the window, gazed upon the stream of graffiti, I found myself so enthralled that I left the faintest trace of snot on the glass. Just as with the river, I almost forgot myself, but not quite.
Even better than taking in this sight from the train is going for a walk along a section of the river, so you can get a closer look at the graffiti. It is best to take this walk alone, just as I did upon returning from my journey.
As I walked, I felt a bit like Wordsworth (Dorothy, not William) out for a stroll in the Lake District, though surely, I thought, the beauty of that region of England would pale when compared to the beauty of this region of graffiti, which up close was like a deep thicket of hot pink and fluorescent green brambles.
Continuing to walk, I found myself thinking decidedly pantheistic thoughts, feeling very strongly that this was all God: not only the graffiti, but the syringes and the discarded condoms and the empty Corona bottles, even my own awkward body was a part of it all, though perhaps a less important part.
As I paused to examine an especially artistic so-called tag, or signature, by one Sorcerer, who had a particularly nice cursive style, I felt an odd affinity with the graffiti. Sensing deeply my own mortality, I realized that to be human is to be, in essence, God's graffiti: something bright and impermanent and squiggly.
I couldn't help but notice all the tags that had been whitewashed by the authorities. Big blocks of white paint covered many of the names, but the names beneath were still faintly visible; somehow, paradoxically, the names lingered on, even more exuberant, more defiant, more jubilant than before. We can only hope that when it is our time to be erased, they will similarly not be able to get rid of us so easily.
GRAY, THOMAS
Thomas Gray was an eighteenth-century poet who was very unproductive and wildly ambitionless and had curly hair. Gray precedes the Romantics and
is considered to be a forerunner of Romanticism, primarily because he was always depressed and had a thing for cemeteries. He spent eight years working on the poem for which he is best remembered, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”; every day he'd work on the poem in his room at Cambridge, and then every night he would go out cruising in the local graveyard. He liked his men like he liked his scenery, rugged, and enjoyed nothing better than being sodomized whilst licking a tombstone (it was romantic only in a very partial and external sense, he said). Often, after his trick had left, he would stay on in the cemetery, looking like a morbid rag doll there in the moonlight, and would begin to feel a little guilty about being a homosexual in the eighteenth century, but would remind himself, I can fuck all I like amongst the tombstones / AIDS is over 200 years away. Gray continued working on the “Elegy,” crossing out lines and recrossing, sodomizing the poem, until he was forced to publish it in 1751; otherwise someone else was going to print a mutilated copy. But he did write a handful of other poems, all of which are characterized by a fastidious sense of form, like little verbal corsets, attempting (but failing) to constrain something in his heart that was irrepressible. He lived an exceedingly quiet life, rooming at Peterhouse at Cambridge, though in 1757, in consequence of a homosexual disturbance, he moved from Peterhouse to Pembroke. His boyfriend, Henry Tuthill, had been involved in a homosexual scandal and had promptly drowned himself; it is said that Gray was so profoundly embarrassed by this state of affairs that whenever he visited Tuthill at the cemetery, he would blush, and the tombstone itself would blush; death began to seem positively gay. This affair left a permanent mark of melancholy upon Gray's life; as he wrote in my favorite fragment, Sodomy is sentimental / But melancholy is pink and gray. In his final years, he turned toward God and toward muffins drowned in Dionysian amounts of butter. He spent the rest of his days thinking about how to annihilate the hours, until 1771, when his time for annihilation came; eternity opened up, into which he minced his way.
GUILT
Regarding the present moment, we are all guilty, though no one seems even vaguely interested in the verdict or the outcome. I am possibly more guilty than anyone, so guilty that someone has bothered to do this highly realistic drawing of me standing next to a guillotine, my very own guillotine. Rendered in lead pencil, the drawing measures seven inches by seven inches. On my face there is a broad smile, and on the side of the guillotine it says Alistair's guillotine.
GUNS, MY BOYFRIEND'S
When my boyfriend, Tim, wishes to avoid doing something, he gets some oil and a soft rag and cleans his grandfather's 12-gauge shotguns. The guns are sleek and long, crafted from metal and dark brown cherry wood. An intricate diamond pattern has been delicately carved into the wood, a little to the left of the trigger. Eighty years old, they are very beautiful. There are two of them, just like there are two of us. I can only hope that when I am eighty years old, I will be as beautiful and as necessary as my boyfriend's grandfather's guns.
GUTENBERG, JOHANNES
In the first half of the fifteenth century, Johannes Gutenberg invented the so-called Gutenberg press, which made printing practical and almost easy for the first time, thus initiating the deluge of words and books we're presently drowning in (the next great flood will be purely textual).
To be perfectly honest, I've read about the method he developed, but I'm not technically minded and don't really understand it at all. It had something to do with moveable letters and led people to believe that everything was moveable. Yet if we have learned anything since then, over these almost 600 years of rearranging letters, it is that some things are so deathly still they do not carry within them even the possibility of movement.
However, there's a picture of Gutenberg and his press that I like a lot and that I think helps me understand. In the picture, the inventor is standing in front of the press, examining one of the proof sheets. But what interests me the most is the man who is working the press. The man has killer forearms, and it seems the press requires a fair amount of his strength, in fact, the entire weight of his muscular body. Actually, this guy is totally hot, wearing a white cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up (to show off those forearms), tight, black velvety pants, and best of all, a kind of black pirate hat with gold trim. (In my opinion, he'd look really good wearing nothing but the hat.) Gutenberg himself looks a bit queeny, standing there in his white apron, with his hand on his hip. On closer inspection, it appears that although he is checking the proofs, he also has one eye on the boy, who is the kind of boy anyone would want to invent something for. From looking at this drawing, I think I begin to understand the Gutenberg press perfectly.
H
HAIR, BODY
It has been well documented that with the appearance on the horizon of the AIDS epidemic, and with the subsequent disappearance of the species known as the gay clone, gay men, associating body hair with clones, and therefore with death, began to shave off their body hair, in a frenzy, and in an attempt to make themselves deathless.
Although this attempt to deceive our mortality proved to be as futile as Thetis's efforts to make Achilles immortal by dipping him in the River Styx, in the process, we became as smooth as the sculptures of Praxiteles, which were famed for their life-likeness.
Equally drastic changes occurred in the once wildly picturesque landscape of gay pornography. Whereas much of that vintage so-called pre-AIDS porn took place in nature, and the majority of its actors were very hairy—so much so that one feels as if one is observing a document filmed not in the distant decade known as the 1970s but during an even more distant epoch, for example, the Pleistocene era—early-AIDS and post-AIDS porn rejected nature and moved inside. The majority of this porn takes place in pastel bedrooms and crème living rooms; there are lots of glass coffee tables, and the men are as smooth, though not quite so transparent, as these coffee tables.
But, in the meantime, what happened to all that hair? It is not generally known that in the early 1980s, that period of economic savvy, enterprising entrepreneurs in polka-dot bow ties found a use for the hair. They began to collect the hair en masse and ship it off to warehouses in El Salvador. They went so far as to visit the morgues and shave the bodies of dead clones.
This hair was and continues to be used to stuff pillows and eiderdowns.
It is more than likely that you are sleeping on the hair of gay men, some of whom are still living, some of whom are long gone, but this probably has nothing to do with those nightmares you have been having.
HAIR, BODY, THE BEGINNING OF MY
Hairs first began to sprout on my legs at the end of 1983, the summer I turned twelve. I was, to put it mildly, disconcerted. I remember going into the kitchen to complain to my mother, who was peeling potatoes at the sink.
Intending to cheer me up, she took me to the bookcase in my brother's room and pulled out one of her old Glamour annuals, which contained interviews with various Hollywood movie stars from the 1940s and '50s.
She turned my attention to an interview with the actress Betty Grable. According to this interview, Betty Grable seriously loved hairy men, particularly men with hairy chests. I haven't a clue why, but I'm just crazy about them, she claimed. The actress actually went so far as to say that she was slightly repulsed by men who didn't have body hair. Before concluding the interview, she stated (with a wink!), I wouldn't dream of dating a man who didn't have some hair on his chest.
Upon learning of this, I immediately returned to the kitchen, took a pair of scissors out of the drawer, and went outside. Sitting on the back steps in the warm sun, I proceeded to cut the hairs off my legs, going directly against the desires, the orders, and the directives of Betty Grable.
HAIR, BODY, DREAMS ABOUT
Ever since this incident with the scissors, I've felt somewhat ambivalent about my body hair. But this is changing. For example, recently I had a dream where I met the pop singer Justin Timberlake out at a club. Actually, it wasn't Justin Timberlake per se, but aversion of him, a ki
nd of cover version of him. (Similarly, in dream, whenever we encounter ourselves, it is not our actual selves that we are encountering, but cover versions of ourselves. Unlike cover versions of songs, which are generally mediocre versions of the original, these cover versions of the self are far superior to the actual self.)
As I was saying, I met Mr. Timberlake, whom I am by no means a fan of—either in dream or out of dream—out at a club. He looked a bit different. His hair was darker, and I noticed he had a very hairy chest. Afterwards we drove home together, and I kept on looking at the hair creeping out from the neckline of his T-shirt, but I tried to ignore it. I told him that I loved the color of his car, and asked him what color it was. He replied warm rabbit-fur brown.
This dream was sort of like a Socratic dialogue (except with Justin Timberlake—actually, more like a Socratic dialogue with myself) in which I questioned myself about my own opinion, and then the dream took over and asked more questions, ultimately showing me how inadequate my opinion was, and helping me go beyond my opinion, i.e., if Justin Timberlake doesn't shave his chest, maybe I don't have to. Maybe Justin Timberlake and Betty Grable (and my mother) are all correct. Dreams are instructive.
HAIR, BODY, THE RETURN OF
And one must remember that in the grave our body hair will grow back quickly, so quickly that our corpses will be unable to shave it off, and if the state confiscated our electric razors and our disposable razors and our Nair hair removal, our hair would return and carpet our bodies like wildflowers in spring: we would all be a little more mortal; we would all be clones.
The End of the World Book: A Novel Page 10