No Church in the Wild
Page 27
“I’d probably call him crazy.”
“I think you’re right. Would that person be crazy enough to misconstrue hugs?”
“It doesn’t seem like you need me to answer that.”
“I guess I don’t. What if I told you I firmly believe about 80% of humans have some attraction to both sexes?”
“I’d tend to call you right, cause I’m in the 80%.” I looked sidelong at him, eyes wide with surprise, but he only looked at the wall.
“I’m afraid I’ve discovered that we are then equally unable to tell if I’m right precisely because we’re in the block that would do either. I’ve just spent months operating in anticipation, convinced that the question was open, seeing only the things I wanted to see, the things that were like me, I guess, in her. Now painted on that wall,” I jerked my hand outward, “I see all the things I ignored.”
“Were they concealed?”
I sighed. “No, not concealed. In plain sight. I ignored them because I didn’t want to see them, I think. She used to hug me, but never really touched me much. I once watched her with a dude. She touched him constantly. That just occurred to me, just now.”
“But surely something encouraged you?”
“Something, but looking back I don’t think it was anything she really did, just what I wanted to be true. Now that I think about it, she was sort of prudish, often in this ‘don’t even wanna know about it’ sort of way – but I kept focusing on what she was willing to experience. How would we ever get along? Wouldn’t a mutual enjoyment of the risqué be more important than a pretty face? Well, with a smokin’ brain… Hell, she even met my paradigm of the other twenty percent or whatever, she partook a bit and lived in an open urban environment and socialized with lesbians constantly and chose not to partake anymore just the same! And after she barely spoke to me for months… I just so badly wanted the pretty genius bi meme, but she was never participating. Except…” The dance. He was quiet during my pause.
“… I don’t know anything, Grot.”
“No one really does.”
“You know, I’d like to tell you that I was just bewitched by this magical woman, that her mind was so luminescent that I lost mine. But the truth is, I can’t. I’ve done this before. There was a boy I chased, for years, and I saw him as being so much like me and clung desperately to this idea I didn’t know I had –”
“That he would like you because you liked him and you were alike.”
“But now I know that was never true. I wanted people to be something I made them in my head so many times… I can’t even count them. And then I pouted when they ended up not being what I wanted. I’m pouting that way now.”
“Where does the pouting get you?”
“It doesn’t seem like you need me to answer that.”
He chuckled.
“I’ve been having this dream, over and over again. Of one of the baths in Pompeii. In the dream I keep scuttling between my options, paralyzed with the inability to tell which one to choose, toying with all of them halfheartedly. And I set out thinking that if I could just sample all the options, see what was lying underneath them, I’d see which path to choose, I’d understand which one would suit me, and I could get on board with an identity... or some sexuality, because I thought that was the problem, that I didn’t have one of those, and if I were sort of involved with someone that people would assume I was straight or gay based on who I was with and I wouldn’t have to deal with it. But all I need to do in the dream is to make a decision, choose an option, and then it will be done. I crafted this whole Saucing game to look closely and understand what I saw – tried to use the process to look closely at her – but couldn’t see a thing, because what I wanted wasn’t there, because I wanted an option that wasn’t on the table. The whole time I was utterly unable to see anything at all. I blinded myself in exactly the way I always accused other people of blinding themselves, even if I was blind from the gayer side.”
“And then you pouted on their blindness?”
“I’m such an asshole.”
“True.”
“You can’t trust anything you remember, Isis showed me that. It doesn’t matter whether people are in my 80% or not, or if they’re missing something they might actually like. I can’t even prove it’s 80%. And anyway, I’m in no position to tell them what they like – I can’t even accurately perceive what I like, and could certainly never understand it so long as I’m distorting my own vision, inventing what I need to see, creating situations to bemoan. I’ve been doing this since I was a child. It’s how I got my name.” I looked down at the ground and exhaled slowly.
A curiously forceful feeling of resolve washed over me. I let my eyelids flutter shut, exhaled again, and felt a cool prickle in the center of my neck spread outward to my eyes and the crown of my head. The palpability of the sensation felt a hallucination.
“I won’t keep doing this to myself,” I said aloud. “I can end this purposeful blindness.”
Suddenly, I couldn’t hear the wheezing breath that usually accompanied his presence. Then I turned to look over my shoulder at his response, but there was nothing there.
Oh if I were a poet I should dedicate my poems to those who have missed out in life; those whose arrows have never found their target, who have died with words unspoken on their lips, without pressing the hand held out to them; to everything which has not reached its full term or has gone unremarked: to passion stifled, to genius that has not found expression, to the pearl lying unrecognized on the ocean bed; to everything which has loved without being loved in return; to everything which has suffered and not complained. This would be a noble task.
Théophile Gautier, Mademoiselle de Maupin
Acknowledgements
I must first acknowledge and thank the great scientific minds who actually published the research that supports the character’s statements in this Hypomnema, and I have tried to ensure that I have seen support for those positions in trustworthy sources – particularly, an article called “The Forgetting Pill” in Wired by Jonah Lehrer discussing the research of Karim Nader, which formed the basis for Isis’ research. I hope, upon learning of sufficient interest, to build a catalog of their findings and original publications and have reserved the domain www.bacchuspaine.com to that effect. They’ve moved me to new thinking by their work.
I could not but thank my brilliant and insightful editors, who gave their time and their ink and their thought to the idea of flexing sexuality and to this manuscript. To Ellen, who gave me my first outside thoughts, who has adopted and guided me from the vantage of great skill in the art, I can only hope that someday I find an opportunity to repay you for all that you have done for me.
I desperately hope that those wonders can be meaningful to someone else by virtue of reading this tome.
* * *
[*] Hypomnema is a Greek word translated to mean a note, a draft, a reflection, a copy, but to the Greeks it was a particular type of journaling used to record and analyze memory. The Greeks wrote hypomnemae to understand and purify their experiences. Plato’s anamnesis had identified writing as a new kind of memory, a memorialization of what we have seen, heard, done, that can be reread to examine the memories, meditate upon them or solidify them...
[†] Frumini, Dissipate, Prodigite is the purported catchphrase of the late-Roman tetrarch Maxentius, who was said to have spent much of his rule participating in drunken orgies before Constantine defeated and killed him in Rome. Christian historians attributed the phrase to Maxentius, accurately or not, to depict him as a heathen. It translates to English roughly as “Enjoy, Stay Loose, Live It Up,” a credo Maxentius supposedly called out to his troops habitually…
[‡] Aufklärung is Immanuel Kant’s German reference to “Enlightenment” made famous in an essay of his asking just what Aufklärung is. Michel Foucault described Kant’s Aufklärung as “a name, a precept, and a motto,” a “period which designates itself, formulates its own motto, its own precept, and says
what it has to do, as much in relation to the general history of thought, reason, and knowledge in relation to its own present and to the bodies and forms of knowledge, ignorance, illusions, and institutions, et cetera in which it can recognize its historical situation.” Aufklärung is a process which, by its naming, has situated itself in relation to the past, present, and future…
[§] Dispositif is a term used by Foucault to refer collectively to the logistical, physical, and cultural knowledge structures of a society and the hierarchies of power that arise within it as a result. The dispositif of the parts of a society collectively make up the dispositif of the society as a whole…
[**] Right Mind and Right Action are two aspects of Buddha’s Eightfold Path, the way Buddha devised for eliminating suffering and achieving self-awakening. The Path was designed to help one eradicate the ills of life, delusion among them. “Right” means not only correct, but coherent, complete, or ideal as well. The Path is designed to allow one to purify oneself…
[††] Anamnesis means both (1) the seeking of information from a patient by a physician and (2) a reply to the Platonic concept of the sophistic paradox of knowledge: that if one does not know the descriptors or characteristics of a thing, one can neither search for it nor know it when it is found. But if one does know the characteristics and descriptors of a thing, one need not search for it at all. In this context Plato sees no reward for actively seeking knowledge. Socrates replied that the soul is immortal and possesses knowledge for eternity, but that knowledge is “shocked out” of the soul by birth, and that “obtaining knowledge” is merely the process of accessing all the truths we have forgotten and coming to understand them. Plato’s anamnesis espoused a means of being that sought to overcome the errors of the senses by catharsis, or purification, to reach truth, of which he thought there was only eternal truth...
[‡‡] Demiruge is a type of deity from the Platonic schools of philosophy (originally from Plato’s own Timaeus) who undertakes the organization of the world’s chaos of eternal ideas into physical, recognizable, consistent forms. Later schools of philosophy turned the Demiurge into an artisan or a creator figure, perhaps even a malevolent one, but the early concept was of a figure who could take existing ideas, existing knowledge, without shapes or recognition, swirling in chaos, and organize them into forms recognizable to man…
[§§] Antinomianism is an originally Lutheran concept that moral or church law is of no use because the route to salvation is solely through faith, and is used generally to refer to practice of rejecting religious moral codes. Some Buddhist traditions support antinomianism as a part of the exercise of enlightenment…
[***] Marsyas was a mythological satyr who played the lute so well he challenged the god of the lute, Apollo, to a competition and died as a result, making Marsyas a metaphor for the punishment of hubris throughout the ages…
[†††] Sunt lacrimae rerum are the words spoken in reflection by Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid as he looked upon a mural in a Carthaginian temple that depicted and glorified the Trojan War, which had killed most of his countrymen and cost the lives of many people. It translates to English roughly as “there are tears in things”…
[‡‡‡] Synecdoche is a figure of speech meaning “simultaneous understanding” wherein a part or a category of something is used to refer to the whole, where a whole of something is used to refer to its part or category, or a container is used to refer to its contents…