March 30, 2006
The bowl

March 29, 2006
Disparate subjects

March 27, 2006
A needy, ragged woman

March 22, 2006
God, body, Tony Hoagland, carnival, dissociation and postmodern poetry

March 20, 2006
Emailing Ellie

March 13, 2006
Body Worlds

March 12, 2006
Anna, and Marty's ball

March 11, 2006
the lost innocence of my youth and the beautiful life I've created

March 10, 2006
Another scary bout of journaling to find the truth

March 9, 2006
Excerpts from an email correspondence with Ellie Epp

March 7, 2006
iron and wine

March 5, 2006
finding chakras

March 3, 2006
Muses

March 1, 2006
Mansfield, PA - Nurturing and feeling

 

 

 
March 29, 2006
Disparate subjects
 I'm looking for a thread running through all this material on so many disparate subjects...

I've been reading about weight issues, which isn't exactly where I want to go, because those paths are already well-trod. And hunger and desire -hunger for food, sexual desire, desire for relationship and merging. The desire to crawl right into someone's body. Those really fascinate me. Desire. Hunger. Good and bad. Fighting and embracing. Loving and hating. Mothering and being mothered.

I've also gotten interested in consumerism and consumption as a driving force behind our culture's issues with eating and overeating. To have a consumer culture, you need to create need. You need people to buy stuff... you need them to want to buy stuff. To buy food. We all want to eat. We want to cram it into our mouths and our bodies... we want to fill up... with stuff. With something. But how do we get all this stuff? We have to discipline ourselves enough to go to work five days a week. A LIFE? What's that? In our culture it's called a career. It isn't nature, it isn't thinking or feeling our bodies, or being with friends and family. It's wearing the right clothes, and driving the right car, and having the right body so we can get a better job. Or no, so we can get get the best job, and get more stuff, more stuff, more stuff. Why? To fill up the hole that's eating away inside us. And the hole is there because we're all caught in this hamster cage that is LIFE. What a fucked up life!

That really excites me as a concept, because I've always hated the 9-5, 40-hours-a-week mindset. I think everyone in our culture who buys it is totally insane. I really do. I make $20,000 a year. Barely. And I work three days a week. And I don't need a goddamn thing. And I have time. To think, to go to school (with financial help from my mother... and yeah, I feel guilty, but fuck it, she offered me the money), to write and LIVE. To me, that's a life.   

Except I'm not interested in economics... not even a little bit, and to pursue that area with any grace, I think I'd have to study capitalism and economics.

The carnival also interests me. Embodied living in the Middle Ages, where they said, you want embodiment? Okay, how do you like farting, shitting and fucking your neighbor's dog? To that end, I'm watching The Aristocrats this weekend. Carnival keeps swirling in my head as a cool concept. Because god, we're all such prim and proper assholes these days. Oh, sure, we have sexual innuendo on our TV's and we show lotsa violence! Lots, and lots of blood. We've got it all, and we are cool, here in this wonderful country of ours. And we still can't say shit on TV. We still can't show the barest slip of boob! What's up with that? What's wrong with seeing naked people??? I swear, I feel like everyone's crazy. Jesus, we're so puritanical! And for-GET talking about sex. Oh, yeah, we're all so savvy. So cool about sex. We know our SHIT about sex. But nobody knows anything and everyone's scared to death. They all talk, but they don't DO ANYTHING. They're all clueless. And we sexualize everything! Why do we sexualize naked bodies? We sexualize everything, and then we call it DIRTY! Jesus.

My mother, to her credit, sat me down when I was 12, and said, "Alex, you probably already know about this, but I'm going to tell you about sex." And I was CLUELESS, but I didn't let on, and she went ahead and told me about penises and what they do when they encounter vaginas, and how babies can result from such interactions, and I was dazzled. Thrilled. But then she said the coolest thing. She said, "Sex is beautiful. Sex is about love, and it's about beauty, and people will try to make it ugly, and when they do, then sex is wrong. But if sex is beautiful, and it's between two people who love each other, then it's the most beautiful thing in the world."

Phew. Nice gift, huh? It almost makes up for all the crap we had between us.

Okay, so I'm also thinking about the body. I'm thinking a LOT about the body, as a spiritual place. A holy place. THE holy place. I can meditate on my body, and it's a carnival. That's the exact word I used when I first discovered it, and that's the concept I find so cool in the writings about the carnivalesque body... Anyway, after all these years of trying sitting meditation, and trying discipline... That's nothing, compared to meditating, going deep into my body. None of this nasty asceticism with aching ankles, and hard pillows propping up my ass. I lie when I meditate. I feel my body. I listen to it, and watch it cavort, and feel it burn and churn and send out fireworks and energy. It's playful, and it's profound. Sometimes I smile, and sometimes I cry, big, gulping, devastating tears. But it's the way in. It's everything I've ever looked for. It's God and life and spirit and everything. I've ever looked for.

Except here's something else I'm thinking about. Body and spirituality and sexuality, and where you draw the line on sexuality. What makes this part of the body beautiful? It's my arm, with muscles wrapping, and twisting, and sinews winding. It's beautiful, and strong and I can talk about it to anyone. And here's my cunt. And it's mysterious and churning, and welcoming and warm and fucking beautiful, and this is where my attention mustn't go. This is beyond the dividing line, and of this I mustn't speak. But my body is whole, and intact and it's wise and beautiful, but my society tells me my body has good zones and bad zones and it dictates that my breasts are bad and my arms are good. What the fuck is that about? Because when I'm making love with you, and you're stroking my arm or kissing my neck, those are zones of sexuality. Of mystery and potent power, just as much as my breasts or my vagina. My question is how to deal with the whole body, the whole entire body, and not just certain zones.

I don't know...

I just thought that to myself, like a sigh. A cutting off. A wall of fearful silence. That the first time I've noticed doing it since reading Anna's thesis, and Birth of Pleasure. But I DO know. I DO know I don't belong in this culture, with its niceties and its sanitization and its hatred for people with bodies like mine. 

So I'm looking at all this material, and the word that keeps coming to me from everywhere is "control."

Control of eating, control of sexuality, control in public, control of money, control of sanity, control of our bodies... Constant control of our bodies. Relinquishing control... of eating, of our bodies, and of our struggle. Rebellion against control, because I realized what was bothering me earlier in this Goddard process was a sense of being controlled, and I chafed, because I despise authority. Wow, I sound really pissed off, don't I? Not with you, but with the sense that I need to gain approval... from someone. You? Margo? My own insane perfectionism. I don't know, but I hate it. I can never pay bills on time. Why? Well, sometimes because I don't have the money when the bill is due, but usually it's because I HATE being told what to do. How do people get through the nine-to-five without killing someone!? Because they're relinquishing control over their LIVES.

Then there's dissociation and everything I've learned about attachment and the infant-mother relationship. Control and dissociation. Those two don't fit together for me yet, but I think they really do, and I'm just not seeing the connection.

Oh, wait, one more thing. I HAVE been agitated lately about this paper, and I've been acting out. Over eating, over drinking, over masturbating. Acting out. Usually when I do that, I'll KNOW there's something wrong, but it'll take weeks for me to figure out what. And I just realized. That behavior is dissociation. Dissociation for adults. Here I thought I'd overcome the worst of my dissociation, because I no longer pull my attention to the right or hover over my life, but I still check out with substances and distancing mechanisms. And there's control. It's a lack of control. Control over what??? My body? My mind? What is driving me to do things I - my clear, rational, healthy self - don't want to do. Or don't want to look back and HAVE done. 

But how does control relate to dissociation as an infant. That terrifying presence of a mother who is disinterested and aloof, or even angry. No control. NO control. She is in control, and she may want to kill me. An infant can't discern subtleties. All an infant knows is that she's in danger. No control.

That's what's swirling in my head.