on the origins of the name (Part II)

or identity as an instrument of non-reciprocal self-interest

*for the story of how I came to be called pii see on the origins of the name (Part I).

Pie O’ Pah is a character in Clive Barker’s epic and mystical love story Imajica. Pie is a type of being known as a mystif: rare individuals who are born with a peculiar genetic “defect” that results in an utterly unique ability; mystifs can alter, at will, any aspect of their physical body whether eye color, height and weight, or even sex.

One of the things that drew me to Pie O’ Pah as a character was that “he” had no sex yet had multiple sexes, “he” was simultaneously genderless and all genders. This feature of his being was both a condition and an ability. It made him utterly different and therefore always one wholly “othered” yet it allowed him a type of radical freedom from the constraints of sex and gender. He was able to opt into whatever physical form was ideally suited for providing for the needs of his lover. Dedicated to the pleasure and well-being of his lover, the exact nature of his form did not trouble him. That his condition made him uniquely suited to an orientation towards the other before and beyond the self was highlighted in harsh terms when his soul mate, in a careless remark during a time of irremediable melancholy, told Pie that he should become either a prostitute or an assassin. The former subsists by submissive servicing of others whereas the latter subsists by detached eradication of the other. Pie O’ Pah was thus verbally reduced to an other-oriented function, whether it be a provider of fleeting pleasures meaningless to Pie or else a sharp instrument of destruction equally as meaningless. Pie’s great gift was, in an instance of verbal abuse, recast as a novel albeit utile freakishness.

What attracted me was that Pie not only had this gift of being non-gendered and all genders but that he was thus one naturally inclined toward the fulfillment of others. “Commanded” by his lover to become either a whore or an assassin, Pie chose the latter. He could not bring himself to defile his great gift by using it for the basest of functions. The fulfillment of the other was his calling and he himself was fulfilled in the filling of that function. Gentle (his lover) rendered the gift useless and Pie became an assassin. In thinking about this recently, it occurred to me that Pie was happiest, was personally fulfilled, when he was able to be exactly what someone else needed him to be at the time. His own identity was utterly subordinated to this calling. I wonder if our sense of self, our identity, is the most rigid, the most ossified, when we are the most self-serving? Is it the case that an other-orientation is best served by a negotiable identity, one that has elasticity and plasticity? Or perhaps, even, and ideally speaking, the best case scenario is one in which an other-orientation is served by the eradication of an essential identity for the sake of the greatest degree of freedom in performing virtual identities, ones that are crafted in response to the exigencies of a particular context and towards the fulfillment of others?

Midtown

Midtown
Midway between downtown and not-downtown
Between queer and superficial
Banal and avant-garde

The halfway house for niche existence

Amongst the animals
Males perform vibrant plumage struts and songs
But it is my homeliness not my gender
That camouflages

An obstacle like the rush-hour traffic I am immaterial and unburdened

10th and Piedmont
Vibrant and alive with little queer quanta
Electric charges that flow in an alternating current
Unintentionally affirming that the property values have been properly appraised

The self-proclaimed hip side of the city

When I was in grade school
I had a mail-order ant farm
And from the vantage point of a god
I learned about hierarchy and cooperation

Now, from the vantage point of a ghost I learn about pride and distraction

I don’t know whether or not I have a people
But these are not my people
The unapologetically wealthy/shamelessly yuppie
The queerer-than-thou

No, I am not of them, merely among them

Yes, I am envious

And oh how I cherish these moments of anonymity

aspiration

To aspire is to direct one's hopes or ambitions toward achieving something. It comes from the Latin verb aspirare which is comprised of the prefix ad which means “to” and the root spirare which means “breathe.” To breathe, then, should be to aspire. Why else take a breath? If the point of taking a breath is to sustain oneself long enough to merely take another breath then the entire process is rather futile, is it not? So why do we not all aspire?

It seems to me that the overwhelming majority of us let our volitional fluid—that which acts as the necessary and sufficient conditions for active aspiration—coagulate into a synthetic polymer, an unyielding epoxy, by our late teens. Epitomes of obduracy, we add-on liars justify our haphazard formation with dizzyingly dexterous oscillations between outright denial and the stealthy subterfuge of rationalization. We strive but we do not aspire. We strive with herculean effort to maintain what we've inherited, gleaned, absorbed, garnered, accepted, and otherwise obtained. We find ourselves thrust into being already in possession of dogmatically held opinions for better or worse. Our fears and desires are bound up with these views yet we dare not look too closely at them lest we find them unfavorable. Perhaps this is the greatest fear of modern man: to realize that he is not individual, that he is not the progenitor of that which he champions, and that upon closer examination, that which he thought to taste so sweet is nothing short of saccharin saturated scheisse.

excoriation (exposing the quick)

Morality. I am familiar with the hollow concepts, but I am a stranger to the living beast. I deduce, sense, and intuit that none of the codes are acceptable and all of the foundations are contrived. The flag bearers are hypocrites all. Kierkegaard was right. Abraham is a hero, not a murderer. Nietzsche was also right. Morality cannot be codified, because the condition of being human cannot be codified. This is why Jesus taught in parables instead of grocery lists. But if morality is fiercely personal, I am empty. I have a confession: I do not know right from wrong. I have a primal sense and an intuition about love that have been my guides thus far. I am not dissatisfied, but I do not have answers. Respect, compassion, and love I feel. But right and wrong are fairy tales that I have never believed in. Am I corrupt? Am I a slave to my worldly wants? Am I freed by transcending them or by embracing and reincorporating them? An answer must exist. An answer must be found. Or perhaps culled, conjured, and crafted?

on the hyper

Hyper is from the Greek word huper which means over/beyond. When left dangling, hyper is just that: over and beyond. Not over or beyond anything exactly—and most certainly not over and beyond any particular—hyper is just a sort of frenzy, agitation, unsettledness, malcontent. Without the will as impetus, hyper is merely the headless chicken in a moment of exuberant dance.

Spontaneity, on the other hand, comes from the Latin sponte, or "of ones own accord." Those whom are afflicted with huper can never be attenuated enough to know sponte.

are you queer?

"Are you queer?" The question came so unexpectedly. I looked at him and was silent, unable to speak. I wanted to formulate a coherent sentence but the stark absence of response was so loud; a growing silence. I couldn't think. The silence where an easy response should've been had hijacked my cognitive mechanisms. I blurted without knowing exactly what was going to come out. "No. No, I'm not." He nodded, hands in pockets. No change in his expression, no change in his slumpy relaxed demeanor. "Huh," he said and then strolled casually away from our table to tend to the other patrons.

It bothered me. Why did I answer that way? Why did the question throw me so far off balance? And, of course, there was my usual qualm: why are we so entrenched in these categories? Though, as far as categories go, I must say, I like "queer" more than any other.

Queer: strange or odd; tilted away from perpendicular; an ill fit with regards to the norm. To "queer" something is to ruin it, spoil it, pull it away from perpendicular, or to simply make it odd or strange.

I wanted a do-over. I wanted a rewind button. I wanted to say, "Yes. Totally queer. Not straight, not gay. But definitely queer."

I understand the utility of the categories. For the sake of lubricating our interactions we insist on reducing one another to caricatures according to some arcane schema. In courtship and love, in touching and especially sex, we are forced to preconsider all of the possible interactions one might have with another human being, gauge how we are likely to feel in a preponderance of possible cases, and then carve the result into our skins, providing the defining term, the essence of our identity, to others upon request.

For me this is a pressing concern. And here is why: these categories are the most useful, they are invaluable, in the pursuit of using someone else as a means to one's own self-oriented end. In a world in which people are ends unto themselves, in which the joy is in engaging another and the sharing of oneself, in such a queer world, preemptively and severely constraining the dynamics, the gestures, the movements, the values, and worst, the possibilities by the invocation of categories is not only unnecessary it is a subtle tyranny.

on the activity of eros (a letter to a friend)

My Friend,

Since we last spoke, your parting sentiment regarding opening a discussion of eros has been on my mind. I'd very much like to discuss my “project” and wanted to send you something that could act as a leaping off point. But where to start? Normally I'd start with something meant to provoke. In my mind it is nigh impossible to talk about what eros is until a good deal of work has been done to preempt the distortions (at best) or transmogrifications (at worst) that will occur when my attempts at delineation are processed through the cognitive schema that order and make sense of the world and lives of would-be-listeners. Often times such provocations come in the form of a performed lambasting of monogamy. As part of the preempting process—as well as a matter of priming—I also “clarify” that I think that the only thing more destructive than monogamy is the “open relationship” or other types of quasi-polygamy. Without exception, the question then comes, “If you are against monogamy and polygamous arrangements, what is left?” As the singular model currently operating in our culture is exhausted by monogamy and its negative, non-monogamy, the initial response is silence. How does one describe a heretofore unseen color? In the beginning I am unable to speak. Each and every word and phrasing will be made to fit the world that others are always already in. I must first create a space and even then I will long be forced to use poetic prose, paradox, cryptic metaphor and other strategies of massaging language into a plastic enough state to turn it from adversary to accomplice.


about the people I am referring to (despite my habit of invoking absolute language)
Most often my interlocutors are lower-middle, middle, and upper-middle class people of various genders who are mostly agnostics of varying shades and racially best described as urban-american. By race, I mean to indicate something about their experiences of self, their family and upbringing, and their social circles. I don’t often have occasion to discuss these things with individuals who might fit more readily into an explicitly raced cultural background (e.g. an African American from South Decatur, a 2nd generation Indian from E. Decatur, an exchange student from China, or a Latin American from a fairly insular Hispano-Catholic neighborhood). While I have in fact spoken with people from a veritable multitude of races (race in this case meaning that which is identified on a government form where you check a box) and even with people from Delhi while I was in India, these people all share a common enough world-view to constitute a homogenous population when it comes to love, intimacy, and sex. Please be assured that I am keenly aware of the infinite degree of nuance and difference that exists in this population as the hetero-normal drama is played out by this pair or that making each iteration distinct from an other. The point is that all difference and nuance is forced to unfold in a severely constrained arrangement; an arrangement to which I have found no exception.


on contemporary “alternatives” to monogamy
In my experience, there are some who believe that they have alternative conceptions of “love” and models of how to approach such a thing. With a bit of probing, however, it turns out that these individuals maintain dispositions that have the same core concepts and values. The references to “alternative” approaches are merely allusions to minor allowances in otherwise all too familiar conceptions. The fact of the matter is that there are certain fundamental tenets that are not merely hegemonic but that are so overwhelmingly ubiquitous as to be virtually without exception. They operate invisibly, behind the scenes, as though simply forces of nature, brute facts of life of which there are fulfilling aspects to be celebrated and unfortunate aspects to be accepted stoically. They function as the material out of which people construct thoughts, values, and their very sense of self regarding matters of love and intimacy. All of the conceptions, approaches, etc that I’ve come across in my extensive “interviewing” are built from the material of these fundamental tenets. As the quintessential model embodying these tenets is the hetero-normal model—a model which in practice is the referent of the term monogamy as I employ it—it is as though all approaches to love, intimacy, and sex are either mere iterations of this one or else are defined diametric to it thus affirming it as the zero point, the origin. Until these tenets are exploded, the bits and pieces weighed, and their magic exposed as illusion—and all such that their hold is greatly attenuated—there is little hope of anything that amounts to a true departure from the status quo.


beyond mere rhetoric
At the heart of the illness is a family of binaries: monogamy/non-monogamy; romantic/platonic; heterosexual/homosexual; male/female; self/other. Woven in between this constellation of binaries are a series of axiomatic “givens”: monogamy is synonymous with meaningfulness; promiscuity is a symptom of an unhealthy psyche; love is a zero-sum game; lust only arises when one is unfulfilled; mutuality negates malignancy. Of course, under-girding the entirety of this shroud is the mindless happenstance of history. As such, ideas wholly incompatible with the rampant individualism of contemporary capitalist urban culture still dominate individuals’ mindsets wreaking havoc on relationships. Traditional gender roles and the notion of a partner as property are two of the most prevalent and problematic.


on the mess manifest in Generation X
What plagues us can be at least partially illuminated by looking at certain events in recent in history. As genders, bodies, and sexual beings we live a schizophrenic existence torn between two diametrically opposed revolutions: the feminist and the sexual revolutions of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. Instead of formidable creatures amply equipped to engage one another on a limitless field of intimacy we are crippled wraiths, awkward and impotent. Prior generations’ notions of femininity and masculinity were torn asunder, inveighed against beyond all reckoning. No alternative conceptions filled the vacuum left in the wake of such a powerful uprising. Thus entire genders were left to amble about filled with uncertainty and trepidation. Similarly to the case of gender, previously held notions of chastity, modesty, destiny, eternity, and more were undone without alternative notions taking root. The co-mingling of bodies thusly became a highly problematic ordeal with no proper frame to fit within, only remnants. Hence casual sex is anything but casual, fraught as it is with land mines left behind by soldiers of a forgotten war. The anxiety that has become concomitant with sex, has fueled more than just a club culture of drugs and alcohol, it has fueled an entire economy. To be sure, women have not been liberated, sex has not been liberated, and both revolutions have been hijacked by the machine of capitalism’s weapon of choice: visual culture/advertising.

why harp?
The point of dwelling on recent and not so recent history, the point of deconstructing the zeitgeist of our times, is to cultivate a dissatisfaction. The current approach to love, sex, and intimacy leaves a lot to be desired and is lame compared to what is possible. As Joe Biden said to Sarah Palin, the past is the prologue to the future. We must know ourselves, our inner workings, what makes us tick. Then we must undo ourselves, loosing the cultural-historic moorings that ensnare us. Only then may we make ourselves anew.