Everything is new this morning and nothing is so old as my previous persona.

 

 

A scholar in  an introduction to his commentary on Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)  talked about how the poet could be new. He referenced a remark by Charles Peguy on the Lord of Highest song (as Dante calls Homer) stating:

 

“Homer is new this morning, and nothing is so old as today’s newspaper.”

 

 

Just finished a book (non fiction) about Operation Mincemeat, the allied use of deception vis a vis the invasion of Sicily in 1943 during wwii.  At the conclusion of the book, the author writes about how some of the major characters in the book went on to truly re-invent themselves from their previous persona.  I ran with this line though:

 

“…it is possible to fit at least two people into one life.”

 

All this is so much on my mind lately, well since coming out.  And especially after last night’s great dance triumph.

There is me rom birth until August of last year and then this  different person being born, emerging, coming forth into the light. I used to wonder “who-what is the real me?” (Makes me think of the songs in the movie-lp   Quadrophenia by the Who, which i love by the way).   With my beautiful bi sisters and brothers I am so much more upbeat, talkative, positive than the sullen morose curmudgeon of before.

Below, is a lovely image of the sun.  I want to be transparent. I am so much about bringing things to light and to life these days.

 

 

Dancing:  What also was hugely better, different last night versus before, was holding the woman  as i danced.  I felt so much more connected, at ease,  with my partner and myself compared to  the other form of   wiggling, jiggling beside them (as Archie bunker would describe it  to great disdain in “All in the family”).  I could act, react, interact  with the person I danced with so much better. Before I was at sea, isolated, feeling alienated, atomized if you will.

Below, this is the book someone read when they were a kid and gave to me when I expressed interest in Homer recently.  I was touched.   They had kept it all these decades. Thank you.

 

 

Again “Operation Mincemeat”:   “But he was not alone in fitting more than one personality into a single life.  No one in this story was quite who they seemed to be…each was born into one existence and imagined himself into a life quite different.”  It is all of a piece. As deception, ruses, red herrings, feint, lying are the central theme of the book, the author has some comments about lying. Love the image of a modern day Hercules or Atlas figure expending all their energy keep a lie afloat.  Cease the falsehood and see how much energy is released in your life, which will be put to productive ends.

 

Below,  a representation of the universe that I like.

 

 

“the trickiest aspect of lying is maintaining  a lie. Telling an untruth is easy, but continuing and reinforcing a lie is far harder.   The natural human tendency is to deploy another lie to bolster the initial mendacity.  Deceptions- in the war room, boardroom and bedroom-usually unravel because the deceiver lets down his guard and makes the simple mistake of telling or revealing the truth. “

 

p. 256 Operation Mincemeat by  Ben Macintyre

 

 

John Keats goes to school with Mr. John Keating (Robin Williams)

I put myself in dunce school last month when I realized at last, the connection between the great English romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) and the  character in the wonderful film  “Dead Poets Society” played by Robin Williams,  Mr. John Keating.   How could I have not made the connection sooner?   Keats is the great poet of love and the English teacher that  Robin Williams plays in the film is forever reading poetry to his boys in the preparatory boarding school and exhorting them to live, love and seize the day  (the entire ‘carpe diem’ motif ).  This is all quite wonderful.   A friend turned me on to Keats poem, “La belle dame sans merci” which wiki states has been analyzed to death and can be interpreted in many ways and scholars do not have a clear consensus as to what it means.  Is this just like our lives, our love, our sexuality? All so mysterious, uncertain, open to misunderstanding, and such? We are a mystery unto ourselves.  Ergo, how much more difficult is it to understand another person then?

Below, his house in Hampstead in England. I used to love seeing plaques like this on my walks through London when I visited.

When I first was alerted to Keats’  poem by a friend, I bollixed things up, re:  his life thinking he had died at the age of 25, never having known love. Well he did die young (correct on that) but he also did have a love relationship with one Fanny Brawne.  Being very romantic myself, given to flights of fancy I imagined myself as John Keats redivivus. It was  easy and natural for me to transpose my figure into the lonely knight on the hillside wooing the Lady without mercy of the poem I mentioned above.  Last month when I was researching Keats I came across so many wonderful quotes from him about love and knew instantly, this was a poet after my own heart.   Which is why I have so many quotes, images, pictures in this post.  Enjoy!  Who knows why romance, love, sex, relationships have escaped my life for too much of my time on earth as an adult.

Below an excellent movie I am told on his life, by one whose opinion I trust. Check it out!

Tonight I am going out dancing. If I come home that means the night was a huge success.  If I wind up in the hospital (for any reason) that means it was a failure.  It is  that simple and stark. Confronting a big fear is not easy.  Now the words of Lao Tzu come back to me;  “Be compassionate towards yourself.”   Coming out was probably the hardest truth I ever had to face about myself, my life, my sense of who and what I am. When I came to that realization there was this moment in time when everything froze.  Sheer terror, everything stopped, awful thoughts in my head swirling. “Is that so, is this me, is it true I am bi?”

There was this maximum amount of tension, of a frightful clash inside my psyche. Total  inertia  within me and a force at work to break on through. What I imagine childbirth is like for a woman, or passing a gallstone (thankfully  have not had that painful experience).  Those moments, seconds, minutes of unbearable anguish until a decision is reached.

Then you make up your mind and realize your heart is still beating, the ceiling has not collapsed upon you, you still are very much in the land of the living.

Below, for me part of the making it real was telling people one by one, by email-phone-in person about being bi

Fear gave way to love. To self acceptance, peace with oneself, then eventually compassion towards who and what I am all about.   In Feb. 1987 I was in Quebec city, during the winter carnival walking around with a woman I was madly in love with.  I just adored her and was plenty nervous (and frightfully cold also).  Dear gentle patient sweet reader, do you think Fear is the opposite of Love?  Fear is when we do not act.   I think of the words of the Italian footballer Salvatore “Toto” Schillaci,   “the important thing in life is to participate”.*** We do not express ourselves, engage in life, we are inert-frozen (as I was literally looking at those ice sculptures with my Lady Friend in Quebec).  I think of how Dante Alighieri  puts Satan in hell:   frozen in the ice at the very bottom.  There  are no fires in  hell,  rather  in his conception there is  stasis, an immovable object,  zero warmth of any kind.

Love makes us bold, gives us strength-courage. Coming out has truly been the healthiest thing I have ever done for myself. Plunging into dancing might be the second, because I am continually reminded now that I looked at terror and fear head on, and was able to slay my own personal dragon.   If I was governed by fear for so long in my life then I want to spend the final almost half century triumphing over it, crowing and gloating over it. The words of st. Paul “Death where is thy sting?” cometh to mind.

Blog post soon about the Gargoyle club in the Soho district of London, England, ca. 1920s.

Plenty of artistic  bi characters were present.

Also, want to write something about re-inventing oneself.  Coming out this summer was very much that.

I have now commenced to live a second life.

Above a way of life after my own soul.  This reminded me of the   little ditty (see below):

“Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
At least I’ve always found it so.
Benedicamus Domino!”

― Hilaire Belloc

Below, from the  Keats movie. Just a beautiful, sensual image to bring joy to you and me.

As Freud quipped, sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.

Definitely check out ‘Dead poets society” if you do not know this offering. Still cannot believe Ethan Hawke is the same person as the “Before” trilogy (with the lovely Julie Delpy).  You want romance, something to set your heart aflame, see those 3 movies.   Remember watching it over the years and thinking the roommate character of Ethan Hawke  (played by Robert Sean Leonard)  Neil Perry was awfully cute, charming, endearing. Another red flag that went off in my loins that I totally missed. Could I have been more asleep all those decades concerning being bi?  i think not.

Does anyone know the lilting Shaker spiritual  “The Lord of the dance”?

First came across it in the early 1980s and have enjoyed its beautiful melody and verses  ever since.

Have a friend who just adores (as do I) the great British actor Robert Donat, so when I sent her this link of Donat reading Keats she was ecstatic (as was I).

Does it get much better, one of your favourite poems read by a fantastic actor?

Postscript:

Dancing was fantastic last night.   Had a fabulous time.

The hours last night dancing were fabulous beyond belief.  The verses below truly strike a chord within me.  Quite  fitting.

***Schillaci had an odd career.  He only  scored one goal for Italy outside of his 1990 World Cup performance (his 6 goals in the Mundial brought him the Golden boot award, for top scorer). Italy was host that year  for the World Cup, but was eliminated on penalties in the semi-final by Argentina, which sent your humble scribe into a total funk for days.

Isadora Duncan: 1877-1927. The Mother of Modern Dance and Bi

I must read “My Life” by Isadora Duncan soon. Months ago when I was contemplating, researching, investigating the bi calendar project I came across Ms. Duncan as a great and famous person who was bi but then promptly  forgot about it.  It was filed away somewhere in my mind but then yesterday thinking about dance I remembered that fact and let out a yelp almost worthy of Archimedes in the bath tub in ancient Greece. True, I had not just discovered some eternal truth in mathematics but she is now my heroine and role model. Well one of many I have. Plus she was quite left wing in her social political views which would endear her to me ginormously.  When she bared her breast  and waved a red scarf once on stage during a performance in Boston,  she said “it is red and so am I”  Do you think I am NOT going to fall head over heels for this triple threat to my sacre coeur?  Bi in an era where that was hardly done, mother of modern dance (her appellation) and socialist views.  Even something about her existentialist, Camus-worthy death is endearing, i.e. dies in a freak automobile accident at the age of 50 undone by her long flowing silk scarf.  Plus born in one of my favourite American cities (San Francisco) which I have visited many times  and loved.

Below, what a wonderful  life affirming sentiment and motto to live by.

I do not  know that I was tamed into being a monosexual but I do feel free, liberated, released from some kind of gaol that I made for myself  of my own volition, as an adult for decades, ever since I came out.   In a sense I was at the very same time a prisoner and my very own jailer.  I kept myself in stripes, with a very big dose of corporal punishment daily, hourly as in self-loathing eternal non stop negative self talk,  self hatred.  I had put my being into solitary confinement (quite literally in that I became a hermit, a recluse, a shut in for a decade in particular before   this summer’s tumult).   Dancing is such a perfect real concrete activity and metaphor for me right now. This opening up to new life all around me.  Especially my own self-created existence I am forging every day now.   And it was all so easy, sudden in a sense.  One day (actually a weekend to be exact) I simply woke up,  realized my prison cell where I kept my soul did not have iron bars on it, so I  quietly opened the door which was shut but never locked  and went out into the light, into the sunshine that brings joy.   Just like that.  Just like that all the accumulated anger, rage, wrath, fury, moroseness fell away as if cut off with a pair of scissors.

Could there be a more perfect quote to illustrate what I am feeling right now? See below.

Yes, this is exactly what I am thinking, feeling, believing with my whole being.  I do not simply  want  to rework any wiki entry on her life.  Go read up on her and you will see why I love her.  Her fondness for the ancient Greek myths, a returning of dance to the sacred but mixing in the profane in the form of American athleticism,  (running, leaping, skipping for example) . Many years ago I wrote to a friend that “life is movement and movement is life. ”   This was  my e=mc2 moment.  Even supposedly stationary activities would be included, such as reading, writing or meditating.  Stillness can be movement for the soul.

I know busy-a-holics whose life is some kind of non stop whirlwind tour de force but falls under the rubric of sound and fury signifying nothing.  Constantly running around like the proverbial chicken without a head they fill up their empty lives with nonsense. they create nothing but chaos and confusion for people around them who have to pick up the detritus they make on earth.   They give nothing of themselves to the universe, and their fellow sisters and brothers.   Their souls have not evolved.  It is all about ‘what can you do for me?”  Users and takers on the planet not givers and helpers.  Poor deluded fools.   They remind me of Dante’s pitiful souls  who are forever chasing a banner as their punishment. The poet tries to illustrate  the point that in life those souls never took a stand so now they are  condemned to run pointlessly after a blank, unnamed flag to no purpose at all.

Above,  press clipping about her death. A real death in Tehran feel to it, in its absurdity, oddity.   In 2015 when the bi calendar project is realized, definitely a picture-month for her.
In the interim go out and dance your life away. Who knows how long you have.    It may be later than you think.  Go  tell someone you love them today.

.

Death and Life

Went to the hospice today. A very sobering experience, place to be sure.  Very classy, tasteful. Not intrinsically depressing, as when I visited Bellevue Hospital in NYC once, Dec. 1983 (that was a downer!) but you felt so much gravitas, this oppressive weight upon your being. Death in threes for me lately. A painter friend from up north, approximately 81 in age died on the weekend. Another friend lost his mother, she  was mid-80s, ravaged by Alzheimer’s (so a blessing but still tough to take)  and now a cousin, age 71 dying.  Is life washing over me just as powerfully?  Signing up for dance lessons was about energy, being out there, confronting fear, taking a risk. That felt like life to me. What else has been so dramatically  empowering, life giving?

Keep thinking of the verse in the film “walk the line” about Johnny Cash, (with Joachim Phoenix) when he has a duet on stage with June Carter and they sing the refrain “Time’s a wastin’…”

All this makes me want to be honest, open with people NOW and not wait. Not hold back. The antidote to nothingness (and be as existentialist as you want in your reading of it) makes me want to be authentic and real.   When I came out, I had exactly these feelings.  Being genuine bred in me a desire to be that constantly, everywhere, always. Conversely I am so down on fakery, living the lie, fooling yourself,  It is very painful to see those you love exist in a sham relationship.

This is  another reason the bi erasure, the bi invisibility aspect  sticks in my craw. What I am striving for more than ever is to be out there, to be counted, to stand up and take notice and society sometimes tells me “you don’t count, you are not real, it is a phase you are going through”.  That is why I get on my soapbox and hobbyhorse.

A friend said to me 2 days ago, “Why the hell are we here?”. I replied; “Not to get as many toys, to polish our ego”.

Read this book below, and liked it. Check it out.

Told someone today that I no longer think about sex at all. Before I got another word in she  simultaneously harrumphed, rolled her  eyes and guffawed and said that’s all you think about. I recanted and said, “OK, I am just thinking about dancing a lot.” Am just pondering communication lately. So much of life to me goes back to being alone, telling-owning our story/narrative. having someone hear us out. The ancient Greek (and other cultures) myths knew this in spades. When Homer was sung to thousands of people millenia ago, they heard a tale, but it was also their own story, being narrated. Owning-Admitting-Acknowledging I keep returning to that triplet.  Who we are and what we are and then  our relationship to each other, as individuals and in a community.  This is tough sledding indeed in 2014 with the atomization of life, the hyper individualism at work in society.  THE consumer word these days is “My”. What happened to the word “our”.  I can never forget how Dante Alighieri in the  in the very first line of his famous poem The Divine Comedy writes how t this is OUR life (la nostra vita) and we are necessarily involved in his journey.

Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita. Midway the journey of OUR life. That is how Dante starts.

The opposite of life is not death. It’s choosing not to live because you are afraid, dwelling in fear  or living a lie. Death we are told IS a part of life. Is it the end? Who the heck knows. Every single person that has ever lived, that ever will live, was once part of a star. Preposterous, unfortunately true. Doubt I can top that for sheer poetry.

A friend wrote that he would rather have the world hate him for who and what he is (gay) rather than hate himself for who and what he is.

Jesus said you will know the truth and it will set you free. Knowing my own truth certainly liberated me. There are two  women I am very close to that I want to hug, hold, shake, grab, rattle and say “stand up for yourself. Love and accept yourself. You do not have forever!” I love the early christian imagery of a people risen, who stood up, that they were redeemed, made whole, touched by grace. Unhappily that very positive notion gave way to  then  centuries upon centuries of guilt, shame,  and grovelling.

 Being bi is beautiful.

Just needed to insert some images of life into the blog post that was about death, that was penned with a heavy heart.   Excuse the non sequitur nature of the  written word bumping up against an image.

Dancing and Sex

I recently learned that  Baptists were right to be afraid of dancing after all!

Why are Mennonites and Baptists afraid of sex?

Because it might lead to dancing.

That old saw was told to me in September but only in the last week have I truly understood its import, when I started taking ballroom dancing lessons.

Thus far have learned, been introduced to the following basic steps for beginners:

foxtrot

merengue

bachata

salsa

rhumba

I love it. Made a resolve for the new year to completely challenge myself, take my little old self dramatically out of my comfort zone, do something that terrifies me.

Public speaking doesn’t frighten me.  Give me a topic, give me a week to prepare-think-research and then I will speak about it. No problem. Not my idea of fun but I can do it, have done it, tons in all the education I have had in my life. Being out there on the dance floor, now that is frightening. Growing up at school I felt impossibly self conscious dancing, could not relax at all and stunk at it, which was ironic in that I love music and am athletic-coordinated.  The intersection of being self conscious as a teen and the opposite sex factor just destroyed me.  I was totally shy, awkward, nervous, uptight around girls all through high school.

Love (below) this image from 1651 on English rural-country dancing.

I love my dance teacher (F, whom I will call N as if this is some 19th c. Russian novel and I am hiding from the censors). Omg she is just so supportive, gentle, fun, playful, enthusiastic. Come to think of it, aren’t these the qualities we want to find in a lover? A friend was busting my chops today, stating

“Who the hell ever heard of a bi man who cannot dance? No one!”

Below is a beautiful image  I think that just flows together.  . All quite ambiguous where one person starts, the other ends, a veritable rainbow and riot of colours, and androgynous.  It shouts out to me about being bi.

Someone the other day said to me “Imagine doing  these sensual, erotic, sexual dances with someone you are madly in love with?”

Actually, I tried not to think of that too much because then I would be fit for the Royal Bethlehem Mental Hospital (hence where we get the word “Bedlam” from) in London, England. The dancing instruction I have now had, only totaling up one hour (so Nijinsky need not worry, yet)  reminds me of how one should be in the nuptial bed with your partner: playful, relaxed, fun, no pressure, graceful, at ease. Versus what often happens between the sheets; White knuckle terror, fear, pressure to perform, anxiety, guilt, shame, feelings of inadequacy, holding back how you feel, what you feel, what you want.

If dance is expressive (and if it is not that, it is nothing) then romping in bed for me too much in life has been an exercise in inhibition. It does not  matter now to me so much why-how there was inhibition, just there was. Who cares whose fault it was.

Below is the sun that gives us life. Celebrate. Something  about each person dancing-doing their own thing in the image that I love.  At the end it all works, the kaleidoscope of movement.

Not sure any obvious dancing-bi angle in all this except that insofar that dancing is about being yourself, expressing yourself, then that is a nifty little snapshot of what we should be, in the bi community. Ourselves. Maybe the next time I’m in bed with someone I will  channel my dancing self to them and communicate that way somehow.

Everyone knows already that most communication (75%?) is non-verbal. Dancing truly brings (to me at least) the whole self along for the ride. Romping in bed should be like that too. An exercise of the entire person as opposed to some kind of mechanical action. For some reason as a teen, I read the Benchley novel “Jaws”, that the film was based on in the mid 1970s.   The only thing I remember from the book was some sidebar scene in which the oceanographer character Matt Hooper (played in film by Richard Dreyfus) has a fling with the wife of the  Roy Schneider character. The author describes the carnal union with imagery from a motor car. How pathetic is that!

I never forgot that.  It was so robotic. Not a beautiful thing at all.  If the Brazilians (who are hosting the Mundial this summer) can call soccer/football “the beautiful game”

il jogo bonito (?) then doesn’t it behoove us to make shtupping (go find your Yiddish dictionaries for that one) at least that or preferably more important than that? Oy veh.

It is when we express ourselves that we impress. It is when we lose ourselves in an act of creation that it is important.

Have a sense in my life that being bi is completing myself. I have opened myself up to who and what I truly am. It is ironic that dancing eluded me for the opening half century of my life because overall, I am a sensuous, tactile, athletic, physical being. More than most actually, by far.  My genes  are  Italian,  so  I should take to this physicality like a fish to water.

Dancing is an art, the spirit soaring, the ethereal,  that which cannot be defined, limited  and I too am completely simpatico with that approach to life.

It is an intersection of these 2 worlds. They complement one another.

It gets better (for running in the winter)

Lately I have been treated like a rock star at the local gym I go to because I have run outside in the -30C windchill we have been having lately.  My dear sweet gentle reader, I have been running outside in the winter  since January 1978 and way back then the clothes for running in the winter were pure 100% dreck compared to today.

Ergo, it is much easier now! Plus a whole host of other factors make it better.  In no particular order of importance here are some other factors.

It is possible to know exactly the temperature outside thanks to tv or the internet vs back then maybe where you lived they had an outside thermometer.

Secondly, you could know exactly the wind speed and direction which is   HUGELY important in the winter compared to looking to see if the wind was blow the tree branches.

That was quite unscientific as you can imagine.

Back then, many of my winter runs were at night. These days almost always during the day, and when it is sunny that is a huge psychological  lift.

The amount of trial and  error, plus experience has truly helped over the decades without a doubt.

The clothing now is lighter, keeps you warmer and drier  whereas in  the bad old days of bulk clothing that got too wet and thus allowed you to get cold.

I also have a much more focused notion of training and how long a run will be, the route etc. as opposed to something making things up on the fly (always unsettling).

Could not resist the title of the blog today as a send up, take off, reference to the “It gets better” campaign for LGBT youth.  For me, I do not know if it gets better because I did not feel oppressed as a youth, I did not self identify as queer qua youth at all. Not even sure there was a closet when I was in high school (1974-1979). It was more a species you were not certain  existed.  It had not been discovered or invented, created yet in a way.  Nobody was out in my high school, nor even close at all etc. It reminds me of the Victorian laws against lesbianism. There were none because nobody believed such a thing existed whereas there were laws in England on the books against homosexuality.

Once in grade school, a girl returned after lunch to the classroom drunk. She was accused of being a lesbian. This was absolutely sensational stuff worthy of the Salem witch trials, as portrayed in the play “The Crucible” (which I saw last year and enjoyed a great deal) by Arthur Miller.  There were wild scenes, conniptions.  You would  be forgiven if you honestly thought the girl in questioned had just threatened to blow up the school  because she had dynamite strapped to her body or  had just confessed that she had bitten the head off of a chicken to get her kicks. Wow!

In high school, a boy transferred to another school and Rumour swept the school yard like a raging roaring mountain fire, that he did it because “he was a fag”. Which turned out not to be true. But the sense was, he needed to leave, as if he was a mafia soldier turned rat and needed to enter a witness protection program in Arizona  (I think that is where they often end up for some reason) for his own good.  The very enlightened kids of the time would have a conversation like this:
“Hey Mario, are you a homo?”  He would reply with disgust, as if being accused of some heinous crime with a “no”.   End of  discussion.

A friend told me the other month how she and some others in her high school were out in the early 1990s and those of us in my age group almost started rioting on the spot because we were  thunderstruck with amazement.

Death in Tehran

A rich and mighty Persian once walked in his garden with one of his servants. The servant cried that he had just encountered Death, who had threatened him. He begged his master to give him his fastest horse so that he could make haste and flee to Teheran, which he could reach that same evening. The master consented and the servant galloped off on the horse. On returning to his house the master himself met Death, and questioned him, “Why did you terrify and threaten my servant?” “I did not threaten him; I only showed surprise in still finding him here when I planned to meet him tonight in Teheran,” said Death.

While searching for the story online,   I found  one writer  who had these  insightful comments  attached to the tale:

Frankl refers to the story a couple times in this book, at times when a seemingly unfavorable event or choice saved his life. For example, he and another doctor were left off a list of evacuees from a concentration camp to be delivered to the Red Cross. He finds out later that they were, in fact, killed by the SS.

The point of this story isn’t to embrace passivity and trust simply to fate. What I take away is that there are times when nothing we do, or not do, can guarantee the outcome we seek.

Conversely, there are times when a wonderful outcome comes from what initially appear to be terrible circumstances. This is the point Frankl emphasizes in Man’s Search for Meaning

Wiki my ever helpful servant weighs in:

Liberated after three years in concentration camps, Frankl  (1905-1997) returned to Vienna. During 1945 he wrote his world-famous book entitled, Trotzdem Ja Zum Leben Sagen: Ein Psychologe Erlebt das Konzentrationslager (translated: “…Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp”, known in English by the title Man’s Search for Meaning (1959). In this book, he described the life of an ordinary concentration camp inmate from the objective perspective of a psychiatrist

I really need to write this for myself, most of all. That NOW is   the time, the day to act because “one never knows what the day will bring” as my grandpa was so fond of saying a half century ago.  Read Man’s search for meaning at university, ca. 1980 and loved it. How could you not, it is such a gripping read. Dr. Viktor Frankl at Auschwitz.    One engrossing story after another with all manner of penetrating analysis interspersed within.   Check it out.

I am not a big believer in “Divine Providence” allotting us our days, or The classical Fates of antiquity spinning out the length of our lives (although I do confess to love reading about them in the ancient Greek  myths) or any kind of Protestant nonsense concerning predestination.

Online I found this comment on Frankl’s book which is so spot on:

Everyone reading this deserves someone to remind them that the journey is not straightforward, that present difficulties can often lead to better outcomes.

This is Frankl’s story. It’s the story of countless people that have lived and died on this earth.

In my own life, what I have  found since coming out is that any and all difficulties are easier when you feel connected, part of some circle, community, family, group of friends.

How odd that my newly discovered, revealed sexual self has given me this gift, this awareness!

Yes I know this blog is supposed to be about bisexuality and all this talk about life-death-evil  may seem so tangential. It is not.  A friend yesterday was rightly complaining about office politics at work. I quipped there is not necessarily justice on earth, of why some scoundrel can get away with bloody murder in the adjoining cubicle as it were.  We still have theodicy. And we still have the vexing question of why don’t I have a hot date on Saturday night.

Who the hell knows why bad people flourish and good people sit at home on a Friday night alone.   One comfort is that this has been going on for thousands of years, confounded great minds and people throughout human history (the problem of evil and not being date-less I take it,  but I have often wondered if people had more fulfilling sex lives if there might just be less evil in the world.)  I do know someone who is as happy as a goddamn clam with a cutie on his arm, otherwise he is an irascible tyrant.

The Green Green Grass of Home

The ever helpful Wiki:

In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus  is the god of beginnings and transitions, 

thence also of gates, doors, passages, endings and time.

He is usually depicted as having two faces, since he looks to the future and to the past.

The Romans named the month of January (Ianuarius) in his honor.

Janus presided over the beginning and ending of conflict, and hence war and peace.

The doors of his temple were open in time of war, and closed to mark the peace.

As a god of transitions, he had functions pertaining to birth and to journeys and exchange, and in his association with Portunus, a similar harbor and gateway god, he was concerned with travelling, trading and shipping.

The entry about the roman god Janus will have to wait.   There is so much to write about him.  What a great symbol of sexuality and especially being bi, with all the fluidity, sense of change, looking in opposite directions.

It  is a new year and I feel life surging all around me but am also so conscious of time flowing away,  A 71 year old relative is being moved into a hospice as the end approaches. Dying of cancer. When death stares me in the face, one reaction I have is to seize the day, the carpe diem response. Another is more a frozen, deer in the head lights feeling of, well What exactly do I want to live another 47 more years for?

Below-I will write something one day about the novel-film-play “Of Human Bondage”  because it is such a moving story.  Do love in one of the film versions, how  in the intro they have   music and show Rodin’s the kiss, from many angles.

http://youtu.be/aQhKqlOccHE

Above = version I quite like of Joan Baez singing the green green grass of home.

Am still in a huge Dylan-Joan Baez   mood these days and came across Joan’s rendition.    Discovered this song years ago via Merle haggard.

Love  how he sang it.   My grandpappy used to love this song so many decades ago.   Check it out.  Very haunting.  Tom Jones has a version.  Had an uncle who loved him in the late 1960s when he was popular.    I believe he started out in life as a Welsh hod carrier, didn’t find it exciting hauling heavy  weights up ladders and such.

Personally having women throw their clothes at me while I croon to them is much more appealing, so I can understand why he left  Wales  and changed careers.

Below, Rodin’s The Kiss to cheer us up.  When I went to the Rodin museum in Paris in 1981 that was fantastic.

Surprisingly I do NOT have a “Death in Teheran” tie in with today’s post.  Anyone who does not know that one paragraph tale should drop everything and read it.   I have never forgotten that story.   Am thinking less about death since I came out. Freud thought about death once a day (I guess to take a break from thinking about sex).

Aside; I always loved the French expression le petite morte-the little death for the orgasm.

The best remedy, cure, antidote to nothingness is to live.  Do you like the lines, uttered in  anguish by the great William Holden in  The Bridge over the River Kwai when he finally erupts in fury, in the jungle, on the long march at Capt. Warden:

“you and your L pills. They go together well.  There’s a stench of death about   you.  How to die like a hero. When the only important thing is how to live like a man.”

I just want to live. And if it is possible to live life to the fullest, all the better. Jesus did not come and say “I have come to condemn this and that sexual practice” but he said he came to give life.

Iceberg alert: Abandon The Ship of Fools!

Way back when I was learning about being bi, I came across the  iceberg motif, which I cottoned onto immediately about  bi identity VS bi behavior.  The tip that is visible and very small  represents  self-identified bisexuals. The vast majority of the iceberg is submerged below the waters, thus invisible to the naked eye scanning the horizon signifies bi behavior.  Personally I don’t truly care what people want to identify as or their sexual behavior, my interest is in mental health for a know my own story.

And I suspect it is not unique at all. The lesson of a ship crashing into an iceberg is surely not lost on us?  Even such a mighty, ‘unsinkable’ ship (supposedly) as the famous Titanic of a century ago.  Forgive me dear soul for harping on the subject matter of personal integrity when it comes to sexuality,  of bringing the mystery-secret out into the light. Everything that is hidden, shall one day be revealed saith the good book somewhere. Isn’t it better to have that revelation at the time, place of our choosing?

For it to come forth at our pace, speed compared to having it thrust upon us?

The swirling bi colour spinning sun or whatever it is supposed to be represents our sexual life, our journey, adventures,  the fluidity which we have our 3 score and some on earth.  I love how it suggests energy, movement, life, action. A dynamism at work vs the static.   Remember the Bob Dylan verse,

‘That he not busy being born  is busy dying”.   From his 1965 song:   “It’s alright,  ma  (I’m only bleeding) “

Reader beware, you have been warned!  Why do I write these things? 50% is a reminder for myself.

Lately I am super negative on all the serial philanderers I have come across. Damn them for messing up the lives of their partners.  From a bi perspective, what I am more interested in in terms of philandering, are the people who are in some kind of serious, committed, long term relationship and are out there on the down low. It’s real fraudsterism to do this to your partner back home. (Made up that word). Isn’t that more of a gangster culture, to cheat every chance you get?  If you are some type of hipster, in an open relationship wherein any is allowed to screw anyone else, that is totally different. What is going on these days in the affairs of the heart?  The above is  my  anti-dote to the cynical sham   fake relationship garbage going on with some people  I love very much.   May have a blog post about this poem by John Keats it is so magical, mystical. Check it out! Heard it read by the great British actor Robert Donat and that was sheer beauty. You get drunk (or high), you are  in the grip of lust, the opportunity presents itself or you seek it and fall on your face cheating on your lover.  My bad.  But to set out on a calculated long term course. That is a cancer eating away at you from the inside out.  You better use your integrity muscles or they will atrophy baby.  Remember the great poem about “first they came for the communists…..and then they came for the labour leaders…” You know it. It’s so famous.   If you keep that up, one day you will be strip mined of all decency, goodness, principles.   And then what?

Below is a symbol I have always loved. A new take on it with these colours arranged quite differently.

Omg! I had a girlfriend for six (6) weeks decades ago and that meant more to me,  than the other 35 years of being an adult.   Read once that Napoleon said he was only ever truly happy six (6) days, so figured I was doing much better than the little general, plus I did not  need to lay waste to armies, and Europe in war to get it.  Not sure what my Elba exile was or my Waterloo.  Will write about “exile” some day. It so lends itself to being bi. And yes I know all about straight privilege, and “passing”.    So much keeps coming back to the Bard’s words “to thine own self be true”.  In LGBT land because that is Not the norm, one’s sexuality to own it, admit-acknowledge it is a big deal.  You of course do not have to own up to being straight. You do not have to prove it.  So your challenges are different but just as important.

This (below) was too beautiful to pass up.  Enjoy! Keats died at age 25.

The Human Condition, such that it is.

The universe when it was a baby, as the author put it. Something like under 400,000 years old.  They said, it is like a picture of an 80 year old person,  when they are one day old.

below, came across this wonderfully erotic, sensual, loving image. All mysterious and enchanting because you cannot quite make it out in much detail.  Love the passion here.

Saw 12 years a slave last night. Theatre almost full, so good to see that. It was excellent. THE word for me to describe it would be ‘searing’.  Wow. It simply imprints itself upon you, the violence, the treatment of the blacks slaves by the white overlords.  Check it out. The incredible disdain that too many whites had for the slaves reminded me a great deal of the callous disregard the Nazi soldiers often had in the camps for the prisoners.  That was a parallel I was able to come up with. So today, feel the strong need and desire to post something positive after being subjected to hatred and violence in the cinema yesterday evening.  In fairness the violence was mainly emotional-psychological as opposed to scenes of physical maltreatment.   No gratuitous violence either.

Below,   really  Herr Doktorvater?   Hmph.

If there was some alien race or higher power observing the human condition, the species it would say something to us, along the lines of the father-son talk in the movie

“Boyz in the hood” when  Laurence Fishburne sits his son Trey (Cuba Gooding Jr) down for a talk and says  “I don’t know why you insist on learning things the hard way Trey, but one day you’re gonna learn them. ”   Yesterday’s post was about time, psychological distance traveled but by me, my own journey, the laboratory experiment of one (1).

Today we go big, that journey writ large.  How far have we gone as a species in terms of acceptance (sexual and otherwise)? This is open to debate. I guess it depends upon your point of view, what timeline you are using, what scale you feel comfortable with.  Believe we are down to our final billion years on earth, as after that the sun will no longer be able to support terrestrial life. I debate, wrangle constantly with a friend over how far we have come. He is very optimistic constantly invoking the moral arc of history from Martin Luther King Jr, that it is long but bends towards justice.  Since I have only one life to live and to give I am rather impatient to see things happen while I am still living, breathing, observing. A wag once said compared to other fights for “rights” (e.g. the black civil rights movement, women’s fight for equality) the LGBT struggle has been much shorter and seen a lot of advancement.  Hard to disagree there.

One thing that was portrayed very well in the film 12 years was the sense of being caught up in the violence, brutality of the moment.  As if the perpetrators are caught up in the ecstasy of sheer hatred for “the other”, that they are taking their frustrations out on an inanimate punching bag in a gymnasium as opposed to the real flesh and blood that bleeds.  Shylock’s words come back to haunt me here, ‘if you cut us/ do we not bleed?’   A true counterpoint to being caught up in the heat of passion, lust, love.

I could write an entire post (and I will one day) about labels, naming, words and how important they are. How harmful or helpful. Early on in the film when our hero finds himself manacled, in a prison-dungeon of sorts and his captors have a kind of mock interrogation they ask him who he is. He states he’s a free man and they laugh and say “no boy you are a runaway slave from Georgia”.  So   being labelled,  they  are at peace and beat   him severely.

For me, what was I from one day, week month to the next before and after coming out? So much changed.  So little changed. I  put it to my sister “I am the same person, only better.”

The above image is delicious in its innocence I think. A kind of playful, joie di vivre. I like the ambiguity in how the characters are drawn up. Plus, the words are so charming.  War, Slavery, The Holocaust, yes it’s all catnip to me because I am a student of history, with a memory, interested in our past.   When Gore Vidal rants  about the United States of Amnesiacs he is onto something.  Everything down the memory hole in that idiot culture.  I never walk around with my head in the clouds  (the way Aristophanes portrays Socrates in his play “The Clouds”  just loving  smash and grab capitalism, U.S. hegemonic Imperialism, wildfire consumerism,  thinking this is the best of all possible worlds a la Candide by Voltaire.   It is one world. A world. And we can do a lot better pal.  Although once when running I was not paying sufficient attention but instead looking at a pretty girl on the other side of the street and ran smack into a stopped car about to pull  out of a driveway.  Somehow I was not injured, although surprised.   I don’t think the girl in question noticed.  It would have been an unusual way to make a first impression upon someone.

Remember reading in a theology course about the verse “God is light”.  Pretty simple right?  The exegesis went on about what the verse does Not say.   That is,  god is Not one light among many.  Nor is god is  THE light either.  Rather how it uses the verb ‘to be’, = “is”. I don’t care if you hate God, religion, spirituality, your own personal higher power. There’s about a septillion reasons to be pretty anti-religious given how much mischief organized spirituality has made of things for several thousand years.  All I want from you gentle reader is to go towards the light, love, and away from darkness, hatred.  You know what is right and wrong.  Do really big ginormous decisions land people in a jackpot on earth or is it the accretion over time of small little almost insignificant actions that add up? When Dante Alighieri in the Divine Comedy, in the opening canto talks about losing the true way because he was asleep, to me he so perfectly captures what happens to us so often. This imperceptible (almost) straying from what we know is right and just.  We take a path of least resistance.  And then eventually it is too late. This sense is wonderfully conveyed by Burt Lancaster in “Judgment at Nuremburg” when he states how the German people felt they could use-control Hitler but then one day woke up to find themselves in a much worse situation under him.

Do you know someone, whose life is a slow motion train wreck, a self destructive journey of 1,000 cuts? Isn’t that  opposite of going towards life-love-the positive and it’s a virtuous upward spiral staircase you are on.   A mantra I have is to “choose Life”.   I could just  as easily say “Choose light”     The Nazis were so confident,  in their policies but at the end of the day, the whole final solution was wrapped in secrecy because they knew it was evil, wrong,   Consider how  the zyklon-b gas chambers worked in terms of an instrument of mass death, because the shooting of people was too hard on the Nazi soldiers, indoctrinated as they were.  The large scale  fake  “shower” gas  chambers were more “clean”, could be done faster and not involve German soldiers  in quite the same way.  I think Camus and the existentialists would agree with me,    that it is positive that as malleable and fungible as humans are in terms of morality-ethics, that  they simply cannot gun down people en masse  and throw them into a pit repeatedly. That they rebel.   And yes I know about the Stanley Milgram Stanford experiments of decades ago.

OK enough sermonizing for one post.