round-up: 8/3
housekeeping, recommendations, quotations, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m watching
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual.
Things to read/watch:
Housekeeping:
Here is a pic of my daily pills:
Health is wealth. We’re thriving. Just kidding.
& a list of things I hate, and was reminded of hating, in the order in which I hated them this week:
Not being fully 100% in control of someone else’s perception of me (disgusting).
Having to tell someone that they hurt me.
Running out of bread and missing out on my daily morning toast.
Lukewarm coffee.
Returning to work after time away.
Nosebleeds.
The way my heart speeds up when the nurse attaches the blood pressure cuff, which makes me panic that my blood pressure will be higher, which makes me panic that my doctor will think I’m unhealthy, which makes me panic that I’ll be perceived as a moral failure, because that’s how the world seems to operate.
My work friends refusing to sit with me at work so that we can yap for a little midday break (criminal).
Zoom classes. And in-person classes, usually, if I’m being honest.
The lost-passport/passport-renewal process.
I also rearranged my earscape this week:
What I’m watching:
Sunny, Apple TV (two episodes in; very good so far!)
What I’m listening to:
What I’m reading:
Chaos Is My Co-Pilot: In Praise of Tumultuous, Unruly Storytelling
20 Completely Free Ways to Romanticize Your Life This Summer
Quotations:
Despite evidence, I think love should indent the self in some way.
-Spencer Williams, “I wake at dawn to glimpse my barren chest and speak to the children I won’t birth.”
Let me be clear: no sea witch would want me like this. My larynx barnacled & slick with desire. She’d look me over; flex her tentacles. I’ve suckled enough brine to know how this ends. Wishes are for girls with bodies pure enough to sacrifice. Painless. Elegant. Reliable as currency. Would that I were so unsunk. Somewhere, another girl is wed to my longing. I’m still choking back seafoam when the nurse calls my name.
-Arianna Monet, “Thinking about “The Little Mermaid” in the Waiting Room of the Otolaryngology Department”
I'm a Cancer. [Laughs] During the ten years when I didn't do anything, people would ask me what I spent my time on. I would say that I just spent ten years contemplating water.
My aim is to make people lose a sense of the certitude regarding the compass of good and evil as dogma, which scares me and resembles a kind of fascistic interpretation grid. As a humanist and not a moralist, I’m trying to engage with it to the degree that I’m refusing to abide by the compass of good and evil in my art.
A sex scene, if it is to exist in a film, is necessary.
It’s a really, really important thing that people have shed a light on abuses that have gone unpunished. But that doesn’t mean that we should be anticipating this abuse and suspecting it in all places.
I left my mother's home when I was 15, and I had my first affair at 16—we did everything, but not penetration. Now I'm bisexual completely, and I've had quite a few lovers for my age. More men than women. Probably 50 men and 20 women. I'm incapable of fidelity; have a need for a million experiences. Women I love more for beauty than for sex. Men I love for grace and intelligence.
-Maria Schneider
In cruising, I found an important part of my education.
I found a truth in moonlight.
Cruising has always been partly about seeking pleasure, and doing so in a way with no certain end point. One may start out wanting a sexual partner, but there is never a guarantee; thus it becomes a mixture of anticipation, delight, and idleness. I found ways to sideline my restless expectations. This led me to an awareness of the dangers of overdetermining, of freezing meaning rather than letting it arise. Some encounters were extraordinary, some were not, and some even felt unsatisfying, but the experience of cruising never failed to please.
What did I learn? I learned how the need to see validation in another person’s eyes is universal; how kindness brings light into the world; how the smallest gesture, whether noble or cruel, can have unforeseeable consequences. I learned how, despite all the heteronormative narratives of romance, it was utterly true that one could love someone passionately, deeply, for twenty minutes without knowing anything about him, or seeing him again, and treasure the memory of those minutes all of one’s life.
It was in the bushes that I began the hard work of abandoning shame, the shame with which every gay boy I knew grew up: the terrible sense that one is wrong in some fundamental way. Reading and debating began that process for me, but cruising did the heavy lifting. I discovered the luxuriance and variety of desire.
In that tangle of trees and sky, earth and breath, I came to one of my life’s foundational intuitions: a vision of eros, desire, passionate life, as a force churning through and animating the world itself. The issue of watching and being watched also brings up another revelation I came to on the trails: the power of the gaze.
Cruising spaces almost invariably feature no clocks, so the only measure of time is one’s own body, its pleasures, or the moon sailing overhead.
Cruising nourished much in me: an appreciation for posture and gesture, an eye for detail, a sense of how to present the self, and an ever-deepening respect for ambiguity. Nuance is inevitable in this process, because cruisers have a paradoxical agenda; they must let others know they want sex without looking like they need it too bad (desperation is never sexy). They must look hot and cool at once. Putting such equivocal images and energy out there takes phenomenological agility and hermeneutic refinement. I understood that when a man’s gaze crosses mine and seems as if it might lock but then skitters away, that means something.
Driven by desire, the cruiser encounters himself and the world: the world in the form of other men, physical space, or nature.
Gay men were constructing—in the blank spaces in the city, and largely in utter silence—a new culture. A culture of pleasure and desire.
How often we are looked at by those who don't understand us and how rarely we are looked at by the people who really do. To have your aesthetic form, your body appreciated in someone's eyes and have that person truly witness you is a thing that comes so rarely in this life.
A body can feel it coming. A pulling in the chest, gravity stronger at the bottom of the eyes, fog coating the brain. A date on a calendar is more than numbers, a ticket for a flight is more than a transaction. The body knows — predicts change and loss and sadness and hope. The body knows that everything must end, but the body resists regardless: folding into itself, hardening and softening, dripping at the edges.
I think the beauty industry encourages a hyper-fixation on the physical. The communication piece does not apply to the average person’s reason for wanting or getting Botox. It’s a purely aesthetic pursuit. People have been conditioned by beauty culture in general to focus on the aesthetic, whether in the positive or the negative, as the basis for making most beauty decisions.
I often frame it like this: Becoming beautiful in the sense of meeting a certain standard of beauty can have some benefits in the socioeconomic sphere, right? Things like pretty privilege, fitting in. More beautiful people tend to make a little bit more money and have better legal outcomes — these are socioeconomic benefits of being “beautiful.” But they're often contrasted with negative existential outcomes. So with industrialized beauty, we sort of have to do the cost-benefit analysis of like, economic status vs. existential consequences. When you're thinking of meaning and connection and communication, these are the things that really matter.
That spring, I celebrated my first pandemic Passover in isolation with my latest boyfriend. He was a good person. Most of my boyfriends had been. Whatever grief and resentment welled up in me, I’d always thought that was love. For weeks, this boyfriend was the only person I touched, the only person I sat on a couch to read with, the only person I watched TV with.
So much of writing is having the courage to begin again. A new draft, a new story, a new day of making new sentences.
A few weeks later, I came out again. This time as nonbinary. A new pronoun roll out. “We get training for this at work,” my mom told me proudly. “Your gender identity is part of your human rights.” (We’re Canadian.) Other women in my life were more resistant. “It’s just not grammatically feasible,” a dear friend and fellow writer told me. As if neither of us had ever chosen to write in sentence fragments.
Becker and I had loved each other for a long time before we finally got together. They are the first person to have me as Bee, which I think means, to have me fully.
What I am about to say is specific to me. Please do not transpose this sentiment onto someone else’s deadname, someone else’s experience. But me, I love seeing the evidence of myself as a layered, revising text. I look at my books side by side. From she/her to she/they to they/she to they/them, from Rebecca to Bee. These changes do not cancel each other out but rather complicate and reimagine each other. I am a text that I am writing and rewriting.
More and more, I feel uninterested in legibility. I do not want to be a single word.
I wanted to solve my own unhappiness through writing; I wanted to be able to write my way out of a problem, to convince it and myself I could outsmart my own unhappiness.
I’m constructing a cottage in my brain. I’m making a place I want to go to where the ocean always is and where I can swim in it even when it’s cold out and in the morning it is spring but by night it is fall. You see I’ve been, for a few years, flexing my imagination in hopes of returning to the strength I used to have in childhood which saw first the real world and then also what that real world might be. So now the floors are made of water and the windows have flowers on the glass and everything is really vine but there, reach, it’s stone. The grass is neck high and people are hiding and the fire in the fireplace warms the whole house and you are here and I am here so it means we are together, even if that is not true. Even if I wish it were true.
I’ve been welcoming longer periods of want. I’ve accepted that I’m past the point of preferring to be alone and actually, I would really like it now if someone were here.
There's a memory I have of the waning summer in Berlin, sharing a cigarette with Kate on the edge of the canal. Drunkenly, I note the light reflecting off the water, the illuminated face of the river shining back at me through their eyes.
"Why do you think we never dated?" I ask them, deadly serious but smiling.
"I don't know," they say before a pause, looking off into the distance or maybe at me. Or maybe no time at all in fact elapses between these two phrases, as I am recounting a picture of a moment from years ago. Whether finally or immediately, they say this: "I think probably because we want to stay in each other's lives forever." Kate does not remember this moment, which doesn't mean it never happened.
I remember thinking that I’d spend my whole life bucking up against the truth of living while loving someone this much. The two seem mostly incompatible, the shape of devotion rarely contained in something Earthly or understandable. I cannot fit the totality of my love for you in this world, and so I make the world larger. I am always chasing the tail-end of limits I imagine for my existence, confounding myself with the endless expansion. People have spoken of love as a force that unites all disjointed parts, something that makes everything else click into place. For me, there is a dual reverence and terror for the force I have felt, the one that can split atoms and explode the whole world. The other day, I peeked into a Church past sundown and saw a woman laying in the aisle, her head pressed into the burgundy carpet. I understood.
There is animosity in our relationship, I find your hands harsh, but sometimes you can be so gentle. Like at home in Connecticut, when both windows are open and a cross breeze is coming through the windows.
That’s all for today!
-Despy Boutris
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