Penguin Book of International Gay Writing
ed by Mark Mitchell
Barthes: Names, the source of dispute, of arrogance and of moralizing.
-Americans worry about labels as well as the reclamation of the act of naming from the oppressor
-for Europeans, what matters is experience itself
-Eddie is the experiential homosexual. An ideal h relationship that is fraternal rather than conjugal, a kind of eroticized buddyhood. Erotic friendships (mh equivalent of lesgian 'romantic friendships). Carry m friendship naturally into the realm of sexuality, forging bonds that are both intense and enduring
-naming can be as shocking as naming. To allow experience to happen innocently is to unshackle that experience from centuries of persecution and disguise.
Tournier (Gemini): Grayness of college years to a het.. "But then surely that is fair training for what life has in store for him." self-limiting act of naming
-as h, no models hinder me. COULD invent
Baldwin: re black, poor, h "I thought I'd hit the jackpot."
Plato: 3 sexes - mm (sun), ff (earth), mf (moon). Reunion of mm sets men free for other activities. This former union is source of innate love which restores us to our ancient state by attempting to weld two beings into one and to heal the wounds which humanity suffered. Most adulterers from the mf sex. MMs are not shameless, but high spirited and manly... Love is the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole. Let no man set himself in opposition to Love - which is the same thing as incurring the hatred of the gods - for if we are his friends and make our peace with him, we shall succeed in finding the person to love who in the strictest sense belongs to us... returing to our original condition.
Cut Sleeve: when in love, 'a dutiful son, risks violating law, shares his peach'. when out of love, ' usurped my chariot and bave me a peach already bitten.'
Thomas Mann: The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than thos of the socialbe man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance... concern him unduly... take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions. The fruit of solitude is originality, ... the poetic creation. But the fruit of solitude can also be the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.
His heart was filled and moved by a paternal fondness, the tender concern by which he who sacrifices himself to beget beauty in the spirit is drawn to him who possesses beauty.
... satisfaction or relief that accompanied the thought of him dying young.
Beauty is the lover's path to the spirit - only the path, only a means... he who loves is more divine than the beloved, because the god is in the former, but not in the latter - this the tenderest perhaps the most mocking thought ever formulated, a thought alive with all the mischievousness and most secret voluptuousness of the heart.
The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought. Namely, the thought that Nature trembles with rapture when the spirit bows in homage before Beauty. Aschenbach was inspired to write, though Eros usually loves idleness and is born only for the idle. He wanted to carry Tadzio's beauty on high into the spiritual world, as the eagle once carried the Trojan shepherd boy up into the ether.... How mysterious this act of intercourse and begetting between a mind and body!
By not greeting T, he forestalled 'a wholesome disenchantment.' But the aging lover no longer wished to be disenchanted, the intoxication was too precious to him. Who shall unravel the mystery of an artist's nature and character! Who shall explain the profound instinctual fusion of discipline and dissoluteness on which it rests! For not to be able to desire wholesome disenchantment is to be dissolute. Before he would have expended his energy completely on his writing; now he allowed all the daily revitilization he was receiving from the sun and leisure and sea air to burn itself up in intoxicating emotion... Watching the sunrise, his soul, still fresh with the solemnity of sleep, was filled with awe by this wonderful event.
Nothing is stranger, more delicate, than the relationship between people who know each other only by sight... Between them is uneasiness and overstimulated curiosity, the nervous excitement of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need to know and to communicate; and above all, to a kind of strained respect. For man loves and respects his fellow man for as long as he is not yet in a position to evaluate him, and desire is born of defective knowledge.
For to passion, as to crime, the assured everyday order and stability of things is not opportune, and any weakening of the civil structure, any chaos and disaster afflicting the world, must be welcome to it, as offering a vague hope of turning such circumstances to its advantage.... this guilty secret of the city [cholera epidemic], which merged with his own innermost secret and which it was also so much in his own interests to protect.
Solitariness, the foreign environment, and the joy of an intoxication of feeling that had come to him so late and affected him so profoundly - all this encouraged and persuaded him to indulge himself in the most astonishing ways.
[Saving the Polish family] would lead him back to where he had been, give him back to himself again; but to one who is beside himself, no prospect is so distasteful as that of self-recovery... The thought of returning home, of levelheadedness and sobriety, of toil and mastery, filled him with such repugnance that his face twisted into an expression of physical nausea.
[His orgy dream] enticing him with shameless insistence to the feast and frenzy of the uttermost surrender. Great was his loathing, great his fear, honorable his effort of will to defend to the last what was his and protect it against the Stranger, against the enemy of the composed and dignified intellect.
[To Phaedrus} do you believe, dear boy, that the man whose path to the spiritual passes through the senses can ever achieve wisdom and true manly dignity? Or do you think that his is a path of dangerous charm, very much an errant and sinful path with must of necessity lead us astray? [Because our path is the path of Beauty and Eros] we writers are like women, for it is passion that exalts us, and the longing of our soul must reamin the longing of a lover - that is our joy and our shame. Do you see now perhaps why we writers can be neither wise nor dignified, and necessarily remain dissolute emotional adventurers? We renounce the corrosive process of knowledge - for knowledge has neither dignity nor rigor: it is all insight and understanding and tolerance, uncontrolled and formless; it sympathizes with the abyss, it IS the abyss. So we reject it resolutely, and henceforth our pursuit is of Beauty alone, of Beauty which is simplicity, which is grandeur and a new kind of rigor and a second naivete, of Beauty which is Form. But form and naivete lead to intoxication and lust; they may lead a noble mind into terrible criminal emotions, which his own fine rigor condemns as infamous; they too lead to the abyss. That is where they lead us writers; for we are not capable of self-exaltation, we are merely capable of self-debauchery.
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