reading | writing | today

I’ve created a tumblr “Reading | Writing | Today” where anyone can “Submit” (http://bit.ly/LwG0hO) a post. 

What I have in mind for us all is that we each commit to at least one submission of ONE SENTENCE a day. This sentence can be either something that you read that you are working to complete that is representative of the piece OR it can be a sentence that emerges from your own writing. The purpose is to have a collective space for us to have quoting, reflecting the fact of our reading and writing as a daily practice.

[baldwin]

“Thirty [years old]. And I was alone, had been for a while, and might be for a while, but it no longer frightened me the way it had. I was discovering something terrifyingly simple: there is absolutely nothing I could do about it. I was discovering this in the way, I suppose, that everybody does, but having tried, endlessly, to do something about it. You attach yourself to someone, or you allow someone to attach themselves to you. This person is not for you, and you, really, are not for that person - and that’s it, son. But you try, you both try. The only result of all your trying is to make absolutely real the unconquerable distance between you: to dramatize, in a million ways, the absolutely unalterable truth of this distance. Side by side, and hand in hand, your sunsets, nevertheless, are not occurring in the same universe. It is not merely that the rain falls differently on each of you, for that can be a wonder and a joy: it is that what is rain for the one is not rain for the other.”

— James Baldwin in Just Above My Head 
(the absolute best crystallization if his writing…ever.)

[rant] on “gay marriage” & “the black church”

when did the Seventh Day Adventists, the Southern Baptist Church, the American Baptist Church (USA), the Christian Reformed Church in North America, the Mennonites, the Methodist Church, the United Pentecostal Church, the Church of God (Cleveland, TN), the Church of God (Anderson, IN), the Assemblies of God — pretty much, when did mainline white christian organizations — begin affirming the full inclusion and possibility for marriage of “same gender”* couples? have i awakened from a deep, long sleep where these groups have included and allowed — not the survival, nor mere tolerance of, but — the thriving of queer folks in their denominations? no? didn’t think so.

so why is there all of this focus on the cataclysm done to “the black church” because of one president’s announcement? of course, some religious figures [side-eyeing JHB and his horribleness] are exploiting this for their own political gain. but the media representation of “the black church” as overwhelmingly against queer folks is not nuanced at ALL. there’s more than enough queer-phobia to go around and black folks are not the only, nor the most vocal, folks participating in this ridiculous enterprise. selah.

*[a problematic phrase; and “marriage” is also a normative configuration of relationship that does much violence to non-conforming queer folks.] 

“The World” [On Queerness & Pentecostalism]

Today, I presented at 6th Annual Association of Charismatic and Theological Students Symposium: “Spirit Poured Out on All Flesh: Sexuality, Gender, and The Body in the Pentecostal Church.” Following are my comments. 

I have a set of inchoate propositions that I will put forward, with hopes that we can work through at least some of them: 

[I]

Two concerns: on the one hand, I think the discussion of “the body” – as a concept – goes hand-in-hand and should come before discussions of sexuality generally, homosexuality in particular. On the other hand, I realize that this distinction is illusory at best, that we are always talking about bodies and their behaviors, the efficaciousness of what they do – through the pleasure they both prompt and receive, through the pleasure about which they both avert and of which they are embarrassed – toward or against ideologies of holiness and righteousness. In some ways, we are in the distinction between world – indexing the concept of making – and earth, which indexes the concept of that which is given as gift. This distinction is the one between, most fundamentally, body and flesh. A March 1907 testimony in The Apostolic Faith periodical records the following:

‘The Lord is in His holy temple and let all the flesh be silent before Him.’ This quietness will let the Spirit speak out in praises and shouts and song.^[1]

In this early Pentecostal document about “holy quietness,” we are forced to consider the relationship between “flesh” as an exchange for the word “earth” in Habakkuk 2:20 that says “the LORD is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him.” “Flesh” comes to stand in for earth; what is the efficaciousness of this substitution? Hortense Spillers’s black feminist theorizing marked a distinction between body and flesh: the “body” is defined or informed by its capacity to be capturable and captive, but the “flesh” is defined by its liberational tendency and flesh is ontologically “before the ‘body.’”^[2] ‘Adam in Hebrew means earth, such that creation story shows us that flesh is earth animated by the breath, wind, spirit. So when we consider the fulfillment of Joel, the Spirit “poured out upon all flesh,” and thus on all the earth, this outpouring occurs on that which comes before being claimed by cultural norms that give us the “body” as a concept. Spirit is poured out upon that which has the capacity to enact liberation, that which is grounded in a freedom drive.

The utterance of tongues – a defining performative of Pentecostalism – is a likewise breath, wind, spirit speaking out from flesh. When the modern Pentecostal movement began, the theology-philosophy of tongues was animated by a question: are tongues xenolalia or glossolalia, are tongues the language of the Other or a general, praiseworthy incoherence? If incoherence, we should think about how queer sexualities enliven such notions of flesh.

[II]

I have been attempting to theorize are aversion and embarrassment. It appears that the aversion for Pentecostal aesthetics that many popular press periodicals recorded – in the Lost Angeles Herald and the LA Times, and the aversive attitudes toward “lanky black wenches,” black leadership and the interracial, multiethnic sociality, against gesticulations and speaking in tongues until exhausted; and the embarrassment emanating from practitioners regarding those aesthetics such as dancing, speaking in tongues and loud singing – also operates within and, thus against, the worlds Pentecostals themselves have made. For example, the Azusa movement were lampooned as speaking a “weird babel of tongues.” That which spoke out from flesh – breath, wind, spirit – became a source for ridiculing Pentecostals in mainstream media. Still, a world was made through such inspirited practices, practices that people in other worlds averted, and that some inside this world were embarrassed to claim. Can we consider that a likewise world has been constructed with the physical, visible, audible presence of queer folks as constitutive of the process of world making, but that such presence was and is averted in the narrative, that such presence was and is a cause for embarrassment.

The question: what kind of world do we want to make? How can we make a world that not only has the presence but celebrates the presence of queerness amongst us? I want to think about the question of the world, the world in which we are making, the world in which we desire inhabitation. The biblical Acts Church, constructed a world out of having all things common, out of sharing meals and sacrament, out of fellowship and abundant, radical love for one another. They were continually in process of imagining a new and living way together with others. This was not predicated upon unanimity but by struggling together to have community. So when to think of our modern era – and the concern regarding sexuality in its generality, and homosexuality in its particularity – within the Pentecostal tradition, we do not need to be concerned with “acceptance” because the queer folks are already here, and have always been within Pentecostalism. Rather than the question “what should we do about queer sexualities in Pentecostalism,” we might pose the following: what kind of world have we constructed through the refusal to see that which helps make our own existence? And how is this refusal contradictory to the radical openness to the divine that Pentecostals generally celebrate?

[III]

What if we explore within the interstice, opened up by the Fundamental Theorem of Mathematics that says: between any two rational numbers is an infinite set of irreducible numbers, that between 1.1 and 1.2 is a literal world of difference.

1.1
1.1 – 1.2
1.1, 1.11 – 1.2
1.1, 1.11, 1.111 – 1.2
1.1, 1.11, 1.111, 1.1111 – 1.2
1.1, 1.11, 1.111, 1.1111, 1.11111 – 1.2
1.1, 1.11, 1.111, 1.1111, 1.11111, 1.111111 – 1.2

The more we dig, the further we delve into the seeming infinitesimal crack between two numbers seemingly “next” to each other, the greater world discoverable. And the more we explore between 1.1 and 1.2, and the more we defamiliarize the proximity between the two, the less we understand about such nearness, the less we know; and this less known is produced by exploration, not by dismissing the journey. That to say, when we make easy declarations about sinfulness of certain bodies producing certain behaviors, it can only arise by assumption of the nearness of certain concepts, of the seeming facile relationship between homosexuality and the body, between homosexuality and sin. But when we dig in, when we go down, when we move further from the surface, we get into a world – an infinite space – of generative trouble. The surface of Pentecostal aesthetics – to any outside world – has a close proximity to the concept of “nonsense” but to abide, to dwell, to move with Pentecostals is to explore a new world altogether.

[IV]

So I ask a seemingly vulgar question, vulgar only insofar as it, on its surface, seems to body forth familiar terminology, and in some ways, “nonsense”: what if we took serious the theological-philosophical force of an implied critique embedded in the word “deliverance” – a word often used against queer folks telling us that we are in dire need of change? The critique emerges through the defamiliarizing of what “deliverance” purportedly means. Between 1.1 as the present moment and 1.2 as the seeming near, approaching, soon to come is the capacity for unknown, infinite change. To give a personal anecdote: it was the notion that I could be delivered that gave me the space to assert two things concurrently: that what I was at that moment was not necessarily my future; my future was wholly undetermined by a present moment. The proximity of 1.1 to 1.2 was set in relief, giving me space to breathe and to consider, to think and to converse; it gave me a world of irreducible depth to explore. “Deliverance” as ideology was generative for the affirmation of life in any “now” moment. Is there a way to mobilize the unfamiliar for our purpose, to allow us to stop with the assumption that we know what sexuality is, that we know what homosexuality is, that we know what queerness is? Can we ask different questions? Can we think about the world that we have, who is constitutive of such a world and how we can ethically include everyone’s talents, passions and libidinal drives? Finally, what narrative would we need to assert the fundamental value of all persons?

[V]

Pentecostalism is the affirmation of the irrepressibility of life. Thus the praise song, “Yes, Lord.” The song lingers in the interstice between the affirmative Yes and the object towards which such affirmation is directed, the Lord. Pentecostalism insists that life occurs and in such life there is not mere survival but thriving by remaining unfinished, remaining undone, remaining vulnerable. And thus, we say “yes.” So how can we have an ongoing movement toward affirmation without negating certain forms of incoherent life? Queer sexualities affirm a way of life that is often thought as negational. Queer sexualities are sites of anxiety because of the capacity for all of us to have pleasure that is not reducible to the populating of the world but about something more fundamental, something more primal. Queer sexualities are open to generativity rather than reproduction; queer sexualities are open to seeking pleasure in the face of the violence of the state, and of religion, that would repress the tongue, quell the fire, still the shouting body.

moth’s powder [04.21.10]

from: a
to: a
Wednesday, April 21, 2010, 4:13 PM
subject: Re: mp

mp,

it happened again and i don’t know what to make of it. not staring but the sorta moment you feel someone looking at you from across the room and you look up from the convo you’d been engaging and, sure enough, there he is, looking. you make brief eye contact, he takes a deep breath and looks away, almost as if his looking – the very fact of his doing it – stunned him, so he also was not immediately able to look away. you’re the trainwreck. the fire to which the moth is attracted. beautifully so [or, at least, you convince yourself]. but also: he’s cute. very cute. but the hesitant averted gaze, the stalled look away, the wary worry which announces, before any “hello,” the emergence of problems.

it was at calvin’s art opening a few weeks ago, his first gallery showing in fact, so things were abuzz and he was rather excited. wine was flowing and there genuine giddiness in the air. i was pleased to support and met all sorts of folks: people i’d never seen or heard of before – who knew so many cool, artsy folks lived here? – and finally met folks that i’ve known online but never in person from twitter and facebook, for example. anyway. the artwork was nothing short of amazing. called it his “music and movement” installation where he’d taken all sorts of media and used oil paint to create these abstract swirls and strokes, all based on the music to which he’d be listening at the time. the painting was to approach a kind of sonic referentiality, was a type of metaphorization of the sounds, of the music. i was moved by the colors he used, mostly darker gradations :: deep purples and blues, dense, full-bodied reds, and lots of black. he used a variety of surfaces, “to bespeak the everydayness of our encounters with music. this is a piece about the sublime’s relation to the ordinary.” sure, i laughed a bit at his description, but more because i never pay attention to what artists say about their own shit…it’s always on the edge of self-congratulatory “look at this cool shit i did and now please pay me” message implicit in their self-referential descriptions, and so they always misread their own motives. but aside from his description, it truly was amazing. couldn’t deny it.

the problem, of course, was that there was this hella cute dude there with his girlfriendofthreeyears [he said it, rushed just like that, while she was in the restroom]. calvin wanted me to meet this guy because he’s a likewise nerd and sometimey musician, so he thought we’d hit off. dude had been glancing at me even before the official introduction, when i stood across the gallery space talking with some other folks. and then we were introduced and of course i was surprised to learn that the young woman was not just a friend but was, in fact, the girlfriendofthreeyears. but anyway, nice guy and his girlfriendofthreeyears were, in fact, cool as hell. the three of us talked for at least an hour, conversation moving through all sorts of terrain, from theology to the presidency. needless to say, i got along with them very well, so calvin wasn’t wrong at all. the problem? well…you know how i tend to get a bit on the edge of loud, and insistent, when i’ve had one too many glasses of wine. not the sorta belligerent volume but speaking my mind, sans filter, so also full of conviction. i was on some, “i voted green party! not even gonna vote the next time around if things keep going the way they’re going!” shit. and though true, it’s always weird to sorta feel that settled with folks you’d just met. anyway, girlfriendofthreeyears went to the restroom but saw an old colleague and stopped to talk to her for a while. so dude and i kept talking and it was nice. it goes without saying that i noticed how handsome he was and how, had there been no girlfriendofthreeyears present, i would’ve overtly flirted. but i’m not desperate. nor that needy. nor grimy. but things did cross my mind. his smile, his eyes, his lips? just.yes.to.it.all.

so after this hour or so convo and girlfriendofthreeyears returned, i bid them adieu so that i could meet/talk to other friends i hadn’t seen in a while. we facebooked each other and i scurried away. whispered to calvin “oh my god…he’s cute! ugh!” and he laughed. i settled on a new group of old friends with whom i could catch up. but while drinking this newest glass of wine and having convo where i laughed a lot and made several points – with my hands, so you know i was doing my good talking – i looked up and saw him. not quite staring but definitely looking with an almost insatiable desire. i felt it. felt it in me. knew someone was looking, just had to find the directional field from which the energy emanated. and each time [it happened about four times throughout the duration of the evening after we’d met to say nothing of the before] when he realized i realized he was looking at me, he’d sorta almost – faintly – smile but not really, because there was also not a slight hint of embarrassment on his face, in his heart i presume as well, that he was looking at me with that look in the first place. made me question what it was that prompted his search that landed in my face, in my eyes, each time, causing him to further still: search.

[are metaphors a displacement of thought? do they get us closer to the heart of the matter? or are they some other kind of complication?]

i think he saw something familiar in me that he’d not ever named. it almost sounds egotistical to think it the way i’m thinking it but that’s not what i’m going for. i wish things were much less complex but this has happened with so many dudes that it’s pretty common now. declarations of heterosexuality are cool but then they long for something otherwise and see me, and act as if whatever that otherwise might be is somewhere hidden in me, is something familiar. and i had this weird experience when i was a kid that was all about familiarity. we took a bus trip when i was in the fifth grade to Baltimore or some other city and the trip included everyone in the fifth grade so all the teachers, most of whom i did not know, went along. there was one teacher on the bus who, upon catching my eye in the rear view mirror the first time [she was staring at me] continued to look at me. i would turn around to someone behind me and begin to talk and she’d walk up to me, grab my arm, tell me “didn’t i tell you to turn around?! stop talking! and look forward!,” forcing me to turn around on the bus so she could continue to look at me in the rear view mirror. she would not let me talk to others, made me to face forward. she stared into my reflection in the mirror. needless to say, i was not a little bit uncomfortable.

upon my return home, i told my parents about the entire affair and when i told them who it was, they said “the next time you see her, ask her if she knows elder so-n-so.” so i did and when i did, she exclaimed loudly, hugging me hard, “i knew it!” turns out, she saw my parents – mother’s mouth and lips, daddy’s voice [even though i was too young, fifth grade…but i suppose i had pre-pubescent hints of the voice to come, it’s futurity already with me and if i learned anything from my father, it was the insistence in voice, the conviction] – in me, on me. the point is that familiarity shows up in all sorts of weird ways. something about – literally external to – me bespoke something in me. but that something was noise at best, incoherence, or at least, incomprehensible, ineffable audiovisuality [sorta like how cell phones used to produce all of this static whenever you’d go out of range]. nevertheless, it was a certain sort of knowledge, a knowledge of having known, a knowledge of knowing, a knowledge of desire to know. that knowledge – the who that i was – was there, while withdrawing with each pondered “but how do i know him? but where do i know him from?” furrow of her brow. i felt abused by her force on the bus, felt ashamed and felt that she was misunderstanding my simple wish to talk to other kids. and i’m not the least bit disabused of the erotics that sorta underpinned the staring into a mirror to figure me out. she was trying to remember something without knowing what it was. and so, dude with the girlfriendofthreeyears, i think, also was cathected by some sorta eroto-libidinal excess, provoked by the insistence of my voice, an insistence that produced in him some desire to know more. to “get” what was so familiar. maybe he thought he could, if he stared enough, figure out what it was for which he was longing. of course, a few days after the event, it all became a bit clearer with a message on facebook that would feign the flirting that is certainly implied, so vague that a claim of ignorance and misunderstanding – another sort of noise and static – could be made though the apparentness of the interactions are no less there.

anyway. i don’t know what to do with all this. just complaining a bit, i guess. because he’d be a great person with whom to hang out but not with all of this even more complicated interaction. and there’s also calvin. so yeah…we’ll see. and i guess it was something familiar that you’d seen in and on me that made our initial interactions so weirdly frustrating, frustrating because they were so fulfilling to me, for us. as if we’d known each other all our lives, the gift as well as curse. 

Praises to whoever found out about this alt/reblog shit.

(Source: hotrufftrade)

moth’s powder [excerpt 2]

remember how we’d lay in bed all night talking until three or four, you falling asleep mid-sentence in my arms as i spooned you only to wake up an hour later and begin again? me, right behind you, my left leg covering your lower body, my left arm on your stomach, your left arm right under mine, your left hand on top of mine almost getting a bit too balmy so we’d separate our hands and move our arms a bit so that cool air could surface between us because – and you know this – holding someone for a while is both beautiful and hot, the humidity emerging between bodies so close that “between” seemed to be a ruse.

you’d wake up and finish that sentence and you’d not even have to look at me and not even open your eyes and barely begin the sentence again before i was reawakened and reengaging and taking my index finger and running it along your arm and taking my head and moving it even closer and deeper still into your collar bone so i could hear you. i wanted to get into you as much as the music. to make you feel what i felt inside me. to transfer the butterflies that i thought about and saw in the pit of my stomach anytime i heard your voice. it never changed. it never changed. it has not changed. i want to hear your voice and still imagine it in the same ways that i’d always imagined it and even as i sit here and write to you i begin to feel that same way again and you’d smell a bit musky with that cologne and oil you wore and i’d take my finger and slip it in your briefs as you talked and play with the hair right down there, twirling and twirling my finger and around and around and making a bit of a knot and then taking the hair and smoothing it out again.

and i would respond to your speaking but my eyes would be closed too and  

that was the romance. and for the assholes who think there’s no knowledge produced or created or experienced in that movement of bodies into each other – fucking could not do what our voices and laying almost still did, though it certainly approached it, yes, indeed – but we learned and taught and dissented while spooning. something about the small moans and shortnesses of breath and the snoring and the smells of our bodies – once sweaty, once humid, once balmy, now cooled and held – and the taste of your ear in my mouth and your lips with the ketchup from the fries we shared earlier that night. remember that night? those nights? what happens when we remember things as sense and not through the senses? what if my memory of you is synesthesia? i don’t want that feeling to go. neither do i want that knowledge. and i think that is the point of 

taking it to church 

or 

taking it just a little higher 

or [another saying that announces the vamp] 

let’s take it home

is the fact that there is something there that can be taken, that has life and breath and spirit, that there is something carried, held previous to the giving of breath as song that also curiously enough remains after the last chord and note and hand clap recedes.

so yes.

isn’t that the music, the sequestering and organizing of sound that we hear? the song is an object that we use to reach things, to convey things. we turn our voices into objects, we instrumentalize our bodies for the master’s use to sing and dance and pray. and with each breath – singing just makes this explicit – two things: we enunciate and articulate the weight and depth and materiality of the thing carried; and we are the weight and depth and materiality being carried. when we take it, we announce that there is something there that compels this movement, some spirited object that resists being stilled and stilling. 

moth’s powder [rambling]

like when singing congregational songs during the testimony portion of a church service, when we go from one tune to the next because they have the same form, the same chord structure. going from 

this is the day 

to 

in the name of jesus (we have the victory) 

to

victory is mine 

to 

bless that wonderful name of jesus 

to 

there is power, power, wonder working power in the blooooood of the laaaaamb…

well.

the point? at least in the social world and social life of the curious churches in which i’ve been a member or which i’ve been a musician, there is a much more general disposition toward transition and dispositionseems to be bound up with dispossession. in the transition – after breaks, or from song to song – one descends and ascends simultaneously, one gets down by going higher. that is, one creates centripetal and centrifugal space in which to inhabit in the tiniest cracks and crevices, easily discounted when one isn’t given to nuance. getting down, going higher, descending and ascending in small space wears and abolishes the limits of location itself, lays bare the ruse of boundaries. and this social world teaches, if anything, self-critical nuance and attention to detail. to have a dispositiontowards transitionis, to me at least, the realization that transition is the relinquishment of position and location, it is movement on the move that is constantly moving and never arriving [or, more precisely, arrival is about staying rather than possessing: that’s why we never got “possessed” by the Holy Ghost … but more on that another time]. it is the present participle [to get all linguistic on you, apologies] that makes real philosophic contemplation of temporality and being. i mean, what was most intriguing about the transition from song to song was the aspect of and ability to be – especially as kids, particularly as kids – surprised, to be inspired and struck with awe and wonder with the way the transition occurred :: what chords did the musician play, how did we clap, did the drummer keep going or  pause if only in an infinitesimal beat?