verses fit to live*

"When I have fears that I may cease to be...
--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink."


*from John Keats's "Endymion"

sexual liberation or false freedom?

these days we live in a culture where supposedly "anything goes," where sex (i mean intercourse, here) and violence are depicted with graphic intensity in the media and sex has been elevated (perhaps most notably by Freud) as the end-all, be-all of human existence. For Freud, everything, and I mean everything, was about sex, and ever since him (to be bluntly reductive and summative), people have viewed human relationships through a hypersexualized lens, one in which intimacy is synonymous with sex to an incestuous, unhealthy degree.

but has this always been the case? and must it always be the case? i would argue no to both questions, because previous to Freud and his psychosexual theories of development, sex was not the prime determinant of volition and action, at least not in intellectual thought. today, we say people are liberated, that sex has been so deeply ingrained into our culture and exploited/aestheticized that people are not afraid of it any longer, that the taboo of abundant sexual pleasure has been blown out of the water by media images and a tide of continual sexual liberation.

i do not think this is necessarily the case, however. rather than a liberation, it seems that we have fallen under an imprisonment of sorts, under the chains of sexuality and sexualization. in trying to assert the pleasure principle and act on our sexual desires, i feel that something has been lost, that sex has become dichotomized into prude and crude and there is nothing in between.

we see on tv and the silver screen, hear in songs, read in periodicals, books, and blogs, about sex, pleasure, erotic acts, and human relations, but we rarely see a true or healthy depiction of sex and sexuality. some of us preach chastity, morality, or monogamy, but the institutions set in place by our society, the institutions like pop culture and mass media, completely contradict our society's supposed ideals regarding sex, love, and "normal" human interactions.

what is the result? a bunch of confused, disillusioned, sexually frustrated and fantastical humans who think they know what they want but don't know how to get it or what it really is.
we want and we want and we want, but we don't know what we want.
we label, define, construct, and categorize, but in doing so, we end up achieving nothing more than a vicious cycle of mimesis and false progress.

definition is kiss of death, and sex is not what's it's cracked up to be.

on reading judith butler's "imitation and gender insubordination"

sometimes i read something so stirring, that i want to absorb it all or at least as much as i can, into my brain, so i won't lose any of it, won't forget any of it. i want to capture it all and soak it in, but something always falls through the cracks. it's the risk of living, the loss. in order to gain, you must lose, be willing to lose, accept the loss. you have to lose in order to live.

aching to be wordsworth

last night the fireflies danced the flamenco in
the green-gray haze of dusk,
while the clouds swam ellipses
around the pebbled sky.
the blades of grass whistled through the wind.
dissonant chords caressing and colliding
with the raspy scrapes of the
gilded grasshoppers,
sprinkled with flecks of moonlight and
tinted in gradients by the reflection off the
listless water, the water with
no bottom--

this reminded me of what I've seem to have forgotten.
don't forget to play, don't forget to play.

it's been awhile, let the flowery and dramatic language commence

this summer has changed me. it's been long but has flown by so fast that i could never get my wits about me, methinks. witless or not, it's been good for me. stability, openness, discovery, becoming grounded, learning to be still, these are things i have learned, cultivated, adopted into my daily routine.

i'll be turning 23 in less than a month. 23! g*ddamn it, holy moly, jumpin' jehosophat! 18 feels like eons ago, 21 like a twisted, sometimes torrid dream-cum-nightmare. and now 23 awaits me, looming in the distance like a water mirage in the pavement of my life's road.

i walk, nay hurdle, toward the water in the distance and once i arrive, look down to see more pavement, no water, no glistening oasis in the sweltering heat, only black, hard gravel beneath my feet. the painful realization that milestones are merely mirages, deceptions of an overly active mind and an imagination grasping for meaning by creating and assigning purposes and benchmarks to gauge the indefinable, the ineffable, the evanescent.

the ineffable, like love.
i think i'm falling in love.

bye bye barcelona

my life is a series of goodbyes, premature farewells, unfinished experiences.
nothing lasts. things end. but i leave before they are able to, because i'm afraid to stay until the end, because i don't want to find out what happens, because i need something to wonder about, because after the end there's nothing to look forward to.

beginnings don't stem from endings. endings are points reached, finite and fixed. a beginning is a completely different animal.

aborted, precluded, abated, avoided,
i run away from endings, i say goodbye first, i never wait to see someone leave.
because i can't.

what am i afraid of?

Toledo, Spain