I'm writing this to ask you to join me in boycotting the DNC. The boycott is sponsored by AMERICAblog, and cosponsored by Daily Kos, Michelangelo Signorile, and Paul Sousa, among others.
A year ago, the LGBT community, our families, friends and allies across the country were elated by the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States. We poured our hearts and wallets out to elect a Democratic president and Congress, and on November 4th, 2008 we had great hope.
Over the past year our joy has turned to frustration as President Obama and the Democratic Party have moved away from their campaign commitments to gay and lesbian Americans. While President Obama repeatedly promised to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT), and repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), he has now backtracked on all three commitments.
There has been little, if any, pressure from the White House for votes on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). The administration continues to send mixed signals on the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT). And we've been told not to expect the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) to even be considered until President Obama's second term. In the last two weeks alone, the Obama administration continued to defend DOMA in the courts, and the White House and the Democratic party refused to lift a finger to help us defeat anti-gay ballot initiatives in Maine and Washington state. LGBT Americans, our families, and our friends kept our promise at the ballot box, we now expect President Obama to keep his in the White House.
Please join us in pledging to postpone your contributions to the Democratic National Committee, Organizing for America, and the Obama campaign until the Democratic Congress passes, and President Obama signs, legislation enacting ENDA, repealing DADT, and repealing DOMA -- as promised.
The Democrats have it in their power to end this tomorrow. And we remain hopeful that they will. Thanks so much.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Society and culture is often defined by it’s writing. We live in perhaps the most exciting time with regard to literature in that our ideas can be transmitted globally through the internet. As a result, our cultural ideas can be spread through the mere pressing of a button. If someone were to wish to understand what we were writing about and did not know how to speak English, they could easily translate what we have written into their native tongue through one of many translation programs available online. But culture is not so easily transcribed. The culture of a people varies through time and region. If we look at our own culture, we can break it down into individual co-cultures with labels such as, American, Northeastern, African-American, Neo-Conservative, Etc.
What gives us a more concise view of a particular culture is through their art. Expressions of self through painting, and poetry in particular, present a snapshot of an individual immersed in the cultural expression of the self in a cultural context. We can gather a sense of who a people are by the transmission of their aspirations of creativity, love, desire, and intellect in the contextual arrangements of their presentations. Through the use of poetry as an expressive medium of the written idea, understanding emotion beyond visual observation, and description has evolved and digressed through time. By looking at poetry we can feel a connection across time, as we translate the emotions of a person within their cultural context. We relate our own life experiences to their expression of self through their poetry, and weigh the depth of their emotional expression against our own.
Often times this expression of emotion fits directly into our culture’s current value systems, and when this happens we describe such emotional expressions as, “Timeless.” When we stop to consider how complex human emotions are, and we see how tumultuous societies are today, people tend to look to the past as an emotional oasis. We delude ourselves to believe that people in the past had life so much easier. We have a tendency to believe that their emotions were simple and pure, because they didn’t have the complexities of life today. Quite the opposite was the truth, however.
Our current societies have made life for us immeasurably simple, compared to people in the past. We have gained the ability to gather and process information over the past hundred years with amazing speed. We have therefore had the capacity to express ourselves with amazing speed as well. And sometimes we think of our expressions of emotion as unique, when in fact human emotion has changed very little throughout time. The cultural context has changed, but the emotions of love and desire have not changed at all.
In searching for poetry to demonstrate this idea, a good example of this includes poetry with homoerotic themes. Relationships between men have been expressed throughout time in writing and poetry. Relationships between women were not recorded with such abundance, however. Expressions of sexual desire between men are extremely rare to come by outside of dedicated collections of homoerotic themed literature and poetry. This is an example of the shortcomings of our current society.
When it comes to basic study of ancient literature, we try not to muddy the waters with such topics, as our current society has a tendency to be puritanical / patriarchal in ideal, while we certainly are far from such in reality. Homoerotic poetry does not fit in with our delusion of ancient societies being simple and somewhat pure, so we turn a blind eye to examples of poems with homoerotic subjects. Even more obscure are works of literature with female same gender loving topics.
Culturally humanity was quite different with regard to free expression in the past. Currently we have terms such as Gay, and Homosexual, to describe a carved out category of society. This is because we enjoy putting people in categories, for some reason. He’s Gay. She’s a Lesbian. It’s easy for us to label ourselves based on the core of our sexual being. However, as we learn more and more about ourselves, understanding human sexuality is more like a spectrum rather than a category. And spectrums don’t fit into boxes.
An example of Chinese poetry describing what we would consider in present times as a scene, survived 1200 years in a cave. In The "Poetical Essay on the Supreme Joy of the Sexual Union of Yin and Yang and Heaven and Earth" ("Tiandi yinyang jiaohuan dale fu"), by Bo Xinjian (d. 826), a manuscript describing the wide spectrum of sexuality as transcribed, including male homosexuality. In ancient Chinese literature and poetry, stating the obvious is considered crude. Therefore finding the meaning of the poems of the love that dare not speak it’s name, are often mysterious, unless the context of the culture is known. Homosexuals are eluded to, by what they are wearing, the name “Mizi Xia” is used as a reference to a famous homosexual, and as a description of a homosexual such as he. References to Han dynasty courts are used to describe a scene being set where the reader would know what the references meant. Too intricate to completely reiterate, a compilation of works describing use of code words such as “Playing in the rear garden,“ or references to dynastic courts are found in “Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China,” by Bret Hinsch (University of California Press 1990).
...ravishing retainers and cut sleeves in the imperial palace.
And so there were countenances of linked jade
During years of shining pearls.
Some loved their beautiful refinement;
Others were divided by extreme envy.
Otherwise they were like Lord Long Yang
...pointing at a flower....
Mizi Xia shared a peach with his lord
In the Former Han, Gaozu favored Jiru,
And Emperor Wu favored Han Yan.
In ancient times, Emeror Hui's retainers wore caps with gaudy feathers,
Sashes of seashells, and painted their faces.
~"Poetical Essay on the Supreme Joy of the Sexual Union of Yin and Yang and Heaven and Earth" ("Tiandi yinyang jiaohuan dale fu"), by Bo Xinjian
Muhammad al-Nawaji bin Hasan bin Ali bin Othman (1383?-1455) was known as Shams al-Din "Son of Religion." He was a respected citizen and native of Cairo, who studied law. Later in his life, he taught the Hadith at the Islamic colleges of al-Husayniyya and al-Jamiliyya where he led mystic prayer sessions, suggesting he was also a Sufi. He was a scholar of natural history and a poet. His poems reflect his intellect and in the examples provided, a lack of racial bigotry, which at this point in time, was exceptional. In the poems selected particular care is taken to point out that there is beauty in all races.
If the stars glitter white
In the dusk of night
Against the black body of a sky
Whose robe has slipped aside,
Their opposite is even more beautiful;
For here on earth are other orbs:
You, black men,
Shining stars of our days.
And
Those who dare set
The swarthy man before white boys,
Marvels of grace, prove to me
They are weak and ill of eye.
What use is sight
To our brothers' eyes
If to them light and dark
Are one and the same?
~Muhammad al-Nawaji bin Hasan bin Ali bin Othman
When considering the lives of those who are literally expressive within religious traditions in the present-day context, there is a subtle notion of certainly sexual non-conformity. St. Paulinus of Nola was well educated, and disciplined to the point of leading an ascetic lifestyle during the early Christian Roman Empire. He was married, but based on his writing, fell passionately in love with a Christian and fellow writer, Ausonius. Within the selection of poetry written to Ausonius, an eternal relationship lasting beyond mortal bounds, reaching toward eternity is described. The depth of this particular love, never mentioned in the Catholic histories of St. Paulinus of Nola, at least gives permission for same-gender love. But this love is beyond the passions of desire. This love takes on the validity of transcendence.
To Ausonius
I, through all chances that are given to mortals,
And through all fates that be,
So long as this close prison shall contain me,
Yea, though a world shall sunder me and thee,
Thee shall I hold, in every fibre woven,
Not with dumb lips, nor with averted face
Shall I behold thee, in my mind embrace thee,
Instant and present, thou, in every place.
Yea, when the prison of this flesh is broken,
And from the earth I shall have gone my way,
Wheresoe'er in the wide universe I stay me,
There shall I bear thee, as I do today.
Think not the end, that from my body frees me,
Breaks and unshackles from my love to thee;
Triumphs the soul above its house in ruin,
Deathless, begot of immortality.
Still must she keep her senses and affections,
Hold them as dear as life itself to be,
Could she choose death, then might she choose forgetting:
Living, remembering, to eternity.
trans. Helen Waddell, in Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, ed. Stephan Coote, Stephen, (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, Penguin, 1983)
Abu Nuwas al-Hasan ibn Hani al-Hakami is considered to be amongst the greatest poets of all time. He was Persian, born in what is now Iran, and lived in Basrah, the southern port town of what is now Iraq. Although he was not as scholarly as Muhammad al-Nuwaji bin Hasan, he did attempt to be educated by the pure life of the Bedouin, but he preferred a more notorious life writing khamriyyat (drinking songs), and poetically witty, homoerotic lyrics known as mudhakkarat and mujuniyyat. Abu Nuwas was certainly a celebrity of notoriety within his time. He was celebrated for his wit and expression. Although his expression was boundless in extremes, he was courted by the Caliphs, and jailed for disobedience.
A gentle fawn passed around the cup
Delicate of waist and slim of flank,
“Will you be on your way, come morn?” he chirped.
“How can we bear to leave?” came the reply.
He glided among us and made us drunk,
And we slept, but as the cock was about to crow
I made for him, my garments trailing, my ram ready for butting.
When I plunged my spear into him
He awoke as a wounded man awakes from his wounds.
“You were an easy kill,” said I, “so let’s have no reproaches.”
“You win, so take what you will, but give me fair reward.”
So after I had placed my saddle bag upon him he burst into song,
“Are you not the most generous rider ever, of all Allah’s creatures?”
~ Abu Nuwas al-Hasan ibn Hani al-Hakami
Gaius Valerius Catullus was another poet of high social and political standing. The body of his work was not exclusively homoerotic, but four poems of his are known to specifically address the subject. In the first poem, the object of his desire, Juventius, is addressed as fantasy. In the second selection feelings for Juventius have evolved to jealousy. In a later poem, not listed here, advances are rebuffed, leaving Gaius Valerius Catullus bitter.
Juventius, if I could play at kissing
your honeyed eyes as often as I wished to,
300,000 games would not exhaust me;
never could I be satisfied or sated,
although the total of our osculations
were greater than the ears of grain at harvest.
O you who are the youthful flower of the Juventius family,
not only of these, but however many either were
of after this will be born in later years,
I would prefer you to give wealth to that Midas
who has neither servant nor money-box,
than you allow yourself like this to be loved by that guy
"Who? Is he not good-looking?" you ask. He is.
But to that good-looking man belong neither servant nor money-box.
Throw it away and make light of this as much as you want,
but nevertheless that man has neither servant nor money-box.
~Gaius Valerius Catullus
Japanese Haiku and Senryu from Samurai wakashudō or shudō (pedestry), and nanshoku tradition demonstrate the existence of male to male love, up until the late nineteenth century. In Buddhism, sexuality, and gender by José Ignacio Cabezón, the compilation, The Great Mirror of Male Love, wherein the second story, The ABCs of Boy Love, describes Daikichi and Shinnosuké, two young boys, as "The cause of a thousand sorrows," due to their beauty. The poem describes their effect upon an eighty year old Buddhist Monk, who was so distracted by their beauty, yet suggests he satisfies his lust, harbored, "...from spring through autumn." When the boys returned the next day, they found only a note tied to a split bamboo, telling of the Monk's heart torn between his earthly desires and spiritual vows. The suggestion in the second poem is that his vows of spirituality are renewed through his absence/silence. But unresolved lust, it is stated, is the most powerful of earthly ties. So, the poems are contrasting, and yet ultimately ironic.
Here are travel weeds
Tear-stained like my faithless heart
Torn between the two;
I shall cut my earthly ties
And hide myself away in bamboo leaves
Memories of love revive
Like rock azaleas bursting into bloom
On Mt. Tokiwa;
My stony silence only shows
How desperately I want you!
~The Great Mirror of Male Love; The ABCs of Boy Love (1.2)
`The Anactoria Poem by Sappho is an example of Lesbian homoerotic poetry in Greek history. Sappho was another well-educated child of an aristocratic family. She was married a wealthy man, and had a daughter. But her life’s work was in tending to the needs of her academy for unwed women on the Greek island of Lesbos. Sappho’s poems speak to the varying natures of love. In this example, Sappho recalls her love for Anaktória, whom she writes, is reminiscent of Helen. Forsaking her husband, Helen flees to Troy, without a thought for her family, to be with the Queen of Cyprus. How much of Anaktória, whom she writes, is reminiscent of Helen. Forsaking her husband, Helen flees to Troy, without a thought for her family, to be with the Queen of Cyprus. How much of the similarity is left to speculation. But the nature of love’s desperate flight is clearly pronounced.
The Anactoria Poem
Some there are who say that the fairest thing seen
On the black earth is an array of horsemen;
Some, men marching; some would say ships; but I say
She whom one loves best
Is the loveliest. Light were the work to make this
Plain to all, since she, who surpassed in beauty
All mortality, Helen, once forsaking
Her lordly husband,
Fled away to Troy--land across the water.
Not the thought of child nor beloved parents
Was remembered, after the Queen of Cyprus
Won her at first sight.
Since young brides have hearts that can be persuaded
Easily, light things, palpitant to passion
As am I, remembering Anaktória
Who has gone from me
And whose lovely walk and the shining pallor
Of her face I would rather see before my
Eyes than Lydia's chariots in all their glory
Armored for battle.
~ By Sappho
The compilation of these poems show a broad spectrum of homoerotic and same gender loving relationships. In some ways, the relationships are abusive in that sex acts are conducted without consent. In the case of pederasty during ancient Greek, Roman, and Japanese civilizations, this practice was not considered abusive as we do today. But in the poems of St. Paulinus of Nola and Muhammad al-Nawaji bin Hasan, their love is transcendent. The poetry of Bo Xinjian is peripheral in nature, while Gaius Valerius Catullus deals with his desires in a fantastic manner. While the sobering nature of Japanese Buddhist expression is both tantalizing ideologically and repulsive sexually.
These are the preserved relics from long ago opulence. With the exceptions of ascetic histories of St Paulinus of Nola, and the suggested eighty-year-old Monk, all of these poems could be preserved through powerful families. What remains to be uncovered is the lives of the wine boys Abu Nuwas was so keen to flirt with.
What gives us a more concise view of a particular culture is through their art. Expressions of self through painting, and poetry in particular, present a snapshot of an individual immersed in the cultural expression of the self in a cultural context. We can gather a sense of who a people are by the transmission of their aspirations of creativity, love, desire, and intellect in the contextual arrangements of their presentations. Through the use of poetry as an expressive medium of the written idea, understanding emotion beyond visual observation, and description has evolved and digressed through time. By looking at poetry we can feel a connection across time, as we translate the emotions of a person within their cultural context. We relate our own life experiences to their expression of self through their poetry, and weigh the depth of their emotional expression against our own.
Often times this expression of emotion fits directly into our culture’s current value systems, and when this happens we describe such emotional expressions as, “Timeless.” When we stop to consider how complex human emotions are, and we see how tumultuous societies are today, people tend to look to the past as an emotional oasis. We delude ourselves to believe that people in the past had life so much easier. We have a tendency to believe that their emotions were simple and pure, because they didn’t have the complexities of life today. Quite the opposite was the truth, however.
Our current societies have made life for us immeasurably simple, compared to people in the past. We have gained the ability to gather and process information over the past hundred years with amazing speed. We have therefore had the capacity to express ourselves with amazing speed as well. And sometimes we think of our expressions of emotion as unique, when in fact human emotion has changed very little throughout time. The cultural context has changed, but the emotions of love and desire have not changed at all.
In searching for poetry to demonstrate this idea, a good example of this includes poetry with homoerotic themes. Relationships between men have been expressed throughout time in writing and poetry. Relationships between women were not recorded with such abundance, however. Expressions of sexual desire between men are extremely rare to come by outside of dedicated collections of homoerotic themed literature and poetry. This is an example of the shortcomings of our current society.
When it comes to basic study of ancient literature, we try not to muddy the waters with such topics, as our current society has a tendency to be puritanical / patriarchal in ideal, while we certainly are far from such in reality. Homoerotic poetry does not fit in with our delusion of ancient societies being simple and somewhat pure, so we turn a blind eye to examples of poems with homoerotic subjects. Even more obscure are works of literature with female same gender loving topics.
Culturally humanity was quite different with regard to free expression in the past. Currently we have terms such as Gay, and Homosexual, to describe a carved out category of society. This is because we enjoy putting people in categories, for some reason. He’s Gay. She’s a Lesbian. It’s easy for us to label ourselves based on the core of our sexual being. However, as we learn more and more about ourselves, understanding human sexuality is more like a spectrum rather than a category. And spectrums don’t fit into boxes.
An example of Chinese poetry describing what we would consider in present times as a scene, survived 1200 years in a cave. In The "Poetical Essay on the Supreme Joy of the Sexual Union of Yin and Yang and Heaven and Earth" ("Tiandi yinyang jiaohuan dale fu"), by Bo Xinjian (d. 826), a manuscript describing the wide spectrum of sexuality as transcribed, including male homosexuality. In ancient Chinese literature and poetry, stating the obvious is considered crude. Therefore finding the meaning of the poems of the love that dare not speak it’s name, are often mysterious, unless the context of the culture is known. Homosexuals are eluded to, by what they are wearing, the name “Mizi Xia” is used as a reference to a famous homosexual, and as a description of a homosexual such as he. References to Han dynasty courts are used to describe a scene being set where the reader would know what the references meant. Too intricate to completely reiterate, a compilation of works describing use of code words such as “Playing in the rear garden,“ or references to dynastic courts are found in “Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China,” by Bret Hinsch (University of California Press 1990).
...ravishing retainers and cut sleeves in the imperial palace.
And so there were countenances of linked jade
During years of shining pearls.
Some loved their beautiful refinement;
Others were divided by extreme envy.
Otherwise they were like Lord Long Yang
...pointing at a flower....
Mizi Xia shared a peach with his lord
In the Former Han, Gaozu favored Jiru,
And Emperor Wu favored Han Yan.
In ancient times, Emeror Hui's retainers wore caps with gaudy feathers,
Sashes of seashells, and painted their faces.
~"Poetical Essay on the Supreme Joy of the Sexual Union of Yin and Yang and Heaven and Earth" ("Tiandi yinyang jiaohuan dale fu"), by Bo Xinjian
Muhammad al-Nawaji bin Hasan bin Ali bin Othman (1383?-1455) was known as Shams al-Din "Son of Religion." He was a respected citizen and native of Cairo, who studied law. Later in his life, he taught the Hadith at the Islamic colleges of al-Husayniyya and al-Jamiliyya where he led mystic prayer sessions, suggesting he was also a Sufi. He was a scholar of natural history and a poet. His poems reflect his intellect and in the examples provided, a lack of racial bigotry, which at this point in time, was exceptional. In the poems selected particular care is taken to point out that there is beauty in all races.
If the stars glitter white
In the dusk of night
Against the black body of a sky
Whose robe has slipped aside,
Their opposite is even more beautiful;
For here on earth are other orbs:
You, black men,
Shining stars of our days.
And
Those who dare set
The swarthy man before white boys,
Marvels of grace, prove to me
They are weak and ill of eye.
What use is sight
To our brothers' eyes
If to them light and dark
Are one and the same?
~Muhammad al-Nawaji bin Hasan bin Ali bin Othman
When considering the lives of those who are literally expressive within religious traditions in the present-day context, there is a subtle notion of certainly sexual non-conformity. St. Paulinus of Nola was well educated, and disciplined to the point of leading an ascetic lifestyle during the early Christian Roman Empire. He was married, but based on his writing, fell passionately in love with a Christian and fellow writer, Ausonius. Within the selection of poetry written to Ausonius, an eternal relationship lasting beyond mortal bounds, reaching toward eternity is described. The depth of this particular love, never mentioned in the Catholic histories of St. Paulinus of Nola, at least gives permission for same-gender love. But this love is beyond the passions of desire. This love takes on the validity of transcendence.
To Ausonius
I, through all chances that are given to mortals,
And through all fates that be,
So long as this close prison shall contain me,
Yea, though a world shall sunder me and thee,
Thee shall I hold, in every fibre woven,
Not with dumb lips, nor with averted face
Shall I behold thee, in my mind embrace thee,
Instant and present, thou, in every place.
Yea, when the prison of this flesh is broken,
And from the earth I shall have gone my way,
Wheresoe'er in the wide universe I stay me,
There shall I bear thee, as I do today.
Think not the end, that from my body frees me,
Breaks and unshackles from my love to thee;
Triumphs the soul above its house in ruin,
Deathless, begot of immortality.
Still must she keep her senses and affections,
Hold them as dear as life itself to be,
Could she choose death, then might she choose forgetting:
Living, remembering, to eternity.
trans. Helen Waddell, in Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, ed. Stephan Coote, Stephen, (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, Penguin, 1983)
Abu Nuwas al-Hasan ibn Hani al-Hakami is considered to be amongst the greatest poets of all time. He was Persian, born in what is now Iran, and lived in Basrah, the southern port town of what is now Iraq. Although he was not as scholarly as Muhammad al-Nuwaji bin Hasan, he did attempt to be educated by the pure life of the Bedouin, but he preferred a more notorious life writing khamriyyat (drinking songs), and poetically witty, homoerotic lyrics known as mudhakkarat and mujuniyyat. Abu Nuwas was certainly a celebrity of notoriety within his time. He was celebrated for his wit and expression. Although his expression was boundless in extremes, he was courted by the Caliphs, and jailed for disobedience.
A gentle fawn passed around the cup
Delicate of waist and slim of flank,
“Will you be on your way, come morn?” he chirped.
“How can we bear to leave?” came the reply.
He glided among us and made us drunk,
And we slept, but as the cock was about to crow
I made for him, my garments trailing, my ram ready for butting.
When I plunged my spear into him
He awoke as a wounded man awakes from his wounds.
“You were an easy kill,” said I, “so let’s have no reproaches.”
“You win, so take what you will, but give me fair reward.”
So after I had placed my saddle bag upon him he burst into song,
“Are you not the most generous rider ever, of all Allah’s creatures?”
~ Abu Nuwas al-Hasan ibn Hani al-Hakami
Gaius Valerius Catullus was another poet of high social and political standing. The body of his work was not exclusively homoerotic, but four poems of his are known to specifically address the subject. In the first poem, the object of his desire, Juventius, is addressed as fantasy. In the second selection feelings for Juventius have evolved to jealousy. In a later poem, not listed here, advances are rebuffed, leaving Gaius Valerius Catullus bitter.
Juventius, if I could play at kissing
your honeyed eyes as often as I wished to,
300,000 games would not exhaust me;
never could I be satisfied or sated,
although the total of our osculations
were greater than the ears of grain at harvest.
O you who are the youthful flower of the Juventius family,
not only of these, but however many either were
of after this will be born in later years,
I would prefer you to give wealth to that Midas
who has neither servant nor money-box,
than you allow yourself like this to be loved by that guy
"Who? Is he not good-looking?" you ask. He is.
But to that good-looking man belong neither servant nor money-box.
Throw it away and make light of this as much as you want,
but nevertheless that man has neither servant nor money-box.
~Gaius Valerius Catullus
Japanese Haiku and Senryu from Samurai wakashudō or shudō (pedestry), and nanshoku tradition demonstrate the existence of male to male love, up until the late nineteenth century. In Buddhism, sexuality, and gender by José Ignacio Cabezón, the compilation, The Great Mirror of Male Love, wherein the second story, The ABCs of Boy Love, describes Daikichi and Shinnosuké, two young boys, as "The cause of a thousand sorrows," due to their beauty. The poem describes their effect upon an eighty year old Buddhist Monk, who was so distracted by their beauty, yet suggests he satisfies his lust, harbored, "...from spring through autumn." When the boys returned the next day, they found only a note tied to a split bamboo, telling of the Monk's heart torn between his earthly desires and spiritual vows. The suggestion in the second poem is that his vows of spirituality are renewed through his absence/silence. But unresolved lust, it is stated, is the most powerful of earthly ties. So, the poems are contrasting, and yet ultimately ironic.
Here are travel weeds
Tear-stained like my faithless heart
Torn between the two;
I shall cut my earthly ties
And hide myself away in bamboo leaves
Memories of love revive
Like rock azaleas bursting into bloom
On Mt. Tokiwa;
My stony silence only shows
How desperately I want you!
~The Great Mirror of Male Love; The ABCs of Boy Love (1.2)
`The Anactoria Poem by Sappho is an example of Lesbian homoerotic poetry in Greek history. Sappho was another well-educated child of an aristocratic family. She was married a wealthy man, and had a daughter. But her life’s work was in tending to the needs of her academy for unwed women on the Greek island of Lesbos. Sappho’s poems speak to the varying natures of love. In this example, Sappho recalls her love for Anaktória, whom she writes, is reminiscent of Helen. Forsaking her husband, Helen flees to Troy, without a thought for her family, to be with the Queen of Cyprus. How much of Anaktória, whom she writes, is reminiscent of Helen. Forsaking her husband, Helen flees to Troy, without a thought for her family, to be with the Queen of Cyprus. How much of the similarity is left to speculation. But the nature of love’s desperate flight is clearly pronounced.
The Anactoria Poem
Some there are who say that the fairest thing seen
On the black earth is an array of horsemen;
Some, men marching; some would say ships; but I say
She whom one loves best
Is the loveliest. Light were the work to make this
Plain to all, since she, who surpassed in beauty
All mortality, Helen, once forsaking
Her lordly husband,
Fled away to Troy--land across the water.
Not the thought of child nor beloved parents
Was remembered, after the Queen of Cyprus
Won her at first sight.
Since young brides have hearts that can be persuaded
Easily, light things, palpitant to passion
As am I, remembering Anaktória
Who has gone from me
And whose lovely walk and the shining pallor
Of her face I would rather see before my
Eyes than Lydia's chariots in all their glory
Armored for battle.
~ By Sappho
The compilation of these poems show a broad spectrum of homoerotic and same gender loving relationships. In some ways, the relationships are abusive in that sex acts are conducted without consent. In the case of pederasty during ancient Greek, Roman, and Japanese civilizations, this practice was not considered abusive as we do today. But in the poems of St. Paulinus of Nola and Muhammad al-Nawaji bin Hasan, their love is transcendent. The poetry of Bo Xinjian is peripheral in nature, while Gaius Valerius Catullus deals with his desires in a fantastic manner. While the sobering nature of Japanese Buddhist expression is both tantalizing ideologically and repulsive sexually.
These are the preserved relics from long ago opulence. With the exceptions of ascetic histories of St Paulinus of Nola, and the suggested eighty-year-old Monk, all of these poems could be preserved through powerful families. What remains to be uncovered is the lives of the wine boys Abu Nuwas was so keen to flirt with.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
To Be Continued....
Society and culture is often defined by it’s writing. We live in perhaps the most exciting time with regard to literature in that our ideas can be transmitted globally through the internet. As a result, our cultural ideas can be spread through the mere pressing of a button. If someone were to wish to understand what we were writing about and did not know how to speak English, they could easily translate what we have written into their native tongue through one of many translation programs available online. But culture is not so easily transcribed. The culture of a people varies through time and region. If we look at our own culture, we can break it down into individual co-cultures with labels such as, American, Northeastern, African-American, Neo-Conservative, Etc.
What gives us a more concise view of a particular culture is through their art. Expressions of self through painting, and poetry in particular, present a snapshot of an individual immersed in the cultural expression of the self in a cultural context. We can gather a sense of who a people are by the transmission of their aspirations of creativity, love, desire, and intellect in the contextual arrangements of their presentations. Through the use of poetry as an expressive medium of the written idea, understanding emotion beyond visual observation, and description has evolved and digressed through time. By looking at poetry we can feel a connection across time, as we translate the emotions of a person within their cultural context. We relate our own life experiences to their expression of self through their poetry, and weigh the depth of their emotional expression against our own.
Often times this expression of emotion fits directly into our culture’s current value systems, and when this happens we describe such emotional expressions as, “Timeless.” When we stop to consider how complex human emotions are, and we see how tumultuous societies are today, people tend to look to the past as an emotional oasis. We delude ourselves to believe that people in the past had life so much easier. We have a tendency to believe that their emotions were simple and pure, because they didn’t have the complexities of life today. Quite the opposite was the truth, however. Our current societies have made life for us immeasurably simple, compared to people in the past. We have gained the ability to gather and process information over the past hundred years with amazing speed. We have therefore had the capacity to express ourselves with amazing speed as well. And sometimes we think of our expressions of emotion as unique, when in fact human emotion has changed very little throughout time. The cultural context has changed, but the emotions of love and desire have not changed at all.
In searching for poetry to demonstrate this idea, a good example of this includes poetry with homoerotic themes. Relationships between men have been abundantly expressed throughout time in writing and poetry. Expressions of sexual desire between men are very rare to come by outside of dedicated collections of homoerotic themed literature and poetry. These are not the relationships between men, which are made example of in our textbooks. And this is an example of the shortcomings of our current society. We have a tendency of putting a stamp of taboo on this subject. When it comes to basic study of ancient literature, we try not to muddy the waters with such topics, as our current society has a tendency to be puritanical / patriarchal in ideal, while we certainly are far from such in reality. Homoerotic poetry does not fit in with our delusion of ancient societies being simple and somewhat pure, so we turn a blind eye to examples of poems with homoerotic subjects. Even more obscure are works of literature with female same gender loving topics.
Culturally humanity was quite different with regard to free expression in the past. Currently we have terms such as Gay, and Homosexual, to describe a carved out category of society. This is because we enjoy putting people in categories, for some reason. He’s Gay. She’s a Lesbian. It’s easy for us to label ourselves based on the core of our sexual being. However, as we learn more and more about ourselves, understanding human sexuality is more like a spectrum rather than a category. And spectrums don’t fit into boxes.
Passions of the Cut Sleeve The Male Homosexual Tradition in China, by Bret Hinsch (University of California Press 1990), a compilation of Chinese poetry exploring what is known today as a bond between two men related through poems. In The "Poetical Essay on the Supreme Joy of the Sexual Union of Yin and Yang and Heaven and Earth" ("Tiandi yinyang jiaohuan dale fu"), by Bo Xinjian (d. 826), a manuscript describing the wide spectrum of sexuality from his point of view, taken down by a scribe, homosexual relationships are included. It’s interesting to consider with Chinese literature and poetry, stating the obvious is considered crude. Therefore getting to the point of the nature of the poems are often difficult, unless the context of the culture is known. Homosexuals are described by what they wear, rather than simply stating that they homosexual as such.
What gives us a more concise view of a particular culture is through their art. Expressions of self through painting, and poetry in particular, present a snapshot of an individual immersed in the cultural expression of the self in a cultural context. We can gather a sense of who a people are by the transmission of their aspirations of creativity, love, desire, and intellect in the contextual arrangements of their presentations. Through the use of poetry as an expressive medium of the written idea, understanding emotion beyond visual observation, and description has evolved and digressed through time. By looking at poetry we can feel a connection across time, as we translate the emotions of a person within their cultural context. We relate our own life experiences to their expression of self through their poetry, and weigh the depth of their emotional expression against our own.
Often times this expression of emotion fits directly into our culture’s current value systems, and when this happens we describe such emotional expressions as, “Timeless.” When we stop to consider how complex human emotions are, and we see how tumultuous societies are today, people tend to look to the past as an emotional oasis. We delude ourselves to believe that people in the past had life so much easier. We have a tendency to believe that their emotions were simple and pure, because they didn’t have the complexities of life today. Quite the opposite was the truth, however. Our current societies have made life for us immeasurably simple, compared to people in the past. We have gained the ability to gather and process information over the past hundred years with amazing speed. We have therefore had the capacity to express ourselves with amazing speed as well. And sometimes we think of our expressions of emotion as unique, when in fact human emotion has changed very little throughout time. The cultural context has changed, but the emotions of love and desire have not changed at all.
In searching for poetry to demonstrate this idea, a good example of this includes poetry with homoerotic themes. Relationships between men have been abundantly expressed throughout time in writing and poetry. Expressions of sexual desire between men are very rare to come by outside of dedicated collections of homoerotic themed literature and poetry. These are not the relationships between men, which are made example of in our textbooks. And this is an example of the shortcomings of our current society. We have a tendency of putting a stamp of taboo on this subject. When it comes to basic study of ancient literature, we try not to muddy the waters with such topics, as our current society has a tendency to be puritanical / patriarchal in ideal, while we certainly are far from such in reality. Homoerotic poetry does not fit in with our delusion of ancient societies being simple and somewhat pure, so we turn a blind eye to examples of poems with homoerotic subjects. Even more obscure are works of literature with female same gender loving topics.
Culturally humanity was quite different with regard to free expression in the past. Currently we have terms such as Gay, and Homosexual, to describe a carved out category of society. This is because we enjoy putting people in categories, for some reason. He’s Gay. She’s a Lesbian. It’s easy for us to label ourselves based on the core of our sexual being. However, as we learn more and more about ourselves, understanding human sexuality is more like a spectrum rather than a category. And spectrums don’t fit into boxes.
Passions of the Cut Sleeve The Male Homosexual Tradition in China, by Bret Hinsch (University of California Press 1990), a compilation of Chinese poetry exploring what is known today as a bond between two men related through poems. In The "Poetical Essay on the Supreme Joy of the Sexual Union of Yin and Yang and Heaven and Earth" ("Tiandi yinyang jiaohuan dale fu"), by Bo Xinjian (d. 826), a manuscript describing the wide spectrum of sexuality from his point of view, taken down by a scribe, homosexual relationships are included. It’s interesting to consider with Chinese literature and poetry, stating the obvious is considered crude. Therefore getting to the point of the nature of the poems are often difficult, unless the context of the culture is known. Homosexuals are described by what they wear, rather than simply stating that they homosexual as such.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
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