Sunday, August 14, 2011

AUGUST 2011

Have you read Society of the Spectacle by Situationist Guy DeBord?  It is written in an at times incomprehensibly turgid style, but is an important document if we want to understand the culture we move in.  To wit:  we have managed to put life itself, especially our social lives, one, two, three steps removed from ourselves as we exist on a daily basis.  So the blood, sweat and tears of a football game would not be the thrill it is if not for the spectacle, if you will, of the halftime show.
I find strange the notion that what happens to us needs to reach some level of fabulousness before being received into consciousness.  I have seen this pattern repeatedly, been caught innumerable times on a social tipping point of acceptance, usually considered too much of an embarrassment for inclusion.  In a bizarre twist of fate earlier this year, just as I was beginning to surface from years of poverty and isolation (though still in ill health), the social collective unconscious reared its head in a memory of me as I had existed in a maelstrom of public notoriety decades ago in a vagabond, fugitive albeit celebrated existence in lower Manhattan.  Immediately I was expected to choose one end of the sexual preference polarity over the other, and once that was settled, produce a Spectacle.
The requirements for this spectacle included:  1) having a posse of friends, the old configuration of The Beatles often being referenced.  (In the meantime, my cancer survivor friends the Hebranks, several years older than me remain my for the most part my only social contacts.) 2) Immediately make excursions to cultural and night venues in order to make pickups for sex.  3)  Somehow overcome the devastating public humiliation of my sex life as it appeared on highway billboards and as made accessible on some Satanically produced Internet.  For the third time in my life I was caught up in a cycle of vilification for having enjoyed sex.  But it wasn’t good enough.  I was pilloried both for not achieving orgasm and for enjoying the act of going down on men.  I needed to agree to be a skank, a woman devoid of dignity, stripped of accomplishment and respect coming from other areas of effort and involvement, including but not limited to my role in the beginnings of women’s liberation.  I would then cat around bars looking for sex, one night stands, anything that made itself available, all the while enduring the vilification society feels entitled to inflict on a sex-positive woman journeying through life without a man.
So while I am on a sorcerer’s production set, complete with camera and sound system, I’ve yet to produce an acceptable film.  Instead my life continues on in an at times devastating isolation, while I use whatever resources I have at my disposal to continue both a creative and social life, jealously holding together whatever shreds of privacy remain.  But yet I cling tenaciously to my encapsulated philosophy that everything happens for a reason…
Perhaps the reason the Universe kicked me in the ass one final time was for me to assemble a settlement for myself in the Hudson Valley.  I’ve come out as bisexual, and that has led to a curiosity in polyamory.  Certainly the desperation of being a heterosexual racehorse are over.  I’ve given up the oppressive judgment of patriarchal Christianity and the suffocating boredom of sitting in pews, reciting ancient creeds, making repeated and futile attempts at establishing relationships, and have followed a beloved activist woman into exploring Unitarian Universalism instead.  I’ve parted ways with a microsociety of nudists in which I no longer belonged all the while being introduced to the bisexual nudist community  There is loss, there is difficulty, but these changes once made, have astonished me with the hindsight of understanding they’ve been necessary all along.   In my resistance struggle to defy society’s pressure to fill it’s endemic emptiness, boredom and exploitive relationships with the spectacle of sex, I have in the meantime opened up and surfed some wondrous wormhole into an alternate universe where there is exitement, joy, community and the possibility of love.