Drinking the Dregs

I feel considerably better after several weeks of a general malaise brought on by overindulgence, apathy, and several depressive episodes (which, I must confess, were reactionary in nature). I feel somewhat better, but I felt bad early in the week, coming home in despondancy after a tedious, boring and absolutely insupportable period of choir practice. Driving back home, with Freddy in tow as he and I listened to Henry’s bits of inflammatory gossip–I finally realized that I can no longer appreciate classical music in the way I used to. In fact, sacred music, outside of a purely historical setting, is no longer desireable in my essential corps of studies, nor is it something I wish to persue with the fervor I had approached it with. I don’t feel like I am singing for God inasmuch as I feel like I am singing for the liturgical appeasements of a few stricture bound clerics with bad accents and terrible attitudes. Frank told me quite emphatically this evening that I was allowing other people’s negative judgements and bitter sentiments poison my outlook on life. And of course, he’s quite right; if there’s one thing I absolutely loathe it is having to endure the 45 minute drive to the next town over with Henry, and his discriminatory statements, criticisms, bald-faced lies and fabrications, and absolutely audacious personal attacks on people he supposes to be in good graces with, aside from those he has no desire for contact (“they’re horrible”, he’ll say, with his characteristic wave of the hands, signifying distrust and reluctance at the same time). He had the stupidity to mention his absolute hatred for a piece by Christopher Rouse, an American composer of the academic neo-Romantic vein who, he says “wrote a disgusting, ugly piece of music about the Passion” that supposedly paints Christ as an effeminate homosexual. Checking the composer’s entry on the subject at his personal webpage, one immediately finds a description for a piece that imitates in style the works of the Northern Renaissance painters whose bloody depictions of Christ Crucified transfixed the composer. No gay Jesus here. And one would certainly infer, given the provenance of the composer’s compositional language that the work is not entirely atonal, or maybe atonal is not the description for it at all, just “sonorous”. And of course, Freddy responds with horrified fascination and indignation “that’s blasphemous!”, like the idiot he’s allowed himself to become with his force-fed Christianity–never understanding, of course, that the piece he’ll never listen to because Henry hates the composer’s fame more than his work, really is so substantial, much more than what Henry paints it as. And that sort of misjudgement passing onto assertive dismissal is anathema to me. Listening to my iPod, he remarked upon hearing Toru Takemitsu’s choral work, most of which is astonishingly beautiful, that it was “too weird” for him. It might be so for him, because he hasn’t left the dead frozen, marbelized form of the Baroque with its banal, predictable harmony and characteristic white-wigged prejudice. For him music began with Palestrina and died with Mozart. Or of course he was taught that way. Maybe it might have been different if he had allowed himself to explore more rather than to assent to the staid, academic, textbook way of thinking–the world in an entire semester of music history, and the new, crazy music of course mentioned at the very end with much condescension. Frank and I spoke about it tonight in depth and, God love him, I know he’s been through so much of what I know, but, thanks to him, I have a lot more faith and resilience to stand up for what I love and believe in.  I have learned how to be a man through his advice. I feel like I have grown in such a real and classifiable way that now it seems I am more mature than I was a couple of years ago. It bothers me that I have to busy myself every Sunday singing for a Church with which I choose not to associate, with people who adhere to that Church’s dogmas and practices. When I converted after my grandfather died, I thought leaving my Catholicism was the best thing I had ever done for myself, at least spiritually speaking. I feel even better now that my religious ideals have likewise converted from mainline Protestantism, to just the catchall phrase “Christian”, no more, no less. Peter once told me that me he couldn’t endure the endless amount of reckless Catholic guilt imposed by everyone around him. It victimized him–and that same shame and guilt for absolutely unnecessary rules and practices ruined my belief in God; or rather, it negated His positive effects in my life. And of course, being a homosexual doesn’t help either–there is already enough unnecessary guilt there as it is. So I left both churches, but I did not renounce my faith in God, nor in my salvation in Christ. I just merely decided to accept God’s will, and not man’s, nor to put faith in what Man has interpreted as God’s. I will let Him inscribe in my soul what he put forth for me, and I am perfectly content with that. I feel that, after investigating the rise and fall of religions in the course of history, that human beliefs are as wide and diverse as the many tender plants, that each one is unique to a culture’s identity and history, and it is useless to distinguish one from another. 

Destructive Poetry: An Elegy on the Death of Queen Mary

An Elegy on the Death of Queen Mary

O dive custos

Oh, you goddess of the House of Oranges.

And working hope of certain empires

We hear voices working against us.

Superbly, sweetly you can only be second

If you had flowed as the rivers flow to Isis

In favor to flavor, Oxford calls out to you.

If you had sung back, there remotely

Where the river Cam’s prosperous spray laps.

Come down, come down, from the Heaven we don’t believe in.

You had seen, you saw your security in your shield.

The Caesarian household gods, and and the sacred penetration

Mary, you were the flitful, fitful Muse

Mary, you were delicious and delicate, brave

Mary is dead

O weep for Mary, weep, Mary.

O weep for Mary, weep, Camoes, and the River Cam

O weep for Mary! The goddess is dead.

Practice/Amendments

Things have been very eventful. Paul has fully recovered from his surgery and is now back at work. The troubles he encountered in accounting for his time off afforded him the opportunity to review his relationship with the company he works for and their barbarous work tenets. I am glad he is now beginning to see himself as a person working for a company rather than a drone in the corporate system. It is enough to deal with unkind and fairly abusive customers, but to deal with abuses from his administrators is barbarous.

As for myself, I have taken up a position singing again, this time for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brownsville, thanks to my friend Freddy, who managed to present himself with the said opportunity. I am now a principal tenor for the ensemble, singing every Sunday in a small church in the next town over, every couple of hours. I have as a director a man named Henry, who works for the Diocese and teaches elementary school in that town. He is an exasperating, talkative man with a nervous twitch and large hands. His conversations are rarely about himself, but instead about repetitions of previous conversations, presented like cut-ups (usually always something about a certain homosexual priest working for the Diocese or his kindergarteners, like I give a damn) and now and again everyone puts up with his acclamations. I myself, having no choice but to drive with him to and from my domicile, have listened these last five weeks to nothing but a third-rate choir and ensemble singing a version of a Vivaldi Gloria no one has ever heard–a version I downloaded from the Internet for him, just to shut him up.

I have been paid for my merits singing in the choir, having sung now at two RCIA functions at the Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan: $170.00, or so, $85.00 per function. The next function I have been irritatingly reminded of is the Chrism Mass, a tedious affair that comes before Holy Week. I believe I will not be there for that, though I am confident I will still be paid nonetheless through various other means.

My trip has been postponed somewhat until March, but nonetheless I am optimistic about my eventual sojourn to West Texas, to see Ryan and the mountains. Though perhaps a part of me is reluctant to go, I feel I must, because I am not necessarily making this trip to satisfy my own personal interest in the region, but also to further my chances of traveling to see the good college there to which I have applied for another year. I am to be out of this region probably by midsummer or so. The $100 dollars my mother gave me were used for groceries, and I will not have them until March. I had planned to have money that way I could prepare accordingly (and cheaply), but I am satisfied with my sacrifice, as it is propitious for the upkeep of the house and its goods. I am aiming for the week for before Holy Week, or after Easter, sometime then; I am still not sure.

Blood and Water

In the last week or so I completed an out of the blue chamber work entitled Heath, written surreptitiously in honor of the recently deceased actor–and while the actual piece dealt little with the emotions of the appropriate Requiem his passing elicits, I believe it to be a fitting expression of the harmonic and compositional methods I have come up for myself. I was partially influenced by John Cage’s beautiful Quartets I-VIII, a little known and little performed piece from the late 1970s, entirely composed of snatches of harmony from early American hymns. At the same time I also employed some of the instrumentation of Morton Feldman’s music–spare, concise yet somewhat mysterious–as well as the native harmony of South Texas, and my very own pentatonic scale.

Today my little brother turned 21, and he celebrated his nativity with due éclat: he sat all day in the living room, and later on dined on his own chocolate cake. My mother bought him a PlayStation 2, with a couple of games, as a treat for convalescing from his recent surgery, as well as assisting us here. He cannot move–doing so for long periods of time causes him to faint–and therefore he spent the majority of today, as well as the weekend, playing his video games and enjoying himself, which I am actually surprised and gratified to see him do, since he worries much about us, quite needlessly.

I shall, within the span of a few weeks, be taking a trip, partly to relieve my exasperation–a year built up already of frustrating experiences–and also to inquire about the possibilities of school in a place other than home, in the fall. I have saved up some money and am aiming to get out of this town and the region the week of February 25. While I said I wanted to take advantage to visit other friends, I will not, for reasons well-known to them, but I will manage to say hello. I have too many people I talk to as it is–one of them I have tired of so much so that seeing him online I feel depressed every time he talks about his semi-professional boyfriend and their travels all over the country, seeing things, drinking and continuously cheating on one another. My one friend in Sweetwater, Texas, having recently moved there, pledged his support, and I am happy for it. This is the first time I have had such a person in my life, that would pay attention to me so presciently. I definitely need to start paring down on the people I talk to, since I have discovered the lot of them are just there for show, and not necessarily for anything else.

I am still conflicted about my willingness to see Ryan, though that is a routine sentiment, and nothing new to me. I am not too altogether concerned whether anything will develop between us at all anymore. Part of me is thankful, in a way, in knowing that I am not in love with him anymore. For that, I know, things are definitely headed in the right way.

How I long to see mountains in the early evening, with the broad yellow sunlight alighting and forming silohuettes of broad rocky curves in the clear sky. I want to see the road, have the sensation of movement, almost perpetual, the sweet air of the desert, and the starry sky. And most of all, I want to be able to be free from concerns for just one week, to conduct myself in relative silence and quietude for that one week, away from the criticisms of peers, rivals and family, and to experience the unique blessings of adulthood by myself.

Presentiments/Reflections

Several years ago, while bookstore shopping with a college roommate I wasn’t all too fond of, I came across a deck of divination cards from Marseille. As one of my hobbies is sortilege, I couldn’t resist buying the deck and taking it home with me. The typology of these cards is very rudimentary–no over-the-top esoteric, a la A.E. Waite, is to be found here. Instead, the divinatory images portrayed were fairly simple household objects, mainly the matter-of-fact objects of 19th century existence. One of those cards, entitled “Presentiments” was a natural horn, a “corni di caccia” in Italian. Its symbolism, naturally, is somewhat clear to me, as presentiments are akin to doubts, and nothing is as glaring as doubt as one of these horns.

This is by far the first coherent entry into this new journal, of which I was invited to, the other being unfortunately the victim of a broken site on a broken server. I saved and archived all of my previous journal entries (going all the way back to the summer of 2004) hosted on that website. The blog that preceded that site, unfortunately, I deleted in a haze of guilt and bipolar mania, which, sadly, I regret now, some four and a half years after the fact.

The first month of the year being over, I feel somewhat compelled to report what happened during it. After the hullaballoo of the first couple of days of January, I sat down and revised the Positivist Calendar by Auguste Comte, adapting it for the 365-day year plan, and adding and subtracting various historical and mythological figures. I felt that the original calendar, with its focus on Neo-classical fictions and Enlightment monstrosities–were very dated for use in the 21st century, and did not take into account the various non-Western thinkers and doers of our age. Nor, I realized, did it take into account the various women who, despite being openly omitted in sexist accounts of their work, aided society in many different ways. Similarly, I realized that there were not enough people of color as well, nor any non-Western monuments of literature and culture. Since beginning on the 1st I have worked up all the way to May (which is called Caesar in Comte’s reckoning), and will continue to work on it throughout the year.

I was told by way of an admirer of my work that he feels that there is much pain in my previous writings, which I guess is true; given the circumstances that precipitated it. I profess to be knowledgeable about things, but I have still so much to learn. I wish perhaps my knowledge was applied so to my dealings with people, or perhaps I would not be so bitter and unhappy as I am now. It hurts to say that one still manages to hurt people, although one does not wish it to be so; and alas, this has happened with my friend Mario, of whom I was very close. We haven’t stopped talking, but we are no longer on the warm, daily terms we were once on, because of a stupid thing I had said early that practically made out the entire relationship to be little more than just words. However, something inside me told me that it would be better had I a little more honesty with myself, and it’s good now, although I reckon Mario will not want me as company, despite how much he insists otherwise. I wish I had more sensibility in what I do, otherwise I would not hurt so many or hurt myself so terribly. I only wish for more common sense, and much self-reliance. Needless to say I will have to carry this feeling for the rest of my life as an example of my foolishness and inconstancy.

I am not so much worried about friends or relationships though. To me relationships at this point are something I do not look forward to nor enjoy to readily as I used to. And perhaps this is because of my own doing, and maybe that of my views of society, or maybe that of someone else. However the same dewy-eyed fanaticism to which I espoused Romantic affections no longer hold any sort of control over me, partly because I see people as unhappy or opportunistic, or essentially cruel and vindictive. Everything, I realize, is not all contractual after all–give and take extend to certain places, and after that things are not so defined anymore. This is why I do not want a relationship. I do not feel, in light of the above events, as well as others, that I am suitable emotionally or psychologically for a truly meaningful relationship to transpire. That will be something I will have to endure privately and inevitably come to terms with. It has not diminished my desires to settle with someone, nor to harbor affection for anyone. This merely means that my mind is in another place when it comes to love.

And one can imagine my utter astonishment when my former boyfriend revealed to me that he now viewed me as “capable of dating”, several years after the fact. My sentiments toward him are now that of perhaps “best friend”, but not “boyfriend”. I am skeptical of his views regarding gay marriage, for he says he would not want to live in a world where the person he considers as partner to existence would essentially be deprived of his livings upon his accidental (or otherwise improbable) demise. I said that government has no business in decreeing one form of marriage as supreme to another–by this I meant allowing gay marriage legislation to take place–and that marriage was by all means a personal choice, not a necessary mandate for personal existence or civil rights. No one will fight wars over who decides to biologically settle with whomever one wishes. The laws of this country, furthermore, must reflect a sense of timelessness that the original Bill of Rights reflect; the ostentatiousness of the entire issue already indicates that it is hot-button, a subject of people’s changing opinions (which are favorable), and therefore not worthy of consideration by the Government where civil rights are concerned. Lastly, the government of this country is not subject to the uneducated whims of a certain minority (or a majority, in the opposite case) who feel at one point in their existence deprived of rights they already have–we should not be like those other countries whose utterly nonsensical Pluralism allow for gross misconceptions of the Law, as well as immense wastes of taxpayer funds to show their alleigance to them, or the insupportable moral and ethical consequences arising from them. Freedom is never idealistic. It is a basic realization of one’s ability to do things, not a mere conception of what it is like, for those wishing they were free are not necessarily free, but captive to their delusions.

My assertations have given me many enemies, both gay and straight. And while I do not believe whole-heartedly in a somewhat Postivistic belief-system, looking at things in a cold, clear, scientific light, without any sort of over-Romanticizing subjects, nor taking away from their inherent symbolism and significance, has never hurt us in any way. We should examine ourselves as we would an ancient artifact from a long dead civilization: with care and precision, knowledgeable of previous histories and mythologies, and apply to it all the caution and discretion we would give as if it were the last thing extant from that time period. That is the only way we can affect change in others and in ourselves, it seems, and my experiences are a testament to that.

New Beginnings/Surgery

I have neglected to mention certain subjects which I did not touch on in my last post, which I of course regret not mentioning until now. Paul, my hot-headed little brother, had a choleric attack two weeks ago, resulting in a stay in the hospital and subsequent surgery to remove stones that had affixed themselves in his gallbladder. I believe that the entire process removed the organ from his system via some sort of liquefaction of the organ. A catheter was inserted in his private areas, to assist in drainage I believe, and he recounted to me while he walked about sore as he had ever been about the harrowing process to remove it (which, God help me, I hope to never experience). I am no doctor, but I do know that the majority of all gallbladder attacks are a fairly nocturnal occurrence, sped on by bad eating habits, poor posture, and stress. Paul works in the customer service industry, eats terrible food and slouches. However I am also informed that this was congenital in nature, which makes sense, as my mother recounted upon his delivery that he was jaundiced.My scholarly interest in the surgery has brought up some rather curious parallels to the work of Dr. Paracelsus, who despite being a superstitious charlatan of the first magnitude had some very interesting things to say concerning the placement of the gallbladder in the humourous system of the body. There are four naturally occurring humours in the body, based on the four Classical elements as described by Hippocrates and Galen–black bile, phlegm, blood, and yellow bile, the last being called choler, a byproduct of the gallbladder. In the old system it was signified by the Summer, being hot and dry. Choleric people were thought to be very hard-working and capable, though sometimes very disagreeable, which sums up Paul to perfection. He cannot be the others–were he sanguine he would be rushing off half-cocked; phlegmatic, too intemperate, and he certainly could never be melancholic, which is descriptive of myself, and all of my mental illnesses.I remember hearing that if there were a decrease in this yellow bile in the body of a person, the other temperaments would quickly replace the missing temperament, and thus restabilize the absence of that certain humour. All of this I know is hard thinking for those who rely on much more modern ideas of medical practice, but I am hoping that this surgery changes Paul’s attitude about his life and where it is going. Surgery is a frightening thing, and it takes very long to recover. I just want him to be happy. And for that, I think, he will want it similarly.