COMMUNION

Forgive me if I have touched on any of this before. I think its content is timely for me and it may be for you.

A friend once told me, when I confided in him that I had never had a serious relationship, that "there must be something seriously wrong with me". It wasn't the response I was looking for but it did send me into a rage, at least internally. All my life I had been tortured by the idea that being in love or being loved was the only way to feel whole. Love and desirability were always and still are presented as the ultimate ratification of ones worth in the world and I imagine it is a source of great comfort, at least for while, not unlike deep religious practice. For me romantic love is generally represented as yet another portal into the arms of normative society. While this right of passage or rather much sought after prize may at times be a beautiful example of tenderness, passion, desire and even loyalty in human beings it is also a fount of anguish, dejection and a great sense of failure among so many. Personally, while I do enjoy a good love story I think the social ball and chain of the "your nobody till somebody loves you" sentiment is a great distraction from personal growth and odious in its ever presence in song and film as the exaltation of life at its most pure. Not everyone finds love. In fact not everyone finds themselves the object of desire at all.

Sometimes I find myself trying to figure out if the loneliness and lack of desirability I have always had and that feeling of missing something, of not sewing my wild oats or having been madly in love and loved in my youth, if it is a socially constructed neurosis or... is it simply that I have failed at being loved, at being fully human.

As I watch my face and body change with age and as the years do slip away I cant help but wonder about and mourn what I have missed in those sweet and greener years of my youth. To my eyes the language of young lovers that I might witness or encounter on any given day speak a language with each other that is totally foreign to me.

In more sentient moments I feel duped, brainwashed into feeling I didn't ever deserve a place at that table, that I was denied a feast and moreover that that feast would somehow fill me. Like most things among the human race it represents a kind of cast system. Within this system there are those that are disenfranchised and are made to feel they aren't fully living life unless they are loved and loving, racking up bedpost notches or bleeding into a diary about the pain and tumult of their romances.

I don't disbelieve in love as a whole. From my own experience I have fallen in and sometimes out love with my friends more then with anyone else. Those relationships haven't all been a fairy tales either, but they have taught me patience and compassion as well as the pain of letting someone you hold dear go.

What I have come to understand along the way is that I can revel and revile the human experience of communion with equal parts brio and dissonance.

When I am at my best I do not need your gaze for any kind of approval, I can laugh at my own jokes, find ecstasy throwing down in my own kitchen or on a canvas, and I don't need your caress to tell me my eyes are soft or my cheek is lovely to cup in your hand. My exaltation is not necessarily how I am experienced by others or how I move through the world but in how I choose to experience the world moving through me.

Happy New Year

Patches of Sun

For Jasmine

I vacillate between dark and defeated, a general ennui, inured to the violence of the indifference and rejection I face every day and amused and excited by people i find dear, endearing and inspiring.

I have always been a painfully sensitive person. A callous has grown over that sensitivity with the passing years. I still feel the pain of others deeply. I take notice on the street when i see suffering especially when I see another sensitive soul, young or old, in pain just from trying to navigate this difficult word.

It is strange to me how my younger self feels like another person, someone who died long ago. I sometimes sit and mourn his death. He was a slight boy with a lisp he had from teeth made crooked by sucking his fingers as he slept. He had few friends as he was not the kind of boy that boys were supposed to be. He liked warm patches of sun where he could find them, on the floor of his bedroom under the window, in a little meadow in the woods behind the house. He looked for those patches of sun in the street on the way home from school where he could close his eyes with his face pointed toward the light and feel the warmth caress him.

Now as I grow older and another layer of rejection is added as middle age settles in on my face and body, I feel most beautiful as lay on the beach with my eyes closed forgetting the gaze of others just feeling the breeze of the wind off the water and the summer sun on my bare skin.

Sometimes I meet people who feel like those patches of sun to me and they radiate a warmth I rarely see. For a moment when they are close and we connect I feel beautiful and warm looking into their familiar eyes.

I feel as if I have been searching for my tribe all my life. We were separated long ago in prehistoric times and we are all different shapes sizes and colors and sexualities and we are warm loving people, little patches of sun, floating around lost in this cold world, a lifetime spent looking for each other.

Here is a piece of poem is being rehabilitated but none the less pertinent:

I have fought with my and legs long enough

Prayed my face was good enough for a pair of bare arms around my waist.

Now I pray for bleached bones and green glass worn lonely and content

Their hourglass figures long broken,

No trash bins or fingernails tapping at their necks,

A new life as impotent beachcombers trading the nightclubs for hot sand and cool water.

I have been like them all along

Wrong places wrong body

I will trade all my starvation for tender fingers for this

I will lay face down in the surf rushing toward the sand

As long as it takes to be like them

Smooth and glistening

Taken hard every day by the waves, washed asleep for hours.

Branding your Soul

So back into the work of talking about human Identity.. this could get a little dry and boring but anyway..

dig it!

The formation of individual Identity based around social structure, economic circumstances, religious doctrine and ethnic background is not a new phenomena. What has changed dramatically in recent history is how that indoctrination is carried out, the efficacy with which social movements that thwart conformity are absorbed by corporations redirected and commercialized.

In modern times the drive for ratification of ones identity through the acquisition and or use of signifiers that radiate success, beauty and sexual potency has become deeply commercially codified. The efficiency of this mass indoctrination has begun to resemble a type of brainwashing that could be having catastrophic effects on individuation, social innovation and creative thinking in the human animal.

With impunity and regularity, the controllers of wealth, political power, media and information colonize radical identities found in the underground for the purpose of self aggrandizement, commodification and to render the originators of these identities impotent within society. Among the controllers of wealth and power is is a tactical response meant preserve the concentration of resources, control the innovators and co-opt those innovations.

Independent thought is dangerous. The formation of individual identity that is not linked to commercially approved ideas of beauty and success is seen as a threat to powerful multi national corporations that control much of the planets wealth. Homogeneity and the exploitation of human insecurities surrounding physical beauty and desirability are key to maintaining power and control over the enormous commerce in human desire. Ads and information designed to control the populous, by enslaving them to products and services that promise relief from their malformed and "inferior" bodies and faces and lives, flood our senses every day.

From a very young age I became aware of the influence film, television, popular entertainment and commercial advertising was having on the development of human identity. I watched as my contemporaries, more or less within five years of my age, were adopting behaviors, in fact what seemed like entire identities, they had seen on TV or in the movies or how their favorite musicians dressed and acted. It is of course natural in the process of individuation to look for role models especially those outside your family. What stuck me was the inorganic quality, the artifice of these social masks that people were wearing. Body language and facial expressions as well as vernacular all seemed to be based on codes adopted from what TV characters and magazines instructed as cool and my contemporaries seemed so unaware of how affected and inauthentic these social masks were.

I can appreciate it when someone is honest about being in love with an idea of how to be and behave based on some a personal hero found in pop culture. What disturbs me is the lack of introspection and desire to explore beyond the boundaries of popular identities not only among conformist social sets but even in supposedly non conformist social sub sets. In other words your average goth kid isn't exactly reinventing the wheel in terms of individuation.

It is clear to me that Noam Chomsky is on point in his essay "The Manufacturing of Consent" as it applies to ideas about physical beauty and individual value in the context of group acceptance and corporate control over those social standards. People are looking for ratification of their identities through modalities and frame works that are no longer developed in a tribal system but manufactured on a corporate level for profit and control.

Long before Hollywood was corporatist the barons of that industry quickly understood the power of that medium over individual and group psychology. With the advent of the moving image, with the creation of the starlet and the matinee idol, people flocked to Hollywood because they knew, if they were lucky, they would find wealth, adulation and immortality. The riches that were once primarily the province of aristocracy and the privileged classes were now attainable as they never had been before. The chance to be desired on a level never imagined for common working class people was quite an amazing sea change in human history and there was something truly egalitarian about that idea. It was kind of like winning a lottery. The cultural price of this dream and the propaganda created by that industry around what signified beauty and happiness was, in many ways, catastrophic.

The fantasy of fame became the ultimate drug and people imagined themselves as living the glamorous lives played out on screen and on the streets of Hollywood with all the drama and tragedy so beautifully staged. Don't get me wrong, I love film and as an artistic tool its been used to astounding affect. What concerns me is how images of human identity have been represented, molded with the intent of manipulating, indoctrinating and subjugating the general public. It strikes me that the early barons of Hollywood whether they new it or not were creating a textbook for corporate giants and power brokers on how to control the masses on how to sell an idea of how to be and feel and what to aspire to.

At the same time wherever there is this intense commodification there is, transversely, the artists and innovators, those who work in the mediums of film and music and art who challenge ideas about human identity, social tyranny and power structures within our societies. These artists are a force for great social change and we need them desperately. I will talk about a few of them and their work in another post. I have tired myself with my own verbosity.

Peace

zzzzzzzzzz

lamb of love

I took the name E.M. Lamb as a bit of an ironic statement. The full name is Ero Marc Lamb. It is meant to stand for "Lamb of Love", which I most decidedly not.

I am almost entirely devoid of feelings of romantic love and yearning . For most of my life I was a lamb of love and lead to slaughter over and over. I had so many unrequited loves I cannot count them all. Unlike most people I know I have not had a single significant romantic relationship. I have only twice dated long enough to even hold hands in public.

When I once, years ago, lamented the trajectory of my romantic life to a friend he told me something was deeply wrong with me. This was coming from a man who I had seen through more then one tragic relationship and who had also pursued me romantically to no avail. I was deeply offended by his comment not just for me but for others whose love lives were not so storied and deep as they had wished or as society expected of them.

I am not absolving myself of some part in creating the virtual siberia of my love life. I have had no game all these years. I have faltered when there were chances at something grand in all aspects of my life artistic. professional and romantic. I think I have been most successful at being a good friend. Do they write books about that or erect statues to good friends?

How do you measure the worth of a life? What is success? Desire plays an enormous part in our everyday existence and how we perceive our own lives. You must be desired to be considered a success. You must be desired in one or all aspects of your life. Desire is what drives people to the the plastic surgeon and pilates class, the desire for the perfect body, health, "the best life", the desire to be desired. The pain of not being desired drives people to eat themselves sick to satiate that the loneliness and fulfill sensate and sensuous desires. The desire to feel elated and to assuage the pain of life's stresses and failures drives people to drink and get high.

I am not a lamb of love anymore. I am not a lamb at all. Its fine really, there is peace here without yearning. At least for now.

Bones of the Earth

this is a sketch of and idea of a treatment for ... well inspiration for my memoir "Bones of the Earth". A memoir you ask? Why the fuck not I say. Its just a sketch.. but its all true....so far.

Ever since strangers opened me up one night, carving a flower on my forehead with blunt objects and pavement, slashing a window on one side of my face to expose a diorama of muscle and glands, ever since bones and blood were cracked in my face with the celebratory bravado of an ancient hunt I have had no grasp on a linear life. I am lost in the turmoil of a mind that has been beset by distraction from my earliest memories only to be exacerbated by the bludgeon of unknown knives, fists and the butt of a gun on more then one occasion. So much inspiration has sunk to the bottom of this sea of confusion. I cant finish a book, the paragraphs melt away in the click click click of other things that tear my eyes from the pages to a great sea of unopened letters and unrealized dreams, aspirations and desires. I turn to the flesh of dispassionate strangers for brutality in bed and forgetting.

I sometimes wonder if I did seek them out in some way, those boys who cut me open. I was hunted as a child by a teenage boy. He promised to kill me and he chased me through a lonely suburban backyard to an empty wooded ravine where he would brandish a knife and order me to come to him. Will I forever be looking for someone who wants me badly enough to kill me for it? Did I wonder the streets drunk that cool October night releasing the scent of the hunted? Did I set the hunt in motion in search of a murderous desire I had experienced, been the subject of, as a small boy in a small patch of woods, behind Anika's parent's vegetable garden?...

Gone Deaf

There is an empty space here

Between the pages and my fingers

Gone deaf

Gone silent

Gone bone dry

Pressing my eyelids for memory

I enumerate our mistakes

With less than agile reflexes

this fractured history is told in supple scars

They lay on the wall like brail

And we read them together

Two fools volunteering for blindness

Playing for single notes

And our feet like tambourines

On side streets in gutter puddles

Clapping in time and out.

Singing into this empty bowl

We listen for

its hollow

ceramic howl

like a song playing on obsolete vinyl

Scratching,

whining

and warm

Haunted

I wanted to write to you about the title of this blog and the meaning of pretty to me at this time and in this context. I wanted to write about my first post to expound and dissect. Im sorry I cannot be so linear, you will have to wait for those entries.

I am haunted day and night. I am haunted by those I've held dear and let go in into the clamor of letters and emails not responded to, into the chaos of daily life and forgetting. I cant sleep for these memories of love left to desiccate and dissipate in the air like ash. I carry them like lost souls and they wait for quiet moments, when I try to dream, and they wont let me rest. The television can distract me sometimes as do sex and sensual desire. Drinking drowns the memories for a while. Making art culls the memories into another form, telling the stories of my spirits, so thats why I stop and start with my art. The missteps and the mistakes, the loves I have forsaken. I am haunted every day... good or bad poetry the following says it all:

Worry Song

I worry this air,

an old clothe worn thin at the hem by tremulous fingers.

I worry this minute this hour like an old house floor

Longing for the afternoon’s innocence.

I worry these arms

cramped and lonely

two branches

twisted in wind

dipping into fast unconscious waters.

I worry these legs,

these feet and

the unyielding gravity

wrapping me in memory like a widow.

I worry my eyes and my mouth

forlorn

for smooth bellies and a

a finger tracing my spine.

I worry my days like a mother

Sure of the pain in everything

Even in the sweetest delight.

I worry my life like a fugitive

Running tender footed onto and under the sheets of strangers

To forget why

to stop

to smother the worry

So

For a moment…

I can breathe.

me, circa sometime in 2004 or 5