PORTRAIT OF AN IMITATION HEDONIST

. . . . .

This week I found Will Self's 2002 novel, DORIAN An Imitation, accidentally on the shelves of my college library. I had forgotten how much I love being inside of the library. A silence so large it is breath, of which I'm only a small version. Libraries for me always feel like a restful futuristic dome, a room at the bottom of the sea, buried in the blue omphalos where I exist, only partially alive, half-blind, floating through the stacks like a ghost automaton, touching and searching.

Self's novel is a portrait of a dissolution of the flesh by decadence, by an age of cultural extravagances, the perils of early debauchery as well as a contemplation and partial criticism of gay culture since the rise of the AIDS epidemic.

"Don't spoil it by renunciations. At present you are a perfect type. Don't make yourself incomplete. You are quite flawless now. You need not shake your head: you know you are. Besides, Dorian, don't decieve yourself. Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. . . the world has cried against us both, but it has always worshipped you. It always will worship you. You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found."

These are the words of Lord Henry Wotton in Wilde's 1891 THE PORTRAIT OF DORIAN GRAY, and they give us an insight into Self's contemporization of the classic. Dorian, in the original, is haunted by a painting of himself done by Basil Hallward, which embodies all of the terrors of age, anxiety, debauchery, guilt and crime, while Dorian himself remains a picture of an ideal young beauty. He ultimately murders Basil Hallward, and in an effort to destroy the only piece of incriminating evidence, the painting (which now drips with blood and mortality), knifes his own inky image only to break its spell: the police find a mutlilated portait and the body of an old and wasted man, murdered on a parlour floor.




The original novel helped to incriminate Wilde in the (in)famous criminal case in which he stood trial for homosexuality. Wilde, of course, is the first author to be "gay" as such, and Self's version is a contemporary telling that could have been penned by Henry Miller, for all of its vulgar wit, perfect irreverance and its remorseless descriptions of tasteless and frank sexual decadence. It's deliciously sick. In it, Dorian is the "type" of young gay man all of the media attention about AIDS awareness in the 80's, the MTV reality voyeurism of the 90's, and the flamboyant outing politics of this web-lit decade, has made possible. Dorian is young and beautiful, but also out, sexually fabulous, white-party hip, taking part in all the fashionable drug recreations, having almost forgotten that AIDS afflicted generation of the 80's, but still vulnerable to its very real dangers. He's new to the scene, but part of a generation who feels entitled and unafraid of making a venemous public display.

In Self's version, Dorian is the subject of Basil Hallward's avant-garde video installation--Basil Hallward of Basquiat and Warhol notariety--and also the young pupil of Henry Wotton, the insanely wealthy hedonist, closeted and married, drug addicted, brilliantly supercilious Brit. The story ensues: Dorian remains young and unafflicted by age and AIDS. The invention of Self's version is that Dorian becomes a demon, insatiable predator for experience, drugging, corrupting, even raping and murdering, all under that perfect disguise of the charm of his undying beauty. At his own party he infects both Basil and Henry, and proceeds to travel the world like a mogul socialite while his "friends" are left to discover the truth. Basil struggles, rehabs, falls off the wagon, is taken in by New York Dragqueen Trannies, rehabs and tries to turn a new healthy leaf after he finds out he's HIV positive. Henry Wotton, on the other hand, seroconverts and spends his money and time on drugs, drugs, drugs, drugs and drugs. In his sardonic vision of the world, he ironically tells the truth about Dorian, finding a fictitious version of a murderous, deceitful Dorian more interesting than the real, so he thinks, innocent and all too stereotypical, young twink. "I adore destructive spectacles," he says, sucks on a cigarrete and exhales, "they are the last refuge of the creative."

DORIAN, in effect, is the lens by which Self examines the era of gay political selfhood. Out of mid-seventies sexual liberation of the bi-dolls, into the confusion of the 80's secret epidemic and into the 90's newfound culture of tops, bottoms, fems, bears, twinks and republicans, a crime story unfolds parallel to the original, complete with Basil's murder, the blackmail of Dorian, and the final distruction of the tapes, on which the AIDS ridden, murderous, despicable Dorian dances around like something out of Dante--the ring of hell where people dance and laugh in madness after eating their own shit:


"Dorian sprinted straight into this garden of earthly delights. He not only accepted the hands grabbing at his crotch, the drinks shoved in his mouth and the tongues pushed into his ear, he revelled in them. . . He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of his watch! And that's exactly what he did: he loosed the strap of his chunkily expensive diver's watch and thrust it into the hand of a deranged clone, one who was so taken by Dorian's beauty that he licked the face. . . They were draped in chains, the men who jostled and clinked in the Stygian chambers beneath the bar-room at the Mineshaft. Dorian penetrated this sphincter of darkness. He stopped to try his cock in a gloryhole, he paused to watch while two men fucked a third at either end, he moved to join a circle of happy flagellators, he critically pissed on a naked performer in a bathtub. On and on he went; darker and danker it became, as wonkily partitioned room succeeded warped vestibule, each filthier and ranker than the last with the odour of faeces and semen and poppers. All around was the thwack of flesh on flesh, with its ragged accompaniment--the grunts and moans of effortful coition."


This novel is titillating, and might catch some readers off guard with its sexual deliberateness, but it's also a smart, lyric, racing meditation on the Keatsian ideal: youth and beauty cursed by a human struggle against mortality. Self's achievement is especially satisfying if you're gay, since it comes to us at the speed of our culture these last few decades, that have so rapidly changed how we view ourselves among ourselves, as well as how we stand in relation to others. Critics might surely accuse Self of indulging in a negative stereotype of gay culture, but he is writing a novel, afterall. I, for one, am grateful to be entertained by my own darkness. Sell self-help and political-moral doctrine to someone else. Anyway, it's not as if this novel doesn't accomplish a real vision of the world as it is, underwriting our own complicated relationship to it. . .




What I love about the ending to this novel is its epilogue. Where the novel could easily and satisfyingly end after the fourth chapter, at the apparent destuction of the artwork, Self's ability to take everything a step further with both satire and a strange, disturbing, critical eye for gay life as a culture, ultimately proves immensely interesting. Without giving away the ending, Dorian survives, for a time, distracted from his true nature by a lifestyle fueled by appearances and capitalism, much like some people I know today:

"Busy, busy, busy. In May alone there were 2,456,707 hits on the CATHODE NARCISSUS website (www.cathodenarcissus.com). Visitors to the site could view Baz Hallward's original installation, together with other examples of the late artist's work. Sponsored and maintained by the Gray Organisation, the site featured links to GRAY magazine, as well as a photo-file of Dorian's own career in modeling. . . Dorian wanted Baz's work to become synonymous with male beauty at the end of the twentieth century. Male beauty and a new mature pride in homosexual identity--not a pride based on militant identification with an underclass, or a persecuted ethnic minority, but the true pride that came with assuming the responsibility proper to an era, when for the first time gay men and lesbian women were openly assuming positions of power. . . As he bickered over the bill with friends--some gay, some straight--in a Greek restaurant by Primrose Hill one Sunday afternoon, it hit Dorian Gray with sickening suddenness . . . All of us childless, Dorian thought, looking about him at the edgy bantering of his social sibling-substitutes. All of us--relatively speaking--rich, all of us unencumbered with any true, organic responsibilitiy. What's it all for?"

And, then, there is the snide voice of Henry Wotton to rebuke him: "You're all completely interchangeable: cocks, arseholes, jeans, brains. That joint you were in last night was like a swap shop at the end of the world, wouldn't you agree?"




Even if you're not interested in a "gay" novel, per se, you're sure to be drawn in by Self's re-telling. It's peopled by characters both straight and gay, curious and compelling, decadent and disastrous. The plotline not only carries the arc of the original, but assumes comedy and wit as it invents contemporary personas in contemporary predicaments. In the end, this is a novel of political description coupled with Self's burning lyricism, a work masterfully driven by the polar twins of our sensual being: beauty and destruction.

. . . . .

SPRING ELIXIR

. . . . .

So this spring I've been afflicted with sleeplessness, allergies, fog in my lungs. I wake up in the middle of the night wheezing like a dark, heavy current through a red coral reef. I used to have terrible times in the desert. The spring desert is actually filled with pollen, night blooming and perilous, practically viral in the air. Spring was a reminder of the crudity of the human body, piped together, leaking around like some paradisiacal accident. Basically I fell apart, but only partially, only enough to know it and to suffer.

Since I've moved to the beach it's been clear. A cure. Sea-elixir. Surprising because everything here grows year round. It's lush and cool enough to maintain wild lilies, roses, palms, lush green paddles, cactus, sunflower, cyclamen, clock vine, marigold, baby's breath, lavender, bromeliad, nasturtiums, poppies, wild thyme, birds of paradise, orchids, succulents, tromp de oro, tulip, agave, purple namas, fern, velvet paws, bougainvillea . . . the list goes on into the winter. . .

Not this spring. This spring is a disaster! But only at night. . . I don't know what to do, really. I pop the pills, try breathing exercises, meditation and all while I hack my brains out, feel my sinuses loading up like two islands floating on my face. What a bitch. Instead I'm up, 2, 3, 4 a.m. frustrated because my classes this semester are earlier than god. Last night read Attila Joszef, one of my secret saints, who cut his throat when he was my age, 32, and wrote nihilism into a beautiful ditch-shine.

"Just like a pile of split wood
the world lies in a heap;
so does each thing push, uphold, keep
every other thing in place,
so that everything is determined.
Only what is not can become a tree,
only what's yet to come can be a flower.
The things that exist fall into pieces."

Joszef wrote in the early part of last century and much of his poetry has a Marxist feel, poetry for the poor who have nothing, who are commanded by the pleasures they cannot have for themselves. . . there's something about this center that feels familiar: isn't this our human state too? to be afflicted by something beyond ourselves, that we wrack and hustle for, to uncertain ends? Isn't the revolutionary always struggling against the very air we breathe? Isn't revolutionary another name for a poet of mortality? . . . But Joszef's is a less philosophical approach, less about ideas than about the life that has to do while time swings off its pendulum.

This morning I walked through campus in a half-shuffle, still a zombie, mad for coffee--I saw myself reflected in the glass building all the way up into the breathspace and couldn't believe it! What old man is that? Coughing, shuffling, bellied, angry? My god! I've become some stuffy academic! All day I refuse this somnabulent version of my life! In the new Poets' & Writers there's an article, "Phd the new MFA"--and I just about cried. All this business of poetry has become part of the capitalist wallpaper that surrounds us. The life of a poet is beginning to sound to me like a commercial.

Thankfully I've my ailment to keep me up late. Thankfully, Friends and Strangers, I've got my secret saint:


TO SIT, TO STAND, TO KILL, TO DIE

To shove this chair away from here,
to squat down in front of a train,
to climb a mountain, with great care,
to empty my knapsack over the vale,
to feed a bee to my old spider,
to take an old crone, and carress her,
to sip bean soup, and eat cake,
to walk on tiptoes in the muck,
to place this hat on the railroad track,
to promenade around the lake,
to lie, all dressed up, in waters deep,
to get a suntan as waves leap,
to bloom among the sunflowers,
to let out at least one good sigh,
to shoo away a single fly,
to dust off a dusty book,
to spit at your mirror, look,
to make peace with all your foes,
to kill them all with a long knife,
to study how their blood flows,
to watch a young girl as she goes,
to sit still, and curl your toes,
to burn down the whole city,
to feed the birds and have pity,
to hurl stale bread to the floor,
to make my good gal cry for more,
to take her little sister in my lap,
and if the world wants reasons,
to run away, not give a crap--
oh you binding and dissolving,
at this moment poem-writing,
laughing, weeping
life of my own deciding!

. . . . .

Poetry, at least, is the outrage of beauty against Nothingness.

Inexplicable. Miraculous. Revolutionary. Our heart's artifact.

Even if our heart is destined to become a bulb of soft, warm mud, washed completely away by a spectacular spring rain:

"Now the peacefulness of seeds lives
in houses, horses, people,
the peacefulness of seeds that goes deep down
where all things are akin, made
of mud, everlasting, soft and warm.

How good it feels to plunge blindly
after all my thrown-away kisses!"

. . . . .

KAZIM ALI: DANGEROUS QUEEN

. . . . .

Friends and Strangers,

here's the account of a too real read, too absurd event that happened this week to a dear friend of mind. If you knew Kazim, you'd find yourself wondering if he were taking part in a re-enactment of some obscure Kafka play. Instead, he's in his real life, and finding our administration's paranoia deeply sinister, as it finds us with its long blind tendrils. We might take a second to think about what's happened to our country's prisoners still being held in Guantanamo Bay, without lawyers, without being told what they're accused of.

Remember the first line (and if you can, the final beautiful, haunting sentence) of Franz Kafka's THE TRIAL:

"Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning."

Friends and Strangers, read on:

POETRY IS DANGEROUS: BY KAZIM ALI

On April 19, after a day of teaching classes at
Shippensburg University, I went out to my car and
grabbed a box of old poetry manuscripts from the front
seat of my little white beetle and carried it across
the street and put it next to the trashcan outside
Wright Hall. The poems were from poetry contests I had
been judging and the box was heavy. I had previously
left my recycling boxes there and they were always
picked up and taken away by the trash department.

A young man from ROTC was watching me as I got into my
car and drove away. I thought he was looking at my car
which has black flower decals and sometimes inspires
strange looks. I later discovered that I, in my dark
skin, am sometimes not even a person to the people who
look at me. Instead, in spite of my peacefulness, my
committed opposition to all aggression and war, I am a
threat by my very existence, a threat just living in
the world as a Muslim body.

Upon my departure, he called the local police
department and told them a man of Middle Eastern
descent driving a heavily decaled white beetle with
out of state plates and no campus parking sticker had
just placed a box next to the trash can. My car has
NY plates, but he got the rest of it wrong. I have two
stickers on my car. One is my highly visible faculty
parking sticker and the other, which I just don’t have
the heart to take off these days, says “Kerry/Edwards:
For a Stronger America.”

Because of my recycling the bomb squad came, the state
police came. Because of my recycling buildings were
evacuated, classes were canceled, campus was closed.
No. Not because of my recycling. Because of my dark
body. No. Not because of my dark body. Because of his
fear. Because of the way he saw me. Because of the
culture of fear, mistrust, hatred, and suspicion that
is carefully cultivated in the media, by the
government, by people who claim to want to keep us
‘safe.’

These are the days of orange alert, school lock-downs,
and endless war. We are preparing for it, training for
it, looking for it, and so of course, in the most
innocuous of places—a professor wanting to hurry home,
hefting his box of discarded poetry—we find it.

That man in the parking lot didn’t even see me. He saw
my darkness. He saw my Middle Eastern descent. Ironic
because though my grandfathers came from Egypt, I am
Indian, a South Asian, and could never be mistaken for
a Middle Eastern man by anyone who’d ever met one.

One of my colleagues was in the gathering crowd,
trying to figure out what had happened. She heard my
description—a Middle Eastern man driving a white
beetle with out of state plates—and knew immediately
they were talking about me and realized that the box
must have been manuscripts I was discarding. She
approached them and told them I was a professor on the
faculty there. Immediately the campus police officer
said, “What country is he from?”

“What country is he from?!” she yelled, indignant.

“Ma’am, you are associated with the suspect. You need
to step away and lower your voice,” he told her.

At some length several of my faculty colleagues were
able to get through to the police and get me on a cell
phone where I explained to the university president
and then to the state police that the box contained
old poetry manuscripts that needed to be recycled. The
police officer told me that in the current climate I
needed to be more careful about how I behaved. “When I
recycle?” I asked.

The university president appreciated my distress about
the situation but denied that the call had anything to
do with my race or ethnic background. The spokesperson
of the university called it an “honest mistake,” not
referring to the young man from ROTC giving in to his
worst instincts and calling the police but referring
to me who made the mistake of being dark-skinned and
putting my recycling next to the trashcan.

The university’s bizarrely minimal statement lets
everyone know that the “suspicious package” beside the
trashcan ended up being, indeed, trash. It goes on to
say, “We appreciate your cooperation during the
incident and remind everyone that safety is a joint
effort by all members of the campus community.”

What does that community mean to me, a person who has
to walk by the ROTC offices every day on my way to my
own office just down the hall—who was watched, noted,
and reported, all in a day’s work? Today we gave in
willingly and whole-heartedly to a culture of fear and
blaming and profiling. It is deemed perfectly
appropriate behavior to spy on one another and police
one another and report on one another. Such behaviors
exist most strongly in closed and undemocratic and
fascist societies.

The university report does not mention the root cause
of the alarm. That package became “suspicious” because
of who was holding it, who put it down, who drove
away. Me.

It was poetry, I kept insisting to the state policeman
who was questioning me on the phone. It was poetry I
was putting out to be recycled.

My body exists politically in a way I can not prevent.
For a moment today, without even knowing it, driving
away from campus in my little beetle, exhausted after
a day of teaching, listening to Justin Timberlake on
the radio, I ceased to be a person when a man I had
never met looked straight through me and saw the
violence in his own heart.

. . . . .