God, help us! You come yourself. Don’t send Jesus. This is no place for children.

— Anonymous Allied Mess Sargeant, Anzio, WWII

Never has any country given its people so many toys to play with or sent such highly gifted individuals to the remotest corners of idleness, as close as possible to the frontiers of pain.

— Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift

[n.d.; before 1929]

Even if I really wanted to create (…)

The only true art is construction. But the modern ambience makes the appearance of the qualities of construction impossible in the spirit.

For which reason science developed. Machines are the only things in which there is construction today, the only argument in which there is a linkage or a mathematical proof.

The power to create needs a point of departure, the crutch of reality.

Art is a science.

It suffers rhythmically.

I can’t read because my hyper /burning/ critical faculty can only reveal defects, imperfections, possibilities for improvement. I cannot dream because I feel the dream so vividly that I compare it with reality in such a way that I feel it’s not real, and so its value disappears. I cannot amuse myself in the innocent contemplation of things and men because my anxiety to delve deeper is inevitable, and since my interest cannot exist without that anxiety, it either has to die at its hands or dry up.

I cannot amuse myself with metaphysical speculation because I know only too well from my own experience that all systems are defensible and intellectually possible; and that I lack the power to forget that the aim of metaphysical speculation is to seek truth in order to enjoy the metaphysical art of constructing systems.

A happy past in whose memory I become happy again; with nothing in the present to make me happy or interest me, with nothing in dreams or hypotheses about a future different from this present, or that I might have a past other than this past — I lie down in my life, a conscious spectator in a paradise where I’ve never been, a cadaver born from hopes I’ve yet to have.

Happy are they who suffer with unity! Those whom anguish alters but does not divide, who believe even within disbelief and can sit in the sun without hidden thoughts.

— Fernando Pessoa (a.k.a. Bernardo Soares),
The Book of Disquiet, 152

By Rich Juzwiak
prideandshame

Recently, I received a piece of advice: “You should wear a cap.” As this was unsolicited, I asked what my friend’s boyfriend was talking about.

“You should get a fitted cap and wear it out if you want to pick up guys,” he elaborated. “They will flock to you. Guys love guys in fitted caps.”

Oh.

“I don’t need a cap,” I told him. I’m not a big fan of having my head covered, and I’m sure my clumsiness would have me dragging the brim on walls and hitting people in the eyes with it. A cap is one more thing to forget and I already live in fear of losing any of my 13 precious sunglasses. I don’t have time for that much anxiety in my life. Wearing a cap just wouldn’t be me.

But most of all, I do OK. If I see someone I like the looks of, I say something. Beyond that, I don’t need anything, certainly not a flock. I don’t even know if I could value one that came as the result of a cap, which I’ve long considered the cheat of cheats — the easiest, most temporary way of projecting butchness in the entire Land of Gay.

The cap will get you every time. Look past the cap. Never trust a big butt and a cap. These are the things I believe because I know the power of the cap. I even mentioned it last time. The cap works.

Plus, my head is buzzed, my shoulders are broad and my arms have muscles on them. Like I said, I do OK and I do it with the wind in my follicle sprouts.

As a gay man, I find myself consumed by the concept of masculinity. Yet, I have only a vague idea of what defines it: strength, evenness, self-assuredness, vigor, substantial eyebrows, beer, sports, funk. I have an even more vague idea of whether or not I possess enough of it and what to do with it. To own one’s maleness is a matter of pride, but when that ownership consciously turns outward, it becomes about other people and takes on a theatrical affect. Performance is at odds with masculinity’s ease. I realize that cocky bravado runs rampant in straight guys, but even there it is inherently fraudulent.

This issue becomes even more confusing for gay men. As a gay, you understand that while you’ll always find peers who allow you to be exactly as queeny as you are, there is still a social hierarchy that puts a premium on masculinity. Tops are valued. “Straight-acting” is a badge of pride, despite the term’s corrosiveness. I’m not immune to this – my eye wanders toward men who appear to be more on the masculine side, and I don’t know why that is. Shavings of internalized homophobia that litter my brain could be the culprit. To counter, I’ve been considering adopting an affirmative-action policy toward femme guys. I tell myself, “Get into it,” like the drag queens/all of us say.

I’m learning to not be flattered when someone tells me I could pass for straight, and that’s the most confusing thing of all: for as many people who say they think I could, there are plenty of others who think that I’m flaming. I don’t even know what I’m like, but I know making sure all of my sentences don’t rise as they end is a full-time job – and it is exhausting.

I know the cap trick, but it doesn’t mean that everyone is using it to manipulate. For some guys, a cap is just a cap. Some guys just like caps and they just happen to be gay. To what extent they use it to their scoring advantage is anyone’s guess, but I’m willing to envision a scenario based in innocence. You could make a similar argument re: cheating about my buzzed head (though, it’s obviously less temporary than a cap), which has its origins in my own taste for men with buzzed heads. I realized how into it I was when I realized I was into dudes and I emulated. Like I said, I tend to go for masculine dudes. There are no coincidences here.

Perhaps these signifiers that we still enlist to assert our masculinity are part of a weakened strain that was visible in the homosexuals of the ‘70s when masculinity came up from behind and really grabbed gayness by the balls. Then, it wasn’t fitted caps but as Alice Echols describes in her indispensable political history of disco, Hot Stuff, “501 button-fly Levis, flannel shirts, aviator jackets, work boots and belt-dangling key chains.” The “clones” of the “gay macho” movement were often mocked by the older, drag-valuing generation that felt discarded. Echols, whose history of gay macho is as succinct as you’ll find, notes the underlying politics and perceived absurdity:

“As anthropologist Ester Newton discovered, gay men [in the Cherry Grove section of Fire Island – the older ones] simply took it for granted that a homosexual man ‘is effeminate, whether he likes to or not, because of his ‘female’ position relative to ‘normal men’.'”

Even more on point, and brought up later by Echols, is the theory that Andrew Holleran references a few times during his 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance. It suggests that the social ideal for a gay man on the scene is to be admired, and that being the recipient of the male gaze is necessarily a feminine position. “My grandmother on her eighty-ninth birthday only wished she could walk down the street and be looked at!” says the book’s older, draggier Sutherland character. And then later, another character named Paul writes in a letter, “What is so incredible about homosexuals is that, if they live as homosexuals (that is to say, as women: beings whose life consists chiefly of Being Attractive to others), they die much sooner than heterosexual men.”

That’s a bleak view of gays and women (whose own potential sexual aggression is being underrated), but mostly it attempts to destroy a myth that a gay man can do anything to be more straight. Gayness has its own essence, its own cocktail of influences and manifestations.

The greatest irony of all happens when a man’s manhood takes over, he goes bald and then he uses this object of masculinity to cover it up. I hooked up with this guy who answered his door in a baseball cap and nothing else and then wore it the entire time we fooled around. (This was something of a turn-on, really. I will admit that I am a big fan of the porn-approved turning of the hat brim from the front to the back to suck cock because I dig ceremony.) Anyway, that was weird, but not weirder than when we took a shower after and he kept the cap on. Under the water and everything. He got his hat wet as though it were his head, except it wasn’t because it was a fucking cloth hat. I was praying he’d go for the shampoo bottle, but alas. This all mostly worked for him, though. He was a hairdresser and I guess he knew exactly what he needed to keep his head looking good at all times.

The crucial truth is that because gay men are still expected by society to be more feminine, we can either surprise people and get that aforementioned superficial, kind of unsavory thrill or we can just do what the fuck ever. We’ve all got masculine and feminine aspects to our personalities (even straight people!) and to express those things in their entirety can be great fun and liberating. I know a really beautiful kid who’s thin and post-twinky, I guess you’d say, who’s rarely without a fitted cap. He’s stylish and isn’t fooling anyone, as far as I can tell. If anything, he’s giving his softer features and evident fashion investment a complement.

Last week, I started talking to a guy at a bar that I noticed from afar because of his dudeish backwards cap. I got to appreciate his wide smile and beautiful, thick eyebrows up close. And then as soon as he addressed me, he revealed himself to be less than butch. He was Spanish and enthused virtually everything that came out of his mouth in an airy way that sounded like joking but obviously wasn’t – from his love of Jodorowsky and Almodóvar to his compliments directed at my body to his belief in real-life magical realism (“I think the world is magical!” he said, his entire existence twinkling).

He was really cute, and he said vulnerable things about not having a boyfriend, never having a boyfriend and his inability to figure out why. Nothing on his person predicted how soulful he’d turn out to be.

He didn’t need a hat, either.

Dig a hole in your back yard while it is raining. Sit in the hole until the water climbs up around your ankles. Pour cold mud down your shirt collar. Sit there for forty-eight hours, and, so there is no danger of your dozing off, imagine that a guy is sneaking around waiting for a chance to club you on the head or set your house on fire. Get out of the hole, fill a suitcase full of rocks, pick it up, put a shotgun in your other hand, and walk on the muddiest road you can find. Fall flat on your face every few minutes as you imagine big meteors streaking down to sock you. If you repeat this performance every three days, for several months, you may begin to understand why an infantryman gets out of breath. But you still won’t understand how he feels when things get tough.

— Bill Mauldin, Up Front
(re: WWII)

Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.

— actual quote from George W. Bush,
epigraph to Step Brothers

I had a lively time in the vast juror’s hall going over my boredom notes. I saw that I had stayed away from problems of definition. Good for me. I didn’t want to get mixed up with theological questions about accidia and tedium vitae. I found it necessary to say only that from the beginning mankind experienced states of boredom but that no one had ever approached the matter front and center as a subject in its own right. In modern times the question had been dealt with under the name of anomie or Alienation, as an effect of capitalist conditions of labor, as a result of leveling in Mass Society, as a consequence of the dwindling of religious faith or the gradual using up of charismatic or prophetic elements, or the neglect of Unconscious powers, or the increase of Rationalization in a technological society, or the growth of bureaucracy. It seemed to me, however, that one might begin with this belief of the modern world — either you burn or you rot. This I connected with the finding of old Binet the psychologist that hysterical people had fifty times the energy, the endurance, the power of performance, the keenness of faculties, the creativity in their hysterical fits as they had in their quiet periods. Or as William James put it, human beings really lived when they lived at the top of their energies. Something like the Wille zur Macht. Suppose then that you began with the proposition that boredom was a kind of pain caused by unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents, and was accompanied by expectations of the optimum utilization of capacities. (I try to guard against falling into social-science style on these mental occasions.) Nothing actual ever suits pure expectation and such purity of expectation is a great source of tedium. People rich in abilities, in sexual feeling, rich in mind and in invention — all the highly gifted see themselves shunted for decades onto dull sidings, banished exiled nailed up in chicken coops. Imagination has even tried to surmount the problems by forcing boredom itself to yield interest. This insight I owe to Von Humboldt Fleisher who showed me how it was done by James Joyce, but anyone who reads can easily find it out for himself. Modern French literature is especially preoccupied with the theme of boredom. Stendhal mentioned it on every page. Flaubert devoted books to it, and Baudelaire was its chief poet. What is the reason for this peculiar French sensitivity? Can it be because the ancien régime, fearing another Fronde, created a court that emptied the provinces of talent? Outside the center, where art philosophy science manners conversation thrived, there was nothing. Under Louis XIV, the upper classes enjoyed a refined society, and, whatever else, people didn’t need to be alone. Cranks like Rousseau made solitude glamorous, but sensible people agreed that it was really terrible. Then in the eighteenth century being in prison began to acquire its modern significance. Think how often Manon and Des Grieux were in jail. And Mirabeau and my own buddy Von Trenck and of course the Marquis de Sade. The intellectual future of Europe was determined by people impregnated with boredom, by the writings of prisoners. Then, in 1789, it was young men from the sticks, provincial lawyers scribblers and orators, who assaulted and captured the center of interest. Boredom has more to do with modern political revolution than justice has. In 1917, that boring Lenin who wrote so many boring pamphlets and letters on organizational questions was, briefly, all passion, all radiant interest. The Russian revolution promised mankind a permanently interesting life. When Trotsky spoke of permanent revolution he really meant permanent interest. In the early days the revolution was a work of inspiration. Workers peasants soldiers were in a state of excitement and poetry. When this short brilliant phase ended, what came next? The most boring society in history. Dowdiness shabbiness dullness dull goods boring buildings boring discomfort boring supervision a dull press dull education boring bureaucracy forced labor perpetual police presence penal presence, boring party congresses, et cetera. What was permanent was the defeat of interest.

What could be more boring than the long dinners Stalin gave, as Djilas describes them? Even I, a person seasoned in boredom by my years in Chicago, marinated, mithridated by the USA, was horrified by Djilas’s account of those twelve-course all-night banquets. The guests drank and ate, and ate and drank, and then at 2 a.m. they had to sit down to watch an American Western. Their bottoms ached. There was dread in their hearts. Stalin, as he chatted and joked, was mentally picking those who were going to get it in the neck and while they chewed and snorted and guzzled they knew this, they expected shortly to be shot.

What — in other words — would modern boredom be without terror? One of the most boring documents of all time is the thick volume of Hitler’s Table Talk. He too had people watching movies, eating pastries, and drinking coffee with Schlag while he bored them, while he discoursed theorized expounded. Everyone was perishing of staleness and fear, afraid to go to the toilet. This combination of power and boredom has never been properly examined. Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.

There were even profounder questions. For instance, the history of the universe would be very boring if one tried to think about it in the ordinary way of human experience. All that time without events! Gases over and over again, and heat and particles of matter, the sun tides and winds, again this creeping development, bits added to bits, chemical accidents — whole ages in which almost nothing happens, lifeless seas, only a few crystals, a few protein compounds developing. The tardiness of evolution is so irritating to contemplate. The clumsy mistakes you see in museum fossils. How could such bones crawl, walk, run? It is agony to think of the groping of the species — all this fumbling, swamp-creeping, munching, preying, and reproduction, the boring slowness with which tissues, organs, and members developed. And then the boredom also of the emergence of the higher types and finally of mankind, the dull life of paleolithic forests, the long long incubation of intelligence, the slowness of invention, the idiocy of peasant ages. These are interesting only in review, in thought. No one could bear to experience this. The present demand is for a quick forward movement, for a summary, for life at the speed of intensest thought. As we approach, through technology, the phase of instantaneous realization, the realization of eternal human fantasies and desires, of abolishing time and space the problem of boredom can only become more intense. The human being, more and more oppressed by the peculiar terms of his existence — one time around for each, no more than a single life per customer — has to think of the boredom of death. O those eternities of nonexistence! For people who crave continual interest and diversity, O! how boring death will be! To lie in the grave, in one place, how frightful!

Socrates tried to soothe us, true enough. He said there were only two possibilities. Either the soul is immortal or, after death, things would be again as blank as they were before we were born. This is not absolutely comforting either. Anyway it was natural that theology and philosophy should take the deepest interest in this. They owe it to us not to be boring themselves. On this obligation they don’t always make good. However, Kierkegaard was not a bore. I planned to examine his contribution in my master essay. In his view the primacy of the ethical over the esthetic mode was necessary to restore the balance. But enough of that. In myself I could observe the following sources of tedium: 1) The lack of a personal connection with the external world. Earlier I noted that when I was riding through France in a train last spring I looked out of the window and thought that the veil of Maya was wearing thin. And why was this? I wasn’t seeing what was there but only what everyone sees under a common directive. By this is implied that our worldview has used up nature. The rule of this view is that I, a subject, see the phenomena, the world of objects. They, however, are not necessarily in themselves objects as modern rationality defines objects. For in spirit, says Steiner, a man can step out of himself and let things speak to him about themselves, to speak about what has meaning not for him alone but also for them. Thus the sun the moon the stars will speak to nonastronomers in spite of their ignorance of science. In fact it’s high time that this happened. Ignorance of science should not keep one imprisoned in the lowest and weariest sector of being, prohibited from entering into independent relations with the creation as a whole. The educated speak of the disenchanted (a boring) world. But it is not the world, it is my own head that is disenchanted. The world cannot be disenchanted. 2) For me the self-conscious ego is the seat of boredom. This increasing, swelling, domineering, painful self-consciousness is the only rival of the political and social powers that run my life (business, technological-bureaucratic powers, the state). You have a great organized movement of life, and you have the single self, independently conscious, proud of its detachment and its absolute immunity, its stability and its power to remain unaffected by anything whatsoever — by the sufferings of others or by society or by politics or by external chaos. In a way it doesn’t give a damn. It is asked to give a damn, and we often urge it to give a damn but the curse of noncaring lies upon this painfully free consciousness. It is free from attachment to beliefs and to other souls. Cosmologies, ethical systems? It can run through them by the dozens. For to be fully conscious of oneself as an individual is also to be separated from all else. This is Hamlet’s kingdom of infinite space in a nutshell, of “words, words, words,” of “Denmark’s a prison.”

— Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift

“Syrup! As soon as something enters your head you blurt it out. That’s your big weakness, your worst temptation.”

This was my day to see the other fellow’s point of view. How does anyone strengthen himself? Denise had it right, you know — by overcoming the persistent temptation. There’ve been times when just because I kept my mouth shut and didn’t say what I thought, I felt my strength increasing. Still, I don’t seem to know what I think till I see what I say.

— Saul Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift

The A-bombs saved my life, saved my buddies’ lives, and most decidedly saved the lives of millions of Japanese, civilian as well as military.

— Eugene B. Sledge
Montevallo, Alabama
1999