DESIRE AMONG THE VECTORS

It’s almost a half century since gender has been taken out of the closet in all three aspects:  desire, identity, and social role.  It’s been almost as long since a virus came out of the African jungles to devastate the demographic category of “gay men” and then slowly ooze out over the rest of the world until now most AIDS victims are heterosexual, including children.

It’s about six centuries since Europeans found the American continents and started the traffic back and forth across the Atlantic -- loot, slaves and disease.  Early cases of smallpox among the indigenes were recorded almost immediately.  Smallpox, and many other zoonoses, are thought to have originated ten thousand years ago in Africa near the Mediterranean, the consequence of domesticating animals so that they were kept in enclosures near enough to transmit viruses and bacterias to their owners.  North Americans had no defenses and were decimated.

Not long ago smallpox was eradicated (sort of, since hidden samples are suspected) and now they claim that an effective vaccine for malaria exists.  The cause of malaria is a plasmodium (one-celled parasite) that uses mosquitoes as a vector syringe.  It is also an African organism, thought to have originated in primates. 

Human beings are the most effective vectoring entity from Africa.  The cross-over diseases not only were stored in the bodies of the African people but were also carried worldwide by them.  These human-transported parasites have endangered other living beings, but the humans themselves are parasites on the whole balance of the planet.  Some believe the only “cure” is to fly to another planet where there are no living beings -- a sort of clean slate.  But a spaceship is a vector of the problem -- us, we are the mosquitoes -- or are we the plasmodia in the mosquito?

Syphilis, which no one knows the original cause of, is bacterial.  Sheep have been mentioned, but the main origin is humans indigenous to America, going back across the Atlantic.  Recent research seems to clarify (and it's only fair) that Columbus took syphilis back to Europe with his crew.  And we finally acknowledge that every member of the Lewis and Clark party was infected except Clark.  A few died of it right away, some later, and pretty certainly Lewis was one of those victims, dying in agony and psychosis before he had a chance to edit his journals.

Meriweather Lewis

“Genocide” by Tim Barrus is an anthology of short stories considering these demographic disease issues and society's reaction, mixing male same-gender bonding with indigenous American peoples, with World War concentration camps disguised as carnivals, and space travel in a spaceship so anthropomorphic that it wants to know about sex.  The concentration camps are to hold HIV-infected persons -- the model is leprosy.  In reality it was actually suggested in regard to HIV and currently practiced to confine Ebola.

There’s one more element: the needled syringe, the proboscis of the human insect which made it possible to penetrate directly into blood, as a mosquito does, by-passing the acid bath and molecular-parting-out protective metabolism of the digestive system.  The visionary sci-fi epic of “Dune” took on drugs in terms of early versions of LSD, as something to put in the mouth (watching in cowboy country, the movie version of "spice" looks a little like “snoose”) rather than the injectables of today.  

Our times have addressed consciousness in the most brutal and invasive of ways, from electroshock to solitary confinement to surgery on intimate parts.  We have neglected the aesthetic power and lyric savagery of life itself.  Somehow it has been reduced to chemically triggered fucking, plastic credit cards and 3D video.  Now ebola comes, requiring a brutal response -- shrouded attendants drenched in bleach who only bury the dead because once more we must struggle to find a cure.  But we haven’t yet cured HIV and now realize there is a whole family of filoviruses out there, each waiting its turn.

The universal element of this story is, of course, humans.  It’s not just the medical dimension of confronting disease, but also defining our response as “fighting a war”, thus leaving refugees and creating stigma.  Truth be told, someone is “getting off” on the control, the blaming, the playing at heroics, the secret conviction that it’s related to virtue and that the people with the money are the virtuous ones and therefore justified in not spending it on the infected, because surely it must be their fault somehow.  They should pay.

Blood cells under attack

This means that the fruits of war include sexual ownership of the vulnerable, esp. children, and for some tastes, esp. boys, who don’t get pregnant (though they can be infected).  Boys can be partly controlled by the hope of someday themselves growing into warriors, as though being a victim were preparation for being anything but a bully.

The motor of this social system is ignorance that there is any other way of organizing a culture, which is why the indigenous and historical contexts are so valuable.

I don’t read much gay literature and haven’t really been very deep into sci-fi since I was a kid -- so long ago that Heinlein was new.  But I did read H.G. Wells and understood that he was doing cultural criticism, trying to suggest alternatives or at least thinking about many worlds rising into consciousness as they did in the 19th century. It’s the root of “Star Trek” and all the time travel tales.

The Starship Enterprise

“Desire, identity and social role” are characteristics of individuals, but the culture as a whole must be responsible for supporting the survival of individuals, who exist in reciprocity with all other humans plus the other beings and circumstances of the planet.  Otherwise, it all collapses. The idea of taking on the predicaments of suffering people everywhere across the planet is pretty daunting, and yet we come up with shelters and food for them.  Why can’t we do that for our own boys right here in America?

“Genocide,” the Barrus anthology, is poetic riffs on “desire, identity, and social role”.  Metaphor, narrative, and theatrical climax.  He could defend it as experience, but that’s dancing too close to bull-fighting with the well-dressed Puritans who live in airport bathroom stalls, passing judgment and gas.

My sci-fi (if you choose to call it that -- some say there’s not enough sci) is feminist, I guess:  that of Ursula LeGuin (more than Atwood) because the Pacific archipelago of Puget Sound is a place I know.  Her portrait of the cultures is almost stronger than the desire and identity, but Ged wears the monk robe, confronts the wind, and is infected with a small black scuttling thing that could be taken as a disease.  He’s a boy, the essence of boy, and finds a niche rather than aspiring to a throne.  He relates to both the small clinging companion in his hood and to the dragons that climb the skies as though they were rockets.

Ged

“Genocide” was copyrighted in 1988.  It is defiantly and erotically obscene and not a chronological narrative, but vividly the product of one haunted mind in a devastating time.  The latest work, “Just Before the Cure” probably cannot be copyrighted, though it is composed, written, and filmed mostly in 2015 by a group of boys.  It is a pastiche, a jumble, remembered nightmares colliding, the product of argument among boys about things they know, a harangue, a tantrum, and a love story (inevitably). Photos, videos and music smash into bitter surrealism.  A lot has happened in the 27 years since Genocide, but not enough.  One thing that has happened is that Barrus has been pushed by activism from a “solitary genius” sort of mode into this group performance that is both much older and much newer.

ROUND AND ROUND

Wheel.  Helix.  Screw. Circling, gyring, spiraling, orbiting, twining.  I used to let the kids at Heart Butte watch a movie on Friday afternoons -- the remnant still in attendance -- on condition that they would let me talk, supplying commentary both technical and about the plot-line, which they sometimes lost in their admiration of explosions and search for sex.  I would point out how the set designers of sci-fi used those huge factory twenty-foot-across air evacuation fans, along with hanging chains and dripping water, to indicate danger, industrial power and a pulse beat, a drum beat, a heart beat.  Pretty soon they were talking about “Mrs. Scriver’s fans.”  They didn’t mean the kind that form clubs. 

I didn’t think of the mammoth “London Eye” or “Millennium Wheel” because it hadn’t been built yet.  “When erected in 1999 it was the world’s tallest Ferris wheel until surpassed first by the 520 ft Star of Nanchang in 2006 followed by the 541 ft Singapore Flyer in 2008 and lastly the 550 ft High Roller in 2014. Supported by an A-frame on one side only, the Eye is described by its operators as "the world's tallest cantilevered observation wheel.”   BBC thrillers love having spies meet near it.   Of course it’s thrilling to be up so high, and the machinery feels risky.  But consider the above brag-phrase word-by-word:  world’s (universal); tallest (prestige in a hierarchical world); cantilevered (one-sided, overhanging); observation (The EYE!  The eye in the sky.  Watching.)

Jantzen Beach ferris wheel in early days

I used to love the ferris wheel that was permanent at Jantzen Beach in Portland.  Most of all, “parks” like the one in Jantzen Beach are industrial; machinery used as entertainment, sources of income, controlled mysteriously by mechanics one hopes know what they are doing -- like the people who fix our cars. Or, well, rocket scientists. Because machinery is dangerous, inhuman. 

The wheel and the incline -- Ferris wheels and also roller coasters, “oh, the rush!”  Basic physics that kids internalize in their play.  The wheels of the bicycle, the skate board.  The machinery of an entertainment park is festooned with lights, a structural marquee for a theatre of internal adrenaline.  Even to see it is to get a little jolt.  If you read in the paper about someone being killed on a ride, it's a bigger jolt.

Happy Days at Jantzen Beach, riding the merry-go-round with my father, 1941

When I was just graduating from the eighth grade, fully grown, my family drove to Salem to the State Fair where my father had business to do with his job for Pacific Supply Cooperative. Five years earlier a car crash concussion had changed his personality, making him far more violent and intolerant.  My brothers and I were quarreling in the back seat.  My father lost his temper, pulled the car over, dragged me out, bent me over the car trunk and spanked me as hard as he could.  Today someone might stop and accuse him of sexual assault.

Already humiliated and rebellious, at the fairgrounds I went on rides by myself.  One was a tower where the people each sat in a swing seat dangling at the end of a chain and then the center turned fast enough to make the chains move out by centrifugal force until the seats were sideways.  It WAS scary. 

When I got off, my parents and some family friends were standing there white-faced.  The friends had witnessed this kind of ride when one chain broke. The victim’s body was recovered from the parking lot where it had smashed a car.  If that had happened to me right then, I would not have minded.  I wanted to be out of control.  No-guilt suicide, instant death, I’ll show YOU.  Typically, no one talked about it.  Ever.  A photo exists because my father hid behind his camera, his little machine.

When one reads something that expresses such an indelible but secret moment, there is a special thrill of recognition.  Even the milder little surprises of the crazily laughing life-size puppet woman and the distorting mirrors of the Fun House or the Tunnel of Love where things flash on and off or things jump out can give us a pleasant bump of adrenaline.  The robot fat lady exploits the “uncanny valley,” a term to explain how something that seems human is at first attractive but then if the inhuman indicators can’t be resolved, it becomes uncomfortable and finally repulsive, even terrifying.  Zombie.

Terror of clowns has become a staple of horror movies.  A children’s ward in a hospital was decorated with murals of clowns, but had to be repainted because the kids hated it.  John Wayne Gacy didn’t help.  I’m puzzled by the attraction of adults to the idea that clown disguises and shticks can be funny and rewarding, but that’s a different essay.

zombie?

Industrially based thrills are far more basic, anchored in our muscles, our infant fear of falling, the necessity of trusting machinery to lift, cantilever, drop, and rock us.  And yet we seek to challenge ourselves, our physical limits, and we do.  Modern urban life requires it daily on subways, in elevators, in traffic, in airplanes, on ferries.  We’re also aware of the cameras that watch everything, the alarms -- some silent and some we WISH were silent, like car alarms.  Sirens.  And now drones.

“Matrix”  cleverly exploited the “uncanny valley” from the inside, playing off one’s own felt identity against illusion in both what you see and what you are.  The internet has meant that our inner selves can be accessed or -- in the reverse -- projected out to others.  Images, sounds, and their arrangement can pluck the strings of our connectome.  Instead of an industrial source of entertainment, in a cybernetic amusement “park” you park your butt in front of a screen.  Or wear the “eye” on your own spectacles.

Extra-human additions to the sensorium (the first level of thinking) require response to speed, strangeness and certain kinds of danger, challenge the brain with a lot of sorting and editing work (the second level) in order to know what the body ought to do.  Say something?  Run? Shoot? (third level).  Then we come to the influence of the “fourth brain,” the community.  What is the family response?  (Denial, control, punishment?)  What is the response of friends? (Understanding, intervention?)  What is the denial/explanation embedded in whatever larger communities a person might discover, including those of literary genres like sci-fi or medical mysteries or psych texts?   “Game of Thrones”?

This essay is also meant to address GLBTQX, whose worlds may seem so uncanny to others -- far less now that we realize that they were here all along, not some weird tribe likely to attack us.  Because it is a distinction based on sex, which is an entitlement for only adults in our society, gay kids find themselves criminalized by their exploration of their natural impulses.  Their communities are suppressed, displaced.  Their internal felt uncanniness makes them identify with werewolves, vampires and wildlings.  Authorities intent on capture (“rescue”, “help”) only makes them run away -- if they aren’t thrown out already as faulty freaks.  Criminalized, they are locked up.   Tim Barrus, in his short-story anthology “Genocide”, conflates the carnival ferris wheel with the holocaust.  The entertainment value of torture -- “broken on the wheel” -- is combined with the destruction of unwanted people.  This is more history than fantasy.

Writers/actors/artists create a virtual community that might be in their own image or might expose the dilemmas of the times.  The environmental community is beginning to talk about how we can handle our emotions when human beings destroy life, which is an achieved fact in many senses.  Senses.  How do we cross the “uncanny valley” to a new way of life that is neither industrial nor digital, neither war nor suppression, hopeful but not smug, not festooned with little slogans but beckoning us toward something transcendent that includes us all? 

THE POEMS OF "GENOCIDE" by Tim Barrus

The management of consciousness is what it means to be human altogether.  When considering poetry, this is the angle of approach that I take:  how is the poet managing his consciousness and how is the reader or hearer’s consciousness affected?  Mrs. Othus, our grade school library teacher who wore a ugly wig but somehow had a husband who was rumored to love her very much, told us our brains were like a field and that thinking wore paths across it where the feet went to and fro.

Many years later when I attended college, the school wanted to pave the muddiest of their campus paths.  There were already paved paths where the students were supposed to go, but they were goat-footed and would not stay on the pre-existing sidewalks.  So the administration simply waited until mud or snow made the student paths obvious and then paved those.   They didn’t like mud.

Poets go on both kinds of paths but there is a kind that tries always to walk on grass, stone, air, to wade in the waterways, to swing from the trees.  Their consciousness wants something new because that’s often where the power is.  And they discover that the forbidden is the most powerful poetry of all, whether it is religious taboo, fenced propriety, or simply deadly.

If one lives a forbidden life, let’s say on a beach somewhere remote, or squatting in a ruined building (there are so many now, esp. in Detroit), or a small town where everyone knows what’s happening and no one wants to rock the boat so they are silent, then true poetry will reflect that.  But who will read it?  How does one get the writing to the reader or listener?  Today we know an answer is electronics, but that does not solve the problem.

Mrs. Othus was a liberal who believed in protocol:  “This is how to take a book off the shelf,” she taught us.  “Slip your fingers in between books -- do not pull from the top of the back of the binding.”  It’s like grabbing a poet by the back of his collar, though these days they tend to wear t-shirts and their books are all paperbacks, maybe hand-sewn.  Mrs. Othus was a BBC type before there was television.  She was strict, almost clerical.  Some students hated her.  She saw something in me and urged me to read “Pilgrim’s Progress,” so I did.  It was the path to destruction, paved with good intentions.  I had lots of those.  Destruction turned out to simply be deconstruction.

In high school Mrs. Tyler was our teacher of American Literature.  We read Whitman and she taught us to admire F.O. Matthiessen.  The high school had a primrose festival in the spring but I never competed so never found the path.  As an adult, I was friends with Mrs. Tyler, retired now, frail as a sparrow and all big eyes, so she bought tickets for theatre and I drove her car.  We saw “Chorus Line,” and a ballet about being gay, which I only thought I understood but she really did.  We didn’t talk about it.  What would have happened if we had?

Now I walk direct across the prairie to the horizon and pass the piled or scattered bones of many ideas.  I never take my books off the shelf by their backs because they stack up beside my chair.

I have friends who have lived obscene lives:  Ob (outside) and scene (the stage defined by the pro-scenium) which divides the actors from the audience in the days when every play was a passionate attempt to make the gods stop punishing us, to discover our crimes, to offer sacrificial bribes.  It was a search for justice.

The hydraulics of human bodies is managed by blood which is what supplies the fuel for everything -- including sex -- by providing the molecules of joy and relief, engorging the membranes, carrying the toxics left from former lovers.  The poetry of “Genocide” is the tracing of these trajectories as they plummet through lives of nonconformists, escapees from both school and teachers.  “Schooling” in some contexts is a painful forcing of obedience, using violence.

Education happens all the time on its own terms because it is the way that consciousness manages itself.  It is the way brains grow through time, but one of the things a person learns is that looking over the shoulder does not kill Eurydice, but rather one’s younger self.

i am old

tired now

i want to die

my genocide visions are humble

even squalid i laugh

not bitterly but with

ruinous soul

as honest as the stoic sun.

Those who dare adventures out there on the edge of the world where there are dragons, have not wasted their time, have not been “ordinary.”  (Nothing is worse than being “ordinary.”  Both Mrs. Othus and Mrs. Tyler knew that, but danger kept them quiet.)

“Fucksweet Turbulence”

sunrise somewhere off the venezuelan coast

our boat is old and it leaks

my latino lover this so-called revolutionary. . .

any books just books can get you shot

drug smugglers are fed to sharks in a place where

everyone smuggles something the revolutionaries here

are mainly children when all of your brothers are murdered

you become a revolutionary.

Recently this period in history has been keeping books on atrocity:  how many killed, how much destroyed, where are they, what is their DNA, who claims them, where is the art that used to hang on their walls?

. . . i know slashing

twilight and I want an accounting

of what has been done

a full accounting of every small

insignificant horror because there

is nothing insignificant about

horror the books must be put in perfect

economic shape being mellow and all

There is only one respite, as these stories record.

tears

are interludes the stage

the bed the mystery

you slept on my

chest.

but

genocide

boys

melt

slipping 

away

while

you

hold

them

tightly

genocide

boys reach

with 

tender strength

chests

flared 

into 

manhood 

reaching.

beyond

the 

realm

Water seems to have no paths, but in truth they do.  Differences in temperature, gradients of saline, deep variation in the terrain below the flow, and always the wind -- that metaphor for spirit -- taking one’s boat by its blushing sails.

What possible way can an old woman much more like Mrs. Othus or Mrs. Tyler (except that they ended in lovely apartments in retirement towers where no cats were allowed) ever relate to a renegade guerrilla who shepherds boys across the abyss piled with skulls?  

Yin and Yang can be closer to each other than same to same.  

. . . we 

will never be retired from passion

my cats and I sit in rockers on the 

front porch stoned my cats drink too

much rum we are so alike believing 

that there has to be some deep enigmatic

significance to a collection of sea shells

gathered by boys drunk on sunset

. . .  we are not retired from kisses

Don’t get too excited.  It’s all metaphor.  It’s all words.  We’re merely managing our consciousnesses.  We’re human beings.

(All poetry quotes from "Genocide" by Tim Barrus.)