Essay: When A Body Was A Shore

Painting above by Agnus Martin

This essay goes deeper into the ideas covered by my most recent musical release Salt. You can listen to it here.

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“Come on down and claim your prize/ It’s nothing like they advertise.”

— John Moreland

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Touch — most malleable of senses.

Comfort. Graze. Calm.

Hold. Rest. Warmth.

Split. Puncture. Burn.

Climax. Pulsate. Rapture.

Each word sputtering into another, each word having more to do with the who and when than the what.

It is through touch that we discover proof of our belonging to this world, and our endless precarity within it. Pull each hand away and we etiolate, turn translucent. Without connection we are ice melting. Forgotten, cell by cell, watching time diverge around us without a second glance.

Our reaching is a tangled mess of personal history and cultural baggage, of ideas we haven’t yet realized aren’t ours. How do we begin to uncover what we want? And I don’t mean to say we want, or think we want, but that we require.

Demand.

Need.

Long for.

Yearn for.

Pray for.

Like a break in the storm,

or a drop of rain.

For men born into patriarchal culture, the relationship between touch and what is actually desired has been stripped of its depth, to the point where such questions are rarely (if ever) considered. This lack of intrigue not only reduces all parties involved but facilitates situations that are at best unfairly weighted and at worst dangerous.

Societal messaging dictates that tenderness and intimacy for heterosexual men are primarily associated with sexual relationships. To phrase this in a more direct manner, for a heterosexual man to be touched in any tender capacity, it almost exclusively has to come from a sexual partner. Many, myself included, have subsequently felt pressured to change the way we are to increase our chances of such opportunities. Meaning, in order to have compassion, rest, or an outlet for pain, men must reshape themselves into the prevailing ideal of the masculine, or alternatively, learn how to deceive. For I have no memory of ever lying to gain power over someone, but I have continuously lied to avoid being questioned about subjects I feel shame around, all the ways I am failing to be an adult male.

Chris Rock, in a famous bit, exclaims,

“Only women, children, and dogs are loved unconditionally. A man is only loved under the condition that he provides something.”

This same idea is put academically here by Bell Hooks:

“Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being. In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are. Their value is always determined by what they do.”

Interestingly, when I have spoken about this to women, they disagree. Yet, to the men filling comment sections beneath clips of Jocko Willink or Kevin Samuels, it is life’s main fact. This division of thought is understandable, as it is the daily lives of men, not women, that are inundated with this thesis. Guileful sexist messaging doesn’t just disseminate with a megaphone from Jordan Peterson, or Reddit, or Donald Trump, but subtly, from friends, family, and yes, even partners. 

We follow the map of the world provided at birth, only to find at some point it is false. We are then forced to confront a painful quandary: if the majority believe a lie, does that lie metamorphosize into truth? If the culture states where fulfillment is to be found, and you cannot find it there, it appears that you yourself are the one who is wrong. And so, it is you who has to bludgeon your sensitivities, to believe in and even proselytize the reduction of love into something earned, something utilitarian, something compartmentalized, to be neatly set between work, alcohol and exercise. The conclusion presents itself as this: To hold the external, you must set fire to the internal.

Subjugating sex to biology, to a set of physical actions that produce pleasurable results, it is easy to overlook what we may ask of consummation; the wish for a key, a refuge, a disappearance, validation, grounds for resurrection.

Writing this, I collated my awakenings to red wine headaches, dried lips, pressure in the skull, nerve endings triggering leave (good morning) — the heavy of another unsuccessful attempt to discover myself through movement with another. An expedition to clamber upon a vantage point, to see my life from a new pair of eyes, ignorant to the questions I posed to hearts that knew no more than my own.

A pebble echoes ripples. Each water-drawn string widens until its eventual disappearance. I longed for something more. Total excavation. An asteroid.

Tilt closer. Breath stutter. Lungs lose signal.

Gentle heat of mouth. Salted breeze, skip from white crest

To ink blue in midday June.

A hand guides where hair meets neck.

Soft spot in the centre. Grass from weeks of rain.

The joyful negotiation of unclothing. Shy, mischievous smiles.

“I don’t want to go just yet.”

I have read that the removal of taboo is averse to the expansion of desire. As human beings, we have an innate need to push against, to briefly belly under the fence. We want to feel we are doing something ‘wrong’. For pleasure to reach its full heights, it can’t be applauded. Contrast this with the therapeutic ideal that shame should be exposed, lit up for all to see, in order for what is false to fall away. We can’t tell the validity of our thoughts until we see what expressions cross the faces of our confidants. 

In the circles I belong to, most are comfortable with anatomy and physical recounting. I have heard stories sketching a vast palette of hunger; no one has spoken to me about tears following consensual (and for all accounts ‘good’) sex. Yet, I have experienced the rocky breathing on my chest enough times, with enough partners to make it more than an anomaly.

There is something about our need to release, and our wish to do so while being tightly held. It’s as if we require someone to retain our shape, to not allow our suffering (which is a part of us) to slip from this dimension, helplessly out into endless expanse. For much of my life there were subjects I could not broach unless sex was involved. Predictably, this led to unhealthy situations and provided a compelling reason to stay within them. It also placed an enormous weight upon whoever I was with — tons and tons of emotional labor — save me, please, only you can.

Oblivious as I was, I viewed myself as giving, when in many ways it was all about me. An unfairness created by my refusal, as Olivia Laing says, to

“Do the work of mending, the work of grief, preparing oneself for the dangerous, lovely business of intimacy.”

Why did I feel I could pose the question of my existence to women whom I had known for a relatively short time, yet, I could not speak about my inner world with people I’d known for years? Why could I tell childhood stories to a casual partner, but I couldn’t open my mouth to my closest friends? Maybe most pointedly, why could I run my fingers compassionately through the hair of a stranger when I could not hug anyone in my family?

In The Will To Change, Bell Hooks writes:

“Most men think that sex will provide them with a sense of being alive, connected, that sex will offer closeness, intimacy, pleasure. And more often than not, sex simply does not deliver the goods.”

I think of that literary definition of orgasm: la petite mort (the little death). Ten seconds of not having to exist, of disappearing into another. We position our bodies, fricative machinery, a pressure meter rising, as absurdity enters my periphery. Of all disturbing and out of place images, I am a boy again, swerving toy cars about a cityscape carpet as Eve’s apple enters my life — what is the point of this? I am enacting, but I am not living. The physical without authenticity is a styrofoam model of intimacy.

Following the advertised outline of collecting sexual experiences for the sake of numbers alone offers no gifts that stay. Eventually, they run together. Murky vignettes. Flashes in darkness. Some kind of ledger that thinks it proves our worth, and all the duplicities that are told as points of pride. Purely visual memory, drained of every other sense.

A few years ago, during a time of personal upheaval, a woman approached me in the grocery store. We spoke for no more than five minutes, about nothing in particular. Still, I can’t forget her presence, how she treated me with some wild (and by wild, I mean free) kind of kindness. How her energy surrounded and wrapped me without arms. I am sure you’ve met these people, with whom you immediately understand there is no point in posturing. They know your tricks, your masking does not fool here.

How I want to be that for others, to touch without touch. To journey there the first step seems to be to not allow my own deceptions to work on me. To be, as M. Scott Peck says, “totally dedicated to the truth.”

Led to wall. Spun around. Pressed against.

Open palms shift on plaster.

Dark cotton peels, slightly holds in patches.

Salt. Tongue coast vertebrae.

An athlete in overtime’s gentle drop to knees.

Shoulder arch in silvery half light,

 Headlight strobe from the sliver window.

Muscle and bone. Dust prism spotlight —

Look too long, think too deep, wonder of God again,

Wonder how it could ever be otherwise.

Disposed of, lid shut,

We were never here.

I remember, after several separate experiences, a gradual anxiety, its nexus an index finger beneath my left rib. A spilled glass of water released from its vessel, growing then spreading.

I started to believe there was something wrong with me.

Evil.

Broken.

Touch, but not feel.

Inhuman.

Our idea of happiness, of pleasure, has become so diminished that these concepts are now a thinly veiled synonym for escape. Certain substances, the kind of sex we are sold, entertainment — all ways to pull away from the self. If what we long for most is to forget, what does that say about the quality of life we are living? And what are we losing by subscribing to this capitalist formula: to increase pleasure (most of which is avoidance) and decrease pain (much of which is healthy and growing) equals satisfaction. From where I sit, this isn’t working.

It has taken years for me to understand how the tie between touch and feeling has been severed within me. I am just beginning to become conscious of the amount of sustained effort that is needed to reconnect the two, in a world that would prefer if I left them on the floor, frayed, in their own separate corners. It is difficult, to actually listen, to ask questions whose answers I may not want to hear, to extend myself, to create space for another to rest in me.

Pleasure: Any action that enhances and deepens one’s connection to life and/or others.

A long talk with an old friend.

An evening stroll with somebody new.

Or chopping carrots while your love stirs, recounting office drama of names without faces.

That bruised plum sky just after sunset, sitting alone on a city bench.

When I see my friends in love.

The rare feeling draping over me again, that it’s still possible.

Belonging.

Adrianne Lenker sings,

“I don’t want to be the owner of your fantasy, I just want to be a part of your family.”

The extension of family being chosen family. The extension of friends being community.

What I am longing for is a loosening of the strict categorization of relationships and a normalization of expressing personal truth. 

I am not against boundaries, but I am growing to resent the bluntly drawn lines between the titles of our relational roles. What is permissible to speak on with a coworker, a mother, a partner, someone we are seeing, a therapist? The narrowing of where it is acceptable to show all of oneself forces certain roles to bear too much weight. If it takes a village, then let it take a village. We should not settle (or rejoice) for surface-level communities. We are skin, shedding and permeable. Alive. 

To be clear, I am not advocating that one share the depths of their personal trauma to any ears close enough to hear. Rather, I am reminding us that genuine connection is possible with anyone whose path we cross. We hide because we think of emotional displays as inappropriate, reckless even, when it is this alone that holds the potential energy to pull together you and me, and the roads that lead everywhere else.

I know I quote too much, but I am thinking now of the Bill Callahan song where in his assured baritone he states, “When we let go, our arms are open and our hearts are exposed.”

We, as in all of us, not just cisgendered straight men, need to let go, and more importantly, need to risk being exposed. To keep our arms up and our hands balled into fists means that we may reduce our chances of getting hurt, but concurrently it means trading away our ability to fully receive. Softness and all its offshoots deserve a reclamation of habitat beyond the limiting doorways of bedrooms.

How are you, for real? (I love you)

Do you want to sit by the water on Sunday afternoon? (I love you)

Here’s a meme that reminds me of us, at that weird party last summer. (I love you)

We can help you move, just let us know when! (I love you)

It’s not too late. (I love you)

I wrote this for me, and I wrote this for you.

(I love you)