This essay appears in a recent issue of NEVERLAND zine and I also read an excerpt from it for Our Gala opening Auckland Pride for 2020
Is joy even possible in a world as tempered with malice as this one? I feel like my capacity for joy has become mangled, a distorted lens which has been forced to adapt to a foreign diet of worry and violence. In this way the strangest things give me joy; crisis, the prospect of violence, of collective disaster, the death of a beloved celebrity without whom the average citizen (reared on a diet of celluloid) can't fathom the rotation of the earth. I remember as a kid joy came more easily. But did it really, or am I misremembering on purpose to more expertly perform the role of jaded adult? Disappointment, lack of expectation; these are affects which shelter us from the hurt of expecting the best for ourselves, for others, for this world. Disaffection is what sustains the veneer of functionality, an evacuation of every larger, more troublesome emotion. Even if it's a positive one, like joy.
There's generally no room for joy in the course of a day.
Take the work environment, especially if you're interfacing with the general public who, as a rule, are made up of the dizzyingly normal, the unconscionably complaisant, the workaday damned who dream of retirement only because it's like being unemployed but without the stigma. If Max Weber's admittedly flawed arguments about capitalism, coercive productivity and Protestantism are to be believed, this knee-jerk future-orientation in which hay is made while the sun is out and gratification is endlessly forfeited until an 'after', is entirely compatible with the habitual projection of the Christian soul into the afterlife by which all reality is a 'worldly' trial-run for better days (a better eternity). Obviously this does two things; it denigrates the physical world by upholding a spiritual Beyond as superior (subsequently establishing a premise of resent for the coarser body), and it also practically institutes cognitive dissonance, asking people to constantly split their attention between their direct experience and a symbolically maintained dream of Tomorrow at all times. Nothing can be enjoyed for it's own sake, everything gains or loses value run by the ledger of Heaven and Hell.
I can only speak to Christianity (we were Baptists) but let's assume that most organised religions with a monotheistic premise operate along similar lines, dangling otherworldly bliss as a carrot for people to lunge towards by aligning their behaviours with a preset code of ethical and moral behaviour. It seems to me ironic that the very concept of God, which in more psychoanalytic terms might be equated with the joyous dissolution of form and a direct oceanic experience of life as a numinous totality, gets historically domesticated; forgetting it's ecstatic roots for the most part and doing it's best to undermine the originally joyous religious experience of touching the divine, with bureaucracy and drudgery (and let's not forget those Catholic specials guilt and shame).
Sex has forever been a pill for me, as I'm sure it's been for anyone. New toys have something of a feverish allure and when you're slouching towards thirty still maintaining the HBO-fuelled delusion that adolescence extends into the late twenties (like myself), then the allure is probably yet to fade. I remember vividly the ways in which my early brushes with religion braided with my burgeoning pre-adolescent sexuality. Throughout my childhood I had those vertiginous feelings of attraction (mostly to parental figures and older family friends) which could only be detailed as such when looking back, but which at the time felt like some magical mystery narcotic dropping into the dormant pit of my long-sober body. The awful sobriety of childhood was for me comprised of a poverty-violence combo (which I'm only just feeling like I have some functionality and perspective over), and as anyone who grew up poor and gay and (semi) battered can tell you, the experience is both alienating and (subsequently) incredibly lonely.
Lonely because you see these less turbulent lives happening around you. Agonisingly close, as close as the distance between yourself and the desk of the kid next to you in class who has branded snacks for lunch and not the economy version which doesn't even have a characteristic logo or anthropomorphised spokes-animal, which makes you feel like crying every time you think about it because it just seems to encapsulate the whole sorry mess your life is at this point, which you're powerless to effect or even articulate as a child; and so you squirrel away at recess and huff your little off-brand snack even though you'd rather throw it in the bin as a raised fist to the dark fates which have cursed you so, but you can't because you're also overeating to compensate for the stress of it and because of which you can add body dysmorphia to the growing list of developmental issues that will crop up when puberty finally hits.
Which it does. Like a mushroom cloud over Nagasaki.
And then there's church. That's where I met my first sexual partner at age eleven. Jesus Christ.
Basically Christ did two things for me as a kid; firstly, he was ripped as fuck and strung up on a cross in an overt bdsm scenario, which I'd discovered I liked at age six after seeing an episode of Sinbad The Sailor (a bad live-action version from the nineties). In that particular episode Sinbad had been captured and imprisoned by a long running nemesis who happened to be female and got played by some daytime never-was like a hammy femme fatale who didn't know if she wanted to fight or fuck. I got the gist and for the next few years privately percolated my crotch-twinge at this and it's implications, until passively learning that my premature discovery of finding both men and scenes of bondage hot was for all intents and purposes taboo.
Enter Christ, who not only ticked my long-ruminating box of rippling suffering sub, but also came pre-stamped with societal and parental approval. They encouraged, nay exhorted me to 'have a relationship' with Him. Sexual confusion and childhood loneliness twined powerfully, wrapping round my dick and heart like an effigy-crown of thorns. In Christ I had found the perfect spiritual-psycho-sexual outlet and proceeded to nurture this trade-marked fantasy figure like the whirlwind love with Duncan James from boy-band Blue I secretly wanted to be having.
Say what you will; fantasy or not I can only remember this short time of discovery in my life as one of unadulterated, blistering and unearthly joy. It was also the beginning of a chronic masturbation phase that only petered out in my early twenties (and which as a habit flares up sometimes depending on certain stressors). But masturbation is an incredibly reductive and frankly inaccurate descriptor for the kinds of intense erotic preoccupation with Jesus Christ I was going through, my lonely childhood suddenly being filled with holy/rosy light; I could literally feel the rippling biceps of this agent of divine forgiveness wrapping around me at the drop of a hat, because the church was telling me I need only think of Him and the Holy Spirit descended like a trade-marked veil of ambience. So think of Him I did, often, cultivating the 'relationship' the adults around me kept telling me was the cornerstone of our religion.
The ironies were not lost on me even as a horny tween, that certain elders in their anxiety around my effeminate behaviours would gently remind me that homosexuality was a sin, perhaps convinced they were diverting me from the devil's program even while they were telling me to nose-dive passionately into a divine romance with Jesus. Relationships with other men were off the table I realised, maybe not because faggotry was inherently bad but because Jesus gets jealous, because when it comes to the gays he wants to be the only pole in the room, the divine pole by which all other poles are measured and deemed lacklustre, micro, or sub-par.
We took family trips often which in my mind counteracted the various darknesses any childhood consists of, and which were especially precious in pushing back the claustrophobia of a father with a gaping wound and a short temper. On these trips the great New Zealand pastoral became emblematic of god's grace and beauty, and driving through pristine kiwi landscape beside my otherwise bored sister and behind my inanely chatty mother (who talked incessantly to camouflage her battery) and my brooding father at the wheel, I would project myself out the window into passing trees and grasses and braid natural beauty to my boyfriend Christ and by the time we'd reach our destination my dick would've been hard for roughly three hours and I'd run to the bathroom and basically only brush the head before exploding in a maelstrom of shuddering Nature-y Jesus-y joy.
Mea culpa.
Is there much of a difference between pleasure and joy? If they weren't so similar then people wouldn't so frequently mistake their vices for absolutions. Makes me wonder if perhaps pleasure exists in the foundation of joy like fruits and vegetables in the ass-layer of the nutrition pyramid; not synonymous but related. And yet the working world for most people is comprised of the opposite ethos, one of delayed gratification and forfeiting immediate pleasures for the yonder lands of retirement and security (and the non-secular equivalent Heaven). Is pleasure and it's cousin joy entirely virtual then, veritable states of mind? Should I be manipulating my oxygen intake via mindfulness workshops and namaste-ing my way towards a cognitive framework rinsed of the cultural particularities of existing in this country, in this economy, in this time, wading out to a purer being free of ideology and bias?
Partying is kindof a thing. I find it ironic that for so many 'radical' subcultures the steady consumption of drugs and alcohol remains internal to group dynamics, as if the dire reality one is combatting (or even passively resisting) necessitates a diet of numbing agents. I understand because my thought processes have me gravitating towards numbing agents too, nothing overly insidious but there's definitely not much I won't do under the banner of Recreation. There's a scene in Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac in which Charlotte Gainsbourg's titular sex-addict describes the only two kinds of people, and that's the kind of person who when shortening their fingernails clips the left hand first, offset by the kind of person who firstly clips the right. Obviously clipping the left hand first signals a person that gives primacy to pleasurable pursuits while the right-hand clippers are in the camp of god-bothering future-oriented goal-setters, delaying the easier route as they're convinced it always pays to do the work first, as if purchasing pleasurable experiences through their toil. Christianity itself as a martyr-cult kindof bolsters this logic that good things are paid for through labour and/or suffering, seeing as their icon-towards-salvation is a tortured human body strung up in homoerotic repose, awaiting his death after which it's alleged he dipped down to Hell and retrieved the keys to immortality. Or something.
In the film Stellan Skarsgard is attentively listening to Gainsbourg's analogy and feels he's in the right as a right-hand clipper, because certainly good things come to those with the work ethic to meet the harder task first. Gainsbourg looks at him bemused and explains that clipping the left hand first is not some lazy hedonistic manoeuvre but also the only clear rational decision, as once you've clipped the easier hand there's only the right hand left, beyond decision and subsequently the 'easy' remainder. By leaning into pleasurable pursuits the path emerges with simple clarity, desire as a motor propelling it's subjects through a variety of tasks and phases with the surety of a divine roadmap. It would seem pleasure and it's natural precursor desire, in Von Trier's opinion, contain an almost evolutionary providence in as much as they remove the agonistic necessity of choice itself. They resume 'flow', re-inscribing the human animal inside nature's script, giving us back from acculturated abstraction into God's channel.
Within the confines of a film about sex addiction (if only as allegory for 'agape' love which in Grecian classics is akin to divine-whorish love of everyone and everything), Gainsbourg's coda is that joy as an affect of alignment with god's will can be attained via unbridled pursuits of pleasure. You can literally fuck your way into heaven.
Happiness gets talked about a lot but I'm convinced it's nothing more than a consumer affect, an ambience of sedation via the implanted desires that make for quiet lives, the kinds of lives seasoned with a house and kids and cars and regular vacations to tropical climates and foreseeable retirement plans. Happiness is probably the litmus of a single way of life, one which doesn't come naturally to a lot of people because it's concocted and imposed by a billionaire class which profits from our compliance. Obviously domestic existences aren't foreign concepts relayed to the public on billboards; there's history to be considered and all the acculturated incidentals, the happenstances and byproducts that in history's unending stream can ossify into legitimate phenomena. In the sweep of history an accident or a joke can become a program. I mean look at Trump's hateful brand of populism. Who could've predicted that the next 'leader of the free world' would be an ex-reality-television star? Today's theatre of the absurd can easily become tomorrow's feat du jour.
Things like Fordism and heteronormativity have a lot to do with the ways in which the middle classes have historically organised themselves. And yet this far into the new millennium with the very concept 'middle-class' being an archaism of economically more stable times, there remains a sense of terror when we are faced with anything other than the prescribed, IG-ready lifestyles. Maybe success paradigms (apparently thresholds to greater personal fulfilment now since the labour force can fluidly act through freelance channels and autonomously dictate it's own hours and rates), have if anything become more oppressive when failure (and it's subsequent losses) is pinned to the worker, and not the rigged system; meanwhile governments jerk off bigger and badder corporations and pretend like draining the public sector is a good thing.
Fuck happiness. It's for cattle and I might've been born cattle into a society which has diminishing value for human life, but I certainly won't be rolling over and offering my half-alive carcass as nutrients for the overlords with a limp medicated smile. Happiness is the drift that makes us play nice while the house is on fire. And clearly it's neurochemical effects are on the wane because everybody is fucking depressed, vibrating with apocalyptic anxieties and (barely) existing somewhere in the dissonance between business as usual and total annihilation. After pointing out the ideological nastiness of Christianity putting suffering on a pedestal in the visage of Christ, there's also a part of me which finds the prospect of marching gleefully to my own death, embracing all the needling drudgeries of the gig economy and the consumer-addictions proffered as pitiful consolations (with which we're meant to exercise 'mature' levels of restraint), as reason to be joyous. To wit, happiness is a middle-lane affect making us manageable units in a grid of quiet despair. Happiness is a very social feeling while joy stands opposed to the flimsy metrics of workaday conduct, in it's feeling and doing being decidedly anti-social. It's too big for the office. Happiness gilds the slow decline into oblivion with the delusion of longevity, positing survival for it's own sake as an overarching value.
Fuck. That.
I know I'm going to die, I don't need the blinder. I don't need the myth of longevity or security, because if the twentieth century has taught us anything it's that no one anywhere at any time is 'safe'. Safety's about as real as an easy fix for climate change.
So pardon me while I embrace anxiety as a lifestyle and let it ravage my body, alternating between pitch-black and crystalline blips of otherworldly clarity in which I'm reminded that nothing matters and everything sucks and death will relativise all of my life experiences into neither good nor bad but something else entirely. I guess you could call it negative transcendence or something but here in my body it still registers as joy.
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