I realise that nothing I say has any truth. I realise that whenever I state a fact I am proving myself a hypocrite. But this does not bother me, I never claimed to be objective or correct and I never claimed to have any morals. Morality is for the weak. Morality is for those who are not connected to the natural intelligence of their own body. There is no need to believe in abstract linguistic constructs when there is a truth made of flesh that is the entirety of our experience in this strange universe. My body is my beacon, I have everything I need. It leads me to green pastures where there is food and rushing water and where the people are waiting for me with kind welcoming eyes.
Recently it has brought me to the city where I am forced to develop extra-sensory skills of a very strange nature. The ability to wear a mask, to cover my body and my voice with shame and inhumanity. The ability to not only write a CV, but to believe I am that CV and I am nothing more than the banal life-denying skills which I weakly have to offer for a job that does not utilise any of the natural and powerful talents that would really make this company come alive. Because in the city we deny life like we deny death. We cover the earth in concrete and we cover our flesh in clothes and make-up; we spray to kill insects and opportunistic plants; we cook our food to make sure it's dead and we criminalise any public displays of the loving act that brings life into the world. We are indeed a strange species and if you haven't noticed then you're not looking, you must be looking down your own pants to make sure your genitals haven't been bitten off yet (by your boss or your girlfriend or your landlord or your prime minister).
Who's going to bail you out when you slavish parents finally grow old and die and leave you weak and unable to cope into the world they co-created while you were growing up and presented you with on your 18th birthday? Is it too late to develop the skills that will provide you autonomy in a world that apparently will not protect you unless you can afford to pay for it? Are you too old at the age of 19 to change your belief systems? You know, the belief system that says that the world is dangerous and does not like me and I have to speak in the same language as the job descriptions I am sent in the mail every time I sleep in past 09.00.
So I stepped out into the world and I keep walking and so far I have not died though I assume I will one day. I am told that everyone dies eventually but the amazing thing is I've been going for 26 years now and still no death. I walk along the side of the road and I am told this is highly dangerous but no car has hit me yet, in fact sometimes they stop to offer me a ride. I get in and turn to my right and there sits another human being, in the driving seat of their huge metallic machine. They have invited me not only into their most expensive and precious toy, they have invited me into their lives and I do not underestimate the trust involved.
I stare straight ahead at where the road is taking us and they do the same, guiding our metal monster safely through this high-speed high-danger environment. Through the exploration of the power of eyeless conversation we find our connection point in the world, we both there is one, for no other purpose than pleasure and curiosity. We have no desire to own each other once a connection has been made because we both know that as soon as the most superficial division comes into our lives my new friend will stop the car and let me out and I will wave goodbye and thank their kindness and again I am exposed to the weather and the concrete and the dangers of being alone in a world that may or may not want to kill me.
If there was any truth in the warnings heaped onto my back by those evil people who think they are good because they have dry vaginas and circumcised penises I would be cowering in the corner of some room I knew I could afford to pay for and I would be low on some drug and wearing my winter clothes and hiding from the light in a cardboard box that will conveniently warp to the shape of the twitches in my anxiety-ridden body. I must be unique in this response because everyone else seems to function relatively well under such pressure, merely developing one of myriad new cancers when it's really time to have a break from work longer than four weeks per annum.
I bathe under waterfalls sometimes and other times I am not even allowed to walk barefoot even if I am doing exactly what everybody else is doing and just watching without the sin of participation. Sometimes I feel an opening in the social haze and I'm not the only one, my friends feel it too, and we can get naked and dance as if we are happy to be alive because we are happy to be alive, rather than in denial about being dead. I would love to see you without clothes. I would love to see you enjoying your body in the sun and the glistening rushing water of the stream. I would love to look into your eyes and see joy shining out like a light and the skin of your entire body radiating divine solar light. I would love for us to roll around on the earth as if we loved her and cover ourselves in her pure damp flesh, and smear it all over our bodies. I would love to take a handful of her drippy brown mud-flesh and cover the area of your back that your arms can't reach and make sure, like me, you are covered for a little while in something that enriches your organism, rather than something which stops perspiration or strips your natural oils.
I love to touch and be touched because I have been incarnated into a physical body in this lifetime and weather or not I am some sort of spiritual entity who will survive this life and go on to better things that I can believe in but not conceive of it makes no difference to the fact that I am here with my body and the feelings it produces and there is a beautiful intensity when we move close to one another and when we exist in love this intense proximity effect is empowering and when we exist in hate we have nothing but muscles and pain and that gets us nowhere and when we deny ourselves with drugs like alcohol and religion we feel nothing and like it (but hate ourselves).
I don't hate God enough to deny the reality he dropped me into for the sake of something which may indeed be as true as the authority-figure tells me it is. It may indeed me true that abstraction is a better way to live than experience, but I choose to experience experience and merely take abstractions into consideration. They have no physical reality I can place in relation to my body, so how can I live my life by these principles?
God told me once that it's okay to be gay, cos this was a concern of mine at the time. I didn't hear his voice, I wasn't lead to some authoritative text or person, it was just obvious to my otherwise confused and horny teenage body. I was just 17 years old when I realised that I couldn't conceive of God denying me, I couldn't conceive of a world without God's love and despite the paranoid anxiety of my mind and the instructive mind of the institutions I allowed to shape me, nothing could change the self-evident reality that I was okay. It later became obvious that the world itself is also okay, despite all propaganda to the contrary.
I casually chose sixth-form classical studies as another one of the subjects that was supposed to brainwash me into being a productive and uncomplaining member of free-market capitalism but this subject and the beautiful teacher who shared it with me introduced us all to another society that was different from ours but one of the primary influences for what we now call Western Civilisation. We were introduced, specifically, to Socrates, who not only loved and appreciated the beauty of young men, but questioned the society into which he was born. He naively questioned the holiest man in Athens about what this holiness abstraction really is and they couldn't figure it out. Some oracle said he was the wisest man around and he said, "Maybe because I realise I'm ignorant," and I said "Ah!"
I think maybe if I don't feel unsafe walking down the street then maybe I am not unsafe and so I can stick out my thumb. And if I don't feel unsafe hitchhiking then maybe hitchhiking isn't dangerous. And if I hitchhike for ten years and meet only wonderful people then maybe people aren't out to get me and maybe the world is not a dangerous place and maybe I can go anywhere and do anything I want, or at least try. I have no desire now or any other time to live in a box so I don't get wet when it rains. I don't need to save for my retirement because I am not planning to spend forty years working and building up a lifestyle in which I need to spend hundreds of dollars a week to maintain the status quo. When I run I scare myself at how fast I can go and how far away I can find myself; it seems when you run you're just keeping yourself stocked with coffee and underwear.
Maybe I'm just a hypocrite, but at least I am free. I don't want to judge you cos I know you're free too and it's okay if you don't want to travel with me, I'll just be a bit lonely without you. I tried living with you in your concrete world and found it profoundly lonely. Your presence was the only light in a dark and confusing world and I would merely bump into things uselessly waiting for you to get home from work at the end of the day. I have no purpose in a place where my instinct is to take off my clothes and there is no context in which I can do this without causing banal conflict and police confrontation. I tried searching the gutter for coins to buy me a ticket to some aspect of this society that I tried to belong to but all I found were half-empty plastic drink bottles and I wasn't sure whether anyone had spat in them before throwing them away or whether the sun had already fermented the fruit juice.
When I am older and my gifts are legitimised I will return and hold your hand for another little while and speak to the people you share your world with, but now I am here, on the beach, breathing in as much of a balance of salty sea-breeze and exhaust fumes I can handle. I am a hypocrite, I don't believe any of this, but I will say it with as much conviction as my moment and my body can personify. I will stand up in front of as many people as want to hear, three or a billion, and speak with all the utter truth I can muster. I will change my mind the next day, but again I am willing to stand up and speak for those willing to listen. I live the best of my abstractions and otherwise rely on the food, water, air and love the planet provide me with. I don't know anything, but I write beautifully.
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