ANONYMOU[S] is a brief series of texts submitted, read, and published anonymously, with the agreement of the author not to reveal themself.
And burne me o Lord, with a fiery zeale
Of thee and thy house, which doth in eating heale.
— Donne, Holy Sonnets V
A lot of what’s false and malicious in the world comes from people harboring just that idea: that they could ever be safe, clean, saved. Thinking you could be is the same as thinking you are. A negative existence hungry for vacuums and casualties – a vacuum being not only where there’s nothing, but where nothing ever was. Impossible. My name’s _____.
There’s images, scenes I’m leaving out of my experience with religion, but I think from the effects I’m reporting on you get the idea of what must have happened. A description is only that, I think – the inside of the outline, its contents, are filled by the future, the effect wrought on life despite all intentions. I think we can’t remember everything that’s happened and how it happened, what it looked like, for this reason: to show us the sense of things. So, while not enviable, the fate of vision in Dante’s hell, where the damned only foresee the future and are ignorant of the present, really isn’t that bad, as it’s more true than good.
I tried to write this about my mother and already I’m talking about hell. Great.
Just, when I was a child one of my first memories of being punished happened after church. I think I was three. Another boy behind us, I remember thinking he looked a lot like me, or reminded me of myself in some way. For I mean no reason, I turned my head around and stuck out my tongue. Maybe he cried, or told his mother loudly in the quiet church, but my mother took my hand and we left. I don’t recall my punishment but, there was the sensation, even then, that the kid who did that misbehavior just wasn’t her son, she was more confused than enraged.
I tell that story because, a lot of my life, I tried to look at my childhood with the presumption that older people and peers hated me, that what I did was in reaction to that. However, what the hell did that other boy do? A few other things happened like that. Just, I wonder if, or I didn’t even wonder, I merely did. That part is still with me, a powerful interior kernel, and it’s where the writing comes from, and it’s not necessarily where the sex comes from but when I’m shifting somebody I’m in harmony with it. When I’m not writing or lustful I try and pretend it’s nothing.
The robber barons that control this world, with billions of dollars each – you only get that way by doing something wrong so frequently that you become carnivore to the repetition.
I had a lot of trouble sleeping as a kid: for longer than I would have indulged me, my parents checked up on me, in my room, to support and soothe if I was so nervous I couldn’t lose consciousness. Especially my mom. And I think of how I felt, then, when after hours of feeling petrified she’d appear and ask what was the matter.
Years and years and years and years later, in my early twenties, we cried in my childhood bedroom because my grandfather, her father, was losing his memory. I never felt less alone.
I’ve read before – these are two people I feel uncomfortable quoting because the examples of their giant lives make mine seem puny and crooked – from Baldwin and hooks, together, that a considerable portion of male rage has to do with their adolescent or late-childhood realization that their mothers, once seemingly all-powerful, have comparatively little power in the patriarchy that might outlive them all[1]. Also: that white people, although their lives might be free and easy, will make art that seeks to draw blood, makes it sound like they’ve never laughed, because of what Baldwin consciously called emphasis and not perspective (the former implies more of a choice)[2]. Thinking a lot about that, I’d add that, for the weird community white people make in this world, we have in common the practice of not only denying sadness, but swearing an incapacity to harbor it, that we don’t have the apparatus to even sense sorrow: so, when we do feel, or fuck, or make art, we’d like to see the blood we know is on our ghostly hands.
Art doesn’t do that. If being in the church a little taught me anything, it’s the importance of faith – if only because in church I found none of it, but the very real evidence of need, absence, possibility. I will live to find the words that know how much I loved my mother. And life is only change.
[1] The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, 2004.
[2] The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 1985.
minor literature[s] 