Work in Progress
Life
Daily Living
The work in progress is life–that simple, that encompassing. I've always used my creative and intellectual work as a tool for the exploration of being alive, and now I see that the tools I use in daily living and the experiences, perceptions, and changes that emerge from them are as much my work as are writing and performing.
The phrase "work in progress" feels beside the point and inaccurate because it conventionally designates creative work that results in a product, a final result, ready for the marketplace: selling for money, working towards recognition and fame. In the process of self-creation, the creator is the art, soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body. Neither that entity nor its actions is a performance. That creator is real, whether I'm presenting ideas at a conference or talking with a street person who's just asked me for money. In those and all situations I am my aesthetic and erotic self-creation, and creating that soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body is happening every moment.
Self-Care and Self-Study
Aesthetic and erotic self-creation comes about through self-care and self-study. Primary tools in my self-care and self-study include the following, which I list along with reasons for their appeal and some other particulars about my involvement in them.
Scholarship
Reading, reasoning, and analytical thinking.
Bodybuilding
Muscular strength and shape. I discontinued bodybuilding in 2008.
Yoga
Asana, meditation, and studying ancient yogic texts. I began to practice and study yoga before I finished college.
Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy
Exploring with brilliant teachers the depth of myself. Both have been men. My psychoanalytic experience was from my late 20s into my early 30s. Psychotherapy began in 2001 and continues into the present.
Beauty, economy, and necessity
Beauty, economy, and necessity are foundational pleasures for me. These days they spontaneously apply themselves in writing and performing as they do in eating, cooking, moving my body, connecting with people, choosing and arranging the material elements that create my home, buying and wearing clothes, picking a book, an aesthetician, acupuncturist, yoga studio, or travel destination, be it the Missouri Ozarks or Tamil Nadu.
Beauty is a cultivation of self and surroundings through feeling the subtleties of each.
Economy means attentive management rather than sparing use or scarcity.
Necessity ensures, to the best of my ability, that shoulds and have-tos dissolve before they lead to wasted energy, time, and words, and such selectivity and discrimination unfix ways that I've written and performed, so that my own flexibility surprises me, letting ideas and texts reshape themselves, freeing myself from forms and processes of writing and performing that have become routine and redundant to me.
Art Works
Writings and performances come about these days in unpredictable ways. They experiment with me—my patience, my habit-breaking happiness, my passion for the craft of writing, my love for men, my research into bodily sensation and sutras, my reading Sherlock Holmes, and the excitement and peace I feel in friendships, overall my willingness to be who I am now, in this gala of many names.
The sutra could become my preferred form of writing. I've wanted to write a sutra for a number of years, and that desire fulfilled itself in The Glamour of Being Real. I love the satisfaction of distillation, utter pointedness, and no waste. I love combining elements of a simple, rich, and profound ancient literary genre with very contemporary subject matter. Sutra is Sanskrit and it means thread. The English suture derives from it. A sutra is a literary form “sewn” of individual sutras, each a concise statement, which makes the whole sutra intentionally congenial to memorization by a student. A sutra is devoted to a particular subject, and the most famous sutra is Patañjali's Yoga Sutra, written over 2,000 years ago.
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