what is this thing called love?
by Douglas Messerli
Byron Ayanoglu, Brad
Fraser, Gerald Hannon, Tomson Highway, Donald Martin, Charlie Pachter, Stan
Persky, Scott Symons, Ken McDougall, Patricia Rozema, Daniel McIver, and Nik
Sheehan (writers), Nik Sheehan (director) Symposium: The Ladder of Love /
1996
In 1996 Canadian
documentary filmmaker Nik Sheehan produced a series, later shown on the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC, Société Radio-Canada), loosely based on
Plato’s Symposium in which various well-known figures of Canadian gay
society were asked to express their ideas about love. The resulting short
films, of different lengths, were filmed over a period of 2-3 years, gathered,
and shown at the Montréal Film Festival.
I
have been unable to see a collected feature version of Sheehan’s Symposium,
but I believe there must have ten sequences featuring Byron Ayanoglu, Brad
Fraser, Gerald Hannon, Tomson
Highway, Donald Martin, Charlie Pachter, Stan
Persky, Scott Symons, Ken McDougall, and Patricia Rozema, small films about
each of them I found on various different sites on the internet. The order of
the segments below has been determined by the way the cast members were listed
in the IMBd listing. I have kept the subtitles associated with each of the
films I found, three of them appearing on Sheehan’s own Cell Productions
YouTube collations, which intrigued me to seek out the others.*
*Soon after I published this essay on line, I was contacted by Nik
Sheehan who posted a complete version of the Television broadcast (of about 46
minutes) on Vimeo (https://vimeo.com/500976406). The order was completely different and between each of the now
only 9 shorts (the Donald Martin piece, “I Loved Him Absolutely” having been
cut) the participants had brief discussions which brought up many of the
questions I raise below, some explanations about the authors’ intentions, and,
particularly after the episode of “A Box Called Love” responses that further
revealed these figures’ emotional depths. In that discussion Brad Fraser
brought up a crucial fact, that elicited several profound comments. He argued
that as gays particularly “we have to discuss love and death at the same
moment,” in part due to how AIDS has affected the community. Besides the Martin
cut, Gerald Hannon’s “Time, Huh?” was censored, the sex scene mostly removed
and edited to delete the discussion of the blow job and the boy getting fucked.
In the discussions Pachter had perhaps the most comic moment when he described
an older woman he knew describing him as finally having come out of the
“cupboard.”
The order of the TV
version was as follows:
“Naked”
discussion
“Tonight You Get Quail”
discussion
“Three-Spirited”
discussion
“The Shape I Think”
discussion
“Time, Huh?”
discussion
“A Box Called Love”
discussion
“From a Distance”
discussion
“Lion Dance”
“The Whole World”
discussion with Stan
Persky in Berlin via phone
Obviously, the ladder in Sheehan’s completed version moves from
Eros and the immediate world to the more abstract concepts of love expressed in
the last three pieces, while Symons work is a testament to Eros as well,
although the love he speaks of in both distant and now part of the larger
world.
Instead of reorganizing
the order, however, I have maintained my original gathering based on the IMBd
credits, simply because I somehow made sense of my far more random reading.
Sheehan wrote me, after reading what I’d written, moreover, “Your ordering of
the shorts is probably better than mine!” I would disagree, but it has given me
license to keep the structure with which I struggled while writing the comments
below.
*
“The gay legacy has been
to create art,” begins noted Montréal chef and writer Bryron
Ayanoglu in the first segment of Symposium: The Ladder of
Love. “Even in the kitchen
we take something as mundane as food and transform it into cuisine and sauces,
god, a gay person won’t even consider it if it has no sauce. ...I don’t mean
some macho sauce, some overwrought tomato sauce that takes three hours to cook
and ends up tasting like a tart and salty piece of underwear. I mean a gay
sauce. Perfume of basil laced with olive oil, with tomatoes you can still taste
and garlic scent you can practically touch. You know, a great sauce is the
signifier of cuisine and by coincidence is its gayest component.
We watch him chop, dice, slice, and stir a
sauce before clinking a glass of wine against the glass of someone just out of
sight.
It is obviously the television interviewer
Adrian Childe, for at that moment Ayanoglu stops to reminisce:
Remember Adrian that party in the
old days when we were young
and death was a distant threat
without a face.
The camera pulls back to reveal the bearded
rotund chef now seated at table with Adrian (Daniel MacIvor), with a massive
bowl and platter of what appears to be the quails.
Remember that dish I served, that
lamb that...didn’t really look
like a lamb because it was more
like a lump. It was deboned and
and stuffed with a whole farm
full of fowl. Deboned turkey inside
the lamb and then a capon and a
duck...and inside that a grouse, a
carnival of life and death
regenerating itself as the curvilinear feeding
frenzy had slaughtered a feast
for our most carnal desires. And a
surprise at the epicenter of the
whole thing, Deep in its heart some
counterpoint, a little
miracle...*
Adrian interrupts, “the
lark.”
Yes, a lark, a live lark, a
beating heart so beautiful, so happy to
escape when I finally cut
through the meats to set it free.
Apparently, there are no larks tonight.
“Tonight you get quail.”
We have, obviously, begun our trip up the
ladder of love with a dinner to match Trimalchio's grand dinner party in
Petronius’ Satyricon just as Plato’s Symposium begins with a
grand banquet at which all the others describe their views of love.
The Canadian Byron Ayanoglu, who began his career as the restaurant critic for the Montréal Gazette went on to become what his many Hollywood fans describe as the “food god.” Beyond his fifteen some cookbooks, novels, and memoirs he worked as the private chef to Mick Jagger and Robert De Niro among others, including Los Angeles’ blueblood Annenberg family.
Since we have eaten and drunken
ourselves almost into a stupor, it is now time to get a little high and
cuddle-up in bed.
*I have only one
significant criticism of this series, and that is the quality of the text
translated from the spoken words for those with hearing loss. Whoever
translated these episodes clearly had little experience with the language,
literature, art, geography, or history. A single paragraph from the Ayanoglu
piece will serve as an example for all of these short works. Here’s the written
version of the chef’s description of his lamb dish stuffed with various fowls:
“Remember that dish I
served that lamb that was that really didn’t look like a lamb because it was
more like a lump it the bond and stuffed with for the whole farm full of fowl a
t-bone turkey inside the lab and then I cape on and a dog at reggae dabangg
duck and inside that a grouch a carnival of life and death regenerating
itself....”
There are numerous
examples of these unintentionally humorous passages throughout the 10 films.
Perhaps this is
translation built on sound. But it certainly is in its rawest stages.
*
naked
Brad Fraser is one of
the most widely produced of Canadian playwrights, known for his queer-oriented
commentaries of sexuality, drugs, and violence. Among his plays are Wolf Boy
(1981), which featured Keanu Reeves in one of his earliest acting roles; Undentified
Human Remains and the True Nature of Love (1989), about a group of young
30-year old Edmontoners facing a serial killer in their midst; and Poor
Super Man (1994) whose production at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati was
temporarily canceled for fear of obscenity only three years after that same
city had canceled the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition. Fraser also wrote the
screenplay for Denys Archand’s version of his play retitled Love and Human
Remains (1993), and directed his own screenplay for Leaving Metropolis (2002).
He also wrote for the television series Queer as Folk and over a period
of time wrote a biweekly column for the Canadian gay magazine fab.
For his interview about love, Fraser
required the interviewer, Adrian (Daniel MacIvor) to
appear naked in bed with him. Adrian, working for a television network, clearly
feels uncomfortable in the position, describing it as a bit “unusual,” to which
Fraser responds, “Well, it’s unusual to go around asking fags what they think
about love. It’s a difficult question for...anyone, but particularly for gay
men.”
He continues, “Real intimacy, like the
ability to sort of drop your shield and be vulnerable with one another. So if
I’m going to talk with you about love in front of your fucking camera, you’re
going to have to get into bed with me to talk about it. Because I’m not going
to just make myself vulnerable for your machine.”
“Okay,” Adrian meekly responds. “I feel
very vulnerable actually.”
“Do you? Good. Sometimes you achieve love
for a second. You have like a second of love while you’re sucking someone’s
cock, while they’re fucking you or something, and you feel that and it’s real
and then it’s gone, sometimes you love someone for a year, you move in with
them, you get a house together. And it’s all there, and it’s all beautiful, and
you enjoy that while it’s happening, but it goes away, it changes, it evolves.
It becomes different kinds of love.”
Adrian: “So the grand idea of love you
think is just a grand idea?”
“Yeh, absolutely. It’s a lie that’s been
foisted upon us by mostly straight white men who want to keep things in control
by the church, by...the priesthood...they’re gonna tell us what love is...what
marriage is...these people don’t even have sex except with children (Adrian
snickers). So why do we buy into it? It just amazes me...and why are there so
many unhappy people? How many people you know have a relationship that lasts
their entire life, who are in love with one person for their whole life? Like
wolves and swans and that’s it. A few people here and there will achieve that
kind of thing, but who wants to?—"
Suddenly the interviewer takes out a
joint, probably offered to him by Fraser before they joined one another in bed
or that he brought with him just to be able to relax into the odd situation
with which he was faced. He interrupts Fraser’s with the comment, “I don’t
normally smoke while I’m working.”
Fraser quips, “You don’t normally work in
bed.”
At this point the interviewer is hardly
able to keep his thoughts together as he mumbles something “ummm, ummm, I can
see your point entirely, and I have had firsthand experience there” etc. But we
can see that he’s gradually losing his sense of continuity, and in the midst of
the conversation he suddenly leans over and pinches one of Fraser’s nipples,
Fraser warning him to be careful.
“Why be careful?” Adrian ridiculously
inquires.
Well, suggests Fraser, you might get me
going here, the interviewer, finally comprehending, “Yes, of course.” Before
long he draws in another drag or two of the joint, and suggests perhaps they
should turn off the camera.
Fraser agrees, if he wants to, but
suggest its fine with him if he doesn’t mind leaving it on. The two continue
for a short while in meaningless conversation, until finally Adrian cuts off
the camera.
We can only wonder (or imagine) what
might have occurred in that black emptiness of the screen. Was our
uncomfortable interviewer becoming perhaps a little too comfortable with his
bedmate? Might he have found that moment of love of which Fraser speaks? We can
never know of course, but since it’s all so very fleeting, does it matter? One
can only hope it might have been as much fun as this almost nonsensical
interchange was.
*
time,
huh
Gerald Hannon is a
Canadian journalist and author, well known for his posts about queer life and
his own personal relationships. At the time of this short, apparently 50 years
of age he was still also working as a male prostitute, a fact that can only
remind one of the American writer-hustler of the 1950s and 60s John Rechy.
Without knowing any of the above, however,
one might imagine the first image of a long-haired youth making a call to be
the prostitute, a voice telling the viewer:
I’m a writer and I’m a prostitute.
And that means I get a kind of special
insight in love I think. Sometimes I
also think I become a kind of scientist
of love. I see people falling in
love with me...and I don’t fall in love with
them. No matter what happens I’m
unavailable except at a certain specified
time and for 50 dollars. It’s
astonishing how many people are willing to
spend that kind of money to create
that kind of space and time.
The boy (Aaron Foord), meanwhile, calls up
to inquire “Are you available?” The boy
is early, but is told, in contradiction to what the voice has just told us, to
“come on up.”
When the boy arrives at the door of the
apartment, and the door opens, he asks, “You’re Gerald?” And when the man says,
“Yeh,” the cute kid flashes an engaging smile and softly laughs, adding “Not
what I expected.” Nor, I might add, what the viewer might have expected.
Yet once the two have removed their clothing and begin making love, it is clear that our young virgin is in safe hands and enjoying apparently his first gay sexual encounter. Only when Gerald attempts to gently kiss him does the boy, whose name we learn is John, resist, proclaiming he wants to save his first kiss for someone else.
Yet apparently, the prostitute cannot
resist in philosophizing as well, telling the boy, “You’re wrong,” suggesting
that John has just saw it all the movies, “long walks on the beach, sunsets,
that first kiss. Love isn’t like that.”
The boy rightfully challenges him, “You
know what it is?”
Gerald pauses, “Well love is a thousand
things, but the thing that...as I become an older man...the thing that it seems
to do most for me is allow me to look at the world the way young people do. It
allows me also, the way children do, to stretch the remaining time I have
longer than the hours [inaudible: we have together?], I create that as a
prostitute. They pay me money to make me do it. I think they’re getting their
money’s worth. I’ve stretched time out..... For me that’s what love is. It’s
making time stand still.”
Moments later over coffee and pastries,
John muses: “Time, huh?” adding, “Gerald, that was the best blow job I ever
had.”
Hannon laughs: “That was the first blow
job you ever had.”
John asks another question: “Is getting
fucked as good?”
The elder suggests he’s had
testimonials.
“Would I feel love?”
“Maybe.”
The boy admits he only has 50 dollars,
and once again, the prostitute contradicts his early comments about being paid
for a certain time and space, hinting that he’ll offer the experience to John
for free.
three-spirited
Tomson Highway was born
into a Cree-speaking family and is the librettist of the first Cree-language
opera, The Journey or Pimooteewin (2008). After receiving a B.A. in both
music and English from the University of Western Ontario, he worked for seven
years on the native American reserves around Canada before turning to
playwriting and composing novels and children’s books.
Among his most noted
plays are The Rez Sisters (1986) and Dry Lips Oughta Move to
Kapuskasing (1989). His novel, Kiss of the Fur Queen (1998) was
based on the events that led to his brother René’s contracting and dying of
AIDS. In 2009 he premiered his cabaret work Kisageetin which was
developed into a musical performed across Canada. He now divides his time
traveling with his partner of 29 years, Raymond Lalonde, between Ontario and
France.
A member of the audience, The Trickster
(Billy Merasty), bends toward a man in the row ahead of him (once more, our
ever-attendant Adrian), licking his neck, and asking (stealing from Cole
Porter) “What is this thing called love?”
From the stage Highway declares: “For me,
I think is the most wonderful thing on the face of the earth. Now that I’ve
reached the ripe old age of 40 I find that one of the benefits of growing older
is having the privilege of collecting so many friends and loved ones.”
Highway claims that there are so people
in the world that he loves, men and women. Love for him is a terrible
responsibility, and even more important is the “need to be loved,” to be
necessary to so many others and to the life the world.
The camera by this time has shifted to
the piano which Highway has been playing as accompaniment to his declarations,
which continues with his plea to love as many people as is humanly possible.
From the balcony the Cree Trickster who
fist uttered the Porter title is now looking down upon the stage where Highway
tells a story:
In the language of my birth,
Cree, the great spirit, men, women,
children, dogs, cats, horses,
trees, rocks all enjoy the same status.
Everything together forms one
great unity. And so it follows that
if this is true each and
everyone of us would have an instinctive
desire to be a part of that
same essential spark which we call life.
We all want to feel as one with
that one central energy, that great
boat of magic.
We now see the Trickster in rather
feminine apparel sitting once again in the row behind the viewer. He puts his
hand upon Adrian’s shoulder and says: “I want so desperately to be a part of
everything.”
Through a lens projecting multiple images
of his face, Highway repeats some of his early assertions concerning his
attempts to love as many people as possible, reiterating the desire to be part
of that “essential spark.”
Highway waltzes with the Trickster who
now appears almost fully in drag. “When we are together, me and my friend, my
soul sings.” blackout.
*
i
loved him absolutely
Screenwriter Donald Martin’s contribution to these variations on love is filmed, appropriately, in black and white, since the story he relates is one of the streets. It’s there he meets the man some would describe as a prostitute, whore, hustler, trade—what he describes as “simply safety valves, judgments meant to harm, to maintain a distance.” To the narrator, “Man reaches out across the void to satisfy a longing, drives his car through darkened streets to cry on the shoulder of, dream a fantasy with a stranger.”
Yet the narrator admits he never told the
boy of his love. So infatuated with the kid was the narrator that he sought him
many times and finally on Christmas Eve he did find him, the two joining up for
passionate love. But he still didn’t tell him.
Looking for him for weeks after, he once
thinks he spots him, but it is someone else. He finally asks another boy
whether he knew him. The boy shies away suspecting he might be a cop. But when
the older man tells him that he simply loved the boy, the other tells him that
he’s dead—of an overdose the day before his 25th birthday.
The narrator admits that he’s had a lot
of people die in his life, “but until then I just couldn’t cry at funerals, I
couldn’t. I remembered him and I cried.”
While Gerald Hannon described love from
the prostitute’s view, Martin’s work looks at the male hustler with desire and
love. His short gay noir is a painful work about a love that never dared to say
its name.
Martin has written the screenplays
several films, including Never Too Late (1996) about a group of seniors
who fight the owners of their assisted living home, with Cloris Leachman
playing a lesbian; The Christmas Choir (2008), about a man working at a
homeless shelter whose members he joins together into a choir; Too Late to
Say Goodbye (2009); Bomb Girls (2013); and Milton’s Secret (2016).
*
from
a distance (ecce homo)
Canadian artist Charles
Pachter shows off one of his paintings, presumably titled Ecce Homo (since
that is what appears in parentheses following his work’s title)*. Adrian begins
the work by asking the artist if he loved the person depicted in the
beautifully energetic half nude his has rendered.
Pachter says only that he loved the model
“from a distance.” Yet, the interviewer pushes it a little further in
suggesting that it looks like he knew what the model’s skin felt like, to which
the
He quickly turns to another painting,
looking somewhat like a Van Gough interior. “I was struck by the resemblance of
the film writer J. Scott to Van Gough and I asked him if he’d pose for me and
he was delighted.”
For Pachter, one of the true expressions
of love he can manifest “is by painting a beautiful portrait of someone who I
admire.” For the artist the distance between, as ethereal as it may sound,
permits his ability to reveal his subjects’ beauty in paint.
This is the first creator of Sheehan’s
“Ladder to Love” to succinctly describe love as a process of removing oneself
from the body in an almost voyeuristic manner. Love here is a symbol
representing the beauty he finds in the other without actually physically
involving the self with it.
Despite the utter explosion of youth
Pachter has depicted in Ecce Homo he objectifies it so thoroughly that
the work might have as well been titled Noli me tangere, the words
Christ spoke to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection. In a sense, this artist,
in his objectification of the flesh, has taken it away from the possibility of
the human touch; yet, as the artist suggests, in that ideal world it may indeed
live longer than the artist and his subject both, even if the “life” of which
he speaks is purely a spiritual or mentally imagined one.
*The image of the
painting featured in this segment that I found on the internet was simply
titled Painting.
*
the
whole world
Professor, scholar, and
writer Stan Perksy, born in the US and in the early 1960s living in San
Francisco, was involved with the Beat poets and friends with the group of poets
that included Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, Robin Blaser, and George Stanley. In
1966 he moved to Vancouver, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1972. Studying
anthropology, Perksy also became involved in sociology and philosophy, teaching
both in university positions at Simon Fraser University and Capilano
University. He was also a literary columnist for The Globe and Mail and
The Vancouver Sun. His more than 20 book-length publications cover a
wide-range of subjects including Lives
of the French Symbolist Poets (1967), At the Lenin Shipyard: Poland and
the Rise of the Solidarity Trade Union (1981), Flaunting It: A Decade of
Gay Journalism from The Body Politic (1982), Boyopolis: Sex and Politics
in Gay Eastern Europe (1996), On Kiddie Porn: Sexual Representation,
Free Speech and the Robin Sharpe Case (2001), and Robin Blaser (2010).
Perksy (performed by John Gilbert) begins
his “lecture,” the structure he has chosen in which to discuss love, by
rejecting the entire notion that he need say anything for or about the subject.
“Well I think love can do without my praise. From what I see it’s perfectly
capable of taking care of itself. It has no shortage of suitors. Not that I
don’t believe in Eros, the god of love.”
The camera pans to show us members of his
audience, mostly those individuals whose arguments about love we’ve already
heard. As in the Symposium, these now somewhat worn-our revelers must
still remain to hear what the others have to say about the subject.
The professor summarizes his ideas about
eros: “Love gives you the illusion of not being alone. And everyone is alone,
I’m sorry to say.”
The young man to whom Persky was
momentarily infatuated asks an interesting question, given Persky’s
near-dismissal of eros as creating a meaningful, long-lasting experience: “What
about friends?”
“For a long time I thought friendship
was it,” the professor intones. “Friendship circulates freely, it seeks to
enlarge its circle, it doesn’t try to possess beauty or bodies, and unlike a
pair of lovers it has eyes for something other than each other. But there’s no
sense in friends being together if they’re not thinking of the whole world.”
In short, for Persky there is something
more important than love, “the whole of human relations.” “Instead of just a
lover, it’s many and multifaceted. It is the world itself.” And the professor
closes his lecture, switching off the light.
Strangely, Perksy’s whole world seems
even more abstract to me than even Pachter’s reverential “distance.” And even
though Tomson Highway also sought to embrace the whole world, you had the
feeling that he knew quite specifically who his “whole world” was. His was not
Persky’s vague notion of “human relations,” but the hugs and embracement of a
large number of good friends. Highway’s love might very well tire you out, but
it wasn’t a vague notion of bringing all people—who, as Persky admits,
are all alone and different each in their own way— together in that tiny space
of a single being’s imagination.
As an idea, Persky’s desire to embrace
the “whole world” seems attractive; but I have absolutely no idea where to
begin in attempting to accomplish what he asks. Moreover, will anyone in the
vast mass of human beings moving each in their own direction have any idea of
who their would-be lover is? Would they feel loved? Or would it be somewhat
like Martin’s phantom love for a street hustler who he never truly knew very
much about? At least Hannon gave love to a single human being for a few
specific hours, and got something back in turn, enough money to help pay the
rent.
Clearly, Sheehan’s Symposium on
love was beginning to make me—and presumably Adrian (who I spotted in the
crowd) and the rest of the CBC audience—ask some serious questions. But as we
had begin to climb Plato’s “Ladder of Love” I somehow felt we had lost touch
with human body with which we’d begun. At least a body keeps you warm at night,
while my worries about the people of Afghanistan, of Poland, Hungary, and
Brazil—and believe me every day I do think about these people—just keeps me up
at night. Does anyone in those countries know that I worry about and care for
them? Does it matter that perhaps my worries are not theirs’—or not even the
right ones?
*
lion
dance
Now perhaps having
reached a level of love’s ladder that seems to put one somewhere in the clouds,
it is interesting to watch someone looking back on love lost as Scott Symons
does, a man who has even had to abandon his homeland, who is almost completely
grounded in the earth. His remembrances of his early love for a 17-year-old boy
which embraced—if not precisely Persky’s “whole world—so many aspects of love
that it served as the major event of Symons’ life. After having established
himself as one of the elite intellects of Canada, love transformed him into a
notorious outsider which forced him to live for long periods in Mexico, and
later—during the time of this short work and Sheehan’s feature film about his
life, God’s Fool (1997)—in Essaouira, Morocco.
Symons began to realize early in his youth
that he was a homosexual, but, like many of generation when gay sex was
criminalized, he attempted to suppress and deny his desires. In 1958 he married
Judith Morrow, the granddaughter of the president of the Canadian Imperial Bank
of Commerce.
For a while Symons worked on the editorial
page of the Toronto Telegram before joining the staff of the Québec Chronicle-Telegraph,
shifting once more to La Presse in Montréal, where he won a National
Newspaper award for his series of articles about the early stages of what would
later be described as Québec’s “Quiet Revolution.” Throughout this period,
Symons and his wife became notable figures in Québec society. Yet in 1959,
during a time when he and Judith spent time studying at the Sorbonne, his acquaintance
with fiction writer Julien Green evidently “awakened” his dormant sexuality.
After working as a curator at the Royal
Ontario Museum and teaching as an assistant professor of fine art at the
University of Toronto, he fled the family farm in Claremont and holed in in a
hotel in Montréal for 21 days to write his first fiction, Place
d'Armes.
During this period Symons left his wife,
having fallen in love with 17-year-old John McConnell, leading to an incident
reported in the press that scandalized Canadian society, particularly since the
media had mistakenly claimed that he had run away with the boy to Mexico.
Evidently, Symons had travelled to Mexico
only to participate in an artist’s retreat in San Miguel de Allende, and the
boy had been sent for his protection to Nassau under a kind of “house arrest,”
what Symons calls “a golden cage.”** When McConnell heard of Symons’
whereabouts—according to Symons in his comments in this short film he wrote to
him at a secret address telling him to “take out your cock and walk”—he escaped
to Mexico to join his elder lover.
McConnell’s parents immediately posted an
award for Symons’ arrest, resulting in police and federal forces from Canada,
the United States, and Mexico to trail them as they moved to and from various
hideouts. Basically describing these events and his feelings for John in his Symposium
segment, Symons quotes John’s response: “My cock must be very important. We’ve
got five sets of police looking for us!”
The stories that Symons relates about
John’s and his relationship are charming and, at times, quite comic. But one
nonetheless realizes the gravity of the situation they faced when one
recognizes that it is similar to what happened Oscar Wilde and his beloved
Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas).
Symons and John broke up in 1971, and by
the time the elder was fondly recalling his “passion” for John in front of
Sheehan’s camera he had moved permanently to Morocco where he was in a
relationship Aaron Klokeid. Yet clearly he recalls his relationship with the
boy to be the central experience with love in his life. He describes their
meeting as occurring when he was out walking in the woods, when out of the snow
appeared a young boy who looked to him like a Russian Tartar:
Out of the woods came John
on a horse galloping, and he
practically ran into me.
He stopped his horse and said, “O
you big black bear who
frightened my horse! And we were
in love.
From the abstract heights of Persky’s
embracement of the whole world, Symons gets right down into the mud where he
apparently fell that special day, describing his and John’s passion. “Lovers’
passion is not part of our society. It’s usually simply called an affair and
that’s a minor venture. We gave up everything...”
Then 32 years of age, Symons immediately
recognized the boy as an almost mythical figure: “John was totally Pan, he was from the world of Pan, the great
Greek god of dance and music and wine and eros... He was very gentlemanly and
very ferocious.” And without saying it, obviously, quite dangerous given the
social attitudes of the day. If their situation soon turns into a kind
Wilde-Douglas affair, it apparently began as something closer to the love
between Rimbaud and Verlaine.
Symons recalls that one day, while they
were hiding out in Oaxaca, he received two telegrams in one day, the first
saying that his wife wanted a divorce and the second reporting that his Place
d'Armes had won the best first novel prize in Canada, requesting that he
return for the banquet dinner. Obviously he didn’t make the trip, joyfully
describing how each day John returned from fishing with the Mexican villagers,
the boy made the call of a rutting moose, which he had recently learned to
imitate.
It’s touching to hear Symons’ almost
nostalgic expression of a state of being that in which he lived during that
special time that might surely be described as “transcendent.” “Orgasm was not the high point of life, it
was the kick-off point. You lived beyond in what we called the state of
aftercum.”
While Brian Ayanoglu, Brad Fraser, and
Donald Martin seem to have connected love to the body, here for the first time
we see a true commitment to Eros as a god. As Symons begins his fascinating
adventure into the past, he almost chants an invocation to that god who he
suggests marries desire and sex:
Eros is the prayer incarnate.
Eros is the dance incarnate. Eros is love
within the world. Eros is the
dance within this world that allows us to
be love, that is love as being,
while sex is love as doing.
His love is “within the world,” without
necessarily connecting with “the whole world.” If it is finite, fleeting, for
Symons it certainly seems worth the burdensome effort and the possibility of
even giving up the world for the intense passion of the moment when everything
seems to come together in a different kind of wholeness.
*This selection from
Symons’ novel will suggest its sexual playfulness:
André moans Magnificat
as assoul clutches steep on rood
Cocked Chalice
(more freight shunts
alongside Lachine Canal, beyond Wedding Cake, where Van Horne still seats)
whole world reborn in
our Host that quivers me André sensing withdraws me out to the rim of his
world, plies my quaver, secures my Holyrood at arsedge and as I bore back steep
raises our nave off our bed to capture my Man thrusting homage into our sunburst
monstrance as I reach out reach out in
to the Host in the Nave
on the Altar in the Church in our Place d’Armes, reach in for that Body and
Blood now reborn in the flesh, made sheer flesh… Man reborn, made whole in me…
donnant donnant, for my Land given back to André gave me the Host
bloodworthy, gave that
back to me as key to our kingdom gave it back to me as I reach out to the
bloodspurt of the
Object resurrected in
me, Manned once again
and as André cups the
blood of my new life I kiss the Mona Lisa smile of his Quiet face
trainshunt farewell of
Marc along our Greyway
Bugger buggered and
damned: what more can a man want? …
**In Symons’ rendition
as related in Sheehan’s film, he escaped Canada on the advice of his lawyer for
Mexico after the couple grew aware the John’s family had been apprised of their
relationship.
*
a
box called love
It seems fitting after
so many of the figures Sheehan has chosen to speak of love have had their noisy
say that at the ninth step of his ladder to love the featured figure does not
speak. That figure, Ken McDougall, had died of AIDS in 1994, two years before
Sheehan’s film was released. It could have been possible that Sheehan filmed
this sequence early in the process, before McDougall died, but I should imagine
that the clip in which a dying man (McDougall) lying in his death bed with his
lover sitting beside him, both without speaking, is from Cynthia Roberts’ film The
Last Supper, with Daniel McIvor (who in Symposium plans the role of
Adrian Childe throughout) playing the Doctor, Parthens, or perhaps the earlier
stage version.*
In this sequence, Hillar Liitoja, who
wrote the original 1993 stage play in which McDougall played the same role of
the dying Chris serves as the Doctor.
And in this sense, Sheehan has brought the
dead to life, Liitoja now speaking of love and his AIDS patients as we observe
the actor McDougall playing out his own imminent death on film or stage.
This film, in short, is clearly a family
affair, with Liitoja performing as a doctor explaining to Adrian the medical
definition of love, as well as revealing something about love that helps to
explain a human reaction beyond medical science.
This episode begins with someone
receiving a shot. As the camera reveals the doctor’s face, he, in turn, reveals
the medical definition of love:
Some research indicates that
love is purely a bio-chemical action. In
the first stage of love,
infatuation, three natural amphetamines bathe
the brain causing euphoria,
giddiness, sleeplessness. In the second
stage of love, attachment,
it’s a different set of chemicals, endorphin,
our natural morphine. These
endorphins flood the brain, giving us
that peaceful, secure
feeling. So, when a lover leaves or dies the
pain of loss is very real.
We see blood samples
spinning around in a centrifuge.
The doctor continues by reporting that
he’s seen some 60 patients, presumably with AIDS, all of them from first two
years now dead. But he has observed something about his dying patients
that has informed his
science with regard to how “profoundly death sharpens and brings love into
focus.”
The camera pans to a hand holding
another man’s hand within it, probably the hands of the man and his dying lover
(McDougall, dreadfully thin with a faced marked by Kaposi's sarcoma spots).
I have never forgotten coming upon the
scene of two lovers, only moments
from death. I witnessed here a certain
knowledge at work. The lovers knew
death was imminent. They knew their
love would soon be only a memory
in the survivor, stored in a gangly in
the lover, in a little box called love. And
it was this little compartment in the
brain and the knowledge each had of
its existence that so profoundly eased
the passage of the dying lover.
More than any drug I could administer,
more than any treatment designed
to ease the suffering the simple
knowledge of that box called love allowed
for the highest form of dignity,
allowed for grace itself.
Despite all the other scenes we have witnessed before this which dismissed the importance of or even the possibility of love between two individuals as something enduring and crucial to their survival, this step of the ladder takes us into a new territory wherein the relationship between these men, the profound closeness they feel for one another, is ultimately what allows them to die with a sense of some small relief that, if nothing else, they have loved and will not be immediately forgotten.
Surely the couple of men at the center
of this work, Liitoja and McIvor, will not forget their now dead friend.
I do not know if the text here is
related to the play (the film The Last Supper does not currently seem to
be available in the US), but clearly the shot we see the doctor injecting into
an arm at the beginning of this segment is similar to the one injected into the
character Chris’ arm in The Last Supper, in which, dying of AIDS, the
central character choreographs his own celebratory last dinner and subsequent euthanasia.
*Sheehan has explained
to me that this scene was from The Last Supper filmed by him at the same
time that the director of the film Cynthia Roberts was filing her movie.
*
the
shape i think
For his decimal and
final short cinematic offering in the Symposium, Sheehan chose the
lesbian filmmaker Patricia Rozema, who has made some 20 movies, television
films and TV episodes including I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987), When
Night Is Falling (1995), and Tell Me That You Love Me (2008).
It seems almost inevitable that given
the previous segments’ focus on the memory and end of love, Rozema’s piece is
devoted to an imaginary beginning of love, a vague outline of what may possibly
exist in some hazy future if only the narrator (Rozema herself) might be able
to find her way through the “wall” which hides her from it. If the others have
characterized eros as a force grounded in the body or the mind’s imagination,
Rozema’s narrator positions it in a future outside of the self that can exist
in the present only as desire.
And that “desire” can be expressed only
through a kind of mysteriously comic, almost surreal fable which she proceeds
to tell us, a bit like a Scheherazade beginning her tales. As the narrator goes
out to her front porch to pick up the newspaper, she spots a beautiful
Abyssinian cat, mottled brown and black, and she muses on why she herself
couldn’t be more like that: a being of such elegance, authority, with pride in
itself. The cat comes to her, and she caresses its head and neck, finding by
its collar a little piece of folded paper which she unscrolls and reads:
written in an elegant script the note reading, “Strange what desire will make
foolish people do.”
So begins the somewhat inexplicable voyage she undertakes as the woman follows the cat, the cat often stopping to look back to see if the woman was still on her trail. Questioning her sanity, the woman continues on their circuitous voyage through the city while her mind weaves stories of what might be at the end of this journey, perhaps an extraordinary gorgeously statuesque woman with a depth of humor, of understanding, of erotic allure who holds a special power and, after surveying all the inhabitants of the city had chosen her as “the one.”
Finally, the cat brings her to a wall
which she had never before seen, a tall, three-storey tall edifice with no
windows, no way to climb it, no access whatsoever. The cat meanwhile slinks
along the wall and suddenly slips into a small gap at the bottom of the it,
which the narrator, stooping down, attempts to peer into, but can see nothing
but branches with a sweet, strange smell emanating from them. She stands and
continues around the block, only to find the wall is almost ceaseless, without
entrance. She sees an older man walking by and asks him what’s behind the wall.
“Oh, everyone’s got a different story, everyone you talk to’s got a different
angle on this. Some say it’s like this hermit millionaire guy, see, and he’s
really strange; and then my brother’s cousin’s wife’s sister’s cousin’s mother
says there’s this gorgeous, exquisite woman who lives in there who had a tragic
accident and lost her eyes.” The woman thanks the man and returns home.
Her narrative, meanwhile, begins anew.
Another cold, rainy day, she goes to pick up the newspaper and there is the cat
once again. She strokes its wet fur and discovers another note, but having
suffered the pellets of raindrops, it’s soggy. But once more she unrolls it and
attempts to decipher what’s written upon it: “It said ‘something something ache
something something by (buy?) something something love.’” She’s not certain
since she can’t quite make it out; the word “love” might have be “heave,” she
suggests.
But at that very moment the cat again
takes off, she running after it, the cat taking a different route but again
ending at the wall, and again disappearing into the same gap. By this time, in
total frustration, the narrator gets down on her stomach determined to see
something, pushing her face into the hole. She hears “unbearably beautiful
music,” but it could have be, she admits, the wind and the rain. Thinking she
discerns some movement, she pushes harder against the stone, scrapping her face
as she continues in her determination to see and understand.
Blood is now running from the cuts on her
face which she doesn’t even mind except that she can no longer see anything as
it drips into her eyes. Her body, she argues, is “betraying” her in her attempt
to see whatever it is, a poet, a hermit, her instructress in the art of
loving—or, perhaps, in the art of “heaving.”
Obviously, the hole in the wall has
become a kind of mystical peep hole into a desire she cannot quite define. And
the whole adventure, accordingly, ends as a kind comic incident out of Boccaccio’s
Decameron. Her head now stuck in the wall, neighbors call an ambulance
and firemen who arrive with their hydraulic drills to extract her to now face
into large crowd of gawkers.
And what was behind the wall. Not much.
A garden, some exotic plants, the ownership still in question. But still, she
takes up the note, looking at it and straining to make sense of its message,
which she continues to think says “something something love.” She thinks
“that’s the shape.”
Rozema’s beautiful tale is a metaphor
for all of our desires to be called by the most beautiful person we might
imagine to join them in a love beyond our limited comprehension of that word.
It is the other we seek in every romance: in our dreams, our reading, and even
in images of pornography, soft and hard, promising us some entry into a world
beyond our everyday experiences. But there is a terrible danger as well in
those desires in that they may trap us, showing up our foolishness and
revealing our own inadequacies that will never permit the fulfillment of
whatever we might found in that nebulous but enticing “other.”
It is logical that for a people
themselves always defined as the “other,” as the “outsider,” that we, as
lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, or individuals just wondering who we
are, that love seems nearly impossible because we have been taught that it lies
only inside a world from which we have been expelled, or, conversely, in a
space so far beyond us that it can never be reached. The here and now of Eros,
accordingly, seems increasingly tempting as a space where love for our kind
might be able to exist. For beings asked by the heteronormative world to keep
love at a distance, Persky’s whole world seems to me, at least, as far away as
that garden just on the other side of Rozema’s wall. Like most of the others of
this queer Symposium, I will remain here in the world into which I was
born to hold on for as long as I can to anyone who in turn will hold me. And
with any luck we won’t forget to tell one another that what we feel is
love.
Sheehan’s wonderful
cinematic exploration of “the thing called love” through the guidance of some
of the major artists of the LGBTQ community is stunningly brave and
adventurous. CBC can only be praised for having allowed the general public to
share these meaningful explorations. I don’t know how these short films were
shown on Canadian TV, but it seems the perfect format for airing each of the 10
episodes would be to run them each individually at various different intervals
over a period of a week for ten months, slipping in a new one each month
between regular network programming or even advertisements. “Watch the news,
drink a Coke, and find out what some major gays and lesbians think about love
before you watch your family comedy tonight or your afternoon soap opera.” Why
can’t US television imagine such a marvelously innovative way to talk about
things the general public doesn’t find it easy to talk about.
Los Angeles, March 23-25
Reprinted from My
Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (March 2021).
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