Get my mojo back and nurture my squishy inside
Monday, 24 August 2020
Pleasure Activism, cover design by Herb Thornby. Image description: against a white background, the title of the book is spelled out in large sans serif letters. “Pleasure” is in purple and “Activism” is in red. The words are each broken into two lines. Between them, and between the title and the subtitle, are rows of solid colour drawings of animals mating (dogs, insects, birds, snails, rhinos, rabbits). Below in smaller teal letters is the subtitle, “The Politics of Feeling Good” and below this is “Written and Gathered by adrienne maree brown” in red.
After horrible few days (a week? what is time) during which the next book to read passionately didn’t make itself known to me, this morning I picked up Adrienne Maree Brown’s Pleasure Activism, which Britt brought into the house after it came out (Britt is often a few steps ahead of me and I like that). Yes, I know—I’m the last person on my block. Maybe I’ll start watching Game of Thrones now har har. I don’t usually write about books until I finish them, but something about that smacks of mastery, so I thought it would be good to challenge myself to write from a place of incompletion—of process over product—making this a construction site with a hole cut into the plywood, letting you peak inside.
I feel like I’ve been looking for this book, or a book like it, for a while. Several weeks ago I wrote to my friend Audra something like that her poetry felt very aligned with the soft pink truth in herself (I realize this is the name of the side project of one half of the band Matmos, but it works for me as a term for the vulnerable, weird, and, well, squishy inner part of oneself) and did she have any tips or exercises that helped her be in touch with that place.
Yesterday, I started making two lists based on two goals/questions. The goals were:
1. Get my mojo back, and:
2. Nurture my squishy inside
In order to reach these goals, I asked myself, “What makes me feel my mojo?” listing things like: giving a reading, singing with my band (or just singing), hosting things, giving tarot readings, doing my stroll down main street and running into people. Re: the squishy inside, I jotted down things like: being guided, receiving care, magical ritual, dance/somatic stuff, and getting to participate in ‘girl stuff’ that I missed out on when I was younger.
Starting to read Pleasure Activism brought home to me that I am on a bit of a quest right now and, at least so far, this book is consonant with my quest. If books like Pleasure Activism and My Gender Workbook are self-help, then I like self-help. I’m charmed by the workbook-y inclusion of exercises (I think most books invite exercises, but usually readers have to do the labour of extrapolating them), like this one, from the end of Brown’s intro to the first section, “who taught you to feel good?”:
HOT AND HEAVY HOMEWORK
Write up your pleasure activism lineage!
Who awakened your senses? Who politicized
your experiences of body, identity, sensation,
feeling good? If they are still living, have you
thanked them properly? If yes, do it
again. If not, reach out. If they are ancestors,
honor them with a pleasure altar covered in
sticky fruit, sweet smells, sacred water, and
thick earth, centered around fire. Gratitude
is part of pleasure too.
I started to try to make my list. The first people on it were Kate Bornstein and Penny Slinger. I got to see Kate read from her then-forthcoming book Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws back in 2005. Penny Slinger, co-creator with Nik Douglas of the Tantric Dakini Oracle, ran a workshop on exploring your sexual identity through erotic collage that I attended—I want to say it was that same summer. From the stack old magazines she brought, I snipped and pasted together a world of sexually ambiguous starfish and gloriously fat merwomen. Both of these took place at San Francisco’s Center for Sex and Culture, so credit is due to the person who introduced me to that institution and to Carol Queen, Robert Lawrence, and everyone involved in making a space for queerness, kink, and sex-positivity.
I also listed Bonnie Cullum’s Dark Goddess theatre rituals that my friend Elisa introduced me to in the early aughts. To enter a theatrical space by being anointed, exchanging a ritual call and response on the way to placing a lit candle in a central hearth, and then to watch an collection of mystery plays in which actors/celebrants portrayed/embodied goddesses to tell their stories through the media of the sensual, the ritual, and the erotic. This was a lesson in pleasure for me.
So I guess what this post amounts to is the beginning of a long thank you note, written and sent on the way to finding other sources of awakening-to-pleasure which, when I find them, I will thank, too. But, to begin with, thank you to Britt always and for myriad paths to pleasure (and its politicization), but in this post specifically for introducing me to Adrienne Maree Brown, to whom I offer a hearty thanks; thank yous to Audra, and Kate Bornstein, and Penny Slinger, and ____, and Carol Queen, and Robert Lawrence, and Bonnie Cullum, and Elisa! As Adrienne Maree Brown points out (and Audre Lorde whom she quotes and annotates), pleasure is deeply constrained and commodified, subverted and siphoned off for the benefit of others, but you have all been guides orienting me towards my own authentic pleasure in my vexed and intermittent experience of it.
PS Some of the linked books go to my Bookshop.org storefront, and I get a percentage if you buy from there, but don’t forget about the library! I anticipate meeting you in the future where we don’t have to monetize everything to keep body and soul together!