The Grace Pages

Living in a windmill in Amsterdam, ya!

They sang every morning,
'How lucky we are,
Living in a windmill in Amsterdam, ya!'

Like the mice in the famous song, I have been feeling increasingly lucky for where I am in life. These past few weeks -- rather strangely, really -- I've been having frequent flashbacks to my days in the classroom. I'll be sitting down reading a magazine or watching TV when I see an image that triggers a memory, perhaps of arriving in the staffroom at 8am, depressed and dreading the day ahead; being humiliated by the behaviour of a student in front of thirty intimidating teenagers; getting home in the evening to face hours of sitting at a computer wringing my hands over the next day's schedule. They are painful memories; painful in the same way it makes you cringe remembering a social faux pas that still embarrasses you to this day.

I have to pinch myself to be reminded: Dave, you don't have to do all that crap now; you're a free man, Dave; you're a freelance writer. Being a writer is one of those careers I always thought only the privileged few got to do, and now apparently I'm one of those few. Don't misunderstand me:-- I'm earning peanuts at the moment, but I'm getting there. I'm doing stuff I love day in, day out. I've got my finger in a hundred and one delicious pies, all of my own choosing.

And I sang every morning, how lucky I am...

Today's a pray-day

I have a few dear online friends in both New Orleans, which is set to be devastated by Hurrican Katrina, and in Mississippi, which looks set for some shit, too. Today's a definite pray-day.

A GP Classic: Melting cakes and misplaced recipes

(This was originally published on 20 April 2004)

Certain songs have become to me, at certain times in my life, like anthems. Know what I mean? Like a song was written just for me at that exact time in my life, expressing just what I was feeling or going through, giving voice to things I hadn't quite put into words yet myself.

Recently I went through a period where These Days by Nico seemed to match my circumstances perfectly. Before that, things weren't all that much better, and Gordon Lightfoot's In the Early Mornin' Rain was the one that seemed closest to what was going on inside me.

But let me take you back a few years before that. It was a time in my life when nothing was as it first appeared. Everything was changing for me. All the things I once took for granted were now being questioned, and the world I had been living in for several years was beginning to crumble. It was the beginning of my break with fundamentalist, conservative Christianity. And the words that summed up the process for me were from the song MacArthur Park. If you know it, you'll also probably be of the opinion that the lyrics are crass, confusing and fairly artless. Actually, I totally agree. What's more, it was made a hit by a guy who, frankly, couldn't sing a damn note (the late actor Richard Harris). Still, something in the chorus totally resonated with me:

    MacArthur Park is melting in the dark,
    All the sweet, green icing flowing down.
    Someone left the cake out in the rain.
    I don't think that I can take it,
    'Cause it took so long to bake it,
    And I'll never have that recipe again,
    Oh no!

Don't ask me what MacArthur Park is or was, because I don't have a clue. Don't ask me either why the "park" metaphor suddenly becomes a "cake" metaphor, because I don't know about that either. All I know is that at that period in my life I couldn't have put it any better myself: The icing was falling off the cake for me, and I'd spent so long baking it, I was shit-scared I wasn't going to put it all back together again.

Put in plainer terms, I had grown up in a certain type of charismatic, fundamentalist Christianity, it had become my life, and now everything that seemed so real and unquestionable was starting to lookfalse. Let me throw in another metaphor: Humpty Dumpty had fallen off the wall, and it didn't look like even all the King's horses and all the King's men had a hope in hell of putting him back together again. I was scared. I was feeling like a stranger in a foreign land. I'd spent so many years learning the recipe and baking the cake, and it looked like it was all going down the pan with no hope of retrieval. (Forgive the mixed metaphors. I'm on a roll here.)

Some of you identify with that feeling, perhaps. The journey away from fundamentalism has been a scary one, and maybe the most terrifying thing is that after so long putting that world together bit by bit, you've lost the recipe and can't find it again. Well, here's what I want to say to anyone who's scared they lost the recipe and aren't going to get it back: That's the whole point. For years they told us there was a recipe. For years Christianity was presented to us in the form of strategies and technologies for spiritual success: Do this, do that, jump up and down and through the hoop, and you'll be acceptable. For a long time someone convinced us that there was a formula we had to follow, a long list of ingredients and instructions we had to get right to build our perfect, holy and acceptable-to-God religious world.

For a long time, even after I had given up on fundamentalism and conservative Christianity for good, I still had this feeling that I had to get the recipe right. I mean, I had got rid of this and that belief, dispatched of this and that doctrine, and for a while I had this worry that I needed an alternative to replace them. Now I think, Hold it there: Who says I have to have the recipe figured out? Who says I can't just say, "Don't know"? Who said I had to have everything sussed?

I know it's painful moving on. It's not easy, even when we know it's the right thing to do, to leave behind things we gave our life to. And it's a scary path, that's for sure. But it's a while since the icing melted on my religious cake now, and I have a peace about where I am, a peace I doubted I would have when I was watching all that sweet, green icing flowing down and wondering how I was ever going to get it back. And if things started to change again, I doubt it would be that same scary process, because the path I'm on now is an adventure in faith, where no turn the road might take is worth being scared of.

I think I've probably said more than I wanted to say, and probably not in as articulate a manner as I wanted to say it. (There's always the "edit" button for anal-retentives like me.) I just wanted to give hope to anyone whose cake is melting at the moment. No one decreed you needed a recipe -- that fiction was part of your old world. Don't sweat it.

The death of the question mark

I work as a researcher and writer for a service that promises to obliterate the question mark by answering any question any time. Well, I'm going through quite a 'big questions' phase at the moment; not in a traumatic, dark-night-of-the-soul sort of way, but in that I'm trying to search out the deep things.

Part of that has been provoked by a renewed friendship: Craig, an old classmate with whom I've found myself working after well over a decade without seeing him; we weren't particular friends when we knew each other. But things have really clicked, and we've enjoyed many a philosophical conversation over a pint in the last couple weeks.

Part of it has been my friend Phil, who asked me the point of continuing to go to church if my beliefs had departed so radically from 'historic Christianity'. It started me wondering what really unites Christians. Fact is, I don't feel any less a part of the Church, any less a Christian, or any less a wholehearted participant in the worship of the Church just because I'm probably the single most heretical individual in my parish on a Sunday morning. There's something else that's binding us together as a community of God, and it's not just a matter of beliefs or doctrine.

Here are some thoughts from the last few weeks of searching:

The universe is characterized by change; if we're not changing, we're out of step with the rest of the universe. (Thanks, Craig.)
Everything's the same, even if it's different. (Thanks, I Heart Huckabees and, to some extent, The Dreamers.)
'Humanity is the cipher of God' (Karl Rahner)

I find myself more and more looking to humanity and human nature for answers, seeing more and more that 'God' and humanity are inextricably bound together. Oh, I know, this is downright heretical and unchristian -- supposedly -- but it's just where I'm going.

I plan to dip into Thomas Merton (don't know why, except that I happened upon a couple cheap Merton paperbacks in a second-hand store yesterday and felt drawn to them) and maybe the process theologians. This whole 'bound up' thing is looking more real these days.

Call off the search...

...I'm back. The housesitting is over; it was lovely, but for practical reasons I was ready to get back to familiar surrounding.

During my short vacation I managed to cut back the smokes from twenty a day -- I never knew whether to feel sorrier for my lungs or my bank manager -- to about five or six a day. I also wrote the first couple scenes of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a 'grand guignol entertainment in two acts', which I hope to stage locally next year. So it was a productive fortnight.

I'm at my busiest since I gave up the whole teaching lark, but I am still determined to make room at least once a day to blog on here. I'll also be blogging elsewhere, but that'll be top secret, since it will be under my real name, as part of my new job: news editor of a local website.

As a way of filling the archives here, I'm going to be reposting some old favourites alongside the new entries. Look out for some Grace Pages classics.

Still kickin'...

Pretty damn busy at the moment. I am news editor of a new local website, and it's gonna be big. We've moved into an office and we launch September 5. Hope to be back blogging properly ASAP. :)

Fury at Smuggler's Bay (1960); Shock Corridor (1963); The Creeping Flesh (1972)

Fury at Smuggler's Bay. Wow. Classic entertainment, and the unmistakeable work of director John Gilling, whose usual themes of colonial imperialism, class and power are all present. This is a period adventure about smugglers and pirates and the like, but exceptionally well-crafted. The cast, including Peter Cushing, George Coulouris and William Franklyn, is strong, the action exciting, the script and story intelligent, and the locations stunning.

Shock Corridor (1963) is one of director Sam Fuller's most well-known films. It's a pre-Cuckoo's Nest (the film, not the book) look at life in a mental institute, with a B-movie appearance, but an interesting social outlook, using drama as a metaphor for society and mental illness (roles, script etc). There are some really poignant moments, even if the central performance is a bit hammy.

The Creeping Flesh is a 1972 British horror from Tigon Productions, and is far superior to the last Tigon film I saw, the abortive Blood Beast Terror (1967). It's a classy production, as you'd expect from director Freddie Francis. I enjoy Francis's visual flair -- after all, he was one of Britain's finest cinematographers long before he gained cult status as a horror director.

Does this all seem rushed today? I'm on dial-up, and the owners are paying per minute, so I'm nervously typing away ten to the dozen.

I have some theological thoughts for later, viz, on what basis does (or should) someone belong to a/the church? More specifically, how much and in what way do beliefs have to do with it?

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

At a mere seventy pages or so, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a cinch to leaf through in a couple hours. Surprisingly, it unfolds like a detective story, without Mr Hyde's identity being revealed until somewhere towards the end. It is also told largely from the point-of-view of Jekyll's friends, chiefly the lawyer Utterson. Everyone knows the basic story nowadays, of course, so the intended suspense is not really there; it's nevertheless a gripping tale.

I was surprised by the copious biblical allusi0ns. Jekyll could well have been the apostle Paul, tormented over the conflict between the good he wants to do and the evil that reigns.

There is more than enough material, even in so short a book, to provide the basis for a two-act stage adaptation, which I hope to write over the next few weeks and produce locally next year. There are obvious obstacles to overcome in adapting it, most of which have been neatly solved in  the many film versions. For a start, the characters in the book are overwhelmingly male, something it make sense to redress for practical reasons as well as dramatic. (Actually, although I am not given to queer theorizing, I'd hazard a guess from his writing that Stevenson was homosexual, something I intend to look into.)

I'll be drafting the characters and plot tonight.

Housesitting again...

I'm back housesitting in glorious surroundings again. Feeling a bit worse for the wear, though. Have been nursing a headache all day, possibly a combination of nicotine and caffeine withdrawal. The latter I want to go back to -- there just isn't any decent coffee around the house -- and the former I'm quite pleased to be avoiding.

I'm hoping in the next couple weeks to apply myself to writing a play. It will be in the style of Grand Guignol, possibly an adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I have in mind to have it performed locally next year.

The Archetypal Gay

There's a certain stereotype of the gay man that is almost superfluous to describe: effeminate, outrageously camp, with a particular taste in fashion and music, and an obsession with sex; probably promiscuous, too. It is a stereotype reinforced by both gay and straight people. It is an image of the gay man representative of one particular subculture, perhaps, but a subculture that is in fact just one aspect of the gay "community".

I was amused by the irony when a straight friend the other week explained his reasons for thinking that "all" gay men were of a certain type. His first piece of evidence was that all the gay men he'd met were the same; but where had he met these men? On a night out in a gay club with his gay brother. Most gay men I know rarely do "the scene", and many are put off by it. The second piece of evidence was the image put forth by well-known gay celebrities such as Graham Norton and Julian Clary (both camp as t*ts). I pointed out that in fact there were hundreds more gay celebrities that have little in common with Norton and Clary; the irony is that they were ruled out of his equation simply because their gayness was so incidental to their public image, and manifest in such a non-stereotypical way, that they had slipped under his radar. Or should that be gaydar?

The media often does little to help the situation. Programmes like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy further entrench the stereotype. The gay media, too, at least in the UK, is dominated by a particular type of "queer". I enjoy my monthly read of Gay Times, but find it bizarre that a serious, well-written feature about politics or the arts can be followed by a full-page ad for hardcore porn videos. Reading another gay magazine, Attitude, I found no less than three articles in a row, all opening with a cliche along the lines of "We gay men love to..." followed by some fashion supposedly followed by all gay men, ranging from being "obsessive" to having a fetish for men in uniform.

I am full of praise for The Advocate, a US magazine which apparently doesn't suffer from the same blinkered view of gay life as its UK counterparts. And I have discovered pockets of people trying to do something to balance things out: The Independent Gay Forum discusses gay issues from a broadly conservative perspective; and Out Everywhere is a thriving online and offline community making a conscious attempt to challenge the ghettoization of gays into a monolithic subculture.

I hope to add my own voice soon with In Perspective, a quarterly online periodical of gay perspectives on just about anything. Look out for the launch later this year.