Life, death and politics...

A friend from a previous life lived died on the weekend.

Honestly I can not remember the last time that Aveline entered my thoughts, but I suspect it was more than three years ago when I still lived in Canberra and would randomly run into her in the smallness of Canberran circles. But she entered my dreams on Friday night for reasons I can not fathom. I can not remember the dream but I woke up with a smile on my face, content with the thought that it was once again likely that our paths would randomly cross.

Then on Monday I came across the news that following a brain aneurism on her birthday she had passed away on Sunday. Shocked by the strange serendipity of my dreams the news has really thrown me.

I did not know Aveline well. But what I knew I loved. I remember walking into the queer brunch in my first week of uni and meeting her. I was simultaneously awestruck, intrigued and scared out of my skin by her. She was the bravest, craziest, queerest, intelligent and most political individual this small town kid had ever met. And I was continually shocked that she would want to talk to me.

We were both working at parliament house at the same time and she was this welcome burst of colour, life and passion in that building – it still upsets me that she was the absolute exception to every rule in that place. Her physical presence alone was a shock in the sea of suited conservatism, but her life, her politics and her passion were also great exceptions to the blandness of so much about the political establishment. She is one of the only people I have ever met who perfectly understood both my absolute love of parliament, parliamentary procedure and the potential role of legislative governance and my passionate desire to see a more anarchic and radically diverse culture infiltrate the system. She also so wonderfully lived her politics in all areas of her life. Political culture in this country needs more people like Aveline to shake things up, and sadly it has taken her death to remind me of my desire to passionately live my cultural politics and also to subvert and challenge the culture of the system while working within it.

Aveline seemed to irrevocably and deeply touch so many people and I am reminded of how incredibly lucky I am to have known her and so many other fabulous people who dare to live their lives passionately and radically.

Sunlight in a Jar

We’ve never been much chop at all that sensual stuff
One of us always seems to stop before the other’s had enough
Like a self-help manual that’s been written in Braille
It seems the more that we touch, the more we learn about our failings

I’m struck speechless by the nape of your neck
But your requests and suggestions have a similar effect
A litany of prettiness and pettiness too
I reckon every second second we come up with something new

I tried to write an opera for us
But I didn’t get that far
’Cause trying to sum you up in song
Is like catching sunlight in a jar

Complex, completely credible love
The kind that is made not handed to you from above
Is difficult to talk about and harder to write
Like the rhythm of a pulse, or the contours of firelight

Overblown libretto and a sumptuous score
Could never contain the contradictions I adore
We can just be chaos and then something aligns
It’s so hard to contain, maintain it or define it

I tried to write another chorus
But I didn’t get that far
’Cause trying to sum you up in song
Is like catching sunlight in a jar
It’s like catching sunlight in a jar
- The Lucksmiths

It is cheesy and soppy but I love this song. It is part what I want out of a relationship, the concept of being struck speechless by the nape of someone's neck (or them of mine), the inability to ever capture, contain or even know the other person and the concept of a 'complex, completely credible love' as the 'kind that is made not handed to you from above' cuts so close to the relationships I have been in that even vaguely worked and what I want out of future relationships.

But listening to it today I began thinking about it in terms of the work on sexual learning that I am using in my thesis. Like most of my academic work I am going through a process of 'feeling' the theory to see if intuitively it accounts for the processes and phenomena it describes.

McInnes, Bollen and Race (2002) argue that within contexts of sexual adventurism, defined as any sexual activity which extends an individual's existing sexual repertoire, a process of affective learning takes place. This learning process has its locus in the body and its interactivity with other bodies. Affective learning provides a model for understanding how bodies accumulate and live our experiences, particularly within interactions such as sexual scenes (for a better description see conference paper).

There is something about this song which today, in my mind, captured an everyday process of sexual learning in a relationship. The learning which takes place in any new sexual relationship operates in a similar manner as the ‘sexual adventurism’ McInnes, Bollen and Race talk about, but there is a sense of the everyday that their work misses in its focus on acts which dramatically extend an existing sexual repertoire. They talk a lot about the newness of the particular sexual acts or experience for the individual rather than the newness of previous acts with a particular person, and the creation of a repertoire of acts which align rather than stopping before someone has had enough.

I am not sure where this leads me, but I think that if I am going to continue using this model of sexual learning to think about the delivery of safe sex messages I need to think about how the model works in non-sexually adventurous (there is so much wrong with that categorisation I know – tomorrow I will attempt to ascertain a better way of explaining it!) context. As well as the experiences of fear and interest that often seem to mark sexual attraction and relationship development.

Tali White who wrote this song is also one of my remaining boy crushes.

Swoon

I have the biggest crush on C.J. Cregg on The West Wing.

That's all. I just needed to get that out there.

principles for living in 2007

I am usually not one for making new year’s resolutions that I have any chance of keeping, but for some reason I have been inspired to make a list of general principles that shall guide me in the next twelve months. Here they are:

Write more
Blog more
Wear less underwear
Play more dress ups
Make more costumes
Take more photos
Date more, snog more, play more, fuck more
Cook more new food
Eat an entire meal made from things I have grown
Live my politics
Read and write more fiction
Tattoo my skin
Dance more
Make more clothes
Acquire a suit
Publish an article

Prizes for anyone who can guess which six I have already made concerted efforts towards achieving…