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Originally Posted by !@#$%!
suchfriends, your interpretation is completely arbitrary (and therefore wrong), but it's ok, at least you're reading it, which is what counts.
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that is not true at all, but you are of course entirely free to your opinion, though in all honesty, we have completely difference tastes when it comes to latin american literature, as you and I already disagree about Octavio Paz..
please explain to me how my interpretation is either arbitrary or wrong?
I'm rereading a Clive Barker novel, Sacrament. When I first read it a decade ago I enjoyed it thoroughly, but did not fully get it as I do where I am it in life. It is surprisingly insightful and deep. It seems very much autobiographical, I also didn't notice the connection to homosexual culture and monastics in the "nuclear family" and "genetic posterity" sense, which is why Barker drew on religious motifs several times in the book, aside from the more obvious title. I had never reflected upon that before, about homosexuals feeling a bit left out of the Darwinian approach to immortality, sexual reproduction, child birth, a familial legacy. Barker points this out even obviously in several places and moments in the book, but I guess since I had less experience with monastics and priests at the time in my life, and had lives a markedly less monastic life at the time, I just didn't catch it. Interestingly, around that time I was living a rather
indulgent life of sex and drugs, and consequently it seems from my recollection that I noticed these aspects of Sacrament so much more so than the more spiritual insights Barker has in the novel, where as now I have had a bit more years living the examined life of religious introspection and spiritual exploration, so I am a bit more in-tune with that vibe, and I see it threaded across this novel with some precision. I suppose in its own way, that may be what this novel is, Clive Barker's own kind of self-reflective analysis of the spiritual experience disctinct of his own homosexuality, and that is quite deep in fact to ponder, it is a subject very much neglected, over-looked, even taboo.
I think many people just assume because of the antagonism from most organized "by the Book" religions that homosexuality is deprived of its own sense of religiosity and spirituality, and that is deceptive, naive and even prejudice. The Rightists would love for people to conceive of homosexuals as being entire atheistic or irreligious because it fits into their own stereotypes of depravity and hedonism which are horrifyingly distorted...
Also, Barker really pushes us into our spiritual reflections as well..