Adonis Gate
Yet this ritual walk cannot exist without the car. The mental balance of narratives gets harder to hold, the gymnastics of it all becomes more complicated with every step I take. What do I say? I think about my Dad. The unfortunate timing of it all. Dad, 20th century apostle, phoenix raised from the ash of the post war docks, rat-running car devotee. Just as I was about to experience my own crash, a sudden climatic release of one self into the other, a finite moment, a date to remember and revere, it was aborted. Dad’s decline reached a precipice just as I gained a true knowledge of myself. The Ballardian tightrope between sex and death was flattened, from the sharpness of a novel, into the extended dullness of reality. The last months came in the heat death of autumn. The fiery passions cooling with the body temperature. The decisions of what to call myself got lost under the decisions of what last things to say before the decay of understanding got too far. There was no freedom under the rot and no escape in the loss.
The true heartfelt words never survived the tightness of Dad’s throat, closed tight by the stiff lip and inward pressure to be a man. The meaning implied in his brief words of encouragement, the subtle looks and a hand on my back was something to be learned through time. I understood his care, as much as he was able to give, but there was no assuredness in the implied. We had to believe in the motive behind his actions. We were denied a confirmation in his voice. In a final becoming of man, of following tradition, I denied him a definite knowledge of my true self. Maybe he already knew. I have no doubts he would only have been supportive of my life and proud that I choose to do things my way. I’m sad I didn’t tell him, when time is precious there is only so much you can say.
The truth, as much as truth can ever be such, is that the conversation would never reach a full understanding, how can you speak with someone who never uses their voice? Questioning my sexuality inevitably leads to questioning my gender. Compared to the hours spent walking with Elsie this writing process has crossed epochs and with it the coming out changes. The thoughts develop with time, the ritual representing further clarity than I had during the walk. Such magick is a powerful force. My disjointed relationship with masculinity can now be more effectively expressed as dysphoria. Wrong peg, wrong hole. The conversations would deflate for lack of intense self-reflection on his part. I have never been able to live without questioning everything about myself. So what I thought was a final becoming of manhood, the supposed final understanding of self, was a completion of standing the dominoes. How they fall.
The journey at this point had reached a doldrums of appropriate road signs. Like the best adventure stories we journeyed onwards with great distances covered in a few words. Nits on the barren scalp between thinning hairs. The buildings are getting taller, the streets more cavernous, yet they have never felt more barren and inhuman. The capital succumbs to capital. The bustling streets docked off to be replaced with displays of maximalist dominance. Yet the glass buildings that constitute these displays are fragile and hollow as glasshouses; no one here throws stones. No one ever questions why. The very act would sag the steel beams, liquify the foundations. Introspection as total collapse.
The traces of masculinity in the city’s architecture haunt me as they loom above. I’ve always wanted to know the city as well as my dad did, all of its streets and cut throughs. To become this master of the city is secretly a masculine goal; it is to become dominator, overseer, all knowing, to control it. Or is this need for control my way of overcoming masculinity in its architectural physicality? A way of coming to terms with my masculine patrilineage by repurposing it as my own queer self-discovery. All this stone, concrete, steel and glass is a cover for never really knowing, never questioning what it means to be a man, whether any of us were even meant to be one, it is a facade above all else. Once I understand the geography I’ve won. I am above it. Build all you like but the streets are mine.
In passing, Dad’s life has become serialised into a mythology of fragmented memory, all stitched together with what we can recreate of the human. But I need a reality I can feel, I hope the physicality and geography of the city can guide me to my own knowledge. So I stitch it together, to Dad, to my lineage, to the city. To grant myself the backing of place, to grant myself the energy to call myself “human” and be strong enough to believe my true feeling of what that is for me. To face the city’s streets with confidence is to face my dad with confidence; that I am who I am, whatever that may be.
