More on Antony--a Queer theology

So.....what is it about this music of Antony and the Johnsons other than it's connection to my Queer collective unconscious that makes it so enthralling, so beguiling?  Certainly, the poetry is remarkable, lyrical and filled with imagery and majick, a mysticism of darkness and flames, of water and earth, of light shining in the darkness, but it is the music qua music that fascinates me as a musician as well as the profound connection which Antony brings to my soul through his poetry.  The music is thoroughly triadic and melodic, something altogether too infrequent in contemporary noise and scream bands. There is a wonderful weave between the major and minor mode that is smooth and seamless, the repetition with slight variation each time there is a repeated line of poetry, the tone painting on words like wind where we hear the wind whistling in the trees or on the rocks ("Another World).  There are the exquisite timbres of cellos, violins, harps, gongs, keyboards, clarinets, saxophones, violas, flutes and even sung quarter tones. Certainly the rhythmic structures are quadruple and duple, for the most part, but within those thoroughly square and masculine rhythms, there is a litheness, a suppleness, a winding and breathing, a certain fluidity that is thoroughly feminine in the round lilt of triple meter, a rare occurrence in contemporary pop music. There is also the use of polyrhythms like in "Hitler In My Heart" where the group uses the jagged patterns of fives and sixes one after the other, and the magnificent drum riffs of "Kiss My Name", that capture my musical imagination.  But it is Antony's poetry, combined with his remarkable musical gifts, which pulls at my mind, my heart, my soul, my Queer spirit.

 

One day I'll grow up I'll be a beautiful woman

One day I'll grow up I'll be a beautiful girl

One day I'll grow up I'll be a beautiful woman

One day I'll grow up I'll be a beautiful girl

But for today I am a child, for today I am a boy

For today I am a child, for today I am a boy

One day I'll grow up I feel the power in me

One day I'll grow up of this I'm sure

One day I'll grow up I know the womb within me

One day I'll grow up  I feel it full and pure.

But for today I am a child, for today I am a boy

For today I am a child, for today I am a boy

This is the Warrior Cry for our time in the Queer World.  To sing a paean to the child, to the boy and to the great possibility of growing up to live in the beautiful eternal feminine, gender Queer, gender bending, neither male nor female and yet both.  It is the fulfillment of the Gospel of Thomas wherein Jesus, when asked how to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, said, "when you make male and female into a single one, so that male will not be male and female will not be female." (Saying 22)  It is this ancient Eastern truth about the "is" ness of things, "when the upper is like the lower, when the inner is like the outer" (Saying 22).  These are the things of which Jesus spoke, of which the Tao Te Ching and Inner Chapters speak.  These are the things of which we read in the Sutras and the Vedas. This is an ancient knowledge, and, I would suggest, an ancient Queer knowledge.  This is the knowledge of which Antony's poetry sings.

When I was in seminary in the 1980's, working on Queer Liberation Theology before there ever was even a glimmer of such a field in any credentialed theologian's eye, I learned to bring my own Queer knowledge to things such as The Hebrew Scripture and The New Testament.  I understood the love between David and Jonathan better than I ever thought possible.  I recognized well the relationship between Jesus and "the beloved" John for what it was, and saw, decades before the "ground breaking" book on this subject was written by Theodore Jennings, just what the Gospels told us about that relationship and why it was most definitely sexual in nature. I was trained well by my feminist liberation mentors who taught me how to recognize that John was privy to the Mystery and to certain secret teachings of Jesus of which the other disciples were not, that the words Jesus spoke to John and Mary from the Cross are the words one lover speaks to his partner and his mother upon his own death.  I learned this from my Queer knowledge, from my own experience in the Death Years during the Genocide, when dying partners would "give" their partners to their mothers and vice versa. "Woman here is your son...[son] here is your mother."  (John 19: 26-27, NRSV)   My understanding of the importance of sexuality and spirituality comes directly from my Queer knowledge.  When I read, "if the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is amazing, but if spirit came into being because of the body, it is even more amazing. I am amazed, though, how such great wealth has settled into such poverty." (Gospel of Thomas, Saying 28), I know that my sexual body is the thing that created my sexual spirit, not vice versa,  that they are both Holy and it is, because they were created in that order,  "even more amazing.".  In me there is no "poverty" of knowledge of "such great wealth".  It is my Queer knowledge which allows me to understand so well the Mystery of things, and I am unafraid to speak the truth of my knowledge.  Jesus, in the Gospel of Matthew, says that I "am the light of the world"  I will not "hide [my] light under a bushel" (Mathew 5:14) just because that light makes people, both Gay and straight,  uncomfortable.  

So it is now that I bring that Queer knowledge to the Holy Books of the other great religions of the world, which, in their turn, taught me about Queer Spirituality. I bring my spiritual understanding, that came from projecting my Queer knowledge onto conventional spirituality, to my listening and to the world of Antony who lives in the Faerie of The Divine Feminine, with its correlative Divine Masculine.  Antony, who lives with Athena and Ceredwon, Lilith, Kali  Durga, and Morgan Le Fey also lives with the Queer trickster gods Mercury and Loge, the Druid priests and Lords Shiva and Vishnu.  He lives in the world of non-dualism where Queer is paramount, where masculine and feminine are not those which separate, but those which bring together.  He lives in the world of Queer Spirit, a Spirit of peace and life abundant, of harmony and the circle, a Spirit where fire and water live side by side in symbiosis, wherein the masculine and feminine are bound together in unity, a Spirit of co-operation, consensus, and creativity, a Spirit of everlasting Life.  As Jesus so clearly teaches, I know that my Queer Spirit is born first and foremost by my Queer Body.The Body comes first and births the Spirit.  Antony's music and poetry concretize this theology. It is in the wideness of that Queer Spirit and Queer Theology that the world will find its saving grace.  Antony opens the door to such grace, and it is in the truth of "Aeon", "Divine", and "One Dove" that we will be set free.  Thank you, my dear, for the great gift you give us--the gift of non-dualism and oneness, the gift of self-awareness and examination, and the gift of paradox that is God/dess.  You give us the realm of the Divine, Feminine and Masculine, and allow us to live in it in the fullness of time and with great joy.  Your music is the door to that realm.  Your music and poetry are a Holy Gift, indeed, and I will treasure that gift for the rest of my life. Bless you, sweet Man.