Steve_Bamlett_blog

How do you relax?

Frankie Goes to Hollywood ‘Relax’ 12″ Disc by Personal camera, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7794234

I was at least 29 when I first laughed out loud at the word ‘Relax’, because it was 1983, I was just starting a job at a University of London affiliated institute and being gay was still a serious thing for me. I still wore numerous badges advertising the issue though more discretely than when at university as a student at UCL- the personal was after all the political and some people knew that the lambda necklet I wore indicated GAY LIBERATION.

My own politics was a mixture of highly moral ‘feminism’ (for in those days men could claim feminism as a belief structure) that was also rather down on the entitled – which included all men who defined themselves mainly through their masculinity and to a certain extent all heterosexuals. It was a very tense thing – this being political as a gay man. There was a certain cruelty in defiance that required the strength of numbers to sh out at: 2-4.6-8, Is your husband really straight to gesticulating ladies horrified to be at the edges of those (in those days) very political Pride or GAA marches.

When the group Frankie Goes to Hollywood (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankie_Goes_to_Hollywood) released Beyond the Pleasuredome in 1983, I was far from at ease even though with the idea of gay sex – of men having sex, well, just for the sake of sex. That wasn’t part of my working-class grammar-school boy upbringing. In the sixth form I used to hate going to parties where boys and girls had sex even – it seemed rather sordid, or perhaps i just felt excluded. Enough to sit in a corner and listen out for Elton John’s Someone Saved My Life Tonight, Sugar Bear, because I had heard that it was about a gay man being brought from suicide by admitted love of another man. Love was okay. Sex – was sex was hard to configure, precisely because it did not fit into any paradigm that included romance for me then (and my, wasn’t romance and affiliation – serious bonding over at least a measurable duration of time, even if not ‘forever’ – necessary for all that). The song Relax on the Frankie Goes to Hollywood album was a case in point. Though the band made pretence this was a song about how to be motivated, they soon admitted, given the BBC banned it and its explicit video set in a gay club, that it was about ‘shagging‘ (their word) and that it took on certain beliefs about the biology of sexual orgasm relating to the necessity of both relaxation and tension interacting in the process. I laughed because, at last some social tension was released, and some awareness that being uptight about the body was not the freest way of being human and approaching the love of another, or even the idea of pleasure without commitment.

I won’t say it didn’t take time to get to the last position – I was at least 68, had been (and still am) happily married to my husband with whom I have been together some 45 years – and even then the sex was mixed up with mixed up romantic longing (to my detriment for the world is not like that). Before then ‘relaxation’ (after 1983 and up to 2021 at least) was a thing you gained in ‘therapy’ and in which I was trained, if you can call it that, as part of my role as a Primary Care Mental Health Worker. It involved mindfulness type exercises such as the infamous ‘body scan’ where, starting at the tips of your toes (in you mind of course for anything else might sound like a fetish) you progressively persuaded each bit of your body to relax. On the discs my Primary Care Trust made available the sexual organs of either sex/gender never got scanned in the mental process except by being passed over between hips and torso. Relaxation could be assisted by ‘guided imagery’ (I confronted that again in Pilates classes) in which you imagined yourself on a beach – it was never Blackpool for it had to have palm trees and clean seas – or floating up into the air on a cloud that changed colour as it toned to variety in your synaesthetic mood.

I never became a cool cat. Trying mindfulness relaxation therapy myself for work stress all I was aware of was the squeaking of exercise mats under a largely overweight colleagues and the sound of continual non-harmonic flatulence that had to be ignored.

Now I think you need to return a bit to the understanding of body process and the nteraction between the systems of inhibition and tension not only in the muscles but throughout the complex sections of the nervous system, including that troubling hard to generalise autonomic nervous system, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system) wherein the binaries of the parasympathetic and sympathetic systems are never quite binaries; as they never are in biology, despite the amateur biology of ‘philosopher’ Kathleen Stock.

And the connections to the genitals of those systems and the fact that they are, it is now thought, interactive with other systems, including systems of perception and conscious and unconscious expression (which is why relaxation therapy sometimes works) actually take us back to the lyrics of that naughty song Relax (https://genius.com/Frankie-goes-to-hollywood-relax-lyrics). So when you wish to be excited, don’t look for it, relax and it will happen through a process of conversation. And, likewise, if you want to relax, remember that this sometimes requires the previous discharge of excitation, and that goes for the brain working more abstractly and less in direct relation to the body other than just the central nervous system. Hence, I must blog excitedly, and read like that too, to really relax. My husband sometimes says, ‘just relax, watch something mindless like Corrie or Pointless‘. But I can’t. I would rather read Proust and write a blog and relaxation (sometimes) comes with the process of thinking satisfied. I don’t recommend it for others though. If anything, I would say, there are no easy or non-paradoxical answers: there is just knowing yourself and getting temporary release. In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud says that dreams follow this process, and, would you believe it, so does reading Sophocles’ King Oedipus.

All love

Steve