My new favorite drink.
And aptly named, let me tell you.
Here's the recipe - perfect for parties because you can use the cheapest ingredients available and it still tastes great. Just make sure you have plenty of time to recover...
2 cans beer
1 can vodka
2 cans lemonade
I know it sounds disgusting, but trust me on this one. Delicious. Some recipes suggest that you use lemonade concentrate, others add sprite to the mixture. I think either of these could be good substitutions for some of the lemonade. Be warned though - you'll be tempted to make up huge batches for parties (I had my first glass out of a blue tupperware tub) but the beer will go flat if it's made too far in advance. Better to make it up 2 cans of beer at a time.
**Bonus** if you add the beer first, you can use the emptied can to measure the other ingredients.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Everyone Wins
(to the tune of Colors Of The Wind)
Everyone Wins
You think I’m an ignorant drunkard
And you’ve read so many essays,
I guess it must be so
But still I cannot see,
If the drunken one is me,
How can there be so much that you don’t know?
You don’t know…
I’ve seen you eating dinner at the D.C.
And you don’t have a girlfriend, I don’t think
And I’ve been waiting for my chance to “meet” you…
So imagine when I found out you don’t drink.
You think the only people who are people,
Are people you think and act like you –
But if you’d walk the footsteps of a hipster,
You’d learn things you never knew you never knew.
Have you ever seen the sunrise from a stranger’s bed?
Or asked a drunken freshmen why he grins?
If you’d just give in and cave to social pressure
Then you’d get drunk and we’d hook up – Everyone wins!
Yes you’d get drunk and we’d hook up; everyone wins….
Come taste the stale Natty’s of the Soco’s,
Come drink some crystal palace in my room!
Come try some cheap-ass rum punch at this party,
And we’ll see just how much booze you can consume…
Security and campo are my brothers,
The EMS is more than just a friend!
And we are all connected to each other,
In a circle, in a hoop, that never ends!
How high the stoner kids go?
If you turn it down, then you’ll never know!
And you’ll never see the sun rise from a stranger’s bed,
Or wonder what you did the night before!
We need to seize what little time we have together
We need to hang some sort of signal on the door…
You can get good grades and still
All you are is lame until –
You can drink just like the frat boy that’s within
Everyone Wins
You think I’m an ignorant drunkard
And you’ve read so many essays,
I guess it must be so
But still I cannot see,
If the drunken one is me,
How can there be so much that you don’t know?
You don’t know…
I’ve seen you eating dinner at the D.C.
And you don’t have a girlfriend, I don’t think
And I’ve been waiting for my chance to “meet” you…
So imagine when I found out you don’t drink.
You think the only people who are people,
Are people you think and act like you –
But if you’d walk the footsteps of a hipster,
You’d learn things you never knew you never knew.
Have you ever seen the sunrise from a stranger’s bed?
Or asked a drunken freshmen why he grins?
If you’d just give in and cave to social pressure
Then you’d get drunk and we’d hook up – Everyone wins!
Yes you’d get drunk and we’d hook up; everyone wins….
Come taste the stale Natty’s of the Soco’s,
Come drink some crystal palace in my room!
Come try some cheap-ass rum punch at this party,
And we’ll see just how much booze you can consume…
Security and campo are my brothers,
The EMS is more than just a friend!
And we are all connected to each other,
In a circle, in a hoop, that never ends!
How high the stoner kids go?
If you turn it down, then you’ll never know!
And you’ll never see the sun rise from a stranger’s bed,
Or wonder what you did the night before!
We need to seize what little time we have together
We need to hang some sort of signal on the door…
You can get good grades and still
All you are is lame until –
You can drink just like the frat boy that’s within
Thursday, May 15, 2008
In The Beginning
In the beginning, there must have been light. This light was invisible, but everyone and everything could feel it, and it was joy and bitterness and hunger and fullness and boredom and fear and infatuation and peace. The light was the way you feel when you eat a sandwich on Tuesday, and it was also the way you feel right before you get sick. It was the sixth time you’ve bumped you toe on the same corner of the bedstead in the middle of the night. The light was the taste of pineapple lollipops, it was misdirected anger, it was unexpected kindness, it was love. It was not hate. But it was everything else.
And because the light was everything, and everything was the light, the beginning was also confusion and chaos, and so the things in the universe developed ways to filter the light, and then ways to reflect it back at each other, and in this way a particular emotion or experience could be remembered and shared at will with any other part of the universe. This became communication.
It started with the stars. Being the largest things there were, the stars got more of the light than any of the smaller objects, and after a while, all of the hope and despair, and the smell of baking bread, and the heat of warm baths, and the shimmer of gasoline in small dirty, puddles, and the excitement of traveling on a jet plane became too much for the stars, and they turned themselves inside out. Now everything that had come in shot right back out, and inside it was dark and quite. This is how the stars became the most selfless things in the universe, giving without ever taking, and it is why today people make wishes on them. However it also meant that the stars were no longer able to absorb light, and that’s why the wishes seldom come true, because they can’t hear us, no matter how hard we try.
After this, there came color, because color reflected some things while letting others through. And by becoming a certain color, an object could reflect something for everything around it, and any time someone looked at the object, they absorbed whatever the object was reflecting, and in this way, there was communication.
Still the light was too much, and so next to come were hardness and softness and squishiness and stickiness, and a whole universe of other textures that deflected or accepted the stronger forms of light, like a door slammed on your finger, or a hand held for the first time in the back row of the movies.
And now they could communicate and share, and they could order the chaos and sort out the confusion. But everything was not perfect. Because when an object chose to take on colors and texture, when it decided to reflect something to the world, it found that now it could only absorb the opposite. When a flower chose as its color perfect happiness, it gave off happiness to everything around it, but it could only absorb sadness in return.
For this reason, things in the universe found it prudent to make colors that were not pure, but mixtures of many different things, becoming, for example, green, which is newness and power and promise, but also illness and jealousy and pride, or red, which is love and warmth and confidence, but also anger and warning and embarrassment. And in this way they might give off happiness and absorb sadness, but because the color was only a small part happiness, they might still hope to absorb some when it was given off by a friend.
With these mixed colors, things got confusing again, because no one could tell whether someone who was, for example, red, wished to project love or anger or heat or scratchiness or the thrill of beating the high score on the pinball machine at the crowded arcade on the boardwalk, or perhaps something else entirely. So the next thing to be created was sound, which was like a secondary filter. And now with sound, the red thing could crackle and pop, and every one would know that it was fire, and something that was green could say “I am envious” and everything around it would know that it was not growing, or, if it was growing, that that was incidental, the important part being the envy.
Of course, of all the objects in the universe, only one kind of object was so worried about this communication that it made itself black and white and brown and beige and tan so that it could reflect a little bit of all the colors (and absorb them too) and it invented clothes and accessories, which were colored things that could be put on and taken off at a moment’s notice, and it thought up a million different sounds to make and called them words or songs or giggles or cries. And these objects, that were called people, were so confusing in their many colors that they began to rely on the words and sounds to communicate with each other.
Now, the more they relied on these fragile secondary filters, the farther away they got from the stronger forms of light, like touch, which became frightening to the people, who mostly tried to avoid them. In fact, they became so worried about what they were reflecting to the rest of the universe, that they developed mirrors, which would reflect everything and absorb nothing. With the mirrors the people thought that they could see how they would be received by the objects around them, but they forgot that communication is about what is absorbed, not what is reflected, and that a mirror could not tell you how another part of the universe would absorb a touch or a sound, or what parts of you they would in turn reflect and not absorb.
Having never before encountered something as absolute as the mirror, no one could know that when they invented it, they would inadvertently invent the feeling of hate. Hate is a perfect reflection without any absorption. It is the denial of communication. This is why people often feel sad when they look in a mirror. But when people thought about the mirror, they had a great realization, which was that if something could perfectly absorb everything that you reflected, it would create the opposite of hate. Immediately the people wanted to believe in this opposite of hate, and so they agreed to name it in order to make it more real. But because the people hadn’t found this anti-mirror and so had never experienced this feeling, they could only imagine what it might be like, and they called it love, even though that already meant something, because it was the best thing they could think of. Then they thought about it some more and decided that this was not strong enough, and so they called it being in love, because it would be like existing in a world where only the very best and happiest light surrounded you at all times. And they were certain that all they had come up with must be true, because they had experienced hate.
As soon as they had discovered this, the people ran out to try and find this anti-mirror in the world. It would have to be very complex, they thought, in order to absorb all of the many different things that each of them reflected, and they searched high and low but could not find it in beautiful paintings, which had many different colors, or in diamonds and jewels, which fascinated many of the searchers because they were translucent and could absorb and reflect at the same time. Still others insisted that they could create the anti-mirror by collecting a group of things which, together, would be able to absorb all of a person, and they set off in search of all the things they would need, but they could never quite find enough of them. Finally, some of the people stopped searching and angrily returned to the mirror, convinced that the secret lay with in it, but there they found only hate, and sat for a long time but could not free themselves.
At this point, the remaining searchers, who had been searching together for a long time now, were very tired, but not yet ready to give up, and so they turned to each other as though to ask the person next to them what they thought might be answer. And since it had been many years and they had used everything they knew of to try to figure out the answer, many of the searchers had used up all of their words and had none left to give to the person they were looking at. And over the long journey much of their clothing had faded, and their accessories had been lost, and they had nothing to reflect colors at the person, not even to give them the general sense of excitement and queasiness that’s reflected by a pair of striped earrings, or moisture and disparity from a paisley tie, or that exhaustion tinged with the sour aftertaste of gooseberry berry jam, for which tangerine swim trunks seemed to be most effective. Many of them then remembered the stronger forms of light, and fighting broke out between some who used their arms and legs to express their despair or frustration, and others tried pressing different parts of their bodies together, touching each other in every way they could think of, and it was pleasant indeed, so for a while they called this making love, but nothing much came of it after all, except to distract them from their search for the anti-mirror. The few who remained didn’t know what to try anymore, so they just looked around, and tried to guess what someone else was thinking.
All of a sudden, one of these last people cried out.
“I have found it!” he said. And everyone around him hurried over crying “Where? Where is it?” but all they saw was a girl sitting on a rock a short distance away.
“It’s right here,” he said, and they looked at him, but he was staring at the girl.
“It’s her,” he said, and his voice was hushed and reverent. But the others looked at her and they did not see it. Slowly they all turned away in disappointment, but in the darkness came another voice.
“No! It’s him! It’s him!” cried a woman, and “Quickly, come and see!”
But when they reached the source, still the group did not see it, and they were again disappointed. “We don’t see anything,” they said, but the man whom the woman had pointed at stood up and shook his head.
“That’s because it’s not me, it’s him,” he said, and with this he pointed at a man nearby, the very one who had occupied his attention.
The crowd looked and looked again with each new shout, but each time they were disappointed because now matter how certain the person who shouted, they could never seem to agree on any one source.
“It must be someone,” an old man reasoned. “It only makes sense that the one thing complex enough to absorb us is something as complex as we are! It must be one of us! Everyone look for him!”
And with considerable fervor the whole group set out to look for the person who would absorb everything of them, the one who would bring them to the light. At this there was much confusion, because everyone seemed to have a different idea about who it might be. And sometimes the crowd would agree on one particular person, and they would exult that person above all else and say that they were sent from the Light as it originally was, and they would capitalize the “L”, meaning that light of the Beginning (which, being in the Middle, they would also capitalize), but they were forgetting that originally the Light contained bad things as well as good and that they were each a part of the Light, but that they had mostly forgotten this fact in their search. So they could never seem to say definitively that they had found what they were looking for.
Still, as the crowd passed by, two people remained, smiling and facing each other, and they did not leave with the rest.
“Why didn’t you leave with them?” asked the girl.
“Why, because I know they won’t believe me,” said the boy, “but I’ve found it. And so I just thought I’d stay here with it as long as I could.”
“I knew it!” said the girl, “because I’ve found it too!”
“Yes,” said the boy. Then, “It’s you.” And he smiled at her.
But the girl frowned at him.
“No,” she said.
“No?” he asked, alarmed.
“No,” she said firmly. “It’s you.”
And for a little while they argued, but neither of them could be swayed. And in the end, it didn’t matter. Both had found what they were looking for, and rather than risk losing it, they decided to stop arguing and let the other believe what they wanted as long as they might stay with them. And for the first time since the stars turned themselves inside out, something in the universe remembered what it was like to absorb the Light as it was in the Beginning, and because they were too busy holding on to it to figure out what exactly it was, they continued to call it being in love, and this led to even more confusion and chaos in the world for which the people needed more words and songs and clothes and accessories, but sorting this out gave them something to do while they were searching, and so they didn’t much mind it at all.
And because the light was everything, and everything was the light, the beginning was also confusion and chaos, and so the things in the universe developed ways to filter the light, and then ways to reflect it back at each other, and in this way a particular emotion or experience could be remembered and shared at will with any other part of the universe. This became communication.
It started with the stars. Being the largest things there were, the stars got more of the light than any of the smaller objects, and after a while, all of the hope and despair, and the smell of baking bread, and the heat of warm baths, and the shimmer of gasoline in small dirty, puddles, and the excitement of traveling on a jet plane became too much for the stars, and they turned themselves inside out. Now everything that had come in shot right back out, and inside it was dark and quite. This is how the stars became the most selfless things in the universe, giving without ever taking, and it is why today people make wishes on them. However it also meant that the stars were no longer able to absorb light, and that’s why the wishes seldom come true, because they can’t hear us, no matter how hard we try.
After this, there came color, because color reflected some things while letting others through. And by becoming a certain color, an object could reflect something for everything around it, and any time someone looked at the object, they absorbed whatever the object was reflecting, and in this way, there was communication.
Still the light was too much, and so next to come were hardness and softness and squishiness and stickiness, and a whole universe of other textures that deflected or accepted the stronger forms of light, like a door slammed on your finger, or a hand held for the first time in the back row of the movies.
And now they could communicate and share, and they could order the chaos and sort out the confusion. But everything was not perfect. Because when an object chose to take on colors and texture, when it decided to reflect something to the world, it found that now it could only absorb the opposite. When a flower chose as its color perfect happiness, it gave off happiness to everything around it, but it could only absorb sadness in return.
For this reason, things in the universe found it prudent to make colors that were not pure, but mixtures of many different things, becoming, for example, green, which is newness and power and promise, but also illness and jealousy and pride, or red, which is love and warmth and confidence, but also anger and warning and embarrassment. And in this way they might give off happiness and absorb sadness, but because the color was only a small part happiness, they might still hope to absorb some when it was given off by a friend.
With these mixed colors, things got confusing again, because no one could tell whether someone who was, for example, red, wished to project love or anger or heat or scratchiness or the thrill of beating the high score on the pinball machine at the crowded arcade on the boardwalk, or perhaps something else entirely. So the next thing to be created was sound, which was like a secondary filter. And now with sound, the red thing could crackle and pop, and every one would know that it was fire, and something that was green could say “I am envious” and everything around it would know that it was not growing, or, if it was growing, that that was incidental, the important part being the envy.
Of course, of all the objects in the universe, only one kind of object was so worried about this communication that it made itself black and white and brown and beige and tan so that it could reflect a little bit of all the colors (and absorb them too) and it invented clothes and accessories, which were colored things that could be put on and taken off at a moment’s notice, and it thought up a million different sounds to make and called them words or songs or giggles or cries. And these objects, that were called people, were so confusing in their many colors that they began to rely on the words and sounds to communicate with each other.
Now, the more they relied on these fragile secondary filters, the farther away they got from the stronger forms of light, like touch, which became frightening to the people, who mostly tried to avoid them. In fact, they became so worried about what they were reflecting to the rest of the universe, that they developed mirrors, which would reflect everything and absorb nothing. With the mirrors the people thought that they could see how they would be received by the objects around them, but they forgot that communication is about what is absorbed, not what is reflected, and that a mirror could not tell you how another part of the universe would absorb a touch or a sound, or what parts of you they would in turn reflect and not absorb.
Having never before encountered something as absolute as the mirror, no one could know that when they invented it, they would inadvertently invent the feeling of hate. Hate is a perfect reflection without any absorption. It is the denial of communication. This is why people often feel sad when they look in a mirror. But when people thought about the mirror, they had a great realization, which was that if something could perfectly absorb everything that you reflected, it would create the opposite of hate. Immediately the people wanted to believe in this opposite of hate, and so they agreed to name it in order to make it more real. But because the people hadn’t found this anti-mirror and so had never experienced this feeling, they could only imagine what it might be like, and they called it love, even though that already meant something, because it was the best thing they could think of. Then they thought about it some more and decided that this was not strong enough, and so they called it being in love, because it would be like existing in a world where only the very best and happiest light surrounded you at all times. And they were certain that all they had come up with must be true, because they had experienced hate.
As soon as they had discovered this, the people ran out to try and find this anti-mirror in the world. It would have to be very complex, they thought, in order to absorb all of the many different things that each of them reflected, and they searched high and low but could not find it in beautiful paintings, which had many different colors, or in diamonds and jewels, which fascinated many of the searchers because they were translucent and could absorb and reflect at the same time. Still others insisted that they could create the anti-mirror by collecting a group of things which, together, would be able to absorb all of a person, and they set off in search of all the things they would need, but they could never quite find enough of them. Finally, some of the people stopped searching and angrily returned to the mirror, convinced that the secret lay with in it, but there they found only hate, and sat for a long time but could not free themselves.
At this point, the remaining searchers, who had been searching together for a long time now, were very tired, but not yet ready to give up, and so they turned to each other as though to ask the person next to them what they thought might be answer. And since it had been many years and they had used everything they knew of to try to figure out the answer, many of the searchers had used up all of their words and had none left to give to the person they were looking at. And over the long journey much of their clothing had faded, and their accessories had been lost, and they had nothing to reflect colors at the person, not even to give them the general sense of excitement and queasiness that’s reflected by a pair of striped earrings, or moisture and disparity from a paisley tie, or that exhaustion tinged with the sour aftertaste of gooseberry berry jam, for which tangerine swim trunks seemed to be most effective. Many of them then remembered the stronger forms of light, and fighting broke out between some who used their arms and legs to express their despair or frustration, and others tried pressing different parts of their bodies together, touching each other in every way they could think of, and it was pleasant indeed, so for a while they called this making love, but nothing much came of it after all, except to distract them from their search for the anti-mirror. The few who remained didn’t know what to try anymore, so they just looked around, and tried to guess what someone else was thinking.
All of a sudden, one of these last people cried out.
“I have found it!” he said. And everyone around him hurried over crying “Where? Where is it?” but all they saw was a girl sitting on a rock a short distance away.
“It’s right here,” he said, and they looked at him, but he was staring at the girl.
“It’s her,” he said, and his voice was hushed and reverent. But the others looked at her and they did not see it. Slowly they all turned away in disappointment, but in the darkness came another voice.
“No! It’s him! It’s him!” cried a woman, and “Quickly, come and see!”
But when they reached the source, still the group did not see it, and they were again disappointed. “We don’t see anything,” they said, but the man whom the woman had pointed at stood up and shook his head.
“That’s because it’s not me, it’s him,” he said, and with this he pointed at a man nearby, the very one who had occupied his attention.
The crowd looked and looked again with each new shout, but each time they were disappointed because now matter how certain the person who shouted, they could never seem to agree on any one source.
“It must be someone,” an old man reasoned. “It only makes sense that the one thing complex enough to absorb us is something as complex as we are! It must be one of us! Everyone look for him!”
And with considerable fervor the whole group set out to look for the person who would absorb everything of them, the one who would bring them to the light. At this there was much confusion, because everyone seemed to have a different idea about who it might be. And sometimes the crowd would agree on one particular person, and they would exult that person above all else and say that they were sent from the Light as it originally was, and they would capitalize the “L”, meaning that light of the Beginning (which, being in the Middle, they would also capitalize), but they were forgetting that originally the Light contained bad things as well as good and that they were each a part of the Light, but that they had mostly forgotten this fact in their search. So they could never seem to say definitively that they had found what they were looking for.
Still, as the crowd passed by, two people remained, smiling and facing each other, and they did not leave with the rest.
“Why didn’t you leave with them?” asked the girl.
“Why, because I know they won’t believe me,” said the boy, “but I’ve found it. And so I just thought I’d stay here with it as long as I could.”
“I knew it!” said the girl, “because I’ve found it too!”
“Yes,” said the boy. Then, “It’s you.” And he smiled at her.
But the girl frowned at him.
“No,” she said.
“No?” he asked, alarmed.
“No,” she said firmly. “It’s you.”
And for a little while they argued, but neither of them could be swayed. And in the end, it didn’t matter. Both had found what they were looking for, and rather than risk losing it, they decided to stop arguing and let the other believe what they wanted as long as they might stay with them. And for the first time since the stars turned themselves inside out, something in the universe remembered what it was like to absorb the Light as it was in the Beginning, and because they were too busy holding on to it to figure out what exactly it was, they continued to call it being in love, and this led to even more confusion and chaos in the world for which the people needed more words and songs and clothes and accessories, but sorting this out gave them something to do while they were searching, and so they didn’t much mind it at all.
Il Duomo
One day I’ll go back through the Tuscan hills, which to me are mountains, past the vineyards and the olive groves and the cities set surprisingly beneath a pale yellow sun. I will cast my blue-black shadow over sage grass and foot-worn paving stones, and watch the sunset spring from cloud to cloud in daring acrobatic glory through the pitted surface of a window on a winding train. Somewhere past Cortona, on its tipsy seat, before the perfect dome of Firenze is visible above her crowded streets, I’ll find myself inside the rough arms of an ancient Etruscan city called Arezzo, and I’ll feel at home.
It was the walls that made the city mine. I had to pass beneath them every time I entered, through the arches waiting stoically atop the hill. They made the city feel alive, embodied. American cities sprawl, their edges broken by the tire tracks of SUV’s, sprouting suburbs like fungal faerie rings in concentric circles. They are indecisive. They are an operator’s nightmare, making 411 a game of guess and check with patient callers digging through their memories for different county names to try. My Italian city set its limits and simply made the people chose the safety of the wall or the freedom of the hills beyond.
You cannot be ambiguously in Arezzo, with its shortened towers and it steeply climbing hill - there is in and there is out. It shrugs its shoulders at the baking midday sun, sending cobblestones shivering down it back in crowded streets. Piazzas throw themselves open to the café tables of osterias which open barely long enough each night for a slew of languid dinner dates before they tuck themselves away and watch the people come out and fill the streets with talk and window shop at ten in the evening, pushing children in strollers, making dates, meeting friends.
From where I stay, without the city walls, the throng of people that it holds will disappear, recede behind the stony heights. At my window I count the cypress trees, I trace the aqueducts with a careful finger. There are the city fields, where I would make my stand in time of war, a soupspoon waving proudly above my silver kettle helm. There are the chestnut trees along the swooning track I risk my life to run before I eat and start the day. Gallantly the road sweeps bows to every stuccoed ochre villa, nodding at the gated drive of a minor palazzo where the Count is still a presence here above the town, surrounded by his carefully tended hedges, protected by a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary and her child.
And in the distance, my church. A spindly, cobblestone thing, red clay roof and sandstone floating on the lights of the town below it like a lonely vessel on a silent sea. My church, amidst the fairy lights, the eerily fixed reflections of a thousand stars that quivered and hid in the glare from their earthly doubles until the incandescent amber glow was more authentic than the sky above.
I’ve never been. A dozen steps, as long across as the space allowed, set the church apart in the crowded piazza and leveled ministering stares at passerby. They stood like frozen sentries and gathered dust and leaves and tourists until the cold of autumn slowed the summer winds that blew them in and only snow was left to settle there from Sunday night to Saturday. A thousand times I passed them, swept away the smeared edges of forgetfulness with darting glances that kept them crisply marching in the corners of my mind. Occasionally I brushed along their lowest tier, feet finding purchase on the grey gold edges of the rounding blocks of stone, but then some business called me back into the warren of the winding streets. From time to time the evening crowds would force me up along the sagging ranks to make my way as best I could with one leg longer then the other, but I never made it to the top. Something always kept me hobbling along, at cross-purposes to the heavy steps; though I felt their solemn gaze, I never bathed the polished handles of the doors in cooling sweat from palms that clenched unconsciously against the cold until the incline filled my lungs and legs and face with heat that spread beneath my sweaters and my jeans, and struggled through my tangled curls. The heavy doors remained austerely still.
In the morning, my church peaked through the shutters at me, blinking in the early sun. At dusk, the light sank gradually behind its spire: first the yellows, then the oranges, and, finally the reds, until at last only a dusty pink lingered in the mountains, curling through the blue and violet cypress trees, and licking up the gravel roads they walked. And all day in between the pino grigio sunrises and the vin santos sunsets, the light was drawn and dragged and pulled across the layered tiles, as though the spire of the church were acting like a lightning rod for the midmorning sun.
I flirted with it, when I ran, or walked along the hills, or into town. Here and there the olive groves broke apart and let a piece of ancient wall pass in among their ranks, and through these cracks, I could watch my church grow larger or smaller, turn this way and that. I saw it winking at me in the frost, through streams of breath grown heavy in the chilly air. At night I let it walk me home, say goodnight before I went to sleep and wish me pleasant dreams. I saw it every morning when I woke and let it welcome me when I returned from traveling, let it lead me home and wave me off.
And still I never entered it. If the city walls contained me, then my church contained my wanderlust. I could be happy in the grip of Etruscan walls and let my curiosity run through darkened rooms that held the whole of what I’d never seen. Inside the doors I never opened lay a world of things to contemplate, waiting patiently for me to think of them, calling plaintively like pealing bells. I would be happy to be confined and find myself a traveler in the changing light that filtered through the swelling clouds and picked out angles I had never seen although I watched them as I went about my day.
Leaving Arezzo, I felt some part of me tear, my friends running along behind the fleeing train, the chiseled edges of the city softening with distance and a darkness that was tender pink. I sank into the seat, the musical Italian on the speaker like a scratched record I ignored, and felt some part of me that would not leave the loving walls. Against the rushing fields that were flinging me away, I saw the ground rise sharply toward my steadfast church, the buildings leaning on each other for support. I followed alleyways that wound me upwards until at last I caught my breath and leaned a hand against a solid, silent door. I could see it only in pieces, it was so great – the cast iron of the handle and the gleaming white of wood worn down with so many Sundays worth of hands. I felt the heavy grain curl softly and laid my palm against a dark knot. Inside the sound of music whispered through the keyhole and for the first time I thought that I would do it, enter it, confront myself, admit my curiosity was stronger than this strange compelling superstition which told me I would lose all of it if I ever went inside…
The train lurched and I realized that the light had left me staring at my reflection on a darkened windowpane, fled behind the mountains that were leaving me as well and only taking more time in taking leave.
One day I’ll go back through the Tuscan mountains, I’ll take a train towards Florence and get off before that city has the chance to say hello. In a small town called Arezzo, I will buy a bottle of wine and push my legs against the leaning streets until I’m hot and sticking to the inside of my shirt, until I think I may have lost my breath and wonder how I ever made the climb. When I reach the top, a church will be there waiting for me in the sun or covered by a thin layer of snow. It will be empty, or open, or full. I will admire the many steps, the terracotta shingled roof, the well-carved wood of the heavy doors…
And, after a moment, I’ll move on. I’ll pass beneath the walls and out the other side, find a road and follow it as far away as I can get. I will look back, as I go my way, but see that the city no longer holds me in its arms. Instead, a little piece of me has fled inside the church.
It was the walls that made the city mine. I had to pass beneath them every time I entered, through the arches waiting stoically atop the hill. They made the city feel alive, embodied. American cities sprawl, their edges broken by the tire tracks of SUV’s, sprouting suburbs like fungal faerie rings in concentric circles. They are indecisive. They are an operator’s nightmare, making 411 a game of guess and check with patient callers digging through their memories for different county names to try. My Italian city set its limits and simply made the people chose the safety of the wall or the freedom of the hills beyond.
You cannot be ambiguously in Arezzo, with its shortened towers and it steeply climbing hill - there is in and there is out. It shrugs its shoulders at the baking midday sun, sending cobblestones shivering down it back in crowded streets. Piazzas throw themselves open to the café tables of osterias which open barely long enough each night for a slew of languid dinner dates before they tuck themselves away and watch the people come out and fill the streets with talk and window shop at ten in the evening, pushing children in strollers, making dates, meeting friends.
From where I stay, without the city walls, the throng of people that it holds will disappear, recede behind the stony heights. At my window I count the cypress trees, I trace the aqueducts with a careful finger. There are the city fields, where I would make my stand in time of war, a soupspoon waving proudly above my silver kettle helm. There are the chestnut trees along the swooning track I risk my life to run before I eat and start the day. Gallantly the road sweeps bows to every stuccoed ochre villa, nodding at the gated drive of a minor palazzo where the Count is still a presence here above the town, surrounded by his carefully tended hedges, protected by a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary and her child.
And in the distance, my church. A spindly, cobblestone thing, red clay roof and sandstone floating on the lights of the town below it like a lonely vessel on a silent sea. My church, amidst the fairy lights, the eerily fixed reflections of a thousand stars that quivered and hid in the glare from their earthly doubles until the incandescent amber glow was more authentic than the sky above.
I’ve never been. A dozen steps, as long across as the space allowed, set the church apart in the crowded piazza and leveled ministering stares at passerby. They stood like frozen sentries and gathered dust and leaves and tourists until the cold of autumn slowed the summer winds that blew them in and only snow was left to settle there from Sunday night to Saturday. A thousand times I passed them, swept away the smeared edges of forgetfulness with darting glances that kept them crisply marching in the corners of my mind. Occasionally I brushed along their lowest tier, feet finding purchase on the grey gold edges of the rounding blocks of stone, but then some business called me back into the warren of the winding streets. From time to time the evening crowds would force me up along the sagging ranks to make my way as best I could with one leg longer then the other, but I never made it to the top. Something always kept me hobbling along, at cross-purposes to the heavy steps; though I felt their solemn gaze, I never bathed the polished handles of the doors in cooling sweat from palms that clenched unconsciously against the cold until the incline filled my lungs and legs and face with heat that spread beneath my sweaters and my jeans, and struggled through my tangled curls. The heavy doors remained austerely still.
In the morning, my church peaked through the shutters at me, blinking in the early sun. At dusk, the light sank gradually behind its spire: first the yellows, then the oranges, and, finally the reds, until at last only a dusty pink lingered in the mountains, curling through the blue and violet cypress trees, and licking up the gravel roads they walked. And all day in between the pino grigio sunrises and the vin santos sunsets, the light was drawn and dragged and pulled across the layered tiles, as though the spire of the church were acting like a lightning rod for the midmorning sun.
I flirted with it, when I ran, or walked along the hills, or into town. Here and there the olive groves broke apart and let a piece of ancient wall pass in among their ranks, and through these cracks, I could watch my church grow larger or smaller, turn this way and that. I saw it winking at me in the frost, through streams of breath grown heavy in the chilly air. At night I let it walk me home, say goodnight before I went to sleep and wish me pleasant dreams. I saw it every morning when I woke and let it welcome me when I returned from traveling, let it lead me home and wave me off.
And still I never entered it. If the city walls contained me, then my church contained my wanderlust. I could be happy in the grip of Etruscan walls and let my curiosity run through darkened rooms that held the whole of what I’d never seen. Inside the doors I never opened lay a world of things to contemplate, waiting patiently for me to think of them, calling plaintively like pealing bells. I would be happy to be confined and find myself a traveler in the changing light that filtered through the swelling clouds and picked out angles I had never seen although I watched them as I went about my day.
Leaving Arezzo, I felt some part of me tear, my friends running along behind the fleeing train, the chiseled edges of the city softening with distance and a darkness that was tender pink. I sank into the seat, the musical Italian on the speaker like a scratched record I ignored, and felt some part of me that would not leave the loving walls. Against the rushing fields that were flinging me away, I saw the ground rise sharply toward my steadfast church, the buildings leaning on each other for support. I followed alleyways that wound me upwards until at last I caught my breath and leaned a hand against a solid, silent door. I could see it only in pieces, it was so great – the cast iron of the handle and the gleaming white of wood worn down with so many Sundays worth of hands. I felt the heavy grain curl softly and laid my palm against a dark knot. Inside the sound of music whispered through the keyhole and for the first time I thought that I would do it, enter it, confront myself, admit my curiosity was stronger than this strange compelling superstition which told me I would lose all of it if I ever went inside…
The train lurched and I realized that the light had left me staring at my reflection on a darkened windowpane, fled behind the mountains that were leaving me as well and only taking more time in taking leave.
One day I’ll go back through the Tuscan mountains, I’ll take a train towards Florence and get off before that city has the chance to say hello. In a small town called Arezzo, I will buy a bottle of wine and push my legs against the leaning streets until I’m hot and sticking to the inside of my shirt, until I think I may have lost my breath and wonder how I ever made the climb. When I reach the top, a church will be there waiting for me in the sun or covered by a thin layer of snow. It will be empty, or open, or full. I will admire the many steps, the terracotta shingled roof, the well-carved wood of the heavy doors…
And, after a moment, I’ll move on. I’ll pass beneath the walls and out the other side, find a road and follow it as far away as I can get. I will look back, as I go my way, but see that the city no longer holds me in its arms. Instead, a little piece of me has fled inside the church.
Monday, May 5, 2008
French Psychoanalytic Feminism
An Identity Which Is Not One:
The Banner Under Which We March
In their articles “This Sex Which Is Not One” and “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous respectively discuss the overlapping (dare we say contiguous?) concepts of parler femme and l’ecriture feminine with which they hope to engender a freer, truer manifestation of the female gander. When considering the success of their endeavors, it is important to start by noting that parler femme and l’ecriture feminine amount to much the same thing for our purposes . Both terms describe an act which is more than a seizure of voice – it is a creation, through preparation and performance, of a speech that then allows the existence of the speaker. To put it another way, this voice enables “woman” to begin to escape her identity as masculine object in a world dominated by a symbology that she lacks, one which excludes her at every turn because it creates her as an absence so as to create itself as the state of being. Parler femme serves to address a fundamental schism between the societal structure in which we live and the female person, whose being is fundamentally repressed and whose oppression is made routine by the heavy mantle of lack. Although Cixous and Irigaray’s psychoanalytic approach comes under fire for its questionable relevance in certain situations, I believe that the approach of parler femme is still sound, and that it merely needs to be filled out by a fuller chorus of voices.
To begin with, the problem that parler femme sets out to address is that of our (woman’s) socially generated position as lack, as desire for penis, which has been relegated to the class of individuals known as “women”. The dominant symbology of our (white, western – in a word – ideologically dominant) culture is arranged around the idea of a gender binary. Here “binary” is taken to mean a whole composed of two parts of which the male is positive while the female is negative . Under this system, simply put, the male is the existence, the female the lack. Female sexuality, in particular, is the lack of penis, so that she is neatly created to be the desire for the penis – a constant justification for the existence of man.
This ideological identity is taught to us as something central to sexuality, the sex-act boiling down to the man/penis filling the hole/woman. Under this system, until the woman/hole is filled, she can never be complete, and is thereby controlled through her desire to be made complete by man, as well as by her blindness to her own existence which she is told she cannot own until it is given to her by a male. As women, we are indoctrinated into this ideology through the male phallocentric symbol systems. Viewed in this light, we can begin to understand why a parler femme is necessary in order to escape our place as silence/absence/object in the masculine economy. Our quest for identity is being struck down at its very roots: our thoughts. We are being incapacitated from the start by a language that does not allow for woman as anything but the opposite of man/being.
If our identities, our sexualities are being defined simply as the other to a masculine parameter, what then might a feminine sexuality look like? Luce Irigaray describes a sexuality that is very different from that phallocentric/scopic sexual economy we are taught to take for granted. Irigaray bases her definition on a concept of female genitalia as defined, not as a hole, a zero, but as a plurality. A man's sex organ is singular, objectifiable, she says, whereas a woman's sex is plural, is not an organ, a single object, but rather resides in the touching of plural objects (as of the two vaginal walls touching). It is in this crucial difference that Irigaray is finally able conceive of female sexuality. Here already we can see the need to (re)think in parler femme – we speak of a sex organ as the locus of sexuality, but for woman, sexuality is not in the object but the touch. Our sexuality is not located singularly, in an object, but is everywhere, because it is an action, a relationship.
Historically, we have been unable to conceive ourselves in this manner and so are relegated to an imperfect position in the (voiced) masculine economy of sex organ, sex object. In practice, this objectifiable sexuality is also necessarily scopic. Masculine sexuality, often characterized by a proprietary order, can be understood through sight and the visual relationship created between seer and seen. Sight, like masculine sexuality, has a clear subject and object. Touch, on the other hand, is analogous to (and definitive of) female sexuality, where the relationship is not so easily categorized because both parties touch each other, thereby doing away with the idea of subject and object. Since it is the masculine relationship which is normalized in our culture, women are forced to exist in a world structured around the subject/object relationship and, not being natives to what Irigarary refers to as the “scopic economy” (325), women are relegated to the role of object of desire. In this system, a woman can only ever desire to be desired, she cannot desire something in and of itself.
Parallels can be drawn between a woman’s plural sex being forced into a binary sex system and a woman’s contiguous thought being forced into the metaphorically-dominated form of masculine thought. Desire, which we think of as being sexual in origin extends its reach into the intellectual realm as well – helped along by both substitutive logic, which creates a desire for something which will make us more desirable, and by a capitalist economy, which harnesses this principal to create desire for the consumption on which it runs. Thus the structure of thought is affected by this structured desire, and we can conceive of a female thought, which is, as female sexuality, contiguous.
Central to this female thought, then, is dialogue, because it is the form that bridges and unites the plural selves of woman – it is the verbal/textual equivalent of touch – and woman is constantly engaged in dialogue as a means of unifying her parts. Language on its own (language as object rather than as relation) does not express woman, and so she must harness it through dialogue. The dialogue (as well as the monologue, for they are one and the same to woman, for whom a speech to the self also represents a speech to the Other) is an important tool in the constant (re)creation of her self. When spoken, or written aloud, then, “[w]riting is precisely the very possibility of change” (Cixous 337), because woman can find herself in language instead of trying to find language in herself. “By writing herself, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display” (337), says Cixous, and herein lies the efficacity of parler femme, which will “tear [woman] away by means of this research, this job of analysis and illumination” (338), becoming the touch which awakens her from the numbing isolation of her artificial, scopic identity, making her aware of the concept of relationship, without which feminine thought and sexuality are impossible.
I hope that I have done some justice to the proponents of a parler femme in setting forth not just a justification thereof, but the need for parler femme to (re)create woman, however, there are several arguments which call into question the relevance of Irigaray and Cixous’s writing on a global scale, and now we must consider those. The first is that they do nothing to address the most direct and physically embodied oppression suffered by women who are not as privileged or educated as the authors, such as genital mutilation, or blatant exclusion and discrimination which keep women from any sort of independence. This first, I believe, is adequately addressed by Arelene Dallery in her article “The Politics of Writing (The) Body”. She points out that a solely political approach may solve the immediate issues but does nothing about the unconscious issues that create the problematic situation. To that end, she offers:
French feminists… have unearthed the deep structures of feminine repression in the symbolic suppression of woman’s subjectivity, body, and desire in the logocentrism of western knowledge. (61)
In other words, Dallery believes, as I do, that dismissing the psychoanalytic work of the French feminists because it does not address the “real” oppression of women misses the underlying issues of an invisible but very real system of symbolic and structural oppression.
This system, while it may legitimately be criticized as one that speaks mostly to white, upper-class, western women, could perhaps express the underlying structures which effect the more apparent oppression of all women. Dallery uses the example of clitoridectomy (something we often think of in terms of Other women), illustrating the interconnectedness of the abstract oppression theorized by psychoanalytic feminists and the “real” (read direct, embodied) oppression undeniably visited on women worldwide:
Symbolically, the construction of women as exchange objects, to be exchanged by men, required effacing the clitoris as an autonomous source of sexuality… Clitoridechtomy, the effacement of the clitoris can be real in some cultures and symbolic in the West. (61)
Here Dallery shows not only how a theoretical understanding of symbology can be important to the day to day struggle against an issue like genital mutilation, but also how consequences of an intellectual, symbolic oppression can be just as invasive as a physical mutilation. Of course bodily pain and the very immediate issues of infection and loss of sensation are spared the women who are spoken to/of by psychoanalytic feminism (in other words, white, upper-class, Western: privileged and educated), but emotionally, intellectually, Dallery’s comparison suggests that these women are suffering from an oppression which – if “comparable” is perhaps a bit strong – is at least analogous.
This point (or perhaps just this author’s reading thereof) may be inflammatory, but I believe it serves an important purpose in an analysis of the usefulness of author’s like Cixous and Irigaray. First of all, to those for whom psychoanalytic feminism seems effete, who would perhaps advocate a more direct/political attack of the day-to-day oppression of women for whom clitoridechtomy is a reality, Dallery offers that
Cixous and Irigaray seem to be saying that unless woman’s unconscious is liberated from repression, unless women can authentically voice their own desire and pleasure, then all forms of political liberation will be to no avail. (61)
Secondly, highlighting the connections and parallels between oppressions suffered by women of vastly different cultural and class backgrounds brings a feeling of camaraderie to a class of people that is notoriously historically lacking in unity – to the point where it is often debated whether it is even appropriate to classify women as a class or to attempt to unite them behind a single front, given the diversity of issues and outlooks within the category. Still, the significance of a greater, shared oppression that typifies a group of people must carry some weight in any attack on the oppression of certain members of that group insofar as those waging war wish to demarcate their cause under that same banner.
So, in considering the relevance of parler femme and l’ecriture feminine to women who are not privileged and highly educated, who can be said to suffer under the direct fire of physically violent or blatantly exclusionary misogyny in situations where their physical person is harmed or coerced – or where the means of an independent life are directly denied them – I believe that Dallery satisfactorily provides the necessary connecting tissues, showing that a theoretical explanation and intellectual solution are to one class of woman as political reform and outside aid are to another – both prongs of the same attack against different kinds oppression; one fighting the manifestations of oppression, the other battling the underlying social structures which allow for those manifestations.
However, where Cixous and Irigaray’s philosophies can be said to fail is in the dissonance with the experiences of women who have the “luxury” of fighting oppression at the intellectual, societal level, but whose cultural structures of oppression differ from those of either author – for instance, middle-class American woman of color. To put it another way, opponents of psychoanalytic feminism who argue that it is does not address the issues of women who are not economically privileged and well-educated miss the point that it serves a function for the women who are that is comparable to, say, a grassroots campaign to teach illiterate women how to read so that they are able to take care of their own affairs when they are abandoned by a male relative. At the same time, their parler femme fails to address the issues of women of different cultural backgrounds in the way that a program to teach women how to read would be ineffective in a situation where women were literate but knew nothing of sex or birth control and so were constantly burdened by unwanted children. In both cases it’s a feasible approach but the wrong specifics.
To this end, I am afraid that I can offer only a plea for the voices of women who feel left out by the parler femme described by Irigaray and Cixous to sing the song of their own particular oppression and begin the process of freeing their bodies and minds. If it is not a man who expects you to be the absence so that his presence is continually confirmed, is it not still the expectations of a man which are creating you always in relation to himself, whatever that relation may be? Perhaps it is not. This is hole is one with which I am unfamiliar and therefore unqualified to fill. I must settle (temporarily, unsatisfactorily) for a sign to caution other travelers in expectation of new voices to speak out in dialogue, creating relationships through which more women are able to embody themselves. This is the purpose of parler femme and l’ecriture feminine, and I argue that any holes in their current incarnation are, far from justification to discard the approach, reason to pursue it even further.
The Banner Under Which We March
In their articles “This Sex Which Is Not One” and “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous respectively discuss the overlapping (dare we say contiguous?) concepts of parler femme and l’ecriture feminine with which they hope to engender a freer, truer manifestation of the female gander. When considering the success of their endeavors, it is important to start by noting that parler femme and l’ecriture feminine amount to much the same thing for our purposes . Both terms describe an act which is more than a seizure of voice – it is a creation, through preparation and performance, of a speech that then allows the existence of the speaker. To put it another way, this voice enables “woman” to begin to escape her identity as masculine object in a world dominated by a symbology that she lacks, one which excludes her at every turn because it creates her as an absence so as to create itself as the state of being. Parler femme serves to address a fundamental schism between the societal structure in which we live and the female person, whose being is fundamentally repressed and whose oppression is made routine by the heavy mantle of lack. Although Cixous and Irigaray’s psychoanalytic approach comes under fire for its questionable relevance in certain situations, I believe that the approach of parler femme is still sound, and that it merely needs to be filled out by a fuller chorus of voices.
To begin with, the problem that parler femme sets out to address is that of our (woman’s) socially generated position as lack, as desire for penis, which has been relegated to the class of individuals known as “women”. The dominant symbology of our (white, western – in a word – ideologically dominant) culture is arranged around the idea of a gender binary. Here “binary” is taken to mean a whole composed of two parts of which the male is positive while the female is negative . Under this system, simply put, the male is the existence, the female the lack. Female sexuality, in particular, is the lack of penis, so that she is neatly created to be the desire for the penis – a constant justification for the existence of man.
This ideological identity is taught to us as something central to sexuality, the sex-act boiling down to the man/penis filling the hole/woman. Under this system, until the woman/hole is filled, she can never be complete, and is thereby controlled through her desire to be made complete by man, as well as by her blindness to her own existence which she is told she cannot own until it is given to her by a male. As women, we are indoctrinated into this ideology through the male phallocentric symbol systems. Viewed in this light, we can begin to understand why a parler femme is necessary in order to escape our place as silence/absence/object in the masculine economy. Our quest for identity is being struck down at its very roots: our thoughts. We are being incapacitated from the start by a language that does not allow for woman as anything but the opposite of man/being.
If our identities, our sexualities are being defined simply as the other to a masculine parameter, what then might a feminine sexuality look like? Luce Irigaray describes a sexuality that is very different from that phallocentric/scopic sexual economy we are taught to take for granted. Irigaray bases her definition on a concept of female genitalia as defined, not as a hole, a zero, but as a plurality. A man's sex organ is singular, objectifiable, she says, whereas a woman's sex is plural, is not an organ, a single object, but rather resides in the touching of plural objects (as of the two vaginal walls touching). It is in this crucial difference that Irigaray is finally able conceive of female sexuality. Here already we can see the need to (re)think in parler femme – we speak of a sex organ as the locus of sexuality, but for woman, sexuality is not in the object but the touch. Our sexuality is not located singularly, in an object, but is everywhere, because it is an action, a relationship.
Historically, we have been unable to conceive ourselves in this manner and so are relegated to an imperfect position in the (voiced) masculine economy of sex organ, sex object. In practice, this objectifiable sexuality is also necessarily scopic. Masculine sexuality, often characterized by a proprietary order, can be understood through sight and the visual relationship created between seer and seen. Sight, like masculine sexuality, has a clear subject and object. Touch, on the other hand, is analogous to (and definitive of) female sexuality, where the relationship is not so easily categorized because both parties touch each other, thereby doing away with the idea of subject and object. Since it is the masculine relationship which is normalized in our culture, women are forced to exist in a world structured around the subject/object relationship and, not being natives to what Irigarary refers to as the “scopic economy” (325), women are relegated to the role of object of desire. In this system, a woman can only ever desire to be desired, she cannot desire something in and of itself.
Parallels can be drawn between a woman’s plural sex being forced into a binary sex system and a woman’s contiguous thought being forced into the metaphorically-dominated form of masculine thought. Desire, which we think of as being sexual in origin extends its reach into the intellectual realm as well – helped along by both substitutive logic, which creates a desire for something which will make us more desirable, and by a capitalist economy, which harnesses this principal to create desire for the consumption on which it runs. Thus the structure of thought is affected by this structured desire, and we can conceive of a female thought, which is, as female sexuality, contiguous.
Central to this female thought, then, is dialogue, because it is the form that bridges and unites the plural selves of woman – it is the verbal/textual equivalent of touch – and woman is constantly engaged in dialogue as a means of unifying her parts. Language on its own (language as object rather than as relation) does not express woman, and so she must harness it through dialogue. The dialogue (as well as the monologue, for they are one and the same to woman, for whom a speech to the self also represents a speech to the Other) is an important tool in the constant (re)creation of her self. When spoken, or written aloud, then, “[w]riting is precisely the very possibility of change” (Cixous 337), because woman can find herself in language instead of trying to find language in herself. “By writing herself, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display” (337), says Cixous, and herein lies the efficacity of parler femme, which will “tear [woman] away by means of this research, this job of analysis and illumination” (338), becoming the touch which awakens her from the numbing isolation of her artificial, scopic identity, making her aware of the concept of relationship, without which feminine thought and sexuality are impossible.
I hope that I have done some justice to the proponents of a parler femme in setting forth not just a justification thereof, but the need for parler femme to (re)create woman, however, there are several arguments which call into question the relevance of Irigaray and Cixous’s writing on a global scale, and now we must consider those. The first is that they do nothing to address the most direct and physically embodied oppression suffered by women who are not as privileged or educated as the authors, such as genital mutilation, or blatant exclusion and discrimination which keep women from any sort of independence. This first, I believe, is adequately addressed by Arelene Dallery in her article “The Politics of Writing (The) Body”. She points out that a solely political approach may solve the immediate issues but does nothing about the unconscious issues that create the problematic situation. To that end, she offers:
French feminists… have unearthed the deep structures of feminine repression in the symbolic suppression of woman’s subjectivity, body, and desire in the logocentrism of western knowledge. (61)
In other words, Dallery believes, as I do, that dismissing the psychoanalytic work of the French feminists because it does not address the “real” oppression of women misses the underlying issues of an invisible but very real system of symbolic and structural oppression.
This system, while it may legitimately be criticized as one that speaks mostly to white, upper-class, western women, could perhaps express the underlying structures which effect the more apparent oppression of all women. Dallery uses the example of clitoridectomy (something we often think of in terms of Other women), illustrating the interconnectedness of the abstract oppression theorized by psychoanalytic feminists and the “real” (read direct, embodied) oppression undeniably visited on women worldwide:
Symbolically, the construction of women as exchange objects, to be exchanged by men, required effacing the clitoris as an autonomous source of sexuality… Clitoridechtomy, the effacement of the clitoris can be real in some cultures and symbolic in the West. (61)
Here Dallery shows not only how a theoretical understanding of symbology can be important to the day to day struggle against an issue like genital mutilation, but also how consequences of an intellectual, symbolic oppression can be just as invasive as a physical mutilation. Of course bodily pain and the very immediate issues of infection and loss of sensation are spared the women who are spoken to/of by psychoanalytic feminism (in other words, white, upper-class, Western: privileged and educated), but emotionally, intellectually, Dallery’s comparison suggests that these women are suffering from an oppression which – if “comparable” is perhaps a bit strong – is at least analogous.
This point (or perhaps just this author’s reading thereof) may be inflammatory, but I believe it serves an important purpose in an analysis of the usefulness of author’s like Cixous and Irigaray. First of all, to those for whom psychoanalytic feminism seems effete, who would perhaps advocate a more direct/political attack of the day-to-day oppression of women for whom clitoridechtomy is a reality, Dallery offers that
Cixous and Irigaray seem to be saying that unless woman’s unconscious is liberated from repression, unless women can authentically voice their own desire and pleasure, then all forms of political liberation will be to no avail. (61)
Secondly, highlighting the connections and parallels between oppressions suffered by women of vastly different cultural and class backgrounds brings a feeling of camaraderie to a class of people that is notoriously historically lacking in unity – to the point where it is often debated whether it is even appropriate to classify women as a class or to attempt to unite them behind a single front, given the diversity of issues and outlooks within the category. Still, the significance of a greater, shared oppression that typifies a group of people must carry some weight in any attack on the oppression of certain members of that group insofar as those waging war wish to demarcate their cause under that same banner.
So, in considering the relevance of parler femme and l’ecriture feminine to women who are not privileged and highly educated, who can be said to suffer under the direct fire of physically violent or blatantly exclusionary misogyny in situations where their physical person is harmed or coerced – or where the means of an independent life are directly denied them – I believe that Dallery satisfactorily provides the necessary connecting tissues, showing that a theoretical explanation and intellectual solution are to one class of woman as political reform and outside aid are to another – both prongs of the same attack against different kinds oppression; one fighting the manifestations of oppression, the other battling the underlying social structures which allow for those manifestations.
However, where Cixous and Irigaray’s philosophies can be said to fail is in the dissonance with the experiences of women who have the “luxury” of fighting oppression at the intellectual, societal level, but whose cultural structures of oppression differ from those of either author – for instance, middle-class American woman of color. To put it another way, opponents of psychoanalytic feminism who argue that it is does not address the issues of women who are not economically privileged and well-educated miss the point that it serves a function for the women who are that is comparable to, say, a grassroots campaign to teach illiterate women how to read so that they are able to take care of their own affairs when they are abandoned by a male relative. At the same time, their parler femme fails to address the issues of women of different cultural backgrounds in the way that a program to teach women how to read would be ineffective in a situation where women were literate but knew nothing of sex or birth control and so were constantly burdened by unwanted children. In both cases it’s a feasible approach but the wrong specifics.
To this end, I am afraid that I can offer only a plea for the voices of women who feel left out by the parler femme described by Irigaray and Cixous to sing the song of their own particular oppression and begin the process of freeing their bodies and minds. If it is not a man who expects you to be the absence so that his presence is continually confirmed, is it not still the expectations of a man which are creating you always in relation to himself, whatever that relation may be? Perhaps it is not. This is hole is one with which I am unfamiliar and therefore unqualified to fill. I must settle (temporarily, unsatisfactorily) for a sign to caution other travelers in expectation of new voices to speak out in dialogue, creating relationships through which more women are able to embody themselves. This is the purpose of parler femme and l’ecriture feminine, and I argue that any holes in their current incarnation are, far from justification to discard the approach, reason to pursue it even further.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
The wHole Thing
“Do you love me with your whole heart?”
“Yeah. The whole thing.”
~From Pirates XXX (2005)
The hole in my heart is punch shaped, and Yes, that one’s from you.
The one in my head feels like a hangover, but can be traced to the stifling fluorescent lights of a discount shopping center in Hanover, New Hampshire. The one in my stomach has been there since birth, or sometime shortly thereafter when I learned to eat solid food. I think it was created by a stale chocolate graham cracker – though no, I can’t be sure. The one on my right foot is tiny, and was made by the puncturing blade of a custom Ridel figure skate. The one on my left shoulder is filled with white sand. The one on my ankle came from a unicorn.
I remember making the one in my nose with a toothpick at a play date when I was five, but only because that one bled a lot, and my mother insisted she know why exactly I’d done it.
The four in my earlobes were the product of much wheedling, and were ostensibly birthday gifts, although the three in my cartilage were beyond contestation, since I’d gained my majority.
The one on my chin is a scar from a zit I popped because it was giving me a migraine. The one in my eyeball is from a pin that broke when I forgot to take it out before sewing through it, so I stuffed that one with cotton and loose pieces of thread. The thread looks like veins. The cotton does not really look like eyeball jelly. But no one gets close enough to tell.
In fact, no one gets close enough to notice any of my holes any more. Sometimes I cover them with make-up, and pretend that people can’t see them, but I know it’s only pretend. Everyone in the world can see them, plain as day. But they don’t.
To be perfectly honest, no one is looking.
There’s a hole in my watch that I use to hold all of my spare time, and one in my memory that used to hold things like the ways you annoy me – but then it got full, and now I have a huge problem with loitering in the area it used to occupy. In fact, I sent someone in to round everything up and redistribute it, but they just sent things down to the hole in my heart, which was clearly not the right shape. Things kept pushing through anyway, smashing fragile walls, gouging long white scratches and bedraggled corners, and now the hole is jagged and torn around the edges where the Ways I Love You were too big to fit and just burst through, dragged mercilessly behind the Ways I Hate You. Someone tried to fix this by directing them towards the hole in my stomach, but they kept ordering food and then running out on the check. I had to start sending things back, and you know how I hate to do that.
The one in my liver was like a freaking worm hole, that just spontaneously occurred and started gobbling things up, until one day it closed back in on itself and was lost. Too bad the one in my ego won’t do the same.
There is a hole in my heart. And it came from the bite of a batmonkey-boy. This origin complicated everything because it also gave me rabbies, and I had to get shots in my stomach to cure me. So now there’s a hole in my stomach, which looks like a belly button and is right on top of the one I already have, and I have been excessively clear that that can only be filled by a furry pink pony, which tastes like strawberries, and smells like grapefruit juice.
Together, the pony and I will cross the dunes of Mesopotamia, subsisting on wild jelly beans, of which I will eat more than my share, causing the pony to complain that I’m eating them like a chain-smoker eats crack cocaine while he’s waiting for the subway. I will ask what kind of sense that makes.
It makes punch sense.
That’s what kind of sense.
Don’t listen to me, I’m punch drunk.
“Yeah. The whole thing.”
~From Pirates XXX (2005)
The hole in my heart is punch shaped, and Yes, that one’s from you.
The one in my head feels like a hangover, but can be traced to the stifling fluorescent lights of a discount shopping center in Hanover, New Hampshire. The one in my stomach has been there since birth, or sometime shortly thereafter when I learned to eat solid food. I think it was created by a stale chocolate graham cracker – though no, I can’t be sure. The one on my right foot is tiny, and was made by the puncturing blade of a custom Ridel figure skate. The one on my left shoulder is filled with white sand. The one on my ankle came from a unicorn.
I remember making the one in my nose with a toothpick at a play date when I was five, but only because that one bled a lot, and my mother insisted she know why exactly I’d done it.
The four in my earlobes were the product of much wheedling, and were ostensibly birthday gifts, although the three in my cartilage were beyond contestation, since I’d gained my majority.
The one on my chin is a scar from a zit I popped because it was giving me a migraine. The one in my eyeball is from a pin that broke when I forgot to take it out before sewing through it, so I stuffed that one with cotton and loose pieces of thread. The thread looks like veins. The cotton does not really look like eyeball jelly. But no one gets close enough to tell.
In fact, no one gets close enough to notice any of my holes any more. Sometimes I cover them with make-up, and pretend that people can’t see them, but I know it’s only pretend. Everyone in the world can see them, plain as day. But they don’t.
To be perfectly honest, no one is looking.
There’s a hole in my watch that I use to hold all of my spare time, and one in my memory that used to hold things like the ways you annoy me – but then it got full, and now I have a huge problem with loitering in the area it used to occupy. In fact, I sent someone in to round everything up and redistribute it, but they just sent things down to the hole in my heart, which was clearly not the right shape. Things kept pushing through anyway, smashing fragile walls, gouging long white scratches and bedraggled corners, and now the hole is jagged and torn around the edges where the Ways I Love You were too big to fit and just burst through, dragged mercilessly behind the Ways I Hate You. Someone tried to fix this by directing them towards the hole in my stomach, but they kept ordering food and then running out on the check. I had to start sending things back, and you know how I hate to do that.
The one in my liver was like a freaking worm hole, that just spontaneously occurred and started gobbling things up, until one day it closed back in on itself and was lost. Too bad the one in my ego won’t do the same.
There is a hole in my heart. And it came from the bite of a batmonkey-boy. This origin complicated everything because it also gave me rabbies, and I had to get shots in my stomach to cure me. So now there’s a hole in my stomach, which looks like a belly button and is right on top of the one I already have, and I have been excessively clear that that can only be filled by a furry pink pony, which tastes like strawberries, and smells like grapefruit juice.
Together, the pony and I will cross the dunes of Mesopotamia, subsisting on wild jelly beans, of which I will eat more than my share, causing the pony to complain that I’m eating them like a chain-smoker eats crack cocaine while he’s waiting for the subway. I will ask what kind of sense that makes.
It makes punch sense.
That’s what kind of sense.
Don’t listen to me, I’m punch drunk.
Straight Up
The guy I sit next to every Thursday is one of those guys’ guys you always read about but never thought existed if you went to a small girl’s school before heading off to a sort-of-co-ed college out east. He has dark, combed-back hair and a strong chin and makes loud exclamations in class when he feels strongly about something, even if it’s half in jest. When he doesn’t feel strongly, he’s quiet. He sits either hunched at the front of his seat or lounges back against the chair – in or out of the conversation, he doesn’t front. His comments are intelligent, and suggest some investment in the discussion, but if you look at him, it seems he might just as easily be debating the lyrics to a song he used to know or replaying a brilliant save as he scratches a borrowed pen across this week’s assignment. He’s the kind of boy I picture wearing sports jerseys all the time until he’s 18, although I saw him last week in a simple black sweater and a pair of jeans. I watched him talking to friends out of the corner of my eye and imagined that he’s learned the value of a basic black sweater, that he’s learned that it sits well on broad shoulders and a lean frame, and so some of the sports jerseys have gone now that he’s 22, and he only keeps the ones he actually plays in. I bet he knows how to use an iron.
I have a huge crush on the boy I sit next to. It struck me as I listened to him explaining a piece one day in class. Sometimes, in writer’s workshops, the author will give some introduction to a piece about to be workshopped, something about the inspiration or the title, some qualifier, calculated to preempt criticism. He spoke too, when it was his turn. This is what he said:
This piece is shit. I didn’t have time to really write, so I’m not attached to it or anything. You can rip it apart.
The guy I sit next to loses at scrabbulous. He reads Jack Kerouc, Cormac Macarthy, Joseph Conrad, Kurt Vonnegut – the kind of authors who wear a coarse persona and substance abuse like a pair of road-worn leather boots, to match their hard-edged, masculine prose– those writers descendant from Hemingway whose natural habitat you might expect to be a dingy bar in the serviceable, local sector of some tropical tourist trap at midday, where they sit, occasionally joking with the bar tender, or buying a bum a drink so they have someone to sit with, and otherwise just keeping quietly to themselves, watching the sun polish the long brass railing on the bar from the door that’s open to catch the breeze more than to entice early customers.
He plays baseball and watches basketball – supports at least two teams that I know of – a college team and one in the NBA. The NBA team is his home team. I imagine he’s the kind of guy who’s been with them for years – went to his first game when he was too small for the souvenir jersey he insisted on buying. He knows they’re not very good, but he would never admit that except to another die hard fan.
He listens to Outkast, Bob Dylan, Nas – you know he drives around in the car he bought himself as soon as he’d made enough money, pumping hip hop on speakers he got installed because he could picture himself pulling up to a bunch of girls he used to know from high school, the base pounding through the rolled up windows that he can’t lower because they’re not automatic and it would ruin the effect to lean over and turn the hand crank. The bands he lists as his favorites are all the kind of stuff that you can rattle off when another guy asks and get approving nods for – the kind of thing it was really cool to listen to in high school, that he probably bought because he heard it on a friend’s stereo one day while they were hanging out in a basement.
He drinks whiskey and belongs to a Southern Comfort fan group. Grew up around DC and classifies himself as a southerner; is interested in women, but married to a guy on the facebook; his profile says he’s looking for friendship in that way that says I’m looking for that girl, but I won’t find her, and even if I do she won’t like me, so whatever, I don’t need that shit… Out of our 387 combined friends at college, we have one in common – a girl I don’t even really know but took a class with freshmen year. The posts on his wall date back two months and say things like “son, whats good, hit me up” and “wiggity wigggity vas up?”, and are from guys with names like Joe, Tyler, and Teddy. His current profile picture shows a happy woman holding a smiling baby with flyaway hair and a big toothless grin in a soft, midmorning light tinged brown by what I would guess was 20 odd years of intervening time and a slight residue of dust from the scanner he used since they didn’t have digital cameras when our generation was born.
The picture before that shows a different kind of grin that I can only assume comes from the two girls who are nothing more than tangled limbs and shining hair, wrapped suggestively around him in what was clearly his idea of a great night. The picture before that is his baseball card shot – all done up in maroon and white, the word Brewers half visible on the cropped lower edge, slight gap between his front teeth unselfconsciously apparent.
I picture him sitting at a bar, ten of fifteen years from now, holding a glass of whiskey, surrounded by smoke from a cigarette he’s holding but not really smoking, occasionally taking a sip from the glass of whiskey in which the ice cube has long ago melted into a thin film of diluting water, thinking about some girl he still sometimes wishes hadn’t left him when he told her to, or maybe about his father, which makes him melancholy regardless of whether the memories are good or bad. Or maybe he’s thinking about a story he’s going to write, because he still does. Write, I mean. Maybe his books are selling right now and he’s meeting with a reporter from some men’s magazine who will also wear a leather jacket and order himself a beer because he has to stay professional but will look wistfully at the whiskey and maybe give in as the night fades on like blue smoke from the forgotten cigarette, and the writer will encourage him with a barely gap-toothed grin and a nod of appraisal that makes the reporter say aw, fuck it all, and buy them both the next round so that they’re just a little bit drunk when they get down to the real questions, and the writer let’s himself be just a little more sentimental than he normally would, and the reporter thinks – this is a real guys’ guy. This is the kind of guy who’d have your back in a bar fight even though you’d only known him as long as three rounds of drinks – and then writes an article that’s more about the kind of whiskey the writer drank and the shoes he had on and the way he shifted his head when he was really thinking about an answer then it is about his latest book.
He’s the kind of guy that girls will be tempted to believe is just waiting for the right woman – the kind of guy who’s single forever because ‘he wants to play the field’, or because ‘he just doesn’t have time to settle down with someone’. But you know that when he walks into his apartment late at night there’s someone there, waiting for him, half ghost, half memory – the idea of a good woman. Someone strong - like his mother, whom he still calls once a week - but who lets him take care of her in small ways because she knows he likes it when she wears his jacket on summer evenings that suddenly get cold, or when she stays in bed on Sunday morning and pretends to be asleep because she knows he’s making her his famous eggs and toast and coffee, and that he’ll smile when he brings it in to her like the little boy in the picture she saw once with flyaway hair and a strong, happy woman holding him in her lap.
He’s the kind of guy you can’t help but laugh at sometimes if you’re really listening to him because he’s still bitter about that popular boy in the fifth grade who hit puberty first and was the star of the basketball team simply because he was a full five inches taller than anyone else. The kind of guy who’ll own up to the stupid decisions he made in high school that nearly got him killed once or twice, or at least arrested. He’s probably had more run-ins with the cops then anyone but his closest friends know about, because they were there too and saw how he talked the officer out of charging them because they got caught in a backyard with a fence that’s too high to jump three blocks down after they ran from the flashing lights, but no one can prove that they weren’t just hanging out in Tommy’s backyard since they got lucky and this house with the fence happens to belong to an elderly man that they know is staying with his daughter for a week in Michigan and who always leaves his back door unlocked because he can’t remember to lock it after he lets the cat in, so their story checks out just enough to fly with a skeptical cop when he’s really spinning it, really hitting his stride and just barely keeping from going too far in a tribute to the sheer rush of adrenaline.
I have a huge crush on this guy I sit next to every week. I don’t know what color his eyes are, but I know there’s something soft about them that seems to fit him best when he’s discussing his work. It’s something unexpected, like the way he’s picky about diction and hates to hear echoes from a word used too often and thoughtlessly.
The boy I sit next to smiles at me sometimes, and sometimes he admires something adorable in the story we’re reading. If he doesn’t like it, if he thinks the work is bad, he doesn’t pay much attention. But if it’s good, you can tell he thinks so, because then he becomes an active member of the conversation. He has things to say, he has opinions. If it’s worth it, he gives a crap.
And so you know, that deep down, this boy I sit next to actually cares. Deep down, more than anything he is afraid that he is alone – not just that no one will understand him, but that understanding someone like him is impossible, and somewhere in the awkwardness of adolescence, he has come to believe that writing is something important, that a good book, a good story, can change things, because it’s been there, buried, as parties raged and parents yelled and teammates scored, and somewhere, between pen and paper, he finds validation. For this boy, writing is justification and promise, it is enticement, it is sex. It is love, as far as he can imagine it. It is everything he will never admit to wanting. It is everything he never believes he’ll have.
The last time the boy I sit next to brought in a piece to be workshopped, he hadn’t been prepared. He scratched something out and sent it out an hour before we met, and when it came to him, the class was silent. At first he joked about it, laughing at how little he’d done, reveling in his detachment and catching my eye. As the silence stretched and the sparse suggestions dried up, his laughter softened too. Five minutes passed and it was over. He looked around at the waiting faces, and saw only finality. Not bad, they said, but that’s all it is. Not Bad. And not good either.
His face fell as he realized it was done, that it hadn’t been any better here and now than it was in his room, that the little voice he would just laugh away, the one that tells him his writing really isn’t any good, maybe is right after all.
Before going on, he had a chance to ask us any questions, but he just shook his head.
I’m kind of disappointed now that I didn’t send out something else. – I would have, if I’d remembered that the class was going to be reading it... – I guess I wish I’d put a little more of myself into it, you know, that I’d actually said something...
And the something soft melts a little bit more in his eyes.
Straight up.
I have a huge crush on the boy I sit next to. It struck me as I listened to him explaining a piece one day in class. Sometimes, in writer’s workshops, the author will give some introduction to a piece about to be workshopped, something about the inspiration or the title, some qualifier, calculated to preempt criticism. He spoke too, when it was his turn. This is what he said:
This piece is shit. I didn’t have time to really write, so I’m not attached to it or anything. You can rip it apart.
The guy I sit next to loses at scrabbulous. He reads Jack Kerouc, Cormac Macarthy, Joseph Conrad, Kurt Vonnegut – the kind of authors who wear a coarse persona and substance abuse like a pair of road-worn leather boots, to match their hard-edged, masculine prose– those writers descendant from Hemingway whose natural habitat you might expect to be a dingy bar in the serviceable, local sector of some tropical tourist trap at midday, where they sit, occasionally joking with the bar tender, or buying a bum a drink so they have someone to sit with, and otherwise just keeping quietly to themselves, watching the sun polish the long brass railing on the bar from the door that’s open to catch the breeze more than to entice early customers.
He plays baseball and watches basketball – supports at least two teams that I know of – a college team and one in the NBA. The NBA team is his home team. I imagine he’s the kind of guy who’s been with them for years – went to his first game when he was too small for the souvenir jersey he insisted on buying. He knows they’re not very good, but he would never admit that except to another die hard fan.
He listens to Outkast, Bob Dylan, Nas – you know he drives around in the car he bought himself as soon as he’d made enough money, pumping hip hop on speakers he got installed because he could picture himself pulling up to a bunch of girls he used to know from high school, the base pounding through the rolled up windows that he can’t lower because they’re not automatic and it would ruin the effect to lean over and turn the hand crank. The bands he lists as his favorites are all the kind of stuff that you can rattle off when another guy asks and get approving nods for – the kind of thing it was really cool to listen to in high school, that he probably bought because he heard it on a friend’s stereo one day while they were hanging out in a basement.
He drinks whiskey and belongs to a Southern Comfort fan group. Grew up around DC and classifies himself as a southerner; is interested in women, but married to a guy on the facebook; his profile says he’s looking for friendship in that way that says I’m looking for that girl, but I won’t find her, and even if I do she won’t like me, so whatever, I don’t need that shit… Out of our 387 combined friends at college, we have one in common – a girl I don’t even really know but took a class with freshmen year. The posts on his wall date back two months and say things like “son, whats good, hit me up” and “wiggity wigggity vas up?”, and are from guys with names like Joe, Tyler, and Teddy. His current profile picture shows a happy woman holding a smiling baby with flyaway hair and a big toothless grin in a soft, midmorning light tinged brown by what I would guess was 20 odd years of intervening time and a slight residue of dust from the scanner he used since they didn’t have digital cameras when our generation was born.
The picture before that shows a different kind of grin that I can only assume comes from the two girls who are nothing more than tangled limbs and shining hair, wrapped suggestively around him in what was clearly his idea of a great night. The picture before that is his baseball card shot – all done up in maroon and white, the word Brewers half visible on the cropped lower edge, slight gap between his front teeth unselfconsciously apparent.
I picture him sitting at a bar, ten of fifteen years from now, holding a glass of whiskey, surrounded by smoke from a cigarette he’s holding but not really smoking, occasionally taking a sip from the glass of whiskey in which the ice cube has long ago melted into a thin film of diluting water, thinking about some girl he still sometimes wishes hadn’t left him when he told her to, or maybe about his father, which makes him melancholy regardless of whether the memories are good or bad. Or maybe he’s thinking about a story he’s going to write, because he still does. Write, I mean. Maybe his books are selling right now and he’s meeting with a reporter from some men’s magazine who will also wear a leather jacket and order himself a beer because he has to stay professional but will look wistfully at the whiskey and maybe give in as the night fades on like blue smoke from the forgotten cigarette, and the writer will encourage him with a barely gap-toothed grin and a nod of appraisal that makes the reporter say aw, fuck it all, and buy them both the next round so that they’re just a little bit drunk when they get down to the real questions, and the writer let’s himself be just a little more sentimental than he normally would, and the reporter thinks – this is a real guys’ guy. This is the kind of guy who’d have your back in a bar fight even though you’d only known him as long as three rounds of drinks – and then writes an article that’s more about the kind of whiskey the writer drank and the shoes he had on and the way he shifted his head when he was really thinking about an answer then it is about his latest book.
He’s the kind of guy that girls will be tempted to believe is just waiting for the right woman – the kind of guy who’s single forever because ‘he wants to play the field’, or because ‘he just doesn’t have time to settle down with someone’. But you know that when he walks into his apartment late at night there’s someone there, waiting for him, half ghost, half memory – the idea of a good woman. Someone strong - like his mother, whom he still calls once a week - but who lets him take care of her in small ways because she knows he likes it when she wears his jacket on summer evenings that suddenly get cold, or when she stays in bed on Sunday morning and pretends to be asleep because she knows he’s making her his famous eggs and toast and coffee, and that he’ll smile when he brings it in to her like the little boy in the picture she saw once with flyaway hair and a strong, happy woman holding him in her lap.
He’s the kind of guy you can’t help but laugh at sometimes if you’re really listening to him because he’s still bitter about that popular boy in the fifth grade who hit puberty first and was the star of the basketball team simply because he was a full five inches taller than anyone else. The kind of guy who’ll own up to the stupid decisions he made in high school that nearly got him killed once or twice, or at least arrested. He’s probably had more run-ins with the cops then anyone but his closest friends know about, because they were there too and saw how he talked the officer out of charging them because they got caught in a backyard with a fence that’s too high to jump three blocks down after they ran from the flashing lights, but no one can prove that they weren’t just hanging out in Tommy’s backyard since they got lucky and this house with the fence happens to belong to an elderly man that they know is staying with his daughter for a week in Michigan and who always leaves his back door unlocked because he can’t remember to lock it after he lets the cat in, so their story checks out just enough to fly with a skeptical cop when he’s really spinning it, really hitting his stride and just barely keeping from going too far in a tribute to the sheer rush of adrenaline.
I have a huge crush on this guy I sit next to every week. I don’t know what color his eyes are, but I know there’s something soft about them that seems to fit him best when he’s discussing his work. It’s something unexpected, like the way he’s picky about diction and hates to hear echoes from a word used too often and thoughtlessly.
The boy I sit next to smiles at me sometimes, and sometimes he admires something adorable in the story we’re reading. If he doesn’t like it, if he thinks the work is bad, he doesn’t pay much attention. But if it’s good, you can tell he thinks so, because then he becomes an active member of the conversation. He has things to say, he has opinions. If it’s worth it, he gives a crap.
And so you know, that deep down, this boy I sit next to actually cares. Deep down, more than anything he is afraid that he is alone – not just that no one will understand him, but that understanding someone like him is impossible, and somewhere in the awkwardness of adolescence, he has come to believe that writing is something important, that a good book, a good story, can change things, because it’s been there, buried, as parties raged and parents yelled and teammates scored, and somewhere, between pen and paper, he finds validation. For this boy, writing is justification and promise, it is enticement, it is sex. It is love, as far as he can imagine it. It is everything he will never admit to wanting. It is everything he never believes he’ll have.
The last time the boy I sit next to brought in a piece to be workshopped, he hadn’t been prepared. He scratched something out and sent it out an hour before we met, and when it came to him, the class was silent. At first he joked about it, laughing at how little he’d done, reveling in his detachment and catching my eye. As the silence stretched and the sparse suggestions dried up, his laughter softened too. Five minutes passed and it was over. He looked around at the waiting faces, and saw only finality. Not bad, they said, but that’s all it is. Not Bad. And not good either.
His face fell as he realized it was done, that it hadn’t been any better here and now than it was in his room, that the little voice he would just laugh away, the one that tells him his writing really isn’t any good, maybe is right after all.
Before going on, he had a chance to ask us any questions, but he just shook his head.
I’m kind of disappointed now that I didn’t send out something else. – I would have, if I’d remembered that the class was going to be reading it... – I guess I wish I’d put a little more of myself into it, you know, that I’d actually said something...
And the something soft melts a little bit more in his eyes.
Straight up.
The Storm Has Not Yet Come
ZIZZI, wearing a yellow dress and a plastic sunflower in her headband, hands out food to the audience saying:
ZIZZI
[smiling and adlibbing as she passes through the audience]
Here. This is for you. Would you like some? This is for you. Have some. Go on. Here, eat this – I’d like some... Have some food.
[when people ask why, or what the food is for…]
This is the food I’d like to be eating. or This is what I won’t be eating. or It looked so good, but I won’t be eating it.
STREGA swathed in layers of fabric and wearing high heels – perhaps with her lower legs exposed, walks in and gets up on a table in front of some people, making sure to interact with people so as to destroy any sense of a fourth wall.
STREGA
[loudly]
Why don’t you carry this for me for a while.
[addressing a man]
That is not a question, Mark.
[***reading from mary daly***]
Why don’t you carry this for me for a while.
I want to perform ON you.
[looking everyone in the eyes]
This is our mourner. Zizzi.
[***reading from mary daly***]
ZIZZI
[sitting, eating carrots]
What would people do if I went off on them?
[STREGA – A voice in the background: The Rhetoric]
It would be really good for me. It would look good on me.
[STREGA – A voice in the background sitting on the table with legs crossed. Casually: Shocking behavior is always fun a first]
Would it really ‘look good’ on me? I think people wouldn’t know what to do
[ZIZZI spits carrot on an audience member and holds their gaze]
I think people wouldn’t know what to do.
[STREGA takes off her mask and turns to ZIZZI as a friend for their argument]
Like, what would people do if I just went off on them?
STREGA
[yelling]
Zizzi! Omygod, I hate you! If you don’t stop being a good friend, I’m going to hate you! I hate you! You fucking take care of me, I hate you! IF YOU DON”T STOP I’M GOING TO VOMIT ON YOUR GYM BAG!
ZIZZI
What would they do?
STREGA
[yelling]
I HATE you! Zizzi!
ZIZZI
[laughing lightly]
I don’t think they’d like it.
STREGA screams and stomps feet and shakes table, causing a ruckus. When she’s finished, she replaces her mask and resumes a detached manner.
My ‘going off’ would look like a ninja. Killing people with a judo chop to the heart.
STREGA
If your your anger were a natural disaster, what would it look like?
Like a volcano?
[ZIZZI chops someone in the audience with a ki-ay]
Like a tornado?
[ZIZZI chops someone in the audience with a ki-ay]
Like an earth quake?
[ZIZZI chops two someone’s in the audience with a ki-ay]
ZIZZI!
[ZIZZI freezes, about to chop someone and turns sheepishly]
ZIZZI
33 degrees but with a wind chill that feels like 7 / so it can still be raining…
STREGA
/No.
Zizzi
Alright Summer weather – wet air, high winds –
STREGA
No storm.
ZIZZI
[in an amused and disbelieving tone]
The Storm hasn’t come yet!
[silence in which ZIZZI sits down and gets out vegetables and ketchup. - Squirting ketchup into a container of vegetables:]
I would like it to rain ketchup on/
STREGA
Zizzi!
ZIZZI
Thank you, Life. For sending us another stand in. Another blonde! /
STREGA
ZIZZI!
ZIZZI
/And this one’s Happy!
[quelling look from the STREGA that ZIZZI doesn’t notice]
Thank you.
STREGA
[w/o mask; as though an attorney interrogating an audience member:]
If you were going to meet your discontent on the street – what gender would it be, and what would it be wearing?/
ZIZZI
[in the background, as opposing council]
/Move to strike!/
STREGA
/That’s too pointed, let me refrase:
ZIZZI
[STREGA turning back to ZIZZI]
The Titanic Song.
[STREGA puts her mask back on and hits play on a boom box and starts dancing interpretively to My Heart Will Go On]
- If my discontent were a childhood song – it would be The Titanic Song.
STREGA
[still dancing]
That’s not a childhood song, but okay…
ZIZZI
[throws a carrot at the STREGA who stops. They stare at each other in disbelief, until, after a pause:]
NO.
[STREGA presses stop on the boom box and sits down to listen to ZIZZI]
Not my heart will go on.
[another pause where they look at each other until ZIZZI gets up on a table, singing:]
It was sad when the great ship went down… hmmmm hmmm hmmm… Uncles and cousins, little children lost their buttons…
[starts to cry]
Imagine how horrified you’d be if you were a mother and you thought some other kid was cutting your child’s clothing.
[ZIZZI and STREGA sit forlornly for a moment]
STREGA
What shape is the hole in your heart?
ZIZZI
That is THE question, isn’t it?
[after a long pause]
I think it’s circular.
STREGA
[gets up and starts to braid ZIZZI’s hair]
I’m picturing you in pearls.
- But if you’d rather have a mask…
…No, I think the pearls.
ZIZZI
No – it’s punch shaped!
STREGA
Hmm?
ZIZZI
The hole in my heart – it’s PUNCH shaped!
[STREGA isn’t listening. They start to hum “What’ll I Do?”]
ZIZZI
[smiling and adlibbing as she passes through the audience]
Here. This is for you. Would you like some? This is for you. Have some. Go on. Here, eat this – I’d like some... Have some food.
[when people ask why, or what the food is for…]
This is the food I’d like to be eating. or This is what I won’t be eating. or It looked so good, but I won’t be eating it.
STREGA swathed in layers of fabric and wearing high heels – perhaps with her lower legs exposed, walks in and gets up on a table in front of some people, making sure to interact with people so as to destroy any sense of a fourth wall.
STREGA
[loudly]
Why don’t you carry this for me for a while.
[addressing a man]
That is not a question, Mark.
[***reading from mary daly***]
Why don’t you carry this for me for a while.
I want to perform ON you.
[looking everyone in the eyes]
This is our mourner. Zizzi.
[***reading from mary daly***]
ZIZZI
[sitting, eating carrots]
What would people do if I went off on them?
[STREGA – A voice in the background: The Rhetoric]
It would be really good for me. It would look good on me.
[STREGA – A voice in the background sitting on the table with legs crossed. Casually: Shocking behavior is always fun a first]
Would it really ‘look good’ on me? I think people wouldn’t know what to do
[ZIZZI spits carrot on an audience member and holds their gaze]
I think people wouldn’t know what to do.
[STREGA takes off her mask and turns to ZIZZI as a friend for their argument]
Like, what would people do if I just went off on them?
STREGA
[yelling]
Zizzi! Omygod, I hate you! If you don’t stop being a good friend, I’m going to hate you! I hate you! You fucking take care of me, I hate you! IF YOU DON”T STOP I’M GOING TO VOMIT ON YOUR GYM BAG!
ZIZZI
What would they do?
STREGA
[yelling]
I HATE you! Zizzi!
ZIZZI
[laughing lightly]
I don’t think they’d like it.
STREGA screams and stomps feet and shakes table, causing a ruckus. When she’s finished, she replaces her mask and resumes a detached manner.
My ‘going off’ would look like a ninja. Killing people with a judo chop to the heart.
STREGA
If your your anger were a natural disaster, what would it look like?
Like a volcano?
[ZIZZI chops someone in the audience with a ki-ay]
Like a tornado?
[ZIZZI chops someone in the audience with a ki-ay]
Like an earth quake?
[ZIZZI chops two someone’s in the audience with a ki-ay]
ZIZZI!
[ZIZZI freezes, about to chop someone and turns sheepishly]
ZIZZI
33 degrees but with a wind chill that feels like 7 / so it can still be raining…
STREGA
/No.
Zizzi
Alright Summer weather – wet air, high winds –
STREGA
No storm.
ZIZZI
[in an amused and disbelieving tone]
The Storm hasn’t come yet!
[silence in which ZIZZI sits down and gets out vegetables and ketchup. - Squirting ketchup into a container of vegetables:]
I would like it to rain ketchup on/
STREGA
Zizzi!
ZIZZI
Thank you, Life. For sending us another stand in. Another blonde! /
STREGA
ZIZZI!
ZIZZI
/And this one’s Happy!
[quelling look from the STREGA that ZIZZI doesn’t notice]
Thank you.
STREGA
[w/o mask; as though an attorney interrogating an audience member:]
If you were going to meet your discontent on the street – what gender would it be, and what would it be wearing?/
ZIZZI
[in the background, as opposing council]
/Move to strike!/
STREGA
/That’s too pointed, let me refrase:
ZIZZI
[STREGA turning back to ZIZZI]
The Titanic Song.
[STREGA puts her mask back on and hits play on a boom box and starts dancing interpretively to My Heart Will Go On]
- If my discontent were a childhood song – it would be The Titanic Song.
STREGA
[still dancing]
That’s not a childhood song, but okay…
ZIZZI
[throws a carrot at the STREGA who stops. They stare at each other in disbelief, until, after a pause:]
NO.
[STREGA presses stop on the boom box and sits down to listen to ZIZZI]
Not my heart will go on.
[another pause where they look at each other until ZIZZI gets up on a table, singing:]
It was sad when the great ship went down… hmmmm hmmm hmmm… Uncles and cousins, little children lost their buttons…
[starts to cry]
Imagine how horrified you’d be if you were a mother and you thought some other kid was cutting your child’s clothing.
[ZIZZI and STREGA sit forlornly for a moment]
STREGA
What shape is the hole in your heart?
ZIZZI
That is THE question, isn’t it?
[after a long pause]
I think it’s circular.
STREGA
[gets up and starts to braid ZIZZI’s hair]
I’m picturing you in pearls.
- But if you’d rather have a mask…
…No, I think the pearls.
ZIZZI
No – it’s punch shaped!
STREGA
Hmm?
ZIZZI
The hole in my heart – it’s PUNCH shaped!
[STREGA isn’t listening. They start to hum “What’ll I Do?”]
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