eadweard, 2006 (animation)

eadward, 2006 (animation) by angela beallor

posted with vodpod

from here to the corner

from Conversations with James Baldwin, University Press of Mississippi (May 1, 1989)

‘This collection of interviews with James Baldwin covers the period 1961-1987, from the year of the publication of Nobody Knows My Names, his fourth book, to just a few weeks before his death. It includes the last formal conversation with him.’

fragment from –

James Baldwin, an Interview with Wolfgang Binder, 1980, from Revista/Review Interamericana, 10 (Fall 1980), 326-41

Binder: In A Rap on Race, your dialogue with Margaret Mead, you state that no people nor individual can really escape, if that person is honest, history and the effects of history.

Baldwin: Well, it is impossible.

Binder: In what sense does this apply to whites and blacks in America?

Baldwin: I have been living with those questions for a long time. You see, the trouble I am having right now is with the word itself. History means one thing in a European head. It actually means something else in an American head, and yet again something else in a black man’s head. To leave it at that is enough for openness. I am not sure any longer what the word means. Especially as the white world now is calling on what it calls history to justify its dilemma without having the remotest sense of how they got to where they are. In spite of their adulation of history. So history in the context in which the French, or the English, or the Germans are operating is an enormous dead letter. Because if history means something, it means that you have learned something from it. If you haven’t then the word has got to be changed. History in England, or France, or Germany, or indeed in Europe is now meant as an enormous cloak to cover past crimes and errors and present danger and despair. In short, it has become a useless concept. Except that it can be used as a stick to beat the people without history, like myself, over the head. That worked as long as I believed that you had history and I did not. And now that it is clear that that is not so, another kind of dilemma, another kind of confrontation, begins. Perhaps history has got to be born for the first time. It is certainly true that all the identities coming out of history with a capital H are proven to be false, to be bankrupt. We cannot live with them for another five minutes, they are going to carry us from here to the corner. And no one knows how we got here, from Maggie Thatcher in London to Ronald Reagan in America. If that is not the bottom of the barrel! And in terms of America, the Americans are even more abject than the Europeans who are stifling among their artifacts, their icons, which they call history. The Americans have never even heard of history, they still believe that legend created about the Far West, and cowboys and Indians, and cops and robbers, and black and white, and good and evil. There is a reason that the most simple-minded men, Mr. Carter and Mr. Reagan, who might be considered to run a post-office, are the only candidates America can find to run the world. If the Europeans are afflicted by history, Americans are afflicted by innocence.

tongues untied and faggot snappin

i found this video in a post on the boulevardier. anarchism, queerness, and fashion? it is interesting. the combination of topics keeps me coming back to the blog for more. the post is about hooliganism and anarchism and tactics for resistance and survival. pretty interesting. i’ve had many a similar conversation and i like where the writer takes it. but this morning i found the embedded video, faggot snap, and didn’t really want to go much further than that.

this video faggot snap makes me pretty happy. i think i do have a love for homo ‘pop culture’ or homo takes on pop culture. i stay out of a lot of the mainstream of pop culture… as much as i can… (my aunt/uncle who normally reside farther outside of pop culture were getting on me because i didn’t know the name of that adam guy who lost american idol at some point?) anyways, when it has queer under or overtones and/or is from queer culture… i listen.

this video makes me think about marlon riggs’ 1989 film tongues untied depicting experiences of black men loving black men. 1989 — imagine being a black gay man at this time given the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. while this youtube video is pretty lighthearted, it owes a lot to these earlier films, including looking for langston. the space carved out by these films should not be underestimated. the presentation of other lives in the face of homophobia and racism while at the same time being a queer cultural production.

and tongues untied is so 1989. clothes. hair. music. amazing.

or another great (though censored!) piece of the film is located here. (i couldn’t get it to embed for some reason…)

this is also what makes me so much more interested when the pop culture presented is decidedly queer. it takes a lot to put yourself out there like that. to not hide what has been for so long hidden. and in the face of a pop culture that often doesn’t acknowledge its queerness. so while all this shit goes on against queer and genderqueer people… there’s so much desire for the wall that divides hets (heterosexuality) from homos (queerness) (and here i refer to that erected by those who want to protect a pure heterosexuality. it goes the other way too) that it is denied time and time again how very homo so much about human relations is!

oh man. i think this means it is time to write about collier schorr! who i love!

ok. almost to work.

writing. queerness. park. writing. etc.

oooh. i can blog from my ipod. so strange. smaller and smaller and smaller. the technology. i’m always so afraid someone is looking over my shoulder while i write. which affects how much i write. i used to write a lot on the bus in cleveland. here it seems someone is always looking. i could be writing the two hours of my commute. but that space feels claustrophobic to me lately. i’m even tired of eavesdropping and people watching. which is crazy cuz they are two of my most favorite things to do. i mean it isn’t totally gone. but I just miss riding the bus above ground. studying the landscape. watching people. watching the city change from west to east and east to west. now it feels like the same trains, the same ads, the fluorescent lights, the same deadpan faces trying to avoid the crowd of eyes and faces packed on the train. sometimes then i worry i am indeed a pessimist. and one day the wonder and amazement of living will just vanish, will just abandon me. i try to describe these experiences (like the subway) sometimes and i feel like the response is that i just gave into being bored. but i try to say that’s not it! i’ve just known something else! and i dig my little hole just that much deeper. and maybe then that really is my grave. and i’m really as moist and dried up as celan is simultaneously. paul celan! of course. i feel i’ve acted as though i have forgotten you.

the last vivid day of people watching i had… there have been others BUT! there was this one day where i was overwhelmed by a love for women. and i wanted to know each and everyone of them. my energy was so heightened and my skin was singing from desire. god it felt crazy. i mean i think i tend to operate in this way most of the time. and somewhere along the line i just decided most men are not worth my time or energy. (and they tend to drain time and energy. without giving it back in return. and giving and supporting another woman seems far more of a give-and-take investment) and that what is harbored in a woman… is far more intriguing. i’ve been really attracted to older women lately. but i’m too much the coward to do anything about it. oh my love-hate relationship to desire and power and passivity. sigh.

i got in this conversation with j this week. turns out a friend told a friend that told him that i had been talking about our earlier conversations on gender and queerness. yes, i was. i wasn’t hiding this fact. and he was like it’s cool, i understand you were frustrated. and i said, i wasn’t frustrated. i was pissed and hurt. and the whole conversation opened up again. i don’t understand this wall erected that ‘i will just never understand.’ what if you have no choice but to understand (or at least try to)? which is no promise of a resulting comprehension but work towards trying to nonetheless. what if I said we can’t really be friends given this? because i feel no choice. it feels intrinsically wrapped up in my experience as a queer woman.

a question i have is: if any another human being is doing something then this means you have the capability and capacity to do it. i think we want to moralize our lives. pretend that we are above all these things that exist in the world. but i think we would get a lot further if we recognize that it is all within us. that we can’t really erect that kind of barrier through declaring impossibility.

i think james baldwin discusses it well over and over again. you are your understanding of yourself developed in relation to the other. that he is not a n*gger, he is a man. and if you have made him a n*gger in your mind then you must ask yourself why you need him to be that in order to be who you are. it scares me when such an investigation of another’s life and/or choices comes from or becomes analytic gaze.i am finding it hard to find your compassion. particularly for one of your closest and oldest friends and her lover…

anyways, it is now the next day. Before writing group last night, i walked around prospect park for about an hour or so. i don’t know where to begin… how amazing it was. walking through the warm autumn air. the bark of the trees moist and dark against the night. the leaves translucent orange yellow red in the street lights. walking on the mud and grass in the dark. i left the city behind. i felt like demian walking in the fog of the park after the androgynous figure. i was singing to the air. felt finally alone and able to explore slowly in the night. i really miss this. i watched the archway celebrating the victors of the civil war. the eagles, the snakes, the triumphant men in green metal in the violet spot lights. i thought of animal symbols. their meanings. the eagle of a US monument, the pelican on a cuban grave in havana.

i thought about how i’m no great thinker. i prefer to stay in the feeling that just having the thought provokes. or maybe such relishing is why i am so slow.

i was also thinking about writing and phenomena. how much of my writing had been about description of phenomena. the world as it is seen. mostly the phenomena of sight and seen. lately, it has been shifting. short short bursts of fragments. not completely but often thinking about the character(s) of I. writing about social experience. it is a different layering than description being what builds to create and convey meaning.

the phenomena of dreams. this is an interesting space. the description of characters held within. the occurrence of a dream. the telling of it shifted into narrative.

i liked what grey said last night to my poem fragment. i need to ask him again about what he said of freud. oh wait. there is never a no in a dream? so no negation. no binaries? need to come back to that. interesting that the poem fragment was heard as a dream. since it began from there. as so much does.

then he said something about toni morrison and ancestors. held within us? ourselves seen through what we come from? or we are these multiplicities.

mas adelante.

vehicles of thought

< Hope Hippo, Allora & Calzadilla, a life-scale hippopotamus made of mud for the 2005 Venice Biennale, supported a volunteer who read the daily newspaper and blew a whistle upon encountering an instance of social injustice in the news.

from BOMB Magazine, Fall 2009: Allora & Calzadilla by Carlos Motta

An interview of the artist collaboration Allora & Calzadilla

“We see a fundamental relationship between violence and form in the sense that the creation of all forms entails a certain violence—the exclusion of everything the said form is not.”(Guillermo Calzadilla)

“All the same we are interested in the ruin of language, with words that slip from their intended meanings, that work against themselves, that topple into nonsense, that push language to its silent end or beyond.” (Jennifer Allora)

For Nancy’s class,  I curated my Collected Buttons series with a piece of Allora & Calzadilla and this piece by Matthew Buckingham >

from Murray Guy’s website about Buckingham’s piece: “A single 35mm slide-image of a public sculpture depicting the mythic founder of Copenhagen is projected over the duration of the exhibition. Over that time the heat from the projector lamp slowly alters the emulsion on the slide, creating a protracted, almost cinematic ‘fade-out’ or dissolve which challenges the monument’s attempt to fix meaning against the flow of time.”

Matthew Buckingham, Image of Absalon to Be Projected Until It Vanishes, 2001 “12 c. warrior-bishop absalon was the 1st dane to realize the importance of narrative history in forming national identity, and an equestrian statue was erected to his memory in 1901.” (text with the piece then tells the story of the building of the statue.)

Allora & Calzadilla, Under Discussion, 2005, Single channel DVD. 6 min 14 sec. from the San Diego Natural History Museum: “Under Discussion (2005) features a special boat, a simple wooden table that Allora & Calzadilla flipped upside-down and enhanced with a motor. The video’s protagonist, Diego, circumnavigates the island on this craft, a witness to Vieques’s uncertain situation as well as an actor in determining its future as he moves the discussion into surreal waters. The table has become a vehicle-a means to get somewhere-and also a stand-in for other tables around which those seeking to resolve Vieques’s future have gathered. As Yates McKee has noted, however, such tables are imperfect vehicles. ‘In liberal thought, ‘sitting down at the table’ suggests an ideal space of conflict-resolution through rational dialogue [...] Yet this ideal fails to account for the inequalities that underwrite the space of the table to begin with, such as the hierarchical division between scientific expertise and local ecological knowledge, which rarely register at all in planning processes. Under Discussion is an experimental device for publicizing such counter-knowledge.’”

Here are some note fragments about the work that I wrote for this project::

Desire and intention communicated / Seeking an impact upon contemporary events / Sometimes desire is foolish. An impulse followed.

Narratives reiterated / Again and again / A holding pattern

A vague recollection / Icons still a part of our consciousness / As Nancy asked, is there a sale by date on certain information? On certain information vehicles? / How do we relate to what remains? Do we? Do we have a choice or not? / What is our ongoing relationship to past events whose impact is still reverberating? / What of differences in impact? Myself? Someone half way around the world? Someone up the block? / Can we have a common platform to speak? Can we hear each other? What constitutes a collective platform? What overlaps and what does not?

A statue intended to solidify meaning, particular /Memory of a national identity / Guarding against forgetting, / Insistent of a particular set of meanings

But as memory works— It is what must be forgotten /Who decides what vanishes over time?  / When is it a decision? When is it not? / What endures?

Vieques was never upon so many radars. / Lost in a constancy of information / Who decides what is heard? / Communicates collective desire to be heard, / To have an impact for change— something realized.

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i was re-reading an earlier blog post about the work of akram zaatari. the vehicle (picturing moments of transition in a modernizing society), 2001

this quotation was taken from an article about related work so it is relevant to quote here:

“…exhibition that traces the infiltration of modernity into the Arab region [Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria] through the representation of the vehicle. Motorized means of transportation, whether cars, planes, ships or automobiles are often very present in family albums. They somehow reflected peoples desire to picture themselves during moments of transition. It is the moment that takes them from a place to another: traveling distances in a vehicle signified speed, technology, liberation and reflected the passengers personality.”

in my earlier post, i reflected on the feeling of traveling in the landscape by vehicle, particularly train. there was a scene in the video that i was relating to shooting photographs from the windows of the amtrak train.

i know that i was thinking then too about cultural perspective, modernization (by who? of whom? which power directs the progression?) what drives our thought (in the from birth sense, in the sense of cultural vision). though i unfortunately made no notes about it in the post.

what is the vehicle of our thought? do we see it or just ride it? is it seen in the frame of our view or do we just look through the pane of glass out at the world?

in terms of our work, how do we challenge and break our own formal inclinations? think about the language choices we make? what are the foundations we rest upon as assumptions? what are the conversations that we are not having? how do we know? how will we ever know? how do we bend and stretch and break ourselves across the knee of what we have ever and always known?

i wish that i had the james baldwin interview book. my writing group and myself are starting a new reading series. it is entitled:: From Here to the Corner: A Reading Series. The title is taken from a 1980 interview of James Baldwin by Wolfgang Binder in Revisa Interamericana. when i have the book at hand, i  will insert the quote here. but it is this gigantic question about how far western thought will take us and as baldwin suggests, it will take us from here to the corner.

the way that baldwin speaks. about how we can understand ourselves. through how we are seen. through the image made of ourselves by the other. and how this other also secures their sense of self in relation to the vision of us.  how we cannot understand ourselves from outside. that we are always and forever subject to relationship.

James Baldwin in an interview with Kenneth Clark. Sometime in the mid-1960s.

“… I can’t be a pessimist because I am alive To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an epidemic matter. So I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe we can survive whatever we must survive. But the negro in this country. The future of the negro in this country is precisely as bright or as dark as the future of the country. It is entirely up to the American people and our representatives whether or not they are going to face and deal with and embrace this stranger who they’ve relied on for so long. What white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts, why it was necessary to have a n*gger in the first place. Because I am not a n*gger, I am a man. But if you think that I am a n*gger, it means you need him. The question you have got to ask yourself , the white population of this country has got to ask itself, north and south, because it is one country. And for a negro there is no difference between the north and the south. It’s just a difference in the way they castrate you. But the fact of the castration is the American fact. If I’m not the n*gger here, and you invented him, you the white people invented him, then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that. Whether I am able to ask that question… Simply to face that question.”

so for us, as we write and create artwork . . . how are we examining our artistic production alongside and as our social production? how is it class and race and gender production? how do we dig into ourselves? ask ourselves who outside us has helped to define ourselves to ourselves? how is this a relationship of privilege?

as we cycle through questions of writing for instance… pronoun problems? understandable or incomprehensible metaphor? emotional or intellectual expression? cliche or newness? how are we cycling into these questions, the questions of race, privilege, oppression, class, gender, etc, etc? how do we push and push and push ourselves? how far can we go? what will take us beyond that corner?

more soon………..

the many leaves it takes…

wow. tonight was a throwback on many counts. i went to a dinner party at my dad’s house. his oldest friend of 54 years was there. my aunt and uncle who were incredibly important to me while growing up. etc. etc. a lot of the conversation was catching up on what has happened in the past 5 or 10 or 15 years. the last time d. saw me, i didn’t have a lip piercing. this means that we haven’t seen each other in 16 years. my uncle was describing introducing me and two friends to the internet at age 15. how we looked at a band page. then quickly proceeded to look at body modification. how horrified he and my dad were at what we found. and this was all in relation to talking about my cousins who are now 12 and 14. comparing my life at that age to theirs. which was a bit hard to admit to. mostly losing my virginity at age 14. drugs. sneaking around on my parents. nothing too bad. but it still presents me and my family life for scrutiny, judgment. i was saying that i think my relationship with my bf in high school protected me from a lot. i think i would have gotten into a lot of fucked up shit in high school if it were not for him. i think he saved me from a lot really. our conversation was cut off. which i am glad for… because otherwise it would have traveled to more territory that i couldn’t really talk about it if i had wanted to.

i’m too honest. when asked to be. i am too honest. and not honest enough in places where i could have a lot to say. but of course this goes back to my former post. about taking risks. imposing myself. i’m straddled between what i understand would be too scary for me and what would be too scary for another… if i said everything i needed to say. if i stuck up for myself. if i expressed all my anger and sadness. my rage. my desire and love and and and . . .

ugh. i had too much wine.

on myrtle i walk by a playground. a row of large oak trees looming above the sidewalk. i love walking below them……

the many leaves it takes to just see one sometimes. quivering rusted orange and red. rough-hewn clouds shaking at the dark of sky, the street light burnt out.

before i go to sleep, i must note that i talked to my uncle about farming(!) they know a number of people who either have farms or who want them. i need to set my life into a track towards the things that i desire. i need to leave the desk job behind. i need to have my own hours. i need to carve out space for what i really really want.

i wish i could cuddle tonight. aloneness is wonderful. but ultimately, at the end of the day, i would like to crawl into bed beside… i wish too for a better space to talk. to cross talking about connecting with connecting. to find an ellipsis that trails off into just holding. to the intimacy beyond the wall of words.  i wish it weren’t always so hard to connect to this.

good night.

winter light & new work & risk

the day has slipped away. i leave my room for a moment and see the skyline silhouetted against sunset. not quite used to the early arrival of night. setting back the clocks makes me want to settle in, hibernate, breath on the glass as i look at the world outside. nostalgic for something that seems so close but unachievable. winter is what i always see in my mind. a snow covered hill, a stand of black apple trees with no leaves, crackling upwards. the world is just before darkness, we are walking up the hill through the clouds of our breathing. i see myself in the scene, from behind, walking away up the hill. sometimes the memory is of a daylight blue sky. the kind of frozen clear-day summer sky that descends in winter. crisp and sharp. a clarity. the blue of winter light. i don’t know who the other person is.

seasons are colors to me. rather seasons in certain months. october and november are orange. a rusty deep orange. december and january a dark dark midnight blue fading to silver edges. february is violet and ash. the color spectrum trailing october to february. perhaps it is because i am so paralyzed by the cold in between and it is bookended by autumn’s arrival and by my february birth.

anyways, this was to begin to tell how late i am in beginning to write today. and how i have to leave the house in an hour to go to a dinner party. sigh. so much to say and so much time needed to pull apart what has become tightly raveled.

i’ve been working on this today::

researching sheet metals and wire. strings of pennants flying in through a crack in a window. sweeping up, streaming into the room. each flag waving (hopefully i will have studied the physics of this) as if in the same gust of wind.

i bought metallic pennant strings months ago – a string of silver, turquoise, and magenta-orange. i think the pennants  i bought are a little large (12″ x 18″) and that i want them to either be 6″ by 18″ or 6″ by something smaller.

i am also toying with them being purely made out of metal OR lining the flags i have with metal to make them bend the way i want them to… i is exciting though to begin to envision this piece existing. i have wanted to make something(s) that are more physical in their production. something(s) that require my hands and body in movement to create them.

it is also exciting to have a place where the piece could actually go. that helps for motivation!

i may also get a string of black flags (or make them) and go ahead with the idea of slogans on pennants, black text on black flags… the winter could be a good time for such indoor experimentation.

this quote is pinned to my wall::

“…it’s never been my prime mission to give comfort, unless somebody’s in drastic need. i’d rather give pleasure, or shake things up.” – susan sontag

i am not sure if i have the time now to react to why i am thinking about this quote.

it haunts me a bit because i think that i am not actively of this mindset. which is not a bad thing- to be one who comforts, consoles, cares for… but i think constantly comforting/consoling or worrying about hurting someone or worrying about doing the wrong thing or about pushing someone somewhere that might be uncomfortable… it leads to paralysis. to NOT taking risks that may be important or pleasurable or producers-of-growth-and-change.

to not try to read what may be needed in a given moment. to act rather than respond. to put forward. to be forward.

i need to be pushed. pushed to take risks. pushed to expand out into the world, to relate to others … in ways that may be scary to me.

i need to change my circumstances. new situations. new ways of relating.

to be trouble

to touch what

isn’t mine to

and yet, still

james baldwin

‘The so-called straight person is not safer than I am really… Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility… The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if society itself did not go through so many terrors it doesn’t want to admit.’

-james baldwin

on conflict and compassion

i feel violated by your pessimism.

but i don’t even know if i can tell you that. where to even begin. because it begins right deep in my core. which is maybe why i feel so violated. like the anger in your words penetrates right there. in my center. right where we diverge so sharply. in practice. having thought ourselves aligned in so many ways. it is painful to see where i cannot walk beside you.

at the center is exactly what is most inaccessible for articulation. but i have been trying. to give you something. feeling silly with the words that cannot even begin to touch what is there. so much that i have learned from so many people. so much compassion i have felt from others. and the great pain that i may never be able to return that to anyone. that my own fears and insecurities and ego and just plain inability will never allow me to allow that to another person.

the definitions of strength and weakness as malleable as good bad evil. all judgments and redefinitions of what to emphasize. conversations held with words grappling, again rarely touching. so many times i can’t see it happening. all the talking around and around and around missing the point entire. which is then where writing comes in, where silence comes in. it isn’t a question of strength vs. weakness. whether we are strong or weak. all relative definitions. the question to me is whether we can be vulnerable. whether we can be vulnerable and allow our vulnerable to touch another’s. to let our guard down enough to just let someone else in. whether we can show them the love and compassion we so much yearn for. the patience only really earned in showing patience to others.

to slow down long enough to hear what someone else has been struggling for so long just to say. to see what is in their eyes. what they have experienced. to feel them slow down for you. to walk together even for a moment at the same speed. the rarity of such occurrences (‘…it is by speed and slowness one slips…’)

how we’re just silly creatures full of desire, desire by definition never met. how much we so often live in fear of what we want.

i’ve been forever chasing the question of why we are here. and of course i don’t know. there may be no reason. there may be. it doesn’t matter. we can’t ever know. which is slippery. because this is where i think the feelings of optimism and pessimism come in. what do we rest our future-bound outlook on? in recent months i’ve come to feel it is neither. it just is. and the importance of attending to the present tense. examining ourselves. noticing ourselves. alone and in relation to others. slowing down and listening. paying close attention to the quality of each moment. which often means our relationships with other people.  because hardly any moments go by where others are not in some way involved. either in actual interaction or in memory or influence. and g wrote something to me that i’ve been trying to write to for the past two weeks. and it is coming. and this is a part of it. but amongst many things that the impossibility of this life is reality. which echoes so loudly in the center of me where it comes to compassion for self and others. because we can never really know what anyone else has experienced, what goes into their words and actions. what they have seen.

i am thinking so much of my mom in all of this. how much this woman has had to put up with in her life. how much pain there has been in our family. how much pain there is in our relationship. how much i feel incapable of giving her. how much that hurts. she has just started looking into early retirement and i’ve been looking into it. and i am so afraid for her because it doesn’t look good. dammit. dammit. dammit. the woman just wants a fucking break. from so much. from her $9 an hour piece of shit no benefits housekeeping job. but it doesn’t look good what social security will give her at 62. in general. but especially at 62 vs 66.

and the crazy thing about my mom is that you may just never know what she has seen, what she has experienced, what pains her. because she doesn’t talk about it much. you have to draw it out of her. and it is so mixed up and out of order that the stories are hard to follow. and she is so unaccustomed to talking to others. she has no friends really. she is shy and scared. and for us there is so much in the way of our relationship. all of this combined makes it hard to talk with her, to relate. we have our breakthroughs. and what helps is how compassionate my mom is. how she has really come to not judge so much of what i have done. it is pretty incredible. but i feel uncomfortable sometimes with her. when the conversation runs low i ask her to tell me about west virginia. and all the crazy stories. about my grandparents. etc. etc. what i’m struggling with is that i don’t want to turn it all into this past-looking relationship. but then again, no one else is asking. and it is something she feels confident in talking about. i don’t know. it’s just complicated. patience. compassion. love. care. these are fucking hard things.

especially with family i think. so much pain. so much hurting one another. so many expectations placed on children. the dynamic so often. where parents are the caretakers. the dependency of childhood. parents hoping to have what they expect in life met through children they don’t even know yet. and children being too young and deserving of being nurtured and cared for. and supported and loved. all that so often sabotaged far before the children are born. and by the time you are grown so many wounds, so much pain that you then have to sift through and find your way in the world. never sure you can come out from under it. and we’re just grappling with finding the love and attention we may not have had from the parents we expected it from. so many of us. i might even venture to say we are all grappling with this. maybe not consciously.

eight years ago or so, i was very involved in educational work on sexual assault. it was more than just education, there was some confrontation, some support work, some political organizing. it was out of all of that that i eventually withdrew from political work. sexual assault happened within our ‘community,’ divisions around these events, inability to support the survivor, inability to deal with perpetrators. i learned a lot around that time about things in my family. all related. all interconnected. i began to feel increasingly uncomfortable with the work i was doing. as i was finally informed of many of the secrets of my family, as i began to unravel it all, as i began to understand why things were as they were, as i saw my sister, my mom, my cousins, myself, and every member of my family affected directly or indirectly by things that had happened. i didn’t know how to bring the work i was doing home. in the places that needed it most. i felt so paralyzed. and hypocritical. who was i responsible to? who should i be responsive to? what did i need in all of this?

and i still don’t really know. and i’m still grappling with it. over and over and over and over and over again. my sister. i can’t even bring myself to talk to her right now. i don’t even know how to open my mouth. to tell her how much i love her. and how much i think of her everyday and worry about her. how much compassion i feel for her. but how much she will not feel it. how little compassion she has for herself. how much she hasn’t dealt with. how much it is dealt out to others- all the backlash, the hate, the anger.  i don’t even know what to do with that. so i don’t. and it feels like cowardice. and i feel so much shame that i can’t do anything. that i have so much of my own anger and i can’t express it in those moments when i feel it. because i am afraid of causing pain. that i don’t and i retreat. float away, float away, just float far far far away.

and i know that there is a lot hidden there beneath the anger and hate. behind ego and ridicule. but how to get there. what work are we each willing to do to get there? how much of my silence is about avoiding that work? about the fear of rupture, conflict, confrontation?

(yep. and this is often where i end up. where i end. with this question.)

to be continued…

calculations

it is 2:30 am. i can’t sleep.

i (a) drank coffee too late in the evening (i’ve realized lately that if i want to sleep i can’t do this. in the not so distant past, it did not really affect my sleep) and (b) i worked myself up through writing and (c) i cannot stop thinking about sex. and sex with a very specific person. who is very far away. sigh.

until summer 2007, i had (for the most part) always slept on a twin mattress. the habit of such a small sleeping space has stayed with me even though i now have a full sized mattress. i have found that i like to sleep on the right half while the other half is covered in books, clothes, excess blankets, etc.

i also like to dive into my pillow and  eventually cover myself with a sheet. or a princess blanket. i like landing on my stomach.i used to like to sleep on my side. but lately i have enjoyed sleeping on my stomach. since childhood, i have forced myself to lay for a long time on my less comfortable side or in an uncomfortable position. until i couldn’t stand it anymore. then i would shift and the new position would be all the more glorious because i had suffered for it. i still do this. though i find that i like to lie sprawled, disheveled, with little attention to blanket pillow bed tidiness.

i like to sleep naked. but, as anyone who knows me will know, i sleepwalk. a lot of the time this involves putting my clothes back on. why? because there are people in the bed. or in my room. or coming over. visiting. etc. really? well, no, but in my dreamworld they are. i often sleep-talk about there being people in the house that ‘aren’t there’ or about there being a person in the closet. last week, i thought someone was throwing cheese balls at me. i ‘woke’ up and sleep-removed-them-from-my-bed because i don’t like crumbs. when i lived alone in lakewood, ohio, i really think there were ghosts in that apartment. my sleep-walking was constant and intense, and often involved people being in my space. i would bring them blankets in the living room and answer the door to let them in. someday i will share more about what happened there.

when i am sleeping with someone i tend not to sleep-walk. well, this is not entirely true.  i woke up and started yelling at m. one night. i told h. there was a boy in the house. i told g. last week that there was someone in the closet. i’ve sat up and carried on conversations. all in my sleep. but generally it doesn’t happen as much when someone is sleeping beside me.

and wow. i like to do calculations. i just did one about the amount of time i have spent sleeping alone vs. the amount of time sleeping beside someone over the past year and a half. roughly 30% of my nights were spent sleeping next to someone while 70% of my nights were spent alone. love across long distances!

and wow. this is changing and soon.

good night.