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.
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