STRAIGHT
TALK:
To
Be
Female
Remains
Radical,
Still
Mutualism
We, set to stitching a whole cloth, to slipping out from under this being defined against, this voided womanhood,
we, who treasure bonds even as they dissolve, we ask,
what’s to gain but abundance from a broadening chance to contribute?
who have fought for scraps
in the float
All becoming through relation.
and still hold difference dear.
A
Small Chapbook
All else an extinquishing. All else energetic larceny.
S
ADDENDUM
FIVE
(Nascent Multilogue entry)
THIS VOIDED WOMANHOOD
I wrote this with women in mind, thinking it would be best for us to be prepared when asking men to come along in this shift in our gendered way of understanding one another; prepared not only to find the way in the filling/knitting out of human definition (from our previous woman state of voided-ness) but also to be on the watch for some not necessarily anticipated shifts within ourselves. If the men do take us up on deep gender realignments.
I do mean to put the responsibility on women, with and without the willing help of men, to keep in motion the rethinking, re naming, re being - and to keep warning ourselves that it won’t be easy, nor without some brokenheartedness. But then, we have that already.
ADDENDA
A TIDBIT FROM MY LIBRARY
“(Rilke) asks whether, since women have done the work of ‘loving’ for centuries, it might not be time for men to take on their share of this work. ‘We have been spoiled by easy enjoyment like all dilettanti and stand in the odor of mastery. But what if we were to despise our successes, what if we were to start from the very outset to learn the work of love, which has always been done for us? What if we were to go ahead and become beginners, now that much is changing?’”
Adrienne Rich Of Woman Born
Reviewing the Primordia
STRAIGHT
TALK:
Sexual
Trading
S
This Womanchange underway, it’s forcing change in men. Makes for an uneasy MaleSelf.
So much of their Being seeded in not being woman;
in not being, at least, this defiled & conquered Other. Not us, the WeVoid.
This framed state not encoded in us.
That shift in you triggers absence in him.
The ground falls out from beneath his feet.
ADDENDUM
SIX
(Nascent Multilogue entry)
MAKES FOR AN UNEASY MALESELF
I’m aware this decoupling from the oldstories is a most difficult & dangerous crossing as the path here leads into/through the not yet known. And heaven knows, we humans love the certainty of well-signed, trodden paths.
I am aware of, and also have some worry over the sense of loss many of us feel, particularly the loss felt around male identity - as “solids” once stood upon or defined against are dissolving. I know we are not often at our best when uncertain about who we are.
But then, that's what's ahead of us now. Isn't it? Learning to stand on fluid ground. And as I say, that fluidness is understood as a welcome opportunity by many of us.
ADDENDA
A TIDBIT FROM MY LIBRARY
“I had multiple false starts because there was so much I resisted: I could take feminism in only bit by bit. Maybe there was only so much I could take in because it meant recognizing that I had been taken in. You can feel stupid for not having seen things more clearly before. You have to give up on a version of yourself as well as a version of events...
And maybe we need to remember how hard it is to acknowledge that a world is not accommodating you because of the body you have. I didn’t want feminism to be everywhere, as I didn’t want to encounter these limits; I wanted there to be places to go where I could just leave my body behind.”
Sara Ahmed Living a Feminist Life
Facing Our Void
STRAIGHT
TALK:
Mistaking
Appropriation
for
Love
We remind them, in our carry of life,
in the response to one another stirred within of what dissolves of this brilliant transience. Our tenacious connectivity, gift and curse.
So they bargain with their need to frame these bodies, as if.
sometimes tender
at end
Radiant mystery: this body becoming more than one.
And then comes fear. This life, a borrowing.
As if that could disguise our inevitable parting.
At what cost this recurring shame I feel at your need exposed to have my being be less?
possess
Yet, here we are, as they risk our survival for their dream of controling what's beyond grasp.
afterall
A TIDBIT FROM MY LIBRARY
“If all goes well, the baby will make it out alive, and so will you. Nonetheless, you will have touched death along the way. You will have realized that death will do you too, without fail and without mercy. It will do you even if you don’t believe it will do you, and it will do you in its own way… People say women forget about the pain of labor…. But that isn’t quite right – after all, what does it mean for pain to be ‘memorable’? You’re either in pain or you’re not. And it isn’t the pain that one forgets. It’s the touching death part.”
Maggie Nelson The Argonauts
A PARTICIPATORY NARRATIVE
STRAIGHT
TALK:
A
Relationship
Model
Instead
S
All any of us want is treasured belonging,
All any of us want is to contribute, to give to this emergent, commons narrative; nurture the root woven deep of perception complex & fluid.
For this we offer our lives lived of relation and its tenacious fabric empathetic.
meaning &
That magic, those words, in tossed sail from you to me
Communion and comfort to be found here.
to let go silence
& me to you.
day by day
Our search for bedrock in that solace, this brief solace of being,
of being part of a whole.
Communion
S
Our infinitely complex being with, besides our confusion, the gift.
So fluid, so possible, and too, there’s solace in our sparking stitch.
Even with uncertainties, this flowing energetic between us defines a self, and perhaps some other darling not self.
Go ahead, follow that empathetic seam as it unfolds; that hazy unframed, that maybe not mirage caught-up-with.
In the let of one another in,
we trigger the necessary deep
beyond body
tangling untangle
makes
we stitch it
Reflecting back and back again.
Generates meaning.
Toe to toe.
A
Small Chapbook
A TIDBIT FROM MY LIBRARY
“All human life on the planet is born of woman. The one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men is that months-long period we spent unfolding inside a woman’s body. Because young humans remain dependent upon nurture for a much longer period than other mammals,and because of the division of labor long established in human groups,...
where women not only bear and suckle but are assigned almost total responsibility for children, most of us first know both love and disappointment, power and tenderness, in the person of a woman.
We carry the imprint of this experience for life, even into our dying.”
Adrienne Rich Of Woman Born
A Quickening
S
In this spherical netting we, multi modal, fast moving and complex, wander a wilderness of tattered edges loyal to the dead.
Loyal to that past we hold in these bodies.
Our crossing tenacious into this connectivity, these altered meanings.
And still,
hold tight the confirmations. Especially of love.
all together
radiant forward
A life seeks meaning.
How we grow one another.
ADDENDUM
SEVEN
WHAT IS THIS MULTILOGUE?
The intended purpose of this yet-in-the-making Multilogue of Thinking Daughters is to encourage an exploration of what I perceive to be a particular moment of womanhood – my/our moment, now aging and soon to pass; to express some of what we’ve come to understand by living female through this particular era. I am imagining the voice here as aggregate, multi authorial & plural.
My generation of women was born into a time of rapid change in conception of what, beyond (in addition to) the procreative, beyond the uses of men, composes the life of a woman.
We are female humans of a specific warp and weft that lives just now; a link from the mostly prescribed & framed reality of our mothers and what is/will be WomanLife after we are gone. Our generation is of the last who remember, still. We are transmutationists (to borrow from Darwin.)
Multilogue of Thinking Daughters
Site
Map
But, this framed state of being is learned.