falling back on femme

WHO IN THE WORLD SENT ME THIS ADORABLE DRUNK CAT PLUSHIE?!?!?!?!

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

“In a book about her anorexia, Caroline Knapp describes standing in a kitchen and taking off her shirt, on the pretext of changing outfits, so her mother could see her bones more clearly:

I wanted her to see how the bones in my chest and shoulders stuck out, and how skeletal my arms were, and I wanted the sight of this to tell her something I couldn’t have begun to communicate myself: something about pain … an amalgam of buried wishes and unspoken fears.

...

What I appreciate about Knapp’s kitchen bone show, in the end, is that it doesn’t work. Her mom doesn’t remark on the skeleton in her camisole. The subject only comes up later, at the dinner table, when Knapp drinks too much wine and tells her parents she has a problem. The soulful silent cry of bones in kitchen sunlight—​that elegiac, faintly mythic anorexia—​is trumped by Merlot and messy confession.

If using your body to speak betrays a fraught relationship to pain—​hurting yourself but also keeping quiet about the hurt, implying it without saying it—​then having it “work” (mother noticing the bones) would somehow corroborate the logic: Let your body say it for you. But here it doesn’t. We want our wounds to speak for themselves, Knapp seems to be saying, but usually we end up having to speak for them.”

“In a poem called ‘The Glass Essay,’ about the end of a love affair, Anne Carson describes a series of visions—​‘naked glimpses of my soul’—​thirteen visitations: a woman in a cage of thorns, another stuck in a ‘contraption like the top half of a crab,’ another turned into a deck of flesh cards pierced by a silver needle: The living cards are days of a woman’s life. Carson calls these visions the ‘Nudes,’ and each is a strange, surprising, devastating vision of pain. We aren’t allowed to rest on any single image; we move itinerant from one to the next.

The first Nude is ‘alone on a hill,’ standing ‘into the wind’:

Long flaps and shreds of flesh rip off the woman’s body and lift and blow away on the wind, leaving an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle calling mutely through lipless mouth.

If a wound is where interior becomes exterior, here is a woman who is almost entirely wound—​an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle. Her body is utterly exposed and also severed from itself—​losing shreds of flesh, losing its lips. After the mute call, we get this confession: ‘It pains me to record this, / I am not a melodramatic person.’ This closing motion performs a simultaneous announcement and disavowal of pain: This hurts; I hate saying that. It describes how the act of admitting one wound creates another one: It pains me to record this. And yet, the poet must record, because the wounded self can’t express anything audible: Calling mutely through lipless mouth.” -From Leslie Jamison’s amazing essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain”.

(like the opposite of Yeats’ “A Coat”)

I want a chance to map my knowledge of you onto your body, your flesh. Like a tailor draping fabric on the man, I want to make a bespoke suit for you out of my love. You would wear it so well, and it would give you strength. You could project yourself out onto the world in ways you would have never imagined, clothed in my love.

I have loved you for years. Perhaps that is a careless thing to say. Let me be more precise: I have not loved you. I have loved the idea of you. I do not know you. I love the idea of you I have sewn together from the little bits and pieces you’ve strewn about the internet. I love the facade you have placed before the world, and especially before me. I think some stones in that facade were placed there specifically for me, no?

So this is what I have loved and love more than I have loved any real person (and yes, I am quite aware that has bad implications for my character, my capacity for love, etc etc). But oh, if I had a chance to make you a suit, a suit of my love…

I would take my idea of you and lay it out before me, take the symbols we have shared as my measuring tape. Did I make the shoulders too broad? I’ll take them in. The joy I would take in the altering of it, my love of you, my idea of you. Picking up things I missed along the way, adding a vent here, changing the buttons there to account for your particularities, which I savor through my labor, my work to make the fabric fit the flesh.

Your face, your body, always obscured in photos, would roll out before me in all its real dimensions. The pleasure I would take in looking, in moving my tailor’s hands across the expanses of fabric and flesh, discovering new terrain, new textures on your surface, moving slowly, carefully to size you up.

And I would do that. You would be human and small before me, defined, very much of this world, no more the dizzying stuff of abstraction. Perhaps that is what scares you most of all? You seem more weary of proximity than the rest. You’re right to fear losing this. Perhaps if I were smarter, I would be scared too. I like the dizzying heights, of course I do. I find them scintillating, exciting, erotic on some level. Love and danger, pleasure and suffering, such old companions.

But I want it anyway. I would risk all that to know you. I want the familiarity, the comfort of clothing that fits. I want to wrap myself around you, not only my ideas, but my body, and be comfortable there. Let the rest of my life be filled with dizziness. I chase it everywhere I go. Let me take refuge beside you. Let yourself take refuge in me. I wish I could show you how strong I am, how safe, how much space I could hold for you if you let me.

These are just feelings. I wish I could say them and you could hear them as that. I wish it was understood that these feelings and my actions exist on different levels simultaneously. I don’t want anything grand from you. I just want a fitting. Maybe if that went well, you could ask me to make a suit for you. I don’t want commitment, I just want a chance to get to know you. Getting to know someone when you have these crazy dreams and ideas floating around in the back of your head is the best experience. Your belief in and passion for the other pushes you to compromise, to deal harshly with yourself, to grow. This dream of love presents a challenge that one only has the desperation and hubris to face while those dreams are intact. And, of course, love shatters eventually. Something breaks it. Sometimes it is many things. But that growth, that movement through yourself, through another, through the world is so worth it, no?

I guess that is just what I want. I want you to let me move through you. I want you to move through me. Either that, or something else who inspires that level of desperation and hubris, the kind that gives you the strength to move through another human.

flash prose p1

A Visual Diary (Shirley Clarke, 1980)

Still get teary-eyed watching Scurry block that goal, then Chastain blasting one in and ripping off her shirt in sheer joy, being swarmed by all those strong ass women who are her team mates. It's fucking beautiful. It's crazy to think that this was one of the first times an image of a woman ripping off her shirt, not in a sexy way, but in a sport bra, was seen widely. It's just so normal to me that a woman can exercise outside in a sport bra and be strong and victorious, nbd, but it wasn't that way till 1999. Those things were completely foreign to my mother, to my aunt who used to lay out and tan topless on the beaches of Texas (but only cause she was a butch enough and flat-chested enough lesbian to pass as male).