FUR FEATHER TOOTH AND NAIL

I went back to the origin, the starting point, the innermost despair in me,

This is why girls are so much more employable than young men in all the shitty, less-than-subsistence-level service jobs they’re trying to cram young people into across Europe and America. Girls are better at pleasing other people and plastering on the pretty grin even when we’re screaming inside. That’s what being a girl is. Girls are better at this sort of labour, often called ‘emotional labour’, not because there’s anything in the meat and matter of our living cells that makes us naturally better but because we’re trained to it from birth. Trained to make other people feel good. Trained to serve the coffee, fill in the forms, organise the parties and wipe the table afterwards. Trained to be feisty, if we must, but not strong. To be bubbly, not funny. You must at no stage appear to have a body that functions in a normal human way, that pisses and shits and sweats and farts and falters. Decorate the prison of your body. Make yourself useful. Shut up and smile.

The hymen is a profound example of the way humans metaphorize anatomy. Here is an organ that has no biological function, and yet Western culture made up a powerful story about the hymen a long time ago. The story has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with controlling women. Culture saw a “barrier” at the mouth of the vagina and decided it was a marker of “virginity” (itself a biologically meaningless idea). Such a weird idea could have been invented only in a society where women were literally property, their vaginas their most valuable real estate—a gated community.

A black cloud of grief came shrouding over Achilles. Both hands clawing the ground for soot and filth, he poured it over his head, fouled his handsome face and black ashes settled onto his fresh clean war-shirt. Overpowered in all his power, sprawled in the dust, Achilles lay there, fallen… tearing his hair, defiling it with his own hands.

despite how many times you’ve killed the animal inside you only to meet it again in the morning / breathing out of your own mouth

Today, my 84 year old neighbour said to me, “I quite like mushrooms. They have a good outlook on life.” She then admitted she felt a bit silly to have said that and suggested not many people would understand what she meant.

“All the “not readies,” all the “I need time,” are understandable, but only for a short while. The truth is that there is never a “completely ready,” there is never a really “right time.“ There comes a time when one simply hopes for the best, pinches one’s nose, and jumps into the abyss. If this were not so, we would not have needed to create the words heroine, hero, or courage.”

“Out of the window I saw the trees coming into leaf. Pecan and chinaberry and black walnut. I thought that those leaf-buds were almost voices. I thought that those new leaves, gold-green, were almost words, almost something being said.”

“The witch-burnings did not take place during the ‘Dark Ages,’ as we commonly suppose.  They occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries– precisely during and following the Renaissance, that glorious period when, as we are taught, ‘men’s’ minds were being freed from bleakness and superstition.  While Michelangelo was sculpting and Shakespeare writing, the witches were burning.  The whole secular ‘Enlightenment,’ in fact, the male professions of doctor, lawyer, judge, artist, all rose from the ashes of the destroyed women’s culture.  Renaissance men were celebrating naked female beauty in their art, while women’s bodies were being tortured and burned by the hundreds of thousands all around them.”

When I started screaming, I finally figured it out. I had always been afraid…of not being able to see my future, of not knowing what I want to do with my life, of not knowing why I don’t know what I want to do. And…of the days that kept flowing by mercilessly, in spite of that.