Rope

Waitress, 2014
Boro Rope

Part 1: Hair

When you ask for my help I will let you sit in the garden.

Hog Hill (Dixmont, Maine), 2014

I will invite you to sit in my garden, the one that I built, but only after you invite yourself. This insinuation on your part lets me know you are weak and avaricious and I will plan to care for you like I have cared for that garden.  I will have you sit on the ground and I will cut your hair, watching it fall amongst the blades of grass. I do not like touching you, but I continue, marveling at how the thick, greasy masses are so unlike my fine, discrete strands. You may have cried, because you were lonely and also failed, but it doesn’t so much matter if you did. My hair is short then and I cut your hair to appear like mine, only slightly damaging it with a knife. This was to let you begin again, saying at the same time ‘Kappiyam bhante’ or ‘I am making this allowable’. I invite you to move into my home, although you also invite yourself because the movement is beginning. I invite you into my home, the one that I built so you can learn how to be me.

Hair, 2014
Waitress, 2014

I know that I am leaving. I packed for the inn over a period of months. I drove through the mountains and lakes and drove back and forth past the front of the white building. Waiting to see if it would be my home and it did not answer, not with a flock of black birds, not with anything, but I was already packed. I collected all of the memories I could find and arranged them neatly and beautifully into small wooden boxes. I made sure these memories were the elaborately specific ones, the ones that could never be replaced or recreated. I left the more obvious ones out, the generalities, so that no one would really notice that the unusual ones had disappeared. (Being unusual, they were harder to see anyway, so it is never so difficult to make them disappear. Their absence rarely raises suspicion.) I wrapped the small boxes in strips of white paper and glue so that they could not be opened again. Looking at the small mummified boxes was a reminder of necessary omissions, but not of those things themselves, those would be lost forever.  You hid things, too, with craft, using a small knitted pillow to conceal spent casings from bullets used to shoot law books, which were lined up for execution in the back woods. A facile and darkened mimicry.

Waitress, 2014

 

A tree grows around a rope.

Boro Rope, Hotoke Antiques

I considered taking you with me, but I was sacrificing you instead. An offering to make peace in my absence, to heal over the wound. I could not take you with me. When offering such things, a layperson can either remove the seeds or make the fruit allowable slightly damaging it with a knife. This is done by piercing the fruit; it is a form of seduction meant to reveal what is inside the skin. And I could count on you to be weak and not of your word. I saw that in you from the beginning. And your insinuation, your striving. If not for these things the replacement could not have happened. Now it would simply be a process of “making allowable”.  Just the body sitting in for another body, learning to speak the language.

Would you be poisoned forever by your own treachery? Never whole? Never integral? Word always loose and false. There are twenty more years to diverge now. But those years are already past, not the future.

 

Hair, 2014 

Stories are written as if they are the past but I am foretelling this story not telling it. I know what will happen. I see the world coalesce around my pain and my birth. You tried to burn a silk scarf with an iron and we were surprised at the length of time it took to create the dark impression on the peach silk.

Monks will refrain from carrying on correspondence with women, other than for matters pertaining to the monastery, travel arrangements, and providing basic information. When teaching, even in a letter, it is easy for inspiration and compassion to turn into attachment

The earth will move with me as collateral from these violent observations. Nations will change too, because language will change. When female background is born the world will lose its words. All scrambling to put like with like instead. Consumed with fear and compulsion. It will be foretold with the undifferentiated, incessant voices of women escalating to a violence. Against one another because they cannot learn, they’ve become small, trivial.

Part 2: Chatter

I will practice replacing girls with other girls. With moving them into the background. All of them, so there is nothing to be distinguished between a landscape and a swath of hair. The hills around my house and the back of an animal. I will have a puppet theater in the bathtub: two twins moving back and forth between personalities with a simple incantation “you be me.” And then to switch, “ok, now you be me.” Mimicking each others speech and manner. Telling one another’s story.  Becoming one another like jumping rope double dutch style.

I will cast spells of objects and actions over time. I will take the puppets into the woods, as snowy trees move back and forth and I’ll have them whisper in alternation: “you be me, ok, now you be me.” I will change my body and my dress. I will wear glasses, pretending not to see, and then dye my hair. My costume will make us indistinguishable to the untrained eye so that when I am ready to leave, you will not notice me gone, will not feel the absence.

“I made her for you. I will give her to you at my vanishing point.”

Waitress, 2014
Waitress, 2014

Women’s voices will be indistinguishable from one another; as the sound and number escalate, like a flock of migrating birds marking the time to go, the effect is dissonant, raucous, desperate, and volatile. It portends a violence. The are no distinctions, pure background.

Part 3: Fertilization

Hair, 2014

Once a single sperm has penetrated, the cell membrane of the egg changes its electrical characteristics. This electrical signal causes small cortical granules just beneath the membrane to empty their contents into the space surrounding the egg. The contents swell, pushing the other sperm far away from the egg in a process called cortical reaction. The cortical reaction ensures that only one sperm fertilizes the egg. The other sperm die within forty-eight hours.

I move away from the plot of land in the midst of trees demarking, but only barely, parts of the rural hillsides. I move up through celestial spheres, I watch these earthbound parts getting smaller. You try to follow, grasping skyward. I see the perspectival distortion of your form as I look backwards, your head striving large and body trailing small behind you. Passing the boundary from one sphere to the next, it is time to let go. The sphere’s membrane closes, forever. Your rapid mutual descent to earth tempered by snow falling quietly and gently. Nestled together back into the hillside, the bucolic sphere rests on a small wooden stand, which rests on a small wooden, bedside table. This makes it all easier, more stable.

A midwife protects the boy’s arrival.

Hair, 2014

Careful around cameras

and young children, who, as with heavy metals and certain other poisons of the body and spirit, capitalism and the like, become more susceptible to theft of the narrative kind. To be unnaturally frozen, and on the internet at that, without their consent.

I was surprised when I caught a glimpse of your new shoes.

LIFE: A collection of women’s dreams, recorded and then translated here as part of the Female Background metabolism. A way in, a way out.

It had been years since I’d seen you and we pretended not to know one another, which I suppose was not truly pretense. I looked over my shoulder as we passed one another and saw the high heel of your pale blue shoe and the shine of your pant cuff. You joined your family at the table where we used to eat. I continued my work purposefully after this sad interruption only now wondering at the deflective sheen of your uncannily foppish attire.

They Tested Your Cortisol Levels

DREAMLIFE: A collection of women’s dreams, recorded and then translated here as part of the Female Background metabolism. A way in, a way out.

They were among the highest ever seen and you wondered that they tested them at all. Machines pulsed. You wished they’d tested something else, measured it. You saw the apparatus, the tubes of green fluid rising and falling like breath, only somehow unnatural. This made you think that not all life was from nature as some would have you believe, or at least it’s origins did not have some state that was more of nature than its current incarnation. You wondered that they did not test instead your intelligence, something they would just as soon deny and certainly not so easily pathologize. You knew, though, that your intellect might be as dangerous to your health. You picked at your skin and considered just how the green fluid measured that level of disturbance that came through. That measured the quality of that final barrier, however illusive, between you and them.

My Son Is Not A Little Man: 5 Style Tips

In the early days of my pregnancy, I spent a lot of time imagining how to dress my soon-to-be son.  By the time he was born, I had carefully selected clothing for his first six months of life. The thought of raising a boy considering the political events of the past year  inspired questions. Some days, it sounded outright alarms.

In the same way that we have strong associations with certain smells, I also have very strong associations with certain fabrics and patterns from my childhood. My wish for my son was that, if he remembered his early clothing at all, the memory would be a gorgeous underpinning, a depth of time, like a mossy undergrowth in an old forest or a well-loved storybook. His memories, carefully tended pictures, a kind of redolent imagery. I wanted my son’s clothes to be part of a beautiful, intentional life. I also wanted to resist the violence of binary conventions.

I’ve been on an evolving quest, man-repelling for baby boys, only, in this case, repelling his future-man in favor of his future. As soon as I took to the baby registry, the perils emerged: my son was headed for the major leagues or the military. He also had his choice of sanctioned interests: trucks, cars, dinosaurs, outer space, and superheros.

Certain companies pay lip-service to egalitarian dressing. They mostly make ‘boy-things’ cool for girls, most especially things conferring economic advantage, STEM for babies.  This strategy emphasizes the importance to creating an accessible iconography, defining a range of interests and assigning them to our children. This ideology, geared towards creating egalitarian economic producers, is often just undermined by the aesthetics of the garments. For example, frilly, pink dresses decorated with spaceships. Sure it’s important that girls can like science, but that is certainly a separate concern from considering the fundamental disparities between the sexes. Is it important that they are still girls? After all, what are girls and boys if these simple assignations, given at birth, disappear? In the words of J.D. Salinger in a conversation from Franny and Zooey: ” . . . all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold.”

Finally: Plant a flag: pink or blue.

Screenshot of Search for Baby Boy Clothes

 

Screenshot of Search for Baby Girl Clothes

I’m not blind to all of the yellows and pale greens out there, but frankly, that feels like a form of tokenism. Black, white, grey, and brown seem like better choices for color neutrality, although far from a solution. I would like to strive towards a future reality where there are no distinctions in dress between men and women, Until then, dressing my son in girl’s clothes isn’t an answer.

I’m wary of my own hang-ups: the unconscious expressions of my hopes and fears. Although there’s no way of relinquishing my ego completely, I try taking time to observe my son, as well as my gut reactions. For example:  I usually cringe a bit when someone refers to a boy as a “little man.” It feels a bit like fulfilling a prophecy we might reconsider wanting filled. We tend raise our boys to be the kind of men that we are used to seeing. Unfortunately, that is a nurture we have clearly come to regret. As Simone de Beauvoir describes the being of women as “what they have become” instead of “what they are”, so too with men. Children are not little adults.  At some point our choices will determine identity and I would like to choose wisely. To this end, I have a provisional set of guidelines:

  1. Avoid text and overt iconography.  Perhaps, it’s the explicitness that chafes. A foreclosing on the complexity that seems our birthright. Additionally, I have no interest in becoming an unpaid brand ambassador.

2.  Avoid sports and military themes.

3.  Mix & Match Color and Pattern: Combine traditionally gendered colors and themes, or choose those with weaker gender associations. All-over patterns are better than single images. Avoid ready-made sets. Select items that work together for more flexibility.

Bloomers: Lions, Flowers, Moons, Art: Satsuki Shibuya

4.   Use abstract designs and nature or animal themes.

T-Shirt, Onesie, Romper, Art: Georges Braque, Oiseaux Pour Paroles Peintes

Bodysuit, Sleepsuit, Pants, Leggings, Bodysuit, Romper, Art: Sarah York Designs

5 .  Simplicity Always Works.  Pattern, color and minimalism are not mutually exclusive.

Onesies, Shoes, Jumpsuit, Art: Karine Legér

 

I once read that Andy Warhol was “[making] the world safe for Andy.” Through some mysterious alchemy, showing the world to itself, reflecting it, making oneself simultaneously part-of and apart-from.  A mechanism for individuation. I hope that as my son moves through life, his individuality is complex and that he becomes aware of its fragility and contingency, but that he can become inspired and curious about it’s beauty.  Small choices made towards complexity increase safety and destroy illusory differences.

 

 

 

 

13 Ways to Dress a Boy

Or a girl.

 

Sweatshirt

Jersey Shorts

Sculpture: Louie Rockstrong

 

Forest Tee

Pants

Sculpture: Camilla Engman

Cotton Sweater

Bloomers

Sculpture: Joshua Smith

Cotton Tee

Cotton Bib Overalls

Sculpture: Santiago Ribeiro

Sweater

Bloomers

Sculpture: Nina Lindgren

Landscape Tee

Joggers

Sculpture: Evol

Rainbow Tee

Mustard Yellow Jumpsuit

Sculpture: Evol

Cityscape T-Shirt

Bloomers

Sculpture

Bunny Onesie

Leopard Joggers

Peach Espadrilles

Sunglasses

Sculpture

Raincoat

Sweatshirt

Jungle Joggers

Sculpture: Anne Rook

 

Striped Shirt

Trousers

Sculpture: Pamela Sullivan

 

Pretzel T-Shirt

Spotted Pants

Shoes

Sculpture: Wim Jonker

Jungle Bucket Hat

T-Shirt

Bloomers

Sandals

Sculpture: Evol

 

Cleaning

DREAMLIFE: A collection of women’s dreams, recorded and then translated here as part of the Female Background metabolism. A way in, a way out.

We were cleaning up our property which was like a crossroads where you see strangers in a campgrounds. My former neighbor was walking her dog near the perimeter and I wanted to say hello, but I also wanted to not be seen, to just watch her. She was older but still had the same walk and the same hairstyle, the same glasses and smile, walking her dog as she had ten years ago. Once she passes out of my eyesight I get back to the task of cleaning. The yard has not only been untended, it’s has been an active dumpsite of domestic waste.  Drugs and kitchen utensils are the first targets and we are making progress, but there is so much to get rid of and I am sweating now, but I’m not tired of doing it.  I’m still not sure what I’m looking for in this mess. There is an auditorium stage that appears to my far right opposite to where I was watching my neighbor walk her dog. It’s light oak and I’m drawn to it, so I walk towards it. I get closer and I see discarded odds and ends that look like I might save something. There’s a kids’ sand shovel without its bucket. My two year old might use it even though I don’t think it’s hers and when I get closer I grab that shovel, but its covered in dust and something sticky so I immediately put it back down. All of my friends and family are helping me clean up at this stage and it’s going more quickly than I can approve or disapprove of discarding, one by one, the items. So I’m a little worried that they’re just getting rid of things that I want to keep. I reach for and look at a stack of papers on the stage because they have foreign stamps and it looks like I have kept them for a long time. At first I, when I open envelopes, I see they contain letters and they’re letters my ex-husband and I wrote to one another other when I was his college student, but then I look closer. They seem to change. They’re the divorce papers and I wonder if it is all over and if this is actually my MeToo moment and I wonder what’s left for my daughter.

Measured

DREAMLIFE: A collection of women’s dreams, recorded and then translated here as part of the Female Background metabolism. A way in, a way out.

I was with some friends and we were looking at my hair and we were measuring how long my hair was to see if it needed to be cut and when they measured it they told me that it was down to just above my butt and I was very shocked and upset and I told them that it was too long. It was too long for my hair. That it needed to be cut closer to my boobs.

Future Female: Forget Balance, Go For Suffering

“Why is your wife so intense?” asked my husband’s class of graduate students. He had just finished describing my response to their lecture request. I admit I had a strong reaction, but one I am still willing to defend. Students should learn how to confront material, formulate questions, and through discourse or writing come to meaning. (I have a favorite line from the movie State and Main: “Everybody makes their own fun. If you don’t make it yourself, it isn’t fun. It’s entertainment.” Analogously, there’s no passivity in learning.)  My husband reported my outrage (a hyperbolic way of stating my case, but it makes for a better story.) Their response is not an unfamiliar one. I often have strong, and I’m not proud to say, black-and-white responses to situations. Not that my responses don’t respect a gray area, but they do so in a decidedly adamant way.

Pregnancy and an 8-month old baby have noticeably tempered this tendency. Take my dietary habits: A vegetarian for 27 years, I now eat meat. I especially love steaks and hamburgers. I fed my son grass fed steaks just today for breakfast.  This morning, as I considered my so-called intensity and this laissez-faire approach to my new diet, it occurred to me that they directly relate to my identity as female.  The bodily entanglement required by motherhood* generates ‘femaleness’. We know a mother shares her body with someone else in pregnancy. We’ve heard about the fourth trimester.  My selfhood is indeed moderated, quite literally by someone else’s. I am not me. Not entirely at any rate.

A friend recently remarked that it must be exhausting being a mother, constantly considering another’s needs. I am exhausted, but my relationship to my son’s needs is not one of active consideration any more than I consider what I’d like for dinner. I won’t draw the comparison between the consideration of my own respiration, or better yet, my heartbeat, because his needs are not quite so automatic, but they are firmly in the territory of sustenance, of biological imperatives.  There is a diffusion of identity, of ego, that comes with sharing your body with someone else. Extending it into autonomous space inhabited by another will, another ego.

I’m sure there are plenty of examples of this physical extension. As I sat in a group Vipassana meditation session, I marveled that someone else’s sneeze, across the room, should send such waves of feeling through my body. It really is as simple as an adrenaline rush from being startled. But, regardless of how I describe it to myself, the bottom line is that I’m very affected by others, who are ostensibly outside of myself.

I continued this musing as I walked my four dogs this morning, baby strapped to my chest. I experienced the slow growing rage that accompanies these walks, the subtle sensory onslaught, the gauntlet of perils that besiege the springtime morning. So let my description to follow sound less like a rant and more like a meditative investigation of my bodily response to this routine.  

It begins while trying to leave the apartment, gathering the coats, definitely the baby’s and sometimes all four dogs, depending on the season. A process no one is particularly keen on, making the challenge of lifting everyone’s spirits while completing tasks they’d rather not, all the more daunting. Coats, baby carrier, leashes, poop bags, house keys, and cell phone.  I arrange this efficiently, minimizing the always looming risk of crankiness (canine and human). I also try to minimize the number of squats I do holding a twenty pound baby.

Next, it’s getting down the five flights of stairs and two doors (heavy doors that open towards me and threaten closing on dog tails and noses.) I watch my steps amidst a tangle of leashes. I cannot see ahead of me as I step out the door, not onto a landing, but down another short flight of steps, occupied by neighbors sitting, trying to enjoy their morning. Here I come, pack in hand, bursting towards the sidewalk propelled by four urgent bladders. The wild card: will a passing dog incite this already precarious circus act into complete chaotic lunging, barking, and frantic snapping, tethered ineffectively by deep breaths. I attempt to keep my balance and some charade of equanimity. If all of this goes as smoothly as possible, it is nonetheless accompanied with the kind of hypervigilance that knows, bodily, how tenuous any calm.

The rest of the two mile journey is about the same. A woman passes by, “You’ve got a lot going on,” she cleverly observes. I laugh to myself: “Man, I’m making it look easy.” (Although, thank you to the young woman who remarked to her friends, “that lady is the MVP – she’s got four dogs and a baby!”)

Our walk (in all manner of weather conditions) is punctuated by squatting to pick up dog feces in what I’ve learned is called a hell strip. Some people call this patch of terrain the road verge. However, as I squat (remember that twenty pound, squirming baby and picture my sweater now grazing the ground), the breeze-stoked gyre of dog feces, cigarette butts, chicken bones, grease stained paper, and fluttering plastic feels more like a hell strip to be honest. I’ll give you one more image; congestion, both human and canine, approaching from all directions as I maintain this delicate balancing act. I take refuge in oncoming traffic, letting others pass as I wait to resume our morning perambulation.

I try to metabolize the energetic shrapnel. The phrase “emotional contagion” running through my mind, lest my displeasure ruin my child’s chance’s for emotional self-regulation and become a text book “don’t” for Cesar the Dog Whisperer.

Here I am. Fully dispersed by 9 AM.

 

The demands on women are overwhelming. Be thin, but not too thin, cook, clean, nurture, be more aggressive, but not too aggressive. Women aren’t fairly compensated, they do more of the household chores.  Maternity care and family leave are abysmal. The work of the so-called stay-at-home-mother is not calculated as part of GDP, and frankly, things are primarily valued in terms of productivity.  This we already know. However, it’s the response , the counter-demands, that feel simultaneously oppressive and less achievable. We are called to love our bodies as they are, to care about health and not appearance, to embrace imperfection, and to generally act in consciousness of the double standards, the oppression. Reveal our too-fat and our too-thin, show our scars, our acne, share our #metoos, and declare #timesup. Any lack of self-acceptance, self-care, self-esteem, or self-advocacy is just another way we can fail.  On top of it all, it has been proven that practicing gratitude is how mentally strong people lead healthier lives. If we fall from this high wire, it is surely through our selfishness and mental weakness.

As a palliative, there’s the endless babble about how to find, or more accurately, how to achieve (our character is hence invoked and our success or failure measures our very integrity) the ever-elusive ‘balance.’ Now, let me throw out a suggestion: balance is not desirable. We actually already have balance; we hate it. Balance is a state of perpetual tension. We actually want integration.  We don’t want to be further fractured, further pulled in multiple directions that simply pull equally in all of the directions, like some sort of new age drawing and quartering. We want all of the parts to work together instead of at opposite ends of the horse-drawn rope. Even our zen is preposterous: Be here, now. Live in the present. Don’t forget to make the maximum contribution to your 401K, your IRA.

There is one final, perhaps ultimate demand: Forge an identity. If my identity is actually moderated by this fundamental dispersion, this inexorable confluence of mutually exclusive imperatives, identity is truly a Sisyphean joke.

Last Saturday, I sat in a group Vipassana meditation.  Afterwards, there was a speaker, he said, “the path is not ‘be here now,’” but instead “the path is suffering, this [Vipassana] is a way out.”  Finally, the resonance of truth.

Where does that leave me but to embrace my bodily reality for its implicit wisdom. Surely there is power in the invisible extension into space that has become the special place relegated to women, if not by nature then surely by nurture. It seems increasingly important to inhabit that space rather than retreat into a singular, if visible, entity. This grace seems the only appropriate ground for the future female.

*Femaleness does not require motherhood, nor does bodily entanglement require pregnancy. Consider the ever fascinating, and not relegated to female, field of epigenetics.