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The Unbearable, Invisible, Prisons Of Our Being

July 27, 2010

“We build ourselves prisons and live there, sometimes all of our lives.

We think we will be safe in them, but we just cut ourselves off from everyone else.”

Larissa

It’s my great good fortune to be employed in an environment which allows me to see and speak with some of the most remarkable human beings I imagine live on Planet Earth. They are nondescript, often poor and many times uneducated in the ways of suburban American lives.

Sometimes they are loud, often they see things I do not and can describe them in detail. Often their thoughts do not resonate with my experience, but the offering of them resonates within the speaker, sometimes to such a degree that no one else can speak to the thoughts presented.

The people I am fortunate enough to work among have that thing about them that most Americans fear, more so, I think, than most of us fear death. They have diagnoses. They have mental illness diagnoses.

Yes, the things we fear greatly: schizophrenia (often of the paranoid type,) schizoaffective disorder, severe bi-polar disorders, dysthymic disorders, acute glossalaliac mania, and depressive disorder. Many also have the lesser Axis II diagnoses that add a tremendous handicap to both themselves and the practitioners who work with them, the families who once (and occasionally still do) loved them (and sometimes contorted them into beings as brittle and delicate as funnel cakes,) and for those who live near them, interact with them and wish that they would just go away: borderline personality disorder, complex PTSD, anti-social personality disorder and the frightening to others dissociative identity disorder.

Some of those I work among are persistently at risk for self-harm, up to and including suicide. Very few and very rarely do they express a desire to harm others (no more so, anyhow, than the 10-million-times-a-day-said-by-most-children-and-many-adults-and-generally-not-considered-acutely-threatening “I wish you (him, her or they) would die” or a so-usual-as-to-be-not-noticed-in-the-suburbs “I’m gonna kill you (her, him or them.)”

Odd, no, how the addition of a diagnosis that scares the hell out of layman and professional alike (some if not all of those listed above) can make the mundane startlingly emergent, leading to calls for crisis clinicians and police officers, ambulances, psych-wards and state-owned psychiatric hospitals.

Ask politicians if scaring the bejesus out of the population isn’t an effective way to govern unhampered a supposed democratic republic. Better yet, ask yourself how many freedoms and tolerances are you willing to forego for the constitutional right to live forever regardless the fact of your own mortality.

“Larissa” (not, of course, even close to her real name) is one of those folks I am privileged to work among and with. She has one of those dreaded diagnoses so many of us perceive as nightmares on nights when we’ve over indulged in peanut-butter, dill pickle and bleu cheese with Alfredo sauce pumpernickel crust pizza chased by a 6-pack of PBRs.

Yeah, truly exquisite and torturous nightmares engulf us when we consider the possibility of a D-I-A-G-N-O-S-I-S. Frightening stuff, gimme a flaming pit in the deepest Puritan hell instead.

Yet, when one finds herself 21 years down the road working with such folks in one capacity or another, she finds that in most respects, hell, all respects on most days, she feels more safe and blessed to be among them than she feels herself to be among her suburban neighbors and acquaintances. There is no creature alive, I am certain, more liable to erratic, unhinged behavior than a suburbanite on a highway or road with an SUV or sedan.

No creature can be as unpredictably dangerous as the remnants of the disappeared white middle-class who profoundly believe that the ubiquitous relegation of a Puritan-based “Sinners in the hands of an” Angry God to fireside tales designed to frighten children has somehow managed to denigrate their supposed democracy to a plaything of “socialists and those people” who wish to enchain them in a subservience they grew up thinking was reserved to those of browner hue.

They decry their stolen wealth that they declare was taken by those who struggle to eat three meals a day and buy Pampers for their babies not able to admit the bare truth: they ‘ve been hoodwinked, bamboozled, relegated, stolen from, and demeaned by the very iconic paragons of America’s “wealth equates to righteousness and we do God’s work” financiers, corporate heads and minions (lawyers, accountants, journalists and pundits), corporatist-Neolibs, Libertarians and -Neocons who they fervently dream will raise them to the level they believed they were born to. Those people are dangerous and frightening.

However, the fever dreams of the disappeared American middle-class and the cynical dictatorships of the wealthy and their minions in modern America aren’t the focus of the canvas I’m trying to paint in this essay.

The words attributed above in the epigraph to “Larissa” are the focus of that canvas. But, I know that her words bear as well on the “American problems” delineated above. We who make prisons for our selves live in the realm of our severe and persistent nightmares. We alienate ourselves from others and find our only friendships are among those who fear the same things as we fear: relationship, compassion, social consciousness and conscience. Afterall, the trope goes for the past three hundred years: God’s blessings are evidenced by the wealth and power he grants us, not by the good and decent works we do nor by finding that love and care are inexplicably among the few slivers of human existence that are both plentiful and free-of-charge.

“I dance in your words. Appreciating your vulnerability. Surprisingly comfortable with my own. Your work is beautiful. Your journey is felt with passion and respect. Rest comfortably in yourself for you inspire me.”

Words from the Netz, graciously posted in comments here. I give her a curtsy in return and offer my hand, how else respond to such a gift?

In her words I dance, knowing full well what it costs to open just a tiny crack in a prison wall that’s built on years of torment and harm received. The common wisdom wraps us, as smooth and constricting as swaddling, or wrappings on the feet of classical Chinese women. It whispers through our limbs and alights while we sleep in our dreamscapes, you must be strong and alone to survive, else the demons will come again and ensnare you, begin the torture again.

Yet, what we know is true is that our dreams possess us even in daylight. Voices from the past flitter or shout through the bones we use to dance. Fear ripples through the muscle that moves the bones we dance with. Still, we maintain our notions of prisons, the safety that inheres inside the walls, closed away in dark cells where, if we are fortunate, the fears cannot find us.

Alas, no one is that fortunate for fear holds the keys to the prison and to the doors of every cell inside the thick, stone walls. He visits us when he cares to and we are helpless under his gaze and in his keeping.

The only avenue out is the avenue we most usually refuse to walk along. Avenue V that bears the initial of the keys to our unbearable, invisible prisons: vulnerability.

The truth is paradox. My hiding and fear never managed to release me from the prison of my being. The recognition and embrace of my vulnerability released me. Your recognition will release you as well. For, what are we if not inherently vulnerable? Who among us is unbreakable, immortal, needing have never a care for death, sorrow or pain?

Would all the secrets of a heart keep that heart from pain or sorrow, keep the brain that holds that fear from moving through the doorway into death? Thus, what is left, but to try the door that one fears most, but that one never tries at all?

In vulnerability lies the sacred  space we imagine lies beyond our deaths. In vulnerability and its acceptance for one’s self lies the fact of one’s inherent freedom: the freedom to be, to be one’s very self and take joy in that.

I know without a shade of doubt that the thought of others knowing I am a trans-woman, or knowing that I experienced a brutal rape once upon a time may lead to their removal from my life … out of fear. The fear that grips us in the places we feel most vulnerable: our sexuality, our acceptance and regard from others.

So it goes … and so it goes. On and on human being leads us into useless and groundless fears. We cower before differences in skin color, differences in our beliefs about deity or its non-existence (very like a religion itself, except that it refers to itself with a trope seldom used by the traditionally religious. Whisper now, rationality).

We hide the facts of our rapes, of our brutality toward others or their brutality toward ourselves. We hide, quiveringly, our transsexuality, our homosexuality, our compassion, our empathy, our love, our desire, our skin-color sometimes, our parents and siblings, our girlfriends or boyfriends, our intelligence, our joy. All of our virtue, we often feel, must remain hidden away and unreachable by those who would hurt us, by those we might love, or meet in friendship.

Is it wondrous, then, that the human world abounds with suffering, or that many think of life as “a vale of tears?”

How so? We hide away the best of ourselves, imagining that is the only way we can live long and without pain. Yet, death seeks us out, pain seeks us out, even in our hidden fortresses where fear holds the keys to the cells in which we immure ourselves.

Life hurts us. It’s a precondition of living. To be mortal and made of vulnerable material is to be inherently subject to pain. No amount of dissembling or whistling past graveyards changes that fact.

Fear holds the keys, and the keys are our various vulnerabilities. It’s only in reveling in vulnerability, risking pain and living in freedom from our unbearable, invisible prison walls, that we thrive. Only through acceptance of our vulnerability and through exultation in that vulnerability can we finally live in freedom, knowing others, loving them and laughing with them, crying together and holding one another in spite of ever-possible sorrow, ever-possible joy.

This post is cross-posted at The Spectrum Cafe.

Categories: A Life, Communion, Community, Inclusion, Intersectionality, Magic, Mental Health, Psychology, Relationship, Transsexuals, Trauma
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Possession

February 26, 2009

Possession

Listen as the wind blows
from across the great divide,
Voices trapped in yearning,
memories trapped in time,
The night is my companion
and solitude my guide,
Would I spend forever here
and not be satisfied?

And I would be the one
to hold you down,
kiss you so hard,
I’ll take your breath away
and after I’d wipe away the tears,
Just close your eyes dear

Through this world I’ve stumbled
so many times betrayed,
Trying to find an honest word,
to find the truth enslaved,
Oh you speak to me in riddles
and you speak to me in rhymes
My body aches to breathe your breath,
your words keep me alive,

And I would be the one
to hold you down,
kiss you so hard,
I’ll take your breath away
and after I’d wipe away the tears,
Just close your eyes dear

Into this night I wander,
it’s morning that I dread,
Another day of knowing of
the path I fear to tread,
Oh into the sea of waking dreams
I follow without pride,
Nothing stands between us here
and I won’t be denied

And I would be the one
to hold you down,
kiss you so hard,
I’ll take your breath away
and after I’d wipe away the tears,
Just close your eyes dear.

Sarah MacLaclan

 

In the darkness she felt the softness of her skin as her hand soothed her tummy and whispered along her thighs. She imagined a place somewhere else, a cottage, perhaps, enclosed by woods, or a chateau ensconced within acres of planned and symmetrical gardens, a house in some suburban wilderness like the one she lived in now. The end of hope and longing, dreams shattered, scattered like broken glass through a well-trimmed yard, A child approaching dangerously close to the ruins. 

 

I sit here, three weeks and longer without an essay. I don’t think today is the day an entire one will appear on this page. For although I’ve read and experienced a lot over the haitus, I find myself unable to cast letters across a page and form them into a sacrifice to Sarasvati, Mother of Words and Lyrics, that I would find fitting to lay before her feet as she strums her lute.  

I wonder will words ever manage to make enough connection to grant us each our desires? Or will words do as they do and tend to be misunderstood and divide us all into isolated groups of the least common denominator? Our words always seem to divide us, because, I think, we each bring a unique experience and nuance to every word we use. Our experiences and our nunaces are not always close enough to manage not to be misunderstood from beginning to end. The use or lack of use of a single word seem enough to divert us from another’s point to something we feel strongly about. Or we experience a memory tripped by a word, a gesture, a sigh and find ourselves not where we are but where our memories have taken us. 

Like the woman in the initial paragraph we are creatures of dream. We yearn and our yearnings sometime lead us to desire for possession: to be possessed and to possess. Some desire possession of emotions, others possession of the body, far more, I imagine, as someone who was raised and grew up in American suburbia and became an adult in an American mid-sized city, I find that possession of material of some form to be the overriding desire of most people I know. 

Or at least that’s the impression they leave. To have enough money for their material longings. For enough money consistently grows: past food and shelter to art, clothing for all seasons and every new year, appliances, convenience possessions, validity, recognition, — I don’t think I can list it all. But we find ourselves too often the subject of the MacLachlan song. We desire possession but never quite reach the goal, for the possession we seek, that of another, a lover, a heart bound to our own we often fail to understand that the nuance must be sharp and exact. We must finally bare ourselves and say what we mean and feel, not what may be expected by our upbringing, our moral compasses.

Even the inventor of moral compassing, William Bennett, could speak morality; his heart simply wasn’t in his own living of his own professed morality. He is not alone.

Most of us confuse blunt and sharp with truth. We hide our truths Our lovers are never quite able to merge with us so completely that we know our loneliness is assuaged. They never know our truth, quite, for what it is.

Our lives play themselves out in the images of our desires and all-too-often we die used and empty on the altars of that unquenched desire. What do we seek? To what ends do we go to grasp our wishes?

For too long I confused the possession of things with a longed-for fulfillment, when my fulfillment was as close as the palm of my own hand raised before my face at night in an empty bed. I failed to see what was there for the darkness that hid it. Now I find that my possession has been completed, almost without recognition by myself.

I find the things I have chased recede in the distance, ever-galloping like Camargue-horses running forever along the sand spits and through the twisted ilex, sea-grass and brush. I find, I don’t care anymore. Let them go, those beautiful stallions and mares, their white coats gleaming in a westering sunlight. They are disappearing into the purples and blues of the twilight.

In leaving the chase I find myself, right where I am sitting now. I am possessed and possessing. My contentment and my happiness have been with me for a long time, unrecognized. I need only speak it and it will become real and whole. My utterance will become words of power, making bound on earth what’s bound already in the ideal realm — the realm where I speak my heart.  

Into this night I wander,
it’s morning that I dread,
Another day of knowing of
the path I fear to tread,
Oh into the sea of waking dreams
I follow without pride,
Nothing stands between us here
and I won’t be denied

And I would be the one
to hold you down,
kiss you so hard,
I’ll take your breath away
and after I’d wipe away the tears,
Just close your eyes dear.

She dropped her hands and ran to the doorway, stooping once in the yard to gather the child in her arms and to hold him close, kissing him and holding him to her, knowing her desire was filled, she was possessed by the child in her arms. She carried him to his bed and stroked his hair while he fell asleeep and she walked quietly back to her bed and slept. 

Longing and desire are as close to fulfillment as we are willing to allow them, willing to see them truly. Our desire is to be possessed by friends, children, lovers, for we are a social people. Our deepest desire is to belong to a family, a clan, a tribe, a people, a world. Our lives are fleeting, our connections last an eternity. 

Blessed Be. 

 


Categories: A Life, Communicating, Connection, Humans, Love, Relationship
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Serendipity and Relationship: The Dragon’s Fiery Heart

November 18, 2008

I’ve spent a few days not writing. In that time I’ve read a few short stories, seen a few films, heard some very moving music, shared a supper with some friends and their two-year old daughter, shared a day at home with my ailing son and felt some despair at some things I have found on the world wide web. 

But, I have also shared hope and some dreams that maybe there are ways we find, or are given, hope and the sense that connection, true and meaningful connection, with other human beings can raise itself as a possiblity in our lives. I’ve even found a sense that with some understanding and the easing of our internal pains we might still find a place, or places, where we can meet in shared humanity.

The hope is small, an ember in a dying fire deep in a cold and frost-painted night under fir trees. Our blankets and furs cover us and we lie sleeping while the fire’s burned to simply the glowing heart ofdeta-8714 wood-on-fire. In our sleep we cannot know if, when we rise in the morning, cold and shivering, the heat can be aroused within the firepit and the flame rekindled to make a breakfast and so renew our strength for making the journey we’ve left before us.

Even then, shall the encampment walk together or take separate ways through the fir-forest and up the slope of the mountains? Shall we walk together or decline into a dulled variety where each goes her own way simply because we cannot see past difference and what we think we know? Is there a possibility that we can agree on pathways, on the most efficient way to plot a route, and then still be able to diverge and remake the route if some untoward and unexpected obstacle rises before us, blocking the way along the plotted route?

Thus, at the edges of a depression I am trying to bring together a few wavering sparks of ideas, a few snatches of stories that I can relate here and weave, perhaps, some kind of cloth or tapestry begun in the hope of finding some community, some common place, where we can at least accept the pure joy of living life that trumps our thoughts that in smaller and smaller seams of different people we can somehow “win” the many battles we fight amongst ourselves. 

My inclination is to accept at face-value, and as a commentary on my attempt, the words of my friend: “American politics is a blood-sport.” He’s a rather sceptical person when it comes to human interaction, although I find it impossible to give him a rational, full and decisive argument that would change his mind. I find it impossible to make such an argument for myself. So much easier to hurriedly eat and wash, move on, before the terrors of the fir-forest make themselves known by slaying me and making a meal, leaving merely the bones and cartilege for the smaller scavengers lurking beneath the trees.

Call me Candide if you will: “the best possible of worlds.” But, this morning I rose, made a light breakfast and coffee for my partner, roused my son and sent him back to school. Now I sit here and write before the afternoon rolls around and I must be out in “the real world.”

A few days ago came this belated comment from a woman who had simply stumbled across the essay, Ewe’s Full Things. Lynn’s comment struck me rather forcefully. She’s a lesbian witch out in the Midwest who was searching out an artisan in South Bend, Indiana, and who came, quite by accident, to my blog, read, and left with something she hadn’t expected. Then she was kind enough to leave me something I hadn’t expected: a comment that touched my heart and renewed my sense that putting down these thoughts might occassionally be well-worth the effort.

Your account of your travels has touched my heart. I happened on your blog by serendipity, as is the way of the Goddess. I was looking for an local artisan from northern Indiana who makes felted wool purses and I found your story. I have printed it and will keep it with me in the coming days to help me through the stresses I face. I am a pagan, Green Witch, by my own labeling and lesbian.

I have a tendency to forget who I really am when surrounded by people who think my current job defines who I am. It is not a bad job (in fact it allows me to connect with people with special needs which is a great gift in itself ) but the work (accounting) does not sing in my heart as does my art and design work. The story you wove will help me remember that the people I love and connect with and my dreams are what makes me who I am.

We’ve never met, as far as I know she and I have never shared anything at all but that essay and a penchant for loving other women, witchery, and fine wool goods. Yet, in the fashion of serendipity I would like to think we have also found a connection, something that brings us together, however briefly, into a space where we recognize the value and worth of the other.

The importance of a political stance, the importance of how bodies configure and minds parse the threads of our existences don’t seem to be as important when one reads such a comment as the knowing that far away another’s been touched by one’s words and feels she is better for having been touched. Her words to me, mine to her, two hearts meeting for just a second on screens of pixels.83562611dhqinlws20060917132611_c1

There’s an importance there, a possibility, that I find makes even the deepest depression lift just a bit, makes the eastern sky lighten with the promise of dawn, the possibility of renewing life. Today, for that comment, I am most grateful to Lynn. She’s helped to nudge me back to a sense that maybe people can actually reach out through this medium and find something resembling connection; or something that resembles connection enough that one can be reminded that connection drives human existence, regardless of events and the things we read and watch that would give us another reading of human interactions.

I’ve read, sometimes, the stories of a reporter and columnist at the Memphis Commercial-Appeal named Wendi C. Thomas. Lately I have read the news from Memphis that a sister who had been beaten last Winter by a police officer in a Memphis police precinct-house, had been shot to death on a street corner in Memphis.

Wendi Thomas’ humane and human story of Duanna Johnson’s mother in the funeral home has, for me, made this a heart-story. Her ability has taken me past the questioning of whether Ms. Johnson was a “classic” transsexual or a “transgender” person. Duanna Johnson was simply a human being who was loved very deeply and is sorely missed by her mother. How can that not touch another? What argument of politics, sexuality, gender, or right and wrong can trump the death of a woman and what comes from that death to another woman, a mother? 

Monica Roberts has written many fine entries at Trans Griot about the ways black women with transsexing-histories interact with the communities they live in and the communities of LTBG-people who form this political umbrella we sometimes find useful as a way of making the United States a bit safer place, more willing to accept the reality of the human lives of lesbians, trans men and women, bisexuals and gay males. Her writings continue to exhort us toward the better angels of our hearts. They continue to dig to the human connection we all have with one another while never slacking on the political and societal issues as well, particularly those that point out to us the demand that we must allow the emergence of leaders among us who also know the experience of black community and black and Hispanic realities among LTBG people who come from those groups.

Monica always very deftly shows us what blind spots, willing and unwilling, we have in that regard. Her work is invaluable and I would ask that you follow the link and read her if you haven’t. For I find in her writings a connection, one heart, one mind to another, in the same way that Lynn showed me a connection. More distance, more difference and yet, the inescapable knowledge that one can understand and heed the heart of another, of others, different though they may seem at first glance to be. Somewhere beneath the difference there’s a great realm of similarity and sameness, a call of heart to heart, the sense of hands touching and realizing the warmth of another.

Well, Radha, if you see so much connection what makes you despair? Why do you think that people cannot find within themselves some ability to actually touch one another, relate positively to one another? Because I also read the other side. (If you click that link, please click on the initial entry on the Google search. I simply don’t have the heart to directly link this blog with that one.) 

Reading that leaves me with the feeling I have put myself in a kitchen dumpster and rooted for sustenance, emerging with filth and ichor all over me. I find I simply should take a shower. I got much the same feeling during this election-campaign just past as I watched some of the more harrowing displays of demeaning talk and unfeeling vitriol on Fox and Friends, or read the rantings of Peter LaBarbera and Focus on the Family and MassResistance to the possibility of gay men and lesbian women being allowed to institutionalize our love in California, Arizona and Florida.

As Americans our political discourse seems to always devolve into a battle in the cesspool of human hatred and dismissal. The nastier and more vitriolic the better, the more valid, one side, or both, appears to believe they are. Instead, I think we come to find a deep hatred within ourselves that continues to grow and thrive in us. It robs us of our major human truth: that connection and relationship are necessary, absolutely, for our survival as both individuals and as a species. Connection is simply who we are. 

Efforts like those by Leigh to dismiss and damn others are simply useless spewings of hatred that do nothing but make us all less, showing us the heart of despair and anger and how, when we try to make political and social desire the be-all-and-end-all of our lives that the lives themselves become twisted and very sad and lonely affairs. 

Thus, the monsters lurk in the fir-forest. They creep closer as the fires at night die and until the dawn calls us to stoke them once more. We escape monstrosity as human beings only by allowing heart and understanding to attend us. Our monsters are our worst fears: those that start with “what if they  are seen to be like us. Let’s make sure that no one ever mistakes us for one of them.” In making that plain we make plain the twisted ogres we can become. Perhaps that knowledge is why the petition connected to her blog has only managed 79 signatories in an attempt to reach 1,000 after six or eight months of being listed on the Web and flogged daily by that blog and others. 

10266Perhaps in the reading we can see that if we give way to the same vitriol and dismissal that we will become ogres as well, scary stories to frighten children at night in their dreams. Perhaps somewhere deeply within ourselves we know that. And so, we become unwilling to risk the chance. When I look at the matter that way my despair lifts. I imagine that there is some hope of understanding and appreciation even if another is unlike me. For in their unlikeness they are still human and all their lives show me is that I, too, partake in wonderful human possibility and the chance to assist in the alleviation of pain. 

Saturday night I spent a few hours in the home of some very dear friends who are blessed with a tiny, fluent, agile and free-spirited daughter who is between two and three years of age. When we arrived her mother recounted to me that the little girl had talked off and on all afternoon about how she needed to get ready for Radha to come to her house, because, said mom, she really likes Radha a lot. 

Although partaking of the adult conversations I did spend an inordinate amount that evening listening to and interacting with the child. (Forgive my not placing names here, I find it uncomfortable to not mention them, but think it probably best for my friends and for their daughter.) I haven’t a single clue how our friends have “explained” my history to their daughter. I don’t really much care, for what they have shown her is the base importance of interacting in positive ways with others.

I met hands with names who talked. I saw enormous amounts of food go onto a plate where it mostly lay uneaten, (I’m not used to that as Ian usually manages to eat all the food on his plate and then some.) I met stuffed animals. I saw a new child’s room (no longer does she live in her parent’s room) that also is being readied for the advent of a baby brother in a few months. I was hugged and sought out and felt embraced in the arms of delight and fascination. I was embraced by an acceptance of a child as just another woman she interacts with. For a few hours the world was a kind and gentle place, limned in the radiance of loose blonde hair, an avid intelligence, and an agile and swift body. 

In her simplicity and her very vibrant heart this small girl granted me an ability to touch her joy and feel it call to my own until we both laughed and felt the safety of a home, companionship, and human holding of one another. My time with her was like a spell that changed the very fibers of my heart and made them vibrate joyously like the strings of an Irish harp plucked just so by the harpist, or the plaintive tunes summoned by uilleann pipes. For a few hours the world was a safe and joyous place. The campfire burnt brightly and the wood shadows seemed distant and untroubling. 

Relationship, relationship, connection. This is my greatest human heritage: the knowing that the other is so like me it’s as though we breathed with the same lungs, were animated by the same heartbeats, dreamed the same dreams, and were held by bonds that were stronger than any fear, any recognition of difference. 

In her book of short-stories, Harrowing The Dragon, the wonderful American novelist, Patricia McKillip, initiates her book with the tale of two people, a woman and man, who together destroyed the island of their birth. He through too pat an answer for making things “better,” and she through a too passionate response to try to alleviate the damage she perceived the man accomplishing. 

As Peka Kroa watched Ryd Yarrow try to drive the dragon away from the island of Hoarsbreath she came to a realization of the love she had for her place, a love of the wondrous nature of a winter-world set in the midst of changing seasons. It became important to her: the mines and tunnels that formed human interaction on the island, the warmth of fire and groggy stories told underground in the tavern and the mining of the gold in the darkness. The importance of her connection with place and people, a way of life suddenly blazed within her. 

As she watched the fire of Ryd, dragon-harrower, come to the verge of destroying the island dragon, of bringing regular seasons to the island, she found within herself both filled with regret and the hope he would not succeed, but leave the dragon sleeping around the high mountain that was the island. 

“You’ll go on to other dragons. But all I’ve ever had is this one.”

“You never knew …”

“It doesn’t matter that I never knew it. I know now. It was coiled all around us in the winter, while we lived in warm darkness and firelight. It kept out the world. Is that such a terrible thing? Is there so much wisdom in the flatlands that we cannot live without?” 

He was silent again, frowning a little, either in pain or faint confusion. “It’s a dangerous thing, a destroyer.”

“So is winter. So is the mountain, sometimes. But they’re also beautiful. You are full of so much knowledge and experience that you forget how to see simple things, Ryd Yarrow, miner’s son. You must have loved Hoarsbreath once.”

“I was a child then.”

She sighed. “I’m sorry I brought you down here. I wiosh I were up there with the miners, in the last peaceful night.”

“There will be peace again,” he said, but she shook her head wearily. 

“I don’t feel it.” 

“Sometimes I almost hear what you’re trying to tell me. And then it fades against all my knowledge and experience.”  — “The Harrowing of the Dragon of Hoarsbreath” pp. 20-21.

It seems to me that this encapsulates each of our lives in some very subtle ways: not finding the appreciation and joy of the dragon heart of our lives until it verges on the extinct, on exile from our hearts and minds. We are so filled with knowledge and experience of pain and dismissal, broken promises and harsh rhetoric, that we find our knowledge and experience covers over our knowing that life can be, often is, very different than our tropes and cliches, our dicta and commandments make it. 

We are fond of quoting St. Paul about the putting away of childish things now that we are adults.1351980164_b53e9967c4

Yet, who of us cannot watch the spirit and the freedom of a child and wish, for some instant, that we could also touch that vigor, that life, the joy of human being they show us so lightly that their spirits might be delicate spring flowers, opening and reminding us of a spring when we too felt life clearly within us: before we became so full of knowledge and experience? We are so full of handling our lives as if ideas and distinctions were the only things of importance. “I will bring you riches like you’ve never before seen. I will make this better and stronger by bringing it totally to waste. Then something better can grow here.”

There’s a fire that burns in the dragon’s heart. In our desire we try to reach it and pull it forth, making it our own, creating a world we think could become perfected with the ideas and the hierarchies we imagine. To pull forth the dragon’s heart and hold it in my hand is to slay the dragon. The heart’s color and fires die, fade, and like a polished stone plucked from the water to carry home for it’s beauty beneath the liquid, we find when it dries that the beauty has vanished. We discover that on the mantle it becomes merely a stone, arousing no curiosity in anyone, least of all ourselves. 

Yes, the dragon arouses in us both our longing and our lust for possession and also the promise that life could be better. But, discernment can show us that the dragon’s heart for humans is simply our communion with one another: an end to loneliness and exile, the fiery center of belonging.

There lies my hope. That somehow when we awaken on the cold, unyielding ground that I will start the coffee and you will fry the bacon while we both enjoy the smells, the discussions we have. I hope for the understanding that perhaps in our human condition it’s more important, more life-affirming to to find that the connection between us has an importance for both of our lives that far-overreaches the importance that one of us “be right” and the other “be wrong.”

Maybe a dream of walking the mountains and palins, the valleys and rills of life together need not simply be a dream that comforts one in the night, in her imagination. Perhaps, just maybe, we can each stand together and behold the dragon’s heart in mutual wonder. Perhaps we can behold together that heart alive, corruscating and throbbing, animating the life of the dragon itself, with a thousand thousand shades of color we never knew were possible.

Perhaps the answers we seek are answers that can only be found together. Perhaps the answers lie beyond the confines of the fir-forest of our fears and the “old sayings” we’ve been taught to grant the honor of wisdom. Perhaps we can find together that fire and brilliance are things to be appreciated wherever they reside and that to snatch them is simply to kill the fire, erase the brilliance, leaving us alone in the darkness and lost.

Categories: Activism, Connection, Duanna Johnson, Humans, Psychology, Transsexuals, Witches, Women
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Real Girls, Part I: Reality and Delusion

October 23, 2008

Last night we stayed at home. There were no computers on. No one had a practice, no one was rushing to get to an appointment. Everyone was home by six and we enjoyed one another’s company. There’s something that quite wonderfully sets up when we are with family. It’s an atmosphere that partakes of coziness and laughter, shared ideas and it allows us to relax our cares, unwind the small sorrows or huge elations of a day.  

We had a marvelous baked chicken dinner with broccoli and cheese and we sat and talked, all three of us. Then we cleaned the kitchen and retired to the living-room to watch a dvd Catherine had rented a day or two before. 

In itself that was odd as we seldom rent dvds, mostly choosing to purchase them at Target or Wal-Mart. But Ian has been harrassing us for a couple of weeks, every time we pass the local Blockbuster, to rent “The Love Guru.” Over the weekend we broke down and stopped at Blockbuster and allowed him to check out a copy for the week. At the same time Catherine rented “Lars and the Real Girl.” We had liked the previews we’d seen of that in one of the cinemas where we had seen a movie. 

After three days of Ian getting his fill of Mike Meyers last night was the designated evening for “Lars and the Real Girl.” So we settled in on the couch and the loveseat and Jetta, the beagle/dobbie, after trying to snatch a place on both loveseat and couch, finally settled on the rug and we turned on the movie.

For those of you who haven’t watched the movie revolves around the life of Lars, a rather withdrawn young man who resides in a garage while his brother and (pregnant) sister-in-law reside in the family home. The sister-in-law has made it a mission to involve Lars in the “family.” But Lars does whatever’s necessary to maintain his solitude, hurrying home from work and going to church on Sundays all the while attempting to avoid the attention of his sister-in-law who’s concern is Lars lack of socialization.  

One day at work Lars talks, rather listens, with a co-worker talk about a Web offer to purchase a “real-life, true-to-life” girlfriend ( the blow-up variety.) Lars orders the doll and eventually she arrives at the garage. At this point Lars begins to dress-up and take a bit better care of himself. His brother and sister-in-law invite both Lars and his girlfriend, Bianca, to dinner, where they discover the reality of Lars’ situation. The brother is horrified and the sister-in-law amazed as Lars talks with Bianca, and continuously informs his family what she is saying.

The upshot of the event is that brother and sister-in-law make an appointment for Lars with the town doctor who also has a degree in psychology. A degree both justifiable and necessary, the doctor says, when one works that far north. With the instruction of the doctor and occasional interventions by her, Lars’ family and friends, most of the town-folk begin to involve Bianca in their lives. She became the glue that brought the town, and eventually Lars, into that very important social interaction and care we all long for. 

I’ll not render the entire movie as I think it’s well worth the two hours or so that it will take you to watch it yourself. I have to admit that I laughed (a lot) and cried (a lot) due to the film. I found it a deeply nuanced and tender story that presses the viewer toward answering the question, or at least pondering the question, what is real and how does it become so?

I found the film a perfect combination of “chick-flick” and psychological meditation, a thing not foreign to the viewing preferences of two therapists and their precocious son. I found myself deepely engaged almost immediately as I watched the drama unfold and the film has continued to engage me overnight and this morning as it’s brought me to think very deeply about “delusion” and “reality” and how we parse the spaces between the two. 

Not unusual, I suspect, for people caught in the borderlands of human being: transsexuals and transgendered folk, people diagnosed with mental illness and simply plain ole folks who go about their daily routines slicing this or that experience as representational of “illusion” or “realism.” The film exhibited a deft touch of both the director and the producer. The cinemantography was excellent, capturing so well the edges and the blurs of life in small-town, great northern American life.

Where do we draw our lines of “reality” and where do we draw, both as people and as psychologists and therapists, the borders of delusion? What allows us to make this or that person “delusional” and what makes another person “realistic?” Are the borders between the two states, the two definitions, permeable to the movement of one or another from one label to the other? And if so, what mechanism, what nunaces, what willing suspension of disbelief, requires that we re-think what are often felt by the majority of us to be firm and distinguishable boundaries?

The movie appears to lead in the direction of acceptance and love as the mechanisms by which unreality and reality blur. If one speaks long enough, interacts long enough, in the case of Lars’ brother with a plastic doll, plays along so to speak, the playing shades into a solid reality that becomes everyday and acceptable, so much so that when there arises the occasion for a funeral that one goes and even weeps for the loss that the bereaved feels, even feels his own loss at “the way things have become.”

Thus, does the entire population somehow become “delusional?” Or is reality simply based on our willingness or unwillingness to involve ourselves in the life of another, or many others? I find/have found that one’s involvement can make a difference.

For instance, in a fashion when I was an undergraduate Syrians were in many ways unreal to me. Their culture, their religious lives as foreign and unexamined by myself as would be the lives of denizens of a planet revolving around the star Sirius. One might have speculated and read the news of such people as their country played itself out on the evening news or in the papers, but as far as being real people, Syrians didn’t “really” exist for me. Until I met and eventually became close friends with Abdullah, an exchange student.

The to sit and exchange conversation, to learn that his family had many of the same ways as did my own; to learn that he had goals and desires, hopes and fears just as did I, I found the reality of Syria and Syrians became normalized for me. Suddenly it seemd to me that people who inhabited a small country on the other side of the planet attained a reality for me that I would have never thought possible six months before I met Abdullah.

I felt a loss when his sister was killed in an Israeli bombing raid. Yes, I know, I am sure the Israeli air force had very good reasons to bomb the house she lived in, or that the hit was a mistake as is often the case in modern warfare. But his loss, his sorrow to be so far from home when his sister was buried, his outrage that such a tremendously horrible event was perpetrated by another government became meaningful and outrageous to me as well. How dare they kill my friend’s sister?

I suspect that the same varieties of foreignness as I held about Syrians before I met and befriended Abdullah operate in all of our lives. Why else does it become so easy for us to dismiss those we hate as being somehow unworthy of our concern and compassion. How else explain our insistence on “principle” or “natural law” to the exclusion of compassion and empathy for another’s pain and plight? How easy it can become to imagine that this or that person embodies unworthiness of unreality.

On the other hand, as we get to know and relate ourselves to the lives of those who are foreign in some way to our own lives: union-organizers, hard-hats, stay-at-home-moms, drivers of SUVs (one of my favorite whipping posts) or postal workers, transsexuals, trangender people, Democrats or Texans; we somehow wish to disengage our acqauintance from “that group.” We become more and more willing to exclude our friend or acquaintance from fear and loathing. We reach that point that many white folk reached, or seemed to me to reach, in the sixties, in their dealings with African-Americans, “well there’s good uns and bad uns, just like everyone else.” 

I suppose that “good uns and bad uns” might be a useful way-station on the road to acceptance and understanding, although I doubt that its a very wholesome and embracing place to be. People come to acceptance of the foreign in stages. What’s ineffably “bad” slowly becomes what’s “acceptable” and “right.” It seems a bit much to expect that one wholly drops one’s opposition to another in one abrupt sea-change of acceptance and Bonhommie. Rather there’s a slow inching that may be quite difficult for the one inching their opinion, their ways of looking at the world, toward a willingness to embrace an accept. 

I suspect that knowledge is rather widespread among the leaders and movers of our various political and social parties. To take a position that in fact demonizes and makes another less-than me becomes a matter of simply divocing myself irrevocably from the “other.” That way, with no intimate knowledge, no interaction of any sort, with them I allow myself to believe and embrace the most most horribly reasons for them to be the way they are. The fact that they weep and laugh, blled and tear same as I doesn’t involve me with the difficulty of having to empathize in any way with their lives.

As a woman with a history of transsexing I find this pattern of much importance in my own life. It’s one of the reasons I generally don’t mention the fact that at one time I was designated “male.” There’s too much drama, too much delicacy required in the presence of those who do not know. I would rather simply be seen nd judged on the basis of being “Radha, my therapist” (another designation fraught with all sorts of fear and loathing,) or as “that woman next-door, what’s her name? She’s really nice and friendly.”

The “reality” then somehow turns and becomes normalized when one isn’t faced immediately with a knowledge that they will find it, perhaps, difficult to incorporate into their current views. That aspect of my life should wait, I think, until it becomes necessary to tell. It waits until they can realize me as one of them, another person attempting to live her life and make a living just as they do.

 

It’s this way that works for me as well. I have found it easy to conglomerate human beings into a precisely drawn area that I can label them and be done with any nuance that might be imposed on me by seeing something more than that they are members of a group I know nothing about. My friend Zythyra certainly encompasses that reality for me.

When I first started corresponding with her I felt she was someone whose life was distant from my own, whose experience couldn’t possibly have connection with my own. Yet, now, after a long while in corresponding and interacting I perceive a flesh-and-blood human whose borders range well within my own borders. She’s my friend, not some foreign admixture of experience and reality who I can never be like.

There came a point in “Lars and the Real Girl” that I was expectant of Bianca actually beginning to speak. I waited on her arms to move, for the plastic of her face to settle imperceptibly into flesh and blood, her chest to rise and fall with breath, just as my own does. Yet, the makers declined to make this movie that easy. Instead I had to become aware of Bianca’s breath. I had to form within myself and attachment to her life and that of Lars in such a way that the fact of her place among the other humanity of the small town became “real” to me. Then I could and did weep at her “death.” Then I could find within my own heart the devastation of Lars at the loss of one he held dear for the healing she had brought to him and I could laugh empathetically at the prospect of his acceptance into the realm of love building between himself and a “real girl.”

Reality is what we make it. That’s the reason, I suspect, that we, at least unconciously, attempt to hold the “other” at more than arm’s-length. For at more than arm’s length the other can be seen readily as a demon, as a foreigner not privileged to hold a place in our reality as another human being whose life breathes the same air and whose body takes the same food as does our own.

In distance there is safety for all of the fever-dreams of danger and evil we allow ourselves. In closeness and relationship the “other” transforms herself into a friend, a normal human being who has AIDS or breast-cancer, who works hard to maintain her life, the lives of her children. We begin, so very imperceptibly to allow her into our lives where she’s no longer feared or degraded. She’s no longer a plastic doll dressed and made to speak by another’s volition. Instead she becomes sister, friend, perhaps, even lover.

 

All blog photos by Catherine Wetzell, (c) 2007-2008

Yesterday I linked to another blog as a way of getting to a point I was trying to make. The blog owner felt I had mis-read what was written and that I had held them up to ridicule. That was certainly not my intention. 

I have removed all links and the blog owner’s comment I had approved and my comment back to them lest anyone find the blog and relate what they do to my making fun or in any way finding that blog objectionable or “unreal.”

I am making a public apology to Sara for offending her. I truly meant no disrespect to her and her struggles to see her own way through her life with what I am certain are the same pains and struggles that I have had to find ways through in my own life.

I very much respect her points of view and find them in no way outlandish or worthy in any way of disrespect or laughter.

I made a mistake and have done the best I know to do to correct it. I hope this public apology removes the sting at least somewhat to her feelings and her efficacy as a writer, and as another person with a difficulty that involves transgender issues.

I wish for her the very best results in her life, her work and I wish for her great happiness and satisfaction in all areas of her life. — Radha Smith

Categories: Connection, Fear, Friendship, Humans, Inclusion, Intersectionality, Love, Men, Otherness, Psychology, Relationship, Transgender, Transsexuals, Women
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Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?

September 26, 2008

Over years I’ve been struck by the singular parallels between the story Phillip K. Dick was moved to write in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and in the lives of the transgendered, particularly the lives of transsexuals who change our bodies and often the sense among others that we have changed our humanity to something meant not as an experience of “the self made whole,” but as an affront to them. Somehow we forego, I think others think, the humanity that graces us all.  

The struggle of the novel is separation: what separates the “andy” from the human? In the novel the separation is two-fold: 1) the “andy’s” inability to replicate cells (thus, they live for four years and die) and 2) the “andy’s” inability to feel empathy and any truly expansive emotion such as love or even hate. Like the “sociopath” the “andy’s” internal emotional make-up is limited to self-referrent emotion: “I hurt, this is bad” while “other-referrent” emotions do not exist for the androids.

I have wondered in my life if other humans do not see myself, my brothers and sisters with transsexual histories, in this way. I have wondered if they do not understand that our emotional and feeling capacities are the same as their own. How else the deep loathing among some, their willingness to feel a personal affront when they “discover” us, their ability to kill a Brandon Teena, a Chanelle Pickett, a Gwen Araujo or an Angie Zapata as ruthlessly, as without regret, as they might kill a fly or a mosquito: Deckards without the thought that goes with the act itself. 

Thus, I sit here, reading again a letter from a friend I received yesterday morning. He was writing in response to me about empathy, about there being times when you simply have to say a thing exactly as you see it and not worry too much about how the way you say it will be felt: for the purpose is to drive home some fact-of-existence that seems important to you that your interlocutor hears and hears with out varnish. “No sugar-coating” as we say in addiction/recovery circles. 

One of my favorite places in the world is Lake Tahoe.  I love to ski at a place called Heavenly Valley.  If you go up on the Nevada/California border there is a great place to stop for lunch.  If you face to the East, you look down from the mountain and across a vast wasteland, devoid of water, a perfect desert with its warm browns and tans rolling out into infinity.

 But, all you have to do is turn yourself around a little bit and what you see is Lake Tahoe, surrounded by peaks covered with snow and trees and the snow-covered mountains seem endless.

 Same place.  Same eyes, very different views.

And so it is true. My eyes do not see the same world as you see. We stand in different places and have come by different paths to reach that high ridge over Heavenly Valley. Perhaps we will ski it together after we have stood and looked down until we can look no longer and must be on our way. What do we each take from the experience? Could I, in a million years of trying, see the same memories and grant the same importance to the texture that he grants it? 

I suspect not, not exactly. I would see that sight for the first time, he for the hundredth. The five-hundredth? With each sight his vision has grown. His internal reactions would be far more nuanced and accentuated by all of the other experiences of the sight he has had before we might go there together. 

My vision would be the vision of the first appearance: the infinitely more emotional, less-refined and definitely less-nuanced experience of the novice. I might gasp, or shiver, might just stand and stare out into the vastness of landscape and be awed by the way it dwarfs me with its beauty, with its grandeur. In my emotion I might turn to him and hug him, thanking him for bringing me to such a dramatic place.

My reactions, of course, would change his as well, add one more bit of texture to his memory the next time he came that way to look. We can never quite come to a place where we match our points-of-view: visual, aural, emotional, rational. In our journeys to that place where we stand beside or against one another we remain separate, climbing a slightly different path and seeing from a slightly different vantage with a very different history brought to bear on the experience we each take from the thing-itself.

In that fashion we are all unable to communicate fully, for the way we nuance words and thoughts will always be limned with the differences of the experiences we have had that brought us to that moment of togetherness. The quality of relationship is forever strained. Although the quality of mercy must never be.

It’s in mercy that I could touch my friend and experience the rare beauty and feel, somewhere, something similar to his view of place, of interaction, by being there with him and seeing through my own eyes, in his presence, what he sees through his eyes, alone or with another. Regardless if he were simply my friend, or my lover, my mentor or student he would always remain different, with eyes that see another place as I although we view the same place.

Hence, Dick’s question: do androids dream of electric sheep?

You will make an answer of your own, as I have done. I believe that they dream of the same sheep as are in human dreams, vague, fluffy, sometimes bleating, meandering slowly across the meadow they are penned in. Dream sheep penned in a dream meadow with dream eyes full upon them, counting.

In our dreams we court one another, wishing for deep connection because we are human, even the transsexuals, even the transgender folk who people, vaguely, this world we all pass through and into. Our experiences, our winnowing of experience, and the transformation of those experiences into thought and the ways we define the world run along similar neural pathways and come to rest in similar neural pools of knowledge where a dream salmon leaps.

If we catch the salmon and cook it for food we might touch the heating flesh of salmon and burn our fingertip. Whereupon we will put the tip to our tongues to cool it; and, so, gain, like Taliesyn, the knowledge that the salmon in the well of the world holds within it. Perhaps we will see in the aftermath of that touch that our similarities out-weigh the experiences and the dicta we’ve internalized as guides to “the way things are.” Perhaps in that taste of salmon grease we can find our likenesses to one another as well as we perceive our separations from one another. 

I suppose we shared a childhood, though mine was somewhat less vivid.  The forest at Pioneer Park was not exactly as you describe yours, but it was enchanted nonetheless.

I went there a few years ago, I had not been in over 4 decades and it seemed so small, what once bordered on the infinite now was an easy walk from one end to the other.  Had it shrunk?  Or had I grown in some way?  And how exactly are you sure of that answer?

Yes! The matter is sharing and recognition of that sharing. The matter is not that we are different, but that in our differences we can and have shared in some fashion that similarity of childhood, adolescence, adulthood. The matter is that we can both hear Jerry Garcia and know that somehow we are both in the rapture of lyric and music. Somewhere inside the other the music and lyrics conjure up for each of us a river, a kind of love that we might, if we imagine it completely, share.  

http://www.dead.net/song/brokedown-palace

Fare you well, my honey
Fare you well, my only true one
All the birds that were singing
Are flown, except you alone

Gonna leave this brokedown palace
On my hands and my knees, I will roll, roll, roll
Make myself a bed by the waterside
In my time, in my time, I will roll, roll, roll

In a bed, in a bed
By the waterside I will lay my head
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

River gonna take me, sing me sweet and sleepy
Sing me sweet and sleepy all the way back home
It’s a far gone lullaby sung many years ago
Mama, Mama, many worlds I’ve come since I first left home

Going home, going home
By the waterside I will rest my bones
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Going to plant a weeping willow
On the bank’s green edge it will grow, grow, grow
Singing a lullaby beside the water
Lovers come and go, the river will roll, roll, roll

Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul.

We never step in the same river twice. Nor, I think, can any of us step in the same river as does the one walking beside us. That river is forever different. For some the Mississippi, for others the Waikato, the Watauga, or Stones River. The names of rivers sometimes define us: Dneiper, Passaic, Sacramento, Wabash, Blue Nile, Orinoco, Vaal, Maas, Donau, Evapanitsa, Nyanga, Oxus, Krishna, Mekong, Salween, Olenyok, Amu Darya, Loire, Po, Washita. There are endless rivers and endless steps through them. There are endless human beings who have and will and do step into them and feel the water, never the same water, flow across their feet. 

The quality we must define is the context in which we hold one another. Our determination is not the content of another’s dreams, for they will be, like the rivers, the same, but different. The quality we must define is the quality of separation that we find amongst ourselves. Are we all human? Do we bleed and cry, hope and laugh, are our tears able to flow across similar cheeks and are our minds filled with similar longings, similar dreams? 

Then, in the finding we must ask, very simply, what separates us: he and I? 

Is his heart somehow crafted differently because he doesn’t have the deep desire, the deep need, to make his body congruent with his self as I have felt for a lifetime? Does the fact that he sees importance in forthrightness and words that slice through bullshit and into the heart of the matter make him so very different that somewhere within myself I cannot find respect and similarity, love?

We each will find our answers, if we ever bother to ask of ourselves the question. What makes another so different from me that I fear them, hate them, desire to see their extermination or exile from this land I walk? 

I cannot find comfort with only my own small kind: with those who love simply the things I love. Although the objects of that love, that comfort, are different, I see within them the same straining core: the need for companionship and friendship, the need to be needed and wanted, to embrace and to communicate beauty, truth, hope, longing, joy, sadness, horror and triumph. 

For so long that it’s become cliche and (in that defining word, “cliche,” we make a thing become meaningless for all too many) we breathe the same air and take comfort and joy in so many similar things that I wonder at the ways we percolate division among us. The division never seems to be limited to others very unlike us exteriorly, but also applies within our various human tribes to those who are so like us that our pasts might be written by the same writer on the same page with the same ink. 

Do androids dream of electric sheep? No! They dream the same sheep as I, tend them as I tend my own flock. 

Thank you my distant friend for the experience of reading your letter. Thank you for the thought and the feeling it’s brought me. Thank you for the love I have come to bear for you and the knowledge that through distance and time, there is so much alike in us that we might, on a cold day, at the top of Heavenly Valley, remove our hands from our gloves, touch fingertips and stare into the other’s eyes. Thank you for the chance to don again the gloves and to turn and ski down the slope together: separately but interwined, intractably and exquisitely.

Categories: Beauty, Civil Rights, Connection, Feminism, Friendship, Gender, Humans, Inclusion, Intersectionality, Language, Love, Men, Otherness, Politics, Psychology, Relational-Cultural Theory, Social Relations, Thoughts, Transgender, Transsexuality, Transsexuals, Women
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Skin-jobs And Connection: Living Life On Life’s Terms

September 22, 2008

Her: Some in life are down-to-earth, straight-forward and honest and others are not.

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Me: Hmmmmm. An interesting observation, S. I act in that fashion and I think most of us do. Of course we do have this little tendency to place ourselves in the honesty category and leave the other to unnamed, mostly, people.

Each person’s honesty is his or her own. Dao de Jing says: Everyone always tells the truth. The task is hearing the truth they are speaking to another.

Wisdom or Foolishness? I have my answers, You choose now. Or do not. It is probably pretty much all the same.

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It’s about judgments.

Everyone decides what their reality is based upon our judgments, our discriminations, of experience and belief.We exercise judgment in order to determine the validity of other people’s realities as we find them presented. We judge in order to feel good about our judgments.Your reality is subject to my judgment in order for me to feel good about my judgments. It is as simple as that.

You called and I returned, just for this, just for the wonder of communicating, or attempting to, with someone I consider friend. Is that judgment? Well … yes it is, isn’t it?

It’s not like we were children together, knowing one another for years down to the secret affinities we each have for mouse fur hoodies and silk stockings. Or were we? Somehow did our realities merge and we walked the same corridors through the forest, miles and minutes notwithstanding?

I smile at this, a thought experiment run into fantasy, or another world where we did, indeed, have exactly that history together. It could be any one of you reading this that that would be true for.

I might imagine as I read this screen that we did share a childhood. That we played in the wheaten, golden fields of the Goddess and walked with Garanhir and his red-eared hounds between the sweeping boughs of fir, oak, beech and rested from the day’s heat in a copse of birches while eating water-cress and cream cheese sandwiches our mothers had packed for our trek.

There is so very much left to my imagination in a simple reverie.  I winnow in my thoughts the imagination of a presence I know. Someone I have known, somehow, as long as I can remember: someone I have never met. Or, possibly, may never know in any way beyond imagination of who you are and what moves you. Yet, I refer to you in my heart as sister/friend.

Yes, a judgment. A judgment ensconced as concretely as most anything here in my heart. The willingness to be vulnerable to another, or many others.

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So, are transsexuals real? Are androgynes, genderqueers, gays, Muslims, Catholics, cross-dressers and transvestites real? What about women and men? Are we real or are we merely constructs? Is one breath like another or are some breaths being taken by evil incarnate? Are there some people who cannot be real people because they are in some fashion unlike me and deserve no rights, no recognition of their own humanity? Are those people unlike me frightening and inimical to the well-being of all? Should we hire Bladerunners to blast them out of existence as threats to ourselves and The Good?

Afterall, what are all those myriad others out here in my world who are different in some way than me? Aren’t they merely skin-jobs? They have to be some sort of robotic creation that cannot partake of life in the same fashion as I can partake of it. They are only good to work on colonies on distant planets, perform feats of military victory or defeat and then fade away after five years. Is that not so? 

How very odd, the safety of a screen. It’s a place where I can relieve myself of a burden in my heart and imagine that I am forever walking past the doorways of the other odas of the harem. Walking along a marble floor built for the Sultan of Gimbook toward the leafy green of the graman tree orchards beside the waterfalls of Netherrim on the planet Escamiril.

I, the mother of two of his sons and you his new favorite, engaged in a conversation that loses us in the wavering, shimmering noon heat. Later, a servant would bring us ice flavored with blanquish-fruit. And later still we would go to our respective chambers and await the unfolding of night and sleep. 

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Yes, we make judgments. Consistently? Probably not. But we do consistently make them. A feel in the words of the other invites us to trust, perhaps to even feel affection, or to defned them when another might say: “You are wrong. I can’t stand this person.”  (All of that from her words.) We make for ourselves an ability to decide that this place is safe or that not so much.

We make decisions about one another and proceed to enact them, deciding that that unreal chimaera is friendly and that that unreal dragon is frightening. Or that I am the princess Melisande, sleeping in the highest tower of Carebegone Castle for a hundred years, waiting for the touch of love’s kiss to awaken me with dewy eyes to see … morning.

Where is, then (or is there,) a difference in the fantasy? A difference between real and unreal? Or simply between what we choose to believe is real and what we decline for another reality? What difference lies in that word for each of its users? Reality. The choice of defining that word is simply individual. What makes me feel valid and different, what makes me feel whole and connected to others. I think that connection is the deepest yearning of us every one. 

The difference is in the choosing. You choose, perhaps, to hone the edge of what you call reason and find in the workings of genes and mitochondria (beasts as mythical for their invisibility as griffins or sphinxes) and declare that neither she nor I are real women.

But, is the declaration all there is? Is that the final word, the visible form of judgment?  Or is all of life simply a singular vision pasted together from the shards of what we each imagine, mosaic vases placed carefully on the mantles above the fires in our souls? Fragile collections that might be shattered at the slightest touch of another’s fingers as they examine the carefully pasted pieces of what the maker thought she knew?

It‘s enough that I have my hall of mirrors. That I choose to walk among the reflected images of myself and be at peace, seeing there the imagined reflection of you. The imagined reflections of others I come into contact with in this swirling mist I call reality. We call reality. Some of that mist is the electrons swirling through this screen and its connections to servers and satellites far above our heads. Some mist is the electrons swirling in what we call body and air. There seems little difference sometimes, for love, and hate, can be had in either net-space or land-space.

We base our lives on reflections. We walk, no matter how hard-headed we perceive ourselves, in the mists that rise in the cypress swamps of the ocean at the end of time. For there, within my heart, and for you, perhaps, within the brain in your head, we examine a skein of images we judge to be reality. We do that until the thread on the skein parts through our deaths or our loss of the ability to show mind as we have known it in younger days.

Is one more real for its language than another? I doubt it. One simply allows me to derive more comfort from it. Another may allow that for another. We see, we choose. We live the choices. I choose to believe in the reality that not everyone is made the same as I am made.

I choose to believe that Universe and Mother are so great that She, It, is capable of forming Itself, Herself, in ways that my experience and mind do not allow me to understand. Must I then define those others as illegitmate, harmful, to be slain by whatever means necessary or to make them redefine themselves in ways that give me comfort and the certain knowing that I am right? 

What makes woman, what makes man, and are there other designations that might apply to those who wish to be neither man or woman that would still show they are fully human, just as you and I are fully human? Our nodding ignorance often doesn’t allow for such acceptance. The Muslim and Jew, the Christian and the Wiccan must all somehow become amalgamated into one another with the right creed taking the precedent position and being the one we must ALL obey. 

What a quaint and foolish notion! It must have to be leftover from our human sojourn through clan and tribal existence where all people were scattered and each had to believe they should be fearful of the other. That’s a reptilian-brain habit we have. Fear of the other. Yet, reptilian though it may be, we often cling to those thoughts, those actions, as if they will save our lives or give us a new life in a world as imaginary as that of the planet, Escamiril.

We generally call that world, Heaven. The justification for our harsh and hateful deeds now comes from the hope of that world where we imagine we sha’n’t any longer have the need for slaying and cruelty. There, all will be made in the image of ourselves. When you read it that way it seems more ridiculous than it does when you speak it to yourself, does it not? 

Does it matter to you, or should it that I find your words unreasonable, hurtful, hateful, lacking any semblance of reality given the ground I have walked and the place I now stand? You have also walked. You also stand on a ground in a place other than I stand on. Could it be that we view the same thing from a different angle? Thus, our descriptions supply ourselves with the ‘truth as I see it,” but the descriptions are as different as are gray and blue.

To take this much further, as so many appear to do, is to fall into a great solipsistic abyss  in which meaning strictly and only is defined by the way I see things. Communication isn’t important then. Simply the adherence by myself to a belief that mine is the only reality and you cannot share mine nor can I share yours. It simply doesn’t matter to me in that abyss.

There, be dragons!  That abyss is relationship’s end and there is no connection possible between people. The world becomes a lonely emptiness, and vision and existence becomes singular, other shadows that appear to be like me are simply cardboard or holographic ghosts that people a landscape. Their words, their lives, have no meaning or purpose except to entertain me. I am Goddess then, one without a second.  So was stated God ‘s definition by medieval theologians.

Universe is singular and varied. We stand in different places, but partake together in life and find different ways to express the same thing. Yet, we cannot live alone for we are social creatures craving the touch, the sound, the smell, the feelings, and sight of one another for our own health.

You may, or I may, believe that this or that person isn’t real, doesn’t bleed or weep, doesn’t laugh or shout and shiver with joy the same as we. In my eyes they may be other. Yet, somewhere deep inside me I know that if I can find a way to come into relationship with them I might still disagree with their view, but recognize within them the exact same humanity, the hopes and dreams, the infinite sadness and infinite joy of which I am capable of finding within myself.

Whatever the word we speak or hear, whatever the ground we walk across or sun, we are connected as inextricably as the jewels connect in Indra’s Net. Could a smile be enough reason to slay another? Only when the demons within myself are so terribly, breathtakingly vast and frightening that I cannot find within myself the ground of communion and value in another. That place, wherever it lies, must, indeed, be Hell. 

Categories: Angie Zapata, Connection, Feminism, Inclusion, Magic, Mental Health, Politics, Psychology, Queer, Relational-Cultural Theory, Social Relations, Thoughts, Transgender, Women
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Gender’s Prison: The Inevitable Lightness of Being

September 18, 2008

 

“I LIVE ON THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE AND I DON’T NEED TO FEEL SECURE.” — The Revolution of Everyday Life, Raoul Vaneigem

Perhaps, though, I need to find within me the security that muffles us all, naturally, like a comforter against the winter wind when I relax into that warmth lying in my core. 

Culturally, we revel in our unknowing, liberally dosed with the conditioned knowledge of material convenience, scientific infallability and the ever-present cadence of the evolutionary drumbeat. Allow all to be as it is; for inevitability is the nature of life.

Yet, the inevitability of our lives can and has been changed by everyone who bothers to read this. For we are all in the process of changing what we think we know.

Changing what we have been told is our inevitable helplessness in the face of Nature. For most surely transsexuality is against nature. Or is it simply the nature that has been ignored. Perhaps, I would say most surely, we define “Nature” as what we are comfortable with. Warm slippers on a winter blizzardly night are “Natural.” I find some sense here as one who appreciates that, just perhaps, we have actually had to discover that skin-tags are not the “mark of the Devil’s teat” that can only be had by a witch and one who requires burning. 

It is simply that our perspective has changed from that of our sisters who walked before us: 100, 1000, 10000 years ago and at all points between, before and afterwards. Our grace is the technology we avail ourselves use of in ways that those women could not. 

Did they lead shallow and useless lives devoted to despair and suicide? Were they cast down among the vipers of humankind’s frequent inhumanity to humankind? Some, without doubt, were. But how many of my sisters have walked, in some less chemically changed way, through the waiting doors of opportunity to become themselves? How was it possible for them to be shamans or barmaids in a world insistent on seeing to the roots of existence and in defining a relationship between every individual and her world, her universe? Is the evolutionary constant a new belief, a shadow cast by our fear of what we do not know, cannot define or embrace without definition?

Did some few like she, of whom I have read but have forgotten her name, who in 16th-Century England was born male, live jailed a short time for deceit in maintaining herself as the wife of a tradesman, who claimed at trial, that he never knew she was equipped with a penis rather than a vagina? Yet, in her prison, I imagine her free and soaring. How would that be possible in this world, this time? Who makes love without the total uncovering of every square inch of the body of love? Lest there be some poison hidden that unmakes her in her loving? 

We chant, in our Western culture, the mantra of disclosure and openness. We must parse each sentence to its essential core. Parse each granule of matter to its constituent molecules and discover what is really there.

What is there? Dust, the infinitesimally small and meaningless collection of grains of sand that comprised a piece of sandstone until my investigation left no stone and only individual grains of sand. 

To find meaning, I destroy meaning. To define life, I make death and dissolution and call them knowledge. I embrace no secret place that might be sacred, find no clothing that is immune to removal, leaving what is beneath bare and unenchanted. I find no enchantment, afterwards, and claim, scientifically, that there was never any there there, only dust. 

Rather, like an unruly child I desire to break my toys to see how they work, though the knowledge leaves me bereft of both knowledge and toys. I propose no answer, rather intend to simply ask a question: what is it worth to me to discover the barest essentials of everything and have nothing to enchant me, nothing to allow my play to be joyous and nothing but the driest dust of logic to inform what might have been the fullness of life?

In my rage and despair in finding nothing to call up wonder and familiarity, I scream and rally to the proposition that absolute Nothingness is the only state. All else is illusion and a fevered dream of my own existence. Yet, I feel within pain, ennui, and, overarching all, the deepest sense of fear and of my own helplessness in the face of that monstrous Goddess, Nature, I desire to do my bidding. 

Materialism and science are surely the quintessentially male-marked human paradigms: we try to expand them to fit every conceivable space so that our fear and quest for security is complete. To paraphrase and reslant Andrew Marvell: the grave’s a fine and secure space, but in what tomb lives nonpareil grace?

I cannot explain you, or myself, away, and reach some satifying knowledge that will leave me secure in whom I am and in what path I might walk eternally. I prefer the magic of creativity and surprise, a sense of wonder to a sense of certainty and definite knowledge. When the magician’s trick is explained, the magic ebbs away. 

The essence of womanhood? Magic.

Magic, the powerful and imaginative joy of life within the chains of my slavery. The secrets of The Red Tent where men are barred entry by their own rules for those they rule. Stealth is possible, carefree and joyous in the most secure prison, my life. For when one is locked away what secret then must be revealed? What possible harm could she provide anyone while she lies secure and secured within the prison of patriarchy? 

Ironic and absurd, and therefore, as Tertullian imagined, worthy of belief? Maybe, but given current climates and current frenzies, I would prefer not to discover the truth of absurdity in my physical form. I have already known pain, enough to fill many buckets with tears.

What possible combination of chemical analysis, information stored in bytes on vast networks of computer gigabytes can possibly breach the security of my life, the chants of my soul? What possible explanation can reduce me to mere dust and mist breathed into a scientific nostril and digested by a scientific gut? What arcane investigation robs me of being Persephone, daughter of Ceres, the Earth? None, except my own willingness to submit to robbery. 

The robbery is sometimes by other Feminists who would deny my womanhood as surely being contrary to their ideas about how gender’s prison should be escaped and broken for good. I’ll not send you to Germaine Greer or Janice Raymond, those of you who have read them know already what they have said. Nor will I make a stake of arguing for the ideas of Andrea James, Julia Serano, Jenny Boylan, Lynn Conway or Zoe Brain all of whose words I have gathered a lot of good sense and hope from. You can find them all five on the blogroll or on the TG resources lists on this blog. 

Instead I will employ my chosen weapon for breaking and freeing, for doing away with the prison of gender and nastily-cast stones of my sisters: “MAN!!” I shall lead a life simply my own and shall lay down over days and months the record of that life, these thoughts, here. And I shall be my Mother’s daughter, Persephone. A trope, yes, but we all live in tropes don’t we? We have exemplars and symbolic talismans we draw near to and use as guideposts along the ever-unfolding paths of our lives. Mine shall be like yours. Yet, unlike yours as well. My magic is the going down into Hades’ hall and the return, again and again. 

Wondrously, magically, I escape the inquisitorial instruments of investigation and the neatly labelled slides and jars and vials. Forever, laughing, I escape with the magic of Mother’s makings and unmakings. Forever I float free, secure in the insecurity of the investigators.  

Life is always subject to Mystery: the defining failure of the pre-, post- and present-industrial mind and its gearwork and drudgery. The door left unbarred and opened, for not all the hands of men can push it closed. The secret escape? Life is no drudgery, no Rubix cube to be slotted deftly into six monochromatic sides. Life is a dance, forever changing in its steps, forever fleeting beyond the boundaries of description and definition.

Gender’s prison need be no prison at all, if within it there is song, dance, revelry in the Mystery of simply being. This is Mother’s gift, touchable by the least of us, by the greatest, however any of us might define “least” or “great.”

What is real? The dust or that which inhabits the dust, or both. The key to gender’s prison is within us all. It’s ours to grasp and use. What you do with your key, lock the door or unlock it, is simply immaterial to me. My key allows my escape, my dance, my song, the joy I bring to my own life.

Life is… Mystery: a hologram of Mother, where breakage simply multiplies its magnificence, its depth, its plentitude, its magic and its wonder a thousand-fold. Security and knowing lies there, a bit in every shard.

 

Categories: Feminism, Gender, Inclusion, Magic, Psychology, Thoughts, Transsexuality, Women
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