Introduction: was released in weekly chapters but written with the idea/plan of a full novel, in Dicken’s magazine, seen as a psychological drama.
“This first impression is of scenery and physical conditions; grim enough, but, Margaret is to learn, inhabited by human beings who respond and evoke response. The human reaction is the most important thing, for if people are not human they are nothing. (Easson Introduction xiv)”
“[Gaskell and co] were all convinced the nation was split [...] and that the only solution, apart from
revolution, lay at the level of personal reconciliation. Man must come to terms with man; capital and labour
were complementary, but could only work if masters were prepared to take the men into their confidence--and the
men prepared to trust the masters. (Easson Introduction xv)”
-Gaskell’s take is more optimistic than
Dickens’
14p.2 check out Xantippe by Levy, and Aurora Leigh by Barrett Browning, Daughters of Danaus: Mona Caird
“In “Wise in Her Generation” (1890), Levy portrays a woman who chooses to decline marriage proposals from a wealthy man she does not love, while at the same time recognizing that, “there is only one way of success open to a woman: the way of marriage.” As this character puts it, invoking evolutionary language as she meditates on her refusal, “Better be unfit and perish, than survive at such a cost. (Introduction 20)”
“Gertrude Lorimer was not a beautiful woman, and such good looks as she possessed varied from day to day, almost from hour to hour; but a certain air of character and distinction clung to her through all her varying moods, and redeemed her from possible charge on plainness. P. She had an arching, unfashionable forehead, like those of Lionardo da Vinci’s women, short-sighted eyes, and an expressive mouth and chin. Ad she stood in the full light of the spring sunshine, her face pale and worn with recent sorrow, she looked perhaps, older than her twenty-three years.(Chapter I - In The Beginning 51)”
"It was the first time that either had been in the studio since the day when their unforeseen calamity had overtaken them; a calamity which seemed to them so mysterious, so unnatural, so past all belief, and yet which was common-place enough—a sudden loss of fortune, immediately followed by the sudden death of the father, crushed by the cruel blow which had fallen on him (52)."
"A tall, angular woman, heavily draped in the crispest, most aggressive of mourning garments, was sitting upright on a sofa when the girls entered the drawing-room. She was a handsome person of her age, notwithstanding a slightly equine cast of countenance, and the absence of anything worthy the adjectives graceful or sympathique from her individuality.
"Mrs. Septimus Pratt belonged to that mischievous class of the community whose will and energy are very far ahead of their intellect and perceptions. She had a vulgar soul and a narrow mind, and unbounded confidence in her own judgments; but she was not bad-hearted, and was animated, at the present moment, by a sincere desire to benefit her nieces (63)."
"Gertrude, walking up and down the room, stopped suddenly and said: "Let us make some good resolutions!"
"Yes," cried Phyllis, with her usual frankness; "let us pave the way to hell a little!"
"Firstly,
we won't be cynical."
The motion was carried unanimously.
"Secondly, we will be happy."
This
motion was carried, with even greater enthusiasm than the preceding one.
"Thirdly," put in Phyllis,
coming up behind her sister, laying her nut-brown head on her shoulder, and speaking in tones of mock pathos:
"Thirdly, we will never, never mention that we have seen better days!"
Thus, with laughing faces, they
stood up and defied the Fates (66)."
""[Mr. Russel] added, that our best plan would be, if possible, to buy the good-will of some small business;
but, as we could not afford to wait, and as our apparatus was very good as far as it went, we must not be
discouraged if no opportunity of doing so presented itself, but had better start in business on our own
account. Moreover, he says, if the worst comes to the worst, we should always be able to get employment as
assistant photographers."
"But, Gerty, why not do that at first? You would be so much more likely to
succeed in business afterwards," said Conny, for her part no opponent of common sense; and who, despite much
superficial frivolity, was at heart a shrewd, far-seeing daughter of the City.
"If I said that one was
life and the other death," answered Gertrude, with her charming smile, "you would perhaps consider the remark
unworthy a woman of business. And yet I am not sure that it does not state my case as well as any other. We
want a home and an occupation, Conny; a real, living occupation. Think of little Phyllis, for instance,
trudging by herself to some great shop in all weathers and seasons!"
"Little Phyllis! She is bigger than
any of you, and quite able to take care of herself."
"I wish—it sounds unsisterly—that she were not so
very good-looking."
"It's a good thing there's no person of the other sex to hear you, Gerty. You would
be made a text for a sermon at once (68).""
"Gertrude, as we know, was by way of being a poet. She had a rebellious heart that cried out, sometimes very
inopportunely, for happiness.
And now, as she drank in the wonders of that April morning, she found
herself suddenly assailed and overwhelmed by a nameless rapture, an extreme longing, half-hopeful,
half-despairing.
Sorrow, labour; what had she to do with these?
"I love all things that thou lovest
Spirit of delight!"
cried the voices within her, with one accord.
"The Maryons surveyed these
preparations from afar with a certain amused compassion, an incredulous kindliness, which were rather
exasperating.
Like most people of their class, they had seen too much of the ups and downs of life to be
astonished at anything; and the sight of these ladies playing at photographers and house decorators, was only
one more scene in the varied and curious drama of life which it was their lot to witness.
"I wish," said
Gertrude, one day, "that Mrs. Maryon were not such a pessimist."
"She is rather like Gilbert's patent hag
who comes out and prophesies disaster," answered Phyllis. "She always thinks it is going to rain, and nothing
surprises her so much as when a parcel arrives in time."
"And she is so very kind with it all (79).""
"Aren't you ever coming to see us?" she said, giving Gertrude a great hug. "Mama is positively offended, and as
for papa—disconsolate is not the word."
"You must make them understand how really difficult it is for any
of us to come," answered Gertrude, who had a natural dislike to entering on explanations in which such sordid
matters as shabby clothes and the comparative dearness of railway tickets would have had to figure largely.
"But we are coming one day, of course."
"I'll tell you what it is," cried Fred, as they emerged into the
street, and stood looking round for a hansom; "Gertrude may be the cleverest, and Phyllis the prettiest, but
Lucy is far and away the nicest of the Lorimer girls."
"Gerty is worth ten of her, I think," answered
Conny, crossly. She was absorbed in furtive contemplation of a light that glimmered in a window above the
auctioneer's shop opposite (91)."
"Gertrude lay awake that night for many hours; the events of the day had curiously shaken her. The story of the
miserable Frenchwoman [owed money, tried to kill herself], with its element of grim humour, made her sick at
heart.
Fenced in as she had hitherto been from the grosser realities of life, she was only beginning to
realise the meaning of life. Only a plank—a plank between them and the pitiless, fathomless ocean on which they
had set out with such unknowing fearlessness; into whose boiling depths hundreds sank daily and disappeared,
never to rise again (94)."
"Fanny had accepted the situation with astonishing calmness. Prudish to the verge of insanity with regard to herself, she had grown to look upon her strong-minded sisters as creatures emancipated from the ordinary conventions of their sex, as far removed from the advantages and disadvantages of gallantry as the withered hag who swept the crossing near Baker Street Station (99)."
"The Sycamores was divided from the road by a high grey wall, beyond which stretched a neglected-looking garden
of some size, and, on the March morning of which I write, this latter presented a singularly melancholy
appearance (106)."
Whose POV is this in?
"I will never go there again, if that's what you mean."
"But what is the matter, Gerty? I found him quite
polite."
"Polite? It is worse than rudeness, a politeness which says so plainly: 'This is for my own
sake, not for yours.'"
"You are really cross, Gerty; what has the illustrious Sidney been doing to you?"
said Lucy, who did not suffer from violent likes and dislikes.
"Oh," cried Gertrude, laughing ruefully; "how shall I explain? He is this sort of man;— if a woman were talking
to him of—of the motions of the heavenly bodies, he would be thinking all the time of the shape of her ankles."
"Great heavens, Gerty, did you make the experiment?"
Phyllis opened her pretty eyes their widest as she spoke. "We all know," remarked Lucy, with a twinkle in her
eye, "that it is best to begin with a little aversion."
Phyllis struck an attitude: "'Friends meet to part, but foes once joined——'"
"Girls, what has come over
you?" exclaimed Gertrude, dismayed.
"Gerty is shocked," said Lucy; "one is always stumbling unawares on
her sense of propriety."
"She is like the Bishop of Rumtyfoo," added Phyllis; "she does draw the line at
such unexpected places (110).""
Significant for its representation of Gertrude's instant dislike of Sidney. Not something I expect in this era
of writing.
"A curious, dreamlike sensation stole over Gertrude at finding herself once again in a roomful of people; and as an old war-horse is said to become excited at the sound of battle, so she felt the social instincts rise strongly within her as the familiar, forgotten pageant of nods and becks and wreathed smiles burst anew upon her (112)."
""One demands so much more of a game in which one is taking part," said Gertrude; "and with social intercourse,
one is always thinking how much better managed it might be."
They both laughed.
"Now what is your
ideal society, Miss Lorimer?"
"A society not of class, caste, or family—but of picked individuals."
"I think we tend more and more towards such a society, at least in London," said Lord Watergate; then
added, "You are a democrat, Miss Lorimer."
"And you are an optimist, Lord Watergate."
"Oh, I'm
quite unformulated. But let us leave off this mutual recrimination for the present; and perhaps you can tell me
who is the lady talking to Sidney Darrell (115)."" What is Gertrude referring to when she says 'picked
individuals?'
""But not," cried Gertrude, "by trampling over the bodies of other people. Ah, you are all laughing at me. But
can one be expected to think well of a person who makes one feel like a strong-minded clown?"
They
laughed more than ever at the curious image summoned up by her words; then Phyllis remarked, critically—
"There is one thing I don't like about him, and that is his eye. I particularly detest that sort of eye;
prominent, with heavy lids, and those little puffy bags underneath."
"Phyllis, spare us these realistic
descriptions," protested Lucy, "and let us dismiss Mr. Darrell, for the present at least. Perhaps our revered
chaperon will tell us something of her experiences with a certain noble lord," she added, placing in her dress,
with a smile of thanks, the gardenia of which Fred had divested himself in her favour.
"It was very nice
of him," said Gertrude, gravely, "to get Mr. Oakley to introduce him to me, if only to show me that the sight
of me did not make him sick."
"I like his face," added Lucy; "there is something almost boyish about it.
Do you remember what Daudet says of the old doctor in Jack, 'La science l'avait gardé naïf.'"
"What a set
of gossips we are," cried Conny, who had taken little part in the conversation. "Come along, Fred; you know we
are dining at the Greys to-night."
"Botheration! They are certain to give me Nelly to take in," grumbled
Fred, who, like many of his sex, was extremely modest where his feelings were concerned, but cherished a belief
that the mass of womankind had designs upon him; "and we never know what on earth to say to one another
(117).""
""I shall ask her to sit for me, at any rate. There's the dragon-sister to be got round first."
"Indeed you are mistaken about Miss Lorimer."
Darrell gave a short laugh. "I beg your pardon, my
dear fellow!"
Frank frowned, and Darrell, going forward to the Lorimers, preferred his request. Phyllis
looked pleased; and Gertrude, suppressing the signs of her secret dislike to the scheme, said, quietly:
"Phyllis must refer you to her sister Fanny. It depends on whether she can spare the time to bring her to
your studio."
She glanced up as she spoke, and met, almost with open defiance, the heavy grey eyes of the
man opposite. From these she perceived the irony to have faded; she read nothing there but a cold dislike.
It was an old, old story the fierce yet silent opposition between these two people; an inevitable
antipathy; a strife of type and type, of class and class, rather than of individuals: the strife of the woman
who demands respect, with the man who refuses to grant it (131)."
""Let me look at you," cried Gertrude. "What is the charm? Where does it lie? Why are these sort of things
always happening to you?"
"Oh," answered Lucy, with an attempt at a smile, "I am a convenient, middling
sort of person, that is all. Not uncomfortably clever like you, or uncomfortably pretty like Phyllis (145).""
Conversation after Lucy has to refuse a proposal.
Vociferousness and Vociferating: (adj) vehement or clamorous (162)
""You are over-exciting yourself. Lie still, Phyllis."
"But, Gerty, I feel ever so much better to-night."
Silence. Gertrude sewed, and the invalid lay with closed eyes, but the flutter of the long lashes told
that she was not asleep.
"Gerty!" In about half an hour the grey eyes had unclosed, and were fixed widely
on her sister's face.
"What is it?"
"Gerty, am I really going to die?"
"You are very ill,"
said Gertrude, in a low voice.
"But to die—it seems so impossible, so difficult, somehow. Frank died;
that was wonderful enough; but oneself!"
"Oh, my child," broke from Gertrude's lips.
"Don't be
sorry. I have never been a nice person, but I don't funk somehow. I ought to, after being such a bad lot, but I
don't. Gerty!"
"What is it?"
"Gerty, you have always been good to me; this last week as well. But
that is the worst of you good people; you are hard as stones. You bring me jelly; you sit up all night with
me—but you have never forgiven me. You know that is the truth."
Gertrude knelt by the bedside, a great
compunction in her heart; she put her hand on that of Phyllis, who went on—
"And there is something I
should wish to tell you. I am glad you came and fetched me away. The very moment I saw your angry, white face,
and your old clothes with the snow on, I was glad. It is funny, if one comes to think of it. I was frightened,
but I was glad."
Gertrude's head drooped lower and lower over the coverlet; her heart, which had been
frozen within her, melted. In an agony of love, of remorse, she stretched out her arms, while her sobs came
thick and fast, and gathered the wasted figure to her breast.
"Oh, Phyllis, oh, my child; who am I to
forgive you? Is it a question of forgiveness between us? Oh, Phyllis, my little Phyllis, have you forgotten how
I love you (177)?""
To have passed through such experiences together as she and Lord Watergate, makes the casual relations of life
more difficult. These two people, to all intents and purposes strangers, had been together in those rare
moments of life when the elaborate paraphernalia of everyday intercourse is thrown aside; when soul looks
straight to soul through no intervening veil; when human voice answers human voice through no medium of an
actor's mask.
We lose with our youth the blushes, the hesitations, the distressing outward marks of
embarrassment; but, perhaps, with most of us, the shyness, as it recedes from the surface, only sinks deeper
into the soul.
As the door closed on Constance, Lord Watergate turned to Gertrude.
"Miss Lorimer,"
he said, "I am afraid your powers of endurance have to be further tried."
"What is it?" she said, while a
listless incredulity that anything could matter to her now stole over her, dispersing the momentary cloud of
self-consciousness.
(Chapter XXII - Hope and A Friend)
""Miss Lorimer," he said, and there was no mistaking the note in his voice, "have I come too soon? Is it too
soon for me to speak?" She was overwhelmed, astonished, infinitely agitated. Her soul shrank back afraid. What
had the closer human relations ever brought her but sorrow unutterable, unending? Some blind instinct within
her prompted her words, as she said, lifting her head, with the attitude of one who would avert an impending
blow—
"Oh, it is too soon, too soon." He stood a moment looking at her with his deep eyes.
"I shall
come back," he said.
"No, oh, no!"
She hid her face in her hands, and bent her head to the marble.
What he offered was not for her; for other women, for happier women, for better women, perhaps, but not for
her.
When she raised her head he was gone.
The momentary, unreasonable agitation passed away from
her, leaving her cold as a stone, and she knew what she had done. By a lightning flash her own heart stood
revealed to her. How incredible it seemed, but she knew that it was true: all this dreary time, when the
personal thought had seemed so far away from her, her greatest personal experience had been silently growing
up—no gourd of a night, but a tree to last through the ages. She, who had been so strong for others, had failed
miserably for herself.
Love and happiness had come to her open-handed, and she had sent them away. Love
and happiness? Oh, those will o' the wisps had danced ere this before her cheated sight. Love and happiness?
Say rather, pity and a mild peace. It is not love that lets himself be so easily denied.
Happiness? That
was not for such as she; but peace, it would have come in time; now it was possible that it would never come at
all.
All the springs of her being had seemed for so long to be frozen at their source; now, in this one
brief moment of exaltation, half-rapture, half-despair, the ice melted, and her heart was flooded with the
stream.
Covering her face with her hands, she knelt by his empty chair, and a great cry rose up from her
soul:—the human cry for happiness—the woman's cry for love (188)."
"She had told him not to return and he had taken her at her word. She was paying the penalty, which her sex
always pays one way or another, for her struggles for strength and independence. She was denied, she told
herself with a touch of rueful humour, the gracious feminine privilege of changing her mind.
Lord
Watergate might have loved her more if he had respected her less, or at least allowed for a little feminine
waywardness. Like the rest of the world, he had failed to understand her, to see how weak she was, for all her
struggles to be strong.
She pushed back the hair from her forehead with the old resolute gesture. Well,
she must learn to be strong in earnest now; the thews and sinews of the soul, the moral muscles, grow with
practice, no less than those of the body. She must not sit here brooding, but must rise and fight the Fates.
Hitherto, perhaps, life had been nothing but failures, but mistakes. It was quite possible that the
future held nothing better in store for her. That was not the question; all that concerned her was to fight the
fight.
She lit a solitary candle, and began sorting some papers and prints on the table near.
"If
he had cared," her thoughts ran on, "he would have come back in spite of everything (191).""
"The world, even when represented by her best friends, had labelled her a strong-minded woman. By universal
consent she had been cast for the part, and perforce must go through with it.
She heard steps coming up
the Virginia cork passage and concluded that Mrs. Maryon was bringing her an expected postcard from Lucy.
"Come in," she said, not raising her head from the table.
The person who had come in was not,
however, Mrs. Maryon.
He came up to the table with its solitary candle and faced her.
When she saw
who it was her heart stood still; then in one brief moment the face of the universe had changed for her for
ever.
"Lord Watergate!"
"I said I would come again. I have come in spite of you. You will not tell
me that I come too soon, or in vain?"
"You must not think that I did not value what you offered me," she
said simply, though her voice shook; "that I did not think myself deeply honoured. But I was afraid—I have
suffered very much."
"And I.... Oh, Gertrude, my poor child, and I have left you all this time."
For the light, flickering upwards, had shown him her weary, haggard face; had shown him also the pathetic
look of her eyes as they yearned towards him in entreaty, in reliance,—in love.
He had taken her in his
arms, without explanation or apology, holding her to his breast as one holds a tired child.
And she,
looking up into his face, into the lucid depths of his eyes, felt all that was mean and petty and bitter in
life fade away into nothingness; while all that was good and great and beautiful gathered new meaning and
became the sole realities (192)."
"The attempt made, here, is to trace the influence of character on circumstances. The conduct pursued, under a
sudden emergency, by a young girl, supplies the foundation on which I have built this book.
The same
object has been kept in view, in the handling of the other characters which appear in these pages. Their course
of thought and action under the circumstances which surround them, is shown to be (what it would most probably
have been in real life) sometimes right, and sometimes wrong. Right, or wrong, their conduct, in either event,
equally directs the course of those portions of the story in which they are concerned. (Author's Preface
xlvi)"
"The earliest known traditions describe the stone as having been set in the forehead of the four-handed Indian god who typifies the Moon [Vishnu]. Partly from its peculiar colour, partly from a superstition which represented it as feeling the influence of the deity whom it adorned, and growing and lessening in lustre with the waxing and waning of the moon, it first gained the name by which it continues to be known in India to this day – the name of THE MOONSTONE. A similar superstition was once prevalent as I have heard, in ancient Greece and Rome; not applying, however (as in India), to a diamond devoted to the service of a god, but to a semi-transparent stone of the inferior order of gems, supposed to be affected by the lunar influences – the moon, in this latter case also, giving the name by which the stone is still known to collectors in our own time. (Prologue 1)"
"'Now I saw, though too late, the Folly of beginning a Work before we count the Cost, and before we judge
rightly of our own Strength to go through with it.'
(The Loss of the Diamond – Betteredge 7)"
--It's a mistake to begin a task before planning and seeing what it will take/if that's something you can
afford.
"I am not superstitious; I have read a heap of books in my time; I am a scholar in my own way. Though turned
seventy, I possess an active memory, and legs to correspond. You are not to take it, if you please, as the
saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as Robinson Crusoe never was written and
never will be written again. I have tried that book for years – generally in combination with a pipe of tobacco
– and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life.
(The Loss of the Diamond
– Betteredge 8)"
"Selina, being my wife, couldn't charge for her board, and would have to give me her services for nothing. That
was the point of view I looked at it from. Economy – with a dash of love. I put to my mistress, as in duty
bound, just as I had put it to myself.
'I have been turning Selina Goby over in my mind,' I said. 'and I
think, my lady, it will be cheaper to marry her than to keep her.'
My lady burst out laughing, and said
she didn't know which to be most shocked at – my language or my principles. Some joke tickled her, I suppose,
of the sort that you can't take unless you are a person of quality. Understanding nothing myself but that I was
free to put it next to Selina, I went and put it accordingly. And what did Selina say? Lord! how little you
must know of women, if you ask that. Of course she said, Yes.
(The Loss of the Diamond –
Betteredge 11)"
"She took me by one of the lappets of my coat. Iam a slovenly old man, and a good deal of my meat and drink
gets splashed about on my clothes. Sometimes one of the women, and sometimes another, cleans me of my grease.
The day before, Rosanna had taken out a spot for me on the lappet of my coat, with a new composition, warranted
to remove anything. The grease was gone, but there was a little dull place left on the nap of the cloth where
the grease had been. The girl pointed to that place, and shook her head.
'The stain is taken off,' she said. 'But the place shows, Mr. Betteredge – the place shows.
(The Loss of the Diamond
– Betteredge 24)"
"He had been so clever, and clear-headed (before he began to talk the foreign gibberish), and had so completely
taken the lead in the business up to the present time, that I was quite unprepared for such a sudden change as
he now exhibited in this helpless leaning upon me. It was not till later that I learned – by assistance of Miss
Rachel, who was the first to make the discovery – that these puzzling shifts and transformations in Mr.
Franklin were due to the effect on him of his foreign training. At the age when we are all of us most apt to
take out colouring, in the form of a reflection from the colouring of other people, he had been sent abroad,
and had been passed on from one action to another, before there was time for any one colouring more than
another to settle itself on him firmly. As a consequence of this, he had come back with so many different sides
to his character, all more or less jarring with each other, that he seemed to pass his life in a state of
perpetual contradiction with himself. He could be a busy man, and a lazy man; cloudy in the head, and clear in
the head; a model of determination, and a spectacle of helplessness, all together. He had his French side, and
his German side, and his Italian side – the original English foundation showing through, every now and then, as
much as to say, 'Here I am, sorely transmogrified, as you see, but there's something of me left at the bottom
of him still.' Miss Rachel used to remark that the Italian side of him was uppermost, on those occasions when
he unexpectedly gave in, and asked you in his nice sweet-tempered way to take his own responsibilities on your
shoulders. You will do him no injustice, I think, if you conclude that the Italian side of him was uppermost
now.
(The Loss of the Diamond – Betteredge 43)"
"Gentlefolks in general have a very awkward rock ahead in life -- the rock ahead of their own idleness. Their
lives being, for the most part, passed in looking about them for something to do, it is curious to see –
especially when their tastes are of what is called the intellectual sort – how often they drift blindfold into
some nasty pursuit. Nine times out of ten they take to torturing something, or to spoiling something – and they
firmly believe they are improving their minds, when the plain truth is they are only making a mess in the
house. I have seen them (ladies, I am sorry to say, as well as gentlemen) go out, day after day, for example,
with empty pill-boxes, and catch newts, and beetles, and spiders, and frogs, and come home and stick pins
through the miserable wretches, or cut them up, without a pang of remorse, into little pieces. You see my young
master, or my young mistress, poring over one of their spiders' insides with a magnifying-glass; or you meet
one of their frogs walking down-stairs without his head -- and when you wonder what this cruel nastiness means,
you are told that it means a taste in my young master or my young mistress for natural history. Sometimes,
again, you see them occupied for hours together in spoiling a pretty flower with pointed instruments, out of a
stupid curiosity to know what the flower is made of. Is its colour any prettier, or its scent any sweeter, when
you do know? But there! the poor souls must get through the time, you see – they must get through the time. You
dabbled in nasty mud, and made pies, when you were a child; and you dabble in nasty science, and dissect
spiders, and spoil flowers when you grow up. In one case and in the other, the secret of it is, that you have
got nothing to think of in your poor empty head, and nothing to do with your poor idle hands. And so it ends in
your spoiling canvas with paints, and making a smell in the house; or in keeping tadpoles in a glass box full
of dirty water, and turning everybody's stomach in the house' or in chipping off bits of stone here, there, and
everywhere, and dropping grit into all the victuals in the house; or in staining your fingers in the pursuit of
photography, and doing justice without mercy on everybody's face in the house. It often falls heavy enough, no
doubt, on people who are really obliged to get their living, to be forced to work for the clothes that cover
them, the roof that shelters them, and the food that keeps them going. But compare the hardest day's work you
ever did with the idleness that splits flowers and pokes its way into spiders' stomachs and thank your stars
that your head has got something it must think of, and your hands something that they must do.
(The Loss of the Diamond
– Betteredge 50)"
"Self-willed – devilish self-willed sometimes – I grant; but the finest creature, nevertheless, that ever
walked the ways of this lower world. Perhaps you think you see a certain contradiction here? In that case, a
word in your ear. Study your wife closely, for the next four-and-twenty hours. If your good lady doesn't
exhibit something in the shape of a contradiction in that time, Heaven help you! -- you have married a monster.
(The Loss of the Diamond – Betteredge 54)"
"'You don't really mean to say, sir,' I asked, 'that they would have taken Mr. Franklin's life, to get their
Diamond, if he had given them the chance?'
'Do you smoke, Mr. Betteredge?' says the traveler.
'Yes,
sir.'
'Do you care much for the ashes left in your pipe, when you empty it?'
'No, sir.'
'In
the country those men came from, they care just as much about killing a man, as you care about emptying the
ashes out of your pipe. If a thousand lives stood between them and the getting back of their Diamond -- and if
they thought they could destroy those lives without discovery -- they would take them all. The sacrifice of
caste is a serious thing in India, if you like. The sacrifice of life is nothing at all.'
(The Loss of the Diamond – Betteredge 74)"
"As a female, and a widow, I may well be excused giving the precise date of this important event. But I do not mind confessing that the century and myself were both young together and that we have grown side by side into age and consequence. (1)"
"My fortunes underwent the variations which befall all. Sometimes I was rich one day, and poor the next. I never thought too exclusively of the money, believing rather that we were born to be happy, and that the surest way to be wretched is to prize it overmuch. Had I done so, I should have mourned many a promising speculation proving a failure, over many a pan of preserves or guava jelly burnt in the making; and perhaps lost my mind when the great fire of 1843, which devastated Kingston, burnt down my poor home. As it was, I very nearly lost my life, for I would not leave my house until every chance of saving it had gone, and it was wrapped in flames. (7)"
"Early in the same year my brother had left Kingston for the Isthmus of Panama, then the great high-road to and from golden California, where he had established a considerable store and hotel. Ever since he had done so, I had found some difficulty in checking my reviving disposition to roam, and at last persuading myself that I might be of use to him (he was far from strong), I resigned my house into the hands of a cousin, and made arrangements to journey to Chagres. Having come to this conclusion, I allowed no grass to grow beneath my feet, but set to work busily, for I was not going to him empty-handed. My house was full for weeks, of tailors, making up rough coats, trousers, etc., and seamstresses cutting out and making shirts. In addition to these, my kitchen was filled with busy people, manufacturing preserves, guava jelly, and other delicacies, while a considerable sum was invested in the purchase of preserved meats, vegetables, and eggs. It will be as well, perhaps, if I explain, in as few words as possible, the then condition of the Isthmus of Panama. (9)"
"It seemed as if nature had determined to throw every conceivable obstacle in the way of those who should seek to join the two great oceans of the world. (10)"
"My experience of washerwomen, all the world over, is the same--that they are kind soft-hearted folks. Possibly the soap-suds they almost live in find their way into their hearts and tempers, and soften them. (91)"
"[The Crimean Rats] occasionally did us damage, in a single night, to the tune of two or three pounds--wasting what they could not devour. You could keep nothing sacred from their teeth. (115)"
"My readers must know, too, that they were much more familiar with the history of the camp at their own firesides, than we who lived in it. Just as a spectator seeing one of the battles from a hill, as I did the Tehernaya, knows more about it that the combatant in the valley below, who only thinks of the enemy whom it is his immediate duty to repel; so you, through the valuable aid of the cleverest man in the whole camp, read in the Times' columns the details of that great campaign, while we, the actors in it, had enough to do to discharge our own duties well, and rarely concerned ourselves in what seemed of such importance to you. And so very often a desperate skirmish or hard-fought action, the news of which created so much sensation in England, was but little regarded at Spring Hill. (147)"
"I soon entered heartily into the then current amusement--that of exchanging coin, etc., with the Russians.
[...] There was a great traffic going on in such things, and a wag of an officer, who could talk Russian
imperfectly, set himself to work to persuade an innocent Russian that I was his wife, and having succeeded in
doing so promptly offered to dispose of me for the medal hanging at his breast. (189)"
-racist ass
soldier
"Native slipstream exploits the possibilities of multiverses by the reshaping time travel. Ultimately, the
appeal may simply be "the fun" that Broderick lauds, but slipstream also appeals because it allows authors to
recover the Native space of the past, to bring it to the attention of contemporary readers, and to build better
futures. It captures moments of divergence and the consequences of that divergence. Vizenor's "Custer on the
Slipstream" offers an alternate reality where Native peoples no longer suffer ""the loathsome voice and evil
manner of this devious loser," General George Armstrong Custer. Diane Glancy's "Aunt Parnetta's Electric
Blisters" transforms spatial-temporal dislocations brought about by globalization, communications technologies,
and electronic circuitry into a story of the heart's restoration."
-pg.4 p.3
"The white man has been killing us since he first drifted off course and got lost on the shores of our great
mother earth...
"Now our pockets are empty and mother earth is polluted and stripped for coal and iron.
Why are you all sitting her listening to talking about talking from a white man? My name is Crazy Horse,
remember that, you'll hear it again. My people are the proud Sioux. Listen, there are things to tell now. Te
white man puts himself in our way everywhere. Look at tthat Border and the Bureau, Custer is sitting everywhere
holding up the Indians. Now all the original people on our mother earth go through white men and stand in lines
for everything. The white man tries to makes us like you to sit and listen to white people talking about
talking about money and things and good places to live away from the poor.
"What would the white man do
if he didn't have our problems to talk about? Think about all the people who are paid to talk about us and our
so-called problems. Who would social workers be without us? Tell me this. Who would they be? They'd be out of
work, that's where they'd be now. . .
"But they are wrong, all wrong. The land will be ours again. Watch
and see the land come back to us again. The earth will revolt and everything will be covered over with new
earth and all the whites will disappear, but we will be with the animals again, we weill be waiting in the
trees and up on the sacred mountains. We will never assimilate in places like this. This church. . .
"There just ain't enough jobs in the Bureau of Indian Affairs to keep us all quiet. Everywhere else the
government restores the nations they defeat in wars. Do you know why the Indian nations, the proudest people in
the whole world, were never restored? Do you know why? You, all you white faces, do you know? The answer is
simple, see how dumb white people are. This is the answer, listen now, because we were never defeated, never
defeated, that is the answer. . . .
"Everywhere else in the world the white governement sends food and
medicine to people who are hungry and sick but not to the Indians. We get nothing, nothing, because the white
man never defeated us, but he makes his living on us being poor. The white man needs us to be poor for his sick
soul. We got nothing because we have never been defeated, remember that. . . .
"The white government puts
people everywhere in our way, trying to defeat us with words now and meetings so we can be helped. But we still
dance, see. The road to evil and hell will never be laid with feathers from sacred eagles. We are the people of
the wind and water and mountains and we will not be talked into defeat, because we know the secrets of mother
earth, we talk in the tongues of the sacred earth and animals. We are still dancing. When we stop dancing then
you can restore us. . . .
"Remember me. Remember me talking here. My face is here before you. My name is
Crazy Horse and when I talk the earth talks through me in a vision. I am Crazy Horse. . . ."
(pg. 20 p.3
- Gerald Vizenor "Custer on the Slipstream")
"Crazy Horse waited on the white carpet. The longer he waited for recognition the more he smiled. He bumped the
brim of his western straw hat with his thumb, tipping it back from his forehead. His right ear moved with ease
when he smiled. Animals knew more about smiling than people, animals knew that when he smiled and moved his ear
in a certain way, it meant that he was in spiritual control of the situation. He survived much better when
white people did not speak, because words, too many words, looseded his concentration and visual power.
(pg. 23 p.10, Gerald Vizenor's "Custer on the Slipstream")
"Pidgin is a mixedblood Blackfeet Indian who is trying to inter his dad's body nine years after a government
lab finally releases it from clinical experimentation, "no cavity unviolated, and a seam-ridden heart . . .
back in the wrong side of his chest where it had always been."
(pg. 35, p.2 Stephen Graham Jones
'The Fast Red Road')
"But then again. God. New Mexico was too much with him; he was daisy-chained across twelve days. His breath was
corrosive."
(pg. 50 p.3 Stephen Graham Jones 'The Fast Red Road')
"Do I pull out my guns and shoot all these people?
Do I shoot that little boy over there with his mother?
He is maybe five years old. He has blue eyes and blonde hair. He's wearing good shoes. A jean jacket. Khaki
pants. Blue shirt. He's beautiful. A beautiful little man. His mother, also blond and blue-eyed, smiles down at
him. She loves him. She sees me watching them and she smiles at me. For me. She wants me to know how much she
loves her son. She's proud of the little guy.
Did my mother love me like that? I hope so.
I wave at
the little boy. He waves back.
I hate him for being loved so well.
I want to be him.
I close
my eyes and try to step inside his body. But it doesn't work. I cannot be him.
I open my eyes. I think
all the people in this bank are better than I am. They have better lives than I do. Or maybe they don't. Maybe
we're all lonely. Maybe some of them also hurtle through time and see war, war, war. Maybe we're all in this
together."
(pg. 54, p.21 Sherman Alexie 'Flight')
"I want to tell him the entire story. I want to tell him that I fell through time and have only now returned. I
want to tell him I leanred a valuable lesson. But I don't know what that lesson is. It's too complicated, too
strange. Or maybe it really is simple. Maybe it's so simple it makes me feel stupid to say it.
Maybe you're not supposed to kill. No matter who tells you to do it. No matter how good or bad the
reason. Maybe you're supposed to believe that all life is sacred."
(p. 57 p.11 Sherman Alexie
'Flight')
"There is a responsibility here that is true to the tribal traditions I grew up in--respect for one's family,
tribe, and elders is just as important as trying to find one's own way. It's been noted that in western novels
one finds oneself by leaving home, while in Native American storytelling one finds oneself by returning home."
(pg. 78 p.1 Gerry William 'The Black Ship')
"[Williams] explains that his writing follows "the Okanagan beliefs that linear time is something from western
paradigms. Time in our stories is not circular, but perhaps more in keeping with the Irish tribal traditions of
the cone, where time spirals along a path which never repeats, but is also always where in the past, present
and future." The space-time shifts of "the black ship" featured in his debut novel illustrate this conception,
as Enid Bluestreak follows a spiraling trajectory through memories conveyed in the narrative."
(pg. 78
p.3 Gerry William 'The Black Ship')
"Are those men looking for something on the moon, Nana? he asked his grandson.
They're trying to find out
what's on the moon, Nana. What kind of dirt and rocks there are and to see if there's any water. Scientist men
don't believe there is any life on the moon. The men are looking for knowledge, Amarosho said to Faustin.
Faustin wondered if the men had run out of places to look for knowledge on the earth. Do they know if
they'll find knowledge? he asked.
They have some already. They've gone before and come back. They're
going again.
Did they bring any back?
They brought back some rocks, Amarosho said.
Rocks.
Faustin laughed quietly. The American scientist men went to search for knowledge on the moon and brought back
rocks."
(pg. 88 p. 16 Simon Ortiz 'Men on the Moon')
"Amarosho had told him that men on earth--scientists--believed there was no life on the moon. Yet those men
were trying to find knowledge on the moon. Faustin wondered if perhaps thay had special tools with which they
could find knowledge even if they believed there was no life on the moon. [...]
They will study the
rocks, too, for knowledge?
Yes, Nana.
What will they use the knowledge for, Nana?
They say
they will use it to better mankind, Nana. I've heard that. And to learn more about the universe in which we
live. Also, some of the scientists say the knowledge will be useful in findong out where everything began a
long time ago and how everything was made in the beginning.
Faustib looked with a smile at his grandson.
He said, You are telling me the true facts, aren't you?
Why, yes, Nana. That's what they say. I'm not
just making it up, Amarosho said.
Well then, do they say why they need to know where and how everything
began? Hasn't anyone ever told them?
I think other peopel have tried to tell them but they want to find
out for themselve, and also they claim they don't know enough and need to know more and for certain, Amarosho
said."
(pg. 93 Simon Ortiz 'Men on the Moon')
"There's this woman I love, Tremble Dancer, but she's one of the Urbans. Urbans are the city Indians who
survived and made their way out to the reservation after it all fell apart. There must have been over a hundred
when they first arrived, but most of them have died since. Now there are only a dozen Urbans left, and they're
all sick. The really sick ones look like they are five hundred years old. They look like they have lived
forever; they look like they'll die soon.
Tremble Dancer isn't sick yet, but she does have burns and
scars all over her legs. When she dances around the fire at night, she shakes from the pain. Once when she
fell, I caught her and we looked hard at each other. I thought I could see half of her life, something I could
remember, something I could never forget. [...]
Sometimes Tremble Dancer waits for me at the tree, all we
have left. We take off our clothes, loincloth, box dress. We climb the branches of the tree and hold each
other, watching for the Tribal Council. Sometimes her skin will flake off, float to the ground. Sometimes I
taste parts of her breaking off into my mouth. It is the taste of blood, dust, sap, sun.
"My legs are
leaving me," Tremble Dancer told me once. "Then it will be my arms, my eyes, my fingers, the small of my back."
"I am jealous of what you have," she told me, pointing at the parts of my body and telling me what they
do."
(pg. 145 p. 5 Sherman Alexie 'Distances')
"Lecha had not appreciated Yoeme's diagnosis of Christianity until she had worked a while as a psychic. Lecha
had seen people who claimed to be devout believers with rosary beads in their hands, yet they were terrified.
Affluent, educated white people, upstanding Church members, sought out Lecha in secrert. They all had come to
her with a deep sense that something had been lost. They all had given the loss different names: the stock
markey crash, lost lottery tickets, worthless junk bonds or lost loved ones; but Lecha knew the loss was their
connection with the earth. They all feared illness and physical change; since life led to death, consciousness
terrified them, and they had sought to control death by becoming killers themselves."
(pg. 219 p. 2 Leslie Marmon Silko 'Almanac of the Dead')
"I considered my options. On the one hand, I had the choice to more or less trap Miss Sweater Set between me
and the wall of the airplane for the better part of ninety minutes, all told. I could read gay books, write gay
smut on my laptop, discourse helpfully about the life of the modern homosexual. I could give a little ex
tempore speech about Gays Throughout History, perhaps focusing on characters she would recognize. A little
speculation, maybe, about the preferences of Eleanor Roosevelt, or the water jug carrying man (a highly
gender-non-normative behavior for a man of the time) who leads Jesus to the Last Supper as referenced in the
Gospel of Mark, chapter 14. I could read to her from the collected speeches of Harvey Milk, or share some of
the excellent research my wonderful friend Hanne Blank was doing for her upcoming book about the origins of
heterosexuality. Or perhaps I could just take the opportunity to cough on her a great deal, complete with much
apologetic touching.
Listen, I'm not a saint. It would have been a lot of fun.
But then I realized
that if I relinquished this particular set of pleasures, I could have my seat to myself again; that the
putatively sympathetic flight attendant was extremely unlikely to make someone else move to accommodate the
homophobic wishes of what's-her-name. I could spread out my things, and my body. I could probably work or
sleep.
In that moment, if I am being honest, I have to report that I had no compassion whatsoever for
Miss Sweater Set. I like to imagine that I can act with generosity even toward people who avow themselves my
enemies, and sometimes I really can, but in that tired moment I didn't care about her. I didn't even consider
her. I thought only of myself, and how tired I was, and how much I was not equipped for any toxic energy or
misguided nonsense, and I waved her off. The flight attendant grumblingly reseated her (immediately in front of
a screaming infant, I was pleased to note) and I buckled my seatbelt and raised my armrest and let my arms
down. ("The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You" 14)"
"When I am asked, as I sometimes am, why transgendered Jews--and especially transmasculinely gendered Jews—appear, anecdotally, to be more likely to remain religiously affiliated, I say that this is part of the answer: It seems to me that we do not have to go as far, nor do we have to climb into places that seem quite as foreign to us. We can still cry and read and be sweet on babies; we do not have to go as far, nor do we have to climb into places that seem quite as foreign to us. We can still cry and read and be sweet on babies; we do not have to learn how to spit or like beer (which is a good thing, as my fondness for babies is roughly as strong and unlikely to shift with gender presentation as my general distaste for beer). In addition to emotional connectedness and intellectual success (with a heaping side order of argumentation skills), Jewish masculinity also tends to prize storytelling. I began this essay by telling the story that was told to me by my mother, as she heard it from my young cousin's father. As a people of diaspora, a people with a staggeringly long oral tradition, even considering our equally staggering literacy rate, there seems to be some . . . genetic selection at work. I have known good storytellers of many cultural or ethnic backgrounds, for certain, and I have known some Jews who could not find the beginning, middle, or end of a story with both hands and a flashlight, but I will say plainly that sitting down to dinner with a tableful of Jews guarantees good storytelling. ("Today, I Am a Man (And Other Perorations of the Tranny Jewboy)" 36)"
"[After stopping to assist a man whose car is pulled off on the side of the road.] I wanted to say something else, though—almost did and then changed my mind in the split second before I spoke it. I wanted to say, "I need to say this: I'm a queer. I want you to know because out of all the cars that passed you, I'm the one who stopped. I'm the one who stayed until your problem was solved." I am not sure if it would have registered, if it would have been a safe thing to say while I held his hand, but in the moment of being there and play0acting this rough kind of helpfulness, I wanted to say it anyway. If he liked queers, if maybe he had a sister or a best friend who was of the lavender persuasion, I wanted him to feel well cared for by the great global homo conspiracy. . . and if he didn't? Well, if he didn't, I wanted him to think twice, I suppose. I wanted him to feel humbled, or perhaps shamed, that his rhetoric or thoughtlessness might have harmed someone who went out of hir way to help him. I wanted him to look at LGBTQ people with her new eyes. I wouldn't have minded some stirring music to go with it, either, and maybe a little speech about how I had changed his mind about faggots forever while his wife looked at both of us adoringly. Still holding hands, of course. But here's the thing—the entire business got me thinking even more about why it is that I am always stopping on roadsides. Partly, I think, it's how much I like to be helpful (which, as my friends will tell you, is a powerful drive for me). But also, I think, as queers (and Jews too), we know what happens when everyone assumes that someone else will step up. In a rather intimate way, in all sorts of situations, we've been on the shit end of the I'm Sure Someone Will Do Something phenomenon too often to imagine that we're not also Someone. That we can help, and that if there's a risk to helping, the person may be worth the risk. And that, frankly, even if the person is not worth, we remain the people who were willing to stop, to offer something. (Roadside Assistance 40)"
"Man, did I ever not find it (pun intended). I didn't know, before I made my little shuffly hopeful move, about the great and terrible truth of transgender life, which is that they will never let you be real, ever again. Not even if you absolutely promise and completely swear to follow every directive from the Home Office immediately upon receipt. I didn't know it when I signed on—maybe I should have, but I didn't—but the transperson is always a knock-off, as in, "Why would you date a fake man when you could have the Real Thing?" (strut, strut, posture, posture), and ze is always the location of deceit. It must be true, or people wouldn't respond the way they do. Kate Bornstein famously asks, when people ask if she's had the Surgery, if they mean her nose job. She jokes about it because she has been talking about transfolks, and her own trans experience, in popular culture longer and better than anyone else, and after the millionth iteration of some stranger deciding it's okay to quiz you about your genitals after thirty seconds of acquaintance, let me tell you . . . if you don't make a joke you'll scream. I could recount all the impertinent, intrusive, or arrogant questions here, but they're endless and boring and I frankly don't want to give anyone any ideas. What I will say is that, when I mention that something might be a personal question, people tend to say that they're just really curious. They say this in an innocent tone of voice as though surely I can't understand, and furthermore, why, I should be grateful. Grateful, I say, that they want to know more about the life and times of the transsexual; grateful that they're not running away shrieking or throwing rotten fruit. If I push the issue and suggest that querying people on their history, former name, surgical status, and so on is rude, my interlocutor gets angry, accuses me of being oversensitive, or asks me if I have something to hide. Which is unfair, and also tiring. The truth is that I might not mind as much if I didn't understand so well what was going on. I might be willing to believe that there was some sort of innocent educational journey at work every single one of those times, if I hadn't already answered those questions over and over only to discover that each of my questioners was using the information to decide whether or not I was real. I say that my name is Bear, and when I'm asked I have changed my first name to Bear, I say no, it's my middle name. Not real enough. When people learn that my grandmothers still call me Sharon, it's further proof: not the real deal. These judgements are made about surgeries, about hormones, about sexual orientation, and people who ask them—the same people who moments before claimed the need for my tender educational mercies—are now the gender judge and jury. (The Velveteen Tranny 72)"
"Those questions are complicated because it seems to suggest that further interrogation of trans bodies is appropriate, which is a difficult concept. A lot of my work is about saying, hey—here's my gender. Deal with me on the face. If there's some possibility that you might encounter my genitals, we'll deal with that when we get there. And also, it's about creating a space in the world for others to say the same. Asking a transperson about hir sex will always carry a whiff of, "But what are you, really?" (The Velveteen Tranny 77)"
"It's lovely to have smart friends. They make you smarter, especially when you've known them for half your lifetime, even with time off for good behavior. (The Velveteen Tranny 82)"
"Further, genders that are unusual, nonstandard, mix-n-match, or new to us are just as valid as the ones we're more accustomed to. My conversations with people who are just beginning to understand and include transsexual who is a real student at their school or client of their agency can be new and surprising. But for queers and transfolk, who have institutionalized an additional set of queerly normative genders, it can sometimes be difficult to hear that we, too, must expand. If butch daddies want to crochet, if twinkly ladyboys are sometimes tops in bed, if burly bears can do BDSM play as little girls, if femme fatales build bookcases in their spare time, these things, too, are not just good but great. They bring us, I believe, wonderful news: news that gendered option can continue to explode, that the chefs in the kitchen of gender are creating new and imaginative specials every day. That we, all of us, are the chefs. Hi. Have a whisk. Unfortunately, it seems that we are more likely to decide that these people, and their genders, are secretly fraudulent. That after all this gender mixing, all this firm and sweet belief taht a female-bodied person can be called Rocky and be ferocious as a hurricane, we cannot quite make the next step and let Rocky also like to needlepoint. So many of us will go so far as to accept a nontypical gender-and-sex pairing—but only if the gender is uncomplicated. Maybe yours is relatively straightforward, no pun intended. And that's fine. There is plenty of room for everyone's gender in the New Gendered Order. Mine, which is as messy as chocolate chip cookies made by a pack of eight-year-olds, and yours, which may be a perfect souffle, all ingredients combined in elegant harmony. Also fine: everyone else's gender. Not to extend the cookery metaphor forever, but fusion cookery is popular for a reason. Macaroni and cheese is delicious with truffle oil and a little blue cheese mixed into the sauce. (The Field Guide to Transmasculine Creatures 91)"
"There are more locations than girl and boy, man and woman. Decamping from one does not have to mean climbing into another. There's plenty of space in between, or beyond the bounds, or all along and across the plane or sphere or whatever of gender and it is entirely okay to say, :I do not like being a girl, and so I shall be a boy." But it must also be okay to say, "I do not like being a girl, so I shall set about changing what it means to be a girl," and, yes, okay to say, "I do not like being a girl, and so I shan't." Totally okay. Not always easy, not always tidy, not always something one can briefly explain—but can you say it? Of course you can. Of course. (I'm Just Saying 100)"
"My suggestion is that we put the burden where it belongs: on the observer. Imagine a construction of language that, rather than reinforcing an idea of transgender or transsexual people as creating a falsehood, supported the notion that our genders are perfectly natural and inherently truthful. For that to be the case, however, some blame needs to be assigned in cases of disagreement (and no one will allow me to just blame the media culture and its great love affair with the binary, regrettably). I say we assign it to the cisgendered. Rather than talking about who passes, let us instead talk about who reads. "They read me as a man." See how this works? That sentence assigns responsibility to the person or people doing the seeing, the reading, rather than further objectifying the object of the gaze. Not just that, but in the sentence it is not clear what the speaker's identified gender or sex assigned at birth is. It could be, in that person's eyes, either a successful or a failed attempt by someone else at correctly parsing their gender, but the onus is on someone other than the speaker. The actions of bystanders, rightly and reasonably, do not reflect on the transperson in question (though, of course, they may affect hir). The idea that someone is attempting to pull some sort of gendered fast one does not make the transition from a sentence constructed with passing to a sentence constructed with reading; nor is there any sense of endeavor. In no way does the language indict that efforts of the person being read; they are more or less what they are in somewhat the same way a book is what it is—engaging or boring, quick or slow—and these things are understood to be in the eye of the beholder. This is why we have Amazon rankings and reviews on librarything.com as opposed to, say, a governmental assessment and eternal branding with the result. Ahem. (Passing the Word 110)"
"At first blush, there isn't a space for a lot of things on these government forms. But as traveling, tax-paying transperson, perhaps the most valuable lesson I have learned is that in North America, even if there is not a form for you in the general packet, they probably have one for you in the back somewhere. So I am optimistic that somehow, in the grand selection of forms and exemptions and ancillary letters, there is somewhere for me to write in all the details of this relationship, absolutely charmed for all that it may look a little strange. There must be. The Selective Service has a form called the Status Information Letter to exempt young men from the draft if they were born female (the Vice President of the United States, I learned while looking for the form number, is also categorically exempt). Someone at the IRS knows exactly how much of my travel expenses I am entitled to deduct as a self-employed performance artist (not, as you might imagine, a giant employment category), and if you look long enough, you'll find that you can use form 2106 and then take the total and add it to line 1040 form with a special code to indicate that you're exempt from the two percent rule about miscellaneous expenses. The State of New York, if you ask at the DMV, will give you form MV-44, to which you staple an affidavit from a medical professional and proof of your name change, and they'll change the sex marker on your driver's license from M to F (or vice versa). Surely, there is a form for me. And so with this peculiar, bureaucratic optimism I settle in. (Like Love 136)
"Also, not for nothing, I read constantly as a child, whereas Jeffrey played a lot of video games, and many dire predictions were made about this. He's turned out spectacularly. So I hereby solemnly swear that if our eventual munchkin somehow turns out not to be a reader and has no special interest in all these many, many books, I will not totally panic. (Writing the Landscape 151)"
"I heard an Australian writer on CBC radio the other day who had lived from age two until eleven in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), and she spoke eloquently about her experience reading books as and she spoke eloquently about her experience reading books as a child. Hardly any of them, she observed, mentioned monsoons, or desert, or other things from which her Sri Lankan childhood was marked. She spoke of a certain sense of being "off the world," somewhere not visible to writers or artists, and that this sometimes made her feel invisible, and at other times like a brave explorer. When the host, the marvelous Jian Ghomeshi, asked her whether she would have preferred her books to be more reflective of her environment, her answer was certainly instructive. Haltingly, she said, "Well, yes, in some ways, because I wouldn't have felt so . . . alone. But also, I had never . . . never seen a daffodil. Had no idea about them. So I knew from reading that the world was full of things I had yet to see." I am not much worried that our eventual, theoretical child will read about heterosexual, cisgendered, closed parental sets and feel as though they are a wonder yet to be experienced or observed. Thank you, macroculture, for crossing off one of my Official Parental Worries. I'm pretty sure that's going to be a given in hir world. But I do worry about a kid feeling alone, in much the same way that other children I know from complex, queer families end up editing the details of their lives in order to sound more strictly normal. They report that they went shopping for shoes or to the rock gym with their uncle, quickly learning that if they use words full of cultural meaning, no one asks, they simply assume: your uncle, the brother of one of your parents. It does not occur to them that the uncle in question is in fact the long-time-but-now-ex-partner of your sperm donor, whom you liked far too much to separate from, and so regular dates are scheduled to see one another despite the fact that another of your cadre of uncles, the donor himself, would like to scratch his eyes out. Perhaps I need to start there: a Who Are The People in Your Family? book, one that goes beyond a grandmother-as-caregiver book or a dad-and-step-dad one. Maybe a more fill-in-the-blanks kind of book, where young people can write the stories of their own families into the spaces. Or perhaps also a community-parenting kind of book, featuring baby marmosets (marmoset parenting is evidently a lot like human parenting in one key way: adults will bring food to babies who are not their own on a regular basis). In my book, a young marmoset will narrate about a series of people in hir life with whom ze undertakes a variety of pursuits—the mama marmoset, the mama marmoset's mama, the uncle marmoset who takes hir along stalking salamanders, the auntie marmoset who forages for frogs and brings them back as dinner, the other uncle marmoset who sometimes sleeps with the mama marmoset, and his twin sister also lives there with all of them and is going to have some babies soon, making our protagonist marmoset a Big Sibling real soon now. And when the new baby marmosets come, everyone will get to take turns carrying them—mama and aunties and uncles and the brand-new Big Sibling, who will be careful and very gentle and very responsible. And all the other marmosets will be very proud. (Writing the Landscape153)"
"And this is one of the many places where all of the very careful explanations about transpeople's gender being the expression of their true selves is simply a giant lie. It is quite a romantic lie, of course, which is our favorite kind, especially in North America. It conjures up tender images of young people crying themselves to sleep wishing they could just have a frock to wear, or elders on their porches grieving about what could have been (if they could just have had a frock to wear), and while these things certainly happen, they are never as uncomplicated as the motion pictures make them out to be. […] While I love the idea, and while there have been moments in my life where I would have done nearly anything to be allowed to wear something the made me feel right in the world, it's also true that "making the outside match the inside" is only part of the story. The rest of the story is about making the outside match something in the Field Guide to Normal People so that the folks where you live, work, or amuse yourself will recognize and accept you, allowing you to exist outside your own home without being constantly challenged. And that, it must be said, lacks some of the romance of the previous scenario. Malcolm's story, while darkly humorous if you tilt your head a little, isn't unique; there are many ways in which those people whose genders aren't in the first ten entries on the first results page have spent quite a lot of time either working to ameliorate the effects or learning to cope with the results. (It's Always Easier If You Can Be Something They Recognize 173)"
-Check out "Carnal Acts" by Nancy Mairs
"The shame of this begins with the fact that the common vernacular does not have words for us, for what we have
to be touched or how we want to touch, fuck, love, revel in our or others' trans bodies.
We have no words
for the kinds of families we create, no way to talk about how all of these things have happened to us, no sense
that we are not alone or, at least, in community at the sufferance of a few people who we believe are somehow
far better or smarter or more "real" than we are, who have read all the right books and know the Official Trans
Answers. A community from which we cannot get booted at any moment, without warning, if we cannot make
ourselves sufficiently likable.
So these wounds fester. We cannot reach them ourselves most of the time,
and we often do not even know what to tell someone we believe might be willing to help us, if we could stand
it. Sometimes it's okay if we tell another trans or gender-adjacent person, but mostly it's like asking the
pharmacist for medicine to heal a part of the body she's never heard of. An like a wound to the body, whether
it heals even while you pretend it doesn't exist or gets worse and worse, depends in some part on your overall
well-being. Depends on the shame load you're already carrying. Depends on how well you are able to tend the
other areas of your health.
In a culture and time that offers us a never-ending series of messages about
how we're bad, wrong, and different, it's easy to get overwhelmed by them. Easy to let things slide, easy to
skip what we know is good for us, easy to turn to cheap fixes with big highs and bigger lows, but while we're
busy distracting ourselves by poking our pleasure centers with a stick, those injured places don't heal. They
get worse. They become the portal through which other damaging ideas enter when the tough and flexible skin of
our psyches is too badly damaged to keep them out. We've all felt this, though I hope for your sake it's been a
while; I hope that by the time you're holding this you've been able to get clean and dry and dressed and
treated nicely somewhere they like you and want you to be happy (almost as much as I hope that you remember how
extraordinary that is, and make sure to offer it to others as soon as you have your strength up).
Then
there is the other decay, the specific one, the kind of shame that is planted and grown and encouraged, and I
wish I did not have to write about this kind. I wish it, but I've been there and so have a whole lot of the
transthings I adore, and if we are going to stop this, someone is going to have to talk about it. That shame is
the repeated freeze-and-thaw cycle; love and being shut out and then redeemed again, over and over. We get into
the clutches of someone who feeds on our shame, all the shames enumerated above, who tells us that we are too
freakish or fucked-up to be loved, that no one else would ever want us. They sell us on the idea that however
badly they want to mistreat us, at least we're not alone like we deserve. They freeze us out and then heat us
up again and, baby, the end of this movie does not ever feature the asshole holding the end of the string
realizing in a flash what many wonders and pleasure the sweet freak has to offer the world. I am sorry to say
it, because I know in my bones that some people reading this are in that place this minute, and still hoping
they can, in fact, live on a diet of shame and recrimination forever if it features very occasional fat juicy
steaks (tofu, beef, or otherwise).
Maybe you can. But it is not a good idea. When you eventually get free
of this toxic bullshit, you will find that every unexamined area has developed the sickening aroma of shame in
the exact same way that food frozen and thawed too many times will spoil fast but never rot away; it will just
hang on and hang on, tricking you with the idea that it is still viable. It is no. What you need to do is chuck
it out right away. And if the person who has helped you to create it needs to go as well, in order to make sure
that you don't spend your life throwing bits of yourself off the back of the sleigh involuntarily, then send
them out with all the wrapped and reeking packages of your shame in their arms. I swear, I absolutely promise
that if you can, there will be better things ahead. That thing about how no one else will ever love you is
almost certainly not true.
And if you can't get free—if you're really sure that ze'd kill you if you tried and you can't see any way
out right now—then please stay alive. However you have to. Please scheme and save and plot; please have a
secret email address you access only from the library with which you reach out for help; please remember that
you are precious and that living to fight again another day is a lot.
I am full of advice, of course (anyone who has ever met me for even five minutes isn't surprised at
this), but I am shitty at this particular follow-through. I have not yet managed to evict my shame, or expose
it to the healing elements until it curls up and dies. In fact, what I notice in myself is that I protect and
defend those chilly and dim places of my soul, sometimes far more vigorously than I am able to care for the
well-lit spots. I keep other people, even those whom I perceive to be armed with bleach solution and sunlamps
for the shameful heart, far away. Maybe especially them, because there's a further truth to shame for me, and I
think for many of us, which is what keeps us from ever opening up those places so they can heal. I am ashamed
of them. And ashamed to be ashamed of them in a cycle of nested unpleasantness that leads to me to package the
entire mess in heavy black psychic plastic, stash it under the concrete back steps of my body, and pretend it
doesn't exist. I do not want it, but I also do not want anyone to know I have it, and the exposure to air and
sunlight necessary for dealing with it means, among other things, that other people might see. So when anyone,
no matter how well-meaning, gets close to it, I say, "Look! A bird!" (or the conversational equivalent) and
change the subject. No, thank you. Lots of thank you, actually, but a substantially larger amount of No.
I cannot seem to protect my pleasures or warm places by hiding my shame, though. When someone bent on
causing damage to me wants to trash a warm oasis of joy in my life I can almost never stop them. I wish I
could; I wish for the equilibrium to smile as gently and politely as I do at the person who wants to help and
ask them to please, very kindly, fuck right off (which seems to work just fine then!). But somehow, this is not
possible, and I am beginning to trace the reasons for this to the increasingly foul miasma around the back
stairs. That shame, which I have allowed to sit and stew, begins to affect the rest of me as surely as a rotten
piece of food makes every other item in a refrigerator taste terrible. Over time, I and you and all of us begin
to believe that all of us is as horrible as the parts we are ashamed of. They all smell and taste the same.
I am feeling brave at my keyboard; I want to make a laundry list of what I am ashamed of right now and
publish it in this book and let everyone in the world see the Superfund sites of my internal landscape, with
latitude and longitude and an open invitation to do-gooders of all varieties to come and bring their rubber
gloves and bleach. In this moment, all alone in my office except for the dog, I feel as though I could almost
allow it. As though there were some way in which I could start to heal myself.
Instead, I try to heal other people, which I trick myself into thinking is both Better and More Noble,
when, in fact, it is largely impossible and basically useless except as a good way to keep me distracted from
my own shames. Knowing this doesn't stop me, of course. It turns out that it's hard to encourage someone to let
go of hir shame when you're actively protecting yours; oddly, they don't seem to really invest in what you're
saying. It is from this that I came to understand the shame-as-a-rotten-thing-in-the-fridge effect. In whatever
unknowable way, it's not just me who can smell it. Some role model." (Shame 182-186)
"But I don't have to remain quiet, and so I will not talk about transpeople in any other way but as fabulous creatures of great and many wonders who are not, in fact, just like you. And I will not stop insisting that this is a good thing. That "just like you" is a phrase we do not need; we can be fully human and fully present and real and fully able to empathize and be empathized with. We can celebrate our commonalities without being the people of the "just like you." We can revel in our unique excellent qualities, and we can take pride in them" (Sing If You're Glad to Be Trans 193).
"We [Transpeople] have thought not only about how much we want to be daughters instead of sons, but why, and
what that will mean. We've enjoyed fantasies and then we have grappled with our realities, and at every turn
there has been a cost/benefit analysis. At every turn, we have thought about what it was worth to be who we
thought we were.
And how powerful is that? However difficult it also is, we know who we think we are and refashioned
ourselves. Let's just say that transfolk, as a community, are not the ones to find ourselves easily thwarted by
a difficult task.
And by the way, since we're talking about it, this is a job skill. I think we approach
job interviews full of dread, full of fear, hoping that someone will "see past" our trans identities and hire
us anyway. The hell with that. "Listen," you should say to your prospective employer. "Listen, now. I was born
Louise, in Missouri, in 1971. Between then and now I undertook a substantial process of internal review,
identified all the steps required to achieve and investigation of local, state, and federal laws and statutes.
I created a budget, managed a financial plan, engaged in medical research and literature review, created a
support network for myself, undertook a rigorous program of education and training, negotiated substantial
reworking of existing agreements with all constituent parties, and completed all portions of the plan on
schedule. My name is now Phil, and you should hire me--if not because I did all that, then because when am I
ever going to say to you all that, then because when am I ever going to say to you that something can't be
done? When am I ever going to tell you that a task is too complicated?"
We have already learned how not
to invest ourselves in someone else's No. We have already heard No a million times in our own lives, and we've
heard it from the most powerful people in our lives—parents, teachers, religious leaders, medical
professionals—and yet we have not been deterred. Maybe for a minute, maybe we have retreated and regrouped and
returned again, but we have not let out people's No's run our lives, and we have not let them overrule the
Yesses in our hearts. And that is why it is great to be trans.
That is, of course, leaving aside the
reality of how good it is, how satisfying, to occupy a body you had a hand in creating. Let's think about this.
Most people just spend a lot of time complaining about their love handles or dying their hair a darker red. And
while that's fine—and hey, I'm not that excited about my love handles some days either—it is not the same as
taking a good long look at what you're working with and making substantive changes. I know a fabulous
transwoman who was once vigorously scolded by a religious fanatic about mutlilating the temple of her body. She
retorted: I didn't multilate it. I remodeled the kitchen, I added a breakfast nook, and I put on a little front
porch.
Listen, no one is saying you should have surgery, or that you should take hormones, or that
there's anything better or worse about those options. Well, not true--people are. Othere people have all sorts
of opinions about what transpeople should or should not do to or with out bodies. I am here to say you can
freely ignore them. But I am also here to ssay that is, in itself, a miraculous thing. Transpeople have a lot
of choices about how we embody ourselves, and I don't just mean phusically. We are none of us doing it exactly
the way they did it at home. Okay, some things: I am making my grandmother's chicken soup the same exact way
she makes it, and I'm not giving that up. But overall, we have already learned that there is more than one
right way. We have already learned that we can remain true to our hearts' desires. That we should.
And
some of us are making changes to our bodies. We're taking hormones, we're having surgeries, we're at the gym,
we're in the bathroom with a secret tube of mascara brushing it onto our lashes or trying to make our goatees
look a little thicker . . . um, maybe that's just me. But regardless, we have our ways. We are making our ways,
and we're looking in the mirror every morning for signs of changed, and when they happen we are so excited! So
pleased to be moving toward what we need to look like, how we need to walk through the world, what it is we
need to see when we examine our reflections in the mirror for ourselves. We've taken change in hand, and we've
made it, and that is so satisfying. It is like living in a house you built yourself, paddling down the river in
a canoe you built with your best friend, making something with great tenderness and great care that will serve
you forever and give you a lot of pleasure. And that is why it is great to be trans.
While we're
talking about pleasure, can I just say this? Queers and transfolk have great sex. We do. No one wants to talk
about this. There is a movement afoot in North America that says sex is frivolous and selfish, that if we talk
about sex we will not be taken seriously, and so we edit it out. We have learned that when we talk about sex,
it makes the relifious fundamentalists go bat shit crazy and start lighting up the phone lines, and so we have
stopped. We censor ourselves. And that is not fair. Sex is great! It's fun, it feels good, it's good for
us--and let me tell you the truth about this. The fundamentalist right wing is not going to like us any better
if we don't talk about sex. They will not. They already think we're irredeemably perverted freakshows, so let
'em. I am not going to pretend I don't care about sexual pleasure in order to appease a group of people who are
never, ever going to be happy with me anyway. Are you really prepared to let a group of mean strangers guide
your life? Guide it more than your own pleasure? Your own wellness?
Queers and trannies, as a group, have
better sex. I am sure of this, even though I can't prove it. I can prove that people who have sex an average of
once per week over the course of their lifetimes live longer and report much higher satisfaction with their
lives, or at least I can point to the research that says so, and I want is all to live longer. As an elder, I
want to my world to be populated with old queers and trannies sitting around on the porch telling activist
stories and raising up young people into our culture and dropping our napkins repeatedly so that the hunky
nursing assistants have to bend down and get them. Ahem. So I'm just going to say this like a fact--we are
having better sex. We are having amazing, transformative, delicious sec. We started learning about our genders,
many of us, through sex, and we learned that we can be anything we want while we're fucking. That's a lot of
power, right there, a lot of possibility. While we're busy doing things our own way, nowhere does that exist
more than is bed (or alleyway or backseat or over the arm of the couch or whatever you've got going on). We
already know that we can try on, or try out, new ways of relating, new genders, new sensibilities. WE have
already learned to communicate about sex, to say please touch me here and not there, please call my parts this
or that, okease touch me in a way that makes me feel okay about myself. We've already learned that we can
choose not to have sex with people who won't sign on to our comfort as a high priority, and we've learned that
if you break the barrier and talk about how you want to be touched, you get to have much better sex" (Sing If You're Glad to Be Trans
196-200)
"Indeed, while many considered thinness an American shortcoming, for the adherents of the style, slenderness
served as a marker of moral, racial, and national superiority. This attitude is on full display in an 1896
article from Harper's Bazaar titled "Are Our Women Scrawny?" It begins with a reflection on the slenderness of
American women: "American women in general are still thought to be sallow and scrawny." The article's anonymous
author contests this assertion, claiming that while poorer women may be malnourished, few women of the
privileged classes are so slim as to look peaked, as may have been the case with their foremothers. Today, the
author asserts, American women have a "wholesome glow in their cheeks" and a bit more flesh on their bones,
both of which are a testament to the "wholly unmeasured success" of the American experiment.
Yet, while praising a new and laudable "roundness" to the figure of the modern girl, the author
nevertheless betrays a preference for traditional American slenderness. Of the shifting outlines of the
nation's women, the author wrote, "One cannot help noticing in every metropolitan assembly that the feminine
litheness and flexibility for which the republic has been famous is already on the wane, and that the opposite
extreme is menacing."
(Intro 3)
"The discourse of fatness as "coarse," "immoral," and "black" worked to denigrate black women, and it
concomitantly became the impetus for the promulgation of slender figures as the proper form of embodiment for
elite white Christian women."
(Intro 6)
"For my analysis, I draw on the work of two eminent social theorists, Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault.
According to Bordieu, elites are constantly working to differentiate themselves from the lower classes. In so
doing, they often distinguish themselves by cultivating tastes, diets, and physical appearances that are in
opposition to those of the subordinated groups. These "social distinctions" serve to naturalize and normalize
social hierarchies."
(Intro 7)
"I show that abstemiousness in England during the eighteenth century laid the groundwork for moralizing
surrounding the oral appetites that would be seen in subsequent eras, particularly in the United States."
(Intro 10)
"But her husband was never entirely comfortable with her success, and de Mille was aware that he had affairs on
the side. She accepted this as something of an inevitability. When her friend the writer Rebecca West learned
of her own husband's infidelity, de Mille sent her a letter of empathy and support. "I have yet to meet the man
who can accept with grace and comfort creativity in his wife," she wrote. "Men can't. They want to. But they
feel dwarfed and obligated. . . . That's how it is, darling. Gifted women pay. There are compensations."
(p. 46, p.1 Agnes de Mille)
"Well I must confess I have had an idle day--god knows why," Mansfield wrote in a representative example from
1921.
All was to be written but I didn't write it. I thought I would but I felt tired after tea and rested
instead. Is it good or bad in me to behave so? I have a sense of guilt but at the same time I know that to rest
is the very best thing I can do. . . . There is so much to do and I do so little. Life would be almost perfect
here if only when I was pretending to work I always was working. But that is surely not too hard? Look
at the stories that wait and wait just at the threshold. Why don't I let them in? And their place would be
taken by others who are lurking just beyond out there--waiting for the chance.
[...] And she also had to
admit that her nonwriting days were, in the end, just as important as the more conventionally productive ones.
"What happens as a rule is, if I go on long enough I break through," Mansfield wrote in her journal.
"It's rather like tossing very large flat stones in the stream. The question is, though, how long this will
prove efficacious. Up till now, I own, it never has failed me. . . ."
(p. 108, Katherine Mansfield)
"I wake filled with a tremulous yet steady rapture," [Virginia Woolf] wrote in a 1930 letter, "carry my pitcher
full of lucid and deep water across the garden, and am forced to spill it all by--some one coming."
(p.167 p.3, "Virginia Woolf") -- in reference to being interrupted or unable to focus due to
guests/friends.
"Her teaching often informs other academic commitments. Her teaching often informs her writing--indeed, Nelson
said, a lot of her writing starts as intensive "reading cycles," during which she'll make notes with a
mechanical pencil in the margins of books. When she reaches the end of a cycle, she'll go back through the
books and type up all her notes and see where she is. At some point, she knows it's time to start writing.
"It's kind of cheesy, but I'll just start writing sentences in my head," she said. "And then it seems like I've
hit some kind of tipping point where the research should be over and the writing part should happen."
(179, p.2, Maggie Nelson)
"Asked if she's ever had writer's block, she laughed. "Never," she said. "If you have writer's block, you're
not reading enough. And you're not thinking enough. Because there's no such thing as writer's block. What that
really means is you don't have anything to say. And everybody goes through a period of not having anything to
say; you have to accept that." Asked whether she often has periods of not having anything to say, Giovanni
laughed again. "Very seldom."
(181, p.3, Nikki Giovanni)
"From the age of fifteen to the moment in which I am writing, I have been scolded in one form or another, for
working too hard," Martineau noted in her autobiography. But the fact was, she continued, that she "had no
power of choice" when it came to her intellectual labor: "I have not done it for amusement, or for money, or
for fame, or for any reason but because I could not help it. Things were pressing to be said; and there was
more or less evidence that I was the person to save them."
(192, p.2, Harriet Martineau)
"One night at dinner during their vacation, Mitchell turned to Saint Phalle and said, "So you're one of those
writer's wives that paint." The remark, Saint Phalle wrote years later, "hurt me to the quick. It hit me as
though an arrow pierced a sensitive part of my soul."
Returning to Paris, Saint Phalle decided that if
she wanted to be taken seriously as an artist, she would have to make a more drastic commitment. Since marrying
Mathews at eighteen, she had worked as a model, attended drama school, suffered a nervous breakdown, and
discovered a talent and passion for art. But she had never had the opportunity to give all her energy and
attention to one thing. In 1960, still smarting from Mitchell's comment, she left her husband and two children,
ages nine and five, so that she could "live her artistic adventure to the full without the perfect balance that
I found between my work, Harry and the children." [...]
(207, P2 "Niki de Saint Phalle")
"A few years later, Saint Phalle began working primarily as a sculptor, and in 1978 she embarked on the Tarot
Garden, a monumental sculpture garden that she built in Tuscany over the course of twenty years. After the
site's largest sculpture, a house-size female figure, was completed, Saint Phalle moved into its interioor,
turning one breast into her bedroom and the other into her kitchen. (The only windows were built into the
sculpture's nipples). "I enjoyed living the life of a monk, but it wasn't always pleasan," she later wrote of
her seven years living inside the sculpture. "There was a large hole in the ground where I kept my provisions,
and I cooked on a tiny camping stove. Every hot night I woke up to find swarms of insects from the marshes
buzzing round me, as in a childish nightmare."
(pg. 209 P1, "Niki de Saint Phalle")
"It seems to me you have to have your personal life organized so that it takes as little of your time as
possible. Otherwise you can't make your art. And if you're an artist, I don't care what they say, you should be
married to an artist. If not, forget it. If you aren't married to an artist, what would you talk about?"
(216, P.3, "Eleanor Antin")
"Later, Klumpke learned of another key aaspect of Bonheur's morning routine: The artist's bedroom was filled
with birdcages, in which she kept more than sixty birds, "of all kinds and color, who made a deafening din from
morning until night," Klumpke wrote. Every morning after waking, Bonheur went from cage to cage, feeding her
beloved creatures. But, Klumpke wondered, didn't they bother her when she was trying to sleep? "Not at all,"
Bonheur replied "I never close the curtains, and the sun wakes me before my birds start warbling. I love to
catch the morning's first ray of light. That's why I'm so happy every morning when the clouds haven't deprived
me of my favorite wakeup call."
Birds were hardly the only animal in Bonheur's care--she also kept, Klumpke reported, "dogs, horses,
donkeys, oxen, sheep, goats, red deer, roe deer, lizards, mouflons, [a type of wild sheep], boars, monkeys, the
sweetest and fiercest lions." One of the lions, names Fatima, was known to follow Bonheur around like a poodle,
and the pet monkeys were given the run of the house. Of one monkey, named Ratata, Bonheur wrote: "In the
evening she comes home and does up my hair. I think she takes me for an old male of her kind!"
But the
real purpose of this extensive menagerie was to give Bonheur plenty of subjects for her paintings, and to allow
her to work from her estate without having to make the rounds of farms, stockyards, animal markets, and horse
fairs. To paint her animals out in the fields, Bonheur commissioned the construction of an unusual wagon that
protected her from inclement weather, described by a friend as "a kind of cabin on four wheels" with one side
"all in glass, behind which, protected from cold air, sat Rosa Bonheur." With her animals and her painting and
the love of Micas and, later, Klumpke, Bonheur had everything she needed. "I am an old rat," the artist wrote
in 1867, seven years after settling on her estate, "who after sniffing about over the hill and dale retires
quite satisfied to his hole, yet in reality somewhat sad to have seen the world without taking part in it."
(251, "Rosa Bonheur")
"You know artists used to talk about inspiration and the muse. The muse! That's amusing! But it's not your
muse, it's your relationships with the creative forces that makes things appear when you need them. . . . So
you have to work with free association and dreaminess, let yourself go with memories, chance encounters,
objecys. I try to achieve a balance between the rigorous discipline I've learned in my thirty years of making
films and these many unforeseen moments and the vibrations of chance."
One of the advantages of getting
older, Varda said in 1988, was that she felt a growing tranquility about her career. She no longer got tense
about the work she had yet to do; she enjoyed, she said, "the privelege of having something in me that no one
can touch, which no one can destroy." And then, when the opportunity to make a new film came along, she would
spring into action with tremendous energy. "I tend to wear out the people on my team with the extreme speed at
which I do things and also by my demands on them," she said. "I get up at five a.m. to write my dialogs. I get
to the set an hour before anyone else to check things out. I may have last minute ideas and want to set them in
motion right away. I make incredible demands without any doubts about whether they'll work."
(283-284,
"Agnes Varda")
"Needless to say, Sagan never followed any particular writing routine. "Sometimes I write in bursts of ten days
or fortnight at a time," she said. "In between, I think about the story, day-dream and talk about it. I ask
people for their opinions. Their opinions matter a lot." She always started with a rough draft, which she wrote
quickly, sometimes completing ten pages in an hour or two. "There's never any plan because I like improvising,"
she said. "I like to feel that I'm pulling the strings of the story and that I can pull them whichever way I
like." But after the draft was done she revised carefully, paying special attention to the rhythm and balance
of her sentences: "there mustn't be a syllable ro a beat missing." When the writing didn't meet her standards,
Sagan found the process "humiliating," she said. "It's rather like dying: you feel so ashamed of yourself,
ashamed of what you've written. You feel pathetic. But when it's going wel, you feel like a well-oiled machine
that's working perfectly. It's like watching someone run a hundred yards in ten seconds. It's a miracle."
(268, p.2 "Francoise Sagan")
"In this and everything else, Neel refused to copromise; it was the artist's perogative to be selfish, she
thought, and she would not feel guilty about it, especially when male artists were granted these priveleges
without question. She told students in a 1972 lecture, "I felt women represented a dreary way of life, always
helping a man and never performing themselves, whereas I wanted to be an artist myself! I could certainly have
accomplished more with a good wife. That is quite male chauvinist, but this was the world with which I was
confronted."
(268, "Alice Neel")
"Indeed, one constant in her career has been long breaks, usually years long, in between photo series. During
this time Sherman will feel thay she never wants to take another photo--but so far, eventually, something has
always brought her back for another attempt."
(302, "Cindy Sherman")
"I have to say that as life went on I understand that when you are more adult, a state of mind is less
important to writing, in that at a certain stage in your life you have so many losses that there is always an
underlying unhappiness. And therefore it influences less. You learn to write in any state of mind, and you feel
more . . . I wouldn't say distant from you own life but a bit readier to dominate it."
(318, Natalia
Ginzburg)
"At the end of heavy breathing
who will be responsible
for the destruction of human love?
Who
are the heartless
sons of bitches
sucking blood from dreams
as they are born?
Who has the guts
to come forward
and testify?
Who will save
our sweet world?" (15 V2 'Heavy Breathing')
VOICES
In Memory of William DeLoach, Age 5
My hands disappear
gloved in crimson flames.
They drip like wax
with your blood
burning the floor.
Nothing about this alarms me.
Nothing appears unusual.
I open the refrigerator
and place your head
on the top shelf.
Blood streaks
the white-shelled eggs below.
The voices of my waking world,
the captors of my sleep
are satisfied. Silent.
They are leaving
as I wax the kitchen floor
for the seventh time.
Over many months
the voices spoke to me.
As I tried to sleep,
when I rode the bus
or shopped for food
they were with me.
I tried to flee
but the voices pursued.
No drug soothed me.
No doctor could hear
what I heard.
The voices wanted me
to free my son
from his breed
and complexion.
"Too dark to live!"
They implored.
I should have kept him
in my womb.
I don't hear his screams
when I close the refrigerator.
The evening the voices demanded,
"Deliver him---now!"
I withdrew the meat knife.
I called him to the kitchen
and beckoned him into my arms
to kiss me.
I slit his throat
as he tip-toed up
to put his lips to mine.
I licked his sweet blood
from my hands and blade.
I carved his heart from his chest
and hid it from a thief named God.
Nothing about this alarmed me.
No, nothing appeared unusual,
Your Honor. (pg. 25-26, whole poem)
WHEN MY BROTHER FELL
For Joseph Beam
When my brother fell
I picked up his weapons
and never once questioned
whether I could carry
the weight and grief,
the responsibility he shouldered.
I never questioned
whether I could aim
or be precise as he.
He had fallen,
and the passing ceremonies
marking his death
did not stop the war.
Standing at the front lines
flanked by able brothers
who miss his eloquent courage,
his insistent voice
urging us to rebel,
urging us to not fear embracing
for more than sex,
for more than kisses
and notches in our belts.
Our loss is greater
than all the space
we fill with prayers
and praise.
He burned out
his pure life force
to bring us dignity,
to bring us a chance
to love ourselves
with commitment.
He knew the simple
spilling of seed
would not be enough
to bind us.
It is difficult
to stop marching, Joseph,
impossible to stop our assault.
The tributes and testimonies
in your honor
flare up like torches.
Every night
a light blazes for you
in one of our hearts.
There was no one lonelier
than you, Joseph.
Perhaps you wanted love
so desperately and pleaded
with God for the only mercy
that could be spared.
Perhaps God knew
you couldn't be given
more than public love
in this lifetime.
When I stand
on the front lines now,
cussing the lack of truth,
the abscence of willful change
and strategic coalitions,
I realize sewing quilts
will not bring you back
nor save us.
It's too soon
to make monuments
for all we are losing,
for the lack of truth
as to why we are dying,
who wants us dead,
what purpose does it serve?
When my brother fell
I picked up his weapons.
I didn't question
whether I could aim
or be as precise as he.
A needle and thread
were not among
his things
I found. (pg.31-33, whole poem)
"When I speak at home, I mean not only the famililial constellation from which I grew, but the entire Black community: the Black press, the Black church, Black academicians, the Black literati, and the Black left. Where is my reflection? I am most often rendered invisible, perceived as a threat to the family, or I am tolerated if I am silent and inconspicuous. I cannot go home as who I am and that hurts me deeply (p.231)." (pg.37-38 "Does Your Mama Know About Me?" essay, quotation from Joseph Beam)
"Mapplethorpe's "Man in a Polyester Suit," for example, presents a Black man without a head, wearing a business
suit, his trousers unzipped, and his fat, long penis dangling down, a penis that is not erect. It can be
assumed that many viewers who appreciate Mapplethorpe's work, and who costruct sexual fantasies from it,
probably wondered first how much larger would the penis become during erection, as opposed to
wondering who is the man in the photo or why is his head missin? What is insulting and
endangering to Black men is Mapplethorpe's concious determintation that the faces, the heads, and by
extension, the minds and experiences of some of his Black subjects are not as important as close up shots of
their cocks.
It is virtually impossible while viewing Mapplethorpe's photos of Black males to avoid confronting issues of
explotation and objectification. Additionally, Black gay men are not immune to the desire elicited by his
photoes. We, too, are drawn to the inherent eroticism. In "True Confessions: A Discourse on Images of Black
Male Sexuality" (Ten-* No. 22, 1986), Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer accurately identify this dichotomy when
they ovserce that Mapplethorpe's images of Black males reiterate "the terms of colonial fantasy" and "service
the expectation of white desire."" They then ask the most critical question of all: "What do [Mapplethorpe's
images] say to our wants and desires as Black gay men (p.6)?"
It has not fully dawned on white gay men, that racist conditioning has rendered many of them no different from
their heterosexual brothers in the eyes of Black gays and lesbians. Coming out of the closet to confront sexual
oppression has not necessarilygiven white males the motivation or insight to transcend their racist
conditionin. This failure (or reluctance) to transcend is costing the gay and lesbian community the opportunity
to become a powerful force for creating real social changes that reach beyond issues of sexuality. It
has fostered much of the distrust that permeated the relations between the Black and white communities. And
finally, it erodes te possibility of forming meaningful, powerful coalitions. (pg. 38-40
"Does Your Mama Know About Me?")
"It is not enough to tell us that one was a brilliant poet, scientist, educator, or rebel. Who did he love? It makes a difference. I can't become a whole man simply on what is fed to me: watered-downversions of Black life in America. I need the ass-splitting truth to be told, so I will have something pure to emulate, a reason to remain loyal (pg. 64 "Loyalty")."
THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES
You are not to touch yourself
in any way
or be familiar with ecstasy.
You are not to touch
anyone of your own sex
or outside of your race
then talk about it,
photograph it, write it down
in explicit details, or paint it,
red, orange, blue, or dance
in honor of its power, dance
for its beauty, dance
because it's yours.
You are not to touch other flesh
without a police permit.
You have no privacy---
the State wants to seize your bed
and sleep with you.
The State wants to control
your sexuality, your birth rate,
your passion.
The message is clear:
your penis, your vagina,
your anus, your orgasm,
these belong to the State.
You are not to touch yourself
or be familiar with ecstasy.
The erogenous zones
are not demilitarized. (pg. 72-73)
"Everything different
tests my faith.
I have stood in places
where the absence of light
allowed me to live longer,
while at the same time
it tendered me blind (pg. 81-82,
"The Tomb of Tomorrow")
"In Paris is Burning, power remains almost exclusively defined in materialistic, Caucasian, and consumer terms. Many long to be rich and famous. Some long to be rich and famous. Some long to be white and female, clearly an escapist longing, a longing that if realized would then place them in collusion with white supremacy-- the primary source of their present disempowerment. They want to be stars in a world that barely wants to see them alive and thriving. They want things in a world that has caused more than a few of them to not want themselves (pg. 116 "To Be Real")
"A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Harlem" by Eric Garber
CORDON NEGRO
I drink champagne early in the morning
instead of leaving my house
with an M16 and nowhere to go.
I die twice as fast
as any other American
between eighteen and thirty-five.
This disturbs me,
but I try not to show it in public.
Each morning I open my eyes is a miracle.
The blessing of opening them
is temporary on any given day.
I could be taken out,
I could go off,
I could go forget to be careful.
Even my brothers, hunted, hunt me.
I'm the only one who values my life
and sometimes I don't give a damn.
My love life can kill me.
I'm faced daily with choosing violence
or a demeanor that saves every other life
but my own.
I won't cross over.
It's time someone came to me
not to patronize me physically,
sexually or humorously.
I'm sick of being an endangered species,
sick of being a goddamn statistic.
So what are my choices?
I could leave with no intention
of coming home tonight,
go cray downtown and raise hell
on a rooftop with my rifle.
I could live for a brief moment
on the six o'clock news,
or masquerade another day
through the corridors of commerce
and American dreams.
I'm dying twice as fast
as any other American.
So I pour myself a glass of champagne,
I cut it with a drop of orange juice.
After I swallow my liquid Valium,
my private celebration
for being alive this morning,
I leave my shelter,
I guard my life with no apologies.
My concerns are small
and personal. (pg. 124-125)
"I'm a faggot because I love *me* enough to be who I am. If your son becomes a faggot it won't be because of the way you or his mother raise him. It won't be because of television, movies, books, and education. It will be because he learns to trust the natural expression of his sexuality without fear or shame. If he learns anything about courage from you or his mother, then he'll grow up to be himself. You can't blame being straight or gay on a woman or education. The education that's needed should be for the purpose of bringing us all out of sexual ignorance. Our diverse sexuality is determined by the will of nature, and nature *is* the will of God" (pg. 128 "In An Afternoon Light").
"I'm a faggot because I love *me* enough to be who I am. If your son becomes a faggot it won't be because of the way you or his mother raise him. It won't be because of television, movies, books, and education. It will be because he learns to trust the natural expression of his sexuality without fear or shame. If he learns anything about courage from you or his mother, then he'll grow up to be himself. You can't blame being straight or gay on a woman or education. The education that's needed should be for the purpose of bringing us all out of sexual ignorance. Our diverse sexuality is determined by the will of nature, and nature *is* the will of God" (pg. 128 "In An Afternoon Light").
PRESSING FLATS
You wanna sleep on my chest?
You wannt listen to my heart beat
all through the night?
It's the only jazz station
with a twenty-four-hour signal,
if you wanna listen.
If you answer yes
I expect you to be able
to sleep in a pit of cobras.
You should be willing
to destroy your enemy
if it comes to that.
If you have a weapon.
If you know how to use your hands.
You should be able to distinguish
oppression from pleasure.
Some pleasure is oppression
but then, that isn't pleasure, is it?
Some drugs induce pleasure
but isn't that oppression?
If you're immobilized you're oppressed.
If you're killing yourself you're oppressed.
If you don't know who you are
you're pressed.
A prayer candle won't always solve the confusion.
The go-go won't always the mind off things.
Our lives don't get better with coke
they just--get away from us.
There doesn't have to be a bomb
if we make up our minds
we don't want to die that way.
We're told what's right from left.
We're told there is good and evil,
laws and punishment,
but no one speaks of the good in evil
or the evil in good.
You wanna sleep on my chest?
You wanna listen to my heart beat
all through the night?
It's the only jazz station
with a twenty-four-hour signal
if you wanna listen.
If you know what I mean. (139-140)
BLACK BEANS
Times are lean,
Pretty Baby,
the beans are burnt
at the bottom
of the battered pot.
Let's make fierce love
on the overstuffed
hand-me-down sofa.
We can burn it up, too.
Our hungers
will evaporate like---money.
I smell your lust,
not the pot burnt black
with tonight's meager meal.
So we can't but flowers for our table.
Our kisses are petals,
our tongues caress the bloom.
Who dares to tell us
we are poor and powerless?
We keep treasure
any kind would count as dear.
Come on, Pretty Baby.
Our souls can't be crushed
like cats crossing the streets too soon.
Let the beans burn all night long.
Our chipped water glasses are filled
with wine from our loving.
And the burnt black beans---
Caviar.
BETTER DAYS
In daytime hours,
guided by instincts
that never sleep,
the faintest signals
come to me
over vast spaces
of etiquette
and restraint.
Sometimes I give in
to the pressing
call of instinct,
knowing the code of my kind
better than I know
the National Anthem
or "The Lord's Prayer."
I am so driven by my senses
to abandon restraint,
to seek pure pleasure
through every pore.
I want to smell the air
around me thickly scented
with a playboy's freedom.
I want impractical relationships.
I want buddies and partners,
names I will forget by sunrise.
I don't want to commit my heart.
I only want to feel good.
I only want to freak sometimes.
There are no other considerations.
A false safety compels me
to think I will never need kindness,
so I don't recognize
that need in someone else.
But it concerns me,
going off to sleep
and waking
throbbing with wants,
that I am being
consumed by want.
And I wonder
where stamina comes from
to search all night
until my footsteps ring
awake the sparrows,
and I go home, ghost walking,
driven indoors to rest
my hunter's guise,
to love myself as fiercely
as I have in better days. (146-147)
UNDER CERTAIN CIRCUMSTANCES
I am lonely for past kisses,
for wild lips certain streets
breed for pleasure.
Romance is a foxhole.
This kind of war frightens me.
I don't want to die
sleeping with soldiers
I don't love.
I want to court outside the race,
outside the class, outside the attitudes---
but love is a dangerous word
in this small town.
Those who seek it are sometimes found
facedown floating on their beds.
Those who find it protect it
or destroy it from within.
But the disillusioned---
those who've lost the stardust,
the moondance, the waterfront;
like them, I long for my past.
When I was ten, thirteen, twenty---
I wanted candy, five dollars, a ride. (152)
"I feel thankful I don't love you.
I won't have to suffer you later on.
But for now I say, Johnnie Walker,
have you had enough, Johnnie Walker?
Do-I-look-like-a-woman-now?
Against the fogged car glass
do I look like your crosstown lover?
Do I look like Shirley?" (160 "Isn't It Funny")
"She remembers her mom explaining what levees were for. They weren't made for beach towel picnics, she
said—they were made to protect them. To keep water out when storms came.
It wasn't long afterward that a
storm too big for the levees came. 2005. Their apartment in Belle Chasse, the Idlewild place, got eight feet of
water. All the files, maps, photos, all the years of handwritten notes, a wet pulp shoveled out the window of a
condemned building. August's mom saved one tupperware tub of files on her brother and not a single one of
August's baby pictures. August lost everything and thought that maybe, if she could become someone who didn't
have anything to lose, she'd never have anything to lose, she'd never have to feel that way again.
She
turned nine in a Red Cross shelter, and something started to sour in her heart, and she couldn't stop it.
August sits on the edge of an air mattress in Brooklyn and tries to imagine how it would feel if she
didn't have any of those memories to understand what made her who she is. If she woke up one day and just was
and didn't know why.
Nobody tells you how those nights that stand out in your memory—levee sunset nights,
hurricane nights, first kiss nights, homesick sleepover nights, nights when you stood at your bedroom window
and looked at the lilies one porch over and thought they would stand out, singular and crystalized, in your
memory forever—they aren't really anything. They're everything, and they're nothing. They make you who you are,
and they happen at the same time a twenty-three-year-old a million miles away is warming up some leftovers,
turning in early, switching off the lap. They're so easy to lose.
You don't learn until you're older how
to zoom out of that extreme proximity and make it fit into the bigger picture of your life. August didn't learn
until she sat knee-to-knee with a girl who couldn't remember who she was, and tried to help her piece
everything back together.
(114)
"She can hear everyone in the living room laughing. She feels as separate from it as she did the day she moved
in.
Her whole life, the gnaw of anxiety has made people opaque to her. No matter how well she knows
someone, no matter the logical patterns, no matter how many allowances she knows someone might make for
her—that bone-deep fear of rejection has always made it impossible for her to see any of it. It frosts over the
glass. She never had anyone to begin with, so she let it be unsurprising that nobody would want to have her
around. […] You can try, she guesses. You can tear yourself apart and rebuild from scratch, bring yourself to
every corner of the map, sew a new self from the scraps of a thousand other people and places. You can try to
expand to fill a different shape. But at the end of the day, there's a place at the foot of the bed where your
shoes hit the floor, and it's the same.
It's always the same."
(280)
"Myla sighs. "Sometimes the point is to be sad, August. Sometimes you just have to feel it because it deserves
to be felt.""
(345)
(p. 28 P.10 "Radio Drama" ) "The world is such a strange place. This disgusting pattern just keeps on repeating. I felt myself getting angry—of course the one with all the power didn't need to argue! When you're the one with the torturous monologue droning through your head all day and night, of course you need to shout. You have to get it out. Men don't hear that voice. They keep going just as they please, not hearing anything at all."
(p 62 P. 2 "The Chest") "An Yah remembered all his old habits. Thirty years of marriage, during which they had changed both enormously and hardly at all. The sewing machine, gramophone, bamboo blinds, sideboard, and various other furniture had been in Big Man's family since long before the two of them married. For the better part of half a century, the room had barely changed. The major transformation had happened when Big Man died and An Yah became a widow. This old place had become hers."
(P 72 p7 "The Chest") "Then [An Yah] and her daughter set about moving the chest into the kitchen. It wasn't an
easy process: An Yah had to clear away piles of merchandise, and then the two of them had to half-drag,
half-carry the chest along the newly cleared route.
"Last night I suddenly remembered why it's so heavy," said An Yah. "This isn't Dad's gramophone chest, it
belonged to your granny."
"To Ah Nei? You mean we had two?" Her daughter was surprised. She clasped her
hands to her face and sighed with relief. "I thought you had thrown it away and then regretted it, and secretly
gone to get it back."
"Why would I do that? There's too much stuff here as it is."
"That's what
you're like, though! You never throw anything away. You live in a glorified trash heap!"
"Nonsense." An Yah was getting angry. "Now you're just nagging."
"The whole house is full of junk!"
"If you don't like it, don't come over!"
Her daughter didn't reply.
The wood of the chest was in perfect condition, not rotten at all.
"If Ah Nei were here, she'd hack it up for firewood . . ."
"Things like this are always turning up in this house . . ." Said her daughter.
The house had been home to so many dead people.
An Yah knocked on the bottom layer of wood inside the chest. It sounded hollow. The nails were firmly in place.
She hunted around the kitchen for a claw hammer to pry them out, pushing aside towels and cleaning rags drying
on a line. When she opened the drawers, cockroaches and geckos scurried out in all directions.
Other people's kitchens weren't so stuffed with cupboards. Big Man's uncles had made these ones. Aside from the
big display cabinets, all the furniture in the shop was at least fifty or sixty years old. The little stools,
the long sideboard used for ironing, the ancestral shrine. The wood was old and hard, exceptionally sturdy,
varnished to a high shine, all as heavy to lug around as those doors she carried in and out, every morning and
evening.
"I sold one off, this one was probably under Ah Nei's bed or something. How it got out here, I have no idea. I
was confused. I forgot which one it was. I just assumed it was the one your dad kept his gramophone in."
Finally, she found an ax in the back of a drawer.
"Stand back," she warned her daugther.
And she started hacking the chest apart."
---This is such a strange but awesome ending! A haunted chest! Seems like there is something about familial
baggage, even not your true family or people you even liked. An Yah has old fashioned doors, the last set in
the shops around her, and each morning and night she has to lift them and move them open and closed. They're
not even that protective. She lives and works in a junk shop. It all feels like a woman aged and trapped in the
place of those who've died. Everything is heavy with memory there.
(pg. 123 p. 5) "Reading from the Quran mends mouths, but they sin by misprounouncing syllables. They sin by
secretly skipping pages. They sin by lying. They sin by gently pinching someone else's palm, and sin by
pressing someone else's face into their laps and trapping their hair between their knees, stroking their head.
The scent of wrongdoing wavers on their lips. The corners on their mouths collapse inward, forming two sharp
little caverns.
It is all major. As major as the crumbs carried by the ants."
(pg. 124 p.5) "The wind blows the rain sideways, blows clothes sideways. The clothes never dry.
muram = desolate
It's the day before Hari Raya Haji and everyone has gone home. Only Aminah is left behind. Every hour the
warden comes looking for her with eyes like pincers. The emptiness weighs on Aminah. It feels like she has
swallowed a bowl of stones, or maybe a spiky fruit. Her lungs, heart, stomach are empty rooms.
On the day of the festival, starting from the dawn azan, she spreads herself wide as the garden. Or, to
be more specific: for the whole day, she walks and scatters herself. Her skull splits into four parts. One part
sleeps on her pillow, one falls into a washbasin, one is forgotten in front of the television, and one is left
behind on the sewing table.
Her tongue stays behind in her cup. Her toes lie on the doorstep. Her elbows rest on the edge of the
dining table. Her eyes press against the window glass. Her fingers are wedged behind the bolt for the gate. Her
knees roll off the top of the fence. Her ribs fall into a clump of flowers. She can't go any further. The
outside world is a hundred paces beyond her fingers. Aminah is everywhere.
When she wakes up, she'll realize that this is all a dream. The difference between dream and fantasy is
that the latter might cheat you, but the former never does."
(pg. 128 p.2) "This is a bit sentimental. Maybe everything we think about Bi is wrong. After all, we've never
really thought about people who exist between two elements before. Take us: I never even wanted to think about
the existence od Aminah. I have a crazy fantasy that Bi is our guardian angel. I have it even though the ustaz
say this is a Western idea, that angels are servants of Allah, and our webbed friend is too lowly to compare.
But I can't control my fantasies. And so the amphibian sleeps by our side, with rugged scales and hardened
scabs. The dream closes in on us, damp and cold.
Loneliness is to blame, there's no doubt. Bi appears to me as someone small and thin, but in my fantasies Bi is
tall and strong. Without even meaning to, I rely on my fantasies to lick my wounds. It can be a clear and sunny
day or the depths of the rainy season and my loneliness doesn't go away, so the fantasies just keep on coming.
Maybe it should have touched me up .But it's like a non-stop carousel. Loneliness, exhaustion, fantasy,
disillusioment. Fantasy fails and you're confronted with reality, and the reality is that you're lonely, and
you have to get used to it. But you'll never overcome it, because it's tiring to be lonely and exhaustion sets
in, and then the whole thing starts again. Should this be making me stronger, this perseverance in the face of
the same ordeal, over and over? If I believed in God, I wouldn't need to battle this alone. But if I choose not
to believe in God, then loneliness is my only bruden to bear. Does the make me pathetic, like a poor dog
begging for scraps? I think it's more pathetic when a person does not dare ask questions. You don't now what
you should ask, so you prefer to stand as far away as possible. You prefer to believe whatever it is you have
to say to make yourself feel better.
To be honest, I don't really want to tell Aminah's story. She always makes me feel pathertic. But there are
some things that have to be done, whether we like it or not. In this story, Aminah is more obedient than I
could ever be. I'm good at running away, although not at fighting back. When I want to run away, my gaze shifts
outward, alighting somewhere else, for example on the fluorescent light in front of me that's switched off now,
a thick gray line like the crease in the wall.
When I ask myself questions and answer them, Aminah disappears and Bi vanishes into a little crack, or maybe
dips back underwater I dream up a little hideout for Bi: fireflies glow faintly on all sides, mossy rocks steep
in ik-black river water, whirlpools gurgle and slap against Bi's ears, slap-slap, slap-slap, as Bi drifts
further and further away."
(pg. 133 p. 3) "The baby's coming," says Shaimah. "He's kicking me."
No hand can make a shadow shaped like a person. It has never been done. You can't make a person. That
patent belongs to God.
Stand up and you'll see it. The candle makes your shadow grow."
(pg.137 p.3) "Luck can't stay bad forever. Two cats snarl nearby. They've been fighting long enough that both
their ears are bleeding. A fruit thuds onto the roof and then rolls off onto the ground, where it will rot
before it has the chance to ripen. A dead bird lies with its legs to the sky. Aminah looks everywhere for a
good omen but there are only bad ones.
Whatever the omens, no more letters come from Kai. Everything
feels unbearable. The worls spins dast and it's flung me out of its orbit. This seperation is pointless. His
name peels away from inside me and I want to scream it. Water sours in my chest. I look at the trees, look at
the blank road ahead. The wind loosends rainstorms from the leaves. Stand at the railings and you can feel the
whol valley is dripping, the rain turning everything black: window lattices, tree trunks, roofs, pillars. Birds
build nests in holesbeneath the eaves. Spiders are massacred and then reborn, lurking in the corners of the
ceiling while their legs grow long again. Cat shit stinks up the garden."
(pg. 139 p.5) "The best destination is probably the savannah. Yes, that's it, then we could really run away from it all.
But then again, I'm not sure I could bear to be completely forgotten. It's hard to say, will this calm us
down or break our heart?
At the thought of being completely forgotten, tears well up. The Gombak River flows a long, long way. Why so
sorrowful, why so reluctant to leave?
Anyway, all we have is this blind horse. Pass through the forest that crashes like the sea, follow the
Gombak River down the mountain. Stroke the horse's ears, press bare feet into the stirrups; I have to learn
to handle a bllind horse. I feel that Aminah and I are bound together like a thick scab plastered over a
throbbing heart. Sunlight explodes from behind the trees and dazzles my eyes. Aminah, I call. She abides in
me, still and quiet, and later we will be each other's secret, one that neither of us can deny. The horse is
quiet, the stones are smooth, the forest is thick, the coast is far away.
For a second I watch a blade of grass. I do not move. I watch a wavering thread of light for a long, long time.
When you don't say or think anything, it's like sinking into mud. Once everything is completely love, I'll
speak from my heart, right into the air. Please blow away my longing. Slide down this slope, follow the
expressway, traverse fields and lichen-encrusted mounds, pass through container ports, climb up slopes, rise
above thundering freight trucks and jangling train rails, blow over the grass by the tracks and scatter the
sand from between the sleepers, one grain at a time, don't stir up dust, keep on until you get to his house.
Knock over the fence and pass by the orange trees. If the stuffiness is getting to him, he'll appreciate the
breeze.
After a while, the tree-sea roars. The wind swoops down from the tall, tall sky and lands on top of me.
The rain stops for two days and the leaves start to rustle as they walk. Aminah and I sit very still and quiet,
drying our toes in the sun.
(pg.141 p.3) "October, season of shifting winds; of winds in chaos. A southwesterly in the morning could turn
turn to northeasterly by afternoon, making it a perilous time for voyages at sea. Set off for Sulawesi and you
end up drifting toward Palawan. Venture into the Pacific and you might never come back.
In the balloon,
it would be calm to start with, because it would sit inside the wind. But then would come a pause, a switch in
difection, a sudden breath of warm air. The earth would spin in giddy circles down below--roofs, ship masts,
people; all bright as stars. The bay a blue plate, revolving slowly from west to east, and the air silent,
undetectable except for the currents dragging you along, pushing away the shoreline beneath your feet. Ocean
waves would knit together and surge forward as a blazing, shimmering expanse."
(pg.151 p.5) "She thought of the Amakusa Islands. She had almost forgotten her hometown, but still remembered
its hard, dry sand. The earth in Amakusa was hungry and it swallowed a lot of people. People died chewing sand.
There were more dead people in the fground than there were live rats above it. Her house had been as dark as a
rat hole and, in it, her mother had grown weaker and smaller by the year, as if gradually sinking into the
earth; as if there were something on the soles of her feet, pulling her in. One winter she decided that she no
longer wanted Kikuko drank a little ginger tea and left with a stranger, onto a boat going somewhere else. "If
you don't like it, just overboard," said her elder brother. Ten-year-old Kikuko did not jump overboard. Though
death was scarier than hunger, her stuffy wooden box was scarier than death, but she wasn't allowed out of it
onto the deck.
Thinking about it now made her fee abandoned all over again.
But she had not been abandoned, she told herself; she had abandoned them.
At first she had thought it was wrong to feel sadness about her departure, but she was starting to think it
might not be. She felt melancholy, a mood that hovered like a cloud of fog."
(pg.202 p.4) "She turned over, feeling oddly devastated. The winter bird was dying. It was inside her stomach;
shrunken like a plant's tendril, and heat and time were turning it into a fossil.
"Can I help you?" she asked. Whispering, as if talking to herself. [...]
"I'm about to go home and I'm not coming back," she said. "I know you're not here looking for me."
Her right arm tingled, and she almost fell on top of him. Her heart thumped. He was curled up. He seemed very
far awat, at the bottom of a sea she couldn't acccess. Never mind. Everyone had their own sea. She watched over
him for a while, and it was like watching the surface of water. And even though he was right there, she started
to miss him. But she couldn't get any closer.
Whatever happens, I am a keeper of mysteries, not a child anymore. [...]
Cui Yi wrote:
Will you come looking for me?
If you could come to my house, you should know that the floor is cracked. It is cracked into many pieces and
swollen in the middle, as if there's been an earthquake, but there hasn't; it's like that because of the whale.
Kedah province used to be all sea (the Kedah Sea, the Laut Kedah). One day, the sea water retreated, and all
the boats suddenly dropped, crashing onto the back of a whale, and they all cracked open along the bottom. The
whale had been living at the bottom of the sea for years and years, and after all that time it was covered in
sad, shells, seaweed, and parasites of all shaped and sizes. Imagine: its encrusted skin was as hard as rock.
After the sea retreated, my grandpa found some wood and earth and set about mending the floor. But it didn't
work, because it has been cracked every few years it cracks all the way open again.
My grandma consulted the spirits of our ancestors, and according to her, the only thing left of the whale is
bones. Our family isn't like other familis. Ah Nei would never lie about something like that. Why should she?
Unless her memory is playing tricks on her. If you ask her: Were the Japanese the bad guys? She will say: Some
of them. There's always good and bad no matter what people you are.
Last year I finished my exams. I learned two or three reference books by heart for every subject. One is never
enough, because no book can tell you everything. The contents might be mostly the same, but there's always some
tiny thing that's different, like one might have lots of words and simple illustrations, and another fewer
words and more detailed illustrations. I learned spore diagrams, maps of mineral distribution, diagrams of frog
and human dissections, cross sections of complex and single-celled organisms, electron cloud models of heavy
metal atoms--and that last one amounts to dozens of diagrams. Every single thing you touch is made up of a
hundred million tiny galaxies. A model of the most infinitesimally small electron cloud can be rotated and
redrawn in an infinite number of ways: a figure eight, a ring of Saturn, a double ring of Saturn, layers of
flower petals. . . it's such a complex equation. Like the mating dance of an insect, with all its seeking,
posturing, and fighting rituals. Have you ever watched the documentaries on the Discovery Channel? No matter
how hard you try, you'll never finish drawing those strange dances. To start with, they're invisible to the
naked eye and you need a camer to put them in slow motion. A hundred million dance moves in the blink of an
eye. What are they saying, in the space of that fraction of a second?"
----Is this her acceptance of not being able to understand the man's trip or purpose? If he is a ghost and
seeking something, is it simply impossible to spot the key moment he's seeking? She's watched him so many
times, followed his varied trips to the train, but she doesn't know him. To the untrained eye in another's
life, everything appears both important and unimportant. It's not for her to know. She cannot solve his riddle.
He does not even know she's there.
pg.18 P3 "The trouble was, that you couldn't becalm your mind completely because if you weren't careful, you'd
forget to turn off the stove."
Returning to this quote helped place the story for me. While Dorothy
is figuring out stuff with her fishy friend and relaxing into his affection, she misses the big glaring fire in
her life. Her husband stops sleeping with her and has started sleeping with the daughter of her best friend
Estelle who is a teenager. This line early on seems like an interesting bellringer for what's to come.
pg.37 P4 "Yes, I've always loved the sound of the sea. I think everybody does."
"For me, it's the sound of where I live. That's hard to explain. It's always there, like your heartbeats.
Always, for our whole lives, we have music. We have wonderful music. The sea speaks to us. And it's our home
that speaks. Can you understand?"
"You must be lonely."
"More than anything. More than hunger. Even hunger sometimes goes away, but this doesn't."
She stroked his face with her hand. She tried to imagine what this world could be like. Perhaps it was like a
child floaing in its mother's womb and hearing her voice all around him.
She asked, "What was it like?"
"So many things are different. Colour is different. Everything that you see tells you something. At the
Institute, they told me there are some people who are colour-blind. When you show them, they don't believe it
at first. They can't believe they suffer from this thing, because they have never known any other way. That's
how difficult it would be to explain the difference in the way my world looks."
"And the sound."
"And the way it feels. When you move, the place you live in moves too."
Pg.62 P4 "It was the first question shehad failed to explain since her collapse over the subject of industry and progress. She had started out with the introduction of agriculture, the coming of industry, the exploitation of women, the fact that it all started in the home where there was no choice, the idea that eventually robots and machines would release people to live a life of leisure and explore their own personalities; but, just before she reached that point, she forgot how to wind it up. A friend of Estelle's had once mapped it out for her so that it all sounded so clear, but ow she couldn't remember just how it went. Even what she could recall didn't seem to make so much sense any more. In fact, it was sort of a mess and impossible to explain. She had stopped, confused, and added, "But what people really want is to be happy."
Pg.76 P5 "He said that he enjoyed housework. He was good at it, and found it interesting. It was so different from anything he had known before: the hands had to be kept in constant motion, while the rest of the body remained more or less still.
They were lying in bed and watching television that afternoon, when Larry said sharply, "Look!"
"What?"
"What is it?"
"Where?"
"On the screen."
"Oh, it's an ad for a dance company."
"But what is is? Look."
"It's somebody called Merce Cunningham. You were right -- it's an ad, for a dance programme coming up next
week. It's a series. He has a dance company of his own."
"What's he doing?"
"Dancing."
"No, no, no," Larry said, getting out of bed, standing on the floor, and doing the strange
motions he had been doing for days now. Suddenly Dorothy realized that he was giving a perfect imitation of the
dance.
"That's his dance," she said.
"But what is it? What does it do?"
"I don't think it does anything. It expresses some emotion or idea, or gives an impression of an event. It
makes variations with patterns. Do you like it?"
"I don't understand it," he said, getting back into bed.
Pg.89 P3 "You don't like it that I killed him. Does it make it worse that you knew that one?"
"Yes."
"Why? To do a bad thing is the same from a stranger as from someone you know. Maybe it's worse from someone you
know."
"But you make allowances for the people you know."
"I told you what happened. There were five of them, they tried to kill me, and they jumped on me without any
warning. They were armed, and they were enjoying themselves. That Joey one, too. Aren't you going to make
allowances for me as well as him?"
"I've known him since he was a baby. I've held him on my lap."
"You've loved me more than you ever loved him, haven't you?"
Dorothy fidgeted with the telephone cord. She nodded and sighed.
"What really worries you most, Dorothy? It isn't because of what I've done -- I can see that now."
"I guess i's Estelle. From the beginning, we were just the opposite: our families, our characters, and our
marriages. But we've always gotten along so well, like sisters. We've helped each other so much. Once or twice
our lives were broken up so seriously that each one of us was nearly ready to go under -- really. So, when
something hits Estelle badly, it hits me, too. You can't imagine how she complains about her children, even
when they're there in the room, but I know they're really everything to her. She just adores them. I don't know
how she'll ever recover."
"You did," Larry said.
"Sometimes I wonder."
She drove out to Estelle's house, but there was no answer when she rang the doorbell, and none when she went
around to the back and pounded on the door. She got the notebook out of her purse, ripped out a page, and wrote
a short letter, whcih she folded up to look like an envelope, and pushed it throught the slot in the door.
She drove in the direction of the museum. From a long way off it was obvious that there were crowds of people
driving towards the place, so she changed her mind and took the turning for the coast. She stopped the car
under a eucalyptus tree and sat looking out at the ocean. She felt like crying; for Estelle at the moment and
Estelle in the future, and for herself in the past, when Scotty died. She tried to think of what to do, and to
arrange plans for hiding Larry, comforting Estelle, getting rid of Suzanne, taking the holiday alone without
hurting Fred's feelings, and getting Larry back to his home. If I do this... She couldn't attach any of her
thoughts together for very long. She would much rather have cried. What she did, however, was to fall asleep,
with her shoulder up against the seat and her head near the window. She woke up after about twenty minutes and
drove back to Estelle's house, where there was still no answer."
Pg.95 P2 "Have you been able to cry at all?"
"I've been trying not to. At least, I think that's what's going on."
"It might help."
"I'm afraid it wouldn't stop. Remember what happened to you. They almost had you in the loony bin. Once you're
helpless, one of those bastards steps forwawrd with a hypodermix and the curtain comes down on your life. You
stay there and they give you massive doses of sedatives every day because you're easier to take care of that
way. And then your brain is pretty much slugged into submission. No more chance to find your way out of your
troubles, ever."
Dorothy said she agreed. Estelle had always felt like that about doctors, by which she meant male doctors --
the women, apparently, weren't so bad. But Dorothy until her troubles, had not agreed at all. She had twice
been into the hospital for minor operations as well as for Scotty, and had thought everybody was so kind and
nice. Despite the boredom of waiting around, she had enjoyed being taken in to the workings of a new world. She
had found it easy that nothing was expected of her, no act of hers could be a mistake, a neglect, or something
she should feel guilty about. It was wonderful, she had thought, that there were experts who had dedicated
their time and strength to such demanding work and who could put you right when you were in real trouble --
broken, cut, bruised, scrambled up inside. Only much later did the realization of her helplessness contribute
to a certainty that nurses, doctors, in fact the whole idea of medicine, had made her a victim. To her it had
not brought healing. It had brought death where she was sure death had been avoidable. Her own doctor was still
all right and she had one weapon against him: she could just not go, and phone to say she felt fine. But
hospitals -- whenever she thought about them now, she felt like a sacrificial bundle on a stone slab, with the
priests whispering to each other over her head."
pg. 15 p. 1 (The Memory Librarian) "After midnight, the bar is overwhelmed with a new crowd, diverse in a way she's not used to seeing in downton Little Delta (and certainly not in the corridors of the obelisk): the oldest must be in his seventies and the youngest still a teenager; all shades of brown, Black, and beige; men in dresses and women in sharp-cut suits and others who defy any gender catergorization at all. She pretends not to notice. With New Dawn any gender nonconformity is enough to get you a deviant code appended to your number--dirty computer, recommended for urgent cleaning--and she doesn't want to flag anyone tonight. Seshet recognizes some of them. They're still members of her flock, however wayward. Others are unrepentant memory hoarders, the kind who never so much as walk through downtown in case a drone recollector might land, light as a horsefly, on their temple and graze a few loose memories off the top while they're waiting for the light to change. She cares even for them, though they don't know it. The obelisk's eye, like any panopticon, give only an illusion of omniscience--Seshet has made an art of selective gazing."
pg. 66 p. 1 (The Memory Librarian) "Seshet has never felt anything like this raw creative energy before. She doesn't understand how she lived without it all these years. Dreams are better than memories; they bite."
pg. 229 p. 1 (Save Changes) "Franky glanced up at [Amber] and kept drawing. "Sorry, it's so cool," she said quickly, "but it isn't the world mapped out already? Do we even need new maps anymore?" "Do you really think maps are permanent? We are here," he said, drawing an X to mark the West Harlem Piers. "The sun of New Dawn don't shine everywhere," Eric sang happily, taking a swig of champagne and beaming up at the moon."
"I've been thinking a lot about the importance of joy. And now I'm going to take you on a little journey, so, I've been having not the easiest time, and so I've been finding things to be excited about. […] Today, I'm just saying, chase joy, find it wherever you can, even if its minimal, even if you have five minutes to go literally sniff a rose, frickin do it cause it will make you feel better. (Brown 3:30)"
"I bought this skirt that I liked, and I'm just like, ah well, if I'm comfortable in my gender, and if I'm
figuring out how to be comfortable in my body and it's like, I genuinely do believe that clothing doesn't have
gender, and people ofany gender can wear whatever article of clothing. Then it's like then why have I created
this fear relationship around wearing skirts and dresses.
It's like, well, I'm scared that people are
going to think that I'm a woman, if I wear those things. And, it's like, well, they might, babe! People might
think that anyway, like I can't control that and so I'm trying to figure out how to do the things that I like
anyway. (Hewson 4:35)"
"My mom had this friend named Peter, who, she knew a lot of realtors in Miami, and Peter was a realtor in Miami
Beach in the 90s which meant that there was a ninety percent chance that he was gay, and he was, and my mom was
a single mom, and we didn't have a lot of money like I said.
And I met Peter a couple times and he was this like fabulous gay man and I would just like stare at him.
Cause I knew that like, I think in the Latin community, or at least in my community and in the Cuban community,
like being a gay man, for men, for like macho men was like a no-no, like for your dad was a no-no. But, for the
women, had a use, right? You were a hairdresser or a designer, or you had something to offer and you were
friends to these women. And it was a little bit more acceptable.
Gay women had no use because they're just trying to be men and they don't have babies and whatever, right, and
that's like the bigger arching thing.
So, I would look at gay men who were living their lives openly and freely and also my mom's relationship with
them. Who, my mom was very close to a lot of gay men and very non-discriminatory about them. Although, you
know, she would say, like, "of course they can't get married, not through the church." (Morales 36:30)"
"I have been having this thing recently where I've been quite settled in general over the last few years (Hewson quote starts at 0:50)