From Marge Piercy

Excerpts from her novel, He, She, It


We are tool and vessel and will. We connect with powers beyond our fractional consciousness to the rest of the living being we all make up together. The power flows through us just as it does through the tiger and through the oak and through the river breaking over its rocks, and we know in our core the fire that fuels the sun.
….

What we cannot name, we cannot talk about. When we give a name to something in our lives, we may empower that something, as when we call an itch love, or when we call our envy righteousness; or we may empower ourselves because now we can think about and talk about what is hurting us, we may come together with others who have felt this same pain, and thus we can begin to try to do something about it.

Every life is new. Every word is constantly speaking itself for the first time: birth, love, pain, want, loss.

Every mother shapes clay into Caesar or Madame Curie or Jack the Ripper, unknowing, in blind hope. But every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream.
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I have stood on Rosh Hodesh in the darkness of the wood by the whispering river, and I have called powers through me to blast into life what has never before been… I am the maharal and I make the golem with my whole life’s best and most potent moments, and so does Avram, and so, perhaps, my darling, may you. Creation is always perilous, for it gives true life to what has been inchoate and voice to what has been dumb. It makes known what has been unknown, that perhaps we were more comfortable not knowing. The new is necessarily dangerous.
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The ability to see vision is one of those human talents that flourishes when rewarded by a society and withers in most of us when punished by society. That is, whether the ability to see the hand of Ha-shem writing on the wall secures you pleasant notice for your religious and prophetic acumen, or whether it gets you locked up in the local nut bin, will determine how many people in a society form the habit of seeing what other people are wont to think is not there.
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At any moment in history, certain directions are forbidden that lie open to the inquiring mind and the experimental hand. Not always is the knowledge forbidden because dangerous: governments will spend billions on weapons and forbid small sects the peyote of their ecstasy. What we are forbidden to know can be – or seem – what we most need to know.

... But how sometimes the near impossibility of carrying out an action makes it irresistible. I must do it because I cannot do it: because it is both forbidden and held to be unachievable.
…

As a woman who spends her days creating fictions and monsters, how can I feel I am committing calumny against Judah [for creating this golem]… I cannot always distinguish between myth and reality, because myth forms reality and we act out of what we think we are; we know on many levels truths that are irrational as well as reasoned or experimental. Our minds help create the world we think we inhabit.
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For a human being to make another is to usurp the power of Ha-shem, to risk frightening self-aggrandizement. It is to push yourself beyond the human. It is dangerous to the world. As soon as the mind conceives of a possibility, it wants the possible to be actualized. It wants to be doing, no matter what the cost or the damage.

never mind i like it rough

a friend sent this in as a birthday gift:

September 3 is the day of the mold breakers.

Because their work is often of a visionary nature, exceptional people born on this day can be way ahead of their time and must understand if others are sometimes slow to approve of their methods. Fortunately, most of these mold breakers display great patience, as well as confidence in the value of their work. Thus they are well-equipped to endure years without recognition while continuing on with their endeavors. Their path to wider acceptance can be a bit smoother, however, if they take time to explain to others, in everyday language, what their objectives are and how they intend to get there.

Ha Riin in Praktis?

Noong isang araw, nabulahaw ako. Alasais ng umaga nag-ring ang telepono. Si Coms, umiiyak.

Hindi na raw siya makakasali sa rap, ke ngayon, ke kahit kelan (choke, choke), masakit na masakit raw ang ulo niya, mamamatay na yata siya, at ngayon ay may dugo na lumabas sa kanyang taynga. Panic ang lola.

Kung bakit kasi sa kung saan-saang aspalto nagsisirko. Katanghaliang tapat, kung kelan nagpupuasa ang mga tao.

“Ang titigas kasi ng ulo ninyo! Tigil na kasi yang rap-rap na yan!”

“Ayaw namin.”

Kanina si Coms uli.

“Me lumabas na namang dugo sa taynga ko, Kah Shei.”

“Lecheng tenga iyan...“

“Pero hindi na masakit ang ulo ko!”

“Bahala nga kayo sa buhay nyo!”

Kasisira kaya ng form. Heto at kaboses ko na mga nanay nila. Mas maganda pa nga boses ng mga nanay nila.

Para mo silang mga anak sa iba’t-ibang lalaki, sabi ni Berkis, habang nakangising tinitingnan ang mga shots na kuha niya.

Wish lang nila yun.

Dahil pag akoy naleche, pangtatalian ko sila, pangtatapon sa dagat.

Baka saka na sila maibenta.

Neruda and pedophilia

He doesn’t have a High School Student affairs division daw. I’m disappointed. Now there he goes tuning out at my literary citations before I could remonstrate that hey Child Rights guy, I don’t have either!!!

But there’s not much of it in literature, is there? There’s a plethora of Dickens on lice-infested street shits but who cares about Dickens. I do like Sappho though: You Monkey, I have loved you for long, even when you just seemed to me a small ungracious child. And Ensler: Huwag, Ate, ah ah ah ah, and a little of Wilde, though I can't recall any line for now. I had not read Lolita, and didn't read enough of Neruda. I only know that Neruda had a wife, way way far younger than him who went crazy living with him and went worse when he left her, for another woman, probably older. It was Jules who tipped me, and No, she was not arguing against inter-generation love, she is for it, more so if it's lesbian. Jules just loves some of Neruda, but perhaps his poetry cannot abscond him from his crimes, no matter how true how good it was.

What did Neruda write?

Love is short, forgetting is long. Because I dont love her, maybe I still do.

Seryusly wala naman tayo

Seriously wala naman tayong maboteng pinagsamahan, no, I don’t even remember your 17 years back until you reminded me. Mas maalala ko si Florante mainly because it struck me that he apologized to me that night over his brother’s impregnating and abandoning a first cousin’s cousin. Takot siguro isumbong sa hukbo hahaha. By that time, 1993, nangamatay na lahat ng hukbo ko kaya wala nang babaril sa kanya, ako na lang.

Kung minsan nasusuka na ako. And I just tell my friends, puwede ba you settle accounts with your men? Mga problema nyo sa mga lalaki ninyo huwag nyo na dalhin sa akin. Mga anak nila puro reklamo na kesyo they’re being turned into pawns sa fights ng mga parents nila. Kung minsan mas matatalino pa iyong mga anak nila telling them to divorce if they like and live their lives as they like my mistakes are my own you can’t live my life for me, Mom.

Parang yung sa kanta ni Carly Simon, my friends from college they're all married now, their children hate them for the things they're not, they hate themselves for what they are, and yet they drink they laugh, close the wounds hide the scars, but that's the way I've always heard it should be, so it's time we move in together, so let's drown in love's debris.

But no. Some of my friends they're actually happily remarried, four or five to men getting their second chance at post-revolution family life. Some are into lesbian relationships. The root of their pain now, as often happens when the new spouse doesn't have an expat salary to buffer the hard crunch, the refusal of their exes to take financial responsibility for the children's upkeep. Iyong ibang lalaki kasi iyon na lang paraan nila to get back at their ex-wives who they see as better off after the divorce. Kaya pagdating sa singilan ng pangtuition pahirapan talaga. Nakakapagod makinig. Leche at bakit sa akin ninyo dinudulog yan, ano ako, family court? Or can’t you at least keep the ledgers to yourselves?

Men and their horse-hung romance. From persuasion to blackmail. Meron pa iba diyan, tinenkyu mo lang at pinauwi ng bahay, pupromote pa bigla mga sarili nila: from spurned lover to literary critic. Why all pains? Why all resentments? Sabi nung isa, in bad grammatical construction at that. Why not write about joy? Sa Legaspi Street, sa San Pedro at sa Claveria marami akong Joys na kilala, ikako, gusto mo ipakilala kita? Twenty years in America and right now on psychoanalysis, babalikan ka lang para hingan ng joy and peace and love? Ano ko, Parish Bulletin?

Writing is about one last thing that when I do it, sabi nga ni Lia Lopez-Chua na seryusly wala naman kami, I feel more, rather than less, of myself.