Mean mean Me

People are mostly monsters of selfishness and egotism and vanity. It’s nice to be poking fun at them, giving them different shapes and fates other than what they like to be famous for.

If you are hatching something illegal, or at least mildly bohemian, like smuggling yourself out of unpaid rent, or giving your landlord a to-your-face shot for getting a crush on you, or dumping your luggage in your brother’s house for your sister-in-law to see to while you gad about planning lesbian conventions and cultural productions sans funding and sans bus fare money, surely, your making-both-ends-meet friends and poorer relations – no matter how iconoclastic or subversive they think of themselves theoretically – are the last persons you can discuss life with, much less map out escape routes with. Right?

Right. Better hire your landlord’s househelp, instead.

Jean Genet and me

The American health care system, Time or Asiaweek says, is tops at the higher end. I would end up a bag lady if I were there.

My poet friends there went into carpentry, care giving, backhoeing, then one, the best of the lot, to business writing for a computer company, and then real estate. Real estate doesn’t make her a real estate broker, only rich; she is a poet and will always be.

Jean Genet was a thief and his distinguished compatriots who think highly of their radicalism call him poet-thief, sometimes, criminal-poet. I asked, why not a broker- poet? If you want to distinguish yourself as a poet-fuck, sheilfa, said she, that’s your business.

I sometimes wish I were just plain me. Then maybe, just maybe, she can love me?

But maybe Jean Genet was just a mediocre thief, and like me he only stole books and bric-a-brac to get free board at the penitentiary. A place to be warm in, with table and chair, warm bodies, too, that he may write the plays he wrote.

And that’s why he never completed a novel; prison term didn’t allow him that breadth.

kung minsan naghihinala sila

The most violent wars are fought on the ideological plane. Bakit kaya ayaw nila aminin yun. Kaya yata kapag gumagapang na mga salita ko papalapit sa usaping kapitalismo, umiismid at umaawit na si Ganet. Sila lang kaya ang may karapatang magsalita laban sa di-matakasang pananalanta ng dambuhalang korporasyon. Usurper, dapat magpaka-socdem ka, sa isip, sa salita at sa gawa, magpaka-western feminist, stop na ang pagpretend-pretend na may pakinabang ka sa usaping tunggaliang uri.

Hindi ako napatawad nang dalhan ko ng Puti na feminista at isang bag ng female condoms. Ni hindi ako nagkaroon ng pagkakataong sabihin sa kanila na ang pangalan niya ay Gwenola, at tulad nila ay may boypren na Maoist na karantso ni Joma at may mga sinu-subsidize na mga foot soldiers ng The Shining Path. Doon pa ba naman nag-opensiba sa upisina nila ang mahadera. Nilektyuran ang cashier na walang ideya tungkol sa usaping programa sa birtud ng pagpuputa, na hindi malayo, aniya, sa kalagayan ng maraming asawa at asa-asawa. Sex workers nang sex workers, e di nagalit sila. Prostituted women, ayon sa kanila, ang dapat itawag sa mga babaeng nagbebenta ng aliw. Ka-classist third person impersonal plural. Hindi ko raw kasi alam ang sinasabi ko dahil hindi ko alam gaano kadumi doon sa putahan. Ang dapat pag-isipan pa'no iahon ang kababaihan mula doon.

Parang si Lobregat ang programa: Ahon Badjao.

my last duchesses hanging on the wall

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.
….

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.
….

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.
…

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.
…

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.