SubscribeFebruary 13th, 2011
gardening on a Sunday
In my drive-way garden plants are responding to the warm wind driven days. Last year’s sunflower is disintegrating. Long strands of plant tissue are appearing, exposing the deep heart of the stem to the new spring. It will increase its rate of decay, and by the time the new seedlings reach that height, the old head will have fallen.
And of course much has started to lift up from the soil. The buddleia has produced little clusters of grey-green ovoid leaves at its joint. It won’t blossom for some months, but its new leaves feel like little projectors; I glimpse things in them as I go by that remind me that work is not the same thing as life.
And there’s the winter jasmine, all windy little flowers, red-tipped markers of a world completely unconcerned with 9-5. Probably, tomorrow, when I am at my desk, I’ll only sort of remember this afternoon and the jasmine floret ready to disclose, but there will be something left in my head, regardless of how fuzzy. That’s good.
February 10th, 2011
adjusting
In a recent post I told you that I’ve just returned to work after five months. It is proving to be a bit of an adjustment.
For one thing I am so tired by the end of the day I have read next to nothing, and thought even less. In an interview with John McPhee I read recently, McPhee says that he tries-to-write for about seven hours in the day and then produces for about two hours. I’m afraid I’m like that too. I need to roam around, to pay attention to the world, walk a little, think about odd things, go get coffee and watch the street corner as it absorbs and discharges people. All of these activities are part of my trying-to-write. While I am at work I am not going to get to do much of that, I’m afraid.
Still, I spent the day today reading about policy and change indicators in my company’s particular area of Canadian society and, surprising as it might be to some of you, I actually found it fascinating. It’s the anthropologist in me I suppose.
Following on that discovery, I’m going to try and make the best of the situation. I need to since rent is always frakking due, and unless one of the people who is ascending to heaven after May 21 gives me his cash, I am probably going to continue needing a job. So I am going to try and find work things in which I can be deeply interested, and use it to ponder, futz around etc etc so that I can continue to write.
Here’s hoping it works.
February 9th, 2011
Good news and bad news
I started back to work today after a five month hiatus.
That’s both bits of news by the way.
January 18th, 2011
an educated woman
I am reading Bluestockings by Jane Robinson. (Thanks litlove for the post.) It’s a wonderful book, that I find hard to put down.
Here’s the starting quote from chapter four:
A Cambridge professor who is in the habit of addressing his students most pointedly as ‘Gentlemen!’ proceeded to his lecture room on Ash Wednesday, to find only the ladies present. With head erect and eyes riveted on the opposite wall, he announced, ‘As there is nobody here, I shall not lecture today,’ and with stately dignity made his departure.
I am an educated woman, have somewhat of a temper, have no class at all, and can barely imagine the outrage these gentle ladies must have felt. And although I do not know this, I suspect they said not a thing to the professor as he left the hall. Not that they should have / I doubt very much if I could have contained myself. They were in a delicate situation. Those ones out there that thought women’s education an atrocious waste of money and time as well as a real danger to women’s health and the well being of society itself, those people often controlled the doors to academia. So the ladies in the classroom had to sit still for it. Had they thrown their reticules or skewered the bugger with their parasols, the conservative pundits would have crowed and suggested that the retaliation proved the point of the unsuitability of women to education.
I so deeply admire these women’s ability to press against such callous disregard of their humanity. It’s because of them that I was not doomed to clean floors or work in a shop, as my class would have made appropriate.
And there is still so much of this. It’s appalling really to think of the number of cases today where such disregard still rules the minds of the majority. And not just with respect to gender either. Think of the inhumanity of the normal workplace as an example. But back to the book…
Bluestockings is one of those books that I have difficulty keeping all the names and players straight. There is so much information, much of which I did not know. Yet from the first page I felt a part of the “family” that these women make. I think that is in part because education, knowledge, and the right/power to pursue my own mind means so very much to me, but it is also the author’s writing style. It is friendly, warm, compassionate and yet clearly welded to the facts and not to her personal interpretation. This ability to be both deeply attentive to the facts of the world, and still flexible enough to achieve narrative lucidity, this is what it means to be an educated woman. At least to me.
This is a book I will buy because I know that the stories it tells are more than just about the fight women had to gain access to a decent education. It is about what it takes to refuse the little box cultural habit sometimes wants to impose: not only passion, but also self control. I can imagine myself pulling it off the shelves for an hour’s read when things get hairy and I really want to kill someone. Thank you Ms Robinson. You may have saved me the cost of a good defense.
December 23rd, 2010
workplace humor
Hah!
via wimp
December 2nd, 2010
aggression in women and the pouting princess
I’m an aggressive person. And female. That seems to be a problem. I keep getting counselled to “let it go.”
Certain things make me really mad and to be truthful I suspect that at least some of the things that make me mad are the result of my pedophile “uncle” (hereafter known as “P”).
Yuck, I know. (Please relax. I am not going to tell you about that set of experiences, rather I would like to briefly meditate on the outcome today, all these decades later.)
I acknowledge that some of my aggression is the result of trauma and emotional damage. However, I suspect I would have been aggressive whether or not P turned up to the family property that summer. My father was a terrier with an attitude. He was, frankly, terrifying in his rages and drunken affection and I have inherited some of that disposition, although not the alcoholism. (I associate the feeling of being out of control with the hurt of others and therefore do not partake to the point where I feel that instability which precedes drunkenness.) What I suspect is that P narrowed the focus of the natural aggression. I react poorly, for example, to threats to my physical or emotional safety or to the safety of children or others under the power of a “well wishing” majority.
One time, as an example, a boyfriend thought that pushing me into a corner was the answer to my anger at a bit of his behaviour. Before I knew quite what was happening I had a pair of scissors in my hand and the points were headed for his throat. He had very long (and fast) legs. Last I saw of him he was booting it down the road outside the apartment.
I have fought very hard to control the actual outcome of my anger. I did not kill the bugger above, for example. And as soon as the threat was gone, so was the anger. I will not tolerate what I consider to be abusive behaviour. Even things as simply juvenile as snides, snarls, slammed doors and tossed heads in the work place I consider worthy of disparagement, nay, outright scorn. I recognize it makes me an uncomfortable, and vaguely threatening person to be around and there is no cure for that I’m afraid. I just stay away as much as is possible from people who are afraid or threatened by my presence. I don’t really care if a 30-something year old acts like a 10 year old except when I have to both witness it and suffer its effects. If you want to be a princess do it away from me. That’s all I require. I don’t think it too much really. And if you do decide to sport your tiara and flip your hair at me, I will attack.
A lot of people see that as a problem though. I keep being told that I can be assertive without being aggressive, for example. Actually, I’m not sure that this is really possible, not without changing an important component of what makes me me. It’s who I am, welded, now, to the bones of what I would have been.
I am a badger. Leave me alone and I am kind of fun to watch. But I have enviable claws and a disposition to dig.
I do like being me for the most part. While I have had several rather nasty things happen to me in my life, I feel more than compensated by my “gifts.” I hear the sky singing, for example, and when the brain shifts sideways I can also experience yellow as a “ting” sound and other such cross-modalities. I can think; I can reason. I can flow in and out of the experience called “art.” I have wonderful children and friends. I live in a country that will take care of me should I need it. And perhaps most importantly, I have a strong sense of ethics.
This last – my sense of what is OK and what is not OK in the commerce between people – I thank P for that. The horror that was his life, his actions, his pain and inability to control it, left me (and others) irrevocably changed. I can never be what I would have been, but I don’t think of justice as pertaining to the outcome for the transgressor but justice is rather the eventual outcome for the transgressed. And I think justice has been achieved: my life is a good one all told.
I am aggressive and not simply assertive, it’s true, but I suspect that my justice achieved is really due to my agression, so it is not something I would forgo for others’ comfort’s sake. I can’t help but think of the time and current places where the chucking of full grown women under the chin, the silly diminutive names and bottom pinchings that highlight genderized power disparities and the people who counsel the few outraged women to accept what men are like for the sake of peaceful co-existence. Rage has its problems, of course, but it is also the social change engine.
For me one key to living with rage is the control of my behaviour. Yes, I make most people uncomfortable but I never actively set out to hurt except in self defense. Rage is a form of power and it must be controlled. P taught me that. Still, I don’t think social ease is something that should be overtly fostered, rather the self awareness that must underpin any real acceptance of others should be the focus of our joint efforts. (I mean, the vocalizations of the deaf make many hearing people visibly uncomfortable. Whose problem is that?) Hair flippers that gain self awareness stop being hair flippers. Since I see the source of hair flipping and its generalized form, princess pouting as emotional immaturity and as such an emblem of emotional damage in a woman that should have achieved a higher level of maturity, I think that addressing that damage is the way to achieve justice. So I leave it alone until flipped and then inquire if the person realizes that she isn’t really a princess. “You do realize that daddy wasn’t really a king, don’t you?”
Don’t you think that should be warning enough? Certainly it’s better than smacking her upside the head.
The other key to living with rage is a profound respect for the nature of what is. Slipping into the easy but empirically incorrect comforts of belief is dangerous to self, but more importantly, dangerous to others. The princess pout limits the pouter but it actively hurts the eye and ear of the one witnessing the shocking loss of decorum. To be more serious, I do find that my ability to feel joy, to fall into awe, is directly relational to my ability to accept how I actually am, where from I, in fact, came and where to, in fact, I will go. Princess pouters cause me pain and while I can moderate my response to that pain, I cannot stop the pain itself. Nor should I have to really. It’s not that I expect the princesses of the world to stop being affected assholes, just that I expect them to do what I do and control their natural propensities. In other words, pout all you like, just don’t do it near me. I mean, really, all of us need to shit but most of us learn to do it in a way and place set apart for such unsocial needs. Princess pouting is just a sort of emotional defecation. Do it in private please.
I suppose you can see why I am not universally liked. Oh the joy of living with others.
October 24th, 2010
My new hero – Barbara Ehrenreich
I’ve always felt a mild case of disgust for these kind of people. Now it just more pronounced. Wonderful video.
via Wimp
September 19th, 2010
Too much to think about
As a brief perusal of these pages will establish, I am interested in a number of things. My main obsessions are poetry, poetics, 18th and 19th century American history and literature, the importance of the esoteric in the development of the American psyche and its expression as religious history, the concept of imagination and its philosophical history, the concept of wilderness, Phenomenology especially when it speaks to the arts, embodied cognition and perception (and where perception and imagination diverge), plants, beading, indigenous technology, music, tarot and alchemy.
And that list is considerably diminished from the one I would have made a decade ago.
The problem is that following (even modestly) these interests is time consuming. And I’m writing poetry at the moment – a raft of stuff all about one subject, telling one story. So I think I’m going to have to put my books on imagination, history, alchemy, etc aside for the nonce. Even my reading on poetics is getting in the way. I suspect that all I can really do is write and bead for now.
What that means for tailfeather is that you are likely to get a bunch of angsty moans about how hard it is to find a way to tell the truth (which is what makes poetry readable) and maybe some more pictures of my beading and quilling in progress. I apologize in advance.
I suspect this putting-aside might be hard to do since I find myself continually circling the idea that imagination is an intentional act that positions one with regard to the Other. That is, imagination is not a static thing, not a theatre where images are displayed, but more the projector, and simultaneously the energy that it takes to run “the projector”, the images that are created, the (ir)reality it creates in the process and the real world from whence the power and audience originate.
Oh well. We all know writing is difficult and I am just not the kind of person anymore who can carry it all, juggling whilst running a marathon. Nope. Can’t do it.
September 18th, 2010
Analysis with a sweet bite
I was futzing around again and ran across writerly advice from someone named “Sugar.” Now you may be long aware of this person’s column but it is new to me. What a sweettart delight!
As someone who recognizes her own self pity and its underlying arrogance, I was both moved and glad of this:
I’d finally been able to give it because I’d let go of all the grandiose ideas I’d once had about myself and my writing—so talented! so young! I’d stopped being grandiose. I’d lowered myself to the notion that the absolute only thing that mattered was getting that extra beating heart out of my chest. Which meant I had to write my book. My very possibly mediocre book. My very possibly never-going-to-be-published book. My absolutely no-where-in-league-with-the-writers-I’d-admired-so-much-that-I-practically-memorized-their-sentences book. It was only then, when I humbly surrendered, that I was able to do the work I needed to do.
What an old professor of mine called the “attach-bum-to-seat” sure-fired writing methodology linked to the “get-over-yourself” philosophy!
August 14th, 2010
It should be de rigueur
for all city hall crossings. It might remind us of the limits of corporate-style authority.
via The Daily Dish