Scribblings with Green Chalk

I blame it on Denise (on whom I essentially blame the existence of Scribblings). If it hadn’t been for this post, my forever overactive curiosity would not have been piqued, I would not have written to a musically-literate Canadian friend about the possible bonds between curling, Canadian serenity, and good music. Moreover, I would not be stuck wondering–as always–about my personal level of musical literacy and my taste.

Far from being a musical explorer, I tend to rely on friends’ recommendations and good poetry. I tend to think I’m easily bought by well-written lyrics, persuasive praise, and perhaps a good concert atmosphere. In high school I went to dozens of garage band gigs: I can’t remember any names, only that I had fun. I can’t play any instruments, I’m convinced that on some level I’m incurably deaf (maybe the garage bands are partly responsible?).

So in the case of the Weakerthans, I’m recruited via Denise’s enthusiasm, obscure hints at curling’s zen-like qualities, their indirectly experienced concert skills (browse!), great lyrics, and the cat named Virtute.

Samson’s not a dead poet, so I won’t paste the lyrics to “Plea from a Cat Named Virtute,” but go into an unlikely linking frenzy: the lyrics and the NPR interview.

I honestly don’t know how he does it, but he manages to be optimistic and disillusioned at the same time. Virtute’s a tenderly-written cat. And while my mother’s cat would gladly taste my tinny blood, I’m sure it wouldn’t cure my melancholia. (Maybe curling would help?)

Walcząc z zatruciem kawą (niestety) i porządkując ostatnie sprawy przed świąteczną wycieczką do domu, słucham Kultu. Za moimi plecami stoi otwarta walizka, jeszcze pusta. Bez zmian: nadal nienawidzę pakowania; jutro będę spontanicznie wrzucać ubrania i prezenty. Kazik powinien napisać piosenkę o torturach pakowania. W wielu innych sprawach trafił idealnie w moje odczucia. Słucham Polski i przypomina mi się, jacy w liceum byliśmy wspaniale zblazowani, ale jak mimo wszystko pragnęliśmy zmian. Te pociągi i ponure perony… przypomina mi się noc, którą z Jakubem spędziliśmy na dworcu w Zielonej Górze; jego spontaniczny krwotok z szyi bez żadnych śladów, groźni bezdomni, jak czytaliśmy Autostopem przez galaktykę, żeby nie zasnąć. Trudno uwierzyć, że to było prawie pięć lat temu. Podejrzewam, iż jest to tak naprawdę do powtórzenia, z krwotokiem włącznie. Tylko że znaleźliśmy się w tak odległych miejscach, nie tylko geograficznie, że osób, które mogłyby to powtórzyc już nie ma.
 
 

 
 

Te pociągi! Te dworce!

I like looking at owls. In case you didn’t know, now you know. I love how serious and quizzical they look.

I dreamt of owls last night. And maybe because I went to bed at 7 pm and slept over 10 hours, there were many of them. I don’t dream of animals often, which, as Paul Shepard confirms in The Others, is a sad truth about growing up. As a child, I used to have dreams crowded with mostly wolves, then dogs, cats, snakes, and owls… Thank God, pre-Christmas tiredness made me move back in time.

***

Because I cannot put it so beautifully, I quote:

The perception of animals ceased to be only a recognition. First swallowed in substance, then swallowed in thought, they were finally incorporated in psychic structures.

(Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human, p. 3

Animals are among the first inhabitants of the mind’s eye.

(Paul Shepard, Thinking Animals, p. 2)

[animals in dreams]

The child’s absence from its own dream is part of normal unselfconsciousness, without the “self,” “you,” or “they.” The child is said sometimes to be frightened by such dreams but not frightened in them.[...] These dreamt animals may be, very early in life, the dispersed elements of the unknown self — the body’s sounds, contractions, upheavals, secretions — and then also disguises of familiar people in stressful circumstances of ordinary experience.[...]As the child gets older, animal dreams diminish and a self emerges more frequently, as do familiar faces. [...] Throughout our lives animals in dreams may continue to signify unresolved concerns, intolerable truth, or interpersonal uncertainty. They are not a random choice of symbolic vehicles of the unconscious mind but a continuation of the maturing processes of humankind. They are nurturant among small children because animals are already synomymous with the mind’s drive to find order and the heart’s desire to affirm given reality.

(The Others, pp.75-76)

[marginal animals, owls among them]

Categories defined by human observers inevitably collide with animals at the edges of categories. Such confusing forms elicit strong responses, but even the ambiguous forms may be classified. Such “misfit” animals may be seen as anomalies, superior or diabolical, more interesting than the rest, for they challenge the very grounding of our thought in category making.

(The Others, p. 59)

Judaism and Christianity found other zoological, categorical equivalents of evil, such as the twilight forms (owls and bats at dusk), those between earth and water (toads and other amphibians at the streams edge), and those who undergo transformation (larvae, nymphs, and moulting forms). [...] Owls are the demonic equivocator of day and night; the larvae of insects and amphibians are are the deceivers of appearance. The image or call of each can be appropriated to signify disarray.

(The Others, p. 67)

the responses to the hate-mail received by Feministing editors (here and here). Thinking women rock. The wit of those replies is a Christmas gift for us all.

There are several other interesting posts in the anti-feminism category — just browse through the Feministing archives.

Here’s one of my favorite comments:

pffft, my vagina does my taxes, and my bookkeeping. and it brings me soup, 7-up, and crackers when im sick. annnnnnnnnnd, it does a mean dance routine to “my humps” by fergie. my vagina is totally not boring, nor am i, this guy can go die. (Posted by: jessilikewhoa)

Last night I finally pulled out of my mailbox an envelope that wasn’t from the bank.

It’s not that I terribly miss getting paper letters. Because so many letters I sent got “lost” somewhere on their way, I am generally very reluctant and distrustful towards the post. Reading Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 only made things worse. I don’t romanticize paper letters. When they get to the destination, it’s a hundred years after you wanted to say what you wanted to say. Also, I don’t think they’re more “real” than email, only more tangible.

To get a beautiful handmade card from a friend you haven’t seen in a long time is so much beyond that.

The letter in your hand is a point in the cosmos when and where you know things are in the right place. I was standing in the dark and the rain, feeling that I know my spot in the universe: after all my moving the letter finds my address (which means I’m here), it comes to me from a place I’d been to before (which means I once was there and there was here for me), and it’s from a dear friend (which means that although there isn’t here anymore, it wasn’t all just a dream — not everything dissolves when places change places).

As you can see in the picture above, the card is amazing. It tells you a lot about Denise, more than all my praise and affectionate descriptions could… And it speaks volumes about December in Central Europe. Christmas time has become an extension of autumn and we’re very unlikely to get snow before mid-January. (Unfortunately, pretty fiery leaves such as this one are also hard to find at this time of year.) The message inside I’m not sharing. Admire the leaf.

Denise, you’re the sweetest.
And this is the sweetest thing.

Why such a post sounding like I thought I knew more than I know I do? Because, hey, why not? (OK, that’s not the reason. Read on.)

Honestly, I don’t see myself as capable of “enlightening” destitute minds. I don’t think you can “teach” anyone anything, you can only tell them about the different possible paths. This reading guide contains a couple well-written texts about issues that anger me but to which I often fail to respond, because I’m too preoccupied with guilt-tripping myself about the things I haven’t yet read and I don’t yet know. (In other cases, when I do try to answer, I feel that no one gets my point.)

Caveat lector: a narcissistic paragraph about my personal philosophy follows. Humor me, because I’m on a serious caffeine overdose, taking a break between writing two papers, and badly in need of some pseudo-intellectual showing off.

The foundation of my personal philosophy is a deep belief that if you challenge people and let them know that you believe in their capability to think and learn, you help them grow. Treating them as children and spoonfeeding “knowledge” leads to blind conformism and, when brought to the extreme, totalitarianism and utter stupidity. I’m against stupor, because it means the death of thought and there is nothing I desire and admire more than free thought.

Free thought, mind you, in my subjective free-thinking out loud, must be informed. It’s born of curiosity but not naïvety. It seeks self-discipline and connection to other interesting thoughts, it negotiates its place, but, nevertheless, respects its own arrogance. There is little more arrogant or, to some, offensive than free thought practiced by women. I find this witch-hunt both repulsive and fascinating, ergo I let my thoughts play with other thoughts on the playground we often call feminism.

Forgive me, dear reader, the lie. I gave you two narcissistic paragraphs instead of one.

I came up with the idea of a reading guide when engaging in evil, brain-damaging multi-tasking whilst I should have been concentrating on writing my first paper in queue. This is to give your (and my) free thoughts something too nibble at: delicious rhetoric and lucid argumentation. The posts I link to below answer the repeated accusations against feminism:

…watch this space, I might add more later. In the meantime, back to paper #2…

What’s wrong with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland?

When I first read it, which was a while ago, I didn’t give it a second thought. It seemed to be revolving smoothly, a well-oiled utopian music box. The structure appeared sound. As sound as a recipe: throw in the elements, concoct solutions, and pretend that it’s clear-cut mathematics. And then get an idiot to look at your equation. It took some shaking to realize that a few screws were loose in the story. I was the idiot looking at the equation.

There’s a mechanics of writing utopias and a mechanics of reading them. If you forget about the other one, you are the story’s dupe. This is no true forgetfulness but a combination of fear and laziness at the sight of a mathematical problem. You stare at the lines of numbers on a sheet and find yourself nodding, as they painlessly fly through your brain.

I have two crude pictures in my mind when I say “mechanics”: the author with measuring instruments, slowly putting the parts together and the reader, screwdriver in hand, bending over the work to dismantle it. Reading utopian fiction without a screwdriver is, to me, exactly like staring at an equation. It’s pointless. In the latter case you can merely say you like the shapes of the digits, in the former, that you’re intrigued by the author’s use of adjectives.

Utopias are planted in the author’s here and now. Unlike autobiographies and memoirs, though, they do not repeat that with every “I.” The sage leading you through non-place is that very same author that in a memoir is spanked by his or her mother, however. They’re showing you their own world with a twist: as if someone had cleaned all the streets, repaired all the clocks, made all the people kind and wise. Made all the people… Made all the people…–

Here is where Gilman’s music box gets stuck.–

Made all the people… white. Hear those screws rattle? I didn’t when I first read the novel. I put it away without a second thought. It was only when a teacher addressed the question of Herland’s whiteness in class that it sank in. Why did I miss it?

While it could be true that I have a gaping hole in my head through which intelligence, vitamins, and all the other wonderful undefined things escape, I would prefer to believe that there is still hope for me. My mistake was not to bring my screwdriver to the text. Or: I stared at the equation and didn’t try to solve it myself. You have to break into the utopia, because no utopia is a dream. Wrapped in neologisms, inventions, exotic moral concepts is the writer’s here and now, and as a reader you should feel its breath on your neck.

Read in isolation, every utopia is a pretty mechanism. It announces itself as a neutral solution tailored to humanity’s needs. You can read “neutral” and “humanity” from where you stand, you can take your all-inclusive formulation, but the writers were never where you are, they didn’t use your dictionaries. You find the utopia in their back yard. In their trash can, if they couldn’t afford a garden. In the streets they crossed during their daily walks, in the people they saw as the scum of the earth, in their prayer books, in their laundry baskets.

As entertaining as it might be, utopian fiction is never written solely for one’s friends and about one’s friends. It’s always a vision encompassing the world. My failure as a reader lay in my laziness to verbalize and follow up on these points: (a) Gilman’s world was never the same as mine, never had the same norms, (b) Gilman must have realized that not all people in the world were the same as her closest friends, because — if that were indeed the case — there would be no need for her to write a utopia.

I didn’t ask myself about the exact shape of Gilman’s world and the “others” of that world. Yet there is more to utopia than the explicitly named. Men are just one kind of others. The rest was wiped out from the text, but you see them, if you go deeper into the world where Gilman wrote Herland. It was a world before anyone even mentioned “colorblindness.” Skin color organized life, space, and labor. However distraught at times, Gilman must have seen those hierarchies and divisions. And it’s not against them that she put down her prescription. Was it ignorance on her behalf or intended erasure?

I have no idea whether she read any literature by people of color, and if she did, where she put it within her intellectual space. Did she hate, did she turn a blind eye to whatever didn’t directly concern her? Whatever her true attitude, the fact is that the parthogenesis in Herland eliminates not only sex and all the boys but also black women, the black girls Gilman saw — not an imagined people from a distant country — the black women around her.

This is no simple elision and surely not an oversight. By comparison, Mickiewicz didn’t leave out Jews from his imagined pastoral homeland. The plot of Pan Tadeusz would collapse without Jankiel, but Herland stands proudly on its one leg. Until you rattle the music box, that is.

In the novella Péplum, Amélie Nothomb mocks utopian simplifications. She has a messenger from a glorious future elaborate on how it turned out so glorious for “mankind.” Evasive at first, the messenger confesses to the narrator/Nothomb how wealth and equality was won through blowing up the poor south. That is where the story gets going. There is no such moment of insight in Herland and though this could be put down to the different era (Nothomb wrote her book at the end of the twentieth century, Gilman in its first half), Gilman is stuck with the messenger in the simplicity of her solutions. The virgin wombs of her amazons swallow black girls.

Without ironic disclaimers, without footnotes, blackness is written out of existence. Gilman’s is not a whiteness that arrives with a thump, like in the ending of Poe’s Pym, but one that sits quietly. But only until it’s opened up. Then it becomes obvious why and how a “forgetful” utopian vision has come to create one of the many splits between feminisms. Is Herland a case of ladylike backstabbing?

Regardless of intentions and the culprit’s lucidity, there is a body in the room. Herland rattles on.

I don’t know what’s happening with psychology today, but it seems like it’s embracing the accusations of being a pseudo-science. I don’t find it remotely amusing.

Thanks to Denise for linking to Slant Truth’s analysis of an outrageously inane piece on “human nature.”

For a while now I’ve been trying to figure out a response to a thread on Feminism 101 about rape and evolution. The problem is that I don’t follow closely what is going on in psychology, I tend to read only what I find interesting for my own work, and that isn’t necessarily very recent… Evolutionary psychology has, in my opinion (and I haven’t read more than a handful of articles), a cool name like a fig leaf covering its intellectual poverty. Furthermore, the explanation of everything as “natural” and “an outcome of evolution” as practiced by its proponents is far more damaging than extreme relativism. Who can argue with “human nature,” since we don’t even know what it is? So when we get aberrations from racism to rape explained by the notion of “human nature,” what else is there to do but sit down and cry?

This is psychology at its worst, stabbing itself right in the heart. If it’s all just evolution and overpowering nature, then there is no point in any kind of therapeutic work or any theorizing beyond this slavish essentialism. If psychology as a discipline and practice disappears, it will only have to thank this trend to portray deviations as something natural and organic as carrots.

*

* * *

I’m slow. I wish I had found it earlier, but it’s no use crying over spilt milk, so I link now (lepiej późno niż wcale): The Evopsych Bingo is fabulous. Found on Punkassblog via Hoyden About Town. Kudos for the brilliant idea.

is the line with which my favorite moment in Tori Amos’s “Father Lucifer” begins. Sometimes, on nasty rainy mornings, like the ones we’ve been having here recently, I am reminded of that line. No matter how ugly the day, it’s my wedding day. In the evolving relationship with myself (or yourself), vows have to be renewed often, every morning needs a promise. If you’ve ever experienced self-hatred, you know what I mean.

Today, I could actually put on a tiara or a veil and have a tiny wedding reception. As I was leaving the apartment this morning, Mr. Technician arrived to install internet. Getting an internet connection in this town seems as involved as arranging a wedding ceremony. Only you can’t get 20 magazines about it… After over two months of waiting, through desire and thirst, we got to the moment where most popular romances end. We’re all enamoured of our router tonight. And, you know, Sebastian and I might try some homemade Glühwein later. José’s in bed with a cold, but we might talk him into a toast with Heisse Zitrone, if he’s not asleep…

Since I’m in a celebratory mood, I thought I could send you to “Father Lucifer”… Enjoy.

I don’t know how it works, but that’s what it says. All the pretentious language and references for nothing

I would like to know, though, how this application dealt with the entries in Polish…

No, I have not suddenly been blessed with insight into technology, I’ve just found something that responds to my obsessions. I am the person who walks around the house turning the lights off in empty rooms. I segregate garbage. I tell people to put black backgrounds on their PowerPoint slides because it’s easier on the eyes. And I like little black dresses.

Black is less tiring for your eyes than white. (Yes, the background of this page is white, maybe that’s why I don’t have a crazy number of readers.) Black is also better for your computer screen and it saves energy. Though I hate to think I’m advertising something and doing it for free, for the reasons stated above I link here to Blackle — i.e. Google in black. (Not: ‘Google for Black people’ as a website for young Black professionals clarified.)

I wrote to the Blackle team to ask them why you can’t set it as your default Google option in the internet browser but they kindly replied that they’re snowed in with emails and directed me to their FAQ site, which didn’t work. Nevertheless, I like the idea of black (dress) search, because I like my eyes. And since I do like other people’s eyes too, I wrote this weird post.

Guilt-ridden readers, shameful writers, printed pages on the couch: literature has always been a guilty pleasure. Think of boarding-school girls reading in secret, the little boys sneaking under their blankets with flashlights. Wasn’t fiction meant to blow minds?

The emergence of “therapeutic writing” has killed the pleasure. It has footnoted our experience of the text. We now have a wasteland of reading. It’s not at all like psychoanalysis with its stories of pen(is) envy, fathers, mothers, keyholes and vaginas, writing and sublimation. It’s much less funnier, much less story-bound. In fact, it’s counter-narrative. There is no story: in its place we now have a gaping whole of pointless explanation. All the articles about Coelho’s novels and poems in therapy have rendered writing ridiculous. As if it were a simple painkiller, a function of a tortured mind, a prozac pill filled with ink. This is how the text is explained away, its pleasure deflated.

But the guilt stays. Now reading and writing are not ways of turning away from violence, as romantic psychoanalysis would have us believe. Now they’ve become exercises assigned by the therapist. You read because you’ve experienced something painful, you write to put it into words, you like a piece of writing because it’s about a similar experience. These are simple, stupid lies. But don’t they make you feel guilty about reading?

Literature: a plate smashed by an angry citizen X on a Sunday morning. Literature: a winding road of frustration with no possibility of bliss.

I imagine Roland Barthes turning in his grave. Where’s the pleasure? Want to analyze this thought? After all, I’ve written about it.

Literature is always about experience of some kind. Yet the experience of the Word is by no means inferior to the experience of bare fact. People have turned to literature for advice, but also for beauty and for the flow of language. Why devalue that? A text is woven out of words. It’s not a tattooed body waiting for ointment to be put on its scars. The text is where the memory’s at, where the body’s at, where the fantasy’s at. It’s not the therapist’s office: you can’t close a deal with the text that by the time you reach the last letter you will have learned to manage your anger. You cannot get anything from it, you bring the weak flame of pleasure, it brings the dry sticks of words.

I needed this lengthy preface to introduce a piece of writing that runs the risk of being relegated to the therapy ghetto. While it does strike the reader on the level of intimate memories, it’s not literary wound-licking nor a frantic confession. It’s an essay — and the essay is, arguably, the most challenging genre — about waking up to our own and others’ sexuality and the silences around it. It talks about how these silences are learned and tries to unlearn them in the process of writing. Richard Jeffrey Newman’s “My Daughter’s Vagina” is a disciplined piece with a subtle associative logic and an intuition about words. A balancing act between the experience of the facts and the experience of the Word. Read it.

(You can also find it here along with readers’ comments.)

This is an in-joke among the initiated.

I see the Manhattan skyline everywhere: and I need not look at my holiday pictures. I see the Manhattan skyline when I look at the rows of books on my shelves. At 2 a.m. black print pretends to be an unruly grid creeping towards the ceiling. My turquoise thermos wants to be a tea-filled skyscraper, and the mess in my bag (as I stuff things in it quickly in the morning) is the jazz of the skyline. The blog stats on my blog are the Manhattan skyline. The gray matter of my brain says it’s the Manhattan skyline: a process, desiring sleep, staying wide awake, leaving things unfinished. Coffee overdoses turn my veins into the Manhattan skyline: they’re pretty tired, pretty boring, and yet, pretty. If people don’t stop coming back to Kouwenhoven in class, I promise, I will throw myself into the Hudson in my thermos.

At first glance this question might seem slightly awkward. But I find it crucial to ask about perpective and forms of engagement before going on to explore particular issues connected with the black feminist experience.

From its inception, black feminism was by Black women for Black women and the benefit of the Black community as a whole. The communal aspect cannot be undermined, since black feminism has been primarily concerned with praxis: no theorizing without activism.

This much is clear. Yet since its orientation is not solely towards the female individual but the community — of women and women within a larger community — what if we asked about its possible benefits for the society at large?

The black feminist standpoint is exceptional in that it grasps multiple levels of oppression: it’s articulated at the intersection of race and gender, and as such it reveals the ways in which systems of oppression and exclusion conflate. Although in everyday existence this position signifies deprivation and invisibility within dominant discourse, in the light of standpoint theory, it makes for deep insight. Coming from the very bottom of the power hierarchy, the black feminist standpoint is cognizant of the mechanisms and ideologies that more privileged standpoints would either not notice or consider neutral.

It’s knowledge.

The pursuit of knowledge is one of the great human desires.

And — I’m thinking out loud here — this kind of knowledge appears exceptional in that it provides a chance to sever the cords between knowledge and power. It’s not about inventing the wheel or, more accurately, inventing systems of control, but about understanding. Understanding has been increasingly undervalued, since it does not have momentum, does not lead to expansion. Or has understanding never really been valued?… And yet, as I stated above, people desire knowledge, if only for the sake of satisfying desire.

Since standpoints are not inherent qualities, it makes sense to believe that one can access them without being part of the original group, with additional effort, perhaps. Yet how to do that without making it seem like an attempt to steal, and change ideas?

First of all, how to listen and hear? There is no “neutral starting point” for a dialog with a position we do not know enough about. All such attempts fail and, what is worse, lead to more misunderstandings. I found two posts at Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters that clearly illustrate this. In “What Can the White Woman Say to the Black Woman?,” the writer, Ann, warns about disregarding history. Irrational fears of “reverse racism” often preclude necessary openness, without which participating in the project of black feminism is not possible. This leads to isolation and separatism. And while separatism has its advantages, it rarely leads to sharing knowledge and spreading tolerance.

As Patricia Hill Collins warns (critiquing Hazel V. Carby):

Exclusionary definitions of Black feminism which confine ‘black feminist criticism to black women critics of black women artists depicting black women’ (Carby 1987, 9) are inadequate because they are inherently separatist. Instead, the connections here aim for autonomy. (Black Feminist Thought 32-33)

Arguing for autonomy instead of isolation, Collins opens up the possibility for outsiders to be part of the discussion. The question remains: How?

Another one of Ann’s posts, “Shut the Fuck Up,” mentions attempts at placating Black women without asking about the reasons of their anger and discontent. Treating women like children is, of course, nothing new but always a suicidal shot if what one wants is insight and knowledge. The answer is, as Ann points out, to shut up. Not to step in with “but’s” and “however’s” before you’ve heard the argument and thought it over. My next question is where to go from there.

If your objective is to learn and use the knowledge in your experience and, furthermore, to engage with the perspective (which is what I personally want), how do you find your place within the larger project? Which, in the end, boils down to the question: who can become a black feminist?