Scribblings with Green Chalk

… on R. Kelly’s epic Trapped in the Closet (the epic dimension surely demands italics!) — the bitchy ladies at Go Fug Yourself have made me cry from laughing hard. There is little I can add to their in-depth interpretation of the work’s profound message (so it’s depth squared!):

God, is there nothing this man won’t do for us? He trapped himself in a closet to teach us all about relationships, and how complicated they are, and how if you come home and a phone rings in the vicinity of your closet, you should immediately check in the bathroom, the shower, under the bed, and in the dresser drawer before actually checking said closet, and how firing off a bullet in the air can really shut a bitch up, and how a woman shouldn’t ride her husband too aggressively in the sack because it puts him in severe danger of getting a groin cramp, and how no matter how much needless exposition exists in your life, you will NEVER know who the hell Roxanne is, so just give up already.

Little I can add and yet…: What kind of devil tempted me to watch ALL the parts?

Those self-righteous uppity bitches just don’t know when to stop. They throw at you that twisted nonsense divorced from reality, cos they’re closed off in their own world. They’re loud and ridiculous. Vicious and competitive. Turn off the volume and you get an amusing pantomime. Caricatures of women. They’re like half-women, trying so hard to be like men. If they knew the meaning of the word “moderation,” they’d just shut up.

Sorry. Did I forget the quotation marks? I was so focused on translating. I’ve always been quite gifted with languages, supposedly because I have ovaries. Or because I inherited the talent from my father. Either it’s irresistible biology, my small, comely feminine brain, or my masculine side, making me an exceptional token woman, almost as neat as a guy. Theories of intelligence are exciting, really. And they’re oh so objective and oh so neutral.

There is an interesting post on Shakesville about this article. Sadly, the comments shifted quickly from theories and perception of intelligence to whether men are “maybe, just maybe, actually smarter.” Good luck arriving at conclusions beyond the shadow of a doubt. But just how do you plan to “see” and evaluate intelligence? I might have old information, but for all I know no one has procured the philosopher’s stone and we’re stuck in a world of perceptions, misperceptions, and inferences.

The first paragraph is, as I hinted, a translation of a message I’ve heard many times. In its most polite formulation meant as “good advice,” it sounded like this:

“Modesty is the greatest virtue. A truly modest person will be content with possessing knowledge and keeping it to herself. She will answer only when asked directly. She will help others, give them the answer, because she knows she has a moral duty toward the group to work toward achieving harmony, to cooperate.”

Quotation marks duly inserted. Emphasis mine. The only thing this vision lacks is a deathbed scene wherein a grateful crowd gathers over the heroine’s body (after her last breath) to say how wonderful she was. Hearing the accolades would be to immodest, of course she has to be dead. Why do I make “person” feminine? Because I got this wonderful lesson of “true womanhood” from someone who was very concerned about my modesty. It’s a picture of what I should have become but never could.

Looking back, I can say I am greatly indebted to my native culture and system of education for the following: for not knowing what “intelligence” should mean, having heard smart and accomplished women described as bitter bitches (worse if they happened to be childless and/or unmarried), for not having a sense of reality that would allow me not to feel like the world’s biggest hoax, an award and national contest winning idiot, for recognizing my curiosity as inappropriateness, stupidity, a desire to be “one of the boys,” for translating my ambition as “trying too hard,” ” an anti-social impulse.”

Abiding by the rules of “modesty” does not let a woman excel. But that is not a problem, given that an “immodest” woman is evil. And, as so many will let her know, she is not a woman at all, because she supposedly wants to be a man, as shown by her sins against femininity.

The performance of intelligence is gendered, and intelligence itself, the “essence” is beyond reach. You never experience someone’s naked intelligence. There’s always gender trouble and intellectual cross-dressing involved.

When you hear a man disclaiming his contribution with “This may be stupid or irrelevant…” or “I’m sorry…”, let me know. I never have. If that happens somewhere in the world maybe we can talk about those IQ tests.

When will multitasking finally be considered a medical condition? It is not a skill, it’s a way to shred your focus to tiny pieces. I’m reading two books, browsing through several websites, posting this, beginning an essay for class, and glancing at magazines scattered on the floor by my desk.

My profoundest thoughts at the moment are:

Where can I get a feminine fedora (US Glamour, Feb. 2008, p. 176)? My grandfather died after teaching me how to tie a tie, leaving my grandmother to burn all his hats in grief. I’d love to have a get up that would allow me to pay homage to Marlene Dietrich and my classy grandfather.

Don’t take symmetry of feeling for granted. For an instructive example go to the February US issue of Marie Claire, p. 72. Several couples were caught at Sundance and bullied into answering the challenge: “What I love about you.” One of the couples will surely be off movie events for a while. The editors must have hated these two for some reason, because here’s what appeared in print:

She: “He’s really tuned in to other people.”
He: “I’m gonna say her ass!”

I’m sorry, I can’t help imagining their faces when they opened the magazine. No. Stop. Go pray for focus.

My tastebuds are incapacitated. An eating disorder in my teens and later ulceritis have turned my relationship with food into something of a marriage of convenience. I tend to compliment dishes with “interesting,” as if suddenly drained of adjectives. I am grateful for good food, but I lack culinary imagination. I have fleeting food obsessions but no true love ensues.

I wish I could write seductively about peanut butter. Nothing makes you appreciate good peanut butter more than bad peanut butter. I felt like Rapunzel’s mother, asking a friend to get me real, serious organic peanut butter from the US army grocery store uncanny shopping land. I could not deny my intense real-peanut-butter hunger, even though I could not write an ode to peanut butter nor a lament for the bad peanut butter I had in the past months. As a birthday gift, my friend gave me two big jars of crunchy and creamy. I’d never have guessed it would turn out to be such a marvelous gift. I went for a birthday week with peanut butter toast, peanut butter toast with my mother’s jam, and, of course, apples with peanut butter, and peanut butter without company.

Magically, the sun’s declared a temporary cessation of hostilities. In hope of catching some natural vitamin D, I took a long walk yesterday with a curious pause (thanks to my friend and the passport I forgot to leave at home) in uncanny shopping land where I binged on American women’s magazines, coffee, and a brownie. Caught the last sun rays on the way home and had apples with peanut butter before sleep. The life.

Waving frantically and mouthing “no” is about all I can do. These days, I can’t help feeling like a bull an elephant in a china shop. I cross out the bull in accordance with the Polish version of the saying, where the elephant is the culprit. The elephant conveys my inept reaction to the red rag.

Here’s the menagerie of my thoughts at this moment. The earlier assertion that cats won’t be hijacking this space seems a bit humorous several cat posts later. Perhaps I should change my nom de plume (nom de keyboard?) to “Derrida’s Cat,” since Haraway’s presentation of the thinker’s dilemma has moved me so much. However, with a drawerful of notes and a stack of books and articles, my original MA thesis remains unwritten, still waiting for a better time. At the same time, though, animals are thought.

What is interspecies companionship and, delving further, what does failure in fulfilling the obligations of companionship consist in?

Haraway starts with the failure of perception, drawing attention to Derrida’s revelation of seeing his cat in her separateness and individuality, recognizing her intense presence. I’m not sure that sight as a sense is the source of failure, but it’s the model sense for explanations, so let’s stay within its realm. Stripped to simplicity, this is a problem of a commonly accepted blind spot blotting out animals as animals. What kind of presence do you experience when you look at or touch your pets? Do you ever wonder what the animal is thinking — stopping there, at that sense of wonder, at the question mark, not pushing toward an answer — what the animal feels?

I see two paths, intersecting at many points. Two paths that give different meaning to separation. One uses separation as a device creating distance to enable sight and an understanding of difference. The other separates the human from the world so that thinking becomes frozen within an exclusive human space, with metaphors of otherness created in the realm of human-only interaction. The first path leads us to seeing space through the animal presence, reflecting upon ourselves through it, retaining distance. Whereas the other entails the danger of smothering the animal in thought by translating its presence into comparisons and parallels that cannot do it justice.

Over at Wohnen in Wien, I commented on Jessica Valenti’s idea of treating pets as “starter babies.” In my momentary old-saying elephantine clumsiness, I’m afraid it came out as a criticism of Denise’s interest in the idea and I didn’t mean it that way. (Apologies again, Denise.) I understand the idea’s appeal. I don’t think that people who have pets are driven by ulterior motives. However, I believe they can be very, very wrong in their thinking about animals.

Here’s where I start waving. Frantically.

The catchiness of the term “starter baby” makes me cringe. Is this a new take on euphemism, where the animal is the unspoken, the abject, too “impure” to be noted in language? Or is this meant to uphold Paul Shepard’s tenet that pets serve as stand-ins for teddy bears? I should hope there is more to pet-keeping than human narcissism.

Wouldn’t it be too easy if one experience could serve as practice ground for another? Yet life doesn’t have a pause button, there is no draft phase. Everything is for real and really present. It’s happening. Parallels and simplifications help us organize our thinking about experiences and phenomena but they do not change the reality of the said experiences and phenomena.

Your dog is not a baby surrogate. It’s a dog. Please take your catchy blindfold off and see it as who it is. Taking care of animals does teach us responsibility; this is hardly a new discovery. Recasting it in the frame of parenthood training ground makes it sound like a revelation, whereas it really is a reduction. It takes our attention away from the question of animal rights, animal consciousness, and the conditions of human-animal co-existence and companionship.

Loving animals, feeding them, dealing with their feces is not in any way comparable to rearing a child. It won’t take the shock and difficulty away from parenthood. There are no stand-ins for experiences. Especially experiences as complex as both the relationship between parent and child and that between human and animal.

Coming back to Derrida’s cat: discovering the animal’s intense presence is a revelatory moment in Derrida’s essay, in his experience, and in Haraway’s framing of the story. Something Joyce would call an epiphany. Seeing the animal means mapping space differently. The intersection of the human and the animal gaze is an invitation to seeing oneself through the idea of an unfamiliar animal consciousness. The human’s inner otherness responds to the otherness embodied in the animal. Is this the entry to a new realm of perception?

Whatever it means in individual experience, it’s a gift, an impulse to thought. In order to approach the question of interspecies companionship (not yet define it), one must allow the animal to enter the eye. Derrida’s failure to build upon the encounter lay, according to Haraway, in his immediate turn towards translating it into purely human metaphors and parallels. The animal doesn’t exist there.

The first obligation of companionship is seeing the companion. Would the second be avoiding allegorizing and comparing?

Let’s start with seeing. Let the dog be a dog, not a “starter human.” It’s not a stub, it’s a fully-fledged being. PLEASE LOOK AT THE DOG AND SEE A DOG. This is how your story of companionship begins.

Jacques Derrida has a cat. It made my day.

One morning, Monsieur D. discovered that his feline companion was looking back at him…

He understood that actual animals look back at actual human beings; he wrote at length about a cat, his small female cat, in a particular bathroom on a real morning actually looking at him. “The cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the room as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literatures and fables” (374). Further, Derrida knew he was in the presence of someone, not a machine reacting. [...] He came right to the edge of respect, of the move to respecere, but he was sidetracked by his textual canon of Western philosophy and literature and by his own linked worries about being naked in front of his cat. He knew there is no nudity among animals, that the worry was his, even as he understood the fantastic lure of imagining he could write naked words. [...] But with his cat, Derrida failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him at looking back at him that morning. [...] Incurious, he missed a possible invitation to other-worlding.

(Haraway 19, 20; emphasis mine)

Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet arrived in the mail yesterday. I started reading it right away, like those distracted people who grab at books and life greedily and without a concept. (I am one of them.) I’m amazed and curious how she develops her idea of interspecies companionship, how different it is from Shepard’s.

Talking about companionship, or rather “bonding,” or not even that, since it could be merely a catchy theme… I saw SAD on several blogs recently. January appears to be a breaking point. Either that or it’s everyone’s New Year’s resolution to talk about their emotions.

Pets are out there too. I find the idea of pets as “starter babies” uncanny and… well… somehow disrespectful of animals as who they are. Reductive and blind to the otherness and the specific character of human-animal interaction. Denise wrote about it (commenting on Jessica Valenti’s article), I replied. I couldn’t disagree with Valenti more; I get the points, but I don’t accept them.

… wishy-washy winter continues.

Those who claim that boredom is a disease of the lazy have been too much in love with misanthropy to notice the insidious boredom of being busy. There’s an empty spot in the midst of the bustle. Boredom’s unmade bed. Baudelaire’s messy chest of drawers. Yes, I am busy. Yes, I am reading an interesting book. It’s not helping.

In the middle of the night I go to the kitchen to heat up milk for a cup of cocoa. Not much of a comfort. Something is off. Unhinged. But it works. Strangely.

The pewter gleam of late morning only fades to early evening darkness. I feel that the weather makes me stupid. No snow, no frost to bite your fingertips, your toes. I’m as unexcited as the bored kid in the picture below. Winter wolf’s toothless. I don’t even need a gun in that basket. I’m bored. Occupied attention doesn’t help. Cocoa doesn’t help. I don’t like myself so blasé.

[Image found here.]

Reading Bowleserised’s latest post, I missed my remembered excitement about fairy-tales, Angela Carter, Neil Jordan’s movie adaptation of “The Company of Wolves,” and all those other things that seem like they happened a hundred years ago, though the dates in letters and documents say otherwise. I know I’m in a momentary funk but the moment lingers.

I feel like changing out of my pj’s into other pj’s, sleeping through the rest of the season with snacks in between. Of course, nothing of the kind is happening. I go to school every day, write my papers, do my presentations, getting busily bored. There must be some cunning plan to get out of this, like Old English riddles and charms. It’s worse than “unfruitful land.” An unfruitful brain looks nasty on a resumé. People will eat me for dull blog posts. I’ll die bored.

Help, I’m stuck in the world of vitamin D and green nail varnish.

Soon I’ll know all the lyrics from Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton’s Knives Don’t Have Your Back. Please help me before I dig out my Portishead records and start singing along with Beth Gibbons.

This is probably how many cat blogs are born.

There are many great things to be said about cats, but they’re not hijacking this space.

And yet I owe it to that gray cat to finish his brief story…

It was a he and his name started with “M” as I learned from a plea for help at the tram stop. The cat I saw fit the description: big, stripey gray male (judging by the size, it must have been a castrated male). I ripped off the phone number and left a message on the owners’ cat’s human companions’* answering machine when I got back home. I believe they found him, because the next day the note was gone.

I’m somewhat ambivalent about the idea of having pets. I don’t know if I could keep any of my own. If you’re not dead serious about your pets, it doesn’t seem fair to me to have them. Cupboard love has its laws. So do other dimensions of the relationship. I wish I had had the chance to hear a voice on the phone, to hear the relief of knowing that the cat’s still alive, the hope of finding him. I could have gone to bed that night hearing phantom purring, my “good deed” done.

I didn’t see it as a great feat, just fortunate coincidence. Yet, together with vitamin D, M.’s cameo in my life brought back the opening of Herbert’s “Mr. Cogito Ponders Suffering,” with “desperate actions to save stray cats” failing to bring inner peace.

Wishy-washy winter continues…

* I don’t know a good word for someone who keeps pets. If they’re mentally sane, the compromises they make don’t fit mere “ownership.”

I saw a cat outside my window this morning. One of the few benefits of a basement apartment is the view of birds on the lawn, clueless rodents, and, yes, an occasional cat. More often, however, you get to see the irresolute legs of someone heading to the supermarket or rubber boots of kids running towards the nearby playground.

Meanwhile, I feel like never leaving the house, only lounging in my pj’s and watching Katharine Hepburn movies.

Time’s dust is slowly accumulating between me and my essay on Elizabeth Bishop’s conception of poetry as a glass eye gifted with sight. I decided to close the process of revision and consider the essay done, though I still can’t read it without thinking that it could be improved in many ways. Today, I would also add other questions to my original inquiry. But that could be a separate essay, couldn’t it? The question of creative and created sight remains open.

Because the most interesting points about sight were made by Bishop, not by me, I hesitate to paste here any excerpts from my paper. One possible point of departure for more questioning would be this paragraph, which brings together many of the ideas that interested me then: Probing the limitations of perception is one of Bishop’s idées fixes. Regardless of whether we are dealing with objectivized narration or an emotionally-colored description, the problem of the sense and aim of observation inevitably returns. The knowledge gained through watching the world closely is always questionable, being a combination of what one sees and what one only desires to see. By recreating visual experience through linguistic means, the poem becomes, out of necessity, also a tale of the act of perception. References to other senses not only emphasize certain characteristics of the object but, above all, expose the limitations of sight, its dependence on memory and imagination. Naturalness and artificiality are therefore present in observation from the very beginning.

I’m glad I used “objectivized” and not “objective,” which settles the Krapp argument tentatively in favor of me being the same person now and then. Sight as Bishop constructed it in her poetry was never “pure,” innocent, or unquestionable. Not all-embracing, not all-knowing. Tricky.

About sight in poetry, she wrote:

Off and on I have written out a poem called “Grandmother’s Glass Eye” which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of a poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye.

(Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box 212).

Although this applies to representation of sight, I think it could be extended first to extraliterary representation and then to conceptualizing sight as such. Not that this hasn’t been done, because it has — if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t even be asking about this, because the notion of disembodied objectivity still has rather strong appeal.

I’m thinking of Bishop’s modesty as pitted against the Objectivity of scientific representation. Remember what she did in Georgaphy III? The series of questions that opens that volume creates a skeptical lens through which to view space, distances, places, and phenomena from the poems. Sight according to Bishop is a modest sense. So modest that in “Poem” Bishop cuts it off from visionary pretences–

Our visions coincided—“visions” is
too serious a word—our looks, two looks

Is modest sight too dubious for science? Is vision the locus of objectivity? How can objectivity be questioned?

I could probably turn now towards modest sight as a david to scientific vision’s goliath in Bishop’s poetry, but in this sketchy post I’ll go in the other direction.

Whether scientists like it or not (and I know a few who don’t, because they will insist that linguistic is not a “real” science), language plays with them and their findings. The “objectivity” that is touted as the ultimate truth of inquiry and representation is language pulling their strings (and having its strings pulled to some extent). The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after a bath in champagne. The legacy of sentimental novels, newspaper articles, and political propaganda entering “serious” research (not like the wishy-washy humanities) all the time, quietly, unnoticed. Sic!

Apologies for enjoying the irony so much (with probably more than a hint of a humanities “complex”). Being in language is inescapable as is being in culture, politics, society. An objectivity which claims that this is possible has ulterior motives. It’s an enticing objectivity, with pretentions of godhood, one floating above the mundane in an impossible trick of its vision.

Whatever I could say has already been said in a more cogent and convincing way by Donna Haraway, so I will let the quotes from “Situated Knowledges” do my work for me.

I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision, and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribed all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. [...]

The visualizing technologies are without apparent limit [...]. [...]Vision in this technological feast becomes unregulated gluttony; all perspective gives way to infinitely mobile vision, which no longer seems just mythically about the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters. [...]

A tribute to this technology of direct, devouring, generative, and unrestricted vision, whose technological mediations are simultaneously celebrated and presented as utterly transparent, the volume celebrating the 100th anniversary of the National Geographic society closes its survey of the magazine’s quest literature, effected through its amazing photography, with two juxtaposed chapters. The first is on “Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The choice is the universe–or nothing” (Bryan, 1987, p. 352). Indeed. This chapter recounts the exploits the exploits of the race and displays the colour-enhanced “snapshots” of the outer planets reassembled from digitalized signals transmitted across vast space to let the viewer “experience” the moment of discovery in immediate vision of the “object.” These fabulous objects come to us simulataneously as indubitable recordings of what is simply there and as heroic feats of techno-scientific production. The next chapter is the twin of outer space: “Inner Space,” introduced by the epigraph, “The stuff of stars has come alive” (Bryan, 1987, p. 454). Here, the reader is brought to the realm of the infinitesimal, objectified by means of radiation outside the wavelengths that “normally” are perceived by hominid primates, i.e., the beams of lasers and scanning electron microscopes, whose signals are processed into the wonderful full-colour snapshots of defending T cells and invading viruses.

But of course that view of infinite vision is an illusion, a god-trick. I would like to suggest how our insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision (though not necessarily organic embodiment and including technological mediation), and not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as a route to disembodiment and second-birthing, allows us to construct a usable, but not an innocent objectivity.

(Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of the Partial Perspective.”The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. 86-87)

When I lived in Poznań, someone explained to me why the city wouldn’t close down the old zoo, even though most of the animals had already been moved to the new zoo at lake Malta. Stare zoo, situated near the city center, was acquiring a ghostly quality, partly abandoned, dilapidated.

“They can’t close it down completely. There’s an enormous rat colony living off the zoo waste. If they shut it down, all those rats would flood the city.”

For a long time afterwards, I couldn’t shake the image of rat hordes overtaking the Poznań Old Town, streaming through Św. Marcin, swallowing Zamek. It reminded me of a movie scene I’m not sure I had actually ever seen. For all I know, I could have imagined the whole thing, as I admitted in my comment on Bowleserised’s post on foxes. My sketchy description reads as follows: … a movie scene from a USSR production which, come to think of it, might never have existed, only I dreamed it and convinced myself I saw it on screen. [T]he scene is communist tower blocks reaching high, high into the sky, concrete gray in a desolate landscape and wolves, wolves everywhere, with glowing eyes. And a voice saying that they’ve taken over the city.

Exaggerated, dreamed, romanticized, maybe morbid. Still, the rats are there, unwanted but hungry. Beyond antipathy and acceptance, rats simply exist in the cities as another layer of their population make-up. Tip the balance and they crawl out of hiding.

I didn’t know about the rat quarter under the old zoo before that memorable explanation, but there were plenty of strays where I lived then. My roommates and I helped feed the cats the janitor found in the dumpster until someone complained to the administration. The janitor was forced to give up the cats and leave rat poison in the cellar. Rats again.

In Vienna, a rat spotted one night by the main university building was the only stray I saw. After a couple months it became disconcerting. No surprises, no uncontrolled life. It’s hard for me to imagine that Vienna reached some sort of a higher level of “cityhood” when it became simply uninteresting for undomesticated animals. It seems more likely that only rats survived the effective catching and killing.

Where do you find the life of a city, in what circumstances do you see its contours? When I read Reznikoff’s animal poems, I see the city as a living space in an instant unmade and made up again by the discovery of birds in naked trees, foxes on the park lawn.

So I was wondering about the request for information about fox sightings in Berlin (see link above). Is the man looking for stories that a reader of Reznikoff might appreciate? Does he want to re-imagine the city in the mode of my USSR movie fantasy? Or is he a member of some sort of vigilante fox-hunting group for which fox is the new rat? Let’s get them before they eat us?… I’m too lazy to write to him. In this case ignorance might be bliss.

(The title is absolutely borrowed. I am intrigued by how powerfully this combination of beauty and emotion with dismemberment works. If you’re curious about the source, read Linda Gregg’s poem, completely unrelated to this discussion. If not, pass on to my rambling below.)

The conceptual marriage of beauty and suffering comes across as a Gordian knot. I say “comes across,” not “is,” because I don’t believe this link is necessary for our thinking about either concept. Yet together they come to produce a new quality, a kind of beauty martyrdom.

Many concepts are inverted along the path to salvation through beauty. (Something called “beauty” being conceived of as, paradoxically, both essential and produced, its production and attainment of a “natural-looking” ideal desired without questioning.) Most importantly, pain becomes anaesthetized in the beauty discourse. It becomes something purely imagined and exaggerated. In beauty martyrdom, pain doesn’t exist. It’s swallowed before the mind could let it come into being.

The mind. Smoothly inserted into the body, which is — what? An object? Property? Easily remodeled clay? Whatever it is, it is clearly divisible from whatever the mind is in this narrative. If beauty is married to suffering, then the mind is forever divorced from the body. In my rushed and perhaps somewhat inconclusive comment to Wildly Parenthetical’s post “The appropriation and normalisation of the body,” (which is a response to [What in the hell...] do things do things look like if we start with the body?, so I recommend reading both) I wrote: The discourse of beauty production further removes the body from the mind, depersonalizing it even further, it seems to me. The body ready for a “cosmetic surgeon’s” scalpel, with lines drawn on it is already dismembered, ready for another level of butchering. The justification for the practice erases identity from the body. The woman (it is usually the woman) is made to believe that the “imperfect” body is abstracted from her self and that the mind (as a fully separated entity) should have all possible creativity in determining the shape of its flesh encasement.

For a far more cogent and comprehensive argument, I suggest looking up Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth.

What I would like to focus on is the question of dismemberment.

It strikes me that this kind of dismemberment seems to have a completely different cognitive impact than the dismemberment of animals as described by Paul Shepard:

Breaking up the world in thought, attending to its diversity and discontinuity, discriminating differences in order to think–all this clearly threatens its continuity and wholeness. Learning the morphology of bodies has been likened to a kind of dissection. The butchering analogy extends as well to the naming of the internal part of the body. Oddly enough, it is the insides of animals that work against the tendency of the world to fragment. (The Others 47)

We need to cut up the world in order to make sense of it and animals are our primary models, argues Shepard. But “butchering” has two different meanings for him depending on the context. When the process of dismemberment is removed from our eyes and made the business of institutions that deliver to us ready products:

Butchery makes new categories by abstracting “meat” from the whole animal, creating a perceptual gap between the food and the thing eaten. (The Others 34)

I wouldn’t want to insist on direct parallels between the animal world with human participation and the human society which sees itself as abstracted from the broader natural context. But I’m tempted to ask if there is any human-to-human equivalent to creative cognitive butchery when the beauty industry so neatly fits the second description?

To what extent can we relate dismemberment to control or creation? Where is the point when these ideas become perverted? When and how did the marriage of beauty to suffering take place?

Thank you, Mr. Frost.

Cardrona Bra Fence

 

And thank you, Tigtog, for linking to the Wiki entry on Hoyden. I also loved Tigtog’s picture of the shoe fence in Tasmania.
It would be wonderful to see both, but with the New Zealand fence I just feel I’d have something to add…

With question 2, I’d like to look at Black feminist bloggers as a community sharing aims and ideas. I wrote earlier about the blog persona. This is not a “sub-section” or addendum to that post. I would like to use the ideas I outlined there to ask about the online Black feminist community and its culture.

In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes about the myths informing the literature of the African diaspora. Can we talk about a reservoir of concepts and stories shaping and binding Black feminists’ online spaces?

Do Black feminists and womanists see themselves as tricksters, offering subversive knowledge, criticism from an epistemologically privileged (important) perspective? Is that a mission or an ethical perspective shared among them/you?

There are several academic Black feminists and womanists who do not necessarily take the tone of instruction, but inscribe the question of knowledge and the search for it very visibly into their blogging objectives. Referring to the academia is not just a statement of interests but a speaking position, it seems to me, one presupposing a principled interaction, sometimes also applying a hierarchy, though the particular rules are up to the blogger.

The Angry Black Woman does not rely so much on the teacher persona but on the strength encoded in a stereotype she uses to her advantage on the blog. She best describes it herself:

A couple of years ago during a discussion of confrontations and how people handle them, I advised a friend that he needed an Angry Black Woman to resolve his conflicts for him. After all, Angry Black Women have advantages certain others don’t.

Firstly, ABWs are angry. Anger won’t solve most of the world’s problems, but it will get people who play at being aggressive and dominant to back down quickly. Second, ABWs are black. And we know that most white people are scared of black people. Third, ABWs are women. So, if the person you’re in conflict is a man, isn’t backing down from the anger, and doesn’t flinch at going toe to toe with a black person, being a woman is really useful. He can’t hit you, you’re a woman. If he does, he’s an abuser. If he calls the police on you, they’ll exclaim “You’re frightened of a woman? Grow a set of balls and leave us alone!” Thus, Angry Black Women have the advantage in almost all conflict situations.

(Read more here.)

Mnemosyne makes use of the figure of the Greek titaness, the embodiment of memory who gave birth to the Muses (and thus comes before them), to mark her blog’s non-literary orientation and her focus on “what i and other marginalized people have to say, than how we say it.”

There are, of course, many other ways of self-representation. One of them is focusing on the content and objectives of the blog rather than self-characterization. Ann of Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters provides a mission statement on the “About” page without any self-description. Aulelia, a young African journalist in the UK, doesn’t use a mythic persona, but instead outlines her background, her beliefs, presents her artwork and photographs of herself.

The imagery and avatars that appear on the blogs are an important aspect of the personae. Photographs place the writer as a person of flesh and blood and in almost tangible surroundings (there is a suspension of disbelief, no one reacts automatically suspecting inauthenticity). Do illustrations then suggest detachment or increased distance between blogger and reader? What to make of them?

I am not going to try to bring the above observations together. I’m asking here about common threads and would like to hear some ideas on that. Feedback will be greatly appreciated.

I took a peek at Jonathan Carroll’s blog today.

Carroll is one of those authors to enjoy astounding popularity in most unlikely places. Not many of his compatriots are aware of him… but he’s a bit of a cult author in Poland. His debut novel, The Land of Laughs was the novel of the beginning of the nineties — first printed as a serial in the legendary magazine Fantastyka, then it went through several book editions, was nonchallantly mentioned on various TV shows, and read by everyone who wanted to be someone, it seemed.

I first read The Land of Laughs when I was 15. I then read almost everything he published until I got tired with the recurrent themes — collecting fountain pens, suspension between Vienna and Connecticut, talking animals, interestingly flawed women and the sensual feel of the back of their heads when caressed by the protagonist…

I find myself returning now and then to two of his novels, the debut and Bones of the Moon and to his short stories, especially the ones collected in The Panic Hand (or rather: Upiorna dłoń, because the stories might have been published in a different form in English). Bits of God captured in a woman’s casual pencil drafts, dogs that can smell evil, fashion for a dying man. Themes I like in the way I like pieces of chocolate slowly melting on the tongue. not to be dead sophisticated but tickled on my imagination gray cells.

Like one of the reviewers on Carroll’s official website, I wish he had written the children’s stories from the Land of Laughs. The language blows me away every time:

The Land of Laughs was lit by eyes that saw the lights that no one’s seen.

The plates hated the silver, who in turn hated the glasses. They sang cruel songs to each other. Ping. Clank. Tink. This kind of meanness three times a day.

The voice of Salt loved Krang too. When it was with her, it always whispered.

I’m touched:

In the preface to the Polish edition of A Child Across the Sky (Dziecko na niebie), Carroll writes that he feels fulfilled as a writer when he thinks that a person in Wrocław is sitting on the tram going home after work and enjoying one of his books.

On his blog, in the entry “CarrollBlog 1.6,” he quotes Magdalena Samozwaniec, a largely forgotten Polish writer. Warm laughter. Thanks.

It was Anthony who brought to my attention the tricky nature of the blogging persona. The “About” page didn’t make me fully aware of the complexity involved. True, I tried to write as little as possible and be very cryptic. It was not to be me with my dental history, family members’ pictures, and occupational info in a new medium. No overflows of spontaneous confession, because, well, that’s not me. Even when I kept a diary as a teenager, it was more about stylistic exercises and playing with voices. It was always a notebook, you couldn’t tell what I ate for breakfast nor what the weather was like. My letters, which I have been addicted to writing for years, are pretty similar but with the adrenalin generated by the presence of a reader.

For a fleeting instant I even entertained the idea of “killing the author” in a way, of writing in a sort of disembodied voice. However, the last time someone used the term to describe me, I was more than slightly hurt. Disembodied voices don’t work. In the end you want to feel that your body is there, that blood is flowing, and ideas flutter across a pleasantly imperfect brain.

Given that I knew this much, I still didn’t see filling the “About” page as the birth of a brain-child, thought-child, as Athena leaping out of Zeus’ skull. Yet now I come to think that it was no less than that. Having been addressed several times by the name I chose for the persona writing here, I see Januaries as an idea in process of becoming, a sketch to which new lines may be added as time passes. Not a split, separate identity, but definitely a specific costume in which I perform my self.

By now, we’ve come to share to some extent the dental history (vide the summer posts about how my wisdom teeth came out), but ‘mother’ and ‘father’ in this space bear the blank masks of cartoon parents, those legs standing in the door, hands touching kids’ shoulders. You can’t complain to my grandmother that you don’t like what I say. You can’t appear out of nowhere on my doorstep, you can only send me an email. These things are important to me.

So much for me. But there are multiple ways of handling your blogging persona or rejecting it (I would argue that there is always a persona, but I don’t want to climb on a hill of theory). Anthony says he finds it easier to accept personae and nicknames that real life names. I will add that photos and details concerning work and family can be challenging. How does a blog-writer who divulges such details conceive of their online performance?

People who blog so as to stay in touch with their friends from distant places I would be inclined to exempt from this suspicious questioning. Politicians and celebrities are slaves of self-creation, so they are a particular instance in the personae game. Fiction writers are insulated by the character of their work, the blog is merely a new venue. Checked off the list. What about the others?

The most intriguing case I know of identities collapsing on each other is Zoe Margolis creating the persona of Abby Lee for the purposes of Girl with a One-Track Mind and Lee becoming Margolis as the book version of the blog became famous. I don’t know how she handles it. Furthermore, I don’t know (yet?) how her story is affecting the blogosphere. Perhaps, unbeknown to me, there is a new dream of fame out there and a new wave of erotic writers waiting to be discovered, ready to sign the accounts of their sexploits with their real names. I am sure that the online surreality is fluctuating and twisting with new conceptions of the writing self.

Meanwhile, I’m here, pondering Kate Harding’s argumentation in favor of using one’s real name on the blog. I find her explanation very convincing, although it doesn’t make me want to abandon my Dürer owl.

The icon or so-called avatar is another component of the blog persona worthy of attention. Many choose iconoclasm (or laziness, or technological helplessness) and leave a blank, others carefully sort through their best pictures. It took me a while before I found a satisfying image: a symbol that I liked, by an artist I admired.*

Does compiling your blog persona have something of scrapbook magic? A little bit of what you’ve wanted to be, a little bit of insolence, a little bit of wild theorizing, grounded in who you are, perched upon certain limitations (I wonder, for instance, how many blog personae are “thinner” and “taller,” though I’m not happy with that thought).

I think the personae are performed in an area between fiction and reality. Maybe that area already has a name, only I’m not quick enough in my link-hopping. Maybe someone will tell me I’m getting it all wrong and the blog-logic operates on completely different principles. I’d be thrilled to learn.

*I admire a pretty piece of cake, hence I replaced master Dürer with cherry pie at some point and who know what else later.