wet green brown and purple

The rains of spring have arrived, and with them have come bursts of color and inspiration and memory inside my brain. A good friend posted several photographs from college yesterday on a fairly public website; I've been enjoying them and thinking of those times since. Those pictures have stories; those stories have smells and textures and strange little jests. I do not want to forget these things. They must not disappear behind the cloudy eyes of days not yet born.

It makes me think of my parents telling me stories from their college days. They both maintain that the happiest days of their lives (at least until parenthood) were those in college. I remember a few of these stories, but not enough. My stories and memories matter to me, and so do the stories of my parents and family. We're not famous; I very much doubt any biographers are going to pieces together our miniature sagas in decades of the future. So, I want to save some snippets. I do not know where this will go.

-A sideshow performer hailed from the region of my mother's birth, and he still spent his time off the circuit in the area. The Knots of Knott County had small growths all over his face. They projected, dripped, bumped and stuck out from every part of his face; his specialty consisted of using his eyebrows to wiggle a long one that hung out over his eye. He did this to scare and amuse children. When he did this in my mother's direction, she was terrified and indignant.

-When asked, my grandma would always say that she choose to marry my grandpa, a salesman eight years her senior, because he was the best dancer.

-When I was a very little girl I spent lots of time outdoors. One day my grandmother came with me to spend time near my tree in the apple orchard. We brought my little round basket filled with play jewelry and decorated the early tree with these sparkling baubles. Plastic hearts, rhinestones, and all my assorted treasure made my already special tree otherworldly in the bright sunshine. Somehow we even managed to gather most of the jewelry back into the basket though, if I recall correctly, that was much harder.

More to come.

Tonight I watched two episodes of television on my computer: episodes of Dark Shadows and Big Cat Diary. These are new shows to me and I know already that they will become favourites. Though on the surface they seem to have nothing in common in terms of narrative, genre, or aesthetics, they are appropriate for this winter. This is a dark winter, perhaps the darkest I've known. In different ways, these little bits of moving light on my eyes process that darkness with me and for me. It helps to see nature and the struggle for survival along with its beauties and stalemates when I see death, disease, and pain (moving slowly and quickly) on the edges. I love the black tear marks and yellow teeth of the cheetah when I cannot open my own mouth without pain. It is like the memory of this summer's stinging nettles or the urge to revisit a sort again and again before healing has taken place. It helps also to see the melodrama, and fun of sustained risk and danger. I can feel good getting lost in a story that can go on and on and develop without end in crazy limping circles vaguely inspired by literature. This helps with the uncertainty, fragility, and blindness with which our steps are followed. I hear the night rain outside and know I could be anywhere or nowhere in six months or a year.

New Year's Eve and New Year's day are not my sort of holidays at the best of times; the command to be merry makes me maudlin, but this year I worry that their spectacular ordinariness was positively dangerous. I fell ill on the last day of the calendar year and knew I was too catching to be around people. I stayed in and heard fireworks and heard of adventures and read about resolutions without having any. I didn't watch the border between 2010 and 2011 closely enough, and so far I've not yet had a good day in 2011. My lack of vigilance allowed the real year, the shining one, be replaced with a crying wooden doll. This year has proved a changeling thus far and it does not have the vitality necessary for twelve months and thirteen moons. Tomorrow, hopefully closer still to health, I board a plane to travel backwards. As I go back in time, I plan to toss this mannekin year to the sky and land to find the real 2011, Or, if I have to, make a new one.

All decadents need cats

"Seraphita was of a dreamy and contemplative disposition. She would remain for hours on a cushion, wide-awake and following with her eyes, with intensest attention, sights invisible to ordinary mortals. She liked to be petted, but returned caresses in a very reserved way, and only in the case of persons whom she honoured with her approbation, a most difficult thing to obtain. She was fond of luxury, and we were always sure to find her curled up in the newest arm-chair or on the piece of stuff that best set off her swan's-down coat. She spent endless time at her toilet; every morning she carefully smoothed out her fur. She used her paws to wash herself, and every single hair of her fur, having been brushed out with her rosy tongue, shone like brand-new silver. If any one touched her, she at once removed the traces of the touch, for she could not bear to be rumpled. Her elegance and stylishness suggested that she was an aristocrat, and among her own kind she must have been a duchess at the very least. She delighted in perfumes, stuck her little nose into bouquets, and bit with little spasms of pleasure at handkerchiefs on which scent had been put; she walked upon the dressing-table among the scent-bottles, smelling the stoppers, and if she had been allowed to do so would no doubt have used powder. Such was Seraphita, and never did a cat bear a poetic name more worthily."

Theophile Gautier

not yet restored

some queer thoughts

So, lately queerness has come up a lot in the media and in my experience of social media. Coming Out day was recently and lots of my friends were very gung ho about coming out... as allies. At first, I felt really proud and happy. I am glad to have so many allies and that they are proud. But eventually when I saw about 4 times as many allies and many ambiguous messages by the folks I know who are queer things started to look a bit different.

Coming out is complicated and has consequences.

I'm not fully out of the closet in all situations. I'm sure out in my current town and in my work place and with my friends. I even came out super awkwardly to my mom after my sister outed me herself and lied about it. But, that's a story for another time and the bad poetry involved will never see the light of day. But, I am not explicitly out to my father (he totally knows though) or my husband's parents or to everyone I ever met back in super rural Kentucky. I'd like to be, but Its complicated (I'm working on it).

So, when I didn't feel fully comfortable shouting out my queerness on Facebook, I started to feel alienated by all of the happy cheerful straight people enjoying their participation in queer visibility. Though there can be complication for allies, coming out as supportive of homosexuality doesn't strike me as the same level of magnitude as truly publicly coming out as gay, or queer, or bi, or trans, or asexual, or gender queer, or any number of the mindblowingly diverse flavors that sexuality holds.

Allies, I appreciate your participation in queer activism. I really do.

So, I questioned this emotional response. I do not want to take away any support of queer issues, and I don't want to quash anyone's self-expression of sexuality or activism or visibility. I stand by this, but I do think my questioning led me to something a bit more complicated. What got me there was this. A very smart male straight pastor, for whom I have the deepest respect, posted to his FB wall a neat article by a queer female pastor. The gist of the article was a very rousing challenge for victims of bullying and other forms of oppression to do the Christian thing and bless their enemies and also to learn from them. It was very smart and thought provoking. I did find it uncomfortable to see this explicit challenge being shown to me by straight person. I didn't want to reject such a smart good thing, but I also don't want someone in a position of privilege (even the nicest, coolest, most open-minded person-in-a-position-of-privilege ever) to be telling queers how to deal with our bullies or oppressors. So, I went back to thinking.

Queer people are confronted with their identity in almost every space in culture at almost every moment. This is not our choice. As a result, there are parts of queerness that even the most intelligent, empathetic straight people may only catch a glimpse of, and because our allies are more numerous than we are, I think some of these perspectives and experiences risk being drowned out in the happy noise of the newly expanded pride parade.

I do not want to silence or censor folks. I especially don't want to do that to people fighting a good fight and showing their love. But I am totally willing to advocate for a bit of self-awareness. For everyone. I hope I can take my own medicine; I certainly try. I benefit from privilege, and I try not to forget that. So here's where I'm going with this.

Think about other people. Think about them when you advocate for their rights, or your own rights (for your rights will always affect others). Take time to put yourself in the position of people different from yourself and look at your own actions from the outside. Think about how other people feel. Think about people who have been thinking about this and working on this for longer than you've been alive. Think about people who have multiple minority statuses, all of which complicate each other. Think about the differences of opinion and desire and politics within the spectrum of queerness. Think about the very young and very old who don't necessarily have the freedoms many others enjoy. Think about the fact that not everyone defines queer in anything like the same way. Be a conscientious activist.

Hopefully the parade has room for everyone who wants to participate. I think it does. We just need to be sure that our participation doesn't overshadow or displace anyone else's.

------

Since writing this two amazing blog posts have come to my attention. Both deal with this same issue in different ways and I think they do an amazing job of sensitively but honestly addressing allies.


The Day After That

The Do's and Don'ts of Being a Good Ally

Leave a difference at all

I feel trapped sometimes, and weirdly enough I think it is partly the color of the light around me that affects this feeling. I hate yellow light. It is the part of fall and winter that holds no love or fascination.

Golden light I love; every photographer needs their golden hours of the day. That gentle gilded glow adds so much to any subject. No, what I cannot handle is harsh yellow light. Summer afternoons radiate with it and winter evenings do in the hours just after the sun has gone. Through most artificial light in these evenings, everything becomes stale, too warm, and itchy and yet toes stay slightly too cold. Escape and change become my inner chant at these times.

I want to run in the dark, tell secrets, and laugh airlessly with my friends far away and do it by the strange shadows of summer nights or the white brightness of winter mornings.

Fall gives birth to many urges and experiences, but sadly one of them has left me in these years living too far south for true seasons. Back in Ohio when fall turned cold and brown and deep after its earlier kaleidoscopes I would get what I called "land urges". It felt like longing and loyalty and fierceness all at once. I wanted to stand on a hill with a stick in my hand surrounded by wind and earth and belonging. This feeling rooted me to my place and told me of future connections that could grow even deeper. This cannot happen here; I feel nothing for this shifting sanddirt it isn't the earth and clay that I love. It holds biting ants and spiky strange growths. Lovely and wild yes, but never ever mine.

I wonder how connected everything is sometimes. If I exercise again today will I feel like I can live here longer without losing something precious? Does applying for lifetime jobs all over the country attune me to my gypsy self? Does growing older inspire rebellion? These answers elude me solidly.

My hands want to grasp and my eyes to scan. My location cannot change now, and my work requires me to be grounded for months and months yet. Sometimes it is all I can do to transubstantiate my desires into the realm of the possible. But then in the realm of reality, as always, I trip into conflict, compromise, contention.

Monday, I walk into the house of law. Interviewers will try to find out about me and make guesses like those addicted to horse races. Strangers and I might become a jury together and put on blindfolds so as to be many faces of justice. Sunday, my escapes appear like clockwork. Saturday, I could hunt and watch the gavel fall many times. But what about tonight? I do not know what I can do.

The venn diagram of myth and reality

A couple of weeks ago I went home too see my folks and my homeplace and the pets before my year swept me up for the next two and half months. What I found there, in addition to the comfort and inspiration I so often find, was the season of butterflies. They greeted me on the road; I saw flashes of color rip over my head, and rush beyond me. Every step out of the door brought me to the butterflies. They rested, played, fed, and bloomed as riotously as any flowers.




Beyond the immediate joy of seeing these paper thin splashes of color and flight, I felt like I'd come home to an overwhelming symbol. Butterflies can mean change and this sight of them in the last weeks of summer also spoke to me of bravado and panache in the face of fragility. There will be change. We will all be vulnerable to it, but we can leap into that, not only face change but run to it as our best selves and forget any thought of useless clinging. This felt apt to me the moment I learned it, and that rightness continues. Sometimes it feels like very many iterations of the same lesson occur all at once or that many go through the same experience together and apart but with unwitting synchronicity.

Last fall, I saw rupture and loss; it echoed through the harsher winter and the slow spring. It stayed apart from me, but I watched it like a cubist painting from many angles simultaneously and in or out of sync. Now I feel like the tumblers in our locks are moving again, but this time with me. It is not loss, this season, but movement into the unknown. We are the butterflies at the very end of summer, but we are also the coming fall.

For me this means putting forth my name and ideas for jobs. Each of them becomes a nucleus for a host of potential futures and most of them will be ended in a barely read stack of papers in a stale busy office. But I have to send these chances out; they are bright winged possibilities that range from the tiny and unknown to the deeply familiar or dauntingly celebrated. I am sending myself out on at least eighteen quests.

This merging of the archetypal, mythic, or fairy tale with what can be readily experienced jolted me this morning and prodded me to write. In Banff, somewhere in the wilds of Canada, there are these mysterious geological formations called the Inkpots. They are round greeny-clear pools of water in a mountain clearing, and they stay at the same very cold (but not freezing) temperature all the year round. We don't know much about them, save that their water comes up from below. It bubbles through their quicksand floor instead coming on the surface. How could anyone hear about such places without thinking of the story of King Turnip Counter or the many myths of being lured into magically beautiful water only to be paralyzed and drowned. These Inkpots sound more than real, and they remind that the world is wilder and bigger than our minds can hold in an everyday way. With all of this possibility, who can say what will happen?

Thunder on a sunny day

I've been realizing that I need to walk, to walk long distance, step after step out in the world till I have seen wonders and my body grows tired. The urge has struck me in many places both home and just as often away.
My first days of college – orientation really- I needed long nighttime walks across campus, through deep sleeping professorial neighborhoods into the more restlessly drowsing main street. Traversing again and again between the two poles of this tiny town I found my transition and so my days were social and engaged.
Later, I took small sweet snacks out into the creeping English spring around lanes and lakes alone in a medieval city. Watching the Brits congenially escorting their dogs helped me feel, if not properly kinship, then at least friendliness within a lonely time.
My steel town and truly large city walks functioned as constant exploration. I saw the architectural ghosts of Europe (some a bit more ragged than others) and the tarnished marvels that neighbors even three streets down had never seen. The largest city, one I've never fully understood nor yet determined my relationship with, crawled with life on my walks. Life outcrowded life and brutalized life and surrounded and buried and nurtured life. Trees reached up before lots could even be called abandoned, and the wildlife rivals any I've seen since in fecundity and ferocity.
Beyond these small specifics, walking performs enough miracles that to describe them would doom me to the trite and overused words of a snake oil salesman or smooth tongued contractor. But, I look for it, the change, the loss, the mindless working through with my deep reptile brain, and at the same time the breathtaking cabaret dazzles my waking eyes and inspires the stories of my sleeping hours. Tuesday, I walked, despite the heat, and I saw green hearts yearning in a not-quite-solid wave of particles making my shred of sidewalk into something of motionless surfboard. I saw ants taking a dead snake back into the earth while leaving its maize and garnet colors spread across the path. Warmth bathed me and smothered the air from my face, but tiny scents and wasteful sprinkles of water sustained me.
I didn't carry food for thought with me this time, but since I stopped walking cares and concerns enough have found me to make me long to walk again. I need to walk with them, not deny them or even wear down the exclusions, unwanted changes, and witnessed sadness. That night, talk and touch and dance under cheap confetti lights kept me, but I've walked since and needed it.

red and white/spots and stripes

I saw my scars today as I wandered deep in an old tale's retelling. My dear one calls them inverse freckles: little and tiny, more or less round, dots of pale in my summer hued skin. They are not like my others; they do not each have a unique origin and memory. They are subtle and must be read together. In two summers, many miles and years away from my present, a plant took me over. Poison Ivy stole weeks from me in those awkward summers, and left behind these speckles that can hold no pigment. I love my scars like I love my tattoo. They allow me to physically carry symbols and knowledge and more than myself. These scars are the season, they are transformation, they are survival and forgetfulness and growing will.

Next week they will come out more as I play in the space where ocean and land come together: geographic doorways and wind, sun, salt. Every breath will be a ritual and welcome some new knowing.

There are so many Englands.

Many of us create these Englands ourselves. We imagine it whole cloth, or bend the wood of its ancient trees, or embroider the land and its culture whether we mean to or not. I fully admit this, and have lived with the consequences.

This past trip to England ended a week ago, and I miss any sort of England that exists (be it real or no) and my own England. Each day puts my experiences more and more in the land of my own invention, my England, and less in one that might be visible to anyone else. This loss is one of melancholies of coming home. For me, this is compounded by my sleepy thoughtless loss of my travel notebook. Faithfully, for two weeks, I kept detailed thorough entries about my days only to lose it on the last leg of my very long day of travel.

But to speak of my trip itself improves things, as does posting my photographs, or thinking quietly to myself of living in some part of England again. I cannot recall everything; my photographs sadly do not contain scent (lavender and wet stone on the breeze so rich I do not even have to dip my head to find it); memories do not carry me back there. Still, we can enjoy these imperfect impressions and not hope that they are more than tiny views from moving windows.