Stupid White Man

Two hundred fifty years ago today, William Blake was born in London. Here is his poem about the city.

London

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

Like so many before and since, he places the blame squarely on the shoulders of the youthful Harlot. I guess he had some mind-forg'd manacles of his own.

It's fine, everything is fine.

This evening I write from the rocky cliffs and murky bogs of premenstrual grumpiness. That long time friend of mine is calling me from the depths of my mind and telling me not to accept things as they are, no, life certainly is NOT good enough as it is. I remember telling you about it a few years ago - I wish I could remember now what you said. Here is a fantasto-historical re-enactment of our conversation:

L: So I'm going along every day and everything's fine, and then - BAM!- there's this voice in my head. She whispers seductively to me, she says, "Lenya, I know you better than the rest...GET OUT OF YOUR RELATIONSHIP NOW!!"

Z: I see...and how do you feel when you hear this voice?

L: Well, I feel like everything I thought was good enough suddenly isn't anymore, like I've made a horrible mistake and I'm trapped.

Z: Do you think you should get out of your relationship?

L: Well, I don't know...maybe because the Voice visits me around my period, it is actually my inner voice of wisdom, uncompromising in dignity and refusing to let me go astray - you know, my INSTINCTS.

Z: Len, baby, listen up and listen good. Your instincts are with you all the time. Yes, befriend this shrew if you must, but all of your other guiding voices are just as wise as her. What does the voice REALLY need? Does she need you to end your relationship or is it something ELSE, something entirely more important than that, something that has nothing, nothing at all, to do with anyone but YOU?

L: (sigh) Oh, Zoe, your wisdom speaks to me so directly that I feel as if its been with me all along, unacknowledged.

Z: You're beautiful, baby - remember that. I love you, kid.

Stay tuned for my psychoanalytic deconstruction of The Departed!

"I never wear this into East Hampton. This is my Revolutionary Attire."

Robert, my African dance teacher, does not celebrate Thanksgiving. "The music is my Thanksgiving," he says. My gentleman friend Siyavash does not celebrate Thanksgiving, either. "The math is my Thanksgiving," says he. Lenya, for one, is looking forward to cranberry sauce and delicata pie.

As I look out the window here in Bloomsburg, great, terrible flakes of snow are falling down from the sky. Its a sea of snow - I've dropped things, scarves and things, you know, out there and I know I'm never going to find them again. Its a beautiful sea today, but I know I'll go mad if I stay here in Bloomsburg. My darling friend Rosa Nilpferd came for a visit and we had just a terrible time. It was the most atrocious thing ever to happen in America.

Lately it occurs to me how lovely it would have been if, at the end of Return of the King, Frodo and Gandalf and Galadriel and Elrond had boarded their elven bark and sailed across Long Island Sound to Grey Gardens instead of Grey Havens. I would have been waiting for them with lembas bread and a can of liver pate.

At night, alone, she marries the bed.

Today is poet Sharon Olds' birthday, and last week would have been a birthday for Anne Sexton. She was a teenaged runaway turned suburban housewife who started writing poetry after a nervous breakdown.
I read her poem "In Celebration of My Uterus" as a high-school student and it inspired in me a great wave of essentialist solidarity with all women. It is a long poem, too long to include here, and too unified to segment, but I would like for you to read it. It is a beautiful poem. You can find it here.

Pictured above is not Anne Sexton nor Sharon Olds, but another artist. One whose poetry is shaved eyebrows and flag dances. She sees herself as a little girl. Edie Beale is like a mother to Lenya.

Expecto Patronum!

Well, I ended up in the emergency room last night because I had a UTI and my kidneys were throbbing with pain. Now I am on a long course of Ciprofloxacin, the powerful antibiotic often criticized by my friends and colleagues in the world of natural medicine for being like a bomb that wipes out all of the good intestinal and vaginal flora along with the "bad". Each time I get a UTI it progresses faster and faster.

Being sick is always so utterly shocking, because it makes me think about death. Last night, walking home from town, I thought about the people who died from e-coli in their spinach. What if I have some sort of antibiotic resistant infection, I thought, and it spreads into my bloodstream, and they put me on an IV but it doesn't work and my kidneys fail and I die? Well, Lenya, you'll just have to be at peace with the life you have lived. Don't ask for anything more. "When the doors of perception are cleansed, everything appears to Lenya as it is - infinite." William Blake said that. Its good to reflect on death.

Yes, its good to reflect on death. I even had a dream last night in which Death came to me in the form of a person. He was skinny and blonde, quite polite and a pleasure to be around. I was given the task of showing him around Montreal. We went to the theater. Thank goodness for dreams.

Die if necessary, but never kill.

Like when you pick up the phone to call Zoe and she is already there on the other end of the line, we are both studying dances of Africa. Lenya's instructor is from Tanzania and he wants to help us to become friends with the ground. This is sometimes hard for Lenya because of my ballet background, but it feels so good to be expressing the joy and confusion of my soul in body movement. This is crucial to the human experience. My gentleman friend joins me for these classes and he is the only boy student. Now why on Earth is that? The other evening, my gentleman friend asked Robert, our dance instructor, how he was feeling. Robert answered very honestly that he finds teaching difficult because there is just too much of African experience that his students in the US do not understand. Sometimes, to watch us doing these dances that mean so much to him is not uplifting. We told him that it is an honor for us that he shares this gift with us, but I realized that the only real way to show what an honor it is is to acknowledge that I do not fully understand but to try as hard as I can anyway, and to dance with a certain freedom and respect.
In Moldova, Lenya took a lover who was an Ethnobotanist. She was being funded by the government of Peru to learn the medicinal secrets of the Amazon. It was a chancy endeavor for her, after all, the motto at the Bureau of Indigenous Relations is "Die if necessary, but never kill." My friend discovered that medicinal knowledge is passed only from one generation's shaman to the next. Thousands of acres of the Amazon are destroyed every second for the production of newspapers, catalogs, and toilet tissue. Young people are leaving their communities and there may be no one left to whom this ancient information can be passed on. Still, many shamans would rather take their secrets to the grave than share them with the unworthy. The knowledge is sacred, and must not be misused.
Robert is sharing something very special with us. There are elements of the history of African dance that are shared by all of humanity because so much of human history developed there. African music has most likely influenced every type of music that exists throughout North and South America. So these are some of the connections that I can fairly make. But there are other things that I do not understand because of differences of modern history, race, nationality, food, war, and money. I do not understand these things from an African perspective because I have been on the end of things that blindly benefits from the Differences. And yet he shares these dances with me. The only thanks he expects is that I will do my best to truly express myself in the language he teaches.

The Sexual Politics of Animal Research

In a dream two nights ago, I had started a job as a research assistant at the hospital nearby. We were studying a tumor growth and had to go to the basement where all the animals were kept to retrieve two boxes of small, soft, grey female mice. As I followed the primary investigator down the hallway to the mouse room, I saw in front of me a young sow. She stood on a metal cart that was designed to prevent her from lying down. We wondered why she had been left there in the hallway - there did not seem to be any other person nearby. The primary investigator went to get the mice, and I walked to the sow. She grunted softly as I approached her. I came close and scratched her head, patted and stroked her back. As I placed my palm on the warm, smooth area behind her ear, I tried to send her love, calm, and respect. My employer came back with the mice and smiled at us. "I hope they are nice to you," I said to the sow as we walked away. I felt helpless, hypocritical, and confused. When we returned to our lab, I excused myself for a while. Later I remember finding out that she had been killed in the experiments that day. All I could tell myself was that she met a kinder end than if she had been killed for meat. She had been fully anesthetized, for example - but what narrow paths for meaning we allow these strong and gentle creatures to walk!

I have read two of Carol Adams' books - "The Sexual Politics of Meat" and "The Pornography of Meat". I read "Pornography" first and I did not expect to like it. I felt she used the word pornography in the title because she assumed that I, the reader, am opposed to pornography. This annoyed me. Once I began reading it, I found Carol's writing style to be unfocused and unclear. Her interpretations of heterosexual intercourse are certainly a part of its violent history and construction, but she doesn't encourage a radical reinterpretation. Is she sex-negative? She seems align herself with Dworkin and McKinnon on topics of sex and female subjectivity. I was also frustrated by her lack of proper citations. She gives example after outrageous example of disgusting (male) behaviors toward women and animals, but you must take her word about incidents and interpretations because she rarely includes her sources. That being said, I would recommend these books to anyone. Her ideas are so important for us all to consider and struggle with. Now that I have read the "The Pornography of Meat," I am no longer annoyed with the title. Carol and I may have different views on pornography, but that does not change the fact that the images she presents and analyzes in her book are exactly what she calls them. They are advertisments to (male) spectators enticing them to objectify, dominate, brutalize, penetrate, consume, and disregard (feminine) animals. I am grateful that she helped me to make this connection so clearly, and to consider its implications in my own life.

Beachbirds for Camera

The wind is cold and wet. Still in bed this morning, as I wrapped myself up in my blanket and looked out the window, I thought of the cold Autumns I spent in Moldova as a child. Things have been hard for Lenya since Merce Cunningham came to Bloomsburg University last weekend. The audience was horrible - laughing awkwardly when the disturbing movements and gutteral soundtrack made them nervous. Pathetic! But what did it matter to him that I was there in the audience with my heart in my throat, devastated by the forceful elegance of his dancers...he does not remember my audition seven years ago, neither him nor that awful stage manager, Svenko...I lingered outside the stage door after the performance for a while, watching a few of the dancers chat before slipping into hired cars. Then I went home and cried bitterly. Lenya is not a dancer anymore.