hagiography

July Something:-

Passion is usually cast as a beautiful, defiant woman; beautiful because she is defiant, and defiant because she is beautiful - either way, it involves hair, unbound, wild. And passion is about lust, that throaty scream, that ragged gasp, that open mouthed and open legged invitation. Oh yes, and those lusty women, the lusty woman, she WANTS you. Sure, she may shout and curse and appear like a spitting cat, but REALLY she wants you; up her, inside her, owning her. She’s passionate about you, loves you to death, to bits; she’ll take you apart, limb from limb, but all BECAUSE of her passionate and unbridled love for YOU.

Essentially, forever and always, it’s about YOU. Uhuh. Uhuh. This is why anger is not seen as passion. While you might make HER angry, her anger is about HER/SELF. HER anger is introspective. In HER anger you are just a character, a target, a wall she bounces HER head off.

Dare I say it, you’re not interested in her anger. It shows you the shields and defences and, I expect, the vulnerabilities you imagine you can breach, but still, it belongs to HER. It’s outside of YOU and YOUR considerations; the vulnerabilities are not fleshy holes, instead they have teeth, much like vagina dentata, but you’re used to her kisses and wild invocations for penetration and submissive spreadings.

In her lust she accommodates you. In her anger she asks you to accommodate her.

This you are not capable of doing. This is beyond your frame of reference. Ever since mommy tore you from her redeeming breast, and God told you that you were a bastard, you’ve been looking for someone to VALIDATE your painful existence, to take it from you and serve it back up to you on a plate lovingly adorned with garnishes of forgiveness and attentions. When she is lusty she will do this for you; when she is angry she will do this for herself, inspite of herself, despite herself.

If she refuses to subsume or submit, you consider her to be difficult and unstable, morbid and unreliable, rude and utterly fallible.

In anger she stands before you naked and raw. Anger, like a riot, is the last vestige of refusal, confused, indiscriminate, incoherent. And so she riots, but not for you. She throws bottles and bricks, but not at you. She cannot win this particular confrontation, but that’s not her aim. She doesn’t have an aim. Anger, like all faithful passion, is an explosion, desperately unfocussed. There’s no such thing as precision bombing, clitoral damage will occur. Molotov cocktails need no olives or fancy umbrellas.

Sit down, chug your beer, I’m ripping up cloth.

July the day after the night before:-

The personality is not fractional or fictional; it is not possible to divide it with a line and suggest a beginning, middle and end. Instead, we are like paper, foldable only eight times. There is no infinite regress.

The personality is both fractional and fictional; we are infinitely divisible, a series of markings measure our temper and temperament. We bear no relation to paper, except for our creases; we cannot even communicate with paper, hence the wafer and transubstantiation.

Dried grasses …

July 27:-

I am not Cleopatra
And you are not Mark Anthony.
I will not clasp a snake to my breast
And you will not fall on your own sword.
Octavius is not waiting outside the city gates,
And no Roman legions, legends or lessions apply …

Mundanity overtakes mythology. Dirty washing spews out of the basket in the bathroom. It is of no consequence that you make the bed every morning. Tragedy does not rest on dual pillars of discipline and domesticity.

A skipping rope hangs slack/lies coiled/invents knots while it rests. I remember its concrete slaps in a once arced motion, my feet grazing the ground during imprecise, shuffled landings. As a child I was more up than down. Flight, no matter how miniscule, did not elude me. These days, motion, even on a horizontal plane, is problematic.

July 28:-

There is a particular species of insect in which the male, who is fifty times smaller than the female, spends his lifetime as a parasite living in her abdomen. He leaves once, to fertilise her, and then dies immediately.

July 29:-

Of dissident value is menstrual blood; 99.5% of the time it serves absolutely no function, except to support failure.

The dissident, like the dilettante, is a necessary component of modern society. As Kurt Vonnegut once said “I tell you, we are here on earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different”.

Athenian democracy, as we know it, in terms of it being that THING purportedly held to our breasts (either our implanted breasts, or our uselessly nippled breasts, or our prepubescent breasts, or our - once in a lifetime for about ten years - fucking perfect breasts, or our sagging breasts), PURPORTEDLY HELD TO OUR BREASTS, lasted about one hundred and fifty years. Its end was signalled by the death of Socrates. He was given a stark choice. He drank hemlock and so died, puking and shitting and racked with convulsions. Why? Because he denounced the gods. He was a dissident.

We have now a new God; money, worshipped within the paradigm of capitalism. Mammon. How we love our disposable incomes, always created out of someone elses’ surplus value. The money in your bank account is not yours. Those neatly folded notes nestling in the back of your wallet ARE NOT YOURS. Those nice, warm coins, snuggled up in your trousers pocket A R E NoT youRs. You only have it because it’s been STOLEN from someone else; the person who slaved in a sweatshop making said wallet or jeans wrapped round your ARSE, the shoes on your feet, the plastics your food comes in …

And to the dissidents, who are the dissidents? Today’s terrorists have been ‘re-branded’ as ‘criminals’; funda/mentalists we like to call them. Fundus, ‘the base or bottom of the organ, the part remote from the external aperture’ (OED). Extremists. Murderers. THEY KILL INNOCENT CIVILIANS in pursuit of their cause. Of course the civilians are innocent, shrouded up in their ignorance, bleating their pathetic excuses of powerlessness. But there’s the paradox, one martyr, one dissident, show us all EXACTLY how powerful we are.

Let’s make this W(with a capital W)estern centric, to reflect the values of world politik and throw in a bit of history. Consider for a moment the IRA. Why, oh why, oh fucking why, did they bomb the mainland? It’s all a mystery, except it’s not. They bombed the mainland, according to their statements, in order to ‘Bring the war home’. How are a people going to know they’re at war if they don’t FEEL like they’re at war. War has casualties. We needed casualties.

Wait,
Wait,
Wait …

And now the Red Army Faction, more specifically Ulrike Meinhof. She said “Protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more”. That’s excellent, that’s truly and edifyingly excellent. Supposedly she hanged herself, awaiting trial, I’m sure the state’s hands were clean, the fact they removed her BRAIN without seeking any sort of permissions is entirely excusable.

And to my point, I think, perhaps. I saw an author being interviewed the other day. “How do you write women so well?”
“I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability.”
Jack Nicholson, ‘As Good as It Gets’.

We, women, are simultaneously defiled and revered for our perceived stupidity and weaknesses. Our anger becomes ’a tantrum’, our passion becomes ’lust’. We’re unreasonable, hysterical, unless full frontal, in which case we’re desirable, but also culpable. There is no situation where we can possibly considered winners, or even participants.

The dissident woman is the strongest image I can think of that disrupts this equation. I bet Boudica was ugly, I almost hope she was, but I don’t expect she thought that of herself, she didn’t have time, she was a warrior. Similarly, Silvia Pankhurst, probably couldn’t be bothered with all that shite. She was fighting for universal suffrage, and then, when it became apparent that ‘rights’ were just a sop to the whining, liberal intelligentsia, she fucked off to Ethopia. Meinhof was our last and our best. These days, the male martyrs take the yoke, because they certainly don’t have the crowns, and we find ourselves, once again, alienated and vilified. Sure, there is passion, but it’s polite, decadent, dressed up in leather and lace, panting platitudes and, invariably, oh so fucking accommodating.