true stories

by margaret atwood

i

don't ask for the true story;
why do you need it?

it's not what i set out with
or what i carry.

what i'm sailing with,
a knife, blue fire,

luck, a few good words
that still work, and the tide.

ii

the true story was lost
on the way to the beach, it's something

i never had, that black tangle
of branches in a shifting light,

my blurred footprints
filling with salt

water, this handful
of tiny bones, this owl's kill;

a moon, crumpled papers, a coin,
the glint of an old picnic,

the hollows made by lovers
in sand a hundred

years ago: no clue.

iii

the true story lies
among the other stories,

a mess of colours, like jumbled clothing
thrown off or away,

like hearts on marble, like syllables, like
butchers' discards.

the true story is vicious
and multiple and untrue

after all. why do you
need it? don't ever

ask for the true story.

cyborg aesthetic

 [photo of rihanna, one hand over eye / taken from an illuminati conspiracy theory website]

all quotes from chapter 8, "a cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century" from the book simians, cyborgs, and women by donna j. haraway

"this chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. . . the cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. it is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence."

"the relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. unlike the hopes of frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. . . [cyborgs] are wary of holism but needy for connection."

"pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. . . but basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. they could not achieve man's dream, only mock it. they were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. to think they were otherwise is paranoid. now we are not so sure. late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert."

"the boundary between phsyical and non-physical is very imprecise for us. . . writing, power, and technology are old partners in western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism. miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles. . . our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile - a matter of immense human pain in detroit and singapore. people are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque. cyborgs are ether, quintessence."

"a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints."

"consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic. with the hard-won recognition of their social and historical constitution, gender, race, and class cannot provide the basis for belief in 'essential' unity. there is nothing about being 'female' that naturally binds women. there is not even such a state as 'being' female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism. . . chela sandoval. . . has theorized a hopeful model of political identity called 'oppositional consciousness', born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class. . . sandoval's argument has to be seen as one potent formulation for feminists out of the world-wide development of anti-colonialist discourse. . . as orientalism is deconstructed politically and semiotically, the identities of the occident destablize, including those of feminists."

"cyborg feminists have to argue that 'we' do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole. innocence, and the corollary insistence on victimhood as the only ground for insight, has done enough damage. . . but in the consciousness of our failures, we risk lapsing into boundless difference and giving up on the confusing task of making partial, real connection."

"one important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations. the cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. this is the self feminists must code."

"to be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labour force; seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex."

"the permanent partiality of feminist points of view has consequences for our expectations of forms of political organization and participation. we do not need a totality in order to work well. the feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. in that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction. perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be man, the embodiment of western logos."

"every story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation; that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the other. these plots are ruled by a reproductive politics - rebirth without flaw, perfection, abstraction. in this plot women are imagined either better or worse off, but all agree they have less selfhood, weaker individuation, more fusion to the oral, to mother , less at stake in masculine autonomy. but there is another route to having less at stake in masculine autonomy, a route that does not pass through woman, primitive, zero, the mirror stage and its imaginary. it passes through women and other present-tense, illegitimate cyborgs, not of woman born, who refuse the ideological resources of victimization so as to have a real life. these cyborgs are the people who refuse to disappear on cue."

"why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?"

"monsters have always defined the limits of community in western imaginations."

"cyborg imagery... means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. . . a cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. one is too few, and two is only one possibility. intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. the machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. the machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. we can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. we are responsible for boundaries."

"cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance. race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. there is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction."

"i would suggest that cyborgs have more to do with regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of most birthing.  . . we have all been injured, profoundly. we require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender."

lemonade.

finally.
crying for ten minutes straight near the end.
less the music / more the visuals, the narrative, the honesty, the poetry.

 

(poetry by warsan shire)

i am accused of tending to the past

by lucille clifton

i am accused of tending to the past
as if i made it,
as if i sculpted it
with my own hands. i did not.
this past was waiting for me
when i came,
a monstrous unnamed baby,
and i with my mother's itch
took it to breast
and named it
History.
she is more human now,
learning languages everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates.
when she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will.

on violence

all quotes from the wretched of the earth by frantz fanon

"decolonization is always a violent event."

"the colonized world is a world divided in two. the dividing line, the border, is represented by the barracks and the police stations. in the colonies, the official legitimate agent, the spokesperson for the colonizer and the regime of oppression, is the police officer or soldier. in capitalist societies, education, whether secular or religious, the teaching of moral reflexes handed down from father to son, the exemplary integrity of workers decorated after fifty years of loyal and faithful service, the fostering of love for harmony and wisdom, those aesthetic forms of respect for the status quo, instill in the exploited a mood of submission and inhibition which considerably eases the task of the agents of law and order."

"the 'native' sector is not complementary to the european sector. the two confront each other, but not in the service of a higher unity. governed by a purely aristotelian logic, they follow the dictates of mutual exclusion: there is no conciliation possible, one of them is superfluous."

"challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. it is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different."

"the intellectual who, for his part, has adopted the abstract, universal values of the colonizer is prepared to fight so that colonist and colonized can live in peace in a new world. but what he does not see, because precisely colonialism and all its modes of thought have seeped into him, is that the colonist is no longer interested in staying on and coexisting once the colonial context has disappeared."

"the colonized intellectual learned from his masters that the individual must assert himself. the colonialist bourgeoisie hammered into the colonized mind the notion of a society of individuals where each is locked in his subjectivity, where wealth lies in thought. but the colonized intellectual who is lucky enough to bunker down with the people during the liberation struggle, will soon discover the falsity of this theory. . the colonized intellectual witnesses the destruction of all his idols: egoism, arrogant recrimination, and the idiotic, childish need to have the last word."

"whether it be in the djemaas of north africa or the palavers of west africa, tradition has it that disputes which break out in a village are worked out in public. by this i mean collective self-criticism with a touch of humor because everyone is relaxed, because in the end we all want the same thing. the intellectual sheds all that calculating, all those strange silences, those ulterior motives, that devious thinking and secrecy as he gradually plunges deeper among the people. in this respect then we can genuinely say that the community has already triumphed and exudes its own light, its own reason."

"the colonized subject is a persecuted man who is forever dreaming of becoming the persecutor. . . this impulse to take the colonist's place maintains a constant muscular tonus. it is a known fact that under certain emotional circumstances an obstacle actually escalates action."

"in the colonial world, the colonized's affectivity is kept on edge like a running sore flinching from a caustic agent."

"stating the principle 'it's them or us' is not a paradox since colonialism, as we have seen, is precisely the organization of a manichaean world, of a compartmentalized world."

"the existence of an armed struggle is indicative that the people are determined to put their faith only in violent methods. the very same people who had it constantly drummed into them that the only language they understood was that of force, now decide to express themselves with force. in fact the colonist has always shown them the path they should follow to liberation. the argument chosen by the colonized was conveyed to them by the colonist, and by an ironic twist of fate it is now the colonized who state that it is the colonizer who only understands the language of force. the colonial regime owes its legitimacy to force and at no time does it ever endeavor to cover up this nature of things."

"the violence of the colonial regime and the counterviolence of the colonized balance each other and respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity. . . the colonist's logic is unrelenting and one is only baffled by the counterlogic of the colonized's behavior if one has remained out of touch with the colonists' way of thinking."

"to the expression 'all natives are the same,' the colonized reply: 'all colonists are the same'. . .the theory of the 'absolute evil of the colonist' is in response to the theory of the 'absolute evil of the native'."

"the work of the colonist is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the colonized. . . for the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonist."

"europe's well-being and progress were built with the sweat and corpses of blacks, arabs, indians, and asians. this we are determined never to forget."

"the basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anticolonialism, indeed capitalism versus socialism, is already losing its importance. what matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences."

"colonialism and imperialism have not settled their debt to us once they have withdrawn their flag and their police force from our territories. for centuries the capitalists have behaved like real war criminals in the underdeveloped world. deportation, massacres, forced labor, and slavery were the primary methods used by capitalism to increase its gold and diamond reserves, and establish its wealth and power. . . and when we hear the head of a european nation declare with hand on heart that he must come to the aid of the unfortunate peoples of the underdeveloped world, we do not tremble with gratitude. on the contrary, we say among ourselves, 'it is a just reparation we are getting.' so we will not accept aid for the underdeveloped countries as 'charity'. such aid must be considered the final stage of a dual consciousness - the consciousness of the colonized that it is their due and consciousness of the capitalist powers that effectively they must pay up."

"it is clear therefore that the young nations of the third world are wrong to grovel at the feet of the capitalist countries. we are powerful in our own right and the justness of our position."

easily led

what does it matter

if i smoke at my window
-the tall one-

i am on my knees
on a stool
i have moved bones

like the president
or his wife
on television

unlike the show
my legs tremble
hand shakes

death remembers me

what does it matter
if ten years went by
or five or two or
none

what i feel in my blood
is a type of prayer
that i cannot
finish

4.29.16

The Verb to Be

by André Breton
translated by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow

I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no wings, it doesn’t necessarily sit at a cleared table in the evening on a terrace by the sea. It’s despair and not the return of a quantity of insignificant facts like seeds that leave one furrow for another at nightfall. It’s not the moss that forms on a rock or the foam that rocks in a glass. It’s a boat riddled with snow, if you will, like birds that fall and their blood doesn’t have the slightest thickness. I know the general outline of despair. A very small shape, defined by jewels worn in the hair. That’s despair. A pearl necklace for which no clasp can be found and whose existence can’t even hang by a thread. That’s despair for you. Let’s not go into the rest. Once we begin to despair we don’t stop. I myself despair of the lampshade around four o’clock, I despair of the fan towards midnight, I despair of the cigarette smoked by men on death row. I know the general outline of despair. Despair has no heart, my hand always touches breathless despair, the despair whose mirrors never tell us if it’s dead. I live on that despair which enchants me. I love that blue fly which hovers in the sky at the hour when the stars hum. I know the general outline of the despair with long slender surprises, the despair of pride, the despair of anger. I get up every day like everyone else and I stretch my arms against a floral wallpaper. I don’t remember anything and it’s always in despair that I discover the beautiful uprooted trees of night. The air in the room is as beautiful as drumsticks. What weathery weather. I know the general outline of despair. It’s like the curtain’s wind that holds out a helping hand. Can you imagine such a despair? Fire! Ah they’re on their way … Help! Here they come falling down the stairs … And the ads in the newspaper, and the illuminated signs along the canal. Sandpile, beat it, you dirty sandpile! In its general outline despair has no importance. It’s a squad of trees that will eventually make a forest, it’s a squad of stars that will eventually make one less day, it’s a squad of one­-less-­days that will eventually make up my life.

sleep-scattering

poems from song offerings by rabindranath tagore
translated by joe winter

77

the pain the soul bears, and life's being
of pain, alas, even from birth's freeing --
     o let your flame tower high and higher,
     spare not, admit me to the fire
     though frail, all earth-bound pale desire
          into its ashes fleeing.

o sound the call, the call that must be,
     why needlessly postpone it?
this blind entanglement of the heart,
     tear it away, disown it!
          now may the crash of thunder break --
          so let the noise your conch will make,
          pride-shattering, sleep-scattering, wake
               into a brilliant seeing.

90

strike me more, i will endure it --
     let the blows come.
with a harder tune now make
     these life-strings thrum.
as yet the melody in them waking
is minor, its full tune not taking --
a crueller cadence, by your making,
     let it become.

kind compassion, o my dear one
     is not the whole.
in tender music's play let me not
     lose my soul.
let all fires explode and quiver,
let all winds cry out and shiver. . .
with all the skies awake, deliver
     the all and sum.

absent

quotes from in the realm of hungry ghosts by gabor mate

"psychological isolation tips people into addiction in the first place, and addiction keeps them isolated because it sets a higher value on their motivations and behaviors around the drug than on anything else - even human contact."

"if the differences between my behaviors and the self-annihilating life patterns of my clients are obvious, the similarities are illuminating - and humbling. i have come to see addiction not as a discrete, solid entity - a case of 'either you got it or you don't got it' - but as a subtle and extensive continuum."

"addictions, even as they resemble normal human yearnings, are more about desire than attainment. in the addicted mode, the emotional charge is in the pursuit and the acquisition of the desired object, not in the possession and enjoyment of it. the greatest pleasure is in the momentary satisfaction of yearning. the fundamental addiction is to the fleeting experience of not being addicted. the addict craves the absence of the craving state. for a brief moment he's liberated from emptiness, from boredom, from lack of meaning, from yearning, from being driven or from pain. he is free. his enslavement to the external - the substance, the object, or the activity - consists of the impossibility, in his mind, or finding within himself the freedom from longing or irritability."

"if in doubt, ask yourself one simple question: given the harm you're doing to yourself and others, are you willing to stop? if not, you're addicted. and if you're unable to renounce the behavior or to keep your pledge when you do, you're addicted."

"you may even devote your entire life to a passion, but if it's truly a passion and not an addiction, you'll do so with freedom, joy, and a full assertion of your truest self and values. in addiction, there's no joy, freedom, or assertion. . . addiction is centrifugal. it sucks energy from you, creating a vacuum of inertia. a passion energizes you and enriches your relationships. it empowers you and gives strength to others. passion creates, addiction consumes - first the self and then the others within its orbit."

"my relationship with rae loses vitality. because my internal world is dominated by obsession, i have little to say, and what i do say rings hollow in my own ears. because my attention is pulled inward, the interest i offer her becomes dutiful, rather than genuine. when i'm in one of my addictive cycles, it's almost as if i were engaged in a sexual affair, with all the attendant obsession, lying, and manipulation. above all, i'm absent. it's impossible to be present when you're putting up walls to keep from being seen. intimacy and spontaneity are sacrificed."

oh no

what comes after a word like that

(you know)

the right word is not "puddle"

not "mess"

not "loss" or "lifeless"

the right phrase was not

"come down"

nor "stay up"

(i see you)

"don't drown"
could be said, held

under

writhe

ache

echo

moan

writhe

ache

echo

moan

writhe

ache

echo

moan

no words

are stones

to step

a way back

way back
back

rest here.

throb

&

hold

the enormous

terror

it's fascist

will be said

queer, will be said

sad will be said

thrown back

all wrong

all wrong

4.28.16

nothing

by margaret atwood from true stories

nothing like love to put blood
back in the language,
the difference between the beach and its
discrete rocks & shards, a hard
cuneiform, and the tender cursive
of waves; bone & liquid fishegg, desert
& saltmarsh, a green push
out of death. the vowels plump
again like lips or soaked fingers, and the fingers
themselves move around these
softening pebbles as around skin. the sky's
not vacant and over there but close
against your eyes, molten, so near
you can taste it. it tastes of
salt. what touches
you is what you touch.

the last time

by marie howe, from what the living do

the last time we had dinner together in a restaurant
with white tablecloths, he leaned forward

and took my two hands in his hands and said,
i'm going to die soon. i want you to know that.

and i said, i think i do know.
and he said, what surprises me is that you don't.

and i said, i do. and he said, what?
and i said, know that you're going to die.

and he said, no, i mean know that you are.

in-between spaces

quotes from the location of culture by homi k bhabha

“a boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing” -martin heidegger, 'building, dwelling, thinking'

“the move away from the singularities of 'class' or 'gender' as primary conceptual and organizational categories has resulted in an awareness of the subject positions – of race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation – that inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world. What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These 'in-between' spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.”

“i wanted to make shapes or set up situations that are kind of open... my work has a lot to do with a kind of fluidity, a movement back and forth, not making a claim to any specific or essential way of being.” - renee green /also: “it's still a struggle for power between various groups within ethnic groups about what's being said and who's saying what, who's representing who? What is a community anyway? What is a black community? What is a latino community? I have trouble with thinking of all these things as monolithic fixed categories.”

“how are subjects formed 'in-between', or in excess of, the sum of the 'parts' of difference (usually intoned as race/class/gender, etc)? How do strategies of representation or empowerment come to be formulated in the competing claims of communities where, despite shared histories of deprivation and discrimination, the exchange of values, meanings and priorities may not always be collaborative and dialogical, but may be profoundly antagonistic, conflictual and even incommensurable?”

“the real world appears in the image as it were between parentheses” -emmanuel levinas

“the lesson aila teaches requires a movement away from a world conceived in binary terms, away from a notion of the people's aspirations sketched in simple black and white. It also requires a shift of attention from the political as a pedagogical, ideological practice to politics as the stressed necessity of everyday life – politics as a performativity. Aila leads us to the unhomely world where, gordimer writes, the banalities are enacted – the fuss over births, marriages, family affairs with their survival rituals of food and clothing. But it is precisely in these banalities that the unhomely stirs, as the violence of a racialized society falls most enduringly on the details of life: where you can sit, or not; how you can live, or not; what you can learn, or not; who you can love, or not. Between the banal act of freedom and its historic denial rises the silence.”

dyed carnations

by robin schiff

 

There’s blue, and then there’s blue.

A number, not a hue, this blue

is not the undertone of any one

but there it is, primary.

I held the bouquet

in shock and cut the stems at a deadly angle.

I opened the toxic sachet of flower food

with my canine and rinsed my mouth.

I used to wash my hands and daydream.

I dreamed of myself and washed

my hands of everything. Easy math.

Now I can’t get their procedure

at the florist off my mind.

The white flowers arrived! They overnighted

in a chemical bath

and now they have a fake laugh

that catches like a match

that starts the kind of kitchen fire

that is fanned by water.

They won’t even look at me.

Happy Anniversary.

equidistant

quotes from labyrinths by jorge luis borges

“plato said that poets are the scribes of a god who moves them against their own will, against their intentions, just as a magnet moves a series of iron rings.” -in “the argentine writer and tradition”

“in time, because if the future and the past are infinite, there can not really be a when; in space, because if every being is equidistant from the infinite and the infinitesimal, neither can there be a where. no one exists on a certain day, in a certain lace; no one knows the size of his own countenance.” -from “the fearful sphere of pascal”