Truth destined for others is less important than truthfulness to ourselves

"The paradox of reading is that the path toward ourselves passes through books, but that this must remain a passage. It is a traversal of books that a good reader engages in — a reader who knows that every book is the bearer of part of himself and can give him access to it, if only he has the wisdom not to end his journey there.

Truth destined for others is less important than truthfulness to ourselves, something attainable only by those who free themselves from the obligation to seem cultivated, which tyrannizes us from within and prevents us from being ourselves.

All education should strive to help those receiving it to gain enough freedom in relation to works of art to themselves become writers and artists."

~ Pierre Bayard


"Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become the path himself.

I began in absolute chaos and darkness, in a bog or swamp of ideas and emotions and experiences. Even now I do not consider myself a writer in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life, a process which appears more and more inexhaustible as I go on. Like the world-evolution, it is endless. It is a turning inside out, a voyaging through X dimensions, with the result that somewhere along the way one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling itself. It is this quality about all art which gives it a metaphysical hue, which lifts it out of time and space and centers or integrates it to the whole cosmic process. It is this about art which is ‘therapeutic’: significance, purposelessness, infinitude.

From the very beginning almost I was deeply aware there is no goal. … With the endless burrowing a certitude develops which is greater than faith or belief. I become more and more indifferent to my fate, as writer, and more and more certain of my destiny as man.

My huge failure was like the recapitulation of the experience of the race: I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything, smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark."

~ Henry Miller

I turn to sunlight for answers

From http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.com/2013/09/that-emptiness-between-us.html

Given

And I carried to that emptiness
between us, the birds
that had been calling out
all night. I carried an old
bicycle, a warm meal,
some time to talk.

I would have brought
them to you sooner
but was afraid your own
hopelessness would keep you
crouched there. If you spring up,
let it not be against me

but like a weed or a
fountain. I grant you
the hard spine of your
childhood. I grant you
the frowning arc of this morning.
If I could I would grant you

a bright throat and even
brighter eyes, this whole hill
of olive trees, its
calmness of purpose.

Let me not forget
ever what I owe you.

I have loved the love
you felt for those gardens
and I would grant you
the always steadying
presence of seeds.

I bring to that trouble
between us a bell that might
blur into air. I bring the woods
and a sense of what lives there.

Like you, I turn to sunlight for
answers. Like you, I am
not sure where it has gone.

Joanna Klink

Forevers and Ever afters

In memory and longing,
my heart reaches out
in long leaps...
Until I become -
One with the ocean.
An expanse of calm waves,
leaping and receding
staining straw-hued sands,
sands that are you.

Each encounter -
a fractal waveform
upon
a novel scatter of grains.
We merge gently, anew.
Reappraising.
Another finale.
A new color.
A story untold.
A song unsung.
A verse unsaid.

Forevers and ever afters
Language can be so useless!
It dares to seal infinity into a word.

Loving you
is an avowal
I am grateful to make.
Each day.
Each hour.
Each instant.
Every moment the waves of my being
leaping, reach
the corners of your thirsty eyes.
Every moment the radiance of your heart
spilling, paints
the borders of my sunset world.

What time-stamp would one put
on a love such as this?
I love you in letting you be,
You win me in setting me free.

Sep 10th, 2013.

The Space Between

I think I
like this distance,
This parting that,
lets me long.
Long for your fingers in the wealth of my tresses.

Seek, in dawns;
Hunt, in nights -
The gentle graze of your lips
While I drift deeper into dreams.

It helps me tell
The fractions where I am complete
From those, where I have expanded, and made room.
Room - for your at-peace voice,
your arms that wrap me with comfort,
your still-in-search-of-something eyes.

[This isn't a madness.
I may have grown over that part of myself.
This abstraction -
is deeper,
akin to an ache,
but less so.]

You are
An un-needy absence,
an un-devouring desire.

August 4th, 2013.

The Feels

No, not even today.

Moved? Something has -
Beyond the grooves of my fingertips.
But whither?

Not traipsing,
The stoic calm -
Of my fanatic heart.

Outward, perchance -
Making moss that erodes the rocks in your garden
Scenting the shy buds of jasmine in your night bowl
Fogging the starry night air you breathe.

This June,
I may have blossomed
Into a million summer butterflies
Arresting and cavorting
Colorful belligerent raindrops
Siphoning
A happy guardian cloud
Hung over you.

June 12th, 2013
~ 6:00 PM

In a Dark Time

By THEODORE ROETHKE


In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is—
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Between Ledges

I hover afraid

At the abyss between 

the leap and the ledge.

Rigth leg splayed

The left, remembering 

the grit of the edge.

This sacred space -

between footholds,

is a monastery.

A shrouded shrine

cast in chaos

for unwilling pilgrims.

Deserve it? Nay...

I am thrust here,

to understand

to empathize

to remember

to discover and word

the terror -

of feeling like falling

the heart squeezed spirally

into a blackhole belly

with the permanence of breathing.

I am thrust here,

to never forget

to never dismiss

to never, minimize -

if ever again,

The right foot finds feeling.

April 6th, 2013.

Philosophizing Depression

And so it is on occasion, that page after page after page, each moment surrenders into the next without pause. It is like that terrifying time-piece, whose long arms race (Newton might have invented differentials to make some sense of the crazy unrelenting time of such clocks) at a pace steady with its staccato cousins (the ticking clocks). But because it doesn't have that ever expected pause - the signal for the passing of one second - it arrests your vision, your imagination, your whole being is paralyzed by the flow of never resting time. Cognizant of your hypnosis, you want to steal yourself away but your eyes just go on searching for that hint of a pause. You feel your hair turn silver. The passing of time should never be this real.

You realize how your biography has been adulterated. You watch destiny violate your hopes. In a way, you feel you are still the girl from years past, reading your own self in the story of a knackwurst and the children's transport*. In the alleyways of your mind, you still orate your story to dazzle some audience and these twists feel like rape because they threaten to terminate the story before its written. You also feel you need at least three more words as powerful as the word 'story'. A new sense will have to be founded. The large part of you that is okay, is so because it thinks it can still avenge destiny by some greater heroism, possible only because now you don't have what would have kept you busy for years.

You are better than this exhibitionist, you tell yourself. There actually are selves in you that are good (enough?). Better is the enemy of good, and in your world right now, you are not good enough...let alone better. You know how you measure yourself by spoonfuls of accomplishments that you barter for worth. It so difficult to write in first person. But any other person is deceit, you feel like lying using them. Yet the intimacy of 'I' is so fundamentally disturbing that you cower behind the closest option - the reader. Let the reader become the read. Let him bare his own bruised mind (you achingly feel the need of a genderless pronoun).

Synapses are these odd ephemeral things. They huddle and convene by the thousands formulating a thought. Then they cage it in words, words with walls so high that seasoned linguists with grappling hooks may only, if ever, free the prisoner. And then, even those shadows of words are lost in oblivion. The only means of preserving that infinite moment of formulation of thought, however shabbily and inconsistently, is the recording of those words. Most of our lives are a struggle to verbalize, as tangibly as possible, the cogitation of these synapses.

And this is perhaps the only purpose of this treatise. To record how you felt at a certain unhappy moment in time. In posterity, when you have walked on into being another self, these words will help you remember - and if you can remember enough, you can be, and what you want more than anything is to somehow be. Whole.

~ March 12th, 2013.

* "The Children's Transport" by Lore Groszman Segal.

Home

"In her solitude, she discovered something odd. She had envied men their long-legged freedom to roam the world and return full of glory to wives who only waited. She knew about history-makers and the home-makers, the great division that made life possible. Without rejecting it, she had simply hoped to take on the freedoms that belonged to the other side. What if she traveled the world and the seven seas like a hero? Would she find something different or the old things in different disguises?

She found that the whole world could be contained in one place because that place was herself. Nothing had prepared her for this."

"When no one was left she would have to confront herself. Leaving home left nothing behind. It came too, all of it, and waited in the dark. She realized that the only war worth fighting was the one that raged within; the rest were all diversions. In this small space, her hunting miles, she was going to bring herself home. Home was not a place for the faint-hearted; only the very brave could live with themselves."

"Orion slowly grew cold. It takes some time for the body to stop playing house."

"...and she was lonely, not for a friend but for a time that had not been violated."

~ Orion - from The World and Other Places: Stories, by Jeanette Winterson

Things I Miss

Stumbled upon an unposted manuscript from Jan 7^th 2011 in an old hard drive:

Things I Miss

I miss June mangoes –

Yellow, luscious, inebriatingly aromatic.

I miss dripping green rains –

Punctuating march with rainbows of flowers.

I miss a pair of blue eyes –

Sinkable, poignant, blue-gray eyes.

I miss a hoarse mid-pubertal voice –

On a beautiful, red-lipped, truthful teenager.

(Remember how we laughed –

While our joke was still new…

“I ask you, 

why are my glasses askew?”)

Jan 7^th 2011.

Where Worse Things Keep Happening

To have to revisit one's own past with such distinct clarity - one would hope it were something beautiful. Shame! Shame to see that the pains that were numbed by the kindness of time, have been pried open by bullets and bomb shards.


Where Worse Things Happen

[Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening. - Arundhati Roy]


[The blood-curdling echo of wails
Shall keep reverberating yet]

In the white silence of night,
In the vengeful stinging of frost -
The narrow breadth of my gauche hands
Has expanded monumentally,
Till it now encompasses
The galactic girth
Of my utter helplessness.

Each bleached morning,
I carry that leaden weight
Strung to my eyelashes.
Kohl, charred and inured
Spreads chaotically
From all the chafing.

Whereto should we look for succor…
The fallow faded promise of heaven?
The bitter belated justice of hell?

Or the paradoxical tying of our hands
(O yes, paradoxical!
I tried hard,
But fingers aren’t hair.
They’re unknottable)

And so we have become
Buyers and sellers
Of puppet masks –
We have one for every occasion
We have to have…
For underneath those facades
Our glazed over eyes
Do not [cannot] alter
Ever.

Dec 5th, 2009

Sophie

I think perhaps I may be a cat, born into a human body. I have my cautious curiosities bundled in a mistrusting parcel of whim. I didn’t think this until I lived thus, daily, with a pair of felines. They had to tame me, as much as I tamed them. They crawl in my lap now, curling their warmth in a half moon on my thighs. They sleep in a circle near my face, their back so often walling up my side (they like to physically make sure I’m there, my announcement of arrival into bed isn’t enough). Sasha, the blind one, waits for hours on my blanket (I have been a late sleeper lately). I sometimes wonder if their previous bedmates, that still man this house, notice – the absence of a warm half-moon in their beds.

Today for the first time, they both convened for space on my small lap – until sasha, my older companion, let sophie stay… He knew she was newer to trusting this newcomer in their house.

‘There is nothing inherently wrong in a person, one could come to find comfort in anyone reasonable’ –Sophie taught me this. By curling in my lap today, by correcting my faulty fear that she inherently disliked me, she taught me this simple insight. She didn’t bound off every time I stepped nearby because I was un-get-alongable – No. She had a different taming timeline. That was all.

And this is why I think I may be a cat (and at that - a sophie cat). For I take my time to tame my mistrust. And mostly no one has that much time (perchance most humans are humans in human bodies, unlike me, a sophie cat).

[Or could it be that there is a Madeeha human in the body of Sophie cat?]

Jan 14th, 2013 11:40PM.

Later Love

'For the very young, love is like a huge river which sweeps everything before it, so that you feel that it is a restless current. Now a sensitive person has acquired some self-knowledge by twenty-eight; she knows that any happiness she can expect from life will come to her through love; hence a terrible struggle develops between love and mistrust. She crystallizes only slowly; but whatever crystals survive her terrible ordeal, where the spirit is moving in the face of the most appalling danger, will be a thousand times more brilliant and durable than those of the sixteen-year-old, whose privileges are simply happiness and joy. Thus the later love will be less gay, but more passionate.'
~ Marie-Henri Beyle, better-known by his pseudonym Stendhal - On Love

On Rape

What some women say (fiction and non-fiction):

"...a lot of people see rape as an opportunity to moralize about women’s behavior, and instinctually think of rapists as vigilante justice squads setting women straight for being bad girls."~ Amanda Marcotte

“Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it.”
― Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women

“Not being assaulted is not a privilege to be earned through the judicious application of personal safety strategies. A woman should be able to walk down the street at 4 in the morning in nothing but her socks, blind drunk, without being assaulted, and I, for one, am not going to do anything to imply that she is in any way responsible for her own assault if she fails to Adequately Protect Herself. Men aren’t helpless dick-driven maniacs who can’t help raping a vulnerable woman. It disrespects EVERYONE.” 

― Emily Nagoski

“Men don't rape women because their women are ugly," cousin Jostien said, but there was a protest at his words. 
"That's what my fa said! He says that inside their hearts and spirits they are nothing but little men who need to feel powerful.” 
― Melina Marchetta, Froi of the Exiles

"The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women."
- Ursula K. Le Guin

"Men who are in prison for rape think it's the dumbest thing that ever happened... they were put in jail for something very little different from what most men do most of the time and call it sex. The only difference is they got caught. It may also be true."
- Catharine MacKinnon

“As an animal lover, I don’t like zoos. I feel the only creatures that should be caged behind bars are politicians, lobbyists, and lawyers. And rapists, but I’ve already listed that three times.”
― Jarod Kintz


"I prefer to characterize rape simply as a form of torture. Like the torturer, the rapist is motivated by the urge to dominate, humiliate, and destroy his victim. Like a torturer, he does so by using the most intimate acts available to humans -- sexual ones."
- Helen Benedict, Virgin or Vamp, 1992

“Masculinity is simply a conglomeration of the personality traits necessary for the patriarchal soldier-rapist: physically strong, emotionally cauterized, rational, domineering, cruel. All of this is supposed to add up to "handsome" as well. Likewise femininity is ultimately a description of the personality that results from trauma and powerlessness: weak, passive, yielding, emotional, hyper-vigilant to the needs of the dominators and desperate for the dominator's attention.”
― Lierre Keith

“I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak


"Most commonly, rape is a crime of opportunity; the victim is chosen not because of her looks or behavior, but because she is there."
- Helen Benedict, Virgin or Vamp, 1992

“Now, should we treat women as independent agents, responsible for themselves? Of course. But being responsible has nothing to do with being raped. Women don’t get raped because they were drinking or took drugs. Women do not get raped because they weren’t careful enough. Women get raped because someone raped them.” 

― Jessica Valenti, The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women

“I offer all the riches I've made out of the panchayat-enforced gang-rape to the president in return for justice.”
- Mukhtar Mai

What some men say (fiction and non-fiction):

“The defense focuses on the actions of [the victim]. Don't you know that's why a lot of rape victims don't come forward?”
- David Hilburn

"I should hope that we can raise our daughters by teaching them THEIR responsibility to NOT dress or act in a manner that would incite unclean thoughts in the minds of people who either did not have the privilege of having their parents teach them those values or simply don't care. Dressing or acting provocatively will not only attract "habitual" rapists, it will also plant that possibility in the minds of people who are on the edge of becoming one but not there yet. It is much safer and more sensible to dress modestly and not let yourself become an object of impure desire rather than rely on the self-control of an unknown individual."
- Abdullah Imran

“All women love semi-rape. They love to be taken. It was his sweet brutality against my bruised body that made his act of love so piercingly wonderful.”
― Ian Fleming, The Spy Who Loved Me

“He did not care upon what terms he satisfied his passion. He had even a mad, melodramatic idea to drug her.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“Oh,' she says, 'the Vat prints nothing but rapes. You know what a rape usually is? It's a woman who changed her mind afterward.”
― John Updike

"Consensual sex can turn into rape in an awful hurry...All of a sudden a young lady gets pregnant and the parents are madder than a wet hen and she's not going to say, 'Oh, yeah, I was part of the program.'"
—Wisconsin state representative Roger Rivaud

"The facts show that people who are raped —who are truly raped—the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work and they don't get pregnant. Medical authorities agree that this is a rarity, if ever."
—Former Rep. Henry Aldridge

A thought for the male youth:

“In spite of hopes to the contrary, pornography and mass culture are working to collapse sexuality with rape, reinforcing the patterns of male dominance and female submission so that many young people believe this is simply the way sex is. This means that many of the rapists of the future will believe they are behaving within socially accepted norms.”
― Susan G. Cole

And finally, yes:

“The punishment for rape should be castration.”
― Amit Abraham

“I think when a person has been found guilty of rape he should be castrated. That would stop him pretty quick.”
- Billy Graham quotes


For laughs,.... no for real, really for real, courtesy of http://www.eclectablog.com/2012/10/the-gop-rape-advisory-chart.html:

“What’s the worst possible thing you can call a woman? Don’t hold back, now.
You’re probably thinking of words like slut, whore, bitch, cunt (I told you not to hold back!), skank.
Okay, now, what are the worst things you can call a guy? Fag, girl, bitch, pussy. I’ve even heard the term “mangina.”
Notice anything? The worst thing you can call a girl is a girl. The worst thing you can call a guy is a girl. Being a woman is the ultimate insult. Now tell me that’s not royally fucked up.”

~ Jessica Valenti