🎧 Music: “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane
Knowledge is power, and by that virtue information can be vulnerability. I adopted and honed my capacity and finesse for writing during the existential pogroms of my adolescence. I’d often climb onto the roof of the house I grew up in, particularly above the dining room and the kitchen, and sit beneath the second-floor overhang and scrawl my thoughts and feelings onto mediums like the low grade green and white perforated dot matrix printer paper my father would bring home from his place of work. It was then, as it so often still is now, an exercise in rendering the interior world of myself somehow tangible, and thus in some regard immutable, inextinguishable. There’s sometimes ritual catharsis even in something as reflexive and unpleasant as vomiting. Linguistic communication is not wholly unlike a good psychedelic purge.
Who am I writing for? What am I writing for? Are metrics like success, popularity, or acclaim the only measures of validation for talents like these? I’ve shared knowledge of the existence of this website with a handful of people so far, and responses have been tenuously mixed. A professor of mine called it my “little project” before politely correcting what she’d said. A classmate of mine who has at times seemed to me suspiciously interested in the details of my life said, “good for you”. Though it was in response to me telling someone else I’d finally gotten things up and running, and in the way other women sometimes can say something when that that’s not what they really mean. I try and eschew the Machiavellian facets of feminine social politics, but I don’t always succeed. Am I doing that by writing about her here? She may wind up reading this. Does it depend on whether she does? Schrödinger’s slow burn. I’m not oblivious.
By putting my writing onto the internet, I’m in some ways immortalizing whatever it is that I share or express. I’m rendering myself vulnerable- to being known. Earnest communication can be so difficult these days, or perhaps it just always has been. Everyone has their shields up. Mine tend to be burying the lead in exuberance, or more darkly sarcasm. It stings, and it burns to be this effusive well of substance and well-meaning when so much of your existence is often regarded as exhausting or annoying. When time and space are seldom a pleasure, and often some kind of chore or labor. When just living is some kind of Gordian Knot you’re supposed to untie if you ever want things to improve.
I write so well! I write too much. I need to put myself out there and maintain determination, but I need to take it easy and be patient. I’m always too happy, or too sad.
What if understanding you required knowing you, but people could only get to know you by understanding you? That is the nexus of my eternal quandary. I guess I started this website with the intent of carrying on in my practice of writing, as an outlet for personal catharsis. But I realized in sharing it that it could mean more than that, and I don’t know whether that’s a net constructive or a net terrible thing. Vulnerability of these degrees has historically for me heralded the threat of real annihilation.
I’ve been reading 𝘌𝘷𝘪𝘭 𝘉𝘦 𝘔𝘺 𝘎𝘰𝘰𝘥 by Derek Murphy and have found a lot of what it has to say illuminating. It’s an academic dissertation on the poem 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘦 𝘓𝘰𝘴𝘵 by the 17th century English poet John Milton. It’s about Satan. Some of its themes resonate powerfully with my body of experience. It’s a rebuke of the conservative tendency in contemporary readings of 𝘗𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘦 𝘓𝘰𝘴𝘵 as one which is “pedagogically committed to resisting Satan’s rhetoric by ridiculing or refusing him as categorically untrustworthy.” And that strikes at the heart of how I’ve very often been made to feel.
Imagine that at the very core of insight into your fundamental existence lies a terrible poison. Imagine that that poison is to you an ineffable cure. Comprehensively understanding that the cure is only a poison by maddening consensus, you know that any attempt to elucidate this truth of it is tantamount to entering the no man’s land of the very reality that inverted the cure to a poison in the first place.
Have you ever felt so overwhelmed at the prospect of addressing something that to even conceive of beginning is exhausting? When all you wanted was to live, but that bore for you the burden of endlessly bestowing people with wisdom they’re reflexively averse to receiving in order to prevent them from robbing you of your basic humanity or even your very existence? And you can’t know without further endangering yourself if they know, or if you’re just finally getting to exist? But it’s often the case that when they suspect, or once they definitively do know it irrevocably changes the way they receive you- forever, and often for the worse? Because the simple act of being yourself is such a heavily loaded thing that to even try living is often immensely overwhelming.
We forge the chains we wear in life, but not in isolation.
Solitude has often been the lethal kiss the variables of my existence have gifted me. I was socialized as a refugee in my own skin. It’s made me an unwittingly versed observer of the human condition.
There are people, even people I’ve told about this website, who might revel in the suffering I’ve endured. They might pointedly scoff at the observation I’m about to make as clumsily self-aware. Because they think me an ersatz woman worthy of culturally antiseptic harm and erasure. But what it feels like to me, to try and just get to live my life like anyone else around me, can often be summed up in what Mary Shelley penned into the mouth of Frankenstein’s monster, a contemporary Promethean allegory, when he said: “Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, who thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good- misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”
Tolerance is a thin veil, a pale imitation of real understanding. It’s flimsy and immodest. And intolerance, to paraphrase the character of Nomi Marks from the Netflix series 𝘚𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘦8– is often petty and ignorant, but true to the people practicing it. “The real violence, the violence that I realized was unforgiveable, is the violence that we do to ourselves, when we’re too afraid to be who we really are.” When we enable with our complicity the fairweather minds and myopic perspectives of people suffering the ailments of things like their own fragile self-identity to constrain us.
Until my mid-50’s, I won’t have lived my life as and for myself longer than I had to be a stranger to myself for everybody else. But contrary to the high-femme, hypersexualized caricatures rendered by a scared and feeble world I endeavor not to empower, the things that most captivate and liberate me are realities like the one where I get to die an old woman. Unless fascists kill me (not without a fight), or I die in the impending Resource Wars.
I didn’t want to write this. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have to. Being myself is as incidental to me as it appears to be for everyone else. I’m only complicated by everyone else. Again, same as anyone.
I’ve been met with arguments for and about all manner of eschatological ideology, and what’s real or natural countless times. By all the same people who continue to wear glasses, take insulin, dye their hair, get (dental) braces- the list goes on and on. Funny how everyone becomes a quantum physicist when it pertains to things they don’t know and don’t want to really know anything about. We live in a time when there have never been more advanced and diverse ways to be a human by the nature of social and intellectual evolution, and there has never been a greater abundance of fear and anxiety surrounding what that means.
We should all hope to be as inspired and inspiring as the metaphorical icon of Lucifer, the Light-Bringer. Every bit as radical and audacious as the figure who learned in the process of fulfilling his creative purpose that he was being tragically manipulated into bringing about God’s (perfect and unquestionable unless it pertains to something that challenges me the wrong way, personally) plan. It’s grotesquely hilarious to me the massive degrees of projection which are insidiously perpetrated by the people who would have it otherwise. Like the endless strings of people who accuse others they don’t like or understand of being pedophiles, or of homophobes, and religious figures (it all almost sounds repetitive) found in possession of child porn or Grindr accounts. Or how the most transphobic people in America watch the most transgender porn.
The symbolic devil committed the unforgiveable atrocity of letting us know we are our own gods. That we are personally, in this single, finite existence we’re handed by dumb celestial fate responsible for and subject to the courses we lay, conditions we fashion, and all their consequences. He embodies the virtue of taking ownership of one’s reality and growing out of the infantile need for authority to prescribe one to you.
Non Serviam, Hail Thyself.
