On shape-shifting


A poetics organized not in relation to light or precision but in relation to shape and change.

Shape & not image per se, or image as wave.

Shape from Indo-European roots for scraping, sketch, scratching, cutting (Sanskrit klp) gone cut

or figure from dheigh, dough—go figure, riddling fingered shadows.

In my dim hands not a stained glass of your body, but palpate. Rhythm in breaths and
rhyme of hamstring to patella shin—your deep wells of essay

Which rises in fluids.

A sentence or poem that wanders along a trace in the arm, a stir hid. Part of our best suggestions.

Body is after-all dream. Slips left and wakes. Endless surfacing and surge.

As foot, body tells dream we are steeped in. Step in and out of worlds.

What surprises in dreams are occurrence and resolution or solution as figure, space, room—and the insistence of narrative.

I have been altered as bird, turned to boat-wood, made small inside a book’s spine, gone upstairs into deserts, been bear, returned to ever changing homes I am still managing.

I’d write poems that whispers this drift, marks change. Deep currents and deeper. Structures of heart and sun’s circle and breath and light—repeat and deep inflect.

In precise relation to shadows, blackbirds begin to rattle—in the last weeks, I’ve noticed a sudden peal of nostalgia among my 30 year-old friends for a childhood that wasn’t theirs. This sudden haunting that descends like a cold front, sinks wells and circulates along paths scried in the airs.

Habit is both grass, small knell cupped north into the darker sky and beyond immediate sources of warmth, and what dreams between haunts grass that some call aura.

What changes this way is fast.

***

A poem thought this way runs angled shorelines suffused
aught between “knot” and “was” and nevertheless strung
deflate form flows fill forward, fury
aspect assonance leant bell
mouth incident to domed carapace or chalked
as echoes test this cupped vocative to your yoked chalice
as resonant suggestion of affordance, a room you could
borrow, ask after weddings slit sun
as all air these slim once was I can’t say
acre acre

***

to bend sound to make it slip where meaning almost aspirates

already transport, this lace in you, her needle


***

Some musing about gender (about which I am already displaced):

° Gender is a relational/transactional factor. It is not a property. That said, it is hard to talk about gender in ways that admit this transactional status.

° Our behavior is structured by organic factors but also by transactional dynamics.

° Human beings use the difference between male and female as a way of managing a possible violence given when relations occur and an order is essayed.

° Not sure why we order or sequence relations, but we do. The ability to order and sequence relations appears to be a necessary adjunct to all kinds of skill sets. May also be hard-wired feature of cognition. Order and sequence appear to be meaningful features of the appearing world and not simply an effect of our attention. But, it might be that order and sequence are an effect of our attention.

° I don’t know if the biological differences between men and women are sufficiently significant such that desire and affect are necessarily different. There is perhaps no way to say what that difference could be.

° Human beings appear to have multiple interests—in power, in care, in being touched, in truth—at stake in our other-relations. The dialogical status of interest is generally masked by the thematization of one interest as a master interest. The error here is much like the error that occurs when one attempts to model all five senses on sight.

° We regulate each other by the assertion of gender expectations. This goes on inside same-sex groups and in mixed-sex groups. Boys jostle each other into being proper guys and, at the same time, doing this, make little performances of what a guy should be. Gals do the same thing.

° A given person’s behavior may or may not reflect gendered norms. We cannot assume that because “x” is a man, his emotional behavior is a function of his having been gendered in normative terms. People get oddly gendered by their families all the time, and gender norms do not work for every person. Rather we read that person to the norms or against/away from the norms.

° Like all normative structures, gender patterns are both deep and shallow.

° Gender structures give men and women different kinds of access to social power and organizational affect. It is difficult to say if this is strictly unequal since the kinds of access are different and may occur within different topoi.

° Gender is one of the ways in which human beings regulate desire and interest.

° When a person says “you are acting just like a girl”, they are making a regulatory assertion.

° Despite utopian fantasies that human beings can function without regulation, we need regulation. [Think of the end of the Third Elegy where Rilke says “restrain me”.]

° It is always appropriate to review and adjust regulatory stances.

° It is not clear that supposed gender types reflect natural kinds or reflect the only adaptations possible for natural kinds. Gender is a cultural construct, however deeply patterned or evolutionarily reproduced. It is a writing across what occurs at each generation.

° Because cultural constructs always have an element of play (think “play in the wheel”), there is a certain amount of play in gender patterning from generation to generation, and, it will be possible to “play” with gender.

° I find I want to pursue a gender critique or draw attention to gender when I sense a regulatory apparatus is in place that is not being examined and/or whose relations involve an indirect assumption of power. Gender is a social mechanism by which the violence of ordering is hidden/deferred or suspended by the performance of gender codes. That is, the performance of a gender code/norm performs “an order” as a social fact. It is harder to protest unequal allotment and ordering in the face of this fictive display of a false order. One is supposed to play by the rules.

° When a person says, “you are acting just like a man” they are making a regulatory assertion.

° Making assumptions or speaking in gendered terms is reflexive and pervasive. The thought of the other is rapidly inflected in terms of gender. In conflict, is this because conflict leads us to draw boundaries and to polarize? If so, gender is just one of a range of terms we might use as we attempt to get a grip on the other.

° It would be useful to tease apart any bifurcation of interests as characteristically feminine or masculine. Not doing so allows us to ignore the specific ethical dimensions of our own interests.

° The thought that a person has both masculine and feminine aspects/dynamics may be a way of attempting to recover the full range of interests at stake in our other-relations. This might be what Jung was getting at, and might be why Jung is, after all, a Freudian.

° The hysterical, slender femme-fatale of the twentieth century whose anger erupts and who, alternately appears as Mary on the fields of genocide, might be a desire/interest being said a man says.

° Getting her a chance to speak is not as simple as passing the mic around. It is a more difficult demand that we break back against our love of power. Gal or Guy.