the teddy bear and the doll

Simone de Beauvoir might as well have corrected 
Freud, showing him without raising her voice, 
how the lack is not the girl's, but the boy's.

Freud had glorified the boy's little thing which
Simone describes as wart, in other words,
insignificant. She says

everyone begins protected and pees sitting down, 
until the boy 
is weaned again and is told

"Stand up, you are a man."
"Stand up, be a man."

And so the pain is converted, becomes aversion.
The want, into compensation. 
And then both of them meet, Freud and Simone,

on the same road noting the girl with her doll
and the boy with his penis and his animal toy,
the teddy. Notice

it is Freud, as nearly all men, who is trapped
in his family name; it is Simone who has her own.
As nearly all women, able to move fluidly

one house into another, belonging truly to
no one but herself. Her own name she keeps
no matter the changing family names.

It is all, really, a matter of perspective.

Whenever I see a woman, I know how small I am
against the mystery of worlds, the layers
she knows of life and living and loving, depths

I can never be, trapped on the shallows.
How I compensate, like everyone else.

It goes the same way

and the professor says Hegel,
I understand, is a difficult
read, that
Derrida, afraid, couldn't
count the times he revised
his work on Hegel. Hegel 
anticipating our responses
still 
two hundred years later.
No change then, this 
phenomenon that is ourselves. 

What does it mean, this line?

The room remains quiet. 
Graduate students now past 
the courage of teenagers
(who saw futility 
on first day and left)
wrestle within themselves.
Mostly looking away.

Karl and Mao, Fanon, Butler...
The professor, his 
three translations
and academic German.

The room where empty chairs
outnumber the class
below the first floor
where one entire wall is
glass windows looking straight
at an unpainted concrete wall.

What does it mean, this line?











  

It goes the same way

and the professor says Hegel,
I understand, is a difficult
read, that
Derrida, afraid, couldn't
count the times he revised
his work on Hegel. Hegel 
anticipating our responses
still 
two hundred years later.
No change then, this 
phenomenon that is ourselves. 

What does it mean, this line?

The room remains quiet. 
Graduate students now past 
the courage of teenagers
(who saw futility 
on first day and left)
wrestle within themselves.
Mostly looking away.

Karl and Mao, Fanon, Butler...
The professor, his 
three translations
and pocket German.

The room where empty chairs
outnumber the class
below the first floor
where one entire wall is
glass windows looking straight
at an unpainted concrete wall.

What does it mean, this line?











  

to make sense of the world,

some resort to words and the trouble (and pains) of definitions: this is
what is, and therefore, that is not.  in other words, this is

the drawing of lines.  the making of differences,  the pointing
of marked territories, otherwise known as concepts.  

or boundaries.  whichever is deemed closest  to or farthest from
the perceived real ("real", of course, being a construct

which no one says, unless...)  Simone says
"One is not born---

but becomes one" which sums the efforts of many who trouble 
(and pain) with definitions:  what we think we know

we may not really know.






*the full text by Simone de Beauvoir is "One is not born a woman, but becomes one."


















 
  

on questions with no answers

1.

this business with poetry.  almost no wonder why 
poets were sent away from the republic.
all questioning that could, on any day, be meant
to mean subverting  what has been 
a long held belief.  e.g. the world is flat. 


2.

this city is connected to the others by two steel bridges.
mornings and evenings, people fall into long, long, long lines:
all in a hurry to leave at first light
all in a hurry to return by dusk fall.
they all curse under their breaths in between.


3.

in poetry reading class, the students' thoughts
are thick like fabric.  the professor has opened
a window, has let something in: 
postmodernism:  a poem in footnote form;
gender theory:  a poem on the satire of normative roles;
philosophy:  a poem on memory's palimpsestic quality.

the students' thoughts
clutch their bibles, reciting verses.

not one of them has ever seen a firefly.




 

azumi, bodhisattva

Yesterday, I spent nearly an entire day watching two quite-lengthy films adaptations, Azumi (2003) and its sequel, Azumi 2: Death or Love (2005).  Originally, Azumi is a multi-awarded mangga series about the life of a young female assassin in feudal Japan; the films were loose adaptations.  

Should one want to, one can always expound on the concepts and/or ideologies couched in the characters; in some readings, for instance, Azumi herself is thought to be a bodhisattva.  

But what most interest me in these two films is the performativity of gender, especially explicit in the swordfight scenes between Azumi and Bijomaru.  Here is Azumi, dressed not unlike a prince  replete with a blue cape; and Bijomaru, as a delicate lady in white gown, seen most of the time holding and admiring a red rose.
.