Fish In the Afternoon

Lamentations

February 3rd, 2025
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If you had truly loved your neighbor, it would’ve occurred to you long ago to divest yourself of this wealth. But now your possessions are more a part of you than the members of your own body, and separation from them is as painful as the amputation of one of your limbs. - St. Basil, Homilies
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I don’t know how to write about the Trump regime. I feel anger and fear, not poetry.

Caesars corrode the soul. The idolaters in power bleed the state and sell it for parts, synthesizing CEO and president. To do so, they degrade not only mechanisms that resist their power but also the moral core of social life. The reactionaries foment an epistemic atmosphere that swallows knowledge and expels ignorance, simultaneously collapsing social bonds and flattening our self-image. The energeia of capital is M-C-M’, the constant and accelerating Time-Machine that extracts surplus value from the activity of life. Those caught in the flow of capital come to reflect this energeia, the soul being partitioned, quantified, described, and sold for parts — M-C-M’ as identity. The world that this flow produces is progressively hollowed out, idolatrous, and necrotic. If there are demons, they reside in capital accumulation.

I fucking hate this. Why does my writing sound like that? What am I even talking about? M-C-M’ blah blah blah fuck off. I hate being a fucking political signifier, worse, an ever-present yet erased political signifier — trans people must now both exist to play the enemy and not exist as a principle of policy. Fuck off.

Capital has decreed: liberal democracy has ended, techno-feudalism approaches. Socialism or barbarism, and the tech bros clap: barbarism. Their goal is not only to block the information flow that sustains democracy, but to direct our attention towards apathy, resentment, and rage. When you’re privatizing the American government, it’s important to be able to conjure enemies at will. The question resistive forces face is how to re-direct that attention away from capital accumulation and the social factory and toward a republic of the commons. We must be able to reveal the utopian potential of the human species-life and re-organize our togetherings into a force of anti-power — the distribution of power into a horizontal and flexible network that is able to challenge Leviathan. Mutual aid, black bloc, the Party. Forget the restricted image of what you think these are and think of them as creative patterns: (1) Mutual Aid: a common holding of resources able to re-distribute them throughout the community, (2) Black Bloc: horizontal and flexible strategies of community defense and solidarity, (3) the Party: cadres dedicated to building dual power in the heart of the community.

I’m so fucking tired of politics. Let us rest. Let us live. What do you even want from us? Spoiled little brats playing with toy rockets, vampirically sucking out the life force of the world they live in. There’s no genius there, just ill-used wealth. Musk is an 8Chan troll, Zuckerberg is a manosphere weirdo, Bezos is a lecherous incel. Oh, look at me, I’m so big and strong with my shitty fucking websites and cars that explode. Are you proud of me, daddy? While our communities suffer, these bawling little baby men get to determine our public policy. Meritocracy my ass.

Reaction is idolatry. Tempted by the Adversary, they cloak themselves in the mirrored image of the Begotten One, turning sibling against sibling and neighbor against neighbor for the sake of Caesar rather than the Kindom. Rendering unto Caesar what is his, they claim the whole cosmos for Rome. Don’t mince words: there is no god but God; there is no king but Christ. No gods, no masters, no priests, no popes. In the desert, ha-Satan offers fire and majesty and the capital-poisoned elite bow. Meanwhile, the Begotten One refused power, instead incarnating the creating-begetting-proceeding that grounds creation. This is the vision of the beatitudes,the revelation of the Ghost loosed upon the world. Christ is executed, liberates Tartarus, is resurrected into glory, and sends the Ghost out into the midst of the ekklesia. The One who wears the crown of God humbles herself to the oppressed and washes their feet, becoming in body and blood the bread and wine by which we feed one another.

Are liberals even going to do anything? These Democrat dorks are all licking boots, shining Trump’s shoes for him. At least the tech dweebs are under no illusions about their interests. The Democrats are jumping ship and suckling on whatever morsels of power Trump allows them. Oh, please, sir, may I have some more? You were crying fascism the whole election while you Weekend at Bernie’d Biden’s skeleton. And then when it arrived you started groveling. We are the world, kumbaya, imagine no heaven, may I just have a little treat, sir? Just a taste of influence? A smidgen? I promise to be good. Spit in their face, useless ass politicians.

Sin emerges from idolatry, separating our souls from the Holy One. Idolatry is taking something as a substitution for God and creation and imbuing it with power. In the myth of Adam and Eve, the original humans are tempted into idol worship by the Serpent, who through the fruit of the garden makes them ashamed of their nakedness, interjecting good and evil into the relationship between human and divine. It is this false knowledge that separates them from Eden, the flaming Cherubim a sign of their alienation. In imagining part of creation as good and another as evil, they create the first form, becoming Demiurges. No longer is the good-itself whole and complete, identical with creation, but is a fragment of the world separated off and made transcendent, taking for itself the power of God. This is the source of capital; commodity fetishism is idolatry and it leads only to one place: hell.

I’m just sad. And scared. And angry. I want to live my life in peace and quiet. I don’t want to be a political symbol, a topic of partisan chess-playing. Just let me and my family and friends be. Just let everyone be. Our elites are tiny boymen who play with katanas and dream about being the king of Mars, why should we listen to any of them? They made Trump emperor, a husk of a human filled with nothing but excess ego and old rich grandpa rage. The bourgeoisie are filled with nuclear dust, fragile yet dangerous. Actually, they don’t deserve metaphors. Fuck them. Just leave us alone. Just leave me alone. I’m not your fucking game. None of us are.

Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little Ones to Her belong. We are weak but She is strong.

God grant me strength. God grant me safety. God grant me wisdom. Please, protect us and guide us. Please, we need your help. I need you. Please, God hear me. Please.
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Blessed are the poor in spirit,
  for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
  for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
  for they will inherit the Earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
  for they will be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful,
  for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
  for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
  for they will be called the Sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
  for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me.
Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you...

- Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew 5.3-12
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Image: Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise by Marc Chagall (1961)

Magnolia

January 20th, 2025

Shhhh. – the wind

When I die, bury me at Petit Jean. Fill my lungs with fresh-tilled earth and let the Arkansas rush through my ribs. I am a flower, strong and frail, a gardener tending to the soil of my heart. When I return from Hades, my soul will sprout again, blooming among the magnolias.

When I live, set me sail along the Buffalo. Lay me down, head towards the sky, and let me drift among the sunken trees. I am a manger made of wooden flesh, a carpenter tending to the desert of my palms. When I return from Galilee, my fingers will be butter and jam, a picnic among the mulberries.

When I dream, sing my song at Mt. Sequoia. Keep low and barely hum, where only the whippoorwills can hear. I am a poet, made of sugar and vinegar, an artisan tending to the glass of my tongue. When I return from America, my voice will be a banjo and fiddle, a prayer in the hollers of Ozarkia.

Listen. – the river.

Image: Magnolias by John Singer Sargent (1912)

Butchfemme

January 8th, 2025

There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love. – Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

There is no such thing as gender. There are genderings. To gender, as a verb. One genders by echoing a history, intending futures and expressing pasts in attending to the present. Genderings are performances of intending-attending-expressing suspended between past-present-future, the full significance of which is only found in the interconnection between them. One attends to the world as the gender they unfold, but this attending is incarnated from an en-habiting of a past-present-future relation. This en-habiting is en-worlding; every gendering reveals a world.

One is not a woman but womans. When I woman, I attend to myself and others by en-habiting a world that echoes a past of womanings and intends a future womaning. (Think of this as Trinitarian: creating-begetting-proceeding is perichoretic, her personhood only revealed in the indwelling relations of the three. This perichoresis is also kenotic, in that each self-empties into the others. The doings of the Trinity, her energeia, are en-homed actions, the whole of the doma unveiling creation as One-in-Many and Many-in-One. Such too is intending-attending-expressing and past-present-future. Intending-attending-expressing is perichoretically kenotic, each doing only signifying as its self through the interpenetration of the three, which empties each into the others. That is, it is not only that when one intends they also attend and express, but that what it means to intend is only sensible through what it means to attend and express simultaneously. Each is empty-of-self but full-of-others. Meaning is gifting. Likewise with past-present-future. The past is not only kenotically revealed through dwelling in the present while being oriented towards certain futures, but it also perichoretically unfolds from the present and future. The echoic history pasts by presenting and futuring.)

Lesbians lesbian in their womaning. Desiring emerges from intending-attending-expressing. One desires another and unveils their desiring intentions by attending to the desired-one and, in doing so, expressing the hoped-for future of one’s desires. Thus, sexual orientation: I lean in my desires to the desired-one. A sexual or romantic orientation is a meta-category of desirings that groups them according to a family resemblance. One is a lesbian because she desires those who woman (or unfold ways of en-habiting the world that emerge in relationship with womaning), and she unveils this desire by attending to those she desires and expressing a future with them, whether for hours, months, years, or forever. Likewise, one is heterosexual because they desire those who conventionally gender in ways opposite to them (where this opposition is highly culturally-bound), unveiling their desire by attending to those they desire and expressing a future with them. As with intending-attending-expressing and past-present-future more broadly, these desirings are perichoretic and kenotic: when one lesbians, she simultaneously intends, attends to, and expresses her lesbianing across a relationship of past-present-future.

However, these desirings are not reducible solely to those that are conventionally sexual or romantic in nature (however difficult it would be to determine that in the first place). These desirings are also genderings. One lesbians not solely by sexually or romantically desiring another, but through patterning these desires as a quilt woven from the lesbianing of others. How one lesbians is informed by how one genders and how one genders is informed by how one lesbians. This quilt is as detailed as the Uniques that compose it, each lesbianing in their uniquing and togethering, ultimately patterning into constellations of gender roles and gender expressions — that is, into a queer cosmos. Within this cosmos there are gardens of well-cultivated genders, two of which are butch and femme, togethering with one another as butchfemme. Butchfemme is a form-of-life that lesbian togethers form over time within their echoic history. This form-of-life generates a dance of intertwined patterns of activity, ways of gendering as femme and butch. This disco of unfolding souls unravels a shared lesbian placetime, where one’s genderings occur in echoic resonance with the genderings of others. Echoic resonance orients the togethering of these genderings towards the common heart of the community; in fact, it is this echoic resonance and the intertwining of Unique genderings in the together of butchfemme that marks it as a community. However, echoic resonance is not reducible to a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. There is no set definition to femme or butch, because there are no gender definitions at all. What it is to be femme or butch is determined by one’s gendering and lesbianing within an echoic history. Butchfemme expresses an ocean of different resonant frequencies, each repeating and transforming one another in forming a lesbian pluricosmos, a Sapphic chorus.

Gender is not a thing but a doing, an en-habiting and en-worlding. When I woman, I playfully self-create, using the womanings of others as the echoic content of that play. Likewise, in womaning, I reveal a world and en-habit it, my womaning also a dwelling arising from the en-habited echoic resonance of the womanly forms-of-life that I sprout from. In then womaning as a lesbian, I intend, attend to, and express my desires, the ways my womaning is interwoven with those of who I desire and the communities of desiring that I echo in my activity. All our lives form a great orchestra and within this orchestra are an infinite range of improvisations, each emerging from a ground of harmonies that gift meaning to our play. In bouncing off of the patterned echoes of butchfemme life, I locate myself as a world, within a world, among other worlds — in a solar system of the ever-unfolding cosmos of genderings within which I dwell. From the history of queer life I creatively re-constitute myself again-and-again, a melody in the symphony of life.

Our categories are important. We cannot organize a social life, a political movement, or our individual identities and desires without them. The fact that categories invariably leak and can never contain all the relevant ‘existing things’ does not render them useless, only limited. Categories like ‘woman,’ ‘butch,’ ‘lesbian,’ or ‘transsexual’ are all imperfect, historical, temporary, and arbitrary. We use them, and they use us. We use them to construct meaningful lives, and they mold us into historically specific forms of personhood. Instead of fighting for immaculate classifications and impenetrable boundaries, let us strive to maintain a community that understands diversity as a gift, sees anomalies as precious, and treats all basic principles with a hefty dose of skepticism. – Gayle Rubin, Thinking Sex

Image: Le Bal élégant, La Danse à la campagne by Marie Laurencin (1913)
Ithaca

January 6th, 2025

Sweetest of the sunflowers, yeah, you’re the sun to me. – Zach Bryan

There is no one else in the world but us.

You appeared after the tornado, newly-breathing the rush of time in a lightly-held cafe. I saw you; you saw me. You asked me: do you prefer handsome or pretty? And when you called me pretty I felt my heart echo back: her. Our knees nestled, my motions careful, timid — do you mean it? Do you see me? Do you hear me? I felt your breath threaded like cashmere in the candlelight, and our lips hovered in the aching-potential of the summer air. You held out your hand and I asked if I could kiss you. No one had ever offered their hand to me; no one had ever asked you for a kiss. There was no one else in the world but us.

Intertwined in the ever-wyrded ellipsis of Ozarkia, we traveled north. Don’t worry, the armadillo is fine. Barely-moving, trying not to wake you, I saw you. I saw you and knew I’d share my life with you. And time crawled to a still as the sun rose, the stained glass of God’s architecture shimmering the new morning. And I held you; and you held me. The next morning, we traveled by ambulance and I met your parents. For a few moments, I was only a corpse, possibility frozen in place as my teeth chattered fear. Bonewhite knuckles sweating over a 911 call and an earth-soul walking me through. You first saw me cry in the ER, forehead to forehead solid-as-stone. Everything’s okay. It’s okay, it’s okay. There’s no one else in the world but us.

We woke up the next day to a rabbit’s paw. June joyed and June wept, and in the in-between we rhythmed a new life, coalescing into our happy home. No Brain July. And there it was that the future unveiled itself, a new beginning after many apocalypses; strawberry sugar and vanilla cake and honeysuckle atmosphering eternity as Teddy tossed to-and-fro in the grass of our backyard. My family: you and me and Luna and Teddy and Sable, voyaging uncertainty to find ourselves again in the hearth of one another. I now had someone (someones) to miss; I now had someone (someones) to live for. I now had us. And even in the steel of Empire, the fact remained: there is no one else in the world but us.

I don’t know if I’ve ever conveyed what you mean to me. Before I met you, my mouth was dry and my bones ached. A mountain collapsing into itself, I avalanched into the void, only to be caught again by an angel. For years, my skin stung and my breath shortened, heartaches and heartattacks constricting subjectivity into fear. I took a saw to womanhood and clawed at the boundaries of my soul until it resembled jagged glass.But, under the maple, you freckled my heart with threads of light, giggling rebirth. You said to me I know you and held my hand as I transformed, resurrecting Penelope from the ashes. Through anxiety and death and mourning and uncertainty, we wove ourselves into the bark of one another, a single oak tree emerging from two. And to that oak I return (again-and-again), to our Ithaca of primrose and thyme. To you, my Odysseus. And I know, our souls tethered together in the morninglight of coming-spring, that I always have a home there. There, swaying gently in the breeze on our back porch. There, building Lego and inhaling incense in the evening calm. There, tracing symbols on the backs of our hands, holding each other through ember and frost. There, where there is no one else in the world but us.

And every time I ask: would you fall in love with me again? And you answer back with every breath: I will. And there we remain, and there we return, and there we journey again and again – to Ithaca, to Rogers, to home. To where there is no one else in the world but us.

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. – James Joyce, Ulysses Ch. 18: Penelope

Image: Country Garden with Sunflowers by Gustav Klimt (1905-1906)
Transitions #8

December 30th, 2024
In trans women’s eyes, I see a wisdom that can only come from having to fight for your right to be recognised as female, a raw strength that only comes from unabashedly asserting your right to be feminine in an inhospitable world.
In a trans woman’s eyes, I see someone who understands that, in a culture that’s seemingly fuelled on male homophobic hysteria, choosing to be female and openly expressing one’s femininity is not a sign of frivolousness, weakness or passivity, it is a fucking badge of courage. – Julia Serano, Whipping Girl

This is a common transmisogynistic pattern of thought:
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P1: Women’s bodies are inherently sexual. That is: to be a woman is to be a sex object.
P2: Men only dress and act like women as part of a sex act - because they desire to be a sex object.
P3: Trans women are men who dress and act like women.
C: Trans women are engaging in a public sex act, the content of which is to present herself as a sex object.
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P1 is generally unspoken, while P2-3 may be explicitly affirmed in defending C. This pattern leads to a wide range of injustices, including public bathroom laws, three articles laws, bans on drag performances, bans on gender affirming care, and the “trans panic defense” as a justification for murder. Since we (trans women) are, according to this line of thought, engaging in a public sex act, we can be regulated and punished. Using a public restroom becomes sexual harassment, wearing women’s clothing become public indecency, drag performances become sex work, gender affirming care for minors becomes grooming, and murder is justified because trans sexuality is a form of coercive trickery. There is a clear line from trans women being sex objects, to the everyday activity of trans women being a sex act, to violence and oppression and deprivation.

Notably, there are some redundancies in the reasoning and it can consistently be presented as such:
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P1: Women’s bodies are inherently sexual. That is: to be a woman is to be a sex object.
P2: Trans women are women.
C: Trans women are engaging in a public sex act, the content of which is to present herself as a sex object.
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P2 and 3 in the original argument are sometimes presented as justifications for the connection between P1 and C. This is because the person who engages in this pattern of thought does not typically affirm that trans women are women, and so must explain why they still fit the sexual object role. Cross-dressing or similar actions or identities are therefore used as both a bridge and a smokescreen. However, this move is only at the surface. What drives the transmisogynistic argument is an internal affirmation that trans women are women without an external or public affirmation. Trans women are oppressed as women, but part of this oppression is to for our identity as women to be denied. However, the denial of our womanhood only works because we are women.

Many of the forms of oppression trans women face are variations on women’s oppression more broadly. If you are a woman, it is safer to use public restrooms in a group. If you are a woman, you must self-monitor your appearance to avoid dangerous interactions and a loss of social status. If you are a woman, anything you create will be interpreted according to your perceived sexual value. If you are a woman, changing or expressing or valuing your body is an impurity and invitation to unwanted sexual behavior. And, if you are a woman and you are assaulted or even murdered, it is justified because all women want it and all women are temptresses. In all of these cases, we, as both trans and cis women, are reduced to sex objects, are denied our autonomy, self-ownership, and safety, and are subject to the property(object)-owning authority of men.

Misogyny is the pervasive dehumanization of women, and it takes different shapes depending on how our womanhood is perceived. All women are criminals for the misogynist, but what the crime is may differ. The crime of the trans woman is to be assigned a different sex at birth and to transition, but it is only a crime because we are women. The denial of the transmisogynist is self-defeating, because their accusations only work with the presumption of affirmation. Transmisogyny is misogyny and the liberation of women generally and of trans women in particular is biconditional. To abolish transmisogyny we must abolish misogyny and to abolish misogyny we must abolish transmisogyny. Trans liberation is a necessary path in defeating patriarchy.
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Let me listen to me and not to them
May I be very well and happy
May I be whichever they can thrive
Or just may they not.
They do not think not only only
But always with prefer
And therefore I like what is mine
For which not only willing but willingly
Because which it matters. They find it one in union.
In union there is strength.
- Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation
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Image: Man and Woman I by Edvard Munch (1905)

Lamentations

Magnolia

Butchfemme

Ithaca

Transitions #8