Fish In the Afternoon

What is a Woman?

October 24th, 2024

On ne naît pas femme: on le devient. – Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

This is an adaptation of a writing from a Queer Memoir class. Parts of this text have incorporated elsewhere on this site.

To Matt Walsh.

I: The Bio-Survival Circuit

Activates at birth. Either/Or. Nurturing/Noxious. Trust/Suspicion.

The body is a woman.

How do you think of your body? Is it a contained whole? Is it an assemblage? Are sensations part of you or are they separate? Are your perceptions within or do they come from the outside? Where does your experience begin and your self end? Is experience all there is? If you could change that experience would you? What does it mean to hate your body? What would it mean to enjoy it?

Is your body a man’s body, Matt Walsh? What are the manly parts of it? Are your sensations manly? Your perceptions? Your experiences? Which is it? The body or the mind? Are you a real man, or do you just say that because you don’t know what else to call yourself? Does it give you pleasure to be a man? Or are you duty bound? Does manhood ever feel stifling? Do you ever want to escape? Or do you like the thrill of power? Is that power yours or Father’s? Do you like it when Father decides? Do you like the body having rules? Is that the man part of you? Or is that fear? Perhaps both.

Transitioning is an act of survival.

II: The Emotional Circuit

Activates by motor activity. Mine/Yours. Dominance/Submission. Cooperation/Competition.

The mind is a woman.

Breathe in. 1 2 3 4. Hold. 1 2 3 4. Breathe out. 1 2 3 4. Now again, but listen. In. 1 2 3 4. Hold. 1 2 3 4. Out. 1 2 3 4. What does your breath sound like? What does it feel like? Is that your spirit? Is that your pneuma? The in, the out, the hold? Or the 1 2 3 4? Where is your soul? Where is the mind? If they looked at your brain, would it be pink or blue or gray? Are your chromosomes carved into your esse? Does your ghost have a cock?

When was the first time you thought “I’m a boy?” When were your first manly thoughts? Was it when you breathed air rather than amniotic fluid? Was it when you played with trucks rather than dolls? Was it at baptism, all glory to God from whom all gender flows? Do you hate these questions? Does it seem so obvious to you? Boy/Girl. Man/Woman. Penis/Vulva. XX/XY. Dirt/Rib. Is your reason a manly reason? Are your emotions manly emotions? Would Descartes be proud of you? Is the wax melted or solid? Penis ergo sum? Is that it? Is that really it? Is that your conclusion? I am man, the extension of the penis, the thinking of the Y chromosome? 1 2 3 4. Breathe breathe breathe. 4 3 2 1.

Transitioning is an act of expression.

III: The Dexterity-Symbolism Circuit

Activates by conceptual thought. This/That. Up/Down. Forward/Back.

The past is a woman.

When did you learn the words “woman” and “man?” Who did you learn them from? What did they teach you? Did they teach you at all? Did you learn by memorizing or by doing? By craft or by repetition? When did you start performing? Have you ever stopped? If you got the chance to be still, would you take it? Or does being a man require you to perform forever?

Think back. When was the first time you saw a girl and instead of thinking “friend” or “person” you thought “girl?” When was the first time you thought of someone as fundamentally different from yourself, as being an other-gender? What signs let you know? What signifiers? What aesthetics? Was it her dress? Was it your toy gun? Did you divine the presence of XX chromosomes or did you see the flowers on her skirt? Was it the way her mom told her “a lady doesn’t do that” or the way your dad said “man up?” When did you know your dad was a man and your mom a woman? Did you always know? Did they tell you? Did you acquire it by anamnesis? Is there gender in Hades? Are there women in Elysium? Would you prefer there not be?

Transitioning is an act of knowing.

IV: The Socio-Sexual Circuit

Activates by learning. Past/Present. You/Me. Then/Now.

The present is a woman.

The first time you kissed a girl, did you do it like a man? Did you enjoy it? Or did you not know what to enjoy? When you touched her did you think “I’m touching a woman?” Were you present or elsewhere? Here or there? What did it feel like? Or is that too womanly to consider? Did you desire her? Or did you desire a woman, any woman? Are you heterosexual because of the way you long to touch and be touched, or because of the way the machine fits together? Do you ever want to break the machine?

When you fuck, do you think of your penis as a man’s penis? Is your penis required? Have you ever fucked without one? When you kiss your wife goodnight is the kiss manly? Are you kissing her or are you kissing “a woman?” Is there a difference between kissing her and kissing another? The first dance at your wedding – who decided? And did it matter whether the song was manly or womanly? Did you look at her and think “woman” or did you look at her and think “my beloved?” When you proposed, was it because you wanted to spend your life with her, or because that was the next step in being a man? When you imagine love, is your love gendered? What comes first, love or chromosomes? Can you have one without the other? Really think, Matt – have you ever loved someone without only loving an image of them?

Transitioning is an act of love.

V: The Neurosomatic Circuit

Activates by leisure. Space/Time. Freedom/Constraint. Here/There.

The future is a woman.

Have you always been a man? Will you always be? If you could be reborn right now, would you choose to be a man again? The eternal return of the penis: always and forever a man, over and over and over again. Or would you experiment? Have you ever considered what it would be like to be a woman? What it would feel like? What it would sound like? What are the qualia of being a woman? What are the qualia of being a man? Can you ever understand what it is like to be a woman? Are you free or are you unfree? Are your chromosomes a cage?

When you were making that film, did you have an answer in mind? Did you think it was obvious? Binaries floating around in a miasma, ordered by the divine Man? Is the Great Chain of Being a manly one? Are you above and them below? Are you scared that you might fall? Is the surface getting slippery? What lies down there? Are you scared because you don’t know what you might find, or because you know who is down there and you don’t want to be treated accordingly? Does it ever feel like you’re rolling a boulder up a hill? Does it ever get heavy? If you had the chance to stop pushing, would you? Or are you so dependent on the boulder that you would rather do nothing else?

Transitioning is an act of freedom.

VI: The Neuroelectric Circuit

Activates by abstraction. Possible/Actual. Relative/Eternal. Territory/Map.

Life is a woman.

Who was the first woman? Was it Eve? Lilith? Lucy? Was there a microorganism swimming around with a bow and pigtails? Is the invention of the penis required for the invention of man? Do we need testosterone for male animals? Can anyone be manly without the human sequence of chromosomes? When you call your dog “he” or “she” what is the reason? Is it purely the genitals? Does the dog know she’s a girl? Know he’s a boy? Why do we call snakes “he” and “she?” Is a cloaca gendered? Why do we call the ocean a woman? Does the sea have a vagina? Do the waves ovulate? What are the Atlantic’s chromosomes?

Do you know how metabolism works? How estrogen works? Testosterone? Do you know what is involved in gender reassignment? Do you know that not all trans people want HRT or surgery? How many trans people have you talked to? If I came to you, five o’ clock shadow and all, and said “I’m a woman” I assume you’d scoff. But if another trans woman had undergone HRT and surgery would that matter to you? Does any of this matter to you? Or is part of being a man to be a fortress? Nothing in, and only cannon-fire out? If women and men are biologically separate, why does a small change in metabolism produce a lot of the features you identify with female and male? Why do you care when the body doesn’t? Is this why you emphasize the genitals and chromosomes? Can’t be other features, which are malleable, it needs to be the non-malleable ones. Except of course even genitals are malleable, and chromosomes do very little to stop metabolic transformation. All around, quicksand mistaken for stone.

Transitioning is an act of creation.

VII: The Neurogenetic Circuit

Activates by anamnesis. Mortality/Immortality. Immanence/Transcendence. Self/Other.

God is a woman.

Do you call God “he?” What about Jesus? What about Gabriel? What about the Ophanim? Show me on this diagram where the angel’s dick is. Does God have a body? Does God have parts? If there was no XY-carrying sperm involved in the generation of Jesus, does that make her intersex? Does it bother you that I called Jesus “her?” Is it bad to misgender God? Does the divine have pronouns? Do you want to pray about it?

Do you believe God makes mistakes? And if the answer is no, what is the mistake? What if I told you that I don’t believe I’m “a woman trapped in a man’s body?” What if I told you I’m a woman in a woman’s body? There was no mistake – there is only appearance and recognition and transformation. Do you believe God is so weak as to be incapable of creating a trans woman? Is your vision of creation so muted that it can be reduced to two pairs of letters: XX and XY? Does it matter to you that those are not the only chromosome combinations? Or do you believe God made a mistake those times? You call yourself a “Christian fascist.” Who do you follow? Is it the carpenter? Or is it Caesar? Is it the Spirit? Or is it the pater familias? Do you feel the flames licking your feet? Will Jesus welcome you in the ouranōn? Or will she say “render unto Caesar what is his?” Do you fear God or do you fear Father?

Transitioning is an act of theosis.

VIII: The Neuroatomic Circuit

Activates by astral projection. Micro/Macro. Human/God. Being/Nothing.

I am a woman.

Are you scared, Matt? Does the abyss make you shake? Is the dark night of the cis soul too impenetrable? Or is the problem that it is penetrable? That it’s permeable? That you know there’s something else once you walk through? What if there’s nothing holding you together? What if the self is an illusion? What if a man is an empty box? What if a woman is a raging fire? What if the Leviathan is hollow? What if the woman-king returns?

Do you feel the new world creeping in? Do you smell the rotting corpse of your kingdom? I’m here, at daggers drawn with the existent. What do you have? A badly-made documentary? A meme turned into two hours of nothing? What is a YouTube video compared to self-creation? Does the money you made from our suffering give you peace? Or is peace for a man impossible? Do you want peace? Or do you know that we will never give it to you? Does the smoke burn your lungs? Do you call us traps because we trick you, or because to accept us as women would be to undermine your own power? Do you feel us sawing off the legs of the throne? Do you feel it wobble? Are you so scared of self-creation that you would rather destroy the world with you inside it? Are you so afraid of alchemy that you will poison the future? Are you so fearful of freedom that you will turn the universe into a prison?

Look at me when I’m talking to you. Look at me when you attack. Look at me when we fight back. Look at me when we turn lead into gold. Look at me when we build the new in the ashes of the old.

Transitioning is an act of rebellion.

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition. – Timothy Leary

Image: Woman-Child by Joan Snyder (1977)
Transitions #3

October 23rd, 2024
```
"Hope" is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
And never stops — at all —

Emily Dickinson, Poem no. 254
```
We world, us dwellers. Incarnate wisdom, the accumulation of nature buzzing restless in our bones. I en-habit. Think back: the I. The indexical points, it describes a looking – a here, here! Who? The here, here. The I is the here that never leaves. There is no center, but there is always a here, the pre-condition of ensouled life, consciousness-across-time. I am here. Here.

What is a world? Only a here. Which? Well, there’s a here, and a here, and a, oh! a there and a there. Each a here, each a world. A world is an appearing-to, appearing-to the here that grounds the I. Grounds. Events do not float but plant, growing wild in unfolding souls, each event unveiling at a time-here, a moment in the soul. I guarantee – the ground grounds past-present-future-ing, the -ing-ing that apocalypts time. You there? Wake up, wake up. We’re arriving. Here. Be-ing is time-ing, time-ing is past-present-future-ing. I-ing is a we-ing that indexes to here, the en-world-ing of the present-in-time. At a moment in the soul, I wake; at a moment in the soul, I sleep. Can I have this dance? In a world, as a world, among worlds. {Who, What, When, Where, Why}.

Agency is the transformation of placetime, dancing mattering – we do, and in this doing we shape and re-shape our dwelling, our inhabiting, mattering as an act and mattering as a medium. Matter matters matter; the soul souls a soul in mattering the matter it ensouls. I quid, I haecc. A me-in-motion, the index that unspools the soul, the warmth of generation. I, here, I, there, I, Atman. In-in-in, always in (a dwelling, a’dwelling, a-dwelling). Catch me / I fall. Lift me / I rise. {ash, woman, now, here, joy}. I woman by mattering matter; I lesbian by dwelling. The Sapphic cosmos echoes the intertwined becoming of the many-worlds, the body of God held, kissed, and loved, the eros of creation. The Milky Way is a woman; I am a woman. A woman within a woman within a woman. Atman nests in Atman, creation nests in creation, love nests in love, becoming nests in becoming. To nest is to dwell ever-deeper, an intimate inhabiting. I inhabit my body again. (I dwell, I dwell, I dwell). The Buffalo rivers the plateau; I granny-to-be, a woman-soul wandering Ozarkia.

Transitioning is re-membering. To re-member is to bring-back-together, to re-shape the origami of the soul.

I am a sculpture I art.
```
    The indefiniteness beyond being
        lies beyond beings.
    The unity beyond intellect
        lies beyond intellect.
    The one beyond thought is
        unintelligible to all thinking.

    The good beyond logos:
    ineffable to all logos
    unity unifying every unity
    being beyond being
    non-intelligible intellect
    ineffable logos
    non-rationality
    non-intelligibility
    non-nameability
    be-ing according to no being
    cause of being to all; but itself: non-be-ing,
    as it is beyond every being, and
    so that it would properly and knowingly
    manifest itself about itself. 

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names
```
Image: Autumn Trees by Egon Schiele (1911)
Transitions #2

October 17th, 2024

How strange it is to be anything at all. – Jeff Mangum, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

My writing tends toward fullness at the expense of clarity. There’s so much I want to say; so little that is immediately accessible to my cognition. So, instead of building a palace brick by brick I turn each brick into a sculpture, situating each word in a context that imbues it with overdetermined meaning. The multiplicity and mystery is the point; each word is a world.

But sometimes this gets nowhere. Sometimes I sit and want to speak, but meaning cannot be wrapped tightly enough to be gifted. This gap is the gap between significance and life-itself, between expressing and dwelling. All language is alienation. We alienate the pure quality of our experience, the rushing rhythm of our senses, to echo it out to others, hoping in its alienated form it will be seen by another. Originally, we sing — our vocal cords warble and strain, setting sail across the cosmos to be taken-up again by another. First, we listen, heartbeats and unknown speech and gentle swaying songs. Then, we sing as two, patty-cake patty-cake a baker’s man, Simon says, I see you. From the two the many erupts, joining in chorus and choir – gathering, hunting, eating, loving, fighting, worshipping, celebrating, lamenting. And it is in this many we find the one again, the echoic universe of the many allowing us to signify ourselves to the world.

Wait, wait, back again. The world. I sit here, contorted in an airline seat, hunched over and typing as a Tetris of city lights and farmland falls across the windowpane. I always try to poetry. I don’t want to right now. I want to say what poetry can’t. But it’s this problem of can’t that I’m not sure how to leap across. Wittgenstein helped me to navigate my sense and my nonsense, but what of that mystery he pointed to beyond? I wish I wasn’t sitting here in this uncomfortable seat. I wish I was sitting there with you, on our back porch swaddled in blankets watching the dogs wrestle in the soft grass. Soft. The line between expressing and being flows from the artifice to the sense that the artifice emerged from. There is more felt in a held hand than we can gather from a thousand sonnets. I want to hold your hand. But more than that. I want my hand to speak the sonnets that sing restlessly in my heart, the poetry of heartbeats of which written poetry is only an abstracted remnant. I want to give you my heart.

I love being your girl. Girl. Transitioning is a magic of place and a symphony of time. My body is one place; my body becomes another. I want to spend my time as a woman; I want to sing as a woman. I want to be a woman with you. What is it about me that shifts as I travel transition? Hormones flow and shift, cycles dis-membering and re-membering again. My skin softens, my fat travels, my body takes on a new form. In these shifts, I dwell more comfortably in my womanhood, seeing for the first time the woman-that-I-am. HRT does not make me a woman but it helps me to wipe away the clouds that obscure my womaning, that keep me separated from my body, my womanhood. Still, so much more remains — I want to be a woman with you, I want to woman with you. I’m your tomboy, hiding in my dysphoria hoodie seeing myself for the first time in the reflection of your honey-oak eyes. You’re my Odysseus, spiriting forward across the chaos and tumult to arrive again at the home we are building together. At the end of these trials, you will return as queen, I will return as Penelope. And then we will journey again. And return. And journey. And return. Always remaining a together – two women in love, swaddled in blankets on our back porch.

After philosophy, after poetry, two things remain: (1) the mystery of love, and (2) the mystery of womanhood. You cannot know either by knowing alone. You can only know by doing, by a leap of faith into the unknown, by kicking away the ladder of reason. I love because my life testifies to it – no poem will ever express the whole of love, because its significance is found not in language, but the world itself – in the act of loving. I am a woman because my life testifies to it – no theory will ever capture womanhood, because what it is to be a woman is to woman – the act of womaning. And here I sit, dwelling in these mysteries and moving through them, loving and womaning. And my soul aches. Because what I want is to love and woman with you. To sit on our back porch, swaddled in blankets watching the dogs wrestle in the soft grass.

Just two women in love.

The the the the the the. The the the the the the. – my heartbeat.

Image: Summer Evening on the Porch by Konstantin Korovin (1922)
Transitions #1

October 14th, 2024
```
I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into new tongue.
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
```
Do you feel the earth beneath your feet? Roll, gentle, roll-around and touch the contours of place – what does here feel like? Bumps and grooves and grassthings, the esse essaying essence over the easysoil. Feel the roots dig tender into the sense between bone and home.

Do you feel your feet above the earth? What does my flesh feel like? What body do I inhabit? Ghostly post-COVID simulacrum dance eloquent in the dreamscape that blurs the Atman. Take a step back and dim. Enter, here. Silence. I sway. Does an image? The thing-I-am Deis, imago-ing nothing but the One-in-Many, a Unique. Thirtyyears growing in every-place, the loom of time swaddles my spirit inside the I, welcoming experience. I travel, I am, a world-between-worlds. Past-present-future. Creating-begetting-proceeding. Love-loving-love. Who I was, who I am, who I will be. The persons share the same essence; they differ only by their relation. “The three are testifying— the Spirit, the water, and the blood—and the three are united in agreement.” (1 John 5.7-8 CEB)

Sometimes it hurts. Does God hurt? The only God worth worshipping does. Worship, being-worthy-of-reverence. Where does worth grow in the painless hollow? All else is secondary in faith to this: God became human. Humanus. Kind, refined, learned. Adamah. From-the-ground. The earth-soul is Adam-kind that flecks its soil-birth with spirit-worth. A human being is matter mattering. And sometimes it hurts. And sometimes it heals. Transitioning is re-membering, bringing-together the shattered parts of the Unique. In the original dwelling, the One was whole but lonely; in loneliness, it created something outside of itself – creation. This creation was loving-shattering, the potential for recognition folding out of the otherness of the two, the three, the many. The One heals itself by dis-membering and re-membering, by taking-apart the hurting nothing and putting-it-back-together as whole. At the beginning, the hurt One; at the end, the healed One. God becomes human as a wounded healer. She weeps and turns her tears into wine.

Jung’s mistake is the same as Plato’s; to think the transcendent is other than the immanent. The archetypes are enfleshed in echoing; the form is formed in forming. It’s a mistake to think there is anything other than persons. The Trinity isn’t such a mystery once we people everything. Why I am not seen as a person? Sit with me a second and listen. To the thump of my heart, to the whistle of my breath, to the groan of my ribcage. What part of me does not speak? You cocoon the world in your head and forget that you were the caterpillar. All there is around you is the same that you decided, and in this forgotten womb you cannot see me. The pilgrims forget their cocoon and mistake the glint of money for divinity, as if the pneuma moves in metal rather than spirit. The TERFs forget their cocoon and mistake the security of identity for liberation, as if womanhood moves in genes and genitals rather than sisterhood and solidarity. I woman afraid of the woman you are, but I woman more freely than you ever will.

At the beginning of a journey, I pray. To the One who is closer to me than my own breath. To the Many that carry me closer to myself.

ash. she.

You are intellect, I am life! – Margaret Fuller to Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image: Dandelions by Isaac Levitain (1889)
The Begotten One

October 11th, 2024

If you want to be complete, go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor. Then you will have treasure in heaven. And come follow me. – Jesus, Matthew 19.21 (CEB)

The pipes are frozen and the shelters are full as we gather in a squat to help deliver God into the world. We wait, we work, midwives of eternity beckoning crying hope into the midst of poverty. Swaddled in donated blankets, the child God first breathes the warmth of love in the frost of Empire. Seraphim sing hallelujah, proclaiming the reign of the poor and suffering, heralding the fall of Caesar. Joy to the world.

Queerness is the creativity of God. God as pure immanence; so close to the body as to become transcendent. Matter as spirit and spirit as matter. We are a world and in the world, the imagination of the universe creating and re-creating itself again-and-again, learning to find joy in its self-creation. We are a body, a body in loving-becoming, re-membering through holding one another, in our blossoming and sunlight and retreating and moonlight. Queerness is a you-and-I, a we in difference, not one by sameness but one by love, a compassion that takes all into-itself as an unfolding of infinity.

Beloved child of God, cosmic creation incarnate in powerlessness, the ember of faith faintly burning like a wood stove. She was born a carpenter’s daughter, her hands calloused and dirty, caked with soil and wet with rain. Hoped-for sibling of humanity, she kneels in the mud of the creekbed and enfleshes herself in weakness. Holy kid of the occupied slums, she throws mercy against power and compassion against war. She threads a whip of cords and strikes against the alien beast, the idol being birthed from Caesar’s occupation: quantity. “Give everything to the poor and follow me.”

Queer love breathes at the edge of the possible. Sophia (incarnate knowing, creative relationship in energeia) is enfleshed in infinite mossy worlds. The owl hoots eternity into the divine beauty of queer longing beyond the beyond of the present. Being becomes becoming in the halo of eros, a fragment of the good-in-itself becoming the breath of persons in intertwined belonging. The earth is my body and I am the earth. Gaia is trans, a Sophia of free forests. In all queer folk I see the breath of God; and in our queerness we create a new heaven. Queer love whispers the promise of the impossible.

Future ancestor of justice, love-loving-love becoming creaturely in a conspiracy of friends. Sister-spirits uproot division and serve peace, turning their back on ambition, outmatching hate with recognition. “Turn the other cheek” is another way to say, “hit me again, I dare you.” Awaited-for future home, washing feet and welcoming flesh into the eschaton, take and eat, receive and drink. We are one flesh, sharing a meal together; we are one spirit, drinking wine together. This dinner we share, the literal body of God. We sojourn rest, clothed in the cosmos, playing tag in the freedom of the kindom.

The kiki is an ekklesia.

I’m sorry it’s had to be this hard. But if I hadn’t walked this path, who would I be? At the moment I felt at the center of my life, the dream still braided like sweetgrass in my memory. I remembered Duffy’s challenge. Imagine a world worth living in, a world worth fighting for. I closed my eyes and allowed my hopes to soar. I heard the beatings of wings nearby. I opened my eyes. A young man on a nearby rooftop released his pigeons, like dreams, into the dawn. – Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

Image: Christ of St. John of the Cross by Salvador Dali (1951)

What is a Woman?

I: The Bio-Survival Circuit

II: The Emotional Circuit

III: The Dexterity-Symbolism Circuit

IV: The Socio-Sexual Circuit

V: The Neurosomatic Circuit

VI: The Neuroelectric Circuit

VII: The Neurogenetic Circuit

VIII: The Neuroatomic Circuit

Transitions #3

Transitions #2

Transitions #1

The Begotten One