Fish In the Afternoon

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
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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
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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)
My Sanctuary

October 7th, 2024
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Joy, in Nature's wide dominion,
Mightiest cause of all is found;
And 'tis joy that moves the pinion
When the wheel of time goes round. - Friedrich Schiller, Hymn to Joy
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Intimacy – intimatus, intimus, intus, interior, h₁éntm̥mos – to-make-familiar, to-make-an-impression, the innermost, the inside, what lies within, the heart.

What joy impresses my soul, morrowmemory bells the primrose. I tend, waves, here-and-there to-and-fro, the lighthouse of your spirit sunrises the starrysnow. O, softwelcoming gentle-one, I work for you; my paradise, earth-soul that earths my earth-soul. I unfold.

Familiar / familiaris / familia. Of the household. You thou me, my fairy love. Impish time flowers into intimacy, the rocking-rocking-rocking of dwelling-with-you. Feel my breath rock in you; I impress my heart with you. We begin crackling animas alighting the placetime of our inhabiting, disclosing our soul as we unfold. Worlds upon worlds sway with every footstep, I clockwork the many in dancing slow, a 1 a 2 a. Smooth drips the jamlight cognac of being-here. We mellow.

Caramel, this time-between. With-, breathe-in, with-, hold, with-, breathe-out. With-you. Now. Motion is entelechy (in the kitchen we sugar ontologies). This is the best of all possible worlds. (I met you.) This is the best of all possible futures. (Everyday, I meet you.) I womb our garden in my futuring, intending-attending-meaning-dreaming. I leap into joy, hearthing my everyday patterning in the warmth of our doma. Our souls unfold together like a forest. There is so much life in us. There is so much life to come.

Hold my hand, my Odysseus. I’ll keep you safe. The sea cannot haunt you anymore. I am your Galatea. Keep me close. In every life, our spirits said I love you. We are cosmos, we cosmos. My beloved. Awaking a bluebird, cinnamon salmon buccaneers our backyard, Teddy borping his disapproval while Luna flies ahead. In the pink-hued amber of the morninglight, we waltz our togethering, Sable purring the to-come.
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We joy together. Always and forever and far, far longer. Through eternity, I ever-wander with you. My sanctuary.

From Sweetpea to Sunshine.
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Love loves to love love. – James Joyce, Ulysses

Image: Autumn Landscape by Gustave Courbet (1885)
Echogia

September 27th, 2024

As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Language is a map of the interior, mirrored me-and-yous that echo out to form landscapes of meaning, intertwined matterings. Communication begins with perichoretic subjectobjects, exterioring the interior by instantiating a world-with-another, the indwelling of being-here, -now, -with-you. Every locution is a world-between, a you-and-I that unfolds into a doing, an illocution that bubbles up the perlocutionary wave, the echoic ocean of meaning-in-motion. The ma is a disco, the space-between that articulates significance in the dance of poetic swaying, here-and-there, here-and-there. Rolling, rolling, here-again. Affect bounces signification, clapping our sense-of-time together, (who whoo, a whoing humming a’humaning).

Do that thing you say with your thumbs. Y’know the one, knowing. Knowing is en-habiting echopraxy. Praxis ticcing meaning-in-time, echoeros echologos echopathos echogia. Gaia guarantees the ground-of-all-being (she’s here, she’s here). Intention waits in silence. Listen. Breathe. The the, the the, the the. The heart illocutes being. As if there is knowing without feeling. (Facts care deeply about your feelings. Write them a letter sometime.) To mean is to matter-with-another, to matter another, to matter-to, to matter-to-you. I mean. Please, I mean. Meaning sits softly the underbelly of mossygreen theosis, synthesize synesthesis, I promise to you, I Dei.

“Unsheathe your dagger definitions. Horseness is the whatness of allhorse. Streams of tendency and eons they worship.” (Joyce, Ulysses) I cannot speak that that I mean, I mean I mean in intended-attending. The space-between flutters potentia into recognition; “I see you” is hidden at the start of every definition. Pharoah goosebumps generalissimo Aten, hymnhim that echoes-you (ask who it is that echoes you). Whose past will you appear in? Who are you the future to? Sometimes you are the future of a child you’ve never seen and the past to an ancestor that you will never know. Meaning is the same thing as history, v. to-history. Historing (us). We who history. The common-soul is the great re-membering, come-to-me my darling. I sparrowgently genera, grassgainly the Unique.

As if there is ever just one.

Forget the years, forget distinctions. Leap into the boundless and make it your home! Zhuangzi, Discussion on Making All Things Equal

Image: Fabric Design with Trout Dance for Backhausen by Koloman Moser

Transitions #2

Transitions #1

The Begotten One

My Sanctuary

Echogia