raw and possible

061509

Initially I see these two wiry bony consecrated hands, sharp-tipped and skinny, long fingers with severely, gorgeously articulated joints, reaching down into a throat, through mouth, beyond lips and teeth and tongue, past the epiglottis, I think, past uvula and gag reflex and there is no hope of vomiting because this is going down. I see them inside, the two hands, the fingers catching hold of a wizened greenish-greying mass, this sticky dripping lump, something squeamish, tender, almost furry or corrugated, entirely encapsulated in slime -- something like a hairball or a carcass, the body of an alien life form, but without tendrils or tentacles -- something without hope or fever or mental status.

Something incoherent. Or inchoate. Or both.

The hands pull it out of its lodging the way you yank something nearly rotted and festering out of the disposal chamber in your sink -- gingerly, quick, with steady pressure, hoping your fist will fit on the way back out with you holding to the pile of not yet decomposed foodstuffs mixed with peach bits or bones or a spoon, all of which is tangling up the blades of your disposal -- I mean your throat.

It's become its own colony, this amalgamation: collecting every loop that got slipped around your neck, every swallowed I said no thank you, every murmured Please stop , every unspoken I wish you would, every clenched teeth mumbled Jesus Christ will you just get the fuck away from me, every Gosh I don't know that issued from between your lips instead of the facts that gathered boom like metal to magnet         on the other side of the gathering storm in your throat. Numbers, equations, dates, names, places, hopes, longings, dreams: all tangled together, knotted and nearly putrid         but not quite         just like the compost can be. You know it's all good stuff in there, even if it has been left all on its own to fester and decompose

The fingers begin to pick and pull at the mass, brushing away green slime         saliva and more caught for so many years, what got washed down your gullet -- and your throat is bone sore, stretched and aching, wheezing empty with sound         cavernous, open, raw and possible

Loaded

I wrote this in Monday's workshop, and it's the beginning of something longer, I think, about how different words are "charged" differently for each of us... xo, Jen
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Yesterday at the bookstore I asked the man behind the counter if they had any books by James Pennebaker.

“I don’t know who that is,” he said.

I waited for him to offer to look the name up, but he didn’t. He was quiet, and for a moment I thought that was going to be the end of the conversation.

Then he said, “What does he write about?”

And so I described how Pennebaker writes about the uses of writing to mitigate the aftereffects of trauma. And the young man behind the counter at this Berkely bookstore said, "Oh, well, I don’t know – but if we had anything like that it would be up in self-help popular psychology – you know, we hear the word ‘trauma’ and we just throw it up there."

Ok. I’d just spent the last hour scanning all the titles in their relatively (at least by today’s bookstore standards) extensive linguistics, psychology and popular psychology sections, and found no books about the uses of writing as a healing or social change craft or practice or tool. But, here, look – I did find this old standby attitude about trauma: It’s not a terribly serious issue, not really, those whiners, put it there next to the What Color is Your Inner Elephant? and How Your Catbox Can Guide You To Enlightenment. I felt that old internalized shame, to be asking for a book about trauma – just one more white woman looking for the language to my loss? What's this attitude about the struggle and strain for transformative experience?

I mourn the feeling that these words of my life are the loaded curse words: trauma, incest: not dyke or pornographer. Those latter words have no power over me, carry no tethers to my own shame and still these years later I cringe under the gaze of real academics, real literary pursuers, rel social change workers who aren’t so ‘bound by their past’ or who are able to just ‘let things go, move on.’ This is me, moving on, with these words, sanded against my face always, chapping my lips and cheeks, reminding me where I come from. This boy-man behind the counter worked it out on my bald face, his fear of this word, this one of the many loaded words we all carry, and how the word becomes a crematorium to connection or even meaning if we aren’t truly listening to each other.

Some words that are loaded for me to hear: incestuous, traumatized, raped—especially, I’ll tell you, when those words are not used to refer to people and their actions against the bodies of, or experiences at the hands of, other people, and instead used thus: the women’s community here is so incestuous, you know? Or, The people are just being raped by the banking execs, huh? These images don’t work for me.

A loaded word is one that is too heavy for metaphor.

The loaded words I use that are not triggering or difficult for me any more but might still score an anvil-dropping line across another’s ear are: lesbian, gay, dyke, queer, survivor, rebel, survivor, Black, white, fucking...; I say these words with impunity, I spend them freely, I have earned the right to let them fall off my lips in every day conversation, at the credit union or with my father. The folks I’m talking to are not always so similarly prepared, their ears not exercised or stretched out, their eardrums are tensed still, they are accustomed to these words being laden with anger. But in my world, these words are laden with fear – ok, sometimes, sure – but they are laden also with love.

These are the buckets of cold water we offer one another to drink. Sometimes, we have to say the difficult thing, just because we know there’s another someone nearby, maybe also waiting in that bank line, whose ears are parched from all the silences, from all the years of people not saying the words that are too heavy for some people to hold. True, sometimes those words are going to sound like that cold water just got thrown in our face, our eyes pop open wide and we get that shocked look, like we just woke up – hard.

We wake each other up.