I attended a lecture today that blew my mind. You will know about it. But first:
I went out running the other night. It was the first time after dark in this hood. I got lost. I typically run down the 97 steps, up the steepish hill of the street nearby, down the crazy steep, nearly vertical street on the other side to the lake, over the undulating path that circles the lake, then back. In the dark though, it was tough to make out where the lake was, as it’s fenced off in some areas and obscured by houses in others. While running the first quarter of its circumference, a stretch with which I was comfortably familiar, I was passed by a cute gay boy dressed exactly like me. The competitive nature I rarely submit to said, “oh hell no,” and I lengthened my strides. I passed him, he passed me, I passed him, he passed me, and we went on like this for some time. Until I noticed he was no longer passing me. I looked back for him, but… No cute gay boy dressed like me anywhere. I stopped, plunged suddenly and abruptly into aloneness. The night darkened. I realized with slight panic that I wasn’t edging the lake anymore. The lake was also gone.
I ran on, hoping to recognize something and reorient myself, but everything was alien. I turned around, ran back, saw no lake, turned up streets, turned around again, up hill, down hill, until I eventually found the lake, but in finding it, not knowing which direction to go. Anxious, exhausted, worried that I would never be able to stop running, I called wildly out to a couple walking along the path, their well-dressed backs to me, strolling away. They turned in unison–two attractive and curious faces. I lumbered redly toward them and yanked my hat from my burning head. I explained that I was lost. The man asked me for the name of an intersection, which I gave him. He said, “let’s just Google map that right now,” and pulled out his phone. They were both so polished and pretty, accenting my relative repulsiveness—sweat soaked, the heat of me a rising vapor in the chill air, my hair a tangled, wet, steaming nest. The woman looked at me, smiling. There was that surprised, curious, I-don’t-quite-know-what-to-make-of-you look hanging from her done-up face, her frozen open mouth.
I thought I should say something, so I said, “I’ve been running.”
Her expression didn’t alter. Her boyfriend, still working it out on the phone, nodded and smiled without looking up.
“A. Long. Time.” This I added just to explicate my nastiness. The woman laughed—half forced, half genuine—and said, “Well. You look very healthy.” Her tone was friendly and sweet, yet trance-like, fixed as she was on the picture of me there under the street lamp. I felt separate from myself then, observing suddenly a completely objective, very brief image of myself. My jaw line, neck, shoulder—the S shape these made—were somehow the most feminine thing. I don’t know why. Men have the very same arrangement of features. And yet.
I might have blushed. By then the man found my intersection and pointed me in the right direction. It was all up hill, including the ascending retreat over the nearly vertical street–gravely ill suited for the end of a too long run.
As I scaled the concrete wall of a street, I reflected on that objective view, the certainty (and brevity) of my out of body experience, and how it resulted in something like a sexualization of myself as feminine. Not only that, but a new identification with, and sense of belonging to, femininity. It was an unexpected gift.
Part of this lecture today, which was about the fiction writer, reader, and the relationships therein, addressed an idea, or rather, a scientific fact called neuroplasticity. Cortical remapping. The literal changing of a mind, in that the actual physical shape of the gray matter of the brain (bearing the footprints of every thought, act, decision, belief, etc.) shifts. Whenever something new happens to you, the brain shifts, and you are not the same. You will never be the same.
This leads me to the next part, the part where many somethings new have been happening to me here among this community of writers and educators, many of whom are intimidatingly brilliant. One such person, who I paid attention to after hearing her say that she was there to “see what structures could be built with language,” made a significant impression on me out in the street in front of an Italian restaurant one night. I asked her to perform something (she’s a performance poet) and she did, right there on the spot. Flawlessly. The poem is called Two Bits. It’s about the first time she shaved her head and her mother’s reaction to it. I found the piece in its entirety online, and will paste one verse here, which is both my favorite and the one that mirrors my internal experience most poignantly:
She lectures like a sonorous sewing machine:
“You look like a boy.”
Mom, you mean I look like a dyke.
I knocked you off-kilter and the ponytailed filter
that allowed your perspective of
nearly-straight Kate
has been clipped. The closet is clear-cut. My slate is full up
with this silent scrawlin’—I will not let you pretend to
ignore the forest that’s fallen from my face.
I am stark, I am satiated in this suddenly-sparse
space, I am uncomplicated without
cornrows of cautious trees. I am caged neither by
the scabs of a boy nor
the arms of a man.
I am free.
Besides, Big Mama, dig my breasts,
dig my hips,
dig this sarcastic, cynical, shit-eating grin pussyfooting
across my lips—dig this salty-sugarshockin’ stanza, then
hold my green dragon eye and tell me, ain’t I a woman, Mother
whip-strong and smart,
ain’t I?
This phenomenon of living in a body of a gender, a body that changes over time, with flashes of the senses, piercing and startling, overlaid and informed with echoes of memory, is exuberant. This specific physicality. Its shininess. Its dulling. Its promise to die and disappear. It seems remarkable that it be here at all, cast loose in the world, sometimes for so long. But never long enough. The consciousness that accompanies it, the mind that it serves with a life of its own, one that remains invisible, can go away from it. Out of its gaze. This gap. It haunts me. Where does one begin and the other leave off? Where does one go when the other disappears? This quest to imagine my way into and attempt to give form to the incomprehensible–if only for one brief, dazzling glimpse–it seems part of what changes minds. It seems part of the inherent wildness I must claim.
(The full text of Two Bits by Katie F-S can be found here:
http://rattle.com/blog/2009/04/two-bits-by-katie-f-s/)
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