That’s what he said! Can you believe it? The nerve. I’ve been reading Psychology Today for forty years, and he has the temerity to insinuate such a thing.
Remember how up to DSM-II—until 1973—the American Psychiatric Association asserted that homosexuality was a disease? Remember phrenology? The APA’s track record isn’t very good.
Who does that quack think he is?
This is my moment to bloom.
I am a dayglo flower!
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!”
— Emily Dickinson / “I’m Nobody! Who are you? (260)”
The difficult made holy by happenstance. She was delirious, but understood she’d make the first cut soon—minutes, perhaps seconds. She recoiled imagining the pain.
The rain in Maine stayed mainly in her brain. She moved—graceless—in a fog.
The reaper was scything at her heels. She resolved to move while she was able.
“His lips are brought down and his head again, yes, the gulls were there. They never miss an evening. They are grey slush in the spewing meatus of the sewer … It is the placenta of the departed, the red rigor of post-partum.”
— Samuel Beckett / Dream of Fair to Middling Women
wish you were here, the insects are legion (maine version)
The dust, the arid heat, the vexillologists. None of that made any sense there. It was a tropical rainforest last year when we booked, and the defoliation and climate change left the place a barrens. What gives?
And why were there 120 vexillologists installed at dozens of tables festooned with swatches of fabrics, encyclopedic books, drawing pads and markers out there in that wasteland? There were also the carcasses of the old denizens — piles of bones of howler monkeys, tamarins, marmosets, every imaginable bird of paradise, jaguars, tapirs, and so many more. Everything that once lived there was now a discrete pile of bones, generally undisturbed, each life reduced to its own monticule of what once was, but the insects were legion.
Nothing escaped, and yet there we were as death tourists — gawkers of our future.
But why the flag people? I couldn’t figure it out.
“Why are they here, dear?” I said to my husband. He was embroiled in the flag drama, and as usual he ignored me.
Then an eminence at the central table rose and screamed, “I’ve got it. I’ve got it,” then correcting himself said, “No, we have it,” he said making a sweeping gesture to the rest of the table full of white haired men.
“We’ll undertake the usual scholarly investigations and we’ll produce a paper with the title: ‘A Review of the Changing Proportions of Rectangular Flags since Medieval Times, and Some Suggestions for the Future.’”
There was one full minute of confusion and discussion at all the assembled tables. And then the men at the head of each table said, “Harrumph. Yes!” in a precise counterclockwise uncoiling of their support outward until arriving at the outermost, and largest table, where a younger contingent of vexillologists were gathered.
Their representative said: “Fuck you. Nay! You got us into this bind, and we’ll be damned if we let you finally drive us over the cliff as we teeter at the precipice. All you’ve been useful at up to this juncture is winning at the war of attrition. Look around. This was a verdant jungle last year and now it’s a clear cut wasteland. You were part of the leadership that got us here, and we don’t trust your tired ideas, your platitudes and your do as we say, not do as we do approach. You’re fraudulent, and you’re mostly tired old people having lived out your life in profligacy and now bequeath us this sinking ship.
We say fuck you, and fuck the horses you rode in on. We’re starting our own thing in diametrical opposition to this dead horse flog of yours. In fact, we’ve added a codicil to our manifesto, we insist that you die already because resources are scant and once we’ve banded together in a larger group — for there are more of us than there are of you, and as life would have it, there are pleasingly less of your lot everyday — we’re going to see to it that you do die before your appointed time. You’ve fucked this up so much already. We don’t need the extra dead weight!”
And with that spittle-filled pronouncement the newly minted “red vexillologists” marched off into the dunes that were once verdant foothills to form a cadre of revolutionary guerillas.
“Oh, well that’s interesting,” I said to my husband. “You know since this ecotourism thing didn’t pan out like we thought, why don’t we just fly to Maine tomorrow — it’s already dry there — and there remain a few puddles of fetid water where the beach once was, and you know how much I enjoy a nude beach, dear. And voila, here we are. Isn’t it just gorgeous here?”
“I feel like that’s something that sometimes gets lost in our culture, where everything’s about building a brand before you even have an established creative process. Please, don’t be a poet unless the number one thing you like to do is write poems. And read poems.”
— Ada Limón / In conversation with T. Cole Rachel, The Creative Independent
Fall. Fall, I say. She doesn’t. She stays perched on her branch. Fall, I say. She does not. This ritual—the repetition is liturgical. A call and response in absentia. There is no rejoinder. There is no: and also with you. There is only silence and the absence in her eyes. Fall, I say again. She looks down where I stand. She looks away into the distance. I look. I see what she sees. Nothing there. Fall, I say. She’s like an unhinged censer rolling away down a transept. Fall, I say. And she jumps. I turn. I step away.
“And then suddenly the life would go out of them and they would sit round the table looking at one another with extinct eyes, like ghosts fading at cock-crow.”
Nature repulsed her in myriad ways—psychological and visceral assaults. She needed to be harangued and harassed—everyday and in every way. Her Sisyphean rock would be the nocturnal infrared world she sensed in the water. She would remain in Maine forevermore. She took up residence with a sea urchin in a tide pool. She waited for night to fall.
“I wasn’t convinced that a workshop full of 13 other young writers trying to find their voices was the best place for me to find my voice.”
There is no legacy in semiotics, she thought—nothing to tether to—not land, historical connection, cultural heritage—it was a deep deracination. She found no reason for planting any of her own signs, for setting my own roots, for begetting generations. She expected another apocalyptic deracination—this one global. So why read signs?
“The purpose of writing is to make your mother and father drop dead with shame.”
Clodomira’s legs are whirring pistons. She’s up over 100 revolutions per minute on her bike. The countryside streaks by her and in these few seconds there is no revolutionary struggle, no ultimate leader, no great leap forward.
The fervor of the People dissipates and all is still. She is frozen in the moment, and the moment frozen all around her. The landscape a stilled blur of streaks. In this instant all of existence becomes the object of her consciousness.
Life in this infinitesimal moment is bearable — worth the battle toward transcendence.
A flash and the moment is gone.
The bicycle, a humble 1956 Rabasa, feeling greatly misused upon resuming at that diabolic speed rebels, and disengages its chain breaking into a dizzy wobble. They jackknife.
Clodomira is thrown into the sugar cane detritus — the edge of the field heaped with the sharp husks of post-Marxist labor. Now in mid-air she pictures herself as the radiant spear point of the vanguard, but as she hits the ground a shard of cane husk pierces her abdomen.
Clodomira rises to a sitting position. Our Lady of Charity hovers in the distance in an alcove of roiling cumulonimbus. All manner of birds and land animals are swept into the funnel and disappear.
Clodomira seethes. Oh, to be swept into that vestal vortex. Then she feels her father’s leaden hand on her shoulder, his grip tightening and constricting the blood flow to her head. Then his other hand under her shirt and rubbing her belly.
She is earthbound.
“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.”
thee istsfor manity reader 