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inexorable advance
Feb. 11th, 2007 04:40 pmSometimes I wonder if my facility with my own epistemic/-ological and ontological structures and habits just make things more questionable. I'm going back, and slowly reconsidering (or considering reconsidering, in some cases) some stances that have taken on the weight of premises, foundations, or histories, and it's scary. There's this feeling of slow movement; the image that comes to mind is of a glacial wall of ice, with megaliths shifting and grinding as the ice moves forward, under great pressure.
Zum Beispiel, this whole (")girl(")/not (")girl(") thing. I know I don't believe in absolutes, naturals of gender at all; that goes to the core of my experience and my beliefs. Not all that many years ago, I had a nascent, prefigurative idea that it might be possible to take what I want and place it within the social context of a label meaningful to others, without it being necessarily restrictive or summoning etiological and narrative constructs to dwell at the heart of my life. I hadn't tested any of it, but it felt possible.
Then the abyssmal dealings of 2004 hit, right about the same time the seeds were germinating and starting to grow. Toxicity, sharp blades and thorns, flavored much of that developmental time. Some of the damage led to false contagion and yet more internal colonization, such that the only way to face the internal and external fronts seemed to be a wholesale rejection of anything that touched on contaminated terms and ideas, like "girl", "transgender", "transition", etc. I went forward still, but in an anti-zen, eternal myopic now of action divorced of longer term consequence or context, and I don't think that serves me any more. In some of this, I can see clear, straight impulses that I recognize as my own (I don't believe in either the efficacy or ethicality of what most mean by 'transition' for me, for instance), but there's a reflexive, reactionary valence that does me no good, and might well be doing me some harm.
I'm not sure what to do about this. I'm cautious about a wholesale reclaimatory project, and wary about reengaging with possibly still polluted and dangerous concepts one on one. Still, I've begun to reclaim some things, which upon reflection looks like mostly emotions (anger, resistance, hunger, affection, love). I've not been good with emotions in general; maybe the lack of intentional usage leaves them accidentally free of the specific contagion I'm so afraid of. It's slow, slow going, and I'm not one for patience, usually. The challenge of the right amount of waiting as well as the right amount of force is a big one.
Zum Beispiel, this whole (")girl(")/not (")girl(") thing. I know I don't believe in absolutes, naturals of gender at all; that goes to the core of my experience and my beliefs. Not all that many years ago, I had a nascent, prefigurative idea that it might be possible to take what I want and place it within the social context of a label meaningful to others, without it being necessarily restrictive or summoning etiological and narrative constructs to dwell at the heart of my life. I hadn't tested any of it, but it felt possible.
Then the abyssmal dealings of 2004 hit, right about the same time the seeds were germinating and starting to grow. Toxicity, sharp blades and thorns, flavored much of that developmental time. Some of the damage led to false contagion and yet more internal colonization, such that the only way to face the internal and external fronts seemed to be a wholesale rejection of anything that touched on contaminated terms and ideas, like "girl", "transgender", "transition", etc. I went forward still, but in an anti-zen, eternal myopic now of action divorced of longer term consequence or context, and I don't think that serves me any more. In some of this, I can see clear, straight impulses that I recognize as my own (I don't believe in either the efficacy or ethicality of what most mean by 'transition' for me, for instance), but there's a reflexive, reactionary valence that does me no good, and might well be doing me some harm.
I'm not sure what to do about this. I'm cautious about a wholesale reclaimatory project, and wary about reengaging with possibly still polluted and dangerous concepts one on one. Still, I've begun to reclaim some things, which upon reflection looks like mostly emotions (anger, resistance, hunger, affection, love). I've not been good with emotions in general; maybe the lack of intentional usage leaves them accidentally free of the specific contagion I'm so afraid of. It's slow, slow going, and I'm not one for patience, usually. The challenge of the right amount of waiting as well as the right amount of force is a big one.
