something i'd written in 'anger' once,sometime last to last summer, to one of the profs i debate a lot with...

y'know half the women writers never really got to write what they really thought coz it was so difficult to get a chance for their writing to be published or circulated in the first place that, at the end of the battle they were seething with just anger.you can't reach anyone with anger.i can't afford to be angry!
i was angry here.so i couldn't move.
things have changed so much since...
the revolution is within,i have found my channels,we'll see what happens..lol..
no answers coming from no messiah anywhere,from no system.
.
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anyway it might as well be read
.
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'Recently I was eve teased by five men, there were four other people sitting at my table. They were all highly 'intellectual'. Books were more of weapons for them than anything else. Yet day before yesterday, they could not say one word for me. I fought sir for twenty minutes,after staying quiet for forty. But somewhere towards the end,..all I could think was that whatever I do, however much I read, figure out, these men will still be able to feel naked in front of them. I realized I am doing all I do, reading whatever I read all because I am being 'allowed' to do it. It is an allowance. In the old history textbooks I used to laugh when there would be sentences like 'The women of the Parsi community were well educated'. We are almost a different animal species. I have been allowed to be just by my family, not necessarily the rest of the society. Those men had the guts to go ahead further more because the men at my table were 'observing' the developments. I walked out of that restaurant. I didn't want to speak to any of them, but over the next two days they spoke to me, some 5 hours at a go, they told me about the 'psychological bunkers' they all had taken cover in,how I hadn't given them 'margin time', how I was fighting quite well and they were just waiting for things to 'escalate some more'. Some more? Till I got hit? If those men had me in an alley way,sir, I would have been raped. Would they watch for it to escalate then too? What is enough? How much thought and theorizing is enough? Why do I have to be resolute to the fact that these things happen and will continue happening because I am physically weaker, because my kind have been subjected to this before. When do I get to breathe in something other than the liminal space my parents provide?

That evening in the restaurant sir, I suddenly got tired .I got tired of always being the screaming 'aggressive' woman. So then maybe I should shut up? Maybe it would all be peaceful then? A lot of women do that..not only when they're being abused as in this case, but also at work . Some stay quiet,but there are others who've probably been hurt so much that now they use their bodies. They now abuse themselves. They throw it around at men and feel justified by the sparkling results in their work. I can't stay quiet and I respect my body,so where is my space? I cannot shut up.'

musical

...'He had to move. He was excruciatingly in command. He had to step
deeper into his terror and further out over the void. There was no
other way. To his left was a rounded outcropping of rock and on the
other side of it a means of descent. Make for over there. He let go of
his left handhold and slipped off one strap of the backpack, then
switched hands, then slowly the other strap. He let the pack fall down
to the rocks below. In some far-off place, in some unreal time, he
hoped the flashlight had not broken.

Then slowly, he began to inch his way left, cranny, by cranny, hold by
hold. He made slow careful progress. He was half way across. With the
toe of his sneaker he felt out the loose-fitting rock in the next
cleft. He kicked away at the broken bits of rock. Nudging his way in,
he tested its strength. It was Okay. He transferred his weight over to
it. It held. He trusted it, committed to it. All his weight, now. The
rock slipped and gave way. His knee banged against the rock wall, his
foot forced down violently, jangling in the air, weightless. I'm
falling. I'm dead.'




andrew boyd

'the most obscure poem is addressed to everybody'
audiberti

today i read truffaut talking about the whiteness of carl dreyer's images and cried.
god help me.lol...

Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight.

Albert Schweitzer