Monday, October 30, 2006

momentous desire

so i've decided my next project for genderschmender is to coordinate a writing project. i have been throwing around ideas. what i've been fascinated by lately is the slippery nature of desire. the way some small details can transform a situation, my sense of self and others... the way desire can suddenly be there, where nothing was before. it really sneaks up on me sometimes, particularly when i'm listening to E read aloud, curled under her arm, my body absolutely flaccid with fatigue, and then something creeps up, heats up... maybe it's also relevant to E's creeping crouching jungle tiger theory. i remember also a moment in yr 12, sitting in economics behind this boy called Andrew Skyring. He was so skinny and his head was down and the vertebrae were visible under his pale neck skin where his long hair had fallen to the side. i wanted to fuck that boy so badly. right there. biting his fragile boy body. it was like that again when another long-haired thin boy, Eden, walked toward me in the morning sun after i'd had sex with him the night before, his first time, and his hair and skin kind of glowed.

I also think these moments of desire are caught up with gender. certainly for me. The way gender can shift, even moment by moment. Moments of ambiguity, moments where breasts are unbound and suddenly soft, where hard chests bud, moments where binding shows under shirts, where voices suddenly drop, where sun catches new facial hair, when putting on a wig can transform the way i walk and talk. surely people have moments they want to write about...

i have been wondering about a working title... 'moments in desire' 'momentous desire' 'moments in body and desire'? hmmm.

Monday, October 02, 2006

shifting currents & dead chickens

Something is going on in my head. and my stomach. and my chest. Kind of uncomfortable shifting. like my emotional state is composed of seismic plates. Is that what they're called? Those massive plates of earth that groan and shift and cause tidal waves that engulf whole islands and cities? I feel restless and sad. but not really sad, just kind of frustrated and unmotivated. kind of watching myself fail law from a distance. not caring most of the time. devastated when i do engage. I think the feeling could be called 'lost'. Politically and emotionally. After casting myself adrift from uni politics, i feel like i'm wading through this political landscape that is just so unformed, barely cognisant of itself and it's hard to know where to turn or how i fit in. I think the advantage of student politics is that there is a basic calendar that gives some structure and immediate objectives.

Beyond that, i feel like everyone is as lost as me. and I find myself yearning for some kind of political mentor. an organisational structure that will take me in and nourish me and push me out of the nest stronger and with a clue about what i'm meant to be doing. maybe buffer me from the intense and pointless antagonism between leftist cliques. oh maybe i'm just yearning for a clique of my own.

I guess what i'm saying is that after doing my time in the little student politics hot pot, i've emerged to realise that I have not been equipped. I've read more Marx & Lenin than Bakunin. I find the anarchisty cliques the toughest to engage with. I feel battered and damaged by cynicism. I feel tired of being patronised by people who think being hopeful for something better is naive beyond belief. I feel jaded by people who think this is all there can be. Most of all though, i think i feel let down by my own finite political energy and passion. My own failure to be the brilliant, well read visionary that I want in my life.

and Venus died. in a tiny fitting bundle of grey feathers.