yes

spiral dance

yesterday evening we celebrated pagan new year, the feast of Samhain.
marÃa and i went to the Spiral Dance, the ritual by Reclaiming,
the activist wicca (witchcraft) group of Starhawk,
in the Golden Gate park in San Francisco.

mourning the dead of the year that passed away (all the names…
shoes of people who died in iraq… photos of young brown and black
men shot by SF police…). welcoming new life.

insisting chants, and a spiral dance with hundreds of bodies
spinning a circle of life with a promise of renewal of the earth.
(and as spirits strayed among us,
i recognized a guardian angel)

(impression from the altar of the north | the winter )

for you

this summer back home i began to buy, in beautiful Tropismes, the works of Luce Irigaray. i feel how i keep on “thinking with” (this is marÃa’s mark) her and decided that i wanted to read and re-read her, in french. this autumn i’m reading quite some Judith Butler, and through her i stumbled upon Adriana Cavarero this evening. next time back home i’ll try to get some of her work, in italian. (oh, italian in need of practice, yesterday by accident, madonna, a spanish word crept into il mio italiano un po’ strano and it did not make giulia happy… pero giulia, sempre quando provo a parlare spagnola, le parole italiane vengono, voilÃ …) for the moment, Cavarero through Butler, on sociality:

“In her view, I am not, as it were, an interior subject, closed upon myself, solipsistic, posing questions of myself alone. I exist in an important sense for you and by virtue of you. If I have lost the conditions of address, if I have no “you” to address, then I have lost “myself”. In her view, one can tell an autobiography only to another, and one can reference an “I” only in relation to a “you”: without the “you” my own story becomes impossible.”

i don’t think it’s a coincidence that i’m interpellated and attracted so much by words like these, and Irigaray’s, and marÃa’s (who’s working with Haraway’s words) while being here in America, where i’m confronted so much with the sociality of the “I”. i’ve been tempted for a while now to write a small little intimate poetic personal-political-collective book about this america, as an investigation into individualism (…freedom…independence… the public /common good… and what i’ve come to call suburbia-subjectivity) and now a genealogy of thought to have conversations with is starting to shape up: irigaray, cavarero,… this involves re-appropriating european feminist thought, as sexual difference thinking isn’t exactely the most popular way of thinking nowadays, between equal opportunities and all things queer. and i like the thought of being an unfaithful blasphemous and recalcitrant daughter-thinker of irigaray, with her original basque connection, her forgotten belgian and leuven connection where there never was a place for her, fleeing away in, and then from, a violent psychoanalytical french connection and finding a political community through a communist italian connection.

what would it mean to start thinking here, in this america, that i exist only by virtue of you?

yes, once more

I’m awake early today, as i was (gently) shaken out of my sleep by a (light) earthquake (a magnitude of 4.7, the news reports say). (“Did you enjoy it?” Leta asked when we met in the kitchen, “I always enjoy them a lot.” These California people…) Started reading The Olive Readers by Christine Aziz, it is beautiful so far. And i find that after every 5 pages, i go back to the opening quote from James Baldwin. Yes, once more, and thanks again Rutvica.

“One must say Yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found – and it is found in terrible places… For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light falls, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”

A movie which Rutvica insisted we should see
and since we had spend all our time in Oxford talking
she suggested to take her laptop on the bus to London
and as the green English landscape passed by us
we were absorbed in the poetry,
the dazzling, sharp and beautiful verse (!),
the pounding rhythm of the lyrics, images and music
of this gem, this song of love and politics.

Words from the director, Sally Potter:
“I began by writing an argument between two lovers,
one a man from the Middle East (the Lebanon), the
other a woman from the West (an Irish-American) at a
point where their love affair has become an explosive
war-zone, with the differences in their backgrounds
starting to cast a long shadow over their intimacy.
He has decided to end the affair, for he finds he can
no longer tolerate the imbalance of worldly power in
their relationship; nor the challenge that the affair
poses to his identity. His belief in God, and in the
world he left behind, begins to surface once more,
and now seems a higher calling than the call of love
and sex. All that first attracted him to this blonde
American professional woman now reminds him only
of his humiliation and loss.

He pushes her away at the very moment that her
marriage seems to have broken down irretrievably,
increasing her sense of isolation. For the first time in
their relationship he seems to have all the power in his
hands – the power to say ‘no’. But as he rejects her,
the deeper reasons for his anger and anguish gradually
emerge; the pain and humiliation he experiences every
day as a man from the Middle East living in the West.

These two characters, each trying to listen to the other,
and each wanting to be heard, formed the basis of the
story, which developed to include other characters, each
of whom is wrestling with his or her beliefs; whether
religious, political, or – in the case of the cleaner who
is a sort of one woman comic Greek chorus – about
the true nature of dirt.”

Oh dear friends, you must see this movie. yes the movie