Little Weirds(27)

Call me a vandal but I am lying in my bed and I say, I think maybe we should throw it in the trash. Can something that is important enough to be in a museum go right to the trash now?

Of course, I am just a woman lying in the dark, listening to my stomach squeal and counting the seconds before my midnight curry diarrhea extravaganza, but should we just throw this ancient statue of a choad into a French dumpster?

Or sure, sure. Okay. The trash doesn’t feel exactly right, so, okay.

What about: Keep it in the museum but say what it really is and what it has done, and make the museum visitors scream NOOOOOO at it, so that people on other floors of the museum are drawn to the spot of the shouting. People from Indiana and India and Iran—on vacation in France—say, What’s that exhibit where you get to scream at something?

They look at their museum maps but they can’t find any information. So they just do what animals do and they follow the sound. They form a crowd around a glass case that holds a random old stone boner and they find themselves screaming NOOOOOO as well. It is refreshing and out of the ordinary to do this, and they like it because it feels good to make big noises as a group.

And the sound waves are so forceful that they wash away the etching of the old, evil laws.

And then when the etching is erased, let the sound waves of that universal NO bounce off that dusty dick-statue and into the bodies of the people screaming NOOOOOO. Let the sound waves wash the inside of the people too, washing out the misogyny, washing out the ingrained laws that cause all of us, any gender identity, to have anxiety and rage and sadness because of where we have been sent and kept. Blast away the deep ridges inside that create a feeling of unnameable dirtiness and shame.

Let it wash the obsidian phallus until it feels naked without its code and it just shrinks down, puffs into black dust. Then, place what is left into a little vial. Put that vial in a boring part of the museum. And the label on the vial should read, “These are the crumbs of the code that choked humans for thousands of years. This used to live in our minds and hearts. Now it is here and it is nothing but dust. If I were you, I would check out the Mona Lisa, which is surprisingly small for such a famous painting, but still thrilling. Take in her mystery! What is she thinking?”

Focus on this old painting of this woman who doesn’t care about serving you, who keeps her story to herself because you are not her boss and she is smiling first and foremost for herself and she’ll grin when she fucking feels like it.



I finish the documentary eventually. I learn about ancient female warriors and poets, and quite a bit of new information about foot binding in China, and about St. Hildegard of Bingen, who was a mystic and a genius and who also really turns me on, intellectually speaking.

But the Code of Hammurabi really sticks with me. When I encounter a proud misogynist or an unconscious one, or I see misogyny flare up in myself, I imagine this Code sitting in the museum, or sitting on a block, being created far back in the past, and I say to myself that this can all go another way.

I lie in my bed and I say, There was a start and so there can be an end.





Kinship

I sit at the table in the afternoon in the part of the day when the air is warm still from hanging in a day of sun. I have a clock in my kitchen and the kitchen is a different room from the dining room, because this house is from before World War II and even before World War I, when people were smaller and lived shorter lives and didn’t know the term “great room” or “open concept.”

I sit in a room that was built even before movies were made here in this city, which has been filled with movie people and people thinking about movies, with movie people’s shredded dreams, shreds of dreams left to moan in pieces all over this palm-tree-dotted patch at the edge of a whole country. I sit where people came like babies and zombies, drawn to an art form that is incredibly dangerous and decadent and astounding and represents stories in motion, represents life in a way that we find irresistible, and also is responsible for a massive amount of darkness and abuse.

I sit in a chair in an old house at a table that is from Denmark and from someone else’s house in the 1960s on another part of the planet in a time that has rolled away behind us. I sit in the chair, which is probably as old as my friend’s young baby, who is crawling so fast and is startlingly robust and most likely currently holding a banana too hard and making it into a lint-y, silly pudding in his little baby hand.

I sit here in the afternoon, which seems to be holding its breath, and I hear the day birds and their noises like necklaces shifting, like glass being tinkled, but I also hear the motors of the wings of the night bugs starting to rev up because they feel the sun glancing over its shoulder to leave. I sit here and I turn around to face the air coming through the window, and the air is so warm that I take it as a sign that it is all right to be alive as I am, just as I am, and to keep trying.

I have recently clung to my very foundations and lasted many upsets, and I have had a muddled mind, even. But I see the light on the leaves and how it makes them seem filled up with green, not just flat with green on the flat. I see how they appear to be filled with air and how light and air are separate but make holy beauty out of nature that is already so sacred. I see it. I know it. That nature makes art and I am a creation and I make things. This is an expansive fact that I could never measure, and it calms me. The elemental companionship of light and air make it so beautiful on those leaves that when I turn in my chair to really look, the leaves are just there existing, and I feel my heart break down even more and I say, Good, let it fall away, and look, look, everything is always remaking itself and so are you. Everything is art and nature and so are you.