*

[anneboyer]

“Toward a Better Love” -- Roque Dalton

“Sex is a political condition.” — Kate Millet

No one disputes that sex is a condition in the world of the couple: from there, tenderness and its wild branches.

No one disputes that sex is a domestic condition: from there, kids, nights in common and days divided (he, looking for bread in the street, in offices or factories; she, in the rear guard of domestic functions, in the strategy and tactic of the kitchen that allows survival in a common struggle at least to the end of the month).

No one disputes that sex in an economic condition: it’s enough to mention prostitution, fashion, the sections in the dailies that are only for her or only for him.

Where the hassles begin is when a woman says sex is a political condition.

Because when a woman says sex is a political condition she can begin to stop being just a woman in herself in order to become a woman for herself, establishing the woman in woman from the basis of her humanity on not of her sex, knowing that the magic deodorant with a hint of lemon and soap that voluptuously caresses her skin are made by the same manufacturer that makes napalm knowing the labors of the homes themselves are labors of a social class to which that home belongs, that the difference between the sexes burns much better in the loving depth of night when all those secrets that kept us masked and alien are revealed.

(Roque Dalton -- San Salvador, El Salvador, 14 May 1935 – Quezaltepeque, El Salvador, 10 May 1975) 

[42million]

To Do - Anne Boyer

1. write poems which allow me to believe I have written no poetry

2. write prose which allows me to believe I don’t know a word

3. read with a technique that convinces me I’ve read nothing

4. think in a way deniable as thought

5. sleep each night of sleep in a way of sleeping which feels as if I’ve never rested

6. love with a technique of love allowing me to declare innocence that I’ve felt anything at all

7. develop a way of living which I swear to you will generate material evidence that I’ve never been born

http://anneboyer.tumblr.com

[anneboyer]

A Prayer for Time

No more duration as a unit of infliction -- no work hours, no prison sentences, no deadly prognoses.

No more believing in centuries, generations, "war" as what begins and ends, the rude periodizations of historians on the payroll of history.

Gestation is also not a clock.

Erotic love must finally be given credit as the greatest temporal burglar ever known.

And just to be clear, it is not "Father" Time, it is Time the androgyne who is more like Nature's distant cousin -- an exile, prosperous and alluring.

What flies but never lands?

No one on earth should be forced by pain into wishing away their time on it.

All the epic struggle ultimately is comes down to people who believe in their own right to property versus people who must come to believe in a right to time. 

May the minutes of our own lives now be revered, unsold and forever unsellable.

[anneboyer]

[anneboyer]

"“First we began learning something together, it was a sort of waking up to a knowledge that was collective, and this has to do with a collective self-awareness of what was taking place within all of us. First we began by asking one another, and ourselves questions, and from there we began to resolve things together. Each day we continue discovering and constructing while walking. It is like each day is a horizon that opens before us, and this horizon does not have any recipe or program, we begin here, without what was in the past. What we had was life, our life each day, our difficulties, problems, crisis, and what we had in our hands at the time was what we used to go looking for solutions. The beginning of the practice of horizontalidad can be seen in this process. It is the walk, the process of questioning as we walk that enriched our growth, and helped us discover that strength is different when we are side by side, when there is no one to tell you what you have to do, but rather when we decide who we are. I do not believe there is a definition for what we are doing, we know how it is done, but we are not going to come across any definition, in this way it is similar to horizontalidad. More than an answer to a practice, it is an everyday practice.” -- Neka, Quoted in Horizontalism, Marina Sitrin, 2006

[anneboyer]

i wrote a piece for Afterall about the late work of the socialist-feminist artist Jo Spence  which includes thoughts on skeletons, corpses, metabolism, the politics of illness, the problems of representation, mortality, weariness, identity, and sick woman theory:

“Illness presents a problem for emancipatory politics, and likewise poses a challenge to political art. If an artist’s politics are expressed in an art based on corrective representations, like exposing the ‘real’ that lurks under the ‘idealised’, illness creates – at least – a double bind. Illness is, as Spence wrote, the ‘ultimate crisis of self-representation’,15 and part of that crisis is inherent in any attempt at making illness legible without reproducing the reductive heroics or violent sentimentalities attached to sickness. An image of a sick person – especially of one enduring the kind of illness, like cancer, that can render dramatic changes in appearance – can present upper-level pathos, but this is for a reason: to be a person who was once strong and vital and who now wastes away and dies is sad. How do you take a photo of a victim that doesn’t look like a victim or like a victim’s opposite? For Spence, it seems, the answer was you don’t.”

[anneboyer]

what resembles the grave but isn't

Always falling into a hole, then saying “ok, this is not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of the hole which is not the grave, falling into a hole again, saying “ok, this is also not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of that hole, falling into another one; sometimes falling into a hole within a hole, or many holes within holes, getting out of them one after the other, then falling again, saying “this is not your grave, get out of the hole”; sometimes being pushed, saying “you can not push me into this hole, it is not my grave,” and getting out defiantly, then falling into a hole again without any pushing; sometimes falling into a set of holes whose structures are predictable, ideological, and long dug, often falling into this set of structural and impersonal holes; sometimes falling into holes with other people, with other people, saying “this is not our mass grave, get out of this hole,” all together getting out of the hole together, hands and legs and arms and human ladders of each other to get out of the hole that is not the mass grave but that will only be gotten out of together; sometimes the willful-falling into a hole which is not the grave because it is easier than not falling into a hole really, but then once in it, realizing it is not the grave, getting out of the hole eventually;  sometimes falling into a hole and languishing there for days, weeks, months, years, because while not the grave very difficult, still, to climb out of and you know after this hole there’s just another and another; sometimes surveying the landscape of holes and wishing for a high quality final hole; sometimes thinking of who has fallen into holes which are not graves but might be better if they were; sometimes too ardently contemplating  the final hole while trying to avoid the provisional ones; sometimes dutifully falling and getting out, with perfect fortitude, saying “look at the skill and spirit with which I rise from that which resembles the grave but isn’t!“ 

[anneboyer]

some rules for teachers

after John Cage

1. only ask the questions to which you really need answers

2. demonstrate uncertainty

3. reconstruct for your students your own previous errors of thought and elucidate to your students what factors lead to a changed mind

4. do not let the terms with which you understand the world get in the way of understanding it

5. give up any desire to be the smartest person in the room

6. remember that students have bodies and that bodies require movement, sustenance, rest, and relief

7. leave an inheritance of dialectic 

8. preserve and sustain whatever delusions you’ve found necessary to behave in good faith

9. every student is a genius

10. do not be afraid to state the obvious

11. a socratic bully is still a bully

12. thoroughly prepare class, including making preparations to abandon your preparations entirely

13. listen with your body

14. suspect charisma

15. conduct yourself in such a way that your students can eventually forget that you exist

[anneboyer]

Sometimes it is difficult to keep going in poetry, keep the mind of it, too, when everything in the world is structured against going in it, keeping the mind of it, too, like to be a poet in a world arranged like this is to be a tiny rock trying to move on its own legs, when of course rocks don’t even have legs, are not moving but moved; “poetry” some village(s) of delusional atemporal inamination somehow still animate and temporal, I guess, as if foolishness itself were a force stronger than even entropy.

[anneboyer]

“She wants suddenly to make it somewhere, this surcharged darkness is all-earth. She wants to be established on the surface of this. She wants to talk in a banal way to a banal person. To-morrow will go on like yesterday and there will be no break in continuity, no ripple on the surface . . . She wishes, for a moment, she could stabilize it, look forward to some simple, silly thing, an excursion to the Rialto or some hunt through Florentine byways, for a shop to mend her ear-rings. She wants to see herself, silly as all that, with ear-rings, not disembodied, with silver before her and inchoate rock at back” -- H.D.’s Night

[anneboyer]

formula

To manipulate the old: false fear.  

To manipulate the young: false hope. 

To manipulate the middle aged: real comfort. 

[anneboyer]

Radical Objects: “Cancer Sucks” at History Workshop 

“Sherak refused to subscribe to what she saw as the misleading and trivialized image of breast cancer popularized by the pink ribbon. The “Cancer Sucks” button, with its unequivocal message, was her answer to the corporate softening of the brutal reality of a disease forcing those diagnosed with it to go through harsh treatments that could not even guarantee survival.”

[anneboyer]

suddenly

I want to tell the internet things.  Like how yesterday was my birthday, and every birthday after cancer, no matter how calm you play it, is at once somber & ecstatic,  how it is both announcing your life extended & your life reduced, how it confuses you with a push & a pull of time & of expectation -- this age what you didn’t expect to happen, what you always expected to happen & then learned could so easily might not, how a birthday is also a reminder to of how you were once an infant & unmutilated, & now, mutilated and amended, is a reminder of how you are intact as a mutilated person, too, in a world in which to be be mutilated is also a mark of having survived.  A birthday marks everyone, too, who once passed your birthdays with you and went away from you & never came back, who left you because you were ill or because you were ill in the wrong way or who came to your life because you were ill, too. The sun right now is like the sun when I was diagnosed: it’s the same chlorinated bug-bitten late-summer heat and same cut-off jean short and sandals, the 2nd anniversary of diagnosis so close -- that 2nd year, that 3rd, the toughest ones to not die in, now also a new pain next to the site of the formerly deadly one.  I look in the cards to see what it says: it says I will feel now like a wet dog and her best friend another howling dog and a lobster crawling up from the ocean and howling at the disapproving moon, or like the feeling queen on the tiny island of only feeling, or the hoarder of upright sentiments, or the bird who keeps her head under her wing.  I am a sunny leo, made mostly of fire and air, and love to think all day and get dressed up  and feel only in the most general linguistic and utopian ways, now facing a survival which asks me to feel about it in so many specifics, like how does time feel (too short and too long), like how does the world feel (too hot and too small), like how does the garden feel (possible and hard), like how does it feel to have a body?  astonishing, of course, after all these years. 

[anneboyer]

“in all the ‘civilized’ industrialized nations, literature, if it is realistic, speaks a completely different language from any and all public disclosures.  As if every country existed twice over.  As if every resident existed twice over ...

” -- Christa Wolf, “Conditions of a Narrative” 

[anneboyer]

“Of course I am outraged as I have learned my history, as I have taken off the mask of being someone I was not.  I am outraged at what was done to working class peoples.  I am outraged at what the dominant culture (which produced me) has done in colonizing and destroying other cultures, other economies. I am outraged at how we still differentially continue to benefit from this.  Yet I cannot fully engage with these struggles until I fully understand what I am still trying to work through and make visible --i.e. the shame of who I was told I was / what I lacked.  In this way I am beginning to be more congruent within myself so that all my energies can be directed outwards in a pro-active rather than reactive way.  I can’t go backwards to any physical roots.  There was never any pure state left behind to be recovered, only half truths, evasions, fabrications, fantasies, memories, hypotheses.  The best I’ll ever be able to manage will be a montage of fragments of reconstructed histories in which I can gain new knowledge and wisdom and perhaps begin to share it.  Not mere a history of victimization and injury, nor a shift into a utopian world of ‘positive image’, but one which represents the continuous struggle to speak, to redefine, to name, of coming into being.  Where I become the subject of my own enquiry rather than the object of someone else’s, where I act rather than being acted upon.” 

-- Jo Spence, 1990, from “Could do Better... Towards a personal and political theatre of the self?” 

[anneboyer]

on headaches

— Roque Dalton

It’s great to be a communist, although it brings on lots of headaches.

It’s that a communist’s headache is, in principle, historical; that is, it doesn’t respond to analgesic tablets, only to the realization of Heaven on earth. That’s the way it is.

Under capitalism our heads hurt and then it’s off with our heads. In the struggle for Revolution the head is a time bomb.

In the construction of socialism we organize our headaches which doesn’t make them less frequent, but just the opposite.

Communism will be, among other things, an aspirin the size of the sun.

— Roque Dalton

[anneboyer]

“Nothing is further from realizing the pretension of the beautiful than an ill-arranged ball. So many things difficult to assemble are necessary that during an entire century perhaps only two are given that can satisfy the artist. There must be the right climate, locale, decoration ' food, and costumes. It must be a Spanish or Italian night, dark and moonless, because the moon, when it reigns in the sky, throws an influence of languor and melancholy over men that is reflected in all their sensations. It must be a fresh, airy night with stars shining feebly through the clouds. There must be large gardens whose intoxicating perfume penetrates the rooms in waves. The fragrance of orange trees and of the Constantinople rose are especially apt to develop exaltation of heart and mind. There must be light food, delicate wines, fruit of all climates, and flowers of all seasons. There must be a profusion of things rare and difficult to possess, because a ball should be a realization of the most voracious imaginations and the most capricious desires. One must understand one thing before giving a ball: rich, civilized human beings find pleasure only in the hope of the impossible. So one must approach the impossible as closely as one can.”  -- George Sand, Lelia