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The mother was a very smart, beautiful lady with fuzzy black hair combed out
round, like electricity. But she had to go build a bridge (and fast, too)
because the people couldn't get from one place to the other place without the
bridge. So the little girl went to school and had lots of lovers and friends,
and practiced archery, and got into a family, and had lots of adventures, and
saved everybody from a volcano by bombing it from the air in a glider, and
achieved Enlightenment.
"Then one morning somebody told her there was a bear looking for her "
"Wait a minute," said I. 'This story doesn't have an end. It just goes on and
on. What about the volcano?
And the adventures? And the achieving Enlightenment surely that takes some
time, doesn't it?"
"I tell things," said my dignified little friend (through Vittoria) "the way
they happen," and slipping her head under the induction helmet without further
comment (and her hands into the waldoes) she went back to stirring her
blanc-mange with her forefinger. She said something casually over her shoulder
to
Vittoria, who translated:
"Anyone who lives in two worlds," (said Vittoria) "is bound to have a
complicated life."
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Joanna Russ - The Female Man
(I learned later that she had spent three days making up the story. It was, of
course, about me).
XII
Some homes are extruded foam: white caves hung with veils of diamonds, indoor
gardens, ceilings that weep. There are places in the Arctic to sit and
meditate, invisible walls that shut in the same ice as outside, the same
clouds. There is one rain-forest, there is one shallow sea, there is one
mountain chain, there is one desert. Human rookeries asleep undersea where
Whileawayans create, in their leisurely way, a new economy and a new race.
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Rafts anchored in the blue eye of a dead volcano. Eyries built for nobody in
particular, whose guests arrive by glider. There are many more shelters than
homes, many more homes than persons; as the saying goes, My home is in my
shoes. Everything (they know) is eternally in transit. Everything is pointed
toward death. Radar dish-ears listen for whispers from Outside.
There is no pebble, no tile, no excrement, that is not Tao; Whileaway is
inhabited by the pervasive spirit of underpopulation, and alone at twilight in
the permanently deserted city that is only a jungle of sculptured forms set on
the Altiplano, attending to the rush of one's own breath in the respiratory
mask, then
I gambled for chores and breakfast with an old, old woman, in the middle of
the night by the light of an alcohol lamp, somewhere on the back roads of the
swamp and pine flats of South Continent. Watching the shadows dance on her
wrinkled face, I understood why other women speak with awe of seeing the
withered legs dangling from the shell of a computer housing: Humpty Dumptess
on her way to the ultimate Inside of things.
(I lost. I carried her baggage and did her chores for a day.)
An ancient statue outside the fuel-alcohol distillery at Ciudad Sierra: a man
seated on a stone, his knees spread, both hands pressed against the pit of his
stomach, a look of blind distress, face blurred by time.
Some wag has carved on the base the sideways eight that means infinity and
added a straight line down from the middle; this is both the Whileaway
schematic of the male genital and the mathematical symbol for
self-contradiction.
If you are so foolhardy as to ask a Whileawayan child to "be a good girl" and
do something for you:
"What does running other people's errands have to do with being a good girl?
"Why can't you run your own errands?
"Are you crippled?"
(The double pairs of hard, dark children's eyes everywhere, like mating
cats'.)
XIII
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A quiet country night. The hills East of Green Bay, the wet heat of August
during the day. One woman reads; another sews; another smokes. Somebody takes
from the wall a kind of whistle and plays on it the four notes of the major
chord. This is repeated over and over again. We hold on to these four notes as
long as possible; then we transform them by one note; again we repeat these
four notes. Slowly something tears itself away from the not-melody. Distances
between the harmonics stretch wider and wider. No one is dancing tonight. How
the lines open up! Three notes now. The playfulness and terror of the music
written right on the air. Although the player is employing nearly the same
dynamics throughout, the sounds have become painfully loud; the little
instrument's guts are coming out. Too much to listen to, with its lips right
against my ear. I believe that by dawn it will stop, by dawn we will have gone
through six or seven changes of notes, maybe two in an hour.
By dawn we'll know a little something about the major triad. We'll have
celebrated a little something.
XIV
How Whileawayans Celebrate
Dorothy Chiliason in the forest glade, her moon-green pajamas, big eyes, big
shoulders, her broad lips and big breasts, each with its protruding thumb, her
aureole of fuzzy, ginger-colored hair. She springs to her feet and listens.
One hand up in the air, thinking. Then both hands up. She shakes her head. She
takes a gliding step, dragging one foot. Then again. Again. She takes on some
extra energy and runs a little bit. Then stops. She thinks a little bit.
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Whileawayan celebratory dancing is not like Eastern dancing with its motions
in toward the body, its cushions of warm air exhaled by the dancer, its
decorations by contradictory angles (leg up, knee down, foot up; one arm
up-bent, the other arm down-bent). Nor is it at all like the
yearning-for-flight of Western ballet, limbs shooting out in heaven-aspiring
curves, the torso a mathematical point. If Indian dancing says I Am, if ballet
says I Wish, what does the dance of
Whileaway say?
It says I Guess. (The intellectuality of this impossible business!)
XV
What Whileawayans Celebrate
The full moon
The Winter solstice (You haven't lived if you haven't seen us running around
in our skivvies, banging on pots and pans, shouting "Come back, sun!
Goddammit, come back! Come back!")
The Summer solstice (rather different)
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The autumnal equinox
The vernal equinox
The flowering of trees
The flowering of bushes
The planting of seeds
Happy copulation
Unhappy copulation
Longing
Jokes
Leaves falling off the trees (where deciduous)
Acquiring new shoes
Wearing same
Birth
The contemplation of a work of art
Marriages
Sport
Divorces
Anything at all
Nothing at all
Great ideas
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Death
XVI
There is an unpolished, white, marble statue of God on Rabbit Island, all
alone in a field of weeds and snow. She is seated, naked to the waist, an
outsized female figure as awful as Zeus, her dead eyes staring into nothing.
At first She is majestic; then I notice that Her cheekbones are too broad, Her
eyes set at different levels, that Her whole figure is a jumble of
badly-matching planes, a mass of inhuman contradictions. There is a distinct
resemblance to Dunyasha Bernadetteson, known as The Playful
Philosopher (A.C. 344 426), though God is older than Bernadetteson and it's
possible that Dunyasha's genetic surgeon modelled her after God instead of the
other way round. Persons who look at the statue longer than I did have
reported that one cannot pin It down at all, that She is a constantly changing [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]