ode / audit

Funny how a danceur is male, funny how a danceuse is feminie (en francais). Funny how it takes more movement of the tongue to say the latter, that is, why does it always take more effort to be feminine. When even our language asks more of our syllables and letters than to say the version that is first and tough, and likes beer and whiskey in public, and maybe wine in the comfort of an artist. Why is it so that boiled down a man is a man, but women cannot be, mothers cannot be, aunts and grandmothers could never be defined simply in a word or two, their definitions the ones that take up pages of a dictionary, a man's possible a line or two. Gender is a net, I'm stuck in the loop that holds me half way in the water, away from the fate a fisherman has for me, but halfway in the air, feeling my scales grow in the heat, a different color than I'd like to be treated. Funny how this year I want to dance again, to borrow and to ballet and to ballad across waxed floors where feet have whispered stories. Funny how my resolution can be simply summed up as to be honest. 

If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name. Anne Carson, (source here)

2016 is where I find myself, but I'm curious when I will. Will I continue to cartwheel, half-assed, watching my comrades cartwheel with so much effort they fall to the floor with their asses? I don't like giving questions any time to think, as the answer is yes, and always will be, passively so. I am going to expend more energy than I have, is all, to grow movement in places of sturdy stiffness, and of course stagnancy. I hope to compile some formats of a book of essays, on looseleaf papers, and to read the novels with titles I am attracted by, but with titles I feel know me more than I'd like to know myself. I'm a stranger to the practice, but that is what a new year is for. And I'm wondering when the title will wear off and 2016 will just be a year, an automatic recording of the date at the top of some paper, disposed or created.