Goodbye to All That

A Mess


(At a Table
Goddess—Fable:
Anger – Able.)

Within a clan
There was a plan:
The god is man.

So mother frayed;
And brother played;
While I: charade.

Around the ghost
We still do toast
He who cut: roast.

Not knowing night
For bearing plight --
Love begets might.

(Pounding out this
Was not amiss
From seeking kiss.)



Slightly better

Pleasant is the stair
Going up somewhere.
Mattered little then,
Martyred, battered wen.

Patient for a dare,
Angry at a pray'r.
Stopping life so that,
I'm a void somewhat.

Passing lights do glare,
Some finale tear.
"Arrogance is bliss,"
Filling me, you hiss.

STAR, sorrow, sickness, stagnation, strength 1999-2009

The last decade (1999-2009) saw some of my best (though small) output in politics and poetry and prophecy.

I made my relationship with Sylvia Rivera, partially, a pretext for writing about her and her politics, abandoning Chelsea, with whom I had had a similar relationship, to the wolves. I learned a great deal from her and Kristianna Thomas'leah about what activism is, and how to write as an activist (more in three years than in all my life previoiusly). Sylvia reconstituted STAR, and I became the secretary and word-person who put her ideas on paper (though in a much more pompous and legalistic fashion than they came from her mouth).

After three years (2002), Sylvia passed away, and then my father three years later (2005). During this time I abandoned myself on and off to the Hospital, including ECT and a stint in the State Hospital, along with a suicide attempt; and to prostitution and drug use, from depression, guilt and politics, again, and also because that was the life I chose and the life that seemed to promise a building of personal strength.

Thanks to the encouragement of Ms. Jamie Hunter and others, I began to see my talents as worth pursuing in a slightly more regular fashion and learned to see the poetry in all the crazed jottings or weighty prose that mingled in my notebooks. I began to read other poets, including Ginsberg, Audre Lorde, WAlt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Anne SExton, Nikki Giovanni, Alexander Pope, Robert Graves and others. I also began to search for the roots of anti-trans religious bigotry in a priestess' perspective through reading many books on religion and myth including Roman and Greek antecedents and parallels to today.

2007-2008 I found a need to reconstruct what still was black and white and mean/violent thinking, which Nathan Schiller and later Antonia Cambareri directed me towards.

In 2008 I had what I thought was a near-death experience that transformed my motivations for writing to more positive and happy, loving ones. I had focused on the Queen of the Universe as the Queen of Death for so long that I forgot that life must for any individual have happiness as its goal.

Then there are these Blogs.\

Next, a promised essay on ????

The boiling point: writing life 1988-1999

Okay, I got married (1988). She left (1991), I dropped acid, came out, met my community and CHELSEA, started estrogen, became part of an unintended orgiastic community (1992) transitioned to full-time, became unemployed transsexual, i.e., sex worker(1993). She came back (1994).

I abandoned grad school sublimation/ competition and coherence (repeated sterile attempts to formulate and reformulate Trotskyism) for spontaneity and the TRIPPIE (Transsexual Hippie). Rusty and Chelsea in addition to breaking me of the straight man revolutioinary thing, gave me a much more free understanding of human possibilities beyond the binary Man/Woman system.

I started writing what was going on inside me, combining automatic writing with self-awareness in a healing perspective. In other words Artaud combined with pagan devotion combined with the transgender culture combined with what my friends taught me about who I was. What's that mean? I started to write barely readable but uninhibited lines of poetry that invoked the Goddess I knew to be in me and evoked (I hoped) through raw unedited fonts of language Her Divine presence inside of each of us.

At the same time I felt driven to stay hooking through needing to write aboiut it and community. In other words, I became a political whore (big mistake).

I imitated the possibilities others showed me but I brought concerns and language that were my own. (at least that's what I'm saying here).

1995-1997

Even more hell broke loose. I was labeled and institutionalized psychiatrically (where I discovered a bunch of people with a lot more skill at fighting the imposed reality than I had) and where I filled notebooks with what I thought were deeply original records of my thoughts, e.g. poetry read graphically across the page. (It turns out Rimbaud? had done it a century before). I also wrote political slogans that us politicized queer people used at demonstrations to demand our rights, at least in the City of New York.

1998-1999

Did I write?

As the title of the post says, I began to write life.

Reading: Lesbian mysteries, WEll of Loneliness, Lesbian comics (see something common here?). Also gay classics. Lots and lots of history and culture imbued through the memories of my friends and the deaths of so many from the life we are forced to live. (Right, Julia, you were forced.) Gay classics as well; began to read such pagan perennials as Starhawk's work, Drawing Down the Moon, The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets.

I decided at some point to rather make history than write about it.

Writing and Emotion, Ages 15-45, continued

From 1981 to 1988 (18-25) I was in the throes of private college and graduate education (on scholarship). I won't try to bore you with a complete account, but I will touch on some of the life-changing reading I did and some of the life-changes that were occurring along with that reading.

First, there was the enormous increase in demand for reading and writing. For the first time I was intimidated not only by other people but by the books I was made to absorb in as little time as possible. Secondly, there was drinking. I discovered that people liked me more, drunk. So I did not do well my first two years in college, averaging a 2.5 GPA. Thirdly, there was exposure to some of the great "pagan" philosophers who predated and influenced Christianity, a fact I had had no idea of. After reading Mark Twain on the violence and inconsistency of the Bible I became an 18 year old atheist. Fourthly, I found that on the one hand there were so-called smart people who knew and debated and debated the tiniest points of fine distinction among theories, and then there were the relatively laid-back, often well-off students who I eventually figured out were at Stanford to replicate their parents' lives. I was not one of either group. I spent much class time dozing off.

Emotionally speaking this was a time of more crisis. I blacked out during drinking, threatened suicide once or twice, impressed at least one woman enough with my "illness" that she recommended psychotherapy, which I rejected because the therapist put down my small-town origins. I could not say even hello to other people for months at a time. I was one of the two least responsive people in my freshman dorm, and by the time I was a sophomore, people would commonly ask me if I were drugged even though I was simply withdrawn into my own daydreams.

At the same time I was becoming a better writer. Freshman English was an important course for me since I learned so much about organizing my thoughts, making arguments and doing it with proper diction and grammar. I read Strunk and White. Other students also influenced me with their better high school educations. My writing became much more polished and also polarizing. My writing class was divided into two groups to read each other's essays. One of the groups said my writing was extremely poor, and the other said it was the best in the class. The instructor herself told me I was in the top ten percent. Now I achieved some of these affects by coming up with very strong theses and then defending them to the hilt in the strongest language. At the same time my skills were increasing, my thoughts were becoming more rigid, which would eventually lead to some extreme consequences in my life.

Sexually speaking, I met my first out gay people. In the early 80s at Stanford, gay people were mostly marginalized, and I was afraid of that. My Resident Assistant early in my freshman year was gay, and he tried to get me to think about myself differently, but I was too scared to begin. I was beginning to get occasional passes made at me from men and I received comments like, "you shouild be a dancer" in gym class. Instead of coming out, I began to masturbate everywhere, in class, in the library, just standing in public. I would surreptitiously shave my body and then take showers when no one else was awake so that no one would know about my terrible "transvestism." I was obviously in extreme stress, and totally isolated in this world where 86 percent of the students declared themselves happy, but I did nothing about it.

My second two years began my contact with Marxism and socialism. My grades went up. So did my mental grandiosity. These years really ran into the two years of graduate school in New York at the New School. So much happened, but the upshot was that on the one hand I had these increasingly grand and absolutist political and intellectual preoccupations, and on the other hand I had my hidden, repressed desires and "activities."

I began in my reading to learn about "methods" of reading that would obsess and confuse me, particularly Sartre's Problems with Method. I began to hear about the deconstructionists who were trying to criticize dualistic thinking in philosophy and literature, at least. I became less and less able to simply communicate my thoughts in a clear way, and more and more obsessed with perfection. I sublimated my anxieties and my sexual and gender ambiguities into my writing, justifying, I believe, to myself at any rate, my not coming to terms with myself.

Moving to New York, of course, would eventually tip the bucket over in many more ways than one. Next to wanting to learn whether "Marx was right," was my wanting to "dress up in public." I spent an interesting night in Times Square in heavy makeup and a miniskirt which I had paid for by stealing money from a trick the night before (my first time) hearing the comments from the crowd that I was "disgusting," that I was a "man," etc., etc. I had actually thought that no one wouild notice. I thought I must surely be psychotic because my idea of myself was so divergent from others'. The next day I went to my (closeted?) gay professor's class on history and historiography and tried to slip back into the woodwork.

(Just writing about this makes me angry.)

In the next post I will write about coming out, becoming political and the last few years of stasis and danger (doing drugs and selling my body for no apparent reason) and what kinds of writing I have done along with those times of change for me.

Writing and Emotion, ages 15-45

In the time just before the period I'm going to write about in this post, the early to mid-70s, when I was 10-14 years old was when firstly, I began to read more adult books such as Jaws and All Creatures Great and Small, and then to turn toward science fiction, as so many in that generation did, and fantasy. So I read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I started reading Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein along with some slightly more contemporary authors. Asimov's Foundation Trilogy gave me the image of a society in which a hidden power could predict the future based on social facts. Clarke of course wrote 2001, A Space Odyssey and other books in which mysticism about the future of the human race combined with the technical achievements of space travel. Heinlein wrote the great Stranger in a Strange Land, which introduced me to alternative conceptions of religion and also of transsexuality, giving to me one of my first and most intense feelings of longing for change in my life and in my body. I was transported to another reality which was ecstatic and was my own.

I also began, through school to read Dickens and those scary books for me, Lord of the Flies and Planet of the Apes, tales of human endeavors gone awry from within and without, with apocalyptic consequences. I also began to read histories of the Vietnam War (just concluded), biographies of military leaders, as well as Westerns by Zane Grey, The books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, of Jules Verne and of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan).

I was saved at age 14, and tried to take literally the word of God, but for some reason it always put me to sleep.

My father, to his credit, would weekly bring me to one of the post libraries and wait as I picked out my next set of reading material.

What interests me in the above list is that it is an expression of idealism and apocalypse from the mid - 19th to the mid-20th centuries, with the anxieties of all of that being transmitted into the brain of a relatively young person. Also, there was a basic conservatism to much of the literature, certainly missing the incredible experimentations that were going on in the time in literature in breaking down writing, narrative and character to their elements and perhaps putting them to gether again, probably not. I was not reading Donald Barthelme. I was not reading Susan Sontag. NOr was I even reading Beatniks such as Jack Kerouac or Alan Ginsberg, much less anything political about the civil rights movement and struggles over the War in Vietnam that for adults was still the major subtext of American politics.

Sexuality, however, was beginning to slip in on the sly. I read, for instance, Shere Hite when I was around 14. I would avidly scan books for mentions of sexual intercourse, for tales of transsexuality and transvestism, etc. These inclinations would only intensify as I grew older.

Now at the period which I am concluding in middle age, but which began in mid-adolescence, I began to notice the great differences in development between me and my peers. I was socially turned inward, was competent at and interested in strictly academics, had virtually no rebellion to speak of. Between the age of 12 and 17 I went to exactly one party. But at the same time I had burgeoning emotional tides and cross currents that were ripping me apart inside. I began to dress in my mother's clothes (usually masturbating when I did, but that's another story, isn't it.) I made semi-public excursions into the night which usually ended with me being scared and exhilarated, and once in danger of being molested. I had exactly two friends that I informed of my "difference," and for both of them, one my counselor-suggested "girlfriend," and the other my buddy from playing war in the desert and getting high on pot and wanting to seduce him, it was an occasion for laughter.

My parents were, despite my academic success, unrelenting in telling me whta to do, where I coiuld go, who I coiuld see. At age sixteen my come-home time after church on Sundays was ten o'clock! I was becoming more and more angry, particularly with my father, who declared that our house was not a democracy adn that what he said went. But I didn't express any of it, except through slowness and confusion and an internal temperature that was reaching a boiling point. It was when I reached a place where I couild imagine ants crawling inside my head, torturing my brain that I finally turned to the only mode of expression with which I was comfortable, writing. I lay there on the living room floor as he watched TV, feeling the ants, and started to write angry angry words down, shaking the while, so that of course I drew his attention. I think he may have read what I wrote. But I had finally foiund a way to escape inner destruction by bringing out the feelings I had.

That same year in one of my English classes, I learned automatic writing for the first time. While others barely wrote anything, especially not anything interesting, I poured out thoiughts on sex, on feelings, on my life that shocked others in the class, since they knew at the age of 16 I had not even had my first kiss. Fortunately the English teacher had enough presence of mind to keep the other students from harassing me very much.

In the transition between late-adolescence to "early adulthood," if that's what to call the college years, I became ever more outwardly conservative while most nights praying to wake up as a woman. I read more and more about transsexuality when I was a high school intern at the University of Arizona. I became more and more hardened to my individual needs except when expressed at the feet of the girl I was obsessed with. I was competent enough academically to go to Stanford where the next shocks of emotion and writing, combined, sent me into near catatonia and the beginnings of self-destructiveness that only at this point am I learning to live with.

Enough for now. Continued in next post.

effective, organized and lucid: writing present [Incomplete draft]

This post will not appear in the usual unedited (or nearly so) format. Instead, I will write in an orderly fashion, first, about the art of writing as I have learned it; second, about a topic -- not chosen at this moment -- which will illustrate the first section; and third, perhaps a set of verses which will conclude and epitomize this post (hopefully in an entertaining way.)



My understanding of writing and reading go back to the mid-sixties of the 20th century when I was about three years old and began to read street signs and other material to my mother. It is perhaps interesting to note that I did not begin to talk until relatively late, but when I began (according to my mother) it was to speak in complete sentences. Some of my earliest memories include reading books to myself at the age of five or six. The titles of these books were, for example, "I can do anything, almost," "The Golden Book Dictionary," (Illustrated), and of course the tale of The Little Train who Could." Slightly later, around the age of six or seven I began to read science fiction, a broader array of children's, especially boy's books, but also the Beverly Cleary books about ? and her sister, Ramona. By the age of eight, I would check out ten books at a time from the library and read all of them (three at at time) in two weeks. I read Dr. Spock's Baby book two or three times by the age of eight -- so I knew what child raising techniques ought to be applied/were applied to me at the age they were applied. Also Time/Life publications and Reader's Digest were available and fascinated me, along with the World Almanac and of course the Guiness Book of World Records.



I say all this to demonstrate that I was an early and avid reader, of books with rather adult themes, and that my parents very much encouraged me in this, thus influencing heavily the course of my life, not to mention my thought process, my political views, and the course of rebellion and reformation that these led to.



All of this activity happened outside school. But in school, I was just as interested, able and active at least with respect to reading and writing. Now, the time I began school was the late sixties and early seventies, a time of great upheaval around the world. I, however, being on a military base in Southern Arizona, having a conservative NCO for a father and an overprotective mother, missed almost all of this, except in the unavoidable dribs and drabs on the news and such liberalism as popular culture allowed in children's television.



There was also much debate and change in learning to write and read. Phonetic learning was considered radical and dangerously tending to functional illiteracy. Bilingual education was an innovation which many considered threatening, since it tended to legitimize the populations of Mexican and other Spanish-speaking immigrants (and citizens) that were at that time widespread mainly in the Southwest.

The upshot of all this, reader(s), will be that the way I learned to write heavily influenced both my mode of self-expression and also my self-image such that, along with the confusion about reading and writing, there came confusion in my emotions and identity. Each reinforced the other (at some level, obviously.)
Continuation in Next Post

Love,

c*

A commentary on the last post

A lot of energy goes toward feeling like there's some kind of happiness beyond the immediate moment. I am beginning to learn that is not true.

As a matter of fact, I believe that with all the destructive impulses I personally have within this fucked-up world (I decided it was "fucked-up" last night), that I know that all this effort at communicating is only a way to avoid the facts that I am so loathe to recognize: God is nice because he believes that he can be the all in all, and he wants to know the boundaries that the goddess sets so that he can one day be the goddess herself.

I am not anymore the friend to myself that I was.

I am, instead, a relentless foe to the bitch that made me afraid, meaning the woman that I fled so that I could be happy. That bitch is a lover and a fair miss to the god.

I cannot be the fair miss of Her life (that bitch).

So I am tamed.

Enjoy the facts that you are alive and very funny for Her, and that's all.

Crack