Cross-posted to my Twitter Archive.
I took the liberty of a series of micro-breaks from my working week to participate in #twecon, organised by the capable and innovative @HORansome (Matthew Dentith). I was quite daunted by the prospect of summarising my article-in-process, but primarily because of the other demands on my time, not the subject matter itself. More generally I was struck by the way in which the frisson of anxiety that preceded by presentation was identical to that I’d feel if I were stepping up before a non-virtual live audience and speaking for twenty minutes.
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Inspired by my friend (and new-media artiste) Robyn Gallagher’s tweet, I have discontinued the Twitter archiving function on these, my narrative pages, and transferred it instead here, to a back-end blog with a separate feed to which you may wish to subscribe.
I am more obsessed than ever with archiving my Twitter-presence, seeing it as a short-form narrative whose relationships to these longer essays is both real and polyphonic, but the archive adds clutter here. I hope you will continue to read and comment in back, however, where I have imported and archived the existing Twitter-aggregates and will continue to tinker with the space.
Amid the fizz of Twitter and the flurry of Facebook, in the forest of my RSS feeds and the walled gardens of electronic correspondence, I have been travelling alongside the issues of the day, from tikanga and feminisms of difference, to the disavowal of unions in favour of notions cultural and commercial. Though I roll out the lectorial barrel in my new class and interrupt meetings to leap into doorways and under tables as aftershocks roll,
in long-form, here,
I only have eyes for her.
Behind this, all else intermingles in my thinking: an associatively-linked soup.
We held a naming ceremony for her yesterday, secularly, to draw a discreet veil over the spiritual poles and attendant windows into people’s souls that inhere in our family’s traditions and from which we politely resile. I would have for her the tools of the Enlightenment but not in a manner that would make them a hammer with which to hit others; I would have her an ally with the tradition that upholds the corporeal life of women without the attending shame at its failure to be virtue on a stick or brain in a jar.
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Since it appears that most of my mental wanderings now come back to the baby, I thought for the sake of my conscience it would be timely to map a little the mandala (or, for the vertically-minded among you, great chain of being) that spreads out, in my mind, from her. This comes in particular from the dimly-remember months interspersed throughout last year when I wasn’t pregnant.
Less this be too obtuse, I should be clearer. I am thinking about pregnant women, and women bereaved of their babies or their foetuses or denied their fertility, and of women too who make the vexed and private decision by which pregnancies don’t continue. I don’t want these baby-centred entries to be a source of pain for those whose experiences of fertility, natality and maternity have turned out differently from mine, and I don’t want this narrating of the fog of motherhood to obscure those other stories. This is all part, I suppose, of being what I am increasingly thinking of as a conscious writer (which is different — shut up — from all things to all people, or second guessing my reader).
I’ve been looking for some way in which I could acknowledge and reflect on all of this without sounding too heavy-handed, too overbearing. As is often the case with writing online, however, I’ve found a source in which someone else has done this first and in a manner comprehensive enough that I need only point to it to signal my own feelings.
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When it comes to art, I enjoy complicated failures, an unintended consequence of all those years spent studying the unpublished fringes of New Zealand modernism. When first I heard of it, therefore, I knew that The Room would likely be well up my street. The opportunity to see it in a theatre at this year’s film festival was too good to pass up, and so it was that it became the first (and thus far, only) outing for which a babysitter was required since the birth of the harvestbaby. I left her in the care of her grandparents and joined my lady-date, Wellington’s knowing cultural connoisseuse, at Hoyts Riccarton.
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Posterous
Can’t see a thing in the sky
24 October, 2010
in at home,commentatrix,in Aotearoa,O internet,poems,we are family
Amid the fizz of Twitter and the flurry of Facebook, in the forest of my RSS feeds and the walled gardens of electronic correspondence, I have been travelling alongside the issues of the day, from tikanga and feminisms of difference, to the disavowal of unions in favour of notions cultural and commercial. Though I roll out the lectorial barrel in my new class and interrupt meetings to leap into doorways and under tables as aftershocks roll,
I only have eyes for her.
Behind this, all else intermingles in my thinking: an associatively-linked soup.
We held a naming ceremony for her yesterday, secularly, to draw a discreet veil over the spiritual poles and attendant windows into people’s souls that inhere in our family’s traditions and from which we politely resile. I would have for her the tools of the Enlightenment but not in a manner that would make them a hammer with which to hit others; I would have her an ally with the tradition that upholds the corporeal life of women without the attending shame at its failure to be virtue on a stick or brain in a jar.
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