A Dyke A Broad #18

The edition by the half-blind lesbian for the novice quitter.

Hello from Paris!

Well, I don’t have much of note to say for myself (or anyone else) this week. I spent a big chunk of it huddled in a fetal position or staggering around with my eyes squeezed closed because my self-ripping cornea ripped itself yet again, which meant that every bit of light hitting my eye felt like a jab from a stick holding a razor blade dripping with hydrochloric acid or the like.

In fact, this is the first time I open my light-emitting computer in days. 

Aside from the excruciating pain, it was actually kind of peaceful. I heard the news on the radio. Listened to my first audio book which was narrated in such a soothing mellifluous voice I fell immediately asleep. I “watched” TV with my eyes closed, only squinting occasionally if I didn’t understand what was going on. I did sometimes look at things on my phone. Because.

Cooking with your eyes mostly closed is a challenge, but I did it anyway, too. Call it an act of resistance against Incapacity itself—which didn’t notice and didn’t care. But I couldn’t help it. I have the habit of large and small futile gestures, though I keep swearing them off—the first time at the end of my senior year in high school when I was running track just to keep in shape for field hockey, and my coach assigned me to the one and two mile events because nobody else wanted to do them. Still, I’d often earn a point for the team by coming in second or third just because nobody on the other teams wanted to do it either, so all I had to do was finish. Once, when I was the only runner, I came in first!

Which is how I qualified to compete in the district finals. Where, of course, there were real long-distance runners who zoomed by me on their long, skinny legs, so distressed at my slowness they encouraged me as they went by. “You can do it!”

I still had a lap left to do by the time they were done, and an official jogged on the track to tell me I didn’t have to continue, but I insisted, weren’t you always supposed to finish what you started? So I pursued my solitary race around the track, going faster than I ever had before, which wasn’t very, and the guy on the loudspeaker actually encouraging the crowd to cheer me on. Probably because I was delaying the next event.

And halfway around that final lap, as the crowd cheered, the doubt started growing in my mind, that instead of being heroic, I was, just maybe, making an ass out of myself. What good did it do? What was I proving? And to whom? Though afterwards, when I’d finished puking in the bushes from pushing myself to the limit, the coach turned to the team and said, “Look at her, she never quit.”

And the other girls did stare at me, probably marveling at how impervious I was to shame. At which point I thought, maybe sometimes you should. Quit. Abandon ship instead of going down with it. Do a cost-benefit analysis (of the soul at least), and maybe let some things slide. Because while winners never quit, some quitters were never in a million fucking years going to win. Like me, who hadn’t landed in the finals by skill. But by default.

After that, I did quit some things. Especially around my college years. The Southern Baptist Church, for instance. A string quartet. Field hockey. The university choir. The pre-med program. Heterosexuality. My family. Eventually Kentucky. Then grad school. It was terrifying and strange and liberating to be so transformed. 

Later on, I quit the Lesbian Avengers—twice— though I never quite quit being an activist. Just switched media from the street to the page where I’ve lingered on the margins for decades, engaged with lesbian and queer politics, exploring how our movement depends on things like free speech, links which then as now no one seems interested in.

Now that I’m in another frenzy of quitting—we gave up our home, left New York, the U.S., I quit writing my column for Gay City News, (though I’m not sure they noticed)—I wonder if it’s time to stop writing political commentary altogether. I mean, somebody should be doing it from a dyke point of view, but I’m not sure it has to be me. That creature jogging awkwardly around the track as the skinny-legged girls fly by. Perhaps it’s time to admit I’m in the wrong race. Try something else instead. Remain indigestible, but write smaller and smaller and smaller, go further into the margins. Resist resistance itself.

WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA

As the Polish poet  WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA wrote in:

The End and the Beginning (translated by JOANNA TRZECIAK)

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won’t

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs,

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder

to prop up a wall.

Someone has to glaze a window,

rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,

and takes years.

All the cameras have left

for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,

and new railway stations.

Sleeves will go ragged

from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,

still recalls the way it was.

Someone else listens

and nods with unsevered head.

But already there are those nearby

starting to mill about

who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes

sometimes someone still unearths

rusted-out arguments

and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew

what was going on here

must make way for

those who know little.

And less than little.

And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown

causes and effects,

someone must be stretched out

blade of grass in his mouth

gazing at the clouds.

---

Yep, it’s a thought. Making way. Which I had time to entertain this morning, violently roused by the early bird which inexplicably started chirp chirp chirping at 5:14 a.m., a mere three hours before dawn and the early worm.

Disgruntledly yours,

Jelly Gobswell