Hello from Paris!
Good news! We finally broke 80 F. That’s right. For all you guyz dealing with drought, and heat waves, and forest fires, the last couple months in Paris have been so cold and wet that my apartment uniform has been flannel pj pants, long underwear tops, and hoodies pulled right up over my head. The fan I brought up from our storage compartment in a tiny heatwave in the spring is forlornly gathering dust in the corner. The herbs in our window box are going to seed because who wants to add cooling mint to dishes when your teeth are already chattering? Of course, by this time next week, or even tomorrow, I’ll be complaining about the heat.
Meanwhile though, the bees are thrilled with the mint’s unexpected flowers.
Confused Thoughts on Identity
Lately, I wonder if I’m unraveling a bit. It’s partly this endless fucking pandemic, SERIOUSLY, GET A VACCINE! But also because I’ve been playing mindgames with myself. It’s the only way I know of to grapple with identity, what it’s good for, what it isn’t. How far you can take it. As a simple exercise, I try to feel them—in my brain, in my body— the labels associated with that person called Kelly, called Cali, called woman, lesbian, American, Kentuckian, white, etc.
The problem is that each time I try to pin down a part of me in order to describe an actively felt identity, I feel like I’m chasing a greased pig. It shifts and dodges and squeals. Then disappears into thin air.
As Gertrude Stein used to say, though probably in a different context, there is no there there. Not in a permanent way. I walk differently in different shoes, different outfits. The state of my hair can shape my mood. And at the market buying endive, is what I feel— this dyke born in Louisville, Kentucky in the mid-1960’s—much different from that of the older Parisian next to me? She buys what I do with the same intent, counting her change as well, settles her endive next to her apples in her bag, probably wonders too if she should make a gratin with a nice bechamel sauce, or considering how warm it’s been lately whether she should buy a lemon for a vinaigrette, and make a salad instead.
Sunday, in a snit, and doing anything I could to avoid my computer, I decided to sand our kitchen counter which was a mess when we moved in and still was until Sunday, half the varnish gummy, the rest worn completely off. At any rate, I rustled up some sandpaper and went to work. And for several minutes I was nothing but the motion and force of a rubbing arm, a hand extending through the sandpaper and into the wood it met, the grating sound and the ears that heard it. I wasn’t even aware of having legs.
As I dusted off the counter, and started rubbing in the slightly rancid walnut oil, I thought about how Montaigne, patron saint of substacker scribblers, used to marvel in the 1580s at his own changeability, his mood dependent upon his digestion, or the state of his feet.
My footing is so steady and so insecure, I find it so vacillating and ready to slip, and my sight is so unreliable, that on an empty stomach I feel myself another man than after a meal. If my health smiles upon me, and the brightness of a beautiful day, I am a fine fellow; if I have a corn bothering my toe, I am surly, unpleasant, and unapproachable.
Then I thought about how big a linguistic and ontological divide there is between being something and identifying as it, mostly because it puts the identifier outside the thing they identify as, and requires a recognition of, and reaching towards that category. In short, identity is like a webpage that requires constant refreshing.
Because I like girls I am a lesbian—a homo female, it’s primary meaning. But I began to identify as one when I actively saw what we lesbians had in common, acknowledged we had a shared history, faced many of the same obstacles. It’s why I had a moment early in my Lesbian Avenger career when I was sitting at a meeting, looked around that room full of dykes and finally, finally, felt like I was home. It’s also why, a few years later, I sat in the same room with many of the same people, and thought in horror, “Who are those people? How can they say that? How can they think that?” My connection to the external commonality unraveled.
Of course, I can slip it back on whenever I want. Identity can be a lens, an artifice. Even merely being something is fleeting. There are times when I’m in public feeling blank and universal, and a catcall reduces me to a cunt, some tits, a pussy-up-for-grabs, a “woman.”
We aren’t as good at the identity business as we think, no matter the proliferation of hashtags. We can’t hold that one thing in our hands, are blind to it in others. This is why there are so many inconsistencies, so many failures, really, even in communities bound and bounded by an identity. When I first started working as a journalist and paying attention to social change movements, I remember how shocked I was at the hatred some gay Democrats had for gay Republicans. Or how under George W. Bush, some black people sneered at Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell. Said they weren’t real black people. Even now can’t see, won’t admit, that they helped pave the way for Obama.
I’d always thought that in the game of identity politics you couldn’t exclude people defined by the same thing as you. If you’re gay, you’re gay, if you’re black, you’re black, isn’t that the point? Nope, not really. Not always. That’s what interests me most. I think there’s something about how identity works, externalizing something then catching hold of it again like a tiny thread in a sweater, maybe to see it better, which leaves it vulnerable to unraveling. A tiny yank will do it.
This week it came from Black Lives Matters—officially, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, Inc— who proved that all black lives really don’t matter, even for storied black activists, by issuing a press release siding with a (mostly white) 62-year-old communist dictatorship and totally fucking over Afro-Cubans who are risking their lives to protest for freedom (and vaccines).
Semi-disgruntedly yours,
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