Responding to a poem by Alice Notley, Masha writes:
I love a love slash fuck you poem.
To be able to read fuck you as I love you.
To be able to read what someone is really saying, really feeling. Not feeling, not saying.
To not take things—people—at face value.
To hear what you’re really being told, take what you’re really being given, even when it’s difficult or not the form you want.
“I’ll fuck up your life” (“your cute life”) is to sometimes make it better, a life. I’ll fuck up your fucked up life and make it better by fucking it up. I’ll fuck up your life is the gift you’re getting. Avital Ronell always says that a relation is not real unless you’re rattled, unraveled. Why should meeting each other be light, forgettable? Why should it pass for easy?
Why shouldn’t you not know what hit you?
Why should you remain the same after love?
You shouldn’t remain the same, of course. You should be rattled. Love reaches into the core of who you are. As Jonathan Richman sings, “True love is not nice.”
In All About Love, bell hooks quotes from James Baldwin, “I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering–but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.”
Writing about Jacob’s encounter with an angel, hooks says:
Rather than letting the angel go when light comes, Jacob demands and is given a blessing. Significantly, he cannot receive the blessing without first letting fear go and opening his heart to be touched by grace… It should reassure us that the blessing the angel gives to Jacob comes in the form of a wound.
Woundedness is not a cause for shame, it is necessary for spiritual growth and awakening…In Coming Out of Shame, Gershen Kaufman and Lev Raphael contend: “Shame is the most disturbing emotion we ever experience directly about ourselves, for in the moment of shame we feel deeply divided from ourselves…At the same moment that we feel most disconnected, we long to embrace ourselves once more, to feel reunited. Shame divides us from ourselves, just as it divides us from others, and because we all yearn for reunion, shame is deeply disturbing.” Shame about woundedness keeps many people from seeking healing. They would rather deny or repress the reality of hurt. In our culture we hear a lot about guilt but not enough about the politics of shame. As long as we feel shame, we can never believe ourselves worthy of love.
We are all wounded at times. A great many of us remain wounded in the place where we would know love… The story of Jacob reminds us that embracing our wound is the way to heal.
I don’t think I understood before I read that just how much a bullshit feeling of shame about being transgender had been part of my gender dysphoria for so long, part of what was dividing me from myself and from others. Nor did I understand the gift of woundedness, how that meant that I was healing, coming through the shame and really feeling for the first time in a long time that I was worthy of love.
Dear Lord when you did not come
My faith was gone
—
Dear Lord when you did not come
My faith was born
Notes
deniminvasion reblogged this from agameofme machschine liked this
1200dinosaurs-blog liked this
grayesthistle liked this
mashatupitsyn said: Love this. Beautiful entry. I quote that passage about Jacob wrestling the angel at length in Love Dog!
mashatupitsyn liked this
agameofme posted this