Saturday, August 6, 2011

Meow

I am going to be EXHAUSTED today. I am working the overnight Friday to Saturday shift at work and I could not sleep last night! It's been a while since I've only had 5 hours of toss and turn sleep. I stayed up watching "Howl" last night. It was so motivating to me that I had to update one of my blogs midway through the movie.

I absolutely was pushed by the scenes in which James Franco, as Ginsberg, describes his writing process. I do not in any way wish to compare myself with Ginsberg, but I've never heard a better description of what it feels like to produce prose.  "I saw windows and thought 'eyes' and I felt 'dun, da, dun, da.....' so that's the way it should be..." (Not an exact quote.) The push and abdominal need to spit out authenticity, through words, through descriptive auditory paintings  - I can feel this. I can feel a corporeal response to that - as if my body rather than my mind agrees with him. In a grunting, hands pushing a plough, feet digging in kind of way. A delicate at times, other times guttural, "unh" "this is me, this is my inside out." It is as if you are slowly, beautifully and grotesquely, inch by inch, from your toes up, pulling your insides up through your gut and out of your mouth to examine, to share, to both shed light on them and to protect them. To declare them safe, valid and real. As if the are not real until they are seen, the very solitary experience of them not enough.

That said, like "Leaves of Grass" I have a feeling that "Howl", if I read it, would feel overly masculine to me. Whitman, while the pure relishing of earth and form resonates with me, has always felt distantly male. I don't know a female voice for this same genre, for this same cry to be seen, to see ones self, to self-validate at the same time you are making an argument that you are valid without question and in prose. In a hazy, half poetic, half drunken or drugged, or elated lyrical way.

My little half asleep, sleep deprived, morning meow.

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