Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places

The rationalist utopia is a power trip. It is a monotheocracy, declared by executive decree, and maintained by willpower; as its premise is progress, not process, it has no habitable present, and speaks only in the future tense. And in the end reason itself must reject it.

Fiction in particular, narration in general, may be seen not as a disguise or falsification of what is given but as an active encounter with the environment by means of posing options and alternatives, and an enlargement of present reality by connecting it to the unverifiable past and the unpredictable future.

Narrative is a central function of language. Not, in origin, an artifact of culture, an art, but a fundamental operation of the normal mind functioning in society. To learn to speak is to learn to tell a story.

We tried to offer our experience to one another. Not claiming something: offering something.

True work is done for the sake of doing it. What is to be done with it afterwards is another matter, another job.

No house worth living in has for its cornerstone the hunger of those who built it.

if you’re underneath, if you’re kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains.

Our schools and colleges, institutions of the patriarchy, generally teach us to listen to people in power, men or women speaking the father tongue; and so they teach us not to listen to the mother tongue, to what the powerless say, poor men, women, children: not to hear that as valid discourse.

That, of course, is the power of the script: you play the part without knowing it.

There was a groundswell gathering. I felt it, but I didn’t know it was a groundswell; I just thought it was something wrong with me.