I’ve been watching from the sidelines for a couple of months now rather than writing much here. Thinking `Hmmm.’ And `This looks familiar.’ And trying to write. And falling into silence.
Admittedly I’ve also been looking at shards of glass and canals with an over-interested eye lately, but that’s a trivial, even somewhat flippant, reason for my silence. And the other external reasons to don the scold’s bridle – jobs and border crossings – are positively frivolous. Not to mention immoral, cowardly and quite possibly irrelevant.
Which I am.
But it is also true that my silence has proceeded from doubt and distrust.
The doubt is about language, specifically my ability to use language effectively to convey meaning, to be – for want of a less crushingly clumsy phrase – taken seriously? Heard? Something between those two perhaps. Here.
And since language is not only my weapon of choice, but also my only weapon, this doubt is dispiriting.
A cat can look at a king. You might think – and some have posited – that here in the ethereal world of text, we meet at last on an equal footing, stripped of corporeal distractions, borders and pretence. You can be whoever you want to be – a cat can not only look at kings, it may claim kingship for itself. If it feels so inclined.
But no. Blood makes noise. If we try to write truthfully (and what would be the point of doing otherwise?) – albeit obliquely and through a glass darkly – our political allegiances (or put another way, our choices about whom to regard as human) and possibly even our subject positions, will out. And then our barbed wire world comes crashing in hard and furious.
And with it comes distrust.
Because the thing that holds our barbed wire world in place (or one of the things, anyway, as to my sorrow I suspect that redundancy may have been among the principles of its construction) is privilege.
Also known as the power to betray with impunity.
Let me reach for a moment to my beloved Delany in what I surmise may have been a moment of pain.
No. Can’t write it out. Not now. Partly because it touches too many emotional things in me. And partly because, seven weeks beyond my forty-second year, I’m cynical enough to wonder seriously if a young heterosexual working couple would give up, for a gay friend (even if he were dying), what amounts, after all, to a night’s sleep on the last day of Carnival before returning next morning to full work schedule: ten, twelve hours for them both. (They probably would have gotten him home, whether he wanted to go or not, and left him there, feeling vaguely put out.)
Samuel R. Delany — Flight from Neveryon
It is a sad thing, no? When even in imagination there is no happily ever after?
Now as for me personally? I’m not feeling betrayed over this, as it happens.
Fury, yes. I think mary hit that nail on the head. But then, a cold rage has long been my natural condition.
And shame for my silence.
But to feel betrayal one first has to have extended trust. One first has to have thought without hesitation that one belonged. And being of a cautious and wary disposition (or rather, as others might and indeed have put it, being a callous cold-hearted bitch by nature), I did not.
Or at least when the temptation arose I did my hard-hearted best to resist it.
Because having been in that place before, I am damned if I will go there again.
Even if, sometimes, in a transient moment of weakness, I might wish that things were otherwise.