November 10,2002
Overheard at an ACT UP demonstration in Manhattan circa 1988. A heckler shouts at us, “You people should all be transported to an island and left there.” Quick witted queen yells back, “Honey, you’re on it.”
After a long time you find a small place where you are comfortable and you begin to realise that the smallness of the place, contrary to what you might have thought, is not a hindrance to your enjoyment of those very specific contours, but a further comfort. You go about your daily life sometimes forgetting that the atmosphere of the tiny little planet is beautifully tailored to fit your whole biology. That many of the other inhabitants seem more like your own blood than those people you used to gaze at disbelievingly all thorough Christmas dinner as their sagging ear lobes betrayed the fact that they were actually a different species from you. One Saturday you take a train north, for a mere hour and ten minutes, and the trees are admittedly beautiful. But you understand with a deep shock that now you are in a very big place where the air has too much oxygen and the people, though friendly, seem more like that species you escaped from so long ago, and you don’t like it very much and you want to return, as fast as possible, to the small place. Some part of you is actually afraid. The part of you inside, still not grown, begins to gnaw from the bottom of the stomach and up into the throat; it is hungry and it is reminded of all the first days at other wrong places where you were irredeemably foreign. To be polite, you attend a ritual with your kind hosts, and you worry that you may spontaneously combust and blow a hole in the roof of the ceremonial building as you fly out like a fleshy missile, or fidget yourself down the aisle in a wild ecstasy of Tourette’s. You want to leave. So you do. In the middle of the night you bundle yourself into the trunk of a departing car with your knees up around your ears and breathing exhaust fumes. They dump you somewhere nearby the small place in the night and from there you jump into another car, and you travel down one of the beautiful arteries, a shining road, a sweet tunnel nosing its way under the river, or one of the heroic bridges jumping itself onto the island. You open the car window and you can breathe again, the sweat on your skin resolves itself into salt, your restless extremities calm themselves back into feet and hands. You are returned, drawn inexorably by those structures that are proud and wise, cognizant of their destination and of their duty to carry you safely back there. So inevitable that this is the only pocket of air and land that can support your peculiar morphology. This perverse farm of plenty. And coming through the door of the walls where you live you see the other who lives there sitting at the table. Where else would you have found this other. You resolve to stay a while.
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Overheard at an ACT UP demonstration in Manhattan circa 1988. A heckler shouts at us, “You people should all be transported to an island and left there.” Quick witted queen yells back, “Honey, you’re on it.”
After a long time you find a small place where you are comfortable and you begin to realise that the smallness of the place, contrary to what you might have thought, is not a hindrance to your enjoyment of those very specific contours, but a further comfort. You go about your daily life sometimes forgetting that the atmosphere of the tiny little planet is beautifully tailored to fit your whole biology. That many of the other inhabitants seem more like your own blood than those people you used to gaze at disbelievingly all thorough Christmas dinner as their sagging ear lobes betrayed the fact that they were actually a different species from you. One Saturday you take a train north, for a mere hour and ten minutes, and the trees are admittedly beautiful. But you understand with a deep shock that now you are in a very big place where the air has too much oxygen and the people, though friendly, seem more like that species you escaped from so long ago, and you don’t like it very much and you want to return, as fast as possible, to the small place. Some part of you is actually afraid. The part of you inside, still not grown, begins to gnaw from the bottom of the stomach and up into the throat; it is hungry and it is reminded of all the first days at other wrong places where you were irredeemably foreign. To be polite, you attend a ritual with your kind hosts, and you worry that you may spontaneously combust and blow a hole in the roof of the ceremonial building as you fly out like a fleshy missile, or fidget yourself down the aisle in a wild ecstasy of Tourette’s. You want to leave. So you do. In the middle of the night you bundle yourself into the trunk of a departing car with your knees up around your ears and breathing exhaust fumes. They dump you somewhere nearby the small place in the night and from there you jump into another car, and you travel down one of the beautiful arteries, a shining road, a sweet tunnel nosing its way under the river, or one of the heroic bridges jumping itself onto the island. You open the car window and you can breathe again, the sweat on your skin resolves itself into salt, your restless extremities calm themselves back into feet and hands. You are returned, drawn inexorably by those structures that are proud and wise, cognizant of their destination and of their duty to carry you safely back there. So inevitable that this is the only pocket of air and land that can support your peculiar morphology. This perverse farm of plenty. And coming through the door of the walls where you live you see the other who lives there sitting at the table. Where else would you have found this other. You resolve to stay a while.
- rachael 11-10-2002 11:54 pm