Cleavage, by Jennifer Finney Boylan, true self emergence, masculine-feminine-divine, Bach and rules don't apply wealth
yesterday i was grateful for a mostly quiet day…
today i am looking forward to coffee with donna and getting ready for block island…
i have been enjoying Cleavage, by Jennifer Finney Boylan... Jennifer transitioned to womanhood when she was 40... makes me a bit wistful... i would very much have liked to realize who i was at that age... but then she gets wistful at one point as she presents her writing to a group of teen and 20 somethings, gender fluid and trans, thinking it would have been so nice to have been able to be who she was at their age... we can't control the time and circumstances we are imbedded in and it's best to be grateful for your true self whenever it arrives... for some, it never does...
i didn't get there until i was about 67-68... it was thrilling when it happened... i am happy with my femmen, womanly-man self... even if a little wistful about the what ifs... i so would love to be a woman complete... i will have to save that for another life... i pray, if i come back as a woman, it will be into a loving and embracing world that honors and respects women...
i explained to my friend SO yesterday, my idea that the divine can only be reached through the feminine... that the masculine is earthly... designed to manage the body in the here and now... designed to manipulate matter into structures and devices that support existence... the feminine is designed to connect to the cosmic all... from the feminine comes communion with the spiritual center of the cosmos... to connect us to that which gives life a greater purpose and goal... we live in an age when masculine is dominating and has shoved feminine to the margins... feminine hasn't disappeared... nor is it completely imprisoned... it just isn't very well respected... i view the current circumstances of humanity as a result of the masculine overrunning the feminine... the patriarchy is destroying planet and itself... it has no idea how to stop... we all need to channel the spiritual wisdom of the feminine... i believe my feminine presentation is in part about that... a breaking of patriarchal bondage... i can only hope that more of us find a way to do the same...
and just now i read this in Cleavage...
Herman Karl von Keyserling, for whom J. S. Bach wrote the Goldberg Variations, was once described as a "cheerful man of sin, [who] kept a harem of ladies, had 354 bastards, whose chief mistress was a daughter, and died drunk." (pg 169, Cleavage, Jennifer Finney Boylan)
i read this and think... oh... the-rules-don't-apply-to-me-rich-men are not a new phenomenon... and to think... we have such a beautiful piece of music to thank him for... i wonder if Epstein was a patron of any great art and whether one day he will be written about in this way?...
and now i read this...
That was the year I was wiritng my novel The Invisible Woman. It was meant to be Barthian in its comic self-referentiality, but in the end it turned out to be Bolanesque: a tale of a woman who had to keep herself hidden, lest the unforgiving world discover her identity. It would take me years to understand the obvious: I wasn't writing a novel, but a memoir, and the woman in hiding I was describing was, of course, myself.
oh my... in preparing a recent submission of my photography i came to the same realization... that my work was, and had been, symbolizing a process of emergence... the emergence of my feminine self... for almost a decade before it burst forth into my conscious brain and onto the surface of my body...
and now, after reading about it in Cleavage, i spend $100 for a first edition copy of Canary: The Story of a Transexual... finding a story you might see yourself in, priceless...
couple of images from this morning's walk
