APRIL THE TWELFTH

(Family photo 8 December 2012, taken by Win Farrell)

Only one feeder now still with seed on it, and a muscular young skwirl is standing on tippy-toe to rake small amounts out as breakfast. House sparrows queue on the railing with feathery irritation.

Scout insists a glowing screen viewed around an immovable feline silhouette is an enhanced experience, not a problem.

12 hours on Levaquin. Antibiotics have saved my ass more times than I can count.

Today a drunken soil conservationist named Edmund Ruffin was coaxed by his hothead South Carolina secessionist shithead friends to begin firing on Fort Sumter, and thus hostilities were begun which would kill 620,000 people. The good news is that brilliant African-Americans would be able to wrest an end to slavery from the ensuing years.

During the late 1970s, I worked intimately with a woman, in the Pleiades, to stop the legacy of child sexual abuse in this country, an effort which succeeded beyond what is generally credited or understood. We too, those of us in that group, worked in chaos against entrenched "reality". It turns out, she was the direct descendant of Edmund Ruffin. She said he died full of grief and bitterness over what he had done. Not all action is noble; male anger and fear seldom produces a positive result, and that's a fact.

According to the Writer's Almanac, it was also on this day in 1633 that Galileo Galilei was put on trial by the Inquisition, for supporting the theory that the Earth revolves around the sun. Yeah, there was white boy justice in action.

In quite different news: Happy third anniversary to the woman of my dreams, Margot. Still can't quite believe my luck in gaining your love.

Let's get this weekend rolling.

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INCLUSIVITY AT THE THREEPENNY OPERA

Opening scene of Threepenny Opera, 3 April 2014, by Margot Williams

{Guest post by Margot Williams in Birmingham, United Kingdom}


I saw an electronic flyer for The Threepenny Opera online, and loving Mack the Knife and Pirate Jenny, but knowing little of the story, I bought a ticket. It was the day of the Saharan Smog, and the traffic was shocking; I barely made it to the theatre in time.

Entering the foyer, I wasn’t sure if I’d arrived in the middle of a flashmob. There were homemade banners, and people singing on the stairs; I threaded my way through the crowd and encountered a Little Person clapping along – "join in!" he cried, so I did – but I still hadn’t twigged. Once I entered the auditorium, I realised that the performance had simply spilled into the foyer. The space was festooned with more banners, and at centre stage amid the apparent chaos, a man in a power chair dominated the space, announcing the cast members.

This new translation – or rather, reinterpretation – of The Threepenny Opera is set in the near future: the run up to the coronation of King Charles III. Austerity has bitten deep, the struggle for survival is brutal, and we have finally brought back hanging. Who better to bring to life this tale of those at the bottom of the pile than the multi-ability players of the Graeae Theatre Company?

JJ and Mrs Peachum have raised their daughter to join the upper classes on the backs of the rag-tag band of beggars run by JJ, but Polly has thwarted them by falling for the beautiful and charismatic underworld boss, Macheath, the notorious rapist and murderer. Webs of affection and violence run deep: Mack and Jenny, the first of his whores, sing of "our little knocking-shop in Bethnal Green" lending it an almost cozy domesticity; corrupt police chief Tiger Brown attends his old comrade’s wedding and they fling their arms around each other while leading the assembled guests in a rousing chorus: "the British Army / will make salami / from Basra to Goose Green..." Polly sings at her wedding, but does she choose a romantic ballad? No, she opts for Pirate Jenny. They all betray each other as the drama unfolds, but the love is perversely persistent.

Can there be a happy ending? Whether Macheath hangs or not, there will be no justice.

This is a stunning production. There is so much going on on stage, it’s almost impossible to keep up. Lyrics and text are projected onto convenient surfaces, and the brilliant (certainly to me, and I don’t know sign) interpreter is fully integrated into the action. Images flashing onto screens bring home the realisation that this is no imagined dystopia; but beyond all that, the performances, the stage-craft, the musicianship! Wheelchairs whizz round, mobility canes become part of the dance, someone’s prosthetic arm is flung back and forth – but the grace and elegance with which the performers negotiate the stage, unobtrusively handed across space by their fellows or using them for support, moved me deeply. This is what inclusivity looks like. See it if you can.

The Threepenny Opera extended trailer 

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MY GAL MARGOT: MARCH 2014

Margot at Cwm Crafnant, Wales, March 2014

My gal Margot, my world’s pion
Driving back from Caer Seion
Cleansed by wind and pumping blood
Jumbled like cerrig mwsoglyd
Seeking secrets like the cymoedd
As a bulwark ‘gainst the void
Must return now to urban welter
Ruled by greyhound and an elder --
Takeout Chinese once a week
Endless rain and concrete bleak
Spreadsheets, tea and VAT
Hour each night with distant me --
Let us wish the gwyllt endures
Through nightly dreams and love like ours.


(copyright Maggie Jochild March 2014)

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NEW POEM

(Photo by Margot Williams, London, 13 May 2012)

FULL LARDER

She takes photos of her ex currying bananas,
yellow curves still unpeeled, lowered arcs
in a lethally red bubble. I never feel any
jealousy about their enduring love, or what
once sparked in her with this woman. I can
trace how it shaped her, and ache to that beauty
as I do all else in her. I still have her smell
on my skin, the dermal memory of her face
pressed against me, the bounce of her accent
from the other room. I know it will fade and
must believe I will have a chance to water
once again our epiphytic flame into fresh stoke,
feel our binary lock into orbit, taste her tea
and fingertips, let her roll through my belly.
Many have survived on less. I have survived
on much less. She filled my pantry with
vivid spices in glass jars, and I will ration
them out over this coming drought.


© Maggie Jochild Written 13 May 2012, 3:15 pm

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BLENDING IMPOVERISHED LINEAGES

(Birmingham, England silverware factory from Victorian era, photo by David Sillitoe)

Yesterday I had what felt like a real "day off", no extra appointments or obligations, just the usual. Rosemary made me refried beans (MY beans!) with cornbread, then dashed out to a nearby barbecue joint for a pound of hot juicy brisket as well as a slice of "diabetic" lemon meringue pie, the latter her idea. The pie was sugar-free and not especially flavourful; I am demanding about lemon, my favourite dessert option, so though there was no immediate spike in my glucose, I won't repeat the experiment.

But the brisket turned Sunday into MEEEET day for me and Dinah both.

Feeling some slack, and having temporary access to UK census/vital records. I started researching Margot's lineage. All I had was the names of her four grandparents -- one of those wrong, as it turns out -- and her insistence that everybody for generations was from the Midlands and/or Black Country. It was my first serious venture into seeing how England has organized its records, a steep learning curve. At least it was in English, but the cultural priorities were noticeably different from even early American values. For instance, no attempt to gather property values on the English censuses, or suss out what is being farmed.

(Tools used in silverware factory, Birmingham, England; photo by David Sillitoe)


Margot's lineage, as of this morning, now has 185 individuals in it extending back into the 1600s on a couple of branches. She is right that she is from overwhelmingly Midlands stock, though a few Welsh and Yorkshire origins have crept in. Her people are working class, in fact poor, and it seems like everyone is named either William, Rose, Joseph or Emma, a bewildering repetition of nondescript names. Children are at work definitely by 14, often by 10 or 11; families are enormous; and women die early. Education is truncated severely.

This is what birth control changed, plain and simple, this handing on of generational despair and poverty. Right there on the page.

The occupations were industrial and sounded stultifying. When there was an identifiable trade, it was zealously handed on to the sons (and sometimes daughters), a way out of the monotony of factory work. Discovering a publican was a relief; he and his former servant wife owned the Bridge Inn, a beerhouse likely near a canal in Ladywood, Birmingham.

My own ancestors were equally poor and limited, but I kept thinking at least they were on farms, had access to clean air and sunlight and fresh food. I know such comparisons cannot be made using modern values, and I had to stop such projections as they arose in me. Follow the record and get it down without interpretation, not until the history comes naturally to me as it does here.

But already I can see what a change the first World War wrought on this world.

Margot had warned me she was not especially interested in the details of her ancestry, it's not "her thing" nor it is important to her mother. However, as I unroofed generations, they both got a little sucked in. How can you not?

The most significant part of the day came when M and I discussed whether she wanted me listed as her partner, thus linking my massively researched pedigree to hers out there in cyberworld, permanently. Ancestry, despite being a Mormon-owned company, sidely includes the possibility for same-sex alliances in the software, and in fact there is an option to link friends or partners into a family unit. M said to go for it, even though at some point Mother may want to see the online chart. So I linked us as partners, a first for me in all my decades of genealogy.

I am still near tears about it. Major symbolic step, my friends.

My dreams last night were too confusing to sort out, full of her kin and my cousins. She has one great-something-grandfather who lived in Wales and gave his occupation as "naturalist", Thomas Crosse; now there's a man I want to know more about, and he was in my dreams, with a long beard and a ratty hat, roaming about cliffs over the sea. Along with my cousin Barney, a huckster and womanizer whose grin still keeps getting him off the hook out there.

Thank g*d I had all that meat, this kind of digging and synthesizing chews through B vitamins. Ahh, Tammi just announced a fresh batch of cornbread is done, do I want a slice? Must go, my people's grain awaits.

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HAPPY 50TH BIRTHDAY, MARGOT!

(Photo is Margot's hands, wedding and gardening, 2011, self-portraits by Margot Williams)

LATE BIRTH

What means it when a love is turned,
the friend whose liking you declare
as proof you are one of the good
When she grows vivid under your gaze
and you begin to count her calls
You work to make her laugh, you
tell raw secrets, rein your gush
because you do not want to be
the one who needs the most. She seems
to welcome each new confidence
but you obscure, to her or self,
where this is going. This is what
they tell you is a bad idea.
Friendship is the golden hoard
and wanting more is beflowered lies.
Keep cashing out, don't let it ride.
But still you look for secret signs.
And then one too-hot April day
you find the words, and glory glory
she says "Yes, me too", and then
in middle age, with no games left
you let her matter more than you
have ever dared. You strip in daylight
No shower first, no song and dance
You look into her greenwood eyes
and fall.


Copyright Maggie Jochild, written 9 August 2011, 12:06 p.m.

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WADING

(Photo at the edge of the Lea Marshes, London, taken by Margot Williams, April 2011)

I woke up at 2:45 (after a 4-hr REM cycle and an Architecture Dream) and stayed up 2 hours, rereading Ginny Bates from the point where I had dipped in to get an excerpt for M. (Keyword search for that massive manuscript was "overalls", I had to laugh at how many hits there were but it finally surfaced.) Reached the birth of the first grandchild before I fell back asleep. That book looks like one long prayer of manifestation now.

I am living still in an altered state of "Be here now" body anchor and "Dream it forward" recovery, a swaying hammock that requires constant adjustment. And unlimited patience. I keep making 100 day plans, and at each new draft, there is definite movement but never as much as I had wanted. At those times, I have to staunchly resist the pull to Blame Self as best I can. Or blame at all. Blame is how my father glided through his oblivious life, and I want to do more than survive as long as he did, stepping over the bodies of those he claimed to love.

But Mama's pattern, of trying to assume responsibility for what which she could not change, is equally murderous. It is the lesson of being a girl in this country, and if you did not have it lacquered in thick coats onto your spirit before you were even a year old, I do not think you can truly Get It. It's a conditioning my generation, at least some of us, wake up to wearily every morning and mark the new perimeter, like a personal glacier's retreat or advance, so as to know our task for that day.

Has nothing to do with hormones or what attire we put on -- those illusions do not buy respite. Not for me. Not for Margot. I buzz my hair, she grows hers to below her ribs, and we are still both reacting to girlhood messages about female = wearing your hair for others. The Male others and their sheriffs.

Intimacy with another woman is a revolutionary act. It defies the most cardinal rule of the patriarchy -- Do not prioritize that which we call female. I don't mean love: "They" claim love for us. But here inside, we know what real love breaks down to, and thinking well about another female, valuing her intrinsically, is the act that threatens all the foundations and sets then whistling for the harriers.

The folly of the patriarchy is to try to control the Mississippi at all. The defining river of North America has traveled where she needs to for millenia, but within my lifetime men decided to stop its western advance -- because how can you own property near a force of nature otherwise? So now they are opening the Morgansas Spillway, saving New Orleans (this time) by flooding Cajuns. The hierarchy is always written plainly on the wall. Now that the Ninth Ward has been emptied of blacks, New Orleans is valuable enough to spend money on future lawsuits and a few insurance claims from those who will be under 25 feet of water by this time tomorrow. Blacks and Cajuns are both expendable. just at different points on the scale. But that difference is exploitable enough to get the Cajun vote for David Duke and Bobby Jindal.

Look deeper, bigger. See what the original watercourse was and get the fuck out of the way of her path. Women have always loved each other this much, when we could. I feel raw and uprooted only because I grew up with Boys running the world. I stand in rising waters that are from a broken dam, and I breathe, refusing to panic. And I have a strong hand firmly in mine, someone who for two years has not faltered with me, not once. A girl-hearted woman who keeps saying "We ALREADY have it." I stand on submerged granite and build leg muscle back. And think of the poem by Louise Glück:

THE UNDERTAKING

The darkness lifts, imagine, in your lifetime.
There you are — cased in clean bark you drift
through weaving rushes, fields flooded with cotton.
You are free. The river films with lilies,
shrubs appear, shoots thicken into palm. And now
all fear gives way: the light
looks after you, you feel the waves' goodwill
as arms widen over the water; Love,

the key is turned. Extend yourself —
it is the Nile, the sun is shining,
everywhere you turn is luck.

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