She's not there

You've heard the song by The Zombies. And you may also have heard the cover by Santana.

Well, let me tell you 'bout the way she looked
The way she'd act and the colour of her hair
Her voice was soft and cool
Her eyes were clear and bright
But she's not there

I can remember hearing that song pouring out of my little transistor radio when I was still small. It perplexed me in so many ways. How could she be so palpable, so vivid and real ... and yet not be there at all? Was she an hallucination? But the thoughts about this would trail off and disappear again, like spring water in a gully.  There'd be a patch of green where the questioning water returned to the subterranean world in which things can no longer be pondered much because too much data is left out of the equation. There is too much ambiguity. Ferns would grow there, silently.

The article I was just reading, nevertheless, resurfaced the question.  It said, 

Much of our knowledge is based on exclusion of large swaths of reality. We pigeon-hole information and discard what does not fit in the filing system, even as we acknowledge that the filing system is utterly arbitrary and rather flawed. We then discard this scorned data so thoroughly that we do not see it. This lack alters our ability to perceive. It alters our senses. It alters our lived reality. We live without knowing our world. This seems to me to be the central tragedy in human existence. (from - Blinkered: On Time and Being - Resilience)

Last night I sat in the back yard of my next door neighbor's house and a conversation unfolded between myself and the husband and wife who dwell there.  They are my friends.  Eventually we drifted the conversation away from the topics of history and domination and how the climate and ecological crisis is woven into that mostly subterranean narrative. We spoke initially about the Banda Islands, the tiny archipelago in the Indian Ocean which was once the only place on Earth where one could find nutmeg, which was priced higher by weight than gold in the 1620s. We spoke about the horrible violence which ensued when the officials of the Dutch East India Company (the world's first multinational corporation), ledgers in mind, decided it was necessary to get rid of the villagers on the largest of the islands, which was only about two and a half miles in length. We discussed Amitav Ghosh and The Nutmeg's Curse. 

Though our conversation soon drifted from this history and what it suggests about corporate capitalism and our weirdly global culture today, it didn't drift quite as far as one might think, for it turned to the topic of gender and its relation to biological sex. It is this topic which evoked the memory of the song, She's not there.

The eleven year young daughter of the husband and wife (whose names I will not use for the sake of their privacy) sometimes says that she feels that she is a boy. Sometimes mama calls her they, but says she hates all these fucking pronouns. All of them -- he, she, they, whatever. Sometimes the daughter thinks she's gay. Other times the daughter believes she's bisexual, or "omni" -- whatever that may be.  I guess it's like pan. Sometimes they believe they are pan. But one must have a label, mustn't one? That's the real topic of our conversation. Labels. And culture. And how the mind makes shit up and we believe it.  We pick it up osmotically from the culture, which has stories, endless stories about things as real as ship anchors and national borders. And the walls we build there. 

"It's socially constructed," said the wife, speaking about gender. I should have said, "Yeah, like the border between us and Mexico." The border, of course, is very real, socially constructed or otherwise. And yet it is not there. Just like she is not there. Socially constructed like money and the price of nutmeg. It's not like you can just walk into Whole Foods and walk out with nutmeg without paying the price. We know these things. 

I spoke some about my ever shifting thoughts and views about gender. We all did. We're all on some sort of gender journey. And I do mean all of us, not just myself and the husband and wife. What was once there for us, a map and a legend, has been falling away. We turn toward its story, its narrative, and it's not there.  For gender, in our youth, was a settled land, a territory, a known place. Boys were boys and girls were girls. Men were men and women were women. Sugar and spice and everything nice. Snips, snails / And puppy-dogs' tails.
Blue. Pink. Dresses. Pants. Sports and kitchen duty. And everyone was heterosexual unless they were "those people". You know the ones. We had a compass for gender and the compass conformed to the map. Simple. Plain. Done. Smooth sailing. Terra cognita. 

But now she is not there. The daughter. She's perplexed. The terrain of the labeling is on unstable ground. Or it sinks below the surface like spring water. An apt label, she apparently imagines, could sort out the confusions, could provide a known and stable sense of identity. As if this is all flotsam and jetsam and the boat has gone down somewhere nearby and there are a few floating labels to cling to in order to escape drowning.  

(What are a few mixed metaphors among friends?)

---

In college (and this has little or nothing to do with gender) we were watching the World Series when the tv screen was beginning to go haywire. The last words we heard before the screen went blank were "I'll tell you what, we're having an earth..." and then it went silent and black. 

The Earthquake Game: 1989 World Series Game 3 San Francisco vs. Oakland. 

I wasn't a baseball fan. I've never been much of a sports guy. I write poetry. I'm an artist. Not that there aren't poets and artists who like sports. Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with liking sports.

I was just hanging in the dorm's lounge, where there happened to be  a tv, for some time away from the books.  I wanted to be with people, whatever they may be watching. 

I was in Oregon at the time, but I had lived in California as a child. I had felt a few minor earthquakes, but never anything like this one. And the thing about this quake is that it wildly stirred up my previously stable sense of being on solid ground.  One moment the world was solid, stable, unmovable. And then it was destabilized. A lot.

For a number of weeks after the quake I wore my Levis blue denim jacket indoors and out, warm or cool, it didn't matter. It was the equivalent of a child's blankie. It was sort of like a magical suit of subtle armor which gently held the world still for a moment. I just needed the earth not to quake. I needed that terra cognita. Something, damn it, has to be still and unmoving, lest my compass were to break.

I didn't know about the jacket thing until a friend pointed out that he found it odd that I always had that jacket on. I had hardly noticed. No. I hadn't noticed at all. I think perhaps the jacket represented my stable self. I needed a stable self like I needed air and water.

A culture, like a self, is a journey.  It holds together by its stories. Some stories are deeply rooted and deeply rooting, such as the story of gender in relation to biological sex. There have always been earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fires.... Shipwrecks.  And when everything seems to be destabilizing, we all have some need for a denim jacket, a little break from the storm. That's okay. It's natural. 

---

We have left port with regard to gender, and we're not going to be returning to Mayberry. Those days are over. We're giving birth to a new story of gender and sex, and we're doing this together. It's the only way we can. 

To the daughter I want to say, as mama does, "Just be ________" (her name). That's all. "Don't worry about it. Forget about labels." But I know she'll have to find a felt essence under all stories of sex and gender -- in feeling.  And I know she will need to love this which is her actual being underneath all stories, all maps, all labels.  

There is no need for medical intervention, surgeries or hormone replacements. 

When I go looking for gender in myself ... it's not there. And this is a comfort to me. I never much liked national borders, or walls.