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"But over the years, if you just keep putting forth your experience
and you just keep saying, 'Okay, this is it, this is it' whether it's attractive or not,
or supposedly taboo or not, if you keep doing that you'll find that there are so many
more people who say, 'Thank you for saying that,' or who say, 'Me too.' And you
realize that all of these things that are personal and private and not to be exposed
are universal, too.... I've come to the conclusion that to exclude all of those
unsavory aspects of life is just sort of cowardice. There's a lot of good political
work to be done in mentioning the unmentionable."
(Ani di Franco)
I want to say everything.
Excerpt from a timed writing exercise I haven't turned into anything yet:
. . . I have too much terror of waking everything up -- paging Dr. Freud! I meant to write MAKING,
inventing it all and having it feel phony, but the upside-down character has stirred a tense
nursery-school dance of Wonderland creatures in my belly, firebirds and playing cards and elves and
intelligent soft-furred foxcats from the woods of elementary school dreamery -- the apple tree behind
that dreadful house -- WAKING EVERYTHING UP, the horror scenes where they cut off Aslan's mane and
put him on the stone slab; where they used the holy water to change a disgusting ogreous monster into
a man, and then rebaptized or unbaptized the bound-to-a-stake protagonist with the defiled unholy water,
which must be like those lepers' footbaths the crazy sainted nun drank, with bits of necrotic skin like
the pulp in fresh orange juice. Writhe a while in the land of Nod, where adult dreams are so dull,
so leaden and predictable with cars going off roads or quasi-familiar men in black leather pants
coming behind me in the shower. Child dreams still had that leaping hope, the leprechauns who COULD
fly given the proper magic shillelagh; the firebird and Fire Queen, radiant aflame with that chitinous
copper and red about her hair, feathers, and cloth-of-gold gown . . .
Back to the Nest...
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