I’m thinking today about experience and the body, about objects, physicality, and boundaries. Where in our bodies do we experience things? How do our feelings get inside us, and where do they live once they’re there?
Sometimes there’s something about an object or a place or even a feeling that makes me love it so much that I wish I could truly possess it, that I could somehow absorb the thing into myself like The Blob. It’s not exactly a comfortable feeling, and actually I don’t know if love is quite the word, either. It’s more like longing, a craving I might not ever really be able to satisfy.
I bought a book yesterday that made me feel this way, overcome with bodily desire as I read it in the bathtub, wishing there were more points of entry than just my eyes on the page, the writer’s ideas in my mind. I’d already bought the book as an e-book when it first came out a couple years ago because I loved the title and was familiar with the work of some of the contributors. But when I saw it in the bookshop I knew I had to have the “real” book too—so that I could finish the book and reread a few of the essays, but also as a talisman to hug to my chest and carry around with me in my black backpack. It’s called Becoming Dangerous: Witchy Femmes, Queer Conjurers, and Magical Rebels. Such a good name for a book, a whole world I’d like to inhabit if I could just find my way in.
To get to the bookshop Joe and I made the long, pleasant walk through our neighborhood to the one next to ours. Up hills and through the honest-to-goodness woods of the Wissahickon, a forest within the city of Philadelphia. Past turn-of-the-century row houses like the one Joe and I live in as well as larger, older ones, with crooked wrought iron gates and messy, sleeping winter gardens. Over a bridge on busy Henry Avenue that’s over 170 feet high, where you can stand and look at those woods below, bend over a bit and rest the side of your face on the stone barrier because it’s not high at all, which makes the bridge dangerous, tantalizing. During the walk I got that old, funny feeling—when the early spring sun warmed my face in the cold air and I smelled someone’s sweet wood fire burning, and my body remembered walking in the neighborhood I grew up in, after I was grown but still living there. The way I could walk those streets and crave everything around me even as I was living it. What is it about me that makes me so hungry for more?
One of the essays in the book is by Maranda Elizabeth, a writer whose zines I read and admired years ago but lost of track of at some point. With their vivid descriptions of the apartment and building they live in, painted in every shade of purple and filled with books, plants, and trash-picked, reclaimed objects, Maranda Elizabeth conjures something truly magical. Among other things, they write about “learning histories and legacies of [their] blood family,” which is something I’ve been involved with too. Learning the recorded history and the secret history that exist side by side. Learning how to tell the truth, if only to myself, and merge the two histories into one.
Discussing the depression and migraines, witchcraft and psychic premonitions that run in their family, Maranda Elizabeth writes: “I reclaim everything I’ve been told is fake and irrational.”
Me too. Yes, I reclaim these too. But it’s been a struggle to do so, and at this point the person I’m wrestling with is me. The rational part of me has always been so mean, making fun of my shadow self, telling her she’s crazy, ugly, getting it wrong again. That her feelings are somehow incorrect, and her memories of her own painful lived experience were probably misunderstandings. I wonder where on Earth she could have learned all that?
There’s another witch-writer, Siobhan Johnson, whose work has helped me recently. I’ve read her writing on her website, in her email newsletter, and through some of the courses she offers, where she returns frequently to the idea of “the shadow self” and the necessary work of integrating our submerged, hidden, and denied desires into our conscious minds. Recently she wrote: “Your shadow, like a toddler… just needs love, support, acceptance, and little bit of what it wants.”
This feels true to me, and finally, after working on it for some time, it feels good. I’ve spent the last several months meeting my shadow self, listening to what she has to say, and then giving her a little bit of what she wants. (And okay, sometimes I spoil her.) Turns out I quite like her. She’s the one with the impeccable taste in music, and the one who chose the black backpack and the rotating collection of patches and pins that adorn it— a bright yellow pencil, a black cat, a drawing of a human skull with a plant growing from it. It’s possible that, of the two of us, she’s the true artist, and I think she’s been the funny one all along.
And as I write this I think: Oh. She’s the one who’s so hungry, practically starving for life. She’s been hiding in the dark all this time, after all; she deserves to feel the sunshine on her face. I think I’ll keep feeding my shadow the things she wants—not the things she thinks she wants, like cigarettes and denial and obsessional thinking, but the things she needs, the things she deserves. Maybe I’ll even let her start calling us a witch, finally, if it means that much to her. Cuz why not? All along we’ve been building altars together, casting spells of protection with mundane materials and whatever attitude we could manage. Together we’ve learned to embrace our wildness, becoming something that’s both more animal and more spirit at the same time.
This morning as I got dressed I said to my cat, “Happy Women’s History Month! Did you know we have our own history?” and then chucked to myself a little, feeling irritated and sad. But as I said it I remembered: Of course we have have our own histories. It’s just that they’re secret histories, made of coded language, concealed intention, and steely survival. Those aren’t the kind of histories that well-intentioned commemorations like Women’s History Month are ever talking about, though. You have to look elsewhere, go deeper, to find stories like that. You might have to squat down on your haunches in the woods and smell the dirt; feel the lure of the tall, tall bridge and decide to keep on walking; straighten up from the floor of the cozy, cramped bookstore that honors your people and holds space for your stories and find the book you need, right at eye level, looking back at you.
Indicative Mood 