The Making of Power
Ode to Gertrude Stein, Mary Daly, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa,
bell hooks, Cherríe Moraga, and everyone of us.
“…to a very large extent power consists of the ability to make others inhabit your story of reality…” - Phillip Gourevitch *
I. Perception is everything
smelling the approaching stranger, wood smoke, musk: sweet
nibbling the tender leaf, tangy: noxious
examining the pattern on all sides of the mushroom: edible
measuring the timbre in your relations’ voice: cautionary
touching soil: add potash, no lime
the senses,
the special five we’ve been taught to count, plus
the ones eluding consciousness and quantification
the senses
receptors of all experience,
keep us alive
adjudicate our world,
define our reality,
our first attunement to danger,
measuring the conditioned safety markers,
heat, breath, weather, well, gas in the tank,
moods of beast, red lights, planes overhead
the senses
our incontestable bottom line security system
the last to learn a new code.
Any adjustment in our perception of reality,
our ability to “see” what was
previously out of frame
(someone else’s power
more compelling to
our homeostasis)
needs an actual breathing encounter with something different
the receptor sites calling
for some other environmental stimuli
ardent enough
to make a fresh arrangement
it then has to be experienced, again and again,
some sensor has to open, some receptor notice the change
then “you” have to know it,
Live it
till the message finally gets to the sentries
the ears, eyes, nose and throat
“ I can sleep without fear.”
Perception is personal.
II. Perspective is everything
Mary
gave us the sagittal plane
wheel rolling, back to front,
pineal gland to pituitary
women emerging out of the primordial mass
striding forward, the earth rising under our feet.
The background,
all those women standing behind the man,
bring the background forward all the trees behind the field
You are the picture.
bell
added the horizontal plane, mammillary bodies, heart radiating out 360
Yeah, who says we are sidelined putting ourselves
Center
butter the edges
the middle will be taken care of.
Audre,
the vertical plane
roots to sky
coccyxgeal bodies
to 7th charka
warrior’s call
to grab
words
fear sucks just out of hearing
truth
snatched at the edge of consciousness
power
rising out of distinctions
satisfaction
absolute plumb line.
G.L.O.R.I.A.
tumbling us into a
wide mind,
the widest possible.
Wide enough
to embrace the contradictions.
Cross over borders
transverse roots
Spanish speaking catholic immigrant family,
Mexican Indian culture,
go underneath
woman, lesbian, poor,
smart.
Journey through limitations,
pull up the ground water
All present in one body.
This vortex they taught us
to enter the dark,
the creative chaos,
face our shadows,
be the other,
dragon ride thru the abyss
And Gertrude
really had it right,
everything
is
equal in the ultimate democracy of reality,
emitting our physiological psychic meter
equal in the universe’s holographic waves.
Perspective is political.
III. mixing these
the inner and outer confabulations
among us
determined to find ourselves
we built the bridge to
IV. Now,
going all directions
everything shifted
ourselves as
center,
no matter where,
equal,
no matter what,
powerful
no matter who,
present and accounted for.
Now
jumping into our lives
swimming in any stream, against the tide, with the flow,
whatever way necessary to
spawn
no territory forbidden,
touching across all lines drawn in the sand
moving from the deep
consciousness of our own Paleolithic noses,
and the guaranteed messages from the gut
knowledge
under every God is the multi-petaled yoni,
the tree of life’s song is sung in every language
translated simultaneously in the UN’s labyrinth of the inner ear.
The infinite truth of the universe
lies right behind our third eye
all around our fluttering beings
and is always
in the making.
*We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Picador, 1998) (back to top)
working notes
The experience of violence is a great narrower of reality; the use of violence is the traditional way to enforce a view of reality, the basic world model for “power.” Feminism gave me the right to claim power, and define my reality. It gave me a way to think differently, but it also could have merely reinforced my narrow world view of “all men are perpetrators” ( learned in my family) and the need to focus on “them” without the massive internal drive I had to “feel” differently. These women’s writings changed and expanded the space/dimensions from within which I might see; the internal work changed the seeing. I am thrilled to have a venue to name how these great co-conspirators have influenced me.
about the author
Karin Spitfire is the 2007 Belfast Poet Laureate. Her first poetry book Standing with Trees came out in Nov. 2005. Her choreo-poems include Incest: It’s All Relative, Corpus Callosum, the original Standing with Trees, Sports and Art, and Wild Card Anatomy. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Currents: The Journal for Body-Mind Centering®.
Spitfire has been writing, performing, teaching, and working as a healer for most of her adult life. She has pioneered an experiential methodology combining movement, bodywork, feminism, creative arts, and psychotherapeutic tools to address the healing of trauma. Spitfire works at home and abroad as freelance teacher of Women’s Studies, a certified practitioner of Body-Mind-Centering and an assistant wilderness guide with Her Wild Song.
