I’m the future stranger you used to love
(remember the declaration? I do).
I’d like to say it’s liberating,
but I still struggle with the time
between closing and opening the curtains.
For a while, I thought I should see
if I was still capable of being surprised,
but now that I’m older, I’m not sure
if I even have the guts to find someone
(it sounds so simple in blue ink on papier vélin)
and forget about you.
Sometimes I wonder, Why do we cling so tightly to so-called manhood, however defined? Why not, for once, listen to Dr. Dreyfuss advice to be a mensch, a good person, a human being? Because before anything else, we are all humans, regardless of gender (or lack thereof). Just respect others and yourself, reach out to your neighbour, like in that simple slogan of the John Doe Club from Capra’s classic, and rediscover the open-minded boy you once were. I know it sounds a bit naive, but isn’t it worth exposing yourself to ridicule if it turns out that it will change your and others lives for the better?
What does it mean to be a man? I really don’t know, to be perfectly honest. All the significant social functions defining my existence, like citizen, employee, or parent (I deliberately avoid the word father), have nothing to do with my gender and could just as easily be fulfilled if I were a woman. Even biologically, my role in maintaining the species is rather minor and purely accidental. Once I donate my semen, I might as well cease to exist if the mother obtains stable means of subsistence independent of my providing. One might say that I’m the role model for the children, but honestly, what are the roles that I’m supposed to teach them that specifically require my gender? And aren’t lesbian couples as good at parenting as straight ones, despite the lack of that extra accessory in their underwear that some men are so fond of? In the past, it was all simple—muscle power and ruthlessness—and once men consolidated their position, all they had to do was make sure that women had no chance to rise above their assigned roles, as perfectly captured in the slogan used under the German Empire: Kinder, Küche, Kirche, although the 3Ks mentality wasn’t something specifically German. Thus, men’s entire position and identity were based on oppression. This couldn’t last forever, despite continuous—in some places deadly—backlash all over the world, and when this whole structure started to fall apart, we discovered that the king was naked—the whole manhood thing was nothing but a hollow eggshell. The answers to this vary: bloody violence, right-wing extremism, Incel, depression, alcoholism, suicide, and so on—all destructive, all wrong. I’m sure there are also positive initiatives, but they are unnoticeable in the shadow of the above. I, myself, like many others, I’m sure, somehow managed to avoid the worst, but I’m still confused, insecure, and trying unsuccessfully to find my way through all this to define who I am as a man. The first step is to tell myself there is nothing wrong with being lost and vulnerable. Boys don’t cry no longer applies. We’ll see where this takes me.
I don’t know how to be a father. I lost that lesson to a bottle of vodka my father preferred over family life. I wasn’t a good husband either, for that same reason, I guess, although I can’t really blame him for my short temper and lack of patience; that’s all on me. Being the child of an alcoholic scars you for life. Drunken screams, chairs flying across the living room, a military belt marking your buttocks for the slightest offence, no money—the list could go on and on. There were no birthday parties, and what’s more, my friends, and there were only a few of them, couldn’t even visit me. No wonder I grew up locked in my room like a hermit, escaping from reality into the world of books. It certainly didn’t help me develop my social skills. But after all of that, I should have known better, but, what a surprise, I started drinking myself. I remember one evening in my dorm room, when I was sitting on the windowsill with a bottle of vodka, drinking straight from the bottle. My friend came, and when he saw me, he didn’t say a word; he just went to the wall, took down the mirror hanging on it, put it on my lap, and left. It was only a few years later, when, after emptying a bottle of vodka in the cinema during the opening credits, I blacked out and the next thing I remembered was walking on all fours like a dog down the main street of the city on the way back home, that I realised it was time to end it. Vodka eventually killed my father—he died of cancer. I survived sober for almost twenty-five years. But I will never be normal, whatever that means.
Maybe it is a matter of one’s inner voice being inaccessible to others (perhaps being a man makes me deaf to it), or maybe it’s like those deeply personal rituals that, seen from outside, seem absurd, ridiculous even, but I’m two-thirds through “The Vagina Monologues,” and apart from a very few exceptions, I can’t muster anything more than a shrug.
I really started to wonder where all this hype came from when the book was first published. I guess the real novelty was the title itself—controversial and headline-making. I’ve also never seen Eve Ensler on stage, and I could imagine her performance being crucial to the reception of this text. But beyond that, I can’t help but exclaim that the king (queen, actually) is naked. There are no secrets unravelled, no divine revelations about women. The whole book doesn’t even look like coherent narration. Reading it feels more like going through someone’s random notes on roughly the same topic in a notebook you found left by accident on a bus seat.
I am sure that this book will go down in the annals of history, but more because of what happened around it than because of the text itself. But it won’t be a whole chapter; more like a two-sentence mention, a short paragraph at most. And I don’t say this out of malice. This text simply doesn’t have enough weight to deserve more. If I’m in the mood for real heavyweight feminist writing, all I have to do is reach for something by Germaine Greer or Susan Faludi from my bookshelf.
As a side note, I will mention that after I finished Gloria Steinem’s foreword to “The Vagina Monologues” and the introduction by the author herself, the idea of my own monologues came to me. You can find them in the following texts:
Somewhere between a punching bag’s punching bag
and a fully fledged piss-artist, you decided that life is not long enough
to carry on like that, but you also know that it’s nothing
but an act of pure cruelty if you constantly complain about it
and still decide to bring a new one into this wretched realm of yours.
Then you may recall the invisible you barely knew, and only briefly,
as your blooming youth denied him a single breath in your vicinity.
The problem is that he has long disappeared from your sight,
and you have no idea where to start to find him.
I can give you a clue: always look for the one with a book,
mastering the sigla of the Leiden Conventions or chasing the quiet of a meadow
enchanted in the vellum pages of the Voynich manuscript.
Once you find me, never let me go. We may have enough time
for one last vacat page to fill.
Back in college, any time I complained about my lack of success in love, my friend used to say that every monster will find its amateur (this Polish proverb sounds much better in my native language because it rhymes). Truth be told, I always thought she was actually saying it for her own comfort because, with her being severely overweight and having a face that made you think of a hamster after a meal, what chance did she have of finding someone? It turned out that I couldn’t be more wrong. When I got to know her better, I saw that she was the life of the party, always surrounded by guys, swearing like a cobbler, and able to outdrink even the toughest of them. As she once told me, she couldn’t complain about the lack of intimate partners either. It was her fairly pretty yet terribly shy room-mate who was lonely, always in her shadow. I lost contact with both of them after college, but sometimes I wonder how their lives turned out. But I learned one thing from them: appearance may help you a little to make a good first impression, but in the end, what matters is who you are. If only I wasn’t that shy.
吾が舞へば、麗し女、酔ひにけり（あがまへば、くはしめ、ゑひにけり）
吾が舞へば、照る月、響むなり（あがまへば、てるつき、とよむなり）
結婚に、神、天下りて（よばひに、かみ、あまくだりて）
夜は明け、鵺鳥、鳴く（よはあけ、ぬへどり、なく）
遠神恵賜（とほ、かみ、ゑみ、ため）
Because I had danced, the beautiful lady was enchanted
Because I had danced, the shining moon echoed
Proposing marriage, the god shall descend
The night clears away and the chimera bird (white’s thrush) will sing
The distant god may give us the precious blessing!
Japanese pre-feudal-era wedding song
When, at midnight, he sings with a longing voice,
“A ga maeba, kuwashime yoinikeri,”
the wind pushes him towards his desire.
When, at midnight, he sings with a longing voice,
“A ga maeba, terutsuki toyomunari,”
cherry blossom petals show him the way.
When, at midnight, he sings with a longing voice,
“Yobai ni, kami amakudarite, yo wa ake, nuedori naku,”
a dropped feather caresses his flushed cheek,
and their hands, at the first touch, yearn for more already.
But then the scorching sun of the day comes
and turns the petals into dust on the road,
taking away his voice, so he can no longer sing
“Toh kami, emi tame.”
I hit a woman once. She was fourteen, as was I. We were classmates. It happened at school during the lunch break. We all entered the congested stream of students passing through the main corridor in the direction of the school canteen, and while slowly moving towards the smell of the chef’s latest invention, at one point I felt someone behind me brutally pushing me. I turned around. It was her. What surprised me even more was that when I asked why she was pushing me, instead of answering, she started kicking me. And then it happened. Without a moment’s thought, I instinctively slapped her. It was as if my hand were acting of its own accord. I was as surprised by this act as she was. Of course, she and the friend she was with immediately ran to complain about me to the teacher. As you can easily guess, a scandal broke out. My parents were called to the headmaster because the girls didn’t bother to mention kicking, so I was accused of an unprovoked physical attack. Fortunately, at that time I already had the reputation of being a quiet, harmless bookworm, so the headmaster believed my version of events, which they ultimately confirmed. Of course, this did not explain my reaction, and I had to apologise to her, but the whole affair ended without any serious repercussions for me. Two things make me wonder, though: why did I respond to the attack by attacking instead of running away as usual (I was a cowardly type, which infuriated my father every time I came home crying), and how did my hand know to stay open instead of balling into a fist? As a boy, I knew how to use my fists and had a fight or two with the boys in the yard, even if I usually preferred to run away. And more importantly, would I respond the same way now, as an adult? Although I never did it again, I never experienced being assaulted by a woman again either.
hidden pilcrow 