on gender and time

I read a quote by Albert Camus recently – “every artist keeps within himself a single source which nourishes during his lifetime what he is and what he says.”

I found especial strength in identifying with the ‘he’ of this sentence. Not least because it is about writing, but because I found something masculine in me that stood to attention and burned with recognition. It is one of the rare times I have appreciated the gender binary. My heart hardened and glowed, and I felt some of the jingoistic joy of a soldier off to battle.

Politically, gender feels destructive. Jackson Katz says that the term violence against women, in its passivity and magicking away of male responsibility, makes us forget that it is men who are violent against women. In language also, then, gender feels destructive.  But it can also be revelatory. I read somewhere (Tumblr, circa 2013 probably) that it is more than likely that the first human to come up with the month – the menses, the keeping time with the moon – was a woman who simply had to track her cycle. The woman disciplines time, making it incorporate, hooking it to her womb.

~

I read of a time when people kept their knives on the upper rafters of their huts. Some men who had studied the etiologies of early architecture said that the sun hitting the rafters would keep the blades hot and sharp. They said these people were always ready for battle. But some women who had raised children said that mothers always keep sharp objects out of reach. Imagine, some millennia prior, an infant fastened at a large hip, their stubby little arms reaching for the glint in the rafters, thinking it a toy. Imagine, my mother’s eyes flaring with caution even now when I pick up a matchbox. What is the use of fire for her child? There is enough burning in her arm looped around me, in the congee she stirs as the baby bounces, as the knife glints above her. What is the use of a knife’s point, when there is enough injury in the child’s cry, robbed of a new toy? I am taller than my mother. She still returns the matches to the top shelf, inventing safety.