From
Coleridge's telescopic introspection to a boy's. A boy's Travels With
A Telescope, watching ships, and beginning a voyage of discovery:
gender divorced from sex. A boy with dreams of femaleness. The world
he wished to inhabit so distant through the glass he felt removed
from the human cycle: what part did he have in any of it? He existed,
yes, but his mind and body were not One, and therefore as a boy he
couldn't be at one with the world. A spiritual Conundum, a spiritual
quest. From Wales to stately, intellectual, scholarly Oxford; to Army
life and foreign travels. A boy, a man, a woman.
But
not a woman, in my opinion, in the true sense of the word. The term
is more than a feeling.
Woman is a biological experience: it's painful, it's messy, and
fluctuates from one extreme to another; a bodily tide of mood and
emotion. Woman has a different relationship with her anatomy;
chemically, hormonally,
there is a difference – a huge country of influence. Boys, men can
explore or cross into this terrain, but their lived experience is not
Woman, it is Other. *
I
can only judge through the lens of my own lived experience. I do not
deny that all mortals have feminine and masculine qualities, nor that
one, irrespective of biological gender, will dominate, be the
principle ruler, but 'Woman' I translate as Fact; determined
biologically, chemically, by Nature. The issue for me is Language,
not prejudice. I don't much care what people are; I don't much care
for confined spaces – cramped boxes with labels – but I do care
when one half of the human race is told they can't hold certain
views, nor discuss openly their own idea of 'Woman'. I do care when a
people are redefined without any rational debate, just flung hatred.
I do care when women are informed their identity, their experience,
as seen through their individual lens, is obsolete, and that they
must now accept a new language, a new order. Woman, an accommodating gender, is too often dictated to.
Picture credit: Still Life with Telescope, 1927, Max Beckmann (source: WikiArt).
I refer
to Jan Morris' Conundrum and
to the initial response it raised within me. Adapted from a journal
entry, October 2021.
