The Female Man

A quiet country night. The hills East of Green Bay, the wet heat of August during the day. One woman reads; another sews; another smokes. Somebody takes from the wall a kind of whistle and plays on it the four notes of the major chord. This is repeated over and over again. We hold on to these four notes as long as possible; then we transform them by one note; again we repeat these four notes. Slowly something tears itself away from the not-melody. Distances between the harmonics stretch wider and wider. No one is dancing tonight. How the lines open up! Three notes now. The playfulness and terror of the music written right on the air. Although the player is employing nearly the same dynamics throughout, the sounds have become painfully loud; the little instrument's guts are coming out. Too much to listen to, with its lips right against my ear. I believe that by dawn it will stop, by dawn we will have gone through six or seven changes of notes, maybe two in an hour.

By dawn we'll know a little something about the major triad. We'll have celebrated a little something.

XIV

How Whileawayans Celebrate

Dorothy Chiliason in the forest glade, her moon-green pajamas, big eyes, big shoulders, her broad lips and big breasts, each with its protruding thumb, her aureole of fuzzy, ginger-colored hair. She springs to her feet and listens. One hand up in the air, thinking. Then both hands up. She shakes her head. She takes a gliding step, dragging one foot. Then again. Again. She takes on some extra energy and runs a little bit. Then stops. She thinks a little bit. Whileawayan celebratory dancing is not like Eastern dancing with its motions in toward the body, its cushions of warm air exhaled by the dancer, its decorations by contradictory angles (leg up, knee down, foot up; one arm up-bent, the other arm down-bent). Nor is it at all like the yearning-for-flight of Western ballet, limbs shooting out in heaven-aspiring curves, the torso a mathematical point. If Indian dancing says I Am, if ballet says I Wish, what does the dance of Whileaway say?

It says I Guess. (The intellectuality of this impossible business!)

XV

What Whileawayans Celebrate

The full moon

The Winter solstice (You haven't lived if you haven't seen us running around in our skivvies, banging on pots and pans, shouting "Come back, sun! Goddammit, come back! Come back!")

The Summer solstice (rather different)

The autumnal equinox

The vernal equinox

The flowering of trees

The flowering of bushes

The planting of seeds

Happy copulation

Unhappy copulation

Longing

Jokes

Leaves falling off the trees (where deciduous)

Acquiring new shoes

Wearing same

Birth

The contemplation of a work of art

Marriages

Sport

Divorces

Anything at all

Nothing at all

Great ideas

Death

XVI

There is an unpolished, white, marble statue of God on Rabbit Island, all alone in a field of weeds and snow. She is seated, naked to the waist, an outsized female figure as awful as Zeus, her dead eyes staring into nothing. At first She is majestic; then I notice that Her cheekbones are too broad, Her eyes set at different levels, that Her whole figure is a jumble of badly-matching planes, a mass of inhuman contradictions. There is a distinct resemblance to Dunyasha Bernadetteson, known as The Playful Philosopher (A.C.344-426), though God is older than Bernadetteson and it's possible that Dunyasha's genetic surgeon modelled her after God instead of the other way round. Persons who look at the statue longer than I did have reported that one cannot pin It down at all, that She is a constantly changing contradiction, that She becomes in turn gentle, terrifying, hateful, loving, "stupid" (or "dead") and finally indescribable.

Persons who look at Her longer than that have been known to vanish right off the face of the Earth.

XVII

I have never been to Whileaway. Whileawayans breed into themselves an immunity to ticks, mosquitoes, and other insect parasites. I have none. And the way into Whileaway is barred neither by time, distance, nor an angel with a flaming sword, but by a cloud or crowd of gnats. Talking gnats.

PART SIX

I

Jeannine wakes from a dream of Whileaway. She has to go to her brother's this week. Everything suggests to Jeannine something she has lost, although she doesn't put it to herself this way; what she understands is that everything in the world wears a faint coating of nostalgia, makes her cry, seems to say to her, "You can't." She's fond of not being able to do things; somehow this gives her a right to something. Her eyes fill with tears. Everything's a cheat. If she gets up right now, she'll be able to make the early bus; she also wants to get away from the dream that still lingers in the folds of her bedclothes, in the summery smell of her soft old sheets, a smell of herself that Jeannine likes but wouldn't admit to anybody. The bed is full of dreamy, suspicious hollows.