Today I'm a 13 year old boy,
with a rather swollen chest.
My hands rove deranged
grabbing at the ghost
of a penis that
I desperately wish to whack.
I look at other women
and the lips that I found worthy of aping,
I now wish to chew upon
as bits of incredibly delicious
meat.
I'm not fated for any relief
so I lash out
and bitterly bite off the ears
of anyone who shines
half as bright as Van Gogh's yellow.
All I wish for is to hold
a silly little girl
as she drips with adoration
for my queerly jutting throat.
Another today,
I'm a 16 year old girl.
Woman or girl?
I'm constantly rocking back and forth
on the titles to my titties.
I'm quite coyish,
and smile shyly as my lips part
ever so slightly
at the clenched jaw of a classically disturbed boy.
Broody, silent
unyielding,
someone who only I can nurture into
malleable warmth.
Yet another today,
I'm a concept.
That exists only as its own self
devoid of anything but a lengthy definition
of all it tries to encompass.
A complex ball of thought
that jerks off not with its
tool or lips
but with rapid tugs
at teats of thought that then descend
in a messy,
white web.
Relief is simultaneously mine
and tantalizingly beyond me.
Animus and anima
smushed together
in the locked basement of one
who has defecated the key
in an endless desert.
But this house is merely
an ever expandible diaphragm
that moulds and changes
as it gets acquainted with time's putrid breath.
Often the basement leaks
in gravity defying dark energy
that needs no laws,
rules or bounds
and soon I'm a mush of
boy,
girl,
concept,
and everything in between.
Now,
all that remains
is for you to see me
as this collected chaos
that is sine noun.
Image Courtesy: Google itself: A quick google search on animus/anima
As an (almost) Jungian, (and a confused Freudian maybe) the animus/anima are almost the primary aspect of my perspective of the world around me. And after an intense, yet intense yet interesting conversation with a person that described themselves as the many with no noun, or sine noun, I knew I had to step into their skin, no matter its blank label and just be.
The animus (or the feminine energy) and the anima (or the masculine energy) are archetypes of our collective unconscious that express themselves as thoughts, patterns, behaviors, mindsets and often unresolved aspects of our personality/ external environment. As we distance ourselves from bringing consciousness to our unconscious, peculiar things happen - psychosis is a term that Jung often used for this. Each of us have a certain kind of psychosis in our own way; with victory fated for those that can effectively understand and channel this psychosis.
Considering that reality is an observation to each of us, through our carefully constructed perspective-lens, often my reality could be psychotic to you and vice-versa.
However, back to Jung's thoughts on gender, here's a quote from one of his most renowned works - "The Red Book":
“Humankind is masculine and feminine, not just man or woman. You can hardly say of your soul what sex it is. But if you pay close attention, you will see that the most masculine man has a feminine soul, and the most feminine woman has a masculine soul. The most manly you are, the more remote from you is what woman really is, since the feminine in yourself is alien and contemptuous. ”
The goal in Jungian terms is to be psychologically androgynous - a whole within yourself. Instead of searching for that which you lack but secretly desire (masculine or feminine) in another. Jung's thoughts on gender are as applicable today as they were in 1930s; although the context has changed vastly. Gender as an identity or form (no matter how vanilla or alternate) is something that binds us to a lifetime of separated consciousness; however, integrating it within ourselves, leads us to being more than just the concept of who we think we are.
This Sunday, I'm not here to color with my opinion but to open up to the rainbow (pun int.) of yours. And remember, the rainbow has black and white too. The prose attempts to be a view of gender fluidity, from the lens of Freud's free association, Jung's archetypes and my limited understanding of this concept.
[P.S. - In dream psychology - an aspect both Freud and Jung explored, albeit through different methodologies, a house is often (not always) a symbol of self and the basement a symbol of the unconscious. Reference contained in sine noun : paragraph 5]
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