Leaping off Whitman
I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.
--Walt Whitman, “Mannahatta”
…
I want, for the women and mothers of my city, I want them to know that their rage and sacrifice is seen and heard, that their efforts are valued — not just the cooking and cleaning and driving — but the ways in which we have absorbed and absorbed and silenced our own immediate responses for the well-being of others. And I want us to learn how to find in these skills we've acquired, we've been handed down — I want us to learn — I want to learn — how to turn those skills into my own inner-directed powers — Rumpelstiltskin turning straw into gold — it's really us, turning the dross that men throw at us and want us to turn into wealth for their benefit — Rumpelstiltskin is our own inner trickster who dances by her own aboriginal name by the light of the fire in the forest, gleeful that she will get the first born child of the princess because of her powers. But the princess learns this aboriginal name, reveals it, and in so doing, reclaims her nearly forfeited child. I am both — the dutiful mother bound by the tower I've been locked into to protect my child — and I am the crone in the forest who knows my name and would have spirited this child off into the woods and taught her how to forage for mushrooms and live by firelight.
So, yes, that's what I want for the women and mothers of my city — I want us to reclaim the power of the fairy tales written by others and know that we will decide who Rumpelstiltskin is and how her story ends.
And the man-child she bore? What specific and perfect thing do I want to ask for these soon-to-be men — for Richard, a boy long ago trapped in a man's life, for Jay, for Mateo — these boys for whom violence, against themselves or others, is the solution most obvious to them, who live in a spiritual void, depression the symptom of the city's failure to give them temples or wildernesses in which to discover their own aboriginal names?
If the princess had borne a boy and if Rumpelstiltskin had indeed spirited him away into the woods to raise, he would have known the way wolves play with each other fiercely, with claws and teeth, causing pain, though not fatal, but enough to relieve the anger inside them. Is sports really the only fucking way we have for them to know this now? The wolves would also have shown him how to howl out his rage and loneliness, and would have taught him that the howling itself is a communication, that his pack would hear the howls and answer him and in that way he might find a mate, or safety from an enemy, or the company of a shared meal.
I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city of broken and wounded and lonely man-cubs.
I ask for them that the rest of us city dwellers can find some way to show them how to howl like wolves, how to reclaim their own aboriginal names. I ask that I, as one city dweller sharing my space with two of these man-cubs, not be left to figure it out all on my own. I ask for the faith that they themselves will know which trees to piss on, how to claim their own territories. I ask for the guidance to help point them on their own ways to the upspringing of their own aboriginal names.
I so often feel that it's all far, far too much for me — too complex, too broken and I too insignificant and powerless to have any impact.
For my own inner city I ask for the specific and perfect streetlamps that light up in the twilight, one at a time as I walk slowly down the street, each one lighting my way to the next street corner, until I find, at the heart of the city, the wilderness from which upsprings my aboriginal name.