Blue Sky

I attended a lecture on the fissure of symbols at a time in my life when I had rejected the idea of being a woman. I was not interested in being a man; my rejection was not the finale to suppressing an honest desire to become myself. I wanted to be a woman and I wanted to reject being a woman; to be concise: I wanted love. A Catholic nun gave advice on marriage through a reading of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. She suggested that the reason women felt unsatisfied in their marriages was because women chiefly desired to be admired. I feared my admiration for others was less valuable than the admiration others might have ever had for me. On the stage of someone’s admiration I became more aware of the performances that led me there. When I honored my own ability to love, I was met with the purity of a stranger’s common sense, their ideas of themselves and their ideas of women, or the impassable knowledge that came with naming then abandoning lust, even when a gaze transformed only into the sincerity of flesh speaking with flesh. In honoring my love, who admired me mattered little, but the effect of my love certainly seemed dependent on the presence of this admiration. When I honored the fact that I could be loved, the silence of love seemed most immune to the social dregs of language at every age of realism. Even when I did not love myself, I understood what Eartha Kitt meant when she said that to be in love was to love herself, to have someone love herself with her.

John Berger wrote that every woman carried an image of herself: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” How a woman related to men influenced her relationship to herself. If so, when I wrote in the first person, whether in plain speech, or the lyric, I was always already wearing some clothes of language I could not fully see or feel. I only knew what Berger wrote about women because I attended the reading of a woman I admired who recited his words when asked about her relationship to clothes. A mixture of admiration for the woman and her clothes, and a censored loathing towards myself and my clothes, even in my anonymity, lent Berger’s words their frustrating realism. Naming a symptom did not necessarily bring one closer to finding a cure. I did not think one might wish to cure oneself of having an image to begin with. Though, I seemed to desire a cure for some affliction of images. Philo of Alexandria said the happiest man was the one who was true and who appeared true. One who was true but did not appear true, or one who appeared true but was not true, could not be truly happy. It would seem this philosophy applied to women as well if not for the fact of Berger’s words. Words and I were equally faithful to experience. Words watched over a pattern with rigid fidelity to itself, and I fell into a mold of fate one described later as faithful, then cited as evidence for some way of love.

The image existed before a woman became a woman, before she came of age and considered her feeling towards time at the prospect of having always been a woman. I was always becoming and would always have been one woman. As a child I could imagine being any woman, and I could even imagine being many. I was the future of women. I believed I saw the world from my own perspective before I was told that the perspective belonged to men, and later I had to reconsider the order of my feelings once I realized two distinct conditions: my attraction to the other sex, and the fact that I was the other sex some men were attracted to. It was a betrayal—of whom, or what, I do not know—to look upon a history of my own thoughts, to see that they were mine alone, that, once uttered, would only participate in an understanding about women that seemed equally mythological to men and women.

I became more aware of the image I had been carrying as an image when I did not receive attention. I was not certain the attention I desired was what I desired. I was almost certain that my desire for attention was a shallow mode of resistance to habituation, and that what I desired could not exist as a desire, much less that attention was its name. If I truly valued attention, then, for attention to become an object of my desire, whether of the flesh or the spirit, as a way to measure the quality of my time, or the making of my consciousness, I was misconceiving attention for the sake of desire. Once attention became the object of my desire, it was no longer what I desired before I desired it. Either attention was a translation of my desire, or attention was the translator of a desire becoming my own. I knew that I loved seeing the world more than I loved to be seen. I would have preferred to see myself, rather than how I was looked at, if not because, I think, if I could have, I might have been able to truly love, rather than introduce myself in a mood for love.

To speak to my desire through the language of my image, to imagine my desire comprehended me when I acted through the rules of my image, gave power to the mood. To love suspended the history of interpretations that trailed every image. When I loved, I forgot all images. I might have had the chance to look at the person I loved clearly if I could have unseen every apparition of myself. How might one have seen another as themselves without the past of their own gaze haunting the present? If my eyes made peace with the limits of my language, then seeing another as another, without a shadow of the past saturating their present color, prolonged some apparition of passion. Passion required more courage than I required of myself relying on a ghost as a conduit for a passion that could not find the freedom of its form in life, having the ghost express for me what I could not yet express to myself in my own words. I was afraid that this sense of an original image, before it was supplanted by the gaze of the other, never existed, and that it was as much of a fantasy the present had about the past, as it was a fantasy the past kept for itself while the present evaded the word I desired to say in time.

Of the images of women that I knew, I could not genuinely refer to any famous woman as my model for beauty when I was alone. I felt almost impoverished for admitting to that fact. It was only when I spoke to other women that I looked to women whom the world had long looked at. I was deeply enamored with Marie Curie when I was eight years old, but I knew once I was exposed to chemistry that I would not become a chemist. At the time, I admired a narrative of her strength and intelligence that presented her will as a will to power, to know the unknown at the expense of her own body. I did not consider then why her power seemed most visible to me in my discovery of the fact that she was killed by the very element that she named. Without knowing more about her personal life, I thought that true love, and my ambitions, whichever form they would eventually take, were equally possible, if not inevitable, as they seemed the absolute companions of one another in a summary of her life.

Every moment of identification that seemed as intense as becoming was oil mixing with the water of an image I could not make permeable to my social reality. I laughed at myself for remembering how in the third grade a white girl pointed at each of the girls sitting in our circle of friends to name us, and when she arrived at me, she paused. She called Emily a great performer, Lily a singer, and Alexa a dancer. When her finger landed on me, she called me Asian. I cried instinctively because one word was unlike the others. By sharing this detail, I had named my grievances as gendered and racialized. The history of my social image easily abstracted itself due to the absence of names in my memory—the proof of details I was willing to remember—that would signify myself as one type of woman rather than another. On a date I was asked why my profile picture was of a blue sky. I said, “Because I am happiest when I am looking at the sky.” A close friend asked a similar question when she noticed I had changed the picture to a lighter shade of blue. In Berger’s discernment of the condition of a woman’s look upon herself, I had answered to the failure of my own vision, and the imposition of others’ visions of me, with the sky. Must I have been a woman you enjoyed looking at even in my own mind? Of course not, but then, consider to whom this question could have been posed, and imagine your great love before you. If all this was the war of our imaginations, let mine begin and end with the sky. I would have preferred for this image I carried of myself to be the sky, or at the very least, the afternoon light scratching a wall. Wisteria casted bulbous shadows into a barbed and tawny cirrus cloud shredding a pool of light where orange began to depart from yellow against the pale grey wall made wooly by strangling ivy. If I could not become what I saw when I was happiest, I wanted, at least, to be where the light landed, even if the light only ever hovered or crawled.