No craft (When the Men are Gone the Women Go Mad)

No Craft-When the Men are Gone the Women go Mad

Week 161

Nobody here. No craft. (Must read Joan Didion because she was described in the Times as a master of her craft). I have none. I know nothing.
This I find reading Women’s Ways of Knowing is in part internalized sexism erasure. I am erased. I have been erased. Colonies are the women of the planet I suppose. The putas. And I am colonized, a woman. These hurts traveled into me through my mothers’ hands, her blows.

So I was primed for wage slavery. And now I am a wage slave. I think I have a mind but I have just a facsimile of one, I’ve sold off to much of it too many times. The things I seemingly know are the things for which I have provided my mind to my owners. Ways to herd people, to track them, ways to use my mind to fuck with theirs. Thank God I’m not a prison guard or an army general or a cop. The soul possession would be still deeper.

The meeting from hell. Solly was in slavemaster form. In that form she is somebody else I don’t know. (O, but I know her very well.In that form she channels my Mother at her worst, my Mother during her violent fugues; Mrs. Crespo entering imperially into the fourth grade classroom benign and a despot all at once. She begins by humiliating Lucha who was distracted, sleep deprived, walked into the meeting after just having spoken with Jody’s counselor in the desert. I can always tell from Lucha’s face if Jody’s doing well and that morning was a bad one. Later she told me, during the meeting break, whispered it standing in the middle of our little office by the file cabinets that separate our two desk wide spaces, that Jody had once again tried to run away. Into the desert. “Where did she think she could go?” Lucha sobbed hard. “Does this mean she wants to die?” But during Solly’s first humiliation offensive at the meeting I didn’t know yet that Lucha was wondering if her daughter was dead or alive. It made me notice how much of my mind at any given time is on Machi. On the question, “Where is Machi?” And, o my god, on Ori, on the question.”Where is Ori?’ So of course I have no craft, know nothing. That was the question of my childhood, “Where is Papi?” And the lesson of my childhood my Mother taught: When the men are gone the woman goes mad. When the men are gone the woman wonders aimlessly room to room unable to track the housework, collapses when she gets home from work and after she has fed the child cornmeal mush with brown sugar for her supper, and reemerges phoenix like from the devastation of full erasure, in a rage, a full blown rage, threatening to kill the diantre (her euphemism for Diablo a word that evidently could not be said), and shaking the diantre, digging fingernails into the diantre’s shoulders, hitting the diantre as hard as she could on the bottom, careful never to hit where the bruises might show.
But no provocation of Solly’s gets Lucha to the rage place, her prodding of Lucha, her rapid fire questions about her report first and later about her opinion that Solly should in person go visit the programs that will be closing to say something, anything, acknowledging to the workers many of whom will be let go, the mockery, the glances at x (bbf), then the rest of us all of whom are also being put in our places as she puts Lucha in her lowly, lowest place.
(Likei in school, in the burocracy some must fail so that others succeed.). Targeting scapegoats for terror puts the fear into the rest of us.

And how can Lucha think at all, wondering if Jody is dying of dehydration or starvation, or trampled by a wild horse or bitten by a rattle snake?

Solly said, “You’re telling me the programs don’t know they’re closing at the end of this month? Didn’t I tell them that last time we met?”

Lucha raised her hand and brought the heel of her palm toward her forehead as if she was about to hit her head. I’ve seen her make this gesture before. It usually makes me laugh. Not this time. I sank low into my chair. So low my head was resting on the padded chair back. Showing my belly like the beta dog I am.

Of course we all know Solly told everybody nothing was certain about the programs closing because nothing was. She made everybody believe that they would continue under the volcano, eruption as imminent and unlikely at once as ever.
Now we all laugh, nod. Some thought stirs in my brain and I sit up and pipe up. “It wasn’t clear. That the programs would actually close at the end of the month was’t clear.” Solly looks at me. The looks at Lucha . Solly’s at the head of the table, Lucha and I are each sitting beside her, across from each other. Now Solly ping pongs her head from one to the other a few times. She shakes her head. Looks at the others for approval. “There you go. The two of you. You are the staff developers talking to the staff. You’re confused so they’re confused.”

I slide down into my chair again. Lean my head back. This time I’m giving my belly, and my neck. Nobody else says one word. Although all of us know it was Solly herself who started the confusion.