From the Cambridge Dictionary – Girl – noun, a female child or young woman
Can also mean
Old-fashioned, usually plural
A woman worker, especially when seen as one of a group –
Shop/office girls
From the Alice Severin dictionary – Apron Girl – noun – a woman who cringes when her fellow co-workers, having been upgraded from secretaries to executive assistants, call each other “ladies” when emailing about the latest task to be undertaken, or cones in the parking lot, or anything; a woman who recognizes that silence, smiling, and subservience are the elements of harvesting a paycheck; a woman who having never spent enough time ironing or cleaning, leaves a faint trail of unease, however wide the smile or deep the curtsey.
I was just reading an article about poetry, and the difficulties that the author was having with a particular attempt at writing a particular poem. The essay dove in to language – to the ancient and innately poetic words of place names along a drover’s track in Scotland – the Scots Gaelic and older forms leaving their imprint on the land. But she referred to philosophy as well – talking about Wittenstein, a translation by Zwicky – it was a very well written article, and reminded me of my own past as an essay writer in university, and how admiring I still am, yet how impatient I was of conventions. Yet the style of writing was engrossing, the fluid heavy meanderings of thought. A quote from Zwicky showed how to engage with Wittenstein, maybe with language itself:
It often requires us to hold its sentences side by side in our minds until connections dawn.
Here, meaning in the USA, the demands put on language and expression – repetition, a false jollity, often demonstrated by exclamation points, frequently in use of simple, conversational expressions – make language, and possibly thought, sexless, flat, unsurprising. The drive-through of expression, and your latte at the end of it may have whipped cream, but it’s also a bit bitter, sad and lukewarm, but always recognizable. And in your hand. You know where you are with an American email or blog post. Unless you don’t. The connection is made transaction, the length of time it takes to wait at the window.
As a professional apron girl (see above), I recognize the elements of power in how often minds are changed and the instructions that follow completely overridden with their opposition. A nation that worships simplicity, athleticism, and the rule of law now finds itself in a place where the irrational and ill-considered whims of a leader are followed, tracker-like, by the press, by those that think everything is fine.
As a professional apron girl, I could have seen this coming. The horror of everyday emotional pummeling turned on the people that promoted it. Men who would rather vote for abusers, and women who would rather vote for the illusion of safety.
As it turns out, I know a great deal about the illusion of safety. Or illusions. Or what happens when you look down, as I am now, and realize you are the one that put up the high wire. You admire your previous bravado, as you wonder how the hell to get down. Or if you should get down. Maybe this is a chance to draw an entirely new web of wires to go higher, go somewhere else.
What has this got to do with poetry, you may ask.
Maybe I am thinking of the danger of incorporating poetry into life. Or the thrill of it. You know that one word, used in an unusual way, is going to break something. Or the lack of words. The silence that must be kept, overfull like the last month before giving birth.
In the article, one point that struck me was how, they said, what was unsaid was just as important as what was said. The writer, Lesley Harrison was talking about the “vast, airy, unworded space around them”. Lesley Harrison “Everything I have not written”
It instantly made me think of Walter Benjamin, and his quest for a universal, spiritual language. I keep his philosophy in mind during my attempts to befriend the pigeons who are now coming to roost on the brick windowsills of my new lodging place, a former mill. The lease strictly forbids the feeding of animals, so I have nothing useful to offer them. But now that it is cold, I am guessing that the slight heat that comes off the giant windows, open or not, is enough to keep them wheeling around and settling. This is behavior I have noticed only since it has become very cold. Or not very cold – but shocking nonetheless, because this is just the beginning of winter outside the huge windows, winter with grey and pastel rose streaks of long clouds and darkness filling the background completely by 5pm. Winter, wilderness adjacent, where one can try to speak to animals, animals who know, when they look at you and gauge what your real intent is, what is unsaid is where connection happens. Silence is important.
Connection. To whom, or what, or how, or when, or not at all.
I came across a comment written on an old essay admonishing me to not try to put everything in. I laughed, yet was saddened for that 17 year old student who believed that whatever they had been trying for hadn’t been achieved. They didn’t know then that escape was complicated, and survival without letters from home, uncertain. A teacher might have seen something in the quiet. But no one said the thing that made whatever their no doubt well-meaning instructions, or at least well-practiced – click. The not-thing wasn’t there. Pigeon-like, my young, hopeful self looked the person in the eye and saw they had nothing to say that made sense. I didn’t feel the not-thing behind their words. 17, brave, foolish, broken.
It’s a funny world. Connections count for so much, and the webs they weave leave out so many, and the left out, try to pretend it doesn’t matter, or that they will make more attempts. The truly left out are silent. Ignore the dangerous media pundits who claim they are speaking for all those silenced people. Like a direct line to god, it’s very handy. Useful for their plans, that they spoke to a million, to a multitude and got the lowdown on what hadn’t been heard.
We live in an age where everything we believed may be up for debate. We discover that tools newly excavated point to sea crossings long before the land bridges we thought explained everything. That the law of jungle is actually cooperation, not a robber baron cult of the brutalist. That trees speak to each other. But there are a lot of people out there with money who have invested heavily in their right to determine what the people believe. I don’t think they are thinking about how to undo the system, the game they learned to play, pitchforked into the midst of money, usually by parents with money. They are thinking about reinforcements. After all, what use is poetry to a person with 250 million dollars? What use is irony when discussing a man who arranged to be voted a salary of 1 trillion dollars.
An animal might see the disquiet in a person’s eyes. I might see it in a person’s eyes. Both of us need to bow our heads before the imperative of not becoming dinner.
The person writing the article on poetry and the poem that was proving difficult painted a picture of mountains, low houses, lochs, tradition. Now I think of those ancestors in Scotland driving their sheep across moulzie – frost-shattered – hills and valleys. My ancestry is part-Scottish, part-Irish, part other places, all whose language names might pull something under my skin, the way that word did – if I heard them. I found one ancestor who seemed to come to this country alone. What did he remember? The echoes and legends of all the experiences may still be there, in place names on my features.
Now, with nothing but persistence, patience, and moments of clarity, I have to live on my silences. To be directed by lost placenames.
This morning I asked if the sky could be a greater friend than a person who had lost your trust`.
And a pigeon landed. Silently.
