To the faithful in some short-term future. Another sermonette, about labels and audience, so meta and so central to what I think about here.

This morning I went over every post in the short collection so far and tweaked a few bits of syntax, cut a few chunks out altogether for publication purposes–adjusted my camo.

I carefully considered, and I left a lot more alone than I thought I would.

My name is Vairtere and I often wish that was all you knew.

I want my theater and my politics to be whatever the opposite of identity politics is.

I don’t want to act the part of writer or author or artist. I just want to write and be and create.

I don’t want an image and I don’t want a brand and I don’t want to market anything.

On the other hand I want intimacy with you. I want to be perfectly honest and naked and vulnerable. Such a freedom in that.

Maybe it’s true that those things are irreconcilable.

Let’s start here.

The host called the poet ‘he’, and the poet says the poet grew up as a young woman. Invent your own label for your own private use, and without judgment if possible; I know I did.

It was a week or so ago that I said that. Yesterday there was another trans poet on the air, a local one this time, talking about a project to put word art into bathrooms, and how s/he was getting paid a little for it, some grant, some breathing space in which to craft without thinking too hard about holding down scattered and marginal teaching jobs for money.

I have some compelling and even scientific lived reasons for rejecting vanilla notions of the gender binary. When we say he or she, it’s a convenience and a shortcut that glosses the truth. Usually. There are plenty of people that have no reason to care about that. The labels are close enough to their truth, and they assume that it’s the same for everyone around them, and this assumption is more often than not right, or right enough. For government work, for polite society, for the average use case.

To these people, on this subject, I have nothing really to say. Except this. As I spill, and as you are voluntarily wet by the spill, you will continue to make assumptions. These will be mostly right. You are allowed to point to the things that make them rational, as when I refer to myself in vaguely male terms, conveniently labeling my own self, shorthanding.

That’s all for now on that. Forgive me if I’m being baffling. Maybe the next example will help to clarify. It’s easier to work with in many ways.

Gender aside, you’ll not ever see me identify racially. Race is even more deeply mythical than gender. I won’t ever imply to you that I’m black or white. There won’t ever be anything here about my experience as a Chicana poet or a Latino writer. I am not Indigenous to anywhere, even if the juniper mountains speak to me like nowhere else does. An accident of birth may have led the authorities to consider me a natural citizen of the Empire, but that’s their problem. I don’t consider my genetics or my legal status germane.

Religion. Just no. Not Catholic not Protestant. Not Sunni or Shia. Not Confucian or Jain or Zoroastrian. Neither Buddhist nor Jew. Once in a while I’ll say atheist-sounding things. But even atheism implies an unwarranted certainty about things metaphysical.

Now my distraction-friend Lukens, who I mentioned once before, is a cultural Baptist without belief, and he would say that my position is that of a ‘bugman’. It’s a meme word, I think, in the worst sense. Maybe some truth in it even, but not enough to sway me, certainly not enough to make me start attending church for his pragmatical reasons of economy or even community. To hell with your inherited identities and your useful skypuppets; I walk alone.

Age. “I won’t be here for the endgame”. It scares me that people I like have kicked off suddenly in their sixties. And of course “decades” have gone by. Assuming I’m old is close enough. I’ll tell you what I tell all those random websites. My birthday is January 1 in whatever year will get me past your age restrictions. What do you want to hear? What will you choose to believe?

Politics. I told you I voted for Sanders and in my heart I did, but it was a lie. Now that I consider the actual facts, I would have had to register as a Democrat to do that, to vote in their primary. I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I couldn’t ever have voted for Hilary, much less the feeble-minded prick that beat her in the Super Bowl. Party labels are of no more use to me than any of the others. It might be that feeling so qualifies me as an anarchist. I’ll think on it.

Geography. The idea of the Southwest is a fiction too. What is it south and west of? Well, the financial and political heart of the Empire. It would make equal sense to tell you I am a Norteña, an inhabitant of the northern part of the empire that lost. I could tell you about Aztlan, or Deseret, embrace either of those notions too, but it wouldn’t be any more true. Maybe for Oscar Zeta Acosta. Maybe for Terry Tempest Williams. But not for the Alex that calls itself Vairtere and is still working on a resonant middle name.

It is true that these arid and more empty elevations suit me, feed me, speak to me. That certain ranges have saved my life. That the tree labeled genièvre grows here and that I am often glad of it to a depth that sometimes edges into a feeling like worship.

Finally.

The last label that has floated around me in these prologue posts concerns what I do for wage slavery, which currently is teach.

That’s going to have to wait a bit though. I’ve been at this entry all day and I saved the hardest for last.

Next time.