Constructing Space: from Pizan's City to Woolf's Room

Forgive me if this is rushed, but I’ve promised myself to write on a daily basis, even if a few sentences.
So I read Virginia Woolf’s Room of One’s Own today and having read Christine De Pizan’s A City of Ladies, a comparison was inevitable, as I’m sure many have done. Pizan wrote in the early fifteenth century and Woolf five centuries later, but lamenting the status of women in literature, particularly as depicted by men, and the need for women’s voices to be heard. In short, Woolf argues that women writers require a space of their own and must be financially capable of attaining and sustaining such a space and Pizan an entire city. What’s interesting is not only the relevance of Pizan’s work at the present time but her aims surpassed Woolf’s, suggesting that women have been able to acquire a space of their own. While both attempt to distance themselves from their work, Pizan by introducing three allegorical figures, Reason, Justice and Rectitude, and Woolf by introducing the first person narrator as Mary Breton. Unlike Woolf, Pizan herself is the first person narrator actively constructing a city of women. So while sexual politics are present in both texts, Pizan attempting painting women as superior beings as to oppose the common held belief of their inferiority. Woolf was aiming for something more androgynous, yet her definition of androgyny sprang from a masculinist view of literature and writing, that is not to say a patriarchal view as she clearly denounces patriarchy; that is, she aimed to write as men have written, since they’ve had a freedom of mind and space. Throughout her text, she represses any form of emotion or anger in the hopes of appearing as a rational, collected, suppressing that which is connected with the feminine, mainly emotions (I’ll have more to say on women’s writing and essentialism when I write on Cixous and Irigaray).
An abrupt ending for now!

The Lights went out: Kant’s Sublime

Last night there was a storm that wiped out the power and I was reminded of both Lebanon and Liberia particularly when I took a shower by candlelight: places where both water and electricity were scarce, and still are. Though, this time, I didn’t have to worry about running out of hot water or water in general. But I was also reminded of something else, particularly of Kant’s conception of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment. He defines sublime in the said book as that “which is absolutely great.” As branches fell outside, and the unstoppable rain poured and thunder and lightning played a dramatic beat in the background and the sky began to change colours, I was faced with the absolute. The storm instilled both fear and awe, overpowering my cognitive faculties. At the same time, I became cognisant of myself as a rational and moral subject, more so of the former. For Kant, the sublime, as I understand it, registers in two parts: at first, it represents the inadequacy of our imagination, but at the same time, since we have access to it from a position of safety, we sense superiority over nature; that is, we find “a faculty of estimating ourselves as independent of nature." In this scene, the storm proved the inadequacies of our physical capacities, in that we are not able to resist it, yet this is revealed through our faculty of reason. In other words, the sublime subordinates our imagination to our reason.

backward

i wrote this a while back, but thought to return to it:

uttering lacerated words--
like bullets searching for a lover
in a straitjacket
I reach out my hands to touch a stranger
but I’m read in reverse

insanity

How does one approach insanity? By what criteria can we judge it? Is recognition sufficient to making a claim that it insanity is manifesting itself? Would Kant’s list of categories regarding the judgment of beauty—quality, quantity, relation, and modality—apply to judging insanity, particularly one’s own?
***
Insanity feels like a shadow lurking beneath moving, vibrant vessels, feigning deep sleep as it chases laminated dreams across stained pages. drained of hope it seeks meaning by aligning shattered glass, deciphering the message of a broken bottle, tossed night after night after night when the sunrise is brilliant advancing straight to the heart, but is soon enveloped by an endless chain of jasmine fragranced shadows and nothing else.

...

If I had to choose one word to describe life it would be flicker. Life consists of an on and off rhythm presenting us with our greatest challenges when it's off, and all turns pitch-dark like the womb of a spider and we're asked to crawl within and against. An unsteady movement like our eyelids as we glance onto the sun. It makes you question the reality of life and all we deem real.

this conversation

This conversation: a cool breeze unravelling, dispersing, awakening meaningful past moments. Spaces travelled, thoughts gathered, memories opened together. Live words erupt a streaming symphony rupturing silky blades against the winnowing night. Your words like curves, yes curves, never harsh, but expanding, soft against the dying light, moist. I listen. I move. I look. I wait. There are photographs in the background, catastrophes abroad. Politics empties cities, pouring souls to merge in tongues across the globe, all in search of proximity. They sail on edges, tattooing wet passports where the heart should be. I speak. You hear nothing.

revisiting

in the dark
I clean
memories between crevices
soft, yielding
laughter