Pardon blooming
Date
1983
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract
A toad, a butterfly, a human being, a philodendron, all need sustenance, need air; all grow and change. Clamp a bottle over a living creature and it suffocates, its movement restricted, its possibilities limited. For an individual, rigidity becomes a glass bottle, and those who struggle to escape the bottle must experience something painful in the process. Glass bottle. Rigidity of society and tradition. For some, rigidity comes from their own acceptance of society's rules or tradition's importance. A creature raised in the confines of a glass bottle is uncomfortable with sudden freedom, as uncomfortable, perhaps as a free creature confined. For others, rigidity is imposed from the outside. These rigid boundaries of society and tradition may not be apparent until they conflict with the individual's inner needs for growth, but when they do conflict, the individual must find air to breathe. Some escape the glass bottle; most don't. Glass bottle. Rigidity of linear time. Although the concept of time as linear is arbitrary in Western thought (some American Indian tribes do not have such a concept), most of us assume our past happened to us in the time line before now. If we remain always the same person, the past, the memories happen continually. But if we have grown and changed, we are not the same person as the child of ten, the adolescent of fifteen, the young adult of twenty. The memories we hold happened to a different person because we are always becoming someone else. Linear time does not allow this idea, but circular time, or even spherical time, does. Glass bottle. Rigidity of gender. Separation of the sexes by innate differences or by imposed societal roles creates a rigid boundary that obscures the commonality of human experience, that denies the similarity of emotion and need in men and women. The first thing that strikes the careless observer is that women are unlike men. They are 'the opposite sex'--(Though why 'opposite' I do not know; what is the 'neighboring sex'?) But the fundamental thing is that women are more like men than anything else in the world. 1 Glass bottle. Rigidity of language. The boundaries of our language define the boundaries of our world. Those things we cannot perceive, we cannot say, and vice versa. The stories in this collection seek to express what our language has no way of saying, to escape a rigid structure, voice or time, to break glass bottles.
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Print version deaccessioned 2024.
Print version deaccessioned 2024.
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