Streams of Consciousness: A Postmodern Tirade on “This Woman’s Work”

Well now I know why I like the song “This Woman’s Work” so much. It’s a remake of an 80’s tune from a British singer named Kate Bush. I heard it while reluctantly watching the John Hughes film “She’s Having a Baby”. As soon as I heard and recognized the opening lines, I rushed to my computer to find its author. After downloading it, I listened a number of times and then suddenly it became clear, as I will attempt to elucidate, that this song hauntingly laments about the longing to be one, while tacitly revealing that we already are.

(WARNING: Proceed with caution, as contents may cause confusion.)

Here is a song about a woman imitating a man trying to empathize with the woman who is giving birth to their child. And Maxwell, covering the song, is imitating a woman imitating a man trying to empathize with the woman who is giving birth to their child. And I, a woman, am identifying with this man imitating a woman imitating a man empathizing with the woman giving birth to their child. Still there?

Of course, conveyed in the film, there is an even deeper meaning, or superficial one as it would be, almost mystical in its ability to capture that indescribable moment when, at the birth of a child, everything, it all makes sense. Childless, I can only romanticize what that might be like. But this much seemed to epitomize my place in the whole mess, what we, so awkwardly term “this generation”, finds itself doing again and again—unable to either eliminate or stop trying to eliminate its boundaries through an enigmatic process of unending self-imitation.

It does nothing to less complicate matters that Maxwell is a black man imitating a white woman. It fits quite nicely in what black-and-white has always been, especially in this country, a two-sided truth that can neither be fused nor separated. No matter how hard black tries to imitate white, or white black, the essence of difference is never eliminated, while, at the same time, also never stripped from one another as it uses itself symbiotically to devise meaning. That is, no one can ever know what white is without knowing what black is, and vice versa. So the pain of difference can never be eliminated even as this pain motivates us to desire its elimination.

The closest any modern cultural icon has ever come to eliminating the cleave between black men and white women without clearly representing one or the other has been Michael Jackson. And we all know the wrath this attempt has ensued. What other ostensibly benign figure has been the subject of such contempt outside of Jesus? I can hear the offended gasps now.

Truthfully, something bothers us about dissolving difference; it’s interpreted as dissolving oneself, ethereally of course, even as attempting to do so seduces us. Who would deny that they all had a crush on RuPaul, who bell hooks once described as a big black man trying to become a little white woman. It was an exciting show, an intercourse that climaxed and pulled out back into this reactionary Dubbya period.

So I give up. I fold. Pushing against the residual manifestations of our desires, in this case the desire to erase otherness necessitating the existence of others, has left me both frustrated and weary, especially now that I realize that an idea can never be demanifested or destroyed, only a withdrawal of our attention to it. Moreover, I digress. In the simplest terms and without the guilt, I like the song “This Woman’s Work” because, another example of life imitating art, imitating art, imitating life, imitating art until we forget where it all began, it reminds us that we are all one…thought. The rest has already been said. I’m satisfied, for now…

Good Manifestations II: Mom’s Manifestation

As usual, I was watching a film—this time it was Something New—and I had one of those a-ha moments, this time, with respect to my mother.

As a side note: it has taken me most of my life to realize that I was born to my mother, not out of some cosmic joke, but in large part because of the questions she was asking the universe to answer. For some reason or another, she was not in the place to receive the answers directly. Nonetheless, she kept asking, desiring. Hence, I was born. I grew up answering those questions, quite easily it seems, because I didn't desire them as much as she did. So in the spirit of tradition, I offer this piece…

Metaphysicists say that through living our lives, which naturally cultivate desires in us, we create and cause universal expansion. In other words, just the desires themselves manifest expansion and change. The catch is that we ourselves have to catch up with that expansion in order to personally take advantage of it; otherwise, while it most definitely will serve humanity potentially and the universe immediately, it will not necessarily be enjoyed by you individually, that is, within the lifetime of your focused ego. But if you catch up with the expansion, the equivalent of believing and knowing that, as an extension of the expanding universe, you already have what you want, then within your lifetime, immediately as you believe, as soon as you come to speed with the desire, you will experience it—its essence will manifest.

What does it mean to know and believe you have something that is not in that very moment present in your reality? It means being excited, happy, anticipatory—it's going to sleep Christmas Eve, knowing that Santa's coming with your presents.

Incidentally, there's a reason why we have this Christmas ritual in our culture. It reminds adults of the reason for our existence—getting stuff we want. Even though children are eventually told that Santa Claus is really just their parents—a traumatic rite-of-passage which serves only to foster permanent dependence on our parents for the things we desire—in actuality, the only real lie we are told is that Santa Claus doesn't exist. The same as saying God, source, the universe—whatever name one chooses for the infinite intelligence of which we are all a part and which creates all things—doesn't exist, so doing is the reason why hearing the lie, or more accurately, believing it hurts so much as children who are so much closer to their god-self to begin with. Along that line of reasoning, any attempt to disprove the existence of “God” is an attempt to perform suicide. The good news is neither is really possible.

So what the Secret and the whole LOA gang are getting at with all this "get happy" nonsense that seems to irritate the permanently pessimistic is really self-empowerment. In order to enjoy in this dimension, in this lifetime all of the goodies we have subconsciously been creating all this time, we need to wake up out of this self-loathing trance we have been under and get happy because, simply put, happiness is the key to self-empowerment…and not, as the time-old misconception teaches, the other way around.

Which brings me back to the first teacher of time-old misconceptions—mother. Mine has been writing, imagining a story for the last 30 years. It’s the story of a black woman and a white man. It’s the story of interracial love. As I mentioned earlier, I was watching this film “Something New” the other day, and something dawned on me. It dawned on me that this is the story my mother envisioned! So you think, “Yeah, well, so what? That’s not hard to imagine.” But even bolder than that, I assert that she created the story. She may not have been in the place to receive it into her own reality (i.e. get credit for it), but there it was. And aspects of the film so closely mirrored my mother’s life that I am sure the universe were putting up neon signs to prove it. The amusing little coincidence that the place the main character took her daily walk is the exact same place my mother takes her daily walks, for instance. It just goes to show how, like a baby discovering its own hand for the first time, discovering our ability to manifest, a higher level of the same self-realization process, is meant to be amusing.