Bewundernswerte Sternen-Strich-und-innen-Frau

Glottisschlagende Nachtigällin. Neulich bin ich ihr begegnet der Sternenfrau, der Strichfrau, der Innenfrau. Sie hat mir deutlich signalisiert, sie sei nicht nur ein biologisches Produkt, ein Organismus, ein Mensch, eine Person, eine Persönlichkeit, nein, sie sei viel mehr. Sie sei weiblich von oben bis unten und mittendrin. Was ein Mann kann, könne sie schon lange oder – selbstverständlich – noch besser.

Eine Sternenfrau*.* ist immer der bessere Mann.

Diese Sternenfrau ist intelligenter, gebildeter … sie ist in allen Belangen besser, nein, der Komparativ gibt es nicht wieder, sie ist das Optimum, das Non-plus-ultra.

Die Sprache müsse geändert werden, damit der Geist der Gesellschaft sich ändere, sagt meine Sternenfrau. Schrieben alle nur noch weiblich und sprächen alle nur noch mit dem Glottisschlag, wendete sich die Gesellschaft allmählich und endlich zugunsten der Amazonen, der Kriegerischen, der Kämpfer innen.

Das Handwerkszeug zur Geschlechtsumwandlung der Sprache besteht aus eingebetteten Sternchen, Groß-Is, Quer-, Schräg- und Unterstrichen und wilden Mehrzahlformeln. Wo Logik keine Rolle mehr spielt, tritt die Ideologie ins rosa aggressive Rampenlicht.

Meine Sternenfrau haut Schranken weg, stürzt Denkmäler um und reißt Mauern nieder auf ihrem Weg in die matriarchalische Zukunft, damit die Jahrhunderttausende währende maskuline Vorherrschaft beendet und in eine feminine Vorfrauschaft gewandelt werde.

Die verweiblichte Gesellschaft wird neue Begriffe definieren und die Allmacht der Frauen nicht durch unterwürfiges Anhängen eines in an die männliche Form erdulden, sondern kreativ agieren. Wir gehen dereinst zur Bäckin, werden gelenkt von Politikinnen und bewundern die Arbeitskraft von Hochseefischinnen.

Meine Sternchenstrichfrau sagt: Wir tun das ja nicht nur für uns; wir denken umfassender und kämpfen darüber hinaus für all die vielen Hormoncocktaile und Geschlechtsnuancen zwischen den Polen Frau und Mann.

Ist sie nicht bewundernswert, meine Sternen-Strich-und-innen-Frau?

Mon admirable femme étoile

L’autre jour, j’ai rencontré la femme étoile, une femme super-allemande et forte au combat, une femme qui a clairement annoncé qu’elle n’utiliserait que des astérisques pour écrire les noms de professions et de groupes de personnes; par exemple Politiker*innen.Elle m’a clairement indiqué qu‘elle – et ses camarades féminin*es – n‘est pas seulement un être humain, une personne ou une personnalité …  non, ellec’est bien plus. Elle est une femme à part entière. Ce qu’un homme peut faire, elle est capable de le faire depuis longtemps ou – bien sûr – encore mieux. Une femme étoile est toujours le meilleur homme! Cette femme étoile est plus intelligente, plus éduquée … elle est meilleure à tous les égards. Il n’y a pas de comparatif, elle est excessive, la nec-plus-ultra.„La langue doit être changée afin de modifier l’esprit de la société”, affirme ma femme étoile. Si tout le monde n’écrivait que sur les femmes et ne parlait qu’avec le coup glottique, avec une petite pause, avant l‘astérisque – comme Politiker innen –, avec force la société se tournerait progressivement et au final en faveur des Amazones, des guerrières, des combattantes.

Les outils utilisés par la société pour la modification des genres du langage consistent en des astérisques intégrés, des majuscules, des barres croisées, des barres obliques et/ou des traits et des formules plurielles sauvages – aussi alors Politiker-innen, Politiker_innen, Politiker/innen, PolitikerInnen. Là où la logique ne joue plus de rôle, l’idéologie passe sous les projecteurs roses et agressifs.

Ma femme étoile abat les barrières, renverse les monuments et détruit les murs sur son chemin vers le futur matriarcal, afin que la domination masculine qui dure depuis des milliers de siècles se termine maintenant et se transforme en une domination féminine.

La société féminisée définira de nouveaux termes. L’omnipotence des femmes ne durera pas à cause de l’attachement soumis à la forme masculine, mais agira de manière créative. Nous allons à la boulang*èrie, sommes dirigés par des politici*ennes et admirons aussi le travail dur des pêcheur*esses en haute mer polaire inhospitalière.

Ma femme étoile dit: „Nous ne faisons pas cela uniquement pour nous-mêmes, nous pensons plus largement et luttons aussi pour toutes les mixités et les nuances de genre entre la femme et l’homme.”

N’est-elle pas admirable, ma femme étoile?

Adorable starry stroke-and-I-inside gal

Glottis-beating night-time birdy. The other day I met her – the star woman, the dash woman, the inward-I woman. She clearly signaled to me that she was not only a biological product, an organism, a human being, a person, a personality, no, she was much more. She was female from top to bottom and in the middle. What a man can do, is easy cake and she has long been able to do that, or – let´s not be too humble – even better.

A starry *.*woman*.* is always a better man.

Such star woman is more intelligent, more educated … in brief: she’s better in all respects, no, the comparative does not render it right, she is the optimum, the non-plus-ultra.

Our language must be changed, so that the spirit of our society would change, says my starry woman*.*. If all used only feminine forms and spoke just with a glottis stroke, society would ultimately turn in favor of the Amazons, the warriors, the fighter(esse)s´ interests.

The toolkit for genderizing language consists of embedded aster*i*sks, capital I’s, slashes/, underscores_, and wild plural form(ae)s.  Where logic no longer is of importance, ideology steps into the pinkly aggressive limelight.

My starry wo*.*man rocks and knocks down barriers, overturns monuments and tears down walls on her way into the matriarchal future, so that the masculine supremacy lasting for centuries is ended and changed into pure feminine predominance.

The feminized society will define new terms and not endure the omnipotence of women through submissive attachment of an „-in“ to the grammatically masculine form, but will act creatively: Thus, one day, we will not go to the baker´s shop but to the bakeresse’s, we will not be guided by politicians, but politesses and will admire the working power of female deep-sea fisheresses.

My starry-I-dash-inside-woman says: After all, we don’t just do the language genderizing for ourselves; we think more comprehensively, we fight beyond that for all the many hormone cocktail drinkers and all the gender shades of gray between this boring binary sex. Isn’t she (he*.*r) admirable, my starry-*I*stroke-/-woman?

Attempts of touch: Poem and aphorism. Questions and experiments from the workshop[1]

Poems and aphorisms share many a fate: both being literary short forms – the aphorism, of course, even more than the poem. Both occurrences of literary establishment’s outer rim; the aphorism, in fact, so much so that for many it doesn’t even seem to belong. Unlike successful novels or stage plays, neither bear significant money-making opportunities. While there are at least prize money and scholarships provided within the field of poetry, there is (almost) nothing of the sort for aphorisms. Both have their loyal fans among the producers as well as among the recipients. Although both have been certified dead on multiple occasions, nobody happens to really be able to finish the job. And both are, although marginal phenomena, in a certain way omnipresent: poems are our life’s companion from birth, possible baptism, first love, wedding, anniversary all the way to our funeral. On the other hand, aphorisms and proverbs in all shapes and sizes are not only plastering these days social media pages, they are at least as much an ultimate perennial favorite as poems for all significant and other life situations.

Despite all these similarities, however, the virtues of poems and aphorisms are running rather separately. Being intensively occupied with poems does not translate to an equal occupation with aphorisms, and vice versa. There seems to be a – not necessarily normative – Apartheid between the forums of each; especially online but also in magazines. The typology of the core adherents also seems to be quite different: While the field of aphorisms, even preceding this tasteless pejorative, was said to be run primarily by „old, white, conservative men,“ the field of poetry, at least if one looks at avant-garde contemporary poetry rather than universal-trivial heartache poetry, seems to be populated primarily by sociopolitical-linguistic-gender-related rebels. It is clear that, if it should be more or less like that, one does not feel the greatest possible closeness and attraction to each other. The typological differences do bear a rather hard core in the matter: although it is possible to claim that aphorisms, just like poems, turn thinking at least one turn further and want to lead to a different, new kind of perception and recognition. Aphorisms, however, do this precisely with the normal language’s toolbox, i.e. the means of normal grammar, syntax, semantics, etc., even the context is in a new way reformulated and thought differently. Poems, at least those that can be classified as contemporary poetry, on the other hand, very often work with deviations from and dissolutions of conventional language structures in order to open up new and different spaces of perception and recognition. Here, as far as the handling and understanding of language is concerned, not infrequently trenches open up. Yet there have of course always been quite intense the approaches and contacts between the two genres in literary history. For one, in conceptual philosophical poetological terms: think, for example, of the ideal of combining poetry, philosophy, and natural science, as pursued especially by (early) Romantics such as Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Novalis in the form of the fragment and its prototype the form of the aphorism. But think also of all the many famous poets who have distinguished themselves with poems as well as aphorisms, e.g. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Novalis, Friedrich Nietzsche, Christian Morgenstern, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Kurt Tucholsky and others (this list actually does not contain too many women!). Or one considers those authors whose texts lie in the area of tension between diary, poetry, aphorism, and other literary short forms, such as Kurt Marti or Felix Philipp Ingold. Despite these historically isolated strong points of reference, the paths of aphorism and poem, if one disregards the trivial forms of their confluence, nowadays run largely separate from each other. With this, perhaps, the potential of mutual inspiration is only rudimentarily exhausted.

Being someone who is concerned with and fascinated by poems and aphorisms alike has brought about questions in my own writing workshop about their relationship and interaction:

• Where does the aphorism end, where does the poem begin?
• What is the effect of their matter of arrangement?
• Can a text be both an aphorism and a poem?
• Are there lyric-drawn aphorisms that and poems wanting to become aphorisms?

Such questions give rise to experiments, some of which I would like to briefly outline here.

(1) Variation of the arrangement

Some texts incite me to test them in both forms of genre. This text was originally written as an aphorism:

Understand, this is normal: men love men, and men love women. And women love men, and women love women. And all love their children. And they love their parents – men as well as women. So much can be trusted to love.

Evidently, this text is not quite the typical aphorism simply because of its rhyme and the distinct repetition of words. If one arranges it as a poem, it looks as follows:

understand

this is normal

men love men

and men love women

and women love men

and women love women

and all love their children

and they love their parents

men as well as women

so much can be trusted to love

What’s different? In the arrangement as a poem, the parallel struts between „men“ and „women“ become more conspicuous and thus probably even more striking than in the regular order of sentences. This way one might possibly read the text differently, namely more slowly. To me this is a case of: could be either, but is probably better suited for poem form.

Here, I draw the contrary conclusion:

pain

avoidance is the basement of lust

but lust wants more

wants to reach high

it wants when it has come to the light

to rise ecstatically

into spheres where stars shine milky

and lust and pain unite 

When put into poetic form, the phrases „to rise estatically“ and „spheres where stars shine milky“ seem hard on the edge of kitsch. Embedded in aphoristic prose, they seem more discreet and hence probably more coherent:

Avoiding pain is the basement of lust. But lust wants more, wants to reach high. Once it has come to the light, it wants to rise ecstatically: to spheres where stars shine milky, and lust and pain unite

(2) Aphoristic Poem and Lyrical Aphorism

Now we are dealing with texts that show characteristics of both genres and can therefore be considered as kind of hermaphrodite. An example would be the following:

You will never reach the ignorant, not with facts, not with deeds and not with beautiful pictures. Save your time, pump it somewhere else. You speak only with your own kind. There you get love likes, you can also argue splendidly. The rest is waste of time.

Although the rhyme as well as the somewhat longer sequencing of the sentences do not make this a typical representative of the genre, the text would probably pass as an aphorism. However, it could also be staged as a poem, in which case it would certainly be rather atypical in the context of contemporary poetry simply because it is strongly grounded in life wisdom and comes across as rather advisory:

the ignorant

you will never reach

not with facts not with deeds

and not with beautiful pictures

save your time

pump it somewhere else

you speak only with your own kind

there you get love likes

you can also argue

the rest

these are futilities

Particularly because the text, with its imperative ductus, is more conspicuous in the family of poems than in that of aphorisms, and because phrases such as „pump it [the time] somewhere else“ and „love likes“ are more unusual in poems than in aphorisms, it seems to me more interesting as an aphoristic poem rather than in its pure prosaic form.

Again, the situation here is the other way around for me:

without you no me

without me no we

without we neither you nor I

no basis for it

the ground of the one is the ground of the other

As an aphorism, the text is a bit atypical in that it plays with semantic vagueness and an elliptical parallelism-construction. Whether it thus makes for an exciting enough poem, however, seems questionable to me. On top of that, perhaps the capitalization chosen in the prosaic version benefits the comprehension of the text. For me, it is therefore more a lyrical aphorism than an aphoristic poem:

Without you no me, without me no we, without we neither you nor I. No basis for it. The ground of the one is the ground of the other.

(3) And this: Aphorism or poem?             

It shall remain an open question:

what

would they be without me

my love my desire

my crooked and slanted

ways infidelity thoughts

and without them what would I be

now say

straight out say it now  

and do not say nothing now

What’s the point?

Poems and aphorisms currently seem once again to have few touching points with each other. Simultaneousy, I believe gentle attempts of touch and relational experiments between the two to be worthwhile, because they do not only sharpen questions about the staging of the texts, but more importantly bear potential for inspiration and design in both directions.

[1] The literary texts used are  taken from the author’s book: „denk / mal / frei. Sauschlaue Sprüche und renitente Reflexionen“ (Geest Verlag) March 2021.

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