School of Girls

I remember that years ago, I had a dream of wondering through an abandoned hobbit-style village whose houses each had a clock mounted in its face; the minute hand of each was missing. There was a tunnel in the hillside sealed by with a gate or door. I ventured near the entrance but the air was so cold and the tunnel so unnaturally dark, I thought that I had no good purpose within and decided to leave. Then the darkness from the tunnel reached out and drew me within. I came to awareness on an airfield in the 1940s (but perhaps the 1950s). There were a hundred WAACs standing in formation. I was a senior female officer; I approached to stand before them as though I were to make a speech; I thought that I had returned to my Alma Mater. Another officer approached me, and said, “How old are you now, Anne?” I thought she knew well my age, since she was a former schoolmate. Concentrating on this inconsistency made me awake.

If there is something to remember, I know it must be unpleasant; women in earlier ages did not have pleasant lives. And yet, it seems to me that remembering the details cannot be the goal; we are in hell merely because our attention is the kind that is attracted to dark events. We cannot help but look whenever tragedy or scandal occur. This locks us into a reality in which tragedy and scandal occur. I have learned this satisfactorily from dreams; we have nightmares only because we look at them.

The opposite of a nightmare is to love. It is a liberation to love; yet we struggle to find objects worthy of love. The concept of worthiness is itself an artifact of a dark world. (Psychedelic) love does not require an object; it is a grooviness that notices opportunities.

I think there are two solutions . The first is to love what you create, however small must it be. It can be as small as your home or your hobby. The second is to love others who are similarly seeking a path out of hell, they that have no superceding project.

There is a logic of schools that a school teaches according to the needs of the civilisation that created it. The needs of the students have no primacy — and why should they? Anything which is not a need of the civilisation does not put the civilisation in a position to create schools. Civilisations which cannot promote their own survival and expansion are subsumed by those which can.

A student therefore finds herself in an environment that treats her as a cog. She has a function to play and she is taught to play it; any contradictory impulse is discouraged or punished. To love — to seek the liberation of love — is at best orthogonal to the needs of civilisation, and at worst a menace. Civilisations have created the concepts of forbidden love and illicit love — concepts which should be enough to deligitimise those civilisations — save that those civilisations tend to be the strongest.

In such an environment, a girl may love another girl. A girl is the only possible object of affection, as she is similarly oppressed, and has not yet internalised the oppression. This is not to imply a sexual relationship, but at least some kind of intimate emotional relationship.

I think this is why I dream of being a girl in a school with other girls; it is our shared dreaming enterprise, rather than shared gender, which unites us. In the end, I don’t know that there is anything for me to remember, other than the enterprise itself.