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Posted by babylon crashing | Filed under Illustration and art
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ghost girl
18 Sunday Aug 2013
Author Archives: babylon crashing
the way of the sword [in color]
18 Sunday Aug 2013
female samurai in colors (except when they’re not) …
Posted by babylon crashing | Filed under Feminism, Illustration and art
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ain’t i a woman?
18 Sunday Aug 2013
Posted in Feminism, Illustration and art
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Sojourner Truth (1797-1883): Ain’t I A Woman? delivered in 1851 at the Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman? …
Then that little man in black over there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? I said, where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with him …
If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again!
consider yourself
18 Sunday Aug 2013
Posted in Illustration and art
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“[I think] … the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement.”
— Angela Davis
onna-bugeisha
16 Friday Aug 2013
Posted in Feminism, Illustration and art
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art, Bushido, Empress Jingu, female samurai, Japanese mythology, kimono, nude, Onna bugeisha, woman warrior
“Any woman can be a hero, but few heroes can be an Onna-bugeisha. To be a true warrior you must follow the qualities Empress Jingu dictated: loyalty to one’s lord or lady, honor unto death and unselfishness, a readiness to sacrifice one’s own for that of others. What samurai is courteous to all? What lord is kind to those weaker than himself? Men are raised at birth to be vainglorious and as a result they will never know the Way, Bushido. Remember that these qualities are the signs of a true Onna-bugeisha as our lady wrote down, a warrior and a hero.”
— from Angelique Ange’s history, “Onna-bugeisha: les mères de bushido.” (translated from French, out of print, Paris, 1977)
2 hours
16 Friday Aug 2013
Posted in Erotic, Poetry, Portuguese, Translation
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Tonight. Nightly. Husbands penetrate their wives with boredom and cock. This is the same boredom in every city. In every countries. Tonight, from your hips to your feet, I want to make that long trip. With wet fingers with saliva. For two hours I will banish your husband. For two hours I’ll make your rose of fire damp. I’ll make your volcano erupt, and drown inside your goldmine. Tonight. Nightly. Husbands snore face down while wives in the dark dream about fucking.
.
Esta noite. Todas as noites. Os maridos penetram suas esposas com tédio e pênis. O mesmo tédio em cada cidade. Em todos os países. Esta noite, das tuas ancas aos teus pés, quero fazer uma longa viagem. Com dedos molhados de saliva. Por duas horas eu vou banir o seu marido. Por duas horas eu vou fazer tua rosa de fogo humedecido. Eu vou fazer tua irromper vulcão, e afogar dentro de sua mina de ouro. Esta noite. Todas as noites. Os maridos ressonam de borco enquanto as esposas no escuro sonham com o fucking.
the fine art of belly slicing
16 Friday Aug 2013
Posted in Poetry, Uncategorized
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art, Bushido, Chivalric Code, do got the guts?, Japan, katana, poem, seppuku
in one artful stroke
she demonstrated
to all the loutish
and barren old men
that she had more guts
and honor than all
their empty boasts
combined cutting
through first
her muscles and then
into baby fat …
.
.
NOTE:
Here in the West it is easy to romanticize other cultures, especially ones separated by distance and time that we believe had higher moral codes than we do today. It’s the ignorant belief that “things were better in the good old days.” Take 14th century France’s so-called Chivalric Code, in theory a set of principles we generally associated with the iron-clad medieval knight. Except that history has shown to us that there was very little that was noble about that warrior class, most of whom were butchers and mercenaries who were considered by European peasants they exploited worse than the Black Plague that had just struck. As Barbara Tuchman pointed out in her excellent A Distant Mirror (1978): “Barbarism, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable from France’s knightly Order of the Garter than sex.”
Japan’s warriors, the samurai, were no different. They had their own code, Bushido, which is typically thought to have stressed blind loyalty to one’s lord and honor unto death. What samurai movie doesn’t have the scene where at least one grim warrior, sitting crossed legged on the floor, his kimono open, sword in hand as he prepares to plunge the blade into his stomach, in order to keep his honor? I might not know a lot about history but the idea of seppuku remained with me for a very long time.
The image I present here is of an Onna-bugeisha, a female samurai (there is debate whether or not this class of warrior women actually existed or functioned in the way today’s stories present them, for a person like me who loves the romanticized ideal I will say yes and yes to both questions). The whole concept that someone would willfully cut open their own belly and pull their own intestines out with their hands as a way of “saving face” is so alien a concept that it horrifies me to the point of fascination. I will say right now: I do not romanticize suicide, but I seem unable to turn my eyes away, either. One of my favorite authors,Yukio Mishima, killed himself in this manner a few months after I was born. It is a very long shadow to live in and at times I can hear it calling.
lilith from the book of splendor
15 Thursday Aug 2013
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“… thou Lilith of the desert, thou hag, thou ghoul … naked art thou sent forth, unclad, with hair disheveled, and streaming down your back.” — part of a recovered Babylonian prayer to cast evil spirits out of one’s house.
I.
Out of sorts types of glamor of a good
death is a glamor of a good lay in
the wilderness where we once laid, for you
said it was tremendous to be that lost
gayly knowing that all that remains just
so, step out of my shallow depression.
II.
I took some vine and vined it through the glow
of her concealed, she was concealed at high
noon; you could see through her. Her glow was not
swamp flame, more blue iris, more moon flame if
the moon burned between her two dark shoulders.
III.
Spinsterhood, they called it. Torturous Tongue,
Woman’s Shame, Impure. They called it a lot
of queer and odd words. I dreamed of her owl
feet, her cat eyes and her four breasts. I dreamed
of that alien word for ecstasy.
IV.
Who could find me? She brought me a bastard’s
knife from out of the goldenrod, brought me
to a hut. She said, “arise,” and I did.
She said, “enter,” and I did deep inside
was a room full of tiny snakes all burned
to soft, small, nameless ash. Stir the coals then
V.
lie down in the field. Cut a door into
yourself and sprinkle the ash in. When it
opens a crow will caw out, over and
over. Outside jackal and hyena
will stop fighting and watch. Outside satyr
will stop singing and watch. All that moves, all
that flies, all that creeps. The sun returning
to this glamor death in the wilderness
where we laid all down now you must see that
all that remains here is a depression.
.
.
NOTE:
The Babylonian prayer I used in the beginning of the poem comes the book The Holy and the Profane (Gaster, 27)
genesis of lilith
15 Thursday Aug 2013
The dull elk, all beast-eyed and slow, mounting
some sort of grotesque heifer, each nipple
as long as your thumb. She was their offspring,
or close to it. Dim-witted and docile.
Breeder. Eve. They say, “Lilith seduced her.
Lilith knew no shame.” In a world where man
was a limp failure, wouldn’t you? Lover
Of All The Flesh, She Of The Two-Heart Clan,
Girl With Locust Wings. Men who never knew
love will tell you the damnedest lies. Lilith
betrayed Eve — went down on Eve — sucked Adam’s
cum out — gagged it all down, then off she flew —
Bollocks. There is no bisexual myth
only the tale of the world’s first threesome.
lilith of the talmud
15 Thursday Aug 2013
memories of my ghost sista 