If you were to ask me what part of myself still amazes me the most, it would definately be the chatter I produce when I am alone.
I don't just hear voices, I become voices, characters in my head with their own point of view. They are under my control, just vents from my subconcious where the voices bubble away all the time, having their own conversations.
"Radio Plays," people I know have called them when they sometimes get heard, me doing radio plays that amuse, delight and question. That's what they are, how I see them — snippets of chat and outbursts of speech that let me be aware of my churning connection to the godhead.
I don't do them out loud around people much, and I very rarely do them in text. It's hard enough to keep a voice in text, but one that shifts to irony or another view? That can get lost very easily. You can see this in what Steve said amazed him about me, my ability to speak in the voices of others, or even in places where some didn't believe that the same person was writing in two so different voices.
I remember the first time I met The Prince in person. She said I wasn't accepting my femme self. I asked which femme self she meant — the wisecracking English babe, the earnest mom, the party gal, or any of the other ones that come up. She waved me off as crazy, but an evesdropper said that she understood. She wasn't just one or the other. It's like I told TBB — we will never be just one or the other: we are trans.
So I listen and I hear and it amazes me. What comes out would be hard to process to text, but it leaps from my tongue like magic, voices that make me laugh and think and be aware in a way that I consider central to my own spritual calling.
The problem, of course, is that it's hard to have others engage these voices. I may laugh to myself when I say something funny, but without context, well, it's just all "you're so weird!" to most other people.
That's why I like play, why I have written on the importance of play, of my need for play and process. I know that TBB laughs the hardest when she hears me speak in a voice she recognizes, just hears the shift in tone, lets the poetry take over from the literal, and gets a taste of some realization that rings like a bell.
I babble. Sometimes, the babble is almost totally crushed. When I was down with the move and the surgery and all that mess, often I couldn't even form words. I spoke slow and with difficulty not finding the words. That's such a difference from moments like now when my fingers fly on the keys, words coming out easily, that it may have been the hardest part. That's not to say that what comes out is always fun & joyous — often it is not that at all — but at least when it's flowing it is better than when it is clogged, jammed, smashed. Even when I feel the pain and challenge, if I can speak it out, I have something of value.
Babble without someone who can listen, hear, understand, empathize or even "grok" is just noise that gets in the way. I know about being noise, because no matter how clear I try to be, stupid noise has been my ususal characterization, just babble that is so hip it is junk.
I'm not an author, writing for you, because I don't think you will get it. But I do babble for myself, in text and in my "radio plays" and it is that babble that continues to amaze me, full of what I could never build with blocks but that still flows like a mountain stream flowing over a rock ledge, falling, splashing and babbling into the brook below.
Maybe that's just my femme thing, a vibrancy and life out of logic that I have had to try to bottle up in my own septic tank.
But what ever it is, it is amazing, fun and pretty.
Even if it's just noise to you.
Callan 