My Body Is

My gender is not. My body is not. My gender matters. My body matters. My gender does not matter. My body does not matter. My gender is. My body is. My body is a female composer’s, musician’s, songwriter’s and lyricist’s. 2021. I am 47 years old and with age I have noticed that thoughts wander further inward into the mind and the personal surroundings; the very same mind winds its way around inside there. I pause and do not know whether I should describe this. Whether it has relevance for this text about my position in music. About my gender. Body. The physical working conditions. May I speak about the children? About everything that poured out of me. Music, blood, semen, children. What was created. What creates. Why am I writing about this now? Why do I say it out loud in writing and look expectantly at the reaction? I do it here. What happens then? I take off my clothes and show the female body. Again and again. I decide when it should be shown. I decide in what context. I decide over my body. My body is. In defiance. Just as the child’s mind goes into defiance, takes everything to extremes, and the untamed imagination stands right behind me whispering in my ear. These are sentences that make no sense whatsoever. In fact it is crucial that I do not understand them. You place an onion in the hand at a concert with a Big Band. Afterwards. You do it only afterwards. When everything is lined up, I interpret myself and my surroundings. What was created. The whole thing is the work. Onions, horns, vocals, the guitar, the keys, the drums, oh, the drums that get caught in the dress, moved by the legs, the body spinning around in its dress, like the child spins, like the Sufi dancer I am only allowed to look at, not be, because of my gender. The Big Band that is men men men who believe I sing another man’s sound, and the troupe of artists I choose to work with because they know how to make a huge female womb one could tumble into, lie softly in, or perhaps it could simply speak. I have always needed help to stand up, like the unsteady child, and in an environment where my gender began as a factor of resistance I crept entirely into close relationships and stayed there. Watchful, violent and paranoid is what I have been called by myself and by others. I call it an alert bullshit detector with a longing for fundamental safety. When I forgive myself. In my life. My life. My work. There are no limits. I have even hit people, to see if they would stay. I still hit them. In play. In sound. The boundless does not exist. There is yes, no and maybe. The transgressive is a shared matter; otherwise it is an assault. Assault is not transgressive. It is assault. Boundaries disappear in the assault because one disappears as a human being, alive, as a body. My gender is not. My body is not. My gender matters. My body matters. My gender does not matter. My body does not matter. My gender is. My body is. Just as the intention of the first sound contained a kind of dissolution within it. What is it you want? Why are you making so much noise? I want to press people up against the wall with the noise. I want to see them disappear. Become pure body smiling with closed eyes. Gaping and holding their ears, yet staying against the wall. Those who are closer to the ecstatic dissolution of the individual. Those are the ones who dance. I shout from the stage. Sing. Scream. I play on borrowed gear. Toys. Throw the blocks at the wall. See where they land. Pick them up. Throw again. Play with the pretty doll. She plays guitar with her knife. In a silk dress. Slowly I gather my own toys in a beauty box. My own pedals. My own guitar. And man asks me all sorts of things I do not care about and I must bring forth the defiance in order not to appear stupid. I do not understand why man keeps asking. Does he not see that I cannot answer in a way that satisfies anyone? Where is the semen? Is it sprayed again without any other purpose than the release of an insecure ego? Why must I compromise my politeness to escape that form of communication? Self-assertion is an exhausting game. Duality dies. I close the door. Shut those kinds of conversations out. My gear is an extension of the body. I compose with my ears. I do not care about gear. I can make anything no matter what I have in my hands. Look at this stone. It has killed thousands of women by the water’s edge. Now I throw it as far as I can into the sea. And when, over the years, it has rolled back to the shore again, I will find it and throw it out again. I will keep watch. Furious, perhaps silent. Even the feminist version of Sisyphus becomes exhausted and gives up. I withdrew. For a while. Not because I no longer wanted to fight. I still kept an eye on the placement of the stones on the seabed. I dive daily and draw the seabed within myself. A map of bodies in transformation. My gender is not. My body is not. My gender matters. My body matters. My gender does not matter. My body does not matter. My gender is. My body is. The mind. The thing that winds its way, once asked me to stop and find my opposites and through them find my own gender in my music. The gender that is sufficient in itself. The gender that speaks without resistance, about resistance, in resistance. The gender that speaks freely. The gender that creates from what stands and not as a reaction to what has fallen. This knowledge now lies beside the guitar pedals, in the weight of the keys, bells and strings are struck. No one should live from reactions to unrest. For that the mind is too fragile. The sound of unrest is a master. One leaves one’s master. I could not stay there. The violent, the sharp, as expression held my surroundings in place, which held me in place. I ran away from home with the intuition, the instruments, the body, and my master waved without me seeing it. I did not turn around. The opposites I held in each hand, like small kindergarten hands that without intention simply reach out for the adult hand in order to walk. Together. The finest little group. What happens now? Is there something we must shout at, comfort, or throw back behind the skin of the stomach? Is there a series of tones among the transformation of lost teeth? I stand strong and the man avoids me. Checks that I do not intend to eat him. My starting point is the starting point and it is frightening to realize that one is the same as everything that has been created. That we exist at the same time. I am neither spider, scorpion nor Greek gods. I am the one who lay under the stone on the seabed. I am made of the same material as any horn player’s instrument. I am the longing to belong. To be connected with everything, as I know we all already are. It reveals itself. My gender is not. My body is not. My gender matters. My body matters. My gender does not matter. My body does not matter. My gender is. My body is.

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek