The Furious Spinner

I dreamed last night I was a man. I wasn't a particularly nice man. I never am in my dreams. A nice man, I mean.

Before the dream, I woke up in the middle of the night, miserable because of this terrible itch on my back (long story—just imagine having an itch that never lessens no matter how much you scratch it). I picked up the book Women in Praise of the Sacred and flipped through it, looking for something to inspire me to go back to bed. My fingers stopped at a poem by Sappho. I imagined the poet on the Isle of Lesbos listening to a group of young women taking turns reading their poems. I liked that image. Unfortunately only a few scraps of Sappho's voluminous writings have survived to present day. Most of her work was burned at the instigation of Pope Gregory (380 C.E.) and Pope Gregory VII (1073 C.E.). They were not very nice men, either.

I picked up another book, Barbecued Husband and other stories from the Amazon by Betty Mindlin and indigenous storytellers. I LOVE this book! It is so funny. She's got stories in this book like stories I have never read anywhere else. Every time I pick this book up and read any part of it, I just giggle. I even get a kick out of the story titles: "Akaké, a groom with three cocks" (and she's not referring to roosters); "the ghost lover and the girl with the giant c1itoris;" "the clay pecker."

"The ghost lover and the girl with the giant c1itoris" is the first story I've read where a c1itoris is even mentioned, let alone a major character in the tale. This woman has an invisible lover, a spirit lover, who seduces her away from her husband and her lover. Each time she makes love with the spirit lover, her c1itoris gets bigger. Soon, it is so big that it drags along the ground behind her. (Are you picturing this?) She is quite miserable. The villagers decide to capture the spirit lover, so they come up with a scheme to do so. Eventually, they cut off his arm, throw it into the river, and the spirit lover never returns to the village. The woman is still in agony dragging this huge c1itoris around after her spirit lover is long gone. So the villagers cut off the c1itoris and throw it into the river. The giant c1itoris turns into an eel and swims away. The husband no longer wants his wife. No one knows if the lover takes her back. And no one lives happily ever after. Except maybe the eel.

Now that story was enough to put me to sleep. I went back up to bed and dreamed I was a man. I won't tell you what I did as a man. Just know, as I said at the beginning of this little missive, I was not very nice. And probably when I wasn't looking my wife was looking for a way to barbecue me, too.

All photographs and written material copyright © 2003-2008 by Kim Antieau unless otherwise indicated. May not be used without permission.