Others
'Vegetable presences' — or so Strindberg would have them.
I'd use a different term — but one they'd like no better, now I come to think of it.
No wonder I'm celibate.
Mothers, wives, daughters, lovers, — I've had commerce with them all at various times. And still I'm at the disadvantage of placing their lives beyond the purlieus of the male mind.
Whether they're meditating, or throwing temper-tantrums, or chatting in living rooms, their otherness disturbs me.
They watch and wait like strange plants gifted with intelligence.
Yes, it's romantic nonsense; — I know I know they're human, no less, no more than I am. Perhaps I'm misogynous in considering each one a powerful alien.
Certainly I'm acting-out a pattern learned in childhood from struggles above my head — fought by a house of women for a prize never mentioned to the one small boy at hand.
Tony Connor
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