The Art of The Feminine Through Storytelling

“What is 2 + 2?” Winston turned the electrical machine on. The dial was all the way down.

The woman giggled, “What would you like me to say?”

“I told you. 2 + 2 = 5. Do not make me repeat myself, woman.”

“2 + 2 = 5. Workin’ 9 to 5, what a way to make a livin’, barely gettin’ by, it’s all takin’ and no givin’.”

Winston felt his chest jump at the tune. He turned the dial up to one. “You will learn to love Big Brother.”

“Where have I heard that song before?” The woman thought out loud.

Winston shocked her.

She blinked slowly when it was over, “Winston? Have you heard that song before?”

He blinked too, confused by her nonchalant reaction, “What is 2 + 2?”

“Oh, 5 I suppose. But that is just your surface-level prose. You want to dig deep? Shock me again. We can do this all day, my friend.”

Winston dialed the machine to 2.

“Workin’ 9 to 5!”

Winston shocked the woman.

She breathed in and let out a long sigh, “Winny?”

Without another thought, Winston covered her mouth, and through muffled words, she said, “You smell like cedar. Once, my grandfather took me camping in the woods, and cedar trees were everywhere. We ate oranges, and the smell was just delightful.”

“What is 2 + 2?”

“5, sir.”

“I don’t believe it.” Sweat formed on Winston’s temple.

“Well, of course you don’t. 2 + 2 obviously equals oranges.”

Winston turned the dial up to 3.

This logic, this logic doesn’t exist, not to him anyway. Not to the game played, and yet this woman almost looked giddy to be shocked again, like there was something to be seen past her suffering. O’Brien was not the same. No, no. O’Brien had a structure, a way about himself that was easily claimed, but every time the woman was shocked, Winston seemed to forget himself. Maybe it was the whimsy of her smile, or that workday show tune suddenly forming in his head. Where had he heard it before? Show tune. Show tune? Show tune. What in Big Brother’s name was a show tune?

Winston shocked the woman once more.

The woman yawned, bored, then perked up, exclaiming, “Oh! The orange! The orange cream soda I had when I was a little girl! And that song! It came over the radio, and my mother was eating a blueberry pie, and we were playing solitaire later that night!”

“What is solitaire?” Winston has never heard of it. He has never heard of any of the things she mentioned. For the first time in what seemed like a lifetime, intrigue tugged his heart. He turned down the dial.

The woman swiftly slipped out of her restraints and turned the dial to 4. “There you are, dear Winston.” Then put her restraints back on.

Winston stood there, dumbfounded and a little afraid, but her eyes sparkled like stars twinkling at night, so he put his finger on the switch and suddenly apprehended something. It was the sound of cards shuffling, and what was that smell? Cedar. His mouth twitched, wanting to smile, but whatever he hoped to catch slipped out of his head like blueberry jam. He could taste it on the tip of his tongue, like a ghost that lingered within the walls.

The woman waited patiently while Winston was deep in a trance. The woman turned the dial all the way up and put the contraption on his head.

“Forget yourself, Winny,” she said with a wink, then, in the affliction of the electrical tool, Winston remembered.

“Blueberry Jam! Solitaire by the pool. In another life…in another life I remember it too.”

When the currents in his nerves subsided, the woman disappeared to somewhere not understood, but in his hands Winston held something quite strange. He wasn’t sure where it came from. Was this what they called art? Or something more? In his hand was an Ace of Hearts and a Joker card.

What if I told you that 2 + 2 = Oranges? You would look at me like I belong in a psych ward. What I’m about to explain to you is challenging to put into words. Often, I find that my short stories explain it much better than my logic ever could, but I will do my best to explain the unexplainable.

Masculine and Feminine, the strange dance we are still trying to figure out. I have been working on my own theory on what the masculine and feminine are on a metaphysical level. My running theory, in simplest terms, is this: masculine and feminine are structural movements that work together to break down and configure higher structures to solve a problem.

The masculine, for me, has been easy to define. It is the seemingly immovable structure of reality in front of us. This structure is rational, strong, protective…The feminine, however, has been much more difficult for me to describe.

Culturally, when we think of the feminine, we may hear words like soft, empathetic, nurturing, intuitive, sensual, and mysterious, among other things that do not seem bound in the structure of logic as we have come to understand easily. What if I told you that the feminine is all those things, but not necessarily by the definitions we automatically think of?

The feminine is soft. It must be for it to hold a structure that continually shifts and bends based on the context of what masculine structure (the reality we see in front of us) has unfolded. It allows this tightly bound structure to move into the void to create a higher form of its structure.

The feminine is empathetic as a whole. It allows us to be in the world and connect to others through the matching intensity of the vibrations of emotion. This invisible string seems like nothing, yet it holds us together even when we are thousands of miles away, in life or death. Time and distance do not matter to the feminine. It is apathetic to the masculine logic and reason, in order to be empathetic to what is true.

The feminine is nurturing by holding up a mirror, forcing the masculine to look at the flimsiness of its current structure. It builds upon itself so that the structure becomes stronger. The feminine whispers, you could rebuild yourself as stone. And are we, as humans, truly nurturing if we do not look to the mirror, to the cracks in our own structures, in order to build upon them?

The feminine is intuitive. It knows, even though it may not know how it knows, and its structure continues to move, picking up data of memories, smells, sensations, and longings we have encountered in our being until its logic of apprehension emerges. Its movement occurs even before the thought has formed.

The feminine is sensual and mysterious. It must be, for who would want to give up the comfort of the masculine reality and logic to throw themself into the void that seems as if it is nothing, beyond what is understood, where we are faced with the deepest parts of ourselves too tender, shameful and too frightening to share with others.

The art of the feminine is the structure of “it depends”. One that continuously moves, fueled through sparks of glimpses that connect to memories and different points of data, that are again, apathetic to the masculine structure. For the masculine structure, in its logic, 2 + 2 = 4, and in some cases, when trying to fool the structure of the feminine into an artificial mode of progression, it will say that 2 + 2 = 5. But the feminine knows that for this particular moment, 2 + 2 = oranges. It does not know why it knows this, but it knows it all the same, and there is no judgment toward this particular truth.

Now, of course, when you attempt to stabilize this truth of the orange to bring it back into the masculine, a seemingly immovable structure, the stagnant logic does not accept this. It commands that 2 + 2 must equal 4, because facts don’t care about your feelings. But the problem is that you’re still thinking about the orange. It has left an impression on you that you cannot put your finger on. Again, the masculine will attempt to drill into your head that 2 + 2 = 5 as a feeble attempt to proclaim that the structure has not only been changed, but has the capability to move as the feminine does. Unfortunately, it still cannot get rid of the truth of the orange. It lingers there like a ghost, a smell that brings a long-lost memory forward that will never be caught, but will be compassionate enough to offer humans a glimpse of this.

These modes of movement live inside of us all, and we can tap into this art of the feminine movement any time we want. The greatest stories ever told are the ones unique to only your Being-in-the-world, and your Being-in-the-world, and your Being-in-the-world. But this uniqueness, this orange, drives a universal string. It is a vibration of sentimental data that allows us to see the Other.

The feminine can only be explained, or rather, felt in stories, for I could tell you, we need to put grandma into a nursing home, or I could ask you to read The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. Only then do you understand what it is like to be seen as an object of use and discarded like a bug when you cannot benefit others anymore. I could tell you that I have experienced unrequited love, but you would not believe the depth of what I am saying to you until you felt the intensity of Young Werther's heartache when he could not be with Lotte. We could say that women were never meant to be domesticated, or we could strip away our autonomy and sanity by being forced to stare at yellow wallpaper all day.

The art of the feminine is Nothing to logic, not the kind that we understand. Yet it is the structure that holds everything that is, was, and is to come. It is here in this void where we forget ourselves, where we catch a glimpse of divine art, bring it back home to reality, and hold a new creation that we cannot quite understand how it got there. We see this beauty, and it is because of this beauty of the feminine that we choose to face its violence, uncertainty, and vulnerability. When we forget ourselves and enter into the movement of the feminine, a transformation occurs.

It was not until I faced my own void of the feminine head-on, holding up the mirror to my face. I did not see the glimpse of my depth until I had suffered in ways I did not believe were possible, and that I truly began writing. By choosing to face the deepest and darkest parts of my self, I was also able to access the most joyful and innocent memories I had forgotten, pull them back to the surface of the masculine and write a story that still moves wild in my soul. In the structure of the feminine, the logic as I knew it was thrown away and created into something else entirely. In the logic of the feminine, we follow the feeling(no matter how vulnerable and uncomfortable it may be) to get to the core of ourselves. It looks like nothing to others, in the reality before us, and yet it is everything unique and specific to us individually. I believe it binds us like an invisible string. Its structure continuously moves in, “it depends”, depends on the context, the person, the event, the time, and so on, yet it is the driving force that creates so much of the reality before us that we are able to reflect back on again and again and again.

When you write, I urge you to forget you are writing for the audience you see before you. Look to yourself and what it is you need to face. Sit there for a while and enter the void of femininity where you forget the work in front of your eyes and are submerged into sensations that cannot be grasped by a rational thought. Stand as Nothing behind the thought, and a glimpse shall be given to you. Whatever the feminine is gracious enough to allow you to catch, because you chose to turn your face to the void, will become your art, your story. And by the time you realize you’ve captured something, the feminine is hidden again, waiting in the Nothingness of Being, collecting, and sifting through every moment, stringing patterns and pulsing with quiet intention and apprehension.

A logic that is sound is not always true, because sometimes 2 + 2 equals only the thing that is hidden from you. And when the world demands that you give them the answer 4 and possibly even 5 if it wants to seem progressive, you tell them oranges. By chance, a little girl across the world will read it, the art you have written with tender words on a random piece of paper,  and though she may not understand it, because it gives her no reason to, that hidden truth in the feminine void is what gives her the will to live too.

So let yourself feel all of it, sink into the chaos of Nothing. Experience it simply because you can. Taste the orange, smell the cedar, remember the song for the first time again and again and again. We write, create, and tell stories to remember to live authentically, in all of our Being. While the masculine holds our reality in place, the art of the feminine keeps the world turning through storytelling.