FROM WEST TEXAS

7. While the group speaks,  takes herself, slowly, through the stages of early physical development — stretching, curling into a ball, rolling over, pushing up on her hands, pushing up onto hands and knees, rocking back and forth. 8. When  manages to push herself into seated position, the Group falls silent.  selects a member of the group (), reaching her arms out to her, as if for an embrace.

9. With the assistance of the Group,  picks up , rocks her, then sets her on the ground, on hands and knees.

10. Group begins to walk in a cluster, circling the space, all talking at the same time again ignoring , who crawls after them.

11. When  is ready, she shrieks or calls, demanding attention. A member of the Group helps her to standing and she joins the Group. 12. Group continues to walk for a few steps as a tight group, conversing, then Breaks into silence and different directions.

Beading Ritual

In this ritual, we bead as a community, to experience how we are connected and all contribute to a larger pattern of creation. Women can share stories while beading, or the beading structure can frame the space for other rituals.

1. Group creates a shape in the space with the beading string — every member holds the string taut.  is at the head of the string, ✸ is at the end of the spool. 2.  beads. As she beads, other members alternately kneel and stand to allow the bead to travel from one member to the next.

3. Every five to 10 beads,  hands off the beading role to another member of the group, ✸ hands off the ending role to another member of the group, the group changes its physical configuration. 4. Repeat.

Rituals of Female Friendship

The theory of pre-patriarchal matriarchal societies comes from 19th century anthropologists. It was immediately and enthusiastically taken up by first wave suffragists (including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who wrote about it in her 1891 essay “The Matriarchate, or Mother-Age”). In her feminist historical-revisionist The Double Goddess: Women Sharing Power from 2003, Vicki Noble tracks the reiterating figure of the double goddess in ancient artifacts as proof of a matriarchal system, one in which women ruled societies in pairs. Is this actually true? Who knows? Who cares? To me, the idea of women running societies in pairs explains the particular intensity of female friendships: in their passionate closeness, the specificity of sharing lived experience, the close observation of others (socially denigrated as “gossip”). These relationships rehearse the roles women are meant to take — as leaders of society.

Friendship 1. Babyhood: Parallel Play to Cooperative Play

Babies don’t play with each other, they play next to each other. This is called “parallel play”: toddlers learn through the exploration of their own bodies in their environment, while also having their play partly stimulated and then directed by absorbing the play of the other children around them.

In celebration of this initiatory phase of female friendship, participants, in pairs, engage in parallel play until their play organically reaches some form of cooperation.

Friendship 2. Girlhood: Mirroring to Routines

We are now at early girlhood. Participants, in pairs, engage in mirroring play and early routines. Laughter is welcome throughout. 1. In pairs, women spin, holding each other’s hands or wrists. They crouch on the ground, arms draped behind each other’s backs.

2. Pair stands, and with their inner arms connected, reach up to the sky and then bow down to the ground. 3. Pair walks themselves to the floor, lying down on their right side, facing the same direction, knees drawn in. Pair rolls onto their back — then onto their left side, onto their belly, onto their right side, then onto their belly. 4. From that position, pair begins a mirrored gestural rhythm, coming into sitting, then standing facing in the same direction, inner arms pressed into each other.

5. Pair runs across the room, then stops suddenly, facing one another, making a bridge with their arms. Repeats, again running across the room, then stopping suddenly making a bridge with their arms. 6. Pair moves into a simple routine dance with each other that takes them out of the space. This choreography can change depending on the group.

THE GHOSTS WE LIVE WITH

DODIE BELLAMY

Most ghosts are confused. They manifest pale and elongated. But some ghosts are professionals, spirits who use a medium to enter a circle of believers. They plunge their disembodied arms into hot wax, and the wax hardens to a hollow skin, capturing the shape of a thumb from beyond or a clawlike fist. Believers display these bits of dimensionality in glass-fronted cabinets. Ghosts flow through key holes, flicker behind the bathroom door while you splash in the tub. Ghosts sneak up from behind when you look in a mirror, where in its gloss you too waver about, flat and empty. Some ghosts have personalities and can even speak. They convey their emotions via smells the living recognize. Other ghosts manifest as vaporous fogs or cold swirling funnels. Some are fragments of disembodied drives, little glowing orbs that that zip about super fast.

An evolved ghost is called an entity. An entity knows what it wants and who to terrorize to get it. Flashes of a bramble-headed woman appear at the foot of your bed. Poltergeist means noisy ghost because it bangs things around. It lives inside your TV and rearranges the objects in your home in configurations that break the laws of gravity. At first you find its quirkiness charming, but eventually it slams you against the wall, hangs your body upside-down from the ceiling like a bat. You wake up in the middle of fucking and find yourself alone in bed, pummeled by this energy envelope that smells like rancid wax. Ghosts slain in battle are particularly persistent. To escape them, you must run around your village three times and wash yourself. My building predates the 1906 earthquake, a humble Victorian built for workers. Its embossed walls are thick with residual ectoplasm from all the lives that have passed through these six units. We host a hungry ghost who moves from apartment to apartment, latching onto holes in the occupant’s aura, forcing them to overindulge in alcohol drugs food or sex. The preppy guy in 18A is suddenly a major stoner, pasty with zits on his face. The guy next door with the wealthy Republican parents, goes from being a responsible citizen to a drunk who plays video games full volume, at all hours, explosions of guns and bombs rattling our shared living room wall. His family ships him back to Vermont for detox. His replacement is a drunk from the get-go, abandoning the apartment to druggy friends. I peek through their open front door and see a maze of filth, like the contents of more than one apartment have fused and are stacked in a double layer. The handsome rocker guy I’ve lived above for years suddenly becomes a junkie. When his drugs are delivered, I see him in front of our building, in sweatpants, shaky and thin, walking with a cane, sucking a red-white-and-blue rocket-shaped popsicle. He stops paying rent, is evicted, and his friends ship him back to Los Angeles for detox. After he leaves, I feel this presence wavering in the doorway, waiting. I start eating like there is no tomorrow, and now I’m fat because of the Minna Street ghost.

My back-porch office starts to rock and shake, making me queasy. It’s not an earthquake. It’s not a poltergeist. It’s the alcoholic skateboarder who’s moved in, a foot and a half beneath my floorboards, fucking in his illegal loft bed. Demons are making him fuck, the same demons that live inside my computer, demons who compel me to binge on information. I press the search button over and over and information streams through my eyes and into my body, so much information it’s impossible to retain any particular bit of it. Online information, like avant-garde poetry or music, is a process, an onrush you experience moment by moment by moment, with no catchy tune, no overarching meaning, to pull it all together. It’s not substances ghosts are hungry for, but time — a metronomic immersion to break the vast gray vague of eternity. Out of glowing screens they reach, lusting for time.