March 21, 2007
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same
…is a line from the back of a book about Foucault that I photocopied and stuck on my door for a while a few years back. It seems as relevant as ever.
I am consciously engaged in a process of change. While I don’t know exactly where it will lead – part of the point is the unknowability of the outcome in advance – it feels like progress is occurring. From those who know me I require the freedom, space and understanding to experience that change, with all it entails.
So. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.
Thanks.
Filed by billy at 10:58 pm under the moose
18 Comments
At first I was against it, but then I thought; “if Billy wants to become a woman – so be it.”
“What I wouldn’t give to be twenty years younger – and a woman.” (Lloyd Bridges in Hot Shots).
Mine was a (paraphrased) Simpson’s quote π
You’re shaving your beard? π
Is it your birthday?
The changes I am thinking of are mostly internal but they will doubtless manifest externally in some unpredictable way.
There’s a face hugger growing inside you?
That line is from the introduction to The Archaeology of Knowledge. I also like the line immediately before it: “I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face”.
There’s also a good quote on similar lines in the introduction to The History of Sexuality vol.2 explaining why it’s so unrelated to the project for it outlined in The History of Sexuality vol.1: “As to those for whom to work hard, to begin and begin again, to attempt and be mistaken, to go back and rework everything from top to bottom, and still find reason to hesitate from one step to the next – as to those, in short, for whom to write in the midst of uncertainty and apprehension is tantamount to failure, all I can say is that clearly we are not from the same planet.”
If it weren’t so bloody long, that’d be another one for the door…
OMG He’s finally gonna get a job π
Yay. A hair cut?
My birthday was months ago, I have no plans to have a haircut (or beardcut), some plans to get a job someday, am unsure whether or not I write with any regard to having a face or not, and am not knowingly impregnated with alien monsters (or anything else, for that matter.)
Γ’β¬ΕI am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face huggerΓ’β¬Β.
It must be a sex change then :p
Ah… no.
Given my actual motivation for this post (which, no, I’m not telling, at least not in this forum), the responses have been pretty amusingly misdirected. π
I’d say deliberately misdirected…
Seriously though, is your intention to be mysterious or something? If you’re “not telling”, why post? Naturally people are going to want to know.
Want to know what? What makes you think I know? The original post says exactly what can be said and no more, as far as I can tell. If posting doesn’t decend into occasional abstract navel gazing, surely it’s not a real blog?
I have no need to ask you who you are (an odd question to ask someone you already know the name of), and would not presume to ask you to be anything at all, so sweet as …
Though I certainly feel the name is simply a referrent, while I am the thing referred to… whatever that is π