Things don’t really change, do they?

 


Hello, everyone! Welcome to my very first blog. Let’s get right into it. 

One of the first poems we have read in the class that has intrigued me is “Doesn’t he realize…” by Ono no Komachi. We discussed how the speaker is commodified like seaweed, and that she will no longer put up with the actions of some man in her life. Although we don’t have any explicit description of the speaker as a woman, it just feels like it is. The most impactful part of this poem is the fact that was written around 1,000 years ago. One. Thousand. That is so crazy to me. But I guess not really either. I should know that female pain hasn’t really changed in all this time. 

Its like when Lana del Rey said “Cause you’re just a man/Its just what you do/Your head in your hands/As you color me blue” in her song “Norman F***ing Rockwell”. 

And it’s like when Kristin Scott Thomas’s character in Fleabag said “Women are born with pain built in…We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives. Men don’t. They have to seek it out. They invent all these gods and demons and things just so they can feel guilty about things, which is something we do very well on her own. Then they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other, and when there aren’t an wars they can play rugby.”

And it’s also like when Florence Welch said “We argue in the kitchen about whether to have children/About the world ending and the scale of my ambition” in the song “King.”

All three of these quotes were said within the past 3 years.

They don’t all quite match up with the poem, but I think they address similar ideas. Like the seaweed gather uses the speaker as he wishes, the man in “NFR” romanticizes the woman’s pain to make him more interesting. Which brings me to the quote from Fleabag about how intrinsic pain is in a woman’s life. It is so foundational to our being that its been going on for literally hundreds of years. Which then brings me to “King” and how a woman’s ambition could cause an argument. But, as the speaker in the poem states, the speaker in the song realizes her power and refuses to be reduced by a man. If someone told me Komachi’s poem was written a week ago, I would have believed them. Because these things don’t truly change, do they?


Here are the links to the songs and scenes I mentioned above:

Lana Del Rey’s song “Norman F***ing Rockwell” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPt0dGg4BKA

Kristin Scott Thomas’ scene in Fleabag (from beginning to 45 seconds in) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qI8JlZlv1Kg

Florence + The Machine’s “King” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L62LtChAwww

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