Antinomian Women

What are they anti, your antinomian women?

Rules. Law. Explicit ones. Implicit ones. The true of agreeable. Being nice. Anti the whole world, as it stands.

The patriarchal world?

The matriarchal one, too. All the worlds. All possible worlds.


They’re suspicious of existence, antinomian women. They’re enigmas, even to themselves. They’re perpetually appalled … disgruntled … but never unhappy. It’s not as simple as that.


They were born into a world that didn’t understand them. And that they didn’t understand.

Sure, the whole feminist argument.

It goes further than that. Or it’s gnostic feminism. They were born appalled, and appalling those around then. They had nothing to do with the rules. With how you’re supposed to be. Nothing to do with their parents. With their brothers and sisters. With the place where they were born. Nothing to do with their society. The usual mores. With amazing biographies.

They were one offs. Experiments. Full of wild adventures. Which were all adventures of fleeing and disgust. Of just … hating everything. Never being one of the girls. Or the boys. Never belonging to anything. Never signing up.

They had adventures through the world and adventures in the head. Eternal and internal ones. Having to create themselves. Without role models. From scratch. In their unique ways of being – of being themselves. Of becoming themselves. Trying to find a language in which to speak. A way of being true to whoever they might be.

And maybe they weren’t anything. Maybe they didn’t exist at all. They were just lines of flight. Rolls of the dice.

Is that what you are, an antinomian woman?


With no clue, really, as to how to live. How to do the ordinary things. How to fit in with the ordinary world. How to say the ordinary things and mean them.

A blank look on their face, always. Not confusion, but something else. Removal. Indifference. Distance. That they didn’t belong here. Dissociation – is that the word?

It’s just that they’re foreign. Alien. Coming to the world from without. From a great distance. That’s what shows on their faces. That’s what shows in how they are in general.

This isn’t their world. It isn’t their fault. They’re here for a while, and you’ll disappear – that’s all. They’re here to go. This will never be your world. They’ll never sleep soundly – really soundly. They’ll never lay their heads down in peace. They’ll never be at peace with themselves – in this world.

Always perturbed. Always some thorn in the flesh. Some vague, unreasonable discontent.


Some sense of this not being for them. That they shouldn’t be here. That they’re here by mistake. That they have to put enormous effort into doing the things everyone else can do by instinct. What everyone else was born to, adapted to, prepared for, designed for. But the world is not their niche. The world isn’t their home.

It’s like living undercover. Under an alias. In some kind of witness protection scheme. Where you have to maintain a lie. And lying to yourself. Where you’re disguised. When you’ve had some kind of  plastic surgery. When you  can’t even recognise yourself in the mirror. When you can’t even remember who you were. When you can’t even say your own words – speak in your own name. When you know only that it’s Wrong, it’s all Wrong.


Not even unruly. Not even rebels. Just…  natural anarchists. Indifferent, somehow. Not of this. Not part of the world. Not subject to the rule of this world.

Distance in their eyes. A wounded distance. A distant distance.


And incapable of just living directly. Incapable of simply being alive … Never knowing what to say … Who to be …

Such a sense of division. Barely speaking of anything that concerned them. Not knowing the words to say. Not able just to be, like everyone else.

Strewn, in some sense. Scattered, in some sense. At a distance from themselves. Asking the question, Who am I supposed to be? with their entire being. With everything they are.


Never able simply to speak for themselves. Never able to just use their own voices. Never capable of speaking their minds. Never present to themselves. Always lagging behind.

Dazed, somehow. Touched, somehow. Left-handed. Cack-handed.

Never anything particular on their minds. Never thoughts in their heads. Never interior monologue.

Who wanted only to be left alone. But who didn’t know, for all that, what they were being left alone for.