- Semester magazine Spring 2005 - Goddard College
IMA program
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Ellie Epp, Editor's introduction: embodiment
studies at Goddard
This issue of the semester magazine again includes work by several advisors'
students (the advisors, Karen Campbell, Lise Weil, and Ellie Epp, are indentified
by initials after a student's name), and for the first time also includes
work by advisors. Some of the work presented is by students who think of
themselves as embodiment studies students, and some is not, but all is
compatible with an emphasis on understanding human life as the life of
a physical body.
Links given below begin to provide institutional and theoretical context
for the work presented in this semester magazine. We are innovating embodiment
studies at Goddard, and welcome student participation in the development
of this new framework.
New
initiatives development draft: institutional document describing embodiment studies
Embodiment
studies web worksite:
large collection of statements, student work, quotations, bibliographies,
etc.
Curriculum
discussion: includes
an example of an actual student's study plan
Past
workshops page:
catalogue descriptions for residency workhops and minicourses in embodiment
studies.
Book
list page: annotated
faculty suggestions for core embodiment studies books.
Paula Anderson (LW) , There is something
I have always wanted to say to you
These passages are from the introduction and first chapter
of my thesis. Thanks to Jen Collins for suggesting the writing prompt "There
is something I have always wanted to say to you."
The fear of knowing and showing what I feel has wielded an unholy power
in my life to limit, diminish, prevent, and forbid the most meaningful,
the most personal, and the most essential aspects of who I am and who I
could be. It has robbed me of my most important relationships, including
my relationship with myself.
In my mad rage for order and control and perfection, I extinguished
feeling, because feeling was chaos and chaos led to insanity. I had read
about Sylvia Plath's shock treatments. I had heard stories of what happened
to girls who made mistakes. I saw my friends punished when they rebelled.
I knew, without having to think about it, that feeling and expressing my
feelings would have interfered with surviving, and surviving came first.
Put things in order before they exist, the Tao Te Ching advises. In
this case, however, my prescription to myself is to pull everything that
already exists out of order and drop down into the chaos. Then feel.
***
"Come and get me." I think I always wanted to say that to
you. It's not that I ended up in a bad place. I was fine, in a lot of ways
that count. But I wanted to know that you loved me. That you did
leave me because you loved me, as I wanted to believe was true, and not
because I was too much trouble.
I would have liked to daydream about you, imagining you as beautiful
and romantic and tormented. I would have wanted you to be steely with the
determination not to let the loss you suffered, when a cruel world parted
us against your will, crush the joy out of your life. But I would have
wanted you to miss me; to regret every day of your life that you let me
go. Because every day of my life was a silent regret that you did. We were
parted. You let me go.
I couldn't form those words in my mind. You were a thought so forbidden
to me, I couldn't even relish the idea of you in private. The key to success
in the place where I was, was to hold you as non-existent. I knew early
on, as soon as I could understand, that I was adopted. I was told it meant
I was loved "as if" I were their own child. We all knew I was
adopted. We accepted it in our family. But it was clear we didn't mention
it in the outside world.
My mother's identity depended on being a wife and mother. A mother has
children. If she can't have her own, she can adopt. And there's no shame
to that, and yet there is. My job was to pass as her real child, to take
the place of the baby that never came and make up for the loss of the one
who would have been loved as their child, not as if.
We were shopping once, my mother and I, and a saleswoman was helping
us.
"Do you like the blue jumper," the saleswoman asked me, "or
do you like the red one?" I didn't answer her.
"Do you like this white blouse?" she smiled at me and held
out the blouse on a plastic hanger. I looked up at my mother, who was staring
at me without expression.
"What do you like?" I asked her.
"Tell her which one you like," she said impatiently.
I couldn't express the danger I felt. I knew if I didn't like the same
thing my mother liked it would spoil everything. The saleswoman would realize
I was adopted, and I'd blow our cover as "real" mother and daughter.
I knew that "real" mothers and daughters agreed on everything.
I scanned my mother's face in hope of picking up a clue. All I could see
was that she was getting mad at me.
When she was mad, she didn't say anything. Silence surrounded us like
fog, hung in the air for days, and left me groping blindly for answers.
"Why are you mad at me? What did I do?" If only I knew what she
was thinking, I could put things right and make her happy again. I focused
all my attention on her, watched her expressions, followed her eyes, listened
intently in case she called my name. I'd check and recheck everything in
my room to make sure that I hadn't left something open that should be closed,
or set something down that should have been put away. I'd color pictures
and set them in places where she'd see them. I'd bring her a glass of water
when she hadn't asked.
I would have longed for you to come and get me then, if I'd known how
to long for such a thing. Instead, I sat alone in my room, waiting for
an all-clear signal and reading my Little Golden Books out loud or turning
on my record player to listen to fairy tales on the red and blue records
that came on top of the cottage cheese cartons. Maybe if you had come,
like a fairy godmother, you would have explained to me what I had done
that made my mother so mad. Maybe you would have held me on your lap and
stroked my hair and said you loved me. Maybe you would have taken me home
with you.
From the adult conversations I overheard but didn't understand, I always
thought that if I was bad, Sister Gertrude would take me away. I knew from
what I'd heard that Sister Gertrude was the social worker from the adoption
agency where my parents had gotten me. The truth was, the agency had two
years in which to check on my parents and decide if they were doing right
by me, and, if not, the agency could take me back and start me again somewhere
else. Believing it was the other way around caused me endless fears of
losing my home and family for some misdeed I might accidently commit.
It wasn't until I was forty-four years old that I heard anything about
my circumstances before I was adopted. I thought my parents didn't know.
It turned out that, once again, they just hadn't said anything.
I had known two important facts all along, however. They got me on December
7, 1950; Pearl Harbor Day. I'd heard the story many times, the one about
how Mom lost her purse that day. However, I was born on August 23 of that
year. Where was I from the time I was born until the day three months later
when Sister Gertrude called and said she had a baby for them? I feared
the worst and didn't think about it. I thought that I had been forgotten
in a crib in a dark room, hungry and frightened and alone. Nothing I had
ever heard contradicted this idea.
Afraid of being sent back to that place, I tried to be funny and good
and make my mother laugh and make her happy. I tried to fill the shoes
she had waiting for me.
"Paula walked at nine months," she'd tell people. "At
nine months she told me she had to go potty and was toilet trained."
Never again would I be as perfect. Never again would I rise to her expectations.
And never would she lower the bar on what I needed to do to show the world
that she was the perfect mother.
When I was five, my parents got another baby from Sister Gertrude: my
brother Keith. They never said anything about Keith's history before his
adoption either, until the day when Mom and Dad and I made lefse for Christmas,
1994. By chance, it was December 7, Pearl Harbor Day. I don't know how
the conversation started, but they broke their own taboo by bringing up
the subject of birth mothers.
"I always felt guilty about getting you," my mother told me.
"Your birth mother had wanted to keep you." I kept my eyes on
her, the smile I'd had a moment ago never leaving my face.
"She wanted to keep me?"
"Yes," she went on, "but she was the oldest in a large
family of children and she still lived at home, even though she was twenty-six,"
the same age as my mother. "Sister Gertrude gave her three months
to decide if she could keep you. You were in a foster home when we came
to get you."
I forbade myself tears, but the word "wanted" was making the
back of my eyes hot and firey. WANTED WANTED WANTED. How could I not have
known? How could they have not told me?
"I never felt guilty with Keith," she added. "His mother
was sixteen. She didn't want him. She didn't even want to see him."
Had you wanted to see me? Would they have let you, back in the dark
ages of adoption in 1950? Had you seen me? Such a question had never occurred
to me before. Not only had you wanted me, you may have wanted to see me
and maybe you had. Maybe you had held me. Maybe not. But maybe.
There was more.
"Sister Gertrude told us that your birth mother was adopting a
baby at the same time we got Keith."
The breath went out of me, and I couldn't pull it back in.
My mother had always said that adopted children who look for their birthparents
when they grow up break the hearts of the parents who raised them. She
said that it's the deepest form of betrayal to go trotting off to another
mother, the one who never sat up nights or changed diapers, and let her
share in the glory of having a child without doing any of the work. I understood
from what she said that I was never to look for you. I was never to ask
questions about you. I was never to think of you. She'd know, somehow,
if I did, and it would be like running a knife into her heart.
On Christmas day, a few weeks later, my dad had a massive heart attack
and died. It was true then. Talking about these things was perhaps deadly.
But having been given this little glimmer of an idea, my mind began
to track along your course. What had happened? Did you really want me?
You must have gotten married, and then you adopted someone else's baby.
What if, what if?
Years later, I started asking these questions out loud to my partner,
Sheila, who said, "Maybe there's some way you could look for your
mother on the internet."
"I can't," I told her. "And besides, she's never looked
for me. Maybe she doesn't want to see me."
I knew from my birth certificate, which lists my adoptive parents as
my mother and father, that I had been born in Eitel hospital. I thought
that Eitel Hospital had been torn down. On the internet, I found a web
page that detailed the hospital's history. It had been in Minneapolis,
across the street from Loring Park. The building was still there, it said
in the history, but had been converted into Allina Health Care offices.
That night I drove down to Loring Park, to the corner of 14th and Willow,
and walked in front of the brown brick building on the corner. I had driven
past there often, I had walked in Loring Park and felt drawn to the area,
but now I gazed lovingly up at the big, dark windows facing the park. The
web page said the patient rooms had been furnished with oriental rugs and
mahogany furniture. It was a private hospital with an outstanding reputation.
Why had you come there? How could you have afforded it? Did you live in
this neighborhood? I looked up and down the street at the apartment buildings.
Did you still live near by?
The hospital's entrance had been bricked up and a new entry added farther
down, but the original inscription over the old door was still partly visible.
I walked over to the park across the street to look at the building. I
was born in that building. I enjoyed the intense feeling of loneliness
and longing that came over me as I stood there in the cold dark night.
It was December 8, ten years after I first dared to think about you. Now,
I felt you moving in my blood, solidifying in my bones.
Standing in front of the former entrance, I wanted to feel what you
might have felt walking into the hospital. Were you alone? If someone came
with you, who? Were you frightened, ashamed? Was there something you were
unresolved about that prevented you from knowing what to do about me?
Then I tried to picture you walking out of the hospital that day, the
day you were discharged, the day you left me behind. Did I sense you were
gone? You were still undecided, perhaps, at that time. What thoughts occupied
your mind during the three months you had been given to make your decision?
What feelings ran through your body, your breasts full of milk? And once
you did decide, did you mourn a part of you that was forever left behind?
Did you and I long for each other in ways only we could understand? Did
we both feel empty inside and have no way to express our loss of each other?
Were you as forbidden as I was to talk about what had happened?
I looked at the bricked-up door frame, closed forever as if to say,
No more walking out these doors and leaving babies behind. We don't prescribe
that any more.
***
There is something I have always wanted to say to you.
I have never known anyone I am related to, whose blood flows in my veins,
whose features resemble mine. I have never felt comfortable in my body,
in my family, in my life, in the world. I felt alone and outside. I felt
abandoned. Still, I have carried you in my body for fifty-four years, sixty
times longer than you carried me. I may never know exactly what caused
you to walk out of the hospital without me, or if you successfully put
me out of your mind once you did. But I do know that I have never spent
one day of my life without longing for you, longing to hear your voice,
to feel the touch of your hand on my cheek, to see you smile, hear you
laugh. I have carried you and will carry you, your spirit, in my heart
and in every cell of my body forever.
Juliana Borrero (LW) , Portrait of a woman
language theorist
- They say that language is dead.
- What do they know about language?
- -Carol Maso, Break every rule
The making of an academic. Or the unmaking. This is the story of my
evasions. The story of my rebellion. This is the story of coming into dialogue,
into language, struggling for an academic existence committed to the social
world, for a persona not detached from body, desire, life. It is the story
of the explosion of certainties, the dynamiting of lies, the shedding of
skins, the coming out into a theory and practice of language fresh
and vulnerable and new - that is only beginning to show its moist, green
bud. So much has been done, but almost everything is yet to be said.
The stages, shadows, mirages, the back and forth of an academic. Between
the exploration of the territory one walks on, getting to know the territory
one has wanted to stay away from, and the need to branch off, digress,
wander down the barely trodden path. Between needing to learn the rules
of the game and finding ways to bend them, stretch them, put heat under
the ground on which they stand and make them dance. Between having words
of one´s own and losing them to the voices of authority and discourse.
And the question, ever present: What does it mean to work with language?
What can it mean?
I am a woman in academia trying to make sense of language. I am: escritora,
profesora, traductora, ávida lectora . how do all of these experiences
of language pave the way toward the vital theory of language I have always
dreamed of? I am seeking to open an academic space for the theory I have
intuited, I have worked with, I have needed, and others seem to be in need
of, in order to not be silenced in the simple act of being, for the simple
reason of loving language and not wanting it to be "just words".
I am looking for a theory in which language and freedom may echo each other
reciprocally.
1
Darkness. I am walking in where there is no door. I have felt a hole
where it has been said there is stable ground. The supposedly stable ground
is language. I strike a match. I am searching for meaningful language.
It burns out. I strike another. Why have creativity, singularity, subjectivity
been banned from knowledge? It burns out quickly in the damp air. I walk
more than I am able to see. The cave gets longer and longer. I light more
matches: I am both a writer and a teacher. What does the one offer the
other? I am searching for a way of knowing that is not disconnected from
the way in which I want to live. I am searching for the place of language
in all of this, a language capable of working from and through desire.
It is a slow process, how one begins to unearth a problem. A certain
time is needed in order to mature a question, to find words with which
to shed light on it and convince others that behind what they see as nothing
there is a question beating. The place where one begins is always random.
One seeks a sign or a dream or has a pain. And one begins to pull and pull,
slowly, remaining attentive to connections. One thought one was holding
the neck when really one was holding a shoulder, or a knee. One thought
this was just a question, a problem statement, an assortment of words,
but now it seems the words are just the tips of something heavier. One
thought one was picking up loose limbs but now it seems that they are all
connected. Out and out. So big you cannot contemplate it whole from where
you are. The process requires patience, intuition, trust. I trace paths
of words like white pebbles in the darkness. How to tell the story of this
darkness, this unstable territory, this dismembered body, this wound we
have grown so accustomed to we no longer see?
***
I was a literature student fascinated by language. From reading literature
I learned that words could restructure the way I looked at the world. They
opened the eyes, awakened the numbed body, and produced reactions, life
as the continuation of text, text after text. Reading made me write. From
writing I learned that words had edges, that they responded to rhythms,
they were not simple, but these edges and rhythms enabled them to poke
holes in reality and restructure it.
Yet, the writer and reader´s fascination with language was constantly
crashing into the formatted word use of the academic and other worlds,
where language was made to hide its edges, supposedly so that it could
be understood, and rhythm was seen as an enemy of clarity and precision.
We were surrounded by words but words were worn out. We read and spoke
and wrote, but words were pebbles sinking to the bottom of the sea. Meanwhile
the war raged on and there were no words to say death, to say no, to say
peace.
I was a young Colombian, aghast at the proliferation of war, wondering:
What did it mean to use language in Colombia? What kind of (political,
ethical, aesthetic) position could the reflection about language come to
occupy in the national context? How could the rescue of the plurivocal
vitality of language operate as resistance to the violent - intolerant,
uncritical, stereotyped - frames of mind and being proliferated through
education and mass media all over the world?
The difference between my dream of a vital language and the flat notion
of formatted language, was the importance that I gave to flesh and blood
experience. Throughout my study of literary analysis at the university,
I kept wondering: Why was the experience of language kept out of academic
reflection about language? How was literature connected with the world?
If it was true that the writing of literature fed from the world, how could
the study of literature return something to the world, through its experience
of freedom in language?
Because, in my experience, literature threw me straight into the jaws
of life. The claiming of my tongue came with the claiming of my feet; and
that was late, 21, maybe. Until then I was always falling when I walked.
Every step taken implied a doubt inside me, would I make it, would it come
out right. Until then I had used language mostly to do homework, to follow
instructions, to do what I was told and understand it. I had not discovered
that language could be something other than a norm for me to follow, a
path set out for me by others who did not know me well enough, that it
was an accomplice through which I could give shape to my desire.
Learning to walk the city I discovered that walking was not just about
getting from one place to another, it was also rhythm, observation, becoming
an anonymous inhabitant of a city - and a nation - that I had never felt
the need to be a part of. I discovered how much I did not know about the
city I lived in, how little I knew about the existence of different lives
and troubles. I realized the tiny perimeter of the crystal house I had
always lived in. I discovered to what extent the crystal clarity of its
windex-cleaned glass walls could be a form of blindness. Walking the city
came with learning the importance of defying prescribed borders, becoming
political, learning to dance, to take risks, to give my body for the first
time. Learning to walk had to do with becoming my own person. So did the
discovery of the language of desire.
And here something else must be added. When I was at this opening-up
age of 21, a philosophy professor was elected as mayor of Bogotá.
Mayor Mockus was into citizenship pedagogy more than into paving avenues.
He employed the city´s mimes and jugglers to teach car drivers to
respect the jaywalk. He implemented all-women´s night every month,
where no men could be out on the streets; and also all-men´s nights.
He made bicycle routes and scheduled days where private cars were not allowed
to transit. He got married during his time of office and held the ceremony
in a circus (he got married in the lion´s cage) charging expensive
tickets to the city´s polititians that he then donated as charity.
I should also say that the reason he started getting press and decided
to run for office was that at a lecture at the public university - by Lyotard,
on the ear of the other - he got up and mooned a group of students who
were sabotaging the event. During this time there was a taking over of
the city´s parks, streets, and public spaces (which had for a long
time been considered dangerous and "ugly") by its young people.
I grew up in a moment when arts, city, politics, and play seemed clearly
connected and the only way to get people, so tired of corrupt politics
and trite discourse, to come to claim and inhabit their city. I came into
being in the midst of body sweat, postmodernist discussions, workers' boots,
fear of being mugged, devotion to the turn-of-the-century literature of
the city, complicity with homeless, stories tinted by ink of the prohibited,
and lots of salsa.
I learned all of this in college (extracurricularly). Literature had
opened the door of my becoming. Could all of this vitality, diversity,
all this stretching of boundaries and expanding of the self be brought
back into language and the reflection on language? Was there any place
for this in academia?
2
The city led to the land, travelling to the mountains, to the country,
to the jungle. Now the legs the city had toughened with its diet of smoke
would need to strengthen and be nourished on real air and green and sky.
I met people to whom I was like an extra-terrestrial, people whose language
I could barely understand. Here again I realized how ignorant, how tight
the limits of my world were; here again my being stretched. I learned to
soften my voice while speaking to a country woman, I learned to collect
the broken stories that constitute this violent nation. I began to scheme
the day when I would leave the city and begin life as a teacher, in a more
simple place, where life was not so disconnected from nature, where I would
learn so much that I had not learned. I dreamed of the moment when I would
no longer seem an extra-terrestrial.
I became a teacher of literature in a university institution in rural
Colombia. I went from walking to epistemology. I learned from Foucault
that every query is also a conscious or unconscious interest in how we
are constructing knowledge. All this time, there is an underlying question
that has been traced alongside that of language. An absence. At first mysterious.
Then suspicious. Then unethical. Almost criminal. Definitely guilty. What
is the role of the subject in knowledge? Why was the subject position so
slyly kept outside the dominant ways of knowing in academia? Why did my
vital, intense, exciting - experience of language have to be kept
out of the analysis of literature? For the sake of science? For the sake
of objectivity.
Objectivity claimed I was as dangerous to knowledge as anyone else,
it claimed that there was barely any difference between myself and anyone
else, and that if there were, it made no difference to science, we should
act as if we were the same. Did it matter to art? What if we no longer
thought about science or art, but about the people who would be the recipients
of this knowledge, the neverending question: what is the role of academia
in a world aching with problems, what do we go there to do, what did we
study for and what will we teach? Was there an epistemological position
that allowed me to reconstruct from differences onward, that took subjectivity
into account as a way of knowing (like I had found in literature)? Where
is it to be found? Why doesn´t it circulate? What would change if
it did?
***
This is the territory I arrived at: the intersection between the problem
of the self and the problem of language. Weaving between literary theory,
philosophy of language, linguistics, epistemology, psychoanalysis, and
feminist theory, I realized that this is not a new topic. One might even
say it has been one of the great topics of the XX century. Nietszsche,
Woolf, Kristeva, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, Heidegger, Derrida, . But if
so, why was there still a hole in the place of the subject and even more
suspicious, why had this hole been assumed to be stable ground? Why was
I (like some kind of criminal) still having to look for guidelights, a
method, a license, to bring the plurivocal vitality of the experience of
self into (academic) work with language?
Language. Epistemology. Ethics. It seems that these three are part of
a triangle. If any one of them is modified, it affects the others. My dream:
to re-formulate the concept of language so that the other two will necessarily
have to be re-formed, re-vitalized, re-related through the acknowledgement
of the subject as a question to be re-answered and re-discovered again
and again.
But every theoretical search is a metaphor for what occurs in the self.
I begin to wonder. The Birth of Voice, Autobiography as Stance,
Mother Language Wound, and Autobiography of a Social Body,
these are the titles of the essays in this section. What is crying out
underneath the call for voice, desire, stance, mother, a community? Language,
literature have made me become attentive to my own desire. What do I desire?
Then there is a voice, and she says: where is your core? Core? According
to Foucault... According to Derrida... Acording to Barthes, there is no...
I guess... I must have left it... somewhere far... away. Core? Could I
ever respond to something so definitive? The woman asks: where is the body?
I say: how should I know, I´ve never been good at keeping track of
these things. The woman says, what are you looking for that you really
believe in? I run circles around her but she stops me in my tracks and
commands me to hold still. Only then do I see a door. The door does not
lead in to a house, to a livingroom, to a classroom; the door leads
out to the forest.
***
In the middle of the forest there lies a body. White. Naked. Is it sleeping?
It is beautiful. Is it the aborted baby? Is it my mother? Is it desire?
Is it dead or alive? The moon shines on it setting it aglow. I push it
with the tip of my shoe. It turns over heavily, like a sleeper. Wake up,
I say out loud and have to smile to see the heaviness of its sleep. I kneel
next to it and shake it violently by the shoulders. Who are you? Can´t
you see it is dangerous to be out here, naked, sleeping, in the middle
of the forest? I shake it by the shoulders: wake up, don´t sleep
through your life! Is it me? She sleeps so comfortably I begin to wonder
about my own state. I wonder which one of us is dreaming and which one
is awake.
(What place is the forest? What magic words do I say to get there? No
words. Perhaps it is a matter of not saying words. Seeking deep inside
the prohibited place, the sealed-up labyrinth of the self. The return to
the silent place where words are born. The forest is the place where theory
and life, art and science are possible in the same breath. The forest...
the forest... only by believing in such a place is the lost body found.)
I strip and lie next to her. She breathes into my arms placidly. She
is warm. I am warm. The night is on us: she is my baby she is my mother
she is my self. She is so big I cannot hold her with my eyes. She is so
big I need more than my body to hold on to her. She is so small she fits
into my cupped hands. It was the body I was looking for, I realize, tears
in my eyes. I babble like a baby. I write with the tips of my bare fingers,
whittled off with a pocket knife. I have all of language to relearn.
3
As I write this portrait I have a dream:
My colleagues have decided to form a committee in order to check
on me. Profesor F. tells me this, after giving me the most beautiful Christmas
present, a white virgin wool duffel bag, and smiles. Yes, he says, cheekily:
we want to check on you because we don´t understand what you´re
doing (in academia), we want to figure out if it is serious. For example:
where did you get the license to teach (horseback) riding when you should
be teaching writing? And what is this that you call writing from the body?
He is wearing a small turtleneck sweater that belongs to me, and when I
point to it, he says it is his. The woman across the street thinks it's
kind of cute because my belly button shows, he says and stretches his chest
inside my sweater which is clearly too small for him. Then Profesora D.
continues the interrogation, sitting at a metal teacher´s desk: What
about your research project? Can you explain to me what are its objectives?
I take the opportunity to tell her I never really felt comfortable with
those objectives, that I tend to feel uncomfortable with all objectives,
with the mere act of writing objectives, but that if she wants to hear
them I know them by heart. She says, triumphant: See, I told you, she knows
how to write, but she doesn´t know the difference between science
and techné. (She on the other hand .)
I am an academic struggling to break with academia, while still being
in it. I am struggling to propose new forms, but my passion for language
keeps crashing against the idols of scientific progress. I have learned
that in order to be heard, I must get to know the discourse that is against
me. I move gracefully through it. I take the other´s discourse and
make it dance, make it whirl, make it sing, in order to convince the other
that there is something missing from his use of words.
Oh, dear, I had almost forgotten: I am a woman. I had never really stopped
to think about it; I mean, I had never thought that it might have something
to do with the sensation of being educated with a knowledge that never
quite fit. I never thought it had something to do with the feeling of never
being home, always being strange, foreign, stranger. Speaking in a language
that was always like speaking in tongues. Crazy woman, opening up drawers
inside herself and getting celebrated for those drawers. And what when
I pulled them all out. What would I find there? Would I be bold enough
to make sense of the air running through my hollows? With only these air
holes, these empty spaces (not language), to invent, to reinvent the self.
I am a woman thinking about language in academia. Anyone who wants to
understand this quest will have to hear the story of the flood. How I had
language and loved language, but the more I had it the more I wanted it
to be true. I wanted powerful language, magical language, melodic language,
and thus all the false words started to fall away, every day a new handful
of them, until the distressful moment when I realized that the only word
I still wanted was on the other side. I had spoken of breaking language
in order to find a language for myself but I hadn´t reflected on
what would happen if I pursued this mission beyond simply stating it as
a kind of cheeky comment. Sailing through the walls like Alice. Learning
that stillness is really movement, I became a sort of witch and when I
arrived at the other side, I was all alone with my one word and no other,
I was all alone and afraid, and alone, and lost and nothing made sense
anymore.
Anyone attempting to trace the process that is depicted in these essays
will have to go there, will be led, perhaps painfully, perhaps deliciously,
through this theoretical and linguistic reconstruction, spinning and spinning,
every essay a new spin, less that is certain and more to be said. Every
essay unsurer and barer, the self peeking out green and timid like a worm.
As I rush towards it, of course it hides.
I am a woman writer translator teacher vital language theorist. I am
the survivor of a shipwreck. I am the shedding of all my certainties. I
am whittling discourse down to the nude self portrait, stripping language
to the bone.
***
I wanted a simple forest path but perhaps that is not possible. The
path is contorted, it is winding, I do not know it, I have never been here.
I have no models, I have no companions. It seems that all I can do is be
true to the prism, the problem, the ball of saliva that does not allow
me to speak or to enjoy.
I must perform surgery on this knot that does not let me speak. I must
cut it open so I can see what yellow and green things come out of it, my
abandoned children, my long lost knowledge, the land I lost beneath the
bare tact of my feet.
I wanted a straight and simple path but maybe it is not possible, yet.
Because one has to run away to come here. Because one is like a criminal
or a refugee. One has to be a bad child and disappoint one´s family.
One has to say things about the people one loves that hurt. One has to
say things about oneself that perhaps should have been kept silent. One
has to suffer ugliness. Impatience. One´s words are fingernails scratching
on glass.
***
I want to imagine a time in the future when I can be a woman language
theorist and not have to be measuring myself against criteria that clearly
do not fit, criteria that have not even been questioned. When the bolder
risks that I have taken in doing this may be of more value than the subservient
repetition of theories that are only half assed. I want a full assed language
theory, generous as my birth giving, salsa dancing hips. A theory to give
not to take away from, that respects the reader as a living, thinking,
enjoying (!) being.
A theory whereby the reader can trace the path of existing language
theories and end at a place of hope. A theory that puts language (back)
in her mouth, his tongue back in his body, and leaves them set to continue,
to discover missing limbs, to put theory to the test, but only in the practice
of life, not pedantry.
A theory not exclusive to artists or scientists, rationals or irrationals,
a theory for more integrated beings, more embodied persons, persons committed
to beauty and a better world. A theory willing to recover the valid work
that has been done before it, and to be brave towards what has not
been done. An academia aggressive about disrupting the dominant warring
frame of mind.
***
A woman is walking in a thunderstorm under a red umbrella. Her face
is completely placid, as if she knew home was far away, her feet were already
wet and she was enjoying the drumming of the rain on the surface of the
umbrella. Everyone else on the street is either taking a taxi, or running
hysterically, or locked up in their homes. Yet she walks on, like an angel
of the times, an angel against the times, an art form, a performance, a
cry, a complaint uninterested in what will be the reaction of others because
it is so sure of itself. If this is what it means to be human, this hysterical
running into taxis, and locking shut of doors, then I am with the rain.
I am with beauty and I will offer no excuses for walking at my own pace.
So let the thunderstorm come in. Let my language open up and swallow
it whole. Let the storm come in, the contradiction. Let all the water in
heaven come down, and make the grass grow, make the plants inside me grow.
I want to open myself and show these words like wild flowers, this garden,
and not have to argue, and not have to justify. It is all there. Look anywhere.
Follow the tracks of the authors. It is written in the "corpus"
of academia. There is the howl for a sense of living. For a return, a return
to what palpitates. Let this old form crack open, fall to the sides of
me, and leave only the impossible text.
Woman in a rainshower. I have been pressing these pages under my jacket,
tightly against my breast to keep them dry. It is impossible. I am all
wet. When a woman writes with full knowledge of what it means for a woman
to write, every single page gets soaked. The letters blur. Rivers run down
the pages. The text overflows into a larger structure. The page is only
one point in the constellation that is text. The rest is cosmos, forest,
body, other, full fleshed life force refusing to be ignored.
And so I toss forth these dripping pages, these rivers of words, leaving
a puddle of ink on the floor.
Juliana Borrero, Mother language wound
[thesis excerpt]
1
Like a wave, smashing against a rock. Your clear vision is blinded by
white foam. The shell that holds your self together cracks open against
the angular rock. Is it the waves that have pushed you or have you thrown
your self suicidally headfirst? How long will it take to reconstruct, how
long for your three-year-old self on the Brazilian beach to recapture its
spirit in the plastic water bottle that you fill and spill, fill and spill
again? It is the best game in the world, nothing like the joy of warm water
wetting back your hair, running down your face. It is maybe four o'clock
and the low sun lays its shadows on the beach to dry. Your mother is wearing
a t-shirt with legs printed on it over her tiny Brazilian bathing suit.
Your father is taking the picture. She is wading in the low water enjoying
the word-less poetry of the afternoon as you play with your bottle.
In these gem-like moments, she forgets about you, taken as she is by
the surface of glittering diamonds. The light is a golden glaze over the
dark sand of her legs; her skin tingles from the touch of the setting sun.
The palms of her feet are naked against the wet sand. She watches the water
come and go, the sand cover and uncover her feet. It is pleasure. All that
she loves is here around her: her husband, her child, this faraway land
of samba, oxygen, youth, and freedom. Gulls glide through the air
and she watches them pierce the brilliance of the water and disappear again
through the secret windows of the air.
She can see them, the windows. She feels the invisible currents pulling
her self out of her skin, her body starts to dissolve into the warm honey
of the afternoon. The earth entire its complexity, its abundance,
its state of perpetual unfinishedness - is crying out to her. Poetry tugs
at her feet. It pulls, from here to the underworld. Suddenly a familiar
sadness fills her; she recognizes the sensation welling: in the very heart
of a beautiful moment. The flight of the gulls is suddenly a violent thrashing
of the air. The beauty of the afternoon is a mouth with sharp teeth. The
ground below her feet starts to give way. She tenses; she resists. This
moment will go too, she tells herself, and spills out her sadness over
the vast bed of water whose claim on her self she has rejected.
When she turns she can barely distinguish her daughter from the sand
and sunlight. You are all sparkling water, eyes lost in the distance. You
sway gently, lulled into a trance by the great sea. Mother walks toward
you, shakily, like one who has survived drowning. Possessed by the ocean's
rhythm you are so deep inside yourself you don´t seem to notice her.
She smiles at the sight of you, yet feels a pang. Mami, you look
up, and the pang goes away. She kisses you and turns to her husband, deep
in a mystery novel. It is getting dark, why don´t we head back
home, she says.
You on the other hand want only to return to that warm pool. To have
a plastic bottle to fill and spill. To see your mother bathed in sunlight.
And then to lose conscousness of her, and for her to lose track of you,
as you are inhabited by the pulsing life beat of the sea.
2
Where to find the space of women, "before it is filled with dread?"
(Kloepfer*)
According to psychoanalysis, words are extensions of the phallus, like
language is an extension of the law. Thus, the mother and daughter are
mute because language was not made to represent them. And yet this is hard
to understand when you have used words all your life. Both you and your
mother. When you are both writers. When you have not one but two, almost
three, tongues. To live without language: you cannot even imagine the bare
emptiness of it. You prefer to trust that words will lead you to see through
the darkness of these odd questions, that seem not to fit the rules of
words or logic. What will you find when you turn your language toward the
mother? How far must you go back? What is the name of our language, Mother?
Absence, inferno, forgetfulness. Rhythm of our loves. A hunger remains,
in place of the heart. A spasm that spreads, runs through the blood vessels
to the tips of the breasts, to the tips of the fingers. It throbs, pierces
the void, erases it, and gradually settles in. My heart: a tremendous pounding
wound. A thirst [...] Impossibility depressing possibility - of transgression.
Either repression in which I hand the other what I want from others. Or
this squalling of the void, open wound in my heart, which allows me to
be only in purgatory. I yearn for the Law. And since it is not made for
me alone, I venture to desire outside the law [...] Nothing reassures,
for only the law sets anything down. Who calls such a suffering jouissance?
It is pleasure of the damned. (Kristeva, 319)
You wonder if this is not the story of any self coming into being. You
wonder if the problem might be that we have forgotten how to work from
the void. And what would happen if we could re member the void as part
of us, not absence and lack of meaning but "a space of tides and rhythms
and biological hieroglyphs that transforms psychosis into primal song".
(Kloepfer, 85) You wonder.
***
Aphasia? Muteness? Not at all, except there are too many things that
you can't say to her. Almost everything that is important to you you cannot
say. What you write is what you will never share with her. For you, as
well as for her and - many women writers, "the text constitutes
itself on the premise of her absence". (Knoepfler, 2) There is a tragic
discommunication between the mother and daughter. You know the story: the
daughter "considered herself deviant, set apart, from the type of
life her mother lived; that what most concerned her, mother could not understand."
(Rich, 229) Persephone and Demeter pulled apart. Meanwhile the war is raging;
meanwhile the earth is withering.
Before her your words spin like coins. Their meanings grow blurry. Their
sounds grow muffled. Your words are phrases in the wind. Are they nothing
but lies? What words will serve to awaken this deadened earth body? To
caress this wounded land skin? To recover this blinded knowledge vision?
***
- I beg of you to keep this in mind if at times I seem unloving I
put my head in the lap from which I came forth and thank you for my life.
(Paula Modersohn-Becker, Diaries and Letters )
You are not mute, though. You have stolen a language with which to endow
yourself with a separate existence, inch by inch. It is a language gained
stealthily, like an adolescent closing the door of her room to put secret
barbarities in notebooks that are like treasure chests. Your words against
hers.
The story repeats itself. What was your crime? As it unfolds
it does not follow straight. It comes again and again and shows its ghostly
rostrum. Then all goes white. Then all goes black. What was your crime?
What is this guilt? You have done nothing. Why do your words stink of poison,
then? All you wanted was a space to be. Matricide when you found the body
it was dead already. Cross your heart.
There are clothes and papers tossed all over the room. The whole room
flowered with all your dear little slips of paper - you begin to collect
them one by one - each one of them so lovingly written. There is a baby
on the floor but you do not care. You walk out the window and leave it
to die. You are full of explanations but you cannot stop stuttering. Dead
Baby Mother. You do not want to be. Ghosts. You cling to life with your
teeth. It was not life, it was death you wanted to kill.
What cryptic writing you go through in order to claim your body as yours.
Contradiction at the very heart of you. What paradox must be traversed
so that life can grow in you You cling to writing because it is only there
you are real. You cling to intuition because you are blinded by the light.
If to be woman was to be your mother, you would enter the world of men
through writing. How much more time and life must pass so that you can
associate motherhood with life. Only words can cover the death in your
self. Only words can bring back life over death, and the living mother
and child. The one whose mother does not have to be dead. The one whose
mother you can be. Oh, the complex ways in which our paths around the mother
are written; oh, the complex ways in which our language writes us.
***
What she doubted was the reality of names, though she had to deal
with them; she certainly felt that naming is seldom accurate and that,
even if it is accurate, name and thing coincide only for a short time.
(Wolf, The Quest for Christa T., 35)
To understand the problem of (women and) language, Julia Kristeva differentiates
between the symbolic and the semiotic registers in language. The first
of these is the language that carries Lacan´s symbolic order and
the name-of-the-father. It is the "inevitable attributed meaning,
sign, and the signified object for the consciousness of the transcendental
ego". (Kristeva, Desire in Language, in Kloepfer, 11) But there
is also a time before the sign, before predication, and meaning. The semiotic
register in language appears as the "unnameable, improbable, hybrid,
anterior to naming, to the One, to the father." (ibid.) The semiotic
or chora - is the space of vocalization, rhythm, music, laughter
the very workings of poetic language, that which protects meaning from
petrification.
But like the mother, the semiotic register is ambivalent, mysterious:
a dark tug and pull unsettling all fixed meaning, that void which the self
turns its back to in order to become established, solid, stable. Not all
laughter and music, the semiotic
is (also) a ´crisis´ of the ´unsettling process
of meaning and subject.´ At the edges of jouissance and also psychosis:
´the occult, the esoteric, and the regressive rush in as soon as
the symbolic surface cracks and allows the shadow of the mother to appear
its secret and its ultimate support.´ (ibid.)
The search for the (non) language of the mother, then, leads back to
the memory of before. Before language as law before identity as separation
before you learned that the image in the mirror was yours is the
body memory of the preoedipal phase. "In which not only ´she
is mine/ I am hers´ but ´she is me/ I am her´" (Kloepfer,
33) Where pleasure was learned where desire was formed where you were part
of the world and it was part of you.
And then the sign is born, the self is torn from the other. The mother's
body is exchanged for the word, that will enable the self to be self. Paradoxically,
this is the word that cannot speak self it is?* "re-present"
it. Fancy technology: we will now be able to control meaning we will now
be able to use meaning to control you The body is forgotten. The mother
is gagged. As she learns the language that does not come out of her body,
she loses her voice. When she speaks she speaks the language that annuls
the self.
Kristeva proposes the recovery of desire in language as a way
out of the symbolic abyss of meaning that is ancestrally locked in the
family value system.
[...] a passion for ventures with meaning and its materials [...],
in order to carry a theoretical experience to that point where apparent
abstraction is revealed as the apex of archaic, oneiric, nocturnal, or
corporeal concreteness, to that point where meaning has not yet appeared
(the child), no longer is (the insane person), or else functions as a restructuring
(writing, art). (Kristeva, 1980, x)
Although words do not speak her, the mother does not die. "Behind
every temple to the father (the symbolic) there is a dark cave or inner
hall where one might invoke the mother´s voice and rhythm."
(Kloepfer, 130) Her story is behind each word She does not show, but the
trace of her body (or its repression) can be read in the gaps and holes
of symbolic language. The mother is the cause of language not being able
to be easily retained as pre-modeled representation of reality. She is
the memory that before language there is
"The ´space´ they lost is not a geographical locus
but a space in language, an ´in-between,´ where the semiotic
register pulses beneath the ´tin-pan noises´ of male discourse."
(Kloepfer, 27) It is by sensing the unacknowledged presence of the mother´s
body, by recognizing the interplay within the structure of meaning
(Kristeva, again), by getting a feel for the endless gamble between the
semiotic and the symbolic, that language comes alive, with words that bear
the mark of her ambivalence, her rocking motion, the space that is at once
presence and absence, its possibilities, its tragedy. Language opens its
arms, then, like a mother who has not put away her desire. Mother tongue
come to lick your wounds. Mother thought running electric through the body,
reconnecting you with other bodies, tapping you back into the uncontainable
flow of life.
Because the relationship of language and the body is not metaphor. It
can be described: "as a scroll unwinds before shut eyes a kind of
Freudian subconscious which was shifted was opened up as if a layer of
hardened, protective sand and lava had been sifted. Behind that layer,
the things that had been blighted were, by the same token, now fresh."
(Kloepfer, 108) To conceive of language without suppressing the body modifies
all language acts. Psychoanalysis teaches that to read language is to read
the body; text is a blind under which the body is veiled, mourned or birthed.
Writing can be the act by which we access our bodies and literally create
our selves in language that is pulse, life beat, rhythm. "Where memory
might be retrieved through meter and meter retrieved through memory."
(Kloepfer, 107) Body memory, the forgotten memory of the preoedipal, before
identity, definition, split, territorialization, language, war rhythm,
as the memory that connects us. Ah, I see you now, mother. Nested in nature,
you have not fled. Mother, you were the sky not the cage. Now I fly.
***
When daughter is born it is rain over sun. That day there was the glow
of the rainbow over her face. Now you have lived it too, the miraculous
transformation of one in two. The stretching of the skin. The generosity
of nutrition. The place inside where other dwells. Grows. Kicks. The enormous
leap over the mountain of your fear. The rainbow on the face. A new voice
so delicate that it would not wake a bird from sleep. The place where you
never thought you would be. You are radiant sitting in the place that was
occupied by your own mother. And what is this pull, this sweetness, oh
dear piece of self, oh, tender piece of being that wants to grow a life
of its own. Blood of my milk, tongue of my skin. There are no words for
this, only eyes.
Timeless eyes look at you fixedly from the cradled arms of mother. You
are a link in the chain of mothers and daughters. She is the promise of
vision that does not petrify, of understanding that does not slaughter,
of a language that does not kill. Life beat, fluid, courage, palpitation.
Between each mother and daughter lies the breadth and the diversity of
the rainbow. To touch mother is to traverse the spectrum. You dive into
the darkness and begin to see with rainbow eyes.
***
In The Unspeakable Mother, Deborah Kloepfer clarifies how in
our society language is a kind of blind contract erected upon the mother´s
silence. The patriarchal economy of desire, based on "a system of
exchange, with woman as its object and language as the adjunct with the
signifier as the ´counter,´ is premised on the forbidden, and
the forbidden, both libidinally and textually, is the mother." (174)
Releasing the mother, then, is considered illicit, and unspeakable. (2)
Incest. A voice whispers the word again sending an electric shock through
your spine. A black woman is sucking on a mango "Her teeth would bite
into a mango and her lips would fasten on either side of it, and while
she sucked you saw that she was perfectly happy." (Jean Rhys, Voyage
in the Dark, in Kloepfer, 68) The longing with which your tongue squealed
for the mother's breast Memory long lost The birth of desire in the infant's
relationship to the mother.
You cannot say that you have not loved to suck on a mango, or that your
eyes do not immediately go to the woman walking rhythmically down the street,
or that you do not admire the naturalness with which simple women seem
to accept babies, or to envy the time a mother spends cootchie-cootching
with her child. You experienced breastfeeding. It was the sweetest kiss
a nipple could have. And you never quite managed to hide your breast the
way a decent woman should do. And it was not painful. And it was not difficult
like there was a simple, unasking, joyous way, and this was it. And sometimes
you fell asleep while the baby was feeding, like you have fallen asleep
with your lover still inside you during a night of love.
To understand what would be necessary for the mother's absence to become
a space of presence, it is necessary to reclaim the term incest
- the unspeakable taboo of this shared space between mother and daughter
- and reformulate its story. To do this it is necessary to ask: "if
we have functioned for centuries out of the economy of the son's desire,
what would be the consequences of the daughter's desire?" (174) Incest
is
preoedipal, formulated not on severance and lack and prohibition,
but on presence, on the literal. Incest, then, precedes desire, for our
earliest relation to the mother is incestuous in the sense that the infant's
experience is undenied access to her body, both internally (prenatally)
and externally. (175).
To recover the preoedipal memory of the mother is to undo knowledge
of (the father´s) language to the point of recovering the place where
the knowledge of the mother´s language begins. It is to touch the
creative, connective, erotic, generous, flexible, ambivalent place (of
the mother) that has been banned, abandoned, forgotten by the language
of the father. To watch the words of the father and with them abstract
reasoning, grammar, syntax, the structure of the sign, the promise of fixed
meaning, language as re-presentation, the economy of desire contingent
upon loss - slowly disintegrate as you journey back inside the mother´s
body - love skin womb - back back back to the great life body.
This is the memory of before. You put your eye on the wound and look
inside.
***
If desire is contingent upon loss, any economy constituted out of
that loss will necessarily form itself around a hole, a gap, a wound. (Kloepfer,
6)
The wound is linguistic, it is epistemological, and of course it
is ethical. (JB, "The Birth of the Voice")
Waves beat against the brinks of the wound, soothing the hurt with their
hypnotic hum. Waves to weave it back together. Life fluid rolling back
and forth. Nutrient as well as knowledge. The very stuff that creation
is made of. The relation between self and other. Subjects and earth. What
is eternal and at once ever changing. Light and dark. Life and death. The
possibility of seeing nature-world-life as the place where all of these
dichotomies potentially flow rather than antagonize. Aren't all these pieces
part of the same reality? Is there not a body that can contain them all,
in their dissimilitude?
You want language in its liquid state, before it is evaporated or frozen.
Language allowing you to see the invisible windows in the air that lead
to ways of embracing life, re membering your self as part of its great
body. Because it is not enough to be born, there must be air bitten, wind
swallowed, green taken in; there must be sharing, there must be courage,
defiance of the exchange of time for coins, self for coins, thought for
coins. There must be eyes as quick as flies to trace the constant shifting
of boundaries; and a tongue that is wet enough to lick them together. There
must be life giving back to life, reenacting the constant flow. There must
be mothering, and daughtering and lovering that is not disconnected from
the great life spool.
You want language to mother you, and to mother your mother. You want
language to lead you back to who you were before your body was broken,
before your roots were pulled out of the earth, before you were taken away
from your self, away from your body, before your roots were pulled out
of the earth. It is only by reconstructing the memory of wholeness that
you can inhabit life without turning your back to it, voluntarily or involuntarily.
In search for a language that will tell your story, you fall and fall down
this pit, making up word images to give you some ground; hoping, at the
end of the fall there will be some kind of nest, mother, language, home
to cradle my not knowing in its great arms.
* * *
until she could finally determine to what extent the mother made
her and to what extent she might remake the mother (Kloepfer, 16)
Because you must understand that your mother today is no longer the
mother of your childhood; no longer the mother of your adolescence
To see her better you must imagine her in the perspective of her own
mother. You have known wonders about your mother and grandmother that they
have never shared with each other. To your mother, her mother was the norm,
the imposition, the endless list of manners and appropriate things to do,
she was the constant hassle over the phone, the nightmare of your calm,
humanist grandfather, the women´s doctor according to your mother.
You think of your mother now, ponytail and overalls, on her knees in
the dirt playing with your son at knights and warriors. Your mother sweating
beneath a worker´s helmet in the petroleum fields, flying in helicopters
and telling lies to her mother in order to spend full weeks in the
red guerrilla zone. Your mother writing erotic novels about everything
she could never share with you, or with her mother, the intimate cellars
where she can see herself naked, transforming into women of different bodies
and different lives, fusing with all the women of the world and all of
their desires. They are not the words she uses to talk to you or anybody
else; they are words she keeps in her sewing basket like a million colored
threads in order to tell the stories of other women, reflections and refractions
of her self. Her larger, deeper, wider, more diverse and multiple self.
Your mother wearing the feathered collar she adjusts on her coat when she
is invited to a literary meeting. Your mother, who made up a different
name for herself in order to write love novels; who registered herself
officially with that name in order to be published and now will not receive
her pension because of it. Somewhere between her two names, the writer
and the woman, is gestated the space for courage, the space for other,
the space for body. Your mother coming to birth at the age of fifty. It
is after the daughter leaves that she returns to herself; it is the painful
rupture of the mother and daughter asphyxiating each other that allows
her the space to come back. Oh, the beautiful pathways we must invent in
order to come back to our selves.
"It is not in the mother´s ´story´ that her power
lies but in how she riddles the discourse that denies her." (Kloepfer,
174) Now you remember what Adrienne Rich was saying about Mrs. Ramsay in
Virginia Woolf´s To the Lighthouse: "the passion of the
daughter for the mother, her need above all to understand this woman, so
adored and unavailable to her; to understand, in all complexity, the differences
that separated the mother from herself." (228) You realize this new
form of love which springs from the discovery of her complexity,
her humanity, your mother´s. How to use language to
embrace her in her complexity? How to love her through language? How to
speak of her through this ethical consciousness of the (m)other, as a subject-in-process,
this new consciousness of plurality that wants to make, more than self,
connection?
You want to write a text that will come together like this slow conjugation
of memory, feelings, and words. You want to put together these fragments
of misunderstood selves so that the sum of them will find their place in
the larger picture. She, like you, is incontainable; how not to exhaust
her mystery?
* * *
You are independent now, the life sucked out of you by the world of
work. You are wounded by the sword-shaped tongues of academia. You can
feel your own tongue turning sharp, it is monstrous. You are worn out by
the ethic of not working to depth but also not enjoying, the plastic valuation
of comfort, the epistemology of fixed meaning, arguments over definitions,
classifications, isn't there anything else? You are worn out by women stopping
in their paths to point to the spot of dirt on your trousers. The burden
of everyone's lies. You walk out lightly in the morning and return a heavyweight,
loaded with the charge of glances and words and interests that pull you
into the dirt. The stories of the war accumulate on the skin of every day
like scum. You are tired. You want your mother.
You take an orange cloth napkin, one of the ones you inherited from
your grandmother, and set it over a nest of pine needles in the forest.
In the middle you place a picture of her. You and your sister are playing
in the sandbox and she is standing behind you, with sunglasses and holding
onto her purse. She looks elegantly and distractedly to one side. In one
of the corners you place the golden buttons she sewed onto your jacket
when you were away on a trip, and which you hated for being too fancy.
In another you place the letter where your sister tells your mother she
is in love with a woman. In the lower right corner, a picture of the mother
of your man, a small, stout, brownish-skinned woman with an apron and nine
children and a look that is neither happy nor sad. In the lower left corner
the book of German fairy tales your mother read you when you were a child:
Rapunzel, Twelve Dancing Princesses, The Princess and the Pea, Hansel and
Gretel, and Red Riding Hood. In your head is the voice of Ellis Regina
singing a love song in feminine Portuguese. You set down a bunch of colored
wildflowers, the kind you don't buy at the florist. A ripe banana, open
for the birds. A box with the school medals that made her so proud and
made you embarrassed. A conch. This is the forest, mother. This is our
mother. It starts to rain. And now may it thunder. Without knowing how,
you begin to pray: Here´s to you and me, mother. To all of our unfinished
seeds. Here´s to all that we could be. Here´s to life, that
is mother´s secret. And here´s to the mother of life. When
mother and daughter come together, in their thunder as well as in their
frailty, the earth is replenished.
You plead for delicateness and the strength that can derive from softness.
You return to the small details that weave together the day's moments.
The smell of tangerines. The wings of butterflies. A cloud that is a fish
flying through the air. The bathing of the child, and then the patient
drying, making up crazy stories as you apply skin cream, selecting every
day a slightly different and novel combination of clothes, of foods, of
words. You read a story to your child every night, and if you are particularly
tired, you trick him and end the story early. You stroke his head as he
falls asleep.
Through these minuscule actions, you pass the delicate thread of your
hope. Outside, the demolition goes on. You have placed your hope in the
small dewdrops that remain on life's spider web in the world's morning
after a night of bombing. If these fugitive pearls can survive, then hope
is still possible.
***
In the innermost core of me, where body and soul are not yet divided
and where not a single word or a single thought can penetrate (Christa
Wolf, Cassandra, 112)
The self needs a nest of silence, to return to for strength. Use the
caressing texture of words to get to the space before words. Sunlight on
the dancing leaves of trees reminds you of sunlight on the skin of your
newborn self. Leaves love life. Life leaves love. Love leaves life. Home
is this nest of favorite words that are cooing sounds with no meaning.
The tranquil sleep of baby so delicate, so new - atop mother, so
fascinated, so tired. The touch of skin that has not coarsened. The smell
of having awakened to the world. The cry of the voice that is also the
necessity of breath. Language that is air. The trak trak slip slop
trudge trudge of outside is aggressive to the newborn, trying to stay newborn
inside. The sword-edges of words and sharp intentions. Preserve the sensual
alertness. The time of self against tic toc time. The space of the self
against cosmetic suffocation of the skin. Seek out the seed before self
was subjected. Defend that self against the forces of the war. Preserve
life against and above duty, ramble against trudge. Proliferate the love
that does not take the air of self away. Create connection, do not forget
rhythm. Guard with one´s words the sacred nest where life is made.
Where does this journey lead to? The closest place.
JA (EE), Snow
The hospital called one Friday afternoon in January to say that your
mother had taken a turn for the worse and they didn't expect her to make
it through the weekend. Your father called you at work and you raced home
despite the slippery, greasy snow that was falling. Your highball was waiting
for you on the kitchen table. Your father was already drunk. You raced
through dinner and then headed out in the dark to the hospital.
You saw her in the road long before you realized your father didn't.
She was just standing there in four lanes of busy Friday night traffic.
She stepped into your lane. It was too late when you shouted out. The car
skidded into her as he slammed on the brakes. She bounced up onto the windshield
with her face smashing the glass in front of you. (Odd - the first thing
that happened once you were sober was the recurring nightmare of her face
hitting the windshield. You woke up screaming noiselessly, drenched in
sweat, night after night, to the sound of those car brakes screaming, seeing
her dull, lifeless eyes peering into yours - or were they really your eyes
reflected?) She flew off the hood of your car, hit the pavement and rolled
down the road. Her purse opened into the windy, snowy night. Napkins -
white cocktail napkins - came spilling out and started flying off into
the air - twirling and lifting higher and higher, mixing with the swirling
snow. Like hundreds of white flags signaling surrender.
You remember only a few things about that night. One - the first thing
your father said to you immediately after hitting the woman was, "Do
you have any gum? I don't want them to smell alcohol on me." Two -
you never made it to the hospital that night. You and your father went
back home and drank bourbon highballs until there wasn't any fear, pain,
hatred until there wasn't any memory. Three - the woman miraculously didn't
die. And four - they were wrong. Your mother lived through that weekend
and spent six more months dying a slow, painful death.
Heather Davis (KC), City pieces
1.
I remember Sundays in New York. Waking in the loft bed, always alone.
Lying there, listening to the car wash, sometimes to the muffled sounds
of Brian and Karen talking in bed on the other side of the wall, reading,
trying to decide whether to get up, sitting on the couch, staring out the
window, listening to the record player and smoking cigarettes to pass the
first few hours of the day.
Sometimes, a walk, or in good weather, a quick trip into Manhattan to
walk around, to make love to the buildings in the Village and eat $2 falafel
on MacDougal Street. Sometimes I would call you from the park, but you
never answered.
Later, cooking in the kitchen, drinking a beer and listening to This
American Life on the clock radio. Sitting down to smoke and listen
while something boiled or simmered or baked. The calm contentedness of
a cat. I never missed you on Sundays, I reveled in the soft, quiet hours
of solitude, pulled them around me like a favorite sweater, and also counted
the minutes until I could return to the loud, impassioned bustle of Harlem.
I made phone calls, I wrote, I worked on papers and essays. I waited
for the Simpsons, for Peter to come strolling across the hall to sit waifish
in our pink chair with the strip of metal that jutted out from behind and
tore my shirts, to roll one of his cigarettes and talk about how he didn't
know what he wanted to do with his life.
Sometimes we talked, we usually talked on Sundays, and I think it made
me happy.
There was also laundry.
2.
,the buildings, neighborhoods, trendy white kid parties, the streetsound,
the feeling of always living, moving, growing, creating, the churches,
the dirty snow banks on the corners, boots filling with cold slush, the
bodegas with dusty shelves, the walkups, the sneakers, the little tiles
in the entrance-ways of all the apartments, the crooked wooden staircases,
the pipes that banged and clanked and hissed in the walls as they carried
soothing hot water into the room, the aboveground trains, the bridges,
the gowanus yacht club, brunch with mimosas in alphabet city, mamoun's
falafel, the writing group, the art galleries, the music, is that mos def
over there?, the clubs with candy, lotion, and bowls of flowers floating
in water in the bathrooms, with mermaids swimming behind the bar, the wooden
floors, the smell of old elevators, the bricks, the stone, the cups of
sweet mango and coconut icees,
3.
Why were we walking out by the field? Where were we going? I remember
nothing but that moment of laughter on the path, and looking up at the
dark sky and my friends' faces, flushed with uncontrolled laughter
not how we got there or what we did after.
But that was before. That was sweet and good, but it was not the roman
candle of joy that I came to know in myself in the city, that was my gift,
finally, for enduring so much hate and sickness, that came flying into
my heart without warning and sent me floating from my apartment to the
train, that filled me with something I didn't know about before, something
that could come alive in every cell, happy and radiant, full of sweet,
warm lust for everything around me and the perfect knowledge that I had
everything I wanted. My legs burned in the same rhythm as the sun hitting
the sidewalks.
4.
,the bronze crows at the chinatown A train stop, the graffiti, coney
island, the smell of the ocean, the squealing of the subway trains, the
wide yellow strips with raised bumps at the edges of the platform, the
rows of people all leaning forward, looking into the tunnels for a train
that we knew we would not see, the neighborhood maps, the G train, the
murals, the walking, columbia on a sunny day, the crowds, prospect park,
birthday party at the lake, awkward conversations with taxi drivers, everything
delivered at all hours of the day, even the drugs, the stoops, the rows
of brownstones in park slope and harlem, the families, the bad-ass little
kids strutting around on their bikes and scooters and skateboards, the
rooftops, never having to buy gasoline, hooray, the m60, 2 dollars for
a trip from laguardia, the orange and white columns of steam on the roads,
a Saturday afternoon of legs aching from walking up and down broadway,
wasting time, bottled water and cigarettes,
5.
Take the D train to Coney Island with the kids in early March while
it is still cold. Go, even though it will be dark when you arrive. Claim
Summer for yourself, do not wait for it. On the train, take pictures of
Brooklyn, talk about the shapes of the bridges, let the girls gossip in
one corner of the car, the boys look at the back pages of the Voice in
the other corner. Play, listen to Ab's lectures, and wonder what we will
do once we get there. Notice that the commuters want to look at us but
are afraid.
Eat at Nathan's, drink lemonade, even though the wind is cold against
your skin. Share all your dollars, then all your nickels and quarters.
Watch the kids whisper that Heather and Ab are crazy, and know that
they love you even still, or maybe because. See the silent boardwalk, fly
the kites that the night sky swallows, listen for the ocean that you cannot
see, find the dead seagull in the sand. Take a photograph. Laugh later
when Laura says that one kid makes a special trip to see her on Saturday,
demanding to know why we would take a picture of a dead bird. Laugh when
she tells how she explained the way the artist sees. Watch Abishai standing
in the seafoam with his pants rolled up to his knees, determined to have
his summer day, the girls with perfect hair and shiny lips and cute shoes,
appalled at the possibility of getting wet, of acting freely, because they
are so young and so worried. Feel some sadness when the kids express relief
at returning to a familiar neighborhood, take last minute group photos
on the train platform, watch everyone pose, become nervous, smile, try
to capture the day you already know deserves to be remembered. Call him;
he won't answer.
Take another train back to Brooklyn with Abishai. Talk, fast and unending,
not to cover up the spaces, but because you are full and unstoppable, because
there is always so much to say. Arrive at Southpaw, listen to Ab confess
that he is broke, pay for everything without discussion, brother and sister,
know that he will do the same for you another time. See that the place
is almost empty, realize that we are always early, always uncool, always
so eager to begin. Sit in a dark red corner and cry out to each other over
the music; feel good yelling stories. Tell them, tell many, swallow so
much drink, say too many things, things too sacred even for the page, secrets.
It was this girl, and I met her and she . . . but her father . . . and
I don't know how . . . she said my body . . . if we could . . . I wanted
to cry. Tell of fear and confusion and strangeness and regret and hate
and know that you are not afraid and are not sad. Know that you are
shaping, giving things a place, examining. Acknowledge each other as family,
become close, tell the stories few will hear. I love you.
Watch the stage light up. Do not stop, do not sleep for a whole day.
Watch Clay bring history and rhythm up from his thighs and out through
his hands and mouth as he prowls the stage. Say hello to Aseer; watch his
slow eyes and the long locks trailing down his back. He does not remember
our names; see how he greets us with warmth anyway. Dance, even though
you are the only ones dancing, even though you are early and eager.
Take the next train ride home. Ride home safe in the 3am dark, know
that it is almost too much, too much goodness in one day. Do not sleep;
feast on the cool, blue room and the dark street sounds, open your eyes
to make sure that everything is real, just as you had left it before you
closed your eyes, press your face into the sheets and inhale, know this
day and never forget.
In the morning, the alarm. Throw it against the wall with a smile, and
bury your face in the sheets again. Know that you don't want a new day
to begin so soon, that you don't want the perfection of the day before
to ebb away from you. A push out of bed, warm water all over your body,
the sun, spring is coming, and the train again, and watch how it doesn't
stop, how it never stops, for so many days. Know that it is so good and
so unexpected and so delicate a joy after so much crying and loss that
you are afraid to breathe, that if you breathe too sharply, if you inhale
too deeply, it will crack into pieces and be gone forever.
6.
,running through the sprinklers at union square on a hot day, the
courthouse where I lied about the incident at the turnstiles, the water
towers, I can't believe I didn't say that first, the water towers everywhere,
groaning, pumping, watching, people who know what a hero is, a cheese sandwich
from jamal for 1.75 at the star deli in harlem, oui, je parle francais,
the buckets of fresh flowers heaped up on the sidewalks, the bars with
nothing but red furniture and soft lights, the fire escapes, the roof tops,
the sidewalks, the Hasidic neighborhoods with Hebrew print on the store
windows and school busses, everyone in black, those two perfect curls,
the street festivals, the dollar stores, that cheap, public-school toilet
paper for sixty cents, the good bands playing at the bar up the block,
the gardens, the fireworks, the streets lit up,
7.
Some days I remember so much that I cannot free myself from the slow
sinking into a bittersweet, nostalgic ache. I feel quiet and cautious
easily disturbed by the world bustling around me. I think of many things.
I think of walking down Smith Street with my beloved friend, once in the
fall, the long and sweetly awkward goodbye at the top of the stairs to
the train, a laughing crowd at the beer garden on the corner; I see the
lights dotting the air and shimmering in the leaves above the bustling
people. And then, Smith Street in the winter, waiting in the snow banks,
feeling safe and loved and protected, watching him hail a cab for me like
only a boy knows how to do, counting each breath, glad the goodbye is right
and comfortable, not too sad, although, awfully, awfully sad even still.
I think of his hands closing the door behind me, I remember leaning forward
to tell the driver where to go as if he was not standing outside the window
with a smile, an ache in my heart both times, and now. My dreams to live
with all my friends in one place never once diminishing into the immaturity
of the past as I always thought they would.
My head is in the city, on the streets of Harlem, in the garden with
Pablo's sunflowers, on Manhattan Avenue, in Yvette's apartment, holding
Sydney's hand in the park, howling with laughter, my stomach hurting so
badly, Hot 97 and bad coffee, cups of ice for 10 cents, stories on the
rocks in the park, Lacey smoking her cloves with intimidating grace, the
throbbing, silent crowds in the subway tunnels, my chin held high, my steps
swift.
I need the city, I need you, Yvette, James, Abishai. I need all of us
together, our children, our lives, our families, the conversations we are
meant to have, the truths and pleasures we are meant to share, I need you
to keep teaching me. My heart aches at the sound of their laughter, I drown
in memories of their houses, Yvette's living room full of Christmas lights,
Abishai's broken stairs, Jimmi's incense always burning, the slow creak
of his landlady's door opening to scrutinize our arrival, each lilting
note of our laughter up the stairs, of days in the park, of walking the
streets of the city, this is the most passionate love I have known.
Every month of the year brings inevitable recollections of where I once
was. March twelfth, March twelfth, I know you, I have been here before.
I have arrived, sick and feverish on your doorstep, heartbroken and in
love, I came to you in gypsy cabs, in the last car of the A train, on my
own two feet, coughing and dizzy up the stairs.
"H, why are you here?" "I don't know", with
a laugh, but I did know, I wouldn't give up one second of that year, one
breath, I had to be there, to see you, to touch all of you, because I knew
it would come to an end, eventually, and even though I had to pause after
every step on the stairwell, and even though I hid how sick I was, and
even though I had a babbling fever and could do no work, I could not stay,
sleeping, aching, alone in Brooklyn. I had to take that train ride, to
bask in love, in Ab's words, in Yvette's gold, in Jimmi's brilliance.
I wonder about genetics. I think of my grandfather, I piece it all together,
I wish he was still alive, I would ask him, tell me, please, the story
of New York, of being born in Brooklyn, of having immigrant parents, of
cold water flats, of cigars and grey streets. New York is in my blood,
every cell has a blueprint of its streets, my heart is made of its stuff.
It is home, I felt that there, home, in a way that I never felt in Maryland,
New Mexico, Texas, Vermont. A feeling of pulsing actualization, of the
complete perfection of place, of the completeness of desire fulfilled and
even the lack of completeness, of unfulfilled desires feeling perfect,
just, completely, perfect. The drama of life is limp and distant to me
anywhere else. I was born there, my genetic self is starved for its oxygen.
I wish I could know, I want to know the stories of the immigrants who started
this, who infused my blood with the city, with a relentless aching for
it.
Jimmi howls on the phone, "I need a mango", and I understand
him perfectly.
I hear the twins, Yvette and Jimmi's children, crying. I know I am bound
to them. James would laugh to see these words. He only knows me as he has
wanted to know me. He knows me, drunken and unhinged. He knows me, brave
on a 3am street with his knife in my pocket. He knows me, laughing, happy
as a teacher. He knows me as masculine. He knows the tough, straight, hard,
clear parts of me. He has not met me, the writer, me, the poet, me, the
gentle female. Yvette knows.
Give me more, the everpresent sense of family, of love, of being unafraid,
of being always open with the mind, of confessing and not being ashamed,
of drama and physical movement in the body, of physical closeness without
hesitation or awkwardness. I think of Yvette inviting me to sit in bed
with her and keep my arm wrapped around her pregnant stomach, of our candid
talks about sex, of Jimmi declaring joyfully his love at the end of our
phone conversations, of Ab and I sharing stories and embraces, of Yvette
laughing in the sun with gold lip gloss and saying that she dreamt of us
watching Japanese films and drinking wine and kissing in her apartment,
of always feeling like a huge, loud, rowdy family and not afraid, the things
I always wanted.
8.
The goodbye: a million people flowing fast around us, and we two standing
still as people rarely stand still in the city, your arms around me, saying
goodbye with the angle of your neck against my body instead of with words.
I understand becoming woman, I understand the loss of a certain kind of
pain, the loss of childhood. I stand alone crying in the afternoon light
of the apartment in Brooklyn, having said a final goodbye. I cry for the
loss, but also feel a timid joy at its sweetness, at the perfection of
such an experience, at having known it and lived through it and known the
pain of its ending. How beautiful to be crying so purely, so openly for
the ending of something so violently sweet and brief. The purity of sadness,
the knowledge of the goodness of mourning. The car wash went swwissssh
swwissssh. The bass of the Latin music rose to the window in rhythmic
vines of sound, the sun glinted from the cars and stung my eyes. The tears
fell down my cheeks and I stood with my arms wrapped around my stomach,
my head bowed, crying. And then, when my breath returned, I smiled at myself,
I laughed a very quick, soft laugh. And I kept moving.
Shine your light on the city, goodbye. Make love to a million women,
Hashim, goodbye. Pour your soul onto the page, fill the rooms of people
with it, press your lips against the microphone, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
cold mornings on Maujer Street, goodbye Williamsburg bridge, goodbye midnight
phone calls, goodbye stolen kisses, goodbye dancing, goodbye eating baklava
and sitting at David's house to pass the time, goodbye holding hands in
the movie theater, goodbye outrageous passion and slamming doors and violent
kissing and jealousy and screaming and crying in the train station and
eating tulips and feigning cool and long talks on the subway, goodbye.
I am a woman now.
9.
,the neighbors too loud, the supers too shady, the break-ins, the
electric tension of the other always present, channel 13, the bookstores,
labyrinth especially, the diners, the breakfast for two dollars, always
open, spanish bakery, parades, halloween, the insanity of the subway performers,
watch me, I'm dressed like a horse, west indian day parade in the sun,
the abandoned buildings, the fire escapes, the days never ending, the nosleeping,
the sneakers on the telephone wires, the cloisters, rats in the subway,
are you jewish?, cold sangria at panchito's, weed delivery, karina, wolf,
sean, leslie, e.j. gina, nicole, the hudson, riverside drive, $7 cigarettes,
no birds but pigeons, pommes frites, crates of fish on the sidewalk in
chinatown,
Heather Davis, Wedding
I did get married, and I would not say it was startling. It is blissful
and peaceful this far. My husband and I have been partners for a long time,
and as we met when we were both very young, we always gave one another
freedom and support to travel, live apart, etc, which we both did frequently
- so it has felt good to finally settle into one another after lots of
separations.
We stubbornly decided to have our wedding be exactly as we both truly
desired. A poet friend of mine from college paid a dollar to become a Universal
Life Minister so he could marry us, and he, my husband, and five of our
friends spent the weekend at a lakehouse near San Antonio - a very magical
place. The ceremony consisted of a walk from the lakehouse down a dirt
road in the woods and through a river to a rock ledge above a huge pool
with waterfalls, me with my bouquet of wildflowers gathered from the walk
through the woods. Wedding
picture.jpg.
Carolyn Hauck (LW), Seeing
It was a very small moment only a few days after we'd met. We were standing
on a stage. Talking with another student about directions for a performance;
how to proceed. How to set the stage. We were in the midst of directing
a pathway, a way we could take an audience on a scripted adventure. We
were mapping it out. We were making sure all was in order. We were preparing
a strategy and then at that moment my eyes caught his.
Something I did, something I said made him laugh and he looked at me.
He looked at me with eyes open to every possibility, open and shining,
past the line that separates him from the space beyond him. His body began
to fuse with everything around him, so that I felt as though this world
where I was standing opened to a place past space and time. I felt the
sea around us, the trees around us, the stars around us, the planets around
us. The world was spinning, spinning inside me, turning in time with the
universe. Turning, turning slowly, so I could feel the pull of gravity
within me.
He was the gateway to truly seeing. His eyes looked as though they were
not coming from him, but from You. The IYou that surrounds me and orbits
our bodies. I was seeing through him through me.
I felt bare. Not naked in the way you feel in dreams, as though you
need to rush and find clothes, but bare in the sense that I felt completely
vulnerable, open and unafraid. The look in his eyes said "you,"
the look I felt myself give back to him was "yes, me, you." It
happened all in a split second, with no pretense and complete lack of facial
control. There was no fantasy, no story being constructed around him, and
with that I felt my own story begin to dissolve around me so that I could
just be. He was beaming in front of me. I beamed back at him. My face feeling
my body transmitted to him in a sort of Morse code. Yes. Yes, Yes. Yes.
Two flashlights flashing. Two children in separate bedrooms speaking in
lights in the middle of the night. All my body wanted to say was yes, yes,
yes to him.
*
I am stunned by a bit of information I learn at school: when a baby
is born, there is a moment that is perhaps crucial in defining the newborn's
capacity for love:
It is not only the mother who is releasing hormones during labor
and delivery. During the last contractions, the fetus is also releasing
a high level of hormones of the adrenaline family. One of the effects of
this is that the baby is alert at birth, with eyes wide open and pupils
dilated. Mothers are fascinated by the gaze of their newborn babies. It
seems that this eye-to-eye contact is an important feature of the beginning
of the mother-baby relationship, which probably helps the release of the
love hormone, oxytocin. Both mother and baby are in a complex hormonal
balance that will not last long and will never happen again. Physiologists
today can interpret what ethologists have known for half a century by studying
the behavior of animals: where the development of the capacity to love
is concerned, there is a critical, sensitive period just after the birth.
(Michel Odent, www.gentlebirth.org/archives/brtrauma.html)
Hearing this, my throat swells and I begin to cry. I can remember the
moment. I am overwhelmed by a feeling in my throat and my stomach. I remember.
I remember the gaze. I remember the look my mother gave me.
She is desperately in love with me and extremely hesitant all at the
same time. I imagine this is possibly what all mothers feel. It seems only
natural. Extreme love and extreme fear. In this memory I feel myself in
the presence of her eyes. I am in love. I fear her hesitancy, but I am
overcome with desire to live, with and without her. I feel it in my newborn
toes. I love you, but want to live beyond you.
It's the eye love you that wells in my throat and my heart despite my
fear of her hesitancy. In the books I've read these past several months,
much of what is said about daughters and mothers is that daughters are
shocked to find that the mother is not the goddess the daughter thought
she was as she sucked at her breast. But if my memory serves me correctly,
it is quite possible that we knew all along. We knew her limitations even
in the womb. We knew. But it is in the look, in the flooding of love that
we say to her "I will live a life filled with love for you."
My body is covered in blood and fluid. I am slimy and screaming. My
new mother gazes upon me and is filled with the highest level of hormonal
love that she will ever feel in relation to me. It is her first time seeing
me. Her experiences of me until this point have not been visible. They
have been in her dreams, in what her belly tells her. At the sight of me,
she begins to feel all the other possibilities.
What if it were customary for mothers to record the moment of first
seeing and pass it on to us like a birthright story? What if they asked
us to remember our own seeing, to remember this time when a gaze upon us
spilled over with love?
*
On that one afternoon, his look said love one moment before his body
could register fear.
*
This seeing him changed me. Changed everything about the way I see things.
This seeing him was a rebirth. A being born again. As though my eyes had
been opened, shaped by the moment I saw the world in him. As though I was
aware again that the world spun, moved, changed.
And now I search daily for a way of truly seeing. Of seeing the 'You'
in ordinary things. Of seeing the 'You' in 'him.' I do this to take myself
back to the tree. To connect my body, its limbs, all of its joys and sufferings,
to the world within me, to the world within him.
Susan Moul (EE), the road with me on it
mmm I DON'T KNOW anymore/ think I was fourteenish/ and I used to go and
get this airedale from the pastor of the church I attended/ david and linda/
eventually and eric/ the airedale wz really highstrung and a large willful
dog/ I wd put his leash on the handlebar of my bike/ a bike which by the
way like most of what I owned/ a used something / bought for myself with
babysitting money
the town I lived in was rural and abysmal/ the kind of place being probably
gentrified right this minute/ but then of maybe eight hundred or a thousand
people/ wz the remnants of a farm community/ a place where people who had
already lost everything/ or more likely whose parents had done that losing
for them/ lived side by side with people who had come in/ a generation
or two back/ with money of some sort/ who had nothing whatsoever to do
with the rest of us/ there were a lot of churches/ all of them evangelical
christian/ I took myself to the lutheran one/ alone
did my //confirmation// there david / the pastor/ said the only thing
I can remember about the teaching I got over a three year period/ he told
us about martin luther and the reformation and I wz aware cynically of
how likely it wz that this story wd be told to put mr luther
in some fantastic light/ the guy who got it right/ until one day david
talking about the nicene creed / et unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam
ecclesiam/ one holy catholic and apostolic church/ slipped in
luther's conviction that we wd not ever figure life out/ but that we
had this responsibility to live it/life /more than we had any kind of responsibility
not to/i.e.
to restrain ourselves you know/ to
behave/ he said that luther's main drop wz/ sin boldly and believe
in god/ I remember making him david stop right then and say it again
/ twice explaining it/ you're going to mess it up he repeated and /the
call/ is to let go of that/ because true humility is to know that and still
try to live/ it doesn't mean that you can
just go do anything u please/ it means u have to try knowing that u
will fail and /that the part where you don't get it right/ that is beside
the point/ what you mess up is in some way sent as the opportunity of grace
and a kind of enmity between me and god set in right then/ though the
effect of this was to open a conversation/ a right of complaint/ my own
moral judgment of the situation
if there was a sense in which I idealized / god/ it began there/ with
the ichthy and the communion wine I hauled up the back steps as the first
altar girl/ only boyz before me/ the smell of the waxed to death floors/
the albs from the dry cleaner/ and learning to go on reading aloud whenever
I became conscious of my voice reading the lessons during the sunday service/
which wz part of my shit to do/ carried
a packet of matches always in the pocket of an old army shirt some relative
or friend had given/ plain olive nam shirt/ and my parents searched it/
like they searched and sniffed everything in the boundary-less world of
our tiny ranch style world/ asked if I smoked/ what contempt I developed
for
them then/ my mom lighting up in their bedroom and blowing the smoke
out the windows like she wz twelve/ it's for the altar candles I said with
the look that naturally got me both slapped and grounded/ who cared/ it
wz like that all the time
took umbrage at the condition to which I had been consigned/ this being
created into the fall in order to make an occupation for a grace which
apparently wd be purposeless without me/ that condition of servitude /
maybe because it so closely paralleled my home
life/ where there was a guarantee of never getting it right/ the difference
being that this god/ wz saying/ what I expect is that u won't stop trying
and it isn't any of your business to worry about how/ my parents idea wz
that I wdn't stop trying either but there wz no forgiveness/ so this wz
like my idea of a generous arrangement / and I began to have
a voice in it anyway which at home/ my protests had brought my father
to the point of annihilating me/ which he had assured me recently no one
would have the slightest interest in investigating and I ought to watch
myself/ this
came about from a conversation in which I had asked him as I had so
many times before exactly what it was that I had done that so pissed him
off/ what was it/ I really
wanted to know/ that made him hate me/ and he wd get himself lathered
about the roof he put over my head and wasn't that love/ which I wz clear
so clear/ that no it wasn't/ you don't even like me/ I said/ and why not/
why
don't you
and in exasperation/ no doubt in a considerable amount of some kind
of hellfactory working/ pussy whipped wife fucking/ lard lousy pennsylvania
dutch diet he towered as best he cd over me/ and I wz afraid of him but
I wasn't you know/ it wz like
kissing with yr eyes open yeah I'm here alright/ when my father / now
that I wz getting closer to his height and had this relationship with god
and cd see how it all stacked up/ he
said without a trace of irony/ I cd kill you and no one would care/
do you understand me/ I cd bury you in the back yard and no one wd come
looking for you.
this man now with his myasthenia gravis/ agoraphobia/ married to his
dead brother's wife/ I
may go fishing with him this summer
right/ so I wd get the dog/ and go across the narrow two lane culvert
bridge over beaver creek/ right below the parsonage at the edge of the
presumption of main street/and dip among the farms that swelled around
the land for a mile or two west and south/ a curvy
road with little traffic/ along which the mad dog/ named /unfortunate
thing/ benson/ wd dash glazed eyes/ pulling the bike and me behind him
like a musher/ he was about himself that dog and we never had any kind
of a relationship/ liked his speed/ and I marvel now as only an adult wd
stop to think about
how I kept the entire contraption of rust and dog and half a sticky
hand brake under control/ I can remember every single thing about that
squeaking claptrap bike/ it was too big for me/ it was poorly maintained
in spite of my laboring over the /small is beautiful/ whole earth catalog/
hand-drawn diagrams in my bookmobile copy / of
the clear creek bike book [always that edge of counter culture/ the
bike book insinuating to my dirty fingers and lack of any sort of tool/
a world of small and self reliant/ community and hippie/ I got from it
that the detail of my having got a bike wz a step in the direction of marijuana
/ peace marching / other non violent activism] there wz nothing in the
world I cd
- do for it but ride it/ banging fenders/ clattering chain and hard assed
weather beaten seat/ screaming speed behind the neurotic the miserable
dog of the lutheran pastor/ from pittsburg / who had told me about not
only kierkegaard years too soon but also the pink and black fad of his
college years/ crossing his legs/ and yes smoking/ effete/ I knew that
grown ups were by and large lonely/he wz probably gay and his normanmailer
character of a wife/ had very large brown eyes/ hook line and
- sinker
one evening/ maybe it was may/ it was warm enough and there was still
school on/ me and this mutt were traveling together when a red car something
chevy I recall/ that fat and low frame/ nova maybe/ passed me came back
and stopped did I know where/ but I didn't and I rode on/ yes I noticed
that he passed me two and three more times/ looking I supposed for this
place/ he asked about/ and I turned around my orbit when the beast was
slogged /legging it back/ probably singing to myself/ gadiamus igator uvinistum
deo/ when that same chevy or pontiac or /cherry curvy steel frame shoved
me off the road very
uncompromising a /shock that's for sure/ stumbling off the pedals feet
sliding in the freestone of cd it have been called a shoulder barely righting
the bike and the leash and the dog underneath me/ and with the frame between
my legs looking up into the pistol in his right hand leveled at my head
through the open passenger
window of the car/ get off the bike
the click which was the safety coming off the gun/ goddamn fool
taste of metal/ blood/ in my mouth/ get off the bike he said and I did/
wild wild wild shaking of my arms and hands and legs o/trembling in my
body that I
cd not get control of /
what wz I feeling/ all I remember really was the taste in my mouth/
and the shuddering/ and my mind arrested on details/ small completely isolated
details/ come around to the other side of the car he said/ and I went
behind the car cz I thought he wd run over me/ in fact he put the chevy
in reverse when I went behind the car/ just not fast enough / I felt one
step ahead of something/ that's what I felt/ one world without any other
sound except the click of a safety and the shift of the gears of the red
low car in it shaky step ahead of
what/ I cd not conceive/ what is yr name he asked
which struck me as my limit/ the place
where I wd draw the line how shd I
know I can only remember that I
knew
I knew that it was the edge of something to answer that question/ I
wz thinking about him already/ though I cannot remember his face/ I was
thinking/ that he didn't need to know my name to do whatever he wz going
to do with that gun/ which he was holding in his right hand and talking/
to me out the window on the driver's side now/ shut that dog up he said/
the dog growling wz he barking some I really don't know/ but he wz menacing
and now/ it seemed maybe we did have a relationship/ not that benson cared
what happened to me/ but he / the dog taught me in that minute/ a little
and important thing/ to know when I did not like a person/ and neither
of us/ the dog and I/ we did not like this guy/ I cd feel that I didn't
like him/ and also/ that I still
had something
but I wasn't sure what it wz for/ why do
you want to know that I asked him back
what he said
why do you want to know my name
just tell me your name
why do you even care what my name is
do you live around here he said to me/ no I answered
in star wars/ there's that scene/ mos eisley spaceport //you don't need
to see his identification/ these aren't the droids you're looking for//
something wz happening this/ I wd say now/ wz the field/ but then/ I
only felt that something funny wz going on/ and it made this man with a
revolver both restless and dangerous/ what cd be more dangerous than a
man with the safety already clicked back
behind us / did he hear them or see cz his head snapped up to the rearview
mirror
on the road four riders I think/ on bikes/ clamorous and he put the
car into gear/ peeled away from me
my body began to convulse with muscle releasing/ I almost cdn't get
on the bike again/ everything single muscle was contracting and releasing
all out of balance/ all out of coordination/ just at whatever pulse was
happening there/ in an arm or a foot/ a woman named bonny I think/ I knew
her from church and her kids on bikes and I told her what happened she
shushed me immediately cz of the kids and we went to her house/ called
the pastor someone took me to their house/ with the bike and the dog
the field/ the push/ the magnetism of can't penetrate this boundary/
wz that what the dog felt when he growled/ wz that what I entered when
I wd not say my name/ my only name to this did-he-want-to-kill-me guy did-my-dad-hire-him/
I say
the field/ cz there wz no reason for me to not answer him/ but I think
it saved my life/ I think it slowed things down just enough/ which wz all
it took to save my life that time/ and the field is like that/ this fucking
with you absence of the usual/ I bet I wz glowing there along side the
road/ I bet he wanted to know/ that man/ asked himself what he was doing
there/ and I wonder what did happen to him that night/
I didn't walk the dog anymore after that/ david gleason took me out
for coffee two years later/ at lau's general store across from the church/
he said to me/ it's my job/ it's a part of my job to ask you this/ hope
you won't mind if I ask you/
kept thinking what now/ he wz sputtering / when he finally got to/ vocation/
vocation did I think I wanted to go to seminary/ it wz part of his job
to recognize and encourage those with vocation/ which he felt I clearly
had/ relieved
to get it out of his mouth/ I wondered how he felt about his seminary
schooling and we talked for awhile about college where my parents said
I wasn't /going and about god and service and the time I spent / helping
to found our first community library/ setting up free day care during hurricane
floods/ visiting one or two of the town elderly / writing the parish newsletter/
working in the synod youth commission office
and I answered/ this call you talk about/ I do feel it/ it's funny that
you think you can see it/ but I can't go to seminary
why not
if everyone who feels this/ this /what/ that I feel/ goes off some place
and gets themselves put in a gown I said/ then who is left out here/ living/
with the rest of us
he was embarrassed/ he said to think it over and he left too then/ like
the guy with the gun/ like he heard someone behind him
Susan Moul, hard breathing
IS THERE SOMETHING about rage that is hidden from me
for instance
that rage is pleasurable / that there is something hugely erotic in
the entire living of rage/ including it between two people
what did this come from in me / I am saying that rage is somewhere part
of love/ of authenticity/ of breathing/ of elements and soul kissing
I say I don't trust her I say I don't trust me/ but here I am months
later daily opening the network/ my self to her / when I have refused just
such access to any other person/ and there have been not one or two but
half a dozen or a dozen persons applying for the position/ suing for
the right/ and I cast this to myself as my untrustworthiness/
isn't it rather that I do trust myself and this woman I feel as I do
feel about/ more than I trust the undead world / the world with my friends
and loved ones in it/ because of where they haven't been because of what
they refuse to know/
even/ say it/ even at the funeral/ so that my brother asked me/ these
women are sizing you up can you tell or is it me are they gay/ he said
it's not like I know anything about lesbians/ they're straight I said/
these friends of gia's
- there was something that should have been mordantly funny in it/ the
sex craving that was happening in these once-borns at the gaping yaw of
mortality / funeral of a beloved friend/ divvying up the widow
-
- carrion birds/ and they thought I wz finally in reach of those long
sharp beaks
-
- right there in the myrrh and frankincense black robed latin incanting
wicksmoking surrealism/ my eyes / my eyes/ that not sleeping never again
will sleep feeling of the flesh/ of body chemistry and field and needing
water and never will I eat again and my
-
- brother-in-law had come to me in the parking lot of the church before
the service september eleventh the sky blue blue blue I was in a sleeveless
black dress watching my son six foot two and these women circling and the
feeling of the conversations
-
- around me my tongue swollen against the roof of my mouth do you
know that feeling of the eyes I'm talking about and my brother-in-law
said planes are crashing into the world trade center in new york city it's
a terrorist attack and while I was thinking what a relief I'm
-
- clearly asleep for sure as strange as all of this has been that last
part proves I am asleep dreaming this while that feeling in my ears in
the ear canals of blood pulsing heat searing the back of my eyes getting
ready for the mass and these people those
-
- two shemin and cori squaring off over me and in the lezzie crowd of
our friends already plans once-overs thinkings penelope with odysseus lost
not coming back my son telemachus the sound of his sandals crossing the
tile of the forsaken halls/ his disgust
-
- watching me
-
- we had put her in the ground the day before/ the day before they all
got there/ her parents sly about this/ there had been a private funeral
unknown to all of her friends showing up the very next day for talking
about it by a priest / eucharist/ and me
-
- acute
-
- which began began
- in that room the little white room
- the doctor came in did the nurse come with him/ the er
- nurse / what a job/ nothing but er she was a licsw is what / not a
nurse/
-
- stethoscope
-
- talk always I want to talk about this scene and was warned by lorie
the creative non fiction editor I worked with not to write it/ the lie
of veracity she said/ and even tomjenks said if it's heavy write it light
-
- hand over hand I have let myself down the rope of these cunts/ and
the feeling of stifled rage / to this the stethoscope around the md's neck
which lorie told me not to mention in the writing/
-
- write it light
-
- there I was /of the field/ riding the subway/ here is what I want to
say say it say it finally fucking say it/ I knew and I didn't want to /
runningstumbling
-
- fallinglikesnowinsidemyself talking aloud
-
- there is inside of me screaming there is a substrate of energy that
is along the atomic structure of infinity and my screaming found ears in
it and arms which held me up as I ran/ in a skirt/ with sunscreen on my
body sunscreen that only hours before I had copped from a
-
- man at race point beach in provincetown riding a bike I was which I
had borrowed from a woman staying in a bungalow behind the b and b in which
I stayed white horse the white horse inn rooms empty off season mid week
off season
-
- meredith's bike and the sun strobe orb knowingalready the sun that
shone on me and that suicidal maniac my girlfriend chewing her last mouthful
of something she ate that day I had not planned well and at race point
noon I searched and asked and finally amid strangers I
-
- found a man who had sunscreen under a large umbrella with a baby who
laughed and he let me borrow it who was quick to say something about his
wife lest I be using so clever a thing a request for sunscreen as a pickup
line
-
- and then off I pedaled to the beech forest on meredith's bike and
-
- still on my skin that sunscreen its scent confused with the pine needles
under the sun and the cool off the floor of the forest smell of ocean air
relaxing as though on a break from its work with the tourists
-
- my blue bikini under a white t shirt a square old white t shirt from
the gap that smelled like the sea like salt like me like sunscreen stolen
from a baby the salt still on my skin the sun still on my sunburned mouth
my face and my hair my very short hair full of oil and
-
- resolve and faith in the future having painted that morning on the
beach with meredith and making her get over the silliest habits she had
demonstrated about the canvas and where to begin set her free before borrowing
the bike
-
- a skirt a knit cotton skirt oatmeal colored to my knees my blue adidas
sneakers my athletic legs my muscles my calves my knees war horse knees
that I wd have crawled on in the ratriversubway tracks if I cd have changed
what
-
- was happening what had already begun and now was
- wanted to get there ahead of her parents I
- needed to get there first
-
- in that room I sat and waited and the longer I waited of course the
more certain I was because if she didn't if she hadn't been if she wasn't
say it dead these words! they wd have rushed me up a donor blood type that
sort of thing
-
- but it was only him coming in at last and the gorge of me rising at
the sight of him
-
- this this was the moment that I did not behave as I ought to b- behave
and
- did
- not
- hold
- back
-
- what I had held back for years
-
- can I still feel the heat on my skin oh I can I can feel the rush of
the epinephrine and the flare of my nostrils like a wild horse shot in
the heart rearing back when he began with the words as a doctor this is
the worst thing we never want to have to say these things/ like he was
begging for mercy/ like he was saying this is tough for me go easy and
I did not I stood up as he spoke those very first words with nothing more
than that out of his mouth I began to yell very very loudly so that she
closed the door the erlicsw did and he took two steps backward and they
exchanged looks I was yelling shut up shut up shut up I cd not stop the
words that flowed from me shut up don't you dare say those fucking words
to me you will not tell me she is dead don't tell me that and I was ranging
around the room the door in the wall closed like that was the end of everything
-
- breathing hard formidable in shock isn't it like this often or do other
people actually sit still and let you say these filthy things
-
- my head rolling back/ I threw myself down on that cocktail lounge sleazy
pleather couch they had in there and said what what get it out yelling
just tell me and put my bald little head in my brown so brown so lovely
hands
-
- someone today some one who had gia bari's driver's license in her pocket
someone she jumped from the seventh floor
-
- and I was moaning nononono
-
- ok was it a moan that's wrong I didn't moan I was screaming I
- think he left and came back I don't know she said to me do you want
to see her
- he said to me we need you to identify the body to tell us if it is
her
-
- do you think you can do that
-
- did I want to say no
-
- and I needed to get there before her parents
-
- what can I say about the feeling in my body the thousands of nerve
endings going pop and going silent the fire raging along my nerves the
way that it felt the way that it felt to be I don't want to be right to
be finally irretrievably not the one who was making it up or exaggerating
to be the terrible bearer of what was unfortunately I've been trying to
tell you
-
- real
-
- and he said to me the doctor did you have reason to think she wd do
this and I looked into his eyes from my eyes floating as they were in the
sludge of suntan oil from my face and my lashes with salt and the grit
of the beach under my nails and in the corners of my eyes my eyes which
had something to do very soon some work for which they were blinking now
blinking hard in the florescent light slamming on the linoleum floor at
my feet in their sneakers under my pretty legs did you have reason
-
- ah yes did I did he mean had I said to her yes I am leaving you yes
it is the end of the relationship had I only too recently sat at the kitchen
table with my bald little head in my hands weeping boohoo a little hysterically
saying I can't do this anymore and knowing full well that the next thing
short
