embodiment studies semester magazine - spring 2006 & fall 2006 - goddard college IMA program
	back issues fall 2003 spring 2004 fall 2004 spring 2005 fall 2005

Editor's introduction

Juliana Borrero and the Lenguaje y Paz Project Where does the writing lead

Al Garcia 100 could have beens /// Mother / father

Stacey Ginsburg Smoke /// Anywhere taxi to Bessemer, Michigan

Chris Gray 2.28.2006 xo

Alexandra Hartman Body and early relational trauma /// Strong women and their anger

Lisa Johns The classroom /// Technical notes

Susan Moul convection / further notes on the body as a spiritual vehicle

Angela Mullins Part one: the awakening

Gwen Stanley Paper moon

Laura Taylor Resilience, emotion, experience /// Naming her /// Message from my soul

Ellie Epp, Editor's introduction

This collection of student and alumna work for the spring and fall 2006 semesters includes work by my own students and embodiment-oriented work by students of other advisors. It also, for the first time, includes the work of a second generation - a student's students' work.

For work by students of another advisor, I give that advisor's initials in brackets after the student's name.

To know more about embodiment studies at Goddard, follow this link to our embodiment studies web worksite.

 

Juliana Borrero (alumna) with the Lenguaje y Paz Project (Carolina Peña, Gloria González, Lizzbeth Sánchez, Rocío Gavilán, Deicy Pérez, Adela Ávila), Where does the writing lead: notes on a process

Juliana teaches at the Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica in Tunja, Colombia.

Juliana's students write:

Writing scares me, I am afraid of my body and my words. I wrote twenty pages without stopping. I put in a notebook my childhood, my lost father, my blind mother, my perverted stepfather, my lost baby, my fears and tears. I made a weavework with them. However, it was very difficult to read. I said, I am this: death, blood, loneliness, suffering, abortion, hate. I avoided to speak about those pages because I saw others in a different way. They were machines and I was an alien. I could not look at my mom, I did not believe in love. Now I scare my mom, my family acts strange when I talk to them, my boyfriend thinks I am mad; in the university, people ask me if I only write about dark things. I hate superficial women. I hate men´s stupid words. Through words, I have opened my womb; while people use words just to lie, to hide their fears or to judge. I am afraid, I really want to cry, I do not know what continues now. I do not know if I can save myself through writing. I do not now if writing is an illness.

I usually want to commit suicide, and I do it while I write. I die in my texts; writing has become a vice. I do not know if I am masoquista or if I am really mad. Sometimes I think "I want to be normal, please, I want to be normal again", but I can not come back.

-Carito

My voice has been a weak thread, similar to that silence where before, the body was a cage, while inside of her there was something that watched in silence. Words, if there were any, dwelled inside, immaterial. Outside, only the eyes covered in cobwebs. I slept by the window, my wings wet from impossible dreams. My body existed in long nights, and in the background, a web of sounds that I could not differentiate.

Then I would feel that thoughts were males wanting to penetrate everything, and words were females, sometimes allowing themselves to be inundated. But even then, my words could not translate them. My thoughts were platoons machine-gunning my head; because thoughts also shout. But they, the words, would become fugitive, cotton sweets in my mouth, clouds, and they would not exist, and they would not speak. And since my words would not allow themselves to be guided, my thoughts would tell lies, that wanted to be truths.

I tried to see myself through my body, I tried to subtract what people had generously given me in order to be. How to recognize what I was, not as an extension of them. I discovered myself monochromatic, and now I arrive at a center where my words do not separate so much from my thoughts, and I feel that only there is my voice strong. I discover myself a lagoon, with an undulating body, where to write is to dance for myself, facing the mirror, recognizing the eyes of the other side.

-Mónica

Something has broken inside my body. Before, I was a girl hiding under the blankets of fear, crying hidden away in a corner because she broke her father´s favorite glass as she was washing the dishes. I was a frightened girl looking for her mother´s hand so I could come back home. Now the girl is twenty years old and without meaning to she has bumped into her mother´s eyes. Looking into her fragile, lost girl eyes after so long is not easy. Her eyes have saved me from my abandon, the eyes of my mother bring me back to the calm, to the trust that today I don´t have as a woman. Her eyes have reminded me that she is my mother, that she is somebody who still preserves a woman inside that body that is no longer hers. Her eyes confess to me that she has illusions with my sisters and me. They confess to me that she loves life when I tell her, somewhat serious and without looking at her: Chao, mamita, have a good day.

I dream with this, I dream that it is my mother now who carries the sons for me inside her belly, because I can´t be a mother, I lost my right, my gift of being mother the moment I decided not to be one. She is lending me her belly so that my son grows and feeds from her belly button. But I feel fear. I know that any moment my father is going to appear to hurt my mother´s belly and make her abort my son again.

-Gloria

July 27 or 28: I just read about contagious diseases. Erisipela. Note: before taking any determination I must keep calm.

Needles going through my head, my forehead, my thorax, my hips, reminding me that it doesn´t matter where or how strong the next stab of the needle will be. I had lost sensibility and even faith. It is difficult to accept an illness or a discomfort in my life or in my body, especially when there is no definite place to hold on to, but it is tempting to risk finding one.

My legs hurt. I tremble. I am weaker every time. Time is running out. I want to do more things. I need to write a lot more. Writing, like neurotherapy, injects substances inside the body that make me dizzy, that may not relax me, may not heal me, but lighten the pain. My body is shocked as it receives the change. It only lasts a few seconds, it doesn´t matter. We are here. With no lips, no ink. Now what?

I helped facilitate a workshop on literature from the body for 300 school teachers. Working there I realized that literature was a thread that could sew back the isolated parts of any human being, including myself (...) I realized that they, as well as I, were reluctant to read in a different way, to read our selves, and to learn to listen to the tissue of each other. Welcome to this surrealist adventure, I told them. Remember, the hand must not stop moving. Keep in mind that you as I are anxious, you as I are ill, you as I are haunted by ghosts, you as I are reluctant to go through the eye of dreams, you as I are hesitant to dream yourselves into being. We don´t know everything, but we can guarantee you that words, like dreams are powerful

-Lizzbeth

Story, lost, confused, in memory. Tangled in some part of my body, the same as my language, a language full of fungus, full of moss, with spiders that circulate from here to there. Cobwebs all around me, give me the appearance of an old woman, they let me know that I have been kept for years in a box in the attic.

One afternoon, somebody entered that room, regardless of the indications the grown-ups had given her, and surprised, she looked at each of the corners that the scarce light allowed her to see. There was a box that had the shape of a woman´s body. Her curiosity pulled. She caressed that body of wood, as if it were her body. She let the cobwebs wrap around her as if they were a part of her. She opened the box. What a surprise

Night, lights, slant, stroke of a brush, fairies, aire, a dasmófera, quimaperi, sym-phony, sinfos, enfos, elfos, la noche, the night, flight, barn owl, fleeting, stealing, with orange eyes, white chest, me with grey wings, buzzing in their ears, don´t escape, no, no, I lose them, I lose my self, I escape I fall into the deep sea, glu, glu, glanaque, my invented language, il pa mua, inesapacua, fur mi naré, o na lai, si pua fen sa, in la la pai, fimunari, feripe, flotar, floating, to go out. How was this word written? How were all these words pronounced? Be quiet! Good, I am quiet. No more now. I return, I return. I am on the street walking, looking at the stars, those that in my dreams I dare not see.

-Rocío

Through this process of writing from the body I have begun to know my self (it can sound commonplace, but it is certain). I have left aside pretty words in order to begin to say what is truly important in my life. But it has been really difficult, especially to recognize my real voice among all of my internal voices. It is necessary to silence those voices which can deceive oneself with words that sound good, but for the heart they are not true. Then this process becomes diffuse, because one day you can be connected with yourself, but other days there appears the "vain ego", who doesn´t let you write seriously, and you find yourself lost among pretty words and the opinions of others, but never your own voice. There have been some pages where I could be an honest woman, however I haven´t been able to see them again, because they confront me with that face I never dared to see and that others do not know. Writing from the body means to engage one´s skin, to think in one´s history, in one´s fears, in one´s scars.

In my search for what it could mean to for my body to speak, I have also found contemporary dance. The same as in writing, my body has found inside certain barriers which repress my movements. However, there is a force that wants to go out, that traverses me to the finger tips The same thing happened last week, at the Slam poetry session, where I felt naked and free with my own movement and rhythm, writing on the wind with my body without endpoints, but with silences which let me be more true.

-Deicy

I began to write at the age of twenty six, after long years of silence, loneliness, fears and hate. I have drunk different faces of violence, this is why I believe that most of my writing is aggressive and full of vengeance. It is like a constant wound inside my soul that does not permit me to cry, because tears are a symbol of life and I have not been able to do it until now. Each time I face the white paper, I sharpen the sword of my memories, and the sheet is left splashed by hits in the body, shouts in the ear, gushes of blood across a face, drops of sperm between small legs, dead bodies resting on two weak arms, and a huge and lost desire to commit suicide.

After three years of dark and painful writing, of walking alone in the night, drinking more and more liquor, of not having a place to sleep, a certain pair of forest eyes began to caress my sadness. Those eyes love literature, too. Those eyes are the light that makes visible the shadow that I am. Those hands bring hope into my skin, with those lips I know the breeze of a smile, and the wetness of something uncertain. That body gives me every day the smell of calalillies recently stolen from whatever forgotten garden. That voice cares for my dead tears and my young sickness.

Among us there is no tomorrow, we only desire to live ourselves today, with poetry, silence, dawns, writing, music and the present. When I have that silhouette touching my hand, I do not remember my nightmares or the smell of my 3 years of notebooks that my mother burned because they knew more about me than she knew.

-Adela

-

Images from a performance of Women at the Edge: Monologos de la vagina y otras curiosidades performed by Lenguaje y Paz project and others at the Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica in Tunja, Colombia.

-

Juliana writes:

He would not listen. He would not listen to what I needed so much to tell. He did not want to know about the thing that made my life five floors deeper. He could not understand the language in which I had found the other side.

If there was another side, he would not hear of it...

He said I sounded like a conference. He said I had changed. He changed the topic. Said language was not everything ­ convenient for him.

Impossible conversation.

I went to bed every night with a strategic space between us. My foot touching his foot as the last sign of hopeless hope.

I sank my face into a pillow, shut all the doors of my waking world and dreamt of wonderful women in northern forests. A place where I could hold on to this ­ this secret other layer ­ this infinite me.

I was dying of sadness. And my writing was dying of thirst.

*

Because I could not speak to him, I turned my body to the world.

How to explain this, academically, to explain embodiment as a methodology.

The setting up of a literature program rooted on a legitimate interest in the relation between language and self.

Like, what would it mean to take Barthes seriously, to take ourselves seriously. How long have you shoved yourself into a drawer in order to exist?

With a principal research interest in creative thinking, as the integration between the critical and the creative, not just one on each hand, but the crossing of the two, something that requires quite a bit of hand gesture.

I strained my brain to get there.

And the 23 women working together... women at the edge, sharpening edges against each other.

All the beautiful women

If we are going to do this, then it must be by our own standards, our own parameters ­ it must be an aesthetic defined by our bodies, whatever that means.

The intelligent women ­ my co-artists, my friends

So much good writing ­ but how to pass from the lucky fragments to ­ really ­ the composition of a larger structure ­ to a real dialogue with the artists, those who are creating.

2 hours of women's stories, non-stop... And 23 consecutive orgasms at the end. I define this as the howl, the savage scream beneath language that has to literally claw open the realm of meaning.

So many difficult stories. Was there enough of me to help them?

You're not a psychologist. Never have cared for therapy.

We had to literally claw open a space.

A molotov cocktail, one text after another. Language ripped right out of the strange, the ungeneralizable experience that was each one.

So violent.

All dressed in black with something red.

Beauty is essential.

Unaesthetic ­ claimed the poet ­ . Vulgar. A shame. Beware, it is dangerous to think that this is literature.

It was the possible impossible.

Not enough to expose ourselves for 3 hours, we had to defend ourselves for weeks.

Do you ever write about anything that is not pain? Is there no other muse?

What was aesthetics? (I guess I never learned my lessons.) What was its relation to the particularities of each body?

All the time getting into trouble. Were we starting to like it? Didn't we ever learn?

So tired ­ what was the relation between aesthetics and getting into trouble? How to turn the pain around into something more... desire... the reconstruction of hope... what was the next step?

...to have to literally claw open a space...

...for

...that which does not exist...

So that it did not surprise me when a hole opened up in the sky and it would not stop

Raining.

Swimming in the silver lake with the tall grass and thunderbolts.

Leave me here. Leave me here, I will stay here forever ­ floating, arms open to embrace the sky.

And absolutely wet, driving through the naked mountains, yelling songs in English with two ten year old girls.

So that it did not surprise me it did not surprise me when one day he was back and I did not care to explain anymore because he already knew. He had understood. Some things are not said in language.

*

But it is this I really want to talk about.

You will forgive me if I speak from the orifice of my reviving. If I speak impudently. If I poke into what is none of my business.

We all have our problems, like what to eat and who to love. (Elfriede Jelinek)

Now that I know it all. Now that under the trees, on the path, such a beautiful afternoon, we have touched... the impossible conversation... I can feel it come, like a flame inside my belly. Desire.

So have you finally got tired of thinking?

One day my writing broke open ­ and oh, what tenderness, what a surprise.

The sense of spring... things tossing their fluff everywhere... Undeniable.

One day... some things can not be talked about within the confines of a cafeteria table. Let's walk. Where do we start?

I think I am sick, she says. Rivers flood my eyes.

We flow down the path, umbrella swinging on my arm.

What you are is in love.

After all this time of living inside a brick.

Let's sit here - it is so nice. A schoolboy climbing up the fence to escape from school. I will do nothing to stop him.

I have not slept in months. Do you really think I am in love?

Sometimes everything is a miracle.

You cannot deny a flower has come out of the ground. You can cut it, put it in a vase. You can suck the honey out of it, or put it in a poetry book and plas ­squash it- like me.

It is horrible, but you are right ­ at least there is a reason to live.

We laugh. Impossible conversation.

Rivers flow.

This is the sacred space.

Your eyes today, like looking into a honeycomb ­ like a sky after a rain shower.

Something pulling from the belt; not provoked by penetration. More subtle, resisting being broken. Like waves on the water. But violent as the shaking of an antenna and the sound that it produces. Undulation. Inner movement. Something is moving which gives life.

Your eyes, blue fire.

My story tied to hers and hers. And you, what is your place in this. I can never say enough.

I will bring you a bottle of Curaçao ­ what's that blue liquor? I will pull it out of my sleeve and say: this is for you. Shhh. Not a word, not a word until we have drunk it all.

In honor of all that is ridiculous. I am so grateful.

Drinking in the germinal process of plants. It is thus that I survive. To awaken before the image of two young girls like old women, reviving in the finding of first love.

So beautiful, so dangerous.

Like a homage to the spring. I cannot stop smiling.

The secret authors of this wetness. She and her.

You cannot deny...

Like the bee comes to the flower ­ you were so ready.

I give you this bunny. That is how I want to touch you. Your nose smeared with carrots. That is how I will jump.

Mark me, baptize me...

Two women, melting the borders of identity. Two women face to face. To allow oneself to be woman, to be women, furry white bunnies and all ­

Do what you want with it.

This is the impossible conversation.

How happy you have made me.

And what it means to me ­ to watch her there ­ to recognize her as if finding my own hymen. Again.

This writing like swinging on a hammock.

These pieces I put together over and over again.

There were 3 looks and a half, 2 dreams, those letters, the precision in language, the intensity of tone, that turquoise shirt.

Lately everything she writes is a love poem.

You knew there was more than this.

You opened the door and all the water in me made it come down.

I fall 5 floors through your eyes.

You watched me drown, unmoved.

At... the bottom of the ocean... You were waiting. A stone buddha.

I owe you so much.

Endless chain of women ­ my story tied to hers and hers ­ and you you you what I want to say is...

Because one can be in love and just honor that.

Because one can be love.

This is what one woman can do for another.

This is the art of conjure... to remember what has not been lived

... that words,

                said in the precise places,

                                can...

                                                invent...

                what is real.

The recovery of joy -

                                there are tiny bells in the air.

You open your hand that has been closed for centuries and at the very center ­ a date ­ so sweet, so tender.

I cannot not take it.

Al Garcia (EE) , 100 could have beens

[January 2008. Al has asked to have this piece removed.]

Al Garcia, Mother/father

Mom:

Yo lloraba cuando me quedaba sola y no podia alcanzar el creal que me iva a tomar en las mananas. Translation from Spanish for those of you who need it: "I cried when I stayed alone and I couldn't reach the cereal that I was going to have in the mornings." This statement by my mother via email is quite possibly the very first time in my whole life, when I read it, that I felt a desperation for her. She said it very matter of factly, like as if that kind of suffering is simply part of life-not saying it to say oh look at me I'm in pain. But just more matter of fact.

My mom's arthritis used to be so bad that she seemed to handle her hands like little houses made out of super flaky material, in her palms, with this weird beige colored bandaging or brace or something that she used to wear and that I'd play with when she wasn't around and I was small and rummaging through my parents' things. It was like she was a cripple, she couldn't work doing secretarial data entry anymore and that's what her occupational degree was in from Mexico. So she became a housewife who sometimes helps my father at the family market. My father told me once and once only that it was the medication that my mother took for her arthritis that made her emotional. My mother fought with me when I was little as if we were the same age, and she would huff and puff and call me something like a no-good delinquent, or like a spoiled brat - it's hard to translate exactly.

I'm not sure why but I always made things worse by saying things that I knew would spin her into hyperventilation. I've called her lazy and I've also called her a liar. These things really pissed her off for some reason. My mother hyperventilated and her nose flared and she cried as if she was being tortured, all this when she got overwhelmed and angry. It was as if she was animalistic in a way, because if you spoke another word when she said to not say anything anymore, her whole body would jump a little and it was a little bit like a Venus Fly trap that knew that there was food there but didn't know where and just sort of snapping every time you came near it or touched it... or, in my case, talked to it.

For a small child, I'm talking about me, well, for me, it was strange. Because it was so intense, these fights, for her, but yet I was so detached. And yet, my hatred for her was not. I hated her for most of my life up until VERY recently. I hate her less, but there's still resentment there. She oppressed me. With chores and with house rules. She looked through my things. Almost every day was about my mother's dominion in the house. She wore the pants. She belittled my father all the time, but it didn't seem to affect his self-esteem. And yet, he never really stood up for me or my sisters. He just went around her back (not connivingly) and did nice things for us. She always yelled at him for making her out to be the bad guy, he always spoiling me. But she WAS the bad guy.

She loved me so much. But she was too nervous to know how to express it through her logic. I mean, quite literally, she was always nervous. I swear to you that there is not a more nervous person I have ever encountered. When she cried and got scared part of me accepted as normal the extent to which she cried and got scared - but part of me, subconsciously, always always knew that it was somehow abnormal. I think she was sort of bi-polar but in a Mexican way not the Anglicized DSMIV way.

She was so tender to me. So so fucking sweet. She cradled me in her arms when I was a baby and one of my earliest memories is this very thing. She even took me to Mommy and Me classes. She still loves me to this day very very much. With ALL her heart. But it's still so strange that we interacted and fought so much every single day of my life, and that our fights were so incredibly astoundingly intimate, and that yet only once or twice did I feel like I could see in her something that made me think Wow that was beautiful and special what my mom just shared with me. What I'm referring to is basically this one time she told me that as a little girl she was terrified of the ocean because she thought there was no bottom to it.

I knew nearly nothing of her childhood until very very recently, and even now I only know shreds. I don't really understand what motivates her. For a long time I wondered whether or not she was smart. Lately I've been thinking maybe she's smart but not innovative, and that she clings to her cultural conservatism to a point where it is I must say a large handicap. She's so religious, always thanking God for everything. When she's especially terrified she'll do the hyperventilation thing, or something like hyperventilating, and she'll pray so hard but like in a way as if she was a tiny little girl running to hide under the sheets while singing a song that she sang because she was brainwashed into believing it was somehow truly effective - I don't know either way if it is but what I do know is, going with the little girl metaphor, that it keeps her comfortable because she swears maybe it makes the monsters go away.

I feel like my mom probably had a really hard childhood. I know she was Third World poverty-level poor and know that she had lots of siblings and know that she had to work her way really hard to get a car and her own place. That's the only thing she did share with me, and drilled into me, my whole life - that she worked since she was fourteen. That's about it. I think a couple of years back she told me that she came here to Los Angeles for vacation but then decided to stay, that when she was at the train station some very creepy old lady with missing teeth offered her a place to stay, since my mom was stranded (the person who was supposed to pick her up didn't show). My mom said the lady was so scary but then a little boy came up to the old lady, like a grandson or something, and that my mom felt safer and so went to the lady's house. And my mom said that the old lady gave her bread and coffee even though there were so many children in the old woman's care and that this old lady obviously had nothing herself - also that the woman would accept no money.

I'm going to try to find out more about my mom. Because every tiny little thing that I find out about her totally slams me in my heart. I'm not sure why, but I feel like getting insider information about my mother and her brain and her history and life is more of an event and more humbling but also gives me more of an understanding of myself and I love finding out things about myself - all this with an impact more than if I were to get insider tips from a spy in the White House.

I used to hate my mother, down to the bone, down to my core, for things like the fact that her nervousness got in the way of everything. It was always about things making her uncomfortable and the need to set things right so things wouldn't be scary anymore. She lives in fear every single day. I'm just now, at 22 and 23 years old, starting to understand, or at least hypothesize, that maybe she is always so nervous about every tiny little thing that happens (or might happen) because she was never secure as a child. She had no guarantees that there'd be food there. She probably lived in a really shitty and therefore unsafe part of town. This never occurred to me until just now as I'm writing this - the unsafe part of town thing - and it really does break my heart to think of my mom as little and feeling scared. My mom said also that I think one of her older sisters hit her and was hard on her and that she was passed from relative to relative. This also probably made my mom ALWAYS feel unsafe or at least not stable.

I am not a violent person by nature. And yet when I think of anyone harming my mom when she was a little girl, it makes me want to go back in time and physically hurt the person. For some reason I imagine hurting a bad woman, like teaching her a lesson by pulling her hair and staring her in the eyes with my own vengeance. Maybe I'm thinking of her sister who was not very nice to her. I also know that my mom was the youngest, which I feel gives me a particular type of insight into her that I didn't have while I was growing up. What I'm talking about is the fact that she's very under-developed. Not very emotionally mature, I'd say.

And all my life I never ever thought of her as selfish, because the things that she was so strict about or the chores or her reasoning for doing certain things - I used to think it was, though oppressive, I used to think it was necessary in a way. But now I realize that, in a way beyond her control, her fear her perpetual fear, makes her selfish. What she does have is resolve and the will to survive and to move forward. It's quite possible that without these things she would not be alive today. I think she will certainly outlive my father even though she's about half a decade older than him.

My mom has diabetes but she's adjusting her diet because of this. Otherwise, though, her diet was relatively healthy and she never ever let my sisters and I have soda and rarely did we have cereal with sugar. My mom takes very good care of herself, especially her skin. My mom has the softest skin. (I inherited this obsession with taking care of my skin.) She has a very light fuzz on her cheeks and though you can see wrinkles, there's a softness to her face. When I look into her eyes it freaks me out because I can tell she's related to me, that I came from her. This is what happens when you stop talking to your folks for years and then see them in person again.

Since you're not seeing your mom's eyes every day it takes you aback when you come across them again, those two dark and dewy eyes that you can't help but stare at with awe and wish you could set them aside on a table to stare at them some more. But a longing to stare at eyes is self-defeating if you don't want the person to know you're staring at their eyes. They'll just think you're staring at THEM, not their eyes per se. And if my mom ever thought I was doing that, just staring at her, well, I'm honestly not too concerned about what she might think I was doing - I don't know WHAT she would think to be honest - I just don't think I could bring myself to stare at her. It would make me uncomfortable as hell. Me sitting alone with my mom in the same room makes me nervous as fuck. So much of my life, when I was in the same room with her, was about feeling like she was about to demand something of me.

Dad:

With my dad, I could be in the same room as him, just coloring or something. I have the vaguest memory in fact of just hanging out in the bathroom while he peed. It wasn't sexual in any way; I truly think it was just that I was his best little buddy and we were just hanging out like pals. He even often picked his nose in front of me like nothing.

My father's relationship with me is far far more tragic than my relationship with my mother. Whereas with my mother it was fight after fight after fight, with my dad it was him desperately trying to connect with me but there was never any kind of bond with him or much interaction after I was old enough to go to school. I started off in first grade kissing girls by running after them during recess, but I think I did it to be scandalous, not because I was trying to be suave. The nun who was my teacher had to have a talk with my parents and I think it made my dad so proud of his son, for being such a stud in development. But like I said, I was never truly interested in girls.

I was involved in sports, like a normal boy, and sometimes we played basketball together (my dad and I), so this definitely gave him a way to bond with me, but eventually I played sports less and less and in high school no one on my teams ever really invited the folks to come to the games when it came to my sports - volleyball, cross-country Running. Anyway, there was always less and less to say to my father. Even in the high school years when he took me to school in the mornings for some time, I had nothing at all to connect about with him. He tried teaching me how to shave this one time but I was embarrassed and said I already knew how. He always told me that if I had a question about girls or girls' private parts that I could ask him, because, he said, he had to find out about girls and sex in textbooks because he didn't have a father. He told me this all the time, that he didn't have a father and that I should appreciate him.

He ADORED me when I was born and wasn't too occupied with hiding how much he spoiled me, probably because the rest of the family kind of were spoiling me too, especially with attention. But he especially spoiled me and thought of me like a little King who he'd help guide to rule women and to rule toughness. My dad always constantly told me it was important that I know how to fight, said that he fought a lot in military school. He always tried teaching me how to fight like a boxer. I was never interested.

To this day I don't think he (or my mom) have ever given me a piece of information that was truly useful except for like how to start a bank account. I mean, in a sense I've always been smarter than them or more wise or something like that. And I mention this because it makes me feel especially that therefore there's EVEN LESS that I can do with my dad. I feel really embarrassed when I can tell he's trying to give me advice about life and he's being all serious and fatherly and solemn but to me it's just like so trite what he says. He's also very under-developed, not necessarily emotionally, but culturally. His vision of the world is VERY VERY Mexican, very macho, very family oriented. Everything is about family and his legacy through his son.

His biggest problem with me being gay was partly the fact that his Garcia name would die with me. He told me that before me all the males on his side were pretty much all named Alvaro Garcia. He also talks about his death all the time. Even when I was little. "I'm going to die one day" or when I'd say something about the future he'd say, "if I'm still alive then."

Well, it's been 20 years since he's been saying this and he's still alive and mostly strong. He's getting a tiny bit weaker, but until very recently he still lifted boxes that were way too heavy for him. He's fought with burglars with guns if they tried robbing the store. Once his head was busted open and this other time he got a broken finger. So he wasn't all talk, I must admit. The guy was, for my whole life pretty much, short but very very very strong. Brute strength. Thankfully he never hit me. He almost never got mad at me the way my mom did. I can still remember times when I could tell that he was pretending to push me and pretending he was so mad at me. But the truth is he didn't really feel like disciplining, but more just like being my friend.

He's a character, always goofing around with people and is really really good with groups of people. I can tell he was probably a huge flirt with da' ladies when he was younger, because he still flirts now but it's just embarrassing for anyone watching who knows what's going on. Anyway, I know a little bit more about his past than my mom's, including the fact that he was very political and vocal and all those things, that he was rebellious and did protests. He was apparently very good at having friends in key places and I think if he had stayed in Mexico I have no doubt he'd be in a high office there, maybe even President. I say this in all seriousness. I can still see this type of vitality at times when he interacts with his customers and how amazing he is at running a business, but for the most part I think that me being gay and detached from him and this country and its foreignness has muffled his spirit.

It makes me so angry, and I'm not even sure who to be angry at, that my dad, who is very tough and likes being tough and likes being a big shot but not an asshole big shot but instead like a nice guy big shot, that he has these characteristics but that here in this country the language intimidates him to a large extent. Once he gets comfortable with someone the language thing fades and he's an excellent and charming conversationalist. But at first he is at a loss. It made me so so angry when we'd go to order food through the drive-through and I could tell that he felt weak and stupid for not being able to say the words right, like maybe the person at the Del Taco just wasn't understanding him and he'd get frustrated. He never became as good at English as my mom, maybe because he's also very stubborn and so wasn't as up on learning the language as my mom was. She's much more American than him. She likes tacky knick-knacks and jewelry.

Anyway, my signature is similar to my father's because I feel like I have nothing really to give him except for that. Maybe more of my time is something I can give him, but I don't know what we'd do. Maybe we could bowl. Even though I'm gay, I can bowl. He likes bowling. Yeah, maybe that's it. Anyway, we will never be buddies, kicking back beers and talking about women. The closest we ever got to bonding over something was me working at the family market here and there. He was so happy to be working with me. And the thing is I didn't think I would be, but I was too. I was kind of shocked. I thought I was doing it more for my dad, like to make him feel good and to indulge his desire to bond with me but it felt nice for me too. Like we were really bonding at least a little and it wasn't just pretend.

Stacey Ginsburg (EE) , Smoke

We didn't go to a funeral. I didn't know what a funeral was. My dad was buried in a wooden box in a Jewish cemetery in Hollywood. I visited it twenty years later for the first time. I brought my dad's favorite sandwich, corned beef and rye, and a bottle of beer. I couldn't find the grave. I couldn't find the grave. I was desperate and trying not to cry. The caretaker found me. My mind was wild with thoughts such as, 'see, he didn't really die, but where is he?'

The caretaker told me that my dad was here. He showed me where my dad was on the map. He walked me there. There was no marker. My dad died and not one adult person, not one family member or one friend had honored his memory with a marker. He was buried and left forgotten, just a piece of land growing on top of him. I had walked over his grave three or four times, stopping on top to rest, before that caretaker found me.

I sat on top of the place where he lay and offered him beer and the corned beef sandwich. I wasn't raised Jewish. I never ate corned beef. We didn't have any trace of Jewish culture in my town where I was grown. I only knew Judaism by going to a deli. To my dad, God lived inside damn good food.

He had taken me to the delis when we lived in California. He bought corned beef and matzo ball soup. He gave me deli pickles, and afterwards, for desert, my favorite candy, the raspberry jelly candies covered in chocolate. He'd eat deli food and say, 'God, this is so good!'

I was a vegetarian, but I ate that corned beef sandwich for my daddy, right there on top of his grave. I ate the pickle even though my throat was tight, and it was difficult to swallow.

I put flowers on his grave and poured the bottle of beer all over it, in honor of him. I knew he would have liked it. I think I may even have lit a cigarette and smoked it, just for him.

I cried the entire time. I talked to him with my tight throat. I told him that one day I would get him a marker. I was so sorry that he had been forgotten. I hadn't known. I had no idea. I told him how much I missed him, how much I thought of him, and I told him I was letting go now, so that he and I could both be free. I wanted him to find his way to a better place. I thought about church and purgatory, and wondered if he was in some place between, neither here nor there, his ghost haunting him and haunting me.

I needed and wanted to be free. I needed and wanted him to be free.

I took a picture of the tree near his grave just to remember him by.

I was devastated and furious that my mother never bothered to get him a marker. I called her and told her that daddy had been buried in a pine box without a marker. She didn't want to talk about it. She was busy. She said she thought his friend Bob had got him a marker.

My dad looked a lot like Elton John. Whenever I see pictures of Elton from the 70's, all I can think of is my dad. My dad wore big goofy glasses. He loved Billy Joel and John Lennon. Before Mom and Dad separated, I grew up on Glass Houses and Crocodile Rock.

After he died, I learned how to play "The Way You Are" by Billy Joel on the piano. I played it for him, sang it when nobody was home, crying while I sang "Don't go Changing, to try and please me. . .I like you just the way you are." I mourned him by remembering the things he loved when nobody was around, when nobody was watching. I wasn't allowed to be sad when they were around. So I did it in secret. I was too proud and too strong to be sad in front of my mom and sister. It was confusing. It spiraled into a whole mess later on.

We had a memorial at the church in town for my dad rather than flying to the funeral, because it was too expensive. The memorial, in my opinion, was stupid. I hated it. I read my reading and we lit candles, and I don't really remember anyone crying. I didn't want anyone to know just how sad or mad I had been. I didn't want them to know how much I had loved him. I was his baby. I was his girl. I didn't want anyone to know how terrified I was to realize that that was that. That it was just mom and Melis and I now. Forever.

I prayed every night for four or five years because I was concerned that he would go to hell for having been in prison. Even though I didn't believe in heaven or hell, some conditioning runs deep and I didn't know for sure, so I prayed an Our Father and a Hail Mary every night. Sometimes if I was feeling particularly energetic I gave him an extra one or two. But I still doubted that he was dead. A part of me was sure that it was a lie. The part of me that died when he died also believed that he would come back and surprise me. The part of me that died found its way to purgatory with him.

I had a dream that first year. He was under the water in a swimming pool staring at me. I was surprised to see him. He was alive, but he was underwater. I wanted him to come up and be with me. He wouldn't. But he was alive, he was right there, breathing underwater. "Come on, Daddy, come on!" But he didn't. But he was alive. I hated him for teasing me like that. I just wanted one of his hugs, but I couldn't get it. All I could do was look at him underwater smiling at me. And then he disappeared.

My mom and sister and I never really spoke of him after that. I mean we never celebrated his birthday, which was only ten days after his death day, and we never talked of his death together, as a family. He died and that was that. It was buried and forgotten, the way he had been and the way a part of me had been.

We received the last two letters that my sister and I had sent to him, a couple of weeks after he died.

Geoff, my mother's Oklahoma boyfriend, had taught us that special beings receive messages in smoke. We burned our letters to Santa Claus because it was through smoke, not real mail, that the special beings receive our thoughts. I remember knowing that the dead would get our thoughts if we wrote them on paper and burned them. When we got our return letters from prison, it was sobering. It was disappointing that he hadn't received our last thoughts before he died. I had told him that I made the part of Annie. But he never got the letter. I reminded Mom that we should burn the letters. The three of us held each other and watched. It was the only thing that made sense and comforted me.

Every year after that it was my secret ritual. Every year on his death day, I wrote him a letter. I told him all the things I wanted him to know. I included pictures, drawings, whatever I felt he might enjoy, and I burned them, crying and trusting that the smoke would get my secret messages to him.

But every year after that, Christmas and my birthday became confusing. I celebrated but I also felt sad. I didn't feel like I was supposed to celebrate. I couldn't authentically celebrate because underneath the celebration was the pain I had been too stubborn and proud to show. And because the pain came out later, when it wasn't allowed, it was even more painful and confusing. I became awkward about my birthday. The memory of my dad lived underneath the magic of the season, just lingering there, darkening the supposed joy of the season. I wasn't supposed to be sad.

Stacey Ginsburg, Anywhere taxi to Bessamer, Michigan

It started here. It could have started anywhere. It was one of those times when I had the wisdom to sneak past judgment. So here's the picture. Goddard, Vermont. Anywhere Taxi. Driver, big guy, balding, rough. He picks me up and first thing out of his mouth is what a jerk this guy is for screwing him at work.

Then he tells me about a weirdo he almost picked up, who asked him to drive her from Burlington to Detroit, Michigan. She didn't like flying. He thought she was weird, so he passed her along to his friend. His friend took her to Michigan for 1200 dollars, after she opened her blouse, and let her breasts and her money fall into the cab.

And then he tells me about Hooters. I'm thinking this guy is annoying the hell out of me. I want to fade away and disappear into the carpeted seats.

I get real quiet. I don't want to say anything. I'm being polite. I also start to space out a little but catch myself. Something tells me to be patient, and to be present.

I ask him about children. "Do you have any kids?"

He tells me about his kids, his daughter, who is 12, and wants to be a writer. "She's good", he tells me. "They want to put her in the gifted class. She is writing an anthology for children. They want to help her publish it."

For some strange reason, I'm surprised to hear the words anthology and Hooters just three sentences apart from one another.

"But my other kid, he's getting' C's and D's. They tell me he has a concentration problem. But he's a whiz on the computer. He fixed the school computer after it broke down. But he can't sit still. If only they'd let him do his work on the computer. He'd be getting A's. But they want him to learn the old-fashioned way."

We talk about teachers and that stupid 'no child left behind' act, and the teacher who demands respect from his son. He told the teacher recently, "'Why don't you start learnin' to respect him?' Christ, they take away his computer privileges and his recess so he can fix his concentration problem. Like taking away what he loves and is good at is going to help him concentrate?"

I agree, the logic is stunning.

I start to feel myself getting hot, and feeling my anger towards injustice. I can't find the words to articulate why. I am surprised by the direction Anywhere Taxi is heading.

We talk a lot about education (well, he does most of the talking still), and I'm feeling my body, and I'm feeling inside my body, and I'm grateful for this man's honesty and candor, and, well, salt.

He tells me about how his daughter got beat up for shaving her head. How the kids called her a dyke. So he goes to the school and says, "Where're those girls who beat you up? Ok, you go now and punch 'em. I'll wait here."

I start to feel uncomfortable, and thoughts like, small town, ignorant, red-neck, hick, start racing in my head.

He continues to tell me how she marches up to those girls and bam! Socks her in the face. She goes back to him and says, "You know, I didn't want to do that, but you know? It felt really good."

My body contracts a little more.

He tells me about the questionnaire that the 5th graders have to bring home. The one that screens for behavioral issues at home, like, "Do your parents smoke?" "Do they drink?" "How much?"

He tells his son that when the teacher gives him one, he's supposed to either tear it up in her face, or say, "My dad says, kiss my ass."

I'm wondering where this conversation is going, and if I should say something or not? I'm pissed again that I'm missing graduation. I want to space out again, and just drown him out. He reminds me of my hometown. The attitude that numbed me into silence.

Something tells me to remain present. So I do.

I do want to say something, anything, but all I can muster is, "You from Vermont?" He tells me all the towns he's lived in. I'm familiar with them, as I used to live in Vermont, and traveled to a lot of high schools to introduce youth to cross-cultural exchange opportunities. I remember the school district he lives in. It was rough.

I comment on how he's lived in a lot of places. He responds by telling me about his dad. "My dad beat the shit out of me bad. When I was 12, I wrote an essay for a contest in Time magazine. I wrote about a boy who gets the crap beaten out of him, and all the different ways he's beaten. I won the contest for the best essay. The editor called me and says, "You know, you can turn him in." I said, "How did you know?"

"He says, 'Nobody writes like that who hasn't gone through that.'"

And he continues, "I couldn't turn my dad in. But I did run away to an old farmer in Williston when I was 13. Lived in a tent and had a stove that I made. I worked for the farmer. When I was 17 I went back home and had my mom sign me into the army. I learned how to fight. I got into stupid trouble though. Spent a lot of time in jail afterwards for doing stupid things. A friend dared me to throw a rock in a liquor store. I did. He went in and stole a bunch of liquor. Spent 18 months in jail for that."

I like him. I like his honesty. He reminds me of the men in my hometown, a lot. I like how I feel in my body when he talks. He barely looks at me. I like the largeness of his head. I listen to the silence for a while. I feel tenderness here. We are both quiet, I'm just taking in his story. I'm not sure what he's taking in.

I ask him if he ever works with kids. He says he'd like to. Says he used to, after he got out of jail and got cleaned up. He tells me he wants to work with the kids they call "bad apples" because he knows deep down they aren't. They just need some guidance and love.

I tell him my secret. For some reason, it just slips out and wishes to reveal itself to him.

I tell him about my roots. "I was one of those 'bad' kids. Well, sort of. I hid it. I drank, smoked, had tons of sex, did drugs, and was pregnant by 15. I tried to kill myself many times. I hated myself. I just kept all my sadness in, so nobody knew. After all, there wasn't anybody to tell. My mom never knew any of it, until I got pregnant. But she never knew how miserable I was. She thought I was moody, just too intense and sensitive."

And then I tell him the second half of my secret. "I want to go back. I've wanted to, but I've been a little scared. Mostly, I just feel it is a depressing place."

"No!" He jumps in. "You can't be scared. You have to go and face your fear. That's the only way to move through. The only way to heal is to go through the pain. And if you don't get back to your roots, how do you know who you are?"

His voice changes and sounds like the voice of wisdom.

"My mom," he says, as if reading me, "says I am her miracle boy. That's all she ever says, 'You are a miracle. You lived through hell. You are a miracle.' If you don't go back to your roots," he repeats himself, as if I already have forgotten the crux of our conversation, "how do you know who you are? I mean, really? And how do you know what you're capable of doing if you don't find your own miracle there? "

He starts to talk about kids again, and how important it is to inspire just one. We arrive at the airport. He gets my luggage out, still barely looking me in the eye. "What if your story helps just one kid do something a little different, so they don't have to make the mistakes you or I made?"

I'm quiet again. Reflecting deeply. He hands me my luggage. I thank him for sharing his story with me. He gives me a hug, and says something about roots and making a difference. He thanks me, and drives away.

Chris Gray (EE), 2.28.2006 xo.

Republished from Chris's blog, Everything hits at once.

I just finished re-reading Dave Eggers' seminal memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It's the second time I've read the book cover to cover, and the first time since high school (or early college, I forget).

A Heartbreaking Work is often thought of as the defining work of a generation. What generation? For the sake of generalization's ease, let's consider it all those who greeted young adulthood from the end of grunge era until today. Eggers' story begins with the death of his parents, middles with his informal adoption of his younger brother and their move to San Francisco, and ends after a few years in San Francisco, when Eggers and his brother Toph leave town for New York City. The story is shaped by death and life, confounded by the necessity that the two define our existence, and because of that it's filled with anger and frustration, fatalism and hostility.

In the five years since I first read this book, I forgot about all of that. I've held an image of this book as a triumph of playful wordsmanship and unique humor, wryly self-aware and just a little pretentious. I remembered Eggers' major introduction and acknowledgements section, wherein he outlines all of the themes and metaphors at work in the book, along with the lies he tells, characters he truncates, and offers those who are dissatisfied a full refund (which I believe he honored) if they would send the book back to the publisher. I remembered the forty-page fake transcript of Eggers' interview to get onto the San Francisco edition of The Real World. I remembered his unbridled hope and imagination, and his incessant love for his brother, who he must protect at all costs.

But I forgot so much. I forgot about the lengthy tirades against those who stand in his and Toph's way on their way to anything ­ school, prosperity, a future. I forgot about Eggers' deep-seeded morbidity, how he is convinced he has AIDS and will die of AIDS unless he is first killed in a car accident or plane crash or by gang members. I forgot how he is surrounded by fragile people who get into accidents or are too weak to conquer their addictions, and how mad they make him and how much they remind him that he will be dead soon. I forgot that he is much more than the ingenious prankster he's discussed as.

I actually don't want to talk about this book right now. I want to talk about myself in relation to this book. I was excited to plunge into it again, to really think about it, to see a virtuoso talent at the peak of his audacity. I wanted to read the book and write a term paper that was a hopeful treatise for modern literature and for my generation. I pored through some of Eggers' more challenging diatribes and wondered, Can I still do this? Is my optimism for myself and for my friends a figment of my imagination?

No.

The real triumph of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the fact that it is, for almost 400 pages, both of these seeming contradictions at once. It is bitter and deprecating. It is hilarious and vital. It is often all of these things at the same time. And it does define my conception of my generation.

And how to explain all that? First, a caveat: I cannot fairly make a claim that I can define any one person (even myself), let alone any group of people, with any measure of accuracy. All I can do, all I will do, is project my well-considered impression onto this page and onto the Internet for the world to gape in awe at.

I try to think of the bond between all of the people I admire, love, interact with on a daily basis. They are a disparate group, of teachers and educators, retail clerks, graphic designers, artists, musicians, carpenters, photographers, crafters, and coffee roasters. On the whole, they all understand each other, like each other or much more. They, meaning we, are at once a part of the world, a part of American culture, yet are simultaneously a cultural anomaly. We watch TV, but not a lot. We know the news, but we don't have cable. We go to the mall and we go to Target, but only when we have to and we generally try to avoid Wal-Mart at all costs. We drink and some of us do drugs, but we're selective about where, what, with who. We are consumers, but we are shrewd and when we can be, we are socially responsible consumers. We are trying to make the world a little bit cleaner, a little bit more upright morally, with whatever extremely limited funding, talent, and knowledge we have.

Our existences are shaped by compromise. We get depressed but can only wallow in it for so long, milk it for its artistic worth, for its alcoholic worth, at which point we dust off our shoulders and start again, largely rejuvenated. We have people who help us get through this and know quite precisely what it's like. We are introspective, but we have the opportunity to be unusually gregarious and polite and social, because we are amongst others created from the same mold. We can create truly groundbreaking moments, in the form of concerts, parties, ideas, and art shows, and they will never leave the comforts of that room or this town, and that is just fine. We work at jobs that we don't necessarily love, but that are ideally suited to help us achieve later goals. Failing that, we work at jobs we can leave in order to move to that position. We are in the mainstream because we are out there, because we participate. We depart from it because we have smart friends and because we know how to navigate the Internet, and these two resources provide us with limitless forms of alternative knowledge. We understand that others don't do the same, because even the country's most average household is already bombarded by more information than it can possibly consume. We have found a means to be selective about our information and our entertainments, to have them suit us, and we are proud of it.

We live in Portland because it's inexpensive and beautiful. We make it worthwhile because we are eager to espouse and promote our ideas. Because no matter what we desire the future to hold for us, Portland is the appropriate launching pad. It's the pep rally before the big game. Like the pep rally, it can get old fast. But it's quick, and when it's over, we are as energized and as ready as we need to be.

Me? Every moment's a compromise. Any moment of outlandishness or earnestness or honesty I portray is usually carefully measured and self-aware, probably more than anyone else's I know. That doesn't mean I'm never surprised, and it doesn't mean I never surprise myself. I smoke. Sometimes because it passes the time, but in a manner that allows me to be thoughtful and productive. Sometimes because I just like it. And when I hate it, it's because I know I haven't gotten everything out of it that I will (like cancer, I know). I drink every day, but just one almost every day, because it tones me down or greases the wheels or whatever I'm wanting it to do that day. I'm a romantic conservative, but only because I know I've still got time to do it right, and because I've done it too wrong for too long. I am more loyal to the people I love than anyone (I swear it might be true), and by extension I am reserved and leery upon first encounters with new people. I'm ready for most anything, but I'm not often ready to do it without a gameplan.

And today, as I write this, I am happy with all of it. This is not a standard day, but these are the days I have been having, the days I owe to this town, these friends, this year and, begrudgingly, myself. I am grateful. I am exultant. I am in complete control of my universe. And, for now, I can have a sense of humor about it. Thanks.

So, that's what I'm studying. Pretty neat, eh?

"We need to change him."

"Inspire him."

"Him, everyone."

"Get everyone together."

"All these people."

"No more waiting."

"Means through mass."

"It is criminal to pause."

"To wallow."

"To complain."

"We have to be happy."

"To not be happy would be difficult."

"We would have to try to not be happy."

"We have an obligation."

"We've had advantages."

"We have a platform from which to risk."

"A cushion to fall back on."

"This is abundance."

"A luxury of place and time."

"Something rare and wonderful."

"It's almost historically unprecedented."

"We must do extraordinary things."

"It would be obscene not to."

"We will take what we've been given and unite people."

"And we'll try not to sound so irritating."

"Right. From now on."

- AHWOSG, p. 130-131

Alexandra Hartman (EE), Body and early relational trauma

Personal history

My mother was 22 years old, and eight and a half months pregnant when my father was killed in a plane crash in Japan. I was born two weeks later. I can only imagine my mother's grief and isolation while giving birth in a foreign country. I can only imagine her rage at being robbed of her baby's father. I can only imagine her sense of failure in the days after my birth when I refused to let her hold me in her arms. I can only imagine her bewilderment and even anger as we struggled to bond, and I interrupted her suffering by reaching for comfort she couldn't give.

I grew up with my mother and my grandparents in a home where arguments and harsh criticism were the norm. I was shy and solitary, and I spent my childhood immersed in books. As I grew older, I learned to disengage from the chaos of my surroundings and observe from a safe mental distance when my emotions threatened to overwhelm.

In my early teens, my family life progressively splintered. My mother remarried over the objections of my grandparents, who withdrew much of their support. After moving into my stepfather's home, I was subjected to my mother's combative marriage, and her attempted suicide before the marriage ended in divorce four years later.

As I struggled to maintain stability, I perfected my powers of disengagement. I learned to protect myself from overwhelming emotions by sliding my focus to the right of my consciousness. This shift in attention felt like looking hard to my visual right, but instead of using my eyes, I used my mind to pull myself away, like averting my gaze from mangled bodies. If my attention returned to the center and my anxiety increased, I dragged my attention back.

Until I was in my twenties, my dissociation felt innate and often automatic. It never felt like an aberration until the day I sat beside my husband in the car, while watching us from above. Reality confronted fabrication and I stopped overtly dissociating.

Defining dissociation

For most of my life, my body's physical sensations have been dull and muted. I've never derived pleasure from being in my skin, taken pride in my body, or moved my body just to feel myself in motion. I've mentally disconnected from reality, and shut myself off from the totality of who I am, as someone who breathes, feels, and senses her surroundings. I've always moved through life without being fully conscious.

Dissociation is a defense against feelings that threaten to overwhelm. It's not uncommon, nor is it necessarily pathological. Everyone occasionally spaces out by creating mental distance between a stressful situation and ourselves.

Dissociation manifests in numerous ways. Many people dissociate when we tune out the world in front of the TV. Then there are people who self-harm, overeat or use additive substances to escape strong emotions. Others have difficulty integrating their emotions with their cognitive functioning. Some who cut themselves off from their connection to the environment or to family and friends. And some people induce positive dissociation by distancing from pain or entering trances. At the severely pathological end of the dissociation spectrum is dissociative identity disorder (formerly multiple personality disorder) in which separate personalities develop for separate sets of memories.

Dissociation's many forms and levels of severity complicate efforts to force it into a single, encompassing definition, and for that reason, its official clinical definition is currently being debated (Eisen 224; Holmes; MacMartin 343).

The American Psychiatric Association defines dissociation as, "a disruption of the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity or perception of the environment," (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV, American Psychiatric Association, 1994; DSM-IV). Dissociative pathologies are more likely to develop when awareness of one's body, thoughts and emotions, one's ability to perceive one's surroundings, and overall mindfulness and consciousness of past experiences aren't integrated holistically. Put simply, mental health is enhanced by a strong sense of self-unity.

Bessel A. van der Kolk professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and medical director of the Trauma Center in Boston, describes dissociation as compartmentalized experience. "Elements of the experience are not integrated into a unitary whole, but are stored in memory as isolated fragments and stored as sensory perceptions, affective states or as behavioral reenactments" (1995). When the mind receives overwhelming emotional input, the content is wrapped and put away to protect the self, similar to the way a muscle spasm immobilizes and protects injured muscle tissue from further injury.

Neurologist Robert Scaer, former medical director of Rehabilitation Services at the Mapleton Center in Boulder describes dissociation as, "Fragmentation and splitting of the mind, and perception of the self and the body" (2001), but since the mind is of one piece with itself and with the body, and cannot split or fragment in a literal sense, Scaer's description seems inexact and confusing (Epp).

Psychologist and author Carol Gilligan describes dissociation as, "Our ability to separate ourselves from parts of ourselves, to create a split within ourselves so that we can know and also not know what we know, feel and yet not feel our feelings" (20). Dissociation is nuanced and subtle. It compels us to expend emotional muscle to suppress and cloak memories and meaning within our body. Awareness and sensation are muffled and stay within the iron vault of our body, but the sensations never die until we do. We don't know what our bodies know.

Gilligan writes, "The brilliance of dissociation as an adaptation to trauma is that it keeps alive what had seemingly been lost. What is known and then not known remains out of reach, buried in the depths of the psyche; an innocence and ignorance that becomes frozen in time (185).

My early relational trauma

It took years until I was able to name my disordered mental processes, but once I knew them as dissociation, I learned that people dissociate as a response to severe trauma. "Trauma has been identified as the principal antecedent to dissociative disorders" (Lego, 246). This was confusing, because I have no memories of abuse, and I began eying my family suspiciously. Had my grandparents sexually abused me? It seemed unlikely. Had my mother harmed me physically? I remembered few spankings, and no overt physical abuse. I wondered if I'd suppressed memories, or if the turmoil in my family had prompted my retreats into dissociation.

My confusion eased when I read a paper by Giovanni Liotti, MD, former associate professor at the Institute of Clinical Psychiatry, Rome, and currently teaching at the School of Cognitive Psychotherapy in Bologna. Liotti wrote, "Traumatic losses in the life of the dissociative patients' mothers that took place two years before to two years after the patients' births proved to be a significant risk factor for the development of dissociative disorders" (Liotti, 476).

Small babies adopt dissociation as a defensive response to influences other than overt trauma and abuse. Just two weeks after my birth, my mother was undoubtedly still grieving, but I never understood how I might have absorbed her trauma. But Gilligan says, "as babies we pick up and respond to emotions in a third of a second, registering pleasure or anger or whatever emotion is felt by the person relating to us" (6).

Liotti cites John Bowlby's work with attachment theory, which holds that humans, and indeed all mammals, are born with a strong, instinctive drive to seek comfort, food and nurturing from a caregiver. The baby communicates hunger, and her need receives a response. Warmth, stroking, love... it's circular, and the baby's needs are usually answered, except when the mother suffers trauma within two years of her baby's birth, in which case she can be so overcome and distracted that she's unable to sense or respond to her baby's needs. Instead she reacts to her baby's cries with sadness, detachment or even anger (Liotti, 476).

An infant sees life simply in terms of life and death. If she feels fear in response to her mother, she assumes that she could die. The mother's rejection feels like death, but while the fight or flight response might ensue in an adult, a baby can only freeze like a hunted animal (Liotti, 477).

I believe experiencing my mother's trauma prenatally made me see my mother as a fearful influence when I was an infant. Freezing became my primary coping skill, and I froze whenever I experienced strong emotions. As I grew older, my freeze response became dissociation, first from my mother and then from my surroundings. I learned to annihilate frightening thoughts by dragging my attention away, and I refined my dissociation to the point where I could not only distance myself, but I could also paint an alternate view of reality.

Hunger

I no longer cope with strong emotions by engaging in the more pathological forms of dissociation, but at times of stress, I still dissociate by trying to satisfy my hunger.

I believe hunger and desire go hand in hand with dissociation. A baby's cries for food and nurturing are repeatedly ignored or perverted, so hunger becomes an antecedent to dissociation. The child comes to understand that her needs are rarely met. She grows up with a sense of isolation and emotional poverty, so later, whenever she feels needs or insecurities, she has no expectation that she or anyone else will be able to soothe her. As an adults she relieves her pain with food, alcohol, drugs or sex.

As a child I was always trying to soothe myself, and I was always hungry. Hungry for food, I hoarded sweets beneath my bed and my body grew. Hungry for attention, I endured criticism from my family and taunts from my peers because my body's appearance didn't conform to societal norms.

Hungry for rescue, I imagined myself a victim saved by handsome men. Hungry for companionship, I pressed my back against my bedroom door to prevent my friends from leaving, while their parents called them home. Hungry for acceptance as a teenager I drank, abused drugs, and gave my body to boys.

Hunger, desire and lack of control twist through my life like tight cords, as does dissociation. I've always felt out of control, and my body has never felt like part of me. It's felt more like an other. Like something I drag somewhere below me. I've never been satisfied with the way my body looks, or appreciated how beautifully it works, nor have I treated it with anything but contempt. I'm strong and healthy, but I've consistently responded to my body with hatred. To heal myself, I need to increase my somatic awareness and counteract my tendency to dissociate when emotions threaten to overwhelm.

Healing dissociation

My intuition tells me that honoring and understanding my body is key. I want to explore my prenatal physical states. I also think trusting a skilled professional to care for my body and emerging from the experience with a sense of safety and well-being is essential to my process.

Body-centered psychotherapist Christine Caldwell recommends, "moving consciously and satisfyingly," with Tai Chi, hiking, biking or dancing, but she says the best activity for overcoming dissociation is play that includes vigorous exertion. "It is in the arms of play behavior that our finest movements may arise, and capacities such as behavioral plasticity, intelligence, creativity and advanced problem solving coalesce" (229). I love the idea of engaging in physical play because early trauma gives birth to old souls. As children, we're so occupied with eluding fear that there isn't time for play, and I've always longed for a life with more play and fun.

Robert Scaer suggests touch-based modalities like acupressure or craniosacral therapy to offset dissociation, as well as carefully induced movement of the body. Since a threatened baby's escape attempts are futile, her only recourse is stilted locomotion. As an adult, moving beyond this contracted bodily state can eliminate fears associated with old patterns by allowing them to be fully evoked.

When I journal, I often find myself writing about being compressed and bound but I never why until a few weeks ago, during a disagreement with my lover. I felt emotionally frustrated, agitated and miserable. I had recently read philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin's book Focusing, which teaches how to focus attention on the body to discover what Gendlin calls a felt sense, or inner knowing. I started observing my body while I was in a high emotional state, and I immediately noticed that my forearms were tingling and almost numb. When I sat down, I felt that my body was tightly contracted. When I tuned in even more, I could barely breathe, and I felt claustrophobic, as if straps were pulled tightly around my belly and chest. I recognized it as a defensive posture adopted as a child. I became almost desperate to counteract the constriction, with an opposing movement to break free. I know now on a visceral level that I need a practice like yoga that will allow my body to stretch, expand and break free.

Scaer also recommends visual art as a way to explore trauma since it bypasses the limitations of verbal communication and taps into preverbal, somatic memory ("Trauma Spectrum" 265-7). As a lifelong artist this is enormously appealing to me. I especially like the idea of working with room-sized canvases and lots of paint so my entire body is reaching, stretching and bending, while releasing emotional and cognitive expression at the same time.

In addition, Scaer recommends self-defense training (268), which allows the body to break free of the freeze response and complete itself in defense, rather than compressing to save itself from annihilation (Epp).

Dusty Miller, Ed.D., a clinical psychologist and author specializing in trauma and addictions, writes, "failure to process the dissociated memory of the traumatic event is the essence of trauma," (98). She advocates gentle trauma reenactment in a group setting, where participants can learn about the nature of trauma and as well as healthy alternatives to dissociation and addiction (99-104). I understand the importance of reprocessing buried trauma memories, and I see this as a useful treatment strategy as long as it includes supervision from a therapist trained in working with trauma victims.

In Carol Gilligan words, "The process of recovery centers on the recovery of voice and, with it, the ability to tell one's story" (182). I am absolutely convinced that the best way to heal ourselves is through the power of our own words through journaling. Journaling allows the quiet voice within to speak and be heard. Dissociation is about muting ourselves, and writing allows us to whisper or to protest or to scream at the top of our lungs, and it's the way out of the vault and into the light of morning.

Peter A. Levine, Ph.D., author and originator of Somatic Experiencing says, "successful healing methods inevitably involve establishing connection to the body" (28). To that end, I've begun turning my awareness into my body by meditating into it to discover its inherent wisdom. The process of body meditation is simple, but it's different for me than traditional meditation, where I'd struggle to empty my mind while furtively peeking at the clock. With body meditation, I lie comfortably, breathe deeply and observe my body's murmurings. I begin at my body's core, and observe the physical and emotional sensations. Soon I'll sense my belly throbbing and burning like lava, and feel energy racing through my hands and feet. I find quiet answers there.

I have contained my emotions for almost 50 years, but when I meditate on my body, my emotions surface easily, because they're clamoring to be heard. There's deep sadness in my body, and I cry easily when I turn my attention inward, but there's also deep stillness there. I am emotion embodied, and my body is wise. It is God embodied. It's the spirituality I've always desired but never felt until now.

Works cited:

American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed (DSM-IV). Washington, DC, APA, 1994.

Caldwell, Christine (2001). "Addiction as somatic dissociation". Heller, Michael (Ed.): The flesh of the soul: The body we work with. Bern: Peter Lang.

Eisen, M.L.; Winograd, G. Individual differences in eyewitness suggestibility. Eisen, M.L., Quas, J.; Goodman, G.S. Memory and Suggestibility in the Forensic Interview (Eds.),Cambridge, MA: Earlbaum.

Epp, Ellie. Email interview. 2 May 2006.

Gendlin, Eugene T. Focusing. 1st Ed. Ed. New York: Everest House, 1978.

Gilligan, Carol. The Birth of Pleasure. 1st Ed. New York: A.a. Knopf, 2002.

Holmes, E. A., Brown, R. J., Mansell, W., Fearon, R. P., Hunter, E. C. M., Frasquilho, F. & Oakley, D.A. (2005) Are there two qualitatively distinct forms of dissociation? A review and some clinical implications. Clinical Psychology Review, 25 (1), 1-23.

Levine, Peter A. Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body. Louisville, CO: Sounds True, 2005.

Liotti, Giovanni. "Trauma, Dissociation, And Disorganized Attachment: Three Strands of a Single Braid." Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training 41.4 (2004): 472­486.

MacMartin, C., & Yarmey, A. D. (1999). Rhetoric and the recovered memory debate. Canadian Psychology, 40, 343-358.

Miller, Dusty, and Laurie Guidry. Addictions and Trauma Recovery Healing the Mind, Body, and Spirit. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.

Scaer, Robert C. The Trauma Spectrum: Hidden Wounds and Human Resiliency. New York: Norton, 2005.

--- "The Neurophysiology of Dissociation and Chronic Disease." Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback 26 (2001): 73-91. 2 Apr. 2006 <http://www.trauma-pages.com/scaer-2001.htm>.

van der Kolk, BA, Fisler, R. Dissociation and the fragmentary nature of traumatic memories: overview and exploratory study. Journal of Trauma Stress 1995. 505-525.

Wylie, Mary S. "The Limits of Talk; Bessel Van Der Kolk Wants to Transform the Treatment of Trauma." Psychotherapy Networker 28.1 (2004).

Alexandra Hartman, Strong women and their anger

How I'd love to feel light in my body. All bright and lit up inside, moving like a firefly or a bright, small fish. Strong and balanced and breathing from my belly. Delicate and strong.

I used to confuse strength with ANGER!!! Oh god, this is huge. I just remembered that I used to confuse strength ­ strong women and men - with anger. I've always been terrified of my anger! I don't want to become my grandmother. My mean grandmother. Fucking bitch treated me like shit. Embarrassed me in public, and only said nice things when there were people there to hear and she could brag me into having something to do with her.

I knew exactly who she was, because I carried part of her in me. Smart, hard as nails, tough, abrasive, angry, abusive. She was also weak. I could FEEL her softness, shyness, and fear, and I loved that about her. That part of her was me, and I kept my finger on her pulse. Maybe she didn't like that. She refused to speak with my mother ­ really, really want to dissociate.

Placate her, calm her down. Someone shut her up. She's going to ruin everything.

That house was splitting apart from the inside. She pulled a pistol on my grandfather because he wanted to maintain contact with his own daughter, after she brought shame onto our fragile family. Want to cry. But my mother smelled money in that wounded, influential man. One-armed lawyer. Scion of the community, he was, and she must have seemed like a breath of fucking sunshine to that man. My mother was beautiful, light and crazy, but he never bargained for the shit she brought down on him. Want to dissociate.

Okay, should I tell the damn living-with-the-lawyer story, or stay with being afraid of my strength? I'm a strong woman. I could have stayed wimpy and shy but I'm leaving this crumbling shroud. No more living in the tomb. Breathing heavy ­ hard to even think about the bad time.

I had to leave the only home I'd ever known, the only friends I'd ever known, and move to another town, and nobody in my family gave a shit that I was terrified. I felt like I couldn't breathe, couldn't eat, for months feeling like I had to throw up. That's when I realized how insignificant I was to everyone in my life.

Moved to another house, another school. Blue bedroom. My consolation for moving was picking the colors of my walls. Blue. I hate blue now. Blue pool in the backyard. Definite upward move for the family. And then my mother met Gordon.

Oh, that reminds me of the time my mother told me about sleeping with Uncle George, who was married to Aunt Marie. He wasn't really our uncle, just my grandparents' oldest friends, but she said she slept with George. I'll bet I was 15 when she told me that.

She met Gordon, and this guy was old. He sat on the draft board, and not one of his four sons went to Vietnam. He was huge and he had one arm and he was 22 years older than my mother (want to diss). Bad, bad years. My grandmother never liked any of my mother's men, including my father. She abandoned my mother after she married my father, and they weren't speaking when my father was killed and I was born. Bet my grandmother finally forgave her after that.

This is my body. This is where I live. This is where I Alex, live. I am a turtle, and I am protected here in my body. Imprisoned here. If there was a way, I'd totally leave it here. Leave it where? In the care of strangers. Lonely body, nobody loves you. Lonely body, lonely baby body. Lonely baby body.

Where does my mother reside in me? I am curled around and over her, protecting her inside my body. Inside my chest and belly, I'm wrapping myself around her. She's the grit inside the oyster. I'm birthing her as a pearl and no body's birthing me. I'm underground and she is all the world. I'm so tired of protecting her. My father's vapor and fog, drifting around me, sometimes he's in my mouth, but he isn't wrapped around me, and my back is too exposed. I cannot sense the back of my body. I'm numb beneath my turtle shell. My body, buried in the shell. Glossy, hard and black, the river turtle, with blood red somewhere on my body. I'll take the black turtle as my totem instead of the crow.

Lisa Johns (EE and LW) , The classroom

Lisa's graduating project was a novel, Mother-naked. "The classroom" is a section of "The relevant question," a process paper that accompanied her novel.

She is leaning against the blackboard. Her arms are crossed and she is frowning. She is watching us. I am in the back and I do not have to turn my head to look at her. She leans forward and pushes herself off the blackboard. She picks up a piece of chalk. She writes:

"The Need for Feminism."

The letters are block and her handwriting is perfect. She replaces the chalk and turns around. She takes a breath and begins to speak. I open my notebook. It is brand new and I select a new pen as well.

"The institutions by which women have traditionally been controlled - patriarchy, motherhood, economic exploitation, the nuclear family, compulsory heterosexuality - are being strengthened by legislation, religious fiat, media imagery, and efforts at censorship."

I write this down verbatim. I quickly go back before she speaks again and add the punctuation. This is my job this is my job sitting in this desk and writing it all down. I listen and I write. She is speaking again:

"... how and why women's choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, lovers, community has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding and disguise..."

I write this down and I am amazed that I have almost filled a page.

"... the virtual or total neglect of lesbian existence in a wide range of writings ..."

I look at her teaching. She is speaking to a classroom full of girls girls of different ages and different races different backgrounds. She is teaching all of us teaching the ones who come into the classroom as well as having taught the ones who have left.

She is speaking again. She is asking questions questions I think are rhetorical. She is speaking quickly pushing out words and I am trying to write her words down.

"What does a woman need to know?" She looks around the room she gathers our faces before she continues she has a way of doing that drawing you in getting your attention.

"Doesn't she need a knowledge of her own history, of her much-politicized female body, of the creative genius of the women of the past?"

There are rows of us all sitting in front of her near her watching her. Some are constantly writing some talk with her. Some of them I know and some I do not. I am sitting in the back. My friends sit around me. I do not talk much but I listen. Sometimes I daydream. My friends talk all the time.

"Doesn't she need an analysis of her condition, a knowledge of the women thinkers of the past who have reflected on it, a knowledge, too, of women's world-wide individual rebellions and organized movements against economic and social injustice, and how these have been fragmented and silenced?"

I remember coming here. My mother took me here she wanted to listen to see what this was about. I came in with her and we stood by the door. The teacher asked my name and when my mother and I left the class said goodbye to me in unison. The next day my mother signed me up for another classroom but I came here instead. She does not know I am here.

"Doesn't she need to know how seemingly natural states of being, like heterosexuality, like motherhood, have been enforced and institutionalized to deprive her of power?"

I am writing again writing quickly trying to catch all of her words. She suddenly retreats to the blackboard. She grabs an eraser. She picks up the chalk and in block letters writes:

"What is a lesbian?"

I start a new page in my notebook. I take out my ruler and underline this heading. I poise my pen and I am ready. She is already speaking.

"What are some of the names they have called us?"

The class is alive. Words are thrown back at her words coming from mouths wet with spit words that are epithets insults words hard words full of hate.

"Dyke!" "Pervert!" "Man hater!" "Pussy eater!" "Freak!"

But these words do not touch her. These words do not touch her because they are not said in hate but in response to her question. She smiles and nods. I try to write some of these words down but I cannot get them all.

"And what do we name ourselves?"

Again there are words but beautiful words.

"Lover!" "Mother!" "Daughter!"

She nods once.

"And we have something to say."

The girls are nodding back to her some are already writing again. The teacher looks down at her feet for a few moments. She looks like she is gathering her words making them come to her tongue.

"The fact is that women in every culture and throughout history have undertaken the task of independent, non heterosexual, women-connected existence in the extent made possible by their context, often in the belief that they were the "only ones" ever to have done so."

This must be a beginning. She is revving her words throbbing her words throwing them into the room. She must be beginning an oration no a discussion a sharing. She must be beginning she must be setting up. She is trying to teach us about this trying to tell us this is the most important thing we will ever need to know.

"We begin to grasp breaths of female history and psychology which have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited, mostly clinical, definitions of lesbianism."

I write in my notebook "definitions of lesbianism." I highlight the words in yellow ink. I number some lines underneath. I am expecting the definitions expecting her to order them say them aloud make them simple so that I may memorize them. But she does not give us a list.

"We are all in a lesbian continuum, all of us."

I quickly write "lesbian continuum" unsure of my spelling but she is still speaking.

"I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range -- through each woman's life and through history -- of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had a consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman."

Someone raises her hand a girl I do not know. I watch her face as she asks her question but I do not hear her words. I am distracted. My friends are whispering to each other they are having a conversation. Girls often whisper to one another in class and they often get in trouble. When the teacher catches any of us talking she makes the offenders speak aloud to the whole class. But my friends avoid getting caught they usually avoid whispering they pass notes instead. Long notes each scribbled in a variety of handwriting as they get passed. When they come to me I only read them.

My friends are bright eyed their faces red their conversation is not brief and I worry they will get caught. But they don't. It ends when a note is passed between them. I watch as it is read and before I can object before I can warn that they are being too loud too obvious the note is thrust onto my desk. I cover it with my arms just as the teacher looks up to answer the girl's question.

The note is in Dorothy's handwriting.

"What the books did contribute was a word -- the word Lesbian. When she finally appeared (with her hair sprouting from both her upper lip and her nipples, bloated, fat, and sweaty) I knew her immediately . She wanted women; I wanted my girlfriends. The word was Lesbian. After that, I started looking for it."

I look down at my chest to the place where my breasts have begun growing. I try to picture myself naked try to remember if I have hair on my breasts and I get upset that I cannot remember. I look around the classroom I wonder if I could sneak a glance pull my shirt out and duck my face inside to see but I reject the idea because I am wearing a bra. I vow to myself that I will check the next time I go to the bathroom.

I hear soft giggling and I see Dorothy and Chrystos smirking at each other. The teacher turns her back to write something on the blackboard and as she turns Dorothy holds up a sheet of paper. At the top it says "All the Lesbians I Know" and underneath are names and she has filled the whole sheet. Chrystos collapses her head on her desk in laughter. The teacher turns back around the chalk between her fingers and she stares in our direction but she says nothing. She turns back to the board.

I take the note Dorothy gave me and ball it up. I chuck it at her head. The ball bounces off her and she turns in my direction. She does not say anything. Instead she makes a gesture at me with her fingers and her tongue. Chrystos is now laughing so hard she puts her face in the crook of her elbows.

The teacher erases her notes on the board. She talks to us as she writes something in block lettering"

"Lesbian Relationships."

I turn back a few pages in my notebook to the page where the class gave the teacher beautiful words. I highlight "Mother" "Daughter" and "Lover."

"Can anyone think of examples? Write something about lesbian relationships. I want a discussion I want you to share."

The teacher gives us a few minutes to write a response. She paces the room as she waits. I look around me at the desks clumped close together at the girls occupying them. I watch some of their faces memorizing their movements the way some cock their heads the way some wear their hair watch who smiles secretly at whom.

I look down at my notebook I recite the assignment in my head. Relationships relationships as a way of knowing a lesbian as a way of defining a lesbian. She wants an example she wants our opinion a reaction a response. The response can be anything something we have heard or something we have experienced. I look up as she calls for volunteers.

Lillian is the first to volunteer. She sits closer to the teacher than I do. She always has a few books open on her desk at once and sometimes the books spill over onto the floor. She is older than me and she is the class secretary. She is the detailer of the class's events the recorder of the class's words the biographer of lessons. She writes down what the teacher says word for word. She asks a lot of questions.

"But the truth of the matter was that women who were concerned about their future as independent beings and the future of other females, women who were "woman-identified," women who gave their energy and commitment to women's interests, did love other women. Such a love was weird or evil, however, by male definition. It was women's job to reclaim female same-sex love by redefining it for themselves."

Lillian looks up at the teacher. She asks can she read more share more and the teacher nods. Lillian pulls out of her pile of books another notebook. She must have at least six on her desk. I notice for the first time that there is a pile of notebooks at her feet. She uses this pile as a footrest.

"If women were able to choose a life partner without concerns about economic security a social and political status, might not the institution of marriage be under siege?"

The teacher is clapping. She is exclaiming and she asks that Lillian tear out the pages she has read from and give the pages to her. Lillian tears out the sections first folding the paper and making a crease with her nail and then slowly tearing. She hands the neat sections of her writing to the teacher. The teacher takes the page and pastes it to the blackboard. Lillian looks pleased. She opens a notebook and writes down what just happened.

Someone is asking Lillian a question about her writing and I take the time to reread my notes on Lillian. Lesbian relationships we are talking about lesbian relationships. I look at Lillian's writing. I take out my highlighter. I highlight "same-sex love" and "love other women" and "life partner."

The teacher looks around for another volunteer. She spots Audre. Audre also sits in the front. She is older than me too. Audre nods and fumbles in her notebook for her response. She has already written pages more after finishing the assignment. She scrambles but she finds it.

"I had no idea what making love to another woman meant. I only knew, dimly, it was something I wanted to happen, and something that was different from anything I had ever done before."

Audre puts her head down and continues writing. But the teacher asks her for her work as well. She rips it out and hands the jagged page to the teacher who puts the work next to Lillian's on the blackboard. I resume highlighting Audre's words "making love to another woman."

The teacher looks around again and this time calls on Mary. Mary has not even raised her hand. Mary is sometimes a show-off. She always has something to say. And she stands up next to her desk to read her response. I can tell she is being overly-critical over-thoughtful. But she is precise and she is correct and the teacher walks closer to better hear her.

"Women loving women do not seek to lose our identity, but to express it, dis-cover it, create it. A Spinster/Lesbian can be and often is a deeply loving friend to another woman without being her "lover," but it is impossible to be female-identified lovers without being friends and sisters."

Before being asked for her writing Mary carefully removes the page from her notebook and places it in the teacher's already outstretched hand. Her work is pasted beside Lillian's and Audre's.

There are no more volunteers. I look back at my notes again. I highlight some of Mary's words "identity" and "friends" and "sisters."

I look to Dorothy I look to my friend the one with the long dirty blonde hair. The one that teaches me dirty words the one who scrawls messages onto the bathroom stall doors. She is what my mother would call a misfit one I am not allowed to invite home. She is writing but she looks up. She smiles and she passes me a note. It is a new note the page fresh with only her handwriting. She smiles as our fingers touch and I quickly put the note down before the teacher sees. I do not want to have to read it aloud for the first time before I can even get the chance to savor the fact that I am the first to read this.

"Even now I sometimes make love holding my breath, trying to make no sound, pretending that it is the way it always was back then . It was the worst sex and the best, the most dangerous and absolutely the most satisfying. No one else has ever made love to me like that -- as if sex were a contest on which your life depended. No one has ever scared me so much or made love to me so much ."

I cover my smile with my hand. I am dying to know more. Dorothy tries to reach for the note back but I smack her hand away. I ignore her as she pats my arm taps my desk with her nails. I put the note under my notebook. I want to think of a response to her.

I catch the last of the teacher's words:

"... it is the women who make life endurable for each other, give physical affection without causing pain, share, advise, and stick by each other."

She turns again to the blackboard. She writes:

"Personal and Political Writing: We Find Our Voice."

She turns to us her hands clasped in front of her. She smiles slightly and she begins to side step as she talks. She is hypnotic.

"What do I mean by political? What do I mean by personal?"

Mary raises her hand but the teacher shakes her head. She comes closer to our desks and she makes eye contact with each of us. I avert my eyes when she looks at me.

"The personal is political."

She raises her eyebrows a quiet challenge a thoughtful prompt. She repeats it again. She is moving faster now getting into her words her body pushing along with her mouth her feet hitting the ground harder and harder with each step keeping the rhythm a tempo.

"Your personal experience is political. "

I practically rip the binding of my notebook going back to the beginning. I reread the notes I have written about patriarchy about invalidation and I realize that what I am reading is really about silence. What I am reading is really about voicelessness about oppression. I look at the verbs she used the verbs being done to us before feminism before this classroom existed: controlled, censored, crushed, forced, neglected . all of these verbs and I am angry.

"I asked you in the beginning, "What does a woman need to know?" Does she need to know the state of her oppression the state of her voicelessness?"

I sit up straighter her words are crisp and clear. Everyone is sitting at attention.

"How can we move beyond that state? How can we speak out speak aloud our experience?"

"Every one of you has the ability to say something. And you will all say something differently."

She goes to the board raises her hand and touches the responses. She looks at the words for a moment before turning back to us.

I write in the margins of my notes I write and I turn the notebook around and around as I circle these notes adding in my understanding. I think of what I feel and see when I think of political. I think of what I feel and see when I think of personal. I write in the margins:

"The political the outside the public the acts which demonstrate that voice is needed. The personal the inside the experience my experience ."

I look at the teacher and I realize I am breathing hard. My hands are sweaty so I wipe them on my jeans. I look to Dorothy I look to Chrystos I want them to look at me but they do not. They are writing too. I go back to my note I try to finish the thought but I am interrupted.

The teacher is opening her own notebook. She says she wants to share a poem. She reads:

"I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.

Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,

you've been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:

our friend the poet comes into my room

where I've been writing for days,

drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,

and I want to show her one poem

which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,

and wake. You've kissed my hair

to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,

I say, a poem I wanted to show someone...

and I laugh and fall dreaming again

of the desire to show you to everyone I love,

to move openly together

in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,

which carried the feathered grass a long way down

_______the upbreathing air."

The teacher is calling for words calling for a response. I open my notebook to a fresh page and I get ready to transcribe. I feel I want to say something but I do not know what to say. It is an interminable long wait waiting for the others to hurry up and write. I cannot sit still and I can feel redness in my face and my scalp itches. I feel the need for words. I feel others have the words have the right words so I get ready to listen and to write.

There is a girl named Judy. She is quiet and she reads a lot mostly newspapers magazines non-fiction stuff. She sits in the corner and she props her head on one hand and writes as she listens. I watch her as she moves her pen back and forth watch as she glances up once in awhile. I have never heard her speak. She has a girlfriend. I do not know the girl's name but she sits next to Judy and often when Judy reads or writes she is holding this girl's hand.

She is the first to raise her hand. She looks nervous she bites around her nails scratches her head. She moves her butt around in her seat. The teacher quiets us with a finger to her lips as Judy begins to read:

"We," and she looks at her girlfriend, "discovered that women love poetry which is true to our own experience, and art which helps us see ourselves without masks."

She looks up at the teacher her face red her neck red. The girlfriend grimaces and I think Judy squeezed her hand too tightly. The teacher nods and smiles. Judy nods as well. The teacher knows she is not finished.

"She came to me out of the silky midnight mist, her slips rustling like cow thieves, her hair blowing in the wind like Gabriel. Lying in my arms harps played soft in dry firelight"

Dorothy leans out of her desk and slides me another note. She leans so far in an effort to be quick she almost falls over. I take my eyes off Judy to read it.

"I was working ferociously to take my desires, my sexuality, my needs as a woman and a lesbian more seriously. I believed I was making the personal political revolution with my life every moment."

I look at Dorothy. She is facing away from me again. I try to whisper to her to get her attention. I consider waving the note at her but then Judy is speaking.

"in the place where

her breasts come together

two thumbs' width of

channel ride my

eyes to anchor

hands to angle

in the place where

her legs come together

I said 'you smell like the

ocean' and lay down my tongue

beside the dark tooth edge

of sleeping

'swim' she told me and I

did, I did"

Judy is sweating now and red all over but she continues. She still has her girlfriend's hand clasped in hers and when she gets to the end of the page her girlfriend uses her free hand to turn it. Judy looks grateful for this but does not look at her girlfriend.

Chrystos passes me a note and I nab it from her fingers. I am turned on and I look around to see if anyone else notices.

"She tender whiskers dip me in molasses sucking deep

her back I dreamt in afternoon light

comes to me in rainy 3 A.M.

fingers delicate as rainbows in puddles my ass arcs

she takes me then again

lights fading in the dawn our lips cling

swollen when I wake she's left for work

my nipples reach

to where she lay

burying my face in her smell rolling over laughing

when someone asks me how

I feel

I grin Oh

so good still swollen wet my my my

I'm Natalie's puddle"

Judy is still reading it seems her response is endless but the teacher does not mind she is leaning on the wall her arms crossed a state of bliss visible on her face. I want to make the teacher feel like that too. I pull out my notebook I open it to a blank page and I doodle at the top. I am trying to think on my words trying to have Judy's words run in my head over and over so that I may think on mine. I see the corner of Dorothy's note sticking out beneath my book. I pull it out and notice that there is writing on the back too. I turn it over and read:

"'Oh, fuck me. Goddamn it! Fuck me!' I begged. When her fingers opened my cunt and her teeth found my breast, I started to scream . I jerked and pushed against her, wanting to fight wanting to give in, wanting the world to stop and wait while I did it all . Toni climbed over me and put her naked belly against mine, and I began to cry the deepest aching sobs. It felt as if my skin itself were trying to absorb her, soak up the peace and silence inside her. I wanted to stuff myself with her until I was all cotton-battened, dark and still."

Judy continues:

"How they came into the world,

the women-loving-women

came in three by three

and four by four

the women-loving-women

came in ten by ten

and ten by ten again

until there were more

than you could count"

I can feel myself responding feel myself sweating and I look to Dorothy. She is grinning at Judy sucking on her pen biting on the cap pushing it around the side of her mouth. She is grinning and she is listening.

I am staring at Dorothy flicking paper at her trying to get her attention. The paper bits are landing in her hair but mostly at her feet. She is sucking on her pen ignoring me.

Judy is standing now gripping her girlfriend's hand a few inches from her desk. She is clutching her notebook her knuckles white.

"How they lived in the world,

the women-loving-women

learned as much as they were allowed

and walked and wore their clothes

the way they liked

whenever they could. They did whatever

they knew to be happy or free

and worked and worked and worked.

The women-loving-women

in America were called dykes

and some like it

and some did not."

I rip out paper and I start licking it into balls and throwing them at Dorothy making them stick making them plaster themselves to her face her hands her desk. Still she ignores me.

"They made love to each other

the best they knew how

and for the best reasons"

Dorothy is writing now her hair trailing her desk. She is plastered in bits of paper doesn't seem to mind them doesn't seem to know they are all over her.

"you have right, what is right

for the bond between women is returning

we are endlessly within it

and endlessly apart within it.

it is not finished

it will not be finished ."

Judy is done. The teacher is applauding the girls are applauding some are out of their seats roaring and clapping Chrystos among them. Dorothy writes through it. I don't know how she can concentrate. The teacher asks Judy for her work pastes it to the blackboard as the clapping continues. Judy is sweating profusely her underarms wet and she pulls her girlfriend out of her seat and hugs her. I am glued to my desk I cannot move cannot make my hands come together. I stare as the girls applaud and Judy sweats.

The class is still applauding when the teacher holds up her hands and quiets them. She shakes her head and smiles. She touches her hands to her face and I see she is holding a tissue. She wipes her forehead wipes her lips. She takes a bow in Judy's direction and Judy's face gets redder.

I look down at Dorothy's notes look down at my own scribbled writing. The personal is political. The act of loving women is political. I look at Judy's words her wonderful words of "what is right" of the "bond between women" and I am blown away.

The teacher is calling for another response and there are hands waving hands fluttering trying to get picked. The teacher has called on another girl to speak one I think is named Susan. Susan is quiet calculating in her gaze. She walks to the front of the room holding her notebook. She stares at the teacher waiting for the cue to begin.

"These words are written for those of us whose language is not heard, whose words have been stolen or erased, those robbed of language, who are called voiceless or mute, even the earthworms, even the shellfish and sponges, for those of us who speak our own language"

I hold Susan's voice in the back of my head. I am trying to think of something something that I can feel behind all of their words something that I am missing. I look over my own notes the ones sprawled in the margins. I look at the words mother daughter lover that I have highlighted that my eyes keep going back to keep reading.

"We open our mouths. We try to speak. We try to remember."

Susan stops. She looks up at all of us moves her eyes around the room until she catches each of us. She is quiet again. Looks at her notebook. She fingers the paper and then continues.

I finger my own notebook. I gather the pages that I have written on between my fingers compare that with the pages that are still blank. I listen to Susan and I think try to think try to form the words.

I look at the words I have written in the margins. My own words crammed into the margins. I look at the notes next to them my words defined because of these notes. I look at the process the movement from silence to voice. The movement from oppression to freedom. I look at the power that exists the power evident in the words spoken aloud today in the words pasted on the blackboard.

I look at the two notes on my desk words from my friend. She is saying something different but yet she is saying the same thing. I listen to Susan again.

"Her name from her daughter. The named from the unnamed. The spoken from the spoken. The daughter from the mother."

I think of my mother and how she does not know I am here. I think of how she should be here how she should be sitting beside me so we can talk so we can share. I think about how I would not mind that.

There is a tug on my sleeve and a piece of paper slides onto my desk. I have to grab it to keep it from gliding to the floor. The paper is ripped on one edge a rip running through some of the written words.

"I was thinking about Bobby, remembering her sitting, smoking, squint-eyed, and me looking down at the way her thighs shaped in her jeans. I have always loved women in blue jeans, worn jeans, worn particularly in that way that makes the inseam fray, and Bobby's seams had that fine white sheen that only comes after long restless evenings spent jiggling one's thighs one against the other, the other against the bar stool."

Dorothy's words are not a distraction. Her words are fierce and sexual. I am drawn to her words just as I feel drawn to Susan's. I feel hot again. I feel agitated but in a good way. I feel like my pen is light as a feather I feel it quivering. I feel like I need to say something need to write something or I will begin to shake. Dorothy throws something I catch it out of the air without thinking. I open it and read:

"The fiction I make comes out of my life and my beliefs, but it is not autobiography, not even biomythography that Audre Lorde championed. What I have taught myself to do is to craft truth out of story-telling."

I feel this process. I feel the process flowing in my fingers. I feel the need for voice. And I see something I see behind all of these words three women three characters. But they are vague they are outlined but they are not full. I turn my notebook back to the first page. I let Susan's voice fall around me her words fill the air. I imagine the block lettering of the teacher on the blackboard.

I write out each line write it out on a new page.

The Need for Feminism

What is a Lesbian?

Personal and Political Writing: We Find Our Voice

And I imagine myself I imagine my characters I imagine what this process means. I look to Dorothy who is constantly here constantly writing constantly sharing. I feel I am so close. So fucking close and yet I cannot get a grip cannot fully wrap my head around those words the words that I am filled with to bursting.

Chrystos passes me another note and smiles. She does not look long because she and Dorothy are leaning forward in their desks their feet propped on their seats their shoes left on the floor. Their faces are now intent on Susan.

"This room of her wants. Of her desiring. This room of her desiring to live. This place which allows her to exist. Where the women stare into each other's eyes. Where the daughter feels the life of the mother."

My heart is pounding. I look down at this new note I have a collection of them now. I think that is unfair to them that I take and take and never respond back never pass them out with my own words.

"But if