Last night I had a dream that an old friend asked me to be in her sister’s wedding. I haven’t talked to this friend in a while and I was late in getting ready. About 3 or 4 hours late. But who needs THAT much time to get ready? That and I didn’t have the dress I was supposed to order or the shoes and I had to pick from a huge pile of dresses, some of which weren’t mine, and ended up going with a horrific spandexy, floor-length, doily, off-white leaning more toward gray dress. I looked like a Q-tip. And shoes. I had to pick shoes from either my own boots or some very hideous purple ones. Yup. Very hideous purple ones.
My friend was all pissed off at me and said I needed to send her sister and her soon-to-be husband on a nice weekend somewhere or give them lots of wine. I told her I didn’t have the money at all to send them on a vacation and that that was ridiculous.
Then the make-up woman was about to leave, but I said I was ready. I kept sweating and I was worried they would notice my hairline beaded in sweat.
We ran back and forth between strange hotel rooms. It was laid out like a strange complex. One of the long hallways (like the moving walkways at airports) was very industrial. Metal escalators, moving floors. Pink, blue, white gears. Parts of the walkway were missing like scales torn off. And it moved up and down, back and forth. Very Star Wars.
There was also a bus. I got on for just a moment because I didn’t know where I was going. And then I got off at the next stop and I could have walked. My mom was in there somewhere too, playing on her phone.
I overheard my friend talking to someone on her phone, saying she wasn’t sure why I came, that it wasn’t really working out, that she tried to make a connection again with me and it was a mistake.
When we finally arrived in her sister’s room, her sister loved my outfit and had a similar dress on – long, tight, but white.
I wasn’t sure why I was even asked to be in my friend’s sister’s wedding, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to be serving them wine.
The night before I had a dream that a dog wandered through our back yard, right through the needle bushed with red berries and he had a squirrel in his mouth and he was shaking in furiously.
This morning, a bird kept calling “Aaron” or more like “Aarwin” like a baby trying to say “Aaron.”
Unconsciously, or more consciously, but unaware (are those the same things?) I’ve been writing the body. It was suggested I read Hélène Cixous’ essay The Laugh of the Medusa which I have never come across before this. Sometimes I think books and poems and literature and essays fall into our space like a leaf into our cups. Cixous is (was) a French feminist writer and talks about writing ourselves (women), writing our bodies. All the tumults and tides we swim through. To strike down the idea that a “well-adjusted normal woman has a … divine composure.”
“Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth …
To write. An act which will not only ‘realize’ the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal; it will tear her away from the superegoized structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty (guilty of everything, guilty at every turn: for having desires, for not having any; for being frigid, for being ‘too hot’; for not being both at once; for being too motherly and not enough; for having children and for not having any; for nursing and for not nursing …) – tear her away by means of this research, this job of analysis and illumination, this emancipation of the marvelous text of her self that she must urgently learn to speak. A woman without a body, dumb, blind, can’t possibly be a good fighter. She is reduced to being the servant of the militant male, his shadow. We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing. Inscribe the breath of the whole woman.
“Because so few women have as yet won back their body, Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reserve-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word ‘silence,’ the one that, aiming for the impossible, stops short before the word ‘impossible’ and writes it as ‘the end.’ ”
Oddly, I’ve been writing out some of these issues in my work: silence, my body, slavery to silence, the “aphonic revolts” of my body. I have been writing through my body, have always been writing through my body to understand the “luminous torrents.”
Thank you, Rebecca for the suggestions. Here’s a link to the full text if you’re interested.
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