Semester magazine - Fall 2004, Goddard College Individualized MA program photo by Juan Carlos Silva Salguero Editor's introduction   Anne Bergeron Fire and snow Carolyn Hauck A room with no mirror Juliana Borerro Embodiment and theory Anna Hawkins An epistemology, or methodology Sharon Bray Freedom Layla Holguin-Messner Balancing South Favor Ellis breath Amanda St John she.girl. Suzanne Ehst David Abram on language  Scott Youmans Afternoon with Julie Larry Greer Annotation of Tyler Volk Ellie Epp, Editor's introduction For this semster's magazine I sent an open call to IMA advisors for student work that could be thought of as related to Embodiment Studies in some way. IMA faculty who worked with the students published here also include Lise Weil, Karen Campbell, Margo MacLeod, and Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg. (I am noting each student's advisor in the form of initials in parenthesis.) We are inventing Embodiment Studies at Goddard from the ground up. One of the things this means is that we have not started from definitions, but from student and faculty preoccupations and intuitions. We have not been hurrying toward theory, but hoping to allow theory to evolve within experience. This issue demonstrates our richest mix yet: gorgeous transcription of personal life, inspired tracking of theoretical connections, and - in many of the pieces - careful transcription of the experience of theoretical realization. Anne Bergeron (CM-G), Fire and snow (adapted from the Fire section of Traversing the home landscape: elemental encounters with place, Anne's graduating piece) Not long after I dreamed about the sea creatures in Lake Champlain, I had a dream about fire. In it, I am there once again with another woman who looks like me. The woman with long dark hair wants to fly on a trapeze. She has a daughter and maybe a son. She sets up a trapeze in my house. In a far room, my mother and maternal grandmother sleep. The woman takes big, slow swings, trailing her long hair behind her. While she swings, I hold her child, a black-haired girl who clings gently to me and is comfortable in my arms. The woman asks me to hold some ropes for her, and to help her do a move on the trapeze that is a little tricky. I am reluctant, but agree; the woman is smiling and confident. I hold the ropes, and she explains what she will do. Then she stops, leaves the room and goes into the garage. She is pouring some liquid, blue, over the cement floor; when she is finished she takes off her clothes. I am still holding her daughter, who feels like my own. Then I realize the woman has a match. She is going to set herself on fire. I scream at her to stop, but I am afraid to go through the door to get her. The child clings, I don't want to get burned. The woman drops the match and she begins to sing. Slowly she ignites. There is a wall of thick, grey smoke. *** Two months before my father died, he and his family sold my grandparents' house on Main Street in Winooski, a house that had been theirs for seventy years. It was a simple white house with two stories, three bedrooms, and a porch on the front with a slate floor and wrought iron railings that showed off my grandfather's blacksmithing. Next to their home was my grandfather's shop. When my grandparents first found the house it sat on the edge of town. Four years ago, the house burned and nothing remains. I now see my grandparents' old address - 321 Main Street ­ in newspaper ads for the new pharmacy. My grandparents provided a home for anyone who walked through their front door and for all of their ten children and grandchildren. Family gatherings were the lifeblood of my French Canadian family. Though I loved these gatherings and was happy to be part of a raucous, French speaking clan, they made me made me achingly self-aware and put me on edge. My father's brother, who had the same bald head as my father, the same long nose, the same sharp chin, and the same thinness, used to get my attention with a pet name that still makes my skin crawl. I was five, perhaps, or younger, when I first remember Marcel cornering me at a large family gathering, whiskey and water gleaming in a clear glass, ice clinking because the hand that held the glass was shaking. He brought his face down to mine, so close I could feel the sharpness of the bearded stubble on his chin and smell the sweetness of his alcohol breath. "Hey, Pussycat," he would say, and then smile slyly or sometimes even whistle. For long years, my uncle embarrassed me, worried me and intrigued me all at once. He would reach his hands to me, hands with long, pointed fingernails and diamonds encircling both ring fingers, the most feminine hands I had ever seen on a man. He shuffled, knees perpetually bent, pants too long and baggy. His eyes glittered with a desire I understood so clearly that my face burned with shame. He would whisper to me when he got close ­ "Oh my sweet my femme fatale you're going to break a lot of hearts." It was a prophecy that unsettled me and would rise unbidden in a blaze of grief years later. Somehow, I would manage to move away from him, and find a cousin to stand near, or a brother. Often that was not enough to stop his methodical pursuit. That was the uncanny part. I would move away, be free for a time, and then I would see him coming. I was always on the way to where he was going ­ to refresh a drink, to get a plate of food, to join a conversation with my uncles. He was not secretive. I received his attention with my family as the audience. Marcel's presence colored every gathering of my father's family until I was thirty-two, when he died. *** My father, like his own father who was a blacksmith, loved and feared fire. He especially loved fire of his own making. In my grandfather's shop my father welded the frames of cars and trucks, and at the camp he welded plumbing pipes, protective gear shielding his eyes and face from the spray of sparks. He raked flood logs brought to shore by the rising June lake, and piled them up, making a big collection of driftwood. When it dried, he kindled a fire that would burn for days. It smoldered through the night, engaged the next morning, soared into blaze during the day and settled into ash at dark. He raked spreading coals into a neat pile, and then rolled logs, levering them with a thick branch, onto the flame. He burned on days of little or no wind, and only if the breeze came from the north. This kept the smoke billowing out over the water, saving the scrub woods of raspberry, jewelweed, poison ivy, wild mint and poplar from catching the flames. My father was happy building fires, nurturing the flame, watching for hints of a change in wind direction that meant the approach of a storm, a half day away, a half hour away. The lake is unpredictable that way; the wind shifts, storms whip up and die quickly. *** I knew I could not stop Marcel from bothering me, because I had no idea how to stop him. He never got beyond hugging me, stroking my arms, cupping his hands to my face, caressing my shoulders. Only rarely did he find me alone, away from the crowd of family. Once, the summer when I was nine, I approached him from behind, mistaking him for my father. It was at a family picnic. I remember reaching up to take what I thought was my father's hand. Marcel turned as he felt my hand in his, and gave me a knowing smile and opened his arms to me. A shock of fear ran through me as I realized my mistake and I snatched my hand away and ran off, my heart beating wildly. Bewildered and anxious, I found a group of cousins to play with. If I had learned anything as a little girl raised in a Catholic school, I had learned to respect authority. To do otherwise was to incur the wrath of the nuns who slapped hands until they were red with yardsticks that folded into thick paddles. But I did not like the way Marcel looked at me. I was confused by the overt sexuality of his attention, something for which I had no words and little context. It never occurred to me to tell my parents because they knew. My parents and my aunts and uncles witnessed what went on. The fact that they did nothing to keep him from me did not occur to me as strange until I was well into adulthood. I remember slapping my own father when he reached out across the kitchen table and grabbed my emerging breasts. Marcel would whisper in my ear, purse his lips as if to kiss mine and wink at me from across the room. In my teens, I endured it when he took me by the arm and made me waltz with him at weddings, anniversaries, and family reunions. He would close his eyes and put his cheek next to mine. I wanted to escape, but I did not want to call attention to myself, did not want to get him in trouble. *** I hold the phone and listen to my mother tell me that they burned the house today, a controlled burn, a planned fire, an opportunity for the Winooski fire department to hone their skills. All of my father's siblings and my mother stood on the sidewalk across the road and watched as the house was lit, engulfed in flames, and reduced to ash. "I thought you knew it was today," she says. I did know. I drove by the house on my way home from running errands and saw my mother and my aunts and uncles all standing on the sidewalk. I did not stop to join them. I could not bring myself to watch the house fall. I could not stand with my family and watch sixty years of memories burn, the house where they were born, where they were raised, where they celebrated graduations, engagements, birthdays, holidays, the size of the family increasing each year. Fifty of us descend from my father and his nine brothers and sisters; more than that descend from us. *** I was twenty-nine at my youngest brother's college graduation party, one of the last times I saw Marcel. Glynn stands next to me as a conversation with family and friends disperses. Marcel, still aware of opportunities like this, sidles up to me and in a low voice but loud enough for Glynn to hear says there are "things he could show me that he knows I would like and some things that he is sure I could show him that he would like. I tell him I don't think so, yet I do not move away. He gives me the same old look, he holds the same drink, his hands shake the same as always, only he's noticeably older, unsteady. He persists. I turn away and he follows me into the dining room. I stop and he continues repeating his ideas about what I could show him. I feel my face turning red. One of my aunts who stands nearby hears him. She puts her fingers to her lips shaking her head quickly from side to side, shushing him like a child. He walks on. *** A few weeks later at my mother's house I find Polaroid photographs of the burning house. Flames reach out of the two front windows upstairs, the white clapboards gleam in contrast. There was little wind that day in mid September, overcast and warm. I imagine the flames, the heat bubbling the paint and wallpaper, igniting the old floors, racing up the stairs to the two small rooms where my father and his nine siblings slept. The hollowcore door at the foot of those stairs gone, the door to the basement gone, the heavy front door with the bells gone, the side door to the porch with the Venetian blinds gone, all cleared by the fire department to allow the fire to spread quickly through the house. "It went up like that," my mother says on the phone. The wrought iron railing, the slate porch floor. "It burned in no time." The colorful strings of lights that ringed the porch each December, the women gathering in the living room, filling couches and chairs, even sitting on the floor in party dresses and high heels to watch my grandmother open and linger over each Christmas gift from all the members of her family ­ where did it all go? The tortiere in the oven, the apricot pies steaming on the table, the cigarette and cigar smoke, the Canadian Club. Marcel in his loafers walking my way. Watching myself through the years, each holiday, each Christmas night, each New Year's night, each Easter night, grow up, as we all grew up, my cousins and I, to the smell of our grandmother's pies, to the sounds of our fathers talking loudly in French, sentences punctuated by words in English. In my memory, I open the aluminum exterior door to the enclosed porch and find my grandmother in the kitchen where she always welcomed us with a hug and a kiss ­ each one of her nearly fifty grandchildren always got the same welcome. She kept track of our birthdays and learned English at the local high school in the evenings when she was in her sixties so she could talk with those of us who did not speak French. *** Two years after my brother's graduation, I attend a cousin's wedding reception at the Elks Lodge in Burlington. At dinner, two of another cousin's daughters, ages seven and ten, sit by themselves at the end of the long table where I eat with my family and a few aunts and uncles. I see Marcel, wearing a baggy dinner jacket and balancing a plate of food in both hands, heading for the end of our table. He sits with the girls. I stand up, pick up my plate and move to the end of the table to join Marcel and my cousin's daughters whom I do not know. I stare at Marcel as I sit next to one of the girls directly across from him. Glynn follows me. Marcel is in an alcohol haze and says nothing during the entire meal. No one else joins us. The cake is cut, desert is served, and the dancing begins. Marcel leaves the table. He positions himself by the bar for the rest of the evening. When my brother finds me on the dance floor, he looks at me and says, "Good call." *** I am glad my father did not have to watch his house burn to the ground. I am glad he died remembering it as a solid place, the last homestead in a suburban zone of commercial property, surrounded by Comfort Inns, several convenience stores and gas stations, a pet food store and supermarket chain. The new drug store completely obliterates the lot. There is nothing left to remind you that once there was a house, once a family lived there, once the smell of apricot pie wafted onto the street. *** My father loved watching storms blow in from across the lake. In those perfect moments of breathless air and still water before the wind flung itself on beach cedars and double-hung glass, my father would cock his head and turn his ear toward the west, no longer needing to watch the black sky, which was now overhead. At the first rustle of a leaf or clink of the pressed glass wind chimes nailed to a cedar branch, he would holler so loudly I had to block my ears. "Heeere ... iiittt ... comes!" "Get inside now, Anne," my mother would say, as sheets of rain hit porch windows and wind seemed to bend quaking glass. Outside all was a swarm of grey ­ pelting rain, churning lake, rushing wind ­ and it was impossible to see more than a few feet. My father, especially delighted, would laugh as he jaunted back and forth from porch window to living room where my brothers, mother and grandparents sat, rubbing his shiny head, clearing his lungs, and shouting above the crash of rain, wind and lake, "Listen now! Here comes the big one!" And sure enough, the first bolt of lightening would flash white into the warm yellow lamplight, casting haloes on pine board walls and cutting the power as an enormous blast of thunder detonated in the sky. My father would screech with delight. He would clap his hands, then rub them together as if in anticipation of a juicy feast, and he would whoop as the next crack snapped the world in two. *** As a child, I learned to hold my own with my father. I dared to stand up to him with a bold mouth risking sharp thwacks on my bare butt, underwear at my ankles, my face red and pressed into white bed clothes as his dry, wrinkled hands or brown leather belt rose and fell hard with violent words that pounded me like heavy rain. "No slap goddam slap daughter slap of mine slap will speak slap to me slap that slap way. Slap!" "I hate my father," I remember saying to a girlfriend when I was eight as we practiced balancing along the curb at the edge of my driveway after supper. It was spring, I was wearing a striped knit pink dress and blue sneakers. "I hate him." *** Over years of my childhood, I learned the wisdom of circling, of giving him a wide arc. From a distance I would watch him for signs of storm ­ silence marked by a knit brow, a grimace, a red face, a long toss of my cat across the room. If I stirred wrong in his direction - if I laughed just a little too loud for too long, put my feet up on the couch, touched the white living room walls, or wrestled with my brother, screaming with delight in playful, grappling battle ­ he would loose a fury. All would go black, and I would run for cover waiting for the bolt to strike and white out the world. *** Mother's Day, 2003. My brother Tim and his wife, their two sons and Glynn and I have come to cook dinner for my mother and enjoy the budding leaves and high lake water at the camp my father loved. That afternoon signals a stretch of four days of long, hard, solid rain, storms that blow in and seem to circle back to flow in one more time. Dusk comes early under a low grey sky and inside the camp we sit at a table set with my great aunt's plates, my grandmother's teacups and a cracked cream-colored platter edged in green leaves I remember my grandmother buying at a yard sale. When the rain starts, my brother and I close all the windows on the glassy porch where we sit in golden light. The rain splatters windows, and hard showers roar on the roof. Kyle, who is two, sits on his mother's lap. His eyes are wide, his body still. A thunderbolt flashes, jolting us upright. Immediately cannonades of thunder begin, sound spilling over itself like a waterfall, tumbling hard and fast. Kyle buries his head in his mother's breast. My other nephew, Troy, five, is enthralled. "Oh, I love thunderstorms!" he says. He is jumping up and down and running from living room window to kitchen window peering through the darkness. "I hope the power goes out and we have to stay here overnight. Where's the flashlight? I'll hold the flashlight so we can see when the power goes out." He is lit, struck by the great force of the storm that promises to linger and rumble for hours. Laughing and leaping, he screeches with delight each time a blast of sound pierces us to the heart. I sit down on the couch next to my brother whose bulky arms enclose his smaller, subdued son. "He reminds me of someone," I say, directing my gaze to Troy who has the flashlight batteries out on the floor to inspect them. "I know," my brother says, shaking his head. Later, as the rain still pounds in darkness and we load cars to leave, Troy loudly complains, dawdles with putting on shoes and coat, and empties the flashlight batteries once again onto the floor. He is a boy who knows what he wants, who is at home in the midst of storms, ablaze with the flame of his own desire. I recognize my father and myself in Troy. We aim precisely and narrowly at what we want. If we miss, our screeches echo into the emptiness of open lake and green meadow. *** It is one of those school days that every student and every teacher knows should have been called off because a hard snow has been falling since last night. Now, ice builds as the temperature rises. At least a third of our small student body is home curled up by the fire, or out running their snow machines in the woods. Those of us who are carrying on with the school day lack motivation, wander the halls with resentment. I teach at a rural school that prides itself on its low number of "snow days," days when school is canceled because it is treacherous to ride the school bus. The secretary has paged me to the office to take a phone call; it is the last period of the day. I pick up the receiver and lean on her desk. We exchange insolent looks. My mother says I need to come home. "They said it may be a few days," she says, "or hours." Back in my classroom I type out lesson plans for the rest of the week. I am two hours from where my parents live, at least three in this snow. I see my principal on the way out and promise to call. It is rough going on the road. When I reach the bottom of my steep, wooded driveway, I find a mound of hard snow left by the town plow. The road up to my house is not cleared. After several attempts, I force my four-wheel drive pickup through the thick chunks of snow, and slipping more than once, maneuver up the hill, securing myself tracks for the way out. In the house, I gather clothes, and call Glynn at his clinic. Then I look for something to wear to my father's funeral. I will not be back here until that is all over. I pack a black skirt, a grey pullover sweater, wool socks, jeans. I take one of my dogs and put her in the front seat of the truck. I back down the hill in fresh tracks. *** It is still snowing when I pull into the hospital's parking garage nearly four hours later. The temperature hovers around freezing and there is ice everywhere. I leash the dog and take her for a walk under orange streetlights. Snow falls steadily. *** My brother stands on one side of my father's bed. My mother sits on the other, holding his hand. Everyone looks at me expectantly. I read the relief in my brother's eyes that someone else is here. I listen to my father talk, his voice solid but gravelly, and to the rhythmic beeps of the monitor tracking his erratic heart on a screen. He wears a white hospital gown tied in a bow at the back of his neck; a baby-blue polyester blanket covers his body from the waist down. Shaved and grey, his face is washed clean of expression. Every line that creases his face is relaxed, every emotion ever expressed in those deep lines, leveled. "I know I should be scared, but I'm not," my father says. "That's good," I say. My mother drops her head. We all sit, waiting for words. I sense that things are in order, my parents feel settled with each other. "I love my family," my father says, "I don't want to leave. This was going to be my year to have some time. To read my books, enjoy the camp." March would have marked his fortieth year at the manufacturing plant where he works. He would have been married forty years to my mother in June; he has one grandchild, a boy a year and a half old who calls him "Pa." My brother Jay, who has driven from Connecticut, arrives now, cheeks red from the cold, hands in the front pockets of his short leather jacket. I am glad to see him. I understand what my brother Tim felt when I arrived. Everyone who comes to share this takes some of the weight off your own heart. "Whatever you do, don't sell the camp," my father says and he looks at each of us directly, to see how well we understand him. He did not say, "Don't sell the family house." *** My father's heart monitor shows irregular jumps all over the screen today. Outside the hospital window, cars move slowly over ice into the parking garage. The world is shadowy in January sleet, a new storm front is on its way. Early morning looks like four o'clock in the afternoon. It has been three days since doctors said my father is definitely dying. My father tells my brothers and me to go home: go back to work, go back to your lives. He is talked out. We have cried, laughed, thanked each other, remembered funny stories, and staunched old pain. We feel complete. None of us moves. My father finds his way down to sleep. My brothers and I walk to the cafeteria. I drink tea from a Styrofoam cup; they gulp bottles of water. Jay buys a box of fries and reluctantly eats them, dipping the limp strips into pools of sweetened ketchup. It is raining hard now, and water runs down the large cafeteria windows. By evening, the temperatures will drop and the roads will freeze. *** I walk with Glynn over thick shards of anchor ice on the shore of Lake Champlain. Strong gusty winds consorting with black churning waves have crashed against ice that formed close to shore and have broken it apart into huge chunks that are lodged askew. It looks as if something from beneath the ice has pushed it up and scattered it recklessly. I have never seen anchor ice beside the lake as thick as it is today. It is crusty enough to get traction and invites us to climb and explore. We clamber to the edge of the banks that have formed where open water and ice meet. Icy spray reaches us. Like explorers in new terrain, Glynn and I walk slowly in subzero wind chill, examining the ice's thickness and its opaque glass veneer full of dizzying cracks and reflections of the burning sky. We are taking a break from my father's dying and have come out to the camp to walk the winter beach and watch the sun go down. Nothing is untouched by scarlet light. It looks like the sky has ignited or as if it could roar. People who have seen the pictures I have from that night assume Glynn stands facing an Alaskan sunset or a riot of northern lights. It is this I love so much, I want to tell my father. It is this gift you have inadvertently given me. There is divinity in this color, this flaming surprise of sky. We grow cold but cannot leave the winter shore and blazing sky until it is nearly dark, and the fiery colors have calmed. Above the Adirondacks on the western horizon, a thin line of ruby light persists. Back in my father's room, we find him asleep. *** The afternoon before my father dies, when we are all simply waiting for something to shift, he wakes and sleeps fitfully. The grey of the day settles in. My father's urine bag has been nearly empty for many hours, evidence that his kidneys are shutting down. Now and again, he will feel his stomach and chest to see if they are expanding from fluid. They are. The heart monitor had been alternating between very low and very high heart rates - 40 beats per minute to 170 beats per minute. Time is what we have. Nothing very thick with promise, much like the grey day. *** Late on Friday night, the nurse is trying to get him to eat something, but he is queasy, without appetite. "How about some ice cream?" she suggests happily. "Okay," my father agrees. "What kind would you like?" "Strawberry," he says and I see in him the child I had never been able to imagine. By the third spoonful out of the Dixie cup, my father grimaces and turns his head away. "That's okay," the nurse says to him. He closes his eyes. I go to the window, cup my hands to the glass, and look out to the night. The glow of orange street lights and a few slow-moving cars in the dark night meet my gaze. *** The IVs will come out at noon and all the drugs that have been keeping him alive will be stopped. From that point on my father's heart will be left to pump itself out, and there will be morphine. His doctor is not sure how long this will take, but he estimates not more than a few hours. My father will slip into a coma. I call my father's family. A small storm is forecast. Back in my father's room, I look out the window and see that the road and sidewalk are white. His family arrives and a silent vigil begins. One of my uncles kneels at the foot of my father's bed, arms draped across the frame, hands meeting in prayer. He stays this way for a long time. At some point, I realize he has fallen asleep, succumbing to the great and deep exhaustion we all feel. I have a dull ache in my head, not technically a headache, just pressure from the tension of the day, of the dying that is happening. I take a walk down the hall, swing my arms, stretch. *** Outside, the snow falls slowly, and is letting up. Occasionally, the snow glistens in wan rays of sunlight. Patches of blue open in the sky. After the IVs are removed, my father looks at everyone for a good long while, nothing much changing on the monitors. Then he asks the cardiologist why he can not feel anything changing. "It's your strong heart taking over," he says. This is a revelation. I had always assumed it was my father's weak heart that led to three heart attacks, open heart surgeries, artery-clearing procedures, and this last two months of gradual weakening, his inability to recover from one last operation. Now, it appears, it is really the strength of his heart that got him this far, that lets him survive beyond sizable odds. Of course. The passion that blazed and raged in him coupled with the heights of great joy he found repeatedly in family gatherings and in work and storms - these had sustained him. The two opposite gifts bequeathed by his family - the unpredictability of a wild angry fire and the warmth of a well-tended hearth - were the legacy of his own French ancestry. They burned in him, as they do in me and in all of us who descend from this clan. It is a wonder that I came to know this truth while he still breathed.   Juliana Borrero (LW), Embodiment and theory (excerpted from Juliana's semester self evaluation) I am expecting that this work will completely reshape my idea of reading and writing. I do not say this lightly. It is sad to see such powerful material as literature used for purposes that oftentimes seem like pure rhetoric, an absolute opposite to the glorious and inexplicable feeling of truth that literature has the power to convey. The following are the principal theoretical disquisitions I came into contact with this semester: LANGUAGE. At the beginning of my third semester, I was excited about the idea that all is language and everything could be read as a text. I was excited about language eroticized to the point where it could speak from the inflection of one´s body. I was excited about poststructuralist discourse, invaded by such words as desire, love, vitality, and voice. I believed a change of attitude toward language could provide a change of perception toward epistemology and ethics. Then a voice whispered: what about non-Language? Not all is Language, you know. And I was invaded by fear. What was my research question really about? What was the core that made my questions about language, subjectivity, ethics, and epistemology come together? My intuition is that language can be eroticized by reconnecting it with images, body, nature, non-language and its way of speaking in a language before words. The knowledge that the relations between words and things were arbitrary and that language could only point to truth momentarily would lead to remembering the sparkling and uncontainable ocean of reality; thus re membering it. Language that is ambiguous and multiple as reality itself. Language that is connected to the body, and to the larger body we inhabit. WOMEN AND LANGUAGE. In the process of trying to solve the question: what is this work in favor of the rescuing of language really about, my advisor whispered the word "mother" into my ear, and I thought, oh, no, I don´t want to go there, I don´t what to go backwards from all my advance to be away from her. But theoretically I knew this was an issue that could not be ignored. Mother language, mother as mutism in psychoanalysis, all of these women writers and theorists adamantly claiming that woman has no language, my self being woman. At the very least I had to come up with an understanding of these ideas, a posture towards them. I thought I had little to say about THE RELATION OF A MOTHER AND A DAUGHTER. As I started writing, I actually came to a block ­ a block of ice if you will - and was paralyzed for several days, out of physical tiredness and fear of not knowing. Then I started to write without knowing, I wrote from memory, from lack of memory and from experience. As I read Rich and Kristevas' essays on mother to clarify my ideas or orient my lack of orientation, I did not understand either what they had to do with me or why mother was so important in their theorizations. I did not believe I was getting anywhere. As I wrote about mother I hit a troubled and aggressive place. I turned into a teenager again, blaming all on (m)other. I was trying to "see her in her complexity, love her through words" as Virginia Woolf proposed, but I kept returning to this place. The word darkness seemed important. Why did I feel my own writing was always feeding from darkness, which my mother was not? I let my writing take me to dark places, which were not at all, as I had thought, disconnected from mother. The idea of vertigo, nausea, split self, feeling like one is outside one´s body, all of these ideas were related. I read Irigaray and Kloepfer - wisely recommended by my advisor - and kept writing. I can finally say I understand how the agressiveness and tension was like a first step that any daughter has to go through in order to become self, independent from (M)OTHER, and how that story was the essential lead to the recognition of (m)other also as independent and separate, complex and valid. For this recognition to be real, a real giving of each self to the other, there had to be a passing through mutism and not knowing, memories forgotten in the body, and thus a rephrasing of language where the tongue is first a part of the body, and second, the code by which a group or people speak and organize themselves. I learned to distinguish key referents such as understanding the interplay between symbolic and semiotic text. My most happy discovery was that yes, although language was not made for woman, language is of great importance to woman not just as code, but as desire. PSYCHOANALYSIS. For a while I had been attracted to the notion that the self is reconstructed through language, and had intuited that the lens of psychoanalysis was pertinent to my work. Knoepfler´s book helped me to understand the tendency of an economy of desire based on loss to objectify the subject, creating a wound. Living in a world marked and decided by the symbolic order, the language of the self inevitably speaks from a wound. I became familiar with the scope and limitations of Freud and Lacans' theories of the subject´s use and construction of language, as well as Kristeva´s ambivalent reconstruction of the mother-daughter relationship and the role of desire in language as a foreground to a female ethics "that does not reduce women to milk and tears". After Kristeva´s dark and at times hermetic discourse, I could see how Irigaray continues this process, pushing the style of her discourse even further in the rephrasing of woman as something different than loss. In this female reconceptualization, the concept of incest with the mother is particlarly appealing as a blind spot of our society, the forbidden space of knowledge and communication that could reconstruct desire, ethics, and language. What does it mean to read and write from the blind spot onwards, what does it mean to use the darkness ­ this place of not knowing - to see? I understood that psychoanalysis is a form of reading (translating) the body that is veiled by language. In this way, I think I finally understood (both theoretically and in my own writing and reading practice) the meaning of dreams and the unconscious in language and the thought processes and artistic products through which we attempt to understand the world. The concept of memory then (and this is developed by Gail Scott) becomes important and profound; in writing as in reading, to use memory is to connect language with the body (unconscious, oneiric, biographical, and even preoedipal). EMBODIMENT. If I can venture a definition: It is rethinking language by rethinking the body, and thus rethinking our relationship with the world in which we are immersed, beyond or before (dualist) conceptual binds. It is reactivating ethics as an eroticism towards the other, rethinking thinking itself. Embodying language as a way of inhabiting it; making language a way of making sense of reality. To think language from the point of view of embodiment is to think the tongue as a part of the body before thinking about it as a system of representation. Coming into contact with women´s literature and essays, and particularly with French theory-oriented feminist writers (Helen Cixous and particularly Gail Scott), I have been able to understand the history and implications of WRITING FROM THE BODY, as well as the important role of Virginia Woolf in this enterprise. Writing from the body is also allowing language to bear the trace of identity. Identity is cultural, economic, linguistic, it is marked by gender. What does it mean, then, to look for one´s voice as woman, as Latin American, as member of a determinate social-political group? What does it mean to write-in-the-feminine, to conceive of the self as a constant subject­in-process, to allow fiction and autobiography as valid thought forms that can feed the space of theory? But psychoanalysis also sheds important light on AUTOBIOGRAPHY, in that it seems to be principally concerned with the story of the subject, particularly the story of becoming independent from mother and father, the drama of becoming self. My first stories were of the fantastic genre. I had been asking myself why at a certain point in my life my writing turned autobiographical. At the end of the semester I came to a suprising revelation, one that is a very tight fusion between my theoretical perspectives on language and embodiment, and the intensity of my present writing practice. I realized that my turn to autobiography responded to the intuition that my language ­ my writing - needed body to support it, and that that body could only be my own body. This is its link with fiction; there is body behind the language of the best fiction. For a while I had been wondering what might be the link between an interest in language and subjectivity in Modern European literature, and the autobiographical genre I did a detailed study of last semester. I was looking for work that had the linguistic inventiveness of modern fiction, but applied to the topic of autobiography: the self. The link, I realized, was in the word subjectivity. How was subjectivity explored in fiction (in the works of Virginia Woolf and Christa Wolf), and how could this exploration enrich autobiography, as the space where the self is analyzed and reconstructed in language? THE NATURAL WORLD can be another form of body or nonlanguage. Its presence, the possiblity of relating to it, the narration of how we do and don´t relate to it. In my context, ecocriticism is not even an alternative in the gamut of literary analysis methods, but slowly I began to comprehend. Nature is like the body behind the text. One of my stories ended up being about nature rather than about subjects, and it was then that I finally understood. The Waves, for example. One of my legitimate questions about such a rare masterpiece was whether this novel was about language or whether it was about something before language. The most developed comment I can make at this moment, is that it is about the relationship between the two. At times, non-language in the form of the world out there supports and strengthens the language experiments of the characters. At times, it sinks like pebbles to the ground and the characters know it. I cannot say whether Woolf is claiming to defend nature, but I can say that the novel is asking how much language can narrate the world. LITERATURE AS WEB Christa Wolf introduced me to this structure in her proposal, in Cassandra, of an ethical poetics. Literature is constructed as web in that it is composed of different strands (and here it comes close to Kristeva and Barthes' definition of text as textile) that acquire new meaning as they come together. This resembles the notion of fragmentation in texts, but there is something more to it that makes it embodied. There is body behind it, the life that is before language and that possibly language will never touch. The image of the web is necessarily a web of life. I remembered this the other day: my undergraduate thesis began with the line the text is a dead body. This was a pedantic line written in order to sound postmodern. I was obsessed with death at the time, but as that which leads to a greater life. Remembering this line, I realized I no longer agree with it. The text is a living body to me. The dead body, as I see it now, is language that does not have body behind it. Literature is seen as a dead body by the kind of criticism that dissects. A variant of the idea of the web is the PALIMPSEST. In relation to this notion Christa Wolf´s Cassandra parallels H.D.´s Helen in Egypt. A palimpsest is a text that is inscribed with different versions of the same story, in the same way that cultures pile myths upon myths. This text, then, has all these different layers whose stories may cancel each other or also give one another added meaning. Living in a piece of the world that is clearly a palimpsest - the Indian, Spanish-colonized, now-assimilated third world - I realize that I first came upon this sort of thinking in contacts with indigenous wise men. Reading and hearing their way of talking and understanding the world, I realized that their thought process was different. I used to imagine it in terms of x-rays, which can be used to see any object to many different depths, all of which are connected; but now I see how the web is a better image: an image in fact often present in their own speech. All things are connected. We all have a place in the reality we share. And this leads to thoughts about ethics. It is also notably a women´s form of thinking and writing, different from the androcentric plot line. Christa Wolf and HD use it as narrative strategy, but it does not only work for fiction, it is also a way of theorizing, of putting thought into words. It is the form of Gail Scott´s essays, where fiction, theory and memory are fused. I would also point out that it is in essence an interdisciplinary method. What it is doing is reminding us that there are no hard boundaries between genres or within topics. DIALOGUE. Bakhtin speaks of the search for the living word, where the act of enunciation does not end in the speaker but rather in the listener. Where the destination of enunciation is the other. Where each word finds its significance not in an original intention but in the other´s reply. To view language in units of completed enunciation rather than units of the sentence, then, opens the important possibility of a dialogical rather than a monological system of knowledge. Understanding this, I can understand one of the big blind spots of academia. It gives me an argument that promotes and enforces the search for a language that allows for a more collective construction of knowledge and values. I came to Bakhtin by chance, because I was asked to review him with my students for a state exam. When we sat down to discuss the assigned text in class, my students were a little shocked at the radicality of this (my) position with respect to the linguistics and the scientific methodologies they had spent their whole career studying. It was perhaps too much for them to think that most of what they had done in college belonged to a monological way of seeing and knowing. I realized that the greatest challenge of being in favor of dialogism or cultural perspectives, or any kind of non-essentialist tendency in any area, is keeping it up, backing it up with the body. Here I was appearing to them possibly as monological (in my dialogical discourse) as their most monological teachers. Or maybe I was trying to open a dialogical space in the classroom, but how prepared were they to take part in it? What role did all of our different bodies play in the dialogical space of the classroom? How long has their desire in language been blocked, so they didn´t even seem to consider it a problem? The great challenge of embodiment studies I think is finding ways to mend the gap between theory and practice, as well as the gap between self and other. Changing ways of knowing that are connected with changed ways of being. Creating discourse that recognizes the black hole of not knowing at its very center, and feeds from this spirit, uses it to see. Accepting the presence of the void is the courtesy of leaving a space for real questions within one´s discourse, making others remember their own questions and participate in the collective re membering of reality (rather than truth). Accepting knowledge as a kind of dialogue, an act of weaving that tunes our ears to the different stories that come from each body, and allows our body to remember its own story, as well as that which is common to all of us, the tissue from which the social body is built.   Sharon Bray (CM-G), Freedom I don't want to boast, but... - George Gibson I don't want to boast, but when the moon shone bright over the hayfields I stripped to my bare nothings, cast my two broad buttocks toward the sky and laughed at the sheer delicious moment of unbridled freedom.   I don't want to boast, but when the two old men in the Dodge pickup leaned their heads out the window and whistled and hooted their lewd comments at me I swung my hips in an exaggerated side to side and politely gave them the finger.   I don't want to boast, but when my neighbor's husband breathed his wine-colored breath in the corner of the library and suggested we retire somewhere, say, private I giggled shyly and ever so deftly elbowed him sharply in his groin.   I don't want to boast, but when I stood stark naked in front of my full length mirror and saw my sagging breasts and cellulite thighs, I murmured softly to anyone who would hear, "Honey, you're a gorgeous specimen of a woman."   Favor Ellis (EE), breath (excerpted from stone unseen, Favor's graduating book project) As a child, I didn't understand longing as a possibility. My mother gave me her understanding of life as an inalterable, irrefutable set of circumstances designed like a lesson plan, an exercise against hope. I didn't long for a family, for specific people, but I did collect my cache of reasons for this absence. I hoarded my inadequacies and mistakes into a deep secrecy. I learned to turn to this depth within myself as an explanation for the silence. This became the foundation of my life. I dream an elaborate dream of a moth-like creature inhabiting a body, which dies. The creature needs to find another body to inhabit. She chooses mine, and I consent. There is to be a ceremony, but at the last moment, I divert her into another woman's torso. It becomes as though I am telling a story, because I say, "And the next morning I made sure to smile at her. She really liked that." Reds and browns and velvet, I smooth this woman's skin, she becomes winged. This morning I saw my dead grandfather facing me across the street. Pale blue fisherman's cap, beige old-man's windbreaker, white sneakers. White skin cold pink. He carried two weighted shopping bags. His shoulders pulled forward, his head heavy toward the ground. He opened the grey graffitied dumpster, disposed of the evidence. He walked slowly, holding himself tight in the middle as though his hips were closing in on him. I willed his hips to snap shut, lock it all inside, in place. Wet of his tongue in my mouth, wave of nausea, hiss in my ears. I willed him to slip on the wet and mossy steps, fall, become bloody, know the sharp crack of breaking. The screen door slams shut, sealing him inside, leaving me alone on my own porch, outside. My vision returns from shades of tunnel-grey to a more familiar depth of shadows and light. At my feet are pots filled with growing things I know. Dahlia. Zinnia. Salvia. Love-Lies-Bleeding. Every night I water these plants from the spigot on the eastern wall, and every morning I thank the night's growth for watching over my sleep. I become aware of an inhalation stuttering through my lungs. My grandfather has been dead for eight years. This man bringing out the garbage is my neighbor's brother-in-law, harmless, arthritic, intact. In the beginning, I was raised to understand the presence of others to be superfluous. I was taught that my mother was my best friend, and I hers. We were each other's sole family and community. The existence of my mother's clan was something I just did not consider. I didn't know words like grandmother, grandfather, aunt, uncle. Father. My mother had sprung from the earth or sea or sky, to be my mother. This is a mythology we both accepted. My mother was a sad, lonely woman. Born neither of the sea nor the sky, she was raised in a family of people with names and histories and secrets, withheld. She left it to me to create and define her new world, to tell the story of the good mother. I was to be her salvation. She is young, pre-teen. Her younger brother is chasing her through the house. She is a distressed damsel. He is a monster. He has a wooden ruler for a tongue. They are running. They are laughing. She slips into a bedroom, slams the door behind her. Still running, still chasing, he crashes into the door, the ruler punctures his throat. Again, the chase. The four children are spinning circles in the attic. My mother's foot breaks through the floor, dangles over the dinner simmering on the stove. Her blood and her shoe ruin the stew. She tears through the house screaming. I don't remember the words she uses. Her hair wild, her bare breasts flopping. Disgusting. She tears through the house after Kimberly of the always dirty feet, always now in my world, always watching, always breathing. They both run, four bare breasts, I cannot find my eyelids. I wish for blindness. She tears through the house, screaming, chasing Kimberly, picking up the two-by-four in the doorway, bare breasts. I cover my eyes. I burrow through the hole in the floor. I am a gopher. I am a mole. I am a snake. The hole is a tunnel is a new world dark and wet and smelling of worms in rain. No seeds here. I will go hungry. No light here. I will go blind. The rumblings of chase, thunderous and electric, a freight train head-on with the eighteen-wheeler filled with chickens. Fear-dropped feathers, blood and dung, the squawkings of doomed women. And reverse and reverse and then disappear. Gone. I am a speck on someone else's wall, a wall built with two-by-fours and shit. I am in a world of dirt and secret spaces, deep and hidden, wild and worm-filled, water level rising, then receding. No air. No breath. No skin no bones no sound. When I was being a child, I made my home in the base of an uprooted oak. Her roots, once deep and wet and thirsty tongues, now stained and wizened, moss-draped fingers sheltering a kiva for a child's most important ceremony. Into her cupped and cradling palms, I burrowed and breathed and slept. Inside her grasp, I was held and hidden, warm and earthy. Inside her, I buried my most precious things. Stones, marbles, sea glass, yarn, colored paper scraps with words written on them. I stuffed my special bits into the creases and crannies formed within the arching, clasping roots. In the moist soil beneath me I dug trenches and graves and gardens. I spoke rites or prayers over each piece. Thank you I'd say, placing the speckled stone next to the yellow yarn, covering them both with the scrap of red paper, the special word secreted with its folds, you will not be lonely. You will have each other. Covering the cairn with leaves and mud, patting the whole of it, humming the little buzzing song in constant play in my throat. He was my age, with dark shaggy hair and skin darker than mine. He was always dusty, dirty, tear- and sweat-stained rivers down his skin. His visits were preceded by a low rhythmic hum, something like the ocean at night, heard through closed windows. Steady, strong, salty. He came to me at night, when I stared at the moving shadows and then at the still shadows that moved by my will. His inherent rhythm became a voice, a deep, rocking sound, moving through me, vibrating me. And there he was. Familiar, always, a reflection of myself, inside. I always had that knowledge, that he was the same as me, but inside instead of outside. By the time I was ten, I began losing consciousness every time he appeared. I collapsed into the street while waiting for the school bus, when he came to me and showed me that he died when jumping off a cliff. Chased, he flew from the dusty red rocks, into an unknowable distance, because death was better than this. I remember my childhood and sometimes wonder that he is all I had. The huge pine in front of the house on Walnut Street. Crawl under the lowest branches to the place of just dirt and needles, canopy of green Christmas above. Haul your little body to that place under the tree when inside becomes too loud. Hold your breath. Hear the bloodrush drown out that silence. Disappear into the dirt floor. Believe you can hold your breath forever and become dead and then you will become not alive and then you will become yourself. Wake in the morning, not dead, not discovered. Alone with the dirt and the needles and the smallest of crawlers and flyers. Asking questions about the absence of a family indicated a depth of dissatisfaction, which I was never supposed to understand. I learned early that we get what we ask for, no more and no less, implying my loneliness was of my own doing. Wanting a family and a father was a betrayal of my mother, who had sacrificed everything for me, including her own history. Instead, I held the same cautious, secret certainty of so many sorrowful children: if they had known about me, they would have come for me. And later: if I were better, smarter, more beautiful I dream of the chase. I must gather my belongings, all that is important, and flee. This process is slow, deliberate. I am not hurried, though the necessity is clear. I leave alone, having loosed the animals and opened the windows. I have what I need. The house, gray and defeated, is behind me. I am not afraid. I enter the field, the forest, the riverbed. That which pursues me is an hour, a day, behind me. I am not afraid. But I cannot stay. I enter this flight with only the knowledge that what will be important will be ready upon my arrival. I learned the language of others when I was three years old. My mother tells me she had made it a point to read to me every day since I was born, and one day I just took the book from her, turned my back, and began reading it, silently, for myself. From my books, I learned about playing and friends and adventures. I learned about girls and boys and toilets and overhead lights. I learned how babies are made, and born into families with mother father sister brother. I learned these words for family. My books taught me distance and dissociation. I learned to disappear. I learned to find safety in the words of someone who has found someone to listen. *** I am four years old, and my mother is pregnant with my sister. She marries a man, gives us his name. I am flower girl at the wedding, surrounded by his family, who are not mine. Black and white photo of me, flowered frilly dress, eyes level with dozens of cotton-poly thighs. I am looking at the camera, clutching wild flowers. I am so sad, so alone. I remember this day like a recurring dream. Another photo, entire wedding party, I am my mother's only family. I am the only child. All the women are looking at me, all the men looking into the camera, but for the one gay brother, who is the only person smiling. He is smiling at me. And when that gay brother died, of that long illness no one would name, I thought this is it. Now I am alone. The story is that after this wedding, I asked my mother if I could call her new husband my Daddy. *** This is how I crept into his family, hungry for anything a family could give me. I am four, I am seven, I am nine. I convince myself he is my father, this is my family. But I am an outsider, the only child. I am held at arm's length, observed like a stray animal who might be infected. I am called daughter, granddaughter, told there is a place for me at the long empty table. Bread and butter. Wine bottle, dark. Ashtrays, the chair is too low, I can't reach the food. I am unseen. But there is a place for me, I am told. The parents of this family did not speak to each other during my life. Not one word. They lived alone together in the house once filled with their six children. Dark paneled wood, locked rooms. Mimi sits in her chair with her embroidery. A sorrowful chain-smoking silence. No one speaks. He watches television in the other room, plate on his knees. No one speaks. Alex Trebek, Pat Sajak, something won, something lost. It's nearly time to go to the club. He leaves, and Mimi puts down her threads, lifts me to her lap, tells me I am good. These are the stories I don't tell. My details are not what people understand. You've heard all those words by now, from voices other than my own. I don't know the smell of old man penis, or the scratch of old man skin, or the sear of child flesh tearing. I cannot give you dates, or times, or patterns of behavior. I can elucidate the nature of distance. The encroaching betrayals of darkness and oxygen. Blindness, suffocation. I can tell you what it's like to simultaneously dread and beg for the passage of time. Ceilings, water stains, spackle patterns, spider webs, streetlights. I can tell you that sometimes it just doesn't matter who is in the room, or across the hall. Anyone can pretend to be asleep. Anyone can pretend to be awake. I try to stay awake until he goes to sleep. If I stay with him in the living room, running my fingers over the pale blue carpet, watching the television into the late late night broadcasts. If I stay awake, over here, under the coffee table, covered in the afghan she crocheted, he will become too tired to come to me. So hot, there is sweat, there is the so tired of flickering television, the thickening of muscles, no water, no movement, just the corner of the eye and the canned laughter. She locks the door behind us. My place is on the cot at the foot of her bed, the portrait of her grandfather looming angry above her head. She checks me surreptitiously as I undress. Spotting the shock of clean white undershirt, she grabs me, whispers what did he do to you? Tears so easy, ready, I don't know, Mimi. I don't know what he did to me. No bruises, no markings, but the shaking begins at the base of my spine, moves into my belly. I become liquid, waves crashing into the pit of me. She holds my chin in her fingers, says you have to stay away from him. Everything that is me leaves me, puddles to the floor, swarms to the thinning air. I am cold, black, silver, gone. In the morning, such a drumming sadness, such pain. No one speaks. Nine years old, they sit me down, tell me this is not your father. He tells me he is my sister's father, tells me my father is nowhere. I had managed to forget this reality, erase the beginnings of my life. In this sudden disclosure of truth, the jig is up. This means he is not my grandfather, she is not my grandmother. The betrayal is not of my family, but of the error of kind strangers taking this stray animal in. I see how easy it is to separate, how easy to turn away, become blind. He says I'll be your father, if you'll let me. I'd rather have no one, I say. But so desperately I want a family. I want grandparents and parents and sisters and brothers and cousins and all the rest. I want holidays and squabbles and secrets that do not tear my world apart. I want my children to know what their world is made of. I want them to know love. Big, beautiful, emotional, no-strings-attached love. Dinners with full bellies and laughter and messes for the dogs to clean up. My mother says: I woke up in the middle of the night and my brother had his hand under my nightgown. That is the story, beginning to end. I dream I am at my mother's house. The house is on stilts, built on a small slope. The land moves toward the elbow of the brook. I see the roots of my secret tree at the turn of a path. A small crawl space where there ought to be a foundation or a basement. In dream and life, both, no foundation for this house. Dream has no walls, dirt ground, not closed with the plywood and black tarp and abandoned spider webs. I'm screaming. Under the house, hanging from beams, there is a bird caught in a net or ropes, spinning rapidly, she's cocooning herself in a web of her own making. The black dog is barking ferociously at the bird. I'm screaming for him to stop. I want to save the bird. I look for rocks under the house to throw at the black dog. I am furious with him, and afraid, but I don't throw any rocks. I am powerless but for my screaming. I am unable to rescue the bird, but I know she's there, under my mother's house, beating her wings. There is a silence within these stories. A surface-skating, darkness, winter, withholding. Every night, within exhaustion and retellings, I am trying to capture the essence of what I was not able to communicate. I stare at walls, doors, ceilings. I sit for long minutes, my thoughts covered in a thickness I manage to keep mostly at bay within my public life and interactions. Through a thick web of pale cotton, wool, smoke. And I am gone. *** Three nights after I was married, I dreamed of a candlelit screened-in porch near the lake. I sat on a chair with a hidden compartment in its arm, into which I was intently secreting away my most special things. The proximity of her family was heavy and dense, yet their nearness was something I craved. I was glad to be there, surrounded. All at once, the lights went out, and with them disappeared my secret holding place, with all my most special things. In my sleep, I woke my partner, yelling, They've stolen the light! They've stolen me! The black sky, white moon. Squint these eyes, there are mouths moving. They speak, respond, echo, locate. Encounter a voice, herself wandering knowing. She bends voicelike, takes this face in her palms, or this hand in hers, whispers a secret belonging to a place. Notice roundness, she says, balanced upon the moon, rolling seedpods in her fingers, she wants to be seen. Move toward circles and spirals and all things round and full and steady. Hold a stone in this palm; feel her sigh of telling against this skin. Know the cycles of river to sea the salts of fish, of bird's belly, the fall of release. Know palm of hand, know now. The hot eggs of snake, intensity of movement within soft shell, know this is what it is to be enraptured, entwined. Name snake and estuary, vein, as parts of self. Know these modes of travel as the most true and sacred of all movements. I struggle to be here. On an airplane, I say this is how it has always been. These seats, these patterns, this air pressure. This is my life. I do not know anything else. Recycled stale air, the pressure buzz in my ears. The sense of hurtling through sky without soreness of muscles or dehydration; this is familiar to me like my dreams. When I was young, I would hold my breath until I turned blue. Deep stretch of my lungs, air still at the top of my throat, I was alive inside my body. Hold it, hold it, lips tingling, chest moving with a heartbeat fully realized. The shifting of muscles moving into my center, an opening, a closing. Suction. The river rush in my ears, underwater, contained. Hold it. Taste of salt in my mouth, unimagined and thick. There is blood inside me, I think, there is blood inside me and bones and meat and worms and water. Run my fingers over my skin, everything is softer, finer, more subtle and sensitive. My body my body my body. Hold it. There is nothing but me, nothing but me and the breath that I choose to keep. I'm cradling a person, small boy, older boy, it's not clear. Somehow he seems to be my son. We are at my mother's house. She is on the couch with us. His head is on my lap, I am stroking his hair and face. It is a good, strong moment. Then it is time to go. The boy lives with my mother, and I will leave him there after my visitation. I'm preparing to leave them, when he asks me to do something I don't want to do. I get angry. I yell that there was tenderness a moment ago, and now there is just this. My mother starts demanding that I do the thing, too. I think she put him up to it. I change the lining in the garbage in the kitchen, all the while railing against feeling so used. I feel like the tenderness was a front and what they really wanted was this. My sister and I used to play a game called "Pretend I'm Dead." I would lie on my back, arms straight at my sides, stiff. I would close my eyes and hold my breath while she would try to bring me to life. She would tickle me, lick me, try to make me laugh. If she felt me breathe, or if I opened my eyes, the game was over. Our roles in this game, and all others, never changed. She was always trying to bring me to life, and I was always resisting. They used to think I was a genius. Ran tests on me, rewarded my high scores with a choice of a gold-spined book, which I had outgrown before I started school, or a milk chocolate bunny left over from Easter, which made me sick to eat. They skipped me past kindergarten, and wanted to move me to second grade. Four and a half years old, shy tiny little girl, I slid into first grade, everyone hoping I would have a better chance of making friends if they were closer to my age. I made brief friendships when I gave away pieces of my chocolate bunnies, but no one wanted the gold-spined baby books. There was a girl in my first grade class named Michelle. She wasn't allowed to sit her desk in rows like the rest of us. The teacher had brought in a cardboard box from a clothes washer and placed Michelle's desk inside. She did her drawings from within the brown corrugated box, with no windows cut out, in the farthest corner, near the racks for jackets and wet shoes. My desk was across the room, where we were arranged alphabetically. Second row, second desk back. Sometimes I could hear her crying, but she never made any other noise. When we rode the bus home after each school day, she would sit in the front seat, by herself, the long bumpy trip, while I sat in the seat opposite. I watched her closely, ready to observe some difference between us that kept her in that box, and me outside. We both kept our hands on our laps, our feet dangled above the floor. We carried the same tin Wonder Woman lunchbox. Her hair was longer than mine, but lighter brown. Her socks bunched up around her ankles, and her favorite sweater was red. Her father was always waiting for her at their corner. They walked away together holding hands. I craned around in my seat, watching them, until they were gone. I walked home by myself, everyday. There were snakes crawling out of the hole in the bathroom floor, the night I woke up vomiting blood. Conscious thought: everything is coming out. We moved that week to a house in the forest, with a sudden new father and sister and new kerosene smell on my skin. No electricity, no toilet, no running water. This is where I would become strong. Twenty years later, my shoulders ache from hauling firewood and buckets of water to the house. My most secret places, my escape routes, learned in this house. The silence of deep winter, snow piled to the windows. I learned the distance born of solitude and cheeks turned. My mother watches the door, cigarette after cigarette, waiting. When he comes home, it is early still, but winter dark. I look up from my book in the corner. Thick blood smell in the room. She stands, grabs the shotgun resting by the front door, I'm done with this. Past the wood stove, past the bathroom with no door. Up the ladder into their room. Gun dangles from her hand into the air, disappears. Beacon. Yeasty blood smell, I hope this is never me. He follows her, quickly, looking to my corner for an explanation. No words, no stories, I have nothing. Snow on his boots, his jacket still buttoned. Bag of groceries in his hand, he does not let go. I am eleven. I hear them, tides of voices, she is crying, is he crying? I am alone downstairs. I begin buttering bread for grilled cheese, her favorite. I spread mustard on the inside, slice onions and orange cheese. I pull the green beans from the freezer. I am not breathing. I am almost gone. I hear is this what you wanted? Look at yourself.   Suzanne Ehst (MM), David Abram on language In The Spell of the Sensuous Abram blends theory and experience well to explore the now-distorted and often undervalued relationship between humans and the natural world. While some of his conclusions that the human disconnect from the earth gives rise to human "sicknesses" such as violence, suicide, and psychological distress seem a bit stretched or oversimplified to me, in general he makes a compelling case for embracing a connectedness that is more in keeping with the knowledge and practices of indigenous cultures. "How has Western civilization come to be so exempt from this sensory reciprocity?" he wonders. "How, that is, have we become so deaf and so blind to the vital existence of other species, and to the animate landscapes they inhabit, that we now so casually bring about their destruction?" Abram made some of the connections I expected him to make-for example, he cited Descartes' separation of mind and body as a stream of thought that allowed this disconnection and the subsequent idealization of the human intellect. However, he also critiqued Galileo and the turn against sensory perception in mathematics and science, which trust instead that which is either theoretical or not perceivable by the unaided senses. "Subatomic quanta are now taken to be more primordial and 'real' than the world we experience with our unaided senses," Abram states. Indeed, such thinking leads to a devaluing of subjective experience and bodily knowledge, and also has the effect of placing "real" knowledge among the select few who have the right training and tools. To counter this trend, Abram turns to phenomenology, or the field that seeks to "describe as closely as possible the way the world makes itself evident to awareness, the way things first arise in our direct, sensorial experience". As an alternative to the idea of "objectivity," Abram, after other phenomenologists like Husserl, suggests we view such attempts to arrive at a common understanding of the world as intersubjectivity. In this view, multiple subjective beings try to come to the most common agreement on "reality," but there is no "objective" observer who stands apart from the scene and attempts to describe that scene with no reference to himself or herself. Similarly, intersubjectivity suggests a relationship similar to Martin Buber's I-Thou; as we act upon the world, we find ourselves acted upon; to touch a tree, is, at the same time, to feel oneself touched by that same tree. Because of the direction of my studies, I was especially taken by the chapter titled "The Flesh of Language." In this chapter, Abram draws heavily on Maurice Merleau-Ponty to suggest that language itself has its roots in pre-verbal perception that is an exchange between objects involving body, gesture, noise, and glance; thus language sprouts from the physical, sensory world and is not some abstract, "bodiless essence that we arbitrarily assign to a physical sound or word and then toss out into the 'external' world". Language cannot be studied apart from the body. Abram and Merleau-Ponty were both drawn to Saussure's "theoretical distinction between la langue-language considered as a system of terminological, syntactic, and semantic rules, and la parole-the concrete act of speech itself". Under this theory Saussure clears the way for the systematic study of certain aspects of language, yet allows the expressive act of speaking itself to remain somewhat enigmatic. In sum, this particular chapter lauds the view of language as emerging from the body as something that could lead us back into relationship with the earth, thus creating greater health for both humans and the surrounding world. Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Random House, 1996.     Larry Greer (EE), Annotation of Tyler Volk's What is death? A scientist looks at the cycle of life Tyler Volk is associate professor of biology at New York University. I had a great adventure reading his book What Is Death? A Scientist Looks at the Cycle of Life. I found this book in a fairly haphazard way and it has proved to be one that has created a great deal of thought. I must admit that I have mostly stayed within the realm of spiritual death and not explored too much of the scientific view of bodily and cell death, but as I try and see death from my clients' eyes, it is valuable for me to ask what is happening in the body. Volk does a great job of opening up for me the concept of death within the biosphere. What I found also parallels the spiritual realm, because even as a scientist, Volk also says that a conversation of death brings us to life. If the study of death does not change one's life or perception of life then why bother? I was also interested in the make-up of the brain and how it affects or functions to create consciousness. Volk asks, "What about this thing called self? Is it just the integration of everything in the brain? Or is the self specialized in the brain?" Volk quotes Bernard Baars, a cognitive scientist, to support his belief about the brain's importance to consciousness. Baars identifies key parts of the brain that function to make consciousness. He says that the reticular formation is located in the brain stem and its function is to make the rest of the brain sensitive and awake. He says that its destruction causes permanent coma. He also talks about the two thalami, egg shaped mini-brains located right above the reticular formation. He explains that the thalamic eggs connect virtually all regions of the brain that involve sensation, motor control, attention, and other aspects of cognition. Volk makes a great argument for the brain being the center of our consciousness because of the inner workings of its parts. He speaks of the dynamic core of the brain, that all parts work in tandem with each other, the parts mentioned being central to all parts of our being. He uses the metaphor of the candle to explain how the dynamic core both changes all the time and yet maintains a certain constancy. The flame flickers in endless variations yet is still located at the wick of the candle. "Consciousness might be seen as the vibrating flame in the brain." Here is the struggle for me. If the brain is the source of the self, then how can we live without it? Volk strongly suggests that in his scientific opinion we cannot possess a soul. When we die and brain activity ceases our consciousnesses also ceases. I hear the evidence and understand academically that it is true, but how do I reconcile this with beliefs in an afterlife? How does our "soul" or "consciousness" live without some container? This is a point of contact between scientific and spiritual thoughts on death and thus life. The message is that if we want nirvana, then we must look for it here. I hear that loud and clear, but are thousands of years of spiritual traditions all about the denial of death and control of the masses? How do we live life to the fullest? Why do we wait until terminal illness to being living? In my work I have often seen that when people receive a diagnoses they began the life long-quest that had been in their someday plans. Quit the job they hated, go on the trip they always dreamed of, ask or give forgiveness. I have also witnessed families in total denial. I have arrived at the doorstep of a new client and his or her family member will meet me at the door and tell me not to tell the patient because he or she does not know they are dying, and then the same patient will tell me not to tell the family because they don't know. Volk speaks of how our fear of death is played out in what he calls terror management. When we at some point recognize our mortality, he says, what we know is in total conflict with what our brain tells us is our greater purpose, to survive and reproduce. "The realization of one's inevitable death conflicts with the functional purpose the brain has to survive. This realization reveals that someday survival will not be possible, no matter what acrobatics are performed, no matter what foods are eaten, no matter what pyramids are built, no matter what chants are intoned, no matter what intensity of mental effort is applied to try and figure out this this fact [??something missing??] perhaps more poignantly than ever, because medical advances often extend life immensely - but not indefinitely." Volk holds that in terror management fears are controlled and overridden by what he calls "immortality projects or cultural worldviews." I believe that afterlife beliefs are the earliest forms of culture or society using religion to overcome death. If we know that we have an afterlife then there is nothing to fear. Volk asks "What came first, culture or the awareness of death?" I would suspect that in some ways culture came first, in relation to survival and reproduction, but human consciousness grew as the larger brain developed and the fact of death was understood. When we say we are afraid of death are we afraid of the unknowing or are we afraid of the dying process itself? It has dawned on me what life might be like if there was no death, for it seems that death makes life safe. Who could face life with horrific diseases that might last hundreds of years? I found fascinating the chapter entitled "Little Deaths, Big Lives," where Volk examines the controlled, programmed deaths of cells within creatures such as trees and humans. It is amazing for me to think that every second one hundred thousand cells die in my body and that at the same time one hundred thousand are being born. Our bodies are a whirlpool of death and birth. "There are many forms of cell suicide, yet the greater, overarching idea is the same: some die for the well-being of the greater whole. Cell death used in the development and daily maintenance of larger organisms did not just happen. It was invented during the course of evolution and maintained in so many organisms because it was functional - for example, in creating cell corpses for the transport of water in plants and deleting tissues between the developing digits of vertebrates. Therefore, the issue for evolution became not whether, but how, to effectuate the mechanics of cell death. The 'how' was a perfect question for the evolutionary process, which tries out mechanisms and incorporates ones that work into the pathways in the molecular dynamics of cells. In functional cell death we find nature clearly speaking a message of 'death, thus life.'" I feel I am at peace with my death though like many in the world I am not thrilled about how it might take place. I do agree that too much thought of an afterlife, especially as it was presented to me in the Southern Baptist tradition, eats up too much of our energy and life. The clarity necessary to navigate through death is cultivated in the midst of this life. I feel we need to investigate what is directly ahead and live fully in the present moment. When we can do this we can trust the ground we walk on and our capacity to stand erect in our self-esteem and make our choices from the heart. Volk sums up with what I found to be a very powerful statement, "How did life originate? No one knows. We do know the origin of biological death. It began with life. But as we have seen, in biology there is much more to death than simple demise. By the diverse frenzy of organisms actively feeding on the living and on the dead, taking in and putting forth wastes, the entire biosphere is amplified: It is more alive by two hundred times. Death is the resource of life." What a wonderful explanation of death from the scientific world! Death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature's ongoing rhythms.     Anna Hawkins (EE), An epistemology, or methodology, of the unconscious I read the introduction to Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook the other day, and it echoes what I now understand is the way to conduct my own education. Any first semester student could get a lot out of reading this introduction; I'll give these lines as an example: "There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag - and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought ." I think this is important for the beginning of a Goddard education; "I need to read this to know that" can come in later and fill in the holes that have emerged. During the application process, or at the beginning of a study plan, it might be better to focus on the question "where do you want to begin?" and, "what does the first stepping stone look like?", rather than, "what does the whole journey look like?" and "where will the journey conclude?" For some people, the whole journey is important because they really want to arrive somewhere in particular, but for others it may be better to just focus on the first step, because in stepping they may either discover where they want to go, or just arrive there by taking very authentic strides. Lessing also implores the student to remember that the truth is not always written down; don't be dependent on the printed page. Students are indoctrinated by an educational system full of assumptions that go unquestioned, she says. Students are urged to look for their own opinions rather than adopting those of the critics or "authorities." The people able to be helpful in advising a student are likely to follow their own instinct when reading. Such a person "is nearly always someone right outside the literary machine, even outside the university system." Lessing declares that what one should really be learning, is how "to follow your own intuitive feeling about what you need". This echoes what I have been learning myself, and really understanding more and more. A final and very important point that Lessing makes in her introduction to The Golden Notebook: "the book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not understood, because that moment of seeing the shape and plan and intention is also the moment when there isn't anything more to be got out of it." This would again place Lessing in the heart of intuitive process, of the unknown. This isn't what we're taught normally. We're taught that structure should be visible, clear, overt. I think Carol Gilligan's book fits into Lessing's description; The Birth of Pleasure doesn't offer its structure for examination, it just keeps tripping gaily from subject to subject along a common thread. Lessing reminds me in her statement that it is okay to rest in formlessness, the unknown, and a certain amount of chaos, because then you are still on fertile ground, the sparks of imagination are still flying and churning, much like what Woolf alluded to when she spoke of the union of masculine and feminine minds. Unconscious Process and the Felt Sense I've been thinking about this new process (new for me) that I'm using in this program. An unconscious epistemology. I've also been thinking about tone and style, and I remembered a book from last semester, John Welwood's Towards a Psychology of Awakening, a mellifluous read. It was deep and grounding and rich. I thought I might just look at it in relation to the other books I analysed for style, but I opened it to a page titled "Toward a New Understanding of Unconscious Process." Hmmm. What I found was that Welwood disagrees with the Jungian tendency to see the unconscious as a realm separate from conscious awareness. It is not some container parallel to conscious experience, full of submerged instincts, drives, repressed memories, and archetypes. Rather, the unconscious is a "holistic mode of organizing experience and responding to reality that operates outside the normal span of focal attention." Welwood bases this definition of unconscious process on the assumption that our basic experience as humans involves interaction. The unconscious "takes account of larger fields of interconnectedness without breaking them into linear, sequential units. What is unconscious, then, are the holistic ways in which the body-mind organism experiences its interconnectedness with reality, prior to the articulations of conscious thought." Welwood's explanation of the "felt sense" helps to show how he sees the unconscious process. He was profoundly affected by his training with Eugene Gendlin, teacher of the psychotherapeutic technique called focusing, which draws one's attention to a felt sense within one's experience. The felt sense is the pre-articulate fabric underneath a person's words and actions. It is responsible for most of the decisions we make. To be able to articulate this non-verbal felt sense, our attention needs to "shift to a more diffuse attention that allows a holistic scanning of experiential intricacy." The focusing method draws heavily on this felt sense, because Gendlin found that most forward changes happened when clients were able to tap into and speak from their felt experience of the moment. The felt sense is often diffused and blurry; it is preconscious. The challenge is to stay with the unknown of this felt sense in order to move authentically from it. Welwood describes psychological inquiry as an unfolding process, which may begin with this felt sense. We tend to talk about our felt sense, instead of speaking directly from it. The unfolding happens when we zig-zag back and forth between our pre-articulate felt sense and our speech. Unfolding in therapy has three main stages: widening into the felt sense of a situation, direct inquiry into this sense, and articulation from various angles until its crux is discovered, thereby relieving the stuckness. Welwood refers to Max Picard's suggestion that speech is powerful and affective when it originates from the large space beyond words; speech that moves "from silence into the word and then back again into the silence and so on, so that the word always comes from the center of silence . Mere verbal noise, on the other hand, moves uninterruptedly along the horizontal line of the sentence . Words that merely come from other words are hard and lonely." Welwood's tone feels quiet, warm, and unusually human and accepting. I think it must be that his connection to this felt sense makes the language seem to have a permeable impact on my consciousness. In fact, while reading his words, I become silent, still, grounded, and physically centered in my heart. Welwood comments on his process: "I started with a diffuse felt sense of what I wanted to say, which I have to keep referring back to along the way. I can't know exactly what I want to say except by letting it unfold word by word . At the end of this chapter I should have discovered the full range of my intent." As I reread the last sentence, I see that I spiral around, relearning this theme, that as I write, I will find out, and I don't need to have a clear idea of what twists and turns the path will contain. This is me learning that there is, in Welwood's terms, a holistic organizing principle that sees and comprehends a larger field than my conscious awareness. This also makes me think of a drawing I saw that was meant to describe the relation of conscious and unconscious knowing. It was a large circle with a tiny "x" in one part of it. The "x" is our conscious awareness, but we actually have access to the rest of the circle, we just don't know it. Becoming connected to one's felt sense is, I think, a critical component of engaging in education in this unconscious exploratory manner. This semester I am experiencing some kind of felt sense that offers a feeling of rightness, or aptness, to what I choose to read next. This is a different way of operating; it contrasts with the linear mind that has a clear path from point A to point B, and which may have a strong reason for doing so. But the felt sense, and unconscious process in general, make it possible for a non-linear path to emerge, one step at a time. Unconscious knowing and fiction I think a deeper understanding of this felt sense was something I was craving, and is what is transfixing, surprising, and shocking me as I read fiction this semester. I am amazed at the depth of emotional knowing that is conveyed in a glance, a gesture, a fidgeting. A character will suddenly have a deep insight into another character's intentions from the slightest detail, or the smallest unconscious yet observed grimace. I feel naïve when reading books like those of Woolf and Lessing. These authors convey emotional depth and perception in such a way that I am made to become aware, and I am made to admit that it is so, it is true what they say; if one is super-conscious and feeling in a situation, and observes acutely, one will understand those small clues which indicate a coming together of people, or of a pulling away. I feel as if I am studying emotional awareness, perspicacity, and am shedding some emotional naivete. Doris Lessing and Anita Brookner both write of characters who feel they are, in some way, naïve. I feel this way as well. I think the naivete comes not from not-knowing, but from a refusal to know the depth of things, a sort of chosen ignorance. Perhaps it comes from a clinging to childishness on some level, to avoid the responsibility that deeply knowing brings. Or perhaps naivete is a natural state that we slowly move out of into awareness. I watched with humor recently how I knew and perceived, but avoided knowing that I knew. My mother, when visiting Maui, had asked about my boyfriend, "what is John's last name?" I said, "Palicki", and she said, "what kind of a name is that?" "Its Polish." Sparks of unsaid questions, doubts - Poland?? Hoping that going closer to Britain would provide reassurance to my parents, I offered, "the other side of his family is Irish with some name like O'Hare." There was a flash of a pause, where my mother's gears of averting possible harm turned, and then she tensely advanced, with just the slightest trace of nastiness, "does he have any bad habits?" Now I knew what she was asking, but I initially went literal, just for a few seconds, before I realized that my first instinct, does he drink like an Irish slob? was what she really was asking! Perhaps I have made a practice of some measure of emotional denseness, at least around my mother, to either annoy her by not getting her point, or to go directly counter to her somewhat paranoic and overtime machine geared to avert future harm. I will play the naïve light-hearted child to her habitual tense seriousness. Actually, on returning to this area of my packet later, I don't think that I am emotionally naïve at all, yet these books provide a kind of a template for understanding and recording all the minute emotional details that surround me. I think books that portray an acute inner emotional awareness help me to become more aware, they help me become faster with this type of understanding. And they introduce me to all kinds of feelings that are out of my typical daily spectrum. I suspect that they will help me in the future with the identification of a particular feeling, if I want to go deeper into understanding of some inner movement. This "emotional template" that these books provide is similar to the "inner dialogue template" that Virginia Woolf so expertly offers. I remember how I left the library just before noon several months back, after I had been reading Mrs. Dalloway for a couple of hours. During my short walk to my car, I became vividly aware, as if in meditation, of the nature and style of my inner chatter, Mrs. Dalloway style. Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook is full of tiny potent moments of taut emotion. I'm in suspense and tense as personal relations play themselves out in her book, and I'm enlightened by her female character's grasp of the rich knowledge of the unsaid. I'm also shocked at the moments of twisted hate, the convulsions of a desire to hurt another, that her characters go through, and which she acknowledges. And Lessing directly refers to what I now understand is the felt sense, when she speaks of the "nostalgia for death", the feeling from which the main character Anna's book is written. This also reminds me of Woolf, in Room of one's own, who talks of novels built of squares, or domed, or like a pagoda; their shape "starts in one the kind of emotion that is appropriate to it." As I mentioned before, Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac certainly had a felt sense to it; I've never before read a book that felt so consistently grey. This book was, I think, the first book where I fully felt an emotional theme like this. I wonder if the use of the felt sense is something that may distinguish female and male writers, or rather writers who are two-gendered, versus writers whose masculine and feminine brains do not inform each other. Lack of a felt sense might be akin to what Virginia Woolf calls lack of "suggestive power," which lets writing be a vital sparkling fire capable of igniting thousands of new sparks nearby. "When a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within," as when she reads a critic on the art of poetry and finds that his comments were intelligent but "his feelings no longer communicated; his mind seemed separated into different chambers, not a sound carried from one to the other."     Carolyn Hauck (LW), A room with no mirror The Buddhas' teachings emphasize that because the object is always unsatisfying to some degree, it is our insistence on its being otherwise that causes suffering. Not that desiring is negative in itself. We can learn to linger in that space between desire and its satisfaction, explore that space a bit more. Mark Epstein It's unbearably hot today. So much so that slowing down is my body's only choice, slowing way down. My body smells kind of good actually. The heat makes it warmer, makes my body want to be a body; be as hot and rhythmic as it is on the inside. I start to move a little, touch my skin a little, just barely so that my finger tips can feel every last little hair on the surface of my skin. My body starts to think about you; touch the tip of you, feeling as though it's skimming over the surface of water. Your flesh is soft and smooth, the lightness of you so near the edge of my skin. I kiss you. And then I begin to find you. I find you in the tangling of limbs, wrap my legs around you and pull you in, hearing your deepest groan. In the movement of your hips I know you're not all talk. You aren't all words, you understand the rhythm you are heard repeating over and over again the sounds you've put to paper, put with ink and slid across the page as though sliding is what you were made to do, into water, over paper, into me. It starts with the rhythm of my body and becomes yours and back to mine up and through yours. Everything is rhythm, is timing. Longing is rhythm, is push then pull, is scream then echo, is question then answer. Desire asks a question and waits for answer. Waits for an answer. Creates space for an answer. I wait for an answer. In the space I have two choices. Two ways of circular motion, one the path of race cars spinning around and around and around, never touching the center, and the other a motion that begins in the center like a ripple that slowly makes its way out across the water. A round, soft movement so slow I can feel that each dip and rise and each small movement is everything, is me, is you. Most of the time I choose race cars. Question after question after question. Why did I say that? Will you come back to me? Do you have the strength? Do I know myself well enough to know you? Questions all day long. Question marks turned upside down and sunk in me like hooks that don't let go. Don't let go! Please don't let me go! I'm hooked! But to what? Your ideal? Your grown man image is a mixture of every school-boy crush. Cory, the blond haired, freckled son of a surfer. Geoff, the tender and sweet best friend who played all of my games. Chad, the slouchy, tough, heavy metal kid. You're all of them. The image of you is. The shiny surface image of you, like a mirror.   "It's like looking in a mirror." I say. "Down to the freckles," you say. "It freaks me out." But you're not here. I can't look into the reflection that astounds me. It's like being in a room with no mirror and the only place I can go is inside. And once in there I find answers to my questions, echoes to my screams, where something deeper resides. How your quivering shoulders were the visible expression of my jittering belly. How you said you've spent your whole life searching others' eyes for what you see so clearly in mine. How almost every touch from you had something in it that held back from me. "This isn't like me." You say. Until the edges of you would slowly begin to soften and your body would begin to shake and I could see you begin to get lost in the sea, not knowing which way is north, which way is south, and you'd look at me like the only thing, the last thing you wanted to do was grab hold of the life perserver you'd shaped in my eyes. Rescue me, don't rescue me. Stab me, don't stab me. Come to me, don't come to me. Somewhere in the middle lie the answers to our screams. And oh how I scream: Why can't YOU SEE what is so clear to ME? Don't you know that the strength you see in me, is you reflected back through me? I keep looking for you there inside and it becomes less about the familiarity and freckles and more like listening for a child who has fallen deep in a well. I hear you. Your longing like the ocean and your laughter like a cry, like a baby reaching for his mother only inches away. It taints the edges of your laughter and makes me want to rush in and hold you every time you begin to smile. One of my first Buddhist teachers, Jack Kornfield, writesabout his early experiences with long-term meditation at a monastery in Thailand. His mind was just filled with lust. He was freaking out about it, but his teacher just told him to note it. Despairing that it would never change, he tried his best to follow his teacher's instructions. And what he found was that, after a long period of time, his lust turned to loneliness, one that he recognized from childhood and that spoke of his feeling of not being good enough, not deserving enough of his parents' love. I think he said something like, "There's something wrong with me, and I will never be loved." Something like that. But his teacher told him to just stay with those feelings, too; just to note them. The point wasn't to recover the childhood pain, it was to go through it. And eventually the lonliness turned into empty space. [] This is one way to unhook ourselves from repetitive, destructive, addictive desire. It lets us go in a new direction-it frees desire up. (Epstein) There's something wrong with me, and I will never be seen. But you've seen me, now I'm hooked. Sometimes you have to sit with things in order for them to reveal themselves and sometimes it's as if you've been struck by lightning. You were lightning. And like all near-death experiences, once over the shock, all I wanted was to love and live and love and live more than ever before. It was all there in front of me. In each explosive flash. The misfit girl who'd felt so alone all her life and now her friend was back at her side. An ally, a partner in misfit crime. You said it yourself, "It was like I'd found another misfit, like the island of misfit toys." When I'd asked, "Why did I feel so right?" So here I am in front of you: the eyes, the freckles, the misfit, the longing. And somehow you manage to turn, and turn and turn. Every time you turn from me I take aim throwing blades. Isn't that what you asked for? Pages upon pages begging for daggers, here I stand ready and you run away. All I have left is to shape you around me like a voice, like an echo. The shape of you rounds me like your songs. Echoing on the verge of a canyon that is long, entrenched and snarled. A huge splitting wound in the desert. Dusty and dry and reeking of carnage and things that you've eaten and spit over the edge. I want to stop every last bone that begins to make its way to your mouth. The juice of it dripping down your chin as if you can't stop devouring everything in sight. Slow down! Slow down, slow down. I can't stop the need for control. The need to hold my hand out in front of you and yell stop! or point my finger and say go! I want to tie you to the tracks, make your life flash before your eyes and then make you tell me what you see. I don't know. I want to say I don't know anymore. You haven't answered me. You haven't called back. I don't hear the sound of you from the edge anymore.   There is something very useful about the capacity for renunciation. I think that renunciation actually deepens desire. That's one of its main purposes. By renouncing clinging, or addiction, we deepen desire. I'm slipping away on the edge of goodbye. I can't hold on any longer. You know that don't you? As though you've slowly been lifting each finger, one by one just as I began to mistake them for hands reaching in to find me. It was you I'd heard first at the bottom of the well. I must have been straining over the edge and fallen in myself. I don't remember the fall and all I know is that I woke and here I am lost, empty and alone, with no shapes to distract me now. I can barely put an image to this place. Usually, underwater, I can see a far-away bright light wavering over the water, spilling down in streams and lighting every reef and fish in front of me, but this time a darkness has come over me. Still and haunting shadows above me, so long like fingers, the way they are before the sun goes down. It's like nowhere I've been before. The only surprise is that I breath underwater - I have to stay it seems. My body is making it so that I can stay here awhile, find a reef to rest with. Find a reef and learn how to make space. Learn how to let longing become me, or me become the longing instead of me longing for you. I stop writing. I'm empty. What if there is nothing there? Like the time I stood in front of you and saw the scared little boy I wanted to love but knew I couldn't save. I felt nothing. I saw empty space. And here I sit and discover the emptiness I feel in my desire for you. My heart has stopped pounding. I can't place an image or a sound to any of it. I feel utterly still, not a ripple. What if deep down I feel nothing for you? I retrace the shape of you. To know you are still alive. To know that I want you. To know that I've thrown the pebble. My fear begins to rise. What if I don't really want you or I am afraid to? I've been so caught in a hook of questions that I don't even know how deep my desire lies. So what if I stayed with the ripple, the center, what if I stayed with the longing to reach for you, but let myself just reach instead. I sit still for a moment and find silence in space. In space I find emptiness and in emptiness I find it all: I want to live like an outlaw live the surfers of the fifties, living for the moment, living on the edge of darkness with Dick Dale's sultry guitar playing in the background as we slink down the alleys of shopping malls, steal shopping carts and push each other into the middle of the night. I want to live like an outlaw and make movies and plays and only go to bed because in the morning I want to do yoga, wake up with the animals and sun-salute the world. I want each breath of moment to be as strong as the next and the next and the next. To take a ferry and weave through the islands under northwest stars. I want to slip away to paradise and eat fruit by the ocean. I want to hide in the trees, sleep in a hammock and swing with the moon. To dress in the slinkiest lingerie and pull it off piece by piece in front of you. I want to live like an outlaw and do everything I'm not supposed to, everything that is living with my heart, living on the edge, living enraptured by the stars. I want dusk to fall over me, slow my motions, make it easier to hear my breath and slowly count the moments until each in and out is heard out loud. This is why I want you, You're the shape of my longing, you're what I find inside.     Layla Holguin-Messner (EE), Balancing South Stand facing the North. Consider that when you are facing the North you are actually standing in the South. The South is the place of strength, protection, faith, and trust. The South is the place of the Self. Consider the strength of faith and protection. Consider that you are standing in a place of faith in the South as you face wisdom in the North. (Wolfe 7) South In shamanic Wicca the direction of South is associated with the element of Fire. Like the hot dry southerly winds and the heating and lighting benefits of southerly-facing windows, the South evokes this hot, dry element. Likewise, the twin flames of will and faith remind us of the energetic quality of fire, and therefore are seen as embodying Fire (capitalized to denote the element). In Wicca we call this 'correspondence' ­ the association of things that seem 'like' one another, things that seem to resonate. As with the martial arts, it is easy when considering the energies of Fire, or the expressions of the medicine of the South, to become caught up its harsher aspects, in its 'teeth' so to speak. I have certainly found that for myself the Fiery qualities of self-protection, strength, will, courage, anger, and self-determination have been the focus of both my understanding of the element of Fire and my approach to the martial arts. Yet the balancing qualities of relationships, trust, innocence, vulnerability, child-self, and faith are also expressions of Fire energy and I am discovering that their integration is essential to my wholeness. Balance we can't achieve this harmony by remaining absolutely still ... we must refresh our balance moment after moment (Cole 98) In my life, I find myself continually learning about balance through the unlearning of dualism. I find that this process of learning often takes the form of embracing paradox. The process itself is paradoxical for me because I have at times rejected the concept of balancing altogether as itself an aspect of dualism. I have seen what is professed as the need for balance as a symptom of the imposition of a false system of division and associative thought on naturally whole nature. An example of this would be the classification of modes of being as 'masculine' or 'feminine' ­ for example the association of passivity with 'the feminine' and activity with 'the masculine', and the attendant idea of balancing in which women are encouraged to 'integrate their inner male' and visa versa. My thought here is that, since I experience and believe the world and each human to be naturally whole, the categories of 'feminine' and 'masculine' do not name something actual, but constitute an ideological fracturing of the world, which the concept of making peace with the inner male or female then attempts to balance out. This is the concept of balance that I have come across in books and teachings and popular thought and that I reject, as I find it to be based on gender-essentialist thinking (female as naturally feminine and male as naturally masculine) and/or on the dualisms of mind vs. body and good vs. evil, none of which reflect my experience of the world. Through experience, however, I have come across an understanding of balance that is entirely different, and which I suspect is closer to the truth on which metaphysical truisms about balance are based. This type of balance can be understood by thinking of a body in balance. My practice of yoga has shown me that the human body can balance in a variety of ways ­ standing on both feet with the feet close together or apart, on one foot, on the toes, on the hands and toes, even on the belly, and in many more ways, perhaps in countless ways. This type of balance is completely personal, specific to the moment, dynamic and constantly being negotiated. This type of balance is not a question of evenly mixing two opposing parts or maintaining a static position half on both sides of a line. This type of balance is the intrinsic balance of the whole, such as the whole body in balance, rather than about any division of two things. This type of balance may take the form, for example, of balancing one's life-work with one's family life and one's need for aloneness, or, as I consider here, it may take the form of the balance within a thing, in this case my expression of the energies of the South. Imbalance I did not need a five-foot radius around me to feel safe when I walked down the street. I created that space psychologically. Nobody got close to me. Everybody was a potential threat. There was no room for error or psychological rest. (Loren 73) I spent much of my first semester at Goddard re-claiming aspects of myself that have been largely denied me as a woman in our culture, mostly Fire aspects ­ the right to boundaries, the right to defend against the violation of those boundaries, the instinct to do so without holding back my physical power, the right to be powerfully angry and to speak out against such violations, the right to not be limited to social definitions of womanhood, the right to agency, to an active body and personality, the right to be protective. In the chaos and personal challenges of the last three months of my life, the experience of which brings to my mind the expression 'trial by fire', though perhaps 'trial by water' would be more appropriate given the presence of high emotions and nightmares, I have discovered that in my passionate pursuit of this active Fiery strength I must remember balance. This means that for me the next step in my personal growth is becoming aware of and letting go the idea that in order to have all of those aspects that I would reclaim, I must reject the equally important rights to be vulnerable, trusting, protected, and in relationship. For it is true that without agency and boundaries and freedom from social definitions it is, as I have recognized from childhood, impossible for me to live a life that I would want to live. This is precisely because my relationships would be destructive to me. At the same time, if, in my determination not to experience the abuse at the hands of loved ones that I saw my mother experience, I operate under the assumption that I must choose between the "teeth" of the South and the "gums" of the South, I will create, as I have almost succeeded in doing, a life of boundaries instead of relationships. I have come to realize that it is not actually worth it to me to fight passionately for a life of self-protection instead of vulnerability, nor is it actually true that these are mutually exclusive. What is actually true is that the beauty of either of these things can only be experienced in the presence of the other. This is the magick of balanced South. In perceiving this fracturing of my Fire my original thought was that my imbalance was a case of over-balanced fire ­ too much of a good thing ­ and could perhaps be balanced by the supposedly softer aspects of Water. Water to douse the fire, so to speak. Returning to my favourite shamanic Wiccan text however, I came across a list of correspondences the significance of which I had apparently missed on my original reading. I found there associated with the South (and the element of Fire) not only strength, courage, will, drive and self-determination, but also relationships, trust, innocence, vulnerability, child-self, and faith (Wolfe xviii). I found there not only those things that I had striven to strengthen but also those that I had pushed away from myself in that very striving. Here was a list that was telling me what I had been needing to put to words as I felt myself unravelling emotionally, the carpet of my identity sliding beneath me: those flames which I had been fanning and those flames which I had being attempting to stamp out were not in conflict, but were in resonance, were all, in fact, essential to a balanced and joyful self and life. To put it another way, I came to the understanding that in my pursuit of the right to self-protection I had forgotten about my right to be protected and in that fracture had repressed my vulnerability and emotion to the extent that, once touched on, it was now overwhelming me. Here was the connection between my amazing sense of personal power and my uncomfortably closed heart ­ the two did not breed one another; I was breeding imbalance through my way of seeing the world. Here was someone telling me something that I had actually thought that I knew: that expressions such as strength and vulnerability, which seem to be contradictory, are in fact expressions of the same energy and must be expressed simultaneously to access the true strength of the South. There is no greater courage, after all, than that required to be truly vulnerable in relationship, and what is the point of protecting my inner child if I never allow myself to be open and playful? Two texts have been instrumental in giving me tools to work through the confusion of this imbalance. The first is Carol Gilligan's The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love, which encouraged me to be aware of where I create for myself in my relationships tragedy instead of pleasure. Gilligan showed me how fantasy images of romance paradoxically lead to tragedy, while relationship leads to pleasure. Additionally, she pointed out that, counter to popular beliefs about human psychological development, individuality and relationship are in fact both natural to humans from birth and develop side by side, an insight that has been crucial to my new understanding of integrated Fire energy. There is a great sense in this book of the return to authentic experience, a theme that is echoed in my second crucial text, B K Loren's The Way of the River: Adventures and Meditations of a Woman Martial Artist. This memoir of Loren's development as a martial artist showed me where my approach to the martial arts in the time I have not been practicing has gotten off track, and that this detour has been largely a response to other women's fears and assertions about the female body. Moreover, I saw how this harsh approach to the martial arts reflected an imbalance in my whole manner of being. Especially illuminating was Loren's third chapter, "Shadows and Light," where she recalled how training with a teacher who emphasised fear had resulted in her temporarily forgetting the "art" (the chi aspects of the martial arts) that her first teacher had taught her. Most importantly, The Way of the River reminded me that chi, or "Qi" as Loren calls it, is the essence of the martial arts and that this life-energy is cultivated through meditation, not fear or weightlifting. These have been two books my reading of which cannot be separated from my life, and together they move me toward balance in both my approach to relationship and my approach to martial arts. The "full mouth," I am reminded, "is more powerful than the [gums] or [teeth] alone" (Loren 10). Balancing Heart Finding and losing and finding again. This is the rhythm of relationship (Gilligan 39) As I have mentioned, my imbalanced Fire became obvious to me as I began to see that my experience of powerful independence and assertion of my right to violence over the past year has been shadowed by a confusing loneliness and closing of my heart. This loneliness had been confusing to me because I was feeling a profound satisfaction with myself as an individual. Because I associated my experience of personal power with my choice to end my partnership of three years I ignored all signs that I was also suffering from, and repressing my emotions about, the loss of relationship in my life. I could not see that in reaching for something that I wanted I had also pushed away something that I wanted, because I subconsciously believed that the twin desires of self-determination and relationship could not co-exist. I also lacked the tools to distinguish between wanting boundaries in relationship and not wanting relationship. I see now that this pattern is based on my internalization of a paradigm in which the energies of the South are fragmented and set up as opposing each other, in which boundaries are seen as incompatible with love, a paradigm I learned from watching my mother in relationships in which she was abused, had no boundaries, and professed her love as the reason. This belief undermines me because it prevents my wholeness ­ a healthy expression must be whole ­ by setting up a battle within my natural totality. In other words, my self strives both for self-determination and relationship, but this belief asserts back to me that these urges are opposing. This leads me to see-saw back and forth between throwing out my boundaries in reaching for relationship and throwing out relationship as I establish my boundaries, most commonly pushing away relationship in my determination not to mimic my mother (making the polar choice to hers within the paradigm of division). I become confused about my identity as the self-statements, "I am a loving person" and "I will protect myself" are thrown back by my mind as incompatible. At the root of this conflict for me, and this has been a conflict that has sent me spiralling into confusion and self-doubt to the extent of not knowing who I am, are two screams at my mother. The first is a roar, "I will not let someone do that to me!" And the second is a whimper, "I am a loving person." Beneath that the desire to take my mother's hand and get her to yell the first, for her to take my hand and assure me of the second. And here it becomes obvious to me that all of my passionate writing last semester about self-defensive violence stemming from self-love (and I believe this) was not so much a scream at my mother and all the women in the world who do not believe it, as a scream at myself, to tell today's self to know what my youngest self knows ­ my natural totality ­ so that I can live my life without having to scream either of those things. It occurs to me that perhaps what my mother really needs from me is neither for me to show her that I can do what she cannot (choose myself over relationship), nor to become confused and full of self-doubt because I ask myself who I am to doubt my mother's way of loving, but to show her that the choice between self and relationship is a false choice. Regardless of whether my actions can matter to my mother in this way or not, there is a gift for our relationship in my knowing that this choice is false, because if I know this then my mother and I are no longer women facing each other across a gulf of opposing priorities so vast it is nearly impossible to bridge. Most importantly, I myself no longer have to sacrifice love because my mother sacrificed herself for love. The love stories are tragic either way; neither is the way to pleasure. Pleasure is what I want. My road out of this confusion and the pattern of choosing independence only to have it accompanied by lonely closing of my heart lies in wholing, in re-educating my embodied mind with "a map" that allows for the integration of my love for myself and my love for others. My understanding of the whole balanced South is this new map, and through it I am able to reject that paradigm of division altogether. With this awareness of my thought patterns that lead to tragedy even in my lesbian relationships I gain knowledge of where and how to choose pleasure instead. This means providing myself with experience of balanced South. This means vigilant practice to begin with. This means practicing making a choice, not between vulnerability and strength, but between a paradigm of division and a paradigm of integration, and choosing integration. This means practicing a balance that is not about mixing opposites but is about being one whole being balanced on my feet and in my heart, not frozen at an ideal point of equilibrium, but on the balls of my feet, ready to shift my weight, to lift one or the other foot, to reach out and connect, to hold up a hand and say no, to reach out and connect again. Balancing Body He had frequently said that the goal of Shao-Lin boxing was to teach a student 'This is my arm, this is my leg. (Loren 36) The process I describe above of observing and re-negotiating my beliefs about being in relationship has been mirrored by a similar process in my approach to the martial arts, particularly through my unravelling of a perceived incompatibility between my interests in martial arts and my enjoyment of dance. Here, as with relationship, I have come to a rejection of duality for a new paradigm of balanced wholeness. Rather than a choice between martial arts and dance I see a choice to live and move in my body without treating it as an appendage with which to attract love or to repel attack. I see that I have subconsciously been associating martial arts with masculine ways of being in the body and dance with feminine ways of being. I remind myself that, rather than rejecting masculinity or femininity, I want to reject both. What's more, I see that I want to practice a martial art that is itself balanced between internal (chi) and external (force) skills. As I have approached relationships, so have I approached life in my body - thinking I had to choose between love and safety, between enjoying my body and defending it ­ so I thought that I had to choose between practicing a martial art and dancing. Here I see my beliefs that because the world is a violent place all the love and joy in it are lies, that to embrace this love and joy ­ as I do when I'm dancing ­ opens me up for violence, that vigilantly blocking people out is the only way to safety, that turning my back on love, as I have begged my mother to do countless times, is the only way to survive as a woman, that because I have seen this violence I am no longer worth sheltering, that the best I can do for myself now is to protect other people who are softer and more innocent than I am. Yet I love to dance, and when I don't I feel it like an ache in my soul, like being in the city too long and missing nature, like missing relationship. As I flee from vulnerability in the hope of protecting myself, closing myself off, my bodied soul calls me back to joy of openness through the call to dance. Once more I become confused. This feeling torn between dance and martial arts has not merely been ideological or based on time constraints, but has been physical. The essence of my quandary was this: when I dance, my body moves fluidly, joyfully, openly. When I focused on self-defence I felt tight, on edge, stiff, closed. Feeling like this, I cannot dance. When I dance, I cannot feel like this. Therefore, when I thought of dancing I felt I would be letting my guard down and putting myself at risk. Of course, any martial artist would be quick to point out that that closed stiffness is the pulling in of fear, the opposite of what martial arts seeks to impart, as well as the opposite of the actual benefits of martial arts practice, and is actually likely to make it as impossible for me to practice the martial arts as it does for me to dance. But I had not been practicing the martial arts. I had been sitting at home formatting arguments against the naturalness of the experience of powerlessness that women have in our culture. I had been getting right up close and personal, in other words, with that belief in our physical powerlessness, that fear. Paradoxically, as I think about it I realize that this closed stiffness is actually congruent with the way I sometimes find myself dancing ­ when I feel myself begin to move only at the hips and with my wrists bent at an angle, when I begin to move with my abdomen held tight to accentuate my image-body, my small waist and curving hips, when I begin to focus more on how I look than on how I feel. When I move like this I find myself out of sync with my body, with the music, with the other dancers. I begin to weave the complicated feminine magick of attracting attention while repelling advances. I cease to dance for myself; I would say that I cease to truly dance. I cease to be in my body. These two congruent stiffness are what I perceive as the essences of masculinity and femininity, femininity being the imposition of softness and weakness and ungroundedness on the body, while masculinity is the imposition of invulnerability and readiness for battle and man-as-an-island on the body. I have tried to impose both on my female body ­ masculinity as the defence against the weakness of femininity. This experience does not lead me to imagine that wholeness and balance can ever be created through the joining of these two ways of being, as they are not two halves of a whole, merely two expressions of the same fracture and forced re-shaping. Certainly my attempt to blend the two has not created for me a balanced, powerful body. Neither is natural to me and both are antithetical to wholeness and balance. Nor is masculinity, Loren reminds me, the essence of the martial arts any more than femininity is the essence of dance. Both martial arts and dance require a whole body. Thus the essence of my physical feminism becomes clear to me: I want to dance. I deserve to dance without worrying about having to defend myself. By rejecting duality I see the truth, and the truth is that if I can dance, I can defend myself, that self-defence (and, for me as a woman, the belief in its efficacy) is the fight for the right to experience what I experience when I am dancing ­ body-sovereignty and the embodiment of a body without fear. Therefore by dancing I am in fact defending myself against a life lived without joy in my body, just as as a woman I need to learn self-defence to know that I can dance. In other words, dance and self-defence are the same thing, and neither of them are about fighting, and yet they are both an epic battle ­ the battle for my body. But the battle can't be won in fear, because fear throws off balance; fear is the enemy of power, it ungrounds. And so safety cannot be achieved through fear. Safety cannot be achieved by pushing life away, only by meeting it. Safety can only be achieved through knowing, beyond any chance of doubt, this is my body. This is my body dancing. This is my body defending. This is my body safe alone. This is my body opened to a lover. This is my body to open to a lover. This is my body, standing centered in the South ­ in myself, in my balance of Fire, in my balance of boundaries and openness. Choosing Chi She shook her head in disbelief. "I'll be damned if that bull could not move me." Another shake of the head, more disbelief. "I pushed a running bull back into his pen. I felt this energy in my belly. Amazing. Qi, or some such hullabaloo. (Loren 149) An interesting by-product of this process of discovery is the answer to a longstanding question of identity for me: how can I be both the warrior and the priestess/healer that I am at the same time, without feeling torn or switching back and forth? Unsurprisingly, by this point, the answer I have found is that those two archetypes are fundamentally the same. Again, this is something that I thought that I knew, that I have asserted before, and yet that I had difficulty experiencing. Through this intensive work for a paradigm of wholeness, however, Loren's reminder that the essence of the martial arts is chi took on a whole new importance to me. Because, of course, the essence of the work of the priestess/healer is also chi. If the martial artist seeks to master her chi, what else does a healer or priestess do? Nothing else, of course. When I remember this, as when I remember that strength and relationship are twin flames of the same Fire, as when I remember that I can dance and defend myself, as when I remember that I can choose a martial art that is internally balanced - when I remember that the South is whole ­ I cease to see myself as a fractured person. I cease to wonder if I am a warrior or a lover, a dancer or someone who can look after myself. I become more able to simply be. Speaking from the South Read historically, the Garden of Eden story records the move into patriarchy ... It is a hierarchy secured by the prohibition against knowing what you know through experience. (Gilligan 205) Gilligan speaks about the struggle of young girls to continue knowing what they know and feeling what they feel, and their resistance to a socially imposed loss of voice that occurs at the time of adolescent initiation into womanhood (23). She follows by describing how this loss of knowing and voice happens for boys at a much earlier age (29). For me the process of writing this paper has been one of knowing what I know and saying what I know, what I knew before I stopped knowing what I knew ­ that the South is inherently whole with me. With this knowing I gain the insight that I do not need to seem in my body or my voice, as I have seen myself doing repeatedly. I do not need to seem to be sexual or to be strong, to be open or to be independent. There is no need to seem to be any of those things, because when I stop seeming I am all of these things.     Amanda St John (EE), she. girl. she. girl. three years old. tattered plaid couch. tv flickers. electric company. the electronic babysitter. she is a handful. everyone says so. talks too much. cries too often. screams too loud. shut your mouth, take your hands out of your pants, why don't you go outside, wait until your father gets home, just go watch tv. she does. she shuts, removes, exiles herself, waits, watches. sentences scroll across the screen. she reads them aloud. her silent bruised (silently bruised) mother gasps. she seems to have done something right. she. girl. four going on five. misses the cutoff date for school by six days. her parents are outraged, she is happy to spend another year reading in crabapple trees and playing in the woods. her mother explains to her that her stutter means that her brain moves too fast for her mouth. her parents tell her that her "imaginary" friend jean-jee is going on vacation. for some reason she never came back. she. girl. young. devours books. library a place of mystery and wonderment. loves books about girls. about stubborn girls. about stubborn girls with no social skills. about stubborn girls with no social skills who are orphans. about magic. about alternate worlds and planes of existence. she. girl. is stubborn. sent to a counseling group for her poor social skills. pretends she is an orphan. builds forts in woods. cultivates her own secret gardens. given to flights of fancy. fantasies more appealing than reality. fantasies harder and harder to distinguish from reality. she. girl. best friends with girl in her counseling group. they scheme. they read. they write notes every day. in elaborate code. they turn the playground into ancient egypt. the statehouse into the scene of a crime. they argue with teachers. they write stories. page after page after page. little girl scrawl so big. pencil on yellow lined paper. find typical narrative structures too limiting. turn to choose-your-own-adventure format. she. girl. third grade. introduced to the writing process. rough draft, revisions, draft, revisions, final draft. that's final. she stops writing. starts getting migraines. starts hearing voices. in bed for days on end. moaning. sure she is going to die. nine is too young to die. isn't it? washes down several aspirin with a swig of rubbing alcohol and presses disposable razors into her arm in naïveté and desperation. (has been a fan of vomiting and terrified of razor blades ever since ) her dad leaves her mom while she is helping her lifelong friends (one of whom is still in possession of the first real live penis she remembers seeing) and next-door neighbors pack up and move to new york. she. girl. fifth grade. first male teacher. still not writing extracurricularly. weekends spent drinking vodka and lemonade and taking pilfered valium. her cousin's boyfriend slips his hands in her underwear under the protective shield of a blanket while they watch mtv. she silently watches tom petty sing about running down a dream and fights nausea. (vaginal penetration causes her to vomit until well into college. she. girl. sixth grade. argumentative and sarcastic as fuck. makes her teacher cry. her teacher asks if she is menstruating. she gets her first c. she. girl. thirteen. mother remarries. they move and she goes to a new school. she stops speaking. she starts menstruating. she. girl. fourteen. lying on bed. like always. migraines and vomit and lethargy, oh my. she gets her first d. she. girl. fifteen. punk rock. riot grrrl. starts reading zines. makes her own. anguish on paper. nobody cares that she doesn't have all the answers. letters start coming. letters sent out. once one is started it is hard to stop. typewriter pounding constantly. fifteen pages of exclamation points and run-on sentences. she is breathless. she. girl. eighteen. college. grown-up. mature activist. no more childish pen pals. academia. first girlfriend. given to fits of panic and rage. her silence exasperates others. she really does not know why she is crying. allergic to everything. doctor does not believe her. prescribed valium. stops venturing outside. reads in bed. heart and motivation soar. she. girl. nineteen. new college. allergies recede in new rural environment. excitedly debates until sun comes up. she and others search for truth. vocal in classroom. first time since sixth grade. one of her end-of-the-semester evaluations calls her a genius. she. girl. twenty. mononucleosis. words begin failing her once again. writes papers on third wave feminism. finds (again) there is, after all, no truth. "resorts" to style of her letters when she was fifteen. no complete sentences. metaphors. no thesis. no ending. uses "i". one of her end-of-the-semester-evaluations calls her work disappointing. she. girl. twenty-one. cysts. migraines return. given to bouts of drunkenness. first boyfriend. lies and listens to others debating until the sun comes up. silent in classrooms. can only give tentative statements in a flustered manner when asked for her opinion. uses "i don't know" in place of periods. cries profusely. only four out of fifteen credits one semester. fills whole journals with whole range of writings-depressed scrawlings, manic exclamations, manifestos, lists of demands, cryptic poetry, stream of consciousness prose, and more. prescribed wellbuturin and lithium. takes the former. forgets how to cry or how to care or fill journals.. stops taking the former. ulcer. (she keeps making herself vomit on a regular basis even after the ulcer has subsided ) she. girl. twenty-two. writes e-mails frequently with her pal in the deep south. gets up and leaves when people start debates. keeps reading this theory she has been reading for semesters now. cixous' first days of the year causes her to weep and shake and run outside in exhilaration. irigaray's discussion of hysterical discourse makes her smile in resigned recognition. contiguities between theory and life more and more apparent. several viral infections. she. girl. twenty-three. her school is closed by roughly the same number of men and women in suits. she moves and must complete her thesis through the mail. she feels more comfortable doing that anyway. the ulcer starts coming back. in a house with two boys. two boys who never stop talking. she does the dishes and the laundry and resorts to yelling and punching on occasion. she reads a zillion books on hysteria. she sees herself in all of them. she is either sullen and hostile, crying and clingy, or hypermanic and childlike at any given moment. her work closet becomes her huddle on the wood floor in the dark and hyperventilate and obsess about how she is once again driving away the people she loves room. she doesn't do much writing. she gets a cold, a stomach bug, and the flu in rapid succession. she. girl. twenty-four. b.a. degree under belt for reasons still not quite known. she doesn't even keep a copy of the final zine. throws herself into a post-undergraduate flurry of doing nothing. days blend. she floats. courts a drug addiction. they have a rocky relationship. finds relief from near-disappearance in the well-ordered expansive stacks of the new york public library. waddles home under the weight of twenty-five volumes. they won't let her take anymore than that at one time. poetry, fiction, cookbooks, history, biology, miscellany-they have it, she wants it. does not get through many of them. the mold in domicile has reduced brain to mush and waking hours to five a day, maximum. reads books about mold and allergies. things crystallize. thesis on invisible emergent conditions develops itself concurrently with the illness inside of her and her housemates. enters graduate school. here we go again. she. girl. twenty-four. weak and bedridden. problems with putting thoughts on paper. problems thinking, save all consuming internal debate about purpose, presence and style. fails her first semester. moves away from the mold and steps back up to the plate. and here we are.   Scott Youmans (CM-G), Afternoon with Julie Teenage sex wasn't possible without a car. Suburbia spread us out and cast us in subdivisions. Then at sixteen, with a car, there was a possibility of interludes not orchestrated by our parents or accompanied by chaperones. *** Through the layer of steam and grease on my glasses, I glimpse Julie smiling at me. She is working the pick-up register, exchanging money for food, and watching me through coke-bottle lenses. I am scouring steel pots and utensils, hoping that the stream of condiment pans will stop. Working at Wendy's between my junior and senior years has given me responsibilities and income. It also gives me a new set of friends and opportunities. Julie is one of them. Tall, with dark shoulder length hair and a luscious figure. I easily fall into distraction. We flirt relentlessly at work. She makes the heat, steam, and odor of fried foods worthwhile. Phone numbers are exchanged. Calls are made. Rides home after closing are given. We hold hands in silence, in a state of chemistry and curiosity. I find a secluded park with a low-hanging tree to shroud my Chevette and we unbuckle our seatbelts. This night is about the kiss. There is so much to learn about kissing, and we clumsily take our time under the drooping elm. I take in the scent and subtle flavor of her mouth. She takes one lip at a time, starting from one corner and gently working her way, testing the tension, the taste, and the feeling along the way. A playful tangle of tongues dances within our mouths. The occasional impact of teeth and giggling recoil lightens the mood. We talk about what we're doing. "That feels good I like that." Our lips are numb from the movement, the friction, and the biting. Glasses on the dashboard reflect the streetlights and passing cars. Windows fogged. I begin to appreciate her subtle spicy flavor. *** One weekday morning, Julie and I arrive together at Tomoka State Park. The park is a swamp north of Ormond Beach. I went camping here in Boy Scouts, and in Cub Scouts we took day trips to visit its sculptures and paths. The pine needles keep the weeds and shrubs at bay, and there are plenty of palmetto bushes spreading exotic green fans to obscure lovers from passing eyes. We crunch our way into the woods and find a tree to work ourselves against. Julie looks down at me through thick glasses and long strands of fine dark hair. She is eighteen, older and taller than I am. Glasses mirror each other on the carpet of dry pine needles. We kiss, and for the first time begin exploring each other with hungry fingers. There is no bucket seat holding us in place, no seatbelt to fumble with. Hands begin on safe spaces: the alluring curves and dips of neck, collar, and shoulder. My fingers fall down her smooth shoulders, over the shirt, to tenderly cup her right breast. It is warm and heavy in my palm, and we look at it, amazed that I am holding her so closely. I unbutton her shirt. There is no bra, and I weigh her cool moon, watching her smile at my tender efforts, my kisses down her chest. Her hands are not as subtle, and while one encourages my head, another finds its way down below. I look into her brown eyes, my right hand tracing the boundary between her flesh and the pink shorts that cling so tightly. I trace the arc of her thigh, just inside and under the cuff. I watch her lips and the expression on her face as my fingers climb under and into her humid foliage. Here, the nectar that I had so often read about rained down on my fingers. I felt dizzy light immersed in the wonderful folds of her body and held in her steady breath. Her kiss is a long pull of passion through my body. My hands return again to her exciting contours, to the small of her damp back, and up her long neck to cradle her head to mine. There is no distance between us. No distance between the tree and me. Kissing, she holds me. She is the first person ever to hold me. I feel wanted in her hand and in her arms. I can feel desire across her body. And in that desire I feel real. Her fingers are smooth on my skin. In her hand, I cannot think of anything except her. I return to her open blouse and nuzzle the smooth discs of her nipples. Her hand pushes my head into her chest, into her breast, and I sink into it, not knowing how hard is too hard, how much is too much. I quickly forget these concerns. We are a tightly wound ball of adolescence. We pant into each other's ears. We have only begun to discover what is possible. *** We hold hands walking back through the dry Florida scrub. We return to a path and make our way back to the car. There is an old man on the path, in long khakis and a long sleeved plaid shirt. I imagine him looking at us and judging us. I wonder what he can read in our flushed faces. Can he can see that we aren't wearing underwear?