I. Meet
And it was honestly because when I read her work, I saw for the first time, the first time I can remember, how theory and idea can bed the word. How a crisp and crystal concept might ride piggyback, yes piggyback like love and anger and redemption, on the back of a lovely letter. And one might see how y is a balcony and n a low round slide. In redemption, we start with awkward climbing and then hit lumps of half-slide, scale against tempters in part reversed, and then prepare to slick fall off the edge into space. Yes, this is perhaps what I saw in her writing, this is what made my head ache and my skin turn red, this is what produced marginalia and dreams. Because burstlike I realized that a story does not capture the story by itself, but: the home clothes the room heats the clothes hold the body contains the juices houses the nutrients feeds the self two ways. Two parts, cells and movement, structure and flight. And the in between, the ligament of stretch between bone and muscle, is a mind, limber and flexing with each reading, at least two theories approaching either side of the page.

In my backpack, wrapped in a plastic baggie—-the kind with green ziptop closer-—a piece of homemade paper, a yellow chewed into pink bits, fragments of blender belching, shredded and falling apart. It takes only one thumbtack puncture, through which dental floss holds a second piece of paper to the first. This second piece is a tiptorn, a torn tip from the lower right-hand side of paper that once existed in a blue three-ring binder. I carried that binder around during the year of shoulder chips lost and never retrieved. On the paper, thin blue lines, furrowed atrophies of academia. And written atop their two-dimensional planes:

“I, the undersigned….”

An adhockery of legalese, did I ever write that way, think that way…?

“do hereby swear…”

Swear to what? Swear to be eternally fickle and changing. Sorry. Swear to love you right now and remain true to the light by which I loved, and not the mode of transfer. Loyalty. Swear to millisecondly realize something new, see it up freshly like a drugged up patdown, strive for everything feasible within the framework of this me, this…

“to renounce the dominant patriarchal de-----c- discourse…”

Oh, little buttercup, oh round and yellow reflection on the buttside of a butter-loving chin. How glowy, how we glow. The darling rampage of excitement…

“and write like Cixous for our upcoming paper…”

And below it: names, names, names. All those who swore to try. When I showed Bill the contract, he told me that only dp and I upheld the contract.

Although I failed miserably. When I look back on that paper, I’m embarrassed, but I’m also fond because it was my first (among the continuing many) attempt to unite thought and form, and I wasn’t sure how, so it’s hugely contrived and transparent as simple sin. I think it wasn’t until Beasley’s class where the idea of “meditation” came my way that I actually started on this path I now strive to walk: fitting ideas over stories like installation art, not just the must of story repetition, the already spoken, but the search for new home, new ways, new loves.

And so, I held this contract, the buttercup moment I passed around the class after I read an author whose words romped around somewhere inside of me.

Sitting next to her, I start the tonguetied moment…

Ani Difranco:
see the little song bird unable to make a sound
even though she follows her words from town to town
we both have gardens of songs and maybe it's okay
that i am speechless because i picked you this bouquet

…simply by noting. Noting is a solid place to begin when talking awks.

Note: something within visitors maintains a distance. I wonder idly how I’d act if I ever had the opportunity to meet a crew of over-eager kids who have come to meet me, drink coffee, eat cookies, for various reasons. I imagine myself as I already am as a teacher: over-energetic and bounce. Prancing. But the two famous artists I have met have both been silent and withdrawn. Something in the process of forming under their skincrusts and I find it like guessing an ocean from blank surface current. A face that is passive, half-lowered lids, no smile, waiting. The internal sigh: what? And of course, there will never be enough time for me to settle, for this heart that thumps when I talk to a simple teacher, to slow and articulate, to mount that confidence, that assertive and well-spoken me, to emerge.

Inside my backpack, I carry the three-year old contract I’ve signed, framed and brought to show her young artists who will go somewhere…

And she begins by dismaying me.

An eager chap in a pinstripe suit asks her who her favorite artists are, and as silly as it is, I imagine her speaking names I should write down out of surprise… but the forerunner of escriture feminine lists the following: Montaigne, Russo, Proust, Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, Beethoven, and ‘even’ Thelonius Monk among others. She does not mention a single female name, not one (although she later mentions Lispector twice, my beloved Lispector), because I keep waiting and noting, noting and waiting, and in the back of my mind: this is the woman who launched the first PhD in women’s studies in France. Not that I find flaw with her list, but…

I was dismayed. Waiting for something more? Something unheard?

And so I took refuge in noting. Her hair close cropped, almost nappy at the roots, lidded dark brown eyes… the lids grooved by wrinkles, not lazy ones—those wrinkles that sag about eyes and cast down her stare—but brillopad rough. Her skin is olive and slightly exotic, something about it speaks of ancestors not French, but Middle Eastern. Algiers is her birthplace, and before listing the canonical litany, she speaks about her maternal family’s side: Jewish women who had long since known the ideas she fixed with words. She sluffs off her earlier work that way: as if her first fist theories weren’t something she invented, nothing that should have been unexpected, but rather something that pre-existed unarticulated from a line of powerful Jewish women scholars and then arrived at the academy. And upon seeing women, scholars, people on the streets, “who didn’t even know they had a body” erupted spoken from Medusa snake lips. Commonsense, my darlings, is the undercurrent of what she is saying, and I wonder if it’s in defense of the essentialist feminism perceived to have lost its function in a society such as ours. She mentions several times that her earlier ideas are “old and outdated” for our current situation. That female place not an issue anymore. That women know they have bodies.

Yes, but they know it because women like Cixous still write. It is not an intuitive process yet, I want to tell her, and saying that it is “an old issue” is forgetting the hundreds of people in America and beyond for whom it is new to have an orgasm, to love themselves, to run fingers across their thigh just for the pleasure of silk. But she claims her early writing for places like Japan, where she says her older ideas are still “new” because Japan is like a Westernized country in the 70s.

I feel something very very quiet in me.

Likewise, I don’t interrupt and tell her what I think, all the bouquets in my head: that the amazing thing about what she used to write, and what she still writes, is not just what she said, although that’s smart too, but the way in which she says. And that, my dear, is not a thing of the past.

Cixous:
Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that I could burst—burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I, too, said nothing, showed nothing; I didn’t open my mouth, I didn’t repaint my half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What’s the meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts? Where is the ebullient, infinite woman who, immersed as she was in her naiveté, kept in the dark about herself, led into self-disdain…hasn’t been ashamed of her strength?

It’s not impossible, and this is what nourishes life—a love that has no commerce with the apprehensive desire that provides against the lack and stultifies the strange; a love that rejoices in the exchange that multiplies.

Laugh of Medusa

I heard another teacher recently say something along the lines of past-abnegation, the denial of the forces that are still so very strong and always impending down. The insinuation that the “personal essay” has more sway in academia nowadays than does the traditional format, and maybe that’s true on high, but why are there so many people who sign contracts like… “I the undersigned,…” who then write like they don’t know how to play an idea into form?

Form/Thought isn’t accepted yet, and people haven’t a clue how to do it. I struggle with it: how to structure word, sentence, live birth, paragraph, page… what I’m thinking / others are thinking? How to build something constructed of the natural and recycled fabrics of memory, tinker toys, imagination, dialogue?

And dare we call Japan like us in the seventies?

Some of this catches up with me when she starts talking about how art/artists are always ahead of their times and that’s what defines art (Great Art, it almost seemed she is saying… am I hearing Jeannette Winterson, Eliot, Kant again?), and then people “catch up” with art and it no longer seems so fresh.

I’m spend some time being glad that I’m in the Time class because I am at least able to form a question that post-lecture will morph: is she placing the concept of art and great art in the arena of linear progression and a modernity constantly struggling to “race after” (she used these words) the brilliant futures created prematurely in the minds of artists? Now I can say: If this is what you are saying, I disagree with you, Cixous. Maybe I'm developing words to put explain what I feel intuitively in reaction to the idea of the fixture of greatness (not in defense of crap, but in defense of the unknown). Here’s what I feel: the concept of Great Art is woghash, and my saying this takes absolutely nothing away from the great and amazed respect, passion, love and hitherto unspoke bouquets I feel for those artists who have fashioned wor(l)ds incredible incredible, including Cixous herself.

I don’t feel that art is “ahead” of its time, but that it is inextricably imbedded, created, in and from time. Art does not exist on the vertical… it does not race ahead and leave everything else behind struggling to catch up. Art mainly exists on the horizontal: each piece, whether bad or good, resides in parallel to a many-life, and what art does is open many-life up to many other lives. Art threshes the field horizontally and vertically. It gives us infinity to perceive the present and infinity perceive the past/future.

One great artwork might help us envision an alternate history. Another might give us today from within an exoskeleton. Another… the creation of histoimagination revealed. Not Great Art, but vast openings. Fields for the frolic. Utopias re/created and distopias re/visited.

What is amazing about art is this capacity to unfasten time, memory, stasis, hatred, confusion. It can close little off. Art can unnarrow our lives, unfix it from a thin band of future, which we will catch up to someday. There is no “aha, but of course this was bound to be perceived as art and theory tomorrow,” but there is one world in which we all step through a threshold or follow the path blazed by others or are pushed over a ledge through openings that happen to coincide—either through initial rupture or contingent connections—with art that has also opened that direction. Therefore Great Art is simply a name for the artwork through which we have, in some form or life or imagining or love, gone.

But this does not make a piece of art just better. Better makes a world full of more simultaneous openings. Better leaves more room for every voice to be a calling.

Cixous tells us that in the meeting that “some people think they are called, but they are not. This is the way it unfortunately works. I have a son who is a great mathematician, and I look at him sometimes like an odd species. He has been called by the language of mathematics, and I would be mistaken to believe I was called in the same way. Sometimes you take on the voice, but that does not mean you’ve been called.”

And I think… called where? Called by whom? Called by which? Is there not a language for us all? If language is therapy, like she also says, then why would some have access to the analysis and not others? If the first thing to give the homeless, the downtrodden, the starving on the street is a paper and pencil, as she also says, then who is to say that the path inscribed on that paper, the smallest squiggle, is not a great opening to a world we cannot travel to?

Cixous, Cixous, mon petite Jew, do I misunderstand you?

I retreat dismayed, my flowers hidden in misunderstanding, in confusion. Buttercups, a field for you.

I keep note: a thin body, sharp and angled like sparrow crossed with raptor. A nose horizontal that suddenly crashes down into thin lips over teeth, incisors slightly jutting. She wears multitudes of fabrics, draperies, gold twined through with green and brown, lacy undershirt that dazzles and a tweedlike coat like a scholar judge. Around her neck, a brown scarf and above her eyes, two plucked and drawn lines mirroring the eyeliner she marks out beyond her lids – two extra slants of paint reaching, too precise for garish, too prominent for average.

I keep note: a thin body, a small space of bandy leg jutting out of brown fabricked pants. A white space of leg with a singular small freckle on the right calf. She drinks something, tea perhaps, keeps the cup in her left hand and uses the right for intellectual aeronautics. A napkin poised on the lap that miraculously forms. At times she leans forward, her face cast downwards, slipping to a floor plane we’re not sitting on, and I sense a grief welling up in her. She mentions Derrida, a beloved, and her voice descends and falls. A pure articulation of loss.

She fills in pauses within sentences, gaps between ledges, with a softly slide ecetera, ecetera. Only ever two, they rush like breath between closing teeth. ecetera, ecetera.

I think there is the instinct to believe that philosophies must be clear, unilateral, and without internal opposition. This is clearly not true of Cixous. As I argue with her in my head, and yet accept that maybe there isn’t enough time, because some of what she says is cliché…

“The world is a school. Everything is a school, if you use it right.”

And some is intriguing, perhaps more so because only a clifftip an awkward ten-person “meet & greet” can only find the time to walk off but not rappel. And shit, here I am sitting right next to the women, and all I can do is chuckle irritatingly when she says that art is “half-science, half-sport,” but I can’t speak the reason I’m chuckling: because both races and science follow such rigid rules for such defined purposes, and I never thought of art as either…nor did I ever see her art this way. Rules bound within, true, the rules of word always to be bent outward, but the goal: a ribbon to slice across? But this I don’t say, and I don’t ask questions, and I don’t give her the gift of the buttercup-contract, because I suddenly am not sure if she would feel the same gentle and tender humor I feel when I see it. I don’t know if she would laugh sweetly about all the contradictions and contractions within such a small scrap of promisepaper.

I start to think that maybe it’s me who perceives that particular paper as a world once existing, and always existing, always, virtual and hopeful. As long as someone has this idea pinned to a corkboard, as long as someone believes, as I do, that great great things will come from the names on a most innocent of classroom balderdash.

And towards the very end of our conversation—the long conversation within which I drift off into my head because I feel no access to words, and thus have to maneuver conversations within—a teacher asks Cixous for some “strategy”: how might one survive the current state of academia as a thinker and theorist.

And my heart sinks with the question (because I what I want to ask her, but never do, because of speechless speechless: how does she work theory and story together? By what processes does she think on the page? Or off? Does she intuitively grasp something in her writing and understand it later, or does she form a soft-shell of idea over which she slides a tale? Does she every feel the large leap between brain and heart, between intellect and expression, or did her form/thought always fit together so well?), and my heart hums with her answer:

“Well, to start, it should never be about survival. That is a given. You will survive, but you can survive anywhere.

But then it could be forcing yourself to it, getting through the situation, in which case maybe you should be doing something else. Because you shouldn’t have to brutalize yourself.

But then—if you are asking about how to thrive, how to make it well: the answer is friends. It is simple, but the friends is important, you form a group or a partnership, and you…”

And in her answer (which I’m sure I’ve bastardized) is the idea of connection and excitement, of joy and contract, of the meeting of languages and exchange of loyalties… and I love her for it. I love her simply // strongly for the theory we share: friendship is the way to move past survival, past making yourself do it, and into the rush, the gift, the transference of betterthanwe-thoughts…

I realize now that another time, another place, I would give this woman a gift, but that it would be more than an contract that means so much to me. It would take work to give to this woman, and I am sad, because a grief wraps over her and I would like to think it simple really—-a smile, my hand, some wiggling words dashed like dots across a page—-but I don’t think it is this time, I just don’t feel it is. The contract is a virtual I take part in, because they are names I hold, and the idea is bigger here not there… but if I could give that motion to her, I would.

II. Lecture
Cixous, Cixous, mon petite Jew. She is so brilliant and dazzling, a perambulatory teller of spiral. She has no thesis, no starting point exactly. She does not go to the podium, but begins with sweet and simple thanks, bending over the table and leaning on a pile of papers she has wrapped in a home-made cloth and tied to be untied, to be spoken and read.

She starts gentle voiced, there are few peaks and few freefalls, but slight emphasis sometimes appear surprisingly. It is hard to follow her, hard to understand where she will go. She gives a lecture on cities and homes and the words that form our consciousness of homes. She talks about leave-taking and death, the mourning for all that falls away, the mourning for the fact that we can never know the thing, we can only ever know that which is translated.

Something Mark Doty wrote in Writer’s Chronicle: “Why did I experience my book as betrayal? The lives of other people are unknowable. Period. I wouldn’t go as far as a poet colleague of mine who says that “representation is murder,” but I would acknowledge that to represent is to maim” (17).

Something Cixous said: Everything is translation. The only thing that is not translation is death, which is the death of translation. But we have no choice not to translate, there is nothing else.

But she also called translation “translaying” as if both she and Doty see the reading of the other as a potential act of violence, with the only other option—death.

And Cixous plays with words all over the place, writes them up on the board and rearranges letters so as to excavate cities from within city names because “every city” she has lived in “has three names. Is three cities.” And she talks about the way we translate place and the place is the body and the place is a land. The city is something to both fear and love.

[Not Actually Finished]