She once said to a friend that if she came for him, it would be as if I had made a loop around a circular plot of land into which no one had made a step. No one is capable of advancing into the wilderness of that thing around which we are all commuting without knowing where it will end. Some may stand still at the border, and watch over the imagined center of that wilderness, but never will anyone even think to step over the fence.
“For those who do consider the consequences of advancing in the direction of the center,” she said, “there will come an awareness that the enormous size of the circle renders the curvature of the perimeter inaudible. I mean, imperceptible. But does it matter if we refer to this as invisible?” For we have been told by our masters and mentors that the straight path encloses a circle, and that anyone who ventures towards the center might end up hardly removed from the border. We have been “told."
She invented this conceit while lying sideways on the smoky Texas sheepskin, incorrigibly aroused at the thought of narrating something of this sort to the immovable friend, who had at that point become associated with a certain dry heat and leonine softness.
“Life would be replaced by a ceaseless striving to enter the center of that circle.”
“If one even thought to enter it, she would start to see that any work she had produced in her lifetime could not approach the perfection of the body as it is programmed: the thigh pressed by gravity into the other.” But it was the difficulty of that ascent, of that approach, which had begun to intensify her perceptions of what she had seen and done and remembered and read; and as the sun flickered over the sheepskin, obstructed in sections by the anthurium leaves by the opposite windowsill, she saw that her voice had split in two: one vatic, as if it had come not from herself, and the other merely propositional, mere stuff captured in a photograph.
“I believe I am preparing for my funeral rites,” she wrote; “I am learning to listen carefully when they wash and dress and wrap and incinerate me. I believe that if the corpse tries its best to be silent, it will be easier for it to learn to speak later.” I would like to find a way to nap with half-open lids, with a blank gaze that indicate an absence of dreams. It is a good idea to learn to be dead, to practice this heavy silence, far in advance of the expected date.
She was glad to have recognized the importance of this project from someone, and not to have discovered it herself; this made the notion more like the rough smoke-flavored pile of the fifth sheepskin than the oleaginous shimmer of the fourth one. Perhaps when the sun comes out tomorrow I will take a series of pictures of these, proper pictures, the kind that contributes to the accursed share, that doesn’t stop at the production of a pretty likeness of the real. I collect not the fleece of ovines, but their “hides”—I am a “collector.” Scum of the earth, or primeval, I take what I don’t need, and I don’t save what I might need, and I allow the noise of excess to distract me, I allow myself to weave something.
“I am unaware of the fact that I have fainted,” she wrote.
On the sheepskin she thought about all the things she couldn’t write. It was a matter of knowing that she was not able to write “like” so-and-so; it was a matter of style, of not having the practiced familiarity that another writer had with their Umwelt, which included the words that constituted it even before she had come into her own individual mode of writing. You only knew what you recognized as worthwhile, and what you recognized as not, but you did not know how to come into your own separate mode of writing and of being, she thought; it was making her woozy to consider her twinned appreciation of the novel beside her head and her deep jealousy of its author. “Someone said that what you did was recognizable, different, and that it made him feel something different from what he felt with different writers. You believed him, but it intensified the problem. Was it possible to see what someone else saw? No, never.” Such a scenario came into her head as she remained without the will or faith to stand up. At least, she thought, it might be possible to teach a baby the difference between right and wrong, and then that baby might grow up to produce something that might be considered an “exemplar” of a certain kind of writing. Indeed, you would manage to teach the baby well if and only if you recognized the importance of categories, of genre difference, of the market, and taught the baby to see and manipulate such categories.
“I,” “You,” or “She”: would she make a decision between “I,” “You,” or “She”?
Anything for the “infinite lightheartedness and confidence
felt by someone raised altogether above his own inner contradiction
and not bitter or miserable in it at all; this is the bliss and ease
of a man who, being sure of himself, can bear the frustrations of
his aims and achievements,” said Gillian Rose, translating Hegel.
Whatever a woman said about the act of writing, the act of writing as a woman, the act of reading another woman’s writing, there was no sense of where writing as a woman would lead, whether it would even lead to a kind of writing that was recognizably woman. For to recognize a woman’s writing as a woman’s writing was to say that it had some sort of value at least as an exemplar of what one was, and you knew it was possible to be far less than an exemplar of something, the way there’s supposedly good infinity and bad infinity, and other forms of infinity if you ask a practitioner of math instead of a theorist of psychoanalysis. What made a human more human than the rest? No way to know except through laughter.
The book critic was wrong, she thought, to have considered writing in fragments hysterical, and therefore bad, but she was right to point out that the fragment might cover over other problems. MN, JO were no good, or at least possible to ignore or forget, but it wasn’t because of the form of the fragment. Perhaps what she needed was for books to hold truths or insights of the kind that philosophers seem to arrive at only after passing through a gauntlet of dialogic pressure; this is why the best novelists of the generation tended to have some training in athletic, aggressive high-school debate, and if not this, they were equivalently athletic in their reading practices, in their command or their unconscious absorption of whatever they had read as youths. And, moreover, they were good readers of themselves, or did a good job of giving the editorial work onto someone else who happened to possess a genius of their own. The sleeper on the sheepskin was not a good reader of herself, she recognized, scrolling through what she had written months before. It was the sort of practice, she figured, that she might have instituted a long time ago, and come to repeat.
At some point in I Love Dick Chris starts to address Dick as “DD.”
She told me that I Love Dick was an example of a book which she found worthwhile even though it bored her often. I am not ‘riveted’ by the writing but I laughed several times and that was enough for me to know that it would matter. There’s one joke at least that I can keep, and when I told it to my analyst, his laughter outlasted mine: “We’ve been treating Dick like a dumb cunt. Why should he like it? By not calling he’s playing right into his role.” She was happy, she told me, to have made him laugh so hard, but it was slightly embarrassing that his laughter could outlast hers, so she was compelled to make an even more embarrassing compensatory comment: “yeah, that was a very good joke."
After finishing the book, she had retrieved a quote from Elif Batuman which seemed relevant to her boredom; it involved a criticism of the notion of écriture feminine. It proceeds as follows: “‘A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending: there’s no closure, it doesn’t stop, and it’s this that very often makes the feminine text difficult to read,’ wrote Hélène Cixous, in a sentence that could definitely have been shorter. I didn’t get it: why did we have to write stuff that was hard to read and didn’t have an ending, just because men were wrong?” Batuman might be accused of tending towards her own, girlish dispersal, but her novels weren’t easy to put down. I can’t say I found the dispersal of the travelogue at the ends of either of her novels excessive, she told me. Nevertheless I was interested in the question of whether or not this stance on Cixous was one she felt she had maintained over the years, or if recalling the encounter many years later had somehow changed the way she experienced it.
After that conversation, I found a longer quotation from “The Laugh of the Medusa,” and decided that I would send it to her as an example of what Batuman was criticizing; it seemed important to at least deal with the primary text before dismissing it. But the passage also seemed far longer than necessary, and sort of boring, such that I couldn’t read it closely without losing something; instead I decided to transcribe only the first three or so words of each sentence:
This doesn’t mean… Though masculine sexuality… Her libido is cosmic,… Her writing can only keep going,… She alone dares and wishes… She lets the other language speak—… To life she refuses nothing. … Her language does not contain, it carries;… When id is ambiguously uttered… I am spacious, singing flesh…
Then I compared this to a few sentences from another woman writer:
“I never found philosophy abstract or abstruse. The dramatic unfolding of both of these works, the one, a dialogue, in which the assent of the partner is continuously wooed, the other addressed to the perplexed, solitary soul, were anagogic: invitations to undertake singular journeys, which deepened and did not seek to placate the burgeoning sadness of the teenage soul. Perplexed, aporetic, not dogmatic, they indicated the difficulty of the way, and the routes to be essayed. I never discovered in them any euporia, any easy way or solution, any monologic, imperialist metaphysics. Philosophy intimated the wager of wisdom—as collective endeavour and as solitary predicament. It redeemed the earnest stupidity of my schooling.” (Gillian Rose)
What was so awful about the positioning of the third-person pronoun in the Cixous? Didi agreed that it had something to do with the lack of a comic element, but beyond this she couldn’t say much. Rose doesn’t strike one as comical from that passage alone, but there is something in the phrase “burgeoning sadness of the teenage soul,” and in the almost giddy speed at which she moves from the aporetic to the dogmatic to euporia, monologic imperialist metaphysics, etc., which reveals the skeleton of a comic’s sensibilities…
She had decided to replace the sheepskin upon which she slept with a second one, as this might lead to a worthwhile modification of her waking routines. It would no longer be necessary to move the object she slept on to the chair at her desk in order to begin work, just as it would no longer be necessary to move the sheepskin from the chair to the floor in order to sleep. Determined that she would choose and acquire a second sheepskin, she went online, and ended up with two more, a small Albanian one with brown spots and silky fur, which ended up sometimes on the floor, and an off-white British one, which she slept on every day for more than a year. Two years after the first decision had been made, she came to make a decision of a similar kind. The first sheepskin she had ever acquired, a grey long-haired hide from the local store, had become worn in the middle, after being sat on and brushed for three years, so she no longer wished to sit on it and put it under her desk. The second remained “useless,” and the third sheepskin continued to serve its purpose, but now needed to be moved back and forth every time she slept. She wondered if she might acquire something with more excessive, luxuriant hair to sleep on; something which would be even more appealing to the senses, or at least more extreme, than the others. The fourth sheepskin was accordingly a Gotland, with long silver curls, almost blond at the borders. But since she had found it online, she did not get a chance to touch it and to realize that its long hair was attached to a thin hide, and that the fleece did not have the pile or density necessary to provide comfort to limbs on a wooden chair or on the floor.
After a long silence at the end of a session of analysis, she made mention of the mistake. Immediately afterwards she went to the local sheepskin store, having resolved to get rid of the fourth sheepskin by selling it. She was, as she had to admit, in the market for a fifth now, and to her surprise, the local store had in stock a new selection of sheepskins which were perfect for her purposes: dense, long, variegated, and without the kind of long hairs which might get matted and tangled over time. The skins are from Texas, though the breed itself is from Wisconsin, the owner said. He complimented her shoes, the ones with a snakeskin pattern on woven leather. After laying out ten or so sheepskins on the floor, narrowing it down to three, leaving for several meetings with students in ger poetry class, and coming back, she tried once more to make a decision. The contenders had been quite distinct; two were near complements of one another: a bright silver fleece with black tips, and a charcoal one with a darker strip of black down its back. The other three were more variegated and more earth-toned, with a mix of cream and brown and darkish tips. The one she ultimately chose had seemed a bit plain at first, since it was lacking in contrast, but its tawny hue was unique among the three, and struck her as a color she would not have chosen at first. Of course, she reasoned, I chose it in part because of the density of its pile, which was not more dense than the others, but not less dense than the median. Perhaps I chose it because it was indistinct, at least to my reasoning: neither the highest in contrast nor the most extreme in texture, its presence in my home could remain resistant to sense.
That evening, she took a break from her regular endeavors and wrote the following: I don’t have anything much to say about sheepskins except for the anxiety they make. Knowing that I don’t have a need for more than several, knowing that so long as I remain aware of the presence of sheepskins, I will continue to come across other sheepskins out there which might surprise me for their color and texture, and thereby induce no insignificant desire to acquire more, I have no sense of the limits to my relationship with this particular object. Unlike a live animal, or plant a sheepskin cannot grow, and unlike a garment, it cannot be associated with certain outward movements and experiences on the part of the user. It has no personality to make up for its static form, and therefore it will provoke in me the recognition of its lack, eventually, especially as a particular exemplar degrades due to the friction of my body. That asymmetry between my desire for an object of purely domestic, private use, and its lack of capacity to be modified in its psychic form or significance, was the precise shape of the cut that split my young life in two, or so it seems to me in retrospect.
I had suffered an exile from whatever it was that made me like this, and now I was back: I had fixed my coordinates around this center, around which I would perambulate but into which I would never penetrate, having replaced the act of penetration (of a concept, of an entity) with the act of feeling the ridges that formed on the inner side of my lower body.
My sense was that you were a beam of light that had remained there, and all I had to do was allow my brain to traverse a certain lace fringe of connections; then I felt like a beam of light had spitroasted me into a pig who was now so serenely caught up in the question of what her relationship was to literary ambition; would she accomplish anything significant enough to warrant a sense that she was indeed attached to the ground with four evil cloven feet?
The stillness of the time—in my heart and soul, in the slow way I got up in the morning, aware of the notion that I might be rolling a stone up a hill—meant that I wanted to throw it at somebody, not the stone but my body, unless those were the same, that I wanted to throw my soft and awful gloomish limbs at a thing I might come to. I wanted it to be simple and stupid, the thing I wanted to do. I wanted to honor what was simple and stupid in what I wanted out of the thing that wasn’t stone, which wasn’t what I had come to know so much.
I went home and my soul flew out. I couldn’t catch it, so I began to write.