This is a piece on, hmnn, security, but it's poetic, so what I consider "the glue," connective images running through the whole book; She added salt... and On the edge of I think of "as bones."
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Is feeling safe in your domain security? Protecting your assets, information, property, who you are? She is without domain. Skinless, visceral wandering. Every abode temporary, a borrowed shell.
Without firewall, dam, divider, enclosure, screen, buffer, barricade. Nowhere to hide. The parchments of her words peeled back, shorn of the sheaths of a fragmented grammatology.
Exfoliate. She is peeled, pared, scraped, sloughed. Shorn of her home, its belongings, the collection of a lifetime.
To bruise, cut or injure the skin of.
The petals of the rose, like dried fragments of blood she carries with her.
Living life in uncertainty; in reality, not philosophically. On edges, where nothingness is, a fall into the irredeemable. Shouldn't the irredeemable be a footnote, the never-realized fear, the 'what happens to other people,' never oneself?
Bleeding, a release of. Sloughing. Shedding the impotency of harm.
A woman without armour, a shell, accoutrements, can disappear quickly.
The weight of things so very important.
Your story speaks to me so deeply just now. I can't tell you. Well, perhaps I will some time.
ReplyDeleteHow much people comment is very random, you know. Often it's the things that move me most that I read and then say nothing - perhaps it's not easy to formulate and I don't have time, so I wonder off and end up not coming back. I would take and use the feedback you do get, but not draw conclusions from the times when you don't. (is that what I do? well, no of course not. It's always easier to tell someone else )
I wonder what this would be like if you eliminated the three questions? Letting things speak for themselves a bit. Just a thought. Might not work. But it might.
ReplyDeleteHi Jean, yes, I understand and agree. I spent a year at Xanga, though, which is a 'comment community,' which wasn't often very helpful either- most people seemed to read not the post but the comments & leave a comment on the post based on the comments, and I was spending hours closely reading posts and leaving often lengthy comments. So I find blogger a bit of a relief at this point. It was just that one post, and only because I was worried about how the piece read, but I see Richard has left some suggestions that will help me revise it.
ReplyDeleteMB, I know you were busy that day, and you are a fabulous commenter, and I feel we have a great dialogue going between our sites, so please don't feel that I expected anything more than you were able to do.
It's just sometimes, you know, does this fall flat on its face, as one goes through the process of wondering about submitting a proposal in to present it. Yadda, yadda.
So, thank you.
ARM's audience will be academics who are middle to upper middle class, mostly North American, though some from Australia, and I can almost guarantee there will be no-one who's had an experience of poverty or is from the Third World. I don't want to overdo anything- but I do care passionately about those probable 70% of women in developing countries who are mothers, and who are generally forgotten in the feminist theory controversies...
And I will certainly try what you suggest here, MB. This piece echoes the more poetic sections running through the book, and it relies on other image clusters that have been develped, though I hope it also stands on its own. If I take the questions out... more suggestive is definitely better.