1 - From BOD (Book of the Dead), for Halloween...

For Halloween, some pages from my NaNoWriMo novel last year, "The Book of the Dead," and I did post this section last year, and will add 3 more sections of this story over the next couple of days...

Her fingers and toes began to grow warm, tingling, even as they were freezing. She is losing feeling in them. She cannot move her toes, nor her fingers. They do not feel like they are part of her. Her legs feel numb. She tries to roll, and cannot move. Her cheeks, exposed, are like stone slabs, weighted and heavy on her face, etched with ice, and then she no longer feels her cheeks or nose or chin or eyes. She can't open her eyes. They are encrusted. It feels as if her scalp has been pulled off her head, a terrifying feeling, and then nothing. Her skin feels like a shell, an exoskeleton, but soon she can't feel the ice her body is ensheathed in anymore. She is still breathing, slowly, painfully. Breathing is laboured, like a huge weight is pushing down on her chest, and she coughs and tastes blood against her tongue. The warmth inside her is dissipating. It is like the oven inside is turned off. She knows she is freezing to death and no longer cares. It is quiet, peaceful, her mind slowing, becoming numb, thought processes barely flickering across a withdrawing consciousness. It is empty and alone, this final passage. She can no more will herself out of it than she could will herself not to be born once labour had begun. In the last moments of her life, she utters through frozen lips, 'I am ready...look after my loved ones...'

And then she was gone.

She was gone into the vast beyond. Into the great nothing, the void, what cannot be yet always is.

She was a soul floating in the dark heavens away from the world. She was an angel fleeing the broken world, the corruption and battles and wars of everyday life. She was a soft flower taking her essence across the vast expanse. She was a tear on the face of existence weeping and being swept away. She was one of billions who have passed this way and gone into the beyond. She was sinking into the earth from whence she came. Her body already decomposing even in its frozen state. Her excrescence ripe for the vultures and the bugs and the worms. Her body, its life energy gone, for composting. She was forgotten in a forgotten graveyard. No-one would find her body; for no-one walked that way anymore. The animals and the insects would feast on her remains until only her bones remained to lie in the grass when the warmer weather came.

When the sun broke across the sky at dawn, rising as a red phoenix between the trees where she lay, she opened her eyes and looked about her. Her nightmares were getting worse, though she hadn't woken from this one before it played itself out. Usually you wake in fear before you die, but she had kept dreaming her death until she had been flung to the far reaches of the universe, until she had seen the dark void and the clear light, until she had disappeared into nothing and felt herself as presence everywhere.

She had been working with lucid dreaming for some time...

One Hundred Million Sperm A Day

The original drawing, albiet with photoshop lighting, from a drop-in, non-instructional lifedrawing session at the Toronto School of Art.

100 Million Sperm A Day

100 Million Sperm A Day, ink, pencil on paper, text a digital layer, 11"x14", ©2005 Brenda Clews

Sassure and the biological referent...

(Update: added a sketch drawn not on paper but with a stylus and tablet on a screen from a few years ago when I was writing a paper for another ARM conference... there's a counterpoint interplay and vision between the two images that I hope is evident.)

In response to the last post, entitled, "Passion, like a flame... or a semiotics of sexuality, or an anatomy of desire..." A little something on semiotic theory...

Hi everyone- I'm not saying that we as individuals want or don't want to have children, or even think about them if we're past child-bearing age, not at all, only that that biological reality is there in heterosexual unions in ways that aren't in homosexual unions.

So it can be looked at semiotically in Sassure's sense, where the "referent" is an object in the world, or a relation to the material world, rather than a concept of it. Sassure's work as a linquist revolved around signs. The sign is created by a signifier (material or physical form of the sign) and the signified (the concept it represents, its content). He applied these concepts to linguistic terms, to words.

The word "sex" is the signifier, and what it means to each of us is the signified.

That's pretty easy. Sex is a sign. Albiet a potent one.

In heterosexual sex there is a referent to the world in a way that is absent from same sex sex. It's a biological referent. It operates as a referent in potentia or as actuality or what is forgone or even as memory. Because it's there, I am suggesting that the anatomy of desire itself, its semiotic configuration, is different for a heterosexual person than a homosexual one.

And then I'm interested in what ways this plays out in culture. But it gets very complicated. I come to this through my work on why the maternal body is problematic not just in our culture but in feminist theory. Where the triad is not really accepted, nor is sexual difference. I'm a sexual difference feminist, in the European sense; rather than a North American feminist in the equality sense (meaning I don't want to adhere to a 'one-sex' model of equality that doesn't recognize my maternal body, its monthly cycles, the children I'm raising, the hormonal fury of menopause). And I need to do this in a non-essentialist way too.

I can see from Suzanne's comment here, and the comments I received at my other site, that I have a long way to go on clarifying what I am trying to say! There is a discussion going on in my post at Xanga, which you can look at here if you wish.

You are all helping me so much on this path, an area I've been exploring in painting, poetry and theory for almost 2 decades now....

Passion, like a flame... a semiotics of sexuality, an anatomy of desire

From the September drop-in non-instructional lifedrawing session with the male model:

"Passion, like a flame..." ink, pencil on paper, text a photoshop layer, 11" x 14", ©Brenda Clews, 2005.

The drawing, when I'd finished it, seemed to speak about homosexual love, queer love, same-sex desire. The way it entraps, because of the culture, the struggle with it. For someone gay, it's not just, 'Are they potentially interested,' but, 'Are they gay, or could they be, too' - a double question. So he is... pulling back, thinking, yet crouched, his body alive with desire, his libido flowing towards the object of his desire. Whether who he desires is even aware of him is not indicated in the drawing.

As I worked on the drawing, I started thinking about whether sexual orientation configures the experience of desire. This profile of desire has no procreational element in it; it's pure sexual desire. Meaning it's different to heterosexual desire where there is a potential conception and a potential responsibility. Where, because a child could be created, the weight of love is different.

In heterosexual love, there is always a referent to potential conception. It's a referent that is absent from queer love, where desire is simply desire, without the consequence of a third, a child, being born. Desire is always a dyad; never a trinity. This makes the act of desiring the other different, surely. Not better or worse, only that sexual desire and its potential consequences is crucially different in hetero and homo bodies.

A semiotics of sexuality, an anatomy of desire... I am playing with these terms: sexuality, with its referent to a third in potentia or as actuality or what is forgone or even as memory, as a triad (hetero); where the referent is non-existent, which configures desire differently, as a dyad (gay); and, excuse the play on words, and serious philosophic concepts, and my giggles, perhaps as a monad (masturbation). When we pleasure ourselves there is no biological referent either.

Each line of the drawing, a deepening of understanding. Our culture has its foundation in Ancient Greek thought, where the dominant, founding class was gay, and one wonders on the paradigm of man alone - a solitary male God, a patristic culture, a 'one sex' model politically - elements which are still with us thousands of years later, comes out of an essentially dyad relationship to the other.

Where desire is only between two, and there is never a spectral third...

(Surely we all have elements of each.)

Will I ever understand why the mother's body is so problematic in Western thought and culture? For it is.

technorati tags: art, lifedrawing, homosexuality, heterosexuality, sexuality, anatomy of desire, semiotics of sexuality, biological referent, maternal theory.

ARM Conference today...

I am at an Association for Research on Mothering (ARM) conference at York University this weekend.



Good thing I finally splurged on an internet connection - I thought the conference was next weekend, and so missed 2 days of it! I volunteered yesterday, and sold journals...

More about these amazing conferences later, gotta run...
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Update: When you're working, you don't get to go to many panels. My view of the conference therefore very limited. It's mostly in the chatting between panels where I meet wonderful women doing most interesting work. But over-riding everything is a flow of mother-love, acceptance of each other, nurturance. It's hard to explain how fulfilling these conferences are emotionally. It could be Andrea O'Reilly too, who founded ARM, who's got a fun social side, heck, she's a party person, and not just a prolific writer of books, of which she publishes at least one a year. Leaders really do put their individual stamps on groups. ARM conferences are warm, supportive and with an array of brilliant women doing fascinating research and analysis on the oldest institution of all: motherhood.

This year I finally met Judith Stadtman Tucker, who runs the best site on socially conscious mothering, on "social, cultural, economic and political issues that impact the well-being of mothers. MMOs purpose is to serve as a clearinghouse for reporting and resources that support social change. Its intention is to promote economic and social justice for mothers and others who do the caring work of our society": Mothers Movement Online. Judith and I had an incredible conversation on subjectivity, batting back and forth ideas on parity and equality theories, with her coming to rest at an ethic of care. That care is the way through the difficulties mothering presents to the 'one sex' model of subjectivity and equality in modern democracy, and to its becoming a force for social change.

Do I agree? I have to think long and hard on that one as I read some books she's recommended. I mean it was a position I took willingly a few years ago, almost as a battle cry when I was exploring the literature on the Mothers of Argentina and their effect on the junta's disappearing of people, the loss of their children; by bravely making their grieving and their anger public, they were able to effect change. Based on examples of what mothers can do, perhaps the compassion and care of normative mothering is the way through the dilemma of modern culture. ARM is doing a conference on Carework and Caregiving: Theory and Practice next May. That will help me to deepen my understanding of this concept as it is being explored by feminist theorists currently.

Drawing Down the Muse

Drawing Down the Muse, ink on paper, 8.5" x 11". These sketches are from a lifedrawing session in Vancouver last July. They were 3 minute poses and I drew three of them on one page. The model had a tatoo of a black cat on her back. By adding the lighting, and creating a literary title, I've turned it into a coven of women in a dramatic setting. They are bathed in what is essentially stage lighting (via photoshop), so a representation of the moon, its shining...

Drawing Down the Moon is the title of a book by Margot Adler. When this ritual is enacted during a full moon, there is a powerful influx of energy. In my drawing I have played on the title, drawing from and connecting to Adler's book, but added a reference to the Muse, or inspiration. I am interested in creativity, our visions and the ways we express them in artistic or literary or musical form. The moon is a very ancient and rich symbol for this process.

It's all in the white moonlight that pulls the ocean with it...

On-line again, at last...

Finding accessing the internet through the library very limiting, and ultimately frustrating, both for posting my writing and art, and especially for the close reading I like to give posts, and the comments I often leave after a day of carrying words with me, I finally got on the phone and called around about internet options. The house in which I am living doesn't have internet or cable. I use a cell phone. And I need to keep my costs way down. So installing a land line was out. It turns out that the cable provider for this area, Rogers, has an "ultra lite" internet service, which they claim is 5 times faster than dial-up, for $20./month, flat rate, no installation fee, no modem rental fee. It took the guy an hour and a half to install it here. And I am ecstatically on-line again. In the intimacy of my living space. Accessing you all in the library was strange, not just because of the time limit, but because reading in a public space over a public computer lacked the intimacy that I have come to enjoy about the way we receive each other's writing on our screens at home. Where it feels like we are talking directly to each other, whispering our thoughts, reflections, expressing our lives...