3 - BOD (Book of the Dead), continuing the story...

Posting some sections of my NaNoWriMo novel, BOD (Book of the Dead) from last year. This time I'm including a little of the narrative of the woman's day-to-day life...


She checked the phone, and there was a message. It was from Jarret, "Hi, something's come up. I'm putting the children on the train. They have enough money for a taxi, so don't worry. They should be home around 6. I'll be back later, maybe tomorrow."

Nothing more, no explanation of why he wasn't coming home. She felt herself crumbling and began to cry. Why did women always cry when they felt overwhelmed or helpless? She cried deeply for a long time. It helped to release the tension inside. Where was her husband? Was the woman who had answered the phone really with him that morning? She sounded like a one night stand, since she didn't seem to know the name of the man she was with. Could it really have been her husband?

It was nearly six o'clock. She went to the bathroom and washed her face. She put on some lipstick. She smoothed her dark curly hair back. She tried to look like she might normally. She heard the key turn in the door and went to it to greet her children.

"Hi Mom," they each said as they dumped their bags on the floor.

"Hi my honeys, how was your trip?"

"Great," they both mumbled and headed off in different directions, one to the kitchen, one to the bathroom. She heard a bath being poured. In the kitchen, her son was opening a bag of chips and holding a can of pop.

"Hey, it's dinner time, not snack time. Let's get pizza tonight."

"Ok, Ma," he munched as he talked. "Oh, yeah, Dad said to tell you he met a business contact and decided to arrange a meeting. They couldn't meet until tomorrow or something. He'll call later. He'll be home tomorrow night probably."

"Oh. He left such a short message I didn't understand what had happened. What," she said, changing the subject, "would you like on the pizza?"

"Everything."

She dialed the number of the pizza house, ordered, and went upstairs to her computer. Sitting there, mystified at the events of the day, she called her friend, Taim, and left a message asking to meet her for lunch the next day.

It was a quiet evening. She spent it sitting in the semi darkness of her office meditating.
.

Bones were certainly interesting. Within the organism, they provided the structure, the underpinning, the foundation that held the body together. Bones were living and were crucial. Yet to hold a bone, they never felt so important, so central, but light, almost too airy. They are what is most hidden, except for the teeth, and so to hold a human bone was a strange experience. To hold it knowing it was a thigh bone, of someone who died there. That this was all that remained.

Only our bones are left in the corridors of time that we have passed through, rattling on the floors…

Even our bones return to the soil, are ground up in the recycling of time, they just take longer.

It was a few days later, when the Police Station phoned and asked for her.

“Yes, it’s Shona Leicht.”

“M’am, you found the site where the bones lay?”

“In the cemetery, yes. Do you know who it was? Was it a woman? Or a man? It quite frightened me.”

“Well, the thing is, m’am, our department took a look at them, ran a few tests, and they seem to be quite old.”

“You mean they were there a long time? Can you trace them back to anyone missing?”

“Our department says there are a few more tests to make sure, but the bones appear to be at least one hundred to one hundred and fity years old.”

“What?”

“That’s what I got written here. Seemed in good shape for bein’ that old to me.”

“That is very strange indeed, officer. Could there be a mistake?”

“Well, as I said, there’re a couple more tests, but it looks like they’re from maybe 1850 or 1900. Could’a been a pioneer even. Who knows.”

“Male or female.” She was trying to keep her voice steady.

“Female, older though, post-menopausal, cause there’s some osteoporosis around the hip joints.”

“Is there any indication of the cause of death, officer?”

“Funny you ask. I was asking our guy in Forensics, and he said there was nothing to indicate the cause of death, except maybe freezing.”

“Oh!”

“Sorry, m’am?”

“Officer, I would like to give the bones of this woman a proper burial, and would like to know if I may have them? Or if I make arrangements at the funeral home, if they can be sent there for interment?”

“Don’t see a problem with that, if that’s what you want to do, m’am. I’ll have to get my supervisor’s signature, that’s all.”

“Should I pick them up? Or will you take them over?”

“We can take them over to the funeral home. It’s time to go out on patrol anyway.”

“Okay, I’ll call them. Thank you, officer.”

Then she called the funeral home and explained that the police would be by shortly with some bones that she had found in an unused and old part of the cemetery, and that she wanted to bury them properly. After some discussion, she chose a standard package, a single plot, the lower of a double depth grave, a vault and a simple coffin, and a simple marble slab on which they would engrave, "An unknown woman, who froze to death in 1850, in honour.” She said she would be there within the hour to pay for the burial. It was agreed that the burial would take place the next day in the morning.

2 - BOD (Book of the Dead), continuing the story...

Posting some sections of my NaNoWriMo novel, BOD (Book of the Dead) from last year. Some other things happen between what I posted yesterday and the continuation of the story here which leave her rather frazzled, one of which is a 'crank caller'...


The phone rang again, and absent-mindedly she answered it. “I have been trying to reach you for hours,” said a deep male voice. The connection wasn’t good and there was static on the line.
“What do you want? Why are you calling me?”
“I wanted to tell you that there is a body in the graveyard, in an old and untended section…”
She hung up the phone and began screaming, loudly, hoarsely, and then sobbing. When it rang again, she picked it up slowly, “What do you want?!”
“To tell you that it wasn’t a dream. An old, homeless woman died in the cemetery where you worked. Her body is still there. You must find it and give her a proper burial.”
The line went dead. Shona shivered deeply. She felt suddenly cold, a sense of dread overcoming her. If it were true, did she cause the old woman’s death by dreaming it? Or did she somehow tune into the experience? Why did she dream of a homeless woman freezing to death alone in an old cemetery and now she has been told by an anonymous caller that there is, in fact, such a body. She dressed quickly, locked the door behind her, got into her car and drove to the cemetery.

She passed shops and houses and parks on the way, and people walking on the sidewalks, driving in cars, in the buses, it seemed surreal this morning, this world, its activity, like ants in an anthill, carrying on our tasks, day after day, keeping everything going. Yet there was a spark, something indefinable, a joy to the whole moving, buzzing, profound venture that life is. She felt a tension between her angst and that joy as she sped towards the cemetery, parked, got out of her car, stood, began looking in all the directions, trying to sense which way to go.

Pulling her coat tightly around her, she began walking towards a forested area, in the far corner; it took three quarters of an hour to reach the copses of trees. The area was overgrown, unkept, had reverted back to wilderness. If there were gravestones, they had crumbled over time. She was moving through tall grasses, whitened with the frosting of the night before, for Winter was setting in early, and brushing her feet along the ground, looking for remnants of gravestones. She wasn't sure that this was part of the cemetery anymore. Her foot hit something, and she leaned down to look, but it was only a field stone. She kept walking. She closed her eyes, seeing if following an inclination other than sight might help. She walked, the day was warm, and she puzzled over the dream, since the woman had frozen to death. Her nostrils filled with an indescribable smell, not of decomposition, but something faintly perfumed, and she opened her eyes.

Before her was a white gravestone, buried in the underbrush, half of it crumbled, and she leaned down and felt it with her fingers. She drew back, it had the feel she recalled from her dream. For awhile she simply stood, her eyes shut, swaying in the morning breeze, her mind silent, poised for what was coming next. When she felt ready she opened them and walked to the other side of the gravestone, looking for the body.

There was nothing. Only tall grasses bending under their own weight. Now what? She walked around the area, looking, but not wanting to look. It was difficult. Her foot touched something hard and she bent down to see what it was and saw a whiteness and found herself becoming dizzy.

Her fingers reached for it. She touched it, feeling the smooth calicified length. She picked it up. As she held it, a life came swirling back to her. The burden of a life came swirling into her heart and mind. She felt overwhelmed by the tragedy of this life, its loss, its loneliness, its abandonment. This person had lost everything, and died here, without anyone knowing or caring. What if it were the goddess herself whose bones had lain here for an eternity, awaiting care? Wasn't even an old and ill homeless woman a goddess? Worthy of dignity at death? She stood in the cold wind and felt anger rise in her chest. "I am here now!" she shouted defiantly to the sky and the trees and the birds and the animals hidden in the leaves and in the forest, but she was speaking to a whole culture that left its old and ill and lonely to die in such ways. "You will be buried properly!"

She turned, with the bone in her hand, and walked back to her car. She drove to the nearest police station and walked in and placed the bone on the counter and said to the officer on duty, "I found this in the cemetery, in an old part. It is obviously human. Can you run a check on it, and please let me take the police to where I found it."

The officer looked at her suspiciously. He reached under the counter for a clipboard and some forms. They went into a small office, and he wrote down everything she told him about going for a walk in the cemetery and finding the bone in an obscure and overgrown corner.

After he had finished taking her statement, he left the room, and returned with two other policemen. The funeral home had been alerted and the manager of the grounds was waiting for them when they arrived. She led the small troup of men across the fields of gravestones towards the forest; at the edge of the wall of trees, she pointed to the gravestone in the underbrush and said that was where she had tripped on the bone.

The police cordoned off the area and began carefully searching. After a couple of hours of watching them scour the area, finding bones and carefully placing them in marked bags, she decided to go home. They said they would call her as soon as they learnt anything about the remains.

At home, she lay down, dizzy and exhausted. The scene was still swirling in her mind, as was her dream of a few nights ago. It was so real as to be surreal. Everything made sense, and nothing made sense. She was confused and yet it seemed as if everything was perfectly sensible. She couldn't encompass the fear and relief she felt at finding, not a dead woman, as she had expected, but calcified bones. She wondered what the forensic department would uncover about her death.

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...
___________________
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.