A Girl is a Sliced Fruit
I look at my face in the glass and see
a halfborn woman– Adrienne Rich (1)
They talk about a road. I see none. I see a plain. That’s when I’m thinking broad. When I’m living more than thinking (or living deep in my thinking) I see a small area like an open-air cell. There are boundaries (walls or hedges) through which I get glimpses of somewhere else. If I look. Then later I’m in another cell with a different view but it’s the same plain. A honeycomb of interconnecting cells all of the same hue. The same dominion. Nowhere really to go
There is no path no journey. Only a movement from one cell to another with better or worse views of the outside. Returning repeatedly to the centre (if I'm still sane). I return to the same cells too but having been before I see them differently. It’s: oh I’m here again but it’s been re-decorated. Sometimes it’s all new and horror. Sometimes it’s all horror because it’s just the same oldWhat the artist confronts... is chaos, the forces of chaos, the forces of a raw and untamed matter upon which Forms must be imposed in order to make substances, and Codes in order to make milieus.
– Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2)
How small is the world, and why do some people find no solace even when they’ve made the effort to get outside their known environment and improve their situation? Bad luck. Bad planning. Or the world (this world) is only pretending. It’s really a cell and you/I can’t get out. The law’s delay and the insolence of office are torturous as ever. We might as well be burning heretics in our shrinking cell as performing our Protection of (whose?) Life actNo place but the one. None but the one where none. Whence never once in. Somehow in. Beyondless. Thenceless there. Thitherless there. Thenceless thitherless there.
– Samuel Beckett (3)
Born or unborn. Willed or unwilled. Alive or dead. Or desperately clinging to the side of the fast-moving economic vehicle? What is the girl doing now? What is she thinking of now? Nursing the slice-scar on her belly? Thinking of the child she didn’t want and how he will always be a living incision that is not/is/might be/could/should/shouldn’t/ be her responsibility/joy/pain
Her nothing. She nothing. Receptacle. Vessel. Ideology container. This in 2014? you could say. In 415 you could say. In some countries they/we/you are imprisoned for being raped. Burned for being raped. They/We/You are receptacles of social guilt. Retain it. Sustain it. After all that has been done. After all that has been said. The principle of kindness? is where
Keep smiling. Keep smiling children. Rush to what keeps you cushioned. Stay in fear for your livelihood. Don’t treat the festering. Don’t entertain it. You are. She is/is not. In 2013. Now. In 2060? whenLet us never cease from thinking — what is this ‘civilization’ in which we find ourselves?
– Virginia Woolf (4)
Life is generous. It proliferates. Its evolutionary behaviour produces natural redundancies and randomised choices. Some choices are better than others. Each of us is a choosing machine and the choice is better when we know something of the world. When we are formed. When we are separate if only in our ten-by-ten. These official faces and their scribblings and their (oh) expert questions.... Your/My head floods with fear. You/I. Guilty if we don’t drown. Innocent by torture (maybe)Dim light source unknown. Know minimum. Know nothing no. Too much to hope. At most mere minimum. Meremost minimum.
– Samuel Beckett (5)
...Irish Catholicism is all about accepting impurities of form.
– Eimear MacBride (6)
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Footnotes
(1) Adrienne Rich: ‘Upper Broadway’, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977, New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1993, p. 41.
(2.) Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, transl. Brian Massumi, London, New York: Continuum, 2012, p. 373.
(3) Samuel Beckett: Worstword Ho (1983). Online at: http://www.samuel-beckett.net/w_ho.htm
(4) Virginia Woolf: Three Guineas (1938). Online at: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200931.txt
(5) Samuel Beckett: opus cit.
(6) Interview with Eimear MacBride, online at: http://www.thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-eimear-mcbride/