I thought to myself: How great would it be if we were expected to include our selves in everything we write. Biographically that is. Isn’t that what we do really anyway? Everything we do? Every thought we have? Every paper we write? And conversation we engage? All contained within a body which refuses to be contained, a story is told and is telling.
What happened to the writer in me? It used to be there. I was completely obsessed with making sure that what was in my head, got on the page. It wasn’t a choice. If I didn’t get it out I couldn’t stand it. I was never without my journal. Always buried at the bottom of my canvas bag. I remember making sure it was next to me in the car in case something came to me while I was driving; writing while driving is always irresponsible as a citizen of the road, but, never as a writer.
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Whereas an image, the terms of whose existence are outside its control in that it is always a moving shadow of something else, needs to come into existence in something else if it is to claim some degree of reality, or else be nothing at all, an exact and true account of what is ultimately real supports the view that so long as two things are different neither will come to be in the other and so become at once both one and two. –Plato, Timaeus
“This Sex Which Is Not One”—these words are creating me.
I buried my body in the backyard last night.
Dug a hole just over five and a half feet long and two feet both
wide and deep.
Just enough.
I placed my body in this hole and told it “Goodnight.”
I stuck my shovel in the mound of dirt that once was in the earth and threw it on top of my chest first.
Choo throp choo throp choo throp
And then my knees and thighs.
Choo throp choo throp choo throp
My face
Choo throp choo throp choo throp
And finally my feet.
Choo throp choo throp choo throp
Perhaps it is reduction that I most fear when I am Writer. Years ago, I rebelliously claimed to be a “Reader” and never looked back. The threat of reduction is always present for the writer of/by dangerous signifiers. I didn’t want to give you that. I didn’t want to give you “reduced me” who can never find the right words. I wanted to give you me when I wrote. To experience all that that means when I am writing to you. But was I thinking of you in all this?
What really knocks me out is a book that,
when you’re all done reading it,
you wish the author that wrote
it was a terrific friend of yours.
~Holden Caulfield
When you see me swimming up to you on the shores of a distant mirage, this will be passed off to you. You will never know swimming through choppy waters, through these choppy waters. Knowing only that I have swam through them because you will have this. It will not be what you have in your hands, the words you are reading, but it will, for worse?, be forever defined in the moment that I give you this and you receive it (because I want you to have this).