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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810126541 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/09/2009 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 168 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.55(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Third Body
By hélène cixous
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2009 hélène cixousAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-1687-0
Chapter One
for a long time I closed my eyes when he would leave, and I kept my eyes closed when we made love. Back in those years when he was so close or so far away, I would often lose myself in an ageless non-place where I no longer felt anything. Sometimes I was overcome by sleep. Then I would dream that he was leaving, I could see him leaving in minute detail, and this detailed departure grated the flesh of my eyes so minutely that my grief from the knowledge that he was leaving and my grief at seeing him leave crushed my bones and lacerated my skin, and yet I saw him gone, his back dripping with blood. I could see him leaving. Then the arms, the legs, which are mine when he's here, would rip off and fall upon him. I wouldn't try to hold him back. But he is in my flesh, and he is in my eyes, and he is the marrow of my bones. By leaving he drew me away from myself, the self that wasn't leaving with him except by means of the immovable in me, and if I'd had my eyes open, I would have seen his back dripping with blood. You are the marrow of my bones. You are flesh to me. One of us felt we were dying with each departure. One of us knew that it wasn't death but a pain as vivid and complete as the body of the one departing, that of the one staying behind, identical to that body, a bodypained by violent absence. The body and the pain knew each other, and by being mixed together resembled one another, were named by the same words. A new homonymy was born for them, through his voice or mine, without distinguishing: "My arm!" also meant my arm hurts (yours, mine). "Oh my mouth, my lips, my teeth, and my tongue!" meant rescue my mouth which is for you and moisten my dry lips, and separate my tongue from my teeth that are biting it so it won't cry out yet, oh my mouth, your lips, the tongue that comes to me from you all the better to accuse us of each still having these lips, those lips, while in fact for a long time we've had only one tongue to question and answer. With each departure: we had to believe the unbelievable, do the impossible, separate the marrow from its bones, yet keep walking, letting the blood flow here, the heart beat there. And keep seeing the blood, the heart, and the marrow in the bones. Keep having in our eyes the flowing, the beating, the pounding.There was a week in October, like a long, invincible arrival, so strong, so prolonged, so certain, so vibrant because of all the senses getting satisfaction, that everything could have changed-did change by all appearances. An unexpected week though. Nothing had foretold it, we hadn't prepared it, we had neither expected nor imagined it. At least neither one of us had had the least hint or advance sign of it. This time came upon us after several years, numerous months, innumerable days, all different, each with its name, its number, its special flavor, and what they all had in common was that they ended with a departure, and each time there was this blood and this terror in greater or lesser quantity. They would come to an end sometimes in an hour, sometimes in a minute, sometimes in several units of pain (hours, days, nights, weeks). Through a door, at a subway, round a bend in the avenue, backward. The end must be pulled off like a bandage: a quick pulling off, abrupt, a brief burning, just the right brusqueness. There were pitiful brutalities between us. He zeroed in on my disappearances: I was supposed to refine my method down to the tiniest gesture, to the point of inimitably mastering a suicide with no death; I knew how to disappear so deftly that he couldn't believe his eyes. I arrived at such perfection in the end that my disappearance disappeared. The features of my disappearance expressed a resolute indifference toward external events; the eye that looked straight into his eye showed a piercing, extraordinary look and, etching itself on his willing retina, proceeded with a rapid folding back of thoughts upon themselves. In short, my disappearance was foreseen because of a final look in which it was established that everything was in order, then it was, but it couldn't be seen, for it absorbed itself. T.t. was convinced that he was the locus of my disappearance, and I often experienced it as such: but it was only in the instant that preceded my reappearance that I recognized, by the form of its walls and the odor of its tissues, the thoracic cage in which I quivered, and that scarcely lasted, for as soon as I opened my eyes, my disappearance had disappeared, cut out from the memory of my senses as utterly as a dream.
That year of Octobers was triumphant; we kept on arriving, our arrival spread right into each other's arms, reverberated, ricocheted, while the disappearances were executed so remarkably that we didn't even feel them: we knew that they were over only because of the spreading, sonorous, intoxicating, perfumed, multiple arrival, fed by itself, stimulated by all our muscles together, but savored slowly. And not a drop of blood. We had discovered the secret of uninterrupted bringing to life. We sailed through time as though it were God the mother, a comic figure, protectress, little old woman, ambitious, harmless, foiled. Without hurrying, festina lente. Passing by, T.t. cut the false cords that had threatened to strangle me while I was resigned to the permanence of their knots, as they were old and had appeared to me irremovable. And there was nothing, no reason for this revolution, no visible sign. O adorable Plenitude of that Monday pregnant with a Tuesday that gave us Wednesday that opened onto Thursday that left us off around Friday that dropped us into the dazzling light of Saturday. Lofty days, bets taken, forces in alternation. Sometimes his joy preceded mine, other times I took the first step of the day. Eyes finally came to me, and those eyes were naked. With those eyes I saw at first only his eyes; as strange as it may seem, I had never really seen his eyes, their scope and their strength and their radiance, so precisely. Each of his looks is another look and a look and one other look, and I don't have enough eyes to see you. I had never gone into his eyes, and it was impossible to go into them without putting them out: it was forbidden depth, and his eyes had no voice that, rising from his inner depths, could have reassured me, they had a clarity, a transparence that showed there must have been a way of seeing him in them. What face, what body awaited me there? Could I look at his brain as though I saw it through the signs of his eyes? My new eyes, as I've said, were penetrating. They were swallowed up everywhere with such a huge appetite to see inside that through the swallowing up were constructed all these curved, hollow cavities that we use as beds, explorable dens, nearly unknown till now, for we had never dreamed of seeing ourselves there; I myself had always shut my eyes each time a hollow appeared, and each time I fell, clearly, into the blackness of fear.
Everything was gotten over, cut through, let go of, launched, scattered, Saturday October morning, October, beyond September beyond August, since we had written Out-of-bounds years ago, anti-month, a hole in the year, when we couldn't see ourselves. With all these outs we could have made a monster year, without stars, its eyes bulging, which we could have saved for later. Paris was out because of the light one Saturday, because of the color of the daylight, true blue, the length of the avenues walked in every direction, reversed, contradicted, unruly, cunning. We ran, we watched each other run. We got dressed, we watched each other get dressed in the mirrors of the dressers, he taller, I shorter, but with the same skin inside out, peeled back, hidden, revealed. Painting each other's, inscribing it, touching it. Spend, take, take, take, we take everything, take take, we flare up, we get fresh air, we take the the, take take take, all the images we cut them out, we try them. It takes; joy comes from deep down. It took. Then we'll see the apartment, O Happy Day. We count the squares of glass in the apartment, there are 365, that's normal. We'll take it. We've gotten help from numbers for a long time.
at noon, October, Saturday, broken, seeded, like yesterday and yesterday's yesterday, it's so hot that flies are born. A bee comes into the room. The sky darkens, in every sense of the word. My disappearance progresses like a dream figure, and as I stand next to him we watch it come show itself to be done away with by us. It comes from now, not knowing where to place itself. Unhurriedly, for it is already the shadow of itself and it does not know itself where to set down and it buzzes in the room where Saturday is pregnant with Monday. Finally I am going to dare to catch a glimpse of my body at loss, my body bloody with departures. He is tall and slender, with black wavy hair, his head bent forward, the curve of his eyelids is not mine: he's the one who looks down at the path.
Side by side, and we look at it; I hear you smile, my cheek, my temple let me know. We are happy because we are no longer members of the everyday. What comes toward us with a step that doesn't know where to set down is a dream figure in broad daylight. But there where we do not sleep there is no daylight to hold us back or to trick us into taking it for a model of forever.
We grow, by the gaze of one another.
The left foot put out in front, and the right ready to follow, touches the ground only with the tip of its toes, while its sole and heel rise up almost vertically. This movement of the disappearance on the point of disappearing holds us back, seduces us. Today distance gives us the beauty of our forms seen from farther and farther away. My eyes rock it at twenty yards, close in upon it at ten yards, spread over it at five yards, and at three yards caress it with a single wide-open caress. There. Don't move, don't move, my eyes are filled and open. Eyes filled with your flesh, bellies lit up. Come forward, slowly, no, stop, yes, come forward, softly, farther, farther ah I'm going to disappear, you get bigger, I see no more than a bit of you, soon I see the disappearance walking, but no matter then, I see it through the breast where I am. The movement that he saw when my eyes drew near him expressed at once the agile freedom of a young woman walking and a repose sure of itself, a non-objection, which gave her, by combining a sort of suspended flight with a steady gait, the bare charm of beings unafraid of passing away.
That's what I say to T.t. then: my disappearance has the calm gait of something unafraid of passing away. These words were not separated. They had been entrusted to me in a single full, polite sentence, which I at once passed on to T.t. On them (these words), my disappearance takes place.
I no longer remember the passing.
That evening, L. comes to bring me various books, difficult to find before the advent, and I can't help telling her the story of the fly, which seems to me to symbolize nicely our being together, during a morning discussion, before our trip across town, which was about my difficulty controlling my gestures made just as I fall asleep-a difficulty that had gotten surprisingly worse in the past weeks. In fact, I had just given in to an unusual act, banal no doubt, yet striking because of the moment it had thrust itself upon me: I woke up with a start in the dark bedroom alive with imperceptible oscillations. My watch showed an hour that started up the next day in me. So I immediately phoned up L., to whom I'd made a friendly pledge that had turned this act into a ritual. A soft voice answered, putting questions to me patiently, without surprise, with a reassuring rising and falling in her voice, asking me gently who I was and what was happening. The first time, I had experienced an emotion all the more violent because, at the very moment I realized my mistake, I was convinced not only that I knew the voice, but also that she too guessed something or other, hence her calmness and concern, and yet I could attach no name, no face to this voice, but, swallowed up into an eager silence, listening, searching, I heard her at last stop speaking, as if reluctantly, but without bitterness. I was not able to say who I was or to find out who she was. I was the one who hung up; she waited. I felt a wave of mad love for her, a certitude that my mistake was a screen for some truth. But I didn't know which number I had dialed for her. And I had been mistaken, truly, about what time it was; it was night-daylight and the time to get started were still way off, and when they caught up with me I didn't know anything anymore. I remembered that I had loved, in another life at once far off and close at hand, a woman no doubt older than myself who knew everything, or more precisely a woman who loved me "no matter what."
The following night, a new call: I am called on to call, but this time, luckily or unluckily, I do not hear the patient voice; I hear the ringing of the telephone that cuts through the skin of my sleep with a sudden violence and gives a shove to my consciousness the way an undesirable is thrown out the door. As I fall I see myself dialing the number, my trembling index finger gets halfway through, but then I crash into a rocky awakening that interrupts the conspicuous gesture. What remain in me are the first five numbers and the hope that she didn't pick up the receiver because maybe she didn't hear anything, so it's as though I hadn't done anything. 53333. I did her no harm. I remember her gentleness. I didn't tell her who I was because I didn't know who I was, and then when I explain to T.t. that I'm afraid of hurting someone I love during sleep (to unmask, to kill, to bring down, to denounce-all these demons are in me in the infinitive of threat), I read in his eyes, turned full on me down to the last eyelash, that he knows the number of the patient voice. We are sitting cross-legged when I say 5, 3, 3, 3, 3, and I repeat it, being surprised to hear only at that instant the multiplicity of threes. I'm saying this to myself-533, 33, 33, 33-it happened in 533, there are 533 rungs in Jacob's ladder, I'm 3 years old, I'm 33 years old, he's 53 years old minus 3 years, it wasn't a bee, it was a fly that hovered in front of us at the height of 33 above mother-level [au-dessus du niveau de la mère], above her who spoke to me once. And with that I am struck with a presentiment: she's drawing near; it seems to me, I say, that the telephone is going to call me, I am possessed of an excitement analogous to that which I feel upon going back over my dreams, my heart moves, lodges on the right, is nailed down in the center, swells.
With mouth open, eyes open, hands open, as though I were expected at mass. The fly goes in by my mouth. Winged host, little bitty p ..., what are you doing? I could have brought it round and made it come back up, coughed, spat, brought it back up, with the same force, effortlessly, that it had when it landed on me, but it was so small, and what happens to us is so great. I was reluctant to interrupt the flow of our happy story, in which we were touching on the outer limits, getting close to all those mysteries, in order to announce this undeniable yet insignificant fact that I had swallowed a fly. An inaccurate and not just impertinent statement, moreover: it was not an ordinary fly, it was smaller and more agitated than what I call a fly, and the fineness of coloring on its wings made it akin to those tiny almond-green moths, truncated dragonflies an eighth of an inch long that are so sanctimonious in September. And then I wasn't sure I swallowed it, it had simply disappeared, at a moment when it was so close to my mouth that there was no other place it could have disappeared into, it was just not outside my mouth anymore, as in a sleight-of-hand disappearance. I felt right afterward an imperceptible irritation around my uvula, which made me come to the conclusion that it had passed by there. I wasn't going to make a big deal out of it or allow a gnat the time for a single phrase. I swallowed. How familiar and yet singular was my delight upon hearing T.t.'s cheerful voice saying to me, like a dog on a leash, joyous, panting: wasn't it 533-33-13? Yes, yes, 13, that's it, that's it; who is it? He tells me effusively with the passion of a game of passion, and I'm filled with dread, with cold, I don't know; what I hear stops me in my tracks, chills me, I can't help going back to my initial suspicions, and fearing the incursion within me of the Unmasking demon, my joy is now mixed with shame, I think in fear, mixed with the scarcely tangible bit of a question that's no longer willing to be popped. But the important thing is his attitude: in fact, he's happy. No emissary from the netherworld will ever diminish his joy. What comes our way, whatever its origin, becomes a good thing as it draws near us. He is happy, he assails me with all kinds of strange little questions, charmed accomplice of the Unmasker, to the point that I too marvel at the act whose stakes really are the difference between life and death, between absolute knowledge and absolute ignorance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Third Body by hélène cixous Copyright © 2009 by hélène cixous. Excerpted by permission.
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