Stories are trauma.
Even when they seek to be the stitches. They can't help but gush. And
slash. Squirt. Sometimes just a slow bleed. Seepage. And scars. Blood
clots the size of chicken livers.
This piece began with the temporal notation of the months. A hook to hang
the body on. The weapon of choice. The first cut on the smooth surface
of absence. I had been consumed with other kinds of writing and reluctant
to re-enter.
I had been reading Elizabeth Grosz' Volatile Bodies: Toward a
Corporeal Feminism and interested in what various ways an embodied
writing might manifest. And I was interested in what happens to narrative
or our ideas of it in a period when biochemistry, DNA analysis, cloning,
neurotransmitter uptake inhibitors enter the field. How might these relate
to writing strategies. What happens when biochemicals squirting across
synapses become a layer (a lair!), a lawyer of their own. Plot lines criss
cross wildly. I mean, psychoanalysis has heavily structured our sense
of story — its place, the rules it is governed by, our explanations
of it.
Little stories: A professional suggested that biochemistry and genetics
have superseded narrative. As if one existed in isolation of the other[s].
Mistresses of the Master Narrative Tell All! The snuff film of the nightly
news.
The months provide a momentum. They imply an aging process, though not
necessarily advancement or resolution. And they are interrupted. Delayed.
Inside and between and across them, snatches of narrative contract orgasmically,
randomly. Whirlpools, excessive and mixed metaphor, metonomy, voices,
theory's puppet show in shadow. Climax is always possible. Immanent. Secrets
are everywhere. We can see our own cervixes or intestines live!
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