The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [43]
As I made my way through literary history as a graduate literature duck I also wrote a story from the point of view of Dora. Joan of Arc. Emma Bovary. Hester Prynne. Helen of Troy. Sade’s mistress. Medusa. Eve. And the statue of liberty. Notice a motif?
In my story, Caddy is in the present. She lives next door to a tard neighbor boyman. Because she is sexually insatiable, and because he both scares her with his too white skin and his too big for his body head and his giant pants bulge and the sounds that come out of him instead of language and his pure physical brute force, she goes over to his house one day and takes her clothes off in front of him.
He bellows that Benjy bellow.
Then he attacks her and fucks her and nearly crushes her.
She loves it. She laughs until she cries and an ambulance comes.
Trite.
So after fantasizing about the dark alley and stomping around and cursing all things Chang Rae Lee that day, I decided to get a Ph.D.
Fuck all y’all “writers.” Woo Hoo.
I took a break from creative writing workshops - though I have to tell you - I positively HAUNTED the halls of the creative writing department. I don’t know why. I’d just find myself there, looking at bulletin boards, seeing what readings were coming up, grabbing random fliers from the office nerds. Twice I walked by a gorgeous tall guy with a ponytail who looked seriously like Marlon Brando but I didn’t talk to him. Writing student.
Sometimes the choices we make come from jealous lame petty places. But they are as real as it gets.
I entered the Ph.D. program. I went on to gloriously immerse myself in Derrida and Lacan and Kristeva and Foucault. In Homi K. Bhabha and Ed Said and Gayatri bad ass Chakravorty Spivak. In Dickinson and Whitman and Plath and Sexton and Adrienne you want some of this Rich and Ai and Eliot and PoundBeckettStoppardDurasFaulknerWoolfJoyce (though he kinda always made me want to piss on his grave) SyngeCortazarBorgesMarquezClariceL’InspecteurHenryMillerAnaissexatiousNinDerekWalcottBertoltBrechtPynchonSilko WintersonDjunaBarnesOscarWildeGertrudethemanSteinFlannerymotherfuckingO’ConnorRichardWrightBaldwinToniMorrisonRayCarverJohnCheeverMaxineHongKingstonSapphireDennisCooperKathyyoumakemefeellikemyskinisbeingsheeredoffAcker - cascades of authors kicking Chang Rae Lee’s scrawny little ass. Take that.
Yeah. Up until he won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1995 and it was his book I was assigned to read. I can’t tell you how great that felt. But what nagged at me no matter how far into the literary intellectual pool I ventured, no matter how well I swam its waters, was the story I had yet to write. Itching my fingers like fire.
Two terms later, I tried again. Graduate fiction writing workshop. This time the story I brought in wasn’t about voiceless women characters from literary history. This time the story was about my life. About fathers and swimming and fucking and dead babies and drowning. Written entirely in random fragments - how I understood my entire life. In the language - image and fragment and non-linear lyric passages - that seemed most precise. The story I brought in was called “The Chronology of Water.”
Something was coming out of my hands. Something about desire and language.
Chang Rae? Sorry I thought those things. Thanks for pissing me off all those years ago. Beautiful random nemesis.
Love Grenade II
WHEN I FIRST MET HANNAH IN GRADUATE SCHOOL I WAS a woman gone numb. I would do anything. Anytime. Anywhere.
I was using my body as a sexual battering ram. On anyone and anything available. In fact, you might say I sexualized my entire existence. It seemed to work a lot like alcohol and drugs. If you did it enough, you didn’t have to think