The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [65]
After the reading at the National Poetry Club, the agent Katherine Kidde from then Kidde, Hoyt and Piccard came up to me and asked me if I’d like representation. On the spot. My small sad throat stone. I went deaf and smiled and shook her hand. I thought I might cry in front of all the dressed up people. All that came out of my mouth was “I don’t know.”
She said, “OK then.”
All those open hands held out to me.
You see it is important to understand how damaged people don’t always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them. It’s a shame we carry. The shame of wanting something good. The shame of feeling something good. The shame of not believing we deserve to stand in the same room in the same way as all those we admire. Big red As on our chests.
I never thought to myself growing up, be a lawyer. An astronaut. The President. A scientist. A doctor. An architect.
I didn’t even think, be a writer.
Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It’s difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run.
If I could go back, I’d coach myself. I’d be the woman who taught me how to stand up, how to want things, how to ask for them. I’d be the woman who says, your mind, you imagination, they are everything. Look how beautiful. You deserve to sit at the table. The radiance falls on all of us.
I knew even on the plane back to the west as the evergreens and rivers came back into view through the perfect drizzle of home that if I was a woman writer, then I was a broken kind of woman writer. I drank many tiny bottles of airplane feel sorry for yourself. I flew back to Oregon without a book deal, without an agent, with only a head and heartful of beautiful memories about what it would be like to be a writer, since I’d eaten with them and shared such perfect company. It was the only prize I allowed myself.
But something in me had been born, still.
Dreaming in Women
SOMETIMES A MIND IS JUST BORN LATE, COMING THROUGH waves on a slower journey. You were never, in the end, alone. Isn’t it a blessing, what becomes from inside the alone.
With Marguerite Duras, you must lie down on a bed in an apartment in a foreign city - foreign to you - foreign enough so that you become the foreigner. Lose your name and your language. Lose your identity moorings. Lose your very thoughts. There must be shutters on the tall slightly open windows. The room must be blue. The floor made of stone. You must be naked. Her breath a whisper against your skin. Up the length of your body. Down. You must listen for the sounds of the city moving all around you. You must listen then beyond that, to the ocean and wind beyond all human motion. And then you must listen beyond that, to the blood in your ears and the drum of your heart and how a lover’s skin stories over you. At night, it will rain. Open the windows. Desire wets. There is no inside out but the body. Love unto death.
With Gertrude Stein there will be eating and paper. Tea and money. She will say it gracefully. She will say it with ice-cream. Eating and paper. A flesh circle. So kind. And then again again.
Make quiet for Emily Dickinson. Sing gently a hymn in between the heaves of storm. Let the top of your head lift. See? There are spaces between things. What you thought was nothingness carries the life of it.
In the next room H. D. has brought the walls down, but look how the light dances across the floor of things differently now. Even your feet are new.
With Hélène Cixous you must close your eyes and open your mouth. Wider. So open your throat opens. Your esophagus. Your lungs. Wider. So open your spine unclatters. Your hips swim loose. Your womb worlds itself. Wider. Open the well of your sex. Now speak your body from your other mouth. Yell corporeal prayer. This is writing.
Jean Rhys came through the vast corpus of literature like water cutting