PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS ON A MANIFESTO OF WOMANNESS IN MULTITUDES, OR
A TOPOGRAPHY IN FIFTEEN CHAPTERS
What is the dance between reclaiming the self and allowing it to be consumed? “There is a powerful saying: Elle habla por en medio en las piernas, ‘She speaks from between her legs.’”3 I drove my soul a hundred miles into dry earth just to sit beneath the planets as they recrossed the signature of my birth. >>
At the height of summer’s heat I dreamt1 of the Queen of Bondage. Bondage/ing, I can’t remember which. The code of union2. I awoke with her image still fresh in my mind amidst the smoke of morning, the smoke of fireworks, the smoldering ashes of us. Shunga photos. Peaches and plums. She was all in black atop a throne adorned with wolves and hawks and blooming hothouse flowers. >>
All that is nature and all that is cosmic and all that is female-bodied teaches us that life itself cannot exist without the void. Nor creation of any kind. These are the blood messages. The burden of alchemy. Void we come and void we go and through voids we pass, ritualistically, privately, unseen-ly, as a bridge from one skin to the next. >>
Circe’s temple with moon snakes and future tongues. A poet of the earth. My being born of earth and air but with the rhythms6 of the sea. Milk and bloody and honey. To erase our “centuries of partly-conscious experience of silent complicity in a myth we did not choose.”7 “Come away with me, he said, we will live on a desert island.”8 >>
A few days later he asks me again, in the morning again, in the sun again, like gently taking my temperature. By then my whole self is rinsed clear by the shock of nature, by the unbroken night4 as it stretched above my sleeping form. Are you happy, he asks and as I start to equivocate he pins me still. >>