I believe what helene cixous was getting at with her own exponential need to write and with expressing the dire need for all women to write, was that we need to allow space for the sensual, for the right brained, for the image driven culture to find their voice in this typically male-driven, left brained culture of writing. You can see it in her writing, the expressive, incredibly image-filled words all strung together. She is writing the goddess, writing the simplicity that was first inscribed on clay. Rememberance being the point. She even states, once something is written, it is in the past, you now longer live it. Here I believe she is taping into the ideas behind cuniform, when cultures would write things down to remember, like what time of year they sowed seeds or how many cows they had. It wasn’t necessarily to capture anything and convey it but a simple way to place mind onto matter, a place to return to, a representation of image, imprinted. Its interesting how in remembering, in a sense we have become prone to forgetting..
Cixous beautifully conveys the tragedy of the male-driven culture that sprung from writing, in her own words she firmly states that, “Logos opens its great maw, and swallows us whole.” (Cixous, coming to writing, 46)
She asks the question, “What is the body for?”
This is fascinating to me, how can we see the part the body plays in a world where things are extracted from the body and written down on paper, removing the body from the equation? Can we write the body into writing? Will this remove the body from writing? Is it possible for the body to come into writing? Spoken word comes to mind, creating images and seeing words spill from the body. But I believe the written language has boundaries, a full point, and that point of overflowing comes when we think of the body. The body and writing can simply not survive together. Once you’ve written down the body you’ve lost the body. I believe what needs to happen is the gratitude for the body, for without the body, there can be no writing.
May 20th
paper
neuro
2 hours
May 21st
Paper
Neuro reverie
6 hours
May 22nd
Class (Eirick)
pottery
haikus
paper
3.5
May 23rd
Paper
pottery
“women who runs with the wolves”
“The vegetative soul”
6 hours
May 24th
Rose harvesting/medicine and lore
“Women who run with the Wolves”
6 hours
May 26th
Paper
reading response
reading women who run with the wolves
reading neuro
7 hours
Total hours: 30.5