my lover, writing

from the chronology of water by lidia yuknavitch

"some people say that words can't 'happen' to you. i say they can. . .

please understand, i loved reading literary theory - i mean, i devoured the primary texts as if they were romance novels - i dove into the discourse as if its waters were mine alone - my body song swam in between currents of language and thought. but trying to write critically, academically, hurt.
a lot.
why would someone do that to novels? for what purpose, other than a sadistic impulse to hush, silence, incarcerate art? it seemed like a violence to me to write that way about literature. it seemed false at best and repugnant at worst - murderous even.
in my dissertation the novels i'd chosen were astonishing pieces of noisy art. white noise and almanac of the dead and empire of the senseless - a book which i promise you, if you've never read it, will scrape your eyeballs. books in which culture towered and collapsed, border identities defied the cult of good citizenship and revolutionaries turned back on their liberators with fire for hair. wars of militarization and wars of race and wars of gender and wars of fathers and language and power and wars of just the human heart played out page after page, taking my breath away.
when i set my hands to writing literary criticism - that act of writing so legitimized by white male knowledge - i felt like i was a torturer. a killer. a betrayer. an abuser. i slept with three of my professors - two men and one woman - i think trying to get the body back into discourse. HEY! what about bodies? the noisy, wet, rule-breaking body that seemed erased by all that lofty thought. it didn't work.
OF COURSE i considered quitting graduate school. i paid my ticket, i rode the ride. right? half the people i started with quit. i did not have to continue toward scholar. but something wouldn't let me. some deep wrestling match going on inside my rib house and gray matter. some woman in me i'd never met. you know who she was? my intellect. when i opened the door and there she stood, with her sassy red reading glasses and fitted skirt and leather bookbag, i thought, who the hell are you? crouching into a defensive posture and looking at her warily out of the corner of my eye. watch out, woman.
to which she replied, i'm lidia. i have a desire toward language and knowledge that will blow your mind. and i'm here to write a dissertation.
yeah. right. whatever. and anyway, where did you even come from?
oh, i think you know. i'm from your father. now open the goddamned door.
my father. whose mind curled around art and architecture and classical music and film. whose intellect i carried in my blood rivers. that's when my two mes had it out. the me i'd forged to leave a family and body batter my way into the world, and the me i'd never met, or even knew existed, except perhaps hidden in my hands, hiding like the crouch of dreams in my fingers. my father's daughter.
'i am a woman who talks to herself and lies.'
the night after i jumped from the train of things, at the computer my heart raced. my first book came out of me in a great gushing return of the repressed. like a blood clot had loosened. my hands frenzied. words from my whole body, my entire life, or the lives of women and girls whose stories got stuck in their throats came gushing out. nothing could have stopped the stories coming out of me. even though my hands and arms and face hurt - bruised and cut from falling from a train - or a marriage - or a self in the night - i wrote story after story. there was no inside out. there were words and there was my body, and i could see through my own skin. i wrote my guts out. until it was a book.
until my very skin made screamsong."