| are you out? or are you outed? | ||||
| do you put out? or are you put out? | ||||
| are you out there? or are you there out? | ||||
| are you out of your
(Josh says fuckin’) mind? or is your mind out of you?
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| Having inhaled the other into the body of text, the mouth exhales and releases not what it had inhaled but a new creation, one that belongs to neither the self nor the other totally but both in parts. Letting the other in encourages the self to let all sorts of dangerous things out. My lips, I figured out, only worked because they were conscious. Without feeling, I would leak continuously. (A principle that might hold true, I thought uncomfortably, for other parts of my body as well.) Much like my inability to keep secrets when I was young (my grandmother nearly killed me when I told everyone the wedding present she had gotten my uncle), opening the text makes the tongue wag in all sorts of ways. | ||||
what is she making? (edited from MS clipart gallery) |
Telling secrets, letting things leak out always gets you in trouble with hegemony – if too many people know then there’s no reason to keep folks quiet because the knowledge belongs to no one and everyone at the same time. But if I don't own it (and it is unfaithful to me) nobody else does either, or ever did. It's just a singing, snarling wind blowing through our mouths on its way through time. And I have as big a mouth as anyone. When the text, the body, goes out into the world, it goes out of writer’s mouth not simply as the writer’s creation but the creation of all the different fabrics, all the different texts, that were pieced together in the making of the language. | |||
| Importantly however, they are only pieced together and have the potential to rip and show their gaps if too much pressure is put on their seams. Her parting words of advice: "If you talk too much you'll wear out your scarlet plush tongue, which ought to have been hemmed on the edges." (advice) However, the patchwork girl does not listen to this "advice" given to her by Mary and the Crooked Magician. She tries at first, but her parts revolt with blood flowing everywhere and if it said anything, it said too careful, too busy, too long. | ||||
| This quilt of a woman soon realizes that The energy required to stay actively engaged, heart and mind creating without cease, makes the temptation of simplicity great. Becoming a real woman meant learning what to pare off. My actual body was craggy, sprouting, leafy, crumbling. My imagined body was utterly smooth. In my tub, I worked the pumice on my scars. I painted them with acid, daubed them with facial scrubs, snipped and filed. Archangel of the bathtub, working at it. We so easily forget that the only real simplicity is some ultimate balance among things, a "quietude" that comes, not when directly sought, but of its own accord when we experience the most profound creative instant, everything at once in equilibrium. |
page 67 of Baum's The Patchwork Girl of Oz |
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| I could be a kind of extinguished wish for a human life, or I could be something entirely different: instead of fulfilling a determined structure, I could merely extend, inventing a form as I went along. This decision turned me from a would-be settler to a nomad. The only way to keep my balance is to keep on moving. Given the choice between keeping quietly ladylike and living out loud, our patchwork girl was growing up into an outline I couldn't see, like a scribble of crayon in a coloring book, trying to guess what I'd be before I touched the edges anywhere, but I knew that whatever it was would be big and complicated. | ||||
from Shelley Jackson's INERADICABLE STAIN
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Wings, tails, extra legs: I could cope with anything but the usual. I shed my scales (I still have one, in a bed of dirty cotton: a translucent bit of nail with faint concentric stripes) and nothing more came of it, but I took it as a comforting kind of promise: anything might muscle its way out of me. I’d really like to dress up in spangled platform boots and plug that novel into a really big amp. And what I love in you, in myself, in us no longer takes place: the birth is never accomplished, the body never created once and for all, the form never definitely completed, the face always still to be formed. The lips never opened or closed on a truth. | |||
