Lidia Yuknavitch - The Chronology of Water

Am I beautiful?

Love is a lifedeath.

I KIND OF DON’T WANT TO TELL YOU THIS.

I mean I was going to write this whole book not telling you. I left words out. On purpose. But I know why I was hiding words from you.

Ask me about my life as a sexualized, gendered body, and I can tell you tales. Endless stories of a woman who was me and is also all of us. Our bodies the flesh metaphor for all human experience. This. This happened to me. This is where I failed. Where I went blind. Where I opened my legs. Where I chewed off my hand. Where I tried to off myself, or offer myself up as useful, or deigned to ask for love, or ventured into pleasure or pain. Or just got drunk and fucked up. Again. Here are the scars. I am a swimmer. My shoulders are broad. My eyes, are blue.

Ask me about writing, well, that’s a fierce private. Writing, she is the fire of me. Where stories get born from that place where life and death happened in me. She carries me and will be the death of me.

So when I tell you this, a little bit it makes me want to bite you.

Really hard.

Some people say that words can’t “happen” to you. I say they can.

One of my last nights with Devin I got all hopped up on mushrooms and went for a walk by the train tracks. We lived next to the tracks in Eugene-in a neighborhood where you would find needles in the alley but also yuppies trying to buy and restore their way to better. I was supposed to be writing a dissertation. That night we sat down on the ground. We drank Chivas from a flask. Then a train slow rolled by, and I jumped up and chased it laughing, and then I hopped it. I have no idea why. I looked back at the image of husband getting smaller and smaller until I couldn’t see him. I loved that receding him. Maybe it was our last good night. The wind felt excellent. The motion of a self riding to nowhere for all she was worth took my breath away.

Of course somewhere around five minutes later I snapped out of it and thought AHHHH what am I doing and thought JUMP IDIOT and so I did, I jumped off, and military rolled through some ground gravel until I came to a scraped to shit stop, laughing and laughing the high of organics and free. I walked home. Devin was exactly where I’d left him, kind of passed out like a giant drunk Caucasian Buddha.

The night after my gravel roll I sat at my computer with my fingers on the keys. My hands were all scraped up. My forearms and elbows, too. My chin and cheek. I was supposed to be writing my dissertation chapter on Kathy Acker, who by then I’d met. I stared at lines of hers I had typed and referenced as part of my critical discussion on the screen:

Every time I talk to one of you, I feel like I’m taking layers of my own epidermis, which are layers of still freshly bloody scar tissue, black brown and red, and tearing each one of them off so more and more of my blood shoots in to your face. This is what writing is to me a woman (ES, 210).

When I went to write words over the top of hers, kind of I felt like I might throw up. Instead of the dissertation chapter, I began to write a story. The first line that came out of me was: “I am a woman who talks to herself and lies.”

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.

SO MY FIRST BOOK OF STORIES BEAT MY DISSERTATION to print. I got published by an independent press. One that did not care about how far I’d paddled outside the mainstream. I called the book Her Other Mouths . In every story, intense things happen to a body. Because, well, they do. Did. And I knew how to tell it. Words the body of me.

I did finish my dissertation though. It felt like walking through fire. A crucible. I called it Allegories of Violence . By some bizzaro twist of fate it got published too. I still think it happened to someone else. But something weirdly good came from it. The two mes? We began to get to know each other. Intellectual me and blood bodied me began to hang out. Brush each other’s hair. Take bubble baths and draw soap pictures on each other’s backs and clink glasses late into the night.