Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

What Do I Do with the Bones After I Remove Them?

If enough hardened bone remains after removal, a behavior whistle, or body flute, should be carved. Music played through an instrument derived from a woman’s own body will tend to calm her feelings, pacify the various rages of the day, and offer a sense of collapsed time, which aids in decreasing attachments for persons or things. The songs from the body flute may also be effective in halting the motion of others, or causing them to sleep or cry or harm themselves, depending on the tune that’s played.

Animal Mimes

It is only natural that miming an animal (slumming) would produce an internal animal state of reduced feelings. Most persons, including women, regularly slum an animal without knowing they are doing so. A basic zoological catalog of actions, such as the Behavior Bible, can be followed by the miming woman (the quiet Gladys) looking to cool down the intensity of her feelings, and these animal actions can more or less be subtly integrated into daily life, appended to the so-called human behavior a woman exhibits, so that basic tasks like walking, swimming, reading, and speaking can be augmented with various animal behaviors: stamping the feet, mewling, scratching, bucking, kicking, lumbering, hissing, skulking in the grass. It will be for the individual woman to determine which animals offer the behavior models she most needs to eliminate or conceal. There are so many animals in the world now, and the history of behavior has become so vast, that a woman should have no trouble finding a creature that corresponds to her emotion surplus (fiend quotient), but the search for an appropriate animal should very likely begin on the American farm. My animal-mime practice, when it was required of me, centered on a creature known as the horse. The horse postures, stances, and attitudes I pursued — the trot, gallop, canter, feeding from a bag, shaking my “mane,” rearing up with my “hooves” when I was introduced to people— including an intricate program of neighing, whinnying, and snorting, which I deployed orally at every opportunity, until I had successfully and legibly integrated bursts of these noises into my everyday speech so that I appeared merely to be loudly clearing my throat — these horse intrusions required so much attention from me that the result, at the end of the day, was inevitably to leech me of every active feeling I was aware of and thus cleanse my rioting heart down to the simplest, pumping thing. Indeed perhaps the chief effect of miming an animal is a kind of deep exhaustion not possible otherwise.

My earliest memories of my father involve his dog mimes, then later a wolf act that became indistinguishable from his real behavior, an addition to his fatherhood that kept him out-of-doors, knocking about in the yard, hard to please. During his dog phase, in the mornings at our Ohio home, he prowled outside my bedroom door and growled and scratched and barked, sending up moans and howls and threatening sounds, sometimes gnashing his teeth as though he were tearing at a piece of meat. He often pretended he was eating me. If I went to the door, still cautious and confused from sleep, to determine what was the ruckus, I’d only hear him scamper away and discover in his place nothing but scratch marks and slobber and a strange odor, along with a hard, dark nugget of waste. Upon my return to bed, he’d be back at it, barking his hard, father’s bark and pawing at my door, throwing himself into it, whining.

My mother’s animal of choice appeared to be a creature I could only fathom to be another woman, very much older, probably her own mother, who was stooped and sad and sometimes aimless. It was a quiet mime, with only the subtlest style, the most refined behavioral imitation I’ve ever observed, entailing long days of stillness by the window, elegant use of her hands to hide her face, and a deep expulsion of sighs that bordered on language but lacked, always, the requisite shape of the mouth to carve the air into words.

Is There Anything I Should Not Pretend to Do?

Miming an emotion is the most dangerous gestural pretense, for obvious reasons. If an emotional condition is unintentionally mimed, such as weeping, laughing, wincing in fright, doubting — even when done as a joke, as though to suggest, Wouldn’t it be funny if I actually felt something? — the only real antidote can be an extended performance of the nothing mime, a stationary pose held outdoors for a full day, which requires a woman to do exactly nothing until the mimed emotions begin to subside. The danger of a mimed emotion is that there is very little difference, if any, between pretending to feel something and actually feeling it; in some cases, the pretense is even stronger, the imitation cuts deeper and lasts longer. Thus the nothing mime, conducted in any weather and deployed with the use of a full-body mood mitten, which registers a woman’s emotional activity on its surface, is prescribed.

The Thrust Mime

The gestures of intercourse (stitching), when undertaken without another body or prop, are useful in purging feelings of confusion and doubt. If I do not believe I can accomplish a task, performing the thrust mime, an extended stitch and volley, tends to erase my doubt and send me back into my life with renewed commitment. My common stitch occurs with a wide stance against a waist-high table, one arm crossed behind my back for balance, the other leaning on the table (military push-up — style). On the count of three, I begin to thrust, a slow pace at first, smooth and solid, with a striding tilt to my hips, as though I were probing a stiff pudding. I drive deep with arched back and clenched buttocks. At the full-thrust position, I “flurry” with short, fast strokes, then pull back and “go long,” slowing the thrust almost to a stop and drawing all the way back (the seesaw); intermittently, I withdraw and hold a long pause, then nozzle at the threshold, which involves rising up and down on my toes (also called Peeking in the Window), before returning to the basic thrust and flurry rhythm, the parry, the dodge, the throw. This style also works over a staircase, though both arms are used for support (the civilian). When practiced against a wall, a shoulder can be relied on for pivoting, with both arms clasped behind the back (the gentleman). People will naturally have to discover an authentic thrust mime for themselves, based upon the primary gesture that brings about release. They may also employ a bump coach, if their budget permits it. If the act of thrusting is not the chief sexual gesture, then the mime should be changed accordingly. Knitting and pecking are other useful intercourse paradigms. I have seen women perform the elegant fade-away jumper mime, the elaborate sauté, the arched mime of hula hoop, and the rise and shine, a somberly grave sexual style that always saddens me, and I suspect these actions were based on sexual experiences, given the gentle facial tremors I observed and the strained gestures of concentration. There are probably thousands of different ways to mime human intercourse — to stitch the air with one’s hips — not to mention the many animal styles that also have their uses, yet a woman should not be discouraged if her intercourse mode is different or unusual to witness, if it requires a complicated and new physical presentation that might frighten other people who could mistake her stitch for a seizure or rough sleeping. A deceitful, conservative stitch is helpful to no one, nor will anyone be fooled. More and more women, during moments of doubt and confusion, will be pausing in their daily affairs to mime briefly a personalized moment of intercourse, however strenuous and interruptive it might first seem, and thus recover their courage to move about in the world.