Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

The Good-bye Mime

The good-bye mime is probably the most therapeutic behavioral imitation available, yet the very notion of therapy involves a promise of relief, which itself is one of the more stubborn American feelings, and not to be succumbed to, so this form of fake behavior should be treated carefully. If too much comfort is derived from performing the good-bye mime, it should be discontinued. In short, the good-bye mime involves constructing nonflesh enemies who can be “killed” through mime weaponry, strangling, drowning, and other means decided by the woman “waving” good-bye. The kill function, as a general behavior in this world, is not available to very many persons without legal consequence, yet a certain love reduction can probably only be accomplished through the mimed slaughter of persons orbiting the woman’s life, especially those doing so to an excessive degree, the fathers, the brothers, the so-called lovers, the strangers. A nonflesh duplicate of these enemies, or mannequin equivalents, can be aggressively mistreated by a woman at will — stabbed, shot, punched, and pummeled — and the result is an outrush of attachment sensations (friendliness), which can be the most resistant to emotion flushing. The good-bye mime should be executed at a private kill site, where vocalizations may be freely released and a wide cache of weaponry is available. A woman should kill her father, brothers, friends, and relevant strangers in this way whenever the trap of devotion begins to feel too real.

In turn, the suicide mime (carpenter), done when a woman’s personal shame volume (PSV) has become overly loud in her body and threatens to produce undesirable acts of contrition and apology, is a useful self-killing mime that, if performed frequently enough, can accelerate the zero heart attempt. In my experience, the suicide mime must be arpeggiated to work well: I must rapidly fake many suicides, through gunshot, hanging, and knife wounds, miming the actual death moment each time. Women might prefer to “Shakespeare” the death moment and draw it out over a full day, while others may find that “cartooning” it is more effective for shame reduction.

Equipment

The very notion of women’s pantomime is to conduct a life without things, so equipment itself becomes a paradox, and, with one or two exceptions, should be refused in favor of a pure mime life that could occur anywhere in the world without alteration. Although some women prefer to wear the full-body mood mitten and the empathic storm sock throughout their daily activities, I view this choice of attire as an arrogant display of reduced emotions, somewhat too preening and boastful, insulting to those persons who still are addicted to expression and emoting.

Yet one important device is indispensable to the frontier of women’s mime, and that is the body-correction full-length glass, the Translator, which serves as a window in front of the miming woman and distorts her actions in various ways: It makes her seem more friendly, it “males” her or “ages” her, it delays her gestures and plays them back later, for behavior festivals, and it creates a mirror template of refined women’s actions, for her to model her body after when she is practicing her behaviors.

Would It Hurt If You Mimed Your Father?

Miming a member of one’s own family (ambush) can create an interesting behavior minus that can nearly last forever, particularly if the family can work as a team to mime one another’s behavior (a figure eight), doing so in real time throughout their daily lives, swapping roles during those hard hours between sleep sessions. A camouflage mime occurs when several family members suddenly mime a single person (bull’s-eye), as when parents mime their son, for instance, and do not relent or admit that they are doing so; this is also called “overmiming,” or “love,” and can cause a very durable behavior minus in the boy whose behavior is being imitated, particularly if he goes by the name Ben Marcus. The overmime absolves the boy from being himself, given that his behavior is so well covered in the actions of others. He can watch his parents acting as he would, imitating him, until his head and heart become so quiet and small that quite possibly no one in the world can see him, and he can make his exit from all visible life without report.

1852

WOMEN IN MIDDLE DENVER seize celebration rights to the annual Festival of Stillness, previously observed and dominated by men. They travel in groups to mountainsides and forests outside of town, drink girls’ water, attire themselves in stiff sheets of weighted cotton, and seek a final, frozen posture, hoping apparently that the mountain weather will fossilize their bodies into a “one true pose,” to represent them for all time. Their bodies are displayed in a traveling exhibit called “Women’s Behavior Statues,” and teenage girls are asked to study and rehearse the more basic positions. The slogan “Action is harm” is coined that year and the Festival of Stillness becomes a dominant women’s holiday.

1934

Early Ohio weather is first captured and preserved, then played back later through a simple AM radio. These radios can be taken on picnics to the lake, for customized weather and simple wind performances, benefiting the other families parked there to eat sandwiches and cast pebbles into the water. If several families stationed on blankets along the shore play their radios in a simulcast, calibrating the tilt of their antennas to focus their broadcast just over the water, the sky appears stronger, the children’s words are clearly enunciated, and the currents in the water ripple more realistically. Every family has a favorite weather style, and a radio that will play it back for them. Sometimes it sounds like the shortest words of the American language, in particular the first names that are used to summon people up from sleep, to groom their heads with a softly blowing oil, preparing them to be addressed by the largest person in the house, often the mother or father.

1939

Long Island physician Valerie James, thirty-six, and a sister begin a practice devoted to what they call “Women’s Fuel.” She has studied anatomy with a local medical group for three years but is otherwise untrained. Before she develops her notorious line of medical drinks for women, the James Liquids, or Water for Girls (1955), she and her sister will attempt several techniques of altering the disposition of women: the water chair, bolted to the floor of a medicinal pool, which holds a woman underwater until her lungs give out and “expel from the body all toxicity”; a sleep sock slung over the doorway, that women might sleep “in the fashion that they stand”; high volumes of wind shot at a woman’s body to “massage the senses”; and endurance speaking (or language fasting), in which the woman speaks rapidly until collapse, to “deeply fatigue the head and free it of language pollutants.” Only the sleep sock, which enforces a female sleeping posture, will prove to have lasting credibility, although the language fast is adopted and modified by Sernier, who requires his students to undergo it before attending his lectures.

1966

A clear sock is devised by the body-sleeve specialist Ryman that will protect a woman’s head from men’s language, the so-called weapon of the mouth. The sock also works to block the entrance of television and radio transmissions, certain man-made aromas, and men’s wind. Because breathing is difficult when wearing the Ryman sock, fainting often results, and it is through this accident that the Listening Group discovers what it will term the “revelatory power of willful fainting,” and adopts the belief that regular drops in consciousness allow women to hear something deeply secret in the air. The Ryman sock will be fitted posthumously to the heads of dead Silentists, to aid their attainment of a possible women’s afterlife.