Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

I further understand that this contract against motion does not imply a legal agreement against nutrient input or other body-sustenance strategies, activities falling under the categories of eating or feeding, but not limited to them. Gesture-free nutrition intake is permissible and advisable, whether through intravenous methods or a food-entry system that can be accomplished without the technique of chewing, handling, or in any way moving in relation to the nutrient stuffs. If I hire a male feeder or biscuit person, I acknowledge that I am responsible for any accidental motion that might occur as he moves around my body, deploying the food into my person, inputting it, injecting it, catapulting or throwing or rubbing it in with the poultice, the dinner brush, or the swab. He is permitted to move me while mediating the food into my system, but if I am seen to move toward food or him or anything or anywhere, including but not exclusive to Objects of the Night that roam outside my periphery, this contract is terminated and I might legally be killed by Susan, whom I hereby designate as my executioner should I fail the terms of this agreement. I invite Susan to come and get me. I ask Susan to end my days.

I admit that because all motion can be argued to be a collaboration pursued with another person, object, or wind, there is no time that I am not complicit in my own motion, an accomplice to the crime of nonstillness, and thus already in breach of this contract, producing hard excesses of visible behavior, betraying myself. If convicted, I may be put to sleep with a Thompson Stick and then interred in the Women’s Weather Museum, put on display or exhibited in a show concerned with portraying the various ways women have failed to be still, though I admit that the verb form “to be” cannot precisely be used with regard to the condition of stillness, implying motion as it does, suggesting tremors, frenzy, spasm, activities that are seeable, which by definition are off-limits to me, as all forms of language eventually will be. I authorize in advance the use of my body as a caution against the future errors that girls not even born might be prone to commit, and I hereby license the Silentist organization, and any of its museum affiliates or community centers or shame igloos or apology huts, to apply any curatorial device whatsoever if it is deemed to create an instructional spectacle of my physical error, including, but not limited to, wall mounting, animated installation, taxidermy, hologram, math, flashlight.

Any fasting procedure conducted concurrently with this promise of stillness is an addition I make by my own design. If I fast, I fast under no impression from the Silentist organization, or any similar women’s sound-prevention society or listening club, that the abstention of food intake will assist the activity of stillness here proposed. Starvation, should it occur, cannot be linked to the Silentist organization or its affiliates but is entirely the result of my own actions, which have not been influenced by any extant women’s group. Nor can I at any time claim or imagine such a connection to exist, either through interpretations of their words or direct citation of such, including, but not limited to, quoting, sampling, footnoting, or applying slogans to my garments. If I starve, it is through my own active avoidance of that which would reverse starvation — namely, food, pellets, cloth, and liquids. I further understand that starvation begins the moment nutrient input or foodstuff acquisition ends, the point at which my mouth cavity lacks population and is fully hollow, save for those objects that have organic residence there, including, but not limited to, the teeth and gums and tongue. A person not eating at this very moment is technically beginning to starve and is thus legally starving, in which case I hereby admit that I am starving right now, already, and thus will have been starving before I signed this document, continuing to starve as I read it, and starving at this very moment, a statement that, when uttered, can never be untrue, which indicates that starvation is a pre-existing condition for me and not covered by any grandfather clause endorsed by the Silentist organization. Nor can I assume that to traverse this border of starvation/consumption by sandbagging my head with a lifetime supply of slow-acting food that will drip down my throat for the duration of my alert term as a person is a sanctioned antidote to the problem of terminal hunger, or that there is a sanctioned antidote for the problem of terminal hunger, not to mention a cure. I admit that it is not possible to be in a constant state of eating, or “fugue feeding,” because eating interferes with breath. For the purposes of this agreement, I recognize eating and breathing to be in a primary competition with each other to dominate the mouth.

By executing this promise of stillness, I sever all future rights to discuss the results of my actions, whether through interpretation, reflection, public memory, dispute, debate with persons who move, or otherwise. I may not use words or signs of the hand or conduct my face through a gymnastics of code that might present some person or other appropriate receptacle standing opposite me, or outside of the space where I can be said to be standing, even if I am prone on a rug and blinded by pain with a hot poker pressed against my neck, with a coherent notion of what it is like, and has been like, to be, or have been, me. Or, if this pronoun does little to produce the suggestion of my person to the attention of others, Me, then whatever word, words, or symbols I use to designate the flesh mistake that covers me, stands for me, actually is me, hosts me, collaborates to materialize my spirit, or leads others to believe that I am being referred to, will indicate my special accident. Doing so shall void me from this agreement and subject me to possible living-prison incarceration, hard-motion punishments, or other public demonstrations of discipline to be determined by the Silentist organization or any punishment strategist designated to act on behalf of the Silentist organization, whether publicly or in secret, or otherwise.

I understand that by choosing a personal paralysis zone, or Shush House, I thus designate the spot from which I may not thereafter retire. This spot must therefore be designated with care, and is hereby referred to as the Final Place, though it can also be known as the Den when I am employing covert messages in the presence of motion addicts. Under no circumstances may I infer that there is an ideal Final Place, or any such thing as a recommended area, from which it is thought best to execute the promise of stillness. Such an understanding on my part, as all understandings ultimately are, would be entirely in error and my sole responsibility and surely a potential occasion for future regret, not to mention punishment and breach of contract. Thus I concede that to draw conclusions would be illegally to engage in deduction, which is a process I choose to take on, and fail at, myself, admitting ahead of time that it is my own folly. So-called good-luck nooks and lobbies are only superstitiously termed (as all terming and naming and definining operate superstitiously to outwit silence) and cannot officially be said to impart greater likelihood of success to the woman bearing down upon herself to end all viewable actions. If I choose a Final Place that has already been chosen, or been designated the Den of another woman, be it an igloo or debris hut or woolen tent, I may either seize that place through forcing motion onto the present occupant, tempting her with motion-inducing gestures such as “the crab,” “the dash,” or “the trot,” as well as other taunting semaphores used to regulate the flight of birds, or I may vacate such an arena in favor of an unoccupied zone, though I hereby admit that there is no such thing as an unoccupied zone, that wherever I go, I do damage to what was there, by either killing or displacing it, that my presence encourages something else’s absence, that the term “my body” implies no one else’s body, that by moving through air and time, I kill what was attempting to rest or habitate or hold steady. I remove that thing from its chosen space and effectively deny its reentry. I act as a warden of a prison in reverse, since wherever I am, no one else can be, so that to execute this agreement is to do a violence, for which I hereby admit my guilt. I admit that even by speaking or shouting or murmuring or babbling or humming, I crowd my personal airspace, and thus someone’s potential personal airspace, with code and thus limit the insertion of codes by others, deny their entry, hoard the airways, create a blockade. For this and other crimes of motion, I hereby admit my guilt.