Author: cinnamongirl

Your name is the only thing you have for your entire life. Your name is always with you, a part of you, and yet your name is invisible. A ghost limb, guiding you through the world as do your feet. But your heels can develop blisters, your toes can grow warts, your toenails can cut your skin if you let them get really long. What pain does the name inflict upon the soul, if it inflicts no pain upon the body?

Do our names decide our fates? Are our names the titles of our photographs, presenting themselves before the fragments of our person? Geryon doesn’t express himself through spoken language, yet language precedes, and helps him conceive, his photographs. In chapter 38 of Autobiography of Red, Geryon has a dream in the backseat of the rental car on the way to Huaraz. He dreams that “creatures that looked/like young dinosaurs (yet they were strangely lovely) went crashing/through underbrush and tore/their hides which fell behind them in long red strips. He would call/the photograph ‘Human Valentines.’” (Carson, 131). 

Geryon’s dream, his artistic vision, is nameless. Nor do the creatures he dreams about have names; they are “like young dinosaurs” (Carson, 131), but calling them dinosaurs would be wrong. They are living without language. Escaping language. The “long red strips” of “their hides” represent the traces of those who cannot speak in the “Human” world (Carson, 131). We see these animals, these quasi-humans, these humans with red wings, but we do not hear them. We see them, but we do not See or Understand them. 

“Human Valentines”: Their love for us expressed in our language, but expressing their vision. The name of the photograph precedes the photograph itself (maybe the photograph will never even be taken), but the name follows the essence of something, someone, that defies what I can write about, that defies what Geryon can say. 

Maybe we grow into our names, or grow with them. Maybe our art, our lives, are nameless. Maybe this is why people change their names. Maybe some people will never feel satisfied with language. Sometimes I fear I am one of those people.

To set the mood, please listen to this before reading: https://open.spotify.com/track/4wbDALtjwuwBxtMgjuumoi?si=5e3fa87c36e44389

Sometimes I wonder if she’d like me. I know she’d love me, but I don’t know if she’d like me. I like her though. I didn’t like her when I knew her, but I like her now. Her hair, blonde on her head, brown on her arms, black on her… that part. I like how she opened that part up for people, she wanted to share it, to share herself. She wanted to bloom and I like that about her, her desire, her longing. I wonder if she’d like me now. If she’d look at me and see a cereus in bloom, or if she’d see a cereus still yet to bloom, or––and this is my worst fear––if she’d see that I bloomed a long time ago.

I like how she had visions, I have visions too. Visions of her, visions of us finally reuniting. Mala and Pohpoh were “one and the same” (Shani Mootoo, 173) for many years before they became different. Before Pohpoh actualized her conception of Mala, before she broke free from herself and became that conception, that imagined person who always used to comfort her. What if everything is better imagined? Pohpoh felt release––relief––when she woke up from her dream of being Mala to find herself in Mala’s body. But Mala, too, now spends her days dreaming, not wishing she could be Pohpoh, but wishing she could see her again. Wishing she could talk to her. Wishing she could smell her. 

Mala wishes that “she and that Pohpoh could have been two separate people” (Shani Mootoo, 173) and that she could, somehow, help Pohpoh become someone else, not Mala as she is now. She wishes that “they could have been best friends, or even that she could have been the mother of Pohpoh or at least her older sister” (Shani Mootoo, 173). That way Mala could still be with Pohpoh, could watch after her, and make sure that she was “protected” from both her father and from herself. Pohpoh became Mala because she didn’t have Mala, or a Mala-like figure. Pohpoh conceived of Mala and put her on, like a cloak, like a sheet. But now that cloak has swallowed her, that sheet has suffocated her, and she isn’t Pohpoh anymore at all. Mala lives in queer time, but Pohpoh is a time traveler. 

Pohpoh bloomed at night, like a cereus. She knew she was going to bloom and she was going to bloom brilliantly, quickly, briefly. She knew her blossoming would be pungent, she knew it would repulse some people, those people who don’t understand the beauty of death. The love of death. The life of it. 

Sometimes I wonder if she killed herself a different way. Sometimes I wonder if she’d like me, if she’d understand that I did what she wanted me to do, I just had to go and make a stink of it. I wonder if she’d think I’m beautiful regardless. If her conception, actualized, was what she imagined it to be. I’m afraid it isn’t, and I’m afraid I’ve let her down. All the pills and the smoking and the stealing and the hurting––I’m chasing with hedonism. I can’t swallow the thought of the Unknown. But she could, and she knew the Unknown was a friend––like Pohpoh knew. The Unknown was herself, a cereus, not yet in bloom, but already emanating its odor. Already past Goodbye, and past its past lives.

“‘Go and make some tea, darling, will you,’ he said and off she went.  

‘Do you have to pay her to be so obedient or is it love?’” (169)

“I’ve always had a wild streak, it starts with a throbbing in the temple and then a slide into craziness I can recognise but can’t control. Can control. Had controlled for years until I met Louise.” (174)

`The narrator of Written on the Body makes several snide comments about Elgin’s “hot date” when they show up announced at Elgin’s home in search of Louise. Even though the narrator was not expecting Louise to be with Elgin, they were hoping that Elgin would tell them Louise’s whereabouts. They were hoping that, even after Elgin and Louise’s separation, Elgin would still be obedient to Louise. He would tell the narrator where she is because he loves her, and therefore he follows her, putting his self-interests behind her interests. (And we all know that Louise was interested in the narrator.)

But Elgin was not obedient to Louise, and he did not tell the narrator where Louise is because he does not know. Louise ran from him, he was following her but she ran, and she hid. Love is obedience. But you cannot be obedient if there is no one to obey. 

The narrator snarls at Elgin: ‘Do you have to pay her to be so obedient or is it love?’ I think the narrator’s thick, frosty layer of sarcasm is hiding their envy. They have never loved so purely, they have never been obedient. The narrator has abandoned all of their previous partners. They confess to the reader that they have “always had a wild streak” that “starts with a throbbing in the temple and then a slide into craziness [they] can recognise but can’t control. Can control. Had controlled for years until [they] met Louise.” After Elgin refuses to tell the narrator where Louise is, the narrator punches him, letting this wild streak of theirs run red––the punch is a flash of passion and rebellion, like the narrator’s relationship with Louise. The narrator controlled their wild streak “for years until [they] met Louise,” implying that loving or being infatuated with Louise was a loss of their control. 

Love is obedience. If the narrator loved Louise, they would obey her wish to remain hidden. If Louise loved the narrator, or Elgin for that matter, she would not have run from either of them. She would have let them follow her, and she would have followed them. Love is a sacrifice, a discipline. It is the taming of wild streaks, the desire to have control of and be controlled by the lover.

Written on the Body is a very lonely book. When I finished reading it, I did not feel any satisfaction whatsoever. I think the narrator is despondent, lost, and formless. Maybe that is why they took to the page. They needed some scaffolding for their existential dread. The “queerest” thing about the narrator is not their lack of name or pronouns. It is not their collection of sexual and romantic partners of all genders and sexualities. The queer thing about the narrator is that they are not even obedient to themself. They cannot commit to anything or anyone because they have not learned self-love. 

“She stroked my hair. ‘I want you to come to me without a past. Those lines you’ve learned, forget them. Forget that you’ve been here before in other bedrooms in other places. Come to me new. Never say you love me until that day when you have proved it.’

‘How shall I prove it?’

‘I can’t tell you what to do.’

The maze. Find your own way through and you shall win your heart’s desire. Fail and you will wander for ever in these unforgiving walls. Is that the test? (54).”

Louise wants the narrator to be something that they are not––a non-self, a blank journal, a space for a narrative that she and the narrator can write together. She wants to grow a new relationship on a bed of dust from her marriage, which is written and read and dead. She asks the narrator to be a part of her new story, but the narrator is unsure if they should begin again––if they should abandon their lone journey through the maze and let Louise guide them through it instead, adding to the palimpsest of their body instead of erasing it. The narrator has done this many times before, abandoning themself again and again for another love. Louise knows this, and wants the narrator to “come to her new,” despite knowing that she can’t tell the narrator “what to do”––the narrator can’t even tell themself what to do. 

Written on the body, palimpsest-like, is everything we have ever been, everything we have ever been told we are, and underneath all of that––maybe––is what we will be. If you erase all of the writing on the skin, maybe there is blank space for a new narrative. But is erasure possible? This is what I imagine is going through the narrator’s mind. This is why they keep letting love guide them––out of fear that erasure isn’t possible. 

The maze. It promises everything to the traveler who makes it through on their own. But if you make it through the maze by yourself, what else could you possibly want? Making it through the maze, erasing the palimpsest of their lovers, would be detrimental to our narrator, who knows nothing else than other people, and their relationship to other people. I think if the narrator made it through the maze, they would realize it is not Louise that their heart desires, it is not Louise or Crazy Frank or Bathsheba, but themself. And who is that? I don’t know, neither do you, and neither do they. 

The maze. It promises nothing to the traveler who wanders its walls forever. And how does the traveler find themselves in such a situation? Maybe because they aren’t traveling alone. They are too busy wondering about their partner’s mindscape to notice their own walls closing in. I think the narrator finds Louise where Louise finds herself. Free, past the walls of the maze. Independent, irrevocable, and icy, like a statue. 

But Louise cannot say, “Leave me now and meet me on the other side of these walls.” She says “I can’t tell you want to do,” because the narrator must find their own way through—they cannot follow Louise, like they followed all of their past lovers, getting lost in the maze while keeping their eyes fixed on the statue, the lover, at the exit. Walking in circles, thinking they are getting closer, maybe the narrator must close their eyes and trust their intuition instead. It’s not like they’ll find themselves more lost.