Estoy caminando aprisa por las estriaciones de luz y oscuridad tiradas bajo una arcada. Soy una mujer en la plenitud de la vida con ciertos poderes, y esos poderes severamente limitados por autoridades cuyas caras raramente veo. Soy una mujer en la plenitud de la vida manejando a su poeta muerto en un negro Rolls-Royce a través de un paisaje de crepúsculos y abrojos. Una mujer con cierta misión que obedecida al pie de la letra la dejará intacta. Una mujer con nervios de pantera una mujer de contactos entre Hell’s-Angels una mujer sintiendo la abundancia de sus poderes en el momento preciso en que no debe usarlos una mujer juramentada con la lucidez que ve a través de fuegos humeantes y de mutilaciones criminales de estas subterráneas calles a su poeta muerto aprendiendo a caminar hacia atrás contra el viento al otro lado del espejo
When Adrienne Rich said “our minds and bodies are inseparable in this life, and when we allow our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger”
From the fifties and early sixties, I remember a cycle. It began when I had picked up a book or began trying to write a letter… . The child (or children) might be absorbed in busyness, in his own dream world; but as soon as he felt me gliding into a world which did not include him, he would come to pull at my hand, ask for help, punch at the typewriter keys. And I would feel his wants at such a moment as fraudulent, as an attempt more- over to defraud me of living even for fifteen minutes as myself – Adrienne Rich
The void is not something created by patriarchy, or racism, or capitalism. It will not fade away with any of them. It is part of every woman.
“The dark core,” Virginia Woolf named it, writing of her mother. The dark core. It is beyond personality; beyond who loves us or hates us. We begin out of the void, out of darkness and emptiness. It is part of the cycle understood by the old pagan religions, that materialism denies. Out of death, rebirth; out of nothing, something.
The void is the creatrix, the matrix. It is not mere hollowness and anarchy. But in women it has been identified with lovelessness, barrenness, sterility. We have been urged to fill our “emptiness” with children. We are not supposed to go down into the darkness of the core.
Yet, if we can risk it, the something born of that nothing is the beginning of our truth.
The liar in her terror wants to fill up the void, with anything. Her lies are a denial of her fear; a way of maintaining control.
Why do we feel slightly crazy when we realize we have been lied to in a relationship?
Women’s love for women has been represented almost entirely through silence and lies. The institution of heterosexuality has forced the lesbian to dissemble, or be labeled a pervert, a criminal, a sick or dangerous woman, etc., etc. The lesbian, then, has often been forced to lie, like the prostitute or the married women.
First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone.
There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it.
Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment.
I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin.
First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element.
And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed
the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters.
This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he
whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass
We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.
Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972 (W. W. Norton & Company, 1994; orig. pub. 1973)
