The Book of Her(Me)s¹ Ex-am, Ex-Amen an Intertextual Meditation on One’s Lifework²

Judy Sibayen Freya

The text of her body³
Out
of
line⁴
N i g h t d r e a m s d a y s⁵

When did I learn to invoke you? Ah, but you have always come unbidden, even before I learned to divine the Divine without and within me! You have come and gone as you pleased always, as if to serve your selfish ends.

You have traversed, impregnated, pierced me with your tricks, your paradoxical synchronistic gifts, upsetting those who refuse your great gift of “life- death-life;” upsetting the world of linear causality.6

But you have been more than generous with your gifts of dreams, all providential

(pro vide, pro life). When I was in turmoil about love, you came to me with a crazed woman, hands tied behind her back, she ascends a mountain. Her hands free, she descends to the sea, by its shores, near a cave, early eve, a lit fire warming her gently warning her, “Forget about love for when you do love will come.” That one enigmatic contraction I hear as simultaneous pauses: “For when you do forget about love, love will come/For when you do love, love will come.”

But it is in my life of art that you have been truly generous. I found embodied in one of your names (for you have many names, Ananse, Loki, Cayote, Eshau, Ictinike, Maui, Mercuria)7 this book I am writing!

Your second gift as I “come to writing” is a dream: “You will not bathe, for the waters will not flow,” say my father and my neurosurgeon brother (also my surrogate father). And they add, “For she who bathes and is aggrieved will prevent the waters from flowing.”

I protest and declare, “But I will be aggrieved, will aggregate these coming days.” The next day, in the afternoon, you let me meet through Hélène, Clarice who wrote: “She would be fluid all her life.”10 Another gift! Which I know is not a coincidence. And I was proud to tell you that I have recently been drunk with water, for it has made my dry skin of more than fifty years smooth and flowing.

These two men/dreams are my fears that try to deceive me, who want to silence me:

“Do not come clean. Do not write! Do not be fluid!” The father removes me from the living room which he appropriates as his working space and directs me to the kitchen-dining room as my writing space. He is kind enough to move the stereophonic turntable to my space.

But I am upset; for every time my family needs to eat, I will have to remove all my writing things. But I need not worry. For in your delight to frolic with symbols, in your mercurial speed to speak to me through Psyche, you guided my family of me(s) or as Hélène puts it, my “multiple Is,”12 to speak/sing/write through a nourished body. And I will be surrounded with song. I hear, I come close to Hélène’s song through you, through Psyche, through Toril: “I was eating the texts, I was sucking, licking, kissing them.”

I need not worry. You merely wanted to remind me again that in brewing your stories outside the Logos, you can only be grasped with the whole of our lived being.

The night after, invoking you to guide me to begin “to come to writing my body,” I kept dreaming of only two words. Dedans La! Simultaneously I heard and said them over and over in a sing-song way—Dedans La! Dedans La! Dedans La! Inside Her! Inside Her! Inside Her! And awoke with Clarice Lispector inside my mouth, guiding me back to Hélène to Clarice’s O Lustro: “I like a book that begins like this. It begins inside, in the body.” Not only did you guide me to start writing from inside my body, you and Hélèn urged me as instructed in her writings Dedans (inside) and La (her and the musical note la) to write singing and playing with words beginning with my “first separation or individuation,” my active self-birth as the heart of my story. And to go to the point where I began to enable myself with artthat “militates against bourgeois commodity-art and any ideology connected to it.”

One last symbolic delight before I inhabit this space of writing: a visitation! You spoke to me at dawn today through a black Vulcan alien named Tuvok, the chief security officer of Starship Voyager, a spaceship abducted from the Alpha Quadrant by a sub-space entity called the Caretaker, which leaves the ship lost in deep space in the Delta Quadrant of the universe. Tuvok and the ship’s crew try to find their way home to Earth.

This Vulcan, in addition to being extremely logical in his ways, has the capacity to “mind-meld.” Hélène’s and your way of calling me, urging me to stay close to your forging fire so I can write in the instant, and burn with passion in this critical time of my coming to writing... “the call sets me on fire, the fire is calling me."

“the call sets me on fire, the fire is calling me.”22

“I want fire! fire!

I demand fire! I implore it, I suscitate it. I suplicate it to explode in my dreams, in my thoughts, I flee it. All my books rest on fire. All those I love walk on fire.”23

This Other (black and alien) of logic is lost in outer space (indeed life is a journey to the stars, the stuff we are made of!) within the deposited sediments at the mouth of deep flowing space. What a joy to unravel your gift-dream! The flow of life will not be accessed if one were to have a life of pure Logos. Further, if one were to think that one is safe (deposited) even if we take an oath in writing (to depose, and again an oath within the Logos, the Law) in this kind of life, an entity that cares will remove us (depose us) from what we think is a place or position of power (Alpha, the brightest, main star in the constellation, a place of first order) so we can begin the real journey home to ourselves. This sums up the process of individuation, a process where we take leave of our socially constructed selves, where you, HerMe(s), play a key role. It is also the story that is at the heart of Hélène’s writing: “Writing is both a search for a social freeing and a writing out of a personal situation of imprisonment.”24 This in sum is my story, our story, the story that you wish me to write!

Back to my dream, Tuvok raises his left hand, his index finger pressed to his thumb, his little finger to his ring finger, and greets me, “Live long and prosper.“ Ah, you and your economy of signs! You spoke through someone whose name Tuvok means precisely to speak, two speak, you speak as in the French tu. 25 Then you gift me prosper and not proper! The Realm of the Proper Hélène considers abominable in that it is “proper to the male. Proper —property—appropriate: signaling an emphasis on self -identity, self aggrandizement and arrogative dominance.”26

“Live long and prosper.” You want me to live, to be alive in my difference.27 You usher me into The Realm of the Gift. 28 This is your tender way of preparing me to be fundamentally one with the Good Mother, whose eternal white milk will surround and protect the writing woman. Within her, I will “always and everywhere feel deeply secure and shielded from danger; nothing will ever harm me, distance and separation will never disable me.”29 This is your way of ridding me of my fears of not being able to steal away, to take flight from language conscripted in the service of the father. This is your benign way of enabling me to begin writing my body. I must steal away, fly away with my own body language: voler. I must be a voleuse!30

So I will say this to you: HerMe(s)—Trickster Soul-Guide, Messenger of the Gods, Bestower of Good Fortune,31 my Great Mother, my Good Mother, divining you, surrendering to you, living through your gifts, are as close as I can get to regaining paradise.

I have learned to pay heed to and be grateful for your guidance appearing in the transition of things, or when not too aware of your presence in medias res. In so doing, I will always be with the desire to keep myself and others “alive and different.”32

—

Death in the middle of things

One day you HerMe(s), sat deep within the pit of my belly, in the middle of all my things,

Coinciding with the first stirrings of discord, of dis-ease, of things seeming out of sync in my life

A life weight, made heavy only because of the fierceness of your terrifying love for me,

An unmovable radiating mediating force, summoning all the nerve endings of my body (now entombed in the ways of the socially constructed),

to turn outside in.

For this is the time when nothing in the outside would matter. This time of great learning, of infinite f/light down, deep within the abysmal sacred center of birthing my true self.33

This time, determined to finally bring me home to divine the Divine within me, you planned that nothing in the outside world would animate me. Even if you needed to bring death to all of them—friends, lovers, work, family, my art.

You orchestrated events and people to conspire to remove me from the high of my work and my art from the center. Betrayed and abandoned by my young Burmese lover, devastated by the betrayal of everything and everyone I held true to all that I had become, to all that contained my heart, I was undone; a babbling unbearable dark woeman, screaming, crying in helpless silent rage, ceaseless within her undifferentiated body.

HerMe(s), still unaware of your benign loving intentions, I had no ears for your presence, and around me, all were deaf to my inarticulate grieving self. I longed to be set right again by and within the very same reality that conspired to betray me. And having disavowed the old sources of life that you pulled from under me, now without any language or ideas or even any notion to grasp this unknown, I thought, and this was the problem, (all the disembodied circuitous thinking) that the physically engaged busy-body in another profession, a new lover, another art form, would move me forward, pull me out of this slowly dying self.

I went back to the grind. Three years of refusal to put to work my ears, my skin, my broken heart, my feet, my nerve endings all prepped up waiting at your command to work with me in abandoning myself only to myself.34 But you have set into motion that not a single thing in my outer world be attracted to my now weary worn terrified heart.

And until I learn to surrender to your void, generous as ever with your infinite patience, you allowed me with great resistance (difficult visas to obtain), one last forced outer journey; you allowed me to physically flee as far as I could from myself, to flee to another source, to journey to the old world and study an art form using an ancient medium that had no resonance whatsoever to my being.

But these undertakings never brought me anywhere near that past secure self. I would be back in the same space that I thought I was leaving. There was nothing there that gave me refuge, that gave me answers to my ill-formulated questions, that would give form to my now very fragile, formless self.

Unmoored from all that was formerly known as safe, having lost my senses, now a stranger to my body, I fell ill—a visitation from the wolf (systemic lupus erythematosus) from an old chronic disease of being allergic to myself! I was my own toxin! This was your last loving synchronistic event to stop me cold in my tracks to total destruction. Like all your gifts, this was a paradox. To put a stop to my own self-destruction, it was not enough that everyone and everything that I considered critical sources of my life were rendered non-vital. I had to be brought to the precipice of bodily death to be lovingly pushed down into the womb of the sacred source. You pushed me into a terrifying free fall via negativa landing me not too gently into the pit of my own belly.

Scathed, wounded, howling in agony, there I was in that same pit where you waited for three years rocking yourself away on your winged feet. This pit, this fount which has no center, has no beginning nor ending, just openings, apertures to states of new self-being, unchartered flight paths to self-places with no borders. Here, the finding/founding of the authentic self is done not amongst people or for others but with and within one’s deep self and for oneself alone. But what did I disavow in exchange for this dark night of the soul? For this perilous but inevitable and necessary deepening, quickening in the middle of all my things?

—

From my Father I received two books. One, a non-all inclusive systematic, systematized source of definitions and pronunciations of all named things in life (words) and the usage of such words in the language the book was written in; this book, written not in my mother tongue, but in my second language refers to me as man in the sense of a collective mankind or humanity.35

The other book, made up of a series of books also written in my second language, is another sourcebook that has commanded, prohibited thou (you, man) ten things in order that thou be a good human.

In the first book my Father gave, I am conveniently trapped36 in the term man as in an individual human but made invisible in the word itself. But I know that I am not being referred to in these commands as a member of thou, for suddenly in one of these prohibitions, I am referred to only as an object that can be coveted as wife to some male neighbor.

In this same book, it is written that this thou, this man was created by a male god and is created in this transcendent god’s image, “in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”37

And unto this man he created, this God gave this man dominion: “ ‘over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves the ground. I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the air and all the creatures that move on the ground- everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.’ And it was so. God saw all that he made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.”38

Further in this same book, this God is the Word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word was made flesh.”39

—

From my Mother, who out of necessity left me home alone so she could go off to work, I was gifted a pair of scissors, flour paste, a shoe box, images to cut and make into a circus diorama; play things to fend off, at age five, the sense of being left alone by myself (with my self). Mother would come home and swoop me in her arms, press me to her breasts, sincerely pleased with what I had created, her joy also from her relief that I was able to keep myself safe all alone by myself. Out of a deep knowledge and love for her child, Mother gave me the right things to bring out a certain kind of self-reliance, a germ of a most profound sense of self.

I discovered and learned a few things that day. I was able to make things with my hands that pleased me and in turn pleased others who loved me. I felt a kind of self-worth in the circle of their embrace. Making things out of play-sure speeded up time and blotted out an outside that if I were really acutely aware of would have created in me a sense of fear of things not being right. That is, a sense of being abandoned, of being separate. I did not feel abandoned. I was not abandoned. I was just without someone else.

And in my Mother’s absence of fear for leaving me alone, in her confidence that I could keep myself safe, I learned no fear of being left alone. I was not alone. You who created many things the first twenty-four hours of your birth, you HerMe(s), the Fool, the Trickster, were playing with me. We created one of your homes, a circus with many clowns. Play is your soup where self-discovery and enjoyment of one’s capacities, possibilities, and limitations happen in the here and now.40 At play, I was with myself, fully engaged in my imagination. So Hélène writes to us, “In the Imaginary mother and child are part of a fundamental unity: they are one.” Cutting away, pasting, tearing, smoothening, folding, tracing, drawing, pounding, pressing, with my tiny hands, my tiny little fingers, birthed from her womb, I could not possibly be separated from Her.41

And again from Mother, I was bestowed the blessing to free myself at age seven from the dis-ease of being in an all-girl Catholic school and to transfer me to a secular both-sexes school.

From Mother, the two events provided me (again pro vide, pro life) at an early age sound passage to a future lifework that required an understanding, an openness and a love for deep solitude; and a recognition of a self that can speak her mind, to will what she bodily and psychically sensed was fitting for her. All these were given by Mother who nurtured my

self-birthing not from within her or “through her”42 but by providing me the prima materia (the time, space, tools for self-directed activities, the love, the trust to be fearless alone) to urge and encourage me, the child and in the future child-woman, to create.

From my Father, I received long letters from his travels abroad. And instruments to measure light, write with light. Photography was his recreation. There were also records of music created and performed mostly by male master artists. Beethoven, Wagner, Teleman, Chopin, Mozart, Mahler, Verdi, Rubinstein, Walter, And books also by male authors. Absalom! Absalom! Faulkner, Conrad, Hardy, Lawrence, Hemingway, Melville, Heart of Darkness, James, The Golden Bowl.

Word. The Word of God. Logos. The expressed or manifested mind and will of God.

Order, Command. Don’t move until I give the word.43

Art. Archaic. Second person singular. Present indicative of be. Used with thou.

Art . The conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects. An innate, personal, unanalyzable creative power.44

—

From Father I received commandments that I grow being a receptacle of received ideas. To grow within the Logos.

From Mother I was gifted to have my own sensing/birthing of a body- self that could endow itself with the choice to create/give from within her solitary Imaginary.

Father signalled that I was without.

Mother embraced me in my fullness.

—

I bathe your body, relieve your armpits of summer’s heat. Night. With water of just the right coolness. You sigh in gratitude. Our bodies know this exact temperature. It soothes you to dream. I soap your belly grown round from all the eating and sitting all day. It hints at what will be mine.

I let this liquid flow of sleep cascade down your breasts, one mound taken away from cancerous growths; then down to your now useless arms, useful till you were eighty-nine. They carried your children away, far from the death of a world war, running towards life, always towards life, in caves, by the rivers, in hospitals, in other people’s homes, wherever there was refuge for your aching terrified but courageous body and foremost, always mostly for your children, your reason to fly to life.

You and I have come full circle in our enhancing exchanges. Embracing you in your illness of lost memory, of synaptic nerves gone awry, I whisper to you in a sing-song, Mommy-oh, Mommy-oh, Mommy-oh, as if to call you back, to keep you in the present. Your humor intact, you whisper back, “Ah! mother and child,” the ends of your mouth lifting ever so lightly to a knowing smile. I have not lost you. You have not left me.45

In the middle of our writing, blood pain flows from my womb.

—

Inside the Center

Her (His) art required that she receive ideas from, and practice art based on, a specific art tradition that was not necessarily hers. She was never to doubt the truth nor the necessity of these ideas and praxes. Nor doubt that this was her only absolute source of art. To practice this tradition meant to take on the quest for quality based on the “concepts of progress, continuity, totality, mastery and the universal claim to history accepted as true.”46 If she desired entry into the center of the Art world, this was its basic premise.

A corollary: she had to have the smarts about where she was coming from. This way she avoided the pitfalls of being called “dumb as a painter.” She was a mimic of “thinking” artists. She exhibited enough “originality” to keep her male mentors interested in her art but did not stray too far from the artists they believed in. Mostly men from North America: LeWitt, Italo Scanga, Stella, Smithson, Christo, Rauschenberg, Lichstentein, Judd, Snow, Rothko, Pollock, Yves Klein, Bochner, Buren, Kosuth, Serra, de Maria, Beuys, Cornell, Flavin, Andre, Reinhardt, Oldenburg. Some women: Agnes Martin, Diane Arbus, Lynda Benglish, Judy Chicago, Eva Hesse, Helen Frankenthaler. And of course their god, Duchamp. Who became hers too. She knew her lineage well.

She gained a certain notoriety for performing art, installing it and most of all for conceptualizing it. Art forms that did not require great manual skills but to her mind required a certain craft of thinking which to her was more engaging. All ephemeral, there were hardly any remains of the work once performed, installed, conceptualized. She had no substantial material proof of her craft. She had documents, press releases, photographs, posters, letters, working drawings, scripts, other peoples’ writing on her art. A growing archive.

Her (His) art required extreme exposure.

But extreme exposure only within one specific physical space. A walled space, with all its walls painted white. Outside this space, this white cube, her art may not be perceived as art at all.

Before sleep comes, when she dreams of making art to be exposed in this space, she sees herself pacing its polyurethane finished floors, measuring it, taking note of its corners, its posts, sensing its scale. Almost like a hermetically sealed box, there are no windows. There is only one door. And not so strange, in her dreams, this white cube never suffocates her.

When day comes, she visits this empty white gallery. This time she will bodily research what the space requires of her art. She paces its polyurethane finished floors, measures it, takes note of its corners, its posts, senses its scale. Almost like a hermetically sealed box, there are no windows. There is only one door. It does not suffocate her.

Empty of her (his) art, still to be created, inside, she takes refuge in the cool conditioned air; she takes naps on its floors, eats her packed lunch, makes small talk with the guards, tests the lights, recalibrates them, observes the accidental viewer come in, writes in her journal, draws and redraws the floor plan, reads on art and its objecthood. Some days she turns off most of the lights, sits in a corner, closes her eyes and waits it out. She has the stamina to wait it out inside this now grey box. Waiting, waiting for its walls to press in on her, making her see what needs to be placed on them, within them.

Her (His) art is never outside the dictates of the inside of this white cube. Inside, she imagines the objects she will create. She is already creating at this instant. Conceptualizing the art inside the space is the critical event in her process. She does not birth the work, she conceives it. The white now grey cube is never a womb for birthing but a cold geometrically axes-ed space more akin to a mind for ideation. Inside this space, as she closes her eyes, she holds all of this space within her mind’s eye, walks inside this space inside her mind, and with her eyes wide shut, sees a future object on the wall, sees all the future objects on the walls inside the white cube, inside her head. She opens her eyes, quickly writes down what she saw inside her head.

A line of painted yellow piece of wood running across the entrance wall, a flat blue rectangular surface suspended from the ceiling lights, a larger flat surface of ochre placed parallel to the floor, swinging from the ceiling slightly above ground, two moss green panels hung horizontally at her eye level, placed apart by the measure of one wall paneling.

Flat monochrome paintings, all these objects she grasps in an instant, all installed in the white cube in her mind’s eye. Mere surfaces for painting colors, one color for each surface, they are non-metaphoric, non-illusionistic. They do not represent any thing. They are not deep vessels of stories. In their flatness and emptiness, in the absence of myth or legend, they begin to call attention to the space that contains them. They point to this space as not a mere innocent passive physical structure. This is her project. She wants these objects to tell the story of this space. How this space is constructed. Its purpose. What it can do. She wants to investigate its power to endow anything, any object that is placed in it the status of art and the person who decides to place this object in this space, the status of being an artist. And in this loop, to endow her thus with the status of being an Artist.

1917: French master artist Marcel Duchamp places a urinal inside this white cube. Titling it Fountain, and signing it R. Mutt, he proposes to the gatekeepers of the white cube that a “readymade,” a non-art object be an art object. They accept his proposition and the lowly object becomes art of the highest order.

She traces her artmaking lineage to this master. Two male mentors introduce her to Duchamp. She voraciously reads their library on this master and on all the other artists who made art in his tradition. She is enamored with this project. Mimics it not too well. In fact, her imitations are retrograde. In 1975. Duchamp and his followers had already emptied the word and the practice of art to its logical conclusion: if “placing an object in an art context or otherwise designating it as art makes it art, then it is in the context or designation, and not in the object that the art essence resides, and it is the context itself that should be exhibited, not an object in it.”47 Yet she could not even do away with the pedigreed art object—that is, the painting, no matter how minimal. She could not make the context be the essence of her art.

A further derivation from such Wittgensteinian/Duchampian gestures of artmaking, Imagine Pieces (1980) was created with the artist simply phoning in three texts to be typewritten on pieces of bond paper by one of the gallery staff who was further given instructions to tape, install these pieces of paper on top of gallery pedestals as instructions for the viewers to imagine “things.” Being ill, unable to bodily attend to the making and placing of objects inside the white cube, and unwilling to forego the chance for an exhibition, she solved her dilemma through these texts. These became her work for the exhibition.

Twice she used the white walls literally as her art material. Etching da Vinci’s Pieta on one of the walls of a gallery in Los Angeles, she created The Virgin Almost Invisible on a Gallery Wall. Unfortunately no one saw the Virgin, no one saw the wall.

Inside the white cube, she also used her body to perform art. Three Pieces was a short performance art in the main gallery of the major state museum where she was working as a curatorial assistant in 1976. Performed with an artist friend, one of the pieces located the artists within a designated area (a four feet by four feet floor area was marked off with masking tape).

She was inside the square reading a text on performance art as an art form. It was written by the museum director, one of her mentors. The other artist outside the square was busy calling attention to himself as being outside the square.

To end the performance, both artists slowly ripped the tape off the floor removing the boundaries between her, the other artist and the viewers. Now there was no inside nor outside. But all were still inside the white cube. And only in this inside can such a nonsensical act be valorized as art.

From Rags to Riches: Art after Duchamp or Revisiting the Fountain (1997), an homage to the master, was her most admittedly honest derivative work. Some forty signed doormats—readymades, were installed on the walls and floors of four major museums in Europe. Another set of forty all unsigned were deployed outside the museum.

—

Her (His) art was imbued with great reverence within this white space.

The ideal white cube built with hardly any exits or entrances, tomblike, is tempered to keep the world outside at bay. The sky is never to be seen from within. It is never to be the source of light. Direct sunlight, daylight, and heat are all banished from this world. Light is always tracked directed from the ceiling, its own sky. The ground, its floors are treated to minimize the sound of clicking feet. And always, always, all its walls must be painted pristine white.

The ideal white cube is built to cult-ure the viewer who usually has just come in from the din and the heat of the city, to disembody herself/himself. Only his/her Eye shall inhabit this place of exhibition. The viewer is not allowed to talk. The viewer is to observe silence in the cool of the white cube. Do not touch. Eating not allowed. All bags must be surrendered at the entrance. Photography not allowed. Please stand behind the cord. No sitting on the floor. Noise, sweat, the oil of our hands, humidity, bulb flashes, are all disturbing corrosive forces.

The ideal white cube cult-ures the viewer to reduce much of who she/he is when entering this site of sighting. We are reminded of other such sites of silence, of controlled atmosphere and behavior. We are in a sacred site with cult objects preserved and kept safe from without. We are the devotees of these objects.

The viewer with the disembodied Eye completes the ritual of reverence. We are to accept these objects as vessels of our highest values as members of a certain citizenry, a certain race. These objects are offered to us by the white cube as evidences of the best, the most beautiful, the most enduring, the Truth, the most masterful of our spirit as a species of humankind. Inside, we are to believe that in our highest of aspirations, we are essentially beings of spirit. This is our reward when we agree to suppress much of our embodied selves. We can become transcendent only if we join this form of collective experience. But only as a collective of a certain class of people; for our supposed transcendence is defined and dictated by only a few who are usually those that need to maintain a certain power based on material wealth. Art of this kind has been rendered mere visual representations that signify the museum’s power over any object—thus creating Art’s symbolic power.48

—

Her (His) art required that it live on beyond the physical white cube.

But physical exposure must be limited to the white space where it was first given life. This is the space that endowed it with its nature as a transcendent object. Physically it cannot be exposed anywhere else. However, exposure in its birthplace is limited. The exhibition ends. The most transcendent objects however may gain the privilege of being housed/exposed for a long time in bigger more powerful white cubes called mausoleums which are spatial structures made up of a great number of white tombs.

Thus, if her (his) art were to live on, if she were to live on as an artist, her art must somehow be exposed beyond its physical nature in another form beyond the white cube.

It has to live beyond the white cube. Its existence needed to be announced beyond the viewing public. Its conception in the white cube had to be press-released. It needed to be presented again, over and over. It needed to be exposed in the dailies and art magazines.

The Image now takes over in representing it outside the white cube. Represented now flat, now small on a page of paper, it is multiplied tenfold to enter households, offices, to sit on coffee tables, beauty parlors, libraries, in shopping malls, in bookstores, in newspaper stands, in auction houses and even back to other exposing physical spaces. The art object now dematerialized, the Image, the Word are now are now put to its service to represent, to continue signifying its cultural value, strengthening its value as a commodity of the highest order.

And further, farther still. It must be projected into the future. It must stand the test of time and space. It must court the favor of the Wordmasters—critics, historians, theorists. It must be historized, critiqued, theorized.

This is the only path to ensuring it an existence transcending its physical dimension. Their words work hand in hand with the white cube’s power of imbuing the object with sacredness. Within their words his art will be found. Through their words his art will live on.

And now valorized through the process of institutional production, exposition, reception and circulation, his art could very well be invested with monetary value greatly exceeding that of its intrinsic material worth; with this value multiplying exponentially.

A system that infuse objects with auratic value, all these—the gallery, the museum, the image, the word, the market, worked together in circulating this kind of artifice within an economy that can render his art into the commodity par excellence. A fetish.

A closed system with only a handful of players who are forever defensively protecting it against the incursion of other would-be fetish makers, it is the of all-powerful fetish making institution. The lowly urinal “found ready made” some ninety years later is a priceless artifact, the fetish of all fetishes. Now absorbed within the same system it wanted to subvert, it has become the master/original mold from which objects of its kind are produced again for circulation in the same system!

—

Her (His) art carried her deep into this instution. Entrenched in this Center, she was not only creating objects that fed the system, but as mausoleum director, she managed, controlled its mechanism that canonized objects and persons as art and artists. A mechanism that privileged a few to the exclusion of many, it chose only those artists who were already initiated to take on roles that were limited and coded by and within a history perpetuated through institutions particular to this system. Thus co-opting and controlling any art/object produced, exposed, received and circulated within it as art.49

Inside this Center, she was in a loop enchanted, entrapped but not innocent of its instrumental privileging power. The investigation of the nature of this power was precisely the content of her art; the wielding of this power—the source of her livelihood!

Inside this Center, a player in an endgame, she was trapped in a endless loop.

She (He) was in constant desire to enter art’s history. An entry that will bury her in the graveyard of masterpieces, no matter that to be admitted to it, she will be consigned to perpetual exhumation. For her fear to be forgotten in perpetual oblivion was so much greater than her fear of being buried in this dead sleep of canonical recognition.50

She (He) was in constant desire of Art’s self-enhancing returns. For all the energy that

she spends and for being spent in making art and making it in art, she (he) expected to be proper-ly51 compensated; that her (his) power returns and multiplies.

She (He) was in constant desire to create objects that were answers to the gatekeepers’ (mostly male) question, “What is good art?” which is “the masculine obsession with classification, systematization and hierarchization.” And as soon as she sought a reply she was “already caught up in a masculine interrogation.”52 Not heeding the fact that all her (his) replies were mere commodity fetishes that fed a capitalist economy, she (he) now was merely a creator of things that signified and preserved the power of a mercantile ruling class.

She (He) was constantly strategizing for her art be continuously exposed in the white cube; strategies that demanded she master art’s discourse, a containment of what is generally permissible, thinkable within art’s terms. For her to “refuse the discourse…in speaking of art or making it, was to court the benign violence of institutional excommunication.”53

Inside the Center, she was trapped in an endless loop, for in the final analysis, whether she chose to work within or without this system, for or against it, her relationship to it was inescapable.

—

But one day, HerMe(s) you made your presence very clear to her.

Appearing as her first stirrings of discord, a dis-ease with and within the Center.

A weight filling the depths of her belly.

Sitting there in the middle of all her things,

You were a life weight, weighed up only by the fierceness of your terrifying liberating love for her.

An unmovable radiating mediating force, summoning all the nerve endings of her body (now entombed in the ways of the socially sanctioned, in the ways of the Center), to turn outside in.

One day, you orchestrated events in her life removing her from the loop of the Center.

It was time to initiate her to sing her own abyss.54

—

She dreaded waking up to work, barely made her deadlines, went home burdened with no clue as to the cause of this malaise. She hardly ate. Although her belly seemed always full. She would oversleep. Fitful with dreams she hardly recalled. She refused to appear in the openings of the exhibitions of her mausoleum. Kept to her office. At home, she kept to her bedroom watching a lot of TV. Nothing of the present held her. She was losing hold of every thing. Everything was becoming hostile to her love.

The Center was not holding.

This Center which after the demise of the dictator was opened up as a democratic space was quickly chosen by the state as one of the soft structures where democracy could be visually embodied, giving form to its re-establishment at its most urgent.

As director of its mausoleum of contemporary art, she was concurrent coordinator of the Center’s coordinating center for the visual arts. Her roles were conflicted. As coordinator, she was merely to oversee the equitable distribution of its finite resources. But as head of the mausoleum, she directed the same resources according to the official discourse which was to be maintained and evolved according to a ten-year plan whose goal it was to arrive at a definition of a national culture as expressed in the contemporary art.

Obviously this project limited its investigation to a very specific form of art which privileged a few and excluded many other artists. Thus began her discomfort with and within the Center. Placed on the mausoleum staff and on herself was the burden of discursively proving the legitimacy of the art that was to be deployed as “contemporary” which would in turn legitimate this newly consolidated mausoleum as a space for progressive art. This verification process necessitated an expertise performed in two kinds of spaces. Practiced in the hidden space of the mausoleum is the expertise “whose function is to produce and organize a representation claiming the status of knowledge.” Then there are the “public spaces in which this knowledge is offered for passive consumption producing a monologic discourse dominated by the cultural voice”55 of the mausoleum.

The ten-year plan mentioned earlier was to be the blueprint for the production of such a discourse, a practice received from the industrialized West and an idea not reflected upon by most cultural practitioners within modern structures in her country, a nation that celebrated eight years ago, 100 years of nationhood and which was very busy in its “political museumizing,”56 a process of creating a national culture through state institutions.

In hindsight, her unhappiness, her discomfort with this Center and in particular with this mausoleum, stemmed from the burden of producing this monologic discourse for institutional legitimacy through the power of privileging a few—a project that went against what the artistic community, then hungry for signs of the new liberal rule, was promised.

She felt vulnerable to the attacks from those who were disenfranchised. Were it only a matter of exhibiting every artist until the Center’s resources ran out, the work would have been easy; more difficult was the ideological work of maintaining the mausoleum as a space designated for contemporary art.

She was not only beleaguered from without; there were basic problems from within. In its desire for a speedy rendition of the new order in high relief, the Center overexerted itself, inadvertently taxing its workforce and its resources, forgetting to breathe and reflect upon the real work at hand. Was the project only to meet the “political demands based on the principle or representational adequacy”?57 Or having been instrumental in the formation of the deposed regime, at least in the area of cultural construction, and given this opportune break in history, shouldn’t the work have been to provide itself the space and time to come to terms with this past by taking the lead in radically rethinking how such structures as itself can truly be responsive to a culture long colonized? And to a people recently unshackled from military rule and now mobilized by the state and industry to make up for lost time in the project of modernization?

Believing that art is a technology of self-transformation, she started to doubt deeply how an artist can possibly constitute and decipher herself with regard to58 what she has been permitted to produce as only that which is valorized when made visible within exposing systems.59 It is a question between a delimited, dependent, pre-coded aesthetic production and self-truth. Controlled and co- opted by such systems and now made mere producer of things intended to be embodied architecturally as objects of institutional discourses of art, her autonomy compromised, she is now merely a technician who makes the commodity fetish par excellence.

Two years into the job, her faith in the criticality of any art practice shaken and eroded, she left the mausoleum, stopped making art and withdrew from the Artworld.

Ah! HerMe(s), she did not hear you sigh with joy that day she began withdrawing, disavowing. Finally, you brought her to the precipice of death. The death of her oldouterworld60 to begin her f/light music down to her own sources.61

—

Down into her own center

HerMe(s), down there in your (my) nether womb, for seven years I molted till stripped naked to abandon myself only to myself.62 Lost, screaming in the dark of my interior, a space where my heart bled broken; where my shoulders hung with despair; where my brain imploded with a thousand whys; where my skin, my throat, my breasts, my vulva dried from a self no longer fluid; where my ears were clogged with old-self noise; where my eyes could not bear the light of day, where my tongue was tied spitting only crazed babble, where my blood was cold, its usual fire from without now extinguished, where my feet could go nowhere.

Until one day, one day sapped of all the fight/flight I could muster, the divine universe conspired that I finally surrender to birth myself, to my ears, my breasts, my hands, my mouth, my vulva, my eyes, my skin, my tongue, my nerve endings of all instructions, commandments, received ideas, notions, habits, praxes, that have cultured63 me in captivity as mere vessel of life sourced from above ground, from without me.

I let myself go! I let go of everything. I let loose everything. I lost everything! Took to the air, to the open sea. Everything remained to be sought. I ran. I flew, swam, descended, crossed, loved the unknown, loved the uncertain, loved what has not yet been. I left myself, shrugged off the old lies, dared what I didn’t dare. It is there that I took pleasure, never made my here anywhere but there, and rejoiced in the terror. I went where I was afraid to go, went ahead, took the plunge. I was on the right trail. I lightened. I owed nothing to the law. Gained my freedom, got rid of everything, vomited up everything, gave up everything, gave up absolutely everything, all of it! Gave up my goods. Done. I didn’t keep anything, whatever I valued. I gave it up. I gave it up. I searched myself, sought out the shattered, the multiple I. I shed the old body, shook off the law. Let it fall with all its weight. I took off, didn’t turn back. There was nothing behind me, everything was yet to come.6

—

A naked root now growing, now burrowing shooting roots in every direction within dark Earth, now my new skin, now my only source of life. Dark Earth feeds me all at once. Earth to root, no boundaries, none!65

Down here, worms are co-burrowers. Aerating Earth, aerating me.

Earth shakes. Above ground, tall things fall, break and stumble.

Down here, my nose and ears close to the ground, I am the lace netting holding Earth.

Deep within, I need no eyes to see. I welcome smelling with my hands, feeling with and moving about on my belly, seeing with the tips of my shoots.

Deep within her, the Eye does not reign.

Down here, I encounter rock, I grow around it, away from it. Nothing stops me

from returning home

from the monolithic Center into the periphery.

from white walls and white pedestals to brownground dirt.

from treading the mill of the white walled-in space of the extremely visible,

to walking, flying, running, breaking bread, renewing friendships, dancing, kissing, smelling, sewing, making music, embroidering, writing, laughing, talking, touching, keeping in touch, offering with one’s hands, healing, falling in love, drinking, playing, telling my story and listening to those of others, in the borderless rainbow of all-senses-all.

Deep within, I gift my self birth to create as a nomad, to find and to found life within

places of no things, spaces of he-supposed no value (gapsmarginspuwangedgescracksoutskirtsabyssesperipherieshorizontalsfringesriminterstices)

and within things of supposed negativities,

(invisibilitiesabsencessilencesdarknesssolitudesseparationsvaginasvoidsexilesemotions).66

Deep within nothing stops me from becoming everyself possible. “I am myself the earth, everything that happens to it; all the lives that live in me there in my different forms.”67

Deep within my (her) interior nothing stops me from returning home,

from history to her story.

from the World to the un-World,68 nothing stops me from my HerMe(s)tic journeying,69

from my un-Worlding.

Back to the wasteland

My home-un-World was necessarily made fluid by many Good Mothers: “omnipotent and generous dispensers of love, nourishment and plenitude.”70 Now fully birthed and more than ready to shoot above ground, I was given a magical art gallery to wear placed on my shoulders by the Virgin Mother of the Brown Scapular.

Issuing from the Mother “whose giving is suffused with strength” and with whom: “The more you have, the more you give, the more you are, the more you give the more you have.”71

Scapular Gallery Nomad was necessarily of her essence—a matrix of one’s true becoming. An art gallery that I wore/performed daily for five years, it bodied forth my integration. The first time I wore it, the gallery felt like an amulet protecting me from falling ever again into art’s endgame. Its efficacy depended on it not being contained clinically inert on white walls and in white spaces where only the disembodied Eye (I) was required for its existence.

Bodying forth my integration, enunciating my new self, this work’s efficacy depended on its being performed in my waking hours, bodily lived out there in the flowing current of the periphery with other bodies everywhere: in my dentist’s clinic to have a root canal at the printing press in a beauty parlor for a haircut and a pedicure in a conference room to chair a departmental meeting in a hotel function room with thirty other guests for a formal sit-down dinner with the first lady bumping into an old acquaintance at a parking lot up a hotel music lounge to take panoramic shots of the city in a hotel elevator with family going up a restaurant for the usual Sunday lunch in another artist’s art opening in a friend’s living room discussing the establishment of a future art school in a shopping mall to look for a two-cup rice cooker at a friend’s house to learn an indexing software at a copy service shop to xerox a hundred copies of the gallery/performance notes in photography class to talk about the exhibition of snapshot portraits being exhibited in the gallery in my brother’s home for a house blessing in a photo studio for an organizational meeting with thirty other members of the International Designers Network Club in a shopping mall art gallery to view a former mentor’s art on exhibit in a restaurant to celebrate my birthday in the university chapel to hear mass and the school year opening address of the university president in the university accounting office talking with one of the accountants who read about the performance in one of the dailies in a super- market to ask help from the janitorial staff in a lecture hall to listen to the talk of an Australian filmmaker in a bookstore bumping into three former students lunch in a friend’s ancestral home discussing the rules for a traditional dance competition in a restaurant with family to celebrate a niece’s 18th birthday at a friend’s photography studio meeting up with a former professor at the National Commission on Culture and the Art’s office to submit the blueprint of a book I designed in a cafe with a graphic designer and a filmmaker friend to discuss the design of a future photoshop course in a book launching where I ask a national artist and former president of the Cultural Center of the Philippines to contribute a work for my body gallery in a friend’s kitchen helping with dinner for a friend from Kyoto in a car with a niece off to work at my office entertaining a friend who purposely came to visit to experience the gallery at an associate dean’s office of another university with three other professors to design an enrichment workshop for public-school teachers on the teaching of the humanities in a Buddhist temple to celebrate the goddess Quanyin’s birthday in a post office to purchase stamps for sending cards about the gallery in a furniture to kill time in a hardware store to purchase warm-white light bulbs at a street party meeting a friend who excited over a gallery with no walls spontaneously offers her polaroids for viewing while being held in a bank queue line to pay my bills walking the streets of Manila photographing the city in a wet market for fresh fruits at a bus stop approached by a colleague who mistaking the gallery for a bag warns me about pickpockets in a car ignoring street urchins knocking on the window begging around us in a boat for a sunset out in the bay in a consulate queuing for a visa in a massage shop for a twenty-minute sedentary shiatsu in an engraving shop to have a friend’s birthday poem engraved on three pages of stainless steel as is work for the gallery at the cleaners to have my silk coat dry cleaned in an electronic shop to have my CD player fixed in airplanes en route to Paris in a teachers’ workshop to give a lecture on the approaches to the teaching of painting in a book launching to launch a book I designed in a framer’s shop to have some small collages framed for another per- formance titled “Into the He(art) of Commodities: An Allegory” at birthday par- ties, Chinese New Years, professorial lectures to install shrines, in trains en route to Barcelona, crossing national borders from Mexico City to Houston wearing a friend’s work titled “Sacred Heart” made of wire spikes almost confiscated by the immigration officers who considered it “muy peligroso.”

And day flowing into night, I performed the gallery too in my sleep dream world: outside a church, I touch its ancient walls and decide the church is a perfect place for performing my gallery; I am in hot pursuit of a friend. I climb a series of stairways ending in a series of garden terrace; there, there is a group of young men gathered around a round table where I place the small paintings I am wearing in my gallery; the men intensely discuss a word I used to describe the working process of the painter—“neg-entropic.” Inside a car I realize that I forgot to wear the gallery. The realization is not visual but comes through my body which registers the absence of the usual slight weight on my shoulders and chest; it is too late to turn back to get it; there seems to be no way of turning back.

More birthing mothers to take flight with! The first artwork I performed was by an artist who had just given birth to her firstborn. Also the first work she created after having given birth, it was naturally about her son—a reliquary, a scapular of her own containing a love letter, a pair of butterfly wings, a tiny photograph of her son curled up like a fetus clothed in bees wax pod. Learning to sew for the first time, she stitches all these up inside a square pouch made of embroidered piña cloth cut from her grandfather’s barong Tagalog.

The art works contained inside the scapular gallery worn close to my heart I carefully wrapped in cloth, and lovingly brought out never just for viewing but for anyone who wished to touch and hold, to read, dance, smell, hear, or co-create the art. There were puzzle portraits, paintings to play games with, soy sauce paintings to smell, invitations for dancing and kissing, dog leashes to put around one’s neck, gifts to be received from the artist whose work was being performed and messages to be written to touch base with this artist. The audience was invited to break bread on a table cloth titled Table Veil, or read a poem engraved on a three-page stainless-steel book, or hold and touch exquisite earthen pots the size of one’s palm or barter something in place of the thing currently contained within the cloth gallery, or listen with a walkman playing a musical composition by a Filipino national artist, or add one’s own places of journeys to a list of places the artist has traveled to.

Now with multiple “Is” as curator, gallery designer and builder, critic, liaison person, graphic designer, messenger, photographer, spokesperson, gallery owner, archivist, editor, publisher, now scheduling other artists’ works to be worn, now being invited to deliver papers on the performance, organizing the gallery’s archive, writing an essay on archiving the materials of the performance art gallery; now emailing artists all over the world who wish to work with me on the gallery, now performing and talking about  the gallery briefly within the white cube and now easily escaping its deadly white enclosures; now writing the notes on the works being performed, now sewing the pouches to cradle the artworks of other artists; now with multiple entrances and exits, now a rhizome having rendered myself the vehicle of this gift of clothing, I was one smooth flowing movement up and down, in and out of built and natural environments flourishing with new friends all over the world, co-creators, and fellow travelers in the journey towards a lightness of being.

—

I expected nothing in return for all the energy I expended in living this art. Living the joy of having my new self embodied in my new art was enough recom- pense. My art created not outside the flow of my daily life was nothing less than a miracle.

And I was gifted tenfold. Matrixed (bound, womb-ed) from the generous Mother, this work brought me to many places where the more I had the more I gave, the more I was, the more I gave the more I had.72

I was gifted to wear and perform Transition, Going on Fifty, by a friend who celebrated his birthday with this poem. I designed it into a three-page stainless steel book with the poem etched on the third page.73 I was gifted to exhibit music com- posed by a National Artist celebrating her 80th birthday.74

But the greatest gift I received from this work was the choice to render my as body as the locus of living my art. Clothed with this gallery, I was given the capacity and the freedom to animate any space I chose to inhabit as potential space for mak- ing/performing art just by occupying any space with an other who agreed to engage with me and my art as conduit for such an engagement. Ever moving, with great fluidity, speed and immediacy, I never occupied these spaces long enough to possess them nor be possessed by them.

Henceforth, I would be fluid all my life!

Henceforth, I became secure in my autonomy to make art sustained only by my own within the scale of my daily living. Having gained the wisdom that my cre- ative life need not necessarily take the form of art since art making is only one of the technologies of the self, I was now acutely cognizant of where I was in art history and its limits, now confident that I can negotiate with ease between the two extreme thresholds of the Center and the periphery, now free to live and create totally re- moved from the megaCenters of the Artworld.

Two works exemplified this stance: with Into the He(art) of the Commodities, I appropriated images, reproductions of works by Western male master artists. Some of these images I xeroxed, reproduced as found. Others were used exactly as found. All were framed and traded as simple products in non-art gallery and non-museum spaces. Postcards were printed to announce the performance. Some were mailed to people in the art world. Some were placed in museums and galleries in Singapore, Sydney, Oslo and Stockholm.

The success of this performance was based on how well these objects per- formed as ordinary commodities and not as commodity fetishes. This time I made no art objects, for I offered no objects to be made visible, comprehensible and commodifiable within and by the Center. What I did offer was the gesture of owning up to the “crime” that artmaking is commodity making of the highest order but this time I owned up to the crime without the pretext of the art system. This time I made art in the heart of ordinary commodity making.

The other work was Sacred Sites and Secular Spaces. I prayed to HerMe(s) for this. In despair over the reality that we live in a city so unwelcoming to a life of deep quietude and of the spirit; bereft of spaces where we can rest our weary heads, of non-monolithic places where we can connect to the stillness of the infinite, I prayed that I be shown what I can do in my own small way about creating precisely these spaces of solitude and communion. I now perform the installation of shrines for friends or for those who wish to have a site for those quiet moments of communion with whatever they consider divine forces guiding and gifting them their lives. Shrines in gardens, offices, homes; shrines for professorial lecture opening rites, for events to usher in the New Year, birthdays, dinner rites to welcome home a friend, for rituals of gratitude to a generous environment, for reinvigorating existing shrines.

These shrines are made of objects intimately vital to these people’s lives. These shrines are created in personal spaces of peace and comfort. These sites may be ephemeral—installed only for the duration of an event; or made more permanent, used as altars for longer periods of time. These installations are never attributed to me. I do not own these shrines. The requesting party owns them. I never announce to my friends that these are artworks. For the more permanent sites, after my performance of the initial rites, the owners can reconfigure them as they wish, adding, moving or removing objects. One can invite others to use these shrines. Scheduled as a twelve-year long undertaking totally outside any system or process of art, this is by far my most fluid and autonomous work yet.

—

A stunning symmetry was attained with my (her) art. A symmetry between what I am able to expend and invest on my own, within the scale of my daily re- sources and who I was becoming through the fruits of my labor.

With my (her) art there are now conversations, laughter, pleasure and stories exchanged with others who are respectfully asked to engage with the whole of their bodies.

With my (her) art no kingdom is built that needs defending; that would only serve to territorialize me. With my (her) art there is only my (her) freedom to create anything and everywhere I (she) please(s) with the whole of my body as source and material; with the whole of his, her, your body actively responding to my (her, our) art.

With my (her) art there is no need to propose any works to gatekeepers, no doors to knock on, nor walls to be contained in; no Wordmasters to court.

With my (her) art, there is almost always the creative moment lived with others outside the Center.

A stunning symmetry was attained with my (her) art. Having given myself the privilege to constantly sense the order of things according to the scale of my being, I have attained a self-sufficiency empowering myself proportionate to and within the scale and possibilities of my own energies and resources.

Only those who love me say I am a fool to make art where it will not matter to the Center. I appreciate their loving observation, for like you HerMe(s), the fool is who we are when we leave the infirmed Center and find ourselves in humbling places, and in gratitude as we endeavor to restore some form of health by inverting/ subverting the perverted Order.75

I am (You, We are) a rhizome

Her spaces of feral artmaking evades conquest by the white cube-erectors, commodifiers, his-story makers, individual-life-reducers, coders and coopters of new creations, mummy peddlers.

I do not stand before the gatekeepers: mausoleum directors, artWord-master-barkers, wheeler-dealers.

“I do not defend myself before these”76 gatekeepers—embalmers, entombers, necrolaters all!

Jouissance77 is the only space in-forming me.

—

“We are ourselves”78earth, rhizoids, dirt, tubers, wrigglers, soil, bulbs...Rhizomorphous, “yes. For her joyous benefits”79 she is Iris; gravityborn runner on the wing, a bow of rain.

Feeding easily above and under, in the dark and in the light, on the fat of the land, she shoots above, roots below thickening herself with water, dissolved minerals, food reserves to bloom waterlilies upward.

Subterranean burrower, self-excavator, absorber, aerator; diffused, she roots out bringing herself to light, to air. Anchor, food storage, support—hers is the depropriated unselfish  “body without end,”80 with a thousand shoots with no known hierarchy, conduits of life enabling her/him/you to survive underground within her rhizosphere the meanest of seasons.

Now birthed to live in the iris of all-senses-all, she, her art “can only keep going”81 guided by the genius of every place she chooses to inhabit without ever containing, commodifying or reducing any exchange of breath, risking to make these rhizomatic flows with the other(s) as quick or as involved as the other wishes, journeys made with her, with them, with him whom she touches long enough to animate or be animated by, recognizing a part of her in him, her, them making possible awakenings in each other.

She alone risks and desires to know from her (the) interior, where she, the invisible has never to embody the void of becoming. She lets the other body live the laughter, live the lives of 1,000 beings ever different, ever flowing everywhere unimpeded.

ENDNOTES

1. I have formulated the title of this self-writing The Book of HerMe(s) after Hélèn Cixous’ The Book of Promethea, a book of love written in the form of poetic fiction. Blurring “boundaries between fiction and theory...Fiction is used to soften whatever theory would repress or harden...A creative method buoys her work, loosens it from the yoke of logic, or alleviates the alienating presence of the technical jargon” (Verena Andermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous (New York: Harvestser Wheatsheaf, 1992) 17).

Promethea is Cixous’ source of writing. Not a mere passive receiver of her gifts, Cixous has an active “relationship with Promethea as she must struggle with the process of writing.” In this text, she endeavors to “create an alternative subject position, in which self and other coexist in a mutually enabling love” (Susan Sellers, ed. The Hélène Cixous Reader (London: Routledge, 1994) 116).

I too have taken the liberty of creating a female Hermes and more. Cixous in her project to “blow up the Law... and like the hysteric who confounded Freud’s laws, disrupts, fragments but not appropriates language...displaces and overturns the opposing male signifier. Cixous signals this by her use of word-plays and complex puns” (Danielle Clarke, “Hélèn Cixous,” The Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Payne (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997) 104).

From Cixous’ essay La for example: “I do not attend before the tribunals: Heliopolice... of Memefils—of Djetoudi...of the region of shadows...” (Sellers 59). Here Cixous puns on Heliopolis, an ancient city in northern Egypt, Helio means of or by the sun used in the formation of compound words, i.e. the heliocentric concept of the universe with the sun as the center. In myth Helios was one of the early sun gods. Memefils translates as Sameson, and Djetoudi is a play on j’ai tout dit—“I have said it all,” (Sellers 67).

All over my own text, I have enjoyed punning and constructing new words myself. Constructed to make obvious the words Her, Me and the plural me—Me(s), therefore Her(Me)s, I have created in name a female Hermes which also refers to Cixous’s idea of the multiple I or the feminine plural: “Laying claim to all possible subject position, the speaking subject can indeed proudly proclaim herself as a ‘feminine plural’ who through reading and writing partakes of divine eternity” (Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1985) 116).

I have also taken advantage of writing from a subject position as a multiple feminine I. In my use of several pronouns, as in the line “Her (His) art required that she receive ideas from, and practice art based on a specific art tradition that was not necessarily hers,” Her refers to me and His in parenthesis indicates that the art I was practicing pre-mid-life was art that was phallogocentric in tradition. But when I come to write about my post mid-life art created by a more authentic self capable of creating art sourced from deep within and made by taking on multiple roles, I write, “With my (her) art, no kingdom is built that needs defending; that would only serve to territorialize me. With my (her) art, there is only my (her) freedom to create anything and everywhere I (she) please(s) with the whole of my (her, our) body as source and material...”

Reading about Hermes in Synchronicity: Through the Eyes of Science, Myth, and the Trickster, I finally understood many of the synchronistic interventions that have happened in my life and my art. Thus, I write here about my relationship with my guide HerMe(s); how she has every now and then synchronistically placed me where I most needed to be to do the highest of spiritual work. Hermes, a trickster and a mediator between the highest of the gods and human beings “is at his best in the service of the central aspect of the personality, the archetype Carl Jung called the Self. His appearance in connection with this archetype can mean that synchronistic coincidences are associated with the growth process termed individuation” (Allan Combs, Synchronicity, through the Eyes of Science, Myth and the Trickster (New York: Marlowe and Co., 1996) 83).

I found myself writing The Book of HerMe(s) also as a book of love. As my psychopompos, as the spirit who has shown me the way again and again, HerMe(s) has loved me and will continue to love me fiercely till the end of my life. To return her love, all I need do is learn to discern her presence through her paradoxical gifts. To love her back, all I need do is honor her gifts by paying heed to her providential guidance.

Before I learned to easily divine her presence, I struggled with HerMe(s). Soul Guide par excellence, she appeared in full force in the middle of my life signalling a major life transition that needed to be undertaken. In my ignorance of her loving generosity, I fought, I resisted to let go of the no-longer-vital old self not understanding that to let go was to birth a new self, to start my own process of individuation. Thus HerMe(s) messenger of the gods, makes possible events, unexpected opportunities and resources at the service of our individuation (Combs 125). And for Cixous “like Promethea...to lead to the absolute into the suspension of a trance, we need to leave behind our inherited social life and its founding myth” (Conley 41).

Worthy of HerMe(s) and her synchronicities therefore, we learn that at the heart of Cixous’s writing is the project to free ourselves from our socially constructed selves: “Writing is both a search for a social freeing and a writing out of a personal situation of imprisonment... How to escape from the double feeling of imprisonment, personal and social, haunts all of Cixous’s texts” (Conley 58-59). She refers to individuation as our “first separation,” an active self-birthing (Conley 62).

In the The Book of Promethea, “Cixous meditates on the creative process” (Conley 120). The Book of HerMe(s) is also a meditation on my creative process as an artist and as someone who has continued her self-creation with her guide as no less than the world maker and fire bringer, a creative force. “Like the imagination, he can manifest in Hades as well as in Olympus, or at any point between. Flying on winged sandals, he can take us to the height of inspiration or the depths of depression. Identifying him with the imagination means we recognize him as a world maker. Further, the trickster Hermes is associated with the light of consciousness in the form of the archetypal bringer of fire. The light of consciousness is central to human creativity, for without it the production of the imagination...would find no expression. Indeed, as world maker and fire bringer Hermes makes human life possible” (Combs 89-90).

This time of my writing, I was gifted with many more synchronicities, for I now know how to invoke HerMe(s). The synchronicity of all synchronicities as I write this text is of course that of HerMe(s) and Cixous being one and the same force! Both work and live the cracks and gaps of things; both urge us to go to our abysses to begin our self-transformation; both disrupt the linear, the Law, the symbolic order; they are beings who are comfortable working in and with the nether, our dreams, the Imaginary.

HerMe(s) the Trickster and goddess of thresholds “steps into through cracks and flaws in the ordered world of ordinary reality,” (Combs 82) “ to make things happen, to recreate boundaries, to break and re-establish relationships, to reawaken consciousness of the presence and the creative power of both the sacred Center and the formless Outside” (Combs 122). And Cixous “will always incorporate differences, juxtapose contradictions, work to undo gaps and distinctions, fill the gap to overflowing...” (Moi 119). After having individuated, I found myself making art in spaces that were not considered potent places of artmaking by the artworld that I left but which I found rich in furthering my self-birthing, my self-creation because of the freedom these spaces afforded me unmoored from systems of institutional power.

If HerMe(s) is a soul guide, Cixous is a spiritual anatomist! Cixous: “On the one hand is this a textual region where I work immersed, in the depths, to explore the universe of what we commonly call the human soul. Soul! what a beautiful word! Like: god! What a word! We say: soul, as if we knew what it is and where it is. In the vicinity of this unknown-one, I proceed with the help of my myopia: I scrutinize ‘the movements of the soul,’ from close up, I observe the passions at the moment they manifest themselves...first of all in our bodies...In this area I work under the microscope, as a spiritual anatomist” (Sellers xix).

To point to further synchronicities, wherever Cixous’ ideas or practice echo a “HerMe(s)-ian” characteristic, I cite the coincidence here in my notes. Moving on to my subtitle ex-Am, ex-Amen, here I play on the idea of leavetakings—of old states of selves (again referring to the process of individuation), of language conscripted in the service of the Father, of phallogocentric thinking. One of the roots of the word examine, is the Latin exigere, to lead out: ex-, out + agere to lead (“Examine,” The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, ed. William Morris (Boston: American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc., 1970) 456).

The other pun ex-Amen is a play on the word Amen an expression of assent, of concurrence and on Amen or Amon who is the “god of life and reproduction represented as a man with a ram’s head,” (“Amen,” American Heritage Dictionary 41-42). Another leavetaking: woman taking leave of situations where she is always expected to say yes to man as her source of life. Cixous in one of her more humorous texts, in a passage from La, depicts women’s “role in constituting man as god. She demonstrates how women’s fear—of separation, solitude, ‘death’—is culturally produced through such histories as the biblical account of Genesis conspiring to prevent woman from giving birth to herself” (Sellers 61). Specific to my own life, this sub-title refers to my own leavetakings from the old ways, places, and ideas of art made in the Western tradition and history of master narratives.

2. This writing is supposed to be an autobiography but Cixous fears the autobiographical form: “There is nothing I fear more than autobiography. Autobiography does not exist. But so many people believe that it does exist. So I declare solemnly: autobiography is not a literary genre. It is not a living genre. It is a jealous deceiving genre—I hate it. When I say ‘I,’ it is never the subject of an autobiography, my I is free. Is the subject of my madness, my states of alarm, my vertigo” (Conley 120).

This fact should have alarmed me for if I were to emulate Cixous’ writing of the self, I should not write an autobiography! Again HerMe(s) comes to the rescue. “The discipline of meditation tends to soften boundaries and, as we have noted, act as a catalyst to synchronicity.” (Combs 132) The Book of Promethea is written as a meditation! “Promethea thus meditates its states as a kind of ‘journal’, written from and with the other, with love and burning passion. The text is written in the quick of life...” (Conley 120). Therefore, if not an autobiography, then a meditation! Thus, I decided to write instead an intertextual meditation on my life work.

Further, in place of the autobiography, Cixous offers The Third Body. “Autobiography is always complicated by the fact writing is done in and from a fictive scene, and that ‘I’ is plural. There is no ‘life’ that would become the subject of writing, there is no linearity, there is no before and after. In a Freudian model, ‘I’ is but a moment of anticipation and retrospection...At the interstices of the narrator—who-is-and-is-not the author—and her explicit and implicit reading of her texts, this new type of ‘auto-biography’ is born. A third body is synthesized from biography and quotation, self and other, writer and reader. Writing is not born as much from ‘experience’ or the description of a pre-existing reality. It is invented from reading, from the investment of affect in living and textual ‘scenes’. The narrator writes out her life in order to be in the quick of it; that is in the very present but always among other literary scenes that include those heeding the very act of writing” (Conley 17).

Cixous works, writes on the “mysteries of subjectivity” (Sellers, xvi). “...the human subject is of course the primary territory of every artist...No I without you ever or more precisely no I’s without-you’s. I is always our like. When I explore I—I take as object of observation a human sample. There is no true art which does not take at its source or root the universal regions of subjectivity” (Sellers xvii).

The Book of HerMe(s) therefore is written as a meditation on my subjectivity in the form of the third body, as an intertextual text, as a writing working through mostly one writer’s writing. I have quoted others. I have quoted myself. I have included my writings in the past. On few occasions, I have patterned some passages directly from Cixous’ writing. Within these notes, I cite her texts in toto whenever these occasions occur. Every now and then I have inserted her writings verbatim. I have even patterned parts of my writing down to the look of her published texts in terms of how she forms her paragraphs. These endnotes too are littered with others speaking.

In Vivre l’orange/To Live the Orange Cixous asked: “What have I in common with women?...I wandered ten years in the desert of books...but where are the amies?” (Sellers 85). The answer comes in the writing of Clarice Lispector, a voice from Brazil whose writing Cixous truly loves. Cixous wants company, she wants friends in the reading and writing of texts. I understand this. We want to find those whose voices resonate with ours. “Cixous herself performs in relation to other texts what she invites the reader to do, that is to accompany her, remark certain terms, follow turns, and risk new formulations” (Conley xiv). Cixous professes to write from and with other writers she claims to have assimilated—not cannibalised. She has made of them...a honey all her own. These writers have become flesh and body with which she writes...” (Conley 122-123).

The Book of HerMe(s) a book of coincidences, is also text that writes itself out through other voices that resonate with each other: my voice, the voice of Cixous, HerMe(s), of other women artists, and other writers and theorists. Thus like The Book of Promethea, which “is written as a ‘braiding’ of voices...[where] the author herself is asserted as plural” (Conley 120), The Book of HerMe(s) is also written as a braiding and weaving of many voices—an intertextual meditation on my lifework.

3. I constructed this phrase based on the technical term body text used in publishing and in the printing of texts and on Cixous’s idea and practice of writing her body. Cixous speaks of “writing said to be feminine (or masculine) or...of a decipherable libidinal femininity which can be read in writing produced by a male or female” (Moi 108): “Writing is less in the service of a demonstration than a way of writing the body, with the body, at the intersections between drives, body and word” (Conley 11). Cixous: “I scrutinize ‘the movements of the soul,’ from close up, I observe the passions at the moment they manifest themselves, such as they express themselves, translate themselves, first of all in our bodies. Where does the tragedy first take place? In the body, in the stomach, in the legs, as we know since the Greek tragedies, Aeschylus’ characters tell, first and foremost, a body state. Myself—I realized this afterwards—I began by carrying out a rehabilitation of these body states since they are so eloquent, since they concretely speak the troubles of our souls...” (in Sellers xix).

Thus Promethea as source of Cixous’ writing. Thus HerMe(s) as guide to my artmaking and my new-self creation. Thus myth and the imaginary as wombs from which to come to creation. HerMe(s) who works deep within symbolic play, who crosses swiftly between the conscious and the subconscious, “tosses out images in play that express the sheer vitality of the imagination” (Combs 116). “To feel the pull of this archetype is to feel the pull of destiny, to sense in your most profound conscience your unique purpose and station in life” (Combs 121). To surrender to the demands of HerMe(s) in our most critical stage of life is to surrender to the world of the Imaginary of the archetypal Self; a process that requires we too frolic in delight in the world of symbols in order that the “conscious mind be nourished by the life-giving vitality of the unconscious” (Combs 117); in order that we experience the supernatural (the spiritual) in the real (Hélèn Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) 97).

And for Cixous it is the same. To write in the Imaginary is to be in “a space where all difference has been abolished” (Moi, 117). Her vision of feminine/female writing is “a way of re-establishing a spontaneous relationship to the physical jouissance of the female body may be read positively as a utopian vision of female creativity in a truly non-oppressive and non-sexist society. Indeed a marked emphasis on the Imaginary is common in utopian writing...Utopian thought has always been a source of political inspiration for feminists and socialists alike. Confidentially assuming that change is both possible and desirable, the utopian vision takes off from a negative analysis of its own society in order to create images and ideas that have the power to inspire revolt against oppression and exploitation” (Moi 121).

Further on writing the body, in The Third Body, Cixous treats the body literally. “Emphasis is on bodily materiality of language, a materiality that resonates at the level of the signifier as well as of meaning. The text focuses on ways of writing the body and articulating life and death, absence, presence, appearance and disappearance” (Conley 17). In the first step of Cixous’ ladder of writing, she brings us to The School of the Dead. “To begin (writing, living) we must have death. I like the dead, they are the doorkeepers who while closing one side ‘give’ way to the other” (Cixous 7).

And back to HerMe(s) who is not far behind. “In [her] official capacity as mediator between the worlds of night and day, spirits and men, and (standing before the temple) between the worlds of Gods and mankind, [s]he is called Propylaios[a] (the one at the entrance) and Harmateus[a] (the driver of the chariot). Two other epithets—strophios[a] (standing at the doorpost...) and stropheus[a] (the ‘socket’ in which the pivot of the door moves)—show [her] closely related to door hinges and therefore the entrance, but also the middle point, to the socket, about which revolves the most decisive issue, namely the alternation life-death-life” (Combs 83).

Where did my tragedy first take place? In my lymph! My blood cells gone awry, they attacked me. So eloquent was my body, it stopped me cold, it had me flat on my back so I could lie there in the hospital, lie there still to listen to my body’s demands pointing to my soul’s troubles. Suffering from a chronic illness called Systemic Lupus Erythematosus, my autoimmune system failed me. Under tremendous stress from a life that no longer made sense, the present life had become toxic. The old self could no longer protect itself from itself! I was fast becoming a living corpse in my place of work, the museum, a mausoleum. I needed to die from disembodied art. I needed to shed dead organs, dead skin, dead ideas, dead ways of loving and living. If Cixous came to write her body, I, with my individuation, with my leavetaking from the socially constructed self, came to make art with the whole of my body. I focus on this event in this book. I focus on what it was to make art for the disembodied Eye to presently making art for the fully embodied I.

To begin (writing, living), I must have my own death as pivot from which to take f/light; from which to write in the quick of life, in the present instant. But how does one write in the quick of things when one’s material is one’s past? “Promethea is written in the quick of life...Cixous’ recent texts meditate on writing in relation to the instant—that is to life—and a bodily way of knowing that she opposes death, memory or a learned, cerebral knowledge. Though death is far more present when articulating the two terms, Cixous continues to privilege life...How can one write in the quick of life?...how do we obtain this lightness, this active passivity, this capacity to let things come through this, this submission to the process? we who are so heavy...How could we become virgin and young and innocent?” (Conley 120).

First one must drop the ego: “For the ego is the last root preventing flight. Or the last anchor. One has to unfasten oneself the best one can, with a snap, or by slowly filing away the soul-ring of lead...writing on the verge of disappearance and death. To accede to this final stage, one needs to leave behind all the gilding that hides an essential truth...poetic truth. In the need...not to make things pretty, not to make things clean, when they are not; not to do the right thing. But, whatever the price, to do the true thing” (Conley 121-122).

HerMe(s) too deals with the ego: the mythic figure “of particular importance to synchronicity, the archetype of the Trickster...is the mythic embodiment of the unexpected eruption into awareness of truths hidden away from the ego” (Combs 104). To be guided by the trickster is “to lighten up—to pay attention to where the flow of the coincidence leads,” (Combs 135). To be guided by HerMe(s) is to be open to the flow as it is happening; she as the trickster has “utter disregard for one’s state of mind at the time that a synchronistic episode is happening...In her Cosmic Love she is absolutely ruthless and highly indifferent; she teaches her lessons whether you like or dislike them (Combs 134).

To pay heed to her lessons is to be speeded up towards our true selves. To die to the old-self is to drop the ego; to take f/light to a more authentic life.

4. HerMe(s) and Cixous refuse to have anything to do with staying in line. HerMe(s) is the mythic figure embodying the unexpected, embodying synchronistic coincidences which “violate our confidence in a world of events chronologically ordered and based on cause and effect” (Combs 81). She creates “a conspicuous discontinuity in ordinary reality, an opening to the miraculous” (Combs 82).

And Cixous? Militating women to take the leap of actively birthing themselves, Cixous “urges for a leap that breaks with the linear thread” (Conley 62). All first separations, being processes of transformation, begin with our being wrenched away from the world of linear causality. Thus, my meditation on my process of transformation does not take a linear form. It begins with a monologue, picks up my story in the middle of my life, then goes back to my college years, proceeds to my first years of work, then jumps to the mid of my life again; moves on to my immediate past and ends at my moving present. In between these are words and their definitions; then there appears a vignette. Then five of the footnotes of the HerMe(s) body text is linked to seven PDF files—the exegeses of the “lyrical prose”— which directs the reader to keep going back and forth from the main body text down to its footnotes and off to a PDF link which also has footnotes and back again to the footnote of the HerMe(s) body text or to the HerMe(s) body text itself. All these render my “self-narrative” into a non-linear, de-centered, non-hierarchical piece of writing made possible by its form as a hypertext. This self-writing then, can only be read in the Internet; an environment of infinite number of links, it can readily tempt my reader to leave my writing to go someplace else more interesting. According to Barbara Page in her essay “Women Writers and the Restive Text, Feminism Experimental Writing and Hypertext,” for some women writers who believe the radical idea that they “can produce themselves—as new beings or as ones previously unspoken—through self-conscious act of writing against received tradition...hypertext would seem to provide a means by which to explore new possibilities for writing” Barbara Page, “Women Writers and the Restive Text, Feminism Experimental Writing and Hypertext,” Cyberspace Textuality, Computer Technology and Literary Theory ed. Marie-Laure Ryan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999) 112.

5. In the first few days of my writing, my dreams were practically guiding me to write the first pages of this exam. A few times, the information and ideas that my dreams offered were there even before I read them, even before I figured them out, even before I conceived them in my waking hours! I had no doubt that HerMe(s) and Cixous were at work here. HerMe(s) “symbolically conducts our night transition to the dream world...In the underworld of dreams, events are seen from a perspective that is reversed from that of the daytime world, as if we were looking at our lives from behind the stage” (Conley 88). Cixous on the other hand instructs us to learn to write in the school of dreams where dreams are the only masters she will allow into her life. “Dreams teach us. They teach us to write in four lessons: Without transition...Speed...The Lost Mysteries...The Magic Word...” (Cixous 79-90).

Cixous and HerMe(s) made me come to my writing by urging me to go deep into my dreams, in my dreams there were their instructions: They gave me the magic words Dedans La! Begin inside her, you, me. All over this text I have paid heed to these lessons. My lost mystery was recognizing my unconditional love for my mother and thus coming full circle in our exchanges of love; I was once the child she cared for; she is now the child I am caring for now mute except for our bodies. This text is written without much transitions inscribing the non-linear non-logical forms of dreams.

Whenever gripped by panic that I would not be able to write, they were all there: Helene, HerMe(s), my dreams, pulling me out of my fear. They were there, they are here now, teachers all! Speeding me up, making me fluid, moving me, moving me on to write!

6. Combs 83.

7. Ibid., 82.

8. Conley 62.

9. HerMe(s) in my second day of mulling over the exam had me dream the following phrases: “You will not bathe for the waters will not flow. For she who bathes and is aggrieved will prevent the waters from flowing.” To which I respond in protest, “But I will be aggrieved, will aggregate these coming days.” In this dream, we have two men (a father and his son!), ordering me (the daughter, the sister!) not to bathe. And warns that a woman in grief if she bathes, will be the cause of the waters not to flow. The woman protests and asserts that she will bathe by declaring that she will be aggrieved and aggregate in the coming days. What is stunning about this dream is how it sums up the content, the method, the stance of my text even before I started reading many other of Cixous’ texts that I did not have in my own library; even before I started putting down one single word to start the text! It sums up the story of my active disavowal of life and art created within the phallogocentric social center.

The word aggregate is a pun! The following day after the dream, I picked up the Cixous Reader and Conley’s book on Cixous and behold there in both books was the French word agregation in the chronology of Cixous life! “1959 Agregation in English,” (Conley, xi) and, from Sellers in the Reader: “After a brilliant period of as a student, during which she passed the agregation in English...” (xxvii). Cixous passes her English studies exam! Aggregate: “Gathered together into a mass or sum so as to constitute a whole,” (“Aggregate,” The American Heritage Dictionary 24). This was the first hint of the kind of stunning imagery and word-play that HerMe(s) was going to engage me from deep within my sleep into my waking, writing hours

10. Cixous 82.

11. Combs 116.

12. Conley 58.

13. Moi 118.

14. Combs 144.

15. I have put together here the two phrases to come to writing and writing the body.

16. Dedans and La are texts by Cixous. Dedans means “inside” in French and La “there,” “she” and the vibrating tone, the musical note la. Thus, in dreaming them together as one phrase in a sing-song, “Dedans La,” or “Inside She” or “Inside Her” over and over again, I was being directed to begin writing inside my body, inside the female body.

Dedans, Cixous’s “first full length work of fiction...centers on the relationship of loss and death.” With her father as a formative influence on her as a writer and with his premature death, she writes about the mysteries and origin of a writing, of being inside and outside the father, as she carries him, as she is haunted by him, as she lives him. “There is a relationship between father and language, father and ‘symbolic’ ” (Sellers 19). HerMe(s) points to this text as an originary text, after all, I invoked her to guide me begin my writing! As for La, HerMe(s) points to Cixous’ own writing journey in search for companions. I am to discover myself “writing toward the Unknown (woman) who calls for [me] and asks [me] to be LA (there, her, la)” (Conley 58).

In singing Dedans La in my dream, I am to consider writing as the “art of ‘singing the abyss’...Drawing on the resources of the unconscious, in tune with the body’s need and pleasures, feminine writing is rooted in a liberating love...its time the present including the acceptance, rather than the refusal of our inevitable death. Its purpose is transmission leading to growth, and a celebration of life in the face of death” (Sellers 59).

17. Cixous 82.

18. Conley 62.

19. According to Conley, Cixous’s form of writing in Dedans displays “self-enabling experiments that militate against bourgeois commodity-art and any ideology connected to it” (Conley 63). This sounds almost exactly like my statements describing Scapular Gallery Nomad, the first work that I undertook after my active self-birthing. I quote my own writing self-published under Works of Winged Women in May 1997; “With Scapular Gallery Nomad, it is my hope that other artists explore the possibilities of their responsibility to conserve than consume, to be self-reliant and autonomous of, rather than be dependent on the power and dictates of commodifying apparatuses.”

20. Tuvok is a character in a telvision series entitled “Star Trek Voyager” which I never fail to watch everyday, seven days a week at 11 in the evening before turning in at night. It is not surprising therefore that I get to dream about him so vividly.

21. Conley 127.

22. Ibid., 60.

23. Ibid., 127.

24. Ibid., 58.

25. The Indo European root wekw means to speak. Its o-grade form (root with o-vocalism) is wokw in Latin vox (stem voc), VOICE: VOCAL, VOWEL, EQUIVOCAL, UNIVOCAL 2. O-grade form wok(w)-a in Latin vocare, to call: VOCABLE, VOCATION, VOUCH; ADVOCATE, AVOCATION, CONVOKE, EVOKE, PROVOKE, REVOKE. 3. Suffixed form wekw-os in Greek epos, song, word, (American Heritage Dictionary 1548).

“Femininity in writing can be discerned in a privileging of the voice: writing and voice...are woven together. The speaking woman is entirely her voice: She physically materializes what she’s thinking; she signifies it with her body. Woman, in other words, is wholly and physically present in her voice—and writing is no more than the extension of this self-identical prolongation of the speech act. The voice is each woman, moreover, is not only her own, but springs from the deepest layers of her psyche: her own speech becomes the echo of the primeval song she once heard, the voice the incarnation of the ‘first love which all women preserve alive...each woman sings the first nameless love.’ It is in short the Voice of the Mother...The Voice, a song before the Law, before the breath...was split by the symbolic reappropriated into language under the authority that separates. The deepest and most ancient and adorable visitations” (Cixous in Moi 114).

My dream is a visitation from the Voice! Urging me to live long and prosper, this Voice loves me and thus will speak to me about and nurture me with the deepest and most ancient of things during this time of my coming to writing my body. Urging me not to fear voicing out my self lived outside the safety of the social collective Center; in fact to write from the voices of my dreams the last territory unconquered by commodifying forces.

26. Moi 110-111.

27. Moi 111.

28. Another synchronicity with HerMe(s): As bestower of good fortune, she is at the service of our individuation, and if we pay heed to her presence as was mentioned in an earlier note, she will provide everything that is necessary for us to evolve into our highest spiritual self. “If you have within you...an [inner Being]...sufficiently awake to watch over you, to prepare your path, it can draw towards you things which help you, draw people, books circumstances, all sorts of coincidences, which come to you as though brought by some benevolent will and give you an indication, a help, a support to take decisions and turn you in the right direction. But once you have taken this decision, once you have decided to find the truth of your being, once you start sincerely on the road, then everything seems to conspire to help you in advance” (Combs 131).

Toril Moi believes that “generosity is one of the most positive words in Cixous’s vocabulary (Moi 110). This is what essentially differentiates the masculine system of value (The Realm of the Proper) from the feminine/female libidinal economy (The Realm of the Gift). “If a man spends and is spent, it is on condition that his power returns...leading to the masculine obsession with classification, systematization, and hierarchization” (Moi 111-112). Conditions that were pretty much the basis of the art that I used to practice before my self-birthing. Whereas with woman, “she is willing to be traversed by the other, characterized by spontaneous generosity...[this realm] isn’t really a realm at all but a deconstructive space of pleasure and orgasmic interchange with the other” (Moi 113).

After having gone through my process of individuation, I found myself in a different space where I could bodily experience the exchange that happens when an object of creation is bodily offered to an audience. I have rendered my body as the locus for a critique of the institution of art, thereby deconstructing an art system through my first hand encounters/exchanges with others.

Also my own process of self-transformation was a gift of being birthed anew and with it the gifts of new ideas, new ways of making art, new friends, many new doors opening my life up to the world; and gifts of new spaces where I could embody my art; spaces where supposedly no power could be gained but for me became generous wombs of self-empowerment.

29. Ibid., 117.

30. Cixous puns and plays with the word “voler (in French the verb means both ‘to fly’ and ‘to steal’): To fly/steal is woman’s gesture, to steal into language, to make it fly.’ The woman writing will fly/steal her confiscated body, to which she will then return” (Clarke 104).

31. Combs 180.

32. Moi 111.

33. Sellers 50.

34. Ibid., 62.

35. “Humankind,” American Heritage Dictionar 641.

36. In The Newly Born Woman, Cixous writes about trap-words as in the term “woman.” It “is not a natural term. It is a trap-word. Men and women have been caught in a historical configuration in a theatre of representation. A word is never neutral just as the body is never natural but is socially ciphered” (Conley 40).

37. <http://www.gospel.bible.com.net> Retrieved March 3, 2005.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. Combs 133.

41. Moi 117.

42. In this passage I only take one idea from Cixous: the woman birthing herself through writing. Moi: “Writing has to find the real path that does not simply go through the mother.” Cixous: “The true path toward birth does not simply go through the mother” (Moi 62).

43. ‘Word,” American Heritage Dictionary, 1474.

44. “Art,” ibid., 74.

45. I had first planned to begin this book of coincidences with this narrative of giving care for my mother. I thought as Cixous instructs us “to begin (writing, living) we must have death.” I thought I could begin this text with my mother’s death as it approached. But I began with my own death instead.

On weekends, I used to visit my mother. I took over giving her bath and although it had become a routine, I looked forward to this event to end the day with her. Stricken with Alzheimer’s disease, she could hardly carry a conversation; she had lost her capacity to recognize anyone around her, except for my father; she slowly lost her capacity to walk, to speak. So it is through our bodies that we expressed our presence to her. Naked, she was closest to me when I bathed her. It was when I bathed her that our relationship was most eloquent.

In Cixous’s School of Dreams in Three Steps of the Ladder of Writing under the section The Lost Mysteries, there is an interesting passage where she describes a relationship between a mother and a daughter: “Dreams remind us of mysteries. The mysteries we need are those that have been lost: these only resurface when something reopens. For a mother and daughter between whom there is an illness such as cancer—I say mother and daughter because it’s the most intense relationship, the closest as far as the body is concerned— unheard-of things occur that can never exist in everyday life, which are yet the very secret of our lives. When I say cancer, I do so to evoke a threat that everyone knows, takes seriously live—a moment of highest and strongest feelings of life. If we have lost everything in reality, dreams enable us to restore those moments when we are greatest, strongest in strength and in weakness—when we are magic” (Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing ( 89-90).Whenever I bathed my mother, dried the water from her body, spread lotion on her skin, and brushed her hair two hundred times, I recalled when she bathed me in times of great illness. The time I was flown back from Florence and was brought straight to the hospital from the airport, she was there, at the age of eighty-four, she was there strong as ever for me. Day in and day out, she stayed by my side. When I was back recuperating at home, she still had the strength to bathe me, feed me, care for me, love me in my moment of greatest weakness. So that it is when I bathed her that I realized that this is the one person in my life who I have loved unconditionally, for her love for me too was unconditional.

46. Marcia Tucker, ‘Who’s on First: Issues of Cultural Equity in Today’s Museums,” Different Voices: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Framework for Change in the American Art Museum, ed. M. Mitchell (New York: Association of Art Museum Directors, 1992) 11.

47. Thomas McEvilley, “Yves Klein, Messenger of the Age of Space,” Artforum, Jan. 1982: 46.

48. Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube, The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) 10.

49.Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory (London: Macmillan, 1986) 158.

50. Ibid.

51. Moi 112

52. Ibid., 111.

53. Burgin 159.

54. Sellers 59.

55. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (New York: Routledge, 1995) 103-104

56. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983) 183-184.

57. Bennett 105.

58. In conceiving a rather odd project when studying the technologies of the self, Foucault proposed “a history of the link between the obligation to tell the truth and the prohibitions against sexuality.” He asked how the subject has been compelled to decipher himself in regard to what was forbidden. It is a question of the relation between asceticism and self-truth. I have taken the liberty of forming my own question based on his formulation (Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, eds. L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, and P. H. Hutton (London: Tavistock Publications, 1988) 17).

59. My deep doubts about an art system that limits creation as valid only when placed within exposing systems is echoed by Cixous: “...how to be an agent without simply perpetuating the lures of power. In order to read the world, one has to throw oneself into the world without reflecting it through an image. Make the future happen outside of images” (Conley 30).

60. In creating the word oldouterworld, I was inspired by Cixous’s construction of the word newold found in the preface of the Cixous reader: “A new language? No. A virgin way of listening and making the always newold language speak” (in Sellers xxi).

61. I juxtapose Cixous’ idea about feminine writing as tending “toward music where harmonics are sought that open to something limitless or oceanic” (in Conley 40) with her urging that we sing our own abysses, to celebrate “life in the face of our inevitable death” (in Sellers 59). I use these two ideas and create my own perspective on what it is to surrender to the process of our own individuation; to surrender in the netheric bosom of HerMe(s). A creature of the unconscious where “the animal roots of the soul have their origins;...Inventor of the lyre and the world’s first musician...[she]conjures luminous life in the dark abyss...for consciousness cannot exist by its own energies alone but relies on the unconscious for the breath of life” (Combs 141-142).

62. Sellers 62.

63. It is culture Cixous argues that has relegated “woman to the other, and the denial of her own access to the pleasure of her BODY, ‘Shut out of his system’s space, she is the repressed that ensures the system’s functioning.’ This system is one based on hierarchy and opposition, where the traditional equation of the male with activity, and the female with passivity posits the female as non-existent and unthought. Thus the opposition is not a couple, and the feminine is merely a space or a lack subjected to male desire. She is thus a nonpresence, even to herself, dislocated from her own body and its desires” (Clarke 103).

64. I have written this paragraph patterned after a passage in La, which I quote here in full. Calling women to cut the many ties that bind them, prevent them from discovering their capacity to fly and swim in the unlimited, Cixous writes: “Let yourself go! Let go of everything! Lose everything! Take to the air. Take to the open sea. Take to letters. Listen: nothing is found. Nothing is lost. Everything remains to be sought. Go, fly, swim, bound, descend, cross, love the unknown, love the uncertain, love what has not yet been seen, love no one, whom you are, whom you will be, leave yourself, shrug off the old lies, dare what you don’t dare, it is there that you will take pleasure, never make your here anywhere but there, and rejoice in the terror, follow it where you’re afraid to go, go ahead, take the plunge, you’re on the right trail! Listen: you owe nothing to the law. Gain your freedom: get rid of everything, vomit up everything, give up everything. Give up absolutely everything, do you hear me? All of it! Give up your goods Done? Don’t keep anything, whatever you value, give it up. Are you with me? Search yourself, seek out the shattered, the multiple I, that you will be still further on, and emerge from one self, shed the old body, shake off the Law. Let it fall with all its weight, and you, take off, don’t turn back. It’s not worth it, there’s nothing behind you, everything is yet to come” (quoted in Conley 65).

65. A point of coincidence again, I have always thought myself rootlike in living out two of my most body-based work, Scapular Gallery Nomad and Sacred Sites in Secular Spaces. Specifically more like a rhizome moving smoothly, swiftly in striated spaces unimpeded as a strategy to escape the clutches of capitalism which has rendered the body into a mere consuming organ (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) 3-25).

But now, I have been inspired to equate my practice of being root-like beyond the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari and go with the imagery of Cixous as she writes about Clarice Lispector, one of the writers whose work she truly loves. Here is Cixous on Lispector: “Clarice strains toward the beginning and end, toward what she develops throughout her work with variations as matter. Matter for her is not abstract but intelligent, alive and powerful. One has to follow a path to arrive at matter, which has stages which are the natural grades of different realms of species. Clarice effects an interior return to journey, since we began as matter before moving away from whence we came. She makes a return to our concrete origins, though the journey is a spiritual one. This journey is spiritual because it is not enough to put one’s foot on the ground to come back to earth. It is an extremely difficult spiritual exercise, reintegrating the earthly, the earth, and the earth’s composition in one’s body, imagination, thought. Clarice does not do this simply: she proceeds by feeling her way, by desiring; she moves blindly, since she is an explorer in the domain, methodically making mistakes. Sometimes she opens the wrong door, makes the wrong maneuvre; sometimes she gets very close to matter, to earth—she’s almost there - then she takes a step too many and breaks through the earth, passes to the other side, and comes back on the side of abstraction and the idealizing thought she constantly criticizes. Realizing this, she returns once again...” (Cixous 150).

66. Creating works that were no longer institutionally contained (infrastructurally), I was now free to work in spaces and with things that were ordinarily considered without potential in the delivery of critical art. I found these spaces of supposed no value, of “invisibly rich” places to continue my self-birthing of discovering a myriad of selves. I felt these spaces embodied HerMe(s) since she is of the nether realm which Cixous notes as considered inferior realms (Cixous 118). I created two long words out of these supposed things and places of no value by stringing them up into a horizon from which potent things will rise; from which I took f/light.

67. Moi 116.

68. Cixous argues that what is spurned by the Bible is what is “unclean”—imund, immonde, literally “out of the world” (Sellers 203); thus my own formulation of this idea as an un-Worlding: to be not of that World, or to undo oneself of that World.

69. Combs 83.

70. Moi 115.

71. Ibid.

72. Ibid.

73. Transition, Going on Fifty is a poem by a friend, Filipino poet and fictionist Anthony Tan. I performed this in my gallery April 1998.

74. National artist Lucrecia Kasilag was inspired by Anthony Tan’s gesture of gifting himself a birthday poem. Kasilag composed On Going Eighty, A Prayer for Flute, Drum and Gongs which I co-produced with three young musicians from the College of Music of the University of the Philippines. The final work was a modest recording heard with a Walkman. She invited me to the world premier of her concerto performed by the Philippine Philharmonic to celebrate her birthday on August 30, 1998. Her other birthday music also had its world premier that night performed in my body gallery. The concert audience was my audience as they milled around the Cultural Center lobby before the concert started and during the two intermissions. Her music composed for and performed in my gallery went on to be heard by many long after the concert was performed.

75. Cixous too wrote about the fool, the Joker in Revolutions, the individual, a heroic mad person who tries to cause or change things in a world of hegemonies, of “discursive formations where the individual or collective bodies are formed by massive forces that determine the face and character of cultures and history...conspiring to produce historical events to chart the future of the globe” (Conley 130).

76. This text is patterned after a passage from La including the way Cixous composed her lines: “Her scene of wild writings forever escapes vigilance armed reason, force, jealousy, death wish, Schadenfreude, the traps and bites of life’s enemies. I do not attend before the tribunals: of Heliopolice—of Busiris—of Memefils—of Pé and De —of Recti— of Seuil—of Djetoudi—of Nairef—of Restau—of the region of shadows —of the kingdom of hatreds. I do not defend myself before these tribunals. I sign at my pleasure the forms of all my letters” (Sellers 59).

77. “For Kristeva the realm of the semiotic is the space of the jouissance, the nonverbal effluence of subjectivity that lies outside the Law of the Father, outside logocentric thinking and practices of representation” (Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds. Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998) 19).

78. I have patterned this whole section of my text on the following passage:

“We are ourselves sea, sand, coral, sea-weed, beaches, tides, swimmers, children, waves... Heteregeneous, yes. For her joyous benefits she is erogenous; she is the erotogeneity of the heterogenous: airborne swimmer, in flight, she does not cling to herself; she is dispersible, prodigious, stunning, desirous, and capable of others, of the other woman that she will be, of the other woman she isn’t, of him, of you” (Moi 116).

79. Ibid.

80. Ibid., 112.

81. The passage after which my text was patterned: “Her writing can only keep going, without ever inscribing or discerning contours, daring to make these vertiginous crossings of the other(s) ephemeral and passionate sojourns in him, her, them, whom she inhabits long enough to look from the moment they awaken, to love them at the point closest to their drives; and then further, impregnated through and through with these brief, identificatory embraces, she goes and passes into infinity. She alone dares and wishes to know from within, where she, the outcast, has never ceased to hear the resonance of fore-language. She lets the other language speak—the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death” (in Moi 113).

Works cited:

Anderson, Benedict Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983).

Bennett, Tony The Birth of the Museum (New York: Routledge, 1995).

Burgin, Victor The End of Art Theory (London: Macmillan, 1986).

Cixous, Hélèn Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

Clarke, Danielle “Hélèn Cixous,” The Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Payne (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997).

Combs, Allan Synchronicity, through the Eyes of Science, Myth and the Trickster (New York: Marlowe and Co., 1996).

Conley, Verena Andermatt Hélène Cixous (New York: Harvestser Wheatsheaf, 1992).

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

Foucault, Michel Technologies of the Self eds. L. H. Martin, H. Gutman, and P. H. Hutton (London: Tavistock Publications, 1988).

McEvilley, Thomas “Yves Klein, Messenger of the Age of Space,” Artforum, January 1982: 46.

Moi, Toril Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1985).

O’Doherty, Brian Inside the White Cube, The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

Page, Barbara “Women Writers and the Restive Text, Feminism Experimental Writing and Hypertext,” in Marie-Laure Ryan ed. Cyberspace Textuality, Computer Technology and Literary Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

Sellers, Susan ed. The Hélène Cixous Reader (London: Routledge, 1994).

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, ed. William Morris (Boston: American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc., 1970) 456).

<http://www.gospel.bible.com.net> Retrieved March 3, 2005.

Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson, eds. Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).

Tucker, Marcia “Who’s on First: Issues of Cultural Equity in Today’s Museums,” in M. Mitchell, ed. Different Voices: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Framework for Change in the American Art Museum, (New York: Association of Art Museum Directors, 1992) 11.