Little Fictions & Ragged Memoirs is weekly subscription writing. Most of the writing is what I like to call “ragged memoirs:” experiential pieces that dive deeper than I do in the blog posts. Occasionally I write short fictions that are also based in my own experience. The writing is physical, cinematic and experiential. Here is an example:
Body Stories
The book of the body
The the scroll of the body
The etching of the body
The earth of the body
The sky of the body
The language of the body
The singing of the body
The sheaves of the body
The stalks of the body
The branches of the body
The vines of the body
The fields of the body
The cave of the body
The lessons of the body
The memories of the body
I look at my body and I wonder: what has been lost and what needs to be lost? What remains to be found? What can be recovered? What am I learning in this exact moment from the body? I think it is to feel myself in the interstitial spaces – the places where life and sensation accumulate in invisible lines – like subtle, moving geologic strata beneath the crust of what we can see. The earth of the body.
I want to feel what is being laid down even now as I write.
I have art etched onto my body. A collection of tattoos. Cuttings of the flesh. Etchings on skin. I am an illustrated woman. The images on my back are horses and magnolias. Winding trunks and branches of pink blossoms and green leaves weaving around the dark, turbulent bodies of Chinese horses. A wild mare flying down my left arm. A stallion like Nelson on my left shoulder blade. A second black spirit horse flying up the right side. A small faint pony peering over the left shoulder. Magnolias spilling over my right shoulder onto my chest.
The last tattoo was so excruciating that I felt the artist was cutting into my shoulder blade with a knife. I wept as he finished the last scrolling Tibetan clouds. The wide needles used for that work were worse than any of the small thin ones. It felt as if I were being flayed.
The horses are under my skin. They were even before I put them there indelibly. A woman of a certain age asking to be marked, to have her horses imprinted on her flesh. Eternal horses. And yet when I am consumed by flames, so will they be. None of us will stay past our time. I feel they have my back, that they hold a mythic story, a fairy tale, a cabalistic history that is playing out whether I am looking or not.
When I see my hands in the mirror I am startled, momentarily horrified. How did my mother’s veined and wiry hands come to be attached to the ends of my arms? When I am dancing and using my hands, I know that I have earned all of those strange mappings. They are brilliant, dancing their complicated mudra, their secret, febrile language. The dances have always been stored in the hands, and then move like the feral tides of the bay of Fundy: pouring in thick waves up and through the channels of my body.
Now I dream of calligraphic birds flying up my right calf and thigh. I collect the images: birds of color, splayed wings, tumbling, spiraling. I can feel them there even though they are not. At the same time, I feel that I am finished. I may not need to be marked again. But there are other ways in which I am not finished. Other ways in which I know that I am just beginning. I am not talking about tattoos.
I am talking about wisdom. I am talking about joy. I am talking about discovery and delight and appreciation. Those are the things that it has taken me six decades to stumble upon, to uncover, to unearth, to carve open. These things – joy, appreciation, delight – are not just destinations, but the places toward which we are continually moving. Not driving with our high beams shining down a known road, but dreaming ourselves forward using celestial navigation, an emotional sextant. Charting a course to ravishment. My friend, the playwright and actress Laurie Carlos, stood with me on a beach on Martha’s Vineyard, and said, “I do not think I can take in so much beauty.” Her face was rapturous, looking out at the waving sea. I did not understand at the time that I had to give myself permission to be swallowed whole by the moment.
The wonder of the body
The softening of the body
The dreaming of the body
The opening of the body
The kindness of the body
The sweetness of the body
The love of the body
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