Snubblar in i anteckningar från april 2001:
… trummande rytmer ligger ljudspårade i hjärnrumsväggarna. Letade efter ett citat som skulle tydliggöra vetenskapandets metaforiska jämställande av kvinnokroppen och naturen.
Hämtar istället Susan Griffins
WOMAN AND NATURE -- THE ROARING INSIDE HER
Kvinnors egenframställande som natur.
I hennes ordspegel reflekteras min grottutvildning
och invildning.
INVAGINATION - processen
PASSAGE -- Her Journey Through the Labyrinth to the Cave Where She Has Her Vision
THE CAVE
Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically over the contours of fulnesses and concavities, through hollows and over peaks -- feeling, touching, seeing, through mind and hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and the hollow, the thrust and the contour.
(BARBARA HEPWORTH, A pictorial Autobiography)
The shape of a cave, we say, or the shape of a labyrinth. The way we came here was dark. Space seemed to close in on us. We thought we could not move forward. We had to shed our clothes. We had to leave all we brought with us. And when finally we moved through this narrow opening, our feet reached for ledges, under was an abyss, a cavern stretching farther than we could see. Our voices echoed off the walls. We were afraid to speak. This darkness led to more darkness, until darkness leading to darkness was all we knew.
The shape of this cave, our bodies, this darkness. This darkness which sits so close to us we cannot see, so close that we move away in fear. We turn into ourselves. But here we find the same darkness, we find we are shaped around emptiness, that we are a void we do not know.
The shape of a cave, this emptiness we seek out like water. The void that we are. That we wash into as sleep washes over us, and we are blanketed in darkness. We see nothing. We are in the center of our ignorance. Nothingness spreads around us. But in this nothing we find what we did not know existed. With our hands, we begin to trace faint images etched into the walls. And now, beneath these images we can see the gleam of older images. And these peel back to reveal the older still. The past, the dead, once breathing, the forgotten, the secret, the buried, the once blood and bone, the vanished, shimmering now like an answer from these walls, bright and red. Drawn by the one who came before. And before her. And before. Back to the beginning. To the one who first swam from the mouth of this cave. And now we know all she knew, see the newness of her vision. What we did not know existed but saw as children, our whole lives drawn here, image over image, past time, beyond space.
The shape of a cave, the bud, the chrysalis, the shell, what new form we seek in this darkness, our hands feeling these walls, here wet, here damp, here crumbling away; our hands searching for signs in this rock, certain now in this darkness, what we seek is here, warm and covered with water, we sweat in this effort, piercing the darkness, laying our skin on the cool stone, tracing the new image over the old, etching these lines which become dear to us now, as what we have drawn here gleams back at us from the walls of the cave, telling us what is, now, and who we have become.
This round cavern, motion turned back on itself, the follower becomes the followed, moon in the sky, the edge becoming the center, what is buried emerges, light dying over the water, what is unearthed is stunning, the one we were seeking, turning with the ways of this earth, is ourselves.
This cave, the shape to which each returns, where image after image will be revealed, and painted over, painted over and revealed, until we are bone. Where we touch the ones who came before and see their visions, where we leave our mark, where, terrified, we give up ourselves and weep, and taken over by this darkness, are overwhelmed by what we feel: where we are pushed to the edge of existence, to the source which sounds like a wave inside us, to the path of the water which feeds us all.
The way of the water we follow, which has made this space, and hollowed the earth here, because the shape of this cave is a history.
The shape of this cave is a history telling us with each echo of the sound of each wave rushing against its sides: "I was not here before; my shape changes daily. I was sand. I was mountain. I was stone. I was water. I was shellfish and sea anemone and sea snail, I was fish, eel, urchin. I was plankton. I was seaweed and sea grass. Here I am black and polished and round, here I am yellow, here I am covered with moss, here I gleam with a purple reflection when the light lies across me, here I curve outward, here I sink back.
"When the water approaches me, the shape of the wave is changed. And when the tide ebbs, you will see, I, too, have changed."
The shape of the labyrinth. The shape of the cave. Space divided and not divided. Space mutable, we say, separation becoming union. Space changing. The new shape. Melting and transformation, the crystal and the seed, the endless possibility of form, as in the metal measuring rod, which changes its shape at the speed of light, we say.
The Hexenhaus destroyed (the witches reborn) the zoological garden opened (the reappearance of species) the prison razed (crime renamed) acoustics transformed (madness released) the buried (plants to flesh to earth) uncovered.
The rectangular shape of his book of knowledge, bending. The shape of our silence, the shape of the roofs of our mouths.
Darkness.
MYSTERY
...
healing must be sought in the blood of the wound itself. It is another of the old alchemical truths that "no solution should be made except in its own blood."
(NOR HALL,
Mothers and Daughters)
Why is she lying so still there? And what is she dreaming? We ask, here, in the center of this darkness. We not so different from darkness, not seen but known as darkness itself, and dark to ourselves. She sleeps. Her sleep is like death. And what is she, in this night, becoming? Buried from the light like the soil under the ice frozen solid. In this dark and cold season, this wintering time, when the moon becomes smaller (just a shadow of herself) and her heart beats slower, we touch the coldness of her skin. This sleeping body, we whisper. Out of the light we can feel this body, hear the air enter her, and our hands ask what is she dreaming in this darkness? What is she, in this night, becoming? And we are darkness. Like the carbon from the air which becomes the body of the plant and the body of the plant buried in the earth becoming coal or the body of the plant in her mouth becoming her own dark blood and her blood washing from her like tides (and the sea drawing into itself, leaving the bodies of fish, coral spines, the reef). This place. This place in which she breathes and which she takes into herself and which is now in her, sleeping inside her. What sleeps inside her? Like a seed in the earth, in the soil which becomes rich with every death, animal bodies coming apart cell by cell, the plant body dispersing, element by element, in the bodies of bacteria, planaria, and back to the seed, this that grows inside her and that we cannot see. What does this body hold for us? (What we feel in this darkness that seems like stillness to us.) And what made us feel that every day was like another? Why did we no longer bother to draw back the curtains? No longer bother to make the beds? Why did we leave scraps of meat out on the tables? Leave our hair wild and uncombed? Refuse any longer to speak? Draw into ourselves and ask? And ask. What this body holds, now. What will come out of this earth. The earth turning and we not feeling any movement. But moving. Spinning through the stars. The moonlight. Turning in our sleep. What was it she remembers? Why did she sit up in her sleep as if waking. What thought seized her? To cry out like a child. What child still in her? Like the sunlight trapped in the leaf which becomes part of the ground, of the sea, the body of the fish, body of animal, soil, seed. What is growing inside and will pierce the surface, if she awakens with this memory: what she was before. And light touches her eyelids, warmth touches her skin, like the plankton thrown into the light by the turbulence of the sea and the spore carried by the wind, her body changes. And what does she feel in this morning? What does she see now? If she opened the window, what new air does she breathe? (Opens the window, combs her hair, washes her face, stares out at the world and speaks.)
The moon swells and tides wash over the rock; granite and shell become sand; the roots of trees are polished and the cell divides every day. Every day we move closer to the sun. Each day she is closer to herself. And to this child within her, growing inside her. She remembers, what she might have been (as oxygen from the plant goes into the flame, into ash). And she puts these pieces together. What is left after the years and what will come together still, like the edges of tissue grafting one to the other: blood cleanses the wound, and this place is slowly restored. (And the forest reclaims what was devastated, and her body heals itself of the years.) So we say, finally, we know what happens in this darkness, what happens to us while we sleep, if we allow the night, if we allow what she is in the darkness to be, this knowledge, this that we have not yet named: what we are. Oh, this knowledge of what we are is becoming clear
THE SEPARATE REJOINED
Out of my flesh that hungers
and my mouth that knows
comes the shape I am seeking
for reason.
(AUDRE LORDE,
On a Night of the Full Moon)
