Differentia

Lidia Yuknavitch

nubin@gladstone.uoregon.edu

 

Women and slaves belonged to the same category and were hidden away not only because they were somebody else’s property but because their life was “laborious,” devoted to bodily functions.

 

–Hannah Arendt

 

I talk to myself. When you are out of the room of the world, things speak to one another. Probably they leave you out of the talk altogether when you leave the room. There is truth in that, or something like it, something too small to know. There is a species of logic resting in the space between molecules of air, between white and white, little extraordinary happenings, little meanings between words. There is something obscene about our boxing it all in–conversations, the page, the frame, the caught expression. That is why pictures make you ashamed, that is why movies swallow you up. I know I am babbling. I am only telling you this because I had a premonition about this story. I saw, not unlike a nightmare, what would happen so clearly, so perfectly, I could have touched the facts of it with my tongue. So I guess this is all really like talking to oneself.

 

What I am talking about now is an image, a single, cannibalized image. I say cannibalized because that is what we did. One image, three writers, three texts, three mouths, three murders committed among species of intellect. We saw something and we did what writers do, we wrote. The problem is that I am stuck and they are not; that is, the two men I know have moved on all right. The air has again filled their lungs, their words are their words, their groins quiver as before, their hands are recognizable to them, they move as if motion were not a series of stilted, jerky, pornographic moves.

 

It is me that is paralyzed.

 

I am an intelligent woman. I look for things between seeing and saying, I try to catch them, write them down. But something happened between what I saw and what I wrote. I mean, usually I can take an image right to paper, give or take a day or two, I can bend whatever it is I am feeling toward metaphor and flight. But something different happened to me with this one. There is no other way to do this. I will put you at the scene:

 

it was from our car driving along a freeway that we saw it. Me and my lover. Two dead horses on the road's shoulder, precisely paralleled in all respects--their brown horse bodies at the same angle, their horse heads and noses pointing at some invisible object long gone and unimaginable, the last thing they saw, sky maybe, because that's all you can see in their too-open dead eyes, their paired gray entrails winding like twin slithers out of the slit and gashed bellies, insides ripped out or spilled on the road, saliva, and again their eyes, unbearably open.

 

And then the car was past them, our eyes rolling back toward the past and the brain, our breath sucked back into our lungs through our mouths in a gasp, our mouths, unguarded, animal-like, open, tongues lolling, our minds pressed back and in as if by wind. It was not the same as slowing for an accident. With that you know, as all the other cars slowing know, that you are hoping to see carnage, you are hoping to see signs of wrecked bodies. But when you get there it is almost always just smashed-up cars, isn’t it. And don’t our hearts sink a little as we speed back up, weren’t we wishing for something overwhelming?

 

We could have seen a dead dog, a dismembered deer, a flattened raccoon or mangled cat, anonymous guts even; any one of these would have passed as normal. But not these, looking to us as if they had been deposited from the horse trailer by some expert psychopathic movie director: in scene one they are two beautiful brown velvet asses and black silken tails exposed from within the vehicle meant to transport animals on the move. In the second scene they have spilled carefully out onto the pavement with little to no change, a brilliant shot, cut to the star’s face recording a disfigured horror in the rear-view. No one could have arranged it more perfectly, I mean it was stunning, truly, dead horses.

 

It wasn’t like sympathy, and I suppose it could not have been empathy, but something closer to the shock of the too-beautiful. What care had been taken! So gently placed. The round curves and swells unmatched on any human, unmatched of course because these were what we call beautiful animals. Bridled or free, dead seems wrong for these. You know what I mean, too much. Think of the movie The Black Stallion, or back to your first viewing of National Velvet. Or how many times have we winced when, in the western, the horses are seen falling down a hillside when the rider is shot?

 

You have to understand, we were in a car, traveling at perhaps seventy or so. At seventy there is no stopping, no slowing down to question. Like the time we passed two neon horse-sculptures on highway five and spent the next week trying to figure out what in the world we had seen. It wasn’t until the newspaper verified our sighting–an artist had planted them in a farmer’s field–that we knew. Strange comparison. Their open eyes, their necks alongside one another, the soft warmth and fuzz between the nostrils, the memory of them running head to head, manes whipping, snorts, or grazing docile and mighty, all this from movies and television. Images that stick in your brain like they happened, ripping up through the thing itself with flashes of color, sound, light, shape and particle over what can be said was seen. Dead horses.

 

In the film version of Equus, Richard Burton loses his mind to the desire of a boy. There is a horse, a magnificent heat and flesh quiver, there is writing and god too close to the drama. Anyone who has seen the movie has been convinced by the scene: the boy naked legs splayed on the bare back of the sweating dip of muscle the ritual chanting the perversion of speech the movement of words into body his body its body the roaring sweat the bleeding grown the bit at the mouth the foam the release . . . who among us can bear it away? It is easy to picture a man losing his mind to the desire of a boy. It is easy to see action killed, the sheer temperature and senseless beauty of desire.

 

He, the man I love, was only giving me a lift to meet another man. It was a ride from one man to another, no one meant any harm, the man I lived with transporting me to the man I worked with, and me between them, me the journey between them. My lover and I, the other man, writing, three writers. Both men carried weight. Can I say they were like words? Yes, words have convulsed me before. When a woman has a mind, she is compelled to ask, from where and why? This passion, ideas, what orbit have I chanced to cross which drives me to think and spins me into this world? A woman has to ask, which me is it today, this year? And in relation to what? Only then can she dress as before and move around as always. And so it was that in our driving our talk froze in our throats and ears, because the horses stopped all conversation in the cab of the blue pick-up truck, the dash instruments filled the dead air with the silence of their functioning, stupid. I think we commented or said oh. Up against the slobber of excess one often comments. I don’t remember what he was saying before the horses. I can almost say he was telling me about performance art, the visceral, the raw materiality, about the way Arnold Swartzkogler’s dismembering his own member or some other man’s crawling naked on his belly over broken glass or some woman pulling a scroll from her vagina put you inescapably at the site of your own body. It preceded the horses in effect anyway. His mouth, my mouth, the words out of the mouth.

 

I am certain that I was listening before we were struck with the blow of two sentences in both our minds: that cannot be what it looks like, and, that is exactly two perfectly paired dead horses on the side of the road. And then we were gone. In the nothing of that image whatever our words were were stolen, escaped me now. What I remember is that we said nothing.

 

So it was that he drove me, me dizzy but of course carrying on like anyone would, to a meeting with the other man. As if this were every day. He drove me up to the door of a cafe so familiar I didn’t recognize it. I opened the blue metal car door, I saw the metal arms and shapes of the car door innards, I gave him an intimate glance, he blew me a kiss, I slammed the door, the sound, harsh and horribly familiar, I raised my hand to wave, familiar, he drove away, I was through the cafe door and into the room and over to a table and down in a chair and the other man across the table from me greeted me, as you would expect, everything was as expected. A series of prepositions directed me entirely, the background music in the cafe could be either classical, minor notes with decrescendo, or perhaps modern, disconnected and dissonant jazz.

 

You must be aware that this was a necessary meeting, for some reason, some particular reason one could definitely articulate, one knows one’s work after all. It had to do with my writing, some place where we, me and the other man I mean, intersected. He was my teacher. I learned what steps to take a little clearer every time we met. The thing is, on a literal level, I really had learned to despise this man, his too-groomed black hair slick as a record album, his sculpted, lightly browned skin, his black eyes, his unbelievably dough-like mouth, almost pliable. His hands waving around, his words filling the air. Me breathing all this in, regurgitating most of it back, so as to metaphorize into brilliance like his.

 

Occasionally I stole words, used what he said when I wrote. This seemed pleasing to him. I am certain that I have used some of his words here, or else they were mine but in the cycle of his producing and consuming and my reproducing them they were sucked into this. That’s what an intelligent woman understands.

 

We ordered cappuccino, or maybe it was some other coffee drink which has been designed cleverly away from labor and heat and broken backs. Disfigured beauty. Maybe it was cafe au lait. We were talking about some topic as if a cellular division had occurred, we carried the trace of a shared thing in our voices, or, we were simply copying each other. This doubling is quite ordinary, really, and also quite necessary for the growth of a woman’s intellect, but not her body, ironically. For example, when my lover speaks to me about performance I feel the urge to strike him, but instead I stroke some part of his flesh, touch him, skin on what appears to be kin, or more, mouth on the image of mouth, maybe we even make love eventually. My legs up against his shoulders, his hands kneading the swells of my body, the thrusting, the yielding, the necks straining, all the curves in flux and pulsing as in a race or contest. At any rate, he speaks and I am touched by our inability to be one another, a moment of pure violence which is what I take to be love. I would never say the things he is saying to me and I am glad, I am full and spilt over with our samelessness. I live for it. I run home to it at night, I ache to feel it inside me, I am sorry to slam the car door and hear the truncated difference severed by metal.

 

So I’m missing my lover even in the cafe because the echo of the car door slamming has worked like a palimpsest, I am making love after conversation and I am seeing the horror-vision, pulses pounding against thin epidermis, sweat producing itself, saliva collecting in the pockets of the mouth, heart begging amplification over voice, or blood surging inside veins and ears as if to say forget words all together–we said, of course, nothing of this. So it was that all I could feel in my mind as this ridiculously brilliant man spoke to me was the urge to fuck my lover, or worse, the urge to write it all down.

 

As has always been like truth to me, sex follows violent images words sounds scenes rather consistently. But within this clearest of desires, I mean, the fatal image of the horses and the unfiltered wanting, this repulsive, beautiful man was filling the space between us with duplications of his own persistent face, hands, eyes, thoughts. He was saying something about writing and mirrors, and I heard the word mirror, I swear to god I heard it, and I saw like the face in front of me what I saw in the moment after the horses: I saw the words, objects in mirror are closer than they appear, because of course my rear-view mirror was my only access to the past. The words, dead horses, shrinking and blurring into distance and light.

 

I don’t know what he said but I am certain that I was listening, that I nodded my head as he did, that I raised my hand toward my chin and rested my head there, which he followed, that I creased my brow either as his or preceding his brow creasing, that I responded with a pre-arranged face and body made up of all the writing he had told me to read and all the writing I was, and he repeated me, or I him, and then again the same whatever he said, I said. The word, conversation was an indivisible movement between us, the words, a series of cafe gestures endlessly repeated over the course of an hour. None of this noticed in the moment. But you would have, had you been there, you would have been struck by the two mimes. Two too sculpted heads, two pairs of shoes or watches or colognes which carried prices over and above the salaries of those serving, those subjects of literature and art and what to do about them. His white shirt and his black echoed in my black blazer and white chemise, in my cornea, in the typed words on the menus, in the condiments, everything following everything else as if one thing were the other. We were talking about writing and writing made us in its own image. Poor black and white copies mimicking every word they’d ever felt in their lives. Somewhere in the very back of my mind I was thinking of something I wanted to write down when I got home.

 

Once in an argument my lover asked me why I always wrote about sex, was I a fucking whore or something. He had unwritten permission to speak to me this way because of love. Anyway, in the instant before I answered I saw a ticker-tape answer jerking in front of my eyes like a waking dream that said, yeah, I am, and all the language I had been learning for the last twenty-eight years flew out of my brain and a new language blew out: Sex is death. Sex is life. Sex is oxygen. Sex is poison. Sex is prison. Sex is gism on your lip. Sex is in someone's ass, cunt, mouth, any hole you can get into and come. Sex is a silver blade slicing open your worst fear you paranoid fuck like maybe a deep gash across your cock or scrotum or from your balls to your rectum which is the same as your dumb little need to be in control, to be on top of things. Sex is you hitting me with your stupid little question and me getting a black eye and telling all your friends. What would you say it is? I'll try not to laugh. After you have answered, why don't you explain it to me because I can be a very good listener what you think sex should be for me too. Then everything will be clear and hunky-dorey like spam. O.K.? And then of course I snapped out of it and realized that all that was a little excessive an answer to the small innocence of a question asked out of jealousy and anger. So all I said was, actually, I have yet to write about real sex and yes, I was once a prostitute as an effect of my first marriage. By the way, I love you out of my mind.

 

Beautiful–we say that word over and over again between us in the cafe over the white tablecloth stretched like a stage between us, sometimes for or to literature and art, or to ourselves, or to the deserts we have ordered which are red and oozing some thick sweet liquid and also in flames, set on fire and brought to our table as the impossible delicious combination of life and death that they are. The beautiful desert, we salivate and anticipation drips our faces. The unexpected, the tortured but silent red and swollen forms being burned alive, just plain old strawberry flambe. The beautiful desert, the beautiful poem, the beautiful lover, his beautiful hands or skin, your own beauty, even the waiter’s blue black skin and the way he slides across the black and white checkered floor, effortlessly (having been trained and paid in small medium wage increments to do so), and most of all the way the waiter says cahn ah get you anythin ils, trinidadian or something like that, the white and the black in a decade where everyone is supposed to be enlightened, all are beautiful. Everything and one and word is reflected in every other thing and one and word. The cacophony of words too loud, and I am able to think to myself, most likely because of the tear the dead horses have made, I am able to articulate in my mind’s eye that this is work. Work is making the unbearable beautiful. Work is the repetition of this man’s words and clothes and hair and eyes and smell and writing exactly on top of me, and I am up and through everything he is, whether or not my hating him enters the picture or not, and all this makes perfect sense to me.

 

If I have not learned how to become this man fully it is only because the dead horses and moments like that have always interrupted the Xeroxing. Strange saviors. If I become him, I will be in his image, I will be the black words on the white page, I will be the black skin of the waiter and the white tiles and napkins, the teeth, the tablecloth, I will be reflexive with anything I see. Beautiful.

 

The meeting thus far begins to seem successful to me because I have realized quite by chance even in the midst of the transfusion that what I want is power, the power of work, of writing, of him. I was the star all along and only pretending to be the underdog. But what I want to do when I get there is attack from the inside out, be the maggot eating the dead thing, turning rot into alive. I also realize that the reason I hate him is that I am not actually him yet and this comforts me. He keeps trying to convince me that he has desire for me but I don’t want him I want to be him and then kill him and let all the waiters and horses and women talking to themselves into the tower for a big party. I look into the waiter’s eyes longingly, I know I could love him.

 

And then I’m looking down into my dark brown liquid and of course it’s the horses again, that is the way an intelligent woman’s mind works, did they suffer, was the death instantaneous, what speed were they traveling at, perhaps seventy, like us, what shock does a horse feel, does it, as a very brilliant man once explained to me, lose its horse soul and what if there exists no shaman, no magic to retrieve it? Is horse shock the convulsion that it is to us, do their minds spasm as their bodies realize impossibility, what are “dead horses?” I am immediately sad and tragic inside and I want my lover inside this cavity, this literal chasm where verisimilitude masquerades. I want his man echo. I am writing a journal entry.

 

I want to hear him reciting to me opposite and unknowable populations of painful difference and people who will remain separate no matter what I do not want to write stories right over their bodies or learn their languages or interpret their art I will not, cannot be them, have them, never ever. I want resistance to win so we can have love. I want my lover to read raw poems to me and not talk about them so that I can know what I am not, so that I can know what I’ve made too much like me, what we’ve made of and into ourselves. And he will, too. He is trustworthy that way. And we will be sucked up in each other’s eyes with the ecstasy of two people who cannot be one another, and our bodies will lunge and devour one another, the words of our love will happen in bursts of semen and wet sticky and spilt estrangement. We will have arrived out of time. I want my lover to read poems to me about the dead and the native and the animal and the criminal and the insane and the violent and the unjust so I can feel.

 

I swirl my espresso around in the too fragile cup and the man who is teaching me asks me a question. Did I forget he was there for a moment? It is quite possible, though he would not believe it, the dead horse flashbacks are indistinguishable in time. Can I give you a lift somewhere I think is what he said. I can’t be certain that he said this, but I am certain that we left money behind and that I rode in his car. I must have asked for a ride to the library because that is where he began to take me. You must see it, magnified to cinematic proportions, being in a car again with a man, the shape of the windshield shaping vision, or the square frame of the window sectioning off sections of what I could see, one of us driving, one of us a passenger, our moving, our dumb static presence contained inside motion and time, 25 MPH, 30 MPH, 45 MPH until I finally came out with it, said the words which turned the wheels in the direction of the carnage even though I had described very little of what I had actually seen. He followed my words with his hands on the steering wheel and his foot on the pedal and his eyes on the road. He followed me because he too is a writer and he remembers that one cannot look away from an accident. Or perhaps it remembers him. We are all helpless that way.

 

As that movement, that illogical car movement toward something as if something would be there when you arrive, as that movement carried us the whole cafe conversation finally dawned on me. The further the car mindlessly traveled, like a recording or like vomiting up the previous night the sentences came:

 

death is the beautiful site or scene of beauty's most powerful moment, death marks its passing, beauty is death and death beautiful, death is the sublime, a paradigm case for the experience of the sublime, the ground itself undoing itself, we are both before and after death always, his love is so powerful it kills her, her death, beauty, even the angles are envious, the poem, his love, his life are produced by death, after all, could this love or beauty happen without death?

 

Who was speaking?

 

What happens in returning? What desires drive us and what place do we expect to arrive at? And who are these characters in our minds, A and B, interchangeable, and how is it that A says to B we have no time like the present? Why do we ever bother to write about irony?

 

For minutes or hours we drove up and down a one mile stretch of road. At some point what we could see was nothing, darkness or night. The more we could not find the horses the more anxious I became, my body again murmured the same utterances, writing itself, pulse, adrenaline. I knew where they had been but because the place was empty, or because sameness and difference were bleeding in my ears, I believed that I had forgotten. We drove back and forth so that I became hysterical, and he kept suggesting his apartment, how he wanted to see me naked, and I was even more hysterical, and he suddenly said you are becoming hysterical.

 

Each time I looked over at him I was nauseated by his sheer brilliance, his black pant legs on his seat and my black pant legs on mine, his two eyes looking into my two eyes and mine into his, his window and door parodying the window and door on my side. I felt I could strike him. I demanded that he pull the car over at the place where I knew dead horse had wounded the world. We were pulling over. He was asking how I knew this was the place. I got out of the car and slammed the door. He got out of the car like an echo. See the gravel I said, don’t you see where the gravel reveals two bodies were here? I don’t see he said. It just looks like gravel he said. We said the word gravel between us three times. We didn’t have raincoats. It was quite dark. I dropped to my knees. He was very frustrated, he dropped down beside me and said this is ridiculous, there is nothing here. Obviously they have removed them he said. I spread my hands out across the gravel and now mud and moved them around. Oh Jesus he said. Finally some words heaved up from my belly, up from my hands on the gravel and through my palms against the grain of the road, against rocks and cement, after awhile of course the flesh tore, my hands becoming raw and my blood mixing with jagged edged real road made by men. So too my knees came conscious because of the faint pain coming through the weight of me bearing down on them, the gravel puncturing flesh as gravel does. There is a difference between being thrown down onto gravel and the will of slamming and scraping one’s hands again and again on the road for no reason except that reasonability doesn’t make any sense to a crouched figure on the side of the road, bleeding, wiping her face with her sliced hands, crying, the cuts, the red, the dark, the moans. The throwing one’s body out onto the road in front of speeding cars. The man grabbing at you and pressing himself down on top of you through his own uncontained excitement. The vomit. The urine. The come, the blood, the shit. Performance.

 

I can hear them hear the mutating whinnies of two surprised beasts thrown for an instant into air hear the extraordinary thud of their bulk falling from their man-made trailer to gravel and asphalt can't you hear them can't you smell the shit and piss and spilt blood and heat I can see them each of them as well as both of them together can't you see them ripped open can't you let go of me can't you see them see me is this what it takes how far into my flesh until the anger is in focus not fictionally justafiable just in focus and why can't we just leave it at that that I am a reproduction I am reproducing I am anger and repetition and I am learning to live with it

 

Cars passing would have seen this in the path of their headlights: two crouched over black and white figures on the road’s shoulder, very much the same, making little if any sense, as if searching for something together, wreckage upon wreckage. Although, you might not make that last observation, having only seen a flash of the two huddled black shapes in your white headlights. I had no choice. People are dying all over the world and we are writing their stories. I clawed at his face until I was blind and unconscious. I have dreams of a bloody face, of the impossibility of human expression.

 

I am in the hammock on the back porch. It has been unseasonably warm. I have a deep tan, I am brown all over except for where the bandages were. My hands hold tiny white scars. For a time I couldn’t make love: the scabs on my knees reopened every time I bent them, as if the joint itself had changed somehow, as if I was meant to stand. My lover has been reading poems to me. Soon my hands will be healed. The other man has written an essay on memory and pain. My lover is writing a Performance piece concerning the mutilation of flesh. As I remember this, there is massacre in Eastern Europe. As I picture these phrases, the Gaza Strip is bleeding between peoples. My hands are white and smally textured. They repeat themselves uselessly.

 

The Lover’s Poem

 

Some bodies stay put
others 
release themselves
like air
like light
over the incomprehensible world
over the 
small human cities
over the dumb world.

Some bodies leak radiance,
letting you 
think love will wash over you,
letting you think the night will not penetrate
the 
room of thick sweet.

But some bodies are just dead,
deadening silences dead of 
the dead
Deathly afraid of the beauty of death
Beautiful as a death laid bare 
like a body before you.

These are love,
these are what we long for.