Metaphor
The mother, too, is a metaphor.
It is necessary and sufficient that the best of herself
be given to woman by another woman for her to be able to love herself
and return in love the body that was “born” to her.
Touch me, caress me,
you the living no-name, give me my self as myself.
The relation to the “mother,” in terms of intense pleasure and violence,
is curtailed no more
than the relation to childhood
(the child that she was, that she is, that she makes, remakes, undoes, there at the
point where, the same, she others herself).
Text: my body-shot through with streams of song;
I don’t mean the overbearing, clutchy “mother”
but, rather, what touches you, the equivoice that affects you,
fills your breast with an urge to come to language and launches your force;
the rhythm that laughs you;
the intimate recipient who makes all metaphors possible and desirable;
body (body? bodies?),
no more describable than god, the soul, or the Other;
that part of you that leaves a space between yourself
and urges you to inscribe in language your woman’s style.
Excerpt, The Laugh of the Medusa, by Hélène Cixous p. 181-182, pub. 1975
I am taken by the Cixous essay, published at a time of widespread political and social upheaval. This snippet is a sample of the verve with which the twenty page essay is written. A manifesto by a woman, advocating uprising by women, a rebellion of writing, of telling stories of women’s truth, writing by women for women. Yes, it sounds partisan. Yet – nothing could be further from the truth. The incitement to revolt is an advocacy for the profoundly human, a fierce, violent and pleasurable self love.
This, the fateful launch-pad, where radical change begins, and then inevitably is offered without limit to other human beings, those who are the willing students.
The revolution must continue, must advance with suitable metaphors, inscribed with metaphors that upend, metaphors to remake the world as we know it.
There has to be a song, a suitable tune for this day. There is! Hold onto this one. Keep On Lovin You by REO Speedwagon.
