Fiction

A Story For The Telling -Stephanie Pope
Repeating & Flowering Through Images

A work beginning its work begins by a doing in the undone. It undoes or unravels in the undone dead place the undone dead deed. A happening within, it happens nowhere. It happens within which is to say within the empty-ing place, the lacuna within--within repeating... within the body of a dying memory...within a voice still bearing the trace of it...within Echo herself. It happens from within a quantum space through a sacrificial act where no-things happen. Somehow no-things unfold imaginings with a power that changes everything. One thing I know. This is where all our violence needs to happen. And, nowhere else.

Opaquing: seeing something

It happens first, by seeing something. One stumbles over it…as if it were something already and already having something to say, it keeps repeating itself. One mistakes it at first, for literal reality. It isn’t. It is Echo. She is the empty-ing place where all the wants are huddling and where “the gift” first presents itself.

One of the images repeating throughout the nowhere of memory happens to me at the tender age of nineteen. It is through this lens that the rest of this imagining now peers to seek what might be happening just now in the nowhere of my existences.

I have a slapping father. I know that for certain one nineteen year old summer when his hand comes down hard along with a contemptuous voice growling like an animal of some other struggle asserting itself, “You don’t know anything!” he insists.

Dad was not handling very well my announcement of impending marriage. I had became engaged to marry that June, though not the oldest of his children, the first of his daughters to portend marriage and the first of his fifteen children to do so as well. “What is it,” cries out my soul-skin to this hard-handed heralder of man-handling. “What is it, O my Father I do not know?”

Already, there is this heralder speaking through like a protecting filter, a scab or healing speaking from its refusal to say.  My father does not do that moment well. And I have the sense to leave home. It is a mistake on his part. Only a mistake. The difficulty arises ever after for me in that he never speaks of it to me and never acknowledges the mistakenness. The event in the schema of things is swept aside as if it were imprisoned and sentenced to death. Yet likenesses go on haunting, living their expression at the edges of nowhere. Some hooligans in my story seem to be secrecy and gender despotism. I think of those as traits of a boy-toyed ego in both men and women. “What is it, O my Father I cannot know?”

So I move away. And learn from there to recognize what are even the “normalized” gestures of violent behaviors we have, the ones we are “allowed” to express in polite society. And there are no more instances like that to speak of in my narrative (even though there are scads and scads that get worse and worse in the larger cultural complex). It’s a healing that scabs over and holds back the blood of the bloodied nineteenth year, the year when the wounding becomes “official” or literalized. When the wounding becomes “voiced” in a discourse. 

I do not know he told me. That interpretation signals his recognition of my youthful ignorance or innocence and such ignorance is natural and acceptable to nineteen years. It cannot be the objection that raised the anger/anguish/anxiety in him. Now the other possibility is I cannot know.  My “mens” is not capable enough. Or perhaps that “mens” is another, a way of knowing that is indeed capable enough. What woman is he talking to and what is he asking her? Is she being instructed to fit an already established discourse, one not to be seen, fitting her in to the fathering skin swallowing her just then? (I  immediately think of that image of the dressmaker’s form in the movie Signs. No other image of the mother is available except through “the Father’s” re-membering. That form is not even a manikin. There is no urania, no muthos, no “mens”). I think too of Irigaray’s comment. “There it is: woman has no unconscious except the one man gives her.”(see This Sex Which Is Not One 93-4) I think of Aphrodite in the Golden Web. And when I lay these things side by side, I cannot help thinking about the pleasures being taken. The masturbations and the mutilations are contained in secrecy in the silent quanta between. Can she say nothing, know nothing about her own pleasuring? What is it I am forbidden O my Father? Is it my own pleasuring? My own mutilating? My own kill-making? A glimpse of the reality of you? Of Her? That experience of the moment when the gift first presents itself?

Shaped by the father-daughter shaper, being both wounded and scabbed, the statements of my own mind and body in time stream together and flow out of and through this image that both bleeds and does not bleed, speaking itself from the timeless edges where also, no injury occurs. Being now of both the bled and blood hiding mixture, some part or fragment functions as carrier to a new kind of life-giving liquid, in the Greek sense, something Athenian because, it is born from a father-infected headache, but from the darker-winged place of spontaneity an other, an alien god intrudes. There begins to carry a new side: a skin, skein, memory, membrane, or organ(ic) that acknowledges the feather of the anti-god---like Talking God who gives to the Diné their song. He that gives all the songs gives this song.  People do not invent this. When that which gives song gives to you a song, you must keep to the promise in the song that he sings if you are to survive. I suppose this is the same thing as staying loyal to the image even when it doesn’t fit anything in your literal life or the lifestyle you inherit at the time.

The song singing me is singing of a woman who falls from the sky (father-daughter). In Diné this means that a Changing Woman is thus born.

Blood-holding serves metaphorically to express that impulse of Psyche to nurture images, to feed or grow the image into sayings that speak without blood in their words. There is one way we can always tell it is a deep love that burrows into the hollow of our bones (Slattery, “In Completeness” from Casting The Shadows) for all at once, almost like a slap, we feel no desire, no longing, and no temptation. In the myth of Echo and Narcissus( repeating and flowering), Echo wastes away, leaving only the trace, the promise of Her repeating. The Call heard everywhere is but the echo in the soul as it fled. “What is it, O my Father I am forbidden to know?”

A woman in her moon time, if she turns away from the world and sees into her own flowing, will see how it was in the beginning and how it will have been if she were to begin again from that. “I live in the flame of a still desire,” I write this past summer. “I flicker there, a not-lived love shadowing these likenesses living beyond the ear of my own speaking.” (A Still Desire).

Tran[slut]ing: Seeing 'as if'; the motif of the failure of the god's love

This past year a large portion of Arizona catches on fire and burns out of control for most of its Sonoran summer. With its thick mushroom cloud lining the northeast valley’s mountain-layered edges, it is an ominous sight to behold. A fiery thing in a fiery season has ignited. It is flaming down the mountainsides like a fountain or like a volcanic eruption spewing smoke and ash prerequisite to an as yet unseen red-flamed flow of not-lived likeness about to erupt while it also never does.

The red flow of a woman can be imaged through a goddess or a god. And so, the image of Pelé serves just such a function throughout the Ring of Fire. For me, here in the southwest, the song of Changing Woman surfaces as well as an archai of  Aphrodite-Hephaestus and I wonder now of this during this season of mounting interest in making war.

Grimal tells me Hephaestus is a god of fire (191-93). Often he uses fire as a weapon; creating with fire a golden throne to ensnare his mother, golden things to ensnare his wife, golden things to entrap and shame her, shaping with metals and fire red-hot things to slay the Trojan giants. Among all the gods it is Hephaestus who can shape with inventiveness and craft the utterly impossible of things. He can make anything it seems. He can even make war with his love. But, it seems there is one thing he can not make. He can not make love itself.

Paradoxically, he has both divinely crippled and divinely gifted appendages. He works underground. He lives on Olympus. He survives the Underworld. Divinity for Hephaestus rests in his manual dexterity while the demonic lay hidden in the truth living under his heart. Or perhaps not quite. Does he carry the heart of a Polyphemic monster or carry in his heart the promise gifting him with the greatest love of his life? The truth is his heartpocket contains the tincture of both and a power of creative intelligence that unites them darkly and deeply (in bed/in the sexual or the sensual). So even though he can not make Love itself since Ouranos does that long before, Hephaestus can make war with his love. And, even as he can accomplish this, he can also make love with his Love.

Such powers of authorship unfold the umbra of the divinity, soul-depth, or the darkness of the ultimate reality. This kind of man-handling helped along by the crafty crafter-god in a god-crafting is soul-making. What forms forms nowhere. It is the divine lowly-ness or umbra trinitatis (see Miller, Three Faces of God p46-68). It is the House of Life (Hers) where there is another kind of light-life because there still is god-life, something Aphrodite re-mains faithfully. Her failure in marriage professes her faithfulness to the archetype of Love & Beauty. When she exists & shows up elsewhere it is because elsewhere there still is soul-life. To see the Goddess you cannot have is to have a glimpse of Her living where you are not-lived. But having seen, you will have begun to know from your own unknown and will have begun to live where you never lived before.
                                                                                                                
      
Not-lived love lives still by spiritual grace
An egg-sac shape that all life yet is pregnant for
Her breast that food that forms and shapes
What only god creates
Abandoned in
What only gods will love
                                       (Not-Lived Love).

There are two stories told of his lameness. His father causes it. His mother causes it. Either way it is evident Hephaestus has a mother wound. His father causes it when Hephaestus remains loyal to the motherside. The mother causes it through parthenogenesis. Sometimes motherwounds belong to the nature of your formation. Sometimes, the father insists on it.

Aphrodite is born from a fatherwound (40). She falls from the sky, from Sky Father’s castration. Just to keep it straight, that means Ouranos not Zeus. From Diné comes a new term for saying this. She is the daughter of Great Spirit, a match for him.)  Immediately the Seasons adorn her. And, Grimal says, she has no story of her own. Her being here at all is episodic and seasonal. Also, you cannot tell when she shows up if she is for real or not. For while the story is going on (while consciousness is doing the telling) She always has nothing to say.  Yet there is an inkling suggestive of her in one telling that points back to her birth. I think it is Meister Eckhart who suggests this. From the pear seed comes the pear tree while nut seed begets nut tree. Just as the pear seed begets pear and just as the nut seed begets itself again, so too from the god seed of the castrated Sky Father comes She. The Divine Nature of life is immortal. Confronted with Death in itself, it merely changes its pattern. Only Life’s loving confrontation with Death in itself has the power to do that.

In this moment I can relive her birth by watching from the dark waters of nowhere through a movement that gathers and separates. I can hear again that voice that is no voice breathing upon those waters gathering them and separating....

       Sky Father is a breath upon the waters in this moment of his own making, in this moment of his own castration, 
          his mutilation. How the force of the anguish within his great spirit comes down. How the blow comes down
          against his own member in an eviternal action forcing a separation that is forever. How his youngest child’s
          blow, that childish blow comes down. In the coming is his cuming. He feels both his pain and his pleasure fall
          against the sides of himself while still gathering in places, while still separate in places. While still falling in
          places, while still coming, his childishness undoes all that he is to become what he, in the other holding can
          never be. And so he falls. And he cums. Then he slaps with every inch of himself those dark waters. It breaks him.
          And he falls apart. So separate he is. And while separate he is, those dark waters gather him again, gathering
          and separating, gathering and separating. He is burning with water. He is churning with blood. He is terrifying
          to behold, he who is no longer holding. He is beautiful to behold, he who is foaming. While hiding in the keep
          of the image emerges a truth kept hidden. Aphrodite is born from a slapping father.

Changing Woman, Isanaklesh is the daughter of the speaking nature of the world beyond the world. The one she calls father is also known as Talking God, Spirit of Dawn. Space is the stuff of her body. Like sky she is. She is made from the stuff of her father and is as he is. She is made from an awareness of opposites, light and darkness, soil and sky, water and fire or sunlight. She is equivalent in form to that which forms her, earth, air, fire, and water, and to that which informs her. This is the voice of her father that is like a thought floating in the silence of an ever-expanding and vast creation the form of which is often in Diné represented by the image of Owl. The bird, the space, the stuff that is no stuff (ethereal body), Changing Woman is a tertium non datur.

Changing Woman’s capacity (the capacity of a tertium non datur) unites separations, oppositions and fragmentations into one body that is nobody---like a thought in expressing its voice reveals a world interpenetrating itself harmoniously. In Diné this harmony is called hozho. Changing Woman is a reflection of hozho, reflecting the seasons of nature and the nature of bodies woven into the fabric of life---woven as harmony and balance just like Harmonia born from the tensions woven into the golden web, woven by mind’s invention and the truth hidden in its heart.

Perhaps Love itself caught in the Golden Web of Hephaestus does not think her own godhood something to cling to and so she takes on shame to experience herself in the many gods. Perhaps Love does not think the image of love something to cling to either. Certainly, Hermes and Apollo sound this tone in their conversation with each other. And, what any one of the gods will give to be in Ares spot! Each is there pleasuring himself with her sensual nature. They are orderly with the order shaped by the golden hardness of the fire-god’s fine-spun erection. Yet what or who condemns her to One Love Image? And as one’s love, is that a superego owning her and controlling her, prohibiting the range of her sensual expression--her many loves or expressions of love kinds or the many forms of her expression as god's love? Does Love so love the world that it loves equally as well what the world cannot find loveable?

Her truest sex is pleasuring, while ego’s pleasure may yet be in harming and limiting her sexual freedom. Slut. Harlot. Bitch. Love does not think beauty something to cling to. Nor inventiveness. Nor wealth. Nor war. She does not find disfigurement something to stay away from. Nor does she find the capacity to disfigure something worth standing by. She does not hold herself accountable to commands or commandments. To models. To marriage oaths. To standards of different kinds of consciousnesses. To examples. Love goes where she will, neither holy nor profane, although profaned and iconed. Love draws divinity down into the unseen hiding in Her nakedness. (When a message has no clothes on how can it be spoken?—Merton) She exposes divinity through consciousness to the barest glimpse of itself by not saying (anything).  Did Hephaestus after spinning the golden web, did he when he looked upon his love and his war, did he see what he intended or what he never intended?

What ever Hephaestus sees it is something unexpected and earth-shaking. It is the perturbation that frees Love from War and god-spun patterns, the perturbation that will have always done so. The unraveling of the gold-spunned is her-making, a work undoing itself, undressing itself in the undone dead place rendering the eye fastened upon both the life making and breath taking expression. Then Homer says, the goddess laughs (gelôs), the language itself ill-equipped to anticipate and recapitulate this sight in the sound of Her, the only sound she makes throughout the entire expression of god(s). The goddess laughs. Proclaiming that where love laughs last love’s laugh lasts.
 

Trans-parenting: A Song For Nobody

                                   A yellow flower (light and spirit) sings by itself for nobody                                      
                                                                                                   --Thomas Merton                                            
                                       
                                                                                                  
How does one write about the unsayable speaking of an action playing itself out over and over in all the movements of her solitary lifetime?  I do not know if she can ever really accomplish that expressing. But, she will begin by creating a space for it to happen. It tells itself to her. She doesn’t tell it. She simply repeats what it says. She repeats it till it dies away in her and becomes irrepeatable that way. The moment she will have said it in that irrepeatable way, she will have written poetry.

She hesitates
In stillness waits
Oh my soul
My weight's repose
Repeats about her head                                                                                      
Where my eye born blind                                                                                     
And breach and inward bound                                                                                     
Re-turns itself in you                                                                                     
Oh my soul
                                                                                                                            
Dare I trepid                                                                                      
Sojourn nearer yet                                                                                     
Oh my soul                                                                                     
Dare soothe the pulse                                                              
Repeating in her breath                                                                                                       
Her thirsty lip grows parched                                                                                      
My faint of face bends low                                                                                       
And begs upon your doorstep                                                                                     
Oh my soul                                                                                                                                                 
                                                                                      
               Shall I Then: The Lovesong of Echo and Narcissus
                                                                    

And so it is with world-making. The Psyche is autopoetic. As Michael Conforti confirms in Field, Form and Fate the universe tears into its own flesh to remake itself. Just as it is with the universe, so it is with storytelling.

I hear through the grapevine many years ago that when my father realizes I’m not coming back, he cries and cries. So shortly before my wedding day, I move back home. We never talk about what happened. Instead, I move back home. And though not the oldest of his daughters, my moving back home, allows Dad to resume himself as a father. And so, he walks the first of his six daughters down the isle and into marriage.

Now I’ve always known that this was the right thing to do. But what really got to me then and what gets me to this day is that not talking. So that is what I’m always paying attention to and it is that not saying that has gotten into me. The giver of song has given me this song. I do not invent it. When the maker of songs gives to you a song, you must stay with the image you have.

I have a slapping father. That image burrows into the hollow of my bone. It is living there still. Sometimes I thirst for it. Sometimes I bend low and stare till I am the very breath of it blowing over itself darkly, gathering myself into this and then separating myself again.

Narcissus bends over the dark waters and sees into them through that which he loves. The image, however, is not talking. Ego’s narcissism has an eye for the image he/it/I sees. But, it cannot hear what the image might be saying because what the image has to say has to do first and foremost with soul-making or poeisis. Poeisis is none other than going beyond, beneath, and behind the god-image (the image writing the song) making new senses out of the old image thereby renewing the god-breath talking.

The blow of my fathering spirit moves upon these waters both creating and destroying this creation. The image ego’s eye/he/it sees breaks apart once again into disfigurement. Both the eye and the ‘I’ vanish into that which made them both up. Narcissism dies here where the image first begets itself—in the silence. The love-flower becomes Love's flowering. A naming becomes an adjectival response.

The trick is to tell the story adjectivally, from its various points of view. That way you are telling not this that the father did but that which in the doing, the father never said. The not-saying was the gift given by the fathering spirit shaping you within the having and within the halve-ing. For where the soul-life first fled, is also where it first inseminated and then embedded. There it deeply imprinted the trace and promise of its own re-turnings. It died to itself right there. Then, re-turning upon this image of itself as what you love it echos, calls, cries out repeating and repeating itself like a flower flowers, repeating and repeating till the flower is no longer repeatable that way.

When the love you have is no longer like the flower it was but like this flowering of which it cannot be like you will no longer be the feminine thing only capable of reproducing him. You will have touched upon the statement within which cannot be stated.  The woman you are. The one telling this story.