Blogger wouldn't let me post early this morning so my daily routine has gone out the window along with any hope of writing something quiet and thoughtful first thing today. Riding the teaching high now: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley's Mathilda.
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"It does not exist for you. You are here because of it." Or something like that. I don't get it.
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Sweaty night, suddenly. The halogen beams; the laptop fans. But if I go sleeveless now my forearms will stick to the desk and I'm in no mood for that. Went to the drugstore to pick up film after watching Everything Is Illuminated and my mind was still working on the movie's thingness--second time today I've felt moved by something speaking to the fixity of obsessive imaging--so I ask the guy at the counter (who knows me by last name now) if he's seen it and he gazes at me warily and long. No, he says. He is young, about the age of my oldest students. Right this minute I wonder if anyone I know has seen it besides me, I say. He closes the drawer, hands me a receipt. I look down at the envelope of photos on the counter and remember why I'm there. No, he says. I haven't.
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Without making a phone call, no one to ask:
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from MWGS's Mathilda:
I clung to the memory of my parents; my mother I should never see, she was dead: but the idea of [my] unhappy, wandering father was the idol of my imagination. I bestowed on him all my affections; there was a miniature of him that I gazed on continually; I copied his last letter and read it again and again. Sometimes it made me weep; and at other [times] I repeated with transport those words,--"One day I may claim her at your hands." I was to be his consoler, his companion in after years. My favourite vision was that when I grew up I would leave my aunt, whose coldness lulled my conscience, and disguised like a boy I would seek my father through the world. My imagination hung upon the scene of recognition; his miniature, which I should continually wear exposed on my breast, would be the means and I imaged the moment to my mind a thousand and a thousand times, perpetually varying the circumstances. Sometimes it would be in a desart; in a populous city; at a ball; we should perhaps meet in a vessel; and his first words constantly were, "My daughter, I love thee"! What extactic moments have I passed in these dreams! How many tears I have shed; how often have I laughed aloud. (Chapter II, emphasis mine)***
Repetition. Melody pointed out Mathilda would dress like a boy while exposing her breast(s)--and we all had a good laugh--the fantasy hinging on literal impossibilities. The miniature, "the means," must be made available for the gaze of the father to see itself, to recognize itself, as decorum, talisman, idol, conscience, suspended from a chain around her neck. Like a leash, yes? The fantasy, in this sense, is suspension, fixation. Hanging. Imaging, without imagining--repetition compulsion. The fantasy can only remain pleasurable and intact inasmuch as it remains suspended and repeatable. The return to the same old fix, again and again, for solace: I think we call it addiction. No matter. More important: what's all this stuff about gender coding? Could the Father's recognition--how visionary is it--see through the boy disguise?
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Mathilda fixates on recreating her father, is a product of her father, reproduces, reiterates, and repeats her father--as much as if impregnated by her father. That's 19th century incest for you. She carries out his life sentence without recognizing him or herself. More, she is horrifically repulsed by his manic, erotic desire for her--for his displaced want for her mother. And Mathilda's repulsion drives him to suicide. How to read this: what is she a victim of? Lack of motherhood, fatherhood? What's the difference between making your father into the thing you want him to be and seeing yourself made into the thing your father wants you to be? Because there is power involved, it's a hard question to answer. Difference is an ethics question here. The simple answer is power. The difficult answer is really a question: who's got power?
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from the Annuniciation notebook, April 25, 2003, 7:30 am:
Dream of crossing a gorge or a ravine, picking my way through cactus.***
