Ghost Woman

[align right] __3 Clementines__ The first I ate in the kitchen, standing dazed and slow-thoughtful, cursing myself for ignoring the sliver of golden, rising sunshine at the door of the hallway. It startled me on my way to the shower *Did someone leave a light on?* And when my shower was done it was gone Did I miss a moment of sublime solitude? What could the golden have told me? [align center] [[◄|part 1]] [[►|If]]

[align left] If, as one should know, the terror seizes you in the instant the light turns blue, then perhaps this is something universal. Sunday afternoon reading: comfortably, in a quiet living room filled with the soft, sighing presence of familiar furniture. Reds and rich textures, the right pillows. The day outside is sunny, the knowledge of which can be taken to confirm that all is right in the world, at least from the vantage of this scene. But a cloud passing outside throws the bright, companionable sun into fearful abandonment. Maybe you’ve wasted precious time, the vaguely comforting thought “maybe I’ll go for a walk later too” is now a missed opportunity The scene is suddenly cold: a shut-in dying slowly amid the houseplants and dust-gathering furniture. Gasp echoes, unheard. The terror is personal—the slow roll of light is like the shoulder of a god whose attention you’ve lost, whose face now turns toward other things The shadows leap and the silence becomes oppressive. The window wrappings creak with the draft, a car drives by. The ticking clock has stopped. ... [align right] what lesson lies in watching these interminable moments manifest? [align left] If writing is what led me here, set me up in this castle of a living room, only to ache, be terrified, and put words to page to describe all that happened in that subtle shift in light-- then there is a diligence that roots me here, or perhaps merely stubbornness. the couch will still contain its melancholy witness, whether I look at it or not. the story may still bear its curse, whether I tell it or not. So I will. [[◄|3 Clementines]] [[►|the curse]]

config.style.page.font: "Iowan Old Style/Constantia/Georgia/serif 18" config.style.page.color: "gray-7 on grape-0" config.style.page.link.font: "italics" config.style.page.link.color: "gray-9" config.style.page.link.active.color: "gray-8 on gray-1" config.style.page.header.font: "16" config.style.page.header.link.font: "small caps" config.style.page.footer.font: "16" config.style.page.footer.link.font: "small caps" -- [align center] ##__*Ghost Woman*__ [align center] ### by Lili Baldwin About the eBook: Click this symbol [[►|About 2]] to turn "pages" This work is intertextual--you may also click certain [[italicized passages]] to trace their source Click [[here ►|part 1]] to begin

Which comes first: the curse or the act that proves it? Is one who is ‘cursed’ also absolved of their actions, since they couldn’t have done otherwise? Or does one become cursed because they committed some act? It all depends on how you tell the story. [[◄|If]] [[►|blush]]

Click [[◄|About]] to go back

[align left] [[*If you want to write an elegy, begin with the blush.*|Nox]] [align right] [[*Why do we blush when we think of death?*|Nox]] [align left] I blush because I feel guilty, already. My story is untellable, this story is not my own. [[◄|the curse]] [[►|conventional]]

[[*Conventional wisdom has it that we dredge up family stories to find out more about ourselves, to pursue that all-important goal of ‘self-knowledge,’ to catapult ourselves, like Oedipus, down the track that leads to the revelation of some original crime, some original truth. Then we gouge our eyes out in shame, run screaming into the wilderness, and plagues cease to rain down upon our people.*|Red Parts]] Self-knowledge and family loyalty become the two ends of a long pole, and differentiation becomes a weapon I must wield to splinter (somewhere) their unity. How to say, at once, *I value this story of yours so much I have molded myself around it—with this disavowed or unintentional gift, I am yours*—and also *what’s yours is not so sacred that I won’t not put my paws all over it, it's also become mine to tell.* How in that honor, there is also betrayal. [[◄|blush]] [[►|beginning]]

Anne Carson, Robert Currie, and Gaius Valeris Catullus. *Nox,* New York: New Directions, 2010 [align center] [[◄|blush]]

In the beginning, I didn’t tell the stories--the stories were told to me. I can’t remember when the gift was given--that is, I can’t remember being told, but I also can’t remember there ever being a time I didn’t know. [[◄|conventional]] [[►|birgit]]

Maggie Nelson, *The Red Parts: Autobiography of a trial,* Minneapolis: Graywold Press, 2016. p.72. [align center] [[◄|conventional]]

Birgit died in 1988, when the car she was in collided with that of a drunk driver. She was the only daughter of John and Jenny--a pair of academics, who raised four children while producing book after book on medieval France, Old Norse mythology and other sundry historical topics. With the death of their daughter, both John and Jenny turned inward on this loss. They retreated to their house in Baltimore, [[pulled the blinds to their studies, and drowned their bereavement in work]]. The walls of their home that I explored as a child were filled with books--an incredible weight in the sagging shelves, like ballast. [[◄|beginning]] [[►|born internal]]

As I grew into myself, father, uncles, and family friends all started to tell me of the ways I reminded them of her. It wasn’t the name, it was everything else. My looks and my interests seemed to spur all of us further down a winding lane of superstition, unnameable pleasure in some secret retrieval. The misty-eyed gazes I evoked in them taught me to hold this story of family tragedy with a special tenderness. I felt myself born internal to their grief, my being felt magnetized by these fragmented points of connection. A fragile urgency in the messages. They seemed poised to teach me something--about death, loss, and the afterness. [[◄|birgit]] [[►|duras]]

[align right] __Death with Duras__ [[*it was a mistake, and that momentary error filled*|the lover]] [[*the universe. The outrage was on the scale of God.*|the lover]] She was [[*immortal and they hadn’t noticed.*|the lover]] [[*Immortality had been concealed*|the lover]] in her body while she was alive, and no one had noticed [[*that it dwelt*|the lover]] [[*there. Now her body was dead, and immortality*|the lover]] [[*with it. And the world went on without that visited body,*|the lover]] [[*and without its visitation. It was a complete mistake. And*|the lover]] [[*the error, the outrage, filled the whole universe.*|the lover]] So the family lost their faith in God. only momentary lapses in their diligent atheism let slip the belief-- a belief in, maybe, a revenant? [[◄|born internal]] [[►|method]]

I am hoping that by putting this story on the page, I can peel it off of my personhood-- a kind of Excision. [[◄|duras]] [[►|trying to write]]

Marguerite Duras, *The Lover,* trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. p.104-105 [align center] [[◄|duras]]

**Trying to write.** I have been putting away the story for a moment, for a long moment. Maybe its because it’s starting to sound stale in my therapist’s office I start to question whether I really am unwell over this, or perhaps if I didn’t have a standing appointment with silence which I am expected to fill with its impression, I might not have any awareness of it at all. But I think the reason to clam up is more sinister There hovers over this writing the spectre of causation, curse. [[*Most writers I know nurse persistent fantasies about the horrible things--or the horrible thing--that will happen to them if and when they express themselves as they desire*|arg fantasies]] [[◄|method]] [[►|excoriation]]

Maggie Nelson, *The Argonauts,* Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015. p.114 [align center] [[◄|trying to write]]

Why call this spooky thinking ‘fantasies’? Aren’t they more properly fears? The fear of consequences, which inevitably follow from taking a stand. The fear of a wrong stand, the fear of stepping outside the Order of events by writing--or perhaps making it come to pass because you dared to write it That leaves me with a sense not of Excision but Excoriation-- [align right] *how dare you?* [align left] [[◄|trying to write]] [[►|sleep side]]

But--is writing really that effective? Could I really slip to the [[*sleep side*|decreation]], write a new layer of reality into being? Is that why one must be so careful about what you write about—some moral duty? or is that merely what the voices have convinced me: you are both so unimportant you must try to do better (be moral!) and so important you must not break things with your large, clumsy steps as you struggle, first, to be. [[◄|excoriation]] [[►|persistent fantasy]]

What if in thinking, in probing our connection I will bring down the abstracted fate of Birgit upon myself? —I have written a garbled stream of notes on this before. I don’t know what use it is to the project other than it still makes my hands tremble I need to remind you of this I need to remind myself of this, if only because as a writer --in spite of myself-- I, too, maintain that [[*persistent fantasy.*|arg fantasies 2]] [[◄|sleep side]] [[►|attache case]]

Anne Carson, "Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)", in *Decreation.* New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2005. p.20 [align center] [[◄|sleep side]]

I like to take Maggie Nelson as my authority on the matter, not only because she is a well-known writer who can speak sweepingly of what “most writers” fear, but because she also offers a glimpse of this feeling from the inside. [[*When I published my book Jane: A Murder--a book that took as its subject the 1969 murder of my mother’s younger sister--I too nursed terrible fears: namely, that I would be murdered as Jane was, as punishment for my writerly transgressions.*|arg transgress]] For Nelson, that punishment materializes in the appearance of a mysterious man who starts stalking her at work--bald, heavyset, middle aged, carrying an attaché case and bent on delivering “a message” about Jane. The narrative elegance of this apparition reinscribes the fantasy of horrible consequence. It sickens author and reader alike with an all-too-familiar glimmer of the violence that bears down on unsuspecting women. Women like Jane, women whom Nelson can almost count herself among, in more ways than one ([[*grandfather has called me ‘Jane’ or ‘Janie’ instead of Maggie as long as I can remember…*|janie]]) The man also leaves voicemails proclaiming “she got what she deserved.” These voicemails incant a perverted kind of logic to the senseless violence that befell Jane, and in the writing Nelson, too, senses a way the writing consolidates a collapse of their fates. [[*I had summoned the horrible thing, and now* |arg attache]] [[*here he was,*|arg attache]] [[*attaché case in hand*|arg attache]] [[◄|persistent fantasy]] [[►|funeral]]

Maggie Nelson, *the Argonauts,* Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015. p.114 [align center] [[◄|attache case]]

Maggie Nelson, *the Argonauts*, Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015. p.117 [align center] [[◄|attache case]]

*Most writers I know nurse persistent fantasies about the horrible things–or the horrible thing–that will happen to them if and when they express themselves as they desire* Maggie Nelson, *The Argonauts,* Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015. p.114 [align center] [[◄|persistent fantasy]]

If writers, as a general rule, are so fascinated with death and doom and fate and [[late-breaking comeuppance]], then the practice of writing may double as a sort of [[summoning]]-- because that would effect some sort of ... justice? or at least a better story. How much of writing is just giving someone something to say at your funeral? [[◄|attache case]] [[►|3 clementines 2]]

[align right] __3 Clementines__ The second I ate in an airport feeling acutely the press of humanity, crowded together, jostling and tense as they wait to board. (Could it be the fear of flight? for these earth-bound beings) I eat the clementine with a detached peace The bottom of my gut has already dropped out I have no fear of falling. [align left] [[◄|funeral]] [[►|2 wolves]]

It’s like this-- [[Inside of you are two wolves]]: the First, a fear of facing (or naming) the most awful thing, as if that very incantation will make it real. the Second, a fear of letting this nascent, unborn thing dog you your whole life long, which might also let it retain some prophetic, spooky power, or at the very least instantiate a neurosis that will impact your psychological health. The former would jam up my testimony, make me stop writing before I even begin, whereas the latter would say ‘write, anyway!’ because leaving it unborn poses a greater menace. [[◄|3 clementines 2]] [[►|obviously]]

Obviously, the latter has won out in this case. [[◄|2 wolves]] [[►|fetish]]

Why the late-breaking comeuppance of the man with the attaché case might fit so well in Nelson’s narrative (so *elegantly* as I just called it) makes me reconsider the function of fantasizing about the horrible consequences. Could it be that most writers suffer, not from fear, but from a fetishistic fascination with tragedy? The 'fetish' being--within psychoanalysis--the thing that [[masquerades as a phallus and creates an illusion of wholeness.|halberstam]] It'd make a sort of sense. According to Virginia Woolf, that pursuit of Wholeness is what writing is all about. [[*I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.*|moments of being]] [[◄|obviously]] [[►|therapy]]

Virginia Woolf, *Moments of Being,* ed. Jeanne Schulkind. London: Harcourt, Inc., 1985. p.72 [align center] [[◄|therapy]]

After all, it’s not a terrifying uniqueness that makes this story worth telling. It’s an old, old process, a kind of therapy by putting it into words. Not because the story will ever be perfect (it will in some ways always [[essentialize, aggrandize, misconstrue]]) or that story-telling is a panacea for all our struggle to understand each other and be understood, but because it is one essential way I can disenchant myself with this morbid, spooky magic--makes it [[lose its power to hurt me|moments of being]]. [[◄|fetish]] [[►|name]]

[align center] __Part Two__ __The Name__ [[◄|therapy]] [[►|irony]]

[[*The least one might say about irony is that it has to do with a certain tension between saying and meaning, a tension that questions the necessary coinciding of these two activities that are usually assumed to go hand in hand--or at least whose relation to one another can normally, with some interpretive effort, be comfortably established.*|birgit's writing]] **Trying to write.** Writing towards the nothingness felt at the bottom of oneself is easier if you give it a name (a shape, a story) Perhaps, “Birgit” is the name I gave to the part of oneself that remains a mystery, the attaché case of the future. The unknowable moment of death, coming down the chute. If it comes imminently, then I have already some sense I could make of that. My imagined connection to her--or at least a form of her defined by her death--also allows me to sidle closer to the fact of falling to pieces. E tells me that is just a form of melancholia. She is right--in some ways I'd like to [[*recuperate this loss.*|agamben]] I'd rather death already be over and done with. Nothing more to fear. [[◄|name]] [[►|misappellation]]

Birgit Baldwin “Irony, that "Little, Invisible Personage": A Reading of Kierkegaard's Ghosts” MLN 104, No.5 (published posthumously --December 1989) [align center] [[◄|irony]]

As generative as that may be, such name-giving is also misappellation, the first step on the slippery slope of misunderstanding, misreading, misrepresentation. If what I am calling the spectre of Birgit is really a facet of *my*self, then it’s not true to *her*self at all. There is a seriousness to this misrepresentation that is heightened by her absence. Can the dead be harmed? How do writers hold the care for the ancestors they write about? My palms are sweating, shaking enough as is. [[◄|irony]] [[►|words speak]]

I'll appeal again to Nelson--when she first writes about her dead aunt, she skirts this transgression by having Jane [[*‘speak for herself'*|red parts speak]], a dialogue that is only possible when you’re dealing with the dead if they leave behind some archive. Insofar as Jane’s own journal entries make up a fair amount of the text of *Jane: A Murder*, you could say the text is co-authored, and Jane, indeed, gets to ‘speak.’ I have the sense that Nelson writes this way because she is dutifully conscious of the ever-present *lack*: the spectre of “in-” that emerges whenever one talks about “justice.” But what is gained, that is not also lost, in the backbreaking, impossible purity of trying to [[*“let her words speak”*|red parts speak]]? Words aren’t always that transparent. [[*The ghostliness of irony consists in the way it allows meaning to break loose from word so that the relationship between the two is one of hovering rather than fixed unity.*|birgit's writing 2]] [[◄|misappellation]] [[►|plucked up]]

Maggie Nelson, *The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial* Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2007. p.67 [align center] [[◄|words speak]]

All of Nelson’s talk about the haunting weight of her “writerly transgressions” lead me to wonder--- What, exactly, is transgressive about writing? Throughout *the Argonauts* she lifts this up, but she gives no apparent resolution. At the same time that she optimistically champions the [[*possibilities of writing*]], she confesses her paranoia of harming, through her writing, [[*those she loves most*]]. The one-two punch: 1.Tell your story, it’ll make things better. 2.Surprise! You are making things worse, incurring guilt by trampling on the tenderness of others at the same moment that you try to absolve yourself by the telling. I think of my family. I wonder whether I can put [[Aunt Emily’s letter]] in my book. <del>I want to because</del> There’s that line of hers that brings theft into view again—“perhaps there is always some theft involved in writing about intimacy”; it mirrors something I was just reading in Leslie Jamison’s [[Empathy Exams]]: “When bad things happen to other people, I imagine them happening to me. I didn’t know if that was empathy or theft” <del>I like the way</del> Both of these bring theft in the picture, and appearing quite close to these things that we think of as goods—empathy, intimacy... the Truth of the matter, it seems to me, is that theft is lurking, always. Not so much a full fact or an act of transgression, but a feeling that has many shades. It lurks at the edges of things that feel nicer, nice enough to capitalize--Empathy. Intimacy. These things commonly considered warm, fuzzy, and good are in fact closer to the nastiness of theft: with all its guilt, pleasure, and furtive shame. [[◄|plucked up]] [[►|without emotion]]

[align right] september afternoon in a busy cafe, filled with filtering golden light and grad students reading and writing I look for her face among them, recognition in the ways their lives presently speed on towards the goals she--too!--held (Birgit’s dissertation was almost done) if one were suddenly plucked up pulled to this side of things--made absent, made ghost Would they silently scream and protest at the gatherings ‘round that happen after? Would they --impossibly, inaudibly--bellow *All of your mourning* *and all of your ‘membering* *do injustice to me!!* I wonder if that is how she feels (does she hover?) as I crack the pages of her story. [align left] [[◄|words speak]] [[►|family]]

_Your mom told me about your thesis comparing confessional modes in the writings of St. Augustine and those in the Argonaut. True confessions--I haven't read either. But I'm thrilled you have, and I can try to do something about my ignorance. You are deepening my experience of the world. Robert Lowell, a so-called confessional poet, wrote a famous book in the 1970's called the Dolphin. In it he appropriated text (the old kind) from his ex-wife's letters, blurring the art-life boundary, which was seen as scandalous. (Privacy used to be a bigger deal.) He is described as "mining" her words, which implies that he found some gems but a lot to discard. In the end he discarded her as well but got a book. Not exactly what Nelson's book seems to do (reading around) but probably there is always some theivery involved in writing about intimacy._ ... with love, Emily [align center] [[◄|family]]

I am learning to write without emotion, or rather, I’m learning to write to the bottom of it. How to explain what I really mean without relying on the first flash feeling. E’s comments on an early manuscript: _lots of emphasis on your own responses, likes and dislikes. **It's like you're trying to claim license to express yourself in this way.** I think as the thoughts develop you may be able to refine the types of emotional responses you're articulating, beyond simple affinity, offense, etc._ I bolded that to chew on it. Well, what if representing this feeling of *claiming license* is exactly what I’m after? **The feeling of** claiming, clamoring to be. [[◄|family]] [[►|hysterical critics]]

I want to express myself [[*as I would, if I could*|augustine]] for all the impossibility (or the consequences) that may bring. I sense license is needed because--already, too soon--it’s too much. Wrongheaded, even. Liable to the charge of being yet another hysterical critic, as Lauren Oyler puts it: [[*“Hysterical critics are self-centred – not because they write about themselves, which writers have always done, but because they can make any observation about the world lead back to their own lives and feelings, though it should be the other way round. A bit like the way, in [Jia] Tolentino’s understanding, one’s themes can ‘coalesce into’ a supernova, though a supernova is an explosion that follows a star’s collapsing in on itself and results in the ejection, not accumulation, of mass.”*|oyler]] Not to make it about me, but— reading this *hit.* I thought that maybe I just don’t know how to read. Not in the sense of illiteracy, because the letters still make words and the words made a sort of sense, but perhaps my sense of ‘sense’ is all wrong, like a miscalibrated compass or a lagging clock. I developed a nagging sensation that perhaps the books I loved to read I loved not for themselves but for the ways I found them, or the whens I found them, found them amenable to my own selfish attention to my life and feelings of the moment. Perhaps I regarded the texts all as merely scaffolding or racks on which I could hang my tattered selves, like old coats, each as slippery and fake as the old skin of a snake. ‘Fake’ because we have been taught that authenticity arrives with a distinctly singular grace. Like empathy, [[*it chafes against the notion of effort.*|empathy effort]] With authenticity, there’d be no use for the rags you still change into and out of, because you’ve arrived at some clean, minimal, nakedness. No need to keep hanging on to the old, nothing worth the confusion and anxieties of shepherding many bags of belongings through bus stations. Dredging up old pains and sore spots in writing would be as useless as pawing at the bruises on molding fruit. [[◄|without emotion]] [[►|nevertheless]]

Leslie Jamison, *The Empathy Exams,* Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014. p.23 [align center] [[◄|hysterical critics]]

*In auto-theory, theorized personal anecdotes or embodied actions constellate with fragments from the history of philosophy to form potent analyses of gender, politics, academia, and contemporary art. Embodied experience becomes the primary material for generating theory, foregrounding disclosure and ambivalence as that which enhances critical rigour and relevance; this move is fundamentally feminist, even as many of these writers and artists openly problematize the feminist position.* Lauren Fournier, “Autotheory as an Emerging Mode of Feminist Practice Across Media,” Abstract for Conference proceedings, International Autobiography Association of the Americas (IABAA) Symposium, YorkSpace Institutional Repository, 2017. [align center] [[◄|nevertheless]]

Perhaps I have digressed. All this ado about reading, when really I’m [[*trying to write*|trying to write 2]]. But the two go hand in hand. Nelson also writes of having a “ghost book” that stands behind her work. [[“not just as its muse, but often as its literal stylistic and/or structural model.”|ghost book]] I like to think that in the casual assertion of ghosts we find yet another spectre of spooky thinking. The ghost that stands behind one—be it behind one’s personhood or behind one’s creative work, or whatever elisions you want to make between the two—is an essential compatriot. It’s the dialogic Other that incites one to speak. It magnetizes one’s being towards explanation, it demands testimony. [[◄|nevertheless]] [[►|otherness]]

Maggie Nelson, "A Sort of Leaning Against: Writing with, from and for others" in *The Writer's Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House* ed. Christopher Beha, Portland, OR: Tin House Books, 2012 [align center] [[◄|testimony]]

Our very selves have an inherent otherness to them too, and this is effected by the passage of time. Writing helps keep track of that--just look at this writerly advice from Joan Didion: [[*I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4A.M. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.*|didion]] [[◄|testimony]] [[►|interlude for the past]]

Joan Didion "On Keeping a Notebook" in *Slouching towards Bethlehem*, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: 1968. p.131-141 [align center] [[◄|otherness]]

[align right] **Interlude for the past** *you mustn’t go out alone at night.* ...but of course that’s exactly what she did coiled to strike with a teenagers’ instinct for rebellion the new city was burgeoning, beckoning beyond the rooms still cluttered with boxes and sprays of packing peanuts *mustn’t* might not have been the word (too prim) but the sentiment rounds about to that. she wanted to instill the Fear in her daughter (the fact that the World is Dangerous) so the *mustn’t* was furnished with evidence *just last week I heard someone was stabbed* *outside the seven-eleven* *so DON’T go out, you understand me?* but she wants to be invisible prolong for just a little longer the feeling of waiting behind the curtain not yet [[*performing*|arg perform self]] [[*a self*|arg perform self]] for the world Backstage adventures on a humid summer night: the blow of autumn hasn’t yet fallen, just late-august night air, pendant with an indolent heat. [[wide-eyed and spectral:|wide eyed spectral]] That’s how it feels. out, alone, at night! —a revelation. a new world teeming with people who cannot seem to see her. they brush past, sightless the thrill of invisibility grows she feels reduced to a film of perception eyes—no!—sight, simply Elemental and absent hovering 5ish feet above the ground bodiless bodilessness confirmed: a car pulls up and a man tumbles out to the sidewalk, right in front of her almost instantaneously, he retches --you could say the vomit fell first, and then the man followed-- but not even that draws recognition no *sorry excuse me* or even a glance in her direction the underwater world gurgles but doesn’t blink no one else seems to pay him any mind stepless she waits, adjusts course and floats on, disquieted. the stranger’s guts on the ground a reminder of what spills in the city the seed of her mother’s fear sprouts root she turns back-- *young woman.* [[◄|otherness]] [[►|death with duras 2]]

__Death with Duras, pt.II__ Since Jenny’s daughter was dead, everything had to die with her. and through her. Death, a chain reaction of death, started with her, the child. (a chain, a cause, a curse) They say, *tragedy comes in threes.* That once it happens, and happens again, you can bet your ass that a third will follow. It all depends on how you count. For a while, Aunt Birgit was the first, at least to me. She was the first I heard about. She was the original myth made out of the child, gone too soon. Beautiful in her unique tragedy, and posessively near. My intercessor--the femme beyond. I learned recently that Jenny had had a sister--had had a few sisters--back in Denmark. But when she emigrated by boat in 1952, she left her family and country firmly behind her. She meant the departure to be total--vowed not to speak about any of the past, and so the details are hard to gather. One of the sisters was named Birgit, and she had died before Jenny left, at age 8? Or maybe 12. Of typhus--or maybe untreated diabetes. Hard to say exactly, since Jenny refuses to speak about it. 1 for Birgit the sister, 2 for Birgit the daughter, 3 for me (Wait and see.) At what point will the danger have passed? When this book is done? When I age past 28? Is there some rapture math hidden in the ages of the Birgits? Could I calculate the moment when the shoe will drop, the third coming into view? If 12 is to 28, and 28 to x, then x is…65.333333333nonono. How bout if 8 is to 28, and 28 to x…? or perhaps some different calculus is needed for the telescoping of time between generations-- [align right] **Arithmetic interrupted:** Then there was David. I think of him while Duras writes of her brother: [[*The wild love I feel for him remains an unfathomable mystery to me. I don’t know why I loved him so much as to want to die of his death. I'd been parted from him for ten years when it happened, and hardly ever thought about him. I loved him, it seemed, forever, and nothing new could happen to that love. I’d forgotten about death.*|the lover 2]] David and I hadn’t spoken in many years when it happened. I hardly ever thought about him. Still, I wailed in the night, and howled when I heard that he had died--26--in a car, somewhere in Colorado. It was as if the lesson I wheedled my way towards with all that mysterious talk—the whispers of *you’re just like her* leading me to believe in some way I’d been in that car, or at least I already knew how deaths in cars could change things. Still, something felt torn out of me. I’d known him, it seemed, forever, and nothing could happen to that shared past. I’d forgotten about death. Death changed the order of things. The pain that was sealed in our shared childhood and adolescence now could never be repaired. No imagined future would hold reconciliation. Every old memory, the pleasant and the fraught, are colored now with this blankness. No future—good or bad. Empty. [[◄|interlude for the past]] [[►|wide eyed spectral]]

Maggie Nelson, *the Argonauts*, Minneapolis: Graywold Press, 2015. p.94 [align center] [[◄|interlude for the past]]

[[*Wide-eyed, spectral*|interlude for the past]] No one saw clearly but I. And since I’d acquired that knowledge, the simple knowledge that her body was mine as well, I had to die. And I am dead. D. gathered me to him, drew me to her, and I am dead. and the threes—the threes! D. is David and D. is also the car crash coming, the car crash that already came. folded within a car, here I am (again?) no. NO! It is too soon. I am twenty-six. it has been fifteen days since David died. the wounds of grief are still fresh and now ricocheting through my body come new ones. the lesson comes round again. I don’t need to be Birgit I am being myself --Lili-- in cars as they shriek and rend I can still hear it I flinch, instinctively gather in. too much is spilling out. [[◄|death with duras 2]] [[►|bodilessness 2]]

[[*People ought to be told of such things. Ought to be taught that immortality is mortal, that it can die, it’s happened before and it happens still. It doesn’t ever announce itself as such—it’s duplicity itself. It doesn’t exist in detail, only in principle…Immortality is not a matter of more or less time, it’s not really a question of immortality but of something else that remains unknown. It’s as untrue to say it’s without beginning or end as to say it begins and ends with the life of the spirit, since it partakes both of the spirit and of the void. Look at the dead sands of the desert, the dead bodies of children: there’s no path for immortality there, it must halt and seek another way.*|the lover 3]] Through bodilessness after the accident, I realize that it is a dead end. There is no glory in curses. No glory nor lesson in the trail of tragedy that may traverse your bloodlines. [[◄|wide eyed spectral]] [[►|fin]]

J. Jack Halberstam, *In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives.* New York: NYU Press, 2005. p.71 [align center] [[◄|fetish]]

Lauren Oyler, “Ha ha! Ha ha!” in *London Review of Books* 42, No.2 (January, 2020) https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n02/lauren-oyler/ha-ha!-ha-ha [align center} [[◄|hysterical critics]]

Nevertheless, I like to think that there will be meaning in my personal testimony. I think so because I have felt so, when I read the work of writers who tell themselves alongside things much larger than that. When these [[autotheoretical]] authors constellate their personal experiences among samples of philosophy, critical theory, religion--you name it--they map the immerse, dark, terrifying sky for other nighttime observers. It doesn’t matter so much if a false coherence gets drawn from this self-centered organization, so much as that the organization allows you to glimpse the multivariant connections between all things. A glimpse of the holy-- a holy that, somehow, little ‘I’ belong amidst. [[◄|hysterical critics]] [[►|testimony]]

*In short, to say all in a word, what but disobedience was the punishment of disobedience in that sin? For what else is man’s misery but his own disobedience to himself, so that in consequence of his not being willing to do what he could do, he now wills to do what he cannot?* Augustine of Hippo, *Dei Civitate Dei (City of God)*, Book XIV, ch.15 [align center] [[◄|hysterical critics]]

[align center] __The End__ [align right] [[►3|3 Clementines]]

Maggie Nelson, *The Argonauts*, 2015. (passim) [align center] [[◄|family]]

*“The inexpressible may be contained (inexpressibly!) in the expressed, but the older I get, the more fearful I become of this nothingness, this waxing lyrical about those I love the most (Cordelia)”* Maggie Nelson, *the Argonauts*, Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015. p.46 [align center] [[◄|family]]

[align center] __Part One__ __The Story__ [[◄|About]] [[►|3 Clementines]]

John Baldwin, as told to Jean Gerson [align center] [[◄|birgit]]

*We tell ourselves stories in order to live. --Joan Didion* ... "stories may enable us to live, but they also trap us, bring us spectacular pain. In their scramble to make sense of nonsensical things, they distort, codify, blame, aggrandize, restrict, omit, betray, mythologize, you name it." Maggie Nelson, *The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial,* Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2007. p.155 [align center] [[◄|therapy]]

Giorgio Agamben, *Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture,* Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1993. p.20 see also Sigmund Freud, *Mourning and Melancholia* (1917) [align center] [[◄|irony]]

Birgit Baldwin “Irony, that "Little, Invisible Personage": A Reading of Kierkegaard's Ghosts” MLN 104, No.5 (published posthumously --December 1989) [align center] [[◄|words speak]]

Maggie Nelson, *the Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial* Minneapolis:Graywolf Press, 2007. p.10. [align center] [[◄|attache case]]

Leslie Jamison, *The Empathy Exams,* Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014. [align center] [[◄|family]]

Marguerite Duras, *The Lover,* trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. p.104-105 [align center] [[◄|death with duras 2]]

Marguerite Duras, *The Lover,* trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. p.104-105 [align center] [[◄|bodilessness 2]]

from Merriam Webster online: Definition of passage pas·sage | \ ˈpa-sij \ 1a: a way of exit or entrance : a road, path, channel, or course by which something passes *Special ships clear passages through the ice.* b: a corridor or lobby giving access to the different rooms or parts of a building or apartment *Her office is at the end of the passage.* 2a: the action or process of passing from one place, condition, or stage to another *the passage of food through the digestive system* 2b: DEATH *when he is fit and seasoned for his passage* — William Shakespeare c: a continuous movement or flow *the passage of time* ... 5a: something that happens or is done : INCIDENT *The soldier related some exciting passages.* b: something that takes place between two persons mutually *the passage of vows between bride and groom* __6a: a usually brief portion of a written work or speech that is relevant to a point under discussion or noteworthy for content or style__ *quoted a passage from the Bible* ... et cetera, et cetera. [[◄|About]]

*..it was I who had insisted on writing about Jane's murder, and while I knew intellectually that I wasn't responsible for this man's actions any more than Jane was for her murder,.(as the caller had indicated), my less-enlightened self felt sick with a sense of late-breaking comeuppance.* Maggie Nelson, *the Argonauts*, Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015. p.117 [[◄|funeral]]

*It was I who had summoned the horrible thing, and now here he was, attaché case in hand.* Maggie Nelson, *the Argonauts,* Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015. p.117 [[◄|funeral]]

"Inside You There Are Two Wolves" is the name of a proverb which began being parodied towards the end of 2018 and through the beginning of 2019. In the original proverb, a grandfather says there are two wolves fighting inside him, an evil one and a good one. His grandson asks, "who will win?" The grandfather replies, "The one you feed." In parodies, the story is often simplified to "There are two wolves inside you. One is X. The other is X. You are X." The proverb's origins are murky. It has been attributed to Christian pastor Billy Graham in 1978, as well as the Cherokee Native American tribe "Inside You Are Two Wolves," *Know Your Meme*, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/inside-you-there-are-two-wolves [[◄|2 wolves]]