possibly or
Colleen Maddingill & the history of error
Elizabeth Treadwell

introductory remark #1:
How quickly unities bounce back even in/at the margin(alia)s of an officially un-unified field (such as: "our" "post-language" "poetics".) "Their musty rules of unity, and God knows what besides, if they meant anything...." -- Aphra Behn

introductory remark #2:
When Elizabeth Fodaski uses the phrase "[sic]" as a device in some of her book fracas (Krupskaya, 1999) I think what she is doing is: in the middle of writing, for example, a history of the word/person/action "Mary", punctuating it or pausing in it with an evocation "[sic]" of all that is unknowable, unspeakable, wrongly (&/or incorrectly) recorded, or lost, about "Mary".

selfish moment:
When I was 26 I had a nervous breakdown. I spent a little over a week in a psychiatric ward in Blackpool, England. (One explanation: "post traumatic stress disorder".) Some days I think all my writing since, and perhaps even before, is an attempt to make coherent and visible all that was inside my mind and body when for some long-seeming amount of time there I could not speak (or read). These were skills I certainly (!) already had at that time: but they were lost to me in those moments. Also, writing to make coherent all that led up to and bled into that experience, of being so open to "vision" (history) or "emotion" (pain, joy) that I was hospitalized (against my "will"). (In the bed there, I did try to write: diagrams comprehensible only - barely - to me.) (A month later I started the MFA program at San Francisco State.)

the guts of it, the "argument":
When I heard from the poet Liz Waldner about an essay I had written for Tripwire 3: Gender, in which part of what I was doing was reviewing her book Homing Devices (O Books, 1998), she was concerned about a note I'd made to mention that I knew nothing of her "biography". She thought this might be an indication that she as a person might seem "unstable" (or something) because of the compositions she had made as a writer. That was not my intention.

However, part of what I was doing in that essay was looking at and celebrating writing that seems to me to break the bounds of "what can be said", that constructs in language experience that has not yet been constructed in language, thus making it, for the reader, more real, or at least legitimate, recognizable. Putting it on the record. Making it, actually, in the act of writing. And making space for it. When I write of groundbreaking acts, women and "madness" are rarely far from my mind: but of course both of these "categories" are made by the very constructions in language that I wish to and that I love to see overcome/broken/(busted!). (And I don't wish to romanticize the experience of "being" in either category.)

Or what has been erased in language, for example in "post traumatic stress disorder", and how useful that can be.

Helene Cixous and Leslie Scalapino have both written toward this concern for the space of the un- (or not yet-, or mis-, or impossible to be-) spoken in the opening essays of their new books (Stigmata, Routlege, 1998 & The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence, Wesleyan, 1999, respectively).

Cixous, in her essay "Bathsheba or the interior Bible", is meditating on Rembrandt's painting "Bathsheba bathing" when she writes: "There is no smile: no exterior. No face that lets itself be looked at. That knows it is looked at. No face. No surface. No scene. Everything is in the interior. No representation."

She compares this painting to the unreadable yet flirtatious Mona Lisa. Bathsheba, here, is in no mood, or mode, for flirting. She is nearly absent from any observer. How does he render this feeling? And, but why be afraid of flirting? And when a woman is the renderer would this mean not thinking of audience? Not wanting the audience to look first at a woman writer, but I say: not wanting them to not particularly not.

There is nakedness and there is being naked while looking in a mirror. There is the interior nude: not nude. The question of clothes, structure, (costume, unity) then, is a non-question. But it's not even about that: it's about being without being seen or even the thought of being seen. But that fits into being an object rather than a subject, thus not renderer.

Yet there is another figure in the painting: a female servant. (Looking into one's blind spots: can you?) The female body is trained to the male eye. Some might protest this statement, at times even me. But what to mention is: female writing is trained to the male eye. Isn't it? Very strange. Not trained to one's own eye: worried. The canon.

But it's not about that. It's about what can't be said. Rendering the interior/exterior, the historical female experience when it has been erased or structured into a galling falsehood, can be, um, difficult. Always having to be renegade, or explanatory (or gendered). Having no, or very limited, or very hard-won, access to evocative, inspiring history (/present). Being a young female poet -- Kathleen Fraser says, "one must simply flick off the lowlifes." (Outlet (4/5), 1999) Of course, just as on the street.

But to get actually inside it, perhaps:
The place of aphasia, not having the power of words, trembling with them anyhow.

Scalapino, in "The Cannon", writes: "I was interested in a syntax whose very mode of observation was to reveal its structure; that is, its subject and its mode are subjectivity being observation. Since it is itself subjective the viewpoint is 'without basis.' It removes its own basis, that of exterior authority, as a critique of itself." Of course, the habit of being trained or accustomed to a particular type of eye changes the "I" itself. The habit of being a feminist, a patient, a teacher, as well. The habit of thinking of eyes, readers. Always being something. How can "I" get attention, money, love, my "point" "across"? And this is terrible, in writing.

Getting to the interior field(s), but not at the expense of the exterior field(s): living in a place of being able to do that, sometimes, by, in, writing. Longing and practicing for that.