Anywhere Apart from Here
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An extract from a lecture I imagined I would one day give, provided I had the time, and supposing as well that whatever institution I happened to have landed myself in allowed it, would doubtless look somewhat similar to what follows. It would be a rather small classroom, certainly no more than fifteen to twenty students would be in attendance, no, no more than that. I stand in the corner with the peeling white board behind me and I’m wearing a very full brown skirt along with a light cotton blouse adorned with small depictions of chairs and everyone is talking while I take large stacks of papers and books and place them on the table in front of me. Fanning out the books which are grey and dogeared and underlined with faint, scratchy pencil marks with strands of loose hair and pastry crumbs enclosed between a few pages and a sandwich swathed in clear plastic wrap beside them. The books will be those I brought from home this morning. A couple, including the Bennett one, I have owned for years, ever since I lived in a house that was very removed from whatever university I’m currently standing in, somewhere with inexplicably yellow wallpaper lined with light depictions of flowers and berries dotted haphazardly in regular patterns which I would scan and trace as I read for the first time what I will be going over again today. These books are always together, they are a group, though it’s unclear whether the writers themselves considered each other as such. No, I don’t believe they ever paid much mind to that. They come from different places. In the specific decades of their lives they wrote about old drawing rooms, textiles, Paris, oil paintings, tangerine peels, New York, aubergines, London, America, cinemas, browning postcards. Some of them ought to have been read while you are still very young and also while somewhere cool and dim, such as by a pond, which is, I think, where I want my students to imagine themselves now. A pond in fact would be perfect. You should be sitting with the mud of the bank seeping in dappled outlines into the hem of your dress, I tell them. You should smell the water ahead of you. You should breathe it in, inhale, exhale. You should notice the fish swimming beneath the water. Finally, you should draw your attention to your book just visible now through the evening dusk. I should like to think you are a woman too, though perhaps not, not yet. That can come later.
I want to start with a feeling. The sense of finding yourself apart from the particular space you are meant to reside within can naturally cause despair. Something is amiss. Off. The air is stiff. There is a clammy edge to your clothing. You walk out into the street and all the lights of the city have shorted and sirens are calling from the distance. There is of course nothing particularly illuminating or original about this; if such a feeling is expressed at all it’s often clumsy and misdirected. You bare yourself and he laughs, he misunderstands, he decrees, you choose to ignore him, he is belligerent, you retreat. When I’m in such a state my thinking becomes dismantled; I stop knowing how to bridge the gap between my words and your words and at once the air becomes very close, my throat and breasts hurt, and more than anything I just want to remove myself from this unbearable wincing sensation and let everything cease. Simmer down. Finish. I suddenly lack the will to go through the all the sordid details of my specifically slippery affectations. And then I worry I don’t have the ability. Or I worry nobody ever does. It’s not clear to me the extent to which my thoughts can ever be sufficiently formalised or expressed to anyone. And this is where I want to begin. I want the lecture room to be quieting now and I want it to be autumn, too. The year should be very fresh; everyone has their brand-new pencil cases and bags, laptops are open, coats are draped against the backs of chairs. It appears as if we’ve put quite an effort into today, haven’t we? I pick one of the grey paperbacks and read a sentence carefully demarcated some years previously while I had been staring at the mottled yellow wallpaper now so very far away.
I have no desire to be so bleakly reductive as to equate femininity with blood.
Bennett writes: The first day the colour is very pretty – it’s a shade of red I’ve been looking for in a lipstick since forever. Neither too dark, nor too bright. Not too pink not too brown not too orange. She is, I tell my students, talking here about blood. The gashes, the bruises, the stained bedsheets, the tests, the copper taste, the bathrooms, the cuts, the products, the expected shame, the movement, the stickiness, the time she had to wear another girl’s knickers. Why is it that this is the subject she chooses to write about? Why is it, too – I’m turning to another book, the Lisa Robertson book – that Robertson’s narrator finds, just as she is rising from a restaurant chair, the entirety of a map of Paris neatly laid out in a stain from her period? Why does Edna O’Brien write I’m a woman. I bleed et cetera? I’m not for the moment particularly interested in an answer. Presently all I wish to convey to these fifteen or twenty students is the feeling I developed when first reading these passages. The certain sordid anxiety, lying against the yellow wallpaper as it rains and rains and you can sense the great big mass of something creeping out to take hold as you press again a nail into the creased white paper. I want them to wonder why so many of these women seem more or less very interested in blood. Its delicate flow. Its dampness, its sweat. There was a point, I tell them, when each time I picked up a book I anticipated finding a similar section about blood, somewhere within. I didn’t know then what it was that so troubled me about this. I didn’t tell my friends that such segments often made me feel reduced and confused and just how often I felt like walking right up to one of these writers and telling them to fuck off. I didn’t tell anyone how they lingered in me as I lay beneath the yellow wallpaper or while my bare feet pressed against the pond’s shoreline. I didn’t voice anything, really, but I tell my students now; I enjoy the theatrics and I enjoy recounting, here and there, a few very small very choice details from my life as I read from this book, then the next, placing them when I’m finished carefully back upon the table. I don’t of course want to overdo this. I don’t want to needlessly rub myself in the two loneliest years of my life where I understood quite forcefully the full extent to which I was removed from what these writers are examining. I also have no desire to be so bleakly reductive as to actually equate femininity with blood. No, no need for any of that. No need, either, for dragging too much of that particularly bilious unease back out onto the surface. My aim is merely to note that there was a time when I felt a great many things about the blood, but this feeling was so mired in context that it was neigh impossible for me to convey it to anyone, let alone myself, and that despite this, the feeling was still endlessly heart wrenching and large, and that it consumed me. That there was something inside of me that I felt I was aware of but could not touch. That demanded interpretation but fled away from it. This, fundamentally, I explain, is what I want to speak about. What Roland Barthes might call the thing to the side. The thing that cannot be adequately accessed or communicated but nevertheless is what the writer needs to access and communicate. I want to talk about talking about the thing to the side. Though, again, I don’t imagine I have the language to do so.
I wish I could be clearer about this. Naturally my students do, too. I tell them a story from a few years ago when I first tried to explain my thoughts about the blood to a friend while attending a residency in America. I tell them about sitting on her corduroy sofa. I tell them that we were drinking loose leaf tea, that the day was very hot, that she was smoking a cigarette in a thin green nightgown; I tell them that I had just recently started injecting oestrogen, that the oestrogen had been purchased online by my friend from a woman in Poland or Canada (I can’t remember which), and I tell them that placing the needle beneath my skin made my gums slip, that afterwards everything became eminently brittle and precious. I tell them, too, after much cajoling, precisely what I told my friend – that my issues weren’t really to do with the blood or periods or any naturalised conception of the female body, nor was it due to the difficulties I had in transforming myself, nor even the still present space between my body and my conception of my body. That it was all of this, but also something else. And to describe that something, I could say that it was to do with history, wanting to write myself into said history, wanting permission to do, and then my talking might become dismantled and I’d use words like sex and hair and strange jackets and desire and reaching and unravelling and mirrors and frothy bedsheets and memory and lurid affectations and dancing. But none of this would be quite right, either. There’s something else. I think there’s something else. A sort of aloof section locked somewhere beneath that, very occasionally, it seems I can just about glance at, if only for a second, and even while glancing I have the clear impression that it will dissipate once I look away. And it’s frustrating. Endlessly frustrating, I tell my students. Sitting with my friend on the corduroy sofa I realise I’m waiting for a great bolt from the blue where the leftovers of my insides suddenly inexplicably totally crystalise into something plain and absolute and my hands are stiff and weak and my tea is cold and the shot has girded my skin. My explanations seem lowered and arbitrary. And I worry I’m making too much of what is ultimately very little.
In an earlier book Bennett admits to her own issues with language; to her, English strictly speaking isn’t her first language. Her language, whatever it may be, cannot be written down at all. Instead, it has to stay where it is; simmering in the elastic gloom betwixt her flickering organs. I want to believe that there is a portentous somewhere between my organs, a thing to the side, some sort of innate and intrinsic spot which if I could only show you then you would understand me and my gender and everything else. During the first two years of my transition it was all I looked for – the thing that might point to what it meant to read about the blood or to let my hair grow or to steal eyeliner pens or to be fucked in the arse. But more and more I worry there isn’t anything. That I’m full of shit. I worry that because in the end I just want to appear chic and noteworthy I’m attempting to narrate myself in such a manner that is absorbing and total when in fact the blood and the yellow wallpaper and the pond speak to nothing except that there was a time when I didn’t feel luminous and erotic and unabridged and now, very occasionally, I do. I’m not sure. I hope there is something just beyond the purview of my language that goes further than just wanting to be a woman and not always having been one; and maybe the issue is merely that to speak about it I would need to editorialise and shift and heighten and garble all that’s within my elastic gloom, my lungs my liver my kidneys my heart my intestines, until the words are each so glumly distorted that it’s hardly worth the bother saying anything at all. But maybe not.
Increasingly it has seemed to me as if there isn’t a way to adequately explain ourselves.
I can’t decide whether there ever really is something to the side. I can’t determine whether I have an unspoken language beneath me or whether I just long to be dramatic and for everyone in the room now to listen very intently and find me interesting. It’s gratifying, of course, to suppose that there’s so much inside of you that is cauterizing and wild and beyond the pale and that would shatter anyone who for a moment had to wade into your organs and confront themselves with your own peculiar horror. But so far I haven’t come up with any real evidence of it. Likely I never will. I can’t say precisely what it was I said to my friend that night on the corduroy sofa. Undoubtably it came out terribly dull. I was still very new then. (It seemed as if I stayed new for a long time.) I still felt the vestiges of my former self coaxing out of my casing. The nagging sense of a lambent creature dragged behind me, the abrupt angst, the presumed failure of having not yet arrived.
Let me try putting this another way. In a paper published some months ago another friend described her gender as the practice of enacting upon an image; the practice of ratifying particular relations and affectations built from however many moments and histories which, taken together, form themselves into a collage, both demanding and quaint, which serves as the manner in which she moves through the world. When asked my opinion I didn’t have the heart to tell her I couldn’t understand half of what she was getting at. We were on the phone and instead of requesting she rephrase her position I tried to mask my confusion by fumbling my words for a while before eventually moving the conversation over to something else. We haven’t talked about the paper since. What I had wanted to say, in retrospect, is that increasingly it has seemed to me as if there isn’t a way to adequately explain ourselves – that the manner in which we interact with our histories isn’t something that can be cleanly mapped out or conveyed to anyone. I can’t tell you the relation I have to my body or my history or the history I wish to be part of; I can’t even tell myself. I can’t say why my gender has affected me in the manner in which it has, I can’t say why I require a shot of estradiol enanthate every week in order to keep living, I can’t say why I have to clothe myself in the manner in which I do, why I need to walk in a specific way, why my body is contorted as it is. It’s just happened. And I’m unsure what I’m meant to do with this.
The obvious answer is that it doesn’t matter: that anyone born within their own history with no desire to remove themselves to a new history has never had to consider such a question, so why should I? But I wonder if maybe there isn’t a way inside your own history for any of us. It’s almost expected that anyone wishing to foreground themselves within a life of creative catharsis will, at least for a moment, remove themselves from their everyday and into a kind of galvanising ‘other’ in which they will be transformed, made anew, and will thus return, bringing forth what they found from wading into their own specific fermented darkness. But I have no desire to bring forth anything. History is a motif I have returned to throughout my limited writing career and yet I still can’t put too fine a finger on what it is this history is meant to mean. Perhaps it doesn’t mean anything. Perhaps this strange wavering need to connect myself to the writers’ blood isn’t so much to do with a nascent feeling of detachment caused by an initial disconnection to my gender but is instead something intrinsic. Perhaps everyone in this room feels the same? Perhaps history is just something that has happened a long time ago and we are all disconnected from it, with little else to do but sit in this small classroom with the sweat seeping into our clothes. I can’t say for sure.
I like the idea that to speak of our most guarded sections of ourselves always requires a level of dissolve.
Looking over my notes, the fanned-out books, the sandwich wrapped in plastic, my students, it seems to me that, as with my friend’s paper, I can’t really explain myself at all. And I suppose I want to be ok with this. I want, if I’m to unravel, to do so productively, to be satisfied with looking at the problem while not solving it. I like the idea that I do have sort of latent content within me; that this content can partly be attributed to my gender but also isn’t simply my gender but is, also, indissolubly linked to my gender. And I like supposing as well that people now will be packing away their things, tucking chairs under tables, that some might stay behind for questions, that I’ll be able to answer them, to the best of my ability. I like the idea that to speak of our most guarded sections of ourselves always requires a level of dissolve. But if there isn’t a thing that is to the side, I want to be contented with this more limited version of myself, too, to be fulfilled by the searching.
Later that night I imagine I’ll awake and decide that the lecture was too broad or lacked specificity. Or that it was too personal. Or embarrassing. Dogmatic, maybe: reductionist even while attempting the opposite. Probably it was. It seems now that any attempt to discuss indirection is always laden with a certain degree of failure. And it’s not as if I really want to shape myself so completely that others would be able to hold me in such a concrete manner, anyway. Words of course have to privilege the contained. Probably I’ll fret for a while, probably I’ll lie back, I’ll rest, I’ll look at the walls, I’ll eavesdrop, there’ll be some sort of tacit sleep. Maybe in the morning I’ll picture myself in another lecture. Or maybe not. I don’t know. For now I’ve said what I’ve tried to say and that’ll be enough. At some point I’ll try again.
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Beth Preece is a trans writer. Her short fiction and essays can be found in the likes of The Stinging Fly, Litro Magazine and Extra Teeth. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart prize and is currently working as a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Birmingham.
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