My Grandmother's Hair

Beginning

 KNOWING

I forget myself.

That is the one constant in my story, the armature around which the clay of my life is built. I do not mean the setting aside of my needs, as I learned as a mother, when my child is the axis and I am peripheral, when “to love is to study the other.” (Carol Ochs) What I mean right now is that all my life I have forgotten the sensing, feeling parts of me. Even now, when I understand that I do this, I am always doing it, forgetting this part of myself that feels like so much more than just a part.

            Writing begins now on an impulse, a force of knowing that this forgetting will continue always: because just a few moments ago while I was sketching an outline I did it again, forgot to include myself as body and soul, forgot to begin with the ground of my being, my sensations and emotions. Even beginning here on this page, the part of me that is the most important, the felt experience of being, of having been and of being forgotten, my concrete experiencing … is not here …yet. The idea, the knowing, that dreadful certainty – they are all reproduced here, but the particular sensations and feelings through which I know are not here. Are not on the page. I sound to myself like a cold dispassionate fact, not a warm body and impassioned soul…. I know that I remember times of pain and silence and aloneness and do not want to, always. I remember being forgotten. Always?

            As I write these words my fingers become stiff. I am cold, my jaw is tightening – too early to tell If I am sad or angry, too early for me to know which part of me I have touched with the alwaysness of my words. Who is it who “knows” with such grim certainty that my body will always be a thought about inclusion rather than a sensed beginning? Always an afterthought. Where does such recognition come from? My mind wanders away; there are other things she’d rather be doing: this stuff is not for her. (And not for some other parts of me either.) The story wants telling, but I am afraid. I am afraid to be here, right now, with all of the feelings and sensations – and thoughts – rising up and demanding attention, afraid that writing them will blow me apart. And there is something else happening, grinding my gut and fluttering my chest, as a question forms on a wave of sadness: Will I always forget myself? Always forget to include the felt experience of being – being me? And then I know that the lurching in my chest is fear, that the beginning of rage is what grinds my gut – because my embodied reality seems to have no other place than … after words.

BLUE/ABSENCE

I shouldn’t care so much

by now.

Written about, painted, molded

in clay,

walked with, talked through

yelled blue.

But just say a key word

or

call up a sound or

an image

and I’m in it, shaking

with fury or

sagging

under the weight

of remembering

            not being

believed.

            It’s only

            nothing

            but

There are no forgotten pasts

only

being forgotten.

There are no forgotten pasts

o

bare futures.

Only today’s cold

with going

on   unseen    unheard    untold.

Unknown.

 

THOUGHTS

With physical and emotional stirrings comes the need to question. Curiosity encourages and motivates me, Curiosity drives me. Curiosity is a way of staying alive, because questioning allows me to be here while keeping my distance from the force of my emotions. I know that now. I did not know that before. Why? Why do I do this? What started this? Where did it come from? Why, when I now understand, through repeated experiences, through years of study, that I forget myself, why do I feel so entangled, so buried, so far away?

One metaphor will do nicely thank you (That bossy voice!)

No it won’t, I feel all of these ways. (Ah! Fearful is talking back)

Why does it take my mind to remind me that I have forgotten to include the rest of me? Even although I know, deep down inside me, that every thought I have and every decision I make is grounded in what I sense and feel, my lived sensations and feelings are not an immediate presence in the way my thoughts and questions are always here. Always, I must go back and get them, like a forgotten child, just as I did a few moments ago when I realized that I had begun with a statement that I forget myself without giving an embodied description of how that feels, or how I feel as I begin to write this story.

            What on earth will an embodied description look like on the page? What words can possibly incarnate the places and ways of pain, and aloneness, silence, sadness and especially absence? Are there words to tell no-thing? To speak of the unseen and unknown? Are there other ways than words? As my stomach knots and jaw aches I wonder how I will live through an attempt to describe, in whatever way, the experience of being dis/embodied. As I explore what it is in our culture that for some people and sometimes leads to forgetting our emotions and what our bodies hold I know that I will be exploring and exposing my own bodily knowledge and forgotten memories.

            I dream that I am lying on my back on the bottom of a boat floating on the water, gazing lazily up at the sky and the first stars. The tiller swings suddenly and bangs me on the (left!) side of my head. I must grab it or it will continue to swing sharply back and forth and the boat could capsize.

Silence

                                                Thoughts                                             Questions

   Underground

             Standing Up                           Knowing                                      Homes

Openings