Home > Work > The Chronology of Water
41 " We laughed the laugh of women untethered, finally, from their origins. "
― Lidia Yuknavitch , The Chronology of Water
42 " Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It's difficult to think yes. Or up. When all you feel is fight or run. "
43 " I believe in art the way other people believe in god. I say that because books and paintings and music and photography gave me an alternate world to inhabit when the one I was born into was a dead zone. I say it because if you, even inside whatever terror itches your skin, pick up a pen or a paintbrush, a camera or clay or a guitar, you already have what you are afraid to choose. Volition. It was already in you. "
44 " With Hélène Cixous you must close your eyes and open your mouth. Wider. So open your throat opens. Your esophagus. Your lungs. Wider. So open your spine unclatters. Your hips swim loose. Your womb worlds itself. Wider. Open the well of your sex. Now speak your body from your other mouth. Yell corporeal prayer. This is writing. "
45 " People are often asking me if the things in my short stories really happened to me. I always think this is the same question to ask of a life - did this really happen to me? The body doesn’t lie. But when we bring language to the body, isn’t it always already an act of fiction? With its delightfully designed composition and color saturations and graphic patterns? Its style and vantage point? Its insistence on the mind’s powerful force of recollection in the face of the raw and brutal fact that the only witness was the body? "
46 " There is a kind of fighting that isn’t ugly. There is a way for anger to come out as an energy you let loose and away. The trick is to give it a form, and not a human target. The trick is to transform rage. "
47 " Remember parts of your body are scattered in water all over the earth. Know land is made from you. "
48 " I’m not sure it is possible to articulate grief through language. You can say, I was so sad I thought my bones would collapse. I thought I would die. But language always falls short of the body when it comes to the intensity of corporeal experience. The best we can do is bring language in relationship to corporeal experience-bring words close to the body-as close as possible. Close enough to shatter them. Or close enough to knock a body out. To bring language close to the intensity of experiences like love or death or grief or pain is to push on the affect of language. Its sounds and grunts and ecstatic noises. The ritual sense of language. Or the cry. "
49 " You can tell a lot about a person from seeing them in the water. Some people freak out and spaz their way around like giant insects, others slide in like seals, turn over, dive down, effortlessly. Some people kind of tread water with big goofy smiles, others look slightly broken-armed and broken-legged or as if they are in some kind of serious pain. "
50 " If you don’t have a twin in a tribe I’m telling you - drop whatever you are doing in your life and go look for them. The twin and the tribe. I’m serious. Because having a bloodword tie and a tribe pretty much saved me from myself. If I had tried to live one more year trying to be like the people around me I wouldn’t have lasted long. "
51 " Make up stories until you find one you can live with. I "
52 " We drank everything his favorite poet drank-Bukowski- and like Bukowski's women, I matched him drink for drink.We drank each other blind. "
53 " He was too beautiful. Way more beautiful than me and way more beautiful than a beautiful woman. Have you met these men? His too beautiful voice and his beautiful hands and his beautiful cock. But the beauty went all haywire on the inside because he thought he was shit. And that thinking he was shit? It transformed him into the exact opposite of me - the most passive man on the planet. Particularly around any kind of high energy or conflict. Which was basically me, in the flesh. "
54 " You do not deserve most of what has happened or will. But there is something I can offer you. Whoever you are. Out there. As lonely as it gets, you are not alone. There is another kind of love.It’s the love of art. Because I believe in art the way other people believe in god.In art I’ve met an army of people - a tribe that gives good company and courage and hope. In books and painting and music and film. This book? It’s for you. It’s water I made a path through. I’m not speaking out of my asshole when I say this.Come in. The water will hold you. "
55 " Women live their lives secretly waiting for their lives to become movies. We act like men are the ones shallow enough to desire an unending stream of beautiful women but really, if a charismatic narcissist beautiful bad boy man actually desires us, seems to choose us, we go to pieces. "
56 " Words from my whole body, my entire life, or the lives of women and girls whose stories got stuck in their throats came gushing out. "
57 " A little bit outside of things is where some people feel each other. We do it to replace the frame of family. We "
58 " Always we were making. Making love, making trouble, making art. "
59 " If I could go back, I’d coach myself. I’d be the woman who taught me how to stand up, how to want things, how to ask for them. I’d be the woman who says, your mind, you imagination, they are everything. Look how beautiful. You deserve to sit at the table. The radiance falls on all of us. I "
60 " All of the rest in July he raged. And August. Everyday when he came home from work, he'd find another way to fill the house with rage, shake the walls with shame, while the little women took it and took it. Sometimes I thought he might kill one of us. But I was not afraid. "