Last year in mid-June, I was lying awake, listening to the sounds of what was shaping up to be a warm but spooky night. My fiancé was out of town and I was home alone. A storm was coming in, ...Read More
Because I don't quite know what to do with this section yet, I've decided to title it after the three chapters in Helene Cixous' Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. Death is the ultimate horizon--it is the cold fact of human mortality that forces us to be honest with ourselves as human beings, and especially as writers. We don't want to go to our graves never having said those deepest, most secreted-away thoughts that we keep hidden from the light of day.
Whether or not you believe in a mysterious and transcendent power of dreams, a glimmering thread that binds the sleeper to another world, it is widely recognized that dreams are the staging ground on which the unconscious acts out its most secret fears and desires. Through the study of our own dreams, we can better come to know ourselves. It is no coincidence that modern art developed "dreamlike" qualities simultaneously with the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis.
Roots are mentioned last by Cixous, perhaps because they are the most difficult part of the artist's mind to assimilate into her/his work. Through the rose light of memory we can work aesthetic wonders, but without a sense of roots, of what actually binds us to our contexts of a Place and Time from which we draw our identity, these wonders are liable to ring false. So to hide our roots is to risk the appearance of artifice in our work. But to show our roots is to betray our idealized visions of ourselves. And there is no easy answer about which side to err on.