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Gillian Conoley
Surely to write at all, to use language at all, is to glimpse a heightened sense of "the other." Reading is the same; so is viewing. To experience extreme unity followed by extreme separation. To experience one's identity merging, then dividing, separating. I have a friend who after seeing a film says she "goes around for the next couple of hours wearing the actress's face." When I was in my mid-twenties I read a novel that was very important to me, Nadja, by André Breton. The novel is constructed around a female character who is the central force around which all events and concerns spin, yet she never completely materializes. Nadja is a woman of both presence and absence, someone who was just seen at a street corner or a cafe -- a trace of her is left wherever she goes, marking her existence, though we never fully see her. She is erotic, mysterious, haunted, powerful, all the things I wanted to be. She is, above all, free to change, mercurial though revolutionary. Simone de Beauvoir describes Nadja as being "so wonderfully free from all regard for appearance that she scorns reason and law alike." The novel was important to me because in it I recognized my own free- floating sense of identity. I have never felt like I had a particularly set-in- stone identity, like I could say, "yes, there I am in the photograph, that's me, and I am always the same person." This was particularly troublesome during adolescence, for while my sense of self was by nature porous and procreant, some part of "me" was quite concerned with erecting a much more consistent, solid self, one whom I could never quite get to remain. At the same time, I wanted to be able to change at any moment, or, at least, to think I could. Gradually I got older, read philosophy, feminist thought, and theory, and sought out the work of like-minded women and men. At some point I began to experience this floating identity as something pleasurable, even comfortable. I discovered that I could live this way. What I was not prepared for was the heightened experience of this floating identity after I had given birth. Nor could I have imagined how much I loved being pregnant. The corporeal reality of there being two present in my body --- two intelligences, two biologies, two sets of ears that could hear, two sets of eyes that were open, two souls --- this was a beautiful evidence of the multiplicity I had felt all my life. For the first time in my life I was physically not "myself."
Gillian Conoley is the author of four collections of poetry, including Beckon and Tall Stranger, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches at Sonoma State University, where she edits the journal Volt. |