House Less Home

1984. Daphne Marlatt. Touch to My Tongue. "houseless".

what is at stake here is an epistemology of the erotic — how ways of knowing include ways of being together

i can only be, no vessel but a movement running, out in the open, out in the dark and rising tide, in risk, knowing who i am with you —

creatures of ecstasy, we have risen drenched from our own wet grasses, reeds, sea. turned out, turned inside out, beside ourselves, we are the tide swelling, we are the continent draining, deep and forever into each other.

The book also conveys the image work of Cheryl Sourkes and these words from Marlatt apply equally to the photographs from Memory Room; they inhabit the similar space. Before a photograph from Sourkes, the book ends with an essay "musing with mothertongue" from Marlatt (first given as a talk at the 1983 Women and Words conference) in which is conjured the figure of the woman writer (and by extension, artist):

inhabitant of language, not master, not even mistress, this new woman writer (Alma, say) is having is had, is held by it, what she is given to say. in giving it away is given herself, on that double edge where she has always lived, between the already spoken and the unspeakable, sense and non-sense. only now she writes it, risking nonsense, chaotic language leafings, unspeakable breaches of usage, intuitive leaps. inside language she leaps for joy, shoving out the walls of taboo and propriety, kicking syntax, discovering life in old roots.

Note the related work of exploring the breath of language via experiments with syntax and the etymological excavations to inspire further ruminations. When same touches same ... more wildly more unmoored.

And so for day 1122
08.01.2010