There is a door that she’s always wondered about. She’ll often pass it on her walk home
to the family she inserted herself into three months ago, but she has picked up on the impulsivity of politeness so it has mostly gone disregarded for those ninety days. But she’ll be leaving soon, so the time is running out. If there was ever a moment to seize, it would be now. She had just finished class and didn’t get a chance to mention the chapter of Testo Junkie that she had read for discussion. The first chapter, Your Death, hurt. She learned rubbing alcohol would not clean the wound, it would actually just infect it further. She had lost a parent almost six years prior to this assigned reading and felt a kinship with Preciado – the staccato sentence structure strictly detailing facts after a sudden loss is the only way to convey any information of the sort. When her parent had died, she didn’t know how else to say it: “He fell and he’s dead and now I have to drive an hour away to see what happened, I don’t know what happened.” /
“We found him dead in his new apartment in Paris. We don’t know. It happened two days ago, on the third. We just don’t know.”(1)
Preciado repeats the phrase: “I don’t know” four different times on the first page of Your Death. Socrates said, “All I know is that I know nothing.” She echoed this nearing the anniversary:
How is this year feeling?
I don’t know.
She felt a particular sting when she read, “Until now, no one was aware of your death”(2)
and thought of how his death wasn’t official until he was found. Both her and Preciado’s
deceased. Death, a most permanent and affective event; but we must mention Badiou’s
interpretation of Deleuze’s thoughts on the matter: “...the event is the immanent consequence of becoming or Life.”(3) According to those surrounding, until otherwise notified, Life is happening and beings are becoming. It is a nonstop biological and metaphysical process until it is not. Until the imminent consequence, until the event happens. A death becomes certain, a fact, that then ripples through the fibers of other processes until it becomes part of the regular procedure of timekeeping. She often wrote about how when he died she remembered everything so clearly for the first few days after and then months went by without a trace.
The ambiguous pronouns will become annoying to the reader, so we will assign
pseudonyms because this is theory fiction, after all. She is Thirty. He is Sixty. Thirty is Sixty’s
stepdaughter, and Sixty is technically Thirty’s stepfather, but for the sake of the heart, he really was a dad. In the Theory Fiction class that Thirty was enrolled in, she began to understand the work that she was making was technically autofiction: akin to Preciado, Nelson, Wark, the like. Even though Thirty had been writing specifically about her encounter with sudden loss, she knew she was not the only one with this particular experience. She sought awkward comfort in Wark’s analysis regarding the coinage of the term autofiction: “It is not a confession of the self or attempt at self-knowledge.”(4) Although Wark claims that the term could use some updating, Thirty feels that she desires to de-center herself through her writing. There is nothing to confess to, nor to write about acquiring more knowledge of the self. If anything, it’s a study of the process of grief. Of human behavior. Of extraordinary events in the ordinary.
But sometimes Thirty became uncomfortable with the fact she was writing about the dead. Do we let them rest in peace? Do we tell stories to keep their memory alive? Do we only tell the good stories? Do we shove away the bad memories?
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
I don’t know.
“It will be your story, in my text – and my copyright. It’s the business of bourgeois
literature to stake claims to property rights over others’ pain.”(5) Wark addresses the reader
specifically and not-specifically in her piece Girls Like Us: a contemplation of owning an
experience. What property rights do you have over another’s experience, especially when they are dead? Dying is the ultimate surrender to controlling the ego – your narrative now belongs to everyone. A pit in Thirty’s stomach grows. She wants so desperately to please Sixty, to make him proud. She tells herself that she does. Others tell her this too. But we don’t know this for certain, so we must tell ourselves that we do.
Thirty continues to think about property rights alongside Wark, through a Marxist lens.
Why is Thirty thinking of experience as ownership? Is there a way to deprogram this instinctive claim of the self? Fuck, that’s autofiction, though. She follows Wark’s thread of holding pride for those writers on the margins taking back the narrative (notably she mentions Black authors, cis women authors, disabled authors, the like), but deflates: “...this just extends the same bourgeois property logic into the margins – and, all too often, with less money involved.”(6) The world does not provide the non-hierarchical and anti-racist conditions for most to thrive sustainably. Thirty concluded years ago that she would most likely not make money on her writing, either. Sometimes, it’s better to have hobbies. But in any case, back to the dead.
Thirty resolves that she must detach when writing about the dead – perhaps it is Sixty’s
story, both of their stories, but who does it truly belong to? Can we copyright an experience,
making something relatively universal now terminally unique? Can Thirty submit an essay like this that essentially emotionally manipulates her professor into obtaining a ‘pass’ on her
transcript? She laughs to herself, she’s quite fond of this professor, so no manipulation is needed. This is not the motivation. The motivation is to reflect on the complications of grief. Now, back to the door.
She finally understood what they meant when they said it pissed rain here. She got used
to it quite quickly though and didn’t mind it much. The door seemed waterproof somehow,
though, and it was pulsating. Just mildly enough that you really had to stare at the door to
understand it looked like it had a heartbeat of its own.
Thirty didn’t like not knowing things. The few months that passed after Sixty himself passed could only be recalled by documentation that naturally turned into an archive of sorts. Thirty could look back at the words she wrote on paper, notes apps, texts to herself, messages to others and compile a sort-of history. She felt that this history needed to be an accurate one so that the story could be told correctly. Thirty was adamant about objectively collecting all of the moments she had experienced and that would be that. The collection was a sort of property right in and of its own – that this was her organization. Logic was attractive, alluring. She could put her arms around this sort of memory.
That’s the reason why Thirty was so bummed to not share this parallel with Preciado in
class that day. She could practically holler with satisfaction at Preciado’s precise documentation of the actions that followed once William was found dead. It’s truly the only thing that one can cling to when experiencing profound grief: sticking to what is real. What is tangible. What is clearly right in front of you and your feet are on the ground and your bladder is full of piss and your nose is clogged. There was an excerpt from her writing that Thirty wanted to share, so she’ll place it here:
It was a little after 4pm and I got a call from her. She never called like this. I
heard her screams crescendo and rescind and I pressed her closer to my ear as if I could hear the ocean, I couldn’t hear what happened.
I didn’t know what happened. My brother told me what happened. He found him. So did my sister, I think.
I folded myself in half approximately 12 feet from the front door. I clawed at the ground no no no no no it can’t be we had plans he’s still here it’s not possible he’s here it’s okay it’s not
I screamed, I think. Everything that was inside was out now.
It’s still pissing so hard outside yet the door remains bone dry. Thirty worked up the
courage and walked to the landing one step two step three step. She was immensely careful with stairs and never told anyone this justified neurosis. Her bangs stuck to her forehead. One knock two knock three knock. There are no doorknobs here but she could hear the latch inside turn and the door opened slightly inwards. She saw a young woman, close to her age, peek her head from behind the door. She didn’t say anything but her eyes widened and the door shut in Thirty’s face.
“I have to tell you something before I open the door all the way,” the young woman
called out. Thirty stood there, annoyed. She didn’t say anything because she was waiting for something.
“I need you to understand what I’m about to tell you. You must stay standing there and
let me finish all that I’m to tell you, okay?” Thirty said nothing in response and kept waiting.
“When I open the door, you are going to see something that will upset you greatly. But
know that you are supposed to be here and I am really very happy to see you, I promise.” What the fuck was going on?
“Do you promise to stay?” Thirty responded with a bland, “uh-huh” and heard the latch
turn again.
Thirty stood facing a replica of herself. The same bangs, but dry. Same height, same
figure, same shoes, different outfit, but dry. Since there are two now, let’s call the dry Thirty “Copy”. Thirty half-expected something odd from behind the door, something along the lines of the Corn-Wolf or one of the Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar (no she didn’t, she’s just being cheeky because this is theory fiction), but she didn’t expect to see Copy. Copy gestured to welcome Thirty inside and because Thirty didn’t want to stay the wet one, she accepted.
Copy smiled. “I’m really glad that you’re here. Sometimes it can get lonely, I mean – I
know that I have these boxes of photos and some letters but the archive doesn’t talk back,” she said as she leaned against the wooden doorframe. Copy then walked past Thirty, taking off her boots to leave by the entrance. Thirty followed Copy down the narrow hallway, her breathing becoming a bit more rapid now that reality had set in. What the fuck is going on.
Thirty thought of Monique Wittig and wondered what adjectives she would use to describe the place she was in now. It wasn’t a home, even though it looked like a normal flat on the outside. Inside though, the ceilings stretched dramatically high and appeared to pulsate as well, just ever so slightly. There were rows and rows and rows of shelves of varying shapes and sizes: some were dark and wooden, some were ash-gray metal with intersecting beams so that they could hold the boxes. Fuck, the boxes. Thirty couldn’t fathom how many crumpled boxes towered over her. She refused to try to be like Wittig and followed wherever she last heard Copy’s voice.
Thirty didn’t have to say anything before Copy got a look at her face and started
explaining. Copy said that it was finally time that Thirty saw The Archive. It had been long
enough that Thirty was ready, and that Copy saw through the peephole that Thirty contemplated what was behind this particular door every Tuesday and Thursday on her way to class. Copy loved the consistency that Thirty provided because inside had no clock. Inside The Archive there were no windows but there was ventilation so Copy could tell when it was a cold and rainy day or it was a cold and dry day (it was mostly cold).
Copy spent much of her time physically in the present but mentally and emotionally in
the past. It was wearing down on Copy’s spirit to be in two timelines at once. Especially when
she knew Thirty would be coming soon.
“Today I was looking through the memories of mother’s 30th birthday, funnily enough.
You have excellent timing,” Copy told Thirty. Thirty closed her eyes. She recalled that a family friend of her parents scooped her up and cannonballed the both of them into the deep end of their pool. It caught her off guard and she didn’t have enough time to inhale so that she could exist underwater for however long he held her there. She wrote a poem about it, she thinks she might have called it wake crest. How funny, she hadn’t thought of that in years. Thirty would be spending her 30th birthday very differently.
“Tell me more about how you’re looking through my memories,” Thirty said. Copy
furrowed her brows.
“No...these aren’t yours. These are ours,” Copy clarified. Thirty didn’t understand. These
were clearly her memories. The Archive was composed of memories belonging to Thirty,
clearly. “See, at some point you decided you weren’t going to keep living in the past. You
maintained that you were going to live in the present and look toward the future, I think it was sometime around mid-2022 you declared this at...uh...oh, here it is. You were in a group
meeting and you said from then on, you ‘were disinterested in re-telling stories from the past
because you feel so far away from them. That’s exactly what they are, stories’ so, that’s when I
showed up. Someone needed to tend to the past.” Thirty felt her heart stop. She’s right. I said
that.
Thirty didn’t feel comfortable now that she had to share her memories with...well,
herself. She thought that when she let her past go, it would, well, stay in the past.
“I know, a lot of people think that,” it appeared Copy knew what she was thinking. Well,
fuck, of course she did. They were essentially the same. “This is what happens when people
decide to stop focusing on what happened and start to think about what’s happening. Real
popular these days, so there’s a lot of us now. But I’m really glad you’re here. A lot of the time
we don’t get to meet our present selves. It’s a treat, truly.” Copy placed a hand on Thirty’s arm, and it sort of diffused into one appendage. Copy quietly withdrew.
“It’s a lot, I know. I’d love to show you around though. I know you think of the past as a
bad thing, but I promise, it can actually feel okay sometimes. It’s not so much a mausoleum as it is the cinema – there’s just a lot to look at.” Copy began walking further back into The Archive.
Thirty paused before she was going to follow Copy. Her heart ached. She knew that she
was invested in autofiction at this point, but it hurt. It hurts like Your Death hurt. It hurts like his death hurt. Thirty sought Maggie Nelson at this point: “Most of my writing usually feels to me like a bad idea, which makes it hard for me to know which ideas feel bad because they have merit, and which ones feel bad because they don’t.”(7) Going deeper into The Archive felt like a bad idea, writing about The Archive feels like a bad idea, this whole essay feels like a bad idea. Maybe there’s an irony in thinking back to Wark, thinking at least this is my bad idea. Well...for the sake of Thirty and Copy, it was their bad idea. There was an idea that was not present in the world before, a becoming. A birth. And of course, there will be a death of an idea – one day, Thirty will die, and with her, Copy will die, and all of the ideas that Thirty ever had and the memories Copy ever kept will die too. That is, unless someone decides to actually go through with writing them down. What risk is there to forging one’s experience into the fire? Thirty feels warmth with Wark’s words now.
“Autofiction doesn’t solve the problem of making your story my property, but it
does bring the problem into the text. It makes no claims to revealing hidden truths. It’s fiction. But the self that is present in it is the author. I am here, in the writing, out of a sense of obligation, that if I tell any of your stories – that’s on me.”(8)
Thirty pulls her head out of her ass – Wark is talking about everyone. Autofiction has the ‘auto’ prefix, yes, but we must tend to this redefinition: what is one’s purpose in the world but to relate to one another, to hear each other’s stories, to write of each other’s stories, be it a text message, an essay, a memoir; so that we can hold each other? We can acknowledge each other’s existence in this landscape through a preservation of words. An archive. To be found or to be forgotten. It’s not about me. It’s about us.
Thirty uncrosses her arms. She decides she will follow Copy. Whatever happens next is
out of Thirty’s control. She understands that she cannot completely abandon the past. However, the past can be greeted warmly whenever it presents itself. It is there for a reason, but it is there for a reason. She can use it to look towards the future. Thirty looks to Nelson as she takes steps forward towards The Archive,
“But somewhere along the line, from my heroes, whose souls were forged in fires
infinitely hotter than mine, I gained an outsized faith in articulation itself as its own form of
protection.”(9)
1 & 2: Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie, trans. Bruce Benderson. (New York: the Feminist Press, 2013), 15.
3: Alain Badiou, “The Event in Deleuze,” Parrhesia, no. 2 (2007): 40.
4-6, 8: McKenzie Wark, “Girls Like Us,” The White Review, December 2020,
7 & 9: Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts, (London: Melville House, 2016), 101.
コメント