I can't tell you the world I have found in Helene Cixous. If you've been around here for a while, you've seen me journey through her Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, a book that helped launch this Blog, led me to my otherness, unliving, agony, writing/dying/living. I was then, and am still now, wrapped up in these things. So tonight, I decide to open the box of seven new books I splurged on, freshly arrived from Amazon. There are six books I really need to read first. Right away actually. But I don't.
I can't. I have to open her. Have her open me.
And I open Rootprints : Memory and Life Writing, where I stumble immediately onto the notion of entredeux, which Cixous calls a place of in between, "between a life which is ending and a life which is beginning."
I have lived there. Unthere. Entredeux. That powerful, agonizing chasm, between was and is, and between is and will. Entredeux. Words unformed, voice unspoken, jagged nails claw the earth from a grave not yet dug. A place where I mourn for a death still living, where I hear songs unwritten. Exiled at home. entredeux.
She's doing it to me again.
And this...from Ms. Cixous....in her own words:
"For me, an entredeux is: nothing. It is a moment in a life where you are not entirely living, where you are almost dead. where you are not dead. Where you are not yet in the process of reliving. These are innumerable moments that touch with the bereavements of all sorts. Either there is bereavement between me, vilolently, from the loss of a being who is part of me -- as if a piece of my body, of my house, were ruined, collapsed. Or, for example, the bereavement that the appearance of a grave illness in oneself must be. Everything that makes up the course of life interrupted.
"In this case we find ourself in a situation for which we are absolutely not prepared. Human beings are eqipped for daily life, with its rites, with its closure, its commodities, its furniture. When an event arrives which evicts us from ourselves, we do not know how to 'live.' But we must. Thus, we are launched into a space-time whose coordinates are all different from those we have always been accustomed to. In addition these violent situations are always new. Always. At no moment can a previous bereavement serve as a model. It is, frightfully, all new: this is one of the most important experiences of our human histories. At times we are thrown into strangeness. This being abroad at home is what I call entredeux. Wars cause entredeux in the histories of countries. But the worst war is the war where the enemy is on the inside; where the enemy is the person I love most in the world, is myself."
