I was looking for Cixous all morning. I looked upstairs/downstairs, trying to remember where I sat when I last read her, last night, or was it today? I found her just now, under the covers. As I wind in and out between work and unwork, I think of her, open her again. Rootprints. I understand what Calle-Gruber writes, but I live what Cixous writes. And so, it's to her text I'm drawn.
Helene Cixous, the space between the words, between notes, the silence between songs, the gap between knowing and not knowing, the place that isn't a place between suffering and joy. That is where she finds her words. So much power. She is the ladder down, not up. She is neither the journey, nor the destination; she is the quiet moment leaning back against the tree at the side of the road. She is not the desolving or the manifestation, she is the waiting.
And just now, I am reading her, she is reading me. About Love. Dare we? Let's.
Cixous: "There is a point where the unknown begins. The secret other, the other secret, the other itself. The other that the other does not know. What is beautiful in the relation to the other, that moves us, what overwhelms us the most -- that is love -- is when we glimpse a part of what is secret to him or her, what is hidden, that the other does not see; as if there were a window by which we see a certain heart beating. And this secret that we take by surprise, we do not speak of it; we keep it. That is to say, we keep it: we do not touch it. We know, for example, where the other's vulnerable heart is situated; and we do not touch it; we leave it intact. This is love."
Re-read it. Do you see? The window, the heart. Open, vulnerable, the thinnest of membranes between you and the other, between love and abandonment, and you do not break that membrane. You see it; it would be easy. You could poke it, prod some, or simply point attention to it. But you don't. You hush. You keep it. You keep it *for* the other. The comfort of having the secret remain so.
And more from Cixous on love:
"There are things that we do not understand because we could never reproduce them: behaviours, decisions that seem foreign to us. This also is love. It is to find one has arrived at the point where the immense foreign territory of the other will begin. We sense the immensity, the reach, the richness of it, this attracts us. This does not mean that we ever discover it. I can imagine that this infinite foreignness could be menacing; disturbing. It also can be quite the opposite: exalting, wonderful, and in the end, of the same species as God: we do not know what it is. It is the biggest; it is far off. At the end of the path of attention, of reception, which is not interrupted but which continues into what little by little becomes the opposite of comprehension. Loving not knowing. Loving: not knowing."
