The Other Shore
by Juliana Borrero
For H.D
Working Notes
Because one can be a woman for centuries and not know what that means. . . This is one woman's journey to feminist consciousness and what it means to language. It is a dive deep deep deep in one woman's body in search for the roots of her tongue. A shedding of certainties, words, skins; a veil torn, reality cracked open, bewildering journey into the vast, uncharted territory that is reached when a woman understands what it means to think and write as a woman. So read on. If you get lost, do not fear. You will have to swim. That's what you're supposed to do. Just breathe underwater, and feel...
1.
On the thin cliffs of pelvis there stand three divers, looking out to sea. On the high, dangerous edge, they sway suicidally as the vision of the water breaks up into a million colored specks. Light exploding on the water. Waves exploding on the rock.
She could describe this as the process of coming to a dramatic edge. Sleepwalking, step after steady step, like a child to it's mother's heart beat. Eyes turned inward guided only by the remembered resonance, the hypnotic harp of a siren's ballad, the giddy waltzing of the waves. Precisely at the vulnerable border, they stop; with the exactitude of the blind.
To jump or not to: the divers' bodies teeter on the tip. The rounded cliff is a pair of arms that will not come to their rescue. Delay is this trepidating tunnel within. Delay is this achingly slow yawn at the pit of self that can no longer be ignored. Fear of shattering one's bones against the surface of the water like glass.
With the tiniest movement, they shoot through, sky divers at last to claim the emptiness that is theirs. Fall fall whirl. Wingless, they will pierce through like fallen birds. Their jump is a series of flips, a rhythmic succession of perfect aerodynamic cycles, circles, dolphins stitching the air. The ocean is an open mouth, a return to what is theirs. Whirl whirl fall.
3 4 5 seconds are an infinity. Praying that the water will be kind. That the bodies jumping out of, jumping into, the body will be flexible enough for the requirements of this act, bound to life enough to prevent slaughter against the sharp diamond surface, unattached enough to lose skins and masks and clothes and expectations as they fall through the air. Air enough. Leaf enough. Fish enough to… Pierce. Crack. Swim. The glossy surface breaks into three whirling pools.
The water claims what survives of her with its ebb and flow. It pulls, it drags and she allows herself to be dragged. Another shore there is not. She bobs. Tossed about by the great sea pulse. She stays close to its beating. Trusts that its rhythm will carry, will hold. Her. Here. Freeforming. She cannot even pretend control.
Thick water brushes her hair back revealing the face. Eyes forced open into the quivering landscape of specks. Blue green transparency as the eye drinks in the spectacle of the bare glimmering desert. Dancing treelings sway with the quiet movement that is the only stillness. Cool and relaxed, clinging to rocks. They can only keep holding on because they dance, because they sway. With no butterflies or birds to envy. With no aching desire for anything else. Behind the silence the ocean breathes, hums, rumbles, roars.
This is it. This is the underwater forest, crazy sister. She is not crazy who has dreamt of it. Is there anyone else who has been here? She clings to a dancing branch. Loosely attaching tiny tentacles, her own green hair flowing, her body obliged to sway.
It is so beautiful here she should be dancing, yet something blocks the motion in her. The word is fear. She fears she will be pulled off this first and last safe place. She fears she will be dragged away forever by the deep sea current. Away from everything she knows, from everything she believes in, and be left alone with only this sub aquatic truth.
If only she could find more words. She dangles where there are no words, or rather, where words are quite useless. All the words she knows were left far away, in terra firma…
She used to know her way around the dry land so well. She knew its contours, its textures, its hills and crevices, yet… Now all the coordinates have changed.
Her words drop through the water like broken shells. As if all this time she had only touched shadow, ludicrous human animal pretending, probing, provoking the shadow of what is there. But this… is something else.
Subhuman. Landscape.
Sub aquatic frog.
Fish. Amphibian.
Race through the timeline of evolution.
Tissue. Blood. Heart. Skeleton.
Skin. Nerves. Limbs. Eyes.
No fear.
Gloire.
You hold the memory of this pulse. You know nothing better. You a dancer. You a fish. Water going through you like air. Like laughter.
Back and forth to this rhythm. It beats, you beat. It bumps, you bump. Slightly behind, you are. But always there.
No staying still. No fearing.
The only stillness is the sway.
To do this you must let loose. Like a monk you give away your
treasures, your certainties. To do this you must treasure only
what is core. What is heart. The ovaries titillating like planets.
The belly palpitating like a rounded home. The visions that are
generated inside your eyes. The old, old memory of rhythm.
Your swimming, dancing, walking feet.
You look up through the water. The surface is no threatening break. The air another ocean. The sky an eye. And vision not in you, but something that swallows and includes the I. World.
Above the surface the air is rippling. It says do not forget. Do not forget the spirit. Do not forget the spirit of the waves.
***
You dive into the water but there is only skin. To your newborn eyes it is skin holds all the colors. Indeterminable. Not pink, not orange, not brown. A little purple. A little green. Certainly warm, a rainbow of salty smells. You let your nose dig deeper.
The armpit is a sea cave. The bellybutton a deep lake. Curves, mounds, trails are opened with the tip of the nose. They invite the journeyer like old roads, paved with silent stories.
Your lips are the hands of a blind person, they are insects crawling up skin. You long to taste. Shy tongue, it peeks out like a snail coming out of its shell. Moist living animal, mass of quivering nerves, it marks the salty path with shimmering wetness.
Licking borders, awakening secret tunnels, opening private passages, it discovers quivering subcutaneous streams. Pulsing communication between your nerves and mine… Between my nerves and hers. Body memory repeated over and over again.
We are pores come together. Pores against each other. Pores ever so lightly awakening the pores of the other. Drinking from the other all that is different. All that is same. This is how we communicate. With water clean messages, skin smooth textures, heart belly pulsing, blood honest temperatures.
Nipple. Shell. Pearl tipped spiral towards which you wind and wind. Mountain seen from afar. Ancient feet trodden trail. Spiraling palace staircase with a pearl chandelier. Straw roof of a humble hut on a jungled hill where you will sleep on a hammock and wake up to the sound of the waves.
You breathe an air that is thick as water. You navigate through it like a creature in its own right. You want to learn to speak. You must learn to speak again. Chirp. Buzz. The strongest scream of your insides is responded to by a mouthful of water. You well. You drown. How does one communicate at such a place, how does one call out when one is choking on water.
Shouting words up my uterus you learn sound. Maaa…, you say and hear it echo through the cave. It is then you see my eyes. My eyes are oceans that reflect the sky. I am a mother and we die so you can be born.
Aaaah……, you say, biting the air with the full extent of your bewilderment. You are smashed through a window into the cold cold air.
***
2.
I feel my head has been smashed through a window and suddenly here I am, where the coldest air I've ever felt is also the most awakening, the most life giving. An air like water, thick, nutritious to what is most mine. But it is hard to see here. All this space. All this whiteness. Words are whispers, coming slowly, fleeing fast. Territory uncharted –is that really possible in this day and age?
Stuck through this window, I wiggle. Yes, here I am, wiggling. Knowing deep down this is somewhere but not knowing where; not knowing who will understand these strange words swallowed by the silence.
My face has exploded to the other side. I am speechless. No words to say: this is real. No words to rely on, to know if this is real. The air so cold it pinches the skin alive. My hair swept back by the moist creamy wind. My whole face exposed. Aaaaaahhhh.
***
Cold. Snow. Angel. You are visited by the vision of a woman lying naked in the snow. Full grown adult baby, she lies tranquil in her nest of snow. She seduces with eyes like cold rivers. Something so warm about her. Something so cold. The naked legs folded to one side. The arms stretch open invitingly. All you want to do is drop your bags, take off your jackets, scarves, clothes, lie with her, crawl into her, complete her, and rest. How you have longed for: whispered meaningless stories, fluttering bellies, forgotten language, flooding silence, and all awakening cold.
Who are you, you say. She says I am you. You are so beautiful, you say, can I touch you. I am not who you think I am, she says. You are all that I've ever looked for, you say. I am a mirage, she says. I have so many things to tell you, you say. You're not listening, she says. I've been looking for you all my life, you say. You've been looking for yourself, she says, and disappears under the blanket of snow.
***
You cannot say you did not know there was another shore. You cannot say you had not guessed that what you saw as clarity was really a sheet of glass. You had seen the scratches on the cheap crystal, the dust crustified at the corners.
There was that night, that room. Women weaving misfitting stories into a perfectly fitting tapestry. Hushed and muffled laughter like drinking the father's whisky. Women speaking from such developed sharpness of experience that it was almost like speaking in tongues.
With words like trinkets, like the fugitive iridescence of sand under the water. In that room they spoke from underneath the water, not caring if their words were bubbles. They spoke from this small place at once trivial and exciting. A language of eyes crossing, meeting and making sparks like the rubbing of flint. With the mouth of the stomach aching from being so open but not fearing; so vulnerable but not endangered.
With no body there to say that it was strange sounding, no body to say that they had gone loony, no one to measure and point the meaning of, no one to compare. Like speaking a foreign language it was except it was their own.
There was that afternoon, sitting on that couch, rounded. The sensation of fullness, yet the sensation of both hands, one on each leg and something evaporating between them. Like a load being relieved, that she had carried for so long.
Holding: whatever it was that she was holding. Meanwhile feeling the balance of her sitting posture in the warmth of the ray of light, rooted like a trunk and rounded like a Buddha. Whatever she was holding, there was the feeling of beginning, even if she didn't know what…
Perhaps the time had arrived, she had thought. The time had arrived to see her pretensions off like balloons: titles, words, explanations. The slow sinking of the head into the belly. The melting of rationality with intuition, and vitality, and the erotics of relating. Tired of fighting, already lighter and freer. Something so much more meaningful happening deep inside.
Double abyss with a hole at the bottom had said the wise book, and prescribed misfortune. But what could a book know about this anyway. About bellies. About this rounded body, empty of words and full of feeling. Quivering with anticipation.
What would it be: boy or girl, yes or no, two or one, will she be brave enough, will it be beautiful, would her face change right after it was born, would she need a different name, what would those looking through the glass be able to read. Would they be able to see.
How to explain, then, the window smashed, the body still wiggling to get out, the open space, the vitality of cold air cold cold showers wild eyes. How to represent it when what you're feeling, touching is a place that has been kept foreign from thinking. From representation. Always. It is huge. It is all there. You have seen it.
All that is to be done and said and redone now. Windows opening inside of windows inside of windows, and reality getting huger and more beautiful and indescribably more terrifying. How to explain the immense fear of the body jutting out? Now that I have crashed through, the whole body is at stake.
Fear of going loony, losing the last tentacle one had in the world because even that tentacle was not yours. All your life walking through doors thinking they were for you and then discovering there was nothing but this emptiness that cannot even be described. The crazy horseride of not fitting anywhere, including language. And because of that only by leaving language ever being able to have a language, and through that language refit the world. On the verge of madness, let's just say it, all the time. Why?
You have to take that risk if you want to know more, a voice tells you, breaking your silence like perfectly thrown stone. You have to swallow language like a frog swallows a fly.
***
In the pool of water, there it is, this thing without a form. Thicker than water, hovering slightly, and almost alive. Visible, veined, transparent, like a mothwing, unfinished, mothless. Held together by its own weavework, its nervous system, its intimate map. Yours, truly, yet, floating on the water and outside of you. Tissue connecting what is inside and what is out. Vision. Sign. Text? Blood story: floating on the water, writing of your body. Red.
Where lie the boundaries between what is and is not part of you? The windings and weavings of the great life thread. You recognized it by the smell. The trembling. Tearful sweating. Deep aloneness. The aching hollow in the self. The tremor of the tongue when made to describe it.
Confusion.
Not feeling anything but the contours of the hole.
Discharged. Miscarried.
Did not cling.
Cave preserved for the bouncing of words.
Emptiness saved for the sake of resonance.
You ache crack echo.
Deep inside the self.
From the borders of my house I can see the mountains of the world. From the borders of the body… Mothwing, leafveined, unfinished, red.
***
Things too small, too strange, too insignificant to be said. Simply ungraceful and inappropriate. Stuck still inside the body in a kind of time warp. Like the girl standing in the corner with her shirt off, hating the conelike bubbly things on her chest. She is at the gym, or is she somewhere else, a bare girl's room. Before rushing for the nightshirt or a towel, there is an instant where she just stands there, hating herself.
Later on one day with almost strangers, let's go for a swim, they say, walking towards the pond. But I didn't bring a bathing… she almost says, as they throw off their shirts in glory and, swinging penises tits asses, dive into the cold champagne lake. Off with you then, she declares to her clothes, and jumps in like a pink salmon.
Like being in that bureaucratic space with Old Beaver. Outside the window, the afternoon sun is shining fiercely on broken bicycles and chicken crap. Inside a hubbub of clerks bustles by your side, carrying piles and piles of documents. The room is filling up with water. Algae-like lamps hang from the ceiling, at some point considered elegant, and now simply sub aquatic. The room is filling up like an aquarium, but the clerks take no notice. Everything begins to be covered in a blue green glow. You look at Old Beaver with a nervous smile.
This is what I wanted to talk to you about, you say. This is what began to happen after the glass broke. The room is filling up with water and nobody seems to notice. As if they still wanted to pretend the glass was there. I have tried to say something, but when I speak these words of flesh, my words are bubbles, Chinese vocables that no one understands. They speak a language that is made of shadows. Have I forgotten how to communicate? Why is it so hard to explain? I have traveled so far and I am still so lost.
If you are able to quiet all the voices in your head there is the appearance of a quiet voice..., says Old Beaver. Yes, you say with tears in your eyes, you have felt it. A tiny language, the feeling of words getting barer, scarcer, and somehow you being the closest you have ever been to... Home? You want to hug Old Beaver for telling you this nothing is something. You must learn to breathe underwater if you want to know more, he says. You must shed language like a skin. There comes a time when you can only swim on.
There is a place between languages, he says. A place before language where language is concocted, fabricated, out of tensions, energies, living breath. You are crashing head first into this sub aquatic no man's land and must learn to breathe underwater if you are to bring words back to the surface. You are committing the ultimate sacrilege: translatio of your inner workings onto the page. The transfer of your own sacred language into the breathing relating communicating world. In an accent foreign to nationalities genders social groups academic jargons. On your own strange terms. But you have to learn to breathe underwater.
Like beginning to live with one's inner skin. Words probing, touching, feeling out the way. Words the tips of fingers. Moist quiet tender nonsense words. Words eyes squinting through the sunlight making all the possible rainbows. Wild flower words, opening up like the smell of eucalyptus in the middle of an afternoon walk. Silent words. Music words. Air. Only at this naked place can a body touch the site where words are made.
But my words are bubbles.
Swim on.
It is so silent.
Swim on.
I am afraid.
Swim on.
I am alone.
Swim on.
There is no one here.
Swim on.
I don't know where I'm going.
Swim on.
I am looking for my beating heart.
Swim on.
Will anyone care? , you ask.
Swim on, says Old Beaver.
In the bureaucratic room, all goes dark. You are swimming through a wall. Perforating the rock surface with the angles of your face.
***
Nobody expected her to move out of that tight place. Her head stuck between two rocks, cold and scraping. A single movement and the whole mountain slides, avalanches down, no longer two rocks now but a ton of rubble knocking down people and small towns and all of civilization. As she begins to move her lips, eyes, her face muscles, the glass glaze that on everything begins to crack.
Rising like a giant out of the mountain, this green bud of a body. A living body out of language staring stunned at the evershimmering sea. As the inside strengthens, stretches, grows stronger… all that is fixed begins to crack, all that holds her fixed, that holds still the inner turbulence, that petrifies what is really motion, what is really power, begins to crack and crumble. I am not one of those pathetic Greek statues. I refuse. This is what it means to be alive. Oh, mother where to go now. Water knees, crazy sister. I am so strong, I am so scared, I can hardly stand.
And I haven't stopped crying since I realized I crossed a line and will never be the same. I am crying for the part of me that I let go in order to stand here. For all the excuses that don't make sense anymore. Because something must always die in the self for something else to be born. Because I already feel lighter. Crying, crying, because I feel lost, but it feels right. Uncontorted. Of the air I am and now finally…
This is where I come from. This is what I see. This broken window the sharp edge where finally I know I am. Vastness. Cold air. If I can make something with this if I can only make something with this if I can make something like a sculptor does with clay if I can make like an artist does with life if I can use words to prove this to be real to be life the life that is the substance of art but also the substance of more and more and more life then I am happy I am dancing I am real I am.
The testimony…
found….
in….
the…
She quivers.
about the author
Juliana Borrero, after very urban college days in Bogota, moved to Tunja, a small colonial city in rural Colombia, where public and private universities live together with cold thick-walled catholic churches, Andes mountains, a tapestry of farmlands and the ghost of whatever happened to the whole Muisca indigenous culture. She is a writer, translator, and teacher of literature and a kind of subversive embodied writing research she calls “Language and Peace”, at the public university there, where she lives with her partner and son. “The Other Shore” is the end of a narrative project called “Putting the Tongue back in the Body”. She is in love with language and dreams of an alter ego in Montreal. You can reach her at j-borrero@usa.net
