This is Not My Narrative

When I say I refuse to be written, I mean I refuse to be written by the patriarchy, by the dominant ideological identity construct of the day/year/decade/age/century/historical period.

But I also mean something else. I want my life to refuse to be written, to refuse, in all its pieces, to become coherent, whole, satisfying.

I want the parts that don’t fit to refuse to be recessed, to be hidden, to be pushed below the surface and silenced.  Like when you overfill the liquid soap dispenser and no matter how carefully or slowly you put the pump back in, it still overflows. Or when you squeeze one end of a water balloon and the other end blows up.

Bad examples. Help me out here.

I want (or Do. Not. Want.) some biographer to find the detritus of my life, read it, examine it, analyze it, lay it out on his living room floor and try to impose order on it–and throw his hands in the air and shout “Impossible à faire!”–because of course he will be French, and my stuff will have ended up in a garret in Paris, in a pre-war apartment building with fabulously large leaded glass windows, through which sunlight shines on the artifacts of my life, collected from all over Europe, but most recently from the Paris flea markets–because the life he has discovered is impossibly fragmented, incoherent, never-working-toward-just-one-goal, and refuses to fit into any sort of genre-acceptable shape or pattern or mold. Bits keep bubbling up. They refuse.

And then I want him, this perversely stubborn Frenchman, who recognizes post-structural theory as brilliant, to fight to the death to publish it anyway, this incoherent, fragmented, ever-changing-in-his-hands, life. And change the genre forever. Break the power of the metanarrative. Leave us all mired in chaos. Unhinged. In the wind.

(Mired doesn’t fit there so well, does it? I mean, you’re either mired OR unhinged, I would think.     How incoherent of me.)

But I can’t even get outside of a metanarrative in a blog post–the writer in the garret, in Paris no less–long enough to talk about the demise of my selves.

This entry was posted on August 30, 2012 at 1:24 pm and is filed under The Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.