Out of Contradiction, a New Nameless Language

Kathy Acker, why are you so damn quotable?

I just finished reading Acker's "My Mother: demonology, a novel". I had forgotten how much power Acker's words have over me, and how she completely changed my life when I was a literature major in college. Before reading Acker, I had always thought my story had to be constructed out of an existing language and infrastructure. But this was counterintuitive to me. I didn't feel like my story was a part of the this world, or of these words that were handed to me--it was other, I was Other, a stranger, and any story I wrote with this language was going to be a lie. Acker's works showed me that in order to tell a true story, I would have to create another language--and that not only was it okay to do this, it was the only way.

No other writer has the power to make me underline, to quote, to cry the way Acker does. Sometimes, I feel like she has written a map of my innards, the most private places. The linings of my stomach, my veins, my heart--reading Acker, I look up, pull my jacket closer around me, panicked that someone knows these spaces that I have kept hidden for so long. But there is nobody watching me, and the world is just the same. It is only myself, forced to know the parts i have been working so hard to neglect.

Acker is my therapist, my sister, my mother, and my mirror.

This particular work of Acker's has quite a few prominent themes. It is the story of a young woman, who morphs across time and space, who has lovers and leaves lovers and has lovers leave her. Ultimately it is not the plot that matters--it is never the plot that matters. It is the ideas of identity, formation of a self, memory, body, and language that keep recurring throughout the book--these are the things that matter.

The protagonist in this story is a lonely woman/girl, and she both revels in this loneliness and simultaneously wants to be close to another body, another soul. She wants to understand/be understood by another, but this is impossible, because she speaks the same language as nobody.

She is clearly inhabiting a female body, and there is a lot in this book regarding the body as a political entity. Acker writes, "Just as I wonder how a bodiless person can go anywhere, so at that time I thought that I could not feel pain without a body. Dead people don't know pain." This is a story about physicality, and the inescapable reality of a physical body. The protagonist is driven by and repelled by sex. She wants/needs sex, and others want/need sex to control her or be controlled by her. The body becomes a means of domination, submission, and control, and thus a means of constructing one's identity. At one point Acker writes, "On the New York City streets, children play with used needles. Therefore, it's the dead who determine how the living act. Mother had taught me to avoid allowing a man to touch me correctly because, as soon as one man would begin to touch me correctly, I would begin to need." Acker's character uses her body like currency. This is the reality of the world we live in: a bargaining process made of skin and bones like dollars and coins.

In one scene the character is raped by her father. Acker writes, "I don't want this consciousness...While my father was raping me, I learned I had to do away with myself. Where could I hide this self? I searched. Decided to hide in the mirror: in memories of my past victimizations, especially sexual abuses and rapes. As father was making love t5o me, whenever my consciousness was bad and wandered into the present,I repeated the sacred laws I had just given myself: the laws of silence and the loss of language. For us, there is no language in this male world." The body, the physical, political body, is also tied to language and who does/does not get to speak. In this world, it is the men who dominate the women's body through rape, and so it is the men who dominate the women's words.

Therefore the protagonist must create an alternate world, where her language can be heard, and where her body can operate unoppressed. Most of the book, then, takes place in a place of dreams, where the female can exist. And yet even this dream-space is not safe from attempts at control. From the contradiction of the self to both yearn for dreams and run away from them. Acker writes, "The hell with dreams because dreams only lead to perversity." The next chapter is titled, " The lack of dreams is disappearance of the heart." She knows that only in this dreamspace, a sort of conflation of memory and reconstruction of memory, can she exist because only here can she create a language of her own. And yet, the way she rejects men who treat her kindly and runs to men who want to control her, she runs away from this space as well.

In the end, we see themes of a reclamation of power through non-existence and non-meaning. These words, this existence, this world--it is constructed and impressed upon her, like male-ness. She both wants it and rejects it. She lives inside of it and yet she cannot live here. She is only human. But there is strength amidst the contradiction: "Scatter, mess up, destroy, throw to the dogs whatever you want, throw everything away in laughter: I'll never bee where you believe you're going to find me." And then: "I'm a woman who's alone, outside the accepted. Outside the Law, which is language. This is the only role that allows me to be as intelligent as I am and avoid persecution...Even when I believed in meaning, when I felt defined by opposition and this opposition between desire and the search for self-knowledge and self-reclamation was tearing me apart, even back then I knew that I was nly lying, that I was lying superbly, disgustingly, triumphally. Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me." Ultimately, the contradictory impulses for love and loneliness will continue. The body, words, politics, rape will continue--and she can only survive through non-meaning and non-existence, because there is no existence in this language that has been created for her and not by her.

This is a beautiful, poetic book with so much more to it. I could probably read this 20 times and still not be able to peel away all the layers--of politics, of history, of religion, of slavery in many forms. There is a lot about the life of a writer as well, and the strange world the writer inhabits. Ultimately, I have fallen in love with the way Acker creates a dream-space that is so far beyond this world, and yet is so familiar, that her words make me feel naked, alone, with only a mirror of myself, the loneliness companion of all, and yet the only one we must reconcile, in the end.

The next book I will read is called "Call Me By Your Name" by Andre Aciman. I don't know anything about this book other than it's some sort of love story and that it won a bunch of awards in 2007. I look forward to this new story, but I will remain haunted, plagued, and lovingly surrounded by the words of Kathy Acker as I continue.