Eventually, I got to the cottage, an extension of the church just past the courtyard. One of the many rooms I’d vacuumed. There I ripped the shoes off, held them up and inspected them. They were blood barnacled as though I’d fished them straight from the devil’s sewers. Inside was a toenail I’d lost to friction.
Girl In A Bottle Which makeup will you choose? Which conscience? Which version of family Will take your breath away? Your arms, your legs, Whisper the world you always wanted, Fashioning conscience From your body’s vulnerability. You vowed to conceal Joy Ladin
In writing this essay, I’ve ruminated plenty on the human mind, fact and fiction. Like Ladin, I conceive of ‘consciousness’ as a continuous process, a response to moments of ‘vulnerability’, to past memories and future memories. I also believe we can consciously resist abjection. Ladin’s metaphors, by design, defamiliarise the normative. At the same time, they personify and make real, magical bodies, objects and landscapes. Ladin calls on her queer readers to embrace ‘the difference, the exile’ inside. To embrace ‘the familiar, scary, miracle of life’.
In A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, the angel, after months of delirium and Norwegian tongue twisters, of ‘dragging himself about here and there like a stray dying man’, makes a miraculous recovery, and a ‘clumsy’ ascension into heaven, ‘knocking the shed down with the ungainly flapping’. Elisenda, who sees him fly off while cutting onions in the kitchen, sighs in relief ‘for herself and for him’.
In the poem ‘Balance’, Ladin too, ascends, ‘like a balloon a child let fly’. The ‘little void’ she held inside, ‘opens to the sky’.
