#frantumaglia

Suffering modifies the image of time. The eruption of suffering cancels out linear time, breaks it, makes it into whirling squiggles. The night of time crouches at the edges of the dawn of today and tomorrow. Suffering casts us down among our single-celled ancestors, among the quarrelsome or terrorized muttering in the caves, among the female divinities expelled into the darkness of the earth, even as we keep ourselves anchored — let’s say — to the computer we’re writing on. Strong feelings are like that: they explode chronology. An emotion is a somersault, a tumble, a dizzying pirouette.

To control that noisy permanent fragmenting in your head, explore that transformation into words that lasts as long as the story lasts is, I think, the secret ambition of anyone who fully dedicates himself to writing.

“Of course, she feels deeply that every abandonment is a vortex and an annihilation, maybe also an indication of the desert that has expanded around us. But she reacts, she recovers, she lives.”

For most people -- sometimes for women, too-- great literature is generally felt to be literature made by men. Apart from a few fine souls, men don't read books by women, as if such reading would weaken their virile power. But it's a subject that concerns women's creations in every field. Educated, broad-minded men treat female thought with polite irony, as a by-product, good only as a pastime for women.

I've never been in analysis. But I know what it means to break apart. I observed it in my mother, in myself, in many women. The process of fragmentation in a woman's body interests me very much from the narrative point of view. It means telling the story of a present-day female I that suddenly perceives itself disintegrating, it loses the sense of time, it's no longer in order, it feels like a vortex of debris, a whirlwind of thoughts-words. It stops abruptly and starts again from a new equilibrium, which–note–isn't necessarily more advanced than the preceding or even more stable. It serves only to say: now I'm here and I feel like this.

Someone who takes love away from us devastates the cultural structure we’ve worked on all our lives, deprives us of that sort of Eden that until that moment had made us appear innocent and lovable. Human beings give the worst of themselves when their cultural clothes are torn off, and they find themselves facing the nakedness of their bodies, they feel the shame of them. In a certain sense the loss of love is the common experience closest to the myth of the expulsion from the earthly paradise: it’s the violent end of the illusion of having a heavenly body, it’s the discovery of one’s own dispensability and perishability.