Cixous Helene - Manhattan

I didnt want to go to Certes and there I was on my way side by side with my brother Im forever doing what I didnt want to do I thought I am in a state of sin it is Easter the first day of passing over instead of passing over to my side I pass to the otherlooklook how beautiful it is my brother was saying I looked

the boats on their sides in the silted up channel slack time the sea has withdrawn we make our way between hundreds of tipped hulls I see them as dead I see them as tuna gasping for breath, a posthumous landscape. I found it unbeautiful, a still life, the graveyard scene, from my brothers perspective: the simple life devoid of unpleasantness the empty hour invisible fishermen gone to lunch says my brother

I am in a state of sin I always do what I didnt want to do, right away I do everything I didnt want to do, sin spreads out over my whole heart, on all sides a feeling of being sucked into the mud grips my thoughts, the square notebook tucked into the left pocket of my shirt weighs on my heart as if it too were quickened by regret, on my right on my brothers side too I am in a state of sin

We walk side by side Pierre walks I sin on all sides, him dry shod me in mud

each time Ive wanted to get back to writing and Ive wanted to write at all costs I have left the book behind, I have even left my own life behind and entered a country I didnt want to be in,

at the very moment writing, the right, the country, the visa had been granted me after having been taken away and forbidden me for years, the very day my life as I call literature had been given back to me, the other, life, suggests I go the other way, and I go, I cant help it, its stronger than my desire, this other desire I am, a ghost I dont see bars my life and the very day I wanted at all costs to go to my life Igoto the other.

To think it took me forty years to discover Certes on my doorstep my brother was saying youve got thirty kilometers of road between the salt ponds, its extraordinarily beautiful, he exults in his discovery and I am in a state of sin I was thinking Im losing New York to the salt ponds I thought I was going to get there today thirty-five years its taken me to get to the New York book, looklook this virginal sky in which I see feeble flickers of Manhattans skyscrapers drowning, the huge simulacra that had so fascinated me getting covered up by the heartrending softness of Certes silk

once again I do what I didnt want to do and it is I nonetheless therefore an other who is doing this to me I thought the personal pronoun has been betrayed I came here to write The Story, as we call this book that is slipping out of my grasp, this very day was stamped on my calendar months ago Ive been through weeks of quarantine Ive put up with boredom fear inanition thanks to this days date, knowing the name of the day of deliverance is itself a release, finally it comes, Time keeps its word, the door to my mental prison swings open, and me does not come out, I am not in my life, I catch the plane for the book, but instead of finding myself safe and sound at my desk, I see myself in reality on the road to Certes walking to the left of my brother like a madwoman, like some hostility come out of my back, a wicked angel puts me in my place legs unsteady leaning on my brother whom I love I drag myself to the rack without admitting it, its not that I am giving in to my brother its worse than that, murkier, I myself lock myself up outside myself, I make myself flee, I do exactly what I didnt want to do and not what my brother wanted, I dont even do what my brother wants but what my opposite wants although (1) clearly I did not want to go on this outing to Certes (2) for seven months Ive been waiting at all costs for this day to come, awaiting it for decades but less wholeheartedly, and now the day goes by without me in front of me, a cool, healthy, breezy April day, I could jump, take it on the run, my brother isnt forcing me, when I told him as we arrived in Certes I dont want to go to Certes he responded tactfully well go wherever you want. We took the road away from Certes, toward the Ocean. Where the road crossed the highway I said: lets go to Certes. And my brother took the direction away from the Ocean. He was happy to do as I wished, but the sin was already sinning in all directions again, against me against my brother, against my will. Whats left of my will is in my left breast pocket the little notebook which throbs, against my heartdivided, like a heart. I seem crazy to myself I see clearly that nothing is clear in my confusion, supposing I speak to my brother who will it be speaking to him?

I am still astounded by the violence of my reactions, I tell myself. You run along between the strings of boats lying like so many dead fish, clinging to your brother as if you dreamt the end of the world might catch up with you in Certes. Certes is nothing but a hole after all. You are astounded? I am astounded by your astonishment. Didnt you yourself wake her up, the one whose presence or absence you so dread?

And that was thanks to your brother, unintentionally, with his unintentional help. Hes a doctor after all, unintentionally, but still.

She who was running like a madwoman between two rows of inert bodies because, or so she thought, she was in danger of losing her mind and felt she should make her way to the exit as fast as possible was the same me whom I had lost or who had lost me violently, brutally, in the USA in 1965, she who was me, a liberated woman, strong, solid, proud of descending from my sensible mother, having inherited her sense of direction, which had suddenly persuaded me to plunge into the absolutely interminable labyrinth that snakes under the City of New York, Im not interested I said whereupon I nevertheless found myself winding through kilometers of underground tunnels, kilometers of gut tiled in bizarrely shaped white terracotta, sometimes standing up often bent beneath the too-low ceiling, sometimes flattened so as to glide like a letter through the slot, it would take weeks, Ive got other things to do I said theyre waiting for me in my country, I have children, a family, which way to the exit I asked. Exit? You have to find it, if there is one. In thirty-five kilometers said the advertising voice, male, husky and encouraging. Few people know the underground. How did I get there? Special delivery. Recommended. Like that last letter, addressed to New York, to New York in person, by this me, encysted or so Id thought after 1965s abscess, but in fact merely dormant and always ready to wake up a demon since the day shed totally done me in, swiftly and violently, in 1964, a blow or two in New Haven to start then in Buffalo, then right after that and fatally in New York, this me lodged in the seismic depths of me, inactive for decades, then capable of crushing everything without warning some night, had committed the suicidal error of turning back to Certes when, to please me, my brother had given up the idea, perhaps because he had given it up, without our realizing that in doing so he was giving free reign and unhoped-for encouragement to my annihilation urge.

I thought of her, my fearsome; I think: shes on the rampage. This strength, tangled up in my roots, which is perhaps one of my roots, never gives me time to talk back. Shes a bolt from the blue. One of those other powers, those omnipotence-others on whom Proust and his mental denizens must have bestowed this vague enigmatic and therefore terrifying and utterly essential name during the havoc wrought by the passage of Hurricane Albertine. They are unleashed in the cataclysm. They are us, we dont know them, once theyre on the loose it is best to face the truth: we havent the strength to tame the omnipotence-others. The solutionmedicine, acknowledging their superiority whenever it meets up with themabdicates reason and consents to a mad collaboration, says the soul doctor. Intelligence reasonably sides with madness. Abdicate, I told myself, such in its wisdom is follys advice. I was having a problem with this. In my little logbook I wrote the word: