Press release

I had to return home.

I didn’t want to escape my parents because I hated them but because I was wild. Wild children are honest. My mother wanted to command me to the point that I no longer existed. My father was so gentle, he didn’t exist. I remained uneducated or wild because I was imprisoned by my mother and had no father.

My body was all I had.

A a a I don’t know what language is. One one one one I shall never learn to count. I remained selfish. There was only my mother and me.

Selfishness and curiosity are conjoint. I’d do anything to find out about my body, investigated the stenches arising out of trenches and armpits, the tastes in every hole. No one taught me regret. I was wild to make my body’s imaginings actual.

And I knew that I couldn’t escape from my parents because I was female, not yet eighteen years old. Even if there was work for a female minor, my parents, my educators, and my society had taught me I was powerless and needed either parents or a man to survive. I couldn’t fight the whole world; I only hated.

So in order to escape my parents I needed a man. After I had escaped, I could and would hate the man who was imprisoning me. And after that, I would be anxious to annihilate my hatred, my double bind.

This personal and political state was the only one they had taught me. I’m always in the wrong so I’m a freak. I’m always destroying everything including myself, which is what I want to do.

Red was the color of wildness and of what is as yet unknown.

As my body, which my mother refused to recognize and thus didn’t control, grew, it grew into sexuality. As if sexuality can occur without touching. Masturbated not only before I knew what the word masturbation meant, but before I could come. Physical time became a movement toward orgasm. I became sexually wilder. I wanted a man to help me escape my parents but not for sexual reasons. I didn’t need another sexual object. Mine was my own skin.

Longing equalled skin. Skin didn’t belong to anyone in my kingdom of untouchability.

I hadn’t decided to be a person. I was almost refusing to become a person, because the moment I was, I would have to be lonely. Conjunction with the entirety of the universe is one way to avoid suffering.”

—Kathy Acker

This text was originally published in
My Mother, Demonology © 1993 Pantheon, New York

-

from Le Sacré by Laure

8

I find myself

trapped as in a circle

which I escape by this other

which brings me back

Hieratic gestures, vile grimaces mix, merge, disappear, reemerge... then vanish entirely. And this “game” will go on a long time.

I thought I was going to heaven (joking aside) just as life again placed its heavy lid over me.

I used all my inherent contradictions living “to be true” all that one carries within “to the end.”

I scattered myself to the four winds with the proud certainty of always finding myself at the zenith and then I fell empty, lost, four limbs mutilated.

I went away over high roads, steep paths, rocks flown over by eagles . . .

The infernal 8 came back to lasso me

I climb along its contours
I drift in its meanderings
I jump out of the circle
and fall back into the other
I remain strangled in the middle my face is there

frozen eel dolphin earthworm

And who, seeing this fateful sign would think of discovering me there, would want to release me?

“A prisoner escaped by jumping the wall at the very place he was to be executed.” (The newspapers)

May 8

This text was originally published in
Ecrits de Laure © 1971 Editions Jean-Jacques Pauvert This translation Jeanine Herman © 1995 by City Lights