Elemental Passions

Luce Irigaray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136646010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Collezioni letterarie

Elemental Passions explores the man/woman relaitonship in a series of meditations of the senses and the formal elements. Its form resembles a series of love letters in which, however, the identity-and even the reality-of the adressee are deliberately obscured.

XV

Sunrise forgotten. The first outline of forms emerging. A world being born. Not yet caught within a defined horizon - that circle which condemns it to being endlessly repeated, governed by properties already fixed. Poles determined irreversibly.

The sun rising - rays alighting upon things, lightly touching them all over and gradually revealing them, bringing them out of the enveloping mist.

This unveiling of the morning's beauty is renewed daily. Yet man has forgotten how light emerges. He lives in the full glare of day, where he can see nothing.

A new East - the sun accompanying the birth of a little girl. Another - the other - being brought into the world. A dawning as powerful as that of the Greeks. Giving birth to a veiled landscape. But not a new origin.

You are witnessing the revelation of the end of a unique truth. Not as the advent of chaos, but as the possibility of the copula - in the sun.

Yes, there, gently you took me by the hand. Once again you had lost me. I was missing from your horizon, absent from your domain. I had taken refuge in such whiteness that you could no longer perceive me. Without an outline, but bathing your gaze in an invisible light.

And I was speaking to you, but you did not hear me. You were absorbed in a closeness other than the one which, defying distance united us - at the nearest and the farthest point. Unforeseeable and necessary reunions. Intertwining of gestures which redefine the silent edges of our worlds of speech.

I was calling you, but my cry did not reach your ears. Blocked by the sounds around you, the words and noises surrounding you. You no more heard my voice than you caught sight of me.

Yet I was there, and remained there, like permanent things which are forgotten. And how could I make you remember my existence?

At one point, you seized me to take a step. Helping me over a fissure in the rock. You were holding me, I was in you. You were holding me close, experiencing my body. Touching me, and I could feel my form emerging once more.

And, from the depths of my memory, I was being reborn. I had a face once more. You could not hear me yet, but you already remembered. I walked by your side in silence.

In the deepest hidden depths, and beyond the horizon, you seek me still. Opening up the limits of what is possible. The scars of the beginning and the end of a story.

You gaze within me, and my past and my future are offered without reserve.

Are you large enough? Receiving me whole, you deliver what kept me captive within them. Do you take me entirely? I become more than I was, uncovering what still clamoured to be born. You seize me without reserve. You free me from waiting for a face, allowing me to appear as so many others, crowding upon each other in the hope of offering themselves up to your contemplation.

Do not leave me behind. You reduce me to singularity. And I die when I am imprisoned in a single unique sameness. When I never go further than my present, never escape that one life, the many within me become impatient to blossom, to harmonise colours and sounds and all dimensions, in remembrance and as a welcome for everything which can grow. And calmly offer themselves to cradle the nostalgia for the return of the gods.

And let the shadow of sadness not make any land sterile by blocking the sun trying to penetrate it. And let no chill freeze what bears light and warmth. For divinity abandons the solitary being who no longer enjoys celebration. And joy is more immortal than is care. And, even in repose, it grants a starry awakening. And, in silence, the taste of lips which move. An imperceptible pulsing which refuses to mourn for love, fixed in eternal contemplation.

I touch you. And if it is not always transparency, if there are not always effusions from one to the other, if daylight separates us, at least in ceaselessly bringing you warmth, I enable us to melt still one into the other at a distance. So that distance should no longer be an irreversible separation of our bodies. Nor light, that cold lucidity which freezes each one within a sealed identity.

And if the poison no longer comes into me, I may remember what came before. Resonant song kept back, exultation kept quiet, an appeal cried out, filling the universe with its clamour. What arises out of the furthest depth, emerging and unfolding, like an airy flower opening with the intensity of impatience. Petals already drenched in the gift of the expected consolation. Attentive vibration picking up the imperceptible tremor of your approach.

For the first time, I saw you appear. And it was not midday. The sun was not any higher, nor the light more intense. But what made you visible came from you. Making you radiate from the inside outwards.

A radiance touched to the quick. No longer held back in its dark crypt. Nor suspended from some inaccessible brilliance. A heavenly orb hanging over the horizon of its distant source.

No shell hid you from me any more. The most secret part of your face offered without anything held back. Fearlessly welcoming its being revealed in another's gaze. Where your most impenetrable part appeared uncovered to you, where your most unapproachable part returned to you.

Hearth returning to its home. Homeland which you thought you would never reach so foreign did it seem to you.

And you did not fix your gaze on the nearest or the furthest point, but proximity was seen through you. An incandescence illuminating without consuming, an ardour pouring out without destroying. Burning in a joyous amazement at the reunion.

And, rejoicing, you were calling out to receive again, to give me again, what was the most irreducibly hidden of what you had.

Between us, with open bodies, the sky was a luminous cloud.

And I was changed into a cloud. Not in ecstasy nor dissipated into the air, but a body animated throughout. Living and aroused in each part of my flesh.

And I no longer knew death, but resided in a lightness where everything embraced everything else. I had not lost my edges. You caressed me to all the limits of my skin. Reopening all the tombs. Stimulating new flowering from the deepest buried depth or the infinitely distant. And nothing inert remained.

I was created by you, still faithful to what I was, A fruition of my becoming that did not remove me from my past. Gathered up, not closed. Abandoned and not deserted. Offered, without sacrifice. Espousing you, like the whole which is offered without closure.

And how could one tell what part of the densest and the lightest was united? What part of the most selfsame and most other was allied? Mingled, and so calm and so vast - yet I was careful to allow you your heaven. We were intermingled and returned to our selves.

An eternity, and I knew that tomorrow it would become more eternal still.

Indefinitely, I embrace you, you embrace me. And it is not in the mirror's shining silver that I seek you, endlessly. Always lying in wait for a face to appear, dazzlingly. Leaning over a mirror, waiting for a fascinating vision to emerge. A looking glass monster which fascinates with its brilliant reticence.

But, I find you once more in the interweaving of the whole of space. The invisible mucous tissue which unites us day and night. Inhabits us and shelters us. Without the break of a departure, the rupture pre- or post-exchange. Divided into parts which call to each other, attract each other, respond to each other, make up a whole. But do not wed nor join together without a trace of laceration.

And how can we feel whole in this universe of sutures? This tracery of scars?

And what kind of love remains behind? What kind of wound always yearns to flow out and to be bound up?

Rather be infinitely open to the anticipation of the whole via the one or the other. An insatiable desire for intertwining and not an appeal to the closure of the one.

Do not leave again. With every step that takes you away, touch me again, touch yourself again. Remember this gesture of our embrace. Turning your movement into living tissue to carry and envelop you. Without the rupture which forces you to go back. To the other edge of a solitary wound.

Why retain such fire in your gaze? Burning to keep captive the heat of the light. A hearth which flashes lightning onto any ice. Gaining illumination from the excess of its intensity. But limited by visions still too fixed. Photographic frameworks where passion is meted out with measure. Where mastery is saved. Where desire is offered without the madness which floods out beyond all limits. A gaze that becomes a marine vastness, a large expanse whose mobile density resonates with the colour of the sun.

In golden light you flow. Firm density, so light. Before the separation of earth and sky, sea and continents, light and dark. A mixture of rock, fire, water, ether. Where violence can still espouse gentleness. The heroic body overflowing with tenderness. Its weapons still those of a native innocence. Which blurs all sharp distinctions and brings all divisions back to their original nuptials. An alliance in which the opposing parties unite in an intense intermingling.

Waiting. Waiting for that wall which divides us to be made porous by your arrival. For its limit to be crossed. The line of the horizon temporarily effaced.

Waiting for the moment when there is no more waiting for you to be there all the time. And your place within me is not filled up with an uninhabited dwelling. In which only the walls preserve the memory of your passing through.

And why should waiting be the price to pay for singing?

In this clearing, on that beach, a space opens up where we can be revealed the one to the other.

In that enclosure which shelters and yet has no boundaries, you draw near, arrive, discarding what binds and holds you back, deep in your most intimate self. Active and attentive the whole day long. Preoccupied and concerned without a break. But keeping yourself hidden away in the secret which inhabits you.

And she who thirsts for you will always remain thirsty, for you do not deliver yourself in this passing. You are found and you are not found. In an ecstasy, out of reach. Veiled in a silent dream. Contemplating your reserve. Your gaze lost in a very distant future. The awaited landscape remaining in the invisible. Drawing you further than your furthest point. Not knowing where your footsteps are leading you, you walk on towards something which recedes as you advance and eludes your attempts to grasp it. Spurring your dream onwards towards the unattainable.

But in this rush forward, you entrust your mystery for a moment to me. And I receive what you keep back most secretly as the present of your coming to life. In a light still unstained by any shadow. Fragile, unprotected by any darkness. Without refuge except in my gaze. A horizon of sky endlessly receiving your contemplation.

How many words to prevent or forbid closeness! Space mobilized, immobilized, pre-occupied in order to make encounter impossible. Attestations, quarrels, protestations, disputes over identity or the identical, distancing us, dividing us without any crossing of these barriers being possible.

We are separated by so many similar things that the flow which attracts us to each other is exhausted as it beats against these obstacles. It no longer flows, held back by boundaries that are too watertight. We are divided by that part of the selfsame and its theatre, which cannot be traversed. Exchanged without a reckoning.

I look at you, identify you, recognise you in that distance which constitutes us, distinguishes us, and paralyses us in the certainty of being ourselves.

How can we still approach each other if there are only coverings which are not porous enough, and a void between those who no longer dwell in their bodies in all their advents irreducible to closure within well-defined forms.

And I shall sing all the day long. I shall fill the air with the joy of you in me, of me in you. Guarding you and guarding me in that incantation. Sonorous home in which I shelter you. Which protects me from the violence of the day. Childhood's cradle, where any rapture is given free play. An attentive hymn. Which does not falter and is not interrupted. And whose tender fragility is never breached by f...