‘This is apparent precisely in the intervals that your masters have not been able to fill with their words of proprietors and possessors, this can be found in the gaps, in all that which is not a continuation of their discourse, in the zero, the 0, the perfect circle that you invent to imprison them and overthrow them.’

     —Monique Wittig, The Guerrillières, Paris, 1969 (trans. David LeVay).

If you want nothing you are nothing you might as well be dead

I’m dead then WANDA

An affectless movie. Don Delillo calls it the dark side of the moon of Bonnie and Clyde. Loden called it anti Bonnie and Clyde writing it ten years before Penn’s explosive movie appeared.

Isabelle Huppert recalls how Loden must have felt wounded by being pushed aside when Faye Dunaway was cast in Kazan’s movie The Arrangement.

In my twenties I wrote stories about the throwaway girl wandering tossed by sea and wind, a lost girl loses herself over and over to be made anew.

Reflecting on this perverse action to give oneself over to the no way out sign I was drawn back to the seventies and the women I knew who had left their children which at the time was a taboo. One was still driving into brick walls, another told me how if she had not left she would have died. She freed herself with meditation and Bagwhan Rajneesh.

And now I touch that wound, I let my son go and live with his father as a way to survive just as Wanda told the Judge

‘they’re  better off without me’.

I remember the pain, I knew early I knew but I was always being told I didn’t.

KING LEAR SPEAK

CORDELIA Nothing

KING LEAR nothing will come of nothing

CORDELIA Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave 

My heart into my mouth. I love your Majesty 

According to my bond, no more nor less.

The quote alludes to one of the most important ideas at work in the play—nothing vs. something. Throughout, Lear battles with the two, consistently misinterpreting “nothing” as “something” and vice versa. His daughters Regan and Goneril deceive and mislead him in their declarations of love, while his youngest, Cordelia, attempts to speak to the truth and is banished for it.