Some Intimations addressed to the guess t

Rosencrantz: We could play at questions.
Guildenstern: What good would that do?
Rosencrantz: Practice!
Guildenstern: Statement! One - love.1

Am I allowed to ask my book
whether it’s true I wrote it2

What are you if I am what you say I am; what am I if not real, if he dreams me; who are you? If the object of her dream dreams her as dreamed in her dream, where is she what she is? An exchange of being between dreamer and dreamed perpetuates the uncertainty and raises the question of knowledge: one comes back to the question of the primal scene. What am I, I would like to know, if I am engendered in the structure? [...] The reply seems to escape, it is always elsewhere, sometimes it is already given but without content, and in foreign language. However, the sequence, noisier and noisier (Bang! Hush!) produces as it moves along yet another couple, that of sleep/waking, and all the oppositions which accompany them: reality/fiction, knowledge/ignorance, silence/noise, and so on, in a swarming of other pairs which surround the subject.3

[...] even if the rationalization and commodification of selfhood remain irrevocably fused with its emancipation, we cannot confuse one with the other. Our task remains not to confuse power for pleasure.4

The assumption that you know what sense is and consequently what nonsense is, depends not on the acceptance or rejection of fact but upon the adoption of certain sets of mental relations.5

I have kept my body. I have my eyes, my mouth. I hear my heartbeat with my hand. And yet I hover, lighter than a feather. Is this not wonderful?6

I’ve created various personalities within. I constantly create personalities. Each of my dreams, as soon as it begins to be dreamed, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I. To create, I have destroyed myself; I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t exist on the inside except externally. I’m the living stage where various actors act out various plays.7

The lesbian continuum, I suggest, needs delineation in light of the “double-life” of women, not only women self-described as heterosexual but also of self- described lesbians. We need a far more exhaustive account of the forms the double life has assumed. [ … ] We have been stalled in a maze of false dichotomies which prevents our apprehedning the institution as a whole: “good” versus “bad” marriages; “marriage for love” versus “arranged marriage; “liberated” sex versus prostitution; heterosexual intercourse versus rape; Liebesschmerz versus humiliation and dependency. Within the institution exist, of course, qualitative differences of experience; but the absence of choice remains the great unacknowledged reality, and in the absence of choice, women will remain dependent upon the chance or luck of particular relationships and will have no collective power to determine the meaning and place of sexuality in their lives. As we address the institution itself, we begin to perceive a history of female resistance which has never fully understood itself because it has been so fragmented, miscalled, erased.8

A merging of feminist and narrative approaches can help women recognize how they resource their bodies to express their struggles. As women attempt to control their bodies as a mechanism for achieving greater control in their lives, it is important to not reinscribe culturally limited stories of women as victims. If [...] forms of resistance are shut down or controlled during the externalization process, a woman’s suppressed voice is only further disqualified.9

I sometimes use a visualization exercise that allows women to explore how they feel trapped or stuck in their lives [...] women imagine themselves in a trap that they have designed and can therefore escape when they are ready. They are able to imagine how they built the trap, what it feels like to be inside the trap, and what feelings emerge after escaping. Often women describe feeling very safe inside their traps and deeply ambivalent and afraid to leave them.10

If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.11

At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded.12

1. Stoppard, Tom: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, London, Boston, Faber and Faber Limited (1980)
2. Neruda, Pablo: The Book of Questions, Copper Canyon Press (2001)
3. Cixous, Hélène: Introduction to Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking-Glass and The Hunting of The Snark, New Literary History Vol. 13, No. 2, Narrative Analysis and Interpretation, John Hopkins University Press (Winter 1982)
4. Illouz, Eva: Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, Polity (2007)
5. Sewell, Elizabeth: The Field of Nonsense, Dalkey Archive Press (2015)
6. Jabès, Edmondo: The Book of Questions, Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, Wesleyan University Press (1991)
7. Pessoa, Fernando: The Book of Disquiet, §308; Edited and Translated by Richard Zenith, Penguin Randomhouse (2002)
8. Rich, Adrienne: Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, in: Signs Vol. 5, No. 4, Women: Sex and Sexuality (Summer 1980)
9. Brown, Catrina: Narrative Therapy - Making Meaning, Making Lives, Sage Publications, Inc (2006)
10. Ibid.
11. Wittgenstein, Ludwig: On Certainty, Blackwell Publishing (1974)
12. Ibid.