Sea you return to sea, and rhythm to rhythm.

Hélène Cixous1

Cast:

Middle Sister: Blonde hair, swollen belly with bruises, maternity jeans, a family doctor who misses the urgency of A&E, married to S., expecting first child

Little Sister: Blonde hair, floating dress, tall, expressive hands, red and swollen all over including fingers, dance movement psychotherapist, married to A., expecting first child

Myself/swimmer: Dark hair, greying, wears a red swimsuit, various professions, latest address an English seaside town, eldest child

Schwenk: Professor for the study of movement in water

Cixous: Philosopher and swimming instructor

Irigaray: Philosopher and beachgoer

Heidegger: Philosopher and ice cream

Keller: Theologian and seagull

Juhan: Physician and wave

Time: A few summers ago

Place: Three bodies of water

I had to pause as I thought of the place.2 Was it the kitchen where Little Sister chops peppers, as buses rattle past the yellow brick terrace? Or further north, where Middle Sister leans over the dining table in a 1930s bungalow plunging a syringe into her belly? Was it the belly itself, in which a new being floats in the salty amniotic…the place of the child’s becoming which is also the site of becoming Mother? Or was it that other belly, the bay in which I swam all summer, that inlet of water in the English Channel? There I am in that curved site of becoming, kicking, waiting to be born.

Three bodies of water then, and inside them a becoming, a not-yet, a desire to be.

ACT ONE

Scene 1: Conversation with Schwenk and Cixous

Darkness. Only voices and the drip of a tap.

Myself: Where is her face waiting to exist? My child – I feel the tug of her tributary. The place where time could pour.

Schwenk: Ah, well, before we talk about daughter, I think we should start with the primordial shape. First things first. Ahem. The hollowing out of inner spaces is a fundamental process – an archetypal form-gesture in all organic reaction, human and animal, where in the wrinkling, folding, invaginating… 3

Schwenk continues to speak softly, intoning “wrinkling, folding, invaginating” on repeat.

Myself: Life starts with a hollow? Something is hollowing me out. A desire thwarted. I wait in the grief and watch it wrinkle, fold. Child, who did not become, the density of her absence grows. I might sink with this hollow. My life might end with it.

Enters Cixous, with armbands and whistle. Switches on a lamp to reveal a stage bare except for table..

Cixous: What is this talk of sinking? Being so heavy with hollow? Hmm? You found yourself dischilded. It’s the experience of mourning.4 Now, come on. A woman without a body, dumb, blind, can’t possibly be a good fighter. She is reduced to being the servant of the militant male, his shadow. We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing. Inscribe the breath of the whole woman.5

Swimmer appears from shadows in red swimsuit.

Cixous: Write your way up. Swim lines across the page, lengths and lengths. Come on. Kick! Kill the false woman!

Exit Cixous blowing whistle. Lamp continues to brighten. Swimmer climbs onto table. Lies down. Begins vigorous breast stroke.

Myself: The grief of not becoming a mother hollowed me out. I sank under the weight of absence. Struggling for breath, I mourned the faces that never arrived – the face of child, mine as mother. Then I realised there was a presence waiting in the space within, waiting to be born. Not a Mother, but something Other. How to give birth to this form, this form beneath the depths, whose contours I could not tell?

As the circumferences of my sister’s bodies expand, I go down to the bay, that basin of water, where the waves wrinkle and fold, and I begin to swim. Descendents of those first creatures that crept ashore, we carry this salty inheritance within, the saline running through our veins. Each of us began life in the miniature ocean of our mother’s wombs. To swim is to return to the landscape of beginnings.

Bright wash of light. Sound of waves and seagulls.

In the summer that my sisters became Mother…

Scene 2: First swim

Watched by yellow eyes, she makes her way to the water’s edge.

She enters the water cold. Lockdown and rain. Is it illegal? She’s not sure. Two women are in – one in a wetsuit, the other in a swimsuit and gloves. The water is deep iodine brown and smells of dankness and seaweed. She wades deeper and deeper; the waves are gentle rolling beasts coming towards. Her lower back is covered. Her arms are crossed over her breasts, adding a little warmth to the nipple; it’s always so cold, isn’t it?

She lowers her whole into the breathing self – then shoots upwards – the shock of the cold, the seizing wholeness of it. Freezing water in streams of piercing colour sinks into her swimming boots. Like zigzags of shock. She breathes and lowers herself back in.

The women are bobbing two metres apart and talking. Their heads bobbing. Everything so friendly today apart from this strange iodine water that smells. She swims, forward up to the first set of beach houses, and beyond to the second. The sun slips behind a cloud and the sea is dark. She is out of her depth but keeps swimming. Then the sun re-emerges and all is okay again – she feels like a small child seeking the reassurance of her mother. That settled feeling of mother. Nearing the black rocks, she turns, water swills newly cold into her gloves, and she swims back.

She lowers her face into the water. Her goggles steam up, and all is a blur, but she is heading for that point – where her clothes are neatly folded on the pebbles, her tote bag and her cloak, ankle length, woollen, the colour of a faded lichen. Nearing the shore, she pulls her goggles up, turns on her back and starts to float, her feet enclosed in their engorged socks. Now, her vision on the horizon, to where there is France and between them great container ships, though neither of these she can see. Looking back at the land. The sun. The sky marked with clouds. Her pile of things on the beach. It’s all so pleasing.

She gets out. Her body is pink with the cold, she feels massive, thumping up the curved incline of the bay towards the pebbles where she has left her belongings.

What she loved, she thought as she swam, is this feeling of carrying nothing.

Myself: Just me, just me without belongings, without bags and things, without cloak, phone, bank card, or key. Just me and the sea. It’s as if I entered death. Where there is nothing to take but yourself.

Enter Cixous with striped beach towel. Begins to towel-dry the swimmer.

Cixous: Ah. The surreptitious slippage of newly-born woman.

Myself: A story of yourself, like an old sundress on the beach, something you can walk out of, leave behind. Being in that old story was so painful. A carapace, the hardness of tension, the shallow breath. I become so stuck.

Cixous: [Vigorously towelling] Your body must be heard. Go on, ask her something.

Myself: Hello. Is it terrible? Finding yourself not a mother?… Who is this Other?

Cixous: What does she say?

Myself: Plunge.

Watched by yellow eyes she makes her way to the water’s edge. Here she steps in, plunges under, and is gone. Ice cream, and flip flops, an old flask amongst the prams and windbreakers, all left upon the shore. Into the waves she goes, into the belly of the bay.

Scene 3: Three sisters

Heavily pregnant Little Sister pirouettes across the stage, off balance.

Little Sister: My baby swims inside me as I dance. She feels the touch of the sea all around her. My body is inwardness and emergence.

Where does she begin, where do I end? Am I her sea?

Middle Sister enters stage with syringe talking to the audience. Little Sister continues to dance in background.

Middle Sister: Fuck, fuck, fuck. That will be so fucking sore. Everyday, every single day I do it – inject myself. Eight months in and I’m having to inject into the bruises.

She jabs the needle into a bruise on her belly.

Fuck! Fuck!

When she’s a teenager and being annoying I am going to show her pictures of my belly and say look, look at what I did to keep you in. Look. All black and blue. It looks like a planet.

She invites the audience to touch her belly. It is hard and black and blue and looks like a planet.

Swimmer, dripping with water, enters.

Myself: But won’t she just say, I didn’t ask to be born?

Pause. All three sisters face audience, standing in stillness, allowing the audience to watch them.

Three sisters: [In unison] Then I would never have known her face.

Lights fade.

INTERVAL: Keller Seagull

During the interval, as the audience get ice creams and snacks, a seagull above them circles and cries out. They can choose to ignore or to listen. But they should be careful, for sometimes the theologian can swoop down when you least expect it.

Seagull chorus: khor, khor, the empty womb, a choric space of unbecoming.6

Keller Seagull: Origins are not to be located in pure realms of light. We recognise the ambivalence and chaos of the choric space and acknowledge the tragedy and evil woven in the wondrous fabric of the world.7

Seagull chorus: khor, khor, the empty womb, a choric space of unbecoming.

Keller Seagull: Have you heard the calls of theologian Jantzen, who develops Arendt’s idea of natality?8 She says that taking birth as the centre of our imaginary will help direct our attention to this world – with its bays and ice creams, its swimming instructors and flying fish – to our connection, through the maternal continuum, with all others who have been born.9

Seagull chorus: khor, khor, the empty womb, a choric space of unbecoming.

Keller Seagull: This birth of the self from the maternal Godness inverts itself: The self gives birth to God!…

Why is God born?

God got lost

And therefore wants to be born again in me.10

ACT TWO

Scene 1: Irigaray eats ice cream

Irigaray upon sun lounger. She eats an ice cream, taking great pleasure with each slow lick. Heidegger, the ice cream, makes delighted sounds.

Irigaray: This ice cream for example is not conceptual. It is material, sensual.

Ice cream: Oh lick me, devour me!

Irigaray: [She takes a bite of the ice cream, licking her lips11] Mine is a philosophy where love is part of the subject matter.12 The material and the sensory are given their due weight and not displaced by the conceptual.13

Ice cream: Oh! Oh! Yes, please, combine love and thought, thought and love!

Irigaray: The connection between our “to be” and love is what can open up a horizon beyond our traditional concept of being…it is in the interlacing of our bodies talking to one another that the transcendental matter, from which our “to be” takes shape, lies.14 Isn’t that right, my sweet?

Though of course we risk welcoming the world of the other into the depths of our intimacy…15 Sweetie?

Silence.

In this rethinking, the surfaces of bodies – or of ideas – are not rigidly demarcated or appropriated; they remain porous and open to the flow of mutual interaction.16 Wouldn’t you say, my little one?

Silence.

Irigaray: Ah. He’s melted. Lichtung, the clearing. Never mind, a new truth can arise and begin unfolding as a world can.17 Poor ice cream. Well, he shall be dinner for the gulls.

Scene 2: Swimmer, with Schwenk, Cixous, and a wave called Juhan

Swimmer stands at water’s edge.

Myself: Where does she begin, where do I end? Am I her sea?

Schwenk: Ahem, well. That’s a good question. Ahem. Let me see…Boundary surfaces, with their rhythmical processes, are birthplaces of living things. It is as though creative, formative impulses need boundary surfaces in order to be able to act in the material world. Boundary surfaces are everywhere, the places where living formative processes can find a hold, be it in cell membranes, surfaces of contact between cells, where the life forces are mysteriously present, in the great boundary surfaces between the current systems of the oceans, where various currents flow past each other in different directions – these are known to be particularly rich in fish, or in the infinitely extensive surfaces of the natural and artificial filter systems of the earth, where the water seeping through is purified and given back its vital qualities.18

Cixous enters briskly , interrupting by blowing whistle.

Cixous: Yes, well of course. The body is always in process with the surrounding world. As is this sea in process with everything in it.19 So get in it!

Swimmer jumps into the water. Juhan, a large wave, comes towards her.

Myself: I am held, touched all over!

Juhan: Touch is the Mother of the senses. The skin is the largest, the most varied, and the most constantly active source of sensations in the body.20

Myself: It’s as you say, my tactile surface is not only the interface between my body and the world, it is the interface between my thought processes and my physical existence as well.21

She is tousled and thrown about by the wave.

By rubbing up against the world, I define myself to myself.22

She and the wave leap.

I am an open circuit that completes itself only in things, in others in the encompassing earth.23

Fish leap up, shoals of silver.

Everything is an invitation!24

Juhan: We are in the midst of active and radical creation!25

Myself: We are!

Swimmer kicks, splashing the wave into the air and all over the audience. Whistle blows vigorously.

Scene 3: Risk of birth

Silence. Stage empty except for table and lamp.

Middle Sister: There was a loss of variability. They traced the heart and contractions of the womb . . . When there are contractions the baby should react. There should be lots of variability. Lots of waves.

But the baby didn’t move. The waves still.

And there was meconium staining, a brownish staining on your pants

When the baby is stressed, they shit themselves

You know, the amniotic fluid, that thick yellow water that the baby swims in

but they’re not, they’re swimming in shit.

Middle Sister gets up onto the table. Lies down, face up.

Middle Sister: In the light above the operating table, which shines silver, you can see them cut.

Pause.

When she came out they put her on the resuscitation tray.

Little Sister enters. There is a beeping sound of a heart monitor getting faster, she dances in rhythm to it. Climbs up onto table.

Little Sister: Too many waves, too fast. They took me, injected my spine, forced my womb to contract. Lay me down. And in the light above the operating table, polished silver, I could see them cut.

Pause.

I was so scared for her.

Myself: Covered in shit.

I was swimming when I swam into shit. I was covered in shit.26 Shit all over me. That night vomiting, vomiting. It is difficult to be born when you’re covered in shit.

Joins the other sisters on the table. Light fades

ACT THREE:

Scene 1: Scar

Night. A fire burns on the beach. A woman, Cixous, can be seen writing with a stick on the sand. Another figure, Irigaray, is floating on an inflatable mattress shaped like pink lips. The swimmer is getting dressed.

Irigaray: Well here we are, together at last, together at the water’s edge, a liminal place of becoming. We can reveal ourselves, the one to the other, and provide one another with a place in which we can come into presence in the gathering together of our being…In this way we can attain a relation to the world that is more true and perceptive.27

Myself: I swam in the dark of myself; I swam deeper and deeper. I could not touch the ground. Below, fathoms of unfathomable dark.

Irigaray: Our way of behaving attempts to grasp and fix the mystery of our origin into a face, whereas we ought always to abandon any face that has already appeared so that we can develop. We can remain living only at the price of a continuous becoming, which means relinquishing what is already flowered, which falls into appearance as soon as it has appeared. 28

Myself: I came swimming out of me. I ripped right through myself.

Cixous: Traumatism as an opening to the future of the wound is the promise of the text.29

Myself: All three of us ripped. My sisters, look at their scars, in a line across their bellies. Look.

She points to the horizon.

Seagull swoops overhead.

Keller: That horizon has appeared as the edge of chaos: a chaosmic eschaton.30

Irigaray: The divine, the horizon of our becoming.31

Myself: I came swimming out of the cut of the horizon. I came swimming out of trauma and divine becoming.

Seagull swoops.

Keller: Becoming divine is not an obligation to become limitless; the quest for infinity would be a renunciation, not a fulfilment, of our gendered, embodied, selves. If the language of the infini now suggests a finite, skin-enfolded participation in the infinite, why go in quest of it at all? Where is it but here and now, amidst our queerly entangled, decisively limited incarnations? Divinity in the face of natals is a horizon of becoming, a process of divinity ever new, just as natality is the possibility of new beginnings.32

Cixous: [Pauses her sketching on the sand] I am inclined to use “mother” as a metaphor, yet at the same time it is not a metaphor. This is the secret and decisive figure that one feels living and writing in those who write…The mother is a quality.33

Scene 2: Sisters go for a swim

My sister with her adjustable swimming cap on

I ask if she is cold, she hesitates, no, she says slowly

Dimples, goose bumps on her pale thighs

Her whiteness is lunar

I miss the moment she dives in

I am swimming forward

She goes deeper towards the horizon

Far out, I feel unease

Are you scared?

She hesitates, no, she says slowly

We swim along

Wind comes skipping in from another room

As does the blue of the sky, the waves

Filled with new ideas

Opening of the Open

Fresh suspiration

We swim towards the scar.

Scene 3: Three towels

Three beach towels folded centre stage.

Enter three sisters in their swimsuits. Little Sister and Middle Sister each gather a towel into the crook of their arm. They cradle the towels like a newborn baby.

Swimmer unfolds her towel, holding it horizontally. It is a large paper towel.

Swimmer: It is time to write.

She towels herself dry and opens out the towel to see the patterns of damp that have been absorbed. Begins to towel sisters dry. Notes the marks their bodies have left.

Enter the rest of the cast in a line across the stage. Swimmer towel-dries Cixous, Irigaray, and Schwenk, bends down to dab the wave as it rolls past, swipes towel skyward to touch the gliding gull, then mops up Heidegger, a puddle on the floor. Exit cast.

Swimmer and sisters face the audience as if looking outwards to the horizon. The audience become the horizon. The swimmer and sisters make eye contact with audience – the fourth wall is opened. Swimmer opens towel to reveal the marks of the bodies.

Swimmer: Onto an opening of the Open, being emerges.34,35

END

1 Hélène Cixous, “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson, trans. Sarah Cornell, Ann Liddle, and Susan Sellers (Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 57.

2 In any telling of self, place is central. This is how Edward Casey puts it: “To come to terms with the inner life, it is not enough to constitute a biography or autobiography in narrative terms; one must also, and more crucially, do a topoanalysis of places one has inhabited or experienced.” He goes on to quote Merleau-Ponty: “For a knowledge of intimacy, localisation in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.” Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 289.

3 Theodor Schwenk, Sensitive Chaos, trans. by Olive Wicher and Johanna Wrigley (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1965), 41.

4 Hélène Cixous, “In October 1991…”, Stigmata, trans. by Keith Cohen (Abingdon: Oxford Classics, 2005), 54.

5 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. by Paula Cohen and Keith Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–93.

6 Heather Walton, “This World of Wonders: Theology, poetics and everyday life”, Knox, F.B., & Reek, J. (Eds.).

Poetry, Philosophy and Theology in Conversation: Thresholds of Wonder: The Power of the Word IV (1st ed.). (London: Routledge, 2019), 148.

7 Walton, 146.

8 Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003), 222.

9 Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1999), 151. Bays and ice-cream etc., are my additions.

10 Keller, 224.

11 Irigaray posits that the female body is a paradigm of place and yet it is always open and moving. Lips are an example of this. According to Edward Casey, the lips “perform place” – they connect the inside and outside world through a common threshold wherein what is within the body meets what is without. Irigaray’s thesis he says, proposes that “the body itself is place.” More can be read in Casey’s summary of her philosophy in relation to place in The Fate of Place.

12 Hanneke Canters and Grace Jantzen, Forever Fluid (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 115.

13 Canters and Jantzen, 103.

14 Luce Irigaray, To Be Born, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 101–102.

15 Irigaray, To Be Born, 91.

16 Canters and Jantzen, 91.

17 Irigaray, To Be Born, 101–102.

18 Schwenk, 42.

19 This sentence is inspired by Rachel Carson in The Edge of the Sea (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955)

20 Deane Juhan, Job’s Body: A Handbook for Bodywork (New York: Barrytown/Station Hill Press, 2003), 28–29.

21 Juhan, 34.

22 Juhan, 34.

23 This sentence is inspired by David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996.) 62.

24 Myself. Emerging from this period of grief, when balanced between the no-more and the not-yet, I said this to a friend.

25 Juhan, 10.

26 Thank you, Southern Water (private utility company that collects and treats wastewater).

27 Irigaray, To Be Born, 95.

28 Irigaray, To Be Born, 41.

29 Cixous, Stigmata, xiv.

30 Keller, 226.

31 See Jantzen, 275, for a discussion of Irigaray’s concept of divine as a horizon of becoming. .

32 Keller, 226.

33 Cixous, Stigmata, 57.

34 I draw this idea of the Open from Heidegger. See Casey, 335: “Heidegger’s expansive view of place as dwelling and nearness – the opening of the Open, the very Clearing that makes room for the manifestation of Being and the fourfold.”

35 “The openness of the Open” is how Irigaray articulates Heidegger’s phrase. Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions (New York: Routledge, 1992), 59.