I’m running away, running late, running on empty, running out of time. You can’t run and walk in tandem. Women who want to write and walk for a while in the world must stop running.
This was meant to be a story about women walking together, about moving in dual motion, strolling along the path with legs aligned. Instead, I was running to catch up. And so, this has become the story of a woman with snakes in her hair and boots on her feet. This is the story of an alive woman walking because a woman running in circles is dead before she even begins. I write of dead women walking and writing with snakes because I have been working with the words of French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous’ and thinking and wondering about her écriture feminine or ‘feminine writing’. In her well-known article, “Laugh of the Medusa”, Cixous writes:
Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies…Woman must put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement.1
Medusa was the wild winged-woman of Greek mythology with a hair full of snakes. Those who stared into her eyes would turn to stone, so the story goes. But Cixous’ Medusa does more laughing than looking. I see the ghosts of Cixous’ Medusa wandering in the words of Rebecca Solnit and other feminist writers. In Wanderlust Solnit wonders about the way women have been evacuated from walking writing, how women’s bodies have been theorised as passive, and that postmodern theory has failed to recognise their physical endeavours, muscle strains, encounters with other species or spending time outside2 . Then there’s just the plain speaking of nature writer Kathleen Jamie about men and their writing adventures amongst the ‘wild’:
What’s that coming over the hill? A white, middle-class Englishman! A Lone Enraptured Male! From Cambridge! Here to boldly go, ‘discovering’, then quelling our harsh and lovely and sometimes difficult land with his civilised lyrical words.3
And so, this is a story about how the rainforest insists that this woman stop running for a while, that she remove herself from the rat race for a moment she’s running out of steam and needs to stop trying to stay in the running. To stop running you have to laugh and so, this is a story about walking with snakes, laughing with snakes and the Medusa and writing with women walking.
To explain why I write about running and walking and women with snakes in their hair I must first write about why I was running late, why I was running in circles like a dead woman. In my distracted and distanced mind, I’d taken a wrong turn and driven an hour and a half in the wrong direction. Dual lane motorways had morphed into roadways, and then narrowed into single lane corridors with rattling cattle grids and mahogany cows. At the end of a goat track there was nothing but a mountain and me: I, on the wrong side of the mountain. All I could do was laugh and yank the steering wheel, re-trace my steps and drive back to the beginning.
The rainforest in Yugambeh country is one of my favourite places in the world to wander and I desperately wanted to wander that day. Walks in the rainforest are few and far between for a mother, moments grabbed in that slice of time somewhere in between feeding the dog and hanging out the laundry and checking spelling words. When I was finally back on the right track, I pointed the car to the sky and steered it up and around a million curves in the road. Also known as Lamington National Park, this is the place of the big and the little. This is the place of the canopy and the tree ferns and the crows nest ferns; the Strangler figs with trunks like volcanic rock; the tiny finches and electric-blue crayfish; and rustles in the bushes and birdsong that squaks like a violin. It is the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia World Heritage Area.
I was meant to meet a friend for a rare walk in female friendship but I was late, and she needed to start, and so we promised to run into each other on the trail. That is why when I arrived, I wasn’t wandering, I was marching. I was running late, running behind, running to catch up.
Running is tricky business in the rainforest because the rainforest demands that you pay attention. She urges you to backtrack, that you walk back in time and place to an ancient system where the grandchildren of ferns and pines and vines whisper about the past. This has been home to First Nations people for millennia. The rest of us have only been visiting for a moment.
Rainforests will find a way to slow you down. At first, it was a gentle nudge. A vine grabbing me with its talons, a swipe across the face suggesting I slowdown. Pause. Walk, don’t run. But I didn’t listen because I needed to make haste. A few metres further afield, there she was, basking in the morning sun, signalling her distaste for my haste, flicking her tail and refusing to budge. It was sunny and she was a snake in late summer on her ground. Slowly, oh so slowly, I wandered past. The second encounter, only minutes later, was closer than the first, so close my boots were airborne, and I could count the scales as she sped by. Suddenly, it was ok to be left behind in this race. Cixous says, “you only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she's not deadly. She's beautiful and she's laughing.”4 If these snakes signalled the Medusa then they were laughing at me, laughing at my rush to wander. The whole goddamn rainforest was having a chuckle. I slowed down and thought about snakes on the ground and snakes in my hair.
I had never before seen two snakes so close together, so close to me, so close to their home.
After my heart stopped racing and my pace eased, I came across a woman walking the other way and told her of my encounter with the serpents.
“It’s because you’re alone,” she said, unperturbed. “When it’s quiet you notice things.”
I wondered about her words as my boots wandered on. And then, slowly, I was laughing.
Something new: Later this year a book I have co-edited with the wonderful In-Sister entitled, Critical authoethnography and écriture feminine - Writing with Hélène Cixous, will be out released through Palgrave. The book is a series of essays of personal, poetic and political writing with and alongside Cixous’ book Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing5. More to come!
Hélène Cixous. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa” Signs p.875. This section also draws from Three Steps in the Ladder of Writing (1993) and Cixous’ words about needing a Dead (wo)man to begin writing (p.7).
Rebecca Solnit. 2000. Wanderlust. p. 28.
Kathleen Jamie. 2007. “A Lone Enraptured Male” London Review of Books.
Hélène Cixous. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa” Signs p.885
Hélène Cixous. 1993. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing.
I too am running away, running late, running on empty, and running out of time this week. It is only Tuesday and I am late, late, late. Ah, to be quiet enough to notice things...