“I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.”

“PLANETARIUMThinking of Caroline Herschel (1750–1848)astronomer, sister of William; and others.A woman in the shape of a monstera monster in the shape of a womanthe skies are full of thema woman ‘in the snowamong the Clocks and instrumentsor measuring the ground with poles’in her 98 years to discover8 cometsshe whom the moon ruledlike uslevitating into the night skyriding the polished lensesGalaxies of women, theredoing penance for impetuousnessribs chilledin those spaces of the mindAn eye, ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’ from the mad webs of Uranusborg encountering the NOVAevery impulse of light explodingfrom the coreas life flies out of us Tycho whispering at last ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’What we see, we seeand seeing is changingthe light that shrivels a mountainand leaves a man aliveHeartbeat of the pulsarheart sweating through my bodyThe radio impulsepouring in from Taurus I am bombarded yet I standI have been standing all my life in thedirect path of a battery of signalsthe most accurately transmitted mostuntranslatable language in the universeI am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-luted that a light wave could take 15years to travel through me And hastaken I am an instrument in the shapeof a woman trying to translate pulsationsinto images for the relief of the bodyand the reconstruction of the mind.”

“A lot is being said today about the influence that the myths and images of women have on all of us who are products of culture. I think it has been a peculiar confusion to the girl or woman who tries to write because she is peculiarly susceptible to language. She goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world, since she too has been putting words and images together; she is looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilities; and over and over in the ‘words’ masculine persuasive force’ of literature she comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman in books written by men.”

“There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.”

“I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child”

“First having read the book of myths,and loaded the camera,and checked the edge of the knife-blade,I put onthe body-armor of black rubberthe absurd flippersthe grave and awkward mask.I am having to do thisnot like Cousteau with hisassiduous teamaboard the sun-flooded schoonerbut here alone.There is a ladder.The ladder is always therehanging innocentlyclose to the side of the schooner.We know what it is for,we who have used it.Otherwiseit is a piece of maritime flosssome sundry equipment.I go down.Rung after rung and stillthe oxygen immerses methe blue lightthe clear atomsof our human air.I go down.My flippers cripple me,I crawl like an insect down the ladderand there is no oneto tell me when the oceanwill begin.First the air is blue and thenit is bluer and then green and thenblack I am blacking out and yetmy mask is powerfulit pumps my blood with powerthe sea is another storythe sea is not a question of powerI have to learn aloneto turn my body without forcein the deep element.And now: it is easy to forgetwhat I came foramong so many who have alwayslived hereswaying their crenellated fansbetween the reefsand besidesyou breathe differently down here.I came to explore the wreck.The words are purposes.The words are maps.I came to see the damage that was doneand the treasures that prevail.I stroke the beam of my lampslowly along the flankof something more permanentthan fish or weedthe thing I came for:the wreck and not the story of the wreckthe thing itself and not the myththe drowned face always staringtoward the sunthe evidence of damageworn by salt and sway into this threadbare beautythe ribs of the disastercurving their assertionamong the tentative haunters.This is the place.And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hairstreams black, the merman in his armored body.We circle silentlyabout the wreckwe dive into the hold.I am she: I am hewhose drowned face sleeps with open eyeswhose breasts still bear the stresswhose silver, copper, vermeil cargo liesobscurely inside barrelshalf-wedged and left to rotwe are the half-destroyed instrumentsthat once held to a coursethe water-eaten logthe fouled compassWe are, I am, you areby cowardice or couragethe one who find our wayback to this scenecarrying a knife, a cameraa book of mythsin whichour names do not appear.”

“Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.”