The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one
really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a product of the historical processes
to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving
an inventory… Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an
inventory. - Antonio Gramsci
P.23 Your archive is an expected declaration — a pronouncement that makes
manifest your worth and belonging in the great halls of higher learning. The
archive, it must be noted, is also your enabling fiction: it is the thing
you say you are doing well before you are actually doing it, and well before
you understand what the stakes are of gathering and interpreting it.
P.27 It was then that I started to wonder over my own body as an impossible,
deteriorating archive — a body that had across my life felt both excessive
and insufficient, oftentimes even monstrous.
P.31 There is something haunting to me about the fact that I lean on
contemporary feminist new materialist discourse to account for the fact that
the body is not and has never been singular. Something haunting about the
fact that the non-singularity of the body, its vital entanglements with
other kinds of bodies, was once so obvious across cultures, geographies, and
histories that it didn’t need to be argued. Something changed, something was
changed. A monumental worldview swept in and tried — with brute force, with
discipline, with pedagogy — to make us each one self.
P.59 I have a lingering and unprovable suspicion that my own threshold is
not natural, not something organic to me. Rather, it grew over time,
emerging through more and less subtle forms of training. Threshold is
pedagogy.
P.76 There are so many forms of pain, some we find evidence for and deem
acceptable, and others we refuse because we cannot understand them.
P.99 I have an acute memory of my mother as a child, desperately lonely on
the shores of Belfast. She is gathering treasures from the sea. At age 4,
she is all blustering whiteness with full rosy cheeks. She has been sent
away to boarding school and is crushed by the absence of her parents. She
brushes a long strand of hair from her face, looks out into a distance that
appears eternal. She seems to know, even then, that she will cross an ocean,
that she is destined to transport her solitude to another continent.
Somewhere in this memory there is an overseer, a body who is making sure
that my mother is not swallowed up by the sea. But whoever she is, she is
well beyond the frame.
P.100 What if we could choose our injuries? What shapes would we become?