And I was afraid. She frightens me because she can knock me down with a word. Because she does not know that writing is walking on a dizzying silence setting one word after the other on emptiness. Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the profound impact of writing and the fear that comes with the vulnerability of creative expression.
Helene Cixous articulates the fear and awe associated with writing, describing it as both an act of courage and an act of vulnerability. Writing is portrayed as a miraculous endeavor that involves navigating through silence and emptiness, akin to a bird that must leap into the void without wings, gaining them only through the act of flying. This metaphor highlights the transformative power of words and the inherent risks of expressing oneself creatively.
In practice
During a writing workshop, I shared this quote to encourage participants to embrace their fears.
By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display - the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. _x000D_ Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth.
Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
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.
Only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way.
We must kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.
If my desire is possible, it means the system is already letting something else through.
When I write, what I long for is not more realism or fiction but more courage. That's what I always find myself short on and what I have to struggle to achieve in order that the work might live.
If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.
If you really want to be an artist, you search yourself, and you find a lot of it comes from earlier times. I have pretty much built the work around my experiences. When I've moved from one place to another, the work has changed.
The poet is never inspired, because he is the master of that which appears to others as inspiration. He does not wait for inspiration to fall out of the heavens like roasted ortolans. He knows how to hunt...He is never inspired because he is unceasingly inspired, because the powers of poetry are always at his disposition, subjected to his will, submissive to his own activity.
Every good writer or filmmaker has something eating at them, right? That they can't quite get off their back . And so your job is to make your audience care about your obsessions.
If you just love movies enough, you can make a good one.
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