Passage collage from Helene Cixous’ "Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing"
[156] We must work. The earth of writing. To the point of becoming the earth. Humble work. Without reward. Except joy.
I’m currently in my cave quietly co-preparing a virtual community container 🦴 this Spring for writing, ritual, and building up personal power—certainly something all of us could use this year.
Shoot me a message if you’re interested in hearing more about this as it develops or sign up for the waitlist here.
And if you are interested in a 25% discount code for 1:1 sessions with me, scroll down to the bottom of this letter.
purpose of collaging Cixous’ quotes
While I am finding resonance in the themes I hope to explore with my not-yet-named co-facilitator of this Spring 🦴 workshop, I collected the passages I underlined in Hélène Cixous’ “Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing.” And so here they are, in order of appearance in the book itself—I expect to use a number of these in a digital zine or future long-form book project that seems to be burbling up from the ground like ancient lava, excited to see the light of day soon.
It’s this book where I felt seen for the first time—as a writer, a woman, a body, a person aware of the darkness and dankness inside my psyche that needed to be expressed through narrative writing—and in ways other lectures or books on writing fell short.
I hope this collection or collage of Cixous’ quotes is helpful for you too, as a kind of book report or lyrical excerpting, for your personal writing practices.
Passage collage from Helene Cixous’ “Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing”
The School of the Dead–
[7] To begin (writing, living) we must have death. I like the dead, they are the doorkeepers who while closing one side “give” way to the other.
[7] We must have death, but young, present, ferocious, fresh death, the death of the day, today’s death. The one that comes right up to us so suddenly we don’t have time to avoid it, I mean to avoid feeling its breath touching us. Ha!
[7] It’s true that neither death nor the doorkeepers are enough to open the door. We must also have the courage, the desire, to approach, to go to the door.
[10] We need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is.
[17] Kafka: a book “must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
[41] Authors dear to me [...] they inspire me with a feeling that resembles Genet’s feeling of his “le funambule” – they inspire me with fear and admiration. [...] Because what they reveal is audaciousness, which consists in saying the worst, in writing the worst, making apparent, naming the worst.
[53] Our pathfinders–Tsvetaeva says she immediately fell in love with the word “pathfinder”--take us this way, where we will be both spectators and actors of the scene of the crime.
[53] Only poetically and in the imaginary can we approach that place of fire.
[53] Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
The School of Dreams–
[58] Perhaps at the School of Dreams we also work with lack, absence, and omission.
[58] Here’s a book “I read” but haven’t finished reading. I don’t make an effort either to read it or not read it. I let it be, it’s in the room where I am, often I don’t read it and during this time it beams obscurely. It’s a form of reading. (This is how we get to the School of Dreams, by making a vast detour.)
[59] Whoever wants to write must be able to reach this lightening region that takes your breath away, where you instantaneously feel at sea and where the moorings are severed with the already-written, the already-known.
[59] I can’t make a recipe of it, for as soon as we begin to inscribe signs, to attract attention, we destroy. So though you should hear everything I say, it should then be absorbed, pass through the blood, without your thinking about it, with your living it.
[59] Not everyone is given access to this other world where the dead and the dying live. We are not all guests of the dead, this wisest of companies. If we can’t get there by dying, then let’s go there by dreaming.
[65] In order to go to the School of Dreams, something must be displaced, starting with the bed. One has to get going. This is what writing is, starting off. It has to do with activity and passivity. This does not mean one will get there. Writing is not arriving; most of the time writing is not arriving. One must go on foot, with the body. One has to go away, leave the self. How far must one not arrive in order to write, how far must one wander and wear out and have pleasure? One must walk as far as the night. One’s own night. Walking through the self toward the dark.
[67] We always find departure connected to decisive dreams: the bed pushed aside. The nature of the dream in or from which we dream is important. We may have to leave our bed like a river overflowing its bed.
[69] [God] is in the dream. He is not outside the dream. He is inside the dream.
[69 - 70] Go toward foreign lands, toward the foreigner in ourselves. Traveling in the unconscious, the inner foreign country, foreign home, country of lost countries.
[72 - 73] The state of creation, Tsvaeteva tells us in “Art in the Light of Conscience”:
a state of obsession… (and of) “possession.” Someone, something gets into you, your hand is an executant, not of you, but of something. Who is it? What, through you, wants to exist.
The state of creation is this dream state where suddenly, obeying an unknown need, you burn the house down, you push a friend off the top of the mountain.
Did you do it? Of course you did. (You’re the one sleeping, you’re the one dreaming.) Your act, your very own act, done with complete freedom, an act by you–without your conscience–naturally.
[77 - 78] What comes up when you start writing are all the scenes of impotence, terror, or vast power. The unconscious tells a tale of supernatural possibility (it’s always supernatural) of bringing a child to light, but the miracle in the dream is that you can have a child even when you cannot have a child. Even if you are too young or too old to have a child, even if you are eighty, you can still carry a child and give it birth and milk. And sometimes the milk is black.
[79 - 80] A dream’s charm is that you are transported into another world; no, you are not transported, you are already in the other world. The scene is that of the other world. There is no transition: you wake up in the dream in the other world, on the other side, there is no passport, no visa but this extreme familiarity with extreme strangeness.
[80] In dreams you are spared this [traumatic experience of foreignness], the feeling of foreignness is absolutely pure, and this is the best thing for writing.
[85] It is the feeling of secret we become acquainted with when we dream, that is what makes us both enjoy and at the same time fear dreaming. When you are possessed by a dream, when you are the inhabitant of a dream, you are driven by this, by a kind of heart beating: and the dream says something that is never said, that will never be said by anyone else and which you unknow; you possess the unknown secret. It is this, not the possibility of knowing the secret, that makes you both dream and write: the beating presence of it, its feeling.
[88] Dreams remind us that there is a treasure locked away somewhere, and writing is the means to try and approach the treasure. And as we know, the treasure is in the searching, not the finding.
If I could, I would be jealous of dreams: they are mightier than we are, greater in weakness and strength. In dreams we become magic, which is why if I could be jealous of my dreams–and I sometimes am–I would be.
[91] “poets will walk without thinking as if walking home” (Tsvetaeva)
[93] She tells us we can enjoy all these axe blows, since we are in the dream’s sacred space where all the rules that ordinarily make us excuse ourselves for the dream are waived. A space that is both totally free and totally limited.
[101] It is surprising that there should be this refusal of such an important source.
[102] I kept thinking: what I have just written didn’t come from me.
[103] but I only copy the other, it is dictated; and I don’t know who the other is.
[103] We have our desert periods. Putting oneself in relation to the unconscious is delicate, since we can’t master the comings and goings, the gushings from the source. What I also learned is that the dream realms must not only be situated there where they exist primarily, under the bed, in the depths of the night, but that they must also exist in waking reality.
[107] The dream’s enemy is interpretation.
[107] We must know how to trust the dream as a dream, to leave it free, and to distrust all the exterior and interior demons that destroy dreams. We all have a demon, there is one hidden in the dream.
[107] How can we do this? We must write at the dictation of our master the dream, a pencil in hand, straddling the mane at full gallop.
The School of Roots–
[117] That is my theme for today: to be “imund,” to be unclean with joy.
[117] Joy is out-of-this-world.
[118] Writing is not put there, it does not happen out there, it does not come from outside. On the contrary, it comes from deep inside. It comes from what Genet calls the “nether realms,” the inferior realms (domaines inferieurs). We’ll try to go there for a time, since this is where the treasure of writing lies, where it is formed, where it has stayed since the beginning of creation: down below.
[118] It is deep in my body, further down, behind thought. Thought comes in front of it and it closes the door. This does not mean that it does not thing, but it thinks differently from our thinking and speech. Somewhere in the depths of my heart, which is deeper than I think. Somewhere in my stomach, my womb, and if you have not got a womb–then it is somewhere “else.” You must climb down in order to go in the direction of that place. But as I said yesterday, this sort of descent is much more difficult to achieve, much more tiring, much more physically exacting (physically because the soul is body), than climbing up. It is a climb, but it requires the whole strength of everything that is you–which I don’t want to call “body,” since it is more complex than the body–to go through the various doors, obstacles, walls, and distances we have forged to make a life.
[119] We don’t know that we can fight against ourselves, against the accumulation of mental, emotional, and biographical cliches. The general trend in writing is a huge concatenation of cliches. It is a fight one must lead against subtle enemies.
[126] Now I am in a world under the world.
[127] I am on the side of roots, or algae, or marshes, but at the same time I reach the nether realms of my desire [...] I want to descend but I also want to ascend.
[129] As soon as there is writing, it becomes a matter of passage, of all kinds of passages, of delineation, of overflowing.
[129] The primitive civilizations that precede us, our mothers, believed in trance, in transformation, in transition, in transfer: one species passed into another, one realm became another, from the human to the mineral to the vegetal, in a generalized, infinite, magnificent, and unbounded way.
[132] Our body is the place of this questioning. And what about the flower part of our body? I’m planting this question here and I’ll let it grow.
[133] and each time I make the idiotic move of taking a knife to cut water.
[150] The journey is spiritual. It is an extremely difficult exercize, reintegrating the earthly, the earth, and the earth’s composition in one’s body, imagination, thought.
[150] Sometimes she opens the wrong door, makes the wrong maneuvre; sometimes she gets very close to matter, to earth–she’s almost there–then she takes a step too many and breaks through the earth, passes to the other side, and comes back on the side of abstraction and the idealizing thought she constantly criticizes.
[156] For instance, if we are to write in joy and in love with writing, we should try to write the imund book.
[156] The imund book is the book without an author. It is the book written with us aboard, though not with us at the steering wheel. It is the book that makes us experience a kind of dying, that drops the self, the speculating self, the speculating clever “I.”
[156] How can it be written? With the hand running. Following the writing hand like the painter draws: in flashes. The hand leads to flowers. From the heart where passions rise to the finger tips that hear the body thinking: this is where the Book(Alive)-to-Live (le livre vivre) springs from…
[156] We must work. The earth of writing. To the point of becoming the earth. Humble work. Without reward. Except joy.
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