Carmen Maria Machado - Tumblr Posts
‘TOTEM’: ‘In the beginning, before the city, there was a creature. Genderless, ageless. The city flies on its back. We hear it, all of us, in one way or another. It demands sacrifices. But it can only eat what we give it.’
Carmen Maria Machado, “Especially Heinous,” Her Body and Other Parties (via baredmirror)
“In the same way, now, the house is filled with something else. It moves, restless. It does not say words but it breathes. I want to know it, and I don’t know why.”
— Carmen Maria Machado, “Eight Bites,” Her Body and Other Parties (via silksaturn)
When you go out to dinner, she orders tuna sashimi and insists on placing it on your tongue. It is sturdy, labial. It melts there. She orders dirty vodka martinis and you come to love their brine. She reads your stories, marvels at the beauty of your sentences. You listen to her read an old essay about how her parents never let her eat sugary cereal.
Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
(via
bluebeardsbridemoved
)
“Well, the Gothic can be conducive to suppressed voices emerging, like in a haunted house. At its core, the Gothic drama is fundamentally about voiceless things—the dead, the past, the marginalized—gaining voices that cannot be ignored.”
— Carmen Maria Machado, interviewed by Theodore McCombs for Electric Literature (x)
“Well, the Gothic can be conducive to suppressed voices emerging, like in a haunted house. At its core, the Gothic drama is fundamentally about voiceless things—the dead, the past, the marginalized—gaining voices that cannot be ignored.”
— Carmen Maria Machado, interviewed by Theodore McCombs for Electric Literature (x)
You will spend the next few years of your career coming up with elaborate justifications for the structure of the stories you were writing at the time—telling them to young readers in classrooms and audiences at bookstores; once, to a tenure-track job search committee. You say, “Telling stories in just one way misses the point of stories.” You can’t bring yourself to say what you really think: I broke the stories down because I was breaking down and didn’t know what else to do.
Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
Traumhaus as Lipogram
It’s hard, saying a story without a critical part. Thinking you can say what you want as you want to, but with a singular constraint. Loss of the function of a particular orthographic symbol—it’s a situation, hmm? A critical loss. Not just a car with bad paint, a lamp with a crack, sour milk. A car that can’t stop. A lamp that sparks. Milk cut with shit. A woman hid my thing and I can’t find it again. That’s just how it is. I cannot find what’s missing. I am trying and trying, and I cannot; as I fail, I shrink. I shrink down into dirt, wood, worms.
It is an awful thing, that missing symbol. Folks know. Folks can pick up on words of rock. Folks will know you for your wounds, your missing skin. Folks say nothing but Why didn’t you go / Why didn’t you run / Why didn’t you say?
(Also: Why did you stay?)
I try to say, but I fail and fail and fail. This is what I did not know until now: this constraint taints. It is poison. All day and night, until I ran, I was drinking poison.
Carmen Maria Machado
Dream House as a Lesson in the Subjunctive
Yes, there are spiders in the basement, and yes, the floors are so uneven you can feel them pushing your right leg up against your torso if you run too quickly from room to room, and yes she’s never unpacked and is using tall cardboard boxes filled with bric-a-brac as furniture, and yes the couch is so old you can feel the springs in your back, and yes she wants to grow pot in the basement, and yes every room has bad memories, but sure, the two of you could raise children here.
Carmen Maria Machado
In her essay ‘Venus in Two Acts,’ on the dearth of contemporaneous African accounts of slavery, Saidiya Hartman talks about the ‘violence of the archive.’ This concept — also called 'archival silence’ — illustrates a difficult truth: sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories.
Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House (via plathsyl)
Fantasy is, I think, the defining cliché of female queerness. No wonder we joke about U-Hauls on the second date. To find desire, love, everyday joy without men's accompanying bullshit is a pretty decent working definition of paradise.
The literature of queer domestic abuse is lousy with references to this punctured dream, which proves to be as much a violation as a black eye, a sprained wrist. Even the enduring symbol of queerness--the rainbow--is a promise not to repeat an act of supreme violence by a capricious and rageful god: I won't flood the whole world again. It was a one-time thing, I swear. Do you trust me? (And, later, a threat: the next time, motherfuckers, it'll be fire.) Acknowledging the insufficiency of this idealism is nearly as painful as acknowledging that we're the same as straight folks in this regard: we're in the muck like everyone else. All of this fantasy is an act of supreme optimism, or, if you're feeling less charitable, arrogance.
Maybe this will change someday. Maybe, when queerness is so normal and accepted that finding it will feel less like entering paradise and more like the claiming of your own body: imperfect, but yours.
Carmen Maria Machado, In The Dream House
Like Lot’s wife, you looked back, and like Lot’s wife, you were turned into a pillar of salt, but unlike Lot’s wife, God gave you a second chance and turned you human again, but then you looked back again and became salt and then God took pity and gave you a third, and over and again you lurched through your many reprieves and mistakes; one moment motionless and the next gangly, your soft limbs wheeling and your body staggering into the dirt, and then stiff as a tree trunk again with an aura of dust, then windmilling down the road as fire rains down behind you; and there has never been a woman as cartoonish as you—animal to mineral and back again.
Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House (via huntdaisy)
The fact is, people settle near volcanoes because the resulting soil is extraordinary, dense with nutrients from the ash. In this dangerous place their fruit is sweeter, their crops taller, their flowers more radiant, their yield more bountiful. The truth is, there is no better place to live than in the shadow of a beautiful, furious mountain.
Carmen Maria Machado, excerpt from In the Dream House (via virgin-martyr)
You wonder if, at any point in history, some creature scuttled over what would, eons later, be the living room, and cocked its head to the side to listen to the faintest of sounds: yelling, weeping. Ghosts of a future that hadn’t happened yet.
Carmen Maria Machado, In The Dream House (via ferngallery)
You wondered, when she came along, if this was what most people got to experience in their lives: a straight line from want to satisfaction; desire manifested and satisfied in reasonable succession. This had never been the case before; it had always been fraught. How many times had you said, “If I just looked a little different, I’d be drowning in love”? Now you got to drown without needing to change a single cell. Lucky you.
In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado (via aquotecollection)
A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.
Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House (via deadpoetsmusings)
How to read her coldness: She is preoccupied. She is unhappy. She is unhappy with you. You did something and now she’s unhappy and you need to find out what it is so she will stop being unhappy. You talk to her. You are clear. You think you are clear. You say what you are thinking and you say it after thinking a lot, and yet when she repeats back what you’ve said back to you nothing makes sense. Did you really say that? Really? You can’t remember saying that or even thinking it, and yet she is letting you know that it was said, and you definitely meant it that way.
‘Dream House as Lost in Translation’ in Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (via ohjoyce)
Your female crushes were always floating past you, out of reach, but she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the first time.
In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado (via aquotecollection)
Fear makes liars of us all.
Carmen Maria Machado, “ In the Dream House” (via grimdarkacademia)
Dream House as Demonic Possession
But isn’t the best part of a possession story that the inflicted can do and say horrific things for which they’ll receive carte blanche forgiveness the next day? “I did what? I masturbated with a crucifix? I spit on a priest?”
That’s what you want. You want an explanation that clears her of responsibility, that permits your relationship to continue unabated. You want to be able to explain to others what she’s done without seeing horror on their faces. “But she was possessed, see.” “Oh well, that happens to everyone at one time or another, doesn’t it?”
At night, you lie next to her and watch her sleep. What is lurking inside?
Carmen Maria Machado
What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives… . Sometimes the proof is never committed to the archive—it is not considered important enough to record, or if it is, not important enough to preserve. Sometimes there is a deliberate act of destruction: consider the more explicit letters between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, burned by Hickok for their lack of discretion. Almost certainly erotic and gay as hell, especially considering what wasn’t burned. (“I’m getting so hungry to see you.”) The late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz pointed out that “queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence… . When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present.” What gets left behind? Gaps where people never see themselves or find information about themselves. Holes that make it impossible to give oneself a context. Crevices people fall into. Impenetrable silence.
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado