little red riding hood

what's to be done to forgive, to be forgiven? we need forgiveness. every day. every day we need forgiveness. every day we need to be forgiven and to forgive. we are guilty of all the faults in the world. what's to be done when instead of forgiveness there is, in general, repression or avoidance? i don't know. it seems to me that we'd have to find a forgiveness beyond forgiving. a forgiveness that is neutral, absolute, unexpressed. advance forgiveness. forgiveness afterwards is already much more difficult to express. so, advance forgiveness, yes. (cixous, 39, "in october 1991...")

helene cixous is truly my inspiration.

stigmata is the lovely collections of her essays. i can't stop reading her sharp opinions about joyce, derrida, lispector, dostoevsky, pushkin, tsvetaeva (the most amazing poet from russia), rembrandt and da vinci.

her writings really opened my mind. how important to write my body as a woman. my body is mine. to dare what i don't dare. to refuse the censorship of the body because you censor breath and speech at the same time. unfortunately, it already happened to our local female writers. people used to hate them because they wrote about women's sexuality openly. people used to hate them because they brought domestic stuffs to writing. people used to hate them because they put themselves (womanhood/sexuality/the discourse of sexuality) into the text.

there's also a quote that makes me love her even more: "writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it" very true, right? writings are more on words from heart than the brain. there is sensitivity. there are more personal experiences. and it is called l'ecriture feminine.

cixous writes any writings to herself. she doesn't think much about the readers. writing is all about her words, her sentences, her passion. i wanna be like cixous. she used her own experience as a woman in her writings. she listened to her own body. she rethought old truths. she made love to her texts. she gave a name to 'writing'.

cixous also changed my thoughts about motherhood (motherhood is hard, admit it!) and nudity in rembrandt's powerful painting, batsheba bathing. i must say, she's definitely one of the greatest intellectuals i have ever known.

read it. it is really inspiring. in short: a treasure!