Little Do They Know

Olivia Rowland

This exposition functions as both a visual and poetic essay, and a manifesto for my methodology of ‘line’. My definition of ‘line’, defined here as: ‘The gestural and abstracting tandem force of drawing-and-writing as a narrative means to express selfhood.’ The exposition posits the methodology of ‘line’ as one alternate artistic means to artistically communicate feminine selfhood. The methodology of line works to resist the internalised assignment of feminine voice to a corporeal body. Instead, ‘line’ communicates selfhood through poetic means and a sense of fragmented corporeality. Visually, the stark and abstracting nature of the drawn line, and the allegorical, metaphorical nature of writing present an abstracted self that playfully evades full understanding. The titling phrase ‘Little Do They Know’ intones a kind of secret power on behalf of the speaker, and the presence of secret and intricate worlds to which the gaze of the spectator has limited access. It is on this premise which the exposition operates, articulating the presence (in all its anxiety, instability, rage, joy and frustration) of a playful and evasive selfhood that reclaims agency from the spectator’s gaze.

The line is a direct means to speak; it’s the fastest, it shouts before the burst ends; yells before my throat shuts; before I am once again overwhelmed with the terror of Doing It Wrong. Jean-Luc Nancy wrote that ‘the gesture of showing by extending – extending in order to show or bring to light, extracting the lineament and incision of a form, contour, sense, or idea from the shadow or a compact mass – such is the gesture of existing.’ (2013:xiii)

And I exist; my experience exists, within this gestural notion. It is through means of the line that I reach forward; the gesture is my being. I embrace the erratic bursts in which my brain thinks; I use these to harness a frantic gesture. It allows me to speak with the urgency with which Cixous commands: ‘And why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you: your body is yours, take it.’ (1976: 876) I will, I will, I will. I will seize that moment; those bursts of energy in which I feel I truly exist and convert them into rituals in which I shout forth.

As Audre Lorde declared: ‘For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence…We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it.’ (2017:8)

So, I draw out a line: a perpetual potential, a burning ephemera poised on the brink about to become, always about to become, burning in my hiding-place, peering out from a veil of deliberate nothingness. I poise to throw out a clue; to run from one base to another under cover of darkness. From beneath my hiding place, I draw the line out as though fishing, extend slyly forwards, pull…pull the line, a wire from the see, a weed from the ground, it extends the further it is extracted; intensifies its rhythms, contorts into shapes and letters and words that shape my being; where I have been; what I can become. In that moment, in that frantic burst of energy – it must not stop! As Luc-Nancy states, ‘one must not cease drawing (if only to draw attention), and in order to draw out (trace or pull), one must not lose sight of the invisible extremity of the mark [trait], the point by which the line advances and loses itself beyond itself in its own desire.’ (2013:xii-xiii) Perhaps I am incomplete, but in the most powerful way.

It is me, and not me.

I am unmoored. I am ritual undoing. I am forever becoming.

Bibliography

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