L'O de V: A Palimpsest

For centuries she didn’t speak at all, the girl Virginia.The silent girl who finally speaks tells the story. Submission, omission, commission, submersion, subversion, inversion, corruption, coercion. Defilement, denial, the child, the trial, fil, fille, vile, ville, filial bonds, bondage, twisted positions and impositions, text and subtext and context and cuntext. Penetration, vellum, hide, marks, pens, wounds, piercings, cuttings, severings, maidenheads, giving head, what’s inside our heads that is left unsaid, what cannot be said being said, the sinkhole in a prison bed, the outburst of consent and the pressure of speech, the hand holding the pencil raced over the paper without the least concern for the hour or the light. The girl was writing the way you speak in the dark to the person you love when you’ve held back the words of love too long and they flow at last2, hysteria catatonia silence asceticism abasement how a woman throws herself is thrown hurls herself is hurled cuts herself is cut how there is an O in the center of the monastery and in the rear of the prison the text is inscribed, marked, stripped, cut, scraped, erased, reinscribed, corrected, raped, rapt, wrapped3 and how this story is old, begins with a snake’s mouth and ends in a bit of tale served up by a woman, an O, once a V, an A(nne), an A(ury), a Pauline nun from the bawdy papers, a Reagent. The Autre. The Autre4 Translation transgression transubstantiation, trasumanar5, tongues, longing, language, sources, apocrypha apostasy outtakes originals pens and penetration, comments, commas, parents, parentheses, prisons, patrimony, patronage, the mouth, the eye, the os, the ass, the orifice, the vacuole, the caesura, the fissure, the seizure, the rapture, ravissement, stripping away, strips of skin, laceration, O in the middle, jouissance,6 O behind, the iron O on the finger, the steel O in the labia, the monsters inside us: The Three-Legged Man, The Headless Woman . . . we forget to remember and remember to forget a story of giving credit and revoking credit of not knowing half the time to whom to give credit.