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The work had proceeded for months but for Max the work load was not that big. They would meet Friday afternoons, Juanita would instruct him carefully what to process and he would finish the job in the evening. The production was slow but steady. One Friday evening when he was just finishing up, she appeared in the doorway and invited him to have a cup of coffee in her office. "Is it not too boring to do this?" she asked as they sat down.
"I'm not easily bored as you know. Rituals interest me. And this is a Friday ritual."
"Interesting. But now the ritual has been broken since this is the first Friday we have coffee together."
"Everything's broken, as they say."
"Interesting."
She stood up and stretched out to get a large Webster's Dictionary from the shelf behind her. Juanita's skin was extremely pale under the clinically bright lighting rod.
"You look like a rock star," she said, "and rock stars don't think in binaries."
She continued: "You don't see me as either black or white, you don't see me as either intellectual or not, you don't see me as foreign or familiar. Am I right?"
She sat down. "Let's find the etymology of 'rock,'" she said.
What happens when somebody does not speak? Max did not speak. What happens when two people do not talk to each other? Juanita spoke moderately. Max carved out precious words in stone but was quiet for most of the time. 'The real quiet storm,' he thought. But where to take this and similar poetic phrases? As in another world they did other things. They spoke parallel, they cooked and made flowers grow, they became abstract together and by themselves. 'Parallel lines are never quite convergent,' they thought. Did Juanita understand this? Through some key reference to the etymology of 'rock' their conversation opened up:
- But if your body is a text, can you really dance with it?
- Why do you ask that?
- Well, Nietzsche said that the highest form of human experience is dancing, and without Nietzsche you could not say that your body is a text.
- Max, you have a very sharp brain You should write your thesis entirely on literary theory. Focus on relations of sexuality-textuality.
- Entirely?
- Anyway, here is my best quote about the body. This is the only quote a feminist needs: "the female body is purposive self-annihilation, a confrontation between oneself and oneself, the extreme end of autoeroticism, killing oneself as other, in the process killing others." Spivak said that. And she divorced at least one husband because he didn't clean his ass ecologically.
- Is the female body different from the male body, then? I mean apart from the fact that male sexuality and textuality are linear and phallocentric?
- If you talk about dancing it is the same, but…
- Same-same but different? Ssurely, a man's dancing is linear, it is the first act in the love-making, the foreplay — and the goal is of course entirely phallic. A straight linear activity that cannot be denied.
- A woman's dancing can be different. If both are same, or same-same, there is a difference. This is basic deconstruction: opposites are never binary. I'm sure there's a very good quote from Spivak about dancing, too. In any case she refuses to have her body categorized as either/or. So, the expression to no not have the cake and eat it at the same time is incompatible with the way a woman's body should be theorized.
- Theory and practice not an either/or, may I assume?
- Yes, dear Watson. In fact Sherlock Holmes was the first deconstructivist in literary history. He studied insignificant details, traces of nothingness, and solved the cases by never thinking in binaries. He was also, obviously, queer. Doyle hid that cleverly in the text.
- Cool. But I still think you are wrong about dancing.
- Nonononono. Although it is feminine to say no, he said no. A lot.
- But dancing is very phallocentric for a man. If you are dancing with somebody that turns you on, there is usually — quite soon — a bodily reaction.
- That's explicit enough. But that can happen to a woman, too.
- But perhaps they are not talking about dancing, then? This would relate more to bodily contact, who would assume that?
- Everybody reacts to bodily contact. The point is that the feminine body can never be predicted, can never be conquered.
