Excerpt
DYSPHORIA
DYSPHORIA | Cambridge Dictionary Severe unhappiness, especially a person's feeling of being very uncomfortable in their body or of being in the wrong body: gender dysphoria. The opposite of EUPHORIA.
Reading was her drug. When reality was over the point, there were always books where she could lose and find herself. Passing the time is an art after 50. And fiction is as good a way as any.
At any given time, she was always reading 20 books simultaneously. She rarely finished any book. Some books that had influenced her the most, she had only read the first chapters. But she had spent years pondering over those first few pages. That was influence. The seed, and not the flower.
She read a lot of women. But mostly nonfiction. Alongside some Pam Zhang, some Siri Hustvedt. She had never finished To the lighthouse or Orlando. She adored Virginia. But she never finished the guineas, not even the hours. Some loves were not about reading. They were more about imagining a person. Mrs Dalloway was her mother. A room of one´s own was her life. The rest, she could fill in the blanks.
And these days, she had gone back to the great fiction writers of her time. Operation Shylock. London Fields. Those were consuming her days.
And she understood that there was a kind of dysphoria in being a woman, in having a female experience and growing up trying to make sense of the world through the eyes of male fiction writers.
Her feminist icon was a man. TOM ROMPINS. His palm reader now a widow, still in some La Conner corner, in that mythical northwest that was home to her own mystika, her own eternal love story.
There was dysphoria in feeling so close to Cortazar and Henry Miller. To Poe and Quiroga. To Borges. To Borges. Though Borges was different. More admiration than love. Love was Cortazar. Love was ROMPINS. Love was Keats. And who could write a love letter to Keats better than Cortazar?
If she wrote a love letter like that, it would most likely be to a man. In spite of her love of Sylvia´s diaries, her early love of Beauvoir never matched her connection to Sartre´s “le plaisir, il n´y a que moi qui puisse me le donner”.
Literary men had helped her discover her own sexuality. More than literary women. More than flesh and blood men.
Dysphoria. All women of her generation suffered it. A look at their library shelves would suffice. Art by women was in its infancy. Not for not having existed, but for not being seen. Not even by women themselves.
This was the tragedy of dysphoria. It was not possible to follow in the tradition of Roth and of Franzen, of Borges and Sábato. Not living through a woman´s body. This was the contradiction of her life. And she had been born in the wrong hemisphere to make sense of it.
Things moved faster in the North. In the South. It was still the era of the carburator. The era of the clitoris, of the talking clitoris, was aeons away. And the vagina monologues were pathetically obsolete, but still selling out at teatro solis on occasion, with one of the vaginas played by a trans actress.
The best a woman could expect from the South was attending a performance of the vagina monologues, when what she could, she should have been doing was living out, performing herself, the monologues and dialogues and triologues and quartets of Her Majesty, THE CLITORIS.
DYSPHORIA LITTERARIA
A dissociation. If I read the contents of a male brain from my female body, and it contaminates me, permeates my surfaces and crevices, if I am HIM, THE WRITER (male by default), when I look in the mirror to find breasts and vagina and clitoris and bloody secretions and all the things that terrify THE WRITER above all else, I experience dissociation, terror, dysphoria, the opposite of pleasure and harmony. The feeling that something is not right in the world.
This is my life, she thinks, and I have a few decades of solitude on this island to fix the problem. So she will continue to read the descriptions of women in Roth and in Amis with disgust. Monstruous concoctions of enticing breasts and fillable holes with no distinguishable compartment for a brain, a conscience, thirsty animals looking for nothing but the semen of MEN, of thinking men who would lose their heads their sense of themselves and all direction if they succumbed to the monsters.
And the question. What am I? Frankenstein or his brainchild? Monster or creator? DYSPHORIA.
δυσφορία σώματος-νου