The Book of Joan

by Lidia Yuknavitch

bodies. I’ve wondered lately what’s next. What is beyond whiteness? Will we become translucent, next?

We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power.

People are forever thinking that the unthinkable can’t happen. If it doesn’t exist in thought, then it can’t exist in life. And then, in the blink of an eye, in a moment of danger, a figure who takes power from our weak desires and failures emerges like a rib from sand.

The earth . . . she’s alive.”

I’ve been thinking about how our desires and fears manifest in our bodies, and how our bodies, carrying these stories, resist the narratives our culture places on top of us, starting the moment we are born.

What if, for once in history, a woman’s story could be untethered from what we need it to be in order to feel better about ourselves?

Instead of a crown of thorns, a tall paper cap, like a mitre, was set upon her head, bearing the words heretic, apostate, eco-terrorist.

The Bible and the Talmud, the Qur’an and the Bhagavad Gita, the scrolls of Confucius and Purvas and Vedas—all that is over, I understand now. In its place, we begin the Book of Joan. Our bodies holding its words.

Leone isn’t content with states of being. She wants states of doing.

You are a writer. But what happens when the story is stolen away from its author? Don’t panic. Don’t be an ass. Learn to inhabit any role.

But what crumples her heart is his chest—the land of body between his shoulders.

We’ve become signs, she thinks—mere signs of our former selves. Dislodged from plot and action in our own lives.

She will bring all of literary history forward like a tidal wave.

And always Leone in my throat or my temple or my chest, or in the place where my very sex sits, pounding with a vengeance, asking me why I didn’t love her in every way humanly possible while I still had the chance.

What must it be like to carry the burden of humanity—and its end—around in a woman’s body, when a woman’s body was made to create life?

To be human. What if being human did not mean to discover, to conquer. What if it meant rejoining everything we are made from.

All of human history has taught us how easily the clownish, the insane, the needy, the self-absorbed, even the at-first righteous can be grooved or embossed by the simplicity of power erosions.

Power is a story humans made when they feared the world they were born into. And feared each other.

Some story we don’t know yet untied from all the ones that have come before.

The body is a real place. A territory as vast as Earth.

A different story, leading whoever is left toward something we’ve not yet imagined.

Most of our greatest thinkers were shitty at relationships. Sometimes worse. Sometimes brutal.

I’m weeping again. Always crying. It has become a state of being rather than an emotionally isolated experience.

I decided you meant that Earth carried other meanings than the ones we used to make culture.

I remember small inconsequential things you said over the years as well. Like the time you told me that there was moss in my hair, and how you gently flicked it away. And then how you picked it back up and put it back in my hair, and smiled without a word, both of us realizing we were of the earth and each other and nothing else now, for the rest of time, whatever “time” had become.