A scar

“What links writing to violence? What must violence be in order for something in it to be equivalent to the operation of the trace? --- Jacques Derrida

"My body leaves no scar on you ... " --- Leonard Cohen

When I was four years old, in junior kindergarten, a little boy named Robin scratched my face. He did it twice. I remember both incidents quite clearly, but not which one was first. In one instance, we were baking cookies as a class. Kids love raw dough; we would all grab chunks of it and shove them in our mouths even though we knew we were not allowed (raw eggs) and risked getting in trouble with the teacher. As we may have well expected, the teacher, a kindly woman, remonstrated the entire class. A number of the children took no notice - our teacher was not a scary woman - and continued to slyly munch on the coveted uncooked mixture. I was no different. Robin, in moral outrage, reached out across the corner of the table and drew blood from my cheek.

The second attack was similar, not in the sense that he was, at least in certain instances like the one described, a teacher's pet, but in the sense that he was defending another against my reprehensible behaviour. A little girl named Emily had drawn a picture. Children are secretive with their personal objects, creations, and privacies; it is difficult and apparently random, perhaps even to the child in question, why some objects are worthy of vicious protection and others warrant widespread flaunting. Emily's picture was a secret, deeply private. She showed it to one of our classmates, then another; she would not show it to me. I begged and pleaded: everyone wants in on a secret. She refused, and I tried to grab the page from her hand. Robin intervened.

He had no particular attachment to Emily. What he had was a particular attachment to me. Robin and I, in fact, were each other's first sexual partners. Every nap time, we would take our mats to the most secluded place we could find - behind the building blocks, or in the play house if it hadn't already been claimed - and we would pull down our pants and our underwear. We would examine each other, but not as doctor and patient - this was not a make believe game. I was astounded at how soft his tiny little vulnerable penis was; he was fascinated with the exterior of my little hairless mound.

I have no way of reconstructing how long our private little ritual lasted. Perhaps it was only two or three times; perhaps it carried on for weeks or months. I am certain, however, that our nap time intercourse was winding down or over by the time of Robin's two attacks.

My mother was astonished that he had found the exact same place on my inner left cheek both times. The scabs from the first scratch had not finished healing by the time he opened them up again. He was making a mark, whatever the four year old boy knew. It was child's play, perhaps, but it was somehow insidiously deliberate. I still have a faint scar in certain lights.

I believe that I never revealed the true nature of our relationship. I let Robin be, to all others concerned, merely a reckless and uncontrolled little boy, asserting himself in an inappropriate fashion that he would be duly trained out of: "Use your words." I believe that I kept our secret safe, despite his betrayal. Perhaps I knew that we would be made ashamed, that he would get in more trouble, that I to would get in trouble, perhaps blamed. While I wailed against the painful scratches, I kept silent about the sex.

He does not remember any of this, I feel certain of that. The reason I feel certain is that I do not believe that I would remember any of this if I did not bear my faint scar; it is a story that I have been telling myself on enough occasions to trace it lines solidly in my memory for nearly my entire life. These lines may have been distorted in their numerous repetitions, but they bear a trace of Robin, inaccurate or not. He is the author of the line on my face; my authorship is a response to his indelible strikes.

What are these strikes against another? Many things, but no doubt a lasting effect, something not to be forgotten. A mark on another. A perverse assertion of identity. A transcendence of the self. A forging into another's space and body, a claiming of territory. A planting of a flag: "I have been here."

What gives us the confidence to mark another, or more broadly and perhaps more importantly, to attempt to mark a public sphere, to attempt to mark discourse? What is a "good" mark, and what is a "bad" mark, and do we always know the difference in the act of marking? It seems clear that Robin's mark on my face was a bad mark, a cruel and hysterical mark. It has nevertheless been an aid to memory for me, which I can not simply and moralistically dismiss.

Regret is unhelpful: I in a sense cherish my trace of a scar. I do not know my face without it. This is not to condone abuse. Four years old or not, Robin was abusive towards me. How might this translate?

Language leaves a mark, especially the written word. Images leave marks, especially when they are pepetuated. Representation traces patterns. As Levinas says, every causality is violent. We hammer the world into shapes of our making.

Who claims the confidence to play the author? At the highest levels, some of the worst of people. War. Colonialism. Economic and cultural imperialism. The hand of empire attempts to enclose the world inside its boundaries, to make of the Other slaves and mirrors. Whence the hubris?

Gender comes into play. The ones who are traditionally enclosed, delimited, and made to bear the negatively differentiated traits of the societal authors are precisely the ones who become afraid to make a mark. The "feminine" is timid. Gentleness does not often find the way to a gentle violence. To change. Gentleness wants to exist in-itself as for-others; it does not know how to define its own being, much less its source.

Gentleness accepts itself as a book to be written in. It celebrates the writing; it celebrates its own creation as gentleness. It begs to be defined as itself. It is modest: it refuses to define others.

I celebrate the mark Robin made on me; Robin has no mark made by me. Robin is in many lights present to me; I am perpetually in the dark for Robin.

Aristotle writes of men as form and women as brute matter: the semen of the male shapes the raw menses of the woman, and an offspring is conceived. The woman is the passive vessel: from the container of her body man's lineage is brought into the world. She is the paper, he is the ink.

The Christian God is a man. Not a human man, but nevertheless father. From his word the light and the plants and the animals and the sea and the land and man were created ex nihilo. Eve was created from the rib of Adam, flesh of his flesh. God spoke and the word was made flesh. Adam knew all the names.

Heidegger says that language is the house of being. Who speaks? Who is allowed to ask?

Simone de Beauvoir believes that consciousness is transcendent, and that the position of women has mutilated their consciousness. Women are bodies complicit in their oppression; they mistakenly believe themselves transcendent in the passive act of bearing children. They are marked beings, shaped by external controlling forces.

The scar written into my four year old skin is a trace. The four year old boy making the scar is a trace.

The best Coen brothers yet?

No Country for Old Men

The review in the Montreal Mirror of the latest Coen Brothers film, which is supposed to redeem their latest cinematic transgressions and dullnesses, points out how remarkably faithful No Country for Old Men is both to its namesake, the Cormac McCarthy novel, and to the general and familiar feel of the Coens' work itself.

Some artists may simply have affinities. McCarthy and the Coens may be such artists. Slowness. Violence. Masculinity. Quirk. Eerie timelessness (how different was the wild west three hundred years ago and in 1980, really, motorized ve-hicles notwithstanding?). A wonderful scene between two county sheriffs points to the relativity of the passing of time in the American desert: If anyone had told me that I'd be seeing kids with green hair and a bone through their nose, one sheriff says to the other, I wouldn't have believed them.

I promise that there are no kids with green hair in No Country for Old Men. There are rather cowboys and more cowboys, hand-painted auto supply signs, rifles and pistols, a terrifying psychopath armed with a cattle stunner, trailer parks, and Mexicans. Technology enters almost seamlessly, sensical and aesthetic. The suitcase with the money has a tracking device. Accounting and high level policing takes place in the corner office of a gleaming office building. These are no reasons to abandon your cowboy boots and ten gallon hat.