This novel is available in four editions:
• full color with 32 original photographs by •
Rochelle Ritchie Spencer
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Rochelle Ritchie Spencer
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– Eileen Myles, author of inferno (a poet’s novel)
“Daughter is quantum. There is a girl, there is an octopus, there is language… No other book ever written has entered my body and being so physically pure. There is not distance between the state of narrative and the matter of being. I turn the page of her body.”
– Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and Reel to Reel
“In Daughter, Janice Lee floods the body of a book with the body of a body, all its hybrid, constantly damaging and mending cells…. The result is a meticulous and terrifying resurrection, a glitchy screamtext passed in dire silence to the reader the way blood passes from mother into child.”
– Blake Butler, author of There is No Year
“Lee
s surgical cadences and sharp fragments work here as writing will work – to force attention to detail.”
– Vanessa Place, author of La Medusa and Dies: A Sentence
“Janice Lee understands that writing cannot exist as narrative outcome. In Daughter there is reckoning with the cosmos as phantom, as something that does and does not exist. Energies appear by means of paradox and evaporation.”
– Will Alexander, author of The Sri Lankan Loxodrome
COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL
© 2012 copyright by Janice Lee
Ebook edition. First paper printing 2011. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-937543-27-3
Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information please email: questions@jadedibisproductions.com
Published by Jaded Ibis Press, sustainable literature by digital means™ An imprint of Jaded Ibis Productions, LLC, Seattle, Washington USA http://jadedibisproductions.com
Cover design by Debra Di Blasi
This book is also available in digital, color and fine art limited editions. Visit our website for more information: http://jadedibisproductions.com
Janice Lee is a writer, artist, editor, and curator. She is interested in the relationships between metaphors of consciousness and theoretical neuroscience, and experimental narrative. She is the author of KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2010), a multidisciplinary exploration of cyborgs, brains, and the stakes of consciousness; and Daughter (color edition; Jaded Ibis Press, 2011). She is also the author of the chapbooks Red Trees, The Other Worlds (Eohippus Labs, 2012), and Fried Chicken Dinner (Insert Press, Forthoming). Janice holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Cal Arts and currently lives in Los Angeles where she is Co-Editor of the online journal [out of nothing], Co-Founder of the interdisciplinary arts organization Strophe, Feature Reviews Editor at HTMLGIANT, and Founder/CEO of POTG Design. She can be found online at http://janicel.com
for my mother
After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave – a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we – we still have to vanquish the shadow, too.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Rochelle Ritchie Spencer’s love of photography was reignited by the humble, medium-format, plastic Holga. Since then she has exhibited Holga photography exhibits in Seattle, and received commissions for portraits and, of course, the images for Daughter. She also works with other analog cameras – the Diana F+ and the Soviet-era Smena Symbol – but the Holga continues to intrigue her with its ability to create dreamy, ethereal images. See more of her art at www.rochellerspix.com
I wish to tell you of a vision which appeared to her in the sky, on a night when the stars were shining and she stood in prayer and contemplation. She saw the head of a human figure with a terrifying face, full of wrath and threats.
I was crying out for her over and over again, and there it was, the color of splayed, a sort of bookmark half-buried in the sand: pebble, burr, grain of sand, glass. This isn’t just one of those fish-out-of-water scenarios. This is a body, still, dismantling it now seems like too much and yet, I want to reach out, my head bowed in recognition slowly over the beach – though this is not a beach and this is not recognition. I’m allowed to change my mind, you know, and it’s fine, really; the chest wall heaving in and out and I don’t think it’s dead yet, not yet, just not now, not yet. Yet. Blowing air through the pores asking what do you remember what do I remember what do I remember about you?
I can admit I was excited, as this was the proof of a competence or a space, and next to it, an emptiness in that space, like a muffin pan, the space in the air that some monster might fit into exactly, or if it is a vacuum, some tiny particles might push the body ever so slightly, causing some imbalance in this whole scene because really really there is no such thing as empty space even in a vacuum. Oh, the evidence.
There’s always going to be less here then there was over there, what a creature, the extended hands, reaching for some kind of antimatter, not to say this doesn’t resemble some kind of murder scene. A silhouette in the sand, hands reaching up, hands reaching for the sky like broken rifles, a kick in the ribs. Ey?
I have unearthed the corpse of an octopus in the sand. How old is it?
The creator of the world did not fashion these things directly from himself but copied them from archetypes outside himself.
My head is full of myth.
All who came to her were filled with terror at the first glance. As to the cause of this, she herself used to say that she had seen a piercing light resembling a human face. At the sight of it, she feared that her heart would burst into little pieces. Therefore, overcome with terror, she instantly turned her face away and fell to the ground. And that was the reason why her face was not terrible to others.
Daughter, daughter, have you gone far? Daughter, daughter, are you in the undergrowth, the sky, the stars? Daughter, daughter, I can not find you anywhere in my memories.
This might be something, then again, it might be something else. This is only a revision of a previous image, and that is only a revision of one previous to that. Is this a giant octopus, a goddess napping in the bright desert light, or a tiny pale fetus tucked and hidden away from the threats of monsters.
The sea is a mysterious force, but there is no sea in the desert.
Where are you going? / to the land of dreams. / in a rickety bus on a rickety road.
Where is it? / far, far away. / very far.
What are you going to do there? / watch my dreams come true. / but whose dreams are these, like unripe grapes, tossed back out into the open…
In the sky, surrounding this deserted desert, a place where everything is in black and white and shades of black and white, two brothers or two god-like beings or two restless serpents in the night slither slither in the sand through the sand on the sand. They play in the sand.
They are brothers of some kind of great power, and being god-like beings, they’re a smart bunch of party animals.
Jorge is the older brother. Jorge knows how to party. Jorge is a cool cool cat.
JORGE
I created a world.
JUAN
What kind of world?
JORGE
The best kind of world, the kind made by me.
JUAN
Who are the people?
JORGE
People-people.
JUAN
Are they good people? They must be good people.
JORGE