PARCEL by SARAH ANNE COX
reviewed by ANNA EYRE
O Books, 2006.
It has been said that history is a series of continuous arguments held in present perspective. Perhaps this is why Sarah Anne Cox writes, “I am afraid of stories. Of where they lead people, of the costume’s various hemlines, of the bleak night that has connected the teller with the fortitude and the moral ground.” Parcel divides, distributes, and offers deconstructed feminine dialogues once cemented as sequence, or worse, silence. Sarah Anne Cox collapses future, present, and past into continuous glyphic thoughts that reveal and build a linguistic mindset open to non-linear historical interpretation and thus, impact.
“It’s because we want to see a kind of order, the lines must go this way, they must be bold here and submissive here there must be rules because we are afraid of anarchy and you must wear a scarf because we have been distracted” As demonstrated by this stanza, Sarah Anne Cox is at once able to reproduce naturalized grammar and play with its construct in a way that draws attention to its peculiarities as well as oppressive abilities. Do we want to “see a kind of order” because we have been conditioned to do so? Is there a way in which communication can occur that transcends our narrow concepts of vernacular concatenation? Sarah Ann Cox raises these questions and delves into their root consequence. As is true with all natural phenomenons, each of the eight sections of Parcel can link with one, several, all or none.
Pantsuits, a symbol for feminine emancipation and assimilation, are perhaps also a metaphor for the evolving definition of a woman’s societal role or place. We are a culture obsessed with product princesses and warrior sacrifices. “The Pocahontas panty and bra set / squeezed into and out of the middle sea without much mangled / the return of the nevernever” Lost matriarchal societies are rubbed against a Phaedra whose sacrifice is trivialized and also worn intimately as a bra and panty set in the nevernever or all time. Similarly, “acid trip of Little Twin Stars my / body again exchanged for law / and media expectation and / to wear down or simplify / the lonely pantsuit in a way that the / public can understand” Sarah Anne raises the question of whether or not true feminine ideals are created by women or the culture’s didactic system of codes that surrounds inventive expression.
How is the feminine body linked to language? “there are ideas without women in them” and “so she rose to serve” in order that the ideas not be completely lost to the fold of “the lasting isolation of a mountain view”. However one has to wonder if, like Phaedra, whom Cox addresses in letter form (Dear), eliciting her presence, “it is true we colluded with the things that would undo us / in order to tame them / in order that we could have a say / in our own undoing”. In admittance, “I’ve said that the wrong way so many times that I no longer know how to say it.” How many concepts, thoughts, cruxes of our intellectual architecture are governed by this all too often unacknowledged mishap? “If someone else’s good time then I am a body / Pedestal and massacred”. Similarly, “The word is repeated so often that I cannot speak it.”, because all meaning has been lost to cliché or misuse. Or is it that “we can no longer use / words without becoming dirty ourselves”; our metaphors fossilized as perverse stelae. Do these questions not cross the boundary of feminine and speak to our modern political bodies as well?
“there were whole markets of naysayers but the doomsday that some men had predicated/predicted I mean, was still to be “at hand” and women still had children and thought about what fucking kindergarten might be “appropriate” for their child’s particular “sensibility” all the while this relentless clamoring for the live or maybe just the limbs of their sons.” Are we a culture that indicates the function of our children in their ability to understand the before of say; will of occur? What is the will of occur, or future, in terms of our cultures languages? Is our “dependence on syntax / for human sacrifice” a “dependence on human sacrifice / for level of desperation”? Cox notes that, “as a daughter I did not agree to make more sons for war / as an antelope I did not agree to be a mascot” Have we agreed to coalesce our opinions and beliefs with that of war lords by accepting their rhetoric? “As if refusing to pay attention to something will make it lie down, or go away or sound like one is exercising some agency.”
Parcel is “a book recurring with the book” which recognizes that “There is forward and backward there is forward and backward there is forward and backward there is forward and backward there is forward and backward movement of a people”. A people who would greatly benefit from a deconstructed, non-linear view of historical and future time as the all present— now. In Parcel, the reader is walked through intellectual, architectural and physical rooms of feminine insight. Its interconnected structure reveals to us that what is now considered the living pit was once the sacrificial pit although the same rituals occur. Sarah Anne Cox is both resurrecting and inventing a rhetoric which invites feminine dialogue to emanate our natural, chaotic universe that is more eternal than incremental or linear and is desperately asking for conscious human immersion.