Constructing the Self, Composing the Other: Auto/Fixation and the Case of Michael Field

I am bleeding. I have tried to stop the flow but the pulsation refuses to cease. The red keeps on coming, spilling onto the pages and into the bodily fissures and gaps of the two lives I am trying to re-member. It doesn’t disrupt me, but I fear it will interrupt others. I have been told I’m not supposed to be in this text.

Neat intervals. That’s where I can appear. If I must. Clearly marked, explaining my presence, my reason for interrupting the flow, the delivery, the unravelling of form. History and those grandfather-greats tell me my place in the text creates air-bubbles – pocketed moments of auto – making biography auto/biographical/bio(auto)graphy; slipping knots between the seemingly seamless divisions that demarcate the now and the then, the past and the present, the beginning and the end. A life is a life is a life. And I am me because my little biography knows me.

Perhaps that is why I am finding this so difficult to write? I am not used to taking up this space, this auto/theoretical/biographical mass. I have been taught to be "objective," even though I know objectivity to be a fallacy. It wasn’t meant to be like this. And yet, I am already lodged deep within the walls of this text.

Writing lives will do this to you. Like the scraps of a love letter that emit dangerous possibilities, biography is a story of erotics that can’t help but sweat with autographic desire.