Why Joan? Because recently, I’d been encountering mention of her in intriguing ways:
In an essay by Anne Carson on translation—largely, the impossibility at its heart—pointing to Joan’s refusal to translate her experience into acceptable terms: “Joan wanted to convey the jar on the nerves without translating it into theological cliché. It is her rage against cliché that draws me to her. A genius is in her rage. We all feel this rage at some level, at some time.… We resort to cliché because it’s easier than trying to make up something new. Implicit in it is the question, Don’t we already know what we think about this?”
In an essay by Elizabeth Willis on the potential of language to both impose and resist aspects of oppression and domination, pointing to Joan as an example of each: “Saint Joan was referred to as The Maid. Even after she led an army.… Like The Maid, we have the right to transform the disciplinary structures of our world with sulphurous language. To fight one fire with another.”
And in a profile of former UN ambassador Samantha Power, which early on describes her in reference to Joan: “For her conviction that America has a responsibility to halt or prevent the suffering of civilians abroad, she had been caricatured as the Ivy League Joan of Arc.” Fueled by quotes from and about her, the characterization increasingly seems related to Power’s voice, the act of her speaking. “I can’t say anything that is not true,” Power is quoted as saying, while about her, a fellow ambassador says, “She doesn’t speak with flour in her mouth.”
Because of the very providence or accident by which I was falling in the way of these occasions and the way they were speaking to me—always of language. Because what do we ask of language? How do we sort through what we will and will not say, what we can, what we can’t?
Because I’m interested in the accidents of history and of our histories, how idiosyncratic—perhaps arbitrary—what we know, what we encounter, what we remember, what we miss, and the way brain chemistry, neurological state, is one kind of answer to these questions that are a theme of marvel and dismay in the daily conversation of my life.
Because every time I start with Joan, I start again at zero. Because don’t we already know what we think about this?
Because perception, hallucination, and, it seems a safe bet, great pain.
Because, in some way, all of the above is refracted by or in my experience of migraines. And because sometimes, in the altered state that migraine imposes, I find myself acutely, at times even obsessively, interested in Joan—specifically, in her trial. That is, in what she had to say.