ME, HYDRA: POSTCARDS FROM A SWAMP, by Tess Williams

[2000]

Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters.

Donna Haraway

Not much is known of the Hydra. A monster from Greek mythology, it is generally seen as a hybrid of familiar creatures such as snake and dog, or possibly a species of dragon in its own right. Always female and always menacing. Hercules killed a Hydra as one of his great labors and it was a hard job. The Lernean Hydra had nine heads and every time Hercules lopped one off, two more grew to replace it. He finally defeated it by having Iolaus, his nephew, cauterize the necks as he hacked them through with his sword. In other stories the Hydra is seen as a creature of the water or marshes, a sort of sea serpent, and in yet others she is one of the critters that hangs around the gates of the underworld, waving her heads of snakes around and scaring the pants off questing heroes. As with many other mythological monsters, the Hydra interests me and I believe it is possible to construct a sympathetic reading of her as symbolically representing and containing some of the dilemmas of modern women—particularly the woman writer. Let me explain:

To start with, bugger this notion of wearing many hats—hats are far too civilized a metaphor to describe the multiple roles regularly played by women in our culture. A hat suggests a neat process of exchanging attractive or serviceable millinery confections when they are not specifically needed, storing them tidily somewhere and taking appropriate ones out for special occasions—say the little black felt job for Aunt Molly’s funeral or that plastic coverall for an accurately predicted shower. Good metaphor? Not. It just doesn’t work like that in my experience. Not only is the wardrobe connection faintly patronizing and gendered to start with, but I find that the process of playing various cultural and social roles is much more like having multiple heads—not hats—ergo, it tends to work (or not work) very much like the hydra.

The hydra is not neat. She has an (often unspecified) number of necks and atop each one is a fierce head, face fixed in a bared teeth grimace, crowned with a nest of hissing wriggling snakes. So, which one is in charge? Answer: none. This is a slithering, hissing mess of multiple priorities which very nearly pulls the infamous dog’s body (did you ever wonder where that term came from?) apart. Consider the creature’s dilemma: while head number one is scaring the bejasus out of a prototypical hero, head number four is investigating a flea on the forepaw and head number six is feeling hungry—but not necessarily for the well muscled bloke number one is intimidating. Heads number seven and eight are locked in argument about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin, and this produces a sense of uncertainty in head number three which knows it has some kind of mission or job to do as it sits guarding the gates of Hades against intruders (Innana? Psyche? Mary Smith?). Meanwhile, head number two thinks it’s been a long time since the whole shooting match had a relaxing swim in the swamp. It could almost be funny, if it wasn’t my life I was describing!

For me the simple act of sitting down in front of a computer brings on a nasty case of Hydra-itis. First I have to decide: am I there in the capacity of a teacher? A student? A writer? All occupations I am regularly locked into, and all simultaneously needing work to be done. Yesterday. And a few of those are the kind that spring double replacement heads if you try to lop them off. The teacher may have her attention absorbed by equity projects at one university, extension courses at another, part-time semester teaching (up to three subjects at two universities), and guest lecture spots in various specialized courses. If I’m in my writerly identity I could be doing an article, a story, a section of a novel, a letter to a magazine. Or, I could be sliding into my student identity and trying to compile a week’s research into one insightful paragraph. Is it any wonder there is a constant sibilant hiss in my mind(s) which resembles a badly tuned radio station? Is it any wonder that I’m not the friendliest at times?

I know well organized people will say that what is needed in this situation is prioritizing—figure out which jobs are most urgent, make a list, start at the top of the list and knock off each job as it gets finished. My reflexive answer to that is that well organized people don’t choose my kind of life style in the first place. My more considered answer is, while I do concede that a degree of organization is essential to run a rig like the Hydra, it’s probably a brand of organization that few people would understand, let alone subscribe to. This is because in a writer/student/lecturer/single mother kind of life prioritizing has to be organized and reorganized on a daily basis—sometimes even on an hourly basis, depending on what’s coming in over the transom. And it’s certainly not done in any way that would be approved of by a late twentieth century time and motions expert.

This is probably because the Hydra just doesn’t fit modern concepts of time and space. She’s illogical, anomalous, ancient and monstrous. She is an archetypal creature existing outside documented historical periods—straddling centuries, potent as a junction between a number of realities, refusing to be categorized and making a helluva noise. And she is not just some ancient Olympian genetic experiment gone wrong, her physiology and her habitat are still powerfully symbolic for us today. She reminds us uncomfortably of things that Walt Disney thought he’d expelled from nursery nightmares.

For a start, she is a creature of liminal spaces, spending much of her time in swamp lands. Sometimes she plunges into deeper waters for a cleansing swim, but often she walks on muddy land that sucks at her feet and she dips her body into murky, fetid marshes that are stagnant and reek of toxic algal blooms. As someone who has never subscribed to a rigid Freudian boundary between the conscious and unconscious, I can see that a creature which symbolically moves in the permeable interface between two such mediums as water and land has some kinship with the woman writer whose pen constantly scratches up against invisible borders and dredges up culturally denied muck. I can see the Hydra could be a muse of sorts to that kind of a writer, feeding visions of marginality, and exemplifying crossed and violated boundaries in her own existence, in her plural identities, in her (sometimes) unacceptable difference.

The Hydra’s inarticulate heads (does she growl? bellow? whine?) could even be interpreted as the underrepresented, feminized impulses of our culture, the drives that are unacknowledged or designated inexplicable and inferior. Perhaps one of her heads emotes, operating from an intense kaleidoscope of feelings? Perhaps one is driven by instinct, that animal sense that bristles at danger and smells fear? It’s possible that one exhibits the often derided psychic factor of intuition, reading patterns in patterns. These are alternatively experienced realities that women writers often try to give voice to. That process of giving/finding voice often starts as the sad and unearthly ululations of poetry and then may progress to the sticky autobiographical stories that so often threaten, like quicksand—like Tillie Olsen’s vast cultural silences—to pull them back under.

Should the writer get as far as speaking her personal truth in her tales, she may well become a “Cassandra” according to the theorists, categorized as an hysteric, trying to express her suppressed female subjectivity by using phallocratic language. Be that debate as it may, Cassandra’s madness only becomes an issue when she has already penetrated the temples and castles of Troy and encountered resistance there. The Hydra, the creature I am interested in at the moment, predates the prophetess’s more refined encounter with patriarchy. She is driven—as it were—from sub-aquatic comfort to mournfully bellow out a primal consciousness on an, as yet, uncivilized shore.

The Hydra is the urge to make sense of a complex life that is not orderly, the desire to participate and progress beyond designated roles. She is the creature that moves what is repressed and denied towards the walls of the city. Only, of course, to find that the homes of princes and peasants alike are defended from the appearance of problematic monsters like her by crews of heroic blokes with names like Odysseus, Hercules, Theseus and Perseus. But she persists. And in her uncoordinated existence as a category crisis, in her attempt to recognize multiple identities (her own and others), in her very impulse to write, she offers the first barely integrated manifestation of a feeling, intelligent, sensate, intuitive woman trying to find her land legs.

I know a lot of people could be disturbed to read such a primal and gendered construction of the processes of a science fiction writer, but this is what writing is like to me. It has never been a purely intellectual exercise. I’m not sure I want to sketch out blueprints for a new and better world, as much feminist utopian writing does, and I’m definitely not interested in producing social critiques from some sort of high moral ground. It’s not that I’m apolitical, far from it. It’s just that it’s sometimes too easy to be a critic. And I certainly do not want to contribute to the shelves of overheated fantasies of technological and electronic mastery. No, I need to be a critic and a player in my own life. So my science fiction writing is ultimately a search for a personal and cultural synthesis. Technology is part of the synthesis, science is part of it too, as is social criticism. However—ultimately arresting as technology, science and social criticism are in their extremities—they must signify meaning for me personally or I cannot use them. The head is no good (however many one has) if it is detached from the body, the body will not reflect reality accurately if it is only feeding on one aspect of culture. If one head of the Hydra insists on only eating junk food, the other heads will become sluggish. Variety is needed. Balance is needed.

To me the genre of sf was always attractive because it allowed me to be grounded in my complex and sometimes painful realities at the same time as it allowed my flights of fantasy and my poetic vision. I have always wanted to write a literature that incorporates my personal process as well as my observations, experiences and knowledge of the world. I want to write maps of how to get there from here, even when I’m totally unsure of where there is. And I want to drag all of my idiosyncratic interests with me—my feminist politics and my anxieties about feminist politics; my deep psychological attachment to myth; my interest in scientific knowledge and my simultaneous resistance to any absolute claims it might make; my understanding of culture as a subjectively experienced irresistible force; my belief in the necessity of spirit and beauty—even in a stainless steel age; my many, many skepticisms, questions and contradictions, and the challenge of my self-perceived monstrousness and differences.

It’s a big ask, a genre/theory/creative expression that can accept and represent such an eclectic and personalized approach, but it exists. A school of thought underwrites my fiction, permits my grab-bag of knowledge, rewrites boundaries with me and offers the distorted intellectual mirrors I love to gaze into. I discovered I am a cyborg.

The Hydra is not only monster, it is also cyborg—it defies conventional biological taxonomy, blurring borders both within its body and its environment. Its many necks insinuate over each other in reptilian caresses while a loving, loyal mammalian heart beats within its canine body. It patrols the gates of Hades, the boundary between life and death, the membrane between consciousness and non-consciousness, and I share some of its issues. I am monster and cyborg too. These blurrings, pluralities and dangerous border skirmishes are also mine—in my fictional writing, in my studies and teaching, in my political existence and in my very body.

Cyborg politics are heavily feminist. The cyborg represents a (not so) repressed desire to express difference, the cyborg exists on the borders of confusion and the possible, the cyborg is a carnivalesque creature which eludes conventional definitions. And that is me, in more ways than I really care to be. Monstrous and cyborg. As a single mother, I have spent nearly two decades surviving in the fringes of an ailing patriarchy. As a novelist I am currently rewriting humans as children of the sea. As a student and a teacher my passion is for remapping evolution and then using evolutionary theory to redraw cultural maps. My politics comes out on every level as I explore the “alien” that is within and without, and I see my life as the intersection of multiple—often competing—discourses (as I also see myself excluded from many other discourses).

And—finally—as a body? Well, it would seem almost too ironic if, in my search for synthesis in genre, I were to bodily prove myself a science fictional creature, a cyborg/monster, wouldn’t it? But I can. Failing organs ensure that within a certain space of time I will have to avail myself of one of two options or find myself tapping on the gates of Hades for admission. The first option is to live through a machine which will clean my blood when my own kidneys can no longer do it. I’ve already had my body adapted to do that and my left forearm snakes with thickened veins which emit a constant, Hydran buzz. The second is to accept a transplanted organ, to accept a foreign body into my own, to know part of me as alien. To know myself, my own flesh, as a cobbled together reality, dependent on the overwhelming generosity of a friend or the overwhelming generosity of unknown people who support human organ donation after death.

There are likely, of course, to be other options in the future. Embryonic stem cells could be fused with my own body cells to regrow a kidney that would not be rejected. My own kidney, which would not necessitate the harsh intrusion into my body of immunosuppressant drugs—a dream, a fantasy, a science fictional reality bonding my body to my reading, my writing, my study. The ultimate synthesis. Or, in a strange parody of the tangled species line of the Hydra, I could receive the kidney of a pig bred with human DNA in its cells. In undergoing what is known as xenotransplantation, my body could cross one of Donna Haraway’s famous cyborg boundaries and combine animal and human with an already recombinant animal/human entity. Human. Animal. Monster. Alien. In joining body, emotion, instinct and intuition I have become a surprising creature with an ancient pedigree. In synthesizing creative work, intellectual investigation and cultural boundary crossings I have become a living cyborg. I am skin deep a woman, but my spirit is unexpected, difficult for me to sort out and sometimes difficult for others to encounter. Unless, of course, they happen to be Hercules and one of his good mates. Then that might become a different story…