by Sarah Treadwell and Paul Veart

Cixous, in the story "Shared at Dawn," writes of finding a dead bird caught in a trellis in her house only to discover that it was still alive and sought by her cat. Instinctively she released the bird to the despair of her cat who sought the bird in the house long after its departure to the other side of the city. Cixous regretted her action.

'I've betrayed my counterpart, my betrothed, my little bride with the boundless heart; oh my god if that bird comes back I will give it to her I swear - yes it is better that I swear, surer that way, yes, if it came back, I too would play with its lukewarm little body, I'd give it sharp little blows with my paw and I'd slit its throat cheerfully.'⁹

Cixous momentarily lets the cat in herself surface as she deals to the bird. Invoking the law she swears to sanction her own cat-like desires. Cixous sees relationships between animals and humans in metaphorical, dream-like terms: 'animals are important for me because I can't imagine human beings other than as animals in transition ... I need the instinctiveness and the wildness in a human being. So when I meet people in reality, or in dreams, there's always a kind of animal awake in the person.'¹⁰

Drawings too are part of the instinctive wildness of the animal but they are socially conditioned and claimed as combatative. Cixous writes; "...every drawing (is) combat(s) itself. Drawing is the emblem of all our hidden, intestine combats."¹¹ In the animation, Beyond, appetites, senses and instincts are represented, constructed and unknowable.

Yoko, in her apartment, talks on the phone and simultaneously gets food ready for her cat. Yoko is ambiguously child and adult; she lives alone and is responsible for her cat; its physical necessities are a proof of life. Yoko herself is drawn with her body rotating across and around the bed as she chats and looks for her cat simultaneously. Her movements are sinuous and unselfconscious; cat-like she seems to lack bones.

From her carefully rendered apartment Yoko hears, unnaturally acutely, the sound of her cat's bell in the city into which she descends. The spatial nature of sound is aligned to filmic technique; there is a sudden blackness signalling the erasure of the visual world in the speed of movement. A heightened sense of animal hearing momentarily predominates. Cixous writes with her senses: 'by apprehension, with noncomprehension, the night vibrates, I see it with my ears...'.¹²

After enquiring as to the whereabouts of her cat from neighbours Yoko is told by a boy that her cat is at a haunted house. Yoko and the children stand on a chain mesh fence and look across the city to the distant site of the house that is marked by a rainbow.

The film then cuts to the city where a woman attempts to control a leashed dog as it slathers and barks at the approach of a menacing looking truck. The dog is wild with fear and the woman who holds him seems anxious. Dogs, once wolves, are nervously presumed to be domesticated. In Beyond the leashed dog intimates imminent alteration; it barks at that which will eventually destroy paradise. To draw is not to be domesticated according to Cixous: like the frantic dog that senses destruction so too painters might draw because "drawing is the right to tumult, to frenzy."¹³

Yoko walks towards the barricaded haunted house. It is not a singular house but rather a conglomeration of variable structures. She enters the decaying interior that opens into a courtyard and sees a can floating just above the ground. Around it golden butterflies play. Even while the tin floats above the ground it is still subject to gravity that holds it aloft while the butterflies move lightly in three dimensions and, in their animation, actively resist gravity.¹⁴

For Cixous the relationship between ground and foot, a relationship of gravity, is uncertain: she cannot find firm footing: "Graze the paper with the soul's foot, and immediately the foot slips."¹⁵ She writes of an agitation that reigns in drawing - drawing as essay, as trial; the butterflies in Beyond point to the provisional nature of the tin's suspension and the certainty of its fall.

The haunted house in the animation is internally labyrinthine and rather than being a discrete object it is riven with internal openings. The house has at its (multiple) heart a leak; rain falls in from a broken roof. Mark Cousins has written of the horror that a leaking roof provokes with its undermining of house/body security.¹⁶ But the internal cascade in Beyond has the opposite effect; gleaming trajectories of water make small bell-like noises and cast prismatic light as a halo, the leak is portrayed as wondrous. For Cixous, far from being damaging, the leak that shimmers, the error in construction, is to be sought: '...to what extent we can't do without the silvery burst of error, which is the sign, [like a rainbow] all those who go by pen don't cease to marvel at this in a similar way, from century to century.'¹⁷