Anxiety Banquet

The house is a bird’s very person; it is its form and it’s most immediate effort, I shall even say, it’s suffering. The result is only obtained by constant repeated pressure of the breast. There is not one of these blades of grass that, in order to make it curve and hold the curve, has not been pressed on countless times by the bird’s breast, its heart, surely with difficulty breathing, perhaps even, with palpitations. (Jules Michelet, L’oisseau, 4th Edition, 1858)

At the banquet, the mother never spilled a drop or made a stain, never let loose a lick. I looked on in pain as she groomed her steaming dishes in a mechanized waltz - gravy, candied berries, honeyed ham, creamed potatoes, she lifting, stirring and separating with her cooking wands; clean, fresh and cold like a young pearl protected from the sticky, hot, spicy stink of those foods pulsing beneath their white lids until dinner time.

The tendency of crystals, certain minerals and rocks is that they break in preferred directions so as to yield more or less smooth surfaces, called cleavage planes. These are interfaces, they are like cracks, they are the gem's defense against boundary confusion. They yield what appears to be solid, smooth units, flat units, contained units; but it is the cracks that reference my lost hopes*

I prayed I was a border crosser, that I had double visions, that I could please the banquet mother and the banquet father without deserting myself.

I looked at each of the faces at the banquet. The sister, the brother, the stepsiblings, the uncles and animals and Grandma with her vanishing fingers glued to her golden goblet of wine. The aunt, who said, "I'm taking something." Who said, firmly, "I'm much better" and "much happier," automatism circling her face like a snake.

This one had a sister, whose every pore gleamed with the extempore flame of her mechanism; her breathe reeked of it as she excreted it in mists of vaporous ribaldry she flung about the table like fire sparks. You could tell the lens she looked through into the world made it bright. “I’ve found it,” she began dramatically, “a light for the night.” You couldn’t blame her for accepting it, this notion that there was no panacea, only little rushes of calculated euphoria (and the people you could love while the fury of the night in your heart rots out its fire) despite the deficits and disappointments that always rushed in like a flood. That you should find comfort and rush in, claw at it – until it made you an animal, a swan that sinks crying.

“The brain tissue, it conducts electricity! And these burdensome psychological thresholds, how they burst!” she sung, spittle gleaming from the crevices of her narrow animal teeth.

I looked deeper into this garden of the banquet, where inhabited space transcended the geometrics of the dining room. I saw the ancestral milk running into rivers and around islands, the putrid vegetable dust of dead mothers who shoved their brains in ovens, or drowned themselves in food and drink. Each ghost bloomed like a flower in its bed. I saw the anxiety that hung around these ghosts, and how what they could not master in life wrapped them like a cloak after death.

The banquet food called to me, shrilly, calling for me to make it my refuge. With syrup and butter married upon my hands I might have fashioned myself a large cradle. Would I submit to its terror? Would I refuse to eat? My little heart stayed back, she starved. My skin played the part of the classic daughter, the daughter seduced by glittering packages and holiday romance, pony-tailed, milk-drinking, rosey-cheeked and chirpy, chiming in during the discussion of safe topics (The weather. Recipes. Technology. Money. Finances) warmly from my very first nest.

Suddenly my lungs and all the other bodily drums ignited, listening to her, this beast that flooded the table with her monster music, her pitch rising against the sinking frowns of the monkey chorus, “I know in what pocket a woman keeps her heart and soul, and in what jostle of the liver, kidneys and genitalia these pockets are pilfered. There is no pure sorrow. Why? It is bedfellow to the lungs, lights, bones, guts and gall!”

Slap. My little heart skipped away for the moment, stolen by revery, still hungrily looking, for nourishment.

My little heart ran from the banquet, from its ominous aroma, that thick stink that struck the air like a bellwether. She ran under careless moonbeams into the forest, where she could dance too much under the stars that rubbed away filial tethers.

How freely the imagination remakes space. My heart danced with the Wilis that night during the banquet while my body could not. If you don't know them, the Wilis are womenlike creatures that appear to mortal men in the night. They take pleasure in the seduction of these men, enticing them and vanishing, luring them into a dance that can only end in their death from exhaustion.

My heart (pulsing, palpitating) thrust herself into this beastly underworld. I wanted the felicitous liaison I made in the forest with the Wili's to invade the banquet where my skin and bones still remained. Could this dream skip from soul to soul?

This garden that grew up all around me during the banquet was fierce, and I felt like a swelling fruit pressing up against its sides. My body sectioned out into independent events - skin, mouth, limbs and of course, my internal organs, which won out in the end for being so hot, so angry, bubbling over from their pots and spilling out like lava on the crisp white table cloth, the cream carpet, burning the hands of the mother and sister and brother and the tongues of the animals as they licked up my hot spilling flesh.


- material in italics has been taken from Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1937)