Phantom Limb

to the nursemaid who has loosened knots, burned through blocked passageways; musicated the very milk of my organs. what old rot having died off completely can come back dressed in sumptuous disguise? my very dangerous limb, where the soul cuts clean the mind sticks; there in its quilt of checks and balances, its illusions - imagining the imaginary - my limb awakening, like a phantom.

what better defense against the death instinct than the false self? shelter the symptom, sabotage my well-being in order to maintain the jouissance of anxiety! i was a disciple of dead thinking, icing the wound of a lost limb. the fable i wore on my body neatly eclipsed the larger myth, the myth of my singularity. it was my spectacle, it was me, confronted with all the pressure to conform to this notion of an embodied, higher social unit.

the imaginary - she is constantly sewing back and forth, tumbling over lines of motion in reverse, building thick ridges, she is always in exultant, intimate revolt. to what service would i direct her? to what height would i let her sublimations reign? she is the damaging of any single meaning. she will rush lengthwise along my nervous system until the signifiers begin to sing on their own.

she is the subject-in-process/on trial, stirring, sweating, singing; giver of a new gift, of parousia, love as a non-reciprocal, disequilibrium. if i clear her the room, she will provide nourishment that is never fixed, a line that will run through the body fashioning a lightscape, source becoming source, low and sweet, floral, rapturous. that feeling of serene mastery few physical things in this world have the power to produce. perhaps the sea? art as a secret exercise rivaling the wide blue sea and its way of extinguishing my thoughts so perfectly, so sublimely.

i constructed a purer fantasy; my mystical solution baring strange resemblance to the bitter root of my original malady. there had to be another way, a thorn pushed into my side in just the right place? you, my love, my shackle, my sticky leash,

whose terrible blood hit my skin and clung, shining like a diamond. you - beastly, bloody, unyielding, driving to the very highest pitches of happiness. a reminder of the animal world calling from outside my calculated solitude. were as all my mortal preoccupations wound tightly like a rope snaking down my throat and through my digestive tract curling neatly below my navel, you were bursting out of yours, your brilliant blood running from your tares and washing down the streets into the gutters and back out into the big wide field in which you roamed. you prohibited my retreat into the sealed imaginary, my transcending into cultivated light. moral compass? you had none. you had no borders, no boundaries, and your maniacal force snapped my very perfect edges. i approached the limits of my symptomatic and treasured flesh. you were as real as this very dark, this very external stain and i couldn’t bare to wash you off like the rest of my earthly tethers.

what was my internal necessity? the bone in my throat. candy bone, glitter bone, gutter bone, gun bone, gore bone. my geometry, my reservoir, my mote, my drinking straw, my lonely round.

* material appearing in italics is taken from selected writings of julia kristeva (1941-)