stag at sharkey's

I wave my hands in front of me

“When I imagine the homunculus, it feels stable to me as a form that cannot be
undone. Maybe that’s a misinterpretation but right now I feel estranged from myself. I’m no longer a child, but not quite the adult I had expected to be. Or the expectations I had are no longer serving the purposeful defense they held as stationary endpoints of becoming. Everywhere, I’m coming to a sudden realization of the world as though I had been blind my whole life. Before: ideas, memories, futures, and people seemed finite and graspable. Very little of what I had held as real or as truth has remained. I’m changing. That’s why an idea of the self as a small thing inside my head seems comforting—but only right now, as a soothing, self-lulling image.”

Read the rest of my contribution to In the Flesh Blog.

Feeling Thought

In that ambiguous space between cognition and being, feeling thought is a transformation, a becoming.

Before his metamorphosis, Hermaphroditus already had his name. The transformed flesh followed like a definition:

It began between the legs where the nymph grafted her desire to his body. He was like a fabric that took to the water’s capillary pulse thrusting upward to the mind. Maybe the motion was altogether different. It could have come from above, his flesh taking hers as its own, a thought that bound itself to his skin. A new language that could not be spoken without a corpus being felt.

In another myth, becoming is the spiral of a flower as it closes into itself—the cruelty of mimesis—the stagnant mirror:

Narcissus had his name, too, as he melted into a petalled form, turning blindly towards a false center. What little self he could find he heard in Echo’s mirroring. She was the text to the image Narcissus saw in the water. Relegated to repetition, she provided the false reassurance of a bodiless word. To pronounce herself, just as herself, completely without the validity of his voice was impossible. She was the text to the image Narcissus saw in the water.

Feelingthought can be like this. Like touching skin through the artifice of cloth as water saturates the thread. The atomic distance between the person touching and the person being touched can be infinite. Oftentimes, the toucher and the touched are one in the same—searching inwards through the liminal film of water, unable to grasp the self.

Isn’t childhood like this? There is a tenuous divide between the child and the mother, and sometimes there is none. The child is an image unaware of his own voice, created from the mirror of his mother. However distant the voice becomes, it holds him. Grown, he will watch himself feel and think—as if these actions were disembodied. He will repeat her, even if only within the rippling surface of the self where the continuum of the mirror lies unbroken: Echo is Narcissus, Narcissus is Echo. For isn’t the mother in love with the child? And the child, stricken with love for her, is defined by the voice of the mother?

He feels the word surfacing from below. He thinks the feeling through as if it were a distant thing he could watch and maneuver with a rope, like a buoy miles away from the pier. He thinks softly as though any other way could hurt—as though a thought could penetrate the flesh.

Any intimacy he gains, he claims through a painful rediscovery of his own self: the pouring out of the voice, the re-flooding of feeling—undoing the marks of memorized identity.

I feel hurt, sad, angry, frustrated. I’m bereft.

When he gives names to feelings there is simultaneous splitting and conjoining of word and pulse into meaning. Thought followed by feeling, or feeling swooped up by thought that defines it. No longer is the threshold a boundary but an infinite body of names, ideas, guttural poundings, heart leaps, wrenched desire speaking and touching each other in a plasmic ocean.

On the tip of the tongue or the visceral throb of the stomach….

Language forms as it catches itself.

~Aldrin Valdez