“I am abject, that is mortal and speaking”
Powers of Horror, An essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva, Columbia University Press, New York, 198
“I am abject, that is mortal and speaking”[1]
I actually met Julia Kristeva in Toronto the day the Blue Jays won the world series. Her texts, translated in to English, (I know no French), provide the basis for most of my thinking and writing about language and desire, abjection and depression. Here let me show you.
Lights dim
SCREEN ABJECT A (Short Cut) The first 2 minutes I thought
A
Ah. Open wide. Aha. Ada. Da.
Abasement: For her gaze, for her touch, I will do anything.
She treats me like shit. She loves me. She loves me not.
My mouth is full of it, hard as it is
to get my tongue around it.
A
is for amulet, is for ankle, a is for amputation
Cast off cast off, donated for a prosection, (see also percentages under P)
I call the new surgeon to replace my ankle with a titanium joint, reach only an answering machine, Wait is the answer; six to nine months, wait for ever – a lesson my father left me in his dying. He read his Bible. I read Beckett. We reached the same conclusion though I’m not finished yet. See also V .
I could be dead tomorrow my mother used to say to invite a visit, but and there I was next to her as she lay dying. I wrote The Dead Mother, after Barthelme’s The Dead Father, in the fall’s Labour Day Three Day Novel Writing Classic years ago. The Dead Mother was buried first. I was unprepared for the weight of the casket and stumbled, straightening up hearing her say from inside the casket “straighten up!” [2]
My depression lifted after her coffin was laid in her concrete vault. I was the only person at graveside to catch the typo on the lid of the vault being lowered into place by the backhoe. ENNF not ENNS. I joke when asked to spell my last name that it is spelled E double N S, but the E is silent.
The poem “The Walnut Cupboard” about my mother’s passing (one poem in the sequence, ‘Further on up the Road,” nails it.). “My Father’s Garden” about his dying and death was also included in the book “Lucky Man,” published in 2005. My father died in 2006.
A|
is for Annihilation
BACK TO THE BEGINNING
To begin again with a clean white
sheet no skid-marks, no siree!
The cleaner and his moustache are steam cleaning
the floor in the hallway, clean clean I tell you.
God is in his closet with his vacuum suction
a blow hard, in reverse. Bye by canary.
My eye-sight is hindered by scratches on my glasses
witch em up for a singled focus to eyeball my computer
brilliantly flashing shrapnel of my last Freudian visit
hoorah hoorah for psychotherapy for day to day it will do
Psychoanalysis, like God and my mother, have been laid
to rest in the riverbank, or is that too easy, what if
the score of y/our life was written on musical staves
with repeats (divorces say) codas, solos and encores
make my throat sore
Too full for emptying my thinking lets loose a scream
not heard in nature, weeding out the bad words
right to the first ever
turd on the run[1]
Anal ysis
Well GeeZ, there is no Jesus;
shot out of a canon[2]
high lilly hi low.
[1] What a banal finish
[2] Here we are again, one n or two?