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.

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 monarchy in 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.

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.




* Some material is taken from selected writings of Julia Kristeva (1941-)