Thirteen years later (2002), while teaching a seminar on Body and Gender, I finally read Lacan. His words serve as my introduction, but the bracketed, bold sections are taken from Marge and Grace, offering direct points of contact between his thoughts and what I was up to over a decade ago:
“What did I try to get across with the mirror stage?
[But I need you still
I still want to need you don't forget
The mirror
With this ring
In game fields
I thee wed
To have and to hold
To be bought raped and sold]
That whatever in man is loosened up, fragmented, anarchic, establishes its relation to his perceptions on a plane with a completely original tension. The image of his body is the principle of every unity he perceives in objects. Now, he only perceives the unity of this specific image from the outside, and in an anticipated manner. Because of this double relation which he has with himself, all the objects of his world are always structured around the wandering shadow his own ego. They will all have a fundamentally anthropomorphic character, even geomorphic we could say. Man’s [Marge’s] ideal unity, which is never attained as such [Grace] and escapes him at every moment, is evoked at every moment in this perception. The object is never for him definitively the final object, except in exceptional experiences. But it thus appears in the guise of an object from which man is irremediably separated, and which shows him the very figure of his dehiscence within the world—object which by essence destroys him, anxiety, which he cannot recapture, in which he will never truly be able to find reconciliation, his adhesion to the world, his perfect complimentarity on the level of desire. It is in the nature of desire to be radically torn
[Desire means hardly having
On the scale of desperation
Driven back by having hope to having
Is the hopelessness of wanting]
The very image of man brings in here a mediation which is always imaginary, always problematic, and which is therefore never completely fulfilled. It is maintained by a succession of momentary experiences, and thus experience either alienates man from himself, or else ends in a destruction, a negation of the object … There is something originally, inaugurally, profoundly wounded in the human relation to the world"
[So there you were hanging out in Hell
No tour-guide
No nothing
No black and white fraud to fall back on,
Then what did you do?]
(Jacques Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego,” 1953; cited from The Body, Blackwell, 1999, p. 221 and 222; emphasis added, brackets added)
Part I:
The Countryside
***
Adolescent concrete paces synthetic lights
Conducting November streets past exhausted nights
Turning mornings
To metallic ticks of mourning
Curved and congealed in my reflection
How can I possibly pretend
To sing a song for ourselves anymore?
Harmonize to calm displacement
Wrenched for judgement
Where judges crawl and crane for the switch
To fall on occasions creased and beaten
Broken in tune to a chair.
And to there we stream
As rhinos trail a storm
Swallowed in flesh-
Blue trees paste themselves up in preparation
While morning sounds under sweet tangerine streets
And mute whales stir in deserts;
Gathering the remains of our general
And gentle play of displacement
Weathered inside an epiphany of grace.
***
The class turned
When she slammed her fist into the formica
Humming a mid-high school song sung for war
Saying
To do that is
Not right yes not right at all.
No, not right, not right at all
The class echoed with turned bent heads,
Wondering where Marge was going;
Or if she was going at all.
Something I think she said
Is wrong here weak but
I can't find it just yet and paused.
But don't you, she waved at the class
Don't you like Henry
Dream at least of the typical
March to glory
It's to glory we go to glory we go high ho to
She looked up and
"But Henry ran." The teacher said.
Oh yes of course
She said looking down
He ran back
He had the courage to run a re-evaluation and took a
Breath to say
Haven't you ever run backwards before tripping sick and
Marge was standing the teacher staring and
The class quiet.
No, I suppose you haven't. Palms wet sticking
She sat back down.
***
A reflex to fury
Veins contemporary washes
Of brown-feet-boredom
Buried in the rumble seat
Where no notes orchestrate order
No news bring plans and
Barely ideas just just.
***
The swell was due to a rise in taxes paid
After an inheritance made on
Garage-sale items coming complete with the
Obligation to make a profit from nothing
Turning space into gold as
Rumpelstiltskin lumped over the land.
***
Fumbling through exercises of swollen compression
Sows hindsight as foresight
Where
Hurried chalk figures
Rise from pitted sidewalks
When the earth begins to rock
Take care to follow the prescribed precautions that prevent
Unwarranted overflows of motion
Resonating on a spasm
Wired for self-destruction
In cast-ironed emotion.
***
Because there was no parade
Said the well-trimmed
Light acnied and hackneyed pilot
Before he dropped into the flak flakking
And the bullets bulleting
Part II:
The Chair
When was the fight ?
Being local war as our grandest metaphor
No I mean what was the name?
Oh that was the Civil--
After the Revolution, before the Mexican and
The rage of two Worlds
(eat a monument for the meat of an archetype);
But listen to the best step of the pattern:
Civil as in civilians
People as in massed
And battle as in exquisite self-
Containment inside thousands-deep
Sporadically spoken in
Buttons and
Brass illumined;
Reflecting from sea to
What a rotten romantic
You are Grace yes see us with
Little pieces of
Tripping now rocking
Oh my failing frail heart
Broken in a Gothic nightmare.
***
No.
No.
No.
That was the Vietnam war.
That's where I lost my legs
In the middle of the day breaking
Would you believe it?
Crossing her arms she leaned forward giggling.
Marge.
What?
You didn't lose your legs
Now come on
Would you get up from that horrible chair
For at least for a little while?
Why is there such a problem with me
And the Chair?
I like sitting here and besides I
She sighs
Get up every single day day in day out
I get up and
Go to bed or to the bathroom.
And to eat,
Why Marge just a reason and
Don't tell me
The Im-studying-the-leaves
Turn-as-nobody-has-before-reason
I mean if you won't tell me maybe
You'd like somebody
Professional? A professional?
I’d kill him before he drove in the driveway
And I could too because
I can smell professionals
And their professional cars miles away;
Marge
She stretched her arms out angling them
Back and forth eyebrows arched
Head back wondering about the color red
Marge why
Why what
For chrissakes Marge I'm waiting
Waiting? waiting for what ?
For what?
She pulled her hands in
And pushed them out again
Straining the fingers to white
Oh right you're waiting for wrestling
Will you check what channel its on?
***
Well does she sit there all day?
All day.
Prostrate in what she describes as
"An irritating albeit fascinating gesture of wallowing"
And she won't switch to the other side of the room.
Says her chair has to be orange.
And not just any orange but the orange of a
"Rainy night over an especially polluted city."
***
I am the tinted Marble-Master
Celebrated discriminator of dying and
All trips taken to the
Grace jumped to the top
Of the table and froze mid-pose.
Frozen frozen you're stuck Marge
Laughed
I but my head's driving at four thousand miles an
And yours?
No more we're barely moving
Like at about more now get
The bag get the Grace saw the bag
On the chair and lunged grasping in fans
Grabbing and raising
(a mistaken flag)
The bag she shouted and shoved it at
Marge eyes eclipsed in pupils
I could have got it my self give
Oh but I just remembered Grace said
Slapping her hand on her stomach
Slamming and sliding down the fluorescent-leopard wall
I just remembered
The veritgo.
***
Vertigo employs emotionless tallies That's Vertigo Vertigo Vertigo, Bono
Of hours' ticking exfoliation and
The second after next's virtue;
The employer of change,
Description and Air Florida crashes into an
Already wounded, but the bridged
And pilgrimaged to with historic procession
City of tomorrow;
Today's fatigue
Boiled with yesterday's
Energy bursting to make our neon clean with
The final absence of visible
Physical infection.
And is the employer of rushes of hope
Holding out for
A decongestant friendliness
Without friends, but
Ideals encasing and of course embracing
A dry-tango of democracy.
And is the mother and father too
Of the net-weighed contents
Of aqua blue spilling
Supporting and numbing.
This is our ocean
Our trembling ocean
Thickens with dramatic pollution
Appeasing political environmentalists
So at least they can have a clear moment placed in the face of
What we feel and wallow in as expectation.
***
Only wanting it to be as before trailing steady ambition
Of practiced self-arrest.
No guts but aluminum
Verbal glory.
***
They both leaned back and stared
At pink curtains striking a pose of leprosy
Filmed through smoke over back-lit pines.
Pause.
How does it look ?
Red crimson like Marge nauseated a sweat to
The edge of the chair
Re-lighting the pipe she'd been hunched over packing
Like that! she pointed at the glowing pot and
Grace stopped and stared
Her face fired mid-hit in reflection
And marbles she continued stretching for the pipe
Dropping the lighter
Quit dropping the lighter you always drop the fucking lighter
Do you real, Grace said drawing an eel in the air, ize
How difficult it is to move?
Oh shut up, you just don't know how to
Hold on
I don't know how to hold on
Guess again
Now what were you rambling about
Oh, the Marbles,
And can they move?
No you do
You do dressed as the Ring-Master, striped jester,
Telling tales in certain susceptible acceptance
And to tell then
(Ask yourselves)
Demands rent for loquacious reason.
Hysterical laughter.
***
It's our florescent fantasy,
A mark of the times
Nailing the backdrop of our artistic dignity
To document the shift as a shift
And not as a Cathedral-promoting symbol,
But right
Like I said,
A beat of kaleidoscope motion
Stuck first to summer-legs
Promising
Ever-browner sensibilities
Because we increasingly take
Not only our bodies to vacation and bake them
In dangerous sub and tropical suns
But our heads when we think
They are wrinkled enough to reach the standard
Of what currently documents beauty
But mostly free time spent
In vanity, we dress them
In the reckless extremes the processed
Extremes dashing one into a pair of
Flashing striped stretch
Pants a slightly different description, but
Much more pleasant to accept in a unison of forgetting,
A description of our drugs
But as I see it to say it
It's the same thing and
There's no way this is to be stopped
This florescent plague,
No so relax in the celebration of
The motion and the bright predictability
Of the excess;
Mimic the electricity and
Become the colors if you really
want
***
Figments of guilt
Bond with straining wakes
Of needing beyond wanting
Want; our world of desires is a
Weak world pretending indifference while
Desire means hardly having
On the scale of desperation
Driven back by having hope to having
Is the hopelessness of wanting.
Needing displaced in all of its desperate forms
Is not wanting nor retarded by hoping,
But the first steps towards pointed and concrete
Getting.
Wading in hope
Catalogues disposable accomplishment
Approved and processed by
Realized desperation
And naturally we can spot this in the eyes.
***
Direction is weakened wanting
Emerging from the initial impulse
To collapse over any kind of given goal.
But to the authentically desperate:
Destinations become historically oblique strongly suggesting
This is hardly a question of choice
But bred of a motion made unable to move.
***
Don't you ever move
From that chair?
It's time for you to
Shut up
Do something with yourself
I said shut up
Won't you
Listen to
No not anybody not any body at all Marge thought and
Wandered instead
***
And then Hell split open
Right before my salted eyes
I’m with you
So what did you do?
I said Virgil Virgil dear sweetheart
Where are you now when I need you
Inside the rolling drama:
Thunder thunder thunder
She said hands raised head down
And what could I possibly do
For reason
And was he there?
Marge laughed and pulled another hit
Staring at Grace faded through the smoke
Varnishing Christmas lights coughing white
Over an insipid holiday pink
In a room frantically masked with marble rings
Scraped across a floor sloped directly towards the door
Somehow somehow
I don't think I'll being seeing a sign
Of our veracious Virgil anytime soon.
***
Between nocturnal-blue
Incandescent dances
And orange-larvaed trances
The television glowed seconds of light
Sweating a day delightfully spent
Wrestling sitting and singing
So
Preparing before
By locking the door
Marge would rise to
Kick and tear
The fraying chair
Trying to scratch and peel
The weave from her skin to
Settle and shed letting it
Fall to the floor
Before going on to bed.
***
Irresponsible it's irresponsible
Do not
She said pausing to pick her teeth
Do not
Feed me that philanthropic bullshit bred from the truly
Mediocre American spirit.
Let the community rot
Without me.
How could you be so--
Everybody
Well great for everybody because
They're not
My everybody
Everybody has
Disowned me she said
Flipping through the T.V.Guide.
***
There was no gray then
But rice-field green
Marking the in between
I can't see it now
Can you see it
Before the Orange
After the Blue
After the Orange
Before the Blue
Where's the chopper the change I've been
Left to turn over
In the olive mud
Of a misshapen mid-afternoon
Summer sun and I'm softening
With gangrene that's crept from lost legs to
Marge held her head in her hands
My face has fallen
God Grace your son of bitch
For even thinking
A political construction,
Take your reeking inheritance and burn
This place beyond malicious
But somehow always
Delicious self-destruction.
***
So there you were hanging out in Hell
No tour-guide
No nothing
No black and white fraud to fall back on,
Then what did you do?
Well
I was beyond limbo with the lusting
Tortured for wanting
And more than your waiting late
For a ride sort of wanting
I'm talking the dropped down
On my knees whimpering kind
Of wanting but the worst part
Was that I was condemned
Not for committing
The sin which I no doubt at all
Will do I can't stop now but
For being on those disgraceful
You've seen me it's
Disgraceful
Yes Grace disgraceful Marge said
Knees and
Drugs drawing circles that were hardly through to
I think you're being too geometric
Grace the sin the sin
Do you know when it stops being that
Will you, can you
Really face it
As some sort of a sin,
a sin
It is a sin Marge
Yesterday now and maybe
I can't roll backward
To embrace that
Because it's all
It's all that I am
To meet that
Meets absence
That's your sin but
Maybe you're right
And that
Is just fear, listen though: just
Just Fear.
***
Exactly, like when I lost my legs for instance;
They lifted me out
By chopper deafening over dissolute rice
Listening to the rain
I couldn't stand the
I couldn't stop
Crying and not even crying
But blistering bleeding and pissing
Through all the dampness
And then it's not even deceit anymore
But a clear and focused vice
Tapping a great Thor's hammer
And after a while,
Because at first you really try,
I mean you really try every way to escape
But you give in and
Begin instead a boneless wait
Because the frigid realization
That you simply don't have the capacity to
Contain maintain and control it
Much less define it
So let me
Learn to walk to another after.
These kinds of after
Are the quietest times
(cotton harvest style)
To slip into gear with the
Rot
Because I know I know
What you're going through
Because this is what it is
To awake Grace
Told the cover of Newsweek magazine
Left behind by Tim two weeks ago hoping
Marge would at least make "an intellectual effort to
Join in with the rest of
Us out there."
***
She fell into the insect light with the neighbors picnicing
Not twenty feet away silent Mr. Wilson rising
At the first
But still to last
Because it was so effectively shattering
To watch the white trapped below the glass disintegrate to darkness
Marge face slowed walked away stick still in hand while
Mr. Wilson followed with a few what the hell, what the
Hell do you think,
Stuttering behind electric couch-lit nights alone
Until the new wife, the new sons, the new picnic table
And of course,
The new light had been bought and brought home
After checking through at least fifteen different
Department stores in and around Boston.