photo by Σπύρος-Ίωνας Μαρκάτης
He pauses a moment and listens to his breathing. Then he continues:
“But even if I find her, will it last for ever? I’m afraid. I’ve seen ‘I’ll love you for ever’ do the wall of death across every lover’s lips so many times…”
Well, so much for “love”… Could access there be genetic? How do they call the wave that time and again washes me up on her shore, leaving a bit of me at her feet every now and then? How can I pull my foot loose from the sand it piles up on me? Would it suffice if every morning’s awakening was the first awakening? Each love was the first love? What clay should I use to mould it?
All these questions danced with the light and the shadows in the magic forest of his mind. Now and again, the twigs of his thoughts that beckoned him softly like lustful lovers, granted him a different view point to chase after and loose himself, like Hansel and Gretel, inside a murderous sweetness.
Her thigh… her shin… the words twirling around her short skirt… the eyes of men staring at her, making her stumble at every step… Pity I can’t have everything in one! I’ve met from weirdoes to sex-bombs, but never a woman who could win me over with words that carry the weight of a riddle and turn me on at the same time. On the rails of my dreams, and on her teats. That’s were the stakes are. But from afar I hear the whistle of the train coming towards me. Will I get out in time? Blood, darkness, scabies, frogs… the seven plagues of the Pharaoh frighten me. I see women watching me from beach beds and colourful parasols. While the Red Sea closes its waters over the heads of lovers swimming cheerfully in the shallows.
Ezekiel Query leaned against the side of his armchair and stroked the beard adorning his chin. His hair, dangling in a loose pony-tail behind his neck, made him look like a student although he was pushing forty. In the pause he made room for between them, two words passed before his eyes: “I” and “You”.
Who’s the “I” and who’s the “You”? God Pain reigns everywhere. The victim dies a slow death with an indelible drop of blood on him… a drop of pleasure that tarnishes his image. It makes it murky and on the opaqueness of his skin the trickster’s sneer trickles wrinkles. He climbs a step. He pauses, listening for the echo of his footsteps. A landing. Then another step invites him to climb it. He pauses to see the trampling of feet that designate his future. He hears them coming behind him. A landing. He’s made it… but still… another step bids him forward… Who put pain in the sanctuary of his body?
Another crime, then…
His thought considered him and let his arm drop heavy on the armchair, breaking the silence in small sharp shards that clattered to the floor.
“It’s probably that image…” the patient under analysis stammered “… of being shut in a bottle and observing the world from the inside… I live life through a glass jar…”
“Hmmm… like the jinni in Aladdin’s lamp…”
During the in-between pause an association of thoughts made itself perceptible to Mr. Query and it ran something like this:
Some guilty neuron excretes neurotransmitter P which contacts the receptors of another neuron’s tree house… Something’s wrong, then, with the neurons “excreting” the image of a primordial pain represented as brand-new and fresh. But what triggered it? What is the stimulus that made the bottle become his glass pain and he himself… a written message… like the ones they cast into the sea in times of old… yes, why not? A letter will always reach its destination, Lacan used to say, because the repressed will always return to the scene of the crime, no matter what. There’s no repression without return of the repressed. Some symptom or other will break the smooth surface of the sea of sighs… Besides, it has no name yet, apparently. Will its name come, I wonder, where the name of its symptom was?
Thanos… Thanatos….
The home he must depart from in order to find his truth is the home of the symptom. But the symptom is housed in his body and outside that the fear of the unknown is at large. Anguish also winks at him, even though he camouflages it temporarily behind the image of the “horse” which scares him. The fear of fear becomes a phobia…
Now I have to find the recipient of this symptom.
