somewhere in the city…

there is a very small mirror, red in colour, stuck to the compound wall of an official building, a blue tarpaulin flutters aimlessly over it. the red mirror and the blue tarpaulin are the only traces that remain of the tea shack which also sold tobacco, biscuits, cigarettes, buttermilk, combs, locks, key chains, candies, and newspapers to fill the emptiness of afternoon breaks. this illegal shack, once frequented by many officials, has been officially uprooted; chances of it coming back are ambiguous – which means that it is entirely possible that it will never and always come back.

the mirror is so small that you have to look into it with some attention, to see what’s happening inside. if you do do that, you will find that the the city in the mirror moves slower than usual, and looks smaller than usual and every reflection that falls on the mirror – vehicles, people, cats, and shadows – all present and all passing, carry a distant air, as if they were images of the past – a miniature city, that lives its shadows – a copy of a copy made backwards in time. defying all theories of reproduction, the city of the mirror looks more accurate than the original.

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Saturday–

Reasonable, he says. What has come of him off late? She’s been especially cold to me lately and he’s noticed, I’m sure. Not that he claims to notice. He doesn’t seem to notice me at all these days and hasn’t for several years perhaps. Otto insists we leave them alone, but how can I! My poor father. How he has changed ever since we have come to Vienna. And now he wants me to meet a doctor. I faintly recall him from a previous meeting two years ago. An ugly middle-aged man, with the beady probing eyes behind round glasses and rancid breath. Father wants to send me off to him. To be reasonable, no less.

Tomorrow seems like a task, everyday feels like a task. Yet, tomorrow I need to be awake. I suspect in this doctor I might find a clue to father’s behaviour. That I must discern to the fullest extent before I decide what to do next, about father, Frau K, Herr K. I shall be patient and frank. That is my mandate for tomorrow.

Wednesday–

I remembered in clearer details the first few years at B_. The doctor was especially interested in what I thought of my father’s illnesses and whether his behaviour towards me changed in those years. I recalled my own illnesses which were recurring at the time, including the time I struggled with my breathing at the mountains. It’s strange but the doctor was curious about how my brother’s and father’s illnesses always preceded mine. But mine were graver, at least in the effect it had on my younger and rather more diminutive body. At this point of mine, the doctor jumped in to point out that this made it more apparent that my illness had something to do with both my father’s and Otto’s. I suspect the doctor believes I made up my illnesses out of jealousy. Today I noticed in him a curious little habit of tugging at his beard.

In an effort to satisfy my own curiosity, I launched into a little ramble in one of the sessions about Frau K’s alleged sickness every time Herr K was in town. She obviously did not want to be intimate with her husband. Sickness sometimes has benefits, I said. The doctor violently tugged his beard before he asked me how long my dyspnea lasted usually. Struck gold!

Sunday–

Today the doctor seemed quite pleased with me. He continued pursuing my earliest memories, a topic which has become an obsession for him. It seems almost impossible for me to remember what my earliest memories are, yet when he prods and pushes as I already know he will I seem to remember things. I told him I remember a day quite clear in my memory- perhaps when I was two years old I said, I was sitting next to my brother, sucking my thumb while tugging his ear. This particular story elicited the same familiar glint of satisfaction in him as when I speak about Herr K.

Through supper today I thought about this memory. I felt an intense urge to suck my thumb, and right in the middle of a second helping of mutton, I excused myself to simply find out what it felt like. My thumb smelled of spices. A sudden surge of violent coughing seized me and I quickly returned to the shank of cold mutton. Visiting the doctor makes me weary, as if the doctor knew better what my wet thumb tasted like.

Tuesday–

The doctor called home, requesting a brief meeting today. Not our usual day and of course I was not surprised, the thumb- sucking was quite an imagery I had constructed. I had let slip quite naively that I knew of sexual relations that involved more than the genitals.

Tuesday–

My cough has to do with me sucking my thumb, has to do with my excitement about Frau K and father’s relations. What about my asthma? I’m sure that has to do with their raspy breath while performing the deed on each other. The doctor will come to that conclusion sooner than later. If he gets lucky my cough will even mysteriously disappear now. One win for me, one for the doctor.

Herr K at the lake was the obvious memory. That I could not afford to hide from the doctor, that is where the meat of the story lies. I necessarily went into detail about my feeling of repulsion, how instantaneous my slap was, how indignant in my complaint to my father. I did not however tell him what happened sequentially, nor that I knew when I set off on that walk that there was no escaping Herr K. Yet, I went. My presence would cool down their intimacy I thought, the blatant showcase of my father’s romantic trysts with Frau K. Or perhaps it was an appeal to Frau K’s modesty, for her to keep me from her own husband. Neither happened. It was as plain as day that Father wished for Herr K to keep me busy and away so that he didn’t have to be pried away from his new love. The doctor seemed far more interested in my perception of the incident rather than Herr K’s assault. Besides, he seemed to know of the incident before I even mentioned it.

Herr K’s forced kiss. This again I did recalled sequentially and in perfect detail. The doctor was taken aback at my reaction to the kiss, even more so when I told him of how I could still recall the pressure of his embrace and how I still cannot walk past a man and woman being affectionate with each other. The last one I threw as a bonus. To strengthen the train of thought that resulted in multiple small tugs at his beard. He then went into great lengths and medical terms about male organs of sexual excitement and how they work and how I knew about them. I had felt Herr K’s organ pressing against me, it was simply just not as forceful as his upper body weighing upon my chest. This I did not tell the doctor, his deductions are often more colorful. Besides, he is far more thrilled when I extend the silence after a particularly vigorous description of my understanding of sexual acts.

The dream was a piece of unique mastery if I may say so myself. It took some time to detail the dream’s various disambiguations. It’s taken me nights of investigative reading and fourteen different ideas to come up with this one. That it should be recurrent I knew, that it must comprise all main characters I knew, that my consciousness must direct it only toward Herr K, I knew- he being the one who gifted me the jewel case. The rest came more gradually. The dream I told the doctor began and recurred for four days after the incident at the lake, in the dream a house was on fire. Father woke me up and i dressed quickly to escape. My mother insisted on saving her jewel case, hearing which Father roared he would not let his children be burnt for the sake of he jewel case. The key components being danger, my mother as the frivolous enemy, the jewel case as my honour and my father as the saviour.

The connection to Herr K would be the final piece of the missing puzzle. I described in great detail an incident where I found Herr K on my bedside as I woke up. Terrified by the event I later got a key from Frau K to lock the room up when I dressed or slept. Soon after, I found the key missing. I’m amazed at the doctor’s good health, his hair never gets upended at the roots with the incessant tugging. In other news, he has also developed a twitch of the right eye. I take it to mean I’m disrupting his usual line of thought. This might prove to be trouble.

Saturday–

Almost two months ago, I had purchased a small purse, one which is now in vogue tucked at the waist. I was almost too embarrassed to disclose my new purchase, and as a result it has been sitting idly catching dust at my desk for days now. This afternoon while writing down little notes on the doctor, what has now become my favourite pass time I realised I had developed a curious habit of playing with the reticule. It’s small hollow opening allows me to slip a finger in and out as a filler between two straying thoughts. When I drew my attention to it, I was struck with an almost beatific possibility. A new nugget for the doctor to obsess about. In and out, a narrow strait connecting my childhood illness to my depravity as an adult.

Oh what joy the sharp doctor experienced today. It was a congratulatory nod to his superior knowledge that predicts my actions before I could even fathom a vague image of it.It is almost satisfying to find answers for the doctor. I also realised he needed a sliver of unravelling meaning to distract him from concentrating on my vacant lips as much. A pass time he does as unconsciously as my fingering of the purse.

Wednesday–

Touching myself came one afternoon i remember quite distinctly. I was waiting outside the washroom for Otto to finish. Both of us had had a gallon of water to drink after an entire day of playing out in the sun. Otto and I liked playing our parents and he often played mother better than I did and my impression of father was almost accurate. In an intense urge to relieve my bladder, I held up my dress to clamp shut the downpour threatening to flood the floor. When I finally relieved myself after Otto had come out, I touched felt myself again wondering at the hardened outer skin. It became an occasional treat. No one found out and much later i eventually grew out of the habit until we came back to Vienna.

The doctor is especially interested in my having been a habitual masturbator, linking all my illnesses to my perverse habits that he finds both normal and the reason for my condition. I suppose they are both. Otto discovered what I was upto when we moved to B_. I woke up and saw him staring at my hand between my legs. Apparently I had begun touching myself in my sleep. He ran out of the room when he noticed I had woken up. I don’t suppose he told anyone but soon it felt like Father knew when he kept insisting that the physician cure me of my bed-wetting habit.

I could have told the doctor in a more straightforward manner, but the reticule was certainly more fun for me. The connection to the catarrh however I realised only retrospectively.

This dream has not gone all that very well. The doctor seems to believe everything is simply a reinforcement of the old. Instead of suicide letter and it’s connection to me leaving the house and hoping for my father to die upon hearing the news, the doctor has simply taken it to be a repetition of my previous dream. It is about the lake and about my fantasy of sexual relations with Herr K. I realise now that it is not novelty but a further exaggeration of his own presumptions that will excite him. It’s become rather boring to invent new things to amuse the doctor. Almost as if he were one of Frau K’s children.

By the time I fed him the piece of nonsense about the governess, he went into a long analysis of my fantasies of having Herr K’s children. I believe he expected me to stay as if presenting finally his glorious declarative stroke of genius. I listened to him fully and parted graciously. I must see the doctor some time in the future, but he holds no answers that would mend my relationship with Father and Frau K.

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Something occurred to me as I watched with a friend, Truffaut’s 400 Blows. At one point, Antoine Doinel and his friend visit the cinema and later a puppet show. Truffaut spends time capturing the expression of joy and wonder and instinctual affect of the children watching the show. Doinel and his friend meanwhile sit at the back and plot a scheme to steal the typewriter. The affective response of the children is entirely different from Doinel who is older and has seen the puppet show many times. They no longer are in wonder, excited by the unknown, the act of objects being speaking beings seem real and unreal at the same time. In the context of language as speaking beings I was thinking then that within the artistic there lies the possibility of language shifting and innovating to form a new understanding of itself. How would we place this dynamism within the logic of the mirror stage?

The children enjoy it because the don’t understand it, don’t have the faculty of language. Doinel and the makers of the puppet show are in the know. When these children grow up they won’t remain in wonder either, they will dissociate themselves by not identifying anymore.

But that expression of wonder is also because of the subjectification of toys which they believe to be impossible. Meaning that the children do possess a faculty of understanding language if not speaking it. They are at an age that is at the threshold of language, if they didn’t understand the impossibility of the toys speaking they might not be as amazed. They sense magic because they understand it to be different.

Art for children is created by adults. Adults who reason language in such a way for children to understand basic commands, they translate it into bright colours, sounds and with objects recognisable to recreate what they believe to be the child’s world. They are not taking the child to the opera for entertainment, it is a puppet show. Hence the older boys see no joy in it, they belong now to the adult world. The pleasure has no transgressive possibility, as I believe you suggest because the child does not cause any fracture in language. Plaisir, pas de jouissance!

But do you not think that the colours, the gestures, the sounds that imitate children or adults for children do not still seem normal to them. They are excited because they are spectating, the spectacle the same as the imagery of the unknown that forms in their mind when they hear their parents engaging in sex. I believe lalangue is a closer approximation to this, a private language that comes before language. In Dora’s case history, Freud mentions Dora’s asthma as a reaction to listening to her parents having sex, her mother’s breathing and pleasure translating into an illness which later in life translates into a symptom of pleasure for Dora as well.

For Dora, the woman is the object as I have stated earlier as well. She thinks the oral drive is bound to the idea of the woman, hence her fixation on her throat and breath- loss of voice and asthma. Her symptoms then, I see as a failure to identify herself as a woman, instead seeing herself in the male figures in life.

I mean however about the sound of breathing,the sound of pleasure, of the movement and rhythms of having sex. Dora perhaps recognises the act for what it is retrospectively, but at the moment she can still imagine that it is an act of pleasure.The sounds translating into the visual that is ambiguous but yet filled with recognisable impulses toward it, of desire. I similarly disagree that it might merely be indicative of desiring sex from her father, but I believe for identification to take place during the mirror stage in such a way she must have been able to translate the echoliasis to an affective memory. The memory being strong enough to cause recurring symptoms indicative of pleasure after the mirror stage and well into early adulthood.

How are you relating this to the children watching the puppet show?

Well they are experiencing something that is beyond simply the contraction of meaning that you say the adults create when making something for children. The colours and gestures and sounds form meaning in their minds, there is an instinctual response to what is happening as a spectator. This I meant to reiterate as an active form of spectating which also takes place when the older boys are at the cinema. While the puppet show is no longer of interest to them, the cinema still holds their attention. The cinema restructures language not in the same way as our eyes see, but simulate it to create an experience. I believe that this affective response stems from the pre-mirror stage, pre-language which processes meaning in a more bodily sense of pleasure. That you understand things without needing to know what it signifies or even recognising the signifier.

And this spectating you say, creates jouissance?

I think the experience of cinema as a simultaneously collective and individual experience is telling of how the symbolic order is disrupted and transgressed. In spectating you are experiencing the Self by not seeing a mirror reflection of your image, but another image entirely. It’s not that Doinel related to the story or the characters of the film and hence responds to it, but the cinematic is creating an experience that is bodily, you don’t simply understand the movie but you understand the sensation that cinema creates. This giving up of meaning within the symbolic order I think is jouissance, pas de plaisir.

cruel cruel lila

We haven't spoken of Americanah in very long, atleast we haven't spoken of it with love. Sometimes, it is almost with derision. We haven't spoken about it with love since the last time we made love and I looked up and said, Ceiling. Is that why we don't make love anymore?

Remember the things we did to make love with ease? We went dancing so our bodies would know how to move together. We danced ,yes, but not with each other. At the end of a class we would tell each other that we found someone we moved better with and what a revelation that was. Then we went home and tried awkwardly to dance some more. All I noticed was your frown, the stiffness of your shoulder, the unease of your hand on my waist and the slight bounce as you moved. We stepped on each other, moved farther away from each other and sometimes completely let go, letting one or the other hit and fall and hurt themselves. We stopped dancing, we slept more and drank more tea and made our peace with it. 

You tried running in the morning and I wanted you to run more, run everyday, and was disappointed when you were lazy. You put on weight and fell sick too often and I thought all of that was lazy. I liked the roundness of your stomach, but when I laughed at it did you believe we wouldn't make love till it went away? I tried so hard to not look at the ceiling the odd times we did make love. The jerky, painful movements, the droplets of sweat falling onto my forehead, my body lying uselessly under you was not romantic, was not Ceiling.

When did we stop speaking of Americanah with love? Perhaps when we discovered a more violent forceful love that would call fucking fucking and never making love. When someone made love they were sure to realise sooner than later the invasive pain of a dick that thrusts blindly. Lila, I think when you don't move smoothly. Lila, I think when you kiss me too hard, without love. Lila, I think when you act cute and whine. Lila would see and she would know that you want to fuck and you call it making love so your dick won't hurt even when you see my face contorted in pain and shame.


But then there was that time, when with every passing day our bodies got softer together and sunk deeper into each other in electric warmth. When lover and protector, friend and muse, beauty and violence all settled into thrilling restful waters. Like the second day at the beach, when my crippling fear of the water would vanish and it didn't threaten me anymore. When I could see you at a distance and count the droplets of water on your back that hit the sunlight and want to kiss each one softly. You became beautiful once more. When you looked at me you became a lover and for days on end there was no childlike insistence of holding your crotch and forcing me to enjoy its alien presence.


Now, we move with ease everyday. The roundness of your stomach is disappearing. You are beautiful nearly always. Yet I keep waiting with bated breath. When you slip, when you sleep too long, when you whine a little even, when you are late and you've forgotten to care, I heave a sigh of relief. Aha... the faltering of beauty, the painful ugliness that Lila will catch before it manifests into a monstrosity. She haunts me relentlessly like a friend I wish I didn't have. She won't let me make love. She whispers into my ears that you will turn, turn when I don't keep vigilant watch. You will turn when you have forgotten love. You will turn when you have forgotten Lila. I almost wish you were not with me all the time, so she can't see you slip. But when you are not, she leaves and my body aches for little crevices in your body that stretch taut and wrinkle slightly when you move against me.


But what do I do about Lila, Ceiling?

rooms shut for years on end

This flutter of fear that ebbs and flows to no end is sometimes thrilling of its possibilities but is largely so incapacitating that I wish I could squeeze the heart in one palm, forcing the fear out of it. Even if it meant the end of life. Ah, what a relief it would be. Even though it wouldn’t be like anything. Those thoughts have returned however, like sweet dreams. It’s only when I dream of it does the fear quell even if only a little. I have to dream of the stillness, as though it’ll happen. It’ll happen by the simple force of my faith that it will. It is impossible to imagine anything else. Sometimes I find strength in remembering that if it was always there, there have also been long stretches when it wasn’t.

Today it feels like being in the airport five years ago and feeling this similar thrilling sense of fear. One of jubilation and one that almost ended with my dream coming true . It has amazed me since then that I did not do it, that I wake up everyday. That I will wake up tomorrow. The dream is a crutch but I wonder how long I can continue to wake up from it. There has to be a point of sheer exhaustion at the very least that will lend itself to a swift success. Perhaps tomorrow, or perhaps I will be run over a bus today and that will be that.
 I am overcome by a desire to leave again, run and run and form my own little bubble far away. A year of quiet as that time before ,to restore my health and my faith in postponing the dream.

 I cannot bear this passing of the day to no outcome ,to no end, to this ebb and flow that becomes almost mundane in its distinct pain. The mundane draws no attention despite its distinction,I have no way of speaking of it, no courage to endure the knowing of its existence. Quietly observe the tops of buildings and find some calm in the damp smell and isolation of rooms shut for years on end.