... for Deathbed
Letters to ∅ from the Deathbed
Dear ∅,
The days are passing in stillness here. The condition worsens. Sometimes I feel like the
ingrowth is hollowed, but then it deepens again. The extraction gets harder with each
cut. I can’t tell anymore where the I ends and where it begins. It was so much easier this
past winter. The split was more drastic. But the closer we seem to get, the more of I
passes with it. They say that it will not be much longer and that the extraction will be
complete. I wait.
The I. Through pale blue rooms. I, defended. Windows shut tight. Smooth and cold. I,
found and chiseled in stone. I of I. Worn as one’s own. Festive. Cherished. Whole. Never
to fade. I chose to dwell in this chamber. This cage is my own, but it is not working out.
∅, you will not believe what their response was. They said, “shedding the symbolic is
not a one step procedure. Even the being that is aware of its hole cannot opt out of the
name that is its periodized placeholder. The simple denunciation of the name does not
make the carcass of this name disappear. You might come to love your cage, but it will
still be a cage nonetheless. Is your mere claim to a negation of the name ever enough
while the traces of the real are played out in the imaginary? Can you ever shift your
subjective position by subtracting from the name alone? You might think you are getting
rid of the name by simply not responding to it, but only if you accept that the whole
symbolic structure takes place in discourse alone. This assumption constructs a new
totality indeed.”
Ah ∅, what an intolerable arrogance! I am sick of the scrutiny of their gaze. Yesterday I
spent all day under a bright light, on a cold and hard bed. As a regular procedure, a
speech like this is usually followed with the clinking of a box of tools. I don’t resist of
course. I just think of you and the weave we formed. I said I would submit to the cut and
come to you ∅ all new. But as time passes it seems that you get farther from me.
Sometimes I think that we will never be 0 again. This relationship is like an asymptote.
Dear ∅,
Yesterday I was quiet. They were gathered over my head for hours, debating
incessantly. This time the extraction left me even blanker, indifferent, spaceless. I was
pretending to be asleep in an effort to eavesdrop.
“Well, then what of the law of the imaginary that hosts the mark of the symbolic, isn’t this
where the materialization of the name takes place?”
“Yes, the performance of the law of the name is what constitutes the space of
placement for this name that she claimed to have subtracted from. We might agree that
it is not just the name, but that the splace of this name is what she is resisting as well.”
“But then there is still the flesh, nothing in itself, but so structured by and pressed
between the force of the symbolic and the imaginary. It is impossible to re-carve the
flesh in itself, since it never takes place in matter alone, but on the edges of the name
and the place. She has no flesh.”
At that point I dazed out thinking of you ∅ and without recollection I must have motioned
a movement of flight. Alas, I was instantly identified. They swarmed closer to me at once.
“This is where the impossibility of his mission gets most interesting. As we think of any
area of knowledge, any given name lies somewhere in this triangle, but never in one
corner alone.”
“Again, we are never able to separate and study the material away from the social and
the occult. What is her God?”
“Yet we fail in the effort to point at the perfect spot where she is located.”
“The rebinding of the nerves and the reconstruction of the flesh is not enough to restore
the flight, as the flight once removed from the knot of being is nowhere to be located.”
“Well of course, the flight is a fuckup of some over-determination caught in the
asymmetry of the triad.”
At once they got disinterested. They gave up and left me in the dark again.
Oh ∅, I think at last we are closer to each other. Now I know I am a knot and nothing
more. But what is the material of my knot?
When I close my eyes I feel like I am zooming close to the monuments, silent and still.
The shells of names once animated. Performed, now hollowed. Depleted, but still so
stubborn. Lurking in cabinets called nostalgia. Traumas faded, or just renamed. Different
basements built. Chambers re-furnished. There was never a wholeness, only folders
neatly reorganized. Now my drawers feel empty. Extraction, cut, purification. All they do
is clean me out, but this blankness is reliant on the sterility of this environment. You
won’t believe how clean it is here, though I feel even farther from you ∅.
Recently I realized that there is a difference between blankness and you ∅. The
blankness caused by this extraction only leaves me more hollow, somewhat depleted,
almost guilty of my emptiness. I feel like I am positioned directly against my ingrowth.
Cut, extraction, less ingrowth, less of me, but at the same time a lot more of me, just
hollowed. I am a proper vessel now. I can hold any matter.
Dear ∅,
Today I am still a vessel, though maybe a slightly different kind. Today I am dripping
right through. The last extraction must have been very efficient. Not only can I channel
matter now, but I can also pass it right through me.
They speak of me as cured. Or maybe more like someone who is so cured, so clear that
I’m not even there anymore. To them I am a perfect subject now. A bleached stain, an
ever becoming-shrinking-woman-animal, a total deterritorialized variable. I slip between
the molecules; I’ve become an unidentifiable particle in an infinite meditation on the
infinite. I am null.
Dear ∅,
I am not even a vessel anymore, but a host of the infinity of phalluses. They all pass
through me now. They purify through my particles. If before I was a vessel, now I am the
void around every phallus.
Dear ∅,
I have nothing to say anymore. I have fallen off the earth. Thus they still have the Phallus.