2 PermeableMembrane ReciprocalAdornment LoseMe

The psychoanalytic tradition is concerned with the extensive effects early life experiences have on the formations of mental schema. We build such complex structures from the scaffoldings of barely-remembered (or misremembered, or entirely unremembered) things that it is truly impossible to separate ourselves from the place we inhabit.

“It’s the *world*, and you’re *made* of it. Every day you’re out there you make more of yourself from it. I’m afraid you can’t be *unmade* now.”

There is no such thing as a discrete human being or an individual distinct from the place. You create it, it creates you, you create it, life everlasting and world without end, amen. The Master promises that we will be rejoined with our physical bodies after death, that we will always be an inextricable part of the material world. He teaches also that it will adorn us more beautifully than the raiment of kings, as pollen freely adorns the hills with flowers. From our place, we create systems of symbols to understand the physical world, language, and we impart the beauty of our language on the sweet plain, adorn it with poems and longing gazes.

I don’t believe that incorporeal, angelic beings love natural beauty. They have seen the face of God and seem to have little interest in intermediaries. But poets know there is sublime beauty in incomplete descriptions and imperfect understandings, in things half-lit by the sun, in their shadows, in the obfuscations of mist and fog.

Kristeva writes that the melancholic has an acute desire for something which defies symbolization, signification, though this is felt semiotically as depression. I would add too that it resists adornment, which is the application of symbols. Semiotic expression is a workaround for your lacking mental schema—perhaps your parents didn’t love each other when you were born, so now you dance. Suicide is the sublation of semiotic and symbolic musings. It is the ultimate bodily act, yet thoroughly adorned with symbols and aesthetic beauty in the fantasies of the melancholic.

“Flowers around
Your body, found.”

There is a story in Japan of a master tattoo artist who adorns the back of a shameful young woman with the image of a diabolic spider, and becomes her victim. In the Bijagos Islands, it’s the young girls who choose their fiancés. There is also a story of a man who cannot communicate with the women in his life, and so creates a dollhouse world to interrogate himself in, until he grows tired of this and goes to live in it as a woman instead.

“Remember the time she got you to pose for one of her paintings? How she told you how beautiful you were? How she made you feel pretty again, for a little while? You are Ellen. All her meager sadnesses are yours. All her loneliness. The gray, straw-like hair. Her red, raw hands. It’s yours. It is time for you to understand this. As the people who adore you stop adoring you, as you shed them, as you shed your beauty, your youth, as you lose your characteristics one by one, as you learn there is no one watching, and there never was, you think only about driving.”