Anamorphosis
On Thursday I went to a public speaking contest where I watched my flatmate get first prize. I was late, turning up in the dinner break, with everyone milling around me, chatting excitedly about talks I hadn't witnessed. I drifted wordlessly, in a gentle trauma where I couldn't articulate anything. I found a friend I hadn't talked to in ages, who was texting indifferently at the back of the room, and suddenly words came to me as I sat beside her.
I listened to Marillion this week, three albums in particular, Marbles (2004), Anoraknophobia (2001) and Brave (1994). I love how their songs go through different phases, where even the most seemingly unremarkable song transmogrifies into a haunting, exquisite series of notes.
The music interspersed my reading about desire, and the death drive, and the gaze. We are, according to Lacan, destined never to know the things we yearn for. As soon as we use language to understand what we feel, the door shuts. Even at the fundamental level of our drives, our processes are always circling, never realizing, our object of unconscious desire. At a very personal level, it kind of makes sense to me, tallies with my experience of the sublime, those sun-drenched fields and that farm on the horizon under the bluest sky that I used to gaze at from a window in my grandmother's house as a child. Your mind reaching out to it, it's why writing a novel can drive you insane in trying to articulate that beyond that you experienced, because as soon as you articulate it, you've failed.
Anyway, it's midday Sunday under a blue sky, the hills of Arthur's Seat before me. I'm reading a book by Slavoj Zizek at the moment and I realize I understand his every articulation despite his best attempts. I've crossed over into Lacan's world of oblique definitions of what things are not, and what we are not, and what is beyond us. To see new knowledge falling into place is a pleasing sensation, even if I'm no closer to that farmland on the horizon. I'm also not sure what this perspective means, in wanting to produce creative writing, is what you write ever completely realizable?
