We hit the deer going thirty miles per hour. It was snowing, we were being cautious. The deer was the reckless party. There were four of us in the car and we spilled out into the night seconds after the collision, staying near to the ground in case anything had happened to our bones or nerves or equilibrium. I say ‘our’ because everything becomes collective on a long journey. Our eating, sleeping, pissing. All together. 

                The driver was my friend. The other two were friends of my friend. The man who stopped to help us, he had nine fingers. A beard. A voice like a shovel hitting wet sediment. He helped us drag the deer to the side of the road. When I say helped I mean he did it while we observed. We were one woman and three men, watching the stranger’s breath plume around his beard. The body, the beard, the exhalation. It was cold and dark and we told the man he could keep it, and he laughed and shook his head. You’ll be taking care of this one, he said, as though he’d take care of the next thing we killed. What you’ve got to do, he said, is skin it. Cut off the head, the hooves. Carve up the meat. Put it in bags. You’ll eat for a year. 

                                            But sir, I said, we don’t know how to do any of that. I’ve never skinned a thing! Never severed a head. Never carved up anything larger than a piece of chicken breast. This is all wrong, I said. We’re going somewhere we’ve never gone. We couldn’t see, the visibility was weak, the deer — the deer was the reckless party. It wanted to die like this. Let’s leave it here. For other animals. Let’s leave it, let it turn from warm to cold. But the man was standing nearer now and he was explaining that the law clearly stated that it was our mess to tidy. Not the county’s. The deer couldn’t go on lying there, it had to be moved. It belonged to us now. I was mad at the driver, my friend. The other two passengers, they didn’t seem to mind. One of them raised ducks for slaughter in his backyard. The other had watched movies about hunting. 

                       The forest that ran the length of this road was swelling with unfathomable darkness and my head felt cramped. I looked at the deer’s dark eyes, and then I looked at the man leaning on his truck. He was looking at the deer’s dark eyes, too, but they were turned towards me. I watched his breath, like a second full yet fleeting beard. This configuration of gazes: the dead, the panicked, the obscenely serene. This triangle of nowhere.

We came in wanting. Wanting! Milk and warmth. Pale light and oceanic sound. It’s what got us to talking. We murmured our want, screamed it. Moved towards it, grasping. This is how we began to perceive distances. The far-away. That which is not in our own hands. Every twitch of the eyelid in the act of looking, gesturing around emptiness. We came in with austere bodies aching for abundance. You rambled on all fours in the backyard, doe-eyed and moist, a small traveler. On the path of ordinary lust. This means you are real. This means you are damned. Even the timid cannot go their entire lives without shouting and writhing from the force of it. One day you’ll look for another to pour your want into, and this will be more painful than you or I can imagine. But it will happen. Not once, not twice. But again and again, until all of the world escapes from your lungs.

Excerpted introduction to “The Body of (Dis)content: A Lacanian Psychoanalytic Study of Murder & the Mother-Body in Medea,” one part of a dual thesis project entitled “The Book is a Body, the Palm the Page.”

To utter the name Medea is to evoke images like those printed on tarot cards: a woman collapsed in despair; a woman rigid with fury; a mother quiet with contemplation; a mother clutching the bloodied bodies of her children. Contemporary readers might render ancient Medea as a tabloid monster or the archetypal betrayed housewife. Despite any temporal framework, Medea was and is woman and mother, contained in a body, a body drawn and quartered by language. 

One comes to know Medea through the page and through performance. She is a textual being and yet was created in order to be embodied by others, cast and recast over time. Much like a flesh and blood woman, her image shifts according to fluctuations in the words used to describe her. 

Medea’s tragedy is to be both read and performed. In the act of reading a literary work, the page is vulnerable. For all of its words, it cannot speak back. As one watches a play, the fourth wall serves as barrier. A member of the audience may object to the director’s interpretation but is nevertheless restricted to her role as silent viewer. The actors, meanwhile, replay a drama for perhaps the ten thousandth time, and it is in this repetition that generations of audiences are implicated in a linguistic, literary, social history. Repetition constructs, it aids and abets the survival of certain beliefs, assumptions, habits, and laws; to read and interpret Medea is to commit a repetition. What justifies this reiterated investigation is the not-knowing. What seems to be and what actually is are two different things, and so there is always room for rediscovery.

My particular reading of Medea, both the woman and the text, is caught up in this fever for rediscovery, re-cognition. A crucial element in my study of psychoanalysis is the searching, the endless untangling that always results in more knots, more puzzles, more layered collages of questions and possibility. My methods of navigation are my love of literature and language, and my hunger for psychoanalytic illumination. I believe in these tools because of their deeply human(e) focus on matters of the heart, the voice, the body, and the psyche. 

Read More

books:

How I Became a Nun : Cesar Aira

The Savage Detectives : Roberto Bolano

Decreation : Anne Carson

Hopscotch : Julio Cortazar

The Invisible Man : Ralph Ellison

Atmospheric Disturbances : Rivka Galchen

At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom : Amy Hempel

Jesus’ Son : Denis Johnson

Please Kill Me : Legs McNeil

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid : Michael Ondaatje

East of the West : Miroslav Penkov

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magazines, journals, resources & sites:

a public space

bomb

cabinet

centre of gravity

gothamist

n+1

proteus gowanus

the invisible dog

the new yorker

triple canopy

udp

i have drawn detailed renderings of the circumference of your ribcage, tracing the angle at which one would chisel, trying to figure how to best crack it open, only hoping to settle down into your lungs like so much smoke. 

how might i remove your soft organs. place them in jars, sealed until winter comes.

the last time i heard your heart it was beating its wings like a trapped bird. arteries like feathers. veins thin and precise as violin strings. i listen to your insides like a radio. you are animal. you are music. you are machine.