judas at the tomb

The primary pain of abuse is experienced as the structure of the world itself, something that has been taken in like the nerves absorb lead or hemoglobin inhales carbon monoxide. But these metaphors are incorrect, for their processes result in a dying brain or shocked cells sucking for scraps of oxygen. What I am describing is closer to fossilization or petrification, one substance taking the place of another. But again these comparisons are not exact, because there, living bone and plant become stone, and in this, a primary pain is absorbed into and itself becomes the living body. What happens is substitution, but of one life for another. A spine of bone becomes a spine of pain. A beating heart, which looks like any other heart, becomes an injury-circulating mechanism.

In The Odyssey, Odysseus is extraordinary for the flexibility with which he can inhabit many different names, or no name at all. It is this quality of being multinamed and nameless that enables him to survive. By contrast, almost all the warriors of The Iliad yearn to have a name and a story that lasts forever. Their many names and titles, as sons and brothers and comrades and fathers and rulers, are essential to their identities, their connections with one another, and their fame after death. They fear, above all, being humiliated (cursed with a negative name), or forgotten and nameless. The lists and catalogs of names are essential to the poem’s own work, of memorializing and mourning the dead. Once the bodies return to dust, these syllables are all that remain.

“I live a living death, my flesh is wounded, bleeding, cadaverized, my rhythm slowed down or interrupted, time has been erased or bloated, absorbed into sorrow… Absent from other people’s meaning, alien, accidental with respect to naïve happiness. I owe a supreme, metaphysical lucidity to my depression. On the frontiers of life and death, occasionally I have the arrogant feeling of being witness to the meaningless of Being, of revealing the absurdity of bonds and being. My pain is the hidden side of my philosophy, its mute sister.”