#nargiskephool

Inspired by Lacan. The Real, the imaginary and the symbolic.

For Ammi, and Abbu, who always bought them for her! 🌼 Happy Mother’s Day! 🌼

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Language initiates us

Into the Symbolic

In the mirror stage

And the Self confronts for the first time

The conflict between its experience of fragmentation

And the illusion of wholeness that lies in the mirrored gaze of the other

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And so we live

Our lives

Continuously seeking to actualise

The experience

With the illusion

That promises to forever elude

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And formal education becomes

In this context

An opportunity to add to the experience of fragmentation

That takes the self

Further away

From all the worm holes that could possibly lead to the Real

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And so as part of my fragmentation

I was taught to internalise

And accept as real

The external signifier of love

And believe

The red rose 🌹 signifies passion and love

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Love for me

Ironically found

A narcissistic pathway

That always led

To the scent of a bouquet of Nargis ke phool

That I fondly identified as my mother’s favourite

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And this association

Beckoning from the realm of my imaginary

Continues to evoke a particular nostalgia

The kind that only special flowers

That once grew in the gardens of our childhood memories

Do

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I didn’t know

Till now

That the nargis

Is also known as the daffodil

Which is in turn linked to

The myth of narcissus in both cultures

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Poems taught at school

In both languages

Split the unity of my experience and illusion of the flower

Into two fragmented versions

Of my reality

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One belonged to a land

That was alien to me

And succeeded in serving only as a delightful abstraction

As incomprehensible

And elusive

As my colonial Other

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And the other

Frequently beheld and cherished

As the delicate signifier of my parents’ love

Seems to always hauntingly allude

To a wormhole

That carries within it the pristine scent of an imagined wholeness

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And as both signifiers come together from the root of one signified

My uniquely romantic sensibility

Pulled by the scent of the Nargis from one end

And by a host of golden daffodils from the other

Suddenly seems to have unified

Into One

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And while I know you insist, my dear Lacan,

That the Real

Remains inexpressible and inaccessible

I assure you, I am Real

And the wormhole that leads to it

Has ‘a host of golden’ nargis ke phool

Growing ‘along the margin of [its] bay’.

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