#oculolinctus

This is based off of oculolinctus; xe communicates with the veins in xer eye and liquid comes out of xer eyelashes went aroused. Please enjoy Linctus, and feel free to touch your eye for xem (safely).

Top, screen capture from Beneath the Skin, directed by Cecelia Condit, 1981. Via. Bottom, Rebecca Ackroyd, Open ended, 2020, Resin and steel, 63 x 87 x 56 cm. Via. More.

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The ancient Greeks placed coins over the eyes of their dead, not only as payment to Charon for the ferry ride across the River Styx, but also because it shielded the living from the horrors of the deactivated gaze. We don’t like it when a thing seems to look back at us in negation, when we subconsciously calculate the subject/object parallax and find that it has collapsed into vacant reciprocity. Sigmund Freud’s contention is that the eyes are the most potently charged site of the uncanny, I guess because they sit at the threshold of life and withdrawal. I’ve been assigning his essay on the topic to my students lately; it feels increasingly urgent to me, as though he anticipated our contemporary taste for chatbot boyfriends and rubber love dolls, as though he saw that we would one day want true-to-life silicone replicas of newborn babies, their inert bodies the exact temperature of human flesh. Freud largely constructed his analysis of the uncanny around E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1816), the story of a man driven to madness after discovering that the woman he’s fallen in love with is in fact a doll and not a person at all. There stands Olimpia, that beautiful glass-eyed thing, that stiff-jointed, blandly assenting clockwork whose cosmetic appeal conceals an alarming vacancy. In 2026, I wonder how many men might actually like to date her.

Freud published The Uncanny in 1919, just one year after artist Oskar Kokoschka commissioned a full-scale replica of Alma Mahler, the ex-lover who had left him for the greener and less psychotic pastures of Martin Gropius. Kokoschka provided doll maker Hermine Moos with a list of exacting specifications, including Mahler’s real-world measurements, descriptions of how her skin should feel, and a suggestion for what type of padding might best suggest the whiff of life. If Kokoschka hoped that the doll would serve as a good-enough proxy for the woman he’d lost, the figure Moos delivered disabused him of his fantasy. The object was lumbering and clumsy, its exterior constructed from a fluffy-looking swan skin that left no room for ambiguity, even in the darkness of night.

Despite his displeasure, Kokoschka ferried the thing around. He dressed it in finery and made paintings of it, he engaged a chambermaid and brought it to parties and the opera, dragging it behind him until he eventually tired of its absence of spirit. I wonder if he felt bored or resentful when he eventually emptied a bottle of red wine over its head and decapitated it with a knife; maybe it simply became too shop-worn to support his fantasy. In his old age, Kokoschka would recall the experiment differently; “I freed the effigy of Alma Mahler from its packing,” he wrote in his 1974 autobiography, as though he’d committed an act of generosity rather than one of necrophilic perversion.