Theatre of the Hole: Encounter and its Psychic (K)nots

…out…into this world…this world…tiny little thing…before its time… in a godfor-…what?…girl?…yes…tiny little girl…into this…out into this…before her time…godforsaken hole called…called…no matter…parents unknown…unheard of… he having vanished…thin air…no sooner buttoned up his breeches…she similarly… eight months later…almost to the tick…so no love…spared that…no love such as normally vented on the…speechless infant…in the home…no…nor indeed for that matter of any kind…no love of any kind…

Encounter is a mystery. Being in the presence of an other is difficult. As Bion has described it, the meeting between two people produces an “emotional storm” (Bion, 1979/1987).

I begin with a soundless letter—aleph. The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, it has no sound of its own. It is a silent letter, unless combined with a vowel, as it usually is. Aleph also indicates a link between the one and only God and the sacred name (and number) YHVH, which God reveals to Moses in Exodus 3:14-15 (King James Version) as “I am that I am.” (One of the movements of the encounter I am staging will be from “I am that I am” to Not I.) To be heard, then, requires two. This is something apparent to psychoanalysts—the transformative intimate relationship of subject and other.

Cut to: A video screen. On the screen appears a tightly framed mouth. As if looking into a funhouse mirror, the viewer is transported. The mouth opens onto the haptic revealing something of an odd circus. Inside, its open cavity is strangely stuffed with stone marbles of slightly varying sizes. A deft tongue sets these inchoate masses moving, as if churning silence into speech. Potential speech is nothing but garbled sound, merely embryonic possibility. It is as though words have become weighty things, grown substantive, solid—the playthings of the acrobatic tongue (Cheng and Cody, 2016, p. 4). And what about this tongue? Let us not overlook it and the work it does to animate these lifeless things. (The v