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“The love that lifts up its eyes,” said Neary, “being in torment: that cravey for the tip of her little finger, dipped in lacquer, to cool its tonsure—is foreign to you Murphy, I take it.”
“Greek,” said Murphy.
“Or put it another way,” said Neary: “the single brilliant organized compact blotch in the tumult of heterogeneous stimulation.”
“Blotch is the word,” said Murphy. —Samuel Beckett,Murphy
“One minute I was standing and the next I had fallen,” she said, the mind in between lost in a swirl. The previous hour she spoke of what she calls “deep memory,” of a kind of inner body awareness in which the nerve endings do not end but extend through all of space and time, a kind of infinite exposure to a tear in the fabric of the protective surround. The fall was, for her, an ominous signifier, a concrete symbol that condenses the unrecollected with the drive to express. There have been many such falls and slips and breaks and tears and nearly much worse during these twelve years of encounter. Each one marked a certain shaping in the multiple profiles trauma held in the holographic field in which mind and body speak distinct languages of their shared parentage, yet also, under conditions of extreme threat, dissociate, failing to relate or to otherwise nest in the other.
“How do you know you have stopped falling?” I asked. She didn't. She screams. She cries. She laments. She twists on the couch, in pain. She wants it to end. She wants this falling