[…] the sight alone [in the mirror] of the whole form of the
human body gives the subject an imaginary mastery over his body, one which is
premature in relation to a real mastery.
Jaques Lacan
Jaques Lacan
Beyond the fiction of reality,
there is the reality of the fiction.
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
It was the preceding normality that made it so disturbing:
utter habitual ordinariness, a well-rehearsed routine, page after page I go, the
pleasure of the text, ding, ding, ding, all my values reinforced and kept in
their place, blah blah, all the usual stuff, words leading to the same
conclusion but in a slightly different way – it was all good. Then, kapow,
something tore a hole in the page – I’m talking metaphorically here obviously,
I didn’t turn the page in a particularly ungainly manner, neither did a stray
cat, while attempting to get my attention, puncture the page from behind with
its claws.
…
I picked this particular book out of a pile to be disposed of during a flat move in August; I’m not really sure
what it was that caught my eye now, it was a book published in the USA
in 1993 called Criminals
by Margot Livesey, and the cover had two hands coming out from the centre of a
lake holding a baby. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions as to what
attracted me to it – fate, the objet
petit a, coincidence, all of the above; but I picked it up and stored it
for reading later.
…
But, what if they were true, all those paranoid thoughts and
obsessive mental meanderings that swirl in our heads, and what if they were confirmed
all in one fell swoop? Arrrgggghhhhhhhhhh. I’m pretty sure we all
have these well-worn fantasies, albeit irrational, of being the centre of the
world, that there is someone or something following us and going to great
lengths to get to us – something that is organising the whole world just to
freak us out and keep us down; I often hear people talk excitedly of events
that seem impossible but have become somehow linked in reality. There sometimes
seems like a consistent thread in our lives leading us to the simple
conclusion that there is a cogent narrative. Rationally, these are things that we try push
into the background of our thought-holes, I mean, it’s all just imaginary
bunkum isn’t it? Fairy tales from another world, lots of chance events mixed
with a will for meaning, it can’t be true, really; but we have all thought it…haven’t
we…erm haven’t we?
Well, I got caught bang in the middle of the knot, the
imaginary, the symbolic and the real were suddenly the same thing, one cohesive
howl in my face, anything I could imagine was a fact. The whole world suddenly
did revolve around me, it was 100% true, it was so many feelings at once, it
was the exact opposite of the absurd, the opposite of an epiphany, the opposite
of inspiration – is there a word for this feeling? It turns out there might be…
…
My name is Martin Pettitt, yes, that is four ts in my
surname, somewhat unwieldy you will agree, there are so many ways my surname
has been mis-spelt over the years and indeed so many different variations of
the surname that other people claim as their own: Petit, Pettit etc. – also,
yes, I am aware it could possibly derive from the French word for small. This
is my name, I see it and I recognise myself in it, I wilfully say 'that is me',
in much the same way I say the same when I see myself in the mirror.
So, I was reading this book, I was about two thirds through it, when this happened:
What‽ What‽ What‽[1]
Yeah, you saw right, that’s my name, my rather unorthodox
and cumbrous name, all of it, every last t.
And the world set afloat, the first thing I did was look
over my shoulder, I was actually lying in bed at the time and so almost hit my
head on the wall, everything had changed in that moment, walls no longer had
physical substance and I was the messiah. It was that initial reaction that was
the most disturbing and the loss of control lasted for about 20 seconds, a
bloody long 20 seconds – it was like placing the finishing touches to a structure
that you always feared you were building and realising that the final pieces
were those bars on the window. It was
like a glitch in the matrix, someone communicating with me from beyond; it was
fantasy realised, which as Žižek states, equates to nightmare – a disturbing
fantasmatic intensity of never-ending pursuit perceived as real.
My good friend (and she would know: http://muthacourage.blogspot.co.uk/) described that feeling
later as: ‘experiencing a little bit of psychosis’. This made me think of Lacan’s
suggestion that neurotics are characterised by doubt, ‘psychosis is
characteristic of certainty’. Normally I’m firmly ensconced in the neurotic
camp, doubting everything from whether I’m standing in the right way to whether
136+235=371. Nothing I do seems to have a single irrefutable line of thought, I
can destroy the immutable principles of mathematics with my raging uncertainty; but in that moment, that 20
seconds or so, everything was certain, every last fear and neurosis regarding
the true desire of the Other was confirmed. And it was… odd, unbearable,
head-under-water; every imaginary tangent was real, anything I could imagine
had lost its definition, it was hued into one single horrifying narrative that
was certain.
...
Was I experiencing psychosis, well, ‘a little bit of
psychosis’? If it was then bring back my neurotic tendencies, all is forgiven.
All of those people with smiling faces on pictures and all those experts with
confidence and charm seemingly certain of their actions and feelings look so
attractive; I always presumed certainty would be amazing, I could swagger
around solving problems, ‘high-fiving those who dared, then moonwalking out of
the scene’; and but it wasn’t, it was bloody horrible, too much. To anyone with
a vivid imagination certainty is the
worst nightmare.
...
Of course my reason returned after 20 seconds and I laughed
at how foolish I had been, nuzzling my neurosis like a plush toy, after all
it’s all just a load of twaddle isn’t it, ahahaha. A pure coincidence, layers
upon layers of actions, mistakes, chance events and all that other stuff; who
knows where Margot Livesey got the name from, but she certainly wasn’t sitting
back and chuckling after she wrote it thinking – now we play the waiting game,
in 21 years’ time this is definitely going to freak him out. It was ridiculous and
I shook off the thought and got on with my life, but it definitely left a trace
for a while, a sly undercurrent that didn’t let go quite as easily; like waking
from a dream that you can’t remember but that stays with you; as much as I know
it was coincidence, there is a part that still wants it to be true.
Maybe this is a phenomenon that is more familiar than I
realise, the sudden and brief realisation of certainty that everything
you feared is true – maybe there is a German word for it or something.
I’m off to play tennis with Kenneth.
[1]
Yes, this indeed is an interrobang: half exclamation, half question, all
double-hard bastard of a punctuation mark.
