a few quotes + notes:
the cipher (1991) by kathe koja:
“the darkest part of me suspects a truth so black it turns my nebulous fears… to the laughable specter of an under-bed bogeyman: what if it is me? what if somehow i’m crawling blind and headfirst into my own sick heart, the void made manifest and disguised as hellhole, to roil in the aching stink of my own emptiness forever? oh jesus. oh god that can’t be true.”
^^^ fear of the abject as revealing the true self; simultaneous recognition and rejection: “a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable;” collapse of borders between inside/outside, subject/object: “a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself;” sensory language, body as grotesque/unclean
we know the devil (2015):
“oh darling… i miss you. i have always missed you. i can still remember what your faces were like. i have missed them since before you were born. please come back. i know i can’t offer much. the bodies i can give you are weak. the stories i tell are impossible. my world is even more precarious than this one. but please come back. it hurts to see you like this so much. so unhappy in those bodies of yours. stricken by those stories. forced to live in so much pain. i can’t even come save you. but i can promise one thing. there is room for three in my world. and only two in his.”
^^^ call of the abject: “drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned;” abject as highest/first truth of the self: “the subject… weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within... finds that the impossible constitutes its very being;” radical acceptance - embrace of abjection as transcendence, true becoming: “sublime and devastated… familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life… a reality that, if i acknowledge it, annihilates me”
“this is the new touch - the feeling of fingers pushing painlessly through our skin, the feeling of the muscle and fat, the weight of it, the intention: it’s best friends forever. it’s a first kiss. it’s a love story.”
^^^ dissolution of borders: self/other, inside/outside, pain/pleasure, life/death, etc: “the place where meaning collapses;” sensory language, simultaneous corporeality and incorporeality of bodies; transcendence: “it is no longer i who expel, ‘i’ is expelled… i behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders;” all of the above as blissful, ecstatic, revelatory