cw: gore, vomiting, cannibalism
The mouth is a grotesque hothouse, a gateway and a gift shop. Transgress its boundaries and you have fallen to the gutter. Rats gnaw at your oozing form, while you watch on and drool.
After lunch it is science. Sticky arvo trudge up the red brick turret to the top room, look out over the magnolia and discarded foil snowball dominion. Line up like so many pubescent sardines, clang of water bottle on linoleum as the bags get dumped. A dull throb in your armpit heralds a pimple later, damp victim of your uneasy razor. Chris Lilley’s latest smasher Angry Boys is careening around the corridor, jokes spouting out private schoolgirl-shaped fountains, but you refuse to feign interest. Hey, P says, and the fountain turns your way. You clutch your Typo pencil case for support. Put your finger in your mouth. Taste of bartered pizza shapes lingers. Now touch the inside of your cheek. Stroke sea slug smoothnes. That’s what a vagina feels like. The water gurgles and churns and sprays and evaporates without the slightest quenching of thirst. Later, as you test a hypothesis, you run your tongue all around the orifice.
I am obsessed with the everlasting gobstopper that is my thumb. My self inside the vacuum, tucked into the curve behind my front teeth, chipped from where I crunched on a chlorine-sodden step (and later from an overly enthusiastic kiss). I do so, Freud says, because I am recreating the teddy-bear nourishment of my mother’s breast. Yet this paratrophic1 sup is detached from any need of life-giving succor, rather it seems to be pleasure for pleasure’s sake. My mother might be concerned that I’m too old for such nonsense, but I get a gold star from the perverted doc; I have reached a “huge psychosocial achievement. For now…[I] can recreate some of the intense physical and psychical pleasures [I] had while at the breast…even after…[I am] weaned” (Lear 82). A chap-cheeked little hedonist, I. Indeed, my infantile auto-eroticism is quenched only by a heady mixture of thumb splints, Mentholatum Stop n’Grow, and the promise of an all-expenses-paid trip to Bondi Junction Smiggle.
My thumb-sucking is ‘infantile auto-eroticism’ because it exists on a continuum of oral fixation: ice cream, pens, hair, scabs, the end of my silicone menstrual cup... Quoth Peaches:
Suckin' on my titties like you wanted me
Calling me, all the time like Blondie
Check out my Chrissie behind
It's fine all of the time
Like sex on the beaches
What else is in the teaches of peaches? Huh? What?
A philosophy tutor suggests that sex, loving sex to be precise, could be the attempt to return to that primal psychic state of nonbeing - a boundarylessness that unifies the self/other, inner/outer, subject/object. In the sucking of the nipple (or anything else for that matter), in the connection between lovers, there is a return to a state of unity, an ecstatic nonbeing. Perhaps earnestly, (for I have always been called earnest), I would like to believe this a possibility.
Yet the utopic bent of this lusty annihilation is a crooked pipe. Boundarylessness infers lawlessness – a state whereby pleasure and horror intertwine as two slugs fucking. This co-mingling ooze drips from the lips, a slippery welcome mat. The grotesque, the perverse, the abject, etc., manifest when the boundaries between world and the body, the self and the other, are transgressed, dissolved. The orifices and cavities of the body are thus the limen of our corporeal hovels - our meatus2. For Bakhtin, the grotesque body is one “in the act of becoming. It is never completed; it is continually built, created” (Bakhtin 317). Key here is the mouth, through which the “confines…between the body and the world are overcome” (ibid). As Snack Syndicate so deliciously put it, when the exterior crosses the threshold “a parasite configures the archive anew” (Snack Syndicate 118). For Kristeva, too, the mouth is a gaping abyss which consumes and expels. Vomiting, as with other forms of expulsion, “draws me toward the place where meaning collapses”, reminding the self of the other self beside it; the inevitability of the corpse – my corpse (Kristeva 2).
My housemate comes to my door early one morning, stricken. She has swallowed a plant clipping; one of many perpetually feeding on the mantles of our house, a Paul Jenning story waiting to take root. She says she tried to the pull it back out as it went down, but the slick little tendril was too quick.
In Julia Ducournau’s 2016 cannibal bildungsroman Raw, Justine chews anxiously on her hair as she is reprimanded by a veterinary lecturer. It is a leporidic3 childhood habit, a coarse teat. But Justine’s habit has dissolved the border, she has swallowed her own hair. Placed on the toilet cistern, we watch as Justine gags, drools, and forcibly expels herself. The hair is thick and matted; her mouth has become the drain clutching at the refuse of her body. She pulls and coughs and pulls, a nightmarish rope; the fairy tale escape out Rapunzel’s fleshy window. Afterwards, as she washes her face in the sink, a girl tells her “two fingers will make it come up faster”, wryly referencing other forms of pathologised expulsion.
As a budding cannibal, Justine rips through the satin wallpaper of sexual oneness and milk-toothed ministration. She radically transgresses the “shared agreement of kissing: we holds off from fully eating each other” (Snack Syndicate 222). At a party, Justine is put in a room with another boy in her year – a painfully nostalgic seven minutes in heaven. She, a virgin, visibly nervous, he tells her they will go slow. She is covered head to toe in cobalt blue paint, he in yellow – together they will make a lush, verdant green. Their kiss deepens, the camera cuts to outside the bedroom, where partygoers lounge and talk. A scream. The boy runs out, blood streaming down his face, the middle of his bottom lip missing, more warzone than pastoral dream. The camera focuses on Justine standing behind him, an abject alien (who looks a bit like Tobias Fünke). In the shower, Justine reaches a hand into the abyss and teases out the missing flesh caught between molars. She rejects the Other, that radical collision between self and world, and flings it onto the floor. Only, of course, to pick it back up and chew it furtively, her eyes fluttering closed in pleasure.
In a series of events to be found only in an art school, I become a life drawing model for an hour and a half one Thursday morning. I am proffered a chuppa-chup for my efforts - so brave, such a good girl. As I root around for a strawberry cream I become suddenly aware that I really am stark naked on a stool held hostage by twelve awkward 17 year olds afraid to draw hands. I won’t start sucking til I’m safely behind the wooden screen, pulling back on my underpants stained inexplicably blue at the crotch.
(this one is a bit of a scrappy meal, but I do hope you find something to your taste).
Yours always,
Niamh
Works cited (ooh la la) :
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Indiana University Press, 1985 (1965).
Brooks, Andrew and Astrid Lorange (AKA Snack Syndicate). Homework. Discipline, 2020.
Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror. Columbia University Press, 1982 (1941).
Lear, Johnathan. Freud (2nd ed.). Routledge, 2015.
parasitic
a bodily opening….what a word!!!
rabbit-like