Mouth

“…I don’t have another life. I don’t exist as another person, somewhere else doing something else with other people. There is no other me. There is no clocking off.”

Morrisey, Interview in The Times Magazine

“ Whatever they may think and say about their ‘egoism’, the great majority nonetheless do nothing for their ego their whole life long: what they do is done for the phantom of their ego which has formed itself in the heads of those around them and has been communicated to them; – as a consequence they all of them dwell in a fog of impersonal, semi-personal opinions, and arbitrary, as it were poetical evaluations, the one for ever in the head of someone else, and the head of this someone else again in the heads of others; a strange world of phantasms…”

Nietzsche, Daybreak

Do I even have a voice? Have I heard myself speak? Open the mouth. It looks seedy in there. It’s Dora’s mouth. In his dream Freud looked into his patient’s mouth and glimpsed repulsion itself; the opening was disgusting. At which point, three doctors, his colleagues, storm in with clouds of babel, diagnosing her with words serious like clowns. They speak foolishness with scientific exactitude. Most times I can’t hear myself speak over the foolishness, the clowns, Zarathustra’s arch-foe, the ape-fool; I have to hear self, my speech. And it is festering and repulsive, like Dora’s mouth. Keep looking. Open the mouth.

I’m not sure whether you’ll find some programme here. I know that I’m going in. The mouth. I’ll hear something – a voice? But not my voice, nor anyone else’s for that matter. It’ll be a cacophony, a congregation of phonemes doused in holy spirit, dancing wildly out from the throat, now in front of me, passing me by, out the mouth. And what did Saint Paul have to say of those who spoke in tongues? That they “do not speak to other people, but to God; for nobody understands them since they are speaking mysteries in the spirit.” The speakers did not wait for judgment, wait for what was to come, wait for Paul even. That would’ve meant waiting for instructions, for means, a plan. There’d have been formalities, protocols, and a waiting room – yes, Christianity as waiting room. But they didn’t wait. They were going in. The mouth.

We’ll follow their lead. Speaking in tongues was a gift of the holy spirit, it shared in the same body as all the others. But it didn’t disseminate itself amongst the idiotes , rather it returned to the source, to the share, the body of Christ, God. A tautology if ever there was one. God opened his mouth and let forth, “let there be light!” And so it was, and it was good. He opened his mouth again; it was, and it was good. Now it opens again! Is this mine, God’s? It makes no difference. We’re returning to the share, festering like Dora’s, cacophonous like God’s. The mouth.

~ by Benoît on April 23, 2010.