La langue ressemble à de la pâte à modeler ou de la pâte à pizza, une espèce de corps contenu dans la bouche, comme un homoncule recouvert d’un drap, un fantôme, qui mimerait à l’intérieur les mouvements généraux de la tête. Cette impression de parallélisme, comme un personnage en pyjama qui ferait en petit ce que la bouche fait en grand, est troublante. On peut aussi penser à un gant de boxe qui se dresse et se replie parce que la main à l’intérieur bouge les doigts. La meilleure comparaison est peut-être celle d’un animal blotti, tapi dans sa tanière et qui s’apprête à bondir pour sortir. Il se masse en arrière, semble s’accroupir et veut jaillir dans un mouvement soudain : il fait d’abord le dos rond avant de se jeter en avant. Ici le bout de la langue est comme la tête de ce corps mou. Cette impression est renforcée par le fait que le corps de la langue, fixé au plancher buccal est libre et semble s’en détacher – on aperçoit comme une fente qui libère le bout de la langue à la manière d’une tête au bout d’un cou. Tout dans le film est une confirmation des descriptions d’Aristote : molle, large, et surtout flexible, la langue est possédée d’une vie propre.
Auteur : Lecteur
Push again, they say a few moments later. You’ve got to be kidding—aren’t I done yet ? But this one’s easy ; the placenta has no bones. I had always imagined the placenta like a rare fifteen-ounce steak. Instead it’s utterly indecent and colossal—a bloody yellow sac filled with purple-black organs, a bag of whale hearts.
The year my father died, I read a story in school about a little boy who builds ships in the bottoms of bottles. This little boy lived by the maxim that if you could imagine the worst thing that could ever happen, you would never be surprised when it did. Not knowing that this maxim was the very definition of anxiety, as given by Freud (“‘Anxiety’ describes a particular state of expecting the danger or preparing for it, even though it may be an unknown one”), I set to work cultivating it. Already an avid “journaler,” I started penning narratives of horrible things in my school notebook. My first installment was a novella titled “Kidnapped” that featured the abduction and torture of my best friend, Jeanne, and me by a deranged husband-wife team. I was proud of my talismanic opus, even drew an ornate cover page for it. Now Jeanne and I would never be kidnapped and tortured without our having foreseen it ! I thus felt confused and saddened when my mother took me out for lunch “to talk about it.” She told me she was disturbed by what I had written, and so was my sixth-grade teacher. In a flash it became clear that my story was not something to be proud of, as either literature or prophylactic.
[W]hatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn’t all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.
The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic…. [Yet] dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible. (Adam Phillips / Barbara Taylor)
I learned this scorn from my own mother ; perhaps it laced my milk. I therefore have to be on the alert for a tendency to treat other people’s needs as repulsive. Corollary habit : deriving the bulk of my self-worth from a feeling of hypercompetence, an irrational but fervent belief in my near total self-reliance.