Primordial: An Abstraction

23

Apropos dismemberment. .

My field of interest — although not my field of specialty — is the grotesque. Who isn’t interested in the grotesque? Either it repels you or it attracts you. Either way it interests you.

Thus everybody’s field of interest is the grotesque.

Here are some terms we might associate with it:

Lowly.

Earthly.

Uncanny.

Male bodily fluids.

Zoomorphology.

Kristeva: Abjection. That which is cast off. That which wallows in the dirt like the memory of a dead soul.

Lacan: Crasse!

OED: “Picturesquely irregular. Fantastically absurd.”

Dryden: “An hideous Figure of their Foes they drew, Nor Lines, nor Looks, nor Shades, nor Colours true; And this Grotesque design, expos’d to Publick view.”

Finally, Bakhtin [to a lover]: “I don’t like your mouth. That gaping aperture unnerves me. That wide-open bodily abyss reminds me of your anus. And I prefer your anus. Copulation, defecation, mastication — these perfectly terrific and disgusting enactments constitute the same prenumbra. All of them grope the sordid privates of the beginning and the end of life simultaneously.”