Long live the new flesh

Ballardian spot of time

Are our first fascinations always perverse, he wonders. The thought comes to him not from Freud—it is not intellectual in that sense—he cannot quote chapter and verse—but from seeing his son playing with the little bits of metal, the tags on the zipper of the traveling bag, which he lies swatting, grasping at, fiddling with, seemingly hours by hours. He remembers himself at his parents’ house, he must have been around two years old, possibly around the time his sister was born, or just after. He was sitting alone downstairs, in the kitchen, in what he remembers as being underneath the high chair, possibly his own, perhaps his sister’s. His mother must have been upstairs; his sense in the memory is that she is upstairs, and that is why he is alone. He remembers there was a magnet on the fridge, a small metal magnet that had a clip on one end, the idea being that you could hold a piece of paper within the clip and then affix the other, magnetic end to the fridge. Why one couldn’t simply attach a piece of paper to the fridge using a magnet he didn’t know. For whatever reason, he now found himself doing something that, he now realized, he had long longed to do. He took the magnet off the fridge (it must have been fairly lowdown, so he could reach it—or was there a paper clipped to it, giving him something to pull down? But that would have left behind evidence, and evidence there would be none), then lifted up his shirt, pinched together a fold of his belly, and clamped the clamp down on it. The shot of pain that went through him then—the shock of it. Instantly, he unclamped the clamp, cast it away, though clearly not quickly enough: the white welt and the blood flowing back. What had he been thinking? The magnet end of the clip was a metal ring, with a circular depression in the middle, like an inverted metal nipple. Evidently his yearning towards this item had something to do with hospitals, with having IV bags and sensors affixed to one; it was connected with some primal memory—about his own early existence, or perhaps about, or recalled by, his recently born sister’s. Whatever it was, it was something he wished to revisit, something that was, significantly, connected with the inorganic, with metal. And, connected with it also, as a lingering somatic echo of that moment, though he cannot now say if it happened in the moment, or in its immediate aftermath, or became folded into it somehow during the later reflection, was the distinct sense—what he now wants to call the distinctly Ballardian intuition—that there was a filament of steel, or, not a filament, but a thin, curved, absolutely rigid steel tube, behind his belly-button, bent inward, pointing down, and having its end at the mouth of his urethra. This was a distinct physical sensation, and one he still has today whenever he thinks of something that gives him a certain shudder; it is as if he feels with a shiver the presence of that steel, not to say cathether, but whatever it is, curved within him. Physical objects, too, can produce this frisson. (The shudder itself can be linked with other, inexplicably unpleasant sensations, like the sudden taste of cold water from a fountain, which has often induced in him the corresponding inverse sensation of dryness in the fingertips, as if they were covered in chalk.) The items that produce it are typically, unsurprisingly, metal; the shudder they induce is one that perceives the inorganic as intimately connected with—not as a casing, but as somehow enmeshed with—our bodies, his body.