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Moving alongside a river, apparently still, the current imperceptible to the naked eye. Abstracted ‘moving’ as opposed to ‘being moved’ via a specific mode of transportation, as if being carried along, or else set in motion through artificial means that are supplemental to the body. Prosthetics – perhaps cyclical – though detached from vehicular frame, render my body as vehicle, its propulsion synthesized from without. The dream state of flowing: the scene and the subject interpenetrating over and under – entire body and entire scene undulating in mutual encapsulation: in ‘infinite reflexivity.’

Still passing by, I am compelled by the view to focus my attention upon the opposing bank and a dense conglomeration of fir trees, many of the firs heavily loaded with snow. Illuminated magnificently by the low early evening sun that reflects onto them in dissipating amber orbs, the vision manufactures a wrench in my guts that twists deeply: both engorging and excavating, producing melancholia that bleeds through me like an embrace.

Where are we now and what place are we going to? Up ahead is the small fishing village that my dreams have shown me for months; the place with the fish restaurant in which I wait tables and my father cooks. A rustic, affable people populate the village and I am welcomed as opposed to held there in perpetual tension (the mark of other ‘homes’ I have attempted to ‘construct’). Holding my entrails in my two cupped hands, coagulating blood and incomprehensibly vital pieces of me escape through the gaps in my fingers that can never close around this conception of self adequately. Loss marks every attempt at apprehension.

Snow now falls; the last time I encountered you (home) was in Spring. I move, again, with a sense of disarticulation, ever closer to the center of the village and pass by a huddle of shirtless men with smooth tanned abdomens, full-figured with limbs like sausages (interior-meat chaffing against the translucent case in which it strains), and stiffly rounded bellies that demonstrate their comforts. It’s snowing and the last time I was here – it was Spring – they were there, too, enjoying a break from manual labour; they are mimetic totems of the world outside and the temporal rupture of the unconscious. ‘Life’, synthesized by my unconscious, has continued without ‘me’, and yet ‘I’ am always ‘here’, this I ‘feel’ wherever my momentary state of consciousness manifests itself on the spectrum.

Katie (a friend from school-days) disturbs me at my temporary abode (a rented room?) at the precise moment of clarity that precedes a shift into the auto-erotic. This programme of disintegration has a tool: a mains-powered phallus whose ergonomic shape belies my desire and my method. The meaning of the penetrating object is thus stripped away in the gestural mimicry of a living body, reconfigured as gestural excess. Penetration is far from the objective, for fucking myself is a fully disempowered activity, serving by its disembodied imitation of copulation only to accentuate absence. The possibility of self-penetration occupies a distant point on the trajectory of sexual desire. Too distant to reach, its performance exposes a detour, a denouement – engagement reconstituted as premature unraveling. Instead of penetration I yearn for apprehension – fleeting yet stabilizing touch, touch that configures the body as embodied matter, an interrogation of inner-space, a pressure that acts like an anchor. The clarity foregrounds an application of pressure that moves and yet doesn’t diminish its hold, so that the movement abandons the touched body in a state of bondage by invisible ties. Pushing against the opening of the body with its knots of clitoral nerve-endings, rather than passing into it and the miasma of lubricating mucosity secreted there, I maintain an urgent bilateral tension between inside and out.

There are bedsheets suspended from the ceiling, bisecting the domestic scene of my masturbatory hovel. So it is from this state that I am transported to the previously described theatres of melancholic return induced by incandescence and a sense of belonging induced by the scene of an unreachable anchoring. I think: if fucking serves to consolidate the multiple threads of ones emotional and physical pull towards the other, notwithstanding the multiple (emotional) withdrawals and (physical) disappearances, does auto-erotic sexuality function, reflectively, to reintegrate multiple performances and obfuscatory gestures that constitute the generative ‘self’?