A journal of narrative writing.
Althusser in the Garden

Listen to Althusser in the Garden read by Sara Henning

“Even though I have been out of psychiatric hospital for two years, I am still a missing person for the public who have heard of me. I am neither alive nor dead and, though I have not been buried, I am ‘bodiless.’ I am simply missing, which was Foucault’s splendid definition of madness.”
           — Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever

I. The body simply missing is confined by reappearance. In the space between death and threats of revival, an elder tree enticing a barn swallow, each leaflet’s serrated margin not cutting her, but thrilling her toward flight. When Spinoza called the body a disinterested gift, you defied him with fantasies of a strawberry’s untamable softness, how as a child you stalked them heartlessly, watched truffles dervish in beaks of hens. There, in Morvan, you learned to burn the chaff you couldn’t plough. That after hours of sheaving, chestnut branches were smooth and plundered as a sheared ewe. You were St. Thomas the Apostle provoking the dove-grey specter of your grandfather’s tobacco smoke, only trusting what you could hold in your hands. Later, your wife’s neck like a shattered mare’s, mane unfurling a loamy intoxication as if you were scything barley, the fertile spikelets urging you to hold harder. Her body falling forward, creamy cluster of elder flower, blue-black berries divulged under the honey-scented folds. And you, the empire moth pausing to tongue the languor, pleasure yourself with the empurpled secret that left raw, would poison most men. II. His wife’s neck like a shattered mare’s. But not before he was St. Thomas the Apostle, provoking the dove-grey specter of his grandfather’s tobacco smoke. Her mane unfurling a loamy intoxication as though he were scything barley. But not before he only trusted what he could hold in his hands. The fertile spikelets urging him to hold harder. The blue-black berries divulging under the honey-scented folds. But not before he learned that after hours of sheaving, even chestnut branches were smooth and plundered as a sheared ewe. Her body falling forward, creamy cluster of elder flower. But not before he learned to burn the chaff he couldn’t plough. And when the empire moth pauses to tongue the languor, she is only pleasuring herself with an empurpled secret that left raw, would poison most men.

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