Geography of Wounds

"The individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He feels himself becoming space, the dark space where things cannot be put, and he invents spaces of which he is the convulsive possession" Roger Caillois

What I wish to present here is a group of meditations on the nature of what is revealed within the wound. The word itself, wound, may for purposes here be easily replaced by the words fissure, crack, aperture, opening, rupture, perforation, puncture or tear, all gathered under the sign of Illumination, which is their primary signifier.

With words that convey both fear and nostalgia, most religions, surviving and archaic, tell in their creation myths of a primal place that preceded form. Many of these mythologies are astonishingly similar considering  both the temporal and spatial distance from which they originated. Egyptian, Sumerian and Zoroastrian cosmologies tell of a place that we have come to know as Chaos. In Egypt the name for this place was the masculine Nun. In Greece it was the feminine Nux. Both were seen as existing prior to light amidst dark and boundless waters. It is this fluidity that I am concerned with, as it is from a wound that fluid will flow. In fluids things dissolve, water and sugar become indistinguishable from one another. Fluidity is the loss of self, of form and of definition.

In the myths of  Chaos sooner or later forms emerge. In Egypt it was an island that first emerged from the waters of Nun. Later myths present creation as less natural. One ancient Sumerian tale recalls a god, Marduk, a god of Chaos who wishes to be served as saying, " I want to coagulate blood in order to build a skeleton and create a human being". This blood, or fluid is what he had to work with and it is from this blood already existing within Chaos that he shapes into something that will serve him. Mandaean Gnosticism much later speaks of this primordial blood that has been contained within a human, "and the blood that is in the veins is flowing radiance".

Gnostic scriptures describe creation as stemming from a Chaos of boundless light in which several Gods and Goddesses reside without form, or more specifically as pure idea. It was the selfish or jealous divinities that were not satisfied with this kingdom of light who created separate realms of which they would be sovereign. In these texts the malicious divinities created form as a flawed imitation of the pure idea of themselves. Light was trapped within skin, this light of Chaos that pervaded the new being with living force. But because this new being was flawed, that is imprisoned within form, it was doomed to annihilation should it not attain awareness of it's slavery.

In Alchemy, all matter is derived from the Materia Prima, the unformed first form, or Chaos, and it is by way of putrefication that the essence of form is finally perfected and freed. There is no regeneration without decomposition. Alchemy was a science that attempted to achieve divine movement through a disciplined and esoteric understanding and manipulation of fluids, an attempt to corrupt form and coagulate spirit. In this way we can see Alchemy as a reversal of Gnostic creation. As the Alchemist Hermes had written, "Dissolve the fixed, make fixed the volatile, and make fast the winged thing, and it will make you live safely."

My intent in speaking of Chaos myths, Gnosticism, and Alchemy has been to illuminate what lurks beneath the surface of their writings, and what I want to convey is the euphoric freedom that is touched in me when I submerge myself in such a text. It is as if these writings stir within my body, rather than in my mind, and a desire to spill myself grasps me.

We resemble the universe insofar as we are wounded. It has been stated that the cosmos is in a constant and convulsive state of expansion, and according to this theory, the outward expansion is a result of the Big Bang and it's inevitable conclusion will culminate in the collapse of the cosmos into it's original formlessness, or nothingness. I would deduce from this that the universe is running from it's own image, rushing forward into it's past to a place of belonging based upon a lack of form where everything exists and no longer exists simultaneously, or more precisely, things exist, but in relation to no thing.

We exist within several skins, and these skins contain or confine our viscera, create boundary, territory and definition. It is by means of this containment that various matter are given names. Yet as some things will not be contained, others remain unnameable.

It is through the wounds to the skin that the object escapes its form and sheds it's name. A wound is a transgression of form and surface, a will towards movement and away from identity. It is a violation of the name.

One need not look back into the history of religion to see a hope for deliverance from the form, we may in fact need look only as far as our childhood. Within childhood imagination form and identity lose their meaning. The child exists in reverie and daydream much more than in utility, which to the child is the superfluous. This is why tales of metamorphosis are so popular with children, it is through them, with the powers of imagination that they escape the Gnostic prison. The fluidity of this way of imagining closely resembles the primal community of belonging. Identity is unnecessary without a maligned other, and the child is able to be both self and other. Because they live within a cosmos yet to be formed, children are capable of remembering the incantations that dissolve form and are able to navigate the waters of Nux and Nun gracefully. But now that childhood has escaped us we find ourselves imprisoned in countless forms, the form of the worker, the citizen, the lover, that have in turn imprisoned that other form, that of our body which serves them, and it is our right to seek the wound or rupture in our forms through which we may flow back to the Chaos of belonging.

What interests me is a certain Will that I see in things. Water it seems, wills itself loose. Matter in a crowded cell wills itself into an open area. I describe these diffusions as a will. Migration from an overpopulated country to a less populous one is a will towards a better life. Space travel is a will towards the unknown. Prison escapes are a will to freedom and revolt is a will to power. These wills towards expansion are what flows from a wound. The nomad, the migrant and the refugee transgress a border. A missile, satellite, and shuttle pierce the atmosphere. The criminal first punctures the social body, then escapes his confinement. The revolutionary impales the king with his blade.

There is no transcendence within the wound as there is no separate Kingdom or consciousness, all is connected by the transgression of borders, and what is called transcendence may more appropriately be described as a bleeding.

We are transfixed when confronted with a wound, gaping mutely at the possibility of what already is. We see our innermost fears and desires written within it's meat, and tremble in fear from our desire to be wounded.

The human body has been said earlier as described by the Gnostics as a prison. This cell however, that we are doomed to inhabit is not without openings through which we may escape, or leak from.

The aperture of the mouth is the seat of both mortality and knowledge. It is from our mouth that words escape, a measure of our wisdom and ignorance, and in which food enters, the stuff that sustains us. It is also from this cave that saliva is produced, which in some cultures is endowed with magic properties. Saliva is the deposit of the soul; spittle is soul in movement. We use it to strengthen an action, for protection, to impress one's will on an object, to "sign" a contract, to give life. Jesus is said to have mixed his saliva with dirt to make a balm that he used to cure a blind man. One spits in contempt at another, most often as a means to negate the power another wields over him.

Vomit is also ejected from deep within our body through the mouth, it will surge forth from a sickly form as if abandoning a burning building, sinking ship or falling airplane. In cases of overwhelming emotion the body will purge itself of horror, fear or despair in the form of vomit.

The mouth may also serve as a receptacle for other sacred fluids, be the place where one wound flows into another. Kissing is an example of this, as is fellatio. In both of these erotic activities there is a loss of self and dissolution of form. There are endless examples of the subtle significance of the kiss in culture. The sayings, "sealed with a kiss", "the kiss of death", kiss of life", and "betrayed with a kiss" each give as an example of the kiss as a means of fusion between two forms, or between the formed and unformed. The lover melts into the beloved, or the living escapes the body as signified in the kiss of death.

In the act of fellatio, the unformed yet semi coagulated substance that makes life can erupt within moist tabernacle of the mouth.

Breath, that invisible and ethereal measure of health and vitality uses the mouth as a door in which to inhabit the body. It is said that the soul will travel upon breath, it is the movement of life itself, entering our bodies, carried on the crisp winds, or exiting us by way of the mouth to return to those currents.

As our breath is said to be the carrier of soul, the eye is said to be the soul's window. Through this window we are told that we can see another's soul at work. We have stated that the soul is what the alchemists wished to reveal, or make known. It is the intangible substance that comprises our essence. It is the light that is imprisoned within our skin and may be made visible by the gaze. With this in mind we may call tears exiled spirit, or expended soul.

We cry for longing, loss, joy and sorrow, all of which have their deepest roots in desire. These feelings we may experience on a daily basis, however, every now and then they may prove too large to contain. It is at these moments that desire will escape us through this portal named the eye. Through these salty tears we taste the waters of our origins, and in them we may travel from the eye to a memory of the sea.

Another saline droplet that may escape us is sweat. Sweat is a measurement of our enslavement to utility and fear, for we sweat in cases of labor and nervousness. The worker is indentured to the task and suffers through it's duration. His imagination may wander far from his body during the hours of work and the sweat that gathers dust on his skin and soaks his clothing closely follows his daydream in the desire to be free of bondage to labor. In a similar way, sweat will escape the body frozen in fear. The body will sweat during an incriminating interrogation, or while awaiting punishment.

Most of what will flow from us is permeated with saltiness, and can thus be associated with the sea, but blood has many qualities that imply more earthen concerns and values. We spill blood to honor our own, and it must be said that blood is also seen as nourishment. An example of this is the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, where the body of the sacrificed God is consumed by the faithful in a sort of sharing of his wounds. The Aztecs believed that the blood of sacrificed victims fed the sun and kept it from dying.

Vampires, that mythical species of sex and death need the blood of innocents to retain immortal status. Indeed it is blood more that any other of our liquids that symbolizes mortality and immortality. To reproduce and extend one's lineage in a bloodline is often seen as a lessor form of immortality, and too have blood spilled or shed is to die. It is through bloodshed that some of us will die, but the bleeding that leads to death is also a return to formlessness. The addict will annihilate his consciousness, a form of self, by puncturing a vein, the suicide will negate his form with a gun to his face, and the soldier's blood will soak the foreign soil so that the state may expand it's form. But blood is also the vehicle of desire both emotional and physical. We speak of its chamber, the heart when we consider strong emotions, and it is blood that will engorge our sexual organs in our need for flow.

I recall having once cut my wrist on a shard of glass while playing in the backyard. After my mother had left me alone in the bathroom to wash, I lifted my wrist to my mouth to taste that silky redness that was falling from me. I was curiously overcome with the notion that I was drinking myself, an idea that I now associate with the image of the snake that devours it's own tail. Much like sweat and tears, my blood tasted like the ocean, and I remembered my older sister having told me that all people came from the ocean before they were monkeys, and with my lips on my opened wrist I dreamed that my skin was the beach, and my blood was the ocean.

Clearly linked with the qualities of blood, the libidinal fluids are an agent of expenditure and loss. In some contexts celibacy is practiced not because sexuality is equated with licentiousness, but because the release of the libidinal fluids is seen as an unsexing. Here what comprises the identity of gender is embodied within the libidinal fluids, and practitioners are advised to channel, or waste this energy through other wounds.

The sexual act is also said to be a fusion of sorts where an individual undergoes a loss of self at the moment of orgasm. But because the pleasure of orgasm is experienced as a type of fusion, with or without partners, it excludes singularity and thus is more aligned with belonging and return to the annihilating waters of Chaos. It is a return to an end.

It is also known that the eruption of libidinal fluids provokes violence in some who would carve a universe of wounds upon another. Gilles de Rais was said to have climaxed when eviscerating young boys, and the desire to expend fluids will still lead many to rape and murder. The association of sex and death dates to prehistory and continues into our future. This pact is not altogether cultural or psychological any longer, as today it is well known that semen can be lethal.

Despite these sorts of images, the libidinal fluids that escape us are signs of fertility as well, and among these life signs are some of the strongest of images and rituals. Among one Melanesian tribe all adults will masturbate into a communal bowl, then rub the combined substance onto the leaves of crops so as to aid them in growth.

Fertility and death may perhaps be flip sides of the same coin. We are reminded of this by the human sacrifices of northern European fertility cults, and today by the deadly marriage of semen and blood as the prime movers of the HIV virus. And so within the arena of the erotic act we can see that the expulsion of the libidinal fluids carry with their flow the loss of self and the desire for expansion, both integral qualities of the wound.

The urethra could be considered in many ways the reclamation of power. For example, in a mescaline cult that was described by a visiting anthropologist, the shaman alone was deemed worthy of ingesting the sacred drug. The less powerful of the devout were required to drink his urine in order to receive the remaining graces of the drug. Urine is also used as a means of marking territory, and in eroticism as a way to establish authority or possession in the creation of hierarchical roles. In alchemy it often signifies the sun, and has as a distant cousin in the practice of baptism. To urinate is to feel movement and warmth, and it serves to purify and remove from the body harmful toxins.

The anus, on the other hand, is itself riddled with taboo. The excessive concern of contemporary Christianity with its penetration testifies to this. It is also considered as filthy, shameful, and home of death and decomposition. To do justice to the anus we may look at it's virtue of disguising things, it's capability to transform, or unform what we consume, and it's lovely way of unknowing what is known. It's pleasures are often said to be addictive, and indulging in them is to play with damnation, such is the freedom it has inspired for centuries. The Marquis de Sade, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Bataille and Genet have all attempted to describe the wonders of this hidden wound, but maybe it is better hidden so that it's shame covertly aids it's pleasure.

Briefly now I will name wounds of the earth, and relate them to our own in their shared qualities.

The body of the earth, that is the Terrestrial Body, has like us a number of outlets, both natural and constructed through which it's substance is revealed and flows forth from. The spring and the well are examples of this and they both are sites of water, that primal element.

The spring, the natural of the two gives water as if it were a gift. We are attracted to the waters of the spring in part because as I have mentioned earlier, it is water that precedes our form, and because we cannot refuse the kindliness of the earth's body. The spring is a place of repose and what murmurings are discerned in it's flow are pleasant words of belonging, first belonging as differentiated from a belonging to men. Many natural springs are consistent in their offering of water and are the symbol of abundance. Some, being either seasonal or intermittent resemble menstruation, emphasizing the feminine gender of their flow. In areas of concentrated seismic activity springs are heated within the folds of the earth's skin, deepening a claim to the feminine Nun of ancient Egypt. A sulfurous effluvia may escape from the lips of this spring, sulfur being an important substance to the alchemal Materia Prima, letting the wanderer know that it is the soul of the earth that animates these waters.

The well is an inflicted wound and as such holds negative qualities. Because the water from the well is not a gift, nature will exercise a right to halt the waters at a whim. Scarcity and drought are the mute companions of the well. The well is thought to be kin to knowledge. It takes labor to achieve knowledge, and effort to dig a well, and the rewards of both are worthwhile, however temporary and finite. They are what would be the gift reduced to use value, they are tools. Those who draw water from the well do so out of neccesity, and the waters offer neither solace nor abundance, similar to those who seek knowledge alone are the mere owners of so many useful things. At the bottom of a well one may also discover the corpse. It has often been the repository of violence and is accomplice to the murderer. In the case of the oil well, the putrefied remains of the earth's prehistoric inhabitants are exposed again to daylight and put to use poisoning the current inhabitants.

The cave and the mine have the same relationship that the spring has to the well. Both are transgressions of the Terrestrial Body, the former being that body opening itself, and the latter an external, forced opening. The cave is an opportunity for shelter. It is the childhood home of our species and is encoded in our memory as a place of safety. It provides warmth in it's solidity during a storm, and coolness under the floor of the desert. The cave also provides refuge for the secret and for the mystery, but is not by nature a place for shame. It's secrets are of the timeless and fragile sort, those that need protection from the intrusion of use. They can be of such grandeur that they reduce us to silence, maintaining the secret not by pact or conspiracy, but by awe alone. Take for example the ancient cave paintings whose meanings are now lost to us, or the natural mineral or ice formations that elude meaning itself. The secrets that reside in caves surpass imagination, this beauty that has evolved for no reason whatsoever, not even for itself.

Mines signify rape, both rectal and vaginal, depending upon what is mined. Inspired by greed, they are a passageway that is coerced into yielding a thing alien to the aggressor, and considered of high value. A coal mine would have the negative stereotype commonly placed on the rectum. A diamond mine would be construed as vaginal given the associations of this gem and femininity, as well as the value placed upon a thing of beauty that will inspire men to take and own a thing. There is wealth to be had within a mine, but that wealth has a tendency to be cursed. A uranium mine provides the raw material for extinction, a coal mine will consume it's locale, and is notorious for it's harm to the human body. In the case of gold or diamonds, the wealth attained stands in contrast to the lives spent wasted as wage labor in the procuring of it for the owner. The walls of the mine are not a place for home or shelter, they are harsh and dangerous. An exhausted mine lays on a hill like an old prostitute who has outlived her charms and talents, thus her use value, or a battered victim of rape.

The volcano has several corollaries to our own body. It is the earth vomiting it's own entrails in a death spasm, it is the androgynous orgasm, ejaculating pent up semen, or is the flow that trickles down the contours of the woman's thighs. The boulders could be seen as feces, and the lava as the blood of the earth itself.

A volcano will erupt only when the pressures of containment under the earth's crust is no longer bearable. The terrestrial Body wishes to be outside itself, and the volcano is it's means. The price of containment is extreme, often burying entire towns or leveling forests. What is called a lava dome will form over the lacerated earth as a scab will over cut skin, and the resulting landscape after an eruption is witness to the volcano's intention to destroy form. Light itself is eclipsed by the ash and smoke sent spiraling towards heaven in defiance of the creator of form.

The earthquake, too is a reduction of form and negation of all useful works. Its human twin is war. Both are movements towards waste and violence quite equal in the power to wound. It occurs to me that the quake may be the earth's retribution for it's enslavement to use, and war may be a retribution for humanity's enslavement to a sovereign. The magnificent display of light in our planet's northern regions, the Aurora Boreales, or northern lights may appear as a celestial wound in motion, the flow of it's currents serving as a map to our desire to lose form. It is the night sky dancing in the rapture of it's own lack of boundary, and is testament to the ancient divinities of light founId in Gnostic texts.

Just as our own bodies are riddled with punctures through which we may leak, or escape ourselves, and the body of the earth orbits the sun while bleeding fire, water and gasses, so it's most external skin, the ozone membrane is in a rapid state of decomposition. This may very likely be the mortal wound through which the final gasps of our collective body may be heard returning to the primal nothing, or formless universe, leaving the corpse of that body to be pulverized into dust by an eternity of meteors and witnessed by nothing other than an eclipsed sun.

dedicated, years later to the memory of Peter Christopherson and John Balance