I am Real
Inspired by Lacan. The Real, the imaginary and the symbolic.
For Ammi, and Abbu, who always bought them for her! 🌼 Happy Mother’s Day! 🌼
🌼
Language initiates us
Into the Symbolic
In the mirror stage
And the Self confronts for the first time
The conflict between its experience of fragmentation
And the illusion of wholeness that lies in the mirrored gaze of the other
🌼
And so we live
Our lives
Continuously seeking to actualise
The experience
With the illusion
That promises to forever elude
🌼
And formal education becomes
In this context
An opportunity to add to the experience of fragmentation
That takes the self
Further away
From all the worm holes that could possibly lead to the Real
🌼
And so as part of my fragmentation
I was taught to internalise
And accept as real
The external signifier of love
And believe
The red rose 🌹 signifies passion and love
🌼
Love for me
Ironically found
A narcissistic pathway
That always led
To the scent of a bouquet of Nargis ke phool
That I fondly identified as my mother’s favourite
🌼
And this association
Beckoning from the realm of my imaginary
Continues to evoke a particular nostalgia
The kind that only special flowers
That once grew in the gardens of our childhood memories
Do
🌼
I didn’t know
Till now
That the nargis
Is also known as the daffodil
Which is in turn linked to
The myth of narcissus in both cultures
🌼
Poems taught at school
In both languages
Split the unity of my experience and illusion of the flower
Into two fragmented versions
Of my reality
🌼
One belonged to a land
That was alien to me
And succeeded in serving only as a delightful abstraction
As incomprehensible
And elusive
As my colonial Other
🌼
And the other
Frequently beheld and cherished
As the delicate signifier of my parents’ love
Seems to always hauntingly allude
To a wormhole
That carries within it the pristine scent of an imagined wholeness
🌼
And as both signifiers come together from the root of one signified
My uniquely romantic sensibility
Pulled by the scent of the Nargis from one end
And by a host of golden daffodils from the other
Suddenly seems to have unified
Into One
🌼
And while I know you insist, my dear Lacan,
That the Real
Remains inexpressible and inaccessible
I assure you, I am Real
And the wormhole that leads to it
Has ‘a host of golden’ nargis ke phool
Growing ‘along the margin of [its] bay’.
🌼
13.05.2018
