Prose Poetry in Conversation with Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror

Poetry

Early morning. I take my pills, a series of psych meds. The last one, flat, chalky, no bigger than my pinky nail: antipsychotic.

I eat my breakfast, drink my coffee. Drink water, press my tongue to the roof of my mouth, will my breakfast to stay down.

The spasms start half an hour later, crawling up my esophagus, rippling muscle and convulsing throat. I dry heave, over and over. Spit in the sink. Spit in the sink. Spit in the sink.

Nausea, salivating. Side effects.

Morning sickness, I think, and laugh. I will never be pregnant. Penises disgust me. My stomach spasms again.
Disgust.

—

“[W]hat… is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things. (Kristeva 4)”

Childhood:

With these pills, I may recover. I may return to a state before the illness, recover, re-cover ground until I am a child again, presumably untainted and unafraid.

Science:

With these pills, I may recover.

—

I do not remember a time before the sickness, and so when I take my pill, “‘I’ do not assimilate it, ‘I’ expel it. [...] I expel myself, I spit myself out,” sick over the toilet again after breakfast (3).

—

To be insane is to be distasteful, to be a remnant, to be abjection itself. I am disgusting because I do not clean myself or my space, because I am insane. I am disgusting because I cannot adhere to social norms, because I am insane. I am disgusting because I want things that are not mine, because I am insane. I am disgusting, I am unwell, I am insane.

I know this, and disgust myself as I seem to disgust others.

I “cannot be assimilated” and so I take my medication, and so I am sick every morning (1). I am twisting inside out, trying to expel the lining of my own stomach and bringing up bile.

I am sick, I say, and my doctor agrees.

—

In order for society to remain sane, I, and those like me, must remain remnant. “[A]bject and abjection” remain the borders, the “safeguards,” “[t]he primers of my culture,” and culture and I are protected from me and mine (2).

—

Kristeva tells us that “[i]t is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. (4)” The “territory” of society, “edged by the abject,” must remain sane in order to function because it is the rule of the sane that keeps the territory consolidated (6). Perhaps no man is an island, but every madman is.

—

When I become insane, abject, am I the skin on the milk or the child who rejects it (2)?

Reflection

        To keep the mentally ill confined to the realm of the abject is to protect society from that which does not work “for” it. Capitalism, especially the stage of  capitalism that we find ourselves in today, requires a mental fitness that myself and many other insane people find extremely difficult, if not impossible, to maintain. By saddling me with a laundry list of diagnoses, doctors work to maintain my abjection, which is to maintain my status as subject, which is to maintain my status as the problem. I am disgusting, I am unassimilable, I am not enough and will never fit in, and so I must remain on the periphery.

        There is something else, though. The reason behind the throwing up. Perhaps I have internalized my culture’s disgust for me to the point that every morning, I attempt to throw myself up. Perhaps the distaste comes from somewhere else, some other source of self-loathing. After all, what does it mean to abject oneself? Would it be an ejection, a rejection?

        Kristeva tells us that

[i]f it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject, one can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when the subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than the abject. The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being (5).

Being disgusted by oneself, then, creates a crisis of being in which subject, object, and abject collapse. Boundaries dissolve, and the self becomes dissolute: psychosis. Madness. Abjection of the self leads to more abjection, and the self revolts.

        Abjection both as a driver and a product of madness, then. To become mad is to become abject, and to embrace abjection is to embrace madness.

Works Cited

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. Columbia UP, 1982.