If this is an unspoken residue of something unarticulated during my birth, time will tell. From this moment on, the only thing I can do is speculate from the intuited inscriptions etched by the words that write me: an I who unknows herself as mad for an entire life until making it into her cure, and an irreparable love, suddenly creating an unthinkable destiny, once crazy. 

By recognizing myself as mad, I open the doors to the resignification and reappropriation of my own body. On the rights of being mad is a gesture of renovation to redirect an ancestral order: obey and fulfill an outside judge (not by chance, the name of my city of birth, also called Juiz de Fora, in Portuguese). 

The rigour of this jurisprudence over my small being is at its maximum efficiency in most of my lifetime, or even before it, I should say. A desire of submission and rebelliousness incarnated in one single knot tying all my law books together; while, intimately, urging me to reinvent ways of survival, never of living, for such was not an option, it being improper, dirty. 

Ever since I was a little girl, I had the habit of calling this outside judge my foreman, cruel father, extreme law, superego, enforcer of excessive enjoyment, at last, an interiorized exacerbated control forbidding me to desire outside its law (once I had no clue of my own). 

But what does it mean to desire outside the law? Is it to be madly passionate, or to be unconscious of one’s own enjoyment? Which madness are we talking about? Incest? Or the transgression and reestablishment of a limit whereby excessive enjoyment opens space for pleasure and love in their purest and unthinkable expressions? This arc, this art of being sexuated and inhabit a body, appears easy but is impossible in its complete articulation. Sexuality, if acted upon, is an occurrence that brings with it the measure of its own improvisation, which often rhymes with the unmanageable. 

Before this conundrum, there is always the risk of facing an unconsciousness deriving from ancestral times, the malign retour of an unceasing repetition demanding more and more, in an excessive cruel reset, desirous of an insane sameness. Why is it important to talk about this? There is coherence in my incoherence. I want to state that by understanding my rights of being mad as a choice, and not as repetition or destine, such sentence is set free. And what is madness for me? Irrationality is unknowing how to articulate every single thing by the laws of the mind which judges the body by its reasonable circumstances only, coding without negotiation and excessively enabling its negations.

It goes like this: if you do this, you will win a moment’s respite. How? By placing and replacing one same object in the same position a thousand times over, by thinking excessively about death, by cultivating an altar for the deadly destructive drives, ad infinitum. In this madness, time is jerked off, and I remain unable to feel bliss or delight. My life is sentenced into a body whose locus of enjoyment is obedience and submission before an oppressor who acts as if it knows how to do it right: and yet, closed to the possibilities of love, the opened doors (and legs) of the heart’s reasons. 

While fulfilling this judgement, imposed by myself, I also struggled to elaborate such martyrdom. The psychoanalytical work I chose to bet was uncertain (like any other bet) and desirous to articulate my letting go of the judge’s hand (the same one that held me, and also my dam origin), hoping to rebirth (or remember) an internal law, which, suddenly and to my unexpected surprise, resurfaces when my life is at risk. Before a cancer diagnosis on the base of my tongue (yes, my tongue), I undergo two surgeries, one urgent, to remove a tumour there lodged. Such intervention is done by a robot maneuvered by the hands of a surgeon, which operates the machine. It is this strange metal being that penetrates my mouth and slits my tongue, cutting the organ in its real materiality, separating its deadly becoming from what announces life. 

It is only months later, when receiving the pathology results, that I will hear: the reports indicate that the tongue showed a negative, or, in medical terms, more flesh was extracted than it was needed. Or, said in my own terms, the extricated rest of this tongue represented the unspoken words the once upon a time baby couldn’t vocalize or reach. But I am moving too fast here. I first need to explain that the second intervention I underwent was caused by an unexpected bleeding during the night, while I was still hospitalized, and that filled my mouth, and my body, with an excess of blood, an absurd quantity of origin. 

It was at that instant, I can assert, that I understood for the first time the primary sense of the law: a determination that requests the separation of bodies so that they can live conscious and aware of life and death’s limits and cycles, despite the illusion of filiation and eternal repetition, many times unconscious in parents, but often manifested in their descendants, successively. Then, and there, I also understood it was time to let go of the judge outside my body and listen to the interior voice inhabiting me, which so much desired but exceeded in blood, in lineage, and yet, still, in a magistral manner (as one of the doctors on call would later say), was capable of swallowing (unconsciously, under the effect of a general anesthesia) the clot over my vocal cords, and, like so, sacrifice the blood, the origin, and liberate the breathing, easing the tessiture of the cut. 

I also have learned that only a small percentage of the cases (20%) in this kind of operation can cause unexpected bleedings, especially due to the quantity of nerves located in the region where the tumour was removed – not to mention the placement of several major arteries, one connecting our breathing directly to the beating of our hearts. For me, the interesting aspect of all this is that, despite science having the reputation of universal and endless in search of definitive answers, the doctors, in this situation, and to my luck, the majority who attended me, gave the final authority of knowing to my body, the expert in the success of this traversal. 

To the point of me listening, almost like a whisper, while waking up in convalescence in the emergency area after the second surgery, extremely fragile, tired (as though I had given birth to my own being and void), after losing so much blood, the doctor’s insistence and reassurance, that I had pulled out of this because my body knew exactly what it was doing at the moment of the crisis, prosperously allowing the effective action of the team. 

Before death, life, which edges but in a second. And the atemporal consciousness of a knowing (not knowing) anterior to words and which govern the law and the pulsation of life, but also of death. And still, why say something before all this? In order to understand how the trust in what one doesn’t know it knows determines the law of those who choose to live, continuously acting over our bodies with limits and answers, many times impossible to be articulated but still valid with the same science.

*

It was up to me, and my desire, to unveil this disruptive and destructive plot, recreating a new way out for this mad infant (this infant on fire). But I didn’t do this alone. I worked, for several years, and still remain, to elaborate the frontiers of the unsayable through the labour of psychanalysis. Without another person occupying the position of a listener, this task would have been impossible, for any link can only be established between one and another. Whilst the dialect of the judge, inverse to the one which connects us in love, is perversely mortal and judgmental: a dictatorship that kills the I in the name of another enjoyment, and whose suffering can reach unimaginable levels, in its best, and worst versions, of the law and its limits. 

By appropriating the demarcation between life and death, and in a certain way, opting to rebirth in this castrated body, cut from the ideal of original fusion, I validated the unheard emotions of a baby which, in former times, came to the world madly. 

These memories, I know, are full of failures, and yet, important to be said, so they can fully act on my skin. It is in this tessiture, also, where holes are found, the mad desires without sense in their sudden disappearances. On my rights of being mad: so that, from the return to the mythical maternal origin, of Juiz de Fora (Outside Judge), and the same mortifications, may be possible to create a new dance, a novelty, where I, gone in the erotica of passionate, interlaced loving bodies, can be lost in the other, but refound in myself, depositary of traces melted in the flesh; a heritage of eternal self-rewriting, affectated by the silver gloss of the moon over our transitory, dazzled beings gulped by the pulsations, unrestricted and contingent, and recipient of frequencies, and meanings, to be rediscovered, the unhindered pleasures out of the temporary residences of words. 

*

Considering that facts are nothing but versions, nothing but nothings reordered, it is like so that I retell my small little story. The summary of a rebirth, of a traumatic repetition, of life and death intermingled. The tale of a young girl who was born and became gravely sick after labor. Who experienced recurring transit accidents that almost took her life; a sequence of psychotic breaks, an exacerbated dread of the law and a crazy desire to be body and transience. From a normal delivery, goes the legend, I was put in incubation for a few days with a very high fever, until, as soon as arriving home, develop an intestinal infection due to a hospital contamination. What does this baby want? I can still hear the echoes around me. Why doesn’t she get better? Eventually, with an excess of food, affection and prayer, the child decides to submit to the condition of living outside of her mother’s body (be it for her desire or mine, I don’t know). 

It took me a long time to completely understand this. I was also late to comprehend how my so-called independence, which made me capable of creating a life in another country, foreign, and live alone, without anyone else (or the fact I never married or had children) are part of the contingencies, but also of an unconscious desire of separation and alienation present in me. Whether this may be a traumatic repetition of what my parents desired and couldn’t realize, or a residue of so many other similar principles, life was realized as it could. Certainly plenty has changed today, greatly due to the psychoanalytical work, moreover, evidently, due to my own spirit, triggered by the mysteries of everything that is most occult and taboo in my soul – for even if I resisted, my life experiences would have inevitably forced me to face each one of my shadows. For this reason, and something more, I no longer feel alienated, much less separated, from the collective or society – the result of an exhaustive and determined work, arduously conquered, obviously with its contingent limitations. 

The demand of an idealized return home, a purity of origins, exerted a devastating power over me, and for a long time acted as a destructive ghost, eliminating any possibility of restoration, thus reflecting its incomprehensive invisibility and narrative veracity. In other words: I believed more in the ghost than in my capacity to recreate a new story. That is, until now. Today I can understand how this unconscious desire for lineage, and the demand for sameness, traversed a series of unconscious generations prior to mine. A collective of men and women inattentive to the savoir of a heart which pumps much more than blood. Without mentioning that, despite it all, I still don’t carry definitive answers (auspiciously), only the courage to ask the questions. For they are the ones which, somehow, indicate the path to my truth and singularity, partial and imperfect, an effect of that which is most unknown in me, but also in my ancestors, that if once desired my life, also condemned me to death. 

In the beginning, in my view, only love and desire (ours and of those who surround us) should remain, so that this trivial cell may expand and win over death, exhausting the thread towards the inorganic (travestied in origin) – while it may be possible. 

*

An intervention, a second time, which, in the case of the medical act, occurs exactly at the moment when the official daylight savings in Canada (from summer to fall) fell back, and the clocks were changed, in an in-between characteristic of the atemporality intermittent in the unconscious, which repeats without any reference to the chronological time, reinscribing itself in difference. A cut beyond the umbilical, in the living real flesh of my body, on the base of my tongue, the one I received from the other, and that, until then, I couldn’t say for sure it was really mine, officialising a new time, an uncertainty, another logic, over my body (an operation without a definitive time, according to the medical reports). 

This, and many other stories, are part of my kaleidoscope of experiences: my effort to articulate my rights on being mad, which I attempt to sketch here. For everything that derives from memory, and writes me, seems to walk in circles, speaking about one thing, and saying something else, so to speak. Like the recurrent dreams on being lost and unable to find my way back home. Like a baby, mad when being taken apart from her mother, the source of her unconditional love. Like the experience of a meditation, which delivers me a vision, and a dream (because I fall asleep): when, searching for my mother, I, still a child, find her lying down in a leaked bathroom, unconscious, maybe dead, the faucet running water. Such is the fright that I panic, without knowing what to think or do. Instead, I act by intuition and impulse, in a knowledge that doesn’t know (but knows) what is doing. The child I once was carries the body of her mother to the hallway (who knows how) and lies her ear against her mother’s chest: she (I) wants to hear her heart, to make sure the mother is still alive. 

It is at that moment that I hear a sudden expansion coming from my mother’s core, while, at the same time, feel her heart inflate – full, unmeasured, and uncontrollable – in my direction. What I see and sense is her heart amplify with such intensity until funding and entering into mine, expanding myself to such a lengthening that I wake up. Open my eyes. My emotion is so intense that I am slow to understand what has just happened. Little by little, still disoriented with what has passed, I breathe deeply and feel my heart again, the same as my mother’s, now fully alive in mine. 

Lying in bed, it starts to dawn on me the memory, the remembrance, of deciding to meditate after arriving home tired after a session of radiotherapy. I remember also that my mother has passed away more than seven years ago, that the bathroom featured in the dream existed once in the past, and that this recollection is partially true in the content of its images, but fully unreal in the veracity of the ensued facts. I also recognize that there are many things I misrecognize when outside the temporality of conscious feeling. 

During the measure of an instant, or a bit more, I remain in state of pause, slowly to reinhabit my body. Until, suddenly, and from a distant, yet close place, I hear in the background (and strangely outside of me), the uninterrupted crying of a baby who thinks she has killed her mother by being born separated from her. It is then, also, when I understand, a bit unreasonably, but fully lucid, that this crying, this desperate baby, is myself, lost in some place in the past locked inside of me and that, until now, hadn’t been heard. Thus, with the patience and loving care of a mother, I listen her lament, her sorrow, and explain carefully (also to myself) that she has not killed anyone, and that her mother will live forever, now in peace inside her heart. 

It is from this love where all things are born, I say, and I listen. 

*

And it is like so, from a simple, almost accidental, guided meditation, with the intuit of changing my astral frequency, that I reencounter the second moment of the law founded in the love of this mother, now internalized, and reawakened, inside of me, sometime later. With opened eyes, and still alarmed by the truthfulness of the experience, outside the linear memory timeline, I regain what I had forgotten: the identification I have with my mother is with her heart. In this riddle of resignification, I also realize the impossibility of separating myself from a quality of enjoyment and pleasure that characterize me, despite my fear, and even horror. My fusional comings and goings with bodies, images, and perceptions: my way of perceiving others traverses and sources infinite possibilities and knowings, not often rational or well regarded with the laws of the mind. 

In my body, one is not just one, but plenty of others, what complicates my learning in a world where (historically) each thing must be one and same, and woe betide anyone who questions why the sea is not shell, moon or whisper, or all together, for it always comes the time of reason, of coming back to oneself, aware of science and the limit of each word and thing. If what partially characterizes my desire is to love intrinsically, madly passionately and with expansive fusion, it is precisely there where I best live, especially when this way of being no longer condemns me to the death row. Knowing how to fuse is also knowing how to separate and sustain the lack in its most profound and constitutive expression, essential to the creation of life (or death), depending on what you desire. From the impossible of being articulated, the castration of the tongue, the reappearance of a mother’s love is reborn inside of me, the origins of my affection, of my way of loving and desiring, and from where grows the laws of life. The error in calculus occurs in the equivoque of thinking that the heart lies inside one’s tongue and what can be explained with words, while what pulses on the skin is exogenous in speech, times over madly and desirous, whether for being unspoken, unconscious or impossible to be said. 

*

Indirectly I can risk saying that it was through the process, and the symptoms, of radiotherapy I underwent later –  six weeks of daily applications of lethal strong rays over the region affected by the tumour (the right side of my neck) – when I learned something about the process of elaborating anterior marks not previously recognized and which, in a certain manner, were repeated and re-actualized: the intense burns left on my skin. The heated fever kept inside me. The lack of taste in my tongue, the distasteful taste of savours and savoirs. 

From the base of my tongue, now castrated and conscious of its rational limitations, and everything that is impossible to be said. From the body that once feared lacking words and now lives in the irrational love unraveling the supremacy of reason, defying death like a temporary breeze, a spiral disorientation of knowledges and altering consciousness, trustful in the greatest worth I inherited: life, while it endures, with its mixtures of oceans, colours and airs, far and close from home, present beyond the mad repetitions of a crazy infant, transgressed with the intersection of a motherly love, the law of a desire to re-signify the gift, returning to the same place but differently, madly passionate and familiar in the alterity of the time of arrival, in the other which comes a posteriori. So that the desire to love may be lived in its plenitude, now free from the need of a time or exact place.