The Muse
There is a superstition, if your right eye twitches it is a sign from the universe that something significant is about to happen. Most websites tell me that the interpretation varies between cultural beliefs and traditions but I still don’t know which ones. Some associate right eye twitching with imminent luck, forthcoming success and even financial gain. While some say it could indicate potential conflicts and shit-talking– my mum says that about sneezing. They even think the duration and frequency of each twitch, a crucial factor to determine whether it is minor and temporary or major and on the horizon.
It is my left eye that is twitching, at a rapid pace. I woke up today with dead arms, strangled by seven silver bangles on either side. Lacy panties, smudged kajol and overly dry lips, I had never felt more like Effy Stonem than I do at this moment. I had a coffee and half an onion paratha for breakfast observing last night’s funk, sitting at the dinner table 30 minutes past 8 am.
It is so unfortunate that unless disabled by your line of sight, it becomes the source of one’s spiritual condition, “windows to the soul,” a primary between a world with and a world without. My unborn child will be the apple of my eye, the pumpkin was so big I couldn’t believe my eyes, that woman so beautiful she’s easy on the eyes and ‘Super Size Me’, the film about fraudulent fast food is eye-opening but I still eat McDonald’s after a late night because love, love is blind.
At age 11, I watched a grown woman sleep on a sunlounger by the pool below me. Our eyes don’t meet and no one blushes but my world shrinks into the four walls of my parents’ master bedroom. I wonder how old she is. If I’m a pervert. I wonder if I sliced an apple real slow and thin, she’d let me put it on her tongue. I wonder when she bleeds if she’d let me lick her up if she tastes like ketchup. I catch my pudgy face reflecting, I squirm, draw the curtains and hide under my blanket until dinner is ready.
I saw my cat see himself at 6 months old, he pounced and snarled until eventually at 7 or 8 months he recognised this similarly spotted cat as himself. Till today, I try to show him us cuddling in the mirrors all around my house. His eyes widen and he often turns away. It leaves me a little bit ashamed.
Henri Wallon was a psychologist who studied reflections and noted, that chimpanzees quickly lost interest at first sight. Still, human infants became enthralled, even devoted to exploring these connections– between body and image.
The year is 2007, It’s an atypical morning for the Kardashian crew, our dear Khloe Kardashian rides in the backseat of a jeep on the way to jail for violating her parole after she got a DUI. Kris is on the edge of her seat, she suggests they dine at IHOP first and is quickly shut down. Next to her, Kim is taking photos of herself, on a digital camera turned backwards. Kris snaps, “Kim, would you stop taking pictures of yourself? Your sister is going to jail!”
But Kim, she’s a rebel. She replies, “It’s for documentation.”
A star is born.
Sometimes if I can get the angle just right, people say I look like Kourtney…
I ask Quora why I look differently in mirrors. User Amaan Aslam from New Delhi tells me, “You can never see what you look like. Only other people can see what you look like. Every mirror reflection, every photograph, every painting is merely an image of your face. You always see a laterally inverted image of yourself. You never see your true self.”
For this reason, I pray to never meet my reply guys, the man who behaves in an overly familiar manner but I’m barely acquainted with. Their psyche piques my interest, especially those who live across the world, in LA or on isolated farms somewhere in Australia. I wonder where they derive pleasure from complimenting me and only sometimes receiving a double-click heart back. Is it the knowledge of providing me with the pleasure of being desired?
A 29-year-old man is narcissistic and jaded beyond his years. Distilled in his room are markers of his privilege– portraits of a tall, thin and old white man splinter the walls– they are his grandfather, enneagram of his inherited wealth. He makes fun of me for not knowing the patterns on his curtains, “you know nothing about culture!” he’s beaming. His job is to help people update the insides of conserved buildings in London. To me, he is morally bankrupt, aesthetically puerile and emotionally dislocated. But in bed, he only wants to successfully serve like a perverse paean of his self-isolation, a coping strategy for his lonely heart, for when he is somehow both too much and yet not enough. He wants to cuckold.
I am playing Mortal Kombat as an athletic warrior versed in martial arts, fighting against a peroxide-blonde female ninja. Have you seen that episode of Black Mirror? S05E01: Striking Vipers. Two old college friends Danny and Karl reconnect through a VR version of their favourite video game, and then they fuck, virtually.
Desire is cuckold by language. A manifestation of the unconscious and the inexpressible. “I love you, but because inexplicably, I love in you something more than you,” wrote Lacan. The objet petit a– a projection of ego made to symbolise otherness. To this cuckold-narcissist-intellectual man of 2024, there is nothing more than being gratified by the fabrications of his mind. It is not that he annihilates himself but transfers himself onto me. When he sees me pleased by (an)Other at the degree of his staging the event, he becomes so invested in my orgasm by becoming the orgasm itself, his perceived lack reflects onto the Other who lacks the knowledge of his control, this is the psychosexual pleasure; jouissance.
Ce n’est pas ça. “It is rather you who are cuckolded; you are yourself betrayed in that your desire has slept with the signifier.”
Do you get it?
Till 20, you get fucked. Frontwards, backwards, sidewards. At 21, you meet them, they look like romance and speak like comedy, they make music that is demure and they conjure up the image of a sort of dignified puppy. They are Ideal. For some reason, the sex doesn’t count… but still, they’re kind of like them and them’s kind of like you… Until a breakdown, you-dont-actually-know-me type fight, you cry and there it is the final final fantasy oooooweeee.
You like this movie, The Unattained Love. You repeat a mantra into your mirror daily, “catching flights not feelings!” Right? Every 3 months you try to go… Somewhere and in the last week you try to find... Someone. You become obsessed, you dream about them, they were probably the one. I LOVE! I LOVE! I see you are me and I am you. I LOVE!
And you learn, they cannot be reached except to raise it as nothing: (a)Voiding Love. They will remain an enigma and in that gap, there is freedom to suspend meaning. It is impossible to be desire when you ultimately do not know what kind of desirable aspect to project, you are only left with the dignity of yourself. They are a muse and you fill the gap with an egoistic drive. A drive to realeyes your own desire.
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In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the analyst’s role is to be an object of transference, to be ‘love’ and so, real, truth. This is achieved by the degree of separation from the patient, purposefully imposed by the analyst. The analyst is an enigma. In the first moment of transference, the subject’s particular fantasy is traversed and the analyst as a supposed subject of knowledge gets de-idealised. In the second moment of separation, love’s effect of imaginary coherence gets stripped away to reveal the pure drive of the subject.
A muse is an object of desire/love made to inspire by being kept wholly silent. A muse lends to an artist’s narcissism which always exists in a desiring love, one loves oneself in love, one encounters here only that, the other must be useful, to serve one’s ideals and in so far as this is a longing for, love becomes a yin-yang.
Again, a muse is an object of desire/love made to inspire by being kept wholly silent. A muse is denied any real active participation in the artist’s creation, away from the symbolism of language… The muse inspires by metaphysical penetration, to gestate and bring forth, from the womb of the mind. As James Baldwin wrote, “All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
The muse’s silence or even non-existence acts as an agent to reveal the real. Except I think there is a moment of hyper-idealisation as the muse’s inadvertent role as a denier of reciprocation gives them weight as a subject of ‘knowledge’ or ‘power’ in the egoist mind.
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The most common triggers of eye twitching are:
- Alcohol intake
- Bright light
- Caffeine excess
- Eye strain
- Fatigue
- Irritation of the eye surface or inner eyelids
- Nicotine
- Stress
- Wind or air pollution
I remember I had not drunk an adequate amount of water in 4 days, I had only been consuming wine, caffeine and cigarettes. If we surrender ourselves uncritically to this profusion of images, we risk ‘overstraining’ our sense of sight and losing the connection between perception and cognition.
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Lacan says the patient does not enter analysis to remove the symptom, they come because the symptom has stopped ‘working,’ stopped reliably producing jouissance like it once did. The patient does not want to change, they’ve already changed and they want to go back.