Bernard Porcheret The Drive is Voracious (excerpt) “The child who coughs is often ill. Once an adolescent, he was emancipated with the machete blows of the maternal furor sanandi. Having become an intern in psychiatry, his pregnant first wife’s uncontrollable vomiting triggers his first demand for analysis in 1974.” .......... “In 1990, my ten-year-old son was diagnosed with cancer and was given a poor prognosis. After a mutilating operation, the surgeon says three months, maybe... The irony of semblance! After chemotherapy, he was in the clear. A repetitive slip would come and intrude on my mind. When I wanted to say “since my son’s illness”, the word death came instead of illness. Furthermore, before he was ever ill, I would see flashes of his hairless head, like the children with leukaemia that I treated, whilst a paediatric extern. I was inhabited by a desire for death. A silent guilt took hold, reinforced by the responsibility that I attributed to my conjugal infidelities during my first marriage. In the end, following an incident concerning the body, a new symptom appeared.” Translated from the French by David Hafner and Victoria Woollard.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Jul 2013 07:55:20 +0000
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