Ode to Castration

Just as one is castrated into civilisation by virtue of adopting a language (Lacan), so a migrant is also castrated into a new version of civilisation by virtue of having to learn a new cultural language -- a language which supercedes and erases the language they would have used in the past. What remains of the past language are mere traces - words which evoke emotionally charged images but which can no longer conveyto others the sense of these images.

Thus the migrant is castrated and forced to transcend him or herself -- in order to find herself anew at the level of transcendence.

I can't fully imagine why it worked out differently for others in my past than it did for me. Had I ever had that direct relationship with the mother literally or figuratively, that psychoanalysts speak of, (Chodorow, for instance), I have lost it now.

The sensitive, direct feeling for the necessity of maintaining harmony between things exists prior to "castration". One cannot presumably relate so well to an essentialistic feeling for harmony between things if the sense of harmony that was present to you in your previous mode of language has been violently disrupted. Others who have not had such a disruptive experience may be less "castrated". But believe me, I have been castrated out of any subjective assumptions concerning naturalistic "givens" in my world. Society appears to me, through and through, an artificial construct. This insight is an outcome of my higher order negation or "castration".

I don't think others have experienced the same thing at all. My old school compatriots do not seem to have thrown off gender roles or anything, due to having become enlightened about society's artifices. The damage is there in some of them, but not the reconstruction. (According to Lacan one gains in societal terms more than one loses through castration.)

So, I don't have a one track line to a basic ground of nurturing. And I'm not "feminine" in that exact sense. Whereas I may have succeeded in doing feminine jobs in the past, relying on this chord of feeling back to my mother's womb to guide me in my actions, I am now completely barred from that. My mentality -- which has survived a double violation (first learning one culture and then immediately another) -- will not allow me to feel this underlying feminine harmony now.

Sometimes, under strong direction, I try to feel this exquisite feminine harmony or rightness in things. Yet it feels like looking for dropped stitches in an article of clothing too fine for me to see.

I don't experience things in that way anymore -- although I can appreciate that there are those who do.