Foreign Bodies

February 04, 2015, 11:09am

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Ugh, fuck, can you … can you feel that? That!, right there, that sensation in the auditory canal, the Eustachian tube, curving down along the jaw line, there is something in there … psychosomatic, right? A slight pressure, a loss of hearing—like water in your ear, or an underground platform right before the train arrives—which compresses and builds, and something is most definitely working its way inside, inside where it does not belong. The moth. Ugh, the moth! Wings folded flat, branched rachni of the antenna slicked back, its whole furry body, so stupidly erratic in flight, now looking determined, sinister, a penetrative medical instrument leaving scale-flecked cerumen in its wake … it could unfurl that proboscis and touch tympanic membrane, could keep forever crawling forward and assault the fleshy nautilus of the cochlea, could cause such unthinkable damage, right?, this harmless little moth, by virtue of its position, by its complete and utter disregard for our great corporeal agreement with the world, namely that we—our precious selves, our physical selves, our prosopopoeia with which we acquire tactile knowledge of existence and so satisfyingly, concretely exert ourselves upon it—is entered into only through our consent. To find one's self—literally, one's very self—entered in any other way, to be invaded, is just … wrong. – B. David Zarley, Chicago Contributor

Vesna Jovanovic | Moth, 2013, ink and graphite on polypropylene, 80 x 60 inches. Photo courtesy of the artist and Packer Schopf Gallery.