i.

Disappointment is a curiously English word. Density obscures meaning : by or in presents as innocuous choice ; the diet of the body, the stomach of a Confederation, our desire for sweet mess and undesirable elements ; cold, unstuck bowels, up to our necks in frustration. 

ii. 

We place words besides ourselves to enjoy sifting sweet mess from what is read as unwanted directed by who? to pick at sections of peristaltic tract. Freud ever hovers over our table. This violence of language, this exchange of diverse interests, falls inverse to the language of violence. 

iii.

Did I tell you… Five years ago. I experienced Malden Road in Chalk Farm, London as a Rose. Was I by this contusion or in it, I could not reliably say, except for pavement slabs, recessed concrete benches under a housing block, the yellow halogen bannersign over the entrance to the Mamara twenty-four hour supermarket, and advancing cubes of blue moontime air indistinguishable from both each other and from a two hundred mile cyclone of pink-edged petals which I attempted to walk, somewhat uncertainly, from The Fiddler’s Elbow to my car. Not that I had been drinking, no ; no alcohol was either by or in me, except, had I been sixteen feet closer to Mamara’s door at that moment these facts could easily although subtly have changed.   

iv. 

Bodies preserve themselves through prolonged and incremental measures until they expel what they have no use for. But is Sigmund by us, as a scent of accompaniment, beside, alongside, with, retrojectively summoned against rejection ; or, in, wafted through air, an inflection, or incursion, introjected viral load of brain, an assimilated infestation, of bearded odd little man? 

v. 

In English professional circles, Disappointed is often used in an unconscious extension of its etymology from the frustration of expectations to mean a synonym of I will respond with unaccountable cruelty by deniable neglect. If you ask me how I know this, I will distract you with a lie.   

vi. 

And so, in the body of Europe, manufactured on and in-between the tables of Vienna in 1815. A messy trade-off to eliminate common rules : basic permissions set back by generations. Limited respect for Freud’s antecedents’ future rights in the fresh thirty-six state Confederation bargained and revised away to those already chosen by each nation. If you ask me how I know this, I will tell you uncomfortable facts about legislative power and the landscapes of tiny words. 

vii. 

Disappointing, a derivation of the Middle French disappointer, has that strangely English construction.

viii.

Bodies of law live no differently to any other being. 

ix.

Whether, in their cold moments, the inhabitants of such small lands are beside themselves or fully alive in themselves : who can you reliably tell.

first published in Ambit #248, The War Issue     Bo