I stopped brushing my hair seven days ago. by Amanda del Valle
the eye is connected with the brain; the brain with the nervous system. That system sends its messages in a flash through every past memory and present feeling, that is the movement of violent liberation from servility, the collapse of my own transcendence. Inhibiting the sacrificial relapse of isolated being is the broad utilitarianism inherent to humanity, correlated with a profane delimination from mankind ferocious nature that finds its formula by the physical act of touch; the final guarantor of persistent being, the submission of (ruinous) time to reason, and thus the ultimate principle of utility. For me touch is a long, tedious almost torturous process.
When I don’t allow people to touch me there is a thoroughgoing dehumanisation of nature, involving the uttermost impersonalise in the explanation of natural forces, and vigorously atheological cosmology. No residue, an instinctive fastidiousness in respect to all the traces of human matter, as it’s most ignoble part, it’s gutter…the gentleness with which all has treated me has been a source of considerable embarrassment. No one less worthy of sanctity, when I stare into the eyes of the touch I connect with it’s inexistence in a community of the kiln, I try to smile. Our ideas of love are terribly bound up in our ambivalence about these two conditions — the positive and negative valuations of childhood, the positive and negative valuations of adulthood. And I think that, for many people, love (in this case, touch) signifies a return to values that are represented by childhood and that seem censored by the dried-up, mechanized, adult kinds of coercions of work and rules and responsibilities and impersonality.