A dream-reading of Jacques Lacan’s ‘Seminar on the Purloined Letter’, (in Écrits, trans. by Bruce Fink, New York: Norton, 2006 [Écrits, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966]), wherein fragments from the English translation of Lacan’s text are discreetly incorporated into my own.  This is a short extract of the first draft of a longer text, to be published in February 2017 in a dream-writing anthology.

I am lung-sore. It seems I have been running for an eternity, following her through the empty streets. Glimpses of her hand clutching the stolen letter as it disappears behind a corner, and then another, and another. I have lost her. I can run no more. I press my head to the wall. Pearly grey. Portland stone. Cut and polished so that the buildings rise up in a geometry of parchment. Vellum. The colour and sheen of fresh ejaculate. My cheek freezes to the slab and as I pull away I leave my skin behind. My face melts like sealing wax: a rose blooming in the rock.

I have come to the realisation that my repetition, (I am compelled to head-walk these pavements, under which there is a breach), is base. Crimes are committed. There is a perverse insistence.

By what oblique imaginary means does the the the the symbolic take hole hold? By what oblique imaginary means are these streets (familiar, strange) the ones in which I walk forward and backwards in the same time.

(Double Click: create a beat)

All pathologies paths are determined by the itinerary of a signifier.

(A story-map might be measured in time)

When I search for I truth I find that I am walking a fable. I tear myself in half trying to walk in both directions.

EXT. afternoon. a city.

This is an ugly type of writing in which the outside is always imagined from the inside. Horizons are fictional and buildings are barred. I have no sightlines. I’m fucking cutting the corners of someone else’s desire. All paths are the continuation of a pre-existing line. This is a city from which I send myself postcards wherein I wish I was here. Flying letters. Words stolen from myself. I refuse to recognise that I have not composed them unintentionally.

There is a difference between a drama and its telling – an event in language is to take a step, and then another. I have no mis-en-scène without this doubling. I am invisible and I am my own audience.

Trap-streets. Trickery.

Cul-de-sac. CUL and Con.