[ Thomas de Quincey, The Avenger ]
Nevenka’s face contorts under the lashings of a lover. In pain he is a schoolmaster, in pleasure he can be the sea. Trembling like Bernini's marble in Santa Maria della Vittoria, limbs proposed as they are, in suffering, bending opaque with anticipation. Like Reni’s St. Sebastian, the gothic self plunges into the fissure that has admitted them at once to impassivity and pathos. Buried alive within the mind, isolated from both the inside and outside of the self, and unable to temper their distance. Separately then, they must fold against one another, a danse macabre leading all double selves to singleness in death.
The Whip and the Body faces here the most fundamental gothic difficulty; a constant inability to tell the tale of itself. The gaze lingers in obscured corridors like great tubes of darkness enclosing all breaths and shadows that have distorted time from within. Silenced and scarred, the narration tries to recollect itself in wholeness through thick clouds of colour. Under these terms, the only possible correspondence with that which the self is, and tries to suppress, is realised through spectres and projections. It is an imprisonment of the ego in pareidolia—compellingly organised in its masochism. The effort of burning reality onto film, abandoned, has left behind a vacuous oppressiveness. What emerges in its place—eyes, hands, and waves— becomes a proximal palimpsest of in- and ex- humation. It is not a circle since it holds no centre, rather, it is a river of meaning, capable of pushing one under into a liquid sleep, as much as buoyantly lifting them into the light. The uroboric power to enclose and disturb suspended over one’s chest; a dagger tearing through the breast of death.