"It is the fantasy of seizing reality live that continues--ever since Narcissus bent over his spring. Surprising the real in order to immobilize it, suspending the real in the expiration of its double. You bend over the hologram like God over his creature: only God has this power of passing through walls, through people, and finding Himself immaterially in the beyond. We dream of passing through ourselves and of finding ourselves in the beyond: the day when your holographic double will be there in space, eventually moving and talking, and you will have realized this miracle. Of course, it will no longer be a dream, so its charm will be lost." --Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
The consequence of entering the symbolic realm, the realm of language, metaphor, image, the imaginary world--and there is no choice in this, cousin--is simply the loss of the real. Similitude is a fantasy, a dream, however, which is to acknowledge that no world in our world will be reproduced, represented, imitated, imaged, without ultimately pointing to the failure of representation. The elusive real; the seductive double. My mother and are not the same. In the dream, she is specter-real, corpse-pale, drawn in green and black with holes for eyes and her mouth formed to a scream. She is like the famous painting, yes. Probably I wrenched her face from Correa's galleria muerta where the screaming is the unheard agony of invisibility--not heard, not represented, not reflected; silent. Munch is there, while Correa's paintings themselves are not. Rather, Munch's likeness is there--the missing (because stolen) original alluded to--but not present, not really, for this internet gallery is a hologram. Correa destroyed the work after photographing it. Likeness. (Loch Ness: mythmaker myth) My mother in my dream: seductive because I mothered it, gazed into its face and saw her face and saw that it saw mine: twin seeing: but she was always already dead and I was always already waking.
