We disgusted her, that’s the thing. We horrified her. How could we not?
We were swarming things to her.
Teeming life. Profusion. What you’d find under a rock.
Busy with life, in some sense. Busy with our life-death. Busy in our living death. Crawling over each other. Horrific. Abased and abasing.
All the way to Hell! Academic Hell!
Some foulness. Something you’d scrape from your academic shoe!
Something macabre. The outcome of some lengthy process of decomposition. No: the decomposition itself. The fall-apart. Entropy, in action.
How could she not feel nauseous recoil, Livia? How could she not flinch, ontologically? Down to the depths of what she was?
She was all flinch. All trembling, in our presence. Her terror, her horror: she couldn’t hide it. Abjection, in person. How could she not gag to see us?
It was more than just squeamishness.
The wrinkled nose! The pursed mouth! Pulled down at the corners!
Disgust is a limbic system thing. A primitive thing. A simple emotion. Like fear. Like anger, like fear, like sadness. It’s pancultural. Anyone would feel it.
But she was fascinated by us, too.
There was an erotics to her disgust. She felt called by what repelled her. She called us towards us. She even smiled.
Some sick desire. Some pollution drive. Some contamination drive.
Work in Progress 