The Bleeding Edge of the Planet

Sometimes in analysis I will be lying on the couch—lying on the fainting couch in the old fashioned way, on the verge of fainting, or in the posture of having just fainted; the psycho-analyst invisible behind my head, her voice like Socrates’ daimon, or Pallas Athena, or maybe Kim Gordan hovering behind my ears—anyhow, sometimes as I talk, relaxed and speaking just this side of the hypnagogic drift, the room will seem to shift, the fainting couch turning 90 degrees so that I am suspended up on the 21st floor, my feet pointing downwards into space with the analyst still floating there above me in the void, and I have the incredible sense of never having been there before, as if I had transgressed the limits of the sensible world and I am flying suddenly at extreme velocity on the bleeding edge of the planet—which, in this case, is me. The garbage storm of history drops away below me, gone miniature and intricate; time sloughs off in great glittering sheaves; the present shrinks to a needle behind me; the world dissolves; all fantasies melt before this one fantasy of being hurled to the far end of intelligible speech way out into an alien future. At least until Kim Gordon coughs, or says something crushing, or stands up and I return horizontal to the mere slow advance of the Brooklyn afternoon.