The Imaginal Blanket
Winding through my childhood was an infinite blue blanket. This was a baby-blue blanket (helping to assign my gender as “boy”) homemade by a neighbor, dotted with little teddy bears, strewn with bits of the alphabet, and along one edge was a strip of blue satin lining. Occupying my crib from infancy onwards, once past weening this blanket became for me the environment itself. Holding the blanket to my face alone in my dark room at night, I would run my hand along its satin edge, loving to feel its wonderful coolness; the rest of the blanket, no matter how soft it was, never felt as good as that cool satin edge. I took the blanket everywhere and demanded that it came along on road trips. Its everywhereness was my security and replaced (especially in memory now) my mother; I remember the blue blanket very well, my mother—at that time—less so. Winnicott calls this object transitional, stuck as he is in notions of ego-development; and yet, if we take nachträglichkeit seriously (a field of desire indifferent to time) then there is nowhere to transition out of; one merely trades one magic object for the next. The blue blanket became for me, through sheer force of the imaginary, and compounded by the occult forces of desire, the central object and protective charm of my early childhood and onwards into the ages of four, five, six, seven, when it began to retreat into the mundane of everyday-objects and finally was forgotten altogether, its enchanted atmosphere emptied and dispelled. Meanwhile I had become fixated upon world-building with legos…
