wailing walls

How to get behind oneself? To reach back to the normative structures of value that govern our comportment to the world and determine our self-conception? Is it possible? Or perhaps there is no “behind”, no a priori (however relativized and contingently historical) of values into which we have been socialized or traumatized? Are the internalized paternal forces merely another myth, is the parable of patriarchy an illusion? But even accepting that, how does that help, naming it as an illusion does not dispel its power. How does one escape an illusion? Can dreamers commit suicide? Brecht believes that Kafka envisioned a nightmare from which he never awoke. Is this to be my fate as well? I see a prisoner in a sealed room walking from wall to wall and inscribing names on each of them, hoping that they will disappear. When he gets tired of a name he crosses it out and writes another. An attempt to crack open language and extract its emancipatory juices. In the end, he slumps in a corner and gazes absently at the word-stained walls.