A Luminous Index

erotic phenomenology of a stain

To end the year, I’m sending you a text I read at The Hugh Lane Gallery in December 2017. It brought together a body of research I’d been working through for some time; positioning the staining body as a supreme mark-making force, and mark-making as a very equalising mode of expression (here, the menstruating body is as as loaded with symbolism and as sacred as Christ, which might not feel important if you didn’t, like me, grow up menstruating inside Catholicism’s particular nexus of shame).

So much of the imagery and thinking here found its way into Redder Days, and I feel sort of wistful rereading it now.

Wishing you nothing but rest for the weeks ahead, and thank you for being here for another year.

Sue

Luminous Index: erotic phenomenology of a stain

A stain; an unintended mark that, once made, resists removal. Inadvertent remnant and by-product, it is something made while we were looking elsewhere; evidence that our attention faltered, or that some vessel failed to function.

Signifying a loss of control, distinct for discolouration and measured by how permanently a fabric or surface has been altered, no one, it seems, sets out to make a stain.

This accounts, in part, for its expressive power.

In “Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph of a Stain”), art historian Georges Didi-Huberman writes “the more fully drama is freighted with consequence, the greater, and more beautiful, will be the splotch, the disfiguration, the stain.”¹

What does it mean, then, this stain inside our bed?

I am looking hard at this stain, at its flared periphery and blushing centre.

I am asking it to tell me things I know it knows; how long it retained its moisture given the weave and density of the sheet, the colours it lost in turning dry.

I want it to tell me things about its provenance and plumage, and about the conjoining of pain and pleasure.

I am asking it to say something about pleasure necessitating pain, and about how one comes to be tethered to the other by a short red rope.

I am asking it what consequences we incurred.

Nancy Spero, Rebirth of Venus, detail from one of seven panels, 1984, hand printing on paper