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‘There was a profound indifference to the objects of our pleasures and of our fictitious needs ; there was still… so intense a passion for the freedom of the fields… that he would certainly have escaped into the forest had not the most rigid precautions been taken.’ Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, The Wild Boy of Aveyron

The she-wolf loves him like one of her cubs. She lets him grab her fur and sink his teeth into her teat. She howls to him gently: “Within our mouths we share the same tongue. If I bite it, you bite it too.”

 

He mumbles softly, her teat still in his mouth, thick milk dripping from his chin: “My conscience bites me in my tongue with your teeth.”1

As he falls asleep, she sees his pulse shuddering along his purple-veined wrist, like a bird shot in flight. She whispers: “Go back so far there is another language.”2

The she-wolf waits for the little cub-child to waken. She looks at him with her mineral green eyes and kisses him. As soon as we kiss we salivate. He opens his small dark eyes, smiles and says:

“She-wolf-she-bear-wild-sow, if you do not love me, I love you.”

She lays on her side, offering her udders to the young feral darling. He plunges on them with the hunger of youth and the energy of love. The she-wolf throws her head back, eyes half closed, holding the moon in her jaws, devouring the text to come and says:

“Smell the world of the future, it’s not a tree we have in our

heads—what we have in our heads is grass!”3

She fears what will happen. Hands will reach out. Mouths will open. Teeth will be shown. Tongues will be eaten. Saliva will soak the ground. The den will be pillaged. Pain will be unbearable.

The adorable cub-child is scarred. They will say she inflicted these scars. The she-wolf knows they did. With knives and belts. That extended scar on his throat, poor little thing, brings tears to her eyes and saliva in her mouth.

Her mouth wide open she sings:

“When I try to speak

my throat is cut

and, it seems, by his hand.”4

Between the two lips runs the tongue, runs language, runs saliva, runs milk, runs blood.

Ceel de Haas Mogami is kunstenaar, Amsterdam

 

1 Hélène Cixous,. L’Amour du loup et autres remords, Editions Galilée, 2003,. translated from the French by Ceel Mogami de Haas

2 Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972, W. W. Norton & Company, 2013

3 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Cinéma / Pensée’, lecture delivered at the Paris 8-Saint Denis University on Dec. 11, 1984. Typed by Guadalupe Deza. Translated from the French by Ellen H. Mitchell

4 Adrienn Rich, op. cit. (noot 2)

Ceel de Haas Mogami

is kunstenaar, Amsterdam

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