| Chapter 1: | Tracking Cixous’s Medusa? |
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How shall we canonize our sister who is not
Quite dead
Who fornicates with strangers
Who masturbates with needles
Who is afraid of the dark and wears her long
Hair soft and black
Against her bloodless face
III
Midnight and the room dream-green and hazy
We are all part of the collage
Brother and sister, she leans against the wall
And he, slipping the needle in her painless
Arm
Pale fingers (with love) against the pale arm
IV
Children our afternoon is soft, we lean against
Each other
Our stash is in our elbows
Our fix is in our heads
God is a junkie and he has sold salvation
For a week’s supply.69
Kandel’s poem fractures the supposed myths and truths of a reasoned society, cracking the “sky of transcendence” and placing god on the streets, stashed and fixed. This could be seen as the “fatal rhetoric” of addiction that Derrida spoke of:
There are those who would say, and not without “common sense”: when the sky of transcendence comes to be emptied, and not just of Gods, but of any Other, a fatal rhetoric fills the void, and this is the fetishism of drug addiction. Not religion as the opiate of the people, but drugs as the religion of the atheist poets.70
Kandel’s poem, however, suggests not the desire to fill a void but the inexistence of one; salvation has been sold—there is no sky, just rooms and streets. The poem surges through these spaces, blasting through