Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil. (Jean-Paul Sartre. The Devil and the Good Lord)
There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk. (Jean-Paul Sartre. The Devil and the Good Lord)
Hell is Other people (Jean-Paul Sartre. No Exit)
Today I fancy drawing the portrait of Mr & Mrs Nausea. An asexual couple, or more like a unisex couple, an androgyne, a possible hermaphrodite, a castrated male, an eunuch slave...
That is to say that Mr & Mrs Nausea belong to both genders, yet they are terribly sexless...for there is nothing sexual about Nausea. Nothing sexual as nothing vibrant, nothing pulsating, nothing alive...a flat endomorphic mass of nothing. No-thing.
I chose to write about Mr & Mrs Nausea, because this is a couple I come across frequently...I am familiar with them. They carry different faces and different masks, but I can always spot them.
They are contemptibly too familiar...
Maybe I chose to write about them because they have visited me as of late...and one peculiar characteristic about their visit is that it lingers on...
I can tell when they are about to knock on my door, without prior notice...I smell them coming from afar...they have this distinctive odor about them. Something stale, like some unwashed garment smelling of old sweat and mothballs.
I can tell when they are about to land at my door step, because my stomach contracts, small spasms at first, giving way to greater contractions, like some labor pangs...like some pregnant woman about to deliver, on the floor right here, right now...
I can tell because even before they ring my bell, their slime seeps through the door fence, through the cracks...it is almost a bottle green, like some burst bilious bag of nothing but slime...just slime...a mucous like slime, like some obstructed tumefied green brown nasal catarrh that is finally discharged, discharged at my door step...
I can tell they are here, because even without shaking hands, their presence is visceral, I feel it mounting in me, like some swelling tide, like a damp volcano erupting with humid green larvae...
I can tell because I feel them moving in my belly like a colony of invertebrates, a colony of worms that have occupied my intestines, rising up to my duodenum, up my oesophagus, lodging at the back of my throat, right behind my larynx, I feel them at the edge of my jaws that crisp themselves, closing down like some prison, like some janitor trying to quell it down....
I can tell because they push forward, and I spit it the saliva, holding back, and they push even more, like some invisible finger stuck down my throat, forcing me to expulse them out, on my floor...
I finally vomit them out, out of my system...undigested, whole, unfragmented...and that mass of green slime comes gushing down on the floor, crushing down on earth, like some subterranean fountain rising from way down below and spreading itself on the surface like a carpet of moldy grass...
I finally vomit them out...vomit them out, the Mr & Mrs Nausea of humanity, the Mr & Mrs Nausea of daily life...
Painting : Iraqi artist, Ibrahim Rabi'e.
