Appetite, Lost: Reading for the breast

“It was the desire of food that spawned disobedience; it was the pleasure of taste that drove us from Paradise” — Abbot Nilus of Annyera 

When I was born, I was indifferent to my mother’s breasts. There were many vain attempts at forcing her nipples into my mouth, each ending with a crying baby and not a drop of spilt milk. Like many new mothers of her generation, mine was also prey to Nestle’s aggressive marketing campaign for milk powder. 

To have been robbed of that pre-oedipal hunger doesn’t always boil my blood, although I find myself searching for it in the larger scheme of my relationship to breasts, and food. Caught in the act of self-investigation, I have taken too perversely close a look at myself like a deranged auto-cannibal (I know it cannot be used as a noun). I turn to psychoanalysis for commiseration. 

While explaining wish-fulfillment, Freud asks us to inhabit the shoes of a newborn for a moment (I try to recover what I can of that perpetually aggrieved appetite). The newborn, blinded by hunger, encounters the objective world for the first time with its mouth at the breast. Here, it discovers milk and satisfaction, and the breast as the gateway to both. This encounter sets the bar for relationships with anything outside the mouth. 

Freud describes these infantile feeding practices as formative measures of economy that the appetite exerts over its environment. When hungry, the newborn learns to hunt with its mouth for the breast, establishing an “identity of perception”. As a response to internal instability, the appetite learns to search for the same thing over and over again, in an attempt to recover the experience of satisfaction from the past… 

Under such circumstances, the bottle must have been a paradigm shift. Arriving at fixed intervals, in measured portions, my appetite was subjected to gross misdemeanors— too little, too late, too much. Pushing the appetite along the conveyor belt of time, there was little about it that needed to be interpreted. 

***

r/NoFap is a self-proclaimed “porn addiction and compulsive sexual behavior recovery peer support forum.” Members often report looking for a satisfaction so specific, and yet always absent in experience. This dooms the compulsive masturbator to a pointless and perpetual search (an appropriate term for which is “addiction”): 

“Off I go to the unknown 

Not knowing what I’ll find 

Everything will be okay 

If I control my mind” 

-Somebody laments on the subreddit, in a poem titled “Mind Control” 

One of the earliest casualties of the Romance genre, Emma Bovary, spends her lifetime waiting for something to arrive from the horizon, some white sail in the mist, never quite knowing what it would bring her. Joseph Epstein found a sentence in a freshman’s term paper on the novel that names her predicament: “Madame Bovary’s problem is that she cannot make love in the concrete!” 

The structure of Emma’s desire is characteristic of Romantic longing. Stuck in the pursuit of an unattainable permanence (“bright star, would I were as steadfast as thou art”), the romance tradition was burdened by the vigilance that religious skepticism warrants against anything that’s momentary: the hungers of the body. 

Then you showed up. 

With a benevolence that I was taught to politely refuse. I didn’t know how to meet your gaze, to break out of character and truly touch something you’d said. I felt around for a language that would fall off the bone. 

*** 

Opened wide, the mouth is full of rooms. It’s where the aftertaste of cigarettes first collided with the words I breathed in my mother’s direction. Have you been smoking? Shit. I was looking for something to keep my mouth occupied. I burned through cigarettes and days and weeks, flipping through my calendar for something to wait for. 

Hungry for hiding places, my appetite always moves in the direction of plausible deniability. I slip out of time for a second, into a world that can be held in the mouth. Like a gasp.

In the aftermath of the eating, we wouldn’t talk to each other for days. Each of us in our chests carried a memory that was too shameful to tell our friends. Fucking only on the peripheries of weekends, under invented circumstances that were not verifiable outside the instant they were conceived. The mouth is a place to hide. 

My mistrust deepened into fear, I began to pursue the dead-end of interpretation. My hunger turned into words that made you flinch. Not knowing what to do when you aren’t looking, I began to scavenge your eyes for a promise. I wanted to exact the love that was due from you. 

*** 

How does one throw away things that need to die? 

There are thirteen cans of Monster White, gathering dust on my shelf, glaring at me as I write. A bag of rotting coriander leaves in my fridge. A box of decomposed pineapples. Not a single piece of fresh laundry in my room, but numerous cans of beer and candy wrappers. My ex, still fast asleep on the bed. 

I try again and fail to hold you in my mouth. I must repair my appetite. 

Citations: 

1.  Hewitson, Owen. "Pornography and the Paradoxes of Pleasure – On the 'Identity of Perception'." LacanOnline.com, 28 Oct. 2016, 

   ww.lacanonline.com/2016/10/pornography-and-the-paradoxes-of-pleasure-on-the-identity-o f-perception/.

2.  Epstein, Joseph. "Why Madame Bovary Couldn't Make Love in the Concrete." Commentary, www.commentary.org/articles/joseph-epstein/why-madame-bovary-couldnt-make-love-in-the concrete/.

3.  Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Translated by Lydia Davis, Viking, 2010.