“Naughty girl, naughty girl,” the old black lady chuckles, pushing the wheelchair through the spidery halls, “where’d you ever think to be a-running off to, missy, and you all near-nekkid besides?”
Erect, all-seeing, like a queen, Neena sits ensconced, silent, hieratical and unmoving, her wrists and ankles secured, invisibly, by means of some inconceivable electromagnetic technobondage that hasn’t even been invented yet. No one’s here by choice or force you see, but by the perfect distillation of both: in a word, we mean: infirmity. Simulated—granted; but think about it, does it really make any difference at all? If you can’t walk you can’t walk. Is a magnetic field that destabilizes and locally neutralizes the cellular charge in biological tissue rendering muscle inert any different, in effect, if not in essence, from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, for instance?
Moving on, (oh please, let’s) as does Neena, a Nefertiti of immobility in modern medical drag, she finds herself handicapped as are all those who are sacred: lame, maimed, set apart for the sacrifice, marked by the gods with extraordinary beauty and, therefore, paradoxically profane, ie. “too damned good for this earth.” She is simultaneously virgin elegance and slattern whore, this walking paradox passing us in broad daylight each and everyday, clickety-clack, mounted upon the iconographic seven-inch stiletto-heeled sandals that set her apart from all the rest. Consider that nowadays, perhaps, the fetish shoe is a more powerful signifier of the Mystery, a more emotionally resonant symbol and psychosexual glyph pregnant with meaning under the unendurable tension of imminent erotic agony than the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. (Ah the Christians will be all over us now, Pinker…)
Moving on, did we say?
Moving on.
Pray tell, though… moving on to where?
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