marciedocherty@icloud.com
Attempts in Transcendence emerged from Paul B Preciado's urge 'to invent a new grammar that allows us to imagine another social organisation of forms of life'. The writing centres alternative considerations of the body, situating embodied experience of desire amongst cultural referents; citing Althusser, Fisher, Derrida, Kundera, Patti Smith, Butler, Preciado.
I am the jockey, the anglo, the originator, the imitator. The quarterback as angled over, his feet merging with the grass, his legs the distance apart. His back rising out of the ground as a firm trunk, roots in the soil, stabled in the earth. His studs mould him in. It is as if his body and the grass were crafted with one another in mind. The turf modulating for his presence, his body moulded just the same. All his extensions tailored to its lack. His legs seem to launch in symbiosis with the land, as he lifts, it undulates, softening below him. I am releasing all tension for the gesture of your calf, it says and does. It rises into mounds with him as he ascends for the throw, tunnelling him through a wide catacomb of trenches when he’s in need of defence.
My horse is the pegleg I clip on. The sound of fastenings cracking are the notes of arousal, one demands the other. It is the firmest succession. As I pull on, as I shift on, my wooden leg. I rise and fall, up and down from my femur. You can see our detachment and the track in between. He canters beneath me, for me. He is motivated separately, though; his body receives the tension of the ground beneath him, softening his foot at the request of the crust. He feeds on her you see, he nurses a lush growth.
A HOUSE STORY
I would get caught with the thorn. The way one might get caught with a smudge or a sting. I am always knelt, in the dirt, not above, on the dirt. So my knees get stained with it on, with the fingernails, and I leave with it mouthing from me. My skin mouthing when my own won’t move. I am walking through it now, on the precipice, and the other is descending with the weight of a hydraulic press. The door was the separation. The salt in the temperature drop would’ve done the telling if I had been blind. I’d walk through onto the porch, tumbled over as a gorilla. Flexing, cracking the ligament as I walked through, stretched up and out. Then I had the poise of a meerkat, stilts in my spine. I’m smiling and shuffling my head up and down over and over. Touched up my tone to the next octave. I’m still smiling. Nodding. I walk from one side of the house to the other. The glass shutter doors are batting before me, singing, lulling, I am lulled. I am convinced. Watch as I drop through and drop my profile too. I scutter out and off, huffing through. Tug the leaves and get warm on a flame. With my posture, my adrenaline drops too. I settle into a ran rhythm.
GROWING IS A METAMORPHOSIS
I’m running on the beaches of Noirmoutier again, nine or ten, swiping as many pine cones as I can and shovelling them in black bin bags. Writing the words in the air to convince my parents to take them home with us. That we should cross the channel with our car’s boot full of the bounty. En masse, they’ve made this composite pine cone, cast in black polyethyene. It’s September, so they’re coating the ground, easy marks. I’m infatuated with them because they’re like nothing I can discern. Fragrant spilling from their core, hedgehog carcasses, familiar only in their woodiness. I love Noirmoutier for its stubbornness. I picture myself connected by causeway and accessible only by low tide. As I grow, I’ll submerge deeper and low tide will become rarer and rarer. I’m stripping a GAP fleece from my torso as I sweep the landscape. The horizon has gone lilac, and I’ll remember this smell, heat on my skin and image forever. I’ll remember the hot breeze and distance from the ground. I don’t know yet that growing is a metamorphosis and not substitution after substitution. That I’ll have to bear the same arms and eyes I have now, this body will simply stretch out into the future. I don’t have a feeling of displacement because I don’t yet know the word. My chest and belly are clean slates in more ways than one. I’ll cut, scuff, and graze, knees, elbows, feet. I’ve not been ciphered and I’ll crave this feeling for the rest of my life.
A RESTITUTION STORY
He drives with the visor down to shield his eyes from the searing sun, batting his hand to his brow when slips of light peak through the gap. They wash over him like caffeine, shimmering onto and through his body, rousing his skin. He dodges like a man in threat, hounded by the innocuous waves. The leather stitched on his steering wheel has started to emit an obnoxious pungency. He feels it enter him and wonders if his skin might turn to leather too. The vision of a man barbed by an animal’s reconstituted skin, imprisoned by the very cruelty that nurtures, amuses him. He enjoys the thought of becoming symbolic offering or mascot to a cow. He enjoys the idea of representing animals in high-court, a cast of mammals behind him. Human defence calling on him as victim of crime, a calf slaughtering the 40-something man in cross-examination. If this isn’t restitution, I don’t know what is! The thought moans on long enough that the journey has slimmed to finishing and he turns into a parking spot.
He flails down to the beach, stripping his clothes as he gets nearer to the horizon. Counts in seconds, entertaining himself as he rises through the distance. Feels the water on his feet like a hammermill, his knees go and his body turns liquid as he becomes one with the ocean. The feeling doesn’t occur to him in any language you or I know; any letters he could piece together fail him. His body has ruptured, silenced, magnetised. If anyone else had seen him bolting in, if anyone else had witnessed the expression fold into itself- they might’ve felt urged, morally urged to call the police. His face starts to clarify into a weak pallor as he accepts his new threshold for feeling.
TERMINAL
This is the one. I would wince the spit back, measuring the diameter of my trachea by the size of saliva that can slip through. I am certain this is the one. I feel the edges of my throat rub over each other, clunky, lumpy rubs. I note the time so someone else might have the time. I brush my shoulders and bring to recall my fondest memories, the people I should’ve made more time for and the people I should’ve made less. The air I’m sipping becomes syrupy, coating either side as the gap dilutes and dilutes. I picture my mother, feel her guilt knowing I asked for listening and it got chalked up again. I swipe my hand across my wet head, gripping my earthly body to might it from being stolen from me. I watch myself float out. Clutch tighter on the slicked strands and manage to drag it back towards. Seducing my person back to its container. It hardens up like a Russian doll and I bid its abdominal incision to whistle me back in. I try steaming in but steam out just as quickly. I’m thinning fast and begin to permeate the interatomic space, re-raising each memory before I lose our atmosphere’s hallucogen. I’ve become omniscient and my vantage darts from the eyes I once mobilised, the mist my essence has now assumed, and my exospheric terminal. I plead that someone else might notice, but my somatic mouth has bonded shut. I will never utter another word again
YOU HAVE PUNCTURED MY SOLITUDE
The flakes of graphite endure the trace of fingertips, from when you buffed them up. The knowing you’d deferred has at long last come back round. Screen is finished with your lacquer, one I’d mighted but couldn’t grasp. Or did grasp but grip slipped, all the beads you’d imparted. In solitude, it was possible for her to get the greatest enjoyment of the man she loved. If his presence had been continuous, it would’ve disappeared. I can see you scratching and humming, the hours I’d spend looting your silence. You have punctured my solitude. I roll around now and would’ve rolled around then. The witnessing isn’t sharp but it was still this stomach that boasted the acid. I picture you rubbing your pencil across the words, tempered in your not-solitude, your chosen-solitude. Then I remember when you pined for the not-solitude, in your solitude. The gap had opened up that greatest enjoyment.
AGENT/AGENCY
It is a heavy burden to bear, sipping, diluting my agency, succumbing to the cravings I condemn. Oiling my body with the damning fluid, rushing my heart rate and burning my chest. If it hadn’t felt so singular, my choice, my medication, my blood pressure machine. If it hadn’t been at 21, maybe 11 or 16- I might have felt less like a thief. Like I’m taking from someone else, myself even. I rub up against the sensation you know, after I’ve swallowed and as the hour draws in, I’m grating towards the time. As though my body is dragging to the after. Maybe if I hadn’t desired it so desperately, to plunge and numb.
Or if I truly believed it were solely to do the doing, to organise the thoughts, my own drag in which I’m dressing to work, but wearing for Mark Fisher. Once the sensation has wiped me clean, I feel the quiet and stunting walk. The taste of sweetness comes on my tongue and dries out my mouth. My eyes kind of fall and sweep the floor, body carves itself out, sweat, stomach, heat. The guilt is because this just isn’t of me. Not pomp but fear. It is predictable, that I’d zip up to move faster.
Or I’m foolish enough to think this is my defining prosthesis. All other limbs I’ve strapped, not damning. As if every other suction doesn’t equally drag features from my face. No doubt because this is the one I let penetrate me.
UNTITLED APRIL 2026
The thickest one I can find still slips through the orifices. The one I’d seen was barbed and steely but wraps round my neck like a boa constrictor. Mine would, of course, be as slim as my veins. I did the same in a shop with a cotton jersey. It’d gone tarmac with time and something had shredded the cuffs. When I pulled it on my image had far overestimated. I thought my shoulders could’ve taken it on, but my pattern was sickly in comparison. Shot straight over, as though I’d not been there at all. I might’ve made the taut material gain a ripple or pull, but it’d swept me. The way I’d seen it, impact with stone could’ve been sculpting with a brush, as if the surface was fleshy and palpable. But the stone had blushed me instead. Where my finger meets my palm had tanned out of its own stone and looked burnt after. I watched another, and the same stone changed states right before my eyes; the solid had melted. That’s the way I thought, I’d wanted to lunge forward, but it’d only ever lunged back. I’d like to have been the effector and not the affected. Crush a concor not last the shell with scabs between my toes. Once I mounted a wetsuit, zipped myself in and was bared in the moments after. Tripped up in socks and shoes that were too big. They find something else to do with the excess; the difference instils them with motion. Then I’d fallen right over. In memory, I’d let the shorts swing at my knees and lap round my waist.