The Membranes

by Chi Ta-wei

She’d rather make a poor decision for herself, acting on her own desires, than have it made by someone else.

“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”

When a child failed to detach from the parent in a timely fashion, were the obsessive behaviors and arrested development the child’s fault? Or was the mother to blame, for overindulging her? Or maybe the responsibility lay with neither the child nor the mother. What was so wrong with not weaning a child? Why force a child to grow up? If a child refused, why place blame on anyone? Why not just not grow up? Why did such a tyrannical social imperative exist in the first place?

An ancient sage known as Derrida once spoke of “différance,” whereby your well-intentioned pursuit of the authenticity of sensory experience only produces endless variations, shifts, and evolutions; the meaning you seek, inconstant and ephemeral, is elusive as a chameleon. “Mise en abyme,” they say—no matter how many layers of clothing you fold back, another layer of clothing always lies underneath; every password you enter yields another request for a password; within the darkness of the abyss always lies another abyss.

Even the future is queer in The Membranes. The narrative does not place much faith in the sanctity of heterosexual reproduction that is so often the bedrock of apocalypse fantasy, where the goal of the propagation of humanity (regularly manifested in the portrayal of the survival of the nuclear family) is taken for granted.

Women nurture, men provide.

If I ever get married, I want a nurturing woman.