Doctorating

Today I read a book called Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the real in performance practice and theory.

In one chapter, the author references Lacan in order to talk about the 'real'.

According to Lacan, the 'real' is the 'full being' that we inhabit as very young infants before we are taught to understand ourselves through language.

Laurie is on the edge of something, she is going to gain something priceless but also lose something.

At the moment she experiences everything as it is, she is pre sign system, apart from learning a few words that represent concepts - up, sit, door, mamma, dadda, banana, toast, shoes, yes, 123 go! Beep beep.

In a few months time she will start to learn the world as a system of symbols, what Lacan calls 'The symbolic realm' nothing as it is, only as it is learned, 'the world of representations we construct to compensate ourselves for the traumatic loss of the real itself.

She has to learn this system in order to live within it but oh, what a beautiful thing it must be to be in her brain now, just feeling, just being Laurie.