Self-Portrait: Moon and Mind - Tina Escaja

I hold the cerebral cortex.
Electrical sequences naming me
generate my
presence,
possibly something I don't take in or resolve,
the mere functions
my hands attempt to inscribe,
to render the occult as culture,
discerning myself
in organ-tubercle, angular quadrant, reproductive quadrant,
essence and machine,
the incision executed through devotion
and hogwash.

To make you present in the hippocampus, the amygdala, the ability to name,
                                                                                    or aphasia.
Me and your gravitational circumference.
Believing myself incapable
of the precise measure, the obsolete encounter with my existence
and my fate.
Pulling it off or not,
chemical options at auction,
alterations, fissures
in my asymmetrical self.

In my hands,
plastic and evasive as dream,
lost in galaxies of circuitry and fluctuation that dictate
billions of nerve cells,
my consciousness.

In my hands
the machine, no soul or mirage or oasis to save me,

moon and mind.

---

Tina Escaja (born 1965) Spain
Translated Kristin Dykstra
Based on Helen Chadwick, Self-Portrait, 1991