Poetry · Chapter
Psychic Larva explained
This chapter explores the oppressive psychic and emotional inheritance passed from mother to child, focusing on Ova's experience of her mother's subconscious anger and the inescapable stigma of their blood relationship.
What happens
This chapter explores the oppressive psychic and emotional inheritance passed from mother to child, focusing on Ova's experience of her mother's subconscious anger and the inescapable stigma of their blood relationship. The mother's unresolved sin and resentment manifest as a 'psychic larva' that erodes Ova's sense of self, leaving her without a dictionary for her inner consciousness.
Themes in this chapter
Childhood and Innocence
Ova's childhood is depicted as a site of psychic invasion and loss of innocence, overshadowed by her mother's unresolved sin and anger.
The Body and Mortality
The flesh is presented as a living witness of sin, with the mother's blood-relationship indicting the body itself, and the child's skin craving caresses like leaves for rain.
Alienation and Belonging
Ova is alienated from her own inner consciousness, lacking dictionaries to understand the stigmata imposed by her parent, and trapped in a bond that offers no liberation.
Characters to notice
- Ova
The child of Exodus, subjected to her mother's psychic larva and sub-carnal anger, her intuition stamped by parental disequilibrium.
- Exodus
Mentioned as the father of the child, though not directly present in the psychic scene.
- Ada
The mother whose blood-relationship is a 'terrific indictment of the flesh' and whose aura of anger overshadows Ova.
Key passages
“The head of the child of Exodus —reaches to the level of an abdominal moroseness —The moronic womb from which we gather our involuntary flesh hovers antagonistically over the child at mother’s knee And erodes her with psychic-larva from an eruptional impotence of offense— —rolling upon her”
The child's head is at the height of a gloomy belly; the foolish womb that supplies our involuntary body looms threateningly over the child as she sits by her mother, wearing her down with a psychic parasite born from a powerless outburst of resentment.
Describes the mother's subconscious hostility as a tangible, corrosive force attacking the child.
“There is no liberation from this inversion of instinct making subliminal depredations on Ova’s brain She is overshadowed by the mother’s aura of sub—carnal anger restringent to the pores of her skin— which opening like leaves for rain crave for caressings soft as wings”
Ova cannot escape this twisted instinct that secretly ravages her mind; she is dominated by her mother's aura of deep, bodily anger that tightens her skin's pores, which then open like leaves thirsting for rain, longing for gentle, wing-like caresses.
Highlights Ova's trapped state and her conflicting desire for tenderness amidst maternal hostility.