Imago (Rendle-Short)

Imago begins in a stupified haze of sublimation, cast aside shortly as the journey commences, leaving English behind for Australia. Australia there becomes a space of fleshly liminality. Her husband is a soil scientists, precluding her own fixation, with maggots and fat. Flesh happens across two boundaries, a gradient in both direction, fertilization as in decayed mud to grow flowerings, and putrefaction as in the living turning to soil in rot. Molly dreams of putrefaction as Jimmy dreams of fertilization. Jimmy, for this life fetishization, for his dreams of flesh not in itself but for what it could create, what use it could serve (his hole of gradient stages) ends with his return, his frightful flight back to the land of sublimation and cold, the neurotic pigeons of Molly's mother.

Molly meanwhile goes on a journey into her body, developing a love and obsession for her obese neighbors Marj and Kevin. Through both of them, Molly undergoes the trauma of one raised under cogito's reign, rediscovering flesh in horror and pleasure as Marj introduces her to gluttony and Kevin rapes her.

Mark decays, withers, and dies in a hospital bed. Molly finds her and they bond in affection over the shared trauma of Kevin, over the shared horror of being-bodily as they once bonded over the shared pleasure of being-bodily.

Imago speaks of food, of dying and growing. Never of death, never of life. Of muscle and maggots, meat rotting, meat being chewed. Imago speaks of the becoming of flesh.