Disgust

Apropos of gabriella's citation of Kristeva, and the unspeakable circumstances that led to said citation — as well as her return to the blog! — I thought I should quote the following, from Sianne Ngai's "Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust."

In expressions of disgust language becomes formless, the "esoteric jargon of grunting and straining," "retched sounds from bathroom splashes." [... T]he poet's expression of inexpressiveness thrusts the base materiality of language into the foreground: "woo, brah." Here the question of what a word means (the form it gives to a preexistent thought) as well as the question of how it relates abstractly to another word in the system (form deferring to form) becomes secondary to its simply "being there," in all its insistence and affective force.

All of which is to say that the word abject doesn't begin to describe the surprise — magical delight, rather — brought on by an unexpected handful of maggots.