*

Somewhere, perhaps in a brain, someone has constructed a museum for forgotten libidos, where busloads of children can go to learn about what happens, about what else happens, and about why the happening isn't so bad and is so horrific that adults walk around saying it isn't so bad. My libido is encased in the East Wing, and a six-year-old boy is tapping on the glass, trying to get the attention of my libido, my little panda of a libido, and he's whispering to the girl next to him, he just sits there all day eating sticks, while the two adults behind them are cackling and trying not to cackle or think about why they are cackling. The little boy is eating his chocolate ice cream thoughtfully, stroking his chin as men do, wondering what li-BEET-oh could mean. (The girl knows. She is waiting for the boy to ask.) And then over to the next case, the case on his left, and there's my libido again, sticks and blank stare, and he recognizes my libido and looks around and sees that every case in the room houses my little libido bears, furry and sleepy and cute, and the cases are libidos, too, and he looks at the glass and he looks kind of fuzzy and everything looks the same and he's getting so bored, and he's wondering if there are any video games anywhere, or if he can get some more ice cream, it's so boring, everything is the same, he wants something to do, everything is so boring and he wants something new. Perhaps a furry little roach scurries by, and he finds a new playmate, and perhaps the little girl thought libido was a rock band, and perhaps the two adults are sad and lonely and balding and want nothing more than to stand next to each other and look at their old reflections, cute little libidos, encased in glass, eating sticks, boring boring, boring, so wonderfully.

__

"Desire is one hell. Contentment is another. I love the cinematic surrealism and elegiac bafflement of this piece—how innocence becomes incomprehensible except as the retrospective fantasy of adults, how insensibly the wild panda takes its domestication, and how the libido itself resists representation by becoming both the subject and the means of its encasement." —Virginia M. Heatter