THE BEGINNING. What was it like before you toddled in front of a bow-tied-Lacan smiling back at you in the mirror? Jacques Lacan's “mirror stage” is his only theory that has a clinical, dare you say it, speculative if not scientific truth. The infant, barely able to keep upright, babbling & bumbling in a bedroom crash-test customised by the parents' anxieties, comes across a closet mirror, floor-to-ceiling. There the infant stands, a joyous recognition of oneness, who, up to now, has been an appendage to a bigger whole, a full & glorious whole that, on reflection, the baby begins to juxtapose with this new independent & whole self in the mirror. The once-upon-a-time umbilical ubiquity of the mother is severed by one look in the mirror. The cut is clean. You become one, separate, apart. You fall into self-regard. You fall into self-criticism. You fall into language. Words begin to accumulate in the gap opened up between you & the world that you once knew as you & everything. You are free from everything, separate—condemned to be free & separate. You touch your face & you touch your face in the mirror too, two? No, one. You are alone & apart. In the future you will unScrabble your words & throw them at the mirror but they won't stick. You will try to hook words onto the world but they will miss & 🄲🄻🄰🄽🄶 on the floor. You will laugh at the 🄲🄻🄰🄽🄶 & cry at the 🄲🄻🄰🄽🄶. But you are happy, for now. You wonder at you. You laugh & cry & laugh & cry. You walk up to you. You try to touch you—you in the mirror you. You stare into you. It is not scary, just funny. It is like you are tickling you as you try to release yourself from the mirror, release yourself from you. You are tickling all over. Tickled pink until red. Lacan wrote that jouissance “Begins with a tickle & ends with a blaze of petrol.” Make of that what you will.