liminal longingremembering/returningnecromancingthe "uncanny" is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar. In Jacques Lacans essay The Line and the Light (1964) he speaks of the haunting subject being a stain within the image. The mimetic subject depicted becomes a stain, it becomes a picture And if I am anything in the picture, it is always in the form of a screen, which I earlier called the stain, the spot. Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: W.W. Norton, 1978, p. 99. Roland Barthes quoted in Susan Rubin Suleiman. Writing and Motherhood in the (M)other Tongue. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1985. 85. This link between the maternal and immersion, leading to a breaking up and dissolution of form, and to a dislocation within space and orientation, reveals the symbolic origin of water seen metaphorically as a maternal and feminine entity. In Julia Kristevas Stabat Mater, she speaks of the relationship between the maternal and the boundaries of language which mirrors the relationship between the loss of language and the ability of water (and the maternal) to fill this void; Belief in the mother is rooted in our fascinated fear with the impoverishment of language. If language is powerless to situate me for, or speak me to, the other, then I presumeI yearn to believethat someone somewhere will make up for that impoverishment. Someone, or rather someone female, before there was speech, before itbefore the unconscious spoke, before language pummeled me, via frontiers, separations, vertigos, into being. Julia Kristeva. Tales of Love. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987 (19831), p.251.Luce Irigaray 'And the One doesn't Stir without the Other'