Carried: Face Nerve Pains (Severe) (I)

It fixes on a single question — whether one is acceptable at the highest level — and answers it in advance, in the negative. Because the verdict is treated as settled, punishment is not feared so much as expected and half-invited, and forgiveness of the self is ruled out as a category error. The face is the site: the surface presented for judgment carries the pain. It was set down early, by people who taught a child that its nature was the problem; what the shape asks for is the question reopened rather than the sentence served.

Somewhere in me a case is closed: I'm the wrong kind of thing, and the sentence is still being carried out.

Judas, unable to imagine that the pardon on offer could extend to him, and finishing the punishment himself. The form implies a task: to consider that the pardon has no exception written into it.