Freud and Dreams, a further thought

The more I read Freud, the more I am convinced that what he finds clever in the dreamworks and classifies under such headings is "condensation" and "displacement" is merely confusion. He's not trying to decode the secret message sent by the unconscious but just trying to untangle the mess made by the image-making, association-rich brain which in sleep has no aid from reason to help it out.

Preliminary Thoughts on Oedipus and Freud

Freud on the Oedipus Complex: People like to talk about this but don’t like to find out what Freud actually said. The initial description of what came to be called Oedipus Complex can be found on pages 294-297 of the old Avon edition of The Interpretation of Dreams (James Strachey translator, Chapter V, part D, “Typical Dreams”). It has often been noted that Oedipus did not suffer from an Oedipus Complex. Two things need to be said about that. 1) Freud never said that he did. 2) If Freud is right about the complex (about which everyone today seems to have reasonable doubts at the very least) then Oedipus, if he is an accurate representation of a human being, did suffer from an Oedipus Complex, though, of course, he didn’t know he did. Nor did his killing of his father or sleeping with his mother occur as the fulfillment of his desires to do so. But of course the Oedipus Complex in actual humans never leads to the killing of the father and sleeping with the mother. It leads to neuroses. Had Oedipus known Laius was his father and Jocasta his mother, he’d never had done what he did. The only reasonable claim is that the play is not about the Oedipus Complex. But again, Freud never said that it was.

                Let’s assume that Freud was right about the Oedipus Complex, just to see where that assumption will take us. If so, Sophocles would have suffered from it and so would the audience. A fictional character, not being a person, need not have so suffered. But a character who in fact kills his father and marries his mother is almost certainly going to manifest the author’s unconscious awareness of the psychological implications of it. Does Oedipus?

                Before answering that question, a brief look at the actual Freudian Oedipus. According to Freud, the thing that distinguishes Oedipus Tyrannous from  all other “tragedies of destiny” cannot be its treatment of fate, since that is what they all have in common. It must therefore be that alone among them this one appeals to us at an unconscious level. And the place where this does appeal to the audience unconsciously is in the dream-like reflection of the desire to kill the father and sleep with the mother. Since the audience also has this desire, they will feel the appropriate and deeply seated emotion that must accompany its representation. They won’t know why they are experiencing this emotion and will resist attributing it to its proper source. They will therefore find some other explanation for the play’s appeal—though that one being false, and unconsciously known to be so, will never satisfy.

                This analysis has already gone beyond what Freud actually says in the pages cited above. But it keeps, I believe, very safely within the understanding of Freud. Here I extrapolate further, but still remain, I believe, safely within Freudian thought.

Sophocles too will of course also have suffered from his own Oedipus Complex. And without intending to do so, would have represented this complex in some way, perhaps in various ways, in this drama. Where might this representation occur in the play? I believe in three places. The first is the least important. Believing the Oracle, he runs away from Corinth. The disgust he feels at the idea that he will fulfill the prophecy unnerves him.  Nor does it make much sense logically. If you really don’t want to kill your father or sleep with your mother, then it seems to me it would hard to bring yourself to do these things. Unless a frenzied mob were going to force you at knife point or threaten you with the murder of your own children if you did not, it’s hard to imagine any scenario in which one would even entertain the thought. And how likely is this sort of overwhelming compulsion? True, one could say, “but he understood that the gods were behind this prophecy and therefore however unlikely, surely the gods had to power to make this happen.” Perhaps so, though the mechanism still seems hard to imagine. But even if so, then acknowledging the power of the gods to bring about such an extraordinary event must compel the corollary acknowledgement that fleeing Corinth will not help. Gods that can make you kill your father and sleep with you mother won’t be stopped by anything you can do. This means that it makes more sense to see Oedipus’ fleeing of Corinth as an irrational manifestation of his desire to fulfill the prophecy accompanied by his disgust at his own desire than it does to see it as a rational decision based upon an overestimation of his own powers to thwart the gods. In fact it would not be out of the question to see his fleeing Corinth as a manifestation of his desire to fulfill the prophecy. After all, he has reason to believe that Merope and Polybus  are not his parents. And he fails to pursue the question to the end to find out if indeed they are. He leaves Delphi under the suspicion (or unconscious understanding) that his real parents are out there somewhere. And if he’s going to get to the business of killing and fucking, he’s going to have to let himself be led to where they are.

  Second, the expedient of the solving of the riddle of the sphinx. It’s an essential moment in the myth, not original to Sophocles as far as I know, but nonetheless bringing to the play the notion that the solving of a riddle is part of the reading of the play. Something has to be done to lead the people of Thebes to declare Oedipus King, and this event has the thematic advantage of doubling the central action of the play, which is the solving of the riddle of who killed the former king. At the same time the circle of the riddle expands to the play itself, an unconsciously plea or opportunity for the audience to comprehend the riddle of Oedipus—to make conscious the unconscious appeal.

More profoundly, though Oedipus did not knowingly kill dad or sleep with mom, if he does suffer unconsciously like the rest of humankind from an Oedipus complex, the realization that he has in fact done these things is going to determine his reaction to these acts. Here is where the psychoanalytic interpretation of the play finally becomes interesting. Oedipus feels disgust at his actions, plucks out his eyes and makes himself an exile. On the one hand this reaction is precisely what one would predict for all the reasons that easily come to mind about the breaking of the taboo. Oedipus’ reaction manifests his own internal accord with the socially defined disgust at what he’s done, which disgust if already a sign that everyone wants to do what he has done but is afraid of the reaction of others. Oedipus’ reaction is a perfectly represented representation of the personal desire against the social taboo. The society (not the gods) is such an overwhelming force that even the fulfillment of the deepest unconscious desire can only mirror the social consensus.

And yet, I find the lack of ambivalence troubling. I ask a couple questions: what if Oedipus had realized what he had done and yet been able to hide this knowledge from the public? We do get a sense of the possibility in the reaction of Jocasta to her own realization of what has happened, a realization that precedes her son’s. Her reaction suggests that she might have been able to live with the realization if the public did not also find out about it. But the public shame (it is a social taboo not a personal one) that drives her to suicide. Perhaps Oedipus too would have been less disgusted had he not been publically revealed. He might have exiled himself without also blinding himself and found some excuse other than guilt. He might also therefore have manifested some ambivalence toward his own acts.

Of course the problem with this whole analysis is that it seems to depend upon the acceptance of the terms of the Oedipus Complex? But does it really. I do not think so. Oedipus is a character who nearly got away with a crime. The Oedipus Complex is too narrowly defined to cover the appeal of this play. One does not need it, when the not even unconscious desire to get rid of everyone who annoys us and sleep with everyone who attracts us is already part of everyone’s experience. Choosing the father as the murder victim and the mother as the sexual object merely puts the desire into its most dramatic form. If you want to get rid of annoying people, how about killing your own father? If you want to sleep with every desirable women, how about your own mother? Any infantile impulses notwithstanding, the truth is normal people don’t want to kill fathers or sleep with their mothers. If those infantile impulses ever did exist, they do not determine the later psychological development of the individual. They do not become repressed. They are chuckled at, abandoned, likely forgotten—erased altogether, without legacy. The mystery is that though sexual desire is universal we are more likely to want to escape our families whom familiarity has made boring and whom a changing power dynamic from child to adult has made uncomfortable, caging. They may always be fun to visit. But they’re more fun to leave. We want to get back to our own lives, where we are king and queen.

So in the end, the appeal of Oedipus over all other tragedies of destiny does not lie in the Oedipus Complex but in the larger family dynamic and also in the larger human dynamic of sex, power, autonomy and freedom. The desire to get away with crimes accompanied by a realization of the need for the laws that define those crimes as crimes.  

The Still Ground

The problem of language is that it shifts while staying

perfectly still.

The problem of truth is that like a very clever fish
or freaking fly
it won't stay what it is
for language to catch it.

The overarching unanswerable question
for which you can hardly begin to find the words
for which metaphor is the metaphor
and poetry the vehicle
whose breakdown
provides only the dim comfort of assurance
and the sadness of knowing
it is there

maybe

urging you closer by this
 

whose words shift

at the fault—
carrying the net of your mind
like a dimsighted guide—
where metaphors
dissolve
and wordless being
emerges
 
where the still ground
shakes
and there’s nothing
you can do.

Freud quotation

There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable—a navel as it were, that is the point of contact with the unknown (Freud, Dreams 143fn).

The Oneness of All

Rise a little ways above the earth and see

the borders disappear. And then believe

that height is the true height. A little higher

and you’ll see the borders between words

erased as well, tree becomes one with apple,

apple with bird, bird with everything. My love

for you dissolves to nothingness and all

love cries for unity with it and snowball.

Tentative Thoughts after Reading Ricoeur's The Rule of Metaphor"

I’ve finished The Rule of Metaphor—a book whose conclusions regarding philosophy and metaphor are—one must use a metaphor—enlightening.

One can take from this work of philosophy an understanding of the necessary failure of philosophy which is an inevitable effect of the limits of language, the inability of language to articulate even once the thing the speculative philosopher desires/attempts to articulate. Metaphor is the conduit from the known to the unknown. Metaphor always erases what it writes as it writes, leaving only its trace. The end of philosophy leads to poetry—the next rung on language’s ladder. Poetry, the cauldron of metaphor, too must fail. The final step to being is silence. Knowing, inarticulate, smiling silence.

You Are a Balloon

You are a balloon.

Inside you is a capsule of compressed air.

On the capsule is a plunger, which, when pressed, releases compressed air.

A little spurt and you grow

a little bigger. But

osmosis lets a little air out through the skin.

Your biggest fear is you will aggravate the plunger and all that bottled air will scream to.

Now.

Boom.

Metaphors of Everyday Life

Ordinary language is the graveyard of dead metaphors. Ricoeur says as often as he says anything that metaphor is what you will not find in the dictionary. Thus he draws the line between metaphoric and literal expression, between those metaphors that have not (yet) ossified into a plain meanings and those that have. For his purpose this is perfectly legitimate. In a larger sense it creates a problem in that all the fundamental corpses of literal language can be (in theory) spontaneously reanimated. We never know if it’s truly dead or merely catatonic. Whether it is truly dead but can rise as a zombie. (This carving of a man out of wax seems sincere.) And there are a number of metaphors at the fuzzy border of the line of the dictionary, passing back and forth, not quite settling into death or sleep. And finally, for anyone deeply immersed in language and the history of language, the implicit metaphors are not dead at all. (I see dead—metaphors. Ghosts.) He laughs at the claim that the typhoon decimated the population.

It’s in part because language’s dead metaphors are never yet quite dead to all readers and yet dead beyond recall to others that sentences are so hard to nail down.

Moreover the study of metaphor yields, eventually, the realization that the ordinary language we use literally every day to make plain and unambiguous meanings is really just a collection of dead, half dead, playing dead and merely sleeping metaphors that create a bizarre monster of meanings in whose belly we live and which, but for myriad accidents of history, might have been entirely another monster.

Reason and Story--and Hamlet

Reason and Story

In one context, the other of reason is unreason, its opposite. In another, its other is story, which is not an opposite at all.

Unreason exists in the realm of reason. Story exists in a realm external to reason and unreason. Think of two nonoverlapping circles.

Reason and story are two distinct ways of seeing, describing, living in the world. From the point of view of the one, they are mutually exclusive. From the point of view of the other, they are not circles. We can live here without reason; we cannot without story.

Reason and story are the two ways we perceive, understand, and respond to being. Reason sees the world as a state that is, reason wants a hierarchy; story sees the world as a field, a field of incessant becoming. Reason wants to put the right name on everything. Story sees that nouns are never quite accurate.  

Both are necessary. Story is the name given to the other by reason. Our perspective, here, in this little essay is that of reason. This is not a story about the two realms of thought. The same exploration should be done from the point of view of story. And it has—too many times to name—never better than in Hamlet.

In the realm of reason, opposites contradict. In the realm of story opposites exist without contradiction. A man can be rich and poor, kind and evil, right and wrong.

In the realm of reason, Hamlet is a hopelessly confused character and a particularly confused play. Reason cannot make sense of the play. It tries. It is reason’s job to try. Reason understands the appeal of the play. Reason should never give up the play. But it will never bring the play into itself.

Story is where Hamlet happens, and story too tries endlessly to make sense of Hamlet. (Gertrude of Denmark, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Gertrude and Claudius are just three of many 20^th-century examples of this, ones whose attempts are more or less direct.) But story is not anxious about Hamlet. Hamlet is a pool in which story swims.

Garden Entrance

Or "How I spent my summer."                                             

Why Paint What Is Present?

You’ll never smell the painted rose

I watched a painter paint a scene of beauty—a nude, a landscape, a starry night—

Why did he do this? It was not to preserve the scene’s beauty.

What he painted wasn’t there or if there it was unseen.

Did he enhance the beauty with his art or his imagination

or did he paint what was unseen?  He added to the scene—yes

but from where did he draw his addition? What absence drove him?

The lover says, I paint my lover when she is absent . I paint from memory or a photograph because, overwhelmed with desire, I want to bring her back. I paint to spend time with her. I paint her for the same reason one who cannot paint stares at the photo or plunges into memory: to make present what is absent.

That’s a motive to paint what is absent. But why paint what is present?  Why crawl out of the lover’s bed when she is there in palpable flesh and paint her? I see her better when I paint her than when I merely look at her, better than when I make love to her. That may be so. But is it enough? The painting is also the delay, the foreplay, of making absent what is present in order to make more present what is already present but not fully present. Also true. But isn't the painting also already about the future absence of what now is present. The future absence that makes the touching more urgent as the painting dries is the same future absence that drives the painting. This play of presence and absence underlies all art.  

Let's think this through more systematically. Why paint what is present?

To preserve, to enhance, to supplement, to elicit. Those might be the whole range of possibilities. They all meld together if stared at too too closely. And even if they were distinct in themselves their borders would be imperfectly discernible, always in dispute. Nonetheless, they are the possibilities.

There’s no need now to paint in order merely to preserve, if "to preserve" is aimed at the ostensible beauty a very good photograph (also a work of art of course) or video would do as much as could be done in that way more closely and more easily. It wouldn’t be the same—as Emerson noted. The whole scene is its spatio-temporal context. And that is irretrievable. You’ll never smell the painted rose. But it is as much as can be had. And so, “to preserve” can never have more than a small part in painting a present scene.

To enhance: This is never not part of the effect. A painting that is only as beautiful as the scene lacks something. We might say the scene can never be captured in a painting, but that is misleading. Something is lost in the translation. Yes, but something must also be gained. A painting points at the thing in the scene that accounts for its beauty and pulls it forward, enhancing contrasts, directing the gaze. This may be enough. But it’s not all.

To supplement, to add what is missing, put in what isn’t there. There are only two ways to talk about what isn’t there: the absent and the invisible. The invisible is there but doesn’t seem to be. "To elicit" is to bring out the invisible. "To supplement" is to add what isn’t there. To supplement is to commandeer the scene. It’s the imperial impulse. It may not be wholly negative for that. One wrestles the scene into what it is not in order to convert it into what one wishes it were or needs it to have been or to be or to make it say what one wishes to say. Lights and filters and oboes and violins. To supplement is to comment on the scene or to use the scene to comment elsewhere. The choice of subject is of course already a comment if it is not an excuse (“this is worth painting”), and everything done from there is also comment, personal or transpersonal: I love this, it moves me or this is a to-be-loved thing; it moves me or it’s moving. That general comment underlies the whole enterprise. All range of specific comments also obtain, potentially: this is why I love it, this is what is lovable about it, or her. One cannot escape supplementation.

To elicit is the Romantic impulse. To make the invisible visible. There is always something invisible, not absent, in anything beautiful. To see through the apparent to the real. God or nothing. This is not strictly the sign-value of the scene. What is invisible may be unutterable. One can ache to possess or to become part of the beauty one perceives. The art may amplify that impulse. It may do this by supplementation or elicitation, and it may deaden the scene too, but it may also bring the ache to such an intensity that the viewer—the lover—loses all power to stand. We fall over for lack of strength in the presence of so much beauty. (Was this the real fall of the mythic Adam for Eve? Milton may have thought so.)

The painting either leads us back to the scene or takes us away into itself. Either way, if it is art and not hack work, it leads us to whatever truth there is in beauty.

What Humpty Dumpty Said

Saturday, as we sat at seder
I sought to borrow Simon’s seeder.
Simon had a super seeder
It superseded that of Peter.
I sought to borrow Simon’s seeder
Because that day I bought a cedar.
I sought to spread some seed around
To spiffy up my soiled ground.

Simon said he understood
And said he’d help me if he could,
“But as it is the Sabbath, sir
And so to such we mustn’t stir,
I suggest you bother Peter
For your seder cedar seeder.”

Gun Thoughts

Some questions to answer before you choose to buy yourself a handgun.

1. Have you ever in your life been in a situation in which it would have been appropriate to shoot somebody?
2. Do you know anyone who has ever been in a situation in which it would have been appropriate to shoot somebody?

If the answer to both of those questions is "no," you probably don't need a gun.

3. Have you ever been in a situation where you were glad there was no gun?
4. Do you know of any who was in a situation that would have been improved had there been no gun?

If your answer to either of those question is yes, you probably don't need a gun.
If your answer to both of those question is yes, you should stay clear of guns.

5. Keeping in mind that the handgun you buy is more likely to shoot someone you don't want shot than anyone you do want shot, why are you buying the gun? Is it to make a political statement?

If you are buying  a gun to make a political statement, to solidify your association with the political right, to thumb your nose at the left, if you are endangering yourself and those you love in order to feel like one of the in crowd, you need to find another hobby.

Copyright Breaks the Contract

Commodification Is Never Innocent

The liar with the lyre strums to town

poetry holds the folks on edge
until they break
in laughter tears astonishment rage
and call to the lyre to play it again

and again

until they know it by heart
until they can write it in air with their voices
until they no longer need the liar and the order of words
he mixed from a town down the river.

Begin

It is still the seventh day

 and we are still

digesting the fruit.

Christianity and the force of history

It was said in the recent CNN special “After Jesus” that if not for the conversion of Constantine, Christianity would never have become the force that it is, essentially that Christianity like all religious movements is an historical accident that could have been stopped at any number of points had this or that chance event not occurred—and any number of intellectual Christians will be suspicious of the claim that God helped Constantine win the battle; we simply don’t see good evidence for such a God. But perhaps history does not work this way after all. Christianity was a growing force in the empire at the time of Constantine, though many emperors and others had tried hard to get rid of it. Like a bubble rising or a stream falling this force was looking for a place to emerge. It happened to emerge here. Had Constantine lost, it would have emerged elsewhere. But it was going to happen because it was a swelling force in history—a force which the church, for all we know, prevents like a dam as much as it channels like a dredge.

Alarmed

Children used as fuel in woodstoves to heat the house—
Oh well, I thought, in this hideous dream, probably too late
to help them anyhow, though they must be in pain, but that’s the way
we heat our homes these days, and though I went back to reading the book
because, after all, there was work to do, I awoke in a sweat
and remembered—I had forgot to set the clock.

Somewhere inside me lives someone who knows how to shock me.

He uses images because he does not have words.
And never the obvious ones
like an image of me failing to set the alarm.
I’d like to know who he is and how he knows so much
and why he keeps such careful track of everything
I’m hoping to lose—like time.
And why he spends all night
shouting at me.

 

The Sensor in the Ceiling

The sensor in my ceiling is watching me

It wants me to move.

If I do not obey, it will throw me into darkness.

It’s like a cowboy shooting bullets at my feet

To make me dance.

Closed Form Poem

by Alan Lindsay

 
 

This is a closed form poem. The rhythm

is invariable. It does not rhyme.

But the third line has to be

enjambed and the fifth line always begins with the word

yellow. I am sorry. You cannot alter the subtle play of vowels.

The glottal stops, the fricatives—all stay the same.

Also caesura, strategically deployed. You cannot change

the words, or the order of the words or any of the line

breaks. The form is locked tight as a drum or painter’s canvas.

 
 

I have created the form. It is mine.

How can you make the poem your own?

You can change the name beneath the title.

That name is not part of the poem and does not belong

to the form. You can tack the poem to a tree

deep in the woods, overlooking a stream. You can place the poem

on a pole in a field above the swaying grass, above the gazing grain.

You can tattoo the poem to your breast and embarrass men by asking them

to read it to the final period. You can recite it before crowds on New York City streets

hurrying to work with cardboard cups of Starbucks in their free hands.

 

Open Form Poem