The Marine Biologist
Episode #78
Originally Aired: Wednesday, February 10, 1994, 9:30
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Production Credits:
Supervising Producer ................. Larry Charles
Supervising Producer ................. Tom Cherones
Executive Producer ................... Andrew Sherman
Created By ........................... Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld
Teleplay By .......................... Larry Charles
Story By ............................. Bruce Kirschbaum
Directed By .......................... Tom Cherones
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Cast:
Jerry Seinfeld ....................... Jerry Seinfeld
George Costanza ...................... Jason Alexander
Elaine Benes ......................... Julia Louis-Drefus
Kramer ............................... Michael Richards
With:
Newman ............................... Wayne Knight
Corinne ............................... Carol Kane
Lippman ............................... Richard Fancy
Testikov ............................... George Murdock
Diane ............................... Rosalind Allen
Also:
Hotel Clerk ............................... Daivid Blackwood
Woman at beach ............................... Heather Morgan
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(Open Jerry's apartment, Jerry is at the table and Elaine is on the phone)
Elaine: (to the phone)Well did he bring it up in the meeting?
(Jerry picks up a yellow shirt and walks to Elaine)
Jerry: Elaine, see this T-shirts, six years I've had this T-shirts, it's my
best one, I call him...Golden Boy
Elaine: I'm on the phone here.
Jerry: Golden Boy is always the first shirt I wear out of the laundry, here
touch Golden Boy!
Elaine: No thanks. (to the phone)Yeah, Yeah I'll hold.
Jerry: But see look at the collar, see it's fraying. Golden Boy is slowly
dying. Each wash is brings him one step closer, that's what makes
the T-shirts such a tragic figure.
Elaine: Why don't you just let Golden Boy soak in the sink with some
Woolight?
Jerry: No!!! The reason he's iron man is because he goes out there and plays
every game. Wash!!! Spin!!! Rinse!!! Spin!!! You take that away
from him, you break his spirit!
(Elaine is suddenly excited)
Elaine: (to the phone)Yeah. Oh! What? He is! Oh! this is so fantastic! I'm
so excited! Yes I'm excited, OK I'll be in soon! OK, OK, I'm
coming, yeah, yeah I'm coming, I'm coming! (Elaine jumps up and
dances around) Yuri Testikov, the Russian writer!
Jerry: The guy in the gulag!
Elaine: Yeah! Pendant's publishing his new book, and I'm working on it!
Lippman and I are going to the airport to pick him up Thursday in a
limousine!
Jerry: You wanna barrow Golden Boy!
Elaine: Oh! Don't you know what this means, it's like working with Tolstoy!
Jerry: Hey ya know what I read the most unbelievable thing about Tolstoy the
other day, did you know the original title for "War and Peace" was
"War--What Is It Good For?"!
Elaine: Ha ha.
Jerry: No, no.. I'm not kidding Elaine it's true, his mistress didn't like
the title and insisted him change it to "War and Peace"!
Elaine: But it's a line from that song!
Jerry: That's were they got it from!
Elaine: Really?
Jerry: I'm not joking!
(George enters with a handful of mail)
George: You can't handle the truth!(he solutes)
Jerry: What?
George: I'm working on my Jack Nicholson, You can't handle the truth!(he
solutes)
Elaine: What, is this your mail? (She takes the mail and starts flipping
through)
George: Yeah, I grabbed it on my way, I don't want my mother reading it.
Elaine: Oh! Your Alumni Magazine.
Jerry: Your mother reads your mail?
George: Yeah.
Jerry: What do you mean like post-cards?
George: No, anything.
Jerry: She doesn't open?
George: She'll open!
Jerry: You've caught your mother opening envelopes!
George: Yeah.
Jerry: What did she say?
George: I was curious!
Jerry: Isn't that against the law?
George: Maybe I can get her locked up.
Elaine: (She looks closer at the mag.) Hey Jerry, you're in the Alumni
magazine! Listen to this: Jerry Seinfled has appeared on "David
Letterman" and the "Tonight Show" and he did a pilot for NBC called
"Jerry"...that was not picked up. Georgie, why isn't there anything
about you in here?
Jerry: He can't handle the truth!
Elaine: All right.. this is too fun I gotta get back to work.
(Elaine leaves and in the hall she meets up with Kramer, he is holding a set
of golf clubs)
Kramer: Ah, maybe you could use this (he searches through his jacket) Ah,
here, ah, it's an electronic organizer, ah, here it is.
(Elaine Gasps)
Kramer: Yeah you know, for phone numbers, addresses, keep appointments,
everything
Elaine: Wow!
Kramer: It's got an alarm that beeps!
Elaine: Oh! I can't believe this, Kramer! I've been wanting to get one of
these things! Are you sure...(Kramer drops a piece of paper and
bends over to pick it up and drops balls everywhere) Are you sure you
can't use one of these things??
Kramer: Oh no. I got all my appointments up here. (he points to his head)
Elaine: Where'd you get this?
Kramer: The bank, I opened a new account.
(Back inside Jerry's apartment)
George: Did you see that whale thing on TV last night?
Jerry: No.
George: I'm such a Huge whale fan. These marine biologists were showing how
they communicate with each other with these squeaks and squeals, what
a fish!
Jerry: It's a mammal.
George: Whatever. (George looks to the table) Hey new tape recorder?
Jerry: Yeah, got it from the bank.
(Kramer enters without his golf bag)
Kramer: (over excited) Hey
George: Hey
Kramer: (still over excited) Who wants to have some fun!
Jerry: I do.
George: I do.
Kramer: (once again, over excited) Are you just sayin' you want to have fun
or do you really want to have fun?!
Jerry: I really wanna have some fun.
George: I'm just sayin' I wanna have some fun.
Kramer: Right now there six-hundred Titleists that I got at the driving
range in the trunk of my car. Why don't we drive out to Rock-a-Way
and hit them-----------(very over excited) into the ocean! Now
picture this....we find a nice sweet spot between the dunes, we take
out our drivers, we tea up and (he makes a golf stroke), that ball
goes sailing up into the sky holds there for a moment and then.......
..... gulp!
George: Come on. Ya wanna go get some lunch?
Jerry: Yeah, let me just stop by the cash machine and I'll meet you at the
coffee shop.
George: Yeah, I'm gonna go get a paper.
(Kramer gets ready to make another swing)
George: Keep your head down.
(At the automatic teller machine Jerry is getting his money and there is a
woman beside him)
Jerry: Cash advance...yes (he looks over) no (he looks over again)balance
inquiry...no (he looks again) receipt....no (he looks again)
processing...processing...processing.(He opens the box and gets his
money and then looks at the woman and says)I won!
(Jerry starts to walk away)
Diane: Jerry?
Jerry: Yeah
Diane: Diane, Diane DeConn, from college. I've seen you on TV you're doin'
great.
Jerry: Yeah pluggin' along.
Diane: I got the Alumni magazine. Ya know what ever happened to your friend
George? I never see him in there.
Jerry: Well he's kind of modest.
Diane: He was always such a goof-off. I mean did he ever get anywhere?
Jerry: Sure.
Diane: Yeah? What field?
Jerry: Marine biology.
Diane: George is a marine biologist?!
Jerry: A pretty damn good one, too!
Diane: I can't believe it I mean I would never had thought..
Jerry: Yeah...he specializing in whales. He's working on lowering the
cholesterol level in whales...all that blubber-- quite unhealthy.
You know its the largest mammal on earth but as George says "they
don't have to be."
(In the coffee shop Jerry and George are sitting)
George: Diane DeConn? You saw Diane DeConn!
Jerry: Something huh?
George: Yeah! How'd she look.
Jerry: She looked great. She asked about you.
George: She did! What did she say?
Jerry: "How's George?"
George: George! She said George? She remembered my name. Diane DeConn
remembered my name. She was the "it" girl!
Jerry: Yeah she asked for your number, I think she's gonna get in touch with
you.
George: OK, I'm tellin' you right now if your kiddin' around I'm not gonna
be able to be friends with you anymore. I'm serious about that. You
got that.
Jerry: I got no problem with that.
George: Good. Cause if this is a lie, if this is a joke, if this is your
idea of some cute little game...we're finished!
Jerry: Expect a call.
George: Oh my god he's not kidding.
Jerry: Now I should tell you at this point she's under the impression the
you are a.....
George: A what?
Jerry: A marine biologist.
George: A marine biologist....why am I a marine biologist?
Jerry: I may have mentioned it.
George: But I'm not a marine biologist!
Jerry: I'm aware of that.
George: So?
Jerry: You don't think it's a good job.
George: I didn't think it was a job.
Jerry: Oh. It's a fascinating field!
George: What if she calls. What will I say?
(In George's parent's house...George is sitting in a chair. He is talking to
Diane on the phone)
George: Algae, obviously plankton, I don't know what else I can tell you, Oh
I just got back from a trip to the Galapagos Islands, I was living
with the turtles.
(In the limo Elaine, Lippman, and Testikov are talkin')
Lippman: We have got you in a very nice hotel, I don't know how you like to
work but I can arrange for an office if you want.
Testikov: I will work in hotel...much better. I will work away from all the
penny bickering and interference.
Lippman: You know Tolstoy use to write in the village square. The faces
inspired him.
Testikov: He didn't need any inspiration....God spoke through his pen.
Elaine: That is so true! Although one wonders if "War and Peace" would has
been as highly acclaimed as it was if it was published under it's
original name "War---What Is It Good For?"
Lippman: What?
Elaine: Yes. Mr. Lippman. It was his mistress who insisted he called it
"War and Peace." "War--What Is It Good For."(sang) Absolutely
nothin'! (spoken to Testikov)that's the song that they got from
Tolstoy.
Lippman: I'm sorry, it's just her sense of humor.
(Elaine's organizer starts beeping)
Testikov: What is that noise!
Lippman: What is that?
Elaine: It's coming from my purse. It must be my new organizer, here.
Lippman: Elaine...here!
Testikov: Turn it off.
Lippman: It's the top one!
Elaine: I'm trying!
Testikov: HERE!
(He throws it out the window of the limo)
(On the beach Kramer is getting ready to hit a ball. He swings and misses.
He looks for it in the air and the notes that it is still on the
ground. Then he goes nuts)
Jerry: I did it for you.
George: Yeah, but what did you have to tell her that for. You put me in a
very difficult position, Marine Biologist! I'm very uncomfortable
with this whole thing.
Jerry: You know with all do respect I would think it's right up your alley.
George: Well it's not up my alley! It's one thing if I make it up. I know
what I'm doin, I know my alleys! You got me in the Galapagos Islands
livin' with the turtles, I don't know where the hell I am.
Jerry: Well you came in the other day with all that whale stuff, the
squeaking and the squealing.
George: Why couldn't you have made me an architect? You know I always
wanted to pretend that I was an architect. Well I'm supposed to see
her tomorrow, I'm gonna tell her what's goin on. Maybe she likes
me for me.
(Kramer bangs into the room with his golf clubs)
Kramer: Hey.
Jerry: Hey.
Kramer: Hey ya want these (He throws down the golf clubs) I don't want em!
Jerry: What?
Kramer: I stink! I can't play! The ball is just sitting there, Jerry, and
I can't hit it! I only hit one really good ball that went way out!
Jerry: Well what happened?
Kramer: I have no concentration!
(Kramer starts to scratch his body and rip his coat off)
Jerry: What, what, what's wrong with you?
Kramer: Sand, I can get rid of the sand. (Looking down his shirt) Look there
is still some in here, it won't go away! Look I even got sand in the
pockets!
(He empties his pocket and tons of sand falls out)
Jerry: Hey you're getting it all over the floor!
(Karma falls over as the phone rings)
Jerry: (to the phone)Hello....yeah....yes it is....really....oh. Can you
hold on a second? (to George and Kramer) Hey listen to this, some
woman found an electronic organizer, my name was in it, she wants me
to help track down the owner.
George: How'd she find it?
Jerry: It hit her in the head!
(Woman on the phone and Jerry are sitting in the coffee shop)
Corinne: So I am walkin' along, minding my own business when all off the
sudden this thing come flying out off no were and cunks me right on
the head.
Jerry: Ya.
Corinne: Yeah, So they took me to the hospital and they put me in this thing
that fells like a coffin for forty-five minutes. Have you ever been
in one of those things? You could go berserk in there!
Jerry: Well you have insurance...
Corinne: I wish!
Jerry: Unbelievable!
Corinne: Yeah.
(Organizer beeps)
Jerry: What is with this thing.
Corinne: I don't know, it never shuts up. So anyway, you can see why I
would be interested in finding this person.
Jerry: Absolutely. You should not have to pay for that.
(Organizer beeps again)
Corinne: (shouting at the top of her lungs)Stop it! Stop it!
Jerry: Let me have a look at this thing.
Corinne: Yeah know somebody told me they thought they saw it coming out of
a limousine.
Jerry: Typical rich people, using the world for their personal garbage can.
Corinne: Boy am I lucky your name came up. I just pushed a button.
Jerry: I would like to know what my name is doin in this creep's organizer
to begin with.
Corinne: Ya.
Jerry: Who do I even know that would have been in a limousine yesterday
anyway. OHHHH!
(In the hallway Elaine knocks on Kramer's door, he answers)
Kramer: Oh, hey.
Elaine: Hey, "great" organizer that you gave me.
(Kramer is still itching cause the sand)
Kramer: Oh, you like it huh.
Elaine: It wouldn't stop beeping in the car so Testikov through it out the
window.
Kramer: Oh.
Elaine: I transferred everything in there. I threw out my old book. I'm
lost now, Kramer.
(He goes crazy again)
Elaine: What, what is it?
Kramer: The sand, it's everywhere!
Elaine: OK I'll see you later.
(Kramer closes the door and Jerry walks up to his door)
Jerry: Oh, there you are!
Elaine: There you are!
Jerry: So?
Elaine: So?
Jerry: So what do you have to say for yourself?
Elaine: So what do you have to say for yourself?
(Jerry unlocks the door and they both walk in and close the door)
Jerry: Why should I have anything for say for myself?
Elaine: "War-- What is it go for?"!
Jerry: Ha Ha, who told you?
Elaine: Ha ha ha. Yuri Testikov, the Russian writer!
Jerry: You told Testikov that Tolstoy wanted to name his book "War-- What
Is IT Good For?"?
Elaine: Ya know what happened?
Jerry: Can I take a guess?
Elaine: Please.
Jerry: Oh I don't know, he threw your organizer out the window?
(Elaine pushes Jerry)
Elaine: What, how did you know that?
Jerry: Because I know who has it.
Elaine: What, how did you find it?
Jerry: Because the woman who got hit in the head with it found my name in
it, called me up, and we met!
Elaine: Well where is it, give it to me!
Jerry: I don't have it!
Elaine: Why not.
Jerry: Because she's not returning it until she gets the money back for the
hospital bill.
Elaine: But I didn't do Testikov did it, he should have to pay for it!
Jerry: How much is Testikov getting from Pendman for this book?
Elaine: One million.
Jerry: Well that's a start.
(George and Diane are walking on the beach)
George: Then of course with evolution the octopus lost the nostrils and took
on the more familiar look that we know today. But if you look
really closely you can still see a bump where the nose use to be.
Diane: Really?
George: Yeah, but enough about fish I can talk about other things like...
architecture...
(At the hotel that Testikov is staying at)
Jerry: You know what room Testikov's in?
Elaine: Ya, 308. I'm crazy for doing this!
Jerry: Well, you want to get your organizer back don't you?
Elaine: Why are you so interested, you want to take her out?
Jerry: You know when Super Man saves someone no one asks if he's trying to
hit on her!
Elaine: Well you're not Super Man.
Jerry: Well you're not Louis Lane.
Elaine: Oh. Listen, you have the tape-recorder.
Jerry: Ya, are you sure you want to do this.
Elaine: Ya I got to get Testikov on tape. If this woman ends up in the
"New England Journal Of Medicine" I'm not going to pay for it.
Jerry: Ah, here she comes.
(Corinne enters through the hotel door)
Jerry: Hi, Elaine, this is Corinne.
Elaine: Hi, you got the organizer?
(The organizer starts to beep as Corinne opens her coat to show the organizer in her inside coat pocket)
Jerry: All right lets go. We'll meet you back here in ten minutes hopefully
with the money.
(At the beach George and Diane are still walking)
Diane: Your parents must be so proud of you, George.
George: Oh, they're busting!
(there is a large crowd of men and women)
Diane: What are those people doing over there?
(In Testikov's hotel room there is a knock and he goes to answer it. He
opens it up and it is Jerry and Elaine)
Testikov: (In a loud and cranky voice) What, What is it! Oh! Come in. That
is if you can spare a minute from your busy schedule! And you bring
guest for my entertainment?
Elaine: Um, yes this is my friend Jerry. He accompanied me, ya know, single
woman alone in a big city could be dangerous.
Jerry: Yes. That's why I where these sneakers, in case of any trouble and
zip, I'm gone.
Testikov: Yeah, Yeah. The sneakers. The Americans and their sneakers.
Always running from something. Well, sit stop running, two minutes
and I'll give you the latest manuscript!
(They both sit down and Jerry picks out a very large book from the coffee
table)
Jerry: Oh! Ramscy, great great book if I my say so sir. I almost read the
whole thing.
(Corinne is standing in the hotel lobby smoking while the organizer is still
beeping)
Corinne: What!
Hotel Clerk: If you can't thing off I'm going to have to ask you to leave.
Corinne: I'm waitin for two people!
Hotel Clerk: Well you can wait for them outside.
Corinne: Yeah I guess I'd better. Wouldn't want to take any attention away
from the hookers!
Hotel Clerk: All right, All right. Out, Out.
Corinne: What ever you say Cro..w-well!
(On the beach George and Diane are standing with the crowd)
Diane: What's going on over here?
Woman at beach: There is a beached whale, she's dying.
Voice: Is anyone here a marine biologist?
(In Testikov's room)
Testikov: Here is the latest draft. I see you next week. Same time, same
place. On time please.
Jerry: It was nice meeting you, real pleasure!
Elaine: Oh, by the way Mr. Testikov do you remember the other day when we
were in the limo and my organizer started beeping and you threw it
out the window?
Testikov: How could I forget?
Elaine: Well would you believe that it hit actually somebody in the head.
Jerry: Right in the head!
Elaine: Boing!
(The tape-recorder in Elaine's purse starts to squeak)
Testikov: (Shouting)What is that noise!
Elaine: Um ,nothing.
Testikov: What is the noise!
(He grabs the purse)
Elaine: Hey that's my purse!
(He pulls out the recorder)
Testikov: A recorder!
Elaine: No that's a radio..
Testikov: You were spying on me!
Elaine: No I wasn't.
(He throws the recorder out of the hotel window)
(Corinne is standing outside of the hotel and looks up to see the
tape-recorder falling to hit her in the head)
(Kramer is standing at his window knocking his boot on the windowsill trying
to get the sand out but he drops it)
(Newman is walking down the street whistling but he stops and looks up and he
yells as the boat hits him in the head)
(At the beach everyone is yelling at George)
Crowd: Come on! Save the whale! Hurry up it's gonna die!
Diane: Save the whale George... for me.
(He turns and throws his hat down. He walks into the ocean)
(At the coffee shop Jerry and Kramer are awaiting the story)
George: So I started to walk into the water. I won't lie to you boys, I
was terrified! But I pressed on and as I made my way passed the
breakers a strange calm came over me. I don't know if it was divine
intervention or the kinship of all living things but I tell you Jerry
at that moment I was a marine biologist!
(Elaine enters and sits down)
Elaine: George I was just reading this thing in the papers, it's amazing!
George: I know I was just telling them the story.
Kramer: Come on George, finish the story.
George: The sea was angry that day my friends, like an old man trying to
return soup at a deli!
(Jerry gives Kramer a "what the h-" glance)
George: I got about fifty-feet out and then suddenly the great beast
appeared before me. I tell ya he was ten stories high if he was a
foot. As if sensing my presence he gave out a big bellow. I said,
"Easy big fella!" And then as I watched him struggling I realized
something was obstructing his breathing. From where I was standing
I could see directly into the eye of the great fish!
Jerry: Mammal.
George: Whatever.
Kramer: Well, what did you do next?
George: Then from out of nowhere a huge title wave lifted, tossed like a
quark and I found myself on top of him face to face with the
blow-hole. I could barely see from all of the waves crashing down on
top of me but I knew something was there so I reached my hand and
pulled out the obstruction!
(George pulls out of the inside pocket a golf ball)
(Jerry and George just stare at Kramer)
Kramer: What is that a Titleist? A hole in one eh.
Jerry: Well the crowd most have gone wild!
George: Oh yes they did Jerry they were all over me. It was like Rocky 1.
Diane came up to me, threw her arms around me, and kissed me. We
both had tears streaming down our faces. I never saw anyone so
beautiful. It was at that moment I decided to tell her I was not a
marine biologist!
Jerry: Wow! What'd she say?
George: She told me to "Go to hell!" and I took the bus home.
Jerry: All right lets go.
Elaine: Are you in a bad mood?
Jerry: No, I just got my laundry back.
Elaine: Ohhh! GoldenBoy?
Jerry: He didn't make it.
Elaine: I'm sorry.
Jerry: This is GoldenBoy's son, BabyBlue.
Kramer: What's with you?
George: Sand. It's everywhere
(End)
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Monday, January 14, 2008
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
I am sure it is from those days I spend in my room that I take the belief that the best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.
What I call my home is really a compact room, a studio apartment. I had begun by attempting a very simple and exorcising decor, all wood and white walls; but the fashionable Finnish starkness I first tried to impose on it was inadequate to house the possessions I had acquired and continue to acquire in my travels through life. I introduced clutter, then more clutter, the odd print or lithograph that took my fancy, pieces of colonial furniture picked up in local shops as well as furniture I had assembled from mail-order kits, including a shaker table that ingenuously passes for an antique. A green-shaded banker's lamp sits atop the tabl
One day I had disinterred an old print of Beethoven from my apartment building's trash room where some tenant had relegated it, and cleaned it up and placed in a new frame. It now hangs over two low, two-shelf bookcases, disapprovingly grave, one of those portraits whose eyes seem to follow you everywhere. I had turned a deaf ear to the occasional visitor's horror of the thing. As a painting it was certainly not good enough to occupy a place of honor, and not quite bad enough to be amusing; which hardly represented its subject's true worth. But I had come to feel affectionate about the unremitting sterness of that gaze; and there were family relics I had reinstated, a small statue of a Chinese horse, a replica of an ancient artifact from one or other Chinese dynasty and miniature busts: one of Benjamin Franklin made of iron, presumably, that I had owned since boyhood and one of Richard Wagner in alabaster.
The room would not please an art director, but it feels like a home. Two large cases contain my abundant book collection, acquired over a lifetime's reading. A dark-blue wing-back chair that looks fittingly old, upholstered in naugahyde comes passably close to resembling leather. Eakins prints depicting skullers on the Schuylkill River cover one wall. Thomas Eakins is a particular favorite of mine. Both Eakins and I are alumni of The Central High School of Philadelphia. My crammed quarters house my worldly possessions and suitably reflect my eclectic temperament; the clutter adequately projects the image of tasteful collecting but is anything but garish or exotic. The room suggests its tenant's intellectual bent and reverence for the past.
Daily routine is the root of our being, and this room is the arena of my earthly passage. The room has a nostalgic glow, as if life were best understood in the episodic rhythms of daylight and darkness.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
Mid-January Ruminations
I put on a Mozart recording, the G minor symphony, Mozart's next to last symphony; and sat staring out of the window. It had begun to rain again. I went to the window and stared down at the rivulets of water that ran down the driveway adjacent to my apartment, at the snowdrops that clustered around the roof of the tool shed just beyond the window. The music behind me: I felt an abrupt wave of happiness, richness, fecundity, as if I was in advance of the actual season outside and transported two months on into full winter. The seed was in hibernation, the days -- winter's approaching expression -- were growing shorter; though I still felt it was a selfishness, an unwarranted optimism. Perhaps it all came from the simplicities of my childhood. I needed complexity, multiple promise, endless forked roads; and simply, at this moment, felt I had them. Just as the green-gold music had, beneath the balance, the effortless development and onwardness, its shadows, so also was there a component of sadness in my happiness: I was happy because I was a solitary at heart, and that must always cripple me as a human being.
Friday, January 11, 2008
An Absurd Loneliness
I have now fifty-three years behind me and I am just as alone as I was when a child. The year-in year-out lack of a really refreshing and healing human love, the absurd loneliness that it brings with it, to the degree that almost every remaining connection with people becomes only a cause of injury; all that is the worst possible business and has only one justification in itself, the justification of being necessary.
A solitary like me, unused to speaking of what I see and feel, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others bush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy me more than their due; they sink silently on, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in me, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous -- to poetry, But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
I simply cannot find within myself the ability to bear the proximity of another person on a regular basis. I cannot bear the physical closeness, to respond to the expectations of another human being.
The attitude goes further than my self-absorption; it goes profoundly into a distaste for other people, whether friends, relatives, or a potential wife. In some remote area I cannot completely comprehend, I fear the disorder an emotional and physical life entails. I am terrified of chaos, something I cannot control from my writing desk.
Perhaps the condition I recommend is virtually catatonic: Perhaps the best resource if some slip stops the entire process is to meet everything passively, to make myself an inert mass, and, if I feel that I am being carried away, not to let myself be lured and taking a single unnecessary step, to stare at others with the eyes of an animal, to feel no compunction, in short, with my own hand to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in me, that is, to enlarge the final peace of the graveyards and let nothing survive save that.
A solitary like me, unused to speaking of what I see and feel, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others bush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy me more than their due; they sink silently on, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in me, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous -- to poetry, But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
I simply cannot find within myself the ability to bear the proximity of another person on a regular basis. I cannot bear the physical closeness, to respond to the expectations of another human being.
The attitude goes further than my self-absorption; it goes profoundly into a distaste for other people, whether friends, relatives, or a potential wife. In some remote area I cannot completely comprehend, I fear the disorder an emotional and physical life entails. I am terrified of chaos, something I cannot control from my writing desk.
Perhaps the condition I recommend is virtually catatonic: Perhaps the best resource if some slip stops the entire process is to meet everything passively, to make myself an inert mass, and, if I feel that I am being carried away, not to let myself be lured and taking a single unnecessary step, to stare at others with the eyes of an animal, to feel no compunction, in short, with my own hand to throttle down whatever ghostly life remains in me, that is, to enlarge the final peace of the graveyards and let nothing survive save that.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Unlabelable Male Relationships
Opposites attract—partly by complementing each other.
Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron.
It is in just this way that truly meaningful friendships can arise among human beings: for antithetical qualities make possible a closer and more intimate union.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
In many ways it was an unexpected friendship. Eissler was much older, and seemed to be everything I was not: conservative in dress, brusque and apparently unfriendly in manner, spare in speech. But what Eissler and I experienced together was, while completely nonsexual, nonetheless romantic in some important sense of the word. For one, it was shot through with fantasy. For another, we both behaved as if we were somehow infatuated, both intellectually and emotionally.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Let us say that . . .
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
. . . we were slowly to form such a true friendship that it seemed a thing of destiny.
Miguel Serrano, Jung & Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships.
In this he was deceived: but who, in his place, wouldn't have deceived himself about that?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
I liked visiting Eissler in his home in New York. His office was a delight to me; completely buried in papers, articles, and books. What mattered most for me and seemingly for Eissler during my visits was that we got to sit in his office and talk psychoanalytic history.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
I felt as if I had . . .
Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession.
. . . . intruded upon the holy of holies.
Jack London, Martin Eden.
It is hard for me now, from this distance, and with all that has happened in between to recapture the mood it put me in, but there is no doubt that I was completely absorbed.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
From the moment they were . . .
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
. . . alone together side by side . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
—from that moment there sprang up a conversation that was contrary to all the laws of logic, contrary because entirely different subjects were talked of at the same time. This simultaneous discussion of many topics, far from hindering a clear understanding, was the surest indication that they fully understood each other. Just as in a dream when everything is unreal, meaningless, and contradictory except the feeling that governs the dream, so in this communion of thoughts, contrary to all laws of reason, the words themselves were not clear and consecutive, but only the feeling that prompted them.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
I felt, rightly, that I had a great deal to learn from Eissler, and I was a good and willing pupil.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
For the moment the great gulf that separated them was bridged.
Jack London, Martin Eden.
It was no longer a relationship of dependence, but one of equality and reciprocity. He could be the guest of this superior mind without humiliation, since the other man had given recognition to the creative power in him.
Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund.
It is dozens of years since . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . I became interested in the origins of psychoanalysis and in Sigmund Freud's relationship with Wilhelm Fliess, the nose and throat physician who was his closest friend during the years Freud was formulating his new theories.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
The friendship between the two was an unusual one.
Hermann Hesse, Beneath the Wheel.
Two years younger than Freud, Fliess became his confidant in the mid-1890s. Freud’s letters to him, . . .
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
. . . which constitute . . .
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species.
. . . the basic document as it were, the wellspring of psychoanalysis. . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . combine passion with intellectual virtuosity.
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
The last term in my last year of college . . .
Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel.
. . . I wrote an eager . . .
Mark Twain, Christian Science.
. . . paper on Freud’s letters to Wilhelm Fliess . . .
Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel.
. . . though I was interested in . . .
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure.
. . . all the permutations of male relationships that are a little skewed: father-son relationships between two men who aren’t really father and son, this loving relationship between two men who aren’t lovers, unlabelable male relationships.
Dave Weich, Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures.
It may be stretching the term beyond its legitimate province, but in important ways, Freud imposed on Fliess a role akin to that of psychoanalyst. Freud's prolonged failure, his virtual refusal, to appraise his intimate friend realistically hints that he was caught in a severe transference relationship: Freud idealized Fliess beyond measure [and] even wanted to name a son after Fliess, only to be frustrated, in 1893 and 1895, by the birth of daughters, Sophie and Anna. He poured out his innermost secrets to his Other in Berlin on paper and, during their carefully prearranged, eagerly anticipated "congresses," in person.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron.
It is in just this way that truly meaningful friendships can arise among human beings: for antithetical qualities make possible a closer and more intimate union.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
In many ways it was an unexpected friendship. Eissler was much older, and seemed to be everything I was not: conservative in dress, brusque and apparently unfriendly in manner, spare in speech. But what Eissler and I experienced together was, while completely nonsexual, nonetheless romantic in some important sense of the word. For one, it was shot through with fantasy. For another, we both behaved as if we were somehow infatuated, both intellectually and emotionally.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Let us say that . . .
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
. . . we were slowly to form such a true friendship that it seemed a thing of destiny.
Miguel Serrano, Jung & Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships.
In this he was deceived: but who, in his place, wouldn't have deceived himself about that?
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
I liked visiting Eissler in his home in New York. His office was a delight to me; completely buried in papers, articles, and books. What mattered most for me and seemingly for Eissler during my visits was that we got to sit in his office and talk psychoanalytic history.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
I felt as if I had . . .
Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession.
. . . . intruded upon the holy of holies.
Jack London, Martin Eden.
It is hard for me now, from this distance, and with all that has happened in between to recapture the mood it put me in, but there is no doubt that I was completely absorbed.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
From the moment they were . . .
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
. . . alone together side by side . . .
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities.
—from that moment there sprang up a conversation that was contrary to all the laws of logic, contrary because entirely different subjects were talked of at the same time. This simultaneous discussion of many topics, far from hindering a clear understanding, was the surest indication that they fully understood each other. Just as in a dream when everything is unreal, meaningless, and contradictory except the feeling that governs the dream, so in this communion of thoughts, contrary to all laws of reason, the words themselves were not clear and consecutive, but only the feeling that prompted them.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
I felt, rightly, that I had a great deal to learn from Eissler, and I was a good and willing pupil.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
For the moment the great gulf that separated them was bridged.
Jack London, Martin Eden.
It was no longer a relationship of dependence, but one of equality and reciprocity. He could be the guest of this superior mind without humiliation, since the other man had given recognition to the creative power in him.
Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund.
It is dozens of years since . . .
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams.
. . . I became interested in the origins of psychoanalysis and in Sigmund Freud's relationship with Wilhelm Fliess, the nose and throat physician who was his closest friend during the years Freud was formulating his new theories.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
The friendship between the two was an unusual one.
Hermann Hesse, Beneath the Wheel.
Two years younger than Freud, Fliess became his confidant in the mid-1890s. Freud’s letters to him, . . .
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
. . . which constitute . . .
Charles Darwin, Origin of Species.
. . . the basic document as it were, the wellspring of psychoanalysis. . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . combine passion with intellectual virtuosity.
E. James Lieberman, Acts of Will.
The last term in my last year of college . . .
Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel.
. . . I wrote an eager . . .
Mark Twain, Christian Science.
. . . paper on Freud’s letters to Wilhelm Fliess . . .
Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel.
. . . though I was interested in . . .
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure.
. . . all the permutations of male relationships that are a little skewed: father-son relationships between two men who aren’t really father and son, this loving relationship between two men who aren’t lovers, unlabelable male relationships.
Dave Weich, Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures.
It may be stretching the term beyond its legitimate province, but in important ways, Freud imposed on Fliess a role akin to that of psychoanalyst. Freud's prolonged failure, his virtual refusal, to appraise his intimate friend realistically hints that he was caught in a severe transference relationship: Freud idealized Fliess beyond measure [and] even wanted to name a son after Fliess, only to be frustrated, in 1893 and 1895, by the birth of daughters, Sophie and Anna. He poured out his innermost secrets to his Other in Berlin on paper and, during their carefully prearranged, eagerly anticipated "congresses," in person.
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
The Nothingness of Mu
As a creative person I am constantly seeking to discover myself, to remodel my own identity, and to find meaning in the universe through what I create. I find this a valuable integrating process which, like meditation or prayer, has little to do with other people, but which has its own separate validity. My most significant moments are those in which I attain some new insight, or make some new discovery; and these moments are chiefly, if not invariably, those in which I am alone.
I find myself forever in a state that is not unlike that of the practitioner of Zen Buddhism, seeking my true nature. The matter of "my nature" has puzzled and eluded me my entire adult life. What could it mean? Did it exist? If it did, what on earth would I do with my "own nature?" Frame it, hang it on the wall? Burn incense to the thing? What is so important about my nature?
Finally, after years of seeking, some truth dawned. Whoever looks for his own nature is lost from the start. I can find something temporary -- my personality -- but who, including myself, cares about that? Mostly the personality is boring and irritating. As long as it is used as a polite mask, expressing a little loving kindness in daily dealings, as long as it pays bills, does the regular routine in a pleasing manner, the personality will serve until the day the body, another not too important and temporary manifestation, falters and is no more. I'm not my mask. Surely I'm not my body, either. The body is a useful instrument, to be washed and shaved, fed, treated kindly, but we don't have to get ridiculous here. It doesn't really matter that much. Do we care about the body's longevity, the personality's eternity, do we care to have our minds repeating familiar thought patterns? Who is the Who who cares? There is the story about the monk with the troubled mind who goes to the master to quiet the damn thing. "Can you do that, sir?" "Let’s, see, my friend. Bring me your mind so I can examine it." "I can't find my mind, sir." "There you are, I have quieted it down for you." "The monk's mind is no longer troubled."
But all this is a play on words. Minds are never untroubled. It's the mind's business to be always busy, always troubled about something. If it isn't one damned thing, it's another. The mind is just an instrument, like a computer, to analyze daily troubles, order them, find a solution. Once that is done, take a nap and shut it down for a while. Put it in sleep mode. I'm not my computer, my mind, my body. What's beyond? Nothing. "Mu," says the Zen practitioner. Nothing. But Mu is a word used to express the inexpressible.
After years of seeking my true nature, I invariably come to the same conclusion. Forget me. There is no me. No me-nature, no real-nature, no true-nature, no nothing. I can probe the principle forever and I'll never see my nature. Why should I, anyway? Who cares?
And yet, I never stop seeking. My seeking is a circle. Round and round I go, seeking my true nature. Then despairing that I will ever find my true nature, I give up the search -- but only temporarily. In time I will begin the search again -- and again.
I find myself forever in a state that is not unlike that of the practitioner of Zen Buddhism, seeking my true nature. The matter of "my nature" has puzzled and eluded me my entire adult life. What could it mean? Did it exist? If it did, what on earth would I do with my "own nature?" Frame it, hang it on the wall? Burn incense to the thing? What is so important about my nature?
Finally, after years of seeking, some truth dawned. Whoever looks for his own nature is lost from the start. I can find something temporary -- my personality -- but who, including myself, cares about that? Mostly the personality is boring and irritating. As long as it is used as a polite mask, expressing a little loving kindness in daily dealings, as long as it pays bills, does the regular routine in a pleasing manner, the personality will serve until the day the body, another not too important and temporary manifestation, falters and is no more. I'm not my mask. Surely I'm not my body, either. The body is a useful instrument, to be washed and shaved, fed, treated kindly, but we don't have to get ridiculous here. It doesn't really matter that much. Do we care about the body's longevity, the personality's eternity, do we care to have our minds repeating familiar thought patterns? Who is the Who who cares? There is the story about the monk with the troubled mind who goes to the master to quiet the damn thing. "Can you do that, sir?" "Let’s, see, my friend. Bring me your mind so I can examine it." "I can't find my mind, sir." "There you are, I have quieted it down for you." "The monk's mind is no longer troubled."
But all this is a play on words. Minds are never untroubled. It's the mind's business to be always busy, always troubled about something. If it isn't one damned thing, it's another. The mind is just an instrument, like a computer, to analyze daily troubles, order them, find a solution. Once that is done, take a nap and shut it down for a while. Put it in sleep mode. I'm not my computer, my mind, my body. What's beyond? Nothing. "Mu," says the Zen practitioner. Nothing. But Mu is a word used to express the inexpressible.
After years of seeking my true nature, I invariably come to the same conclusion. Forget me. There is no me. No me-nature, no real-nature, no true-nature, no nothing. I can probe the principle forever and I'll never see my nature. Why should I, anyway? Who cares?
And yet, I never stop seeking. My seeking is a circle. Round and round I go, seeking my true nature. Then despairing that I will ever find my true nature, I give up the search -- but only temporarily. In time I will begin the search again -- and again.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
A Particle in the Universe
I hated my childhood and everything that remains of it. Surrounded by threatening figures as I was -- a harsh father and an intrusive mother -- I turned "artist" early on in order to manage them, through disappearance and transformation. I always held a hard, unforgiving view of my childhood, not at all tinged with nostalgia or pleasure, as though childhood were an obstacle course full of personal traps. I made it through, survived whatever my family could do to me. I feel I can say with assurance that my perceptions of myself and my world are an outgrowth of the traumas of overstimulation, loss, rejection, and neglect, although no one could have predicted precisely what turns that perception and world would have taken. I made myself into a reclusive shadow of a man, part of an invisible world of fantasy and vain hopes, a world different from that of other people.
In my writing I am like a gigantic vacuum, gathering in the methods and words of others and transforming them through my own unique experience. I have assimilated the use of memory associated with Proust into my own sense of time. I have assimilated Kafka's method of viewing the world through the eyes of a man without qualities; Freud's theories of the oedipal conflict, childhood sexuality, and unconscious, among others, are ripe ideas for me.
My angles of perception distance me from writers who remain unrelentingly object-oriented. My writings move toward abstraction as the crux of paradoxes and ambiguities. I, with my fierce internality, am an abstractionist both by temperament and development. I deny objects and depend on a personal reshaping of things into an almost Mondrian-like geometricality.
My philosophy of life is the philosophy of Sartre, of Nietzsche, of Kierkegaard.
Things as they exist in their nakedness have no essences, their existence is not confined by any words of explanation that we give them. The world of existence, of matters of fact have no connection with the world of words, reason, mathematics, and logic. Existence is not rational. There is no reason that things are as they are and not otherwise: There is no rational explanation as to why there is any world at all, rather than nothing.
I respond to the irrationality of existence with a sense of excitement, fear and nausea. As they were for Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre, philosophies are for me not merely intellectual constructions or games, as they have come to be regarded by some types of contemporary philosophy. Philosophies are things we live by; they exercise a powerful effect upon human psychology and are a matter of life or death for the human spirit. And if it is true, contrary to the teaching of traditional philosophy, that nature has no rationality, and no order, is governed by no scientific laws and structured by no philosophic essences, then anything can happen in such a universe. A world in which essences do not fit existence and in which there are no necessary cause-effect relations, is a world without any structure--it falls apart and dissolves, and I myself dissolve along with it.
I am a shadow of a man, invisible and inert. I pass through time and space, unaffected by the affective bonds that tie other people together. I am an invisible particle in a meaningless universe, with no mass and no electric charge.
In my writing I am like a gigantic vacuum, gathering in the methods and words of others and transforming them through my own unique experience. I have assimilated the use of memory associated with Proust into my own sense of time. I have assimilated Kafka's method of viewing the world through the eyes of a man without qualities; Freud's theories of the oedipal conflict, childhood sexuality, and unconscious, among others, are ripe ideas for me.
My angles of perception distance me from writers who remain unrelentingly object-oriented. My writings move toward abstraction as the crux of paradoxes and ambiguities. I, with my fierce internality, am an abstractionist both by temperament and development. I deny objects and depend on a personal reshaping of things into an almost Mondrian-like geometricality.
My philosophy of life is the philosophy of Sartre, of Nietzsche, of Kierkegaard.
Things as they exist in their nakedness have no essences, their existence is not confined by any words of explanation that we give them. The world of existence, of matters of fact have no connection with the world of words, reason, mathematics, and logic. Existence is not rational. There is no reason that things are as they are and not otherwise: There is no rational explanation as to why there is any world at all, rather than nothing.
I respond to the irrationality of existence with a sense of excitement, fear and nausea. As they were for Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre, philosophies are for me not merely intellectual constructions or games, as they have come to be regarded by some types of contemporary philosophy. Philosophies are things we live by; they exercise a powerful effect upon human psychology and are a matter of life or death for the human spirit. And if it is true, contrary to the teaching of traditional philosophy, that nature has no rationality, and no order, is governed by no scientific laws and structured by no philosophic essences, then anything can happen in such a universe. A world in which essences do not fit existence and in which there are no necessary cause-effect relations, is a world without any structure--it falls apart and dissolves, and I myself dissolve along with it.
I am a shadow of a man, invisible and inert. I pass through time and space, unaffected by the affective bonds that tie other people together. I am an invisible particle in a meaningless universe, with no mass and no electric charge.
Monday, January 07, 2008
Homage to D.H. Lawrence: Blood Brotherhood
The following video is an excerpt from the movie, Women in Love, based on the novel of the same name by D.H. Lawrence. The sequence is derived from the chapter, "Gladiatorial."
Blood brother can refer to one of two things: Two males related by birth, or two or more men not related by birth, who swear loyalty to one another. This is usually done in a ceremony (Blood Oath) where the blood of each man is mingled together. In simple terms, this is an extension of fraternization.
The Lydia ceremony involved nicking their arms with a sharp object and licking the blood off of each other's arms. The Scyths would allow their blood to drip into a glass where it was mixed with wine and drunk by both participants.
In Asian cultures, the act and ceremony of becoming "blood brothers" is generally seen as a tribal relationship, that is, to bring about alliance between tribes. It was practiced for this reason most notably among the Mongols and early Chinese. There is some evidence that Native Americans also did it for this purpose.
Blood brothers among large groups was common in ancient Mediterranean Europe where, for example, whole companies of Greek soldiers would become as one family. It was perhaps most prevalent in the Balkan Peninsula during the Ottoman era, as it helped the oppressed people to more effectively fight the enemy. Blood brothers were also common in Serbia, Albania and Bulgaria.
It is still practiced today, but mostly as a throw-back to tribal times. The tradition of intertwining arms and drinking wine in Greece and elsewhere, is believed to be a representation of becoming blood brothers.
In modern times, a common blood brother ceremony includes having each person make a small cut, usually on a finger or the forearm, and then the two cuts are pressed together. The idea being that each person's blood now flows in the other participant's veins.
Blood brother can refer to one of two things: Two males related by birth, or two or more men not related by birth, who swear loyalty to one another. This is usually done in a ceremony (Blood Oath) where the blood of each man is mingled together. In simple terms, this is an extension of fraternization.
The Lydia ceremony involved nicking their arms with a sharp object and licking the blood off of each other's arms. The Scyths would allow their blood to drip into a glass where it was mixed with wine and drunk by both participants.
In Asian cultures, the act and ceremony of becoming "blood brothers" is generally seen as a tribal relationship, that is, to bring about alliance between tribes. It was practiced for this reason most notably among the Mongols and early Chinese. There is some evidence that Native Americans also did it for this purpose.
Blood brothers among large groups was common in ancient Mediterranean Europe where, for example, whole companies of Greek soldiers would become as one family. It was perhaps most prevalent in the Balkan Peninsula during the Ottoman era, as it helped the oppressed people to more effectively fight the enemy. Blood brothers were also common in Serbia, Albania and Bulgaria.
It is still practiced today, but mostly as a throw-back to tribal times. The tradition of intertwining arms and drinking wine in Greece and elsewhere, is believed to be a representation of becoming blood brothers.
In modern times, a common blood brother ceremony includes having each person make a small cut, usually on a finger or the forearm, and then the two cuts are pressed together. The idea being that each person's blood now flows in the other participant's veins.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Life Imitating Art
This post is dedicated to my friend, Craig W. Dye.
In the mid-1980s I worked as a paralegal at a large law firm in Washington, DC. A new employee had just been hired by the firm in early October 1986. He was originally from Buffalo, New York, and had come to Washington to work on a master's degree in international relations at a local university. At that time I worked in an annex of the firm's library, located on the second floor of the firm's offices. The new employee and I shared workspace in the library. I could not avoid noticing him, nor could any of the other employees. This remarkable young man seemed much older than he looked; in fact, he did not strike anyone as a paralegal at all. In contrast to us, he seemed strange and mature, rather like a gentleman. He was not popular at first, did not take part in our office pranks, and only his firm, self-confident tone toward the senior managers won the admiration of fellow employees. He was called Craig Dye.
One day, I kept glancing toward Craig whose face held a peculiar fascination for me, and I observed the intelligent, light, unusually resolute face bent attentively and diligently over his work; he didn't at all look like a paralegal doing an assignment; but rather like a scientist investigating a problem of his own. I couldn't say that he made a favorable impression on me; on the contrary, I had something against him: he seemed too superior and detached, his manner too provocatively confident, and his eyes gave him a mature expression--which insecure people never like--faintly sad, with flashes of sarcasm. Yet I could not help looking at him, no matter whether I liked him or detested him, but if he happened to glance my way I averted my eyes in panic. When I think back on it today, and what he looked like as a coworker at that time, I can only say that he was in every respect different from all the others, was entirely himself, with a personality all his own which made him noticeable even though he did his best not to be noticed; his manner and bearing was that of a prince disguised among office staff, taking great pains to appear one of them.
In the mid-1980s I worked as a paralegal at a large law firm in Washington, DC. A new employee had just been hired by the firm in early October 1986. He was originally from Buffalo, New York, and had come to Washington to work on a master's degree in international relations at a local university. At that time I worked in an annex of the firm's library, located on the second floor of the firm's offices. The new employee and I shared workspace in the library. I could not avoid noticing him, nor could any of the other employees. This remarkable young man seemed much older than he looked; in fact, he did not strike anyone as a paralegal at all. In contrast to us, he seemed strange and mature, rather like a gentleman. He was not popular at first, did not take part in our office pranks, and only his firm, self-confident tone toward the senior managers won the admiration of fellow employees. He was called Craig Dye.
One day, I kept glancing toward Craig whose face held a peculiar fascination for me, and I observed the intelligent, light, unusually resolute face bent attentively and diligently over his work; he didn't at all look like a paralegal doing an assignment; but rather like a scientist investigating a problem of his own. I couldn't say that he made a favorable impression on me; on the contrary, I had something against him: he seemed too superior and detached, his manner too provocatively confident, and his eyes gave him a mature expression--which insecure people never like--faintly sad, with flashes of sarcasm. Yet I could not help looking at him, no matter whether I liked him or detested him, but if he happened to glance my way I averted my eyes in panic. When I think back on it today, and what he looked like as a coworker at that time, I can only say that he was in every respect different from all the others, was entirely himself, with a personality all his own which made him noticeable even though he did his best not to be noticed; his manner and bearing was that of a prince disguised among office staff, taking great pains to appear one of them.
Saturday, January 05, 2008
Her Father's Daughter: Anna and the Freud Scholar
This post is dedicated to an unnamed federal official. By order of the U.S. Department of Justice I can't disclose the official's name.
In 1980, I met with Anna Freud and Dr. K. R. Eissler, the head of the Sigmund Freud Archives and Anna Freud's trusted adviser and friend, in London, and Miss Freud agreed to a new edition of the . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . Freud . . .
Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.
. . . archival collection . . .
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
—including . . .
Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam.
. . . the unpublished letters between Sigmund Freud and his best, perhaps his only, friend, Wilhelm Fliess.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
It took more than a year of cajoling and persuading to convince . . .
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
. . . the Freud Archives . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . officials to cooperate with me.
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
As a result I was given access to this sealed correspondence (the originals are in the Library of Congress), which constitutes our most important source of information concerning the beginnings of psychoanalysis.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
I was editor-in-chief of an elaborate series of translations of Freud's unpublished letters that were to be published by Harvard University Press in the coming years. My daily life consisted in talking to people around the world who would work on these editions, in finding letters still missing (which involved, to my pleasure, a great deal of travel), in frequent trips to the Library of Congress, almost daily conversations with Kurt Eissler, a large correspondence, and of course my own research.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
And so . . .
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
. . . the inner circle of psychoanalysis . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . lifted its veil of secrecy ever so slightly, in a rare attempt to justify its actions to the public.
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
As I was reading through the correspondence and preparing the annotations for the first volume of the series, the Freud-Fliess letters, I began to notice what appeared to be a pattern in the omissions made by Anna Freud in the original, abridged edition. In the letters written after September 1897 (when Freud was supposed to have given up his "seduction" theory), all the case histories dealing with the sexual seduction of children had been excised. Moreover, every mention of Emma Eckstein, an early patient of Freud's and Fliess's, who seemed connected in some way with the seduction theory, had been deleted. I was particularly struck by a section of a letter written in December 1897 that brought to light two facts previously unknown: Emma Eckstein was herself seeing patients in analysis (presumably under Freud's supervision); and Freud was inclined to give credence, once again, to the seduction theory.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
All that had been suppressed and edited out reappeared . . .
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
. . . as clear, as transparent as . . .
Alexandre Dumas, Ten Years Later.
. . . objective.
Paul Wienpahl, On Translating Spinoza.
I asked Anna Freud why she had deleted this section from the letter. She said that she no longer knew why.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
A masterpiece of evasion.
Don Delillo, The Names.
It was while she held a photograph . . .
Virginia Woolf, Night and Day.
. . . of Emma Eckstein . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . in her hands that she exclaimed, impulsively, if incongruously:
Virginia Woolf, Night and Day.
It never occurred to me to know more.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Modern English Version).
When I showed her an unpublished letter from Freud to Emma Eckstein, she said that she could well understand my interest, since Emma Eckstein had indeed been important to the early history of psychoanalysis, but the letter should nevertheless not be published. In subsequent conversations, Miss Freud indicated that since her father had eventually abandoned the seduction theory, it would only prove confusing to readers to be exposed to his early hesitations and doubts. I, on the other hand, felt that these passages not only were of great historical importance but might well represent the truth. Nobody, it seemed to me, had the right to decide for others, by altering the record, what was truth and what was error. Moreover, whatever Freud's ultimate decision, it is my belief that he was haunted by the seduction theory all his life.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
The question . . .
Emile Zola, Germinal.
. . . of child sexual abuse, . . .
Robert A. Phillips, Jr., Introduction to Truddi Chase, When Rabbit Howls.
. . . I was sure . . .
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
. . . continued to trouble him, though he had supposedly, with scientific smugness, settled it.
Emile Zola, Germinal.
There exists, as far as I know (I looked without success), not a single published account of the devastating effects of incest or childhood sexual abuse before Freud’s time. And yet if this was happening to anything like the extent that is true today—and why should it be any different?—then at least one in three women, possibly more, in the general population had been exposed to a forced and unwanted sexual advance during childhood. In other words, sexual abuse of one form or another was the core trauma of many women’s lives, yet there was total silence about it.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
In the tradition we are dealing with, . . .
Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence.
. . . one was allowed . . .
Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges.
. . . to perform these acts but not to speak of them.
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
There was no taboo on the commission of incest, only a taboo on speaking about incest.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
As a scientist . . .
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
. . . Freud . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . had an almost unique opportunity.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
Here was a man, possibly the first in recorded history, who heard about the sexual abuse of children and recognized what it really meant.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
At that time, had one man put up a fight, it would have had wide repercussions.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
For Freud to have broken that taboo of silence was, to my mind, one of the great moments of history.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
And yet—
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
Later, in one of the most famous retractions in the history of ideas, Freud . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . contrary to the truth . . .
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
. . . had recanted.
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
As he put it in 1925 in An Autobiographical Study: “I was at last obliged to recognize that the scenes of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up.”
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Freud’s earliest insights . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
. . . about child abuse . . .
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . would only reemerge much later, provoking a host of other episodes.
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
I showed Miss Freud the 1932 correspondence I found in Freud's desk concerning Ferenczi's last letter, which dealt with this very topic. Clearly, I thought, it was her father's continued preoccupation with the seduction theory that explained his turning away from Ferenczi.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
Most of the items brought silence.
Don Delillo, The Names.
After Fliess, Sandor Ferenczi (1873-1933) was for more than twenty years Freud's closest analytic friend (Freud often addressed him as "dear son"). Until the last years of his life, Ferenczi was a loyal pupil, loved by many analysts, a constant source of papers, ideas, encouragement, and inspiration to younger analysts. But in the last few years of his life, Ferenczi began developing in a direction that alarmed Freud. In a series of three papers that uncannily parallel Freud's three 1896 papers, Ferenczi began to believe more and more strongly that the source of neurosis lay in sexual seductions suffered by children at the hands of those closest to them. . . .
Ferenczi had returned to Freud's earliest insights, while putting a different interpretation on many later analytic concepts. For example, he maintained (July 24, 1932) that the Oedipus complex could well be "the result of real acts on the part of adults, namely violent passions directed toward the child, who then develops a fixation, not from desire [as Freud maintained], but from fear. 'My mother and father will kill me if I don't love them, and identify with their wishes.'"
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
His aim was a human nature reconciled to itself, that did not depend on illusion.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
The paper he read before the 12th International Psychoanalytic Congress is a somewhat milder distillation of these views. Yet the ideas he expressed in the paper met with the strongest disapproval by every leading analyst of the day. Ferenczi's tenacious insistence on the truth of what his patients told him would cost him the friendship of Freud and almost all his colleagues and leave him in an isolation from which he would never emerge.
J. Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.
And now what kind of truth was I stalking?
Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner.
Miss Freud, who was very fond of Ferenczi, found . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . several papers . . .
Joseph Conrad, Chance.
. . . in her father’s . . .
Thomas Hardy, Life’s Little Ironies.
. . . desk . . .
Charles Dickens, Bleak House.
. . . concerning . . .
Thomas Hardy, Life’s Little Ironies.
. . . Ferenczi’s . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . last letter . . .
Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady.
. . . painful reading and asked me not to publish them. But I insisted that the theory was not one that Freud had dismissed lightly as an early and insignificant error, as we had been led to believe.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
I thought the final argument was the coup de grace—the killer point that she couldn't counter. Instead . . .
George Stephanopoulos, All Too Human: A Political Education.
She would insist that nothing of significance had been omitted, and when I tried to argue she would become upset.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
No real answers were forthcoming . . .
The Watergate Hearings: Break-in and Cover-Up.
She and I said nothing . . .
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . further . . .
H. Rider Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter.
. . . to each other about the
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . issue.
H. Rider Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter.
It was coded matter. It was matter we could refer to only within the limits of a practiced look. Even this became too much.
Don Delillo, The Names.
For a psychoanalyst, she was remarkably closed on many issues that one would expect her to be open to.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
I was trying to be perceptive about her . . .
Don Delillo, The Names.
. . . but I remember thinking at the time . . .
Stewart Edward White, Arizona Nights.
—canny therapist that she is—
Striking Silence. Film Critic James Harvey Explores the Singular Landscape of PARSIFAL.
. . . she will remain . . .
Charles Dickens, Bleak House.
. . . evasive and distant.
Irvin Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
She hated the feeling that someone knew her mind.
Don Delillo, The Names.
Central Casting would have made her the librarian of a New England Christian Science reading room. She was a small, fine-featured, quiet, thoughtfully intelligent, generous . . .
Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm.
. . . lady with . . .
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady.
. . . a purity of purpose, a holiness to her devotion that gave off a whiff of religious piety. I did not find it attractive, but it was genuine, and I was impressed. I don't think she invented this trait, either. I am sure she got it from her father, who of course was entirely consumed with holy zeal for the cause. Her father's legacy lay heavy on her shoulders . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Woe to any truth-seeker who endangered it.
Dan Levin, Spinoza.
Of course, she was curious about his actions and correspondence. But . . .
Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner.
Her unquestioning loyalty made it impossible to deal with events on their basic, real level, he thought. Her stubbornness was difficult to contend with. At times he imagined her as the heroine of a movie, the devoted daughter defending her embattled, innocent father.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
For her . . .
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
. . . her father . . .
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
. . . had died only yesterday. And, by Jove! the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died only yesterday—nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same instant of time—his death and her sorrow—I saw her sorrow in the very moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together—I heard them together.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
Here in this house . . .
H. Rider Haggard, Montezuma’s Daughter.
. . . in London, . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . Between one June and another September . . .
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
. . . Freud lived out the year he still had to live . . .
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
. . . extremely ill; . . .
Henry James, The Chaperon.
. . . an exile, . . .
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Excerpt from Evangeline.
. . . alone in an alien culture.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight To Italy. Diary and Selected Letters (Explanatory Note by T.J. Reed).
What images return
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
June
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight To Italy. Diary and Selected Letters.
crossing the Channel
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
through the fog
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
by the night boat
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
water lapping the bow
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
Then, land!—then England!
Elizabeth Barret Browning, Aurora Leigh.
reaching the other shore
Commentary on the Diamond Sutra.
the first eight weeks of freedom
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight To Italy. Diary and Selected Letters (editor’s note).
June, May . . . April . . . February . . . November
Simon Gray, Butley.
September
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Flight To Italy. Diary and Selected Letters (editor’s note).
this long disease
Simon Gray, Butley.
his daughter Anna,
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
Freud, Living and Dying
Max Schur, Freud, Living and Dying.
—his death and her sorrow—
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
the final summons
James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans.
What is it—what?’
Robert Frost, Excerpt from Home Burial.
My daughter.
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
“—and the doctor.”
Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century.
his loyal and loving physician
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
the morphine
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
Freud’s end as a stoic suicide
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time.
syringes and needles
Alan Dershowitz, Reversal of Fortune: Inside the von Bulow Case.
the portal where they came
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Part II) (Final Scene).
this last of meeting places
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from The Hollow Men.
The pulse in the arm, less strong and
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
his last words
Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady.
the words of bliss, the sentence,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Part II) (Final Scene).
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
My hope
Henry James, The Aspern Papers.
My daughter.
T.S. Eliot, Excerpt from Marina.
And now, in this house, . . .
Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
Anna Freud—
Robert Coles, Anna Freud: The Dream of Psychoanalysis.
. . . who was . . .
Alice Sokoloff, Cosima Wagner: Extraordinary Daughter of Franz Liszt.
. . . inordinately proud of being her father’s daughter . . .
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo.
. . . listened in stony silence while I painted a marvelous mural of all the hidden truths coming to light; doors being unlocked, things falling into place.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
She seemed staggered by my confrontation and retreated by sinking into her body.
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
I told myself that the road ahead would be hard.
Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin.
The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it, would save him. There's the cold in your stomach, but you open the envelope, you have to open the envelope for the end of man is to know.
Robert Penn Warren, All The King's Men.
But there is more than this.
Margaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright.
There was . . .
David Evanier, The Man Who Refused to Watch the Academy Awards.
. . . I now began to see . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . the chance to be an actor in a drama of historical importance.
K.R. Eissler, Crusaders.
I found myself, after years of comparatively unproductive labor, on the threshold of what might prove to be a magnificent discovery.
Howard Carter and A.C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen.
It is hard for me to convey the excitement . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . the fever of suspense, the almost overmastering impulse, born of curiosity, to break down seals and lift the lids of boxes, the thought—pure joy to the investigator—that you are about to add a page to history, the strained expectancy—why not confess it?—of the treasure-seeker.
Howard Carter and A.C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut-Ankh-Amen.
There were puzzles everywhere, and not unimportant ones. Why did Freud keep a whole packet of Ferenczi material, all connected with Ferenczi's views about childhood seduction, in the top middle drawer of his desk? Why was it so important to him? Or had somebody else put it there? Who?
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
The cache of letters had lain unnoticed in a locked drawer of a battered wooden box that . . .
Gina Kolata, When Bioterror First Struck the U.S. Capital.
. . . looked . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . like the slanted top of a lectern.
Gina Kolata, When Bioterror First Struck the U.S. Capital.
A puzzlement.
Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers, The King and I.
How did they end up in that wooden box, which apparently . . .
Gina Kolata, When Bioterror First Struck the U.S. Capital.
. . . dated . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . from around 1900?
Gina Kolata, When Bioterror First Struck the U.S. Capital.
I, of course, kept my reverie to myself.
Irvin D. Yalom, Love’s Executioner.
At times . . .
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days.
I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and absurd mysteries, not fit for a human being to behold.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
One day Anna Freud . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . motioned me to a chair. We sat down.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
It had become very still—
Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor from Warsaw.
I laid the packet . . .
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
. . . of material . . .
Jack London, Grit of Women.
. . . I had found . . .
Jack London, The Sea Wolf.
. . . gently on the little table, and she put her hand over it . . .
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
And then, as he was silent, she . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . said something in German . . .
Don DeLillo, White Noise.
. . . in tones so clear and evenly-pitched that each separate syllable tapped like a little hammer on his brain:
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
“Herr Doktor, . . .
Don DeLillo, White Noise.
Um Gott, was klagest du mich an? War ich es, die dir Leid gebracht?
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
Dr. Masson take note!
Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder.
. . . Mein Vater . . .
Richard Wagner, Lohengrin.
(Whenever she used that phrase "my father" I would shudder a bit at its historic magic—knowing, too, that in just a few years, nobody else would ever be able to say that again . . . )
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
. . . my father . . .
Anna Freud, On Losing and Being Lost.
. . . based his rejection of these women's memories on clinical material. He recanted because he was wrong the first time."
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
" . . . I am proud to know I understood him better than anyone on earth—he told me so himself. . . ."
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
"Is that not plain enough for you, Dr. Masson?"
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
Anna Freud urged me to . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
. . . begin anew, make a new start . . .
Langenscheidt’s German-English/English-German Dictionary.
But over all else . . .
Jean-Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus.
Anna Freud urged me to direct my interests elsewhere.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
I wanted to get inside her, see myself through her, learn the things she knew.
Don Delillo, The Names.
That, of course, was futile.
Zane Grey, The Gold Desert.
She spoke faster, more expressively. Blood vessels flared in her eyes and face. I began to detect a cadence, a measured beat. She . . .
Don DeLillo, White Noise.
. . . held out as firmly as ever . . .
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.
. . . in defense of her . . .
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
. . . dear father
William Shakespeare, The Tempest.
At the same time, she started to make gestures as if she were bored, gave evidence of some restlessness, and looked repeatedly at her watch.
Otto Kernberg, Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism.
I began to suspect that there were a lot of secrets I was not to know about.
Gottfried Wagner, Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family's Legacy.
The uneasy thought came to him that perhaps . . .
W. Somerset Maugham, A Man with a Conscience.
. . . somewhere . . .
Emile Zola, The Debacle.
. . . contained in those papers . . .
Foster W. Cline, An Essay on Dreaming.
. . . somewhere, there’s something nobody knows about.
Alfred Hitchcock and Thornton Wilder, Shadow of a Doubt.
He tried to persuade himself that what was done was done and that he had really not been a free agent, but he could not quite still the prickings of his conscience.
W. Somerset Maugham, A Man with a Conscience.
I decided that the best step would be for me to get an outside opinion . . .
J. Moussaieff Masson, Final Analysis.
But . . .
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
Where should he go? Whom could he ask?
Emile Zola, The Debacle.
In conversations with other analysts close to the Freud family, I was given to understand that I had stumbled upon something that was better left alone.
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
Some added—
Bruno Bettelheim, The Ultimate Limit.
" . . . Everything is treated like a secret over there. Everything."
Joel Glenn Brenner, The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars.
I knew I was taking a risk.
Irvin D. Yalom, Love's Executioner.
(This was made even more apparent when my connections with the Freud Archives were suddenly terminated).
J. Moussaieff Masson, Freud and the Seduction Theory.
Friday, January 04, 2008
Why Do I Blog?
Why do I blog? Really, what do I have to talk about? There isn't all that much of a story to tell. Apart from my writing -- I really don't do much. I spend an appalling amount of time not just under the influence of television but in a falling-down TV-induced haze; television being for me "a form of self-medication, a way of fending off the pains of my own past as well as the continuing agony of my personal life"; my sibling relationship to the former Estelle Freedman was mostly unhappy, at times drastically so, yet we have granted the other a perverse loyalty (when we're not ignoring each other entirely); I putter around my one-room apartment where I have spent most of my adult life; and I, like Donald Trump, worry excessively about money, though Trump's turned it into a career. I just worry about money.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Growing Up Jewish In Philadelphia
This post is dedicated to my friend, Jesse Raben.
http://dailstrug.blogspot.com/2009/12/jesse-raben-growing-up-jewish-in-south.html
Roots. My father's parents were Jewish immigrants from the Baltic states. My grandfather was born in Vilna, Lithuania. And my grandmother came to the United States from Riga, the capital of Latvia. My grandmother's native language was German, my father used to proclaim proudly. "She didn't speak Yiddish like some prost Russian Jew."
http://dailstrug.blogspot.com/2010/04/on-doing-your-own-investigation-litvak.html
They hadn't known it, these Northern and Eastern European Jews, but each of them, pondering the momentous decision to leave the native country, was only a tiny drop in what became the Third Wave of Jews to Philadelphia. They were different in physique, culture, and class from the English Jews (the First Wave) and the German Jews (the Second Wave), both of whom, safely established in the City of Brotherly Love, were, in the main, hostile to these Jewish brethren. Not only did the newcomers threaten the status of those who had preceded them, but they were arriving in too great a number. Indeed, the Third Wave of immigrants to the United States made this the greatest mass immigration in all history.
William Penn's colony of Pennsylvania, unlike the others, was designed first as a sanctuary and in this sanctuary these men and women were to come into their full fruitfulness.
But all the same, upon arrival in this country these homeless and frightened Baltic and Eastern European Jews had to manage their fear, the sense of isolation, estrangement, and rejection. Most were in dread of ridicule. Daily crucial decisions had to be made: what to call oneself, whether to speak Yiddish, German, Russian, or English, which neighborhood to live in, what songs to sing in public (even in private), what to read, whom to court, how to dress, how to cut one's hair, what foods to eat, and which, if any, of the 613 commandments to follow.
Should one imitate the Philadelphia establishment's Anglican-Church Jews, intermarry, take on the coloration of the new landscape and safely disappear into it, or, winding the ancient leather phylacteries around one's body in prayer (as my grandfather did his entire life), join battalions of disinherited brethren who were looking forward to "next year in Jerusalem?" If the latter, might this not lead to a new ghetto? But must a choice be made in this free land? Were there not German Jews in Philadelphia, who were 32nd-degree Masons and who nonetheless prayed visibly at the most exclusive synagogue, Kenesseth Israel, and were admitted to the Mercantile Club and to the golf links of the Philmont Country Club near Jenkintown? Perhaps one could remain a Jew, but of a certain kind.
Wholesale name-surgery -- the simplest form of self-mutilation in the service of becoming American -- was common in this Third Wave: Favoshenko became first Fabush and then Phillips; Rabinowitz, Robbins; Goldstein, Galdston; Horowitz, Harris; Cohen, Conn; Kaplan, Copland; and Russman, Ross.
For my grandparents, Freedman remained Freedman. My grandparents kept their name and their religion. They remained pious, orthodox Jews till the day they died.
Nose-surgery came later, with affluence. Some refused all such transformations as demeaning and hurried to build an extension of the immediate families in the form of landsmanshaft (fellow-countryman's lodge) with other Ukrainian, Polish, Romanian, Galician, Austrian, Latvian or Lithuanian Jews, preferably all from the same town. The monthly dues, a considerable sacrifice, insured them against collective identity-dissolution and provided them with the more tangible benefits of legal advice, medical help, and ultimately, burial plots. At the meetings they could talk about their past and of "America, America" or of "Americhka, goniff" (America, thief).
http://dailstrug.blogspot.com/2009/12/jesse-raben-growing-up-jewish-in-south.html
Roots. My father's parents were Jewish immigrants from the Baltic states. My grandfather was born in Vilna, Lithuania. And my grandmother came to the United States from Riga, the capital of Latvia. My grandmother's native language was German, my father used to proclaim proudly. "She didn't speak Yiddish like some prost Russian Jew."
http://dailstrug.blogspot.com/2010/04/on-doing-your-own-investigation-litvak.html
They hadn't known it, these Northern and Eastern European Jews, but each of them, pondering the momentous decision to leave the native country, was only a tiny drop in what became the Third Wave of Jews to Philadelphia. They were different in physique, culture, and class from the English Jews (the First Wave) and the German Jews (the Second Wave), both of whom, safely established in the City of Brotherly Love, were, in the main, hostile to these Jewish brethren. Not only did the newcomers threaten the status of those who had preceded them, but they were arriving in too great a number. Indeed, the Third Wave of immigrants to the United States made this the greatest mass immigration in all history.
William Penn's colony of Pennsylvania, unlike the others, was designed first as a sanctuary and in this sanctuary these men and women were to come into their full fruitfulness.
But all the same, upon arrival in this country these homeless and frightened Baltic and Eastern European Jews had to manage their fear, the sense of isolation, estrangement, and rejection. Most were in dread of ridicule. Daily crucial decisions had to be made: what to call oneself, whether to speak Yiddish, German, Russian, or English, which neighborhood to live in, what songs to sing in public (even in private), what to read, whom to court, how to dress, how to cut one's hair, what foods to eat, and which, if any, of the 613 commandments to follow.
Should one imitate the Philadelphia establishment's Anglican-Church Jews, intermarry, take on the coloration of the new landscape and safely disappear into it, or, winding the ancient leather phylacteries around one's body in prayer (as my grandfather did his entire life), join battalions of disinherited brethren who were looking forward to "next year in Jerusalem?" If the latter, might this not lead to a new ghetto? But must a choice be made in this free land? Were there not German Jews in Philadelphia, who were 32nd-degree Masons and who nonetheless prayed visibly at the most exclusive synagogue, Kenesseth Israel, and were admitted to the Mercantile Club and to the golf links of the Philmont Country Club near Jenkintown? Perhaps one could remain a Jew, but of a certain kind.
Wholesale name-surgery -- the simplest form of self-mutilation in the service of becoming American -- was common in this Third Wave: Favoshenko became first Fabush and then Phillips; Rabinowitz, Robbins; Goldstein, Galdston; Horowitz, Harris; Cohen, Conn; Kaplan, Copland; and Russman, Ross.
For my grandparents, Freedman remained Freedman. My grandparents kept their name and their religion. They remained pious, orthodox Jews till the day they died.
Nose-surgery came later, with affluence. Some refused all such transformations as demeaning and hurried to build an extension of the immediate families in the form of landsmanshaft (fellow-countryman's lodge) with other Ukrainian, Polish, Romanian, Galician, Austrian, Latvian or Lithuanian Jews, preferably all from the same town. The monthly dues, a considerable sacrifice, insured them against collective identity-dissolution and provided them with the more tangible benefits of legal advice, medical help, and ultimately, burial plots. At the meetings they could talk about their past and of "America, America" or of "Americhka, goniff" (America, thief).
Monday, December 31, 2007
The Vault
My feelings lie frozen within me, encased in an unseen and unseeable compartment. Inaccessible and inert, my feelings do not animate and enliven my existence. They are a numb, dead weight -- cold and mute.
For years my feelings lay in an iron box buried so deep inside me that I was never sure just what it was. I knew I carried slippery, combustible things more secret than sex and more dangerous than any shadow or ghost. Ghosts had shape and name. What lay inside my iron box had none. Whatever lived inside me was so potent that words crumbled before they could describe.
Sometimes I felt my iron box contained a tomb. The walls were stone, like those guarding the mummies in an archeological museum and the air was cool. My mother sat in one corner on a chair like a throne. Her blonde hair was swept up above her ears and she looked stern. My father stood beside her, erect and tall like a military man. The tomb contained the frozen feelings surrounding all the significant persons in my life.
I built my iron box carefully, the way we were taught in school that nuclear reactors were built. I conceived lead walls around the dangerous parts, concentric circles of water channels and air ducts that would soften and contain any kind of explosion. I enclosed it all with metal casing and buried the box far away from my brain toward the small of my back, in the part of my body that seemed least alive.
The box became a vault, collecting in darkness, always collecting, pictures, words, my parents' glances, becoming loaded with weight. It sank deeper as I grew older, so packed with undigested things that finally it became impossible to ignore. I knew the iron box would some day have to be dredged up into the light, opened, its contents sorted our, but I had built such fortifications that it had become inaccessible.
I needed tricks to get near it, strategies to cut through the belt of numbness that formed each time I made a move toward it. I needed company to look inside it, other voices to confirm that those things I carried inside me were real, that I had not made them up. My parents could not help me with this; they were part of it. Psychiatrists I distrusted; they had even more names to disguise things than I had already tried. There had to be other people like me, who shared what I carried, who had their own version of my iron box. There had to be, I thought, an invisible, silent family scattered about the world.
I am not a whole person. Whole people have access to their feelings. I do not. My iron box is a vault composed of inaccessible feelings and memories that, for the most part, are beyond recollection. My personality lies on an inert foundation, which is a frozen wasteland.
For years my feelings lay in an iron box buried so deep inside me that I was never sure just what it was. I knew I carried slippery, combustible things more secret than sex and more dangerous than any shadow or ghost. Ghosts had shape and name. What lay inside my iron box had none. Whatever lived inside me was so potent that words crumbled before they could describe.
Sometimes I felt my iron box contained a tomb. The walls were stone, like those guarding the mummies in an archeological museum and the air was cool. My mother sat in one corner on a chair like a throne. Her blonde hair was swept up above her ears and she looked stern. My father stood beside her, erect and tall like a military man. The tomb contained the frozen feelings surrounding all the significant persons in my life.
I built my iron box carefully, the way we were taught in school that nuclear reactors were built. I conceived lead walls around the dangerous parts, concentric circles of water channels and air ducts that would soften and contain any kind of explosion. I enclosed it all with metal casing and buried the box far away from my brain toward the small of my back, in the part of my body that seemed least alive.
The box became a vault, collecting in darkness, always collecting, pictures, words, my parents' glances, becoming loaded with weight. It sank deeper as I grew older, so packed with undigested things that finally it became impossible to ignore. I knew the iron box would some day have to be dredged up into the light, opened, its contents sorted our, but I had built such fortifications that it had become inaccessible.
I needed tricks to get near it, strategies to cut through the belt of numbness that formed each time I made a move toward it. I needed company to look inside it, other voices to confirm that those things I carried inside me were real, that I had not made them up. My parents could not help me with this; they were part of it. Psychiatrists I distrusted; they had even more names to disguise things than I had already tried. There had to be other people like me, who shared what I carried, who had their own version of my iron box. There had to be, I thought, an invisible, silent family scattered about the world.
I am not a whole person. Whole people have access to their feelings. I do not. My iron box is a vault composed of inaccessible feelings and memories that, for the most part, are beyond recollection. My personality lies on an inert foundation, which is a frozen wasteland.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
A Boundless Sense of Guilt
According to the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein all loss is experienced as a result of one's own destructiveness and as a retaliation for past hatefulness and injuries. In concrete terms, if a child is jealous of a younger sibling, and fantasizes about the younger child's death, well, if the younger child in fact dies, the older child will perceive the death as resulting from his own destructive fantasies. Through loss, says Klein, the world and one's own insides are experienced as depleted and desolate. One's love and capacity to create and protect good relations with others are felt to be impotent and paltry. Good experiences with others, by contrast, augment the belief in the power of one's love and reparative capacities. Hatefulness and malice can be accepted and forgiven; others can be approached with a sense of hope and possibility. Real other people are extremely important in Klein's formulations. The child regrets the damage he feels he has inflicted upon his parents. He attempts to repair that damage, to make good, over and over again. The quality of his relations with his parents and the quality of his subsequent relations with others determine the sense he has of himself, in the extremes, either as a secret and undiscovered murderer or as a repentant and absolved sinner.
I myself suffer from a boundless sense of guilt. That sense of guilt is the prism through which I view the world. I see myself as an undiscovered murderer and try to avoid contributing to my guilt by means of withdrawing from the world as much as possible. I seek thereby to attain a state of innocence, but my maneuvers only serve to prevent the development of any relations with others and obviate any meaningful interaction in the world of men. I live in a black and white world populated by murderers and innocents, by players and the uncorrupted. In my warped value system, human interaction, no matter how well-meaning, is rife with corruption, while the status of innocence is reserved for those who minimize their commerce with the world.
I know I have no place in the world of today; once I'd definitely refused to kill, to be a player, I doomed myself to an exile that can never end. I leave it to others to make history, to live their lives in the world of men. I know, too, that I'm not qualified to pass judgment on those others. There's something lacking in my mental make-up, and its lack prevents me from being a rational murderer. So it's a deficiency, not a superiority. But as things are, I'm willing to be as I am; I've learned modesty. All I maintain is that on this earth there are players and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the players: those who would exploit. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can't judge if it's simple, but I know it's true. You see, I'd heard such quantities of arguments, which very nearly turned my head, and turned other people's heads enough to make them approve of murder; and I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clean-cut language. So I resolved always to speak--and to act--quite clearly, as this was the only way of setting myself on the right track. That's why I say there are players and there are victims; no more than that. If, by making that statement, I, too, become a contributor to exploitation, at least I don't do it willfully. I try, in short, to be an innocent murderer. You see, I've no great ambitions.
My sole ambition at this point in my life is to state my philosophy of life and to expound my passions, my struggles and my woes. I have become a monologist, well-equipped for speech--never at a loss for words. And while this monologue of my existence as an undiscovered murderer is a cryptic passion, it is not poetry, the fact is that I live as a fugitive and speak as a fugitive, and when I die bleeding from the sutured holes in my chest I will die as a discovered murderer of my self; as my blood will flow from me, I will die dispensing myself in utterance, as if death were chattered-out being, or as if all we are made of is words and when we die the soul of speech decants itself into the universe.
I myself suffer from a boundless sense of guilt. That sense of guilt is the prism through which I view the world. I see myself as an undiscovered murderer and try to avoid contributing to my guilt by means of withdrawing from the world as much as possible. I seek thereby to attain a state of innocence, but my maneuvers only serve to prevent the development of any relations with others and obviate any meaningful interaction in the world of men. I live in a black and white world populated by murderers and innocents, by players and the uncorrupted. In my warped value system, human interaction, no matter how well-meaning, is rife with corruption, while the status of innocence is reserved for those who minimize their commerce with the world.
I know I have no place in the world of today; once I'd definitely refused to kill, to be a player, I doomed myself to an exile that can never end. I leave it to others to make history, to live their lives in the world of men. I know, too, that I'm not qualified to pass judgment on those others. There's something lacking in my mental make-up, and its lack prevents me from being a rational murderer. So it's a deficiency, not a superiority. But as things are, I'm willing to be as I am; I've learned modesty. All I maintain is that on this earth there are players and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the players: those who would exploit. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can't judge if it's simple, but I know it's true. You see, I'd heard such quantities of arguments, which very nearly turned my head, and turned other people's heads enough to make them approve of murder; and I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clean-cut language. So I resolved always to speak--and to act--quite clearly, as this was the only way of setting myself on the right track. That's why I say there are players and there are victims; no more than that. If, by making that statement, I, too, become a contributor to exploitation, at least I don't do it willfully. I try, in short, to be an innocent murderer. You see, I've no great ambitions.
My sole ambition at this point in my life is to state my philosophy of life and to expound my passions, my struggles and my woes. I have become a monologist, well-equipped for speech--never at a loss for words. And while this monologue of my existence as an undiscovered murderer is a cryptic passion, it is not poetry, the fact is that I live as a fugitive and speak as a fugitive, and when I die bleeding from the sutured holes in my chest I will die as a discovered murderer of my self; as my blood will flow from me, I will die dispensing myself in utterance, as if death were chattered-out being, or as if all we are made of is words and when we die the soul of speech decants itself into the universe.
Friday, December 28, 2007
School Days
"At school he was an average student," recalls an elementary school classmate of mine, "rather dreamy and inattentive. But what soon struck me about him was the absolute certainty in his own mind that one day he would become famous. In what he would be famous -- that had yet to be determined -- but famous whatever the circumstances." The "dreamy and inattentive" side of my personality -- the romantic and impractical visionary -- has been broadly affirmed by those who knew me. My ambition has been all but forgotten.
It's worth noting that I never quite fit into the local society of boys. I usually would not play with them, preferring my lone pursuits. In school I seemed an isolated, dreamy boy who didn't like rough play and whose preoccupation with dressing up in fine clothes that my mother had bought for me set me apart from the usual run of boys in my neighborhood. One classmate found me strange and conceited, without the usual interests of a boy. Another observed that I had no close friends, and that I seemed to prefer writing stories to the more routine school subjects. I was lazy, too, and did not participate in class projects with any enthusiasm, at least that is what some of my classmates thought. A survey of my report cards from the Rowan Elementary School in Philadelphia, however, suggests otherwise. My report card from Mrs. Lewis in 1963, for example, reports "admirable" work in writing, drawing, and arithmetic. I did, however, show a "lack of progress in grammar and language." Remembering my boyhood, I would say I never did like school and stopped going to school as soon as I got big enough to play hooky and not get caught at it. I would say that April, in particular, was the very best time not to have to go to school.
The usual sports that attract boys did not interest me. I often stayed away from the playground except when I felt like eavesdropping. I was never popular, although most of my classmates considered me friendly and courteous. Certainly no one thought I was academically gifted. I did my homework in a halfhearted way, though my writing ability was such that I could manage without much effort. One of my teachers, Miss Kaempfer, actually assumed that my mother was doing my homework for me.
At recess, I would stand apart from the other children, watching, seeming to study their movements, to listen to their voices, without reacting myself or wishing to participate. My daydreaming in class made me a subject of ridicule among my classmates and did not endear me to my teachers. What I was dreaming about I can only guess now, but it seems likely that I thought about heroism and glory, about crime, about human desire in its various manifestations. As a boy I felt that I contained all the contradictory possibilities of the human spirit within my heart.
It's worth noting that I never quite fit into the local society of boys. I usually would not play with them, preferring my lone pursuits. In school I seemed an isolated, dreamy boy who didn't like rough play and whose preoccupation with dressing up in fine clothes that my mother had bought for me set me apart from the usual run of boys in my neighborhood. One classmate found me strange and conceited, without the usual interests of a boy. Another observed that I had no close friends, and that I seemed to prefer writing stories to the more routine school subjects. I was lazy, too, and did not participate in class projects with any enthusiasm, at least that is what some of my classmates thought. A survey of my report cards from the Rowan Elementary School in Philadelphia, however, suggests otherwise. My report card from Mrs. Lewis in 1963, for example, reports "admirable" work in writing, drawing, and arithmetic. I did, however, show a "lack of progress in grammar and language." Remembering my boyhood, I would say I never did like school and stopped going to school as soon as I got big enough to play hooky and not get caught at it. I would say that April, in particular, was the very best time not to have to go to school.
The usual sports that attract boys did not interest me. I often stayed away from the playground except when I felt like eavesdropping. I was never popular, although most of my classmates considered me friendly and courteous. Certainly no one thought I was academically gifted. I did my homework in a halfhearted way, though my writing ability was such that I could manage without much effort. One of my teachers, Miss Kaempfer, actually assumed that my mother was doing my homework for me.
At recess, I would stand apart from the other children, watching, seeming to study their movements, to listen to their voices, without reacting myself or wishing to participate. My daydreaming in class made me a subject of ridicule among my classmates and did not endear me to my teachers. What I was dreaming about I can only guess now, but it seems likely that I thought about heroism and glory, about crime, about human desire in its various manifestations. As a boy I felt that I contained all the contradictory possibilities of the human spirit within my heart.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
An Intricately Guilty Defendant on Trial
I am usually holed up in my room, writing relentlessly. I am myself a singular being tricked up in many alter egos and attacked from many angles, not only examined but cross-examined, an intricately guilty defendant on trial. One wonders if I could have found my existence so absorbingly important if I had been born in some other place and time, where the edges of my ego might have frayed into the general fabric of indifference.I believe that subjectively speaking, each existence is the center of the universe. I am fundamentally a complete neurotic and unfit for life. I lead a quiet life, occupied primarily in study and writing.
A blogger is never better than his most recent post, and I struggle to surpass myself every time. I never forget the anxiety I myself feel, that I might be unable to equal what I had previously achieved. I am also concerned about how my blog will be received by the reading public. I have several blogs. The Freedman Archives does not have as many readers as My Daily Struggles and attracts virtually no attention. This is excellent. In this way I shake off the gawking mob that insists on being present whenever it thinks there is a disturbance. A deficit in the material world becomes a surplus in the world of the spirit.
I would very much like to be praised, of course -- "Oh, yes!," -- but not by a nobody like some of the people who visit my blogs who come and go like a sneeze. If I am to be praised I ask that it be done by one of the genuine authorities.
There are those who say that I am rather hasty with my productivity and am thus merely a hack. "They think I'm a hack writer," I sometimes think. I am completely convinced that there is no other blog author who treats even the most insignificant word with the extraordinary care that I exhibit. Not only do I myself rewrite my posts at least two times -- indeed, some portions even three or four times -- but there are also the meditations when I take walks, which are so conducive to my productivity that when I arrive home, I often have the post finished, in fact have even committed its stylistic form to memory.
Thus there are times when I can sit for hours, enamored with the sound of language -- when, of course, it resonates with the pregnancy of thought. Thus I can sit for hours at a time, like a flautist who entertains himself with his flute. Most of what I have written has been spoken aloud many, many times, often perhaps scores of times; it was heard before it was written down. I have lived and enjoyed and experienced so much in the evolution of these thoughts and their quest for form that the structure of my sentences could be called my world of memories.
For the most part I am indeed in the proper mood. Who else could move so easily from the charming to the demonic, from sentimentality to a cynical snort? Who else could manage an everyday conversational tone even when dealing with the subtlest abstractions? Who else could situate platitudes or uproarious comedy just a line and a half after the most recondite profundities? Or withdraw, become diffuse, vague, and incomprehensible -- and then in the next instant snap his fingers with a seductive stylistic fillip, inspire his pen, and become so intensely captivating that the reader simply loses track of himself? In sum, what blog writer has ever produced anything so fertile and prodigious? And then they call it "hack writing!" Hack writing, indeed.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
A Dream Interpreted
I recently submitted a dream to Dr. Dreamland for interpretation. What follows is a description of the dream together with Dr. Dreamland's interpretation.
Doctor Dreamland, I am looking at a man's shirt; it is blue with a buttoned-down collar. I know intuitively that the shirt belongs to my friend Craig. There is no objective evidence that the shirt belongs to Craig, however... I feel a great deal of satisfaction to learn that Craig and I wear the same size shirt. I have an impulse to smell the shirt. At that moment I think: "Only a queer would smell another guy's shirt." I examine the collar of the shirt and notice that it is frayed in one location.
DOCTOR DREAMLAND: Interesting dream, Gary. It reminds me of all those stories you hear of widows sleeping with their husband's shirts. Why? Because the shirt is the magic repository of that "dead husband smell." I don't mean it smells like a rotting corpse. I mean it smells like the husband smelled before he became a rotting corpse.But it is a behavior that is dictated by loss. You've lost something, Gary. You don't want to acknowledge the loss, so you presume that the symbol of that loss must belong to someone else (Craig). That attribution in your dream is symbolic of your waking denial. There is some part of yourself with which you have lost touch and you desire to get reconnected. Many times, those connections lie with friends and family. Have you been living an insular existence, Gary? Are you isolated? If so, I would suggest you get out and start repairing your old ties (no pun intended).
Oh... wait a minute. You said the shirt was frayed?Geez, that's embarrassing. I must have missed that the first time around. Well, let's just say, you're right: only a queer would smell another man's shirt. There's nothing wrong with being queer, of course (and the preferred term is "gay," by the way). But the frayed collar... well...
Doctor Dreamland, I am looking at a man's shirt; it is blue with a buttoned-down collar. I know intuitively that the shirt belongs to my friend Craig. There is no objective evidence that the shirt belongs to Craig, however... I feel a great deal of satisfaction to learn that Craig and I wear the same size shirt. I have an impulse to smell the shirt. At that moment I think: "Only a queer would smell another guy's shirt." I examine the collar of the shirt and notice that it is frayed in one location.
DOCTOR DREAMLAND: Interesting dream, Gary. It reminds me of all those stories you hear of widows sleeping with their husband's shirts. Why? Because the shirt is the magic repository of that "dead husband smell." I don't mean it smells like a rotting corpse. I mean it smells like the husband smelled before he became a rotting corpse.But it is a behavior that is dictated by loss. You've lost something, Gary. You don't want to acknowledge the loss, so you presume that the symbol of that loss must belong to someone else (Craig). That attribution in your dream is symbolic of your waking denial. There is some part of yourself with which you have lost touch and you desire to get reconnected. Many times, those connections lie with friends and family. Have you been living an insular existence, Gary? Are you isolated? If so, I would suggest you get out and start repairing your old ties (no pun intended).
Oh... wait a minute. You said the shirt was frayed?Geez, that's embarrassing. I must have missed that the first time around. Well, let's just say, you're right: only a queer would smell another man's shirt. There's nothing wrong with being queer, of course (and the preferred term is "gay," by the way). But the frayed collar... well...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
