Return of The Psychoanalytic Field

I'm a reactive writer. I'm not inclined to spin out the kind of long contemplative meditations that Spurious (or Clavdia of Letters from a Librarian) do so well. I need to feel engagement, to feel something click, to realize that I've been preoccupied with the very ideas I'm reading about, but hadn't known it till that moment. Best of all, to find myself wakened to something else--thoughts that would seem to have only a peripheral relation to what has triggered them, that make me eager to trace out the connection, to find the parallel structure that has been waiting to for me... waiting to be Found. 

Fadi Abou-Rihan's posts were good at that. A section of his multi-part review of Anti-Oedipus, or his series on "Found Things," would be good for a new chapter in my novel, or several poems. It wasn't necessarily the ideas, but the sense of engagement, of presence, that they evoked. I might change the subject entirely (most often, that would be the case), but what I was writing was part of a conversation again--the primal energy that drives me to write, so I was quite pleased to see, after a long silence, a new post on The Psychoanalytic Field. Abou-Rihan will be taking up where he left off--recapping some of his previous posts on Found Things, and then moving on to new material. I'm looking forward to reading his new posts, and to continuing what for me has been an energizing and creative conversation.

... speaking of Spurious

Kafka For Himself

You have to know you're not Kafka, says W., that's the first thing. But you have to know that the person you're speaking to might be Kafka, that's the second. This is why conversation, for W., is always a matter for hope. The very ability to speak, to listen and respond is already something, he says.

 

Animal Silence

 

    If you look at this cat, Ari Figue's cat, it will occur to you that what you see and experience of its silence is not her silence at all; does not belong to them--to the animals, does not begin or end with them, but rather, to all that lies hidden on the other side of speech, to everything the words deny. They meet us emerging from this silence, moving toward us, rising out of white space, but never fully there, a surface impenetrable: animate markings on a blank page, unreadable convergence of being and silence, neither theirs nor ours.

Our collective, genetic biological material efflorescence opens and closes, opens and closes: unique moments of entropic dissolution.

 These are the words he saw on the page. He wrote them. He does not know what they mean. A convergence whose Emperor is the illusion of the first person singular. You see (he tells himself) all along what he heard as the Voice, was only silence, a deeper silence, a more than bodily silence, a river of silence upon which the I moves as a leaf carried on the surface of the stream.

Taking Leave of the Animals

We cannot begin without taking leave
He said when he turned us away
Fire leapt from his tongue

Instead, we gathered the names, leaving the animals
Speechless in the forest brakes, the river's course.
Only now do we understand the nature of our loss

We cannot begin without taking leave
They were more than we could bear, these words.
They grew fruitful and multiplied

We hung them on every bough.
There were not enough trees to hold them.
They fell to the earth like leaves

We cannot begin without taking leave
Our lips are dry with trying
Our fingers sign what we cannot say

How can we leave
What was never ours to begin with?
How can we ever return what we found
in their burning, silent eyes?

The Narrator is Death

I've been obsessed with the problem of narrative voice for more than twenty years. There has always seemed to be something missing--from critical accounts, in what I was searching for in my own writing. I found myself thinking about this again after reading a recent post by Dan Green. He was reflecting on the shifting point of view in Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides. I realized that in both of my novels I have not so much been searching for the right narrative voice, the right POV, as trying to escape it--a sense that the written voice was secondary, itself a reflection of or response to what remains--what must remain--outside the work, the real narrator is that presence that is called into being between the reader and the word--something heard and but imperfectly embodied in what finds its way onto the page, a threatening presence which can only be felt as a kind of absence--as the silence the words are there, not to reveal, but to obscure, to hide, to protect us from... a thing to drive off; leaving the writing, in essence, as a kind of incantation, the words, meaningless in themselves, their real purpose, to draw a circle around the living, to chant into being a border which the real Voice, the countless shifting voices of the dead are powerless to cross.


Here from the first line of Ari Figue's Cat, and the opening of chapter 2.

Late Winter
1995
He had been lying in bed for hours, half asleep, half awake when he heard, as distinct and real as the rattling of the windows in the wind, as the knocking of the heating pipes in the walls, a woman's voice calling out the name, Jacob, as though it were his own.

Cicadas


When he was a child it would come to him, the voice--sometimes out of common white noise, the sound of passing cars, a ceiling fan, a radio playing in another room﷓﷓sometimes in his own head, like the one he would hear when he was reading. Do not forget this moment, it seemed to say, as though he were being held accountable for what he had seen and heard--for everything experienced in that moment. Not seldom, it would take on the voice of a real person: Mrs. Erickson in the third grade, who, catching him daydreaming, would grab him by the ear: Pay attention! she would hiss, pointing to figures on a blackboard, demanding an answer to a question he could no longer remember. Somewhere in adolescence, the voice faded, but the feeling that had accompanied it, this sense of accountability, did not. If anything, it grew stronger. It would come over him like a seizure: a squirrel running up a tree, a bubblegum wrapper floating in a puddle on the sidewalk, a snatch of conversation overheard--the most trivial things would suddenly be transformed into  enigmas--as though something momentous hung in the balance--a problem he was compelled to solve. Portents of the empty set.