Struck, turalisme

The countryside is coming alive with scents. The world smells wonderful. Magnolia, with its macabre undertones thanks to Billy Holiday, the heady fragrance of quince blossom I have yet to hear anybody sing about, and the totally intoxicating nostalgia of hawthorn. When I smell hawthorn I am small and new again. The lilac is budded, the flowers not fully open, but it is everywhere. The mimosa – took ages to find that name, myosotis was on my lips – the mimosa has faded. We have no electronic devices for capturing and transmitting smells, no matter how sweet.

Et tu Brute, Obama confused England and Britain and his wife tapped the Queen on the back! Our wee group of countries is so incongruous in the modern world, so mixed up they can’t portray who they are to the outside (yes I speak English and the parliament that decides on everything for me is in England but that does not make me English!) and why do they still have a queen anyway?

There was yet another killing in America, in an old folk’s home in a town called Carthage. I immediately thought “Carnage in Carthage”. Carthaginian certainly has a warlike ring to it, and indeed, Carthage used to be the capital of the Vandal kingdom, of all places.

It always amazes me how a single letter change can throw the meaning of a word miles off. I get these moments often. The other day it was “doar” for door.

And as I was listening to the radio I heard someone say “scie” followed, what seemed like a long time afterwards, by “canaliste”. That amused me, too. Il était si…… canaliste…



An idea I found in Tolle that is very important to me: background unhappiness is not content-based but structural.


The machine is a book vending machine in an airport...

Gullible's travels

In my mind, I have a picture of Gulliver tied down with thousands of tiny ropes, especially his hair. This is not the exact image but it was the closest thing I could find. I think of it sometimes when I am lying on the couch. Psychoanalysis is a question of carefully cutting all the little ropes, but the ropes don’t want to be cut, and they automatically grow back, and you have to cut them again and again. In other words, you have to be really serious about being free or the bars of your prison will find you again.

Another similar image is of elephants. The cruellest picture I have of them is the adult females chasing pubescent males out of the group and forcing them to trot off and do their own thing in the jungle. The boys become a nuisance when they reach puberty, so they are excluded. It sometimes takes days to get rid of them. They hang around and cry and try to sneak back into the herd, but the females are relentless in keeping them out. I don’t know exactly how human mothers are supposed to push their male offspring out into the world, but I hope there is a less cruel method.

Here I was thinking of how elephants are trained. One ankle is tied to a post when they are young. They rebel and push and try to free themselves. They find they can’t run away because they don’t have the strength to break the chain or uproot the post. Then they grow up and increase in strength but they have internalised the experience of not being able to run away so they don’t even try anymore. Analysis is a way of identifying the parts of our behaviour that were adopted in childhood circumstances and no longer correspond to our adult setting and means. And ideally adapting the behaviour!

I've just bought a brilliant version of Basin Street Blues by Keith Jarret from I-tunes. I can’t put it on here because it is “protected”. The same goes for The Blower's Daughter I bought specially for my life’s soundtrack. This is frustrating. I’ll have to find a way round it, somehow. Anyway, I was humming the song “Halleluja” the other day and was surprised to learn it was by Leonard Cohen, the man who moved me to take up the guitar to learn to play Suzanne and Bird on a Wire. The best version I found was Alison Crowe, and what do you know, I then found a You Tube tutorial on how to play it! Somebody took the trouble to clearly and slowly explain what to do and how to do it in front of a camera for people like me! That restored my faith in human nature. I never managed to play Danny Boy fluently enough on the piano to be able to sing along with it, so it looks like Leonard could be another first. Watch this space! For the moment, here is Alison Crowe singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

Lemons from Algeria

In the news, London. A young barrister starts shooting out of his window, without opening it. He didn’t hit anyone, or aim at anyone, although he fired shots into his neighbours’ homes. What was he aiming at? The police returned fire and killed him. Suicide using the police as a means?

These lemons are from Algeria. There is a long story about them. It is taking a long time to write.

In my post on 15/04/07 I included a short excerpt from “Diary of an Analysand” which is not a diary but a collection of pieces of writing about the psychoanalytic journey – ending with Why? What follows is what followed.

I don’t know why. In truth I was a wanderer, wandering. I was a wanderer seeking something I had never found and until I found it, there was no way of knowing what it was I was looking for. All I knew was that it was something I had not yet found. The unknown. An unknown me, my god.

And there was something about not deliberately going somewhere to avoid missing the undeliberate, magical destination. It had to be happened upon as if by chance. A miracle. I was wandering around earth waiting for a lightning beam to strike me and make me what I was, what I wanted to become. I was expecting to be actuated from the outside. But that’s not how I perceived it. I perceived myself as self-sufficient. I didn’t want anything from anybody. I didn’t want anything from anybody except consecration from the Big Unknowable Other. The Big Unknowable Other that held the secret to my realisation. The BUO had to tell me that I was on the right track by not being on any track, by avoiding all tracks.

I believed that was what it meant to be alive, to not follow a direction laid down by anybody, even myself. My only direction was to keep on, go on, reach as far as I could without having a direction. Like an organism that tries to get as far away from its point of origin as possible, for no other reason than to find out what it is like as far away from home as it is possible to get. For no reason other than to be able to say “I went as far as I could, I went all the way” even though ‘all the way’ didn’t mean anything till I had found the end of the road, found the end of my road, reached the outer limits of my movement. And that could never happen, because I knew I would drop off the end of the earth. I would die lost, running round the globe for the Nth time, happy at never having been in the same place twice, happy that there was enough earth to make this possible.

I don’t know even now what is important. The means of transport I used, the places I ended up in simply through not wanting to be in another place, the discoveries. I don’t know if any detail is more important than any others. I suppose the only thing that is important and that allows me to think about all that is the fact that I finally stumbled on a destination. I finally found myself with a direction. Tobruk, for better or worse, temporary or permanent, pointing like an iron shaving under a magnet. Magnetised.

Before this, I was a short circuit, emitter and receiver – oh I had plenty of energy. I certainly emitted, loud and clear, but I was not happy with what I received. The short circuit was not satisfactory but I did not know why. Why was always my weak point. Why not? Everything was arbitrary, anyway, or so I thought, so I felt, and I did not ask to be an emitter and a receiver, I did not ask to come into existence, at least, if I did ask to come into existence, if I was the one who had actually chosen the time and place and circumstances of my birth, I had no recollection of it and came into life completely and utterly surprised by the whole thing. Unarmed. Naked. Confused.

I still am confused, but I’m no longer naked or unarmed. I’m still an emitter and a receiver, but I’ve found the tuning button. Or I have added a tuning button. Or the tuning button magically appeared, came into existence without knowing why, like me. In any case, there is now a tuning button and I can’t imagine why there wasn’t one before. Surely we should all be born with access to our tuning buttons? My only conclusion is once again that I am a freak of nature. No tuning button, then tuning button appears. There was no tuning button because I had not discovered the concept of tuning. Tuning in; tuning out. I did it automatically, frustrated at all that interference. Static. Crackle. I wasn’t doing it properly. My parameters were wrong. I was a 20^th century adult, using the parameters of some kind of prehistoric protozoa.

Sarky et huche

Speaking from the agricultural show, Sarky announced that he is going to apply for the whole of French gastronomy to be given Unesco world heritage status.

What will we eat?

He really is becoming ridiculous, hence the title. I wondered about "Hutch" and discovered it comes from the French for chest, so Huchette, a mnemonic device for St Michel on a Saturday night in Paris, would be "little chest".

Yesterday a friend told me that Paul Ricoeur decided to keep writing till he died, to observe how his mind changed. Fascinated by this, I started reading about him and found:

"The word is my kingdom and I am not ashamed of it." and `The understanding that psychoanalysis offers to modern man is difficult and painful because of the narcissistic humiliation it inflicts.' This partially explains why it is so difficult to talk about “it”.

Recently I found myself wanting to state the obvious, in case my analyst had sort of forgotten what we were supposed to be doing and thought that what I was saying was what I actually felt/meant/believed, and I found this great quote from a nice article:

“It would be as incongruent for an analysand, in the midst of a transference experience, to announce that she knows that all she is demonstrating at that moment is transference as it would be for Olivier to announce in the middle of the soliloquy that he is not really Hamlet, he is just acting him.”

It is all grist for the mill. Translating about flour, I looked up “mouture” and found “grist”, which is annoyingly the word for the grain taken to the mill both before it is ground and after it is ground. Language is so unsatisfactory, (too strong, because it does sometimes work and we don’t have a good substitute) approximate, etc.

I hope you get the gist -yet another slip twixt French and English

Back in dixit land, I regaled myself with Red herring and White elephant

As I was finishing off a job, the automatic spell checker corrected the word “undergarment”. In that spilt second my uneasiness about the situation made me realise that “the word doesn’t belong to me”. It is common, was already in the dictionary of this software…
The fact that I found that strange indicates that some part of me must have felt that some words do belong to me, are my property, as if nobody else … or, on the contrary, as if everybody else… there are public and private words, and I was washing my linen in pubic…
Oops, a Lapsus clavi. Who would have thought there was a Latin term for typo?

Misty mornings

Searching for the right word. What do we call the stores that sell books and magazines in airports and train stations, points de presse in French? Stationers? I Google it and come up with Newsagent (bravo!) and the following snippet: (…) Travel Retail is responsible for the operation of stores at railway stations, airports and hospitals. Yikes! I never thought of hospitals as transit areas before, but there you go… literally. I seem to spend a lot of time searching for the right word these days.

I once spotted a title in the window of a point de presse: “Je voudrais que quelqu'un m'attende quelque part”. (Official translation I Wish Someone Were Waiting for Me Somewhere, personal colloquialism I wish there was somebody waiting for me somewhere). What a masterstroke I said to myself, the emotional pull of the title, especially in a train station or at an airport, was tremendous. I didn’t read the book straight away - I tend to resist such punches to the gut. It is a collection of short stories. In one of them, a couple meet on Boulevard St Germain and he spoils everything by glancing surreptitiously at his mobile phone to see if he has any messages as they leave the restaurant. The image hit the mark, and reminded me of a drink in a country pub, once. Maybe I’ll write about it sometime.

Meanwhile I still have the urge to start an anonymous blog to post the notes I jot down occasionally after a session of psychoanalysis. Coming to terms with repetition. The idea here is not of rubbing out and starting again (palimpsest) but of producing variations on a theme.

I stumbled on a photographer who likes Gascony morning mist, too.

An innocent form of murder

Analysand’s diary 21/01/05

I apologised for wanting to pretend she wasn’t there. She said you can do anything you like with me. And I said isn’t it a sad state of affairs if that is the case that all I want to do is pretend you’re not there. An innocent form of murder she said.

Rain check

Looking for Melanie Klein and castration on the internet, I came across the following gem from Hannah Segal:

“[…]. One was an extremely gifted professional violinist whom I interviewed on the ward. When I asked him why he stopped playing the violin he responded “do you expect me to masturbate in public?”

My world is relatively silent, I can’t stand much reality. I was unaware that I was enjoying so much peace and quiet, when I started looking for music to add here and suddenly there is so much of it, so many songs and albums that fall into the exceptionally important category. Like paving stones for skipping back and forwards over my life. My favourite songs at such and such a time. Albums I listened to over and over then forgot about. All I need to do is listen to a song to find myself projected back to that particular time, with its hopes and fears and loves and hates and atmosphere. Like Proust’s Madeleine, the reality of a city street on a rainy night surges forth from a chord change, a note, a word, a musical atmosphere.

I already mentioned Roy Orbison’s “It’s over” – that was my first heart ache. I don’t know who it is about, but I can remember sitting in the car with my family, the sun sparkling on the sea and thinking about not being loved by a boy at school. Not my first musical memory - I don’t know if they could ever be placed in chronological order – but my first memory of heartache in connection to boys.

In some cases, I don’t even have to hear the song again, today. I only have to remember it, remember the moment, as if the feeling was encrypted into the music and together they fly like a kite in my inner sky. The soundtrack to my sorest ever heartache, when I was dumped by my best friend - blonde pigtails, blue eyes and red cardigan - with no warning and no explanation, is Freddy and the Pacemakers singing “When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high, and don’t be afraid of the night. At the end of the storm there’s a golden sky and a keepsake forget-me-not”. I have a vision of myself walking across the play park at the bottom of my street in the dark, in the pouring rain, trying to clutch at those words, choking on them, crying my eyes out. My distress was safely hidden by the weather, the heavy rain (“Was it tears that fell or was it rain?” – my father’s favourite song) and the cold that stings your face and makes it red anyway, so no one will know that you want to die inside. That is not a good memory, and to this day I don’t like that song.

Lonely as a cloud

When I typed “psychoanalysis” as a tag in my last message, I saw the “anal” morpheme in the word for the first time. My analyst (there, it happened again, I never noticed the “anal” in “analyst” before) is called Brooke Maddux. For the first couple of years I babbled on about the Brooke part, unable to cross the great divide of the space between the two components and cast my mind upon the first three letters of the surname and their possible relevance to me.

The long sulk

The bass player and lead guitarist of Apocalyptic Dream were coming to practice here on Sunday with Billy, their rhythm guitarist and lyricist. I installed some software to let them record themselves on my computer, so that they could have a CD to work on between practices, to prepare for their next concert on April 7^th.

I took a picture from their first concert last summer and spent quite a lot of time creating a CD cover for Billy to give to Ryan, the singer.

I suppose I expected him to be pleased, or maybe even slightly impressed (!) but he pulled it out and binned it with hardly a cursory glance.

"I went to a lot of trouble to make that cover” I wailed.

“That photo’s no good, wait till April 7^th and take a real photo” he retorted.

Hmmmmph.

That would have been a good excuse to go in the huff, if I needed one, but I don't feel that the world is deliberately trying to offend me anymore. I can't swear that the opposite is not true. Yes, psychoanalysis is expensive. It is a long-term undertaking. It is not for the fainthearted. It is an investment in the not-for-profit enterprise of well-being.

Under capitalism, people who do not own capital spend all their time struggling to survive, and find themselves lacking when they can't quite reach the carrots being dangled at them. Those who fail completely blame themselves. People who manage to survive think the system is ok. Those who profit from it defend it to the hilt. All of these postures are part of the human psychic configuration. We’re living in a winner takes all world.

I see psychoanalysis as a way of toppling the inner, materialistic tyrant, and giving a voice to the altruistic, spiritual side of life. As a way of achieving individual democracy, which is necessary for peace within the individual, which is a requisite condition for peace between individuals, groups, countries, generations, etc.