waiting for mothers to come

sitting on the smoking bench in the yard with a mug of tea. the fireworks have abated. there's a party going on in a house nearby and they're playing a pearl jam live album. an improvement on their usual speed metal.

i have no idea what to write... god this sounds like my morning pages... no idea what to write... for 3 feckin' pages...

something's been untethered from the sea bed and has been floating up out of my unconscious the past couple of days. so sigmund and i went diving today to see if we couldn't get a glimpse of its shape. we got somewhere but what that something was stays in that sacred space. but i can say it was a tiring experience. freudian psychodynamic therapy can be alternatively spelled b-l-o-o-d-y-h-a-r-d-w-o-r-k.

sometimes a blog is like a journal, sometimes like a notebook, and others a letter. so here's some thoughts from the latest adam phillips that have been revealing and resonating, followed by a message to ian, who i didn't know walked by this way until he left a message this evening, and maybe some other stuff...unless i fall asleep on the keys. i've just noticed i find it easier to touch type in the dark...

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From the Preface, which worth the cover price alone...the opening lines:

" 'Even as a grown-up', his biographer John Haffenden tells us, the writer William Empson 'would not forget the secrets of a happy childhood: one day, for instance, to the great glee of a friend's son, he stood on his hands and said the boy could have anything that fell out of his pockets.' Psychoanalysis can also be a way of not forgetting the secrets of a happy childhood. Indeed the game Empson played is more often than not what happens in psychoanalysis: the so-called patient does the difficult thing - talks of the things that trouble him - and the so-called psychoanalyst takes the fallout. Both the patient and the analyst are the recipient of these side effects, of all the things that are implied and unintended and alluded to as the patient speaks as freely as he is able, and begins to understand the ingenuities of the censorship he imposes on himself. Free assocaition, what is said by the way, what is said aside from the matter in hand, what is said 'off topic', is where the action of meaning and feeling is. In this picture digression is secular revelation, keeping to the subject is the best way we have of keeping off the subject; of speaking up without speaking out. 'Obscurity in a writer', Empson wrote, 'may be due not to concentration, but a refusal to speak out.' Psychoanalysis, essentially, is an attempt to redescribe the whole notion of concentration." p.xi

"Unexpected side effects are not what 'we' want; we prefer things (and people) that do only what they say they are going to do, because then, at least so the argument goes, we can decide whether we want them." p.xii

From essay entitled, the master mind lectures (originally a lecture on freud given in the Master-Mind series to the british academy) - a wonderfully lucid and accessible description of freud's invention of the unconcious and the experiment of psychotherapy. if you want to get familiar with what freud was trying to uncover and heal, look no further.

"It is worth noting...that in Freud's view we are, however unwittingly, the active makers of our slips. Reputedly normal people quite often 'make use' of slips, Freud writes, in order to find some way of expressing these unacceptable feleings, 'these amoral forces'. As though a slip were an opportunity or a genre, like the sonenet or a linguistic medium; as though we have been the artists of our amorality - the artists but also the pragmatists. We make use of slips as though they were one of our tools to get us from A to B, to realize one of our projects, to get us something we want. In replication of the external world Freud suggests that the internal world too has its higher, forbidding authorities - the mind too is a society - who, he says, won't recognize certain feelings. But if we can make use of these secret mesages called slips then there can be what Freud calls, pragmatically, a useful toleration of amorality', and these moments of linguistic carnival perform this amorality, they don't merely tolerate it (when I say, 'it was just a mistake' I'm hoping for tolerance). What might once have been called bad manners, a lack of self discipline, or indeed, a mistake is now being referred to by Freud as both a 'useful' tool and a moment of artfulness, a way of 'expressing' powerful feeling... he is encouraging us to be connoisseurs of our cover story." p.8-9


"Psychoanalysis, in short, is based on the idea that talking is different to thinking; and also that surprising or shocking oneself in the presence of another person is of value. Indeed, the point that such nourishing surprise, such productive shock, may be possible only, is made possible only, by the very presence of the other person. The project of the unacceptable in oneself is to make itself known. The forbidden, the transgressive, is always an annunciation." p.17

"In Freud's view the question of the modern individual seems to be asking herself is whether she can make her wanting compatible with her (psychic) survival. For Freud, to speak is to articulate one's wants, to make known to oneself what is absent, what of significance is lacking in one's life." p.18

"We cannot be helped but be harmed by what we cannot help but want." p.18

"As Freud tracked, in his clinical work, the ways in in which the old-fashioned solutions of childhood become the repititions of adulthood; and how repititions of adulthood; and how repitition was a refusal to remember, and how memory was full of hiding-places, he was struck by a peculiar fact: that suffering can sometimes be transformed by applying words to wounds, by being seen as meaningful." p.19

"..desire is usually the contemporary word for the risk not taken, for the missed opportunity; the unlived life that seems the only life worth living." p.20

all quotes taken from ::side effects:: by adam phillips, 2006.

::

hey ian

i do indeed remember you. nice to hear from you. greetings, salutations and sincere thanks for those words of encouragment.

i know you'll appreciate knowing that Pád got me candi staton's greatest hits for my birthday so i can recreate that particular gb highlight in the comfort of my own home. :0)

look forward to seeing you again sometime. i think i heard a rumour some of you may be in belfast soon but i think it might be while i'm away. if that's right, sorry i'll not be around to see you.

nice to have you in the virtual neighbourhood. my best to you and aaron (have i spelt that right? well, the nice young moot man who thought it safe to converse with me as i washed my hair, before i'd even had my morning coffee. good lord, you train your disciples to be brave. even i don't talk to me before coffee. anyhow,) hope you and he and your mootly crew (see what i did there?) are doing well. if any of you are planning to be at the divine comedy in london on the somethingth of november - duke special supporting, details at ticket master - please be sure to stop by the merch desk and say hi.

i'm gonna miss the next ikon :: the second coming:: due to the tour so shall miss br mark's inevitable attempt to convert us all out of undecidability.

slán.

::

the last 3 weeks have been full of good things and yet i find myself in the postion of not having really processed it all. of finding it hard to allow myself room to reflect and thus emotionally connect with all i've been feeling. so many good things. so many good people. so much receiving of good stuff. but also anxieties, fears, separations, leavings and losses and letting go... the joy and the sorrow all shoring up within and not getting adequate voice...

and the witholding is an act of protection for what lies deep within... the still small voice a friend calls it...the child self...

behind every anxiety is an even greater wish... and sometimes i guess we wish for what we can't have... and even if it were granted we would want to reject it for fear of the pain of losing it... and yet the anxiety persists to tell us we keep on desiring it anyway... the things we wish for can seem very real, immediate, tangible, at the surface, such as the desire for a meaningful intimacy in an i/thou encounter. others lie buried at the bottom of the ocean, down in the place of the past, before we had language, before we had the conscious, before we learnt there was a difference between i and thou...

LB,x