4 hours ago
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James Webster flying implicit Mount Fuji.
In a imagination idiosyncratic says to me, “You person been near successful the dust.” An idiom for being near behind, outdone, but I perceive it literally. I’m covered successful particulate and near there. It’s successful my lungs. I am allergic to particulate mites. I besides retrieve its biblical twin: “Dust you are, and to particulate you volition return.” Another 1 bites the dust.
“Let maine punctual you that the connection pollution, with its spiritual and aesculapian origin, archetypal meant desecration of places of worship by excrement, and aboriginal the soiling of sheets by ejaculation, usually from masturbation,” the philosopher Michel Serres writes. I’ve been wondering astir the narration betwixt dreams and trash lately arsenic I perceive to patients. What parts of ourselves bash we permission lying around? Lacan was progressively preoccupied by the residue, oregon waste, excreted by our volition to representation. Our excessive intelligence efforts people the world successful some senses of stain and scratch. This thought seems to spell on with the expanding measurement of pollution, of trash, of civic sick will, that marks the extension, arsenic Serres writes, “of appropriated abstraction … and besides the summation successful the fig of subjects of appropriation—individual, family, nation.” Either we are inactive animals marking territory, oregon we person exceeded the carnal realm by attempting to people each territory—sea, earth, air, and adjacent outer space. My person laughed astatine the thought that we were excited by a hint of h2o connected Mars. “There’s truthful overmuch h2o here!” she exclaimed.
Serres calls for cosmopolitan dispossession earlier the warfare of each wars begins. No 1 willingly gives up ownership of anything, I think. Sacrifice, if we are to marque it, requires immoderate benignant of operation that wills america toward it. Freud, for his part, was funny successful the enlargement outward of the ego by time and its recoiling astatine nighttime successful dreams. I deliberation of patients who person tried to archer maine that dreams are conscionable the encephalon cleaning up trash. This isn’t possible. Not due to the fact that I judge successful dreams, but due to the fact that we don’t adjacent cognize what to bash with existent trash. Better interpretation: a absorption to the enactment of nocturnal emission. A cosmopolitan inclination toward debasement successful the sphere of dreams.
***
Dreams are trash. Dreams are ash. A antheral from Los Angeles near a tiny ziplock container of his ashes to maine successful his will. His ain ashes, not his location reduced to ashes by wildfire. This was made wide by my unease with the worldly successful the bag. In the dream, I was told I was 1 among galore to person this gift. I admired this “spreading” of himself aft death, which seems similar thing attributed to women by men. Day residue: a video of Palestinians sorting quality remains amid the rubble came crossed my feed. How bash you adjacent cognize what to look for? I wondered. Probably 1 learns. A diligent precocious told maine that communicative astir Keith Richards snorting his father’s ashes. The begetter is made immortal by this silly mythic tale. What lives connected of each these lives reduced to ash? A abstracted enactment of thought abruptly appears—drugs, oregon immoderate substance, successful tiny integrative bags. Matter is disseminated and past appropriated by our bodies. In my dream, this is reversed. The assemblage is circulated and made an entity of consumption. The second we sometimes telephone love.
***
In After Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus describes loved ones eating Acker’s ashes, which Kraus calls “cremains.” Never heard this violative portmanteau before. She quotes Matias Viegener: “What deed maine astir was that K would person nary prime astir whom her ashes inhabited.” Scattering them often proves much hard than you would expect. Some comical scenes of ashes blown backmost successful faces, similar Donny’s ceremonial successful The Big Lebowski. Continual unwitting depletion of ashes connected a Los Angeles beach. A sermon that drifts into the decease toll of the Vietnam War. “What the fuck does thing person to bash with Vietnam?” yells the Dude. The aforesaid beaches are present closed, arsenic carcinogenic worldly pools connected sand. Rain, moving done ash, carries pollutants downhill. The Pacific Ocean—black—will person to beryllium tested for harmless swimming conditions. A friend, her location adjacent to the Altadena fires, tells maine her citrus trees person grown fruits that look similar bananas.
***
The caller azygous is black, Baudelaire writes. An look of changeless mourning, a mendacious bid for equality done aesthetic conformity (or horde psychology), and a caller nonrecreational nationalist mentality: “political undertakers, amorous undertakers, bourgeois undertakers. We each observe immoderate benignant of funeral.” We are each funereal workers conducting our ain burials. The clip stamp of this diagnosis is astir 1850. According to Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire is the contradictory leader of a disappearing hint of life. “The satellite is astir to end,” writes Baudelaire. “The sole crushed it mightiness proceed connected is that it exists. … These times are possibly rather near; who knows whether they are not already upon us, and whether the coarsening of our quality is not the sole obstacle preventing america from recognizing the ambiance we breathe.”
“To fuck is to aspire to participate into another, and the creator ne'er leaves himself,” writes Baudelaire. Followed by, “I’ve forgotten the sanction of that bitch … Ah, what the hell, I’ll retrieve it connected Judgment Day.” According to Benjamin, a “measureless desolation” appears connected the skyline embodied by the miserable, misanthropic, and misogynist Baudelaire. My person Elissa Marder argued that helium was trying to inscribe representation onto the bodies of women, the past spot it mightiness hold. Who wouldn’t hatred them for that load and possibility? Baudelaire: Poetry became his existent mistress. He fto this caller world, which helium named “modernity,” discarded him, tally done him, and yet someway helium coarsens into our prophet. I’m told to bask this contradiction, but I’m having truthful overmuch trouble speechmaking him. Something is overly acquainted adjacent erstwhile foreign—so French.
Baudelaire is shocked by the everyday—its speed, its blankness. Our needs blunted successful the smooth, mechanized functioning of life. We are nostalgic but bare of experience. “On the vaporization and centralization of the Self. It each comes down to this,” Baudelaire begins his unfinished work My Heart Laid Bare. I consciousness myself turning into air. “Baudelaire battled the crowd—with the impotent rage of idiosyncratic warring the rainfall oregon the wind,” writes Benjamin. His modernity is simply a “star without atmosphere.” Benjamin is nodding to Nietzsche, who recovered his likeness successful the syphilitic writer and introjected him mimetically, copying him connection for connection into his diary.
A period and a fractional later, we are inactive saying it’s the extremity of the world, but our inability to admit the ambiance we respire is much literal. Baudelaire indulges the extremity openly with his bosom laid bare. How other should we observe our spiritual ruin? Nietzsche, arsenic if yet exhausted by Baudelaire’s relentless darkness, closes his manic diary abruptly. He turns the leafage with what feels similar utter exasperation and attempts to commencement anew, penning simply: “For a small caller air! …”
***
I erstwhile wrote astir a imagination wherever my maternal grandmother’s ashes were served to maine successful the signifier of toast. I was amused by the treble entendre.
***
“There is nary cure for the information of belonging to the world,” writes Bruno Latour, successful Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures connected the New Climatic Regime, respective years earlier his death. We lone person this earth. Without vegetation and microorganisms successful the soil, inorganic forces would reign arsenic they bash connected seemingly each different planet. Lightning would region nitrogen from the air, leaving astir of it dissolved successful the sea. The ungraded would beryllium filled with c dioxide. Oxygen was contamination until a life-form grabbed onto it, driving billions of different taxon into extinction. Will we hold the disappearance of our atmosphere? Embarrassing moment: Latour says it’s not apocalypse soon, it’s Apocalypse Now (exclamation point). French theorists’ obsession with American movies is truthful comic to me. Still, he’s right. Well earlier the dawn of SpaceX:
What nary longer makes immoderate consciousness is to transport oneself successful dreams, without obstacles and without attachments, into the large expanse of space. This time, we humans are not shocked to larn that the Earth nary longer occupies the halfway and that it spins aimlessly astir the Sun; no, if we are truthful profoundly shocked, it is connected the contrary due to the fact that we find ourselves astatine the halfway of its small universe, and due to the fact that we are imprisoned successful its minuscule section atmosphere.
Do you privation your aboriginal to beryllium among the stars successful abstraction oregon connected this planet? Elon Musk erstwhile asked, seemingly disgusted with belonging to this world.
I deliberation of my patient: She had a imagination that her parent took the reins of an aged equine and led her done a constrictive transition successful an aged location successful a mountainous scenery that led to different constrictive passage, successful different aged house, advertisement infinitum. The country is decidedly natural. But alternatively than emerging outside, she ends up further and further wrong herself—caught successful her grief astir aging, her grief astir not conceiving different child, her grief astir quality waste. Can idiosyncratic delight instrumentality the reins? She wants a beingness much pastoral. “Past oral,” I mutter. Latour wants america to recognize that determination is nary aviator oregon God we tin crook to. Even quality actors indispensable beryllium understood arsenic 1 bureau among others whose forces are perpetually colliding.
The past representation I saw that reminded maine of a streak of lightning was successful a video of a Black Hawk chopper colliding with an airplane implicit D.C. Trump: “Real calamity … a acheronian and excruciating nighttime … acold night, acold water.” My patients talk astir this level clang and the Federal Aviation Administration main who discontinue connected Inauguration Day: “I would judge the stripping of our past organization and earthy resources but not failed aerial postulation control. That’s chaos.” A man, precocious 1 night: “There person been 8 level crashes.” “Eight?” “Yes, determination were 2 much yesterday successful Arizona.” I travel upon this enactment successful Freud’s lecture, “The Question of a Weltanschauung”: “It is possible, indeed, that with our contiguous economical crisis, pursuing aft the Great War, we are lone paying the terms for our latest tremendous triumph implicit nature, the conquest of the air.”
***
Knowing that my begetter was successful the aviation helping of the Marine Corps, a psychoanalyst asked maine if I had work the out-of-print 1952 publication The Love and Fear of Flying, by Dr. Douglas D. Bond, who worked with pilots successful America and Britain during World War II. I waited with bated enactment for a copy, antecedently belonging to the U.S. Air Force, to arrive. This was Bond’s lone book. At the clip of his death, successful 1976, helium was a advisor to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I inactive find it hard to ideate specified a person. Would they inactive privation a psychoanalytic advisor today? Would I bash it if I could?
“Over and over,” Bond writes, “one hears this aforesaid refrain among flyers—the separateness of themselves from others; the unity of those who alert against those who bash not; the feeling that among them determination exists immoderate inexpressible enslaved … that lone successful the aerial are they whole; that determination they find thing agelong sought which allows the ultimate fulfillment of themselves.” To emotion flying, according to Bond, is to renounce women and find a hidden god. Pilots’ backstage lives connected the crushed with household are highly troubled. They are peculiarly inarticulate, since their libidinal lives are tied to thing inexpressibly intersexual astir flying. Pilots endure agelong combat missions, enclosed successful cockpits. “A striking happening astir aerial warfare is that it is practically silent.” They seldom brushwood enemies directly. These conditions assistance them support the dependable denial of danger. The emotion of flying unfolds nether a changeless menace of death—a menace they contradict by entering a authorities of mute ecstasy. They acquisition it, for the astir part, passively. And yet this surrender becomes the hallmark of a ultimate masculinity. Strange.
Bond wants the subject to recognize however this subtly constructed suicidality makes for the champion pilots. The question is 1 of knowing however and nether what conditions it breaks down. In Bond’s estimation, this has everything to bash with accidental events that link with unconscious determinants, whether that’s impotently witnessing one’s gunman look peril, seeing different level plummet to the ground, oregon watching the parachute of an admired chap airman drawback fire. What is called “flying fatigue” is not exhaustion, Bond argues, but the surfacing of unconscious meaning. A neurotic phobia is calved by accident. Emotional fears and conflicts statesman to erupt, shaking pilots’ religion successful their planes and their emotion of flying. Bond writes astir 1 aviator who became obsessed with checking his engine. His beloved uncle had died successful a car crash. That aged grief resurfaced aft helium watched different level clang erstwhile its motor took flak. He could nary longer entree the antiaircraft resoluteness helium erstwhile relied on. The Icarus analyzable is shattered.
Wouldn’t it beryllium tenable to fearfulness a level clang portion flying successful a combat zone? Yes, Bond writes—but not for pilots. If they are incapable to summon their anterior armor and rapidly recover, they should beryllium grounded indefinitely. The witnessing of an mishap volition pb to much and much overdetermined, neurotic accidents, which volition beryllium costly—not conscionable to the pilot, but to the subject arsenic well. Planes are expensive. In war, clip is of the essence.
Nothing successful the pilot’s past tin beryllium isolated to foretell a breakdown. Only cautious investigation tin beryllium undertaken. The resilient, businesslike aviator is genuinely libidinous successful his emotion for flight, immoderate the outgo to his mean life. Bond wants america to spot however his destiny is near to chance. As Yeats wrote of the airman,
Nor law, nor work bade maine fight,
Nor nationalist men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult successful the clouds;
I balanced all, brought each to mind,
The years to travel seemed discarded of breath,
A discarded of enactment the years behind
In equilibrium with this life, this death.
I accidental the expert who sent maine to this publication knew I had questions astir my father’s death, which bore traces of suicidality. His willingness to discarded what clip helium had near with me, his denial of decease to the precise past moment, ne'er being capable to accidental overmuch of thing to each other. Who dies similar this? Now I know. Pilots.
We are each paying the terms for the conquest of the air. Forward and backward successful clip is a discarded of enactment for those who delight successful a lonely rotation of the dice. If it was a caller world for those squadrons of fliers successful the large wars, this present feels similar a signature of the modern world. Isn’t it unusual watching truthful galore men rotation the dice with our lives these days? “Bearing you similar a girl, the ambiance spreads itself to you now. This is your place,” wrote the aviator and writer Fleming MacLiesh. Air, of course, is besides the mute articulation you alert through. For my part, I’ll spot my bets connected the ambiance without asking her to dispersed thing of herself to me.
***
The Piggle, published successful 1977, is D. W. Winnicott’s lawsuit survey of a two-year-old kid named Gabrielle. Piggle is simply a word of endearment. According to her parents, she hasn’t been herself since the commencement of her sister. Her parent seems disturbed by caller intonations successful her speech; she perpetually talks astir a achromatic mommy who appears successful the night. I’m amazed by however Gabrielle replicates the sounds of aerial successful sessions. A train: “Puffer puff—blow—blow—blow—puffer puffer puffer [sings] puffs blows.” A tractor successful the rain: “Tipple, topple, pitter patter, raindrops, I perceive thunder, I perceive thunder. Pitter patter raindrops. Here’s a antheral with glasses.” She comes to sessions with her daddy. She’s pleased to person this clip distant from the caller babe with him and Dr. Winnicott.
In sessions, Winnicott begins to absorption connected the Piggle’s greedy probe of the other’s body. She intelligibly has questions astir pregnancy, wondering wherever this caller babe came from. Black is the signifier that seems to basal successful for everything: hunger, the acheronian wrong of the body, demolition by greed (we person conscionable passed done World War II), intimate relationships that consciousness ruined by large feelings, the acheronian of region and separation, nighttime terrors.
Me [Winnicott]: Do you imagination astir it being achromatic inside?
Piggle [Gabrielle]: Piggle frightened.
One day, aft taking the stuffing retired of a doll, the Piggle begins excitedly talking astir her father’s “wee-wee” and her mother’s breasts. Later, Winnicott offers the pursuing interpretation:
Me [Winnicott]: You truly were a spot frightened conscionable past erstwhile you thought of eating the wrong retired of the wee-wee.
Gabrielle: Yes. Katchou! [by which she truly meant, “Isn’t it hot, and however bushed I am”].
What a chaotic interpretation! Everyone successful my speechmaking radical was aghast. Can you truly accidental this? To a child? Winnicott seems to privation to prehend Gabrielle’s aggression; assistance her instrumentality it each the way, instrumentality everything out. I’m pleased that the Piggle sneezes her statement successful accordance with her mode of aerial thinking.
Gabrielle seems to determination from wrong the claustrophobia of the household retired toward a satellite wherever she tin physique up a feeling of excitement that volition prolong her. I spot this arsenic a determination from blackness to air. She has a fabulous imagination wherever her household joins Winnicott successful his swimming pond filled with fish. He tells her the pond is his office, wherever they play with everything and tin ideate anything. This seems to delight her—a beingness wrong out.
Gabrielle and Winnicott play a crippled successful 1 of her past sessions successful which she bursts retired from the curtains yelling, “I americium the wind; look out!” He tells her she indispensable beryllium reasoning astir breathing, thing she could bask lone aft she was born. Winnicott reconstructs an extracurricular satellite for her. Or: a her connected the outside, which is comic since radical deliberation psychoanalysis is each astir getting successful interaction with one’s “insides.” The Piggle’s existent self, to usage Winnicott’s phrase, is an environment, not an entity.
***
A diligent has a imagination that he’s underwater, successful a bid of tunnels. He says to himself, “I’ve been present before.” He turns to me: “I’m reassuring myself that I cognize the mode out. It’s conscionable connected the different side.” But helium can’t find the exit, nor immoderate pouch of air. He tries to aquatics farther. Panicking, helium turns around. He’s lost. And past helium wakes up. I don’t accidental it to him, but helium has been determination before. That doesn’t mean he’ll cognize wherever to go. In fact, it’s astir an assurance that helium won’t find the mode out. Every hallucination successful psychoanalysis is lined with the representation of the maternal body. The gag is arsenic existent arsenic it is stupid: womb = tomb.
***
A person spoke to maine astir his brother, who had overdosed. “After astir a year,” helium said, “he is simply a portion of maine but besides a portion of history. I talk to him each day, but he’s gone from my life. Isn’t this what they accidental erstwhile they talk of angels?” I envied him his mourning. I don’t cognize wherever my begetter is. Still alive, backmost home; I haven’t bothered to call. Dead? I saw his dormant assemblage wrapped successful a polyester yellow-and-maroon Florida State Seminoles blanket. Vanished. Morphine and a unreality of ashes ejected from a propeller level crossed the Gold Coast. There, ever there, successful each dependable that withholds, censures, injures, oregon begs. Somehow this inactive counts arsenic mourning. Yesterday, successful a dream, his look wrong a French doc who asked maine to get connected apical (joke present astir mourn and mount). Why are you truthful old? I thought. Wouldn’t it person been amended to ask, Why are you truthful dead?
***
A diligent has a imagination successful which an infinite fig of tiny crabs crawl retired from her armpits. At first, it reads similar 1 of those dreams we cognize well—shame, bodily horror, the panic of thing multiplying beyond control. But she pauses. She tells maine the imagination felt unusual due to the fact that it seemed disconnected with however she’s been feeling—she says she’s further distant from each that now. In different dream, she’s astatine a edifice with me. She orders lobster. At the end, she’s disquieted astir paying. I joke, gently, “More crustaceans?” She remembers that recently, successful waking life, she wanted to bid lobster and was startled by the desire. “It’s not thing I’ve ever wanted,” she says. “I don’t adjacent truly cognize however to devour it.” How could privation conscionable get similar that? It does.
Then she remembers a puerility representation of a “Great Lobster Escape.” One summer, a neighbour bought each the lobsters from a section edifice and fto the kids merchandise them into the ocean. It was a saccharine gesture, meant to beryllium redemptive. But the adjacent morning, galore of the lobsters had washed up dead. The representation lingers; she is simply a crustacean trapped successful a vessel waiting to beryllium eaten oregon released successful a sham crippled for children saturated with big fantasies of freedom.
In different session, a imagination ends with an representation of explosions, shooting stars, a beauteous density successful the sky. The temper shifts—from awe to dread. She rises up into the air, surrounded by lights. I spot her similar this, the mode she disappears into the infinite. She sees herself arsenic mute, oregon astir so, but erstwhile her dependable emerges, it has this suspended, hovering quality—ephemeral, yet total. That aforesaid infinity threatens to vanish her, flood her with shame, erase articulation. But then, successful immoderate moments, it lifts her. It’s hard to enactment that edge. You ne'er cognize which is astatine hand. It’s hard for me, too—not to instrumentality from her what suffering besides gives. Her sublime sound. I wouldn’t instrumentality it if I could.
***
Swimming connected a reef, I travel a alternatively ample snapper for immoderate time. I play with wondering if it’s my father, since I cognize this fish. I cognize it due to the fact that of him. Snap her. I determine to aquatics backmost erstwhile a radical of incandescent squid look and look astatine me. Hovering 2 feet beneath the surface, the 3 of them alteration colour and aquatics successful zigzags. Their chromatophoric skin, drenched successful sunlight, changes colour to a hypnotic rhythm. Shockingly beauteous and unreal. The larger squid and its smaller companion determination successful synchrony, portion the third, besides small, stays disconnected to the side. It was similar this. They are reminding maine what it was like: either with him irrevocably, oregon alone, watching. There’s nary mode backmost oregon retired of this configuration. No mode through. I aquatics on. I bid the cephalopods adieu.
Jamieson Webster is simply a psychoanalyst and the author, astir recently, of On Breathing and Disorganization and Sex. She teaches astatine the New School for Social Research and Pulsion Psychoanalytic Institute.
