graine, redux, woolf, this prose

DISCLAMING: My tendency is to take work like this and file it away in a drawer. I pretend I do this out of compassion for possible readers. But come now, I do it because I do not want to be seen in this light. I want to choose my appearances carefully. And I am not an especially privileged or insightful judge of my work’s use to you. So here it is (actually yesterday’s too), I trust you can skim and skip as good as I can. But here’s what I am noting as I review this: that it becomes repressive, that it smothers, and that its brilliance lends itself not to enlivening, but to… what? I can’t label it, and I don’t want to pooh-pooh it further. The essay is a form whose impersonality can be demonic or daemonic, and lordy lord, if this one doesn’t slip – for me – between the two, although it opens up vital territory in its own particular way (why so loathe to admit it? – because its hurt repeatedly?). How that part which desires to make sense can itself easily, ever so easily, seductively become monster. One of the worst. To make sense of surroundings - not to experience the always-already existent sense. A hard day's work? - not working, not inventing cycles of work/rest.

What was it like to write it? Slightly uncomfortable, a hungry focus pushing on, circling back. The motions, in the end, tiring, dissociative. Its abstraction gutting my, and this, frame – it stalks it subject, and sails away from it, but enacts the very process it critiques : its distance a bridge to compassion or JUST MAYBE anything I write in this space (at work) is rabidly, violently insane, i.e. a work generated of unresolved tensions and conflicts. How to hold and articulate those then? This morning’s attempt… take it as further madness, like most madness, a raving will to live, a trapping to be free...

(Now those words felt sane)

graine, woolf

and to tire very easily of mute devotion and to want variety in love, though it would make him furious if Daisy loved anybody else, furious! For he was jealous, uncontrollably jealous by temperament. He suffered tortures! But where was his knife; his watch; his seals, his notecase, and Clarissa’s letter which he would not read again but liked to think of, and Daisy’s photograph? And now for dinner.

- Mrs.Dalloway

There are moments in the day that I have come to think of as abandonments. I owe this term to Teresa Sparks, who related it to the writer’s habit of working on a piece, building it up with an intensity which spoke of passion and commitment, only to suddenly and irrevocably sever that intensity mid-plateau, and park the frustrated fucker in the “drawer” cum hard drive.

The problem is that there is no cumming hard here – it’s a frustrating coitus interruptus, or really, coitus abandicus (Mword wonders if I meant to spell "bandicoots" here). Just when it starts to heat up, when the territory is exciting and powerful, when we start to get a little disheveled, in the moment, a little strange to ourselves (itself a familiar, slant feeling) then, the break, the back off, the smother. Its no coincidence that these moments are exactly when our life-limiting habits are simultaneously coursing strongly and in a relatively unguarded, openly visible state. What is it that shuts this door as quickly as it opens – that turns, in a sentence of consciousness, from fury and torture, to seals, a letter not to be read “but liked”, and off to dinner? And where, in what shape, does the echo of this frustration – this interruption, driven (consciously) underground – persist, dwell, in our bodies?

Its this habit, this move to close what is clearly a powerful subterranean well, a psychic geyser of repressed energy (if, like Woolf’s Peter Walsh, we find the strength of our own emotions unsettling, foreign, awkward, something to avoid and to later try to clean-up/explain) which renders our own emotions Other, and relegates them to shadow, to subjugation and censure and avoidance. It’s a move, a quick snap of the switch of mental attention, denying audience to some powerful upsurge, but why?

I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires
- Guy Debord

Walsh turns to toys, knick-knacks, sentiment, and the routine regularity of set mealtimes. This seems so familiar, this turning, this abandonment of his own greatest energies – at the very moment they present themselves. Familiar from daily encounters, from my own stream-of-consciousness, and from myriad cultural representations once the emotional intensity becomes coded as abnormal, malfunction, breakdown. Politically, the “eruption” of scandal – whether name-brand (DeLay, Abu Ghraib, Lewinsky, the latest celebrity divorce) or generic anonymous is handled in the same way: a defense team assembles about the “accused” and struggles mightily to stomp-out the accusations of rage, greed, lust, etc. An admission of guilt is seen as both humiliating and likely end to a career – the notable exceptions appearing almost as “miraculous” comeback kids.

This defense team is the very mechanism of psychic repression – if we took it back to Lacan, we would be talking about the Symbolic realm, the order of the Father. It is this defensive, goal-minded, career-egoistic behavior that the emotions threaten; they threaten its static stability, its fixed identities, its narratives of progress.

While we talk about a nervous breakdown, its not the nerves or emotions which “breakdown” (rather, they spring to dizzying life), but rather the subject’s transparency and fluidity in the discursive realms and roles demanded of adulthood – job function, citizen function, consumer function. And, heart-breakingly, these functions have become so demanding, so central and normative to symbolic narratives of identity, that when a friend, family member, or lover is in such a place, we often experience this what? - frustration, impatience, stagnation/confounding which often results in our repeated attempts to catalyze (i.e. fix, either directly or via distraction) “the problem” – as it becomes – or to abandon it (and therefore, abandon our intimate (and our own intimacy too) and return to the familiar, predictable workings of the Symbolic.

To go to Dinner, or return to work. These are – from the Symbolic opinion – reassuring, normal, orderly events to be relished when compared to the odd strength and dark uncertainty of intrusive, demanding emotions which know no timetable, have no clear guide or intent, can’t even be properly traced back in time to some specific cause. If we – immersed in the net of the Symbolic - do dally with them, much of the dalliance is generated from friction, a Symbolic resistance – to allow in, to listen to and accommodate the different, but undeniably powerful and real logic of the emotions. Hence much advice, the offering of strategies to get over/get on with it, offered medicinally – as curatives – in the same fashion as a doctor’s prescription for an upset stomach, or splint for a broken bone. The sense is there is something wrong, and it needs to be righted. And that it’s the doctor – or his pills – which will do the righting. The wrong dwells, inarticulate, helpless, in the body, asking for deliverance. Which arrives from outside – from the Symbolic. But is a broken heart equivalent to a broken shin, and can rage respond well to tablets of Tums?

Too abstract? I am not trying to state that we are all bad people who abandon their friends and repress their own emotional vitality and spontaneity, but I would be surprised if most of us did not experience some difficulty, often profound, when confronting a friend, lover, parent, child – and esp. ourself – in distress. Even laughing too loud, having too much fun, joyful wildness, is disruptive. How many movies bear one of these scenes where one guest’s incivility (manners being the Symbolic policing of affect) disrupts the dinner table?

The link between Modernism, Marxism and Psychoanalytic thought (and for many, from Benjamin on, various Mysticisms) has opened a wide vein of study of this tendency in the arts and literature. Surrealism comes to mind, and at an even rawer, ruder level, much Dada. Perhaps it’s the book I’m reading, but women seem often to be adepts at this work – or is it just I recognize it more clearly when it is Other? Not just Woolf, but Maya Deren, Djuna Barnes, and today, writers such as Renee Gladman,Bhanu Kapil, Summer Rodman and Teresa Sparks explore this rich, unsettling vein with remarkable veracity and fluidity, if not with untroubled ease. Rather, if this trouble, as always, is liquid, then they have learned to swim, passing the barrier of frustration/repression and diving down to this unconsciousness, to the realm of desires and aversions. Although not always surfacing again – Deren may have grown lost in Voudon, and Woolf fell prey to her despair, literally enacting the “drowning” sensation of one buried and oppressed by the heaviness of feeling.

Duncan comes to mind too – and even straight white post-avants can dip their toe in – the logic of Sean MacInnes work is a definite probing of emotional terrain, digging through sentimental encrustrations to contact less predictable moments of resonant lucidity. But the closer one stands to the Symbolic power nodes, the better one is at that game, and the harder, the less accessible such “radical” explorations, such “threatening” openings, seem. A mansion is a far greater investment than a one-bedroom apartment, or a cell. Its defenses are accordingly far more involved and elaborate.

I’m very excited about this thought-string. And I am equally saddened by its abstraction, its distancing, its predilection towards utilizing Symbolic means to critique the Symbolic. Whats the old situationist slogan - “One cannot end alienation with alienated means”? Then there’s:

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth
– Raoul Vaneigem, "The Revolution Of Everyday Life"

And not just because I want to wind it back now, to the subject of migraines, to the brainstem, to explore – and offer testimony – of how it might dwell in the body once denied conscious audience, how, like a scorned child, unable to speak to the parents and share its needs and experience, it sulks and tantrums and rots instead up and down the neck, in the back of the head, along the shoulder, in the pit of the eye. Except I am not – instead this piece tracks my motion away from this initial desire, is its betrayal, its abandonment. The circle closes not to bring revelation, but an annulling completion, a FINIS in which further participation is … I want to say an impossibility, but I don’t know – I’ve grown tired of writing this, the logic is unsustainable, falters, gives no further life, only questions about just how much its progress so far has enabled, and to what extent its been a further distraction, a new repress.