Category: Post

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A Session of Therapy

I was browsing recently in the works of my late friend Georg Garner, about whom I have written at some length already. This is what I stumbled on.

“[Il y a eu] un certain développement historique qui fait que, désormais, il faut faire tout un parcours psychanalytique pour retrouver l’Autre à l’intérieur, et non pas dans cette extériorité que le social aussi bien que le médiatique lui réservent.” (Les travaux d’Oedipe, p. 25.)

The way history has evolved we must from now on resort to psychoanalysis in order to find the Other within ourselves and not in the outer realm where society and its media project it.

***
The same day the following poem emerged: 

When it comes to incinerating
ants with a magnifying glass
or capturing bees bare-handed
to sequester them in old jam jars
filled with honeysuckle, breathing holes
punched by nail through their tin lids,
I’m passed master, though these minor
feats lie indistinct in the past.
The cruelty I practice now
begins with my own self, whom
I treat more like a bee than an ant.

***
In Truth Serum

 

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Once There Was a Thoroughfare

High in the Sierra the Interstate
cuts its own course above the dry creek bed,
its swerves matching the mountain sides
where math and matter marry to carve
the slopes I speed along, marvelling
at the mileage I make until, below,
I catch sight of a strip of buckled asphalt,
remnant of a turnpike no longer on the map.
This is how we age. Steep crests once
ground up laboriously in low gear are
blasted into empty air. One highway
replaces another. Weeds take root
in the cracks of the thoroughfare leading
nowhere. Above, traffic moves swiftly on.

***
Odd for me to realize that I wrote the first version almost thirty years ago, beating a retreat back to Canada on the I-5 somewhere near Mount Shasta.  An instance of what we might call senīlis praecox.