Tag: Friendship

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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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Ars poetica

We went to spot a trogon and I began to hum,
picking paces down a path greater than their sum.

Milky lime, the river, sometimes smoky jade;
in the brush, bromeliads; red orchids in the shade.

Cawing to the trogon as if we knew his sound,
we surely drove him farther in the dim background

where flashes off the river flitted with the breeze
and likenesses of birds flocked behind the trees.

At length we reached the ambit of a murmur
first confused. From hush there rose up whispers, firmer

round each bend, until we knew a roaring
falls could best explain the din, though its pouring

as it filled the pool came to form a quiet cove,
a hollowed cell recessed within the tangle of the grove.

I looked up through the rainbow spray where
my creature should have been, emerald scarlet in the air,

thoughts of ruby green. The water’s plunge made the bluff
beside it soar, but no bird perched up in that rough.

Mine remained the rarest bird, one that’s never flown.
The echo of his dearth is for my ears alone.

***
In Pastis.