psyche in process – March, 2011

“psyche ist ausgedehnt, weiss nicht davon.”

Un: Ich bin gegangen davon (Wien, Vienne, Vienna) [Ego is gone from there]

1943:          Freud was carried across his threshold by his closest friends, transported- not a moment too soon – over the borders of the Eastern Reich as though by the West Wind, carried across France to London (though he didn’t see a lick of Paris) in the nick of time– bientôt, ce serait trop tard, va t’en aussitôt qu’on puisse, on lui a dit.  But he never thought he’d been carried away before.

1909:          Freud was carried across an ocean, stretched out past England, all in the spare Manhattan apartment of his (fellow) expatriate.  But this was just a hint, eine Winke, the senseless dream of a lonely man.

1914:          Freud was carried across among the English, in the stuffy Late Victorian apartment of the Lesser Stratchey, whose Standard Version lacked the Lytonnesque verve – that je ne sais quoi – de son Grand frère.

This is the story of how a simple German I (was) metamorphosed into the immortal Latinate Ego.  Standardized by this passage across two tongues, across two Wests – Even, Socratean – out from the city that once straddled East and West.

One-A Breath of air, the flight of reason

A flight, above or around, just around and autour, you get the sense that the butterfly is entirely two-dimensional – from up here, a plane folded to fit into this world, a form without depth, infinitely complex in its motion, still.  From the lumbering caterpillar (phalluses everywhere, yes), the butterfly is translated.  It stretches out its wings, ex-tends its self into the air, and so transcends both x and y, time and its unknown relative: Pysche becomes the air, immortalizing her self in the perfect imitation of death, making love with Love. (meta love beyond all sense hidden and unspeakable – SHE DOESN’T KNOW WHO SHE KNOWS EACH NIGHT- Sans queue ni tete, acephalitic, a-phallic, simply (caterpillar all gone), the straight grid étendu par la plié, stretched out beyond dimensionality, folding out from in from out – Descartes spins in his grave and she longs to know, longing, she stretches her tongue.

Eins- as if infinitely (as if the body were only ever something lickable)

Nancy reclaims Descartes quotidian letters, Cartesian everyday life.  “would make {Decartes} spin in his grave,” but who is this descartes, the spinner, extending the thread of his life beyond Death’s box.  What is his extension?  I dream of Descartes writing a letter to the Queen while nibbling on a sandwich, still yet unnamed. Descartes, though, translated through the body of Nancy, that vague smile of his headshot, that elegant woman on the cover of his Body.  Descartes spinning in his grave – the very idea would make Descartes spin in his grave.  The idea makes Descartes, makes the coffin, digs the grave, sets him spinning, and all the time Descartes is thinking “I am” from some breadthless point spirited far away. We go to overturn the Cartesian body and only we extend the boxes, gonflons le corps.  We inbox to outstretch – “an event both virtual and current.”  On étend le corps.  On s’étend le corps.  Le corps s’étend, and each gesture inwards moves further out, centrifugally forcing the box outward, creating a field of gravity in this field of bodies.  partes intraorbiting partes – les corps s’entendent bien: c’est l’espirit du/es corps.  L’éspirit dés corps, from the moment of the body, the momentous body, the pliant corpus.  over his dead body, we stretch this corpus out into life.  Incorporating generations of superstitious spirits who, still, suspect the truth.  The truth, spinning in his grave(s) – boxes, quotes, epigraphs, discoordonated within the infinitely bounded idea of infinity.  Draw his plane on the board, the face of his coffin, and mark your points. (if the line goes on forever, then God).

(going out on a limb)

My arm, drawing all my strength, stretches out, as though to rap on the side of this inflated coffin and ask (self-consciously), “is anyone home?”  As if Descartes’ in-body knew something, selfishly keeping it hidden inside his hungry sarcophagus.  But I, spaced out, suspect that I can never reach the coffin, but only build around it.  I don’t let this box myself in, though.  The signal-firing proprioceptive fibers from my skeletal extensors consume their own proper function in the doubtless shadow of a stretch.

heidegg(er)abbling – eye’s been (Da) I-ing you

Elin Diamond sits afar, in a studio, writing my name, rema(r)king my feminine qualities, my feminizing attribution that confuses “she is like me” with “I am like her,” that makes me feminine, allows me to enter femininity.  (if only I had had Descartes’ baguette!) Her heady gabbling Is been gazing on, Eros-like, and are we after all both pondering the same walnut that the shifting sun, and the serpentine (etymological?) roots of this ancient shade tree are calling – let’s say, nous appele – à mordre.  Saying, let’s die into knowledge, come back into ambrosia, que ce ne soit qu’un petite mort.