The Signifying Function of Apples: On Love, Loss & Memory in Psychoanalytic Theory by Claire Burgner

The Signifying Function of Apples On Love, Loss & Memory in Psychoanalytic Theory

Claire-Madeline Culkin

The Signifying Function of Apples

A Thesis by Claire-Madeline Culkin on Love, Loss, & Memory in Psychoanalytic Theory

Submitted to Professor Miriam Steele of Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts for the degree of the Bachelors of Arts in Psychology

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Table of Contents

Forward On How to Pray 1 On What We Call Love 2 On The Signifying Function of Apples 3 On Letters Un-Sent and Un-Ending Afterward References

Forward

“I have come to believe that by and large the human family all has the same secrets, which are both very telling and very important to tell. They are telling in the sense that they tell what is perhaps the central paradox of our condition—that what we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are—even if we tell it only to ourselves— because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing.” Frederick Buechner

Faith & The Function of Language

Frederick Buechner is a theologian, known for the distinctive literary style he brings to religious writings. I don’t know anything about him, but I do know that if you want to write meaningfully about the human experience, from any theoretical background, you have to write, always, poetically. To write about the human experience is to tell the story of the way in which we come to know ourselves. It is not to articulate an autobiographical account of some series of events. It is to re-create the way one sentiment is situated about other sentiments. It is to describe the way in which some word or some sight or some smell strikes us, from which unravels a strange and yet totally sensible string of associations. I didn’t grow up in a religious household, but two encounters with religion that stand out to me are telling, and are important to tell, in this story of human secrets. One involves my grandmother. I’ve lived in my grandmother’s house, with my mother, since I was 7 months old, when my parents’ divorced. In my memory I am a child, and I cannot sleep. I walk down the hallway, turn left at the end of it, and enter my grandmother’s room. It is a square room, larger than there is furniture. The light from the street lamp situated beyond our front lawn enters the room through the window facing it and casts a shadow on the far wall of the blinds. The light, and the lines made by the shadow of the blinds, draws attention to this space—to all of this space. I notice this distinctly. It feels empty. The light falls onto my grandmother’s bed and off the edge of it. In it, I can see the shape of her body beneath her bed sheets. She is laying on the far side of it, where the light falls, the other side in complete darkness. I think of how she only ever slept (still only ever sleeps) on that side of the bed, a pillow next to her, placeholder for my grandfather’s absent body. It is this side of the bed that I climb

into. I tell my grandma I cannot sleep and she tells me to pray—tells me of the way she speaks at night to my grandfather whom she had lost in the very bed in which I found comfort just a few short months before I had, with my mother, moved in with her. I can still, in my memory, feel the warmth from her body—the strength in her legs next to mine, how ancient she felt next to me—and in remembering this I feel both gratitude and mourning: for having been that close, and for knowing I never will be again. Though she is still alive, she is different now, and I feel her slipping from me. I remember, then, also feeling, despite our proximity, at a remove from her. I recognized a boundary—some point of distinction—between she and I. I recall, after she had turned away from me, looking at her on the other side of the bed, the light from the window illuminating her body. I recall seeing this, and the stark white walls, still bright, even in the darkness, and the shadow from the streetlamp cast upon them; I recall seeing my grandmother and all this space in one concise frame of which I was not a part. This was a fact so distinctive to me that that the entire memory serves to communicate it. I think, also, of a memory of my younger half-brother. This memory feels like it must have been one of a series of memories—as though it was a memory of something that happened with regularity — but which I know must have been an isolated instance: I have only ever seen my half-brother a handful of times in my life. In this memory, we are in a room. The room is rectangular. It feels small in a way that has nothing to do with its size: it feels cluttered. The walls are patterned plaid with deep green and blue hues, like moss, and denim. I can’t stop noticing the endless lines that make up the pattern, all at once, and everywhere. It’s oppressive. The bed is small, and pushed up into a corner of the room. My brother is laying on it under a blanket that is rough to the touch. My stepmother and I are near the bed, though not in it. Exactly where we are in the space I cannot place. I do not know if I am to go to sleep in another room, or, in this home at all. I am not entirely sure exactly why I am here. I know this room to be situated on the north-east side of my stepmothers mother’s house, which means that, at this point in time, she has already divorced my father—the parent my brother and I share—and it feels as though he is not present. My stepmother is instructing my brother to pray. In recalling this, I see, with exactitude, his small face. I can see the way the shape of his lips are identical to mine—perfectly symmetrical and shaped like a heart. I can see, in his eyes, the same smooth richness that distinguishes my own irises, and this— this memory of sight—feels like a memory of love. I am looking at him—I notice nothing else—and from his mouth, I can hear a small, boy-ish voice, praying for mommy, praying for daddy, praying for our sister, Olivia, and praying for me. At this moment in my recollection, the memory unravels—leaves me nearly completely—the

specifics having dissolved into a pervasive feeling of guilt, which though undeniable, confuses me—seems out of context—as I look up, and find myself in my apartment in Chelsea, aged 22, researching my thesis. That’s the thing about memory. You don’t know how you got from one, to the other—how you got from now, to this or that then. Memory fails us, in a way. People talk often of the accuracy of memory, as though assessing the extent to which memory is reflective of reality is useful to understanding its purpose. The accuracy of memory is irrelevant to the function it serves. But this deficiency on the part of memory tells us something of ourselves; it tells us something of a divide that we find utterly intolerable. It tells us of a divide between the present, and the past—this is, after all, the superficial content of a memory. But it also tells us of a divide between the self and the other: remembering is a hopeless effort to hold onto hold someone who, even in the particular way in which they come back to us, tells us about the particular way in which they elude us—tells us about the particular way in which we elude ourselves. I don’t know how to pray, but I do know how to write, and it is in writing that I find peace. Writing is the way in which I tell the secret of who I truly and fully am—if only to myself. Which is where my interest in Freudian psychoanalytic theory originated: in writing as an associative process in which we assemble a narrative, construct a history, and in it, some semblance of a self. As a student in a prior life, of writing, I was arrested under the authority of artful devices. To be taught how to write is to be taught how to lie, convincingly. Writing is itself already an act of assembling a revisionist history. But there is a distinction between divisive deceit, and a representation, in language, of the discrepancies in our experiences that structure, sincerely, this split: between the past and the present; between others and ourselves. As a student, in this life, of psychology, I encountered Freudian psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic theory evaded me. But it enabled me to encounter, in language, the particular way in which I elude myself. In short, I, baffled, began writing: I began wrestling with the authority of the word. Which is where Freudian psychoanalysis begins: in a confrontation with silence, in a broken conversation, between yourself and yourself. Psychoanalysis requires a leap of faith and leaves you with more than this: with a legacy and a language, and with a personal relationship to a self that is God-like, both necessary, and barely believable, at its best. My attempt to educate myself, therefore, has been less an attempt to acquire some kind of body of knowledge than to develop some way of being. I have had to face some kind of inexplicable loss: the loss of myself into an unknown and unknowable past. I have had to find a way, through desire, out of this absence. I have written myself out of a fear-induced stasis in order to come out the other end of it—in order to construct my existence as a subject. Which is to say that I have learned something about desire and the absence of it. These are not

antithetical things defined by their opposition; they are two different things that share some other relationship. It is not that there is desire, and then there is not desire; it is that desire is a way out of nonexistence: it is that failure is a necessary pre-condition for anything that follows it. As I proceed in this piece of writing, I will, most certainly, fail. I will fail to raise specific questions, and at best, I will only provide approximate answers. I will not fault Freud, though someone ought to, and indeed plenty of people have. I will not praise him, either. The nature of my education has not positioned me in such a position of authority. But navigating my way through my personal history and through Freud is both something that I know better than anyone else, and something that has merit. My intent in this writing effort is to piece together the way in which I have pieced myself together through an encounter with particular psychoanalytic concepts that I think are foundational to psychoanalysis and that I believe are formative to the individual human subject. These are narcissism, mourning and ambivalence. These, I believe, both organize and collapse in love and in our memories. It is in this organization and this collapse that we both hide and keep these human secrets. It is in structuring them that we can both be known, and develop the capacity to know, both others and ourselves. I have encountered them in Freud, but experienced them in life—in the way in which one gives representation to life. In Joan Didion, and in Roland Barthes, I discovered my mourning for a past love, and for an impossible post. In Hamlet, I was able to make something of Freud’s Oedipus: I came to understand authority to be a necessary illusion, and one that necessarily must be undermined. In the photography of Nan Goldin, I confronted the brutality of the impossibility of the sexual relation—one that I experienced, but did not know well. In her photography, I recognized the brutality as existing in an encounter with this illusion of the authority of love; after we came face to face with it, we must come to accept the basic unreality of a belief in the other. In life, there is endless loss. We love, risking a nothing that is unknowable, for a nothing that we believe in but which will, in time, fail us. We risk a loss, for a love that will fail to aggregate into something appreciable; for a love that will measure to a memory at the same time as it fails to measure up to it. But in life, as in Freud’s theory, and in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, there is something about striving without the desire for success—about desire for desire’s sake—that is stunning. If this effort brings me one step closer to this capacity for desire, this capacity to know and be known, then I think that my work as an undergraduate preparing for advanced study in clinical psychology has proved purposeful.

On How to Pray

Scrambled Eggs

Today I made eggs, cracked their frail white shells on a bone-white bowl's edge, tipped their yolks into the hollow bottom of it. How it cradled them. Today, I ate eggs in small scrambled bits with my fork, slid my finger around the plate's surface, took up every last bit and licked my finger, like I was praying. How, this: my body, cradles me.

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“The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.” Homer The Iliad

The “Me” In Melancholy

Love & Loss (or) Is There Any Other Way? M y memories are scenes which structure a loss. In them, I am always the excluded term. I am separated from my grandmother in the bed, both by a split between shadow and light, and between generations. In a house that is not my home, I am separated from my halfbrother, whose relationship to its structure, structures the scene, and in it my separation from him, and from my father—from our father—an ‘our’ we could never claim. I string these words together, like beads of rosary; I write my mourning, pray for faith in a forgotten past. Freudian psychoanalytic theory begins with our forgotten origins, and with memory as structuring, in some way, this fundamental impossibility of knowing: the others, who bore us, and ourselves, in relationship to them. Freud observed this function of memory in his observations of normal and pathological mourning. In mourning, this gap—between the past and the present, between self and other—collapses. This space, which separates, is restructured—it is rendered temporally senseless. There is something about the way, in mourning, our relationship to time is re-configured around loss so as to avoid an acknowledgment of the fact of some absence. In mourning, people are forced to face a fundamental fact; a fact which, on normal days—days that come and go without a blip in our habitual action arc from waking to sleep—goes unnoticed. That fact is that we are trapped in time— trapped in our awareness of the fact that we are born, and then we die. We spend our lives dividing that period into manageable units so that we get from unit 1 to unit 2 convincing ourselves that the period thus measured was meaningful. When we talk about all of the meaning we have packed into those units,

we bend language around time with tense changes to talk ourselves around and out of it. We make language our best defense mechanism against the ultimate absence: the loss of this life, this self. Joan Didion calls this “Magical Thinking,” a term which she used for the title of a book she wrote after her daughter fell into a coma, and her husband unexpectedly dropped dead while she was preparing him a salad before dinner, as she always did (2005). Her daughter never woke up, and then she wrote another book about that and called it Blue Nights. You would think that these books are about understanding that death is a mundane occurrence, happens to every one, happens everyday. Didion writes: “life changes fast. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it changes” (2005). This is not the case. What Didion lays out on the first page of her book (and on every page that follows) is that it is impossible to comprehend such occurrences. What is so incomprehensible is that the strange version of time we conduct our existence within is ultimately a fantasy constructed from a series of wishes designed to deny the fact of loss, until death do us part. And then we are forced into the realization that we cannot wish ourselves alive—that we cannot wish ourselves into only ever approaching death but never actually reaching it. “We are condemned to live until we die” (Barthes, Leger & Howard, 2010). Roland Barthes said that in his book, Mourning Diaries. That book was also about the impossibility of comprehending death. It came out of a series of loose scraps of paper with which Barthes marked the passing of the days he endured after the passing of his mother. He also said: “Now, from time to time, there unexpectedly rises within me, like a bursting bubble: the realization that she no longer exists, she no longer exists, utterly unadjectival—dizzying because meaningless (without any possible interpretation)” (Barthes, Leger & Howard, 2010). The body lives until it dies. It is the mind—that elusive interior—that is condemned to do so. Freud & Oedipus Rex (or) The Wish to Kill The King This incapacity to deal with loss, for Freud, typified the human character in that he saw that it is an experience of loss that is the first psychically formative event that the entirety of the human psyche is constructed around. According to Freud, this first formative event is the loss of the breast. But more than that, it is the loss of a shared existence with an other. For much of a person’s developmental existence, one is, quite literally, connected in the physical sense, to an other. For some time during infancy, one does not recognize the physical fact of one’s separation from that other. It is when the infant realizes that he is a separate entity from its object of desire—its mother, which the breast becomes symbolic of—that the self and other which once were inextricably linked begins to divide, forming the ego.

It is also through this engagement of self and other—of the self with the mother as an authority figure—that the super-ego is formed. This similar process is uniquely significant because it indicates not just the physical fact of the relationship between what is internal and what is external but also the emotional fact of this relationship. Just as an infant desires the breast as a source of nourishment, the infant also desires the parent as a provider of love. For this reason, the infant must gradually renounce instincts through the psychosexual stages of development out of fear of disobeying the authority of the parent so as not to loose her love. The child makes a negotiation with himself: he will modify his behavior and internalize his frustration towards the mother who demanded he do so, instead of directing it outward and loosing her love. The resultant aggression is internalized, sent back to where it came from…directed towards his own ego” (Freud, 2010). “[In the ego] [the aggression] is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego” (Freud, 2010). In this way, human development is dictated by a series of negotiations made in order to navigate oneself around the fact of loss. During the Oedipal phase of development, this series of negotiations is made more complicated. Prior to this stage, negotiations are made within a relationship constituted by a two: that between the mother and the child. During the Oedipal stage of development, the child realizes that he is not alone in trying to tether himself to his mother. His father, too, is tethered to her, preventing him from ever being totally unified with her. So he wants to subtract his father from the equation of three and bring it back to a balance of two. However, doing so would be problematic because his mother would be sad, and begrudging of her son. So the child decides to accept this partial loss but only because he realizes he can make a negotiation with himself so that the partial loss is accounted for. He accounts for this loss by creating a secondary desire to become the kind of man his father is and decides to find a woman like his mother who will love him completely. Of course this is ridiculous, because the boy will never actually be his father and will never actually find his mother, but will only be and find a close second to the love he desires. This is, of course, also ridiculous as a myth. But there is an organizing principle in it which I think ought to be retained. For Freud, the series of negotiations we make during psychologically formative years are made in order to circumvent loss, to make loss partial. They serve, instead, to delude ourselves that we have done so. Loss, in this myth, becomes pervasive. Didion, in her most recent books, and Barthes in Mourning Diaries, was prompted to write about loss after confronting the physical loss of a loved one from their lives. The loss these authors write of, however, is a very different kind of loss—one that the physical absence of a person cannot come close to explaining. It is a loss that death forces to erupt through the surface of our lives but it is one which is not specific to loss in the physical sense.

Death does not mark the end of loss, it marks the beginning of endless loss. Yes, it is a physical fact that when someone is dead, their physical existence ceases. But it is also said that people persist after death, living ‘in memory’. We say this as though doing so is what the deceased wanted, chose even. The dead do not hang on because the dead do not wish. We wish. We hang on. Didion’s Blue Nights, about her daughter, ends with the following lines: “The fear is not for what is lost…The fear is for what is still to be lost. You may see nothing still to be lost. Yet there is no day…on which I do not see her.” Love Letter No. One Dear Ex-Lover, I would like you to know, that I have the book I assembled for you. I keep it in my fireplace, though if the fireplace were working I would not burn it. I don’t know why. The book holds no power over me anymore. Most days, I don’t even notice it, or catch, in passing, a glimpse at it’s front and back covers: a mouth, wrinkled, so elderly it doesn’t make you think of age, open in endless scream; and a road, electric with the sense of death opening from the frayed ends of the colorless grass it divides and the yellow lines drawn down the length of it like a warning sign. When I do accidently see it, I don’t believe it is the keeper of a secret, like the Bible I had made of it for enough time to be referred to as substantial and which felt to be a period that extend so far into the time that the only indication of its beginning would have to be inferred by how bright angel shale is folded over limestone. I don’t open the book and attempt to eradicate meaning from the typewritten words, as though if I cut the letters out and re-arranged them, I could reassemble your ghost and find you standing there, in front of me, on any given Sunday. The book now has become sort of like a piece of abandoned animal bone: hollow, the life force of the marrow withdrawn so far into its edifice that it evokes only a haunting sense that it once was something but now just seems strange, devoid of any fathomable meaning. I keep it next to my accumulation of Vogue magazines, and a coffee table book titled Camera Obscura. It’s more kitsch than anything else. It’s just something I’ve acquired, over these years. I say this to you as though intending to flaunt my triumph over the memory of you. But in the interest of full disclosure I must admit that this triumph was accidental, an unanticipated consequence of time. Till Death Due Us Part & I Do (or) Other Unconscious Vows Didion’s encounter with death (her confrontation with time, the beginning of her endless loss) occurred while she was making dinner. Her husband was waiting, like he always did, and she was

preparing a salad, like she always did. And then he dropped dead. Let’s re-consider the story: Take One: One day, your husband is waiting for you to prepare him a salad that he will eat for dinner. And then he dies. Take Two: One day, you were married, and almost every day thereafter, you slept next to a man you called your husband, and sometimes slept with him, but that was not the point of the story. Take Three: One day, you were married, and every day thereafter knew to wake up, and put your husband’s B-Complex vitamins in a Dixie cup next to the coffee maker, and knew to expect the mess he’d make in the bathroom after his shower with the water dripping off of his body and all and looked forward to cleaning it all up. And in the evening, too, knew to prepare salad for dinner because he liked it for aiding his digestion: what an easy decision. Closer. Take Four: One day you were married. And your husband became the sun that rises and sets and then also the moon that rises and sets afterward. And one day he died. And there was no more sun keeping the tiny earth that is the body you inhabit spinning around day in and day out. Love Letter No. Two Dear Ex Lover, I sometimes remember, absently (with no real feeling, like a foreign memory: untranslatable), the year I spent writing it. I put the book together as though constructing a gadget that integrated parts of you and parts of me, and would become our shared meaning; in the same way I might, if we were in our 30’s and lived in a house in the suburbs, prepare your coffee and put your B Complex vitamins in a Dixie cup next to the coffee maker at night and then go to sleep. And in the same way you might wake up, and push the button on the coffee maker, and brush your teeth, and never clean up the water that dripped off your body onto the tiles in front of the tub after your shower and leave the house always rushing, spilling your coffee all over yourself, and everything else, which I would wipe-up while my bread was toasting for my breakfast. Time & Life (or) A Basic Incongruence We feel, in the wake of a loved one’s death, like we are now only part of the person we once were. We feel like we will never be whole again. What makes mourning beginning-less, is that inherent in the encounter with death is the fact that, even in life, there was never total unification. We mourn not only for what is no longer; we mourn also, for what never was. Death creates an interesting predicament: it forces us to recognize that unification—that sense of having, holding, being with (as opposed to being

without)—was never total. Memory creates another interesting predicament: it prevents loss, too, from ever being total. It does this by equipping us with the capacity to suffer that painful fact of partial unification endlessly, in memory. We mourn for the dead. Then we mourn for their memory. And then, when we finally forget, we mourn for our having forgotten. I think of how Barthes feared the end of his mourning, as though to have a reason to be sad, would be better than having no reason to be anything at all. He wrote of this fear: “To see with horror as quite simply possible the moment when the memory of those words she spoke to me would no longer make me cry.” Love Letter No. Three And Dear Ex-Lover, Do you remember (and by remember I mean, have you also forgotten): how one day, I was struggling just to put one foot in front of the other and had retreated to my bed and let it hold me and read the book for the first time, ever. I believed I would find myself there. You walked in. You always walked in like you had a right to be there and also like you couldn’t figure out how to claim the space as yours. You’d open the door sharply as though a tool you could use to carve a place out for yourself. I was crying, silently. My tears dropped onto the pages lifting the ink from its neat arrangement in the letters that constructed my belief in you, leaving tiny puddles of type-writer ink that left the pages dry, and blotchy, and crinkled. You watched me disassemble with a strange sense of comfort, like you were watching me light a menorah and bless the first night’s candles, reciting ‘Baruch ata Adonai, Elohenu,’ or reading Goodnight Moon. I was lying on my stomach, my feet on the pillows on your side of the bed; and you found a place to settle, next to me. I could feel the pulse from your fingertips on the skin on my leg where you touched me—the entirety of your palm wrapped around my ankle like a rope supporting the trunk of a tree. I loved your pulse for two reason. One: It was the only thing that made you human. Two: It reminded me that I was human too. Later, you made me guacamole while I studied and offered it to me as though performing a transaction. You gave me crushed avocado instead of yourself. In exchange, I excused you from owing me honesty, or a place in your life. Then I put my things in a truck and left the state making the splinter that sliced first through everything, then through the surface, geographical. I had a recurrent dream over the last months we lived together that my pointer finger, up to the first knuckle from the nail was being chopped off by a butcher knife, clean and not at all bloody. I would wake up and look at

you sleeping and wait for you to wake up and roll over on top of me and put yourself inside of me. When you did, your skin and the physical dimension of your body felt like nothing. You looked into my eyes, and the sight of you was sterile. Over the several years that followed we were mailing the book back and forth to each other. Before we moved in together, you read it everyday. When we lived together, it sat on a shelf next to required reading for Multicultural Lit and reams of printer-paper, and I read it once, partially out loud, to you. Then we couldn’t decide whom it belonged to. Love & It’s Limitations (or) The Function of Language I think of some lines in a poem called “Those of Us Who Think we Know” by Stephen Dunn: Those of us who think we know the same secrets are silent together most of the time, for there is eloquence in desire, and for a while when in love and exhausted it’s enough to nod like shy horses and come together in a quiet ceremony of tongues. It’s in disappointment we look for words to convince us the spaces between stars are nothing to worry about, it’s when those secrets burst in that emptiness between our hearts and the lumps in our throats. And the words we find are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have. (Sater) ‘It’s in disappointment we look for words,’ and ‘the words we find are always insufficient.’ Yet the deficiency is ‘all we have’. Love, the failure of it, is all we have. I think, also, of some lines in Barthes’ Mourning Diaries: “’I suffer from maman’s death.’ (An

approach to reach the literal fact)” (2010). I note the words: ‘insufficient,’ and ‘approach;’ the way they suggesting nearing but never reaching, and also, partiality: that failure. There is something about loss that is, as Barthes terms it, ‘unadjectival.’ Deaths, and other kinds of losses, do not mark occurrences. They mark the failure of occurrences. Death is a failure, on the part of the heart, to beat. And what is more, it represents something that never actually happened but which we only ever fooled ourselves did. It is in this way that death is also indicative of another kind of failure: a failure on the part of our relationships, and all of our greatest efforts to maintain them, to integrate. These facts make the tragedy of death, and also of life, unspeakable. It is not that we cannot identify these facts; it is that we dare not let language approach such an identification. It is not just loss that is, for Freud, psychically formative, but the particular manner in which we circumvent it by forgetting. It is this forgetting—this series of internal negotiations we make between the limitations reality imposes on our wishes, and the compromises in our wishes we are willing to make—that sets in motion the whole of the human psyche, forming Id, Ego, and Super-Ego on one axis, as well as, on another axis, the Conscious, Pre-Conscious, and Un-Conscious. In his theoretical mapping of that second axis, Freud made the past determinant of the present. “The unconscious contains not simply what is not conscious or that of which we are at the moment unaware, it contains, he insisted, our forgotten origins. Yet to forget them is not to abolish them. On the contrary, to forget an event or motive is to conserve and even augment its importance. The stretches of the past stored in the unconscious only seem empty; in reality, they are burdened with the present” (Reiff, 1979). What we remember is intimately associated, psychically speaking, with what we forget. There is a relationship between what is forgotten, damned to be repressed into what Reiff calls the “false bottom of the psyche,” and what seeps into the conscious, fragmented and dislocated from it’s original placement in the spatial-temporal organization of our physical lives. It is this relationship that creates the structure of the component parts of our psyche and makes the present and the future forever indebted to the past. For Lacan, it is this tragic loss—the tragedy of life that is a series of endless losses—that makes life possible. The kind of loss that is endless, is the result of the impossibility of total unification with an other—the impossibility of the singular desire which perhaps all other desires come out of. According to Lacan, this essential problem is engendered in the linguistic function. “Lacanian discourse theory…starts from the assumption that communication is always a failure…that it has to be a failure” (Verhaeghe, 1999). At the basis of this failure is the nature of the ego, which keeps from itself knowledge of its own desire. This secret was kept long ago, a loss incurred as a cautionary measure against loosing one’s mother, one’s only love, during the Oedipal phase of development; it is, essentially, the function of repression. As a result, one cannot communicate one’s desire to an other with whom one is in relationship. “The bridge between agent and other is always a bridge too far, with the important result that the agent remains stuck

with an impossible desire” (Verhaeghe, 1999). The normality of this failure of the communicative function is such that it is a protective function; if we were able to successfully identify and accurately communicate our desire, the realization of “the perfect symbiotic relation” would “imply the end of our existence of subjects” (Verhaeghe, 1999). However imperfect this relationship, it is the context in which identity is created. For Lacan “identity is always outside with the other, or more precisely, in the particular relation to the other” (Verhaeghe, 1999). Love Letter No. Four And Dear Ex-Lover, Let me remind you that what the book meant, was that I belonged to you. I thought you might forget that, or all of the time we spent together in your dorm room. That room was angular, like the bones in your face. There were three windows adjacent to each other that looked awkwardly into other dorm rooms so the blinds were always closed, though they would have been anyway because that’s how you like to live: secretively. Between the windows and your door frame was your beaura, it’s door always open to reveal the mirror hung on the inside of it so you could look at yourself while you moved your clean laundry from your hamper haphazardly into drawers or onto the floor, or while you changed from one stained wife-beater into another, your index finger pulling taught the collar, your lips half-puckered, your eyes, mesmerized at the sight of yourself. Your room smelled metallic, like your breath in the morning, and like sweat, and cum. The halogen desk lamp reflected the blue of your comforter, and the grey of the floor, and it was like being in a prison that was, to you, more like a shrine for everything hideously human about yourself. You were bare. Your sexuality radiated from the crevices formed by your collar bones and the skin stretched over them like an un-holy light that didn’t inspire but paralyzed when you stared for too long at it. I used to find refuge in that room. When I couldn’t sleep, I’d walk from my building down the street in my pajamas and slippers carrying my student ID like a child with a stuffed animal over to your dorm building where I’d hand them my ID and enter it. I’d stand in your doorframe while you, barely conscious, sensed my presence and pulled me in so the shapes of our body fit together. Your body was my blanket. I was moved not by your hideousness itself, but by the authenticity of it. I was deeply yearning for authenticity and stumbling in my efforts to strive for it—stumbling into the sense that I was an apple fallen from the tree that bore it, misshapen and blemished, at my very best. Which is exactly who you believed I was.

Speech & Cure (or) The Language of Desire It is in language that Freudian psychoanalytic treatment begins. Though importantly it is not in the active function of language, or the way in which language asserts; instead, Freudian analytic work begins in silences, in failures of memory, in the inability to make an assertion. In Reiff’s interpretation, Freud ascribed, “the unique misery of man…to the discontinuous development of his memory” (1979). The sorrow that pervades our existence is a double-edged sword: it is not just that we don’t remember, but that we can never completely forget. And what is more, that what we have left in our memory of our origins is distorted around a denial of desire. Freud’s genius was in re-constructing the medium with which we construct our memories which are never accurate, and in which we assemble our sense of self which is always incomplete. Speech betrays. Speech breaks into awkward silences, barely audible utterances, stammering syllables. It is for this reason that language provides an entrance point into one’s psychological interior. Speech does to the mind what age does to the body: it betrays; it indicates loss; it foreshadows the end of things. Stephen Dunn told us that: And the words we find Are always insufficient, like love, though they are often lovely and all we have. (Sater) So does Hamlet, that mad and maddening Shakespearian anti-hero who provided a point of reference for Freud’s theory of the king who must be killed in a war that’s impossible to win. In waging this war, all Hamlet has are is his words. His words, too, are about love, and loss. They are maniacal; they attempt to cover up some loss, on the part of his mother, some failure, on the part of himself, and the undermining of an authority, in his father and in the function of kings. His incessant speech can be read as an effort to claim what has been lost. Such is the function of my letters. Love Letter No. Five I became trapped in your prison cell where I acquired a habit that felt like the sense of purpose I had been longing for, not of placing your B complex vitamins next to our coffee maker, but of genuflecting at the grotesque sight of you. In the evening, you manipulated my limbs and though I wasn’t unwilling to receive you, forced yourself inside of me. You pushed me against the wall until I became a part of it, and you painted with my skin, smearing it all over everything.

Your eyes took bites out of the sight of me. You re-strung my nerves and hung them like a chandelier, the sight of me pointless, a symbol of your power. And then you broke me. We crashed, the light bright for a moment so luminous it burned out fast and violent and the crystals shattered onto the floor leaving shards, which in the dull morning light where unspectacular. And in the morning, I watched you shovel scrambled eggs into your mouth with a fork, and home fries with small, diced pieces of sautéed onions, too brown, and too soggy. I watched you reach for a piece of buttered burnt toast with your fingers and tear a piece off and throw it in your mouth and chew it as you tore another piece, and put that piece in your mouth too until you could not tear off any more pieces and left the last bit sitting there in the mess on your plate. Then you grabbed a spoon, and ate a bowl of cereal, the milk dripping off of the spoon and onto the table, and then off of your chin, and onto your shirt. Then I watched you drink a glass of milk. It was grotesque. You slept. And I watched you do that too not for a moment wondering why. This was the way I loved you.

On What We Call Love

My eyelids blink lethargically allowing the sun to slip inside leaving traces of yellow both bright and browning. I watch their shapes change, as though looking through a microscope at sun cells. I must be awake now, I think. It is morning, regardless of the hour. Turning to my side, I pull the blankets between my legs, squish the crumpled sheets against my chest to ring out the remaining sleep, then unwind my body from my bed linens. I press my feet flat and firm against the floor. The wooden planks, though warmed from the sunlight, are cold in the way blankets are cold because they are not someone else’s body. Rising, I feel a part of the room, no different from the chair or the bookcase—a vacant structure. I blink and breath in the same way the clock turns its hands; a light bulb’s filament flickers. My weight pushes into the floor, which pushes back. Like hands that have been clasped for so long, it is difficult to determine what is feeling, and what is being felt. I have been standing for what feels like a moment, though I know from the length of my cigarette that it has been approximately four-and-a-half minuets when the day, as anticipated, arrives, but is nonetheless unexpected. As a traffic light, unmonitored, turns green; cars honk out of turn: so are the placement of the places I need to be—the when’s, and the why’s: disharmonious. I walk from this spot, to the bathroom. If someone were waiting, they’d say I am walking slowly, but no one is waiting, so I am walking in the absolute sense of the action. In the bathroom, I turn the sink’s silver knobs. Water crashes into the sink’s basin and spirals down the drain. I interfere with the water’s falling, cupping my hands beneath the spout as though I am receiving the Eucharist. I throw the water at my face. My eyes close prematurely and unnecessarily too tight. When my eyes open, I see, in the mirror, my face, vaguely recognizable. I stare passively. I blink. My wet eyelashes press against my check bones. Single drops of water slide down their pronounced slope, and then dangle from my jaw lane, trembling on the verge of detachment. I lick the water from my lips, then close them, forming an uncomplicated line. I know my body not because of the way it looks, but because of the particular way of feels. I turn the sink’s silver knobs again in the reverse direction to alleviate my ears from the stress of deciphering its dull and deadening noise. My hair, as I brush it, captures the light; it looks to be the light of dawn. I notice this, then think about what it feels like to look at his face when it is the first thing I see. His blue eyes are open because they are not closed and also because they are blue. My brown eyes are open because they are not closed, and also because they are what he sees. Remembering this feeling is the closest thing I have to a memory of infancy, by which I mean it is a memory of the oldest familiar feeling. The rest of the morning involves more objects that I touch in the process of getting out the door. It also involves an unsettled feeling which though familiar is always uncomfortable. I always long for the nighttime, which is to say that I long for the particular sense of longing I feel when I look at the moon, suspended in the sky’s infinite absence. Dizzied from our repetitious days, both the moon and I want a free fall followed by a crash that ceases our cycles.

Rosencrantz My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the king. Hamlet The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body. The king is a thing – Guildenstern A thing, my lord!? Hamlet Of nothing. William Shakespeare Hamlet

The Tragedy of Hamlet Or: “How to Kill Yourself in Order to Live”

The King Is a Thing Hamlet is a bewildering play. In it, almost nothing at all happens, except in bizarre accidents of plot, which do not reveal information but confuse what we already knew from the start. The narrative of the play is less like a structure and more like a collapse: the action, which directs its arch, is deferred by the very story line to which it belongs. The play begins with a question of the action that sets the stage of the first act: the castle at Elsinor in the Kingdom of Denmark is being guarded, but from an unknown threat. It is possible that the threat is coming from another country – from Norway – but it is also possible that the threat is coming from within the castle itself – from the new King Claudius – or from the other side – from the ghost of the killed King Hamlet. It is, in the beginning, impossible to tell. However, by the end of Act I, Hamlet knows for sure. There is a threat coming in from all there sides: from King Claudius who murdered his father, from the ghost of the killed King seeking revenge upon him, and from young Fortinbras of Norway, for what reason, it isn’t entirely clear. The predicament Hamlet finds himself in is that he cannot begin, on the basis of this knowledge, to act. It is this basic confusion about what exactly has happened and what ought to be done about it that makes it difficult to state directly what this play is about. On the level of plot, it can be said that the play is about Kings. The play begins with a Kingdom that is put in question. We find out later, that the Kingdom is put into question, because the King of the Kingdom has been murdered. The revenge plot that unfolds is told through the perspective of a son and Heir to the throne whose place is taken by his

Uncle, the now King, a man who robbed his brother of his life and took his wife, too. Throughout the play, everyone is calling on the dead King for some kind of answer. And when it comes, finally, to a tragic end, Denmark is defeated by the next in line to be King of Norway. OK. Kings. The play is about Kings. But on the level of meaning, this answer is not so simple. The title of the play, ‘Hamlet,’ is a reference to a kind of King, in particular to a would-be King whose place is usurped and whose authority is put perpetually into question: is he sad or is he mad? Is he mourning or has he lost is mind? The title is also a reference to a dwelling place – a place of belonging. Hamlet’s authority is first put into question when his father is murdered: an event that precipitates other events, all of which put into question Hamlet's relational position – his place. Firstly, Hamlet's mother becomes hitched to Hamlet's Uncle his father's brother. Secondly, the killed King Hamlet's brother becomes the new King of Denmark – King Claudius. Effectively, Hamlet's Father's position is taken, and, at the same time, because of this particularly incestuous configuration, so is Hamlet's location not just as a royal, but also as a son. His father is dead and, what is more, his mother is a whore. To say that the play is about Kings is immediately betrayed by the text, which is constantly putting the place of Kings into question. Though being a King ostensibly means something, it isn’t entirely clear what that something is. “The King is a thing,” Hamlet says, “a thing of nothing” (Shakespeare, 152). It logically follows that though a King has been lost, what, exactly has been lost in him is impossible to define, and therefore so is what Hamlet ought to do about it. The Question of Fathers The central question of the play turns on the level of plot, and the level of meaning, which share a precarious relationship in the play’s text and its action. “The body is with the King,” Hamlet says, “but the King is not with the body” (Shakespeare, 152). Hamlet’s punning reveals this disjointed relationship. In it, is posed a question about the relation between body and meaning – a question about what has been lost in his Father’s body, and if its possible to get it back, as well as of what implication this has for, Hamlet, the murdered King’s son. Shakespeare didn’t, in his writing of Hamlet, invent this question of Kings – of the relation between generations, and of fathers. Neither did Freud invent this question of Fathers, though he did draw on the play in question, in trying to make something of its central question, with his Oedipal theory. “The Father of psychoanalysis,” Verhaeghe writes, “is without doubt the man who elevated the importance of fatherhood to a hitherto undreamt level” (132). He goes on to point out, however, that there is a discrepancy between the fathers in Freud’s clinical encounters, and the father as he accounted for

him in his Oedipal theory. This discrepancy between the real and Oedipal father is not unlike the discrepancy found in Hamlet. In Hamlet, we find, also a real and ideal father. In Hamlet this discrepancy is made apparent in three ways. First, In King Hamlet’s murder we find that the value one holds as a King is only symbolic. It is contingent on one’s position in the monarchy. The meaning of a Kingship is unspecific to the individual, but is designated to him based on his place. In the occupation of Claudius in the throne, we are faced again with this discrepancy between the honorary title and the honor characteristic of the man who holds it: Claudius is a pig who has made of the royal court, a sty. Finally, in the young Hamlet we find a man whose agency is arrested under the weight of his own authority as a would-be King whose title and authority he cannot claim. There is a disjuncture, here, between the real and the symbolic. The symbolic and the real, in Freud, are similarly dislocated, so much so, that his theory is nearly as difficult to tolerate as a reading of the slow and senseless action of the tragedy of Hamlet. The Tragedy of Desire In his seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud introduces what would become a main tenant of his theory, the Oedipal Complex. In particular, he introduces the infantile complex in a section concerning the material of dreams concerning “deaths of persons whom the dreamer is fond” (272). These dreams, Freud deduced, reflect a repressed, unconscious wish that the parent in question die. Freud observed, the parent in question is always the same-sex parent: the child’s infantile rival. For Freud, this rivalry – this Hamlet-esque tragedy of betrayal and revenge – typifies the human character. It is a necessary condition to our existence. The Oedipal child exists in a network of desire constituted by three: a mother, a child, and a father. To exist in this network of three necessarily means someone is always being betrayed. The child experiences this betrayal most radically. For him, his mother’s love cannot be shared, in particular, with the father whom she loves, and who is not the son. So, in this myth, the child wants to avenge his father – the one who threatens his place – but can’t because his father is bigger than him, and would win. And because regardless of the score and how its settled, the mother would be bitter and begrudging of her son. However ridiculous this story sounds, there is something important in its dramatization, in particular with regard to the power relationship between the father and the son, and the stakes of their fight. In Freud’s “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, we see, in his theoretical movement from pre-Oedipal, to Oedipal, both the origin of this conflict and the resolution of it. In his psycho-sexual stages of development, we can see the elaboration of the Oedipal child’s desire and conflicts over it, which

begin at the breast of the mother, and ends (if all goes un-tragically well) at the genitals of the self. How we get from mother to me—from the body of the other (her breast) to my body (my genitals), is not quite clear. The loss of the mother (represented by the breast) to the father can be accepted when the child recognizes the anatomical distinction between the sexes; at this point, like Hamlet’s father’s ghost into the scene, enter castration anxiety. The child can, at this point, fear the father. The score is settled. Oedipus: 0. Father: 1. The question immediately corresponds to the question continually asked in the text of Hamlet: what is it that has been lost. Does Freud’s Oedipus loose his mother’s love, or does he loose his own penis? How is it that a loss can be registered on the level of the other, but incurred at the level of the self? How does this shift from the breast to the genitals serve to orient the relation between the body and meaning relative to a loss? And what function, exactly, does the father serve in constructing this relation? What we do know, is that to loose the breast and its symbolically orienting function is to be castrated. It is, essentially, to loose. In his “Three Essays”, Freud explains the function of the anatomical distinction between the sexes in establishing castration anxiety. “Little girls…when they see that boys’ genitals are formed differently from their own,” he explains, “are overcome by envy for the penis” (“Three Essays”, 122). There is a logical inconsistency in the Freud. If the penis is taken as real, and it is the boys’ penis which is being taken as significant, then the boy would not have an Oedipal complex; if the problem is that the girl realizes she has not got something, then she would be the only one who suffers a loss. But this is not true. The boy child, also, is in a position of lack: he has a penis, and it is not the one the mother wants. It is this not the one the mother wants that has consequences for both the male and the female child. It is not simply that a boy has something and a girl does not. It is that the child does not have something in relationship to the mother. If it is Hamlet’s experience of mourning that is what is so vexingly perplexing in the play, it is because in the face of this father’s death he faces the un-representable loss of his mother. It is she who the ghost of Hamlet’s father wishes remains alive, leaving her to agonize endlessly in her error. Similarly, Hamlet’s accusations against Claudius do not concern Claudius’ relation to his father’s murder, but Claudius’ relation to his mother and her whoredom; Claudius’ action is significant in so far as it exposes the loss of Gertrude to him. The Pre-Oedipal child is always loosing. So is Hamlet. He looses his father at the hands of his Uncle. He looses his mother to his Uncle’s desire for her and her consequent whoredom. He looses Ophelia to her family. He looses himself to his memories and to his madness. He even looses to Fortinbras’ army. Hamlet is always loosing; he is always loosing to all of these others. It is this to all of these others that makes psychoanalytic reading of Hamlet useful, not on the basis of a psychoanalytic

interpretation, but in order to answer questions Freud posed, and failed to answer in his Oedipal theory. It is this to all of these others that may help us answer a question of the discrepancy in Freud’s theoretical relation between the body, and it’s meaning, and so too, make meaning of Hamlet. A Thing of Nothing In thinking of the questions the Oedipus complex both raises and fails to answer in relationship to Hamlet, we have to ask ourselves, why is betrayal always murderous? We have to ask ourselves how the other annihilates the self and why avenging the murderer is the only way to live on? These are questions Hamlet raises. They are also questions the Oedipus complex raises. Importantly, both Hamlet and Freud’s Oedipus raise these questions in the face of the father. In the Shakespearean tragedy, Hamlet is unable to orient himself to his family and to the royal court, or, in any meaningful way, to basic action, in the presence of his father’s ghost. The absence of the father, serves to dis-locate Hamlet in an interesting way. There is a parallel in the Freudian myth of the tragedy of the human character to this orienting function of the father. In Freud’s Oedipus, it is by shifting one's identification position to the father that the child can resolve the Oedipus complex. If we think of the function of the anatomical distinction between the sexes in the face of the father, we may be able to situate the loss which is incurred in the disjuncture between the body and its meaning. It is here where we go back to the Oedipus complex, and back to the penis. As we said previously, the Oedipus complex is resolved when the child accepts castration – when the child accepts some loss. It is a loss which is incurred in relationship to the mother, but which becomes meaningful in relationship to the father. The female is defined as a shift back to the mother after she has identified with the father. This shift to the father enabled her to identify what exactly it is she has not got – that is, what exactly it is that the mother wants. The male is defined in the shift to the father on the basis of whom he can establish the symbolic value of the father's penis. Once the boy shifts his identification position to the father, the child can, on the basis of him, symbolize the mothers' desire. Having done so, the boy child, too, can identify what it is the mother wants. In both the male and the female Oedipus, it is only in relationship to the father’s position that the anatomical distinction between the sexes – the child’s genitals – acquires significance to castration anxiety. On the level of anatomy, it is the fathers' penis that has meaning. The penis, then, in the Freud, is significant because it serves the function of symbolically representing the desire of the mother. The penis is significant because it is a signifier. Lacan, Andre explains, theoretically accounted for the symbolic function of the father in a way

Freud did not. While Freud’s triangular model of identification involved the child, the mother, and the (real) father. For Lacan, it involved the symbolic function of the father. For Lacan, the phallace was the third term. When Lacan writes this triangle, it already presupposes that the symbolic agency of the father...is present, because the fact that the mother's object of desire is symbolized as a lack, in a signifier (as opposed to as a signified, in a real object), depends upon this symbolic agency. (113) Where as previous to the resolution of the Oedipus conflict, the desire of the mother annihilated the child who encountered an unfathomable loss in the face of her, after its resolution, the desire of the mother orients the child in some way to the family. The loss is still a loss, but it is a loss that is constituted on the level of the signifier: I am not what the mother wants. What the mother wants is impossible. The symbolic agency of the father – the phallus – is a signifier of the mother’s desire, in particular, the part and parcel of the desire that will never be fulfilled. The signifier is therefore a representation of a nothing. As such, it conceals a lack, which, in the signification of it, closes the gap between desire and the object of it – between the other and the self. The Lacanian signifier serves to structure the relation between the symbolic and the real, a relation, which neither Freud in his theory, nor Hamlet in his tragedy can reconcile. Hamlet’s staging of the mouse-trap-play is the closest thing to a deliberate action that he takes. “The play is the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (Shakespeare, 92). At best, he stages the actions of others who will represent the actions of the royal court he both ought and aims to avenge. In the soliloquy that follows however, it is apparent that even in this attempt at staging a symbolic revenge – a confrontation with the King’s conscience – Hamlet cannot tolerate this gap between the symbolic and the real inherent in the structure of the theatre. “Is it not monstrous that this player here, but in a fiction…could force his soul so to his own conceit…An all for nothing – for Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba that he should weep for her?” (Shakespeare, 89). Hecuba is a representative of a failure to represent loss. “What would he do had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have?” Hamlet questions, perplexed, and guilt-ridden, “Yet I…can say nothing – no, not for a King” (Shakespeare, 90). To Be & Not To Be Lacan, by substituting the penis for the phallace in Freud’s Oedipal equation de-literalized the myth in a way that allows us to deal with these questions about love and loss, murder, identity and revenge, on the level of the play. The phallace is a representative of a loss incurred in the impossible space

between self and other. Similarly, it is a loss and its represented that sets in motion the unraveling of the plot of Hamlet. In the unraveling of the story, there is, in the beginning, an empty place – a throne and crown – that must be claimed. There is a silence surrounding the loss of the King and the manner by which his place is vacated. This space and this silence are the stakes of Hamlet’s life, and they exist at the interface between his father’s death, and his own. Denmark is strangely disrupted and the guards want an answer; they demand the ghost to speak, to break the silence, to give meaning to these confusing events. Throughout the play, Hamlet speaks, ceaselessly, but his utterances hold no meaning. And when there is action, that action is accidental, made with great haste. Hamlet's actions precede speech; they precede conscious deliberation. This is a play about nothing, which proceeds in a non-narrative, in which the speech that drives the plot, and the action that constitutes its arch, is strangely dislocated. Life cannot just be thought, it has to be lived. Hamlet knows that. But why did he have to die? Why did Ophelia have to kill herself in order to live? What is the boundary between life and death? This is a chief concern in the play - the play is a meditation on this question at the same time as it provides no answers to it. But perhaps, instead, it demonstrates one. Given the form of the Shakespearean play, in which the script of the play and its basic action are together structured in its verbose language, looking for a demonstration in this relationship between speech and action, life and death, is perhaps fitting to its form. If Hamlet is not about Kings, then it is about the distinction between action and inaction – it is about the boundary between thoughtless action and thoughtful inaction. It is, essentially, a play about the impossible discordance between speech and deed and its tragic consequences. But at the same time as the characters speak incessantly of life in terms of being and ceasing to be – of being alive and dying as being basically opposite (“to be or not to be, that is the question”) – the action of the play betrays its basic script (Shakespeare, 97). People are always killing each other in order to live. Claudius takes king Hamlet's life, in order to assume the position of the King and take his place. Hamlet takes Laertes’ life in the process of getting to the King, whose place he wants. Ophelia takes her own life - a life others were constantly claiming as theirs – and in the moment of her death, claims her right to her life in her right to take it. To conceive of oneself, as an individual requires an other, at the same time as the other basically threatens the individual. Desire is, in both Hamlet and Freud’s Oedipus, murderous. In Hamlet, Claudius’ must kill King Hamlet in order to be with the object of his desire, Queen Gertrude. In, Freud’s Oedipus, the desire of the mother annihilates the child insofar as so long as the child believes that he fulfills his mother’s desire he cannot have his own. Desire devours. Our desire, devours others. Our desire is devoured by other’s.

We do not live between life and death; “to be or not to be”, is not, exactly the question. We live between others and ourselves. It is this space – this symbolic, inter-subjective space – of which life and death are the stakes. To claim that space – to claim one's life, to establish a subjective position – is always a matter of life and death (read: life and death, as in, simultaneously, as opposed to one or the other). This simultaneous experience of death and life in the face of the other makes the boundary between the two, slippery. The Freudian character is fallible; it is prone to fracturing in particular ways which are difficult to conceptualize, and once comprehended, are difficult to tolerate. So is Hamlet; he pauses, he falters, he pontificates and fails to act and we hate him for it. Importantly, he does all of this in the face of a loss that cannot be signified because everyone in the royal court is silent on the matter, and the only one who speaks of it, has no kingly body to speak of. For Murder, Though it Have No Tongue, Will Speak Just as Freud’s Oedipus is arrested by other’s desire, it is the desire of all of these others that traps Hamlet in the prison of Denmark. In act 1 scene 2 Claudius holds a council in the castle to establish his place as King to the court and makes a claim regarding the state of Denmark and a Kingly promise to protect it from young Fortinbras, of Norway, the outside threat. Concurrently, Claudius uses this speech to situate himself as a father to Hamlet and solicits him to silence his desire on behalf of his own. He is not to go to Wittenberg, for college, as he wishes, but is to keep close under the King’s reign. Hamlet’s desire is spoken through the mouth of Claudius and is sacrificed to his maternal loyalty. He submits, but to his mother’s desire. “I shall in all my best obey you, madam” (Shakespear, 20). By Scene 5 of that same act, Hamlet’s desire is silenced again, this time, in the face of his father’s ghost. Having heard of the crowned King’s murderous incest, Hamlet vows to avenge him and devotes his desire to that of the dead King’s. “Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe. Remember thee?...From the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past, that youth and observations copied there, and thy commandment all alone shall live within the book and volume of my brain” (Shakespeare, 47). Hamlet’s sacrificial words speak to Wittenberg. Having just learned of his desire to go to return to college, where he had developed as an individual under the influence of the institutions of higher learning, he now defers his desire to his father’s, using the language of the experiences in which he had initially laid claim to it. The conflict of the Oedipus complex is between the other’s desire, and one’s own. The shift from the mother to the father through the Oedipal situation enables a movement from passive object of, to active subject with, desire. It is a movement from death to life via the other. Because the play in question

is structured around death and mourning, which serves as a means from a collapse of its plot to a structure of its action, it is useful to use Freud’s paper “Mourning and Melancholia” as a reference point. As Lacan points out in his analysis of the play in question, “from one end of Hamlet to the other, all anyone talks about is mourning” (Lacan, 109). There are several questions sustained through the text of Hamlet surrounding death and loss. Firstly, King Hamlet has died, and we don’t know how. Secondly, there is the question of the proper time and manner of mourning: Hamlet has grieved too long, Gertrude has not grieved long enough. Thirdly, there is the question of what it is that Hamlet has lost: in terms of the plot, Hamlet has lost his father, but in terms of the text, Hamlet incessesently references the loss of his mother to her whoredom. And then, of course, there is the loss of Hamlet’s place in the patriarchal lineage and with it his pride in his country, which concerns Hamlet throughout the play. Disgusted with Claudius’ gluttony, Hamlet, to Horatio complains with concern: “This heavy-headed revel east and west makes us traduced and taxed of other nations. They clepe us drunkards with swinish phrase soil our addition and indeed it takes from our achievements” (Shakespeare, 37). It is interesting, then, that Freud provides, as his definition of mourning, “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one's country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (Freud, 243). Also interesting to Hamlet, is the relation Freud notices between pathologically and normal mourning. A real or perceived loss can result either in normal mourning, or melancholia; in this case, Freud explains, “we consequently suspect them of a pathological disposition” (243). Hamlet’s apparently pathological disposition is the exclusive concern of the entirety of act 2. After Ophelia comes to her father with concern for Hamlet’s horrific behavior, a bizarre sequence of spying ensues. “He is mad, ‘tis true: ‘tis true” (Shakespeare, 65). Polonius and Claudius together spy on Hamlet in a set-up with Ophelia to expose the secret of his love for her and his bereavement in the face of the loss of it. Independently of Polonius, Claudius and Gertrude summon Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on the pathological Prince with perplexing intent. Together with these suspicious schoolmates, Hamlet sets up the mouse-trap play to eye the King and spy on his conscience. In thinking of what to make of all of this spying, we can confide in Polonius and his shameless sermonizing. “By indirections find directions out,” he says, instructing Reynaldo on how to spy on his son, Laertes (a separate matter all together from the spying he sets up of the somber prince) (Shakespear, 57). The truth in, Hamlet, can only be exposed through a third set of eyes who spies on the one on behalf of the other. Polonius pontificating brings me back to our questions surrounding the perplexing network of desire in Freud’s Oedipus. In the Oedipal myth, the only way to define the familial desire is through the eyes of the father who serves to spy for the son on behalf of the mother – of her desire.

In the Freud, desire is arrested between the mother and the child in narcissism. It is this narcissistic nature of love that Freud saw as prompting mourning or melancholia in the face of a real or an ideal loss. What distinguishes normal from pathological mourning is the turning round on the self of the feelings toward the lost love object. Freud explains, “the melancholic displays something else besides which is lacking mourning—an extraordinary dimunition in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale” (246). He continues, “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself” (Freud, 246). This turning round reflects the incorporation of the other into the self in narcissism. Freud explains, “we see how, [in the melancholic] one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and as it were, takes it as its object” (247). We see, in Hamlet, this turning round from mourning into melancholia. Hamlet’s troubling transformation takes place on the castle grounds when he comes face to face with his fathers ghost. He begins to feel, himself, dejected, and cannot directly address the source of his sadness. Where as previously he speaks only of the loss of his father, now, his mother becomes a subject of his speech which he uses to debase her, as he does Ophelia, his once lover, and importantly, too, in his soliloquies, himself. “Now I am alone…am I a coward?...That I, the son of a dear father’s murdered, prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, must like a whore unpack my heart with words…For murder, through it have no tongue, will speak.” (Shakespeare, 91). These Words, Like Daggers “The most remarkable characteristic of melancholia,” Freud continues, “is its tendency to change round into mania” (253). For Freud, mania, as compared to melancholia was opposite in its symptoms, but, as Freud observed in his cases and as we will in Hamlet, they are similar insofar as both symptomologies involve a response to a loss and serve as a kind of revenge. “Mania is no different from…melancholia in that both disorders are wrestling to the same complex” (“Mourning,” 254). In this way, melancholia and mania are less opposite from one another than they are each other’s inverse. Where as melancholia is a response to the loss of the other, mania can be understood as a response to the loss of the self. The complex these two conditions share is a conflict in desire. The issue remains how to exist in a relationship arrested by desire between subject and object—between other and self. The normal process of mourning, Freud maintains, is an unconscious act of murder which functions. The pathological process of melancholia which slips easily into the suicidal impulse is a conscious act of murder staged by the self to symbolically structure the other into the scene which fails, (assuming the suicide succeeds). Where as melancholia is the fatal consequence of a loss, mania is triumphant by virtue of it.

What appears in Hamlet to be madness, which puts his character into question, is actually a markedly more useful technique than we give him credit for. After the staging of the mouse-trap play, we see Hamlet’s melancholia make this inverse turn into mania. He stages his sadness, structures the other who structured him out into a play. In so doing, Hamlet begins to come closer to the meaning of Hecuba—to an understanding of the symbolic. Where as prior to the play-within-the-play Hamlet failed to represent loss, subsequent to it, Hamlet is no longer succumbed to silence. His speech, however maddening, is still more than this. What makes mania masterful is the way it enables the subject to put his desire into the world, in speech. Words, though they are not actions, are still closer to them, still. It is not insignificant that after the mouse-trap-play Hamlet takes his first action, however accidental in its consequences. While condemning Gertrude to her guilt with his words, like daggers, Hamlet thinks he hears a mouse moving about behind the curtain. With great haste, he hurls his sword through the screen and murders Polonius who was planted there, a spy, a third set of eyes. “O, what a rash and bloody deed is this!” Gertrude cries (Shakespeare, 135). “A bloody deed?” Hamlet comes back with, cunningly, “Almost as bad, good mother, as kill a king and marry with his brother” (Shakespeare, 135). This putting of one’s desire into play in the world, symbolically in speech or directly through action is the surmounting of the Oedipus complex—it is a way out of it. Mourning, for Hamlet is a means by which he escapes the submission of his desire to all of these others—that is, the narcissism, which traps him in their desire—and succeeds at something else. Interestingly, Lacan points out, it is Hamlet’s father’s ghost who undermines him as he condemns Gertrude to her guilt, on his behalf. “As kill a king?” Gertrude questions. “Ay, lady, ‘twas was my word” (Shakespeare, 136). And his words, vengeful and raging on behalf of his father, affect Gertrude. “O Hamlet, speak no more,” the Queen pleads, “thou turn’st mine eyes into my every soul” (Shakespeare, 138). She cringes under her conscience, until the ghost enters the scene and sells his son out, turning the question again on the Hamlet’s sanity. “A’las, he’s mad”, Gertrude concludes. A conclusion, which Hamlet challenges with the words, “my madness speaks” (Shakespeare, 140, 143). In this play, madness is always speaking. There is always this question of what Hamlet is saying, and what Hamlet sees. There is always this question of what others see, in Hamlet or hear in his words. Hamlet's words have the power to constitute reality, and they put others' reality as they know it into question. "Have you eyes? Have you eyes?" Hamlet asks Gertrude, in the face of his Father’s ghost. Although she claims to not have seen, we know that when she leaves Hamlet, she exclaims to herself, despairingly, "what have I seen?" (Shakespeare, 148). Hearing and seeing are in this way made interchangeable. This move from melancholia to madness – from death to representation – is, for Lacan, an “encounter...with a form of death that lies at the heart of desire” (Lacan, 110). The entry into language involves a similar kind of castration as is incurred in the Oedipus complex. Similarly as we are alienated in

our narcissistic image with the other—in our lack, as object—we are alienated in language in so far as representation on the level of the world involves the substitution of a thing for the signifier of it. There is a space, between self and other, between signified and signifier which cannot be reconciled. Insofar as suicide notes are a literal representation of a death they are useful to take up. This relation between mourning and representation in action and speech is what Marc Etkind finds in the notes left behind in a suicide. In the suicidal act, and its articulation, is an attempt to reconcile this disjuncture between self and other, in an action and the way in which it is given particular meaning in it’s linguistic representation. As Etkin notes, the suicide note became a structured into the suicide with the emergence of a confluence of factors – factors all converging around the word, and the other. He explains, “in the eighteenth century, with a dramatic increase in literacy, a few eccentric souls decided they would attempt communication, even if it meant eternal damnation…At the same time, newspapers catering to the growing masses of the newly literate decided to publish these last-moment messages. Etkin notes that the printing press “gave potential suicides, for the first time in history, access to a mass audience…Suicide was now an act of self-expression” (2). The suicide note seems to situate the self within the context of the other. In an act committed by oneself, against oneself, the individual, in the word, symbolically relates that act to others, realizing, in this way, their revenge in a symbolic act of murder in which the self is s stand it, scarified as a signifier of the other. “Dead Betty: I hate you. Love, George.” (Etkin, 9). In the every eloquent words of Etkin , “this brief suicide note explains so much” (9). Alas, Poor Yorik But for Lacan, the ability for language is also an achievement. In language this relationship between ourselves and smothering others can be arranged in a way that functions even as it fails. It is this ability for representation that Hamlet progressively produces, throughout the remainder of act 5 and which collapses in a sacrificial act of suicide and murder. One scene, in particular, is important to this progression of representation which takes place at Ophelia’s grave. As the grave-digger is preparing Ophelia’s coffin Hamlet engages in a conversation over death and the meaning of life. There is a conflict here, a pomp and wit sequence, between Hamlet and the man he preceieves to be peasent, but who is meaningfully situated within his personal history. The

grave digger uses a skull upon which to meditate on these questions. The particular skull he uses, it is revealed, belongs to Yorik, a court jester who had lived under the Killed King. In their banter, we learn that Hamlet’s father defeated Fortinbras’ army on the day of Hamlet’s birth, a fact which he recalls in remembering Yorik. This memory inspired by the meditiation on poor Yorik, is the closest memory Hamlet has to his childhood – to a memory of life before his father’s murder. The only match for Hamlet’s madness is the grave-digger clown (as referred to in text): a comical and crass man, who began diging graves on the day of the defeat of Norway to Hamlet’s Father’s and so too the day of his birth. This scene situates Hamlet meaningfully in this tragedy—in the particularities of it’s collapse—in a way that compound loss and help us to define what it is that has been lost in his father. The Rest is Silence We began this paper with a strange and tertiary threat. The question of the play’s point revolved around a question of the threat’s origin. Having carried out this analysis, it seems to now center less around where the threat is coming from than who it is that’s beaing threatened. Hamlet—his ‘Hamlet,’ his place—is being threatened, from all three sides. To the threat from within—to King Claudios—Hamlet loooses himself to the desire mother. To the threat from the other side— to the ghost of King Hamlet—Hamlet looses his desire to the deisre of his father. And to the threat from without—to young Fortinbras of Norway—Hamlet had already lost the Crown and the questionable Kingship it allows for from the beginning. By the time Hamlet effectively executes his revenge and resolves the play’s plot, he has already been fatally wounded with a strategically posioned swoard in a set-up dual between he and Laertes, coordinated by King Claudious. Claduious’ plan fails, in the tragically comic way that makes this play so entertaining. His mobled queen ends up drinking the fatal cup of wine he had intended for Hamlet’s carefully coordinated celebtration of his fencing feat with Laertes. And Laertes, in a scuffle, ends up switching swoards so it’s Laertes who gets speared with the deadly dagger. Once wounded and waiting for the poision to win the day, Hamlet finally takes revenge, avenging the murderer by murdering him. With the marked words “The King, the King’s to blame!,” he makes his fatal mark and seals Claudious’ fate, his life sacrified in his seeking vengence (223). What is tragic, also, though, is the way in which Hamlet’s revenge plot suceeeds. He suceeds in seeking revenge only when he knows of his own death. It’s not just that Hamlet dies that makes Hamlet a tragedy, its that he has to kill himself in order to live. At this point in the plot Hamlet is able to act on behalf of the desire of the other in a way that structures his own relational to it. We see this in his movement from silence, to speech, to deed, and in the progressive representation of an unknown loss to

one that at least can be constituted in some way. Hamlet looses everything and in so doing lays claim to his life. After Hamlet takes his last breath, the young Fortinbras marches in, comedically victorious, the cometping desires of Elisnor having caused the castle to crumble from within. It’s as though he was fated to win, which is to say it’s as though Hamlet was fated to loose from the out-set. Which is the moral of the story, if there is one, in a play when everyone is manipulating eachother’s motives in order to indirectly incarnate their own intent. The moral of the story is that in order to live you have to experience a kind of death. “To be or not to be” is the central question of the play which provides, in the particular structure of the plot in which it’s posed, a rather unexpected answer. It is a question of how to die, and yet still live. Which is to say that life and death are not opposites, but are, rather, the stakes of one another insofar as they structure human subjectivity. We move from a radical annhiliation in the face of the other’s desire – a narcisistic death – to a representation of the incurred loss – to something that is both less than and more than this; to something that is worth both dying over, and living for.

On The Signifying Function of Apples

Apples used to hold a meaning now beyond me, I think, in recalling that picture I took of you when we drove up to Vermont. We picked apples all afternoon, made pies in the fading sun, baked the left-overs with Brie cheese on them. In that picture, your wrists and hands were captured in the frame. Your hands were cupped and placed one on top of the other, cradling an apple mostly red but also green. It looked as if your fingers, spindly and calloused from playing the guitar, were branches growing from your wrist, the trunk of a tree. I recall how this meant birth; how it, somehow, also meant me. But I couldn’t tell you why. That was a time when I wasn’t entirely sure if I was being born or dying; a time when the distinction between the two seemed to me a semantic failure to identify the particular nature of their opposition which was not a difference between being and ceasing to be—between action and inaction— but rather some other precipice from which one could fall in either direction, but could still only fall. I remember that song by The National that went “it’s hard to keep track of you, falling through the sky.” But that came later. Before that, there was Boston, where I wandered; a city that felt to be contained in a dream; a city that was spatially and temporally senseless. I was peculiarly interested in maps at that time—maps of a variety of specific locations from a variety of different periods; maps of the whole world; maps of cities; maps of parts of cities. One night I cut them up and pasted them all together and hung the new map I made up on the wall above my bed. The earth is not flat, I thought, but it’s not exactly round either. And did not think this was a particularly surrealist way of thinking about things. I used to calculate the distance between Boston, and Babylon, where I had moved there from. I traced the routes by plane and bus and train. I approximated their relative travel times. I tried to reconcile these facts in some meaningful way, and failed. I remember Boston International Airport, vaguely. I remember one image of it, vividly. I am riding down an escalator, not rushing, content because I know that when I step off of it onto the ground level and walk toward the luggage trolleys and the taxi-line, I will find you standing there with your stormy-blue eyes, your wiry-hair, wearing that leather jacket, waiting for me. As though it’s the only possible direction to go, I walk from the escalator toward you, neglecting my luggage. Standing there, in front of each other, we kiss. You fetch my luggage and hail us a cab where I sit, not next to the other passenger side window, but near to you, your arm around my neck. Of the things I do remember, is the smell of that leather jacket, the one that used to be your Dad’s, and the way I could feel the shape of your voice in my ear, more so than I could hear it, when you whispered to me, that one time, “I love being here to pick you up”. I remember you used to love picking me up from the airport when I returned to Boston. But I don’t remember, in any detail at all, the trip to New York. I remember having landed at JFK, but not, the

airport, exactly. I remember the scenery escaping me as I drove down the Southern State Parkway, but not traveling from the parking lot to that final expanse of road. Cut to the lake at the center of town. The autumn leaves, every single one of them, it seemed, a dry, ashy brown. A flat grey sky. These images are isolated from one another, as in a dream sequence, that doesn’t trace, in any meaningful way, the distance I had estimated so precisely. Cut to Boston. The distance from my apartment on Beacon Hill — the one situated at the exact part of Charles Street that shifts direction due west — to the dorm building where you lived at other end of the commons, was one I knew well, like the back of my own hand. It is nighttime, and I am alone in the Commons. I am sitting on a bench near the Gazebo where we would meet, often, for tea, at hours of the morning most others don’t know about. I am talking here about Boston, and the gazebo at the center of it. I am talking here about the sky — the way, looking up, from the gazebos stark white steps, it looked to be stretched around us, as though we where the scope of the whole world. I am talking here about you: you were the sky, and I was falling through it.

I think of apples, and of Boston. I think of the sunlight at 7am; how bright it was; how I didn’t have blinds; how, in the mornings, I’d stand in the middle of the sun-soaked floor and feel as if I felt what it was like to be by myself for the first time. I think of how even after all of the time we spent together in the commons—how I’d flee to you when I was afraid—you couldn’t overshadow me. I think of how I’d find my way.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way than this: where I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close, as I fall asleep. Pablo Neruda “Sonnet XVII”

I don't want you to murder me with your lips, or slice me in two with the words "I love you."

Merely, My Love

I don't want to know the contours of your face with an exactitude that far exceeds my ability to know the feeling of my own heart beating, or the sensation of your skin on my skin more intimately than that of the light of day. I don't want to know you now, because I don't want there to, one day, later, be a day, when my capacity to recall, in hallucinatory flashes, you, from every fathomable angle, far exceeds my capacity to dream. I don’t want to know you, now, because I don’t want you to amount only to a fragmented vision of a body just barely close enough to touch, in spite of everything,

in spite of all of the time we spent together, all of the seconds spent staring at each other, all of the ways we figured out bodies could touch bodies, the ways mouths move, make words, syntactically orient nouns to other nouns, subject them to one another with participles and prepositions, equate people with things, tell the story of this: merely, my love.

Beds, Bodies, & Other Books of Common Prayer

Psalm 3.1 I encountered The Ballad of Sexual Dependency like a prayer, like something which orients you in some way to a kind of faith at times when there is no basis believing. I had spent some time at a hotel bar talking to a stranger, a visitor of the city, whom I felt like I've known forever and did not know how that could exactly be. But I found myself sitting Indian style on the bar stool next to him, going places in conversation I usually hesitate to, and when I found out about some of his secrets they did not seem to signify some kind of warning, but served as a testament to his honesty. So I stayed in this on-going exchange, which has not yet, and I hope will never cease. By some stroke of luck, he felt the same, a notion which, when his stay in New York was up and he boarded a plane back to his home in LA, I had no real reason to believe, except for the way when looking at his face it felt familiar-like: familial. As he was packing his things before he left, I laid in the bed watching him move about, wanting both to remember everything, and expect nothing else. But when he laid down with me before going, his face, again, up-close, and I kissed it, I decided this was someone I was not going to let go of, not even, as he said, to ‘say goodbye for a little while.’ And questioned how on earth I would manage to keep him around with the distance, and the time difference, and everything else. So, with his carry-on still on the right side of the room but both feet already out the door, I called him back and we kissed and I told him I'd fight for him, fight for the whole of him, despite the distance, and the past lives we've lead, and all the rest of it that separates both strangers and even the best of friends. He said ‘hi!’ instead of goodbye as he

left, and then I slept. It was when I woke up that I felt like I began dreaming and wondered how to sustain this surreal sense of connection with this stranger. I sat with a cup of coffee in the hotel's lobby where I wanted to wait a while before returning to reality. I walked over to the lobby's library and chose a book of photography which pictured, on its cover, a man and a woman in an anonymous room, the woman laying down in its bed looking on at the man sitting up on the other side of it, his eyes closed, and turned away from her, their faces abrasively yellowed in the intrusive light of morning. Goldin's collection, of what has been called 'snap-shot photography,’ titled, compellingly and also curiously, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is about this fight for familial others. In it, she asks the question of what it is that makes it so hard to hang on and why there has to be a war to wage in order to wield a sense of togetherness in what feels to be some kind of dream in which the light of day always seems to intervene and rupture it. Goldin, in her introduction to the collection, explains that this book is about "the history of a recreated family” (“Ballad”). She explains, “In my family of friends, there is a desire for the intimacy of a blood family, but also a desire for something more" (“Ballad”). It is in this ‘something more’, though, that something strange intervenes that both stimulates and stunts the effort to sustain it, something like the light of morning, and the distance between bodies in a bed. In flipping through the book, I look at her photographs but in my mind’s eye I see a series of snapshots—a hallucinatory slide-show of memory. Memory I remember when he wanted to be close to me. When he believed my body, touching his body, was closer than it really was. If this believing in bodies when they touch is what we call love, then I remember when he used to love me: I remember when he didn’t just fuck me. I remember the first time we were close, after I had left Boston. He had put on Philip Glass. The notes, I remember, were slow. Each one of them came together, like droplets of water: separately. Listening to them was like listening to words: the sound felt close to me. He was lying next to me just far enough away so as to not touch me. He told me to take my shirt off. It was strange. It wasn’t like the times he seemed to manipulate my body, as though arranging it on a display. I didn’t feel like an instrument.

I felt like skin. I felt like bones and the blood that runs through them. That was when he took his hand and touched me. He just touched me. Psalm 3.2 The Ballad of Sexual Dependency came out of a series of images Goldin had taken of a man named Brian, her boyfriend of three years from 1981-1983. Goldin’s work at this time focused on, as she calls it “people’s external behavior,” in particular, both during and after having sex (In My Life). In this series, she explores her own sexual life through her camera’ lens: using a tripod and cable release, Goldin photographed hers and Brian’s sexuality as it unfolded in real time, as well as the sexual lives of her family of friends. In part, the relevancy of this book to this thesis rests on its centrality on a singular relationship: one that was equally as compelling as it was catastrophic. Similarly as my writing functions as a lens through which I can bring my relationship—the destruction of myself in my relationship—into focus, so does Goldin position her camera. As Goldin explains “The way the show [out of which, came Ballad] is constructed at the Whitney the critics have accused it of being narcissistic...and self involved. If I hadn't constructed it in such a personal manner they'd be accusing it of voyeurism and vicariousness. It's neither narcissistic nor voyeuristic. It's something else” (In My Life). In the photos of Ballad, Goldin neither functions as her-self, nor as an other. She is simultaneously observer and observed; she is, at once, herself, and the effect of an other. Her work, as she tells us from the out-set, says something about dependency. Though she describes this dependency as ‘sexual,’ the bodies of Ballad are distinctly not erotic. There is an intimacy to them that reflects a desire that is not strictly bodily. Insofar as the material is overtly sexual, it is not pornographically so; there is not the contact that characterizes sex; there is nothing in them that indicates the pleasure of togetherness. When two figures appear coupled in the photographs, they are framed in a way that is both related and unrelated: they are touching, but not looking at one another; they are situated meaningfully in the frame but doing separate activities; they are standing side by side, together, but looking, separately at the camera, like two glaciers (I think of the word glacier, and then of ice—of isolation.) Goldin tells us, also, that this work is about alienation. (“Ballad”) In Ballad, the bed, like the body, is a place where we both come together and separate. The photographs represent some limit and simultaneously refuse it. Goldin, in going back to the rolls of film produced spontaneously, finds, in her process of editing the images, a way to stage a separation, it seems, as a means of structuring it: rendering it comprehensible. Goldin describes the photograph, introduced

earlier, which would become the cover of Ballad—it’s snap-shot anthem: "I found this picture that I thought was really meaningful, in the ambivalence of my gaze, and sort of the distance between us right after sex—the fact that he’s turned away from me and smoking, and I’m still looking at him for intimacy" (Interview Part 2). Regarding the next photograph in the series, which does not appear in the book, Goldin comments on their sad estrangement—about the way sex segregates. The words that stand out to me are: ambivalence, estrangement, sad. In her voice, as she describes this body of work—this period in her life as this body—I notice her sad estrangement from it—from herself. She is complacent at the same time as she is captivated. Such is the experience of looking at her photographs: it is an experience of captivated complacency. One looks on. One witnesses the violence. One notices the desperation (of a man, for example, hunched over in a doorway, holding himself erect and alone, his eyes pleading, the direction of their gaze vacant but for the camera) as repellent as it is relatable, and so one continues to look. As one turns the pages, one grows complacent. I think of that breakfast with my ex-lover after sex. I think of his narcissism and his ambivalence. I think of my ambivalence in the face of him. It’s as though his attitude toward me, was, in my desire for him, turned round upon myself. I think turned round upon itself. Freud said that. This turning round upon the self, Freud explains, is what happens in the formation of the Ego-Ideal in the development of the human subject. The ego-ideal is a precursor to the super-ego, and to castration anxiety. In the construction of the Ego-Ideal, the ego is able to take itself as it’s own object, and treat it as an other, as it’s own love object. The construction of the ego-ideal is a means of accounting for the narcissistic loss incurred in the Oedipal conflict. One both looses narcissistic love, and retains it. (“Instincts”). This turning round happens in love, and in mourning. That piece, like Golding’s photographs, is as much about my ex-lover as it is about me—about the way I became an effect, an after-effect, an after-thought. As I told you then, I was beside the point: the sight of me was pointless, a symbol of his power. For Freud, this is the threat of human sexuality, desire, and subjectivity: it is dependent. In this dependency—in this turning round—desire has always the powerful and precarious capacity to turn round into violence. (“Three Essays”) Memory I was listening to Band of Horses. The album “Infinite Arms”. That one came after we no longer occupied the same space; when it was in music that I sustained our shared existence—imagined it into it. It was the album after “Cease to Begin” and after “Everything All the Time”. Infinite. Everything. Cease. These words all suggest something absolute, something imposable—this never again, this always forever we condemn ourselves to being in and out of love.

It was in music that I grew to love him. It was in our mutual listening—in our shared silence—that we were first intimate. I don’t remember our early conversations: the ones we had before he kissed me for the first time; before we started sleeping between the same sheets. It happened, that night we had stolen wine from that grocery store down Boylston Street, bought cheese to go with it and passed the time, not at a party, but in my dorm room. That was when Boston began to look slightly less strange. That was when he told me things. I don’t remember any of them. Just that on our way back to the dorm from the grocery store, it came over him suddenly. It was evident in the way he then began to carry himself, with a kind of stride; in the way he slung his arm over my shoulder, and fell in line with mine. It was then that he spoke the words I remember, and they were these: “I like this.” I remember he was sitting at my desk near the window. He was crouching in the chair, not obviously uncomfortable with himself, but not unnoticeably so either. When he spoke, he kept one hand on his knee, and held the other near his face, not exactly using it to hide behind but not exactly using it to gesture with, either. I was lying on the bed pushed up against the opposite wall. I was facing him; he as facing the direction perpendicular to me. He looked at me, sideways, through the corner of his eye. He spoke softly. After listening, silently, these words came over me: “I want you.” That was when I couldn’t imagine the sound of his scream. When he wanted my wanting. Psalm 3.3 The bodies of Ballad fail similarly as does the body in Freud. In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes”, Freud theorizes a relation between the body and mind that is structured around a fundamental separation. For Freud, the instinct exists “on the frontier between the mental and the somatic” (122). The instinct is generated from within the body, and places a demand on the mind to direct the aim of the instinct to an object, which satisfies it. The body necessitates a demand on the mind that is fundamentally impossible. The impossibility exists on the frontier between mind and body, and between instinct and object or, to use terms more fitting for our discussion of the failure of the sexual

relation, between self and other. The sexual instinct, which directs the self to the other, orients bodies in some way, but it is an orientation that is precarious, at best. So far we have identified Freud’s Oedipus as being characterized by precariousness and fallibility, by a mythological relationship to a body—by a mind that is condemned to the body’s limitations. The peculiarities of this precariousness exist, in Freud’s theory, in the relation between a series of paired opposites, all of which verge on this frontier. It is a frontier between the mind and the body—between my body, and your body. That Freud uses the word frontier here is particularly interesting, insofar as the word suggests a space, constitute by a limit that is unidentifiable; it is one that we simultaneously strive for, one that we refuse. Memory #3 Why is loving someone and being loved in return always a matter of life and death? I wonder. I think of what Neruda told us: “Where I does not exist, nor you, so close that…your eyes close as I fall asleep.” Love, he told us, is always a matter of life and death, and I still don’t understand why. Desire can be thought of that which transgresses limitation or tries. Desire is also what fails, and it fails in the face of the other: that point we strive to reach and don’t quite. “Where I does not exist, nor you.” That wish. I think: the other, a precipice. “Your eyes close as I fall asleep.” I think: the other, a site of this fear: that they will transgress our love when they are not near and in the space of themselves we cannot enter. Psalm 3.4 There is desperation to desire that gives it a violent edge. The intimate verges on the catastrophic. This is a precipice our relationships verge on; it is a risk we do not know, and which, when we do, we refuse. This precipice is the precipice between instinct and object—between self and other. The libidinal drive, in Freud, invests itself in objects—in others; it transcends; it moves beyond the body—beyond the self. It is in the way the drive approaches this frontier—a point of externality that both corresponds to the instinct’s aim and is also different from it—that sexuality is organized in a split. Desire, in Freud, is essentially perverse. By perversion, Freud means, it is contingent. In “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” he writes, “the object of an instinct is the thing…through which the

instinct is able to achieve its aim.” (214). In “The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”, he tells us, anything that is not genital is perverse. Our dependency on the other, in sexuality, is what makes it perverse. Love, is inherently pathological. The overwhelming sensation of the other leads to the extension of the sexual aim—into its love object, its other. The over-valuing of the sexual object to a position of contingency in the satisfaction of the sexual aim elevates the object to the level of perversion. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is an anthem of this contingency. We can feel this contingency—the weight of the space between bodies in a bed—in its cover photograph. It is a contingency that perplexed Goldin and which she became obsessed with—which possessed her camera’s lens for an entire period of her life and career. Goldin explains, "my work for years was about sexuality as an addiction. I’m not a sexual addict but the idea that you could become sort of sexually addicted to someone who was inappropriate with you on many levels and why this need to couple is so strong” (In My Life). Goldin’s experience reflects the extent to which identity is contingent upon an other; one risks, in love, and one keeps risking, accepting loss after loss because there is a particular gain in the effort that amounts to something more than this. Memory I remember too, a weekend morning, we took the subway to that bookstore and cafe down the end of Newbury Street. I took a picture of him in the subway station near the hotel—the one at the near end of the Boston Commons. He was wearing that leather jacket, and the plaid under-layer he always wore with it—the red and blue one I ruined in the wash. His hair was a mess with bed head, which I loved—loved that we had slept together, and had woken up together, and having thrown on any old thing, were getting up and getting breakfast together on a weekend morning. He would’ve been content staying in and watching cartoons. At the cafe, when we were directed to our table, he chose the seat next to me in the booth, not the chair opposite it. We barely spoke; we just wanted to be near each other. He said something there, something I can’t remember. Something I didn’t realize, I didn’t realize, at the time. Something I then disregarded. He had said, I am sure, something about if I had loved him, really loved him, for who he was, not as a body who was near to me, who wore the clothes I ruined in the laundry, whose head was a mess from the bed we both slept in. I never noticed when he noticed that something had gone wrong somewhere along the line. He was quiet about it. He took everything in by looking, addressed it with actions, not through and in language, as I did. He would ask me a question, in a near whisper as he looked at me shyly, through the corner of he eye, as though it had taken he all the courage inside of him to utter it and having done so was then prepared to turn a cheek—was praying he wouldn’t have to.

He did, every time. And every time, he stayed—chose the seat near to, not opposite me, content to be as close as mere bodies enable us to be. I never noticed then, how badly he wanted to want me, or how long it had taken him to accept that a long time ago I had gotten untraceably lost into a past that came before him—that he was unqualified to direct me to find myself there. Psalm 3.5 The something more, is, in Freud, a narcissistic demand that is impossible. The basic impossibility is both necessary to the relationship and has nothing to do what so ever with it. It is fundamental, and it is original; it is essential to the relationship and it also pre-dates it. It extends beyond the other—beyond the he of the hour, or the year, or the decade—and into the past. Goldin told us: her photographs aren’t exactly narcissistic, but they aren’t voyeuristic either. There is a simultaneity that characterizes them which both captivates and perplexes the viewer. So does love. I suppose this effect of her photography is fitting. What Freud classifies as normal or primary narcissism is distinguished from the pathological or secondary narcissism insofaras in the later, desire is withdrawn from objects, either real, or fantasized, where as, in the former, desire is cathected to the object. Normal and pathological narcissism are similar insofar as it is in this object, either real or fantasized, that one experiences a sense of self (such is the contingency). In love, however, the boundary between self and other in desire, and in its fantasy, is not this clearly elaborated (such is its violent edge). (“On Narcissism”) Goldin’s photographs came out of a radical confrontation with this failure. She describes her relationship with Brian and this basic brutality of love. “[Brian’s] concept of relationships was rooted in the romantic idealism of James Dean and Roy Orbison….We were addicted to the amount of love the relationship supplied. Things between us started to break down, but neither of us could make the break” (“Ballad”). Eventually, the break came, and it came down on Goldin’s body—the physical site of this failure. Brian had beaten her, after burning the diaries of Goldin’s he had found in which she had represented, to herself, in language, this basic impossibility. “Confronting my normal ambivalence had betrayed his absolute notion of romance. His conflict between his desire for independence and…the relationship had become unbearable” (“Ballad”.) Desire gets stuck. A fixation—the kind that constitutes a perversion—Freud explains, is a renunciation of this unbearable impossibility in the form of an “intense opposition to detachment” (“Three Essays,” 122). It is hard to love, unconditionally, because love is conditional; it is conditional on

an other and it conditions a sense of self. It is hard to let love go, because it is as our loved ones leave—our lives, forever, in death and in divorce; or out the door, to JFK airport—they take a part of us with us. Pathological mourning tells us this tragic love story. We both do and do not allow these loved ones to make their exits; we say hello, and goodbye, at the same time. This thesis is a testament to that fact. I write my memories as an attempt eradicate the past, at the same time as I erect it. I write the reality of my love to find the violent edge of fantasy, which separates me from the other. My writing functions as a dismantling of fantasy at the same time as it structures the scene. Memory #5 I like colored glass things, tiny items capable of breaking. Someone once said to treat bodies in our intimate encounters with them like glass, like something that at any moment may break. I wonder: How could I have broken without ever having been touched? Is space just as forceful, just as capable of fracturing? I didn’t want love, didn’t want to be touched by speech—by the way words subject me, nor to the limbs of the one who speaks of love for me. I didn’t want to break and co-create. I wrote a poem about it, called it, “Merely, My Love”, then I made eggs and wrote a poem about that: about how my body cradles me. I think: I, I, I. Then there was a boy at a bar spying on me through his blue eyes, kind and nearly fading—needing. I let him look at me through them up close, let him fall in love with me from there on the wooden bar stool next to me, on the other side of the space I’ve tried so hard to sustain between bodies. Then something shifted: his shoulders, just slightly, so as to frame me. When I looked at him looking at me from over there, I let him press his lips to my lips and something settled into place: the way his lips parsed the space between my lips; his fingers, the space between my legs, and later between each and every one of my fingers. I felt gently held; precious; capable of breaking but unafraid of those gentle eyes, his bodies’ kindness. We went to more bars; sat next to each other on different bar-stools; bridged that space with hands on legs and around shoulder blades. We exchanged few words. Mostly I just let him look at me. Mostly I let myself look at him looking. As the moments passed, they felt long and slow—liquid like—like glass before it’s blown hollow and hardens. Then we’d sleep.

When I’d wake up in the mornings, I didn’t want to make eggs. I wanted A’s eyes. As the moments passed, they grew more lengthy, making me, moment by moment, more empty. It felt like a hollowing out of what had prior filled me. So I stopped eating. Filled my lungs with smoke and blew it out: empty and emptying. Psalm 3.6 Desire is always narcissistic. Desire is unconscious. What is unconscious is fantasy. Fantasy is always failure. Importantly, though, it is a narcissism that is essential and it is a fantasy that finds a way, in its failure, to function as desire. This narcissism and this fantasy are together bound up in the (Freudian mythological) mother, and in the symbolic agency of the father. There is a way in which, in love, we experience our selves in the experience of other. It is an experience that approaches some kind of fantasy of, to use Goldin’s term, ‘coupling.’ Goldin’s idea of ‘coupling’ is one that approximates Freud’s narcissism: both contain in them the wish for a togetherness that is total (I told him I would fight for him, fight for the whole of him; I told you). It is a wish that will always fail, as all wishes do. For Freud, the first failed wish is the wish for the mother. In Freud we learn that in love, the stake of desire is life and death and we’re willing to wage a war in order to lay claim to our desire, our wish. We learn, in Freud, that we want the mother completely. In Lacan we learn that the wish is a wish to be the thing that makes love complete. There is a desire for absolution in love, but it is an absolution that turns round upon itself: from mother to me, from voyeurism to exhibitionism and masochism and sadism. We are both the subject of desire, and the object of it. Goldin is both the one looking on, and the one being looked at, similarly as I tell a story about the way in which I am an object, and in so doing, make myself a subject. There is something about this simultaneous function of, as Goldin observes, narcissism and voyeurism that makes her photography function as something else. So is love: it is, at once, both and neither. Just as the bodily instinct places a demand on the mind that not accord exactly with its capacity for meeting it, so too does the instinct place demand on the other that does not always accord exactly with his (or her) capacity for desire. Memory It is important for me to remember that it is okay that people and places loose their meaning; that people loose the meaning we vest in them; that sometimes it can’t hold up.

A didn’t hold up. I didn’t hold up for A either. Which I knew from the get go: I knew from the get go that I was, to him, an empty thing. A prop. An image constructed into the structure of his denial. As I get farther away from the events, I can’t tell the story of how, but I know that I couldn’t live up to the task. I half-hoped I was wrong: that he wouldn’t see how, if I became an object designed to deflect and deny, then I would easily come to represent the very thing I served to refuse—that a surface that deflects is none other than a mirror. Psalm 3.7 The fantasy of relationships, Goldin told us, does not coincide with the reality of coupling. These relationships between self and other, and between reality and fantasy, are inexact. The boundaries between them are complex. More than being oppositional, they constitute a gap. Goldin’s photography tells us something of this gap; her obsession with it tells us of the way the self and the other switch places in it—of the way the self and the other both annihilate, and are annihilated in it. Goldin’s photographs can be understood as an attempt to capture this distance between bodies by arranging it in a frame, as though organizing a nothing that is incompressible into a something which can at least be represented. In this structured incomprehensibility there is a brutality that characterizes the images. Some of them are overtly violent—Goldin’s self-portrait, for example, after she was battered by her boyfriend in the fight that ended the fight for intimacy—but all of them are difficult to look at. There is impossibility in the effort pictured of bodies engaging with other bodies, or trying to, laying on top of one another, flaccidly. Nothing is happening. Nothing at all is happening. It is brutal. It is banal. This is the unbearableness of Goldin’s photography. This is the unbearablenss of love. It is the mere-ness of it, more than the violence, which is so severe. The bruises on Nan’s face that boarder on the fatal are not nearly as difficult to look at as those bodies, alive, but barely verging on love. There is an army of people captured in these photographs, and yet there is an anonymity that characterizes them. These men and women are all the same. In a way, none of them are any different from me. Memory At a certain point it becomes impossible to discern who it is I’m thinking about. I still remember the way Ch. protected the privacy of his ex-something-or other—the woman who made me feel like I was the other woman—in the face of me. I had asked him why he kept a password lock on his phone, not because I cared, but because it was always going off, and he was always running off to do someone favors, and when I asked if he was seeing anyone else he said, no, convincingly, and fought for me on the cobblestone crosswalk in the Meatpacking district where I was about to leave him, or pretended

to, and he followed me, fighting, or acting like it. So I started coming up with new ways of asking the same question and we kept on chasing each other, or just carrying out the same old scene, running aimlessly around in circles. The moment was banal. We were sitting there, on his sofa in the living room, probably talking and touching—doing nothing at all really, the way we mostly did. His phone was sitting on the coffee table in front of us, with all of the rest of his crap. He was routinely ignoring its repeated rings, as though it was just another discarded book there on the table he feels ambivalently about reading. “Why do you lock your phone?” I asked, to which he replied with a routinely dismissive response. He looked away, when he offered it, raised his voice just slightly as he leaned his head back and away from me with a sour face plastered to it which would have made more sense if I had been positioned closer in proximity to it and he felt he needed space. It comes back like a bomb exploding. I’ll be reaching for the soap in the shower, bending down to grasp it, mindlessly, and in my mind, in it’s hallucinatory mine-field, a bomb is detonated, a memory explodes in a flash and then is gone. They all come back like that—the series of them—one after the other. I must have buried them all in the same cerebral fold. They all come un-done at once. Ch., then A., then C. Banal moment after banal moment. We were on the phone one time—C. and I. It was night-time. Everyone else in the house was sleeping. I was sitting on the floor in living room. It was empty feeling: all of the un-used furniture in the dim table-lamp light. The moment was silent, mostly, except for the occasional sound of C.’s voice on the other end. It was sorrowful, feeling, his silence. I don’t know—will never find out—if he had been dating that girl, of if he had called her, like he said he would, earlier that day to end it; or if she happened to beat him to the punch, and if that had anything at all to do with the weekend he did not spend with Alex, in New York, when he watched hockey with me on the coach which at this moment no one was using. With the phone to my ear, pointlessly, I sat there, not even wondering. But with the silence separating us farther than the miles between New York and Boston, I could not pretend not to notice the way C., on the other end of the phone, in his sadness, was in a world private to him which I could not—would never be able to—be a part of. I sat there listening to him saying nothing for a little while longer before I decided to say a mute goodbye, and hung up. It was uneventful: a memory of nothing at all happening.

They all are. In each and every one of them, I feel like no one. I feel X-ed out and no one notices. Prayer 3.8 The unbearbleness of these photographs is an unbearbleness that verges on loss. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency did not just chronicle Goldin’s relationship with Brian, but also a decade of what has been called ‘the culture of the American marginalized.’ The subjects of Goldin’s photography, including herself, are bi-sexual, they are homosexual, they are transsexual and transgender. The book, to some, is a ballad of the counter-culture of the American 80’s: it is about the tragedy of drugs and the AIDS virus. Goldin didn’t just experience a love that was sliced with the violent edge of ambivalence: she became addicted to love, and to heroin; and she watched others around her die, also, of love also as they lost their lives to AIDS. The loss of Ballad is the loss of others to emotional and physical illness, the loss of the self in sex, and the loss of love. Curiously, the loss, in Goldin’s work, does not fracture love; it constitutes it. For Golidn, her love is qualified by the fact that she is there for her friends, in and through their emotional and physical losses, in particular to the AIDS virus. To use her own words, “because I photographed them when they were alive and death is a part of our relationship, I can't say I really love someone unless I am there not there them as they're dying. So part of the love and the investment in the relationship when they were alive is carried over into the process of them dying and me witnessing that” (In My Life.) There is persistence in the pictures—an insistency—even as the photography fails to rectify this failure: of bodies to sexuality and to our mortality. “[Goldin] had thought that [she] could stave off loss through photography” but found that “photography doesn’t preserve memory as effectively as [she] thought it would” (“Ballad”). In an afterword that was published in 1996 in a later edition of the collection, Goldin tells us: “a lot of people in the book are dead now…Cookie is dead, Kenny is dead, Mark is dead, Max is dead, Vittorio is dead…The book is now a volume of loss” (“Ballad”). As you move through the photographs, page after page, this loss accumulates at the same time as it amounts to nothing. Goldin’s photography doesn’t preserve memory. Neither do my narratives. My memories—this pile of letters and of nouns, subjected to one another with participles and prepositions—amounts to nothing. In Golding’s collection, the limit of love is represented not just at the boundary of the body, but also at the boundary between genders, between drug use and drug abuse, and between night and day. In the fight that ended the fight for love, the structure that had organized the incomprehensibility of the

basic impossibility of love at each of these boundaries collapsed, prompting a process of mourning. Importantly to Golding's story, this intimacy was faced in her sexuality but formed in her family: in the loss of her sister to a suicide. These two losses represent the loss of the feeling of ownership over our experiences of others. Goldin tells us, of the effort in her photography, “I don’t ever want to be susceptible to anyone else’s version of my history. I don’t ever want to lose the real memory of anyone again” (“Ballad”). Goldin explains the way she lost her sister to the revisionist history her family, and her sisters’ psychiatrists constructed about her sadness and about her fate. To Brian’s battery, Goldin’ lost the experience of desire she had for him; in order to save her life, she had to relinquish that which made her feel most alive. In a way, Goldin in her sobriety and her sister in her suicide are intimately related in an attempt to achieve the same thing: that is, some relationship to desire that is their own. As is fitting with the frames of Ballad, life and death structure love. Goldin briefly, and in vague generalities that ask us to take her at her word, describes the way her family law was defined by a basic and pervasive denial of reality. In Goldin’s understanding, her sister took her life, not as in took it away, but as in claimed it as her own. “By the time she was eighteen,” Goldin says, telling us the story, “she saw that her only way to get out was to lie down on the tracks of the commuter train outside of Washington D.C” (“Ballad”). In her suicide, Goldin’s sister escaped escapism, similarly as in Goldin’s photography, Goldin’ flees from fantasy. I see Goldin’s photographing effort similarly as she sees her sister’s suicide: “as an act of immense will” (“Ballad”). When Golding entered rehab, she had brought with her a copy of Ballad as comfort, and company, but it was removed from her as the images threatened the memory of drug culture both in her self and those around her. Her camera, the doctor’s thought, posed the same threat. When it was returned to her after she moved from rehab, to a sober-living facility, she began photographing herself in order to learn how to recognize herself, alone, un-drugged, and in the light of day. Before reaching the limit of love, and of drugs, Goldin lived mostly at night. In her search for sobriety, Goldin literally found the light of day. She discovered herself anew, realizing in her self-portraits the way that light affected photography. Golding admits, powerfully: “I did not know that available light could mean anything other than the red light of an after-hours bar” (Interview Part 2). Memory I need to do all of this, because I need to do all of this. Not because it will bring me to you. I always transform a means away from a person into a means to them.

What a brilliant preservation of a wish: to make a relationship in order to break it, and in breaking it, make it again; to enter a relationship in order to abandon it, and in abandoning it, find a way back to it. I think: Me and the other, over and over and over. I think: My relation to an other—my subjectivity—is the only thing I can control. That is, the way in which I subject myself to an other is the only thing I can control. Prayer 3.9 The sexuality of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is, at best, fragmented; it is transgressive; it runs the risk of alienation in the other, or in the self as fantasy. One can approach it, and one can transgress it (Goldin knows this) but one cannot define it (she knows this too) and yet one refuses to accept this impossibility, and so one tries (such is the function of her photographs). In the tragic dual function of Goldin’s photographs we see an effort to define something that is impossible to identify and in this imposable effort, an attempt, also, to find some way to move beyond it. This boundary between self and other indicates another boundary, between the somatic and the psychic—between the body and its meaning. All of these boundaries are at odds with one another, but they also structure, in their impossible relationship, a possibility. Goldin’s photographs picture neither the fantasy of love, nor the way in which it fails, but something else—something more than this. Goldin perhaps describes it best: "I've been called a snapshot photographer and that's fine with me because snapshots are the only form of photography that are completely inspired by love” (In My Life.) Her photographs are inspired by love and inspire love; they picture the way that love inspires. Like I said, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency came to me like a prayer: in its failure, I found a faith. The book ends with a moment of lovers' alienation and then with an empty bed. It ends with a Valentine’s table prepared for love’s ceremony but empty of its lovers; with an elderly couple standing idly along side one another on a house’s patio; with a photograph of lovers’ adjacent graves. It ends with corpses, lifeless, embracing, bone on top of bone, fated forever to be as close as mere bodies enable us to be. Which makes me wonder what it is we get from seeking proximity to the other only to be alienated in their presence. Golding tells us that failed fantasy results either violence or alienation—in either narcissism, or loss. So does Freud. So do my narratives. It makes wonder about this me and the other, over and over and over. And it makes me believe again that we will find in this process something more than this; something beyond desire; a new way of being, not exactly with, and not exactly without, but a way of

tolerating this imposable divide. We move from the other to an I that is both God-like and barely believable, at its best. We love, and we document this love as though staving off the loss it began with. And when our wish to do so fails, as it will, we fantasize it anew like we are praying, as we must. Goldin’s photographs have the power of something that moves—the quality of something like desire. She explains, "I’m very interested in the continuity of relationships and the history of people's lives. I never believed that a single image said anything about a person. I believe in the accumulation of images.” She says, “[I believe] in the narrative" (In My Life). So I write. I just keep writing. Reverie Yesterday was Cinco De Mayo which means nothing at all except that it was sunny, and I wanted a glass of sangria. I wanted a reason to simultaneously escape thinking of Ash., on the other coast, and share a fake holiday with him in spirit, from mine. We sent each other pictures of our mustaches: mine drawn on a piece of paper and held up to my face for a snapshot, his pinned to the end of his beer, taking a swig so it sat there like some sort of Spanish pun above his upper-lip for the flash. This is the function our fantasies, isn’t it? A means of flight: a means of finding? I want the color blue: chlorine chartreuse. A pool. I want a white one-piece bating suit, a purposelessly enormous black straw hat, Chanel color-blocked sunglasses. I want oppressive sunlight. I want LA-that anonymous city, itself a signifier. I want relief: a reprieve. I want to feel gorgeous–good enough: stunningly deficient. I revel in my reverie–in the triumph of memory.

On Letters Un-Sent & Un-Ending

According to Brueghel when Icarus fell it was spring a farmer was ploughing his field the whole pageantry of the year was awake tingling near the edge of the sea concerned with itself sweating in the sun that melted the wings' wax unsignificantly off the coast there was a splash quite unnoticed this was Icarus drowning William Carlos Williams “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”

Dear Father, I don’t remember you, really. And this not remembering is different than forgetting because time moves forward and we get older. I no longer remember, because I have tried so hard, for so long, to forget. Sometimes, when I’m applying my make-up in the morning, or getting dressed, I notice the ghost of you in my bone structure and stare for a moment stuck whenever it was that you left me; noticing the way my forehead is so long, the way my cheek-bones are high and my chin so sharp; how this all makes the whole of my face look angular, much more so than my mother’s, even though I have always been told I look like her twin. I do, except for a few details that I mostly neglect to notice, until I do, and then I look, to myself, like a stranger. I do remember Aunt Pat: the way she was always excited to see me. “Claire-The-Bear,” she’d say, grasping my face to kiss it, cradling my chin for a long moment before letting me go. I remember how Aunt Pat loved me. How she didn’t have to say it. How I could tell by the way she looked at me that there was only one me and I was it and she wanted to spend time with me and make me laugh and listen to my laughter as though if I were to stop laughing she would miss that sound that only little me could make. I don’t remember if you ever looked at me that way. And this not remembering is different than willfully forgetting. I couldn’t remember, even if I wanted to. I do remember, though, how one time, we were in a diner: you, Michael, Olivia, and me. I don’t know how old I was; I was older, but younger than fourteen, because that was how old I was the last time we spoke. Michael and Olivia were little – they will always be little, as far as I know. We were sitting in a booth. I had been seated opposite you at the table. We waited. Before our orders had been taken, but after the water had already been put on our table, the waitress came over and introduced herself. Then she stood there for a moment, with nothing to do, just looking at us; she was looking at all of us, together. Then she said something, quickly, about how we looked like such happy family. “Those are all’a’yah kids,” she said to you, pointing at Michael, Olivia and I in one swift motion with her index finger. Then, dismissively, as she turned to go, she said how she couldn’t get over the striking resemblance of each of our faces. You smiled, glee that you could not believe stretched clear across your face. It made you look strange. You were looking directly at me—as directly as you could—and it was still as if you were not making eye contact. You were looking at me as though you couldn’t get over it either—like you couldn’t quite comprehend what it meant: I was your daughter.

I love the way faces look up close. That is to say, I love the way faces look, when they are looking at me from up close. It’s better than looking in a mirror, because it feels like something, which is to say that I feel like someone.

Some days, especially when it’s grey, I like to be in Babylon, where I am from. I like to drive to the parking lot on Montauk Highway where the sky always seems to break-open, off to the west side of it, above the Pathmark and the Pet Smart situated there. I like to get a coffee from Starbucks and park my car so that it faces southward, towards the Starbucks and the highway, so the part where the sky opens up is off to my right. I like how my windshield frames all of this perfectly: how I can watch the cars on the highway drive clear across the road in front of me, and the cars driving through the Starbucks drivethrough come towards me before turning left, or right, joining all the other cars, beverage in hand, sailing off into their day. I like how I stay; I like how still I feel. Even the beach-weeds planted in the parking lot, there to define the traffic patterns, sway sharply like the air that moves them, jerking all around. I like the way sight moves you—makes you feel something. Sometimes there is music with me to keep me company; other times, silence, until I open my window to let a little of the air in and break it with it’s razor sharp chill. I like how the salt in the air from the ocean fills me up, the way, when you hold a conch shell up to your ear, the ocean fills your ear up, and then your head, and all of the hollow spaces in your heart that a moment ago were empty. I like how, for that moment, that’s all there is—how, for that moment, that’s all I am.

I love when a boy who is not yet my lover looks at me for the first times before he knows my body

completely. I like when that boy looks at me, but doesn’t look me in the eye, except for only sometimes, but mostly looks at the shapes that make my face up—how it has circles, and squares, and how my forehead, and my cheek-bones, and my chin, make it look more angular than it otherwise is. It’s like they want to figure it out; it’s like they want to figure me out. I like it when I sit on top of that boy when he’s laying on the bed, the way my legs bend, kneeling on either side of him, child-like, and so adult, my hands splayed flat and firm on either side of the pillow where his head rests, eyes open wide. I like how I can watch him watching me from up high—how, after some long moments, before anything happens, he calls me gorgeous.

“Claire-The-Bear” she’d say, and “let-me-look-at-that-face.” All those words strung together like that, the way “I love you” is, and how it means everything. “Unsignificantly off the cost there was a splash quite unnoticed this was Icarus drowning.” William Carlos Williams said that. Just like that: without any period at the end of it; absent of any definition. I am always falling in love, privately; with men, from a far. I am always pushing them off of pedestals I build, resentful and blaming as they fall from their impossible heights; never able to tell if I am Deadalus or Icarus; never able to tell if it is my wax, or their wings; ever able to determine who it is that is always falling. It is me.

I am always falling. Unisignificantly, off the cost of my past, quite unnoticed. That is me.

That is always me.

90 Â

Afterward

“Fantasy is a basic scenario filling out the empty space of a fundamental impossibility, a screen masking a void…This impossibility is filled out by the fascinating fantasyscenario…As such, fantasy is not to be interpreted, only 'traversed': all we have to do is experience how there is nothing 'behind' it.” Slavoj Žižek

Afterward or Finding a Way Forward

I told you I would fail, fail so perhaps it is fitting that I end with failure. It is also fitting, though, that I end with this failure and with desire. There is something about desire that is fundamentally impossible: it cannot be satisfied; no, it must not be satisfied; it must fail. Desire must not be made complete but the demand for it to do so threatens and often does arrest it. I know something about desire and the absence of it. I told you that. I also told you that they weren’t exactly oppositional; that they constitute a precipice—something similar to the precipice I found between myself and my ex-lover—which, as one verges on it, feels to be a precipice of life and of death. Love is terrifying. Desire, is terrifying. To have it means, always, to both gain and loose something. One gains a new way of being and one looses one’s past. I told you: apples used to hold a meaning now beyond me. There are many things, still, as of yet, inaccessible to me. There is a past—in my memory of my father and in the mirrored reflection of his face in my own, and in my relationships—that are still so beyond me that I cannot possibly move beyond them. And yet, in this impossibility—in coming face to face with it, in love, and in loss—I have found a faith. In this faith, I have found the will to loose myself: to madness, to memory, to the other. I believe in the turning round of the self on this edge and into the space it carves. I have spent a lot of time here talking about Freud’s Oedipus as a myth and trying to make something of the emotional arch of desire in its narrative structure. I have looked to the stories Didion, Barthes, and Goldin have told us about the life and death of their own desire—about the love they have found in their loss—in order to find it in Freud. Perhaps more importantly, though, I have found the love

in my losses and in the loss of myself to my past. I have done this selfishly. This thesis, one could say, has been self-indulgent. One could accuse it of being vicarious or narcissistic, like Goldin's photography, if it either steals from others stories or is too specific to my own. But I have done this also in an effort to demonstrate a psychoanalytic axiom that I believe to be true—that I have found to be the axis on which my subjectivity teeters and about which it turns. If there is something this thesis asserts about psychoanalysis—something that would function as its thesis statement—it is that there is something to be said of the way we discover ourselves in the unconscious desire of the family and then have to find a way to put that desire into play in the world as our own. It is that there is something to say about the way we do this ‘me and the other over and over and over.’ In my reading, this is the surmounting of the Oedipus complex. Something is done to us—the other places on us, a demand—and we then have to do something with it. We can either submit to the other’s desire, or we can find our way as a subject with our own. We move in this way from other to other—from family to romance—finding something of ourselves in verging on the edge of desire—the edge of the other—and in its ceaseless turning round. Sexuality, in Freud, is both universal and entirely idiosyncratic. It both belongs to the other and is uniquely our own. This is the turning round. Hopefully, in the cycles, I have found a momentum in my desire. Hopefully I have found a way to move forward. That stranger I told you about is still, for reasons that are still beyond me, around. He is no less a stranger to me despite his being a part of the day in and day out of my life. For allowing the way in which I struggle to allow this impossibly unfamiliar familiarity—this strange strangeness—I thank him. I don’t know if this thesis would be possible without him. And yet I know that it must. I know that I must. I must find a way of being that is fundamentally without even as it is with him. This is my discomfort in love. I am always falling into it. It is always me falling. I told you that. I know this now. I know that I must fall. This is the failure of love. This is the possibility of love. All fantasies are a bit like this. I went to California, like I wanted. My trip, it turned out, was as much about reverie as it was about memory; it was as much about desire as it was about death. California is about fantasy, but it is also about the failure of fantasy—about the way, when reality approaches it, it fails. "Be careful what you wish for," they say. I wanted L.A .and I got it. I wanted a pool, chlorine blue, chartreuse. I wanted a hat and I had that. I brought it to L.A. in my strategically packed suitcase designed to stave its brim's shape (the brim, the point over which things overflow). I wanted a convertible so when I landed in LAX I picked up my suitcase at the luggage trolley, all pride, marched to the rental car counter and drove away with a Camero, the top down, unable to find any song on the radio to play to my perfection. When I got to the pool at

the hotel, I paraded down to it in my bathing suit and my sunglasses and my hat and when I sat on the lounge I thought "now what?" You know what they say. "Be careful what you wish for." What they mean to say is "be careful what you wish for, you might actually get it, and then what." "Now what." That was on my mind when I stared off the coast of California at the horizon, so expansive you can see the curve of the earth, as though at an abyss where the oppressive sunlight basking on the eclipsing stretch of ocean blue gives you the unmovable feeling that there is nothing else, nothing after this. There is California, and then what? After 9 days, I ended up canceling my flight and keeping that Camero (though I have not since used the radio). If there's nothing after this, I figured, I might as well just stay in L.A., hang around in the sun's static same heat. I told you: in life, as in Freud’s theory, and in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, there is something about striving without the desire for success—about desire for desire’s sake—that is stunning. I went to L.A., as I told you, to revel in the triumph of my memory. But there is something about the anonymity of L.A., and the catastrophic capacity of its landscape (California, really is the edge, and it teters there) that is unsettling. So I turned, as I do, to words, in particular, to the words of Joan Didion, where this started. What Didion told me, was a story about "love and death in the golden land" where "the future always looks good because no one remembers the past" (Slouching, 4-5). Well, when you get there, when you've traveled with your eyes closed over most of the country and still find that you have snow-capped mountains and long expanses of agriculture to cross before you even arrive, the past seems to descend into the sky streaming behind your aircraft, and the future seems to teeter off the coast, verging into the ocean, where, just a mile off of shore, it is 2 miles deep, and the Santa Ana winds and the static same heat sets the coast ablaze, turns boats into the ocean's depths, and you feel exactly nowhere in its fake environment. You get there, and there is no turning back. L.A., it seems, is so far away from anything familiar, so far away from even itself that the five-lane freeway you have to traverse to get to LAX airport seems like an excursion as impossible as hiking the Himalayas (even—especially—in a Camero). So you concede. You order another mimosa, and you look up at the palm trees isolated in the sky, rising up into that flat same ocean blue as in a dream, planted there from elsewhere to extend up as if beyond L.A. And you revel. Not exactly in the triumph of the past, but in the basic impossibility of the future. You know what they say. "And then what." I say, abandon the persistent need to ask the question. I say, concede to the impossibility of its demand. Silence, like the static same heat of this city, is oppressive. But then so is desire. So are dreams. Joan Didion's dream was Hawaii. A California native, New York had already failed to live up to its promise when all of the new faces became old (though no less unfamiliar) ones. And since the Santa Anna winds had been, from the out-set, a base banality, I suppose a volcano is as good a place as any for

reveling and remembering to collide like oppressive desert pressure systems with cool ocean air. Hawaii, she tells us, had particular significance from the years 1966 to 1971 during which time she spent what was "to many people [she knew] an eccentric amount of time in Honolulu" (White, 13). There was a "particular aspect" of Honolulu that "lent [her] the illusion that she could any minute order from room service a revisionist theory of her own history, garnished with a vanda orchid" (White, 13). In 1969 she found herself at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, with her husband and their daughter, waiting, as we do, for the fantasy to fail—for the pot to boil over the brim and empty. Didion, her husband, and their daughter, were waiting at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel for a tidal wave to hit Midway Island, the result of an earthquake in the Aleutians rated 7.5 on the Richter scale. Didion, her husband, and their daughter, were waiting for a tidal wave to hid Midway Island instead of filing for divorce. The wave never came. Neither did their separation. A fact which, however, as Didion describes it, "anti-climactic," was no less cataclysmic. While her husband watched the television for the emergency weather report, Didion watched the curtains bellow and blow in the wind. After the report came, when her husband turned off the television, the curtains continued to bellow and blow in the wind, and Didion continued to watch them, stared blankly at the un-impending doom of the mundane, as she, and her husband, continued to mutually excluded one another from their private lives as they moved about the hotel and its island, as they had before the volcanic emergency and continued to do after it, until her husband’s death, did they part. Didion's private life was one of despair, and of dread, which she knew, at times, intimately, and other times, forgot, implacably. She writes, about the time when New York had failed to live up to it’s promises: “It was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces. I could not tell you when I began to understand that. All I know is that it was very bad when I was twenty-eight…There were certain parts of the city which I had to avoid…I could not go to Times Square in the afternoon, or to the New York Public Library for any reason what so ever…I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor he said only that I seemed to be depressed and should see a ‘specialist.’ Instead I got married, which as it turned out was a very good thing to do but badly timed, since I still could not walk on Upper Madison avenue in the mornings. I had never before understood what ‘despair’ meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood that year.” (Slouching, 236237) Didion got married, and moved to Los Angeles, where she established a career in journalism which elevated her to the level of an American Icon. Others tell us that Didion’s work, concerned the

'cultural breakdown' and the 'breaking up of the time' in particular in California. 'The time' began, for Didion, in 1966 and ended in 1971 but was referred to by the rest of America as generally 'the sixties'. That period, during which Didion's writing ostensibly concerned California, also, took place, for Didion, in large part, in Honolulu. Regarding this description of her writing, Didion comments that she "supposes that almost everyone who writes is afflicted...by the suspicion that nobody out there is listening" (Slouching, xii). She comments that "she had never gotten a feedback so universally besides the point” (Slouching, xii). Didion writes about emotions like they have the assurance of events—like they are even actually compelled by them. She references dates, and numbers, and locations; she describes these places and the events which take places in the parameters of these time frames intimately; tries, in the way journalists do, to reconcile the facts in some meaningful way, and she fails. “The patient to whom this psychiatric report refers is me. The tests mentioned….were administered…in the outpatient psychiatric clinic at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, in the summer of 1968, shortly after I suffered ‘the attach of vertigo and nausea’ mentioned in the first sentence and shortly before I was named a Los Angeles Times ‘Woman of the Year.’ By way of comment I offer only that an attack of vertigo and nausea does not now seem to me an inappropriate response to the summer of 1968” (White, 15). It is as eccentric for a journalist to establish her authority by providing psychiatric intakes from her personal hospital records (which she did in the piece that came to define ‘the time’) as it is for a neurologist to evidence the unconscious by documenting his own dreams. Which is what Freud was, and which is what he did. Like Didion, he wrote about emotions like they have the assurance of events, tried to reconcile the facts in some meaningful way and failed—addressed the limitations of his trade. For Didion, dread descends into the scene as resolutely as a volcanic eruption and can be calculated with the bellowing of the curtain with as much actuality as a seismic wave. For Freud, the unconscious experience of love and of loss is as actual as a birth. To say that Freud was concerned with sexuality as hetero-normativity is as ‘universally besides the point’ as saying that Didion wrote about California in the sixties. Sexuality, for Freud, is equivalent to Didion's Hawaii. What Didion, in fact, writes about in her pieces from the years 1966 to 1971 during which time she spent an eccentric amount of time in Honolulu, is the inability to impose a narrative line, to believe in a script and stick to it. Sexuality is fantasy, in Freud, and fantasy does not hold up. Neither do the facts. Didion uses the word 'promises' a peculiar, almost concerning, number of times in these pieces and she tells us precisely in what sense she uses it, which is despairingly. Didion writes, of this time, "I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself seems increasingly obscure" (White, 134).

In a piece that begins with the lines "we tell ourselves stories in order to live" and ends with the lines "writing has not yet helped me see [what the story] means" Didion pieces together in fragments the tragedies of divorce, and of murder, of war, and of cultural excess, which came to define ‘the time’ (White, 11, 48). These are the stories, sitting there idly on Honolulu, watching the curtains below and blow in the wind in order to anchor herself in the wake of a seismic silence, that Didion promised her husband she would ignore as some kind of concession to survive her marriage. "We are each other’s...restraint at the very edge of the precipice. He refrains from noticing when I am staring at nothing, and in turn I refrain from dwelling at length upon a newspaper story about a couple who apparently threw their infant and themselves into the boiling center of a live volcano on Maui…At the end of the week I promise him that I am going to try harder to make things matter” (White, 135-36). As she told us, she had trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters. L.A.—all of the images of all of the palm trees and all of the pools glowing electric blue in the silver moon light—had made a promise to me that it would live up to what ever promise I had made of it. So did the familiar stranger I know who lives there. His promise was that he would not go away as I, in my way, tried to make things matter. That promise was elusive, as promises are. I could fill up the hollow sound of the word—that sacred, empty, 'Om'—with any wish I wanted. In determining how to keep up his end of the deal, so could he. What is meant by going away? And in what ways am I allowed to make things matter? We could shift these stipulations of our peace treaty as often and as unbeknownst to each other, and ourselves, as we wish. Shortly after we made this agreement, he went 'on holiday' and did not tell me that he was not going to Mexico but instead was going to another city, equidistant from L.A. as Cabo San Lucas, and conveniently in the same time-zone, where he would visit a woman he did not tell me was ex-wife. "I was in Mexico like I told you,” he said, by way of argument, “I went to Mexico by way of." He promised he would not go away, and then he disappeared off the map. It wasn't until I was in L.A., warming up under a blanket from my sun-burn (the sun is so hot it makes you cold; you know what they say: "took much of a good thing"), that he admitted, finally, that he went to Mexico by way of his past and his words meant nothing. The facts did not arrange into an intelligible narrative. And the promise I am making is to pretend not to dwell on the basic incomprehensibility of love—on this despair. I have spent a lot of time in L.A. crying. I have cried on the corner of Pico Boulevard and Ocean Avenue across the street from a Big Blue Bus station. I have cried on the Santa Monica Pier listening to the feigned fright elicited by the children riding the roller coaster there, and the static sound of the Pacific Ocean lapping onto the Santa Monica shore. I have cried in that Camero outside of Ted Danson's old house where I stayed for the remainder of my days after the first 9 (someone famous, it seems, has spent a

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significant amount of time exactly everywhere in L.A.), on the massage table at the spa, at the bar overlooking the pacific. I have cried on a beach blanket in Hermosa on a Monday, over a mimosa on a Wednesday, looking on at that same beach wondering how I got here, and what exactly the factual parameters of the event were. I cried on a couch that belonged to that stranger and to the woman I did not know was his ex-wife, sitting exactly between where they had sat, doing all of the crying you do when waiting for the casual catastrophe of daily life which does not descend like a Santa Ana wind, does not erupt like a volcano, does not come crashing down like a tidal wave; but is impossible to place, like dread; like despair, is a hollowing out—easy to forget about. It was comedic, how easy it was to get rid of that Camero. I drove into the Hertz return lot near Los Angeles International Airport, parked it next to an army of other vehicles, left the keys on the dash and walked away from it, like I was abandoning a war zone. Just as easily as I came, I went. I took a shuttle to the terminal and stood outside smoking a cigarette and when I looked up into the sky I saw no palm trees. The marine layer had extended miles into the mainland and was dense, and flat, and grey. I stood there, long after my cigarette was gone, staring at the sky, dense, and flat, and grey, knowing full well that I would not be able to keep my end of the deal; knowing full well that I would dwell on the palpable impossibility of these promises. The promise of L.A., like Didion’s Hawaii, was that it would revise my history; would erase it. But eventually you have to go back to where you came from, which I'm traveling to, by way of LAX, and I'm taking this despair with me which is like a foreign territory onto itself where even I am an exile. I find comfort in the way words can be arranged into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs which both structure and fail to account for the point of the story which is that the moral is always forced in a promise we don't know we make and which we will always fail to keep; which we will exchange, like passports and boarding passes at security, for an imprecise fantasy that will always fail us (that sentence, too, could function as this document’s thesis statement). I hope this thesis, like the failure in my fantasy, is a bit like love, a bit like the failure of love: stunningly deficient.

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