I am working on editing the book a fictional biography about Sigmund Freud, called The Endless Control of Madness, so for fun here are some teasers. (it is a long book.) +++ He felt the waves covered him, breaking him, and finally swept him up again, chocking his mouth with salt and giving him wings to fly through the love of life. As he tumbled on the shore he knew there was a deeper place he would one day go, when he no longer had to breathe and he could swim all the way to the bottom, and feel the hot air vents against his face. In that picture of ecstasy would be all the broken hearts he had ever met, and he would love them as he did his own body. +++ Sigi, sat across from Martha and his three children eating dinner. “This is a wonderful meal,” he said as he stared at the pepper shaker. “What,” Martha said bored with dinner conversation even before it began and looked dotingly at her children. “I don’t know,” Sigi said slightly depressed and not really in a mood to talk either. “What?” Martha said again as she heard the gargling of her children like she did cows and chickens in a farm. They were a welcome symphony over her own thoughts and she let their tiny hands and eyes change her own features, as her facial expressions became flatter and flatter. Sigi wondered if she cared about his reply and instead he stared at the tree that had begun to cry in the center of their table. It had thick branches and the leaves began staining the white table with painful tears of loss. “I was just thinking of my childhood,” Sigi said to himself as he chewed carefully and slowly. “That is nice,” Martha said thinking of her inner world and how it had become somewhat private and undisturbed. She spent more and more of her time with her children. “I saw Fliess the other day. I don’t know if you know this Martha but he is also Jewish and he has so many great ideas. I think of him as a real inspiration. It is so hard being a doctor during a time when resources and answers are so limited. I tried to give a grieving couple cocaine the other day. I know it was the right thing to do, but there must be a greater versatility out there than this one answer. Even this one answer is beginning to feel less than it was. At times I think back to the perspective of Breuer, and that patient he had and hypnosis.” “How is Fleitcher?” she said spoon feeding her young Oliver. “I don’t know,” Sigi said getting a longing look in his eye as he pictured his wife naked and eating super. She dropped some food on her chest and smeared the red sauce like blood into her white skin. “Stop looking at me like that.” Martha knew what lust looked like in her husband’s private eyes and she secretly smiled to herself. She turned her back to him and the piles of peas on Jean Martin’s plate as Mathilda looked on quietly with a strange tension of politeness and observation. “Fliess is really original,” Sigi said cutting his potatoes and looking for the yellow trails of butter. “Oh, that is nice,” Martha said with a mild sense of apathy, and the monotone life of her day to day littered the underground of her thoughts, like a well crafted path up a mountain. Sigi looked around the small room of his family. Maybe we should eat alone, he thought but didn’t dare say it. For his entire life he had hoped to be a better father than his father was, but at that moment he had no energy to be a father, and he felt himself falling into despair. He stood at the bottom of a glass bottle and watched the sand falling in one by one as layers to create a beautiful decoration for those who valued commercially made art in art schools with low budgets. The sand was ugly as he saw it dripping into him, annoying green and pinks, and everything unusual. It created an instant look of chaotic beauty, in a timeless bottle, but did those greedy hands know, who were spilling the sand inside the small neck, that there was a message that the sea had carried; it was meant for a man standing alone on an island to give him one more day of hope. No, children never thought that. They were too greedy with their love, and they hoarded it away and assumed it was only valued when they were alone with their parents. Sigi watched his children seamlessly play out their characters as his wife, in blind absorption, picked up their slake so that they could dance without tripping on the trails of their un-wrappings, they were as ugly as trash, the natural disasters of fate. Sigi wondered what his children would think of him, and he silently continued to eat. “Was that all you wanted to say,” Martha said getting up to gather some milk for Mathilde. “Did I say anything at all?” Sigi said with a far off look over to the burners, feeling as if he had revealed his entire heart in his silent thought, and he said nothing. “Yes,” Martha said sitting back down. “You just told me about your work,” and she hung onto those few syllable as if it was all they had, and all that really mattered in their marriage, the slow construction of all the whys, the wheres, and the whos. They were a mystery novel and as Martha turned the page hoping that she would understand herself, she felt only the lines of his words, the experience of walking alone. She looked at her children who had began to waddle off their seat and she cleared the table, let yesterday be the past. She looked forward to the blank page, where she would write out her heart in between the lines of all her husband’s darker perceptions. +++ It was like a family of strangers, where love was considered the glue. Yet if you asked each individual family member what keeps them close they would question their fate, and realize that their elastic attachments would one day break by predicaments and tragedies. There was a strange thing about family, as each person circled and circled the other person, until finally there were boundaries, and expected behaviors. And people could no longer leave their territory or the family would break. But from a viewer’s eyes the family was already broken. It had only slightly stabilized because every child leaned in the opposite direction. “What am I to do?” yelled the table cloth as it felt shattered by falling food and dirty fingertips. “What am I to do about this chaos? It is staining my white presence. How am I supposed to bring back the innocence of nature?” Yet family was never natural. It came as an attempt to order the chaos of reproduction. Despite the nuclear home and the black and white windows that litter the small red houses, many children grew up without parents. There was a hope with every pregnancy that one day the world would become a better place, but in reality the world was never going to change. It tunneled down into the black hole of disrepair deep into the pressure of responsibility, until one day there would no longer be anywhere else to move. Trapped inside a spot in the universe that many scientist even debated the true existence of, would be humanity, and all the non-humans would stare through telescopes and see in the circles the design of both good and evil. They would talk to themselves about all the philosophical possibilities in a gray and intellectual way, as if there was no universe, only earth and a burning out sun. In this gray matter, would be the great problem solvers, who assume everything was solved by cutting out the heart of a woman, and calling every topic far game in an intellectual toss up about human problems. They would laugh and crackle when humanity showed its way in the awkwardness, shyness, and insecurities of the living. The lonely men leave the astrology castle and go out for coffee behind books and computers, and tell each other, how strong they were because they never talked about their pain, little do they know, the universe began in a black hole. A woman watching from afar would cross her legs, and inside her uterus was the germination of yet another male alien that would call her mother. +++ “I don’t remember much of my childhood,” she said, keeping her eyes closed and thinking of the dryness and the insignificance she felt as a child. The bugs crawling on the outside of a window were constantly in danger of the wind and rain, and finally after years of persistence they became destroyed by a hand. “That is okay,” Sigi said writing down even the smallest of her words. “Tell me what you can remember, and when your hallucinations began.” “I remember a cousin of mine. I can’t remember her name though. She was taken to a mental hospital when I was very young. I assume she was just like me, or who I am now. I am not sure who the real me is anymore. Isn’t that funny? I have the picture of who I was as a child, but is that the real me? I can’t tell any longer. Everywhere I look, all I see is the me who I was supposed to be, and the real flesh and skin inside of my mind, and the me I was always trying to be has become blurred. There are these thin gray lines made out of silver, and they have become the hats I wear, poisoning my brain. I had thought I looked better in a hat, funny right? I thought there was a job. Only did I not know, that every hat maker eventually dies from mercury poisoning, like a mad hatter. I am not mad, am I?” “I think you are very unique,” Sigi said carefully scribbling something down and trying to catch all her words, like a lover does in a conversation about his admired piece of work. “Unique, sounds awful. I want to just be normal. I don’t want to be mad any longer.” “It is okay though because you are mad, to one degree or another.” “That was rude.” “I am making my diagnosis from your symptoms not your personality.” “And yet it feels so personal doesn’t it, to call someone mad? It doesn’t feel like a diagnosis, it feels as if you don’t like me. Am I that unlikeable? Even my family has rejected me.” “I didn’t say that, did I?” and he looked at his watch. “I am sorry it must have come out wrong. Go on, please tell me more about your childhood.” “Once I saw my mom lying on the floor. She had fainted I think. She was lying in the kitchen with her best dress on, and, at first I had thought she had died. I had thought, I should have heard her fall. I should call the police and do something. You know normal thoughts, right? I think they were normal. But then I felt like her, I wanted to be broken too. I wanted to understand her pain, and I curled up next to her, like I was a real little girl and I tried to fit under her arm like a baby, and I sat there for a long time, until someone came and called the doctor. That was the beginning I think, the beginning of me forgetting who I am. I forgot who loved who. I forgot it wasn’t my fault. Funny how memory is, how it just begins when we ask it to begin, and yet it never stopped, memory never stops, it just keeps going. Right now, this is a memory. And we were so close, me and my mom and yet, when she was lying there I didn’t feel anything at all.” “I felt as if now maybe I can be valuable to her and wipe away all her other bad memories of my sisters and brothers dying. Maybe now she is still, and she has stopped moving, maybe I can have that affection I couldn’t find before. Isn’t that ridiculous who believes that? It is like falling in love with a dead person, because you think they are beautiful with the expression of horror on their face. Pain, doesn’t draw people into one another, and yet to me it was like falling into honey, and I got stuck there. I could no longer escape it. All I wanted was more, more and more and more, until finally I realized I would die on the floor with her. Even though I was just pretending eventually it would became real.” “Now, where was your father?” “I haven’t finished,” Emmy said annoyed. “I have a lot to say, you must just listen, okay. I can’t order it out, like on paper. I don’t know where my father was, and frankly at that time I didn’t care.” Sigi, looked at his watch, “Well, I am sorry but your time is almost over. Are there any last thoughts you have?” “Over!” she said angrily. “But I just began, and I have so much to share. How can things be over already!” “I am sorry,” Sigi said, “time goes by quickly when you talk all the way through it.” “I am still hypnotized, un-hypnotize me!” “Okay,” Sigi said taking out his watch and moving it over her eyes.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Sep 2014 01:21:28 +0000
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