Experimenting with Freudian Concepts
This might well be gathered under a category of the use and abuse of Freud, but it’s also an experiment, and akin to all experiments, there’s play involved. Like a child who doesn’t know about architecture or its principles, or mechanics of any kind, yet attempts - in enjoyment - to build and rebuild structures and castles of different forms, me too, like a child, would attempt to toy with these concepts without any claim whatsoever of being rigorous, consistent, or authoritative in any way. Maybe whoever reads this should regard it as a piece of literature - in the very limited, very narrow sense - perhaps, a mental exercise, or just scattered premature remarks of random thoughts.
Now, let us tackle an issue that has proved to be irritating for me, for the past six years, I think. The inability to write about it, in fear of lacking enough knowledge or understanding, in fear of being too harsh, and even in fear of being so mercilessly ridiculed - there’s always fear involved - regardless of the fact that for the past couple of years * three I guess * I have lost the appetite to write, sadly enough - perhaps were among the reasons behind such an inability, although I have discussed it over and over with many close friends of mine. But in favouring speech over writing at the time - which may be warmer, more human, more alive than the cold act of writing - wasn’t I as well afraid unconsciously of having the exact same issue that I’m fiercely attacking and criticizing? Wasn’t I, too, afraid of being insignificant, the same way the event appears “not” to be, while accusing those who embrace the issue’s core ideas as insignificant?
Write it down and we will see.
The setting of our scene is as follows, an event that took place, an opening not experienced before in our lifetime - thus an event - and the violent shutting down of such an opening.
Grace has left this soil, vowing not to return back, and an enigmatic will - wills? - is tirelessly trying to wipe out its traces left behind, its marked footprints in this soil as if this terrain was never crossed before - but is that so?
The tune of defeat was in the air, there’s a love for drama, one that was actually instilled in us, everywhere, all the time, for more than one hundred years, thanks to mass media advancements. Everything is dramatic, tragic even, but not much of everything is really tragic. A great deal of this sense of the tragic - and the comic, and the tragicomic, too, you name it - is theatrical. There’s a difference between reading Oedipus Rex or Hamlet for the first time, and then watching it years later - in its same standard classical guise, unchanged - after hearing about it millions of times, reading about it, contacting its metaphors everywhere, hearing their references uttered in every occasion, watching it again and again and again that it seems endless. To be or not to be, kill the father, mother is married, blind yourself, and wander aimlessly, etc.
Watching it years later, you are almost if not fully dissociated - unless adaptation is involved, as in every interpretation - the feelings it instills are not thrilling anymore, it’s repetitive but fearing that you might be missing on something, you might have lost the old thrill - the text, the performance hasn’t changed, so it’s you who must have changed! - you start to exaggerate, you recall, you wish to claim the sense of the tragic again, you want catharsis to take place again.
And we also have love for mimesis.
There’s a love for mimicking what has taken place, re-enacting - and revisiting crime scenes either done by us or towards us - The rituals of losing a beloved one, the rituals of being rejected in a job admission, and the rituals of writing down. The same goes for a trend, maybe social media made it easier for us to notice a phenomenon that is “trends” which are rapidly changing - not only to notice it but to live it, and in most cases to live by it - but there were always generational trends of behaviour, expressing oneself, the role and importance and aims of writing, writing styles, and thinking about writing and styles. That was always the case, was always there in newspapers, school textbooks, political speeches, tv programs, propaganda slogans, novels, folk songs, and of course, cinema.
The tragic is a hero, a revolutionary, a martyr. He has to be defeated at the end, we all know that and we witness it without any change of his fate, we love him, we sympathize with him, but we want him to die at the end. If not dead, he wouldn’t be tragic anymore, if not defeated, he wouldn’t be commemorated and admired, he would be a comic, mostly a fraud, but always an actor, a violation of the unwritten contract we signed with the institution of the dramatic in our social life. Adel Emam as an “actor” - and you go to see his movies based on the desire to watch him, not the characters that he plays - and a comic, is allowed to triumph at the end, tragedy is permitted here if the comic protagonist would triumph and avert a tragic fate. The comic is allowed tragedy as long as he wins at the end, and the tragic is allowed comedy as long as he is defeated in the end - even if the ending is on a high note, you know that what follows from there, what you haven’t seen, will never see, and is yet to come, is tragic.
No writer - taking seriousness seriously, which is probably the unconscious sarcastic comment on his mediocrity - who wishes to be significant, would like to see himself as a comic. The “serious” writer is always tragic, he might be humorous, sarcastic, cynical to the extreme, but he would always maintain his tragedy, his suffering, and his defeat(s) which would take the place of satisfaction and fulfillment, for the tragic is always defeated, and the “serious” writer\thinker\whatever deserves to be defeated, and defeated badly, an epic defeat in an apocalyptic fantastic war - not a battle - but war, “The” war.
There’s always an enemy for the tragic, and as his significance grows, his enemy has to be of greater power and might. Sure, there are enemies for the comic and the dramatic, melodramatic, and to everyone and nearly to everything, there’s always an enemy but no conception of what an enemy is, perhaps. And sure, in a state of conflict and enmity, you try to anticipate your opponent, taking steps ahead of him if you have enough power and resources. The greater the danger is, the greater are your precautions and pre-emptive blows. But the tragic diverts this common state into another path. The tragic is in war with everything and is losing on every front, the enemies are gigantic dragons - and dragons had a long and peculiar history of enmity and friendship - thousand years old; the state, the culture, history, tradition, religion, nature, capitalism, language, being, and of course, himself. Himself paradoxically enough, is stronger than himself thus defeating him each time - but aren’t we all? And even better, are we?
But the defeats are constant, he would only indulge in what he would call “small victories,” minor satisfactions for the Id that would only maintain his existential narrative of him still being alive, and still, writing - if you’re defeated on every front, constantly, you should by now be either dead or captive, enslaved perhaps, and wouldn’t be interesting? The idea that you’re actually captivated by those who defeated you, and like a slave in ancient greece - since tragedy was greek - you indulge yourself with your small victories, enchanted by their dazzling light of achieving both satisfactions of a tragic writer, pleasure and death? And who would captivate you, if not your most powerful enemy? If you’re your greatest enemy since you’re of the greatest significance as a tragic, wouldn’t it mean that you’re held captive by yourself? And wouldn’t these “small” victories be big enough for you if it weren’t for the tragic narcissist that you are?
What should it look like, then? A revolution, as much as it is loved, it has to be defeated in the eyes of the tragic writer. It has to die, and we have to keep mourning it in order to be immortal, in order to be truly tragic deserving a place in some pantheon downtown. An overwhelming opening that is the event cannot be tolerated, apprehended or embraced by the tragic, a secret death wish was there for the beloved one - revolution - and as a proper tragic hero would always do, his love object is personified, it grows, it acts, it suffers, and it is killed violently. It dies and it’s in its death that a tragic writer discovers his relief - maybe because it also acted as a super-ego he couldn’t tolerate? Was it too much for him - and disturbed by such relief, irritated, it’s now revealed that he actually hated it, thus regret begins. Significant enough as he sees himself, he didn’t just witness its death, he must have taken part in it, his participation must have been there in the act of killing, therefore the mourning that would last forever, a mourning that would be the emblem a tragic writer would carry, as a sign of his status as a tragic.
But it’s not enough, it’s no longer enough. There is a need, always a need for rational representation of the issue at hand, there must be some consistent narrative there, and the tragic writer would spare no time in composing a grand symphony in order for him and for others to sing along it. It’s no longer sufficient for the “serious” writer to compose a simply structured folk song about loss and alienation and the overwhelming capacity of his enemy and the overwhelming love for his lost beloved. No, it has to be a symphony, a grand structure of four movements, an overly complicated and pretentious counterpoint, but with an accessible and flattened sense of polyphony and orchestration, for both he wants to appeal to a larger audience, not only tragic writers as himself, not only writers other than himself, but also tragic subjects, and so a distance has to be maintained, a certain proximity. He has to be pretentious and complicated but not as much as to alienate his audience - already a vulnerable audience, like most of not all of our generation, and vulnerability to the tragic as such, since we seem to have witnessed enough of it, even born in its shadowy consequences - those whom he wishes to accompany him in singing the symphony of mourning. The other reason is that he simply doesn’t understand neither music nor harmony - even the principles - well enough, so when it comes to a colourful and rich sense of polyphony, he would fail to arrange it even if he wishes to. The theatricality of his sense of the tragic is evident as he would struggle more and more to identify with the tragic, sees himself as a serious tragic figure, painting himself talking to skulls, but he is willing only to pay half the price, counting on his seemingly - real before his eyes - tragedy to pay for the rest and to compensate for any lack of a real will to know, for any lack of a real will to really understand.
Satisfied with his narrative - about himself and others, where he’s paradoxically blamed and at the same time cannot be blamed, for his end is already destined - he would happily and sadly declare the defeat of a revolution - and along with it himself - in the most eloquent and pretentious way that time and space could permit. Using his long cultivated skills of writing as a tragic writer par excellence, making use of whatever half-baked understandings of what he reads, quick analogical associations that’s utterly nonsensical and embarrassing but shiny and promising with something more - which is never there - and taking only what serves his narcissistic tragic narrative, what’s left behind is always more important. What really happened? And what was really said by those whom you amputated their jargon for your failing epic of defeat?
And yet, there’s a “thing” here. The tragic writer, in carrying out his projection, is haunted by the dead - loved\hated - ones, and the haunting is not due to guilt - alone? - at this time, it’s due to violation. Violating the dead, hostile feelings brought about by his half-witted mediocre attempts in declaring its death - and the way he does so - appears on the surface again. The hostility we have against the deceased beloved ones - the ghosts of now - is seen as pointed towards us rather than emerging from us. And here, the tragic writer is mirroring the “oppressor,” for there is an oppressor - the tragic writer is not entirely delusional - there is an oppressor who mirrors the tragic writer’s attitude, but exactly like a mirror reflection, your right hand’s reflection is not in the right if viewed from the opposite side. For the oppressor there are things - a lot of things - that have reverse positions, but these things themselves remain the same. It’s the same opening, anyway.
For the tragic writer here, who claims phony mastery of knowledge of what he’s talking about and of his narrative - to the extent of denying such mastery - his feelings and attitudes and reactions are what they are, but it’s his assessment that is off target. The thing he loved and hated simultaneously - for various reasons as I might have said, and additionally there might be others linked to his very authority and mastery that was threatened by such an opening, much like the oppressor but in different sense and over a different audience, but I’m tired of writing now and I have to end this paragraph - is not lost. It’s not an object that can be lost. It’s not a person that can be defeated, a plant to be decomposed, a machine to be destroyed - metaphors are interesting, though - and it’s not a treasure to be buried or hidden for now only to be discovered by generations later. It’s - and here it would be a bold claim, perhaps - an opening that came to do away with everything and nothing in particular, it’s a process that no one can initiate or claim to take a hold on, not to mention to kill, to stop, or to defeat, or represent. The tragic writer’s perceptual faith is what had to be done away with, it’s as if he thought that his daughter who is dead so he would go through all that, while in real life she isn’t dead, and when she suddenly comes back one day - in real life and not as a ghost - he would discover that she’s been his mother all along from the beginning and that he doesn’t have a sister to begin with.
Now, I wonder, who’s personifying events?
