#orpheus rex

[havesexwithghosts]

Look back don't look back

Be like Orpheus. Look back, don't look back, and look back again.

Look back now--no, not now, look back then:

We are Peaceful, Monumental.

[havesexwithghosts]

Nachträglichkeit

From Kaja Silverman's Flesh of My Flesh:

The unconscious opens onto the world in another way as well; it accommodates not just personal memories but also the "reminiscences of mankind." [...] If we live through more than we are, [Lou Andreas-Salome] argues, it is both because the past lives on in the present and because the present exerts a transformative influence over the past. A psychic Nachtraglichkeit can also open the door to one that is historical in nature. By turning around to face the partner he has left behind, and tarrying with her, the subject described in this passage also reaches out to all of the others who have been left behind--either by himself or by his predecessors.

As my reader may already have observed, another interlocuter has silently joined the conversation I am having with Freud and Salome: Walter Benjamin. He also characterizes the past as a book, and he urges us to read this book by recognizing the similarities that connect our moment to earlier moments in time. If we do this, he writes, we will change the "character" of the past--transform its defeats into victories, and awaken the dead. 

[havesexwithghosts]

From Kaja Silverman's Flesh of My Flesh

Since Salome was so attuned to the phenomenological dimensions of psychoanalysis, she understood from the very beginning that when the unconscious displaces affect from a repressed wish to a perceptual stimulus or memory, it does not create a new analogy; rather, it acknowledges one that already exists. Infantile memories are precious because they "[unite] us with the world-outside-us," she writes, "bridging the gap which otherwise seems to separate us as individuals from everything around us"--and even "what we term 'objectivity' rather than 'love' is nothing but our conscious mind utilizing its methods in opening itself willingly to the unconscious, where we have never ceased denying individual isolation, insisting upon our shared roots in the cosmos." Consequently, if there is something pathological, it is the refusal to associate. The goal of analysis is to undo this refusal--to turn its "no" into a "yes."

Since the unconscious is only in a position to affirm the analogies that are perceptually and mnemonically available to it, and always privileges some of them and repudiates others, it might seem difficult to see how it could open onto the All. But since everything is connected to so many other things, and each thing bears within it the weight of all things, if we are able to recognize even one of our primal siblings, we will immediately find ourselves surrounded by kin.