[The whole in me, in everyone, there is a hole. Love can’t fill it. True love is about not filling it. You are the hole in me, the hole that is the Holocaust in all your friend’s lives, that means, you make yourself the right shape and deny your ability to fill it. Somehow, you manage to do it universally.]
We had this conversation to ourselves during the dream time compilation of the lectures from the day on psychoanalysis and its reference to the French/American divide, which is, I gather, that the French are more shapely, far less content abstract, or content concrete, because they care mostly about form in both its universal and contextualizing senses. That is much like the both of us. They also wear better makeup and have nicer hair, which is like me. People there spoke to me in French. You told me that if I didn’t want to be there I should leave. Actually, you said, I could always leave and I asked you if that was your unconscious articulating that wish in the form of advice.
His lecture begs the question though, how do you deal with the historical burden of of civilization’s appropriation of death on the treatment of the individual during psychoanalysis? Is it that you help them to see that they have already attempted to appropriate death into themselves? To me this seems like the entire foundation of the need for the thing in the first place. Otherwise might we not still believe in universalities, like religions and the like and not have ever come to be so complex as to take death as our own burden? If you read Hannah Arendt you will find that psychoanalysis and totalitarianism are contemporaries and they both have everything to do with the Jewish question. You’re Jewish. So am I. Maybe that has something to do with it too. You are kind of like the opposite of the Nazis. You’re the shape of the violence you won’t perpetrate.
We are caught in a trap, boy, it is cyclical and solipsistic. What are you writing your poetry about lately? Yesterday at lunch I told your friend that we hadn’t been friends for at least 5 months. This was after you told him not to use you as a point of reference and I told you, stop making yourself a point of reference and forbaying other people to use you. This has something to do with it. By it, I meant totalitarianism. It means you can say and do anything.
But here I am, still talking about you, still trying to fill the thing that can’t be filled, to answer questions with no answer, your correction of, on which is based our love. You almost drove me mad sir and you think you are going to make people more sane but you drive people mad, which is why they stop being friends with you, or that is just me and for them its just that they don’t get anything out of it, because they are not in love with you, like me. I’m not saying you can’t use this approach to make people sane.
During lunch all of our intimacy was expressed in ironic commentary against the other, no, my ironic commentary, your just telling me when I was wrong, like usual, which you have yet to realize is the event that triggers the thing that makes this all oppositional and if you really wanted to know me you might have the courtesy to stop with the triggering event which you would be able to identify if you only had the ability to hear everything I am saying to you all the time.
Like I said, lets go to the Medici for lunch. And you said, I hate the Medici, we could get into our car and go to The Nile and I said No, I don’t want to go there. Because every time I go there I order the same things and it reminds me of you and all the times we have gone there for the past 10 years and ordered the same things. When we told your new friend that we had known each other for 10 years he thought we were older than him, like 32, which was ironic because when I am with you I feel like I am 19, which was ten years ago.
You ordered a sandwich and ate it in under 5 minutes flat and took claim to the other half of our omelettes which I proceeded to eat the rest of, on principle. I convinced your friend to order the same omelette as I do there, the omelette Lorraine, which is delicious and also particularly apropo both because of the French people we had been listening to and because it’s a dish that always reminds me of people other than you. When your friend commented on the speed of your consumption I wanted to point out that you have been eating that fast for the last ten years, but I know this mothering tendency of mine, its rude and you never correct me. That’s not one of the things you correct me about.
He told us about going insane in Sweden and being hospitalized for a month in a facility that had gardens, but no psychotherapy. I asked, which would you prefer, if you had to choose between one of the other? Then I asked him if he was bipolar or just manic, because I was curious and you corrected me: I can never ask someone, “Are you bipolar?” I have to say “Do you have bipolar?” And then I corrected you and said that having something implies that there is something to be had.
And I’d rather attribute the condition to someone’s character and then you said it is more correct to ask someone if they have had a depressive episode and I said that I don’t like to get caught up in scruples having to do with grammar and you said you would ask someone if they were neurotic because most everyone is neurotic and I said that people take offense to that and you said but its more right and I said that other people won’t not take offense just because it is more right.
The sin of being too sure of myself obviously takes a reactionary form for me. You are always accusing me of that, of being too reactionary. When our oversureness enters into relationship with one another we fight and I become the correction to all your flaws. And you are like the dad I never had. The one who would have paused his lecture to tell my mother to stop fighting with me. But like with him, I am still correcting you into something that’s not always assuming that I will think like you, because that’s my appropriation of my own death, making sure that no one tells me what to do. I won’t tell them they are wrong, either, unless they are telling other people they are wrong, like you. So we are in stalemate and inasmuch as we are the perfect corrections for one another, we are also in love.
[Two totalitarian nations can only be islands, otherwise, the borders get confused, they have to make compromises, to allow other people’s frameworks to draw different holes that can’t be filled, to make the space for domination conspicuous and incomplete.]
