Talkin The Dark's Talk

The siss of the shisp of the sigh of the sitzing at the stir of the ver grose O arundo of a long one in midias reeds: and shades began to glidder along the banks, greepsing, greepsing, duusk unto duusk, and it was as glooming as gloaming could be in the waste of all peacable worlds.

-- Joyce, Finnegans Wake (140)


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Fascinting reading in a review of Annie Rogers new book The Unsayable in Sunday’s New York Times. Rogers enervates Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalytics as a means of uncovering -- and recovering -- the language of the unconscious, which is both true and beautiful, strange and horrifying.

In “What’s Left Unsaid,” reviewer Kathryn Harrison tells the story:

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At the age of 16, Annie Rogers stopped speaking. “I realized,” ... “that whatever I might say could be misconstrued and used to create a version of ‘reality’ that would be unrecognizable, a kind of voice-over of my truths I could not bear.” Given her apprehension, silence was a sane response — the only response possible for a girl who understood herself as having been called by the archangel Michael to end human suffering by translating “the voices of angels for the world.”

Rogers recovered; she spoke; she grew up and became a Harvard University professor and a clinical psychologist who treated abused and abandoned children, fulfilling the vocation that, when she was a teenager, landed her in a mental institution. She no longer felt the responsibility to convey messages from heaven and had replaced the archangel with another divinity of sorts, someone with a different ecstatic following — Jacques Lacan — but ending human suffering remained her purpose. “The Unsayable: The Hidden Language of Trauma” is an account of Rogers’s successes, as well as her frustrations, in helping girls, herself included, hear the stories of their pasts and discover the truths of their essential selves, truths that surface no matter how forcefully they are repressed. A basic principle of psychoanalysis, Rogers, who now teaches at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, reminds us, is that a powerful, even controlling part of each person, the unconscious, “insists on knowing the truth, even if the truth is a shocking and costly retrospective.”

She calls her own troubled adolescence “a place of shattering and beginnings,” and she presents her personal history as a prelude to a series of case studies that reveal how the ideas of Lacan (whom she introduces as “enigmatic, maddeningly obscure”) provided her an essential tool for analysis. Those ideas offered Rogers “a structure for listening” to her patients so as to help them understand themselves and transcend symptoms more commonly treated with cognitive-behavioral therapies developed for post-traumatic stress disorder. Lacan’s contention that “the unconscious is structured like a language” was the epiphany — the light-bulb moment — she needed to begin to untangle the puzzles of symptoms, actions and statements that characterized the abused children she worked with, many of whom were considered too sick or damaged to be helped.

When we contemplate acts we consider unspeakable, we call on a civilized society’s imperative to remain silent about physical abuse, rape, incest — the third monkey in the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil triumvirate of denial that protects abusers who hold victims in their thrall. As a matter of conscience we fight to create a climate in which victims are not shamed into silence’s effective complicity. But unspeakable is not the same as unsayable. The first audience of the self is, of course, the self, and what stops us from revealing hurtful and damaging events isn’t (or isn’t only) imposed from without. Before they protect their predators, victims of trauma (defined as any experience “which by its nature is an excess of what we can manage or bear”) protect themselves by not consciously expressing what happened to them. To articulate, or to say, is to put together, to draw fragments of an experience into a coherent narrative, a potentially devastating process if the experience was so overwhelming as to have been, like the author’s own past, “shattering.” Before a thing is consciously (if not audibly) voiced, it has yet to be acknowledged or owned; it has yet to be believed.

Rogers’s user-friendly (and admittedly self-serving) summary of Lacanian psychoanalytic thought explains that human beings are “born into language,” and that as we acquire language we discover loss. Our preverbal selves are one with an all-providing mother who anticipates needs we cannot give voice to; our verbal selves have separated, enough that we are conscious of that separation. Necessarily, we are traumatized by what separation means: that we must rely on language to express our demands and thus risk being misunderstood. It is equally risky to be understood too well, and in order to get the affirmation we crave from mother, we repress or censor what we imagine she won’t like.

While Rogers apologizes for having to guide her readers through enough psychoanalytic theory to understand the work she does with damaged children, her abbreviated tutorial helps make “The Unsayable” an absorbing, even exciting book for readers who are neither victims of abuse nor therapists. To grow up and become fully human is traumatic. Whether we recognize it or not, each of us is poised between two existential terrors, that of remaining unknown and unseen, our anguish and our joys without witness, and that of being known so completely that we are left undefended. Every reader of this review has experienced overwhelming and unbearable separation from his or her mother, trauma that fractured each of us into a conscious and an unconscious self.

Lacan’s insights represent a “radical return to Freud,” to the concept of a separate and dynamic unconscious where “time stands still, words function as puns, forbidden ideas find uncanny disguises and dreams are riddles or puzzles.” The Freudian, or Lacanian, analyst is as much sleuth as listener, piecing together a code that emerges from language, symptoms and actions. “Although unconscious life is anything but random, its logic isn’t always clear” but it can be deciphered “through associations and in retrospect.” In recounting her treatment of an 11-year-old girl who suffered debilitating headaches and anxiety in the wake of being abused by a neighbor, Rogers outlines a process of listening for words or even parts of words the girl repeated during therapy, remarking how motifs from her dreams connected to her waking life, and remaining alert to any physical symptoms, in this case the headaches. After sessions, Rogers took notes, and she ruminated on what she’d heard. Like a good detective, she acted on a hunch as well as evidence when she asked the child if headaches might not be code for Ed aches, a way of “telling by not telling” that the neighbor, whose name was Ed, had hurt her.

Psychoanalysis has been eclipsed to a great extent by less expensive and less time-consuming ego-based therapies, and by the even shorter cut of psychopharmacology. But as “The Unsayable” demonstrates, analysis is as uniquely rewarding as it is demanding. Given discipline, patience — and a measure of courage — it may be the only means of reaching certain patients. To learn that “the unconscious is structured like a language” is to see this aspect of the self as radically different from the way it is popularly misrepresented, as a murky soup of dream fragments and primitive urges from which it’s possible to fish out the occasional insight, a kind of primordial chaos from which higher consciousness distinguishes itself.

For Freud, Lacan and Rogers, the unconscious is as complex and sophisticated in its organization as is the conscious, and as individual: each psyche requires its own lexicon. Within this mysterious realm that the Jungian analyst Alan McGlashan called a “savage and beautiful country,” Lacan’s voice does hold the power of an archangel’s, and Rogers’s ability to listen and perceive has an equally rare authority. It isn’t everyone who can hear what we don’t allow ourselves to say.





ANGEL FLUKES

August 16

My angels demand Truth and
Beauty; there’s a brace of ‘em
with a fiery blue halo for each
sooth, hot for troth’s sweet booty.
They bid me mount the whale
and dive full down where
a blue chapel houses horror
and repast, bound in a whale’s
belly or split in the father’s keel,
cold rooms piled with verboten
trash -- feces where they don’t
belong, the Man in the Car’s
Lacanian slacks, the bloody
stump of a squirrel I once
dissected with a brick trying
to get what lies under and
below, the unremitting
stone vagina of that older
girl who undressed me
in the woods. That sort of
stuff wells the sea itself,
a shitpipe of wash and thrash,
uteral and magisterial,
smashing in its surf
sursurrant breasts of
foam. How can I speak
of that salt-cut
umbilicus without a
stylus in my hand,
without oars of white
desire, without a
guitar pick to flail
airs on g-strings,
without a yellow pail
for hauling up
the wonders of black
water woods, be
it a big toad or
a tossed toy or a
forever breeching whale?
Such metaphors greet
the shores of walking
destiny, a salt-brined
gnash of watery bones
still regnant despite
the atrophy of my lips,
crowned by a silver
phallus which sailed
from me long ago
in search of a fading,
perhaps forever
sundered Yes. Heave
night and sea close to
me here, as if my head
were squeezing out
the halves of a dream’s
riot-rousing scream,
thighs of myth and mystery
urging me to jot
this urgent ink-cream
of doodle-jots into
noctilucent quim
too deep and old to name,
much lest spout
wild discourse with
on saline, siren reams.
All this hot jackulate
and not a cunthair closer
to the devastating realm
of raw truth and naked
beauty, the undersea half
of things beneath the heart
I wring, tolling every
black bell of heaven’s thing
pantied in blue abyssal seem.
I just spiral round and
down the same damn
drain like a plastic
yellow ducky, stuck
in the same incessant
sucking drone which
sounds like every lala
dream of home --
the fantasy of perfect
returns which I
forever habitually
roam with penis
guitar scythe boat
book pen, mortared
fast between that
narrow land between
a woman’s thighs,
pressed hard by
howling margins.
The pattern is the
same, a signature
write in my inner ear
by events so long ago
they are like wrecks
turned reefs, paradisal
tumors down the leagues
both true and beautiful
in forever’s tide,
silent or most eloquent
to be all that I feared
yet exactly what
I fought here to become.
A black brogue lacquers
my ear with whiskied
pussylicks inside a
curved hellacious wave,
nailing me to old crimes
with the desire they
spoored then spawned,
a dark childhood’s
beautiful monster
erupting through doors
I chained and locked
in growing up, irrupting
the boyman I fear I am.
Beneath the basement
stairs the bogeyman stirs,
his green horseteeth
a rictus smile,
his appetite unspeakable,
his crimes too long unsaid.
He’s coming back
for me in the guise of
a happy dog I fear
will kill one of our cats
out back; he is the
sales call I can’t make,
the poem which I
can never end right;
he’s in the way my
wife turns far away
on her side of the
bed; he’s in the
world too high or
low for me to reach
or name, breeching
in the strangest
ways -- a breeze,
sour light at 3 p.m.,
a tossed sneaker
next to a dead
possum on the tired
road home. To sing
of him I Finnegan
the wake like a
barber bleeding dreams,
like a parishioner
singing in tongues
the heart’s hot Arabic
almost, not quite,
askew by one or
two degrees from
the propoundings
too damn dark to
say, their leagues
too deep for mortal
tongues to fin. The lovers
shout all night to
orgiastic gods from
hard nipples and
swole balls; they
are the unseen
benefactors of
the schnickschnacking
pair, the white shore
always just behind
the other. The mortal
man plows hard and fast
the sweet sluice of
the wanton swive,
both of them with eyes
screwed tight,
sighting dark familiars,
& shades & ghostly ruins,
their ecstasies geared
to fling them far
into the clear blue space
of Love; stare hard,
sweet lovers, hurl
wild the name buried
deep within the ruins
of a self. Meat in
motion swirls the bole
which devours every
lust and once oh
so rarely once
wakes the next day
in love, giving wing
to the hatchling
ichor of my pen.
Caul the spoorings
of this dark
hour on that spent
bed I never was welcome
in for long, not in all
those old first damaged
ways when thrall
was a war’s seahorse
built for two to battle
on. It’s dank and humid,
juicy and still, the
late night breathing low
and steady like a world
asleep and dreaming
this cold blue song.
No, it’s not poetry
but still vatic in its
way, the singer’s
shadow’s ligature,
the part of song
at Acheron beseeching
Hades to remit
the beloved ghost of
history, she who
left me long ago
when the Girl on
The Playground took
my dandelion bouquet
and flung it laughing
in the air, leaving me
to curse in showering
gold; the one I dove
into the pond to
save who left me
standing naked in
the woods; the tide
which ebbed from my
mother’s voice, taking
the breast of seas away.
This is the old song
of that first shore
when fish and sea
parted ways, creating
the language of two
worlds, a lyric both
high and deep, strange
and bittersweet,
forever lost and ever
new, both beautiful
and true and all of
it swirling round
bore of chiasmic blue.
Thus I am welcomed
yet again at this next
futile end where I give
up the ghost with an
empty toast and
trudge home alone
to first light
where seedlings are soaring
green and proud and true,
ethereal and wounded,
perfect in my angels’ sight.