The Sweet Machine

What is repeated ... is always something that occurs -- the expression tells us quite a lot about its relation to the touche ((the real encounter)) -- as if by chance.

The function of the touche, of the real encounter -- the encounter in so far as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed encounter -- first presented itself in the history of psychoanalysis in a form that has in itself already enough to arouse our attention, that of the trauma.

Is it not remarkable that, at the origin of the analytic experience, the real should have presented itself in the form of what was unassimilable in it -- in the form of the trauma, determining all that follows, and imposing on it an apparently accidental origin? We are now at the heart of what may enable us to understand the radical character of the conflictual notion introduced by the opposition of the pleasure principle and the reality principle ...

In effect, the trauma is conceived as having neccessarily been marked by the subjectifying homeostasis that orients the whole functioning defined by the pleasure principle. Our experience then presents us with a problem, which derives from the fact that, at the very heart of the primary process, we see preserved the insistence of the trauma in making us aware of its existence. The trauma reappears, in effect, frequently unveiled. How can the dream, the bearer of the subject’s desire, produce that which makes the trauma emerge repeatedly -- if not its very face, at least the screen that shows that it is still there behind?

Let us conclude that the reality system, however far it is developed, leaves an essential part of what belongs to the real a prisoner in the toils of the pleasure principle.

-- Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, transl. Alan Sheridan





SWEET MACHINE

What is it about the real
that has to be so rude,
so rough, so unassimably
ragged blunt & stewed
that I can’t speak of it
without immediately
attempting to rev up
the sweet machine,
whirling fast off-topic
in a pervertimento
of blue glee, singing
pussy pussy pussy
where I should be
saying just what it
is that makes hard
going real on the
next oh-so labored
day? My wife and
I watch TV on
Sunday night, our
weekend together
soon to close, watching
“The Bourne Identity”
for a second time
because anything half
good is worth watching
again than all that’s
worthless mute and
poor -- just about
everything else, these
days. The story
of brilliant fights
against sure extinction
was classic Hero.
half Hercules half
James Bond, & provided
a distracting counterpoint
to the real terrors of
our small life, the
one we live to make
love’s dreams real,
at least. As I lay
there on the couch
the thought came to
me that we could lose
all this so easily,
just a random rude
spark from Fate and
we could be out of
this comfort room
-- if I lost my job,
if one of us died
driving home,
if this country
took a hard hit
from bombs or some
financial blight:
the more I wondered,
the more traumas
crowed into the room.
It made me feel the
awful preciousness
of our simple, long-
worked in too-sharp
relief, spooring the chill
emptiness of loss into
our dark living room,
lit only by the phosphor
of the TV, with the
world outside dark
too, all dark soon cold.
And that’s exactly when
the the sweet machine
began: I found myself
no longer there
but strutting on a stage
singing truths directly
from a burning ocean’s
page & fucking every
finhole rumping up
the swale. Is song
the nightingale which
feels the inflict of
the real like a
barb clean through
its breast, causing
a gorgeous music
to erupt from its
barbed heart with
the ocean sense of things,
rhythmic and margeless,
bawdy, free, safely
back inside the
womb's backside
that first rejected
to me to cold hours
so alone. Ever there’s
a cross between two
paths: the one which
leads from what
really happened toward
what will happen
yet again, and the one
which reels drunkenly
from honey pots
toward poppy fields
of incessantly sweet
dreams. At that
crossroads I’m
worst (or best)
at opting for Plan B,
howling happy doggy
style in creamy
cheeks, yowling
sonnets at the moon.
The irony is that
the wrong turn here
bears the right one
in a strangely prescient
delay: I make this music
as if it were plainsong
in a matin chapel
of a grounded, purposeful
day, harrowing the
sweet machine so
I can enter the next
day sated, refreshened
on blue waters, my
wolf-boy’s trouser
tooth fed full
so the adult can
zip up & begin real
labors which always
must ensue.
Thus I close
the book and head
upstairs to love my
aging sad and lovely
wife who needs the
most visible proof that
a real man is getting
business done, beneath
and beyond this tender
roof real love worked
hard to sustain,
lala excrescence
and hooha boobs
restrained between
wet pages of a book.
Monday morning at work
I heard of a former coworker
at the newspaper being
struck by a massive heart
attack as she sat with
her husband watching TV
on Sunday, wholly out of
the blue -- 47 years old,
a runner and health-food
freak -- Now I wonder
if my fright which
revved the sweet machine
was gyred through
fear’s aether from that
awful, cruel event,
a whiff I caught through
night-opened windows.
Dunno. Whatever
the cause, I think
my addlement and
thrall keeps the saddle
ready for rides on
oceans always toward land.
The real man here
emerges in what
the surreal one surges
and submerges,
forever happy here
so it’s never only
crappy there.
Maybe some day
I’ll sing my way
out of the sweet machine,
step from its wave
of crashing, hymnal blue
and walk a real man’s
way inland back home to You:
or perhaps this is the
only way I’ll ever have
to mine and mint a dream
which feeds on horrors
to bloom gorgeously
at night when ills lamp
the margeless moon.