"Maybe, I prefer a bit of muddle to the use of a gadget."

This title quote comes from Paula Heimann's essay, "About Children and Children-No-Longer," about which I have been thinking and writing. After making the above statement, she rescinds it, writing, "I must contradict my last sentence. I do not like muddled thinking at all, although I am guilty of it only too often as just now. I meant to express my strong dislike against introducing any gadget into the psychoanalytic relationship. I probably should not be able to handle it correctly" (339). The quick distance Heimann takes from the "muddle"--it's only there to illustrate a kind of option that might represent a state of not having the "gadget" (the "gadget" in question, a tape recorder)--is something I'd like to think about. But the impulse to ask a question about status of the muddle in relation to the gadget also opens immediately into the problem that such a question is, as Winnicott writes, "not to be formulated" (Playing and Reality 17)* and yet: does the renunciation of the muddle take place because it is already too much like a "gadget"--too much of a thing that can be applied to thinking--or because it operates as a kind of fetish, and so threatens to expose a space that might indicate the absence of method in psychoanalysis?

What is interesting to me about Paula Heimann's term "children-no-longer" is that it clearly locates the adult in relation to a state now passed; in contrast, "grown-ups" suggests having one's sites on the movement forward. Philli, the other day, talking about her feeling that it would be "impossible" to grow up, for example, that it "would take so long." The "grown-up" who knows the other side of this feels the pressure to "grow up" in his/her various ways. The pressure to do so is in every place; even when it is not clearly ideological, as in professionalization, or in determining one's identity, it is there, perhaps simply, as time.

The child-no-longer has no better method than anyone else for getting through the day and the way it throws up, at every juncture, something that needs to be gotten through. But since these forms of mediation appear socially, they seem to require a facility with method--with something, I think, that we think of as providing a procedure or process for getting through. It's, I suppose, obvious why "method" is posited here. Or why the question of method is so firmly lodged in the junctures. Conversations in the recent panel I took part in at the ACLA, "From Extraction to Exhaustion" repeated these questions--something like, what if you move backward into rather than forward from/with method? Maybe it's not spatial (backwards) or regressive but one thing to contend with, on the one hand, is the feeling that it is; on the other hand, it registers in the feeling of not being included in the any of the movements are are pushing forward, coming into being. There, the psychotic aspect of the "child-no-longer" comes into play, in the feeling of having hallucinated oneself into the story about how something has come to be.

Today in the bi-weekly installment of a reading group that I've been taking part in on financialization, led by Miranda Joseph, we were joined by Leigh Claire La Berge, who has written about literary aspects of abstraction and representation in relation to finance, and I felt like this conversation somehow took place for me in the above framework, roughly sketched out. Here, the conversation was explicitly about method and interdisciplinarity, proposing the mediation of various dualisms, such as form/content, or abstract/concrete, or representation/reality, as the work to be done (does the child play and not work simply because it is not required to muster the same kind of energy just to keep things going, to maintain the capacity to set things in motion at every instance?).

So I think the question raised for me here--after a day like today, a day that felt like a continuous hallucination of myself into forms of being that no longer count me in, or that have counted me dead, in various ways, which is a very intensely narcissistic thing as well--is why I'm always lingering in these spaces, from which it feels like others have passed on through, or if they haven't, they are aiming to? Or it's this idea of myself as doing so that I can't let go of. But if the insistence on that is not pathological but rather a part of one's being a child-no-longer, does it mean it's a state that you can continue to hold, even though it's dead to others--dead to those who have moved on to other terms, to fields and disciplines where the stakes require justification on other terms? Why, or in what situation, do we see the dead things behind as "everything"--the everything we want to bring along with us--and not the "nothing"? This was a question that arose for me in Michelle Cho's lovely talk, "Genre Worlds," and in the discussion that followed. Here, I lose a sense of what I'm talking about because I'm talking about so many levels, and for much of the time of the talk all I could be aware of was the way that the room like a space of total loss, giving rise to a very acute feeling of suffocation, a form of the feeling of not making it through. That's what it was, anyway.

Winnicott, who discusses the importance it being a "matter of agreement" not to ask and thus decide whether something was found or created, and yet that's always the demand that method makes, to determine this in some way. I wonder if the feeling that going "back" and trying to pick something up is painful comes not so much from one's encounter with reality (i.e. that whatever it is that is being picked up is not "there") but from being compelled to make this choice between what is found and what is created (which is just as unfathomable as the "impossibility" of growing up).

In object relations, this would be the pain associated not with the destruction of the object, but with pain affecting the ego, the "narcissistic hurts" suffered in time. Looking back on this formulation in Heimann's essay, "About Children and Children-No-Longer," it's notable that the description of "narcissistic hurts" comes up when she is talking about the difference between the "regressed" person and the state of original childhood. She writes, "The regressed person, adult or child, suffers from a breakdown of advanced functions, suffers from destructive processes affecting developmental achievements. This implies narcissistic hurts, wounds to self-esteem, shame, a sense of being let down by oneself, failure in many respects" (335). These "hurts" or "wounds" or "shame" seem to point to the vulnerability that the ego must always feel, on the edge of its own destructiveness, as Freud describes, as a border-animal, a Grenstier, whose method, though it might be perceptible to others in this kind of retrospective glance, is nothing other than a kind of hugging to oneself of something--a piece of "time" frozen, an otherwise nothing--about which you have not been compelled to choose, I found it/I created it.

Such was the view out/of the window today in Walter 101: against the backdrop of the fallen classic grandeur of the building of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, which is in the middle of being torn down and so boarded up, an April snow large-flaked and gusty. And there continues to be something about the snow--about the way that I experience it as an enclosure (or the perceptibility of an enclosure) close to the form of an embrace--that seems to lend itself to imagining the afterlife of dead letters, those objects that continue to transmit their messages, as falling down to earth.

*Winnicott's passage reads: "Of the transitional object it can be said that it is a matter of agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question: 'Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?' The important point is that no decision on this point is expected. The question is not to be formulated. (Playing and Reality 17; italics in original)

Note: As always, a form of working through with RT. So much also moves from the totally moving series of conversations had around what is found/what is created with RP, CC, and AL in the Spring 2016 course "Psychoanalysis and Lit II"; this, in turn, was found/created in "From Exhaustion to Extraction" and continues to converse there, after the conversing is past.

Picture: Still from Hirokazu Koreeda, After Life (1998).

on therapeutic utility

In a rather astonishing passage in The Writing of Disaster (trans. Ann Smock, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), Blanchot discusses Serge Leclaire’s and D.W. Winnicott’s “child,” the dead child, the child who is “always already dead.” The discussion takes place in his reflections on “impossible necessary death,” and the death of the child is understood as the first death; in contrast to “organic” death, the second death. One of the remarkable things about the passage is that Blanchot identifies the object of one’s destructiveness in a way that Winnicott himself does not quite get to. This object is “the dead child”; “what we strive thus to kill is the dead child: not only the one who would have for his function to sustain and maintain death in life, but the one for whom the ‘confusion’ of the two deaths has been unable not to obtain and who, therefore, does not ever authorize us to ‘lift’ this confusion” (69, italics mine). This child is perhaps really two: the child, like Leclaire’s infans, whose death is the instance of our being able to speak and to live; and the child for whom the first and the second deaths remain confused (double negative: unable not to obtain), which for Blanchot signals the “the infinite passivity of dying” (70). That child who is the condition of individuality (who is in this sense a “me”), is also not an individual, is a “not-me.” Both of these “children” are dead; they are “confused,” on this basis.

What I find worth noting about the passage is the way that Blanchot qualifies psychoanalysis. He does so, first, by noting that Winnicott’s explanation, which is “fictive,” is perhaps “therapeutically useful”: 

Or rather, this explanation of Winnicott’s is only an explanation, albeit impressive—a fictive application designed to individualize that which cannot be individualized or to furnish a representation for the unrepresentable: to allow the belief that one can, with the help of transference, fix in the present of a memory (that is, in a present experience) the passivity of the immemorial unknown. The introduction of a such a detour is perhaps therapeutically useful, to the extent that, through a kind of Platonism, it permits him who lives haunted by the imminent collapse to say: this will not happen, it has already happened; I know, I remember. It allows him to restore, in other words, a knowledge which is relation to truth, and a common, linear temporality (66).

As Blanchot describes, Winnicott’s “primitive agonies” entail a state in which the child is not yet a subject, and the function of this state, the unintegrated state, is to allow the adult individual to have a narrative in which organic death, the “immemorial unknown” can be known as a memory that refers back to this primary state, a state of primary nonintegration. It’s perhaps precisely because it’s “fictive,” or “therapeutically useful,” that Winnicott’s explanation functions as the obverse to Leclaire’s assertion that “one lives and speaks only by killing the infans in oneself (in others also)” (67). The condition of living and speaking is the death of the child, not just of the child, but of the “dead child.”

Thus, one of the dead children is “therapeutically useful” insofar as she allows the lifting of confusion, to return to knowledge, to establish a linear temporality. I think Blanchot is right about this utility, and in identifying it, he points to something that is perhaps obvious but that might seem too much so. It’s one of the aspects of Winnicott’s writing that I think others, including Michael D. Snediker, in Queer Optimism, have highlighted, which is the terrific metaphorical capaciousness of Winnicott’s writing. What Blanchot underscores is that this “fictive” or metaphorical capacity is its therapeutic utility.

Blanchot goes further. In a parenthetical comment in the next paragraph, he claims that psychoanalytic vocabulary should be used only by analysts: “only those who practice psychoanalysis can use—only those, that is, for whom analysis is a risk, an extreme danger, a daily test—for otherwise it is only the convenient language of established culture” (67). Only the analyst, perhaps, writes and speaks and lives these terms through their practice, terms that would otherwise merely describe “established culture.” Winnicott’s position as an analyst allows him to function in a realm in which the metaphorical aspect of language is therapeutically useful because it does not have a correlate with social experience; it “has not been experienced.” To turn the language of psychoanalysis over to ordinary language implies that this metaphorical dimension will be lost. This is the dimension of language that is at work in representation.

The dead dead child—this means not just that we kill “the marvelous (terrifying) child which we have been in the dreams and desires of those who were present at our birth (parents, society in general),” but that we kill the identification of the child with “primary narcissistic representation,” a representation that “has the status of an ever-unconscious, and consequently, forever indelible, representation” (67). The “indelible ever-unconscious representation” is the impossible necessary death, and it’s this that we seek to destroy (and that in destroying gives us the ability to live, to speak). Blanchot writes: “Whence the literally ‘maddening’ difficulty: in order not to remain in the limbo of the infans, on the near side of desire, one must destroy the indestructible and even finish off (not at one blow, but constantly) that to which one has not now, nor has one ever had, nor will one ever have, access: impossible, necessary death” (67). We destroy the representation itself, though we want (hence the limbo) to maintain it. This, among other things, getting to the end, leaves us confused…

Combatting Neutralization

This recent sequence of days has compelled me to recall that all my other, all my previous love stories, were unrequited. There is nothing quite like "love" or "desire" (distinctions withheld, momentarily) that better motivates paranoid reading, a kind of oscillation between what is palpable, and what felt, what is imagined and what fantasy, what is surface and what depth. In these days, I've finally been able to "get to" the way that "love" in relation to my academic work (such as I perceive it) has been in the position of perpetually repairing (and this term should resonate with all of its attendant psychoanalytic chords, whereby repairing is a way of recovering one's relations to objects that one has also destroyed), and all the while, I've thought that this reparation functioned as a way of working through the way that I've felt destroyed by my own lack of profession, my lack of a job, my lack of some kind of minimum environment that I can "love." But these are, of course, tentative thoughts.

In the past five or so years, there has been a good deal of writing about the "labor of love," the way that labor is effaced when we think of work, as low end theory writes in "A Love Letter to Radical Graduate Students: Present, Former, Future, part I," as producing a "social good," and the way, more generally, that this contributes to the ideology of the university; Marc Bousquet's essay, "We Work" (Minnesota Review, Winter/Spring 2009) is frequently cited, including in the recent essay, "In the Name of Love," by Miya Tokumitsu in The Jacobin (Issue #13, Alive in the Sunshine (Winter 2014)). Although each of these three essays points to the contradiction of being compelled, as Bousquet writes, "to find love, pleasure, and even success in making ourselves exploitable subjects," only the love letter makes a link between this insight and its centrality in Marxist feminist work: 

What makes this a love letter is the idea I want at once to express and in expressing, to make irresistible to you—the idea that knowledge work in the academy is most powerful because it is a domain of love, by which I mean a place in which intimacy, desire, attachment, and investment all hold considerable sway in keeping the machine running smoothly. Or otherwise.  So this is meant at once to serve as an expression of love and to carry a distinctly Marxist feminist lesson about it—particularly, that the idea of love has never been far from relations of domination and exploitation.

Invoking this tradition of Marxist feminist thought is really important, because although Tokumitsu and Bousquet both identify this realm (and the realm of care work traditionally associated with feminist work) as important to how we consider labor, this formulation points to its importance for how we think about love. 

And it's really to this topic that I want to turn, one that I think really does gain by being addressed by mobilizing, perhaps among other things, various aspects of psychoanalytic thought that usually get dismissed in the realm of politically-committed academic labor. In his essay "Against Heroism," (Minnesota Review, Winter/Spring 2009; subsequently republished in The Critical Pulse: Thirty-six Credos by Contemporary Critics, ed. Jeffrey J. Williams and Heather Steffen, Columbia UP (2012)), John Conley calls for a critique of what he calls "politically-committed academic labor," and before I get to the topic I really want to get to (love is always deferred), I want to say a few things about how this kind of critique is so useful for thinking about these relations of love that we (as radical graduate students past, present, and future) would like to reorganize. The distinction that low end theory makes between deprofessionalization and deprivatization, as attitudes that can be taken toward one's desire to do academic work, is on my mind from the outset, and I think that Conley's essay makes a similar recommendation, in wanting to think about a "critique" of politically-committed academic labor. Both of these raise the question of how we can "perform a negative function" (these are my words but I'm putting these words in quotes because I'm unsure about them) on work that we love. 

Having, as I indicated in my earlier post, just spent a few days thinking about how forms of divestment can replace the model of critical thinking that valorizes a model of consciousness raising, it seems to me that Conley's critique of politically-committed academic labor addresses some of the concrete aspects of critical divestment that were not the subject matter of the panel itself. Specifically, Conley proposes auto-reduction as a way of reducing workload: "We need to help each other work less." This, he claims, is the subjective side of the critique--this kind of "what can be done"--that actually correlates with our collective, de-privatized acting in the world; the objective side has to do with the way that we understand the construction of our own desire, of our "love." Conley writes, "By misrecognizing our labor as political work, our desires to participate in the construction of a better world are captured and effectively neutralized." Desire neutralized. Desire, as the desire for a better world, "to work within the 'belly of the beast,' to try to effect change in the world, etc." If auto-reduction helps us to think about deprivatizing or collectivizing (and maybe these are not equal processes) labor, in order to combat this neutralization (but how do you "combat"neutralization?), how can we, from the other side, the objective side of the critique, think about deprivatizing desire, about deprivatizing love? Or does the idea of deprivatization fall short here, in the face of an object of love (in short, to our "literary" objects) that so many of us experience in dimensions tropic, figurative, ephemeral, ethereal, oscillating, immaterial, or all too material, and so on?

So turning now to love. I remain stuck on D.W. Winnicott's idea about the counterintuitive nature of the reparative act (where love is or is an aspect of this act). In his 1964 essay, "Aggression and its Roots," he writes:

Naturally the fact that the patient was becoming conscious of the destructiveness made possible the constructive activity which appeared in the day. But it is the other way round that I want you to see just now. The constructive and creative experiences were making it possible for the child to get to the experience of her destructiveness. (121) 

As I described above, my own experience of unrequited academic love has led me through a pretty extensive sequence of reparative acts--it was me, it was you, it was not personal, it was the was already there from the beginning, the end began at that moment on the beach when you said--or ways of trying to manage and assign responsibility or blame for the conditions that contributed to the destruction of the object. Along the way, of course, there were Winnicottian therapists who made interpretations about my relation vis-a-vis structural conditions and all of that, and while I've been able to get it kind of abstractly, or to know that I should get it, I think I've only just hit upon what Winnicott describes as the other side of our relation to things that we love: the experience of destructiveness. Winnicott is clear that this destructiveness is the condition of loving relationships.
 
Such an acknowledgment aims at taking “full responsibility for the destructiveness that is personal, and that inherently belongs to a relationship to an object that is felt to be good; in other words that is related to loving” (117). For Winnicott, love is not just close to "relations of domination and exploitation," it is the outcome of domination and exploitation. And yet, Winnicott is not advocating making use of this relation as a way of justifying the socialization of such dynamics. 

Even more, however, Winnicott is suggesting that because this is so much the case, because it is unavoidable, there is no necessary correspondence between psychic domination and exploitation and social domination and exploitation. This correspondence is a contingency that, however, justifies or seems to justify the retrospective transformation of destructiveness (Winnicott's other term is aggression) into cruelty; in other words, that transforms a kind of unintegrated or objective destructiveness into a subjective or intentional "envy" (to use Klein's term, which Winnicott disputes). The distinction amounts to a critique of primary narcissism, to Winnicott's critique of Klein that "envy" just "puts the baby there" without an environment. An elaboration of this, Michael Balint's The Basic Fault develops the problem of primary narcissism in detail: "According to the theory of primary narcissism, the individual is born having hardly any or no relationship with his environment" (67). Counterintuitively, perhaps, "getting to" one's destructiveness implies an acknowledgment of the falseness of primarily narcissism, even though our experiences of "envy" as humans often seem to tell us otherwise. 

Winnicott does not quite say what it would mean to "experience one's destructiveness," and as a way of trying to come to the end of this train of thought, I'd like to make a few speculations that don't really get quite around to addressing, yet, the problem of how to love academic objects. Alas. However, in his discussion of the "baby," (he imagines that) destructiveness is experienced in the baby's biting and attacking of its first love object. In attacking it in this way, the baby externalizes it, brings it into being as an object. What is destroyed is not the object, but the "union," the idea that the baby and mother are one and exist in a state of nonintegration. Still, the baby is always asked--as we also always are?--to perform this psychic operation of imagining this "union," this identity of self and environment, when it is not there. That this is a paradox that is retained in love relations is little more than an observation, but one that might help us to think both about how easily it can come to pass that the "intimacy, desire, attachment, investment" are sapped or "neutralized" and about how, psychically, such feelings register not only an attitude about an object but also attest to a readiness to encounter this object destructively, that is, to see it as both external and persisting in its being as an object. To destroy an academic object--twentieth century German literature, for example--means something for disciplinarity, or field, although I'm not sure yet what.

This post is still a kind of hold over or extended conversation from "Critical Divestment"... 

Nonintegration, the Unintegrated State: the Silence of Falling Trees

One of the impressive features of Freud's "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death" is the emphasis that he places on the disjuncture between individual morality and the morality of the community, a disjuncture that is also at play in his account of the ambivalence of civilization and barbarism. The difference in the matter has to do with the role and the function of instinctual renunciaton, which both "creates" civilization (per Freud), but also (per Adorno) only creates civilization (i.e. leads to the appropriation of individual interests for the sake of "humanity"). In his effort to describe the primitive attitude towards death, from which he thinks we stand to learn something, Freud digresses about the function of the artwork in representing death:

"It is an inevitable result of all this that we should seek in the world of fiction, of general literature and of the theatre compensation for the impoverishment of life. There we still find people who know how to die, indeed, who are even capable of killing someone else. There alone too we can enjoy the condition which makes it possible for us to reconcile ourselves with death—namely, that behind all the vicissitudes of life we preserve our existence intact. For it is indeed too sad that in life it should be as it is in chess, when one false move may lose us the game, but with the difference that we can have no second game, no return-match. In the realm of fiction we discover that plurality of lives for which we crave. We die in the person of a given hero, yet we survive him, and are ready to die again with the next hero just as safely."

As he describes elsewhere (primarily in "Creative Writers and Daydreaming") through the concept of forepleasure, Freud here again attempts to account for that "extra" work that the artwork does; the so-called "incentive bonus" of the artwork, which elicits--also through identification--catharsis for an observing audience. But the suggestion that "compensation for the impoverishment of life" is provided by artworks links aesthetic "forepleasure" more explicitly with the performance of instinctual renunciation, with the renounced "death wish" that there is to experience (so his narrative of the primitive attitude of death goes) that is there in the observation of the deaths of others. The secret of forepleasure, then, is that it can provide us with the experience of the "plurality of lives," and this somehow provides the "compensation" for the feeling that life is impoverished. This is a feeling that Freud finds characteristic of the modern attitude towards death and one that he is optimistic that war (via aggression) could also work against, that is, counter-intuitively, that war could enrichen the experience of life.

Winnicott's similar interpretation of a patient that "All sorts of things happen and they wither. This is the myriad deaths you have dies. But if someone is there, someone who can give you back what has happened, then the details dealt with in this way become part of you, and do not die" (Playing and Reality 82) contributes to the development of the link between forepleasure and death. In the footnote to this interpretation, he comments: "This is, the sense of self comes on the basis of an unintegrated state which, however, by definition is not observed and remembered by the individual, and which is lost unless observed and mirrored back by someone who is trusted and who justifies the trust and meets the dependence." Here, and in other essays on the maturation of infants, he writes about the "unintegrated" state which precedes the important phase of "integration" in child development. This "unintegrated state," which he describes as also existing in older children and adults as a "non-purposive state" (74) is "the opposite of integration" (86).

The value of making a distinction between the pre-integration state (which is also not disintegration) and integration lies is Winnicott's desire to say something about "what life can be about for healthy children and adults" and thus to creativity and culture (there are also things to say, he notes, about the unintegrated state in relation to infant life and schizoid disorders). In "The Concept of a Healthy Individual," he writes, "In adult life, integration is enjoyed along with the ever-extending meaning of the term right up to and including integrity. Disintegration, in resting and in relaxation and in dreaming, can be allowed by the healthy person, and the pain associated with it accepted, especially because relaxation is associated with creativity, so that it is out of the unintegrated state that the creative impulse appears and reappears. Organized defence against disintegration robs the individual of the precondition for the creative impulse and therefore prevents creative living" (Home is Where We Start From 29). In his footnote, he also gestures towards forepleasure: "It is thought by some, as in Balint's paper (in Problems of Human Pleasure and Behavior, 1952) discussing Khan, that much of the pleasure in the experience of art in one form or another arises from the nearness to unintegration to which the artist's creation may safely lead the audience or viewer. So where the artist's achievement is potentially great, failure near the point of achievement may cause great pain to the audience by bringing them close to disintegration or the memory of disintegration, and leaving them there. The appreciation of art thus keeps people on a knife-edge, because achievement is so close to painful failure. This experience must be reckoned part of health." As Winnicott suggests, like Freud, the value of art, as described, is its ability to create conditions for the experience of nonintegration, a state that is lost unless observed and reflected back by someone (or in the case of the artwork, something). Much like the question of whether a tree can be heard if it falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, the enigma lies in imagining the parameters of a state that hinges on, but does not necessarily lead to integration (to being heard). The silence of the tree that falls without being heard is nonintegration.

As suggested by Winnicott, and by Bernard Golse's definition of "integration" in the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, nonintegration is significant because it implies the trust to "yield to this regressive movement"; such a negative state occurs like depression between integration and disintegration, civilization and barbarism, and guilt and aggression to indicate the work of alternative forms of rearrangement that enhance our understanding of agency and activity--political, emotional, and otherwise.

photo: Philli Workman
Disclaimer: Above thoughts and associations might only be confused at this point...

cry in

The drag of taking a resisting/resistant philli to daycare is this morning a heavy weight. The fine line between knowing when to insist and knowing when to listen to your child may already be crossed when one begins thinking and talking about the fine line and its being crossed... Better: there is surely a reason that Philli does not want to go to Amys house, but is it one that needs to be pushed through or one that needs to be heeded? It occurs to me that Winnicott would have something to say about this issue, and in thinking about it I recall his essay on the reasons for crying in infants, and wonder how it translates into the toddler world--so much more complicated and dramatic, it is. At the time when I read Winnicotts essay (which I cannot now recall exactly what it was), probably two and a half years ago, it was a remarkable relief to find that crying often had to do with frustration, and that crying was a expression of satisfaction, an act that in and of itself did not communicate any content. Perhaps this is implicit in todays question as well--the extent to which acting out is communicative rather than expressive, the extent to which the message is what is manifest in the content of speech. Still there remain only questions--how does the attached-to mother act in such situations? Surely, she cannot help but feel like everything is a matter of this attachment and wish that her morning was more like that of the other parents who walk in, set their children down, say good-bye and leave. Instead, leaving a writhing, screaming mass takes some hours to let go of, in itself.

moving on

Reading through my journal of the past months, nothing of much substance is to be found, just lists of things to do, and things done, notes about how tired I am, etc,... There are a few passing comments about wanting to see Philomena's dreams. The blog began as an effort to write alongside the dissertation, and now that that's past, I feel the paucity of new material. Or the overwhelming nature of white space. So, squiggle. I mean, that's one answer. I've been thinking of organizing some thinking on mobility and childhood aggression around the figure of the squiggle, D.W. Winnicott's game for the analysis of children. It's in line with blind contours, at any rate. This is just to mark the end. And, just now, the beginning of the wiggle: meaning, Philomena started crawling today.