Reminiscences

Freud speaking with Breuer, in Lower Manhattan,
New York City, September, 2001

I

They’d completed their rounds of patients at the hospital and walked
through the damaged city for about one hour, before returning back

to the clinic. “All the world’s psychological traumas can’t be resolved
by the Talking Cure—” Breuer said to Freud as they strolled past

the railway of the Hudson River where a man, drunk on yellow bullets,
Nembutal, rocked back and forth like a Bedouin, a crazed orphan.

The park was full of young mothers and children, and the restless river,
punctured with refuse from the recent terrorist attacks, glistened

with floating glassware and plastic. Scrap wood and debris rippled lazily
over the sordid currents, and above them, swallows from a bombed-out

brownstone up the hill rose and fell in haphazard, drunken reenactments.
Someone played a saxophone under a tree, and a boy, his thin mouth

full of lipstick, his face painted in clown, did silent mime like a fragile doll.
The media had issued warnings about toxic debris in lower Manhattan,

and the police warned of other possible terrorist attacks and that citizens
in all parts of the city should maintain a calm alertness, wherever they went.

The two medical doctors paused, fed the ducks at the river’s edge
of the park before proceeding across the busy streets of New York.

II

“Oh, let me tell you of the woman I spoke with yesterday,” Breuer
said to Freud, nudging the latter on the elbow as they walked beyond

the park onto the street where the crippled clubs hosted dinner music.
“The woman had spoken to me with specific complaints of losing

the smile on her face, that it had been torn off, really, after the tragic
unfortunate death of her child, just a boy—a sixteen year old boy

with freckles and piercings, by suicide, by leaping, she said to me,
recklessly from an overpass north of here and high on hallucinogens

and too much Metallica.” “And that he’d been obsessively viewing
sociopolitical material about the East-West divide in our world, on the web,”

( Breuer added, while pulling out a cigar, “and that his mother couldn’t )

By Ken Meisel

                         ***

Ничего никогда не вернуть,
Как на солнце не вытравить пятна.
И в обратный отправившись путь,
Всё равно не вернёшься обратно.

Эта истина очень проста
И она, словно смерть, непреложна.
Можно в те же вернуться места,
Но вернуться назад невозможно.

[translation here--and yes, the original is rhymed]

Nothing can ever be brought back,
Just as the sunspots cannot be removed from the sun.
And setting out on the road back,
One still cannot come back to the same place.

This truth is a very simple one
And, like death, it is inexorable.
One can come back to the same location,
But one cannot ever go back.

(Nikolai Novikov)

Ballad of Another Ophelia

Oh, the green glimmer of apples in the orchard,
Lamps in a wash of rain,
Oh, the wet walk of my brown hen through the stackyard,
O, tears on the window pane!

Nothing now will ripen the bright green apples,
Full of disappointment and of rain,
Brackish they will taste, of tears, when the yellow dapples
Of Autumn tell the withered tale again.

All round the yard it is cluck, my brown hen,
Cluck, and the rain-wet wings,
Cluck, my marigold bird, and again
Cluck for your yellow darlings.

For the grey rat found the gold thirteen
Huddled away in the dark,
Flutter for a moment, oh the beast is quick and keen,
Extinct one yellow-fluffy spark.

. . . . . . . . .

Once I had a lover bright like running water,
Once his face was laughing like the sky;
Open like the sky looking down in all its laughter
On the buttercups -- and buttercups was I.

What then is there hidden in the skirts of all the blossom,
What is peeping from your wings, oh mother hen?
'Tis the sun who asks the question, in a lovely haste for wisdom --
What a lovely haste for wisdom is in men?

Yea, but it is cruel when undressed is all the blossom,
And her shift is lying white upon the floor,
That a grey one, like a shadow, like a rat, a thief, a rainstorm
Creeps upon her then and gathers in his store.

Oh, the grey garner that is full of half-grown apples,
Oh, the golden sparkles laid extinct -- !
And oh, behind the cloud sheaves, like yellow autumn dapples,
Did you see the wicked sun that winked?

by D.H. Lawrence
~~

Originally posted by duathir at D.H. Lawrence, 'Ballad of Another Ophelia'

Black Marigolds

"And sometimes we look to the end of the tale that there should be marriage-feasts, and find only, as it were, black marigolds and a silence."
—Azeddin el Mocadecci

Even now
My thought is all of this gold-tinted king's daughter
With garlands tissue and golden buds,
Smoke tangles of her hair, and sleeping or waking
Feet trembling in love, full of pale languor;
My thought is clinging as to a lost learning
Slipped down out of the minds of men,
Labouring to bring her back into my soul.

Even now
If I see in my soul the citron-breasted fair one
Still gold-tinted, her face like our night stars,
Drawing unto her; her body beaten about with flame,
Wounded by the flaring spear of love,
My first of all by reason of her fresh years,
Then is my heart buried alive in snow.

Even now
If my girl with lotus eyes came to me again
Weary with the dear weight of young love,
Again I would give her to these starved twins of arms
And from her mouth drink down the heavy wine,
As a reeling pirate bee in fluttered ease
Steals up the honey from the nenuphar.

Even now
I bring her back, ah, wearied out with love
So that her slim feet could not bear her up;
Curved falls of her hair down on her white cheeks;
In the confusion of her coloured vests
Speaking that guarded giving up, and her scented arms
Lay like cool bindweed over against my neck.

( Even now... )

From the Sanskrit of Chauras
(Chaura-panchasika, 1st Century)
English translation by E. Powys Mathers