Abstract
When I got the invitation to contribute to this column, my mind went into overdrive. Or perhaps into drive. A phrase of Homer’s came into my mind from decades ago when I studied the classics. He spoke about the “winged word.” Words do indeed fly away, to someone else, or into the void. Spoken words. For Homer, in his oral tradition, where writing was extremely limited, some of these words got caught and kept, recited by bards like himself.
For us, in the 21st century, the winged word may find in a piece of paper or a laptop screen its branch to perch on. There, the thought or message can be stored, returned to; not lost but recovered, perhaps modified.
Then I found myself remembering another of Homer’s phrases: that words escape, or emerge, from “the barrier of the teeth.” Clenched teeth shut them in, but sometimes open up to let them out. “Herkos odonton”—the phrase even reemerges in Greek.
* * *
So: one reason for writing is that the mere prospect of it gives life to what is old, from behind the barrier of the mind’s teeth. They escape from suppression, from repression. They link up with other thoughts, that often appear unconnected.
This is especially true of the early stages of a piece. The winged word, the barrier of the teeth. I feel more alive. Metaphors are revitalized. There is more to me than I realize.
Clearly, this kind of experience is central to the pleasures of being in psychoanalysis, both as patient and as psychoanalyst. This setting of ours encourages, makes it more possible for us, to think/say what we like, whatever comes to us. I wonder if we psychoanalysts talk too little about the intense pleasures of the process, the satisfaction of the enlargement of our minds. (I hate the word shrink).
Part of the pleasure involves (of course) showing off and being listened to, which I’ll come back to. But there is also the pleasure of discovering things in oneself, resources, creativity, surprising thoughts, uncomfortable identifications. Out of the infinite sky of the past, reappears the herkos odonton and its ambient associations.
Writing catches the thought (or a version of it). What next? Our butterfly minds may flutter on, too fast, skittering over the surface, failing to let a forming thought settle. Or, at the other extreme, we may stamp a particular thought onto the page, capture it, turn it into a personal or social dogma or prejudice.
But it may, like Blake’s joy, be kissed as it flies, embraced, lived and appreciated, given house-room, but not pinned down like a dead butterfly behind glass. The Talmud is an extraordinary example of this phenomenon, preserving the arguments, the commentaries which become free associations to some original adventure of thought. In Rowan Williams’s (2015) acceptance speech after winning the George Orwell prize in 2015 (given to “the work which comes closest to Orwell’s ambition to turn political writing into an art”), he differentiates between writing that invites a response, an enlargement, and writing that dictates how it is to be received.
In these tiny moments—recalling Homer, say—I both refind and show off. My thought, my memory, this little piece of my past, escapes the barrier not only of my teeth (I find a hearer, a reader) but also the barriers within my mind. A bit of my preconscious, even my unconscious, becomes alive to the listener me, as well as to the reader, you.
How do I know what I think until I read what I write!
* * *
These are just the first gasps, the birth cries, of writing. Associative freedom requires also discipline—checking, working through or working over, and polishing. “Polishing” (it occurs to me) is a partial, superficial word for what writers do or try to do. On the one hand we do want to make it more readable, less interrupted by the written equivalents of “um” and “er.” As in giving a scripted talk, we try to take out clumsiness, unclarity, repetition, hesitation, crudeness. We refine our original thought. We allow in at least some second thoughts (for better or for worse). Often rightly, we censor, recognizing our pettiness, arrogance, pusillanimity.
We may also, consciously or unconsciously, overrefine, thereby keeping roughness out. Our polishing conceals something of the struggle, the process, the feeling that entered into our thought. “I hope to shed some darkness on the subject,” Hans Loewald (2000) wrote. In The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner conveys the formlessness, the disability, of his character’s mind, the confusion that is his form of life. We try to be clear, we aspire to art, but also to avoid being “arty,” artificial. too clever, too trite, or too narcissistic.
Writing these last sentences just now, I notice an echo in the phrase—“form of life”—of Wittgenstein’s use of this to convey how one’s form of life limits the possibilities of thought and thinking, of our conceptualization of the world. Even if we go beyond the conventional use of words, what we go beyond is part of the context of our going beyond.
There is a story that, in their first meeting, Jawaharlal Nehru and Bertrand Russell talked late into the night. At one point, Russell, excited by shared beliefs, said, “So we’re both alike in this—we’re both atheists!” “No,” said Nehru. “You are a Christian atheist, I am a Hindu atheist.” In other words, their atheisms differed in what sort of a theism they each opposed. These barriers fix the starting points of our journey, however far we travel. Words do break free from the barriers of thought, but only so far.
We stand on the shoulders of others. We stand on our own shoulders.
* * *
My training analyst once said, when I was beating myself up for some failing or shortcoming: “We have to remember where you come from.” This applies both socially and individually. If, as we do, we live in societies infiltrated with long-standing racist attitudes, say, we cannot escape this complex strand in our being. Our responses are colored by these social and psychological facts. We are conditioned by it, both in our susceptibility to elements of racist thinking or assumption, and in our opposition to that tendency.
Writing stimulates self-analysis or at least self-reflection. There is both “look what I’ve done, written, how wonderful,” and “Oh God, look what has come out of my mouth, out of my typing fingers.”
For me, writing is a natural partner of analysis, a continuation of it. We aim at truthfulness, and also at integration. We bring together parts of ourselves that have become lost or split off or disowned. We discover at times both our deformations and our capacity for transformation.
We live in the moment, in Eternity’s sunrise, spontaneously, but also as we write it down, we work to get to a steadier view of what we really want to say.
As does William Blake (1988):
He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy He who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sunrise