Abstract
I imagine I started writing stories for my father. A return gift, perhaps. After all, he invented stories every night for me long after I had exhausted his Scheherazadean bank. The rest of the day he was lost to me, shrouded in the study with his books and pipe smoke. The stories I scribbled were my first love letters. And he, my first analyst. “You are too self-absorbed,” said he, never one to mince his words. That time, I wrote to overcome having disappointed him and to assuage my hurt. I wrote to renew love which felt under peril.
In the beginning, there was mimesis. I imitated; therefore, I was. Embarrassingly, my first-ever story was plagiarized. But for one heart-stopping moment, my parents looked at me with some surprise, and I heard my own voice, not liking its thinness. They patted me proudly. “That’s pretty good.” “I read it in a book,” I confessed instantly. “Well, don’t copy next time,” they said without much surprise. Perhaps we imitate to bring ourselves into existence. Writing allowed some shape while everything else threatened with shapelessness.
The need to write probably summons us from different locations. The impulse comes from an urgent need to write myself into being. How else would I know I am? There is a forgotten Indian folk tale (Ramanujan 1991) in which stories live inside a man. They get furious as he won’t “tell” them to anyone. So they confer with each other and plot murder to free themselves and find a more generous host. They go looking for a teller. What happens to all such untold bits? Is that what makes one restless? Not being able to tell ourselves our story? Are we looking for a teller?
In Pirandello’s (1922) play, six characters search for a playwright who can bring them into existence, or they may remain “unrealized characters.” Bion (1970) imagined thoughts to be like these unrealized characters. Thoughts need thinkers, like experiences need minds—to cast shadows, to shape, and to edit. To keep and to let go. Writing to me is thinking. It is arranging thought-bits and feeling-bits in a way that brings me closer to myself, to inhabit my character in an ongoing story I tell myself.
Writing needs a pause in time-space when one can enter the darkroom and develop the negatives into photographs. Or else I fear I may remain an “unrealized” psychoanalyst until I can enter the darkroom where captured and uncaptured images come to light. Days and even lives go past us unpunctuated, like blurry landscapes on highway drives. What is it that happens to these fleeting shadows of thoughts? Perhaps many remain undeveloped, like old negatives in the recesses of storage boxes. There are too many moments in the course of the day one is unable to hold, for fugitive time is constantly on the run from us. But some unformed sensations linger on. We are just not done with them. We need to keep them because they stirred something in us, but we are unsure what or how. Writing is not just when I key these thoughts into a paper but also when the impressions are being noted down in my mind.
To write is to translate. The patient tries to communicate something to us. But this is lost in the words. We try to gather our impressions to make something meaningful. This is translation, ergo, transformation. But it is also simultaneously a reduction. The patient’s dream is straitjacketed by our words, parsed, and pinned down. The ineffable evaporates, leaving a flaky residue. We feel the loss, too. One hopes that something enduring can be patched together from the rags of time. Much in the way we try to return to an interrupted dream, we may want to write about some moments. To relive the dream, to return what is lost in translation.
We write to surprise—ourselves and our objects. Sometimes, I can’t wait to see what will pop out. There are some moments in our sessions that astonish us but sound unbelievable. But there are those moments. I had started seeing Mr. B. His drab grey jacket filled me with dreariness even before his whiny tone filled my room. One night, I dreamt he had changed into a suede jacket, and oddly enough, he came for the next session wearing a new jacket. Nothing cataclysmic followed. But some moments feel like gossamer gifts you wish someone else could witness, too. I write seeking that witness.
Anonymity is the sine qua non of our life. We exist in the shadows of the patient’s life, ghosts in Hamlet. Nobody can say for sure why and what it is we serve. Writing is our side of the story; it is evidence. We had a role to play; we would like to claim it. Being with some people can be so hard and unrewarding that I feel I must make something of the unrelenting drabness, a secret gift to myself, a stolen beneficence—a furtive promise to make something of it.
The act of writing animates that nub that feels inconsolable. It is a way of bringing oneself to life; it is an active search for that crevice within where the pain is lodged but which we do not notice until there is silence. If we can reach there, it rekindles the sluggishly burning embers of truth. Of course, we can write from other places—places of imitation, of propaganda, of sterility. We can write to excavate and mine and thereby deplete ourselves. We can write to mislead and to deny. We can tell the good story rather than the true story (Coetzee and Kurtz 2015). It is that place of search for connections—with one’s self and with those who matter to us, the way we would have liked to be seen. In doing so, we mix up how we are with how we would like to have been. Writing is also that process of sifting through our mind, of getting past the confusing lies we tell ourselves. It is the act and the process that animates, and not the final shape it takes. Writing is to me, the verb and not the noun.
