Hi all,

Doris asked me to contribute a poet’s column of the eForum, so here is a first of an occasional offering. I welcome members to send me thoughts on poems (including your own) that seem to relate to the psychoanalytic process.

I thought I might start with a new poem of mine that reflects back on our annual conference, especially on the experience of close connections, revisited for a short week, then suspended for a year:

Sonnet 412: Camera Phone

I just took a picture of the table:
A reunion of friends, a moment just shy
Of the clink of glasses, farewell, good bye
Will I see you all next year in Vancouver?

One of us wrote a book on the permanence
Of mourning, another is an expert on
Rebuilding love after betrayal, I’ve been
Talking about the moment in Book Six when

Aeneas’ arms pass three times through his
Father’s body, his loss irredeemable.
Now I’ve left the camera on, the crazed

Pattern of the sidewalk, socks, the buckle of the
Parking meter, essential tremor, like free
Jazz, no frame, no click, spooling on for no one. 
 

By way of the briefest introduction, the poem is a sonnet; a fourteen line form that goes back roughly to the start of the 13th century, when its invention corresponds to the moment went the subjective experience of selfhood became a topic in poetry. In the words of Paul Oppenheimer (1989), the sonnet marked a moment when “Emotional problems, especially problems in love, needed no longer merely to be expressed or performed: they might now actually be resolved … through the logic of a form that turned expression inward…” (p.3). My particular take on the sonnet features an eleven syllable line and a two four-line and two three-line stanza form.

It occurs to me, reflecting on the poem, that our conferences bear some resemblance to the therapy process itself, in which intense moments of meeting are bounded in time and then followed by loss and absence. I thought of a prototypical parting scene, the clink of a glass then au revoir. Perhaps the wonderful closing reception in Vienna at the summer palace of the Hapsburg’s, but I think in my mind’s eye I was picturing a smaller, more intimate gathering.

The poem centers around a kind of Chekhovian irony in which three people who have written about different kinds of loss are now themselves faced with the loss of the conference ending. I have thought that part of the power of therapy is in the procedural way it enacts the trauma and repair of loss, through its repetition of sessions ending followed by another meeting. Here we mark our ending as endurable through two rituals, one ancient and one brand new: we clink glasses and pull out our camera phones.

I then allow myself to associate to an episode in book Six of Virgil’s Aeneid, where Aeneas, having passed test after test, is finally allowed to travel through the underworld to meet again his deceased father. I write about this episode in my forthcoming book, Poetry and Psychoanalysis. When Virgil sees his father he rushes to embrace him, but, in one of the most poignant scenes in all literature:

Three times he tried to reach arms around neck.
Three times the form, reached for in vain, escaped
Like a breeze between his hands, a dream on wings.
          VI: 942-944, (p. 72) translation Seamus Heaney

Books and papers written about mourning or betrayal, an oath pronounced over wine, the storing in our tiny phones of an image of our time together, a belief that we will meet our deceased in another world. All our rituals and beliefs designed to contain or master this primary human experience of loss.

Sonnets, especially since Shakespeare, have come to observe a “turn,” a radical change of perspective or theme. The turn in my poem comes in line 11. I have long been fascinated by the way our phones, when we leave the camera on, wildly record a phantasmagoria of the world around us, distorting everything they see and behaving in the exact opposite of what they were intended to be – a second memory that registers our experience and indemnifies us against loss. As opposed to this: a kind of death in life, recording image after image with no coherence and no meaning. But here the poem, like free jazz, attempts to note and give a form to that chaos. A small consolation, perhaps, turning the camera’s randomness into a list poem. But one that doesn’t require us to ignore or deny the randomness that underlies our precarious existence.

If you’ve read this far, I thank you, and feel that you deserve to know the names of the people in the “picture”: it’s my dear friends George Hagman and Carla Leone.