Homeland Elegies(32)
That’s when she showed me the trick with the pencil.
She suggested a short one, so that night, I snapped a new Dixon Ticonderoga number 2 in half and sharpened the jagged end before affixing it to my index finger with Scotch tape. It looked like the silliest of makeshift splints. (Luckily, my roommate at the time spent most nights with his girlfriend.) But Mary was right. Three times that first night, I woke with images in my head, the pencil proving enough of a prod to reach for the pad and start writing. As I scribbled in the dark—the scrawl would be hard to read the next morning, but it didn’t matter; simply having written the dreams out had somehow fixed them in my mind—a spool of dream pictures poured forth, one recollected bit leading to another, then to a forgotten chunk, then to another dream I hadn’t recalled even having until I was already in the process of noting it. It felt like there was more space inside me, I remarked to Mary the following week, more space than I ever realized.
Her smile seemed to say she knew exactly what I meant.
For the next month, our weekly study hour would be mostly taken up with talk about the unconscious. The reason she didn’t like that word, she explained, was because it mystified rather than evoked. One had a sense of a thing that resisted meaning or formulation, something that wished to remain obscure, something often defined by Freud for his own purposes. She thought none of this productive. And while she wasn’t advocating for any single way to reconceive the great Viennese thinker’s concept, she had her preferred metaphors. One was the dictionary. The latest edition of the OED—which had come out three years earlier, in 1989—had 290,000 entries in it. Most people didn’t know more than twenty thousand, she said. To know half that was to be considered fluent. Fluency was like the conscious mind, the array of possibilities contained in the words you knew. The unconscious, she suggested, was like the mass of words you didn’t. Those unknown words and meanings—rhizomes of sound, radicles of signification—were like a body of forgotten roots still drawing sustenance from the dead matter of the lost languages buried in the living one we heard and spoke and wrote. She liked the metaphor of a dictionary, for it implied a task, that of learning the language richly and deeply—though what she didn’t like about it was connected to this as well, the implication of something fixed, something that began and ended, that could be contained in a book you could hold in your hands. Her recent readings in mathematics had given her what she thought was an even richer way to reimagine the Freudian unconscious, she explained over coffee at the student union, where we’d ended up after one of our sessions in her office. She pulled a thick textbook from her bag and opened it to a page showing various diagonal and bulbous graphs; each diagram was labeled some form of mathematical “lattice.” In these plots of interrelated lines, she spied visual corollaries of the human nervous system, the filigreed mesh of our perceptive apparatus. Each lattice graph emanated from and returned to a single point, which she likened to the prefrontal cortex—the seat of our conscious personality—which, she said, was informed by everything that teemed along the body’s vast neural network but which barely registered most of it. “As an artist,” she said, addressing me now as an aspiring writer, “the more you can dwell along the weave, feel the lattice at work, the closer you’ll be to the vital, vivid stuff.”
In noting my dreams those first few weeks, I was already making my own sense of what she might have meant by this, recognizing the way just remembering whose voice had last spoken in my head before I awoke could lead me back not only into the body of a dream but also, as I wrote it out, to the pieces and patches of the past—the threads of memory—from which it had been woven: a voice would lead to the insinuation of a room; recalling the room to the memory of a copper-colored rail alongside a hospital bed; to the nurse who tended to me for a month when I was sick with typhoid at the age of two; to a plate of ravioli tossed, at three, into a trash can when my mother went to answer the front door; to what were likely the first stirrings of my sexual desire at four, awakened by my aunt Khadija, an almost dead ringer for my mother, her sister—Freud was right!—sitting in a sunlit square as she read in our family room in Milwaukee.
The vivid stuff onto which I was stumbling was certainly vital, but only to me, I reported back to Mary. Who else would care about any of it? And if no one else cared, why should I? To what purpose all this self-absorption?
Mary responded as if she expected the skepticism. For the next few weeks, our literary hour would be filled with neurophilosophical speculation. Analysis of the Whitman phrase and Freudian code gave way to talk of Wittgenstein’s language games and the phenomenology of perception à la Merleau-Ponty. The body’s form and function shaped the mind’s possibilities and ordered our grammar; our thinking could not be divorced from the bodies in which it took place. Dreams, she said, had been her best way into that simpler, more primal perception of being. What she saw and felt from that perspective felt more vivid, yes, and ended up being more enduring. I defied Mary to defend her assignment with facts—and statistics! I was a scientist’s son, desperate, at the very least, for reasoned arguments to justify all this navel-gazing. She asked if the visionaries we’d studied—Whitman and Woolf, Black Elk—ever bothered to rationalize their surrender to the deeper currents of human experience. No, I said. They didn’t seem to care in the least. “Then why do you?!” What a question to pose to a twenty-year-old!