Thank You For Your Sperm

July 24th 2012

Making: I don’t seem to be able to discipline myself to write during these last few weeks. Only routines that I can do mindlessly I can really do mindlessly and then I can forget them again, which is okay; I wish there was more in my life that had this hard to define quality of being mindless, a paradox to discuss using your mind, of course. All I know is that I sit down every morning very early as I’m used to, surrounded by the tools of my trade, but as soon as I hold the hammer, I freeze up: it is almost as if someone is continuously speaking in the background, but I can’t decipher what he says, or when I can decipher it, there’s no paper to put it on, or when I put it on paper, it disappears right away. This is how it is right now. If there’s any fun in the process then it’s of the grim kind. As soon as I stop talking to myself I can hear the blood rush through my ears down the veins of my neck to the heart where the blue blood and the red blood mix. In a way, writing is the brain eating itself. It’s important to bring fresh food to the mind plate.

Marking: I like to draw, not necessarily in any original way: as in the image shown, I’m perfectly happy to make marks. Getting lost in the mark–making is pure relief from the pressure of word–shaping. It’s mindless all right. And while I am making those marks, even though I use an iPad, words, new words and sentences, are beginning to form like the foundations of buildings in the fog. It brings to mind words spoken by W H Auden into the void when the world was slipping into war. His diction and tone are almost as important as the words themselves. You can trace every mark in his face back to an unhappy thought or to a joyful rhyme.

For about him to the very end were still
those he had studied, the fauna of the night,
and shades that still waited to enter
the bright circle of his recognition

(From: Auden, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud“, 1940).

All writing it seems to me is wrestling with the creatures who live in that “fauna of the night”. Who knows, perhaps I’ll simply retreat to making marks on the surface.

[#73/1000] [Photo: Auden in Berlin © Mark B. Anstendig, modified by me on iPad] [View this at Nothing To Flawnt]

Posted at 4:13pm and tagged with: 100 days 2012, Auden, Freud,.

Making: I don’t seem to be able to discipline myself to write during these last few weeks. Only routines that I can do mindlessly I can really do mindlessly and then I can forget them again, which is okay; I wish there was more in my life that had this hard to define quality of being mindless, a paradox to discuss using your mind, of course. All I know is that I sit down every morning very early as I’m used to, surrounded by the tools of my trade, but as soon as I hold the hammer, I freeze up: it is almost as if someone is continuously speaking in the background, but I can’t decipher what he says, or when I can decipher it, there’s no paper to put it on, or when I put it on paper, it disappears right away. This is how it is right now. If there’s any fun in the process then it’s of the grim kind. As soon as I stop talking to myself I can hear the blood rush through my ears down the veins of my neck to the heart where the blue blood and the red blood mix. In a way, writing is the brain eating itself. It’s important to bring fresh food to the mind plate.
Marking: I like to draw, not necessarily in any original way: as in the image shown, I’m perfectly happy to make marks. Getting lost in the mark–making is pure relief from the pressure of word–shaping. It’s mindless all right. And while I am making those marks, even though I use an iPad, words, new words and sentences, are beginning to form like the foundations of buildings in the fog. It brings to mind words spoken by W H Auden into the void when the world was slipping into war. His diction and tone are almost as important as the words themselves. You can trace every mark in his face back to an unhappy thought or to a joyful rhyme.

For about him to the very end were stillthose he had studied, the fauna of the night, and shades that still waited to enter the bright circle of his recognition

(From: Auden, “In Memory of Sigmund Freud“, 1940).
All writing it seems to me is wrestling with the creatures who live in that “fauna of the night”. Who knows, perhaps I’ll simply retreat to making marks on the surface.
[#73/1000] [Photo: Auden in Berlin © Mark B. Anstendig, modified by me on iPad] [View this at Nothing To Flawnt]

July 12th 2012

Reblogged from marcusspeh|1 note |#

A group therapist someone told me about keeps it all very calm and quiet but encourages histrionic outbursts of his clients: he even helps them summoning the ghosts of their various disorders. But as soon as these ghosts show themselves he assaults them fiercely: using the tools of his trade, he bludgeons them to death, these harmless neuroses and mental misfits. At times it seems to me as if I’m the therapist in this story. I certainly have my fair share of disorders though on the outside I appear cool and collected, as people keep telling me. When I try to impress them with my Freudian slips, my parasympathetic dreams or my miserable moods, they look around as if I’d spoken of someone else altogether. This experience has often put me into a slight state of despair (if such a conjugation makes any sense) because in these moments I feel that I don’t exist: as if the view others hold about me was more important to them than who I really am. Though I recognize that same devil of denial inside me, of course. It delivers ultimate proof that I am indeed neurotic and therefore much more interesting, at the very least to myself, than if I weren’t. -ms

[#5 of 100 Days Of Summer.][#57/1000]

Posted at 8:35pm and tagged with: freud, neurotic, 100 days 2012,.

A group therapist someone told me about keeps it all very calm and quiet but encourages histrionic outbursts of his clients: he even helps them summoning the ghosts of their various disorders. But as soon as these ghosts show themselves he assaults them fiercely: using the tools of his trade, he bludgeons them to death, these harmless neuroses and mental misfits. At times it seems to me as if I’m the therapist in this story. I certainly have my fair share of disorders though on the outside I appear cool and collected, as people keep telling me. When I try to impress them with my Freudian slips, my parasympathetic dreams or my miserable moods, they look around as if I’d spoken of someone else altogether. This experience has often put me into a slight state of despair (if such a conjugation makes any sense) because in these moments I feel that I don’t exist: as if the view others hold about me was more important to them than who I really am. Though I recognize that same devil of denial inside me, of course. It delivers ultimate proof that I am indeed neurotic and therefore much more interesting, at the very least to myself, than if I weren’t. -ms
[#5 of 100 Days Of Summer.][#57/1000]

January 5th 2012

Overload

23 notes |#

That night, Gregory dreamt of his mother. It was a dream that he’d have carried to his therapist like a raw, precious egg if he’d had a therapist, and the dream made him wish he had one. In the dream, he sat in the kitchen of his mother’s house at the table on his usual place. He could hear her handle pots and pans and sigh occasionally. Sitting there filled his heart with sadness and also with a long missed feeling of comfort until he realised that the chair and the table were much too small for him: it was a child’s chair and he could barely fit his long legs under the table. He was worried that his mother might scold him for being so large and for not wearing pants. Gregory, in the dream, felt his manhood press against his belly while he was crouching uncomfortably, not daring to move.

Now he noticed that there were four more chairs at the table. Chairs for grownups. His four girlfriends sat in them looking down at him. Each of them wore a large gingerbread heart around her neck. He wondered if they knew that he was naked and if they cared that he had a kid-sized chair. “Hello there, pretty ones”, he said wanting to sound casual, wishing to buy himself some time to think. But his talking sounded like barking and worse of all, he began to drool worse than a doberman. The saliva was flowing from the corners of his mouth onto his thighs and from there down to his balls where it gathered making him feel as if he sat in his own feces. He looked up at the women’s faces but they all looked like his mother, who he could still hear behind him, which was confusing. He wished he could get up and out of this chair, but then he’d stand with his tackle hanging out in the middle of his mother’s kitchen in front of four women. He was freed from further thought by a scream that quickly turned into the ringing of his alarm clock as he awoke wet from sweat. He first put his hand down his belly to check if he was dry down there. As a boy, he had wet his bed. Something else he wasn’t going to tell any women in this life, like ever.

He turned on his side and closed his eyes again. Valentine’s day was here and he had avoided making any arrangements with any of the four nemeses. He was not looking forward to this day and he was, not for the first time, wondering if there was a way to go back into a dream, stay there for a while and come out the next day. The phone rang and Gregory decide to pick up. “Hello”, he said, suddenly remembering the tone he’d had in the dream and resenting it instantly. “Hello, darling”, his mother said.

[#45/1000. Originally written for Meg Tuite’s Exquisite Quartet as part of a piece “Posse”, co-written with Meg, Susan Tepper and Matt Rafferty for Used Furniture Review—now published as an anthology.]

Posted at 11:40am and tagged with: flash, fragment, freud, lit, meg tuite, published, story, used furniture review, valentine, valentine's day, susan tepper, matt rafferty,.