making-sense

This image I came across a while ago reminds me of my grandmother. She is exceptional at knitting, reads detective novels, adores cats, and always has vases full of fresh flowers around her in her front room. Lots of magical associations in this image I think:

At the same time, it also reminded me of a dream I had a few years back:

I am afraid of James and I want him out of my house. On the windowsill I am placing a sculpture to dry. It is made from bits of grey parched bone, and stuck together with sticky, syrupy saliva. It is drying, but James is coming in and out of the window to smoke cigarettes. He tells me to move it as it will be knocked over and smash. This seems reasonable so I move it to the side of the windowsill. He sees it and tells me again that it will get smashed if I leave it there. And in this is a threat. That if I do not do as I’m told he will smash it on purpose to punish me. This is simultaneously a fear that he will hurt my cats.

I am focusing here on this image in order to make sense of my own creative process that is often enough threatened by a traumatic glitch (a set-up which the dream alludes to.) Maybe in order to grasp a greater context, to spread myself concentrically outwards from that insular immediacy; a self-referential attentiveness that I hope will inspire dynamical divergence but also something protective or transforming in response to said psychic threat.  

Yesterday i read an essay by Luce Irigaray ‘the gesture in psychoanalysis’, and here are what I take from it for this particular cluster of associations, sense-making. In the essay she differentiates between the game of fort da played by the little boy in mothers absence and the play of little girls. It is a certain creative acknowledgement which I want here to quote and describe the emotional effect it had on me, a creative moment which creates a psychic space for me:

“The sexual movement fundamental to the feminine is much closer to gyration than to the gesture like little Ernst of throwing away and drawing closer. The girl tries to reproduce around her or inside herself a movement whose energy is circular, and which protects her from dereliction, from immediate effraction, from depression, from loss in itself. It is also, although this is in my opinion secondary, a means of seduction. The girl describes a circle, both inviting and refusing, access to the territory thus inscribed.”

This makes perfect sense to me, but I want to specify an absolute psychic necessity in it. It is the acknowledgement of seduction being secondary to this auto-erotic “need to be born to themselves and to gain their autonomy themselves”. Because this is not at all a constant realization in my day to day relationships. In bleak moments I have took my only place to be in the space of seduction if not alienation (the room of her own) or the defensive oscillation between the two, where imagination and language have failed me. But this here, for me, demonstrates a very fruitful turning of the head, turning of attention.

Such a process I can see in my writings (which I only create out of emotional urgency; to make sense, and making sense too involves all the corporeality). The previous post, ‘kill the bitch’ was something written in a café in the morning time. A dialogue in a monologue. I often re-read what I write a few times in order to further make sense of, but not in a purely interpretive, identifying way, more a continuation of the sense-making if sense-making can here be conceived of as an ongoing, almost tactile, relationship to language (knitting). ‘kill the bitch’ I sent to a few people impulsively, there is a definite pleasure in self-consciousness here. In that text was a wish formulated (or multiple wishes) I think if not an out-right cry for help to myself. It was on re-reading the text and the fact that when you share something, a part of you is revealed elsewhere, beyond all your control, but a very nice feeling it can be to see again and again all the moments of yourself that evade you. And on re-reading, the aggressions of the initial writing had calmed, and I saw in the dialogue a certain community of women united in the exaggerated digression of a public pump. I thought 'oh I must tell my friends about this, it is hilarious'. This in a simple but uplifting way brought me into a witches sabbath of sorts and so I did not feel the segregation, the alienation of my ‘last word’ ending on eclipsing fear. The fear that is maybe implicit in my dream, that is, ‘James’s threat’.