... the trickster lie, held lightly in order to explain another truth. The trickster lie is the joke told serious, explaining indirectly. The manifest alludes to the truth beneath, exactly the opposite of the stuff of conspiracy theories and the paranoia of the American political climate where the manifest statement declares exactly what’s happening with a certainty that is nearly psychotic.
In the 1990s, sociologist Susan Lepselter examined the creation of (now quaint-seeming) UFO conspiracy theory narratives. Through their observations of the world, her subjects created new patterns that “follow that quick leg of the semiotic journey where the public sign is internalized, and then reproduced as another sign, or another story...” The anecdote becomes a form of knowledge creating new patterns that ascribe meaning to chance encounters. As Lepselter describes, “this affect as it moves from a fleeting sensation to the center of things,” helps to create the conspiracy theories and fantasies that explain our world with a certainty held tightly against the terror of lives directed by chance.
Charles Simic accepted chance in all its joy and tragedy as creator of our world. In Dime-Store Alchemy, he wrote of Joseph Cornell’s collages and assemblages:
“You don’t make art, you find it. You accept everything as its material… The collage technique, that art of reassembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image, is the most important innovation in the art of this century. Found objects, chance creations, ready-mades (mass-produced items promoted into art objects) abolish the separation between art and life. The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen, if recognized.”
The process of finding the image, the poem, the story, reminds me of therapy sessions where both the patient and analyst are both surprised by what came up by the end of the hour. Collage, like a conversation of unedited associations, allows us to catch glimpses and references of our associations that build our worlds, our ideologies. A meaning begins to hint at itself. Things that were not meant to be linked now are and signify something new, an angle on the world we did not have before.
A therapy session that surprises both the therapist and patient becomes a poem in this way and the arc of a therapeutic relationship becomes a glimpse of that unutterable whole. Like psychoanalysis, poetry is this effort of trying to be as precise as possible, adjacent to direct meaning, while not knowing what it is we’re trying to say.
Psychoanalytic work demands we incorporate the uncertainty of the world, the unknowable, into our existence. The horrific what ifs, what-nexts, shoulds and the dread of how-do-they-see-me exist, marking the unbearable anxieties left wordlessly outside of our narratives while driving our behavior. These what-ifs are trick questions that demand, humorlessly and impossibly, for definitive answers. Psychoanalyst Anton Hart wrote that this work is not about uncovering the unconscious as much as building up a tolerance to the unconscious, which is always creating itself anew.
Charles Simic’s humor is that of the trickster pointing out the impossibility of safely knowing the world. Like the 15th century Zen master, Ikkyu, whose poems venerated the brothels and wine shops but mocked the priests who worshipfully doused their buddha statues with incense. These are the great jokes of contemplative religious practice – jokes that are true, jokes that, like all jokes, hold an edge of hostility in their upending of the receiver’s expectations and tell us something new, and true, about the world.
Psychoanalyst Eugene Mahon traces the “ah ha moment” of an analytic session where the patient takes in an insight that suddenly shifts a perception of the world. Mahon traced the etiology of “ah ha” back to Jeremiah and Ezekiel, when humankind, or the speaker, is faced with a revelation and asks God, “Is this so?”
In conjunction with Mahon’s “ah ha moment”, we have to also hold onto the suggestion from Wilfred Bion, a psychoanalyst whose war experience influenced his clinical work, that we keep “the capacity to have feelings of respect for the unknown.” This is again, akin to the Zen Buddhist sense of self as being more than a singular subject and the paradox of the self that doesn’t exist but is sitting on a hot stove.
Simic’s work asks us to stay open to the possibilities of the unknown as well as the impossible questions with which we are left, reminding me of Michael Eigen’s summary of Bion’s unknowable reality, which Bion labelled as ‘O’, the great unknown: “We cannot count on the niceness of O.” Bion’s ‘O’ also reminds me of a Talmudic scholar, quoted by Richard Rohr, who wrote: “God is not nice. God is not an uncle. God is an earthquake.”
That unknown, unformulated thought is where we might create meaning as the coming moment has the potential to change the one just passed. And each moment becomes this perpetual emergence as the past no longer exists except as stories we tell ourselves.
And Simic notes both the safety and threat of the stories we tell ourselves:
“All lives are strange, but the lives of immigrants and exiles even more so. My parents died a long way from where they were born. It’s not how they imagined their lives were going to be. Even at the age of eighty-eight in a nursing home in Dover, New Hampshire, my mother was puzzled. What does it all mean, she wanted to know? What terrified her was the likelihood that it meant nothing.”
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