Vacation is like a dream. A time for the mind to sift through the tangled and complex experiences it had stored away due to its inability, at the time, to fully acknowledge them. Like a housewife cleaning out her attic, it roots through its storage bins, torn t-shirts and ancient magazines contemplated then rejected, great-grandmotherly heirlooms and old photographs scrutinized and placed in piles - this to keep, that to throw out.
For Freud, dreams were a soapbox of sorts for the return of the repressed, but Freud lived in a time of repression.
We, on the other hand, live in a time of expression, a time in which not a single thought is cherished in the privacy of one's own head, but rather ejaculated thickly onto self-aggrandizing monuments to the wonder that is me - Facebook, Twitter, Google+, what have you - where it (the thought - now a status, tweet, comment - whatever) writhes unattractively in that worldwide slush-bucket that is the Web, like a hooked worm in water too muddy to entice any fish.
What a hypocrite I am, for writing this in a blog.
But to the return of my repressed, now to become the expressed, and how fitting that it be sexual:
My memory is of a class in which one particular young man of the most utterly "dorky" classification - small puckered eyes framed by giant spectacles, downturned and perpetually spit-oiled lips overlooked by dark fluff reminiscent of a dead caterpillar more than it is of a mustache - stood up as I was in mid-sentence and revealed, from between an oversized old t-shirt and ugly, stained sweatpants, a rather statuesque and impressively large 'boner'.
The split-second it took him to notice the mishap and tug the t-shirt over to hide it was enough to cause me to falter, mid-sentence, and completely lose track of whatever it was I was saying. Like an impassive boulder, it derailed the train of my words for a good thirty seconds, during which I was left stuttering in the manner of that Looney Tunes character Porky Pig (Bdee bdee, bdee bdee, That's All Folks!)
What is most confusing now, and what I feel sure must have caused my mind to delay homing in on that moment for analysis - due to the complex conclusion I feel now this analysis must inevitably come down to - is that this stuttering was not merely the effect of embarrassment. Language, as Lacan explains in his theory, had become inaccessible due to my approach of its core, a thing he called 'trauma'.
I mean to say that at that, yes, extremely embarrassing and utterly confounding moment, I must have - as I see it now - connected somehow to that boy. On a sexual wavelength one usually reserves for other adults, or, in the case of a married woman such as myself, one other adult (although I would have found it far less 'repressible' to relate in such a manner to any other man of adult age, probably just sweeping the matter aside as a slight mental indiscretion, of which my husband is probably guilty at least four or five times a week).
I would like to state that I was, by absolutely no means, attracted to the boy, who is, as I have described, objectively ugly and in all probability highly unattractive, at this point in his life, at least, to anyone of the opposite sex. As a matter of fact, if I thought I could - in any way, shape, or form - be attracted to 13-year old boys, I would immediately quit my job and seek professional help.
The problem is that the feeling was visceral, vehemently so, and totally apart from any logical understanding of the person to whom this thing belonged. The 'boner' was so completely out of context, to my mind, from the framework of the classroom that it was like coming face to face with Zeus in a parking lot. I was drawn to it, awestruck, it was magnetic, but totally detached from the boy himself. It belonged at once to all men, it was my husband's and it was my father's, and my response was attraction and repulsion in equal parts. It was the phallus, not the penis, as Freud would have it. The phallus being the locus of Lacanian trauma, making language impossible.
It does not seem to matter, then, that I tend to view myself as a sexually open and uninhibited woman in general (placing aside, for a moment, the fact of one's being a thoroughly unreliable witness as to oneself). I think my response overrides both inhibition and any lack thereof. This was an experience of archetypal female responding to archetypal male in whatever cave they were first engendered, first broken apart into two different sexes. Embarrassment does not enter into this equation, nor does attraction.
Of course, to try to signify this event with words is somewhat of a moot point, when I have already defined its essence as the "Real which denies signification". Perhaps the trauma seems more approachable when it is entombed in flowery language and thus seemingly laid to rest. However, upon its publication here, this particular trauma has been preserved in a transparent mausoleum, through which all the world may peruse it. I leave my analysis of the reasoning for this (or lack thereof) for a later time, at which I hope the unwinding summer will have gifted me with greater clarity.
For Freud, dreams were a soapbox of sorts for the return of the repressed, but Freud lived in a time of repression.
We, on the other hand, live in a time of expression, a time in which not a single thought is cherished in the privacy of one's own head, but rather ejaculated thickly onto self-aggrandizing monuments to the wonder that is me - Facebook, Twitter, Google+, what have you - where it (the thought - now a status, tweet, comment - whatever) writhes unattractively in that worldwide slush-bucket that is the Web, like a hooked worm in water too muddy to entice any fish.
What a hypocrite I am, for writing this in a blog.
But to the return of my repressed, now to become the expressed, and how fitting that it be sexual:
My memory is of a class in which one particular young man of the most utterly "dorky" classification - small puckered eyes framed by giant spectacles, downturned and perpetually spit-oiled lips overlooked by dark fluff reminiscent of a dead caterpillar more than it is of a mustache - stood up as I was in mid-sentence and revealed, from between an oversized old t-shirt and ugly, stained sweatpants, a rather statuesque and impressively large 'boner'.
The split-second it took him to notice the mishap and tug the t-shirt over to hide it was enough to cause me to falter, mid-sentence, and completely lose track of whatever it was I was saying. Like an impassive boulder, it derailed the train of my words for a good thirty seconds, during which I was left stuttering in the manner of that Looney Tunes character Porky Pig (Bdee bdee, bdee bdee, That's All Folks!)
What is most confusing now, and what I feel sure must have caused my mind to delay homing in on that moment for analysis - due to the complex conclusion I feel now this analysis must inevitably come down to - is that this stuttering was not merely the effect of embarrassment. Language, as Lacan explains in his theory, had become inaccessible due to my approach of its core, a thing he called 'trauma'.
I mean to say that at that, yes, extremely embarrassing and utterly confounding moment, I must have - as I see it now - connected somehow to that boy. On a sexual wavelength one usually reserves for other adults, or, in the case of a married woman such as myself, one other adult (although I would have found it far less 'repressible' to relate in such a manner to any other man of adult age, probably just sweeping the matter aside as a slight mental indiscretion, of which my husband is probably guilty at least four or five times a week).
I would like to state that I was, by absolutely no means, attracted to the boy, who is, as I have described, objectively ugly and in all probability highly unattractive, at this point in his life, at least, to anyone of the opposite sex. As a matter of fact, if I thought I could - in any way, shape, or form - be attracted to 13-year old boys, I would immediately quit my job and seek professional help.
The problem is that the feeling was visceral, vehemently so, and totally apart from any logical understanding of the person to whom this thing belonged. The 'boner' was so completely out of context, to my mind, from the framework of the classroom that it was like coming face to face with Zeus in a parking lot. I was drawn to it, awestruck, it was magnetic, but totally detached from the boy himself. It belonged at once to all men, it was my husband's and it was my father's, and my response was attraction and repulsion in equal parts. It was the phallus, not the penis, as Freud would have it. The phallus being the locus of Lacanian trauma, making language impossible.
It does not seem to matter, then, that I tend to view myself as a sexually open and uninhibited woman in general (placing aside, for a moment, the fact of one's being a thoroughly unreliable witness as to oneself). I think my response overrides both inhibition and any lack thereof. This was an experience of archetypal female responding to archetypal male in whatever cave they were first engendered, first broken apart into two different sexes. Embarrassment does not enter into this equation, nor does attraction.
Of course, to try to signify this event with words is somewhat of a moot point, when I have already defined its essence as the "Real which denies signification". Perhaps the trauma seems more approachable when it is entombed in flowery language and thus seemingly laid to rest. However, upon its publication here, this particular trauma has been preserved in a transparent mausoleum, through which all the world may peruse it. I leave my analysis of the reasoning for this (or lack thereof) for a later time, at which I hope the unwinding summer will have gifted me with greater clarity.
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