Why I’ve Been Silent
Eight days ago, in Northern California, I came within about ten feet of driving off a cliff. This was at about five in the morning, deep in the woods; while of course it’s possible that I would have survived, it’s also quite possible that I would not have. It was not smart for me to be driving, and I fell asleep at the wheel, only to awaken in time to yank the wheel, jam the brakes, and avoid the edge. Since then, not a day has gone by — in fact, not an hour has passed — that didn’t find me wishing that it had gone the other way, and I’d plummeted.
I’ve ruined my life two ways: firstly by trying to make dysfunctional romances work, and secondly by earning an extremely futile Ph.D. in English. I take full responsibility for both choices, although I believe that in a better society, the Ph.D. at least would have meant a little more. I can’t get over the miseries of my serious relationships, particularly my marriage, and have given up on pursuing new ones. Nor can I avoid the fallout of that resignation. As much as we might like to avoid both romance and ice cream binges, digital addictions, and sweatpants, that’s not how human beings were built. We were built with cravings and reward pathways, and something has to satisfy them. I’ll do what I can to fight turning into The Comics Guy from The Simpsons, but who knows how successful I will be. It doesn’t particularly matter.
I haven’t had much success with my online writing, which doesn’t surprise me, because if my stuff was going to thrive, I would expect more of the mainstream culture to be interesting to me, which it’s not. (I do like television, but I don’t write for television.)
For a while, I couldn’t even bring myself to write a single word — here, or on Cowbird, or on Twitter — because I felt like I was being hypocritical: the general drift of my writing is to uncover what I consider “the truth,” but it’s not “the truth” that gets me out of bed in the morning. Pure fiction gets me out of bed. I get out of bed to watch Newsroom, not to watch the kind of show Newsroom supposedly depicts (as if such a thing even existed). I get out of bed to watch The Amazing Spider-Man, not to write a letter to The New Yorker explaining that Louis Menand’s latest essay, on James Joyce, was grossly inaccurate. I did write that letter (reproduced below), but they ignored it, of course.
Tonight, as I was lying with my face in my pillow, thinking about all of this, I remembered that I wrote my dissertation not because I believed it would make a difference, but simply because that’s the only thing I know how to do. I am quite certain that we are about to experience a comparatively terrifying and difficult period of human history, characterized by both scarce resources and the strange bedfellows of totalitarianism and political chaos. I think it’s very unlikely that saying such things — or doing the more serious work of writing in detail about particular issues — will do much to avert or lessen these crises. I know for a fact that my life of solo trips to the supermarket, and making iTunes purchases, will make no difference one way or the other.
So I’m not writing because I want to, since I’d rather not even be alive. I’m just writing because it’s the only thing I know how to do, and that starts right now, with the problems with Louis Menand’s careless account of Joyce. Enjoy.
-Kugelmass
***
In his July 2nd article about James Joyce, Louis Menand writes that “Joyce was contemptuous of psychoanalysis.” This is demonstrably untrue. Joyce often poked fun at psychoanalysis, but that is not very conclusive in his particular case — he also poked fun at Catholicism, Shakespeare, and himself.
Thanks to archival research by critic Daniel Ferrer and others, we now know that Joyce read many of Freud’s works closely, and with great interest, and that he incorporated parts of them into Finnegans Wake. The overall structure of the novel, which takes place in the mind of a sleeping and/or concussed dreamer, owes an acknowledged debt to Freud’s Traumdeutung (“On The Interpretation of Dreams”), which Joyce likens (with a pun, naturally) to the trams that carry Dubliners around their city.
Finnegans Wake also quotes extensively from Freud’s case study “An Infantile Neurosis.” There Freud denounces the brutal treatment of a child who evinces homosexual desires; in the Wake, Joyce parallels that case study with the story of Oscar Wilde, who was imprisoned on charges of “gross indecency,” and who died a few short years later, his health ruined by the time spent in jail.
Joyce’s relationship to psychoanalysis was certainly complex, but given the important role that psychoanalytic theories and works play in Finnegans Wake, to call him “contemptuous” of Freud and Jung is more than an over-simplification. It is both unscrupulous and misleading.
One reader, me, is so deeply grateful that the cliff did not take you, that some REM intuition woke you to brake your car. Truly spooky: I just returned from a week’s holiday by train and car and on the second last day, on a highway, our rental vehicle braking to slow down onto a narrow shoulder, went over into a high grass ditch. The SUV was over on its side and when we tried to drive out, we tipped over further.
I climbed out the passenger side. Neither of us had a working mobile phone, we were in Quebec with limited French, on a rural road. (We had just seen a moose and were chuckling.)
We got the car out, but man alive, Joseph, how can it be that two Cowbird writers had ‘almost’ physical injury (and yours so much more profound) in the same July week…?
I don’t like July anyway. Summer is a bummer. Hang tight. You are going through something of your soul, I assure you.
I am back home but I have not returned to writing.
I woke up this morning and said to my husband, “If you had lived and I had broken my neck, you wouldn’t be drinking coffee with me, you’d be putting me in the ground and sitting shiva.”
It’s actual thing you are going through, not just in your mind. You saw the edge, and you came back from the edge.
And listen: your writing matters, K’mass. I am a fan. Your humour comes from a real place, digging down in that impacted heart soil and making it friable. It might not be better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all, but man you are in the life, and this is true living.
Your pal in words, and Jumping Vehicular Jehosephas, on the precipice of la vida.
Susan Perly
So glad you’re alive! Sending you an e-mail right now…
New to your blog, found it through searching for some sanity on the Wild craze. Love your line, “there’s nothing dramatic about self-inflicted crisis”- first sane thing I’ve read about the book, now that Oprah gave it her blessing…and I’m a huge Oprah fan! Just don’t think she is a bit naiive on this one. So, you awoke from going over the cliff for a reason, and that is enough reason to explore for the rest of your life. I look forward to exploring more of your writing — and even in your downness, the truth still shines through! Cindy
I mean I do think Oprah is naive on the Wild story…..
Aside from checking in with you, I’ve wanted to reply directly to this post since first reading, as it moved me tremendously. But I wanted to avoid haste or offering platitudes and solutions you either don’t need or will already know. You offered up a part of yourself to us with frankness and that deserved more somehow.
Here, nearly a week later, having re-read many times, I find myself still without words for the meaningful response I’d like to give.
So I just write now to show my presence, and perhaps, as it is sincere, my being here with nothing ‘useful’ to say, will actually say more of what I want to express than mere words would anyway…