Douglas Mercer
August 11 2024
Sigmund Freud said that being born is a trauma from which no one ever recovers and it makes sense. You’re floating in an amniotic sac of pure bliss at one with primal matter, you have to neither toil nor spin, you get fed seamlessly, you are at the omphalos of the world, and are in a state of pure oceanic and cosmic perfection. And from this paradisiacal state you are cast out—and it should confuse no one that there is a reason they come out kicking, screaming, and crying in what appears to be a state of abject terror.
T.S. Eliot said that the whole earth is our hospital. Because being born is a trauma from which one never recovers. That is everyone is in recovery but no one ever truly recovers, or at least that is what psychoanalysis says.
English holds a midway point between the Latin and Germanic languages. English has the flat and level diction of a Nebraska sportscaster, the Latin has the lilting beauty of soft curves on a sunlit day, and Germanic the harsh staccato expectoration of a deep seriousness and profundity. A butterfly is a beautiful thing, colorful, light and ethereal; they say that the Greek goddess of the soul called Psyche was a radiant butterfly. And though fly is not a beautiful word butter is and butterfly possesses the sweet solid economy that characterizes English. But as always it’s the Latins that knock you out---Mariposa, as if word and image, sound and sense, merge, meld and melt in a sweet and unremitting light gently traversing the air. The Germans on the other hand went with schmetterling, said as gratingly as possible, which make you want to say: schmetterling? Really? You saw a light as air multi-colored image of the soul which was transmogrified from a worm and you went with schmetterling? For all their unparalleled greatness sometimes one must wonder what the Germans are thinking
Dream is also a beautiful word, it has the dry and quick punctuation that is the hallmark of English, and we have dream dance, dream trance, and sweet dreams, and dreaming on the omens to come, life is but a dream, dream vision, dreaming one life away, daydream, dream weaver, and of course we are such stuff as dreams are made of. For all of our down to earth practicality we certainly have our flying fishes we call poets. But once more the people of Spain put us in the shade, put the dreaminess in dream with Sueno, sensuous, and beautiful, they put a serendipitous thrill in the trill to warble the night away in the land of nod. But in this case one must stand back in awe of the Germans and you remember why those deep Northern forests gave us the deep fugue of the organ, and the hurly burly of dramatic life. For in German they call a dream a traum, as in trauma. A dream is a trauma, a reversion to the preconscious terrors, the horrible imaginings of supernatural soliciting. For there are sweet dreams for sure, and dream magic, and dreamy imaginings, and dreamy poets, but there are also bad dreams which haunt the infinite dream of space, and nightmares and things that go bump in the night. Life is war after all, or so the Greeks believed, and the Germans too.
Because being born is a trauma from which no one ever recovers, for Hypnos in the fable is the dearest friend of the Muses, and his twin brother is Death and he lives in cave around which the river of Forgetfulness runs.
But memory is deep well too, one whose rivers never run dry as long as one makes it to its source or mouth of its subterranean springs. And so perhaps Freud was a little draconian in his universal prescription. They say that Rilke wrote the entire cycle of the Duino Elegies in his castle on the Adriatic Sea in three days. All alone in his fastness he would walk out unprotected on the windswept rocks and declaim his meters, and sing, thanking the gods for sending him his angel. He reported that by the end he was merely taking dictation, as if in embarrassment the god was teaching his fingers how to write.
Nietzsche was a hypochondriac and patient all his life and was certainly one in his madness, his sister said she was mortified in the company of strangers by the strange noises that emanated from the upstairs. But though he admitted that life was nothing but convalescence, and humans by nature invalids, by the end he said that there was an unerring sign that one was becoming well, that one was nearly out the woods, that one was not on the road to recovery, but nearly recovered—namely, that all one wanted to do was sing. They say that in his madness all Holderlin wanted to do was sing as well, and he played what in retrospect can be seen as Avant Garde music on his piano. And those who heard it said Nietzsche too played in an unsettling style on the piano, a virtuoso out of time, all swerve and terror. But it was when he began to sing that he said he finally found his voice, the voice come down from the silent mountains to tell us all.
For a long time I was convinced that in the long span of the universe it was the human brain that was creation’s greatest marvel but I was badly mistaken. It is the human voice. For the brain is an intricate and delicate mechanism and it has one fatal design flaw; for it to work you have to use it, and in most instances that is easier said than done. The voice on the other hand is simplicity itself, and psychologists and writing instructors speak of “finding one’s voice,” an authentic self. But all you have to do is open your mouth and sing; the voice is not a grail but is there in your throat all along; it is the royal road to recovering what has always been yours. Be sure to stay in tune and on key, and do all the voices, and on the rocks or in the mountains remember to thank the god for sending you an angel; leave the ward behind, count yourself king of infinite space with no bad dreams, and see that Goddess they called Psyche floating all around you.
