Being a successful therapist is always a matter of creating something out of your own madness that will help other people become saner or, at least, negotiate a better peace with their own madness. This is usually a matter of reducing your own distinctive way of being a little crazy to a method that can be followed working with clients. People wondered for years why the Freudian armchair was always placed behind the famous Freudian couch out of sight of the client. Freud was shy and liked to be able to ask questions and make notes on his pad without being seen. Psychoanalysts for years made it a point to sit out of sight and ask questions only when the client fell into silence because that’s the way Freud did it. Some people like to watch. Some people like to watch and write it all down and sometimes the resulting description feels more real and more compelling than what was going on as the author scribbled. Is the scribbler adding something? The sweat of the scribbler’s crafty hand makes something as bitterly tasty as sourdough bread out of the routine misery of everyday life.

Freud and Jung crossed the Atlantic in 1910 to bring Freud’s new science to Clark College in Massachusetts in a series of lectures. Jung was still Freud’s heir apparent at that point. The crowds at Clark were more impressed by Jung than by Freud to such an extent that it might be argued that the event would be forgotten today if Jung had not accompanied him. Jung was a big man with a booming voice that easily filled a fair sized lecture hall. Freud was a small man who was relatively nondescript. He was the kind of person who could make a grand entrance into a lecture hall only after most of the people in the hall had become convinced of his importance by reading him or by being talked to by someone who had. The person who was there to talk to them at Clark was Jung.

Most of what Freud had written had not been translated into English in 1910. This is an important fact if one believes, as I do, that Freud primarily succeeded in establishing his new science because his case studies, the only evidence ever offered for his elaborate attempt to explain just about everything human, were compelling and convincing. They left the reader with the impression of having been initiated into a truth hidden behind the façade of the everyday by following in the footsteps of a master detective as he walked the road to that truth figuring it all out as he went. Jung was convinced in 1910 and convinced a hall full of people that those among them who did not read German were missing something as important in its way as the Koran in the original Arabic. Jung’s preacher father would have been proud of him that day, praising not the message but the manner and the method. 

When did Freud become Freud and what kind of odd recursive loop do we create doing a Freudian analysis of that process given that we are all Freudians now, given that Dr. Freud taught us not just what a cigar means but the how of what things mean to us? Did Freud ever do a Freudian analysis of himself as a historical figure, of the precise alignment of psychodynamic social forces that made Freud a psychodynamic social force to be reckoned with in his own right, or is that one most famous of cigars just a cigar because the fellow who thought us all about what cigars mean says so?

Or is that cigar the “why” symptomed in the how, when, what and where of lives that seem, all at the same time, too real to bear and as dream-like and liable to melt away as the snows of yesteryear or the soap bubbles we blow as children? We dance on flames so subtle as to be invisible but we do dance and who can tell the dancer from the dance or the symptom from the sign of some eternity we dead awaken to when the dreaming of our soap bubble lives melts back into the thin air it came from?

Or is it just thin air? Does all that feels solid when we are living a life that feels immediately real melt away once the need arises to ask for an answer to the whole tangled web of how, what ,when and where that describes such a life? Is every life based on living as if certain questions that were never asked had already been asked and answered in a particular way? And what happens when those questions are asked and the Answers don’t sound convincing? Are we left always and eternally wondering how we could have lived lives so intensely that depended so totally on answers that seem so little capable of bearing all that weight once they are laid out bare and simple before us? Can we understand the lives we have lived without reducing every something that seemed to matter most to nothing?

Imagine yourself as an American avant-guard filmmaker called to Vienna about 1934 to make a film about Freud. Changes in the weather are known to be extreme and you arrive in a very old city to find especially the most sensitive of souls scurrying around nervously like ants that sense a change in the air but don’t quite know what to do to get ready to ride out whatever storm is coming. The smart money especially is lost in the funhouse here folks and trying harder than ever to give the appearance of being on the inside of it all exactly because no one really knows anymore whose in or out but only that no one can get out of this particular fun house with all its twisted mirrors.

One wonders how much one particular funhouse ever really differs from any other given that in every form of design form follows function.  But, does the function of it all start to break down when you realize how those mirrors distort or is the function of it all to point out how mirrors distort? That’s not just a question for Dr. Freud; that’s the question that made Dr. Freud. One wonders if it occurred to him one morning while shaving and, if so, if the little trickle of blood running down his face struck him at the time as an example of the hero’s wound, of the injury one must suffer to step out of the funhouse for even just a moment. Unless all funhouses follow a general plan ruled by function, each funhouse is unique and no one, not even Dr. Freud, could tell you much about any of them except the one he had wondered in himself.

The oddest moment in any funhouse is when you stand there seeing, in the same moment, the distortion built into a mirror and the face that you would have said was your own until that moment staring out of it. This is the moment Freud called insight and he thought that insight was a very good thing. I don’t mean just that the face is distorted but that the distortion is part of what it takes to make the face look the way it always has before, like your face; the face of someone who was who he was because of seeing his own face in just that way and not seeing the distortion. Who does one become in seeing the distortion and what face does one present thereafter to all of those whom have taken that face at face value up until now, have perhaps shared lives with one up until now skating on the smooth surface of taking that face and their own faces made up in response and so much else besides at face value.

It’s Vienna in 1934 and everyone who’s anyone or could fake it well enough to get by until now is looking for sweat on every forehead searching for clues and no citizen is either above suspicion or below when the definition of who’s who and who’s to blame is changing faster than currency exchange rates in a time of volatility. Have you ever been stuck inside any other time and place that would give you a clue how to relate all this to your own experience? Is the paralyzing fear that the mask might slip a human thing or just a local malady created by extreme conditions?  If one can’t take one’s own face in a mirror at face value how is one to avoid being taken in by counterfeiters and charlatans? What does the fact that you can’t cheat an honest man have to do with how anyone lives, what any one has to decide right here and right now under conditions of uncertainty where what we think we know or can get someone else to believe is all we have to go on and we have to go right here, right now by putting one foot in front of the other or one word after another?

You arrive to find that Alfred Adler is hidden back behind the process whereby the money was raised to back the film; hidden back behind it all like Professor Moriarty or the Wizard of Oz is not, as you expected, Freud himself but Adler. The Gnostic overtones are as inescapable as a thing forgotten, as a thing forever present as symptom in everything all the time just because the thing in itself is as empty as the temple where the holy of holies was supposedly hidden. The Romans were a scary bunch and you did not want to mess with them but they shit the floor of that empty room when they charged right in like Alexander cutting the Gordian knot and found it just flat empty.

 How do you say, “These fuckers are dangerous crazy” in Latin; the same way you say the secret name of g-d in Hebrew. Every Roman who set foot in that room was troubled by dreams forever after, every one of them would wake up in a cold sweet all of a sudden with the words “You can run but I can hide” in mind. Who spoke those words and from where? Don’t even ask why. Just look around and read the signs like symptoms. And remember, dear friend, as you wish for a cure, that the disease is the why behind the how, what, when and where of everything you have ever been, loved or lost in time and space forever. Would you wish a sleep as dry and empty as the space were fish and insects hide from their own inability to dream? Would you? Is there truly no worse fate than the dream you have fallen into or the waking from that dream into? Into?

The film is a move in a game where the stakes of the game are the opportunity to make the rules of the game. To get the general atmospheric, imagine yourself as Holly Martins in “The Third Man”. Harry Lime is not Orson Welles. He may be Freud or he may be a girl you once knew called Deborah but never Debbie who was born in Missouri but, for reasons maybe only Dr. Freud could explain, always wanted to be Viennese. You hope it’s Deborah. It would make the beautiful sense of no sense at all to chase the absence of Deborah to a place she had never been but could never have been without.

 Maybe you just want to ask Dr. Freud why but you keep having this awful dream about the old gypsy fortune teller snarling at you from behind the coach, out of sight behind the coach writing everything down, snarling “am I your granny? Go ask the wolf. Go ask Lacan to silver bullet your werewolf heart”. Who is this Lacan in 1934 and why would Deborah or anyone go to Vienna to speak French, to speak to Freud in French and get all confused about what happened when and where and how? And doesn’t every fool know that Dr Freud’s whole point is that there is no why but only how, what and when, that why is an empty room? What kind of fool comes to ask Dr. Freud why especially in French when every fool knows that if it is not clear it is not French even if it is Lacan?

Do you try to weave the fact that the film itself is a move in the game that the film records into the body of the film? Will this create a screech of feedback or will the film melt in the projector to reveal the narrator sitting back behind it all like a voice speaking from an empty room. Is the narrator reliable? The Gnostic overtones are inescapable which is why you wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweet which is the same cold sweet that makes a wet dream wet but dry and insect empty all at the same time. Fish do not dream; when they spawn to keep the little fish coming do they do not come themselves and therefore, in dying, where do dreamless fish souls go? Would a thing that never came have any sense of going, going gone to heaven? Is it then our destiny to be kissed by a spider at the end of the yellow brick road? Does a voice call and whose name do you call in reply in the moment of terror’s climax, in the place called abreaction where everything reverses like a photo negative one split moment before the monitor goes dark; these fuckers are crazy becomes the secret name of g-d and then the rest is silence in the dark. “Why” is a voice that speaks like one hand clapping and what could it matter when, where or which particular how it found to make a mouth with? This particular piece of shit is the holy of holies only because it is my own personal piece of shit come to me as in some dream which is having me like a bony old whore strictly from hunger rather than the vice versa. How often have we heard this and is it not always so true just because strictly from hunger?

Who wants this? The speaker holds up the cards stacked in his hand. This is the hand Wild Bill Hitchcock was holding when a kid slow was a kind enough soul to send him to wherever it is one may sleep deeper than the dark, deeper than hunger can strictly go if hunger is kind enough to play by the rules and not lift the rock one would hide under even though it was hunger that made that rock in the beginning just after making the first place for the rock to sit as a brute fact heavy beyond the power of hunger AKA desire to move.

I’m here at this poetry reading tonight to offer someone’s life a meaning in exchange for a bullet in the back of the head. It says right here in this my last will and testament that whoever will do this fine deed shall get the cards and become my executor as well as my executioner. I’ll just lie here grateful on the ground and my magical left testicle, the key to my enigma and the stone with which all most be read, is left to whom it may concern as well. It’s all in writing; all in one of the documents left behind to be executed at will AKA desire just like yours truly by the lucky winner.

If you love me you will. How many of you have heard that before but golly folks I mean it and I’m special like a slow kid who don’t know no better AKA mercy and I sure could use a little bit of that myself right now. There must be something beyond the law and this is against the only law in these here parts and that’s close enough for me. How about you there back way back in the back row? I see you’re crying and you have all your teeth so I know you’re not just some bony old whore trying to screw me out of my valuables or nothing. No need to be shy. Step right up. We both know you want to. Please? Could we both know you want to just for once?

Adler and Jung will speak to you but Freud will not return your calls at first. Later, you get the impression that other persons who will are negotiating on Freud’s behalf, negotiating the appearance of Freud in a film which is coming more and more to be structured around the absence of Freud. At what moment precisely does the chance of his appearance become not a promise but a threat? At what point are those negotiating on his behalf clearly threatening to pull aside the curtain and reveal the wizard as a humbug. At what point did what they were making it a point not to say all the time they were making exactly that point become just leave town quietly; it’s best for everyone and we, of all people and for the best of reasons, will not try to stop you. Don’t you know who your friends are? Don’t you understand why people do the things they do; why shit happens all the time and never seems to stop? Why study psychology except to understand why shit happens all the time and, perhaps, even to dream of stopping the worst of it. Would daddy really do that? That is the question here. Would daddy really do that?

 You begin to feel like a spy who is being encouraged to become a double agent by persons who may or may not be double agents themselves. The Gnostic overtones are as unmistakable as the sounds of love through the wall of a cheap hotel room where you wait to rendezvous with maybe no one at all, with maybe someone sent as the punch line to the gag, with maybe the moon but how do you know? You do know with Cartesian certitude that your loyalty is being tested but can never be sure by whom or even if you are being tested by one faction or several simultaneously. You are like a bastard child who has no idea who his father was or what his mother could have been thinking given her latent lesbianism and her obvious hatred of anything that shits in a diaper and demands to be feed without having any more pragmatic use than a door stop or a paper weight. When mom is the ultimate subversive and spreading her legs was the terrorist plot in question, it is hard as hell to decide which side to root for much less to be a reliable team player who knows the score and would not have it any other way.

It’s like being discovered floating where the papyrus reeds grow in the shallow water, found already circumcised with a note attached to your body in the most humane possible way reading, “return to sender, address unknown”. Being circumcised is the best disguise because it works when you’re naked. Those who are sensitive can tell even were it’s darkest which is why it is such a cruel lie to impose on anyone.  Daddy would not do that. At least that’s what the first “they” you remember told you but all you really know is a phantom pain where a foreskin ought to be and a lifelong feeling of doing the time in this vale of tears without ever having the high whopee of actual involvement in whatever crime justifies this here and now wicked shit. Would daddy do that? The Gnostic overtones are as inescapable as the motion of a tiny boat floating in shallow water. Let me in. My wounded eyes plied, let me in. Take me in. See me. Feel me. Touch me. Heal me.

Such visions are the kind created when blindness is cured by the spittle of a bony old whore and mine are of that kind. She gave her name as Magdalene and claimed to have been famous long ago in better days for playing poker with Wild Bill, Snake, Stagger Lee and boys so bad their names may not be mentioned still on Desolation Row or even in Storyville. She did not look it but sometimes the piano player who is the real reason to come doesn’t look like much either after all the dues he had to pay to earn that lived-in sound pouring out of him.

My visions are of that sort and Adler will love it madly if I can ever get it out there like a gold watch laid right on the table like a bony old whore strictly from hunger. Adler is not what he seems.  If he were, he would not know that some people only get lucky playing with Magdalene, only get lucky holding eights and aces while a bony hand explores with piano player sensitivity in the dark under the table searching for a wound that is gospel written in Braille so elaborate and arcane that only the person with the cure can read it. It’s all a matter of filling in missing letters based on what is only knowable from the other side of the situation. Adler knows all this and this tells me he is not what he seems.

Why do I only know about people that they are not what they seem? Is this a question for Dr. Freud? Is this the question Dr. Freud is afraid I might ask? Is this the one question that must go unasked, when one speaks to Dr. Freud? I am not what I seem. That is why Adler chose me and also why I have no idea why Adler chose me. I keep staring in the mirror at my own face trying to see not just the face but the distortion that Adler sees and I can’t. I can’t and it’s like playing poker with a kind of mirror positioned in relation to the table that lets someone see what cards you will be left holding before you even draw or ante, at the moment you sit down at the table.  How I hate that smug bastard. It’s like looking in a mirror when I see that poker face and knowing I’m looking at someone I ought to recognize but don’t. I live in a house of mirrors where I see poker faces that tell me only that they are not what they seem.

The first thing I remember? A gentle moving up and down pushed and pulled by the moon moving through shallow water like wind through grass. It takes a special sensitivity to see the moon in the water in two ways at once and to take this as the emblem of an eminence which is also transcendent.  Do I remember a bony hand sensitive in the dark trying to heal a wound? Do I want to remember? Do I remember because I want to? Who got me the wound and who will heal it in a house of mirrors and poker faces which are not what they seem; that is the question. Who would do a thing like that?

 Everyone claims to know who’s my real daddy and to be responding appropriately given this inside information but do they really know any more than I do? Everyone believes me when I say that I have no idea why I was chosen for this project by Adler but everyone seems convinced that they know why I was chosen for this project by Adler. Who really knows why anyone was chosen and for what? Least of all those of us who are chosen to find our answers in empty rooms and poker faces as clueless as our own in the mirror.

 When you ask that immortal question “why me” you <vous> are referred to a detective story about a guy who found what he was looking for right under his nose growing just like a mustache to hide behind. You can’t imagine how snide some people can be as they inform you that Oedipus Rex has been translated into even the bush tongue spoken where you hit the fertile earth after being shat out in a hurry by profligate nature. The worst are the ones who manage to do this while being icily polite in a way that is exactly an assertion of absolute, knowing superiority to a natural born fool who lost nothing from being raised by wolves just being a natural born fool anyway. Saying it nice is the ultimate insult because it puts one beyond reproach and, therefore, the possibility of being boomeranged by any possible twist of fate or faith, any shift of allegory or allegiance. You search and search for a reliable narrator and find only stories that are right inarestin when read as symptoms of some love which dares not speak its name.

You come to understand that something as purely physical as sodomy is never the point but always a way of making the point, a sign that refers to---- what was absent from a room which was empty before the Romans barged in and shat on the floor; the scent of Deborah leaning forward to ask in French if you < Tu not Vous> know how to say “quarantine” in French; what Dr. Freud is not saying as he sits invisible as a subtle flame behind the coach.

The situation is so grave and delicate in that awkward moment when the dream is just beginning to become a little bit lucid that one must be grave and delicate also, like a sensitive hand exploring a wound in darkness. One must proceed with caution at this point. One must approach the insight that the holy of holies is a piece of shit on the floor by slow degrees and with great care. One must always say “vous” if conducting business in French to avoid making it all too personal too quickly, to avoid making the film melt in the projector with a crackle like the laugh of a Gnostic devil that had fooled vous into thinking he, she or it was g-d. It’s so hard to make them stop once they start screaming and crying. Sometimes they never stop. Sometimes the only thing to do is ship them off to Jung in Switzerland and that’s dangerous given the stories that guy will tell if provoked.

 You come to believe that Freud is, first and foremost, a writer of genius. He is also a really incompetent MD and an obvious quack if you take his assertion that psychoanalysis is a science at face value and examine it accordingly; doing so reveals a Freud who has a lot in common with Anton Mesmer or L. Ron Hubbard. He may look like your granny but he is not what he seems. Do you see the wolf there? Do you want to see the wolf? Would it do you good to see the wolf there? You also come to believe that the therapeutic practice based on this quackery is as real as hypnosis; the practice works even though the theory behind it is an ersatz religion worthy of Moses himself. Do you see the wolf there? Can you tell the wolf from the sheep or has it all gotten way too deep, way deeper than the gentle roll of shallow water.  The quack is a healer who believes his own quackery is real. His great concern is to have his quackery presented as science and accepted as such. Can you believe? Can one be healed without believing?

You start having this strange dream about a little Jewish so-called doctor who rolls into town on a medicine wagon claiming to be able to raise the dead. He looks like a peddler but his smile ticks in a way that makes almost anyone with anything to hide keep listening and talking just long enough to figure out what if anything the little so-called doctor really knows. This typically goes on longer than most people would have thought it would to begin with as the odd little man listens to the stories that get told and makes his odd little comments very occasionally and writes a lot of notes to himself down as if reminding himself of important things that need to be done later, always later.

He is a lefty and half erases everything he writes down dragging his hand over the page. He talks about “unfinished business”, about how the misery of the living is almost always a symptom of unfinished business the living have with the dead. He is good with words and plays with words. What does “those who are no longer with us” mean? What does it mean to assert that they are with us still? The so-called doctor says that, for a reasonable fee of course, he can bring those who are no longer with us back.

He would never offer to make them go away and stay away. No one with any heart would want this. No one with any heart would want to turn the holy of holies into an easily flushable piece of shit. So the people pay the little so-called doctor and he does his thing. He then quietly leaves town and no one tries to stop him. Many people have visited him secretly in the night and paid him a second time not to do what he was paid to do the first time. No one wants to talk about this any more than the little doctor does.

Is the narrator reliable? Is the narrator an avant-garde film-maker in Vienna in 1934? If so, how is he dreaming a dream that so closely resembles an episode of “The Twilight Zone” that was only filmed 30 years later? Is this a lie which somehow tells the truth?  The truth about what, about who or whom doing what when, where and how with why being the unspeakable thing not spoken in the story that makes you laugh or cry at the story, that makes fools who have fallen in love repeat the same old story like a favorite song that was originally found in a juke joint in Alabama now long torn down to make way for a Wal-mart, a song that travels far because it has deep roots of black under the blonde and knows that the truest blondes are blonde by choice, a song that sad and broken souls listen to as far away as Finland thinking that they got them down home blues. It’s not your cheating heart that tells on you in stories about unspeakable whys. It’s your bleeding heart forever true not to what, were, when or how but to that unspeakable why that is everywhere and forever just because it was never completely anywhere, not even in a story. The greatest story ever told is not the one true story but some come close enough to remind us of what’s left out and, for that very reason, never left behind.

The man who claimed to raise the dead was not Dr. Freud, or was he? Should he have been? Could he have been at all without Dr. Freud and everyone knowing that the holy of holies is not something you want to touch or even look at too closely? Better to leave the holy of holies buried in the ground or in memories that can’t be easily checked against hard evidence.

The little doctor has rolled out of town and we dead are slowly rising. We move toward town as if the tick in Freud’s smile were an IOU about to be marked paid in full, as if all the meaning deferred in all those notes the little doctor wrote to himself to take care of later were about to come in for a landing like a hawk with claws extended.

Am I dreaming of an avant-garde filmmaker or am I an avant-garde film-maker dreaming or? Or? The sound is either a Gnostic devil laughing or film burning in a projector. The scent is either Deborah leaning forward to ask how tu say “quarantine” in French or the smell of fried onions. I hope it is Deborah. I hope it is not Deborah. There has just got to be more to life than fried onions. I can’t cope with anything more than fried onions. I can’t live in a world of only fried onions. Deborah is the holy of holies and I have drawn down the moon. Deborah is a piece of shit and the moon is a cold dead rock in the sky. The little doctor has rolled out of town and we dead have risen again like the tide to roll slowly back to where we started. The narrator sits in an empty room and somehow the words unspoken come, “call me a quack now you piece of shit. Call me a quack now”.