A Single View of a Multidimensional World

Photo by Ben Vander Beek

Warm up time, everyone up and at 'em. Come on, guys. Get up. Start up the little grey cells (LGC), thank you very much (TYVM) Agatha Christie. I might try to write the whole piece in that initials stuff, what do you call that? It's not an eponym or anagram. What is it? It will come. I will move on without it and it will catch up to me later.

It's all part of catch-up or warm-up, or maybe warm-catsup. At any rate, I think I need to work on not starting sentences with phrases like, "at any rate" or "so, anyway". I'm not sure what they're called but they frequent the conversational landscape. Common in phone conversations and even face to face, they seldom survive serious editing and, if I ever took a real writing course, I'm sure the teacher would make that a 2-day drill, designed to eradicate pointless introductory phrases from the landscape.

If I like reading and writing so much, why is that when I'm involved in one, I always want to be doing the other? I need to print that question on my Ovaltine box to give me something stare at while I chew in quiet, God-like, reflection. A very good question. One that the world at large should consider. I'm sure there's quite a bit of time being wasted out there, when they could be thinking about these things I'm writing. Hear, hear!

In other news, <== there's another one. That one could have slightly more meaning, depending on what follows, but generally, in the way I use it, it parses to; Blah, blah, blah, starting another thought. So far we can say that if a phrase starts a sentence, which begins a paragraph and it will be set off with a comma, it is likely a pointless flabberism and should be scrubbed before it takes root.

So I just tried to leap into a meaningful sentence without the wind up of the pointless phrase and found myself in cricket-city at a dead stop (CC at a DD). Golly, this means I have to actually have an idea of what I'm going to write if I don't lead off with the fluff. That puts an entirely different spin on the thing, by George! Should George be capitalized in the exclamation? It's a proper name but doesn't refer to any real person. Like Sam Hill or Godfrey Daniels. Well not quite like those examples. I'm stalling here. I'll just press on.

So I find myself, sort of, wandering about in the compositional wilderness here without a camel. I do feel as though I'm warming up though. That's good news.

Before beginning this, whatever it is, I happened to be looking up "stuff" about psychiatry and happened upon the quarterly magazine of the psychoanalytic association, The American Psychoanalyst of winter/spring 2010*, and began looking through it. I do that kind of thing, sometimes without warning and reason. You might think, dry stuff I imagine, but, Hah! you'd be wrong. There are quite a few lively and interesting items within. I'll admit that a good deal of it is procedural and has to do wwith billing, shocker there, hey?

There are a good many pictures of people standing about in clothes that they should be buried or cremated in, with drinks in their hands, looking at the camera with either forced smiles or looks of proper concern on their faces. I can't imagine what prompts psychoanalysts scattered about the country to drop whatever it is that they do and fly to this meeting.

I understand that psychoanalysts as a group begin life as a very troubled bunch that seek help or have it thrust upon them and then decide to follow the line of work, I suspect, in order to go undercover and divert attention from their own behaviors. If this is so, I congratulate them. They have found a way to make lemonade out of the memory of having been beaten regularly with bags of lemons.

I, however, cannot imagine that these get-togethers resound with laughter or that the police are often called to breakup a rowdy rumba line of analysts carried away with joyful companionship. This is probably as it should be given the solemn and serious nature of their work.

And so it was surprising to me to find that even the sacrosanct field of psychoanalysis is not immune to the call of amateur beat-boxery. I ran across, and reprint here, a Rap Piece, authored by one of the august members, memorializing one of the signature cases from the early moments of the science and art of psychoanalysis. I leave you to draw your own conclusions about the creativity held bound within. (I like the way he rhymed consternation and masturbation, but it's derivative of RapMaster Jay, I think.)

(It adds something if you do the "spit-beat" into your cupped hands while someone else reads this.)

AN ANALYTIC RAP 

ON 

NOTES UPON A CASE OF AN OBSESSIONAL NEUROSIS

A guy name Ernst and a guy named Sig
Got together for an analytic gig.

Concern about debts was Ernst’s main bother.
Sig said,“No way! It’s all about your father.”

Rats and ghosts caused Ernst’s consternation.
Sig was sure it was childhood masturbation.

Ernst behaved like he had a case of rabies,
But Sig figured out he was worried about babies.

Ernst pleaded passionately his need for Gisella.
Sig let him know he really loved a fellow.

Sex. Rats. Money. Ernst’s mind got bleary.
Sig was ecstatic. It neatly fit his theory.

Ernst voiced feelings: deep, despairing.
Sig responded with a pickled herring.

Sig built a theory, compact, intense,
Without noting his countertransference.

Sig solved the riddle. Ernst learned some lessons.
And suddenly was free of all of his obsessions.

What relieved symptoms of this excited barrister
May not work well for the obsessional character.

Ernst got the girl. Sig got a medal.
Now we’ve got a case with problems to settle.

—Nathan M. Simon, M.D.

(They also published visual art done by members!)
* http://www.apsa.org/sites/default/files/TAP%202010%20vol44no1.pdf

Letters that abbreviated a string of words is an Acronym. I was very close, I crossed them up.

More later,