After reading Partial Objects today, an amazing post, all about things like Lacan and the Soul—
All I know is, my soul is a pest. Or whatever that internal thing is that has kept yammering away, lo these many decades. Always with a very clear idea of what is right. Not what was easy, at the time, or even possible. Certainly not taking my children into consideration, when I was young and most wretchedly married. Just, Move on, move on. You’re going to leave here, sooner or later. One of the leavings was without my children—and I have never, ever been able to explain why that was something I had to do. Granted, I thought it would be a separation of months—but back then, and maybe still, a girl who would do such a thing was a slut. Beyond slut: inexplicable. I simply knew that if I had to move to Iowa and live in married-graduate student housing, I would kill myself. Having seen the sad and depressed women who lived in the same at Princeton, which I figured to be a fucking palace compared to Iowa.
Women then had nothing to do but childcare, which is a really, really boring thing, as occupations go. And the grad student housing itself had walls of the kind of wallboard that picked apart in shreds, the rooms were tiny, it was terribly hot. I saw enough. We lived in a cottage, as my then-husband’s family knew someone, a family so extended it was hard to go anywhere in America and not know someone. In truth, for a while I wanted to fit in with them, it was ever so much better than mine, which had no influence at all, except for my father’s fellow physicists, scattered along the Eastern seaboard at just enough removal so that every night, when we travelled north or south, there was someone from whom to cadge dinner. For all six of us, something I did not know was rather strange until I studied the whole autistic-spectrum thing and began to see them for who they were. People hugely without a social clue, which is where shades of autism show up. Who saw nothing wrong with showing up with their four children just in time for dinner. I remember clear as day my father checking his watch, noting that it was ten to six, and, getting out his address book, punching into a pay phone the number of tonight’s poor suckers. I also remember the worried look on the face of the wife as she dished out her bean casserole. Wondering, I realized later, how to feed another six people, while my mother sat silent, mortified—but then, she was always mortified—and the husbands talked physics or whatever the hell it was they talked.
The soul so intimately tied up with memory. When everything fell into place, later, in adulthood, I realized most of what my soul had nattered on about was the normal. Healthful. Not a massively distorted life. It definitely wanted and still wants for me to live amongst people who love me, and whom I love. Let me just add, something I’ve had very brief experience of—and trying to stay sane in the midst of thought-disordered people, autistic or not, is the biggest damn energy-suck. The point always was, I coulda been a contender. Instead of a bum. Which is what I am.
Or words to that effect.
{ fin }
Thanks for the reference! Awesome post, too.
“The soul so intimately tied up with memory.” Absolutely. I think it’s a completely necessary part of the way in which we integrate memories.
With Robert, I’m bowing deeply to: “The soul so intimately tied up with memory. When everything fell into place, later, in adulthood, I realized most of what my soul had nattered on about was the normal. Healthful. Not a massively distorted life. It definitely wanted and still wants for me to live amongst people who love me, and whom I love.”
There’s that longing that we all know–that begs the word “inchoate”–here, fully choated for us.
Soul is always in mourning for something, in longing for something else, even when Mind looks around the landscape of the present and sees little that can be realistically attained, Soul looks around the past and sees all the substance it requires to long and mourn again.
But I’m not sure about regret. Regret seems so specific for the Soul’s work. The Soul longs to become, yes and yes, again. But can a soul be judgmental? Or is it some other part of my being that wants to blame me and label me? If Soul is the irreproachable innocent in me that is always swimming hard for the surface, then what is it that shoves Soul under over and over again?
You can bum around with me on these digital pages anytime.