Lou-Law

Last weekend I'd felt abandoned and decided to find a pirate streaming of the film about Lou Andreas-Salomé. First time I'd heard about the author and woman-pioneer in psychoanalysis, was in Lisbon, when I also felt abandoned: on a given night I was talking to an old Austrian diplomat and he tried to guess my intelectual-sisters; — he said: “You're the sister of... Lou.” But I never found translations of her works. Or was it that I simply didn't pirate well enough.

So we're in the ship's saloon, at table, for a meal of psychoanalytical literature-cinema. Bom apetite.

Lou starts: “I developed, in the Vienna Group ministered by Freud, through the study of memory as recollection, my theory of creative narcissism.” She points out that: the strict formulation of pathological narcissism as a childish and primitive stage to be overcome, is based on the dichotomy between ego and sex, self and other, conscious and unconscious; this dichotomy being responsible for blind spots in freudian psychoanalysis.

Over the table, Lou says to the poet Rilke, repeating what he himself said to her: “You alone are real to me”.

On the plate: “What prevents us from becoming social robots, the completely socialised egos, is that 'uncontrolled and uncontrollable continuous surge of creative radical imagination in an through the flux of representations, affects and desires'” Lou articulates: how the unconscious drives emerge right in the ego's proper domain, and are then fleshed out as narcissism; an Unconscious intransigent to egoic domination.

— Next morning I opened Lou Reeds biography, via recommendation of my comrade D'Anjou, to read the chapter where Laurie Anderson comes into scene. Around both their fiftieth year they met, fell in love, balanced each other. Or Lau balanced Lou. — Therefore they too were to this feast invited. Dr. Lou: “Every couple needs to work out its own rhythm of individuality and union. Anderson seemed to require such distance to maintain her equilibrium.” Each kept their own apartments, and a shared studio. They only married five years before Lou's death...

“Such unconscious drive must be the 'persistent accompaniment of all our deeper experience, always present'. The neurotic and the psychotic has it, but distorted. The emergence of the id depends on it. Here, Narcissus does not look in love at his own image with sadness; he is not passively 'mirrored but becomes — gives birth to himself' through nature.” Note that his mirror isn't artificial: it's water. “Altering the ego's dominance over the id is a process of taking in the contents of the Unconscious.” In its reflection on the water, the self is one with all: such is the dream of early childhood. The undifferentiated, unified libido, which dissolves the dichotomic frontiers in a life-affirming state, all-embracing.

In the saloon, a track from Lau's 'Big Science', where Lou and her sing: In our sleep / Where we meet...

Dr.: “Recollection is the nodal point where narcissism and sublimation interlace, to enable for a reconfiguration of the oldest dreams into the newest images and cultural symbols. Healthy sublimation must be the work of the artist: it is narcissism in operation, the creation of symbols and a cultural environment, evoking forgotten resources from the unconscious, regressing to the childish state of pleasure in a total union — accessing that which is not private, but collective: our human dreams and desires...”

This is memory, right? I tap you, sort it out, and feed back in, said the mute A.I. to the human.

I don't have that good a memory, replied the human.

Everybody does, but not many of you can access it. Artists can, mostly, if they're any good.

I pronounce myself: it is beautiful, how the presence of all of you coincided with my writing, at the moment, of the part in the novel where I recollect our experiments with the scientist-doctor Lou Vaz Franc. In the beginning I'd named her Louise Vaz Franz, in honor to the jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz — because what the scientist-doctor and I had done was an alchemical study and penetration of my dreams. But, then, with the entrance of Lou Andreas-Salomé into scene, yet another piece was constellated. Even Salomé had written in her freudian journal of her 'Technique for Dream and Wakening – Poetic Technique'. And: my Lou and I, too, had developed our own techniques...

I conclude myself: during the Lou-Law week, I dreamed I arrived in a very poor village, crossing by foot a bridge made of thin twigs and hanging flowers. The village's entire ground was a water mirror, shallow. It was an ancient home of mine. My self's home is always water: and that is the element I lack the most. I keep dreaming that I encounter my co-captain on the sea and fear his drowning.

For dessert: Dr. Lou and poet Rilke died alone from each other — she'd left him, loving him, because they became unbalanced. This to me reveals her mistake, theory in practice. But here-now, in the saloon, they dance together, swim the air.