Roland Yeomans's Blog, page 39

P IS FOR WHERE ALL BAD AMERICANS GO WHEN THEY DIE

 "Freud's attitude always seemed to say: 'If they don't understand me, they must be stamped into Hell.'"

 - Carl Jung of Freud

{Freud's famous sofa which was a gift from a patient, a Madame Benvenisti. She told Freud that if she was going to have her head examined, she might as well be comfortable,  so she bought him a plain beige, divan-style sofa—what some people might call a “swooning couch”—which Freud covered in exotic red Persian carpets and piled up with velvet pillows.}
Freud answered my question of what the next letter was to be in my Free Association exercise, "P."

"Paris," I said quickly to keep Mark Twain from being himself and driving Freud to ghost-icide.

"Why Paris?" asked Freud.

"It is one of the destinations in my new Steampunk novel, The Not-So-Innocents Abroad:
 http://www.amazon.com/dp/1530302722/


He nodded.  "So this city is much in your thoughts, is it?"

Freud actually smiled,

" The creative writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously—

that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion—while separating it sharply from reality."

"Oh, yes, Paris," moaned Mark.

"Anywhere is better than Paris. Paris the cold, Paris the drizzly, Paris the rainy, Paris the damnable. 

More than a hundred years ago somebody asked Lucanus, 'Did you ever see such a winter in all your life before?'

 'Yes,' said he, 'Last summer in Paris.' 

Let us change the proverb; 

Let us say all bad Americans go to Paris when they die. 

 No, let us not say it for this adds a new horror to Immortality."

Freud looked dourly at the ghost of Mark Twain.

"If I promise to miss you, would you go away?"

"Naw, you'd enjoy it too much."

O IS FOR ... YOU REALLY MEAN THAT?

 "All my life I have had to tell people truths that were difficult to swallow." 

 - Sigmund Freud


Freud's hair was beginning to darken as his temper was beginning to rise against Mark Twain.

I hurriedly asked, "So what letter in this Free Association are we up to anyway?"

"O", he answered curtly.

Before Mark had a chance to say something that would let me learn if one ghost could kill another, 

I said, "Opinion."

Freud scratched his chin.  "Odd.  You do not strike me as one who cares what another says of him."

"I don't except for what it tells me about them."

Mark nodded.

"When we are young we generally estimate an opinion by the size of the person that holds it, 

but later we find that it is an uncertain rule, for we realize that there are times when a hornet's opinion disturbs us more than an emperor's."

"Yeah," I laughed.  

"Anyone who sneers at the effectiveness of small opponents has never shared a bed with a mosquito."

Mark cackled,

"Ain't that the truth?  But truth is over-rated when it comes to opinions.  

I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts."

 Freud drolled, "How unsurprising."

He saw the worry on my face. 

"This antagonism is of long duration within me I fear. 

My growing resentment towards the world was no doubt intensified by the necessity of having to be kind and tolerant every day."

Mark raised an eyebrow. "You call how you've been acting as kind?"

The storm clouds gathered within Freud's eyes, and I said at a clip.  "What is that next letter, Doctor?"

N is NOT for NOOKIE!

 “The weakling and the neurotic attached to his neurosis are not anxious to turn a powerful searchlight upon the dark corners of their psychology.”

 - Sigmund Freud


I was beginning to think that the ghost of Mark Twain was turning Freud's ghost permanently grey.

Freud leaned back in his chair, sighing, 

"We now will see what first occurs to you, Roland, when you hear the Letter N."

Mark leaned towards me and loudly whispered, "Say Nookie.'"

Freud shot bolt upright in his leather chair.  

"No, not Nookie, you jackdaw!"

He closed his eyes and muttered to himself, 

"The weakling or the neurotic attached to his neurosis is not anxious 

 to turn such a powerful searchlight as free association upon the dark corners of his psychology.” 

Mark snorted, 

"Just because no one understands what you say doesn't mean you're a genius, Saw-Brains."

Mark winked at me.  "When we get to S, say Schlomo."

Freud flinched and Mark chuckled, 

"That's Saw-Brains' real middle name.  In fact, his true first name is ...."

I shook my head sadly, 

"Is his own affair, right?  You're too good a man to hurt another for a laugh."

Mark frowned, "You talking about the same man I used to see in the mirror?"

"New Orleans," I said quickly.  "That's what I thought of first when you said N, Doctor."

{Steamboat at New Orleans circa 1890}
 Mark chuckled, acting as if he were the subject  of the Free Association.

"I remember New Orleans well.  Beautiful city.  But the people cannot have wells, and so they take rain-water.

 Neither can they conveniently have cellars or graves, the town being built upon 'made ground'; 

so they do without both, and few of the living complain, and none of the others."

He stroked his mustache. 

 "Ah, yes, I remember that lovely cabaret singer.  I told her: 

'We can’t be lovers, my dear, because we both have mustaches. But since you’re a lady, and I’m a gentleman, I’ll shave mine off.'”

Mark gazed off into the shadows.

"It has been said that a Scotchman has not seen the world until he has seen Edinburgh;

 and I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi Gras in New Orleans."

Freud said between clenched teeth, 

"I am not interested in the least in your puerile recollections!"

He turned to me.  "What occurs to you in thinking of New Orleans?"

"Memories of its streets right after Katrina when the power went down, civilization died, and the predators came out.  

Me hugging a rocking mother holding her dead child as we waited for an ambulance ... it never came."

Neither Freud nor Twain had any words for that.  I could no longer speak.
Some memories wither speech. 

Remembering YesterFuture

 Paramount has ruined Star Trek for me, 

but a recent episode of the lackluster PICARD Season 3 made me remember how grand it used to be: 

Of course, the Earth would have destroyed many times over if not for the original Capt. Kirk: 

Which STAR TREK series was your favorite?

M is for ... NOT MOTHER!

 "The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious things in life."

 - Sigmund Freud


Freud was back to white hair and beard again.  My eyes were in danger of getting whip-lash.

He sighed as if almost afraid of asking, "It is time to free associate the letter M ...."

Mark Twain cried, 
"Please don't say 'Mother!'  

The last time this Saw-Brains talked to me of 'Mother,' I almost washed out my ears with boiling pitch!"

Twain lit his cigar.  
"My own mother had a great deal of trouble with me ... but I think she enjoyed it.  

Why, I remember her telling a neighbor who was fearful for me to swim in the lake, 'A boy destined to hang has no need to fear the water'."

Freud groaned, "I have no desire to hear you free associate the letter M, Twain!"

To spare both Mark and Freud, I said, "I was going to say 'Money.'  It is close to Tax Day after all."

Mark grimaced, 

"By popular custom at this time of year, millions of United States citizens pause only long enough from biting pencil stubs and fingernails to curse this day."

Freud shrugged, "Money is but emotional currency."

Mark gruffed, "Tell that to the pilgrim that can't pay the rent ... or his taxes."

He ground out his cigar.  
"I shall never use profanity except in discussing house rent and taxes. 

Indeed, upon second thought, I will not even use it then, for it is unchristian, inelegant, and degrading--

though to speak truly I do not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a cent without it."

Feud nodded,
"The lack of money surely aggravates the flaws of society. Who knows what enough money might make of a man?"

I quoted Ophelia from Hamlet. '"We know what we are but not what we may be.'"

 Mark groused, 
"Roland, sometimes you make my brain hurt."

I quoted Emily Dickinson, "The brain is wider than the sky."

Freud studied me. 
"We are so made, that we can only derive intense enjoyment from a contrast and only very little from a state of things."

Mark Twain said, "Suddenly, I am very afraid.  I think I understood that." 

* Visit my Author's Page on Amazon!
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L IS FOR FRIENDHIP?

 “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”

 - Sigmund Freud





Freud looked troubled at me.  "We have reached L -- what comes to mind at that?"

"Lord of the Rings," I said.



Freud groaned in disappointment.  "A mere entertainment of the cinema?"

"No, it was more than merely a movie" I said.  

"The three movies are a moving testimony to the saving grace of true friendship."

"Bah! Friendship, as I define it, plays a key role between individuals to the extent 

that it appears as a metaphor for those relationships between two people that, unlike the state of romantic love, lead to a broader form of unity."

Mark Twain wrinkled his face as if
 he had bitten into a lemon as Freud when on.  

"In this sense, I connect it with these other ties that are based on the aim-inhibited sexual impulses: 

the tender relationship between parent and child, and conjugal love in which the sexual relationship has gradually fallen into second place."

Freud played with his unlit cigar.  

"These two bonds form the basis for the broader unity that is constituted by the family, 

just as friendship is the foundation for the creation of social ties."


Mark Twain snorted, 

"All that fancy talk gave my brain the whim-wams! 

When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that murmur along the corridors of memory, 

and do it without knowing why, save that we love to do it,

 we prove that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy--

that it is built upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them."

Freud said, "You are a sentimentalist.  I am a scientist." 

"And a mighty cold-blooded one, Coke Head.  

The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right."

Mark lit a cigar and blew the smoke into the granite face of Freud. 

 "Why, the holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime ... 

if not asked to lend money."

K IS FOR MISUNDERSTANING?

 “We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.”

- Rudyard Kipling

As soon as Jung left, Freud returned.

"Finally that misguided zealot who wished me dead is gone.  Sad case.  Sad case."

I shook my head in sadness. 
  
At the beginning, he had been close to Jung but when Jung disagreed with him, Freud would faint.

 Once after interpreting a comment to mean Jung wanted to kill him, Freud fainted. 

He then fainted again when Jung continued to disagree on the diagnosis. 

Freud admitted that fainting was a defense mechanism for unconscious anxiety.

Freud interrupted my reflections,

"Jung's homosexual tendencies got the better of him I am afraid."

I sighed. We tend to think of theory development as emerging out of an objective, scientific attitude. 

Wrong. 

 All theory is autobiography. 

 The person the theorist really wants to understand, more than anyone, is himself.

 The subjective can never be elbowed aside. It hovers inescapably, like an off-stage voice, whispering, whispering, whispering...

Twain looked at Freud, his arsenic grey eyes suddenly sad.


Freud turned to me.  "So at last we come to the letter K.  What do you think of upon hearing that letter?"

"Kipling," I cried.

Freud frowned, then his eyes fell on the young ghost who sat beside Mark Twain, and Kipling cocked his head at the psychiatrist.

“We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.” 

Freud stared at him uncomprehending, and Kipling sighed, "You really do not see it, do you?" 

"See what?" snapped Freud.

Kipling rose, shaking his head.  
"I sat down hoping to leave with laughter,  But alas, I see it is not to be."

He gripped my shoulder.
“The world is very lovely, and it is very horrible--and it doesn't care about your life or mine or anything else.  

But, Roland, remember -- no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

He gave one last look of sadness to Freud and walked into the engulfing shadows. 

Mark Twain sighed, "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble.It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."
Freud looked like he did not understand Twain ... or more likely, he did not wish to understand.
***Mark Twain is a major character in 7 of my historical fantasies which team him with Nicola Tesla and Oscar Wilde.
I've included some of the incidents recounted in the following video:

J IS FOR ... EXCUSE ME, I MUST BE LEAVING.

 

*

Without playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
-C.G. Jung

Meilori's was much wider, higher, and deeper than seemed possible from how it looked on the outside.

Inside the haunted jazz club, I could see no walls, much less any torches that hung from them.


Only an endless array of tables whose candles pushed back the darkness only a little.

In this dark cavern of a saloon,

things vast, blind, and monstrous took shape in the bronze-hued mists that billowed all through the place.

They lumbered without notice of me. They became almost solid, fuzzed, then drifted apart only to re-form feet from where they had been.

I sat at my table and tried to make sense of Dr. Freud's sudden departure.  What had that been all about?

A dance macabre formed in the mists to my far left.

Up high and almost lost in the billowing fog, sprites of dark ice spun on one leg, twirling slowly, their angular faces lost in some delirium of madness. They began to sing.

It was an invocation.

Abysses loathsome and endless yawned hungrily in the mists before me. I caught flashes, glimpses of alien voids and unholy dimensions beyond all human experience.

"May I sit down, young man?" said a deep voice.

I looked up. Carl Jung.  His ghost actually.  And Freud's sudden departure made sense.  The two of them had started out friends and ended up enemies.

"Of course, sir."

He smiled and sat down opposite me. "I wrote about the need for finding and living our myth, our story."

He sighed,
"As I grew older, I wrote my most important works and found my own unique ways to play."

He peered deep into my eyes.
"Young man, we need new stories that weave playfulness, gratitude, and compassion for self and others. Re-writing your myth or story can help you understand more fully your core values."

He smiled sadly.
"Your story reflects your uniqueness and the many gifts you have to offer others. You might ask your computer friends:


 If they fully expressed their values, how would others see them? Would it change their life in some way?"


Jung gazed into the bronze mists and murmured, "I had sick bed images, terrible and beautiful both at once."

His chin sunk to his chest,
"I felt as though I were floating in space, as though I were safe in the womb of the universe---in a tremendous void, but filled with the highest possible feeling of happiness.

Everything around me seemed enchanted.... Night after night I floated in a state of purest bliss, thronged round with images of all creation."

The ghost of Mark Twain in the seat beside me laughed,

"I had me some of those same dreams, there, Young. But soon as I gave up radishes, they cleared out."

Jung glared at Mark.
"Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart not your stomach. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

Mark smiled crooked,
"Wasn't you the pilgrim who said everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

Jung's scowl could have curdled vinegar.

"I also said I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become. Must you be a jack daw, Clemens?”

Mark Twain smiled wide,
"You spout on about the secrets of life. I will tell you the Secret to Life:


 “Life is short, Break the Rules. Forgive quickly, Kiss SLOWLY.

Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably. And never regret ANYTHING that makes you smile.”


Jung huffed, “The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.”

Twain snorted, "Maybe. Maybe not. When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”

Jung rumbled,
"The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. It is clear your mind has become mired in nonsense.”

Twain chuckled, "T'weren't you the gent who said:

'As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.'”

Jung shook his head,
“It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how things are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”

Mark looked at me. "Suddenly, son, I'm afraid. I actually understood that.
 ***
What would say is your own personal myth? Are your core values reflected in what you write?  In the last thing you wrote what would a stranger say are your core values, what you hold to be true about life?
*
These images (or other media files) is in the public domain because its copyright has expired.
This applies to Australia, the European Union and those countries with a copyright term of life of the author plus 70 years.***If you like my characterization of Mark Twain, then you may enjoy his fantastic adventure in 1895 Egypt with Oscar Wilde, Nikola Tesla, and my Texas Ranger answer to Allan Quartermain:
 https://www.amazon.com/DEATH-HOUSE-LIFE-Roland-Yeomans-ebook/dp/B00HIU5O38/

I IS FOR ... ME?

 “Where does a thought go when it is forgotten?” 

- Sigmund Freud
Freud suddenly wore glasses and looked slightly sad.  "We have reached the letter I, Roland.  Quickly, what occurs to you?"

"Me."

He sighed, "I cannot believe I am about to say this, but I wish you would be more like Lewis and less like Twain."

"Doctor, I mean it.  You say "I" and I think of Me as in the 'Me Generation'."

He took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose.  

"Young Man, it has always been the 'Me Generation.'"

"But not like now.  

It is now possible to hire, yes, hire your own private paparazzi to follow you around, taking photographs of you wherever you go one night.  

You even get a faux celebrity magazine with you on the cover and more pictures of you on the inside."

Freud slowly shook his head.  "What starved, stunted personalities they must be."

I nodded.

 "Worse, high school students beat a detested classmate to pulp and then post video's of the beating on YouTube."

"You Tube?"

"A worldwide video access for the bored."

"You are saying there is a relentless rise in narcissism in your culture?"

Mark Twain slid into the chair beside me.  

"Tell the old coot of that Kim Kardashian gal pasting pictures of her naked self for the all world to see ... with nary a pasty to be seen."

Freud gave Twain a look that should have left welts, and then turned to me. 

 "It would appear that you are living in changing times, an era of a poorly studied morality shift ... much like I did in Nazi-dominated Vienna."

"What do you suggest I do, Doctor?"

"Be unlike my four sisters ... survive."

I sighed, "Well, this brings us to J."

Freud looked over my shoulder.  "Excuse me.  I must be leaving."

Mark looked in the same direction and wryly smiled, "Of course he does." 

H is for C. S. LEWIS?

 “A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is alright. This is common sense really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping.”

 - C.S. Lewis


C.S. Lewis began to light his pipe, glanced at Freud, frowned, and then put it away.  

"I forgot.  If smoking brings you memories of past pain, I will not smoke in front of you."

Freud sneered, "I thought you would be in the Great Beyond."

Lewis shrugged, "But I am, Doctor.  I thought you knew: Meilori's is a suburb of  Purgatory."

 Freud snorted, "Have you then been kicked out?"

Lewis smiled sadly.  "Perhaps I have been a bit of a scamp, and I must bide here awhile?"

"Or perhaps you died, remaining here among the dead ashes of your false faith?  You see, I never believed, and here I still am."

 “When the author walks onto the stage, the play is over.  He has not done it so there is yet time for you to reconsider your worldview."

Freud rolled his eyes.  "Please tell me that you are not going to try to harangue me into heaven!"

"Goodness, no.  A man is never successfully argued into changing his mind.  Quite the opposite: the man becomes more obstinate in his views."

"Hfmmmfh!"

Lewis sighed, “Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever. We must take it or leave it.” 

"I leave it as I left life.  Ethics are merely a kind of highway code for traffic among mankind that is all. They change with time and culture."

Lewis nodded.  "The German nation under the Nazi regime obviously ignored the law and practiced a morality the rest of the world considered abominable."

Freud's face saddened.  "Indeed.  My four sisters died in one of their foul camps."

Lewis spoke softly, 

"The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, 

saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other."

Lewis took out his pipe out of habit and then put it back into the inside pocket of his coat. 

"The standard that measures two things is something different from either. 

You are in fact comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting there is such a thing as a real Right, 

 independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.”

 Lewis concluded, 

"If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something— some Real Morality— for them to be true about.”

"Bah!" snapped Freud who turned to me.

"We are up to H, Roland.  What does H spark in your mind?"

"Hope," I said.

"Hope?  For what?" barked Freud.

"Hope that you choose wisely in the days to come."

C S Lewis smiled sadly and faded away.