For a Little Fresh Air …

James Webster flying over Mount Fuji.

In a dream someone says to me, “You have been left in the dust.” An idiom for being left behind, outdone, but I hear it literally. I’m covered in dust and left there. It’s in my lungs. I am allergic to dust mites. I also remember its biblical twin: “Dust you are, and to dust you will return.” Another one bites the dust.

“Let me remind you that the word pollution, with its religious and medical origin, first meant desecration of places of worship by excrement, and later the soiling of sheets by ejaculation, usually from masturbation,” the philosopher Michel Serres writes. I’ve been wondering about the relationship between dreams and trash lately as I listen to patients. What parts of ourselves do we leave lying around? Lacan was increasingly preoccupied by the residue, or waste, excreted by our will to representation. Our excessive mental efforts score the earth in both senses of stain and scratch. This thought seems to go along with the increasing volume of pollution, of trash, of civic ill will, that marks the extension, as Serres writes, “of appropriated space … and also the increase in the number of subjects of appropriation—individual, family, nation.” Either we are still animals marking territory, or we have exceeded the animal realm by attempting to mark all territory—sea, earth, air, and even outer space. My friend laughed at the idea that we were excited by a trace of water on Mars. “There’s so much water here!” she exclaimed.

Serres calls for universal dispossession before the war of all wars begins. No one willingly gives up ownership of anything, I think. Sacrifice, if we are to make it, requires some kind of structure that wills us toward it. Freud, for his part, was interested in the expansion outward of the ego by day and its recoiling at night in dreams. I think of patients who have tried to tell me that dreams are just the brain cleaning up trash. This isn’t possible. Not because I believe in dreams, but because we don’t even know what to do with real trash. Better interpretation: a reaction to the act of nocturnal emission. A universal tendency toward debasement in the sphere of dreams.

***

Dreams are trash. Dreams are ash. A man from Los Angeles left a small ziplock bag of his ashes to me in his will. His own ashes, not his house reduced to ashes by wildfire. This was made clear by my unease with the material in the bag. In the dream, I was told I was one among many to receive this gift. I admired this “spreading” of himself after death, which seems like something attributed to women by men. Day residue: a video of Palestinians sorting human remains amid the rubble came across my feed. How do you even know what to look for? I wondered. Probably one learns. A patient recently told me that story about Keith Richards snorting his father’s ashes. The father is made immortal by this silly mythic tale. What lives on of all these lives reduced to ash? A separate line of thought suddenly appears—drugs, or some substance, in small plastic bags. Matter is disseminated and then appropriated by our bodies. In my dream, this is reversed. The body is circulated and made an object of consumption. The latter we sometimes call love.

***

In After Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus describes loved ones eating Acker’s ashes, which Kraus calls “cremains.” Never heard this offensive portmanteau before. She quotes Matias Viegener: “What hit me most was that K would have no choice about whom her ashes inhabited.” Scattering them often proves more difficult than you would expect. Some comical scenes of ashes blown back in faces, like Donny’s funeral in The Big Lebowski. Continual unwitting consumption of ashes on a Los Angeles beach. A sermon that drifts into the death toll of the Vietnam War. “What the fuck does anything have to do with Vietnam?” yells the Dude. The same beaches are now closed, as carcinogenic material pools on sand. Rain, running through ash, carries pollutants downhill. The Pacific Ocean—black—will have to be tested for safe swimming conditions. A friend, her home close to the Altadena fires, tells me her lemon trees have grown fruits that look like bananas.

***

The new uniform is black, Baudelaire writes. An expression of constant mourning, a false bid for equality through aesthetic conformity (or horde psychology), and a new professional public mentality: “political undertakers, amorous undertakers, bourgeois undertakers. We all observe some kind of funeral.” We are all funereal workers conducting our own burials. The time stamp of this diagnosis is roughly 1850. According to Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire is the contradictory hero of a disappearing trace of life. “The world is about to end,” writes Baudelaire. “The sole reason it might continue on is that it exists. … These times are perhaps quite near; who knows whether they are not already upon us, and whether the coarsening of our nature is not the sole obstacle preventing us from recognizing the atmosphere we breathe.”

“To fuck is to aspire to enter into another, and the artist never leaves himself,” writes Baudelaire. Followed by, “I’ve forgotten the name of that bitch … Ah, what the hell, I’ll remember it on Judgment Day.” According to Benjamin, a “measureless desolation” appears on the horizon embodied by the miserable, misanthropic, and misogynist Baudelaire. My friend Elissa Marder argued that he was trying to inscribe memory onto the bodies of women, the last place it might hold. Who wouldn’t hate them for that burden and possibility? Baudelaire: Poetry became his real mistress. He let this new world, which he named “modernity,” waste him, run through him, and yet somehow he coarsens into our prophet. I’m told to enjoy this contradiction, but I’m having so much difficulty reading him. Something is overly familiar even when foreign—so French.

Baudelaire is shocked by the everyday—its speed, its blankness. Our needs blunted in the smooth, mechanized functioning of life. We are nostalgic but empty of experience. “On the vaporization and centralization of the Self. It all comes down to this,” Baudelaire begins his unfinished work My Heart Laid Bare. I feel myself turning into air. “Baudelaire battled the crowd—with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind,” writes Benjamin. His modernity is a “star without atmosphere.” Benjamin is nodding to Nietzsche, who found his likeness in the syphilitic poet and introjected him mimetically, copying him word for word into his diary.

A century and a half later, we are still saying it’s the end of the world, but our inability to recognize the atmosphere we breathe is more literal. Baudelaire indulges the end openly with his heart laid bare. How else should we discover our spiritual ruin? Nietzsche, as if finally exhausted by Baudelaire’s relentless darkness, closes his manic diary abruptly. He turns the page with what feels like utter exasperation and attempts to start anew, writing simply: “For a little fresh air! …”

***

I once wrote about a dream where my maternal grandmother’s ashes were served to me in the form of toast. I was amused by the double entendre.

***

“There is no cure for the condition of belonging to the world,” writes Bruno Latour, in Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, several years before his death. We only have this earth. Without vegetation and microorganisms in the soil, inorganic forces would reign as they do on seemingly every other planet. Lightning would remove nitrogen from the air, leaving most of it dissolved in the sea. The soil would be filled with carbon dioxide. Oxygen was pollution until a life-form grabbed onto it, driving billions of other species into extinction. Will we delay the disappearance of our atmosphere? Embarrassing moment: Latour says it’s not apocalypse soon, it’s Apocalypse Now (exclamation point). French theorists’ obsession with American movies is so funny to me. Still, he’s right. Well before the dawn of SpaceX:

What no longer makes any sense is to transport oneself in dreams, without obstacles and without attachments, into the great expanse of space. This time, we humans are not shocked to learn that the Earth no longer occupies the center and that it spins aimlessly around the Sun; no, if we are so profoundly shocked, it is on the contrary because we find ourselves at the center of its little universe, and because we are imprisoned in its minuscule local atmosphere.

Do you want your future to be among the stars in space or on this planet? Elon Musk once asked, seemingly disgusted with belonging to this world.

I think of my patient: She had a dream that her mother took the reins of an old horse and led her through a narrow passage in an old house in a mountainous landscape that led to another narrow passage, in another old house, ad infinitum. The scene is decidedly natural. But rather than emerging outside, she ends up further and further inside herself—caught in her grief about aging, her grief about not conceiving another child, her grief about human waste. Can someone please take the reins? She wants a life more pastoral. “Past oral,” I mutter. Latour wants us to understand that there is no pilot or God we can turn to. Even human actors must be understood as one agency among others whose forces are constantly colliding.

The last image I saw that reminded me of a streak of lightning was in a video of a Black Hawk helicopter colliding with an airplane over D.C. Trump: “Real tragedy … a dark and excruciating night … cold night, cold water.” My patients speak about this plane crash and the Federal Aviation Administration chief who quit on Inauguration Day: “I would accept the stripping of our last institutional and natural resources but not failed air traffic control. That’s chaos.” A man, late one night: “There have been eight plane crashes.” “Eight?” “Yes, there were two more yesterday in Arizona.” I come upon this line in Freud’s lecture, “The Question of a Weltanschauung”: “It is possible, indeed, that with our present economic crisis, following after the Great War, we are only paying the price for our latest tremendous victory over nature, the conquest of the air.”

***

Knowing that my father was in the aviation wing of the Marine Corps, a psychoanalyst asked me if I had read the out-of-print 1952 book The Love and Fear of Flying, by Dr. Douglas D. Bond, who worked with pilots in America and Britain during World War II. I waited with bated breath for a copy, previously belonging to the U.S. Air Force, to arrive. This was Bond’s only book. At the time of his death, in 1976, he was a consultant to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I still find it hard to imagine such a person. Would they still want a psychoanalytic consultant today? Would I do it if I could?

“Over and over,” Bond writes, “one hears this same refrain among flyers—the separateness of themselves from others; the unity of those who fly against those who do not; the feeling that among them there exists some inexpressible bond … that only in the air are they whole; that there they find something long sought which allows the supreme fulfillment of themselves.” To love flying, according to Bond, is to renounce women and find a hidden god. Pilots’ private lives on the ground with family are extremely troubled. They are particularly inarticulate, since their libidinal lives are tied to something inexpressibly sexual about flying. Pilots endure long combat missions, enclosed in cockpits. “A striking thing about air warfare is that it is practically silent.” They rarely encounter enemies directly. These conditions help them maintain the steady denial of danger. The love of flying unfolds under a constant threat of death—a threat they deny by entering a state of mute ecstasy. They experience it, for the most part, passively. And yet this surrender becomes the hallmark of a supreme masculinity. Strange.

Bond wants the military to understand how this subtly constructed suicidality makes for the best pilots. The question is one of knowing how and under what conditions it breaks down. In Bond’s estimation, this has everything to do with chance events that connect with unconscious determinants, whether that’s impotently witnessing one’s gunman face peril, seeing another plane plummet to the ground, or watching the parachute of an admired fellow airman catch fire. What is called “flying fatigue” is not exhaustion, Bond argues, but the surfacing of unconscious meaning. A neurotic phobia is born by accident. Emotional fears and conflicts begin to erupt, shaking pilots’ faith in their planes and their love of flying. Bond writes about one pilot who became obsessed with checking his engine. His beloved uncle had died in a car crash. That old grief resurfaced after he watched another plane crash when its engine took flak. He could no longer access the defensive resolve he once relied on. The Icarus complex is shattered.

Wouldn’t it be reasonable to fear a plane crash while flying in a combat zone? Yes, Bond writes—but not for pilots. If they are unable to summon their prior armor and quickly recover, they should be grounded indefinitely. The witnessing of an accident will lead to more and more overdetermined, neurotic accidents, which will be costly—not just to the pilot, but to the military as well. Planes are expensive. In war, time is of the essence.

Nothing in the pilot’s past can be isolated to predict a breakdown. Only careful analysis can be undertaken. The resilient, efficient pilot is truly libidinous in his love for flight, whatever the cost to his ordinary life. Bond wants us to see how his fate is left to chance. As Yeats wrote of the airman,

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

I suppose the analyst who sent me to this book knew I had questions about my father’s death, which bore traces of suicidality. His willingness to waste what time he had left with me, his denial of death to the very last moment, never being able to say much of anything to each other. Who dies like this? Now I know. Pilots.

We are all paying the price for the conquest of the air. Forward and backward in time is a waste of breath for those who delight in a lonely roll of the dice. If it was a new reality for those squadrons of fliers in the great wars, this now feels like a signature of the contemporary world. Isn’t it strange watching so many men roll the dice with our lives these days? “Bearing you like a girl, the atmosphere spreads itself to you now. This is your place,” wrote the pilot and poet Fleming MacLiesh. Air, of course, is also the mute articulation you fly through. For my part, I’ll place my bets on the atmosphere without asking her to spread anything of herself to me.

***

The Piggle, published in 1977, is D. W. Winnicott’s case study of a two-year-old child named Gabrielle. Piggle is a term of endearment. According to her parents, she hasn’t been herself since the birth of her sister. Her mother seems disturbed by new intonations in her speech; she constantly talks about a black mommy who appears in the night. I’m amazed by how Gabrielle replicates the sounds of air in sessions. A train: “Puffer puff—blow—blow—blow—puffer puffer puffer [sings] puffs blows.” A tractor in the rain: “Tipple, topple, pitter patter, raindrops, I hear thunder, I hear thunder. Pitter patter raindrops. Here’s a man with glasses.” She comes to sessions with her daddy. She’s pleased to have this time away from the new baby with him and Dr. Winnicott.

In sessions, Winnicott begins to focus on the Piggle’s greedy investigation of the other’s body. She clearly has questions about pregnancy, wondering where this new baby came from. Black is the signifier that seems to stand in for everything: hunger, the dark inside of the body, destruction by greed (we have just passed through World War II), intimate relationships that feel ruined by big feelings, the darkness of distance and separation, nighttime terrors.

Me [Winnicott]: Do you dream about it being black inside?

Piggle [Gabrielle]: Piggle frightened.

One day, after taking the stuffing out of a doll, the Piggle begins excitedly talking about her father’s “wee-wee” and her mother’s breasts. Later, Winnicott offers the following interpretation:

Me [Winnicott]: You really were a bit frightened just then when you thought of eating the inside out of the wee-wee.

Gabrielle: Yes. Katchou! [by which she really meant, “Isn’t it hot, and how tired I am”].

What a wild interpretation! Everyone in my reading group was aghast. Can you really say this? To a child? Winnicott seems to want to seize Gabrielle’s aggression; help her take it all the way, take everything out. I’m pleased that the Piggle sneezes her agreement in accordance with her mode of air thinking.

Gabrielle seems to move from inside the claustrophobia of the family out toward a world where she can build up a feeling of excitement that will sustain her. I see this as a move from blackness to air. She has a fabulous dream where her family joins Winnicott in his swimming pond filled with fish. He tells her the pond is his office, where they play with everything and can imagine anything. This seems to please her—a life inside out.

Gabrielle and Winnicott play a game in one of her last sessions in which she bursts out from the curtains yelling, “I am the wind; look out!” He tells her she must be thinking about breathing, something she could enjoy only after she was born. Winnicott reconstructs an outside world for her. Or: a her on the outside, which is funny since people think psychoanalysis is all about getting in touch with one’s “insides.” The Piggle’s true self, to use Winnicott’s phrase, is an environment, not an entity.

***

A patient has a dream that he’s underwater, in a series of tunnels. He says to himself, “I’ve been here before.” He turns to me: “I’m reassuring myself that I know the way out. It’s just on the other side.” But he can’t find the exit, nor any pocket of air. He tries to swim farther. Panicking, he turns around. He’s lost. And then he wakes up. I don’t say it to him, but he has been there before. That doesn’t mean he’ll know where to go. In fact, it’s almost an assurance that he won’t find the way out. Every hallucination in psychoanalysis is lined with the memory of the maternal body. The joke is as real as it is stupid: womb = tomb.

***

A friend spoke to me about his brother, who had overdosed. “After about a year,” he said, “he is a part of me but also a part of history. I speak to him every day, but he’s gone from my life. Isn’t this what they say when they speak of angels?” I envied him his mourning. I don’t know where my father is. Still alive, back home; I haven’t bothered to call. Dead? I saw his dead body wrapped in a polyester yellow-and-maroon Florida State Seminoles blanket. Vanished. Morphine and a cloud of ashes ejected from a propeller plane across the Gold Coast. There, always there, in every voice that withholds, censures, injures, or begs. Somehow this still counts as mourning. Yesterday, in a dream, his face inside a French doctor who asked me to get on top (joke here about mourn and mount). Why are you so old? I thought. Wouldn’t it have been better to ask, Why are you so dead?

***

A patient has a dream in which an infinite number of tiny crabs crawl out from her armpits. At first, it reads like one of those dreams we know well—shame, bodily horror, the panic of something multiplying beyond control. But she pauses. She tells me the dream felt strange because it seemed off with how she’s been feeling—she says she’s further away from all that now. In another dream, she’s at a restaurant with me. She orders lobster. At the end, she’s worried about paying. I joke, gently, “More crustaceans?” She remembers that recently, in waking life, she wanted to order lobster and was startled by the desire. “It’s not something I’ve ever wanted,” she says. “I don’t even really know how to eat it.” How could want just arrive like that? It does.

Then she remembers a childhood memory of a “Great Lobster Escape.” One summer, a neighbor bought all the lobsters from a local restaurant and let the kids release them into the ocean. It was a sweet gesture, meant to be redemptive. But the next morning, many of the lobsters had washed up dead. The image lingers; she is a crustacean trapped in a tank waiting to be eaten or released in a sham game for children saturated with adult fantasies of freedom.

In another session, a dream ends with an image of explosions, shooting stars, a beautiful density in the sky. The mood shifts—from awe to dread. She rises up into the air, surrounded by lights. I see her like this, the way she disappears into the infinite. She sees herself as mute, or nearly so, but when her voice emerges, it has this suspended, hovering quality—ephemeral, yet total. That same infinity threatens to disappear her, flood her with shame, erase articulation. But then, in some moments, it lifts her. It’s hard to work that edge. You never know which is at hand. It’s hard for me, too—not to take from her what suffering also gives. Her sublime sound. I wouldn’t take it if I could.

***

Swimming on a reef, I follow a rather large snapper for some time. I play with wondering if it’s my father, since I know this fish. I know it because of him. Snap her. I decide to swim back when a group of incandescent squid appear and stare at me. Hovering two feet below the surface, the three of them change color and swim in zigzags. Their chromatophoric skin, drenched in sunlight, changes color to a hypnotic rhythm. Shockingly beautiful and unreal. The larger squid and its smaller companion move in synchrony, while the third, also small, stays off to the side. It was like this. They are reminding me what it was like: either with him irrevocably, or alone, watching. There’s no way back or out of this configuration. No way through. I swim on. I bid the cephalopods adieu.

 

Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst and the author, most recently, of On Breathing and Disorganization and Sex. She teaches at the New School for Social Research and Pulsion Psychoanalytic Institute.