On Reading and Forgetting and Then Waking Up

[READING AND WRITING EXPERIENCE 12-20-2010, 5:00 A.M.]:
Waking up after a dream involving forgetting my dead son Dylan—well, no, the dream was about neglecting Dylan when somehow it was really about contemplating marriage with an unknown woman while on a picnic, eating spinach dip and looking at a map of the mountains of New Mexico (where I had just been last week and where Dylan was born), sitting on the tailgate of a station wagon (I’ve never owned a station wagon)—so a dream NOT about Dylan and somehow in that notness having everything to do with him or my forgetting of him, I was in anguish, could not imagine lying down to try to go back to sleep with such heavy thoughts or bodily remembrances beyond thought. So I got up.



I picked up my copy of James Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology, maybe to finish it, maybe to not remember my forgetting and the weight of this elf-imposed guilt (I meant to type “self-imposed,” but maybe “elf-imposed” is better—a typo version of the slip of the tongue?), guilt at having obsessively ignored Dylan in the final summers of all the time I had left with him, had I only known, as I worked out streams of javascript logic, nothing else seemingly in my control or available to such unravelings and logic, now picking up Hillman’s book to finish this part of a chapter-writing process of my new (four-year process so far) book on Anzaldúa and thinking to myself, “How on earth could a book about the human soul written in the wake of the Vietnam War get to page 187 and not yet mention the War once? How could the soul-upheaval, the guilt and weight of history not imprint itself on such pages by this point? What kind of massive historical repression must be at work for an author so obsessed with Renaissance completion and fulfillment not to be able to see the unwritten scream tearing itself from the page? My friend Barrett Watten would surely have mentioned Vietnam by now in a book published in 1975 and concerning the dances and the forgettings of the soul, Vietnam the most recent explosion into barbarity of this tyrannical youth of a nation and its blood-stained mechanisms of forgetting.”


And then I turned the page, turned to page 188 in my still-foggy half-awake consciousness (and self-righteousness?), and saw the word “Vietnam.” Not only Vietnam but Algeria. And concentration camps. The book, its author—a man of Jewish roots who, perhaps stoically, perhaps strategically, perhaps painfully (in a book that so far seemed to soar imperiously above pain), had not yet mentioned Hitler or the Jewish Holocaust in a book written in 1975 (the year I graduated from high school, so a year that always resonates with me and a period of wounding I cannot forget)—a book concerning the human soul finally mentioned Vietnam:


Humanism’s psychology starts off by forgiving and forgetting. Its very use of the word “human” forgets what it means. By making it mean “humane,” the shadow in the word is forgiven. But the human touch is also the hand that holds the flame-thrower and tosses the grenade. Correctly speaking, to humanize means not just loving and forgiving; it means as well torturing and vengeance and every cravenness history will not let us forgive. (Of course the Love Children insist on keeping innocent of history; history, having replaced all former repressions, has become today the primordially repressed. No one wants to look back, except with sentimental nostalgia, for in that mirror we see Vietnam, Algeria, concentration camps—all human phenomena.) Hitler was human, and Stalin too, and the soldiers banging at Christ’s legs were as human as their victim, and they knew what they were doing.


How is it that I became angry at the absence of Hillman’s reference to Vietnam at just the moment that he was about to mention it? I do not believe that I had unconsciously glimpsed at the following page, the verso of page 187 and therefore invisible to me before turning to it. Am I just unexpectedly so attuned to the author’s argument that I can now sense its inner movements and finally-unearthed anguish? At 3:30 A.M. twenty-four hours earlier I was up struggling to make any sense of the book at all. Or perhaps more accurately struggling to accept what I was understanding already, but which didn’t fit into my presumptions about what the book would be and what it would say and how it would say it.


And how is it that, in the midst of weeks of reading Jung and about Jung, about dreams as the field of imaginative archaic ancestral expression, a time when I was realizing I cannot remember my dreams and haven’t really remembered them for years now since the deaths of my sons, I was still in the throes of this dream about Dylan but not about Dylan—he was physically absent from the dream—and now somehow could intuit the very unexpected movement of this whale of a book (I scattered Dylan’s ashes among the whales off the shores of Provincetown, but that’s another story)? A book I’ve been wrestling with, resisting, loving and hating—hating myself for loving, for who could love this smug Renaissance superiority and complacency and exquisite cadence and choice of words, this voluminous resonance of intelligence and grace and horrific certainty in the absence of the name of Vietnam, an absence I had not yet specifically named myself (I had rather been angered at the absence of Wounded Knee).


I don’t know. But I know that I can go back to sleep now. Pieces have unexpectedly fallen together. I do not understand the pattern into which they have fallen. I do not understand the resonance of a book now thirty-five years old, that had struck Gloria Anzaldúa with its soul-making somehow, and which somehow now makes sense to me in a way that makes no sense to me at all. And still I feel good and assured in this very uncertainty that seems to contain an unspeakable certainty and resonance and gesture and soul. I can go back to sleep now, perhaps to dream, and really wake up when it’s really morning, and see what the reverse side of morning’s moment has to offer to the living and the dead. Will I be stepping out of the book? Or more thoroughly into it as it issues forth a new day, a new sun, a new eclipsing moon, as I go about my day with my wife and my living daughters?