Fata Morgana by Lamorna Ash

I did not think the world had any color left to lose but by the afternoon, shades continued to leak from the sea and sky until they were  both the same void white, the line of the horizon disappearing with it. The sky spilled down into the water and I imagined the Filadelfia drawing up day stars in its hauls – or perhaps it was the sea that rose up into the air so that jellyfish, squid and rays dipped in and out of the constellations.

I looked out at my bleached cloud city, which had not budged all day, and then headed over to the bench in the wheelhouse to continue reading Arctic Dreams. The most extraordinary mirages seen by man are those that appear at sea or in colder regions like the Arctic – Fata Morganas, so-called superior images. Inferior images occur mostly in deserts, when the distant object is inverted and doubled below its actual location, creating the illusion that there is a body of water on the ground, reflecting the object in it. Fata Morganas are much rarer projections appearing above the original object. The materialize when the temperature of the air closest to the ground is colder than that which is above it. The cold dense air causes light rays to bend upwards, tricking our minds into believing an object is higher in the sky than it truly is. The Flying Dutchman ghost ship is thought to have originally been a Fata Morgana – an image of a distant ship projected upwards into the sky, from which there grew a great body of maritime folklore.

True mirages are not the works of the imagination, not fantastical new cities opening up above us, but merely a reflection of the known world – the ordinary raised up. These visions in the sky can sometimes be so vivid that whole land features – mountains, lakes, whole islands- end up drawn into explorer’s maps of the Arctic. Years later, when other explorers returned to follow the maps passed down to them, they found the scribbled-in landmarks had simply evaporated. ‘President’s Land”, “King Oscar Land’, ‘Petermann Land’, and the Croker Mountains, were later found to be nothing more than mirages.

On the Filadefia, too, islands erupted without warning from the water. On occasions, these were faint mirages, but more often than not it was my mind playing tricks on me, expanding to fill the vast canvas it was presented with. Newlyn fisherman-turned-artist Ben Gunn told me that when fishing up near the Arctic, he found that if you stared at the rice fields long enough, they would transform into any kind of shape you wanted: Churches, houses, wherever your imagination takes you, you’re in it. You flick your eyeballs and it’s changed again.’

The places hidden from us are the points from which or imaginations flow. We do not get to see what is behind the horizon or below the surface of the water, and so impose on these unknown spaces, those unreachable things which we desire: some fisherman who have lost friends or family at sea remain convinced they are still out there. Kyle throws bottles containing his number into the water, hoping they may be discovered one day by a being who will speak across the world, across time even, back to him. Lopez writes that sometimes nature seems so illusory, so indescribable, that we cannot help but let it merge with our own fictions. When he follows a bear’s tracks up to a hole in the ice, but finds no tracks coming out again, he says that one can start to understand the Eskimo’s belief that ‘ there are bears walking around on the bottom of the ocean.’ Our desires for storytelling and myology bleed into the sea, giving it a distinctly human hue. Like my imagined abolishing of the horizon line and the reconciling of sea and sky, fishermen must see themselves as becoming part of the world in which they spend half their lives, letting the water’s skin be their skin.

 

Before dinner Andrew took me up to the gutting station and hands me an incredibly sharp knife- ‘you’re on a roll now, Raymundo. It’s time for you learn how to fillet.’ He brought up a frosty monk, plaice, lemon and haddock from the fish room and slaps them down on our quasi-operating table,. When filleting, he explained to me, you have to feel gently for the  backbone of the fish as you cut through its flesh, letting your knowledge of its anatomy guide the knife trough. It is a world away from the harsh, staccato stabbing of gutting. Instead you make one, unbroken movement along the center of the fish, not a dot, but a line. Andrew started me off on a flat fish. The blade glides so easily through the plaice that if you jerk it up even a little bit, you lose half the fish. He taught me to caress the knife along the rough bumps of the bone, remaining attentive to the feel of it so as never to lose contact with the fish’s spine.

Despite his coaching, the fillets I drew from the plaice were rough and jagged. ‘Never Mind,’ he said, throwing the limp forms over the deck to the seabirds. He chucked me a monk instead –‘ much easier.’ To fillet a monk, you make a nick in the skin at the end of the tail and then pull it away from the flesh, like taking a sock off your foot. After feeling for the monkfish’s chunky bones, he instructed me to make a cleans wipe through the meaty white flesh first on one side of the central bone, then on the other, to create two equally thick fillets. We worked for a good hour, slicing through each fish and putting them into plastic bags for the crew to take home to their family and friends at the end of the trip. Just before we went back for dinner, Andrew dug around in one of thee boxes on deck and asked me if I’d ever eaten raw scallop. I shook my head and he broke one open with his knife, speared it and passed it over to me. Sweet and delicate in flavor, it tasted like the sea.

The late night haul around eleven is always the wildest. Outside is ‘as dark as a dog’s guts’, as Don put it. The sea seems to absorb all else into it. If I fell in, I thought, I would not hit the water but disappear without a sound into its depths. The bodies of fish, illuminated by the trawler’s lights, gleamed white. They stood in two large heaps, like treasure. Now and then, a roving fish eye was caught in the lights and flashed demonically .  .  .

Several gnarled spider crabs scuttled across the the Filadefia’s deck and I gave them a wide berth. Sea urchins rolled from left to right across the sodden wood, curled up into protective spheres dotted with spikes so sharp that they can pierce through gloves. And everywhere there were ye dismembered legs of starfish that found themselves tangled in the net and ripped apart. Alongside them were sea-beaten cans, pieces of plastic and hats. I was amazed by how many hats are pulled up by trawlers, mainly caps, but the odd beanie too- and once an old boot. The scene resembles the aftermath of a violent battle.

Beyond the detritus scattered across the deck are cuttlefish, writhing in their boxes and sending out sudden jets of black ink that add blood spatters to the scene of devastation. Andrew told me that you get to know by holding them exactly when they are about to squirt from the particular way their body tenses, ‘Like this’, he said, and demonstrates by pointing a cuttle at Kyle, drenching him a moment later in black ink. It streams down his face and he wipes it away with a glove, still grinning. On the gutting table tonight are also a couple of massive ling, once the most common fish caught by fishermen, but these days seen rarely and worth nothing. I decided they are my least favorite fish. Their long thrashing bodies are reminiscent of eels and, when they die, their innards come up through their mouths so it look as as if they had vomited bright pink sausage meat.

 

Before I headed down to bed, I looked out the wheel house window to check whether the loud city was still hanging there. I could just make it out in the night, looming above us, the bright stars piercing it lik lights from flats. I thought  of Newlyn. I thought of home. All of sudden it didn’t feel so far away anymore.

[ For Simone Weil, it is possible to move away from the spectral condition of modernity through resituating work at the spiritual core of life. In fishing, as you stand before the sea, the brackish waters spraying your face, gripping a small knife in a thick glove, slicing into  a twisting fish that has just come up from the water, you get that you are engaged in a kind of work that is truly real. In these moments, you feel you are the closest to being in the world that a person can be. We cannot attain this spirituality within work without first acknowledging the burdensome nature of work, the monotony that ‘hangs with an almost intolerable heaviness’. Once this monotonous ,dragging time is recognized, Weil believes  that we might ‘mount upwards’. For ,she suggests, ’monotony is the most beautiful or the most atrocious thing. The most beautiful if it is a recognition of eternity – the most atrocious if it is a sign of unvarying perpetuity. Whether eternal or in perpetuity, Weil’s sense of monotony is somehow outside of or beyond time, and therein lies its potential for spirituality – for man to recognize that ‘through work he produces his own natural existence’ and therein accepts the endless cycle between work and rest. It is only when man sees himself clearly as a squirrel turning around and round in a circular cage that, if he does not lie to himself, he is close to salvation.]


Dark Salt Clear; The Life of a Fishing Town by Lamorna Ash Bloomsbury, 2020

pages 260-263
page 140

 

What Explains Jacques Lacan's Success by Didier Anzieu

 

Power comes to those who desire it strongly and know how to handle collective psychology skillfully in order to get it. One would have thought that in a psychoanalyst his phantasy relationship to power, his desire for narcissistic omnipotence, his fascination with the dialectic of master and slave and his propensity to behave as a strategist  because it is easier and more advantageous in managing conflicts with others than to speak truthfully – one would have thought that these tendencies, marked as they are with the stamp of pregenitality, would have been sufficiently analyzed and decathected. One would likewise have thought that a psychoanalyst would have quickly learned by experience that the prolonged and solitary exercise of power makes one a persecutor (and persecuted), and that the more absolute power is, the more its wielder tends to exempt himself from common law, to pander to his passions, to unleash his madness, and to reincarnate that image of the father of the primitive horde, omnipotent, egotistical, and cruel, who was described  so well by Freud.

But something else is also needed: this man, who idealizes himself and demands to be idealized, must put ideas forward. Lacan never lacked ideas, even if he rarely cited his sources when his ideas were ‘borrowed’ from others and even if, in order to increase ‘suspense’ he was tacitly twisting the meaning of an everyday word or concept in philosophy  or linguistics. Lacan put a host of ideas into circulation that not only interested analysts, but professors of Letters or Philosophy, Jesuits and Dominicans, professional writers and thinkers, and a whole world badly in need of new words in the absence of accurate thoughts. He got debate going again, he encouraged stylistic research in writing, he rejuvenated the figures and tropes of old rhetoric by drawing a parallel between them and unconscious defense mechanisms, and he had hopes that it would be possible to formalize the logic of the primary psychic processes. Here is a list of his ides, without claiming either that they are in any particular order or that they are exhaustive: the mirror stage; the distinction between the three registers of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real: the other distinction between desire, need and demand; the role of the signifier in the articulation of phantasy and discourse, and the endless parade of signifiers; the splitting of the subject; the name of the father and its foreclosure in psychosis; how unconscious formations are produced by metaphorical and metonymic processes; deep seated alienation through displacement into the Other’s place; the human being [ etre humain] as a speaking being [parlete], which structures itself by means of language [lalangue, in a single word], etc.

The statement that Lacan gradually focused upon (namely that the unconscious is structured like a language –a prudent formulation, since this ‘like’ leaves the door open for many analogies), if we take this statement as a scientific one, it can neither be proved nor refuted, since by definition, of its very essence, the unconscious eludes knowledge founded on verbal thought.. I cannot say whether I agree or disagree with the statement, since I know nothing about it, and nothing can be known about it.

Lacan wanted to detach psychoanalysis from American influence, which would make it into a branch of psychiatry, behaviorism, and even neuro-physiology of the brain (Freud started out from the latter beginning). Lacan tried to re-situate psychoanalysis within one of the essential areas opened up by Freud, namely within the world of culture, together with the unconscious substructure included in culture, which Freud brought clearly to light. This considerable development of the human and social sciences soon after the Second World War, and also of anthropology, provided the latter is taken in its broad sense and not reduced to ethnology, gave Lacan the idea of a rapprochement with the anthropology of Levi-Strauss, the linguistics of Jakobson, and the structuralism subsequently developed by Barthes. Lacan reminded us that the qualities necessary for a psychoanalyst are every bit as much the products of a training in literature, philosophy, and anthropology as one in medicine, neuro-biology, and psychiatry. Here he was absolutely right.

One could write –and, indeed, books have been written –about each of his ideas. Unfortunately, mixing in Lacanian circles, familiarity with these notions, and facility in playing with them in conversation and making them glitter with myriads lights, have done little to help Lacan’s followers to acquire a clinical sense and to work psychoanalytically with their patients. These ideas do not standup well to the test of clinical practice. Thus, when I began psychoanalytic practice with and thinking about groups, I started off with the Lacanian distinction between the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. But I had to abandon it after some years of vain effort because it only provide me a superficial description of the phenomena. I owe it to my reading of Melanie Klein and then Bion that my mind ha been opened up to the levels of anxiety and the different types of phantasies that are mobilized in group situations.

For Lacan and his followers – or rather, his imitators, the analyst’s  role is reduced to floating attention, which they call ‘listening’, and to engendering sufficient frustration by means of systematic silence to bring the patient’s phantasies to light. But confronted with the later, the patient is supposed to pick out the infantile attitudes they conceal, which he will renounce when he establishes their infantile character – what a utopia! - and also the forbidden desires they contain, which will then turn out to be possible and will transform an individual lost among illusory longings into a subject with desires – and to hell with other people, whose desires are not compatible with his own!

There is no longer  one single psychoanalytic  theory, any more than there is a single uniform theory in modern physics. There are psychoanalytic theories in the plural –each more appropriate for a certain type of patient or even analyst, or for a particular moment in treatment. Psychic functioning is of a variety and richness (and sometimes poverty) that defies all classification, and all systematized structural explanation. The psychic Self increasingly appears to be composed of disparate pieces; some are distinct and coherent, or different but still tending to agglutinate; others are felt to be strangers by the ego; still others are deported and encapsulated on the periphery of the mind, where they constitute a hidden Self, a silent source of depression. The same disparity is found in references to theory. Each psychoanalyst, depending on his personality, style, experience, and patient, turns to more or less diverse bits of psychoanalytic theory that give him something to hold onto- make no mistake about it – a symbolic  warrant for his psychic work of understanding and his psychoanalytic work of interpretation.

Nothing is ever established in the human sciences because fear of death, the desire for eternity, the dream of absolute power, and many more  expedients besides that are linked with archaic processes keep cropping up repeatedly no matter what scientific, pedagogic, or political systems have actually developed.

 

 

The Sing of the Shore by Lamorna Ash

Early on in my stay in Cornwall  I discovered by chance, in the Cornish history section of Penzance’s Morrab Library, a small book of Cornish sea words written in the 1960s. In the introduction by its author, R. Morton Nance, explains that it was the disappointing lack of specificity in the English Dialect Dictionary, which translated te Cornish word gijoalter vaguely as ‘part of the rigging of the ship’, that first spurred him to create his Glossary of Cornish Sea-words.

As part of his research, Nance embarked on a series of visits to every harbor in Cornwall to hear first-hand from fisherfolk ‘the old words and ways at sea as they remembered them.’ There is cabarouse – a noisy frolic and drinking bout; cowsherny – when the sea looks as if it is colored with cow dung; ouga – the stench of fish. These words, brimming with and redolent of the sea, equip me with a vocabulary with which to articulate my Cornish experiences. One night I see the whole sea prinkle as a gleaming shoal of pilchards is brought to the water’s surface; ouga follows me everywhere, gets into my nostrils, not just on the trawlers, but for many days after fishing trips. Each voyage back to the harbor is celebrated by a wild cabarouse.

But the phrase that acquires the most meaning for me is ‘the sing of the shore’- defined by Nance as ‘the sounds made by waves breaking, varying with the nature of the shore – sands, pebbles, boulders, scarped cliffs, or reefs and ledges of rocks – and thus giving the experienced fisherman an indication of his position when fog or darkness makes land invisible. As I say the phrase, I imagine old Newlyn fishermen leaning out over the bulwarks to listen for the peculiar note sung between the shore and the sea, delimiting the coastline and guiding them through  the thickest fog.

I keep a Dictaphone in my pocket and begin harvesting sounds on it. After carefully labeling each recording I add it to my museum of littoral sounds until I have built up a whole musical sphere carried in the device. Later, when I am away from Newlyn, and am craving re-immersion in the place, I hold the Dictaphone up to my ear like a shell and hear again the rage of the sea on a black night captured from the balcony of the Filadelfia, the yarns of fishermen told to me in pubs muffled by the blaring jukebox, the fish merchants yelling prices in the early morning auction, the scuffle of pebbles as I make my way across a quiet beach on a wind-rent day. As I listen Newlyn becomes visible to me once more, the sing of the shore continuing to ring outwards.

There are two paths out of Newlyn to Land’s End. One leads up beside by main road to Penlee Point and the other down to the sea, where you find a rocky shore on one side and a concrete wall dense with graffiti- together with a half-roof structure to retreat under in a sudden shower- on the other.

{the author’s final paragraph of this chapter:}

I take the lower path. There is no one else around apart from an elderly woman in a dark coat down to her ankles and a long brown plait snaking down her back. She seems not to notice me as she looks straight out at the sun-dashed water, her feet practically curled over the edge of the rocks that border the sea. For a moment I consider turning around and going back the way I’ve come, but when I catch sight of a slender object raised to her lips, from which comes a haunting sound , I find myself compelled towards her. As I near her, I recognize from the kind of sound and then the woman’s finger movements that the object is a small wooden recorder and that the woman is plying her melody directly to the sea. I move closer until I am standing right behind her shoulders, listen to her play. The woman does not break from her music or take her eyes off the sea for even a second and I wonder if she is aware of my presence at all.

I listen to her for a long whole, her music filling the space between the sea and land; a woman looking at  a woman looking to the sea. I let my gaze follow hers, to where all the eyes of Cornwall cannot help but turn. And as I look, there are word as contained within the waves, etched out in shimmering lines, and I read them as an incantation produced by the woman’s wordless song. When they touch the clefts of the cliffs or pour into the sand these words are deposited there in small pieces. All that the sea comes into contact with has terraces of these incantations, in the same was music is scratched onto a records. This is how the water tries to tell us its ways.

I leave the lone figure enacting her own sing of the shore back to the waves – “I am here. This is my nature. Are you Listening?– and continue up to where the paths meet once more on the way to Land’s End

{My edited version of her final paragraph of this passage:}

[I took the lower path. There was no  one else around apart from an elderly woman in a dark coat down to her ankles and a long brown plait snaking down her back. She seemed not to notice me as she looked straight out at the sun-dashed water, her feet  curled over the rocks that border the sea. For a moment I considered  turning around and going back the way I’d come, but when I caught sight of a slender object raised to her lips, and its   haunting sound, I was compelled towards her. She was playing a small wooden recorder , her music filling  the space between the sea and the land. I let my gaze follow hers to where all eyes in Cornwall cannot help but turn and heard in the woman’s music the incantation  the words of the waves etched out in simmering lines, touching the clefts of the cliffs and poured  piece by piece into the sand:

“I am here. This is my nature. Are you listening?’ ]




 

Wilfred Bion and Samuel Beckett by Gerard Beandonu

The autobiography is discretely silent on the two years Bion spent working with the man who was to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Towards the end of 1933 Samuel Beckett, who had been suffering from recurrent health problems, had been persuaded by a doctor friend that his problems might be of psychosomatic origin. He managed to leave Ireland, and his mother, to live in London. He decided to leave both because of his physical symptoms and the anxiety they caused him, sapping his strength, and because the literary world had discovered psychoanalysis, partly through the  Surrealist poets. On his friend’s advice, Beckett went to the Tavistock  Clinic early in 1934. As chance would have it, he began psychotherapy with a trainee who was to become one of the leading lights of psychoanalysis: Wilfred Bion. The experience was of great importance to both men, even though neither mentioned it in his publications. Each probably provide the other with the image of an ‘imaginary twin’, as Didier Anzieu (1986) suggested, on discovering a plausible series of analogies between the lives and problems of the two men. Their ancestors were French Huguenots who fled to Britain to escape religious persecution. They both had narcissistic and schizoid characteristics, and both had turned to culture to contain this psychotic part of themselves. Furthermore, Anzieu suggests that Beckett transposed the structure and experience of psychotherapy into his literature, although the writer himself considered that this suggestion was ‘psychoanalytic fantasies.’

The therapy enabled Beckett to understand himself differently; it pushed him to reveal more of himself in his writings of that period, although he was one of the most reserved writers of his time. He even acknowledged that his night-time panic attacks were caused by his ‘neurosis.’ His therapist soon had his work cut out, as he found himself faced with a negative therapeutic reaction. Beckett could not progress until he could acknowledge his ‘addictive’ relationship to his mother. Nine years older than Beckett, Bion, who was still in therapy with Hadfield, became, in the transference, the writer’s older brother Frank ( it was in his bed that ‘Sam’ sought refuge from his nocturnal panic before coming to London). The two men shared many intellectual interests, especially literature. At times they discussed, even argued about, the nature of the creative process. According to Beckett, the ‘analysis’ was limping along. The patient suggested to his therapist that the cost-effect ration was leaning towards termination, and that whatever his intellectual interests might be, he could not make a choice between Bion and his mother. His body somatized, producing boils, tremors and an anal abscess. Beckett announced his intention of stopping at the end of 1935.

Bion suggested to Beckett That he should go to the Tavistock Clinic to hear a lecture by Jung ( the third in a series of five lectures). The clinic had a policy of building a public profile by inviting famous lecturers to speak. Beckett remained very impressed by Jung’s ideas – he soon saw their relevance to his own work in progress. His therapy ended at Christmas. Bion had expressed reservations, as he doubted that the relationship to his mother would improve in the way his patient wished to believe. He was proved right in the long run. Nevertheless, Beckett finished his first novel, Murphy, not long afterwards.

Beckett was critical of his therapy in much the same way as Bion was to be critical of his analysis with Melanie Klein. Nevertheless, the writer maintained a lasting interest in psychiatry and psychoanalysis. In 1960 he questioned his nephew, a psychiatrist, on the difference between Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis. It is not impossible that he was aware of Bion’s resounding success in his work. Bion, for his part, certainly remembered the person he treated at the Tavistock who was nominated for a Nobel Prize each successive year from 1964, and he was awarded in 1969. It was in the late 1970s that the inspirational flow was reversed. Bion, in the last period of his lifework, was oscillating between literature and psychoanalysis. He too wanted to transcend the literary style of James Joyce, in order to create a language in which to describe the reality of intrauterine life. Had he been asked ‘Why are you writing? He would no doubt have replied, like Beckett: ‘Bon qu’a ca!’ [loosely: ‘The only thing I can do!’].

Bion’s apprenticeship ended with an encounter with another memorable man: John Rickman .  .  .  .

Wilfred Bion; His Life and Works 1897-1979 by Gerard Bleandonu

Unfortunately Didier Anzieu's 'Beckett' is only available in French and Turkish.