Persephone comes back
Chapter 20: Freud reads Balzac, the man in the car on my street, the abyss of Tartarus, books on natural magick, to sacrifice the ram of spring
Dear reader,
Things are changing, and it’s good. This newsletter might be changing — I have ideas for other formats, other things to say. Email me always, if you feel like it (regular.pleasuress@gmail.com). But for today I’m writing after a Saturday overnight shift, so nothing fancy, xo.
The last book Freud read was Balzac’s La peau de chagrin, or The Wild Ass’s Skin. It’s about a man who finds the hide of a donkey, which grants him endless wishes. But with each wish the skin grows smaller, and so each wish physically depletes him. When he finished the book, Freud told his doctor: “This was the proper book for me to read: it deals with shrinking and starvation.” Freud shrank from his cancer over years until he asked his doctor to help him die. I sometimes think of the myth of Persephone, who was abducted by her uncle Hades to become the goddess of death. Hades fell in love with her, and stole her from her friends one day in a field picking flowers. He brought her to the underworld to marry her and keep her hidden. Persephone’s mother was the goddess Demeter, who searched the earth desperately for her daughter. Demeter was the goddess of the harvest, and in her grief she forbade the plants from growing. The earth fell into winter, and people starved; their bodies shrank, and they died. Confronted with his starving people, Zeus forced Hades to release Persephone to her mother, and life and greenness returned — we had spring. But Hades tricked his wife: he fed her pomegranate seeds before leaving, which would tie her to the underworld forever. And so Persephone was forced to return each year for a few months to the underworld, which is when we have our winter.
There is a man on my street who spends most of the day and sometimes the night alone in his car. He lives with his wife in a house a few doors down, where I’ve seen them arguing on their porch. I don’t know what he does in his car. He sits in the passenger seat against a Hello Kitty headrest, and sometimes he smokes, but usually he does nothing at all. Sometimes I hear him at 3:00 am. I’ll wake up to a loud engine running outside my window, and it runs for an hour because it’s cold outside. Sometimes in the daytime I’ll see him smiling alone in his car. He is the first person I ever saw on my street before it became my street, the first neighbour I met but didn’t meet. A few months ago he said hello to me for the first time as I was passing his parked car from the sidewalk. I was so shocked to see him acknowledge me that I didn’t say anything back. He’s never said hello again. But the days are warmer, and maybe he’ll start leaving his windows open again.
Once a week I teach a class on psychoanalytic theory, and last month our topic was Freud. At the Freud Museum in London, in the famous office (the one with the couch), the space is filled with archeological artifacts, little statues, small objects dug up from the ground. This made sense for Freud: psychoanalysis uncovers the unconscious things we’ve buried. The statues in his office are symbols of the memories and dreams we find too threatening to keep in conscious awareness. It’s in mythology and history that we sometimes find a vehicle to make sense of what we’ve dug up. As a good Greek child, my bedtime stories were not about farm animals and porridge. Instead I learned Hercules and Odysseus and the Olympian gods before bed. I still have the big hardcover picture books. Now I love to bring myths into therapy. Our seminar readings a few weeks ago (from Deborah Cabaniss’s great book Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: A clinical method) reminded me that before Zeus and the gods of Olympus, the titans ruled the earth. Zeus’s father, Cronus, was a titan who kept eating his children, so his mother Rhea sent Zeus away to be raised by nymphs. When he grew up and returned, he rebelled against the titans who’d given birth to his generation of gods — his brothers and sisters Hades, Hera, Poseidon, Hestia, and Demeter — and he banished all the titans, his parents, to Tartarus. Tartarus was a massive pit, which he covered up so the titans could never return. The titans never did get out, but they didn’t disappear: in Greek mythology they were the source of the earthquakes and tsunamis that destroyed villages and cities. It reminds us that even the unseen things, the unconscious things, maybe especially those things, can bring the greatest chaos.
When I was in university I’d go to the Rare Book Library sometimes with a friend. He was in chemistry and I studied cognitive neuroscience, and we’d go to the library to read books about magic. We’d search the catalog for the oldest books we could find, which were usually 16th and 17th century texts on “natural magick”. There was Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s Fourth book of occult philosophy and geomancy, the nature of spirits, and Arbatel of Magick. There was Frier Bacon’s first English printing from 1659 of His Discovery of the Miracles of Art, Nature, and Magick. We’d request them at the main desk and we’d take a table in the reading room to leaf through them in white cotton gloves. We copied out medieval recipes for aphrodisiac “love cakes”, early modern methods for dyeing your hair blond, evergreen spells for restoring broken hymens. In the early modern period, medicine, magic, astrology and math weren’t separate. Isaac Newton founded calculus and modern physics, and he was also an alchemist. He also determined the age of the world by counting the begats in the Bible. We loved the titles at the Rare Book Library because they conveyed the fascination of their authors. Imagine what it must have been like to write Mathematical magick, or, The wonders that may be performed by mechanical geometry in two books. I’m amazed they let nineteen year olds touch these things. I remember in that first year of school I used to walk around campus and think of the word university, and what it meant. It seemed like the state of being like a universe, or that a thing that is a universe contains university. It was a word that never fully made sense, no matter how much I tried to hold onto meaning. I loved school because of that, because that state of wonder never ended.
A few years ago I had an annual tradition of shooting 35mm portraits of my friends at the beginning of spring. For one day each year, friends and acquaintances came to my apartment, one by one, for one to two hours to do a photoshoot. They’d take off their shoes at the door, and then they’d receive a questionnaire to fill out about their favourite body parts, their deepest desires, and the animal with which they most identified. I’d play disco and buy armfuls of cheap tulips from the corner store. I’d adorn my friends with flowers like the painting of Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais — a kind of funereal sexuality, the true Persephone, both a goddess of spring and a queen of death. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus goes to see his dead mother in Tartarus, and he sees Persephone there. In Tartarus Odysseus sacrifices a ram to the goddess to pay for a pleasant afterlife. The ghosts of the dead were supposed to drink the blood of the sacrificed ram — the symbol of Aries, the first month of the astrological calendar, the beginning of spring. One year during my spring portrait shoot, one of my friends tore open an orange with her fingers and squeezed it slowly over her face as I shot the juice dripping down her cheeks and into her open mouth. She drank the sacrificial ram, the natural magic of spring, and we laughed the whole time.
Love,
E