● Lady Percy moves me - might she move you? CLICK TO FIND OUT
● Plus my novels, stories, verse, vulgar interests, apologies, and singing.
● Most posts are 300 words. I respond to all comments/re-comments.
● See Tone Deaf in New blogger.


Saturday 17 August 2019

Expiation

A warning to cigar smokers
- in both senses
A post about sexual solecism to compensate for an unforeseen inability to deliver a post about mosaics (see Suspense).

Immediately, one looks for wriggle-room. Who better than the Sage of Vienna to blur the issue? Much innocent mileage may be derived from “the existence of libido - a sexualised energy with which mental processes and structures are invested and which generates erotic attachments, and a death drive - the source of compulsive repetition, hate, aggression.”

I  mean that’s everyday life, innit? I don’t dislike Huw Edwards. I love him because he reminds me of my Mum.

As for my cucumber phobia, so obvious. The shape – though, happily, not the colour - is ludicrously symbolic.

Then there’s Paris, not the source of Freudianism but one of its largest Petri dishes. I’m happier walking down its boulevards these days. But that’s because they’ve done away with all those pissoirs: large cast-iron cylinders on street corners within which male Parisians could gain physical (perhaps spiritual) comfort providing they didn’t mind exposing their lower limbs to public gaze.

I’ve read Proust. Say no more.

But let’s have something more up to date. I drive a car and the engine projects forwards. (Yes, I know that’s the norm but when did you last give yourself a Freudian workover?) Not only does the engine project but I cannot see its foremost extremity. There’s doubt there. Quick as a flash automotive doubt becomes doubt about virility, gender, and whether bow-ties are a sexual signifier. I’d drive the car backwards but the boot (US: trunk) would then do the projecting. Close your eyes to the horrible associations that invokes.

I’m sorry I failed with mosaics. I got too involved smashing the tiles and I shouldn’t have. Am I now shriven? Shrove? Shreeved?

2 comments:

  1. How on earth did your essay (of sorts) on the process of creating mosaic art turn into a somewhat disjointed musing on sexual matters and Freud. Do your rare occasions of failure cause you to chastise yourself, which then brings to mind matters sexual?

    Boy, wouldn't Siggy have a field day with that?!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Crow: How did it happen? Automatically. And because I belong to the human race which is nominally divided into two genders. Almost all disturbances are traceable to our sexual upbringing. Because we experience our upbringing "from the inside" we tend to think it's normal. And of course it is in Freudian terms but we only get to know this when we discover the books wrapped in plain brown paper and lodged by our parents on the top of the wardrobe. Disjointed? Most adolescences are. If yours was smoother you were lucky and shared this benison with water-snails all of whom enjoyed happy, uneventful childhoods. Alas, water-snails later have nightmares about pike (it's a predatory fish in the UK) and the dreams become reality.

    ReplyDelete