A tongue-lashing brings forth the lion on tired old Freud

What happened this morning left me befuddled!
Marianne's mum had invited me to lunch, offering to fetch us by car at the end of the Kid's week here. When she 'phoned to ask how we were doing, I said "Fine, but Marianne's still fast asleep and the place is a mess." Her bags remained unpacked, her stuff strewn all over.
It was 10:15, I saw no rush and the conversation was as friendly as ever.

My only problem -- not worth mentioning -- was that the Condition had caused a sudden, unstoppable accident with my last decent trousers. They too had to be pre-scrubbed and then bunged into yesterday's wash. Such incidents have been rare since August. I've regarded them as sufficiently revolting (and embarrassing the three times it's happened in public) not to 'blog.
But Friday's mess was my downfall!
Then came two get-up-several-times nights, avoiding waking the Kid.
No big deal. "Shit happens," they say.
By the time Marianne was clean, dressed and had sorted out her bags, I'd taken no fewer than four powerful diarrhoea-stopping pills (which don't always work) by precaution.
I asked her to call her mother and say we were ready.

Half an hour later, the woman and car were waiting. As the Kid rushed out, I asked her please to tell her mum that I'd been down in a moment, just as soon as I'd been to the loo.
And so I was.
When I got into the car, Catherine asked "OK?" but wore one of those looks.
"Yes thanks, and you?"
"You don't look OK!" she said. "That jacket must be 15 years old and as for your jeans...!"
I didn't want to explain why I was wearing a ragged old pair of jeans with a hole at the knee, though I defended my only warm coat as recently cleaned at quite hair-raising expense!
"I'm sorry," I said, "but all my other trousers are still damp from the wash."
"You trying to arouse pity or what?" she snapped.
"Well, this is just a family affair, isn't it?"
Her answer to that?
"You have absolutely no respect for other people, you look like someone well on the road to becoming a tramp!"

I was gob-smacked. Shirt, socks, shoes, underwear, jersey and jacket were all perfectly clean. So was my shave and my hair. Was it simply those damned jeans?
"You want me to go up and change?"
When she failed to reply, I said "Fine!"
I got out, slammed the door, hastened upstairs, pulled on a damp pair of clean trouser and grabbed a hairdryer to blow hot air over the dampest, most uncomfortable part.
Within four minutes, I was back in the street.
No car.
No ex-wife.
No Kid.
No farewell.
And two of my favourite women, between them, have now lately labelled me rude, uncivilised, uncharitable and halfway to a tramp.

I'm neither angry nor upset, but I find some particularities in behaviour so odd that (as the Faithful 5 ¾ know only too well), I'm capable of 'blogging these things to try to make general points.
If I were cross with Marianne's mother, I wouldn't be writing.

Physically, I'm wrecked today, but the mind's been in overdrive, a slow gear for work, as one AFP colleague would disturbingly point out, but high-flying enough to go deep into prolonged meditative thought!
That's perhaps no bad thing before tomorrow's first of an intensive batch of sessions with the "psycho-somatic shrink", Dr F. -- who has a terrific sense of humour I've not hitherto encountered in her job. It's going to be interesting (and to my surprise I find that I'm not expected in the office tomorrow, while an "emergency arrangement" with Dr F. means I'm going to ask for Tuesday too).

As soon as the clean trousers were dry, I went to the Canteen for lunch, sure of offending nobody there with my latest digestive difficulties.
Baudier came late, not only talkative but in receptive mood, free of that inclination to "play games" of mind and world-weary politicking which can make him as irritating as he's lonely.
When our "literary lion" is at his best, he's disposed to share a storehouse of learning about matters mathematical, philosophical and psycho-sociological which have made him a lifelong student as well as an academic teacher.
I've been unable to finish 'L'Odeur des Casernes' (alapage.com; Fr.), after reviewing some of his other books. It's too impenetrably abstruse and immensely experimental. It fascinates, but doesn't quite work for me. But Baudier has an appreciative audience elsewhere for that kind of achievement... I prefer his lucidity in dialogue.

"I'm astonished that you're even surprised!" was Baudier's response to a brief account of this morning's little episode. "That's pure Freud for you, through and through. The woman could hardly have done otherwise."
"André," I said. "Freud and I are not the warmest of acquaintances. The man often strikes me as mistaken, a thinker too much of his own time and place. So just spell out what you mean."
"I mean," he answered, "that somewhere, probably quite unconsciously, it's clear that your ex-wife still detests you!"
"That's outrageous!" I gasped. "I'll take it as a possibility, all right, but probably groundless. In the years since the divorce, we've both changed a lot, we're often the best of friends. We have our differences, true, but agree on essentials, including Marianne's upbringing. And that's no small matter!"
"Et voilà!" he broadcast to an almost empty restaurant, startling two elderly American tourists. "Exactly. All you've said proves my point. If you'd read more of your Freud, you would understand this."
"I'll make one concession," I informed him as he beamed over his steak. "When we were married, I used often to be a shabby dresser. She didn't like that. But she changed it, and I scarcely make a habit of it now. This is France, after all."
"That makes no difference. Indeed, it rather reinforces what I am saying."

I took the offensive. "First, a silly question: would it have made any difference, in your opinion, had I not slammed the car door?"
"Why did you slam it?"
"Hmm, because in that instant I was angry. Not particularly with her, I assure you, since I was too bemused, though it did remind me of things long stone dead. But I was really fucking cold, André, and I didn't want to go up those stairs again and pull on a damp pair of trousers. Also -- do you think appearances were still so very important?"
"Probably not. But that was the trigger, wasn't it? Do you see any other?"
"Well, I've not been especially inclined to smile or look cheerful in the past couple of weeks. But that happens. We've all been there. And Marianne swore she didn't mind; indeed, she was good company, simply being around. We didn't talk much, she did her thing and I did mine, and she said she was perfectly happy that way."
"Yet I assure you, Nick, that when she grows up, she'd do exactly the same thing as her mum did. Drive off!"
"André, that's off the wall! Are you telling me: 'That's women for you, mate' ... or, worse, saying you think we have built that into her 'nature'?"
"No, but it's what is commonly described as transgenerational" (Psyche Matters, I've looked it up since -- well, well, well!)
"Now there's a new one. Put in by upbringing ... or some kind of genetic inheritance? Pull the other leg, prithee!"
"I'm not talking about the genes." Being Baudier, I'm surprised he didn't slip into English and add: "or the jeans, tee he he!" That's a kind of chance he rarely overlooks!
"Freud?"
"At the origin, yes. But also, I feel this."
"That's cheating. I grant you your intuition, I often pay much heed to my own! But to haul that into what you'd regard as 'analysis'..."
"Don't expect me to rationalise the innately irrational! Such as your ex-wife's reaction. She's scarcely to be chastised for it: that's how it works." This reminded me of my great buddy Tony's near-motto, produced at the end of any illuminating anecdote: "And that's how it is!"
Silence, a long one.

"You know, André, I very much prefer Jung."
I added: "That Freud 'revealed' many a true thing, agreed, that he was a pioneer, agreed, but did he not, in his way, further fuck up Vienna just as that city gave him its fuck-ups?"
"Jung? Pah!"
"No, wait. After all, Freud's legacy is the couch, the dreams, all the rites, the word-games and the rest of it, the good old sex imperative at the core, the repression ...And then, in the last resort, you know how they are, psychoanalysts?
"'Well, that's all I can do,' they'll say once you've paid them the cost of the skin off your ass, because that's good for you, all part of the treatment, your 'need'! Then transference is attained, over, dealt with - huh! 'Now it's up to you!' And many go back for more! Fucking years of it, sometimes, n'est-ce pas? And what, André, do they get out of it? Does it make anybody happier?"

Oh, he had an answer.
Unsatisfactory, to my ears and mind: an answer lacking for me, since there is absolutely no place in Baudier's bleak world, as far as I can tell, for anything approaching the numinous, the spiritual and the ... mystical.
His is an essentially mechanical outlook: corporeal, cause and effect. Granted, the man acknowledges the complexity of his causes and effects, that there can be multiplicity.
For a trained mathematician, physicist and socio-shrink, he remains a reductionist to a point that I think today's physics and especially quantum theory have left far behind.

One side-effect of that discussion was to tease Baudier into some novel intimate disclosures of his own, to an extent that had two or three of us saying: "Well, we understand you far better now!"
In his world, much is a matter of dominance and submission, there's a sado-masochist element I recognise in many people but cannot identify with, especially when it comes to explicitly sexual behaviour.
That I'm capable of self-flagellation and unwarranted agonising, I admit, but I don't seek out punishment or cruelty in a way which for Baudier and many like him, can sometimes characterise all relations of the flesh and engagements of mind. He can be competitive too: "Look at me!"
And yet. When once I tested my growing conviction of our personal multiplicity on him, he surprised me by buying it. "Except that I'm emotionally a multitude," he went on. "Intellectually, I'm lucid, whole."
So it may be. I can't judge and wouldn't.

Sad to my mind, but not (perhaps) in Andre's, is that in his outlook, I can see no place for genuine disinterest, uncalculated action, altruism even less, let alone faith. And I know a lot of people like that -- maybe most? I'm learning...
Remember. This is the man who rejoiced in that comment, taken from 'L'Humanité' (a "reformed Communist" paper that forms part of his daily digest), 'C'est l'année de tous les désespoirs!' (Elsewhere, I loosely translated that little jest on words as "the year of total hopelessness".)
"Why do you insist on reading these and above all 'Le Monde' when so much you read gets you so irritated?" I asked him once. 'You buy that unreadably turgid rag every day, you pay to endure it."
Not to speak of underlining whole passages in a thick pen with outrage in his eyes. His reply: "Because I have to know."
It all goes into his books. A proclaimed hatred of France and things French, especially the country's politicians, which puts him on a par -- almost -- with the renowned 'Merde in France'.
Which this particular Sunday, as ever, is immersed in 'blogroll-worthy shitting on the French:

"Message to France: keep appeasing terrorists, both domestic and foreign
"Zek (Fr. only) ponders the causes of the Red Sea plane crash (DEBKAfile; English) and why France is the Limp biscuit for hardcore ayatollahs" (Dantek at Subversif; Fr. only).

All of which gets me little further in comprehending Catherine's uncharacteristic outburst, Baudier's strong admiration for the flawed Freud, and my own sense of a dangerous darkness of mind that's back as it was when first I wrote about the Condition.

I've never felt quite as ready to consult a shrink as I do about what begins tomorrow. On the strict understanding that it will entail both take and give, news on the "empathy front" (apparently my Achilles heel), and something more constructive than yet another "pseudo-analysis" of family things past, love-hate of my mother.
As, of course, I've loved the Wildcat. Still she deserves another plant.
It could be a fir, not to rhyme or match in with her own fur, sorely ruffled in an excess of our shared "truths" -- huh, again! -- that caressed right the wrong way for the flow...
The message of the yellow carnation is ambiguous. And more uncertain. Check it out at places that specialise in such things, both east and west. This particular variant comes from ... 'Of the Earth' (custom paper). The sheets we've written on are far from finished.
If certainly not slept between, together!

I half-regret the brutality of one thing I told her in response to that "please, just friends" tack of hers, for it was unnecessarily savage to say:
"Love is free. Friendship has to be earned." Still I believe that, profoundly, but to harden my heart and hurl such a lance at a troubled one is not something I'm proud of having done.

Friendship is also learning to trust, which can come hard. Having faith. And -- though it comes even harder -- forswearing despair.
Had I remembered it in timely fashion, it's what French novelist Jean Cavé said that marked me enough to have merited repeating to André:
"Le désespoir n'est qu'un manque d'imagination." ("Despair is but a lack of imagination.")
He also said something George Dubya might do well to know, given that world misleader's particular vision and that wretched "roadmap" catchphrase of the times:
"Une carte routière, c'est un voyage qu'on ne fait pas." ("A roadmap is a journey we don't make.")
Title of the book that first quotation came from? Pretty simple in the context of this ramble: