by Lily Hoang
“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Andreas said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing myself all at once, if I speak of myself. Or perhaps, speaking of other women, I have already lost myself, little by little.”
“It seems as though you’ve been speaking of nothing but memory.”
“It always seemed to me: since our body must play for us a double role, since it is just as much ‘we ourselves’ as also at the same time the immediate piece of external reality, to which we are in the most various ways forced to adjust ourselves in exactly the same fashion as to all the rest of the external world — for this reason it can only accompany us a little way along the road of our narcissistic behavior.”
~
When Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas first began corresponding, he asked her for an image of her likeness in the form of a photograph. The Great Freud asked in the meekest manner, but Lou Andreas could hardly decline his offer. When she did provide him with her photograph, she prefaced it with the acknowledgement that although the picture captured her image, there was no connection between the still figure encased in sepia and herself. In that way, there would always remain permutations of self, never the same woman, the perpetual shape-shifter.
Women & Eyes 5
There is always mucous dripping from the eyes of the woman down the hall. It grosses us out. We wish she would go to the doctor and get it fixed. We tell her, “Woman, go to the doctor! Let him fix your eyes!”
She says, “No doctor can fix these old eyes. There are doctors who can fix eyes, yes, but not these old eyes.”
The woman down the hall is not old. In fact, she’s a good looking woman, nice body, strong features, except for that yellowish mucous that will not dry from her face. We have seen it travel down her face, past the soft curves of her breasts, and all the way to the cup of her knees. It’s disgusting. It’s repulsive.
We tell her, “Woman, you are not such an ugly woman. There is no reason for you to be so alone, so hideous with your lonely eyes.”
She says, “No doctor can fix these old eyes. There are doctors who can fix eyes, yes, but not these old eyes.”
The woman down the hall often tells us stories about where her eyes have been, how if only we had lived the life these poor, old eyes had lived, we would understand. She tells us elaborate stories about how she came to own these eyes, how they did not always belong to her, that she can remember a time when she was not so blessed and afflicted. She says that they were a gift, but we can’t imagine such a thing being a present. We can’t think of how one would wrap something so moist and spherical.
So we tell her this. We call bullshit on her story and the woman down the hall, she uses her fingers to scoop an eye out from her socket and there, right there underneath that mucous eye, there’s another eye! Under one set of her eyes, she has another. And somehow, we’re surprised when she tells us again, for the five thousandth time, “No doctor can fix these old eyes. There are doctors who can fix eyes, yes, but not these old eyes.”
Women & Names 4
The woman down the hall dreams of Dora. Every night, when she closes her eyes, she becomes a frightened girl, lying on that infamous couch, which is actually just an old leather thing like you’d find in any old house. The woman down the hall dreams Dora’s dreams. They’re not especially spectacular. In fact, she does not even know they are Dora’s dreams. She thinks they are her own, only in the dreamscape, her name becomes Dora. Sometimes, on accident, she calls herself Dora, because it is easy to become confused. Because even when banal, Dora has a vastly more exciting consciousness than reality.
Women & the Dead 3
“I find it pleasurable,” the woman down the hall tells us, and our intestines roll abrupt somersaults and backflips. We’re sure we’re going to either throw up or drool. Somehow, all at once, we’re disgusted and turned on. It shouldn’t be this way. It’s not right, but there is something truly compelling about her and all her perky smiles filled with sunrays and butterflies and that cold metal room with those old cold cocks and that she finds pleasure in it, well, that’s not our fault at all.
Women & the Sky 2
The day that man appropriated the woman down the hall as his object, the sky dropped tornadoes onto our heads to tell us to help her, but we did not understand the message. Then, the oceans filled our lungs with salty water until we could not breath, but even then, we could not get it. Finally, the earth shook the word HELP in big, bold letters, and we ran. We ran with legs we did not have, legs of clean muscle, and we arrived to her screams. Then, we punched with arms we did not have, arms of passion, and we threw that man away from her body, our friend, our woman who lives right down the hall from us. She laid there, legs apart, and a cyclone funneled him away forever. We didn’t care to turn and watch him fly out.
Continuous Women 1
The woman down the hall believes in legacy. She tells us about her mother, who was a fine woman, and her grandmother, who was a complete tramp but lovely nonetheless. She tells us about her great-grandmother, who had broad shoulders, and her great-great-grandmother, who was practically a fairy tale princess.
So the woman down the hall tells us all this, and we’re interested. You see, we want to believe in happy endings, we want to believe in forever, but the fact of the matter is that we don’t. We don’t believe that just because her great-great-grandmother was practically a fairy tale princess that it means that she will have the same fate. We don’t believe in continuity. Instead, we believe she’ll die old and alone. That’s the fate we will all share.
~
Sigmund describes a woman who could be either his wife or his wife’s sister to Lou Andreas to see if she could differentiate between the two. One woman he refers to with tenderness; the other with patience. Lou does not respond quickly, but when she does, she tells him another story about a woman down the hall.
With frustration, the doctor says, “I’ve told you my rules! I will tell you about a woman and you will tell me if she exists, if my imaginings of woman are true to your experience.”
The Russian responds, “I can tell you about thousands of women, doctor, and each of them will be the very woman you have just described. I can tell you about hundreds of women, and in them, you will see none of your wives, none of the women you love, as a point of differentiation. I can tell you about myself or your wife or your daughter and I can give them different names, but they will only be as I tell them to you. You cannot create women of your own out of the pieces I give you.”
Freud says, “But tell me if they are real. Tell me if the women I speak about are real.”
“When you describe these women, you give me only their characteristics as reflections of yourself, and so yes, Freud, these women are real, given that you yourself are real enough to touch.”
~
SIGMUND: I don’t know when you have had time to visit all the women you describe to me. It seems to be you have never moved from my side.
LOU: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same smoke and smells, the same silence streaked by the rustling of your wife. At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this room, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence, though I continue, without a moment’s pause, moving through room to room, speaking with women burdened with hysterics.
SIGMUND: I, too, am not sure I am here, sitting beside this fire or eating decadent foods, receiving awards or even speaking with you. I am unsure I stroll in the early evening and I constantly question if my sleep occurs with any regularity, or perhaps I am where my sons are, fighting in dirt with imaginary bullets that kill without reservation.
LOU: Perhaps this conversation exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids, and we have never stopped: you, from raising dust in the fields of internal battle; and I, from bargaining for sacks of pepper in distant bazaars. But each time we half-close our eyes, in the midst of the din and
throng, we are allowed to withdraw here, dressed in our finest garbs, to ponder what we are seeing and living, to draw conclusions and understandings, to contemplate from a distance.
SIGMUND: Perhaps this dialogue of our is taking place between two hysterics named Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salome, as they sift in and out of rubbish heaps, piling up invisible flotsam, scrapes of imaginary nerves, screaming from repressed desires for their fathers and mothers, while drunk on a few sips of poor wine, they see in the distance all the treasure of calmness shine around them.
LOU: Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland covered with rubbish heaps and this one room of Sigmund Freud’s where we sit. It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which is outside.
SIGMUND: It is most clear to me that all of this could merely be transference and that these women you describe are manifestations of your homosexual desire for both self and, strangely, me.
LOU: All of this is irrelevant in the face of memory and reality, this accumulation of variations of self, and how you see it as a way for me to seduce you.
Women & Names 5
That cunt down the hall, we call her cunt. We say it without shame. We say it like it means vagina. And that cunt down the hall, when we call her cunt, her shoulders rise up and swallow her head, and after a little while, they fold back down and her face is all red. Her ears pulse. We could dance to their beat, but that would be rude. It is, after all, our fault that she is a cunt. Before we called her that, this never happened. We made her this way. We made her insecure.
Women & the Dead 4
When the woman down the hall lusts for a man, it is like his death. It isn’t her intention, but it can’t be helped. Only yesterday, the woman down the hall saw a man on a bicycle and surely he was attractive enough, but with senses as keen as a mongoose, she stuck her head to the full extension of neck out her window so many stories high to the clouds, and she sniffed. The woman down the hall from so high up caught the brief scent of his sweat, and it was as simple as that.
She memorized the texture of smell, the hint of the dinner he surely ate alone just last night, and when evening breached, the woman down the hall dressed in her most conservative black, and as she approached the restaurant, this man who was on his bicycle earlier that morning couldn’t stop himself. He couldn’t resist her charm, her simple laugh, the way she listened to his trivial stories with care, and before he could acknowledge it, he was caught in a love so easy that even breathing became a chore.
Women & the Sky 3
The woman down the hall is in love. We can tell that she is in love because her hair becomes branches that extend and entangle. When she is happiest, we can hear the whistle of wind move through her leaves. They sing a sweet melody that sounds like fairy tales.
Continuous Women 2
The woman down the hall speaks in ellipses. It doesn’t seem possible, but she does. The woman down the hall never finishes a thought. She never finishes a sentence.
Hidden Women 1
The woman down the hall is constantly hidden. Most often, her bulbous body exposes her, but she keeps her face obscured. She is not an unattractive woman so we cannot discern why she would hide. If she were ugly, that would be a different matter, but she is not. We cannot understand her.
She is a curious one, this woman down the hall. We often find her huddled in the corners of couches, her entire body lodged between cushions and frame, her eyes connected with a book.
But even though she seems too entranced in her envelopment to speak with us, she knows everything.
She is the Gossip Queen, the securer of truths and exaggerations, and although it is most difficult to find her, once we do, we are well rewarded for our diligence in sighting the cleverest chameleon.
~
LOU: …Perhaps this room and all we have discussed exist only in the continual expanse of our mind…
SIGMUND: …and however far our troubled enterprises as psychoanalysts and friends may take us, we both harbor within ourselves this silent shade, this conversation of pauses, this evening that is always the same.
LOU: Unless the opposite hypothesis is correct: that those who suffer with dreams and aphonia, neuralgia and transference exist only because we two think of them, here, enclosed among these walls, motionless since time began.
SIGMUND: Unless toil, shouts, sores, stink do not exist; and only this azalea bush.
LOU: Unless the poor, hungry, wounded, dead exist only because we think of them.
SIGMUND: To tell the truth, I never think of them.
LOU: Then they do not exist.
SIGMUND: To me this conjecture does not seem to suit our purposes. Without them we could never remain here, cocooned in the safety of this room.
LOU: Then the hypothesis must be rejected. So the other hypothesis must be true: they exist and we do not.
SIGMUND: We have proved that if we were here, we would not be.
LOU: And here, in fact, we are.
SIGMUND: But then all these women who live down the hall, where are they?
9
The Great Freud owns an atlas where all the parts of the empirical mind and the neighboring realms are drawn, neuron by neuron, cell by cell, with folds, memories, fears, sensations. He realizes that from Lou Andreas-Salome’s tales it is pointless to expect news of those places, which for that matter he knows well: how women with hysteria wail in the moments when their control slips furthest away from their skin; how bodies can become islands where the rhinoceros rages, charging, with her murderous horn; how translucent pearl tears appear in moments of epiphany.
Sigmund asks Lou, “When you return from your journeys down the hall, will you repeat to your women the same tales you tell me?”
“I speak and speak,” Lou says, “but the listener retains only the words she is expecting. The description of the women to women you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of women who live down the hall, waiting eagerly outside my door is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by one of these women and put in irons and lace in the same room as a writer of great stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.”
“At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make women live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again.”
The Great Freud owns an atlas whose drawing depict the terrestrial woman all at once, a conglomeration of women, one on top of the other, a palimpsest, which seen from the distance, can be only one form, but up close, her contours shift through the translucence of skin. He leafs through the maps before Lou Andreas’s eyes to put her knowledge to the test. The woman recognizes Constantinople in the woman whose hair dominates a long strait, a narrow gulf, and an enclosed sea; she remembers Jerusalem for her set of two hills, of unequal height, facing each other; she has no hesitation in pointing to Samarkand and her gardens.
For other women, she falls back on descriptions handed down by word of mouth, or she guesses on the basis of scant indications: and so Granada, the streaked pearl of the caliphs; Dora, the neat, boreal port; Anna O., black with ebony and white with ivory; Paris, where millions of men come home every day grasping her wand of bread. In colored miniatures the atlas depicts inhabited women of unusual form: an oasis hidden in a fold of the desert from which only palm crests peer out is surely Katherina; coy smile amid quicksands and cows grazing in meadows salted by tided tears can only suggest Franziska; and a palace that instead of rising within a woman’s skin contains within its own skin a woman can only be Anna.
The atlas depicts women which neither Lou nor mothers know exist or where they are, though they cannot be missing among the forms of po
ssible women. For these, too, Lou says a name, no matter which, and suggests a route to reach them. It is known that names of women change as many times as there are foreign languages; and that every woman can be reached through other women, by the most various calls and snickers, by those who speak, write, sing, or remain in the most quiet silent.
“I think you recognize women better on the atlas than when you visit them in person,” the psychoanalyst says to Lou, snapping the volume shut.
And Andreas answers, “Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each woman takes to resembling all women, sex can exchange form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades my gender. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.”
The Great Freud owns an atlas in which are gathered the maps of all women: those whose feet rest of solid foundations, those which fell in ruins and were swallowed up by the sand, those that will exist one day and in whose place now only memory gapes.
Lou Salome leafs through the pages; she recognizes Elizabeth, Nefertiti, Virginia Woolf. She points to the landing at the mouth of Joan of Arc where ships waited for ten years. But thinking of the Greeks, she happened to see next the form Helen and Aphrodite, and from the mixture of those two women a third emerged, which might be called Yulia or Hilary, Sirivamo or Indira, a woman who may gain an empire of knowledge and understanding more vast than the Great Freud’s.
The atlas has these qualities: it reveals the form of the women that do not yet have a form or a name. The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its woman, new women will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of women begins. In the last pages of the atlas there is an outpouring of networks without beginning or end, women in the shape of leaders, thinkers, writers, mothers, friends, humans without shape or borders.
Women & the Dead 5
By tomorrow morning, the woman down the hall will be dead. We wish this were some kind of petty prediction, God knows we do, but this is all true. We wish it weren’t because the truth of the matter is that we love the woman down the hall. She is our favorite tenant, but the woman down the hall, she’s cursed with clairvoyance, and she’s known since she was a child. She’s known exactly when she would die.
