O IS FOR ... YOU REALLY MEAN THAT?

"All my life I have had to tell people truths that were difficult to swallow." 
 - Sigmund Freud

Freud's hair was beginning to darken as his temper was beginning to rise against Mark Twain.

I hurriedly asked, "So what letter in this Free Association are we up to anyway?"

"O", he answered curtly.

Before Mark had a chance to say something that would let me learn if one ghost could kill another, 

I said, "Opinion."

Freud scratched his chin.  "Odd.  You do not strike me as one who cares what another says of him."

"I don't except for what it tells me about them."

Mark nodded.

"When we are young we generally estimate an opinion by the size of the person that holds it, 

but later we find that it is an uncertain rule, for we realize that there are times when a hornet's opinion disturbs us more than an emperor's."

"Yeah," I laughed.  

"Anyone who sneers at the effectiveness of small opponents has never shared a bed with a mosquito."

Mark cackled,

"Ain't that the truth?  But truth is over-rated when it comes to opinions.  

I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts."

 Freud drolled, "How unsurprising."

He saw the worry on my face. 

"This antagonism is of long duration within me I fear. 

My growing resentment towards the world was no doubt intensified by the necessity of having to be kind and tolerant every day."

Mark raised an eyebrow. "You call how you've been acting as kind?"

The storm clouds gathered within Freud's eyes, and I said at a clip.  "What is that next letter, Doctor?"

N IS FOR ... NO, NOT NOOKIE!

“The weakling and the neurotic attached to his neurosis are not anxious to turn a powerful searchlight upon the dark corners of their psychology.”
 - Sigmund Freud

I was beginning to think that the ghost of Mark Twain was turning Freud's ghost permanently grey.

Freud leaned back in his chair, sighing, 

"We now will see what first occurs to you, Roland, when you hear the Letter N."

Mark leaned towards me and loudly whispered, "Say Nookie.'"

Freud shot bolt upright in his leather chair.  

"No, not Nookie, you jack daw!"

He closed his eyes and muttered to himself, 

"The weakling or the neurotic attached to his neurosis is not anxious 

 to turn such a powerful searchlight as free association upon the dark corners of his psychology.” 

Mark snorted, 

"Just because no one understands what you say doesn't mean you're a genius, Saw-Brains."

Mark winked at me.  "When we get to S, say Schlomo."

Freud flinched and Mark chuckled, 

"That's Saw-Brains' real middle name.  In fact, his true first name is ...."

I shook my head sadly, 

"Is his own affair, right?  You're too good a man to hurt another for a laugh."

Mark frowned, "You talking about the same man I used to see in the mirror?"

"New Orleans," I said quickly.  "That's what I thought of first when you said N, Doctor."

{Steamboat at New Orleans circa 1890}

 Mark chuckled, acting as if he were the subject  of the Free Association.

"I remember New Orleans well.  Beautiful city.  But the people cannot have wells, and so they take rain-water.

 Neither can they conveniently have cellars or graves, the town being built upon 'made ground'; 

so they do without both, and few of the living complain, and none of the others."

He stroked his mustache. 

 "Ah, yes, I remember that lovely cabaret singer.  I told her: 

'We can’t be lovers, my dear, because we both have mustaches. But since you’re a lady, and I’m a gentleman, I’ll shave mine off.'”

Mark gazed off into the shadows.

"It has been said that a Scotchman has not seen the world until he has seen Edinburgh;

 and I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi Gras in New Orleans."

Freud said between clenched teeth, 

"I am not interested in the least in your puerile recollections!"

He turned to me.  "What occurs to you in thinking of New Orleans?"

"Memories of its streets right after Katrina when the power went down, civilization died, and the predators came out.  

Hugging a rocking mother holding her dead child as the ambulance failed to come ... it never came."

Neither Freud or Twain had any words for that nor did I have any more myself.

M IS FOR ... NOT MOTHER!

"The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious things in life."
 - Sigmund Freud

Freud was back to white hair and beard again.  My eyes were in danger of getting whip-lash.

He sighed as if almost afraid of asking, "It is time to free associate the letter M ...."

Mark Twain cried, 
"Please don't say 'Mother!'  

The last time this Saw-Brains talked to me of 'Mother,' I almost washed out my ears with boiling pitch!"

Twain lit his cigar.  
"My own mother had a great deal of trouble with me ... but I think she enjoyed it.  

Why, I remember her telling a neighbor who was fearful for me to swim in the lake, 'A boy destined to hang has no need to fear the water'."

Freud groaned, "I have no desire to hear you free associate the letter M, Twain!"

To spare both Mark and Freud, I said, "I was going to say 'Money.'  It is Tax Day after all."

Mark grimaced, 

"By popular custom at this time of year, millions of United States citizens pause only long enough from biting pencil stubs and fingernails to curse this day."

Freud shrugged, "Money is but emotional currency."

Mark gruffed, "Tell that to the pilgrim that can't pay the rent ... or his taxes."

He ground out his cigar.  
"I shall never use profanity except in discussing house rent and taxes. 

Indeed, upon second thought, I will not even use it then, for it is unchristian, inelegant, and degrading--

though to speak truly I do not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a cent without it."

Feud nodded,
"The lack of money surely aggravates the flaws of society. Who knows what enough money might make of a man?"

I quoted Ophelia from Hamlet. '"We know what we are but not what we may be.'"

 Mark groused, 
"Roland, sometimes you make my brain hurt."

I quoted Emily Dickinson, "The brain is wider than the sky."

Freud studied me. 
"We are so made, that we can only derive intense enjoyment from a contrast and only very little from a state of things."

Mark Twain said, "Suddenly, I am very afraid.  I think I understood that." 

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L IS FOR FRIENDHIP?

“Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.”
 - Sigmund Freud

Freud looked troubled at me.  "We have reached L -- what comes to mind at that?"

"Lord of the Rings," I said.

Freud groaned in disappointment.  "A mere entertainment of the cinema?"

"No, it was more than merely a movie" I said.  

"The three movies are a moving testimony to the saving grace of true friendship."

"Bah! Friendship, as I define it, plays a key role between individuals to the extent 

that it appears as a metaphor for those relationships between two people that, unlike the state of romantic love, lead to a broader form of unity."

Mark Twain wrinkled his face as if
 he had bitten into a lemon as Freud when on.  

"In this sense, I connect it with these other ties that are based on the aim-inhibited sexual impulses: 

the tender relationship between parent and child, and conjugal love in which the sexual relationship has gradually fallen into second place."

Freud played with his unlit cigar.  

"These two bonds form the basis for the broader unity that is constituted by the family, 

just as friendship is the foundation for the creation of social ties."

Mark Twain snorted, 

"All that fancy talk gave my brain the whim-wams! 

When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that murmur along the corridors of memory, 

and do it without knowing why, save that we love to do it,

 we prove that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy--

that it is built upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them."

Freud said, "You are a sentimentalist.  I am a scientist." 

"And a mighty cold-blooded one, Coke Head.  

The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right."

Mark lit a cigar and blew the smoke into the granite face of Freud. 

 "Why, the holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime ... 

if not asked to lend money."

K IS FOR MISUNDERSTANING?

“We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.”
- Rudyard Kipling

As soon as Jung left, Freud returned.

"Finally that misguided zealot who wished me dead is gone.  Sad case.  Sad case."

I shook my head in sadness. 
  
At the beginning, he had been close to Jung but when Jung disagreed with him, Freud would faint.

 Once after interpreting a comment to mean Jung wanted to kill him, Freud fainted. 

He then fainted again when Jung continued to disagree on the diagnosis. 

Freud admitted that fainting was a defense mechanism for unconscious anxiety.

Freud interrupted my reflections,

"Jung's homosexual tendencies got the better of him I am afraid."

I sighed. We tend to think of theory development as emerging out of an objective, scientific attitude. 

Wrong. 

 All theory is autobiography. 

 The person the theorist really wants to understand, more than anyone, is himself.

 The subjective can never be elbowed aside. It hovers inescapably, like an off-stage voice, whispering, whispering, whispering...

Twain looked at Freud, his arsenic grey eyes suddenly sad.

Freud turned to me.  "So at last we come to the letter K.  What do you think of upon hearing that letter?"

"Kipling," I cried.

Freud frowned, then his eyes fell on the young ghost who sat beside Mark Twain, and Kipling cocked his head at the psychiatrist.

“We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.” 

Freud stared at him uncomprehending, and Kipling sighed, "You really do not see it, do you?" 

"See what?" snapped Freud.

Kipling rose, shaking his head.  
"I sat down hoping to leave with laughter,  But alas, I see it is not to be."

He gripped my shoulder.
“The world is very lovely, and it's very horrible--and it doesn't care about your life or mine or anything else.  

But, Roland, remember -- no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

He gave one last look of sadness to Freud and walked into the engulfing shadows. 

J IS FOR ... EXCUSE ME, I MUST BE LEAVING.

*

Without playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to birth.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.
-C.G. Jung

Meilori's was much wider, higher, and deeper than seemed possible from how it looked on the outside.

Inside the haunted jazz club, I could see no walls, much less any torches that hung from them.


Only an endless array of tables whose candles pushed back the darkness only a little.

In this dark cavern of a saloon,

things vast, blind, and monstrous took shape in the bronze-hued mists that billowed all through the place.

They lumbered without notice of me. They became almost solid, fuzzed, then drifted apart only to re-form feet from where they had been.

I sat at my table and tried to make sense of Dr. Freud's sudden departure.  What had that been all about?

A dance macabre formed in the mists to my far left.

Up high and almost lost in the billowing fog, sprites of dark ice spun on one leg, twirling slowly, their angular faces lost in some delirium of madness. They began to sing.

It was an invocation.

Abysses loathsome and endless yawned hungrily in the mists before me. I caught flashes, glimpses of alien voids and unholy dimensions beyond all human experience.

"May I sit down, young man?" said a deep voice.

I looked up. Carl Jung.  His ghost actually.  And Freud's sudden departure made sense.  The two of them had started out friends and ended up enemies.

"Of course, sir."

He smiled and sat down opposite me. "I wrote about the need for finding and living our myth, our story."

He sighed,
"As I grew older, I wrote my most important works and found my own unique ways to play."

He peered deep into my eyes.
"Young man, we need new stories that weave playfulness, gratitude, and compassion for self and others. Re-writing your myth or story can help you understand more fully your core values."

He smiled sadly.
"Your story reflects your uniqueness and the many gifts you have to offer others. You might ask your computer friends:


 If they fully expressed their values, how would others see them? Would it change their life in some way?"


Jung gazed into the bronze mists and murmured, "I had sick bed images, terrible and beautiful both at once."

His chin sunk to his chest,
"I felt as though I were floating in space, as though I were safe in the womb of the universe---in a tremendous void, but filled with the highest possible feeling of happiness.

Everything around me seemed enchanted.... Night after night I floated in a state of purest bliss, thronged round with images of all creation."

The ghost of Mark Twain in the seat beside me laughed,

"I had me some of those same dreams, there, Young. But soon as I gave up radishes, they cleared out."

Jung glared at Mark.
"Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart not your stomach. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

Mark smiled crooked,
"Wasn't you the pilgrim who said everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”

Jung's scowl could have curdled vinegar.

"I also said I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become. Must you be a jack daw, Clemens?”

Mark Twain smiled wide,
"You spout on about the secrets of life. I will tell you the Secret to Life:


 “Life is short, Break the Rules. Forgive quickly, Kiss SLOWLY.

Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably. And never regret ANYTHING that makes you smile.”


Jung huffed, “The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases.”

Twain snorted, "Maybe. Maybe not. When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”

Jung rumbled,
"The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong. It is clear your mind has become mired in nonsense.”

Twain chuckled, "T'weren't you the gent who said:

'As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.'”

Jung shook his head,
“It all depends on how we look at things, and not on how things are in themselves. The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.”

Mark looked at me. "Suddenly, son, I'm afraid. I actually understood that.
 ***

What would say is your own personal myth? 

Are your core values reflected in what you write?

  In the last thing you wrote what would a stranger say are your core values, what you hold to be true about life?

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I IS FOR ... ME?

“Where does a thought go when it is forgotten?” 
- Sigmund Freud

Freud suddenly wore glasses and looked slightly sad.  "We have reached the letter I, Roland.  Quickly, what occurs to you?"

"Me."

He sighed, "I cannot believe I am about to say this, but I wish you would be more like Lewis and less like Twain."

"Doctor, I mean it.  You say "I" and I think of Me as in the 'Me Generation'."

He took off his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose.  

"Young Man, it has always been the 'Me Generation.'"

"But not like now.  

It is now possible to hire, yes, hire your own private paparazzi to follow you around, taking photographs of you wherever you go one night.  

You even get a faux celebrity magazine with you on the cover and more pictures of you on the inside."

Freud slowly shook his head.  "What starved, stunted personalities they must be."

I nodded.

 "Worse, high school students beat a detested classmate to pulp and then post video's of the beating on YouTube."

"You Tube?"

"A worldwide video access for the bored."

"You are saying there is a relentless rise in narcissism in your culture?"

Mark Twain slid into the chair beside me.  

"Tell the old coot of that Kim Kardashian gal pasting pictures of her naked self for the all world to see ... with nary a pasty to be seen."

Freud gave Twain a look that should have left welts, and then turned to me. 

 "It would appear that you are living in changing times, an era of a poorly studied morality shift ... much like I did in Nazi-dominated Vienna."

"What do you suggest I do, Doctor?"

"Be unlike my four sisters ... survive."

I sighed, "Well, this brings us to J."

Freud looked past my shoulder.  "Excuse me.  I must be leaving."

Mark looked in the same direction and wryly smiled, "Of course he does."