“Okay, now I angry dog. Where a snake looks? Look my eyes. His will in him eyes. Okay, I punch your face. Punching your face! No, no, okay, better, good. Vai! Loose hip. Don’t previewing, take what he offering you. Okay. Slip and turn, hooks in. Espalha frango, break him down. Surf. How you don’t surf?”
— J.D. Daniels in The Correspondences, Jonathan Cape, London, 2017, p. 14
I was busy throwing a flat-blade screwdriver at the wall to see how many times its sharp end would stick, keeping score in two columns on a yellow legal pad, when Edgar walked past and saw me in the window and stepped in, dragging a small white dog on a leash.
…
“You can’t bring that animal in here. It smells like a skunk shitting bleach.”
…
A siren whined down the street. Edgar’s forlorn little dog began to grunt and snuffle. It was trying to howl, but you can’t eat scraps under the table for seven years, or forty-nine dog years, and then one day up and decide to let out a howl. All it could manage was a kind of chewy sneeze.
I’d been expecting Edgar: he had e-mailed me a poem he’d written, all eight-six pages of it. No matter what lazy fun you might be having on a Saturday night–maybe you are performing your assigned exercises, muttering, “I accept myself, I accept myself,” gritting your teeth until you worry they will crack; or maybe you are watching a television show in which a researcher injects himself with gonadotropic hormones, followed by an interview with a med-school dropout who claims to have transplanted a monkey’s head onto another monkey’s body–while you fritter away your precious life in trifles, you can rest easy, knowing that Edgar manfully craps out sodden lumps of poetry, shaking his bathroom with the thunder of his spirit.
— Ibid., pp. 86-87
“The Group Relations Conference,” says the Web site of the A. K. Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems, “is an intensive participatory process that provides participants the opportunity to study their own behavior as it happens in real time without the distractions of everyday social niceties and workplace pressures and protocols.”
And they have to say something corporate-klutzy-jargony like that, don’t they, because if they were to come right out and say, “You are cordially invited to have your individual ego reduced to molten slag in the hell-furnace of our collective unconscious,” no one would sign up.
What does such a conference reveal, if not the something else that is not the people at the meeting: the something that is not “me,” but conspires to act through “me,” then disowns me and claims, in a bizarre act of half-justice, that I am to be held responsible for both its actions and my own own.
–The good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do.
–Really? Whose unconscious is it, anyway?
–Maybe the answer to that question is more complex than it appears.
…
Thirty-six psychiatrists, chaplains, social workers, counselors, nurses, and others in the caring professions had been sent by their respective employers to investigate authority and institutional life by improvising an institution and analyzing it, if they could–or, as things turned out, by failing to improvise such an institution, and by failing to analyze that failure.
Thirty-six white-collar professionals, and one writer, devoted to following his frequent errors wherever they might lead him.
Many people hate writers. As the judge snarled at Brodsky, “Who has recognized you as a poet? Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets?” It’s true that something has gone wrong in a family or a group that gives birth to a writer, a person whose role is to escape and tell the tale. But the hatred at the conference had a particular flavor.
…
Our regression was swift. It is incorrect to use the word “I” when describing mass-hysterical events. My feelings were not special or unique. They were not even mine.
…
“I don’t have an image for this conference,” Tommy said.
“What does that mean?” said Vicki.
“I don’t know your names. Tell me your names,” said Tommy.
“I know your name,” said Eric. “I know everyone’s name.”
“We told each other our names yesterday,” Vicki said.
“Maybe the name is not the name,” said our consultant.
We went around the small group and said our names again. Tommy, Samantha, Vicki, Jennifer, Martin, Eric, Renata, Frederico, and Tina.
“My name is Ronald,” I said.
“Hello, Ronald,” said Tommy. “I am Tommy. Pleased to meet you.”
“His name is not Ronald,” Vicki said.
“That’s enough about the names for now,” I said. “Five minutes before this meeting, I threw up my breakfast into the sink in my room. Isn’t anyone else here as nervous as I am?”
“Why did you choose to throw up alone in your room?” said our consultant. “Don’t you feel you can throw up here in our group?”
“I threw up scrambled eggs and two cups of coffee mixed with the juices of my stomach. Not metaphorical undigested emotions. Yellow-and-brown vomit.”
“Thanks for the image,” said Vicki.
“I know I talk a lot,” said Tommy. “I take up too much space in our small group. I wish someone would tell me to shut up.”
“Okay. Shut up,” said Samantha.
“Shut up,” said Tina.
“Shut up, Tommy,” said Eric.
“Please shut up,” said Vicki.
“How can you speak to me like this?” Tommy said.
…
Back to the large group.
…
“The group appears to be attempting to ignore and deny its aggression,” said the conference director.
“I’m aware of the group’s aggressive feelings,” I said. “For example, I would like to kill you.”
— Ibid., pp. 110-117
