David Wallace - Broom of the System

RICK: I think I’d prefer to be the drooling simian, thank you very much. JAY: And why is that?

RICK: I’ll bet you can puzzle it out.

JAY: It has to do with Lenore.

Rick Vigorous pauses.

JAY: Rick, I put a vital question to you in the gentlest and most diplomatic terms possible. Do you think you are truly what Lenore Beadsman wants? What she really needs?

RICK: We love each other.

JAY: You didn’t answer my question. We both know that Lenore is a wonderful but not insignificantly troubled girl. Are you helping her? Are you concerned with her needs? Are you engaged in the sort of discriminating, mature love that focuses primary attention on the needs and interests of the beloved?

RICK: I definitely don’t think Lang is what she needs.

JAY: Who said Lang is what Lenore needs? It’s you we’re discussing, here.

RICK: I think I’d rather discuss Lenore.

JAY: And the issues are separate, aren’t they? And recognized as such. Discussing Lenore is different from discussing you.

RICK: There’s something wrong with that?

JAY: I didn’t say that, Rick. I was simply making an observation. You and Lenore are distinct. Your networks may overlap, but they are distinct. They are neither identical nor coextensive. They are distinct. RICK: What about my dream? Now I’m both afraid to go to the bathroom and afraid to go to sleep. There’s not too much left.

JAY: I personally think the dream is far too complicated to tackle in the short time remaining to us today. For what it’s worth to you, I believe it represents a gigantic foot in the door of breakthrough. I might make a few off-the-cuff observations, if you wish. Shall I?

RICK: (uninteUigible).

JAY: The dream strikes me as being simply chock full of networks. Inside-Outside relations. Inside is the office, outside is the shadow and the little girl, both threatening to enter, to suck you in. Lenore is inside the page, inside the drawing Lang creates with his bottle, but she transcends her context and comes quickly to emblazon her context on his outside. You are trapped behind, inside, the fan of urine, but the tea bag you use to try to cover your difference from the Other “bleeds out” into the hot liquid and stains, discolors, soils the already unclean out-of-contro! extension of Self that imprisons you. A tea bag in hot liquid strikes this psychologist as a perfect archetypal image for the disorienting and disrupting influence of a weak-membraned hygiene-identity network on the associations of distinct networks in relation to which it does, must, understand itself. So on and so on. Airless scream: air cannot get inside your lungs. Lenore “drowning”: clean air in lungs displaced by the exponentially soiled element of soiling tea in soiling Self-extending liquid. Lang holds Lenore under the stained surface with his anus, the absolute archetypal locus of the unclean. There are of course the seemingly ever-present mice, in the putrid currents. Mice we’ve discussed at length already…

RICK: OK, that’s enough. I might have known that—

JAY: But, see, it’s not at all surprisingly Lenore who really fascinates me, in the context of the dream. Your unconscious conceiving of Lenore as somehow “rising off a page.” The Lang drawing serving to place Lenore initially in the network he constructs, making her two-dimensional, non-real, existing and defined wholly within the border of a page, a page on the reverse of which is a story, a network very definitely of your construction, so that—

RICK: A story Lenore went out of her way to scoff at, at lunch, by the way.

JAY: I’m not equipped to discuss that; that’s not my area. My area is the fact that Lang constructs a Lenore, constructs her the way we each of course construct, impose our frameworks of perception and understanding on, the persons who inhabit our individual networks. Yes, Lang constructs a Lenore, and initially she is trapped and two-dimensional and unreal…. Ah, but then he puts marks, initials, his initials, on her, in her. Penetrates her carefully constructed network with his Self, his self, of which the initials are an elegantly transparent symbol and flag. So Lang in the dream is able to bring himself within the very Lenore-membrane he has constructed. He puts himself in her. And what happens, Rick?

RICK: Jesus.

JAY: What happens, my friend?

Rick Vigorous pauses.

JAY: Oh, she becomes real, Rick. She becomes free. She bursts out from behind the membrane of two-dimensionality the page represents and becomes real. Hair, hands, breasts, feet tumesce and burst up and out from the flattening, constricting network of membrane. She rises and circles the room. Was this circling a walking circling, Rick, or a floating circling?

RICK: It wasn’t clear.

JAY: Well, no matter. She escapes, Rick. She is free, real. That is to say, she is no longer merely inside a network, she is a network. Reality and identity rear their Siamese heads at the junction of Network. And what is the newly three-dimensional Lenore doing? She is signing the Other, putting herself on, in, the Other who set her free through membrane-permeation. She puts herself inside a network.

RICK: Lang’s network.

JAY: The network that set her free, Rick. The network that made her real. Only as real is she able to bring herself truly inside an Other. A clean thing is necessarily a reciprocal thing, Rick. Lenore kneels, with overtones perhaps not so much sexual as they are religious, I think, and puts herself on, in. She is valid, Rick. You are watching Lang and Lenore give birth to validity.

RICK: But where am I in all this? Am I chopped liver in the validity-scheme?

JAY: You are watching, Rick. You are the watcher, the observer, looking on from a spatial-dash-emotional elsewhere. You are intrinsically Outside, here. You cannot enter the networks. Why not?

RICK: Jesus.

JAY: And what is the last recourse of an inefficacious hygiene network unable validly to interact with the networks of the Other-set? You soil, Rick. You soil. You enter the networks by dirtying. The childish loss of bladder control, the fan, the swirling currents. The uncleanness made all the more unclean by the introduction of the contents of the tea bag, the shield and symbol within the dream of the locus of your difference and inability validly to enter, its introduction into the hot unclean liquid that represents your only interaction-vehicle. From Outside, you can influence only by soiling, dirtying, disrupting the hygiene networks of those who are valid.

RICK: You’re being cruel, Jay. Go back to blatant bullshit. I vastly prefer blatant bullshit to overt cruelty.

JAY: You know, Olaf Blentner once said to me, over tea, that when reality is unpleasant, realists tend to be unpopular. Rick, as a last resort you try to soil. You try to drown and negate the valid Lenore by dirtying. But it does not work. It cannot. Even from below the currents of your filth and difference, Lenore’s hand, with the violet pen, emerges to carry on the valid membrane-interaction. You are truly Outside, here, Rick. You cannot meaningfully influence. The only recourse of the defective hygiene network is the unclean, and it is impotent in the face of the real, the true.

RICK: Lenore has spoken to you of Lang, hasn’t she?

JAY: Rick, you and your dreaming unconscious have spoken to me of Lang far more eloquently than poor Lenore ever did, or even could. You have, I think, truly perceived a valid need in an Other. You are. striding, in my opinion.

Rick Vigorous pauses.

JAY: And why are you and Lang naked in the dream, Rick? Why is the validating pen in the shape of a beer bottle, with all of that image’s attendant phallic and urological overtones?