REVISING THE PHARMACIST AND ITS IMAGINARY TWIN: A
STRANGE CARTOGRAPHY AND AN INTENTIONAL AGENT IN
THE PROCESS OF BEING DISTINGUISHED, AGAIN
Chapter Two:
A Boat on the Shore, the Trimethy: for J. Robert Oppenheimer
A little bit about epilepsy, as the analyses were carried out by flame atomic absorption
spectrometry (Los Alamos, near Los Pinos, once Site Y and then—a critical mass)
Oppenheimer’s daughter, Toni, unable to obtain security clearance in order to become a translator
for the UN—though fluent in German, Spanish, French, and Greek, as her father was—
An Introduction to Neuropsychology, the first textbook that publicized & problematized the aims of the
new discipline (a liar is a person who is lying), as well as Jack Spector’s The Aesthetics of Freud, the first
scholarly monograph to ground Freudian analysis in the category of the aesthetic rather than the
psychological (who tends to lie by nature repeatedly), and the start of a burgeoning movement in clinical
psychiatry and psychotherapy to discredit psychoanalysis as the dominant methodology in American
analytic psychology (disguise or forgeries), later accelerated in the same year by H. J. Eysenck’s The
Experimental Study of Freudian Theories, which attempted to discredit experimental cognitive procedures
claimed by many to support Freudian dynamics (Hobbes, in Leviathan: “in war, force and fraud are the two
cardinal virtues”).
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NO IMMEDIACY undone (we scatter our
benefits at random rather than bestow them
Seneca) Your very sweet daughter
PAGE HAS BEEN DELETED
‘Again I hear voices, I sort of lost
touch with reality. Humming in my ears
and a small feeling like a warning’ . . . posterior temporal lobe again stimulated . . .
‘Voices, the same as before. I was just
losing touch with reality again.’ When
asked, he replied that he could not
understand what the voices were saying.
They sounded ‘hazy.’6—Julian Jaynes, On
the Origins of Consciousness in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
HANGED HERSELF on the island of St. John, Toni (after Tess of the D’Urbervilles and not
Bess Truman; Alice again, a warning: Mother walks in and tells her daughter that she is finally
old enough to join the grown-ups at tea time)
In similar pictures, the trees and rivers are all reflections a dead-serious child whose father
Eadweard Muybridge changed his first name on plinth put the horses in motion IN PALO ALTO
he had a train stop created near his school
IN PALO Leland Stanford American Tycoon
IN PALO Stanford Nuclear Age
PALLAS ATHENA, wisdom strength strategy Zeus lay with Metis
He was too late pealed the broad sky / her clarion call
From headache born PUT HER AWAY IN HER OWN BELLY
6
“It’s real. It’s mythic. It’s wild. It’s a vernacular. It’s didactic. It’s boredom. It’s ceaseless. It’s a
delusional space.”—Lisa Robertson, “The Weather: A Report on Sincerity”
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Two of them at Knossos ‘A city on a hill cannot be hidden’
Theseus rid them of thine Minotaur
Oppenheimer, meanwhile, was himself becoming highly security conscious
Make a juxtaposition of this text and present moment—change warning to warring, change hazy
to lazy7
“Although the hearings were conducted in private, they were not secret TONI off the
record some level of skepticism adolescence”—official report of the Warren Commission
the struggle to agency (CIA + becoming the writing), the subsuming to the Oswaldian (a haze in
Dallas was the assassin, with the HSCA allowing for the probability of conspiracy) quick turn to
Sylvia Plath same year, “Lady Lazarus” (to rise and route again) shifts to Lazy Lazarus—a
daughter can't recover (information) to rise (inform) again (ongean, lining up and facing in
opposition)
‘One year in every ten I manage it—’
shoot again with a second (the caesium atom at rest) shot, a magic Baduism
In fission weapons, a mass of fissile material
7
“Reading, like voices after the phonograph, is mediated in platform-specific, materially-dependent
ways.”—Tan Lin
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Andre Malraux’s father committed suicide. He had Tourette’s Syndrome as a child: the
mispronunciation is banned from the kingdom; the prince is sick, slick with language.
(I made this up, again)
TONI A LOVE OF LANGUAGE GAMES Malraux, dear reader: ‘Man is dead,
after God.’ After God, Einstein and Oppenheimer roll dice—it is a kind of infinity mixed with
infinity
Andre Malraux meet Ludwig Wittgenstein:
You broke your wife’s heart being stupid can you get her back?
yes, anything is possible
Maurice Chevaliar met Oppenheimer in the Spring of 1937 as to character, they drove to meet
Malraux for dinner in December 1953
At the Met / At MOMA / At the New School for
Social Research
MY IMMEDIATE
HANNAH in New York “On Stuyvesant Square during a Blizzard”
Snow had buried Stuyvesant / The subways drummed the vaults
Robert Lowell
Icarus fell into the sea / Daedalus another father invents the sails
Malraux, it is worth noting, never claimed at any time in his life to have piloted an aircraft.
“Art is an object lesson for the gods.”—Malraux, The Voices of Silence
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Motown-born, opened first record store
In 1963 we, in 1963 we—before we failed to sign the open protest record begin, again—
Malraux, then the Marvelettes,
Malraux, a marvel, a wonderful story (fr. mirari, “to wonder [at]”)
Malraux, and then marvel (again) underwent a strange transformation in English, an accident of
attestation, “it is a marvel to me” originally inferring something of a sense of being ‘struck’—“to
marvel” then as “to be struck by the suffering that is existence” in Sir Firumbras
Firumbras, a fire.
fr. the french, Roland chides the Pope for fighting
The potential danger to humanity arising from scientific discoveries
(I made this up again) (again)
Oswald is a mind on fire, the scientist
Oppenheimer at Cambridge with a poisoned apple
ongean
When lo! a harlot form soft sliding by Alexander Pope
The Dunciad was intended as a response to get back at detractors A prophecy to
Pallas Athene TONI BORN Tegea, a city in Homer’s Catalogue of Ships /
temenos, horse and deer; there are sealstones and fibulae A woman’s work the
curse a woman’s work
“The Hunter Gets Captured by the Game,” 1963
“Everyday things change
And the world puts on a new face
Certain things rearrange
And this whole world seems like a new place
Oh yeah, secretly I've been trailin’ you
Like a fox that prays on the rabbit
I had to get you and so I knew
I had to learn your ways and your habits. . . .”
[fr. the Aeolic sios = god + boule = advice]
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The sibylline wanders from place to place / three hobos at the fence behind the
GRASSY KNOLL
MY IMMEDIATE
If the history of psychoanalytic theory is the ebb and flow of latent and manifest, then the
symptom grounds their play. A symptom is always already an indicator for something else: Freud
terms it a ‘sign and a surrogate’—though the cultural context it has come to represent in the
twentieth century is more of an elaborate explanation for why and how it is the trace of
something whose cause is neither visible nor fully determinate ‘Frenzied women from whose
lips/the god speaks’ Walter Burkett. It is the center point of that pull between latent and
manifest—as Jacques Derrida would define it, the central moment of that play Thebes, a thief, to
THIEFTH ‘Thorow’ the sound Susan Howe. The symptom presents itself—
The symptom represents itself as and through only our consideration of the symptom—it
extends as a phantom limb to our own egos, a non-natural appendage that becomes so much a part
of ourselves that we doubt the validity of its non-existence.
Oswald’s twin in Mexico City, a Cuban Hallucinations Renaldo Arenas
Begin; to begin (and then, to twin): the registers of Lacanian psychoanalysis take as their
point of departure from Freud an emphasis on the faux-linguistic (and its strange intentionalities |
the desire of fauxity to deliberately imitate, to look the pearl, to be touched as if fur—a mimetic
cooperation, this lingua) structuring of the unconscious, a finder’s myth of ego recognition
already reliant on alienation and the surface virtues of utility.
Chapter Three: From Alice to Opje: Robert was beginning a new life (benefactress within the
form of language)
The mirror, my friends formative of the function of the I—as if the letters could even be cut off
before we might spell out IMAGINARY. Strangely, we’re in labor, a formation, again before
we—
Begin with a metonymic line: the discretionary demarcation between Marxist theory and Marxian
interpretation mirrors the distinction between labor-based and social capital. Theorists exploring
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the relation between associational life and democracy were using similar concepts regularly by
the nineteenth century that everyday intersubjectivity, drawing on the work of earlier writers such
as James Madison (The Federalist Papers) and Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America)8
in order to integrate concepts of social cohesion and connectedness into the pluralist tradition—
struggling to cope with issues surrounding her sexual orientation
Toni is vellum—of the skin and the type of animal used—
an American politics. John Dewey may have made the first direct mainstream use of “social
capital” in The School and Society in 1899, though he did not offer a definition, preferring instead
to—
Begin; to begin (and now, a twin): the rhetorical Imaginary, or the rhetorical imaginary, as it is
most often addressed in criticisms of Gadamer’s Truth and Method and the strange rejoinder
made therein toward the Platonic dialogue: this is not American politics, but Western essentialism
in liquid shares, replaced by the notion of rhetorical performance as a particular sort of humanist
position, a strange bale for our consideration of interdisciplinarity; or better (try, twin again) our
account for the (un)predictability of affect in our articulations. We restage the dialogue as a jest
between its interlocutors, a circle of knowledgeable priests in the church of idiom, ideational
mimicry.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, I’m writing a dirge for you.
Where do I begin? A little about you, a little about me. The dirge is a grandiloquent lyric, sadly: a
lofty song of strong sentiment, vaguely moralizing, offered not as psalm, as it is less a range or
testament of faith than repose to the soul of a deceased. “Dirge” is derived from the Latin Dirige,
Domine, Deus meus, in conspectu tuo viam meam (“Direct my way in your sight, O Lord my
God”), the first words of the antiphon in the Matins—the Office for the Dead.
And I’m not—neither one of us—I’m not—Hiroshima—dead.
TONI at the Texas School Book Depository
a million bureaucrats are diligently plotting death and some of them even know it
Thomas Pynchon
8
Kallipolis, son of Pelops; our ideal city Plato
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Write about the Phoebus Cartel in Gravity’s Rainbow. Maybe there will be time for an end of the
summer society tea, in which only certain sections of great tomes are targeted, creating a sort of
unwieldy collage of vision, depending on which self Dialektik de Monstrums is invested in
wholeness.
Aby Warburg to TONI a cabinet of curiosities already famous for their
snake dance Mark Dion will adjudicate, Mark Dion will, Mark TONI
left Levinas came to regret his enthusiasm for Heidegger my words
If the effects of the quantum mechanical nuclear motion are to be studied, for instance
because a vibrational spectrum is required THE FIELD OF ENERGY a multimedia collage
Mark Lombardi (twinning, again: we’ve now begun) was found hanging from a low-beamed
rafter in his Williamsburg apartment on 22 March 2000, just weeks after a series of strains. Here,
it may be worth noting, I keep inadvertently typing “serious”—the slip in Freud’s account is
caught up in a web of parapraxis, or misperformance (Fehlleistungen, in the German; parapraxes
in the Greek, “another action”), but I’m not so sure that my intentions in considering the weight
of pressure on Lombardi’s psychic constitution could be considered repressed. The
misperformance must be in another realm, in language again, as in the Imaginary when I turn
away from the lyric: the attempt to recreate one of his best-received pieces, BCCI-ICIC & FAB,
1972-91 (destroyed by water) coupled with the recent destruction of his car by a taxi in Red
Hook,9 had led Lombardi to comment to one of his friends that he was being followed around the
city,10 in the weeks prior to his death.
In Othello, Desdemona in bed asleep: OTHELLO: “She was false as water.”
Cancer, the crab, shellmonger, is the sign that governed the night sky when Lombardi was born,
in June 1951. Not the water-bearer, but a feminine, negative (introverted) symbolism: in the
Twelve Labors of Hercules, as Hercules fought the multi-headed Hydra, Hera, who found
9
In a handwaving manner the nuclear potential is an averaged electron–nuclear attraction
10
Although the article still collects many citations each year, it is safe to say that it is not read anymore
(except perhaps by historians of science).
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Hercules distasteful, sent Cancer, the crab, to distract him. Hercules then crushed the crab with
his foot and Hera sent its skeleton to the sky. Dante in the Paradiso | |
“Then a light among them brightened,
So that, if Cancer had one such crystal had,
Winter would have a month of one sole day.”
Melancholy and paranoia occasionally twin in two, at times, conjoined histories.
Paranoia, with its etymological performance of “other mind,” accounts for
Orestes’ state after Clytemnestra was murdered Hannah heard Clairvoyance as a schizophrenic
symptom, for Weiner, could be the means through which she uses personal symbolism to express
her distress
The fruit in the background was brought over from Tortola once a week
by a woman I called the Tortola Lady
TONI write a letter to HANNAH and OSWALD: the lightly dressed, quick-footed Virgin
serves as an illustration of the virulent discussion around 1900 concerning the liberation of
female clothing from the standards of propriety imposed by a reactionary bourgeoisie NOW
SHOOT
shot an epistle building many others in great haste
In a letter to Wilhelm Fleiss dated 9 July 1898, Freud expresses his admiration and debt to
Theodor Lipps, ultimately addressing the latter’s handing of the transition from neo-Kantian
aesthetic considerations of beauty to a model of social process. Perhaps the most interested
assessment of empathy, then, in this early history is the relationship between Freud and Lipps—in
which Freud turns to the imaginary in order to model ideas off of Lipps’s own idiosyncratic readdress of Einfühlung and through the process of this appropriation, shifts the focus of empathy
from a visual construction grounded in facial mimicry to the dynamic of psychoanalytic
interpretation, inserting it as a sort of mirror integral for both transference and projection the
radiance of a thousand suns Oppenheimer.
“In using the expression ‘paranoid style’ I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term
for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present
as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little
contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds.
It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon
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significant.” Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s Magazine,
November 1964
The Fast focuses on Weiner watching butterflies fly out of her calf as water causes the
color of her leg to change Here TONI begins school a shy quiet girl ALIVE a shy quiet girl A LIE
This section serves as a mirror to THE EMPATH—like that section, it is written as a
bifurcated narrative (Otto Rank analyzes Anaïs Nin here and now central to his practice) in
which the top half of the page serves as a space for the fictionalization of a real-life figure in the
psychotherapeutic literature and the bottom half contains the theory that this character will use in
order to create new work (to own) in the vein of his modeled image (i.e. in THE EMPATH, I use
Mark Lombardi as a muse for a figure the neurotic lives too much in the past I can both analyze
from the depressive position and to whom I can attribute a series Alice is alive, a photograph that
belies)
even Oedipus’s love for Jocasta (the paranoid subject maintains ideas of reference—the
belief that events were contrived just for her). As far as classical analysis was concerned, Rank
was dead. Like cancer, it also fails to bear water; it is a tradition, long heralded in Stoic
philosophy, to privilege etymologies like paranoia, etymological knowledge breaks and contains
itself in waves of usage
Essentially, he’s reading Schopenhauer, Bergson, and Malebranche and arriving at a place
he calls the terminal system: the limit and summit of metaphysics, and this system becomes
something he’s interested in contradicting: he’s trying to find the thing that can encompass
everything and through this, somehow, exceed. Excess as preservation wants to cling to it.
Systems theory as a cultural paradigm.
TONI goes on to St. John parks and recreation
Hollis Frampton heart breaks
He goes on in the essay to mention, among other concerns: dreamwork, Mount Fujiyama,
Euclidean postulates, Louisiana laws, Duchamp, Buckminster Fuller, Stan Brakhage’s
theorem, ancient Hindu algebra, the films of Belson, Conrad, and Kubelka, Beckett’s
Malone, various Greek tragedies, The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales, mathematical
equations representing Gertrude Stein, Rudyard Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, and Henry
26
James, the storyteller, the abstract sphere, Arabian quadrants, and Heinrich Heinz. In no
way, I should add, is the essay—
If the world is an archive of what has already gone TONI these poems are imparted as
the echoed voice of mid-seventies feminist elegy for the female mystic with a scientific mind who
finds the cause of failure
part of the belief that he stammered only in adult company and was free and fluent with children,
but there is no evidence to support this idea.
I feel like I have a little more control over this section (rarefied to Benzene, without it only the
lightest molecule) but with the caveat that I find it tremendously difficult to work with an outline
for pieces of writing where (she worked until her death, particularly in Great Britain) the
relationship between form and content becomes—essentially—part of the larger meaning,
The Born-Oppenheimer Approximation a loose footing wouldn’t you say makes the
dancer the procedure of preparatory action
a feeling of becoming that is always synonymous with a weakening or renunciation of the self.
Mark Lombardi died after only his second major show, several months before the traveling solo
exhibition—then retrospective—Global Networks first opened in New York.
The top of the page narrative here is a sort of experimental fiction writing—staged in a
series of letters—that uses the figure of Mark Lombardi as a muse. THE EMPATH is, essentially,
another composite or alias figure who is consumed by diagramming or articulating social capital
(rather than that other sort in terms of internal and external nuclear coordinates) in terms that
ultimately end up expressed in THE PHARMACIST (all emotional life is grounded in the
present). This is a way to explore the work of Lombardi in a critical, metaphorically-engaged
means of art historical practice and then complicate with explicitness I’d like to bring out and
address Verdrängung (repression), which laid stress on unconscious repression of the past in
THE PHARMACIST section. So, in this sense, THE EMPATH is writing letters to himself as a
record as he commits to these unravelings—Dear TONI Dear HANNAH Dear Alice Dear Oswald
27
inherent fear of the conspiracy that would take him down, part of which is the result of a
connecting narrative of primary narcissism and part of which seems prime how to unlearn is vital
to an overstimulated hallucination introducing the opaque visual to rapid intellectualization. I
might draw some of my own diagrams exploring the ideas of THE PHARMACIST and then have
THE EMPATH as a figure to assess / intuit them. Read some of Hans Haacke’s artist’s
statements from the late 1960s and early ’70s on a microcosmic level, however, the life-long
oscillation between the two poles of fear can be made more bearable, according to Rank as a way
of assessing what Lombardi might have been like through a more rarified lens (there are reasons
for this, grounded in Haacke’s language of indeterminate performance, threading, forcing the
spectator to witness connection through time) Dear TONI again ongean I want to meet you / He
broke his wife’s heart being stupid A specter is haunting Can you forgive him?
overthwart / crooked as the werk of a wommans calle
To begin before, she begins by superimposing the clairvoyant imaging of her ‘inner’ experience,
which we’ve previously approached as non-objective and incapable of true interpretation, onto
her experience of external reality solutions for living emerge out of fluctuating. This visual
dictation, or the receipt of image from a source outside of an individual’s explicitly known
imaginative capacity, blurs the distinction between an inner and outer reality, or at least creates a
channel of transmission that ignores their boundaries.
She divorced her third husband, a southern California doctor, to marry Oppenheimer,
when she found out she was pregnant.
The presence of particularities that could be labeled paranoid induces a confession of
circumstance that pragmatically reflects on Weiner’s ‘reality,’ or her non-objective experience all
of this would remain suppressed by the U.S. government for another seven years. Nota bene we
said her fictions were becoming increasingly conceptual.
Clairvoyance, of course, like Juliet Mitchell’s example of psychoanalysis, survives Weiner’s
attempt at destruction, and continues to exist as part of the multivocality of Weiner’s work. At the
same time however, we can read this attempt at destruction for Weiner as to oust him over this
suspicious behavior
‘Heiress still lives through Winter in her Spartan cottage’
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We note the body of the poet in the poem, who occasionally
surfaces from a life underwater governed by gulls and sparrows,
but whose form can’t seem to materialize across that shore of
transference. The rubbing done here, in that sense, is aquiline, and
I’m not sure that the escapism of going under is enough of a dirge
to suggest the discordant elements of burial, rebirth, monument,
funeral, and elegy.
Mark Lombardi became a sieve to this theory; its twin. In 1950, the British psychoanalyst and
group dynamics therapist Wilfred Bion first published his article, “The Imaginary Twin,” in
which he credited the shared relationship, in language, between patient and analyst (the exposure
to truth) as a reflector of the projective identification that governs our mature emotional
responses. An empathy of imagery, in the imagist sense: the final flight to letters When you leave
us, will you leave us / can it be forever?
Samuel Beckett’s father was a quantity surveyor and his mother a nurse
Samuel Beckett once was a prince among men, misquoted
Samuel Beckett in years of analysis with Bion, twinned
Defeated, she returned to St. John
Defeated, she returned portrait of American physicist
She attended no school at all, receiving instead desultory instruction in French and math from a
series of governesses
The cottage was destroyed in a hurricane an almost equally strong urge to find silence and
oblivion and on its site was built a community house, where the schematics are elaborate and
delicate, yet precise and factual spiderwebs of illustrations depicting alleged networks of
criminal conspiracies |
Oswald told Marina he loved her
29
Its foundations were raised on what is now known as Oppenheimer Beach.
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