THE GIANT AND THE PRINCESS (PART 2)

KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK!

Giant: "Huh!???"

Princess: "Huh!?"



Princess: "Marvin!!!! Is that you!!? I thought you had left town!"



Prince: "I did, my darling..."



Prince: "...but I couldn't bear being away from you!"



Prince: "I couldn't think without you! I couldn't sleep!"

Princess: I-I know how you felt, Darling! I couldn't sleep either! I couldn't even keep down a cheese sandwich!"

Marvin: "Oh, I can't tell you how it feels to hear you say that!"

Prince: "M-Maybe it's time we made this permanent!"

Princess: "It always was permanent, Darling, it always was! Let's find a grotto somewhere and hold hands."

Princess: "Giant, clean this place up while we're gone will you? It's a mess!"

LET'S BRING BACK PSYCHOANALYSIS (REVISED)

I'm an admirer of Freud now but I wasn't always. I used to feel uncomfortable with ideas like childhood sexuality, the centrality of dreams, and the existence of the subconscious. I'm not aware that the fantasies and dreams I had when I was a kid had any influence on my adult life, and I just couldn't see any evidence for a subconscious. When I read that Freud was an advocate of cocaine, that tore it, I just dropped him from my thoughts. Now I'm beginning to wonder if I was too hasty.

When you think about it, psychoanalysis is an interesting idea. Modern methods of counseling nudge the patient toward normal behavior. They aim to produce a functioning citizen, and that's all. Psychoanalysis on the other hand, attempts to take the patient on a weird and fantastic journey through uncharted territory. The patient becomes Odysseus or Jason. He matures and deepens and sometimes even becomes heroic through conflict with demons from the netherworld. When the cure is arrived at the patient can look back on his trip as one of his great life experiences. The goal is not simply to create a citizen but to create a brave, powerful and wise human being.

Of course analysis is expensive and time-consuming and I imagine that a lot depends on the character of the analyst. Probably over time analysis became somewhat dry and formulistic. Maybe that's because society changed and shed its romantic roots. The analysts thought they were following Freud's rules because they stuck to what he said in print, but they neglected to add the flavor and feel of the romantic era that produced Freud. Some of the rules for psychoanalysis were unwritten because in Freud's time they were taken for granted. Things like the love of heroism and the passion for adventure were the common belief of everyone then living. You can't undertake analysis without a strong sense of this, yet it might not appear anywhere in the writing.

I know what you're thinking. All that journey stuff is fine but when it comes down to it, what really matters is, does it work? Was Freud right? My answer is that it probably doesn't work a lot of the time, but who cares? The journey is enriching all by itself, regardless of the outcome. You may come out of it a neurotic, but you'll be a more interesting neurotic.

All of us in the arts have something to be grateful to Freud for. He influenced all the arts, maybe literary novels and acting especially , but also painting, photography and even genre fiction like horror, sci-fi and thrillers. And what about politics? Freud's emphasis on sexuality and looking inward was one of the cornerstones of the 60s.

Freud is a gold mine of inspiration for writers. It must be a lot of fun to write scenes like: "I dreamed I was in a room with two tables, each with a vase of flowers and a clock. I tried to smell the flowers but I was overcome with a feeling of dread, as if the flowers didn't want me there, and the clocks began to tick, louder and louder . Outside I heard a car slam on its brakes and a loud crash. I tried to run to the window to see what happened, but..." And you have to admit that Freud-influenced screen plays provide much-needed work for Theramin operators.

It would be hard to over-estimate Freud's influence on the modern world. He took a lot that was over-the-top about 19th century literary romanticism and repackaged in the form of therapy for the 20th century. No small feat, that. Maybe Freud was the greatest of the Romantics.

It's a stretch, but you could argue that Freud was one of the people who saved the West from communism. Marxism was spreading like wildfire among intellectuals in the late 19th and early 20th century and it only hit a stone wall when it came up against Freud and the nationalist romantics. Freud's ideas weren't antagonistic to Marx, but they represented another systematic way of seeing the world, which existed completely outside of Marxism. After Freud, Marxism was not the "next new thing"...it was just one of a number of new things.

MY FIRST YOUTUBE VIDEO!

"Hi dudes and dudettes!!!! Welcome to my first YouTube video!!!!"

"Wait a minute! Gotta adjust the camera!"

" Isn't this tres cool!!!???"

"Oops! Gotta adjust the camera again!"

"Well, as you know, Christmas has been here!"

"I got lotsa cool presents!"

"But the best that I got from my family was this little baby here...an ipod Classic!!! Is that righteous or what!?"

I just looooooove my ipod!!!

"Of course there's a downside to it. Everybody says they break in a year or two! The classics have a disk hard drive inside and it just wears out!"



"And they say you can't change the battery! You have to buy a whole new machine when it runs out!"


"Maybe the Nano's a better deal. It doesn't have so many movable parts. It's like a big Flash Drive. Of course other brands have mp3 players that allow you to change batteries. I had one of those and it worked great!"

"But iTunes is such a great way to download and that only works on ipods ! iTunes is so easy to use! I used to use Realplayer and that sucked big time!"

"W...W...Wait a minute.....(Sniff!)"

"Ah...Aaah....AHHHHHhhh......"

"ACHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!"



"Good Lord! I got my ipod dirty!"

Lick! Lick!

"Don't worry, little guy! We'll fix you up!"

(Blows)

"Well, if you only last a year, then we'll make sure it's a good year!"

"Gotta go now! Peace, all you dudes!!!"




"Now let's see...how do you turn this thing off?"

FAMOUS POETS GO DOWN IN FLAMES

Why do modern poets have such a difficult time writing about Christmas? Take a look at this fragment of a poem (below) by Auden (Most of the poems are represented by fragments to save space...you're not missing much, believe me).



The "ingression" of love? The "abiding crag" is "on" forgiveness?? Did Auden even think about this when he wrote it? What a shabby effort!

"Little silent Christmas tree/ you are so little/ you are more like a flower/...were you very sorry to come away?" Ugh! It (above) sounds like the something the big, dumb, dog in the Screwy Squirrel cartoon would have said! E.E. Cummings wrote this turkey!

This one (above) is slightly better than the others, maybe because Eliot was a believing Christian, but it has some pretty clunky parts. What is this about the the camels being "galled, sore-footed and refractory?" Why the academic language? The idea of poetry as a celebration of common feeling is lost here.

Modern Christmas poems are often downright depressing. No "Jingle Bells" or "Deck the Halls" for us. Here's part of one by James Dickey. It makes me want to commit suicide. Modern poets are a sad lot, maybe that's why I seldom read them.

Older Christmas poems, especially the ones that double as song lyrics, are much more to my liking: "Away in a manger, no crib for a bed/ the Little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head." Why can't our poets write something simple and elegant like that? Imagine if Auden had written "Away in a Manger:" "Stuck here in an ingressing manger/ The man-god thrust his head on the abiding crag."

It must really gall modern poets that the most popular Christmas poem is still the happy one written by Clement Moore 140 years ago:

Twas the night before Christmas,

And all through the house,

Not a creature was stirring,

Not even a mouse."

The mouse is not "galled, sore-footed and refractory." He's just a mouse.


By the way, while I was looking for a picture to illustrate this post I stumbled on this (below) picture of the Nativity by Rubens. Here's a detail...

It's an unusual picture because Christ is portrayed as playful and Mary is positively jovial, as she must have been sometimes. It's a touching picture even though the right side seems to be making a different point than the left side. The colors and rendering are nothing less than masterful.

MY CHRISTMAS SO FAR

I had a great Christmas; I hope you did too! That's me above, looking unexpectedly like a figure on a 50s jazz album.

Our tree this year was about 6', in other words, way too short. Proper trees should be awe-inspiring because that's the quality that Christmas itself possesses. Never, ever allow a short person to buy your tree. All trees look tall to someone like that, and that disqualifies them as objective buyers.

A proper tree scrapes the ceiling. A proper tree is so big that that it leaves no room for people. A proper tree is hard to get through the door and provokes endless arguments among family members. A proper tree scratches furniture, knocks things off shelves, and gets sap all over fingers. Proper trees are expensive, and most people will experience years when they can't afford them, but families who've had a good year tempt the wrath of the gods when they try to chintz. Better to skimp on presents than skimp on the tree.

And presents...this is the year that I'll be remembered as a bum because I got my wife a digital video recorder. Her girlfriends call and ask what she she got and there's always a long pause when she tells them, followed by "He got you.....WHAT?" Somehow it got around that only beasts buy their wives electronics.

It happened because I had to do all my shopping at the last minute and I found myself in a giant electronics warehouse with a loudspeaker saying, "The store will close in 20 minutes. Please bring your purchases to the front!" I frantically rushed around looking for something she might at least tolerate. They started to dim the lights and salesmen were nudging people out. I grabbed the first thing I saw that looked like it might work out...and the upshot is that I'm a bum. Friends of my wife won't even look in my direction.

I told this to my neighbor and he said, "Why didn't you get her a gift certificate for some beauty treatments in a spa? You know, one of those places where they put mud and cucumbers on you?" I have to admit that I thought of that but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I'm a guy and like most guys I'd rather set myself on fire than go into a place like that. Oh well, I'll make it up to her this weekend... but the blemish will remain for years, I can tell.

Anyway, everything else about the holiday was great! What a really profound time Christmas is! I'll write about it later!

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By the way.... have you ever noticed how Christmas trees mirror the personality of the person who trimmed them?

I imagine that a guy who looked like this (above) would have a tree...

...that looks like this (above). It's a tidy tree with evenly spaced, tasteful balls.

I imagine that a woman who looked like this (above), would have a tree that looked...

Like this (above). It's the tree equivalent of a poodle.



On another subject, here's a tree (above) that isn't a tree at all. It's a step-ladder!