I could manifest a list of things that I can recall: the way he caressed my hair while he thought I slept; that line in Anita Phillip’s A Defence of Masochism where a pining pathetic masochist has nothing to do with the pains that come alongside unrequited love, but a true relishing desire to be alone; certain movie lines, the entire script even, from a certain winged bat; a painting, but not the artist’s name, that captured body awareness so well I felt the trigger aimed at me … that’s not the point.
When something goes awry with recall a signifier has been forgotten, dislodged from place, or it was never there long enough to leave the necessary mark to whip it (up). The missing signifier is not so much free floating otherwise it could still be grasped by its balloon string, and could be brought down a bit lower to read the fine print. For an analyst it’s a glitch in the signifying-code, covered by this particular, constantly itchy flesh sac, that is to reveal something about a history.
Here are some funny to me moments of recall gone awry: During an interview in 2019 I said, in a point-blank-don’t-miss-your-target kind of manner, that eternal recurrence was a Freudian concept not Nietzsche’s greatest insight while journeying along the shores of Lake Silvaplana. Perhaps recall could not serve me because of all the burgeoning nerves that may or may not have sprung forth from being documented, or, perhaps, the very attempt to recall anything on (self-constructed) command is just scholarly self-flagellation I tend to shrink from. During a solo book launch over Zoom in 2020 I misheard or mistook the word “transmute” as a newfound traverse-ability to mute and unmute people, to hear and un-hear any speaking subject on command made possible by the tap of a finger, and provided an response on how I have recently applied this phenomenon to how I now engage with my practice as a research poet. During a trip to Vienna in 2011 I came to the realisation that the pouch for “negatives” at the back of a Moleskine notebook was not strictly a clever spot for me to house all my gnarly “negative thoughts” to process later, but a now-turned anachronistic place to store transparent plastic film to develop later in the past. (Insert a conversation here about how to use the word vestigial in a subsequent sentence but choose to leave this parenthetical interjection as is.) During a heated conflict in 2018 a misquoted line from Mao was hurled (hauled) at my sad drunken ass, which I was stupidly upset over to not at all recall a few years later in 2020 when the conflict was jokingly parodied for relief and levity — as time can only offer any of us a chance at objectivity. During a semi-rough acid trip in 2021 I couldn’t differentiate between the Russian revolutionary Bakunin and the Russian philosopher Bahktin — all the diverse areas of human activity involve the use of language or nihilism? If it was an actual ego death the difference would not have mattered enough for me to consider my death over a problem with recall with such ferocity. There have been enough times I’ve soggily woken up bruised thighed and having bruised an other, but I don’t think this experience is the same as those I’ve listed before it but rather the product of being a really fun drunk.
Yes I can look it up. There’s a Wikipedia article for everything. There’s a well-written book on the shelf across the room that’s not going to reach me merely through osmosis. As the great hysteric Britney Spears once said: you better read and retain, bitch. The desired telos, or “hot body” I’m after, is one where this patient (this arm chair parodying analyst) admits how exemplary precision is always a joke and that the glitch experienced is a self-negation that holds some meantime available for unconscious subversion (perversion, monstrous thinking).
I rely on the signifying chain to have some reach with others and it can be frightening when it is altered by old bouts of stupidity, amnesia, forgetfulness, let alone an alcohol rich diet. There are so many factors that affect the capacity to recall: some social subjects are trained to recall their mistakes more than others, attention-altering devices and technologies, and physical and psychic pain. In what ways could the aftermath that follows a signifying collapse incite a new response that still commingles with fear but + more! (The point is not to elide fear but to cultivate other parts to gleefully join the party.) Like Nietzsche’s ill-rot mind willing movement by forcing his ill-rot body to walk past the same scenery, the same self, the same rock, over and over again to inaugurate a whiff of difference, I am at this moment building off of old contexts and narratives to recall the name of the artist I could not recall spontaneously. The colour and texture of the paint and how they created a figure of folds to fold into. If marketing strategies are always co-opting our time and movements, could we not co-opt their strategies to recall what really matters to us at the peak of an acid trip?
During the last day of 2022 I gathered all the cursory approaches to understand what’s gone awry with recall and measured them against the last three years of attachment theory, self-diagnosis as identity, trauma-informed take-your-pick, partial hauntings, Wikipedia articles, and well-intentioned infographics. I threw every inundation the way you can skip a rock three times for the tide to bring them back smoother, that much more marketable.
There’s nothing more to recall here that hasn’t already been respectfully ordered without prejudice.