Voices, Voices Mesmerize*. Freud, Jung, Virginia Woolf and Pattie Smith

I don't feel that I'm somewhere that I shouldn't be.

Pattie Smith

There is -- no doubt, an eerie presence in some houses that have been shared with unusual intensity. There are some ghostly energies palpable in the air. It may come to you as the elusive echo of faint voices or some trace of a vanished smell. 

I still remember with some thrill a very strange experience I had while visiting Freud's home in Vienna some years ago. I don't know how popular the spot may be today but at the time it seemed to me quite remote from the core of the old city -- some residential district for the middle-class you reached by bus. I can still see myself in the solemn stairway to Freud's flat all alone climbing the red-carpeted steps that made me feel like I was in the shoes of some Freud's wealthy female patient from the last century. I was ushered into what was now some sort of a museum -- rather a mausoleum by a very discreet attendant. The lofty sombre flat with fine panelling and moulding was filled with some heavy presence hovering around. I don't know why but my imagination had been arrested in the contemplation of one of Freud's belongings, a cabinet of antiquities filled with a collection of Egyptian objects and Primitive works of art. I was lost in my thoughts when I was summoned back to the present reality by the smell of a cigar breath I felt in the back of my neck. Nobody was there. A couple of years later I was reading Histoire de ma vie, Jung's Memories he wrote with collaborator Aniela Jaffé four years before he died. I was through a chapter describing an explosive argument between the young man and his mentor about the very same cabinet I had been so much engrossed with when the same olfactive illusion happened again. I smelled a breath of cigar. The passage described a visit that 33 years old Jung paid to his elder confident to collect his views on paranormal phenomena. While Freud passionately dismissed the whole matter as nonsensical, both of them could hear loud creaking noises coming from the bookshelves of the old cabinet. Jung described how he felt a curious sensation in his diaphragm just before foretelling to incredulous Freud they would be soon hearing another noise. He had not yet finished his sentence that a second loud crack came from the cabinet. Both Jung and Freud started up in alarm very much shaken but in a letter dated April of the same year 1909 Freud reasserted his opposition to Jung in a display of utmost 'materialistic prejudice' and challenge. 

I don't know how it happened now that willing to write on Pattie Smith's relation to Charleston House and Virginia Woolf those long forgotten impressions resurfaced. It might be that Virginia Woolf's intense effort to capture the infinity of the mindscape is still at work. Bodies can pass away but prose and poetry never lose voice.


Sigmund Freud's Letter to Carl G. Jung, April 1909

"I do not deny that your comments and your experiment made a powerful impression upon me. After your departure I determined to make some observations, and here are the results. In my front room there are continual creaking noises, from where the two heavy Egyptian steles rest on the oak boards of the bookcase, so that's obvious. In the second room, where we heard the crash, such noises are very rare. At first I was inclined to ascribe some meaning to it if the noise we heard so frequently when you were here were never again heard after your departure. But since then it has happened over and over again, yet never in connection with my thoughts and never when I was considering you or your special problem. (Not now, either, I add by way of challenge). The phenomenon was soon deprived of all significance for me by something else. My credulity, or at least my readiness to believe, vanished along with the spell of your personal presence ... The furniture stands before me spiritless and dead, like nature silent and godless before the poet after the passing of the gods of Greece."

C. G. Jung's Erinnerungen, Traüme, Gedanken, original text on line :

Es interessierte mich, Freuds Ansichten über Praekognition und über Parapsychologie im allgemeinen zu hören. Als ich ihn im Jahre 1909 in Wien besuchte, fragte ich ihn, wie er darüber dächte. Aus seinem materialistischen Vorurteil heraus lehnte er diesen ganzen Fragenkomplex als Unsinn ab und berief sich dabei auf einen dermaßen oberflächlichen Positivismus, daß ich Mühe hatte, ihm nicht allzu scharf zu entgegnen. Es vergingen noch einige Jahre, bis Freud die Ernsthaftigkeit der Parapsychologie und die Tatsächlichkeit «okkulter» Phänomene anerkannte.
Während Freud seine Argumente vorbrachte, hatte ich eine merkwürdige Empfindung. Es schien mir, als ob mein Zwerchfell aus Eisen bestünde und glühend würde - ein glühendes Zwerchfellgewölbe. Und in diesem Augenblick ertönte ein solcher Krach im Bücherschrank, der unmittelbar neben uns stand, daß wir beide furchtbar erschraken. Wir dachten, der Schrank fiele über uns zusammen. Genauso hatte es getönt. Ich sagte zu Freud: «Das ist jetzt ein sogenanntes katalytisches Exteriorisationsphänomen.» «Ach», sagte er, «das ist ja ein leibhaftiger Unsinn!» «Aber nein», erwiderte ich, «Sie irren, Herr Professor. Und zum Beweis, daß ich recht habe, sage ich nun voraus, daß es gleich nochmals so einen Krach geben wird!» - Und tatsächlich: kaum hatte ich die Worte ausgesprochen, begann der gleiche Krach im Schrank!

Ich weiß heute noch nicht, woher ich diese Sicherheit nahm. Aber ich wußte mit Bestimmtheit, daß das Krachen sich wiederholen würde. Freud hat mich nur entsetzt angeschaut. Ich weiß nicht, was er dachte, oder was er schaute! Auf jeden Fall hat dieses Erlebnis sein Mißtrauen gegen mich geweckt, und ich hatte das Gefühl, ihm etwas angetan zu haben. Ich sprach nie mehr mit ihm darüber. 

Charleston House
Firle
Lewes
East Sussex
BN8 6LL

Sigmund Freud Museum

Berggasse, 19

1090 Vienna

*Pattie Smith, Pissing in a River

 Pissing in a river, watching it rise

Tattoo fingers shy away from me

Voices voices mesmerize

Voices voices beckoning sea

Come come come come back come back

Come back come back come back

1 Pattie Smith, The River Ouse 22,80 x 15,10, 2008

2 Pattie Smith, Paintbrushes, Duncan Grant's Studio
3 Pattie Smith, Virginia Woolf's bed 

4 Pattie Smith, Self-Portrait titled 'Bird Head' 25,00 x 17,50, 1973

Wild Words. Lottie Cole, Painting with Darkness and Light

Finally, and most emphatically, words, like ourselves, in order to live at their ease, need privacy. 

Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light...

Virginia Woolf

Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations — naturally. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today — that they are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages. The splendid word “incarnadine,” for example — who can use it without remembering also “multitudinous seas”? In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words — they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation — but we cannot use them because the language is old. You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great writer knows that the word “incarnadine” belongs to “multitudinous seas.” To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the English language as it is. How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.

And the person who could answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the world has to offer. Think what it would mean if you could teach, if you could learn, the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper would tell the truth, would create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing upon the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still — do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were unlectured, uncriticized, untaught? Is our Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan? Where then are we to lay the blame? Not on our professors; not on our reviewers; not on our writers; but on words. It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all in alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look again at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems more lovely than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid.

Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live — the mind — all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not about them, but about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for impure English — hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech; it is a protest against the puritans. They are highly democratic, too; they believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as good as educated words, uncultivated words as cultivated words, there are no ranks or titles in their society. Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, in paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.

Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity — their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity that they survive. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing to-day is that we refuse words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die. Finally, and most emphatically, words, like ourselves, in order to live at their ease, need privacy. Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light. . . . That pause was made, that veil of darkness was dropped, to tempt words to come together in one of those swift marriages which are perfect images and create everlasting beauty. But no — nothing of that sort is going to happen to-night. The little wretches are out of temper; disobliging; disobedient; dumb. What is it that they are muttering? “Time’s up! Silence!” 

Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth, and other essays

Link: Lottie Cole at Cricket Fine Art

1,2,3,6 © Lottie Cole, Paintings Charleston 
4,5 © Lottie Cole, Paintings Monk's House

Mythe (1) Un si lourd héritage. Angelica Vanessa Garnett's Truth

1 Vanessa Bell, Angelica, 1930

2 Angelica with mother Vanessa Bell

3 Angelica with  aunt Virginia Woolf in 1932 © Lettice Ramsey, copyright Stephen Burch

4  Vanessa Bell, Angelica with her four daughters, 1959

5 Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell while pregnant with Angelica, 1918

Angelica Vanessa Garnett artist and writer died age 93, 4 May 2012. Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant's daughter, she was both blessed and burdened by her too heavy Bloomsbury group inheritance. 

   

Née le jour de Noël 1918, sa vie commence comme un conte de fées. Elle est au centre de toutes les attentions, suffoquée d'amour dans cette ferme de Charleston ou se jouent les amours, les conflits et les ambitions artistiques des membres de Bloomsbury. Le miroir est terni quand Angelica découvre que son père n'est pas Clive Bell, le mari de sa mère mais Duncan Grant, l'ancien amant de celui qu'elle a épousé.         

Dans Trompeuse gentillesse (Christian Bourgois, 1986)elle décrit ce pesant héritage.  

Further readings: 

Angelica Garnett, Les deux coeurs de Bloomsbury, Editions Le Promeneur, 2001. Angelica Garnett, The Eternal moment, Puckerbrush Press, 1998.

David Garnett, Lady into fox,  at Project Gutenberg, free online reading. 
Other books by Angelica Garnett, see here.