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Similarities and Correspondences

a study in relationship


by

j jackson


ana  n.  1. A collection of notes, sketches, or scraps of literature bearing on some particular subject.  2. The information in such a collection. See  --ANA.
ana  adv.  Med.  Of each: used in prescriptions to signify the amount to be taken of two or more substances prescribed: often abbr. ã or ãã.
ana--  prefix  1. Up; upward: anadromous   2. back; backwards: anapest.   3. Anew: sometimes capable of being rendered re-, as anabaptism, rebaptism.  4. Throughout; thoroughly: analysis.  Also, before vowels and h, an-
--ana  suffix  Pertaining to: added to the names of notable persons, places, etc., to indicate a collection of materials, such as writings or anecdotes, about the subject: Americana. Also iana.


plants are sentient creatures, too...

i do believe and know that plants are also sentient creatures with a will
to live just as strong as a human or a cow. and plants are just as
miraculous and complex and just as much a beautiful miracle as any
animal.

... i feel that the REALITY that vegetables are ALSO sentient beings with
a will to live is sorely overlooked. they just don't have cute eyes and
they can't scream or run.

which, of course, puts those of us who are sensitive empathetic people
when it comes to what we eat into quite an ethical predicament.

what IS the difference between eating boiled lobster vs. boiled spinach?
and of course we would ALL be grossed out to eat the lobster while it
still WAS alive....but that's what we do when we eat a salad. it just
dies a pretty violent death right there in our mouths...much like a snake
eating a mouse.

ana voog, 9-1-1


I made a t-shirt once that said:
"Hey, PETA! Plants have feelings too. Eat Dirt!"
(I made a separate version that said "Eat Shit!" but I never wore it.)

The words you wear on your chest or back characterize you.
But the zeitgeist, as much as your own personaity, determines the choice.

As with most projects I begin, the zeitgeist project has piffered out.

I'm resurrecting it now, here. In all life, simpatico, like analogues,
exists. I run across these daily, and occasionally the experience rises
to the level of coincidence. Exposure to these moments of serendipity
arouse me almost to a level of belief, in the spiritual nature of humanity.

Since these experiences have no consensual correspondence (at least
for me), I resort to an unconventional idiom (if that isn't a contraction
in terms) to render them. I have no way of knowing if any reality or
truth lies behind the experiences that lie behind these expressions.

Last night I was in something of a bigoted, prejudicial mood and I told Gretchen "there is nothing less funny than a Native American." She was appalled at this over-generalization and proceeded to inform me that she had actually studied Native American literature and that the Native American wit is a "dry acerbic" one, similar to the wit of the Jews. At some point in the conversation I realized that in the future I wanted to refer to funny things with the description, "dry, in the manner of Native American humor, which you've no doubt heard of." But that would just be for laughs; I still don't believe Native Americans are funny.
--Gus, 8-1-1
Native Americans have a highly-honed sense of satire, which they express physically and without comment. Why else would Geronimo have continued his guerrilla war for years after all seemed lost and hopeless. It was a comedy act worthy of the best of Don Rickles or Stephen Wright. But I think the epitomé of Native American humor is Little Big Horn. And what about introducing tobacco to the English? And consider this: they object to their various names being used as labels for sports teams, but they don't, in general, mind being called Indians. Any other ethnic group would vociferously object to being mislabeled in this way. Why is this? I have a theory: it's a joke. I think, given their history, that this sense of humor is extraordinary.

Indians, like all tradition, are being left behind. As much as they think they express their heritage, they are being assimilated. Or the mainstream culture is being assimilated by them. Both, with the weight of history favoring the mainstream, of course. It's like breastfeeding. The baby gets most of the benefits, but the mother benefits too.

eebomb said she read a survey where it stated that of breastfeeding mothers, only 48% had tasted their own breastmilk. i can't imagine it. i mean, just from the standpoint of i would like to KNOW what my baby is eating before s/he eats it, y'know? i wouldn't feed anything to my baby that i wasn't willing to try and eat myself.
 
from an ana email (7/12/2)

I wonder. Did she come up with s/he on her own, as a product of the zeitgeist, or did she see it on my site?2
Breastfeeding is only a few steps away (speaking in very sick, deep psychology terms, from pedophelia.

e-mail to ana

On 1-13-02, ana writes:

>something i am just starting to delve into on a much deeper level is pedophelia. . . i'm confused about the whole thing. i even find myself being lured into it, but is it my wish to return to the state of being a child girl? i do still see myself in that way in many ways still. how is it for a man then?<

ana,

I think pedophilia is a misguided search for lost innocence,
which instead of finding it within the self where all such
searches should take place, the pedophiliac tries to find it
in the self of an innocent child, but ends up instead
polluting that source of innocence.

I love what you're doing with your life and art.
I look forward to receiving your feeling and thought-
provoking e-mails and always feel a twinge of joy
when I see your name in my inbox.

Often I find in your e-mails a correspondence with what
I've just been through. I suspect a meta-identity at work.
Thanks for your sensibility and intelligence, and for
sharing your doubt and pain.

If I had any discretionary income at all, I'd join your
website and support your promotions, but as it is,
I can barely afford my Internet fees. But some day...

jai


Of course, psychological problems are expressed as much, if not more so, indirectly as directly. If breastfeeding can be latent pedophilia, an effect of too much mother love, then anything's possible, just as anything's possible in the opposite direction, that of mother rejection.

Kohut, in his later writings (1971, 1977), makes a fundamental distinction between a technique based on instinct theory and ego psychology, and his understanding of analysis and the restoration of the self. The process model in Kohut's theory of restoration of the self is determined by the following theses:

1. The selfobject seeks itself in others.

2. There is a lack of empathetic resonance by the mother. The degree to which the empathetic resonance is absent ultimately determines the deficit in the self. Empathetic resonance is composed of several stages determined by development: mirror transference, twinship transference, and idealizing self transference. These determine the form taken by empathetic resonance and are described as man's basic needs.

3. Deficits in self provide the decisive basis for all disturbances. In his later works Kohut (1984, p.24) considers even oedipal pathology as an emanation of the nonempathetic mother or father. In his view, if there were no primary self damage, there would be no castration anxiety with its pathological consequences.

4. After the resistances directed against renewed selfobject frustrations (frustrations because the other is not how we would like) have been overcome, there is a mobilization of "selfobject transferences" in the therapeutic process, with inevitable conflicts in the analytic relationship. The conflict is between the constant need for appropriate selfobject reactions on the one hand, and the patient's fear of injury of the self on the other. If the patient feels he has been understood, archaic, disavowed needs are revived on the selfobject in the selfobject transference.

5. The relationship between the analysand's self and the selfobject, i.e., the analyst's function, is inevitably incomplete. Since the attempt to establish complete empathetic harmony with the analysand is doomed to failure, there are self regressions with symptoms which are understood as disintegration products.

6. By means of his empathetic resonance, the analyst senses the patient's legitimate needs for his selfobject function, which are buried under distorted manifestations. He clarifies the sequence of events and corrects his own misunderstandings.

7. The goal of therapy is the transformation of the "selfobject functions of the selfobject analyst to a function of the analysand's self" (Wolf 1982, p.312). This is known as transmuting internalization. What is significant is that the increase in self structure does not mean any independence from selfobjects; on the contrary, it means a greater capacity to find and to use them.
 
Thomä & Kächele, pp. 340-1
This study (Similarities & Correspondences) constitutes (I hope) an expanded use of my selfobjects. This is the attempt of my selfobject (as an inner self-therapist) to seek itself in others.

[#s below correspond to the quote above.]

1. This makes intuitive sense to me. I feel this.

2. This is the basic problem, the focus (F1). In a certain sense, this is not a problem at all, but rather the human condition, an inevitable failure to find the basic need of unconditional acceptance. It only becomes a real problem when it becomes fixated at a certain point so that it prevents social functioning.
In a positive sense, perhaps as a healing that has "taken" as a result of past therapies, and certainly as a residue from my more flexible childhood, I experience an empathy that I've learned how to use. In childhood and well into adulthood, I responded to this empathetic ability reactively. It's taken me a long time and a lot of therapy to mold the experience into an asset, and even so, in times of stress, it tends to revert toward a negative (paranoid) reaction. In any case, it's not hard to see how this "ability" developed, as an early recognition of the void (separation; lack of acceptance) that I perceived to exist and as an identification with that void. [Is this what mirror transference means?]

3. This is yet to be investigated, but it feels true. This is a point (elsewhere defined) for further introspection.

4. People are never what I want them to be. (I theorize that people are never what anyone wants them to be. We are a race of disenchanted, dissatisfied individuals.) But, apparently, these frustrations can be overcome. Hooray! Via empathy and selfobject transferences, we learn to be ourselves (i.e., our selfobjects.) Longing after others as objects of ourselves, we gradually become aware of how we project ourselves onto others (becoming fans). In other words, we analyze and interpret the transferences.

5. Self-therapy, by this defintion, should be impossible, since both analyst and patient exist within the same person, so that what might be in an other-therapy situation an impossible harmony producing therapeutic results, becomes in self-therapy a dissociation. But therapy via other-interaction (i.e., via empathy and transferences) can still be possible, because a part of the self is projected onto another, who functions transferrentially as a proxy patient.
When it (relationship, or imagined relationship, or perceived correspondences) all becomes too much, we regress--until we rest and summon the courage and determination to go on again.

6. I'm not sure from the context here who it is who is correcting whose misunderstandings. In my (self-therapeutic) case, though, it doesn't matter. Whether the analyst part of me is correcting its own (counter-transferential) misunder- standings or the analysand is correcting its own mis- understandings is irrelevant. Misunderstanding is being corrected within the (my) self, enabled by the insight gained via empathy with external selfobjects, which in standard therapy would be the analyst, but which here are the others empathized with.

7. In my (self-therapeutic) case, this would mean the creation of an "inner harmony" via a realization that the inner and outer worlds are "in tune" because similarities and correspondences are seen. I develop a greater capacity to find myself in others (and vice versa), thus (further) freeing myself from an isolated, separated world.
See also: similar material


Once my lover, now my friend.
What a cruel thing to pretend.
What a cunning way to condescend.
Once my lover, but now my friend.
 
Fiona Apple     
"Shadowboxer"
Ana was once a friend of mine. But that was in another life.
We've lost touch, and she's forgotten. Now, she's back again.
But she still doesn't remember. She's a different ana now.
Even better, though. Smarter. More like me, more liberal.

She's still sad though. That hasn't changed. It follows her.
We carry themes through multiple lives, until they're resolved.
She seems even worse now that she was before. More crazy.
Less stable. Needs meds now, but that's because they're more

available. She hides from me, even more so now. She thinks
she doesn't know me. At first, I thought she wasn't going to
acknowledge me at all. But now I see, she can't help but see
who it is I am. I have to read between the lines of paranoia.

It's kind of nice, to know I can influence her, that she'll allow it
like she used to, but now without such direct contact, in her art.
I see myself reflected in the mirror of her writing. It excites me
to think, she knows, but is afraid, to contact, me. I know, we see.


No sun. No light. And the trees, beautiful trees.
It's a strange day, no colors. No sun tonight.
I forget who I am when I'm with you.
There's no reason. There's no sense.
I'm not supposed to feel. I forget who I am.
I forget. Fascist baby. Utopia. Utopia.
My dog needs new ears. Make his eyes see forever.
Make you live like me, again and again.
Fascist baby. Utopia. Utopia.
I'm wired to the world, that's how I am.
I know everything. I'm superbrain.
That's how they made me.
Fascist baby. Utopia. Utopia.
 
Goldfrapp,
"Utopia"
To: anacam@camgirl7.com
Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 09:11:44 -0400
Subject: Re "Utopia" by Goldfrapp

>do you think the song called "utopia" by goldfrapp is about an android? the more i listen to it...i think it is...which makes me love it all the more. my android fetish grows and grows. i think i need to build myself an android. i mean..i know i need to. and i will.<

It probably is about an android, or about the psychology behind why we are so attracted to the idea of androids, like we are attracted to aliens or angels.

The "New Ears Mix" version of the song (basically instrumental) reminds me of the music in the old flick "Zardoz" with Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling.

Have you seen it? Great fantasy.
Not about androids, but utopia, where people never die.

Also reminds me of "The Hunger" with David Bowie, Susan Sarandon, and the famous French actress whose name escapes me at the moment.

(If I were an android, I wouldn't forget.)
I always wanted to be an android.

If we live long enough, we'll all be androids, when they start replacing all our failing body parts with artificial ones and plugging computer chips into our brains.

What are the words in the song just before "make his eyes see again?" I can't understand them?

SuperBrains,
jai


PS: Catherine Deneuve


Tuesday, September 4th, 2001
12:50p:
i've decided that in my lifetime, it must be made possible that cloning
will be available to the public so that we may clone our pets because i
NEVER want to live without the pookadog.
...
i am the android in the song utopia by goldfrapp. and when she sings, "
my dog needs new ears...make his eyes see forever...make him live like
me...again and again...."
that is me being an android singing about my pookadog. i want everything
to be that new and calm and serene everyday. reboot me and defragment me
everyday.
...
humming and whirring,
ana


A while ago I began a novel, In The House, the third part of my proposed quintet (only parts of each part of which are finished). At the beginning, a girl, the half-sister of the protagonist, returns to the home of her childhood to attend the funeral of her mother and stays with her brother for several months. I named her ana (with a small "a"1), for a lot of reasons, not the least significant of which was that it was a short form of analogue, because she was an analogue of the protagonist. Now I'm beginning to wonder if this story was a psychic representation of ana voog, before I knew of her.
During this same time, I was working on a collection of pieces that I entitled ana, never having made the obvious connection to the novel, not meaning it to be a person's name, but rather a play on the concept of collection, like in the word "Americana." Now that collections has become my prime forte, I recognize the connection with everything that ana represents.


Everything she writes of in her e-mails, I've already thought, and am in the process of rethinking.
The subjects come up so frequently that it's beginning to freak me out. There is evidence of...
I have to stop quoting the material because it's too voluminous. There is some kind of connection.
I have to start deleting the e-mails, because you can't save everything just because you agree with it.

She's up early in the morning, working productively, almost manically, and so have I been, recently.
She's scanning photographs, talking about a project that is "slowly finally coming together." Me too.
[Both my project and myself. I'm slowly coming together, even faster than I'm coming apart, now.]
She's thinking of staying up, rather than going and taking a nap, to keep more of a normal schedule.
[Who does that sound like? I think I'm experiencing someone else's life when these things happen.]
I think these things all the time. This is a way of life with me, living out the things other people say.


When you're attracted to someone, it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously. So what we think of as fate is just two neuroses knowing they're a perfect match.
 
David Hyde Pierce
Sleepless in Seattle

When you live with no passion at all, other people's passions come into glaring relief.
 
Bill Pullman
The Zero Effect

pleasure activist
i'm trying to be a pleasure activist like annie sprinkle. she believes
that when something bad is happening in the world, it is her duty to
counteract/balance that energy by doing something pleasurable, like
masturbating. when i read that she had said that ( in that book called
Angry Women by REsearch )it changed my life and she has been my hero ever since.

well, so i have been trying to do that the last few days. sometimes when
i come i can imagine the light pouring out of my clitoris and into the
matrix of the universe for healing and for joy. and the light sprouts out
the top of my head and it also shoots straight down out of my toes deep
into the core of the earth and then it all circles back again into me and
then out again.
 
ana voog, 9-1-1
I can't get back to my regular schedule. I hate it when my anti-routine is disrupted. I start to fall into fantasy. Last night (this morning) I dreamed about fantasy characters, people who don't exist except in my imagination. This is the first time I've ever dreamed about them. They weren't actually in the dream, that is, they were scheduled to show up, but I never got to that part of the dream before I awoke, but I thought of them in the dream, as if they were real. [They're the members of my fantasy rock band, those idealized individuals who don't exist in the real world. You can never find a group of people (at least I never could) who mesh so well that harmony prevails. (I'm not talking about musical harmony here; in music, harmony is easy.)] In this dream, my sister told me to run a bulldozer to level out the land that we were going to play on (the parking lot of the gas station at the corner, which was a dirt lot where the gas station is), i.e., to use as a stage, in preparation for the coming event. I felt a great deal of power running that bulldozer. I leveled out the land. I guess I'm leveling my psyche, to prepare for what is coming. I don't think I like the implications of this symbolism, even though the dream made me feel good. It's like I'm ready for what is to come, for my performance (in the dream, I played guitar on the "stage," as a warm-up, and the assembling audience loved it.) I'm leveled, emotionally, psychically. Never again will I become so involved in events that I lose sight of the detachment I must maintain in order to be objective and universal. I don't really want ever to get caught up again, but I miss it just the same. I miss the rock days, when nothing was important but the music, and even that was not so significant. I miss the freedom from the inevitability of an end to life. I miss the balance that we brought to the universe by living only for the pleasure of the moment.

echoing echoes

super to hear voices other than mine echoing thru my head periodically.
 
e-mail from
Deavours Kemp

Everyone echoes through my head. It's like I am, my own universe.
The author of every book or story I read is another person inside.
But it's different with letters and e-mail. It seems more personal
when people are more real than authors, who are like abstractions
(a la Umberto Eco's schema of empirical/model authors/narrators.
I would be the model reader, in this case. But I'm not. I'm very real.)
And in person--look out! As I grow in experience/consciousness,
I more readily realize the subtleties of mutual presence we seldom see.
People with whom I communicate in both directions, echo my own self
more profoundly than one-way read material, even in conflict, as I
more easily project, my own self onto their behavior, to see myself
in a different way, as they must see me, as I echo them, unknown.

excerpt from e-mail to my mailing list, 9-15-1:

special note to Alice: You are so, so right in your social analyses (and in everything else I read from you.) I find your ideas echoed in my writings over the past few days. (Actually, I've been noticing this echo for quite a while now.) If you will, please read my latest bit of writing, because I feel you may be one of the few people on the planet who is capable of understanding it. (If you find the introductory material boring, or if my erratic style bothers you, scan down to section C.)


From a local northern coal (steel) town to southern climes,
Italy and New Mexico, deserts, at heart,
literature in hand, always, attached,
problems with, yet affinity for women, lesbians,
traveler, wandering, wanderlost,
he never settled down, except when on the road.
Who does this sound like, in his early days?
I've betrayed myself, reincarnated into form.
He died just as I was born.


hi! i just LOVE the show on MTV called "The Osbournes"
have you watched it?
it's the best reality tv show PERIOD!
 
-ana
Another point of similarity between us.
Ozzy goes to the White House correspondents dinner.
It's all too much for me.
It's an imcomprehensible mess, how the human mind draws correspondences.

------------------------------------------------------
1. I've subsequently changed this, not for content purposes, but because so many sentences seemed to be starting with 'ana' and it looked a little strange.

2. I did a search on Google for s/he. Almost a milllion hits. Everybody's using it. It must be in the zeitgeist. There's even a book named S/HE, about lesbians. The excerpts are pretty good. They're reminiscent of my novella, oblation, available in my postmod collection life stories: a fragmentation, available from Xlibris [a crass advertisment.]