Fragments of Glass, a poetic autofiction
Spirit Labor: Duration, Difficulty, and Affect, installation view, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2021
Photo: Ivan Erofeev
© Garage Museum of Contemporary Art
Fragments of Glass, a poetic autofiction
Ksenia Kononenko is a poet and psychoanalyst.
The work, presented as a hybrid cycle with elements of poetic writing and essay, takes a close look at a man who has gone mad and been socially disconnected (the author’s father), and his family, who had to replace systemic and institutional inclusion and destigmatization of mental illness with their own bodies, decisions, and knowledge.
funny.
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unbearable, perhaps, is just your sadness
stronger than any living man
ten people could not overcome it
when I have nothing left to sing my poems with
I will imagine I am kissing you
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In his doctoral thesis on paranoia, Lacan presented a detailed analysis of the case of Aimée, the Beloved One. He wrote: «Most often there exists a clear connection between a critical or traumatic event and a long-term life conflict. This conflict with a strong ethical resonance is most often connected to the subject’s parent-sibling relationships. The sum of these factors probably determines the beginning of a psychosis.» Later, he got interested in structure and saw psychosis as a foreclosure of the father’s name. Below, I will present the etiology of my father’s psychosis.
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there might be a lot
to let go, there might be a little,
make twilight out of a dot, howl silently in the twilight,
I’ve worn down ten knees and a hundred boots,
and it was not final —
I forgot to freeze on the spot.
like Eucalyptus* I hung on a tree,
or a juicy green fruit, you can’t bite it,
or pick it. you can’t see it in the grass
but try rubbing me before embracing others
to smell fresh and nice,
so that like a fragment of glass
all is clean and clear
* Eucalyptus is translated as «well concealed.» I remembered it when I was reading about femininity, which is concealed in its connection with itself. Once I found a eucalyptus leaf inside my book as a bookmark.
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The etiology of your paranoid psychosis included both organic issues and an abrupt change in living conditions. You had persecutory delusions, delusional jealousy, delusions about saving the world, our souls, and your own. You had no memory of the violence you caused in the state of insanity. The pressure of your mother’s Christianity and your father’s violence (he used to beat you up for any misconduct when you were a child—you have told my mother) made you eventually (I mean towards the end of your history) isolate yourself from us. They did not accept you at the monastery; they told you to take care of your children, so you went away to live in an isolated house, where you mostly read or did sports. Later, I looked for a description of your everyday life in Barthes' How to Live Together. I painstakingly tried to figure it out—how you lived there and how one could understand you, share your loneliness, when you were ill, nobody needed you, and you were thrown out of your life at 37.
You still saw demons and ghosts and believed that your wife was filthy, but you no longer beat us. You spent the last year and a half of your life at home, because mother did not want to send you to a hospice. You were dying slowly and suffered from constant pain; you had metastases all over your body and in your lungs. You croaked and bellowed like she had when you beat her up. You were hawking up your lungs. You literally needed others to wash away your filth. Opioids did not help. I remembered how you had taught me to meditate, and I hoped you would stop feeling pain. But I wanted you to stop feeling pain completely.
I started doing psychiatry a little at the age of 14, in the 7th year at school. My first science report was devoted to suicide, I worked on it for a few years, and my main point was that people who committed suicide always talked about their troubles, but nobody heard them or took their words seriously. Men succeeded more often, but women were more inventive and made more attempts. I made a questionnaire for teenagers, and I tested it at school. I wanted to spot the people whom nobody understood. Yet only now I understand that you always had speech problems; you spoke very fast and incomprehensibly as if you were scared of being understood.
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should we have seen that you would never be able to receive what one could call the necessary help? should we have understood that none of us would ever get what we wanted, neither together nor instead of you? should we have stopped waiting for the end of your life and our lives? should we have resisted or kept asking? Why and how did another person’s knowledge not reach us? What became the wall between us—was it your illness or everybody else’s fear of it, and you as its bearer? What did fear mean?
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essentially, I have missed several years of my life, like I have missed many things.
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ten sublimations, ten diapers.
the music has stopped, you can hear
very well. some fuckheads
think they can get us clear.
the four brave and strong ones,
their dear hangman’s the fifth
don’t say «please save me,» the words that you say
will come crawling out as tears
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I was for a long time afraid of any thoughts that could be wrong or not normal in the understanding of my family, of your and mother’s family. For example, I could suffer and so I could drink, but I could not suffer yet not drink. I could feel nothing yet dedicate my life to others, but I could not feel nothing and not care about others. One of my favorite psychoanalysts said that Desire is Hell. Yes, I know.
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my father was a jolly big man, you know
he took me to the park, holding my hand, bought me my favorite books,
he took me to riding lessons, tennis and swimming lessons (I did not learn)
he read philosophers and poets with me,
he told me funny stories, and he was strong and handsome
he loved me, and he heard and saw me.
one day we were going for a walk in the park
dad, I am too big to hold your hand,
you hang your head.
I know, you are very sad.
yes. You let go of my hand.
well, that was the last time I held your hand without fear.
dad, I am never too big; I have changed my mind, daddy
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the term «paranoia» was coined by Emil Kraepelin
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«We describe one group of these patients as suffering from delusions of being observed. They complain to us that perpetually, and down to their most intimate actions, they are being molested by the observation of unknown powers—presumably persons—and that in hallucinations, they hear these persons reporting the outcome of their observation: 'now he’s going to say this, now he’s dressing to go out' and so on. Observation of this sort is not yet the same thing as persecution, but it is not far from it; it presupposes that people distrust them, and expect to catch them carrying out forbidden actions for which they would be punished. How would it be if these insane people were right, if in each of us there is present in his ego an agency like this which observes and threatens to punish, and which in them has merely become sharply divided from their ego and mistakenly displaced into external reality?» (Freud, S. Lectures On Psycho-Analysis. Lecture XXXI, The Dissection of the Psychical Personality)
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what a stupid question is that?
this did not affect me in any way
(I’m writing this text)
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I remember shutting the door with a desk, so you would not enter the room, so you would not touch me, would not touch me and my sisters. At 13, my body was made of stone; I remember (I remember as I counted and repeated. counted and repeated) that I did 6 sets of 20 push-ups, 6 sets of 30 upper core exercises, the same for the lower core, did 4 sets of 20 dynamic lunges. I still throw knives very well, and I hit the sewage slit with the cigarette butt 9 out of 10 times.
all I wanted was to find a little crack, a tiny little hole through which I could get into your head and change something inside, correct something, or hit something in it. To hit you with something fine and sharp. Nobody could help me.
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nobody thought it was true. nobody knew.
that only meant that my only refuge from you were the other people who never came.
they never came and never heard anything and never saw anything and could not do anything.
in the end, you see, I had to rewrite even this—my entire desire was based on the fact that nobody noticed anything. and one man saw things that were not there.
but you were just ill. You were just really tired.
still nobody came to see us.
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It was not black and became like a wheel.
Ghosts have no pupils, no eyes, no arms, no legs,
no mouth, no head, no me, no you, no today, no tomorrow
no past, no future, no prayers, no confessions, no agreement, no vows,
no offenses, no songs, no ghosts, no dead.
What do the ghosts have that we don’t?
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one needs to read something else in order to write. One needs to read along with something, layer it over or under in order to look from the outside, sideways.
the analyst stays on the edge, but the poet runs through a burning house. You hit me when I was 6, hit my head against the table because I wrote badly (What was I writing?). When I was 10, you chased your father with an ax, when I was 11 you hit my sister for the first time. when I was 13, you tried to choke me. for six years you beat up my mother for anything.
you said that poets feel the spirit. that they are like tuned strings, vibrating and feeling. you were a big man, 190 cm high, 120 kilograms, a former hockey player, a boxer, an Ivanhoe reader; what happened?
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«Women can go further than men on the path of loyalty in love, and that is why Lacan prefers to use the term 'devastation' to 'masochism' for what a man can bring onto a woman. It is not that women are masochists, but the threat of castration knows no borders and has no obstacles. Women can be more committed in giving themselves and their body to reach the point where life turns into the pleasure of the Other».
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k. asked me if I could see figures in the empty space between the objects— their contours? I think I only know how to see the empty space.
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«The absence I mentioned earlier,» Lacan says in Seminar XVIII, «has produced a curious contamination in French. If you take the sans, which is supposed to come from the Latin sine, which is highly unlikely since its first form was something like senz, we can see that the absentia, in the ablative, used in juridical texts and from which there comes this sans, a term without head or tail. We have already put forward this little word from the beginning of what we have been talking about today. So what? In talking about senz and then sans (puis sans), are we not dealing with a puissance? One quite different to this en puissance (in potency) of an imaginary virtuality, which is only power by being deceptive—but rather the being in sense, which is to be taken differently than being in the fullest sense, and is rather what escapes being, as happens in the mot quite correctly described as esprit.«
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My middle name is Aksinya.
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I know how long I need to keep silent for, for the screaming to turn into black letters on pages—around 12 years.
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autopsy
biopsy
spend the entire day with me
I clap loudly
distracting your shadow
do you see these dots on the knees—
yesterday she asked me to pull out the ingrown hairs on her knees,
her back does not bend and her legs are swollen from work.
make peace make peace, and don’t fight again.
and you are not asking for anything. for several weeks now you have not talked to us and you have not come home, we are feeling good together and quiet, we are drinking tea, and nobody is shouting.
Somehow I’m not so good at poetry when I think of my mother.
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a year before you died, I started learning to dissect things at medical school. I cut out hearts and nerves from the fat and fascia. I wanted to save the hearts and nerves of other people.
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«So, the first phase of the beating phantasy in girls should have to do with the very early childhood. Something in them stays remarkably indefinite, as if it were indifferent. It is as if the scarcity of the information we get from the patients when they first announce 'a child is beaten up' were justified within the phantasy of this [phase].»
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no police ever came to us. no neighbors ever looked into our faces. You answered all of the psychologists' questions correctly and smiled sweetly, and they really believed you; then, you left their office and beat up a man on the bus. because you heard demonic music and saw demons, you threw an ax at your father. and we were three, we no longer screamed, and she no longer screamed, she was silent or howled, and the walls were cold, and I wanted to get under the bottom of our bunk bed and hide in the bags of our kids' clothes. I did that in my imagination. because the girls were smaller than me and held onto me. then, when you started falling down, I learned to turn onto my stomach, turn your head sideways, and jam your jaw with a spoon and hold the weight of my mother when she cried on my shoulder and did not call the ambulance.
who have I become to you?
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then I got three friends; they were all men.
my sisters had none; in a way, I got one for each of us.
one because Render unto Caesar, that’s what you believed
that’s what you said.
so, really, it’s unclear who it is that (I?) mourn,
my sisters whom you (-) in my memory
I don’t remember anything
I do not see them there
my mother whom you (-) in my memory
I don’t remember anything
I do not see them there
my friends whom you (-) in my memory
I remember
I can see well
but I have no words for that
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did I dream of that, when I did not think of your ghosts,
wings and wings?
I had no right to be naked,
too helpless, thin,
there was no tree to jump from. and no color.
beautiful kids laugh in my face
cute girls, boys, your glass is thin
and transparent
and so is mine, thin and transparent
only I needed to hide, and you wanted to be noticed
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In the Torah, «God» is never called «father.»
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still
winds blow before the rose is ready, dragging it into a lullaby.
still
there is color and sound and a little more
of a resonating superficial word,
above your dust.
a mix of arrogance and cracks
here is an interpretation of the prepared slurry for you, master:
of the place where the word is looking for a place to jump just once
peek into the screen, put a plaster on,
a rescue ball like a telegram circle.
and all that was needed was a point and the continuity of place,
where without the rumbling spurs nor a pointing stick
a long prayer tale with the mapping of meaning, the text,
pretty things, nasty things, musty things
sing to misery and happiness
unknown to me—they repeat all the same, and they lie:
ἄξιος,
ἄξιος,
respond to me!
respond—you are being called