The Invention of Influence by Peter Cole

Author:Peter Cole [Cole, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry, American, General
ISBN: 9780811221726
Google: CxTzmQEACAAJ
Amazon: 0811221725
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2014-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

3.

After, Lou recalled,

Tausk’s lecture

on the Father Problem,

Freud was waiting

for me in the street. He

was restless—Tausk’s

ideas were close to his,

and during the talk

he’d passed me a note, asking:

“Does he know

all about it, already?”

—

He left an uncanny impression, said Freud,

who felt the disciple somehow in him—

thinking his thoughts though out ahead of him,

under his skin. Whose ideas

were his? What sort of sympathy was this?

Something deeply familiar, but strange,

which rendered one oddly at home in the foreign

and also alien to what one had been.

Where would it take them? What could be known

on one’s own? Weird is the word

that suited him—as in what was destined.

—

Precisely this

afflicts the plagiarist,

or something like

the X he is:

What’s old and has

long been known

seems to him new

and becomes his own.

He’s all reception,

all alone,

and the fruits are manifold

though the root is one—

thwarted ambition

and a sense at heart

the doctor describes

as a kind of cry:

I cannot bear

not to have been

the first to have uttered

a certain thing.

—

Freud said he could never be certain,

in view of his wide and early reading,

whether what seemed like a new creation

might not be the work instead

of hidden channels of memory leading

back to the notions of others absorbed,

coming now anew into form

he’d almost known within him was growing.

He called it (the ghost of a) cryptomnesia.

So we own and owe what we know.

—

Invited to Freud’s Friday evening.

Talked at length of the Tausk problem.

Home at two thirty in the morning.

—

“From the first stirrings of the dream,” wrote Lou,

“through to the place where we’re fully conscious,

we are only en route.”

And this too—

“Poetry is something between the dream

and the reading.”

Which might be just: Poetry is something between …

—

To be a link

to something more

and in that thinking—

to know its core.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.