Words for Wednesday (on Thursday)

From Freud’s Sister by Goce Smilevski (translated by Christina E Kramer) – a novel written from the voice of Sigmund Freud’s sister, Adolfina.

My mother sensed my vulnerability, and she plunged her hatred into it. Hatred cannot be understood completely, nor its sources known, just as Sarah once said of happiness that it could not be defined – it could only be felt. Perhaps, like sin and happiness, hate also exists only in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes I tried to make sense of my mother’s hatred toward me. Perhaps I was something like a pit into which my mother could throw her darkness. Perhaps, I thought, she hated in me my father, her ancient husband, who was older even than her own father. Perhaps in her hatred toward me she extinguished her longing to have a husband her own age even before that yearning had been ignited. Perhaps her hate was an expression of that distant pain, born of being forced to smother her girlish dreams prematurely, to obey her ancient husband in silence, to live in poverty and give birth and raise children in that poverty. Or perhaps, because of my attachment to my brother, she hated me because she was powerless to hate the one who had separated her golden Siggie from her. He was beginning a different life, building a new world in which we could be only incidental passersby, and had now chosen to be just a guest in our wold. But if my mother had taken a dislike to Martha Bernays, there was nothing she could do to her, since poison directed at my brother’s beloved would never reach her, would remain in my mother, and therefore she had chosen me.

that is how it seemed to me, though perhaps I was mistaken, as I tried to explain to myself the burden of my existence. Already in a child’s first glimmers of consciousness there is a heavy sense of time, a vague premonition that our existence is formed of grains of sand that the wind disperses, and that it is only the sense of ourselves, of our I, that holds us intact, until the last small grain of sand – the last relic of life – is blown away, when our I will also be extinguished, and behind us all that will remain is the wind of time. From time to time, the wind blows so fiercely that it carries away not only the grain of sand but also parts of the I itself, and the I feels powerless – it feels the wind will carry it away along with the sand, that it will be extinguished before all the grains of sand allotted to it for a lifetime have blown away – and then the I seeks  another I, some other I‘s, to accompany it while the wind of time howls around it; it needs these other I’s as support for the survival not of its material substance but of what is most essential to that I.

My mother, be her glance, her word, her gesture, broke off a part of me, a part I would always lack, a part that I would always seek. Throughout my life I felt I was lacking something, the way the Venus de Milo lacks arms. I lacked nothing in my outer appearance but something inside of me, as if the arms of my soul were lacking, and that absence, that lack, that feeling of emptiness, made me helpless. Throughout my life I felt as though someone’s gaze were destroying my existence, and, at the same time, I sought some being who would heal the brokenness of my I.  (pages 98-99)

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