On Ferenczi, Personal Savings, Histories of Pee, and Other Remains
After class on Tuesday, I jumped on the train, through the cold February of Berlin, to meet Marc at Kotti Cafe in Kreuzberg. And then ran off to AP Bookstore, for our Sandor Ferenczi reading group in Wedding. The topic, “The Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money” his 1914 paper on anal eroticism, extrapolating a theory of why some people obsess, sublimating early fixations for a less smelly fetish over money, the discharge some hold onto, a power play that goes on sometimes for days and years. “Thc excrementa thus held back are really his first "savings",” says the master, “the growing being… remain in a constant, unconscious inter-relations with every bodily activity or mental striving…”
Every mental striving, it's hard to think. I can only imagine.
Everyone else in the group is talking.
A book is glaring at me in the distance.
I can’t stop thinking about it sitting ahead of me, Solitary Sex, a history, reminding me of summer reading from two decades ago, drafting a review essay, PhD research, academic and personal, chatting with Penelope by the pool, worlds colliding, ever intertwined.
Ferenczi hated the subject.
I imagined there was more to it.
Our bodies and their functions, inner and outer, psychic and physical worlds, demons and pleasures, holding and releasing that we try to reconcile throughout our lives.
When I get home the teenager reads me a poem about urine, where it goes, where it comes from, here and there, from beer to the Spree, to the Gowanus Canal and its toxics, our sewage overflowing into the East River.
Lots of ideas, the teenager drafts stories of lives, ignored, feelings disguised, joking, neglected, ever deflecting, laughing, of moss and isolation, no one listening but the junkies, hobos, ghosts, and imaginary friends, secret histories of goth punks and emo kids in the park, a bowel movement on a moving subway seat on the way to school during the morning rush hour.
Listening, I find myself thinking about the history of condensation, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, from water to vapor drifting in the air transformed, changing form, from rain to snow.
Down it pours from the clouds to the mountains, tricking into the rivers, creeks, tributaries, into our lives, into the beer in a bar.
Drink, sustenance, pee.
The journey of the raindrop we read about as kids, takes countless turns and tributaries.
Their history, all of our histories, into “piles of dust”.
Later we watch the X Files episode when Mulder and Scully can’t find water, reminding us of the water we ignore, that we expel.
The water in cities, in the drains, the smell of pee in the streets, by the subways.
Filling the air, with the odor of urine, pretzels and pee, my old New York familiar, displaced, replaced with the drift of pot, now ubiquitous in Gotham.
Lingering in the nooks and crannies, hiding in the desultory alleys, like Peter Lorie in M, shadows in the fog, it evaporates, transformed to vapor, something that was once here, disappearing, changing shape, to something else we can’t see, still around, repeating, recurring, reappearing.
I’m studying for social theory class, thinking about Nietzsche and his “last breath of a vaporizing reality” differentiating between the “real” and the “apparent”.
The ditch digger picks me up in a dream and we drive on fumes, into the Garden State, not sure whose real or apparent, shadows and illusions.
Back to Ferenzci, back to shit, construction of symbols, myths, fears, tales, and fantasies. A psychologist talks about his patients in the hospital, celebrating their bowel movements, telling him about them. Everyone’s giggling.
Dad always knew he was going to be ok when he had a good bowel movement after an operation, he said with a grin, a twinkle in his eye.
I recall the guys who used to smear it on the bathroom wall, writing messages, doodles by the toilet in the ominous, gothic Chicago Theological Seminary.
We’d write them letters.
PhD students stuck, all but dissertation for years, their advisors on leave, in purgatory.
More confessions about getting it out, constipation, pregnant with ideas.
“To shit is to live,” says Lina Wertmuller’s escapee in Seven Beauties, before collapsing to his death in a pool of shit at the camp.
The German toilets let it sit on display, says another observer in class. Why?
To shit is to live.
The secret history of pee can be traced back millenia, says Ronald Blumer. “...a wild history which winds its golden stream through the origins of Count Dracula, ancient Hindu doctrine…”
The stream of transcendence tells us everything, said the New Yorker article Steve told me about all those years ago.
“It sounds like a theory of biological determinism,” says a comrade in the bathroom at Freie Universitat.
Onward, into the toilet, through the sewage drains, the bathrooms in Tompkins where guys shoot up, passed out in the back, the boys in stalls and urinals, where the ladies hitch up their glamorous outfits to pee at Berghain, Berlin, the actual toilets filled for other uses, god knows what, pleasures and intoxicants, ever luring.
I’m more taken with the sweaty bodies dancing at the Panorama Bar on the second floor.
A familiar song fills the afternoon dancefloor, everyone singing along to the old disco anthem:
“I still hang around neither lost nor found..
Street life,” they clap along, the lights filling the room.
Boys, no shirts, girls in even less.
The sensory feeling, beats filling our souls, smells of perfume and sweat, among the moving bodies, strobes, blurring into darkness, glimpses of daylight, pot, cigarette smoke dancing between the lights, meandering among the secret stalls, nooks, sex spots, the fog flying onto the dance floor, the smell of chemicals mixing into the afternoon air, everyone clapping along, eyeballs bulging, cheering the DJ’s.
Wednesday, Marco invited us to Amanda, a disco party at Sameheads, where the DJ in sequins, played and everyone shook, song after song, Italian cuties, tight pants, party outfits, Marco putting makeup on his adorers from Berghain.
“.... I feel love....” sang Donna.
Dance, Marco demands.
A dildo spins on the turntable.
And everyone moves, throughout the smokey room, hot and lovely.
Across town, Frau.Fisch stands up in the window to sing at Mysliwska, after the Long Tall Texans finish their psychobilly set at Lido on Cuvrystraße 7. Everyone in the dingy bar looks at them performing, amidst the cigarette smoke and steamy windows, fans from Berlin to Brazil.
And I find myself walking past the Russian embassy, past murals about the war, signs, memorials, for the dead. Onward, backward through Friedrichshain, I walk past squats, colors, paints on the walls. Thinking about the Ratman who perished in the mud during the Great War, Winnicott and a fear of a breakdown, Ferenczi and his struggles to come to grips with the joy and birth, the falling apart and ontological shock that hits us all from time to time, in need of an existential break.
“Fear of breakdown is the fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced,” said Winnicott.
Caroline tells me stories of walls rising and falling in a divided city, screams she can’t stop hearing, dancing between the real and the apparent.
By Friday, we we’re all naked in the baths down the street in Prenzlauer Berg.
To the shower, the hot sauna, cold pool, back and forth, repeat, dozens of us together, our senses swirling into a kaleidoscope of feeling, finally outside with the stars, everyone, looking at the moon, howling away in the winter evening.
Drizzle in the air, steam rising off our bodies, maybe some else’s remains, into the air, into the night.
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