BtZ: Pirate//Brown on Fantasy

[ish mailian]

 In _On Creativity and the Unconscious_ Freud, in the short essay,
"The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming (1908), contrasts the
phantasies of children, who daydream of being grown up, play at what
they view it is like to live in the world of adults, and  have no
inhibitions, no shame in it, don't conceal this play, with the adults
on the other hand, who must hide play, fantasy, though they know that
all adults, to some extent must also day dream and have fantasies, for
they know too that what the fancy  is  not only often prohibited but
also that dreaming of it, playing at it, is the work or play of
children.

It's a fascinating essay.

Sorry I can't find a copy online.

On Fri, Mar 25, 2016 at 7:41 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:
> Noting some things in Life Against Death and GR that seem related (at least,
> they made me think of one another in rereading)., especially as we start
> looking at Pirate and his gift more.
>
> Brown (I mean you could pull ten relevant sentences out of any page in this
> book, so this is sort of arbitrary) says, pp 162-3 of my paperback of Life
> Against Death:
>
> "The regressive orientation keeps not only our moral personality (character,
> conscience) in bondage to the past, but also our cognitive faculty--in
> Freudian terminology, the ego's function of testing reality. The human ego,
> in its cognitive function, is no transparent mirror transmitting the
> reality-principle to the id; it has a more active, and distorting, role
> consequent to upon its incapacity to bear the reality of life in the
> present. The starting point for the human form of cognitive activity is loss
> of a loved reality."
>
> 163: "the ego does not abolish the pleasure-principle, but derives from it
> the energy sustaining its exploration of reality."
>
> "Hence also human consciousness is inseparable from an active attempt to
> alter reality, so as to 'regain the lost objects.'"
>
> "The more specific and concrete mechanism whereby the body-ego becomes a
> soul is fantasy. Fantasy may be defined as a hallucination which cathects
> the memory of gratification.; it is of the same structure as the dream, and
> has the same relation to the id and to instinctual reality as the dream."
>
> 164 "Identifications as modes of installing the Other inside the Self are
> fantasies."
>
> "Fantasy, according to The Interpretation of Dreams, is the product of the
> primary process, the human organism's first solution to the problem of
> frustration."
>
> Quoting Isaacs: "reality-thinking cannot operate without concurrent and
> supporting unconscious phantasies."
>
> 171: "Projections, with their fetishistic displacement of inner fantasies,
> must distort the external world."
>
>
> GR p. 12: "You can't run a war on gusts of emotion."
>
> GR p. 31: "All these things arise from one difficulty: control[...] The
> control is put inside. No more need to suffer passively under 'outside
> forces'--to veer into any wind."
>
> p. 36: "Incredible black-and-white Scorpia confirmed not a few Piratical
> fantasies about the glamorous silken-calved English realworld he'd felt so
> shut away from."
>
> p. 36 "[...]Scorpia figured as his Last Fling--though herself too young to
> know that, to know, like Pirate, what the lyrics to "Dancing in the Dark"
> are really about...
>
> "He will be scrupulous about never telling her. But there are times when
> it's agony not to go to her feet, knowing she won't leave Clive, crying
> you're my last chance...if it can't be you then there's no more
> time....Doesn't he wish, against all hope, that he could let the poor,
> Western-man's timetable go...but how does a man...where does he even begin,
> at age 33...."
>
> p. 37 "Yes he is waiting, to see if it will end for Roger the same way, part
> of him, never so cheery as at the spectacle of another's misfortune, rooting
> for Beaver and all that he, like Clive, stands for, to win out. But another
> part--an alternate self?--one that he mustn't be quick to call
> 'decent'--does seem to want for Roger what Pirate himself lost...."
>
> p. 37 "'You are a pirate,' she'd whispered the last day--neither of them
> knew it was the last day--'you've come and taken me off on your pirate ship.
> A girl of good family and the usual repressions. You've raped me. And I'm
> the Red Bitch of the High Seas....' A lovely game. Pirate wished she'd
> thought it up sooner. Fucking the last (already the last) day's light away
> down afternoon to dusk, hours of fucking, too in love with it to uncouple,
> they noticed how the borrowed room rocked gently, the ceiling obligingly
> came down a foot, lamps swayed from their fittings, some fraction of the
> Thameside traffic provided salty cries over the water, and nautical
> bells....
>
> "But back over their lowering sky-sea behind, Government hounds were on the
> track--drawing closer, the cutters are coming, the cutters and the sleek
> hermaphrodites of the law, agents who, being old hands, will settle for her
> safe return, won't insist on his execution or capture. Their logic is sound:
> give him a bad enough wound and he'll come round, round to the ways of this
> hard-boiled old egg of world and timetables, cycling night to compromising
> night...."
>
> "Scorpia's talc-white face, through the last window, across the last gate,
> was a blow to his heart. A flurry of giggles and best wishes arose from the
> Wonder Midgets and their admirers. Well, though Pirate, guess I'll go back
> in the Army...."
>
> It sounds like an apocalyptic death-sex fantasy.
>
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