Remembering, repeating and working through

The thesis I started off writing was about film adaptation, and I'd read a lot of Freud the year before beginning it, and so I was aware of Freud's essay called 'Remembering, repeating and working through'. I thought that an essay called this should by rights lay out very precisely the psychodynamics of a textual obsession I was myself by then thoroughly obsessed with - the one where the obsession with the text is expressed and fulfilled by remaking it. But Freud's essay, which I clearly remember reading and re-reading some months apart, in something like disappointment or frustration, is in fact about nothing of the sort. Instead it is about the cognitive structure of progress in psychoanalysis. Remembering and repeating are mutually exclusive and insufficient approaches to acquiring distance on the past. Working through processing and it draws on remembering and on repeating in a very controlled and minute way, without ever succumbing wholly to one or the other.

Now I am not about to launch into a long disquisition on psychoanalysis. I only brought it up because my mood and the things that are mattering to me now have to do with memory and repetition.

It is silly, but I have been kind of bothered by the current social media fad for side-by-side comparisons of pictures taken this year with pictures taken ten years ago. It's not the entirely unsurprising evidence of how people who are ten years older actually look it, or the banal fact that we change our hairstyles etc. It's not the difference that throws me, it's the sameness.

Two unsmiling bathroom self-portraits:


Montmorency, 2008



Lancefield, late 2018

Last year I wrote about bathroom mirrors and feeling like I don't understand or even really recognise my own face. In that linked post I talked about the shock of illumination I received on remembering staring at my own face in the bathroom mirror when I was twelve or thirteen. I can now add a couple of things more to what I said about that memory when I wrote about it last June.

First, I know that I'll never be able to convey directly to another person a literal description of how it felt to be seeing myself, the parts of my face, in the mirror that day more than thirty years in the past. The memory is strong, clear and vivid. But the memory is of an experience of myself as unconnected elements. Freckles; eyes; a mouth; hair; a forehead; a gaze. It was recognition, and at the same time, bewilderment. This was one of those surreal experiences that can only be carried in broken language - poetry and song as well as mad ravings.

The second thing I can add is that I have thought a great deal about why it might be that I have such a hard time, in various ways, figuring out whether other people are really seeing me when they look at me (and I mean also when they encounter my work) or whether they're looking past me to something else.



Remembering the past versus repeating the past - such a tricky maybe fraught opposition to navigate, in terms of one's own life for sure but just as much in engaging with larger communal narratives and experiences. I have just started an interesting project which is going to be a good field for reflecting on these questions. The project is reading a text, one which mattered hugely to me as a younger person, though lenses since acquired which are sceptical about the explanatory power we accord to texts that occupy these autobiographical positions.What I have managed to do is identify that the play of memory and repetition in the text I'm looking at falls in a kind of Greimasian rectangle with autobiography, culture, nostalgia and refusal at the corners. This is useful but static. I am looking to tell a story, though, so I need to give some thought to which axis will open up the strongest flow of narrative through the concepts.

I was looking for ideas about this in a book of essays on re-enactment in contemporary art and performance, and I turned a page and there this was: a postcard from a Mike Brown show at Heide about five years ago.

It hit me pretty hard. Again, I know just why and it's a mixture of feelings about the artwork itself, its beauty, its directness, its strength in simplicity and vulnerability, its wisdom and the light it emits and that slides into the cracks in my own broken heart; a mixture of feelings about Mike Brown who was a quietly powerful presence in my life for a few years; and also, just the unlooked-for surprise of seeing again a beautiful thing, this expression of hope and trust, which I had not thought about for a long time. But I had not forgotten it.

At work on Friday I was quietly doing some research about the family of an Australian nurse who died in France of flu in 1919 and her family who lived around different places in northern Victoria. Then, all of a sudden, I was working out how much time I would need to drive to Jenolan, then to Katoomba, and back home via Canberra, with a couple of days in each place. E went to Jenolan last year and described the somewhat Overlook Hotel-sounding Jenolan Caves House, and I thought, that's it, that's the place which I have been looking for my whole life. I wrote all of this down, too - distances and times - I think I might have been planning a holiday. I scribbled routes and dates on a piece of paper and it has stayed on my desk. I didn't think about what it meant to have this wish, to write it down, and then to neither throw the paper away nor plan to take steps to really make it happen. Then this afternoon I did think about those things. I was genuinely surprised to notice that I had been abstractedly contemplating a perfectly doable and really quite modest bit of travel apparently as if it was no more possible and realistic than a wish to fly to the moon. And I said to myself, You really can do that trip: but you need to save it for a time when you know you can travel in a spirit of optimism and happiness.

Much more simply, I am looking forward to the full moon that's coming on Monday night. I would like to take an evening walk in a quiet open place, where I could watch it gliding up into the dark sky.