My new unconscious

He constellated my matters, placing wine glasses in triadic opposition. Now move the person and issue to where you want them, he toyed, chin in hand I'm sure, and I didn't fully confide but moved the issue closer and the person well away. You need to find a place in your heart for this person, he corroborated. I was annoyed. Not banish him and laugh at his greyness? Anyway I was instantly addicted to the playfulness of it.

I don't rate Freud, I said, there in Freud's dining room, recalling Matthew Brannon's recommended book. I just don't think I have an unconscious, I don't think problems and their friendly solutions are just hanging out in there waiting to be discovered and applied. I wondered if he was the first person to talk of such solutions, or perhaps the first one to make news with it. I discovered later in the week that Patanjali was onto a similar thing in 200BC. There's a reason for the adjective Freudian and the non-adjective of Patanjalian. And the size of that house in Hampstead.

What repression is it to say 'I have no unconscious'? Just because I can arrange (quite clumsily) my problems in the conscious realm, doesn't mean that's all there is. Imagine if this was all there was? Not even This, as This in itself is an act of drawing from said unconscious. Would I be writing these words without a keyboard or pen? Would I hell. I'd not be talking to myself out loud either. I'd probably just be prancing round the kitchen to something tacky on Smooth FM waiting for my egg to poach.

To bite me back, perhaps the spirit of the doctor remained you know where, but I spent the rest of the week dreaming. Two plane crashes, some dying grandparents and some licentious affairs. And day-dreaming about Liverpool, ruining a couple of jugs of milk. On Liverpool! I thought you were supposed to push things away by trying to remember them, like that phone number or spot you holidayed at in 1987. Or perhaps it's that don't-think-of-a-polar-bear-and-it's-all-you-can-think? Or maybe it's just a strain of that Conscious Conversation?

There is some dichotomy here between the idea of mindfulness and said conversation. I see the former as a Westernised, pay-per-view version of the latter. You're almost doing it, but you're doing it by rote and a handy CD rather than being it. I don't want to be one of those People Who Write Lists and Still Get Fuck All Done. But if you don't make a list somewhere, physically, mentally, consciously, unconsciously, how do we know where we're going?

A while back I was quite concerned with my writing being mere catharsis, sitting back next to my eustachian tubes (damn things on my mind), waiting for keys and ink to help it out. What was this prophetic fallacy, something both hallowed and limited to me having an arbitrary hour late on weeknight to release? There's really no mystery. Whilst believing in Now, Being, all that, we must believe too in the now we don't yet know, brewing back up in some dark magical place we can't yet fathom. My new unconscious sits back there like a chicken oyster and I bathe it in best wishes.