Forgetting All the Way to the End

Forgetting All the Way to the End Kathryn Walsh Kuitenbrouwer (bio) From the Freudian point of view man is the subject captured and tortured by language. Jacques Lacan Seminar III I’ve started this paper three times. Maybe four. I am indeed “captured and tortured by language.” I keep forgetting what I want to write. I forget the words. I forget what the words mean. I forget why I agreed to write this. Forgetting is my problem and I suffer for it. I forget signifiers, especially nouns. I ask my partner if she has noticed that I am forgetting words lately and she says, “I can’t remember.” I stand in the antique store with a lampshade in my hand. I have “lamp-shade” on my list of things I want to buy. I have just read the word on a sign in front of a shelf filled with lampshades. The one I pick has beaded tassels and is silk; it’s probably from the 1920s. The store owner has asked us to write down what we are buying on the bill. I write down, “One large—” and I hold up the lampshade and say, “Whatever this thing is,” and then, [End Page 133] “It sucks getting old,” and the owner shrugs and says, “Tell me about it,” because she can’t recall that this thing is called “lampshade” either. I think that forgetting is its own sort of defense but against what? What could the word lampshade be condensing from my unconscious? It feels like madness, like annihilation, this forgetting. I know that I forget the word for [ ]. And also [ ]. I can see the objects these words describe perfectly so I guess I haven’t lost my mind. It occurs to me that maybe I am released a little from the expectations of the symbolic by these memory lapses. Maybe forgetting loosens the hold the symbolic has on me. I am certainly less afraid of confrontation being a symbolic project than I used to be. This might be the gift of aging. The curse of aging is death, of course, and not my own. Dying is easy compared to losing those you love. I’m mourning this loss of words just when I need them but I am also mourning the critical theorist, Mari Ruti, my friend and mentor, who died of complications due to cancer treatment on 8 June 2023. I’m remembering her even though, like the words I forget, she is gone, and this strange remembering ties me up, locks me down. ________ Mourning: that is when we say goodbye to the lost object. Mourning that introjects that object and refuses to let go tips into melancholia, or so Freud conjectures. ________ It’s Mari who introduces me to theory, and especially Lacanian psychoanalysis. She supervises me through my doctorate and then we write two books together—discourses on how to live and write creatively. I’m not a true-born academic. I am a novelist. My impetus is always to fracture and debilitate language a little and, in so doing, get it to do things it seems not to have been invented to do. But there are academic or academic-adjacent essays to write. These challenge the flights of fancy my mind wants to make. Mari’s precision with academic language stabilizes me. Her grammar is elegant and deliberate. She writes beautiful sentences in English, not her first language. Writing this paper (now my fifth attempt), I am missing her terribly. It’s as if by losing her I lose a grasp on syntax, vocabulary, and how to make meaning. I’m stymied, shut out of myself. I can’t seem to latch on to anything. I write for a few minutes, an hour, and then for the rest of the day, I am exhausted, as if putting words on the page is a physical labour. With this essay, I feel I am dragging grief up a hill. This is terrible for me because words are all I have. I am made of words and for words. [End Page 134] Mari and I are roughly the same age, one year apart. There is no...

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