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But to our little abridged Greek Lexicon, to verify akantha. Yes — as from aké, a point, edge, hence a prickly plant, thistle; also a thorny tree. A thorny tree. Was our thistle the sign or sigil of all thorny trees? Perhaps even of that singularly prickly Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil with its attendant Serpent. There were, and are, many varieties of serpents. There was, among many others, that serpent of Wisdom that crouched at the feet of the goddess Athené and was one of her attributes, like the spear (aké, a point) she held in her hand — though we cannot be sure that it was a spear that the Professor’s perfect little bronze once held in her hand. It might have been a rod or staff.
69
Thy rod and thy staff. In England, our American goldenrod, that runs riot in the late-summer fields and along every lane and at the edge of every strip of woodland, is cultivated in tidy clumps in gardens, and is called Aaron’s rod. The goldenrod brings us to the Golden Bough; it was to Plato that Meleager, in the Greek Anthology, attributed the golden bough, ever shining with its own light. And the Professor, one winter day, offered me a little branch. He explained that his son in the South of France had posted (or sent by some acquaintance returning to Vienna from the Midi) a box of oranges, and some branches with leaves were among them. He thought I might like this. I took the branch, a tiny tree in itself, with its cluster of golden fruit. I thanked the Professor. At least, I murmured some platitude, “How lovely — how charming of you” or some such. Did he know, did he ever know, or did he ever not-know, what I was thinking? I did not say what I had no time to formulate into words — or if I had had time for other than a superficial “How lovely — how perfectly charming,” I could not have trusted myself to say the words. They were there. They were singing. They went on singing like an echo of an echo in a shell — very far away yet very near — the very shell substance of my outer ear and the curled involuted or convoluted shell skull, and inside the skull, the curled, intricate, hermit-like mollusk, the brain-matter itself. Thoughts are things — sometimes they are songs. I did not have to recall the words, I had not written them. Another mollusk in a hard cap of bone or shell had projected these words. There was a song set to them, that still another singing skull had fashioned. No, not Schumann’s music — lovely as it is — there was a song we sang as school-children, another setting to the words. And even the words sing themselves without music, so it does not matter that I have not been able to identify the “tune” as we lilted it. Kennst du das Land?
70
Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?
The words return with singular freshness and poignancy, as I, after this long time of waiting, am able to remember without unbearable terror and overwhelming heartbreak those sessions in Vienna. The war closed on us, before I had time to sort out, relive, and reassemble the singular series of events and dreams that belonged in historical time to the 1914–1919 period. I wanted to dig down and dig out, root out my personal weeds, strengthen my purpose, reaffirm my beliefs, canalize my energies, and I seized on the unexpected chance of working with Professor Freud himself. I could never have thought it possible to approach him, nor even have thought of inquiring if it were possible, if it had not been for Dr. Sachs’s suggestion. I had had some fascinating, preliminary talks with Dr. Hanns Sachs in Berlin and wanted to go on with the work, but he was leaving for America. Dr. Sachs asked me if I would consider working with the Professor if he would take me? If he would take me? It seemed such a fantastic suggestion and to my mind highly unlikely that Freud himself would consider me as analysand or student. But if the Professor would accept me, I would have no choice whatever in the matter. I would go to him, of course.
71
I have said earlier in these notes that the Professor’s explanations were too illuminating or too depressing. I meant that in some strange way we had managed to get at the root of things, today, we have tunneled very deep; and in another still stranger way, we had approached the clearest fountain-head of highest truth, as in the luminous real dream of the Princess and the river which was in the realm of what is known generally as the supernormal; it was a scene or picture from those realms from which the illuminati received their — “credentials” seems a strange word as I write it, but it “wrote itself.” My Princess picture was one of an exquisite, endless sequence from an illuminated manuscript, and has its place in that category among books and manuscripts; the dream, you may remember, I said in the beginning, varies like the people we meet, like the books we read. The books and the people merge in this world of fantasy and imagination; nonetheless we may differentiate with the utmost felicity and fidelity between dreams and the types of different fantasies; there are the most trivial and tiresome dreams, the newspaper class — but even there is, in an old newspaper, sometimes a hint of eternal truth, or a quotation from a great man’s speech or some tale of heroism, among the trashy and often sordid and trivial record of the day’s events. The printed page varies, cheap news-print, good print, bad print, smudged and uneven print — there are the great letter words of an advertisement or the almost invisible pin-print; there are the huge capitals of a child’s alphabet chart or building blocks; letters or ideas may run askew on the page, as it were; they may be purposeless; they may be stereotyped and not meant for “reading” but as a test, as for example the symmetrical letters that don’t of necessity “spell” anything, on a doctor’s or oculist’s chart hung on the wall in an office or above a bed in a hospital. There are dreams or sequences of dreams that follow a line like a graph on a map or show a jagged triangular pattern, like a crack on a bowl that shows the bowl or vase may at any moment fall in pieces; we all know that almost invisible thread-line on the cherished glass butter-dish that predicts it will “come apart in me ’ands” sooner or later — sooner, more likely.
There are all these shapes, lines, graphs, the hieroglyph of the unconscious, and the Professor had first opened the field to the study of this vast, unexplored region. He himself — at least to me personally — deplored the tendency to fix ideas too firmly to set symbols, or to weld them inexorably. It is true that he himself started to decipher or decode the vast accumulation of the material of the unconscious mind; it was he who “struck oil” but the application of the “oil,” what could or should be made of it, could not be entirely regulated or supervised by its original “promoter.” He struck oil; certainly there was “something in it”; yes, a vast field for exploration and — alas — exploitation lay open. There were the immemorial Gods ranged in their semicircle on the Professor’s table, that stood, as I have said, like the high altar in the Holy of Holies. There were those Gods, each the carved symbol of an idea or a deathless dream, that some people read: Goods.