Invisible Women

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SIGMUND: I don’t know when you have had time to visit all the women you describe to me. It seems to be you have never moved from my side.

LOU: Everything I see and do assumes meaning in a mental space where the same calm reigns as here, the same smoke and smells, the same silence streaked by the rustling of your wife. At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this room, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence, though I continue, without a moment’s pause, moving through room to room, speaking with women burdened with hysterics.

SIGMUND: I, too, am not sure I am here, sitting beside this fire or eating decadent foods, receiving awards or even speaking with you. I am unsure I stroll in the early evening and I constantly question if my sleep occurs with any regularity, or perhaps I am where my sons are, fighting in dirt with imaginary bullets that kill without reservation.

LOU: Perhaps this conversation exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids, and we have never stopped: you, from raising dust in the fields of internal battle; and I, from bargaining for sacks of pepper in distant bazaars. But each time we half-close our eyes, in the midst of the din and throng, we are allowed to withdraw here, dressed in our finest garbs, to ponder what we are seeing and living, to draw conclusions and understandings, to contemplate from a distance.

SIGMUND: Perhaps this dialogue of our is taking place between two hysterics named Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salome, as they sift in and out of rubbish heaps, piling up invisible flotsam, scrapes of imaginary nerves, screaming from repressed desires for their fathers and mothers, while drunk on a few sips of poor wine, they see in the distance all the treasure of calmness shine around them.

LOU: Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland covered with rubbish heaps and this one room of Sigmund Freud’s where we sit. It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which is outside.

SIGMUND: It is most clear to me that all of this could merely be transference and that these women you describe are manifestations of your homosexual desire for both self and, strangely, me.

LOU: All of this is irrelevant in the face of memory and reality, this accumulation of variations of self, and how you see it as a way for me to seduce you.