New

Clapper rails make their loud alarm calls.

It’s a marsh in the southern part of the borough and something about a sudden encounter with a species after a long day of reading and writing strikes me as worth reflecting on. I moved to the city ten months ago to move from an academic career to a career in psychoanalysis, as a practitioner in its central U.S. location, the site of the Jewish exodus for the Jewish science and while it might be more elegant somehow to think of it as a universal science not affiliated with religion or culture or a specific locale, psychoanalysis has become for me my own ethnic marker of a membership of a tribe, New York.

NYC. Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island. Jersey City. Harriman. Westchester. Bushwick, Flatbush, Prospect Park, Central Park. I’m in Marine Park, at the south end of Midwood.

Who knew that I could become so local once more, so ecologically-minded, not in the sense of non-human interactions on virginized land, but in terms of the local culture of psychoanalysis, and the people I’ve come to know through being part of an institute, and part of a city plugged in to apps used for dating.

There’s something absolutely destabilizing about the drift that the city induces, at least in my mind, that of someone who seeks to become a professional listener. I sit in my room all day composing a paragraph on D.H. Lawrence’s “Etruscan Places” and wonder about how it might be incorporated into a discussion of meaning-making, a very abstract but rigorously constrained discussion of affirmation and negation. Then I run to Marine Park and walk along the marsh-side trail until the rails “clapper” at me in alarm.

The sound of the rail isn’t yet ingrained in my recall, so I listen to it again. That chorus of linear clucks whose frequency range seems so limited, and therefore machine-like and somewhat electronic. It’s uncanny, really, beacuse you can tell that it comes from the throat of some animal with a thin neck. When I play back the call from the app on my phone, Merlin, the most intrepid of the rails walks out from the reeds and makes itself visible. A machine responding to a machine, or a life with a mind of its own?

Laplanche believes in the primacy of messages, in the messages sent from the sexual unconscious of the parent to the perceptions of the child. I think of the skin of the infant receiving these messages and stowing them away into her own sexual unconscious, but I also think of the child’s first encounter through sight or with the living other, a bird or an insect, an encounter which might also occur through hearing.

When I encounter a non-human entity I can’t help but feel myself pulled into this condition of seduction, of being seduced by what the other shows me. We don’t know why she shows me what she does, and that’s the question that drives forth desire, and the symptoms of the neuroses, and whatever blind maneuvers. The rail I see doesn’t seem alarmed or frightful; rather, she’s cautious and assertive. Mapping on to the stern bird an affective state is all part of the game of observation and writing.

This would imply that I learn to feel the same; that I am assertive, cautious, calm, thinking of this bird. What I in fact feel is a certain ambiguous heightened state, a state of arousal around the foreign. A little like being touched without having any sense of what that means, what that could mean in the future.