Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association

http://apa.sagepub.com/ Yesterday's Silence: An Irreverent Invocation of Beckett's Analysis With Bion

Eugene Mahon J Am Psychoanal Assoc 1999 47: 1381 DOI: 10.1177/000306519904700419 The online version of this article can be found at: http://apa.sagepub.com/content/47/4/1381

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YESTERDAYS SILENCE: AN IRREVERENT INVOCATION OF BECKETTS ANALYSIS WITH BION

amuel Beckett ( 1 906-1989) and Wilfred Bion (1 897-1979) crossed paths in 1933. I t was a brief encounter, but who knows what impact it may have had on the history of literary and psychoanalytic ideas? Bion went on to become a psychoanalyst of great distinction. His seminal and controversial ideas had a worldwide impact on psychoanalytic thinking, particularly in the area of schizoid and psychotic states. Beckett emerged as one of the great literary voices of the twentieth century. A Nobel Laureate who wrote novels and poems as well as plays, his influence on modern drama was perhaps his greatest contribution to literary development in this century. Becketts line I cant go on, Ill go on is a cri de coeur that reflects not only modern mans disgust at the atrocities of our century (world wars, holocausts) but also his heroic insistence that despite the odds he must proceed to the end of his doomed journey. Becketts artistic credo was similarly constructed of defiance in the face of despair: he believed that an artist had an obligation to express even when he believed that there was nothing to express. Actually, the brief encounter mentioned earlier was not so brief. Bion was Becketts analyst for almost two years. When Beckett met Bion in 1933, he was suffering from severe anxiety symptoms, which he described in his opening session: a bursting, apparently arrhythmic heart, night sweats, shudders, panic, breathlessness, and when his condition was at its most severe, total paralysis (Knowlson 1996, p. 169).
Supervising and training analyst, Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research. Submitted for publication October 1, 1998.
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Bion was newIy arrived at the Tavistock Clinic and Beckett may have been one of his first cases. Bion saw Beckett three times weekly for almost two years. Much later (in 1989) Beckett described his analysis as follows:
I used to lie down on the couch and try to go back in my past. I think it probably did help. I think it helped me perhaps to control the panic. I certainly came up with some extraordinary memories of being in the womb. Intra-uterine memories. I remember feeling trapped, of being imprisoned and unable to escape, of crying to be let out but no one would hear, no one was listening. I remember being in pain but being unable to do anything about it. I used to go back to my digs and write notes on what had happened, on what Id come up with. Ive never found them since. Maybe they still exist somewhere. I think it all helped me to understand a bit better what I was doing and what I was feeling

[Knowlson, p. 1711. Analysts are intrigued by the notion of the contact of two such creative minds-their influences on each other, how the one may have affected the history of literary ideas, and how the other may have affected the history of psychoanalytic ideas. Such topics have been taken up in most scholarly ways by Didier Anzieu and Bennett Simon, whose contributions are essential readings for psychoanalysts interested in the creativity of these men. Simon (1988) suggests that some of Bions later writings sound a lot like Beckett, and Anzieu (1989) argues that there is a reference to the Bion-Beckett relationship in some of Becketts writings (How If Is and Murphy, for instance) that contain characters called Pim and Bom. Anzieu fancifully suggests that if you put the two syllables together Pim and Bom sound a lot like Bion or Biom! I have written a brief play in which I try to imagine the dialogue of these two extraordinary beings. Whereas Simon and Anzieu are bound by the facts, so to speak, as they try to bring the science of psychoanalysis to bear on their elusive subjects, I play with the genetic facts to create an illusion that I hope will capture the spirit of the two men, even as the truth, as it must, slips through the humility of human fingers. If my approach seems wild and perhaps irreverent I invoke the unorthodox spirits of Bion and Beckett in my defense. After all, in midA Memoir of the Future. Book One: The Dream (1975); Book Two: The Past Presented (1 977); and Book Three: The Dawn of Oblivion ( I 979).
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analysis, when a stalemate had been reached, Bion learned that Jung was in London, and invited Beckett to go along with him to hear the visiting analyst. The lecture was on psychopathology and creativity, and in the question-and-answer period Jung made a comment that affected Beckett deeply. Referring to the premonitory dreams of a tenyear-old girl whose death, according to Jung, had been announced in dreams before the fact, Jung concluded that She had never been born entirely. Becketts biographer Deirdre Bair comments: Beckett seized upon this remark as the keystone of his entire analysis. . . . With Jungs words, Beckett finally found a reasonable explanation of his relationship with his mother. If he had no; been entirely born, if he did have prenatal memories and remembered birth as painful, it seemed only logical to him that the aborted, flawed process had resulted in the improper and incomplete development of his own personality (1978, pp. 209-2 10). Psychoanalytic eyebrows will undoubtedly rise at the conclusions Beckett drew from Jungs remarks, and at Bions complicity in validating these_extra-analytic ideas which, like a deus ex machina, were called upon to explain not only Becketts incomplete biological and psychological births but the incomplete births of the transference neurosis and the psychoanalytic process as well. But as I have said, they were both still beginners. And Bions analyses with John Rickman and Melanie Klein, as well as most of his psychoanalytic writings, were yet to come. As I mentioned earlier, Didier Anzieu has tried to interpret the effects of Becketts relationship with Bion on Becketts subsequent writings. When he asked Beckett in 1984 for his opinion of Anzieus interpretations of his work, Beckett responded tersely A psychoanalysts phantasms! (Anzieu, p. 164). At the risk of being similarly accused by Samuel Becketts ghost and perhaps Bions as well, I have tried in my imagination t o get my hands on Becketts lost notes on his analysis. I cenvisio one or two o f his sessions with Bion, and I have called them Yesterdays Silence. Tongue in cheek, putting words in their mouths, I grope not for accuracy, which would obviously be absurd, but for perhaps some small resonance with what must surely have been extraordinary dialogues. I have woven genetic images from Knowlsons biography into what follows, but the spirit of the text is nonetheless an exercise in imagination.
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B l O N AND BECKETT: YESTERDAYS S I L E N C E

Act I, Scene I

Enre: London 1934. The stage is bare except for couch and chair, BECKEIT on couch, BIONbehind hint. BECKEXYesterdays silence. How long did it last? BION:(No response) BECKETT You shit. I asked a question. If I were to match my silence with yours, thered be nothing here between us ever but everlasting silence. BION:Uh huh. BECKETK Uh huh! Thats all I get. Thats all I ever get. BION: (Silence) BECKEXYesterdays silence. How long did it last? BION:(Silence) BECKEXYou ignore me as if you believed time were not important. How long did it last is about time, a question of time, goddammit. Without time the speed of light could not be determined. Science and time are codependent. Science sets up this amazing experiment: two black boxes, light passing between them. Are you with me? BION:(Silence) BECKEXYou son of a bitch. With me or not, Ill go on, I cant go on. Ill go on. Going on and on is all we know. Even your silence attests to that: the non-verbal goings on of your preposterous being! BION: Get back to the boxes. BECKE~T: Get back to the boxes. You break your silence for that majestic utterance. Shite and onions. 1 learned this obscenity from Joyce, by the way, who learned it from his father, shite and onions I mean, an oral anal tradition maybe you would call it. Are you following any of this! BION:(Silence) BECKEXGetting back to the boxes. As I was saying, science sets up this amazing experiment. Two black boxes, light passing between them. Picture the wave motion, the molecules of light. Time passes between the boxes too so you can measure the speed of light. Imagine. The whole relativity of our existence straddled between two boxes of darkness.
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BION:Our life straddling the womb and the grave you mean: two boxes of darkness? BECKE~ I :wasnt that far along in my thinking yet. Why spoil every semiotic garment by pulling on the last thread before youve even tried it on? Some popular kid Ill bet you were, with your gallows in your humor before the damn joke of life had a chance to even get started. The womb and the grave indeed. Two boxes of darkness. What about the light between the boxes? Its light theyre measuring, asshole, not darkness. BION:Youre losing sight of the silence that got this whole line of thinking started. BECKETT: Im not losing sight of your preposterous rudeness in not answering a simple question. Yesterdays silence. How long did it last? BION:(Silence) BECKEZ (Excitedly) There is time between the boxes and light. They travel together. They are friends one could say in a poetic way. But science insists on measurements and relativities and their closeness gets lost in the rush. BION:Are you talking perhaps about you and me and our journey between the boxes and our closeness? BECKETT: (Soberly) There is an awful distance between us even when were close. We are born alone. We die alone. BION:(Chidingly) Now yotr re neglecting the light between the boxes. BECKETT. Yes, Im afraid of it. Everyone knows what light is. No one can tell you what it is, as Dr. Johnson put it. BfoN: Telling is no match you mean for the inexorable silent reality o f it, the relentless particular movements of it, the dazzling indifference of it, whether human eyes envision it or not. BECKET. Theres no telling can take its measure, yet telling is all we have. BION:Telling is tall tales and truth tongue-tied to a word for an instant, a mouthful of wind captive in a breath of longing, a human breath that warms the edges o f the wind, leaving all the wind it cannot reach t o blow in all the spaces human breath can never reach. BECKETT: Thats a lot of space. It would take a lot of loneliness to fill that space.
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Silence. Yesterdays silence. How long did it last? BION:As long as we could bear it, I suppose. Or perhaps it was less than that? Less than that perhaps. BECKETZ Last night I had a dream: you were lying here, with me behind you in the chair. Can I show you the dream, enact it for you? They change places. BIONlies down. B E C K E sits ~ in the chair. Silence. BION:So? BECKEIT: In the dream I told you to say whatever comes to mind. BION: And? BECKETZ You did. BION: And? BECKEIT: Thats all. In the dream you said whatever came into your mind. Silence. Knowing when he? beaten, BION,a good sport, decides to play along ivith-the niischieJ BION:Once upon a time there was a boy called Bion who learned how to tell time by listening. He could hear the movements of the seasons, huge chunks of time changing places almost imperceptibly unless you trained your ears to listen. After a while telling and listening were almost the same for him and he got to know time very well in this way. Some people said he had a perfect pitch for time, each note of its silence sounding and resounding in his mind, one acoustic moment of experience never dulled or dampened by the one that went before it. Is this what the dream was like? BECKEIT: In the dream you improvised. Theres no telling now what you said. Only what you meant was clear. BION:Meanings are easier to grasp than all the particulars of telling, arent they? Thats why we go on and on so. Going on is all we know, telling, listening, listening and telling. BECKETZ Does anything come of it, this warming of the edges of the wind with a human breath that cannot reach all the spaces where wind in utter loneliness blows its breath alone? BION:Two people warming the same shard of wind can make a song with all their listenings and tellings that could make the wind weep, make the wind laugh even. And never tell me that all these centuries of song and dance have never made the wind go breathless once
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in a while in wonder at the marvel of the music that sounds from womb to grave. BECKETT Music like light between the boxes you mean. BION: Silence like a song without words, a dance without gesture soundlessly telling and listening. . . . Was the dream anything like what Ive described? BECKET. Yes, Exactly so. The song and dance of it. The listening and telling of it. Theres no telling, of course, how I let you loose in my dreams and how it set both of us free. BION: Free? BECKET. Yes. Free. Free to plunge again into the depths of experience and sing in our chains like the sea. BION:Maybe dreams, spawned in darkness, moving between the boxes like furtive nocturnal creatures, know more about existence than the speed of light. BECKE And ~ art between the boxes. What of it? BION: Art on this doomed planet has its limitations to say the least. But in its limitations lies its greatness. in its limitations lies the fierce, frightened dignity of man! Silence in chair. They change places again, BECKEITon co~rch,BION BECKETT Yesterdays silence. How long did it last? Silence. And will there be silence tomorrow? And can we count on that? Curtain.

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Act I, Scene 2

BECKE Yesterdays ~ silence. How long did it last? And will there be silence tomorrow? And can we count on that? Thats where we left off yesterday. BION:I remember. Did you doubt it? . B E C K E Now ~ : theres something you can rely on. Doubt. Maladie des doictes. I suppose there must be a maladie des convictions. BION:Smugness. BECKETT: Or prejudice, I suppose. BION:Religion perhaps. BECKETT: My father would have none of it. While mother went to mass, he took to the hills, the wind in the trees and birdsong his only
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psalms and sermons. With my hand in his on the blessed hills under the sun that is young once only, as Dylan Thomas put it, God could take a hike for all we cared. BioN: Its an image to write about. BECKETT: Perhaps I will. BION:Weve ignored the question of whether you believed Id foigotten where we left off yesterday. BECKETT: Trust is at the root of it, I suppose. Will the light find its way between two boxes of darkness? BION:You dont trust the sun? BECKETT: Not at night. There are boxes o f darkness not even the sun can penetrate. I remember an experimental box of childhood. I found a hedgehog. I was a young zoologist you could say. I put the hedgehog in the box along with some worms. Once when I returned to lift the lid, the stench and putrefaction sent a whiff of death into my nostrils Ive never quite gotten rid of. BION:You became a mineralogist instead? BECKEXActually yes. On Greystones beach I would try to count what nature had strewn so casually on the sand. Round stones, ovals, each surface moulded by unseen tempestuous forces beside the seeming innocence of the sea. I would take some home to protect them from the elements, cradle them in the branches of a tree. Was I daft to protect the inanimate or did I know even then that were all minerals at heart that found some magic aeons ago to pull a spark of life from the sun or the sea or god knows where. BION:Daft is no word for the deep unanswerables that all science gropes with. BECKETT: Memory is t h e deep unanswerable y o u r science grapples with. BION:You could say that. BECKETT: Greystones. The sand like scattered ocean dust, milky ways of crunchy stars underfoot as the boy flung his flesh at the wind this way and that like a dervish until he dropped giddy as a drunkard into his own impression on the malleable sand. Is memory like that, impressions on a beach, the boy lost in the man as soon as high tide reclaims its property? BION:Between high tide and low tide, children play. BECKETT: Some playground. One forgets where memory once played. One forgets the place where love and fear and hate got started,
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how they got along together, or didnt. One forgets the place and who the hell would want to go back there anyway? BION:You never left. BECKETT I cant go back. I must go back. Once, suspended in the safety of darkness, night let me drop. I fell like fruit released from a tree. They found me at the bottom of the stairs in the morning. They blamed the nursemaid. Mother was hardly going to take the rap. Oh ho ho did I fix her later for allowing the arms of darkness to drop me through the trap door of night like a startled actor in a dream. I used to leap from the pinnacle of a tree letting the lowest branches break my fall at the last minute, my mother with her heart in her mouth like Mary at the foot of the cross. Oh ho ho the thrill of it. BION:You were a daredevil. BECKETT: Later I drove cars and motorcycles like a madman. Once on a hairpin turn, the woman I loved unrequitedly was injured, as the wheels of the car couldnt quite keep up with the wheels of my mind. Her fathers look has taken up permanent residence in my mind like a vulture on a-deathbed. BION:It was your mother you were trying to kill. BECKETT: (Silence) She did come between me and my cousin whom I loved, the whole force of her provincial prejudiced soul pitted against my hearts desire. I could have killed her for that. BION:You did. (Silence) You suffer as if you had, BECKETTI remember being in the womb. Is that possible? It was darkness, surrounding darkness. I felt closed in. I wanted out. No one was listening. BION:Like a hedgehog trappedin a childs innocence. BECKETT: Like the spools of memory tangled in their own yarn. BION:You must talk your way out and write your way out. As Helen Keller said, the only way out is through. There is no womb can trap you if you word your way out of it. BECKETT: I will bore my way out through the body traveling through all the nerves and arteries of pain and sorrow and joy and laughter and guilt and silence and speech and wonder and failure. When I fail, Ill try to fail better since art as a lifeline on this doomed planet is a precarious enterprise. Ill write about despair and silence, two clowns that have walked the world since tears and laughter were first invented. BION:Your clowns will outlive both of us.
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Silence. BECKEE Yesterdays silence. How long will it last? BION: Like speech it lasts a lifetinie. Enough time for you to make a song of sound and silence and throw your voice beyond you, towards eternity. Ctrrtain.
REFERENCES
ANZIEU, D. ( 1989).Beckett and Bion. ItttertiatiotialRevieivOfPsyccho-Analysis

16:163-169.
BAIR, D. ( I 978). Sainirel Beckett: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, Brace

and Jovanovich. KNOWLSON, J. (1996). Datnned to Fame: The Lqe o f Sanitiel Beckett. New York: Simon and Schuster. SIMON, B. (1988). The imaginary twins: The case of Beckett and Bion. International Review o f Psycho-Analysis 15:331-352.
8 East 96 Street New York. NY 10128 Fax: 212-289-1950

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