A Letter to Marcel Proust

Painting by  Ikram Yakoubi

07:00 I woke up and took my sugary coffee. While I was reading seas and waves, rivers and mountains, maps and letters, maybe intersected frontiers in my cup, I woke up! I couldn’t remember am I unconscious or not. I mean conscious or no more! Seconds stopped up, minutes closed. I am lost. Too fortunate, I remembered that I could retain the memory of my last night, spent reading À la Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust.

Now, I forgot about that sour coffee. I must have been dormant; not sure yet if tis the end or the middle, or the very beginning of a dream. For, in fact, "the limbic and paralimbic areas of the brain, which control the emotions, desires, and motivations", brain scan imaging proves, are very active during deep sleep . (Tom Butler-Bowdon)

Ouch! Fair enough, then I must be encore asleep!

Before long, I slithered to my library. Enough wakefulness, I scattered the books, sat amongst them, went through them. A first reading: Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious: “As we sleep the current sweeps its own way through us, as the streets of a city are swept and flushed at night. It sweeps through our nerves and our blood, sweeping away the ash of our day’s spent consciousness towards one form or other of excretion.” Thus spoke D.H Lawrence.

Woe is me! I am unconscious! I get scared about me being naked, my thoughts stripped, my consciousness digressed! “O me! What eyes hath [night] put in my head, which have no correspondence with true sight”. (Shakespeare Sonnet 148)

Must be in Hades! I must be! At the time, I felt like I was trapped in a dark room as The Order of Things flashed on my mind (my here and now mind) “This unconscious is always the negative side of science – that which resists it, deflects it, or disturbs it… This unconscious and the forms of the unthought in general, have not been the reward granted to a positive knowledge of man”, Such outlined  Foucault.

No, no, ’tis no flattery; I tried calling any fantasy to my mind, but it was hapless. Besides, bethinking Freud’s investigation of the psyche, I recognized what seemed for me of more intangible impasse: “the motive forces of all fantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single fantasy is the fulfillment of a wish, a correction of an unsatisfying reality”. It is not likely that I might have repressed a fantasy with such artifice!

Going after The Hero with a thousand faces, my mind could go but to some pretty dark places.

“The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind—whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves.” “There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide", Campbell announces, "the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives”.

For quite a few minutes, my Cartesian self continued to run to determine the causes of this shadow that wrapped my body and thwarted my mind.

Here I am. Dear Sir Proust, I am urgently asking you to help me resolve this mystery which has ever since, perturbed or shall I say, Sir, awakened me?

If your majesty would argue in favor of my unconsciousness, and for that I shall thank you, and if I was conscious before newly being not, would you Sir specify, what sort of deviant detour is this?