[This is me reflecting. Sorry. Bad pun.]
I've been reading a lot these days. I've been delving back into Charcot territory. In a turn that probably deserves a poem of its own, I uncovered some articles I had copied when I was researching that series this past weekend when I was dismantling my old bed. Ever since I moved out of 5 Willard Street, I'd been sleeping on the same, hard, rickety twin sized bed that I used as an adolescent. Well, now, thanks to my lovely parents I have a grown-up's bed.
But back to the old bed for a moment - it's the one on which I lost my virginity; it's the one that supported me through any number of teenaged traumas; it's the one on which I was inclined to martyr myself (in a manner of speaking) after the dissolution of my last relationship.
And it was during the dismantling of this bed - this carriage-of-so-much - that I found the unfinished aspects of my hysteria research. Have at it, Freud!
So, in addition to the satyrical self-psychoanalytic poem (maybe it should be a limerick!) I'll write about this, these are the things I've been considering adding to the series:
- a poem for/on Ada and Byron
- a poem on hysteria in Restoration comedies
- a poem that (somehow) messes with the accepted structural elements of bourgeois respectability
- inasmuch as hysteria can often be imitative, a poem in which the sufferer bears symptoms that match the mercury poisoning her husband would have contracted from producing daguerreotypes
- a poem on Charcot on art (based on Les Demoniaques dans l'art)
- a poem on Linda Santo and her daughter Audrey, focusing on the attitudes of Audrey's body
- I think there ought to be something, too, about epidemiology in the book (I just haven't figured out how I want to tackle that...)
What do you think, Charcot?
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