Embolalia

Oh lovely, this is probably my favourite comment so far. I am quite interested in the way in which interpretation changes a text – more specifically, in this instance – you missed my Freud reference (the ‘fort da’) and read ‘fort’ (I presume) as a fortified building. What ‘fort’ signifies in Freud is significantly different.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Sigmund Freud relates the story of a game his grandson invented at the age of one and a half, before he could speak many words. He used to throw small objects away from him, then say “o-o-o-o” with pleasure. He also took a wooden reel attached to a piece of string, and threw it over the edge of his cot, so that it disappeared. After saying “o-o-o-o,” he would pull it back to himself and say, “da.” He repeated this game over and over. Freud and the boy’s mother understood him to be saying “Fort” and “Da” (German for gone and there).

Freud theorized that this game of disappearance and return allowed the boy to manage his anxiety about the absences of his mother, to whom he was very attached. By controlling the actual presence and absence of an object, he was able to manage the virtual presence of his mother. The Fort / Da game was the child’s invention of symbolism: the use of one object (wooden reel) to represent another, absent object (mother).

In human psychological development, symbolism coincides with the emergence of language, or the child’s entry into the field of culturally symbolic sounds and words. Language is one way we give presence to (or re-present) people, ideas, events, and feelings. It’s how we recover the past, or make what is gone, there.

Freud’s grandson was not merely re-presenting his mother as a symbolic object. More importantly, he was representing arelationship (with mother) and coming to terms with a concept (mother can be gone yet still there, in memory and play).

In my poem I used the ‘fort. da.’ to express something about the way in which we negotiate relations in the symbolic, the attempt at mastery in the encounter of absence and presence.

I wrote this poem about someone I met, who I thought was impressive, but who I came to find was a little less than impressive. The ‘fort. da.’ (for me) acts as the hinge (or the pivot) of the poem, the first part being written when I was impressed, and the second part when I was merely bored.

That said, I am quite convinced that the author should not be the authority on the interpretation of the texts that they produce, and I did very much like and found interesting the way in which you read the text.