Monday May 13, 2019

Culture is a necessary inheritance — a preinstalled “operating system” of sorts. Yet with our dreams and our fantasies, we can hack it, play new mind games, produce new subjectivities. D.W. Winnicott points a way forward in his theories about use of the “intermediate area,” the space inscribed in the ludic magic circle drawn between internal and external reality, past and future. Infants use what Winnicott calls a “transitional object” in their experiments with this area. Books and poetry are transitional objects of this sort for me, allowing me to communicate with myself across the years. An old journal entry from August 1999, for instance, points me across a twenty-year gap toward the organ part in “I Am a Rock” by Simon & Garfunkel, knowing me enough to know I’d like it.