These verses were written today, my husband Geoff and I having booked to see the film, Freud’s Last
Session next Wednesday at Bishop Auckland Town Hall. My verses are entirely fanciful and bear no relation to the film or history. Instead, they puzzle about the birth or death of God in sexual fantasy, in my imagined versions of two masters of that art: Sigmund Freud, a blasphemous heretic in the eyes of any faith, and all faiths, and Clive Staples Lewis (the C.S. Lewis of the Narnia books and many popular texts in which the devil, Screwtape, is most charming). Freud was an early lapsed adherent of religion and a collector of religious icons of the past but used them to speak of his suspicions and boredom with the monotony of mono-deity in his own ancestral Judaism and its Christian variants. Patriarchal authorities both of different kinds they debate (a debate which may have happened in life but may not) in the film the issue of God’s existence and the hope that fallen war-trauma-torn humanity could be redeemed by some transcendent truth. In the film they are played by Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode respectively (see above),
Hidden in a wardrobe,midst fur of mink
Made into coats his mother wore on nights
She skated on the social ice, its queen,
Imagine a boy alone,making a link
From his self, tumescent bodied,to lights
Reflecting from chandeliers hardly seen
In the cold glint of Mummy's eyes. Far back
In the wardrobe rude Tumnus, horns sprouting
Above an ear open to any sound
Of spies sent to discover his sad lack
Of any backbone, their voices shouting
That in sin Clive Staples has now been found.
Meanwhile, Freud chewing a cigar, though oft
A cigar is only a cigar, lies
On his own couch, and associates this
With that, and finds hard held truths are quite soft
When exposed to analysis. He cries
That anxious humanity finds no bliss
To fill the abyss that life often seems
Alone to offer. Freud yawns that even
He relapses into childish magic
Thinking. Yet with no hope, omit the screams
Too. Fear of God's sight of us in Seven
Deadly Sins leading us to a fate that's tragic.
These two men were silent. A wardrobe can
Open backwards and ice yield to Lord Christ
Dying in pain for me. Those are my hopes
Thought Clive. God's arisen, lion Aslan
And his blood fills me, that payment sufficed
To render me saved. Freud's mind my art gropes;
My goat-tumescent Tumnus, priapic
As a phallic dream is easily seen thus.
Freud finds neglectful mothers in Ice Queens,
Sees leonine redemption as the prick
Of desire that magic lions discuss
With men, telling them what their desire means.
With love
Steven
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