A Psychoanalytic Guide to Dressing Oneself During the Internal Afternoon: A Study Inside of Cafes by Adam Shechter

A Psychoanalytic Guide to Dressing Oneself During the Internal Afternoon:
A Study Inside of Cafes
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    Forty-three years of dedicated practice has taught me that the spectacle of internal overwhelm—in public—is an invisible, psycho-culinary stage-act worth mining with psychoanalytic picks and pens. Invaluable shining elements of tasty personality emerge—that teach about the character’s appetite for its own identity—in a way like no other. The nature of this psychological truth requires a cannibalistic gymnastics of language to obscure the direct blast of emotional pain—the ego and its latticework seasoned with precise humor to be appropriately consumed. During fairly recent research, this phenomenon of hiding from oneself in the maze work of café-words made itself delightfully transparent. The last few field notes of observation show that a startlingly familiar epiphany can instantly echo an experience of one having eternally known something in realms of uncanny starvation. This delivery of archaic knowledge in behavior needs dressing in the archeological stylistics of literary desire.
    Careful use of the greatest sounding depth-language has been recommended, lest one wind up opening the cold door of a thought-kitchen, isolated from the bodily warmth of emotional ingredients. And yet, I have an aversion to consciously planned seduction. I lean more towards the spontaneous interaction of highly articulate personalities. This revised schedule of communication raises the concern that if I just say the bistro’s name of where I presently sit, that I may never be discovered. I want to be lost in the gaze of implication. I want to be mistakenly found in a location that constantly changes its environment due to unstable, shifting planes of perception. I will place my show of the unconscious upon the specimen slide of the cafe and hold it up to the new afternoon light, so that its wish to metaphorically explode can glow in the coal-burning stove of the written word.

Here is the clinical-cafeteria reality, recorded as absorbed:

1) The balding pattern of a man--lonely in loose white skin--erodes by the door. He is hunched over in a slight black sweater, reading in the prison release of a thick yellow prism of a book.
2) The hipster-age/late middle-age mother-daughter duo furiously engage in codependent talk at varying speeds of aging hopelessness.
3) The spritely dressed gay men market their artisanal flavors of unique gestural excitement about being experts at never starting a start-up.  
4) The magnetic Tuscanite grandmother with vague owl eyes labors over Anglican repressive styles of quarantining her gothically dressed toddler-granddaughter into the fragmentation of her café swivel seat.
5) The pattern of I-phone conversations zigzag the collective sound dust of the premature daylight acoustics.
6) The sunlight slants at 12:03pm UWS latitudinal angles through the storefront window and onto the frilly flan colored fabric of a dress.
7) The anxiety of afterschool rage lines the countertop with the calculation of giggles.
8) Two cousins fight over a great uncle and the fantasy of his wallet/the emptiness of his heart.
9) The graphs of an architect, towering in laptop luminescence, depict line maps of obsessive need.
10) In a sudden chorus, two mothers pronounce toddler recidivist acts of silly-ism while unspecified consultants declare Genexes something arrogantly un-hearable.
11) The threat of spectacular abandonment is everywhere, the silence of half-eaten orange cake is on a small white plate, and 2.35 hour old Cappuccino stains settle into the little world of an oversized coffee cup.  
12) The freedom of coming and going through the cool spring door permeates the psycho-locomotion of all respiratory emotion.  
13) The squinting of tourists’ inquisitions through the façade’s glass add postcard evaluation to the yearning mix.
14) The paranoid conceit of sunglasses casually mystifies.
15) The accumulation, coagulation and thinning of the food-drink line syncopates with the dismissive pauses and haste of the slender Caribbean cashier. She adjusts the buying operation of her eye movements.
16) The slowing of conversation in the foreground of the room’s emotional life subsides to the building echo of male competing voices at the top of the stairwell.
17) The acceleration of the dominant-articulating conversational partner climaxes a round of narcissistic bullying.
18) The roaming of curious eyes behind slightly retro-eyeglasses and grease in long curls that’s just about to wilt the integrity of hair physics, calls into question discreet notions of self-care correlated with mid-range levels of superior intelligence and mediocre achievement.
19) The heads that nod too much harmonize with other forms of agreement that fall flat.  
20) The beat of Euro-pop pumps an endless soundtrack to 1980’s French Indie films about lost seedy young minds, buttressing the Slavic belligerence of an insecure chap out of sync with the cheer of public festivity.
22) His wife who smiles too much still betrays her want of an uncertain connection.
23) The lineage of café writers who have recorded the downward gawk of the written letter amidst a party of flames in darkness are eulogized in the pity of this onrush of new words.
24) The Korean businesswoman rushing for the door in a black suit with a large silver hip zipper and a hard grey jacket in a V is all about that fast flying images of her mother.
25) The blown-out sunlight that hides her face and seems to follow her everywhere, also swallows the shaking tambourine of the Slavic gentleman’s sugar packets, shimmering in this wall of illumination—and then teaspoons bang in coffee cups reifying the auditory narrative hyper-feelings of the café’s shared adrenalin.
26) The gospel runner’s voice booking it out of the radio runs deep into the archive of the blue-sky’s bass line.
27) The bald man closes then opens the book, gazes inward to a sacred symbol of cohesion he almost found.  
28) The golden fingernails of the architect, adjust, one just on top of the other, next to scraggly hair on a passable pink sweater. She brings two thoughts together, each about a former client she will never possess again.
29) All the minds go in and out of deep thought, unable to spy one another in the black hole union of the unconscious gathering, this suckling emptiness to be the first entity to catch the author’s eye. He hears the sound of sad children’s voices top the swell of punk guitars filling the sound pool of the room—the memory of being in a Jewish Social Worker’s womb, circa 1972.   

    The café as an exhibition of emotional portraiture highlights that the interior dance of ones third-eye can be appropriately blended with the ecology of the surrounding population. Who is the "I" of the house poetico-scientist in this projected café? A long documented history of wine, coffee and cigarettes mists the literature, so that if these obfuscating potions are removed, we are then left with the infant's page. The fictive oasis of the cafe cuts the narrating "I" a break, as do all environments that designate/intend for a leisure of depositing the unwanted aspects of self. The ego's speech can set down its armor-plated angst and don the more loosely fitting gown of observation and alimentary experience—this penetration of thoughts into the artifice of the other gracefully goes hand in hand with the id currents of slurping at a coffee cup and noshing a sweet chocolate pastry.
    The park and the sea can both be makeshift places of work, yet scribes are not providing a direct service to the systemic operations of such spaces. Dissimilarly, the cafe is a meeting place of intersecting purpose—off the main freeway of the 9-to-5 flow—yet still deeply connected within the electric current of the collective socio-economic body. Mothers with babies, the homeless, the retired, tourists, teenagers; also within the routine of work: the variety of schmoozing appointments orally exchanged via caffeine and alcohol; as well as the satellite workers, freelancers wrapped up in laptop tasks, and just plain remote corporate wanderers in search of regulated communal zones. The wavy line of these sheltering effects poses a multifaceted problem to the writer of the psychological self.
    The cafe's importance here is not so much in the surface drama of its stage, but more in the mirror of its actors and the overall reflectivity of the show’s not-so-subterranean gestalt. A panic trance of wacky interruption genies up from the utilization of a communal arena as an introspective tool. Donating the psyche as a civic laboratory for our intellectual species to better understand the nature of its unconscious processes, may cast gothic shadows into the illumination of the words. The challenge becomes how to keep the speech clearly lit and audible, and with solidly delineated boundaries of authorial voice, as the language comes apart in frenetic shadows—the silhouette of a word mascot dancing in front of the flame of collective pathology, transmogrifying the unprocessed anxiety of scientific morality through the impish crystal of the ironic intellect. One refracts in beams of healing comedian, self-hating magician, or just plain old professional neurotic filtering the medicinal properties of psychoanalysis through the spectacular alchemy of sharing a culinary unconscious. The memoir can be a technology of superior isolation, a polemic for aggressive loneliness, or a feeble plea of the street animal negotiating a domesticating blueprint for business. The underground voice of the restaurant owns the irrationally narrated psychic worlds of food and talk, and being so close to the primal act of its representation, the poetic concealment is so repetitively punctured by the social feeding frenzy of the senses. The street is in the home.
    The café population can be just as much of a bureaucratic fiction as this paranoid menu of the emotionally starving psyche—a live chorus-cauldron to dump the incomprehensible paradoxes of true selves into the creative play of exaggeration. Words are consumed and whimsical hallucinations of character assumed, interacted with and digested in the arc of a collectively eaten spell of woven-others. The conclusion of what's wrong with humanness as an all-encompassing mind-meat floats to the surface of the brew. The writer sits in front of his metaphor, eats it as a sacrifice for the ritual of narrative creation, consumes his shadow face to become his own golem of infantile neglect. This mask of triggers is the overwriting anxiety—the desire to cover up the simplicity of feeling and its thin layer of protection inadequately designed for a very complicated, deep problem. The ornamentation of description deepens the veneer of the splitting apart object—the visual epic clouding vulnerability with the adornments of lyrical rebellion.
    Taking for granted that ones soul-deed on earth is drafted in an ink of spaceless substance, although still a moral property of this world, makes for a constant judgmental nervousness, especially when it comes to eye contact and pre-verbal communication through posturing in the literary café arena. The banal event of eating something at the communal table is then an exigent threat to ones very bookish existence. The conflict projection is even available during the capitalist transaction, as if the currency of undesirable psychic material is more precious than the exchange of money for goods to be devoured. These urges are as transparent as a monarch butterfly in the diaphanous heartbeat moments before he violently births himself from his sullen cocoon. And yet this rage, this primitive body want, is/are but mere pulses of the psychesoma—emotional secrets stimulating the story machine of a place in this world with the pleasure of just being.
    I am a happy baby man who loves being taken care of by being rid of himself through the pyrotechnics of projective poetry—I coach myself—before entering the café-theater, beginning the work of unpaid guilt. Just how does one budget the rental chair of the unregulated seat in the café. Why is there not a parenthetical time limit beside each item on the menu. Café Au Lait (25 minutes) - $3.50, Greek Salad (45 minutes) - $8.99, add chicken (add 15 minutes) - $4.00, equipped with calculations for the computer as non-eating guest, as well as relative and composite time. This displaced feeling of an unspecified role in the void, both within/without is the residue of the primitive mother’s tones of relating—the lack of a clear contractual agreement for financing the concerns of annihilation in the protective coating provided by a precisely purchased container for timed existence. 
    I love people and they love me; I say, repeat, bloom smiles in the neural rivulets of my mantric supplication. Thank god for being able to learn patience in the years of middle life and the blessing of moderation, the gray zone of desire and frustration. I am having fun at the sleeping boundary of socializing with unknown people. I pull my face from a puddle of dreams and overhear the acceptingly savvy food server, as he clears the narrative rich complaints of the Old World traumatized consumer. I duck the murderous projectiles of his kvetchy voice. I don’t need to ask for help covering my ears. Instead, I explore the emptying coffee cup. It's large roomy pot able to be filled with all that I would need for an ambulatory workday of the itinerant mind: Lap top, dress shoes, sweater, snacks, papers, random odds and ends comprising the arsenal of defensive props—placed alongside the barricade of a coffee mug. The almost aerodynamic curve scheme of the cup’s shoulders, chest and waist give the impression that I might climb in—cling to the walls of this porcelain exoskeleton like a weightless ladybug. I am complete and ready to descend the verticals of my day as an aesthetic insect at the bottom of an empty well.
    In the dream pit of the café, the scale/exposure of architectural elements comes across in unusually large dimensions of height, light, width and length—gravity opens up awareness to the poetico-regressive inquiry. The subjection of public space to the single patron destabilizes the realm of the object, so that the audience as performer grows susceptible to psychic swaps with the spectator. A field of salad greens is a safe haven, in particular, munching with one's face too close to the flow of the vegetable landscape. All the planes of sight jagged with the ruffled contours of leaves offer the camouflage needed to tend to the latent pain of an Old World narcissist's broadcast across the restaurant floor. The warm chunks of grilled chicken provide anchors to sink his anger to the stomach shore. The chore of his inter-Atlantic hysteria is mitigated by the sedation of olive oil. The need to connect through the silence of hypercritical watching dissolves the free radicals into the peaceful blood of hearty artichokes, thin carrot strips, crunchy green beans, and the health stream in general.
    Narcissism is only further irritated by interpretation, challenge; any question to its state of illusory wholeness that reveals its incomplete composition of fragments. These shards are sharp and when released from their wall, easily cut a perceived enemy, dissect shrewdness through their momentary shatter, so they can return to their placement in a picture perfect whole. Philo-narcissism, a caring love for the narcissism of the self or other, is understanding this need to keep the mirror as is and to respect the self-hatred that this self-love constantly battles as fundamental to the healthy balancing act of any psyche. The stranger’s voice that aggravates and elicits the "would he just shut up," is not the voice of my own, but perhaps the voice of his most important ancestor, who might've felt just that way about him, "the object who hates him" that he transplants with the tentacles of his needy desire to each relational vector of his occupation. He, who is the other of the restaurant laboratory-cage.
    When the restaurant-other exits, suddenly I can breathe again. The respiratory reality of the café resumes. Clearly, I was linking my emotional scuba gear with his in the symbiotic underworld tank of this place of eating. Detaching my psycho-carnivorous ways from the public space would clearly benefit the lucidity of this text. This realization having the same metabolic effects of peppermint tea on the gastrointestinal system as it does for its psychic corollary. The surplus of unconscious objects accumulated from deconstructing the internal-outside world experience reveals itself with the hormonal taste of over-narration in the lonely esophagus of café history. The guilt continues: I came to this innocent public space to pillage it of its metaphors, forming the unbearable sense of needing to belong somewhere that I am too much for—typical.
    Primal identity is illuminated in the fluorescent boxes of desserts--coated in the thinness of ego membrane—bringing bright invisibility to the interface of oral capacities, or opacities as it were, an activation of primal deficiency in darkened mirror. Almost amoebic, plasmic, the festival of little life swirls to the surface at the slightest maternal touch—brownies, creampuffs, a banana muffin—making good decisions about pleasure strengthens the ego’s insulation. In the adult, this representation for extrauterine envelopment, feeding for systemic regulation, manifests in distorted currencies. The glass display case is a pornography of the greed wound—mammary gland by design, it signifies that the most longed for object of consumption can be contained inside the outside of optically penetrable beauty. Even before I realize that I am through with this meal of myself, I plan departure into the meta-habitat of street mammals, birds, rodents—pedestrian predators of the more monetized food groups.
    Perhaps, I shouldn't even bother going out. I have already colonized the café’s instinctual symbolization, even before seeing the notion of a full day. The twirl of tourist desire agitates my native roots, as if I am sealed in a diorama of my syllogistic gaze—they are me (in me) in my vision of eating myself, in a now that I have cooked for them in the deepest, hottest pots of my mind. So then, I am assume the joyful blame of devouring the primal mother screen in public—a less than candy flavored cartoon of the intrapsyhic sorts. Killing time is depressing by its very concept, except when done in preparation for a holy feast of the unconscious. As if time is something to wipe away—the only thing we have—still, seconds are best gradually swallowed in an arena of blissfully nervous dining.

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Adam Shechter has been published in The Minnesota Review, The Literary Bohemian and Psychoanalytic Perspectives, among others. He delivered a paper called “Notes on a Theoretical Script for Poetic Living in a Therapeutic Trance,” at the 2017 Annual Conference of the Association for the Psychoanalysis for Culture and Society. His chapbook, Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue was co-authored with Daniel Y. Harris and published by Cervena Barva Press. He lives in NYC with his wife and two children, where he works as a psychotherapist in private practice and at a neighborhood clinic.

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