‘I like the fact that the word “present” also designates a gift’ – so said the psychoanalyst J. B Pontalis.
As we come to another New Year, I looked at the strange, maverick autobiography by the French philosopher and psychoanalyst J.B. Pontalis – mainly because the title is so evocative: ‘Love of Beginnings’.
[That feeling of the first page of a new notebook comes to mind, the white clear expanse – before the first mistake and crossing outs, and doing it wrong.]
Pontalis actually doubts the use of the word autobiography – as he reconstructs what he calls ‘a scripture of the self’ from the vantage point of the present. Each person might write ten or a hundred autobiographies, he writes, for while we have the one life ‘we have innumerable ways of recounting that life (to ourselves).’ To write about our life is rather: ‘… to seek to give shape to the shapeless, some basis to the transitory, a life – but how fragile a life! – to the lifeless.’ The hope is then to arrive at ‘the illusion of an endless beginning. As long as there are books, no one, ever, will have the last word.’
Considered by his family to be almost mute up to the age of 5, Pontalis saw going to school as the start of his torments connected with his love and hatred of language which was to dominate his later adult work and life. This first school involved one two-hour class a week and then exercises, reading and lessons to do at home on which the boys were then tested and graded the following week.
‘Mothers and governesses would attend the class, separated from the pupils by a flimsy barrier. They weren’t allowed to intervene but sometimes expressed themselves noisily by means of sighs and exclamations, plaintive or indignant, in the face of our failings and blunders: ‘he recited it yesterday without a single mistake!’ Fans who wouldn’t have missed one of our matches for anything in the world, they confronted one another, attributing our successes to themselves, complaining all the way home if we hadn’t shown ourselves equal to the task. They were the children at the H school, moaning, vain, whining or happy about nothing.’
Attending the Lycée as an older child felt, he writes, like exchanging a totalitarian regime for democracy. Then his father died, and Pontalis retreated back into silence:
‘In order to keep my father, to hold him and hold myself with him, once again I became silent. No longer, this time, through a massive rejection of language, but in order to speak only with him, in secret.’
Pontalis received a Catholic education – more he says out of routine, and whilst finding the weekly catechism sessions ‘a chore’ and confession rather a pretence he found then and still does that communion was ‘an extraordinary invention’.
‘The slow, dispersed absorption of that small whitish circle, of unknown manufacture and substance and therefore already ethereal, used to transport me. Where to? The destination didn’t need to be defined. The journey was the whole metamorphosis. I swallowed a pastille and I was a soul! I changed state without losing anything; I breathed in another world while continuing to move in this one. … Afterwards I found everything dazzling… During this brief moment of divine everlastingness, I worshipped grey humanity.
… since the death of my father, the idea of redemption, the mystery of incarnation, the aspiration to wholeness – and the assurance that it wasn’t out of reach – had won me over.’
Pontalis asks what he has done with these beliefs from childhood that while vanishing in their original shape have remained active as, ‘one never gives up anything. … across the succession of dishevelled illusions, the thing in itself remains, that it has a life tougher than life!’