My Fraud Paper #1: On Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming
by Anna Mantzaris
Freud’s 1907 talk was written down a year later and looks at the writer’s life in connection with his art.
Freud: “The artist dreams aloud and in public. But what is it that makes for the special pleasure we derive from the artist’s depiction of painful or unpleasant events?”
My high school gym teacher was married to the high school English teacher. I’ll call them the double “K’s” for anonymity. The wooden-floored box where we ran around in matching shorts and tank tops felt akin to a pressurized airplane cabin with anxiety mounting over morphing bodies and the insurmountable fear of being pelted by the live wolves they brought in during a sadistic game of indoor dodgeball.
At first we thought the wolves were supplied by an animal trainer known in town. I’ll call him “Z” for anonymity. He housed a family of chimps that looked so much alike they were interchangeable and shared the profits from television show appearances. It would be a year later I would hear about the fire where the chimps would perish. No one charged but everyone suspected.
But the first day the pack of wolves came in, we assumed they were trained by “Z” so we were optimistic. You should know boys no longer attended our school because they’d been shipped to sea for a possible revolt against our Spartan mascot. So it was twenty-one teenage girls lined up as twenty-one gray wolves were marched in on thick and clattering chains. The wolves, of course, were ecstatic! Very few of us had learned to speak up and we looked like prime prey to these salivating creatures with yellowing eyes and fanging incisors. They were let loose and instead of a basketball-worthy one-on-one offense, they stealthily signaled and chose the weakest and surrounded her. I’ll call her “L” for anonymity. They tore her limb from limb. Yes, it was as gruesome as you would imagine. But the worse was the sound. Not from “L” who must have been paralyzed in fear and couldn’t speak, and she’d always been so quiet, but the noise of ripping and almost burning flesh as she was dismantled until Mr. K nodded and said, That’s it for today, once the wreckage was complete. The wolves walked out in an ordered configuration, licking their chapping lips while sharing one egregious smile.
Next period we sat damp and frightened in Mrs. K’s English class in a space as swampy and fluorescent-lit as her husband’s arena. Write a 999-word story about a girl who goes missing and never returns, said the gym teacher’s wife. I reluctantly raised my hand. I had to ask the truth. But instead, when she called on me with the same nod her husband used, the sound of my faltering voice echoed only Do you want us to double-space?
Freud: “Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?”
When I was a girl, before high school gym, I collected empty boxes. From soap. From bolts of thread. From ripe bananas. I saved and stickered them all with glue-backed medallions my grandmother had accumulated during the war. I carried my eclectic inventory to the fraying basement stacked with wicker baskets in case any more babies were born and created a store I called “On the Spot” that I opened to the neighborhood. I advertised outside with gold-painted cursive signs and images of peacocks pointing in my direction. It was a massive hit. Floods of neighbors and more from adjacent towns I didn’t recognize lined up around the suburban perimeter to enter. I quickly “scanned” items with my stiff horse-hair brush and came up with an arbitrary number to charge them that I confidently announced before packing their items in faltering paper bags.
Freud: “The opposite of play is not which is serious but what is real.”
They handed over large bills and small bills and sometimes coins. Foreign currency was not unusual and I accepted it. They paid me whatever I wanted. And sometimes, if I was in the mood, I asked a sky’s worth for these empty cartons and previously creased sacs and containers that were void of all things edible and useful.
It’s a win-win my father said when I handed him the stacks of money.
Freud: “We may lay it down that a happy person never phantasizes, only an unsatisfied one.”
This is wrong. I was quite content. Later. As an almost-married woman. And for a while. Years. I was very happy. I was blissfully bursting. But I didn’t dare tell anyone. Because that would be cruel. But still. I fantasized more than ever. I dreamt I was an observer in a glass box over Central Park with a baby who couldn’t stop laughing. I imagined the sinuous clouds that floated by our once-duplex were a parade of everyone I’d ever met and loved. I once elevated myself a foot off the ground and floated down the hall, thinking about a future of an every-Sunday pancake breakfast laced with the perfectly tart raspberries he used to harvest. *Note: This is the only time I ever scared him. I was draped in satisfaction like Mick Jagger in his prime. And the fantasies grew and summersaulted like lush tumbleweed that only needed to be watered on occasion.
Freud: “You will remember how I said that the day-dreamer carefully conceals his phantasies from other people because he feels he has reasons for being ashamed of them.”
He’s right. I didn’t tell anyone. What I was doing. What I was thinking. How I thought things would work out. The shame hadn’t set in yet. But it has now. Who was I to think I could expand into another dimension? Build out walls from a constructed and red-taped space? How was I so self-assured to think that my loving and soft limbs wrapped so hard around another could save us? As if nestling my quivering lips while telling him how good he was could make the wolves disappear.
Source for italicized quotes: Freud, "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" [1907].
Anna Mantzaris is a San Francisco-based writer. Her work has appeared in BlazeVOX, The Cortland Review, Five on the Fifth, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Milk Candy Review, Necessary Fiction, New World Writing Quarterly, Sonora Review, The Lascaux Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Occupations (Galileo Press). She teaches writing in the M.F.A. program at Bay Path University.