On 12 July 2026, I gave a reading at Plume cafe in Berlin, along with Nora Fulton, Liola Mattheis, and Maxi Wallenhorst. I increasingly find that I like to produce a bit of public journaling of these events.

My portion involved an initial discussion of ideas, then the reading of a poem by Denise Levertov called “Uncertain Oneiromancy,” then I read the first part of my chapbook, Eugene, up to the point of decision. This was an experiment, which I think went well, though afterwards a German friend said I had been talking too fast. That’s probably true. What follows is an attempt to set those thoughts out a bit slower, and with a bit more self-permission to jargon.

I began by discussing the concept of negative hallucination. Hallucination is often imagined as seeing what isn’t there—pink elephants and the like, or as an unshared perception of intensified significance, beauty, and pattern. By negative hallucination I mean the opposite, namely the inability to see what is there, or following on, the annihilation of aesthetic or conceptual experience across some or all of life.

In the crudest sense one could say: the positive hallucination is seeing the elephant that isn’t there, and the negative hallucination is looking past the elephant in the room.

This notion became interesting to me many years ago as a result of reading Wilfred Bion, in what I feel was his best period, the early-to-mid sixties, which is to say at the moment when he was developing Kleinian theory and moving toward a non-philosophical but very complex epistemology in the form of the Grid. Broadly speaking, Bion is interested in processes which block off certain levels of thinking, so that for example you might be aware of something but unable to name it; you might be able to name it but not to thematize it; or to thematize it but not be curious about it; or to be curious about it, but not to investigate it; or to investigate it but not to commit oneself fully to the investigation; or to deeply investigate without being able to turn the results of that investigation into action. This is the horizontal dimension of the grid, and vertically, one also has a hierarchy of forms of thought, which I think expresses a bit of classic 20c physics envy, but I do think at least that the ability to bring something out in the dream, the ability to bring something out conceptually, and to enter into responsible forms of shared rationality, these are certainly achievements which might be a bit laddered if not perfectly hierarchical. Well, just to say, that while Bion has some crude notions of “attacks on linking” and “-K” (anti-thinking) as well as degradation of the apparatus of thinking, perhaps oriented to the avoidance of certain thoughts and perceptions, what is developed here is a notion of an evasive or damaged self which doesn’t need to fully eliminate the object, just to snip a few wires, confining thought to a primitive level, or say, to the level of what can be thematized but not investigated, or what is mysteriously cut off from the sources of normativity or action.

I believe this also relates to the material which Christopher Bollas calls at the beginning of the eighties the “unthought known.” That is, the form of thought is restricted. One can then orient psychoanalysis somewhat to the question of why something is, or even needs to be, unthinkable for the subject. I feel that Bollas is a bit more commonsensical than Bion on this point, in that he is a bit of an enlightener, while Bion particularly in his late work, seems very concerned actually not to ally himself entirely with a project of knowledge or thinkability, there is a new orientation not only toward action and transformation but a kind of healing of the person one is in an unremembered dream. I find myself partly in agreement with this more mystical turn, which one finds elaborated further in Grotstein’s 90s book Who is the Dreamer, Who Dreams the Dream? However I’m not sure that one can say anything about it, in psychoanalysis or anywhere. By contrast I love the solidity of Bollas, I think when I read him, not only “what an analyst” but “what a man.”

So much digression. I only wanted to say that the material of subtle negative hallucination, of Bionian attacks on linking and anti-thinking, of the Bollasian unthought known, which belongs to characters, is something which I have been trying to reach in my fiction. It’s difficult to do so while staying close to the character view. But I introduced here my own concept, of the diegetic invisible. That is, what the characters cannot see, or can only glimpse, or more interestingly, which they can sort of see but are distinctly limited in their ability to think through or act upon or bring to attention or commit to the investigation of. On and on.

It should be said that none of this jargon was in the talk, which was improvised from notes and which I tried to do without heavy terms or proper names.

Moving on from this, I indulged in a bit of speculation about metaphors of blindness and light, which often unfortunately rub up rather badly against experiences of real disability. I’m not sure what I said was very helpful or conclusive, I mostly wanted to add a bit of disclaimer and not to lose this poem, from Levertov’s final book, Sands of the Well. I have been obsessed with her lately, spending the last month reading her more or less completely, the biographies as well (Greene’s is better than Hollenberg’s, even if the latter is more scholarly and orients more to politics). I read this poem to the room, then I read them Eugene, in which I tried to be faithful to the diegetic invisible, to the unthought known, to the anti-thinking and negative hallucinations of my characters, to their blindness. And sadly to my own in so many ways.

After a full year, I finally have the Eugene chapbooks in hand and was able to sell a few. They’ve been very hard to get to Europe and this weekend was actually my first time seeing them. I think perhaps a few will go to Hopscotch but you can certainly get them from me if you’re around in Berlin or any of the places that I love to run away to.

If you made it this far, have a song:

and another poem by Levertov:

Americans can buy the chap pretty easily here: https://www.topospress.com/collections/pamphlets/products/eugene-by-jackie-ess

And anyone can get this from my patreon, where you can also find the audiobook I made of Darryl (the first edition, I’m not doing it again), and a few other goodies, though it’s not very regularly updated. I think perhaps I will put some more audio on there soon, perhaps a read-through of Eugene or some of the articles I record for myself. https://www.patreon.com/jackie_ess/posts/fragment-of-132092270