Sunday, April 11, 2010

Anne Carson

Freud (1st draft)


Freud spent the summer of 1876 in Trieste
researching hermaphroditism in eels.
In the lab of zoologist Karl Klaus

he dissected
more than a thousand to check whether they had testicles.

"All the eels I have cut open are of the tenderer sex,"
he reported after the first 400.
Meanwhile

the "young goddesses" of Trieste were proving
unapproachable.
"Since

it is not permitted
to dissect human beings I have
in fact nothing to do with them," he confided in a letter.


-from "Men in the Off Hours"

No comments:

Post a Comment