Panic Signs

6. Sometimes my mother consoles me

With a certain amount of presumption on my part, I had written in the prologue of the first edition of this book that I was sure the state, the army, the ministers, the institutions, and organized forms of oppression in general, were going to provide me with a sufficiently long list of panic signs to allow me to keep writing about them. But I neglected to mention, in that first prologue, something else that the book itself would discover: the private, personal, individual sources of hallucination and terror, the miraculous and the absurd. Often, when I cannot sleep, I try to count sheep; the attempt is useless : the first sheep in the flock refuses to jump. The sheep doesn’t walk, doesn’t move, doesn’t follow my orders. It remains indifferent to any effort to impose my will on it. I don’t know what the psychoanalysts would think, but it seems to me that even in the most inoffensive of fantasies, power relations are apparent. In a very clear sense, I don’t own the sheep that I summon in my imagination, and this discovery has appeared to me to be a sign, a clue. To Have and Have Not was the title of one of Hemingway’s novels. False, subtle opposition; nobody has, but some believe themselves to have. —C.P.R. Barcelona, 1980 —— 3 —— ...