On Writing a Circle

Whereas the magic circle involves an active human governance of the boundary between

the apparent world and the hidden world, the magic site is the dark inverse: the anonymous, unhuman intrusion of the hidden world into the apparent world, the enigmatic manifesting of the world-with-out-us into the world-for-us, the intrusion of the Planet into the World.

Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, Volume 1

On March 16th, 2020, the Planet intruded finally into my World; the entire globe had become a magical site, infected and infecting. Membranes had been rent, forces loosed. With everyone else, I set about the task, employing various technologies, of trying to construct a new magical circle. A ground on which to stand and from which I might be available in some way for my patients who were engaged in the identical labor. The task itself is a synthetic one. Whatever I was doing, I wasn't sure it had terribly much to do with the work of analysis.

On March 24th, I began to keep a clinical diary. I made entries three to four times a week for three months with a final isolated entry in late July recounting two patients' eerily similar dreams reported the same day. Double-goer. Nebenmensch.

In my second journal entry from March 25th, I cast a memorializing gesture toward that “supremely consoling entry into strangeness” that Anne Carson formulates in her essay, “Every Exit Is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)” (2005). Carson begins her essay recounting her earliest memory of a dream, when she was three years old, of the house where she lived. Coming down the stairs from her bedroom to the living room, the dark green sofa and light green walls were exactly as they had always been, and yet the room was utterly strange. As a child, Carson explained the dream to herself, that she had entered the room from the sleep side. She recounts recovering this dream much later in life, when her father was afflicted by dementia, and his face was just the same and yet whol