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Abstract

Freud suggested in his essay “The Mystical Writing Pad” the beginning of the geological ethnography in which the person might be split into coexisting archeological layers. But Freud short shrifted the method and his choices for excavation. What would happen if a garden were psychoanalyzed? The grub and praying mantis, the piece of blue glass in the humus, the encroaching Bermuda grass, the sharpness of the spade, the lingering traces of the previous owners, and economies would all have to be accounted for in what Braudel described as a “set of sets.” The result would be a stratified, geological history of the marks left behind in literal scars, in lilacs, and in the emotional tones vibrating in the pattern of cuts and cutting devices—but all related like a set of living boxes nestled inside one another.

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The Mark on the Spade

Abstract

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