OMER WISSMAN

PSYCHOMATHS

Coperniklein and Freudinger met in kindergarten. At first they showed no interest in each other, only in themselves and the circle of friends orbiting around their still light of mass bodies. But when the kinder bully, Bolby was his name perhaps, stole the gardener’s IPhone X2 and smashed it to variable and power, hurtling one at Coperniklein’s eyes and the other at Freudinger’s crotch, the two prodigies were entangled there or then and with the force of <2+1 as they quickly hid behind the empty tool shed. They recovered from this heady drama to throw ( ) and 0 at the bully, these none-objects seeming to grow experientially in volume as they came closer and closer to bounce off maybe-Bowlby’s bulbous bleeding. Coperniklein and Freudinger looked at each other and telepathically agreed upon the first law of psychodynamic emotion, explicating how the comet-like coming of the bully’s objects into their system created an effect, a response of equal energy, conserving their balance still rooted to the same ground of being.

At the kindergarten inappropriately named ‘Eden’ began a small graduation ceremony, and the sitter of babes brought her guitar and sang some nonsense about tip talking through a guardian, but Coperniklein and Freudinger were transfixed by the workings of her instrument and would use this experience to formulate their heartstring theory. The pair stipulated that for hearts to sing and not only be beaten a soul must have a hole it hopelessly tries to cover over by strands of artifice themselves requiring the very same sufficient tension provided by dark holes, so when the strands are picked on they produces heartquakes, their magnitude determined by the set of keys a kid’s father was able to accumulate during his life and leave to his child in death.

The prodigious boy girl duo entered elementary parting school, and began a project of redefining language as the sugar coating of a bitter wisdom tooth, using an old book found in mama Freudinger’s attic, and began reinterpreting its words as spells, moving on to dictionaries as books of shadows and lexicon grimoires. From this Coperniklein extrapolated the concept of a fiction quotient, assuming certain outgrowths of language, like adjectives and adverbs, decrease in effect exponentially with relation to the frequency of their use, creating the measure of fiction (Freudinger insisted on a missing are) between the said and the heard. This was the pair’s first foray into the field they called realitivity, principally the relation between two children’s relative realities which determines the length of phantom jump rope available for the twosome’s entanglement.

Having devoured enough language by this point, the duo began expressing and referring to themselves in accordance with poetic terminology by saying, for example, ‘this part-I wants candy’ while pointing to the belly, or nudging one another ‘this eye-me is realitively hungry’ followed by the television turning on as if by itself. When groups and cliques started forming the two reacted by equally distancing from these and nearing each other, a motion manifested among other ways in the form of an hypothesis claiming an archetypal relation, dating back to the first membrane, of in-out, where in is better yet is holed, knowing it can not survive without an out. This began for them in womb, continued with breath and nourishment, and ends (Sex Ed was still some grades ahead) with herds of teacher pets and flocks of gossipers and schools of fishy silence kids.

Once the school bully, previously of the garden variety bullying, pushed Coperniklein in a puddle of muddy ground to roaring laughter the child rose quickly, smile dripping blood, screaming you reek ah! This would soon turn into the name of a theory of shame, which freudiklein, as they called themselves now, now and again, developed alongside their physical developments as a bricolage of hermeneutics and puberty׳s demand to wash ever more thoroughly one׳s hidden parts. Original sin, they would soon claim, was not man’s, but God-made, splitting by the serpent’s split tongue pure nowledge into tasty and nasty. Hearing of this, the Bible teacher sent them to their headmaster, who found disturbing satisfaction in telling pupils ‘you've been a bad’.

One English class both bad boys noticed that on the back of a seat stood in front of them, written by their frenemy Schroeder, was his country’s childhood catchphrase ‘he who looks at me from behind does not know who I am’. The two protagonists were taken aback by this strange sentence, but quickly and delightedly regained its sense-making and started writing down, exquisite corpse-style, their conception of a ruckenfigur complex. For them, the fact a person can barely see his back and hardly see his face resulted in several interesting phenomena and epiphenomena. This meant, in the context of this complex, that a ‘me’ is merely a ‘merror’, erroneously mistaking himself for what is seen through the eyes of an intricate so called enterweb, a self of superimposed transparent print-outs of truthproof promises, chief among these a pledge to return in and as the same stream of consciousness, as dawn is sure of day.

After this realitivization, Freudinger shared with his little old friend an hypothesis suggesting how he became so creative in thought; claiming to have accidently swallowed a bee back in Eden, which made and kept his algorithmic head a-buzzing. Coperniklein replied that ‘this is but a variation on the input-output equation, in this particular instance formulated as what bee goes in must end out honey’. Coperniklein expounded further that in his friend's very special head-case, to become more than a shell-self he needed to open up a hole so whole it let him let the entire world in, starting with a little thing, like a bee. You then insert being busy to contest the bee, spells to exercise the two busy bodies, a comb for them to honey in, holy sweetwater to water the holey darkness, a swallow to swallow the whole thing and spew it out inside the mouth-part of a hummingwelt.

At this point they began to ask their classmates what point could there possibly bee to their shell-life. Some shrugged, some hugged, others screamed ice-cream, and when the survey was concluded the dual child-scientists concluded this pointing at something else is the meaning of meaning, but the meaning of life is in identity, finding and escaping it like in a game of tag, hiding in its expanding 0 until it devours 1’s soulitude. Freudinger said to his friend life is but about solving I=Y, and Coperniklein countered that if anything the opposite is true, and the point is the relationship betweenn point a and b, and the counterpoints which take them to(o) and for(m) always anew. Coperniklein hoped Freudinger will hear the subtext song of Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? But Freudinger, at the time still denying tomorrows exist, now saw Coperniklein as veering towards sentimentality, and rather than increasing intimacy the cord between point Freudinger and counterpoint Coperniklein started growing slightly more tense than their heartstring bridge could bear.

Freudinger would then cling to his schadenFreud part like it was his mother’s mastectomized nipple. He wrote little notes to be glued under the teacher’s desk diagnosing God as always multiplying an absolutist zero, Gulliver as mere Lilliputian infantile phantasy, literature as the farce stage of myth, metaphysics as failed psychology.

Coperniklein meanwhile was taken by so took to, with just as much dedication, the arts. Coperniklein was particularly involved in drama, often reciting ‘heavy is the head for to bare the frown’. When Freudinger, hearing something else entirely, asked what in hellen this meant, Coperniklein put on a very serious look and laughed, as though trying to explain tragedy and comedy both to be masks behind which there is nothing but the sound of an empty theatre and the fury of cheated understudies. This struck a sour note with Freudinger, who grew yet more distant. Coperniklein noted Freudinger’s little body beginning to exit his orbit, nearing escape velocity, so tried to stop time with some tall tale about how their heads are like polar magnets, and ‘the further space pulls us apart the more l world can be between you and I created’. Freudinger put his hand on Coperniklein’s head and coldly shrugged off this child’s way of expressing love, saying it was simply a fear of death talking, talk he could never reciprocate, because after all and from the first he was all along his beeing the way-above mentioned X, while ‘you kleine Klein were stuck by the power of 2, to which one such as myself can never add an I, because of the Y we both know only you are possessed by.’ Coperniklein mumbled at gravity’s tiles ‘of, never only by’ but Freudinger no longer heard what was trying to be said, only a stammering molasses-like goodbye.

BIOGRAPHY

Omer Wissman is a 37 year-old multidisciplinary artist. His essays have appeared in PopMatters and Overland, his fiction in Sensitive Skin and ShortStoryProject, and his poetry in Serotonin and others. @MiddleEast