The Pathetic Fallacy

Author(s): Laurie Kutchins

Source: The Georgia Review , FALL 2004, Vol. 58, No. 3 (FALL 2004), pp. 528-532
Published by: Georgia Review

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41402479

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 Laurie Kutchins

The Pathetic Fallacy

The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state
of mind which attributes to it these characters of a liv-

ing creature is one in which the reason is unhinged by

grief. All violent feelings have the same effect. They
produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of
external things, which I would generally characterize
as the "pathetic fallacy."
-John Ruskin, Modern Painters

YESTERDAY,
the the
road.road.
It layItonlaytheleaving on thebridge
old narrow my old
overhouse
Joes narrow forthan
Creek, less bridge town, over I found Joes a Creek, penis in less the than middle a hun- of
a hun-
dred yards from my house, where Green Hill Road turns sharply toward the
hamlet of Singers Glen and meanders through a grove of wild redbuds about a
month from bloom. I drove right past it before it stopped me. It jarred a voice
inside that rippled from groin to mouth, questions wedged between a laugh
and a shriek, is that what I thought it was? Did I just pass a penis on the road?
I wanted to be sure. I braked, checked to see that no one else was coming, put
the car in reverse, and when I was again upon the small bridge I rolled down
my window and saw that I had made no mistake.
How pathetic it looked, lying all by itself on the road in the raw foggy
morning, maturely erect but disembodied. So exposed, so unhinged, it seemed
marked for blasphemy. Its strange shade of pink and its obvious displacement
made me think of the frozen shrimp I sometimes see displayed among the
pork and beef inside the local butchers counter. On our quiet country road
flanked with Mennonite farms and rural churches, and not one bar or night-
club, here was some chucked stump of testosterone arresting me atop the dark
wet asphalt. How well it held its shape, like a hyacinth mischievously snipped

[528]

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 LAURIE KUTCHINS 529

at the base and robbed of its necessary att

it looked to be about nine inches long wit
me at once as both vulgar and vulnerable.
Its shape held all character of a living cre
My tongue wondered what to call it. The
itself with so many synonymic choices: ph
shaft, chubby, pecker, peter, whizzer, tool,
organ, not to mention the countless priva
lips. Made of a bloodless rubber, this pha
spirit, but with perpetual erection. I knew i
roadkill, but I was relieved my tires had a
littered thing, or perhaps a prank for wh
who would back up for a closer look? Wh
a piece of trash, I couldn't be sure. And
it? That it lay so near my house gave me
farther and it would have settled into Jo
stream where my child likes to wade for
buddy from across the road.
I was about to leave it be and drive off
penis was abruptly my dilemma. What s
bridge? What if it was still there when I pic
brought him home from school? What if he
that on the road?" And would I feel relief if
it was gone? What if someone else came a
into the creek where my child would sooner
Duane stepping on the love snake in their
buckets filled with creek water, and luggi
tadpoles or salamanders swimming inside
daughter peering into the bucket, eager to s
she was not with me at the time. I felt a pr
as a mountain lion's, press down on my t
I did not know what to think; I had n
make sure no one was watching me. I got
up. My thumb and middle finger gripped
see the poor thing had a head but no brai
I surmised it had seen better days. I opene
the floor, wiped my hands on my pant legs

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 530 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

above, I saw myself driving to town with someo

of my car.
Psychology and history came flooding in. I wondered if my predicament
was what Freud had fantasized when he coined the phrase "penis envy." And
I both chuckled and grimaced over Jung s reverence for synchronicity. Play-
fully, I mused whether the penis was on my road because I was being urged
to make more intimate contact with my animus, my inner masculinity. Was
I not potent or complete enough as a woman? Was I to be more aggressive,
more pointed, firmer in the world of my Eros? Did I need this dick, and so it
manifested out of the morning fog to meet me on the small country bridge so
near my house?
But I was equally disturbed by its timing and presentation. At exactly
the moment I was crossing the bridge and met the phallus, I had been puz-
zling over whether my body is carrying an old memory of trauma- or might
it be rapture?- a somatic sensation unhinged from any accountable cause, an
inchoate knowing that I cannot trace or story, cannot even name. I was think-
ing how much like the earth I am: my body with her own moon, her strata of
understories, her fossils and shadows, fires and oils; my psyche layered with its
own imprints of trauma and pleasure that I cannot reach through fact, rational
mind, and narrative memory.
It is true there is nothing logical about grief. To experience, to feel ,
whether despair or rapture, is grief s threshold. To the strict logician, grief
does unhinge us, but it also makes our human boundary more open and porous
with the world of living creatures and external things. Have we not castrated
ourselves from our own porous natures out of fear of all that is inchoate, pas-
sionate, and tender within us? We lose both collective and personal memory
when we become dissociated from our own fears. We have not yet learned how
to grieve, how to listen to, and speak intimately enough of ourselves, or of our
worlds.

But our bodies have not lost this connection. They have mastered the
arc of creation and death even before we have taken our first swallow of air.

Like the earth, the body keeps the memory, and its knowledge, even protects
it from the logic of binary mind. In my own body, I honestly do not know if
the somatic memory I am trying to fathom is personal or collective, early or
ancient, molestation or intimacy, trauma or pleasure, or the all of it. These were
some of my thoughts, sharply interrupted and reconfigured by the phallus

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 LAURIE KUTCHINS 53I

that moments later lay on the floor of m

breathing creature.
Inside, the penis quickly claimed more of
out on the asphalt. It raised its sense of pers
seemed as if history itself had fallen into m
the dark hush of the lynchings among th
of the burning crops and the killings of t
blood has met the ground where I raise c
I recalled the legend of the Soothing Fo
located just beyond the little bridge and
I've been told is that long ago a Senedo ch
people after falling in love with a colonial g
the Soothing Fountain where the spring w
tion and answers. I wonder what happene
a lovemaking or a rape, a consummation
recent incident in town where a man wa
stalls of the Livestock Auction. I thought
feel it but not reach it.

The penis could belong to anyone I passe

two Confederate flag stickers in the cab
who has dressed the scarecrow in her garden
could belong to me now. I turned up Grea
often when I am walking, I come upon a
It seems each time I walk here I pass new
musk of death coming from the grass. I n
miscellany of human trash, new gunnysac
body parts, the fur of legs and ribs, and
white-tailed deer.

Over time, I have come to accept this o

scape. I have even come to appreciate its r
shameless visibility of some neighbor s p
the ugly, the unsanctioned, the violated, on
sary part of the work of ecological and em
than hidden, we are finally asked to see the
but good when taproot meets the surface,
know wind and ravens beaks.

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 532 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

I knew the grass along Great Hollow was w

among the other discarded parts- the delicate sp
of the femur, the entrails, the dark heart, the sple
the empty cans, the smashed net cap, the blue c
pipe, the broken bottle. I stood before the litter
again. Briefly cradled between my fingers, it seem
potency.
There is enough empathy to go around. I wondered whose body the penis
missed. I wondered how loyal can spirit be to a sentient world that is classified
as false, and allowed to be cut off. And what pact can body keep with spirit
when it is violated, dismembered, and littered? Is it not good that some wise
part of us keeps a pair of wings folded in reserve, to flee as impetus for survival
and to rejoin the more than human with ferocity of tenderness?
A vulture circled over, moving a small shadow, waiting for me to leave
its feast site alone. Pathetic phallus. I flung it onto the heap. It landed head
up and settled between some rib bones and a sack of guts. Now its root could
take to earth, its stark furless crown reach skyward. I'd done my part. Id made
of it an altar to the lost and disembodied, to the severed and the not grieved.
There among the littered grass and the strewn body of the once-living deer, I
saw that it could be whole. But I could not say whether it was human or not.

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