Decoding History In Bed Poem by gershon hepner

Our histories, though cryptically encoded,
can be decoded once we go to bed,
when sperm and cunty juices are downloaded,
or when a dream removes our maidenhead.

Inspired by Adam Phillips’s review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, ” in the LRB, April 26,2007:

The important thing here—and in all forms of history writing which, like Daniel Mendelsohn’s, have been affected by Freud—is not that everything is ‘reduced’ to sexuality, but that everything is subsumed by memory: desire for the past has the urgency and ingenuity once accorded to sexuality. Sexuality matters because it is one’s history at its most cryptically encoded. Family history shows up at one’s most intimate exchanges with other people. The lost—the literal and more figurative losses from one’s past—are never, in this view, quite as lost as one feared, or indeed hoped.


5/20/07