Oblivio: Stories and such by Michael Barrish

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Pinocchio’s Erection | Aug 12 2000

Why does Pinocchio’s nose grow longer when he lies? Despite the fact that I saw the Disney film as a child, and despite the fact that I just read an online synopsis of the more recent film, The Adventures of Pinocchio, I don’t know the answer to this question. However, somewhere, it may have been in the synposis, I recall reading that Collidi’s story was intended as a morality tale for children, the moral of course being: don’t tell lies or you’ll be kicked out of school and forced to have incredible, life-transforming adventures.

A poor memory is a mixed blessing. On the downside, you lose a lot of valuable information such as where you parked your girlfriend’s car, or, well, other stuff I can’t think of right now. On the upside, you get to do various fun things like lie in bed and try to figure out why Pinocchio’s nose would grow longer when he lies, as I did this morning.

Here’s what I concluded, and I don’t care if it’s “wrong”: lying is a libidinal act; Pinocchio’s giant nose is a giant erection. I realized this when I thought back to Tuesday’s story of the lunchtime cyclist and his frantic, sweat-inducing couplings.

And, um, speaking of erections, I had this dream last night (I only just remembered this) in which Susi and I were babysitting three babies. All of the babies were naked – which is not such an odd thing for a baby – and one, the smallest, had this enormous erection. I mean, the erection was larger than the rest of the child. I pointed this out to Susi, though it didn’t really need to be pointed out, and Susi said that despite the giant penis, the baby was actually a girl. This filled me with pity, for I realized that this baby was going to have to go through life attempting to hide a rather impossible-to-hide thing – a thing, moreover, that belonged to the opposite gender. Whatever she did to fight it, this thing, this lie, would forever define her.

A footnote about dreams. Last night I read an abstract for an academic paper by one Martin S. Fiebert entitled Sex, Lies and Letters: A Sample of Significant Deceptions in the Freud/Jung Relationship. The Freud/Jung split is well-trodden ground, I know, but I still learned a few things. Namely that Freud had a long-standing affair with his wife’s younger sister, Minna Bernays, and that Bernays secretly revealed this to Jung, who was shocked and never told Freud that he knew. Feiberts states that Freud’s affair “stimulated and sanctioned Jung’s growing desire for his patient and student, Sabina Spielrein,” with whom Jung began an affair a year or so later. Naturally, all this screwing around and concomitant secret-keeping led to a rather complicated and comical scene when the two men sailed together to America in 1909 and conducted mutual dream analyses. In short, both were forced to offer the other bogus dream associations, with Freud looking particularly pathetic since Jung knew the truth about Bernays. Jung lucked out here, as Spielrein had written to Freud, telling him of her romance with Jung, only Freud had fallen for Jung’s explanation that Spielrein was emotionally disturbed. Three years later, just before the two men split, Spielrein visited Freud in Vienna, and the two became close. It was then that Freud realized the truth.