[cw: image of the aftermath of DV (via Nan Goldin); mention of rape]
It is day four of surgery recovery. Sun breaks through the bedroom curtains this morning, a fact I notice with relief. The grim procession of gray days since Christmas have tamped the city’s energy, exacerbated my depression, and, in the last half-week, intensified my sense of being penned in by this period of convalescence. YES it’s only been four days, NO, I’m no good at slowing down.
When Kevin wakes I’ll ask him to draw the curtains wide, invite the light entirely in. I am starved for light, I long for illumination; my plants, too, appear miserable with photosynthetic inattention. For now I let him sleep, wishing to grant a reprieve from my need. For four days he’s rushed about the apartment, ensuring my movement is easeful, incremental, and assisted. It isn’t that I’m in pain—I am cushioned and coddled by Meloxicam, Tylenol, Valium (I am avoiding the opioids). No, I float happily above myself in an oddly pleasurable dissociation. My body seems intuitively to recognize these new delimitations; when I lift myself from a supine position, automatically my core ignites. (Let us praise our lord and savior, Yoga with Adriene’s Adriene Mishler.)
Harron spent the weekend here, cooking, tidying, rewatching Girls with me1, walking Olive, playing tug of war with her and her demolished stuffies. Emily will be managing my well-being in the afternoons this week and next, as Kevin returns to work. Of course I am already moving around the apartment, doing small things for myself, spiting protestations from Kevin, from Harron. Every atom of my being bucks against this helplessness, which I nevertheless must again and again cede territory to. Partly, I think, it is a resistance to hyper-saturated sociality—I require so much alone time to recuperate, to reorchestrate my capacity to be around others.2 For two weeks I will be alone hardly at all.
In the last letter I wrote that Aunt Léonie was my purest pleasure in the first section of Swann. Here we return to her, to the peculiarities of her confinement and the strictures she imposes on her companions, comic scenes that quietly signal Proust’s gentle mockery of her, which is also, winkingly, a satirization of his own “invalidism.” Proust was a severe asthmatic who lived before the discovery of cortisone; as Edmund White writes in his brief study of Proust, this condition meant “he was separated from nature, which he worshipped,” and was “forced to spend much of his life in bed.3 As the years wore on and his condition worsened, he made only rare sorties outside,” increasingly becoming, by medical necessity, oriented toward solitude.
In the afternoon, as I lie propped in bed with my books, my laptop, Olive lying protectively over or curled between my legs, I look out the window, as Léonie does, imagining the world that continues apace. In the bare tree beyond the window two finches cheerily chatter.
On the fifth day Emily accompanies me to the surgeon’s office for my post-op. In transit I am profoundly vulnerable, fearful of stumbling, knocking into the poles in the centers of the trains, of being shoved by someone who, in all likelihood, is unmalicious, but—as we all are in this city—incredibly busy. In the transfers we move slowly, Emily checking in, guarding my body with hers when we are moving through blooms of crowding people on the platforms, going up the stairs, milling about just outside or inside the door of the car. (Probably I should have called a Lyft but it is impossible to choke down the fact that, now, a one-way ride between midtown and Queens soars over $60 on a Monday afternoon. I wonder, suddenly, how anyone affords anything anymore, and think, too, of how much money is quietly kept in this city.)
In the office, once I undo the ridiculous compression bra I am compelled to wear for the next month, the surgeon meditatively regards my breasts a moment before saying, “My god, they’re perfect.” A shard of light penetrating the window shifts position, suddenly illuminating her expression. It feels comic, a cartoon gag.
In the melodrama of this visual revelation I am reminded suddenly of the steeple of St. Hilaire in Swann, its grand “effort” “to hurl its spire-point into the heart of heaven […] the steeple that dominated everything else, summoning the houses from an unexpected pinnacle, raised before me like the finger of God.”
For a moment I wonder if it is wanton narcissism that inspires me to connect these instants, or if I’ve hallucinated the detail, if it’s the Valium blurring the edges of my perception, but the light sits on her face for the remainder of the visit. When I’ve safely shut the office door behind me I find myself laughing.
On the ninth day I renounce the fiercer pain meds, shifting my bodily burden to Tylenol exclusively. My breasts remain numb, they are two cabbages slung across my chest. Perhaps an ambient fear of dependency lingers. Some weeks ago now Kevin and I trekked to IFC to see the Nan Goldin / Laura Poitras documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, a film that remains lodged somewhere in my gut, a ruthless overlaying of three griefs, private and global—Goldin’s loss of her sister to suicide, AIDS, and the opioid crisis.4 As I pace the apartment in the silent hours between Kevin leaving for work and Emily arriving to help with Olive’s afternoon walk, I listen to Terry Gross’s interview of Goldin, whose voice is familiar and raspy, mostly monotone, appealingly sharp-edged.
She speaks baldly, unmoved by niceties, perfectly willing to offer correctives to Gross, who asks if anyone assisted in the photos Goldin did of herself fucking in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency: “First of all, I took those pictures, there was no [other photographer] present […] It was a tripod […] I never set up my work. I just put a camera on the tripod and took pictures, and some of them were good and some of them weren’t […] It’s important people understand I never ruffled a sheet or asked somebody to do something they weren’t doing. That’s part of the intimacy and the power of the work.”
I cannot help but think—in encountering Goldin’s sense of her photos as unmediated, because unposed—of the narrator’s grandmother, and her reluctancy to gift him “photographs of ancient buildings or of beautiful places,” for “she would find that vulgarity and utility had too prominent a part in them, through the mechanical nature of their reproduction in photography.”5 But Goldin is right to note, I think, that the power of her photographs lies in a proximate hyper-present--they are portraits, of self and others, that long to dissolve the separation between looker and spectacle, they are not (at least as I see them) invitations to an omnipotent, objectifying voyeur but ethical claims6 to our mutual vulnerabilities and astonishments.
As I begin my next book, a memoir, I am struck by a kind of archival paralysis: how to narrate the events of my history without undercutting their immediacy, without dithering away the urgency of their presence with the writing. This is also partly Proust’s project: his novel from life, which refabricates experience without functioning as mere transcription. How to collapse the translucencies between memory and art? I wish for my own madeleine, in my way—for involuntary memory, which is an odd thing to wish for in my circumstance, as the memoir is one of trauma, and part of arriving where I am now, a great deal of my survival’s texture, has been founded in managing the involuntariness of rape-related PTSD. There is a delicate distance to be established between the experience and its narrativization.
Etymological digressions are, I know, rather overcooked in the personal essay—nonetheless I love them, in the way I am always thrilled by situating meaning through its sedimented histories, its vestigialisms. The process reminds me that nothing is ever lost; or rather, that some trace of the present remains in all the strange and disparate matter of what follows. “Recovery” lives inside the Medieval Latin, recuperare, and in Old French—recovrer, to come back, to return, which is related, also, to the Anglo-French, rekeverer, which joins with recoveren, “to regain consciousness,” or health after sickness.
I think of Goldin’s corpus as a testament to these modes of recuperation: she honors the glittering singularity, the artistry, the loves of people who are exiled by our often socially callous world to its margins. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is a document of witness to those killed by governmental negligence in twin crises—AIDS and the opioid epidemic—including her own narrow salvation after an opioid overdose. I seek in my book—not a healing, because I think such prescriptivist notions of “getting over” trauma are, in the main, tidying fictions—but a re-vision of my consciousness, which is about my memories of violation, yes, and also a recalibration of how I reckon with this pastness to defacilitate its ability to coopt my continuing present tense. Proust’s novel, of course, is also an act of retrieval, his gathering of lost time—du temps perdu.
In today forgoing the pleasant fog of the benzos, mainly what I long for is clarity of thought. I correct myself: it is not only a longing but a requirement. I am on a freelance deadline, also I worry my emails to editors and publicists are coming off loopy, also it’s time to begin drafting the first chapter of this new book. It’s true I am writing, but writing under the influence is more haphazard in hindsight than you realize. At 20, I convinced myself my drunk poems were better because looser but the cold glare of sober reading always undercut any elation granted by the alcoholic muse. The poems were messy, emotionally unnuanced, and rhyming for the sake of flair, rather than form. It is easy to discount juvenilia; it is necessary to recognize where you have produced bad work.
Now I’m a hundred years old and a day writer, my best hours between 10 and 2—hydrated, largely uncaffeinated. I think: if I am to be stuck at home for the next month, I’m going to write 20k words, goddammit. I need something to show for myself before I return to bartending, before I am swept again into the windstorm of the social. Of Proust’s enforced solitude, White writes that it also “provided him with a ready excuse for keeping people at bay when he wanted to work.”
The eleventh day I spend with one of Mary Garrard’s studies of the Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi, who I am writing about in the new book. I am reminded of “Esther before Ahasuerus,” the only painting of hers I have seen in person, as it was, for some time, exhibited in the Met—and also of Alice Neel’s portraits of Garrard, one of which I encountered in the Neel exhibit “People Come First” at the Met last year. In Swann, there “were two tapestries of high warp representing the coronation of Esther (tradition had it that the weaver had given to Ahasuerus the features of one of the kinds of France and to Esther those of a lady of Guermantes whose lover he had been).” The family has, we also find in this section, plates after the One Thousand and One Nights—staging a subtle but provocative connective thread between Esther and Scheherazade, women who each begged mercy from ruthless husband-kings (Esther, for the Jewish people; Scheherazade for the Sultan’s wives).
On the fifteenth day, Kevin and I go out for dinner. I am less frail now. Off antibiotics by this point, I even indulge in a cocktail. Having had no booze in a few weeks I am quickly tipsy, warm in the cheeks, silly. On the sixteenth day I stop counting days. On the morning of the twentieth day, I finish Helen Garner’s diaries (that it is the twentieth day I verify by my own diary). A bitter, mournful feeling at this fact, like the unwanted splitting by distance of a long-standing friendship. I have luxuriated in the three volumes of her personal records across the last eight months, deeply incrementally—a single paragraph entry one morning, thirty pages on another. I feel our worlds have become assimilated to one another. It fascinates me how present Proust is in the third volume—she returns to La Récherche again and again as her marriage dissolves into resentment, hostility, her husband’s gaslighting her about his infidelity. Proust’s project, too, becomes embroiled in her own:
In work, though, this shadow of THE NOVEL is still hanging over me. A tyranny. The feeling that I have to have a structural idea before I even start. I have imbibed osmotically [my husband] V’s contempt for ‘the confessional first,’ as he calls it. Why don’t I just shitcan all that and follow what moves me? Keep working the territory that I have opened up and marked out and developed—the crossover between fiction and an account of what happened?
And I think how Garner’s thinking through her work—this umbilicus between her territory and Proust’s—has become, also, a transparency laid over my own. An intermingling of labors, a melding of modes.
Everyone’s rewatching Girls, right? What’s that tweet again—something about how you know we’re on the cliffedge of a recession because we’ve all returned to that cultural moment?
When I say I could live like some witch in the wood it isn’t cottagecore posturing—in another life I’d be May Sarton or Mary Oliver, occupied in large part by solitariness, hours-long daily walks and the company mainly of animals. That I cannot walk Olive on my own for a month is perhaps the most infuriating hurdle, but, I remind myself, this is what I wanted, and healing takes time, and—guiltily—I think how incredibly fortunate I am to have a partner and friends and a broader support network who will reorganize their lives for four weeks to ensure I am able to undergo this healing without worry.
White notes that, in Proust’s lifetime, asthma was commonly thought to be a nervous condition (the narrator’s insomnia, too, is ascribed by Mamma to his “nerves”)—a belief Proust himself toyed with, but ultimately divested himself of.
It feels impossible to ignore, moreover, the echoes of this passage / this inquiry in Walter Benjamin’s discussion of art’s aura in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”—there is even an arresting cathedral in the Benjamin! In Proust’s great novel, Benjamin saw “the absorption of a mystic, the art of a prose writer, the verve of a satirist, the erudition of a scholar, and the self-consciousness of a monomaniac” illuminated and “combined in an autobiographical work.” But this is for someone better versed in Benjamin than I am—or for another time…
I am thinking here, too, of the Levinasian “face of the Other” (a concept I returned to recently after reading Namwali Serpell’s urgent, contemporary reconceptualization of Levinas in Stranger Faces)—or of the Jewish ethicist Martin Buber’s sense of the “I and thou” relation—the vulnerable face presented to the Looking Subject compels a moral responsibility in that viewer for the other. (Where Levinas and Buber differed, however, is pivotal—Levinas saw an asymmetry between the two; Buber believed in a “symmetrical co-presence.” This, again, is a digression that must be bracketed for the time being…)
You are a gifted writer. I am getting hooked. So much to relate to in this post. Good recovery to you. M