for Emily Schlesinger
I came to psychoanalysis to mourn the last shards of faith I had in heterosexuality. Into a glass of wine, I say to my ex-partner: I am finally learning to speak. You’re saying you never learned to speak, my ex-partner says. Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?
About psychoanalysis, my ex-partner says: It’s a dying profession. Why don’t you join a support group instead? Al-Anon exists, and I hear there’s one where you co-counsel strangers. You take a class and learn to listen to the strangers. You get close with them, I’m told. It’s radical, in fact. You go to the strangers once a week for an hour at a time and listen to them, but you can’t be friends with or have sex with them. The entire goal of this support group is for people who are strangers to help one another cry.
You can’t have sex with your analyst, either. Not that I’d want to.
I suppose you cannot see her, my analyst, so let me paint a picture in your mind. My analyst has emerald-green eyes. From the Latin, her name means industrious, striving. Physically, she is slender and multi-pronged like the notebook where she writes down my thoughts as she listens, after which she offers observations: incantations that invoke supernatural forms, hidden places, and the dead. Hovering in attention, her eyes remain fixed in a look one might refer to as meditative. Underneath them exists an abyss where light becomes trapped, where she too is trapped inside. I feel formless today, I imagine her thinking, and one might claim I am projecting, trivializing her mood as nothing more than a sentence in her head. And perhaps I don’t understand her, but I insist, I know her: her chapped lips; her tortoiseshell glasses; her dislike of cold; and her ability to win strangers over with a self-deprecating sense of humor, a quality absent in most human beings. While speaking, she pauses to consider the mood of each phrase. With so many words at one’s disposal, one must carefully choose.
My analyst: she is me, as I am her. We have already begun to tell our story.
On days we are dressed in all black, I imagine I am her—my analyst, my kind mirror—and she is me—an austere adjunct, an ugly ghost, a writer’s writer who got her heart smashed to bits by the last heterosexual man she’ll ever love: a long-distance inamorato who, before pausing to kiss her goodbye, said: We should just be friends.
Because she knows what secure attachment is, my analyst feels sorry for me. She does not say so, but I see it, gazing at her through my peripheral vision as I lie face-up on the couch. I dreamt I was forced to perform oral sex on a dead dick, I say. I am in love with a body that is not a body, I say. I came home, made an açai bowl, wept on my cat, and emailed you, I say. Our correspondence helps me write.
What does my analyst think of my porousness? You are going to write a book, I tell her. It will be called Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts. It will be about a psychoanalyst who is trying to write a novel when she is supposed to be writing a monograph. Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts will experimentally juxtapose excerpts from the monograph-in-progress—a series of case studies about world-weary analysands whose psychic woes induce negative counter-transference in the analyst, haunting emotions she cannot exorcise, no matter how many smudge sticks she burns—with a wry inner monologue that elucidates how, while writing her monograph, the analyst chain smokes, eats jelly beans, and becomes distracted by online news articles about North American orca populations starving and disappearing. The novel will contain a 10-page passage about how the analyst is preparing for life after Roe vs. Wade; a flashback to an afternoon she served as a hospice volunteer; a chapter called “Enema”; erasures of pages from Freud’s The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious; and drafts of emails she sends to her monograph’s academic publisher, wherein she concocts a fiction detailing a recently developed water allergy that is causing her to fall behind deadline. Ultimately, the juxtaposition between the monologue and the monograph will produce the novel’s alchemy, described by The New York Review of Books as “neurotically rhizomatic.”
I will write a novel too. My novel will be about you. It will be called The Analyst, and it will take place inside the mind of an unreliable narrator who is obsessed with her psychoanalyst. The novel will be an homage to Lolita: delusional and tongue-in-cheek, but with less blatant erotic motifs. I want my prose to feel like Nabokov, but a little more repressed. Writing is the drive to live, but sentences inevitably lead toward death. This morning, I wrote a list in my phone, and the list may be an outline for the novel, or it may be the novel itself. Novels can assume a number of forms. I learned this in graduate school. After all, the novel is about making literature novel. These days, the novel is not necessarily a paper object; it is a container, a malleable form with malleable boundaries for this malleable century in which the world is a grief that creeps up the spine and pauses in the center, shadowing the heart. In other words, Extended JavaScript can be a novel. Sans serif phrases projected atop buildings, per Jenny Holzer—EXPIRING FOR LOVE IS BEAUTIFUL BUT STUPID; ALL I AM IS IMPULSE, AND LONGING; AND ONLY BY ENOUGH, TO CONTEMPLATE FROM AFAR—can be a novel. A bowl filled with chopped vegetables and ink on paper can be a novel—and a balloon filled with scraps of language, a cross-stitched text, a deck of cards, and so forth.
Balloons make me depressed, my analyst says. They lay dead on the beach like whale carcasses.
I fantasize about going on a writing retreat with my analyst, my kind mirror, my sister, my best friend. In psychoanalysis, fantasy is sometimes spelled phantasy, and refers to a situation imagined by an analysand wherein certain desires are revealed. Phantasies may not be real, but they may be realistic. They can be sexual in nature, but mine are not. Rather, in my phantasy, my analyst and I meet when I am 30. She is 36—an age that makes her feel more like a sister than an older friend—and we bond over our bleak views of romantic love, shared affinity for Arthur Russell, and the scene in the new Twin Peaks where Laura Palmer screams in the Red Room. When I arrive at a coffee shop holding a bouquet of flowers in my arms, my analyst laughs and says: Dead, wrapped in plastic. A barista smiles. The amount of energy created when my analyst and I are together is magnetic! Together, our purpose is to bring something extraordinary to the world that betters the planet. Both of us are committed to zero waste in our homes; both of us are currently reading Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate; both of us know the farmers from whom we purchase eggs; both of us own insulated stainless steel coffee mugs for hot coffee and tea; both of us are members of the Woodstock Farm Sanctuary; and both of us use facial toner made from apple cider vinegar, witch hazel extract, and filtered water. How specifically we meet is not part of my phantasy—it is as if we fell out of the sky and into each others’ lives—but because we both live in Brooklyn, the majority of our bonding takes place in Prospect Park. There, we circle the lake and comment upon men—“that one looks safe; that one looks like he rapes”—and talk about the loneliness of being only children while laughing at ducks I photograph and send to my mother, an avid collector of all things related to waterfowl. My mother collects rubber ducks too, my analyst says, and it is in this moment I know we are friends.
In Park Slope, my analyst and I rent a car at a car rental agency where I once rented a car with my ex-partner. Before renting the car, we purchase macrobiotic sushi and kombucha at the Park Slope Food Coop, where we both work once a month for two hours and forty-five minutes at a time, and where today we overheard a mother tell her child about a friend who had a hysterectomy accompanied by marital woes in great detail. Let’s share sad stories, the mother said to the child, who subsequently pretended to choke herself.
When I work checkout shifts at the Food Coop, I scan strangers’ groceries. As I scan their groceries, the strangers and I discuss our lives. Do you write poetry, I ask a stranger I’ve never met. No, I’m training to be a psychoanalyst, she says. How funny, I say. I want to be a psychoanalyst too. This winter, I plan to enroll in a class on Oedipal Complexes. As the phrase slips from my tongue—Oedipal Complexes—I note my use of the verb to be enrolled, as if psychoanalysis is a school, and I, its student. It is so expensive, after all. It is putting me in debt.
Yes, but is it making you feel good?
I begin to recite a list of psychoanalytic texts I’ve recently ingested: books by Lou Andreas-Salomé, Jamieson Webster, Serge Leclaire, Julia Kristeva—and Lacan, whose first name I can never remember. The stranger types these names into her cell phone. It was good to listen to you, she says.
The stranger’s eyes contain a glimmer of recognition I have been noticing in other people as of late. The people whose eyes contain this glimmer are also enrolled in psychoanalysis. I know this because I am open: I am not ashamed to be psychoanalysis’s student, and as such, I make my enrollment known. I am in psychoanalysis four days a week, I say, drinking wine at a literary event. Just leaving analysis, meet you in ten, I type to a colleague. Couldn’t stop making a frenetic, orb-like gesture with my hands in analysis whilst deploying the verb to cathect, I declare to the Internet, the great void.
My disclosures do not mean I lack boundaries. Quite the opposite: they are declarations indicating how my boundaries are so set they are, in fact, open—so radically open: open to the world and to possibility, to self-exploration and a deeper sense of the abyss. I am open to freely speaking, and to resisting the experience of feeling shame around my most vulnerable attributes. Genetic disgrace is not my fault: I was raised Catholic; I was raised to feel guilty. Psychoanalysis is the box where I place my darkest thoughts and transgressions, where I absolve myself of sin. In this way, it is more like confession than school, but because I attended Catholic school, confession was part of my academic curriculum. In other words, I have completed the necessary prerequisites for and possess the inner depth associated with the psychoanalytic model.
In our rental car, my analyst and I drive to a nearby beach town somewhere in the Hamptons, a stretch of land to which I’ve never been, to which I’ll never go. I’m not sure how we can afford to be here, I say to my analyst. You are a freelancer, and I am an adjunct. Nevertheless, we are subletting a sun-soaked, minimalist three-story home whose floor-to-ceiling glass windows look out upon the ocean, whose kitchen’s stainless steel appliances gleam and emit the faint smell of lavender countertop spray, and whose eggshell-colored couch is clearly extracted from a West Elm catalog. I wish this was our home, I say to my analyst, and my analyst says, I know. I can picture myself sitting on the couch, drinking coffee and writing, the snow falling outside, my melancholy absorbing the light, a cat curled up beside me. In my phantasy, you are also here, practicing Zen meditation—she points to the opposite side of the open-concept living room, where an embroidered patchwork cushion rests on the floor—and at night, we drink wine and workshop our novels, brush our teeth, go to sleep early, wake up, and repeat.
There are no actual cats in our sublet, although in real life, both my analyst and I have Siamese cats we dearly love, living creatures who feel our feelings as deeply as we do. Conversely, in the center of our open-concept living room is a dead sheepskin rug to which we both take political offense. Animal rights are a feminist issue, my analyst says. If a person disregards non-human animal life, how can he ever respect human life? We are in absolute agreement about the fact that animal rights are entangled with intersectional oppressions, and we assert our mutual position as we drink pink wine and cook tofu pups in a cast iron grill pan. As they heat, the tofu pups form small bubbles and become imbued with grill marks. I can’t wait to cover my pup in ketchup, my analyst says. Of course, I feel the same. I am from Pittsburgh, the birthplace of ketchup.
My analyst has never been to Pittsburgh, but she wants to go. When she tells me this, I say: We’ll plan a trip. My father would love to meet you! There is a new Ace Hotel in the neighborhood where I grew up. East Liberty has changed a lot. Last year, I watched a video of a bulldozer demolishing a high-rise building in its center. When I was younger, my mother—the waterfowl collector—and I—her ugly ghost—would go shopping in a strip mall across from what is now the bulldozed building. We adopted our first cat in that strip mall. I named her Tess; her coat was black and white. Days after her adoption, I became convinced she was psychically ill, but at that point it was too late to take her back to the shelter. Besides, I could never abandon her: True love is the act of never letting go. Anyway, I take issue with the hyper-gentrification of my old neighborhood, and with the fact that a behemoth tech corporation has colonized my hometown. It’s gotten so bad, another tech corporation is currently bidding on the city to host its second headquarters. I would never move back to Pittsburgh, and I have not visited in years, but because you want to go, I’ll go. It will be interesting to show you the street on which I grew up. Will it be how you imagine? My father still lives in my childhood home. Across the street from it is a playground. Perhaps we can carve a novel into one of its trees. From the top of one of the playground’s turrets, you can see the tallest building in the city. One thing to know about this playground is that it is attached to the Pittsburgh School for the Blind, so you may notice Braille on the playground equipment, and occasionally you will see people who cannot see you, or who can only partially see you. Have you read “Blindness” by Jorge Luis Borges? I’ve always wanted to teach an interdisciplinary disability studies creative writing class called Writing without Looking, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.
In our Hamptons sublet, my analyst and I are disappointed that the ketchup left in our refrigerator by the sublet’s previous tenants is not the type of ketchup Ronald Reagan considered a vegetable. Rather, our sublet’s ketchup is actually a vegetable, insofar as organic ketchup exists at the bottom of the food pyramid. We reluctantly make this admission to one another: That we both desire to ingest a type of ketchup infused with GMOs and high-fructose corn syrup, and that we—critical thinkers who care deeply about the environment and food politics—feel disappointed in ourselves for desiring that type of ketchup in this way. Upon admitting our shame, we begin laughing. Sometimes, I feel orthorexic, I say. I had a painful relationship to food as a teenager. When my mother and I went out to dinner, I would never remember who I was.
What do you remember?
I remember sitting across from my mother in a vinyl booth at a restaurant whose mascot was a smiley face. She is pushing a plate of chicken toward me. I look at the chicken; it looks at me. Hovering in attention, the chicken becomes part of my body. I imagine its flesh affixed to my right oblique, fattening my stomach, then picture it trapped inside my small intestine, refusing to come out. Next, I am standing outside of myself, holding a plate covered in cubed ham, hard-boiled eggs, and shredded cheese. The restaurant’s fluorescent lights flicker and cut to the trunk of a car, where I am naked and being beaten by an older man who—I burst into tears—is now a preacher.
I feel your memory, which is not only a keen recollection, but also a mirror, my analyst says. You articulate the world in a precise synthesis of image and affect, yielding a lyricism so deeply articulated that I cannot help but remember your past as if I exist inside it. The chicken, the cubed ham, the older man—these things happened to me too. They happened to me too.
To accompany our tofu pups, my analyst and I bake tater spuds, a fanciful kind of tater tot sold in the freezer aisle at the Park Slope Food Coop. It’s simple, our shared meal, but time gets lost while we eat it, accompanied as we are by a bottle of pink wine, which we imbibe until we lose our senses. In the cups, my analyst tells me about the time she first dropped acid as a freshman at Bennington College. I was 17, she says. My birthday fell at the cusp of my elementary school’s registration deadline, so I began college earlier than the rest of my peers.
My birthday is September 12th, I say. I was also the youngest in my class.
Carl Jung believed synchronous events are related by meaning, rather than causality, my analyst says. Since we first met, I have experienced our connection as paranormal, and the images and events that bind us as uncanny. Our mutual synchronicities disturb the boundaries between the living and the dead, and therefore touch the heart. Per Zen Buddhism, our simultaneity—our shared spiritual insight—awakens us toward truth. In contrast, my first experience on acid was unenlightening. I remember sitting on the green late one Friday night with a group of people with whom I imagined I would be forever friends, but with whom I immediately lost touch upon declaring my major in English. A floppy-haired boy in a Joy Division shirt—at this point in the story, she pauses and says: Joy Division, what symbolism!—lifted a small paper to the end of my tongue. I let it dissolve. As I did, I thought about my parents, who disapprove of recreational drugs but who occasionally reminisce about doing drugs themselves. To my chagrin, I remember my father once recounting how he dropped acid and drove his Volkswagen Bug around a suburban cul-de-sac. He told me every sign on the road seemed to say WRONG WAY—you’re going the wrong way—when in fact they said DEAD END.
My trip felt less doomed. It began with what I believe was an homage to Pinnochio. I pictured a wooden marionette—genderless and lithe, neither artificial nor real—with no clothes on, into whose torso the following phrases were carved: LOVEBOT, WORK HARD, HELP. I approached the marionette, greeted it, and ran my palm over its text before finding myself in an office, not unlike this one. The couch in the office was red, and next to it stood a second marionette, identical to the first. Initially, it stood still, but eventually it began to sway back and forth, as if it were Audrey Horne dancing to her own theme song. Unaccompanied by music, it began moving slowly; by the end of the scene, it appeared to be having a seizure.
For over 20 years, I have been thinking about what the marionette represents. This is a question I can only answer with another question. Because everything I write transforms into reality—it is never the other way around—I have always wondered if the twin marionnettes were objects I might encounter in the future, and if the phrases carved into their torsos were letters to myself. For example, LOVEBOT seems to suggest I approach attachment as a program. I input linguistic variables into other people to make them them attach themselves to me. I input “I love you” into another person, and if the “I love you” program runs successfully, the other person says “I love you too.” Although what we call love is frequently a delusion. And if we were less delusional, we could WORK HARD-er, finish our novels, feel more successful than we are. But we never ask for HELP when we need it. Maybe if we carved reminders into our flesh, and looked at these reminders everyday, and approached their messages with seriousness, and acted in light of their commands, thereby executing our bodies’ programs, we would be better teachers, writers, friends. We would be better humans.
You’re already a good human, I say.
If I was better, you would be too.
What do you mean?
I think I’m your mirror.
Like the Velvet Underground song?
I love that song, my analyst says, pouring another glass of wine. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard it.
Lou Reed wrote it for Nico, I say. Nico told Lou she would be his mirror, and he wrote “I’ll Be Your Mirror” for her to sing.
I’ll be your mirror, my analyst sings. Reflect what you are—
—in case you don’t know, I sing along.
I’ll be the wind, she sings.
The rain and the sunset, we sing. The light on your door—
—to show that you’re home, she sings.
When you think the night has seen your mind, we sing.
That inside you’re twisted and unkind, we sing.
Let me stand to show that you are blind, we sing.
Please put down your hands, we sing.
…’cause I see you. My analyst points at me and winks.
I’ll be your mirror too, I say. In case you don’t know.
My analyst laughs and takes a long, slow sip of wine. As she drinks, the open-concept living room’s soft light is reflected in the wine’s legs, its tears.
Throughout the rest of our vacation in the Hamptons, my analyst and I do very little, though part of our doing very little involves meta self-reflexively basking in a hybrid register of guilt and gratitude sparked by our seemingly endless amount of leisure. It’s like we’re in Bonjour Tristesse, my analyst says, referring to the 1954 French novel by Françoise Sagan whose title translates to Hello Sadness. The novel was adapted to film by Otto Preminger in 1958. Like The Wizard of Oz, the film adaptation of Bonjour Tristesse contains both color and black-and-white sequences. In the film adaptation of the novel, my analyst is most certainly Jean Seberg’s character Cécile, a decadent 17-year-old trying to break up her father’s relationship with Anne, his mistress. And I am one of the extras in the conga line—unremarkable, plain, but having a good time, such a good time. Our minimalist Hamptons sublet—with its open-concept living room, organic ketchup, and cast-iron grill pan—is the villa where the film’s main characters arrive for a visit.
I can’t believe Françoise Sagan wrote Bonjour Tristesse when she was only 19, my analyst says. Will I ever finish Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts?
I have a premonition you will, I say. And when you do, it will be great.
In 2005, a critical theorist named Sianne Ngai wrote a book called Ugly Feelings—have you read it? It’s an exploration of negative emotions such as envy, anxiety, irritation, paranoia, and disgust. The book’s jacket copy describes these feelings as non-cathartic and politically ambiguous, in contrast to a feeling like anger.
My feelings are both angry and ugly—and ambient, related to their surroundings.
Sometimes my feelings become diffuse; sometimes, I think it would be nice if a diffuser existed for feelings: I would put drops of feeling into it like essential oil, and they would spread into thin air.
I read somewhere that when an analysand feels hopeful feelings about her analyst, these hopeful feelings are displaced feelings about herself, so maybe my hopeful feelings about Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts are actually feelings I can’t have about myself.
I read on Wikipedia that a critic once referred to Bonjour Tristesse as “a nice piece of precocity.”
That’s condescending, I say. No one takes young writers seriously.
I can’t bring myself to open my laptop today, my analyst says. I feel sick.
I feel a lack.
Lacan says the lack always relates to desire.
One lack takes up another lack—the real, earlier lack—and the two lacks become desire.
I am thinking now of how to articulate emotion as it occurs in the transference.
Sometimes I think of the word ambivalence, but I keep returning to love.
Is it possible we free ourselves from one another?
Or, that, as one, we become free?
Wikipedia says Deleuze and Guattari say that desire does not arise from lack, but rather is a productive force in and of itself.
I don’t know if I agree, but I appreciate the prosody of Deleuze and Guattari’s combined surnames.
Moi aussi, my analyst says.
Do you want a cup of tea?
I want tea.
It is early Saturday morning. My analyst and I are drinking tea at a formica kitchen table in the center of a beach, adjacent to white orchids in a terra cotta pot that lean in to say hello. I bought these flowers after one of our sessions, I say. The plants at the Union Square Farmer’s Market are always the most affordable. This is important, as I am currently practicing a particular form of asceticism. Because I am an adjunct, I must live as austerely as I can. Of course, I broke my ascetic streak last night when I took a private car to my friend’s apartment to lay on his bed and watch a British documentary series about the ocean. My friend and I have been watching this documentary series for months. We are obsessed with underwater sex. This is evidenced by the fact that, every time we watch the series, we replay a scene featuring two cuttlefish humping. One cuttlefish attracts the other by camouflaging itself as the other cuttlefish’s gender. As my friend and I watch this, we laugh, and our bodies move closer together. But our friendship is not sexual; in fact, my friend is gay. Our closeness defies the chasm created by sex, which doesn’t mean we are not each other’s person. Indeed, like people who are each other’s people, we spend our time eating popcorn and performing domestic tasks: grocery shopping, cooking dinner, doing dishes. Often, we walk to a laundromat, where I watch him run his hands over his wet clothes. Goddamn these fucking machines, he says, referring to the fact that the laundromat’s washers do not wring water out of fabric.
The tea my analyst and I drink is made from flowers—chamomile and lavender—and dried peppermint. To prepare this blend, I travelled to the Food Coop alone and selected the ingredients by myself, individually doled out as they were in small plastic bags to which my analyst and I take offense. If only plastic ceased to exist, we say to each other at the same time. Then the ocean would not be in jeopardy, and the cuttlefish could hump in ecstasy until the end of time, which, like sexuality, is a social construct. Take the ontology of the zebra mantis shrimp, for example. Throughout its life, the male zebra mantis shrimp assumes the role of performing the heteronormative task wherein he provides for the female zebra mantis shrimp who stays at home tending to her eggs, who cannot provide for herself. These shrimp live in deep water, feigning monogamy. The male shrimp stays with the female shrimp for up to twenty years, until he leaves her for another female shrimp. At which point, the abandoned female shrimp is left to scream in despair until another shrimp comes.