Dear reader,
Jesus was a Capricorn, and so are many of my friends. We’re past the solstice and into Cap season, the age of bossy-but-secretly-sweet goats of my life — I love you all deeply. On this holiday morning I invite you to unwrap your unconscious like a little present. It’s a normal and good thing to do! As always, thank you for reading. xo
A few weeks ago, while replacing a sewer drain, the city discovered a large void under the road very close to where I live. In the news it was described in exactly this way: a large void. It wasn’t a big hole, or an empty space, or a surprising lack of matter. Soon after the discovery, in the evening, I went out into the street to see if the large void could be witnessed. The road was closed to vehicles and the area was fenced off, but the sidewalks were open so pedestrians could still go to the shops. The void wasn’t visible from ground level, because it was really just the absence of a thing. I watched men in hardhats standing on the paved road above what was presumably the void. They wore orange coveralls with neon yellow straps. They didn’t speak, they simply stood and looked at one another expectantly while the sun went down. I walked around the neighbourhood to pick up fruits and vitamins, and I returned to the void because it was on my way home. It was dark by then, and the moon was a low thin crescent. The same men were standing there in the lamplight, I think because they had never left.
There is a rare neurological syndrome called Witzelsucht where the people who suffer from it are addicted to speaking in jokes. The jokes are compulsive and out of character, and the neuropsychiatric literature calls it pathological humour, a disturbance in the perception of funniness. The condition arises from damage to the fronto-parietal structures of the brain, which preside over attention, problem solving, and working memory. In the psychoanalytic sense, humour is usually a powerful ego defence. It’s very good at protecting the conscious parts of the mind from the unconscious feelings we find intolerable. Defences let the mind avoid, deflect, or modify those feelings; they blunt the pain of our childhood conflicts, the seeds of our neuroses. Humour is among the more ‘mature’ defences. It’s unlike the primary or ‘immature’ defences (things like projection, somatization, denial) which signal some disconnection from reality in our attempt to live inside it. Instead, humour requires a conscious knowledge of the reality of which it speaks: it transforms the intolerable feeling into something more bearable, so bearable that it gives pleasure. Freud wrote about humour in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), where he declared humour to be “one of the highest psychical achievements”, a dignified act. But in Witzelsucht the humour is pathological, and the jokes never land. They strike out but don’t defend against anything because the brain that produced them, the very thing they’re meant to protect, is too damaged to begin with. You can imagine a hollowness in the circuitry of the joke. It doesn’t transform pain, instead it draws the listener directly to the thing the speaker is trying not to see.
The Italian novelist Elena Ferrante writes about dolls in several of her books, where they become signals for what is unspeakable, or maybe unknowable, in relationships between women. I read her books in my first year of medical school on the hour-long bus ride to the university and back, where each day I attended lectures and dissected cadavers soaked in formalin, part by part, over months. I suspect Ferrante is or has been in psychoanalysis. I talk about Ferrante sometimes with my therapist, and when I make reference to Ferrante being a woman, he always reminds me that she could also be a man. I think he’s almost certainly wrong, but I love talking to him about art. My therapist is unknowable, and I know his unknowableness is the whole point of the exercise. Whenever he does reveal something about his own interests, which is rare, it feels like I’ve just been very good, and that I’ve earned some very big reward. I think we have similar taste; his office is filled with paintings and prints that remind me of the ones that fill my house. He knows I love Monica Vitti and Antonioni, and one session I talked about rewatching L’Avventura. The next week he told me he’d watched it because I’d mentioned it, and I felt an overwhelming, expansive pride I’d never felt before, or I don’t remember feeling it. I asked him what he thought of the film, and he closed his eyes and said, Unbelievable. For the rest of the hour we talked about books and films and music we liked, and about how much we don’t like TV. He ended the session laughing: “It’s fun to be a snob! See you next week.”
Last month at my regular café I saw a baby in a stroller holding a doll of a baby. It was an unremarkable thing to see, but then after a moment it left me feeling very sad. It is strange that we offload the act of caring for fictive babies onto real babies, who are unable to care for themselves. When I was six and spending the summer in Greece, my aunt gave me an anatomically interesting doll. It was a normal baby doll made of rubbery plastic, but she had a small hole between her lips, and an even smaller hole where her vagina was. If you squeezed water into her mouth and then squeezed her belly, she would pee. If you didn’t squeeze her belly the water would leak out slowly, over the whole day. I remember one evening I was playing with her and I pushed a toothpick into the hole, because the leaking disgusted me. But the hole was so small even the toothpick could barely fit, and it got stuck. I left her like that on the dining table to play with something else, and I got in trouble for it the next day. I didn’t know what I was doing, or I don’t think I knew, and I didn’t know that the hole for urine was different from the other hole.
I recently talked to a friend about her pelvic physiotherapist, and I’ve transcribed our conversation, with permission, here:
Q: Can you tell me about pelvic physio?
A: First she touched my belly with gloves and some lube.
Q: She touched your belly with lube.
A: Yeah. She’s kind of sliding around there, I don’t know, feeling the tissue. And then she puts on different gloves and then she’s inside my pussy, but like, exploring all angles. To the point where I’m like, what is even in there? You’re in some upper recesses that I’ve never visited.
Q: The fornix.
A: Yeah, it’s fucked. When I first went to see her years ago, my tissue was so tense and taut that it was like a well-done steak.
Q: Jesus.
A: And now it’s getting softer, which is nice, which is what you want. It was the tautness that made the constant urinary urgency and pain happen. It’s where I hold my tension, my root chakra (laughs).
Q: And you had vaginismus?
A: No. But it’s related, I think, with the various pussy pains. It used to kind of hurt but now it’s just sort of nauseating. I just don’t think that part of my body wants to be manipulated in that way. But it felt really good when she left. And then she leaves me — like after a man comes on you, she gave me, like, a paper. It was like, ‘Okay I’ll clean myself up’. But it’s honestly kind of nice, I kind of liked it. Maybe because it’s not me self-reporting something. It’s her saying ‘the tissue is soft’, or ‘the tissue is not soft’. I’m like, okay, it’s objective in some way. It’s comforting.
My favourite cookies are Papadopoulos biscuits, the original petit beurre of Greece. The company was founded in the 1922 with the motto Ένας κόσμος γεύσης και φροντίδας, which means A world of taste and care. I usually buy one or two plastic-wrapped stacks of cookies from the ‘imported biscuits’ section of the grocery store whenever I go. I live alone, which I like because my habits for caring for myself are always available to me: writing in the morning before work, reading on the couch before bed. Every morning I eat oatmeal for breakfast, and after dinner I’ll sometimes eat three Papadopoulos cookies spread with a thin layer of Nutella. I often dip them in tea, and they’re so matterless that they dissolve within seconds. I’ve always liked the Papadopoulos cookie package. The cellophane is clear so you can see the biscuits inside. There are no pictures on the label, only text, and just three colours: red and white and navy, like an old book or a flag. It’s something that makes even the intolerable things more bearable, even pleasurable, even dignified.
A few weeks have passed since the void was first discovered in my neighbourhood. I went to see it again, this time in the daylight. The road was still blocked to traffic and there were CATs, cranes, and large trucks carrying small identically-sized stones lining the whole block. Two police cars with flashing lights guarded the area on either side of it. The void was open, and you could see into it from the fence at the edge of the road. I looked inside, and the depth was unbelievable. People on the sidewalk saw me looking, and they stopped to look as well. A person next to me said I can’t see the bottom. Later I spoke to one of the shop owners on the block, and she said it all started after one of the local businesses had a sewer drain backup. When the plumbers came to clear it, they noticed damage to all of the surrounding sewer pipes, which were laid before 1900. They followed the damage, and discovered the void. Who knows how long it’s been there. But the shop owner was quite hopeful, she said the repairs were ahead of schedule, and she hoped it wouldn’t slow down business for too long.
Love,
E
P.S. A few days before publishing today’s post, the neighbourhood void was filled and closed, and the road is now open again. People in the neighbourhood are calling it a holiday miracle, but I don’t think it’s a miracle. As my practical Capricorn friends (and Cap Ascendant self) would say, it’s the expected outcome of hard work that always needed to get done. See you next week.