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7. The exciting-rejecting object, Pierre Bonnard, waxing my legs to Lana Del Rey, exquisite tenderness, driving to the doctor, the holding environment, holograms
Dear reader,
Goodbye to 2022, a bad year! I love Antonio Gramsci’s 1916 essay on the senseless chronology of the “new year”, and at the same time I deeply love my yearly astrological forecast. I especially like the ones from HTML websites, their vague contradictory predictions, and their rare moments of insane specificity. Taurus readers, it is said that 2023 will bring us “a lucky chance to bathe in holy rivers like the Ganges” (!) Anyway, you’re probably all hungover today, so I’m serving you a longer post about memory and place and pain. Lmao sorry, I adore you all, happy new year, xo.
Familiarity brings a kind of comfort. The psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn believed that we spend our lives trying to replicate the relationship dynamics from our childhoods, because as adults we seek what is familiar. Fairbairn’s theory explained why people stay in relationships that hurt them. He worked in an orphanage in Edinburgh from 1927 to 1935, where he noticed that abused and neglected children often blamed themselves for the failures of their caregivers. He found that in early life, children’s need for parental love was so strong that they would distort reality to justify their attachment to parents who’d rejected them. The children saw themselves as bad: they believed they deserved their parents’ indifference because this delusion let them preserve the fantasy that their parents were loving. If only they’d been good enough, they thought, then their parents would have loved them. They held onto the illusion of love because it kept them from collapsing altogether. According to Fairbairn, those children would grow up to internalize and constantly return to the fantasy of the loving parent (the exciting object), while the disappointment of the actual parent (the rejecting object) was split off and buried in the unconscious. In this way they became stuck chasing the fantasy of a love that was always out of reach — if only they were good enough, if only they’d deserved it — when that love was really never there to begin with.
In my mid-twenties I used to wax my legs at home in the bathroom to Lana Del Rey’s album Ultraviolence. I would laugh about it, because the songs were about feminine pain, the tragedy of life as a woman who loves men. The last track on the record is “Florida Kilos”, which was co-written by Harmony Korine, and meant for the never-made sequel to Springbreakers. When my boyfriend wasn’t home I’d sing along with Lana in the bathroom, and it turned the torture of the wax strips into a kind of ecstasy. I loved how she stretched and hardened her vocals, and I loved her hot baby voice when she sang, Come on down to Florida, I got something for ya. It’s an album about submission, about protecting the innocence of child-like men over the women they knock down. Ultraviolence was well received, but critics didn’t love “Florida Kilos”, claiming “the infantilized sexualization” of Del Rey’s vocals on the track didn’t fit the more serious album as a whole. But I thought her vocals were perfect. Each song on the record had her reenacting a different woman in the same delusion of her own worthlessness. She was the languid cigarette girl of “Brooklyn Baby” who boasted, well my boyfriend’s in a band. She was the Priscilla Presley bride of “Ultraviolence” holding a bouquet of white lilies, a funeral flower, sighing, he hit me and it felt like true love. When I was twenty-five and singing alone in the bathroom I never thought I’d understand that feeling, but then years later I finally did.
My favourite painter is Pierre Bonnard. He lived with his wife Marthe de Méligny in the South of France, where he belonged to the post-Impressionist movement of Intimism, painting the domestic and the banal, two of my favourite things. Much of Bonnard’s work depicted scenes from his breakfast table, his bedroom, or his balcony in Le Cannet. Sometimes he painted his childhood home. He often painted his wife in the nude, usually while bathing or getting dressed. Bonnard’s use of colour was brash and otherworldly, unlike the familiar subjects he depicted. He usually painted from memory, even though the scenes he painted were readily observable in real life. Seeing his work is like witnessing a nostalgia for what he’d had only a few hours before — his breakfast, his naked wife — as if his paintings portrayed not the thing itself, but the feeling of remembering it. For years Bonnard continued to paint his wife from memory, even in old age, even after she died, but in his paintings she always looked young. I imagine he was reaching for something that was right in front of him, but never in the present tense. Maybe it was a way of possessing a thing that was too fleeting, so that it could always belong to him in memory.
I still have tan lines from the beach last summer, because the marks take longer to fade when the skin gets burned. They’re in places most people will never see, along my hips where my bathing suit was cut higher than I realized, and where I forgot to protect the skin. In medicine when a bodily pain is intense, acute, and unbelievably bad, we say the area is “exquisitely tender”. Grief is an otherworldly sort of pain. It makes us so small, and when we’re small we regress to the familiarity of childhood, to the ways we coped before. Our reaction to pain becomes like a personal signet, an imprint of a collected past we often don’t remember. In pain some people seek solitude — they retreat because they’ve always felt safest alone. Others need company. Others find it hard to tolerate the pain at all, so they externalize it, they drown it in chaos. When the pain is too great they’ll make the people around them suffer in their place, one of the unconscious’s most powerful weapons. You can imagine a child kicking out reflexively when he’s hurt: he doesn’t see that he’s kicking the mother who’s holding him, and he covers her with bruises.
Two weeks ago I was driving across town to see my doctor, and I drove through a neighbourhood downtown where I used to live ten years ago. There was a massive church along the main road, which I’d never noticed before because the city has many churches. The only reason I saw it that day, after years of not seeing it, was because the church was half gone. It looked collapsed, as if a corner of the building had caved in, and a whole wall was gone except for a single window arch. It was sunny that day and you could see the light pouring into the exposed stone interior. You could imagine how many people had talked to God in there, and how their words were now escaping into the street because the building couldn’t hold them anymore. I got to the hospital and I saw my doctor, and the news was okay. After the appointment I drove along the small backstreet behind the hospital where I saw two men wheeling a stretcher in the middle of the road, and it was carrying a person-shaped object covered with a burgundy blanket. I’m used to death on the medical wards, but outside the hospital the sight of it was surreal. I drove toward home, and it was unusually warm that day, the day after a storm. The closer I got to home, the more I saw people outside their doors in light jackets, sometimes smiling. I stopped at a red light, and I saw three people smoking blissfully outside their respective apartments, mirroring one another as they stared blankly at the street. There was an older man on his second-floor balcony, and I looked at him from my car, and he looked at me from his balcony. We looked at each other for a long time, more than would be comfortable if I wasn’t in my car.
Donald Winnicott was a contemporary of Fairbairn, and both of them belonged to the midcentury psychoanalytic school of Object Relations. Winnicott coined the concept of the ‘holding environment’ in childhood development: it was the safety provided by an adequate and loving caregiver, where the infant can feel seen, held, and understood. It’s within the holding environment that the child learns to manage their emotions and develop their sense of self in the real world. Winnicott saw the analytic situation between therapist and patient as another form of holding environment, where the patient could feel safe enough to regress back to childhood, reactivate development, and experience a stable attachment with the therapist where they could reintegrate their subjectivity. I think of the holding environment as the place where we find home, where we return to when we’re in pain. It’s the place where I feel like myself, where the self is a solid object I can hold and instantly recognize. I’ve kept a Bonnard postcard on my wall for the past ten years because I find comfort in the feeling of home, and I wonder whether that was what he was reaching for in his paintings. Bonnard painted many self-portraits over the decades of his career, but especially around the 1942, when his wife died. In the portraits his skin is dark red, and we often see him through his shaving mirror, sometimes not even looking at his own reflection. It feels like he’s trying to return to something, or a memory of something, and maybe there’s comfort in the image.
Writing is often painful, and editing feels very good. Writing is like returning to the things that cause pain and maintaining eye contact; but even then the contact is comforting because my voice feels so familiar when I write. Editing feels different because it’s not so immediate; the distance fills the past with a kind of grace. The painful thing is already there on the page, and the goal is to render that thing so familiar, so true, that it feels universally knowable. In the act of making it so familiar there is a goodness that escapes, even from the worst things, and I’ll see things I didn’t see before. Some days when I’m walking or driving around the city it feels like I’m editing. I’m editing whatever I see, I’m changing the feeling of sight itself. In those moments, the act of living becomes like reading good prose, and the same sort of grace spills into the present. Editing makes painful places change. The parking lot, my dining table, that street corner, all the places where I’ve been knocked down this year, a painful year in so many ways, were all places where bad things happened and good things still continued. The bad and good got folded into the familiarity of the place itself, and in the end the familiar is what we seek out and return to. The hospital where I was once very sick, where I once thought I might die, is a place I still return to as a patient and also a doctor, and I’m not so powerless now. This city is so familiar, so filled with memory. I know that when I’m moving around it and I can touch this feeling — where I can hold the present up to the light and see the past flashing holographically inside of it — I know that I’m okay, that I’m capable of some form of joy, which I think is my most fundamental feeling. In that sense I try to hold onto the things within reach, that I’ve always reached for, to fold into the feeling of home.
Love,
E
That last bit on editing was an unexpected and very welcome surprise —how we edit the world around us, how it makes the world tolerable.
Yesterday I went to see a French children's christmas film , Operation Pere Noel. The preview showed William, a wealthy boy whose parents worked too much and planned to work through christmas, which of course upset him, and he demanded he get Santa as a gift. I thought that since it was not a blockbuster and French (known for extended holidays), it would nuance some ideas of labour and family. It didn't. What it did do, which frustrated me and the friend who I saw it with, was what you begin this post with— the way a child blames themselves for the misgivings of their parents. Specifically, in this movie, William, asks for Santa, so his capitalist work-a-holic father's answer is to enlist a poacher to capture him, to control him. Now when William finds this out, he is shocked and upset. His father, somehow surprised by the reaction... tells him he did what he asked. Now, you probably know what i'm gonna write. yes, the boy ends up blaming himself for Santa's captivity. "If Only I hadn't asked for Santa for xmas, none of this would have happened." He blames himself and then goes on a mission to free Santa. His father doesn't take any responsibility for it, and doesn't attend to why his plan wasn't a good idea.
And in addition, the poacher's backstory gets elaborated as ..... yes, him having a bad childhood and being a bad kid who grew up to be this asshole.
While our kids didn't get it, my friend and I were so dissapointed in the rehashing of the trope of christmas movies in which a child always blames themselves (like Home Alone, for example).
There were so many moments the movie could have added in a dialogue line here or there to make a point about capitalism, about children's innocence, but no... it fell into those trappings.
Anyways, your post reminded me of it, but now I think I might write more about this.
xx