Dear reader,
After this week’s frankly troubling full moon in Gemini, I bring you a balm of pleasures and sorrows, which are maybe sometimes the same thing. Anyway, most of these scenes are set on beaches. Thank you for reading, I’m obsessed with all of you, etc. <3
The leading treatment for trauma-related disorders is exposure. Exposure therapy aims to provide a container for patients to relive their most horrific memories, where they recount them in the present tense, over and over, with the therapist. It’s a kind of mental time travel to make sense of the past. The therapy is meant to decouple the horror of the remembered events from the fear of having the memory in the first place. Disorders of trauma are exactly this: the fear of memory itself. As clinicians we often worry about plunging our patients into their nightmares, afraid they’ll become more dysregulated, more addicted, more suicidal. And it’s true, this is something to worry about. Last week I attended a lecture by a world expert in treating survivors of childhood sexual abuse. The speaker, a German psychiatrist, reassured us: “We know that emotions do not kill the brain. Any adult brain can tolerate any emotion. It’s not the emotion itself we are treating, it’s the fear of the emotion.”
My last boyfriend was a musician. The day after we met he sent me an album by a band I’d never heard of, but which I loved immediately. I listened to the whole record from start to finish on the same day, which I almost never do. After a few weeks he asked to be my boyfriend, and after a couple of months he asked to form a band. We talked about what we wanted in love, and we talked about playing local venues and releasing an EP. Our songs were always long because we loved to play them, and we’d laugh and say it’s just not the radio edit. Sometimes now I’ll listen to old recordings of our rehearsals, which I used to record on my phone to keep a log of our progress. I’ll hear the easiness between the two people in that room upstairs, the repetition, the irritation, the breakthroughs, the comments about the setting sun. Those people were having fun. The instruments fit together so easily, as if they understood each other so well, though I don’t think we ever did. There was a song I listened to a lot around that time called “Seabird” from 1977. When I mentioned it he said he’d listened to that song on repeat the summer before, which didn’t surprise me because he always knew every song I showed him. The summer before was the summer his sister got sick; she’d died one month before he met me, which I didn’t know until we’d been together a few months. Our songs got better and better as the relationship got worse, and our last recordings are the saddest versions of our songs, and the songs are perfect.
I’ve always loved the song “Wicked Game” by Chris Isaak. The video won the MTV Award for Best Male Video in 1991, beating George Michael’s “Freedom! ‘90”. The video is shot in black and white on an empty beach, and is mostly about Helena Christensen, the Danish supermodel, playing objet petit a to Chris Isaak in a tank top. When I was younger I always thought Isaak was singing I want to fall in love, over and over. But when I read the lyrics for the first time, years ago, I realized that sometimes he sings the opposite: I don’t wanna fall in love. The don’t is so imperceptible that it doesn’t register — we’re seduced instead by Christenen’s strip tease, by the bored look on her face as Isaak holds her so close to him. The video is meant to be pure eros (it would later win MTV’s “Sexiest Video Of All Time”), but the song is really about Isaak’s ambivalence. In her preternatural beauty, Christensen becomes a kind of caricature, even a bit pathetic. The music video reminds me of Fellini’s 8½, which famously depicted a barefoot prostitute named Saraghina who lived in a shack on the beach. In the film, Saraghina is summoned from her shack by six elementary school boys who pay her to dance a mildly titillating rumba. Watched side by side, Wicked Game and the Saraghina scene sometimes match each other shot for shot. In 8½, the boys are transfixed with terror and delight as Saraghina runs her hands along her hips, just like Christensen, and makes a game of exposing herself, like Christensen. But in the clarity of the transaction, and the pure play of her performance, Saraghina, unlike Christensen, is having fun.
A few years ago I spent five days in Santorini with my seven-year partner, a professor, who is now my ex. A family friend ran a small hotel on the island and let us stay for free, which was why we went. Santorini has many beaches, and there was a beach there called Eros Beach on the southern tip, far from the famous sunsets that draw the massive crowds from cruise ships. Because of this, Eros Beach was relatively secluded and unpopular, which was also why we went. The beach only fit two or three rows of sunbeds, and it was backed by cliffs carved with wind-worn glyphs that were more like a Gaudí cathedral than something made in nature. I took so many photos of the cliffs, the only film photos I took on that trip, because the water felt so cold that it was painful, and I never felt like swimming. It was the last trip we took together before it ended; seven years is such a long time. A few months later I finally developed the photos from the beach, and I saw that my light meter must have been off that day, because the pictures were all overexposed.
Every few months I’ll hear a ringing in one ear. It lasts for only a few seconds, a high-pitched note, like the sound of a tuning fork. Humans are born with sixteen thousand cochlear hair cells, which are the cells in our ears that allow us to hear. On their surface, the cells contain tufts of long extrusions called stereocilia, which look a little bit like hair. Each cell detects a narrow frequency of sound: when the vibrations of a sound hit the inner ear, the corresponding hair cells will bend slightly from the movement, and the act of bending is transformed into an electrical impulse that communicates with the rest of the brain, integrating hearing with feeling and knowing and remembering. In medical school I learned that this sudden high-pitched note is the sound of a hair cell dying. Exposure to too much sound kills the cells over time — the cell bends too far and becomes numb, and this is why we lose our hearing as we age. In the act of dying, the hair cell will sing one final note. It’s a sound not sensed from the outside world, but generated from within the cell itself, telling you you’ll never hear that frequency again.
Last summer, in August, I went back to Greece for the first time since the summer at Eros Beach. I was visiting family in Crete, and we stayed by the sea. In the first few days the sun was too hot and the sea was too cold and I never felt like swimming. Two weeks before, the musician and I had ended things. In the end he’d withdrawn almost everything; I’d tried to need so little, I’d bent so far, I’d become so small, and I hadn’t felt hungry for months. On the beach I made myself go into the water once a day, because the water isn’t so cold once you get in. I did this for a week, without pleasure. There was a morning I woke up early to go to the beach by myself, before anyone else was outside. I lay in the sun to read, for the first time unbothered by the stickiness of sweat and sunscreen, and that day I walked into the water so easily, without thinking, because it was the perfect temperature. I swam alone in the sea for a while. The beach filled up with people and I spent hours moving from the sand to the water and back again, reading and writing and swimming, submitting myself to pleasure and also choosing it. I repeated the ritual for days, over and over, sometimes the first and last person on the beach. For the first time in months I felt hungry. When I think of it now, I believe Christensen’s boredom in Wicked Game wasn’t boredom but a numbness, an armour against desire to shield her from Isaak’s ambivalence — because imagine being held so close by someone who says they don’t want to love you. Instead I could be Saraghina, eros itself, dancing wildly on the beach.
Love,
E
I'm really excited to get to know parts of you through these eloquent words.