Up and down the spiral
Chapter 11: Saturday night at the Guggenheim, my YA fantasy novel, the psychoanalytic spiral, pocket videos, 'they promised us sun', four Italian cookies (reprise)
Dear reader,
I’m posting early today because I’m about to head to a long shift at the hospital. Apparently the unit I’m working on has bedbugs. Lmao! My life is extremely glamorous. In this week’s stack, we take a walk through New York in the rain, which is what I did last week. People were so friendly, and a few strangers struck up conversation. Is this normal? Anyway, wish me luck at work today, it’s a long one. Give me a little forehead kiss and off I go, see you next week, xo.
On Saturdays the Guggenheim in New York is ‘Pay What You Wish’ from 6:00 to 8:00 pm, and at the start of the night there’s a long line to get in. The museum is shaped like a spiral, which everyone climbs: as you go up and down the spiral you see the art. Tickets are usually $25, but last Saturday we paid $1 each, which is almost nothing, but still a bit of something. Lacanian psychoanalysts believe that paying for each session, even a nominal fee, is a necessary part of the therapy. They say the fee confronts the patient with a kind of loss. It makes us know there are things we must give up. I’m not a Lacanian because I don’t understand Lacan’s work. We’re always losing things. At the Guggenheim we walked up the spiral, which is a good way of looking at people. I saw a man in his early thirties wearing scrubs and a hospital badge. Each time I saw him in the spiral I wished I could say hello. I loved the idea of him — a nurse, a doctor, some medical person — coming to an art museum on a Saturday evening after work. He didn’t even bother to change. Maybe he’d just finished intubating a patient, drawing a blood gas, suturing a wound, injecting a benzodiazepine. Moments before entering the museum, he was intervening so intimately and materially in a stranger’s body, the way we do in hospitals when people are sick. By the time he’d finished work it was probably almost 7:00 pm, so he went to the museum by himself. It’s something I would do, but I didn’t say hello.
In elementary school I wanted to write young adult fantasy fiction, and at night I’d read for hours before bed. I knew all the tropes: I knew that heroines were very brave and had purple eyes and magic powers. Reading was the part of the day I could predict and look forward to. I liked it so much that I wanted to write the kinds of books I was reading. When I was eleven I wrote one third of a novel about a brother and sister who were cursed to live forever. At the start of the story they were already a thousand years old, but looked about twenty-one. They were tired of losing everything, year after year. The novel was about their adventure to break the curse, so they could finally grow old and eventually die. It sounds heavy, and to some extent it was, but in the end it was a hopeful story. There was magic and time travel and a unicorn. In the end I was eleven. I kept notebooks full of story notes, maps, lists of possible character names, and detailed drawings of their outfits. The pathos of the story surprises me now. I remember having a feeling when I was writing that I couldn’t describe with words. I remember childhood as the feeling of reaching. I couldn’t wait to be older, because it seemed that then I’d finally understand the things I wanted to know. Looking back, I think we know a lot when we’re very young. And sometimes it takes years, sometimes decades, to come back to the things we knew, and to understand them again.
I think of psychoanalytic therapy as a kind of spiral. I mean this in the sense that we come back to the same memories, the same themes, the same characters of the story many times. Even when it seems we’re landing on the same theme and looking out in the same direction, the view is usually slightly different. We’re looking at the thing from a different level in the spiral. We travel forward and backward through time, letting our connections to unconscious memories and wishes pull us up and down the coiled pathway. With my own patients, who I sometimes see for years, they’ll return again and again to the mother, the father, the illness, the blind spot. And each time they return, the mother is familiar but she’s wearing something new. In some sessions they may not even know they’re talking about her. On a conscious level they may be talking about something else entirely. But the dynamics of the session, the feelings and projections exchanged between us, conscious or unconscious, always come back to familiar themes. Eventually after weeks of circling, the mother’s presence may become conscious, and they’ll finally say her name.
At the Guggenheim we continued up the spiral. I saw bearded men speaking Italian, groups of women, couples, friends. Sometimes you’d see the same people over and over and sometimes you’d see them just once. Everyone was looking at everyone. Very few people were looking at art. You couldn’t escape being watched because that is the transaction of that place, it’s what we paid for. I took a few photos of my friends that night, and later over dinner I realized my phone had accidentally recorded videos while it was in my pocket. It happened when I’d walked off on my own for a bit to look at a painting — the museum was showing Alex Katz. Now in my phone there are a few twelve-second videos of pure darkness, with just the sound of footsteps climbing, and the distant conversations of strangers.
Sometimes I repeat things. Maybe I do this to test my memories, to see if they were real. A few hours before the Guggenheim I’d just repeated a day I had in New York in October. I went for a walk in Central Park to get to that café on the Upper West Side, where I had those four Italian cookies. When I got to the west side of the park my father called me, so I stopped and sat down on a park bench. We talked about his apartment in Greece, which is in a small seaside town near the village where he was born. He lives there half the year now, and he wanted to know when I’ll come and stay. While I was on the phone an old woman in her 80s sat down on the next bench. I looked at her and she didn’t see me. I love watching people when they’re not trying to be watched. She was wearing a white mohair beret and a black wool coat that went to her ankles. She was very small, and her movements were hesitant and slow, they contained a sweetness. I was also wearing a beret and a black wool coat that went to my knees. After a few minutes she got up and looked at me, she walked very close to me, and said with some measure of distress: “Where is the sun?” Her face looked concerned, almost confused. I worried she was unwell. At the hospital most of my patients in their 80s suffer from delirium, a temporary confused psychosis that comes from being medically sick. It was overcast and cold, but the weather report had said it would be sunny and warm. Her face lit up and she started laughing. I relaxed. I replied, “I know! They promised us sun today!” She smiled back and for a while we talked about the strange weather. I don’t know what made her talk to me, but I loved that she did, and that we were wearing the same thing.
From the park I walked to the Italian café on the Upper West Side, where I ordered five Italian cookies. I didn’t order four like I did in October because I wanted a sense of progression, a feeling of moving forward. At the café I read a book and I wrote. After an hour my friend came to meet me, but as soon as she got there she saw her therapist sitting five tables away. This had never happened before. She was worried her therapist would see her, so she asked if we could leave. It’s amazing how terrible it is sometimes to be seen fully. Even though I ordered five Italian cookies, in the end I only got to eat four. The small plate was slippery and shallow, and while I was carrying it from the bar to my table one of the tiny round baci di dama — ‘lady’s kisses’ in Italian — flew off the plate. It went spinning onto the floor, like it wasn’t correct, like it wasn’t meant to be there. I picked it up and kept it on my plate while I read my book. I ate the four remaining cookies. The whole time I was in New York it was rainy and overcast. The days felt less holy than they did in October, but the cookies tasted better than I remembered. The day I left New York the sun finally did come back, and when it did the sky was bright and warm and blue.
Love,
E
P.S. Another song with a cusp (Youtube link) — get to 2:02, trust me!