Venus in repose
Chapter 14: the life drawing class, Wilfred Bion's 'ineffable', a mouthful of gabagool, delivering electroconvulsive therapy, the best line to draw
Dear reader,
Hiiiii good morning, I just got home from a 24-hour shift. I slept for forty minutes all night… RIP me! I’m clicking ‘publish’ on this and going to bed. Next week I’ll be posting from France (!) where I hope I won’t run into the knife guy. A bientôt, bisous forever, xoxoxo.
When I was twenty my friends ran a drop-in life drawing class at the university, where every week you could draw nude models for free. Models were hard to find, so halfway through the term my friends asked if I’d volunteer. I said sure. I googled poses and practiced in the mirror in my bedroom before class. Class was at 8:00 pm, and took place at a student-run coffeehouse on campus, in a 19th century Richardsonian Romanesque building. In the room there was a two-foot-tall wooden platform at the centre, with chairs all around it. Before class I changed into a short black robe with pointelle trim. When I got on the platform, which was really a stage, I took off my glasses. There were people I knew and people I didn’t. Either way I took off the robe.
We began with short poses: one, two, five minutes. My friend timed me and signalled when to change. I heard charcoal on newsprint, pencil on thick paper, sometimes the sound of breathing. Those first short poses were made up of strenuous lunges and exaggerated contrappostos. It was the warm-up, a loosening of the hand for form and movement. After a few minutes we moved on to 10 and 15 minute poses. I sat on the floor, I lay down on my side. I leaned on my elbow like a Venus in repose. I wanted to look like the statues I’d sketch in my notebook whenever I went to museums by myself. My friend announced the break and I was surprised it was already time. I stood up and wore my glasses. After that I wore my robe. I stepped off the platform and circled the outer rim to see the drawings, and I realized the artists seemed shy. This was funny because I was the one without clothes. Some of them stepped away to talk to their friends, but some waited in their seats for me to pass. They leafed through the pages they’d drawn, and showed me how they’d seen me. In some drawings I’d recognize the curve of a hip, a neck, a line that belonged to me. It seemed incredible that the person on the page could look the same as the one in real life. One of the artists, a woman I’d never met, offered me her best sketch. It was a large pencil drawing on newsprint: I was reclining, looking away from the viewer, leaning on my elbow like my favourite Greek statues to draw.
I keep coming back to something: to the impossibility of language, to the failure of words. Sometimes after my twenty-four hour shifts I’m so dazed and euphoric that I’m surprised that language exists. How have we always said things so beautifully? In those moments language barely feels real — or maybe it’s more real than before, because without sleep, meaning becomes less deliberate. It absorbs everything. I free-associate most in therapy after my overnight shifts. Sometimes therapy feels almost mystical, where meaning can happen without words. Last week during in a session with a long-term patient, I felt a slow heat in my sternum, which spread across my shoulders and up to my head. I didn’t feel a particular emotion, but I started to cry. I’m still not sure what I felt. She was smiling at me, and in a few seconds she was crying too. We were crying and smiling and looking at each other. It was the end of the session. I said see you next week, and she laughed, while crying. I don’t know, it’s a bit absurd. The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion said that to truly understand the patient, we must listen to them without memory or desire. The memories and dreams imposed by our own pasts and futures risk dimming our understanding. Bion called it the ineffable — the part of the patient’s experience we understand without words. We lose meaning when we translate experience to speech. But words are so seductive because they’re beautiful: once we’ve found them it’s easy to forget the massiveness of meaning that existed before we had language to define it. To believe Bion (and I believe him) is to look for what Grotstein called a “beam of intense darkness”. We give up the comfort of clarity and look to the chaos of understanding through feeling.
I saw a patient in the hospital this week who only spoke Italian. I tried to talk to her, but she spoke in a thick southern dialect which I barely understood. She was very old. I called an Italian interpreter and kept him on speakerphone, hoping he would understand her dialect better than I did. He didn’t, but I kept him on the line because my Italian has faded over the years. Even though I understood the same words he understood, I let him repeat the patient’s responses in English, because I loved hearing him say them. The patient would say quite neutrally in Italian, ‘sono depressa,’ and he’d say in English with such feeling: I’m Depressed. I could hear his fingers collecting through the phone, his mouth bursting with gabagool. It was so intentional and so unnecessary. I wondered if he was imagining his nonna, a tiny Italian woman, stoically suffering in her lettino, her little cot. The interpreter didn’t see the way she laughed during the silence, the way she’d sweetly tucked herself into the bed, or the shape of her two index fingers which she held together to tell me how much she missed her husband.
In medical school I failed my neuroanatomy exam, which was the first exam I’d ever failed. When we learned neurology, what I remember is the videos of movement disorders: it’s the same hazy VHS tape of a patient moving clumsily around a room. The neurologist in the video always wears a white coat, and models actions he knows the patient can’t repeat. The patient tries to repeat them, and the form of their failure has a name and a category; you see slowness, stiffness, tremors, chorea. The videos are terrible and eerie and also fascinating. The brain is mapped to produce such predictable problems. The location of a lesion predicts where we’ll see changes to sensation, feeling, movements, and memory. Psychiatry is different from neurology in that way. In our disorders there is no lesion. We recognize patterns of behaviours, clusters of symptoms, the feelings our patients cause us to feel — but the observations are fluid, sometimes messy. Two psychiatrists seeing the same patient might disagree on the diagnosis. There must be hundreds of schizophrenias, and a thousand ways to be depressed. Our diagnoses don’t carve nature at its joints, because nobody’s childhood looked the same. As a result, our language is very precise, and our biological tools are very blunt.
I remember the first time I delivered electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), and the feeling I had while holding the two electrodes to a patient’s forehead. The machine emits a hollow note as it delivers the shock. You see the clenching of teeth, the sudden tensing of muscle. Under your hands the electricity travels through the skull; you’re giving the patient a seizure. The body doesn’t convulse because it’s under general anesthetic to keep the patient briefly paralyzed. It only takes a minute, and then it’s done. We trace the seizure using EEG sensors attached to the skull, printing the brain’s activity onto a paper read-out. We do this to make sure the seizure lasted long enough. EEG waves are like the brain’s handwriting, and during a seizure the writing gets massive, chaotic, and unclear. It’s nothing like the tidy beta waves of waking life or the predictable deltas of slow-wave sleep. And somehow the chaos of the seizure is therapeutic. ECT is one of psychiatry’s most effective treatments — we use it for depression, mania, catatonia, schizophrenia — and we have no idea why it works.
I’ve never liked it when words obscure meaning, when the structure of a sentence feels carelessly unclear. My first boyfriend was a Greek philosophy major in university; his ideas were good but his writing wasn’t clear. A few months after we broke up I modelled for the life drawing class. I hadn’t expected the power I’d feel on the platform in that room. I didn’t know the model was the one in control. She chooses which artist will get the best angle, she knows which hand will get the best line to draw. The next time I modelled for the class I looked forward to it. The divide between the platform and the floor felt more fluid, and the robe was barely necessary. Everyone was vulnerable in their own way. At the break I wore the robe and people proudly showed me their pictures, and I felt proud of them for showing me. In a way it was very maternal — this sharing of one’s body in a conscious, generous way. In those languid Grecian poses, the lines of my body became ineffably clear. Feelings exists before we have words to describe them. The closer we think we come to capturing meaning, the more we confront the ways that words fail: imagine being naked in a room of clothed people, seeing the power of being drawn, and knowing you’ll never get to draw yourself that way.
Love,
E