Day 115: at bay

Therapy has helped me become more attentive to the physical symptoms of emotions. So I know, for example, that there’s a certain kind of mental pain – one I associate with sadness, or hurt, or grief – that is accompanied by a sharp needle like pain that every now and then shoots through the tips of my fingers and a more steady ache in the roof of my mouth.

When I am tired of these sensations there are various remedies that alleviate them: lorazepam, alcohol, dancing, and writing this blog are my most favored methods. Writing is the one I employ the most and lorazepam is the one I employ the least. Dancing is definitely the most effective (it doesn’t work, unfortunately, if I just get up and dance around in my sitting room; I have to actually go to a class), and I think the high lasts the longest. Alcohol is probably the least effective. Lorazepam is effective but in a deadening kind of way.

Writing this blog is the pain relief method I find most mysterious.

If dancing is enlivening, drinking is relaxing, and Lorazepam is numbing, writing this blog bestows, albeit briefly, a feeling of connectedness. It’s effective, often, when I’m feeling lonely; as with exercise or drinking, the good feeling only lasts so long. Usually when I write a post, I get a heady rush when I post it and when I look at the statistics page and see that people are reading it; the high fades, gradually, as the satisfaction of writing the post recedes from my memory and as I see fewer and fewer people going to the site to read it. So then I have to write another. And another.

You get the idea.

Another more obvious strategy for alleviating melancholy and bestowing a sense of connectedness, one I think of as the Humean method, is spending time with other people. I’m not dating anyone but I’m making a deliberate effort to be merry with friends. I go out; I entertain at home; and I make liberal use of the wide range of communication methods that the digital age affords.

The times when I write here are when I long for a sense of connection, and feel that I’ve exhausted all my other options: I’ve emailed, I’ve texted, I’ve cuddled my children.

Although I, to state the bleeding obvious, have a strong impulse towards disclosure, I understand and respect that this impulse is not universal. And, indeed, maybe it is sometimes an impulse that would be better resisted than indulged. Or maybe it’s a matter of temperament or etiquette. I suspect many people think it’s an imposition to tell someone else when they feel sad, and maybe some people do feel burdened when a sad friend confides in them.

Speaking for myself, I feel deeply flattered when someone chooses to share something painful and intimate with me. Also—and maybe this doesn’t reflect too well on me—it’s not that I’m happy to discover that my friends are sad, but I do find it enormously reassuring to discover that others are struggling too. I think that’s why I love Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas more and more the older I get: because it attests to the universality of melancholy.

But maybe this feeling of relief in bearing witness to others’ troubles is less a general truth of human nature than a particular trait of mine. In grad school I worked for a counseling hotline; it was run by the university and aimed at grad students, and, honestly, we didn’t get that many calls. I must have only talked to a handful of people the whole time I volunteered there. But there was one regular caller, not a grad student, a middle aged woman not connected to the university, who called every night without fail. It clearly meant a lot to her that she could call us every night and that someone would be there, night after night, simply to listen without judgment.

I don’t think there is really a talking “cure”; I believe, with Johnson, that melancholy is here to stay; but I also believe, with Johnson, that (both literally and figuratively) you can’t take it lying down. That would be like sleeping with the enemy. No, as Johnson says, melancholy “shrinks from communication”; this blog avows my faith that disclosure may keep it at bay.

But just as, earlier today, my son was all out of tears, I find myself, now, all out of words. Neither woman nor duck-rabbit cannot live by words alone. And in support of that maxim, I’m now, finally, going to pick my arse off the sofa and go running.

Day 114: on being seen

“She sees me,” she said.

“She what?” I asked, but even as the question formed in my mouth I knew instinctively what my friend meant, in describing the woman with whom she was in love.

It’s a feeling that, despite its rarity, is not restricted to particular forms of communication or types of relationship.

A case in point would be my recent visit to the aptly named Dr. Lake; I felt seen with the clarity that her first name honors.

It’s a feeling that confers such immense relief; by contrast, the feeling of not being seen is one of the most chilling feelings. It’s intensified when you feel that someone has you in their sights – and you them – and then they slip out of sight, or earshot. They sound muffled. They look blurry. And they won’t come back into focus no matter how hard you squint.

It’s like for a moment being seen as a real live flesh and blood person and then reverting to being perceived as the mere automata cloaked in hats and coats that Descartes sees out his window in the Meditations, or the terrifying mannequins from E. Nesbitt’s The Enchanted Castle, whose “bodies were bolsters and rolled-up blankets, their spines were broom-handles, and their arm and leg bones were hockey sticks and umbrellas.” What is terrifying, in The Enchanted Castle, is not only the uncanny spectacle of the mannequins coming to life, but narrator’s cool assurance, once they do, that it is ethical to deceive and, ultimately, dispose of them, since they “have no insides.” Rereading The Enchanted Castle as an adult, it is blindingly obvious that the mannequins are coded as working-class: they are a “furious, surging, threatening mass.” We are selective, that is to say, in choosing those upon whom we confer “insides.”

I don’t know that any of us really have insides – a core set of easily personifiable traits as so appealingly depicted in the lovely movie Inside Out. But the feeling that one does and that another soul really sees the machinations of one’s own “soul stark naked,” with all her “frisks, her gambols, her capricios,” as in Laurence Sterne’s wonderful image (in Tristram Shandy) of a person’s body as a “dioptricall” or transparent bee-hive, is, surely, one of the most glorious feelings in the world.

Day 113: all out of tears

There was a moment, a week or two after my Dad died, when numbness gave way to something like rage; I wanted to hurt, to smash, to scream. I have a strong visual memory of the moment. I am in the conservatory next to a side table on which stands some decorative pottery. My mum is standing a foot or two away from me. I am screaming in pain and frustration. “I want to smash all of this,” I am shouting, “I want to break everything.” I see as I say this that the worry in my Mum’s eyes is mingled with something like fear, and she says my name in an anguished tone. I don’t remember her exact words but she murmurs something like, “what’s happening to you?” and she looks scared. She, I can understand now, was expressing her own fear and sense of helplessness at seeing her child in such pain; but at the time as I registered that dismay in her voice I felt suddenly monstrous, as though my rage was too big for either of us, too ugly to be expressed.

This memory came to mind this morning as I witnessed my own son’s anguish and rage.

“My head hurts, my head hurts,” he wailed, as he dug his fists into his eyes.

“Sweets, please don’t press your eyes like that, it’s going to make your head feel worse,” I say gently.

He screams in pain and frustration. “I want to hurt someone,” he says. He says his sister’s name. “I want to hurt her. I hate her.”

“I know you’re feeling really angry,” I say. “You can’t hurt her.”

“I want to run away,” he says. “I want to run away to Dad’s house and never come back here.”

He starts to sob and sob. “I know you’re feeling really really sad and angry,” I said. “Can you tell me why?”

“I don’t want to tell you,” he repeats over and over.

“Please tell me sweetheart,” I say, “please please tell me. I can’t help unless you tell me. You won’t hurt my feelings, you can tell me anything.”

Finally he splutters out through his sobs, “I want you and Dad to get back together and I know that you never will.”

“Oh sweetheart,” I say, and I hold him tight. “I know, I know,” I say. “I’m so sorry sweetheart. I’m so, so sorry.”

“I don’t ever wanna be here,” he says. “Even if you never come back to live at Dad’s house, I don’t wanna ever be here again, I just wanna be at Dad’s house, that’s the only place I feel comfortable.”

I feel my chest grow tighter and tighter and all I can do is call him sweetheart and tell him in a big tumble of words how much I love him, and how sorry I am that he is in so much pain, and that of course he is, how could he not be, and that I am glad he is telling me, and that it hurts his Dad and me too, and that we are all sad, but that it is hardest for him and his sister, we know, and that it’s not fair. It’s not fair. It’s not fair.

“I want you to drive me to Dad’s house now,” he says.

“I’m not going to do that,” I say.

“Why are you so mean?” he yells. “You are so mean. You want me to be sad. I feel like I’m going to die.”

He is almost hysterical now. He is still lying in my arms on the floor. “I want to hurt myself,” he says, “I want to punch myself.” He starts to try to punch himself in the face but I catch his hand firmly and he resists and struggles, “stop holding me!” he spits at me.

“No,” I say, trying to keep the fear and panic out of my voice. “No, I’m not going to let you hurt yourself.”

From the other room comes the younger’s voice, plaintive, insistent, “Mom? You said you said I could brush your hair, can you bring the brush and the hairspray?”

I explain that I can’t right now, that her brother is very sad, that he needs me right now. She continues to call me.

“Shut up!” yells the elder at his sister.“Shut up.”

“Shhh,” I say. “It’s OK. It’s OK.”

I hold him and keep holding him. I rock him like the baby he once was. Slowly, slowly, the sobbing subsides. He lies in my arms limp and exhausted. He is all out of tears.

Day 112: The Grisset, redux

THE GLOVES. PARIS.

The beautiful Grisset rose up when I said this, and going behind the counter, reach’d down a parcel and untied it: I advanced to the side over against her: they were all too large. The beautiful Grisset measured them one by one across my hand.—It would not alter their dimensions.—She begg’d I would try a single pair, which seemed to be the least.—She held it open;—my hand slipped into it at once.—It will not do, said I, shaking my head a little.

—No, said she, doing the same thing.

There are certain combined looks of simple subtlety,—where whim, and sense, and seriousness, and nonsense, are so blended, that all the languages of Babel set loose together, could not express them;—they are communicated and caught so instantaneously, that you can scarce say which party is the infector. I leave it to your men of words to swell pages about it—it is enough in the present to say again, the gloves would not do; so, folding our hands within our arms, we both lolled upon the counter—it was narrow, and there was just room for the parcel to lay between us.

The beautiful Grisset looked sometimes at the gloves, then sideways to the window, then at the gloves,—and then at me. I was not disposed to break silence:—I followed her example: so, I looked at the gloves, then to the window, then at the gloves, and then at her,—and so on alternately.

I found I lost considerably in every attack:—she had a quick black eye, and shot through two such long and silken eyelashes with such penetration, that she look’d into my very heart and reins.—It may seem strange, but I could actually feel she did.—

It is no matter, said I, taking up a couple of the pairs next me, and putting them into my pocket.

I was sensible the beautiful Grisset had not asked above a single livre above the price.—I wish’d she had asked a livre more, and was puzzling my brains how to p. 604bring the matter about.—Do you think, my dear Sir, said she, mistaking my embarrassment, that I could ask a sous too much of a stranger—and of a stranger whose politeness, more than his want of gloves, has done me the honour to lay himself at my mercy?—M’en croyez capable?—Faith! not I, said I; and if you were, you are welcome. So counting the money into her hand, and with a lower bow than one generally makes to a shopkeeper’s wife, I went out, and her lad with his parcel followed me. (from Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, 1768)

THE CUFF. DAYTON.

The gruff Proprietor returned from the stall across from hers, where she had been eating a brownie, when I said this.

She had wanted a cream puff, she explained, but wouldn’t you know that they had run out. But the brownie, which was studded with chocolate chips was a fair substitute, she declared.

I pointed to the cuff I had in mind. It was made of a warm, conker-colored leather with a brass clasp. How do you like your cuff to fit? said she. —I hesitated;— I’ve never worn one, I confessed, so I don’t know. Oho! said she, well let’s try some on.

Some people like a cuff to fit quite tightly, she observed, so that it doesn’t slide around and the clasp stays put in the same place. Let’s try this one said she, picking up the one I had chosen. I held out my left wrist aloft; —the gruff Proprietor wrapped the cuff around my wrist tenderly and fastened the clasp. Oh that’s very loose, said she, twisting it to show me how easily it moved around my wrist;—yes, said I, that seems too loose.

Here, we’ll try another one on for size, said she; and then I can custom fit the one you like to just the right size. —Oh, really! I exclaimed, isn’t that too much trouble? Oh no, it’s no problem at all, said she.

The gruff Proprietor fastened a reddish tinted one around my wrist. —The stiff leather snugly bound my wrist like a corset. She tugged at it to show me that it wouldn’t move at all. The leather will soften right up as it ages, she murmured. How does that feel, she asked.

It feels tight, I said, a bit too tight, I added.

There are certain combined looks of simple subtlety,—where whim, and sense, and seriousness, and nonsense, are so blended, that all the languages of the blogosphere set loose together, could not express them;—they are communicated and caught so instantaneously, that you can scarce say which party is the infector. I leave it to your women of words to swell pages about it—it is enough in the present to say again, the cuff would not do.

All right then, she said, I’ll fit it for you so it’s just in between.

She picked up the brown leather cuff and set it on her work bench, hammering and tugging at the clasp, removing and then re-riveting it, adjusting its position so as to tighten the cuff. Try this now, she said. It was still too loose. Your wrist is very slender, said she, I’ll tighten it a bit more. She hammered and plied at the cuff a bit more. Try this now, said she, fastening it once again around my wrist. Now it fit closely but not tightly. Perfect, said I. She nodded her agreement.

What do I owe you, I asked. Aw … well … let’s see, I’ll give you a discount, so …. so let’s say 25. Oh thank you! said I, let me see if I have cash. I dug around in my wallet, but I just had a large wad of ones. I think I’ll need to use a card, I’m afraid, said I. That’s no problem at all ma’am, said she, let me get my phone. I handed the gruff Proprietor my card; — she swiped it and I signed my name shakily with my index finger across the screen. Thank you so much, said I, warmly, for the discount and also for fitting it especially to me. It was my pleasure said she, nodding her head.

cuff

Day 111: Whatever happened to you?

“Whatever happened to you?”

How, in any context, could that not be a grossly insulting question to pose to someone?

Let me tell you the context in which it was posed to me.

Here’s the back story. It was the classic boy meets girl scenario. You know: girl messages boy about Duran Duran online; boy (who didn’t, according to him, graduate high school, and who does not know at this point that I am a literature professor) asks girl, apropos of nothing, “did you read the Table Talk?”; girl swoons.

Pretty standard stuff.

But then, like many fellows I meet online, he wanted to meet either RIGHT NOW or else, whenever he next felt like meeting RIGHT NOW, and I found that …. inconvenient. So we stopped messaging.

That was exactly three months ago. And then today, there’s a little ping, and the message comes up:

Whatever happened to you?

Whatever happened to you?

We were just reading Graham Harman in my critique class, and he was talking about what Quentin Meillassoux dubs “correlationism”: the Kantian idea that “we cannot think of world without humans nor of humans without world, but only of a primordial correlation between the two.”

So, my theory is that this dude subscribes to a version of correlationism, but in his version, he can’t think about me without iMessage or iMessage without me, but only of a primordial correlation between the two. I have not texted him in 3 months: ergo, something has happened to me. I have perhaps died, tragically. Or perhaps I have ascended onto a different plane.

Or maybe he thinks of me as akin to Schrödinger’s cat: he is magnanimously initiating this interaction in order to save me from the indignity of being simultaneously dead and alive in a quantum superposition.

Whatever happened to you?

It’s the question you ask innocently enough in the third person of a washed-up child star (cf. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?). In the second person the tone is quite different. The addition of “ever” to “what” has the effect of suggesting the speaker’s befuddlement or incredulity (“what the hell!”), lending the question an accusatory, aghast, or pitying inflection. This is especially intensified because “happened to” has an unambiguously negative connotation, as if it is a synonym for “tragically befell.”

So, for example, say you see someone looking their usual self and then you see them a bit later all dressed up and looking really pretty. You would not say “whatever happened to you?” would you?

On the other hand, say you see someone looking their usual self and then you see them a bit later all covered in mud and looking really disheveled. I think it’s plausible (though it doesn’t sound quite idiomatically natural to my ear) that you would exclaim “whatever happened to you?!”

I haven’t replied to his text and I wish I could think of a really great come back: the only idea I have is “I BID YOU GOOD DAY SIR,” but I’m not sure the dignity, righteous indignation and steeliness with which I would utter that line would come across via text. (See this episode of Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist 20:37 to 21:25 for an excellent demonstration of what my affect would be while uttering this line).

I know that silence is the best and most dignified response and that, as Aziz Ansari’s dating manual has informed me, “The person who receives the last message in a convo WINS!”; but I am extremely poor at being stonily silent, which is why I invariably lose this game.

Suggestions welcome!

Day 110: Alright, love

This is not a post about being sad! I am still sad, but this is about something different, though perhaps subtly so: it is about tears.

Are there certain stimuli that invariably make you cry? Fill in the blank: “As sloths are to Kristen Bell, —— are to me.”

Here are my top four instant eye-wetters:

Musical boxes that play ballet music with a ballerina that twirls round and around
David Lean’s Dr Zhivago
(Ever since I gave birth to the elder), Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”
Someone (doesn’t much matter who; what matters more is the tone) addressing me in a sincerely sympathetic tone as “sweetheart,” “love,” “honey,” or similar endearment.

So, let me tell you, the last week has been quite a week for my poor nerves!

First of all, the other morning the younger dug out this old musical box that someone gave her. It’s red velvet lined jewelry box with a little ballerina who goes around and around, and when you wind the key, it plays the theme from Dr. Zhivago.

“Do you guys find that music really sad, or is it just me?” I asked.

“It’s just you, Mom,” said the elder.

I sighed and resigned myself to several sustained minutes during which “Lara’s theme” played in increasingly halting tinny notes, all the more poignant as the pace gradually slowed.

The week was just getting started.

Secondly, Em called me “sweetheart” not once but twice in one week. Once in a text, once on facebook. Result: instantaneous tears.

Thirdly, I had to teach “Frost at Midnight” yesterday. Now, at my advanced age, I have by now lectured on this poem many times, and so I’ve developed a strategy:

1) Never read out loud the whole thing in lecture. I did it once and learned the hard way that my voice will crack in the final stanza.

2) Talk fast and blink faster.

3) Have plenty of silly Coleridge anecdotes in your back-pocket.

Phew.

I get my sentimentalism from my Dad, I’m pretty sure.

I have a lot of memories of watching television with my Dad. My Dad, despite having a strong aversion to American culture on principle (no, not because he was a Muslim; because he was a socialist), adored American television. Bonanza; Cagney & Lacey; The A-Team: he loved them all. But, strangest of all, it somehow became a Sunday morning ritual when I was in my teens that he and I would watch The Waltons on Channel Four together.

It was a little ironic. These were rough years during which my father and I argued a lot. But we came together to watch a television show that was a sentimental celebration of familial love, as epitomized, above all, by the final scene of every episode in which the family members bade each other goodnight.

Mum was completely baffled by our devotion to the show.

“Ugh …. It’s so… sentimental,” she would say, looking at us lying on the sofa with undisguised disgust.

My brother, as I recall, was also duly appalled by the show’s irredeemable naffness.

But we were undeterred. My Dad and I were committed, deeply committed, to lying on the sofa late on a Sunday morning and watching The Waltons week in week out.

The episode would frequently end with my Dad wiping his eyes and shaking his head sheepishly; and when I would roll my eyes, he would say, referring to John-Boy Walton and his latest trials and heartaches: “I just …. I just really like that boy.”

The night my Dad died, after my brother and I had been performing CPR for what felt like an eternity but was probably only a few minutes, and I had called the ambulance and called them again and called them again, and explained that I thought my Dad was dying, and they still didn’t come, I finally ran out into the street; I didn’t know what else to do.

I was wearing my knickers and a T-shirt (I still remember that shirt; it had leaf prints on it; my Mum had bought it for me at the annual fair for International Social Service, where she worked, and I wore it to sleep in); my legs and feet were bare. It was September and after midnight. The streets were quiet and deserted.

I stood on the corner of Dalmeny Road and Tufnell Park Road for just a few seconds looking in vain for the ambulance. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere I saw a man, a stranger, walking towards me. Suddenly realizing that I was alone, half naked, on the street corner, I instinctively shrank bank in fear. He stopped immediately in his tracks and raised his hands as if to say, “I’ll back away if you want”; it was a gesture of openness and kindness.

“Are you alright, love?” he asked, and then seeing my fear, he added, with such tenderness, “I’m not gonna hurt you, love, are you alright?”

Then, and only then, I started to cry.

Day 109: the jammy school of bastards

Inspired in equal measure by the Great British Bake-Off episode featuring “self-saucing puddings” (best quote: “now that’s what I call a sauced pudding!” declared judge Mary of contestant Richard’s black forest fondants), and the grad seminar I’m teaching this quarter on critique, I have founded (and also identified) a new literary school.

Allow me to present, ladies and gents: the jammy school of bastards.

So far, there are only two members of this school, but they are heavy-hitters, both of ’em.

First, naturally, there is this blog’s stalwart STC on fine form:

“O how I wish to be talking, not writing–for my mind is so full, that my thoughts stifle & jam each other / & I have presented them as shapeless jellies. … Repetition is the sad necessity of all philo-parenthesists” (Marginalia, vol. 3, p 138) [1]

Secondly, here is James Joyce describing the style of the chapter “Nausicaa” in Ulysses. The chapter is written, he wrote to Frank Budgen in 1920, in a “namby-pamby jammy marmalady drawersy … style with effects of incense, mariolatry, masturbation, stewed cockles, painter’s palette, chitchat, circumlocutions, etc etc.” (Letters of James Joyce, vol .1, ed. Stuart Gilbert. London: Faber and Faber, 1957, p.135)

I am excessively fond of the jammy school – in fact, I am so bold as to try my hand at it myself on occasion, tho, with prose as with jam, I often have trouble getting the stuff to gel at the crucial stage.

Obviously, there should be factions – the marmalady versus the shapeless jellies, for example.

I welcome suggestions of other members or features that we might add to the jammy school.

N.B. Before I’m deluged with enquires, let me make one thing perfectly clear: no, you cannot be a member if your sole qualification is expertise in jam-making (although if you must send samples, so be it).

No, your prose itself must be jammy. For example, Joshua, recent facebook pictures indicate, makes quite delicious looking marmalade from his own home-grown-lemons; but, unfortunately for him, his writing is far too limpid and soundly constructed to belong, properly speaking, to the jammy school. (Yes, to the pedants among you, jellies are limpid, but they are also wobbly). Sorry, Joshua.

Notes

[1] The OED suggests, to my surprise, that the noun jam referring to the fruit-boiled-with-sugar concoction may derive from the verb jam referring to wedging an object between two other bodies … the idea being that there is a similar crushing movement occurring in the jam-making process. And both words seem to only pop into English in the early eighteenth century! How peculiar!

Day 108: at home

When I was growing up my parents had a lot of dinner parties. It was the main way they socialized with their friends. I loved it when we had people over. In particular I loved the sleeping and awakening rituals that became associated, over the years, with these occasions. At a certain point in the evening, after pudding had been served but before coffee, and while the grown-ups were still sitting at the table drinking wine and talking about politics, I would creep off and lie on the sofa in the living room that adjoined the dining room. Gradually, I would drift to sleep. I would feel perfectly relaxed and dimly aware of the hum of voices from the next room and then, eventually, of being carried up to bed.

The next morning I would usually wake up first, and the house would be heavy with sleep and the sound of deep breathing. I’d creep down the stairs into the darkened living room, which would be much tidier than usual except for the detritus of coffee cups. My practice was to go around from coffee cup to coffee cup and drink the dregs, which always tasted extremely delicious to me. I also loved the cups themselves: they were small and cylindrical in shape, with a kind of art deco abstract pattern on them. My parents only used them when people came over. I would sit there on my own, drinking cold coffee, admiring the cups and the tidy sitting room, for quite some time until, eventually, someone, usually my Mum, would come downstairs.

I was thinking of these memories today because this morning, after I went over to H-W-M-B-P’s house and still feeling pretty groggy after my disrupted night, I found I couldn’t quite rouse myself off the sofa once I’d sat down. He and the kids were setting off for the park.

“Is it OK if I sleep here for a bit?” I asked, and he said that it was. I curled up and fell asleep as they were crashing around looking for bike helmets. When I woke up, a couple of hours later, they were back; I awoke to the noise of the younger splashing in a wading pool on the front patio.

It was poignant for me to realize how deeply comforting that experience felt, and not just because I was falling asleep and then awakening surrounded by my family, but because, I realized, I felt myself to be at home, even though it is no longer my home. I was lying on the sofa we ordered when we lived in Chicago. We hemmed and hawed, I remember, for some time over whether to get the dark charcoal grey one we ended up buying, versus one that was more of a taupe color. I nursed the elder on that sofa; and I can remember him lying there sleeping on his back, next to SJ when she visited when he was just a week or two old. That sofa was also where I was sitting, here in LA, knitting, when my waters broke with the younger. The soft, mohair blanket on the sofa that I curled under is the one Liz gave us for our wedding, and that the kids always use as the roofs for their forts.

I suddenly, today, became overwhelmed with a sense of loss, by the feeling that I’ll never be at home again.

Day 107: mine foe estate: most things rot ‘n the dark

Claire observed to me recently that my facebook updates paint a rosy picture of post-separated life; and I think that, by and large, that is true. Consider today’s post, then, the invisible worm in the sick rose.

It’s not that I had a bad weekend; I actually had a really enjoyable weekend until I got sick. It was just one of those twenty four-hour periods during which I start to suspect that I am not a real person but actually a character in a third-rate novel by some 27 year old hipster who fancies himself a Baudelaire for our time.

“But will the reader grasp that these events are symptomatic?” he asks his editor (who is not really his editor but his dad’s friend, and who is just doing a favor for his friend by reading this shit).

“Yeah, I think it’s pretty obvious,” says the editor.

“Really?” queries the novelist, whose name is Luke, but he insists on being called “Luka.”

“Because I’m thinking this chapter needs more imagery of blockages and then I’ll pick that up in the next chapter when she sees her psychiatrist and finally confronts the vile bilious matter that she’s been just desperately tamping down for all these years but which now, at the novel’s climax, gushes out. “

“It’s called “foreshadowing,’” he adds, helpfully.

The editor stares at him with a blend of contempt and disbelief. “Sure, more blockages,” he says, and goes back to browsing bread machines on Amazon.

Here’s Luka’s embellished draft:

Yesterday, Valentine’s Day. was her 13^th wedding anniversary. [the 13^th? Really? You’re laying it on a bit thick. Also, who gets married on Valentine’s Day? Isn’t that asking for trouble? Ed.]

She had planned the day so that there wouldn’t be too much time for wallowing and moping.

It was a warm, sunny Sunday. She went to the symphony with a friend at Disney Hall downtown. She rediscovered how absorbing and moving it can be to listen silently with hundreds of other people to classical music. In the intermission they went outside and looked at the pretty people. Her gold boots gleamed in the sun.

Afterwards they went for a drink. She wanted to treat her friend but her card was declined.

“Try it again,” she urged the bartender.

He did, but it wouldn’t go through. A tiny queasy feeling rose in her stomach, but she chose to ignore it.

“Maybe it’s identify theft,” said her friend.

She found that thought oddly reassuring; identity theft would mean that she was a victim, not that she had, rather, through carelessness and spendthriftiness [sure that’s a word? Ed.] drained her own account.

After her drink she left to meet another friend to see “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” in Century City. She got a ride using Lyft from downtown.

They had been driving for some twenty minutes when she realized that they were still downtown. It was Valentine’s Day, of course, so bad traffic was to be expected; but that wasn’t the problem. Instead, the GPS seemed to be guiding the driver in endless circles.

Perturbed, the driver announced, “I’m just going to turn off the navigation system and go with my instincts.”

“OK,” said her passenger, not entirely reassured.

For nearly an hour, they were, the driver assured her passenger, perpetually on the verge of getting to the 10 freeway. It was around every corner. Except … it wasn’t. Driving around Los Angeles looking for the 10 might be SoCal version of purgatory, thought the passenger, and wondered if she might be stuck there forever.

In the end she made it to the theater in time and settled back to luxuriate at the spectacle of the undead frolicking in Regency costume. Her favorite part of the movie was the very final shot. The credits roll after an apparent final scene depicting a bucolic double-wedding; but then, in the middle of the credits, abruptly, there is one final scene that suggests there will be, after all, no happily ever after.

Oh, Wickham, you are indeed the wickedest young man in the world.

When she got home she congratulated herself on a well-managed first post-separation Valentine’s Day. Then she went to bed, her mind teeming with zombies. Some hours later, she was awoken, not by the undead, but by a sharper queasy feeling. Rising tides of vomit soon followed.

Were the heaves the cries of her perfidious soul, the return of the repressed, or just the tuna tartare? It was hard to say. [Luke, reading this is literally making me gag. Ed.]

Around 8 the next morning, there was a rap on the door. Exhausted from vomiting, and wrapped in her daughter’s pink fuzzy blanket, she walked over unsteadily to open it. It was a handyman, sent by the rental company in response to her complaint, earlier in the week, about a mysterious bad smell in the apartment.

The smell was elusive, both difficult to characterize and to pinpoint its source. The odor was something like a dank, stagnant pond, but it would come and go with no obvious pattern. But when it was detectable it was very pronounced and seemed to emanate from certain cupboards, which is why, as one of her dinner guests pointed out with some amusement on Saturday night, she had taped a sign on one of her dining room cabinets that stated, simply: “Cupboard with Bad Smell.”

When the handyman came in to the apartment and checked the cupboard, he looked puzzled. The smell wasn’t pronounced or localized sufficiently for him to trace where it came from.

“I was hoping it would be a really strong smell,” he said, “and then it would probably be a dead animal and I could just yank it right out.”

“Right,” she said, one again not altogether reassured.

“I’ll have to look at the foundations,” he said. “There’s a crawl space so I’ll come back this afternoon and investigate,” he explained. “Maybe there’s a puddle under there. I’ll probably dump a bunch of bleach on it.”

She settled down to wait for him to return. Remembering the declined card, she checked her balance. It was zero: but the only thief was herself; and the statement told no mysterious story but the plain truth that most of her salary went on rent and therapy.

She waited until it started to get dark, but he never returned. [I’m sorry but this is terribly trite, Luke. Say hi to your dad. Ed.]

Day 106: by sympathy, to communicate

Last night I went to bed before 9pm. I knew that going to sleep at that hour would likely result in me waking up in the middle of the night, but I was feeling aimless and sleepy enough to sleep. So: I slept. And then, as anticipated, I woke up about 2am.

I didn’t have a book. I thought about going on Amazon and buying one but decided that the act of selecting and purchasing a book would contribute to wakefulness rather than alleviating it.

“Who will not mind me texting them at this hour?” I asked myself.

My mum genuinely doesn’t mind me getting in touch with her at any hour of the day or night. But she only very recently got a smartphone and sent her first ever text a few weeks ago. It was deliberately and I suspect slowly and thoughtfully composed. I just don’t think she’s ready for super-cazh-texting-in-bed.

So then I thought about texting my brother but thought, “no, he has a toddler, don’t be so selfish, D-R, the man needs his sleep.”

Only at this point, ladies and gentlemen, did I remember that it is eight hours ahead in the U.K. and so it was not, actually, the middle of the night there.

So then I thought, oh, I WILL text my brother, and here is where we get to the point of this post.

I was on the verge of texting him but then remembered that he almost never uses SMS/iMessage messaging to get in touch with me; instead, he always uses WhatsApp, I think because SMS messaging is more expensive in the UK.

And I immediately thought, “oh no, I don’t want to text him using WhatsApp!” The very idea almost made me recoil!

Why did I think this? I hadn’t realized, explicitly, that I felt this way until this very moment at 2am last night: but what I realized in that moment is that SMS/iMessage messaging feels to me like a highly transparent, intimate form of communication. Whatsapp feels more filtered and more distant. Whatsapp just seemed, unequivocally, like the wrong service for sending a 2am text message. The very idea felt jarring, like sending a Howler when you meant to send an owl.

Why do these different messaging services feel so distinct to me, I wondered?

Being the duck-rabbit that I am, my mind went first to Adam Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, first delivered at Glasgow in 1762–63. This text, in a lovely example of form mirroring content—or, at least, the content I wish to highlight here— is not actually Smith’s own text but based on his students’ lecture notes. It’s a case of form mirroring content because one of the key points in the lectures is that the essence of “rhetoric,” that is, of the art of speech, is transmission.

Here is Smith:

“When the sentiment of the speaker is expressed in a neat, clear, plain and clever manner, and the passion or affection he is poss<ess>ed of and intends, by sympathy, to communicate to his hearer, is plainly and cleverly hit off, then and then only the expression has all the force and beauty that language can give it. It matters not the least whether the figures of speech are introduced or not” (25-6, my emphasis).

Now, to us, this seems like, duh, of course the point of language is to communicate; but at the time, in the mid-18^th century, when the Oxford BA was still mostly devoted to the study of classical rhetoric, for Smith to say this in his lectures on rhetoric was pretty radical. What we witness here, as John Guillory describes in his fantastic essay, “The Memo and Modernity,” is a transmission or communication model of language displacing a rhetorical persuasion model. [1]

In this essay, Guillory argues that Smith is a pivotal figure in inaugurating “a major shift in the conception of language-use toward the explicit acknowledgement of communication” (327). By contrast with rhetoric, communication “posited the transfer of the speaker’s thoughts and feelings accurately to the mind of the auditor” (327).

What does this have to do with texting at 2am?

Well, Smith’s ideal of what he calls “perspicuity” still informs our communication media preferences today, I think. It’s not just in our homes that we look unfavorably upon clutter, Marie Kondo-style. We also favor the uncluttered aesthetic in our media. Instant textual communication (no matter the application) does not replicate face-to-face conversation so much as promise to remove the clutter—of expression, gesture, tone, touch—that always accompanies bodies in space. But I think SMS/iMessage messages (at least as they appear on my devices, which are all Apple; maybe they look different on other machines) performs most dramatically this ideal of a transmission that supersedes, in some ways, face-to-face communication.

Maybe I’m wrong; maybe it’s just that the more you use a medium, the more its formal features become invisible to you; of course, that’s true. But I maintain that there is something about the mise-en-scène of SMS/iMessage texting that foregrounds a Smithian ideal of perspicuity. It’s something about the simplicity of the speech bubbles on the plain white background. By contrast, WhatsApp has this weird busy, doodle-y background; moreover, the actual interface is cluttered with arrows and too many colors, and a little date bubble that slides on top of the messages.

The minimalism of the SMS/iMessage interface reinforces the medium’s promise of “instant” communication: via text message (no matter what the platform) each speaker’s words appear as discrete acts of speech. The uniform speech bubbles make communication less about the personhood or identity of the speakers and more—and I think this is Smith’s ideal—about the affects and thoughts that the speakers transmit.

In conclusion: Smith would be an avid user of SMS/iMessage. And he wouldn’t be seen dead using WhatsApp. But since he is dead, and, therefore, unlikely to mind being woken up, maybe next time I’m up at 2am I’ll message him. Please tell me if you have his number.