That said, I hate and have always hated the word therapist. I detest the idea that my work, if it is work at all, is therapeutic work, that I am a member of what some of my colleagues call—without irony—the helping professions. My pride has sought always to refresh itself in the bracing chill of Freud’s most merciless formulations, his statement that a cure only is a renewed acquaintance with “everyday misery,” his designation of psychoanalytic work as a “school of suffering.”
I reject the claim that psychotherapeutic treatment promises peace of mind, or comfort with oneself, however much these may be the happy by-products of the treatment—the accessory consolations, if you will. Rather than seeking to enhance self-esteem or contentment, the work strives for the opposite, to strip away all illusions of self-sufficiency or autonomy. At its most successful, this school of suffering is a curriculum in awe. The true object of this awe is the sheer, impossible fact of being here at all—to have precipitated like a sudden dew from lightless and dimensionless nothing. That is the horizon of the treatment, the recognition that we appear from nowhere under inscrutable stars, at a place and time we did not choose, driven by desires we do not choose, toward a death we do not choose, a death that chose us for its own even in our mother’s womb.
Maybe this is only madness to you. Why shouldn’t it be? Has my profession disfigured my mind, the endless hours of constant attentiveness, my ear for hire and open to all comers, my face painted with the glare of projected fantasies? The French have a term for it: deformation professionelle, the idea that all forms of work twist the mind away from reality. Hence a backfiring car sends the soldier diving for cover in a shrub. Litigators dart and cower in forests of imagined liabilities. For the detective and inspector, every testimony or confession is a network of lies and concealments. How could my work not have deformed me, all those long hours spent squinting into the soul’s lightless recesses? How could I not have become some moon-eyed, cave-adapted creature, for whom ordinary daylight is an unendurable affliction?
You know what they say: shrinks make for the worst dinner companions. If dentists are always looking at your teeth, analysts are sniffing out neurosis or delusion. The premise, of course, is absurd. You might as well worry that the pulmonologist seated next to you will detect a spot on your lung. Absurd, and yet true all the same, true that the practice of psychoanalysis can be a disfiguring labor, one’s attention hung naked, irradiated by the desires of others. Surely such exposure inflicts damage, a damage as imperceptible as it is inevitable and irreparable, like the deafness that creeps upon the machinist or the madness that leeches the wits from a tanner of hides.
As a younger man, I burned with enthusiasm for my work: I was to be a warrior, the champion of reviled or exiled passions. I would assail the forces marshaled to enslave these passions, the tyrannies imposed in the name of factitious moralities, the sadistic compulsions disguised as highest law. I would be, in my silent, expensive way, the apostle of a thrilling freedom. When did it abandon me, that faith?
How often have I heard it repeated, nearly verbatim, that commonplace of every educated, sophisticated patient: I don’t believe in judgment, in divine judgment; I don’t believe that someone is sitting up in the sky frowning down at me. In the past I would have thought: Yes, you do—and that is your problem. In the fullness of time I would assist them in shaking free of this secret conviction. Now, though, my calling has deserted me. The premise wasn’t wrong: most patients suffer more than they know from obscure inner persecutions. What I did not realize, however, was how deeply I myself believed in such a judgment, how along with my patients I embraced with inalienable fidelity that very conviction. This conviction did not presume a personified judge—bearded, severe, enthroned. It presumed instead a law, inhuman, abstract, and implacable, the law to which we owed our lives, the law to which we owed our reckoning.
Failure, worth, crisis, potential, fulfillment. Every patient returns to these words again and again. They are the words from which my profession is made, and each of these words presumes a judgment, a mark attained or missed. No one enters my office who does not believe in his very marrow that judgment, some judgment, is absolute and fixed. The person I am meant to be: that mythical creature, that being whom each patient longs and dreads to become, is itself a judgment, a standard one does not devise but to which one must account.
What or who set the standard? What or who measured the body for its soul? What or who meant them to be the people they were meant to be? I am certain: belief in judgment is not what my patients reject or grow out of. The belief in judgment is what they cling to. Beneath their affections and afflictions, judgment is their one true love.
* * *
—
“You want me to say that you were not meant to be a junkie.”
“I do. I want that. But you can’t say it.”
“I can say this—you are afraid that might be true, also that it might not be true.”
“I was right,” she said after a long pause. “You can’t say it.”
She was right. What could I have said? The world’s more full of weeping than you can understand?
* * *
—
Somewhere in a book by Simone Weil there is a passage Miriam showed me. Weil writes that the only thing anyone truly possesses is the ability to say “I,” nothing more. This I, our sole possession, is what we owe to God. Whatever else we think of as our own—names, bodies, languages, families, nations—all these belong to fate, to be lent or revoked as fate alone decides. Standing beside Clementine’s crib, in the night-light’s weak glow, had I ever remembered this passage? Had I ever thought: Fate can, fate will, take you away? I never thought: You are not mine; you never were. How could I have, listening to your breathing as you slept, or, later, making you peanut-butter-and-mayonnaise sandwiches for school?
This was my crime: having held her as my own, my crime, for which I am called to account.
Que ce soit avec toi, que ce soit avec la fille, je serai satisfait.
Whether with you or with the girl, I will be satisfied.
NINETEEN
Called to account. My answer forms itself inside me. It is not a plan, not even a purpose, not yet. But still it forms itself: silent, intent, unmoving.
* * *
—
I peer into the second photograph: the one of the river and the railing above it where I had chiseled the date of Miriam’s suicide. The other photographs are intolerable, as though from behind them my correspondent scans my every thought. The photograph of the river, however, conceals no such gaze. What it conceals is something no one else can see.
At first, when I noticed the inscription, I had thought it was a picture of one thing only, the one place I could not bear to see again. I thought I understood what my correspondent was saying. He said, Look, this place remains. I have been there, just as you were once, working your hammer and chisel. You cannot revisit or repair the past, but you can return to this place. I thought, he wants me to know that my secret is a shared secret, that the inscription is still there, a slate recording a debt unpaid and unforgiven. But though the photograph says all of that, it conceals something my correspondent cannot know. It is more than merely the picture of a place. It is also the picture of a memory—no one’s but my own.
* * *
—
In the afternoons during our silent retreat at the monastery, the one Miriam took me to on our first trip outside Paris, Miriam and I would walk out in the fields, following in single file a narrow path through the pastures and hedgerows. We took with us a hiking map we’d found in the monastery, so detailed that even the faintest footpaths appear as thin, broken lines. The path we found traversed the grade crossing of an abandoned rail spur, curved along a small copse of acacias, then happened abruptly upon a stream. The stream, its banks steep and narrow, cut a course nearly invisible from the level of the f
ield. At a bend, however, a herd of white cattle had trampled the bank into a mud slope where they gathered hock-deep to drink from the stream. They shied a little as we passed but then moved to follow us en masse like a slow-moving, rumbling rain cloud.
The third or fourth day we were there, the warmest yet, we walked out farther than we had before, still refraining from speech. After a while we came to where a dilapidated bridge spanned the stream. It had no rails, its planks silvered and soft with rot. We sat down at the bridge’s edge, our feet swinging over the water that flashed shallow and clear over the stones of the streambed.
Staring down into the water, Miriam seemed unaware of my presence. What I had believed to be silence, mutually elected and shared, in fact sizzled with the shrilling of insects, urgent and indistinct at once, like the ringing of a faceless clock, while the heat of the day bore down like the blare of a horn. At some point Miriam had taken off her shoes as though she were going to climb down the bank into the water, but then she had removed her shirt also, revealing her small breasts and the faint hair of her armpits as she pulled it over her head. Once entirely naked she crouched beside me, her feet flat on the rotten boards, and unbuttoned my shirt, whispering something to each button as she eased it through its buttonhole. Sweat beaded minutely on her upper lip, and the warm, released smell of her nakedness rose from her like air tautened before a squall. At first she crouched over me, but then she wanted to be on her back. She wanted my mouth against her, and held my head against her with one hand, spreading her labia with the fingers of her other. She couldn’t come like that, she had said before, but nevertheless rocked her hips harder between my mouth and the grunting boards, her breathing straitened, both hands now knotted in my hair. Usually she pulled me slowly into her, looking, teasing herself with the tip of my penis, dipping it inside her, then rubbing it against her clitoris, always watching, mouth slack, brow knit. But this time there was no delay, only the same frantic grip now on my hips, now my buttocks, pressing me against her as though all of my weight and all of her force were not enough, nothing could be enough—her neck sinews bar-hard from jaw to collarbone, eyelids clenched—her climax no release but a wrenched, shuddering current relenting only to shift its grip and seize her again and then again as though to annihilate the very possibility of resistance and only then to let her drop.
When I withdrew she broke the thread of semen between us with her finger and said, “Et toi, t’as joui aussi, mon ami.” She said this—You came too, my love—as a matter of fact. Nor had I been aware of coming, or of anything except the force of her embrace, a force that, in the end, had failed to obliterate her completely.
Afterward Miriam lay naked, facedown on the planks, staring through a gap between the boards. I did the same, and we lay like that for a while, looking down into the water. The bright surface of the stream beneath us reversed to transparency as it passed beneath the bridge’s shadow. From time to time a fish would steer into one of the clear patches, idling slowly upstream though motionless against the streambed beneath it, or a leaf, dry on its upper side, would glide under the bridge. Mostly, though, the stream carried nothing but patches of sky and the shadows of our faces, which scattered and regrouped on the shifting surface of the water.
* * *
—
That bridge must have long since rotted out and buckled or vanished in a spring flood. And though Miriam herself has vanished, the stream remains, motionless and unresting, and from its shallows her reflection still looks up at me, through me, to a future she will not inhabit, in a country she will never see, at a girl, a stranger, the Clementine she will never know.
TWENTY
We had met again at the café on the rue de Vaugirard to consider a new poem. The Yeats poem we had discussed first had been a photocopy, but this time she appeared with a broad book, wider than it was tall, and placed it on the table between us. Leaning over, she kissed me and said, I love to approach you from a distance, to see you before you see me.
Do I look different then?
You look like the man I love.
Will you introduce me to him one day? I said.
She shrugged. One day—maybe, she said.
The wide book was a musical score, settings of poems by George Herbert. I had not heard of him. A seventeenth-century English poet, Miriam explained, an Anglican priest. She would be performing one of the songs soon, and she had been struggling with several pronunciations, the word guest, for example, and worthy, to say nothing of the name Herbert itself, which she pronounced Air-bear.
“It’s ‘guest,’ ” I said.
“Guayst,” she repeated, frowning. “Again once, please.”
“Guest,” I said again.
“Gust. C’est ‘gust,’ non? Non, pas vraiment…Merde!”
“Guest. The sound is eh…eh—guest.”
“Eh,” she said. “Guehh-st. Guehst. Guest.” The flat vowel seemed to darken the word, obscure it. She switched back into French: “C’est un invité, n’est-ce pas?” And just like that, once she had restored “guest” to its proper sense of “invité,” the poem itself seemed suddenly to recover transparency for her, as though a ray of sunlight had opened up the overcast clouds of English. She must have experienced in my own mauling French a similar wrongness, a shadowing or clouding of the medium that was for her merely the clear precipitate of thought. And yet when she suggested that we each stick to our own language, that I speak to her in English and she to me in French, I refused, saying something inept like On est dans France donc il doit parler français. We are at France so it must to speak French.
“Tu es adorable,” she said, lifting my hand and kissing it on the palm, “but when in Rome, maybe it is not always necessary to do as the French do?”
* * *
—
Every couple (it seems to me) adopts a story of origin, whether to testify to a great and fated love or merely to answer the question “So, how did you two meet?” But when did Miriam and I begin? Was it the moment I first saw her, in the dim light of the elevator? Or the night I first heard her sing, which was also the first night we slept together? On the trip to the monastery, perhaps on the rotting bridge, something had changed; had that been the moment? (Surely it was then, or nearly then, that Miriam conceived.) I am convinced, however, that none of those encounters was it. Still, in each of these meetings, we had yet to meet each other.
When I consider the brevity of those months, I can believe we ended before we began, that it was all over before it even started. But no: there was a time when we were wholly each other’s, and it began that day, at the café on the rue de Vaugirard, a musical score unfolded on the café table. That, I believe, was our moment of beginning.
I believe this because the poem lying open on the table had marked for her, as she put it, her point of no return. It was the crisis that sheared her away from her prior life, and it was along the arc of that deviation that I was to accompany her. Before we met, she had been pursuing a doctorate, her thesis on the French philosopher Simone Weil. Weil, a suicide or nearly one, had allowed herself to die of self-imposed starvation at the age of thirty-four in the summer of 1943, having escaped from occupied France to England. Up to the end she had nurtured a hope that the Free French, under de Gaulle, would put her to some heroic use, this skeletal, zealous, bluestocking fugitive. Though Jewish by birth and violently opposed to fascism, she deplored and repudiated her Judaism and converted to Christianity or, rather, to a caustic and unstable isotope of Christianity, a system she cooked out in her writings, most notably in her sprawling journals. These journals in particular had fascinated Miriam. She had first encountered them preparing for her baccalauréat, discovering in Weil a version of herself, a young woman of ardent and unruly talents. Miriam’s fascination both haunted and animated her university studies and in time drove her on to pursue postgraduate work, where she found she could eke out her modest stipend b
y singing in choirs. Her doctoral thesis argued something concerning Weil’s theory of necessity. “Just ‘something’?” I asked, but she replied only by saying: Whatever I thought, it was wrong—everything, all of it, entirely wrong. Late in her studies, she had veered off this path, the path she had followed since high school.
It had happened the moment she first encountered, somewhere in Simone Weil’s writings, this poem by George Herbert, the poem whose setting she was preparing to sing. Simone Weil had read the poem on retreat at the Monastery of Solesmes, and it had struck her with epiphanic force. For Weil, it gave utterance, with unworldly clarity, to the soul’s wondering disbelief when brought face-to-face with God’s love:
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.
“A guest,” I answer’d, “worthy to be here”;
Love said, “You shall be he.”
“I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.”
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
“Who made the eyes but I?”
“Truth, Lord, but I have marr’d them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.”
The Waters & the Wild Page 11