A Dialogue On Love
A Dialogue On Love
A Dialogue On Love
.
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A Dialogue on Love
Patient(1992)
Apparently it's as a patient that I want to emerge. "Oh, I guess I'm supposed to call you my client, not my patient," Shannon said once, "but
that's the way they taught us, back in graduate school-seems like too
much trouble to change."
Besides, I like patient. It is true I can be very patient. And Shannon
is like this too, so the word doesn't feel like placing me at a distance.
Then, it seems a modest
wordthat makesno claim
to anythingbut-wanting
to be happier
and wanting, it's true, someone else to shoulder a lot of agency in the
matter of my happiness.
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The day after I left my message, the phone offered a friendly, masculine voice with some
hard midwesternsounds.
Eve Sedgwick?Shannon Van Wey.
Oh! MaybeI'mfound?
And then in the waiting room, do I have a mental image of him at
all? The handsome, lean, well-dressed therapists female and male in this
large practice filter through the sunny room, greeting their patients, ushering them up or across....
I look expectantly at each of the men.
And I'm trying now to remember it, the grotesque, reassuring shock
of Shannon hovering down a few stairs into this view, mild and bristling
with his soft gray nap,
big-faced,cherubicbarrelchest,long arms,shortlegs,
Rumpelstiltskin-like
and wearing, I've no doubt, a beautifully ironed
short-sleevedcottonshirt
the colorof an afterdinner mint, tuckedin
at his rotund waist. If it was as hot as Durham usually is in early September, he had a handkerchief too for mopping his forehead.
There would have been a substantial rumble of genial introduction.
tentative
greeting maybe not quite audible in the middle of it. Was
My
this ordinary for him-the first encounter in this familiar room with big,
female middle-aged bodies deprecated by the softness of our voices?
Maybe in some manual it's the secret definition of depression.
And yet (I told him, settled in his office upstairs), it's not so clear to
me that depressedis the right word for what I am. Depressed is
what everyonesaysI'm weepingin a lot of
officesthesedays
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is the Newman Ivey White Professor of English at Duke University. Her current writing projects include The Raw
and the Frozen:Essays in Queer Performativityand Affect and A Dialogue on
Love, from which the present essay is extracted.
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(and I'm sure the tears slipped over my lids as I said it). But I think I
know depression, I have my own history of it; and it felt, twenty years
ago when I really was subject to it, so much less bearable than this does.
So much.
"And yet, you're crying now."
On record, the triggering event was a breast cancer diagnosis eighteen months ago.
Shannon doesn't produce an empathetic face at this or say, "That
must have been hard for you." He makes an economical nod.
"I kind of did beautifully with it. I bounced back from the mastectomy, and when it turned out that there was some lymph node involvement too, I tolerated six months of chemotherapy without too many side
effects. You know, I hated it, and it completely wore me down, but....
"The saving thing was that for me it wasn't all about dread. I know
there are people whose deepest dread is to have cancer, to undergo surgery, to deal with the likelihood of dying." I shake my head many times.
Those are not my deepest dread. I dread
everybad thing
that threatenspeopleI love;
for me, dreadonly
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I maystopknowing
how to likeand desire
the worldaroundme.
"That's it, what you mean by real depression?"
"Oh, yeah."
In some ways the cancer diagnosis came at the best possible timethe best time if feeling ready to die is a criterion. It was about two months
after a book of mine had come out.
"What kind of books do you write?"
I tell Shannon I'm a literary critic; I work in gay and lesbian studies.
The book was Epistemologyof the Closet,and the writing, the organization of it had come very hard to me for some reason. "So I was amazed
at how satisfying its publication was. As an object, the book itself looked
lovely-everyone said so. And for an academic book it got a lot of attention, a lot of praise.
"It was one of those happy times when you say to yourself, Okay, this
is good, this is enough; I'm ready to go now. When the diagnosis came I
was feeling-as an intellectual-loved, used, appreciated. I would have
been very, very content to quit while I was ahead."
"Did it surprise you to be feeling that?"
"No. No."
No.
To feel loved and appreciated-I've slowly grown used to that. And
to feel the wish of not living! It's one of the oldest sensations I can remember.
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615
how they worked. It's still a lot of the reason I like my job."
Firstencounter;my
therapist'sgift for guyish
banalization.
if notanother
woman?)burstingout of my
eyesocketswithpain
and within three or four sessions at most, a particular impasse would
have gotten wedged so firmly between us we could neither of us move.
Shannon is interrogative.
"I can't remember well," I say, "and in fact I don't want to, but it
always involved the charge of 'intellectualizing.' A typical thing would be
for me to say something like, 'I'm not angry, I'm just confused about thisor-that theoretical aspect of the situation,' and for her to respond, 'Then
why are both of your hands balled up in fists?' And of course they would
be. Can I remember how that makes an impasse?..."
... Well, I'm sure it's true that I'm not what anyone would call in
touch with my feelings. "Andin these hideously stylized scenes the woman
would demand that I stop thinking and start telling her myfeelings instead.
Now, as far as I can tell, I don't even have what are normally called feelings! I was being as honest as I could. There was no way to respond to
the demand-I hated it-I just felt battered. After a lot of that, it would
be only a matter of time till the depression let up ever so little, and I'd
realize the therapy-hour felt even more punishing than the rest of the
week.
"So I'd finally get decisive and quit therapy. And it would always end
with the same scene: a woman, suddenly riveted by my severity, wondering to me, 'Why couldn't you have been this way all along?'"
"And do you think you wereintellectualizing?"
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"Oh, I don't know! It was a long time ago, I was in very brittle shape,
and I really might have been. But will you think I'm crazy if I say, I don't
think I do it very much now?"
"No. It's funny, I don't think so either. I've been listening for it too,
and-well, intellectualizing is a real specific kind of defense, it has its own
sound to it. Not this sound, so far."
I may even know a little about where it's gone.
I'm thinking, there were some things that happened in the past few
years that I had no defenses at all to deal with. It was like the Maginot
Line: I marshalled the formidable, practiced resources of the decadeslong war of attrition I'd fought with my depressiveness-and they were
completely irrelevant. Instantly shattered to bits.
So I think I might have made a near-conscious decision a year ago,
after the chemo was over, when my hair was growing back. If I can fit the
pieces of this self back together at all, I don't want them to be the way
they were. Not because I thought I could be better defended, either:
what I wanted was to be realer. What I fear now is
to have long to thirst
anymorein thestony
desertof thatself
threatening to recompose itself in the same way in the same dazed and
laborious place.
Shannon's interested in this. "You're not telling me to just make the
pain go away, are you?" he mildly notes. "And I don't think you're telling
me a story about cancer and the trauma of mortality, either."
He's heard that correctly; I'm smiling when I shake my head.
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"I guess I'm not asking you about your sexual orientation," I saidand he nodded soberly. I don't know what I'm supposed to assume about
this. The very emphatic recommendation of Shannon came from another
shrink, one who knew me pretty well. And experience shows that I'm one
of those people who when others say to me,
"I'mjust sureyou'dget
along marvelouslywith
X"-then X is gay.
But Shannon isn't immediately legible in this way. It's true, gratefully his
hand is un-wedding-ringed, his desk undecked with any wife and kids.
But couldn't that be from reticence or delicacy?
Still, if delicacy, that would itself please and suit me.
He doesn't lookdelicate. Or gay.
He looks more like a guy. Someone who's never viewed his body, or
had or wanted it viewed, much as an object of desire. Someone also for
whom, maybe-unlike me or most anyone I love-his entitlement to exist, the OK-ness of being who and as he is, has never seemed very seriously questionable.
It worries me: how could someone like that have learned to think or
feel? Seemingly he's not even Jewish. I already know the demographics
of people in the mental health field are even more mixed than their assumptions and training; I can't encounter only Viennese refugees, don't
even want to. Still,
this nasal-voiced,cornfed Dutchmanfrom the heartland:
has he any soul?
And he's saying, "I don't want to say, 'Some of my best friends are. . ..'"
Then an ungirdled, self-satisfied laugh. Says he works a lot with lesbian and gay clients; also gives time to the Lesbian and Gay Health Project over on 9th Street.
He adds, "But there's honestly no one template I want to get people
to fit into. I'm certainly not in this profession because I want to turn out
insurance salesmen." He produces the formulation confidently, as though
he's said it with great success to a thousand previous patients. And there's
an additional, habituated-sounding laugh that goes with its articulation.
"-or at least," he amends, "that'swhat I always used to say to people.
Then one day I found myself saying it to a perfectly nice man who sold
insurance. Maybe really that's fine too?" A chuckle.
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queer avoirdupois, the very evident readiness not only to respect but enjoy an idiom not his own. But what I find instead is only, wordlessly, this:
a fact of life in its staggering specific gravity
presentto me, like
earth,less as a new need than
a new element.
If my heart held an image then, perhaps it came from the Scientific
Americanof my early teens. Do I remember or imagine it? An article about
Harry Harlow's baby monkey studies, we'll say. Painfully flashbulbed
black-and-white photos, plus drawings in the gently stippled, tactile style
of the magazine, show hairy infants cowering in avoidance of their wire
experimental "mother," rigged though she is to yield milk if only they'd
give her spiky frame a nuzzle. They won't. Where they cling instead is to
the milkless, white, puffy breast of her sister, also wire, but padded with
cathectible terry cloth that dimples with their embrace ...
Who would dare try to break back from the terry cloth bosom, one
by one, those scrawny, holding, ravenous, loving toes?
Then let the same fearless person try to come between me and my
appointment next week with the peony sunlight of this office, airy rondure into whose
yielding lap I seem
alreadyto have leaptfor
good. The oddestthing!
It's hard, this part. In the new diaries I'd undertake for the first few
days of every January when I was a kid, I'd shipwreck on the need to
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introduce all the dramatispersonaeat once. My older sister Nina was good
at that, though. So this is from her 1958 diary:
"I'm an 11-year-old girl called Nina Kosofsky. I weigh 75 lbs., and I
have dark hair and dark eyes. Quite
oftenI am a
bitshort-tempered.
Yourstruly
enjoysreading,dolls,
dancing, writing stories, poems, and plays. Hiking is also in my line.
"Buttons is our almost-7-year-old cat. She is very fat and everyone
always thinks that she is about to have kittens. (She can't, though, she's
been spade.) She is very unfriendly with other cats of both sexes. She is
all black, gray, and white striped, except for her orangey stomach.
"David is my 4- going on 5-years-old brother. He looks quite a lot
like me. David is very cute when he wants to be (and that's almost always),
and he knows it. He doesn't talk babytalk or lisp, except that he sometimes
changes j's to d's and th's to v's.
"Mommy.
My mother'sname is
Rita GoldsteinKosofsky,
and she's36.
She also looks a lot like me. Mommy is very even-tempered. Unlike a lot
of mothers, she (almost) always likes, and usually uses, new ideas. I love
her very, very much.
"Daddy. Leon J. Kosofsky, my father, is 38 years old. He is not fat,
but just big. He is mostly bald except for some hair around the edges of
his head. He is sometimes
rathershort-tempered
whichI thinkis myfault, but
usuallyhe
is very kind and understanding. Daddy can sometimes look almost exactly like Yul Brynner. I love him very much.
"Eve, my sister, is 8 years old. She has light hair and freckles. She is
really a 'book-worm.' I guess that that must be part of the reason for her
being old for her age. Eve is quite plump (she outweighs me by 4 lbs.).
I seemto remember
her beingeven-tempered,
morewhenshe wasyoung,
although she is still very easy-going."
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Wearegood-looking.
All Mediterranean,
all withfine brownframes
and thosesparklingor
soulful, extravagant-lashed
eyesof chocolate
-all but a dorkily fat, pink, boneless middle child, who always sunburns;
one of my worst nicknames is Marshmallow.
It's true, it's hard to see my mother's eyes. Except in a couple of languid shots from her twenties, she suffers from "photo-face," the painful,
dissociated clamp-eyed rictus
tugging at the cords
of her neckto makeher look
likeNancy Reagan
or a tiny Anne Sexton. Another result of this tension is that any child
young enough to be held will be transfixed by the flashbulb at some precarious angle to her body, or seem to pop from her arms as toast from
a toaster.
Shannon wonders at whom her photo-face is aimed. I guess at my
father, always behind the fatal flash? But, really, the audience for these
my mother's
photos is the four New York grandparents-especially
see
and
want
to
will
mother, who sews all the dresses
(at least, will be supmake
the
young family appear.
posed to want to see) how familylike they
Nina, on the other hand, displays the googly eyes in their platonically
ideal form, and at this moment of Western history that makes her "look
like Annette Funicello." Uncanny how frontal, as toddler and child, she
always manages to be-whether in the mode of cute or seductive;
there'ssomethingperfect
abouther,somethingthatgives
a snap to snapshots.
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It's also clear she loves her baby sister, if awkwardly. Eyes glued to the
camera, she holds on as if for life to my waist or leg-me apparently
struggling to withdraw from the picture, from her attentions. In the pictures from Dayton, I'm never quite there. It's as though I might will my
whole being into my fingertips, and from them into something else
through touch-a stuffed panda, my other hand, a book or cat, the fabric
of a skirt.
I haven't brought teenage pictures. Until one, stylized shot where I'm
nineteen, eyes crinkled with laughter and embarrassment as Hal, who's
twenty-three, is pushing a morsel of wedding-cake into my mouth. Empathetically, urgingly, his mouth gapes toward mine like a mother bird's.
"Isthereany way
this Hal can besweetas he
looks?"Yeah.And thensome,
as seen a few years later in the small circle of unspeakably tender, slightly
sad protection he creates for me in a visit to my parents' house. Those
are years of acute depression for me, the years that convince me I can't
bear to bring my mind close again to the Kosofsky world.
For that matter, the aegis of Hal's sweetness isn't so different from
what was shed by my large, brooding-jawed father in the few Dayton photos where he comes out from behind the camera. Unlike Hal's, his sweetness is generalized by shyness. It seldom condenses around one person,
unless my mother; almost unseen but content, Evie when she can will
only grasp his finger, hold tight to the crease of his baggy trouserswho wouldn't?
"The best thing," I'm telling Shannon one day, "I think the thing I'd
most want somebody to know about how I've lived ... oh, I do seem to
be confessing to you that I
have thesecretvice
of mentallywritingmy
obituary!
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to you?"
"I'mnot sureyet,"says
not.
calm Shannon, "probably
Waita while.It will.
Go on about all the contradictions, though."
"Okay, so here are these sex acts, totally isolated, going on for years
and years. In that dimension I'm having sex, but I'm not sexual. At the
same time, there's this very sexualizing person I am-whose work and
politics and friendship, whose interpretive and teaching and lecturing
life, talking and joking, reading, thinking, whatever, are probably as infused with sexual meanings and motives and sexual connections-gay
ones-as anybody else's you're ever likely to meet.
"It's funny, in spite of how homely looking I am and how shy, I think
a fair number of people think of me as even an unusually sexy person.
And it's not a facade, at all. The thinking, writing, talking, all the sociality
and political struggle around sex: those are the most vibrant things in my
life. It'sjust, they don't connect up genitally for me."
"They don't at all?"
"I think not, no. I can't think of any way in which they do."
"That'sit, then? That'sall
thatgoes on betweenyou and
genitality?"
Well. No.
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Violenceand pain.
Humiliation. Torture.
Rape, systematic.
I'm looking deliberately away from Shannon, toward the far corner of the
room, as I say this, so I can't see his face. I wrench my eyes back toward
him to say deflatingly, "Avery standard catalog of S/M thematics, in fact;
I knowthatnothing
could bemoreordinary
than suchfantasies."
And I'm ashamed of that, too. There's probably not one single thing about
them that I'm not ashamed of-as soon as I step outside of their own,
proprietary space. There,I love them.
I'm ashamed of their not being explainable to Shannon.
I'm afraid he won't be interested in them at all; leaving me out in the
cold alone.
I'm also afraid he'll ask me-unlubricated-more
aboutthem:there'snot
a cornerof the roomfar
enoughto gaze at.
There's just a long pause.
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This does pique Shannon's attention. "No fantasies? Where did they
go, do you think?"
I shake my head hopelessly.
Then perk up. "But there was an interesting thing about fantasies
that got dramatized for me. I hope this isn't too theoretical to say-it was
an amazingly concrete effect. You know how the person in a fantasy feels
like they're both you and not you, at the same time? Well, it turned out
that that was actually a requirementfor the fantasy, at least for me.
"Because as my body got weirder with the treatment, I kept feeling
that I had to choose, and couldn't. Either the girl in the fantasy would
have one breast, or she would have two. Either she would have hair, or
she would be bald. Apparently it couldn't be both ways. But if she was
me, a bald woman with one breast, that ruined the fantasy-and if she
wasn't me, wasn't marked in those ways, then that ruined the fantasy, too."
A funny thing, though: there are also ways that the cancer treatment
did answer to my fantasies in a "warm" way, not in that horrifying vengeful way.
Because it's important, for some reason, that the fantasies always
have an institutional pretext-almost a bureaucratic one. They take place
in a girls' school, a prison, or spy agency-always, always places with waiting rooms.
A lot of the punishment spaces are quasi-medical. Receptionists and
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undressing-rooms loom large. Doors open and doors close; people peer
in. The "examination": fearful word! (At Yale, I failed my orals.)
The slant, withdrawn fellowship of waiting patients at the cancer
clinic: the specific gravity of each thickened by dread: it's like the way
people wait, about to be punished, in my fantasies. Names on the intercom, summonses to a fate, slash at the fragile pretense to privacy.
The unmarked new ones scanning, shyly, the ones experienced in
indignity and loss.
Otherfeelings stream
backfrom the veterans,proud,
ashamed,at onceof
our practiced way with the awful routines.
"I'll tell you one moment when I felt it most-most intoxicatingly,
almost, the touching of the two, utterly separate worlds.
"It was just, I think, before I started the six months of chemo; I was
already worried about my bad veins. But some doctor needed some blood
for something, so I went into the little anteroom where they take blood.
"It was occupied by a small late-middle-aged, prim, kind of severe
Jamaican woman, that day. I've seen her there since.
"And as usual, it was hard to find a vein in my fat arm. She had to
play darts for awhile, and eventually I told her-I knew this because I've
always fainted easily-that I was about to faint.
"She seemed, well, irritated. The whole time, she'd made no eye contact with me.
"So she made me get up and pushed me across the hallway to a long
room, a long dim dormitory-like room, with beds on both sides; with
movable screens separating the beds. I didn't know if anyone else was
already in there.
"And she made me lie down, and she sat on the chair next to the bed.
I could feel every pulse of her impatience.
"There was some rustling somewhere else in the room. Eventually
my own heartbeats let go their grip of me, and I realized that someone
was crying, trying hard not to be audible. Silent sobs, near-silent muted
hiccups. Somebody else somewhere was whispering. I could almost make
out words.
"I could hear the moment when the nurse relaxed. When she realized that she'd never get blood out of me unless she could step away from
the assembly line of her own temporality and simply stop. She silently put
her hand over my hand on the bed.
"I realized something, too. I had to stop hating her enough to give
her the blood. Or it would all never end.
"I closed my eyes, withdrew my attention, tried to relax every mus-
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cle; tried to float freely away on the childish sensation of 'white bed,'
to go ahead and
faint, even, if tofaint was
how I'd surrender.
I felt this was an
initiationinto
mynew, cancerlife.
From her touch I could tell, now, that she meant to help me do it.
"And I wasn't sure it wasn't hallucinated (but it wasn't), when I heard
a low voice somewhere-not near me-say rather distinctly to somebody
else, 'Spread your legs.'
"Can you hear all this at all? Are you getting any sense of how these
things happen, for me?"
"Yes,I thinkI may
be.But unfortunately
we have to stopnow."
A few days have gone by, and I've driven up to the gray building
even earlier than usual. Early enough to clamber across the parking lot,
across the parking lot of the bank next door, across Ninth Street, to ask
someone at the BP station on the corner a question about my car.
But the shrubby border between the two parking lots is unexpectedly
steep, mulched with its slippery pine needles. Typically clumsy, I tumble,
almost fall. Then collecting myself, move on
throughthe bank'sparking
lot with all afat woman's
disavowinghaste.
After my errand, I'm walking back from the gas station when I notice
Shannon rounding the corner toward the gray building. He's crossing the
bank parking lot ahead of me and doesn't see me.
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When my sister and I were in the same high school, she bitterly accused me of embarrassing her by walking around alone looking as if I
was thinking.I don't know if that's how Shannon looks; I notice more the
calm buoyancy with which he is able to steer his round, large, light body,
like a float in a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.
Even if he is thinking, he's alert to his surroundings. When he gets
near the bottom of the shrubby border, suddenly the balloon makes a
graceful, low dip: I see him gather up from the pavement the clumps of
pine mulch I kicked down as I was teetering on the brink. Then bobbing
up gently, he pats it back into place, his hands briefly smoothing it in with
the other mulch.
Me hanging back, wanting not to be seen.