I only remember when I am wishing some horror would end,
like when pitched to the pivotal moment just before a pronounced sentence,
a reading of my fate.
Or, little less than terror, a performance evaluation
by a man sitting at the back of my classroom with a pen, eyes, ears and judgment,
leaning on every word, gesture and response.
I am notated.
Anticipating the fall while peering over the precipice,
these are the times I pray for the ordinary I eschew every other moment of every day:
the groans and dull-eyed drudgery of waking, pissing, showering, caffeinating
and driving the drive in unrelenting heat circulating about my head
blown by the broken air conditioner of a beat up car awaiting the junk yard,
or the crying mop times of late night I’m-just-too-tired-to-do-this moans of despair—
for the boredom, tedium, godawful-lobotomizing numbness of mindless repetition
like factory fingers twisting bow knots on an endless assembly line,
the industrial rosary, sans soothing rhythmic sync.
Deimos and Phobos, moons of my memory, usher me back to boredom,
box seat of the stadium, luxury of the lucky lottery winners of life,
born colorless, coddled and cocooned.
It’s five minutes before class begins and one student, a mousy girl who twitches occasionally and whispers answers to my questions after I respond to her half-mast upraised tentative hand that must be propped up by the other hand in order to give it any height, says, “I think no one’s here because of the shooting.”
The classroom is one third full, not unusual for the hour and time in the semester, about one third of the way through.
I wanted to doff off her suggestion as somewhat silly or illogical to assure her, actually, but as is always the case in teaching college students–or any students–sensitivity is paramount, so I pause a complete second. But in drawing up my response, I immediately flash angrily, “No, probably not. Why wouldn’t they be used to this sort of news by now? After all, mass shootings happen every other day now. It’s just become the new normal.”
I immediately regret my callousness.
This student has confessed in her second essay written for this class that she suffers from epilepsy, a recent discovery that has left her to picking up pieces, rescuing remnants of her former life that held nothing but unfettered future, the worst day up until then being when an elementary school kid called her a mop-head. She told me her medication affects her memory, slows her.
When she confided in me, I thought of my daughter in college two states north from home. She suffers from a recent sport-inflicted concussion, confused and depressed, her mind sluggish and stalling–going on too long now. She fears. I fear.
******
Last week at the head of the classroom, I repeated the line from a prose poem assigned for that day, “In the end, we are alone in the house of the heart.” I then asked the students if they thought that was true. Some thought so. Most did not know.
I offered my story of watching a cancer patient die, slowly, how, after months of gathering her family around her, then one by one sending each off not to return to her as she got sicker, she hunkered down inside herself the last three weeks, doing the difficult work of dying. It certainly looked like no one could help her do it, that she had to do it alone. To further illustrate, I likened that aloneness to being elbowed in the diaphragm, down on the soccer field, fighting for air. All of the hovering bodies above you as you lie on the ground can do nothing for you–you don’t even see them–as you fight the pain and fear of never breathing, diving deeply inside yourself for that will to bear it, to survive or brave surrender.
I thought the dying example was illustrative, poignant. Some stared in reflection, some in emergency-broadcast-test-pattern mode, others in churning liquid emotion. One young man gripped his head in his hands, face hidden, staring down the sheen of the teflon coated desk.
I am unsure why I fell into a musing about horror, Kristeva, the abject, power and fantasy after listening to this video clip I found on my Facebook timeline from one of the sites I follow, but maybe it was the mention of words like freedom, sovereignty and imagination. I immediately thought of a graduate school read on The Powers of Horror by Julia Kristeva, probably because Perel also mentions fantasy that we imagine but would not like to live out. I have often been asked by lovers about my fantasies, and often have hesitated, asking which ones, the ones I want to live out or the ones that merely help me out in the shower that I would never want to live through. Just as often, the inquirers do not understand the question nor my fear of being judged. They just want to know them all.
And what does this all have to do with the mistress? I thought about that too. What about that space that fuels eroticism, the missing body of the wife, the absent body that haunts the mistress relationship, incurring pain of guilt and separation of the cheating spouse based on the conception or misconception of marriage as merging. If eroticism is as Perel often claims in her writings a creative space fueled by seeing the other as strange, separate, then the pain that is associated with separation, difference, separateness–the pain of separation–may be what contributes to creativity and thus, the plagued mind of the cheater also fuels eroticism.
When a man (or woman) engages a mistress, he experiences fear, fear that his wife will find out, that a divorce will ensue, that the life he has built will be crushed, his family lost to him, his life, essentially; he fears death. He comes in contact, in the words of Julia Kristeva in her book The Powers of Horror, with the abject, something that triggers a space where boundaries between self and other, subject and object, are broken down and the real or reality of what we are, who we are, not in symbolic terms but in reality, is experienced–the world as meaningless or chaotic (Modules on Kristeva in cla.purdue.edu). Kristeva exemplifies this notion with what we experience when we view the corpse. Seeing a corpse evokes the state in the viewer of a space of realization that we are mere bodies subject to death at any moment, and returns us to a recognition not merely that we are mortal but that existence is the disorder of mere living matter in various stages of decay. It is the fear, she avers, that is prelingual, the moment of first recognition or knowing of separateness of mother and child (Lacan) every human experiences (Modules).
The getting-caught-and-losing fear of the unfaithful spouse is the unconscious encounter with that primal fear, not only of death but of the meaningless of the human/living existence, and is produced in the recognition that occurs in the relationship with the mistress. It is also a space of the imagination that allows for creativity. The separateness that allows for fantasy (seeing spouse as an other and not an extension or part of self), according to Perel, is also evoked, shares that space of the mistress maintenance. The impulse to merge in marriage, to be as one, is the human need to avoid that separateness experienced at birth and continuing into the childhood recognition that the self is not the mother, but the marital space is also a constant reminder of that separateness, that inability to merge as daily existence has each spouse questioning whether the other is even of the same species on some days. How could he even think I would want sex when I am so tired and stressed? What is a man made of? This experience of separateness is the re-experiencing (or nearly) of the primal pre-lingual space of the abject, the chaos of human existence, that momentary recognition, though not cognition–just being there–of that meaninglessness.
So, the way fantasy is sometimes a place we wouldn’t want to go, but do go in our imaginations is illustrative of this drive toward the abject. People who fantasize about rape, bestiality, necrophilia, humiliation, torture, and more, but would not necessarily want to actually live such fantasy, perhaps dabble in if not downright dive into the abject, something to awaken them consciously or unconsciously to that space of fear of the merging of subject and object with self and the dead material around us, bodies, dead or alive, decaying living or once living matter. In those fantasies, people–we–recognize ourselves as just that–living/dying matter–and it produces fear but also eroticism, a place to create through imagination, the going into and pulling back from that chaotic space, the urge, the freedom and sovereignty, as Perel says, of creating due to that disorder, going into the dark, but emerging from it, improvisation and breaking from the structures of our imaginations–the taboo which keeps us from violating customs and practices that preserve society like incest–a reprieve, a vacation into fantasy.
The mistress as metaphor for so many strands of meaning, of human, is what draws me to the subject. There is a place for everyone–desire, fantasy, death, morality–a living creative space that is not merely the object of the gaze, like watching the ecstasy of performers in the orchestral symphony. We watch, intrigued by the performers’ expressions of perceived pain and pleasure that comes with the drilling discipline that fills their fingers and mouths over the millions of practicing hours they endured along with the erotic merging improvisational space into the music. But the mistress is also a collective space of participation and creation evoked by the non-mistress. I guess that explains my morning muse courtesy of Perel–once again.
In the gaze of the other 