The struggle against those forces was the fight literally for one’s life. I sat across from her. You are up to it, she seemed to be saying. She gave me a taste for it. Don’t give up.
And to not somehow fill that vacuum, that loss of coordinates with cynicism, disengagement, withdrawal, self-protection, guilt. Somehow.
We sat there together and circled it week after week, year after year. Through the thousand retreats and reversals and dismissals and setbacks.
As I walked yet again into another darkened bedroom, another alleyway—begin again. Back to my white world. Begin again. Back into the silence.
The struggle to freedom.
The struggle not to emerge already constructed.
To walk away from all oppression in full knowledge of the consequences. To live outside the usual tyrannies, conventions. To separate finally not from those one despises or is indifferent to — that is easy enough — but from the ones one most deeply loves — so as to be autonomous. To walk out of every enclosure. Fluent at last in your own language. One felt often in that room the strictures of language, the strictures of all existing forms: literary, emotional, social, political. The limits.
Put something down.
Put something down some day.
Put something down some day in my.
In my hand.
In my hand right.
In my hand writing.
Put something down some day in my hand writing.
Those lovely lines of Gertrude Stein.
I was unable to live within the expected perimeters, tired of the usual assignments. I am more lucid about this now than I was then; forgive me, I do not mean to reduce or trivialize, and I do wonder whether it is therapy after all that has made it possible to say these things: facile, useful, but perhaps not entirely true.
I have been uneasy from the start about writing this piece. I am not a procrastinator and yet have put it off countless times. It troubles me. The danger of this kind of writing and of all writing to some degree is all too evident, all too present at every turn. And it in some ways resembles the dangers of therapy. What is this desire to become comprehensible to one’s self? To net the escaping one, haul her in to dissect and understand and to finally display. The temptation, the risk is to assign meaning, motive, cause, in an attempt to feel a little bit better. Not so amorphous, not so out there. To fix the elusive self. To invent a character — and a role to play. The “I” stabilized, fixed on the page now, feigning illumination — What violence do I do to myself and to language, and to the magic of those afternoons with her? What did I learn there? What happened in that room? Well one can well understand the trepidation in writing any of it — What do I change or give up or alter in ways I may not even be aware of — what will I say here in the attempt to communicate something?
How improbable that she met me in snow offering a bouquet of brilliant reds and greens and gold — an offer to return—
Not possible.
Why not? she asked.
Her good sense. Her strange faith. Her practicality. It was a consolation like no other. Certain things could actually be done, could be controlled, demystified. When her colleague, a psychiatrist I had been sent to see, decided to try to seduce this seducer, seduce this basket case in the usual business-as-usual, garden-variety abuse of power, she reports him, without hesitation, to the proper people. Her clear-thinking, straightforward sense of things. One could not help but be impressed. She acts swiftly and without fanfare. And that is it.
And how, and I do not know how exactly — that Upper West Side address over time became a saving thing — a place to go — a place to look forward to in the way I look forward to that which is extremely difficult, challenging, and mysterious and essentially impossible — what I mean is — the way I look forward to writing.
How did she reach me in time? The charm of this life. How did I find her? This one particular woman — who never uttered a word of psycho-babble, who never pretended there were answers, who never displayed anything but wisdom and care.
Her cat, her sullen teenage daughter, her lovely husband, who would from time to time make appearances — the magic of those afternoons in that prewar Upper West Side building — it was a weird bliss — even when I left frightened, or in tears.
Never known such respite.
What was happening to me?
Here is a crimson dress.
Yes?
And I stepped out of my white shift.
A memory, a pressure. Color — in a world bereft of color. Red. Timbre of blue. Touch of ochre. The beloved world — a slow coming to.
I did not dare to hope. A memory of vibrancy. Step. Ascent. Motion. Memory of motion. Not dare. Memory of scent. Of collecting mosses in the forest. Plush. Green. Once she dreamed. Grace notes. Moments of grace. I did not dare. My father and I again in the moody Saturday afternoons listening to music. Every flower. Each and every. Blooming in the snow white of my mind’s eye. Like a rose in winter opening.
Blue and red and gold brocade, stitch.
Streamers flying after.
Here is a wish, stitch.
What happened there?
Two women sitting together in a dark room on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on those days of bottomless misery when nothing seemed to give way.
We make a dress together. Something it might be possible to wear. Invent a room. And imagine somewhere it might be possible to live again.
There was safety there in that place with her, harbor, rest, comfort. Intimations of limitless possibility, integrity, pure health. Creating a place for one’s deepest longings — a child perhaps, a piece of writing never seen before. The wanting comes back. It took years. All the hope. I scarcely can believe.
In that world completely drained of color we choose red. Here is a thread.
Pass the black line through the needle’s eye and watch. Be patient. Here is a silver fish, a star, a sequin, released on a red velvet sea, swim to it. A bead of blue glass.
Two women in the perfection of the struggle. To be alive. One guiding the other. One older, wiser. Here is a strand of gold.
To live outside the thousand impositions. To live one’s life without inordinate fear, without needless apology. To invent oneself from scratch, if necessary. Against a field of possibility. Against the promise of green.
Accretion of the afternoons, years. Time passes. Years pass. Something happens. Impossible to describe or quite understand.
That opening. That clearing in the woods.
Gertrude Stein: When she shuts her eyes she sees the green things among which she has been working and then as she falls asleep she sees them a little differently.
The incredible dimensions of her kindness and intelligence and discretion. Her compassion, her intuition, her open-mindedness. Utterly free of dogma or cant. The exact opposite of what the young woman expected, grimly waiting in that foyer the first day.
To examine calmly all the destructiveness — and to look at it as if from a distance — and not judge.
When the world is snow, is flat, is cold, when all you want to do is to lie down and die into it — step into that dress.