“As later published versions make clear, she was capable of returning again and again to this primal scene of childhood, redrawing it in an almost infinite variety of colours: sometimes erotic and romantic, sometimes brutal and grotesque. Retelling the same stories; going back repeatedly to the substance that she knew was destroying her: these repetitive acts, some generative and some profoundly destructive, made the critic Edmund White wonder if Duras was not in the grips of what Freud had called the repetition compulsion. “I’m acquainted with it, the desire to be killed. I know it exists,” she once told an interviewer, and it is this intensity, this absolute and uncompromising vision, that sets her work apart. At the same time, this statement seems to shine a light on how she used alcohol: as a way of giving in to her own masochism, her suicidal ideation, while simultaneously anaesthetising herself from the savagery she saw at work everywhere, filling the world.”
~Olivia Laing, on alcoholic female writers. Seems Duras AND Edmund White were also moved by the compulsion to repeat. Sometimes, you have to give Freud his due.
I feel sick––like, physically unwell, although I’m also rather sure that I’m making this up in order to avoid certain writing projects that seem daunting right now. I keep moving from room to room to see if the change of environment will make me feel better––Nabokov called this a fallacy, and so far my anecdotal evidence tells me he was correct. I wish there was a large, clean, well-lit library around here that was open 24/7 so I could assure myself that I could stay up all night working, but alas, there are only bars.
In the meantime, I’m thinking of putting myself into the kind of treatment Paul Hammers’ mother does in Bullett Park.
“I went into my room to unpack. The plaster wall was thin and I could hear my mother talking through the partition. At first I thought someone had joined her after I’d left but then I could tell by the level of her voice that she was talking to herself. I could hear her clearly. ‘My father was a common quarry worker, often unemployed. I had read somewhere that the trajectory of a person’s career could be plotted from their beginnings and given such humble beginnings I thought that I accepted them I would end up as a waitress in a diner or at best a small-town librarian. I kept trying to tamper with my origins so that I would have more latitude for a career. Having been raised in a small town I was terrified of being confined to one…’
I went down the hall and opened her door. She had taken off her shoes and was lying on her bed, fully dressed, talking to the ceiling or the air.
‘What are you doing, Mother?’
‘Oh, I’m analyzing myself,’ she said cheerfully. ‘I thought I might benefit from psychoanalysis. I went to a doctor in the village. He charged a hundred schillings an hour. I simply couldn’t afford this and when I said so he suggested that I get rid of my car and cut down on my meals. Imagine. Then I decided to analyze myself. Now, three times a week, I lie down on my bed and talk to myself for an hour. I’m very frank. I don’t spare myself any unpleasantness. The therapy seems to be quite effective and, of course, it doesn’t cost me a cent. I still have three quarter of an hour to go and if you don’t mind leaving me alone…’ I went out and closed the door but I stood in the hall long enough to hear her say: ‘When I sleep flat on my back my dreams are very linear, composed and seemly. I often dream, on my back, of a Palladian villa. I mean an English house built along the lines of Palladio. When I sleep in a prenatal position my dreams are orotund, unsavory and sometimes erotic. When I sleep on my abdomen…'”
that my latest style icon is Nicole Richie’s fifteen-year-old sister?
Natalie Portman
Etgar Keret
Simon Winchester
James Franco
Kate Bosworth
Marina Abramovic
Eva Mendes
(There are more to add, definitely, but I can’t think of them right now.)
Copyright ID 20o9
Not my finest, hence the “study.”
The Ocean
Heights
Dogs
Horses
Machinery
Thunderstorms
The number 13
Opening umbrellas inside
Placing a man’s hat on a bed
Two nuns walking together down the street
A $700 china Buddha statue.
‘Sugly too.
Without going into too much back story:
Back during the Peggy Claude-Pierre/Montreux golden age, PCP went on Oprah, after the 20/20 doc, and brought along with her some of her most unusual patients, including a three-year-old boy. In her book, The Secret Language of Eating Disorders, she describes the three-year-old “Zev” like so:
“Three-year-old Zev always refers to the Negative Mind as ‘the man under his hair.’ That was his usual answer to his mother and me when we asked him why he would not eat. ‘The man won’t let me. He will be angry,’ he would explain.
‘Darling, you are safe now,’ I would assure him. ‘The man under your hair can’t hurt you anymore. I’m holding you very tightly.’
‘Yes, Peggy, you are holding me, but he is still hurting me.’
‘How can he hurt you, darling? See, you are in my arms.’
‘Peggy, he is angry that you are holding me, so he is playing drums loudly in my head so I can’t hear the nice things you are saying to me.’
When anorexia is in its acute stage, the Negative Mind allows the victim no pleasure. When I first met Zev, he was forbidden by it from accepting or opening presents. Everyone else deserved them, but not him. He would put his hands behind his back if anyone would extend something in his direction. His eyes became very dark, intense, and fearful.
If he agreed to eat anything, it could not be called ‘food,’ and it could not make him grow because he was not permitted to grow. Growing would mean an extension of life.
Once when asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, this three-year-old answered very quietly and thoughtfully, ‘I am not going to grow up. I am going to be dead before these pants are too short.’ Incredulous, we assured him he would grow when he was supposed to. He started to cry and said, ‘No, I’m not. The man told me I wouldn’t be allowed to, and I”m scared of the man. He is always mean to me.’
This child never played with other children. He always stood aside and observed. His development, however, was extraordinary. He would memorize pages of the telephone book for amusement. He loved sports and could act out an entire baseball game, playing each position in turn as the ball went around the ‘field.’ He had spent a year and a half undergoing medical testing (before we had been contacted) which failed to turn up any organic reason to explain his refusal to eat.”
So Zev went on Oprah and spoke in his tiny toddler voice, but the clip of that episode (the 2nd one Oprah did devoted to PCP, which aired on January 17, 1996) is entirely absent from the Internet. My theory: the don told the soldiers to get rid of it post-scandal. In Barbara McClintock’s book about the case against Montreux, Anorexia’s Fallen Angel, there was (I believe––book not on hand at the moment) discussion of Zev’s perhaps having anorexia (as distinct from anorexia nervosa) and/or an attachment disorder and/or a disorder on the autistic spectrum. (Autistic children are also notoriously picky eaters.) In any case, take it from me (and the other medical doctors who examined him along the way): very little reason to believe Zev had clinical anorexia nervosa.
From the court ruling, which you can read online, one learns that Zev’s real name is David Bruce, which I think I remember from the show. The fact that the clinic took in Bruce, but was only licensed to treat adults except when given explicit permission, was one of the major reasons the Health Authority ordered it closed. David was born on October 8, 1992 in New York City. This would make him 21, almost 22 now. His mother’s name is Meg. Both pretty common names, which I’ve had no luck Googling. David, or Meg, if you’re out there, please find me. I’m begging you. I need to know.
An old project.
Siobhan will tell you if you email.
