Friends, are you ready?
Are you.
Are you OK with this?
I'm nervous.
So memoir about becoming a poet--
this particular essay, it bops around in time,
but it opens in 1991.
I'm 26.
I'm in graduate school in New York City.
I have also started traditional psychoanalysis,
like on the couch, dude behind me going, say more about that.
My work study job was to show slides.
Do you guys remember slide carousels?
So my work study job was to show slides for art history classes
at the NYU grad school, which was housed
in one of the robber baron mansions
across from Central Park called Duke House.
And so I used to sit up in this what had been the orchestra
area overlooking the ballroom that
had been turned into the lecture hall, and I would show slides.
Gramercy Park makes an appearance.
And if you've ever seen Gramercy Park, it's like a locked Eden.
Only the people who live around Gramercy Park
have a key to get into Gramercy Park, which just infuriated me
when I moved to New York City because I wanted to get
in there, and I could not.
This is an essay on images.
But we will visit my childhood, which had its troubles.
There are 12 sections, and I hope that each section moves
like a slide in a carousel.
So when I say the number, the slide has shifted.
Are we good?
"House of Feels."
One.
I'm going to tell you about something that helped me once,
when I was a young woman, living for the first time in New York
City, grieving and unmoored.
What was I grieving?
An unhappy childhood.
Why was I unmoored?
I hadn't realized how unhappy I was,
which is a testament to how far I lived outside my body then.
Sometimes I'd skip the subway and make the long journey
by foot between my fourth floor walk-up in the decidedly still
grungy East Village to Duke House at East 78th and 5th
Avenue.
Duke House was the site of New York University's Institute
of Fine Arts, where graduate students studied art history
and curation and restoration,
and where for them, I conducted the duties of my grad school
work study job as a slide projectionist
in the converted orchestra balcony above the ballroom
that was now a lecture hall.
I mostly showed slides for classes
in Medieval European art, where religious images dominated.
I began to notice in the details of paintings and altarpieces
I projected on screen, the dispassionate way
angels heralded the most extraordinary events:
the virgin birth of a god, for instance, or the resurrection
of the dead.
These angels seemed creatures of supernatural calm
because they were creatures of light?
That was all I wanted then, light,
to blast the feeling out of me.
Two.
Whenever I made the trek to Duke House by foot,
I'd pass by the Psychoanalytic Institute.
That's how I've kept it in mind all these years,
though Google now tells me it must
have been called The Postgraduate
Center for Mental Health.
Some blocks after walking by Gramercy Park, yearning
for a key into that locked Eden, I would see it.
At some point, I pushed through the heavy glass doors
and found out I could go to therapy for $20 a pop.
The floor on which I found the Office of Dr. Kane
featured nothing but doors down a long white hallway.
Each door was usually closed, and each door
was painted a strong French blue,
the white and the blue that has stayed with me.
And the windows along that hallway,
each pane, two pieces of glass, sandwiching
a sheet of chicken wire.
Dr. Kane welcomed me in through one of the blue doors
and shut it behind me.
He motioned to a chair and sat in the one opposite.
He asked me why I'd come.
I mumbled something about not being
able to maintain intimate relationships with men,
which sounded hollow the minute I said it.
It wasn't hollow because it was untrue.
It was hollow because my fitful relationships were a symptom,
not the origin of my agon.
Dr. Kane waited.
Finally, I made my hand swim up and down like a seal, diving
and coming up for air as it streamed from right to left.
I can't take the this of things, I said.
Then with great energy: I want everything to be like this,
and with my hand, cut a steady horizontal
flying through the air.
Three.
Why was I so averse to feeling?
For the first 10 years of my life,
especially my encounters with feeling were, on the whole,
negative.
A bipolar father, a rager, a plate thrower,
mad Zeus to my mother's controlling,
stone-faced, denying Hera.
So many feelings.
My sisters and I were not allowed to have many.
Feelings belonged first to my father, then to my mother.
The magma of rage that boiled up in my father
at the slightest provocation,
a newspaper not folded, a skirt steak cut with the grain,
was our daily natural disaster.
He was tall, he was big, and his voice was volcanic.
Have you ever experienced the human voice in anger
blasting the air?
More times than I can count, dinner
ended in an explosion of yelling and dishes of meat
smashed to the floor.
For years, I associated these scenes with the phrase,
"bloody murder."
My daily vigils between my father's eruptions
and the wall of my mother's face were sometimes
punctuated by the door-kicking wrath of my middle sister.
She was the only one of the sisters
to claim rage for herself.
My oldest sister and I shrank from it.
Once, in a squabble about chores, she lunged at my father
with a fork, upon which he socked her in the eye.
Whenever the feelings of others welled,
I fled upstairs to my room, site of imaginal escape,
reading, drawing, the construction
of elaborate scenes of dolls and figurines and whatnots
arranged on the tops of books.
These served as platforms for dramas
that finally disappointed because they would not
come alive outside my head.
I built these tableaux anyway, discovering in construction
a method of self-forgetting.
The solitary play disturbed my mother, who would inevitably
come upstairs, throw open the bedroom door and demand I
go outside.
Going outside meant being accosted by the gangly girl who
lived two doors down.
I will call her A.
Four.
Once, welling with feeling, A grabbed and held my arm down
by the wrist, threatening to take my blood with a needle
and tube she stole from her grandmother's nurse bag.
She liked to lock me in a closet when
it was time for me to go home.
She liked to pinch my pudgy stomach under the table
while her unreadable mother served us a snack,
pinch and hold on for as long and as hard
as she could while I stayed silent.
Taunts at the bus stop, petty ambushes,
hair yanks, back shoves, side pinches,
mimicking my protests and cries with a sneer.
Occasionally, I stood frozen, as A tortured someone else.
Once, as she egged him on, her silent brother
came at me with a 2 by 4.
Once, as she egged him on, her silent brother
threw a neighbor girl in the swimming pool
after she told us she couldn't swim.
Five.
This went on for years, until looming puberty
turned A's attention.
Why did I keep going over to her house?
Because my mother told me to.
I was an obedient child.
And I wasn't the only kid suffering at A's hands.
Why didn't we all protest?
Because the 2 by 4 did not connect with my head.
The neighbor girl didn't drown.
Mainly what A waged was psychological terror,
meant to decimate the spirit.
I think now, her spirit must have been trapped in a secret.
My automatic response to A's assaults
was to withstand them as the rage at home had taught me.
And whatever the neighborhood kids were enduring
at their homes, the fact was, it was the 1970s.
Most of us were being raised by the stoic children
of the silent generation.
Like them, we were supposed to adhere
as best we could to an inviolable domestic omerta.
One did not tell.
The few times I reached some limit of endurance and risk
to complaint,
finally confessing to my mother what
my feelings, what the feelings of others were doing to me,
she would say, what are you talking about?
She lobbed versions of this at anything
that hurt or disturbed me so often that going
to her for solace and solution was as risky as trudging outside
to go play.
The intensity of her rhetorical incredulity,
I only realized when I was much older, was in direct proportion
to how much she just could not hear about it.
She was too busy bracing for my father's next violent rage
or crater.
What are you talking about?
Thus began my literary training.
Six.
Despite the suggestion of the chicken wired windows,
I was not suicidal the day I finally pushed
through the heavy doors of the Psychoanalytic Institute
and waited in the hall for Dr. Kane.
I was 25, which felt to me like a first version of being old.
I had begun to realize I had survived something.
Deep in the well under the navel's door
huddled the exhausted captive spirit.
It had taken the shape of a child born into violence.
What is it to grow up in a household
where violence is done to the spirit?
It's hard to talk about.
No one beat me.
I had a yard with a kidney bean shaped swimming pool.
At night, under my pink comforter,
I willed myself to be still and stiff and silent as possible,
as if by freezing myself, I could suspend my trek
through time until the father raging downstairs subsided.
My bed was a flower at the tip of a long ascending stalk,
swaying a little as it climbed into space,
cold, dark, crystalline space with its spray of stars,
where I was safe because I was alone.
Seven.
But these lived facts are not the reason
I want to tell you something.
They are merely the reason I have something to tell.
I don't remember the first time it ballooned up in my mind,
if it came during my time with Dr. Kane or soon after.
I received an image.
It was an image of an enormous hall.
It didn't have a ceiling, as much as a feeling
of extraordinary height,
a sense of walls climbing into a stratosphere of clouds.
The entire hall seemed made of crystal glass.
It didn't have walls, as much as lit matrices of exposed beams.
Everything glinted.
Everything was sharp, bladed, and reflective.
For all its height, the hall was narrow.
It extended so far beyond its entrance,
you couldn't see the border of its back wall if it had one.
Instead, a light in the shape of a diamond,
nearly telescopic it was so far away.
It pulsed there so bright you knew you could not
get close and endure it,
and on either side of this crystal hall,
extending towards that light, rows and rows of closed doors.
Behind each door was a feeling.
Eight.
I called this lit and bladed place the Hall of Emotions.
I think now it was the destination
of a journey in images begun three years earlier after I
had graduated college.
I had left Southern California and followed
friends across the country to New England towns
on either side of the Piscataqua River, Kittery Point, Maine,
and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where
my life and images intensified.
I told Dr. Kane about it, how all my life I had lived
in the desert, had just spent three years in Claremont
on a campus set in California's high chaparral,
and how, before moving East, I had never
seen a bird as striking as a cardinal: scarlet streak
in the brush, then a swoop up alighting on a tree top
to make its piercing call.
You could hear it before catching sight of it,
brilliant bird, so shy of being seen.
I decided it was my heart escaped my body.
I wrote about it obsessively off and on for the three years
I lived in Portsmouth.
And life became a living theater,
wandering the wooded areas around town in winter,
startling my red heart through snow banked branches,
as if one of the tableaux I had built in my childhood bedroom
had finally come to life.
I started a long sectioned poem about it that I never finished.
But I knew the end, which I transcribed into my journal
over and over,
along with all the other stanzas detailing
the drama of my fugitive heart.
When the scalpel draws the line from throat to navel,
when the flesh is peeled back and the ribs exposed,
it will be the cardinal there, red and beating
against a cage of bone.
Nine.
When I moved to New York, the cardinal
fell away, and I found myself assailed by the open chest only,
burst open from the mid-line, shudders
of flesh flung violently back.
And in place of my heart, there would
be a human eye or an eye of Horus, a bird of prey,
or a spiral galaxy,
galleries of objects which rotated as if on a lazy Susan,
globe, egg, hand, skull.
It was as if when my heart fled my chest,
it left a space for a theater.
In my inner eye, as I walked up the long avenues of Manhattan,
the flesh curtains would slam back
and there would be the changing cast of objects,
each in turn appearing on stage.
But none of them were singing yet.
I told Dr. Kane about it.
Each session with him was like entering that theater,
finding myself, both audience and actor in scenes, grueling
and revealing.
And then one day, I can't remember
if it came towards the end of my time with Dr. Kane
or soon after, I found myself standing
between high, bright latticed walls, doors
extending infinitely beyond me.
It was as if the ice-limbed crowns of trees in the winter
woods I used to wander in New England
had touched down in my mind and grown unbelievably tall,
so tall I could not see where the tips of their branches
ended, composing a crystal nave in a house of fields.
10.
There's 12, So we're almost done.
10.
That you could walk in and out of each room
was the first miraculous thing,
that each one had a door.
I don't know why this felt so revelatory.
I had been walking in and out of feelings for years
in the theaters of art.
And even if these theaters of art were made by other people
to house their own feelings, I could safely visit.
Within the borders of frames, screens, binding, pages,
I could safely feel a little bit at a time.
I was accustomed to feelings, accosting and possessing.
That's what I had witnessed all through my childhood,
in my father, in my mother's steely brace of control, in A,
in my sister kicking a hole in the bathroom door while
I cowered behind it.
Unlike the feelings of parents, the feelings in art
came to an end.
You weren't forced to feel them forever.
You could walk out of the theater.
You could close the book.
For a while, the Hall of Emotions
came to me only as setting,
the vanishing ceiling of the crystalline structure,
its glass and edge, the facing rows
of doors, the far off diamond light.
And at some point, the image arrived,
and I walked through a door into a room
and entered a miasmic cloud.
In it, I could sense, could see, a huddled figure,
a brown smudge, and a fog of feeling.
If the figure was hazy, the feeling was not.
This room was misery, and I knew it was the room I knew best.
And I realized there were so many doors
along that infinite hallway to so many rooms of feeling.
And I had only ever dwelled in a few.
And then because there was a door, I finally understood,
I could walk out of misery's room.
11.
It's astonishing to me that I never once realized
that this crystal hall of emotions
had its chicken-wired analog in the hallway
at the Psychoanalytic Institute,
not until today, writing this draft, 30 years later,
or that hall with its infinite length of rooms, each one
housing a particular feeling, had
arrived just as I was working on the art of housing
moods in stanzas,
or that in that first meeting with Dr. Kane,
when I cut that steady horizontal through the air,
I was drawing a picture of flatline:
flatline, the preferred state, so I had declared.
But I had not meant dying.
I had meant not feeling.
Feeling meant anxiety.
And from my earliest experiences of being alive,
I had been trapped in it.
I was a fat, clumsy, brainy, dreamy child,
navigating a dread inextricably bound
to the society in which I was supposed to feel at home:
my neighbors, my schoolmates, my parents.
Peace seemed an abstraction, wholly unlived.
That finding it seemed to involve
excruciating light, rather than the engulfing darkness,
interests me now.
Was this what they call saving grace?
It felt like an instinct.
Illumination would save me, not the body-killing plunge.
I could see it in the faces of angels at Duke House,
in the slides I projected three times a week.
12.
Many years after these events, when I was in my late 30s,
the alcohol and opiates my middle sister took to endure
a complicated, trying life failed her, and she died,
four years after my parents died, father and then mother,
six months apart.
Soon after I received news of my sister's death,
I had one session with a Jungian analyst, S, the wife of a friend
who offered.
In that session, she asked if I had
an image for how I was feeling.
I told her I kept seeing the same scene, my surviving
sister and myself exhausted, barely
clinging to a makeshift raft, an endless open sea.
She told me to let the image change.
This was strangely hard.
I've never been sure why.
Maybe letting go of the image of the raft
felt the same as drowning.
But then, behind my closed eyes, the scene
began to change to the back yard of my childhood
home, my inner eye trained on our bean-shaped pool, especially
the concrete border that traced round it,
and the brick walls separating our backyard from the backyards
of our neighbors.
S noted how the endless open sea had transformed into a contained
swimming pool, something familiar and familial
firmly lodged in experience.
She said, even more than from the shock of your sister
dying so soon after your parents,
your suffering stems from not having a shape
for what has happened to you.
I'd said I was going to tell you about something
that helped me once when I was young, grieving, and unmoored.
Once.
Didn't I mean, this time of shipwreck too?
Didn't I mean all the times I was helped, when I was lost,
when I didn't understand the shape of my life?
Every person is born with a mind for images,
vessels ready to respond to a call,
to ferry you towards or away, wherever survival is,
to conjure against annihilation.
This is an essay on figuration.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]