SEND IN THE CLOWNS

My choices tend towards the screwy. Why not, for example—during a brief and intense era of squinting and straining to SEE ANYTHING AT ALL, when the most recent actual fantasy in my actual dreams is about BUYING READING GLASSES, and when my daughter has run off with my regular glasses and can’t or won’t remember where she put them— why not, right now, decide to start reading psychoanalytic papers in PDF format on the tiny blue-light hell-scape of my phone’s pinched and blaring screen?

Perhaps it won’t surprise you that this is also the person who, at nine years old, saw one of those forklift-ready wooden pallets in her father’s garage and thought “that’d do nicely for a tree fort platform,” and then tied one end of a twelve-foot jump rope to the thing and the other end to her waist, and climbed thirty feet into a pine tree with it banging against the trunk and catching on branches before anyone noticed either the absence of the pallet or the child.

Everyone has superpowers, or a type of genius specific to them— a form of operating that creates experience in a way which no one else could. There is a daftness to mine that I find entertaining. It usually has to do with upping the stakes somehow, making things much harder in order to make them easier, or better, or more alive. I am a kind of hourglass-shaped passage through which ideas have to travel, and things get real exciting when everything has to squeeze super hard and fast to get through the narrowest part and, thence, open out into experience. I seem to invite and cultivate difficulty and paradox with the mouth-breathing haplessness of someone downing jello-shots from the open refrigerator, uhm, because they can.

So this most recent “choice,” wherein 1) I have absolute shit vision and am waiting the “seven to ten days” WHY DO WE EVEN HAVE OPTOMETRISTS before my new progressive lenses for old fuckers arrive, and 2) I am so far past my wit’s end with two five-year-olds who for some reason have a week off from school as often as I find mouse turds in drawers around here, plus WHATEVER THIS WEATHER IS, and I’ve decided in this very lush context that academic papers about the ineffable in humanity on a tiny screen are the way to go— this choice doesn’t surprise me. But it does give me something to bring you.

For those of you inclined to engage in 1990s BBC comedy metaphors (o it’s worth it), here is what feels quite like actual footage of me and my loosed selves, at the outset of this project, trying to understand, appreciate, and make use of academic papers of any kind, much less several gorgeous pieces of psychoanalytic thought that work to engage, with extraordinary attentiveness, some of the particular insanities native to my metamorphically warped mind.

Here’s a short sentence. (I owed you at least a couple.)

Now: what on earth am I learning by this compulsion towards academically-minded insight on the human mind, the human condition, as presented on a tiny screen while I clean playdough off the rug with the other hand? Too much, dear reader, to put down here.

BUT. One piece of it which has been startlingly helpful I will endeavor to capture in a basic form below, just as my children “make bad guys” [fun but difficult] “into penises” [good / hilarious / rewarding / eminently approachable] with their mashed and crusty arsenal of playdough.

This jaw-dropping piece has arisen from learning about subjectivity, which begins with the distinction between the self as subject and the self as object¹. Basically we all for the most part have access to a sense that we are a subject— what I’d loosely call a conscious being with forms of autonomy and desire. We’ve all also had experience with feeling like an object— a pawn, an artifact of someone else’s narrative; a thing that someone else does something to. We’ve pretty much all also been on both ends of this relationship— we’ve all at some time been both the doer and the done to.

What I’m finding mind-blowing though is that one apparently need not spend all one’s time negotiating within this binary, haggling in the dust of the gutter over who gets the wrapper and who gets the ABC gum-wad. There is a whole resplendent buffet just a few feet above our perpetually squabbling, binary skulls, where basically all the cheese platters in the world await— up where both entities retain their own subjectivities, and nobody has to be the object.

Why aren’t we all doing this all the time? The thing is, the buffet can’t be accessed if you’re afraid. You can’t come to the table stinking of fear. You can’t get there if you’re trailing the need to control other people’s reactions or how they feel about you, if you’re getting up to your people-pleasing bullshit, or if you’re working to look fun or spiffy or smart or even slightly less wrinkly, puffy, and tired than you really are— none of that drivel can come to the buffet. The buffet vanishes in its presence.

You’ve gotta be ballsy as hell (I use “balls” here as synonymous with “gonads” and therefore equally applicable to all genders and sexes)— a state which can only arise from trust. You have to trust that you will survive whatever happens in a place where no one is the doer and no one is the done-to, where a great many things are possible. You don’t get to cleave to what you already know. This is a scary thought, but also the only way out of, or past, what you already know—which is to say, the only way to grow.

Two of the things that make it extra tricky for me to try and inhabit a life as a co-subject and co-creator of experience and reality with other humans (rather than one of the characters in the perpetual cartoon battle between doer and done-to) were born on Valentine’s Day 2019, and sometimes call me “Mom-butt.”

The parents of small children, especially, bear unrelenting exposure to people who are mostly incapable of seeing their caregivers’ subjectivity. In other words, parents are mostly doomed to being objects for their children. It is a form of stiflement that sucks the soul out of the nose as if in preparation for mummification.

Enter technology. The other day I was living my flattened life as an object, getting buffeted rather hard by my children’s raucous dress-up activity at their Nana’s house, unable to breathe through my nose at all for a virus they gave me, and I came to an invisible crossroads. I wanted to bark at them, biff them with a slipper, whatever it took to get them to stop. Just STOP making me an object for two seconds you filthy little urchins.

And then I felt that awkward square of pressure on my ass— my phone in my pocket— and thought, suddenly, because I also suddenly had access to the notion of the phone’s camera as an eye that was separate from the melee to a greater degree than I could be, I bet from the outside this is entertaining.

I fished the phone out of my pocket and turned its video camera on all three of us, and as we all watched it and ourselves across the wild and impulsive “narrative” of the dressing up game, a curious and wonderful thing happened: I regained my subjectivity. I started to feel, as the seconds of videoing went by, that I wasn’t just getting buffeted, as object to my children’s whims, but I was actively participating in a game that was actually very funny and enjoyable. I can see, when I watch it, that I’m annoyed in the beginning, basically just “proving” for whichever complementary lumps show up on the other end of my Instagram BS, that I’m “being done to,” (see? look how bad this is!) and that it then slowly shifts to mild enjoyment (wait, this is kinda funny), and from there to participation (omg hold up I think I love you).

The camera served as an intermediary, a reminder to me, a means to return from my flattened state of “object” to my more vibrant and present state of “subject.” And I didn’t have to control or flatten my children into objects in my narrative to do it, either. They got to have their own careening, blooming, inconvenient, lively subjectivities too. We all got to be real and present at the same time.

It’s not that much of a leap, from here, to begin to understand in an astonished and sparkling way what I frantically scribbled down at the end of my last notebook—its very last page— and then copied over into my new notebook—its very first page—after my therapist said it: Holding onto your own subjectivity, and keeping in mind the other’s, is fundamentally an act of love.

1. Ghent, Emmanuel. “Masochism, Submission, Surrender— Masochism as a Perversion of Surrender.” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 26, no. 1 (1990):108-136.