The first death is the one that hasn't happened yet: that of my therapist, Wendy Burns, a tiny fragile woman upon whom I heaped transferences and all their concomitant affects and anxieties. Her attuned listening, receptive, empathic, allowed for me to begin to speak my unconscious, to put into words the drives and desires that shape my actions without my being aware of them. Sometimes she would assess, give advice, "try to understand," but usually my unconscious would kick back, and in the next session I would tell her about a dream in which she'd been messy or oblivious or selfish and she would laugh and say that this is how it works, with correctives and mistakes and constant reminders that the job is to listen, not to interpret. I listened to her too, and heard a cough that would come and go. I smelled the cigarette smoke when I walked in, saw her frailty. And feared, always feared, that she would leave me. For the last six months we've known her death was coming, but the cancer came on fast all of a sudden, and I'm left bereft, going from three intense hours a week of being with her to nothing.
The second death is that of my dissertation supervisor Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Though I didn't keep in touch with her much since I got my PhD in 1998, she has been present to me when I walk into a graduate seminar, comment on a paper, read a book, write. I'm so thankful that I wrote to her this November and told her this, as well as writing that whenever I suffer from insomnia, I always think back to a moment during that generous and heady/giddy independent study on performativity and the novel that she agreed to do with me, Gus Stadler, and Helen Thompson. I must have been feeling ignorant or under-read, and said that I wished I slept less so I'd have more time to think. She said, in that sweet airy voice of hers, "Oh no, you're so lucky. Sleep is such a necessary and effortless way to work ideas through. I wish I could sleep more."
The impetus for writing to her was that in my grief about Wendy's illness, I had finally come to Eve's book, A Dialogue on Love. Her intimate way of expressing so much of what I was experiencing in this new way of talking, being listened to. As a girl she had willed herself to commit a moment to memory for the future. When she tells her therapist about it, she begins to cry: "I guess I'm responding to the distance between recounting it to you, this story, in this context of being loved and listened to--the distance between this and the form of
memory that girl
is practicing. Where no such
conditions obtain."
That for me is the moment of therapy, to be able to put into words what had seemed natural, normal; the solitude in which conditions of love and listening do not obtain, and to feel the loneliness of it, to experience a new kind of interlocution, of being with another and with oneself. (I also admire her bravery: did she really say "being loved" to her therapist?).
So this confluence of deaths opens something for me. Eve's writing, in a variety of registers, about her passions, knowing on some deep level that despite whatever loneliness or fear of rejection, she would be read and that it was worth writing about what she loved. (Her immense success and importance and popularity are immaterial here, because she was just, in her words, having a life where work and love were impossible to tell apart). And Wendy's listening, her sustained engagement with whatever would come up/out, allows me not only to imagine sharing my passions in a more public space, but also provides the topic of this writing, which will chart some of my ideas for my next book on listening and form in art, film, literature. Though listening as a topic (eavesdropping, wiretapping, recording) is part of the project, I am less interested in the content than in the form. How do we listen? What can we hear? Lacan's call to "not understand" allows for a listening that is less hampered by the urge to interpret than it is driven by an attention to how things sound, how they are expressed. It is my belief that to listen not only to what is audible but to what is inaudible --the omissions, absences, pauses, and transgressions-- reveals the inability of the language of ideology to create coherence.
