“I bring you my worries. I bring you my tears. I bring you the dreams I have. I want to leave them here. I want to hang them on your wall and return home healed. But everything I give to you, you give back. You say, like you just said, ‘What is this “something” you want to give away?’ ”
Years later I looked it up, the shrine. There were many like the one my Brazilian patient had described. One of them was a kind of cave or grotto, where pilgrims would leave little body parts carved from wood or wax: a foot, a breast, a head. From time to time the priest collected the wax objects and melted them down, making candles to be sold to other pilgrims. The walls and ceiling of the shrine were black with candle smoke and crowded with these suspended offerings.
I think now that my Brazilian patient managed at least to give that away, the conjured image of a blackened shrine, hung with a jumble of body parts. I think that in the soul of each psychoanalyst such a place must exist, in spite of what we profess about our neutrality, our professional detachment. Perhaps something of what we receive can be melted down and sold back as candlelight—our costly illuminations—but other elements remain just as they appeared, the dreams nailed to the walls, the abandoned hearts and limbs, the soot of inextinguishable longing.
—
Today I wonder: Could it be that you are praying for my soul?
Before now, it has never occurred to me that someone might pray for me. An odd sensation all the odder because I no longer know what a soul is. One would have thought after a lifetime of listening to them, treating them, peering into them, I would understand better. I have said it to student analysts under my supervision, and I have said it to myself: that everything Freud wrote was an attempt to accord the soul a rational form, a credible image. Did he succeed? Did anyone believe him? Did I? I no longer know. Is the soul one of those necessary fictions we cannot, in the end, do without? I have thought God to be such a fiction too, as surely you must have, Father. Sometimes it is impossible to believe what we believe.
I should confess that I have been praying, I who believe nothing. Not for Clementine, or Miriam, or myself, but for Jessica Burke. One session in particular returns to me, again and again, the sole session in which she described her artwork. Of course, she had mentioned her work often: her difficulty getting started, her inability to know when to stop, doubts about whether her work was any good. Was it good? I never saw anything she made. Had I been curious, the protocols of my profession would have prevented me from seeking it out. Now that she is dead, an obscure probity prevents me still, a desire to preserve that invisibility, as though it were a nakedness from which I must avert my eyes.
I’m no good at talking about my work, she said.
Everything about it is all so un-thought-out.
But I want to think it out, think it through, that’s the thing. I just can’t.
How am I going to write an artist’s statement, assemble a portfolio, apply to graduate school, if I can’t say what I am doing?
Perhaps (I suggested) she didn’t want me to know what she was doing.
For a long moment she was silent, then said suddenly: The thought of your appearing at a crit or an opening makes me want to run out of the room.
This room? I asked.
The figure-of-speech room.
It sounds like you don’t want me showing up at your show.
I didn’t say that.
No. Those weren’t your words.
And anyway, I hardly know what you look like. I never look at you. She paused. I mean, what I’m saying is, I can’t imagine it, I can’t envision you actually there.
It is painful to imagine me there. Maybe it is painful to imagine me here. You’ve made the very possibility run out of the room.
I don’t think I would even recognize you on the street.
Am I invisible today because you want your art to be invisible?
She hesitated. She didn’t think so, but there was one thing she would think about when she was high, one thing she would feel: that she was transparent, not invisible, but transparent. But this was the thing: she wasn’t see-through, she wasn’t transparent to light like glass or air, she was transparent to the dark.
She said that’s what heroin did, it brought her down to the seafloor, the floor of an ocean trench. Relieved of the need to see, relieved of the need to breathe, she belonged to the darkness completely. It possessed her, moved through her unresisted, as though she herself were made of nothing more than water and darkness, as though she herself were nothing more than a place, a place where the current turned on itself a little and moved on.
Sometimes, she said, that’s what she wanted her art to be—and she gave a rueful little laugh—transparent and in the dark! Not very promising, is it? Maybe that’s why she’d been doing what she called her smears, these paintings on long strips of paper. She would load the left edge of the strip with a charge of paint, then drag the paint out with a knife or a block of wood or a ruler until the streak was exhausted and the line went blank. She’d tried all kinds of straightedges, all kinds of inks and pigments, some thin, some viscous, papers of varying thickness and stiffness. The effect of the smear was always different, always engrossing to her. But perhaps only to her. It was, in any event, the only thing lately she found she could make. What she was looking for was a kind of transparency like that feeling she used to get when she was high. She found it there, where
