First of all, I'd like to thank you all for coming out this afternoon. I've never given a walking tour before, nor am I precisely sure of what people are interested in knowing. At first I thought it would be neat if I could stand in front of each piece and tell you exactly where the idea came from and how it fit into some larger scheme of what my work was about and where it was heading. But I suspect most artists don't work that way. In my case anyway, the process is a bit chaotic, without beginning or end. If it weren't for the arbitrary deadline of a show opening, I would never have to reflect on what I've done. In the case of this show, as I was working on the catalogue with David Hunter, it became clear that we needed a title, preferably one that summed up what my work was about. We tried out a lot of titles before Rod came up with "Transient States". At least I get the credit for instant recognition: yes, that's it! That's the unifying theme. So now the catalogue confidently states that the show is about transient states.
Yes, of course, I knew it all along.
And now I will tell you another story. The body of this work was started roughly at the same time as my mother was starting to die, a little over two years ago. As many here know, it's a difficult, often disorienting time. For some reason my mother chose to tell me some things about my early childhood which I had never known, and it seemed as if my emotional world were turned upside down. My grip on my identity seemed so tenuous that I decided to see a psychoanalyst in Toronto to help me sort things out. I'll call him Dr. F.
The work you see here in this room, in my mind is so deeply connected with those trips to Toronto and with sitting in a dimly lit, warm room with a friendly stranger, that I thought: how can I talk about my work without talking about that? So, I thought I would read to you a few excerpts from the journal I kept during the course of both my analysis and the making of the pieces you see here. If I had to sum up what it's about, I'd say it was about seeking some sort of identity or psychic stability in this world. Why I jumped on the phrase "transient states" is because there IS no stability. We, everything, keeps evolving. Sometimes this constant change can send us into panic states, but if we're lucky we find something that grounds us. People to love, some meaningful pursuit, for example.
I've chosen some passages from my journals which I think say something about the creative process as well as explain some of the things I do. They're not in perfect chronological order.
I'd been working with epoxy resin all day. In the early morning I had a dream which was visually very complex: The whole dream was illuminated by an amber light:
Two flat layers of resins are superimposed. The layers are separated by time and by space so that each flows separately. Resins like liquid amber trying to take shape but remaining in flat layers, filled with air pockets that stretch and strain or contract into round bubbles. I understand that I am trying to superimpose Dr. F. over my father in the distant past. Dimly I perceive that Dr. F. is the gateway to understanding and experiencing my father, and that this is made possible by the phenomenon of transference. Dimly I reason that if this were possible, then somehow I should be able to get the two layers to match up. Each layer should be most transparent or most opaque at the same points. The air bubbles, the trapped debris should match up but I could not make this happen. Each layer was rich and unique and in constant motion. It was like a dance of infinite change and transformation, a primordial dance of liquid amber which I could not influence in any way.
The dream left me with a sense of confusion. It led me to think of the limits of psychoanalysis: Dr. F. as the glass through which I must perceive my father, darkly. I am supposed to assume that Dr. F. is a man without qualities, that he is in fact transparent. I am supposed to behave that way when in the room with him, and yet my own senses tell me of his complexity. His voice has a quality that conveys patience and kindness. His slowness conveys thoughtfulness and conserved passions. And so on. In my dream I watched with fascination how the forces inside him move him in unpredictable ways. It's the very strangeness of him which fascinates. I am an outsider looking in. I want to penetrate the strangeness, and at the same time I am afraid. It is him I see, not my father. He is nothing like my father. There is nothing of my father in the room except the impossible situation I find myself in. This man, like my father, cannot be touched or moved or influenced.
About 2:00 in another morning I have a dream of sorts, except that probably I haven't yet fallen asleep properly. I've been fretful. I'm a little girl again, dressed for the winter. I'm standing on ice, by the edge of a pond. I sense that my father is nearby. I am smiling at him as in a photo I've seen of myself. But I am terrified. I know that of myself, that when I'm truly terrified, I smile. The dream is all feeling. There is little content. A tremendous sense of dread. I splinter into thousands of fragments. I can't keep track. I'll never ever put myself back together. The panic is so great I want to run out on the street and beg someone to shoot me. I want nurses to come and zap me out of my mind.
Back to Dr. F.'s office. I have retreated into a space which I am unable to describe to him. He asks what would happen if I had to stay there forever. I say I would begin to scream. He asks what I would scream. And then I break down. I say it's pointless because nobody would come anyway. Nobody ever came. Nobody ever came! I cried and cried, repeating that nobody ever came. I felt very very broken, very small. Indeed, I had become very small. I had gone past Sweden in time and was into Germany, perhaps even Estonia. I was somewhere between zero and three years old. I see myself as a pair of eyes in the dark, watching, waiting. No wonder I had no words. Still crying, I said that I couldn't even be sure whether it really happened in this way or whether I was just making it up.
In the background I could hear Dr. F.'s soft but firm voice, "You are not making this up." He said it twice and I believed him.
In tears though I was, I saw clearly how my confidence in my own reality had been challenged, how easy it is for adults to talk a child out of their own experience, or to deny its importance. Certainly everyone had suffered. Who could have guessed that such a young child could suffer so horribly. I was beginning to understand the very tenuous grip I had on reality. Words are the tools of historians. They had words and I didn't.
Until now I had never been sure that my memories were authentic, that they truly belonged to me. But without them I was not a complete person. Without this certainty of authenticity, I was at the mercy of other people to tell me who I really was.
No wonder I have such a deep mistrust of words and such a strong sympathy for animals. I think of the silence of my studio each morning. The freedom to move once I'm there, to choose this tool or that. The feeling of certainty. No need to rush. Eventually a shape will emerge.
I feel tired this morning. I didn't sleep well. Spent all day in the studio yesterday working on sculpture. I watched a video on how to make a whole body mold to reproduce a human figure.
All night, it seemed, instead of sleeping, I was positioning Dr. F. in my studio as if he were a statue. He was hard, immobile, yet alive. I put him here, I put him there. It made no difference; I could not change his expression. It's in the nature of his job, I think.
Later he will ask me, what did you want me to do?
And I will answer: smile.
In the video, one cuts a hole in the back of the figure so that one can reach in and patch up the seams. In the dream I cut a circle in Dr. F's chest, removing the part protecting the heart. I hold my breath wondering, what will I find? It is a warm, pumping human heart. I know what he is, what he is doing, even though I might not like it.
I cut open my father's chest in the same way, wondering, what I will find. The answer is not as clear. I think it might be rotted. I can't bring myself to look. I can't visualize a functioning heart.
Metamorphosis came up with Dr. F.. I am not complete. I am not yet what I should be, or intend to be or am struggling to become. I have written promissory notes to Rod, for example, and so mortgaged my future. Bear with me, I say, and you will see, you have married a butterfly, a swan, a princess. Put up with this larva, this duckling, this toad, all her mumbling and stumbling, wait just a little bit longer, have patience, and you will be rewarded. She will be everything you ever wished for. She will be Penelope, Ann Margaret, Mother Mary, Germaine Greer, an artist all rolled into one. She will be Madame X, where X stands for what you need at that instant.
I laugh at this, and for a moment consider the possibility that he loves what I already am.
On radio, an interview with Doris Lessing some weeks ago: she was explaining how during a certain period in her life (in her sixties, I think) she 'fell into grief'. The state of grief lasted several years. She said what triggered it was listening too much to a certain kind of music. What kind of music? Music of the troubadours.
Next week, on the same program, the interviewer said he had been inundated with calls asking about music of the troubadours. Where could one find it? Everybody wanted to know.
So many curious people wanting to tempt fate. Or, so many people seeking to authenticate their grief.
Early morning dream: There is a road with fields on either side, leading up and down hills. A black figure is in the distance going up one of the hills. A bomb explodes somewhere to the left. I expect there to be more explosions, thinking the war is not over. But there are no more. In the foreground, much closer to the dreamer than the black figure that is now reaching the top of the hill, yet smaller, fainter, almost ghost-like, is a family. My mother and we four children. We don't look like ourselves, but rather like the people in a painting I had done years ago of a family of refugees. Almost skeletal and exhausted, the mother's eyes are closed but she keeps on walking, holding on to the hand of the smallest child.
The family was fading. It made me very sad to see it so faint. Good-bye, dear family, I thought. I saw each face in turn, as we appear in the old family album, as we had emerged from the long journey through Germany, through cities that were bombed or were about to be bombed, our mother keeping her wits about her, trying to keep abreast of news of which way the war was moving. I was overwhelmed by feelings of love for each one of us . . . even my self. I feel I have a deep understanding of what each one endured, and the meaning of the expression on each face.
The lone figure reached the top of the hill. She was silhouetted against a brilliant white sky. The dream did not reveal what was on the other side of the hill, but I didn't feel any fear because these were my own Northumberland hills, the ones I visit with my dogs so regularly. Oddly the dream is in black and white. They are my hills, but they are without colour.
Will there be colour, someday?
Why did I cling so long to a family of ghosts?
At the beginning of my journey with Dr. F., I was the ghost, and the past was strong and vibrant. A reversal in perspective has taken place.
I celebrate the occasion by taking the dogs for a drive through our hills. Certain patches and quiltworks of land I have grown to know well. I love the changes through the seasons. One stretch of land is almost bare earth of uniform colour. Only the different levels of wetness in the dips and hollows reveal the soft contours. From the distance it almost looks like a stretch of velvet. Another is defined by rows of bleached corn stubble.
Beethoven's violin concerto is on the radio. The second movement begins just as I get back to the house. I turn the car around and go back into the hills, where I want to be with my thoughts and this exquisite piece of music. Now it has started to snow, light snow like veils of thousands of brides. Veils of infinite depth covering my Northumberland hills. In this moment all feelings co-exist, love, hate, joy, sadness.
I met a man once who took white men on safaris. He had friends among the tall lion hunters with spears, that is, the Masai. He had feasted with them and sang songs with them by camp fires. Taking white men on safaris was his way of making a living so that he could travel. He told me something I have often thought about. That the people of the Masai tribe had no existential problems. They were at the centre of the world. They never doubted that. They would not understand questions about identity, or existential angst. O lucky men! Could this be so, or is this western fantasy? I believed him, of course. I'd like to believe that someone somewhere has never asked the question: Is the self an illusion?
They never doubted that all cows belonged to them, even if they were kept behind white men's fences. They did not understand property laws. It was soon discovered that to sentence a Masai warrior to spend a few weeks in the confinement of prison was the equivalent of a death sentence. What a romantic idea: give me freedom or give me death.
But, inside those prison walls, what was happening inside the warrior's head? What caused him to die? Death by grief? By disintegration? Might not wrestling with a bit of existential angst have made him more emotionally resilient? It seems almost an obscene question because the romantic notion of the warrior is so beautiful and pure. It's a bit like saying that innocence should be defiled in order to give it a better chance to survive.
I can almost see my desire to survive as obscene. Me with all my contradictions, product of fragmented cultures. A Masai might well wonder what I have to live for. Occasionally I do myself. As a university student I never envied the simplicity of the cultures I studied in anthropology. I saw them as prisons. And now?
Why do I see Dr. F. as hostile now? It's almost as if he is part of the ugliness inside me. He is there every Wednesday afternoon, an inevitability as long as I keep going to analysis. The connection with my father is pretty clear. There was no way to avoid him because he sat in the center of our home. I can still feel a sort of force field around him. Even the sign was there: KEEP OUT! But of course I couldn't read at age three.
I often come back to this early scene to try to understand what power he held over me. How did I become his victim/audience? I wonder about the theory of tacit collusion between predator and prey. Something that disgusted Schopenhauer. The Stockholm syndrome? I won't think too hard. It is of no use to spin some theory about myself. I have to feel my way, blindly, to my truth.
I am feeling a great ugliness inside. I am dreading my appointment with Dr. F.
Thinking of my studio, the state of disorder there. Who can do any work in such a place? I have been paralyzed, unable to do much. This frightens me enormously.
And yet, there are pockets of time when I feel I am about to embark on my most creative period. I see myself taking little steps in preparation. As long as I don't think in too many directions, this seems possible.
Came across a statement by Kiri Te Kanewa, the great opera singer: she does not have time to spend with anyone who has negative thoughts about her.
Now there is a discipline worth considering!
Part of me is functioning O.K. Will take advantage of those moments.
Part of me is dreading tomorrow's session with Dr. F. No doubt about it, my father is sitting there in that room waiting to negate me. I dip my hand into the river and grab at whatever is floating by. Now I have to show it to my father. Here. Here is my life.
That is not a life! Now go away.
Thinking about Dr. F's role as my analyst. The image came to me: I am the malleable goo inside a bowl: undefined material that is refusing to take shape. The matter gets splattered as it is stirred (the natural activity of the brain) and tends to creep up the sides of the bowl, either inadvertently, or in an effort to escape. Dr. F. is the spatula that keeps scraping the sides and turning the goo back in on itself.
First time around, I thought he was the bowl itself. But clearly he's the spatula. So what is the bowl? My own body? My true self? An opportunity? The closest evidence of God?
Most obviously the image comes from working with sculpture in the studio, mixing plaster. I am refusing to take shape. I keep eluding myself. In the past I sensed it was dangerous to take shape. Best to be elusive, slip away, admit to nothing. Best of all, be a pair of eyes, nothing more.
I explained to Dr. F that I was unable to stabilize my perceptions of him. The flip-flopping was totally involuntary. One moment he is kindly, the next he is dangerous. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But I understand that the split is within myself: I the adult see him as a kindly, well-intentioned person, but the vulnerable creature inside me sees him as a scowling, threatening one. More specifically, the defenseless creature is afraid there will be some coercion involved: that Dr. F. would convince my adult self to take him down to the space where she lives.
Dr. F. thought it was entirely reasonable that the defenceless creature should appear on her own terms, when she felt she was in safe territory. This is what I like about Dr. F.: his minimalist approach. I wonder how long it takes to learn to say so little. He was totally non-threatening and again I sensed that glow in the room which made me feel safe and warm. I fell into a long silence which for once was a very satisfying one. I was smiling because I realized I was slowly forming the tissue in my hands into a small nest.
Eventually I showed it to Dr. F.. I said I had been thinking of doing a series of nests in sculpture. The nest project reminded me of Cathy down the road, who raises and trains horses, because she had promised to give me the hair of her horses when she clipped them. I thought it would be interesting to make one nest out of horsehair. I couldn't explain the amazing satisfaction I got from contemplating this project. In particular, I wanted to test the limits of fragility, sculpturally speaking. How frail could a nest be and still function as a nest?
This in turn reminded me of the terrible accident that happened a couple of days ago when a young woman went speeding past Cathy's house and lost control. Her pick-up truck tore out a fair-sized cedar by the roots and landed upside down in a ditch about ten feet below grade. Cathy was the first person at the scene of the accident. She saw a hand through the broken window and looked inside the best she could. I can't even imagine what she saw but she knew the woman had been decapitated. She vomited.
What on earth had the woman been thinking about? Why on earth was she going so fast?
Dr. F. listened, eventually said: I guess what you're saying is that the world is not a safe place and there is a need for nests.
I agreed. It's not that nests make it a safer place, but nests make it more tolerable.
Early morning dream, after a satisfying day in the studio: a tree opens itself to me and shows me the interior of its bark, the rich living circle girdling the hardened dead part inside it. Funny I had never found this image before, all those years when I felt there was a huge empty hole inside me. The inner bark is the only living part of the tree, and yet it must protect even its dead history, for a tree can rot from the inside.
There was a series of photographs in Life magazine, years ago. A cheetah chases after a baboon. The last shot is of the majestic, muscular cheetah coming to a halt, its jaws open, its thick neck curved high over the crouching figure of the little baboon. who has turned to face its dominator. His whole body is one negative curve as though the physical impact has already hit. His fangs are bared but they won't save him.
I cut the photo out and often just stared at it. This is not the first time I think it represents my relationship with my father.
These two curves fascinate me, I tell Dr. F.. The large curve looming over the smaller one. He smiles and muses that the curves are identical to the classic ones of the mother holding her child.
I wonder whether this ambiguity can be expressed in sculpture.
I sense a fundamental dishonesty somewhere in my relationship with Dr. F. although I can't put my finger on it. I know the feeling inside me when I know some part of me has to lie, or if I'm in a situation in which something is concealed. I don't know what the lie is but I recognize the sick feeling inside. A lie is also a compromise. Sometimes I feel I should just make something up just so that I can give a shape and meaning to my analysis, but I always draw back. It's better to admit to confusion, even defeat, rather than to submit to dubious interpretation.
This evening after my session with Dr. F., I found myself on Queen St., looking for a store to buy a gift for Paula. Going west towards Pages bookstore, I passed a young man selling the paper Outreach. I'm not good at guessing ages anymore, but perhaps he was in his early twenties. I stopped to find money in my purse. He asked with genuine cheer and interest, how I was doing with my Christmas preparations. My feelings were so mixed, I said: sometimes Christmas can be a sad time. I smiled rather sadly and gave him two coins, a loonie and a twonie.
"It only costs a loonie," he said.
"I know," I replied and went my way. It almost pained me to be thanked for such an easy tip.
I found the gift, a small lace evening bag, on the very next block. The eager expression on the young man's face was still on my mind as I took the same route back to my car. In the distance was his dark hooded figure, a newspaper held in front of it almost like a shield against the coming of the cold. It was that very evening the cold front was arriving from Minnesota.
"And how is your Christmas going?" I asked, once back to him.
"Oh, it's going all right," he said. I'll spend it with a friend. We have a place just up there." he turned his head to look up McCaul St. "It's not big or anything, but we're not on the street anymore."
I asked where he was from. He grew up in Hamilton, but had left home at a very early age. Something about his parents being impossible. But now he had reached the point of understanding that he couldn't blame his parents forever. His face reminded me of K.. His eyes were as bright, his features as sharp and handsome. But he had not shaved closely, nor washed his face just recently. His right front tooth was badly chipped. I guessed at problems with anger.
We talked a bit about taking charge of one's own life. I told him that even at my age the hurts from childhood are still with you. So you might as well get on with it. We laughed, but I doubt he understood how much I meant it, nor how much I wanted to help him fashion a shield of understanding with which to protect himself.
Had he found help? I wondered. I had heard of organizations that helped with streetpeople. The fact that he was selling Outreach, was already a step taken towards helping himself.
He explained how he was in touch with some agency. I didn't want to pry, just wanted to know he was getting help. It sounded like there was someone there he could talk to on a regular basis.
An inquiry comes through the internet. A young student working on a term paper wants to know if I think immigrant art is a meaningful category. His name, Mr. Ho, suggests Chinese heritage. I have pondered the subject matter since his inquiry, and find that I have nothing much to say about the subject.
A few days ago on CBC, Peter Gzowski was interviewing Chinese immigrants to Canada. One woman spoke very distinctly, very confidently: it's very important to know who you are. She personally was very clear on who she was: of Chinese extraction, with a Chinese cultural heritage.
I have tried this on myself many times: I am of Estonian parentage, born in Estonia. And there certainty ends and an endless blank stretch begins. I was an immigrant. I am a woman. I am now a Canadian. I haven't been able to cling to nationality as my identity. Sometimes when the conversation turns to European politics, suddenly I say things like "my country" and "my people". As for being a woman, I am not at all sure what femininity is, though I consider myself a feminist out of necessity. But it is not my identity. In my dreams I appear as a girl or a boy, interchangeably. The psyche itself seems to have no gender. My identity has been, simply: creature.
Dr. F. encourages me to construct my own narrative. He is helping me to fill in the gaps, especially the enormous gaping hole which is my early childhood. I have no memory of that period and there is no one to tell me because much of the time no one was there to witness it. I am astonished by how the psyche works. The body absorbs the memories. The body shuts down, becomes ill. But dreams keep coming and coming and coming until you finally pay attention.
Dr. F. encourages me to explore what I find unacceptable in myself, to unite the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde inside myself. Without that I am a danger to myself.
With Dr. F. beside me, I have had the courage to listen to the dreams and to begin my true narrative: what I believe defines me, is something beyond nationality, culture, or gender, and that is my childhood experience. Beyond everything, I come from the vast world of neglect, and yes, let's call it abuse. My strongest sense of identity is with the single mom raising her children. I am both the mother and the child. The experience of loneliness and bleakness has been by far the most defining, most influential part of my life. I have been, first and foremost, the lost child, and now, perhaps the reason I can write this at all, I am also a loved woman, a loving mother and wife. I have discovered gardening, and I am learning to be a good artist.
But tell me about Canada's treatment of single moms, and I become enraged. Tell me about neglected children, and I recede into a white space. So many wars going on simultaneously. Newspapers are full of warnings of how children are affected. Tell me about it. Tell me for how long. Tell me what is the 'normal' from which war will divert them? Tell me how my whole life has been a diversion. From what? I think of all the children growing up in refugee camps, their parents' lives torn apart. From where will they find the material to build their identities?
So, what will I tell Mr. Ho?
I want to tell the whole story but I have no art to tell it and I have no art because I cannot see all the pieces, I cannot manipulate them into sequence. There are too many segments.
There is the woman in black who is immobilized.
There is the little girl who is still snow blind.
There is the mother who has nothing to give.
The wife who wonders if everything she says is deceitful.
There is the woman who wants to love and love well.
The woman who is frightened of her own rage.
There is the woman who is repulsed at the thought of her mother's feet.
Yesterday was a most wonderful day. All the important people in my life were here under one roof, and I was surrounded by all that was dear to me, my dogs, my garden, my studio. At one point it occurred to me that this might be the zenith in my life: how could it get any better? All of us had just finished playing a game of Bacce that John and Val brought as a gift, and they went into the house to get dinner. I lay down in the grass to relax and stare up at the poplars and the dappled light shimmering through them. The dogs came to lick my face, I put my fingers deep into their fur. Their tongues made me laugh out loud. When I raised my chin to escape their tongues, I saw the woodland section of the garden, upside down, how it was lit up by the evening sun. Deep red peonies, creamy goat's beard, ferns in the shade of the pagoda dogwoods, the bright golden elder in blossom to the right of them. Suddenly the dogs lifted their heads in unison and looked in the direction of the house. Their mouths were open, their tongues relaxed, panting lightly. I looked up at their beautiful heads, saw the sharp teeth inside the cavern of Maddie's mouth. Whatever they had heard or seen did not seem to disturb them, though they were alert. The house-wren chicks started making a racket inside their house when one of the parents arrived with food. The opening to the tree swallow's nest was mysteriously dark and still. The chicks had fledged at last.
Inside the house I could hear a lot of talking and laughing. Eventually Rod called to me. Time to eat.
It hasn't been stated yet, but I feel my sessions with Dr. F. are coming to an end. I talk about my recent trip, my pleasure with my daughters. About their aspirations and my observation that it takes endless encouragement for them to do what they are doing. I wonder aloud what I would have been like if there had been supportive people around me in the early years.
Dr. F.'s brow is furrowed. I wonder what he's thinking.
Am I whining? I ask.
No, he says thoughtfully. I was just wondering if there was a connection between your grief and thoughts about what you might have been.
I think about this. I'm not unhappy with my choices, I say. I think they are right for me.
The sorrow is more closely connected with the feelings of disintegration that I suffer from. I've come to think that what the disintegration is, is a wild and rapid search for some emotional connectedness to anything. I grow more and more agitated as everything slips between my fingers. There is no one there to put an end to my fall. If I could think of anyone at all who had cared for me at that time, I think my disintegration would stop.
Can I not do that for you? he asks quietly.
I smile. You've been many things for me, I say. Yes, you've done that for me in the past. But now I feel I'm alone again.
I'm sorry, I add, that I can't seem to come up with an alternative way of placing you in my life.
I tell him about the wonderful program I had seen on PBS the night before, about a famous cellist, a Japanese Kabuki artist and Bach's 5th suite for the cello. The Kabuki dancer was explaining that he was familiar with many different forms of femininity in his dancing, and the one he wanted to evoke in his choreography for this particular music was something quite transcendent. He wanted to be not an ordinary lover to the cellist, but more like a bird that lands and sits beside him. This is a lovely alternative, I say. I would like to have that sort of relationship with him, Dr. F.
Is that possible? he asks, in a way that indicates it might be.
No, I say. This is too ethereal, too spiritual even though very beautiful. On my part, there has been too much passion during our sessions.
Impossible, I say again. But perhaps I'll find some other metaphor.
We sit in silence for long stretches. I keep thinking Dr. F might say something, offer an unexpected metaphor. I glance at his face from time to time but can't read it. Eventually he makes a movement as if to liberate his back from the chair.
Is our time up? I ask.
Yes. He moves slowly, giving me time to be the first on my feet. I thank him and close the door behind me.
Going down the hall I think about his silence and the expression on his face, then his question, 'can I not do that for you?'
I wonder if he wished he had been able to be the one to stop my fall. I wonder if I have been unkind and insensitive by denying him that role. I hesitate at the elevators, then decide to go back. I knock on his door and he says to come in. All the lights are on now and the room is white and bright. He is at the end of it behind his desk.
Did I hurt your feelings? I ask.
No, he says, it's not that.
O.K. Thank you, I say, feeling I've intruded. I close the door.
Going down the hall I repeat the words to myself: 'It's not that.' Well, if it's not that, I reason, it must be something else. Silly I didn't see it right away. Asking him personal questions is so difficult for me, but I go back to his door and knock again. I'm sorry to bother you, but you said: 'It's not that.' Does that mean it's something else?
I had caught him mid-room carrying a folder of papers. He takes a few steps towards me and says, sadly, I think:
Oh, what I meant was that coming to an end is always a difficult thing.
On the long trip home on the 401, some cello music on the radio reminds me of the Kabuki dancer. I think of him and his relationship to the cellist and to the music and I feel very proud that I have chosen art as a means of expression. Yes, it has been a good choice. There is so much more to live up to. A reason to keep stretching, to hold on to the idea of excellence.
I imagine a bird sitting next to me. A gentle, fragile creature. If Dr. F. has this creature inside him, it is not something that is apparent in our sessions. It's not that I see him as tough or even self-assured, it's just that I have not feared in him that if I made the wrong move he would fly away. Isn't that the essence of bird?
I return to a dream almost at the beginning of my therapy: The head of an ogre next to a windswept and wet bird. The ogre is sad and self absorbed, and almost thoughtlessly he slurps the bird next to him with his long tongue and so tears off a chunk and chews on it absentmindedly. This scene most likely is inspired by Goya's painting of the ogre devouring its own child. In my dream the ogre was clearly my father, and I was the bird.
There are birds and then there are birds. There are warblers and woodpeckers, ducks and geese. Chickadees and hummingbirds And then there are vultures. I can hear Dr. F. querying this last thought which is designed to distract me from thinking of myself in any serious terms. Behind a screen somewhere my father is giggling. Now, looking down at me from a glassed-in platform is the Kabuki dancer. His exquisite expression of pain and sorrow allows me to take my own seriously. He is the bird beside me. He embodies Art.
Copyright © 1998-2005 Merike Lugus