by Erica Jong
I press my eyes closed, but the scenes replay themselves on the inside of my burning lids. I feel as if I have been flayed alive, as if all my inner organs are open to the elements, as if the top of my head has blown off and even my brain is exposed. Every nerve ending transmits only pain. Pain is the only reality. It isn’t true, I say. Remember the days when you felt pleasure, when you were glad to be alive, when you felt joy so great you thought you’d burst with it. But I can’t remember. I am nailed to the cross of my imagination. And my imagination is as horrible as the history of the world.
I remember my first trip to Europe at the age of thirteen. We spent six weeks in London visiting our English relatives, seeing the sights, accumulating huge bills at Claridge’s which, my father said, were “paid by Uncle Sam…” What a rich uncle. But I spent the trip being terrified by all the torture devices we saw in the Tower of London and all the wax horrors we saw at Madame Tussaud’s. I had never seen thumbscrews and racks before. I had never realized.
“Do people still use those things?” I asked my mother.
“No, darling. They only used them in the olden days when people were more barbaric. Civilization has progressed since then.”
It was civilized 1955, only a decade or so since the Nazi holocaust; it was the era of atomic testing and stockpiling; it was two years after the Korean War, and only shortly after the height of the communist witchhunts, with blacklists containing the names of many of my parents’ friends. But my mother, smoothing the real linen sheets between which I
trembled, insisted, that rainy night in London, on civilization. She was trying to spare me. If the truth was too hard to bear, then she would lie to me. “Good,” I said, closing my eyes.
And Uncle Sam, who made so many things tax deductible, had just two years ago electrocuted the Rosenbergs in the name of civilization. Was two years ago the olden days? My mother and I conspired to pretend it was as we hugged each other before turning out the light.
But where was my mother now? She hadn’t saved me then and she couldn’t save me now, but if only she’d appear, I’d surely be able to get through the night. Night by night, we get by. If only I could be like Scarlett O’Hara and think about it all tomorrow.
17 Dreamwork
It seems to me like this. It’s not a terrible thing-I mean it may be terrible, but it’s not damaging, it’s not poisoning to do without something one really wants…
What’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better.
– Doris Lessing,
The Golden Notebook
When it was clear to me that I’d never fall asleep, I decided to get up. As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn’t care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you.
I sat upright on the bed, pinned my hair in a barrette, and took off my soiled clothes. I marched to the curtain, pushed it aside with great fake courage, and looked around. No one. I straddled the bidet and peed rivers into it, astonished at how long I’d gone without emptying my bladder. Then I washed my sore and sticky crotch and cleaned out the bidet. I splashed my face with tap water and gave myself a perfunctory sponge bath. The dirt streaked off my arms as it had when I was a child and played outdoors all day. I went to try the lock on the door to make sure it was secure.
When someone coughed in the next room, I nearly hit the ceiling. Relax, I commanded myself. But I was dimly aware that being able to get up and wash was at least a sign of life. Real lunatics just lie there in their own piss and shit. Some comfort. I was really grasping at straws. You’re better off than someone, I said and had to laugh.
Naked and somewhat encouraged by being a little cleaner, I stood before the flaking full-length mirror. I had the oddest sunburn from our days of driving in the open car. My knees and thighs were red and peeling. My nose and cheeks were red. My shoulders and forearms were burnt to a crisp. But the rest of me was nearly white. A curious patchwork quilt.
I stared into my eyes, white-circled from having worn sunglasses for weeks. Why was it I could never decide what color my eyes were? Was that significant? Was that somehow at the root of my problem? Grayish blue with yellow flecks. Not quite blue, not quite gray. Slate blue, Brian used to say, and your hair is the color of wheat. “Wheaty hair,” he called it, stroking it. Brian had the brownest eyes I’d ever seen-eyes like a Byzantine saint in a mosaic. When he was cracking up he used to stare at his eyes in the mirror for hours. He would turn the light on and off like a child, trying to catch his pupils suddenly dilating. He spoke literally then of a looking-glass world, a world of antimatter into which he could pass. His eyes were the key to that world. He believed that his soul could be sucked out through his pupils like albumen being sucked from a pierced egg.
I remembered how attracted I was to Brian’s craziness, how fascinated I was with his imagery. In those days I was not writing surrealist poems but rather conventional, descriptive poems with lots of overly clever wordplay. But later, when I began to delve deeper and allow my imagination freer rein, I often felt I was seeing the world through Brian’s eyes and that his madness was the source of my inspiration. I felt as if I had gone crazy with him and come back up. We had been that close. And if I felt guilty, it was because I was able to go down and climb up again, whereas he was trapped. As if I were Dante and he were Ugolino (one of his favorite characters from the Inferno) and I could return from Hell and relate his story, write the poetry I had culled from his madness, while he was utterly overwhelmed by it You suck everyone dry, I accused myself; you use everyone. Everyone uses everyone, I answered.
I remembered how dreadful I had felt about breaking up my marriage to Brian and it occurred to me that I had felt I deserved to spend the rest of my life immersed in his madness. My parents and Brian’s parents and the doctors had bullied me out of it. You’re only twenty-two, Brian’s psychiatrist had said; you can’t throw away your life. And I had fought him. I had accused him of betraying us both, of betraying our love. The fact was that I might easily have stayed with Brian if money and parental protestations hadn’t intervened. I felt I belonged with him. I felt I deserved to lose my life that way. I never suspected I had a life of my own at that point, and I was never good at leaving people, no matter how badly they treated me. Something in me always insisted on giving them another chance. Or perhaps it was cowardice.
A kind of paralysis of the will. I stayed and wrote out my anger instead of acting on it. Leaving Bennett was my first really independent action, and even there it had been partly because of Adrian and the wild sexual obsession I had felt for him.
Obviously it was dangerous to stare at your eyes in mirrors too long. I stood back to examine my body. Where did my body end and the air around it begin? Somewhere in an article on body image I had read that at times of stress-or ecstasy-we lose the boundaries of our bodies. We forget we own them. It was a sensation I often had and I recognized it as a significant part of my panics. Constant pain could do it, too. My broken leg had made me lose touch with the boundaries of my body. It was a paradox: great bodily pain or great bodily pleasure made you feel you were slipping out of your body.
I tried to examine my physical self, to take stock so that I could remember who I was-if indeed my body could be said to be me. I remembered a story about Theodore Roethke alone in his big old house, dressing and undressing himself before the mirror, examining his nakedness in between bouts of composition. Perhaps the story was apocryphal, but it had the ring of truth for me. One’s body is intimately related to one’s writing, although the precise nature of the connection is subtle and may take years to understand. Some tall thin poets write short fat poems. But it’s not a simple matter of the law of inversion. In a sense, every poem is an attempt to extend the boundaries of one’s body. One’s body become
s the landscape, the sky, and finally the cosmos. Perhaps that’s why I often find myself writing in the nude.
I had lost weight during our strange journey but I was still rather too fat for fashion; not obese but just about ten pounds too plump to get away with a bikini. Medium-sized breasts, big ass, deep navel. Some men claimed to like my figure. I knew (in the way one knows things one does not quite believe) that I was considered pretty and that even my big ass was considered attractive by some, but I loathed every extra ounce of fat. It had been a lifelong struggle: gaining weight, losing it, gaining it back with interest. Every extra ounce was proof of my own weakness and sloth and self-indulgence. Every extra ounce proved how right I was to loathe myself, how vile and disgusting I was. Excess flesh was connected with sex-that much I knew. At fourteen, when I had starved myself down to ninety-eight pounds, it was out of guilt about sex. Even after I had lost all the weight I wanted to lose-and more-I would deny myself water. I wanted to feel empty. Unless the hunger pangs boomed resoundingly, I hated myself for my indulgence. Clearly a pregnancy fantasy-as my husband the shrink would say-or maybe a pregnancy phobia. My unconscious believed that my jerking off Steve had made me pregnant and I was getting thinner and thinner to try to convince myself it wasn’t so. Or else maybe I longed to be pregnant, primitively believed that all the orifices of the body were one, and feared that any food I took would seed my intestines like sperm, and fruit would grow from me.
You are what you eat. Mann ist was mann isst. The war between the sexes began with the sinking of male teeth into a female apple. Pluto lured Persephone to hell with six pomegranate seeds. Once she had eaten them the bargain was unbreakable. To eat was to seal one’s doom. Close your eyes and open your mouth. Down the hatch. Eat, darling, eat. “Just eat your name,” grandmother used to say. “My whole name?” “I…” she wheeled… (a mouthful of detested liver)… “S…” (a lump of mashed potatoes and carrots)… “A…” (more hard, overcooked liver)… “D…” (another lump of cold, carroty potato)… “O…” (a limp floweret of broccoli)… “R…” (she raises the liver to my lips again and I bolt from the table)… “you’ll get beriberi!” she shouts after me. Everyone in my family has a whole repertory of deficiency diseases (which haven’t been heard of in New York for decades). My grandmother is practically uneducated, but she knows about beriberi, scurvy, pellagra, rickets, trichinosis, round worms, tape worms… you name it. Anything you can get from eating or not eating. She actually had my mother convinced that unless I had a freshly squeezed glass of orange juice every day, I would get scurvy, and she was constantly regaling me with stories about the British navy and limes. Limey. You are what you eat.
I remembered a diet column in a medical journal of Bennett’s. It seemed that Miss X had been on a strict diet of 600 calories a day for weeks and weeks and was still unable to lose weight. At first her puzzled doctor thought she was cheating, so he had her make careful lists of everything she ate. She didn’t seem to be cheating. “Are you sure you have listed absolutely every mouthful you ate?” he asked. “Mouthful?” she asked. “Yes,” the doctor said sternly. “I didn’t realize that had calories,” she said.
Well, the upshot, of course (with pun intended) was that she was a prostitute swallowing at least ten to fifteen mouthful s of ejaculate a day and the calories in just one good-sized spurt were enough to get her thrown out of Weight Watchers forever. What was the calorie count? I can’t remember. But ten to fifteen ejaculations turned out to be the equivalent of a seven-course meal at the Tour d’Argent, though of course, they paid you to eat instead of you paying them. Poor people starving from lack of protein all over the world. If only they knew! The cure for starvation for India and the cure for the overpopulation-both in one big swallow! One swallow doesn’t make a summer, but it makes a pretty damn good nightcap.
Was it possible that I was really making myself laugh? “Ho ho ho,” I said to my naked self.
And then, on the momentum gained from that little burst of false humor, I dug into my suitcase and pulled out my notebooks and worksheets and poems.
“I am going to figure out how I got here,” I said to myself. How had I wound up naked and roasted like a half-done chicken, in a seedy dump in Paris? And where the hell was I going next?
I sat down on the bed, spread all my notebooks and poems around me, and started flipping through a fat spiral binder which went back almost four years. There was no particular system. Journal jottings, shopping lists, lists of letters to be answered, drafts of irate letters never sent, pasted-in newspaper clippings, ideas for stories, first drafts of poems-everything jumbled together, chaotic, almost illegible. The entries were written in felt-tipped pens of all colors. But again, there was no system of color-coding. Shocking pink, Kelly green, and Mediterranean blue seemed to be the preferred colors, but there was also quite a lot of black and orange and purple. There was scarcely any somber blue-black ink at all. And never pencil. I needed to feel the flow of ink beneath my fingers as I wrote. And I wanted my ephemera to last.
I flipped pages wildly looking for some clue to my predicament. The earlier pages of the notebook were from my days in Heidelberg. Here were excruciating descriptions of fights Bennett and I had had, verbatim records of our worst scenes, descriptions of my analysis with Dr. Happe, descriptions of my struggles to write. God-I had almost forgotten how miserable I was then, and how lonely. I had forgotten how utterly cold and ungiving Bennett had been. Why should a bad marriage have been so much more compelling than no marriage? Why had I clung to my misery so? Why did I believe it was all I had?
As I read the notebook, I began to be drawn into it as into a novel. I almost began to forget that I had written it. And then a curious revelation started to dawn. I stopped blaming myself; it was that simple. Perhaps my finally running away was not due to malice on my part, nor to any disloyalty I need apologize for. Perhaps it was a kind of loyalty to myself. A drastic but necessary way of changing my life.
You did not have to apologize for wanting to own your own soul. Your soul belonged to you-for better or worse. When all was said and done, it was all you had.
Marriage was tricky because in some ways it was always a folie à deux. At times you scarcely knew where your own lunacies left off and those of your spouse began. You tended to blame yourself too much, or not enough, for the wrong things. And you tended to confuse dependency with love.
I went on reading and with each page I grew more philosophical. I knew I did not want to return to the marriage described in that notebook. If Bennett and I got back together again, it would have to be under very different circumstances. And if we did not, I knew I would survive.
No electric light bulb went on in my head with that recognition. Nor did I leap into the air and shout Eureka. I sat very quietly looking at the pages I had written. I knew I did not want to be trapped in my own book.
It was also heartening to see how much I had changed in the past four years. I was able to send my work out now. I was not afraid to drive. I was able to spend long hours alone writing. I taught, gave lectures, traveled. Terrified of flying as I was, I didn’t allow that fear to control me. Perhaps someday I’d lose it altogether. If some things could change, so could other things. What right had I to predict the future and predict it so nihilistically? As I got older I would probably change in hundreds of ways I couldn’t foresee. All I had to do was wait it out.
It was easy enough to kill yourself in a fit of despair. It was easy enough to play the martyr. It was harder to do nothing. To endure your life. To wait.
I slept. I think I actually fell asleep with my face pressed to my spiral notebook. I remember waking up in the blue hours of early morning and feeling a spiral welt on the side of my cheek. Then I pushed away the notebook and went back to sleep.
And my dreams were extravagant. Full of elevators, platforms in space, enormously steep and slippery staircases, ziggurat temples I had to climb, mountains, towers, ruins… I had some vague sense that I was assigning
myself dreams as a sort of cure. I remember once or twice waking and then falling back to sleep thinking: “Now I will have the dream which makes my decision for me.” But what was the decision I sought? Every choice seemed so unsatisfactory in one way or another. Every choice excluded some other choice. It was as if I were asking my dreams to tell me who I was and what I ought to do. I would wake with my heart pounding and then sink back to sleep again. Maybe I was hoping I’d wake up somebody else.
Fragments of those dreams are still with me. In one of them, I had to walk a narrow plank between two skyscrapers in order to save someone’s life. Whose? Mine? Bennett’s? Chloe’s? The dream did not say. But it was clear that if I failed, my own life would be over. In another, I reached inside myself to take out my diaphragm, and there, floating over my cervix, was a large contact lens. Womb with a view. The cervix was really an eye. And a nearsighted eye at that.
Then I remember the dream in which I was back in college preparing to receive my degree from Millicent McIntosh. I walked up a long flight of steps which looked more like the steps of a Mexican temple than the steps of Low Library. I teetered on very high heels and worried about tripping over my gown.
As I approached the lectern and Mrs. McIntosh held out a scroll to me, I realized that I was not merely graduating but was to receive some special honor.
