A Shining Affliction

by Annie G. Rogers

  In the predawn darkness, I sit on my back sunporch and watch the sky turn gray and the branches of the backyard tree go from black to brown. At daybreak, I crawl back into bed and sleep late into the morning, grateful that it is a Saturday.

  65

  As the pieces of this experience begin to come together, I write, just as I write about my sessions with Ben. I write furiously and quickly, because I realize these connections depend upon my getting them on paper. I write with a new sense of wholeness, I suppose, as Saint Augustine wrote to God in Confessions: “You hear what we speak by the fleshly sense, and you do not want the syllables to stand where they are; rather you want them to fly away so that others may come and you may hear a whole sentence.”

  I am trying to hear Blumenfeld as Saint Augustine believes God hears him. Words drop into me as wooden clothespins drop into a milk bottle. Some drop in with a resounding clink; others bounce off the rim. If Blumenfeld slows his speech, each word clinks into the bottle—“Are you wondering, Annie, how someone who doesn’t see you, really doesn’t recognize you, could possibly say goodbye to you?” I want to hear this as a “whole sentence,” but I hear it word by word first. Then, as the syllables fly away and the words begin to form a whole sentence, I find that I can’t listen without speaking.

  Unconsciously working against an injunction not to speak, I burst into speech without words—kicking Blumenfeld in the shins. This act is followed by a gap in memory within the session itself. This gap in memory marks what withdraws from me, both literally and figuratively—my father and my speech.

  The philosopher Heidegger writes, “What withdraws from us, draws us along by its very withdrawal, whether or not we become aware of it,” in What Is Called Thinking. He goes on to explain how drawing toward withdrawal can shape who we are: “Once we are drawn into the withdrawal, we are drawing toward what attracts us by its withdrawal. And once we, being so attracted, are drawing toward what withdraws, our essential nature already bears the stamp of ‘drawing toward.’ ” Another way of saying this is that the gaps in memory draw us into memory, whether we know it or not. So time is “interrupted” and “runs backwards” for me, and I am continually remembering things I don’t recognize as memories. As Ben does in his playing.

  What is clear to me now, as I think about myself at five (as if I were my own patient, just Ben’s age), is that when my father died without saying goodbye (leaving me with an injunction not to speak, as Blumenfeld explained), then this death not only drew me to him, it also left me with the impossible task of trying to find him and memories of him without words. As I pursue this task now, shocking moments of memory draw me to my father. I remember being held in my father’s arms; I also dream of waiting to be tortured. “And what withdraws in such a manner,” Heidegger writes, “keeps and develops its own, incomparable nearness.” Withdrawing when I want to speak, my father is with me; dying without saying goodbye, he is incomparably near. And Ben’s first foster mother, the “mama bear” who left him forever without saying goodbye, is incomparably near him too. It is little wonder that I know how to play these scenes with him!

  During the day and far into the night, as acts of terror on my body are being borne into words, a process of remembering that can be symbolized and shaped by the mind is under way. But the process itself is confusing and terrifying for me.

  I distance myself a little from the terror by thinking about it abstractly. As I am a psychologist and a therapist, the way my own mind shapes an unbearable trauma interests me enormously.

  It is impossible for me to know at what age my father started abusing me, and therefore impossible to know what memories might never have been preserved in words. Is it possible to recover memories that were never symbolized, I wonder? Or is the most common phenomenon of early childhood, amnesia about our earliest months of life, itself a result of speechlessness? I know from my reading that repeatedly abused children who have already learned to talk suffer partial or full amnesia about their ordeal. There may be a great part of their felt experience that can’t be preserved in words, but can be preserved in some other way. I wonder. Whatever the child’s age at the time of the original trauma, it seems that the process of remembering trauma in adulthood involves a psychological backtracking—going back through the barriers of amnesia that protected the child effectively against overwhelming feelings. Experiences in early childhood that could not be spoken are shaped by the adult’s mind, perhaps for the first time. Whatever is left that can’t be known, much less spoken, then would need to be endlessly relived. How does this ever end, I wonder. It appears that the process of giving words to unremembered experience involves returning to the feelings of unreality and horror that must have accompanied the original trauma. I say “must have” because we are in that gray area between memory and invention. I realize, even as I write these words, that this has been happening to me.

  My weekend is marked with feelings of unreality and listlessness. Ordinary objects appear and disappear. I don’t know when I am asleep and when I am dreaming. There are gaps, or amnesias, both in my waking life and in my dreams, which shift from scene to scene, and are incomplete. Some of the scenes I am reliving are so powerful and dreamlike that I call this state “being awake and dreaming.” Time slows down and speeds up. The camera of my mind stops, freezes a scene, and sends me the sensations and sounds to go with it.

  Throughout the day I feel as if I am caught up in a horror movie that’s not of my own making. I am compelled to find words, to write, but sometimes I can’t write. Then I read. Not psychology, but Saint Augustine, Martin Heidegger, Virginia Woolf. I can’t put her down.

  She records in her diary on the first day of March in 1937, “I wish I could write out my sensations at this moment.” She goes on to try to find words for what she does not yet have memory for:

  A physical feeling as if I were drumming slightly in the veins; very cold: impotent and terrified. As if I were exposed on a high ledge in full light. Very lonely ... Very useless. No atmosphere around me. No words. Very apprehensive. As if something cold and horrible—a roar of laughter at my expense—were about to happen. And I am powerless to ward it off: I have no protection. And this anxiety and nothingness surround me with a vacuum. It affects my thighs chiefly. And I want to burst into tears, but have nothing to cry for. Then a great restlessness seizes me ... the exposed moments are terrifying. I looked at my eyes in the glass and saw them positively terrified.

  When she wrote this passage in her diary, I notice, she had not yet written out, in “A Sketch of the Past,” the memory of Gerald Duck-worth molesting her on the ledge in the dining room at Talland House when she was six. In the diary passage, she is seeking the memory—as the memory itself tears through her consciousness. Entwined with physical sensations (“exposed on a ledge in full light”; “something cold and horrible”; “it affects my thighs chiefly”) are suggestions of the ways that she was effectively rendered speechless (“a roar of laughter at my expense”; “I am powerless to ward it off and have no protection”; “I want to burst into tears, but have nothing to cry for”). These are the fractured pieces that she cannot yet assemble into a coherent story. The writing itself is cryptic. And when Woolf summarized her life in “A Sketch of the Past,” she said that as a child, and even in the present, she felt her life “contained a large proportion of this cotton wool, this non-being.”

  Like Virginia Woolf, I experienced many times “this cotton wool, this non-being.” Like Virginia Woolf, I feel compelled to write. I struggle for words against the “cotton wool.” I record, as accurately as I can, the fractured pieces of memory that I cannot tell as a complete and coherent story, even now.

  In the midst of this process of remembering and writing and reading in earnest, I have Blumenfeld nearby, a man who wakes up fully in the middle of the night, to help me bring into words what has been unknowable because it was unspeakable.

  His presence in my life makes Ben’s story clearer to me too, and this
shows me something new—a shimmering pool of light on a dark street, where our two stories overlap.

  66

  During this period I am seeing Blumenfeld three times a week, working at Glenwood full-time again, seeing my three supervisors weekly, and in the evenings also studying for my comprehensive examinations. It would seem that the process of remembering my own trauma would make all this very difficult, if not impossible. It is difficult sometimes. But what is most vivid about this time is that in the interludes between intensive and disturbing bouts of memory, I feel an enormous sense of freedom, the same soaring sense I felt when I first learned to balance myself on a bicycle. My voices are strangely quiet during these interludes. After their steady company all my life, I miss them. For the first time, I am experiencing loneliness.

  In early June, I sit outside on the front steps with my gray-and-white cat, Murphy. It is dusk as I listen to a chorus of crickets and watch the washed light fade from the sky over the red slate rooftops. I notice that I am alive and can often remember details of daily events vividly. The periods of feeling unreal or numb or lost stand out now in clear contrast. In the past, moments of feeling alive blended almost imperceptibly back into the strong sense that I was not really alive. I could remember details then too, but it was as if they were not connected to events, to whole time sequences.

  Now my dreaming time is vivid and memorable, and whole too—whether I am awake or asleep. Time begins to create a stream of impressions, rather than to pass in interrupted chunks. How odd.

  I dream of a little girl who is vaguely familiar, but I do not know her. In the dream, I am dreaming her dream. There is a mug of milk, untouched. She leans against a wall. “Take me out, get me out of here,” she whispers to me. I am standing by a screened door. It creaks as I open it, but the child does not move. The milk in her blue mug is tepid and she does not want to drink it when I give it to her. Outside a storm is brewing, seashell sounds loud in the trees, their green leaves white underneath, the sky white-gray, milk-light on leaves. Soon it will rain, and I want her to leave with me before it does. I feel quite urgent about this. Then it is night and we are put in the backseat of a car by a man who drives away. I pull the child toward me, bringing her head against my chest. In her stillness, I feel her terror. I take her completely onto my lap. She’s too frightened to cry, but she pulls her legs up, so that I can hold all of her. We are going God knows where, and I remind myself that this is her dream, not my dream, to still my own heart’s terror.

  I waken and remember vividly that this little girl was in the examination room the night I was admitted into the hospital. She wanted to know why I was crying. I have the impression that I am a mother to her, or an older sister, someone related, somehow.

  I dream of an old woman who sews Ben’s shadow to his heels, and then she stitches my shadow to my heels too, and then she tells us that we are related—he is my own child, come back to me. Someone at a little distance is playing a piano and his fingers come down on the keys like a summer rain. Doors fling themselves open into a wide green field. Ben and I are unbelievably happy.

  67

  Ben knows he is to see me. When I spot him in the hall, he shouts,

  “You see me today. You come get me at nine, ‘member?”

  As I hand him the playroom door keys, he asserts, “I remember the right key.”

  Inside the playroom, he is tense. He walks around in a stiff, bouncing gait, stopping now and then to touch something briefly.

  Then he picks up the baby bottle on the sink and fills it. “Let’s play baby,” he says, turning toward me.

  “You would like to be my baby?” I ask.

  He lies down on the rug, with a bataka as a pillow, and covers himself with my sweater. He puts the bottle in his mouth and starts to suck, then pulls it out. He holds it out to me.

  “Would you like me to feed you?”

  He nods. “Where’s that other blanket?”

  I retrieve the old blue blanket and tuck it around him. I encircle him with one arm and offer him the bottle. He sucks greedily, looking off into space. When he stops sucking, I take the bottle from his mouth. He is very still. In his stillness, he reminds me of the little girl in my dream.

  “ ‘Member the mama bear?” he asks.

  “Yes, I do remember her,” I reply.

  But Ben does not go on and I wonder what he is trying to tell me or ask me.

  “What about the mama bear?” I ask back.

  “She went away,” he says simply. Three words, but a whole world came to an end.

  “Yes, she did go away,” I tell him, feeling my way, groping for his meaning. “But sometimes a mama bear comes back, Ben.”

  He glances at me briefly and nods, and again meets my eyes. Ben, child of my childhood—he could have been my own son.

  He rolls on his side and reaches over to the dollhouse and begins to sift the toys through his fingers. He picks up a small toy toilet, sits up, and hands it to me.

  “Make me one of these out of clay,” he says.

  “You want me to make it, or do you want to?”

  “You!” he says, smiling.

  As I begin to work the clay, Ben dumps an entire box of assorted small toys onto the floor. He sifts through them and selects a broken handle to a jump rope.

  “What’s this?” he asks, holding it up.

  “A handle,” I reply matter-of-factly.

  “No, this is a cigar!” he declares.

  “A cigar?” I ask.

  “Yep. A cigar for the baby,” he says.

  “Oh? Some baby poop to go into the toilet?” I ask, thinking all at once that Rachael has influenced me. God, I sound psychoanalytic! I expect Ben to reject this interpretation.

  But Ben blushes and sifts around through the toys again, muttering to himself, “Poop, poop, poo,” pushing out the sound in short spurts, while bouncing up and down lightly on his bottom against his tucked-in heels, as if to confirm this interpretation. He looks from the toys to me.

  “What a fine mess, Ben. Look at the fine mess you made!”

  He grins. “You know what? We could make a fishing pole!” he says, holding up the handle again. He sits back on his heels and puts several straws together, pushing one into the other. With my help, he attaches the handle, a string and a paper-clip fishhook. Searching for these parts, he scatters the toys about so that they cover about one-third of the rug. Then he sits among them and, handing me the fishing pole, says,

  “I am the fish and you will fish for me.”

  “You are the fish in a lake of toys?”

  He smiles and nods.

  I stand back and cast the line into the “lake” and wait. Ben tugs at it and lets go.

  “It hasn’t got any bait on it!” he complains.

  I go to my desk drawer and pull out the animal cracker box and carefully stick one animal cracker between the parts of the paper clip, a task that requires some effort, then return to my fishing.

  Ben watches me carefully, and I cast out the line again. He tugs at it and swiftly takes the animal cracker off and pops it in his mouth. As I reel the empty line back in, he bounces on his heels and giggles. I try two more times before Ben holds on to the line and follows it out up to my chair, allowing himself to be “caught.” He stands before me. I look him over, touching his hair, his arms, measuring his length with my eyes.

  “Oh, what a beautiful big fish!” I say. “And such a smart fish.” I pause for emphasis. “I think I’ll eat him up!”

  Ben laughs for joy, struggles halfheartedly, laughs again.

  “No. That would be a shame. I guess I’ll put him back in his lake.”

  I pick him up and put him down among the toys with a verbal “Splash!”

  “Fish for me again!” Ben says with renewed excitement.

  “Not today. It is about time to go,” I tell him.

  Spontaneously, he scoops up many but not all of the toys on the floor and puts them back into their box.

  He leav
es me easily, dragging his fishing pole behind him.

  68

  It is the end of the first week in June before I am able to see Rachael again. She has had hip surgery during my absence, and is still recovering.

  Crossing the parking lot to the Psychoanalytic Institute, I find company enough: the voices of two analysts carry on the air and come down to me like water on leaves, a splashing of confidences and laughter. In their gray suits, they nod together. There are sparrows here too; brown-and-gray-feathered, they balance between tails and beaks, hop, skitter, hop, hop this way and that, skittish. And here’s a pigeon, startlingly large, with big red feet; it chortles to itself and hobbles importantly and slowly over the granite wearing its own suit of gray and blue, quite at home here.

  In the waiting room I find the same outdated magazines and the same buzzer with its little note: “Please ring when you arrive for your appointment.” I remember hesitating, wondering if I was a patient. Now I know: I am a patient and I am a therapist. The wholeness of my life hangs together in one still moment. And of that moment I will tell Rachael nothing. I could more easily tell her about the resemblance of sparrows and pigeons to her analyst colleagues than about this realization.

  And here she is—stooped and tall, with those intense dark eyes, her white-gray hair, leaning on two canes rather than one—an addition that makes her more herself, not less. I get up to follow her and know that she is very old, that she will not live on and on, at least not in this particular guise.

  Like my other supervisors, Rachael assumes that I have been depressed. I do not tell her anything more and she does not press for details. She offers me candy, and it is as if nothing has changed and no time has passed; and it is as if all the colors and sounds and smells of the world have changed and years have gone by. Rachael wants to know about Ben and the other children immediately, as if she has waited for this next installment for a long time.