A Plea for Eros: Essays

Extracts from a Story of the Wounded Self

THE FIRST STORY BELONCS TO MY MOTHER. SHE IS THE ONE who tells it, and when she tells it, she always includes a single terrible moment. She was at home taking a bath, and she thought to herself, How is it possible for a person to be as sad as I am? My mother was miserable because I was born too early. My lungs were undeveloped, and the doctor told my parents I might die. For two weeks, I lay in an incubator while my mother and father waited for my fate to be decided. In those days, the nurses didn’t touch or massage babies left in incubators. I was separated from my mother in the first days of my life, and I now think that experience marks the beginning of a particular personality When I suffered from convulsions on the day of my christening party, I scared my mother yet again. If I felt warm, my mother grew alarmed, and a single sound from my crib brought her to me. I was the firstborn child of a loving mother who lived in fear that she might lose me. We can’t remember our infancies, but they live in our bodies, and had I not been frail at birth, I would have been someone else, and I would have had other thoughts. When I look back, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t carry around inside me a sensation of being wounded. The feeling ranges from the very slight to the acute, but the ache in my chest, dim or strong, has remained a constant in my life.

It is night, and I am lying in bed. Above me I notice a large drill thrust into the wall. No one is holding it; it begins to turn on its own, and as it turns, I see that long, thin cracks are forming in the wall. The cracks get larger, and then the wall begins to break open. I am overwhelmed with terror and throw myself against the wall to try to keep the fragments together, to stop the wall from collapsing. I’m screaming. I wake my mother. She remembers the night vividly and says that I must have woken my younger sister Liv, who panicked and also began to shriek. When my mother entered the room, we were both howling in fear. She said I had thrown myself against the wall and it looked as if I were trying to climb it. I don’t remember Liv or my mother, but I remember the gaping fissures in the plaster and the revolving drill as if it had happened yesterday. I thought I was awake, but it must have been a dream, one without a threshold—/ occupied the same place in the dream and in reality. The fear has never diminished in memory. I must have been about five years old.

This dream, hallucination, or night terror has haunted me as an adult because it is so simple, nearly abstract in its purity, and like no other in my experience. The bulk of my dreams as a child were long, shifting narratives with witches and ogres and people I knew that took place in streets and meadows and rooms and corridors. The crumbling wall remains an efficient metaphorical expression for both my obscure but omnipresent wound and the fear that often accompanies it. I’m afraid that thresholds and boundaries won’t hold, that things will go to pieces.

My sister Liv and I left our mother and father for the first time to visit our grandfather’s cousin in his little house in High-wood, just outside Chicago. After what was probably a week of our pining for her, our mother came to see us and then a couple of days later take us home by train. If I’m not mistaken, it was a cloudy afternoon. I remember how glad I felt as the three of us walked together through downtown Chicago and the feeling of my hand in my mother’s. On our way, we crossed a bridge and saw two policemen restraining a man who had apparently climbed over the railing. Whether my mother said that the man had been intending to jump off the bridge or I simply knew it I can’t say, but the officers and the desperate man made me feel the city’s danger, and I found that air of menace more inspiring than upsetting. Very soon after that, we turned onto a sidewalk. There was a large gray building to my left, and to my right a crowd of people had gathered around someone lying on the pavement. I know it was a woman, but I have no memory of her. I can’t see her face or body anymore. My mother, Liv, and I all looked at her, because I remember my mother’s distress at the thought that we had seen her. When we walked away, my mother explained that the woman was having “an epileptic seizure” and couldn’t help what was happening to her. We then crossed a wide street on our way to have lunch at Marshall Field’s department store. The light was green and we began to walk, but in the middle of our crossing it changed to red and the cars moved forward as if we weren’t there. This amazed me. My visual memory of that intersection, the cars, the looming building across from us, and the arching ramp above is exceedingly vivid. It may be that what I had witnessed immediately before, a chaotic body, heightened my recollection of what came afterward — the chaotic street. The honking cars that suddenly whizzed past us replaced the other, more threatening image of a woman who had lost control of herself.

In my first novel, I included an epileptic seizure witnessed from the roof of a building in New York. In the book, the woman’s convulsive movements are photographed by one of the characters, and I now wonder if I wasn’t returning to that street in Chicago and recording in fiction what I was unable to remember in fact. I am not an epileptic, but the shuddering body I saw must have echoed some tremor in myself, and it frightened me enough to swallow the picture whole and leave in its place an absence filled only by my mother’s words epileptic seizure.

Like many children, I was prone to inward reveries — long dreaming sessions in which I would lose myself and look out at the world. How strange it is, I would think, that we see and smell and speak and eat and feel, that there are trees and cars and houses, barbed wire, cornfields, and cows. These thoughts were accompanied by a lifting within me that I experienced vaguely as closeness to God and nature (the two mingled in my mind) and as a form of private magic, a secret belief in my own power that set me apart from other people and would take me very far in the world. I have often wondered where this inner conviction came from. I was in no way a prodigious child. My early memories of school are mostly sad ones. I learned to read easily but suffered terribly over numbers. Even now, I cringe when I remember the long rows of intractable digits that never came out right. The complex relations among children — the ins and outs of friendships and alliances, the hierarchies of dominance and weakness on the school ground — puzzled and often hurt me. I wasn’t athletic either, a serious deficit in most places but probably even more so in the Midwest, where physical prowess could catapult both boys and girls into a heroic position among their peers.

And yet, despite evidence to the contrary, I held fiercely to the lonely idea of my own great destiny, and I suspect that I clung to this irrational position for a single reason: my parents loved me very well. It was plain that my mother and my father thought I was wonderful. They made me feel that nothing was beyond me, and their belief in me and in my three younger sisters was unshakeable, a fortress into which we could retreat whenever we needed it. Years would pass before I understood that I came from a family that was remarkable in this respect, not ordinary. We are, all of us, made from our parents, physically and emotionally, and the quality we call “character” partakes of both genetic givens and the mysterious meanderings of a particular psychic history.

Some people are more prone than others to numinous experience — those moments or minutes of transcendence, disassociation, or euphoria. It seems clear to me now that I had a neurological as well as an emotional predisposition to these curious transports of the spirit. As a child I suffered from headaches, and at eight I remember my shock when a friend told me she had never had one. All my life, I have shivered at the mere sight of an ice cube, even on a sweltering day. Little more than a passing thought about ice produces a genuine shudder of cold in me. I once asked a neurologist about this, but he seemed not to know what I was talking about. Around the age of eleven, I suffered from commanding inner voices and rhythms that terrified me with their insistence. They always came when I was alone, and they seemed to want to impose their will on me, to press my body into their marching orders. The danger of madness seemed very real to me then, and I’m lucky they vanished. When I was twenty, I was struck with my first migraine, which lasted for eight months and then lifted. In the years that followed, it became obvious that my nervous system was unstable. I lived with auras that ranged from the very mild — a few black spots and brilliant white lights — to the more dramatic, such as a sudden seizure in my arm that hurled me against a wall. Once, I was subject to the very curious phenomenon known as “Lilliputian hallucinations,” during which I saw a small pink man and his little pink ox on the floor of my bedroom and believed they were actually there. I have also had several euphoric episodes before getting sick, and despite the inevitable aftermath, I recall these moments with pleasure: My vision takes on a sudden heightened clarity that makes me imagine I am seeing what I normally can’t, and then, just as I remark to myself on the fantastic quality of my eyesight, I feel an overwhelming joy.

Common wisdom designates this kind of happiness as aberrant, false, a mere trick of the brain that heralds an oncoming migraine or seizure, and there is some truth in this, but the experience is as real as any other, and it may be that trying to disentangle any emotion from the nervous system is futile. It is the interpretation that matters. However morbid my sensitivities may be, they are inseparable from the story of myself, and my reading of these peculiarities over time has been decisive in determining who I was and am.

I don’t remember having any “rules” at home. We had routines that my three sisters and I accepted without question: getting up and eating breakfast, brushing our teeth, dressing for school, doing our homework, and going to bed early. Although we were sometimes scolded, we weren’t punished. A look of disappointment in my mother’s or father’s eyes was usually enough to prompt a heartfelt apology from a momentarily wayward daughter. School, on the other hand, was all regulations, prohibitions, and punishments. I was well behaved, not only because I dreaded the cloakroom where children were rumored to be beaten but because I believed in an idea of goodness. I wanted to be pure, truthful — a diminutive saint. It’s a good thing I wasn’t an only child. My three younger sisters did me a great service when they laughed at my pious notions, my seriousness, my overdeveloped need to be responsible, conscientious, perfect. I’m afraid this unattractive portrait of my earlier self is accurate. I felt so much all the time that I longed for a way to order my inner tumult. Although I was a kind child, I could also be a rigid, humorless little person who took almost everything too hard. I wish I could say these flaws in my character have vanished, but that would be a lie. I remain attached to order, to moral thresholds, to all the forms that keep chaos at bay.

At Longfellow Elementary School, talking in the lunchroom was forbidden. Not even a whisper was tolerated. We ate in silence. If the rule was broken, the miscreant was sent to the far end of the room by an adult person known as a “lunchroom monitor” to eat at one of the brown tables with folding chairs. The tables for good children were white with long, smooth benches. The world of the brown tables was a remote place, inhabited by the naughty, the restless, the high-spirited — mostly boys who hadn’t mastered the art of keeping quiet. I was in the first half of my second-grade year when it happened to me. The school principal, an intimidating, immensely tall person with the uncannily apt name of Mr. Lord, strode into the lunchroom to deliver an announcement. He began speaking, stopped suddenly in mid-sentence, and, to my horror, pointed in my direction. “You!” he bellowed. “Go to the brown tables!” I was stunned. I hadn’t uttered a word. I had done nothing, but I picked up my tray and made the long, mortifying journey past the other children to take the brown seat of humiliation.

I was so troubled by the incident that I mustered the courage to speak to Mr. Lord on the playground after lunch. I walked toward him, looked up at his face, and said, “What did I do? I wasn’t talking.” I detected embarrassment and discomfort in his expression. He hesitated, and in that brief moment when he said nothing, I could already feel my triumph. He peered down at me without looking me in the eyes and muttered, “You were swallowing your food while I was talking.” I was seven years old, and I knew this was ridiculous. He was ridiculous. The sentence burned itself into my consciousness as a sign of absolute sadistic stupidity. It had the force of an inner revelation: Some adults are as mean as some children. It was my innocence that had given me the strength to speak up and my innocence coupled with the Stalinist whims of Mr. Lord that removed every trace of humiliation from my trip to the brown tables.

My internal moral compass was extremely sensitive, however, and that same year I did something that tormented me for a long time afterward because the sin I may or may not have committed hinged on the interpretation of a single word. The class was doing arithmetic problems. As usual, I was struggling with the little numbers and the dreaded subtraction sign, which for some reason was so much worse than its friendlier companion, the plus sign. Our teacher, Mrs. G., left the room, and after she was gone, I realized I had to pee. I paused for a moment, then stood up and walked downstairs to the lavatory. My memory of that walk includes no feeling that I was doing anything particularly wrong. It’s almost dream-like now. I wandered into the murky green hallway, made my way down the steps, peed alone in the little toilet stall, and then walked out the door marked GIRLS. As I left, I saw Mrs. G. straight ahead of me. It was time for the official bathroom break, and she was leading the class down the steps in two lines. She looked me in the eye and said, “Was it an emergency?” I said, “Yes.” Immediately after I had spoken and for years to come, I asked myself whether I had lied. It wasn’t really an emergency in the true sense of the word, was it? Could I have held my pee? Probably. Would it have been hard? Maybe. Did just having to go pretty badly constitute an emergency?

As an adult, I can tell myself that treating schoolchildren like prison inmates is bad pedagogy, that the half-lie may have saved me from a scolding or worse, but the story’s interest lies in my struggle over semantics and the moral resonance of interpreting the meaning of a word. Had Mrs. G. not used the word emergency, I never would have remembered the incident. Some words, sentences, and phrases sit forever in the mind like brain tattoos. On the playground, children used to sing the chorus “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Few things then or now have ever struck me as more false than that ludicrous chant. Words can devastate, and they can heal.

I don’t have a picture in my mind of our Sunday school teacher reading the story of Abraham and Isaac to the class. I can’t remember what she looked like and I don’t recall her name, so I’ll call her Mrs. Y. I retain a vague memory of light coming through a window and floating specks of dust in the air, but that might be from another class and another year at St. John’s Lutheran Church. I do know we heard the story and that it alarmed me even before the teacher uttered these words: “You have to love God more than anyone or anything.” “More than your parents?” I asked her. “Yes.”

That “yes” tortured me for days. What kind of a God asked a man to kill his own son? What if God asked me to kill my parents? I could never do it. I knew I loved them far more than I loved God. Although I can’t remember the class, I do have a vivid memory of lying on my bed at night thinking about the sentence. I can still hear my sister’s steady breathing across the room. I wished so hard that she would wake up. The fear was in my lungs and made it difficult to breathe. I hated the thought that God was there, an all-seeing, all-knowing, jealous God was there, in the room with me and Liv and this God, the one I was supposed to love more than anyone or anything, was the same God who asked Abraham to murder his son. God was capable of anything.

After a week of lying awake with the sentence, I finally confessed to my mother: “Mrs. Y. said we have to love God more than our parents.” My mother looked at me and spoke a single word: “Nonsense.” She was sitting at the kitchen table when she said it, and I was standing very close to her. I can still feel the relief in my chest and a lightness coursing through my body. I turned around, and suddenly weightless, I felt as if I were floating down the stairs to my room.

When my daughter was three years old, she looked up at me and said, “Mom, when I grow up, will I still be Sophie?” I said yes because it’s true that a name follows a body over time, but the three-year-old who asked the question bears little resemblance to the grown-up young woman I know today. We need to think of the self as a continuum, a steady story over time. The mind is always searching for similarities, associations, repetitions, because they create meaning. When recognizable repetitions are disrupted, people say, “He wasn’t himself,” or, “I don’t know what came over me. I’m not myself today.” A few years ago, I listened to a woman who was both a doctor and a manic-depressive speak in public about a memoir she had written. She described the end of her manic episodes by saying, “I returned to myself.” But strictly speaking, that logic is false. Whether people are besieged by a chemical imbalance or thrown into a panic or depression by a wrenching loss, their inconsistencies also belong to the self. It’s the feeling or impression of foreignness that makes us want to cast off the interruptions, explosions, lapses, and inconsistencies — all the material in ourselves that we refuse to integrate into a narrative.

I didn’t know what to do with what I saw in my mind those nights I lay thinking over the sentence — Abraham’s hand clutching the knife and raising it in the air as he prepares to murder his son, to cut open his body. For me, whatever the theological explanation, it was an image of vengeance, rage, and impending mutilation. Many years after that fateful Sunday school class, I sought help from a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, where I was a graduate student. I felt very calm when I walked into Dr. R.’s office, ready to explicate my various troubles and anxieties. I sat down in a chair opposite him, looked him in the eyes, and all at once, without the slightest inner forewarning, burst into tears. He didn’t say a word, but I watched his hand move toward a box of Kleenex, conveniently placed within arm’s reach, which he then handed over to me. It was a practiced, knowing gesture. Even at the time, I found a touch of comedy in the scene and wondered how many other distraught graduate students had shed unexpected tears in this doctor’s office. It’s a sorry little fact that we are often as mysterious to ourselves as we are to others.

I visited Dr. R. for several weeks, but I no longer recall how many. I talked a lot about life and love and my nerves, but there is one comment he made that stands out with the sublime distinctness that only recognition can bring. He said that he thought I was terribly afraid of violence in myself. He then pointed out that he was absolutely convinced that I was incapable of violence either against myself or against anyone else. As soon as the statement was out of his mouth, I felt huge relief. It was as if someone had come along and unloosened a long fat rope that had bound me from neck to toe.

Only in the act of writing this have I understood that Dr. R.’s words echoed the single word my mother had spoken years earlier: “Nonsense.”

A field trip to the state hospital in Faribault: The room is large and rectangular, with tall windows that line one of its blank walls. I walk down the aisle between rows of beds. The windows are on my left. A gray light streams through them from outside. I walk slowly and say nothing. Someone, probably the guide, a man or a woman, I don’t remember, says that this room is for the “profoundly retarded.” In one bed there is a boy, a big child, perhaps ten or eleven, dressed only in diapers wrapped around his slender hips. His hair is dark and silky, and he lies on his back with one cheek turned onto the pillow. The flesh of his thin but flaccid body looks like an infant’s — beautiful, white and un-marred. His eyes have no focus. He drools. And then there’s aview. I see the parking lot from a distance — three orange school buses in weak sunlight and, behind them, tall and mostly bare trees. I can’t say with any certainty whether the view is from inside or outside the asylum, but because I seem to be looking down at the buses, I suspect that I saw it from inside, perhaps from a second-story window. Why that child is fixed inside me is a question I can’t fully answer, but I think the sight of him mirrors some speechless fear and sorrow in myself. In him I saw an image of abandonment and isolation greater than anything 1 have ever seen before or since. And why has the image of the buses stayed with me? Perhaps they were the promise of going home.

One may wonder why the school authorities imagined that trooping ten- and eleven-year-olds through the grim wards of a state hospital would be a beneficial outing. We weren’t studying anything that even distantly touched on the subjects of retardation, madness, or state asylums. Our fifth-grade teacher, Mr. L., had certainly not initiated the excursion. (It was probably an annual duty organized by invisible authorities. The following year, we toured a museum dedicated entirely to farm accidents, in which we were treated to life-size models of arms severed by threshing machines and tegs mashed in combines.) Mr. L. was young and soft-spoken and respectful. Although I wasn’t at all aware of it at the time, I suspect his kindness gave me energy. His classroom was more like my own home, and in that environment I thrived. I wrote, directed, and (selfishly) starred in a play mounted in the school theater; gathered signatures from every pupil in the fifth and sixth grades to petition the principal for the right to talk during lunch {an action that failed miserably); threw myself into writing and illustrating a novel for English called Carrie at Baxter Manor; and discovered a passion for the abolitionists. I found new heroes in Harriet Tubman and Booker T. Washington and struggled through the Victorian language of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, all the while riding high on a wave of what children call “popularity.”

The following year, my old wound reopened. It began in February and lasted until the school year ended. For reasons that were obscure to me, I precipitously fell from favor with the girls who had once liked me. I turned into a despised outcast — the butt of cruel jokes and torments. I was jostled, pinched, and pushed. Every remark I made was met with snickering and whispers from the girls who by some stroke of magic had become omnipotent in that tiny world of sixth-grade pubescent girlhood. I lived in a state of bewildered anguish for months. Like most stories of female bullying, mine began with a single girl. I am sure she had detected my bruised inner sanctum and took aim. Had I been tougher, I might have resisted her machinations. She came from a family in which the sibling rivalry was ferocious. Her desire to hurt me was no doubt homegrown, but I had few tools at the time for analysis of her psyche, and even if I had, they probably wouldn’t have done me much good. Open hostility — making sure I was kept out of games and conversations — mingled with surreptitious cruelty, false acts of kindness to trick me into believing that I had been accepted once again. These deceits were worse. The duplicity sickened me. I drooped and dragged my sorry self around like a kicked dog. My only defense would have been genuine indifference. I had seen it in others and would have loved it for myself, but this quality evaded me. I wanted to be liked and admired and couldn’t fathom what had decided my abject fate. One day, however, I returned to my desk and found that a drawing of mine had been marked up and torn. My enemies had made a strategic error. A small breeze of comprehension blew through me. I was the best artist in my class, and I knew it. My pictures were universally praised, and I was proud of my gift. Desecrating a drawing was a sign of envy.

My visual memories of those months are like gray fragments. I can see the hallway in the school building and the door to the toilet where I would sneak into a stall and shed a few tears as quietly as possible. I remember contemplating my pleated skirt and the gray ribbed wool stockings I often wore in winter as I sat there alone and, despite my unhappi-ness, felt relieved to be away from the others.

At my mothers urging, my father took up my case with the teacher, Mr. V. That encounter took on mythical dimensions in our family because Mr. V. was surprised by what my father had to say. Oblivious to all the intrigue that had been lurking in his own classroom, he spoke the words my parents would both later repeat to me: “But why Siri? She has so much going for her.”

It must have been in November or December of the following academic year that I had an epiphany. I now think that moment was simply a self-conscious recognition of my own dramatically changed circumstances. My family had left Minnesota for Bergen, Norway. My father was spending his sabbatical doing research at the university in the city where my mother’s brother and sister and their families lived. I loved the Rudolph Steiner School I attended. I loved my teachers. I loved my best friend, Kristina. The moment came one night after a party given by one of the boys in my class. He came from a wealthy family that lived in a large, low, elegant house outside Bergen. I was wearing the pink dress my mother had sewn for me, a minidress with a lace ruffle down the front, and the pink suede shoes with a small heel that had been purchased at the largest department store in Bergen. At the party I had danced with every boy in my class. Each one in turn had wrapped his arms around me and swayed slowly to the maudlin class favorite, “Silence Is Golden.” As I stepped out the door into the cold night, I saw that it was snowing. Outdoor lights illuminated the circular drive in front of the house as well as the snowflakes, which were so large I felt I could see the articulated form of each one as they fell slowly to the ground and turned it white. The scene wasn’t only beautiful; it was touched by magic. The dull, brown, and barren world of only hours before had been transfigured into a new and radiant albescence. I didn’t understand it at the time, but no picture could have matched my inner life more perfectly. I told myself to remember the snow and to remember my pure, strong happiness at simply being alive to see it. That thought has never left me.

The lesson of these brutal shifts of fortune ran deep. For some people, cruelty came easily, shamelessly. For me, every unkind word I uttered was followed by a merciless guilt and remorse I could hardly bear. I continue to be preoccupied with these differences among people. The mysteries of personality aren’t easily parsed, but it is certain that human beings run the gamut from the highly empathetic to the absolutely cold. The secret lies in our bodies and in the stories of our lives with other people, in the dark nuances of repetitions and interruptions.

It’s the summer of 1968, and most of the day and into the night I read. I read one book after another. The hooks excite and agitate me. I can’t stop reading during the day, and for the first time inmy life I suffer from ongoing insomnia. One night at two o’clock in the morning, I am still awake. I have been reading David Cop-perfield, but I’ve put it down from exhaustion. I get out of bed and walk to the window. I lift aside the shade and look into the night that isn ‘t night but isn ‘t daylight either. A pale yellow-green haze illuminates the rows of houses in front of me. It’s Reykjavik in June. There are no people outside and no noises. Everyone is asleep. Standing there, I am struck by a strong but pleasant sadness. All my anxiety leaves me as I look outside. I stand and look for a while longer and then return to bed.

Again and again, I have seen those houses in that queer light through the window. The memory is stubborn and potent. Why is this memory so insistent when others have vanished? Unlike the evening when I watched the snowfall, I didn’t tell myself to remember that view, but it returns to me all the time. The memory carries a feeling of melancholy that is linked to both reading and sleeplessness. The experience of David’s childhood had been an enormous one for me. By the time I looked out that window, I had lived through the sadism of Mr. Murdstone, the death of Dearest, the tenderness of button-popping Peggotty, the flinty goodness of Aunt Betsey, and the wonders of Mr. Dick, a character who remains one of my favorites in all of literature. It was that summer I began to nurse the fantasy of becoming a writer. The books made me feel deep and alive, as if these stories were closer to me than anything else. No one could have been less orphaned than I was with my two loving and attentive parents, and yet the sufferings of David Copperfield and Jane Eyre touched on my old sore. I surrendered the whole force of my empathy to the hero and heroine of those novels. Nevertheless, when I read about their sufferings and humiliations, my grief for them was a kind of safe translation — a reinvention of my own emotional life. Through them, I was able to make a turn in myself, and somehow that view from the window seen alone and at night has become an image for what I now recognize as the end of my childhood.

When I say my wound became political in the years that followed, I don’t mean that my involvement in the anti-war movement was somehow insincere or that I have any regrets about my activism. As a champion of the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, the poor, and the oppressed, I found a new outlet for the somewhat irrational but nevertheless strong sense I had of being an outsider in a group — uncomfortable, awkward, and quick to feel a slight. Political feeling can’t exist without identification, and mine inevitably went to people without power. In contrast, right-wing ideologies often appeal to those who want to link themselves to authority, people for whom the sight of military parades or soldiers marching off to war is aggrandizing, not painful. Inevitably, there is sublimation in politics, too. It becomes an avenue for suppressed aggression and anger, and I was no exception. And so it was that armed with passion and gorged on political history, I became a firebrand at fourteen. For three years, I read and argued and demonstrated. I marched against the Vietnam War, helped print strike T-shirts at Carleton College after the deaths of four students at Kent State, attended rallies, raised money for war-torn Mozambique, signed petitions, licked envelopes for the American Indian Movement, and turned into a feminist.

But even then, I didn’t believe all the rhetoric — the puerile drivel that escaped the lips of people like Abby Hoffman and members of the Chicago Seven. The militarism of the Black Panthers, the violence of the Weathermen, the shallowness of Guerilla Theater all alienated me. I remember listening to Russell Means, a leader of AIM, one winter afternoon in Minneapolis as he expounded on the superiority of American Indian culture as if it were a monolith and thinking to myself that his polemic distorted the vast differences among tribes to a degree that was nothing short of preposterous. I began to understand that ideologies necessarily push, pull, and tug at reality to make it fit the system. Even when they are committed in the service of a noble cause, lies inevitably make me recoil.

By the time I entered St. Olaf College as a freshman in the fall of 1973, the historical period into which I had been swept had more or less ended. I vividly remember a discussion I had with a sociology professor my first week as a student. He was a former priest who had been a civil rights activist and had marched in Selma. We discussed “the fall of the New Left.”

Iam sitting at the bottom of a row of white steps in a narrow hallway. There is a door with a glass window that leads to the street. I am sobbing. I was sixteen then and had fallen in love with a tall, handsome political agitator five years older than I was. He had ended it. The young women are crouching on the floor trying to comfort me. It is strange that I don’t remember where this took place — except that it must have been Minneapolis — or who the two people in front of me were. They weren’t close friends, but you would think I could come up with names or at least what they looked like. I also don’t remember how the romance ended. It seems to me that he had written to me, but I have no memory of a letter being delivered to that place. I have repressed it and can’t bring it back, no matter how hard I try. I do know that sitting on those steps, I was inconsolable. My chest heaved. I snorted, honked, and wailed, and the sheer power of my emotion impressed the two hapless witnesses to my heartbreak. I could see it in their astonished faces, the features of which are now lost.

At that moment I was all wound. First loves are often terrible, probably because they are first and there is no conscious history into which they may be absorbed. And yet, the truth is I cried like a baby, without inhibition or a shred of dignity to hold me up, and I can’t help but feel awed by that weeper on the stairs. When faced with separation from a person I loved, I traveled backward into the far reaches of my infancy. I would fall in love again, and I would suffer separations again, and I would cry again, but I would never allow myself to sob with such full-throated, unbridled freedom ever again.

I mourned for a year — the year I again found myself in Bergen. I was a student at the venerable Katedral Skolen, founded in the year 1153, and lived outside the city with my aunt and uncle. My parents had arranged it. Although I didn’t talk much about my sorrow to them, they were deeply aware of it, and they understood that I needed to be a world away. In that rainy city of mountains on the western coast of Norway, I nursed my broken heart, visited my beloved grandmother every day, read hundreds of books, wrote bad poetry, and smoked innumerable cigarettes. I was a seventeen-year-old intellectual hermit, and I think it did me good. Not long after I returned to the United States, the old love object appeared at my door. I rejected him, and to this day the memory of turning him away is sweet.

In college I retreated to the library. I have always loved libraries — the quiet, the smell, the expectation of imminent discovery. In the next book I will find it — some unspeakable pleasure or startling revelation or extraordinary nuance I had never felt or thought of before. I sat in the library every day for hours and was happy there, but I hadn’t left home. I attended the college where my father was a professor and where he gave many hours of his time to the Norwegian American Historical Association as executive secretary. The association’s office was in the college library, and my mother worked in the periodical department of that same library. Two years later, my sister Liv was also studying in that library, and three years after that, my sister Ingrid arrived. Only the third sister, Asti, went away for college to work in another library in another town.

One afternoon, I left my carrel to talk to a male friend who was having a sad bout with a girlfriend. When I returned, I found a note on the desk. It was a letter of remorse. The person who had written it had eavesdropped on me and my friend and discovered that his or her ideas about me had been all wrong. I recall perfectly only this sentence: “I thought you were a cold bitch, but now I know you are a kind, good person.” The letter was unsigned. Since I hadn’t been aware of this unknown person’s dislike for me, I didn’t welcome the news, but it didn’t surprise me either. By the time I received that letter, I had traveled great distances from the girl in the sixth grade who wept in the toilet, but I was still suspect and was still an outsider. Provincial life feeds on conformity — on the idea that no one should stick out if she can help it. The crippled, retarded, and senile can’t help it and are forgiven, but sticking out on purpose was regarded as a criticism of the community at large. Who does she think she is? Indeed, who did I think I was? My twelve-year-old self would have loved to be taken in by her tormenters, but the nineteen-year-old had learned to feel contempt for those who lived by the egalitarian prejudice that ruled my hometown and continued to haunt me through my college years in that same town. And yet the child dreaming in the woods behind the family house, who felt solitary and transcendent and possessed of a singular destiny, remained in the young woman in the library, and perhaps people inhaled that strange, arrogant inner belief and reacted with distaste. If the vulnerable aren’t also proud, they are crushed.

I read and I wrote. I wrote stories and poems, far better than the hundreds of pages of awful things I had written in high school. The college literary magazine rejected everything I had to offer. It is interesting to me that I recall those rejections with bitterness but have entirely forgotten other, later rejections. Only a few months ago, I moved my study from one room to another and organized my papers. Among them I found several rejection letters from literary magazines, some of them very long and detailed, which I had no memory of ever having received. It may be that those early dismissals of my writing smacked of personal antipathy, that it hardly mattered what I wrote, whereas the later letters were merely a matter of literary taste. All in all, my inner life with books during college was better than life on campus, and I nurtured vague dreams of leaving Minnesota and its sturdy, sincere, polite Lutherans for somewhere more vivid, more dangerous, more anything.

In the fall of 1975, I signed on for a semester in the Far East. I left home without quite leaving it because the faculty supervisors of the trip were my own parents, and my three sisters came along as well. I was twenty years old, a young woman in a trembling state of readiness for adventure. While a few of my fellow students came down with culture shock, I spent the early weeks of the trip in Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong in a feverish trance of pleasure. By the time we arrived in Chiang Mai, Thailand, my body had become so awake to sensual stimuli — to the piercing noises of strange birds, the lilt of Mandarin and Cantonese vowels, colors in the market places so brilliant they almost hurt, the new odors of flowers, the pungent smell of meats, and the stink of unknown fruits— that I felt almost reborn. It is perhaps the only time in my life from which I have no memory of reading anything. I must have read because I took classes, but it couldn’t have mattered very much. The words have vanished.

We spent three months in Chiang Mai, and like countless Europeans and Americans before me, I fell under the spell of an eastern enchantment I didn’t want to break. It was a form of cultural tipsiness, I suppose, a need to plunge into what I had never seen or tasted before. My years in Norway had been spent with the familiar. I knew the language. My mother’s family and my father’s relatives lived in that country. In sharp contrast, Thailand was radically foreign. I fell in love with a Thai man, V., and entered a period that on hindsight looks like an explosion of pent-up desire. Every day upon waking I felt it — a wild happiness that surged through me for weeks on end.

My senses remained on high alert, and even thinking back on that time makes me feel giddy. I could never have a similar experience now. I have too much behind me, too many references, stories, too many years of thoughts. I was raw then. Unlike many of my recollections that are weirdly drained of all hues, like a black-and-white movie, my memories of Thailand blaze with color.

I am looking down at the deep brown, wrinkled, and extremely dirty face of a man from one of the hill tribes. He is smiling at me with ochre teeth. His clothes are royal blue and red and covered with silver ornaments that catch the sunlight. In his face I can see that he finds me just as marvelous as I find him.

It is a cool night, and I am standing on the steps of V.’s house when a tuk-tuk, one of the small trucks that serve as Chiang Mai’s taxis, stops on the road. P. and several others climb out and walk toward us, but it is only P. whom I remember without blur. He is tripping toward me with an enormous grin on his face, dressed in a white T-shirt, narrow blue jeans, and over his shoulders he has draped a brilliant pink feather boa. He stretches out his arms for my embrace and calls out my name: “Sili! Sili!”

V. and I are walking toward the village on a dirt road spotted with pale marks from the sunlight that shines through the dark green trees. Five or six children are walking toward us. One of them is carrying a blaring radio in his arms that blasts out the popular song about Muhammad Ali. I hear the words “dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” When they get closer, they eye me, begin to shriek, turn, and run fast in the opposite direction. I can see their thin brown legs pumping hard, the dust rising beneath their bare feet. V. turns to me. “The’re shouting the Thai word for spirit. They think you’re a ghost.”

I am watching a small orange lizard on the wall through a gauze of mosquito netting as the afternoon sun shines through the window. The memory is as still as a photograph, and if there was any noise at all, I have forgotten it.

Only the unprotected self can feel joy.

There was another side. I saw two literal wounds during those three months.

The streets are so crowded, it’s difficult to move. The whole city has come out for the Festival of Lights. The Mekong River is burning with light from a thousand boats, some tiny, some larger, illuminated by torches and candles. V. and I are walking together, holding hands to keep from being separated by the pushing throng. My sister Asti is somewhere behind me with other friends, and then ahead of me there is a burst of red. Blood. The back of a man. Something has hit his shoulder. The memory is in slow motion, clearly a distortion of what really happened, and yet I watch as the crowd parts, opens onto a view of what? I don’t know. People are scrambling away, and V. tugs hard at my arm. There must have been shouting and screaming, but I can’t recall these sounds, only add them to the confusion. “Someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the crowd,” V. tells me. I still don’t know how he knew that. I don’t bother to ask. I don’t feel anything. I note this. I’ve seen a terrible thing, and I’m not responding. Was it because I didn’t see it well enough? Wasn’t it real to me? It’s as if I’m anesthetized, absent.

I am near the Burmese border, watching an operation. A young man has been in a motorcycle accident, and his right leg is badly injured. There is blood all over the operating table. I can see the enormous gash in his leg, a messy, deep wound. I am looking down at him and the physicians from a small balcony. Beside me is the doctor with whom I have traveled. I’ve been living with him, his wife, and his daughter since I arrived in Chiang Mai. I look down at the leg and say to myself, Siri, you are looking down at his injury, and you are okay. You are tougher and stronger than you thought. I silently admire myself. A few seconds later, I feel dizzy. Then the familiar nausea rises up inmy stomach. It has happened before. I feel it coming. My knees give way, and I’m fainting.

Not long after I returned to the United States, I fell violently ill. For days, I lay in bed with a head that felt like someone had left an axe in it. I became a vomiting, shuddering ruin that couldn’t stand upright or tolerate any light from the window. The vertigo and nausea came and went, but the pain in my head remained in varying forms and degrees for eight long months. While I sat in the library, dutifully reading through the pain, I blamed myself for generating a bizarre psychosomatic symptom, a punishing head that made it hard to see, hard to read, hard to think — in short, hard to do what I had to do. But the worst was that as time wore on, I became more and more afraid of myself, or perhaps more conscious of the fear I have always had — a fear that within me is some danger I can’t name.

I slowly emerged from the headache and threw myself even more forcefully into my studies the following year. I became obsessed with Russian intellectual history — in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was so vivid, so crazed, so horribly sad in the end that I filled myself up with it. I continued to eat books like a starved person. I rejected Jung but was dreaming for Freud every night, making dreams the master would have liked: a twenty-year-old woman going through transference with a dead man. I wrote more poems, composing slowly and carefully — sonnets. I wrote a lot of sonnets.

It would happen again in 1982. A stupendous headache would arrive after I had fallen in love, after many months of ecstatic feeling had reached an aching zenith when I married the man I wanted. The attack began on our honeymoon in Paris with a seizure, one that to my utter astonishment threw me against a wall in the Galerie Maeght and then ended as quickly as it had begun. Half an hour later, I was walking in the street with my husband and my vision suddenly sharpened, as if every building, object, person, and color had been refocused through a powerful camera lens, and then I heard those words in my head, Ihave never been so happy in my life as I am now. I was ill for a whole year. Near the end of that period, I landed in the neurology ward at Mount Sinai Hospital. A listless, prone body that had been ground to a halt by the drug Thorazine, I lay in bed plagued by guilt, busily interpreting my sickness. Had I just imagined I was happy? If I didn’t want to be married, why did it seem that I had wanted it so much? I was an enigma to myself, a burden on my new husband, and insane to boot. I have forgiven myself since then. I recognize that migraine can be triggered by any kind of high emotion, be it joy or fear or grief. I am resigned to myself as a jangling, spasmodic, fluttering body that must work to find calm, peace, and rest.

Sometime during my first week in New York City, the week I started graduate school at Columbia University in the fall of 1978, I was standing in the tiny student room I had rented, and I turned to look at myself in the small mirror over the sink. I knew the person I was looking at was myself, and yet there was an alien quality to my reflection, an otherness that brought with it feelings of exuberance and celebration. All at once, I was looking at a stranger. I had left my parents only days before, and when I said good-bye to them at the airport I had felt unexpected tears rise in the corners of my eyes. It seems to me now that in my mirror image I saw a confirmation of my sudden and radical autonomy, a recognition that a cut from home had been made, and I had survived it whole.

I embraced my solitude. I had left everyone I had known and knew nobody in the city. It wasn’t long before I cut all ties to the boyfriend I had left in Minnesota as well. I threw him off with the town and my childhood, and I did it abruptly. I still feel bad about it, not because it was a mistake but because in some frightened corner of myself I had known that I would never return to him or include him in my future and had hidden that truth from myself. Years later, I was at a dinner party in New York during which the host loudly declared his undying love for his wife. Two weeks later, he left her for another woman. I am as convinced that his declaration was sincere as I am that he was a cipher to himself.

That fall, I walked into another world. New York City struck me as more brilliant and more alive than anywhere else on earth. My body hummed with the city’s speed, verve, and humor. I acquired the urbanite’s sixth sense, the ability to detect the vague scent of danger in the streets and stiffen oneself against it. I wore out my shoes walking, and as I walked I rejoiced in the city’s massive ugliness, its mysterious ruined blocks, its gorgeous pockets of wealth, its markets, its crowds, its colors. Columbia is in and of the city, and I can’t separate one from the other during those years. Both the city and the school were part of a crazy new rhythm of things, a repetitive beat of excitement and discovery. The graduate department in English where I had come to study teemed with critical theory. Foucault, Derrida, Althuser, Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari, and Kristeva were authors I’d never heard of, much less read. By the time I arrived, structuralism had come and gone and the hipsters who populated the graduate schools in the humanities were deep into its postincarnation.

The ideas were our weather. We lived in them and they lived in us, and these hot, strong thoughts cast a subversive glare over Philosophy Hall and the Hungarian Pastry Shop, where students gathered to argue and explain and pick apart the French imports. When Jacques Derrida’s latest book was published in English, Salter’s, one of the Columbia neighborhood bookstores, posted a large handwritten sign in its window: WE HAVE DERRIDA’S GRAMMATOLOGY! Students stormed the shop to snatch a copy.

Ideas are always personal, too.

Iam sitting with K in the Hungarian Pastry Shop talking to him about Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. It’s a book K. knows well, and I am asking him about the relation between concept and sound image. He answers me by drawing a small picture of a tree on a napkin. It’s similar to an image in the book. I look down at the little drawing and what was abstract becomes real. I understand. A simple lasting revelation: We see through language. The word isolates, defines, creates the borders of the thing. Arbitrary and floating, language dissects the world.

F. is telling me about Kojéve’s reading of Hegel. He is a philosophy student, a good teacher, and a dear friend. He is patient, methodical, startlingly articulate. Systems take shape for me in his words. He is talking about the master/slave chapter in The Phenomenology of Mind. Hegel is too hard on the page, but now I am thinking about self consciousness, about two-ness, mirrors, about “I”s and “you”s, about entanglement.

The book is on the library table in front of me. To my left, the windows are letting in the last of the afternoon light that is the beginning of dusk. The book is Roman Jakobson’s Two Aspects of Language. Iam reading about aphasia. Jakobson writes that the aphasic patient loses first the words a child learns last— linguistic shifters, like pronouns. I exult in this discovery. I will use it in my dissertation, but more than that I recognize that human identity finds itself only in language as the subject and yet this “I” is fragile; it disappears with the “you.” The thought echoes inside me like the articulation of an old, old secret I’ve always known but never had the words with which to express it.

I will take some ideas and leave others. It’s all a question of resonance. Old thoughts from earlier reading will return in new forms, and I will fall in love with all the ideas that articulate what happens between us, with Martin Buber’s Between Man and Man, because he investigates the silences of touch and feeling, with Mikhail Bahktin’s The Dialogic Imagination, because it explicates the raucous plural dance of the novel, and even with parts of the intractable Jacques Lacan, so convoluted and maddening and yet, in some passages, a spark to revelation. In D.W. Winnicott I will find the story of the self and the other, the wounds and the blanks, and how the forgotten back-and-forth of early life becomes who we are. Years later, I will put the insight into the mouth of one of my characters, Violet, in What I Loved. “Descartes was wrong,” she says. “It’s not ‘I think, therefore I am.’ It’s ‘I am because you are.

I was poor in the city, and when I read, wrote poems, or just lay awake in my apartment I heard my neighbors through the thin walls. They rattled their pots and pans when they cooked, argued with one another, and made noisy love. Police sirens, rumbling garbage trucks, footsteps in the hallway made me jump and then kept me vigilant for the next sound. A young woman was raped in the elevator of my building. I heard stories of muggings, senseless attacks, and murders. One night on my way home, an ordinary-looking man stopped me on the street. I thought he wanted the time, but instead he lunged at me with a livid face and barked out an obscenity before I managed to duck and run. Men pursued me hard in those days, and there were times when I felt emotionally assaulted. They were too hungry, too eager, too full of lust I couldn’t return, and after an evening out I could feel depleted by their stubborn, never-ending pressure. Then it was a relief to be alone, a relief to see my books, my typewriter, my bed. And yet it was a time of dancing, too, of late nights and sporadic, short-lived passions I pursued on my own terms. My own aggression pleased me. But I wanted K., perhaps because he wanted me only fitfully, because he was elusive. I fell into and then got caught in the repetitive machinery of perverse desire — happiness and pain at regular, then predictable intervals, the cycles of an idiot in love — and finally, after many months of motion, the engine ground to a halt. I didn’t want it anymore.

February 23, 1981. I am leaving the reading with J., and we pause in the lobby of the 92nd Street Y to talk about the poems we have just heard. From where I am standing I notice a beautiful man in front of the door. He has a slender face, enormous eyes, and a small, delicate mouth. His hair is nearly black, and his skin is pale brown. He is smoking a little cigar, and he hunches over in his leather jacket and blue jeans as he brings the reed of tobacco to his lips. I notice that his feet are rather large, and I like these big feet, too. In seconds, I have taken in the whole of him and feel woozy with attraction. I can’t remember if J. sees me ogling and tells me that he knows the man or if I ask him if he has any idea who that person is. “That’s Paul Auster,” he says, “the poet.” We are introduced, and then the three of us head downtown in a taxi. In the backseat, Paul tells me about George Oppen, the poet he has just visited in California. I like his voice, and I like the warmth, the tenderness, I hear in it when he speaks of “George.” I didn’t think it then, but now I wonder if I wasn’t hearing something familiar. My father had that when he was alive. He was alive then. My father’s voice changed inflection when he spoke about someone he loved. In the taxi, I am already in love, crazed, enthralled, smitten, and am trying to hide it. The man beside me is not. I can see it in his shrouded, thoughtful eyes. I don’t let hint go. At the party, I talk only to him. We eat. We talk. We walk in the streets and talk. We sit in a bar and talk. The beautiful eyes are gaining focus. He is looking at me, listening to me. I can tell that he likes me.

It is early in the morning and we are standing on West Broadway together in the street. I am standing very close to him, looking into his face, but now, after hours and hours of talk, I have nothing to say. It is late. The evening is over, and I will go home and think about him. Then he kisses me, and it’s the best kiss in the world. A cab pulls up and we climb in together.

Not long after that, I read his poems, his essays, and finally the first half of The Invention of Solitude, “Portrait of an Invisible Man.” There were many books inside me by then, and yet these jolted me with their originality. I met the man before I read what he had written, but if I had not loved his work as I did or if he had not admired my writing, it would have changed things. Our work has been an intimate part of our love affair and marriage for twenty-three years, but what I read wasn’t then and isn’t now what I know when I’m with him. His work comes from the place in him I can’t know.

“When I get stuck,” Professor S. said to me, “I do automatic writing like the Surrealists. Try it.” S. was one of my professors at Columbia and a poet I admired. I was stuck. I had written many poems since I arrived in New York two years earlier but had rejected most of them as derivative or just weak. When I finally produced a poem I liked, I sent it out to The Paris Review, and to my astonishment, the poem was accepted and published. And yet, by the time I spoke to S., my work had begun to harden with self-consciousness, as though some inexorable pressure were bearing down on it. I hated my own words. That night I took S.’s advice and sat down at my blue typewriter in my apartment on 109th Street and wrote freely, and as I wrote I remembered what I had forgotten. I remembered the yellow paper my father gave his girls when he took us to the Historical Association, where he would work at his desk as we drew on the floor. Family stories came back to me — the bits and pieces of the life I had left. I noticed patterns, repetitions — a form emerged that I could never have invented beforehand. Something had broken in me, and I was writing like a person possessed. By the time I went to sleep, I had poured out thirty pages. For three months I edited and reedited those thirty pages into a prose poem. It was the best thing I had ever done.

After that, I never wrote anything in lines again. It would all be prose, and the best prose would always come in a flood. Where does the need to write come from? What is it? It is a need, not a choice. It’s a giving way and a giving up. I remember finding a reference to hypergraphia in a book on the nervous system. The obsessive need to write for hours and hours every day, the author said, was sometimes a symptom of epilepsy, linked to a pathological condition in the brain’s left temporal lobe. Auras. Fits. Writing. Dostoyevsky had it. Saint Theresa probably had it. My husband has often said, “Writing is a sickness.” But many people who aren’t epileptics have the need to write for hours and hours every day. Could my need to write be connected to my neurological sensitivity? Maybe, but not what I write. Content is what few neurologists discuss.

I am afraid of writing, too, because when I write I am always moving toward the unarticulated, the dangerous, the place where the walls don’t hold. I don’t know what’s there, but I’m pulled toward it. Is the wounded self the writing self? Is the writing self an answer to the wounded self? Perhaps that is more accurate. The wound is static, a given. The writing self is multiple and elastic, and it circles the wound. Over time, I have become more aware of the fact that I must try not to cover that speechless, hurt core, that 1 must fight my dread of the mess and violence that are also there. I have to write the fear. The writing self is restless and searching, and it listens for voices. Where do they come from, these chatterers who talk to me before I fall asleep? My characters. I am making them and not making them, like people in my dreams. They discuss, fight, laugh, yell, and weep. I was very young when I first heard the story of the exorcism Jesus performs on a possessed man. When Jesus talks to the demon inside the man and asks for his name, the words he cries out both scared and thrilled me. The demon says: “My name is Legion.” That is my name, too.

2004