Saturday 29 December 2018

Talking



Why do people even talk, do you know? It doesn't usually help, that's what I think, and if everyone suddenly became not able to speak words, well that'd be just fine. In fact I think I might make this the first new rule on the day I become Perpetual Universal Master. (I will permit singing to continue, pantomiming, reading, writing, staring openmouthed etc, just not talking.)

When that film about Marina Abramovic came out, my response to it was what I understand is a fairly common one, ie a first flush of joyful emotion soon replaced by dour scepticism about the thing where she sits across a table from a gallery visitor and they stare at each other for a while, then the visitor departs in a state of astral ecstasy acquired from being a party to the meeting of true minds just staged inside his or her soul. The Big Train staring contest did it first, and anyhow, assuming the visitor's emotion isn't entirely a performance, so easy for it to be attributed to the effect of the meeting with that person across the table instead of what is far more likely, that it's something which was waiting there all along and was summoned up and got out because it seemed to suit the occasion (and has probably come in useful at other times too.) In other words, the probably misleading appearance of true connection in that wordless scene staged by Abramovic, it's just the same thing that nearly always happens in verbal conversation about high stakes matters. The more that seems to be riding on the conversation, the greater the likelihood of both parties bringing their habits and structures to bear and thus talking only to themselves.

 Talking therapy allows for conversational techniques that would seem unbearably dense and annoying in real life. Most of the time you can't say something, or hear someone else say something, and then immediately turn to asking, repeatedly and minutely, what it meant to say that thing in that way. Certainly that's my experience. Circling around and round a thing that is trying to be said in such a way that it's true, and understandable and useful to speaker and listener, is so very allowed in therapy that when it happens it has something of the quality of a trapeze act. But to make a normal conversation into a high-friction, oscillating, volatile, gravity-defying discussion about what some words mean destroys the conventional illusion of smooth light instrumentality which makes normal talking possible, and that is a frustrating experience for all involved and probably also seems mad to non-analysands.

Of course I'm thinking here, in substatus mode, about my frustrations with particular conversations that I won't and don't need to write about.  The feeling of failure to connect; sometimes a feeling almost of panic at the sense that enormous pieces of shipwrecked cargo are floating down the fast-moving river of talk, vanishing before my helpless sight to be lost forever and maybe pollute some beach that used to be clean, and my interlocutor isn't really noticing.

It's not completely dismal and hopeless. There are moments of connection, plenty of them in fact, and they prove that it can happen, you can talk with someone and find that you really do understand each other. But outside the analytic conversation, these moments come unbidden, when you're not looking for them. Something more than I know how to do is required to make them happen. I think it's interesting and maybe significant that a sense of humour is not among my analyst's many wonderful qualities; she also seems to be able to not cry when another person is crying. At different times and places on a single day a few weeks ago, I saw two different people drop the attentive, polite, friendly interested mask for a moment and we met in moments of real connection. In the morning I related a story to a chance-met friend in the street and at a certain point in the narrative her attention was suddenly complete and acute; we both became highly emotional; the tears sprang into my eyes and hers and we both really saw each others' faces and knew what was happening. That night I laughed very loudly at a crack the head curator had made (most unexpectedly) and I saw him stop and look at me, pleased and surprised and enjoying my enjoyment and we both knew it was good.

That ephemeral unlooked-for connecting by chance, and the way it's visibly experienced as powerful by people with whom it happens, is a sign that connection is felt precious and elusive by others as much as it is by me. This is cheering because just the mere fact of being in analysis is bad enough and I would not like to also have to conclude that there was anything much really the matter with me, that I was overly needy for example. I have no way of knowing whether anyone else is really aware of, or free of, these considerations.


2 comments:

ernmalleyscat said...

I had to reread the last half as the powerpoint over the left shoulder of the second waiting chair was disturbing me. Glad I did though.

Anonymous said...

Peculiar article, just what I wanted to find.