Anticipation is a kind of helplessness: you can’t make the desired or dreaded thing arrive.
The pamphleteers understand that all suspended desire, in some sense, feels the same.
Thin Places
“Obsession” was initially a term of warfare. In Latin, obsessio indicated the first phase of a siege on a city, when the city was surrounded on all sides but its citadel remained intact. Obsessio was followed by possessio, when the attacker breached the walls and took the city from the inside. In Obsession: A History, Lennard Davis illuminates the way these two words were adapted to explain demonic possession in the third century: “In the case of obsession, that person was aware of being besieged by the devil since the demon did not have complete control, had not entered the city of the soul, and the victim could therefore attempt to resist.”
D.S. was twenty-nine and afraid that she might lose possession of her own thoughts, that they might travel from her head down her arms and escape through her fingertips into the world. She worried that she would leave a trail of ideas and images in her wake, clinging like residue to everything she touched.
“Fear of contamination rests on the belief, widespread in our culture as in others, that something can impart its essence to us on contact. We are forever polluted, as we see it, by contact with a pollutant.” This notion extends past the physical realm of germ contamination and into metaphor. We worry about the “bad seed,” and fear that someone’s awful luck, lousy attitude, or even insanity will “rub off” on us. 5
In thin places, the folklore goes, the barrier between the physical world and the spiritual world wears thin and becomes porous. Invisible things, like music or love or dead
people or God, might become visible there, or if they don’t become visible they become so present and tangible that it doesn’t matter.
“It could be said, even here, that what remains of the self / Unwinds into a vanishing light, and thins like dust, and heads / to a place where knowing and nothing pass into each other, and through,” wrote Mark Strand for his friend Joseph Brodsky:
What remains of the self unwinds and unwinds, for none
Of the boundaries holds—neither the shapeless one between us,
Nor the one that falls between your body and your voice.
The Big Empty
The twentieth-century philosopher and mystic Simone Weil wrote, “Absolute, unmitigated attention is prayer,”
Which suggests, possibly, that if you are stuck somewhere small in your mind, somewhere unhappy or afraid or paralyzed or heartbroken, all of which are a kind of claustrophobic circling and circling, you might be able to reverse-engineer an expansion, shove yourself through into some larger mind place by putting yourself in the way of some vaster spaces in the world. At least I think that’s so.
Habitus
The wedding day is the day of the perfect dress and, by extension, the apex of a woman’s individual beauty, which is one way of measuring the apex of her existence.
As a metaphor—only as a metaphor—the Marthas’ dresses are so much more realistic: your mother or your sister or an aunt hands you a hundred-pound corseted structure and says, Walk in that, and then you make a lot of decisions about what of the gown you want to keep, whether you’ll change its color, cut off the weird embellishments the last wearer put on, add a whole new panel, or change everything about it except its bones, which cannot change.
