Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Teaching/Depression"
(page 5 of 6)

Looking back, I think he's produced this story "just in case." Just in case, that is, what my announcement really meant was something different, something like "I think I'm ready to relinquish this stubborn symptom, but I'm scared about what will be left of me."

I love his floating the story so coolly as a non sequitur - a story about the non-necessity, in therapy, of what "follows." It gives me a clue. I want to be open to the chance that what any clamorous pain

wants to tell me, is
that it is ready at last
to bid me goodbye.

After this, in fact, I get very charmed and relaxed by everything that looks like non-necessity. I've started noticing how lots of Shannon's best comments - the ones that change the aspect of things for me - amount to nothing more profound than "It ain't necessarily so."

Nowadays, when students ask me, about one thing or another, "But wouldn't that clearly imply-?" or "Doesn't that have to involve-?", it feels Shannonlike when I can respond,

that may not be a
theoretical question.
Just empirical.

WONDERS IF SHE IS SHUTTING DOWN SOME AFFECTS, BUT FEELS MORE THAT SHE IS FEELING GOOD, NOT ANXIOUS, READY FOR THESE NEW PROJECTS . . . HAD A VERY SOFT, GOOD FEELING DREAM - THE GROWING WEB OF CONSCIOUSNESS AROUND THE LIMBS, BRANCHES, LEAVES OF TREES ON THE FIRST FEW PAGES OF NEWEST BOOK.

TESTS SHOW NO NEW CANCER; TESTS SHOW SAME OLD CANCER. SPINAL PAIN REMAINS BUT SOME LESS. TALKING ABOUT THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE WHO ASK IF HER NEWS IS GOOD OR BAD - THAT IS NOT A FLEXIBLE OR PRODUCTIVE WAY OF THINKING ABOUT THIS. AN AIM NOT TO HOPE OR FEAR A LOT, NOT LEAD OTHERS TO.

Here's a Buddhist meditation I've read about. I can even do it.

It happens in a public place; the substance of it is to recognize that every other person there, one by one, male and female and young and old, has been, in some earlier life, your mother.

Or more likely, in many lives.

And regarding the people one by one, you learn to understand how this could have been so. One by one as you gaze, you can see what kind of mother they were to you; you can see as well, slowly, what kind of a child you were to them.

Over and over and over

you're like Aeneas
encountering a stranger,
Venus, and guessing,
just from the rosy
glow of their neck and their feet
and the stately step,
though too late, "Surely,
stranger, you are a goddess.
Surely, my mother."

Shy as I am, I'm pretty good at this meditation.

In almost every face I can find the curve of a tenderness, however hidden. The place of a smile or an intelligence - a shared one.

Even in a skinhead without any lips to speak of; or in a girl who's anxious, anorexic, half crazed with all her narcissistic burden - even from her I can elicit and nurture it, the sense of her possible, beautiful care of me. Indeed, of a compassion; of her imagination, or his.

Of course, with babies it's easy.

In a roomful of my students - I can find it.