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

It's a therapy day and I've driven up to the gray building early for our hour. Early enough to clamber across the parking lot, across the parking lot of the bank next door, across Ninth Street, to ask someone at the BP station on the corner a question about my car.

But the shrubby border between the two parking lots is unexpectedly steep, mulched with its slippery pine needles. Typically clumsy, I tumble, almost fall. Then collecting myself, move on

through the bank's parking
lot with all a fat woman's
disavowing haste.

After my errand, I'm walking back from the gas station when I notice Shannon rounding the corner toward the gray building. He's crossing the bank parking lot ahead of me and doesn't see me.

When my sister and I were in the same high school, she bitterly accused me of embarrassing her by walking around alone looking as if I was thinking. I don't know if that's how Shannon looks; I notice more the calm buoyancy with which he is able to steer his round, large, light body, like a float in a Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade.

Even if he is thinking, he's alert to his surroundings. When he gets near the bottom of the shrubby border, suddenly the balloon makes a graceful, low dip: I see him gather up from the pavement the clumps of pine mulch I kicked down as I was teetering on the brink. Then bobbing up gently, he pats it back into place, his hands briefly smoothing it in with the other mulch.

Me hanging back, wanting not to be seen.

This little, spied-on
scene: how does it endow me
with hidden treasure?

Why do I feel afterwards as if, whatever my frustration or fear, I'm carrying with me an object of reflection: if I turn inward toward it, it will make me smile?

I'm wary of such sudden condensations of sweetness, the kind that, in the past, have made me fall in love.

But I don't resist, either, secretly fingering this enigmatic pebble. I can't quite figure out what makes its meaning for me.

Diffident, I write to my friend Tim that there may be something inexhaustibly pleasing in the tight, light knot of space, time, and seeing. How the small extent of Ninth Street, our wide-skied, midwestern-feeling little college town, turns into a time-lapse graphic that lets Shannon occupy the place where I was, encountering my ghost without recognition, unmaking my mistake - me, turning back, seeing it. And I love that his care for me was not care for me.

Tim writes back, "Far from tedious I find the image of Shannon bending over to pick up mulch - the same that you had dislodged, in falling, if I understood you - not knowing it was you who had dislodged it, to have the power of something in De Quincey - or perhaps the film noir version of De Quincey, that I carry around in my head.

"An immediate, involuntary substitution: anonymous shrinks, doing reparative work - in their spare time."

OVER WEEKEND, E GOT A CALL FROM WOMAN SHE HAS KNOWN HERE WHO JUST FOUND OUT SHE TOO HAS BREAST CANCER. E DESCRIBES THIS WOMAN AS ALREADY HAVING A SIGNIFICANT DEPRESSION. SHE DESCRIBES SOMEONE DRIVEN TO KEEP WORKING EVEN IF SHE HAS NO ENJOYMENT IN THE LABOR. TO ME THIS HAS SOMETHING OF THE SOUND OF HOW E USED TO BE IN HER NOT "BEING ABLE TO STOP." SHE REMEMBERS TELLING ME HOW SHE WAITS FOR SOMEONE TO TELL HER SHE CAN "STOP NOW" - E.G. DIE. SHE IMAGINES ME DOING THIS SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE. SHE ALSO TALKS ABOUT HAVING COME TO BE ABLE TO HEAR A VOICE LIKE MY VOICE INSIDE HERSELF WHEN IT IS QUIET THAT SHE CAN TRUST AND HAVE CONFIDENCE IN. I CAN IMAGINE THE VOICE TELLING HER SHE CAN STOP.

Works Cited

Hinshelwood, R. D. A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought. Second Edition. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1991.

Klein, Melanie. "Notes on some Schizoid mechanisms." The Writings of Melanie Klein. Vol. 3, pp. 1-24. London: Hogarth, 1946.

Tomkins, Silvan S. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.