Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

Touchingly, when Lucius was out of earshot, Sarah gave me a concerned look and asked: ‘Dad, you know about Caspar, but, you know, with you, is there anyone else?’

The truth — my unblemished record of fidelity — seemed like an admission of failure. So I said, ‘No, sweetheart. No one important.’ We talked about the new school, and their set books, and, after a walk along the river, I put them on the train at Embankment and walked back over the Thames at Hungerford Bridge under a grey sky, thinking: no one tells you this, how having children multiplies your capacity for suffering.

*

The gloom that moved into my house after Leonora took the kids made a poor companion and a worse colleague. My work suffered. Deadlines slipped past. I was terribly behind on the Letters . My head of department, a good friend, saw the state I was in and gave me two weeks’ compassionate leave. I got in the habit of going for solitary walks to the South Bank and along the Thames to Southwark, half hoping that I would bump into Lucius skateboarding with friends from his old school.

Outside the Globe, one Sunday, I watched a woman in her twenties pretending to be a clockwork ballerina. Her dark hair was in a chignon, she had a drawn face, an unmistakable look of sadness, and a large rotating key attached to a battery in a box on her back. She moved in sad, jerky moments to music that was playing on a Dansette; only the rise and fall of her chest spoiled the illusion of her lifelessness.

The two commonest delusions among my fellow-inmates in the DHU are that their thoughts are being tampered with by government agencies, and that they are surrounded by human-seeming robots. I’m fully aware that neither of these ideas conforms to objective reality. They are the beliefs of the insane: brought on in a surprising number of cases by a predisposition to psychosis exacerbated by hallucinogens or strong cannabis. Of course. And yet, and yet. My lunatic companions have hit on a kind of truth. The soul that’s left in them rages at the petrification of what once was living tissue.

Malevin père said a hundred thousand words was the minimum to reconstitute a core complex; but I sometimes feel that you could reconstruct an entire marriage in ten sentences.

That spark of new creation, the new phrase that genuinely surprises, the act that bears the impress of a live consciousness: these are astonishingly rare. Human beings are everywhere overcome by rituals and dead language, by threadbare notions about what is real.

We think of ourselves as creatures with agency, but by middle age we are as habituated to our patterns of behaviour as zoo animals, the infinite possibilities of our childhood crimped and shut down as though we’ve undergone a botched and back-street version of the Procedure. But just beyond these bars, tantalisingly, are real feelings. If only we had new words to net them.

Of course, these madmen express it insanely, but they’re right, aren’t they, to fight the loathsome repetition of old postures? There is nothing false in their agony. Their question is my question: How do I become real again?

Extracted from Dr Webster’s Journal

*

[…] Supervision with PW yesterday to discuss cases. Much of the session spent on Q. PW says that even after thirty years he’s still regularly surprised by the tenacity of the idée fixe. Important to remember, in his mind, that factual content is less important than the significance Q ascribes to it. That is the very moving aspect of this work. How awful must reality be for the psychotic to take refuge in this? He compares it to someone jumping out of a burning building knowing there is no hope of surviving the fall. One element of the psychosis, paradoxically, is a will to live.

I try to emphasise Q’s obstinate commitment to his story. What’s surprising about it is the particularity of it. I say I have checked some of the minor details of Q’s account and found he’s oddly precise about circumstantial stuff, even while being delusional in a larger sense. PW maintains this obsessive construction of the protective fantasy is absolutely conventional. I say that while it’s conventional for a client to claim falsely to be the son of God, it seems strange for someone to claim falsely to be the son of Fred Bloggs, 23 Acacia Avenue, Tooting, SW17 or whatever. PW looks at me slightly oddly. Turns the subject back to my father. The whole weary manoeuvre suddenly so predictable and crude. Yes, family history of mental illness. Blah blah blah. Did you feel powerless as a child watching your father destroy his life? Blah blah blah. I get it! Q’s my dad and I’ve lost my sense of professional detachment. So I’m going bonkers too. PW suggests reassigning Q. Suddenly, I loathe PW and want to punch him. Shame that I never experienced any of this in my training analysis.

Still, am a bit baffled by the texture of Q’s delusion. For example, googling the woman Q claims he was married to, a classical musician, throws up a number of articles, one of which is an interview. It mentions in passing that this woman is allergic to fish. This I also know from Q. What a strange thing to be accurate about. I find various instances of the same thing. I know PW is right, but feel strangely torn. PW asks about Roger moving in. I say it’s going well so far. Then of course, last night have a full-on Technicolor dream about Dad and wake up crying at 3 a.m. Rog has taken a sleeping pill and is out of it and frankly not interested, but at least the dream restores my faith in analysis. Bought PW a cake today to say thanks. He looks at it wryly as if to say, ‘Restoring your injured objects?’ The sense of uplift lasts until now.

I’ve cut and pasted the above from Dr Webster’s journal. I was going to write something sarky about her — my relief that she has an interior life — but the truth is I’m overwhelmed by gratitude that she’s experienced even a scintilla of doubt about her diagnosis of me.

Funny though — I don’t remember telling her about the fish.

But how conscientious of her to check my story! I remember that article. It was two years ago, for Gramophone , at the time of the Poulenc recital. They sent a photographer almost as an afterthought. Leonora was rushing off to teach in Marylebone, he had time for five pictures at the most and they ended up using one of them for the cover. She has an extraordinary radiance, still. I remember coming out of a cinema with her once when we were courting and being taken aback by her beauty. Her face without makeup was flawless. We were standing on the pavement of the Fulham Road at six o’clock one summer evening and it was like watching the sun rise. But I was twenty-three and I didn’t have the words for it then.

I didn’t fall in love with Leonora’s insides. I wonder, in the end, if that was one of the reasons for her contempt for me. She mentioned, sometimes with bitterness, how the world had begun to treat her differently when she grew breasts. I myself saw Sarah’s shyness about her pubescent body after all the unselfconscious extroversion of her childhood. It is a kind of Fall.

Imagine Leonora in another carcass and what would she have? The music, of course. A headstrong nature. But nothing to make men fall at her feet. How many doors opened for her because of the cut of her jaw, her hair, her Asiatic eyes? That feeling that our bodies lead separate lives. In my case, inarguably so.

The tattoos on my chest and upper arms are reminders, if any were needed, that someone was here before me. No doubt Hunter and Malevin or their clients have pristine carcasses lined up for their own use. Or perhaps the whole venture is at a more speculative stage. Jack’s quick deterioration doesn’t inspire confidence in the proprietary technology behind this. We definitely have the feeling of prototypes about us.