A Plea for Eros

like without these protections, that fragmented, inchoate reality we all must have experienced as infants before our brains had structured that external “stuff” into things and words. It seems obvious that because our genetic identities and personal histories are all different, our brains, while similar to one another, are also unique. In other words, some people are more sensitive to stimuli than others. They feel what’s happening inside and outside themselves. Dickens was one of these people. He understood or rather felt what Karen Kaplan-Solms and Mark Solms describe, using words that echo Dickens’s own. “From a subjective viewpoint, an excited state of arousal in which the organism is forced to respond equally to all stimuli necessarily produces ego-fragmentation or annihilation. The ‘I’ is overwhelmed by a multitude of ‘its.’“
    We are always accommodating
its
into articulated frameworks that make life livable, but there are times when that integration fails, when the bone, as Mr. Venus says, won’t fit, nohow. I think of these moments or states as holes in the structure—windows onto nonsense. We all long for fixity— and for some of us it’s found in writing. Zazetsky’s desire to record what he could of his life was sparked by a need to fill in the holes, to re-create coherence from what refused to cohere and to make his account sensible to a reader outside himself. Whatever its strengths or weaknesses, a written text has a solidity and permanence that spoken language can’t have. We forget or misremember conversations, but a book can be quoted again with assurance. It doesn’t change. In
Our Mutual Friend,
Dickens includes a tacit acknowledgment of his own fiction as a response to a shattered reality that is both outside and inside the self and a desire to make whole what has been broken in space and time. His artist is a crippled visionary child—Jenny Wren, once Fanny Cleaver, who has reinvented herself as an unhurt, airborne, fictional being. Like a novelist, she has characters—her dolls—whom she moves through stories borrowed from the known vocabulary of fairy tales and whom she dresses in scraps of fabric, which are referred to as “damage and waste.” Jenny Wren’s fictions are born from this damage, and although they don’t allow her to throw her crutch away, in her reveries and stories she is whole and uninjured.
    Dickens was preternaturally sensitive to distortions of language. He knew that words could be used as a tool for obfus-cation, hypocrisy, and self-deception. He also knew that language was arbitrary and limited, that there were parts of human experience where words fall apart—in the choked stammerings of loss, of madness and delirium, and when we come close to the reality of our own inevitable deaths. He knew that the memory of every person is broken, interrupted by lapses and silences, and that our wholeness and continuity aren’t givens but made in us and by us. He knew deeply that the self is an entity under threat and the trick of piecing it together isn’t a solitary game. It is rooted in the other, where we find a mirroring wholeness, dialogue, and finally story. The journey in the book is from “it” to “I”to “We.” This Dickensian
We
is language itself and the essential stories made from it, which not only bind us together but make sense of the world out there and keep the morbid fragment at bay.
    2004

Extracts from a Story of the
Wounded Self

    THE FIRST STORY BELONCS TO MY MOTHER. SHE IS THE ONE who tells it, and when she tells it, she always includes a single terrible moment. She was at home taking a bath, and she thought to herself, How is it possible for a person to be as sad as I am? My mother was miserable because I was born too early. My lungs were undeveloped, and the doctor told my parents I might die. For two weeks, I lay in an incubator while my mother and father waited for my fate to be decided. In those days, the nurses didn’t touch or massage babies left in incubators. I was separated from my mother in the first days of my life, and I now think that experience marks the beginning of a particular personality When I suffered from convulsions on the day of my christening party, I scared my mother yet again. If I felt warm, my mother grew alarmed, and a single sound from my crib brought her to me. I was the firstborn child of a loving mother who lived in fear that she might lose me. We can’t remember our infancies, but