Despair

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Highly traumatized and chronically neglected or abused individuals are dominated by the immobilization/shutdown system. On the other hand, acutely traumatized people (often by a single recent event and without a history of repeated trauma, neglect or abuse) are generally dominated by the sympathetic fight/flight system. They tend to suffer from flashbacks and racing hearts, while the chronically traumatized individuals generally show no change or even a decrease in heart rate. These sufferers tend to be plagued with dissociative symptoms, including frequent spacyness, unreality, depersonalization, and various somatic and health complaints. Somatic symptoms include gastrointestinal problems, migraines, some forms of asthma, persistent pain, chronic fatigue, and general disengagement from life. Polyvagal Theory: Emergent “Emotion” Subsystems [image file=image_rsrc2NG.jpg] Figure 6.2d This shows the effect the phylogenetic systems have in either increasing (+ sign) or decreasing (- sign) the activity of the various organ systems. In some exciting research, the brain activity of people suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was recorded by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they were read a “traumatic script,” which was a graphic and detailed description of someone’s serious trauma (such as an accident or rape).61 The fMRI, scanning the location and the intensity of brain activity, portrayed them as a rainbow of colors.b So, for example, blue (cold) colors indicated a relative reduction in brain activity, while red (hot) colors might indicate an increase. The distress of the volunteers was intensified by the fact that their heads were immobilized, confined in a noisy clanging metal basket. In these studies, at least 30% of the subjects exhibited a decrease in activity of the insula and the cingulate cortex. The PTSD of these volunteers was characterized by dissociation and (vagal) immobility. On the other hand, about 70% of the subjects studied suffered primarily from the simpler symptoms of sympathetic hyperarousal and showed a dramatic increase in the activity of these same areas.62 The insula and the cingulate are the parts of the brain that receive sensory information from receptors inside the body (interoception) and form the basis of what we feel and know as our very identity.63 Underactivity portrays dissociation, while overactivity is associated with sympathetic arousal. In my long clinical experience, I found that many (perhaps even a majority of) persons exhibit some symptoms of both systems. The expression of symptoms appears to depend on a variety of factors, including the type and severity of a person’s trauma, the age at which it occurred, and which traumatic patterns and content were activated during treatment. There are also most likely constitutional and gender factors at play as well. In addition, these symptom constellations tend to change over time and even within a single session.c Most important, treatment must be approached differently according to which of these three systems is activated during sessions and which lie dormant.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Void It is hard to describe the space that yawns open in your life after she is gone. You have to make yourself leave your phone at home; you have to practice ignoring it. You keep reminding yourself that you are accountable to no one. You try to imagine sex with other people and struggle to visualize it; masturbation is near impossible. 48 You wonder if you will ever be able to let someone touch you; if you will ever be able to reconnect your brain and body or if they will forever sit on opposite sides of this new and terrible ravine. 48 . Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , Type C947, Magic power lost by breaking taboo.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  This problem with escalation of commitment to unwinnable wars is a familiar refrain. Once the United States got into Afghanistan, it took twenty years to get out, despite three different presidents promising to do so. After two decades of involvement and a cost of $2 trillion, the Taliban regained control only days from the time American troops withdrew, revealing the fact that this was a war the United States was never really winning. Staw’s central insight about escalation of commitment is that the phenomenon is not confined to matters like the Vietnam War, a complex geopolitical conflict with national pride wrapped up in it. His laboratory and field experiments show that whether it is on the level of an individual, an organization, or a governmental entity, when we’re getting bad news, when we are getting strong signals that we’re losing—signals that others plainly see—we don’t merely refuse to quit. We will double and triple down, making additional decisions to commit more time and money (and other resources) toward the losing cause, and we will strengthen our belief that we are on the right path. Barry Staw might have only realized it later, but his body of work on escalation of commitment helps us understand how the grit that helped Harold Staw build a business empire could be his undoing, how his father could ignore such clear signals that he should get out of the California business until he was eventually left with nothing but a lease on the Montclair property. Waiting until It HurtsWe know that when the stakes are high, it can be hard to walk away. But some of the more fascinating discoveries in the field are about just how low the stakes can be when we escalate our commitment. One study, published a year before “Big Muddy,” was about the simple act of waiting. Psychologists Jeffrey Rubin and Joel Brockner conducted an amusing experiment to answer two questions: How long will people wait for something that never arrives, and what price will they pay to continue waiting? It turns out people will wait a surprisingly long amount of time, and they will pay an amount that clearly exceeds the value of what they were waiting for. The researchers offered students a payment of up to $8 ($45 in today’s dollars) for successfully completing a crossword puzzle in a speed test. To get the full amount, they had to complete the puzzle in less than three minutes, with the amount they would earn declining for each additional minute beyond those three minutes, eventually all the way to $0. They could quit at any time, even if they didn’t solve any of the clues in the puzzle, and earn $2.40 for participating, but only if they quit before the elapsing time started eating into that payment.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  My father brings a pencil and a piece of paper over to the coffee table. We’re going to draw pictures. I climb down off the couch and stand watching. “You don’t want to step on Petie, do you?” he asks me. Petie is underneath my feet. I take the thumb out of my mouth and nod, then put it back in. He draws a triangle with a beak. “That’s a bird,” he says, and offers me the pencil. I can draw pretty hard as long as the pencil doesn’t break. When I’m done the whole paper is covered with a picture, and the bird is nowhere in sight. My father licks one finger and rubs the extra pencil marks off the coffee table. “Jo-Jo made a gorgeous picture,” he calls to my mother. He considers it carefully, turning the paper sideways and then back. “Is it a house?” he asks me. “Is it a dog? Is it Mommy?” No, no, and no. My mother comes in and stands over us. She looks at the picture and then at me. “Hal?” she asks. I take my thumb out just long enough to nod. “This is truly unbelievable,” my mother says. She’s sitting in the rocking chair with her shoes off, smoking. My father is walking back and forth across the living room, singing. Each time he gets to the fringe on the rug he turns around and walks to the other fringe. The song is one he made up, called “Bye Oh Baby,” and usually I hum along but not tonight. I can’t actually cry anymore but I can still make the crying noise. He’s patting me on the back and I’m patting him on the back. We’re walking the floor with each other. “She’s a sandbag,” he tells my mother as we go past. “Tell me about it,” she answers. Linda appears suddenly, squinting in the light. She has her nightgown on backward and her hair is messed up from being asleep. She shields her eyes with one hand and stares at us all. “Can we have pancakes in the morning?” she asks the room. “I’m going to pancake somebody right now,” my mother says, preparing to stand up. Linda stomps back the way she came. “I’d like to pancake Bernice,” my father says darkly. He moves me to the other shoulder, turns, and walks. My hand is tired of patting, I’m just watching the rug go by. Three more times and he walks me over to the rocking chair and points me at my mother. “She asleep?” he whispers. My mother and I are looking at each other. “You asleep?” she asks. I shake my head. She sighs, stands up, goes to the telephone table, dials, and scratches her head with a pencil while she waits. “Wake up and smell the hysteria,” she says into the receiver, and then carries the phone out to the kitchen.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  In this case, the person is knocked off that normal course—whether it is from a single episode, such as a disaster, an accident, surgery or rape, or from a chronic stressor, such as abuse or ongoing marital stress. When such disruptions fail to be fully integrated, the components of that experience become fragmented into isolated sensations, images and emotions. This kind of splitting apart occurs when the enormity, intensity, suddenness or duration of what happened cannot be defended against, coped with or digested. Personal vulnerability, such as age, genetics and gender also account for this psychic implosion. The result of this inability for the body/mind to integrate is trauma, or at the very minimum, disorientation, a loss of agency and/or a lack of direction. Trapped between feeling too much (overwhelmed or flooded) or feeling too little (shut down and numb) and unable to trust their sensations, traumatized people can lose their way. They don’t “feel like themselves” anymore; loss of sensation equals a loss of a sense of self. As a substitute for genuine feelings, trauma sufferers may seek experiences that keep them out of touch—such as sexual titillation or succumbing to compulsions, addictions and miscellaneous distractions that prevent one from facing a now dark and threatening inner life. In this situation, one cannot discover the transitory nature of despair, terror, rage and helplessness and that the body is designed to cycle in and out of these extremes. * Helping clients cultivate and regulate the capacity for tolerating extreme sensations, through reflective self-awareness, while supporting self-acceptance, allows them to modulate their uncomfortable sensations and feelings. They can now touch into intense sensations and emotions for longer periods of time as they learn how to control their arousal. Once a client has the experience of “going within and coming back out” without falling apart, his or her window of tolerance builds upon itself. This happens through achieving a subtle interplay between sensations, feelings, perceptions and thoughts. I believe that the people who are most resilient, and find the greatest peace in their lives, have learned to tolerate extreme sensations while gaining the capacity for reflective self-awareness. Although this capacity develops normally when we are very young, one can learn it at any time in life, thankfully. Children gradually learn to interpret the messages their bodies give them. Indeed, it is by learning to coordinate movements (behaviors) and sensations into a coherent whole that a child learns who he or she is.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Now the terms were even more generous than ever, and on top of it he was promising an astonishingly large Christmas dividend of 30 percent, to be followed by an annual dividend of 50 percent. Some were pulled back into the scheme by such alluring terms, including Sir Isaac Newton himself. But others, as if waking up from a dream, began to wonder about the whole thing: how could a company that had not traded for anything yet in South America, whose only tangible asset was the interest the government paid it on its debt, afford to dish out such large dividends? Now what had seemed like alchemy or magic appeared to be a downright hoax on the public. By early September the selling off had turned into a panic, as almost everyone rushed to convert paper shares into something real, into coin or metal of any kind. As the panic for cash accelerated, the Bank of England was nearly brought down—it came close to running out of currency. It was now clear in England that the party was over. Many had lost their fortunes and life savings in the sudden downfall. Isaac Newton himself had lost some £20,000, and from then on the mere mention of finance or banks would make him ill. People were trying to sell whatever they could. Soon there was a wave of suicides, including that of Charles Blunt, Sir John’s nephew, who slashed his throat after learning the exact nature of his losses. Blunt himself was hounded in the streets and nearly killed by an assassin. He had to quickly escape London. He spent the rest of his life in the town of Bath, scraping by on the very modest means still left to him after Parliament seized almost all of the money he had earned through the South Sea scheme. Perhaps in his isolation he could contemplate the irony of it all—he had indeed changed the course of history and assured his fame for all time, as the man who had conjured up one of the most absurd and destructive schemes ever devised in the history of business. • • • Interpretation: John Blunt was a pragmatic, hard-nosed businessman with a single goal—to make a lasting fortune for himself and his family. In the summer of 1719, however, this highly realistic man caught a fever of sorts. When he began to read about what was going on in Paris, he was struck by the drama of it all. He read vivid stories about average Frenchmen suddenly making fortunes. He had never thought prior to this that investments in joint- stock companies could yield such quick results, but the evidence from France was irrefutable. He wanted to bring similar good fortune to England, and in crafting his plan he naturally imitated many of the features of Law’s scheme, only increasing the scale of it.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  was not easy and it led nowhere. To Erickson, however, the moment he saw the man he understood the nature of the problem—through this gesture he was literally expressing the futile efforts in his life to get ahead and the despair this had brought him. Erickson went up to him and said, “Your life has had many ups and downs,” and as he did so, he shifted the motion of the arms to up and down. The man seemed interested in this new motion and it now became his tic. Working with an occupational therapist on site, Erickson placed blocks of sandpaper in each of the man’s hands and put a rough piece of lumber in front of him. Soon the man became enthralled with the sanding of the wood and the smell of it as he polished it. He stopped crying and took woodworking classes, carving elaborate chess sets and selling them. By focusing exclusively on his body language and altering his physical motion, Erickson could alter the locked position of his mind and cure him. One category that fascinated him was the difference in nonverbal communication between men and women and how this reflected a different way of thinking. He was particularly sensitive to the mannerisms of women, perhaps a reflection of the months he had spent closely observing his sisters. He could dissect every nuance of their body language. One time, a beautiful young woman came to see him, saying she had seen various psychiatrists but none of them were quite right. Could Erickson possibly be the right one? As she talked some more, never discussing the nature of her problem, Erickson watched her pick some lint off her sleeve. He listened and nodded, then posed some rather uninteresting questions. Suddenly, out of the blue, he said in a very confident tone that he was the right, in fact the only psychiatrist for her. Taken aback by his conceited attitude, she asked him why he felt that way. He said he needed to ask her one more question in order to prove it. “How long,” he asked, “have you been wearing women’s clothes?” “How did you know?” the man asked in astonishment. Erickson explained that he had noticed the way he had picked off the lint, without making a naturally wide detour around the breast area. He had seen that motion too many times to be fooled by anything else. In addition, his assertive way of discussing his need to test Erickson first, all expressed in a very staccato vocal rhythm, was decidedly masculine. All of the other psychiatrists had been taken in by the young man’s extremely feminine appearance and the voice he had worked on so carefully, but the body does not lie. On another occasion Erickson entered his office to see a new female patient waiting for him. She explained that she had sought him out because she had a phobia of flying. Erickson interrupted her.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  Offered a full scholarship to study art at Cooper Union, he moves to New York and falls immediately into heroin. Within a few years I will see him panhandling outside the Bedford Avenue L station. Thirty-three, still beautiful, Jasper , I’ll say, what the fuck are you doing? He’ll talk of this job that has fallen through or that gig that dried up, someone who owes him something, a debt soon to be repaid. Sleeping on the roof of his ex-girlfriend’s building, things should turn around next week. The last time I saw him he told me he was moving to L.A., where the winters “aren’t so brutal.” Jasper had moved into the building in the Combat Zone just as Ivan was forced out. The Mafioso heard Ivan was selling heroin out of his building, and that could not be tolerated. I never wanted to know about Ivan’s relationship to junk, perhaps afraid I’d fall into it myself. Ivan found a storefront in the South End, but within a year I heard he was in the hospital. I went to see him and he called it hepatitis but I knew it was AIDS. Norma, a co-worker, told me Ivan started showing up at Pine Street after I left Boston, but had refused to speak to her. And then he vanished, no word of him came from anywhere, for a year, then three, and then we knew he was dead. Richard died a couple years after I moved to Brooklyn. I drove back and sat with him in the hospital for a few days, but his breathing was already erratic, his eyes seemingly uncomprehending. I stay in New York after getting my degree, teach poetry in the public schools. After the years in the shelter it’s what I want, to work with children. I work in Harlem, in Crown Heights, in the South Bronx. Some of these neighborhoods look like Dresden after the firebombing. I thought I was getting away from the homeless, but you don’t move to New York City to escape the homeless. In some schools half the kids I work with live in shelters. Some of these kids write the best poetry I’ve ever read, weird and alive, but some still can’t read in the sixth grade. I get desperate with the nonreaders, want to grab them and say, You don’t have much time . My father’s letters follow me, forwarded from Boston to Brooklyn, psychic bombs. He’s been housed for five years now, and I decide one day to visit him. I want to see his room, look in his face, ask him a few questions about my mother.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  The health plan allows ten visits, one per week. The doctor’s about my age, perhaps slightly older, his face untroubled, eager. A resident, working off his required hours at the university clinic. At our first meeting we look across his desk at each other for a long time, until he asks me how I’m doing. My chart, which I’d filled out a few minutes earlier in the waiting room, lies in front of him. I know he can read that my mother has recently taken her life. How am I doing ? He nods. I smile and turn the question over in my mind. I begin to point out that it isn’t really the right question, but start to laugh before I can finish, and keep on laughing, a laughter that builds on itself. How am I doing? He might as well ask, Would you like more pebbles in your shoes? or Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you like the play? I’m laughing like a goddamn hyena at this point, and each time I look at his face, now clearly riddled with concern, now aware that he’s perhaps in over his head, confronted by a truly deranged person, a madman, it makes me laugh harder, falling-off-my-chair laughter, painful, side-splitting laughter, gasping for mercy, tears streaming down my cheeks, only fueled more with each glance he makes toward the doorknob. Afraid of me ? I can barely put one foot in front of the other, I read books upside down without knowing it, for chrissakes. At the end of our session he says I can come as often as I like, every day if I want. I imagine I must have finished at least the ten sessions, for eventually I leave school without failing, though I remember not another moment with him.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  324The History of Christianity II This is only one tradition in the incredibly varied landscape of African Christianity. Today about half of all Africans are some variety of Christian— that’s roughly 600 million people, and a lot of diversity. However, this lecture focuses on the prosperity gospel and some of the newer revival movements founded in the past century, because their practices and ideas have become so inf luential. They fall under the broad heading of prophetic religion. THE ALADURA MOVEMENT õOlukoya’s father was a policeman, but he was also a pastor in a community of churches called the Christ Apostolic Church. One of Olukoya’s spiritual teachers was a leader in this church too. This is a church that was born in a revival called the Aladura movement. Aladura means “the Praying People” in the Yoruba language. 325Lecture 33—Prophetic Religion in Modern Africa õThat movement has its roots in the year 1918, which saw the end of World War I. It was also the year of the global inf luenza epidemic, which killed at least 50 million people worldwide, including millions of Africans. It’s not hard to understand why some people might decide it was time to pray to God for some guidance. That’s how the Aladura movement started. A small group of Nigerian elders at St. Saviour’s Anglican Church in a town called Ijebu-Ode started holding prayer sessions. õThe Aladura leaders believed that they could use healing prayer to save people’s lives, and gradually their movement spread to other cities and into the countryside. After the f lu epidemic subsided, another health crisis hit Nigeria in the mid-1920s: an outbreak of bubonic plague. And then came the global economic chaos of the Great Depression. õPeople had lots of reasons to feel desperate and to be on the lookout for a hopeful sign from God. One person who felt sure he got that sign was a Nigerian man named Joseph Babalola. He worked for the public works department operating a steamroller. One day in 1928, while he was struggling to repair his machine, he heard Jesus Christ command him to abandon his job and become a prophet of God. õThat’s what he did. Babalola joined the Faith Tabernacle congregation in Lagos. He traveled around carrying a Yoruba Bible and a bell to summon listeners. Sometimes, he fasted for weeks at a time. Two years later, his growing band of followers claimed he had the power to heal lepers, cast out demons, and help the lame walk.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  over 100 lbs.? over 100 miles? In my father’s bag he carries a change of underwear, socks, soap, a toothbrush, a comb. Pens to write with, paper for letters, the forms he needs to prove to whichever agency whatever they need to know. What was your last job? What was your last address? What is your mother’s maiden name? A paperbag with handles, reinforced with duct tape, inside a plastic bag, the type they give out at supermarkets. From this bag, in the restroom of the library or the bus station, he can make himself recognizable, to himself, which has become a daily struggle. Outside too many nights and your face begins to change, to alter. You spend time being invisible in public places, trying to look like you are waiting for someone, that you haven’t been in that booth, nursing that coffee, not long. You stretch it out, for when it’s gone so is your reason for being there. At his table in the reading room of the library my father fills out a form from the Department of Health and Human Services. He’s trying for a disability check, as it’s becoming difficult to even work day labor, sleeping outside every night, difficult to pull himself together from his bag. On this form he lists his previous work experience as “Longshoreman,” “Laborer,” “Cab Driver.” The type of business for each is “unloading ships,” “construction,” “transportation.” The dates he worked each job (month and year required) are “varied” to “varied,” “varied” to “varied,” “7 days” to “10 years.” The days per week are “_____,” “_____,” and “seven.” The rate of pay is “union rate,” “union rate,” and “tips.” In part two he changes his job title from longshoreman to “scallywag,” which my dictionary defines as a scamp or rascal. The form asks: A. In your job did you: Use machines, tools, or equipment of any kind? yes or no. no . Use technical knowledge or skills? yes . Do any writing, complete reports, or perform similar duties? no . Have supervisory responsibilities? no . B. Describe your basic duties below: Unloading ships from other countries in Portsmouth, N.H. Richie Moore was my boss. I lived in Portsmouth N.H. before it became a yuppie town—rents were human—I am a poet—I need a low rent place to live. C. Circle the number of hours a day spent: Walking 8 . Standing 0 . Sitting 0 . Bending constantly . Describe what was lifted, and how far it was carried: over 100 lbs.? over 100 miles? ( left unanswered ) P ART III—R EMARKS Use this section for any other information you may want to give about your work history, or to provide any other remarks you may want to make to support your disability claim. Cab driving gave me bursitis—I can’t sleep at all. A lady doctor at MGH told me in writing to stop the cab driving—construction killed my legs—I have lethal phlebitis—lethal—I lost the use of my right hand as a longshoreman—I have a classic deformity of the (unreadable)— I am also 50% blind—I have visual asquinty—no depth perception at—all—which limits me from 90% of work. My memory was totally destroyed in an assault on my life— My father will spend what’s left of the night upright on a bench, down near the Ritz. Across from his perch are a thousand windows, each window opens onto a room, the container and the contained. A thousand rooms he’s not inside.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  That night, she fucks you as you lie there mutely, praying for it to be over, praying she won’t notice you’re gone. You have voided your body so many times by now that it is force of habit, reflexive as a sigh; it reminds you of your first boyfriend who fucked you while watching porn—how he rutted and rutted and then every so often lifted the remote to rewind something you couldn’t see. (Once you turned your head over the lip of the bed and saw a tangle of upside-down limbs and your brain couldn’t make sense of them; you never looked again.) You would just lie there silently, watching his face move over you. It was like being unfolded beneath the yawn of the planetarium as a kid: the sped-up rotation of the earth, the movement of the stars over you, the constellations melting into and out of being as a distant, disembodied voice told some ancient story to help make sense of it all. You shudder and moan with precision. She turns off the lights. You watch the darkness until the darkness leaves you; or you leave it. To sleep, go to this page. To dream about the past, go to this page. To dream about the present, go to this page. To dream about the future, go to this page. The first time it happened—the first time she yelled at you so much you were crying within thirty seconds from waking, a record—she said, “The first ten minutes of the day, I’m not responsible for anything I say.” This struck you as poetic. You even wrote it down, sure you would find a place for it: in a book, maybe. Go to this page. It’s going to be all right. One day, your wife will gently adjust your arm if it touches her face at night, soothingly straightening it while kissing you. Sometimes you will wake up just enough to notice; other times, she’ll only tell you in the morning. It’s the kind of morning you could get used to. Go to this page. You shouldn’t be here, but it’s okay. It’s a dream. She can’t find you here. In a minute you’re going to wake up, and everything is going to seem like it’s the same, but it’s not. There’s a way out. Are you listening to me? You can’t forget when you wake up. You can’t— Go to this page.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Cycle Cukor was known to torment his actresses to get “real” performances out of them. One biographer wrote that Cukor “seemed almost to revel in taking [Judy] Garland to the brink for scenes where she had to bare her emotions.... [He would remind her] of her own joyless childhood ... and career low points, her marital failures ... and chronic insecurity.” The makeup artist from A Star Is Born said, “He knew how to hurt a woman, and he used it several times to get them into a mood for a crying scene.” While shooting an iconic scene in which Garland’s character, actress Esther Blodgett, dissolves into hysterics in front of a studio head, “Cukor had Garland so worked up beforehand that she was sick, was physically throwing up,” the biographer wrote. “[But while] he might have been rough on Garland ... it was for a purpose.” In that scene, Esther is in her dressing room between takes. She’s wearing an absurd straw boater, heavy eye makeup, a cherry-red cardigan that matches her lipstick. Overly large freckles are drawn on her cheeks. Around her the room is full of reflections: crystal, mirrors, chrome; pink-and-silver cellophane around a bouquet of white flowers. When Oliver Niles asks after her husband—an alcoholic on an intense downward spiral—the cheeriness falls from her face like a person slipping into sleep. She gets up and fusses around a bit before sitting again to talk. She shakes, stammers, gasps shallowly and sharply between words, tilts her head back to catch her tears. Her eyes dart around, never settling on any one place except, occasionally, somewhere behind the camera. She sobs with abandon. Her hand goes to her mouth, as if she has just realized something she does not want to admit. She rubs her hands roughly over her cheeks, wiping away her freckles. “No matter how much you love somebody,” she ends, her voice soaked in misery and resignation, “how do you live out the days?” The scene is unnerving, devastating, wildly effective. Were it not for my moral unease about the details of its creation, it would be difficult to argue with the results: a character who, like Gaslight’s Paula, truly seems on the verge of an acute nervous breakdown (and, unlike Gaslight, with the actress not too far behind). Once they’d finished shooting and Cukor had gotten what he wanted, “gentleness and humor took over.” He touched her on the shoulder and said, “Judy, Marjorie Main couldn’t have done that any better.” As the scene draws to a close, Esther redraws her freckles, collects herself, and returns to the set. There, in front of so many people, she picks up right where she left off—arms flung open, and singing.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Sodom Like Lot’s wife, you looked back, and like Lot’s wife, you were turned into a pillar of salt, 44 but unlike Lot’s wife, God gave you a second chance and turned you human again, but then you looked back again and became salt and then God took pity and gave you a third, and over and again you lurched through your many reprieves and mistakes; one moment motionless and the next gangly, your soft limbs wheeling and your body staggering into the dirt, and then stiff as a tree trunk again with an aura of dust, then windmilling down the road as fire rains down behind you; and there has never been a woman as cartoonish as you—animal to mineral and back again. 44. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C961.1, Transformation to pillar of salt for breaking taboo.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as 9 Thornton Square Before it was a verb, gaslight was a noun. A lamp. Then there was a play called Angel Street in 1938, and then a film, Gaslight , in 1940, and then a second film in 1944, directed by George Cukor and featuring an iconic, disheveled, unraveling performance from Ingrid Bergman. A woman’s sanity is undercut by her conniving husband, who misplaces objects—a brooch, a painting, a letter—in an attempt to make her believe she is mad so that he ultimately can send her to an asylum. Eventually his plan is revealed: he had murdered her aunt when the woman was a child and orchestrated their whirlwind romance years later in order to return to the house to locate some missing jewels. Nightly, Gregory—played by a silky, charismatic Charles Boyer—ventures into their attic, unbeknownst to her, to search for them. The eponymous gaslights are one of the many reasons the heroine believes herself to be truly going mad—they dim as if the gas has been turned on elsewhere in the house, even when, it would seem, no one has done so. Bergman’s Paula is in a terrible, double-edged tumble: as she becomes convinced she is forgetful, fragile, then insane, her instability increases. Everything she is, is unmade by psychological violence: she is radiant, then hysterical, then utterly haunted. By the end she is a mere husk, floating around her opulent London residence like a specter. He doesn’t lock her in her room or in the house. He doesn’t have to. He turns her mind into a prison. Watching the film, you feel for Paula, even though she is not real: her suffering is captured in celluloid’s carbonite. You watch it over and over again in the dark: admiring the eerie shots of their respective shadows against the fanciful Victorian furniture and decor, pausing over her defeated expressions, her swooning, her dewy, trembling mouth. Ingrid Bergman is a mountain of a woman, tall and robust, but in this movie she is worn down like a sand dune. Gregory makes her break down in public, during a concert; later, he does so in their home, with only their two maids as witnesses. No audience is too small for her debasement. “Don’t humiliate me in front of the servants,” Paula sobs. But even if they hadn’t come in and seen what they’d seen, we would have. She might as well have said, “Don’t humiliate me in front of the audience.” Because either way, we—servants, viewers—are witnesses without power. People who have never seen Gaslight , or who have only read secondhand descriptions of it, often say that Gregory’s entire purpose—the reason he “makes the lamps flicker”—is to drive Paula mad, as though that is the sum of his desires. This is probably one of the most misunderstood aspects of the story. In fact, Gregory has an extremely comprehensible motivation for his actions—the need to search for the jewels unimpeded by Paula’s presence. The flickering gas lamps are a side effect of that pursuit, and even his deliberate madness-inducing machinations are directed to this very sensible end. And yet, there is an unmistakable air of enjoyment behind his manipulation. You can plainly see the microexpressions flit across his face as he improvises, torments, schemes. He enjoys it and it serves him, and he is twice satisfied. This is all to say, his motivations are not unexplainable. They are, in fact, aggravatingly practical—driven by greed, augmented by a desire for control, shot through with a cat’s instinct for toying with its prey. A reminder, perhaps, that abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something, and not care how they get it.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Traumhaus as Lipogram It’s hard, saying a story without a critical part. Thinking you can say what you want as you want to, but with a singular constraint. Loss of the function of a particular orthographic symbol—it’s a situation, hmm? A critical loss. Not just a car with bad paint, a lamp with a crack, sour milk. A car that can’t stop. A lamp that sparks. Milk cut with shit. A woman hid my thing and I can’t find it again. That’s just how it is. I cannot find what’s missing. I am trying and trying, and I cannot; as I fail, I shrink. I shrink down into dirt, wood, worms. It is an awful thing, that missing symbol. Folks know . Folks can pick up on words of rock. Folks will know you for your wounds, your missing skin. Folks say nothing but Why didn’t you go / Why didn’t you run / Why didn’t you say? (Also: Why did you stay? ) I try to say, but I fail and fail and fail. This is what I did not know until now: this constraint taints. It is poison. All day and night, until I ran, I was drinking poison.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Word Problem Okay, so, there’s this woman, and she lives in Iowa City, and then she moves to Bloomington, Indiana, 408 miles away. And her girlfriend, who loves her very much, agrees to do the whole long-distance thing. She doesn’t even pause, it’s what she would call a no-brainer. (The pun is lost on her, in the moment.) She spends the entire second year of her graduate school experience shuttling back and forth to Bloomington. She does it gladly. In one trip, she can listen to 75 percent of an audiobook. If she is driving at sixty-five miles per hour, and the average length of an audiobook is ten hours, how many months will it take for her to realize she has wasted half of her MFA program driving to her girlfriend’s house to be yelled at for five days? How many months will it take her to come to terms with the fact that she functionally did this to herself? III And because you are of a kind, the house knows you. When you cry out, the lights flicker, ghostly blue and ragged. When she says you are shut off , the light switches nod their white tiny heads. Tiles creak yes beneath her edicts —something bad must have happened to make you this way , the way where you don’t want her. But the windows rattle, disagree. In their honeyed, blindless light, they see it—something bad is happening . —Leah Horlick, “Ghost House”

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Death Wish Afterward—when she will not stop trying to talk to you or emailing you with flowery apologies on Yom Kippur, and when people do not believe what you tell them about her and the Dream House—you’ll wish she had hit you. Hit you hard enough that you’d have bruised in grotesque and obvious ways, hard enough that you took photos, hard enough that you went to the cops, hard enough that you could have gotten the restraining order you wanted. Hard enough that the common sense that evaded you for the entirety of your time in the Dream House had been knocked into you. You have this fantasy, this fucked-up fantasy, of being able to whip out your phone and pull up some awful photo of yourself, looking glazed and disinterested and half your face is covered in a pulsing star. This is, as you said, fucked up: there are probably millions of people on the blunt end of a lover’s fist who pray for the opposite, daily or even hourly, and to put that sort of wish into the universe is demented in the extreme. You will wish for it anyway. Clarity is an intoxicating drug, and you spent almost two years without it, believing you were losing your mind, believing you were the monster, and you want something black and white more than you’ve ever wanted anything in this world.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as World Building Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view. Later, you will you learn that a common feature of domestic abuse is “dislocation.” That is to say, the victim has just moved somewhere new, or she’s somewhere where she doesn’t speak the language, or has been otherwise uprooted from her support network, her friends or family, her ability to communicate. She is made vulnerable by her circumstance, her isolation. Her only ally is her abuser, which is to say she has no ally at all. And so she has to struggle against an unchangeable landscape that has been hammered into existence by nothing less than time itself; a house that is too big to dismantle by hand; a situation too complex and overwhelming to master on her own. The setting does its work. This world might as well have been an island, surrounded by impassable waters. On one side, a golf course—owned by the university, as was the house—where drunk undergrads would stagger like zombies, silhouetted on the hill. On another, a stand of trees that suggested a forest, mysterious and laced with wildlife and darkness. Nearby, houses occupied by strangers who either never heard or didn’t want to get involved. Last, a road, but the sort of road that led to another road, a larger one. Unfriendly to pedestrians. Not meant to be traversed, really. Miles from the town’s center. The Dream House was never just the Dream House. It was, in turn, a convent of promise (herb garden, wine, writing across the table from each other), a den of debauchery (fucking with the windows open, waking up with mouth on mouth, the low, insistent murmur of fantasy), a haunted house ( none of this can really be happening ), a prison ( need to get out need to get out ), and, finally, a dungeon of memory. In dreams it sits behind a green door, for reasons you have never understood. The door was not green.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Time Travel One of the questions that has haunted you: Would knowing have made you dumber or smarter? If, one day, a milky portal had opened up in your bedroom and an older version of yourself had stepped out and told you what you know now, would you have listened? You like to think so, but you’d probably be lying; you didn’t listen to any of your smarter, wiser friends when they confessed they were worried about you, so why on earth would you listen to a version of yourself who wrecked her way out of a time orifice like a newborn? There is a theory about time travel called the Novikov self-consistency principle, wherein Novikov asserts that if time travel were possible, it would still be impossible to travel back in time and alter events that have already taken place. If present-day you could return to the past, you could certainly make observations that felt new—observations that had the benefit of real-time hindsight—but you’d be unable to, say, prevent your parents from meeting, since that, by definition, had already happened. To do so, Novikov says, would be as impossible as jumping through a brick wall. Time—the plot of it—is fixed. No, Novikov’s time traveler is the tragic dupe who realizes too late her trip to the past is what sealed the very fate she’d meant to prevent. Maybe you mistook your future voice shouting through the walls for something else: a heartbeat pacing and then rapid with want, a purr.