The Empathy Exams (28 page)

Wound #6

Rosa Dartle is a shrew with a scar. “An old scar,” says David Copperfield, protagonist of her novel. “I should rather call it a seam.”

When Rosa was young, the boy she loved—sinister and selfish Steerforth, who didn’t love her back—eventually grew so irritated by her that he threw a hammer at her face. It slashed open her mouth. “She has borne the mark ever since,” Steerforth admits, but she does not bear it quietly. “She brings everything to the grindstone,” he says. “She is all edge.”

Rosa literally speaks through an open wound: the scar is closed, but her mouth is almost always open. The scar itself is a piece of language. As David describes it:

the most susceptible part of her face … when she turned pale, that mark altered first … lengthening out to its full extent, like a mark in invisible ink brought to the fire … now showing the whole extent of the wound inflicted by the hammer, as I had seen it when she was passionate.

I should rather call it a seam:
the ugliness holds her together, knits her skin like it was fabric, gives her shape. It speaks the hurt underneath: she was spurned by the first man she loved (spurned by hammer!) and now means nothing more to him than a “mere disfigured piece of furniture … having no eyes, no ears, no feelings, no remembrances.”
No eyes, no ears, no feelings.
Just a scar. She still has that: “its white track cutting through her lips, quivering and throbbing as she spoke.”

Her scar doesn’t make her compassionate or sympathetic, however, only bitter and vindictive. It grants her the sensitivity of keen awareness but not of human warmth. When Steerforth spurns another woman, Rosa takes a rapturous, almost sexual pleasure in the fact of this woman’s grief. When someone tells Rosa about the woman’s plight—“she’d have beaten her head against the marble floor”—we see Rosa “leaning back upon the seat, with a light of exultation in her face, she seemed almost to caress the sounds.” Rosa wants a companion in her damage: “I would have this girl whipped to death,” she says. She can’t summon sympathy for Steerforth’s mother, either—another woman he’s abandoned. David is shocked: “if you can be so obdurate as not to feel for this afflicted mother—”

Rosa cuts him off to say: “Who feels for me?”

Wound #7

Now we have a TV show called
Girls
, about girls who hurt but constantly disclaim their hurting. They fight about rent and boys and betrayal, stolen yogurt and the ways self-pity structures their lives. “You’re a big, ugly wound!” one yells. The other yells back: “No, you’re the wound!” And so they volley, back and forth:
You’re the wound; you’re the wound.
They know women like to claim monopolies on woundedness, and they call each other out on it.

These girls aren’t wounded so much as post-wounded, and I see their sisters everywhere. They’re over it.
I am not a melodramatic person.
God help the woman who is. What I’ll call “post-wounded” isn’t a shift in deep feeling (we understand these women still hurt) but a shift away from wounded affect—these women are aware that “woundedness” is overdone and overrated. They are wary of melodrama so they stay numb or clever instead. Post-wounded women make jokes about being wounded or get impatient with women who hurt too much. The post-wounded woman conducts herself as if preempting certain accusations: don’t cry too loud, don’t play victim, don’t act the old role all over again. Don’t ask for pain meds you don’t need; don’t give those doctors another reason to doubt the other women on their examination tables. Post-wounded women fuck men who don’t love them and then they feel mildly sad about it, or just blasé about it, more than anything they refuse to care about it, refuse to hurt about it—or else they are endlessly self-aware about the posture they have adopted if they allow themselves this hurting.

The post-wounded posture is claustrophobic. It’s full of jadedness, aching gone implicit, sarcasm quick-on-the-heels of anything that might look like self-pity. I see it in female writers and their female narrators, troves of stories about vaguely dissatisfied women who no longer fully own their feelings. Pain is everywhere and nowhere. Post-wounded women know that postures of pain play into limited and outmoded conceptions of womanhood. Their hurt has a new native language spoken in several dialects: sarcastic, apathetic, opaque; cool and clever. They guard against those moments when melodrama or self-pity might split their careful seams of intellect.
I should rather call it a seam.
We have sewn ourselves up. We bring everything to the grindstone.

Wound #8

In a review of Louise Glück’s
Collected Poems
, Michael Robbins calls her “a major poet with a minor range.” He specifies this range to pain: “Every poem is The Passion of Louise Glück, starring the grief and suffering of Louise Glück. But someone involved in the production knows how to write very well indeed.” I could take issue with Robbins’s “every,” or the condescension embedded in “starring,” but in the end I’m most interested in his conjunction. “But” implies that Glück can be a poet who matters only
despite
her fixation on suffering, that this “minor range” is what her intelligence and skill must constantly overcome.

Robbins frustrates me and speaks for me at once. I find myself in a bind. I’m tired of female pain and also tired of people who are tired of it. I know the hurting woman is a cliché but I also know lots of women still hurt. I don’t like the proposition that female wounds have gotten old; I feel wounded by it.

I felt particularly wounded by the brilliant and powerful female poet who visibly flinched during a writing workshop at Harvard when I started reciting Sylvia Plath. She’d asked us each to memorize a poem and I’d chosen “Ariel,” which felt like its own thirteenth line,
black sweet blood mouthfuls
, fierce and surprising and hurting and free.

“Please,” this brilliant and powerful woman said, as if herself in pain. “I’m just so tired of Sylvia Plath.”

I had this terrible feeling that every woman who knew anything about anything was tired of Sylvia Plath, tired of her blood and bees and the level of narcissistic self-pity required to compare her father to Hitler—but I’d been left behind. I hadn’t gotten the highbrow girl-memo: Don’t Read the Girls Who Cried Pain. I was still staring at Plath while she stared at her own bleeding skin, skin she’d sliced with a knife:
What a thrill—my thumb instead of an onion.
Sylvia and I were still obsessed with the density of a wound—
thumb stump, pulp of heart
—thrilled and shamed by it.

Wound #9

Listen to this dream:

The room was small, but it held all the women you could think of and all the men you were ever scared of in your whole life, passing on the street or just imagining, and all the men you loved the most … There were knives and girls skinned alive and kept alive, and one woman screaming but trying to laugh it off to another, “Look what they did to my face!”—and there were amputations performed right there, the limbs cut off … and all the things that can be done to a person including the pulling and ripping of everything that we didn’t even know we love about a person.

Here’s how the dream ends: eventually the girls are skinned to the point of interchangeability—“just bloodiness, like animals turned inside out,” like Carson’s nude—and tossed from the building while onlookers throw paint onto their falling bodies. They turn all the colors of the rainbow. They turn into art.

They turn, specifically, into a book called
How Should a Person Be?
Its narrator, Sheila, is one of the onlookers and also one of the girls. (She also shares her name with the author, Sheila Heti.) She is in pain but also making fun of how we distort every pain into the worst pain—
the very worst possible pain
—the worst circle of hell. Superlatives are just another way of proving hurt—an abstraction instead of a cut line on the skin. The dream offers a woman who is aware of how girls try to turn pain into a joke. She makes a joke of this tendency. She is standing in front of you—all shivering and bloody, like a freak on a stage—and cranking up the volume on the pain stereo, pushing on your eyeballs with the force of her mind. Raw bodies turn into painted artifacts. The superlative vocabulary of suffering keeps extending its wingspan.

In college, I took a self-defense class with a bunch of other girls. We had to go around in a circle and tell the group our worst fear. These instructions created a weird incentive structure. When you’ve got a lot of Harvard girls in a circle, everyone wants to say something better than the girl before her. So the first girl said: “Getting raped, I guess,” which is what we were all thinking. The next one upped the ante: “Getting raped—and then killed.” The third paused to think, then said: “Maybe getting gang-raped?” The fourth had had time to think, had already anticipated the third one’s answer. She said, “Getting gang-raped and mutilated.”

I can’t remember what the rest of us managed to come up with (white slavery? snuff films?) but I remember thinking how odd it was—how we were all sitting there trying to be the best kid in class, the worst rape fantasizer, in this all-girl impersonation of a misogynistic hate-crime brainstorming session. We were giggling. Our giggling—of course—was also about our fear:
One woman screaming and trying to laugh it off to another.

Whenever I tell that story as an anecdote, I think about the other girls in that circle. I wonder if anything terrible ever happened to any of them. We left that shitty gym to start the rest of our lives, to go forth into the world and meet all the men we were ever going to be scared of, passing on the street or just imagining.

Wound #10

I grew up under the spell of damaged sirens: Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco, Björk, Kate Bush, Mazzy Star. They sang about all the ways a woman could hurt:
I’m a fountain of blood in the shape of a girl. When they’re out for blood I always give. We are made to bleed and scab and heal and bleed again and turn every scar into a joke. Boy you best pray that I bleed real soon. Bluffing your way into my mouth, behind my teeth, reaching for my scars. Did I ever tell you how I stopped eating, when you stopped calling? You’re only popular with anorexia. Sometimes you’re nothing but meat, girl. I’ve come home. I’m so cold.

I called my favorites by their first names: Tori and Ani. Tori sang “blood roses” over and over again, and I had no idea what this phrase meant except that pain and beauty were somehow connected. Every once in a while her songs posed questions:
Why did she crawl down in the deep ravine? Why do we crucify ourselves?
The songs themselves were answers. She crawled into the deep ravine so we’d wonder why she crawled into the deep ravine. We crucify ourselves so we can sing about it.

Kate Bush’s “Experiment IV” describes a secret military plan to design “a sound that could kill someone.”
From the painful cries of mothers to the terrifying screams we recorded it and put it into our machine.
The song would be lethal, but also a lullaby:
It could feel like falling in love / It could feel so bad / But it could feel so good / It could put you to sleep.
Of course the song played just like the song it described. Listening felt so bad and so good. It felt like falling in love. I’d never fallen in love. I was a voyeur and a vandal—flexing the hurt muscles in my heart by imagining myself into aches I’d never felt.

I invented terrible daydreams to saddle those songs with the gravity of melodrama: someone I loved died; I was summoned to a car accident deathbed; I had a famous boyfriend and he cheated on me and I had to raise our child—better yet, our many children—on my own. Those songs gave me scars to try on like costumes. I wanted to be sung to sleep by them; I wanted to be killed and resurrected.

More than anything, I wanted to be killed by Ani’s “Swan Dive”:
I’m gonna do my best swan dive / in the shark-infested waters / I’m gonna pull out my tampon / and start splashing around.
If being a woman is all about bleeding, then she’ll bleed. She’ll get hurt. Carrie knew how it was done; she never plugged it up. She splashed around.
I don’t care if they eat me alive
, Ani sings,
I’ve got better things to do than survive.
Better things like: martyrdom, having the last laugh, choosing the end, singing a song about blood.

I was listening to “Swan Dive” years before I got my period, but I was already ready to jump. I was ready to weaponize my menarche. I was waiting for the day when I could throw my womanhood to the sharks because I finally had some womanhood to call my own. I couldn’t wait to be inducted into the ranks of this female frustration—the period as albatross, lunar burden, exit ticket from Eden, keys to the authenticity kingdom. Bleeding among the sharks meant being eligible for men, which meant being eligible for hope, loss, degradation, objectification, desire and being desired—a whole world of ways to get broken.

Years later I worked at a bakery where my boss liked putting on a play list she called our “Wounded Mix.” We hummed along with Sade and Phil Collins. We mixed red velvet batter the color of cartoon hearts. My boss said that when she listened to these songs, she imagined being abandoned by some cruel lover on the shoulder of a dusty highway—“with just my backpack and my sunglasses,” she told me, “and my big hair.”

I started hunting for more ladies singing about wounds. I asked my boyfriend for suggestions. He texted instructions:
Google “you cut me open and I keep bleeding.” Best bathos on the air.
I found Leona Lewis:
You cut me open and I / Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love / I keep bleeding, I keep, keep bleeding love / Keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding love.
Each chorus returns, at its close, to the main gist: “You cut me open.” The lyrics could be lamenting love or affirming it; trusting the possibility of falling for someone in the aftermath of hurt, or else suggesting that love dwells in the hurting itself—that sentiment clots and coagulates in bled blood, another version of the cutter’s logic:
I bleed to feel.
Bleeding is the proof and home of passion, its residence and protectorate. This kind of bloody heartbreak isn’t feeling gone wrong, it’s feeling gone right—emotion distilled to its purest, most magnificent form.
Best bathos on the air.
Well, yes, it is.
Turn every scar into a joke.
We already did.