a garbage-y smell in here,” announced a friend in graduate school, stepping into my apartment for a party.
Only in retrospect did that rankle. Why not take me aside to tell me that, I wondered the next morning. At the time I merely blushed hard, and ran out of my party with the trash.
I was, in my life, in a kind of coma. I believed, as many girls do, that the signals that came from inside were frivolous, half mad, silly, arbitrary, a blinding, burning fountain signifying nothing. I was estranged from myself, a kind of split-off Nostradamus head lurching my way forward in life without benefit of internal, and often bodily, signals. And then I was asked to teach. I was a second-year student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and assigned a literature class. It was late August, sweltering.
I stood before my first-ever session in the turquoise scratchy polyester frilled dress in which I’d attended my sister’s wedding. A pockmarked, smirking boy in the furthest row tilted back on the hind legs of his chair and clicked his pen. A girl in the first row with blonde, shellacked orange-juice-can curls peered at me, a blank notebook open on her desk. I was teaching Macbeth. I’d reread Macbeth.
“Macbeth is a man at war with his own conscience,” I suddenly announced to my students, and to myself. “There’s no feeling safe, for him!” Not knowing how to teach, I had anxiously abandoned my notes and begun to lecture, to conjure. Knives floating in the air, bloody hands that choke the throat of their own mistress, a ghost sitting silently at a party, a voice announcing, “Macbeth hath murdered sleep!”—“Why, this was just the Bronx!” I exclaimed, glimpsing it now for the first time. It was where I’d grown up. It was people disclaiming the meaning of their actions, constantly. It was the language of your inner reality divorced from what you were willing to acknowledge.
I recalled my sister pinching my cheeks so hard between pincerlike fingers that my skin throbbed for half an hour afterwards, even as she smiled the whole time in my face and I convinced myself this was love. And my mother fretting over Anita’s fleshiness with a fascinated concern that seemed to have a knife blade hidden inside it.
Shakespeare’s play was all about the disparity between the felt truth and the one publicly enacted, I heard my own voice say. It was the refused truth of things exploded outward. It was self-estrangement enacted on the world. It was another way of being a doofus. Of course the witches offered temptations! The world will do that. It will offer lots of glimmering rewards if only you will ignore what you know is true.
The boy clicked his pen, but less. The girl had taken a note or two, nodding slowly.
Walking uphill on Jefferson Street after class, I thought: So, in teaching literature, how you register the emotional valences matters. You can’t afford to be comatose. The institution—the university—values the felt sense of things! Has to! There’s no teaching English without it. “You’re beating a dead horse!” complained some students next class, those who could see nothing in rereading. You think this horse is dead? It’s panting! It’s sweating! It’s laid out before you but its heart is pounding! You think I’m beating it? Stories, I realized, were like McDonald’s wrappers to many of these students—to be emptied and tossed. And I could show them otherwise. I could show them lines to read between, with incandescent meanings clustered there, and sunken compartments in which spirits lay. For the first time in my entire life, I knew I knew something.
After that, I couldn’t help but become more attuned to my own internal signs. Was this the beginning of adulthood?—the signals finally making sense? Because the pangs of hope, the jolts of envy, the stinging rasp when mocked—now instead of seeming the nonsensical knocks and pings of life’s engine, they rapped out a pattern of obvious significance.
In November my students read the Metamorphoses, and walking along the deep green corridor after my class, it occurred to me that Nostradamus was an incarnation of the sacred poet Orpheus. My class had just read that the poet’s chopped-off head, floating down the river after he is slain, retains its mystic power: “his tongue, / Lifeless, still murmured sorrow, and the banks / Gave sorrowing reply.” Just like the physician/astrologer who continued to prophesy! So, a song is lodged in the body itself! I’d acted as if my own body were in fact a McDonald’s wrapper, useful just to keep me intact.
I’d always assumed that the Creature Feature prophet was a warning image of the hyperdeveloped mind—as if to be an intellectual, and especially a female intellectual, meant having to foreswear the other ordinary fulfillments: children, sensuality, a normal home life. I thought women had to choose. Now I saw the prophet as someone who traveled between the physical and the metaphysical, which were not unrelated, as I’d assumed. They might even be in communion, might even sometimes be the same. The body—might the body itself actually be a divining rod, of sorts, helping you to find where treasure was buried, help you to understand what things meant?
Still, despite these glimmers of awareness, it was a hard time, that first year I taught. My internal signals kept bringing me into conflict with those I loved. No wonder I hadn’t wanted to read them! Now I had to confront the friends who intimidated me, or at least my attraction to them. And I had to confront as well my tendency to put myself second, my assumption I didn’t need to be seen—I’d been wrong about that. Another mistake. I did need to be seen! I didn’t want a curtained life!
The tensions with my boyfriend, in particular, became acute.
“I hope you enjoyed buying those underpants,” he’d said with a rigid, panicked smile when I held up a purchase from a lingerie shop.
Because obviously they would have no impact on him.
I’d spent the afternoon among balcony brassieres and merry widows. No, I had not enjoyed it. I’d found the whole expedition mortifying. I’d found my own body mortifying. But wanted something to kindle us, to make what was dead between my boyfriend and me alive again. No go. “I hope you enjoyed buying those underpants”—he’d said, with a stricken, frozen smile.
“How awful,” remarked my best friend, in a restaurant the next day.
“Really?” I stared at her.
“Yes!”
But why was I surprised? Hadn’t I felt, at the time, awful? But then I’d instantly gone numb. Zoned out. Returned myself to a kind of docility—a refusal to draw conclusions. Which was much easier to endure than the crumpling, aching sadness at knowing I might have to leave my cherished boyfriend.
But that was the problem! Right there! Going numb.
I gazed into the candle flame. Well, so what if I left him? I shut my eyes and the candle still burned, although its orange was now green. Why did the thought of leaving him disturb me so much? Wasn’t it better to grow angry at his reaction—“I hope you enjoyed buying them!”—than to go dead? Or, wasn’t it better to whisper: “Really? Is that all you have to say?”
Anagnorisis is the term for an Aristotelian recognition. It marks the moment in a play when the hero comes to a realization about what he’s done, who he is. I read this the next day in the college library while studying Oedipus Rex. My study carrel was beside a Gothic window diamonded with chicken wire. The sky was a blue sword burning overhead. Can there be an anagnorisis involving underpants, I wondered, tears in my eyes. Is that too ridiculous?
The philosopher Stanley Cavell, I read on, says that anagnorisis occurs when the hero allows himself an emotional reaction to his intellectual understanding. The two functions had been kept apart during the hero’s quest. While Oedipus pursued the truth of his situation, he couldn’t allow himself to react. He needed to follow the evidence wherever it led—that great detective who in his youth had solved the riddle of the Sphinx itself. But then: the anagnorisis occurs when he permits the emotional reaction, the inner response to the facts he’s unearthed. That’s when he goes wild, blinding himself, gouging out his own eyes with the brooches. And it’s this very thing—allowing an emotional awareness of what he’s done—that Macbeth flees the entire length of his play, leaving a bloody path behind him.
I looked up from my book to the blazing blue arrow tip