The Imagined Spaces of Self
I recently emerged from the curious imaginative space I inhabited for several years while completing a PhD in Creative Writing. Kirsty Gunn and Gail Low were my joint supervisors. Early on in this venture I remember a conversation with Gail in the café of the V&A in Dundee when she asked me to outline the kinds of things I thought I might write about. It was at the end of a day long writing event for a dozen students or so, and we had about ten minutes before I had to catch a train home. She knew I had worked for a lifetime as a Consultant Clinical Psychologist in the NHS, my specialism paediatrics and health and also neuropsychology. In one sense the real answer was ‘I don’t know.’ But in another I was clear. It was the embedded, complicated and for the large part wordless set of experiences I continued to hold somewhere in me that felt important to try and write about. After probably thousands of meetings with patients over the years— entering their lives for a while and trying to understand their problems and difficulties, external and internal— all of those encounters continued to occupy my own personal imagined spaces, and were looking for some kind of shape and expression. From them I had learned so much about what can go wrong with the body including the brain. About life. About family. About what it is to be human.
It wasn’t catharsis I was after, more a sense of wanting to bear witness to the children and parents I met. To acknowledge the richness of their experience but also to try and put into words its value and worth... cellular memories of how the living bodies of patients spoke directly to my own, often more so than their words… how each new family and situation I met was responded to, experienced by and changed me somehow—in the sense of having been stretched or expanded by sharing and witnessing segments of lives still very much in the making, as all lives are until the last breath. This was true whether I had gained some new knowledge or insight about how our bodies and brains work— a new technical kind of understanding— or whether I learned something simply by hearing what people were going through. When circumstance had pushed my clients to a personal edge of some kind, to a recognition that life would require something new from them, and that the steps that needed to be taken in response those events would be on untrammelled ground, my own positioning in life would shift indefinably too.
I didn’t know Gail very well at this point and didn’t want her to think I was bonkers, so hesitated at listing the range of things I wanted to assemble on the page, having at that point no idea how I would go about creating some kind of order, a working relationship between the very disparate feeling parts. I wanted to give some of the clinical details needed of (anonymised) patient situations but also wanted to draw on other kinds of language and disciplines— philosophy, poetry, phenomenology—to slide freely between different kinds of thinking. While my clinical reports aimed to be objective, in reality many aspects of my own life and experience entered into how I worked, and what I saw when a family was sitting in front of me. Daily, my work within an acute hospital traversed the assumed gulf between the physical and the psychological. Patients ‘presented’ with all manner of unusual symptoms—often difficult, sometimes, traumatic, sometimes life changing which we had to try and find ways to talk about…. How to talk about a 17 year old boy falling 60 feet off a cliff, smashing his body on the rocks below on his first climb with his father, both individuals before me having to deal with the aftermath of the trauma. You saw the rawness of injury, of emotion of guilt. You understand how a life can turn completely in a single moment.
Wistawa Szymborska speaks of the inspiration in which any creative spirit works, and her belief that this is not confined just to those who define themselves as poets or artists more generally, but to any person who does their job, or any work of any kind done with love and imagination. This might include ‘teachers, doctors, gardeners...whose work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it.…Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’[1]Working in healthcare can involve a lot of unknowns for all parties concerned, the sense of challenge continuous, sometimes spilling over unpredictably into all the lived and imagined spaces of self. Writing is a peculiarly human and creative way of responding to the unknown and the unclear, one kind of response to everything in life that is at once intangible and slippery, but at the same time feels very real. Words can help make something real, bringing an experience within some kind of reach, whether in clinic or in personal life. …..Sometimes words were salvage.
What slowly appeared in my case was a collection of essays. I think of them as a family of conversation—inter-related, attempting numerous, continuous and sometimes frustrating exchanges with their tensions and harmonies and contradictions. Open-ended and without definitive conclusions ever being possible. I called the collection, ‘Encounter: An Act of Translation.’ Yet within a family there is usually some kind of understanding, an unvoiced kind of knowing. Noesis comes from the Greek word referring to ways of knowing beyond the five traditional senses—to direct knowing, intuition or implicit understanding.
Within the pages of my family of essays, I had two companions to help me explore the underbelly of thought that works in each of us, often just out of reach of conscious awareness. One was a writer and philosopher, Gaston Bachelard. He made me think differently about the world of imagination, about words and their effects, about our relationship with language itself. The other was a painting by Georges de La Tour, The Newborn, that used to hang on my clinic wall which helped me look, to see beyond what was immediately before me. To think beyond the surface…
Science privileges some forms of looking over others, and science holds a privileged place wherein things that can be named and measured can carry more status and power. The things we can’t measure, the things without ready names, quietly recede ever further. We forget that images in our heads, guiding the way we think, are often themselves metaphors created by the human minds in the first place. The brain as machine, as computer, as integrated informational network, can dominate our thinking and culture; increasingly we look to science to explain our feelings and emotions too. But all new knowledge begins in the individual, in moments when things are seen as if for the first time.
In The Flame of a Candle Gaston Bachelard muses on his life’s work and on the process of writing about it.[2] A philosopher of scientific knowledge at the Sorbonne in Paris, unusually Bachelard dedicated as much of his professional energy to an exploration of the poetic imagination, and so he criss-crossed over two domains that are usually kept rigidly apart. Bachelard’s subject is the living flame; as both material object and image he muses on how the flame of the candle draws the mind into a state of reverie, where the real world in which he lived and worked readily fuses with the inner world of his imagination, ever present, ever responsive. For Bachelard the state of ‘waking-working reverie’ is generative; he trusts the softening mind to find its own original expression, turning inward, freed in the gentle glow of the flame to attune to the conversation that sparks between the living parts of himself, in a ‘surveillance de soi.’ The peculiar power words possess to give rise to images, of the complex kind Bachelard pursues, allows us to share the richness and potency of inner and individual imaginative responses.
Translation was a theme throughout my clinical work as well as literally at one point in my life. I met The Newborn while living temporarily in France due to my husband’s relocation with work. It appeared amongst an assembly of celebrated works passing before my eyes on a computer screen in Connaissance de La France at the local University where I’d enrolled to learn French. With young children myself at that point the memories of my own experiences of giving birth were still within palpable reach.
So I was first introduced to these figures in The Newborn as part of an immersion in a new culture, a new way of looking at things, a new orientation and relationship with language. Words were felt as unfamiliar in my mouth and self-consciously formed; they felt as though they did not yet belong to me, did not resonate with the timbre of my own voice. The Newborn welcomed me into its familiar world, allowing a space in which everything of the less tangible kind could settle for a moment—accessible, less exacting, more intimate but, like life, the painting for me also contained the complicated and the ambiguous. Birth is the overt theme of the painting; the newborn is at its heart but beneath the surface are all the unknowns that arrive with her.
The painting speaks both to the way we hold and the way in which we are held—by ourselves and by others, in language, in relationships, in a shared world in constant flux. Around the infant is the uncertain, the unbounded, the infinite stretch of space and time. The painting holds both her and me in a moment of stillness and calm, in a state of between that is hard to capture in words, and perhaps through its simple recognition that we do not always need to or sometimes that we can’t. Any event of personal significance usually takes us to a place where we have no ready words to hand, where the habitual ones won’t do. When the new breaks into the intensely personal, we know that something has changed; the mother has to fit a new world and a new life inside the old one.
Later when working in the hospital a copy of The Newborn hung on my office wall. Sometimes, after patients had left after a consultation, I used to sit for a moment and look at it. Its calm reflective atmosphere had a visceral effect. It helped with new possibilities and new imaginings for families who, and perhaps including me, had to recalibrate or who felt stuck. The clinical space is a privileged one and conversations can take all kinds of paths. Encounters with patients were often intimate, personal things were laid bare. There are of course different kinds of intimacy. I mean here that in the spaces of the clinic rooms, patient and consultant within, words passed between us but we were also alive to the silences surrounding the words, to their halo and shadow, alert to the fullness of meanings that might carry over and above any easy statements or explanations, or attempts to describe what a child’s symptoms, illness or injury might really mean for them now or in their future. The vital pauses, the human gaps, the suspensions and the omissions, the hesitations between words were often the richest sources of information and stories. Silences and the space they occupy are full of all that has happened and all that yet might be. They join the material world to the realm of the imagination, to the future and what it might bring.
Clinical life was a constantly shifting mix of the bodily, the physical, the practical, the experiential, the existential in some cases. A newly born child is shaped by so many forces, events, occurrences and unforeseens. My family of essays contain different kinds of stories, some of them about patient encounters, some about my own life.… fragments of memories from my own childhood, experiences of being a mother and also a daughter and sister, crisscrossing languages between the personal and the professional. Shifting…between thought and feeling, blurring the lines between the two… sidling up on different ways of knowing. Susan Griffin asks: ‘Is it possible to write in a form that is both immersed and distant, far seeing and swallowed?’ She continues, ‘I am thinking that this is what women have been attempting these last decades. Not simply to enter a world of masculine discourse, but to transform it into a different kind of knowledge.’ [3]
Yet you never know where a real-life conversation will take you—whether with a book or a person before you in the flesh—or which unexpected place you might find yourself when you enter a child’s mind and look through their eyes, or through the eyes of any individual you meet. Living language is a continuous process of translation, shifting back and forth in the space of difference, where meanings are exchanged and created, where there are no easy separations between inner and outer.
I can never know if I have succeeded, in my attempts to give life to the kind of adventures of consciousness Bachelard had in mind, or to do full justice to what The Newborn evokes in me but it felt important to try.
-
[1] Wislawa Szymborsk, Nobel Lecture:’ The Poet and the world’ <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1996/szymborska/lecture/>
[2] Gaston Bachelard, The Flame of a Candle (Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications, 1988).
[3] Susan Griffin in Red Shoes, The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Jones and Elizabeth Mittman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p.10-11.