Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source
Peripersonal space, or near space, is the entire volume of space within a person’s reach, or within a single conceivable momentary extension of his person. Think da Vinci, and the geometry of his jumping jack in extremis sketch. All that. It includes then everything at arm’s length, and a bit more, in a pinch: in a car, for the driver, peripersonal space extends perhaps to the push lock on the passenger door, should the next moment at a stoplight present an unwelcome stranger approaching the vehicle. There is something potential, temporal, contingent about it. It feels insufficient then to call it space, to measure it in cubic feet. It includes the accelerator and brake pedals and the bag of groceries that one might shield from forward propulsion during an urgent stop, as well as the imagination of those events and immediate responses: stop and shield. The windshield wiper and the front wheel well are not part of the driver’s peripersonal space, near enough but accessible only by a series of steps.
In dance, peripersonal space is called the kinesphere. In compositional improv among other specific practices, a dancer develops awareness of her kinesphere and that of anyone or anything that may enter it, attuning to opportunities for interaction: synching, mirroring, dovetailing, clashing, chasing, et cetera. It is not wrong to call it a body’s gravitational field. In the audience attending such a performance, you might feel the tug in your own near space, as two well-attuned bodies pass one another. Little empathic ecstasies, solar flares, brought about by their transit. In that seat, I have reached out before.
I was driving in Los Angeles when I first heard of peripersonal space. I was on surface streets, returning from teaching my class, Life Writing, at Otis College. It had been a good class; I think it was the week we had read Claudia Rankine’s book-length essay about surviving the first term of the Bush administration, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, a kind of emptied-out everyman account of four years anyone might’ve endured, and I was buzzing from it. Science Friday was on the radio, with Ira Flatow, a segment featuring an interview of two psychologists, joint authors of a book which laid out the science behind a new formulation of selfhood. Together they built an explanation: the self was not just the corporal body and the sensate, sentient being in its form; it was also everything within its immediate orbit. The soccer ball behind a person’s heel or the toggle switch on the nightstand lamp beside a person, even in the dark, especially in the dark, are experienced—in their potential for interaction—by that person as part of him or herself. As constituent of the self as a knee or the bridge of the nose. It seemed an extreme theory, ethically troubling, yet also very compelling, satisfying. In fact the example to which the authors resorted for illustration was the one inside the slowing car. A bag of groceries or a passenger in the seat beside the driver is perceived as part of oneself; to wit, securing its wholeness and safety in a sudden stop involves not valuation but rather instinct, to protect not what is most precious but what communicates itself as an extension of the self: the loosest, heaviest things in one’s near space. That which is most susceptible to detachment from the intact integer one feels one is. I may have remembered the study so well because I was training in movement improv that spring; but surely it also imprinted on me because the authors, who shared the same last name and the same title, both of whom Ira addressed throughout as “doctor,” were, he eventually revealed, mother and son.
Since I began this project, I have tried a number of times to write about my mother and me, and have abandoned a few attempts already. If these essays are, in part, inroads to disinhibited autobiography, as I have come to claim they are, and demand they be, I feel the imperative to address the subject above all others. But ours is a relationship so deep and damaged and (still) so tenuous it has defied emergence. It might be best to begin simply, in a gesture, as anyone, anyone in the passenger seat shielded by his mother’s outstretched arm. I was a well-protected little boy. My mother was instinctive with me—nearly animal—inclusive, attentive, loving, and largely unreflective. As a child I was just the same.
This driver-passenger seating arrangement was ours, fundamentally. If we were seated side by side, in a pew at High Hill Primitive Baptist Church—or Union Grove or Spoon Creek—or in a booth on the rare occasion we ate out with my father, Curtis, I sat always to her right. I internalized her concern that, because she is left-handed and I am right, we would bump elbows. Sitting close, two-bodied, our outer arms would each cut the sirloin or hold the hymnal. Invariably, in public, we were told that I was the spitting image of her, that our resemblance was uncannily close, and it was true, bothersome how self-evident, we looked and acted alike. In those parts of North Carolina and Virginia it was called favoring her. Fair-haired, high forehead, pale skin, slight, soft features, big teeth. Sensitive, awkward, quiet, reticent, easily embarrassed, apparently guileless, quick to cry when made to feel inadequate or slow. Even without her, living with my grandparents the summer my parents divorced, each of my grandmother’s friends, approaching me, began, You must be Sandra’s boy.
On our own at home, I remember much tenderness early on. I think my emotional fragility, my inconsolable bouts of overwhelm at school and my inability to know or to say what was the matter, determined that I had no close friends; and though she was popular at work, my mother was lonesome and lost in her first marriage and its aftermath. We had each other, we would often say to one another, if we had no one else. We survived on $35 monthly grocery bills (the smell of Vienna sausages would not come clean from my lunchbox), and I helped her pin sequins and tassels on styrofoam ornaments when she had no money for Christmas gifts. Many times she told me that I would find in the long run she was my best friend. And reciprocally, when she would say, as often she did, that no one loved her, I was quick to protest, to offer myself, an exception, her only sunshine, in the song. She prized my sweetness and attention. We played another game on the carpet in the den, a game she had discovered first with our dog Arnold. When she knelt facedown, in what now I might call child’s pose, and covered her face, and pretended to cry, the puppy would also whimper and manically search for an entry into the fortress of her hurt, licking her hands and pawing and digging the carpet for access. One evening she began this performance but we both knew Arnold was outside. I took his place, nibbling solicitously, relishing the tacit invitation, giving pleasure with my worry. I learned I could reverse the roles and expect the same. My crisis, my frequent and inexplicable loss of composure and attendant shame, presided over the game; we were rehearsing breakdown and empathic despair. The game stood in for actual help: an expression, really, of remediless suffering. She could offer only that I was like her (in my fortress), that we suffered the same fate, that our bond prevailed.
It is more than embarrassing to relate all of this. I come up against the inappropriateness of, for one thing, sharing what is only half mine to share. But is that partiality, expressed by that proportion—half of one—ethical, or healthy for a grown man? Roland Barthes has famously said that to be a writer is, essentially, to violate a primal taboo, to “play with the mother’s body.” No. I love Barthes and he is a signal influence on my conception of this very book; but the remark presumes a class and level of literacy I was not born into. (How self-betraying here to pause to avenge my mother’s unsophisticated heritage before I continue divorcing myself from it.) Language eventually was for me, rather, the realm that provided for the rejection of that body, and for drift beyond its orbit. My facility with it came via the man who married into us. From their weekend away, they brought the proposal home to me, and I too said yes.
Throughout my adolescence and young adulthood—that is, the entire duration of my mother’s second marriage, until Frank’s death last year when I was thirty-nine—our relationship was characterized by the dissolve of that early intimacy and marked by several disruptions and mutual cancellations. Individuation. What can be a normal stage of development was for us already delayed and then protracted by the constant airless terror in her abusive marriage and the business of evading its seizures. My rapidly necessary independence was weakly managed and—when noticed—very nearly peripersonally troubling for her. The persistent empathy I have gravely felt throughout and despite has been a source and site of deep anguish.
When I was thirteen, soon after their marriage and his adoption of me and my transfer to private school, Frank, my mother, and I visited friends of his in Denver—a former Justice Department colleague, his wife and their older children. The first evening, after dinner, we broke into teams to play Trivial Pursuit. It was 1986. Before long everyone was remarking my cleverness, earning green and yellow and orange pieces of the teen team’s pie. I liked the wine-drunk repartee. When my mother asked a question of her opponents, arts and leisure, they answered with quick certainty, Eydie Gormé; but without hesitating, reading again the back of the card, she insisted they were wrong; the answer was Eddie Gormes. Frank and the other couple, all of us, laughed, realizing her error confronted with the exotic spellings, and they teased her, piling on in the easy, witty, high-bourgeois way she wasn’t accustomed to. Her humiliation was instant, and only I could see that, trembling behind the pillow she had bravely brought to her face to feign laughter, she was not going to regain composure. I knew what she felt; this was me a thousand times before. After an uncomfortable period, the pillow was lowered, she spat her terrible, hot, resentful hurt in a burst, ran to the bathroom and did not reappear to the group until morning. Sandra? Mom? The door stayed closed. The game, the evening, the trip, was over. So was the dynamic of my childhood. Because her condition would be stunned, stagnant, unsupported, whatever further distinction I attained would be distinction from her (what happens if there are two Pygmalions in the fantasy, one more adaptable?), and whatever self-determination I asserted would be for my mother a betrayal.
It was as if inevitable. Soon enough, I would walk out of my mother’s church, sit in the passenger seat of the car in the hot sun for the remainder of the hour, and never set foot in the building again. I was fourteen. The sermon was about the righteousness of women who accepted their role as helpmeet, meek and shamefaced. I had seized a moment to make irreprovable my quiet protest, then: not on my account but on my mother’s, weeks after the sermon in which Brother Larry had locked eyes with mine, explaining from the pulpit why man laying with man was an abomination. It was becoming clear most of the world did not accredit my invisibility as we arranged for it at home, the more different I grew. Suffering a traumatic marriage and in an ideology that abhorred me, my mother continued to find no way to witness me—let alone create a holding environment without judgment for the person I was in the turmoil of becoming—and so we deepened a merciless old pattern. If I could not be sufficiently seen, I could be surveilled, I could be watched for signs of something; and to avoid detection, I could withhold, avoid, deceive and cover. I could keep out of reach.
Inevitable, too, then, was a situation we assiduously forestalled for some time. At seventeen, caught off guard by daytime television, a talk show underway about gay teens, I watched, with my mother, two boys kiss, while the live audience catcalled and laughed and grimaced. Where was the remote? My peripersonal self must have been exercised—da Vinci jumping jacks and then some—seeking it. She remarked that she didn’t understand how or where such people proliferated. I wielded a statistic: it was likely that one out of ten of her acquaintances was gay or lesbian, and left the room red-faced. Minutes later, she found me downstairs, stood on the landing, and fixed her gaze on me, her jaw tight. You’d better not be gay, she said. Privately devastated, I believe I managed only sarcasm. What a nuanced and thoughtful philosophy of parenting you have. Such was the condition and extent of our mutual alienation and impasse. There was not therefore another opportunity for candor with her until I was twenty-three, in 1997, when she and Frank visited me in Brooklyn, where I was finding a rich if complicated new context for my sexuality. Suffice it to say, about the confused half hour of nearly wordless, fearsome emotion ending in Frank’s insistence that we all get ahold of ourselves, that it did not go well. She has not visited any home of mine in the seventeen years since.
The mother-son coauthorship of a book, any book, particularly in the field of psychology, and especially at a vanguard understanding of the self in relation, remains perverse to me. I can hardly conceive of it. The separation necessary to decide independently to come together and collaborate with the person who successfully, unilaterally claimed you and your body as part of him or herself, on a book of objective science about the purposes and means and limits of such claims in the construction of self; to be able to count on and work with his or her understanding of individuated separation in healthy human development: this was for me beyond what could be contemplated. It was the publication of my first book, Not Even Then, when I was thirty, in fact, that demonstrated how unthinkable a mother-son harmony of authentic selves would be.
My mother did not take my first phonecall, more than a week after I mailed her an inscribed copy. Frank, to whom I had sent a copy separately with an inscription even more (hideous to me now) reflective, answered the call and said that they were dismayed, that she was beyond words, that the book was unforgivably inconsiderate of her. He was incredulous that I was astounded. The book, like many first books, was part bildungsroman, contained a poem performing my consternation with Primitive Baptist salvation logic as well as an elegiac portrait of my mother seeming to vanish in the dewpoint steam where I had watched her work one morning; but largely the book retains a poetics of impersonality, thriving on the anyone/everyone account that lyric poetry customarily finds. That was in fact a quality described by the blurbs on the back. Bodies of men are in it; desire, love, alterity, the New York cityscape and North Carolina landscape are reckoned in it, fugitive, mostly unattached to person. Para-personal. Regardless my mother’s reading of it was penetrating. When she did take my call, she told me in a terse voice that she was disgusted by the book, which she found so offensive and shameful in its “display” she wished every copy could be retrieved and burned to ashes. She repeated herself, making the wish. She felt her religion was ridiculed in it, and further prophesied that one day I would be prostrate before my God begging forgiveness. The publication had been the highest achievement of my life to that point, and its warm reception—in national review attention—was plunged by the most basic and complete of rejections. To pretend it didn’t matter, to project that I was untouched by her curse, their disapproval, was poor strategy, especially as I consented to their requests to join them at Christmas and to return for Frank’s illness and surgeries. First time I did, six months in, soon after her dog died, I was shocked by how my mother had aged. Her weight gain was ample, her hair was lifeless, she wore nothing but sweatshirts and had dark circles under her eyes. I believe she had suffered a kind of nervous breakdown. When there, I could tell it was useful to her I was out of my context, hard to see.
My best friends were not wrong when they gently advised that one doesn’t necessarily need to maintain relations with someone who is ashamed of you or who erases you or who will not agree to meet your partner or who covers the truth in conversation with others, just because she is your parent, or just because she is hurt. Nor need one ever return, they said, to the constant trade of humiliation and misery in a toxic household. Eventually, as many as five years later (I can admit now), I recognized that my resistance of that advice was itself a form of knowledge. There was a way to align myself in right relation; to develop at least consciousness of feeling, even at thirty-six; to practice healthy limited relationship with someone with compromised capacity; to openly acknowledge to her what is hurtful or unacceptable to me; and to heal, which would mean a refusal to conceal or be concealed.
The most intense confrontation we have since had arose one late night a month before Frank died. Wobbly, heavily, he came to the kitchen and sat down on his stool, witnessing with some amazement the quickly escalating conversation we were having, about behavior I found unacceptable. She was alternately enraged and distraught for hours as I patiently and intently repeated how I felt, vanished and disrespected; if we were to have a relationship going forward I would insist on greater fairness in our mutual toleration of the other’s worldview and I would not disappear part of myself for her benefit. At one point I blocked her swinging arm from striking my face and stepped back out of slapping distance; at another I needed to say aloud that I was not a part of her, and she needed to cry out that all she ever wanted is for someone to love her. (Frank needed to ask, rhetorically, to cover the wailing, what on earth it was she wanted from him.) Some several minutes later, we shared a long pause, registering what we all heard her say: I shouldn’t have to choose between my God and my son. It was I who suggested there was room for her to be openly, publicly honest about who I am and still disapprove of it, equally openly. She forbid me to use the word God, and I forbid her to use the word lifestyle. This seemed a bit of useful resolution. She needed some space, took a short walk, which is when Frank said, for the last time to me, You’re a good man, and went to bed.
In the weeks after his death, my mother told me that during an argument a few years into their marriage, Frank accused her of engaging in incest with me. Why she told me I don’t know, but I remember the night Frank had pointed out, as illustration. They had returned from their honeymoon in Hawaii, one of the first nights we spent together in the new house. One of the 1986 World Series games had just ended, Red Sox and Mets, on our new TV, exciting. At bedtime, as a kind of prank, or in a goodnight hug that wanted to be prolonged, I had crawled under the covers with my mother, in their new king bed, in the filtered rosy light of total envelopment, and nestled against the side of her body, as a surprise I suppose for Frank when he would return from the bathroom and peel back the bedspread. I may even have said Boo. Was the picture unseemly, a thirteen-year-old and his thirty-four-year-old mother lying in an embrace—he in his shorts and she in her negligee—or a gross misjudgment of new family playfulness? Did I think I might be tickled, skedaddled? I remember his pause—Jesus Fucking Christ!—and his slow, stiff retreat back down the hall, we so much more lithe than he, and then the look my mother and I exchanged: Uh oh. Maybe a giggle? She said she was furious with the accusation, and told him I had only been a boy, just an unsure boy who worried he was losing his mother, and was hanging on despite all the disruption.