Keep it in the Closet: Shame as Event

Kris Casey | August 15, 2020

But they told me
A man should be faithful
And walk when not able
And fight till the end
But I'm only human

There is a fear I am having about writing this thing that is examining one of my personal life events. The event I am referring to is a psychosis I experienced while being pregnant. I am afraid of showing this experience of psychosis during pregnancy. I am afraid of having the story seen. Because a mother-to-be should not be hospitalized for four weeks while hallucinating, or so it feels to be. And so this writing is a practicing of embracing the shame and the pain, of examining and reflecting upon the shame and the pain, in order to be coming to a new ground of being with this event. Moreover, I am coming to the understanding that I must embrace the voice with which I write the things I live and learn, the spaces I pursue and traverse. Things are not spaces, but exist within spaces, take up spaces, and I must remain attuned to the position of things and spaces in my choices regarding perceiving living. I must conjure the writing of an affective language. Perhaps poetry is this best minimalist-performative writing, capable of slicing through the thing-itself, in this case, the thing that was lived. Of course, it was not a thing that was lived, but a slice of being that was. It is a thing insofar as it is a thing of the past, a thing of the memory.

But this thing is a thing for which I feel great shame. The shame of having lived at the edge of the margins, so far at the edge of the margins that I have never recovered the position I lived at prior. The location I had previously inhabited was obliterated; destroyed utterly, wiped out.

There is really never a good time to be obliterated. You cannot plan ahead for the obliteration of your subjectivity, your position, your perception. You will never have the adequate preparation for such a rupture and any such preparation will predispose you to some other biases, notions, conceptions, or structures that might predetermine an agenda or an outcome that may potentially not be your own. (The ego, the persona, is a survivalist.) In order to have access to the experiences of the new spaces and the new being you cannot carry with you the old bags of the old thinkings and the old knowings. And so you are required to pass through a bewilderment, a deeply or utterly confused kind of being.

Bewilderment happens when language loses it’s significations, is experienced at the in-between of the signifier and the signified. Bewilderment happens when things contain symbols that connect to spaces that connect to things and they are all orchestrated for the breakdown of a continuation that can no longer go on.

Bewilderment is formless. Formlessness is an a-signifying kind of space. The space of pregnancy is where I experienced formlessness.

Really, what it was, was the event of a making of a space for something of a transversal, that is, a turning across, or into, something else.

I will tell you of this rupture, the event of this rupture that caused me to become formless, which caused me to become something else. It was my fourth month of pregnancy, while living in Paris, that I suffered a psychosis. It came on slowly- maybe it was swelling up for about a month or two. But I can remember clearly the night it erupted and I was catapulted into an alternate dimension which had a feeling that was the feeling of a very round and swollen moment. I was in the apartment, a 400 square foot room with wooden beams on the ceiling and a view of the garden in the backyard. It was August 2013. I was sitting at a small table with my diary. Thinking I was writing, but I was writing nothing. A small moth flew in front of me, and I could see it so clearly, so intensely, that I was not sure if it was a real moth or a machine-moth. I cannot explain much more than this particular experience of the moth, as it is hard to trace in memory. But I realized at that moment that something had shifted, swelled, and I was lost in a space of intensity. I became confused, how long had I been like this? Was it a day? A week? A month? Time lost meaning. But it was not a feeling of pleasure or contentment. It was a feeling of being lost. Lost in time. Mina Loy said that “Time is the dispersion of intensiveness”. What I can say of my experience is that the dispersion of the intensiveness of time had become condensed, and I was experiencing all of time, all at once.

I did not sleep that night. Nor did I sleep the following nights. I would leave the apartment only to be surrounded by what appeared to be perfectly orchestrated events for my own personal witnessing. This guy walking across the street just as I walked out from the front door was somehow a reaction to me walking out my front door, totally connected to my presence, my movement in space and time. Each image or word I saw contained a symbol or symbolism that was crafted for my own understanding, yet I could not entirely understand. When I would re-enter the apartment, I was certain, could feel, that someone had been inside while I was gone, searching my things and putting wires and microphones into my computer, behind the pillows on my bed, inside the television. Everything mechanical and electronic became repugnant to me. One afternoon, I took apart my computer to see if I could locate the bug that I was sure had been placed inside. I found nothing, but that did not dispel my belief. I began to whisper in the apartment, for fear I was being recorded. I stopped eating, bathing, and brushing my hair. I was so deeply entangled in the intensity that I stopped existing as a formal object, a physical thing which required physical care.

I began to believe I was dying. Or that somehow I had to choose between myself dying and the baby dying. If laying in bed, curling my body into a ball meant that I was choosing my own survival, and arching my back meant that the baby would live. I went into the bathroom one early morning. I looked into the mirror and stared at my face which looked distorted and not mine. I was convinced that because I had woken up in a curled up ball position, the baby had died, and I had killed him by choosing this fetal position. I dressed slowly and went out onto the street. It was August, les vacances, so the streets were deserted. I walked up Avenue du Maréchal to les urgences at the Hopital Esquiral. The lights were off when I entered the main reception room. This woman looked at me angrily, and, after I asked where I should go to see the doctor, said to me: “Mais vous saivez tres bien ou c’est”. I waited in the little dark room to be seen. The nurses opened the door and called out “Madame Coube”. I walked towards them. They asked why I was there. I said “le bebe…” clutching my stomach. They looked horrified. They took me to a small exam room. They examined me and explained that the baby was fine. They left the room, telling me to wait. I got up, dressed, grabbed my passport off of the counter and left, confused and ashamed. I walked back to my apartment and got back into bed.

Eventually, I was placed in the psychiatric unit in St. Maurice. It was the old Charenton Asylum, where the Marquis de Sade had spent the last 14 years of his life, writing and putting on plays. As I was escorted into the main hallway, I heard the other patients slowly and lowly chanting “faire glisser en haut…faire glisser en haut…faire glisser en haut…..” They were walking about in a synchronized manner, as if they had planned the whole thing in advance, waiting for the moment of my arrival. The doctors were standing in a line, and, as I walked passed, they lowered their heads, shaking them side to side. One doctor said, “C’etait une gentille dame” with tears in his eyes. A nurse showed me to my room. I heard her say to me, in a mix of French and English: “This is your honte room”. Your shame room. I entered.

I woke up at 2am later that night. I had been stripped naked and was in a button down hospital gown. I had no memory of the hours preceding. Two nurses came into my room with a tray of food. They put it on my table. I sat down to eat. There was a urine sample on the tray. The nurse said, “Cest un tisan”, and said I should drink it. She left the room, shuddering. I did not drink it. I stood up after I finished eating and took off my robe so the nurses could see I was pregnant. They closed my robe, gently saying, “Ca va le bebe, ca va.”

There was a small window on the door to my room, so as doctors or nurses would pass, they would peek in. They caught me at all kinds of odd moments. Our eyes would sometimes meet, and it would startle us both. I felt like an animal. No one could make sense of what had happened to me. I could barely speak English, let alone French, so communicating who I was and where I had come from was impossible. How did you meet your husband? Online. PAR INTERNET?! Oui. What does he do for work? He owns a bar. C’est un BARMAN?! Oui. Where is he now? Sleeping.I remember hearing a girl ask Corinne, who had kindly befriended me, “Alors, pourquoi elle est la?” “Je ne sais pas, peut-etre de la schizophrenie”. I stood up and looked at them and said loudly “JE NE SUIS PAS SCHIZOPHRENIE.” It was the first sentence I spoke since my arrival.

At night, I would have fits of hysteria. Wailing, arching my back, sticking out my tongue, clenching into all kinds of odd and twisted positions, like the black and white photos you see of the girls in the Salpetriere by Charcot. I would be tumbling about in my bed for hours. One night, I felt there were drums beating in my stomach, rhythmic and loud. My back was arched high and my head lifted and underneath me, my then-bulging stomach was raised to the sky. I saw beams of light shooting out of my stomach. I held my breath. I felt something shoot into me, into my stomach, and then suddenly everything went silent. I fell to the bed, exhausted. My body finally relaxed.

Another night, I noticed a huge moth in the corner of the room. It was un Grand Paon de Nuit,  or Saturnia pyri, also known as Aristotle’s Silkworm, the largest moth in Europe, the same moth Van Gogh found in the garden of the clinic at Saint-Rémy in [YEAR]. I told the nurse in the hallway that there was a giant butterfly in my room. She came into my room and looked up to where she was. She took a towel and guided the moth to move. She flew, as if in slow motion, out of the window, and into the moonlight. I did not understand the significance of this moment at the time, and the moth is a motif I would encounter frequently during this period.

I would sleep for 2 weeks, being woken only for meals. I would be walked to the dining room where the other patients would help me carry my tray, my silverware, as I was shaking from the heavy medication and could not use my hands very well. I would eat, slowly, in a daze, until everyone had left the dining room and I would be left at my table across from an old man with white hair, sitting at the table next to me. I would stare at him, knowing he was a symbol of some kind of pain, some kind of memory, some kind of lost story. The nurse would finally come to take my tray away and bring me back to my room where I would go back to sleep.