On Becoming a Drop in the Cloud of Ghosts
Psychoanalysis, Jackson Pollock, and persisting through a traumatic brain injury in Part Four of a series by Amy Leigh Wicks.
I am sitting across from Dr. M, in an overstuffed leather chair that is not as large as his overstuffed leather chair, but it is still large enough to engulf me so that I am Alice in Wonderland after drinking the vial that makes her small. I don’t know exactly what a neuropsychologist does. I am nervous. I have not been out in public for weeks. I have been home, sleeping and painting and forgetting I couldn’t do differently if I wanted to. This morning I shower and brush my hair and dress, as if I am the kind of person who shows up on time for work and goes out on the weekends and knows how to carry a conversation with a stranger at a dinner party. Then I fall asleep. I wake up rumpled, but make it to the appointment.
Now I feel the sunlight bruising my right eye while Dr. M asks me how I am. I smile, or tell my face to smile, and feel my mouth stretch upward at the corners as a lump forms in my throat. I think it’s the bud of a pale pink peony starting to open so I can’t speak, and my eyes are squinting and my face is wet and my head is pounding. It’s one of the stranger symptoms: I cry without warning, but the storm dries up before the cathartic relief that usually accompanies a good cry, leaving me hungover and irritated.
There are tissues beside you. This happens often with concussions by the way, many of my patients are horrified at not being able to hold back their tears or rage. Especially if they are used to being in control. He lifts an eyebrow and smiles knowingly and I don’t hate him for it. I do like being in control. Now tell me about the concussion, how it happened, what life has looked like for you for the last fifteen months. Take your time. Rest your eyes if you like. That window’s bothering you, isn’t it? I’ll close the blinds and flick off the lights.
The shadow is a blanket I welcome. I have been living in the dark since I hit my head. Since I fell down this rabbit hole into the world of brain trauma. I answer his questions without feeling. It has been hard, strange. What does hard mean anymore? I have felt hopeless, full of rage, but most often, I have felt nothing. There are other things I want to explain, but how? My job became a giant, and then the stove in my kitchen grew so big I couldn’t reach it to make an egg. As everything got huge I got smaller. So small I couldn’t reach most of life anymore. When I got smaller, doing became impossible while being became natural. What if being is worth not doing? What is so wrong with being?
Dr. M tells me stories about other traumatized brains he’s seen over the last forty years, particularly outliers. Linda gave up on recovering from a TBI after five years until she bumped into a neurology endocrinologist at an office. He recognized symptoms of a severe hormone imbalance and discreetly suggested she get bloodwork done. A good knock on the head often messes with the motherboard, most people don’t know that. Menstruation, motivation, sex drive, sleep, appetite, aggression, you wouldn’t believe how many functions are influenced by hormones, and you wouldn’t believe how many concussions mess with hormone panels. So Linda got treated based on her bloodwork results and just like that, he snaps his fingers, five years of pain, dizziness and life-altering symptoms were gone. It sounds like a fairytale, complete with years-long monsters, suspense, and a shimmering conclusion. And then there was Janice who eventually had brain surgery performed by a world-class surgeon. Right away she improved, but started experiencing debilitating headaches and complained that her brain was unbearably itchy a few weeks later. They were dumbfounded. The surgery had so gone well. Dr. M leans back with his fingers interlaced, and smiles at me as his eyes widen, like him and I are children waiting for our math teacher to discover a giant cockroach crawling up her neck in the middle of solving an equation on the board. He leans forward for the reveal. The surgery went well, but his student resident sewed her up afterwards with part of the scalp folded in so that hair was growing into her head instead of out from it. The headaches were from her brain being constantly tickled by hair growing toward it. They sorted it out, but poor Janice, he says. Can you imagine?
The more he talks, the more comfortable I feel. The stories get more interesting and terrifying; they tell me Dr. M is driven by curiosity rather than assumption. They tell me others have lived here before and I am small but not alone. The stories Dr. M tells do not promise a way out, they only tell me others have been here before me, and that there might be unlikely solutions to seemingly impossible situations, or at least good stories along the way. The full neuropsychological assessment is scheduled for a few weeks out and will take place over a couple of days. I should rest until then. I flip the appointment card over and over in one hand while I open the heavy office door and step into the too bright world, walking carefully down each concrete stair until I’ve reached the parking lot. The card is smooth and I can faintly feel the pen’s indent from where the date and time are scrawled next to my name.
I pick up some house paint samples at the hardware store. Basic, bright colors. The oil paintings I’ve been working on are piling up and have exhausted me. Maybe trying something different will be restful. The more paintings I’ve done, the more fixated I’ve become on trying to improve. Trying to get better is tiring these days. The more I focus on getting it right, the worse I feel along the way. I’m not done with traditional oil painting, I’ve barely even started, but I need to branch out before I burn out and stop painting altogether. I need to create while I rest. Elizabeth Bishop says, “then practice losing farther losing faster,” so I attempt to let go of what little I’ve learned about painting and throw a drop cloth down. I open the first jar of paint and marvel at how the liquid rolls around inside. When I squeeze the oil paints from their metal tubes onto a palette, they come out thick as lipstick, and that is satisfying in its own way, but this bright pot of yellow sloshes in the jar and holds no form, making me want to pour it from seventy stories high onto a canvas the size of a school bus.
T.S. Eliot says, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” I came around to this idea before I hit my head, while studying poetry. I created maps of when schools of thought were pioneered, established, and dismantled. I paid close attention to why a form was abandoned, what it meant when it happened, and how it was reclaimed later but repackaged as new. For over a decade I set myself for contrast and comparison among my own secret catalog of living and dead writers; those books and lists have been out of reach for some time. But what about this late, limping entrance into art? My ambition is all but diminished. I don’t even have an elementary overview of art history. I’m just trying to keep myself alive by creating. If Eliot is right, (sometimes I wonder if he’s ever wrong, other times I hope he’s never right) even without any formal study of art, even in my attempt to practice losing and forgetting what little I know about technique or form, my creative expression evaporates upward and becomes absorbed into the cloud of every artist who has ever existed. The first time I read Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” I was furious. How dare anyone insinuate that my work would not be truly original and outside of time and completely free of the pollution of outside influence? I came back to the essay a few years later. And then again. It seems the more I read, the more I wrote, the more I grew to embrace the world of writers I was becoming a very small part of.
Here with my house paints on my back porch, the thought that I cannot have any meaning alone brings me great comfort. I have not yet found a way out of this hole I fell into over a year ago, and since then I’ve become smaller than a drop of water. I’ve become so small that I’ve evaporated. Now that I’ve started painting, I see that I’ve evaporated and become a tiny particle in a cloud comprised of dead and living artists who are mostly strangers, save a face or two I remember.
For years I kept this wrinkled print of a photograph of Jackson Pollock at my writing desk, cigarette dangling from his mouth as he crouched over a huge canvas, open paint can in one hand, paintbrush in the other, dripping dark paint through his fingers onto the canvas. There are a few skulls and one of his drip paintings in the background of the photograph. Of course he comes to mind. One, Number 31, 1950 took up a huge wall in the MoMA and it was the first painting I ever felt understood by. It will be terrible if I try to explain it to you, if I say it was like a dance. Go look at it if you don’t know the one I mean, go in person if you can, to the fourth floor of the museum and stand in front of it and feel small and alive and thrilled all the way through.
Pollock studied at the Arts Students League in New York, and his early work shows his natural abilities, and the influence of his teachers and mentors. He suffered a mental breakdown in his twenties (such a small sentence to describe such a giant world of pain). The Jungian Psychoanalytic treatment he underwent afterwards helped him shift his artistic focus toward what he described as his “inside world.”¹ The ‘drip’ technique was born. He dribbled paint, he dripped it, he threw it; and while he was creating this way he said, “I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.”²
This is what I want, as I float suspended in a state of waiting for my brain to be analyzed. I want to separate my broken self into open jars of color, to dissolve into red and blue and yellow and then to see what becomes of landing on the blank space. Not to make something as much as to be part of something being made.
It is ridiculous to compare my trip to a hardware store for house paints after an appointment with Dr. M to Pollock’s departure from formal education and entrance into his inner world through abstract art. But it is equally ridiculous to pretend these connections are not being rapidly made in my subconscious. Haven’t I always felt like a star moving through the dark, making invisible shapes with other bright pinpricks millions of lightyears from myself? It is not Pollock I think about while I mix colors with a wooden ruler until I have a tiny ocean of deep blue green here and a sea of crimson there. I’m thinking of my own pain, my own pleasure and numbness. But maybe Pollock’s skull and mine rest somewhere in the background, maybe even one of his paintings rests alongside our two skulls as I hover over the expanse of my own inner world and begin to drip color.
¹ “Jackson Pollock Invented a New Kind of Painting That Changed the Way People Looked at Art” | Voice of America
² One: Number 31, 1950 | MoMA
Amy Leigh Wicks is the author of The Dangerous Country of Love and Marriage (Auckland University Press) and Orange Juice and Rooftops (Eloquent Books). She holds a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and an MFA from The New School. She loves to swim, ride motorcycles, and finger paint.
