Rachel and I wouldn’t have lasted regardless; we got married the year before I started grad school, after we both, within the space of a few days, lost a parent: my mom finally succumbing to breast cancer, her dad dropping from a coronary. It was a doomed attempt to shore up a sense of family in the wake of those deaths; we had history and grief in common, not much else.
Our wedding, our non-wedding, had been at City Hall, one distracted friend as witness, followed by a celebratory dinner at an uncomfortably upscale Italian restaurant. Soaked by a sudden shower, we arrived disheveled, hair dripping, a wrecked, ironic carnation in my lapel. The waiter poured out a little of the red wine for me to try; for an instant, I thought he was making a joke about my age, giving me a child’s portion. Then I swirled it too aggressively, splashing a little on the tablecloth. I tried to make it into a Chaplinesque performance, but it all had a nightmarish quality—a couple of kids playing at adulthood with desperation. A year of nights spent staring at the ceiling, Rachel asleep beside me, the plaster yellow in the streetlight, the cracks seeming to spread before my eyes.
I felt fucked up about the deception—at least, when I wasn’t exhilarated about Jane—and, probably because my attempt at substitute family was failing, it was like I’d lost my mom all over again, as if the news were fresh, not that the news was old, analysis no doubt also stirring things up. A movie poster with a leading man she liked at the New Yorker on West Eighty-Eighth, a turn of phrase she might have used overheard on the subway, “Remember me to your sister,” Rachel blowing on her tea just so—suddenly I was bereft, but only briefly, like an episode of vertigo, like a crystal had come loose in my inner ear. (Ziegler, Hesse says, “especially admired cancer research, for his father had died of cancer and Ziegler firmly believed that science … would not let the same thing happen to him”; could Samuels have had this passage in mind?) Then there was the world: it was 1969, little improvised bombs detonating across Manhattan, perpetual campus protests; there was outrage, but also a sense of community, of carnival; we felt that history was alive. Jane and I were both increasingly active in the antiwar movement; my younger brother, who would prefer to be left out of a novel, was in the nascent Weather Underground; my father and I were barely speaking after our last fight over the war; all the orders, personal and political, were crumbling.
If I’d ever described my dissertation research to Samuels, I would have assumed that had prompted the Ziegler recommendation, but while I was open about desire and grief—a new erotic life with Jane, the recurring dream about my mom, the one where she’s waving at the camera—I never mentioned my academic work in analysis, something Samuels didn’t seem to notice. If my research became part of our sessions, if it was crossed with talk about my affair, my mom, etc., I thought I’d get blocked, paralyzed, especially if Samuels—dour, widely published, very Swiss—even hinted at disapproval; I already felt like a fraud half the time. I assumed Samuels considered me—at best—“not stupid but not gifted.”
For months I’d been conducting experiments related to the technique of “speech shadowing,” in which a subject repeats speech immediately after hearing it. I’d have participants don cumbersome black over-the-ear headphones and listen to a recording of a text I’d selected more or less at random (a driver’s ed manual I’d found discarded among other books on 109th and Columbus). As the subject parroted the recording, I gradually—almost imperceptibly—accelerated the tape; to my shock, I found that a significant number of the subjects would, past a certain threshold, begin to drivel, thinking all the while that they were repeating the recorded passage clearly. The first time this happened in my living room—two reel-to-reel recorders and a microphone atop the long rosewood coffee table my father had given us as a wedding present—I thought the subject (my downstairs neighbor, Aaron, who also sold us drugs) was having a stroke; Rachel rushed into the room to see what the hell was going on. But Aaron just sat there as he descended—or ascended?—into glossolalia, although without any apparent ecstasy; Aaron, in his one moth-eaten cardigan, looked as bored as ever.
My theory was that, under conditions of information overload, the speech mechanisms collapse—but, as Jane was quick to point out, this was more a basic description of the driveling than its explanation. I didn’t really care; I needed a scientific-sounding topic, but I knew I wanted to be a therapist, and I doubted any of the graduate center faculty read the dissertations closely; the chair of my committee was totally checked out. (I’d focused on an auditory process in the first place because I’d already bought some rudimentary sound equipment for the short films I was making in my spare time.) Scientific significance aside, the shadowing was riveting to watch, at once disturbing and a little comic, an effect amplified by the grandiosity of the driver’s education manual, which sounded like it was written by Hesse:
Shadowed passage, Task 1, 180 Words Per Minute, Presented in Left Ear (Sportsmanlike Driving, pp. 105–106)
When you have looked at a shiny, new automobile, have you ever stopped to think that, through all the countless thousands of generations that preceded this century, not even the most powerful kings on earth could have owned one like it? Nor could they have flown in an airplane, nor listened to a radio set, nor watched television.
Of course you know why. It took those thousands of generations of technical progress, each building on the achievements of those who lived before, to make those common modern articles possible.
Medicine has a similar history. Great plagues killed many thousands of people throughout the ages. Man’s knowledge grew, with each new generation building on the past, until he developed ways of conquering those contagious diseases.
Intelligent people would not want to destroy those hard-won accomplishments in technology or medicine, or to throw away the very valuable advantages we gain from them.
Less understood, perhaps, is the long, long struggle man has had to devise good, sound rules which would enable hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people to live together.
It was as though Samuels had somehow intuited that, in my fourth-floor walk-up on 108th and Amsterdam, I’d become a kind of Ziegler. He’d come to understand the tongues of beasts at the cost of his reason, while I was destroying human language to reveal the river of nonsense coursing just beneath its “good, sound rules.”
My research definitely played a role in what Jane and I still call my “Ziegler Episode.” Instead of ingesting a mysterious pill found at a museum, we dropped some of Aaron’s acid, sugar dissolving in our mouths on the crosstown bus, and went to the Met. It was late January, the city a mess of dirty snow, pedestrians walking with their heads down against the wind. We checked our heavy coats, ascended the grand staircase, and wandered into the galleries of medieval painting: tempera on wood, gold ground, elongated angels and Virgins, livid Christs. At first everything struck me as a little silly: the solemnity of the guards, the bombast of the wall texts; the babies who looked like little old men nursing at breasts that jut out of the Virgins’ shoulders.
Then we arrived before Duccio’s Madonna and Child, where we stood for several minutes, my jaw clenching and unclenching involuntarily as we looked. Old paintings usually bored me; this one stopped me cold. The foreknowledge in the woman’s expression, as though she could anticipate a distant recurrence. The weird parapet beneath the figures, how it linked the sacred world with the world of the viewers. One instant I saw the gold background as flat and another I saw depths. But what really fascinated me, really moved me, wasn’t in the painting: it was how the bottom edge of the original frame was marked by candle burns. Traces of an older medium of illumination, the shadow of devotion. The wall text claimed the painting helped inaugurate the Renaissance because Duccio reimagined the Madonna and Christ in terms taken from life. So in that sense it was a move against the sacred, a step toward paintings becoming objects of aesthetic contemplation, detached from religion, detached from altars, free or doomed to circulate in museums, in the marketplace. But the burns were like the fingerprints of an older time—before Ziegler and his brethren decided that traditional sources of value were merely superstition. “Those thousands of generations of technical progress” obliterated ritual, emptied out all meaning, glossolalia without divinity. I decided that’s what the painted mother foresaw, that she was saying farewell to candlelight, that she knew she was trapped inside a painting addressed to the future, where it could only be, however great, an instance of technique. New cracks spread across the surface as I stared. Tears start in my memory.