“She is forty-five and is writing a book about self-hypnosis.”
The little worlds everyone keeps inside of them, the way we have to define, sift, sort people. The ways we choose to explain people. Imagine her, this woman, a forty-five year old writing a book about self-hypnosis. That is one sentence to represent a whole life. We say, much of the time, that writers who are good at their craft can get a person across in one phrase, one quick brushstroke of imagery, three choice adjectives. But what is that, really? Eduoard Leve wrote a whole book, 120 full pages, of declarative sentences about himself. The book is titled Autoportrait and its project is to successfully represent himself on the page. What you, the reader, are left with is not something resembling a real meeting with a whole human person, but more like something resembling parts, impressions of one. He writes, to record my life would take longer than to live it. This is true, which is why we cannot spend all of our time explaining everything about someone. We must reduce them to a few key phrases—forty-five, writing a book about self-hypnosis—or one adjective—the tall one—or just simply, a name.
Ok, again, imagine her: a forty-five year old writing a book about self-hypnosis. I will give you my version of her and it will rest on my set of experiences and prejudices, my closeness in age to her, my predilection towards writing, my interest in hypnosis, my crush on Jesse Ball, the author of the book she appears in. Yours would be much different. Think about her for one more moment, that woman in your head. See how she compares to mine:
Today she is dressed in a periwinkle sweater. She bought it five years ago at a thrift store in downtown Montreal because she thought it suited her and brought out the color of her eyes and because she wanted a souvenir from the city but could not afford anything new. That had been a rough year for work and money, not that things have gotten much better since then. She is not only a woman writing a book about self-hypnosis, but also a therapist, one who does pro-bono work much of the time because she lives in Syracuse, New York, an American city with a large population of Somalian immigrants and she wants to help provide a service to them. Those women, for it is mostly women she sees, are the reason for her interest in hypnosis. Sometimes it can be hard to communicate with them and so hypnosis seems a way through some of the barriers of culture and language. The woman will not try anything on a patient that she has not tried on herself, so she has embarked on a series of self-experiments. She tells people she is writing a book but really it is more of a journal, a log of attempts. One day, maybe, she will turn it into a book, but for now, it is handwritten and stashed in the first drawer of her desk. She finds it embarrassing to say only that she spends much of her evenings doing these experiments on herself so she prefers to present them as a book in progress.
She has brown hair that she occasionally dyes red or highlights blonde. The frequency with which she changes her hair color has slowed the older she’s gotten and the past year has seen a return to her natural hair. So on this day, in the day I am describing, she has brown hair, the color of tanned leather. This woman is not what I would call conventionally beautiful, though, it could be argued, she would be beautiful to you. This is what I mean about a brushstroke of description being nowhere near enough. If I tell you she is beautiful I mean beautiful as measured against my measuring stick of beauty or my character’s measuring stick of beauty, not your own. How would you know, for example, that I love thin men or women with deep set eyes or thin ankles on either a man or woman?
She has a fingernail on her right hand that is currently black and blue because she slammed it in the car door. She likes Pho more than any other type of food. She is in a long term partnership with a man who sells advertisements to car dealerships. He is rich. She refuses to let him pay for things and insists, always, on equality at least when it comes to money. Sometimes, when they have sex she likes for him to tie her up, but lightly, so she could always get out if she wanted to. This, she thinks, when she psycho-analyzes herself with her therapist’s mind, is because she was always allowed to do whatever she wanted when she was growing up. There is a deep, childhood desire in her to be disciplined. She is mostly happy. Grey skies make her squint with headaches most of the time, though some of the time she welcomes them. When she was younger, she grew faster than everyone else in her class and though she never became a really tall woman, she has carried that as part of her identity ever since then.
But, now, here, don’t you see? I am running into the difficulty of describing someone. Because how do we decide what is intrinsic to them and what is merely happening on one day. She has a black and blue nail today but does that mean anything about her? This man ties her up but other men have not. Some things are objectively true about her and some things are imagined by her. A human being is an unknowable puzzle, unique, a thing unto itself, forever changing. I have been describing our woman for five hundred words and she is still so far from being known.
To describe my life would take much longer than to live it. So, let me try again. She is forty-five and writing a book about self-hypnosis, she is tall, she is named Helen.
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