#leslie jamison
“If a wound is where interior becomes exterior, here is a woman who is almost entirely wound—an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle. Her body is utterly exposed and also severed from itself—losing shreds of flesh, losing its lips. After the mute call, we get this confession: ‘It pains me to record this, / I am not a melodramatic person.’ This closing motion performs a simultaneous announcement and disavowal of pain: This hurts; I hate saying that. It describes how the act of admitting one wound creates another one: it pains me to record this. And yet, the poet must record, because the wounded self can’t express anything audible: Calling mutely through lipless mouth.
What feels most resonant here, to me, isn’t just the speaker’s willingness to grant pain such a drastic shape—nerve and blood—but to confess her shame at this vessel, its blood and gore, its bluntness. I think of the bulb of my skinned knee, badge of my heartbreak, and how I loved the clarity of what it spoke but felt utterly pained by how much I loved it. I am not a melodramatic person. I’ve never wanted to be one, either.”
Leslie Jamison, The Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain
She wanted us to disappear into the pain, wanted to engulf us with it, wanted to obliterate everything we ever had been, everything we ever could be. But strange thing about pain - it can make the world disappear, but it can also open a magnificence inside your body, a terrible magnificence that makes you feel infinite, as if you’re blasting out in all directions, hurtling toward the stars.(And maybe you are)
Gayle Brandeis, Many Restless Concerns (a testimony): The Victims of Countess Bathory Speak in Chorus
The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.- Leslie Jamison, from “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain”
I’ve spent my whole life daydreaming. It embarrasses me to think of tallying the hours. It feels like ingratitude. It feels like infidelity. It’s often been about infidelity. I’ve daydreamed while walking, while running, while drinking, while smoking—sitting in the Boston cold, seventeen years old, daydreams sprouting like so many weeds from the cracked sidewalk of a broken heart. I’ve daydreamed on every form of transport—something about commuting feels conducive to daydreaming, the pockets of time in between our commitments, and the fact of the body in motion, neither here nor there, available for an elsewhere. I’ve daydreamed to music and in silence, in solitude and in company. It’s hardly exceptional.
-Leslie Jamison, Dreamers in broad daylight: ten conversations
“These are the dangers of a wound: that the self will be subsumed by it (“personal vanishing point”) or unable to see outside its gravity (“everything led to it”). The wound can sculpt selfhood in a way that limits identity rather than expanding it—that obstructs vision (of other people’s suffering, say) rather than sharpening empathic acuity.”
— Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams
On my twenty-second birthday, I drove to Richmond to get a small tattoo of an anatomical heart, a motif from Nicole Krauss’ The History of Love. I am asked to explain my visible little heart often, the fist inside my arm. I am never annoyed by being asked; rather, I used to be annoyed at how little I could say of it. Platitudes clotted my explanations: love, I’d say, andwriting;a reminder. My inability to explain stopped bothering me, eventually. The point now is that I can’t explain it without a tissued earnestness, because what it means to me is beyond what cleverness I could impose. “I want our hearts to be open,” as Leslie Jamison says at the close of The Empathy Exams. “I just wrote that. I want our hearts to be open. I mean it.”
Though empathy is the most forthright concept in Jamison’s collection, emotion verging on sentimentality is a close second. If empathy is the skin of us, the depth of our earnest, unedited feeling muscles close behind it. The book’s essays file towards and from one centering essay, “In Defense of Saccharin(e),” in which Jamison examines the “shamefully legible notes of our least complicated desires”: the simple, the human. On the first page of the essay, she writes,
Ifsentimentalityis the word people use to insult emotion—in its simplified, degraded, and indulgent forms—then “saccharine” is the word they use to insult sentimentality. It traces back to the Sanskrit sarkara, meaning “gravel” or “grit.“ It meant “like sugar” until the nineteenth century, when it started to mean “too much.”
Jamison enters the subject through, as the title suggests, both the saccharine and the sweetener saccharin. Aligning the two into parallels brings out what hides in each: the glutting, the comfort component of bodily consumption, against the “unearned” pathos of the feeling. She quotes Epicetus, “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse”; she understands the literal mortification of being a body just as she understands how we lift ourselves with the same form.
Jamison resists the shame pressed on “our least complicated desires,” like saccharin “being too much itself.” It’s the classic contradiction;
Bad movies and bad writing and easy clichés still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.
By resisting the easy answer, Jamison moves to the liminal:
How can I express my faith that there is something profound in the single note ofhoney itself? In our uncomplicated capacity for rapture, the ability to find our whole selves moved by something infinitely simple? I’m not sure how to say it right, with the kind of language that would be sentimental enough to support its point but not too sentimental to damn it.
And finally, as the essay ends, she calls for sentimentality as an entrance to—even the body of—some whole uncharted range of feeling:
I want us to feel swollen by sentimentality and then hurt by it, betrayed by its flatness, wounded by the hard glass surface of its sky. This is one way to approach Stevens’s primary noon. We crash into wonder—fling ourselves upon simplicity—so it can render us heavy and senseless, deliver us finally to the ground.
There is a reason, though, that “The Empathy Exams” is the collection’s first essay. Jamison moves from the necessarily self-contemplative beginnings of empathy to the performances and rearticulations of pain. In all ways, throughout the essay, pain is a way we learn; it excavates and we uncover its tracks, both in ourselves and in others. Jamison depicts herself asking for help—
I didn’t know what I felt, I told him. Couldn’t he just trust that I felt something, and that I’d wanted something from him? I needed his empathy not just to comprehend the emotions I was describing, but to help me discover which emotions were actually there.
—as she simultaneously gives it. Jamison’s job as a medical actor frames the essay; a patient she reenacts often, named Stephanie Phillips, has case materials reimagined and scattered through the piece. At the end of one, Jamison writes:
Your body wasn’t anything special until it rebelled. Maybe you thought your thighs were fat or else you didn’t, yet; maybe you had best friends who whispered secrets to you during sleepovers; maybe you had lots of boyfriends or else you were still waiting for the first one; maybe you liked unicorns when you were young or maybe you preferred regular horses. I imagine you in every possible direction, and then I cover my tracks and imagine you all over again. Sometimes I can’t stand how much of you I don’t know.
Thankfully, the inevitable not-knowing does not keep Jamison from her efforts. I’ll admit to being a sentimental fool myself when I read the book’s final essay, called “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain.” Beginning with the trope of the wounded woman throughout literature, Jamison examines art from Louise Glück to Carrie on her way to an argument about the legitimacy of women’s pain, and the ways in which it deserves companionship and respect. She admits the central paradox of focusing on female pain in the middle of the essay. “I’m tired of female pain,” she writes, “and also tired of people who are tired of it. I know the hurting woman is a cliché but I also know lots of women still hurt.” (And we are back at the useful cliché, the saccharine truth within an “identity-locus of damage.”)
When Jamison examines the “thirteenth nude,” one icon in a procession of “wounded visions” from Anne Carson’s poem “The Glass Essay,” she writes this:
We follow this figure into contradiction, into a confession that wounds aredesired and despised; that they grant power and come at a price; that suffering yields virtue and selfishness; that victimhood is a mix of situation and agency; that pain is the object of representation and also its product; that culture transcribes genuine suffering while naturalizing its symptoms. We follow this thirteenth nude back to the bleachers, where some girl is putting on a Passion Play with her razor. We should watch. She’s hurting, but that doesn’t mean she’ll hurt forever—or that hurt is the only identity she can own. There is a way of representing female consciousness that can witness pain but also witness a larger self around that pain—a self who grows larger than its scars without disowning them, who is neither wound-dwelling nor jaded, who is actually healing.
In her short piece “The Broken Heart of James Agee” (integrated in this collection into vignette-clusters called the “Pain Tours,” I and II), Jamison reviews James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. At the end, she writes: “It doesn’t seem right to say Agee risked sentimentality. Better to say he could smell it from a mile off and clawed his way into it anyway.” She, too, has done this; has brought eloquence to what is elemental in us. It is an act of understanding that will recur each time a person reads her book: brought on by a writer who knows us—grouped, yet singular, and at our most public and private at once—and leading to a place where we empathize with our own strange selves.
Review by Emma Aylor.
