Flat Affect

A Story by A Simple Story

"There is an argument about story writing and character study. The art of the story..."

There is an argument about story writing and character study. The art of the story depends on plot, not portraiture. The logic of the picture as a visual device for narration is missing from that statement. Visual perception and sensory experience of objects create mental images prior to reality. Fiction is history and memory, not fact. Painting the subject in words is intuitive craft, the work of witches, the magic of seeing time unhinged. Everything happens all at once. It can also be a psychotic nightmare.

Clinical Notes:

Those who are acquainted with Celeste think her sense of timing is uncanny. Some think her a genius. Celeste senses reality is strangely familiar, like fate.   Emily, her brilliant and beautiful daughter, reads Celeste's crafty web of interpretive narratives as a ruse and as a disguise occulting the real world. She knows her mother. Celeste's nonsense representation of the world, about signs as wonders of nature and the order of the universe, is flaky.   Arcana of which she has only a partial knowledge and the still unread The Book of Nature on her bookshelf suggest an intellectual interest in the female domestic tradition but actually serve as a diversion from real accomplishment as an academic. Buried in interpretive nonsense, she has lost time for real thought.
Most of the time, she is melancholy about love. Here is an example. For some strange reason, the relationship unravelled as soon as she held in it her hands. At the time, Celeste imagined that the fabric of the tie was resilient enough to withstand anachronistic events. She did not pay attention to the ways in which time was out of joint with the clock and the calendar. She thought moments of instability and disconnection would pass in good time, that time itself had the power to remove the threatening sense that it or love never had a chance. Intuition was seen as paranoia rather than that sense of knowing ahead of time.   Prophecy is strange and disturbing to her. Untimely. Foreknowledge came to her as a sensation of doom tinged with wishes for lucky outcomes. She had a hard time reading the message because she could not separate fantasy from fact.
This is how Celeste spends her free time. She wanders through her memories, looking for true perceptions of what happened so that she can anchor her sense of herself in something real. Threads of real time spent on mending broken connection surface in her mind, perhaps because she insists that she worked at repairing it. This is not true. Her words were a defense against loss, and not attempts to restore the link. It is not as though she did not care to work it out; it is more the case that she knew ahead of time the direction of the current and thought it natural and right to let it flow like time. Too, Celeste is accustomed to loss and tends to think that the death of things takes precedence over desire. She finds solace in an old friend's words that it was not in the cards. There is a tragic note here. That old friend mistreated her sexually, yet she refers to him as a friend. The reason why Celeste holds on to connections is plain. Isolation and withdrawal from the social world suits her mentality and intellect but she cannot resist the pleasures of contact, which she uses as material for thought and analysis. Julia does not relate; she only conceptualizes it so that she can toy with the sense of belonging somewhere in the world. She only thinks that she lives, when, in reality, she has been dead a very long time.
Her father understands her as a "bullshitter", her mother is dead, and her daughter notes that Celeste never has a good reason for her actions. Vicarious, random, and scattered characterize her personality. Though she insists that she is principled, it is clear to others that she is pragmatic in this regard. All that Celeste knows is how to escape from consequences, and all she is comfortable with is her claim to freedom. Bob, a friendly squirrel, kept her company during some dark times. In Celeste's mind, Bob could read her feelings. Foolish and primitive, Celeste substitutes the real world with imaginary friends to avoid the strain of living and to soothe her sense of injustice, unfairness, and fated outcomes.
A call from a man she does not know how to love this morning is a case in point. She cannot read the message of a song he writes, sings, and plays for her. Her child-like fancy clouds perception. Her thought is, he loves me. In reality, their thing together is over. While Celeste is highly intelligent and learned, she has no idea what he means. Eerily though, his melody draws up the nightmare reality of her childhood, and replicates the sound mood Celeste created as a protective covering to keep invasive others from encroaching on her privacy.   She does not see that his gesture, his art, is therapeutic. He wants to connect with her. But Celeste has no idea of how to open the door that she is locked behind. Besides, she needs her privacy, a sublime state she invented to protect herself from pain. To others, her request for privacy is viewed as secrecy. Celeste is blind to that fact that privacy is not property. She tries to own and belong to herself so that she can function with a sense of identity--weird ideas she expects others to understand.
At night, when the moon lit the sky, she would stand under the stars and chant prayer formulas in Hebrew because she believed the words passed through the skin of the night sky and work magic in real life. In many ways, Celeste is like a child, while her daughter resembles a mother. But, not in the way a mother looks, caring; in the way a mother models a sense of belonging somewhere, to someone. Celeste relies on her daughter for advice and perspective. Text to her daughter: Im not crying (over a breakup). The daughter, a beauty named Emily, replies: That is goood. Celeste wonders about the spelling, and misses what is intended--acknowledgement. She tends to move through life impoverished, as if she has been short-changed.
She got in late that night, and slipped quietly into bed. It was a fine time. No one knew who she was, yet she was treated like a friend. What had been a lark had morphed into a social triumph. Celeste had dressed according to code--knees and elbows and collarbone covered--and to her surprise was viewed as glamorous. Modesty can be alluring. But the celebration, though fun, was limited because she left Emily with the neighbor, an Iranian aesthetician Celeste used for regular maintenance. Nothing was the same without Emily. Their tie was especially tight, securely knotted, a bond that could never come undone. Celeste mentioned her daughter at the club to a group disinterested in parenting because reproduction was viewed as something that occurred naturally later in life. They spoke from a standpoint of objectivity about life itself, as if reality were an object of study from which one could get distance. For Celeste, life was inside out; it spilled over the contours, out of the frame of reference of her body. She was in the thick of the teeming stream of experience and consciousness. She attributed this awareness to the fact that she had a child, but there was more to it. Celeste lacked boundaries. This quality drew others like a magnet. It was not that they liked her so much as that they could sense she could be used.
That night, many women told her she was beautiful.   There is a man around her who tells her she is beautiful too. Celeste does not see it or feel it, though. It is not modesty, and it has nothing to do with issues of self-esteem or body image, typically feminine blights. It is not due to a lack of grace. It has something to do with mirrors. When she gazes, she sees a beautiful woman, but when she reflects she sees a dead flower. Can the mirror reflect time? Minutes tick by, but the image in the reflection is at a stand still as she stares at herself, live and alive. She notes facial expression, skin quality, and changes over time. It is like she is looking for something, or watching for what others see.

Event 1:

She is out of breath over coffee with Emily. Today marks the second day since Celeste stopped smoking. There has been a recent update in the status of their relationship that Celeste hopes to skirt.
Emily: What's wrong, why can't you breathe?
Celeste: I have resumed breathing for real, the way we are supposed to breathe, now that I no longer smoke, and I find that I am breathless, as if inhaling smoke were customary. Naturally, smoking had become second nature, but it is as though my body rejects the oxygen. I don't know--early signs of lung disease?
Emily has recently taken up smoking as part of the culture of university life. Celeste hopes to save her own life and also to provide a good example, at this late date. Her answer angers Emily, who resents her mother's overall failure to prosper. Emily's irritation hurts her mother and, sensing this, the daughter takes up the figure of kindness, something that Celeste senses is insincere. The mother reads it as token compassion, poltically and socially correct, but not felt. In Celeste's mind, her schizophrenia is a natural outcome of the knowledge that her daughter cannot love her. She is exposed. It is characterized by the feeling that her inner world can been seen on the outside, by the sense that the barrier between her discrete form and concrete reality has been breached by too much pain. The bond between mother and daughter suffers from a post-psychotic failure to reconnect, though initially, after the first psychotic episode, Emily visited her sweetly in hospital. Celeste had asked Emily for this meeting after painful months spent surviving Emily's absolute withdrawal and abandonment.
Celeste: Something to eat? You have grown so thin. Are you cultivating the habit of an eating disorder?
Emily: F**k off.
Emily leaves abruptly. Her sense of herself is completely intact. There is no sense of guilt or obligation. There is no attempt to draw a line between them, a cord that would suggest a natural tie. Celeste takes it in stride. She's been told that children return at the age of 25. Celeste holds out for this. Emily's recent text to her, that she never contact her daughter again, was felt as ominous, but Celeste prefers to stay positive and hopeful. She had to take it this way; otherwise, the horror of the loss would have been too much. For a moment, Celeste recalls the long, sweet years of steadfast faith in her daughter's love for her. And for another moment only, so slight, she remembers that the bond or foundation built between their hearts has cracked somehow, much like Celeste's mind. She wants to smoke, and to eat, to excess, in response. It is how she is affected. Without much thought, she looks for a convenience store and buys the smokes.

Insight:

It takes about twenty cigarettes before pleasure in smoking returns. As she draws on each one, she composes reasonable thoughts in her mind that might explain Emily's behaviour, her distance, her coldness. What stands out is the story about Celeste's schizophrenia. Its onset sent Emily running out the door of their little family into the street. She lived with friends as she finished high school with a stellar performance. Mostly, Emily was angry. There had never been a direct conversation about the topic of mental illness, only Emily's insistence that Celeste swear to take her medication no matter what. Celeste floundered between two perspectives, one which argued for a recovery model and focused on personal and social identification with the diagnostic label, and one which regarded psychotic episodes as episodes only, not as long term chronic mental states. Bleak for sure was a primary consideration that the disease category is incurable; better, certainly, was the kind of thinking that focused on reclaiming a former fully functioning self and regards an historical point of view as healing.
Love in other areas was making a strange, uncharted kind of progress. Chaotic energies about feelings that had little to do with mental content had made a sharp turn inward to coincide with the intelligent heart. The guy is sexy in every way, Celeste thinks, and gives me what I need. The vast differences between maternal love and romantic love come as a latent surprise; in retrospect, it appears that Celeste's long years of loneliness as a solitary woman were soothed by a bridge her daughter made to the recesses of her heart that Celeste shaped into a kind of natural romance. She adored Emily, and Emily adored her. It worked. Celeste had worked so hard to break the genetic chain that held her to her mother's pathetic and tragic life. There was a recent twist though. Emily's current tone is a harsh reminder of the way Celeste had coped with her mother's violating neediness. The desperate pain she had known as love for her own mother haunts her now in reverse, or karmically, though Celeste does not believe in the idea of divine justice. She feels justified in feeling angry with Emily's lack of respect, and puts the issue out of her mind. The doctor advises her not to push Emily. She is resigned to waiting for Emily to come to her senses and to a natural sense of regret for treating her mother like a bag lady. Truth is, though, that in her worst moments that is precisely how Celeste views herself, rotting from destitution.

Event 2:

Dinner out with a friend is on her mind. She calls Taylor and suggests the Italian cafe nearby. Taylor is amenable, probably on the grounds that she feels obligated to accept Celeste's invitation. Celeste has noticed that friends have difficulty treating her as a social equal, as a natural being, as a real person. Disability wears like tattered clothes and is treated with pity. Topic for conversation over dinner, Celeste thinks, ought to be about the difference between pity and compassion. She wishes she had kept her illness a secret, but she had, like a fool, followed the recovery program mandates of disclosure and visibility. No shower in three days, so she cleans up, dresses in clean clothes, and walks there. She has calculated before hand how little she will eat. Questions of self-presentation that trouble her are forgotten as she depends on a sense of luck and magic that the connection itself will repair confusing cues and reveal the message of subtle innuendo. The friendship has survived a twenty year gap in contact, but for some strange reason she behaves like a child when with her friends. Taylor is already there when she walks in, texting.
Taylor: Hey hey you look good!
Celeste: No I don't. I'm fat. You look nice.
It passes through her mind that women do this s**t to each other, false pleasantries about appearances, flattery that conventionally comes from men. The deception and the discomfort is brushed aside and they embrace. They don't see each other much, and their separate lives no longer collide as they used to when they were graduate students. But, there is merit in the fact that they remain friends, something that testifies to a quality of the heart that can generate interesting conversation across the unknown territory between them. They do admire each other's talents and loyalty to a sense of history.
Celeste: Red wine? Let's have the same party we had last time. It was so much fun. We'll walk through the ravine afterwards and drink coffee so you drive safely later.
Taylor: Perfect. What to eat? I'm thinking pizza.
Celeste: I'm doing salad. Diet.
Taylor: But the weight looks good on you. You look healthy and strong.
Celeste (unable to repress dull familiar words about body size despite her insight that talking about psychiatric illness distorts others' sense of reality): It is medication induced, and pretty much unbearable. I can't afford to buy new clothes. I am ashamed of how I look. I have to get rid of the fat so that I can be comfortable again.
Celeste doesn't see that her desire to return to her thin state masks the urge to pretend that 8 years never happened. The course of the illness and neuroleptics mean weight gain for most treated schizophrenics.
When the time comes, Celeste will tell Emily that the nature of their unconscious love tie is a case of mystical object relations. Her mind still behaves like a wandering jew. She feels dazzled as mental connections light up in her mind. The perils of Celeste's conversational style unnerve Taylor, but Celeste's compassion for "norms" when they cope in public with obligatory social engagement is limited. The gap in attention is felt. Celeste's knowledge of the ways in which the mind wanders when it is not fully engaged unhinges her sense of time in the present tense. She permits her spatial mind to look for provocative phenomena because it stabilizes her attention. There is no tolerance for boredom. The meal is served just when she needs to pee. Bladder leakage due to the failure of the attending nurse to relieve it just as she delivers Emily. The urgent need to release it irritates her. She resents it. She notes that she resented, too, the awful burden of raising a child. She excuses herself.

Episode:

Honey bees, and she is the hive: The sensation as they try to fly out from beneath the surface of her skin is real. The buzzing hum is amplified by the impression that her body will become the comb. Horror. She forgot to tell her mother that she loved her. It is too late. Her thesis supervisor warned her about the law of diminishing returns. Outside in the summer garden, she obeys the command to step in a series of directions, a certain number of times. - "Get a hospital room." - The voice is outside her mind. It is Jen speaking, sister-in-law. Celeste feels hostile to it. It is a threat. Looking through the trees at the fence, she can see David and Michael on a swing, watching her. She can't figure out why they are there. Her imagination tries to make sense of the phenomena. She follows connections signalled by her intellect, but they lead nowhere. Terror and awe are thought to be the only logical mental state to assume. Maybe this is sublime. Intuitively, though, she knows it as pending tragedy. She senses doom.

Observation:

She is in love with him as an object. Sacred geometry. To love him as a subject means to submit to his control. Celeste resists, fruitlessly. The danger of the connection between them is too seductive. She sublimates what she imagines to be a kind of rape. The story is beautiful anyway. In the end, he is patient with her sick mind.