Gently stretching my nervous system's capacity

Reward your attention by recalibrating it

I make school lunches, wipe down counters, respond to teacher emails, refill dog water bowls, pick up dirty socks discarded on the living room/bathroom/bedroom floor, clean toothpaste globs from the sink, and make dinner over and over and over again.

When not working at my paid job, I feel constantly caught up in the mundane tasks of daily life and generally feel angry that, like a neverending rainstorm, they fall relentlessly into my flooded field of responsibility.

I can’t walk from my bedroom to the kitchen for a drink of water without spotting yet more things that need doing: empty Gatorade bottles overflowing from kids' bedroom garbage cans, put a new roll of toilet paper on the holder, pick up the wet towel from the bathroom floor, pull an old popsicle stick peeping from between couch cushions (fucking Charlie) waiting to impale an unlucky ass, pick up more pet hair tumbleweeding across the hardwood and wipe Flaming Hot Cheeto shellack off the remote control (Charlie, again!).

Yet, lately, I have begun to wonder if maybe it’s also in the mundanity that I find safety and reassurance. Because it is precisely these frustratingly banal chores I love to watch others perform, especially when anxiety hijacks my nervous system, as it has these past few weeks.

Watching other people perform the daily tasks we all must accomplish to live reasonably functional lives soothes me, and when depression comes knocking, I often disassociate by typing something like “village life” into the YouTube search bar (my current fave). Places like Azerbaijan and Albania pop up, and I’ll sit for hours watching strong women (of course, it’s always women) make meals or preserve food. Watching other women cook is a proverbial mother’s palm on the fevered forehead of my melancholy.

Sometimes, it’s on a dusty cliff ledge in the rural mountains of Pakistan or Afghanistan, and sometimes it’s in a green field in Russia somewhere as cows graze next to a tiny stream. There is no narration, no conversation, and if there are a few words uttered here or there, it’s in another language. There is no soundtrack save for unseen birds twittering, the wind, wood crackling in the fire, the constant whooshing of a nearby stream, a spoon clanking inside a pan; just ASMR-style submersion into the environment.

I endlessly marvel at the way these wizened women prepare tantalizing meals - restaurant-worthy shit - while crouched over a tree stump for a cutting board; fire started from a bit of kindling, heavy buckets of water carried from a stream, vegetables diced into the palm of the weatherbeaten hand not holding the knife then tossed into sizzling oil in a pot situated over a roaring fire.

While some might be turned off by the notion of primitive cooking conditions, preferring their granite countertops and hand-crafted butcher block cutting boards, I find it all very appealing.

No office job, no television, no car, no emails or texts to return, no onslaught of Slack messages, just a life lived close to the bone, constant communion with the natural earth, one’s next meal always a top priority.

I’m probably glorifying it but maybe I’m not. Maybe working with family members to find and prepare a meal eaten around a fire without the distraction of the myriad devices that electricity powers isn’t glorified enough. Food always tastes better to me when eaten outside.

Still, I’d be just as happy letting my brain float while watching a woman in a St. Louis suburb make dinner for her family, artisan craftsman cutting board or not. I get off on watching how other people do things. I like to see whether it’s the same way I do things or different, both options equally satifsying for different reasons.

I’ve always been anthropological in that way; if I’m on a bus or an airplane, I spy on people. The way they wear their clothing, what they’re reading, how they use their phones and computers: how many tabs they keep open and how they move between them, how they scroll, what they hover over and click in.

It’s not just how people perform tasks. I am endlessly curious about how other people experience the world, their inner monologues, how they may differ from their outer presentations of themselves, and how all of that stacks up against my own experiences. I wonder what people are like when they are alone, how they wipe after shitting, how they clean themselves in the shower, how they masturbate, how they fuck.

Oh yes, I will most definitely watch you have sex and I may or may not be turned on by it. I just wanna see how you do the thing. Is it routine? Passionate? Rough? Are you quiet? Noisy? Performatively noise? Like me, do you sometimes enjoy engaging in casual conversation that in no way relates to sexual matters at hand? Do you talk dirty? Maybe you’re surprisingly good at it? Maybe your dirty talk is awkward, like an 8-year-old using curse words for the first time. No matter, I’ll still award points for effort.

*****

A few years ago, the British Film Institute and Sight and Sound magazine announced the results of their decennial (every ten years) “Greatest Films of All Time” poll.

At the top? Not “2001: A Space Odyssey” with barely any women, not fucking “Lawrence of Arabia” with no women, and its overhyped toxic masculinity/Hemingway vibes (Know the saying “He’s no Hemingway” to describe a not-so-great writer? Well, Hemingway is no Hemingway and I will die on this hill). Not goddamn “Citizen Kane” with its endless excavation of some rich asshole’s life, not “Vertigo” featuring yet another man wrestling with his personal demons directed by still another superhyped man with personal demons. It was the quietly savage “Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.”

The film features a widowed housewife going about her daily chores, taking care of her teenage son, and, oh yeah, turning the occasional trick to make ends meet.

The late Chantal Akerman, the Belgian director of “Jeanne Dielman,” is the first female filmmaker ever to crack Sight and Sound’s top ten; Akerman was just twenty-four years old when the movie premièred at Cannes, in 1975. It is a rigorous, uncompromising film, nearly three and a half hours long, depicting three days in the life of the widowed single mother named in the title (played by Delphine Seyrig), and focused relentlessly on the domestic tasks that occupy her waking hours: the cooking and cleaning, the wiping and straightening and scrubbing. Jeanne is also a sex worker, hosting a client in the late afternoon each day, although these assignations are—unlike the other tedious labor that she performs—mostly unseen. The Sight and Sound tabulations are a striking turn of events, representing a consensus that one of the pinnacle films ever produced in an overwhelmingly male-dominated art form was made by a young woman, with a crew mostly made up of women, starring a middle-aged woman, about women’s work. (bolding is mine)

- Jessica Winters, The New Yorker

Winters’ entire essay in The New Yorker is a delightful read that is certainly worth the 5 or 10 minutes of doomscrolling you would trade for a perusal. Winters notes with relish that the film’s ascendance to the top of Sight and Sound’s top ten pissed off a certain kind of man: “Especially fun was the inevitable grumping from old white guys, most charismatically the director Paul Schrader, who declared, on his Facebook page, that, although “Jeanne Dielman” is a personal favorite of his and “a landmark film,” its shock appearance at No. 1 “does it no favors,” mutating Akerman’s achievement into “a landmark of distorted woke reappraisal.” Schrader wrote, ‘It feels off, as if someone had put their thumb on the scale. Which I suspect they did.’”

Is that what you suspect, Mr. Schrader? A thumb on the scale? Would this be similar to the male fist on the scale of film since its very inception?

Winters writes that “Jeanne Dielman” appeared in the same year as Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which she says “defined the controlling male gaze of the movies and permanently altered the lens through which generations of filmgoers and directors saw women onscreen. That “Jeanne Dielman” knocked the ultimate male-gaze movie by the ultimate male-gaze director—Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” —out of the top position may appear too on-the-nose to an anti-woke conspiracy theorist such as Schrader.”

As noted, the film - which I had not heard of - is more than three hours long and features what most would call the boring daily lives of women, particularly that of its titular character.

I wonder if you’ll make it through if you attempt to watch. Fresh off watching The Fall Guy, a Gosling-helmed tour de force in which mind-boggling action monopolizes nearly every frame—even conversations take place amid the action—I had my own doubts.

And yet, amid this latest bout of disassociation I feel trapped within, the movie was a revelation to me. More from Winters:

The film’s strength derives in significant part from its austerity, patience, and extreme discipline. Each scene consists of a single, fixed shot, placed a bit lower than the norm. (Akerman was five feet tall, and set up her shots accordingly.) The camera does not move; there are no reaction shots and no closeups. Seyrig is onscreen nearly every minute, usually performing some mundane task in real time: washing dishes, making a bed, peeling potatoes. (Just as I never chop garlic without thinking of Paul Sorvino in “Goodfellas,” I never peel a potato without thinking of Seyrig in “Jeanne Dielman.”) More than four minutes are filled by Jeanne taking a bath and then scrubbing out the tub. Well over five minutes pass as Jeanne and her teen-age son, Sylvain, silently eat a dinner of soup, pot roast, and potatoes. Occasionally, Jeanne leaves her apartment to pay a bill or do a bit of shopping. She reads a letter from an aunt; she chitchats with this neighbor and that one. There is no score, just a bit of radio in the evenings. (bolding is mine)

My hours of quietly Youtubing village life while my insides burn with anxiety, have trained me well. The film, which I found incredible from start to utterly astounding finish, soothed me.

Watching Jeanne meticulously prepare chicken, veal, potatoes, and sauces, scrub dishes, and answer the door differs little from my beloved videos of various women around the world. Not only does the ASMR-style of cinema calm my rattled nerves, but I feel a part of something larger than myself as it gives cinematic life to all of these actions - mostly those of women- that are typically devalued.

In “Jeanne Dielman,” I saw myself sweeping the floor, washing the dishes, buying groceries, and otherwise putting order into a home that would, it feels like, deteriorate into madness if not for my daily rituals.

But maybe it’s my daily rituals that are keeping me from madness.

The film, Winters writes, is director Chantal Akerman’s “tribute to her mother, to her countless hours of care, and, beneath the surface, to the religious rituals of Akerman’s Polish-Jewish family, many of whose members were murdered in the Holocaust. (Akerman’s mother survived Auschwitz; her mother’s parents did not.) In the observant Jewish home of Akerman’s paternal grandfather, ‘every activity of the day was ritualized,’ a discipline that ‘keeps anxiety at bay and brings a kind of peace,’ Akerman said.” (bolding is mine).

I watch these videos of quietly working women not just for their depictions of the alleged mundanity of daily life but also to compare the ways in which my experiences of the world are the same and different from yours and find comfort in the ways we are all the same.

Do you wash your hands before handling your food or are you a performative handwasher? Does it make a difference if you’re cooking for yourself or others? How do you cut your vegetables? Do you see random, not necessarily attractive people on the street and imagine what sex with them would be like? Do terrible thoughts inexplicably enter your brain, and the more you try to escape the thought, the more handcuffed to it you become?

I still remember the very first abhorrent, unwanted thought I ever had. I cannot shake it. I was three. I know this because my 4-year-old cousin died of prostate cancer that year.

We were at my grandma’s house, and a group of cousins were running around her family room playing. I can replay the sights and sounds of my 3-year-old perspective: The coffee table, the sea blue davenport, as grandma called it, pillows and blankets piled on the floor, and the shrieks of little kids laughing and playing tag or whatever it was we were doing.

Jeff was too sick to play. I did not understand then that he was dying, that he would die on Chrismas Eve, in fact. That he was enduring incredible pain as he lay there in a bed made up on the floor, his mom giving him morphine through a port in his chest.

We laughed and played around him, utterly oblivious to the horrific fact of his ebbing existence, which is probably what the parents, talking in low tones in the kitchen, had wanted; for Jeff to experience the kind of child play he had missed out on during most of his short, tortured life in whatever way he could.

We played and he’d smile weakly as our antics would crescendo into laughter. His pale bald head never left the pillow, and I remember feeling uncomfortable playing so near him. I worried that I might step on his delicate head. I kept envisioning my foot smashing through his skull, it breaking open like a melon dropped on the floor. That specific image my little brain conjured remains in my head 45 years later: His bald head caving in under my foot like an overripe fruit.

There you go. There it is. One unwanted, detestable thought among a handful of others I wouldn’t care to share with 99% of the people in my life. My little cousin’s crushed head beneath my foot. I have handed it to you. Forced it upon you, really. You had no choice in the matter. But neither did I. Thoughts come unbidden.

Maybe, like excising a wound, there will be relief or a personal acquittal for this shameful thought that has stalked me throughout my years. An amnesty of sorts in the aftermath of releasing it from its cage in my head and unleashing it upon the world?

I wonder if the awful image embedded itself so deeply because although I wasn’t cognizant of the tragedy unfolding in the lives of Jeff’s parents and, by association, the lives of the other adults in the family - including my own parents - who would have all been in their mid-to-late twenties (so young!) at the time, I was aware that badness, the very worst life has to offer, was afoot.

Does it get any worse than the agonizing, painful death of your child?

What is your worst thought? Have I summoned it to the surface of the spaghetti bowl of thoughts in your head?

All of this to say I write this from a place of disassociation, which I have been therapized enough to recognize. I have become uncomfortably numb, so to speak. These days, I am fairly good at Sherlock Holmesing my various behaviors into a cohesive explanation - even if the answer is just, “motherfucking perimenopause” in order to safely see myself through the mental storm.

Awareness is key. Lost in disassociation is a slippery slope into full-blown depression, but awareness of what is happening is a solid first step in climbing out of the depression abyss.

Like slowly losing one’s way in the wilderness, it’s not until you stop, breathe, become aware that you’re not doing so great, and then admit to yourself that you’re actually lost that you can begin to meaningfully assess the situation and make the next right move to find your way out.

I have admitted to myself and then Cory that I have found myself a little lost in these hot last days of a waning summer. I silently go about my daily mundane tasks as a slow-burn rage ravages my mind and body like a fever. Angry, nearly grumbling under my breath about more dishes and wet towels and discarded dirty fucking socks multiplying like bunnies around the house even though the grumbling is just a symptom of a larger issue I’ve been trying to transcend for years yet keeps surfacing in much the same way as the unwanted image of my cousin.

As an adult, the mother of four children, I look back on the family room scene of my sweet little cousin dying of cancer and can now mull it from all sides; my childish perspective of fun amid the small but dawning recognition that despite the play and laughter, all was not well in very serious and terrible ways. Perhaps that manifested into the atrocious 45-year remembered thought of accidentally stepping on my cousin’s head that has stalked spectrally around my brain and haunted me when I’ve managed to forget it for long stretches of time.

I can also look back on that scene and ache with pain and anguish for my poor aunt, Jeff’s mother, who is also now dying of cancer. It’s a strange backward feeling to experience increasingly intense emotions about a thing so long past. Usually, it’s the other way around; time heals all wounds and all that. But in this case, the passage of time has given me a wider, deeper perspective of what was happening the day we danced around my cousin’s dying body. As the amount of time between the event and the present has expanded, so too has my emotional response.

These issues or images we keep locked inside ourselves that we struggle mightily to transcend are steeped in trauma. The only way to the other side is through and the only way through is to be kind to myself and do the next right thing. Figuring out the next right thing is the hard part.

Human existence is run-on sentences of mundanity punctuated by the exclamation marks of agony and joy. Maybe, just maybe, from within this recent flirtation with depression, instead of perceiving the monotony as bleak, I can find my equilibrium within the revelatory tedium.

Tedium is not agony. For the mom whose baby is dying of cancer, tedium is respite, a dream.

Life is always poetry when you allow it to be. Even dissociation and low-key depression, maybe especially disassociation and depression, can be poetry if you can let go of judgment or self-recrimination about what you should or shouldn’t be doing, thinking, or feeling and simply grant yourself the compassion to just watch yourself.

Turn the anthropological lens on yourself and observe dispassionately as it unfolds around you. As Winters wrote in The New Yorker, reward your attention by recalibrating it.

You are the woman slicing potatoes into her strong baseball glove palm of a hand in the rural mountains of Afghanistan.

You are the woman hosting a gentleman caller for sex each afternoon in Brussels.

You are the woman patiently waiting for the whistle of the teapot in the English countryside.

You are the woman tiredly shoving another frozen pizza into the oven in Wisconsin.

You are the worried woman in hour two of sitting in the ER with a sick child.

You are the woman trying to grieve the loss of her living son while keeping hope alive.

You are the woman stripping for men to help pay for your education.

You are the woman whose child is dying of cancer on the family room floor.

You are the woman dying of cancer.

You are the woman disassociating in her bed trying to find her way back by seeing herself in all of you.