Greetings and warning. This one was fuelled by anger and grief. Maybe that makes it a rant. Welcome anyway.
Note: the text has been edited and improved, the recording not yet, and so they no longer match. I recommend reading this one rather than listening.
As social creatures our nervous systems are nodes in a distributed network. We rely on stimulus from neighbouring nodes to know that we exist and that we are well, and that we have a purpose. That purpose is substantiated through our connections with others.
Disconnect us from other nodes in the network and we shrivel from disuse, like a lone neuron.
I’m disconnected and I’m shrivelling. I’m brittle.
You see, this is the kind of world I live in:
Me: I’m longing for touch. I feel stressed and it seems the only thing that would soothe me would be to be held for a long time.
My therapist, on my computer screen: Do you have a blanket? Could you wrap yourself up in your blanket right now?
This is also the kind of world I live in:
Me: A quick hug does not do it for me. I need to be held for a long time.
My therapy school colleague, by text: Maybe doing something tactile like hand stitching would help you right now.
NO. That won’t help me. No amount of blankets or stitching will help me. I’m surrounded every day with inanimate objects, they are clearly not lacking, and they are clearly not the solution.
Do you know the rhesus monkey experiment? Rhesus monkey babies are offered a choice of a lactating wire mesh “mother” and a non-lactating soft textile “mother.” I added the quotes here because how can a shoddy sculpture of a mom ever be a mom, or even, in the experimenter’s terms, a “surrogate mom?” Anyway, all the babies choose to feed off the nipple on the wire mesh sculpture while spending most of their time clinging to the adjacent textile sculpture, looking stressed to the bone… makes me cry every time (on Youtube for your viewing pleasure, I mean, trigger warning, prepare to be disturbed in a way that only 1950s psychological experiments can). While the experimenters are seeking to show that in mammals, affection is essential for the development of babies, surpassing or at least on par with the need for nutrition and sustenance… To me though, the terror on the babies’ faces renders irrelevant and perhaps even criminal this heady Maslowian inquiry. That terror points to the absence of mother and mother’s touch, in that textile structure: Textiles are no surrogate for warm, live, breathing bodies. Clinging to textiles isn’t proof that we need affection more than food. Clinging to textiles is something you do when the real deal is devastatingly missing.
Now back to my therapist’s and classmate’s helpful suggestions. They are kind of like that royal figure who is fabled to have said, “Let them eat cake!” when the peasants didn’t have bread to eat. “You don’t have anyone holding you at night? Have you tried a blanket?”
Ok, so the analogy isn’t perfect. The missing bread really is sustenance, and I’m arguing that blankets never will be.
Maybe it’s more like that man I dated briefly in my mid-thirties, who lived alone in a big cathedral-ceilinged house overlooking the French River, and who drank Ensure for sustenance instead of cooking himself solid food. No amount of liquid Ensure will tell your teeth or your jaw that you’ve been nourished. I would wake up in the middle of the night, alone in the bed. With trepidation, I would get up and hazard into the rooms of the house, only to find him passed out in front of the wood stove, embers still glowing. One time though I found him in the basement, behind the secret double doors of his marijuana grow op, a year before legalization, hunched over his phone under the impossibly bright grow lights. He didn’t hear me and I retreated back to the cold empty bed. Something felt off. I left him shortly after, his face demolished and his pups whimpering as I closed the door for the last time.
How many of us baby rhesus monkeys are there, clinging to the soft night glow of surrogate contact? How many of us don’t know or trust the real mother when she does show up? How many don’t have the nose to follow her scent?
I think of the absurdity of the interactions with my therapist and classmate, and how technology obscures the fact that those were disembodied voices suggesting that I could get comfort from something entirely without a body. As though it would do the trick. As though it was a trick that needed doing, instead of a deep grieving. Or, dare I hope, a deep and collective breathing and reaching towards each other’s bodies in the night.
We each advocate for there to be more in the world of what we already are, and faces on a screen are no different. I’m not there with you to touch you, why don’t you have more non-touching, as that’s all I have to offer? The absence of contact begets more absence. Technological mediation begets more technological mediation.
I know my therapist and classmate were both guiding me towards a moment of self-soothing in the immediate absence of a more satisfying alternative. And I know that it’s my job to get up and learn to do that reaching. And I will get there.
And in the meantime, I’m angry. Must we self-soothe our way to the end of humanity? Must we stroke our own shoulder and rock back and forth in the dark as our skins and sensory neurons shrivel from disuse? Do we and our ancestors not deserve more? Wails and sobs and kicks and screams? Fighting for our nature as touch-fed humans and as a physical, living network of nervous systems that need each other? We were made for this. Michael Clemmens, American psychotherapist and famed master of embodied relational support, whom I had the privilege of meeting earlier this year at school, left my class with the words of Dylan Thomas as a farewell after a moving weekend of learning together, online: Do not go gentle into that good night; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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