Apprehension, or size 6 knee-length empire-waist
strapless in burnt sienna silk shantung with pomegranate bow band
by Emily Meg Weinstein
Posted: December 4, 2005
You would like to believe that the panic attack
you had in Soho had nothing to do with the bridesmaid's dress you
selected moments before. You would like to believe it had nothing
to do with the teapot you were trying to pick out at the time. You
have had relatively few panic attacks in your life; this was only
the second one not brought on by drugs or guilt. You are surprised
by how cheesily cinematic it is--the visual and sound effects used
to convey the idea of panic in movies and television, are not, as
you had thought, a kind of shorthand for a panic attack but accurate
representations of the symptoms of a panic attack as they appear
to a person who is having one. And yet the panic attack is like
a movie or television, in the sense that you are watching it. From
the part of you that observes everything, even your greatest ecstasies
and most deepest despair, you are watching what is going on in your
body and mind with cool remove. At times, you have tried to eradicate
this part of you with art and alcohol and drugs and meditation and
sometimes even exquisite, contrived pain, so you can have some kind
of pure experience, some kind of experience unmediated by consciousness,
which you a realize is a paradox since it is through consciousness
that we apprehend experience. This creates another paradox since
the apprehension of experience, in the sense of the multiple meanings
of the word "to apprehend" (1. to take into custody, arrest;
2. to grasp mentally, understand; 3. to become conscious of, as
through emotions or senses, perceive) is exactly what you both desire
and do not desire. You desire to become conscious of experience,
as through emotions or senses, but you do not desire to arrest experience,
and yet through trying to grasp mentally and understand experience
you cause the first, undesirable effect of apprehension and prevent
the desirable third.
You are dimly aware of these contradictions and possibilities,
even momentarily distracted by them, as you try to apprehend your
apprehension of experience, which has most recently and unexpectedly,
in the midst of an aisle of different sized ceramic teapots in Pearl
River Mart, ceased to be the normal apprehension of experience and
become instead the experience of apprehension (1. Anxious or uneasy
anticipation of the future; dread; 2. The act of seizing or capturing,
arrest; 3. The ability to apprehend or understand, understanding).
You are feeling the first, but not really the second or the third
effect of your apprehension. You feel an anxious and uneasy anticipation
of future, both the immediate future in which you will select a
teapot, and the later future in which you will make tea in this
teapot and continue to live in what at this moment seems will be
an unending state of anxiety. You are engaged in the act of seizing
or capturing, but it is not you who is doing the seizing. It is
you who has been seized.
You are in the midst of some kind of arrest, here among the ceramic
teapots. It occurs to you that if you were to crumple to the floor,
or perhaps slump to the floor (you actually pause in the midst of
your arrest to consider whether you would crumple to the floor or
slump to it), you would jostle and perhaps break some of the teapots,
and they would crash and clatter and shatter. This, too, would be
an appropriately cinematic effect to go along with the rest of this
cliched experience. You are disappointed in your panic attack, in
its lack of innovation, in its hazy edges and wobbly camera work
and vertiginous warping of the simple shapes of the teapots and
bowls and plates and other ceramic objects and the slow-motion demonic
sound of the tinkling Chinese music in Pearl River Mart (how banal!
How unoriginal!) and now---now, you are grasping at the top of your
jacket, you are ripping open the snaps at your neck, and the sound
is so loud, it is exactly the kind of sound that would be amplified
in television or movie post-production, or the post-production of
a television movie, the sound of the snaps ripping open as the character
who is having the panic attack gulps for air and grows dizzy and
sweats profusely and perhaps even spins around and--how do these
attacks even end? They usually pass out, and come to later in a
comical fade-in that leads to a revelatory denouement within the
hour.
But you are not going to pass out. Nor does it feel like a revelation
is on the horizon. You are wide awake and beginning to realize that
you will be neither selecting nor fainting upon a teapot in Pearl
River Mart today. You will get some air, and maybe this will apprehend
the apprehension, the anxiety and dread you are feeling about your
future of anxiety and dread. You have looked up the symptoms of
panic attack on the internet and you know that fear of a permanent
state of madness is one of the symptoms. "The fear that I feel
of a permanent state of madness is only a symptom," you tell
yourself, "and if I can accept this fear as a temporary symptom
of--" and then you are stuck. A symptom of what? Why would
you fear a permanent state of madness and anxiety if it were not
a real possibility? And why wouldn't you have reason to fear a permanent
state of madness and anxiety if madness and anxiety were not the
defining features of the current moment, which like all current
moments, seems quite eternal? "Everything passes," you
remind yourself. "We are all just passing through time and
it is passing through us." This thought, which you normally
find quite comforting and interesting, which occupies you for blocks
and blocks on long walks through the city and comforts you when
your anxiety and dread and painful excitement at the fact that you
are alive is at more manageable levels than it is right now, is,
in your state of apprehension, terrifying. It is not unlike the
first moment as a small child that you consciously realize that
you are going to die. But this is more visceral. Because now you
have moved into second and third actions of the verb "to apprehend,"
you both comprehend as an idea and are having as an experience the
notion, the possibility, the fact, the reality of death, your own
and that of all your loved ones, which if it is not happening right
now, or hasn't happened without your knowledge, will happen, sometime
sooner or later, and it there is no good way to be ready for it,
all the death, and the acute fear of it you will live in until it
comes for you and everyone you love, none of whom can save you from
this fear.
And yet "fear" and "death" don't enter into
the vocabulary of the detached narration that is describing this
movie to its sole director, actor and spectator. As you walk up
Broadway, "getting some air," which you realize has not
had the desired effect of arresting your apprehension but instead
has simply lowered by several degrees the temperature of your panicked
organism, you are not thinking about fear and death. You are thinking
instead of how odd it is that you never noticed before how loud
and frightening the horns and sirens of New York City are, how mean
and scary the faces of the people are, how grotesque the headless
mannequins in every store window are. You pass by a store whose
mannequins aren't completely headless, but rather have heads that
are severed at various angles, so one mannequin has a mouth and
one eye and another a flat round cross-section right above the nose,
and you remark to yourself what an unfortunate set of mannequins
that is for a person having a panic attack to come upon.
You sense that the subway might not be the best place for a person
in the throes of a panic experience. It is underground and claustrophobic
and loud and full of rush-hour commuters. On the other hand, you
think rationally, it's warm and safe and a little more sensory-deprived
then the overwhelming street. The subway will take you to 14th Street,
and it's always good to be on 14th Street because then you are nearly
home. (One of your theories on New York City is that the subway
line you live on is an extension of your concept of your neighborhood,
so that if you ride the L train, really all of 14th Street is your
neighborhood.) The subway, you think rationally, really isn't safe,
you are always a little afraid of terrorism on the subway, it seems
inevitable and the fact that they keep warning everyone about it
and yet it hasn't happened yet makes it seem particularly ominous
and inevitable, but right now, in the midst of severe and unnamable
terror, a terror that comes from within you and encompasses everything,
you are able to see that the terror of terrorism is a mere diversion
from the terrors that lie within us, coiled like snakes and waiting
to strike in the middle of the teapot aisle.
You go down the subway stairs and wait for the train. You sit on
the bench, quivering with the terrible secret of your madness. Is
this what it's like for the mentally ill, of which you are temporarily
one, all the time? Do they sit on the subway bench and feel not
alienated or cynical or smug or late or angry or left out or bummed
out but simply in a constant state of apprehending the horror of
life and its impending end and all the time that lies between now
and then in this state of awareness of that end? How terrible for
them. You would feel empathy for them if you were not so currently
worried about becoming one of them.
You notice more symptoms of panic. Tingling, numbness, nausea,
heartbeat. You take your pulse and it is very fast. Is it tachycardic?
Does tachy mean fast? You think it means fast. "My pulse is
tachy," you say to yourself. "I am a textbook case of
whatever I am having.”
You know what this is. There are words for it. And suddenly you
feel a feeling you haven't felt in the last half hour--comfort.
You are beginning to pendulate out of it. Pendulation is
a neurological term you know. It means that what goes up must come
down.
The subway comes and you not thrilled by its rumbling but you can
get on. You are still terribly afraid, but you are not so apprehended
in the moment. You are thinking that maybe, when you catch your
breath, you can get groceries like you planned, (though not the
tea, you won't be needing the tea). You and everyone you love are
going to die but that is once again just an idea, not an all-encompassing
reality. You don't apprehend that idea quite so much anymore, and
by consequence it doesn't apprehend you. That idea is going back
to wherever it lies dormant in you when it is not causing panic
attacks in the teapot aisle. The you that watches is no longer a
leader in exile, watching from a secret location in your consciousness
as a demon impostor wreaks havoc your physiology. The you that watches
over everything is restored to power, ushered back to her command
center. She settles into her leather swivel chair, touches the items
on the desk possessively and habitually, she pulls some switch and
releases the knots of your muscles. She eases off the tacky special
effects and slows your tachy heart.
The last thing you remember thinking about before this all began
was how many adjectives went with your bridesmaid's dress. The bride
chose some of them: the color (burnt sienna) the length (knee) the
trim (bow band) the color of the trim (pomegranate for you and her
sister, the maid and matron of honor, burnt sienna for the rest
of the bridesmaids) and you chose the rest: size (6) style (empire
waist) neckline (strapless). You were feeling quite pleased with
your decisiveness and sentimental about the June wedding. The fear
of death had not come for you yet in the fitting room, where you
frowned and said "no" to spaghetti straps, nodded "yes"
to the empire waist. You smoothed the fabric of the sample dress
and eyed your reflection with pleasure. The dress looked nice on
you. How nice that you like your body enough to enjoy it, how nice
that you grew out of the body hatred that still afflicted so many
women out there on the street in Soho, how nice that your body is
not grotesque to you, how sad that it ever was. You thought of how
you would wear this dress in the pictures, and the pictures would
go in the wedding album. Maybe the wedding album would be passed
on to the children and grandchildren of this incipient marriage.
The camera would click on a moment still in the future, the moment
you were buying this dress to create, and it would freeze it in
time and maybe in many years you would celebrate this couple's fiftieth
anniversary and you would look at the picture and think how young
you were once and how old you were then, and even later some descendent
of your engaged friends might see you in the wedding album, flanking
the bride, and not even know who you were, but just think, as you
sometimes think when you see an unidentified person in an old photograph,
how you were once pretty and now you must be long dead. But this
thought did not give you vertigo, in the dressing room where you
had not yet been apprehended, in fact it gave you pleasure. You
were so glad to be here at all, so glad that you were here in the
now that would become the then, that you were in the process of
buying a dress that would seem hopelessly dated in thirty years
and then in a hundred, if the pictures survived, perhaps historic,
when now it was the most typical of fancy dresses. You took pleasure
in not being able to predict what would eventually seem dated or
archaic about it, pleasure in the fact that the opinions on bridesmaid's
dresses of the aughties are yet undecided, pleasure in the frivolity
of a pretty dress, pleasure of the absurdity of a soon-to-be lawyer,
a summer associate, a magna cum laude Phi Beta Kappa on two different
law reviews playing princess and pleasure in cynical feminist you
playing her lady-in-waiting and everyone enjoying it. You took pleasure
in simply being there, in dressing for the occasion, in being a
part of it.
The showroom was full of dresses in every style and color, hung
on racks in rainbow order. There dress itself was a concept--a cylinder
of silk--and there were only so many permutations on it. How it
was sewn, the parts of a woman it displayed and concealed, the geometry
of the neckline and the skin it revealed, the difference between
translucent fabric and shimmery. Lately you are interested in editing,
in how the addition or subtraction of any single detail changes
a work of art, and you were mindful of this as you considered the
rainbow of dresses hanging on the racks. You observed how each detail
changed the dress. You hoped to learn something.
You observed how the dresses posed a math problem, but it could
be easily solved. You thought about how you would calculate all
the permutations of dresses, how with six types of fabric and ten
sizes and four styles and three lengths and four necklines and six
trims and twenty-seven colors there was a large but still finite
number of possible dresses. But within the choices already made
for you, there were eight possible dresses, and you tried them all
on. You thought, in the showroom as you made your selection, before
you were suddenly apprehended by apprehension, that you were doing
very well.
|
