THERAPY FOR THE THERAPIST: A CASE HISTORY, IN FRAGMENTS

By Cassie Peterson

In this one You are searching for a new Other. The Others think they are listening to You for Your benefit, but You secretly know that it is for theirs’. This is the thing, the singular truth that they will never admit. But You Know It Anyway,  Because You are also sometimes an Other.

This is the one where You lean back in Your chair and say,   

I’m tired of competing with other people’s OTHER priorities.

You really mean it    and    You know it sounds good.

Your potential new Other smiles wryly at Your wit and takes note of the obvious pleasure You take in narrating Yourself to a complete stranger. Your heartfeeling and skinflesh hide behind the immeasurable longitude of Your stories. She doesn’t know this yet, but she has a sense.

In this one You’re talking to the hot, young Other even though on the phone You envisioned her to be older and wiser and… beautiful, yes…  but not familiar or corporeal enough to warrant an actual attraction. Her clothes fit her well and don’t adequately veil her from Your blazing inquisitions. She says the word “prOcess” with an awkward long “O” sound and You almost ask her if she is Canadian. But You stop, Not wanting her to spook under Your scrutiny. Not now. Not yet. The fighting comes later.

I do not know how to do this…  You will think, and later say to her.

What do You need from me?  She asks Politely. Naively.

I need You to survive my determined attempts to annihilate You for not being enough for me…  Then…

Choose Me.  Again.  And Again.

But Instead You say,  You’re so Young…

And You begin to search her temples for beads of sweat for which there are none. She holds Your stare. In fact, it is only her long “O’s” that pierce the pedestal that You are contemplating building for her. Can You hold her up to the sun? And then tear her down and burn her at Your own private heartstake? Can she be one of Your Others?

You scan her for fear. For an embryo of abandonment. But in this one, she holds the frame, impossible to read. She shakes Your hand, firmly, after 45 minutes and speaks with extra attention to a-nun-ci-a-tion like an over eager theater student. She is acting. We all are. Acting alive while we chase after our own deaths.

In this one You remember another Other from Your past. Or maybe it is just a version of You? Either way, You remember how she performed her aliveness. The role of her lifetime. She survived by never acknowledging just how near death she lived. Her secret bedfellow. A private legacy. Tending to her heartflesh made her feel decadent. Bourgeoisie. She would rather be aligned with immigrant housecleaners and schizophrenics, whom she romanticized as people who can’t afford to dwell in their heartspace or the in the details of their suffering.  She was In cahoots with all the world’s underdogs, yet striving to be the very best of them with an unbearable and unyielding ambition. She was Irish with a repetition compulsion that made her crave the feeling of being colonized.

In this one, you offer her the possibility of depressive narcissism like a good boy. As in, Maybe it’s just because of my depressive narcissism. She will repeat it to the insurance company.

This is the one where You leave, wondering if she will miss You… or feel relief that You are gone. Or if she wanted to slap Your face for making her feel both irreconcilable desires at the same time. You remember that Your father once told You that You don’t have relationships, but rather You take people hostage. Or wait; maybe he was saying that about himself? Either way, You embroider this thoughtmemory onto Your brainmind and decide to tell her about it later.

It’s a hostage situation, he had declared.

That seems important to tell Your Other,  You will think and later decide.

This is the short one where You remember that asshole who broke Your entire face and then Your mother married him 6 years later, Pretending as if it had never happened. She chalked it up to some Kindergarten hallucination that You had had.  More on this at a later time. It is percolating. Ground zero. The genesis of betrayal, In the beginning there was….

And how will You be paying today?  The Other says, pulling You out from the rabbit hole.

In this one, she looks at You with semi-dilated pupils and says,   

You are in the world. You are of the world.

What? Why didn’t anyone ever tell me that???

In this one, we are trapped in a folie a deux, which is defined as a shared delusion.

A person may develop a delusional system as a result of a close relationship with a person who already has an established delusional system.

Yes. This is the State of Things. A folie a deux gone viral. Gone wild.

Show us Your tits!  We will shout.  And they will because we are all believers.

In this one, You say to her, 

Congratulations, I love you

And then You hate her for not applauding Your effort and Your “vulnerable” disclosure. Sitting in the waiting room, fantasizing Your acceptance speech for the Nobel Love Prize, her lackluster response crushes You. Your once-declared love for Your Other quickly dissolves into an old hatehatehate. When telling another Other about it the next day, You see her trying to empathize. You see her working, trying to remember her lines. Scouring the script in her A+ manualmind. You fire her on the spot.

Congratulations, I’m firing You  

She was professional about it, but did defend herself with too much vigor for You to know that her pridefeeling was not hurt.   

I win, You will then think and then later etch into the notes you keep for Your eulogy.

In this one, You tell her Your anecdote about the myth of American meritocracy.

The bootstrap? Pull Yourself up by it? What the fuck is a bootstrap anyway? I googled it to no avail. It doesn’t exist. And how can You pull Yourself up by Your own feet anyway. What does that even look like? Levitation? So basically, the working metaphor for upward class mobility is someone pulling themselves up into a levitated state by using an apparatus that no longer exists. An imaginary tool, the boot straps. How can we believe in an impossible, yet promised phenomenon with an even more impossible metaphor underpinning it?

Fuck this place,  You conclude.  Fuck this stupid fucking country.

She listens attentively, but is on guard, energetically, because she secretly believes that she has actually pulled herself up by her own bootstrap and feels as though others should be able to follow in her footsteps. She is a 2^nd Wave, professional woman who has made it. She has made it so good that there are beautiful, alive orchids in her office in the middle of January. They must have bootstraps and they have obviously pulled them up, by themselves, and now exist in full colorful bloom. She has made it so good that she can keep tropical plants alive in a dead, wintery world. She is not amused by my story and she suddenly becomes,  

Mindful of our time together.

45 minutes together is like a quick fuck in the bathroom of a bar. You barely get her name before You cum inside her.

This is the one where You decide which stories will define You and which ones You will purposely forget or blame Your Other for. This is her story,  You will say because You don’t want to sign your name to that amount of shame.

So, You like to be in control?  She will ask in this one, reducing Your entire life down to one clumsy statement.

Yes. But from the bottom. 

A bossy bottom, You say smiling.

Leading from the bottom,  You say,  Is the most delightful dialectic.

She doesn’t’ understand Your amusement or the way that queer words make Your mouth water with and overwhelming, secret pleasure. She writes it down in her notebook, trying to translate. Your Other writes that You are “ambivalent” and next to it in parenthesis, (“fucked up”).

Of course You are,  She will say trying to sympathize.

Of course You are. How could You not be?

                                               by Cassie Peterson

Please read my latest performance essay/review about Faye Driscoll’s new show, You’re Me at The Kitchen. This piece was originally published on the wonderful arts site, BOMBSITE.

Excerpt/Teaser:

After reassuming their more earth-bound forms, Faye and Jesse make wild gestures to move across an empty space, together. Through these phrases, they both function as the other’s constant reference point, making strange seductive orbits around one another’s energetic openings and closings. They are attending. Mirroring. Each person’s piercing attention frames the other and makes them visible and known. This is a dance of becoming for and through the eyes of the other. This is a dance about undoing one another. The dancers vacillate between moments of total physical merging and long, unbearable separations and absences. Whenever they are separate for an extended period of time Jesse begins to desperately shadowbox or shadowfuck the empty space around him—a yearning gesture for the union of just moments before. His movements remind us that a self cannot exist without an other to coax, know, and name it into an existence. We fight and fuck in order to make each other real.

                                                Return the Critical Gayze!

Dear Editor(s),

My name is Cassie Peterson and I am a conceptual collaborator for Vanessa Anspaugh’s new dance piece, entitled Armed Guard Garden, which is premiering at New York Live Arts on February 15^th. This morning, Vanessa and I noticed that in your brief preview of the show, you have changed the phrase “queer body” (from the original press release), to perhaps a more socially acceptable signifier, “gay body.” First, I want to acknowledge and empathize with your hesitation to print the word “queer” for a more general public. However, your decision to change the word erases the ways in which queer has been linguistically re-appropriated and reclaimed by many sexual minorities as a source of great power and pride. The word queer represents a kind of pluralistic (un)identity that works to unsettle and undo fixed sexual and gender identifications. Queer understands all binary categorizations to be socially constructed and contextual. In this way, queer is underpinned by a radicalized politic that is more interested in challenging historically (hetero)normative expectations, power arrangements, and practices, rather than simply joining them.

Additionally, Queer Theory/Queer Studies has become a very well-known and legitimate theoretical framework within the Academy and supports critical thinker and writers like Judith Butler, Judith “Jack” Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz,  just to name a few. It is no longer just some pejorative hate speech. What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t just belong to the master anymore. It’s ours and we want to use it.

Moreover, your decision to replace the word queer with gay is also just very inaccurate. There is nothing about Vanessa’s piece that is “about” gay bodies. This is a far too literal and specific summary of her work. Whereas, queer in this context is not referring to LGBTQ-specific content per say, but is rather a meditation on a kind of embodied resistance and transgression. It is more of a strategy than a total personhood. Queer is more a reference to process and practice than content.

This is not just some minor semantic quarrel. Your choice has bigger implications. To conflate “gay” with “queer” and vice versa is to do neither one of these signifiers justice. Though they are related, these identities have different political connotations and agendas. Queer is an anti-normative framework(s) and consciousness that is a purposeful departure from a more mainstream, assimilationist gay and lesbian agenda. In the thinking, writing, and creating of the project, Armed Guard Garden, we have very deliberately chosen to use the word queer to communicate and represent a set of principles and way(s) of knowing. The choice to use the word queer was an incredibly political, conceptual, and aesthetic decision. I request that you please change it back to restore our original intentions and the integrity of our disruptive and transgressive queer vision(s).

Respectfully yours,

Cassie Peterson

**Post Script: The editor replied, apologized, but still refused to change the words back to the ways we had written them. They also refused to publish my letter so I have done it here, myself.

                               A Queer Reading of Queer Dance  

Please read my essay/review/love letter to Jen Rosenblit and Vanessa Anspaugh’s newest performances at New York Live Arts — originally published on the performing arts site, Culturebot.

Excerpt/Teaser:

At the beginning of the piece, five badass performers – Aretha Aoki, Niall Noel Jones, Molly Leiber, Lydia Okrent, and Mary Read – mark up the theater in grid-like gestures. They produce literal lines and divisions on the walls and the floor. They create these divisions with chalk and flour and then spend the rest of the performance skewing the lines in the most exquisite and grandiose fashion. They roll around in their own ephemeral boundaries — disrupting them, blurring them with a total abandon and taking unabashed pleasure in their demise. The dancers queer the lines that they themselves have drawn, making a beautifully depraved mess of themselves and the space. It’s an ecstatic refusal to be bound — and a celebration of the parts of self & other that can only exist in the queer, in-between spaces that arise when ‘The Known’ crumbles.

           FOOTBALL IS SO GAY: A Flaming Homage to the NFL

                                                by Cassie Peterson

Is American Football The Ultimate Elevation and Celebration of Hetero-Patriarchal, Alpha Masculinity?

                                                        OR?

       A bunch of queens squat humping each other for three hours?

                                               YOU DECIDE….

Football is one of those cultural phenomena that is so attached to an idealized, hyper-masculinized Straightness, that it’s busting at the seams with latent homosexuality. G-A-Y! The following VERBATIM excerpts of commentary (you can’t make this stuff up!) were collected during Superbowl XLVI…

                                                    ENJOY!

It looked like he was going to run right up the middle but he dumped it to his tight end instead.

                                                                            First they strapped up in leather.

             You just know, he’s feeling nervous… he’s never done this before.

They took a shot at him and all of a sudden they get a face full of that…

           The outcome of this all depends on the positioning they go with.

Two tight ends did something extremely unconventional and made it work.

        They really need to get their shoulders down and get an arm around the waist.

There are so many loose balls…

     He should stay behind and get a good view of that one from the inside.

                                          I can’t tell if he was “touched” early on.

He got swallowed whole by a bunch of blue shirts.

He got buried on that one with the double team.

                                          You can tell, he really wants to avoid the fullback….

(Uh oh, everyone… It looks like another “fisting” penalty.)

                                                   (And also, ummm, Flagging… hello?!)

The tight end ran right up that gaping hole in the middle.

He’s a tailback, but he really plays more like a powerback because they really need a big powerful guy inside.

Moore put his hand in there and next thing you know, uh oh, trouble….

                                                               ….He opened up into the hole.

          They must be warming up some beads just about now.

                                                    (HEY QUEENS!)

When you get someone backed up like that, they really can go either way.

                                                                 …. Whoa! That was a big one!

                    (Then, Madonna plays the half-time show… naturally.)

He gets his hand on the ball and then it’s “game on” from there.

He’s taking his sweet time now. He’s got the right tempo. He’s going to take this one all the way.

Safe Sex Public Service Announcements: That last play really backed up the front line and caused the safety to cut back.

He’s got Woodhead in man-to-man coverage.

They’re going use the dime package here.

You don’t have to get it all on this one.

He’s facing so much pressure in the pocket.

       Now they’re going with a three-wide package.

They have got to double-team him. Make him pay.

                          It’s 3^rd and inches now. That’s huge.

You can see the double crack, right there.

   He one-hands it and it works!

                  He could have settled in the hole, but he decided to run instead.

                         Now, he’s gonna wanna stay on the perimeter….

It’s a beauty here at the finish - He looks down the middle of the line and “cums” late.

(Thanks to Max Steele)