“Apparitions, and What They Want.”
PART I: Apparitions
“You could write the word Untitled repeatedly on a piece of paper every day, all day,
for the next one hundred years without stopping, and you’d never reach the end of
female namelessness.”
Robin Coste Lewis
I want to tell you about the apparitions that haunt me. They feel like ghosts, but in and of the
present: of violence inherited, breathed in, passed on. In the aftermath of the national gaslighting
debacle that was Kavanaugh’s confirmation process, I want to tell you about these apparitions in
case you have them, too. Because I don’t remember a time without them, and I know I am not
alone in this. Stories of damage done to our loved ones, our ancestors, our chosen families and
communities: these apparitions demand attention.
They are always with me, but sometimes they are more pressing than others, coming and going
in waves. Sometimes they crowd around my eye sockets, press in at my temples, stretch
themselves into a film through which I peer at the world. They are often more vivid, more
pressing, than my memories of my own traumas. Other times they are nowhere to be found, but I
always know they’ll come back.
Carmen Maria Machado named this experience – of being haunted by the violence upon others -
and gave it shape and movement in her story “Especially Heinous.” Her protagonist, a fictional
Olivia Benson, is haunted by girls with bells for eyes, who come to her at night clanging loudly.
They possess Benson; they take her body out at night, kiss boys, run around, taste, feel, smell the
world. “The bells ring, ring, ring through the night, stripping skin from Benson’s body, or that’s
how it feels, anyway.”
Years ago I did enough healing to be highly functional, and until recently, I thought that this was
enough. But high-functioning does not mean healed or whole, and recently, I have decided to
surrender to these apparitions. I have decided to let them lead me and I will follow, hoping to
continue forward, in and through - to find some opening within the wounding.
Apparition: from late middle English, that which appears. From the Latin apparitio: attendance.
**
Amid the barrage of predictably horrific things from Trump and the Senate, amid inescapable
headlines simply shocked and clutching their pearls at what so many of us have already known,
thank god for Michelle Tea: “I’m thinking that going totally fucking insane is a completely
rational outcome for an intelligent woman in this society, and I think this idea only becomes
more solid the farther back in history you go.”
And thank god for my friend Megan, who waded through the “think pieces upon think pieces”
(her words) and sent me bits of writing that make sense of it – Lauren Berlant, Lili Loofborouw,
Jennifer Doyle.
I was reminded of last year, when a tenured professor at my university was outed as a sexual
predator. The university had known for years, unable or unwilling to do anything, until
undergraduates began slipping letters under doors and writing on bathroom stalls.
Men I knew, fellow graduate students, self-consciously gentle and sensitive men, were – self-
consciously and sensitively – conflicted.
For all the terrible things I’ve heard, they said, he’s so smart. He can produce these readings of
Marx I could never have come up with.
Faculty, many of whom I respected, wrote an open letter in his defense, calling the whole thing a
witch hunt, calling for due process. Meanwhile Silvia Federici long ago classified witch hunts as
campaigns of terror against women to weaken the resistance to capitalist expansion. And what
about when due process has failed?
Or is this in fact when due process has succeeded? We all know who due process is for, which is
to say the university/Senate/institution, to protect it from legal/moral/political liability: a nod to
justice while going about business as usual (Thank you, Jennifer Doyle).
I didn’t know the professor, had only sat in lectures and seminars with him while he stroked his
beard and wore aviator sunglasses inside, asking long questions that weren’t questions. But his
actions and his lack of accountability tugged on a thread, the same thread that twanged at
Kavanaugh’s unhinged anger in the face of Dr. Ford’s dignity. That thread was connected to a
web of power, and a web of violence, and of pain, and of silence, in which we are all caught up.
And it began to unravel the rug beneath me.
I stopped sleeping well or thinking clearly, in a state of hypervigilance: what memories, what
feelings, would hit me, and when? My friends’ rapes came back viscerally to them too. (And the
fact of the possibility of a sentence like that: the casual plurality of it.) All of us walking around
campus like ghosts, trying to teach and to learn - feminist theory, of all things - overworked and
underpaid, shadowed by our memories. Migraines, flashbacks, shortness of breath and tears in
the stairwell: the wading through molasses of being thrown back into our own traumas.
**
The apparitions come to me at the damnedest times. Driving up to campus I am arrested by a
particularly vivid one, press my hands against the steering wheel and breathe deeply until it
passes. I brace against their presence: I am teaching and learning and do not have time for this
right now.
But they don’t leave me alone. A story, a poem, a confession: they come whispering to me at
night and drag my dreams down into spiraling nightmares.
(Machado’s girls with bells for eyes: “faster, faster, go faster. ‘I need to sleep,’ Benson says. ‘I
need to sleep to go faster.’ That makes no sense. We never get to sleep. We never sleep. We
tirelessly pursue justice at all hours. ‘Don’t you remember needing sleep?’ Benson asks wearily
from her unwashed sheets. ‘You were human, once.’ No no no no no no no no.”)
One of the most recurring is a memory, the whisper of a beloved years ago, in her bed late at
night: There were bruises…I walked to get Plan B the next morning…I still haven’t told anyone.
Those whispers have stayed with me ever since, and they have changed me. Because of what I
said, what I should have said, what I didn’t say.
With these girls with bells for eyes, these apparitions, I cannot see clearly through a “rational”
conversation on this topic. On a walk with a male colleague, he asks, what about desire? He is
concerned that this reckoning with sexual violence leaves no room for his desire. I feel them
crowding around my forehead, trying to hear, leaving no room for me to think.
PART II: Silence
“It’s not that we aren’t talking, or aren’t being heard in a way that could be repeated
technically. It means that people often can’t bear to be changed by what they hear.”
Lauren Berlant
A dear friend is over at our house, talking, eating, drinking. We are slowly building up the web
of mutual trust into which, we hope, we can speak our real truths. Late at night we finally come
to it, what before we had only referenced circularly, the words the whole evening has been built
around:
My rape, she says.
I know, I say, me too.
We don’t even tell each other the stories, the details; it is almost too much in one night to have
said that much. We’d long understood each other as survivors. Still, it matters to have said those
words out loud to each other. To know that the other knows. To hold each other in one long sigh
before she goes home and I go to bed.
As survivors, we know we will not be believed. And we know the figure of the survivor: a
cultural narrative of victimhood, suspicion, and pity. Jennifer Doyle writes that the survivor is
reviled because she and her testimony tell us about who we are as a society, truths we can’t bear
to hear. In naming ourselves as survivors, it can feel like we are giving up some form of agency,
or nuance: Dr. Ford received death threats, was questioned as if she was the one on trial. And
this loss of power mirrors the powerlessness we felt in the original assault itself.
To be silenced: to feel ourselves speak, know we spoke, and yet see a profound lack of response,
is a profoundly dehumanizing experience. As Berlant describes, sometimes one is silenced by
literally being prevented from speaking. But, far more often, it is by the experience of
“communicative impotence: the experience of others’ aversion to taking in and becoming
different in response to the force of what one says.” In that resounding silence, in the backs that
remained turned and the faces that remain passive in the face of your having hollered at them, the
question reverberates: do I even exist? It is a kind of invisibility, an obliteration of one’s sense of
self, a feeling that many of us learn early on.
Still, we testify to each other, hoping to see a kernel of ourselves reflected in each other.
**
This silencing: I watched it play out as Kavanaugh’s defenders argued, not that it didn’t happen,
but instead that it didn’t matter. Because, as Slate columnist Lili Loofbourow pointed out, the
victims don’t matter, because women’s pain is irrelevant.
In the face of that irrelevance, she argues, “the painful experiences claimed by women make no
impression on a certain kind of man’s sense of reality. Her perspective is as unreal as it is
inconsequential to him.” Thus, in a horrific way, a screaming, struggling teenage girl might in
fact make no impression on Kavanaugh, or on Mark Judge: because it doesn’t need to. Because
victims’ pain doesn’t matter, is literally too unremarkable to remember.
But what would happen if we stopped and let ourselves be overcome by the enormous psychic
weights that so many of us are walking around with? Dragging them down grocery aisles,
carrying them on treadmills at the gym, folding and unfolding our hands around them in
meetings – while we fold laundry, get dinner on the table, drive to work?
**
In my early 20s, feeling unlovable, I went looking for what my previous boyfriends had loved
about me. But through emails, letters, poems, texts, I couldn’t find myself anywhere. Any
semblance of myself had long ago vacated the premises, replaced by their desires reimagined
upon me. Looking back, it’s almost comical. But the realization also felt like betrayal, a smack in
the guts: none of you know me. I’d been written out of my own role. Another kind of silencing.
But if lyrical waxing can vacate the loved one themself, can the opposite also be true? Can
sustained loving attention, conversation, describing someone in as much specificity and depth
and authenticity as possible – can that be an enactment of love? I think the answer is yes. Maggie
Nelson’s phrase, to be held and beheld: as time passes this becomes closer and closer to my
definition of love.
Perhaps this is part of what the girls, the apparitions, the ghosts want from us. They want our
mouths, our hearts, our brains to attend to them: they want us to testify on their behalf. They
want us to hear them and be changed by it, bearable or otherwise.
Which is to say that I am thinking about the necessity, centrality, of loving attention – of being
seen - to the work of healing.
PART III: The Ordinariness of Violence
“Often, to serve the privileged, what appears in the capital letters of scandal is amplified
to whisk attention away from the social infrastructure toward a localized scene of
urgency. Scandals blow over but structures don’t.”
Lauren Berlant
We are all vulnerable, though some, obviously, more than others. We are all taking in the world,
responding to it, open with a receptivity that Berlant calls an unbearable tenderness.
“We call things unbearable when we are at a breaking point or broken one; we call things
unbearable when we have to bear them,” she writes. “Unbearable tenderness is the state of
recognizing that there’s no protecting oneself from the world one is trying to survive —
unwelcome, under-resourced, or with exhausted defenses.” Some try to close off from that
vulnerability, from the possibility that someone else’s words might upend their reality. Others
have no choice, know that they are viscerally, physically, psychically at the mercy of the world
around them.
**
Even beyond the sexual assault allegations, Kavanaugh is angry and unstable, deeply
misogynistic, willing to lie on record. But the bright spotlight of did he or didn’t he? – Berlant’s
“capital letters of scandal” – obscures the structuring force of gender as power, and the many
forms of gendered violence other than sexual assault. If anything, his misogyny is, in fact, a
qualifying characteristic: he was chosen, based on his judicial record, to be reliably anti-abortion
and anti-feminist.
The hearings are also a lesson in gender, and gendered violence, and their attendant dynamics of
silence or credibility – which most obviously oppress those of us who are women, queer, trans,
folks of color. But it also matters that these dynamics also harm even the most powerful cis white
straight men: they enforce the disconnection that comes with privilege and allegiance to power.
From a lifetime of refusing the vulnerability that requires us to attend to the suffering of others.
A lifetime of refusing to take in, and be changed by, the force of what others say – a lifetime of
silencing.
None of this is new. Which is not to normalize it, but rather to remember that violence
(gendered, sexual, otherwise) is not the exception. To face the ordinariness of violence, and the
ordinariness of its denial - that we are all “swimming in the waters of rape culture,” as Autumn
Brown says wryly in a conversation with her sister adrienne maree brown.
To remember that we are living in a culture that was built on the subjugation of entire classes of
people, and continues to do so. And to remember that sexual violence is integral to the
maintenance of gender, and of race: to the structures of power that continue, now, in the
disproportionately high rates of sexual violence against Native women, black women, trans
women.
As we swim in these waters, to face the ordinariness of violence and its denial is to, as Berlant,
says, “stay clear-eyed in the scene of violence.” This also means recognizing that the threat of
sexual violence is also used to rationalize other forms of violence. The myth of the queer or trans
person as sexual predator has for decades rationalized the “gay panic” defense, prevention of gay
adoptions, refusing (or enforcing) medical services, and refusing access to bathrooms, homeless
shelters, employment, state services, and much more. The myth of the black man as sexual
predator has for centuries rationalized lynching, murdering, and imprisoning black and brown
men, and much more. In each, the figure of the victim looms larger than life, while individual
survivors are nowhere to be seen – yet another silencing.
I want to go below the scandal, to the structure. I want to carve out space to grieve with my loved
ones, my chosen family, my community, and refuse to be drawn into this larger cultural narrative
of simultaneous erasure and exceptionalism. And I want to grieve the banality of it, the
ordinariness, the predictability. We call things unbearable when we have to bear them: I want to
grieve what breaks in bearing the unbearable.
PART IV: Healing
“on these / quiet nights / I have heard // insects / humming / my name / on prairie grass /
winds / from the / southwest.”
Sarah Holst
“Making oneself vulnerable: is that not what we do in friendship, and in desire?”
Jennifer Doyle
Walking through my California neighborhood of morning glories and hummingbirds, I think of
my old friend Sarah in snowy Duluth. I am carrying these ghosts and these questions, and they
are ushering a newborn baby into this world. We text about healing in the 5-minute snippets of
time in and around a crying baby.
I remember our long conversations on the phone and in letters, almost seven years ago now, as I
told them about the childhood assault I was working through. I was so thankful for their steady
listening presence as I felt the ground pulled out beneath my feet - and I was also keenly,
painfully aware of how much time, attention, love I was taking from them.
And then, three years ago, after years of nights being led in and through their own grief and
trauma and violation – nights in which, they told me later, they didn’t know if they’d make it out
of this beast alive – Sarah began to paint their lament. The paintings started soft and blue and
monochromatic, faint blue-grey ghost deer, drippy and grey. Slowly, over years, Sarah painted
themself back into their body.
Last year, they wrote me a letter thanking me for sharing my process with them and making for
theirs. I was learning how to be vulnerable, and to accept the gift of their friendship. I couldn’t
have imagined that I was giving them something in return.
If being silenced is producing speech that others refuse to be changed by, then perhaps being
heard is the opposite: speaking, and watching others change in return. There is such relief in
being, against all hopes and expectations, heard and reflected in a way that feels real and true.
Sarah’s letter made me realize that I have been deeply heard, and not only by them. Moments in
which my chosen family truly see me are like shocks to my senses: they’ve pierced my bubble of
presumed solitude and in fact have been with me all along. It is a privilege, rare and precious.
**
Recently, my partner wrote: “How much of myself has remained undefined because there
hasn’t felt like a place for it, for me, in the world? What will it feel like to find these parts
and turn them open to the world, vulnerable, hoping to be held?”
They are talking about their gender, about the illegibility of being nonbinary in a binary-
gendered world. It’s not the category of woman that feels so harmful to me, they say repeatedly.
It’s the structure of gender more broadly, it’s the violence that those gendered categories enact
upon all of us, every one of us.
And yet, because you see me, we each are saying, I can bring myself back into existence.
Against the obliteration of trauma or of silencing, we do the work of seeing and hearing each
other. Holding and beholding each other; hearing and changing each other, letting ourselves be
changed: this is the work of radical love. And more than rage against Kavanaugh and the rest, I
want to rejoice in our communities’ courage, our strength, our vulnerability. Our work of healing
and holding each other – our beautiful, radical, precious lives – is powerful, fierce work.
Of course, I hold no illusions that any of us ever sees a complete reflection of each other. But I
also don’t think we’re ever complete selves to begin with. I think we come into being with and
through each other.
Just as hearing of one predator pulls on a thread that tugs on my own histories, I imagine a
tapestry in which we heal with and through each other: a web of generosity for each other, of
caring attention and deep regard.
This is why the apparitions come to their siblings in arms, rather than their perpetrators: because
it is we who have conjured them. (Conjuring, from the latin origin: to swear together.) Swearing
on each other’s hearts, memories, beloved bodies, we conjured them, and they came to us, to
lead us through.
And because these ghosts are not looking for revenge. They are instead looking to be heard,
loved, let go. They know we are beginning to know the practices; they know there is room for
them in us. They demand attention, and they come to attend to us.
PART V: Desire
“Brokenness, fragmentation was a given, if not our most enduring strength, if not our
anthem. / What could anyone whole or alive truly know about living?”
Robin Coste Lewis
“Many of us are out of practice when it comes to publicly weeping: we hide our faces
when they are red and smudged with grief and rage.”
Sarah Holst
So, what about desire? Of course, if ever there was a taboo topic, female desire is it. (Jennifer
Doyle: the victim’s desire is an impossibility.) But I have plenty of desires.
I want all of this to be discussed on different axes, beyond the individualization of Title IX
administration or FBI investigations, beyond hand-wringing over “due process” and “trial by
media.” I want to divert that attention, that energy, to imagining a world in which violence is not
a structuring logic.
And I want to imagine what healing work means in the context of intergenerational violence. I
want a world of transformative justice, which adrienne maree brown describes as “div[ing] deep
to understand and transform the underlying conditions that allowed the harm to happen.”
This is not a world we will get to any time soon. I have watched transformative justice processes
crash and burn as perpetrators avoid accountability and the rest of us, already short on emotional
reserves, are asked to invest more. And I also don’t see another direction to go.
I want a world of radical consent, in which we are safe, secure, self-loving enough to learn our
own desires, when and how and with whom we want. A world in which, again following
adrienne maree brown, “we each have power, and we each have the responsibility to share and
grow power in ourselves and others.”
I want to stay with our immense capacity to grow strong through pain, to derive life from those
harms which might kill us, which send us so deeply into the darkness that we emerge on the
other side, scarred, saddened, perhaps unrecognizable, but strong in our bellies and our hips and
shoulders.
After Dr. Ford’s dignity and courage, after Kavanaugh’s entitled indignation; after his tears and
his unhinged rage (which the newspapers called ‘passionate’); after the meaningless questions
and grandstanding: after all of this, Megan tells me, 80 or so people sat in the Senate hallway, in
a circle, in the marbled halls of power, and told their stories of rape, of assault, of stalking and
molesting and coercion, the infuriating mundanity of violence against them, against us.
I want to remember: those halls echo, and what is spoken in them reverberates, no matter who
said it.
Like Machado’s Benson, who investigated each of her girls’ deaths, gave them names and
stories, and missed them when they left, I want to honor my apparitions, and those of others.
They remind me that in specificity there is connectedness. That in the overwhelm of violence
perpetrated and received, my healing is also tied into the healing of my community and those
around me. They are guides, telling me: not without us. In your suffering you are not alone, they
say. Nor can you be alone in your healing.
And I want to return, again and again, to my beloved community, our ancestors and descendants:
we are a small flock, looking to each other’s movements, guided by each other’s work. With
these listening ears, this feeling heart, these stories, poems, songs: with all I have, I want to pass
on the loving time and attention that I have been given. I want to heal.