The poem “The Cenotaph” (2011) by Fanny Howe (1940–2025) opens with the couplet “I want to leave this place / unremembered.” Cenotaph, from the Greek κενοτάφιον meaning empty tomb, is a sepulchral monument erected in the memory of a deceased person whose remains are either buried elsewhere or have been lost. Howe continues the poem with a list of features of a home in disrepair and neglect: a leaking gas stove, a rusted refrigerator, “ugly” coffee mugs, moldy walls, a sagging staircase. The maintenance of the house feels beyond her control. The image is of a house well worth leaving.

I am particularly moved by the opening couplet of “The Cenotaph.” It carries me through what is otherwise a characteristically Fanny Howe poem: stark, even brusque, both in its crystallinity and in its opacity. Although the lines are spare, the syntax is complex: as the couplet is written, it is impossible to determine what is being unremembered, what is doing the unremembering. Within uncertainty, several possibilities emerge. If we read the definite but indeterminate “this place” to mean the house Howe describes in the poem, then Howe is saying she wishes to leave the house unremembered, or that she wishes to be left unremembered by the house, or both. Indeed, because it is uncertain to determine if “unremembered” refers to Howe or “this place,” both feel simultaneously true. Furthermore, the indeterminacy of “this place” suggests that we invite a few other possibilities in. Presuming that “this place” refers to the house feels like the right thing to do, and also not: I read the line as Howe also suggesting that she wishes to leave the world, and by extension (or by contraction), herself, unremembered.

Unremembered is an uncommon word, subtle in its difference of meaning vis-à-vis the more common “forget, forgotten.” Whereas forgetting or being forgotten feels more passive, merely a result of the passage of time, there is an activeness, an action-ness, to unremembering. To being unremembered. It is a desire not to have faded from memory but to have lived in a way that pushes oneself from the possibility of it, to have left no material or psychic afterlife for the world to continue to negotiate. Which feels both bleak and not. Howe was a deeply spiritual person. The question feels like a question of the spirit. Leaving “this place” unremembered suggests that one could live one’s life so close to its use that the life doesn’t end, isn’t forgotten, but closes in on itself. Both a void and an excess of it. I think of Howe as someone who did not fear death. I think of her as someone who thought of living life as a kind of death. That in order to live life, one must both maintain agency and also relinquish it. And also that in order to live life, we must completely empty ourselves of it. The poem closes with the tercet “where does life begin and end? / In the lamb or the cotton? / My pillow is my friend.” The question is jarring, certain in what it asks and opaque in what it wants answered. Though it does return me to a question of use. The poem feels less concerned with why we live life but how we live it. What is living one’s life in the service of. For whom is living one’s life to be of use.

Recently I have felt so ugly that I have had a hard time leaving the house. In truth I have had a hard time leaving my room, getting out of my bed. It is not that I am finding the experience and concomitant hang-ups of being around, and therefore perceived, by others to be unbearable; rather the very experience of experiencing myself has been difficult to live with. Being around other people merely amplifies it. It has very little to do with what “ugly” means, more to do with what “ugly” feels like. It often feels something like hate. Nor does it matter upon what features of my physical appearance I am hyperfixating. What matters is that it feels like hate and is something that I have been experiencing. I have removed all photographs of myself from display in my room, throughout the apartment. I have deleted any recently-taken selfies from my phone as well. I do not keep mirrors in my room. If I lived alone, the mirrors in the apartment would have long been shrouded by now. When washing up, I have been keeping the medicine cabinet open to avoid catching my reflection in the mirror on the face of the cabinet, to avoid making eye contact with the reflection of myself.

Body dysmorphia is an obsessive condition. I wake up thinking about how ugly I am. I spend the day thinking about it. I fall asleep thinking about it as well. There are a few moments upon waking, just before cognition truly begins, where the mind feels quiet. Then the obsession kicks in. There are also a few moments before falling asleep when I feel truly, completely worn out, where the mind also feels silent. These brief, crepuscular glimpses have become the only parts of my day that I look forward to. Anything beyond rest feels too difficult. I recently started seeing a therapist for the first time in my adult life. Though I have long understood episodes like this to be experiences of dysmorphia, they have now been clinically confirmed to be experiences of dysmorphia. Clinical confirmation does not make them any more or less manageable. It also does not make them any more or less real.

Last summer, at Bình’s first birthday in Herbert Von King Park, I step away to smoke a cigarette, mindful in particular of Bình and the other children present. Eileen arrives and stands with me while I smoke. We coo about the baby, which feels both requisite and deeply felt. Bình is the first baby of a friend whom I have had the pleasure of meeting, the first baby with whom I have spent substantive time. I’m not often around children, my friends and colleagues are mostly not the childrearing type. There’s Bình and there’s Luka but that’s about it. And I met Luka when he was already six. Meeting Bình was both ordinary and astonishing: she made me aware of time, the very miracle of her existence a reminder that the people I love are getting older, and therefore that I, too, am getting older. That I am experiencing time pass around and through me. Eileen and I also talk about loss. Alice Notley and Fanny Howe have just recently died. Death has been incessant this year, arriving back to back. Eileen says “It’s funny, when Alice died I felt her everywhere; when Fanny died, she was just gone.” As if there was no psychic trace of Fanny left, and no possibility of one either. There was no Fanny, nowhere; there was also no-Fanny, no-where. Both a fullness to her absence and an absence to her fullness. I do not wish to think Notley and Howe against each other, either in life or in death. Nor do I believe this to be Eileen’s intent. I believe the only point to the contrast is that death, like life, effects contrast. We attach to life differently. We also attach to death differently.

I am glad to see Mirene for the first time in several weeks. I have just returned to the office from a few weeks off, time I took off with the hope of catching up on reading, writing, life-living; instead I was sidelined by self-hate. Mirene and I take a break from emails &c. to spend some time catching up. I tell her about my ongoing episode. That I have been profoundly depressed. She says I thought you just started therapy. I say yes, that it is apparently getting worse before it gets better. Mirene hums in agreement and suggests that it might be precisely the new therapeutic relationship that is giving me permission to really feel what or how I am feeling. I hum in agreement back. It is likely not surprising that body dysmorphia is often comorbid with suicidality. It is difficult to write about suicidality without sounding maudlin. It is not precisely that I would like to leave but that I feel overwhelmed and tired, ontologically. I feel emptied out. I will leave that observation there.

At the nadir of this episode, I take a trip home. I do not go home because I am feeling unwell; I planned the trip in early January of this year, before this episode, after my twin sister, who recently moved back to where we are from, gave birth. The timing is mere coincidence. At this point I feel almost theatrical in my self-hate. I am deeply relieved to be going home, where I know the episode will not stop but I also know that leaving the city will feel good, that it will be nice to see my sister, to feel taken care of. I also desperately want to meet her baby. The cartography of my family is complicated. To keep things simple, I will say that this is the first child my parents’ children have brought into the world. Being a twin is interesting. It is a singular experience to have known someone since before birth. It is even more singular to consider that person your best friend. In many ways, my sister and I co-raised each other. We grew up in Chatham, Massachusetts, the southeastern tip of Cape Cod, often referred to as the “elbow” of Cape Cod. My parents live elsewhere on Cape Cod because Chatham has gotten unliveably expensive for the people who are from there, held hostage by its own summer tourism economy, sold for parts by the luxury real estate industry. My sister and her husband also live elsewhere on Cape Cod. I believe the any-where any-one grew up to be necessarily singular; I also believe there is no other place on earth like Cape Cod. To be from somewhere that is so surrounded by beach that no matter how inland you are, the topsoil is still largely sand. To be from somewhere so surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean that it feels like you are from the Atlantic Ocean. Life on Cape Cod is governed by the wind and the sea. I mean this literally: buffeted by wind, currents, erosion, the shoreline and therefore the shape of Cape Cod changes every year. But this literal relationship also feels spiritual, psychological. One’s personhood begins to feel governed by it. The random volatility, erasability of life is something by which one feels surrounded. Which feels both bleak and not. It is epistemologically liberating to see the line between land and sea be redrawn every year. To see the place you are from, and therefore the where and how and why you live your life, annually formed, erased, laid bare, reformed.

While home, my sister, her husband, the baby, and I go for a drive to Chatham. To take a walk on Forest Beach, the beach on which we grew up. There is a dirt path in the backdunes, abutted by a salt marsh on the inland side, that you can walk that leads to Mill Creek, the inlet that ends Forest Beach, separating it from Cockle Cove. It is a short walk, maybe two miles. I have been taking this walk for my entire life. It brings me back to every version of myself. It is mid-March. Late afternoon, sunny and bright with cold. On a sunny day in the late winter on Cape Cod, the angle of light becomes glassy, knifelike. As though you could see the time light moves through. Standing in the parking lot while my sister and her husband swaddle the baby, protecting and preparing her for the walk, I notice a pitch pine in the backdunes. The tree is so cowed by the wind that it is growing at a ninety-degree angle, completely sideways. The side of the pitch pine that faces the ocean stands wooden and bare. Stripped by the corrosive salt air. The baby is ready, tucked away and already asleep inside my sister’s husband's jacket, resting on his chest. We take our walk, taking some pictures along the way. I worry about what I look like. We get back in the car and go home.

Back at my sister’s house, I am seated on the floor of the nursery, watching my sister as she holds her baby, seated in an upholstered rocking chair. She is feeding the baby a bottle, humming to her. I feel surrounded by time. Completely empty and full of use. I watch my sister and her baby and I begin to cry. I leave the nursery, not wanting to disturb the two of them. Not wanting to disturb the moment. Wanting to keep it as it is. Back in the city, I try to tell my therapist about this experience and begin to cry. He asks me to say more. I say how could I possibly spend so much time hating myself, wanting to die when this beautiful baby has just been brought into the world, into my family. He hums not in agreement but in acknowledgment. I tell him I feel far away. That I am missing so much. I can tell the tears are the ones I stopped myself from having around my sister and her baby. I can tell it is a cry that I have needed. Our conversation drifts. I tell him about Forest Beach and begin to cry again. He asks me what that brought up. I say “We’re really from somewhere.” He hums in acknowledgment again.

After therapy I decide to go into the office in order to better focus. I focus well, but not on work. I believe in the place where I work; the job itself is deeply boring. It is easy to find myself focusing on anything else. I spend the afternoon watching video footage of dances I love. Among them is Café Müller (1978) by Pina Bausch (1940–2009). There are six performers in Café Müller. One of the six dancers in the work (who, in the video footage I am watching, is Bausch herself) spends most of the performance walking, stuttering but with conviction. Her eyes are closed. She wears a sleeveless white dress that resembles a nightgown. Her shoulders are rolled forward. Her arms are outstretched. Directly downstage from Bausch is another woman. She wears a sleeved white dress that resembles a nightgown. At times their movement mirrors each other; at times, it differs; at times, they seem to be anticipating each others’ movement. Bausch walks into a wall at the end of the visible stage, midway stage right. The stage is littered with small wooden tables, wooden chairs, resembling an abandoned café. Bausch totters back slightly and walks into it again. The camera pulls away from Bausch, who has now collapsed against the wall, to follow the other woman as she walks across the stage. Like Bausch, her eyes appear closed. She also moves stutteringly, with conviction. She walks slightly pitched forward. Another dancer, this one a tall man in a suit, clears the tables and chairs in her way. Another man in a suit stands stage left. She walks into him. Her movement ceases. They go limp in each others’ arms. The camera work is bossy, often cropped tightly; I cannot tell how long this man has been on stage. Another dancer, another man in another suit, manually positions the limbs of the sleeved woman and the man she walked into around each other, then picks her up and puts her into his arms. The man who positioned them walks away. The woman slips out of her supporter’s grasp after a few seconds; the other man returns to set them up again, only for her to fall out of his arms again, &c. The moment increases in speed and intensity as it is returned to. Intermittently, a woman in heels, a coat, and a wig of short, curly, shocked red hair walks on and off stage; she walks as though she has just learned to walk, bearing all of her weight in her toes. Throughout the piece, Bausch returns to her wall, walks into it again.

The piece is both deeply subtle and deeply unsubtle. The movement vocabulary, staging, score (the dance is set to an aria by Henry Purcell), all rely on melodramatic gestures and theatrics. It is almost fey in its lyricism. Worn out by its own excess. But there is also a stark, intense quality to her work, both affectively and effectively. Even the operatic flourishes feel like a part of the economy of the piece, the spare determination felt in each dancer, between each dancer, as constitutive of the performance’s ecosystem. I have watched this footage of Café Müller many times. As I usually am, I am most struck by Bausch, walking into her wall, again and again. Her eyes appear to remain closed for the duration of the performance. But even so, she feels acute with awareness. As if observing, even absorbing the movement of the other dancers. As if she were also them. She gives herself over to the movement. Her arms sweep through a wind only she can feel. Her brow looks furrowed with belief. I think she looks like the pitch pine. I think she must not fear death because she is full of it. I wonder if Bausch was a spiritual person. I get no real work done that day. I leave the office and go home. I eat dinner. I go to sleep.

I wake up the next morning to a quiet mind. A few moments pass. It stays quiet. The episode has stopped. I breathe. While I certainly do not feel as though I like myself, I feel as though I can, for now, live with the factness of my own existence. Like I can bear to look at me. It is heartbreaking being chronically mentally ill. The moments of peace often more difficult to bear than the moments of dis-ease. To know not that this could happen again but that it will happen again. But spring is returning to New York City. I give myself over to the factness of it. I empty myself with belief. I hope to go home again soon, and often, to spend more time with my sister and her baby. I get up, make coffee. I bring my coffee back into bed. I text my sister “I want to visit again soon. I feel like I am missing everything.” She says “You can come home whenever you want to.” The morning light is diffuse. Time moves around me like a field. It is not living that I find difficult but the act of choosing it. How will I know if I have lived my life. When I die how will I leave me.