Ineluctable Modality of the Visible & Dear Lucia—

Ineluctable Modality of the Visible 

                                        after Mai Der Vang

Let’s assume you do not know about Lucia Joyce.

Let’s assume you read one of her father’s early books in school.

Perhaps you love the last paragraph of “The Dead” or once identified with Stephen Daedalus. 

Let’s assume you have not seen Lucia’s photograph.

That you do not know about her extraordinary talent as a dancer in Paris. Or that she was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1930s by Jung and transferred to a Northampton hospital after her father died. That she languished there for thirty-one years without one visit from her mother. Where she wrote all her letters and a novel that her nephew destroyed after her death. 

Let’s assume you don’t know that she was often restrained. 

Let’s assume you don’t know that people with autism are now kept at this hospital. That two documentaries have been made including an exposé about people with learning disabilities who were restrained and sedated. That four patients died between October, 2010 and May, 2011.

Let’s assume you don’t know that, in 2018, the father of a girl with autism sued the hospital because his daughter was kept in a 12 x 10 room with only a mattress and chair, fed through a hole in a metal door.

Let’s assume you do not know anyone like Anna Livia—part of the twenty-five percent of those on the spectrum who cannot speak, read, bathe themselves. You may not know she needs her hand held to keep her from walking into traffic when she is outside. That she spends every unsupervised moment flapping her arms, jumping, babbling, engaging in “non-contextual laughter,” mumbling lyrics from Sesame Street songs, scratching herself, eating paper.

Let’s assume you care. 

Let’s assume you understand what’s at stake. 

Let’s assume you understand my love for Lucia is my love for Anna Livia.

And for the part of me that was also thwarted.

That my love for Anna is inextricable from my grief for Anna. 

That my love for Lucia is my love for every woman who is thwarted. 

Let’s assume you understand the world is a dangerous place for women. 

That the world is dangerous for anyone different. 

That you understand women are still locked up in small rooms and restrained. 

You understand women you love have been harmed—your sister, your mother and grandmother. Your best friend. Your daughter. 

You understand we are all unsafe. 

You understand that things must change. 

You understand things don’t change.

You understand. 

DEAR  LUCIA—

I’m sorry—your mother was afraid
of you. Your brother wanted you

to be quiet. Your mother wanted
you locked up after you threw a chair

at her. Your brother, only too keen
to help, made all the arrangements.

The great Jung was afraid of you. Came
out of retirement to treat you. Stumped,

he left you to his assistant, a woman
who visited your father and took

tea with him after each of your sessions.
Only your father was not afraid of you.

Knew the creativity that lay locked
in your mind. Jung tried to twist

that love, claimed Joyce only believed
in you to protect his anima. Thought

that if he admitted you were mad,
it meant that he was, too. This is how

doctors pathologize devotion. You were
his eyes, the broken window of his soul.

For most of my daughter’s life, I have
been both mother and father to her.

I find us in a glass case at my favorite
museum—row after row of terra cotta

ephedrismos—one girl hanging on the back
of the other girl—their long tunics draped,

intertwined. Impossible to tell where one
ends and the other begins, fixed like this forever.