The Palimpsests of Pamela Beck
DAY ONE: IMPASTO
The light from the lowering sun played thickly on angular features, broken textures of experience and graceful years. Beauty - of a very profound kind - the therapist thought.
“Hello Pamela,” said the therapist gently, “And how are we today?”
Visibly assembling her response, a slow frown spread across the face of Pamela Beck.
“These memories. They aren’t mine. I shouldn’t be keeping them.” Her voice has physical qualities, the therapist thought. It has heft and depth. It has a surface.
“Whose are they Pamela?”
There was a pause as her eyes lifted to meet his.
“Whose are what?” The puzzlement was genuine. Information has been forgotten instantly again, the therapist thought. This is something - indicative.
“The memories you hold. Perhaps you could just describe them to me?”
“A few days ago, I remember feeling very down in the dumps. I didn’t want to go out. I was having panic attacks and pains in my chest like I was having a heart attack or something. And then my ‘phone started going off all the time and other women fighters were sending me messages about their problems too(1).”
“Other fighters Pamela?” The therapist looked up from the paper in his hands with no small amount of surprise.
“The boxing gym. I told you about that.” She hadn’t, but he let that pass.
“We started to talk and they told me they were in the same boat. One girl, Janice, told me she was having panic attacks too. I said ‘Bullshit! You could never have a panic attack – you aren’t scared of anything.’ Well she was. Afraid of going on with fighting. Afraid of not going on with it. Afraid of getting hurt. Afraid of being laughed at. Afraid of not being any good.”
“Those are complicated feelings Pamela. Where do you think they came from?”
“From when I first started as a kid. I wasn’t a skilled fighter, but I always fought bravely with all my heart. I learned that in the gym because I had to be the toughest. I was always sparring with boys. Those first days in the gym were bad. They’d say: ‘Get lost, you’re a girl.’ They laughed at me. They’re all skipping and I’m tripping over the rope. I could hear them laughing but I was thinking: ‘I’ll show you.’”
“And now Pamela?”
She thought for a moment. “I just want to know who I am now. I don’t want to become… the damage, you know?”
The therapist thought for a moment. “Pamela, you need to find a way to move on clearly. You’ve got to bury boxing otherwise it will bury you, under layers you can’t get out from. I want you to try something for me, ok? I want you to literally bury this part of your life. I want you to hold a private little funeral for your boxing career in your nearest graveyard. I want you to literally bury it in the ground below your feet. Mourn it if you must – but move on. You’ll do this for me?”
The tall, oblique figure unfolded in front of him, meeting his eyes again in acquiescence.
“Then I’ll see you in a few days. Thank you, Pamela.”
Moving restlessly, out of her body as much as inside it, Pamela Beck nodded and, on her way out of the office, began to softly hum a tune that the therapist found just maddeningly out of reach.
DAY TWO: SFUMATO
“How did the burial go?” the therapist asked. “Did you get to mourn at all?”
A different Pamela Beck, sitting primly upright in a well-fitting pantsuit, looked at him with genuine puzzlement.
“Burial?” she queried. “I haven’t been to a funeral in a while.”
This can’t be blamed on ordinary forgetfulness, the therapist thought. This is an extensive failure to recall significant personal information. There are also micro-amnesias where the discussion engaged in is forgotten from one second to the next, like the last time we spoke. I’m not going to figure out who this woman is this way. Changing tack, he asked another question.
“My strongest memory?” she responded, visibly pensive. “Well I’ve always loved to travel so I suppose that would be my first time travelling alone. I was in London, visiting a friend, but he hadn’t shown up yet, and I was alone in the city. It was a really foggy day – like the ones they used to have there all the time, like in the song – and there was this feeling I had that, through the fog, the world was not real or was ill-defined and far away.”
“What song was that?” he asked.
“Sinatra,” she murmured and began to sing, her voice suddenly smoky, intensely sensual, the tune she had begun the day before…
“I was a stranger in the city
Out of town were the people I knew
I had that feeling of self-pity
What to do? What to do? What to do?
The outlook was decidedly blue
But as I walked through the foggy streets alone
It turned out to be the luckiest day I've known
A foggy day in London Town...”(2)
A stranger in the city… She is that for sure. This is classic derealization, the therapist thought. This identity is dissociative right now, the edges blurred. It isn’t… fixed. It’s going to take a while to figure out exactly who this woman is.
DAY THREE: TACHISME
“I can't recall ever being more terrified than I was right before my first strip(3).”
This Pamela Beck was a pure force of nature in the therapist’s office. Electric, swirling, alive.
“Your first…?” was all the therapist managed to interject before the words came pouring out.
“I was super nervous before hitting the stage. I felt like my body was a car and I was in the passenger’s seat not the driver’s. I wanted to be great, and I was scared to do something I'd never done before, but the nerves were good because it told me how much I already cared about something I was only just starting. But as soon as I got up there and heard the audience cheering, I was instantly high. Onstage, I felt right at home. I was energized and confident. I felt sexy, playful, fierce, compelled but in control and it was just right. That feeling lasted for a couple of hours after I left the stage, but then it was replaced by an intense desire to do it again, to make more acts, to do more shows. Afterward, all I could say was, ‘...Whoa.’”
“Pamela,” the therapist interrupted as she finally took a breath. “You’re a….”
“Performance artist. With a hint of the political. I’m burlesque.” She drew out the word lovingly, teasingly as if slowly removing a velvet glove finger by elegant finger.
Self-consciously, the therapist ran a finger round a suddenly tight collar. “How long have you wanted to be a performer like this Pamela?” he asked.
“Oh, forever. Like, since I was a kid.” Pamela’s smile showed more teeth than he had seen before between lips that were immediately bold. Brazen. “I’ve always loved the idea of being seen, you know. But more than anything else, I want to express myself in a way that means something to me and others - to create my own unique piece of theater, with total freedom to be anything I want. I have stuff. And I want to strut it.”
This switching(4) is fascinating, the therapist thought to himself. Once again, this is the same Pamela Beck but completely different. Her posture, her accent, her way of being – all totally altered.
“Pamela, I’m so thrilled you’ve found something so active to express yourself with. I know we have been talking for a while, but I’d like to try something different now. I think we can use your passion for burlesque to help you connect with the parts of your mind that you have shut off. I’d like you to do some reading about dance movement therapy and let me know if it’s something you’d like to try the next time we meet?”
DAY FOUR: ANAMORPHOSIS
The camera looked expensive and new. And yet Pamela Beck had hundreds of photographs to show him.
“They say that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. That’s what I try to capture in my art,” she enthused, looking almost as alive as she was in her previous persona. “I don’t see life as linear, as coming at you head on. It’s what happens when you are looking the other way, out of the corner of your eye, when you’re moving really fast. Through the keyhole…”
The therapist looked carefully at each image. They were fascinating – Euclidian shapes, abandoned cityscapes, the unconsciously observed in candid conversations. This version of Pamela Beck most definitely had an unusual eye for composition.
“I like to stand outside of the normal, you know? Not being a passive consumer of the image but creating a new viewpoint and not being casual about it. Actively seeking the magical and the taboo, the secret and the hidden”.
He had to ask. “The magical Pamela? What do you mean by that?”
“Magic is the control of perception isn’t it? Now you see it, now you don’t. It’s erotic in a way.”
Ah, the therapist thought. Echoes at last of this disjointed identity starting to coalesce, her interests coming together. I hear her burlesque performer again now.
“’ Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes?...it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing...’(5) I guess I look for the intermittences – the gaps in the world – and photograph them.”
“I think you should publish these pictures of yours, Pamela. I think it would help give you a permanent record of your thoughts and memories and enable you to process and integrate them into your life,” the therapist ventured. I am starting to find commonalities here, ingredients coming together he thought, and I can work with her to consolidate her alters with them. “Let me help you set up a website….”
DAY FIVE: SOTTO IN SU
The therapist watched her in amazement as she busied herself in his small kitchen, surrounded by sounds and smells that set his senses aflame. Pamela Beck, here outside his office, inside his studio apartment, his life now. A well-oiled machine, she pulled out pretty much every pot and pan he owned and all of his plates and serving pieces. All she had said was that she was ‘feeling her internal chef today’ and immediately she was back in her car, bringing out bags of groceries. Meats, vegetables, spices, sauces soon falling under various knives and other implements moving with astonishing speed and precision.
Feeling his gaze, she paused, turned to him and smiled.
“It’s called mise en place,” she stated happily, “and it’s much more than just having all of the right pieces in the right order. It’s also a state of mind. I think I’m finally, truly grasping the concept.”
And so she was, he thought. Look at her go, able to keep so much in mind simultaneously, weighing and assigning each item its proper value and priority. The boxer who knew when to advance, when to take a hit and when to feint. The traveller who went on her trip, first making sure she had everything she needed, not forgetting anything, then folding everything nice and neatly so it fitted into her bags. The dancer, in tune with her body and her surroundings, giving and taking in equal amounts from her enraptured audience. The photographer, seeing the world askance, seeing its essences and shadows, its themes and variations. And now the chef, looking down on a seething pot of ingredients, seeing all of the elements coming together in coherence and completeness.
As he watched her work, sipping the wine she had uncorked for him, he felt himself looking down too. On all of the ingredients of Pamela Beck. “Mise en place indeed,” he said smiling. “I think I have everything I need now…”
DAY SIX: SGRAFFITO
There is a small plaque to the bottom left of the frame. I squint at the tiny print on it. “Pamela Beck – A World Whole and Entire” it says. I step back to better appreciate the work. The woman is tall, slender and elegant, obsidian hair framing olive skin, eyes the colour of burnt caramel, grey dress hugging her curves. Her pose speaks confidence and complexity. There is a bed next to her, an unspoken invitation to intimacy. On it sits a boxing glove draped with a velvet one, fingers splayed. An exercise in duality, contrast or complementarity? A wooden side table completes the image, holding up a camera, photos strewn around it, a guidebook for London and an overflowing bowl with chopsticks.
The man standing next to me looked up at his own work and then at me.
“She’s cured” the artist stated flatly. “Fixed and whole. It did take a while to get to know her I’ll admit but, well, there she is. On the sixth day of creation,” he laughed. “Not that I’m comparing myself or anything. To be honest, sometimes I feel more like a therapist than an artist. Like a writer uses words, I use strokes of my brush to cover up the cracks in my thinking. Scratch the surface and you’ll see traces of all that she is at once. All that I am too.”
“It’s a beautiful work,” I said. “So many ideas, so many layers coming together. It must have taken a while to get it so… perfect.”
The artist smiled. “What can I say? It takes time to get to the heart of someone, to know who they really are. You have to get inside them, talk to them, understand them.” He nodded slowly, gazing intently at his subject. “Falling in love – really falling – takes time.”
“You’re in love with her?” I asked.
The artist looked at me again, this time with curiosity. “Well yes, can’t you see that?”
I took another appraising glance. The knowledge of this woman was there for sure. His regard for her depth on full view. “I suppose I can yes. And the title…?”
He nodded again. “Pertains to me yes. She is my world, whole and entire. Some day I hope to meet her.” He smiled, turned on his heel and walked away, leaving me with the love of his life.
I spent another minute in the company of Pamela Beck, feeling oddly privileged to do so. “I hope so too,” I eventually whispered and moved on to the next canvas.
A fairly pedestrian chiaroscuro as it turned out.
“Painting, for me, is an intuitive process, and so I let the canvas tell me where to go, and the paint and the canvas and me create a piece of art that people will enjoy.” - James Coleman
Attributions
1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50164091-the-final-round
2. A Foggy Day lyrics (Gershwin/Gerswin) © Warner Chappell Music, Inc, Raleigh Music Publishing
3. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-happy-stripper-9780857713155/
4. http://did-research.org/did/identity_alteration/switching.html
5. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, p. 9--10 quoted in Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977)
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