Unlived Security
On Marion Milner and Vigdis Hjorth
Akshi Singh
The Hands of the Living God describes the psychoanalyst and writer Marion Milner’s analytic work with a patient she called Susan. During her analysis of over twenty years, Susan produced vast numbers of drawings and paintings, sometimes bringing over ninety drawings to a session. A hundred and fifty-four drawings by Susan, selected by Milner, are reproduced in her book. Susan herself came to Milner under the sign of a painting—she looked like the figure at the center of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Her beauty captured the attention of Alice Buxton Winnicott, a painter and ceramicist who encountered Susan in the hospital, where she was offering occupational therapy. Alice was then married to the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, and the couple hosted, in their home, some of the young people whom Winnicott analyzed. They invited Susan to live with them. She initially refused, but acquiesced after two sessions of electroconvulsive therapy in hospital left her in a “terrible state.”
At Winnicott’s request, Milner became Susan’s analyst. The patient who came to her could no longer distinguish the world from herself. When bombs fell on London during air raids, she was terrified because “there was nowhere else for the bomb to fall except her, since everything was her.” Susan’s suffering, as it is described by Milner in her book, was persistent and acute. Writing about Hands, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips says Milner “never takes for granted what it would be for Susan to get better.” By the same token, through the course of Susan’s analysis Milner maintained that her patient could understand and express things in a way that she, the analyst, couldn’t. Without denying the difficulty of Susan’s circumstances, Milner was alert to the overlooked yet undeniable price that is paid by participation in forms of so-called health or normality, how succeeding in either inevitably entails a loss.
All too often, in psychoanalytic writing, the analyst can take up a position that secures themselves in their knowledge. Not so for Milner—the process of working with Susan was, in many ways, one of having her certainties undone. Susan, for her part, left her analysis with a sense that she had something important to say—her correspondence with Milner after the conclusion of their analytic work together refers to her wish to write an autobiography. She wrote to Milner about wanting to write her autobiography in 1980, but at that time she struggled with it. “The writing isn’t going at all,” she said. Fourteen years later, she was still trying to write the book, aware both of its importance—“I think it would help people understand so much more about this dreadful illness of the soul”—and her difficulties in writing it, lamenting, “I just tear up what I write, not in a feeling of anger, but because I feel it is so badly written, bad grammar, inadequate, unable to put down what I mean. Unlike you, I am not educated.”[1] That this book did not take its place in the world is unfortunate, and we must rely on Milner’s words for Susan’s story.
Susan was born into a family that suffered from the generational consequences of poverty. Her maternal grandmother died at eighteen of malnutrition, when Susan’s mother was just six months old. Susan’s family relied on the parish relief for food; as a child she recalled being always hungry. Susan’s father was presented to her as a lodger in their family—she was told her father, her mother’s husband, lived in London. She wasn’t able to settle the question of her paternity until after she started analysis, and got a definitive answer from a relative. At the age of sixteen, Susan joined a dancing troupe. She was staying with the man she considered to be her father, and one morning, when Susan was in bed, “he came and tried to make love to her.” Milner’s phrasing is ambiguous, but the breach isn’t—whether the attempts of making love were physical or verbal, they took place between a girl of sixteen and the man she thought to be her father. By this time in her life, Susan had already been sexually assaulted by her neighbor, who gave her sweets, bread, and jam, and masturbated against her. Susan was four when this first happened, and it carried on over a long time.
Poverty, sexual violence, neglect—Susan’s childhood was marked by all these. What Milner leaves out of her book, but mentions in a paper she presented to the British Psychoanalytical Society, was that Susan’s real but unacknowledged father, the lodger in their house, had served with the colonial army in India. Invalided from the army, he became an alcoholic, and Susan witnessed violent quarrels between her parents—both Susan and her mother were terrified of him. To the already devastating forms of violence Susan was subject to as a child, we can also add the brutality of a recursive colonial violence, brought home by one of its agents.[2]
Susan, Baby Seal in a Coiled Serpent Nest (titled by Milner), from Marion Milner, The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psycho-analytic Treatment
“As with other aspects of psychic life, but perhaps more starkly, more immediately, the languages of security in the psyche and in politics run very close, bleed into each other, and therefore demand to be thought together.”
As is clear by now, Susan belonged to the precariat of psychoanalysis. Although she struggled to write, she would draw. One such drawing, made by Susan and titled “Baby Seal in Coiled Serpent Nest” by Milner, shows a little seal-like creature, ensconced in a cosy nest. But look again. The nest is made of serpent like forms. “It might even be a boa constrictor,” Milner remarks. The fear and claustrophobia is palpable. Of the drawings and paintings reproduced in Milner’s book, many depict jugs, frames, and houses—containers of various kinds. Milner read these drawings as depicting a conflict between Susan’s wishes and her fears—her wish to be contained, her fear that she may be annihilated if she allowed herself to be.
What did Susan know about security? In addition to the personal significance that the drawing had for her, I wonder if Susan also managed to convey, with great clarity and precision, a conflict that is more general. Maybe Susan’s drawing can be read as carrying the knowledge that the things we expect to keep us safe are also deathly—that there is something lethal in our wish for security. As with other aspects of psychic life, but perhaps more starkly, more immediately, the languages of security in the psyche and in politics run very close, bleed into each other, and therefore demand to be thought together.
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During the time that her patient was bringing drawings and paintings to analysis, Milner was involved in her own investigations into painting. She began writing her book about painting when it became clear that Britain was going to join the Second World War. On Not Being Able to Paint was published in 1950. “Painting,” she writes, “is concerned with the feelings conveyed by space.” Thinking about lines, Milner describes how she had assumed that outlines were somehow “real.” Visual experience, she discovered, suggested otherwise. The lines around objects were not always clearly differentiated, as they tended to blend and waver. For Milner, the recognition that lines are less secure and distinct than she imagined them to be is accompanied by an anxiety about “what might happen if one let go of one’s mental hold on the outline which kept everything separate and in its place,” a fear about “losing all sense of separating boundaries.”
The outline is a form of security. It maintains divisions; it keeps something at bay. It is a boundary and border. Drawing and painting brought Milner into a confrontation with her attachment to these forms of demarcation. The presence of another kind of border, a different kind of line—one connected with nations and politics—presses against Milner’s descriptions of boundaries in both the mind and drawing. This impression is intensified in Milner’s discussion of color. As she observed her relation to painting, Milner became aware that colors were most interesting when they were allowed to migrate on the surface of a painting; places where colors blended were more appealing than where they were separated by lines. Milner opposes the experience of color as “something moving and alive” to its opposite: the “coloring of a map”—“fixed, ‘flat,’ and ‘bound.’”
In the British writer Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, the eponymous protagonist, waiting for the end of her days in a Kensington hotel, and suffering from a bad case of postcolonial melancholia, finds herself longing for the color pink, used by colonial mapmakers to indicate British colonies and overseas possessions: “[w]hen she was young it had seemed that nearly all the world was pink on her school atlas—‘ours’ in fact. Nearly all ours! She had thought.” Like the fictional Mrs. Palfrey, Milner’s childhood and youth were also framed by empire. Some of the diaries in which she wrote, which form the basis for her experimental memoirs, include in their printed front matter lists of time zones in the British Empire. When she was a child, she went for tea to a place called the “Delhi Durbar.” Empire was ordinary, and everyday.
Writing in The Question of Palestine, Edward Said describes a “doxology about land,” which makes a distinction between savage and civilized. He is tracing the antecedents, and ideology, of Zionist colonization. European man had a claim to land because he could understand its value—he could make it productive. The native couldn’t, and by this logic, the land was available for taking by those who could realize its potential. This belief accompanied “the great dispossessing movements of European colonialism,” which could declare land unproductive in the terms of its logic and declare it empty—waiting to be improved and settled. Underneath the acquisition of territories and land, Said identifies—he is quoting Marlow from A Heart of Darkness—a “passion for maps.”
In thinking of color as something changing and developing, as moving and alive, in its questioning of lines and boundaries, Milner’s thought is pushing against this “passion for maps”—their lines, their flat colors. Reading On Not Being Able to Paint, I always feel a strange dislocation. I am never quite sure if the words on the page refer to the intricacies of painting, or if they belong to a political discussion. This may have something to do with the way in which Milner’s book is permeated by the time in which it was written—a time of fascism, war, and loss that is rarely explicitly addressed in the book but which, perhaps for that reason, seems to permeate every sentence, hovering behind Milner’s preoccupations with lines and boundaries. But even if we were to set aside this context, impossible as that is, the fact that Milner’s book on painting examines, with uncompromising intensity, the experience of boundaries in psychic life makes it an urgent political text—in her time, as much as ours.
Why are concerns with security so tied up with marking out borders? Forget for a moment, if you can, the great walls and fences that slice up the surface of the Earth, and think of a city, an industrial park, an airport. At the entrances and exits of buildings, on tall fences, on neon jackets, you will see the word “security.” Waiting to have your passport stamped, you may notice that the proximity between borders and security has been given a concrete layout. Politicians keen to show their control over governments and finances will inevitably talk about security, as will demagogues. Security is the shared shibboleth that can’t be questioned, much like borders. In a series of responses to war in Gaza—collected in 2009—Jacqueline Rose quotes an Israeli human rights activist: “at the mention of the word security . . . everyone stands up straight and stops thinking.”
“Security is the shared shibboleth that can’t be questioned, much like borders.”
It couldn’t be more apparent at this time that actions taken in the name of security produce unbearable, irreversible destruction. Witnessing the genocidal attacks in Gaza, it is impossible not to conclude that the logic of security entails producing even greater insecurity. Security brings the annihilation, not just of human life, but of a shared language of accountability, of dignity, of the already fragile and compromised future of planetary existence. What then makes it so difficult to question? What makes us stand up straight and stop thinking? Or, to return to Susan’s drawing of the baby seal in the nest of serpents, why does the seal not realize it will be crushed? Why do we seek security in ways that will evidently destroy us?
Ψ
The central preoccupation of psychoanalysis is often presented as a question of the unknown, and its influence on our thoughts and actions. But it could equally be described as a problem of what we do know, but cannot bear to admit and think about. In the places where we deploy the language and logics of security, the question of an unbearable knowledge is often at stake, a defensiveness at work, a mechanism of standing up straight and not thinking. Painting, for Milner, turns out to be a way of acknowledging to herself what she finds hard to bear—her own rage and hatred, the voraciousness of her desires,her capacity to hurt: “in one’s inner world, perhaps locked up and hidden far away beyond one’s knowing, there do exist loved people who have been hurt or even made into dead skeletons by one’s angry wishes.”
In the Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Will and Testament, the protagonist Bergljot initially greets her friend Klara with fear and suspicion. Klara represents to the narrator a form of chaos and instability. Bergljot is then a student, married with a child, another on the way. She doesn’t want Klara’s “eccentricity” to rub off on her. Later, when she has had a third child, and is living a version of the ideal bourgeois family (nice husband, big house, three children), Klara is still a waitress working night shifts. Nonetheless, Bergljot finds herself drawn to Klara and her group of friends, compelled to admit that her family existence is not as smooth as she would like it to be. Like Klara, Bergljot is also in love with a married man. She gives herself over to her friendship with Klara: “what I was experiencing . . . was that a moment of insight was approaching like the tremors that precede an earthquake . . . I was filled with dread and I trembled at the painful dawning of a truth which would rip me to pieces.”
Will and Testament can be read as a novel about the forms of knowledge that we secure ourselves against, and the consequences of such repression. Psychoanalysis is at the heart of the novel: Bergljot starts four-times-a-week psychoanalysis after her divorce, finding herself in episodes of agonizing pain each time she works on the play she is writing. What will happen in her psychoanalysis is the unravelling of the story of her childhood: “words with which I had so often begun the story about myself, revealed me in all their mendacity.” Like the friendship with Klara, psychoanalysis is a pursuit that can disrupt the way things are. “Breaking ties and shattering relationships,” it is a risky endeavor, “painful and fraught with danger.”
“Security brings the annihilation, not just of human life, but of a shared language of accountability, of dignity, of the already fragile and compromised future of planetary existence.”
What is variously hinted at, prefigured, and eventually revealed in the novel is the incest and sexual assault that Bergljot’s father inflicted on her, and which her mother and two sisters have since denied. There is a series of oppositions in the novel between forms of emotional risk, financial precarity and psychical difficulty, and the forgetting and reconciliation represented by the family. The choices are stark; the price of admission to the family is repression. Psychoanalysis is represented as a means of eschewing the forms of violent security that can be offered by family or relationships. When Bergljot’s relationship with the married man—since divorced and, in her words, “finally mine, my salvation”—ends after years together, she realizes in a session of psychoanalysis that her “pain wasn’t an illness.”
The novel does not reduce or resolve the complexities arising from a refusal of forms of security, even when the extent of their violence is made clear. The narrative is propelled by Bergljot’s insistent questioning—of her motivations, her memories, her sanity. When an inheritance dispute prompts Bergljot to write to her family and remind them of her side of the story, her sister Astrid, a human rights lawyer, responds by saying “everyone makes mistakes.” Through a logic of keeping the peace, rape and incest are rendered “mistakes.” Later in the novel, Bergljot’s daughter Tale refuses to speak to her aunts and grandmother, writing them a letter to explain her position. “I’ve witnessed you denying events which in every possible way have been so present,” Tale writes, “so pivotal and so decisive for Mum’s life, and thus mine too.” When Bergljot calls to thank her, Tale describes her decision as a political act, “because what would happen to the world if everyone behaved like the family in Bråteveien and got away with it.”
The political is never far from the raw psychic immediacy of Hjorth’s narrative. The novel navigates its themes of family violence, incest, and contestations of memory via discussions of political violence, the inadequacies of truth and reconciliation, and the perils of an identification with victimhood. Twice in the novel, the scene shifts to Palestine-Israel. We encounter Jerusalem through Bergljot’s friend Bo, where he sees “the wall, the security guards, the heavily armed military police.” Behind the wall, “half a meter from Bo and cut off from the rest of the world” is a refugee camp for Palestinians expelled in 1967. If the wall in Jerusalem is in service of not-seeing, then Tel Aviv—“European,” “familiar,” “civilized” —with its “fashionable shopping areas and luxury restaurants” leaves an impression of eeriness.
As a Norwegian writer, Hjorth may be read as making present in her novel the consequences of the Oslo Accords between Israel and Palestine, which were unacceptable because, in the words of Edward Said, “there are too many refugees still left homeless (four million at least), too many claims unsettled, too many apartheid policies still in place.” The walls in Israel, Bo argues, are “not just for security reasons.” They are there so that Palestinians remain invisible to Israelis—“so they won’t have to look at them and recognize themselves in them, so they won’t be reminded of their own humiliating history of victimhood, they can’t stand them because of what they have done and continue to do to them.”
Proximity, history, responsibility—this is what the walls are in service of denying. This denial, we could argue, is the function of security. Will and Testament argues against such forms of security, by laying bare their agonizing cost—in psychic, as well as political life. There is no utopia on the other side of such security, at least not in Hjorth’s novel. There are forms of friendship, creativity, and love, but these are accompanied by forms of insecurity. Unlike Bergljot’s parents and sisters, Klara has the gift of opening herself up to the experience of others. Broke, and uncertain about the direction her life will take, she laments that she “would never be safe” from the dangers of unhappy love, car accidents, rejection, tax bills. “Endurance is the first duty of all living beings,” she concludes.
How to endure? For many years, people in Britain have been asked to show resilience as they are denied healthcare, housing, and other essential forms of social provision. There are few utopian moments in Will and Testament, but when I come to the passage where Bergljot announces that she has qualified for “four times a week state funded psychoanalysis,” I find myself stopped short. When Milner was working with Susan, she was clear that Susan would have benefitted from access to a form of housing that allowed her independence while providing support for her needs: “where she could have the feeling of belonging to a community, both giving help and getting help and not having to hide her illness.”
That such housing was not to be found until very late in Susan’s analysis had a tangible, deleterious effect on Susan’s life. For a long period, she lived as an unpaid worker with various families. She had difficulty accepting payment, but also struggled to extricate herself from these arrangements. In one instance, Milner had to write to Susan’s hosts to end the living arrangement because Susan could not do so herself. Milner’s correspondence during this time attests to her attempts to find places for Susan to live during holidays, writing to psychiatrists and clergymen to arrange this. Housing went hand-in-hand with psychoanalysis. Milner draws a direct link between the two, at one point writing to a psychiatrist to say that Susan “cannot go any further in her analysis without a period in which she does not have to go on pretending, to those around her, that she is more normal than she is.”[3]
Anyone with a psychoanalytic practice today—at least one that is not solely constituted of analysands drawn from classes unperturbed by the material circumstances of living—will be able to attest to the persistent toll on psychic life exacted by precarious work and housing. For the psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle, writing in her book In Praise of Risk, psychoanalytic work entails that “security will give way to doubt and vertigo.” It is right and necessary that psychoanalysis puts security into question— it is in keeping with its commitment to the unconscious. But many people who risk themselves in psychoanalysis today do so in a society that offers them little material security. For the analyst, then, as much as those who speak to her, it is essential to never cease examining her assumptions about and investments in forms of security and risk.
“For the analyst, then, as much as those who speak to her, it is essential to never cease examining her assumptions about and investments in forms of security and risk.”
While security deserves to be a matter of difficulty and complexity in psychic life, in psychoanalysis, in literature—there are forms of security that shouldn’t be so fraught in living itself. The social provision— state-sponsored psychoanalysis four times a week—that surprised me when reading Will and Testament is, along with housing, a matter of workers’ rights—everything that supports the dignity of life. This is perhaps the only form of security in our world that makes sense. And yet, for people of my generation and those younger, it is available only in its most attenuated form. That Hjorth underpins her novel about the abandonment of psychical and familial security with this mention of social provision is no accident. In her writing, both psychoanalysis and a politics of the left are urgent and necessary. If psychoanalysis provides Bergljot with a way to live, in another of her novels, Long Live the Post-Horn, a woman is finally able to escape her melancholia by throwing herself into a postal workers’ strike, realizing that “it’s important to choose boldly in big as well as in little things.”
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During the years 1967–1972, the artist Frank Bowling made a series of “map” paintings. Born in Guyana in 1934, Bowling moved to Britain in 1953, and during the 1960s and 70s he worked in both New York and London. In these paintings, vast in their scale, colors move into each other, undulating on the canvas. The experience of looking at them is immersive. To see colors so freed from line is liberatory, and joyous. There are continental forms among the colors, but they’ve been set loose, freed from the tedious work of containing nations, and displaced into a floating delicate relation to each other and the colored ether in which they are suspended.
In her book on painting, Milner considers Paul Cézanne’s invitation to the eye to lose itself in the colors of a painting. At this point, a fear presents itself to her: “some of the foreboded dangers of this plunge into color experience were to do with fears of embracing, becoming one with, something infinitely suffering, fears of plunging into a sea of pain in which both could become drowned.” A fear of color, here, takes the form of a fear of the other, and the other’s pain. Looking at the maps that were the product of the history that Said describes so evocatively, we could surmise that in addition to dividing and governing land and people, maps and borders also perform the role of channeling the movements of sympathy and identification in psychic life.
During the time that Milner was writing her book on painting, she witnessed not only the Second World War and Britain’s withdrawal from its colonies, but also forms of ethnic and political bordering that accompanied the violence of the Nakba and the partition of India and Pakistan. The legacy of British colonialism, in Palestine and India, is also a legacy of partition. This logic of partition relies on the fantasy that things can be kept separate forever, hermetically sealed. Psychoanalysis would think otherwise. As Jacqueline Rose puts it, “the mind is divided, but the boundaries between one part of the mind and another are strangely porous.” Figured through the question of painting, one way of reading Milner’s work would be as a reckoning with the failures of partition, the insistence of porosity—questions that were so painfully alive in the politics of her time.
The borders of former imperial nations, policed with such ferocity, are surely also a form of keeping history outside of the nation, and the nation’s psyche—at least the history that brings with it moral culpability, suffering, or, to borrow Milner’s words, a sea of pain. The immersion into color— which, for Milner, marks fear, suffering, drowning, pain—extends a different invitation in Bowling’s map paintings. The viewer is invited to lose the edges of themselves in their experience of the work—the scale of the paintings is such that the eye is, indeed, lost and absorbed—but the color is sustaining in its embrace. With their flooding expanses of color, such maps cut joyously adrift from the banality of cartography. The paintings seem to be suggesting that both people and nations would do well to let go of their borders.
What of pain? In a recent group exhibition in Glasgow titled “Insecurity,” the writer Daisy Lafarge showed some watercolor paintings. The paintings were made during episodes of severe chronic pain, while Lafarge attended online groups offered her by the National Health Service as a means of dealing with the chronic bodily pain that accompanies Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, and during conversations and phone wait times with Adult Disability Payment (Social Security in Scotland). The advice she was given in these groups was bureaucratic—manage the pain, push through it. A graphic from one of the remote chronic pain sessions is reproduced in the text accompanying the exhibition. It shows a jigsaw puzzle, where “stress,” “sleep,” “goals,” and “quality of life” designate entirely distinct and perfectly interlocked pieces.
Affixed to the gallery walls with kinesiology tape, Lafarge’s watercolors on paper struck me, first of all, as an experience of color. Then, forms began to emerge in the paintings—flowers, trees, a garden? Unlike the pain jigsaw, things moved into one another, touching, merging. But the overwhelming experience remained that of color— its throbbing, pulsating quality; its motility. Larfarge’s paintings could be seen as capturing the experience of pain itself, its insistence, what it can do to the experience of a body, the haze brought on by medication. But there is something profoundly alive about these paintings, as though they have succeeded in depicting a kind of arterial experience—of blood going its way and doing its work.
Any reading that attributes a form of insight to pain or suffering risks romanticizing it. Hjorth is unequivocal about this, writing that it “requires hard work to transform suffering into something which is useful to anyone, especially the victim.” In one of Lafarge’s paintings, through its predominant tones of red-fuchsia-pink, it is possible to discern something that may be a grill, or grate, a shape suggested by the patterning of curlicues and vertical bars. If it is a gate, or a barrier of some kind, then it is also dissolving— the colors that may be expected to be situated behind the gate bleed through it. There is a collapse between foreground and background. Unlike Frank Bowling’s larger than life reworkings of maps, Daisy Lafarge’s watercolors were made at home in her rental flat. In their own ways, these paintings open a portal into what may be possible in thought and painting if, instead of denying the pain of the body and history, pain is allowed into the space—much like the insight that Bergljot experienced as the tremors of an earthquake, or like the unconscious that makes itself felt as an intrusion, an unwelcome visitor.
Ψ
Unlike Milner, who wrote that she “thought in pictures,” I do not have a particularly vivid visual imagination. I was wondering why Susan’s image of the seal in a nest of serpents had stayed with me, why it was where my mind went when I started thinking about the topic of security. Over the past months, I’ve always been able to summon it in my mind’s eye, clear and distinct. Perhaps this is because, while writing this essay and in the months before, I have been involved in my own reckoning with my wish for security. Two years ago, I took up a lectureship at a university in Britain. This felt like an answered prayer—a respite in a precarious and competitive field of work. I had often found myself longing for stability—for my immigration status, my finances, even my emotions and psychic life.
The job offered me the safety I so longed for—the job was my security. I started work, I moved cities. I had every reason to believe the university would pay for my work permit, not least because of the emails I received from their Human Resources team when I joined. Later, I was told I would have to sort out my visa on my own. There seemed to be no consistent policy—other colleagues had their work permits paid for. I sought advice from my union, and they considered the university’s position untenable. But I was grieving, moving cities, trying to convince a bank to give me a mortgage, and I was floundering under the workload assigned to me for the term. My capacity for contestation had shrunk, and I stopped replying to emails from my case worker.
As my visa approached its expiration date, I decided to apply for settlement in the United Kingdom. Of course, it isn’t called anything as straightforward as settlement—it is called “Indefinite Leave to Remain” —and this term captures the profound ambivalence of this country towards its migrants. They allow, sometimes need, you to remain, but they’d rather you leave. Settlement was a form of security. I would keep my Indian passport, but I wouldn’t have to renew my visa every few years, or pay the yearly immigration health surcharge. I wouldn’t need to be in full-time employment or education to stay in the country. I spent my evenings studying for the mandatory “Life in the UK” test, learning to answer multiple choice questions about the Tudors and Stuarts, the Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish patron saints and parliaments, as well as British values, manners, and customs.
I needed to pass the test to book an appointment to have my biometrics taken. All that had to happen before I could submit my application. I passed, but when I tried to book the appointment to be fingerprinted, I found there were no places available in Glasgow (where I live), in nearby Edinburgh, in London, or indeed in any city except Aberdeen, in the north of Scotland. Aberdeen is a city constructed from silver-grey granite, a gateway to North Sea oil. And a few days before I was to travel to Aberdeen, a storm hit Scotland, killing people, flooding fields and roads. All trains to Aberdeen were cancelled. You cannot phone the service providers who do the work of policing and managing immigration, you cannot reschedule appointments, you cannot expect to be in the country without a valid permit and not expect things to go horribly wrong.
Someone I trust offered to drive me to Aberdeen. Many roads were still flooded, so instead of taking the usual way along the coast, we drove north into the Cairngorm mountains, so beloved of the writer Nan Shepherd. I had packed sleeping bags, candles, food, and a flashlight in the car, following the advice on the weather department website. As we drove further into the mountains, losing the light with each passing minute, I was intensely conscious of living out a kind of madness. I didn’t want to miss my appointment. I was willing to risk my life and that of the person with me. I was the baby seal.
My immigration permit arrived in the post, and the horror receded. I was consumed by the demands of my job, where I was told mainly two things: that I wasn’t doing enough, or doing it right. And then, that I didn’t understand how things worked. This was especially when I asked questions: for example, why my work convening and teaching a course for over three hundred students was listed as zero hours of teaching on the workload allocation document. I woke up early in the morning, worked late into the night. It is dull and deadening to think of myself as “a woman of color,” to write or speak sentences that begin with the phrases “as a migrant,” “as a woman of color.” But in a structural, fundamental way, my work was invisible. It counted for nothing. When, inevitably, my doctor said I had fallen ill from overwork, and couldn’t go back, I wasn’t surprised.
“I realized, to my dismay, that my need for security was so great that I was willing to hallucinate it—willing to think I was secure precisely at the moments when my body and mind were grinding to a halt.”
Scared and driving through the mountains to my visa appointment, I could blame the immigration policies of the country. Tired, exhausted, and in pain, I could blame the university and the conditions of labor in higher education, legacies of racism— still vicious and alive. But in the following months, on sick leave, I had to reckon with what I was willing to put myself through for a feeling of security. And I realized, to my dismay, that my need for security was so great that I was willing to hallucinate it—willing to think I was secure precisely at the moments when my body and mind were grinding to a halt, when I was losing touch with everything I cared about, when eating lunch felt like a transgression. So intense was my capacity for self-delusion, I had associated entirely dire circumstances with a feeling of security. I understood then why I kept remembering Susan’s drawing. It was a reminder, a warning, that the wish for security could turn in on itself, protection morphing into destruction.
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That we live in a world that opposes security to health, life, and creativity couldn’t be clearer. To secure their housing, people work jobs that make them ill. To secure their entirely banal interpretations of sexual difference, people are intent on denying young people access to life-affirming medical treatments. On the day I was writing this, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom increased defense spending. This was preceded by cuts to disability provision, the characterization of illness leave, by the Prime Minister, as “sick note culture,” and further investment in a scheme to deport migrants seeking asylum to Rwanda. The cruelty underpinning what passes for security almost doesn’t bear thinking about.
Is there a way of unlinking security and cruelty, or security and delusion? On Not Being Able to Paint leads Milner into a different relation to herself, and her painting—a willingness to live within the insalubrious parts of herself, to accept the ways in which creative endeavor may dissolve certainties about the self and the world, to trust an intrinsic sense of rhythm over externally imposed order. In Will and Testament, Bergljot and her friends refuse any form of security that requires the sacrifice of truth. Instead, they build, and dismantle, their lives around a commitment to psychical and historical truth.
It became clear to me that I would leave my job when I learned that the university would not commit to ending its investments in fossil fuels and arms companies, including arms companies that made weapons currently being used in the genocide on Gaza. It was suddenly very obvious: an institution that could not feel any kind of meaningful shame at the killing of its own students and alumni would in no way have any interest in looking after those who worked for it. Touting commitments to justice, to diversity, and to reparations, while funding the long-term destruction of the planet and the immediate killing of people in Gaza, the institution’s contradictions weren’t in a meaningful opposition that could be resolved—they were part of the same Möbius strip of security-cruelty.
From September to December 2023, I read Will and Testament with students, along with other books like Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, Anna Burns’s Milkman, and Natalia Ginzburg’s Voices in the Evening. It was a course about violence, and every week we spoke about Palestine. I became very attached to the course and the students who took it, each of whom was willing to risk something to make room in themselves for the forms of questioning that the texts opened up. I was looking forward to teaching, in the next term, a course about psychoanalysis and histories of colonialism. I knew I would have a chance to think again of Palestine—to think also of the ongoing occupation of Kashmir by a country of which I am a citizen. Giving up teaching—that way of thinking with others, of being questioned, of the great privilege of saying that something matters and is worth considering—is a loss. Like the loss of anyone or anything that matters, there is no substitute or compensation for what is gone, only mourning.
In retrospect, I realized I had chosen to teach with these texts because they helped me articulate something that mattered to me, but which I struggle to hold on to—something of which I wanted to remind myself: that there are things that are more important than one’s comfort or security. Instead of what Natalia Ginzburg calls “the little virtues” (thrift, caution, shrewdness), we should reach for their opposite (generosity, courage, a love of truth). It is vital to pay attention to what slips beneath our consciousness— in our psychic lives as much as in history and politics—much as it may leave us unsettled. I find it hard to think during the times in which we are living, because all too often the only thought that takes shape is “make it stop!” I have felt afraid that I will lose what it takes to think, that I will forget how to recognize the contours of the ethical. In these moments, it is the blockade of the arms factory, the paint splattered on the offices of law firms who represent Israeli weapons manufacturers, the occupations on university campuses, that save thought, and ethics, from their complete dereliction.