The dry cleaner downstairs screamed, “Quit your bath,” two to three times a week. There was a problem with the plumbing, and a bath was liable to fill a not shallow bucket a floor below. I thought he might give me warning with a thud, the end of broom to first floor ceiling, as one does in all the loving depictions of people living on top of eachother, but he did not, and I was too busy pruning, reading Mayer’s Studying Hunger Journals in epsom bullshit to heed his warning anyway. I like to think Mayer intended I read the text this way, as she had completed so much of it in shorthand, on the subway, at parties, in waiting rooms and cars upstate and back; it was decided her analyst, David Rubinfine, would read the journal as she went about recording states of consciousness over the course of three years (1972-1975) together. Mayer sought Rubinfine out after completing her piece Memory, which demanded shooting a roll of 35 mm each day, thirty-six photos accompanied by text for a month. “I thought I might be crazy after my work on Memory… but I thought why not go over that brink & see what’s there,” she writes in Studying Hunger’s intro. “David, the psychiatrist, gave me two journals to write in, so that he could always keep one to read.. I wrote in the books with colored pens because I hoped I would hit upon a way to color-code emotions, which I never did, & in imitation of Hannah Weiner, a close friend. I was hoping the colors of the pens would help me see emotions.” Mayer, too, was grappling with the fear that time would get away from her, that she would die young of a cerebral brain hemorrhage as her father had. What came of her experiments, her obsessive note taking, is a poetry that defies Greek epics. I wrote all over the margins of the book, where her time stamps indicated what she ate, who she saw or didn’t see, I did the same. She felt and feels a friend to kick the loose gravel home with, to tell of all the unremarkable happenings and ask, ‘Is there something here? Am I making more of it than I should? Am I making less of it than I should? Does perseverance or fear fix phrases?’ Eyesight is the most trusted explanation or answer to a question, but a paragraph by Mayer can be this too.
-Katie Calderon