Anxiety

Where Are You?

The lover's fatal identity is to be the one waiting.

(Roland Barthes)

At the beginning of Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov depicts a "chronophobiac who experienced something like panic" when watching for the first time "homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before" he was born: "He saw a world that was practically unchanged — the same house, the same people — and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence." Among other things, he was disturbed by the "unfamiliar gesture" of his mother "waving from an upstairs window," which felt to him like "some mysterious farewell." What particularly frightened him, however, was "the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin [and] empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated."

"The cradle rocks above an abyss," Nabokov writes, and even though our existence may be "but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness," the end before us appears more terrifying to us than our once not-yet-having-been. It's as if something were awaiting us in the future — a `nothingness' (whatever it may be) that we have actually long since left behind. Isn't our whole life a kind of waiting for something that fell into oblivion with our first cry?

"WAIT, verb: look out (for), watch, direct one's attention, care, tend, serve, bide one's time" reads the definition in the Grimm Brothers' classical dictionary, according to which the expression to wait for someone, in the present-day sense, first appeared in the sixteenth century. A quick glance at the dictionary, furthermore, reveals that the changes in the word's meaning over time themselves already bespeak a long history of waiting. Waiting in the sense of serving once articulated a power structure that, in its most civilized form, still resonates in such expressions as to wait or attend upon; it survives most conspicuously in the waiter's trade, which is, ironically, the exact opposite of waiting for in that it implies abiding presence as well as watching or looking out for.Waiting in the common modern sense was apparently first recorded as far back as the thirteenth century. Not until the eighteenth century, however, did it accrue those adverbial facets and specifications that testify to its more painful side. Since the age of Goethe, one waits with longing,impatience, or in agony.

Perhaps that's why the helplessness that often accompanies waiting is best described in physical terms: it hurts, our body cramps up, we feel achy, as if from a cold draught caused by doors left ajar. Waiting has a temperature — we can remain cool, or burn with desire. What it is exactly that hurts — making waiting, literally, a pain — is more difficult to grasp, for waiting is both imaginary and concrete: a vision of something potentially real that is being withheld.

If the person we are waiting for happens to be someone we love, expectation can easily turn into longing, and longing escalate into mad desire. So intense can the experience of waiting become when love is involved that it will affect our whole being, for love is haunted by the fear of separation and loss. "The cradle rocks above an abyss," and the one waiting can't help being reminded about it.

According to French philosopher Roland Barthes, the lover is always "the one waiting," the one who can't afford to be late — after all, longing, anxiety's sister, is punctual: "Am I in love? Yes, since I'm the one waiting — the other never waits. How I'd love to play the part of the one not waiting sometimes! Even if I try keeping myself so busy as not to be able to avoid being late, though, I always lose at this game; whatever I do, I arrive on time, if not early, finding myself idly waiting." The lover's punctuality betrays his weakness; and in case the other is indeed late, the roles are clearly assigned, for the time being anyway: the one waiting is by definition the one who loves more. Condemned to stay put in view of the other's absence — "all expectation, available ... like an unclaimed package in some God- forsaken corner of a railway station" — he always unconsciously reckons with the possibility of having been abandoned. A lover's waiting is directly related to the primal scene, the overwhelming first experience of the mother's absence. Only a brief instant presumably separates the moment when the child believes his mother to be merely absent from the moment when it thinks she is dead. Whenever we have to wait for someone we love, we are subcutaneously thrown back upon this experience. Thus, waiting evokes the curse of a threat going back to childhood.

Our modes of coping with anxiety, too, go back to a past when waiting constituted an existential crisis. In a famous passage, Sigmund Freud describes what he takes to be his little grandson's attempts to cope with his mother's absence by playing a game. The game consists in "throwing away from himself any small objects he can find" and accompanying this activity with a "loud, drawn-out `o-o-o-o'," which the mother takes to mean "gone." Based on this, Freud conjectures that his grandson is using his toys to play "gone," thus transforming himself from a victim into an agent who actively stages his mother's absence and return. "One day," Freud writes, "I made an observation that confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a string attached to it, but it never occurred to him to pull it behind him across the floor, for instance, and pretend that it was a wagon. What he did instead was to hold the reel by the string and skillfully cast it into his curtained bed, thus making it disappear, all the while uttering his expressive `o-o-o-o'. He would then pull the reel out again and greet its reappearance with a joyful `there'. That was the entire game, disappearance and return."

Such wooden reels, which enable us to play the game of "gone"/"there" on ourown terms, are part and parcel of all scenarios of waiting. The one waiting sets up an imaginary stage, and on it he performs a `soliloquy of expectation', rife with emotions whose depth and nuances depend on our relationship with the one for whom we happen to be waiting.

According to Roland Barthes, there is something like a "dramaturgy of waiting" that tends to follow a classical pattern. Let's take a situation in which a person we love is running late. At first, we'll probably come up with plausible reasons for his tardiness — the subway has been delayed, or he might have been held up at the office, something unexpected that couldn't wait must have come up; we might then get annoyed because he's late again!, before mentally going over the date, place, and time of our rendezvous — Monday, 3:30, at our favorite coffee shop ... are we sure about this? Yes, it's where we met last time — besides, leaving our spot to check if he might actually be waiting for us at the cafÃ(c) across the street would mean risking missing him should he arrive here while we look over there ... Thank god for cell phones! we might then think, nipping all our doubts in the bud ... But — what if we only get his voicemail? And so our soliloquy spirals along to the point of hysterics: And what if something has happened to him? If we're lucky, reason takes over, but only at the cost of disappointment, which cannot fail promptly to set in, tinged with the nagging suspicion that he might not be showing us sufficient respect. In the end, though, anxiety wins the day: And what if he never shows up? Better to think of something else until he arrives and we can greet him with a reproach, or, better yet, with the grand gesture of absolution.

This one-man show is but an adult version of the child's "gone"/"there" game minus the wooden reel, stuffed animals, and other transitional objects that patiently taught us the art of waiting (and that some of us never grow out of). Marking the threshold between inside and outside, absence and presence, these objects quintessentially embody the hope for our mother's return. In the "monologue of absence" playing out in the mind of the one anxiously waiting the other is "there" insofar as I'm thinking of him, and he is "gone" insofar as I'm inevitably thrown back upon myself in the solitude of my waiting: "This singular distortion makes for an unbearable present," Barthes remarks, "I'm wedged between two modes of temporality, that of reference and that of address — in my complaints he is gone, but in my address you are there — and so I learn what the present, that difficult tense, is: a pure slice of anxiety."

Perhaps, waiting might be best described as a continuous reenactment of the primal scene of abandonment, as the infinite deferral of a separation that has always already taken place. I, here — you, there. Fastened to the rack of uncertainty, the one waiting feels the power of time minute by grueling minute. The longer he waits, the smaller he gets, eventually shrinking to the size of a single, red-hot point: never again!

The Silence of the Sirens

Please, God, let him telephone me now. (Dorothy Parker)

Before the invention of the cordless telephone, waiting for a call epitomized love — unrequited love, for the most part. Literature had appropriated this motif since the very beginnings of telecommunication. Waiting, after all, is an integral part of love's imaginary, and longing the essence of imagination. From Jean Cocteau's play The Human Voice, to Dieter Wellershoff's novella The Siren, to Nicholson Baker's novel Vox, the modern Odysseus has been tied to a telephone pole, exposed to the "sad, powerful song" that already Franz Kafka heard emanating from his receiver a century ago.

Even the advent of cellular phones hasn't liberated us from the captivity of waiting. To be sure, the one waiting for a call is no longer glued to the telephone, conjuring it as if in a magic ritual. But anyone who can barely wait for his cell phone to ring in his pocket is like a circus horse obediently trotting out its laps in the arena, having fallen under the spell of the "silence of the sirens," which Kafka, for one, considered "far more pernicious than their irresistible song."

Anxiously waiting for the other to call — suspended between passivity and action — we put ourselves partially at his mercy. We can try to do something to relieve the tension, to bridge the silence with our own precarious words. When no one talks to us, we begin to `self-soothe'. Like children, who still believe in the magic power of language, we can tell ourselves not to worry: the more dire the situation, the more ardent our prayers, and the greater the certainty that our wish will be heard. We can still observe this kind of behavior in those embarrassing moments when we tacitly ask for succor from above in the impossible hope that the universe might actually be ruled by magic. Waiting turns into incantation and, eventually, litany: Dear God, the child in us begs, make this waiting stop — please, make it go away ... When our patience is tried, we tend to fall back on infantile coping mechanisms. Perhaps that's why we often become so childish when we have to wait. Nobody has captured the tragicomic aspects of this motif as pointedly as Dorothy Parker in her short story A Telephone Call — that classic monologue by the telephone, which is but an extended variation on this one supplication: "Please, God, let him telephone me now."

In the drama of waiting, the telephone remains a central prop. By allowing us to hear and feel the other's breathing and voice as if he were next to us, it's the only device capable of conjuring real presence and intimacy across long distances, affording us the illusion that we haven't been left. Just like Freud's wooden reel with a string attached to it, which presumably helped his grandson to cope with his mother's absence, telecommunication, too, is a kind of umbilical cord designed to defy separation and bespeaking the paradoxical experience of presence-in-absence accompanied by impatience. Probably, that's why even as patient a character as the narrator of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time cannot but immediately complain whenever the connection doesn't work.

Whoever even bothers to complain about bad service nowadays, though, will most likely be put on hold: "Please, wait for the next available representative" will be his provider's song. All the while, the one waiting remains superstitious, haunted by the eerie suspicion that the other can't get through because I'm on hold, or that he'll call as soon as I step out, or, better yet, have no reception. French critic Maurice Blanchot once spoke of "the sheer suspense of waiting" coupled with "the blissful disappointment of waiting" — which might suggest that the experience of waiting holds valuable lessons for both our fears and our hopes. Doesn't the one waiting repeat the same tune over and over again: forbearance is no acquittance?

Interlude

Future Perfect

It was late afternoon on a gloomy November day, and I decided not to go home that night. I got on the bus and took in the antiquated charm of the French bourgeoisie through the illuminated windows — stucco, chandeliers, mirrors — the ivory nostalgia of a tradition barely kept alive. Rue Coulaincourt — the last stop of a memory. When I entered the Bar au Rêve, I was greeted by the proprietor standing under an old photograph. She still had the same graceful smile as in the picture, which showed her leaning on a man wearing a beret and with a cigarette in his mouth — a happy couple in a distant Paris moment frozen into a memento of love a quarter of a century ago.

Back then, I was lonely, drifting aimlessly from affair to affair. I would often sit on the worn banquette in the farthest corner of the cafÃ(c), watching the entrance, waiting for something to happen that would put an end to my disappointments. I had been sitting like this for an hour when suddenly I saw her reflection in the window. Without looking up, I followed her every move along the arc of my inner tension. She was standing at the bar in the company of a much older man — a glass of red wine in front of her, behind her a history that seemed to synchronize the smiles of this unequal couple. Instantly, I felt terribly jealous, watching her from my hiding place, furtively and as if already found out. For a brief moment, I thought I might have confused her with someone else: for though it was her face, it was somehow distorted — as in a dream — by the memory of a lost intimacy that had already anticipated the erosion of the years ahead when we first touched each other. Suddenly, I was catapulted back in time, seeing her again as on the day we'd met. Today, I sometimes think that it was already over before it had even begun — a foregone conclusion to nothing. We'd only have to stop pretending and admit: never again will I be able to wait for you.

Just You Wait

We usually wait because we are forced to, not because we want to; sometimes, tough — depending on the situation, or because we are compelled by prudence or pride — we decide to wait, even though this may go against our individual sense of time. For all waiting is heteronomous, or, at the very least, occasioned by conditions not entirely of our own choosing. Let's assume that we are anxiously waiting for our lover to call after a fight. Since we probably don't want to admit that we have become so dependent, we try to convince ourselves that we can stop waiting any time. We come up with explanations (without believing them); we attempt to suppress our emotions and be reasonable, telling ourselves, That's it, I've had it! But this only works if we've already anticipated the possibility that things are over. We imagine the other withdrawing more and more without ever learning exactly why. We submit to the future and resign ourselves to waiting in the face of the irreversible separation we have conjured. It's as if, in this choreography of loss, the other's absence had already taken place within us.

Then, again, we might be racked by impatience, feel trampled on and deserted. How long before impatience turns to anger, and anger to thoughts of revenge? And already the scenario of our own withdrawal has begun unfolding on love's imaginary stage: just you wait ... soon you'll be the one waiting! The question is how much of this psychodrama, in which we'll never see each other again, our love can possibly sustain.