Our Lady of the Thaw
by Marina Gross-Hoy
Marina Gross-Hoy, Sensory Mediation, digital photograph, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
Our lady of the thaw
MARINA GROSS-HOY | Dec 2024 | ISSUE 40
Tell me there's a garden where my flowers will grow
Maybe then all my starting will keep going, oh
I hope so
— “Tell Me There's a Garden,” Joseph
“I’m going to ask you this gently and I want you to tell me how it lands.” The formality of her phrasing is making you nervous.
“Ok.”
“I’m wondering if you’ve reached the point where continuing the PhD is causing you too much harm. Is it time to talk about stopping?”
*
Let me tell you about the statue.
It is small and unimpressive, with pockmarked wood and chipped paint. If you don’t have a thing for Saint Anne imagery, your eyes would skip right over it, feasting instead on more dramatic sculptures like the weeping Virgin and Saint John in agony, blue trails of tears streaming down their devastated cheeks.
But you do have a thing for Saint Anne imagery.
You statue yourself in front of the minimal display case, beyond the flow of Saturday morning museum visitors making their way to the more obviously spectacular The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries. Mother and Child are so small you could hold them in the palm of your hand. Mother Mary sits straight-backed as she holds the chubby Baby Jesus in her lap, her hands wrapped around his tummy, a glazed over expression on her face that reminds you of your own postpartum fog.
Instead of a throne, Mother is seated improbably in the crook of the arm of her own mother, Saint Anne. The enormous Anne gazes out serenely, carrying her miniaturized descendants as if they weighed nothing.
Your mouth curves into a grin at the very silly scale inherent to sainte Anne trinitaire imagery. But longing starts pooling in your chest the longer you stand looking at the warm contact in this tiny trinity. Mary is nestled in her overlapping identities, a daughter and a mother, carried as she carries. Caregiving and carereceiving coexist in her body. You study her like an optical illusion, trying to unravel the mystery. But the mechanics are baffling.
She could let go and nothing would fall.
Shit, what time is it?
You’ve been distracted by this mother and child and mother. You pull out your phone: it’s 10:41. Four minutes left. GADuhn GADuhn, you gallop wildly down the stairs to the front lobby, the crinkly reservation confirmation for museum hypnotherapy folded in the palm of your hand.
*
“Is it time to talk about stopping?”
She is watching you quietly, waiting for your answer.
Her question is a betrayal. She is supposed to be midwifing you safely to the other end, not making you worry that the pain might destroy you.
You get very still. Her concerned face is an open door to a world where there are not 60,000 unwritten words blocking the passage between you and your own life. The knot in your chest loosens. You imagine answering her proposal with a full-throated “YES!” notifying the Museum Studies department of your immediate departure, dragging “Thesis.docx” to the Trash with a loud ping.
It is so close you could touch it, this place where all your problems end.
The relief lasts a second, maybe two. Then, with a roar, the rage of a more probable world comes crashing in, pelting you with images of professional dead ends and unexplainable CV gaps and wasted potential. You remember the truth, that your struggles cannot be taken away, because you are a person who struggles. PhD or no PhD, you will always be you.
But you do not want to be destroyed. You are so tired of how much this hurts.
You know your answer before you have the words to say it. You look into her familiar face, her brows furrowed. Whatever you choose, you know she will be there with you on the other side.
But you have to make the choice.
*
Let me tell you about sensory mediation.
The hypnotherapist has circled your little group in the center of the ancient frigidarium, which is cold and dark despite the glorious spring day outside. You tell yourself that you are not at all disappointed that the session is happening in this colorless space instead surrounded by The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries or the statues from Notre-Dame’s façade. You are just happy it is happening at all. A few months ago, within minutes of receiving the email confirming the dates of your doctoral residency, you went on the museum’s website to see if they were offering a session of this special program during the dates of your stay.
That is how you made this plan for your last Saturday in Paris.
“Take in the space with all your senses,” the hypnotherapist begins, her voice as warm as her smile. “Smell the morning smells that will no longer be here by the afternoon.”
You take a deep breath in through your nose and let out a satisfied sigh. The poetic sensibilities of your guide are making you grin deliriously, just like you did an hour ago in the Garden when you saw the chestnut trees unfurling their first leaves of spring, soft and crumpled like newly emerged butterfly wings.
“Imagine all the people who have been here through time. One thousand years ago. Yesterday. You on a previous visit. You are a part of this place, of the layers of people who have been here before.”
This guide is good. And you would know. You are a regular practitioner of this flavor of museum mindfulness. Your doctoral research even dips into these waters, briefly, mentioning the concept of médiation sensible: interpretation experiences that help visitors engage all their senses to create their own relationships with museum collections.
But this morning, you are not here to evaluate or analyse—or even to think. This hypnotherapy session is a gift your nervous mind is offering your sensory body.
“Put your hands in front of you. Breathe in all your immediate stress and blow it out to the point between your hands.”
You cast your mind around for some immediate stress, and “I hate the frigidarium” graciously offers itself up for your first inhalation.
“I need to make this activity really special.” Exhale.
“I need to make these last two days in Paris really special.” Exhale.
“I don’t know how to finish my PhD.” Exhale.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Exhale.
*
“I hear your concerns. I really do. But I don’t want to quit.”
She looks at you without saying a word. You can tell she is thinking very carefully about what to say next. You hurry to keep explaining before she tries to talk you out of it.
“I just have this feeling that whatever I need to learn to be able to finish the PhD, is what I need to learn. For life.”
You let out a deep sigh, your shoulders drooping under a weight you have been carrying since the edge of childhood.
“I never learned how to be solid,” you explain. “I can shape shift and compensate and find my way around things, but no one ever taught me how to stay solid enough to build anything that matters. I always turn into a puddle, just like I puddle whenever I sit down at my dissertation desk. But if I can just figure out how someone like me can do something like that, I’ll have what I need for whatever comes next. I’ll finally be solid.”
At this, she finally responds:
“O Woman of Water, do you even want to be solid?”
*
Let me tell you about the moment of contact.
After warming up your senses, the hypnotherapist scatters your group out across the room like dandelion fluff.
“Choose a point that calls to you and approach it.”
Without hesitating, you break away from the circle, eagle eyes ready. Responding to spaces could be a special skill on your CV. There! Across the room, sunlight is reflecting on rough stones making shadows. You award yourself bonus points for ephemerality. You itch to tell someone that you have actually written an essay about looking for shadows in museums…
“Now that [mumble], imagine [mumble mumble] your eyes and [mumble].”
You moved too far away and you can’t quite make out what she is saying. Her voice disintegrates as it moves through the vast space.
No problem, you adapt. There’s a pedestal displaying a Roman carving nearer to the center of the room. It is interesting enough. You take a comfortable stance, preparing to ease into a meditative state and form a sacred connection with this place.
“Close your eyes and [mumble]. [Mumble mumble] that? [Mumble mumble] palms touching it and [mumble].”
Your hands are starting to shake, your breathing is quick and shallow. You strain to understand her words, already in your second language, but they are being scrambled by these cruel acoustics. You abandon the carving on the pedestal and rush to the center of the room, looking down at the floor as your new object of attention.
“Bathe [mumble] in [mumble].”
The other participants are still as statues, eyes closed, faces contemplative. You hold your breath to keep from screaming. One last ditch idea comes to you. You change your object of attention to a high window, raising your head to aim your ear directly towards her mouth.
But she won’t stay still. She weaves her way through the group scattered across the room, her face turns towards you and then away. The gift is ruined. You will not be able to make this work.
You close your eyes in defeat, holding back hot tears that threaten to consume your whole body. You need to pull yourself together. You tap your hand repeatedly on the side of your leg like you used to pat your baby’s back, there there.
The hypnotherapist’s voice is suddenly loud, as if she is standing right next to you. Her words have recognizable shapes again, cradling you in their clarity. You don’t know how much time you have before she moves on. You brace for the agony of disconnection.
She places her hand on your shoulder.
You lift your upper back, assuming she is gently correcting your perpetual slouch. But the touch does not stop. And then you remember your hand tapping on your leg. It must have been sending out an SOS in a code legible to hypnotherapists.
Your soundless plea for help was heard. You can let go, she won’t let you fall.
But you have to make the choice. Keep clenching down to hold yourself together or surrender your form to an ocean of salty tears.
Stone or water.
You choose water.
*
“Of course I want to be solid!”
Your voice is forceful, even though you both know that is not what you want. You love being fluid. You just want flow.
Your stubbornness makes you both giggle.
“Listen,” she says, getting serious. “I don’t care if you finish your PhD or not. I really don’t. What I care about is you. And continuing down this path would be really painful. I’m not going to sugarcoat it.”
She pauses to study your face, with eyes that have seen you a breath away from drowning. She knows the limits of your physiology. You wince as you wait for her verdict.
“I trust you. And if continuing is your choice, I will moan and groan with you. In your fear, in your despair, we will meet. We will rage. We will perform a communal ritual, something biblical, with gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.”
You are both laughing from your bellies, gulping for air. You imagine screaming at “Thesis.docx” while she flips off your laptop. Wailing at the dissertation desk while she throws dust over your heads. Freezing in panic while she gently rubs your back.
“This is completely new for me,” you say, surprised by the tears rushing to your eyes. “Having someone in this with me. I’ve always been alone in the struggle, since I was little, hiding how hard things are for me until I can talk about them in the past tense. And I guess I’m still technically alone. You aren’t here to sit with me at my desk.”
Anger rises in your throat as you remember all the aloneness she has not undone. You pause, riding the wave until it releases back into grief.
“But I feel you with me, even when you’re not. Your care is imprinted on my insides. And I just want to reach back to all the little me’s sitting alone in their agonies so they can feel me there with them — my warm mother-body curled up next to theirs, expecting nothing at all, slowly thawing their frozen bodies back into rivers.”
You realize you have made your choice.
“That is how I want to finish the PhD.”
She places her hand over her heart. You mirror the movement. She is not touching you, but somehow the warmth circulating between your hand and your chest is inseparable from this moment of contact with her. The mechanics are baffling.
Her smile reaches all the way up to her eyes.
“We get to love you through the end of it.”
Marina Gross-Hoy is a scholar, writer, and speaker who lives in the Eastern Townships of Québec. She is completing a Museum Studies PhD dissertation at the Université du Québec à Montréal on the development of digital interpretation projects for visitors. She holds degrees in History of Art from the University of Michigan and muséologie from the École du Louvre in Paris. Marina writes about playing with new ways of paying attention to embodied experience. By subverting the gaze honed through looking at art in museums and turning it onto the ordinary and natural world, her essays explore how engaging with life through this 'museum gaze' can open us up to wonder, compassion, and empowerment.