Screenworld - Page 11


To See and Be Seen

So I enter the Anti-Screenworld of the consulting room. I really want a cigarette, but that isn't allowed anymore—which is a pain in the ass and knocks away my favorite crutch and most practiced pose. (Ah, for the olden, golden days, when my therapists smoked!)

My therapist asks a question as my cell phone rings.

"Turn that off," my therapist says gently—or not so gently, as the case may be.

There goes my connection (or what I feel is my connection) to the entire world, my lifeline to Screenworld. Now it's just me and this damned therapist—the two of us, plus the reasons I'm there in first place.

(There's no way to test this, but I'd bet a week's pay that the first thing most clients do when leaving the consulting room is turn on their cells. Calling it a "cell" indicates how our attachment to Screenworld has made it a kind of body-part.)

Now there's nothing left to do but face this therapist, and there's nothing this therapist can do but face me—which is to say, there's nothing more ancient than the situation we find ourselves in. As Socrates said to Alcibiades, "For the soul, if it's to know itself, it's into a soul that it must look."

So we look. We talk. We endure mutual, unquantifiable silences. We talk some more. Eventually, something comes of that—each "something" being entirely different, shaped by my unique nature and this therapist's. The "something" we achieve is a result beyond the powers of Screenworld to display.

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