Talila Gafter

When I had first moved to Manhattan twelve years ago, my mom came to visit me from LA. One of the things that I love about my mom is how she clips interesting articles and meticulously files them until useful. She came equipped with her “When in NYC” folder for that trip. We visited a lovely mix of galleries, stores and restaurants, but made one visit that proved to be an enormous long-term gift to our family.  Mom set up a visit with Ellagem Jewelry after reading an article about Ella Gafter and her amazing daughter, Talila. She wanted to see the gorgeous work of Ella, the queen of pearls and one-of-a-kind fine jewelry {true works of art}. Ella and Talila invited us to their office {I use this term out of function, because this space is stunning} and, as they say in Italian, “E’ stato un colpo di fulmine {Love at first sight!}!” We all connected on so many levels and have since become the dearest of family friends.

From the beginning, I had a strong affinity for and friendship with Talila. She is one of the smartest people I have ever met. She speaks 7 languages and is constantly seeking to study and learn more, be it classical piano or philosophy. She is as kind as she is intelligent. I admire her and always learn from her way of approaching things. This Last Cut Conversation was no different. Talila challenged me to go deeper and even further refine and elevate the dialogue. I am so grateful to have this woman in my life.

Talila: "Let me start before you even ask a question. It is with great trepidation that I engage in this conversation with you, for the reason that I don't believe in cuts whatsoever. I can completely relate to the notion of a cut. I don't know if it is a last cut. We can discuss what a last cut means. The last cut can be the cut of a movie maker, who is just showing the last thing that he obtained for the day, or the last cut for the whole movie, so a temporary state of affairs. Of course the notion of last cut conveys something pretty permanent, so there's an issue there. So I understand that, for example, your own experience, which consists at least patently as the removal of an object, can be described as a cut and, given the nouminous and noumenal meaning and significance attached to the female breasts, I can also understand calling it a last cut, because it is something absolutely very fundamental and very important. [It has been] very life changing for sure and it goes to the essence really of every fundamental question of what it is to be a human being since human beings are separated into male and female, for the moment.

So first of all, I, in a situation where one can actually point at the physical event, an excision, a removal, an explant, as you call it, or as it is called, which really means a de-planting, then I understand the notion of cut. Beyond that, I have great difficulty in even imagining how one could possibly refute something from one's own history, from one's own psychological makeup, from one's own personal constitution--refute it and delete it somehow or annihilate it. I understand the aspect of refusal, perhaps, but I tend to think of the process rather as always one of accumulation even if something is being refuted and repudiated. I very much believe in the notion, also to be refined, of the return of the repressed, in the sense that you cannot eliminate anything from your past and from your psychological constitution. I do believe you can rearrange somehow and you can facilitate the cohabitation inside your person of many different things that somehow you experience as being negative or paralyzing or deleterious to physical or to mental health.

The reason that I looked a little bit at the questions, but I didn't consider them really as guidelines was to the extent I was a little bit put off by the word truth; in the sense that, if you think about it, truth until 100 years ago in the history of Western society was considered something objective and universal, whether it was the religious truth of the one God, or the truth that the philosophers look for as the key to the organization of the universe and the essence basically of the order of things. This was truth. Of course every philosopher built his own system, which he considered the truth, and people subscribed. Then came someone else who said, "No, there is a fault in reasoning like this, like this, like this," and, actually the- let's say the first- very great philosopher who put in question the whole notion of truth is Frederich Nietzsche, the German philosopher about whom I wrote and made a dissertation for my Ph.D. In fact, Nietzsche said something magnificent, which is of course worthy of many a conversation. He said, "The truth is there is not truth." So, ok, talk about a paradox, but that is absolutely magnificent.

So I very personally don't respond to the question, and I'm not being a snob, I just feel it very honestly, that I don't respond to the question, "What is your truth?" I don't have a truth. I also don't believe very much in the possibility of freedom. I believe in fighting for greater freedom than one feels today; the hope, the ideal, of some sort of greater freedom. Perhaps because I've never effectuated a last cut in my own life, even though I have been subjected to very great pressures? Then perhaps it is very possible that I have not experienced the kind of freedom that some of the people that you have interviewed have mentioned. Whether it is small or great or a little niche, I don't really know. The only space where I find any sort of freedom is music making.

Another reason for which I did not read the questions, and perhaps this is the real reason and not the high-falutin reason, but the underlying reason is that, needless to say, one feels suddenly put to the test. Presumably when one goes to a shrink or a priest, one goes to them with the questions and tries to work it out. The priest doesn't ask whoever confesses,  "What is your truth?" He may ask, "What did you do?" And the shrink just sits there and doesn't say anything and waits for a person to come up with these questions. But this is quite rare. If you think about it, even sometimes one says, "Oh, I took a train and I met a total stranger and I said the most amazing things to this stranger, because I'll never meet this person again, etc. So I gave myself a certain liberty." But if you think about it, even if you meet a stranger on a train, it still wouldn't be that. You'd still arrive from here to there somehow, but it wouldn't be with a platter like this, "What is your truth?" Or let's say, "What makes you tick?" It doesn't matter."

Or it might. I think, when you are working on something or you are focusing on something and you have your head in that, then that is your lens. That how I am now going through the world. That's what I'm looking for or asking, because it is what happens to be most relevant [to my work] in this moment. And it is with the understanding that, going back to the idea of being in court, a) there's no right answer and b) I have zero expectation that any conversation, even with the same person, about the subject matter, even from day one to two, [will have the same outcome]. That 's the beauty of whether the truth is capital T, small t or whether it even exists. I find it beautiful. I actually agree that maybe the truth is that there is no truth or that there is no universal truth, because the reality is that what you believe in- whatever you call that, what I believe in, what I believe in today versus tomorrow- the only constant is that I stay connected to myself and that is a changing thing.

LISA: Couldn't you also refer to truth as guiding principles? What do you value most that informs who you are and what guides what you do?

"Of course. I was actually pleased by this surprise effect, which is the reason that I didn't want to read the questions. I didn't want to prepare a speech, but then I thought maybe I would open my mouth like a fish and say nothing. So I had to prepare something. I think it is actually a wonderful way to conduct the dialogue, just like this, to stick your finger in the electric socket. So I thought that the trepidation also derives from the fact that I perhaps exist in a counter-example to an experience of cuts- last cuts, first cuts, small, medium and big, because I am a personality akin to a mule who really carries more and more and more.

The most fundamental aspect of my mule-dom was determined thirty-five or forty years ago. Actually, inspired by your project, I considered that there was perhaps an opportunity for me for an attempt for the seriously required last cut, which I have hoped to effectuate over the last thirty-five or forty years. With that in mind, I betook myself two or three weeks ago to my thirty-fifth reunion at Harvard. I went only to one reunion ten years ago, but that is not relevant to what I am discussing now, perhaps for a very practical reason, which is that ten years ago I lodged in some random dorm. This last reunion I stayed in the dorm where I was a student thirty-eight years ago and where, and I will just throw the bomb like this, in the same dorm in the entrance way, I received a phone call from my mother saying that my father had committed suicide. I traveled there to the reunion with a very, very dear friend from Harvard who knew me at the time. So I thought that I am old enough now, that this would be perhaps an opportunity to review the person that I am, which is the person fully, wholly and over-determined by the fact of father's suicide so many years ago, and that this would be an opportunity not to throw it off or anything, because I don't believe that is possible, but to somehow place myself at the different location in relation to that event and to the history of the reception of that event by me.

Perhaps [I did this] to move away from certain childish aspects, which I recognize rationally- abandonment, rage, all these things, but more than that to…I don't have any words for it, because it was a total failure in the sense that I felt an extraordinary sense of oppression, just being there physically. I mean, we arrived and I went to see a few landmark places there- Harvard Square, this cafe, whatever, and, as soon as I set foot in the dorm, I became totally catatonic. I completely went insane and my friend realized it. We went to the dinner, to the thing, but I was like a total madwoman. I found myself several times just lying in that bed like an idiot, thinking, “Talila, take the train. Go back. This is not working.” The people that I saw I couldn't care less about and the people that I care about I see them anyway. So, I guess there is not much to say about that. I've gone to a psychoanalyst for years, to two types of analysis, really in the attempt, I suppose indeed to nothing else but to place myself differently in regard to my reception of that event over the years. My reception of that, unfortunately, is that it just occupies, in a very constricting fashion, in my guts, and basically my chest and my middle part.  It's not in the question of a sense of responsibility, not very much. Of course, there was sadness and freaking out, as I was eighteen at the time, but I was a good daughter, a very loving daughter, responsive, etc. Yes, as an adult today, I could do very many different things, but that's silly, too. We are forty years ahead so it doesn't really matter."

"So it is not in an emotional sense that I experience specific feelings, it's not feelings anymore even, because it is a long time. I don't know how to characterize it. How would I say? It's in the same way that I feel like I occupy very actively my frame, just because I am an active person and I am a thinking person. I always feel accompanied or I feel there is a coextensive field of, I don't know as if to say emptiness, or lack, or default in the sense of fault, accompanying me or really coextensive of my person. I will on my deathbed, when it comes, certainly regret not having been able to be a Talila without that inside me, not to have ever experienced somehow, "not this." I don't know how else to put it really, just like, one can if there is a divorce, ok, not married. You did the explant, not the implant. Of course, with lots of difficulties around, I'm not saying at all that it goes smoothly. I'm just saying there was this and then there was that and then you work with it. I cannot bring myself to a state where I don't have that. I just can't. With all good will and intelligence, education, help and whatever you want. So this may have already determined for me, the weight and certainly a negative experience to the extent that there was a father and then there wasn't a father. So it might be good for him, but it certainly wasn't good for me in any way or since, obviously. The feeling of being yoked to that event, which is the right way of putting it, I really feel myself like those buffalos that are yoked to the thing with the water, that is what I feel like and fundamentally, I'm going around and around the empty well. Perhaps this habituated me in a certain way to the notion that what happens to me or in my world is going to sit on top of me and just be added to what I am carrying. It's very possible.

To move away a little bit, there is another very fundamental and, I can say mostly positive way, in which I have not effectuated even a first cut is my attachment to my mother. Our lives are extraordinarily intertwined much to do with practical circumstances in the sense that, when I graduated from college, we needed to start a business. We needed to get active with something. When I was nineteen or twenty, we just had to do something, and there was born this business that flourished to this day, which is very nice. But I am certainly a successful vehicle in my professional world for my mother's ambition. I'm not embarrassed by it. I have been, at some junctures, ashamed of it. I have overcome that shame, it was somehow a formal sort of shame that children were supposed to grow up and do one's own thing and I have at certain junctures felt it as a service. I have with the years, freed myself from that sense of shame, perhaps because I have achieved certain things on my very own, which are so strictly and exquisitely mine, that absolutely nobody can penetrate or hear or understand and it doesn't matter to me at all. For example, this dissertation that I wrote, it doesn't bother me at all that I didn't try to publish it or anything, because I don't care. However, I know it's on the Internet somewhere! So if in three hundred years, some student lands on it and pulls his hair out and thinks, "Oh my God, I can't believe I found this thing! Unbelievable!" Well, I'm already happy beyond the great for that. That's enough for that because that will be a sister soul for me if that exists and if it doesn't, I don't care. So that's very nice."

"Or perhaps again, something in my musical studies, also which is perhaps something more personal, because that's just so extraordinarily ineffable, the sound that one produces. It can say anything and so the notion of communication is very difficult in music if you think about it. People think, “Oh, it's the emotions.” There is that too. Of course, the music can be sad in a minor mode, or it can be static, or extraordinarily lyrical or it can be comic. At the same time, the sounds are so ineffable that any piece of music, any sound, can stand for anything if you think about it. Of course the composer wrote agitato for agitated.  He's telling you to help you reproduce [a feeling], but nevertheless, I don't know about communication in music. That doesn't matter. 

So now you have to ask me questions, because my speech is totally finished. Of course, I do consider though my internal space as a perpetual, ongoing extremely last cut, because I do have an internal room where I actively push all sorts of things away. But I consider all these cuts very temporary in the sense that it is a little bit like kicking some cans away and then they roll back. For me, the trick is to juggle or spin plates on sticks, to maneuver and to live with the certainty for me that I'm using my time well, despite many impediments. Once again, I think that for me the music making is very important for me. Even in the very concrete sense, when I sit at the piano and I practice for two hours. After the two hours, I get something to show to myself. It's not the same as the two hours before. There's something there to show for the time. Or perhaps in studying things and certain readings, certain intellectual occupations, just the fact of not being the same. Once again, not being the same, for me, means accumulating because I don't know how to discard. I've been buzzed off in terms of people effectuating a final cut on me, not really last, but a final cut. Of course, my father qualifies as the first one, not only final, but the ultimate last cut. I also had a very very dear friend in Italy who had been my friend for ten or fifteen years, and whom I considered a sister, basically one day told me that I had become a burden on her life. I was really taken aback. Of course she said it to me on the highway from Umbria to Rome and, the second we got on the highway, there were like ten accidents and it was like an eight and a half hour drive. I sat there crying and she just kept explaining to me what a burden I had become on her life. I just wanted to get out of the car and walk back to Rome. And then she kind of had second thoughts that she didn't express herself well and I just said, “Ok, forget it.” That's not a last cut. She had already done the final cut on me and I just said, “Ok .” 

So, this is really the reason for my trepidation, I don't know how to address what you are talking about and I'd actually really like to learn. You know, I have a very long marriage; I'm married now twenty-six years, almost twenty-seven. So I've been with the same man almost thirty years. Of course, there were junctures of difficulty, but we surmounted them. It didn't occur to me to separate. I guess whatever difficult junctions there were didn't seem dangerous to my person so to speak so I would have to throw any chains, however golden they may be, off." 

I think that is a fundamental point, because I think that's where we are then forced into those junctures where you feel that piece has got you by the neck.

LISA: No matter how beautiful it is

"For sure."

In that, I think that in any of those junctures, in and of itself, is a quote unquote last cut. To decide to stay. Just to go back to your original question, the removal of the implants is so black and white. However, if I look at all these other decisions that I've made, or really that you've spoken of, it can be a decision to be all in or to hold onto, as much as it is a removal.

"Yes, this is very refined, what you are saying. Very refined."

In hearing all that you have said, I would reflect back to you that you are living this way very much so. I think you are so intelligent and you are, in some ways, so literal, that in looking at those two words, you thought, “Well, final or it has to be a removal.” [We are speaking] to the nuance of all of it.

"That's really true. I stand totally corrected."

No, no, no. This is not about correcting you.  What you've offered is a beautiful gift to me in hearing all that you said. I think, first and foremost, it is such a personal thing. So, even in providing these questions, it is just the framework for the conversation, but every time I speak to someone, it isn't in this formal way [or with a set outcome of responses]. It comes out that we all have our different approaches to how we go about this. Even, in my mind, hearing your decision to do your dissertation or move toward studying the piano, those are decisions to go towards something.

"That's very true. And any “going to” is a decision to go away from somewhere else." 

Exactly. That is what I was going to say. Two hours a day that you are dedicating to piano are two hours a day that you are not dedicating to anything else. Whether [or not] you are out there on 5th Avenue with a flag shouting these are my two hours and I'm not giving them to anyone else, within yourself, it is an action toward what you believe in, which is your internal space. The other thing that I think is so interesting to point out, within the nuance of the terminology of Last and Cut, is that even where there have been removals, an organ from my body or a person from my life or moving away from a career, there's always what I have taken on and the lasting effect of everything. Every moment in time, we are a new representation of everything that has led up to that moment and, by no means through this, am I speaking as if, “Ok, now I'm standing here in total empty, open space,” as we are all an accumulation of everything that has happened to us.

In your case, you didn't choose for your father to take his life, but it becomes part of the experience. So all I want to do with any of these questions is to do exactly what you did. To make you think. To make anyone think. How do you relate to the subject matter of “what do I believe in most and how am I standing up for myself in the day to day of life.” This was such a concrete example {gestures to chest} but it exemplifies this bigger metaphorical thing that is happening in moments in our lives, sometimes by choice, sometimes not, and then we react and that has its own ripple effect. So the whole point of any of this is that there is no right answer. It is constantly changing. There is no one truth, but I think that all of us have something and it may not be something definable.

"Well, there is a sense of identity, for sure. It's not just a random shift of perspective all the time." 

Right, that makes you feel like yourself in the most fundamental and core way. I feel as if I spent a lot of time being the reactor to that. Then there was this point when I identified that, for me, the truth in the spoken word became something so fundamental for my experience and [that realization] from other fundamental relationships in my life transferred to how I interact with my daughter. To me, in my house, what is most important is that I know that she and I have a clear flow of telling the truth, the literal truth. Then, for my personal experience, that [foundation] opens up my ability to love and feel safe and connect. So, with her, that has become a key principle by which we operate in our home. That's the law. But she can go off and come back and say well that means nothing to me. That's fine under your roof, but what's most important to me is, I don't even know, rebellion or creativity. But I think beyond the word truth, it's that connection to self.

LISA: It's alignment. It's the lived experience in the body. We all know that sense of what feels right, no matter how you want to define it.

"One of the greatest liberations, perhaps, is actually recognizing for real what feels right and recognizing that what is negative is probably not right. Freud said that everyone knows how difficult it is for the neurotic person to give up the neurosis, why analysis is so predictably interminable and not terminable, with all the connotations of the sense of a masochistic pleasure one derives from the neurosis, the certainty of habit, the comfort of knowing what is up, even if it is negative, etcetera, etcetera. So I am saying to recognize, first of all, that it is not simple to recognize what is good and perhaps there are situations or human beings or circumstances where survival of some sort requires a sort of neurosis. It doesn't mean that health is always the way out, or good health or sanity is always the way out. That's not life, because life is the combination, of course, of the madness and sanity. With regard to child rearing, I have tried, I hope, not only formally, but in fact, to convey to my children who are now twenty-six and twenty-four, that they are to develop as independent beings without any sense of obligation.

Personally, I derive a lot of joy from being very disciplined. I'm sure that I generate some “not joy” to other people around me who live closely to me, you know, specifically my husband and children, by being such a disciplined person, because that can be a pain in the ass. I do what I say and I do it just as I finish saying it . I fix things and I put order, but, of course, that gives me pleasure. It is my mini-neurosis, but we all recognize there are many benefits they put out."

LISA: Sam and I talk a lot about freedom and there is a great sense of freedom in structure for most, if not all.

"That's right, because it allows you to navigate. Without order, there is no movement and there is certainly no movement toward what you presumably want. Fundamentally, I derive great pleasure from that; great pleasure from the notion of work. I don't think much in terms of happiness, for example. I can certainly feel a moment of openness in the chest, or a feeling of flying, of course, but happiness is not so much in my vocabulary, perhaps because I am just of a serious disposition. That's just character. Some people are more serious and some people are more light footed and just delighted by everything." 

But don't you feel happy at the piano bench or with a book, even in the angst of it? Even in your seriousness? I've been with you on vacation when you've excused yourself to go study piano, because that is happiness for you.

"Of course, but that is work! Nietzsche said something very beautiful. It is a little parenthesis. He said that beautiful things make one love life, even a beautiful book written against life. That's wonderfully put, no? So I am just speaking for a moment, adopting the pessimist's perspective, that there are plenty of marvelous things to be elated about so whether I make the moment for myself for the small moment of elation or of achievement or if I rely on a beautiful book or an artwork. There is plenty to marvel at, of course. Absolutely."

It's funny. I know many in my life wonder why I choose to be so serious and am constantly turning stones and asking the questions. I am asked often, “Can't you just go out and enjoy life and not ask so many questions?” But it is not who I am and it is not where I derive pleasure in skipping the asking and the questions. I find great peace from retreating and going within and giving space and voice to the places within me that don't completely open up for other reasons. Even here twenty years out from when I was first diagnosed with cancer and have moved through that in so many iterations, I can now go be in a hospital and not have the same post traumatic stress disorder symptoms, but it doesn't go away completely. It formulates part of the experience and I think part of how that now defines who I am is an element of seriousness in who I am and my retreating. Perhaps it is what Lisa and I see in each other and can connect [around] and you and I have always have this unspoken connection that I see in you something that I see in myself. And so that's where again it goes back to [how we view all of this as an] individual.

"It's an enormous privilege. I mean, what can be a higher privilege than the luxury to question when some people are too tired to think? Some people are too tired to think, because they work very hard. They put their head down and they fall asleep, because they have to wake up and get tired again. It's an enormous privilege to not only accumulate, but also be able to process. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living and only human beings have this privilege.  Whatever number of years there were to conduct anything else the way he lived his life, or the way Plato showed him living his life, was him examining all the time. That's all Socrates did. He went to the marketplace in the morning and he hung out with people, raising questions such as, “What is justice? What is friendship? What is goodness? What is the best political system?” The Platonic Dialogues are each expounding on one of those topics in dialogue. So that's all he did. He did nothing else. Of course, most important was his dialogue on love, the symposium where the Greek notion of love, which is so different from what we understand as modern love, which is all about instinct and all about suddenly tapping into some need from childhood or something like this. The Greeks had nothing like it. It was all about education and raising oneself to something higher and finer.

But to get back to us, it is an enormous privilege, obviously, to be able to analyze and englobe and contain and really barely digest; if anything digest, but not expel. To rearrange in a way that is internally more beautiful and more suitable, that's a dream, really. That's a philosopher's dream to have an internal arrangement that, even when painful, is still beautiful. It's the chains that are still beautiful, because the circumstances and what happened to us we can't control obviously. So what happens is the chains and what you do with them, of course.  It's all very nice and very beautiful and very interesting.

You are doing your own modern day Socratic Dialogue if you think about it. You go from town to town and interview. But, of course, the big difference to relate is that the questions that Socrates raised in the marketplace with the young educated men of Athens, in the attempt to make better citizens out of them, and I suppose better human beings since his whole approach was therapeutic and educational. He wasn't teaching something that he knew. He was trying to get to something. What we today would call values- goodness, justice, moderation- at the time, the notion of value did not exist. There is no Greek word for value. Value is a modern invention. All those, at the time, were truths. That was true. That is, the question of what is goodness looked for a definition of goodness.  That would be THE ideal definition in which anything that can be characterized as good participates to a certain extent in that ideal definition and obviously this does not exist in life. But this was the whole notion of THE ideal of justice, THE best city, how do we form the best city, THE ideal friendship, and this was something toward which you tended, toward which you aspired. The desire was for that, for love at its highest. Those were all objectively superficial conversations to the extent that they were looking for the objective, for the object goodness into which for the principle of the concept goodness anything that you could call good participates if you can relate it to it.

Nowadays, every conversation that we are having in this way is a completely subjective conversation, of course, and not objective, because it is my truth and it is my freedom and this is how we live in the modern world. You know, we have been disattached, Last Cut, or God left us or God left the Western world or we killed God, as Nietzsche would say, so the total final cut. So we are unmoored, as they would say, now everyone is unmoored. There is the family. There is the shrink, but you have to pay him, so I don't know. The unmooring, of course, is also what contributes to the confusion. In other times, people knew when they were born that this was their guild, this was their life and they had a profession and this defined them. Some people moved around, but not many. Today, everyone can presumably do anything and everyone is equal to anything. Presumably we live in a meritocracy where anyone can get anywhere according to their virtues and nobody is anything, everyone is a brand. Of course, there are people who do but...

So yes, you are conducting your own Socratic experiment and that is a very nice way to think about it. Why not? You are addressing very essential questions that typically one doesn't have time for, or one has time at the shrink but, you know, we are such a problem solving oriented population that, even at the shrink, I don't know if people talk about this. Usually they just want to resolve something. This would be the epitome of luxury, a conversation like this, because then you are acting as my friend and my doctor and my teacher, or backwards. It's symmetrical, but that's a rare thing to find, of course, those relationships. So it is a very valuable service or contribution or activity." 

LISA: Maybe by virtue of what you are saying, it is a responsibility, too. The responsibility of the privileged life.

"By all means! Very much so. Yes. Yes. That's the only pity that there is, is squandering the time. Using the time? There can't be anything better than using the time. The time goes, so if you use it, then you are doing something. In fact, in the department of accumulation, I operate very much through the motto that everything that is lost outside, is gained inside. That's exactly what you are talking about, obviously, because everything that is lost outside, physically, spiritually, psychologically, circumstantially, is inside. So, you know, the fifty-five years that I have been here, it's all totally here {gestures to heart}. Nothing has been wasted or gone to naught. It's all been rearranged and reinterpreted."

And we constantly reflect back on the points and, even if it doesn't feel as if there is a huge shift, I think there always is a different lens.

"Oh for sure. And then I assume, I don't know, but I think that with age, also, since the physiology changes and everything, that there is some further arrangement waiting perhaps, behind the curtain; some greater wisdom and some greater tranquility. I think that would be nice. I've seen it in some other people. Not that they've reached some stoic sainthood or anything, but they've become wiser and smarter with age. So, that's to look forward to."

That's something to hold up in the clouds.