I’ve had Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car stuck in my head for days and I haven’t understood why. Until this morning when I realised that the fixation was being evoked by these particular lines:
And I had a feeling that I belonged
I had a feelin' I could be someone
I’ve spent recent weeks deep into the psychoanalytical framework of Christopher Bollas who writes about transformational objects. As I understand the concept he argues that successful holding by the good-enough mother in Winnicott’s sense serves to create a sense of transformation: the environmental and then the object mother becomes the grounds for change because self-states are transformed through being embedded in the relationship. Through childhood, adolescence and adult life we find objects that take on this transformational role for us, as echoes of that first experience (however faltering or fragmented) of the transformational object. These experiences inculcate attachments to particular objects, as a way of nurturing a space of possibility within us, indexing the sense of what we could be and what we could do. These objects are what we hold in order to sustain a sense that we are not stuck, that we can move forward, that we can change and we grow.
Which makes me realise that the fast car is a transformational object. Or rather the experience of driving in the car, fast at night, with his arm around her shoulder is the memory of experiencing the transformational object. It’s unclear whether the transformational object is the scene, the car, the relationship or (more likely) a combination of all three:
So I remember when we were driving, driving in your car
Speed so fast it felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped 'round my shoulder
And I-I had a feeling that I belonged
I-I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone
But in that memory now nurtured as contact with transformation comes a sense of potential elaboration, the possibility to give form to her personal idiom: “I could be someone, be someone, be someone”. A denied possibility with an expression promised through proximity to the transformational object. The memory is clutched as contact with a moment where change felt possible, such that holding it reignites that sense of possible transformation:
You got a fast car
We go cruising, entertain ourselves
You still ain't got a job
And I work in the market as a checkout girl
I know things will get better
You'll find work and I'll get promoted
We'll move out of the shelter
Buy a bigger house and live in the suburbs
But what makes the song so devastating is that it ends with a mundane choice about how change actually happens, rather than the hopes invested in the transformational object. The object provides contact with the lived experience of change being possible but the object itself, particularly as an adult, can be so overburdened with phantasmic expectations that it can preclude the action necessary to bring about change. We clutch to the object to feel change but how we relate to the object can actually preclude change because the transformational object is ultimately a relation condensed into an object. As I think Chapman’s narrator confronts towards the end of the song (my emphasis):
You got a fast car
I got a job that pays all our bills
You stay out drinking late at the bar
See more of your friends than you do of your kids
I'd always hoped for better
Thought maybe together you and me'd find it
I got no plans, I ain't going nowhere
Take your fast car and keep on driving
So I remember when we were driving, driving in your car
Speed so fast it felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped 'round my shoulder
And I-I had a feeling that I belonged
I-I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone
You got a fast car
Is it fast enough so you can fly away?
You gotta make a decision
Leave tonight or live and die this way
There’s a release here but no resolution. A sense that the possibility of transformation indexed by the object can only be realised through the surrender of the object. It illustrates how some transformational objects have to be relinquished and this can be devastatingly difficult. But that the only alternative is to remain caught in circuits of repetition around an object that consistently blocks exactly the promise it holds in the psyche. It means letting go of the imagined promise of what could have been through engagement with the transformational object. But ironically in this will often come a deeper and more expansive transformation.
(Incidentally my fixation on this song is a great example of concepts from Bollas as well. I was struggling with these ideas, recognising their relevance (both conceptually and also to my own personal experience) but unable to parse them into my existing register of psychosocial analysis or to make sense of my own existence in these terms. I found myself circling around Fast Car repetitively because it provided the object through which I could elaborate the idiom that was nascent as part of what Bollas would call my unthought known. My sense would be that whenever a song won’t leave us alone there is something working in us that we might, given time and the right objects, come to articulate)
Another thing that struck me here is the mislocation of the transformational capacity. When it condenses into an object it locates the power in that object, whereas in reality the power resides in the subject. But the object is necessarily to elicit the mode of relating which enables transformation, so it’s not just a case of ‘reclaiming your power’ by taking back what you falsely projected outwards. You can’t just decide to transform but equally the power of transformation does not reside in the object. The object does something but that something is creating the conditions for you to do something. That’s why the withdrawal from the object, the surrendering of the hopes invested in it, carries such potential richness alongside such danger.
Mark Carrigan 