don't fall

quotes from the short story collection in the bedroom by andre dubus

from a father's story

"it is not hard to live through a day, if you can live through a moment. what creates despair is the imagination, which pretends there is a future, and insists on predicting millions of moments, thousands of days, and so drains you that you cannot live the moment at hand."

from the winter father

"the next four hours, he learned, were not only the time he had to prepare for, but also the lair of his loneliness, the source of every quick chill of loss, each sudden whisper of dread and futility: for if he could spend them with a woman he loved, drink and cook and eat with her while day changed to night (though now, in winter, night came as he drove home), he and this woman huddled in the light and warmth of living room and kitchen, gin and meat, then his days until four and nights after eight would demand less from him of will, give more to him of hopeful direction. after dinner he listened to jazz and read fiction or watched an old movie on television until, without lust or even the need of a sleeping woman beside him, he went to bed: a blessing, but a disturbing one. he had assumed, as a husband and then an adulterous one, that his need for a woman was as carnal as it was spiritual. but now celibacy was easy; when he imagined a woman, she was drinking with him, eating dinner. so his most intense and perhaps his only need for a woman was then; and all the reasons for the end of his marriage became distant, blurred, and he wondered if the only reason he was alone now was a misogyny he had never recognized: that he did not even want a woman except at the day's end, and had borne all the other hours of woman-presence only to have her comfort as the clock's hands moved through their worst angles of the day."

from killings

"he had always been a fearful father: when his children were young, at the start of each summer he thought of them drowning in a pond or the sea, and he was relieved when he came home in the evenings and they were there; usually that relief was his only acknowledgment of his fear, which he never spoke of, and which he controlled within his heart. as he had when they were very young and all of them in turn, cathleen too, were drawn to the high oak in the backyard, and had to climb it. smiling, he watched them, imagining the fall: and he was poised to catch the small body before it hit the earth. or his legs were poised; his hands were in his pockets or his arms were folded and, for the child looking down, he appeared relaxed and confident while his heart beat with the two words he wanted to call out but did not: don't fall. in winter he was less afraid: he made sure the ice would hold him before they skated, and he brought or sent them to places where they could sled without ending in the street. so he and his children had survived their childhood, and he only worried about them when he knew they were driving a long distance, and then he lost frank in a way no father expected to lose his son, and he felt that all the fears he had borne while they were growing up, and all the grief he had been afraid of, had backed up like a huge wave and struck him on the beach and swept him out to sea. each day he felt the same and when he was able to forget how he felt, when he was able to force himself not to feel that way, the eyes of his clerks and customers defeated him. he wished those eyes were oblivious, even cold; he felt he was withering in their tenderness."

reintroductions

quotes from desire/love by lauren berlant

"theory, as gayatri spivak writes, is at best provisional generalization: i am tracking patterns to enable my readers to see them elsewhere or to not see them, and to invent other explanations. i am interested in lines of continuity and in the ellipsis, with its double meaning of what goes without saying and what has not yet been thought. but generally i am still compelled by the descriptions that are here, and from this distance, i am confused to say that, when i read this book, i still learn from it. when it comes to gender and sexuality there are no introductions, even if that is what this book seeks to be. there are only reintroductions, after all, reencounters that produce incitements to loosen, discard, or grasp more tightly to some anchors in the attunement that fantasy offers."

"desire describes a state of attachment to something or someone, and the cloud of possibility that is generated by the gap between an object's specificity and the needs and promises projected onto it. this gap produces a number of further convolutions. desire visits you as an impact from the outside, and yet, inducing an encounter with your affects, makes you feel as though it comes from within you; this means that your objects are not objective, but things and scenes that you have converted into propping up your world, and so what seems objective and autonomous in them is partly what your desire has created and therefore is a mirage, a shaky anchor. your style of addressing those objects gives shape to the drama with which they allow you to reencounter yourself.

by contrast, love is the embracing dream in which desire is reciprocated: rather than being isolated, love provides an image of an expanded self, the normative version of which is the two-as-one intimacy of the couple form. in the idealized image of their relation, desire will lead to love, which will make a world for desire's endurance."

"even in its most conventional form, as 'love,' desire produces paradox. it is a primary relay to individuated social identity, as in coupling, family, reproduction, and other sites of personal history; yet it is also the impulse that most destabilizes people, putting them into plots beyond their control as it joins diverse lives and makes situations. . . desire also measures fields of difference and distance. it both constructs and collapses distinctions between public and private: it reorganizes worlds. this is one reason why desire is so often represented as political: in bringing people into public or collective life, desire makes scenes where social conventions of power and value play themselves out in plots about obstacles to and opportunities for erotic fulfillment."

"the zoning of desire is less personal, more normative, too. consider, for example, erogenous zones, red light districts, master bedrooms, 'private parts.' moreover, a relation of desire creates a 'space' in which its trajectories and complexities are repeatedly experienced and represented."

"'identity' might be defined as a kind of singularity that an individual is said to have: paradoxically, identity is also the individual's point of intersection with membership in particular populations or collectivities."

"gilles deleuze, from a different angle, calls this subject of data a 'dividual,' to emphasize that individuality itself is a cluster of qualities that don't express the totality of a person but rather her value as data to the reproduction of the normative world."

"we will think about sexuality as a structure of self-encounter and encounter with the world; about modern ideologies and institutions of intimacy that have installed sexuality as the truth of what a person is; that promote a narrowed version of heterosexuality as a proper cultural norm, and regulate deviations from it; and that nonetheless yield some carefully demarcated space to some kinds of non-normative sexuality, such as gay and lesbian."

"the minute an object comes under analytic scrutiny, it bobs and weaves, becomes unstable, mysterious, and recalcitrant, seeming more like a fantasy than the palpable object it had seemed to be when the thinker/lover first risked engagement."

the catastrophe of success

introduction to the glass menagerie by tennessee williams

This winter marked the third anniversary of the Chicago opening of “The Glass Menagerie,” an event that terminated one part of my life and began another about as different in all external circumstances as could well be imagined. I was snatched out of virtual oblivion and thrust into sudden prominence, and from the precarious tenancy of furnished rooms about the country I was removed to a suite in a first-class Manhattan hotel. My experience was not unique. Success has often come that abruptly into the lives of Americans. The Cinderella story is our favorite national myth, the cornerstone of the film industry if not of the Democracy itself. I have seen it enacted on the screen so often that I was now inclined to yawn at it, not with disbelief but with an attitude of Who Cares! Anyone with such beautiful teeth and hair as the screen protagonist of such a story was bound to have a good time one way or another, and you could bet your bottom dollar and all the tea in China that one would be caught dead or alive at any meeting involving a social conscience.

No, my experience was not exceptional, but neither was it quite ordinary, and if you are willing to accept the somewhat eclectic proposition that I had not been writing with such an experience in mind and many people are not willing to believe that a playwright is interested in anything but popular success—there may be some point in comparing the two estates.

The sort of life that I had had previous to this popular success was one that required endurance, a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before, but it was a good life because it was the sort of life for which the human organism is created.

I was not aware of how much vital energy had gone into this struggle until the struggle was removed. I was out on a level plateau with my arms still thrashing and my lungs still grabbing at air that no longer resisted. This was security at last.

I sat down and looked about me and was suddenly very depressed. I thought to myself, this is just a period of adjustment. Tomorrow morning, I will wake up in this first-class hotel suite above the discreet hum of an East Side boulevard and I will appreciate its elegance and luxuriate in its comforts and know that I have arrived at our American plan of Olympus. Tomorrow morning when I look at the green satin sofa I will fall in love with it. It is only temporarily that the green satin looks like slime on stagnant water.

But in the morning the inoffensive little sofa looked more revolting than the night before and I was already getting too fat for the $125 suit which a fashionable acquaintance had selected for me. In the suite things began to break accidentally. An arm came off the sofa. Cigarette burns appeared on the polished surface of the furniture. Windows were left open and a rain storm flooded the suite But the maid always put it straight and the patience of the management was inexhaustible. Late parties could not offend them seriously. Nothing short of demolition bomb seemed to bother my neighbors.

I lived on room service. But in this, too, there was a disenchantment. Some time between the moment when I ordered dinner over the phone and when it was rolled into my living room like a corpse on a rubber-wheeled table, I lost all interest in it. Once I ordered a sirloin steak and a chocolate sundae, but everything was so cunningly disguised on the table that I mistook the chocolate sauce for gravy and poured it over the sirloin steak.

Of course all this was the more trivial aspect of a spiritual dislocation that began to manifest itself in far more disturbing ways. I soon found myself becoming indifferent to people. A well cynicism rose in me. Conversations all sounded as if they had been recorded years ago and were being played back on a turntable. Sincerity and kindliness seemed to have gone out of my friends’ voices. I suspected them of hypocrisy. I stopped calling them, stopped seeing them. I was impatient of what I took to be inane flattery.

I got so sick of hearing people say, “I loved your play!” that I could not say thank you any more. I choked on the words and turned rudely away from the usually sincere person. I no longer felt any pride in the play itself but began to dislike it, probably because I felt too lifeless inside ever to create another. I was walking around dead in my shoes and I knew it but there were no friends I knew or trusted sufficiently, at that time, to take them aside and tell them what was the matter.

This curious condition persisted about three months, till late spring, when I decided to have another eye operation mainly because of the excuses it gave me to withdraw from the world behind a gauze mask. It was my fourth eye operation, and perhaps I should explain that I had been afflicted for about five years with a cataract on my left eye which required a series of needling operations and finally an operation on the muscle of the eye. (The eye is still in my head. So much for that.)

Well, the gauze mask served a purpose. While I was resting in the hospital the friends whom I had neglected or affronted in one way or another began to call on me and now that I was in pain and darkness, unpleasant mutation which I had suspected earlier in the season had now disappeared and they sounded now as they had used to sound in the lamented days of my obscurity. Once more they were sincere and kindly voices with the ring of truth in them and that quality of understanding for which I had originally sought them out.

As far as my physical vision was concerned, this last operation was only relatively successful (although it left me with an apparently clear black pupil in the right position, or nearly so) but in another, figurative way, it had served a much deeper purpose.

When the gauze mask was removed I found myself in a readjusted world. I checked out of the handsome suite at the first-class hotel, packed my papers and a few incidental belongings and left for Mexico, an elemental country where you can quickly forget the false dignities and conceits imposed by success, a country where vagrants innocent as children curl up to sleep on the pavements and human voices, especially when their language is not familiar to the ear, are soft as birds. My public self, that artifice of mirrors, did not exist here and so my natural being was resumed.

Then, as a final act of restoration, I settled for a while at Chapala to work on a play called “The Poker Night,” which later became “A Streetcar Named Desire.” It is only in his work that an artist can find reality and satisfaction, for the actual world is less intense than the world of his invention and consequently his life, without recourse to violent disorder, does not seem very substantial. The right condition for him is that in which his work is not only convenient but unavoidable.

For me a convenient place to work is a remote place among strangers where there is good swimming. But life should require a certain minimal effort. You should not have too many people waiting on you, you should have to do most things for yourself. Hotel service is embarrassing. Maids, waiters, bellhops, porters and so forth are the most embarrassing people in the world for they continually remind you of inequities which we accept as the proper thing. The sight of an ancient woman, gasping and wheezing as she drags a heavy pail of water down a hotel corridor to mop up the mess of some drunken overprivileged guest, is one that sickens and weighs upon the heart and withers it with shame for this world in which it is not only tolerated but regarded as proof positive that the wheels of Democracy are functioning as they should without interference from above or below. Nobody should have to clean up anybody else’s mess in this world. It is terribly bad for both parties, but probably worse for the one receiving the service.

I have been corrupted as much as anyone else by the vast number of menial services which our society has grown to expect and depend on. We should do for ourselves or let the machines do for us, the glorious technology that is supposed to be the new light of the world. We are like a man who has bought up a great amount of equipment for a camping trip, who has the canoe and the tent and the fishing lines and the axe and the guns, the mackinaw and the blankets, but who now, when all the preparations and the provisions are piled expertly together, is suddenly too timid to set out on the journey but remains where he was yesterday and the day before and the day before that, looking suspiciously through white lace curtains at the clear sky he distrusts. Our great technology is a God-given chance for adventure and for progress which we are afraid to attempt. Our ideas and our ideals remain exactly what they were and where they were three centuries ago. No. I beg your pardon. It is no longer safe for man to even declare them!

This is a long excursion from a small theme into a large one which I did not intend to make, so let me go back to what I was saying before.

This is an oversimplification. One does not escape that easily from the seduction of an effete way of life. You cannot arbitrarily say to yourself, I will not continue my life as it was before this thing, Success, happened to me. But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, that the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to—-why, then with this knowledge you are at least in a position of knowing where danger lies.

You know, then, that the public Somebody you are when you “have a name” is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath and which is the sum of your actions and so is constantly in a state of becoming under your own violation— and knowing these things, you can even survive the catastrophe of Success!

It is never altogether too late, unless you embrace the Bitch Goddess, as William James called her, with both arms and find in her smothering caresses exactly what the homesick little boy in you always wanted, absolute protection and utter effortlessness. Security is a kind of death, I think, and it can come to you in a storm of royalty checks beside a kidney-shaped pool in Beverly Hills or anywhere at all that is removed from the conditions that made you an artist, if that’s what you are or were intended to be. Ask, anyone who has experienced the kind of success I am talking about— What good is it? Perhaps to get an honest answer you will have to give him a shot of truth serum but the word he will finally groan is unprintable in genteel publications.

Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that’s dynamic and expressive—that’s what’s good for you if you’re at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. “In the time of your life—live!” That time is short and it doesn’t return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

book nerding

quotes from my life with bob by pamela paul

"this is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. there is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn't be the goal. the novelist umberto eco famously kept what the writer nassim taleb called an 'anti-library,' a vast collection of books he had not read, believing that one's personal trove should contain as much of what you don't know as possible."

"i wanted to crawl into the stacks and absorb the musty smell of decades-old paper. i riffled my fingers through the wooden card-catalog drawers like they were flip books, trying to decode them. i could be the first girl to master the dewey decimal system. i might one day know where every book stood. all i needed was some authority or at least some kind of officially sanctioned status. a few years after we'd moved to town, i mustered the courage to ask for a job.

'i'm sorry, there are no jobs available for children,' the librarian told me. i was ten.

'you wouldn't have to pay me,' i insisted, my eyes gleaming with what surely came across as an unhealthy fervor.

'that's okay, but thank you.'

the rejection was terrible. what was it that put the children's librarian off my candidacy? was it the you-don't-have-to-pay-me part? did she question my intentions? did she not see that i was a book person, different from other, more casual library visitors, that i cared? that i would never leave a book facedown with its spine splayed open like other kids my age. i couldn't help but feel they were taking me down a notch. 'this library isn't yours, you know,' is how i heard it."

"'when we have emotions of fear and pity toward the hero of a tragedy, we explore aspects of our own vulnerability in a safe and pleasing setting,' nussbaum observed. this not only allows us to access our own emotions it also enables us to cultivate empathy for others."

attaching versus joining

excerpt from codependence and the power of detachment by karen casey:

it might be said that roberta was a natural at detaching. or it might be said that her fear of intimacy, sown in her family of origin, taught her to isolate herself and to be self-focused -- and that's not the same as making a healthy choice to detach. although roberta was a good role model for many of us at al-anon, she also didn't allow herself to be vulnerable or to need others. to me, this invulnerability can be as much a flaw as a strength.

reciprocity in relationships strengthens them. generally, this reciprocity occurs through the normal sharing of one's fears and failings and dreams. if you aren't in the habit of revealing your inner self to anyone else, it's hard to build a relationship that is intimate and sustaining. superficial friendships are easy to make, but we need to have at least one person who knows all of us.

so how can we have healthy reciprocity and vulnerability in a relationship without being unhealthily attached and codependent? the key is to distinguish between 'attaching to' and 'joining with' others.

for simplicity, we can think of attachment as the opposite of detachment. in other words, attaching ourselves is akin to clinging to another person and letting that person decide what we should be thinking or saying or doing. living this way is a death sentence for our soul. it removes our choices for doing the next right thing. we do not want to cling or be attached in this way.

however, we do want to join with other people. the difference is that when we join with others, we still allow them to have their own opinions, have their own set of values, and make whatever choices are right for them -- all without feeling that we need to concur. even more important, we allow them their choices without feeling that we need to disagree. we can mutually allow one another the freedom to be whom or what we need to be with absolutely no judgment. as a result, we do not feel controlled by people we choose to join with, nor do we feel the need to control them.