an ecstatic accident

excerpts from bluets by maggie nelson

4. i admit that i may have been lonely. i know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke - take your pick - an apprehension of the divine. (this ought to arouse our suspicions.)

8. do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. "we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it," wrote goethe, and perhaps he is right. but i am not interested in longing to live in a world in which i already live. i don't want to yearn for blue things, and god forbid for any "blueness." above all, i want to stop missing you.

28. it was around this time that i first had the thought: we fuck well because he is a passive top and i am an active bottom. i never said this out loud, but i thought it often. i had no idea how true it would prove, or how painful, outside of the fucking.

44. this particular conversation with the expert on guppy menopause takes place on a day when, later that afternoon, a therapist will say to me, if he hadn't lied to you, he would have been a different person than he is. she is trying to get me to see that although i thought i love this man very completely for exactly who he was, i was in fact blind to the man he actually was, or is.

58. "love is something so ugly that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they were doing" (leonardo da vinci)

72. it is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. loneliness is solitude with a problem. can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it? -- no, not exactly. it cannot love me that way; it has no arms. but sometimes i do feel its presence to be a sort of wink - here you are again, it says, and so am i.

100. it often happens that we count our days, as if the act of measurement made us some kind of promise. but really this is like hoisting a harness onto an invisible horse. "there is simply no way that a year from now you're going to feel the way you feel today," a different therapist said to me last year at this time. but though i have learned to act as if i feel differently, the truth is that my feelings haven't really changed.

104. i do not feel my friend's pain, but when i unintentionally cause her pain i wince as i hurt somewhere, and i do. often in exhaustion i lay my head down on her lap in her wheelchair and tell her how much i love her, that i'm sorry she is in so much pain, pain i can witness and imagine but that i do not know. she says, if anyone knows this pain besides me, it is you (and j, her lover). this is generous, for to be close to her pain has always felt like a privilege to me, even though pain could be defined as that which we typically aim to avoid. perhaps this is because she remains so generous within hers, and because she has never held any hierarchy of grief, either before her accident or after, which seems to me nothing less than a form of enlightenment.

125. of course, you could also just take off the blindfold and say, i think this game is stupid, and i'm not playing it anymore. and it must also be admitted that hitting the wall or wandering off in the wrong direction or tearing off the blindfold is as much a part of the game as is pinning the tail on the donkey.

157. the part i do remember: that the blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. as one optics journal puts it, "the color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue." in which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.

181. pharmakon means drug, but as jacques derrida and others have pointed out, the word in greek famously refuses to designate whether poison or cure. it holds both in the bowl. in the dialogues plato uses the word to refer to everything from an illness, its cause, its cure, a recipe, a charm, a substance, a spell, artificial color, and paint. plato does not call fucking pharmakon, but then again, while he talks plenty about love, plato does not say much about fucking.

187. is it a related form of aggrandizement, to inflate a heartbreak into a sort of allegory? losing what one loves is simpler, more common, than that. more precise. one could leave it, too, as it is. -- yet how can i explain, that every time i put a pin in the balloon of it, the balloon seems to swell back up as soon as i turn away from it?

199. for to wish to forget how much you loved someone - and then, to actually forget - can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart. i have heard that this pain can be converted, as it were, by accepting "the fundamental impermanence of all things." this acceptance bewilders me: sometimes it seems an act of will; at others, of surrender. often i feel myself to be rocking between them (seasickness).

215. it often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing: when it comes round, everything before it, around it, and, perhaps, in front of it, tends to seem fleeting, delusional. of all the philosophers, schopenhauer is the most hilarious and direct spokesperson for this idea: "as a rule we find pleasure much less pleasurable, pain much more painful than we expected." you don't believe him? he offers this quick test: "compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten."

238. i want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when i would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; i would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

finding our own true nature

excerpt from the wisdom of no escape by pema chodron

in one of the buddha's discourses, he talks about the four kinds of horses: the excellent horse, the good horse, the poor horse, and the really bad horse. the excellent horse, according to the sutra, moves before the whip even touches its back, just the shadow of the whip or the slightest sound from the driver is enough to make the horse move. the good horse runs at the lightest touch of the whip on its back. the poor horse doesn't go until it feels pain, and the very bad horse doesn't budge until the pain penetrates to the marrow of its bones.

when shunryu suzuki tells the story in his book zen mind, beginner's mind, he says that when people hear this sutra, they always want to be the best horse, but actually, when we sit, it doesn't matter whether we're the best horse or the worst horse. he goes on to say that in fact, the really terrible horse is the best practitioner.

what i have realized through practicing is that practice isn't about being the best horse or the good horse or the poor horse or the worst horse. it's about finding our own true nature and speaking from that, acting from that. whatever our quality is, that's our wealth and our beauty, that's what other people respond to.

once i had an opportunity to talk with chogyam trungpa, rinpoche, about the fact that i was not able to do my practice properly. i had just started the vajrayana practices and i was supposed to be visualizing. i couldn't visualize anything. i tried and tried but there was just nothing at all; i felt like a fraud doing the practice because it didn't feel natural to me. i was quite miserable because everybody else seemed to be having all kinds of visualizations and doing very well. he said, 'i'm always suspicious of the ones who say everything's going well. if you think that things are going well, then it's usually some kind of arrogance. if it's too easy for you, you just relax. you don't make a real effort, and therefore you never find out what it is to be fully human.' so he encouraged me by saying that as long as you have these kinds of doubts, your practice will be good. when you begin to think that everything is just perfect and feel complacent and superior to the others, watch out!

dainin katagiri roshi once told a story about his own experience of being the worst horse. when he first came to the united states from japan, he was a young monk in his late twenties. he had been a monk in japan - where everything was so precise, so clean, and so neat - for a long time. in the u.s., his students were hippies with long, unwashed hair and ragged clothes and no shoes. he didn't like them. he couldn't help it - he just couldn't stand those hippies. their style offended everything in him. he said, 'so all day i would give talks about compassion, and at night i would go home and weep and cry because i realized i had no compassion at all. because i didn't like my students, therefore i had to work much harder to develop my heart.' as suzuki roshi says in his talk, that's exactly the point: because we find ourselves to be the worst horse, we are inspired to try harder.

at gampo abbey we had a tibetan monk, lama sherap tendar, teaching us to play the tibetan musical instruments. we had forty-nine days in which to learn the music; we were also going to learn many other things, we thought, during that time. but as it turned out, for forty-nine days, twice a day, all we did was learn to play the cymbals and the drum and how they are played together. every day we would practice and practice. we would practice on our own, and then we would play for lama sherap, who would sit there with this pained little look on his face. then he would take our hands and show us how to play. then we would do it by ourselves, and he would sigh. this went on for forty-nine days. he never said that we were doing well, but he was very sweet and very gentle. finally, when it was all over and we had had our last performance, we were making toasts and remarks and lama sherap said, 'actually you were very good. you were very good right from the beginning, but i knew if i told you that you were good, you would stop trying.' he was right. he had such a gentle way of encouraging us that it didn't make us lose heart. it just made us feel that he knew the proper way to play the cymbals; he'd been playing these cymbals since he was a little boy, and we just had to keep trying. so for forty-nine days we were really worked hard.

we can work with ourselves in the same way. we don't have to be harsh with ourselves when we think, sitting here, that our meditation or our oryoki or the way we are in the world is in the category of worst horse. we could be very sympathetic with that and use it as a motivation to keep trying to develop ourselves, to find our own true nature. not only will we find our own true nature, but we'll learn about other people, because in our heart of hearts almost all of us feel that we are the worst horse. you might consider that you yourself are an arrogant person or your might consider that someone else is an arrogant person, but everybody who has ever felt even a moment of arrogance knows that arrogance is just a cover-up for really feeling that you're the worst horse, and always trying to prove otherwise.

in his talk, suzuki roshi says that meditation and the whole process of finding your own true nature is one continuous mistake, and that rather than that being a reason for depression or discouragement, it's actually the motivation. when you find yourself slumping, that's the motivation to sit up, not out of self-denigration but actually out of pride in everything that occurs to you, pride in who you are just as you are, pride in the goodness or the fairness or the worstness of yourself - however you find yourself - some sort of sense of taking pride and using it to spur you on.

the karma kagyu lineage of tibetan buddhism, in which the students of chogyam trungpa are trained, is sometimes called the 'mishap lineage,' because of the ways in which the wise and venerated teachers of this lineage 'blew it' time after time. first there was tilopa, who was a madman, completely wild. his main student was naropa. naropa was so conceptual and intellectual that it took him twelve years of being run over by a truck, of being put through all sorts of trials by his teacher, for him to begin to wake up. he was so conceptual that if somebody would tell him something, he would say, 'oh yes, but surely by that you must mean this.' he had that kind of mind. his main student was marpa, who was famous for his intensely bad temper. he used to fly into rages, beat people, and yell at them. he was also a drunk. he was notorious for being incredibly stubborn. his student was milarepa. milarepa was a murderer! rinpoche used to say that marpa became a student of the dharma because he thought he could make a lot of money by bringing texts back from india and translating them into tibetan. his student milarepa became a student because he was afraid he was going to go to hell for having murdered people - and that scared him.

milarepa's student was gampopa (after whom gampo abbey is named). because everything was easy for him, gampopa was arrogant. for instance, the night before he met gampopa for the first time, milarepa said to some of his disciples, 'oh someone who is destined to be my main student is going to come tomorrow. whoever brings him to me will be greatly benefited.' so when gampopa arrived in the town, an old lady who saw him ran out and said, 'oh, milarepa told us you were coming and that you were destined to be one of his main students, and i want my daughter to bring you to see him.' so gampopa, thinking, 'i must be really hot stuff,' went very proudly to meet milarepa, sure that he would be greeted with great honor. however, milarepa had had someone put him in a cave and wouldn't see gampopa for three weeks.

as for gampopa's main student, the first karmapa, the only thing we know about him is that he was extremely ugly. he was said to look like a monkey. also, there's one story about him and three other main disciples of gampopa who were thrown out of the monastery for getting drunk and singing and dancing and breaking the monastic rules.

we could all take heart. these are the wise ones who sit in front of us, to whom we prostrate when we do prostrations. we can prostrate to them as an example of our own wisdom mind of enlightened beings, but perhaps it's also good to prostrate to them as confused, mixed-up people with a lot of neurosis, just like ourselves. they are good examples of people who never gave up on themselves and were not afraid to be themselves, who therefore found their own genuine quality and their own true nature.

the point is that our true nature is not some ideal that we have to live up to. it's who we are right now, and that's what we can make friends with and celebrate.

the gifted child part two

quotes from the drama of the gifted child by alice miller

from chapter two: depression and grandiosity

“although the outward picture of depression is quite the opposite of that of grandiosity and has a quality that expresses the tragedy of the loss of self in a more obvious way, they have many points in common:

-a false self that has led to the loss of the potential true self

-a fragility of self-esteem because of a lack of confidence in one’s own feelings and wishes

-perfectionism

-denial of rejected feelings

-a preponderance of exploitative relationships

-an enormous fear of loss of love and therefore a great readiness to conform

-split-off aggression

-oversensitivity

-a readiness to feel shame and guilt

-restlessness”

“depression consists of a denial of one’s own emotional reactions. this denial begins in the service of an absolutely essential adaptation during childhood and indicates a very early injury. there are many children who have not been free, right up from the beginning, to experience the very simplest of feelings, such as discontent, anger, rage, pain, even hunger – and, of course, enjoyment of their own bodies.”

“Beatrice was not physically mistreated in her youth. she did, however, have to learn as a small infant how to make her mother happy by not crying, by not being hungry – by not having any needs at all.”

“today I would say: only a child needs (and absolutely needs) unconditional love. we must give it to the children who are entrusted to us. we must be able to love and accept them whatever they do, not only when they smile charmingly but also when they cry and scream. but to pretend to love an adult unconditionally – that is, independently of his or her deeds – would mean that we should love even a cold serial murderer or a notorious liar if only he joins our group. can we do that? should we even try? why? for whose sake? if we say that we love an adult unconditionally, we only prove our blindness and/or dishonesty. nothing else.”

“as adults we don’t need unconditional love, not even from our therapists. this is a childhood need, one that can never be fulfilled later in life, and we are playing with illusions if we have never mourned this lost opportunity. but there are other things we can get from good therapists: reliability, honesty, respect, trust, empathy, understanding, and an ability to clarify their emotions so that they need not bother us with them.”

“although ann could see and understand what had happened to her, she was able to feel the rage and indignation only toward her partners, not toward her father. as she wrote in her letter, she still ‘loved’ and respected him.”

“everyone probably knows about depressive moods from personal experience since they may be expressed as well as hidden by psychosomatic suffering. it is easy to notice, if we pay attention, that they hit almost with regularity – whenever we suppress an impulse or an unwanted emotion. then, suddenly, a depressive mood will stifle all spontaneity. if an adult, for example, cannot experience grief when they lose somebody dear to them but tries to distract themselves from their sadness, or if they suppress* and hide from themselves their indignation over an idealized friend’s behavior out of fear of losing their friendship, they must reckon with the probability of depression (unless their grandiose defense is constantly at their disposal). [*suppression is a conscious act, in contrast to repression.]”

“this ability to grieve – that is, to give up the illusion of their ‘happy’ childhood, to feel and recognize the full extent of the hurt they have endured – can restore the depressive’s vitality and creativity and free the grandiose person from the exertions of and dependence on their Sisyphean task. if a person is able, during this long process, to experience the reality that they were never loved as a child for what they were but was instead needed and exploited for their achievements, success, and good qualities – and that they sacrificed their childhood for this form of love – they will be very deeply shaken, but one day they will feel the desire to end these efforts. they will discover in themselves a need to live according to their true self and no longer be forced to earn ‘love’ that always leaves them empty-handed, since it is given to their false self – something they have begun to identify and relinquish.

the true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality – the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings.”

“it is precisely their oversensitivity, shame, and self-reproach that form a continuous thread in their lives, unless they learn to understand to what these feelings actually relate. the more unrealistic such feelings are and the less they fit present reality, the more clearly they show that they are concerned with unremembered situations from the past that are still to be discovered. if the feeling that begins to arise is not experienced but reasoned away, the discovery cannot take place, and depression will triumph.”

“paula, age twenty-eight, wanted to free herself from her patriarchal family in which the mother was completely subjugated by the father. she married a submissive man and seemed to behave differently from her mother. her husband allowed her to bring her lovers into the house. she did not permit herself any feelings of jealousy or tenderness and wanted to have relations with a number of men without any emotional ties, so that she could feel as autonomous as a man. her need to be ‘progressive’ went so far that she allowed her partners to abuse and humiliate her, and she suppressed all her feelings of mortification and anger in the belief that her behavior made her modern and free from prejudice. in this way she unconsciously carried over into these relationships both her childhood obedience and her mother’s submissiveness. at times she suffered from severe depression, so she entered therapy, which enabled her to feel how much she suffered because of the passiveness of her mother, who tolerated the abusive father without the slightest opposition. confronting the pain of not having been protected by her indifferent, defensive mother eventually helped paula to stop creating her mother’s self-destructive attitude in her own relationships with men and to allow herself to love people who deserved her love.”

“the child must adapt to ensure the illusion of love, care, and kindness, but the adult does not need this illusion to survive. they can give up their amnesia and then be in a position to determine their actions with open eyes. only this path will free them from their depression. both the depressive and the grandiose person completely deny their childhood reality by living as though the availability of the parents could still be salvaged: the grandiose person through the illusion of achievement, and the depressive through their constant fear of losing ‘love.’ neither can accept the truth that this loss or absence of love has already happened in the past, and that no effort whatsoever can change this fact.”

after the end of the world

excerpt from m archive by alexis pauline gumbs

the question for the neuronationalists was how to wash out the trauma without wiping away the skills we had built around all that hurt, all that longing, all that loss. and when they figured that out. well you had no chance. but we still had to live with the consequences.

so they went in like the eternal sunshine movie, like our brains were video-game landscapes, and they hunted. they could chart the steady erosions of certain regions of our minds where we thought of you and what you had done. well not directly. the easiest thing was to find the places where the skills we had built to survive what you had done made hatch marks on our lobes. ruts, you might say. the depth of our resistance, the evidence of your erstwhile irrevocable presence.

during the time when we win no matter what. this is your last survival. how winning how we win still hurts from you.



it was no longer a matter of sex.

this new molecular relationship made distance and intimacy words
that tangled.
or to say it another way.
we were all close.
beyond close.

not knowing where one person ended and another began was no longer love-song advertising or evidence of codependency.

it was a real issue. so then identity (x = x) was no longer technically true. the previous energetic reality of how we are not whole and change each other and are not ourselves except in the most limited version of our imagination became impossible to ignore on the physical level.

so love was not about merging or finding exceptional moments when we could die enough to shrug off the pain of individuality. it was just a certain sound, a vibration, and when we achieved it, it was really all of us.

the gifted child

quotes from the drama of the gifted child by alice miller

from chapter one

“in my work with people in the helping professions, I have often been confronted with a childhood history that seems significant to me.

-there was a mother* who at the core was emotionally insecure and who depended for her equilibrium on her child’s behaving in a particular way. this mother was able to hide her insecurity from her child and from everyone else behind a hard, authoritarian, even totalitarian façade. [by ‘mother’ I here refer to the person closest to the child during the first years of life. this need not be the biological mother, or even a woman. in the course of the past twenty years, many fathers have assumed this mothering function.]

-this child had an amazing ability to perceive and respond intuitively, that is, unconsciously, to the need of the mother, or of both parents, for the child to take on the role that had been assigned to them.

-this role secured ‘love’ for the child – that is, their parents’ exploitation. they could sense they were needed, and this need guaranteed them a measure of existential security.

this ability is then extended and perfected. later, these children not only become mothers (confidantes, comforters, advisers, supporters) of their own mothers but also take over at least part of the responsibility for their siblings and eventually develop a special sensitivity to unconscious signals manifesting the needs of others. no wonder they often choose to become psychotherapists later on. who else, without this previous history, would muster sufficient interest to spend the whole day trying to discover what is happening in other people’s unconscious? but the development and perfecting of this sensitivity – which once assisted the child in surviving and now enables the adult to pursue their strange profession – also contain the roots of their emotional disturbance: as long as the therapist is not aware of their repression, it can compel them to use their patients, who depend on them, to meet their unmet needs with substitutes.”

“one such consequence is the person’s inability to experience consciously certain feelings of their own (such as jealousy, envy, anger, loneliness, helplessness, or anxiety), either in childhood or later in adulthood. this is all the more tragic in that we are concerned here with lively people who are often capable of deep feelings. it is most noticeable when they describe childhood experiences that were free of pain and fear. they could enjoy their encounters with nature, for example, without hurting the mother or making her feel insecure, reducing her power, or endangering her equilibrium. . . these people have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can experience their feelings only when there is someone there who accepts them fully, understands them, and supports them. if that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother’s love or the love of their substitute in order to feel, then they will repress their emotions. the child cannot even experience them secretly, ‘just for themselves’; they will fail to experience them at all. but they will nevertheless stay in the body, in the cells, stored up as information that can be triggered by a later event.”

“when a woman has had to repress all these needs in relation to her own mother, they will arise from the depth of her unconscious and seek gratification through her own child, however well-educated she may be. the child feels this clearly and very soon forgoes the expression of their own distress. later, when these feelings of being deserted begin to emerge in the therapy of the adult, they are accompanied by intense pain and despair. it is clear that these people could not have survived so much pain as children.”

“several mechanisms can be recognized in the defense against early feelings of abandonment. in addition to simple denial, we usually find the exhausting struggle to fulfill the old, repressed, and by now often perverted needs with the help of symbols (cults, sexual perversions, groups of all kinds, alcohol, or drugs). intellectualization is very commonly encountered as well, since it is a defense mechanism of great power. it can have disastrous results, however, when the mind ignores the vital messages of the body.”

“accommodation to parental needs often (but not always) leads to the ‘as-if personality.’ this person develops in such a way that they reveal only what is expected of them and fuses so completely with what they reveal that one could scarcely guess how much more there is to them behind this false self. they cannot develop and differentiate their true self, because they are unable to live it. understandably, this person will complain of a sense of emptiness, futility, or homelessness, for the emptiness is real. . . the integrity of the child was injured when all that was alive and spontaneous in them was cut off. in childhood, these patients have often had dreams in which they experienced themselves as at least partly dead.”

“the difficulties inherent in experiencing and developing one’s own emotions lead to mutual dependency, which preserves individuation. both parties have an interest in bond permanence. the parents have found in their child’s false self the confirmation they were looking for, a substitute for their own missing security; the child, who has been unable to build up their own sense of security, is first consciously and then unconsciously dependent on their parents. the child cannot rely on their own emotions, has not come to experience them through trial and error, has no sense of their own real needs, and is alienated from themselves to the highest degree. under these circumstances they cannot separate from their parents, and even as an adult they are still dependent on affirmation from their partner, from groups, and especially from their own children. . . unless the heir casts off their ‘inheritance’ by becoming fully conscious of their true past, and thus of their true nature, loneliness in the parental home will necessarily be followed by an adulthood lived in emotional isolation.”

putting makeup on space

quotes from living beautifully with uncertainty and change by pema chodron

"it's not impermanence per se, or even knowing we're going to die, that is the cause of our suffering, the buddha taught. rather, it's our resistance to the fundamental uncertainty of our situation. our discomfort arises from all of our efforts to put ground under our feet, to realize our dream of constant okayness. when we resist change, it's called suffering. but when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that's called enlightenment, or awakening to our true nature, to our fundamental goodness. another word for this is freedom -- freedom from struggling against the fundamental ambiguity of being human."

"what it means to be in denial: you can't hear anything that doesn't fit into your fixed identity. even something positive -- you're kind or you did a great job or you have a wonderful sense of humor -- is filtered through this fixed identity. you can't take it in unless it's already part of your self-definition.

in buddhism we call the notion of a fixed identity 'ego clinging.' it's how we try to put solid ground under our feet in an ever-shifting world. meditation practice starts to erode that fixed identity. as you sit, you begin to see yourself with more clarity, and you notice how attached you are to your opinions about yourself. often the first blow to the fixed identity is precipitated by a crisis. when things start to fall apart in your life, as they did in mine when i came to gampo abbey, you feel as if your whole world is crumbling. but actually it's your fixed identity that's crumbling."

"in my stroke of insight, the brain scientist jill bolte taylor's book about her recovery from a massive stroke, she explains the physiological mechanism behind emotion: an emotion like anger that's an automatic response lasts just ninety seconds from the moment it's triggered until it runs its course. one and a half minutes, that's all. when it lasts any longer, which it usually does, it's because we've chosen to rekindle it."

"chogyam trungpa had an image for our tendency to obscure the openness of our being; he called it 'putting makeup on space.' we can aspire to experience the space without the makeup. staying open and receptive for even a short time starts to interrupt our deep-seated resistance to feeling what we're feeling, to staying present where we are."

"as you're meditating, memories of something distressing that happened in the past may bubble up. it can be quite freeing to see all of that. but if you revisit the memory of something distressing over and over, rehashing what happened and obsessing on the story line, it becomes part of your static identity. you're just strengthening your propensity to experience yourself as the one who was wronged, as the victim. you're strengthening a preexisting propensity to blame others - your parents and anyone else - as the ones who wronged you."

"all of our habitual patterns are efforts to maintain a predictable identity: 'i am an angry person'; 'i am a friendly person'; 'i am a lowly worm.' we can work with these mental habits when they arise and stay with our experience not just when we're meditating but also in daily life."

"the three commitments are three levels of working with groundlessness. underlying them all is the basic instruction to make friends with yourself -- to be honest to yourself and kind. this begins with the willingness to stay present whenever you experience uneasiness. as these feelings arise, rather than running away, you lean into them. instead of trying to get rid of thoughts and feelings, you become curious about them. as you become accustomed to experiencing sensation free of interpretation, you will come to understand that contacting the fundamental ambiguity of being human provides a precious opportunity - the opportunity to be with life just as it is, the opportunity to experience the freedom of life without a story line."

folie a deux

from mr. fox by helen oyeyemi

"he says's he's fine and he acts as if he's fine, but he's in a bad way. i don't blame him for not being able to tell; he doesn't do sane work for a living. and i have been sleeping with him, eating with him; we took a bath together last tuesday -- so i'm in a bad way, too. i've seen and heard a woman he made up. i know what this is called - a folie a deux, a delusion shared by two or more people who live together. it was such a strong delusion, though. like being on some kind of drug. nobody warned me how easily my brain could warp a sunny morning so fast that i couldn't find the beginning of the interlude. one moment i was alone, the next. . . i was still alone, i guess, and making the air talk to me."

///////////

"i came to him without substance, and six years later i'm still the same. sometimes i say terrible things to him because i don't want him to know i'm sad; sometimes i fly off the handle to hide the fact that i don't know what i'm talking about. and other times - too often, maybe - i don't dare have an opinion in case it upsets anyone. i'm too stupid for him.

have you ever heard a note in someone's voice that said 'this is the end'? i heard it in the next words he said to me, and i stopped listening. have you ever wanted to try and cross an ending with some colossal revelation - 'there's something i never told you. i'm a princess from the kingdom atop mount qaf,' for example - 'my family live in eternal youth, and if you abide with me, you will, too. i kept this secret from you to see if you would cherish me for who i am.' have you ever wished, wished, wished. . .

my head got so heavy, it sank down onto my chest. so say whatever it is you think you've got to say, st. john. that you're not in love with me. that you need to be alone. say it. i'm not going to like it, no, i won't like it at all. but i'll be all right.

i told him that i loved him. i've never, ever, said that to him before, because i just didn't know how he'd take it. i love you. i mouthed the words because there didn't seem any point in interrupting him just then. i don't know if he saw. i hope he did, because i don't believe it's the sort of thing a woman can tell a man more than, say, three times in their life together. it's only really appropriate in the event of a life-threatening emergency, 'i love you.' it means a different thing to us than it means to them. god knows what it means to them. god knows what it means to us.

'. . . start again, d. let's start all over again,' my husband said. he rested his hands on my shoulders for a moment, then took them away. 'can we?'

start again? nice in theory, but what was he really trying to say? how far back would we have to fall? all that undoing. . ."

some basics

quotes from taming the tiger within by thich nhat hanh

"the energy of mindfulness contains the energy of concentration as well as the energy of insight. concentration helps you to focus on just one thing. with concentration, the energy of looking becomes more powerful. because of that, it can make a breakthrough that is insight. insight always has the power of liberating you."

"in taking good care of yourself, you take good care of your beloved one. self-love is the foundation for your capacity to love the other person."

"when you make another suffer, he or she will try to find relief by making you suffer more."

"punishing the other person is self-punishment. that is true in every circumstance."

"in true love, there is no pride. you cannot pretend that you don't suffer. you cannot pretend that you are not angry. this kind of denial is based on pride. 'angry? me? why should i be angry? i'm okay.' but, in fact, you are not okay. you are in hell. anger is burning you up, and you must tell your partner, your son, your daughter."

"when you understand the situation of the other person, when you understand the nature of suffering, anger will vanish, because it is transformed into compassion."

"when you are carried away with your worries, fears, cravings, anger, and desire, you run away from yourself and you lose yourself."

"when we understand that we cannot be destroyed, we are liberated from fear."

"true love is made of understanding -- understanding the other person, the object of your love; understanding their suffering, their difficulties, and their true aspiration. out of understanding there will be kindness, there will be compassion, there will be an offering of joy."

quotes from how to fight by thich nhat hanh

"we need to reconcile within ourselves before we can reconcile with someone else. we recognize and embrace all our feelings and emotions. we see that the cause of our suffering lies within us and not in the other person -- they have only touched the seed of suffering already inside us. understanding this, we can see our own part in the difficulty that has arisen, and compassion can be born.

when you have reconciled and are at peace with yourself, it is much easier to go to the other person and say, 'i know you have suffered a lot. i know i have also contributed to your suffering. i haven't been very mindful or skillful. i didn't understand your suffering and difficulties enough. i may have said or done things that have made the situation worse. i'm sorry. i didn't mean to hurt you. your happiness, your safety, your freedom, and your joy are important to me. because i have been caught in my own suffering, i have been unskillful at times. i may have given you the impression that i wanted to make you suffer. that's not true. so please tell me about your suffering so that i will not make the same kind of mistake again. i know that your happiness is crucial to my own happiness. i need your help. tell me about your fear and despair, your difficulties, your dreams, so that i can understand you better.'"

"sometimes we receive a large amount of praise. we do need to be praised from time to time, but we want to be careful not to become too proud because of the praise. so you say to yourself or aloud: 'you are partly right.' it means: 'yes, i do have that gift but it's not just mine; it has been handed down to me by my ancestors. and everyone has talents and gifts of some kind.'

sometimes we are criticized. we do need a certain amount of feedback in order to help us progress, but it's important not to be caught in the criticism and become paralyzed by it. you can say the mantra to yourself or out loud, 'you are partly right.' it means: 'yes, i do manifest that unfortunate characteristic sometimes, but i am much more than that. this is something that i have received from my ancestors and i am in the process of transforming it, for their sake and for mine.'"

naked if i want to

by casey kwang, from copia

listening to cat power
on repeat at 4 a.m.
curled up
in the dark
on the floor
like a starfish
drunk with loneliness
& dripping from the rain.




///////////////////

.

by layli long soldier from whereas

a poem about writing, bo-ring. says my contemporary artistic companionate, a muscular ob-
servation and i agree. a poem about writing poems, how. boring as it is, it asks me to do. i
couldn't any other thing tonight. i sat i wrote about writing. i write i sit about writing. i'm
about to write about it, writing and sitting. i will write and sit with my writing.

defamiliarize your writing then, somebody says okay i'm not sitting then i say to somebody.
i'm chewing at a funeral and. i'm nibbling my pulp knuckles. i'm watching a man with a stain
on his. pants always wrinkle in this heat, gnats and humidity. i walk to the front pew to make
a lewd, joke. i regard laughter from the man in the. pants are always honest i mean really heavy
at a summer burial. yet he doesn't ever cry, the stained man, why. when i observe nothing (un-
usual) i do nothing (unusual) in response. new or novel. real lit relics on these occasions. in
ritual: nobody's learning, true. and to lewd is dumb, otherwise. like the way i put up my dukes
when i observe the cowboy kneel. he's praying he's asking. he doesn't see me, my gesture's fu-
tile. what am i doing here, writing. what am i doing here righting the page at funerals.

sublime meanings

from ghachar ghochar by vivek shanbhag

"had vincent taken on a grand name and grown a long shimmering beard, he'd have thousands of people falling at his feet. how different are the words of those exalted beings from his? words, after all, are nothing by themselves. they burst into meaning only in the minds they've entered. if you think about it, even those held to be gods incarnate seldom speak of profound things. it's their day-to-day utterances that are imbued with sublime meanings. and who's to say the gods cannot take the form of a waiter when they choose to visit us?"

failure

quotes from fail fail again fail better by pema chodron

"sometimes you experience failed expectations as heartbreak and disappointment, and sometimes you feel rage. failure or things not working out as you hoped doesn't feel good; that's for sure. but at that time, maybe instead of doing the habitual thing of labeling yourself as a 'failure' or a 'loser' or thinking there is something wrong with you, you could get curious about what is going on. . . getting curious about outer circumstances and how they are impacting you, noticing what words come out and what your internal discussion is, this is the key.

if there is a lot of 'i am bad; i am terrible,' somehow just notice that and maybe soften up a bit. instead say, 'what am i feeling here? maybe what is happening here is not that i am a failure -- i am just hurting. i am just hurting.'"

"it is out of this space that real genuine communication with other people starts to happen, because it's a very unguarded, wide-open space where when you look out your eyes -- unless you are getting into the blaming yourself or blaming others -- you can go beyond the blame and just feel the bleedingness of it, the raw-meat quality of it.

you can't describe it, but i bet everybody knows what i am talking about. and so in that space, communication with others and all of life happens, and my experience is that it's from that space that our best part of ourselves comes out. it's in that space -- when we aren't masking ourselves or trying to make circumstances go away -- that our best qualities begin to shine.

the alternative is that out of that space of failure comes addictions of all kinds -- addictions because we are not wanting to feel it, because we want to escape, because we want to numb ourselves."

"one instruction that i give when you're in that difficult place is to notice what it is you're saying to yourself -- and if it's very self-critical, if it's very harsh, don't believe what's being said. or you can just rephrase the self-critical talk so it's more gentle and positive. in other words, you're in that place of experiencing failure and it is very difficult, and you could say, 'this is really hurting, but i haven't done anything wrong.'"

"there is something cultural that reinforces the idea that we're fundamentally bad rather than basically open, fresh, full of possibilities, whole, complete -- that we're basically good. so when you've actually done something intentional that hurt someone, usually what i recommend... is something like the fourth step of AA. in the fourth step, you bring forth a kind of fearless inventory of all the things that you regret having done. the idea is not to induce guilt and shame, nor is it to turn your awareness away from whatever has actually happened. it has to do with being open and honest and true about the mistakes you've made.

once you've brought them forth, you allow yourself to feel the regret, and this becomes the method for letting the regrets go, letting them pass away. . . let the regret pierce you to the heart, and then you can lay it aside so that you don't have to carry it with you for the rest of your life as a package."

"allowing yourself to get dragged down by failure builds up this huge sense of 'me.' 'me' as a monolithic solid, instead of a fluid, dynamic, changing process. it becomes chiseled in stone that 'i am bad; i am a failure,' and then you sort of get addicted to the feeling of wallowing in self-pity, wallowing in guilt and shame. and who does that help? nobody! it doesn't help you, and it's poisonous for everybody around you. so it's a futile strategy to let failure drag you down, which we employ rather easily."

"chogyam trugpa rinpoche talked a lot about fear as being a positive thing. so again, this is having an attitude that allows you to become curious about exploring something rather than just committing for life to running away from the unknown because it's so devastating or challenging.

trungpa says that fear, unlike anger or jealousy or craving, is a very open and fluid state. it doesn't necessarily have to be narrowed down into something solid. . . he says loneliness is kind of the same, actually."

"my definition of bravery in that case -- or courage -- would be the willingness to stay open to what you're feeling in the moment, the willingness to feel what you're feeling. we talk in the shambhala tradition a lot about the warrior and the definition of the warrior. the warrior is one who cultivates courage and is willing to feel what he or she feels. to be completely human and be okay with being completely human, and the willingness to feel it."

"when i get hooked in any way or my feelings have been hurt or i feel my tendency to get obsessive, which is one of my qualities, or i want to really tell someone off, any of those things where there's that strong pull to go in an old, habitual, small-minded kind of direction, then the courage is to not heed the call of the sirens in that particular moment, but to just stay present and feel what i'm feeling.

every time i do it, i think, 'oh my gosh, how can i be asking people to do this? because this is actually very difficult.' it's humbling every single time, and it fills me with awe when i realize that other people are actually doing this, because it does take a lot of courage and bravery."

my cock weighs a ton

excerpt from 10:04 by ben lerner:

we talked about the latest NYPD brutality for a while and then he said, you know how when you're a kid and you go to the bathroom with other boys, i mean you're standing side by side pissing -- i was a little worried where the protester was going with this -- the big thing was looking at the other kid's dick out of curiosity, and as you got older that became more and more of an offense, could get you called a faggot or whatever, and so that stops at some point, unless you're cruising maybe, i don't know. but then sometime in middle school or maybe for some people it's high school there is this kind of performance that starts when you take your dick out of your pants to piss in a urinal, you start bending at the knees just a little, or otherwise making a show as if you were lifting some kind of weight.

i was laughing because i did know what the protester was talking about, knew exactly, but had somehow never noted the widespread practice consciously. countless instances flashed before my eyes -- in locker rooms in kansas as a kid, more recently in airports all over the country and in large restaurants, two of the only institutions where i now urinated in company, because at school i always entered a stall; many men, maybe the majority, would act, as they took themselves in hand, as if they were grasping, at the minimum, a heavy pipe, and others as though they were preparing themselves for a feat of superhuman strength, often then making a show of supporting their back with the free arm if they held their penis with one hand, or grasping their member with two hands, as if either of those postures were required by the weight. i tried to recall if i'd seen this in other countries. regardless, we were both laughing by this point, laughing as hard as i'd laughed in a long time, because now the protester stood and started miming perfectly there in my dining room the midwestern man's premicturition ritual display.

i saw my dad do it and my coaches and my friends and i did it basically without knowing it, had done it all my life, the protester said, catching his breath, and then the other day we were in the mcdonald's bathroom by the park where the manager lets us go and my friend chris was just like, when are you going to quit acting like it weighs so much, man? do you need help with that or something? and that was the first time i even realized i was doing it, realized that all these men were always doing it, and i just stopped. i mean, i know it's not the point of occupy, but i'm telling you that now i don't size men up in terms of fights all the time and i don't act like my cock weighs a ton and it does make me see the world a little differently, you know?

midsummer

by william bronk
(from ben lerner's 10:04)

a green world, a scene of green deep
with light blues, the greens made deep
by those blues. one thinks how
in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen
(through a window, maybe) far behind the serene
sitter's face, the serene pose, as though
in some impossible mirror, face to back,
human serenity gazed at a green world
which gazed at this face.
                                        and see now,
here is that place, those greens
are here, deep with those blues. the air
we breathe is freshly sweet, and warm, as though
with berries. we are here. we are here.
set this down too, as much
as if an atrocity had happened and been seen.
the earth is beautiful beyond all change.

the weather in space

by tracy k smith from life on mars

is god being or pure force? the wind

or what commands it? when our lives slow

and we can hold all that we love, it sprawls

in our laps like a gangly doll. when the storm

kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing

after all we're certain to lose, so alive --

faces radiant with panic.

outimacy

from sidewalks by valeria luiselli

"the nostalgia isn't always a nostalgia for a past. there are things that produce nostalgia in advance -- spaces that we know to be lost as soon as we find them -- places in which we know ourselves to be happier than we will ever be afterwards. in such situations, the soul twists itself around, as if in a voluntary simulacrum of seeing its present in retrospect. like an eye watching itself look from the perspective of a later time, it sees that remote present and yearns for it."

"cities, like our bodies, like language, are destruction under construction."

"we live in a world in which there has been a complete inversion of the status of the street as the public space and the house as the ultimate private space. in this redistribution of the private-public categories it's difficult to know when we're really inside and when out. i say this without the least hint of nostalgia. in the street we can no longer commune with solitude, and even in our own homes, we can't be with ourselves without the windows of computers claiming our already deficient attention or the neighbors installing themselves in the backyard of our brains"

"conversely, intelligent people who grow up thinking one thing and, on reaching a certain age, realize that everything they believed is open to doubt -- stark, brutal doubt -- can truly enjoy a profound crisis that, in the worst cases, leads them to know themselves a little better. as t.s. eliot contends, the spirit of belief is impossible to separate from the demon of doubt."

a mirror or its opposite

excerpts from outline by rachel cusk

'what you have described,' she said, 'is complete subjection. the idea that you should love your enemies is patently ridiculous. it is entirely a religious proposition. to say that you love what you hate and what hates you is the same as admitting you have been defeated, that you accept your oppression and are just trying to make yourself feel better about it. and saying you love him is the same as saying you don't want to know what he really thinks of you. if you talked to him,' she said, 'you would find out.'

. . .

'but to him this is a game, a fantasy,' elena said. 'men like to play this game. and they actually fear your honesty, because then the game is spoiled. by not being honest with a man you allow him to continue his game, to live in his fantasy.'

. . .

'it's true,' elena said, 'that my own need for provocation is something other people seem to find very difficult to understand. yet to me it has always made perfect sense. but i do admit that it has brought nearly all of my relationships to an end, because it is inevitable that that end is also -- as you say, by the same logic -- something i will feel driven to provoke. if the relationship is going to end, in other words, i want to know it and confront it as soon as possible. sometimes,' she said, 'this process is so quick that the relationship is over almost as soon as it has begun. very often i have felt that my relationships have had no story, and the reason is because i have jumped ahead of myself, the way i used to turn the pages of a book to find out what happens in the final chapter. i want to know everything straight away. i want to know the content without living through the time span.'

the person she was involved with now, she said -- a man named konstantin -- had given her for the first time in her life a cause to fear these tendencies in herself, for the reason that -- unlike, if she was to be honest, any other man of her experience -- she judged him to be her equal. he was intelligent, handsome, amusing, an intellectual: she liked being beside him, liked the reflection of herself he gave her. and he was a man in possession of his own morality and attitudes, so that she felt -- for the first time, as she had said -- a kind of invisible boundary around him, a line it was clear, though no one ever said as much, she ought not to cross. that line, that boundary, was something she had never encountered so palpably in any other man, men whose defences were usually cobbled together out of fantasies and deceptions that no one -- themselves least of all -- would blame her for wanting to break through. and so not only did she feel a sense of prohibition around konstantin, a sense that he would regard her raiding him for his truth much as he would have regarded her breaking into his house and stealing his things, she had actually become frightened of the very thing she loved him for, his equality with herself.

*****

he was describing, in other words, what she herself was not: in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. this anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

surreal cesaire

quotes from discourse on colonialism by aime cesaire

from intro by robin d.g. kelley:

“in the finest hegelian fashion, cesaire demonstrates how colonialism works to ‘decivilize’ the colonizer: torture, violence, race hatred, and immorality constitute a dead weight on the so-called civilized, pulling the master class deeper and deeper into the abyss of barbarism.”

“europe is also dependent. anticipating fanon’s famous proposition that ‘europe is literally the creation of the third world,’ cesaire reveals, over and over again, that the colonizers’ sense of superiority, their sense of mission as the world’s civilizers, depends on turning the Other into a barbarian.”

from 'murderous humanitarianism' by rene crevel et al: 

“we surrealists pronounced ourselves in favor of changing the imperialist war, in its chronic and colonial form, into a civil war. thus we placed our energies at the disposal of the revolution, of the proletariat and its struggles, and defined our attitude towards the colonial problem, and hence towards the color question.”

“cesaire provocatively points out that europeans tolerated ‘nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-european peoples; that they have cultivated that nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of western, christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.’ so the real crime of fascism was the application to white people of colonial procedures ‘which until then had been reserved exclusively for the arabs of algeria, the ‘coolies’ of india, and the ‘niggers’ of africa.’

///book///

“what am i driving at? at this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization – and therefore force – is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its hitler, i mean its punishment.”

“colonization, i repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.”

“security? culture? the rule of law? in the meantime, i look around and wherever there are colonizers and colonized face to face, i see force, brutality, cruelty, sadism, conflict, and, in a parody of education, the hasty manufacture of a few thousand subordinate functionaries, ‘boys,’ artisans, office clerks, and interpreters necessary for the smooth operation of business.

i spoke of contact.

between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses.”

“they talk to me about local tyrants brought to reason; but i note that in general the old tyrants get on very well with the new ones, and that there has been established between them, to the detriment of the people, a circuit of mutual services and complicity.”

“and sweep out all the obscurers, all the inventors of subterfuges, the charlatans and tricksters, the dealers in gobbledygook. and do not seek to know whether personally these gentleman are in good or bad faith, whether personally they have good or bad intentions. whether personally  - that is, in the private conscience of peter or paul – they are or are not colonialists, because the essential thing is that their highly problematical subjective good faith is entirely irrelevant to the objective social implications of the evil work they perform as watchdogs of colonialism.”

“’it is not by losing itself in the human universe, with its blood and its spirit, that france will be universal, it is by remaining itself.’ that is what the french bourgeoisie has come to, five years after the defeat of hitler! and it is precisely in that that its historic punishment lies: to be condemned, returning to it as though driven by a vice, to chew over hitler’s vomit.”

an impermissible and secret weakness

excerpt from the emperor’s tomb by joseph roth

for a long time I fought, vainly, against this love, not so much because I felt myself endangered by it, but because I feared the unspoken scorn of my skeptical friends. in those days, just before the great war, there prevailed a disdainful pride, an overweaning self-identification with ‘decadence’, so-called, with a half-assumed, over-acted weariness and unfounded boredom. in this atmosphere there was hardly room for sentiment. as for passion, that was in the worst of taste. my friends had small unimportant liaisons with women whom they would put aside, and indeed sometimes lend out, like overcoats; women whom one forgot, like umbrellas, or left behind on purpose like heavy parcels, for which one does not trouble to look for fear that they might be brought back. the circle in which I moved considered love an aberration, engagement a form of apoplexy, marriage an incurable disease. we were young. we regarded marriage, indeed, as an inescapable part of life, just as we recognized that in twenty or thirty years arterio-sclerosis must inevitably set in. I could have found many opportunities to be alone with the girl, although in those days it was taken for granted that a young lady could not spend more than an hour alone with a young gentleman without an acceptable excuse. I took advantage of only a few of these opportunities. as I said, to have taken them all would have shamed me in the eyes of my friends. indeed, I was at pains to ensure that nothing of my feelings was observed and I often used to worry that one or other of my circle might well know something of the matter, that I might already have betrayed myself in one way or another. when, on occasion, I joined my friends unexpectedly I would assume from their sudden silence that, just before my arrival, they had been discussing my love for elizabeth kovacs. I would be put out, as if I had been caught out doing something wrong, or as if some impermissible and secret weakness had been discovered in me. during the few hours, however, which I spent alone with elizabeth I seemed to sense the lack of meaning and, indeed, of responsibility in my friends’ scorn, skepticism and arrogant ‘decadence’. yet at the same time I suffered from a kind of nagging conscience at having betrayed their sacred principles. I therefore led, in a certain sense, a double life, and I found that it did not agree with me at all.

love plots

from desire/love by lauren berlant

"the institutions and ideologies of romantic/familial love declare woman/women to be the arbiters, sources, managers, agents, and victims of intimacy: the love plots that saturate the public sphere are central vehicles for reproducing normative or 'generic' femininity."

"these dramas are always formed in relation to a fantasy that desire, in the form of love, will make life simpler, not crazier."

"love plots are marked by a longing for love to have the power to make the loved one transparent, and therefore a safe site on which to place one's own desire without fear of its usual unsettling effects."

"a love plot would, then, represent a desire for a life of unconflictedness, where the aggression inherent in intimacy is not lived as violence and submission to the discipline of institutional propriety  or as the disavowals of true love, but as something less congealed into an identity or a promise, perhaps a mix of curiosity, attachment, and passion. but as long as the normative narrative and institutionalized forms of sexual life organize identity for people, these longings mainly get lived as a desire for love to obliterate the wildness of the unconscious, confirm the futurity of a known self, and dissolve the enigmas that mark one's lovers."

"sharon thompson and others argue that there is effectively no difference between pornographic representations of sex and romance conventions. both of these are said to involve the overcoming of people by desires, and both fantasize scenes of sexuality using realist modes of representation. it has been suggested that women use romantic fantasy to experience the rush of these extremes the way men tend to use pornography, and that fantasizing about intensified feeling can be a way of imagining the thrill of sexual or political control or its loss, or, conversely, a way of overwhelming one's sexual ambivalence or insecurity with a frenzy of representation."

"advice columns, self-help pedagogy, didactic short stories, moral exhortations, autobiographies, and case studies have popularized psychoanalysis, muted its discussions of the pervasiveness of perversion, and sought to help people, especially women, adjust their desires and their self-relations to the norms and forms of everyday life. . . generally this ideology is addressed to women, who are deemed responsible for maintaining the emotional comfort of everyone in their sphere."

"what might it do to people to reveal to themselves and each other that their particular desires are unbearable in their contradictions, unknown in their potential contours, and yet demand reliable and confirming recognitions? . . . what does it mean that, unreliable in desire, we nonetheless demand the other to be perfectly attuned to what's out of tune?"

euphemisms and metaphors

excerpt from the summer book by tove jansson

'how are your legs?' verner asked.

'bad,' said grandmother heartily. 'but sometimes they seem to work all right.' and she asked him what he was doing these days.

'oh, a little of everything.' he was still offended. suddenly he burst out, 'and now backmansson is gone.'

'where did he go?'

'he is no longer among us,' verner explained angrily.

'oh, you mean he's dead,' said grandmother. she started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. it was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. people were either too young or too old, or else they didn't have time.

now he was talking about someone else who was gone, and about the clerk at the store, who was so unfriendly. they were building such ugly houses everywhere, and people went ashore on other people's land without so much as a by-your-leave, but of course there had to be progress.

'oh, stuff and nonsense,' grandmother said. she stopped and turned to face him. 'just because more and more people do the same dumb things, that's nothing to make such a fuss about. progress is another thing entirely, you know that. changes. big changes.'

'my dear,' said verner quickly, 'i know what you're going to say. forgive me for interrupting, but you're about to ask me if i never read the papers.'

'not at all!' grandmother exclaimed, very much hurt. 'all i'm asking you is, don't you ever get curious? or upset? or simply terrified?'

'no, i really don't,' verner replied frankly. 'though i guess i've had my share of upset.' his eyes were troubled. 'you're so hard to please. why do you use such harsh words? i was only telling you the news.'

they walked by the potato patch and came down to the meadow by the shore. 'that's a real poplar,' said grandmother, to change the subject. 'it's taking root, look there. a friend of ours brought some genuine swan droppings from lapland, and it liked them.'

'taking root,' verner repeated. he was silent for a moment and then went on. 'it must be a great comfort to you to live with your granddaughter.'

'stop that,' grandmother said. 'stop talking in symbols, it's old-fashioned. i talk about taking root and right away you're into my grandchildren. why do you use so many euphemisms and metaphors? are you afraid?'

'my dear old friend,' said verner, greatly distressed.

'i'm sorry,' grandmother said. 'it's really a kind of politeness; i'm trying to show you i take you very seriously.'

'it is clearly an effort,' said verner gently. 'you should be a little more careful with your compliments.'

'you're right,' grandmother said.

they walked on toward the point in peaceful silence. finally, verner said, 'years ago you never talked about horsepower and fertilizer.'

'i didn't realize they were interesting. common-place things can be fascinating.'

'but yourself, personal things -- you don't talk about that,' verner observed.

'maybe not about the things that matter most,' grandmother said. she stopped to think. 'in any case, less than i used to. i suppose i've already said most of it by this time. and i realized that it wasn't worth it. or that i didn't have the right to say it.'

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.