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.”