inadequate

 from erasure by percival everett (152)

"i imagined that my mother discovered the letters just after father's death, when he'd asked her to burn and not read them. but he of course knew that she would read them. i found myself angry with him, a stupid enough feeling with a live person. then i wondered which was more confidence-killing: believing that you should not have felt inadequate when in fact you were, or discovering that, all along, you were actually smart enough to see things clearly, that you were correct in your fears."

sorry

 excerpts from on earth we're briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong

the most common english word spoken in the nail salon was sorry. it was the one refrain for what it meant to work in the service of beauty. again and again, i watched as manicurists, bowed over a hand or foot of a client, some young as seven, say, "i'm sorry. i'm sorry. i'm so, so sorry," when they had done nothing wrong. i have seen workers, you included, apologize dozens of times throughout a forty-five-minute manicure, hoping to gain warm traction that would lead to the ultimate goal, a tip-- only to say sorry anyway when none was given.

in the nail salon, sorry is a tool one uses to pander until the word itself becomes currency. it no longer merely apologizes, but insists, reminds: i'm here, right here, beneath you. it is the lowering of oneself so that the client feels right, superior, and charitable. in the nail salon, one's definition of sorry is deranged into a new word entirely, one that's charged and reused as both power and defacement at once. being sorry pays, being sorry even, or especially, when one has no fault, is worth every self-deprecating syllable the mouth allows. because the mouth must eat.

and yet it's not only so in the nail salon, ma. in those tobacco fields, too, we said it. "lo siento," manny would utter as he walked across mr. buford's field of vision. "lo siento," rigo whispered as he reached to place a machete back on the wall where buford sat ticking off numbers on a clipboard. "lo siento," i said to the boss after missing a day when lan had another schizophrenic attack and had shoved all her clothes into the oven, saying she had to get rid of the "evidence." "lo siento," we said when, one day, night arrived only to find the field half harvested, the tractor, its blown-out engine, sitting in the stilled dark. "lo siento, senor," each of us said as we walked past the truck with buford inside blasting hank williams and staring at his withered crop, a palm-sized photo of ronald reagan taped to the dash. how the day after, we began work not with "good morning" but with "lo siento." the phrase with its sound of a bootstep sinking, then lifted, from mud. the slick muck of it wetting our tongues as we apologized ourselves back to making our living. again and again, i write to you regretting my tongue. 

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what do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? a martyr? a weakling? no, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. yes, the period in the sentence -- it's what makes us human, ma, i swear. it lets us stop in order to keep going. 

because submission, i soon learned, was also a kind of power. 

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let me tie my shadow to your feet and call it friendship, i said to myself.

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i'm not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck -- the pieces floating, finally legible.

*******************************************************************************

later, i would learn that this was a common scene on a saigon night. city coroners, underfunded, don't always work around the clock. when someone dies in the middle of the night, they get trapped in a municipal limbo where the corpse remains inside its death. as a response, a grassroots movement was formed as a communal salve. neighbors, having learned of a sudden death, would, in under an hour, pool money and hire a troupe of drag performers for what was called "delaying sadness." 

in saigon, the sound of music and children playing this late in the night is a sign of death -- or rather, a sign of a community attempting to heal.

it's through the drag performers' explosive outfits and gestures, their overdrawn faces and voices, their tabooed trespass of gender, that this relief, through extravagant spectacle, is manifest. as much as they are useful, paid, and empowered as a vital service in a society where to be queer is till a sin, the drag queens are, for as long as the dead lie in the open, an othered performance. their presumed, reliable fraudulence is what makes their presence, to the mourners, necessary. because grief, at its worst, is unreal. and it calls for a surreal response. the queens - in this way - are unicorns.

unicorns stamping in a graveyard

common to whom

 from the introduction section (by anna della subin) in the hospital by ahmed bouanani  [published by new directions]

"in his manifesto the editor and poet adbdellatif laabi railed against the stagnation of moroccan thought and called for the total decolonization of culture and art. yet what foundation was left upon which to build a national culture? what bound moroccans together as a nation? after all, it was the colonizers, laabi wrote, who had come up with the boundaries of nations, artificial divisions that retraced the history of conquest and dismembered tribal zones. what made morocco a unity beyond a shared history of defeat? its conquerors had imposed an invented binary between 'berbers' and 'arabs,' for the french had seized upon linguistic differences to pit two imagined 'races' against one another. often, colonial administrators extended special protections to the berbers to alienate them from their arab neighbors, in a classic tactic of divide and rule." (16)

"the number fourteen conjures a conflicting way of measuring time, as the islamic fourteenth century a.h. corresponds to the twentieth century c.e. - the designation ever prompting the question, common to whom? the dueling systems of timekeeping destabilize any authority time itself might have, that 'invention of adults' which twists into absurd shapes in the eternity of a hospital ward." (24)

airport chapel of your mind

 from someday this pain will be useful to you by peter cameron [farrar, straus and giroux, 2007]

". . . what she didn't know was that the story of the woman who disappeared like that didn't make me sad, i didn't think it was tragic that she left the world without effect. i thought it was beautiful. to die like that, to disappear without a trace, to sink without disturbing the surface of the water, not even a telltale bubble rising to the surface, like sneaking out of a party so no one notices that you're gone." (175)

"and i felt it was okay to think about the lady with the parrot and not think about why i was thinking about her if i knew why i was thinking about her, and i wanted to tell dr. adler that by wanting those things to be explained she was missing something else. i thought, it's enough that i've thought that, i don't need to say it. i don't need to share it. most people think things are not real unless they are spoken, that it's the uttering of something, not the thinking of it, that legitimizes it. i suppose this is why people always want other people to say 'i love you.' i think just the opposite - that thoughts are realest when thought, that expressing them distorts or dilutes them, that it is best for them to stay in the dark climate-controlled airport chapel of your mind, that if they're released into the air and light they will be affected in a way that alters them, like film accidentally exposed." (175-176)

"she said this in a smug, pleased way that really bugged me. like because i had done something stupid in an effort to get close to somebody i deserved to be ostracized and ridiculed. it made me angry that my own mother welcomed my misfortune. i knew she thought it was probably good for me, a so-called learning experience. the problem is i don't ever learn anything from learning experiences. in fact, i make a special effort not to learn whatever it is the learning experience is supposed to teach me, because i can't think of anything drearier than being somebody whose character is formed by learning experiences."

bleak fate

 from asymmetry by lisa halliday [simon & schuster, 2018]

"the last time i saw my brother, in early 2005, he said that parents have no way of knowing when their children's memories will wake up. he also said that the oblivion of our first few years is never entirely cured. plenty of life is memorable only in flashes, if at all.

what don't you remember? i asked.

what do i remember? what do you remember of last year? of 2002? of 1994? i don't mean the headlines. we all remember milestones, jobs. the name of your freshman english teacher. your first kiss. but what did you think, from day to day? what were you conscious of? what did you say? whom did you run into, on the street or in the gym, and how did these encounters reinforce or interfere with the idea of yourself that you carry around?" (135-136)

 "and if it's violence driving up your employer's advertising revenue and you're the one reporting the violence it's hard to see how in that respect, too, you aren't one of the ones perpetuating the violence. so, no, i don't always sleep soundly at night. but it i quit, which i considered very seriously after that day, i think i'd go mad from the alternative. when i'm working, when i'm high on adrenaline, i'm not exactly in what you would call a contemplative state. but when i go home, when i go out to dinner or sit on the tube or push my trolley around waitrose with all the other punters and their meticulous lists, i start to spin out. you observe what people do with their freedom - what they don't do - and it's impossible not to judge them for it. you come to see a mostly peaceful and democratic society as being in a state of incredibly delicate suspension, suspension that requires equilibrium down to the smallest molecule, such that even the tiniest jolt, just one person neglecting its fragility with her complacency or self-absorption, could cause the whole fucking thing to collapse." (214)

"over dinner on the night of his engagement, my brother was trying to explain to his soon-to-be-in-laws about new year's resolutions. in america, he said, it's traditional for people to promise themselves they'll change aspects of their behavior in the coming year. zahra's family thought that was crazy. who are you, they asked, to think you can control your behavior in the future? well, you know, my brother replied, some things you can control. you can decide you're going to eat more vegetables. or that you're going to exercise more. or that you're going to read a little each night before you fall asleep. to which zahra's mother, an x-ray technician at the teaching hospital, replied: but how do you know you're going to be able to afford vegetables next month? or who says there won't be a curfew tomorrow, preventing you from going to the gym or running in the park after work? or who says your generator won't give out and then you'll have to read with a flashlight until the batteries die and then with a candle until that burns down, and then you won't be able to read in bed at all - you'll just have to sleep, if you can?" (222)

". . . i looked rather more like the embodiment of a line i would later read - something about the metaphysical claustrophobia and bleak fate of being always one person. a problem, i suppose, that it is entirely up to our imaginations to solve. but even someone who imagines for a living is forever bound by the ultimate constraint: she can hold her mirror up to whatever subject she chooses, at whatever angle she likes - she can ever hold it such that she herself remains outside its frame, the better to de-narcissize the view - but there's no getting around the fact that she's always the one holding the mirror. and just because you can't see yourself in a reflection doesn't mean no one can." (225)

what belongs to you

 from what belongs to you by garth greenwell

"he never chatted with one woman, she went on, he was always chatting with several of them at once. he was polite sometimes, sweet, but he could be rude, too, he was rough with some of them, it was like he was a different person with each one. it was like that for me, too, i thought as i listened to her, it's one of the things i crave in the sites i use, that i can carry on these multiple conversations, each its own window so that sometimes my screen is filled with them; and in each i have the sense of being entirely false and entirely true, like a self in a story, i suppose, or the self i inhabit when i teach, the self of authority and example. i know they're all i have, these partial selves, true and false at once, that any ideal of wholeness i long for is a sham; but i do long for it, i think i glimpse it sometimes, i even imagine i've felt it."

"making poems was a way of loving things, i had always thought, i had always thought, of preserving them, of living moments twice; or more than that, it was a way of living more fully, of bestowing on experience a richer meaning."

"love isn't just a matter of looking at someone, ,i think now, but also of looking with them, of facing what they face"

silence

from empathy by sarah schulman

"when the phone stopped ringing she perceived a peculiar silence. one of many. which one? there is a silence of perception. it wasn't that. thoughtless silence? forced silence? chosen silence? silence because you're listening. fearful silence. because the radio's broken. hesitation. when you don't say it because you don't want to hurt the other person. enraged silence. when you don't say it because it's not going to do any good. waiting. thinking. not wanting to be misunderstood. refusing to participate. self-absorption. when a loud sound is over. shame."

"'at jack's service this morning,' anna continued, as though all of this was normal, 'i realized that when i first comprehended the enormity of what was happening to my community, i only anticipated that i would lose many people. but i did not understand that those of us who remain, that is to say, those of us who will continue to lose and lose, would also lose our ability to fully mourn. i feel that i have been dehumanized by the quantity of death, and that now i can no longer fully grieve for each person."

"'my family seems so unreal to me. and when i am with them, i also am not real. i am a character in some movie and someone else wrote the script."

"she had long been the kind of person who explains herself regularly. it was part of a longstanding faith in being understood and a desire to apologize for every inadequacy. to ask forgiveness."

"only shame is the true indication of authentic camouflage."

kudos

quotes from kudos by rachel cusk

"i said that while her story suggested that human lives could be governed by the laws of narrative, and all the notions of retribution and justice that narrative lays claim to, it was in fact merely her interpretation of events that created that illusion. the couple's divorce, in other words, had nothing to do with her secret envy of them and her desire for their downfall: it was her own capacity for storytelling - which, as i had already told her, had affected me all those years ago - that made her see her own hand in what happened around her. yet the suspicion that her own desires were shaping the lives of other people, and even causing them to suffer, did not seem to lead her to feel guilt. it was an interesting idea, i said, that the narrative impulse might spring from the desire to avoid guilt, rather than from the need - as was generally assumed - to connect things together in a meaningful way; that it was a strategy calculated, in other words, to disburden ourselves of responsibility."

"'i have known many men,' sophia said, resting her slender arms on the table, whose white cloth was littered with crumpled napkins and wine stains and half-eaten pieces of bread, 'from many different parts of the world, and the men of this nation,' she said, blinking her painted eyes and smiling, 'are the sweetest but also the most childlike. behind every man is his mother,' she said, 'who made so much fuss of him he will never recover from it, and will never understand why the rest of the world doesn't make the same fuss of him, particularly the woman who has replaced his mother and who he can neither trust nor forgive for replacing her. these men like nothing better than to have a child,' she said, 'because then the whole cycle is repeated and they feel comfortable. men from other places are different,' she said, 'but in the end neither better nor worse: they are better lovers but less courteous, or they are more confident but less considerate. 'the english man,' she said, looking at me, 'is in my experience the worst, because he is neither a skilled lover nor a sweet child, and because his idea of a woman is something made of plastic not flesh. the english man is sent away from his mother, and so he wants to marry his mother and perhaps even to be his mother, and while he is usually polite and reasonable to women, as a stranger would be, he doesn't understand what they are."

the appeal of reading

from the uncommon reader by alan bennett

"'i read i think,' she said to norman, 'because one has a duty to find out what people are like,' a trite enough remark of which norman took not much notice, feeling himself under no such obligation and reading purely for pleasure, not enlightenment, though part of the pleasure was the enlightenment, he could see that. but duty did not come into it."

"the appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. all readers were equal, herself included. literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic."

a formative experience of powerlessness

from transit by rachel cusk

"he had felt for the first time that he was at home: the feeling of having unwittingly caused an irreversible change, of his failure being the force that broke new ground, was, he realised standing there, the deepest and most familiar thing he knew. by failing he created loss, and loss was the threshold to freedom: an awkward and uncomfortable threshold, but the only one he had ever been able to cross; usually, he said, because he was shoved across it as a consequence of the events that had brought him there."

"i said it seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same way that stories are said to do, through the suspension of disbelief. it wasn't, in other words, perfection that sustained them so much as the avoidance of certain realities. i was well aware, i said, that gerard had constituted one such reality at the time those events had occurred. his feelings had to be ridden roughshod over; the story couldn't be constructed otherwise. yet now, i said, when i thought about that time, these discarded elements - everything that had been denied or wilfully forgotten in the service of that narrative - were what increasingly predominated. like the objects i had left in his flat, these discarded things had changed their meanings over the years, and not always in a way that was easy to accept. my own indifference to gerard's suffering, for example, which at the time i had barely considered, had come to seem increasingly criminal to me. the things that i had jettisoned in my pursuit of a new future, now that that future had itself been jettisoned, retained a growing power of accusation, to the extent that i had come to fear that i was being punished in direct proportion to something i hadn't even managed to assess or enumerate. perhaps, i said, it is never clear what should be saved and what destroyed."

"sometimes he almost wished he had never shown her a violin in the first place, which goes to show, he said, that we examine least what has formed us the most, and instead find ourselves driven blindly to re-enact it. maybe it's only in our injuries, he said, that the future can take root."

"at first, his mother accused him of making it all up. and part of him almost believed her: the problem with being honest, he said, is that you're slow to realise that other people can lie."

"when he wrote his book, he said, what he desired was to express himself in a way that was free of shame. one source of that shame was other people's knowledge of him: yet what they knew was not the truth. the truth, he realised, was something he assiduously hid from others. when he wrote his book it was this desire to be free of shame that drove him on. he wrote it in the belief that he was addressing someone who didn't know him at all, and who therefore he didn't have to be embarrassed in front of. that person was effectively himself."

"when i went back to the sitting room i was struck by the sight of jane's jewel-coloured clothing amid the white landscape of dust sheets. she had remained very still, her knees together and her head erect, her pale fingers evenly splayed around the teacup. i found myself wondering who exactly she was: there was a sense of drama about her that seemed to invite only two responses - either to become absorbed or to walk away. yet the prospect of absorption seemed somehow arduous: i recalled her remarks about the draining nature of students and thought how often people betrayed themselves by what they noticed in others."

"what she did learn from all the books was something else, something she hadn't really been expecting, which was that the story of loneliness is much longer than the story of life. in the sense of what most people mean by living, she said. without children or partner, without meaningful family or a home, a day can last an eternity: a life without a story, a life in which there is nothing - no narrative flights, no plot developments, no immersive human dramas - to alleviate the cruelly meticulous passing of time."

"it was perfectly possible to become the prisoner of an artist's vision, i said. like love, i said, being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again."

"i had been thinking lately about evil, i went on, and was beginning to realise that it was not a product of will but of its opposite, of surrender. it represented the relinquishing of effort, the abandonment of self-discipline in the face of desire."

"that idea - of one's own life as something that had already been dictated - was strangely seductive, until you realised that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camouflaged their capacity to destroy. yet the illusion of meaning recurred, much as you tried to resist it: like childhood, i said, which we treat as an explanatory text rather than merely as a formative experience of powerlessness. for a long time, i said, i believed that it was only through absolute passivity that you could learn to see what was really there. but my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had awoken a different reality, as though i had disturbed a beast sleeping in its lair. i had started to become, in effect, angry. i had started to desire power, because what i now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what i called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.

he was watching me while i spoke, with strange-coloured eyes that reminded me of peat or earth and that now seemed strangely naked, as though by removing his glasses he had also removed the shield of adulthood. i saw that there were plates of food on the table, though i couldn't remember the waiter bringing them. he was struck, he said, by my allusion to anger: it was a biblical word and carried connotations of righteousness, but he had always believed anger to be the most mysterious and dangerous of human qualities, precisely because it had no fixed moral identity."

pessimism for mothers

from the emissary by yoko tawada

"in his youth, yoshiro had prided himself on always having an answer ready when someone asked who his favorite composer or designer was, or what kind of wine he preferred. confident in his good taste, he had poured time and money into surrounding himself with things that would show it off. now he no longer felt any need to use taste as the bricks and mortar for a structure called 'individuality.' though shoes were still important, he no longer chose them as a means of asserting his identity."

"one morning yoshiro agreed to meet an editor at a coffee shop, but by the time he'd finished making notes on the project they were to discuss he discovered it was way past the appointed time. when he reached the coffee shop and saw the editor sitting way at the back, shoulders drooping, head down, staring at the translucent skin that had formed on the surface of his milk tea, he wanted to apologize right away but couldn't get to the editor's table. for the whole coffee shop had turned into a parking lot for baby carriages. while babies slept soundly in their mobile beds, mothers talked with furrowed brows. fragments of conversation, phrases like 'recyclable resources,' or 'afraid my son might turn into a bird,' or 'putting profit before public health' floated through the air into his ears. while the women were lost in conversation their coffee grew cold in their cups, the cakes they forgot to order dried up inside glass cases, cracks forming in the icing on top. he caught sight of pessimism for mothers on the cover of a book one of the mothers held in one hand while she had the other thrust deep into her baby's carriage, making circling motions. sticking his neck out like a giraffe, yoshiro saw that the mother's hand was rubbing the head of her fidgety infant, round and round, making a tangled mess of the child's hair. was marika in another coffee shop like this one, reading and talking? having a hen party, or a bull session, was she shooting the breeze or just shooting -- what was she doing, anyway? yoshiro finished talking to his editor and left the coffee shop in a state of distraction. he then noticed that the street, too, was full of baby carriages. while yoshiro had been holed up in his study writing, the whole world had changed. all these children being born, flooding the city with baby carriages, filling the coffee shops with mothers. from beneath their cloth canopies, pacifiers protruding from their mouths like the beaks of birds, their tiny bodies making occasional ripples in their cloth swaddling, the new generation glared resentfully at yoshiro. so this was what a baby is. if he were to meet his daughter amana outside would she, too, look this strange? when the light turned green,, the white lines of the crosswalk disappeared beneath a torrent of baby carriages. there were baby carriages in front of every bookshelf in all the bookstores; in fact, yoshiro wasn't able to reach across the three baby carriages blocking his way to get the newly published paperback in praise of masturbation. still on tiptoe, he looked down into a baby's eyes, unclouded as a mirror, watching him.

not long after that, he heard the phrase 'baby carriage movement' from marika for the first time. this was a movement to encourage mothers to push their baby carriages around town every day as long as the sun was shining. . . pushing a baby carriage was the best way to tell how a town treated its pedestrians. mothers had to stop if there was no sidewalk, or too many steps. where the noise was nerve-racking, or there was too much carbon dioxide in the air, the baby would start howling. with lots of other baby carriages around a sort of domino effect kicked in until the collective howling was as loud as a siren, making passerby stop to think just how unpleasant or even dangerous this place was for human beings."

"'the whole human race is becoming feminized,' asserted some specialists, while others said, 'children who are born male turn into females, while those born female turn into males.'

in areas where culture dictated that female fetuses should be aborted, nature, enraged at humans disrupting her balance this way, had started playing various tricks. one trick was making sure that no one stayed the same sex all their lives. everyone's sex changed either once or twice, and people couldn't tell ahead of time how many times their sex would change."

"all through his childhood and youth, he'd kept his body moving, chasing after balls with his friends, yet he had almost no memory of touch, of his heart beating faster after coming into physical contact with another boy. not only other kids, even his own body had seemed to be moving on some two-dimensional plane like an anime character he could watch but never really touch. the closest thing to a sensual memory he had was of putting his hand into his catcher's mitt, that slight thrill he felt every time his skin touched leather, bringing the mitted hand up to his nose when the others weren't watching to breathe in the earthy aroma. once when a classmate called michiru had left her hand lying on top of her desk, he had touched it by mistake. he'd pulled away immediately, but the shock of feeling her warm, moist flesh stayed, carved into his memory. after that he was always aware of michiru, so much so that even when the classroom faded into black and white boredom, she alone appeared in living color. every time michiru said someone's name he was listening, he examined every letter on all her school papers, watched everything she did at recess. that single touch, apparently, had stolen the key to his heart."

the physical reality

from family life by akhil sharma

"it is also hard to remember how frugal we were. we saved the cotton that comes inside pill bottles. our mothers used it to make wicks. this frugality meant that we were sensitive to the physical reality of our world in a way most people no longer are. when my mother bought a box of matches, she had my brother sit at a table and use a razor to split the matches in half. when we had to light several things, we would use the match to set a twist of paper on fire and then walk around the apartment lighting the stove, the incense stick, the mosquito coil. this close engagement with things meant that we were conscious that the wood of a match is soft, that a bit of spit on paper slows down how it burns."

dissolving boundaries

excerpts from the story of the lost child by elena ferrante

she used that term: dissolving boundaries. it was on that occasion that she resorted to it for the first time; she struggled to elucidate the meaning, she wanted me to understand what the dissolution of boundaries meant and how much it frightened her. she was still holding my hand tight, breathing hard. she said that the outlines of things and people were delicate, that they broke like cotton thread. she whispered that for her it had always been that way, an object lost its edges and poured into another, into a solution of heterogenous materials, a merging and mixing. she exclaimed that she had always had to struggle to believe that life had firm boundaries, for she had known since she was a child that it was not like that -- it was absolutely not like that -- and so she couldn't trust in their resistance to being banged and bumped. contrary to what she had been doing, she began to utter a profusion of overexcited sentences, sometimes kneading in the vocabulary of the dialect, sometimes drawing on the vast reading she had done as a girl. she muttered that she mustn't ever be distracted: if she became distracted real things, which, with their violent, painful contortions, terrified her, would gain the upper hand over the unreal ones, which, with their physical and moral solidity, pacified her; she would be plunged into a sticky, jumbled reality and would never again be able to give sensations clear outlines. a tactile emotion would melt into a visual one, a visual one would melt into an olfactory one, ah, what is the real world, lenu, nothing, nothing, nothing about which one can say conclusively: it's like that. and so if she didn't stay alert, if she didn't pay attention to the boundaries, the waters would break through, a flood would rise, carrying everything off in clots of menstrual blood, in cancerous polyps, in bits of yellowish fiber.

*                   *                     *

i lived, in other words, on the money that pietro contributed punctually every month and that nino supplemented by taking on the rent for the house, the bills, and, i have to admit, often giving me money for clothes for myself and the children. but as long as i had had to confront all the upheavals and inconveniences and sufferings that followed my return to naples, it had seemed fair. now instead -- after that evening -- i decided that it was urgent to become as autonomous as possible. i had to write and publish regularly, i had to reinforce my profile as an author, i had to earn money. and the reason was not any literary vocation, the reason had to do with the future: did i really think that nino would take care of me and my daughters forever?

it was then that a part of me -- only a part -- began to emerge that consciously, without particular suffering, admitted that it couldn't really count on him. it wasn't just the old fear that he would leave me; rather it seemed to me an abrupt contraction of perspective. i stopped looking into the distance, i began to think that in the immediate future i couldn't expect from nino more than what he was giving me, and that i had to decide if it was enough.

*                                         *                                           *

. . .sometimes i obey money, sometimes respect, in some cases myself. as for infidelities, he said, if you don't find out about them at the right moment they're of no use: when you're in love you forgive everything. for infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first. and he went on like that, piling up painful remarks about the blindness of people in love.

*         *            *            *            *          *         *

she had often express that idea of eliminating herself, but, starting in the late nineties -- and especially from 2000 on -- it became a sort of teasing chorus. it was a metaphor, of course. she liked it, she had resorted to it in the most diverse circumstances, and it never occurred to me, in the many years of our friendship -- not even in the most terrible moments following tina's disappearance -- that she would think of suicide. eliminating herself was a sort of aesthetic project. one can't go on anymore, she said, electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave traces of yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously: i want to leave nothing, my favorite key is the one that deletes.

that learning had been more true in some periods, in others less. i remember a malicious tirade that started with my fame. eh, she said once, what a fuss for a name: famous or not, it's only a ribbon tied around a sack randomly filled with blood, flesh, words, shit, and petty thoughts. she mocked me at length on that point: i untie the ribbon - elena greco - and the sack stays there, it functions just the same, haphazardly, of course, without virtues or vices, until it breaks. on her darkest days she said with a bitter laugh: i want to untie my name, slip it off me, throw it away, forget it. but on other occasions she was more relaxed. it happened - let's say - that i called her hoping to persuade her to talk to me about her text and, although she forcefully denied its existence, continuing to be evasive, it sounded as if my phone call had surprised her in the middle of a creative moment. one evening i found her happily dazed. she made the usual speech about annihilating all hierarchies - so much fuss about the greatness of this one and that one, but what virtue is there in being born with certain qualities, it's like admiring the bingo basket when you shake it and good numbers come out - but she expressed herself with imagination and with precision, i perceived the pleasure of inventing images. ah, how she could use words when she wanted to. she seemed to safeguard a secret meaning that took meaning away from everything else. perhaps it was that which began to sadden me.

unreasonable

from mathilda by mary shelley

"but woodville's words had magic in them, when beginning with the sweetest pity, he would raise me by degrees out of myself and my sorrows until i wondered at my own selfishness: but he left me and despair returned; the work of consolation was ever to begin anew. i often desired his entire absence; for i found that i was grown out of the ways of life and that by long seclusion, although i could support my accustomed grief, and drink the bitter daily draught with some degree of patience, yet i had become unfit for the slightest novelty of feeling. expectation, and hopes, and affection were all too much for me. i knew this, but at other times i was unreasonable and laid the blame upon him, who was most blameless, and peevishly thought that if his gentle soul were more gentle, if his intense sympathy were more intense, he could drive the fiend from my soul and make me more human."

a kind of flight

from there there by tommy orange

"you know what's funny? i'm all, like, street and shit in real life. but online i don't talk like that, like i am now, so it feels weird to. online i try to sound smarter than i am. i mean i choose what i type carefully, cuz that's all people know about me. what i type, what i post. it's pretty weird on there. here. the way you don't know who people are. you just get their avatar names. some profile picture. but if you post cool shit, say cool shit, people like you. did i tell you about the community i got into? the name of the place, the online community is: vunderkode. it's fucking norwegian. you probably don't know what code is. i got way into it after you died. i didn't feel like going out or going to school or nothing.

when you spend enough time online, if you're looking, you can find some cool shit. i don't see it as that much different from what you did. figuring out a way around a big fucking bully system that only gives those that came from money or power the means to make it."

"'do you know how many indian women go missing every year? geraldine says.
'do you?' i say.
'no, but i heard a high number once and the real number's probably even higher.'
'i saw something too, someone posted about women up in canada.'
'it's not just canada, it's all over. there's a secret war on women going on in the world. secret even to us. secret even though we know it,' geraldine says. she rolls down her window and lights a smoke. i light one too.
'every single place we get stuck out on the road,' she says. 'they take us, then leave us out here, leave us to dim to bone, then get all the way forgotten.' she flicks her cigarette out the window. she only likes a cigarette for the first few drags.
'i always think of the men who do that kinda thing like, i know they're out there somewhere --'
'and paul,' she says.
'you know what he's going through. he's not who we're talking about.'
'you're not wrong. but the difference between the men doing it and your average violent drunk is not as big as you think. then you've got the sick pigs in high places who pay for our bodies on the black market with bitcoin, someone way up at the top who gets off on listening to the recorded screams of women like us being ripped apart, knocked against the cement floors in hidden rooms --'
'jesus,' i say.
'what? you don't think it's real? the people who run this shit are real-life monsters. the people you never see. what they want is more and more, and when that isn't enough, they want what can't be gotten easily, the recorded screams of dying indian women, maybe even a taxidermied torso, a collection of indian women's heads, there's probably some floating in tanks with blue lights behind them in a secret office on the top floor of an office building in midtown manhattan.'
'you've given this some thought,' i say.
'i meet with a lotta women,' she says. 'trapped by violence. they have kids to think about. they can't just leave, with the kids, no money, no relatives. i have to talk to these women about options. i have to talk them into going to shelters. i have to hear about when the men accidentally go too far. so no, i'm not telling you that you should go back. i'm taking you to the bus station. but i'm saying you shouldn't be out here on the side of the highway at night. i'm saying you should have texted me, asked me for a ride.'"

"your dad hardly ever talked about any of it, being indian or growing up on the rez, or even what he felt like now that he's a certifiable urban indian. except sometimes. when he felt like it. out of nowhere.

you'd be riding in his red ford truck to blockbuster to rent a movie. you'd be listening to your dad's peyote tapes. the tape-staticky gourd-rattle and kettle-drum boom. he liked to play it loud. you couldn't stand how noticeable the sound was. how noticeably indian your dad was. you'd ask if you could turn it off. you'd make him turn off his tapes. you'd put on 106 kmel - rap or r&b. but then he'd try to dance to that. he'd stick his big indian lips out to embarrass you, stick one flat hand out and stab at the air in rhythm just to mess with you. that's when you'd turn the music off altogether. and that was when you might hear a story from your dad about his childhood. about how he used to pick cotton with his grandparents for a dime a day or the time an owl threw rocks at him and his friends from a tree or the time his great-grandma split a tornado in two with a prayer.

the chip you carry has to do with being born and raised in oakland. a concrete chip, a slab really, heavy on one side, the half side, the side not white. as for your mom's side, as for your whiteness, there's too much and not enough there to know what to do with. you're from a people who took and took and took and took. and from a people taken. you were both and neither. when you took baths, you'd stare at your brown arms against your white legs in the water and wonder what they were doing together on the same body, in the same bathtub. . .

your dad was the kind of drunk who disappears weekends, lands himself in jail. he was the kind of drunk who had to stop completely. who wouldn't have a drop. so you had it coming in a way. that need that won't quit. that years-deep pit you were bound to dig, crawl into, struggle to get out of. your parents maybe burned a too-deep, too-wide god hole through you. the hole was unfillable.

coming out of your twenties you started to drink every night. there were many reasons for this. but you did it without a thought. most addictions aren't premeditated. you slept better. drinking felt good."

"'now you young men in here, listen up. don't get too excited out there. that dance is your prayer. so don't rush it, and don't dance how you practice. there's only one way for an indian man to express himself. it's that dance that comes from all the way back there. all the way over there. you learn that dance to keep it, to use it. whatever you got going on in your life, you don't leave it all in here, like them players do when they go out on that field, you bring it with you, you dance it. any other way you try to say what you really mean, it's just gonna make you cry. don't act like you don't cry. that's what we do. indian men. we're crybabies. you know it. but not out there,' he says, and points to the door of the locker room.

a couple of the older guys make this low huh sound, then another couple of guys say aho in unison. orvil looks around the room, and he sees all these men dressed up like him. they all needed to dress up to look indian too. there's something like the shaking of feathers he felt somewhere between his heart and his stomach. he knows what the guy said is true. to cry is to waste the feeling. he needs to dance with it. crying is for when there's nothing else left to do. this is a good day, this is a good feeling, something he needs, to dance the way he needs to dance to win the prize. but no. not the money. to dance for the first time like he learned, from the screen but also from practice. from the dancing came the dancing.

there are hundreds of dancers in front of him. behind him. to his left and right. he's surrounded by the variegation of color and pattern specific to indianness, gradients from one color to the next, geometrically sequenced sequined shapes on shiny and leathered fabrics, the quill, bead, ribbon, plume, feathers from magpies, hawks, crows, eagles. there are crowns and gourds and bells and drumsticks, metal cones, sticked and arrowed flickers, shag anklets, and hairpipe bandoliers, barrettes and bracelets, and bustles that fan out in perfect circles. he watches people point out each other's regalia. he is an old station wagon at a car show. he is a fraud. he tries to shake off the feeling of feeling like a fraud. he can't allow himself to feel like a fraud because then he'll probably act like one. to get to that feeling, to get to that prayer, you have to trick yourself out of thinking altogether. out of acting. out of everything. to dance as if time only mattered insofar as you could keep a beat to it, in order to dance in such a way that time itself discontinued, disappeared, ran out, or into the feeling of nothingness under your feet when you jumped, when you dipped your shoulders like you were trying to dodge the very air you were suspended in, your feathers a flutter of echoes centuries old, your whole being a kind of flight."

honey

from the proof of the honey by salwa al neimi

"the desire for knowledge fuels my desire for men. no, my desire for men fuels my desire for knowledge. to learn, by myself, about desire and pleasure, to learn about others, and about the world. after the thinker, i began to judge every new man in my life based on his pedagogical qualities above all. the more a man teaches me, the more i love him. after the thinker, i could no longer put up with a man who couldn't teach me.

for me, the pleasure of learning went along with the pleasure of sex. the center of pleasure and the center of knowledge got mixed up with each other in my head and fused together inseparably. my sexual curiosity grew deeper, deep as an abyss: those who cross my path cannot help but fall into it."

deciding not to decide

from gilead by marilynne robinson

"and i would think back on conversations i had had in a similar way, really. a great part of my work has been listening to people, in that particular intense privacy of confession, or at least unburdening, and it has been very interesting to me. not that i thought of these conversations as if they were a contest, i don't mean that. but as you might look at a game more abstractly -- where is the strength, what is the strategy? as if you had no interest in it except in seeing how well the two sides bring each other along, how much they can require of each other, how the life that is the real subject of it all is manifest in it. by 'life' i mean something like 'energy' (as the scientists use the word) or 'vitality,' and also something very different. when people come to speak to me, whatever they say, i am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the 'i' whose predicate can be 'love' or 'fear' or 'want,' and whose object can be 'someone' or 'nothing' and it won't really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence, shaped around 'i' like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else."

"i have always liked the phrase 'nursing a grudge,' because many people are tender of their resentments, as of the thing nearest their hearts."

"it came to my mind that i should consider what i would say to myself if i came to myself for counsel. in fact, i do that all the time, as any rational person does, but there is a tendency, in my thinking, for the opposed sides of a question to cancel each other more or less algebraically -- this is true, but on the other hand, so is that, so i discover a kind of equivalency of considerations that is interesting in itself but resolves nothing. if i put my thinking down on paper perhaps i can think more rigorously. where a resolution is necessary it must also be possible. not deciding is really one of the two choices that are available to me, so decision must be allowed its moment, too. that is, as behavior, not deciding to act would be identical with deciding not to act. if i were to put deciding not to act at one end of the continuum of possibility and deciding to act at the other end, the whole intervening space would be given over to not deciding, which would mean not acting. i believe this makes sense."

opal

from there there by tommy orange

"opal is on her route. same old same old one. but she's paying attention to where she steps. opal doesn't step on cracks when she walks. she walks carefully because she's always had the sense that there are holes everywhere, cracks you can slip between -- the world, after all, is porous. she lives by a superstition she would never admit to. it's a secret she holds so tight to her chest she never notices it. she lives by it, like breathing. opal drops mail in slots and in boxes trying to remember which spoon she'd eaten with earlier. she has lucky and unlucky spoons. in order for the lucky ones to work, you have to keep the unlucky ones with them, and you can't look to see what you're getting when you pull one out of the drawer. her luckiest spoon is one with a floral pattern that runs up the handle to the neck.

she knocks on wood to cancel out something she's said she wants or doesn't want to happen, or even if she just thinks it, she'll find wood and knock on it twice. opal likes numbers. numbers are consistent. you can count on them. but for opal, certain numbers are good and others are bad. even numbers are generally better than odd ones, and numbers that have some kind of mathematical relationship are good too. she reduces addresses to a single number by adding them together, then judges the neighbors based on their reduced number. numbers don't lie. four and eight are her favorites. three and six are no good. she delivers mail on the odd side first, always having believed it's best to get the bad out of the way before getting to the good.

bad luck or just bad shit happening to you in life can make you secretly superstitious, can make you want to take some control or take back some sense of control. opal buys scratchers and lottery tickets when the jackpot gets high enough. her superstition is one she would never call superstition for fear it would lose its power.

opal is done with the odd side of the street. when she crosses, a car stops for her - the woman inside impatiently waves opal across like she's doing all of humanity a favor. opal wants to lift her arm, lift a single finger as she crosses, but instead she slow jogs across in answer to the woman's impatience and feigned generosity. opal hates herself for the jog. for the smile that came to her face before she could stop it, turn it upside down, straighten it out before it was too late.

opal is full of regrets, but not about things she's done. that damn island, her mom, ronald, and then the shuffling, stifling rooms and faces in foster care, in group homes after that. she regrets that they happened. it doesn't matter that she didn't cause them to happen. she figures she must deserve it in some way. but she couldn't figure it out. so she bore those years, their weight, and the years bored a hole through the middle of her, where she tried to keep believing there was some reason to keep her love intact. opal is stone solid, but there is troubled water that lives in her, that sometimes threatens to flood, to drown her -- rise up to her eyes. sometimes she can't move. sometimes it feels impossible to do anything. but that's okay because she's become quite good at getting lost in the doing of things. more than one thing at a time preferably. like delivering mail and listening to an audiobook or music. the trick is to stay busy, distract then distract the distraction. get twice removed. it's about layers. it's about disappearing in the whir of noise and doing. . .

the boys are afraid of opal, like she was always afraid of her mom. something about how brief and direct she is. maybe hypercritical too, like her mom was hypercritical. it's to prepare them for a world made for native people not to live but to die in, shrink, disappear. she needs to push them harder because it will take more for them to succeed than someone who is not native. it's because she failed to do anything more than disappear herself."

tax-free relationship

excerpts from gorilla, my love - short stories by toni cade bambara

"what happened was this, to make a long story short. not only had he called cool, but he'd also put up bail a couple of times for some of the star pupils miss ruby called herself rehabilitating. one of these stars split, but punjab didnt go after him. not only that, punjab had also stomped a few heads by the subway garage on account of them staring too hard at miss ruby's hips and saying things. all in all, miss ruby was making puppy tracks in punjab's books. so that fall when she was knowing everybody out to set up an election to pick community leaders to represent us on the poverty council and all over the place, we figured punjab for a natural. we figured he was going to get paid off finally. hell, let's face it, anybody in position to be calling themself doing good is always doing well, if you know what i mean. and there was a whole lotta long bread coming into our area." -from "playing with punjab"

"she had wanted to speak of other things, things one spoke of in the kitchen while getting your hair braided, while someone made biscuits and commented from time to time, while the radio was on 'wings over jordan' and the conversation was put on hold when one of your favorites came on. but family ties no longer knitted close and there was no one to say let's get our wagons in a circle when someone was in crisis. so she'd come to m'dear, miss candy, the last of that generation who believed in sustaining, and come to speak about this man and his distances. she wanted to tell her about the years of penance as he forgave piece by piece

lying there sweaty, her legs still in a tremble, the nipples still erect, she felt him moving away, traveling great distances. when just moments before they'd jumped the waves, and no undertow, no drowning, no dangers on release. for the first time in a long time he was not dying or forgiving or withholding, but loving her and giving himself over to pleasure. just a split second ago she had felt him against her again and touched him then felt him retreating, the arm muscle flexed under her back, alert for ambush, then flabby, then gone. he rolled over and switched on the radio and disappeared into the music. she snuggled against his back and tried to tangle her legs in his. and he became a chinese box" - from "the survivor"

"bound and gagged she struggled through the scene and when he called finish, disgusted, she had ripped off the dress right on the spot, trying to explain about the tyranny of the cloth she'd been forced to wear as though it were the dressmaker's fault her spine was paralyzed and the several layers of splendid costumes just beneath the skin were being shredded. of course she had gone on much too long about it. and he had laughed that laugh. the laugh they all laughed which meant if you weren't careful you would be destroyed. then he told her her pacing was off, erratic, lousy. and she'd answered that pacing was a director's duty and the editor's craft. that's what triggered off the argument in the car. and why she was in the back seat (thinking on this rhythm, for the past few months she was being propelled by a rhythm other than her own. as if a malaria parasite was clocking her body to its own reproductive cycles. and she'd been dumb enough to think this out with the mouth open. and he had told her that he'd been right in the first place. she should've gotten rid of the kid in the beginning. it was driving her crazier than she already was and it was ruining his work). which is why he hadn't kept his eyes on the road." - from "the survivor"

"inez lean way back in the chair and cover her eyes like she thinkin on this pressure and maybe rejectin the motion. cause she always maintainin that she offers a tax-free relationship - no demands, no pressure, no games, no jumpin up and down with ultimatums. and it's usually gail that spews steam at that juncture, pointing out that this is the heaviest damn pressure of all. and inez sayin 'sheeeet' and goin on about her business." - from "the johnson girls"

a transparent envelope

from swann's way by marcel proust

"but then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people. even the simplest act which we describe as 'seeing someone we know' is to some extent an intellectual process. we pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him, and in the total picture of him which we compose in our minds those notions have certainly the principal place. in the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice as if it were no more than a transparent envelope, that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is these notions which we recognise and to which we listen."

". . .'she's only an actress, if you like, but you know i don't believe very much in the 'hierarchy' of the arts.' (as he spoke i noticed, what had often struck me before in his conversations with my grandmother's sisters, that whenever he spoke of serious matters, whenever he used an expression which seemed to imply a definite opinion upon some important subject, he would take care to isolate, to sterilise it by using a special intonation, mechanical and ironic, as though he had put the phrase or word between inverted commas, and was anxious to disclaim any personal responsibility for it; as who should say "the 'hierarchy,' don't you know, as silly people call it." but then, if it was so absurd, why did he use the word?)"

"i loved her; i was sorry not to have had the time and the inspiration to insult her, to hurt her, to force her to keep some memory of me. i thought her so beautiful that i should have liked to be able to retrace my steps so as to shake my fist at her and shout, 'i think you're hideous, grotesque; how i loathe you!'"