destabilization

 "in both friendship and love, the expectation that one's expressive (if not best) self will flower in the presence of the beloved other is key. upon that flowering all is posited. but what if the restless, the fluid, the mercurial, within each of us is steadily undermining the very thing we think we most want? what, in fact, if the assumption of a self in need of expressiveness is an illusion? what if the urge toward stable intimacy is perpetually threatened by an equally great, if not greater, urge toward destabilization? what then?"

-vivian gornick, the odd woman and the city

ha ha! you thought you got to choose

 from know my name by chanel miller

"you belong here, she said. and anger is allowed to be embodied. rage for the perpetrator, bystanders, society, was a healthy and normal response. some direct anger inward toward themselves, feeling that this is the only safe way to be angry. this could result in negative self-talk, blaming ourselves for the trauma, struggling to reconcile prior beliefs about justice, systems of meaning." (306)

"no matter how formidable or self-assured i might become, i will always be a tadpole. i believe that's what being a victim is, living with that little finicky, darting thing inside you. most people say development is linear, but for survivors it is cyclic. people grow up, victims grow around; we strengthen that place of hurt, become older and fuller, but the vulnerable core is never gone. more than becoming a frog, i believe surviving means learning to live forever with this trembling tadpole." (307)

"writing is the way i process the world. when i was given the opportunity to write this book, whatever god is up there said, you got your dream. i said, actually i was hoping for a lighter topic, and god was like ha ha! you thought you got to choose. this was the topic i was given. if something else had happened to me, i would have written about that too. when i get worked up over what happened, i tell myself, you are a pair of eyes. i'm a civilian who's been randomly selected to receive an all-access pass to the court system. feelings will include invasion, shame, isolation, cruelty. my job is to observe, feel, document, report. what am i learning and seeing that other people can't see? what doorways does my suffering lead to? people sometimes say, i can't imagine. how do i make them imagine? i write to show how victims are treated at this moment in time, to record the temperature of our culture. this is a marker, and i hope that in twenty years this grueling aftermath of victimhood will feel foreign." (315)

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. 

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

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. 

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

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

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

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

sadness and wild freedom

 from the rules of inheritance by claire bidwell smith

"grief is like another country, i realize. it's a place." (94)

"my grief fills rooms. it takes up space and it sucks out the air. it leaves no room for anyone else. 

grief and i are left alone a lot. we smoke cigarettes and we cry. . .

grief holds my hand as i walk down the sidewalk, and grief doesn't mind when i cry because it's raining and i cannot find a taxi. grief wraps itself around me in the morning when i wake from a dream of my mother, and grief holds me back when i lean too far over the edge of the roof at night, a drink in my hand.

grief acts like a jealous friend, reminding me that no one else will ever love me as much as it does.

grief whispers in my ear that no one understands me.

grief is possessive and doesn't let me go anywhere without it."

"her death leaves me both depleted and emboldened. that's what tragedy does to you, i am learning. the sadness and the wild freedom of it all impart a strange durability. i feel weathered and detached, tucking my head against the winds and trudging forward into my life."

"when it comes to boys, i've always been the same. i;ve always been the girl who gives too much too easily and expects the same in return. i don't remember which boy was first. in the beginning they were all the same: smooth and hairless and vulnerable, emulating or disobeying their fathers -- there was nothing original about them yet.

maybe there never is."

"when people ask me what i do and i say that i work in hospice, they often recoil in a horror that ushers forth a series of well-meaning exclamations.

oh, isn't that hard?

that seems so sad!

i couldn't do that.

the truth is that i don't find it sad at all. when i talk to grieving people, it's like looking at a negative image -- the deeper the grief, the more evidence of love i see.

after my father died i let the follow-up calls from the hospice bereavement counselor go unanswered, and sought out my own coping methods. sometimes these involved drinking and losing myself in the people around me, but i was also driven to learn as much about grief as i could.

i read everything from scientific texts to memoirs about loss. i found myself drawn to movies about death and to information specific to my particular parental loss. i read about trauma and its effects on development. i studied anxiety and how to overcome it. i read about attachment theory and tried to link it to my current relationships. 

i couldn't help wondering if what i felt was normal. and each time i came across someone else's story, each time i found reassurance that i wasn't alone in my grief process, i relaxed a little more. . .

the bottom line is that there is simply no one way to define grief, but the irony is that almost every grieving person i've met seems concerned about whether they're doing it right."

the pure lover

 from the pure lover by david plante [beacon press, 2009]

"grief makes the griever believe the death of his lover is unique. grief demands a grand, timeless expression, and the bereaved tries, tries for that expression, and wonders if the expression is false." (25)

"grief cannot help but idealize." (43)

"grief reveals the griever's vanity, the vanity of his grief, the vanity of all his life." (47)

"at a dinner party to celebrate the success of one of these books, you, when complimented, raised a napkin to cover your face, as if to absent yourself. at the time, i thought you were trying to impress more with your absence than your presence, but i was wrong, for you always thought of yourself as more absent than present." (53-54)

"how confused i become thinking of you and me as one, wondering how much of you i have made mine, how much of me i have made yours - combining in us both mind and soul, as if these two were one, and aristotle and plato, too." (76)

"nietzsche's books, you argued, all together 'cohered,' not 'logically' as philosophy, but 'formally' as in a work of art, the 'form' containing 'an infinite number of inconsistencies.' nietzsche's 'form' was cyclical, was repetition revolving on repetition, each repetition an elaboration." (79)

"did i want you to die, as though your death were a strange fulfillment of my love for you? i'd stop, stand still in the street, overwhelmed by this: the sense, a sensation throughout my body and, too, my soul, that you must live.

i sometimes asked myself in the pages of my diary (wanting in those pages to account for every thought, every feeling) if your death would liberate me from our lives together to live an altogether other life with radiating possibilities. my answer to myself, as near as i could get to a central truth, was no - i wanted, at that center, no other life, but my life radiating in you." (89)

"every night, in bed with you, i thought: i am falling asleep with someone who is dying. all during the night, often woken by you because your back pained you, i'd think: i'm in bed with someone who is dying." (91)

"the griever prays that grief will come and purify him, prays that after the overwhelming devastation of grief, whatever remains of him will be simple and clear. and suddenly, grief overwhelms the griever at the sight of an old woman in a crowd carrying a small valise.

my love for you was not enough - you died." (103)

"grief centers the griever's grief everywhere, making connections." (111)

 

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"

more truthful lives

from everyone loves a good train wreck by eric wilson

"death's perpetual certitude inspires us to imagine more truthful lives. but death, by thwarting narcissism, also elevates our ethical imaginations. what does the egotist believe but that his existence is more important than those of others, that his self is of immense value and preeminently worthy of being nourished and perpetuated? death deflates this puffery, positing that all attempts to boost the "i" are ultimately vain. though you are unique on one level, on another you are the same as everyone else: you will suffer and die and return to the dirt.

shaking us out of narcissism, death calls us to merge with our fellows, to enter into a global community bound by hurt. it says: you are dying, and this is pain, and you would like to alleviate it in any way possible, and so now you apprehend the plight of all others, also moribund and agonized and in need of succor. obviously, when we experience this distress, we don't by necessity become aware of the miseries of others. we can hurt selfishly, convincing ourselves that our discomfort is worse than anyone else's and thus deserving of the most care. but hopefully we will, when we realize that our lot is common, suffer charitably, and so translate our own groaning into empathy with another's torment."

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."

the original choice

from existentialism and human emotions by jean-paul sartre

"certainly, many people believe that when they do something, they themselves are the only ones involved, and when someone says to them, 'what if everyone acted that way?' they shrug their shoulders and answer, 'everyone doesn't act that way.' but really, one should always ask himself, 'what would happen if everybody looked at things that way?' there is no escaping this disturbing thought except by a kind of double-dealing. a man who lies and makes excuses for himself by saying 'not everybody does that,' is someone with an uneasy conscience, because the act of lying implies that a universal value is conferred upon the lie."

"all leaders know this anguish. that doesn't keep them from acting; on the contrary, it is the very condition of their action. for it implies that they envisage a number of possibilities, and when they choose one, they realize that it has value only because it is chosen. we shall see that this kind of anguish, which is the kind that existentialism describes, is explained, in addition, by a direct responsibility to the other men whom it involves. it is not a curtain separating us from action, but is part of action itself."

"on the one hand, an ethics of sympathy, of personal devotion; on the other, a broader ethics, but one whose efficacy was more dubious. he had to choose between the two."

"if values are vague, and if they are always too broad for the concrete and specific case that we are considering, the only thing left for us is to trust our instincts. that's what this young man tried to do; and when i saw him, he said, 'in the end, feeling is what counts. i ought to choose whichever pushes me in one direction."

"the only way to determine the value of this affection is, precisely, to perform an act which confirms and defines it. but, since i require this affection to justify my act, i find myself caught in a vicious circle. on the other hand, gide has well said that a mock feeling and a true feeling are almost indistinguishable."

"dishonesty is obviously a falsehood because it belies the complete freedom of involvement. on the same grounds, i maintain that there is also dishonesty if i choose to state that certain values exist prior to me; it is self-contradictory for me to want them and at the same state that they are imposed on me."

"in wanting freedom we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depends on ours."

"empirical psychoanalysis seeks to determine the complex, the very name of which indicates the polyvalance of all the meanings which are referred back to it. existential psychoanalysis seeks to determine the original choice. this original choice operating in the face of the world and being a choice of position in the world is total like the complex; it is prior to logic like the complex. it is this which decides the attitude of the person when confronted with logic and principles; therefore there can be no possibility of questioning it in conformance to logic. it brings together in a prelogical synthesis the totality of the existent, and as such it is the center of reference for an infinity of polyvalent meanings."

twelve points

excerpt from the drama of the gifted child by alice miller

For some years now, there has been proof that the devastating effects of the traumatization of children take their inevitable toll on society – a fact that we are still forbidden to recognize. This knowledge concerns every single one of us and – if disseminated widely enough – should lead to fundamental changes in society; above all, to a halt in the blind escalation of violence. The following points are intended to amplify my meaning:

1. All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection.
2. For their development, children need the respect and protection of adults who take them seriously, love them, and honestly help them to become oriented in the world.
3. When these vital needs are frustrated and children are, instead, abused for the sake of adults’ needs by being exploited, beaten, punished, taken advantage of, manipulated, neglected, or deceived without the intervention of any witness, then their integrity will be lastingly impaired.
4. The normal reactions to such injury should be anger and pain. Since children in this hurtful kind of environment are forbidden to express their anger, however, and since it would be unbearable to experience their pain all alone, they are compelled to suppress their feelings, repress all memory of the trauma, and idealize those guilty of the abuse. Later they will have no memory of what was done to them.
5. Disassociated from the original cause, their feelings of anger, helplessness, despair, longing, anxiety, and pain will find expression in destructive acts against others (criminal behavior, mass murder) or against themselves (drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, psychic disorders, suicide).
6. If these people become parents, they will then often direct acts of revenge for their mistreatment in childhood against their own children, whom they use as scapegoats. Child abuse is still sanctioned – indeed, held in high regard – in our society as long as it is defined as child-rearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order to escape the emotions stemming from how they were treated by their own parents.
7. If mistreated children are not to become criminals or mentally ill, it is essential that at least once in their life they come in contact with a person who knows without any doubt that the environment, not the helpless, battered child, is at fault. In this regard, knowledge or ignorance on the part of society can be instrumental in either saving or destroying a life. Here lies the great opportunity for relatives, social workers, therapists, teachers, doctors, psychiatrists, officials, and nurses to support the child and to believe her or him.
8. Till now, society has protected the adult and blamed the victim. It has been abetted in its blindness by theories, still in keeping with the pedagogical principles of our great-grandparents, according to which children are viewed as crafty creatures, dominated by wicked drives, who invent stories and attack their innocent parents or desire them sexually. In reality, children tend to blame themselves for their parents’ cruelty and to absolve the parents, whom they invariably love, of all responsibility.
9. For some years now, it has been possible to prove, through new therapeutic methods, that repressed traumatic experiences of childhood are stored up in the body and, though unconscious, exert an influence even in adulthood. In addition, electronic testing of the fetus has revealed a fact previously unknown to most adults-that a child responds to and learns both tenderness and cruelty from the very beginning.
10. In the light of this new knowledge, even the most absurd behavior reveals its formerly hidden logic once the traumatic experiences of childhood need no longer remain shrouded in darkness.
11. Our sensitization to the cruelty with which children are treated, until now commonly denied, and to the consequences of such treatment will as a matter of course bring to an end the perpetuation of violence from generation to generation.
12. People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty by their parents, will be – both in their youth and in adulthood – intelligent, responsive, empathic, and highly sensitive. They will take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves, not to attack others. They will not be able to do otherwise than respect and protect those weaker than themselves, including their children, because this is what they have learned from their own experience, and because it is this knowledge (and not the experience of cruelty) that has been stored up inside them from the beginning. It will be inconceivable to such people that earlier generations had to build up a gigantic war industry in order to feel comfortable and safe in this world. Since it will not be their unconscious drive in life to ward off intimidation experienced at a very early age, they will be able to deal with attempts at intimidation in their adult life more rationally and more creatively.

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."

the buddha

excerpt from comfortable with uncertainty by pema chodron

when people decide to become buddhists, they participate in an official ceremony in which they take refuge in the three jewels - the buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. i've always thought it sounds theistic, dualistic, and dependent 'to take refuge' in something. however, the fundamental idea of taking refuge is that between birth and death we are alone. therefore taking refuge in the three jewels doesn't mean finding consolation in them. rather, it's a basic expression of our aspiration to leap out of the nest, whether we feel ready for it or not, to go through our puberty rites and be an adult with no hand to hold. taking refuge is the way that we begin cultivating the openness and the good-heartedness that allow us to be less and less dependent.

the buddha is the awakened one, and we too are buddhas. we are the awakened one - the one who continually leaps, who continually opens, who continually goes forward. being a buddha isn't easy. it's accompanied by fear, resentment, and doubt. but learning to leap into open space with our fear, resentment, and doubt is how we become fully human beings. there isn't any separation between samsara and nirvana, between the sadness and pain of the setting sun and the vision and power of the great eastern sun, as the shambhala teachings put it. one can hold them both in one's heart, which is actually the purpose of practice.

taking refuge in the buddha means that we are willing to spend our life reconnecting with the quality of being continually awake. every time we feel like taking refuge in a habitual means of escape, we take off more armor, undoing all the stuff that covers over our wisdom and our gentleness and our awake quality. we're not trying to be something we aren't; rather, we're reconnecting with who we are. so when we say, 'i take refuge in the buddha,' that means i take refuge in the courage and the potential of fearlessness, of removing all the armor that covers this awakeness of mine. i am awake; i will spend my life taking this armor off. nobody else can take it off because nobody else knows where all the little locks are, nobody else knows where it's sewed up tight, where it's going to take a lot of work to get that particular iron thread untied. you have to do it alone. the basic instruction is simple: start taking off that armor. that's all anyone can tell you. no one can tell you how to do it because you're the only one who knows how you locked yourself in there to start.

names

excerpts from the short story collection sour heart by jenny zhang

(from "the evolution of my brother"):

i look at the poem again and then go through some other files, including one called "fight on dirt," a painting of magenta, lime-green, and teal-blue stick figures on brown mud. i see another file named "power rain," which i remember seeing a long time ago but never opened. i wondered briefly back then what "power rain" was -- massive droplets of rain, each one fat enough to contain an armed soldier ready for combat, hitting the ground, causing tremors in the earth?

i open up the file and realize the full name is actually "power rain jurs." sour tears well up in my eyes and fall into my mouth. i feel self-conscious and stupid crying for myself -- for my shame, for my regrets, for how quickly a childhood happens. i wish i had acted better. i wish i had been the kind of sister who was patient enough to show my brother the proper spelling for "power rangers."

whenever i'm home for a few days, i start to feel this despair at being back in the place where i had spent so many afternoons dreaming of getting away, so many late nights fantasizing about who i would be once i was allowed to be someone apart from my family, once i was free to commit mistakes on my own. how strange it is to return to a place where my childish notions of freedom are everywhere to be found -- in my journals and my doodles and the corners of the room where i sat fuming for hours, counting down the days until i could leave this place and start my real life. but now that trying to become someone on my own is no longer something to dream about but just my ever-present reality, now that my former conviction that i had been burdened with the responsibility of taking care of this household has been revealed to be untrue, that all along, my responsibilities had been negligible, illusory even, that all along, our parents had been the ones watching over us - me and my brother - and now that i am on my own, the days of resenting my parents for loving me too much and my brother for needing me too intensely have been replaced with the days of feeling bewildered by the prospect of finding some other identity besides "daughter" or "sister." it turns out that this, too, is terrifying, all of it is terrifying. being someone is terrifying. i long to come home, but now, i will always come home to my family as a visitor, and that weighs on me, reverts me back into the teenager i was, but instead of insisting that i want everyone to leave me alone, what i want now is for someone to beg me to stay. me again. memememememememe.


(from "my days and nights of terror"):

my father said they needed "american" names on their resumes when applying for jobs; they had to have names that were pronounceable to white american english speakers because they already had faces that were considered vile to look at and who was going to hire someone with their faces and their names? i thought my mother and my father had beautiful faces but my father corrected me, not in america. we're ugly, and it's that simple. they look at us and think we're cretins. you think they like us going to their schools? you think they're okay with us working in their offices? taking their jobs? you think they're happy to pick up laundry and takeout from businesses we've opened up? you think they want to go to the corner store and see our eyes and our teeth and our skin looking back at them from behind the counter? no! they don't want us here. they don't want to look at us and they sure as hell don't want to have to try to pronounce our chinese names. x-u. q-u-i. they don't want to see that! the more my father went on about how much they hated us, the more i started to suspect maybe he was the one who hated us. on the first day of school in america, i was so frazzled and fearful of everything that i accidentally left off the second e and i became mande with one e and so i started my first day of school in america with a mistake. i was a failure right from the start.

*      *      *    

i had prayed for this kind of soft joy, this kind of contentment, a day like this followed by more days like this, and finally having it was like being born, only instead of not remembering what it was like to be born, i was fully cognizant and participating in my own creation and suddenly it was clear to me why we don't remember what it was like to be born -- because it would give us too much insight into what it will be like to die. to be present for your own birth was suicide. to know the true wonder of suddenly existing was to know the true fear of suddenly ceasing to exist. they had to occur together and there was no prayer for what i knew in my flaky soul -- that there was no way to escape the fear. it would always be there, amplifying joy and stealing from it. still, it was tempting to sink into it, to roll around in its outer rings where occasionally the fear converted to a kind of happiness that turned an entire afternoon into an image that would stay forever, loom forever, return forever.

insignificance

from remnants of the first earth by ray a. young bear

"in an earthly realm where the forces of nature are infinitely more powerful than human beings, personal and collective insignificance is a given. in our relatively compact tribal society, there was equal standing among everyone other than the chieftain hierarchy. in the ancien regime our people hunted, fished, gathered food, planted seeds, and harvested crops together, making everyone interdependent.

this philosophical stance of insignificance was reflected in the journals. preceding each passage my grandfathers wrote were such disclaimers: 'now, at this very moment, i will be forthright and say that i do not know much, that i am not exceedingly knowledgeable, but this is what i have been told: whatever you see, you will document that fact, for it will serve as a point from which present and future black eagle childs will have an unobstructed view of our life. this i have done in the same way my other grandfathers did. . . .'"

"it is true what leslie silko says: that if you know how to write, you inevitably deal with those who once lived -- by yourself.

a human presence is forever. even luciano's. even if he didn't quite die. whether in the act of storytelling or fond remembrances. the mere virtue of being alive, permeable and free, rang throughout the physical totality of the person who was luciano bearchild. he sought and was able to experience new ways to see things, to live them and not be complacent."

"listening to grandmother's pleas for william to awaken, i felt the welling of sadness within me. in a tribal society that was historically burdened with obstacles, suppression of emotion became an art form. to cry over the departed was to inflict misery upon their 'shadows.' in death there was a deep-rooted fear that personal grief could bridge the world of the real and the nonreal. whatever our affliction - physical pain, bereavement, sheer loneliness, or embarrassment - being ostentatious was not part of our demeanor."

"edgar bearchild used to preface and summarize stories by saying: 'ma ni tta-i ni-e na ska ki-a ji mo ni. in this direction does the story fall.' bearchild used this phrase to an obsessive degree for any information presented. in this direction being the disclaimer for words spoken in perhaps an unfavorable context, does the story fall being inevitability."

"keep this in mind: to have every facet of life work to one's advantage was seen not as the glorious result of unbounded determination but as the workings of evil. this was - and even today is - the tribal community's mind-set. illiteracy was shared. poverty was blood-ingrained, and like the harmony that held the clans together, having little was inherited. anything that tore through the delicate netting was regrettable, like suicidal indians or those who chose urban relocation, coming home for their own funerals. what a pity! was whispered through cupped hands to respectful, listening ears. a life misled was lamented over sweet rolls and coffee, but luciano's success with money and white women was deemed unnatural.

suffering and bad luck were shared. equally - like commodity surplus foods. luciano's fortune benefited his immediate family and himself. . . amazingly, after luciano's mysterious disappearance, many spoke of him in respectful terms. those who had been jealous enough to become enemies recanted statements he had been an extraterrestrial all along and took part in the search for him."

who is responsible for what

quotes from the dance of anger by harriet lerner

"anger is inevitable when we submit to unfair circumstances and when we protect another person at our own expense."

"feeling fuzzy-headed, inarticulate, and not so smart are common reactions experienced by women as we struggle to take a stand on our own behalf. it is not just anger and fighting that we learn to fear; we avoid asking precise questions and making clear statements when we unconsciously suspect that doing so would expose our differences, make the other person feel uncomfortable, and leave us standing alone."

"karen's emotional reaction to her boss's criticism obscured her thinking about what she wanted to ask and what she wanted to say. . . her tears and her willingness to let her boss play the role of advisor and confidant were, in part, her unconscious way of reinstating the status quo and apologizing for the 'separateness' inherent in her initial position of disagreement. . . karen had deep-seated fears of her own omnipotent destructiveness and the vulnerability of men. our very definitions of 'masculinity' and 'femininity' are based on the notion that women must function as nonthreatening helpmates and ego builders to men lest men feel castrated and weakened. . . karen was afraid of transforming her anger into concise statements of her thoughts and feelings lest she evoke that disturbing sense of separateness and aloneness that we experience when we make our differences known and encourage others to do the same. . . karen had a long-standing pattern of attempting to restore the togetherness of her relationships by crying, criticizing herself, becoming confused, or prematurely making peace. at the heart of the problem was the fact that karen needed to work harder at the task of clarifying her separateness and independence within her first family."

"more often, and more crucially, separation anxiety is based on an underlying discomfort with separateness and individuality that has its roots in our early family experience, where the unspoken expectation may have been that we keep a lid on our expressions of self. daughters are especially sensitive to such demands and may become far more skilled at protecting the relational 'we' than asserting the autonomous 'i.'"

 "learning to use our anger effectively requires some letting go -- letting go of blaming that other person whom we see as causing our problems and failing to provide for our happiness; letting go of the notion that it is our job to change other people or tell them how they should think, feel, behave. yet, this does not mean that we passively accept or go along with any behavior. in fact, a 'live-and-let-live' attitude can signal a de-selfed position, if we fail to clarify what is and is not acceptable or desirable to us in a relationship. the main issue is how we clarify our position."

"we are responsible for our own behavior. but we are not responsible for other people's reactions; nor are they responsible for ours. women often learn to reverse this order of things: we put our energy into taking responsibility for other people's feelings, thoughts, and behavior and hand over to others responsibility for our own."

"why is the question 'who is responsible for what?' such a puzzle for women? women in particular have been discouraged from taking responsibility for solving our own problems, determining our own choices, and taking control of the quality and direction of our own lives. as we learn to relinquish responsibility for the self, we are prone to blame others for failing to fill up our emptiness or provide for our happiness -- which is not their job. at the same time, however, we may feel responsible for just about everything that goes on around us. we are quick to be blamed for other people's problems and pain and quick to accept the verdict of guilty. we also, in the process, develop the belief that we can avert problems if only we try hard enough."

"the emotional rescuers of the world can have a terribly difficult time allowing others just to sit with their feelings and learn to handle them. . . when we do not put our primary emotional energy into solving our own problems, we take on other people's problems as our own. . . the problem arises when we are excessively reactive to other people's problems, when we assume responsibility for things that we are not responsible for, and when we attempt to control things that are not in our control. when we overfunction for another individual, we end up very angry, and in the process, we facilitate the growth of no one."

if you're hooked

quotes from how to meditate by pema chodron

“the more we see this kind of pattern and don’t go on the downward cycle, the more our confidence grows in our capacity to awaken. as we expand our confidence in the workability of our situation, we begin to see that we are not victims of our habitual patterns. it can definitely feel like we are victims of our habitual patterns; they have a very sneaky way of getting the better of us. but the path of meditation addresses these patterns very directly, and it begins to unwind this whole sense of being imprisoned by our own mind.

the mind is the source of all suffering, and it is also the source of all happiness. think about that. in fact, you can contemplate this for the rest of your life. when something comes up in your life that causes you dissatisfaction, or triggers habitual patterns and reactivity, or makes you angry, lonely, and jealous, ask yourself: are these emotions happening because of outer circumstances? are they completely dependent on outer circumstances?

the path of meditation says that we have to work with our mind, and that if we do work with our mind, the outer circumstances become workable. things that used to irritate and bother us or that trigger our reactivity and habitual patterns begin to dissolve. so whenever you find yourself caught in an emotional attack, you have to ask yourself: ‘how much of this is really happening on the outside, and how much of this is my mind?’. . .

the guideline is this: if you’re hooked, then you need to work on your side of the situation, no matter how outrageous and unjust the outer circumstance might seem. if you’re hooked, this is a clue that you have some work to do -- and you, only you, can call yourself back. this is the basic attitude of meditation.”

“criticalness is an obstacle to meditation, and harshness is an obstacle to awakening. this tendency to be hard on ourselves does not come from the buddha nature, the basic goodness within all of us; it comes from the ego and our conditioning. we all have the seeds of this basic goodness within us -- we only have to nourish them. nourishing the basic goodness within includes not judging ourselves for all the wild thinking that takes place in our mind. we can’t control how many thoughts we’re going to have. and we can’t control what the next thought is going to be. as you practice, try to be faithful to the instruction with a gentle attitude. we train in attention, but it’s friendly attention. we train in labeling, but it’s friendly labeling.”

“as you spend more days and weeks with your commitment to practice, it might seem that your mind wanders even more. many people, even seasoned meditators, say, ‘i’m thinking more than i ever did before!’ they feel like their distractedness and thinking are getting worse, rather than better. the fact is that before you started meditating and trying to develop mindfulness, you weren’t aware of how many thoughts you have. now you are, and that’s why there appears to be more of them.”

“trungpa rinpoche used to say that this kind of experience is very good because it humbles us. he said, ‘our minds are great teachers because we have just enough growing awareness and alertness, or increasing kindness, to encourage ourselves.’ and as he pointed out, we can even get very arrogant about that. in other words, our humanity, this discursiveness and this inability to completely overcome the wild and drowsy mind, keeps us in balance.

the third word i’d like you to hold when it comes to your thoughts is ‘humor.’ gentleness, patience, and a sense of humor. have a sense of humor about the fact that your mind is like a wild monkey. in his book wake up to your life, ken mcleod has a great quote from the theravada meditation master henepola gunaratana. he says, ‘somewhere in this process, you will come face to face with the sudden and shocking realization that you are completely crazy. your mind is a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill, utterly out of control and hopeless. no problem. you are not crazier than you were yesterday. it has always been this way and you never noticed.’ our thoughts are like the weather -- they’re just passing through. in our practice, there’s no need to cling to them, no need to see them as totally solid. they are thoughts, after all; they’re not the present moment. let them pass through the big sky of your mind.”