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"

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."

dislocation

from in the dream house by carmen maria machado

"the late queer theorist jose esteban munoz pointed out that 'queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence. . . when the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present.' what gets left behind? gaps where people never see themselves or find information about themselves. holes that make it impossible to give oneself a context. crevices people fall into. impenetrable silence."

"we can't stop living. which means we have to live, which means we are alive, which means we are humans and we are human: some of us are unkind and some of us are confused and some of us sleep with the wrong people and some of us make bad decisions and some of us are murderers. and it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. it is simply a state of being -- one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind. so bring on the queer villains, the queer heroes, the queer sidekicks and secondary characters and protagonists and extras. they can be a complete cast unto themselves. let them have agency, and then let them go."

"later, you will learn that a common feature of domestic abuse is 'dislocation.' that is to say, the victim has just moved somewhere new, or she's somewhere where she doesn't speak the language, or has been otherwise uprooted from her support network, her friends or family, her ability to communicate. she is made vulnerable by her circumstance, her isolation. her only ally is her abuser, which is to say she has no ally at all. and so she has to struggle against an unchangeable landscape that has been hammered into existence by nothing less than time itself; a house that is too big to dismantle by hand; a situation too complex and overwhelming to master on her own. the setting does its work."

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."

ambiguous loss

from ambiguous loss by pauline boss

"the outcomes of ptsd are also similar, though not identical, to outcomes of long-term ambiguous loss. both can result in depression, anxiety, psychic numbing, distressing dreams, and guilt. but ambiguous loss is unique in that the trauma goes on and on in what families describe as a rollercoaster ride, during which they alternate between hope and hopelessness. a loved one is missing, then sighted, then lost again. or a family member is dying, then goes into remission, then the illness returns again in full force. hopes are raised and dashed so many times that psychically people no longer react."

"learning to live with the ambiguity of divorce and remarriage requires a whole new set of skills. the first is to revise our perception of who our family is and who it is not. . . all this requires a second skill, the ability to let go of needing an absolute and precise definition of family. . . rather than weakening the family, such elasticity in family composition enhances resilience and flexibility. . . in a sense one has to abandon the concept of monogamy in order to make divorce and remarriage work because a first marriage does not simply stop when a second one starts. it is forever a part of the fabric of one's life."

"ambivalence can result from the ambiguity of not knowing who is included in the structure that is supposed to be one's family. conflicting impulses that may exist in the psyche are often a consequence of this uncertainty.

ambivalence is often intensified by deficiencies outside the family -- officials cannot find a missing person or medical experts cannot clearly diagnose or cure a devastating illness. because of the ambiguity, loved ones can't make sense out of their situation and emotionally are pulled in opposing directions -- love and hate for the same person; acceptance and rejection of their caregiving role; affirmation and denial of their loss. often people feel they must withhold their emotions and control their aggressive feelings because social norms dictate that becoming upset is inappropriate and will only bring further harm to the missing person, demented elder, or comatose child. this is the bind, especially for women, who are most often caught in caregiving or waiting roles.

mixed emotions are compounded when a separation involves the potential of irretrievable loss. when there is a chance that we will never see a loved one again, we protect ourselves from the prospect of losing that person by becoming ambivalent -- holding our spouse at arm's length, picking a fight with a parent, or shutting a sibling out even when he or she is still physically present. anticipating a loss, we both cling to our loved ones and push them away. we resist their leaving and at the same time want to be finished with the goodbye."

"if we are to turn the corner and cope with uncertain losses, we must first temper our hunger for mastery. this is the paradox. to regain a sense of mastery when there is ambiguity about a loved one's absence or presence, we must give up trying to find the perfect solution. we must redefine our relationship to the missing person. most important, we must realize that the confusion we are experiencing is attributable to the ambiguity rather than to something we did -- or neglected to do."

"for people who are accustomed to having some control over their lives, insight appears to help; such people want to understand 'why,' to penetrate the deeper meaning of an experience before they risk doing something different. but for others, insight is gained experientially, not cognitively. for them, the family therapist carl whitaker was right when he said, 'you only know what something is after you've gone past it.' people have to experience a phenomenon before they can understand it. what is clear to me is that we as clinicians must be more sensitive to individual differences in ways of understanding a situation if we are to avoid creating the very resistance we sometimes attribute to the people we are trying to help."

bridging

by marge piercy from to be of use

being together is knowing
even if what we know
is that we cannot really be together
caught in the teeth of the machinery
of the wrong moments of our lives.

a clear umbilicus
goes out invisibly between,
thread we spin fluid and finer than hair
but strong enough to hang a bridge on.

that bridge will be there
a blacklight rainbow arching out of your skull
whenever you need
whenever you can open your eyes and want
to walk upon it.

nobody can live on a bridge
or plant potatoes
but it is fine for comings and goings,
meetings, partings and long views
and a real connection to someplace else
where you may
in the crazy weathers of struggle
now and again want to be.

ONE DAY

by grace paley from fidelity

one day

one of us

will be lost

to the other

this has been

talked about but

lightly    turning

away    shyness  this

business of con-

fronting the

preference for

survival

my mother said    the

children are grown   we

are both so sick    let us

die together    my father

replied     no no   you

will be well   he lied

of course i

want you in the world

whether i’m in it or

not    your spirit

i probably mean

there is always

something to say    in

the end    speaking

without breath    one

of us will be lost

to the other

l&c rendezvous

1
what is nearest to me

shadows straining to make
out angles, fixed lines
which hold me cold
and are not what i desire but witness
nonetheless

day to day parades with some measure
of beiges, browns, drumbeat and slight
gestures, pockets of red

windows steam

silence punctuated unlike glass or metal
humid with laughter and sometimes the fear

of being found

2
with winter so close i know
now the ice cream is less
sweet and what compels me to burn
myself remains the same

what compels me to remain

the sweetness

3
if i could just
cup my hands i could just press my chest i could just count your breaths i could just
(sigh)

stay

4
day in i remember the ways you left suddenly
early like stale bread and the door

until i asked another difficult question that again
felt like a small heavy rope

will you stay with
this moment
in the morning
of our lives


11/13/17

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."

return to madison

by virginia hamilton adair from ants on the melon

it is the autumn of 1936,
my bus from the east coast rumbling
into this place that william ellery called
"the shining city of my manhood's grief."
i wear a ring with seven small diamonds
and a couple more, a little larger.
i am in love with at least two men, also
the trumpet of louis armstrong, poetry,
scholarship, ritual, ice-skating
at 10 below zero, drinking manhattans,
dancing, wisconsin lakes and woods,
being in love with almost everything.
a crisis looms ahead: a june marriage;
but 10 months are too endless to be real.
the other man listens for the phone.
we will be walking in vilas park
before sundown, and that huge feeling
vaster than the continent will rise
within us, unbidden, unforeseen, and i--
unlike the men i love-- never ask
to know what will happen next.
that shining return to a city bounded
by lakes i relive five decades later,
looking up from a stegner novel just begun,
staring into the dusk of a different time zone.
"i knew that the university was at one end
of state street and the state capitol at the other,"
and the exaltation of learning, the sorrow and joy
of that year of marvels pierce me:
one all-night blizzard, and the dawn footprints
leaving from my door, filling with fresh snow.

my life

by billy collins from picnic, lightning

sometimes i see it as a straight line
drawn with a pencil and a ruler
transecting the circle of the world

or as a finger piercing
a smoke ring, casual, inquisitive,

but then the sun will come out
or the phone will ring
and i will cease to wonder

if it is one thing,
a large ball of air and memory,
or many things,
a string of small farming towns,
a dark road winding through them.

let us say it is a field
i have been hoeing every day,
hoeing and singing,
then going to sleep in one of its furrows,

or now that it is more than half over,
a partially open door,
rain dripping from the eaves.

like yours, it could be anything,
a nest with one egg,
a hallway that leads to a thousand rooms-
whatever happens to float into view
when i close my eyes

or look out a window
for more than a few minutes,
so that some days i think
it must be everything and nothing at once.

but this morning, sitting up in bed,
wearing my black sweater and my glasses,
the curtains drawn and the windows up,

i am a lake, my poem is an empty boat,
and my life is the breeze that blows
through the whole scene

stirring everything it touches-
the surface of the water, the limp sail,
even the heavy, leafy trees along the shore.

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."

losing heart

by maggie nelson, from shiner

it feels good
like being
inside a car
in a car

wash, the froth
swopping
the roof, the
windows, a regular

murder of dirt.
but what if
it's the self
at stake, not

crimson with sin
just weary of
its own
contours, the run-on

sentence of its
thought. on
the inside looking
out, a window

streaked with black
effluvia, always
threatening to
become a hunk of

something that
won't budge. when
i was a younger man
it was all about

mozart. then later,
beethoven. then
later still -- mozart!
after that, beethoven!

ah, but mozart. ah,
but beethoven.
you don't really

have to believe in
yourself, only
in your circulation.

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."

the bus through jonesboro, arkansas

by matthew henriksen

Inanimate intimacy in the plural
Couples under their dark covers

The distance between one body and another
An echo chamber against every stone

The distance between lovers in a rock-lashing wave
The solitude of two together under the waters of night

Or the flattened space between two people on a bus
Talking above the low beams of a few lost trucks

Seeking their destruction or their portion elsewhere
A road imagined as a slick for words in a discrete stream

Flawless enamel the tongue slides along
Or skates off into a future illumined within a highway sign

At the lip of revelation comes denouement or slow torturous sleep
Because traveling does not follow music

Only music brings the body down from the sky
The solid body in its partial form