on grief
& round-up
Happy Thursday—
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
On grief
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling and apocalyptic, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual. And, fwiw, these past few weeks, I’ve been reading and thinking through the violence and horrors. I hope you’ve been keeping your eyes open and share where you can, too.
Some things to read:
Housekeeping:
Amid an awful October, this crossword puzzle was a bright spot. It took me 30 minutes and 16 seconds—much longer than it should’ve—but I nevertheless enjoyed it. So was this article, which features a photo of Jesus in cowboy boots.
Unfortunately, November is off to a terrible start, too. The horrors continue and, 300 miles away, my cat is dying. Also: I just got my car broken into and am facing a $400 window repair. Today’s a great day to buy a T-shirt, buy a zine, or—if you want—become a paid subscriber.
Anyway, the grief is unrelenting. Even when anticipatory.
Here are some quotations about it.
Grief, for me, is something that sends me to the depths in every dimension.
grief can be alchemizing, it can be paralysing,
Prior to my thirties, grief was unthinkable, heart-rending, unexpected, awful. But now, as I’m starting to adjust to the idea of mortality, and in fact respect it a little more, grief sits with me as the shadow of something very bright, a privilege even — as proof of love so deep someone can linger with you for years, decades, after they’ve gone.
I first learnt about butterfly hugs and head holds and pillow screams and such at a 5 day grief retreat in the summer of 2021 and while i obviously don’t practice them as frequently as would benefit me, i remain moved by how good a simple, intentional self-touch can feel. Stop what ur doing and put ur hand on ur chest with a tiny bit of gusto and tell me you don’t feel better. What a relief to remember that if nothing else, we can hold ourselves.
What I’m reading:
“A monster can look like whatever it wants”: On the Allure of Literary Monsters
Silvia Garcia-Moreno on Dracula’s Depictions and Descendants
The Firing of David Velasco From ‘Artforum’ Sparks a Series of Resignations and a Boycott Effort
Nonfiction That Rivals Little Women: The Forgotten Essays of Louisa May Alcott
Quotations:
Terrorism is the war of the poor, and war is the terrorism of the rich.
-Peter Ustinov
Being essentially secular, I don’t pray anymore, but I remember enough of what prayer was like to know that a poem can function like a prayer to language.
The violence in Gaza has not stopped, and the sheer brutality of what’s going on is just too inhumane to comprehend.
When I die, I know people will talk about Friends, Friends, Friends, and I'm glad of that, happy I've done some solid work as an actor, as well as given people multiple chances to make fun of my struggles on the world wide web. But when I die, as far as my so-called accomplishments go, it would be nice if Friends were listed far behind the things I did to try to help other people. I know it won't happen, but it would be nice.
-Matthew Perry
I was brought up in a very religious house. Religion is so deeply sunk into the self for me that it cannot be separated. And so I’m intrigued that the religious notion of the biological self as a temporary condition is now finding a new home in science and tech. They’re saying “Well, yeah, [the biological self] is a temporary condition that you’ll be able to sidestep through the creation of a digital self.” That’s the promise of technology, and it’s also the promise of religion, the first disrupter of death. And it amuses me to see the separation from the biological self that religion has always promised and foretold coming into vogue, coming into fashion, through the agency of Big Tech.
If you’re doing creative work, you have to move your mind out of its habitual executive function, its administrative mode, and to allow other things to come in, to allow patterns to emerge, to connect things in ways that are simply impossible when we’re just formatting stuff.
I suppose we’re always scared by what we can’t understand and what we feel we have no weapons against.
Why? Why? Why should all ghosts be heterosexual?
They can’t possibly follow the binary after death because it’s a human construct. So that has to go. Ghosts appear as male or female because they need us to recognize them. That’s why they wear clothes, I’m sure. It’s for us, our limited senses, the narrow spectrum that we live in. Our senses are really crude: our auditory senses, our visual senses. We’re very limited persons.
I don’t like social media, and I’m horrified at the way it’s gone. But I wouldn’t want a world without Google. I do think tech is neutral. We are in charge and it’s a tool. All it’s doing is showing us in this larger-than-life form our own grossness and inadequacy. Whenever we invent something incredible, we make it into a tool of oppression.
I think you have to be open, to be receptive, in order to write. It’s this business we were talking about earlier, how you get yourself into the right state of mind to allow new patterns to form, to allow new ideas to emerge, and to not start putting a formula on your work or trying to steer it in a particular direction—all the things that humans do. I’m always saying this to my students: stop trying to stamp it with an identity too soon. Let it be and let yourself be.
People are frightened of not producing in this obsessed world of continuous work. And they think that it’s better to produce something mediocre than to produce nothing. It takes time to learn whether you’re just bottoming out or whether you need this time for things to emerge in a different way. It’s hard in our world not to throttle your ideas to death.
It’s a large part of why I prefer to live in the country. There’s no one around me here and at night it’s completely dark. I am alone. I don’t particularly like bright lights. In the evening, it’s very meditative. You can read, you can think, you can let your mind settle into a better space.
If you’re a woman who wants to do anything other than be an attractive doormat, you’re going to break the rules. Any woman who wants to do something for herself is already in a transgressive state as far as society and certainly religion are concerned.
I became my own character in my first novel, “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.” It was such a mistake [for reviewers] to see that as an autobiography. It wasn’t. It was me writing myself out of where I had been and writing myself into a place where I could be. That was the huge freedom of it. If we understand that our self-state is actually provisional, changeable, and propositional—that we make it up as we go along—we have much more flexibility and much more freedom than we think we do.
My core belief is that we don’t know what happens next. But we can take control of our narrative, which isn’t about the kind of me-first individualism that has so marred our civic or communal life and that I abhor. It’s not about unthinking, unreflecting selfishness. It is about how you know your own story at a deep level and how you then proceed to tell it, whether or not you ever publish a book. Are you somebody who likes to play it for laughs? Somebody who wants the audience, who wants the approval, who needs to dramatize your life at every turn? Or can you find the urtext of who you are and be at least the co-author of that, while recognizing the other voices that made you as a younger person?
And then the question becomes: What can you do? Can you treat your story as something that can be moved, that can be changed? I love working with texts and changing them, whether my own or other people’s. That sense of liveliness that happens when the thing isn’t fixed and it isn’t final. It’s so hideous, these ideas about the Bible or the Quran, that they are fixed and final texts. Fucking originalists. Give me a break. We’re not where we were in 1787—is that when the U.S. Constitution was written?
What’s more important, the spirit or the letter? If you’re doing creative work, you already know that it’s the spirit, the thing that must move through and continue to refresh itself as humanity does.
I think the Americans were nearly right about it being a pursuit. But it’s not quite a pursuit. It’s more like an emergent property, like consciousness, and it comes out of a sense of meaning. For me, that’s very important. I have to feel—and it may be my religious background—I have to feel, above all, that this is a life of service.
So often people imagine that when they make the right decision they will feel better. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred they will feel worse. When we do make these big changes, often it’s really disorienting. There can be a rush of euphoria, and then it’s hard, hard, hard. I think that’s not often enough said. At that point, we can’t look for happiness. We have to go back to the core values from which happiness will emerge again, in the fullness of time.
I really care about this art business. I can't take it anything but seriously. It's everything to me. But I have no contempt for ordinary people. I'm not a middle-class wanker. I've made myself into what I am, because it's what I wanted to be. I am convinced that if anyone wants to make that effort, then all these things are as open to them as they are to me.
[Lesbianism is] very fashionable at the moment to say that everything is genetic, but it's a choice that I made quite consciously. I don't have any problems going to bed with men, don't dislike it, don't dislike them. I could choose, and with women I was able to get on with my life and do my work, and I'm not sure that I would have been able to do that if I'd been heterosexual. I feel like I didn't make a problem for myself, I made a solution. I knew I never wanted any kids. It would take up all my time because I would have to do it properly.
A poem isn’t a fact. It isn’t a definition. It isn’t open to only one interpretation. The simultaneous imprecision and specificity of poetry is part of why I find it the ideal companion for weeks as I raise my tiny, nearly useless voice to oppose thousands of children being killed and 1.4 million people losing their homes and to hear, in response, that it’s simply necessary. I cannot comprehend the voices that tell us this is necessary.
Beauty, in some ways, is boring. Beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like God.
-Umberto Eco
Heaven is not fit to house a love like you and I.
-Hozier, “Francesca”
I think the art filters through all sorts of different layers of sediment and rock until it filters out of the spring. It goes through all sorts of different filters that are psychic and emotional. So I think the ultimate question is […] does the work feel honest to me? And I can’t really consider all too much more than that.
A place can hate you and a place can love you. It is not always clear which is more dangerous. You stagnate, in the loved place; you have to leave it, at least once, before you become it. You languish, in the hated place, and you have to leave it before it becomes you. You can and often do go back, but you are not the same and the place is not the same, of course. Sometimes you shrug off the place and sometimes you don’t. But to define yourself by the lack of it is to simultaneously acknowledge its power.
Much of the sex I had in my twenties occurred at a mental remove, likely due to teenage sexual trauma or because I was blackout drunk (also, likely due to teenage sexual trauma).
The thing is, even in bed with men I didn’t fear, the one I did was always there too—held somewhere in my body, held somewhere in my memory.
Sometimes writing a wound becomes its own wound.
No journalistic process is objective. And no individual journalist is objective, because no human being is.
For me, writing itself is a primary means of liberating my own mind.
Tweets:
Well.
Welp.
Anyways.
Hope you find some joy where you can today—