round-up: 10/15
reading recs, quotations, & tweets
Happy Sunday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
& a disclaimer: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling, 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.
Housekeeping:
My dear friend Luke Johnson has a book out and it’s wonderful and worth buying and once he said this in an interview:
If poems are meant to be a shared language, then why not share in each other’s creations? I believe nothing is original because we’re all borrowing from the same collective subconscious. And that’s beautiful. The need for individuality and originality is too American for my liking. Too capitalistic. Too land grab and imperialist. I don’t want to possess poetry. I want it to be free of me, and in me.
& I will always be thinking about that & will always scream about my friends and how much I admire them and how brilliant they are.
Also: the incomparable Louise Glück has died. She has always been capital T That capital G Good and she remains a huge model in syntax for me.
Thirdly: Does anyone have a favorite tattoo artist in LA? I am feeling bored and impulsive and would love your recommendations. Email me, please.
What I’m reading:
Quotations:
I know relationships can be very difficult sometimes, but it’s always worth it to put in the hard work and care for the ones you love, especially the beautiful ones, who are few and far between. If you happen to find that kind of love, hold it close, hold it tight, savor it, tend to it, and give it everything you’ve got, especially in times of trouble. Be kind, be strong, be patient, be forgiving, be vigorous, be wise, and be yourself. Live every day as if it is your last, with fullness and grace, with reverence and love, with gratitude and joy. This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
-Sufjan Stevens
I was twenty-two years old, but he said I looked like a strange little boy, not a nice young woman, yet I did not feel like a nice young woman, and it seemed to me that a greater share of unpleasant things happened when I was dressed to give the impression that I was a nice young woman.
Civility tends to operate in civilizations, where people stipulate to a series of truths, laws, facts, and principles. Knowledge is good. Science makes sense. Cruelty and ignorance are generally frowned upon. But when people can’t adhere to these basic premises of civilization, they forfeit the right to ask for civility.
“Be civil” just another way of saying “Calm down, pardner.” Civility is, in the end, a way to shut people up, a way to discourage the angry from expressing their anger—about a government that stifles their right to vote, their right to love, their right to control their bodies. It’s also a smokescreen that lets companies avoid taking a side, another tool in the toolbox of the privileged.
“Stop asking prominent white men how they feel about civility,” suggested Substack star Hoarse Whisperer in a widely circulated post from 2018. “White men aren’t the ones being locked up in cages, abused by bigots, or shot by police. Stop climbing to the very top of the privilege totem to ask the unaffected how the affected should behave.”
My imagination can be a problem. I'm prone to making my life, my family, and the world around me complicit in my cosmic fable, and often it's not fair to manipulate the hard facts of life into a vision quest. But it's all an attempt to extract meaning, and ultimately that's what I'm in pursuit of, like: What's the significance of these experiences?
It was so terrifying to encounter death and have to reconcile that, and express love, for someone so unfamiliar. Her death was so devastating to me because of the vacancy within me. I was trying to gather as much as I could of her, in my mind, my memory, my recollections, but I have nothing. It felt unsolvable. There is definitely a deep regret and grief and anger. I went through all the stages of bereavement. But I say make amends while you can: Take every opportunity to reconcile with those you love or those who've hurt you. It was in our best interest for our mother to abandon us. God bless her for doing that and knowing what she wasn't capable of.
Well, love is unconditional and incomprehensible. And I believe it's possible to love absent of mutual respect.
In the moment, I was stoic and phlegmatic and practical, but in the months following I was manic and frantic and disparaging and angry. They always talk about the science of bereavement, and how there is a measurable pattern and cycle of grief, but my experience was lacking in any kind of natural trajectory. It felt really sporadic and convoluted. I would have a period of rigorous, emotionless work, and then I would be struck by deep sadness triggered by something really mundane, like a dead pigeon on the subway track. Or my niece would point out polka-dotted tights at the playground, and I would suffer some kind of cosmic anguish in public. It's weird.
You don't have to be incarcerated by suffering.
In spite of the dysfunctional nature of your family, you are an individual in full possession of your life.
I'm being explicit about really horrifying experiences in my life, but my hope has always been to be responsible as an artist and to avoid indulging in my misery, or to come off as an exhibitionist. I don't want to make the listener complicit in my vulnerable prose poem of depression, I just want to honor the experience. I'm not the victim here, and I'm not seeking other peoples' sympathy.
At worst, these songs probably seem really indulgent. At their best, they should act as a testament to an experience that's universal: Everyone suffers; life is pain; and death is the final punctuation at the end of that sentence, so deal with it. I really think you can manage pain and suffering by living in fullness and being true to yourself and all those seemingly vapid platitudes.
Unfortunately, you can’t escape feelings because feelings are inside you.
It’s an attractive thing! To have an explanation for why you want to do something bad.
But we must separate feeling from action.
It’s legitimate to feel traumatized. The world is traumatic.
As much as one can empathize with people who’ve struggled to deal with the effects of trauma, trauma cannot become the rationale for one’s actions or beliefs. Simply put: if you are an adult, you are allowed to be traumatized, but you must also get over yourself. You must realize that no matter how bad you feel, your actions and beliefs are still your own, and you must own them.
By insisting on trauma as a guiding force, we flatten, distort and reduce ourselves and our complexities, and, at the same time, insist we are morally righteous for doing so! So, we are not only being stupid, but then insisting on our stupidity as good and morally correct!
If we continue to see our lives solely through the lens of trauma, then we cannot move forward, only backward. We become destined to repeat the very things done to us that made us feel traumatized in the first place.
Palestinians are dying and my rabbis are saying I have to believe in Israel, just like I have to believe in America. I don’t believe in America.
I am out with lanterns looking for myself.
-Emily Dickinson
Film comes not from the Latin but Old English and Germanic root filmen, which means “membrane, thin skin, or foreskin.” But whereas membrana got all mixed up in the slurry between words and the material on which they were printed, by the 1500s filmen had come to refer to “a thin coat of something.” Who knows why the divergence—perhaps the monks were preoccupied with making sure their parchment was so full with authority that it could not be detangled from the material on which it was written. Not enough curiosity goes into the early days when writing and paper were evolving side by side—a medium’s materials should go before its genre, in my opinion. But I digress. It’s easy enough to understand how we got from film as a coating to film as a medium of artistic expression by way of silver colloidal photographic plates which used the coating of the chemical gel on glass negatives to produce the earliest photosensitive prints. Even when “filmmakers” of the twentieth century were no longer performing this delicate dark room dance by themselves, the metaphor stuck of a filmmaker as someone who coats life with meaning.
Despair is integral to our human experience. There is no such thing as eternal peace unless perhaps we have died.
It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
-Oscar Wilde
I never learned how to live a life that wasn’t chaotic.
Tweets:
Ha!
Ha.
Sigh.
Me.
Yeah!