round-up: 1/27
reading/watching recs, quotations, tweets, & more
Hapy Saturday!
I have a long one for you today, so please click on the title to open this email in a new window if you want to get to the end.
Here’s what I have for you today:
What I’m reading/watching
Quotations
Tweets
& a disclaimer, again: 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.
And something to read:
Housekeeping:
Got a sweet shoutout from Mississippi Review this week.
What I’m reading:
What I’m watching:
A Teacher
Quotations:
In Ontario, I am a child again. Don’t tell me what to do. When you’re a nail, everything looks like a hammer; when you’re a child, everything sounds like derision
Grief does funny things to time.
Grief obliterates time: it strips it of meaning, destroys its constancy, renders it useless as a measure of anything that matters.
I wonder, crying at him from across the floor of our friend’s co-op, if the end of our relationship forced him to change, or if he was changing the whole time and I was just too near to notice it. I used to feel sometimes like we were suspended in each other, motionless and free from autonomy, like flies in honey — both of us the flies, both of us the honey.
I am the biggest star at being worried about. I am crushing the competition.
All my computers know that I’m grieving. On Instagram, the algorithm serves me ads for ketamine therapy, online counselling services, and an app that describes itself, mystifyingly, as “Duolingo for anger”. It nudges me towards brightly-coloured infographics that say “HOW TO BE HAPPIER” or “Rough Patches Are Normal :)” in cheery, organic font, and then it politely directs my attention towards a baby-pink girlblogger post about suicidal depression and thinly-veiled anorexia. A girl who’s much skinnier than me poses with a hard-boiled egg on a plate, garnished and arranged with suspicious effort. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is excerpted again and again, in different fonts, with varying levels of self-awareness. A post tells me to end my relationship. A post tells me to try microdosing mushrooms. A post tells me to like and follow for more tips on managing grief (bravely, I refuse; this is a last-gasp attempt at asserting my autonomy against the computer that is approximately as effective as a baby’s burp against an atom bomb).
I know the person who made the stupid fucking infographic about grief on my explore page has surely felt grief themselves. It has decimated them. It has torn their world apart and built a new one. I know, also, that their experience of it was surely no less intense or complex or human than my own. But I feel angry anyway. I feel like the computer is saying to me, we know you’re in so much pain, and boy, do we have a product for you. The answer to your pain is posts. I almost threw my phone at the wall the other day but stopped myself because I felt too much like I was putting on a show — performing a song-and-dance of suffering that I’d probably also just seen online somewhere. Sometimes I’m angry that I feel so angry.
So, I can’t stop talking about what will happen if my best friend dies. I am decimated by the loss of things that aren’t even gone yet. I am so full of the people I love — I have let so much of myself be made of them — that I can tell, with clinical specificity, precisely how little of me there could be if they were gone. The more firmly and reliably entrenched they are in my life, the more the fear persists. I, too, am defined by absence. I am a child, and anything could be taken from me at any moment.
I open my mouth, dutifully, and swallow. I am still hungry.
It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m on my knees. The Penitential Act at Midnight Mass reminds me paternally of my sins. I recite the only part of it I remember in submissive monotone with the rest of the congregation: I have greatly sinned, through my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do. (It all feels a little redundant to me, and I think of that Nico song: please don’t confront me with my failures, I had not forgotten them.) My dad, the perennial atheist, whispers a swear word into my ear.
In the car ride home from the train station, my father says he’s sorry that I was born with a brain that wants to hurt me. I remind myself: sometimes an apology means I wish this wasn’t happening to you, and sometimes an apology means I’m sorry I did this to you. This time, I can’t tell exactly which one he’s trying to say.
I used to cry everywhere, in front of anyone, a big open wound begging to be looked at. Now I can’t cry. I haven’t cried in a long time.
I walk around in the night for an hour until my bones hurt and my eyes sting and my bangs are frozen into icicles on my forehead. Then, I can’t walk anymore, and for a moment I just stand still — spotlit by the honey-yellow streetlight, thick snowfall burying me alive, catatonic with grief and loss, overcome in equal measure by the beauty of the world around me and my unrelenting smallness and powerlessness in the face of it. I’ve never felt an emotion I could hold in my hand. If I move, I’ll spill out of myself onto the crosswalk. The snow-plow would collect me in the morning.
My edges are blurry. I don’t know where I end and everything else begins. Sometimes I feel illuminated in the glow of other people’s love, warmer for being around it even when it’s not directed at me, soft and half-awake and responsible for nothing like a child sleeping on the couch at the end of a grown-up party. Sometimes I feel so wrong, so rotten, that it makes me physically sick — black with mildew, vacant, caving-in, ready to be engulfed in flame.
This is it, I think: the great tragedy at the centre of everything is not that the world is empty or evil or ugly, but that it’s full of immeasurably beautiful things that tend towards decay. I’m still unsure if I can accept the idea of grief as a final form of love, but I understand intimately, now, its fundamental truth: horror and pain and loss do not exist in opposition to love, but as affirmation of it. All this terror because of all this beauty. All this just to have something worthwhile to ruin.
I tried to write an essay about grief, but because writing about grief is sort of like staring at the sun, I mostly ended up writing about everything that’s around it. I think, in the end, I tried to write an essay with a grief-shaped hole.
Stories make up culture, and history is just one big story shaped by dominant culture. Recounting personal oral histories is a way of telling history through our own eyes, creating culture and context, and in doing so, illuminating and clarifying the present.
More than anything else, it's just human. We don't need fancy reasons to tell our stories. It's human to tell stories. We're meant to be storytellers. We're not meant to keep secrets.
Parents often impart fear as an act of love — if I can make you afraid, I can keep you safe. And my parents were fear professionals. Both of them had lost older brothers at very young ages — my father’s brother drowned a river when he and my dad were skipping rocks together, my mom’s brother died suddenly in a drunk driving accident when he was a teenager. They both subsequently formed their entire personalities around shielding themselves and anyone around them from pain. To the point that if I ever felt pain, it was a betrayal of their hard work. My therapist once asked me what I remember feeling in childhood, and my immediate recollection was of having my fists clenched and lips rolled inwards a lot of the time. Not breathing. I was stifling something at all times. To be good.
Certainly, monogamy is a norm which most of us seem to aspire to follow more often than not and to which we ascribe moral weight in both the observance or the breach, but it is very difficult to find objective reasons with good strong legs beneath them why most of us either maintain — or aspire to achieve — a monogamous relationship with one other person. There are plenty of subjective reasons. People tend to have strong feelings about this sort of stuff. It’s all quite messy.
Because the thing is, you stay in a monogamous relationship long enough and you’ll develop crushes on people. You’ll feel that early-stage prickle of sexual electricity and potentiality, and this brings with it a level of excitement that is hard to recreate in a realm of such intimate familiarity. Long term love is, in comparison, seemingly more mundane. A body you know every inch of and for whom your own can hold no mystery.
And some people can have both, though generally not all with one person, and others seek to repeatedly fall in love with themselves through the way that a person who is rendered safe by unfamiliarity and distance creates an idealised version of them. Because that is what romantic dalliance and early love is— filling in the spaces of an as-yet largely unknown person with the best case scenario. It has all the interpretative openness and tumultuous, delicious blur of a Turner painting. It is lips brushing against necks and compliments sent daringly into the unknown, to land unexpectedly on someone whose receipt of them feels enigmatic and natural as lightning to us. To compare this to knowing someone deeply is to compare things that differ at their very essence. They are not ontologically the same. That madness can lead to the sounder, stronger place but is no replacement for it.
Sometimes we long to be partial to someone. Not to be known in the unflattering round, as it were. Sometimes we long to carry any mystery at all. To see ourselves through the eyes of another, inhabiting spaces not yet dominated by our flaws and preposterous shortcomings. To be less seen and more imagined. To play the role of ‘me, but more-than’. Because the truth is that we are different in the company of different people. Who we are is not fixed. When single friends tell me that they like their life as it is and don’t want to change it for someone else, I tell them that I hope they like it well enough to stay single. Because another person will change us. They will affect how we live. They will reveal new sides to us. Their presence will influence our desires and tastes.
To want a romantic relationship without this is to be implacable. It is to use someone as a means to an end. To have a person play such a meaningful role in our lives, we have to make room for them, let them in, and then accept that their needs will differ from our own. We have to permit them to see us, and to accept that giving them this flawed gift will change us. We have to accept all that we cannot be to them, and they to us, and remain sufficiently self-aware to value the miraculous thing we have created. Love has so many faces. It is easy to take the nearest ones for granted. There is fresh mystery in working to truly see what is right before our eyes.
A narrator doesn’t have to be a bad person to be interesting, although many excellent narrators are vile, villains, or otherwise nasty people. But they probably should indulge their obsessions, delusions, and bizarre thoughts in the way that most of us try to avoid in real life. What’s the point of literature—where access to another person’s consciousness is a key strength of the form—if our characters’ interior thoughts mirror their curated public ones? Characters can’t play it safe on the page. A prime pleasure of literature is watching characters divulge their squirm-inducing, innermost secrets to you, the reader.
It seems possible that one reason contemporary American literature has seen a decrease in the weirdness, freakiness, and nastiness of characters is the rise of “autofiction.” If you’re writing about yourself, you may be less likely to want to reveal your hidden self to the world. This is the exact wrong tactic IMHO.
I’d argue satire never quite works unless the eye is turned back on itself. The satiric eye should see, and scathe, everyone.
My love, I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. It’s Ok. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive? Ask me the altitude of heaven, and I will answer, “How tall are you?”
My love, I want to sing it through the rafters of your bones, Dying is the opposite of leaving. I want to echo it through the corridor of your temples, I am more with you than I ever was before.
Perhaps depression is the actual opposite of feeling joyfully alive. It’s so passive, so sunk in the stinking mud of doom.
It’s worth remembering that revolutions don’t fail; they get co-opted—often by people who can afford co-ops.
Beauty is culture. Beauty is political!
The complexity of Andy’s love for Miranda is a lost opportunity in the film, although we see her bewitchment and the way it excites her to pass Miranda’s tests. In themselves, the tests are ridiculous, like obtaining galley copies of an unpublished Harry Potter book for Miranda’s twin daughters. Never mind. It’s an apprenticeship, showing the way we take pleasure in looking up to something larger than us rather than only looking across at our peers. You thrill to the level of expertise in someone older than you and marvel at how they put themselves together to gain their status.
The position of the acolyte and apprentice, yearning for the approval of the task master, is an under explored emotional state, especially as it exists between an older woman and a younger woman. This relationship, if even noticed, isn’t supposed to be important in the stories written by men, but the book the movie is based on was written by a woman, Lauren Weisberger, and the film is only, really, about the intensity between the two women.
To acknowledge hurt is to acknowledge vulnerability. It is to say, “I am not impervious to pain.” Even worse, it is to admit that one cares. When they know you care, they can take advantage of you, can’t they? They can take things away from you. Better to lash out than to tend the wound they’ve created.
It’s brave to accept pain, but I think it may be braver to share it with someone else or to witness it for them, especially if you care about each other.
I am staring at the legs.
They’re great — perfect really, which is of course to say slender. They meet a round butt at the top. I feel like a voyeur and keep looking because her back is turned and because she’d probably do it to me if I was in her place. Her waist tucks in just right before her shape forgives slightly into what are probably soft, supple breasts (though I can’t tell, being behind her). I think what I am feeling might be “rage in my solar plexus” which is a term I learned a few nights ago from an Instagram wellness coach. I feel this most times I have extended proximity to women under 120 pounds. The legs again, I look down. Then, the legs turn to face my direction, revealing with them the face of a girl who is — at most — twelve years old. I excuse myself to the bathroom where I lean over the toilet and feel sick for several minutes.
I liked believing things like “all pain is inflammation.” How comforting is that? Like all intangible horror is actually real and finite — distinguishable in all its forms, easily solved by spirulina, by Vitamin D and no french fries. “All pain is inflammation,” I would think, as I put arugula in the blender and felt pain. As I snuck a glance at myself in a shop window and felt pain. As I thought about a friend who had died and felt pain. A gua sha could maybe help with this. All this puffiness, all this pain. Maybe it’s a lymph node issue.
There’s nothing sexier than being really seen by someone. Especially after feeling invisible in one’s own life, the way wives and mothers all too often feel, or anyway, the way I often did.
“What’s your favorite color?” Jesse asked me as we soaked in the Rothkos.
I laughed. “Do you really want to know?”
“Of course,” he said. “I want to know everything about you.”
It was hard for me to imagine he might love me even though I was older than him, and a divorced mother of two. It’s always hard to imagine that someone might see us as worthy despite what we see as our biggest liabilities.
Jesse came to visit me in New York and we went to the Whitney, and as we wandered around the Biennial exhibits we encountered a dark room. I had never before clocked how often art museums plunge you into low light without warning. He stopped, unsure. The first time this happened we paused for a moment. Then I grabbed his arm, and held it close to my body, brushing against my boob. “Here,” I said, “I will help you because I am so nice, not because I’m trying to get some action, I swear.”
This was, I admit, the only time I ever lied to him.
It became a kind of game. Soon he was steering us into the dark galleries presenting videos just so he could feel me up. Maybe museums are on to something with all those dark rooms.
He loved to drive me along country roads, through covered bridges and along the oceanside. It felt so luxurious to be in a passenger seat, taken to a place because someone wanted to show it to me.
Jesse is a photographer, and often carried along a small film camera when we went on our weekend outings. Once he took a picture of me, lying in his bed, from the side. Later, when I was home, he texted me, “How are you so fucking beautiful,” and sent the picture.
I was stunned by everything about this. I’m not comfortable having my photo taken, and I’ve never liked my profile. After examining the picture I texted back, “I don’t think I see what you see, but thank you.”
I definitely didn’t see what he saw. But isn’t that one of the reasons we love to fall in love? Being seen by someone, truly seen? Having someone find beautiful everything about yourself that you find questionable?
On one of our drives, a butterfly flew through the car’s open window and landed on my lap. Sometimes, it seemed like the whole world was on our side.
Dating a divorced mom has got to be strange. I wanted to be seen, and appreciated, and then left alone. Once he said that he didn’t feel like he was part of my real life, and I thought, surprised, Of course not, aren’t you glad about that? My real life is when I’m parenting, and when I’m writing, or I’m working, or with my friends. My time with him was always a kind of exquisite interlude. To me, this was the best possible thing. But he had other needs, which of course makes sense.
Say for example the sub and the Dom have decided that the sub must take their shoes off before entering the Dom’s home. Then one day the sub has some really good news to share with the Dom and gets overexcited and runs across the threshold tracking dirt across the floor. The Dom takes a moment to share in the joy, but then informs the sub they have broken the rule and will now receive the agreed-upon punishment of 20 spanks. In this case, being spanked isn’t something this particular sub hates. It’s not really being felt as a penalty. Instead it demonstrates to the Dom and sub that the promises they make to each other matter. That even in this benign moment, they are finding a special way to connect as Dom and sub. So what “punishment” actually is in this case is more of a way of saying “I see you,” and “I’m choosing to uphold our dynamic right now.”
In practice though, insisting on perfect equality misses equity. Not everyone wants half a popsicle. Maybe they would prefer a handful of m&ms. And some situations, like housework, cannot be perfectly broken in half. And monitoring whether things are being divided perfectly in half is much more a recipe for frustration and score-keeping than feelings of satisfied equality.
We’re all living through a global pandemic on the shriveling husk of capitalist empires gripping to the last dying embers of a poisoned planet.
People who choose polyamory do so for various, occasionally profound, reasons. Perhaps they find joy in the tricky parts, the scheduling and negotiating and navigating the choppy waters of juggling multiple partners (fucking nerds). Others seem to get off on the freedom to be attracted (and act on this) to others.
To be clear: these are not my reasons. I am pathologically allergic to scheduling. I am not purposefully disrupting the nuclear family; I didn't seek out non-monogamy because of its supposed ethics, or even a commitment to exploring and loving in new ways. I am poly because I need attention, am addicted to unavailable men, and simply must create a problem out of my love life at all times.
Our world is: endlessly disintegrating, fractured, mediated by technology, surveillance, capital. I am much more interested in how those factors influence relationship styles, and to what sorts of people they might make non-monogamy feasible for, than the day-to-day of Brooklynites using Google Calendar to wage consistent and low level psychological warfare on their polycule.
And though I really thought of my past experiments in polyamory (to varying means of success) as some sort of deliberate adventure in new ways of loving, realistically I think most of those attempts were a list ditch effort in which to save a failing monogamous relationship, to lasso a person who does not want to be caught, to hold them, to say look we can do this with no rules, which is not how it works, not at all. I look back and think with sadness on relationships that devolved into “openness” not because we wanted to grow outwards, with each other, for each other, but because we wanted to stop the inevitable caving in.
Tweets:
That’s all for today!
As always, thanks for being here. Thanks to those of you who like reading this enough to pay me $5/month or more. And, if anyone ever wants to buy me a coffee, you can do that here.
