round-up: 5/25
reading recs, quotations, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
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.
Things to read:
Hundreds Protest After Police Arrest Students at NYU and New School
IDF recovers hostage’s body from Gaza one day after retrieving three others
What I’m reading:
Housekeeping:
I’m going to start selling necklaces with very niche charms for a very niche audience soon—just for funzies. Here are a couple examples of the ones I’ve been making.
Quotations:
Oh, the enduring guilt of living in a broken body. It seeps into everything.
When my mother died on Mother's Day, my therapist said, "Well, at least she didn't add any trauma reminders to your calendar," which remains one of the most true and darkly funny things any mental health professional has ever said to me. Growing up with a mother who hurt and terrified me so much that I spent my entire adult life running and hiding from her means Mother's Day was always going to be a little bit tough and a little bit weird for me. Now there's the added memory of the convoluted way my sister and I found out she died; the the wild goose chase we were forced to go on to find her body; the genuine worry we both experienced halfway through the goose chase, thinking she'd faked her own death; and, finally, the confirmation that she was, in fact, dead and that she'd compulsively lied to, manipulated, and taken advantage of so many people in her life that there weren't even enough left to have a proper funeral.
Anger is the emotion I’m least comfortable with, in other people and in myself. In other people, it's because I've experienced a lot of anger expressed in unhealthy ways that have caused me a lot of pain. In myself, it's because I do not like the way it feels inside my body. I want to feel love toward people, I want to feel empathy for them, I want to see what's good inside them and celebrate it, and help them see what's good inside them too. When people make me angry, it makes me double-angry because I don't want to be angry! I'll go to almost any length to not be angry! And they're forcing me to do the opposite of what I want to do, which is feel good and nice about them! So then I'm angry.
I’m sorry for only thinking of myself. Had no better option. It was far too overwhelming to digest the fullness of everyone else having infinite worlds inside them. My body couldn’t handle it. Infinity hurts. Always scared me, since I was a child. I want to love others fully. The inner infinity of each person is too much to hold when you want to love people fully. Without the right defense, you will be swallowed. Perhaps loving fully doesn’t require knowing fully. You have to be okay with the impossibility of fully knowing anyone, yourself included. You have to find a way to be okay with the chaos. A lover once told me I used astrology to feel safer with people. The archetypes contain the chaos. The archetypes give form to inner infinities. Our worlds remain infinite, as do the archetypes — each contains infinity — but the archetypes become maps, letting me safely wander into other worlds without getting lost. Other worlds, meaning other people. People are other worlds. The archetypes, they let me step away from the overwhelm of loving real people, away from the urge to burrow into their infinities, and instead fit them cleanly into the infinity of the universe. Neat and tidy. In this sense, astrology gave me a safe way to love.
I had to stay inside for many years to untie the knots.
I’m sorry for only thinking of myself. I want to bury myself in you for the rest of this life.
You don’t understand. I try to explain my hunger. I used to want to love like God.
O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven;
-Shakespeare, Hamlet
It’s a kind of
love, isn’t it?
To commit to enduring.
Despite, despite.
You might consider the cross-cultural punishment of public forced shavings; after WWII, women who collaborated with the Nazi’s were paraded in the streets and forcibly shaved. We know hair has meaning, and meaning is memory. At times we use this as a tool to survive and at times it is a tool to demean and punish people with. These are not perfectly polarized behaviors; revenge is not justice, nor am I a judge to determine the morality of either. (I will note, however, that the only reason Coco Chanel was saved from the public shave after WWII was a letter from her friend Winston Churchill. Networking is not just a skill but an armor between life and death.) Neither is really the point I’m trying to make, actually, just where I come from - the importance of hair and how we treat it is something I take seriously. It is a cultural artifact. It is a treasure. Whenever we do something to it, we are reacting to something bigger than the hair.
You know how practically useless insurance systems are for mental health in the states. The prices, the referral systems: they are debilitating. The monthly premiums can cost hundreds of dollars, and co-pays for therapists, hundreds more. It’s not like writing rates have gone up with the cost of living or inflation - in fact, even for “in-demand” writers with many bylines, they have in fact degraded. Half the publications I’ve ever written for are dead now, just archived ghosts in the wireframe. I’ve spent a lot of time this year not bothering to pitch or write freelance because I truly and honestly do not believe it is a sustainable path forward as a creative - for myself, and for many other people.
The calculus of a freelancer is hard to turn off. I’ve never been good at it. Finding rest is a treasure.
I started writing because I just… needed a tether to reality. It wasn't supposed to be a novel. I just had to write.
Like the microplastics in our bodies, the optimizer ethos permeates our culture—social/media, policy, commerce, you name it. This is by design: American capitalism (ableism racism eugenics) puts the onus of survival on the individual, which means it’s your fault if you’re sick, and doubly so if you stay that way. Even if you aren’t sick, you still must be a competitor, not in order to achieve personal satisfaction or even material success, but to just get by. “Survival of the fittest” is not a dictum or a destiny, but rather a description of conditions, and its misconstrual is a prime example of this ethos’ entrenchment in all our lives.
When I can’t fuck, party, breathe, seek healthcare, or move through the world as I would like to, I think of writers of a certain era who wrote about life with or surrounded by HIV/AIDS: Andrew Holleran, Essex Hemphill, Guillame Dustan, Hervé Guibert², David Wojnarowicz, Reinaldo Arenas, Gary Indiana, Bob Glück. If they could live with it, so can I, I think, choosing to forget, for the moment, how many of them didn’t survive.
I have written three books, two of which—the earthquake room and X—are published. Inside me are many more, and it is my greatest wish to make and share them. But if you want to know the truth, I don’t think I’ll have the chance. With current and incipient pandemics, climate collapse, rising fascism, and the foreign horrors in which my country is implicated, I fear the window for that kind of writing life, let alone career, is closing. I’ll get out one or two more, I suspect. After that, the writing, if and when it happens, will stay with me.
As sorry for myself as it makes me feel, failing to obtain a certain kind of career in a certain kind of consumerist economy would be no tragedy. But if there is a world after the fall of the American empire—and I hope very desperately that this happens sooner rather than later—there is little reason to think I’ll make it there, which leaves me at something of a personal impasse. I will keep writing until I can’t anymore, but how? To what end? For whom? The work of solidarity and survival is cut out for me, but as for my vocation…well…there are more questions than answers.
I’m often drawn to writing that seems to push up against the limits of what’s possible, what a person can do with language.
What first led to this book was the question of who gets to want what. I thought, as I wrote this novel, of the ways people can be made to suppress, deny, and hide what we deeply need and want, and what a violence that can be.
If and when I’m deep in a sentence, trying to get it to be the most truthful version of itself, I lose all sense of an I, an ego. It’s not unrelated to the ecstasy I used to have in religious worship.
I was fascinated by the nature of desire: what can and can’t we change about ourselves? Who’s being asked or made to change, and which desires are more likely to be given primacy?
One of the strongest antidotes to the deepest kinds of loneliness, the worst shame I have felt, has been the fellowship I have found in literature and other people’s art. That's a guiding principle for me in my work. I so badly want to meet other people’s loneliness and other people’s solitude and other people’s shame.
That was one obsession of the book, these different ways—with faith, with wanting children or not, with sexual desire, with appetites in general, including for food—that our bodies are so powerful. I haven't been able to—and I've tried—I can't argue myself into believing in a Christian God. Again, I can't argue myself into or out of sexual desire. I am fascinated by the ways in which I haven't been able to ever reason or argue myself out of who I seem to be and what I want and what I believe.
That’s all for today!
-Despy Boutris
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