shesey

[shesey]

Excerpts from Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

"And hate begins where love leaves off..."

In the absence of eyes, all Aphrodite is vacant, gone.

I hate and I love. Why? you might ask. I don't know. But I feel it happening and I hurt.

The moment when the soul parts on itself in desire is conceived as a dilemma of body and senses.

... sweet fire.... burned by honey.

Desire is not simple. Desire melts the limbs. Boundaries of body, categories of thought, are confounded.

The shape of love and hate is perceptible, then, in a variety of sensational crises. Each crises calls for a decision and action, but decision is impossible and action a paradox when eros stirs the senses. Everyday life can become difficult; the poets speaks of the consequences for behavior and judgement:

I don't know what I should do: two states of mind in me...

The Eros of Euripides wields a bow that is "double" in its effect, for it can bring on a lovely life or a complete collapse.

... a negative image from which positive pictures can be created.

The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting.

Desire can only be for what is lacking, not at hand, not present, not in one's possession nor in one's being.

All our desires are contradictory, like the desire for food. I want the person I love to love me. If he is, however, totally devoted to me he does not exist any longer and I cease to love him. And as long as he is not totally devoted to me he does not love me enough. Hunger and repletion.

Sarte sees in erotic relations a system of infinite reflections, a deceiving mirror-game that carries within itself its own frustration. For Simone de Beauvoir the game is torture. "The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet. This torture of impossible love."

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

Who ever desires what is not gone? No one.

It is not a poem about the three of them as individuals, but about the geometrical figure formed by their perception of one another, and the gaps in that perception. It is an image of the distances between them.

Jealousy... is a hot and corrosive spiritual motion arising in fear and fed on resentment.

This is an emotion concerned with placement and displacement. The jealous lover covets a particular place in the beloved's affection and is full of anxiety that another will take it.

Jealousy is a dance in which everyone moves, for it is the instability of the emotional situation that preys upon a jealous lover's mind.

It would be an unnatural heart or supernatural heart that failed to be moved by desire for such an object.

.... it takes place entirely within her own mind.

Where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components - lover, beloved, and that which comes between them... the third component plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates, marking that two are not one, irradiating the absence whose presence is demanded by eros.

... a mutual sensitivity to the boundary between them.

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between I love you and I love you too, the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.

The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people, of things in general.

Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.

When I desire you, a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions of personal identity: he must recover and reincorporate what is gone if he is to be a complete person.

All desire is for a part of oneself gone missing.

Desire for an object that he never knew he lacked is defined, by a shift of distance, as desire for a necessary part of himself.

He takes up the question whether the desire to love or befriend something is ever separable from lack of it.

It is profoundly unjust of Sokrates to slip from one meaning of oikeios to another, as if it were the same thing to recognize in someone else a kindred soul and to claim that soul as your own possession, as if it were perfectly acceptable in love to blur the distinction between yourself and the one you love.

When he inhales Eros, there appears within him a sudden vision of a different self, perhaps a better self, compounded of his own being and that of his beloved. Touched to life by erotic accident, this enlargement of self is a complex and unnerving occurence.

There is something uniquely convincing about the perceptions that occur to you when you are in love. They seem truer than other perceptions, and more truly your own, won from reality at a personal cost.

All at once, a self never known before, which now strikes you as the true one, is coming into focus... then edge asserts itself... you are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.

How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend.... I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody - with whom? With Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I?

The lover helplessly admits that it feels both good and bad to be mixed up, but is then driven back upon the question, "once I have been mixed up in this way, who am I?" Desire changes the lover... the change gives him a glimpse of a self he never knew before.

The love which has its course barred, and fails to reach its fulfilment acquires a particularly strong hold over the human heart. The sparks of a vital desire burst into flame at the very moment when the desire is blocked in its path. It is the obstruction which makes the wholly personal feelings conscious... the frustrated lover seeks the cause in his own personality.

... the importance of bittersweet love in our lives...

Reading and writing change people and change societies. It is not always easy to see how nor to trace out the subtle map of cause and effect that links such changes to their context.

... a sensibility acutely tuned to the vulnerability of the physical body and of the emotions or spirit within it.

Oral cultures and literate cultures do not think, perceive or fall in love in the same way.

An individual who lives in an oral culture uses his senses differently than one who lives in a literate culture, and with that different sensual deployment comes a different way of conceiving his own relations with his environment, a different conception of his body and a different conception of his self.

Reading and writing require focusing the mental attention upon a text by means of the visual sense... he resists the environment outside him by distinguishing and controlling the one inside him... in making the effort he becomes aware of the interior self as an entity separable from the environment and its input, controllable by his own mental action.

Literate training encourages a heightened awareness of personal physical boundaries and a sense of those boundaries as the vessel of one's self.

When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat.

Written words, on the other hand, do not present such an all-persuasive sensual phenomenon. Literacy desensorializes words and reader. A reader must disconnect himself from the influx of sense impressions transmitted by nose, ear, tongue, and skin if he is to concentrate upon his reading. A written text... separates the reader (or writer) from his environment... written words project their user into isolation.

To know desire, to know words, is for Archilochos a matter of perceiving the edge between one entity and another.

Breaks interrupt time and change its data... Breaks make a person think.

Think of the beauty of letters, and of how it feels to come to know them.

I am writing this book because that act astounds me. It is an act in which the mind reaches out from what is present and actual to something else. The fact that eros operates by means of an analogous act of imagination will soon be seen to be the most astounding thing about eros.

My astonishing victory over Menti did not give me a pleasure one-hundredth part as intense as the pain she gave me when she left me for M. de Rospiec.

Properly a noun, eros acts everywhere like a verb. Its action is to reach, and the the reach of desire involves every lover in an activity of the imagination.

The suffering of love does not arise out of any action... but only from the cogitation of the mind upon what it sees does that suffering issue.

What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one.

... concocting in this way a love object out of thin air.

Anna Karenina's passion for Vronsky depends on a mental act.

All others are either known or knowable and cannot arouse her. Here we arrive at the nub of the matter, not for the first time. That which is known, attained, possessed, cannot be an object of desire.

Presumably, a positive picture could be made if the lover were ever to reincorporate his lack into a new and better self. Or could it? Is that positive picture what the lover wants from love?

O human beings, what is it you want of one another? Well, is this what you crave, to be joined in the closest possible union with one another, so as not to leave one another by night or day?... Consider whether this is what you desire, whether it would satisfy you to obtain this.

Was is the case that the round beings of his fantasy remained perfectly content rolling about the world in prelapsarian oneness? No. They got big ideas and started rolling toward Olympus to make an attempt on the gods. They began reaching for something else. So much for oneness.

... the tactics of incompleteness by which Sappho sustains desire and desirability...

I would like to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive.

Both mind and wooer reach out from what is known and actual to something different, possible better, desired. Something else. Think about what that feels like.

Each one of us is but the symbolon of a human being - sliced in half like a flatfish, two instead of one, and each pursues a neverending search for the symbolon of himself.

Chariton refers to his work as "erotic sufferings": these are love stories in which it is generically required that love be painful.

In Sappho's poem the shift of view is momentary, a vertigo and sudden sense of being very close to the core where feelings form.

It permits the reader to stand in triangular relations to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.

Longing seized him to create a rival image in writing and he set to work on the novel.

All lovers believe they are inventing love.

There is a triangular circuit running from the writer to the reader to the characters in the story; when its circuit-points connect, the difficult pleasure of paradox can be felt like an electrification.

Written letters have the presence and authority of a third person, who is witness, judge, and conduit of erotic charges. Letters are the mechanism of erotic paradox, and once connective and separative.

Letters in this romance, as in Heliodoros' novel, bespeak their own power, a power to change reality erotically.

The words we read and the words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them... Eros is inbetween. Both the experience of desire and the experience of reading have something to each us about edges.

We speculated about writers' purposes (to seduce readers?) and we are finally led to suspect that what the reader wants from reading and what the lover wants from love are experiences of a very similar design. It is a necessarily triangular design, and it embodies a reach for the unknown.

As you perceive the edge of yourself at the moment of desire, as you perceive the edges of words from moment to moment in reading (or writing), you are stirred to reach beyond perceptible edges -- toward something else, something not yet grasped.

The edges of the space are the edges of the things you love, whose inconcinnities make your mind move.

A desire to bring the absent into presence, or to collapse far and near, is also a desire to foreclose then upon now.

... you can't put the melting mass down, you can't keep holding it. Desire is like that. Pulling the lover to act and not to act, again and again, pulling.

Here desire is a disease and an evil from the first line. Within the comparison desire turns out to be pleasurable, but its pleasure is that of holding ice in your hands.

Ice is cold and the longer you hold it, the colder your hands get. But this care reminds us of another. The longer you hold it, the more it melts. So would it not be more reasonable to put the ice down, sparing hands and ice?

Lovers are always waiting. They hate to wait, they love to wait.

Yet, simultaneously, the lover perceives more sharply than anyone else the difference between the now of his desire and all other moments called then that line up before and after it.

The lover's real desire, as we see in that handful of ice, is to elude the certainties of physics and float in the ambiguities of a space-time where absence is present and now can include then without ceasing to be now.

An act of reading and writing, on the other hand, is an experience of temporal arrest and manipulation... it gives the reader or writer a taste of what it would be like to control time.

What is written in letters stays immovable and remains the same.

People who learn the art of letters come to believe in their own ability to render things clear and fixed for all time. It can be a dangerous belief. For it would be a remarkable power.

What difference would such a power make to someone in love? What would the lover ask of time if he were in control? These are questions relevant to our investigation of eros since, in general, we are trying to see what the passion of love has to teach us about reality. And love is an issue of control. What does it mean to control another human being? To control oneself? To lose control?

... he enumerates the ways in which a nonlover is preferable to a lover as erotic partner.

No one in loves really believes love will end. Lovers float in that "pure portion of anxiety," the present indicative of desire. They are astonished when they fall in love, they are equally astonished when they fall out of love.

Love based on the physical passion of the moment cannot but falter when that thrill is gone. The nonlove of the nonlover, in contrast, having no special commitment to pleasure in the present, can take a consistently atemporal attitude to this love object and to the love affair. Now and then are moments of equal value to the nonlover.

"When I spend time with you I shall not primarily be cultivating the pleasure of the moment but, really, the profit coming in the future, since I am not overthrown by desire but in full control of myself... These things are indiciations of a friendship that will last for a long time.

There is no time when desire is pain for the nonlover.

... he simply declines to enter the moment that is now for the man in love, the present moment of desire. Instead, he stations himself safely at an imaginary then and looks back upon desire from a vantage point of emotional disengagement.

The nonlover is unlikely ever to find himself staring down in desperation at a lump of melting ice. When this man picks up ice it is in full expectation that he will soon have a handful of cold water. He likes cold water fine. And he has no special affection for ice.

Such a lover... will stunt the growth of his beloved in every direction that leads the boy away from direct dependence.

One is the damage done by lovers in the name of desire. The other is the damage done by writing and reading in the name of communication.

It is not hard to see that a similar controlling attitude is available to the reader or writer, who sees in written texts the means to fix words permanently outside the stream of time.

He would be an extremely simple person who thought written words do anything more than remind someone who knows about the matter of which they are written.

Technicians of reading and writing see in letters a means to fix thoughts and wisdom once and for all in usable and reusable form.

Sokrates conceives of wisdom as something alive a living breathing word, that happens between two people when they talk. Change is essential to it, not because wisdom changes but because people do, and must.

Writing has this strange power, quite like painting in fact; for the creatures in paintings stand there like living beings, yet if you ask them anything they maintain a solemn silence. It is the same with written words... they keep giving the one same message eternally.

Logos in its spoken form is a living, changing, unique process of thought. It happens once and is irrecoverable. The logos written down by a writer who knows his craft will approximate this living organism in the necessary ordering and interrelation of its parts.

What does the desirer want from desire? Candidly, he wants to keep on desiring.

Now is the moment that presents a problem, so imagine yourself at then and avoid the problem.

Serious thoughts need different cultivation and time to grow; planted as seeds of living speech in the ground of an appropriate soul, they will take root, ripen, and bear fruit as knowledge in due season.

... serious thoughts and knowledge have their real life in philosophical conversation, not in the games of reading and writing.

... emotional calculus....

Lysias' text offers to its readers something that no one who has been in love could fail to covet: self-control. How do apparently external events enter and take control of one's psyche?

... eros is an experience that assualts the lover from without and proceeds to take control of his body, his mind and the quality of his life... eros comes out of nowhere to replace normal conditions of health and sanity with disease and madness.

Very few see him coming. He lights on you from where outside yourself and, as soon as he does, you are taken over, changed radically. You cannot resists the change or control it or come to terms with it. It is in general a change for the worse, at best a mixed blessing.

For indeed lovers themselves admit that they are sick not sane, and know they are not in their right minds, but they are not able to control themselves... harmfulness ensues.

As soon as eros enters his life, the lover is lost, for he goes mad. But where is the point of entry? When does desire begin? That is a very difficult moment to find, until it is too late. When you are falling in love it is always already too late... To be able to isolate the moment when love begins, and so block its entry or avoid it entirely, would put you in control of eros.

Nonlovers are people who remain 'masters of themselves'. Sokrates denies that such control is ever possible, or even desirable, for human beings. He speaks of it as an economy of death.

... the intimacy of the nonlover is mixed with a mortal self-control which disburses itself in mortal miserly measurings and engenders in the beloved soul that spirit of begrudgement commonly praised as virtue.

It is a deadly stinginess by which the nonlover eludes desire. He measures his emotions out like a miser counting gold. There is no risk entailed in his transaction with eros because he does not invest in the single moment that is open to risk, the moment when desire beings, now. Now is the moment when change erupts. The nonlover declines a change... He is secure in his narrative choices of life and love. He already knows how the novel will end, and he has firmly crossed out the beginning.

Beginnings are crucial.

In reality the beginning is the one moment that you, as an unwitting target of winged Eros, cannot control. All that this moment brings, both good and evil, bitter and sweet, comes gratuitously and unpredictably -- a gift of the gods, as the poets say. From that moment on, the story is largely up to you, but the beginning is not.

We should note that the Greek verb 'to read' is anagignoskein, a compound of the verb 'to know' and the prefix ana, meaning 'again.' If you are reading, you are not at the beginning.

As sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be. What is this mode of perception, so different from ordinary perception that it is well described as madness?

To address yourself to the moment when Eros glances into your life and to grasp what is happening in your soul at that moment is to begin to understand how to live. Eros' mode of takeover is an education: it can teach you the real nature of what is inside you. Once you glimpse that, you can begin to become it. Sokrates says it is a glimpse of a god.

In Sokrates' view, to cross out 'now' is, in the first place, impossible, a writer's impertinence. Even if it were possible, it would mean losing a moment of unique and indispensable value.

The facts are that eros changes you so drastically you seem to become a different person.

It assumes, as was standard in the popular moral thinking of the day, self-control as the rule of an enlightened life. Sokrates... vindicates mania.

Change of self is loss of self.

But the fact is, the greatest of good things come to us through madness when it is conferred as a gift of the gods.

Sokrates' central argument... is that you keep your mind to yourself at the cost of closing out the gods. Truly good and indeed divine things are alive and active outside you and should be let in to work their changes. Such incursion formally instruct and enrich our lives in society; no prophet or healer or poet could practice his art if he did not lose his mind. Madness is the instrument of such intelligence. More to the point, erotic mania is a valuable thing in private life. It puts wings on your soul.

Where thtey see loss and damage, Sokrates insists on profit and growth. Where they see ice melting, he says wings grow. Where they brace themselves against takeover, he unfolds himself for flight.

When you fall in love you feel all sorts of sensations inside you, painful and pleasant at once: it is your wings sprouting. It is the beginning of what you mean to be.

... several images of changelessness... the images are not encouraging: at best you will escape your own notice having died.

... when Eros impinges on you in his true form, something is lost, something hard to measure.

Falling in love, it seems, dislocates your view of what is significant.

... Eros deforms our lives. Meter, essentially, is an attempt to control words in time. We impose such control in the interests of beauty. But when Eros flashes into your life he brings his own standard of beauty and simply cancels out 'all those proprieties and decorums whose beauty you once cherished.'

A reader, like a bad lover, may feel he can zoom into his text at any point and pluck the fruit of its wisdom. A writer, like Lysias, may feel he can rearrange the limbs of the fiction on which he dotes with no regard for its life as an organism in time.

These are writers who share a strategy; they purpose to re-create in you a certain action of the mind and heart -- the action of reaching out toward a meaning not yet known. It is a reach that never quite arrives, bittersweet.

Imagine a city where there is no desire... their life looks flat... the art of storytelling is widely neglected.

A city without desire is, in sum, a city of no imagination... delight is beside the point.

Whenever any creature is moved to reach out for what it desires, that movement begins in an act of imagination.

Phantasia stirs minds to movement by its power of representation; in other words, imagination prepares desire by representing the desired object as desirable to the mind of the desirer. Phantasia tells the mind a story. The story must make one thing clear, namely, the difference between what is present/actual/known and what is not, the difference between the desirer and the desired.

He loved to ask question. He loved to hear answers, construct arguments, test definitions, uncover riddles and watch them unfold out of one another in a structure opening down through the logos like a spiralling road or a vertigo. He loved, that is, the process of coming to know.

On the one hand, the reasoning mind must perceive and bring together certain scattered particulars, in order to make clear by definition the thing it wishes to explain. This is the activity of collection. On the other hand, it is necessary to divide things up by classes, where the natural joins are: this activity is division.

That is to say, we think by projecting sameness upon difference, by drawing things together in a relation or idea while at the same time maintaining the distinctions between them. A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related it itself and to its present knowledge but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge.

To reach across it is tricky.

When the mind reaches out to know, the space of desire opens and a necessary fiction transpires.

He describes collection and division as the activity that empowers him to speak and think. And he alleges that he is in love with this activity.

In this one small thing at least it seems I am wiser -- that I do not think I know what I do not know.

A power to see the difference between what is known and what is unknown constitutes Sokrates' wisdom and motivated his searching life. The activity of reaching out for that difference is one with which he admits he is in love.

To reach for something else than the facts will carry you beyond this city and perhaps, as for Sokrates, beyond this world. It is a high-risk proposition, as Sokrates saw quite clearly, to reach for the difference between known and unknown. He thought the risk worthwhile, because he was in love with the wooing itself. And who is not?

#anne carson #eros the bittersweet #book quotes

[shesey]

Excerpts from God Human Animal Machine by Meghan O'Gieblyn

Schoolteachers routinely described me as "absentminded," an exceedingly odd phrase that confuses total absoprtion in thought with having no thought at all.

'Life has no meaning a priori... it is up to you to give it meaning.' But I didn't want to give life some private meaning. I wanted meaning to exist in the world.

My philosophy of life shifted with each book I read, and these transient beliefs rarely found expression in my actions in the world.

To conceive of my selfhood as a pattern suggested that there was, embedded in the meat of my body, some spark that would remain unspoiled even as my body aged - that might even survive death.

But then again, aren't all creative undertakings rooted in processes that remain mysterious to the creator? Artists have long understood that making is an elusive endeavor, one that makes the artiest porous to larger forces that seem to arise from outside herself. The philosopher Gillian Rose once described the act of writing as a a mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control.

At what point do you, the creator, lose control?

Reality is, that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

The most baffling phenomenon in quantum physics, the measurement problem, suggests that the physicist changes, or perhaps conjures, the quantum world simply by observing it.

People find it very difficult, he said, to accept the entirely random and inconsequential nature of our existence.

Such a strange coincidence. It was one of many doublings, as I had called them... I often experience echoes of this sort - images, names, or motifs that repeat themselves across the span of a few days, such that the world seems imbued with a discernible pattern. Sometimes an image I dreamed would reappear the next day in waking life. When I was will a Christian, these moments were rich with meaning, one of the many ways I believed that God spoke to me, but now they seemed arbitrary and pointless. Coincidences are in most cases a mental phenomenon: the patterns exist in the mind, not in the world.

Ideas do not just come out of nowhere. They are genetic, geographical. His quest to understand free will, he wrote, was an attempt to come to terms with my actions. What I took from my reading is that I am less free than I feel I am. Myriad events and predispositions influence me.

The human condition, Kierkegaard writes, is defined by intense subjectivity. We are irrational creatures who cannot adequately understand our own actions or explain them in terms of rational principles.

... How much of our science and philosophy has been colored by the justification of shitty men?

Is the mind a reliable mirror of reality? Do the patterns we per99ceive belong to the objective world, or are they merely features of our subjective experience?

Metaphors... are spectacles that allow us to see the chaotic world in a way that makes sense to our human minds.

Other works of simulation theology propose how individuals should live in order to maximize their chances of resurrection. Try to be as interesting as possible, one argues. Stay close to famous people, or become a celebrity yourself. The more fascinating and unique you manage to be, the more inclined the programmers will be to hang on to your software and resurrect it.

We should recognize metaphors for what they are: crude attempts to elucidate concepts that are still beyond our understanding.

I could not help but feeling that such coincidences were imbued with meaning - signs from the universe- though I knew this was unlikely, particularly when considered from a statistical standpoint.

Our brains have evolved to detect patterns and attribute significance to events that are entirely random... this tendency is probably hypertrophied in writers, who are constantly seeing the world in terms of narrative. In fact, for a while, encountering this very sintiment in books became yet another doubling in my life. When I am absorbed in writing a novel, reality starts twisting to reflect and informs everything I've been thinking about in my work, Ottessa Moshfegh notes in an essay. Virginia Woolf, writing in her diary in 1933, expressed essentially the same thing: What odd coincidence! that real life should provide precisely the situation I am writing about!

Personal essays are often dismissed as unserious or egotistical, a criticism of which I am reminded each time my finger catches on the "I," the only letter that has come loose from my computer keyboard, presumably from overuse. In the past, I'd resolved more than once to write straight journalism or criticism, objective forms that require no personal angle. But each time I tried, something odd happened. At some point in the writing process, I got stuck; I could not get the ideas to come together or the argument to take form - or rather, the argument kept changing. When writing in this divested way, in the realm of pure and unmediated ideas, anything is possible, and the possibilities overwhelmed me. I became too conscious of the words themselves and the fact that I could manipulate them endlessly, the way numbers can be manipulated apart from any concrete referent. I suppose I came to see language the way that machines regard information, as a purely formal structure of symbols without meaning. In each instance the only way out of the impasse was to put the "I" back into the story. As soon as I began binding the ideas to myself and my lived experience, it became possible again to create cogent arguments. The words became conduits for meaning instead of empty vessels that were themselves the whole show."

But I could not help feeling that this experience contained the larger truth. For me, the "I" was not an expression of hubris but a necessary limitation. It was a way to narrow my frame of reference and acknowledge that I was speaking from a particular location, from that modest and grounded place we call "point of view."

There is no Archimedean point, no purely objective vista that allows us to transcend our human interests and see the world from above, as we once imagined it appeared to God. It is our distinctive vantage that binds us to the world and sets the necessary limitations that are required to make sense of it.

The most disquieting ideas rarely present themselves as immediately convincing.

Perhaps this could explain the existence of evil: sin and suffering were simply errors in the code that could not be corrected without significantly disrupting the system.

But the endpoint of this logic- that it's possible to think oneself into insanity - would seem to fly in the face of modern psychiatry, and perhaps physicalism itself, which insists that the full range of human behavior is reducible to chemical imbalances and misfiring synapses. Is it naive to grant the mind such power over the body? Is it only in Russian novels that a person is driven to madness after encountering some new philosophy? Why is the only plausible explanation for an obsession the imbalance of neurotransmitters or depressed nerve centers - why could I not have been driven to the same ends by an idea?

I felt its power most often in my writing, where I've learned that intuition can solve problems more efficiently than logical inference.

The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

How freeing it is to surrender to the purity of unqualified belief.

People become trapped within the mirror of their digital reflection... "algorithmic determinism."

Faith, based on mercy and forgiveness, contradicts his innate human sense of justice.

But he cannot consent to a system that contradicts his human sense of justice. And what his instincts tell him is that harmony and redemption come at too high a price. I renounce the higher harmony altogether, he declares, It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child... I don't want harmony. From love for humanity, I don't want it... I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong.

Our mistrust of the future sometimes made it hard to give up the past.

#Meghan O'Gieblyn #God Human Animal Machine #Book Quotes

[shesey]

Excerpts from Bessel Van Der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score

The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves. We want to think of families as safe havens in a heartless world and of our own country as populated by enlighten, civilized people. We prefer to believe that cruelty occurs only in faraway places like Darfur or the Congo.

Most human suffering is related to love and loss and that the job of therapists is to help people acknowledge, experience, and bear the reality of life - with all its pleasures and heartbreak.

Our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being. Language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning... We can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive.

Trauma almost invariable involves not being seen, not being mirrored, and not being taken into account.

If an organism is stuck in survival mode, its energies are focused on fighting off unseen enemies, which leaves no room for nurture, care, and love. For us humans, it means that as long as the mind is defending itself against invisible assaults, our closest bonds are threatened, along with our ability to imagine, plan, play, learn, and pay attention to other people's needs.

How many mental health problems, from drug addiction to self-injurious behavior, start as attemps to cope with the unbearable physical pain of our emotions.

... knowing that we are seen and heard by the important people in our lives can make us feel calm and safe, and why being ignored or dismissed can precipitate rage reaction or mental collapse. It helped us understand why focused attunement with another person can shift us out of disorganized and fearful states.

When the message we receive from another person is 'you're safe with me,' we relax.

Most of our energy is devoted to connecting with others.

...almost all mental suffering involves either trouble in creating workable and satisfying relationships...

Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.

The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else's mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety. No doctor can write a prescription for friendship and love: These are complex and hard-earned capacities.

Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.

The most common response to distress is to seek out people we like and trust to help us and give us the courage to go on.

Supressing our inner cries for help does not stop our stress hormones from mobilizing the body.

The most natural way for human beings to calm themselves when they are upset is by clinging to another person.

... Human beings may be induced to sacrifice everything they hold dear and true -- including their sense of self -- for the sake of being loved and approved of by someone in a position of power.

i like my body when it is with your body ... muscles better and nerves more.

Economist have calculated that every dollar invested in high-quality home visitation, day care, and preschool programs results in seven dollars of savings on welfare payments, health-care costs, substance-abuse treatment, and incarceration, plus higher tax revenues due to better-paying jobs.

When we play together, we feel physically attuned and experience a sense of connection and joy.

However, the most natural way that we humans calm down our distress is by being touched, hugged, and rocked.

While trauma keeps us dumbfounded, the path out of it is paved with words, carefully assembled, piece by piece, until the whole story can be revealed.

Feeling listened to and understood changes our physiology; being able to articulate a complex feeling, and having our feelings recognized, lights up our limbic brain and creates an 'aha' moment. In contrast, being met by silence and incomprehension kills the spirit.

Death, destruction, and sorrow need to be constantly justified in the absence of some overarching meaning for the suffering.

This is one of the most profound experiences we can have, and such resonance, in which hitherto unspoken words can be discovered, uttered, and received, is fundamental to healing the isolation of trauma - especially if other people in our lives have ignored or silenced us. Communicating fully is the opposite of being traumatized.

Public story and inner experience finally meet.

The object of writing is to write to yourself, to let yourself know what you have been trying to avoid.

Like a splinter that causes an infection, it is the body's response to the foreign object that becomes the problem more than the object itself.

#the body keeps the score #bessel van der kolk #trauma

[shesey]

Excerpts from The Wall Creeper by Nell Zink

If I tell myself stories, I get very sentimental very fast. So I didn't. I had hypnotized myself because Stephen had a job that could support us both and secretarial work bored me. I saw that I had followed the chief guiding principles of the petty bourgeoisie in modernity and made a virtue of necessity in telling myself my husband was a good lover. ... are you saying that what makes our relationship valuable is my willingness to suffer for you?

I don't see what that has to do with having a good relationship. It should be about getting through difficult stuff together. Difficult stuff the world throws at you, not difficult stuff you do to each other. I'm asking you right now to risk your life and health for my reproductive success.

If I put a picture of you and a baby on my desk, I can get promoted.

I'm sure there are couples that are fated to be together, like they meet each other in kindergarten and date on and off for twenty years, and finally they gie up because they realize they've gotten so far down their common road that there's nobody else in the entire universe they can talk to, because they have a private language and everything like that.

Have kids and turn so weird from the stress that nobody else ever understands another word we say. A couple that's completely wrapped up in each other can get through anything, because they don't have a choice. Right now we have the option of floating through life without b eing chained to anybody, but instead we pile on a ton of bricks and go whomp down to the ground.

I'm sorry. I figured human beings are curious. I try not to avert my eyes when life throws new experiences my way.

... my marriage was starting to feel like an exercise in opportunity cost.

Stephen's grief humanized him. I began to fall in love.

Maybe she was the kind who feels guilty when she commits adultery in her heart?

For the first time in years - or perhaps since infancy, when I hadn't known other people existed - I was certain I was alone, and my prompt gut reaction was to abandon all hope.

Consequently, Stephen was physically revolted by her. As if her failure to notice what was going wrong with the planet was linked to a black, spongy degeneration of her brain that might be contagious.

People talk a lot about midlife crisis, the momentary stress that arises when you finally slack off... It has nothing on unrequited love. Stephen stopped sleeping. He spent his nights staring at the TV with the sound off. He took Provigil so he could go to work. He looked weak and ashen as a ghost. On my knees by the couch, I begged him to take a few weeks off.

Even men in their seventies, talking to me after meetings about an impending block party or the proper sorting of garbage, would raise their eyebrows when I saw I had followed my husband from Philadelphia to Berne and then Berlin. I couldn't come up with a step I'd taken in life for my own sake. On my own behalf, to make myself happy, I'd done all kinds of things, all of them with the aim of staying close to a man. It hadn't occurred to me to be ashamed of myself. I'd thought love was a socially acceptable motivation.

Like me, she had moved to Berlin to be with her husband. The key difference was the kids. I envied her with a pang. An educated woman with little kids (I didn't imagine her having acquired them by any other means than hot sex) is a model of feminist, as well as feminine, virtue. Even her struggle to get strangers to take the kids off her hands is a feminist cause. Her work, bringing up the model citizens of tomorrow, is something society feels it ought to value and is constantly proposing as potentially eligible for pension benefits, unlike my work, which neither involved actual labor nor was anything but an end in itself, on good days, and otherwise not even that.

She hand't planned to drop out, but it was absolutely impossible to be an adequate mother and have a life, she said.

Stephen never had a strategy about anything. He just went ahead and did stuff, then tried retrospectively to figure out why.

#nell zink #the wall creeper

[shesey]

Excerpts from Mona by Pola Oloixarac

Bad things sometimes stay trapped inside the mind, which cannot expel them until they're finally expressed.

Our memories look down at us from their precipice, letting us live our normal lives - or almost normal. But there's a volcano underneath, just waiting to erupt. I feel them watching us - I feel my memories watching me.

In international waters, without a compass: at times like these, with no other task than simply to be, even if being was nothing more than being a cocotte, a being fundamentally without any ties, and therefore without limitations, but nevertheless (and more than ever) a woman, Mona embraced her liberty the way the blind embrace the darkness. It was merely her element, impossible to avoid.

My writing is inversely proportional to my speech.

We can't write except in drag.

The majority of people went their whole lives without ever understanding the sources of their own pleasure...

She;d had her phone back in airplaine mode to avoid interuuptions and to ensure she remained the sole guardian of her solitude.

My advice to you is: chill out. That's all. It's not easy to be a young woman with talent. What you're seeking will only come with time, but it'll come.

And the only one sure thing - is that nothing's a sure thing.

My subject is shamelessness and the pain of being, and of contemplating, and of hearing this voice and not being able to do anything to stop it. I write, dreaming that someday I'll be able to silence it. I write and I dream, and everything falls into a deafening silence that can't be escaped or altered, and there's no other vhoice but to write.

Perdida, me ha llamado la gente Sin saber que he sufrido con desesperacion.

#mona #pola oloixarac

[shesey]

Excerpts from Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen

There's nothing I detest more than men with happy childhoods. Meeting Rebecca was like learning to dance, discovering jazz. Never trust anyone who holds so strictly to decorum. I enjoyed having a set of clean instructions, following protocol. It gave me a sense of purpose, an easiness. It was a brief vacation from the loud, rabid inner circuitry of my mind. As I've said her life, the life of a woman, seemed utterly detestable to me. There was nothing I wanted less than to be somebody's mother, somebody's wife.

A house that is so well maintained, furnished with good-looking furniture of high quality, decorated tastefully, everything in its place, becomes a living tomb. People truly engaged in life have messy houses. Here is how I spend my days now. I live in a beautiful place. I sleep in a beautiful bed. I eat beautiful food. I go for walks through beautiful places. I care for people deeply. At night my bed is full of love, because I alone am in it. I cry easily, from pain and pleasure, and I don't apologize for that. In the mornings I step outside and I'm thankful for another day. It took me many years to arrive at such a life. When I was twenty-four, the most I wanted was a cramped afternoon among strangers, or to dawdle down a sidewalk without my father waiting for me, be to safe someplace far away, to be home somewhere.

So you see, what came after this story ends was not a direct line to paradise, but I believe I got on the right road, with all the appropriate trips and kinks.

#eileen #otessa moshfegh

[shesey]

At night, when she weas lying with her head against my chest, which fit exactly because she was so petite, she made my heart beat slower - yes, slower, and that was exactly what I needed.

-- We had to remove this post by Hanna Bervoets

#hanna bervoets #we had to remove this post

[shesey]

Excerpt's from Annie Ernaux's A Woman's Story

For a woman, marriage was a matter of life or death. It was either the hope of making it work together, or else hitting rock bottom. I think she saw the war years as a break in the struggle to succeed. With so much misery around, fighting for social advancement had lost all meaning. When I think of my mother's violent temper, outbursts of affection, and reproachful attitude, I try not to see them as facets of her personality but to relate them to her own story and social background. This way of writing, which seems to bring me closer to the truth, relieves me of the dark, heavy burden of personal remembrance by establishing a more objective approach. In her opinion, self-improvement was first and foremost a question of learning and nothing was more precious than knowledge. She would often say, one must occupy one's mind. With him I had fun, with her I had conversations. Of the two, she was the dominating figure, the one who represented authority. Because she feared people wouldn't love her for what she was, she hoped they would love her for what she could give. She insisted on helping us through our last year at college and was always asking what we wanted as a present. The other family had originality and a sense of humor. They felt they owed us nothing. She seemed disappointed by my silence because it offered no answer to the question that was probably foremost in her mind: Does he at least make her happy? I have just read in a newspaper that "despair is a luxury." The book I started writing after my mother's death - a book that I both the time and the ability to write - may also be seen as a form of luxury.

#annie ernaux #a woman's story #feminist books #feminist quotes

[shesey]

Excerpts from The Summer Without Men by Siri Hustvedt

What IS does not HAVE TO BE

I had to get out of the apartment because being there hurt. The rooms and furniture, the sounds from the street, the light that shone into my study, the toothbrushes in the small rack, the bedroom closet with its missing knob-- each had becomes like a bone that ached, a joint or rib or vertebrae in an articulated anatomy of shared memory, and each familiar thing, leaden with the accumulated meanings of time, seemed to weigh in my own bod, and I found I could not bear them.

Some people just take the room they need, elbowing out intruders to take possession of a space.

Loss A known absence If you did not know it, It would be nothing, which it is, of course a nothing of another kind, as acutely felt as a blister, but a tumult, too, in the region of the heart and lungs, an emptiness with a name: You.

Insanity is a state of profound self-absorption. An extreme effort is required just to keep track of one's self, and the turn toward wellness happens the moment a bit of the world is allowed back in, when a person or thing passes through the gate.

But it was my mother herself who I had come home to. There is no living without a ground, without a sense of space that is not only external but internal -- mental loci. For me, madness had been suspension. When Boris abruptly took his body and his voice away, I began to float. Blowing up is not the same as breaking down, and as we've said before, even breaking down can have its purpose, its meanings. You held yourself together for a long time, but tolerating cracks is part of being well and alive.

We find ourselves in the faces of others, and so for a time every mirror reflected a foreigner, a despised outsider unworthy of being alive.

Indifference was the cure, but I couldn't find it in myself. The actual cure was escape. It is impossible to divine a story while you are living it; it is shsapeless; an inchoate procession of words and things, and let us be frank: We never recover what was. Most of it vanishes.

Nothing is repeated exactly, even words, because something has changed in the speaker and in the listener, because once said and then said again and again, the repetition itself alters the words.

Then I said that sometimes a small thing, even a bit of debris, can come to signify a whole world of feeling.

Had I been clinging to an idea of wretchedness while I was secretly enjoying myself?

You think if your anger had power, paternal power, you could shape things in your life more to your liking.

Is it perhaps that you felt your father's emotions had power in the family, power over your mother, your sister, and you, and you were always stepping around his feelings, trying not to upset him. And you've felt the same thing in your marriage, perhaps you've reproduced the same story, and all the while you've gotten angrier and angrier?

I never thought it was right to turn people into paragons of virtue after their deaths either.

Rejection accumulates.

After all, dear reader, I ask you how many men have thanked their wives for this or that service.

Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder.

Hypersensitivity to the atmospheric nuances around the table.

Perception is never passive. We are not only receivers of the world; we also actively produce it.

Shorn of intimacy and seen from a considerable distance, we are all comic characters, farcical buffoons who bumble through our lives, making fine messes as we go, but when you get close, the ridiculous quickly fades into the sordid or the tragic or the merely sad... the merely sad business about me was that I wanted to be admired.

I wondered why I wanted him myself. Had Boris left me after two years or even ten, the damage would have been considerably less. Thirty years is a long time, and a marriage acquires an ingrown, almost incestuous quality, with complex rhythms of feeling, dialogue, and associations. We had come to the point where listening to a story or anecdote at a dinner party would simultaneously prompt the same thought in our two heads, and it was simply a matter of which one of us would articulate it aloud.

I will write myself elsewhere, I thought, reinvent the story in a new light. I am better off without him. Did he ever do a domestic chore in his life besides the dishes? Did he or did he not tune you out regularly as if you were a radio? Did he not interrupt you in mid-sentence countless times as if you were an airy nothing, a Ms. Nobody, a Missing Person at the table? Are you not "still beautiful" in the words of your mother? Are you not still capable of great things?

She was right. We cannot wish our worlds into being. Much depends on chance, on what we can't control, on others.

I meditated for a moment on the imaginary and the real, on wish fulfillment, on fantasy, on stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The fictive is an enormous territory, it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it beings and ends. We chart delusions through collective agreement. The man who believes he's emitting toxic rays while nobody around him seems to be the least bit affected can be safely said to be suffering from one pathology or another and put away in a locked ward. But let us say that same man's fantasy is so vivid, it affects his neighbor, who then begins to suffer from headaches and vomiting spells, and a contagious hysteria ensues, and the whole town retching -- isn't there some AMBIGUITY here? The vomit is real.

There are times when the fragility of all living things is so apparent that one begins to wait for a shock, a fall, or a break at any moment.

There is no future without a past because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition. I had begun to expect calamities.

Yes, it would have been nice if he had been a little different, but he wasn't, and there were so many good days along with the bad days and sometimes the very thing I wanted to change about him one day was the thing that made another thing possible another day that was good, mot bad, if you see what I mean.

It is wrong that it has become prevalent through custom that these changes are called growth and diminution. It would be appropriate that they should instead be called creation and destruction, because they oust a thing from its established character into a different one, whereas growth and diminution happen to a body that underlies the change and remains throughout it.

When I was mad, was I myself or not myself? When does one person become another?

Not telling is as interesting as telling, I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside, can be so excruciating under certain circumstances is fascinating.

The lesson here is that extreme relaxation promotes pleasure and extreme relaxation is a state of nearly complete openness to whatever comes along. It is also thoughtlessness.

And who is to measure suffering? Which one of you will calculate the magnitude of pain to be found inside a human being at any given moment.

I thought of her mother; it is worse to have a cruel child than one whose vulnerability allows attack.

Having little to divert attention or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together.

This is not the voluntary blindness of new attraction; it is the blindness of an intimacy wrought from years of parallel living, both from its bruises and its balms.

Commentary: the instruments of darkness tell us truths. What are they? Boys will be boys: rambunctious, wild, kicking, hanging from the trees. But girls will be girls? Gentle, nurturing, sweet, passive, conniving, stealthy, mean?

If I were carrying my reproductive organs on the outside, I'd be pretty damned nervous about that delicate little package, too.

Maybe that was my problem. I read too much, and my brain exploded.

It is not that there is no difference between men and women; it is how much difference that difference makes, and how we choose to frame it. Every era has its science of difference and sameness, its biology, its ideology, and its ideological biology, which brings us, at last, back to the naughty girls, their escapades, and the instruments of darkness.

The entire letter turns on three sentences: It has been a black period for me. I even called bob. I have missed you.

If a man opens a novel, he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it's reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

Yes, we (women) certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.

For months, I had drowned in anger and grief, but over the summer my mind had unconsciously, incrementally begun to change. Dr. S had seen it. Reading Daisy's letter, I felt those subliminal, not yet articulated thoughts rise upward, form sentences, and lodge themselves securely somewhere between my temples: Some part of me had been getting used to the idea that Boris was gone forever. No one could have been more shocked than I by this revelation.

After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.

But there is nowhere for us to go, nowhere in the world because no one will have us as we are, and there is nothing to do except to embrace the secret pleasures of our subliminations, the arc of a sentence, the kiss of a rhyme...

A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment.

#summer without men #siri hustvedt #feminist books #feminist quotes

[shesey]

Excerpts from Refuge by Dina Nayeri

But you can't make someone love you, as they say, and shouldn't try, unless you're twenty and have a muscular heart, a heart itching to be broken in. Sometimes, in calmer years, failing isn't such a curse. And then he had come through for her, this man she had chosen to love for exactly this reason: he could understand much more than his experience should allow. But Niloo didn't say any of that because it's important not to care what men think. In truth she had never tried to live without Gui. And that's the only way you know for real, isn't it? The child cried openly, no one bothering to protect her future psyche from the memory of this day. We had our love. No sense to be missing each other all this time, haunting each other's nights this way. It's not healthy. It happens because the world is a sweaty cave crowded with bodies clamoring and fighting to capture every good thing for themselves. Niloo is finished with the visits - they are draining and painful and she's bad at them... These disconnects rouse her at night. The memory of them traps her breath so that it fails halfway up her chest.

Now Zakhmeh has made her curious, and curiosity is one instinct Niloo rarely ignores. The thing she has is stamina; and if she calmed down, as everyone advises her to do, she would be nothing. Dokhtare kharab, a broken girl, which is the Iranian way of describing a sexually free person who happens to be female. This sleepy flatland was no home to me, and it would be worth any hard work and indignity now if I could just find my own. I was afraid they'd find out I was afraid. My only antidote to the fear was math and science, concrete pursuits Baba had taught me to trust. There are creatures a person can see at thirty to which she has no access at fourteen. I'd rather you grow up to be this useless to the universe than to become a religion pusher. If this disaster is absolute zero in value, then Jesus and Allah pushers are deep in the negatives. Live where you fear to live, says Rumi, be notorious. It seemed to Bahman that Rumi respected the pleasure seekers, the ones who hunted for the next tumbling of the heart in the cracks between minutes. Those wakeful ones, sucking joy from the bone-dry day. He had loved his wives, but never lingered, sedated and eroding, in a comatose marriage. What a good feeling, he thought, to be so well loved in one's community -- or if not loved, needed in more than a peripheral way. Well, Bahman was too old and tired to care about the bile that spewed from an old mullah's mouth. I tell you one rule of love. Don't trap. Don't be trapped. How is the atmosphere of her heart? I tore something precious from the clenched fist of the universe. It's a curse to be a bad fit. It's like spending every day trying to force a hundred mixed-up lids onto the wrong jars. People think that's not enough reason, but it's the one thing that's unfixable. It poisons everything. They were stray sparks from a fire too far away to offer warmth. How sad it is when someone who has left your orbit, whose memory has receded, holds such intimate knowledge. Meeting them again feels like a renewed loss, and it's full of tremors and watery eyes and involuntary responses much like a bout of opium withdrawal, not only because every familiar detail - their blue eyes or their yellowing laugh or a charming turn of their hand - is like a coil of skin peeled from the heart, but because they took away that knowledge of you with them, that snapshot of you, out into the world. And as they changed, everything that they knew changed too. And so you are unwittingly altered. Now you're in love with you. The original you.

If old love is opium, then it must be more dangerous than the new. Withdrawal from it drives the addict to the edge of a roof... It makes him moan and beg and collapse and rave for release. Nothing compares to knowing there is no more. Over the years, she has learned to adapt, to start over in each new place and live as if she belongs there. She craves a night of solitary cooking. People change. Everyone. And all love ends. She knows this now. When you stop carrying it all on your back -- maybe that's when the refugee years end. She recalls that the best part of her day used to be hearing a key turn in the door. She would wait behind the door and peek out at him as he came in. His slow smile would bloom, and the wrinkles around his eyes would appear, and he would lift her up, kiss her mouth, and say, you bring the joy.

When she hears I can't do this anymore, it takes a second to realize that these dreaded words have tumbled from her own mouth. It's not enough just to laugh at the same twisted jokes and to say we love each other enough to live under a bridge. We have no roots. Great god, oh god, I want to stay in love. Then she goes back to mispronouncing words and reciting from rote memory. Staying in love, this girl seems to know, is the true challenge. Did Europeans realize how lucky they were, to be part of so much order and care through an accident of birth? I had spent years nursing the wrong fears. It's not easy, to build a village. The road, it travels too. But if I was afraid of anything, it was the possibility of stagnating. All good things end, and I no longer believe that reduces their worth. Lying in this wreck, something important feels finished. It is as if in her fingers and toes she knows that the life she has built is gone and that the passing decades will find her gone from here, inside a different future. What constant breathlessness in uprooting; it's the unbearable stretching on of life. How relentlessly it endures for you - a comfort. Once when he was a boy, Bahman's father told him that you only need a handful of people to make a village that bustles and endures. Turning back was useless, because the road is walking too. Sorrow isn't a devil's contract that you forge in the dark. Sometimes you trip and fall in. Most everything we claim to want is the empty shell of something more essential; we're afraid to face the hard road to obtaining the thing itself. And marriages, houses, what were these but waiting containers for love? He wanted to say, everything ends. Everything. All love and truth.

But sometimes the wind forces you a different way. Niloo Hamidi had woken from a coma much like his own... How would she greet the work that comes after waking? The hurt was spreading inward. His daughter was in detox. We're all strangers to ourselves. More so as we age. So, it's good to remember what you loved as a child. He too had always gravitated toward the natural, toward the roots of things, and yet here was something inexplicable: the human capacity for good, baffling quantities of good. What was the mysterious ingredient that mixed with flesh and instinct to spark love?

#refuge #dina nayeri #iranian literature #iranian authors #persian authors

[shesey]

Elif Shafak’s The Forty Rules of Love | Excerpts

She had always known that they did not connect on any deep level, but connecting emotionally need not be a priority on a married couple’s list, she thought, especially for a man and a woman who had been married for so long. She never confronted the death of anything, be it a habit, a phase, or a marriage, even when the end stood right in front of her, plain and inevitable. And it happened fast, so fast in fact that Ella had no time to realize what was happening and to be on guard, if one could ever be on guard against love. She started to cry, unable to hold back this continuing sadness that had, without her knowledge, become a part of who she was. It wasn’t fair to the angel. But then again, this world was not known for its justice, was it? They say there is a thin line between losing yourself in God and losing your mind. You see, dervish, it wasn’t always like this. Violence wasn’t my element, but it is now. When God forgets about us down here, it falls upon us common people to toughen up and restore justice. So next time you talk to Him, you tell Him that. Let Him know that when He abandons his lambs, they won’t meekly wait to be slaughtered. They will turn into wolves. She had so much love to give and yet no one demanding it. Or how come she felt so lonely even though she had a large, loving family? That was when I realized that although I loved my parents and craved their love, they were strangers to me. I hunt everywhere for a life worth living and a knowledge worth knowing. Having roots nowhere, I have everywhere to go. I have seen the worst and the best in humanity. Nothing surprises me anymore. No matter who we are or where we live, deep inside we all feel incomplete. It’s like we have lost something and need to get it back. Just what that something is, most of us never find out. And of those who do, even fewer manage to go out and look for it. When something needs to be said, I’ll say it even if the whole world grabs me by the neck and tells me to keep quiet. Cities are erected on spiritual columns. Like giant mirrors, they reflect the hearts of their residents. The Tree of the Brokenhearted. Those with broken hearts write down their names on pieces of paper and tie these to the branches, praying for their hearts to be healed. One thing that has helped me personally in the past was to stop interfering with the people around me and getting frustrated when I couldn’t change them. Instead of intrusion or passivity, may I suggest submission? Submission is a form of peaceful acceptance of the terms of the universe, including the things we are currently unable to change or comprehend. But knowledge is like brackish water at the bottom of an old vase unless it flows somewhere. Ella found it odd that sex had once been so important in her life, and now when it was gone, she felt relieved, almost liberated. The glow between them, the light that had helped them to navigate the uncharted waters of marriage, keeping their desire afloat, even after three kids and twenty years, was simply not there anymore. An outsider watching them might assume they were a perfect family, as graceful as the wisps of smoke slowly dissolving in the air. Something inside Ella snapped. She understood with chilling clarity and calm that despite her inexperience and timidity, one day she would abandon it all: her kitchen, her dog, her children, her neighbors, her husband, her cookbooks and homemade-bread recipes... she would simply walk out into the world where dangerous things happened all the time. Intellect and love are made of different materials. Intellect ties people in knots and risks nothing, but love dissolves all tangles and risks everything. Intellect is always cautious and advises, beware too much ecstacy, whereas love says, oh never mind! Take the plunge! Intellect does not easily break down, whereas love can effortless reduce itself to rubble. But treasures are hidden among ruins. A broken heart hides treasures. But eventually it is best to find a person, the person who will be your mirror. Remember, only in another person’s heart can you truly see yourself. A Sufi is thankful not only for what he has been given but also for all that he has been denied. Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at night and see the dawn. She sat curled up in her rocking chair, and wondered how she, hurt and cynical as she was, could ever experience love again. Love was for those looking for some rhyme or reason in this wildly spinning world. But what about those who had long given up the quest? The midwife knows that when there is no pain, the way for the baby cannot be opened and the mother cannot give birth. Likewise, for a new Self to be born, hardship is necessary. Just as clay needs to go through intense heat to become string, Love can only be perfected in pain. The quest for Love changes us. There is no seeker among us those who search for Love who has not matured on the way. The moment you start looking for Love, you start to change within and without. She had read in women’s magazines that families who regularly had a proper breakfast together were more cohesive and harmonious than those in which each member rushed out the door half hungry. And though she firmly believed in this research, she had yet to experience the joyful breakfast the magazines wrote about. Each time I say good-bye to a place I like, I feel like I am leaving a part of me behind. I guess whether we choose to travel as much as Marco Polo did or stay in the same spot from cradle to grave, life is a sequence of births and deaths. Moments are born and moments die. For new experiences to come to light, old ones need to wither away. Don’t you think? Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead, let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come? Personally, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with sadness. Just the opposite - hypocrisy made people happy, and truth made them sad. Though it is less profitable, I find begging much easier than praying. At least I am not deceiving anyone. Your hand opens and closes all the time. If it did not, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding. The two are as beautifully balanced and coordinated as the wings of a bird. At first, I liked what he said. It warmed by heart to think of joy and sorrow as dependent on each other as a bird’s wings. Despite their seemingly endless differences, all of these people gave off a similar air of incompleteness, of the works in progress that they were, each an unfinished masterwork. Where do you get these ridiculous ideas? Do you think God is an angry, moody patriarch watching us from the skies above so that He can rain stones and frogs on our heads the moment we err? Befitting her general mood, Ella woke up sad. But not sad as in weepy and unhappy, only sad as in unwilling to smile and take things lightly. She felt as though she had reached a milestone she was not prepared for. Birthdays have always made me happy, but this morning I woke up with a heaviness in my chest... I kept wondering, is the way I’ve lived my life the way I want to continue from now on? And then a fearful feeling came over me. What if both a yes and a no might generate equally disastrous consequences? Things become manifest through opposites. Behind all hardships was a larger scheme. If the same drink made some merry and tipsy and others wicked and aggressive, shouldn’t we hold the drinkers responsible instead of the drink? We raised our glasses and toasted together, hard though it was to believe, to a God who could love and forgive us even when we ourselves clearly failed to do so. She asked God to either provide her with a love that would absorb her whole being or else make her tough and careless enough not to mind the absence of love in her life. Some men have a way of wanting to sleep with prostitutes and yet at the same time insulting them. If you want to change the way others treat you, you should first change the way you treat yourself. Unless you learn to love yourself, fully and sincerely, there is no way you can be loved. The past is a whirlpool. If you let it dominate your present moment, it will suck you in. Fret not where the road will take you. Instead concentrate on the first step. That’s the hardest part and that’s what you are responsible for. Once you take that step let everything do what it naturally does and the rest will follow. Do not go with the flow. Be the flow. If God’s paradise is reserved for people of your kind, I’d rather burn in hell anyhow.  Doubts are good. It means you are alive and searching. In everything we do, it is our hearts that make the difference, not our outer appearance. To him, people who had not made their heart their primary guide to life, who could not open up to love and follow its path the way a sunflower follows the sun, were not really alive. Aziz was that rare type of man a woman could love without losing her self-respect. “What will be, will be” has never sat right with me. The rest is not in my hands. And this is what the Sufis call the fifth element - the void. The inexplicable and uncontrollable divine element that we as human beings cannot comprehend and yet should always be aware of. I don’t believe in “inaction” if by that you mean doing nothing at all and showing no deep interest in life. But I do believe in respecting the fifth element. What ingredients do you think you are putting in the collective strew of humanity. It always made me both immensely sad and elated to listen to a town sleep, wondering what sorts of stories were being lived behind closed doors, what sorts of stories I could have lived had I chosen another path. But I hadn’t made any choice. If anything, the path had chosen me. The fragility and brevity of life struck me once again, and I recalled another rule: Life is a temporary loan. As I spoke, I watched the dervish’s expression change from subtle scorn to open acknowledgement and from there into the soft smile of someone recognizing his own thoughts in the words of another. Fanatics of all persuasions were unbearable, but deep inside she thought that fanatics of Islam were the worst. In a world beset with mistranslations, there was no use in being resolute about any topic, because it might as well be that even our strongest convictions were caused by a simple misunderstanding. In general, one shouldn’t be too rigid about anything because “to live meant to constantly shift colors.” Time centered on this very moment, and anything other than now was an illusion. For the same reason, he believed that love had nothing to do with “plans for tomorrow” or “memories of yesterday.” Love could only be here and now. There are times I want to rebel against having been created a woman. It was as if she were waiting, confidently and patiently, for something momentous to happen. It was the laughter of a woman who had never learned not to pay too much attention to the judgments of others. It was as if her withdrawal into a calm, private space of her own stripped away the polite decorum behind which her marriage had slept undisturbed for many years. Now that the pretenses between them were gone, she could see their defects and mistakes in all their nakedness. She had stopped pretending. They they remained silent, acknowledging the blunt fact that they didn’t have much else to talk about. Not anymore. It was precisely this new aloofness that scared her husband. Ella could understand him, because deep inside it scared her, too. A month ago if David had taken even a tiny step to improve their marriage, she would have felt grateful. Any attempt on his part would have delighted her. Not anymore. Now she suspected that her life wasn’t real enough. How had she arrived at this point? A strange calm had descended upon Ella. She felt more stable than she’d ever been, even as she was swiftly gliding away from the life she’d known. Nothing had changed, and yet nothing was the same anymore. I keep telling myself that this is a temporary stage. Rumi used to be everything to me. Now he is a stranger. I never knew it was possible to live with someone under the same roof, sleep in the same bed, and still feel that he was not really there. But if you ask me, anyplace where there are more than two people is bound to become a battleground. Bountiful is your life, full and complete. Or so you think, until someone comes along and makes you realize what you have been missing all this time. Like a mirror that reflects what is absent rather than present, he shows you the void in your soul - the void you have resisted seeing. That person can be a lover, a friend, or a spiritual master. Sometimes it can be a child to look after. What matters is to find the soul that will complete yours. It’s as if for years on end you compile a personal dictionary. In it you give your definition of every concept that matters to you, such as truth, happiness, or beauty. At every major turning point in life, you refer to this dictionary, hardly ever feeling the need to questions its premises. Then one day a stranger comes and snatches your precious dictionary and throws it away. All your definitions need to be redefined, he says. It’s time for you to unlearn everything you know. And you, for some reason unbeknownst to your mind but obvious to your heart, instead of raising objections or getting cross with him, gladly comply. This is what Shams has done to me. Our friendship has taught me so much. But more than that, he has taught me to unlearn everything I knew. Is there a way to grasp what love means without becoming a lover first? Love cannot be explained. It can only be experienced. Love cannot be explained, yet it explains all. She questioned every detail in life, waging battles against society. You like distinctions because you think they make life easier. In this world take pity on three kinds of people. The rich man who has lost his fortune, the well-respected man who has lost his respectability, and the wise man who is surrounded by ignorants. As hurtful as it is, being slandered is ultimately good for one on the path. Destiny took me on a different route altogether, one of unexpected twists and turns, each of which changed me so profoundly and irrevocably that after a while the original destination lost its significance. Either way, I suddenly knew that I didn’t need to go anywhere. Not anymore. I was sick and tired of always longing to be somewhere else, somewhere beyond, always in a rush despite myself. I was already where I wanted to be. All I needed was to stay and look within. Through an illness, accident, loss, or fright, one way or another, we all are faced with incidents that teach us how to become less selfish and judgmental, and more compassionate and generous. Twenty years of marriage, twenty years of sleeping in the same bed, sharing the same shower, eating the same food, raising three kids... and what it all added up to was silence. She didn’t know what surprised her more: to hear that David knew about Rumi or that he cared about what she read. I don’t blame you, Ella. I deserve it. I neglected you, and you looked for compassion elsewhere. Thanks for your concern, young man, but sometimes nasty encounters are not only inevitable, they are necessary. A man with many opinions but no questions! There’s something so wrong with that. It must be a huge relief, and an easy way out, to think the devil is always outside of us. The message is that the torment a person can inflict upon himself is endless. Hell is inside us, and so is heaven. But having spent my whole life regretting the things I failed to do, I see no harm in doing something regrettable for a change. Not knowing what to say, I stared into her wounded eyes and wondered how she, young and fragile as she was, had found the courage to abandon the only life she knew. If we are the same person before and after we loved, that means we haven’t loved enough. Where there is love, there is bound to be heartache. Strange things happened to people when they were ready for the unusual and the unexpected. In that long moment, his eyes were the eyes of a man who had neither the strength nor the emotion left in him to stop his wife from going to another man. Mawlana is writing verses. They are beautiful. Sham’s absence is turning him into a poet. I don’t know about that, but it is true that I find silence painful these days. Words give me openings to break through the darkness in my heart. Wherever he saw any kind of mental boundary, a prejudice or a taboo, he took the bull by the horns and confronted it. Because of him I learned the value of madness and have come to know the taste of loneliness, helplessness, slander, seclusion, and finally, heartbreak. Abandon security and stay in frightful places! The poems do not belong to me. I am only a vehicle for the letters that are placed in my mouth. Traveling to a new place often engendered a dreadful sense of loneliness and sadness in the soul of a man. But in chess, just as in life, there were moves that you made for the sake of winning and there were moves you made because they were the right thing to do. I knew I had reached the age to marry, but I also knew that girls who got married changed forever. I slept peacefully that night, feeling exultant and determined. Little did I know that I was making the most common and the most painful mistake women have made all throughout the ages; to naively think that with their love they can change the men they love. There is no such thing as early or late in life. Everything happens at the right time. In every wedding celebration, there was a mourning for the virgin who was soon to become a wife and a mother. It made my blood boil that society imposed such ridiculous rules on its individuals. These codes of honor had less to do with the harmony God created than with the order human beings wanted to sustain. I felt a strong need to run away from everything, not only from this house, this marriage, this town, but also from this body I had been given. It pleased me immensely that he appreciated my thoughts and encouraged me to think more widely. The way to a man’s heart can sometimes take a woman far away from herself, my dear. You see, Ella, all I can give you is the present moment. That is all I have. But the truth is, no one has more than that. It is just that we like to pretend we do. It is never too late to ask yourself, Am I ready to change the life I am living? Am I ready to change within? After grief comes another season. Another valley. Another you. And though I know that there are no words that can express this inner journey of mine, I believe in words. I am a believer of words. Every winner is inclined to think he will be triumphant forever. Every loser tends to fear that he is going to be beaten forever. But both are wrong for the same reason: Everything changes except for the face of God. Little by little, one turns forty, fifty, and sixty and, with each major decade, feels more complete. You need to keep walking, though there’s no place to arrive at. With that knowledge we dervishes will dance our way through love and heartbreak even if no one understands what we are doing. And that is how Ella had come to understand that if there was anything worse in the eyes of society than a woman abandoning her husband for another man, it was a woman abandoning her future for the present moment.

#elif shafak #the forty rules of love #feminist book

[shesey]

Excerpts from Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace Pt 1

I would rather be a murderess than a murderer, if those are the only choices. A woman like me is always a temptation, if possible to arrange it unobserved; as whatever we may say about it later, we will not be believed. It’s chilly in this room. I have no shawl. I hug my arms around myself because who else is there to do it? When I was younger I used to think that if I could hug myself tight enough I could make myself smaller, because there was never enough room for me, at home or anywhere, but if I was smaller then I would fit in. But when you go mad you don’t go any other place, you stay where you are. And somebody else comes in. He must mean that he has come to test me, although he’s too late for that, as God has done a great deal of testing of me already, and you would think he would be tired of it by now. It is of the greatest regret that we do not have the knowledge whereby we might cure these unfortunate afflicted. A surgeon can cut open an abdomen and display the spleen. Muscles can be cut out and shown to young students. The human psyche cannot be dissected nor the brain’s workings put out on the table to display. The brain has corridors... surpassing... material place. Ourself behind ourself, concealed, should startle most. I should emphasize that sanitation and good drainage are of the first importance, as it is of no use to attempt to minister to a mind diseased, whilst the body is afflicted by infections. I am certain that a Sewing Machine would relieve as much human suffering as a hundred Lunatic Asylums, and possible a good deal more. He suffers like many clergymen from a punishable lack of wit and a desire to treat us all as straying sheep, of which he is to be the shepherd. It’s a view he does not admire, it is so relentless horizontal - but visual monotony can sometimes be conducive to thought. His father was self-made, but his mother was constructed by others, and such edifices are notoriously fragile. Simon has been spoiled by European servants, who are born knowing their places; he has not yet reaccustomed himself to the resentful demonstrations of equality so frequently practiced on this side of the ocean. As a medical student he became habituated to a monkish austerity, and to working long hours under difficult conditions. They have been talking to each other all this time, and not to me. They are a low class of person. And underneath that is another feeling still, a feeling like being torn open; not like a body of flesh, it is not painful as such, but like a peach; and not even torn open, but too ripe and splitting open of its own accord. And inside the peach there’s a stone. Why does a civilized man see fit to torture his body by cramming it into the strait-jacket of gentlemenly dress? While a medical student, he dissected a good many women - from the labouring classes, naturally - and their spines and musculature were on average no feebler than those of men. To heal humanity one must know it, and one cannot know it from a distance; one must rub elbows with it, so to speak. He considers it the duty of those in his profession to probe life’s uttermost depths, and although he has not probed very many of them as yet, he has at least made a beginning. But how craven - how callous! - to attempt to take advantage of those who are not in control of themselves! ... The Devil himself is simply a malformation of the cerebrum. If these people were not so well-to-do, their behavior would get them committed. Simon finds it tiresome to be constantly accused, in his individual person, of all the sins of his country, and especially by these Britishers, who seem to think that a conscience recently discovered excuses them for not having had any conscience at all at an earlier period. On what was their present wealth founded, but on the salve trade; and where would their great mill towns be without Souther cotton? He disapproves of public executions, which are unhealthily exciting and produce bloodthirsty fancies in the weaker-minded part of the population. She was a timid creature, hesitating and weak and delicate, which used to anger me. I wanted her to be stronger, so I would not have to be so strong myself. So my mother and father each felt trapped by the other. At moments like this I envy those who have found a safe haven, in which to bestow their hearts; or perhaps I envy them for having a heart to bestow. They hold dreams, like somnambulism, to be a manifestation of the animal life that continues below consciousness, out of sight, beyond reach of the will. Perhaps the hooks - the hinges, as it were - in the chain of memory, are located there? Maine de Biran held that conscious life was only a sort of island, floating upon a much vaster subconscious, and drawing thoughts up from it like fish. He has always been curious about these manifestations of the imagination as he has been able to observe them in himself. Where do they come from? If they occur in him, they must occur as well in the majority of men. He is both sane and normal, and he has developed the rational faculties of his mind to a high degree; and yet he cannot always control such pictures. The difference between a civilized man and a barbarous fiend - a madman, say - lies, perhaps, merely in a thin veneer of willed self-restraint. Women help each other; caring for the afflicted is their sphere. They make beef tea and jellies. They knit comforting shawls. They pat and soothe. I can see he is going to teach me something, which gentlemen are fond of doing. The difference between stupid and ignorant was that ignorant could learn. But it angered her that some people had so much and others so little, as she could not see any divine plan in it. There are sharp rocks ahead. Which I suppose there always are, Sir, and there had certainly been enough of them behind, and I had survived them; so I was not too daunted by that. The small details of life often hide a great significance. And I also thought about how the men would wink and nod when a young and rich widow was mentioned, and how a widow was a respectable thing to be if old and poor, but otherwise; which is quite strange when you come to consider it.

#margaret atwood #alias grace #feminist books #feminist quotes

[shesey]

Excerpts from The Second Place by Rachel Cusk

I don’t think I realized how many parts of life there were, until each one of them began to release its capacity for badness. Nonetheless you carried on, building a shelter for people to use when things went wrong for them too. Fear is a habit like any other, and habits kill what is essential in ourselves. It’s so easy to think you don’t matter all that much at the very moment when your moral duty as a self is most exposed.

But for once I thought, let someone else do it! And that is how we lose control over our own destinies.

I’ve often thought that there are certain characters who can’t or won’t learn the lesson of life.

What is certain is that afterwards many changes occurred, and I had to use all my strength and my belief in right and my capacity for pain to survive them, so that I nearly died from it. I had spent the evening in the company of a famous writer, who was actually nothing more significant than a very lucky man. In the company of the egotist, tramping from bar to bar in the Paris night, I intimated for the first time the possibility of destruction, the destruction of what I had built; not, I assure you, for his sake, but for the possibility he embodied - which had never once occurred to me until that night - of violent change. Why do we live so painfully in our fictions? Why do we suffer so, from the things we ourselves have invented? That’s all I’ve managed as far as freedom is concerned, to get rid of the people and the things I don’t like. At that time of the year - the spring - the potatoes we store in the shed start to sprout, even though we keep them in complete darkness. They throw out these white fleshy arms because they know it’s spring, and sometimes I’ll look at one and realize a potato knows more than most people do. My safety in that moment felt limitless. What was it, I wonder, that I saw to make me feel that way, when in reality I was anything but safe? There is no particular reason, on the surface, why L’s work should summon a woman like me, or perhaps any woman - but least of all, surely, a young mother on the brink of rebellion whose impossible yearnings, moreover, are crystallized in reverse by the aura of absolute freedom his paintings emanate, a freedom elementally and unrepentingly male down to the last brushstroke. It’s a question that begs an answer, and yet there is no clear and satisfying answer, except to say that his aura of male freedom belongs likewise to most representations of the world and of our human experience within it, and that as women we grow accustomed to translating it into something we ourselves can recognize. The fact is that I received the clear message from the very beginning that everything would have been better - would have been right, would have been how it ought to be - had I been a boy. I felt myself falling out of the frame I had lived in for years, the frame of human implication in a particular set of circumstances. I saw, in other words, that I was alone, and saw the gift and the burden of that state, which had never truly been revealed to me before. My point is that there’s something that paintings and other created objects can do to give you some relief. They give you a location, a place to be, when the rest of the time the spaces has been taken up because the criticism got their first. He doesn’t comment and he doesn’t criticize and this puts him in an ocean of silence compared to most people. Sometimes his silence makes me feel invisible, not to him but to myself. Yet because I am one of his Certainties, he finds it difficult to believe that I could doubt my own existence. It was simply that Tony understood that I had interests of my own, and that just because he was satisfied with our life on the marsh it didn’t automatically follow that I would be too. I needed some degree of communication, however small, with the notions of art and with the people who abide by those notions. When people marry young, Jeffers, everything grows of the shared root of their youth, and it becomes impossible to tell which part is you and which is the other person. So if you attempt to sever yourselves from one another it becomes a severance all the way from the roots to the furthest ends of the branches, a gory mess of a process that seems to leave you half of what you were before. But when you make a marriage later it is more like the meeting of two distinctly formed things, a kind of bumping into one another, the way whole land masses bumped into one another and fused over geological time, leaving great dramatic seams of mountain ranges as the evidence of their fusing. It is less of an organic process and more of a spatial event, an external manifestation. Our relationship had plenty of openness, but it posed certain difficulties too, natural challenges that had to be surmounted: bridges had to be built and tunnels bored, to get across to one another out of what was pre-formed. I have a great fear of seeing people when they don’t know they’re being observed, and finding out things about them I’d be happier not knowing. I could never reconcile myself to the fact that just as you’ve recovered from your own childhood, and finally crawled out of the pit of it and felt the sun on your face for the first time, you have to give up that place in the sun to a baby you’re determined won’t suffer the way you did, and crawl back down into another pit of self-sacrifice to make sure she doesn’t. I kept trying to make Tony talk to me about it - I felt a burning need to speak, to analyze, to get these feelings out of me into the open where I could see them and walk around them. It’s just that sometimes I need to talk in order to feel real, and I wish you would talk to me. But for me there is a healthy kind of talking, though it’s rare - the kind of talking through which people create themselves by giving themselves utterance. ... especially in the field of parenting, where egotism - whether of the narcissistic or the victimized kind - runs the whole show. Tony refuses to see anything as a game, and by being that way he reveals how much other people play games and how their whole conception of life derives from the subjectivity of the game-playing state. If it sometimes meant he couldn’t altogether join in the fun, it didn’t matter: the needle always swung back in his direction, because in the end living is a serious condition. How fortunate we felt to be there together, Tony and I - the debt of our isolation is paid back in an instant by times such as these. The pattern of change and repetition is so deeply bound to the particular harmony of life, and the exercise of freedom is subject to it, as to a discipline. One has to serve out one’s changes moderately, like strong wine. The rigorously trained fingers of the concert pianist are freer than the enslaved heart of the music-lover can ever be. I wonder what it feels like, to adopt a child and then prefer it to one’s own. It seems, somehow, completely understandable. I have never understood clothes terribly well, and have found the element of choice especially unmanageable. I feared, suddenly, that my belief in the life I was living wouldn’t hold, and that all I’d built up would collapse underneath me and I’d be unhappy again - I didn’t know, in that moment, how I was going to manage. We are separate people, and we each have our separate part to play, and no matter how much I yearned on occasion for that law to be broken, I have always known that the very basis of my life rested on it. ... this loss of control held new possibilities for me... He talked about his weariness with society and his continual need to escape it, and the problem this posed in determining any kind of home for himself.  Likewise he had never been able to build anything permanent with other human beings. ... and he knew, too, enough examples of the rot that could be concealed within an outward-seeming lastingness. I had great trouble respecting anything, I said, and instinctively rebelled against what was presented to me as immovable or fixed. But the game of empathy, whereby we egg one another on to show our wounds, was one he would not play. Not to have been born in a woman’s body was a piece of luck in the first place: he couldn’t see his own freedom because he couldn’t conceive of how elementally it might have been denied him. To beg was a freedom in itself - it implied at least an equality with the state of need. I don’t think parents necessarily understand all that much about their children. What you see of them is what they can’t help being or doing, rather than what they intend, and it leads to all kinds of misapprehensions. I believed I am obliged to let you go, but if that doesn’t work out, I believe I am obliged to remain responsible for you forever. Change is also loss, and in that sense a parent can lose a child every day, until you realize that you’d better stop predicting what they’re going to become and concentrate on what is right in front of you. Tony had planted most of those trees himself and he cared about each one. How arduous and time-consuming it is, Jeffers, to take care of every last thing and not deceive yourself and wave away some aspect of it! I suppose the writing of a poem must work along similar lines. It was a strange thing, I said, to live a life that had no connection whatever to anything you’d every done or been. And given that life as it goes on works to reinforce our personal bias more and more in order to allow us to accept the limitations of our face, the artist must stay especially alert so as to avoid those temptations and hear the call of truth when it comes. That call, I believe, is the easiest thing in the world to miss - or rather, ignore. Though it must be said that the artists I have known who have come closest to fulfilling their vision have also been the most miserable. No, I don’t want to be completed. I prefer to try outrunning whatever’s after me.| ... I suppose they taught him to value choice and desire over acceptance and fate. I suppose he allowed me to realize the extent to which I had let my own life be defined by others. You always try to force things. It’s as if you think nothing would ever happen, unless you made it. I believe nothing would. But up until that point his refusal to know anything about me had felt like a refusal to grant my existence. It almost felt like the less I had to worry about, the sadder I became. You want her to be safe, Tony said, and that was exactly right: by revealing her true beauty and potential, she was somehow less safe than she had been before. She’s safer out there, Tony said pointing to the window. As long as she has your love. You should practice giving it to her. I realized, once I thought about it, that my main principle in bringing up my daughter had been simply to do the opposite with respect to her of what had been done to me. But there are some things that don’t really have an opposite. They need to come out of nowhere. I’ve often wondered about where authority comes from, whether it’s the result of knowledge or character - whether, in other words, it can be learned. People know it when they see it, yet they still might not be able to say exactly what it’s composed of or how it operates. Only tyrants want power for its own sake, and parenthood is the closest most people get to an opportunity for tyranny. The non-dog represented the necessity for trusting and finding security in human beings. I need to get at the truth of a thing and dig and dig util it is dragged painfully to light. He filled one with the dreadful suspicion that there is no story to life, no personal meaning beyond the meaning of any given moment. True love is the product of freedom, and I’m not sure a parent and child can ever have that kind of love, unless they decide to start over again as adults. But my time belongs to me. Be careful what you ask people to endure. It has allowed me ever after to live with his silence, because I know the river is there, and that only I am permitted to have this knowledge. Language is the only thing capable of stopping the flow of time, because it exists in time, is made of time, yet it is eternal - or can be. Sometimes I liked to imagine, I told him, that it was the sound of wicked men blowing their brains out, one after another. You know, a low of people get a bad idea right around when they’ve just passed the middle of their lives. They see a kind of mirage and they go into another building phase, but in fact they’re building death. The more I tried to make a structure, the more it felt like everything around me had gone bad. It’s good to sit and watch this gentle world. We tire ourselves out so. What I couldn’t understand was how the simple revelation of personal truth could lead to so much suffering and cruelty, when surely it was morally inoffensive to seek to live in a condition of truth. I had learned since then, I said, that I was naive to expect that other people would merely allow me to change when those changes directly interfered with their own interests. There is no limit, I said, to what certain people will do to you if you offend them or take away what they want, and the fact that at one time you liked or chose to be among those people is one of the central mysteries and tragedies of life. I told him about how automatically I had believed - or rather, assumed - that Justine’s father was a nice, or at least a decent man. How easy it is, Jeffers, to believe that of the men who conform to our idea of normality! I don’t think a woman is ever taken on trust in that way, unless it’s through the notion of her subservience. Better dispossession than to live where hatred walks around disguised as love! My individuality had tormented me my whole life with its demand to be recognized. Oh, why was living so painful, and why were we given these moments of health, if only to realize how burdened with pain we were the rest of the time? Why was it so difficult to live day after day with people and still remember that you were distinct from them and that this was your one mortal life? Sensitivity all at once seemed to me like the most terrible curse, Jeffers, foraging for truth in a million pointless details, when in fact there was only one truth, and it lay beyond the power of description. I decided it was better not to say anything else, even though part of me was also aching to receive Tony’s compliments and to sit and talk with him about the people we once were, and whether or not those people still existed. There in the darkness I concentrated my whole self on talking to him in my heart and hoping he would hear me, wherever he was. The thing is, Jeffers, that between two people as different as Tony and me there needs to be an act of translation, and at times of crisis it’s very easy for something to get lost in that act. How could we be sure we understood one another? How could we know that what we were seeing and responding to was the same thing? Shock is sometimes necessary, for without it we would drift into entropy. A kind of forgetting - a betrayal of the truth of memory - would have been enacted, and this is perhaps how we become artificial in our own lives, Jeffers, by our incessant habit of deliberate forgetting. Is it wrong to want things that you can’t give me? Am I fooling myself into believing that it’s right for us to be together, just because it’s easier and nicer that way. The whole notion of art might itself be a serpent, whispering in our ears, sapping away all our satisfaction and our belief in the things of this world with the idea that there was something higher and better within us which could never be equaled by what was right in front of us. If we treated each moment as though it were a permanent condition, a place where we might find ourselves compelled to remain forever, how differently most of us would choose the things that moment contains! It may be that the happiest people are those who broadly adhere to this principle, who don’t borrow against the moment, but instead invest it with what could acceptably continue into all moments without causing or receiving damage and destruction - but it requires a great deal of discipline and a degree of puritanical cold-heartedness to live in that way. Abused as she was, she was nonetheless free. I told her she would always be able to find a white man to be obliterated by, if that was what she decided she wanted. It struck me, Jeffers, how the human capacity for receptivity is a kind of birthright, an asset given to us in the moment of our creation by which we are intended to regulate the currency of our souls. Unless we give back to life as much as we take from it, this faculty will fail us sooner or later. I had remained a devourer while yearning to become a creator. Nonetheless he was still, and watching him I realized that a certain kind of stillness is the most perfect form of action. If only something could tell us in advance which parts of life to pay attention to! So many of our feelings are illusion. I don’t believe he was talking about death, but about the non-being in life that most of us go in for. You are my life - you’re my whole security in living. Where you are, the food I eat tastes better, I sleep better, and the things I see feel real, instead of like pale shadows. ... it seemed to me there was nothing stable, no actual truth in all the universe, save the immutable one, that nothing exists except what one creates for oneself. To realize this is to bid a last and lonely farewell to dreams. L gave her freedom, the freedom not to look to others for the means of her survival that is still so hard for a woman to come by. Might it be true that half of freedom is the willingness to take it when it’s offered? That each of us as individuals must grasp this as a sacred duty, and also as the limit of what we can do for one another? It is hard for me to believe it, because injustice has always seemed so much stronger to me than any human soul. The truth lies not in any claim to reality, but in the place where what is real moves beyond our interpretation of it. True art means seeking to capture the unreal. Why are things more actual afterward than when they happen?

#rachel cusk #second place #feminist books #feminist quotes #cusk

[shesey]

Excerpts from Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

I can no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates their experience. I just can’t engage with the bewilderment and the defensiveness as they try to grapple with the fact that not everyone experience the world in the way that they do. The words hit a barrier of denial and they don’t get any further. Watching the Color of Fear by Lee Mun Wah, I saw people of color break down in tears as they struggled to convince a defiant white man that his words were enforcing and perpetuating a white racist standard on them. All the while he stared obliviously, completely confused by this pain, at best trivializing it, at worst ridiculing it. So I can’t talk to white people about race any more because of the consequent denials, awkward cartwheels and mental acrobatics that they display when this is brought to their attention. Who really wants to be alerted to a structural system that benefits them at the expense of others? Trying to engage with them and navigate their racism is not worth that. I cannot continue to emotionally exhaust myself trying to get this message across. I don’t have a huge amount of power to change the way the world works, but I can set boundaries. I can halt the entitlement they feel towards me and I’l start that by stopping the conversation. Thinking about power made me realize that racism was about so much more than personal prejudice. It was about being in the position to negatively affect other people’s life chances. Entire lives sustaining constant brutality and violence, living in never-ending fear. I wondered how often history would have to repeat itself before we choose to tackle the underlying problems. If all racism was as easy to spot, grasp, and denounce as white extremism is, the task of the anti-racist would be simple. He might look at the white kids he went to university with and watch them effortlessly transition from student booze-culture-loving lager louts to slick-young-professional status. We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in wilful ignorance. How can I define white privilege? It’s so difficult to describe an absence. And white privilege is an absence of the negative consequence of racism... It is an absence of funny looks directed at you because you’re believed to be in the wrong place... Trying to convince stony faces of disbelief has never appealed to me. The idea of white privilege forces white people who aren’t actively racist to confront their own complicity in its continuing existence. White privilege is dull, grinding complacency. It is par for the course in a world in which drastic race inequality is responded to with a shoulder shrug, considered just the norm. But there simply aren’t enough black people in positions of power to enact racism against white people on a the kind of grand scale it currently operates at against black people. Are black people over-represented in the places and spaces where prejudice could really take effect? The answer is almost always no. I tried to encourage her to consider the suspicion and anger of a person who has suffered racism their entire lives. Everyone is complicit, but no one wants to take on responsibility. You learn to be careful about your battles, because otherwise people would consider you to be angry for no reason at all. I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate... the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of a tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action,”... shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. He is the kind of white person who will do that unlearning and unpicking. I only have a few white people in my life like that, and I couldn’t be in a relationship with a white person who wasn’t. I think what made me feel defensive is that I was embarrassed that there was a chance that someone knew something that I didn’t. On some level, maybe I could sense that accepting whatever that person was saying would open a can of worms. It was a combination of embarrassment and panic. I can’t put my finger on exactly what I was trying to protect or defend. I think it was an indignation.  I’m trying to do more things in my ordinary day-to-day life that aren’t in activist spaces, to bring issues up when they’re relevant at that time. Because I don’t know what the other people in the room are thinking, but if I’m thinking about that and no one else is saying it, then it’s on me to say something. Being accountable for that, really only to myself. Doing things when there’s nobody there to see it, because it’s not really about somebody witnessing it or patting me on the back for it. Racism bolsters white people’s life chances. It affords an unearned power; it is designed to maintain a quiet dominance. It looked like he just wanted silence, the kind of strained peace that simmers with resentment, the kind that requires some to suffer so that others are comfortable. When they make it about offence rather than their own complicity in a drastically unjust system, they successfully transfer the responsibility of fixing the system from the benefactors of it to those who are likely to lose out because of it. Tackling racism moves from conversations about justice to conversations about sensitivity.  The imaginations of black Hermione’s detractors can stretch to the possibility of a secret platform at King’s Cross station that can only be accessed by running through a brick wall, but they can’t stretch to a black central character. There is an old saying about the straight man’s homophobia being rooted in a fear that gay men will treat him as he treats women. This is no difference.

Even though I wrote about my experiences with so much contempt, feminism was my first love. It was what gave me a framework to begin understanding the world. Being at feminist events was a relief; to be in a space where people just got it - the shared anger, frustration, the burning will to do something, anything, to change the messed-up world we live in. People’s knowledge was very varied. But we were all kind of describing the same hurts, the same frustrations, and the same anger-inducing moments. That, to me, was just absolutely powerful. Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master’s concerns. Now we hear that it is the task of women of colour to educate white women - in the face of tremendous resistance - as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought. I choose to reappropriate the term “feminism,” to focus on the fact that to be “feminist” in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression. The modesty expectation is just as limiting and judgemental as the compulsory bikini-body one. Both obsessively focus on a woman’s looks and how covered or uncovered her body is in determining her value, as though her body belongs to a male gaze before it belongs to her. There are always external factors influencing the way a woman dresses, but the ultimate decision should be her own. This isn’t about good men or bad men - binary notions that we feel comfortable enough with to slot into neat boxes - but about rape culture. We should be asking why, when children and women speak up about being raped or sexually assaulted, there are always people around them who bend over backwards to try and find the ways to suggest that she incited or invited it. The taboo in discussing these crimes isn’t about race, it is about men. Predatory men. Every woman who has ever been a teenage girl could tell you a tale about an encounter with a predatory man, men who smell youth and vulnerability, and seek only to dominate. [Feminism] will have won when women are no longer expected to work two jobs (the care and emotional labour for their families as well as their day jobs) by default. The mess we are living is a deliberate one. If it was created by the people, it can be dismantled by the people, and it can be rebuilt in a way that serves all, rather than a selfish, hoarding few. Above everything, feminism is a constant work in progress. We are all still learning. I have always loved feminism’s readiness to viciously rip into the flesh of misogyny, to stick its chin out defiantly and scare the living daylights out of mediocre men.  Demands for equality need to be as complicated as the inequalities they attempt to address. Men inhabit different spaces. Some face racism. Some face homophobia. Even if we as feminists decide to put the differences between men aside, does equality demand parity with people who have always had a disproportionately large share of resources. I don’t want to be included. Instead, I want to question who created the standard in the first place. Women in general aren’t supposed to be angry. Women are expected to smile, swallow our feelings and be self-sacrificial.  The ‘angry black woman’ phrase says more about maleness and whiteness than it does about black women. Often, there will be no one fighting your corner but yourself. It was black feminist Audre Lorde who said: your silence will not protect you. Who wins when we don’t speak? Not us. We need to see how it seeps, like a noxious gas, into everything. Structures, she said, are made out of people.  You don’t have to be the leader of a global movement or a household name. It can be as small scale as chipping away at the warped power relations in your workplace. It can be passing on knowledge and skills to those who wouldn’t access them otherwise. It can be creative. It can be informal. It can be your job. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as you’re doing something.

#racism #feminism #reni eddo-lodge #why i'm not longer talking to white people about race #feminist book #black feminism #inclusive feminism

[shesey]

Excerpts from All About Love by bell hooks

in the song of solomon there is this passage that reads: i found him whom my soul loves. i held him and would not let him go. to holding on, to knowing again that moment of rapture, of recognition where we can face one another as we really are, stripped of artifice and pretense, naked and not ashamed. We spoke about the way public art can be a vehicle for the sharing of life-affirming thoughts. I stand before this reminder that we yearn for love - that we seek it - even when we lack hope that it really can be found. I am afraid that they will grow up looking for intimacy without risk, for pleasure without significant emotional investment. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart. Most men feel that they receive love and therefor know what it feels like to be loved; women often feel we are in a constant state of yearning, wanting love but not receiving it. A woman who talks of love is still suspect. Perhaps this is because all that enlightened woman may have to say about love will stand as a direct threat and challenge to the visions men have offered us. Everyone assumes that we will know how to love instinctively. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we still accept that the family is the primary school for love. Those of us who do not learn how to love among family are expected to experience love in romantic relationships. However, this love often eludes us. And we spend a lifetime undoing the damage caused by cruelty, neglect, and all manner of lovelessness experience in our families of origin and in relationships where we simply did not know what to do. We must face the confusion and disappointment that much of what we were taught about the nature of love makes no sense when applied to daily life. He defines love as the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients -- care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication. When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposite of nurturance and care. The authors suggest love should mean something different to men than it does to women - that the sexes should respect and adapt to our inability to communicate since we do not share the same language. This type of literature is popular because it does not demand a change in fixed ways of thinking about gender roles, culture, or love. Rather than sharing strategies that would help us become more loving it actually encourages everyone to adapt to circumstances where love is lacking. Women, more so than men, rush out to purchase this literature. We do so because collectively we are concerned about lovelessness. Since many women believe they will never know fulfilling love, they are willing to settle for strategies that help ease the pain and increase the peace, pleasure, and playfulness in existing relationships, particularly romantic ones. Intimate relationships can provide a sanctuary from the world of facades, a sacred space where we can be ourselves. This inability to connect with others carries with it an inability to assume responsibility for causing pain. Although so many boys are taught to behave as though love does not matter, in their hearts they yearn for it. To embrace patriarchy, they must actively surrender the longing to love. When a man has decided to love manhood more than justice, there are predictable consequences in all his relationships with women... learning to live as a man of conscience means deciding that your loyalty to the people whom you love is always more important than whatever lingering loyalty you may sometimes feel to other men’s judgement on your manhood. Self-love cannot flourish in isolation. It is no easy task to be self-loving. Simple axioms that make self-love sound easy only make matters worse. It leaves many people wondering why, if it is so easy, they continue to be trapped by feelings of low self-esteem or self-hatred. Living consciously means we think critically about ourselves and the world we live in. We dare to ask ourselves the basic questions who, what, when, where, and why. Answering these questions usually provides us with a level of awareness that enlightens. Branden contends: “To live consciously means to seek to be aware of everything that bears on our actions, purposes, values, and goals - to the best of our ability, whatever that ability may be - and to behave in accordance with that which we see and know.” To live consciously we have to engage in critical reflection about the world we live in and know most intimately. Branden defines self-responsibility as the willingness “to take responsibility for my action and the attainment of my goals... for my life and well-being.” Taking responsibility does not mean that we deny the reality of institutionalized injustice. For example, racism, sexism, and homophobia all create barriers and concrete incidents of discrimination. Simply taking responsibility does not mean that we can prevent discriminatory acts from happening. But we can choose how we respond to acts of injustice. Taking responsibility means that in the face of barriers we still have the capacity to invent our lives, to shape our destinies in ways that maximize our well-being. Every day we practice this shape shifting to cope with realities we cannot easily change. There is a gap between the values they claim to hold and their willingness to do the work of connecting thought and action, theory and practice to realize these values and thus create a more just society. Divorce rates were the primary indicators that marriage was not a safe haven. And mounting public awareness of the extent to which domestic violence and all manner of child abuse were widespread clearly revealed that the patriarchal family could not offer sanctuary. She has found it makes life easier when she hardens her heart and turns her attention towards more attainable goals - acquiring shleter and food, making ends meet, and finding ways to satisfy desires for little material luxuries. Thinking about love may simply cause her pain. She, and hordes of women like her, have had enough pain. Addicts want release from pain; they are not thinking about love. Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. In patriarchal culture men are especially inclined to see love as something they should receive without expending effort. More often than not they do not want to do the work that love demands. When the practice of love invites us to enter a place of potential bliss that is at the same time a place of critical awakening and pain, many of us turn our backs on love. While America is full of those who would police our private morals, there is far too little questioning of societal morals. Peck defines community as the coming together of a group of individuals who have learned how to communicate honestly with each other, whose relationships go deeper than their masks of composure, and who have developed some significant commitment to rejoice together, mourn together, and to delight in each other, and to make other’s conditions our own. The failure of the patriarchal nuclear family has been utterly documented. Exposed as dysfunctional more often than not, as a place of emotional chaos, neglect, and abuse, only those in denial continue to insist that this is the best environment for raising children. Since we choose our friends, many of us, from childhood on into our adulthood, have looked to friends for the care, respect, knowledge, and all-around nurturance of our growth that we did not find in the family. Later on, when I knew Debbie, my best friend, I felt even more sure that love was made you feel good. Love was not what made you feel bad, hate yourself. It was comforted you, freed you up inside, made you laugh. Friendship is the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community. All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the health, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way. I was terribly alone and lonely. I learned then that it is more fulfilling to live one’s life within a circle of love, interacting with loved ones to whom we are committed. Lots of us learn this lesson the hard way by finding ourselves alone and without meaningful connection to friends. No friend or lover, no husband or wife, no community or commune will be able to put to rest our deepest cravings for unity and wholeness. When anyone thinks a woman who serves gives cause that’s what mothers or real women do, they deny her full humanity and thus fail to see the generosity inherent in her acts. He wanted from me the unconditional love and service his mother had always given him without expecting anything in return. Constantly frustrated by his indifference to the needs of others and his smug conviction that this was the way life should be, I tried to do the emotional work for both of us. In his mind, my problem was my refusal to accept these ‘natural’ roles. Like many liberal men in the age of feminism, he believed women should have equal access to jobs and be given equal pay, but when it came to matters of home and heart he still believed caregiving was the female role. Like many men, he wanted a woman to be ‘just like mama’ so that he did not have to do the work of growing up. Though they have reached adult age, they are unable to face adult feelings with responsibilities. Out of touch with their true emotions, afraid to depend on even those closest to them, self-centered and narcissistic, they hid behind masks of normalcy while feeling empty and lonely inside. By choosing to remain boys they did not have to undergo the pain of severing the too-tight bonds with mothers who had smothered them with unconditional care. They could just find women to care for them in the same way that their moms had. And even the task of dragging him kicking and screaming into adulthood seemed worthwhile. In the end I believed I would have an equal partner, love between peers. By the time our relationship ended, I had blossomed into a fully self-actualized woman but I had almost lost my faith in the transformative power of love. My heart was broken. I left the relationship fearful that our culture was not yet ready to affirm mutual love between free women and free men. In relationships, whether heterosexual or homosexual, the partner who is hurting often finds that their mate is unwilling to “hear” the pain. Women often tell me that they feel emotionally beaten down when their partners refuse to listen or talk. When women communicate from a place of pain, it is often characterized as ‘nagging’... Those of us who were wounded in childhood often were shamed and humiliated when we expressed hurt. It is emotionally devastating when the partners we have chosen will not listen. Pain may be the threshold they must cross to partake of love’s bliss. Running from the pain, they never know the fullness of love’s pleasure. Weeping may endure for a night but joy will come in the morning. Acceptance of pain is part of loving practice. It enables us to distinguish constructive suffering from self-indulgent hurt. Women are often belittled for trying to resurrect these men and bring them back to life and to love. They are, in fact, the real sleeping beauties. We might be living in a world that would be even more alienated and violent if caring women did not do the work of teaching men who have lost touch with themselves how to live again. This labor of love is futile only when men in question refuse to awaken, refuse growth. At this point it is a gesture of self-love for women to break their commitment and move on. The truth is, if you want to make just one change in yourself that will improve your relationship - literally, overnight - it would be to put your partner’s interest on an equal footing with your own. Giving generously in romantic relationships and in all other bonds means recognizing when the other person needs our attention. Attention is an importance resource. We learn compassion by being willing to hear the pain, as well as the joy, of those we love. To be capable of critically evaluating a partner we would need to be able to stand back and look critically at ourselves, at our needs, desires, and longings. And even more difficult to make a list of the qualities I wanted to find in a mate. I listed ten items. And then when I applied the list to men I had chosen as potential partners, it was painful to face the discrepancy between what I wanted and what I had chosen to accept.We fear that evaluating our needs and then carefully choosing partners will reveal that there is no one for us to love. Most of us prefer to have a partner who is lacking than no partner at all. What becomes apparent is that we may be more interested in finding a partner than in knowing love. In actuality, true love thrives on the difficulties. The foundation of such love is the assumption that we want to grow and expand, to become more fully ourselves. There is no change that does not bring with it a feeling of challenge and loss. While a heart connection lets us appreciate those we love just as they are, a soul connection opens up a further dimension - seeing and loving them for who they could be, and for who we could become under their influence. Yet when we commit to true love, we are committed to. being changed, to being acted upon by the beloved in a way that enables us to be more fully self-actualized. This commitment to change is chosen. It happens by mutual agreement. Again and again in conversations the most common vision of true love I have heard shared was one that declared it to be ‘unconditional.’ True love is unconditional, but to truly flourish it requires an ongoing commitment to constructive struggle and change. The heartbeat of true love is the willingness to reflect on one’s actions, and to process and communicate this reflection with the loved one. How can any of us communicate with men who have been told all their lives that they should not express what they feel.

#bell hooks #feminism #all about love #feminist books #feminist quotes

[shesey]

Excerpts from A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous

Heart, hurt, love, desire: how foreign, how distant these words sound now. Evidently a sophisticated, discriminating love-life requires three square meals a day. My sole concern as I write these lines is my stomach. All thinking and feeling, all wishes and hopes begin with food. Apart from the bravery and resilience she demonstrated, her account reveals the close relationship between an enquiring mind and intellectual honesty. ... yet many still suffer from that powerful human desire for hope in the face of all logic. But seen up close, history is vexing - nothing but burdens and fears. Her reason for writing all this is quite simple. ‘It does me good, takes me mind off things’. Rape in war is a collective experience, she also observes, as opposed to in peacetime when it is individual. Each woman helps the other, by speaking about it, airing her woes. But, as she soon found out the male half of the German population wanted the subject to be buried. ‘These days I keep noticing how my feelings towards men are changing,’ she writes as Hitler’s regime collapses. ‘We feel sorry for them; they seem so miserable and powerless. The weaker sex. Deep down we women are experiencing a kind of collective disappointment. The Nazi world - ruled by men, glorifying the strong man - is beginning to crumble, and with it the myth of ‘Man.’ That has transformed us, emboldened us. Among the many defeats at the end of this war is the defeat of the male sex.’ Women were forbidden to mention the subject of rape as if it somehow dishonoured their men who were supposed to have defended them. People ask why, tormenting themselves with pointless questions. But I just want to focus on today, the task at hand. Since I own nothing, I can lay claim to everything. Once again we see what a dubious blessing technology really is. Machines with no intrinsic value, worthless if you can’t plug them in somewhere. Bread, however, is absolute. Coal is absolute. And gold is gold whether you’re in Rome, Peru, or Breslau. But radios, gas stoves, central heating, hot plates, all these gifts of the modern age - they’re nothing but dead weight if the power goes out. As long as there’s no clock in sight my life is timeless. What flowers, what lovely flowers. The tears were running down her face. I felt terrible as well. Beauty hurts now. We’re so full of death. I’ve had so many narrow escapes; I feel I lead a charmed life. That’s probably the way most people feel. How else could they be in such high spirits, surrounded by so much death? What’s clear is that every threat to your life boosts your vitality. My own flame is stronger, I’m burning more fiercely than before the air raids. Each new day of life is a day of triumph. You’ve survived once again. You’re defiant. On one hand you stand taller, but at the same time your feet are planted more firmly on the ground. I want to give myself over to this communal sense of humanity; I want to be part of it, to experience it. There’s a split between my aloofness, the desire to keep my private life to myself, and the urge to be like everyone else, to belong to the nation, to abide and suffer history together. Technology has devalued the impact of our own speech and writing. We women find it senseless to begin with; that’s just the way we are - reasonable, practical, opportunistic. We prefer our men alive. Why are we so appalled at the thought of children being murdered? In three or four years the same children strike us as perfectly fit for shooting and maiming. Where do you draw the line? When their voices break? Because that’s what really gets me the most, thinking about these little boys: their voices, so high, so bright. Up to now being a soldier meant being a man. And being a man means being able to father a child. Wasting these boys before they reach maturity obviously runs against some fundamental law of nature, against our instinct, against every drive to preserve the species. Like certain fish or insects that eat their own offspring. People aren’t supposed to do that. The fact that this is exactly what we are doing is a sure sign of madness. Here, too, I have to relearn everything I’ve been taught about women in war. Once our role was to play the ministering angel. Scraping up lint for bandages. A cool hand on a man’s hot brow. At a healthy distance from the shooting. Now there’s no difference between a regular hospital and a field hospital. The front is everywhere. But there comes a time when you’re so mortally tired you stop being afraid. The fact that our German word for praying - beten - is so close to our word for begging - betteln -- obviously means something. After all, there was a time when beggars were as much a fixture at the church door as the handle. We’re happy whenever we can flee into the present to escape worrying about the future. And for these women the task at hand is sausage, and the thought of sausage alters their perspective on things that may be much more important by are nevertheless much further away. In the heat of battle, in the thick of the action, you don’t think - you don’t even feel afraid, because you’re so distracted and absorbed. What does it mean - rape? When I said the word for the first time aloud, Friday evening in the basement, it sent shivers down my spine. Now I can think it and write it with an untrembling hand, say it out loud to get used to hearing it said. It sounds like the absolute worst, the end of everything - but it’s not. I’ve never been so removed from myself, so alienated. All my feelings seem dead, except for the drive to live. They shall not destroy me. But I have the feeling that, deep inside, all these simple, undiscriminating men feel insecure in front of me, despite their blustering. They’re children of the people. The conversation did me good, and not so much because of the subject, which I’m not as well versed in as Andrei, but simply because one of them treated me as an equal, without once touching me, not even with his eyes. He didn’t see me as a mere piece of female flesh, like all the others up to now. I couldn’t help thinking about how good I’d had it, until now - the fact that love had always been a pleasure and never a pain. I had never been forced, nor had I ever had to force myself. Everything had been good the way it was. But what’s making me so miserable right now is not so much the excess itself, extreme though it is; it’s the fact that my body has been mistreated, taken against its will and pain is how it responds to the abuse. I’m reminded of a girlfriend from school, now married, who confessed to me at the beginning of the war that in a certain way she felt physically better without her husband. It can’t be otherwise, nor should it be; as long as I’m nothing more than a spoil of war I intend to stay dead and numb, without feeling. But these days I think children are right to be afraid of sexual things - there really are a lot of sharp knives. But I know that even the most seemingly gentle Russian can turn into a savage beast if you rub him the wrong way or offend his self-esteem. But why are these youngsters so eager in their pursuit of anything female?... They probably want to prove themselves in front of their older comrades, like 16 year old Vanya, the stairwell rapist, to show that they’re real men, too. So I am placing myself at his service of my own accord. Am I doing it because I like him, or out of a need for love? God forbid! For the moment I’ve had it up to here with men and their male desire. I can’t imagine ever longing for any of that again. The less he wants from me as a man, the more I like him as a person. What is that supposed to mean anyway - a bad person?

My schooling makes me desirable in his eyes. That’s a far cry from our German men, for whom being well read does little to enhance a woman’s appeal, at least in my experience. In fact, my instinct has always been to play down my intelligence for them, to make a pretence of ignorance - or at least to keep quiet until I know them better. A German man always wants to be smarter, always wants to be in a position to each his little woman. I’m not afraid. I’ll just sail blindly ahead, trusting my little ship to the currents of the times; up to now it’s always managed to carry me to green shores. It felt very strange, once again being around men you don’t have the slightest reason to fear, men you don’t have to constantly gauge or be on guard against or keep an eye on. I’m convinced that this particular woman will never forget her husband’s fit of courage, or perhaps you could say it was love. And you can hear the respect in the way the men tell the story, too. Girls, you better go and change the world. It needs it! We liked that. Because we didn’t think much of the world in 1930 either. In fact, we emphatically rejected it. Everything was so muddles, so full of barriers and obstacles. And this mass rape is something we are overcoming collectively as well. All the women help the other, by speaking about it, airing their pain and allowing others to air theirs and spit out what they’ve suffered. Which, of course, doesn’t mean that creatures more delicate than this cheeky Berlin girl won’t fall apart or suffer for the rest of their lives. If at least we had a little decent soap! I have this constant craving to give my skin a thorough scrub - I’m convinced it would make me feel a little cleaner in my soul as well. But no matter what the case, I think it’s up to each of us, even under these circumstances, to make our lives as meaningful as we can. No matter where we end up, we take ourselves. At times I think I could survive anything on earth, as long as it came from without and not from some devious trick of my own heart. Once I spent several days on a Soviet train, rocking across the countryside, and heard a Russian tell me. Our German comrades won’t storm a train station unless they’ve bought valid platform tickets first. Less sarcastically put, most Germans are horrified by unbridled lawlessness. Maybe that’s a mistake. If pictures like that were available, the men could fill their fantasies with all those idealized figures, and wouldn’t wind up throwing themselves on every woman in sight, no matter how old or ugly. I’ll have to give this some more thought. The major was embarrassed and looked away. In that second I liked him very much. We’ve surrendered. Nevertheless I do feel a new desire for life. Poor words, you do not suffice. The other one, delicate Brigitte, is nineteen and defends herself psychologically with an angry cynicism. These girls have been forever deprived of love’s first fruits. Whoever begins with the last phase, and in such a wicked way, can no longer quiver with excitement at the very first touch. What’s clear is that I was there, that I breathed what was in the air, and it affected all of us even if we didn’t want it to. Now that’s something that only men could cook up for other men. If they just thought about it for two minutes they’d realize that liquor greatly intensifies the sexual urge. I don’t know what in the world I should do. No one really needs me. All I can do is touch my small circle and be a good friend. What’s left is just to wait for the end. Still, the dark and amazing adventure of life beckons. I’ll stick around, out of curiosity, and because I enjoy breathing and stretching my healthy limbs. Once again I have to reflect on the consequence of being alone in the midst of adversity. In some way it’s easier, not having to endure the torment of someone else’s suffering. What must a mother feel seeing her girl devastated? Probably the same as anyone who truly loves another but either cannot help them or doesn’t dare to. The men who’ve been married for many years seem to hold up best. They don’t look back. Sooner or later their wive will call them to account though.  I’m still ecstatic at being able to sleep by myself between clean sheets. A bath at home, a nice dress, a quiet evening did some good. I have to think about things. Our spiritual need is great. Authority as a means of applying pressure. And here I was, using a little piece of paper to pretend I had authority. The trick produced prompt results, too. I’m convinced that otherwise I would have never got the radio back. Still, it left me feeling grubby. However it appears that most of life’s mechanisms rely on little tricks like that - marriages, companies, nation-states, armies. All I want to do is steer my little ship through the shoals as best I can. And maybe my heart will speak to me once more. One thing’s for sure: my life has certainly been full -- all too full! But the simply fact that I’m surrounded by other hungry people keeps me going. Even writing this down takes effort, but at least it’s some consolation in my loneliness, a kind of conversation, a chance to pour my heart out. Sometimes I wonder why I’m not suffering more because of the rift with Gerd, who used to mean everything to me. I only know I want to survive - against all sense and reason, just like an animal.

#a woman in berlin #feminist books #feminist quotes

[shesey]

Excerpts from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolley-bus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo. Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight of my own bones. There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It’s like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction -- every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it’s really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour. I’m not sure why it is, but I love food more than just about anything else. The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn’t see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn’t sleep. You oughtn’t to see this. You’ll never want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn’t let women watch. It’ll be the end of the human race. I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again. I think Buddy could have been a teacher as well, he was always trying to explain things to me and introduce me to new knowledge. He was always saying how his mother said, What a man wants is a mate and what a woman wants is infinite security, and What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from, until it made me tired. He was very proud of his perfect health and was always telling me it was psychosomatic when my sinuses blocked up and I couldn’t breathe. I thought this is an odd attitude for a doctor to have and perhaps he should study to be a psychiatrist instead, but of course I never came right out and said so. I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was 9 years old. After that - in spite of the Girl Scouts and the piano lessons and the water-color lessons and the dancing lessons and the sailing camp, all of which my mother scrimped to give me, and college, with crewing in the mist before breakfast and black-bottom pies and the little new firecrackers of ideas going off every day - I had never really been happy again. The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I felt like a racehorse in a world without race-tracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone. I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs i would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. A million years of evolution, Eric said bitterly, and what are? Animals. There were no people I knew he would want to brag to about it, the way college boys bragged about sleeping with girls in the back of cars to their roommates or their friends on the basketball team. Now the one thing this article didn’t seem to me to consider was how a girl felt. I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman having to have a single pure life and a man being able to have a double life, one pure and one not. That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the coloured arrows from a Fourth of July rocket. I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband. It would mean getting up and 7 and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he’d left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he’d expect a big dinner, and I’d spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates til I fell into bed, utterly exhausted. This seemed a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s, but I knew that’s what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard’s mother did from morning til night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself. And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard’s kitchen mat. I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn’t want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterwards you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state. How would you like to be Mrs Buddy Willard? I had an awful impulse to laugh. Well, you were right, I am neurotic. I could never settle down in either the country or the city. If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. If you love her, you’ll love somebody else someday. A feeling of tenderness filled my heart. My heroine would be myself, only in disguise. I leaned back and read what I had written. It seemed lively enough, and I was quite proud of the bit about the drops of sweat like insects, only I had the dim impressions I’d probably read it somewhere else a long time ago. I wondered, if I’d been my old self, if I would have liked him. It was impossible to tell. I would rather have anything wrong with my body than anything wrong with my head. I knew I should be grateful to Mrs Guinea, only I couldn’t feel a thing. If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air. If I was going to fall, I would hang on to my small comforts, at least, as long as I possibly could. I don’t see what women see in other women, what does a woman see in a woman that she can’t see in a man? Doctor Nolan paused. Then she said, tenderness. That shut me up. What I hate is the thought of being under a man’s thumb. A man doesn’t have a worry in the world, while I’ve got a baby hanging over my head like a big stick, to keep me in line. Would you act differently if you didn’t have to worry about a baby? How easy having babies seemed to the women around me! Why was I so unmaternal and apart? Why couldn’t I dream of devoting myself to a baby after fat puling baby like Dodo Conway? If I had to wait on a baby all day, I would go mad.

#the bell jar #sylvia plath #feminist quotes #feminist books