do you remember your childhood? I do.
I’ve been transporting back to being a seven year old in bed, reading frances h burnett and the snow queen. maybe in some ways i was easy for my parents b/c they could just leave me alone, with a book.
do you remember your childhood? I do.
I’ve been transporting back to being a seven year old in bed, reading frances h burnett and the snow queen. maybe in some ways i was easy for my parents b/c they could just leave me alone, with a book.
if you never liked me. i’ve fucked myself up too badly. i can’t erase you. i’m this me, that carries something that looks like you, inside my neural pathways that curve and meander and bear a root that touched a bittersweet puddle. my mistake. a hand i loved to touch gave me a pebble that misidentified as a seed b/c it was thirsty, and it grew, and then suddenly i was just the awareness at the tip of that striving new life. a blurb of sensitive feeling.
In one way or another, we’re all anchored to the book. A library is a metaphor for human beings or what’s best about human beings, the same way a concentration camp can be a metaphor for what is worst about them. A library is total generosity.
Roberto Bolano
to commit to the search for love feels like to commit to the certainty of harm. who do you want to harm or be harmed by? simultaneously.
You were. You are
The brightest thing in the shop window
And the most beautiful seldom I ever saw.
-Mary Jo Bang
Kindness, compassion, empathy, and grace. Sentimentality (perhaps), but also fierceness.
These are the qualities I look for in art. When I think of the artists I love, they possess enormous generosity. Their work is not primarily about themselves (although they may explore the nature of the self as a kind of anchor, and may very well be less interested/un-interested in social issues as explored through a birds’ eyes lens). They are interested in intimacy, and solipsism, when it exists, is an opening to a kind of grounded-ness, a sheltering that can contract or expand (to accommodate the reader) depending on the reader’s wish. They think well of people and see the potential for the best (behaviors that are well meant) even when the best isn’t achieved.
The flip side of those things may very well be anger, small-mindedness, tyranny, shrewdness, an incisive mind, the desire for punishment, the inability to be pleased. I don’t know. Each person’s strengths are also their weaknesses. I like artists and critics that meet the other or the other’s work with more love than ego. A respect for the human in art, in the self and in other people, that comes from self-confidence/humbleness, presence/merging, innocence and strength.
Random belated thoughts:
I dislike(d) Hilary Clinton for the same reason that many people dislike(d) Hilary Clinton, but many male candidates have had far worse traits and been attacked far less (*cough*). The very fact that the most prominent woman in US politics has such a chameleon nature speaks to me of the huge barriers there have been (and are) to women becoming successful here and other fields, the fact that mostly, women are not accommodated to show up in the world as “themselves.”
fantasy - projecting the ideal of union/understanding onto a real person. the opposite of connection is disassociation.
narrative - feeling like we “never had a chance to be together”
injustice - feeling “why am I the one that suffers b/c I was actually emotionally present when we were together. you ‘escaped’ b/c you were depressed.”
love - love is wishing the best for the person you care(d) for. love is being touched and hurt in a quiet way.
There was no place that destruction did not touch. It was in every vestige of human use that mixed into the aftermath of snow, in every bit of concrete or mulch surfaced after the fact. At best it made everything feel flooded, urgent, while pushing towards decay and exposing the imminent failure of managing to maintain a form at all. Inside this was the kernel of wholeness. She could be broken down into a small, granular piece, a bit of debris jostling against other bits of debris, and in that friction there was some sense of having a boundary or a presence, and that thing-ness of the self, reduced to a basic instinctive sensation, was an almost-nothing feeling that, in its small hard knot of a numb halo, made it clear to her that you were only here, you were only now.