No Fury

Love this book.

The Process of Transformation Consists Almost Entirely Of Decay

“The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle. In her novel “Regeneration,” Pat Barker writes of a doctor who “knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cat of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay.” But the butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is “psyche,” the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming.”

― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

The Blue Longing Of Desire

"We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment ofperspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away.

The mystic Simone Weil wrote to a friend on another continent, "Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are notseparated." For Weil, love is the atmosphere that fills and colors the distance between herself and her friend. Even when that friend arrives on the doorstep, something remains impossibly remote: when you step forward to embrace them your arms are wrapped around mystery, around the unknowable, around that which cannot be possessed. The far seeps in even to the nearest. After all we hardly know our own depth.""
- Rebecca Solnit in A Field Guide To Getting Lost

Are You Loving?

Are we?

“Do you love your spouse?” becomes the wrong question; “Are you loving your spouse?” is the right one. A critic might quarrel with Fredrickson for calling these moments of resonance “love” rather than something else. Why not keep “love” as we have always used it and coin a new term for the moments of positivity that Fredrickson is talking about? I don’t think this is a big deal, but, aside from helping to sell books, the virtue of redefining love in this way is that it encourages people to think hard about whether what they’ve been doing in the service of love is actually meeting its objective. And I can’t overemphasize how striking the evidence is that Fredrickson marshals in support of her position. Not just psychological evidence, which would be important enough. But also neural evidence, neurochemical evidence, cardiovascular evidence, and even evidence of effects on gene expression. This line of work may end up changing both what we mean by love and what we take as evidence for love and its effects.

Art Is Not About Pleasing Your Coach

Swimming Studies:

 And yet, all this control and self-denial are what (in Swimming Studies at least) define swimming, as opposed to bathing. “Swimming” is what people who want to be the fastest, the best, do. It involves never letting your feet touch the bottom, never resting, both literally and metaphorically. “Bathing”, on the other hand, “implies having some contact with the ground while in the water – propulsion and speed are secondary”. Bathing is what the rest of us do. Shapton’s husband James, a poor swimmer who seems from Shapton’s account to be a grounded person in both senses of the word, is a bather. “Watching him in the waves, I realize he doesn’t see life as rigor and deprivation. To him it’s something to enjoy, where the focus is not on how to win, but how to flourish.” To be an Olympic contender you clearly have to be a swimmer, as defined above. But to be an artist? James, Shapton remarks, “is the opposite of a coach”: “He encourages me to sleep in, isn’t bothered when I cancel, shrugs at my whims, my mistakes, my detours into self-indulgence”.

There is a poignant moment towards the end of Swimming Studies when it begins to dawn on Shapton that art is not about pleasing your coach. Finding herself irresistibly drawn to the life stories of swimmers who, like her, didn’t quite make it, she wonders if this is just a case of sour grapes. But her interest seems to go deeper. After her own years of self-flagellation she is fascinated by “the athlete who hates practice”, the “self-loathing questioner of authority”. The others, “the ones who say and feel all the right things, are predictable”.  

Baggage = Caravan

In advance of our caravaning to each other:

I used to wish that I was an unremarkable girl, especially when it came to relationships. I was told more than once, by men who sought something less complex, that it might have helped. I don’t see my experience, or my intelligence, as baggage anymore. It’s a caravan.

Or as Nabokov, of course, put it much more aptly, and beautifully, in his Speak, Memory, “As a company of traveling players carry with them everywhere, while they still remember their lines, a windy heath, a misty castle, an enchanted island, so she had with her all that her soul had stored.”

Making It Politically

Sex On Inauguration Night:

I saw a picture of Barack and Michele Obama dancing face to face at the inaugural ball, and I immediately started wondering if they were going to have sex that night. I wonder what it must be like to be so close to a lifemate after having gone through such a major transformation, from gangly law student to American figurehead. Does sex have a place in that world anymore? ...

It’s hard not to see the sex between them, watching the Obama’s dancing against a blue sea of heads gazing up in the darkness. Barack’s forward-leaning posture, his chin jutting hungrily into Michelle’s face, I can almost see the thoughts in his head. The wetness, the warm touching of skin, the rhythmic thrust inward, straining to ascend, the hips rising in anticipation of his momentum. The arch up, the coming together, the falling back, the dilated pupils, the clenched hands, fingers interlocked.