The Argonauts

by Maggie Nelson

“the very task of love and of language is to give to one and the same phrase inflections which will be forever new.”

Kissing the stomach kissing your scarred skin boat. History is what you’ve travelled on and take with you We’ve each had our stomachs kissed by strangers to the other and as for me I bless everyone who kissed you here

the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one.

Some people find pleasure in aligning themselves with an identity, as in You make me feel like a natural woman—made famous by Aretha Franklin and, later, by Judith Butler, who focused on the instability wrought by the simile. But there can also be a horror in doing so, not to mention an impossibility. It’s not possible to live twenty-four hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one’s sex. Gendered selfconsciousness has, mercifully, a flickering nature.

Performativity has to do with repetition, very often with the repetition of oppressive and painful gender norms to force them to resignify. This is not freedom, but a question of how to work the trap that one is inevitably in.

I think you overestimate the maturity of adults,

Poor marriage! Off we went to kill it (unforgivable). Or reinforce it (unforgivable).

I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty.

The question of what a psyche or a soul can experience depends, in large part, on what you believe it’s made of.

I’m no longer sure which of us is more at home in the world, which of us more free.

Homonormativity seems to me a natural consequence of the decriminalization of homosexuality: once something is no longer illicit, punishable, pathologized, or used as a lawful basis for raw discrimination or acts of violence, that phenomenon will no longer be able to represent or deliver on subversion, the subcultural, the underground, the fringe, in the same way.

underscores Didion’s more interesting, albeit disavowed subject, which is that economic privilege does not protect against all suffering.

Over the years I’ve had to train myself to wipe the sorry off almost every work e-mail I write; otherwise, each might begin, Sorry for the delay, Sorry for the confusion, Sorry for whatever.

it is better … to be enthralled with what is impoverished or abusive than not to be enthralled at all and so to lose the condition of one’s being and becoming.

When the reverend asked us to bend our heads in prayer, I kept my chin up, a sentinel.

I can tell, he doesn’t try to talk her out of her self-deprecation, nor does he abet it. He simply loves her. I am learning from him.

But because it makes the brutal tender,

her desire to install in me an outer parameter of horror of what could happen to a baby human on this planet.

I didn’t have a clue what you were talking about, but I could see you burned for it.

There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy.

But somewhere along the line, from my heroes, whose souls were forged in fires infinitely hotter than mine, I gained an outsized faith in articulation itself as its own form of protection.

All of her passwords and e-mail addresses were variants on Paris, a city she would never see.

How deep can pain go.