The Argonauts

by Maggie Nelson

Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered.

I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one’s solitude right, this is the prize.

“Let us seek ‘joy’ rather than real food and clean air and a saner future on a liveable earth! As if happiness alone can

protect us from the results of profit-madness.”

Perhaps it’s the word radical that needs rethinking.

her recent work was about being photographed by her husband, appropriately named Dick.

I do not yet understand the relationship between writing and happiness, or writing and holding.

I wasn’t ready to lose sight of my own me yet, as for so long, writing has been the only place I have felt it plausible to find it (whatever “it” is).

Carson’s brackets

They seemed to make a fetish of the unsaid, rather than simply letting it be contained in the sayable.

Carson

made being a professorial writer seem like the coolest thing you could ever be.

I went home fastened to the concept of leaving the center empty for God.

as I labor grimly on these sentences, wondering all the while if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness (fidelity to sense-making, to assertion, to argument, however loose)—

falling through the bed with dizziness whenever I turned my head—falling forever—

Just Like me

Can fragility feel as hot as bravado?

it took me by surprise that my body could make a male body.

But the pregnant body in public is also obscene. It radiates a kind of smug auto eroticism: an intimate relation is going on—one that is visible to others, but that decisively excludes them.

Ah yes, I think, digging a knee into the podium. Leave it to the old patrician white guy to call the lady speaker back to her body, so that no one misses the spectacle of that wild oxymoron, the pregnant woman who thinks. Which is really just a pumped-up version of that more general oxymoron, a woman who thinks.

What other reason is there for writing than to be traitor to one’s own reign, traitor to one’s own sex, to one’s class, to one’s majority? And to be traitor to writing.

My writing is riddled with such tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the tremblings, then go back in later and slash them out. In this way I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native nor foreign to me.

Pumping is thus an admission of distance, of maternal finitude. But it is a separation, a finitude, suffused with best intentions. Milk or no milk, this is often the best we’ve got to give.

My mother’s skinny body, and her lifelong obsession with having zero fat, almost makes me disbelieve that she ever housed my sister or me inside of her.

A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother.

Oh my God!

I think my mother is beautiful. But her negative feelings about her body can generate a force field that repels any appreciation of it.

For the duration of her marriage to my stepfather, my mother’s maternal body seemed to me supplanted by her desiring body.

I hated him for crushing her. I hated her for being crushed.

It doesn’t matter to me if both of these men are mad. Their voices still have clarity.

You’re either in pain or you’re not. And it isn’t the pain that one forgets. It’s the touching death part.

The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time.

What exactly is lost to us when words are wasted?—Anne Carson