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the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed. This idea gets less air time than his more reverential Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent, but it is, I think, the deeper idea. Its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.
there might be an OK human, an OK human animal, even if that human animal used language, even if its use of language were somehow defining of its humanness—even if humanness itself meant trashing and torching the whole motley, precious planet, along with its, our, future.
Our most human traift by which we jnudge all else living including other humans are words and langhage. Nothing shows it more than our inability to understand cruelty not only against animals but other humans. against those that use words different than ours. The higher the difference it seems the higher the probability we would be crueler. It made me wonder about machines. Could we at some point even consider weighing against each other the life of a machine and the life of a human being? on the simple basis of one speaking a language we understand - we in fact taught them to - and the other a foreigner, a stranger more foreign in our eyes than a constructed machine
You’ve punctured my solitude, I told you. It had been a useful solitude, constructed, as it was, around a recent sobriety, long walks to and from the Y through the sordid, bougainvillea-strewn back streets of Hollywood, evening drives up and down Mulholland to kill the long nights, and, of course, maniacal bouts of writing, learning to address no one.
My favorite
What if where I am is what I need? Before you, I had always thought of this mantra as a means of making peace with a bummer or even catastrophic situation. I never imagined it might apply to joy, too.
Winnicott holds the relatively unsentimental position that we don’t owe these people (often women, but by no means always) anything. But we do owe ourselves “an intellectual recognition of the fact that at first we were (psychologically) absolutely dependent, and that absolutely means absolutely. Luckily we were met by ordinary devotion.
This slice of truth, offered in the final hour, ended up beginning a new chapter of my adulthood, the one in which I realized that age doesn’t necessarily bring anything with it, save itself. The rest is optional.
there’s one thing homonormativity reveals, it’s the troubling fact that you can be victimized and in no way be radical; it happens very often among homosexuals as with every other oppressed minority.
the more I realized that I support private, consensual groups of adults deciding to live together however they please.
schadenfreude.
Poet Alice Notley raises the stakes: “he is born and I am undone—feel as if I will / never be, was never born. // Two years later I obliterate myself again / having another child … for two years, there’s no me here.” I have never felt that way, but I’m an old mom. I had nearly four decades to become myself before experimenting with my obliteration.
switch the TV channel to a station with a male weatherman. They usually have the more accurate forecast, she’d say.
tacit undercurrent of her argument, as I felt it, was that Gallop’s maternity had rotted her mind—besotted it with the narcissism that makes one think that an utterly ordinary experience shared by countless others is somehow unique, or uniquely interesting.
Christina, too, had a habit of blushing deep red while she spoke for the first few minutes of class. It didn’t make her any less cool. In fact it made us think she ran hot on the inside, that something about her passion for Gayatri Spivak or the Combahee River Collective was uncontainable.
After a lifetime of experimenting with the personal made public, each day that passes I watch myself grow more alienated from social media, the most rampant arena for such activity. Instantaneous, noncalibrated, digital self-revelation is one of my greatest nightmares.
“I still see homosexuality as a narrative of urban adventure, a chance to cross not only sex barriers but class and age barriers, while breaking a few laws in the process—and all for the sake of pleasure. If not, I might as well be straight,” Benderson says.
That’s what we both hate about fiction, or at least crappy fiction—it purports to provide occasions for thinking through complex issues, but really it has predetermined the positions, stuffed a narrative full of false choices, and hooked you on them, rendering you less able to see out,
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.
She seemed to be asking me for a species of advice, so I told her the only thing that occurred to me: I didn’t know this other woman, so all that seemed clear to me was that their perversities were not compatible.
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. One only has to read interviews with outstanding women to hear them apologizing. But I don’t intend to denigrate the power of apology: I keep in my sorry when I really mean it. And certainly there are many speakers whom I’d like to see do more trembling, more unknowing, more apologizing.
I have never really thought of myself as a “creative person”—writing is my only talent, and writing has always felt more clarifying than creative to me.
