Bluets

by Maggie Nelson

This is generous, for to be close to her pain has always felt like a privilege to me, even though pain could be defined as that which we typically aim to avoid. Perhaps this is because she remains so generous within hers, and because she has never held any hierarchy of grief, either before her accident or after, which seems to me nothing less than a form of enlightenment.

This is a simple story, but it spooks me, insofar as it reminds me that the eye is simply a recorder, with or without our will. Perhaps the same could be said of the heart. But whether there is a violence at work here remains undecided.

We cannot read the darkness. We cannot read it. It is a form of madness, albeit a common one, that we try.

She told me that pollution, too, could be worshiped, simply because it exists. But Eden, she said, there’s no Eden.

Daily I think about moving the most vulnerable objects to a “cool, dark place,” but the truth is that I have little to no instinct for protection. Out of laziness, curiosity, or cruelty—if one can be cruel to objects—I have given them up to their diminishment.

Duras did not think of alcohol as a false god, but rather as a kind of placeholder, a squatter in the space made by God’s absence.

For some, the emptiness itself is God; for others, the space must stay empty.

It often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing: when it comes round, everything before it, around it, and, perhaps, in front of it, tends to seem fleeting, delusional.

“We’re only given as much as the heart can endure,” “What does not kill you makes you stronger,” “Our sorrows provide us with the lessons we most need to learn”: these are the kinds of phrases that enrage my injured friend. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to come up with a spiritual lesson that demands becoming a quadriparalytic. The tepid “there must be a reason for it” notion sometimes floated by religious or quasi-religious acquaintances or bystanders, is, to her, another form of violence.

That the future is unknowable is, for some, God’s means of suturing us in, or to, the present moment. For others, it is the mark of a malevolence, a sure sign that our entire existence here is best understood as a sort of joke or mistake.