Make It Scream, Make It Burn

by Leslie Jamison

The natural world has always offered itself as a screen for human projection.

We project our fears and longings onto everything we’re not—every beast, every mountain—and in this way we make them somehow kin. It’s an act of humbling and longing and claiming all at once. Often, we’re not even aware that we’re doing it.

Don’t assume the contours of another person’s heart. Don’t assume its desires. Don’t assume that being alone means being lonely.

reside. She had a deep desire to understand her life as something structured by patterns, woven through with signs and signals and voices. She was hungry for a logic that might arrange all the isolated points of her experience into a legible constellation.

Life becomes a series of omens. I wanted them to imply the presence of some organizing spirit, or at least compose a story.

“What we are, that only can we see.”

Maybe every song is a healing song if we hear it in the right mood—at the end of the right seven weeks, or the worst ones, the ones lost to us forever. Maybe desire and demand are just the same song played at different frequencies. At

others. Loneliness seeks out metaphors not just for definition but for the companionship of resonance, the promise of kinship in comparison. Now there’s an entire coterie gathered around this particular kinship, people tracking the same pulse of a minivan-sized heart. You might say it’s a community formed around an empty center.

was more that I’d grown deeply skeptical of skepticism itself. It seemed much easier to poke holes in things—people, programs, systems of belief—than to construct them, stand behind them, or at least take them seriously. That ready-made dismissiveness banished too much mystery and wonder.

Maybe I was too scared to push back against the stories people told themselves in order to keep surviving their own lives.

almost anything can fit into the puzzle of your life if you want it to.

If we told ourselves stories in order to live, what did we get from stories that allowed us to live again? It was about something more than buffering against the terrifying finality of death. It had to do with recognizing the ways we’re shaped by forces we can’t see or understand.

the rhythms of our lives, the people we love most—are shaped by forces beyond the edges of our sight. It’s thrilling and terrifying. It’s expansion and surrender at once.

Love is not immune from the human hunger for narrative.

that it asked me to understand myself as interchangeable, to see my dilemmas as shared and my identity as something oddly and inescapably connected to distant strangers.

that nothing we lived was unique, that we were always—in some sense—living again.

We say, Wow. We say it again. We stay humble. We can’t know for sure until the body turns up in the river—and even then, it might not be the end. We walk toward the lights. We are safe, or else we aren’t. We live, until we don’t. We return, unless we can’t.

Sometimes I feel I owe a stranger nothing, and then I feel I owe him everything; because he fought

and I didn’t, because I dismissed him or misunderstood him, because I forgot, for a moment, that his life—like everyone else’s—

holds more than I could ever p...

This is how we light the stars, again and again: by showing up with our ordinary, difficult bodies, when other ordinary, difficult bodies might need us. Which is the point—the again-and-again of it. You never get to live the wisdom just once, rise to the

occasion of otherness just once. You have to keep living this willingness to look at other lives with grace, even when your own feels like shit, and you would do anything to crawl inside a different one;

The definition of grace is that it’s not deserved. It does not require a good night’s sleep to give it, or a flawless record to receive it. It demands no particular backstory.

The more important point is that the impulse to escape our lives is universal, and hardly worth vilifying. Inhabiting any life always involves reckoning with the urge to abandon it—through daydreaming; through storytelling; through the ecstasies of art and music, hard drugs, adultery, a smartphone screen.

These forms of “leaving” aren’t the opposite of authentic presence. They are

simply one of its symptoms—the way love contains conflict, intimacy contains distance,...

One hundred percent okay. We seek narratives that will make it so. Violence becomes a necessity, or gets turned into a resort, a soothing holiday.

“Is it right to be watching strangers in a play / In this strangest of theatres?”

True statement: Sri Lanka is paradise. Also true: every paradise is made possible by blindness.

expressionless faces of those men, how their

How does the morally outraged mind begin to arrange its materials? And then—once it begins to doubt itself—how does it rearrange them all over again?

documentary “I”

“Almost any person, no matter how damaged and poisoned and blinded,” Agee writes, “is infinitely more capable of intelligence and of joy than he can let himself be or than he usually knows.”

jolie laide: the idea that something is beautiful because of its imperfections, not in spite of them.

What does it mean to make art from other people’s lives? What distinguishes exploitation from witnessing, and when is that witnessing complete? Is it ever?

This was respect, I thought: to look and keep looking, not to look away as soon as you’d gotten what you needed.

Making art about other people always means seeing them as you see them, rather than mirroring the way they would elect to be seen.

Her work has helped me trust that an enduring emotional investment—even in all its mess and mistakes, because of its mess and mistakes—can help you see more acutely. It

committing to a story you can’t fully imagine when it begins.

We go distances to celebrate the love of people we love, but sometimes it hurts the heart to stand alone on an empty road and think, What am I doing here?

Weddings are about being single and wondering about being in love, and being in love and wondering about being in love—what it’s like for other people, and whether it hurts as much as it sometimes does for you. At every wedding, all of a sudden, all bets are off and everyone is asking when your boyfriend is planning to propose, and you are watching your boyfriend talk to the girl at the cheese table, and the wine in you wants to fight, and the wine in you thinks, You will never love me like I need you to.

You summon your most primal, shameful dreams—for some kind of life you learned to love in magazines—and feed them tiny quiches, these dreams, and hope that these will be enough.

I’d spent so much of my life straining toward his praise like a houseplant leaning into sunlight, begging for something from that voice on the other end of the line—not just love, but the assurance that I deserved it.

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing, fellow-rover, / And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

The world seemed full of desires that couldn’t always be explained, but could sometimes—in surprising ways—be met.

at some point I’d developed an attachment to the state of yearning itself.

Maybe I could start to see that while I had been longing for him, he’d been longing for me as well.

Thank you for staying married and not needing your marriage to be a white room in which you’re always entertained.

understood that any time you were somewhere, there were a thousand elsewheres you might be longing for.

It suggested that this longing was not delusion, but one of our central truths. It constituted us.