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I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it. I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I’ve been circling for thousands of years and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song? —Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours
I was born to be a wanderer. I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave. Some birds fly until they die. I have made a promise to myself: My last descent won’t be the tumbling helpless kind but a sharp gannet plunge—a dive with intent, aimed at something deep in the sea.
I thought I would believe I’d seen the world, but there is too much of the world and too little of life. I thought I would believe I’d completed something, but now I doubt anything can be completed. I thought I would not be afraid. I thought I would become more than I am, but instead I know I am less than I thought.
Closure doesn’t really exist, though. That’s why we’re always looking for it.
Lovemaking brought relief, yes, but also shame, rumors, scorn. She wished to be different, to be someone who did not go with men, who was not oppressed by blackness or possessed by wanting.
In her experience, proximity to other humans did not actually diminish solitude.
All I knew was I had that tight feeling in my chest, like I wanted to kick over someone’s sandcastle. As a kid, I’d had that feeling a lot. I’d be on set and want to go berserk and stomp the plastic stable with the plastic pony into plastic bits, but I never acted on it until I got older, not until I was Katie McGee and weaving down the 405 in the backseat of someone’s Range Rover at 110 miles per hour, not doing anything more than laughing and shrieking but still feeling like I was pulverizing something.
I was bored and restless and pissed off, but none of that was new,
White people sidle in again.
American history, in a nutshell
Everyone knows Los Angeles is a city of deniers. Everyone knows this is a city of silicone and Restylane, of charismatic stationary-bike preachers and kettlebell gurus, of healing crystals and singing bowls, of probiotics and juice cleanses and colonics and jade eggs you stick up your vag and exorbitantly expensive snake-oil powder you sprinkle on your coconut chia pudding. We purify ourselves for life as though it were the grave. This is a city that’s more afraid of death than any other. I
“Men are masters of their own fates.” “Women didn’t fit the meter.” “They never do, man.”
People’s wishes for their own lives tend to outweigh others’ ideas about how they should behave.” She paused. “We must bend in the wind sometimes, Jamie. So much is beyond our control.”
if I forget, I will never know that I’ve forgotten, as is the nature of forgetting. I’ve forgotten so much—almost all I’ve seen. Experience washes over us in great waves. Memory is a drop caught in a flask, concentrated and briny, nothing like the fresh abundance from which it came.
A helicopter went blinking by. It’s helicopters. What else? It’s wind chimes and helicopters, I said. And it’s muscle cars and leaf blowers and trash trucks picking up everyone’s bins and tossing them back like tequila shots. It’s coyotes yipping like delinquents who’ve just left lit firecrackers in a mailbox, and it’s mourning doves sitting on power lines practicing the same sad four-note riff. It’s the thrum of hummingbird wings and the silent gliding gyres of vultures and the long-legged stepping of white egrets through shallow green water in the concrete channel that’s the river. It’s
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L.A. is mysterious crumbling old hilltop piles, and it’s haciendas wrapped in bougainvillea and Craftsman bungalows neat as a pin and little flat-roofed adobe things with bars on the windows, and it’s surf shacks and drug shacks and grumpy-old-man-no-solicitors shacks and patchouli shacks strung with prayer flags, windows glowing red through printed Indian cotton as though inside is the beating heart of everything. It’s the tents of the homeless crowded under an overpass; it’s the spherical mud nests of swallows high up under an overpass; it’s vines hanging from an overpass like a beaded
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One thing I learned is that you don’t just love a person, you love a vision of your life with them. And then you have to mourn both.
I miss her, but I also have a strange, vengeful urge to show her, though show her what exactly I couldn’t say. I suppose I want her to feel regret, to suffer as I am, even though I also want to be the one to spare her from all suffering. Does that make any sense?
In life, beginnings are not fixed but ambient. They are happening all the time, without us noticing.”
We think each new romantic prospect, each new lover, is a fresh start, but really we’re just tacking into the wind, each new trajectory determined by the last, plotting a jagged yet unbroken line of reactions through our lives. That was part of the problem: I was always just reacting, always just getting buffeted along, never setting a destination.
I have a feeling I have reached a juncture full of consequences that can’t be anticipated but will later seem inevitable. Should I embrace a bohemian life as a temporary lark or resist it as a trap? I’m afraid of being sucked under as Wallace was (as I nearly was), but to live without any fun at all seems too extreme a precaution and also discouraging to the making of art. I want love but not a wife, not yet. I want drink but not dissolution. I want momentum but not to careen. I suppose what I want is some kind of equilibrium, but I suppose I want the thrill of tipping back and forth, too.
The fury, logically, exists only within the confines of his mind, his body, but it seems so much bigger and stronger than he is, elemental, something that might break him apart from the inside.
Unfriendliness is another form of camouflage.
“A piece of advice for you,” she said. “Knowing what you don’t want is just as useful as knowing what you do. Maybe more.”
It’s easy sometimes to feel like audacity is its own form of protection, like recklessness somehow neutralizes danger.
“It’s as easy as that?” “It doesn’t matter what’s easy,” he said. “There’s just what you do and what you don’t do.”
We get angry and nothing happens. Men get angry, and the whole world burns up. Then when we want to do our part, they’re always trying to keep us out of danger. Because heaven forbid we should be allowed to decide for ourselves. Their worst fear is that one day we’ll end up owning our lives same as they do.
‘Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.’ ”
She writes only rarely, and tentatively when she does, letting stray thoughts catch in the pages like crumbs. She’s surprised she writes at all. She can’t imagine her little scribbles (and they are scribbles—her handwriting is awful) ever making a real book, but some inconsistent, unplumbable impulse keeps nudging her to pick up the pen.
When you are truly afraid, you experience an urgent desire to split from your body. You want to remove yourself from the thing that will experience pain and horror, but you are that thing. You are aboard a sinking ship, and you are the ship itself.
Later she will conclude she’d had many contradictory wishes: to live, to die, to go back and live her life over and change everything, to live her life again and change nothing.
