Vladimir

by Julia May Jonas

The no-place-ness and no-time-ness of now. The pulsing presence of this moment between moments.

I’ve always felt the origin of anger in my vagina and am surprised it is not mentioned more in literature.

People said this crop of youth was weak, but we knew differently. We knew they were so strong—so much stronger than us, and equipped with better weapons, more effective tactics. They brought us to our knees with their softness, their consistent demand for the consideration of their feelings—the way they could change all we thought would stay the same for the rest of our lives, be it stripping naked for male directors in undergraduate productions of The Bacchae, ignoring racist statements in supposedly great works of literature, or working for less when others were paid more. They had changed all that when we hadn’t been able to, and our only defense was to call them soft.

I know that you will understand if I beg for your understanding, and respect of my privacy, as I decide for myself, as a hot, brilliant lady, how I will handle my marriage of thirty years. Extending me that courtesy is an act of feminism in and of itself.”

She suffered under the weight of her own exceptionalism, I know she did. Over and over she had to show up to the promise of her own potential.

For years I had been trying to cool down the temperature of my writing, to pull it back, pull it back, pull it back—neutralize it, contain it, make it crisp, clear, and sharp, every word carved out of crystal. This writing was nothing like that—it was drippy, messy, breezy. I was working through a mind frame, not a conceit. I was creating a world, not words on a page.

Perhaps it was this idea of self-expression and this thought that if we were fully to release this sadness, or if we were to alter it too much—if we were to give up all the obsessions and anxieties that caused us pain—then we would become a kind of person we disdained, someone content with an abstract idea of the littleness of their lives. For our lives were, as writers, essentially little by nature. Writers have to lead little lives, otherwise you can’t find time for writing. Was depression simply a hanging on to grandeur?

I was passionate—so passionate about the books I read and the way they made me feel. I loved that the complexities of my emotions were understood by authors writing hundreds of years ago, I loved looking at their texts and trying to understand what they were aiming to do, to pull my own meaning from them, to point out what others didn’t see or notice—the repetition of blue imagery, the recapitulation of motifs of separation.

Cigarettes are best when they are accompanied by intense moods—happiness, anger, defeat. No cigarette is better than the one that follows a torrential cry. I had a friend who used to call them “emotion suppressors” but it’s more like they complement emotions, like a good wine complements a meal.

I, of course, was thrilled when she told me she was dating a woman. What a relief, I thought, to free oneself from the heterosexual prison. Straightness: the predictable container in which all possible outcomes seemed already etched into stone—happiness, unhappiness, complacency, strife—a life in which we were all operating inside of a story already told, even as we sought to live an authentic existence. Even as we tried to say to ourselves that it wasn’t who we mated with but the quality of the thoughts in our brain that made us radical, we knew that the patterns of our life were the patterns of our parents, were the patterns of all the dim, sorrel-chomping sheep living unexamined existences in all the homes all over this thoughtless, anti-intellectual country. We knew that the stuff of our lives was the stuff of normalcy, and how normalcy and its trappings and expectations were always there. There would always be couple friends who were a bit more square than you, who you would have to play some hetero game with. There would always be family who would ask the women to do the dishes while the men played chess. How fortunate for her, I thought, to be able to evade all that.

And if she did choose to cook or clean or worry, at least she could maybe do all those things for a woman who understood, not a man who, by virtue of being born with a thing between his legs, had absorbed from an early age that it was all right to sit back and enjoy being served.

the murmur of an incomprehensible tongue surrounding us like a curtain of privacy.

Grief makes people wild in their thought. As if we are ever punished or rewarded in that kind of way—a random tragic death in exchange for a secret indiscretion.

I understood not only the bonding that comes out of complaining but also the incredible sense of identity that comes with discovering why you think something is wrong. I wanted them to feel that fire, that was what college was for. They were enacting a right of all young people, unearthing what they felt were the systemic wrongs of the world. It was their right to look at us murderously, longing to stand where we stood. It was their right to believe that they could do our jobs better than we could. We, who had experienced enough bitterness in life to expect flaws, faults, and complexities in every situation we encountered. They had grown up with a constant stream of global warming and gun violence burbling on low from their parents’ radios as they were driven to and from soccer or clarinet. Their lives, for the most part (at least the majority of students who attended this liberal and very expensive college), were cloaked in the postmillennial blanket of peace and prosperity, while terrible threats loomed in the shadowy corners of the larger world. They were overpraised and overpressured. There were teenage billionaires, twelve-year-old YouTube stars, and no jobs for them once they graduated. Once Trump became president, the illusion, the one imparted to them comfortably from the driver’s seat of a minivan, the idea that the world would slowly get better, that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” was upended.

understood Sid’s and her whole generation’s rejection of the excuse that “it was a different time.” That kind of excuse leads to cultural stultification, it perpetuates misogyny and racism, it is general and not interesting.

Compliments made you supplicant, equal, and master all at once. Supplicant because you are below, admiring; equal because you have the same taste; and master because you are bestowing your approval.

After two failed attempts to meet him for a coffee and discuss what happened, I gave up, telling myself that closure was a myth, a concept fetishized by people under thirty.

we females had all shrugged and monitored our behavior, believing we were the ones personally responsible for either inviting in or keeping our male intellectual stewards at bay, or being deemed worthy or unworthy of that kind of attention. Moreover, didn’t any kind of choice, romantic or not, create a discriminatory environment? We discriminated when we bestowed honors, when we gave prizes and awards at the end of the year, of which Edwina had received several. The act of choosing was embedded in academia, it was meant to be a place in which a student could rise, could distinguish themselves. We had to select some students over the others and those selections caused more pain, at least in my opinion, than the amorous fixations of an over-the-hill professor.

American academics, like the rest of America, become shy when our conversations get too earnest. It is one of the reasons that I both love and am put off by conversations with Europeans, who never undercut their assertions with the discomfiture of having been emphatic, the way Americans do.

So anyway, like in those rides, I feel like what is in the center, what everyone is afraid of falling into, what everyone is spinning to avoid, is the body. The material sense of aliveness, animal-ness, humanness. And yet the body is there—it’s the pit, it’s the center, it lives, molten at the core. I admire that the body is there but that you skirt direct mention of it—ever since Roth and Updike it seems as though men can’t write a book in which the physical is present but not didactic…”

“I think, what do I care about? And for a moment I’ll convince myself that I care about veterans from Afghanistan, or drone operators, or Russian political hackers, or sex slavery, or cults, or the friendship between Babel and Gorky. And I’ll do all this research—this will be it, this will be my big novel. And then I’ll start to write and it will feel so dead and so false that I can’t go on. I think, genre twist, I think personal, and then I’ll think, why am I trying so desperately to find what to write? Doesn’t the world have enough books in it? I should just give up.”

(Not too many years ago, you were unlikely to encounter a wine greater than 11 percent; somehow in the past decade we had internationally agreed we needed to get drunker faster and for less.)

Strange, the detail of a servant loving his master so dearly. Homoerotic, perhaps, which is fun to consider, or a teaching tool of oppression, most likely.

Electra spends the entirety of Sophocles’s play in a doorway, I say to my students, when we read his Theban trilogy in my Adaptations course. She is unable to return home and unable to venture into the world. Pay attention to doorways, to paths, to in-between spaces, I tell them, these are the places of transformation.

things work out because of the way they work out, because I open one door and then another, because I find that ease can be one of the greater forms of freedom.