The Details

by Ia Genberg

Some books stay in your bones long after their titles and details have slipped from memory.

asked myself if this was what structural violence looked like: to unconsciously teach someone about gifts, where to buy them, how to deliver them. To teach someone that you’re not supposed to buy the cheapest pair of pants, ready-made pesto, computer, or frying pan like I’d always done, but that you had to pick the best version? A couple of years later I saw that any notion of latent violence in this

To read with a fever is a lottery; the contents of the text will either dissolve or penetrate deep into the cracks accidentally opened by an out-of-control temperature.

his writing in terms of “the magic of creation,” “subconscious processes,” and “harnessed impulses of spatial presence.”

the subject matter itself was an irrelevant appendix to the verbal flexing made visible by its light.

Ever since my friendship with Niki I think of the anecdote as a form of chronic illness that attaches itself to some people; that compulsion to tell everything in the shape of a story, to turn life into a formula meant

captivate, impress, upset, or inspire laughter.

An anecdote is a sealed box that cannot yield anything other than more sealed boxes until every party to the conversation—or the “so-called conversation” as Niki would put it—sits there with their own pile of sealed boxes, mentally obstructed, tied to the mast,...

TV means that somebody else is trying to control my gaze, whereas books leave me to my own devices. During the time I knew

“Hubris of possession and complete subordination, irrational demands on ownership,” the man next to him commented. The rest

“the collection of unpredictable variables,”

a kind of wild and everlasting insanity right beneath the skin of every single person.

gravity so demanding that it scared me, because it was no longer about pleasure but about something more fundamental, a room in me where everything was spacious and available, my childhood, my people, the connections between everything. “Desire” seemed like “desire” until I disappeared inside of it and stayed in there. It made a different kind of desire appear,

an agreement about temporary magic, when places in us that could not touch did touch. To be permitted authenticity in the midst

We live so many lives within our lives—smaller lives with people who come and go, friends who disappear, children

who grow up—and I never know which of these lives is meant to serve as the frame.

my “self” recedes and gives space to a nameless joy, a unified whole that preserves all the details, inseparable a...

not even a memory as such but rather the place from which all memories came, a shadow that respired in the background of her life every day.

anxiety that doesn’t wax and wane but endures in the form of a tension inside everything. Theirs is not laughter but anxious laughter, anxious joy, anxious walking, an anxious way of talking.

Anxiety’s central task, as instructed by fear, is to run ahead and touch everything, circle potentialities with the intention of preventing them from happening, on and on and on in a process that never stops, that becomes one

She was never granted peace, there was always some aspect of the world that had to be controlled lest things went out of hand. And I suppose that’s what’s at the heart of it for every person suffering from anxiety; the fact that life, by its very nature, is impossible to manage.

Going deeper requires a loss of control, requires the abandonment of that constant surveillance of time and space in exchange for a headlong fall inside oneself, or into somebody else, or down one of life’s many cracks and fissures.

When I was younger I often thought I should travel more and farther, spend more time in foreign countries, that I should be in a constant state of velocity so that I could get out there and truly live, but with time I have come to understand that everything I was looking for was right here, inside of