Things are surprising and mysterious

I have been feeling better, alive, and moved this week. There is a returned pleasure. There is a returned tone of pleasure that in depression I forget the feeling of. It is: that things are surprising and mysterious, and that I could happen to come upon some new or fascinating thing at any time. Sensual pleasures are of extreme value to me. I love soft lighting. I love psychedelic and strangely patterned music. I love being on the brink of focus. and I can feel it coming. I really can feel it! I don't know how to get this state back when I am unhappy, but you know what? I won't worry.

I don't have a desire to be dulled any longer like I did. I can return to a productive state without feeling as though I'm overbrimming or losing control of myself. I am changing what relationships I put my trust in, and who I'm willing to love. I am losing my desire to be with people to whom I cannot truly explain myself. Or I've lost it. I trust myself in ever a different way and my internal life has changed. Now it is a matter of rebuilding my external life to match it.

Sludge Utopia, by Catherine Fatima, is a weirdly compelling book with a fabulous title and very little plot to speak of.

In some ways it reminds me of Elif Batuman's The Idiot, only without the structure of the academic year, a much vaguer backdrop (making it therefore a more theoretical experience?). The narrator has her own Ivan and a summer abroad. She is more sexually experienced than the eponymous idiot, and for that perhaps she is more frustrated. From my more experienced perspective they are equally naive, and while I empathized with Selin, I desperately want to shake Catherine out of her own head.

I could almost write a book in response to this book, paragraph by paragraph (which in fact I was doing for a couple days, but I won't share that here). [Wouldn't that be awesome? Has anyone done that? A book-length response on a relatively micro level to a book that makes you want to scream at it and throw it across the room. Yes.]

It's about being in relation to an other, especially sexually. And being in relation to one's own sexuality. It's about confusing sensual pleasure with sexual pleasure. It also touches on the role of porn. The narrator (a 25-year-old woman) masturbates regularly (at some point, daily), and uses porn as an aid.

This fascinates me because it's been claimed that women are generally not visually stimulated (I fall into this category; porn movies don't turn me on — what's erotic is the imagination, and what's left to it), certainly not to the same extent as men, but I suspect that the advent of the internet and accessibility of porn has changed that, at least in the sense that it has for women normalized behaviours and established expectations of them. Women try to own it, be empowered by it, but I think it just reinforces patriarchical notions.

I have the sense that sex is rarer and less "natural" than it used to be. Certainly sexlessness seems to be a thing in Japan, and Western civilization's sexual satisfaction is increasingly virtual. Even while polyamory and nonmonogamy flourish, I suspect in part those behaviours have developed in an attempt to compensate for the decrease in quantity and maybe even quality of encounters. I should research this (how would I go about doing that?).

I guess that has nothing to do with the book ("auto-fictional novel" it's described as) per se. One blurb calls Fatima a female 21st-century Henry Miller. Definitely there's a similar frankness and an overlap in subject matter. It's been a while since I read Miller, but I think Fatima intellectualizes more than Miller does (both psychoanalyzing and philosophizing).

It's at times a frustrating read — 25-year-old Catherine is just plain wrong about so many things, says the 49-year-old — but it's unputdownable and both emotionally and intellectually provocative.

I suspect, as one grows, the need to bring everything to its climax recedes, and along with it the need to give yourself up and have it filled with someone else's self-offering. There are quieter, softer, and less certain ways of being with others.