Can fragility feel as hot as bravado?

In bonsai you often plant the tree off-center in the pot to make space for the divine.

This concept is new to me. It makes me reevaluate space, white space. I reconsider my aesthetic tendency toward asymmetry. What am I leaving space for? What am I making space for? Meanwhile, all those situations where I require the fullness of symmetry, do they have no need for the divine? Are they already divine in themselves or are they shutting it out?

I've come to The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson, too late in life, my life. It might've affected me more impactfully a couple dozen years ago, when I was pregnant and grappling with my body, motherhood, and relationship dynamics, all in constant flux, but it hadn't been published yet. It might've served me a decade ago, upon its release, as I processed my life to that point, and prepared for my rebirth as a single woman, single mother, singular entity. 

Is there something inherently queer about pregnancy itself, insofar as it profoundly alters one's "normal" state, and occasions a radical intimacy with — and radical alienation from — one's body? How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity? Or is this just another disqualification of anything tied too closely to the female animal from the privileged term (in this case, nonconformity, or radicality)?

As it is, I found this book frustrating; it made me feel both very smart (I have the wisdom of lived experience, of birth and death; I have known seven or seven thousand types of love, my heart has shriveled, grown, burst, reconstituted, softened, hardened, shattered, scarred, mutated, evolved; I have lived in my body across time and space; what can this book tell me about love, grief, identity, adaptability, responsibility, joy, that is new?) and very dumb (I don't know this academic language, these references or frameworks; I don't know what Deleuze said, I know Lorde the jaded pop star, not Lorde the intersectional feminist and civil rights activist. I understand my experience and express it in a way limited to myself and my own experience).

Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnameable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. You called this the cookie-cutter function of our minds. You said that you knew this not from shunning language but from immersion in it.

I was listening to a radio show, writers discussing favourite books, or major influences or recommended reading, and what now brought me to The Argonauts and hooked me on reading it was mention of "Wittgenstein's idea that the inexpressible is contained — inexpressibly! — in the expressed," so here I am again, still, forever unable to articulate what's in my head, heart, soul, yet somehow assured that it doesn't matter; whatever I need to say is seeping out of my pores, obvious to anyone who cares to listen to my silence. Read me, I scream, without having written a word.

I had always presumed that giving birth would make me feel invincible and ample, like fisting. But even now — two years out — my insides feel more quivery than lush. I've begun to give myself over to the idea that the sensation might be forever changed, that this sensitivity is now mine, ours, to work with. Can fragility feel as hot as bravado?

(The answer is yes. This is something I absolutely know to be true.)

Meanwhile this summer, my daughter went on vacation for over a month. It's the longest we've ever been apart. The emptiness is a strange feeling, a bookend to the fullness of pregnancy. A sneak peek at the empty nest syndrome I will someday soon endure, and I begin to understand how biological mothers may experience it with a certain intensity. An evolution in one's physical space, and the new emotional states that introduces. Although partnerless now for about a decade, I haven't lived alone since 1996; I am mostly very good at being alone — for an evening, for a few days, on vacation for a couple of weeks — I crave it, and am almost never lonely. Except sometimes. But solitude done right, strength at its core, is indeed a gift.

I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away, I whispered in your basement bed. If one does one's solitude right, this is the prize.

The balance of self and other, when both are shape-shifting and changing direction.

But whatever I am, or have since become, I know now that slipperiness isn't all of it. I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependence. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one's work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again — not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

The suckings and ejaculations of the heart

The ink and the blood in the turquoise water: these are the colors inside the fucking.

Is blue the color of hope or of despair?

Bluets, by Maggie Nelson, is an investigation into the colour blue, blueness in general, and love. In 240 meditations, or episodes, or prose poems, she grieves a relationship while a friend lies paralyzed following a serious accident. From the beginning, she also declares herself to be in love with the colour blue and proceeds down a path of philosophy, aesthetics, and symbolism.

4. I admit that I may have been lonely. I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which, if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke — take your pick — an apprehension of the divine. (This ought to arouse our suspicions.)

Nelson calls them propositions, invoking Wittgenstein. She addresses Wittgenstein's Remarks on Color, written in his final months, directly. "He chose to write about color. About color and pain. Much of his writing is urgent, opaque, and uncharacteristically boring."

Goethe's Theory of Colour also plays a large role. Nelson turns to scientific, medical, philosophical, musical, artistic, and literary sources to describe the colour and the feeling it invokes. 

(Someone at bookclub mentioned Bluets during a discussion of Han Kang's The White Book. That's when I first heard of it. It immediately put me in mind of William H. Gass's On Being Blue, which Nelson also references.)

In proposition 21, she describes a dream:

There was a dance underway, in a mahogany ballroom, where we were dancing the way people dance when they are telling each other how they want to make love.

...and I think I understand that she is a little like me, and the devastation of her breakup is relatable, and the force of her everything is relatable. Now I think I am closer to understanding:

20. Fucking leaves everything as it is. Fucking may in no way interfere with the actual use of language. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.

But I don't know. Is "may" an imperative construction? — fucking shall not be permitted to sway our communication, it cannot be the basis of our communication, it is something else entirely.

Where does the blueness reside? (What colour is my blue sofa in the dark?)

I am mystified by how a book of this sort comes to be published. It would infuriate many readers. I cannot imagine it having wide appeal. It is art. Maybe this is how I want to write, meditatively, propositionally. (I want to infuriate.) She posits the female gaze. I learn about Catherine Millet and Isabelle Eberhardt.

For my part I have no interest in catching a glimpse of or offering you an unblemished ass or airbrushed cunt. I am interested in having three orifices stuffed full of thick, veiny cock in the most unforgiving of poses and light.

Horace-Bénédict de Saussure's cyanometer

I wonder what kind of woman is Maggie Nelson, and again I think she is like me.

72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it? — No, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to a be a sort of wink — Here you are again, it says, and so am I.

Her blue is not holy or unholy. It is not depression, nor is it festive. It is some solace, a pharmakon, like fucking or writing. 

92. Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping — its intensity, its frequency, She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. (Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed?)

I think my despair has been sufficiently witnessed. I am, however, desperate to be witnessed, before I disappear, witnessed in my desire and secrecy, my madness and joy.

178. Neither Cornell nor Warhol made the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning. For Warhol, fucking was less about desire than it was about killing time: it is take-it-or-leave-it work, accomplished similarly by geniuses and retards, just like everything else at the Factory. For Cornell, desire was a sharpness, a tear in the static of everyday life — in his diaries he calls it "the spark," "the lift," or "the zest." It delivers not an ache, but a sudden state of grace. It might be worth noting here that both Warhol and Cornell could arguably be described, at least for periods of their lives, as celibate.

179. When I imagine a celibate man — especially one who doesn't even jerk off — I wonder how he relates to his dick, what else he does with it, how he handles it, how he regards it. At first glance, this same question for a woman might appear more "tucked away" (pussy-as-absence, pussy-as-lack: out of sight, out of mind). But I am inclined to think that anyone who thinks or talks this way has simply never felt the pulsing of a pussy in serious need of fucking — a pulsing that communicates nothing less than the suckings and ejaculations of the heart.

A sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette

On my CV it says that I am currently working on a book about the color blue. I have been saying this for years without writing a word. It is, perhaps, my way of making my life feel "in progress" rather than a sleeve of ash falling off a lit cigarette.

— from Bluets, by Maggie Nelson. 

Late-stage pandemic is messing with your brain. "We have been doing this so long, we’re forgetting how to be normal." And "the forgetting feels like someone is taking a chisel to the bedrock of my brain, prying everything loose." 

I have forgotten how to make small talk. (That's OK, I always hated it anyway.) Perhaps because nothing is small anymore. Or everything is. Any conversation that is not related to the pandemic — the procurement of goods, the logistics of curfew, what series to binge-watch, how tiresome it all is — is deep and meaningful, even if it consists only of awkward silences.

Imposter syndrome is on the rise, in part because no one sees us work anymore (watch the webinar! prevent burnout!).

The last day I worked at the office was exactly one year ago. I work too much, except when I procrastinate, and then I spend overly much time and energy on pretending to work.

I am conceptualizing a longform piece of literature. The sculpture is gestating. More than a year of daily German lessons. I have assembled a significant portion of my 4,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, but I can't see the forest for the trees. 

Some days I walk. The urge to move is more spontaneous, less regular. My walks are shorter now. My world has gotten smaller.

My feet are itchy. I can't stand to wear boots anymore. I want to shed my winter skin like a snake.

My 18-year-old caesarean scar is itchy. A numb horizontal line inching across my lower abdomen. It feels like it doesn't belong to me.

I have lost three mittens/gloves in as many weeks (why isn't there a single word that is less weird then "handwear" to encompass both categories?). I have lost three articles of handwear in as many weeks. I have lost one mitten and two (nonmatching) gloves in about three weeks.

Reading often feels like a chore, except sometimes it doesn't.

My life, everything, is a work in progress.

Reading Rachel Cusk (Kudos), I discover Nietzsche's motto, borrowed from Pindar: Become what you are. I will embrace the paradox. I am scheduled to start talk therapy at the end of the month.