#good essay

[demilypyro]

[ayara-resara]

[sistertaxon]

<https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2867481>

[st-just]

self-loving-vampire

Have you read Shamus Young's analysis of the ME series? It sounds like you share gripes.

Okay having googled it this is exactly what I was thinking of, yes! Thank you for the name, the thing’s been floating vaguely in the back of my head since I read it in like 2017.

[likopinina]

"Am I roleplaying as him or is he roleplaying as me?"

[gowns]

Mothers as Makers of Death

On motherhood, deafness, death, and trying to finish a novel.

Here is the artist-mother’s bar graph: line one—the multiplying size and need of her expression—held up against line two—the rapid dissolution of time. To write is to be in conversation with yourself, to preserve a state of being so you can conclude a sequence of thinking and feeling. The enemy to this process is intrusion. Children, in all of their beauty and wildness and strange genius, are, in the way of a meteorite, an intrusion.

When a woman becomes a mother, a set of changes is set off within her; the most altering is that she, as if under a spell, loses her autonomy of mind. In A Life’s Work, Rachel Cusk posits that the mother is divided the moment she watches another human being exit her body. This is the instant the mother is no longer alone and can no longer achieve aloneness within. Cusk writes: “Birth is not merely that which divides women from themselves, so that a woman’s understanding of what it is to exist is profoundly changed. Another person has existed in her, and after their birth they live within the jurisdiction of her consciousness. When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself.”

The private actions of the mother’s mind—her scholarship, perversions, miscellany, narcissism—are swamped by the bureaucracy of parenting. A ticker tape hurtles across the mother’s brain listing all of the things she must remember: spoon, bathing suit, milk, booster shot, sign-up, pickup, 3:15. These lists are a form of paying attention, which is a form of love. Love, a wise woman once told me, is how you make the other person feel. Love is how you make your child feel. You accomplish the list. And then the list, indomitable, grows anew.

[...]

No one had warned me that with a child comes death. Death slinks into your mind. It circles your growing body, and once your child has left it, death circles him too. It would be dangerous to turn your attentions away from your child—this is how the death presence makes you feel. The conversations I had with other new mothers stayed strictly within the bounds of the list: blankets, diapers, creams. Every conversation I had was the wrong conversation. No other mother congratulated me and then said: I’m overcome by the blackest of thoughts. You? This is why mothers don’t sleep, I thought to myself. This is why mothers don’t look away from their children. This is why, even with a broken heart, a mother will bring herself back to life.

[worldwithinworld]

Dumbledore’s assessment of the treatment of Kreacher leads to a disturbing conclusion. Treat a slave right and one gets a happy, obedient slave. As has been consistently the case, Dumbledore makes no assertion as to Kreacher’s inherent right to be free. Instead, he essentially blames Sirius for being a poor slave master. By eventually treating Kreacher with a measure of kindness, Harry becomes a benevolent slave owner. Pointedly, Harry does not appear to be poised to give Kreacher his freedom, as he had Dobby. Deathly Hallows instead concludes with an exhausted Harry 'wondering if Kreacher might bring him a sandwich' (749).

Amy M. Green, “Revealing Discrimination: Social Hierarchy and the Exclusion/Enslavement of the Other in the Harry Potter Novels”

[demilypyro]