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I’m thinking, because I’m a good Christian girl, of the theological concept of God’s love: that you don’t deserve it and yet there’s nothing you can do to get out of being loved. For many this is a comfort, the idea that God will love you no matter what. But what it really means is that the statements “God loves me” and “I exist” are equivalent. God’s love is nothing, the pure nothing, the facticity of existence. You are there and, because you are there, God loves you. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just the space in which your life unfolds: in God’s love, a pure predicateless position. I cut my teeth philosophically on theology and I’m still very attracted to concepts like that. The thing about God’s love is not that it is stronger than anything, but that it is weaker than anything. That idea is beautiful to me, the idea that love is so weak that nothing can defeat it.

Andrea Long Chu in conversation with Eric Newman

I forgot C.H.'s birthday. Pain makes me selfish.

"Do you remember what I did for yours?" he asked, once I eventually remembered. Yes. He called me from Italy, the place I had refused to go with him, and wished me a happy birthday at the stroke of midnight, his time. "I just wanted to be the first one," he said in that sing-song voice, toned with uncertainty. What he really wanted to know: "Does this gesture have your permission? Is it welcomed?"

The answer was:

An emptied loop of snakeskin, pinned above the bar at Joshua Tree Saloon, advertising the sale of a corn snake. ("6 feet. Good eater. Female.") The skin was lemon-hued and opaque; almost milky. I snapped a picture and sent a casual text, captioned: "LOL."

It had been his birthday. I think we'd been fighting that weekend, just before I'd slipped out of reception at the furthest edge of the park. Just before I spent two days, hungry and cold, curled inside of a tent in below freezing temperatures, having forgotten my long johns, and any semblance of nourishment. My friends, the pre-nuptial couple who had promised "to take care of everything," had neglected to mention what exactly they meant by that, and I, suspecting the best, regretfully starved for the rest of the weekend.

"I have cheese crackers," said Kat. "Real people eat full meals, Mom." I joked, pushing the bag away.

It wasn't just the quality of my hunger that made me do it, but the elegant fact of Kat — a runway model, thin and luminous as a water spout. Such a gentle slice of person; fluttering in the foreground like refracted light. Within her proximity, performing human activities felt achingly vulgar.

Together, though, treading the broad, rolling back of desert that is Joshua Tree, I remember thinking: I don't feel lonely. Since the first time in forever, aloneness did not feel lonely. The unbounded vastness of California's bottom end — muscular, quiet — felt like the silent removal of some previous restriction. In which case Kat and I weren't walking, I guess, but spilling. I can't believe I live in California. When I first arrived here, staying at A.'s apartment, I kept nervously trying to close the front door, which had been left ajar to let the breeze in. "Leave it," he laughed. "It's that way on purpose." What he didn't say: You're supposed to be open. The possibility of what's allowed in — that's the purpose. "What book you are reading?" C.H. was texting from Washington. "What is it about?" "The same as the last one," I replied. "Absolutely nothing." Soon, I suspect that California will close like a zipper over the East Coast, sealing its contents forever. I wonder: Will I miss winters?

Sometimes we forget, and think there are only women — endless hills and plains of unresisting women. We make little jokes and comfort each other and our lives pass quickly. But every now and then, it is true, a man rises unexpectedly in our midst like a pine tree, and looks savagely at us, and sends us hobbling away in great floods to hide in the caves and gullies until he is gone.

— Lyda Davis, "Men"

Most people in the world are just fine, I remember thinking, back in that time when I was traveling and adrift -- unmoored geographically, but also romantically, with not even the memory, like leftover vapor from a sink running hot, to haunt me on each strange and friendless night. From this supremely pure vantage point, every intention seemed admirable — if not noble — and pain a distant and productive friend. "Really, you must lean into it," I remember instructing a heartbroken acquaintance, scribbling her a postcard from the aquatically hot jungles of Borneo. "These are the things that make us better." Ah, god. Idiot pain. "You're good at compartmentalizing," I texted a friend, just the other day. "Although I suspect your subconscious is running amok with it." (This friend and I are not on good terms, at the moment.) Pain has ruined my traveling mind. Now, going places is just spending money until I can get home again — to safety — among the people I know. There is nothing sub-conscious about it: driving from D.C. to Tennessee, blinded by snow, Paul Simon cranked on the radio. Everything seems so present.

I find myself reading a long list of books and making notes on which ones I "could" have written. So far, in that category are: "The Sicily Papers" by Michelle Orange and "Exquisite Pain" by Sophie Calle, which is mostly a composition comprised of other people's pain. To write this book, you just have to be a collector. The person people trust with their performance of vulnerability. Witness: my phone buzzing itself off the nightstand, into oblivion, on a nightly basis. "Hello, love..." texts A. "K--- is leaving tonight. My heart hurts. How are you doing?" From D.: "The menace of a post-capitalist society is the white guilt of X and Z." (I stopped listening.) Keep in mind, though, that I have still not written a book.

It is January 11, 2017. It is my first day of No Work since the job began. I'm staying in Chicago with a close friend of D.'s and the friend's new girlfriend, R. We are all very comfortable together and share many warm memories over spiced wines and cocktail cherries. In the back of my mind, I can imagine paranoid D., wondering what we might discuss; what might become revealed of him. I want to tell him: "Don't worry. It was all very pleasant and we laughed and felt warm about our times together. Everybody loves you."

The time we went to Rainbo and you left so drunk that you tried to walk through the window of our hotel to get in, instead of the door. Later, in the same place, reeling from our breakup, you'd endanger the life of everyone you knew to start a fight with some bikers who were standing outside in the cold.

I can't even look at a Wolfgang Tillman's book these days, after your adventures in Berlin with him.

Sitting on the floor at Close Friend's house and reading Sophie Calle while eating from a bowl of sliced apple seems startlingly appropriate, if a little bit indifferent, to the new year.

"It's like you're on a swing,' he finally said, 'and you swing way up to the top and for a split second you can see over the wall, you can see all that light, but you're already on your way back into the world. So you swing harder and you get a little higher and you see a little more, but back down into the world you go. To recognize something and then live there takes a tremendous conversion of your being. You don't just swing up there and say, 'Oh, that's nice,' and stay there, hanging in midair. Hanging in midair can be nice -- I did it at the Whitney, I did it in the desert, for a moment with the dots. But the world always draws you back.

Robert Irwin in conversation with Lawrence Weschler, “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.”

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Q. What is the best thing that you hope readers could take away from your work? A. That even if we’re constantly tempted to lower our guard — out of love, or weariness, or sympathy or kindness — we women shouldn’t do it. We can lose from one moment to the next everything that we have achieved. Q. Is there anything else you’d like to add? A. No.

Source. (via winesburgohio)

For a moment I backed off from myself. I saw that I was suspended inside my own life. Only a small part of it contained substance, I was daydreaming the rest. [The man], and the time I spent at the desk, were equal efforts at manifest destiny. I backed off even father and saw that I could not imagine how I would begin to take possession of the larger territory, either in love or in work.

Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

Hello, feelings.

We abide by cultural directives that urge us: clarify each thought, each experience, so you can cull from them their single dominant meaning and, in the process, become a responsible adult who knows what he or she thinks. But what I try to show is the opposite: how at every moment, the world presents us with a composition in which a multitude of meanings and realities are available, and you are able to swim, lucid and self-contained, in that turbulent sea of multiplicity.

Richard Foreman, Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theater.

In completely disparate circles … a distinct but not wholly unrelated idea of ‘engaged withdrawal’ has also begun to hold sway. Rather than fixate on revolution, this strategy privileges orchestrated and unorchestrated acts of exodus. As Italian political philosopher Paolo Virno has put it, 'Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting.’ In anarchist circles, this withdrawal bears a relationship to the idea of the 'TAZ,’ or 'temporary autonomous zones: ephemeral but crucial gaps in an otherwise suffocating global capitalist order, gaps that, at the very least, make other forms of social organization and perception seem momentarily possible.

Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty

Upstate.

I’m upstate with a friend and her man. They’re a couple embarking on something new and this, the strange little cabin where he grew up, is their first gesture toward an unforeseen and unpredictable intimacy — “going away together” — but they brought me here to ruin it. Out of fear, self-hatred, or pure utility. I’m a tool to bring them closer, as though by warily circling the wedge of my presence, they will find each other on the other side of something, still together. A new and different space to occupy; a conversation? A wide green field? It is literally there, the field. I can see it from the small, brown window of my bedroom and now, in the drippy morning light, the both of them crossing it, coming toward each other from opposite sides. Heads down, arms folded against the cold, searching. Is it even a metaphor anymore? I can’t tell, I’m lost. Is it them or is it me out there?

Fuck you, I’m taking myself out.

For a woman to entrust herself to another woman — a symbolic mother, likely but not necessarily older, who possesses “something extra” — meant to bridge the gap a woman feels between “her aspiration to a free existence and the privacy of her sexed body.” Women did not wish to think about motherhood all their lives, for example, but neither did they want to treat maternity as “a dilemma” in conflict with freedom or deny it as a source of truth. Nor did they want to enter the social world at the expense of their most elementary experiences, those associated with the body and sexuality. Emancipation had created space for women to pursue bigger lives than the ones their mothers had lived, but this required a kind of asexual presence: to be at ease among men a woman had to remove the threat of her body from the scene (unless her body, and its availability, was what she wished to broadcast). Such equality was far from freedom.

Those Like Us.

‘A Surrender to All-Over, Non-Directional Horniness’: An Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum.

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