I'd been saving this book for the perfect moment, and I picked it up now after realising that this moment had descended on me months ago. I've been trI'd been saving this book for the perfect moment, and I picked it up now after realising that this moment had descended on me months ago. I've been trying to map my own loneliness in a new city, I've been trying to accept it, to not be ashamed by it. I've been working from my room, and have stopped going to the office. My loneliness is ironic, it wants to fester and grow. It has made me turn my room into precipice, I look at myself sitting at the desk, staring at the laptop while my fingers punch the keys. I look so solitary, so lonely in the dimmed down lights. I needed someone to guide me through this, and Laing couldn't have done a better job.
In tracing out solitude, confinement, loneliness and the intersections between them through art, Laing has created a shrine of the lonely. So I read this book, considered it sacred, offered prayers, asked for relief (from loneliness of course) and left silently. I sought refugee from myself at this shrine. This book answered my prayers, sometimes hissing, sometimes soothing. Because that's the thing about loneliness, it isn't elegant at all. You can't be graceful about it. But you can face it with dignity, as Laing did, though she was naturally afraid of failing all along.
I should have eaten this book more delicately, instead I devoured it in a hungry gorge. So my loneliness not only resonated with it, but responded too. Reading this book is like running in a stranger's garden after not having seen a single flower for years. It's a very beautiful and overwhelming garden. ...more
I specifically bought a blue highlighter for this book, even though I stopped using blue inked pens ages ago because I thought of blue ink as basic. OI specifically bought a blue highlighter for this book, even though I stopped using blue inked pens ages ago because I thought of blue ink as basic. One could wonder what an entire book on a single color would be like, I did. But then again, I could probably write a thesis on red and black, though not as good. It's not like I could associate it with just sullen things and pleasant skies, I can only write about blood, gore and rage. Would that make any sense to others? I can't write things like flannel pink and verdant green. That's the thing about writing a book (even if it's really short) on a single colour, it's not very likely that it will make sense to others. Unless you tap into some sort of collective subconscious and then it makes sense to everyone.
This book not only made sense, it made perfect sense and I don't seem to have liked it (In the same way I'm not liking The Book of Disquiet as much as I thought I would.)
The most I want to do is show you the end of my index finger. Its muteness.
Do I even want to show you anything? Or do I want to show everything? Has Maggie Nelson shown everything or nothing? I wish I knew. Or am I just trying to force her love into something pathological? She's just seeking oblivion. Maybe. What do I know? Material conditions my brain screams.
At least most of my book is highlighted in blue, I think that's good enough....more
My first mistake was reading this alongside Bluets. Both the books have eerily similar themes and almost uncannily same voices, especially in the way My first mistake was reading this alongside Bluets. Both the books have eerily similar themes and almost uncannily same voices, especially in the way they randomly drop quotes and references to other works. Grief, passion and betrayal. I wonder if I'm the first person in the world to have read the two of them together and then correlated them.
Correlation is not causation, one of the books proclaimed, honestly I've stopped keeping track at this point. Everything is mixed up in my mind.
What does it even mean to leave our pasts behind, why do some people ask us to do it as if their pasts don't haunt them everyday? Does your shrink ask you to? Get a new one.
Personally, I perpetually inhabit the department of speculation these days. In fact, I'm the dean of it all.
No one young knows the name of anything.
The above is true. I've only started to learn the names of certain things. Why do you all guard them so closely? Let us learn so we can also run away at precisely the right moment.
The one thing I know is that these authors need better shrinks. Who are these people asking you to return the puppies you adopted, telling you to do things and not do things?...more
I am done with difficult questions and difficult answers and difficult conversations. I want to have easy, laidback conversations like the characters I am done with difficult questions and difficult answers and difficult conversations. I want to have easy, laidback conversations like the characters in this book do, even when they're talking about difficult things.
Reading this book was like watching a block of wood swaying along the waves on the ocean. Sometimes the waters turned turbulent, but the wood bobbed along, always pacified, without sinking.
Ari and Dante tethered each other so that when one drifted apart, the other pulled. They tethered me too. I was always drawn to the book even when I put it down for breaks.
Sometimes when you watch the sea, you want to dive deep down, to its horrifying darkness. But then the sunlight slants and hits your eyes and, you slowly but surely, return back to reality and are content enough with just watching the current. That feeling of contentment is this book....more
This book hurts. It hurts in itself and hurts us too. I've underlined nearly the entirety of this book when what I actually wanted to do was strike thThis book hurts. It hurts in itself and hurts us too. I've underlined nearly the entirety of this book when what I actually wanted to do was strike through. But then it wouldn't look pleasant or aesthetic enough, besides, I resorted to underlining so that the next time I pick up this book to fling it at the wall because I can't handle its sublime intensity, and instead pause to flip through the pages, it is at least legible. Maybe it will be the poison and the cure to my malaise at once.
I've been buying myself flowers even though I'm opposed to the whole idea of plucking flowers. I've been trimming the stems, placing them in a beer-bottle-turned-vase, changing the water regularly until all the petals completely dry out. Then I've been placing these withered flower corpses in between the pages of a somewhat heavy tome (the greatest works of Kahlil Gibran for poetic value.) I think I've been trying to distill and capture their essence. My experience of reading this book has been similar. I don't even know how I read it from cover to cover. But I sifted through the words, underlined them in a bright pink shade that's peculiar to sunsets, collected them and pressed them between the nooks and crevices of my mind, even created new indentations.
But there's only so much of 'everything is nothing' that even I, the supreme pessimist, can take. The other day I was asking a friend why Fernando Pessoa is such a Kurt Cobain (call it blasphemy and screw me over) and I was telling another friend that this should be called the book of lamentations. It laments and cries and wails and hurts. But it does it all with the quality of a sovereign grace....more
I want to cast language out of my body, there's no space for it in me anymore - not even in the little crevices between my joints and in the folds of I want to cast language out of my body, there's no space for it in me anymore - not even in the little crevices between my joints and in the folds of my skin. Why do I need language anyway, when my body betrays me at every turn, in resonance with every tick of the clock? I want to put my mind in a plaster cast, I no longer want to be language-mad.
I alternatively unrealize and disrealize. I am incapable of looking at anything head-on and I refuse to be looked at head-on. I aesthetize everything. What is gentleness? Come, exchange an impulse with me.
I want to be both charismatic and chaotic. Someone is squeezing my heart, clenching it tight between their fingers and not letting go.
Let me utter everything and nothing. Let me utter love. Let me make the pronouns skid. I want to make love in the night of non-meaning, and let the night illuminate the night. I am vulgar because I am sentimental. I am banalized by literature, by words. I am obscene. I am repressive. I am a lover. And therefore, I cannot be the hero. I cannot have the last word, even though I always want to.
There is a Hindu mythological story about a God who ate soil as a child. On being reprimanded and asked to open his mouth by his mother, he showed her the whole of the universe. Ask me to open my mouth and you will see Barthes' contradictory yet simultaneous existence of language-abyss and language-excess.
Langston Hughes has a way of writing about black women and their pain and suffering (especially in the series of poems called 'madam to you') that's aLangston Hughes has a way of writing about black women and their pain and suffering (especially in the series of poems called 'madam to you') that's almost songlike, that's also so full of vulnerability and identification. These poems enrapture you, and you know they come from a place of close association.
She stands In the quiet darkness, This troubled woman Bowed by Weariness and pain Like an Autumn flower In the frozen rain, Like a Wind-blown autumn flower That never lifts its head Again.
He also has a way of writing about death, grief and sorrow, particularly the black man's sorrow, that brilliantly showcases the universal within the particular. I don't mean to appropriate the black man's pain here, I cannot lay any claim to it. I only mean to say that Hughes conveys the sentiment within a black man's heart so well, that we cannot help but feel as though our hearts are being squeezed.
But most of all, Hughes dreams and sings of freedom. Because that's all the dispossessed first think of - freedom.
There were slaves then, too, But in their hearts the slaves knew What he said must be meant for every human being— Else it had no meaning for anyone. Then a man said: BETTER TO DIE FREE, THAN TO LIVE SLAVES. He was a colored man who had been a slave But had run away to freedom. And the slaves knew What Frederick Douglass said was true.
I considered writing this review at 3:32 am last night. I wanted to write a boring, pretentious paragraph about how the title aptly describes my life I considered writing this review at 3:32 am last night. I wanted to write a boring, pretentious paragraph about how the title aptly describes my life these days. But then, I'm tired of writing pretentious reviews. So I wonder how Hardwick wrote so many pretentious paragraphs that are not bullshitty but are definitely pointless and meandering, and not in a good way.
I've been told over and over again that Hardwick who was Susan Sontag's contemporary, was actually the better of the two. Sontag fondly refers to Hardwick as 'Lizzie' in her journals and seems to respect her in a way that she cannot easily extend to others. I can't deny that Hardwick's writing is beautiful. But I also cannot deny that this book was really annoying. It was sometimes wannabe-absurdist and at other times was trying to the emulate stream-of-consciousness style, such that it never could decide between the two and ultimately settled nowhere.
As pretentious and cliche as Sontag's writing can get, it has an undeniable clarity and a mark of confidence that I can't help admiring. Maybe I should read more of Hardwick's works too see why so many people think she's better than Sontag and why Sontag herself seemed to be so enamored. But for now, I am not impressed. Far from it. Sorry, Lizzie....more
Have you ever forgotten that you are human? Felt free from the awareness of yourself that otherwise constantly assaults you? Have you sometimes felt lHave you ever forgotten that you are human? Felt free from the awareness of yourself that otherwise constantly assaults you? Have you sometimes felt like you are an entire village but at other times have been lost like a dot? Have you felt the narcissistic but insurmountable need to prove your body, especially around cheerful people? Have you maybe felt the great desire to dissolve until your ends merged with the beginnings of things? Oh don't worry. Your condition isn't fatal. It is, but only in the way everything you've ever encountered, touched, heard, felt and seen is. You just happen to be a protagonist in a Clarice Lispector novel.
This is my first Lispector book, but I already know I will be intimately familiar with all of her writing. She's the sort of writer who'll show you eternity in a blink. Or to be more poignant and pretentiously referential, she'll show you fear in a handful of dust. And all of that fear is the same: crippling existential agony.
For Lispector, the real essence of life is 'becoming', through which all times are united. The desire to 'become' itself is a veiled expression of the desire to cease. Every process is just a revelation instead of creation.
So before you read her, ask yourself: what is out there? What is in here, near to the wild heart? Sink into the incomprehension of yourself. After all, words are merely pebbles rolling into the river. Then read her and punish yourself. If you haven't already....more
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