Mapping lately

A never-published post from November 2011.

I was feeling poorly two weekends ago and didn't leave my bedroom much, so I decided to tell you about its walls, where I have been keeping track of some ideas and words I've been connecting. Topical mapping, I suppose. I didn't get to finish this post until now, though.

The north wall is the happening one lately. The theme is narration. The relationships between narration, past and present, self as subject, and on.

I want to know: the integrity of a life, of a person's experiences, how we find it. We want to understand it before we tell the story, but how can find that clarity without the process of telling the story?

We don't know how to find meaning outside of our conception of unidirectional time, which is to say, an objectified past, a past that we can act upon and master.

The process of narration, self-narration, in order to glimpse an in-process version of that integrity.

"The Puritan use of the spiritual journal to 'frame' life is a technique to forestall the incomprehension seemingly entailed by our 'continued existence,' to achieve some sense and articulation of a life's shape even as it is being formed — to see, if only through a glass darkly, something recognizably meaningful, something useful to us as we attempt to navigate the often troubled waters of experience" (Jacobs).

I realized that the word "journal" is from the Latin root of "diurnal." By the way.

Have you ever felt the grief of thinking, There is nothing story-like about this? "The clumsy and apparently meaningless bludgeoning of much of real misfortune and the prosaic littleness which usually rob real sorrows of their dignity..." (Lewis).

That clarity — an intense sense of integrity of experience, a certainty that "everything has been leading up to this" and an understanding of just how — you can take certain drugs to get that feeling. Isn't that weird?

I'm interested in the ways that we deal with and act upon the past, through retrospection and "re-vision": "the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction" (Rich). Interpretation and reinterpretation. Continuity versus rupture.

And the way the past acts on us. The "pastness of the past" and the persistence of the past (Persistence of Memory?), which, "of course, presses on the living from all sorts of directions and in any number of ways..." (Keane).

Shared narratives versus individual narratives, and what is lost and gained in dressing one's experiences in shared narratives. "[L]ocal social realities that cannot be fitted into any overarching narrative...without doing some violence to those realities" (Keane again).

Academically: I want to write a paper comparing second-wave feminist consciousness-raising with Protestant conversion narratives.

Personally: I think I am constantly retelling the stories of my life to myself, changing them a little bit each time so that the sense and coherency of them is constantly becoming more accurate. I need them to make sense. INTP drive for understanding combined with the INFP search for meaning. You know how we do.

- 11/27/11

Read in July 2012

1. Catching Fire, by Suzanne Collins
This felt like the middle book of a trilogy. I was a bit exasperated by such a significant part of the first book repeating itself, even if technically it was different this time around.

2. Mockingjay, by Suzanne Collins
I'm one of the ones who really liked this. It just works for me that everyone ends up totally messed up and traumatized. It works for me the way our sense of Katniss's power diminishes as the story pans out from her over the course of the trilogy. It's dark and it's not full of exciting climactic battle scenes the way I expected. Toootally works for me.

3. Making All Things New: An Invitation to the Spiritual Life, by Henri Nouwen
I really want to like his writings, because I like Nouwen excerpts so much, but his style just hasn't worked for me. Too vague, too oblique.

4. The Whale Rider, by Witi Ihimaera
The movie is not very much like this book, but in ways others than plot — and I like the movie a lot better. Hmm.

5. Cracked Up to Be, by Courtney Summers
A fast but involving YA novel. Emotionally weighty. I thought the construction of the main character's psyche was artful.

6. Your Native Land, Your Life, by Adrienne Rich
This felt pertinent to my life. It's more thematically unified than her volumes of poetry usually are — family history, reflections on her past and on what she wants her life to amount to. A whence/whither collection.

7. The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde
Lovely and jolly and witty and sarcastic, of course. A good bedtime read when you need to chase away mind-frights. I hope you've seen the film adaptation with Colin Firth.

These are the materials

[trigger warning: abuse]

I don't want to hear how he beat her after the earthquake,
tore up her writing, threw the kerosene
lantern into her face waiting
like an unbearable mirror of his own.    I don't
want to hear how she finally ran from the trailer
how he tore the keys from her hands, jumped into the truck
and backed it into her.    I don't want to think
how her guesses betrayed her — that he meant well, that she
was really the stronger and ought not to leave him
to his own apparent devastation.    I don't want to know
wreckage, dreck and waste, but these are the materials
and so are the slow lift of the moon's belly
over wreckage, dreck, and waste, wild treefrogs calling in
another season, light and music still pouring over
our fissured, cracked terrain.

– Adrienne Rich
from "An Atlas of the Difficult World"

Read in December 2011

1. Midnight Salvage: Poems, 1995-1998, by Adrienne Rich
I've read too many of her poetry books this year to keep most of them straight.

2. Planet Germany: Eine Expedition in die Heimat des Hawaii-Toasts, by Eric Hansen
Another expatriate memoir read for my German class. "An Expedition into the Home of Hawaii Toast." The funniest and smartest of the three — an insightful and interesting first-person narrative of German culture.

3. Der, die, was?: Ein Amerikaner im Sprachlabyrinth, by David Bergmann
Expatriate memoir #3. "An American in the Language Labyrinth." So gratifying to have the quirks and difficulties of the German language articulated so amusingly.

4. Ballet Shoes, by Noel Streatfeild
A sweet, everything-always-turns-out-okay novel. I like the contemporary setting — 1930s London.

5. Season of Ponies, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
This was my absolute favorite book in third grade — I went to my elementary school library a few years ago and the tag in the book showed me checking it out about eight times in a row -- and upon rereading, I can see why. It has ponies, freedom from adults, creepiness, magic...all the right ingredients, and in just the right proportions.

6. Romaji Diary and Sad Toys, by Takuboku Ishikawa
Part diary, part tanka collection. Emo (depressing). Sometimes relatable, sometimes misogynistic.

From "A Long Conversation"

All kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or not, or even if you’re
only
as we were     trying
          to keep an eye
         on the weapons on the street
     and under the street

Just here, our friend L.: bony, nerve-driven, closeted, working as a nurse when he can’t get teaching jobs. Jew from a dynasty of converts, philosopher trained as an engineer, he can’t fit in where his brilliant and privileged childhood pointed him. He too is losing patience: What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc . . . & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people use for their own ends?

You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about “certainty,” “probability,” perception, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life and other people’s lives. And thinking about these things is NOT THRILLING, but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s MOST important.

His high-pitched voice with its darker, hoarse undertone.

At least he didn’t walk out, he stayed, long fingers drumming.

– Adrienne Rich
in Midnight Salvage

Read in October 2011

1. Fox Poems, 1998-2000, by Adrienne Rich
Not my favorite of hers.

2. Rose, by Li-Young Lee
Poetry. Romantic and image-driven. I posted a section from the long title poem.

3. Intuitive Eating, by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch
I absolutely love their approach to recovering from the diet mentality (which I'd say almost every US American has, apart from actual dieting). Essentially, it's about re-learning to eat the way that we were born knowing how to: eating what our body wants when we're hungry and stopping when we've had enough. The book outlines their core principles (which are smart and kind and utterly sustainable) and the process of becoming an intuitive eater.

4. The Four Loves, by C.S. Lewis
Dense with insights. I could definitely read this again. Exposition on four categories of love — affection, friendship, romance, and charity — and what they show us about God, as well as the particular opportunities in each for idolatry. Anytime he mentions gender, he tends to say something misogynistic, though.

5. Riptide: Struggling with and Resurfacing from a Daughter's Eating Disorder, by Barbara Hale-Seubert
I had a lot to say about this book, so it'll get its own post soon.

6. The Beautiful Between, by Alyssa B. Sheinmel
YA, set in a Manhattan high school. Not terribly memorable, but written with heart.

Our tentative and groping words

"Women have been driven mad, 'gaslighted,' for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have a primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each others' sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.

"Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other...

"Truthfulness anywhere means a heightened complexity. But it is a movement into evolution. Women are only beginning to uncover our own truths; many of us would be grateful for some rest in that struggle, would be glad just to lie down with the sherds we have painfully unearthed, and be satisfied with those. Often I feel this like an exhaustion in my own body.

"The politics worth having, the relationships worth having, demand that we delve still deeper.

...

"It isn't that to have an honorable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that I can know, beforehand, everything I want to tell you.

"It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.

"The possibility of life between us."

– Adrienne Rich
"Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying"

Read in September 2011

1. Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin
The political implications of intercourse from a radical feminist perspective. The first half of the book examines different (male) authors' views of sex; the second is all her. Quite a fiery analysis, quite absorbing. It made me despair at times of the male sex, but it's not really fair to count that against it.

2. The Weather of the Heart, by Madeleine L'Engle
I've posted two poems from this book before, here and here. Her spiritual musings are highly intellectual/her intellectual musings are highly spiritual; and she has a naturally lyrical voice.

3. Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
Like a literary lovechild of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Emily Brontë. Such lovely prose...not flowery, but beautiful, to fit the elegance of life at a seaside manor in 1920s England. Very period-atmospheric, and sort of nouveau-Gothic.

4. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977, by Adrienne Rich
I like pretty much all her writings, but I love her seventies/eighties work. Lesbian feminist thought/poetry at its glorious and incisive best.

5. The Stepford Wives, by Ira Levin
Funky retro satire-thriller slash conspiracy novel...contemporary to the second-wave feminist movement and mostly just amusing, but the penultimate scene was a bit too real to be funny. I read it in about an hour and a half (unfortunately, because I had chosen it for a five-hour flight...).

6. Goodbye Ed, Hello Me: Recover from Your Eating Disorder and Fall in Love with Life, by Jenni Schaefer
Quite conversational (a bajillion short chapters) without being light on content. Made me realize that there are still aspects of the ED/diet mentality in my brain/life that I hadn't recognized as such and was still tolerating. That's not discouraging, though — what's discouraging is thinking that a sometimes-mediocre recovery is as good as it gets.

7. Trickster's Queen, by Tamora Pierce
A favorite fantasy author from my childhood, i.e. always good.

8. love belongs to those who do the feeling, by Judy Grahn
More lesbian-feminist poems from another second-waver, yes. (I've been utterly absorbed by the questions and ideas of the seventies this summer.) Very spell-like, influenced by myth and ideas of ritual. Her work was recommended to me by the two Canadian sisters.

Read in July 2011

1. Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems, by Diane di Prima
Wild and thought-provoking, a strange simultaneity of squalor and loveliness.

2. The Water Tower, by Gary Crew
WHOA strange and freaky-deaky story in a unique picture book layout. It took me several read-throughs to decide what I thought it was about/what had happened. The plot is enigmatic and quiet, but very creepy.

3. Veronika Decides to Die, by Paulo Coelho
I thought from the beginning that I would really like this book, but I found it tiresome. It questions our ideas of sanity/insanity in a very cliché way; it has this gimmicky and unsurprising little twist at the end; also, the turning point in the character's inner journey is this absurd exhibitionist masturbation scene. Oh, and that quasi-inspiring IMAGINE IF YOU HAD ONLY A WEEK TO LIVE, HOW WOULD YOU LIVE? premise. Blah. It reads like an early draft.

4. Eurydice, by Sarah Ruhl
Quirky and poetic. See it on stage if you ever get the chance. I saw it in February at my college and it kind of devastated me.

5. Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, by Lewis Carroll
I don't know how to appreciate this, or Alice. Not saying there's nothing to appreciate about them; I just, ah, have no idea.

6. The Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970, by Adrienne Rich

7. Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006, by Adrienne Rich

8. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, by William Styron
This was quite dark, and it could be very triggering to people with depressive tendencies.  For some reason it was just what I needed, though — a reminder that when I'm facing depression, it is real and serious and urgent, and something that a lot of other humans are encountering too. This is a cliché but I mean it: if you haven't experienced depression, reading this book is the closest you can come to understanding what it is like. I recommend it for that reason.

9. Three Guineas, by Virginia Woolf
She is so freaking smart. It felt like work to read this, but the text is its own reward. Sharp sharp sharp, sarcastic, stimulating. Nonfiction: musings on capitalism (wage labor), war, and the place of women in her society, especially middle-class women in Western societies.

10. Traveling Light: Poems, by Linda Pastan
Have a taste for yourself, here.

Read in June 2011

1. Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems, 1991-1995, by Adrienne Rich

2. A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems, 1978-1981, by Adrienne Rich
Her younger work is much more accessible. This volume was a beautiful complement to the second-wave feminist essays and pamphlets I was reading around the same time. Intelligent, fluid, with plenty of righteous anger and grief. (I want to own it.)

3. To Bedlam and Part Way Back, by Anne Sexton

4. My Soviet Union: Poems, by Michael Dumanis

5. Tiger in the Well, by Philip Pullman
Reread. Engrossing YA Victorian mystery with a socialist flavoring. I love the protagonist, Sally Lockhart. It's the final in a trilogy; I wouldn't love her or enjoy it as much without having spent two books with her already. (The first is also very good; I didn't like the second that much.) My only gripe is that at times there is an intrusively modern, i.e. preachy, flavor to the liberalism.

6. Send Me Down a Miracle, by Han Nolan
Also reread. If I taught high school or middle school English, I would assign this. Really artful characterizations; resists being boiled down.

7. National Geographic: The Photographs, by The National Geographic Society

Read in February & March 2011

1. Rose Galbraith, by Grace Livingstone Hill
Silly 1940s Christian romance novel. Cringe-inducing dialogue. I was mildly disturbed by the extent to which propriety and manners controlled the heroine. But I felt like the world was small and simple while I was reading it, and that was nice.

2. Draußen vor der Tür, by Wolfgang Borchert (English title: The Man Outside)
Read for my German seminar. A play about a soldier returning from WWII and feeling totally alienated from everything. Easy, not subtle, still good.

3. Forget-Her-Nots, by Amy Brecount White
YA novel about a girl at a Southern boarding school who can make magic by making flower arrangements. Not terribly developed, but cute.

4. Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa, by Joan Jacobs Brumberg
An account of how—to paraphrase Brumberg—illness can be biologically caused but is nonetheless always socially expressed. Thought-provoking, and surprisingly quick to read.

5. An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems, 1988-1991, by Adrienne Rich
Wonderful. That's all.

6. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber
Read for Culture Theory; made me realize I'm a cultural Calvinist. I think business majors should be forced required to read this.

7. Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife, by Peggy Vincent
Told mostly episodically, spanning a forty-year period from the fifties to the nineties. I like this book because:

• there are some awesome quirky characters among the clients
• it was interesting to see how Peggy's work and story—the questions of birth and pregnancy in general—fit into the wider women's rights struggle.
• I was pretty sure that this book was important in forming how my big sister thought about her pregnancy and labor. (Meg was and is a pretty inspiring mama, before and after labor.) It's changed some of my ideas about what birth is like, too.