Keepsakes

Ora sono ubriaco d'universo

Dear Reader

I am drunk on the vastness of the universe. Recently, I decided I needed to live as though I am someone lucky, I am someone who for whom good things are going to happen, and that I can trust in that. I drew a tarot card for myself. The seven of coins - the harvest is in.

I have spent a good number of years being very patient about bad luck. Being very careful. And, during that time, I was also very grateful for the little moments of joy, of which there were many, but I lived as though I was unlucky.

You may have seen me in previous newsletters refer to going through some things in the last couple of years. Things that I was trying to bring to a head. They were big things from my past and they were very, very difficult for me. All but one of them have now been permanently resolved. I think I’m freer today than I have been at any time in the past two decades.

Try living where you don't
have to see
the sun go down.
If the hunter turns his dogs
loose
on your dreams
Start early, tell no one
get rid of the scent.

- C.D. Wright, Nothing to Declare.

I am no longer going to live as though I am getting rid of the scent of my dreams.

Incidentally, isn’t the photo above of the gorge beautiful? My husband and teenage son and I hiked down into that gorge and back. I saw my first Splendid Fairywren there.

It’s Dark Because You are Trying Too Hard

It’s dark because you are trying too hard. lightly child, lightly… Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them… throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you.. trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly.. on tiptoes and no luggage… completely unencumbered.

- Aldous Huxley.

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Bonding Social Capital Versus Bridging Social Capital

Robert Putnam in The New York Times on what the hell is happening to us:

I think we’re in a really important turning point in American history. What I wrote in “Bowling Alone” is even more relevant now. Because what we’ve seen over the last 25 years is a deepening and intensifying of that trend. We’ve become more socially isolated, and we can see it in every facet in our lives. We can see it in the surgeon general’s talk about loneliness. He’s been talking recently about the psychological state of being lonely. Social isolation leads to lots of bad things. It’s bad for your health, but it’s really bad for the country, because people who are isolated, and especially young men who are isolated, are vulnerable to the appeals of some false community. I can cite chapter and verse on this: Eager recruits to the Nazi Party in the 1930s were lonely young German men, and it’s not an accident that the people who are attracted today to white nationalist groups are lonely young white men. Loneliness. It’s bad for your health, but it’s also bad for the health of the people around you.

Ties that link you to people like yourself are called bonding social capital. So, my ties to other elderly, male, white, Jewish professors — that’s my bonding social capital. And bridging social capital is your ties to people unlike yourself. So my ties to people of a different generation or a different gender or a different religion or a different politic or whatever, that’s my bridging social capital. I’m not saying “bridging good, bonding bad,” because if you get sick, the people who bring you chicken soup are likely to reflect your bonding social capital. But I am saying that in a diverse society like ours, we need a lot of bridging social capital. And some forms of bonding social capital are really awful. The K.K.K. is pure social capital — bonding social capital can be very useful, but it can also be extremely dangerous. So far, so good, except that bridging social capital is harder to build than bonding social capital. That’s the challenge, as I see it, of America today.

We looked at long-run trends in connectedness, trends in loneliness, that sort of thing, over the last 125 years. And the short version is, it’s an upside-down U curve. We were socially isolated and distrustful in the early 1900s, but then there was a turning point, and then we had a long upswing from roughly 1900 or 1910 till roughly 1965, and that was the peak of our social capital. People were more trusting then, they were more connected then, they were more likely to be married then, they were more likely to join clubs then, etc. And then for the next 50 years, that trend turned around. “Bowling Alone” looked at that single trend, but this new book not only extends the length of time but also looks at three other variables. First, political polarization.

That trend in political depolarization follows the same pattern exactly that the trends in social connectedness follow: low in the beginning of the 20th century, high in the ’60s and then plunging to where we are now. So now we have a very politically polarized country, just as we did 125 years ago. The next dimension is inequality. America was very unequal in what was called the Gilded Age, in the 1890s and 1900s, but then that turned around, and the level of equality in America went up until the middle ’60s. In the middle ’60s, America was more equal economically than socialist Sweden! And then beginning in 1965, that turns around and we plunge and now we’re back down to where we were. We’re in a second Gilded Age. And the third variable that we look at is harder to discuss and measure, but it’s sort of culture. To what extent do we think that we’re all in this together, or it’s every man for himself, or every man or woman?

I have been thinking about Putnam’s research on social capital so much since reading this interview. Like, all the time.

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Trying

The definitive symptom of childhood trauma is trying to get a difficult person to be good to us.

- Patrick Teahan.

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Writing Memoir About Parents

This episode of podcast, Reckon True Stories is the best discussion I’ve heard between writers in ages. Its Deesha Philyaw and Kiese Laymon discussing the complicated process of writing about one’s parents.

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No Meaningful Reverberation

I’ve been a fan of Laymon’s since he published the utterly heartbreaking, Dear Uncle, We Will Never Ever Know I Love You on his blog, which was then picked up published on Gawker in 2012.

I could have finally said, "Uncle Jimmy, you drowning yourself with that crack and all that hate. Ain't nothing really behind that smile, man. I love you and we need you to live." And you could have told me, "There's more than one way to drown, nephew. You looking pretty wet yourself. I know I'm under that water. You know where you at?"

But those words were never said. We talked, but we didn't reckon with each other. Hence, all of our communication created no echo, no meaningful reverberation outside our speculations about each other.

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Where I Pause To Make Sure You Don’t Think My Mother Was a Horrible Person

In the podcast, Philyaw quotes this part of one of her essays, and I loved it, and so went looking for it for here. That plea for some nuance in the reader’s understanding, but also wrestling with that feeling of disloyalty in being so honest, as a writer…

But before I get into that, this is the part where I pause to make sure you don’t think my mother was a horrible person or a bad mother. She was neither of those things. This is important and needs to be said because we don’t allow mothers to have done some shitty things in the course of their parenting career and still get credit for the good they did. In our cultural consciousness, either mothers are saints or we’re driving our minivan full of kids into the river. And in the final tally of who I am because of my mother, I believe she did far more good than harm. She was a loving mother who sacrificed for me, and I always knew that my needs and many of my wants were her priority. If I am generous, hard-working, hospitable, responsible, and a person of integrity, I owe it in large part to my mother’s example and guidance. Even in her flaws, she had raised me to do as she said, not as she did.

From “How can you be mad at someone dying of cancer?” in Full Grown People.

And one more link from Philyaw. This one is a kicker of a short story/memoir piece about repairing with absent fathers. “Whiting: A story of six breakfasts” in Short Reads.

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My Little Broke Best Friend

Comedian, Tacarra Williams on mothering a teenage daughter.

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Life Drawing

I love life drawing. Lately, I have been going to weekly life drawing sessions with my mother and my daughter. We have discovered it is a good way for us to spend regular time together. Drawing quietly next to each, and then, comparing notes at the end of the two hours. Did you get one you like this time, we ask each other.

One of the interesting things about life drawing is how lost you get in your drawing and how detached you begin to feel about the nudity. I have not only drawn but also posed for life drawing. Speaking of life drawing, here’s an interesting interview in Vanity Fair with Lucien Freud’s daughter, Rose Boyt about life modelling. (His painting of her is spectacular but still uncomfortable).

It’s an atypical Freud nude, of a pissed-off-looking college-aged girl lying on a couch with one leg planted on the floor and the other folded up tight with tension, her right heel jammed against her right buttock. “I didn’t want to feel floppy and soggy. I wanted to feel ‘I’m just about to spring into action,’ ” Rose said. “I could have been extremely, extremely, extremely angry. And I wasn’t. And I felt that there was a potential for me to suddenly get up and say, ‘Look, fuck off! I’m not doing this anymore!’ or ‘Where were you when I needed you, you bastard?’ And I think he maybe was a little bit worried in case I was suddenly going to actually spring up and protest.”

Yet his children generally seemed to accept that sitting for Freud was the way to have a fulfilling relationship with their father. With further hindsight, Rose’s feelings about the sitting experience have grown warmer. “Sitting for Rose was an education,” she writes via e-mail. “I mean literally—my father taught me about Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot in particular, and I became so interested in books I decided to go to university.”

And here’s a lovely series of photos in artnet that Boyt took of her father and one of his male models.. and a pet rat (NSFW). Lovely.

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Solitude and the Single Mother

One of the hardest things about co-parenting is all the forced separations from your child/ren. It struck me at the time as a visit from the future, experienced prematurely, before either of you were fully formed. A time when neither of you are yet capable of breathing on your own. It’s bittersweet, of course, because there can also be a freedom that comes with those times when they are staying with the other parent. But, it is an opportunity to truly acquaint yourself with solitude, and while many partnered people will tell you how much they love and have mastered their solitude, they none the less do this with a kind of security not available to a single parent. I’m repartnered, now, but I remember these times well.

This beautiful reflection, “home alone, single mom edition” by Stacia L. Brown in her wonderfully named newsletter, taxonomies of home reminded me of that:

The first night, I dialed my ex, who didn’t pick up but did decide to text: Hey… Saw you called. I’m not in a position to talk. Is everything okay? which was an appropriate question since I never dial my ex anymore.

Hey. Yep. Everything’s okay. Thanks for checking, I typed back. 

He didn’t entirely buy it, I suppose, since he texted again in the morning to see “what was up last night.” I assured him that it really was nothing.

Except that I’d dropped my daughter off in Richmond during the day. 

“Just wanted to talk,” I tacked onto the explanation, hoping it read as casual, knowing it came off as the opposite. 

He called in response, because exes who truly understood you seldom lose the ability.  

We used to make the run to Richmond together, during my first year in Durham, when I was still figuring out far too many things, our fledgling relationship and how to satisfy the obligations of long-distance co-parenting (during a pre-vaccine global pandemic) chief among them.

He’d drive me and Story the two and a half hours up I-85 in his Chrysler 300 and, in the front seat, while I luxuriated both in the leather interior and in a delicious, stress-lightened gratitude that I didn’t have to make the drive alone, we’d trade conspiratorial whispers about how odd it was, this entire practice of passing off a child to their other parent in a mutually-agreed upon parking lot. 

I’d never had to do that in Baltimore. When my daughter’s dad wanted to see her there, he would just pick her up at my grandmother’s apartment, which was awkward in its own way but required minimal exertion on my part. 

I left minimal exertion behind when chose to leave Maryland. Moving five hours south meant cultivating new practices around co-parenting and embracing whatever early tensions they pulled taut.

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All Daughters Turn Into Blood-Thirsty Hounds

All daughters turn into blood-thirsty hounds after years of licking their own wounds and biting their tongue¹.

- Anonymous.

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I Hardly Existed

In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed.

- Mary Oliver, Upstream.
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The Language of Enthusiasm

As far as the aging process physically, we all feel the aches and pains of aging, but also, the tradeoff is, all the experience that we have suddenly.

I find myself being able to articulate myself better when I’m writing all the experience I have as a performer, a singer, in some ways I’m much better.

I might not have that certain look anymore, but I can feel my innate powers.

It’s very important to keep your enthusiasm, to maintain the language of enthusiasm, to be curious, to keep working. And, those are the kind of things that keep us agile and keep us vibrant and healthy.

And.. people turn to cosmetic surgery or all these different things. Those things are very surface. They’re not really going to necessarily magnify, you know, your youthful or creative potential.

And I just think keeping engaged and happy, smiling. Very good youth serum.

- Patti Smith.

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Disastrous

One of the things I’ve realised is that I only really learn anything when things are just disastrous. It’s the only time I’m able to actually be vulnerable enough to learn anything.

Because the rest of the time it’s like, “Yeah, that’s good. I’ll do this. I’ll do that”. It’s fun and exciting, but, you know, whenever everything just falls apart - it’s not that I look forward to it now, but I almost do.

- Laurie Anderson in “I Do Love a Doomed Quest”, written by Steve Hochman in SPIN.

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Reconstruction

So much of the information and advice I received from the hospital was premised on the assumption I’d want to hide the fact I’d had a mastectomy. Cover it up, if not with surgery, then at least with a “foob”; breast cancer lingo for a breast prosthesis.

It seemed as though the simplest option – that of not disguising my new body shape – was a radical act.

- From my friend, Monica Dux’s “Why I’m not pretending I haven’t lost my breasts to cancer” in The Guardian.

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(living moving mourning lamenting and howling incessantly)

- Anne Carson, Decreation.

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Everything Will Be Fixed by Love

Everyone woke up hungover

Everyone woke up in the wrong bed

Everyone had the wrong shoe

on the wrong foot in the wrong weather

Everyone was so hungry

then everyone ate too much

Love me everyone said

Love me first everyone said

Fix me everyone said

Fix me first

- Elizabeth Clark Wessel

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Fall

The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.

- Helen Garner

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Witch

It is October now, after all. This gorgeously unsettling and playful little photograph by Maxime Ballesteros.

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Pussy-Bow

Is it time to rename the pussy-bow blouse? No, I love that name. And I love the blouse. (Ditto for the Mother-In-Law Tongue plant. I love it).

From Vanessa Friedman in The New York Times:

Reportedly associated with the Duchess of La Vallière, a mistress of Louis XIV, it became popular among the French left in the 19th century, was later adopted as part of the Gibson girl look in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and was then popularized by Coco Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent in the 1950s and ’60s. The term itself made its debut in 1930s dress patterns, thanks to its resemblance to the ribbons it was then popular to tie — yup — around the necks of feline pets.

The look was often “associated with women who are starting to invade male spaces — the golf course, the workplace — and to challenge traditional dress codes,” Kate Strasdin, a fashion historian at Falmouth University, told The Guardian..

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Medieval Sexts

Woah.

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A Little Melancholy with Your Joy

Oh, don’t you want a ‘How to make gravy’ Christmas ornament?

They also have Fairytale of New York and River ceramic ornaments. Available from paper boar press here. (Fancy that, two songs from my Christmas playlist are here as decorations. Sorry about this early Christmas content, but in case you are like me and a decoration like this would make you happy, I didn’t want you to miss out).

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Are You Far From Home?

Remember I said how much I love Phoebe Paradise²’s drawings of Brisbane? You can buy postcards of her work at the Museum of Brisbane here and here.

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If You Foolishly Ignore Beauty

The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

- Frank Lloyd Wright

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Southern Gothic

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Overthinking

I think too much. I think ahead. I think behind. I think sideways. I think it all. If it exists, I’ve fucking thought of it.

- Winona Ryder.

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How It Will Be Fixed

Solvitur ambulando.

It is solved by walking. And committing to place.

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Finally

Life has been hectic over the last month, as alluded to here. So, I missed my September deadline for this newsletter and you’re getting it in October instead. Whoops. If I am bit more organised/lucky I may get out a second October newsletter to make up for it.

You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. - Cormac McCarthy.

And that is how I am going to look back on my years of bad luck. Saved.

1. I can’t find the attribution for this, so let me know if you know where it comes from but it was posted by an account with the name vanshistuff.

2. Also, she is a very nice person. You should check out the Merivale Studios that she runs, and its artists in residence.