Self-help - Lorrie Moore

How to Be an Other Woman

Love drains from you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight.  You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop.

What is Seized

Another morning, I heard my parents up early in the bathroom, my dad shaving, getting ready to leave for school.
"Look," he sighed in a loud whisper.  "I really can't say that I'll never leave you and the kids or that I'll never make love to another woman -"
"Why not?" asked my mother.  "Why can't you say that?"  Even her anger was gentle, ingenuous.
"Because I don't feel that way."
"But... can't you just say it anyway?"
At this I like to imagine that my parents met each other's gaze in the medicine cabinet mirror, suddenly grinning.  But later in the hospital bed, holding my hand and touching each of my nails slowly with her index finger, my mother said to me, "Your father.  He was in a dance.  And he just couldn't dance."  Earlier that year she had written me: "That is what is wrong with cold people.  Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist their every word and deed mirror that ice.  They never learn the beauty or value of gesture.  The emotional necessity.  For them, it is all honest before kindness, truth before art.  Love is art, not truth.  It's like painting scenery."

Forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.

How

And yet from time to time you will gaze at his face or his hands and want nothing but him.  You will feel passing waves of dependency, devotion, and sentimentality.  A week, a month, a year, and he has become your family.  Let's say your real mother is a witch.  Your father a warlock.  Your brothers twin hunchbacks of Notre Dame.  They all live in a cave together somewhere.

How to talk to your mother (Note)

You confuse lovers, mix up who had what scar, what car, what mother.

At a party when a woman tells you where she bought some wonderful pair of shoes, say that you believe shopping for clothes is like masturbation - everyone does it, but it isn't very interesting and therefore should be done alone, in an embarrassed fashion, and never be the topic of party conversation. The woman will tighten her lips and eyebrows and say, "Oh, I suppose you have something more fascinating to talk about." Grow clumsy and uneasy. Say, "No," and head for the ginger ale. Tell the person next to you that your inside feel sort of sinking and vinyl like a Claes Oldenburg toilet. They will say, "Oh?" and point out that the print on your dress is one of paisleys impregnating paisleys. Pour yourself more ginger ale.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? - Jeanette Winterson

She filled the phone box.  She was out of scale, larger than life.  She was like a fairy story where size is approximate and unstable.  She loomed up.  She expanded.

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There are so many things that we can't say, because they are too painful.  We hope that the things we can say will soothe the rest, or appease it in some way.  Stories are compensatory.  The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control.

When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening.  It is a version, but never the final one.  And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold.

When we write we offer the silence as much as the story.  Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

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Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the same as being happy - which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine.

If the sun is shining, stand in it - yes, yes, yes.  Happy time are great, but happy times pass - they have to - because time passes.

The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is life-long, and it is not goal-centred.

What you are pursuing is meaning - a meaningful life.  there's the hap - the fate, the draw that is yours, and it isn't fixed, but changing the couse of the stream, or dealing new cards, whatever metaphor you want to use - that's going to take a lot of energy.  There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else's terms.

The pursuit isn't all or nothing - it's all AND nothing.  Like all Quest Stories.

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And here is the shock - when you risk it, when you do the right thing, when you arrive at the borders of commonsense and cross into unknown territory, leaving behind you all the familiar smells and lights, then you do not experience great joy and huge energy.

You are unhappy.  Things get worse.

It is a time of mourning.  Loss.  Fear.  We bullet ourselves through with questions.  And then we feel shot and wounded.

And then all the cowards come out and say, 'See, I told you so.'

In fact, they told you nothing.

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Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

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At that moment a rival group of carol singers arrived at the front door - probably the Salvation Army, but Mrs W was having none of it.  She opened the front door and shouted, 'Jesus is here.  Go away.'

'That was a bit harsh, Mum.'

'I have had a lot to put up with," she said, looking meaningfully at me. 'I know the Bible tells us to turn the other cheek but there are only so many cheeks in a day.'

-
I was thinking about suicide because it had to be an option.  I had to be able to think about it and on good days I did so because it gave me back a sense of control - for one last time I would be in control.

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Our madness-measure is always changing.  Probably we are less tolerant of madness now than at any period in history.  There is no place for it.  Crucially, there is no time for it.

Going mad takes time.   Getting sane takes time.

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And I have loved most extravagantly where my love could not be returned in any sane and steady way.

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But I did not know how to love.  If I could have faced that simple fact about myself, and the likelihood that someone with my story (my stories, both real and invented) would have big problems with love, then, then, what?

Listen, we are human beings.  Listen, we are inclined to love.  Love is there, but we need to be taught how.  we want to stand upright, we want to walk, but someone needs to hold our hand and balance us a bit, and guide us a bit, and scoop us up when we fall.

Listen, we fall.  Love is there but we have to learn it - and its shapes and its possibilities.  I taught myself to stand on my own two feet, but I could not teach myself how to love.

We have a capacity for language.  We have a capacity for love.  We need other people to release those capacities.

In my work I found a way to talk about love - and that was real.  I had not found a way to love.   That was changing.

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'The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feelings."

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Happy endings are only a pause.  There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge.  Tragedy.  Forgiveness.  Revenge and Tragedy often happen together.  Forgiveness redeems the past.  Forgiveness unblocks the future.

The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

I remember  a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness.  This is how it will be when I grow up.  I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her.  I shall live as people in novels live and have lived.  Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance.  However... who said that thing about 'the littleness of life that art exaggerates'?  There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out.  I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about.  Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.

I suppose I wanted to do something normal, or at least pretend that something was normal even if it wasn't. When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books.  You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality.  Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become.  You want them to tell you that things are OK.   And is there anything wrong with that?

"I'm still bald," I said.

What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully?  Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him?  Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised?  Who avoided being hurt and called it capacity for survival?  Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels?  One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain?  Well, there was all this to reflect upon, while I endured a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurt - and inflicted for precisely that reason.