Thank you Sharon for sharing.
Category: Uncategorized
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
Saturday Morning (Mostly right…)
He is talking about weekends. He describes, lingeringly, the Saturday Morning lie-in. Drowsing, love-making, breakfast in bed. Up, finally, for a coffee and a leaf through the papers. A long bath. Then choices, choices: shopping, a long walk, a late lunch? An afternoon movie, an art gallery? More sleep? A haircut, a trip to the gym. Read a novel. Dinner with friends, the opera, a party. Sunday morning, more of the same.
— Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (Picador, February 17, 2015)
Photo: Wally this morning, joining me in the Saturday Morning lie-In.
T.G.I.F.: I want what I want because I want it.
There is no end of advice these days on how to be a good person, how to make good decisions, how to be mindful and compassionate, how to have boundaries, how to be open, how to be assertive, how not to be self-effacing, how to be politically invested, how to live in the now, how to live in a world that demands immediacy, how to think about the future, how not to think too much about the future, how not to think. For a certain kind of person — the person who, usually, strives to be a responsible parent, a sensitive friend, an upright citizen, a person who tries to care about their community — it can be impossible not to succumb to the incessant urge to mimic someone else’s supposed balance and feeling of wellness in life. What do we even know about them really? […]
Listening to patients, it feels to me like we’ve reached a real pitch of delirium regarding generalized advice, prescriptions, moral codes for behavior and images of some supposedly achievable balance. This infinite pedagogical universe was recently, and aptly, named the shame-industrial complex; poured out from every angle of life on social media, pushed by algorithms. In this vertigo we’ve forgotten that no one knows, or has ever known, what it really means to be an adult. Also that pleasure is hard-won, small, ephemeral; singular to each person. Wishes are historically overdetermined — meaning it really is your pleasure, and your pleasure only…
What I found, after much work in analysis, is that there is no justification possible, no matter how hard I tried to find it. I want what I want because I want it. You have to live with your choices which are more-or-less inexplicable to others…
We are contradictory creatures, wondrously and terrifyingly so.
— Jamieson Webster, from “I Don’t Need to Be a ‘Good Person.’ Neither Do You.” (The New York Times · August 25, 2023). Jamieson Webster (@jamiesonwebster) is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst and a professor at the New School. She is the author, most recently, of “Disorganization and Sex.”
Portrait via Peter Rollins
Monday Morning Wake-Up Call
A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: I am a generally sloppy and frustrated baker, but every time I try, I find myself repeating—as a sort of incantation—the vivid, compact, flawless opening lines from “i am not done yet,” by Lucille Clifton: “as possible as yeast / as imminent as bread.” It’s a poem about becoming, about the endless act of inching closer to who we are meant to be. It says, We are never finished. It says, Maybe today is the day you wait long enough for your dough to rise.
— Ellen Cushing, from “The Culture Survey: Ellen Cushing” in The Atlantic, August 20, 2023
“i am not done yet”
as possible as yeast
as imminent as bread
a collection of safe habits
a collection of cares
less certain than i seem
more certain than i was
a changed changer
i continue to continue
what i have been
most of my lives is
where i’m going
— Lucille Clifton, published in Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980