This is the limit of my limits: here it is. You don’t ever know for sure where it is and then you bump against it and bam, you’re there.
From The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender.
When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors dances on the floor. What we call “white” is a rainbow of colored rays packed into a small space. The prism sets them free. Love is the white light of emotion. It includes many feelings which, out of laziness and confusion, we crowd into one simple word. Art is the prism that sets them free, then follows the gyrations of one or a few. When art separates this thick tangle of feelings, love bares its bones. But it cannot be measured or mapped. Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one can agree on what it is. I once heard a sportscaster say of a basketball player, “He does all the intangibles. Just watch him do his dance.” As lofty as the idea of love can be, no image is too profane to help explain it. Years ago, I fell in love with someone who was both a sport and a pastime. At the end, he made fade-away jump shots in my life. But, for a while, love did all the intangibles. It lets us do our finest dance.
From A Natural History of Love by Diane Ackerman.
In Scotland, we kind of celebrate misery, you accept defeat as an everyday part of life. Some bands are about escape and good times; we sing about the difficult times. And people exorcise their own demons by listening to ours.
Biffy Clyro bass-player James Johnston, from here.
I can remember being a child and being blank. Without opinion. Walking around like that. Complete like that. All fear and desire with not much in between. I think of it now as an experimental setup. Like a cloud chamber—where you’ve got this otherwise empty vessel filled with a sort of mist through which events, the passage of subatomic particles, leave evanescent trails. And it kind of felt like a mist, I think. Experience loomed. You tended not to see it coming. All of a sudden there it was.
From Shame and Wonder by David Searcy.
We like to think that we are finely evolved creatures, in suit-and-tie or pantyhose-and-chemise, who live many millennia and mental detours away from the cave, but that’s not something our bodies are convinced of. We may have the luxury of being at the top of the food chain, but our adrenaline still rushes when we encounter real or imaginary predators. We even restage that primal fright by going to monster movies. We still stake out or mark our territories, though sometimes now it is with the sound of radios. We still jockey for position and power. We still create works of art to enhance our senses and add even more sensations to the brimming world, so that we can utterly luxuriate in the spectacles of life. We still ache fiercely with love, lust, loyalty, and passion. And we still perceive the world, in all its gushing beauty and terror, right on our pulses. There is no other way. To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses—how they evolved, how they can be extended, what their limits are, to which ones we have attached taboos, and what they can teach us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.
From A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman.
And that’s another thing this passage hints on: that first-generation immigrants often model artistic behavior for their children. They don’t necessarily realize it, like the father who says the immigrant life is art in its greatest form. But I realize now I saw artistic qualities in my parents’ choices—in their creativity, their steadfastness, the very fact that we were in this country from another place. They’re like the artist mentors people have in any discipline—by studying, by observing, by reading, you’ve had this model in the form of someone’s life. My mother could not have found time for creative pursuits with four children and a factory job. But she modeled the discipline and resourcefulness and self-sacrifice that are constant inspirations in my own life’s work. The things she did, the choices she made, made the artist’s life possible for me. I didn’t know it, but she taught me that being an artist makes sense. While it’s natural for the children of immigrants to want to be artists, it is natural for the parents to feel threatened by artistic vocations. As a parent myself, I completely understand that impulse. When you’ve given so much, when you’ve sacrificed everything to make this huge transition, you want to see your child have an easier life as a result. You want to spare them the anguish of worrying always about survival, especially after all the sacrifices you’ve made. The first generation feels they created a path, they sacrificed, they made the way—and now their children should have stability and peace of mind. This, of course, is not the emphasis of being an artist. And so, for children of immigrants, the creative path is fraught with added risk: There’s so much more at stake if you fail. There’s a feeling that—as the character in the passage feels—if you fail, you’re not only failing yourself, but your family, your parents who have gone through so much to give you this opportunity. It’s not just your own failure at stake—artistic failure can mean the failure of your family’s entire enterprise.
From Light the Dark by Edwidge Danticat.
The religious and the modernist impulse seem to spring from the same engulfing moment of self-consciousness and doubt. “My God, where are we?,” then a space of ten or twenty thousand years to give us time to wander out into the shallows, gathering shells and stuff exactly like we’re not supposed to do, before the secondary wave brings in the terrible apprehension once again. It seems so hard to know what we are really doing—what it all comes down to, finally. I remember an exhibition of modernist objects at the Dallas Museum of Art a number of years ago—for the most part just the commonest sorts of things we’re used to living with, but emerged from this terrific redesign, this reappraisal toward first principles as if, to our surprise, such thoughtless accidental things could have first principles or even be adjusted to suggest the possibility. Is this what we’ve been doing all this time, it made one think, when we thought we were only sitting down or making tea or listening to the radio? Is this what we’ve been doing? How extraordinary, beautiful, uncomfortable and strange our lives have been. And maybe risky too, somehow.
From Shame and Wonder by David Searcy.
I do know, though, that a lot of us point and laugh. The strategy of my aunts and mother is now my default reaction when a fifteen-year-old on Instagram calls me a cunt or when a grown-up reporter writes something about my tits. Just keep pointing and laughing, rolling your eyes with the hope that someone will finally notice that this is not very funny. Pretending these offenses roll off of our backs is strategic—don’t give them the fucking satisfaction—but it isn’t the truth. You lose something along the way. Mocking the men who hurt us—as mockable as they are—starts to feel like acquiescing to the most condescending of catcalls, You look better when you smile. Because even subversive sarcasm adds a cool-girl nonchalance, an updated, sharper version of the expectation that women be forever pleasant, even as we’re eating shit. This sort of posturing is a performance that requires strength I do not have anymore. Rolling with the punches and giving as good as we’re getting requires that we subsume our pain under a veneer of I don’t give a shit. This inability to be vulnerable—the unwillingness to be victims, even if we are—doesn’t protect us, it just covers up the wreckage. But no one wants to listen to our sad stories unless they are smoothed over with a joke or nice melody. And even then, not always. No one wants to hear a woman talking or writing about pain in a way that suggests that it doesn’t end. Without a pat solution, silver lining, or happy ending we’re just complainers—downers who don’t realize how good we actually have it.
From Sex Object by Jessica Valenti.
The existential crisis that Jay referred to was a long time in the making, but when it happened, it happened fast. Someone (not me) could write a very long book on this topic, but let me do the CliffsNotes version. First, the Internet allowed people to get information without paying for it, which was not good for the newspaper business, which sold ads based on the number of subscribers. Second, the Internet and the smartphone made it so people could get information whenever they wanted it, wherever they wanted it, which was not good for the television industry, which sold ads based on the number of people who sat down to watch TV at an appointed time. Third, the 2008 financial crisis crushed the very businesses that bought the ads that funded the media industry. Newspapers were laying off people or closing altogether. The more experienced reporters were being offered buyouts, so outlets could replace them with cheaper, younger reporters. You now had fewer reporters with less experience and fewer editors writing more often to meet the never-ending deadline of the Internet.
Fourth, while media was weakened by technology and economics, it was also losing its sacred place in our democracy in the eyes of many Americans. By the time Obama had started running for president, the halcyon days of journalism were a distant memory. Public trust in the media declined precipitously, and by the time Trump won the 2016 election, the media was about as popular as Trump himself. Some of this decline can be attributed to a rise in skepticism of American institutions, but the media is not blameless either. Several high-profile incidents have given the public legitimate reasons to be more skeptical. Foremost among these is the coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war, where the media—and The New York Times, in particular—parroted the Bush administration’s false claims about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Finally, the Republican Party and the right-wing media had been running a decades-long effort to convince their voters that the media was their enemy and to create an alternative version of reality. Fox News, the Republican propaganda outlet, which marketed itself under the banner of being “fair and balanced,” was the embodiment of the effort to nullify news that ran counter to the political wishes of the Republican Party and conservative activists.
All of this meant that Obama was entering office at a time when it was harder than ever to reach people through the news media, and people were more skeptical than ever before about anything they learned from the media. Not exactly a recipe for success for a new president (and his communications director) trying to tell the country about his agenda.
From Yes We Still Can by Dan Pfeiffer.