Home > Work > Blueberries: Essays Concerning Understanding
1 " Is 'self-care' a neoliberal scam promoting individualistic coping strategies in the absence of broader social obligations or the possibility of radical structural change? (Well, yes, I say to myself as I slip into my fourth late-night bath of the week, thinking aboutmy next semester of unemployment.) "
― , Blueberries: Essays Concerning Understanding
2 " All useless, according to the common sense of utility, yet all of them inspiring in me curiosity and the simplest delight. Delight in the fact that beautiful things made by people forty years ago sit around, bringing pleasure to a stranger in the now. It remindsme of my duty, everyone's duty, to the future. My friends kids will need in twenty years to find crap like this at the markets so that they can feel held by the hands of past people's future dreams and not feel totally alone. "
3 " ...and the story as it plays out in my mind is that I became a writer (if that was what it was) when I started to realise that I wasn't loved and that maybe I never would be. I was nineteen and poetry was snaking out of me because I felt badly treated, or I was newly aware that I'd colluded in my self-annihilation and the love I had sought up until then was shit. I became a writer when I learned that I was a person and not just a figure inside another person's libidinal imagination - I am still not entirely that, though, a person; still part of my brain is lobotomised by the fantasy of glory and worthiness in libidinal abjection and I have to somehow live with that. "
4 " If there is always a question, and I believe there is, in this case it is this: where is home and what is freedom. The promise we accept is that freedom is the freedom to make ourselves anew, but in our hearts we are running home, running the right way round the roundabout, so is freedom the freedom to have a home even if home is a fenced-in square of lonely grass. "
5 " When we say that a narrative is, or is not, someone’s ‘story to tell’, what we unwittingly suggest is that when the story is yours, as in it happened within time as you directly experience it, you are given some power over it. Is this the biggest betrayal of pop psychology via talk therapy? That in language a person can find sufficient tools to erect a life undisturbed by demons? Or the thought, even, that a person can comprehend what it is they have lived through. - Survivors of all things, always trying to reconstruct the moment they survived through. - Strange, though, that even as you narrate it, you get to the horror point, and you think, this time, it’ll go differently. But the film reel keeps playing through, all the way, and, whoosh: powerless. "
6 " Sadness is not always a terrible illness. Sadness is, perhaps, the most honest response to living. "
