girl, so confusing
life rx 10 jun 24
the queen of pentacles, and a paragraph from Ruth Madvievsky’s All-Night Pharmacy: “The more over-the-top the video became, the more palpable the singer's pain. She was all these women at once. I felt close to some epiphany about poorly reflective surfaces as metaphor for the unknowability of the self, about sex as performance-but performance of what?”
the aleatory
Let me tell you something: I don’t feel very seriously about being a woman, or about woman-pain. I have tried to read that women-running-with-the-wolves book, the one everyone has told me I will love, and it does nothing for me. I try to read it and I think: air. I like the folk tales, because I always like folk tales. But not because they tell the tragic story of woman. Not because I feel like I need to pull a bloody relic out of a mountain. (I believe in pain, but not special pain.)
I have tried to hide this for many years, because it seems an unthinkable luxury to be a woman who doesn’t really care about the mythology. (Costumes, yes. Mythology, meh.) I have assumed this was some deadness of spirit in me, and felt bad about it, more or less without even realizing what I felt bad about, in a vague way, at all times. And I have also assumed that I was miles away from my real self, and had to fight through all this deadness to find her.
But that isn’t true. My real self is simply unsentimental, and disinterested in certain stories.
Maybe even a few months ago, I would have pulled this card and this quote and tried to tell you something I don’t really believe about the divine mother. I would have told you something you already know about not knowing the self. I might have even pulled a quote instead from that book that doesn’t really do anything for me because I know it’s meaningful for someone, and my default has been to assume that I’m wrong.
But now I’m more interested in making good work, and good work comes from love, and love has deep roots. Love is love of the truth, not of a surface. But love isn’t an aesthetic. A queen isn’t an aesthetic. She’s a mountain of her own. Love isn’t serious. Love isn’t even nice. It is beautiful, but beauty is cruel because it will live anywhere.
the assignment
let whatever is already true about you be a virtue
writing prompt
just fucking say it
a chune
“Mean Girls” by Charli XCX
I know! I know. Two Charli XCX chunes back to back? (to back to back to back to back …) Sorry. That’s just what’s happening right now. The thing that makes brat (whence comes this week’s chune) so good is a particular kind of honesty that shows up over and over in the lyrics. Honesty without the shibboleths of honesty, the symbols of honesty, the performance of honesty. It feels interesting and complex and exciting, like things used to feel before therapy culture took over Instagram and we all learned the things we were supposed to say in order to seem sane, and thus win the day. J and I watched that documentary about the TikTok dance cult, and I loved how one of the cult survivors had so clearly not swallowed all the therapy speak. She sat down with her father and said: This is your fault! She told her sister: I am dysfunctional! Woo it felt exciting. No more GLOMAR. Tell em it’s their FAULT!!!
credits: small spells tarot deck by Rachel Howe
All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madvievsky
“Mean Girls” by Charli XCX
Dear diary, I am jet-laggy boom-baggy. Waking up is a despair. Falling asleep is a flat white piece of paper with nothing on it: nothing doing. I actually got up at 3am and washed the dishes. And occasionally I feel perfectly fine, as if I didn’t so radically depart from the usual stitchings of time and space such that I left Japan at 5pm Saturday and got back to LA at 10am Saturday. I have the suspicion that nothing I’ve said here makes much sense this week (??) but hey, it’s bibliomancy, not biblio-sensible. XS