Maggie Nelson

But this time, so far as I can tell, my mother has not made her husband her desire incarnate, though she does love him very much. And for his part, so far as I can tell, he doesn__ try to talk her out of her self-deprecation, nor does he abet it. He simply loves her. I am learning from him.

Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking that all desire is yearning.

I am trying to talk about what blue means, or what it means to me, apart from meaning.

It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?__o, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink__ere you are again, it says, and so am I.

72. It is easier, of course, to find dignity in one's solitude. Loneliness is solitude with a problem. Can blue solve the problem, or can it at least keep me company within it?__o, not exactly. It cannot love me that way; it has no arms. But sometimes I do feel its presence to be a sort of wink__ere you are again, it says, and so am I.

For the fact is that neuroscientists who study memory remain unclear on the question of whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable __emory fragment___ften called a __race_ or an __ngram___r whether each time we remember something we are literally creating a new __race_ to house the thought. And since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor: they could be __cribbles,_ __olograms,_ or __mprints_; they could live in __pirals,_ __ooms,_ or __torage units._ Personally, when I imagine my mind in the act of remembering, I see Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, roving about in a milky, navy-blue galaxy shot through with twinkling cartoon stars.

The question up for debate between Socrates and Phaedrus is whether the written word kills memory or aids it--whether it cripples the mind's power, or whether it cures it of its forgetfulness.

92. Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping__ts intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.

Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping__ts intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.

238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. __ove is not consolation,_ she wrote. __t is light._240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.

I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. 'Love is not consolation,' she wrote. 'It is light.'All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.

One thing they don__ tell you __out the blues when you got __m, you keep on fallin_ __ause there ain't no bottom,' sings Emmylou Harris, and she may be right. Perhaps it would help to be told that there is no bottom, save, as they say, wherever and whenever you stop digging. You have to stand there, spade in hand, cold whiskey sweat beaded on your brow, eyes misshapen and wild, some sorry-ass grave digger grown bone-tired of the trade. You have to stand there in the dirty rut you dug, alone in the darkness, in all its pulsing quiet, surrounded by the scandal of corpses.

Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book learn to say: That__ my depression talking. It__ not __e.__s if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.

Misogyny, when expressed or explored by men, remains a timeless classic.

Some of the subjects of Puppies and Babies may not identify as queer, but it doesn__ matter: the installation queers them. By which I mean to say that it partakes in a long history of queers constructing their own families__e they composed of peers or mentors or lovers or ex-lovers or children or non-human animals__nd that it presents queer family making as an umbrella category under which baby making might be a subset, rather than the other way around. It reminds us that any bodily experience can be made new and strange, that nothing we do in this life need have a lid crammed on it, that no one set of practices or relations has the monopoly on the so-called radical, or the so-called normative.

We__e only given as much as the heart can endure,_ __hat does not kill you makes you stronger,_ __ur sorrows provide us with the lessons we most need to learn_: these are the kinds of phrases that enrage my injured friend. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to come up with a spiritual lesson that demands becoming a quadriparalytic. The tepid __here must be a reason for it_ notion sometimes floated by religious or quasi-religious acquaintances or bystanders, is, to her, another form of violence. She has no time for it. She is too busy asking, in this changed form, what makes a livable life, and how she can live it.

[A]fter all, what does it mean for pain to be 'memorable'? You're either in pain or you're not. And it isn't the pain that one forgets. It's the touching death part. As the baby might say to its mother, we might say to death: I forget you, but you remember me.

It is always taking care, but it is difficult, because at times to take care of her is also to cause her pain.