Lu

The self without sym­pa­the­tic attach­ments is either a fic­tion or a luna­tic…. [Yet] depen­dence is scor­ned even in inti­mate rela­tion­ships, as though depen­dence were incom­pa­tible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it pos­sible. (Adam Phillips / Barbara Taylor)

I lear­ned this scorn from my own mother ; per­haps it laced my milk. I the­re­fore have to be on the alert for a ten­den­cy to treat other people’s needs as repul­sive. Corollary habit : deri­ving the bulk of my self-worth from a fee­ling of hyper­com­pe­tence, an irra­tio­nal but fervent belief in my near total self-reliance.

Once I sug­ges­ted that I had writ­ten half a book drunk, the other half sober. Here I esti­mate that about nine-tenths of the words in this book were writ­ten “free,” the other one-tenth, hoo­ked up to a hos­pi­tal-grade breast pump : words piled into one machine, milk sipho­ned out by ano­ther.

Afraid of asser­tion. Always trying to get out of “tota­li­zing” lan­guage, i.e., lan­guage that rides rough­shod over spe­ci­fi­ci­ty ; rea­li­zing this is ano­ther form of para­noia. Barthes found the exit to this mer­ry-go-round by remin­ding him­self that “it is lan­guage which is asser­tive, not he.” It is absurd, Barthes says, to try to flee from language’s asser­tive nature by “add[ing] to each sen­tence some lit­tle phrase of uncer­tain­ty, as if any­thing that came out of lan­guage could make lan­guage tremble.”

My wri­ting is ridd­led with such tics of uncer­tain­ty. I have no excuse or solu­tion, save to allow myself the trem­blings, then go back in later and slash them out. In this way I edit myself into a bold­ness that is nei­ther native nor forei­gn to me.

So far as I can tell, most wor­thw­hile plea­sures on this earth slip bet­ween gra­ti­fying ano­ther and gra­ti­fying one­self. Some would call that an ethics.

Powerlessness, fini­tude, endu­rance. You are making the baby but not direct­ly. You are res­pon­sible for his wel­fare, but unable to control the core ele­ments. You must allow him to unfurl, you must feed his unfur­ling, you must hold him. But he will unfurl as his cells are pro­gram­med to unfurl. You can’t reverse an unfol­ding struc­tu­ral or chro­mo­so­mal dis­tur­bance by inges­ting the right orga­nic tea.