454 W 23rd St New York, NY 10011

May 2, 2012

Anonymous asked:

I’m finding it hard to explain “where I am in life” to the great anonymous internet presence I’ve adored for so long [somehow sic] without sounding like an ass. So I’ll give it to you straight. I’m a little over a month away from 27. An empath in fucking Brooklyn maintaining a hermit routine for sanity. Working a warping, multifaceted, demanding, yet unfulfilling job for a greedy, sadistic vortex of a man who feeds on my life force. All creativity and spirituality on the back burner save for the occasional photo or tarot reading both which feel like little more than masturbation. Female, a natural beauty, both to my chagrin. Ecstatic over each new wrinkle and grey hair. Carrying a dead weight depressed boyfriend of 8.4 years. In a word: stagnant. In another word: drained. But boo fucking hoo, right?

Response:

Sorry if this sounds like an especially arrogant reading, which incidentally you should never, ever do again.

Self-pity, fear and the recourse to a kind of malevolent female softness are and are going to be the three biggest obstacles to a future where you don’t want to die all the time.

-Self-pity. This makes everyday insult and ignominy feel bearable because self-pity places those things into a context where you deserve them. It reframes the fundamentally indifferent things that happen to you into a perspective where all lines of action lead necessarily to your own self. Obviously, everyone does this all the time, q.v. Middlemarch, Ch 27…

An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person…

…but in your case I think there’s the danger that those concentric circles of force will become prison bars instead of just explanations.

-Fear. Quit your job and tell your boyfriend what’s going on. If you can’t go somewhere else together, tell him to fuck off and move on. The fear of penury and making someone else feel sad are absolutely nothing compared to the feeling of looking back on twenty or thirty years of life and realizing that they were exchanged for nothing much. Let alone the most popular deathbed regret: I wish I hadn’t worked so much. I mean, think about it. One day you are going to be lying on a bed from which you will never rise, thinking about all those twelve hour days away from what you actually wanted to do. And how you can never have them back. A day of stagnation should feel like liverless Prometheus chained to the rock. FUCK eight years of it.

-A malevolent female softness. Lots of women, when confronted with stereotypical Hamlette life-problems retreat into a kind of tulle-world. A world where intuition has infinite credit and dithering is confused with grace. This is a huge mistake. If there is a female essence, uniquely suited to navigating the world that confronts women, this malevolent female softness is a black parody of it. Trapped in these doldrums, it can feel perfectly reasonable to pull the petals off your soul until you’re nothing but a narcotized point.

The solution to each of your three canonical problems is to fuck shit up.

These all work:

El Angel Exterminador /////////////
Last Year At Marienbad
My Dinner With Andre ///////////////
Interiors /////////////////
The Anatomy of Melancholy
Essais of Montaigne
The Balloon - Barthelme
Proust
Heart of Darkness
The Golden Notebooks - Lessing
Antigone
Oedipus the King
Oedipus at Colonus
The Rings of Saturn
The Maypole of Merry Mount - Hawthorne
Under the Volcano
Jose Saramago’s Nobel Prize speech ///////////////
The Raj Quartet + Staying On
all William H. Gass essays
all Flannery O’Connor stories
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
Infinite Jest
The Kreutzer Sonata - Tolstoy
The Ruling Class ///////////////
The Shawl - Ozick
Eichmann in Jerusalem
Moby Dick
All that is Solid Melts into Air - Berman
The Destruction of the European Jews
Shoah //////////////////
Within the Context of No Context /////////////
Herodotus