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Bibliotherapy
Jun. 16th, 2007 10:16 pmI just got back my copy of Elizabeth Moon's more than excellent The Speed of Dark, which has me thinking about books and words that reach right in and soothe or change something in me.
The first time I discovered Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, for instance. That was extremely cathartic. The combination of rage, vulnerability, action, and emotionalism was awe inspiring, and I think it was the first time a piece of art made me understand that rage could be something people used to avoid knowing about their own vulnerability.
Whenever I have the uneasy feeling that I have just experienced the kind of sexism from a man that he absolutely cannot be called on because he can't see it, I feel calmer after reading Joanna Russ's The Female Man. Especially the bit at the cocktail party.
For me, Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake books are moving, because I identify with how earnestly Anita's character wrestles with her own morality and how desperately she wonders if her desires and emotions make her a bad person. And I admit that the fact that they're so popular adds to the effect, rather than detracting - knowing that so many other people find Anita's life compelling makes me feel less weird and isolated.
It doesn't always have to be a whole book or character - sometimes a phrase is enough: you can memorize it and pull it out like a touchstone when you need it. I read a translation of Baruch de Spinoza where there was a line that went: "but love for the absolute and eternal thing fills the mind with a joy entirely devoid of sadness", and that's gotten me through a few patches. Nietzsche is generally not comforting, but the oddball of the three usages of "beyond good and evil" in Beyond Good and Evil is a doozy: "What is done out of love takes place beyond good and evil." which can be comforting if taken either positively or negatively, as the situation requires. Edna St. Vincent Millay writes that "Love is not all, it is not meat nor drink" and Conrad Aiken says that "Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread," and between those two poems lies something. In her poem, "Waiting to Happen", Jennifer Michael Hecht bumps the line "If we never starve this bread will never seem in hindsight to have been a feast of pleasure is part of what I mean" right into "But look at the books. Consider the odds. We will very likely starve." and manages to create something very darkly optimistic out of that. In The Lady's Not For Burning Christopher Fry has Thomas Mendip say "You gamble on the fact that I was well-brought-up. And, of course, you're right. I have to see you home, though neither of us knows where on earth it is." which smacks into something about the sort of directionless push that moving forward in life can sometimes be - a duty and an imposition as much as a blessing. R. A. MacAvoy's Twisting the Rope was my introduction to the Maha Prajna Paramita Hridaya Sutra, and there have been times that I was very very grateful to have read it.
I dunno - I think that's what I find awe inspiring about books - that they're so much messages in bottles, sometimes whole genies in bottles, dropped into this ocean that underlies all the desperate silences in human communication, fished out by the searching or the unexpecting. How lovely, and how humane. And of course, The Speed of Dark hit me particularly hard with the idea about how much we want to feel connected to others, and at the same time how problematic that desire is. Which is what brings this full circle. All those bottles. All those messages. It's almost enough to reconcile me to something. No, in fact, it is enough. Which is the part that feels a little like grace.
The first time I discovered Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, for instance. That was extremely cathartic. The combination of rage, vulnerability, action, and emotionalism was awe inspiring, and I think it was the first time a piece of art made me understand that rage could be something people used to avoid knowing about their own vulnerability.
Whenever I have the uneasy feeling that I have just experienced the kind of sexism from a man that he absolutely cannot be called on because he can't see it, I feel calmer after reading Joanna Russ's The Female Man. Especially the bit at the cocktail party.
For me, Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake books are moving, because I identify with how earnestly Anita's character wrestles with her own morality and how desperately she wonders if her desires and emotions make her a bad person. And I admit that the fact that they're so popular adds to the effect, rather than detracting - knowing that so many other people find Anita's life compelling makes me feel less weird and isolated.
It doesn't always have to be a whole book or character - sometimes a phrase is enough: you can memorize it and pull it out like a touchstone when you need it. I read a translation of Baruch de Spinoza where there was a line that went: "but love for the absolute and eternal thing fills the mind with a joy entirely devoid of sadness", and that's gotten me through a few patches. Nietzsche is generally not comforting, but the oddball of the three usages of "beyond good and evil" in Beyond Good and Evil is a doozy: "What is done out of love takes place beyond good and evil." which can be comforting if taken either positively or negatively, as the situation requires. Edna St. Vincent Millay writes that "Love is not all, it is not meat nor drink" and Conrad Aiken says that "Music I heard with you was more than music, and bread I broke with you was more than bread," and between those two poems lies something. In her poem, "Waiting to Happen", Jennifer Michael Hecht bumps the line "If we never starve this bread will never seem in hindsight to have been a feast of pleasure is part of what I mean" right into "But look at the books. Consider the odds. We will very likely starve." and manages to create something very darkly optimistic out of that. In The Lady's Not For Burning Christopher Fry has Thomas Mendip say "You gamble on the fact that I was well-brought-up. And, of course, you're right. I have to see you home, though neither of us knows where on earth it is." which smacks into something about the sort of directionless push that moving forward in life can sometimes be - a duty and an imposition as much as a blessing. R. A. MacAvoy's Twisting the Rope was my introduction to the Maha Prajna Paramita Hridaya Sutra, and there have been times that I was very very grateful to have read it.
I dunno - I think that's what I find awe inspiring about books - that they're so much messages in bottles, sometimes whole genies in bottles, dropped into this ocean that underlies all the desperate silences in human communication, fished out by the searching or the unexpecting. How lovely, and how humane. And of course, The Speed of Dark hit me particularly hard with the idea about how much we want to feel connected to others, and at the same time how problematic that desire is. Which is what brings this full circle. All those bottles. All those messages. It's almost enough to reconcile me to something. No, in fact, it is enough. Which is the part that feels a little like grace.
