ashraya

[ashraya]

“To every writer who has ever published a book, there comes eventually that amusing though irritating moment when someone says pensively, ‘I have always thought that I could write a book—if only I had time.’

I have never been able to decide whether the subtle implication is that only those with an unfair amount of time at their disposal ever reach the point of seeing themselves in print, or whether it is a delicate way of saying that in order to write a book one must have neglected more pressing duties.

In my own experience, I can only say that I have never sat down to write a book with the feeling that I had any time in hand. And, apart from the fact that I write, happily and unashamedly, for the wicked old profit motive, any urge I may have has nothing whatever to do with the question of whether I have time or not.”

Ida Cook, We Followed Our Stars

[ashraya]

[ashraya]

Little Women or The Second Sex?: an assortment of quotes.

“Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.”

“I'm too used up to 'exert' myself for anyone.”

“To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.”

“Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and fall into a vortex, as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.”

“When she does not find love, she may find poetry. Because she does not act, she observes, she feels, she records; a color, a smile awakens profound echoes within her; her destiny is outside her, scattered in cities already built, on the faces of men already marked by life, she makes contact, she relishes with passion and yet in a manner more detached, more free, than that of a young man. Being poorly integrated in the universe of humanity and hardly able to adapt herself therein, she, like the child, is able to see it objectively; instead of being interested solely in her grasp on things, she looks for their significance; she catches their special outlines, their unexpected metamorphoses. She rarely feels a bold creativeness, and usually she lacks the technique of self-expression; but in her conversation, her letters, her literary essays, her sketches, she manifests an original sensitivity. The young girl throws herself into things with ardor, because she is not yet deprived of her transcendence; and the fact that she accomplishes nothing, that she is nothing, will make her impulses only the more passionate. Empty and unlimited, she seeks from within her nothingness to attain All..”

“If they want to flirt or initiate a friendship, they should carefully avoid giving the impression they are taking the initiative; men do not like tomboys, nor bluestockings, nor thinking women; too much audacity, culture, intelligence, or character frightens them.”

“Don't laugh at the spinsters, dear girls, for often very tender, tragic romances are hidden away in the hearts that beat so quietly under the sober gowns, and many silent sacrifices of youth, health, ambition, love itself, make the faded faces beautiful in God's sight. Even the sad, sour sisters should be kindly dealt with, because they have missed the sweetest part of life, if for no other reason.”

“. . . for when women are the advisers, the lords of creation don't take the advice till they have persuaded themselves that it is just what they intended to do. Then they act upon it, and, if it succeeds, they give the weaker vessel half the credit of it. If it fails, they generously give her the whole.”

“When the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh.”

“Be careful, be very careful, not to wake his anger against yourself, for peace and happiness depend on keeping his respect. Watch yourself, be the first to ask pardon if you both err, and guard against the little piques, misunderstandings, and hasty words that often pave the way for bitter sorrow and regret."

“I don't pretend to be wise, but I am observing, and I see a great deal more than you'd imagine. I'm interested in other people's experiences and inconsistencies, and, though I can't explain, I remember and use them for my own benefit.”

[ashraya]

Thin Ice

I didn’t anticipate that the ever-present anxiety of this presidency, compounded by the pain of losing a student to suicide and not knowing how to fully support my students through it, would also make me less able to think. I find myself speechless, stuttering, trying again and again to understand a thing. I tweet it out in 140 characters and then again in 280. I delete the draft. I rewrite the draft. I tweet the draft and delete the tweet. I find myself constantly unsure about whether I am responding the right way, afraid that I am going to make an irreversibly damaging decision, whether in politics or in life. I take longer to decide everything. Does this student’s action merit a phone call home? Does it make sense to prosecute someone 35 years after a sexual assault?

With so much uncertainty, I have responded in at least one way that feels right: I have been more involved than ever in creative endeavors — my own and my students’. I’m making music, advising the school newspaper, and even writing (some) fiction.

But I have withdrawn from most of the decision-making structures within my school and within my union because the effort has felt wasted. And whatever other time I have, I fill with distraction: television, romance novels, cooking a meal and eating it alone. I’m not sure I trust myself to make decisions.

All the time, I’m wondering: What if this isn’t the way to fight it? What if we rally around an imperfect candidate? What if I hurt a coworker or a student by lacking patience, foresight, sufficient compassion?

Is this just what happens when you get older or am I right to see this as a direct response to our present condition? I am heartbroken all the time.

If this is how I feel and I’m not even facing the worst of it, how must it feel to try to do anything when your mother is getting deported? How must it feel to be in a war zone?

About a year ago, I overheard a completely expected conversation between two male coworkers about the muddling of consent, about whether it made sense for someone to completely absent themselves from public life in the wake of harassment allegations, and I felt an incandescent rage building, lighting up the filament of my brain that holds my worst memories of men. I kept trying to focus on my work and instead kept clenching my hands too hard on the computer mouse. You have no right, I wanted to scream. You have no right to sit here and make me remember.

I was not fired up and ready to go. I did not resist. Instead, all that adrenalin and noradrenaline released by my sympathetic nervous system made me freeze. That’s how I feel most days: ice, ready to shatter at any time.

It’s Teacher Appreciation Week, and what would make me feel most appreciated is a country that doesn’t force kids who owe lunch money to only eat jelly sandwiches, a president that doesn’t gleefully tweet about his neglect of his citizens, and a world that isn’t hellbent on its own destruction.

[ashraya]

[ashraya]

Besharam Bisous

https://open.spotify.com/user/ashraya/playlist/4j9aDNv534z0U2wNLjfHkL?si=JnIkYzlzSrK-3rndtWdtpw

no borders to desire, disco, divinity.

[ashraya]

“You can punish anybody in a picture. In pictures you can punish anybody you don’t like. I didn’t like my teacher, I hated her, so I’d punish her in the drawing. If I did a story it would be too real, not right. In a drawing I could have her beaten up or something. That never stops. What you can do in pictures, that never stops. It goes on until now. I can punish people, or mock – mock – people I don’t like. Sometimes something happens whilst you’re doing the picture that, although you loathe the person you’re punishing, halfway through something happens and you begin to like them. Then there’s something perverse where you begin not to punish them but to praise them. It’s very extraordinary how your mind changes and you go with the picture, something in you comes out when you’re drawing. I did a picture called Salazar — our dictator for forty years, my father hated him. I did a picture called ‘Salazar Vomiting his Mother Country’.

I was doing this picture and suddenly I felt sorry for Salazar. Can you imagine? I mean it’s so perverse. I felt sorry for him. I didn’t change the picture, but the feelings changed. Anything can happen in pictures. That’s good isn’t it?”

Paula Rego, from http://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-paula-rego/

[ashraya]

Were Kanan Devi still alive, she would probably remember her “little problem” and also be aghast that it still persists.

From Kanan’s autobiography “My Homage to All”.

[ashraya]

You should mostly listen to radio.mrtwinsister.com right now but!

[ashraya]

Rocking tennis shorts instead of bike shorts now that I’m over 30, but still digging the 90s.

[ashraya]

[ashraya]

[ashraya]

Anyone want to be in a band? Here’s a band I was in once.

[ashraya]

Champion Criers

I watch basketball to watch men cry. The court gives men license to make visible their pain, even to express love for one another. Men are made human to me through sport.

Basketball is the best sport for the purpose. Footballers are too padded, tears obscured by helmets, their game too violent. Soccer players are better, but rarely does the pan of the camera allow for in-depth observation of the play of emotion over a face. Players compensate with exaggerated physical reactions: airplaning around the field for a win, collapsing to the ground at a loss. But for an up-close view of tears tracing the curves and hollows of cheek and jaw, in America, in the age of HD television, there is nothing to match basketball.

I began watching basketball during my first year in schools. My students were obsessed and I’d just started dating a Blazers fan. The Celtics were my team that year and had some champion criers: Paul Pierce, Glen “Big Baby” Davis, Rajon Rondo. Even Ray Allen, with his easy smile and slim grace, had his moments. His mother was at every game and still, he could not win the championship for her.

Through the heartbreak, the men held each other, they wept openly from the bench. At times, Pierce's red-rimmed eyes looked ready to burst. Rondo was forever readjusting his sweatband, as if by doing so, he could hold back the tears. What was beautiful was that they cried not only for themselves but for one another. During Game 6, Kendrick Perkins tore a knee ligament, and his teammates watched tensely, their shoulders leaning slightly forwards, mouths beginning to purse. And at the crushing close of Game 7, when the camera panned to Davis, his face was pure anguish.

The best crier in the NBA is LeBron James. He is a giant of a man. Watching his post-game interviews, I picture him accidentally elbowing sportscasters in the face, their shoulders just reaching his waist. But in these interviews, James is in no way intimidating. Instead, he is vulnerable, overcome, sincere. He cries when he loses; he cries when he wins. And as I watch him, men become less strange to me.

I don't often get to see men cry. My father rarely did so in front of us, though he cries with my mother. I can picture how my brother cries, but increasingly it is a memory. He cried at the 1994 World Cup, which ended in penalty kicks. Sports fans, too, make good criers.

I have watched (and made) my partners cry. Isn't intimacy best established through tears? My partners have faulted me for my reluctance to cry. They are generally more disposed to weeping. I cry at movies, they cry at life. I think I need to see men cry: it is more than a desire. In relationships, I court those I know will be easy to tear up. They do so in the quiet of a bedroom, or in secluded spots of some beauty -- beaches, riverbanks, woods. If we're lucky, we'll be in a car. I suspect LA is a more livable city than New York not because of the sunshine, but because one has a car to cry in. Cleveland, too.

I admit I was skeptical of LeBron when he left Cleveland. Miami had also seduced and cannibalized my Celtics, and I felt a certain resentment. LeBron fell victim to it, too, and rather than empathizing, I could not forgive him for it.

LeBron's decision was met with an undue level of resentment: no one wanted this black man to have control of his body or his labor. They wanted him to stay in his place. Did I? There is something exploitative in my compulsion: I watch men, most of them black, perform excruciating physical labor on the court and then I wait to see if they will cry about it. I am troubled by this, but I am still fascinated by the possibility of seeing men express emotion. I get so few chances.

Were the Heat to be my team now? They were too sleek for me. I missed Doc Rivers. What other coach had such an expressive brow? I went years looking for a team, trying them on. The Knicks. The Nets. The Grizzlies. Even Golden State.

And then, watching the 2015 finals, LeBron got me. The man came back to a city and team where he could comfortably weep. I loved him for it.

In India, I would likely be reduced to watching cricket. Men do not cry in cricket. They are very good sports. Occasionally, you might see them shake their heads in dismay. If you were close enough, you might catch an intake of breath, or even a sucking of teeth. But they would never stoop to crying. Cricket is a gentleman’s game. Basketball players, unlike cricketeers, are braggarts and whiners. They act selfishly, they often show-off, but they are more wonderful to me. They are more deeply human. What good is sportsmanship absent humanity?

I need to see men cry because otherwise, they would be aliens to me. Women, I feel, even as strangers, can be understood. I have seen many women I do not know cry. I have watched them laugh. I have overheard fragments of deeply personal conversations. I see them navigate their relationships and fears — in cities, they do so in the open. On subways, in restaurants, waiting for an elevator. But men are as good as silent to me.

In airports, I sometimes see men I do not know get angry. They get a little too loud and a little too close to an airline agent, a woman with perfectly applied eyeliner and matte lipstick. The woman can meet my eyes, can share a moment of “Can you believe this guy?” — the man, however, is locked in himself. He yells himself hoarse and everyone at the gate is determined not to notice. He is not one of us.

I have a pattern in my mind of what happens to a man’s face when he is angry. I find it easy to mold new faces to that pattern. Regardless of the shape and size of the jaw, I feel I already know how it will tighten. I can see the narrowing of the eyes. I can imagine the pulse on the temple. But sadness? Joy? I cannot picture men I do not know in tears. I have too few examples.

And so, I watch basketball. The Cavaliers have become my team. They joined the NBA in 1970, along with the Blazers and Braves. They were named as the result of a competition sponsored by a local Cleveland paper. A cavalier (from the same Latin root as the French chevalier and the Spanish caballero), is a mounted knight. A gentleman. In English, the term was popularized as an insult for the Royalists during the English Civil War. In common usage, it has become synonymous with debonair, connoting that same sense of offhand dismissal of anything substantive. The Cleveland Cavaliers are not cavalier. They care rather too much. LeBron cries all the time. He can be hurt and knows he can hurt others -- he is a man struggling to do right, rather than a man already convinced of his right (to power, to women, to the NBA championship). The Cavaliers are men, not gentlemen, not sportsmen, but honest, fallible, weeping men.

Try this exercise during your morning commute: observe the faces of your fellow riders. Who can you most easily imagine in tears? Who can you see screaming at you?

[ashraya]

All of Them Witches

Roman Polanski is a rapist of young girls. He is a Holocaust survivor. His pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by members of the Manson Family. In 1989, he married Emmanuelle Seigner, who has acted in five of his films. She is 33 years younger than him. In 2002, he (finally) won an Oscar.

I am something close to fascinated by pedophiles, desperate to rationalize or excuse the abuser. It's disgusting, but I want almost to pity him. The specter of my anger is too dangerous. I want instead to replace it with infinite compassion.

According to Aristotle, catharsis refers specifically to emotional release secured through a vicarious experience. We cannot create the conditions for our own catharsis. We find it in fiction, in observation, and to Aristotle, primarily in the theatre.

I watched Rosemary's Baby in a dark movie hall with two female friends. If you haven’t seen it, the premise is: a woman is pregnant with the spawn of Satan. I was riveted. Mia Farrow, wasting away on screen through the most hellish of pregnancies, failing to convince anyone in the film of her suffering, mesmerized me. At the time, I was in a relationship I couldn’t make myself end. I never learned to say no, I only learned to avoid situations which might give me cause to say no.

Rosemary, slim-hipped, says yes: to the apartment, to Minnie Castevet’s dinner invitation, to a bitter serving of chocolate mousse. When she says no, she’s ignored. The worst betrayal comes not from her husband (the movie has prepared us for this), but from her physician: a well-meaning Charles Grodin, a whisper of a mustache on his upper lip, seems to give her assurance, but then calls up her husband.

In the final scene, Rosemary awakens, dizzy and disoriented after labor. She’s been kept sedated by the coven responsible for impregnating her. Clutching a knife, she makes her way through the darkened corridors of the apartment. But when she finds the group of bizarre and rather bland witches chanting “Hail Satan!” and hears the baby wailing, she lets the knife go. She takes the baby into her arms. Half accusingly, half wonderingly, she says, “You’re trying to get me to be his mother.” The leader of the coven smiles and responds, “Aren’t you his mother?”

The movie, with very little gore, presents the horror of being a woman. We marry monsters, we befriend monsters, so logically, we must give birth to monsters. They are our sons and brothers.

Later, they’ll make movies about it.

Who would Polanski be in his film? Does he recognize himself? Does he feel he has gained absolution?

I want, at times, to kill him. And other times, to hold him close and wipe his tears away.

[ashraya]

My favorite activity is inventing. An early arms control proposal dealt with the problem of distancing that the President would have in the circumstances of facing a decision about nuclear war. There is a young man, probably a Navy officer, who accompanies the President. This young man has a black attaché case which contains the codes that are needed to fire nuclear weapons. I could see the President at a staff meeting considering nuclear war as an abstract question. He might conclude: 'On SIOP Plan One, the decision is affirmative, Communicate the Alpha line XYZ.' Such jargon holds what is involved at a distance. My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, 'George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.' He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home. When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, 'My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgment. He might never push the button.'

Roger Fisher, “Preventing Nuclear War”, 1981.

https://books.google.com/books?id=ygoAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA11&lpg=PA11&dq=roger+fisher+%22my+favorite+activity+is+inventing%22&source=bl&ots=oXglDBurNs&sig=zPMZrcgNZjk4E0itBYOqZOsQAMQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjh64bEsc_VAhUiwYMKHRQ9C5EQ6AEIJTAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

[ashraya]