#romanticize ur mental illness 1k866

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

hey russian literature side of tumblr internet, do you know why the three characters in brothers karamazov whom dostoevsky codes as gay (kalganov, smerdyakov, alyosha) are all also coded as autistic? like, is that a Common Thing in old books that i just don’t know about? it makes some sense bc of the whole “same-sex love as narcissism” stereotype (autism as “selfism”), but idr seeing it much outside of dusty

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

no no no, see, ivan’s not going to an ivy league. he got accepted to three of them, but then got such bad impostor syndrome he deliberately flunked his final semester of senior year in hopes they would rescind the acceptance letters. (they still haven’t for some reason, which, hello?? is he invisible? how is this ok?!)

Dostoevsky high school au where

Raskolnikov is the Quiet Kid™️

Mitya is the jock

Grushenka is the queen bee (also a cheerleader)

Nastasya and Aglaya are cheerleaders who hate each other

Dunya is the edgy alt girl

Myshkin is the new kid

Rogozhin is the rebel

Ivan and Katya are the annoying debate kids who you know are going to Ivy Leagues

Razumikhin is the class clown

Verkhovensky is the class president who won the position through questionable means

Stavrogin is the class hottie/psychopath

Alyosha is the geek

Sonya is the nerd

Smerdyakov is the band geek

Luzhin and Svidrigailov are creepy teachers

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

why so little fanart in the brothers karamazov tag??

clockwise from top left corner, we have smerdyakov in magenta; two alyoshas in turquoise; fyodor in maroon; two dmitris in orange; and four ivans (can you guess who’s my favorite?) in navy

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

in the never-written brothers karamazov sequel:

mitya and grushenka strike gold in america, obviously

ivan has a super super pious phase during illness, like m. de charlus in proust (and like zossima’s brother), then relapses into doubts and sin cynicism upon recovery

herzenstube brings nuts for ivan and alyosha

katya discovers she liked showing the whole world she was ivan’s girlfriend a lot better when she thought it would end tragically. but also doesn’t want to give up having him live in her house. he takes up so little space! he’s so quiet and tidy you would never know he’s there

alyosha gets shyer about expressing his religious conviction, and so gradually loses the habit of mind as well (since, after ivan gives it up, no one around him reinforces it)

rakitin writes a muckraking or novelized version of old karamazov’s murder. educated ladies all over russia embroider “team dmitri” pillows, but have yet to meet anyone on team smerdyakov

ivan and alyosha discover secular morality? hopefully??

...apparently, alyosha becomes an atheist and gets martyred for politics. thanks, dusty, that’s just great.

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

christ, when i first read brothers karamazov four years ago i remember being such a grownup about judging each brother from a distance and keeping in mind all their shittinesses rather than just wanting them to be happy and laughing when they do stupid shit and now on this reread my marginal notes are mostly hearts and, whenever ivan shows up, the word “thoughtcrime” framed in goofy little stars

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

...OH WAIT NO that would still entail working on it where someone could see me. never mind!!!

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

however, i should admit,

But do you know, gentlemen, what was the chief point about my spite? Why, the whole point, the real sting of it lay in the fact that continually, even in the moment of the acutest spleen, I was inwardly conscious with shame that I was not only not a spiteful but not even an embittered man, that I was simply scaring sparrows at random and amusing myself by it. I might foam at the mouth, but bring me a doll to play with, give me a cup of tea with sugar in it, and maybe I should be appeased. I might even be genuinely touched, though probably I should grind my teeth at myself afterwards and lie awake at night with shame for months after. That was my way.

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

NOTE TO SELF!!! usedtoitness is the faculty whereby some given element of your illness/disability begins no longer to seem like One More Thing added on top of the giant pile but converges in a single sensation w/ all the other elements of Being Sick Is Hard. it is neither a beautiful ineffectual dream nor a punishment sent to remind you how little excuse you have to exist!--it’s just that convenient blurring around a problem that keeps you from deploring it more often. 

therefore: the only way out of “It’s Always Something” mode is resignation--not this endless parade of self-contempt. you can’t just magically stop being a useless sack of crap but you can stop feeling like one by not caring whether healthysanes regard your way of life as something between real life and death; you know this is possible, because you have done it before. and all this false hope of achieving a more respectable level of functioning just tempts you to torture yourself in pursuit of a goal you wouldn’t even appreciate if you had it! which means PAST YOU WAS RIGHT!!! IT IS NOT WORTH IT TO MAKE SLEEP A LITTLE EASIER! HUMAN NATURE IS UNGRATEFUL AND THERE EXISTS NO FRESHER HELL (wur hur) THAN THE FUCKING INVALID MENTALITY. i am so. damn. tired. of trying to take irreproachable care of myself just because of ill-understood guilt about Not Trying Hard Enough

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

...OH. shit, i just realized. um. here--this is what i meant.

Anger in me is subject to chemical disintegration. You look into it, the object flies off into air, your reasons evaporate, the criminal is not to be found, the wrong becomes not a wrong but a phantom, something like the toothache, for which no one is to blame, and consequently there is only the same outlet left again--that is, to beat the wall as hard as you can. So you give it up with a wave of the hand because you have not found a fundamental cause. And try letting yourself be carried away by your feelings, blindly, without reflection, without a primary cause, repelling consciousness at least for a time; hate or love, if only not to sit with your hands folded. The day after tomorrow, at the latest, you will begin despising yourself for having knowingly deceived yourself. Result: a soap-bubble and inertia.

thanks, dostoevsky ol’ pal.

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

yesterday when discussing uncle vanya my professor pointed out (as something both nice and thematically important) how whenever anyone in the play asks whether serebryakov’s really ill or just making a big deal out of nothing other characters simply and non-defensively respond that no no, he really is ill. i suppose it’s assimilationist &c. of me to care about this but i’m so glad i’m not the only person for whom that meant something

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

because “the alleged ‘sensitivity’ of neurotic people is matched by their egotism” i enjoy werther’s absolute horror of cranky people, also, since i know i share it. it’s nice when you can watch people do the same stupid shit you do all the time and regard this fondly rather than finding it despicable??? and since he’s a fictional character it’s so easy just to feel sorry for werther, since you can tell he only despises Negative People because he’s trying to leave that phase behind. fiction is a great place to put extra pity! every time i think about the difference between real sensitivity and sentimentality* i’ll get all ready to despise myself for possessing only the Refined Cruelty of the latter and then think “well yeah—refined out of existence.” vicarious self-pity’s a pretty good use for art. not sure what werther’s contempt of cranks means to accomplish in the book, tho?—like, how far goethe stands above that decision. i don’t know that he means to posit this contempt as symptomatic of the unsuccess of werther’s determined optimism; i just hope he does, because w/out that i can’t like his advice.

*see the above-cited proust line, ha. proust is excellent on this subject (esp. in volume 5) but since 2015 the guy who really haunts my ass about it is nabokov, for what he said about dostoevsky’s obsession with murder. nabokov is ableist as hell on dostoevsky. uuuuunfortunately however, instead of enabling me to dismiss his opinion, the accusation dostoevsky was too neurotic for his observations about human nature to mean anything for normal people just makes it more distressing for me to know that the rest of the time nabokov’s right about him. i wish that was impossible!

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

always so refreshing to return to dostoevsky, among whose characters the average life-story is "anyway so then i did this that and the other self-destructive thing, broke up w/ my s/o because pretending to be stable enough to keep up a relationship got too hard, and then went to bed for a month"

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

hhhh ok have some agonized thinking aloud about how scary i find “proof of creation revised and corrected” in the mouth of a hypochondriac martyr like joly??

oh but uh i should probably mention this post doesn’t rly differentiate btwn semi-volitional martyrdom as that of les amis and #suicidal ideation (though marius’ canonical equation of these does not come up)

i think it’s been long enough since i last had a les mis phase that i… have never unpacked (even to myself) how scary that line is; the last time i reread les mis i was still. in that mode where i could (and would) insistently interpret things said by/about a fictional character who resembles myself in a positive light in order to see that as not-upsetting but jesus fucking christ “proof of creation revised and corrected” means god made mice then was like wait shit this is too many mice i will have to kill some of them. which like yes, it is necessary for that to happen for nature to work. i do know this. but, u know. natural selection is not a god, and a mouse being eaten by a cat does not contain a moral diagnosis by the universe of all mice as deterrents to progress, and obviously joly does not even know what natural selection is because his fellow 23 y/o med student-hypo, viz. charlie darwin, was still on the beagle in ‘32, but. les mis was published in 1862 to origin of species’ -59.

which is not even the point; i care ssssoooo very little about vh’s opinions on natural selection, and re les amis it’s largely pointless to wonder what exactly he meant by such and such a trait since like… as i have said before, joly has 18 lines and his appearances in the book are so few and far between that i sometimes wonder how much vh even Remembered From whichever relevant Last Time each time he included joly in a scene; my point is just. that this is the nail in the coffin re how creepy i find? hypochondriac revolutionary? as a concept??? since like the implication of “creation revised and corrected” is. shigalovism, “hundred million heads”*—that if u gotta kill some people to make the world less shitty for other people, Oh Well—and it’s?? strange n interesting and seems kinda telling. for that to coexist with a granted idiosyncratic but presumably ex-catholic idea of creation; it’s very cognitive dissonance, because. the only relevant “proofs of creation revised and corrected” courtesy that weirdo THAT COME TO MIND ANYWAY (not that jesus was real big on proof what w/ the whole second temptation thing BUT, LEAVING THAT ASIDE FOR THE MOMENT) are 1. ok bad plan humans can’t live to be 900 anymore let’s do 70 instead, m. gillenormand notwithstanding and 2. Motherfuckin Miracles, which are generally not of the hundred million heads variety in that usually their unstated moral is don’t kill people. like granted it is Not Hard to be ex-catholic and slobber over the concept of martyring yourself in spite of the hundred million geologic layers of cognitive dissonance involved WHICH THE GUY MIGHTA SEEN COMING RLY tho see above re second temptation but. my point is. that the idea of trying to console urself for ur vague unnameable original sin guilt about going against [presumably-catholic] foundational assumption. by seeing mouse-death as the universe giving u implicit permission to create a better world by, u know, killin n dying? is already creepy as hell, esp for a nervous merry weak generally mouse-like person like joly, and that’s before u remember that. if a 23 thru 27-year-old is terrified of illness but totally down w/ bein a martyr those things probably proceed from the same premise, namely fear of his existence being pointless or pernicious, which puts me more or less On His Side implicitly anyway since it’s such a disabled prerogative but like. really, joly? u hate yourself that much that the only way you can “revise and correct” yourself is, u know: sexy death? like it just creeps me out to finally acknowledge that joly’s hypochondria exists in necessary relation to his belief and wish to participate in violent revolution: that both are about believing not everyone deserves to live and that he himself only does so conditionally.

*this is a dostoevsky reference sorry; i would not normally use this literary-personal 2x combo inscrutable metonym in a tumblr post about les mis but i am doing so today 1. in an icee straw kazoo capacity of wanting to Think Aloud but also 2. because dostoevsky invariably associated his fear of violent revolution w/ his being disabled [neurodivergent + chronically ill], so that reading virtually any other 19th-century opinion on the subject tends to creep me out on his behalf. cf. this post, if u like.

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

Before time was, by some decree which I could never make out, I was predestined ‘to deny’ and yet I am genuinely good-hearted and not at all inclined to negation. ... Well, they’ve chosen their scapegoat; they’ve made me write the column of criticism and so life has been made possible. We understand that comedy; I, for instance, simply ask for annihilation. No, live, I am told, for there’d be nothing without you. If everything in the universe were sensible, nothing would happen. There would be no events without you, and there must be events. So against the grain I serve to produce events and do what’s irrational because I am commanded to. For all their indisputable intelligence, men take this farce as something serious, and that is their tragedy. They suffer, of course... But then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of life? Life would be transformed into an endless church service: it would be holy, but tedious. But what about me? I suffer, but still, I don’t live. I am x in an indeterminate equation. I am a sort of phantom in life who has lost all beginning and end, and who has even forgotten his own name.

dostoevsky you have positively roasted me by giving these lines to the devil

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

OK!!! saint-loup. it is saint-loup o’clock. i do not have these thoughts well formulated so this might get kinda long n messy but i promised myself i’d Talk This Out w/ myself on this reading, so. icee straw kazoo.

ok so saint-loup is the narrator’s friend tho like... to the extent this term is applicable in friendships m’s kinda The Unrequiter, often exhibits w/out expressly saying that he feels kinda guilty for Using Him or at least for like. not being able to match the energy saint-loup brings to the relationship. in fact the main thing he consistently notices in saint-loup is energy, strength. but also solicitude! which combination to me seems weird? i’m fond of saint-loup but he makes me uncomfortable, i think bc while, on one hand, his slightly sophomoric intellectualism and nervous quickness and tendency to be officiously solicitous*--which 3 traits m associates w/ saint-loup’s ability to assimilate quickly (3.98, 153)--all remind me of me, and also of many people i’ve known, but then...? on the other hand, i have never seen those traits (esp. solicitude) in a strong person; saint-loup is passive-aggressive and i have only ever observed that demeanor in weak people--most of them sick, bats and/or non-men; certainly not in a straight-passing man (as saint-loup does at this time) if he’s also healthysane--since passive-aggression is so. roundabout, and mind-over-matter &c. like. all the things i have in common w/ saint-loup are traits i’ve developed because i’m not a man, not straight, not neurotypical, not strong, u know? and certainly these traits are ones people like me are supposed to dislike in ourselves, but i find that recognizing them in someone usually makes me more comfortable around them, because... well, you know. because the ways in which we’d be likely to hurt each other are basically the same?

meanwhile early in volume 3 you get this scene where saint-loup introduces m to a bunch of his friends, all adorably over-eager to Show Off m’s intellect, make sure he makes a good impression, and

“No? You don’t agree about Stendhal?” he went on, with a naïve confidence in my judgment which found expression in a charming, smiling, almost childish glance of interrogation from his green eyes. “Oh, good! I see you’re on my side. ... The Chartreuse is after all a stunning work, don’t you think? I’m so glad you agree with me. What is it you like best in the Chartreuse? Answer me,” he urged with boyish impetuosity. And the menace of his physical strength made the question almost terrifying. (136)

N.B. THO that here and elsewhere m fuckin glories in that strength. here, for example:

My departure depressed me less when I was no longer obliged to think of it alone, when I felt that the more normal and healthy exertions of my energetic friends, of Robert’s brothers-in-arms, were being applied to what was to be done (179)

but also, before we even GET to rachel:

“I’m furiously jealous,” Saint-Loup said to me, half laughing, half in earnest, alluding to the interminable conversations apart which I had been having with his friend. “Is it because you find him more intelligent than me? Do you like him better than me? Ah, well, I suppose he’s everything now, and no one else is to have a look in!” (Men who are enormously in love with a woman, who live in a society of woman-lovers, allow themselves pleasantries which others, seeing less innocence in them, would never dare to contemplate.) (153)

idk, like. i’ve had multiple people talk that way to me? but i possess what almost seems like an “only we can say it” sentiment about it--only people who don’t pass for straight men, maybe, or only weak people, neurotics. and saint-loup has that entire demeanor he seems to think he’s entitled to it as an intellectual or maybe just picks it up from m and rachel but it’s weird on people whose intellectualism does not compensate for frailty of body and/or “willpower,” idk. he does the fuckin... what do i mean, um. OH!--i associate his flirtatious self-deprecation w/ the thing women do in victorian books and in old movies; the thing lizaveta nikolaevna does in demons when she asks what’s his face whether he’d still wanna hang if she broke her leg. and possibly i’m wrong to see saint-loup’s comments as the outpost of a similar thing? but

“You know,” I said, “I did come to say good-bye to you the day I left Doncières. I’ve never had a chance to mention it. I waved to you in the street.”

“Don’t speak about it,” he replied, “I was so sorry. I passed you just outside the barracks, but I couldn’t stop because I was late already. I assure you I felt quite wretched about it.” (233)

haha yeah no i don’t think i’m wrong. so maybe it’s like the last few days’ irritation at hearing my mom employ the detached, bodily-self-contemptuous infodump tone i often use irl to talk about My Limitations--sitting like i do then, w/ that buzzardy hunch as though to tell a secret, and w/ the same aporetic expression--without having also to euphemize, circumlocute, pause and screw up her face and twist her wrist around for long intervals, blushing, trying to think of a less self-flattering [vulnerable] word for what she means, like i would in that situation. but i think it’s... also that i’m uncomfortable on m’s and rachel’s behalf? that in order not to intimidate or seem to condescend he adopts a piece of their demeanor that makes him look harmless. because like. another way in which saint-loup attempts to Regain His Dignity (or at least vent frustration) during his fight w/ rachel is that when the journalist w/ the cigar refuses to put it out, um,

“Would you mind, sir, throwing away your cigar? The smoke is bad for my friend.” [...]

“There’s no rule against smoking that I know of,” said the journalist. “If people aren’t well, they have only to stay at home.” [...]

“In any case, sir, you are not very civil,” observed Saint-Loup to the journalist, still in a mild and courteous tone, with the air of appraisal of a man judging retrospectively the rights and wrongs of an incident that is already closed. (239-40)

and see THIS IS ME this is exactly how i act when i’m angry at someone in public (incl. or maybe esp. if that someone is myself ha), fuckin carrying on another conversation in the background as proof ur Still Sane, BUT THEN

[A]fter the courteous words that he had just uttered, he brought down his hand with a resounding smack upon the journalist’s cheek. (240)

AND LIKE?? i don’t think this would creep me out nearly so much if the pretext (tho obv not the reason) for it weren’t. an ableist comment. “If people aren’t well, they have only to stay at home.” but i’ve more than once gotten angry w/ someone, chewed someone out, for saying something ableist to my friend (tho in the case that comes to mind the comment could be applied to me as well), and in my experience that kind of vicarious anger is?? because you know your friend’s upset about it but don’t know what to say to help them, so you resent the perp for showing you your own impotence, for distracting your and your friend’s attention from more important things w/ their needless judgmental bs. and THAT makes sense here? but without those other layers--of 1. “this insult implicates me also” and 2. “you have upset my friend and therefore obliged me to Avenge them since i don’t know how to make them feel better”--it’s... weird. it’s just so Not His Fight i guess, and. i’ve actually written a similar scene, too? in which case some of the interest was in like... the assumption by stronger people that we’ll be flattered to see them use their greater strength in defense of Our Honor, when. no, saint-loup; that’s a nonsensical n paternalistic pretext to vent ur own unrelated anger? m neither needs nor wants a healthy person to punish ableists’ contempt of his ill health? and in fact it’s embarrassing in the first place when ppl respond to our not making a fuss by making the fuss for us?? blugh! i don’t know. i can point out so many gross things about this but still am not satisfied i have identified The Thing About It that makes me so uncomfortable; maybe it’s just because at the same time i do understand both m’s fetishistic admiration of saint-loup’s strength and aristocratic solicitude and saint-loup’s paternalism itself. i’ve been on both sides, tho without the... punching. thing, ha. on that note:

Now that to the measured conversations of the diplomats, to the smiling arts of peace, had succeeded the furious onthrust of war, since blows lead to blows, I should not have been surprised to see the combatants wading in one another’s blood. ... Fortunately the journalist who, staggering back from the violence of the blow, had turned pale and hesitated for a moment, did not retaliate. (240-1)

M OH MY GOD ur purely academic understanding of How Fights Work! sees a guy 2 whose general opinion on violence he defers punch someone n is just like “well, shit, this is it, we’re all gonna die” fdlahgsdf ur......my favorite, and also, same, but possibly this is a mistake we both oughta quit making. Fuckin Liberals &c. &c.

*appropriate since he’s a sergeant!! but what i mean is e.g. when rachel (his gf w/ whom he needs to break up) makes him feel small in public saint-loup will then try to get back some dignity by turning to m like “You oughtn’t to stand about in the cigar smoke like that, it’ll make you ill” (3.237). it’s like what i said yesterday about my own solicitude--that it’s about liking to feel useful, liking for there to be a subject on which you know what to say. but it’s jarring to me to see this sense of return to familiar ground detached from same-feeling--to see the “useless person’s dream come true” phenomenon in a situation where saint-loup has no obvious reason to consider himself an expert other than his general aristocratic + busybodyish(!!!) tendency to anticipate people’s interests, to want to Know Everything about his friends.

[makeroomforthejolyghost]

i know i’ve quoted this before in a different context but like

You look into it, the object flies off into air, your reasons evaporate, ... and consequently there is only the same outlet left again–that is, to beat the wall as hard as you can. So you give it up with a wave of the hand because you have not found a fundamental cause. And try letting yourself be carried away by your feelings, blindly, without reflection, without a primary cause, repelling consciousness at least for a time; hate or love, if only not to sit with your hands folded. The day after tomorrow, at the latest, you will begin despising yourself for having knowingly deceived yourself. Result: a soap-bubble and inertia.

there. that’s my gender. “the legitimate fruit of consciousness.” i’m the underground... man. sort of