The Chronology of Water | Official Trailer

This book was a revelation when I first read it in my early 20s. 

I highly recommend the book and have high hopes for Stewart's vision. 

Lidia Yuknavitch's The Small Backs of Children.

Where are the borders of art? 

Where are the borders of a woman's body?
How unimaginable is one without the other?
When we think of violence, are we not aware, as women, of our place within the world of men?
The borders of our body, of our safe spaces, of hostile spaces?

I just finished reading The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch and I am re-committed to my impression of her as a fluid, visceral representation of what it is to write of art, trauma, violence and living a woman's experience.

I was floored when I read her memoir, The Chronology of Water. It's lead me here, to her novel, which kept me as enamored.

It's a novel, yes, but I feel as though the narrative of people and places is secondary to the passages that describe life so astutely. This book features a group of friends, all artists and creators, juxtaposed to a young girl in eastern Europe, orphaned by war and surviving through art, grit, and the persistence of young blood.

There are segments of her book that discuss art and experience, art as expression, as language, as reference point, as both anchor and catalyst. These sections created in me more questions. An infinite amount. Sometimes they fuse with and of the body, and gender and sexuality pour into her writing. Violence as commonplace, as a masculine language and threat. She has a similar juncture in violence, trauma, and women's bodies. One intrinsically stomped onto the other.

Our blood is all over this world.

Our greatest threat is so linked to us.

And of trauma, of death and loss and surviving the horrific, does our tongue split, now able to speak two languages? As if at different frequencies, two languages in parallel.

Yes I understand your desire for me to print this document, to do this grocery shopping, to celebrate this holiday, but do you understand that feeling, the deep rumble that comes from prolonged, wretched pain, where you become diluted by the incessancy of it, and become convinced your threshold makes you the undead, untouchable. Have you known that pain? No? Then we do not speak the same language. But yes, I do enjoy coffee. And yes, the weather has improved.

From page 69:

Who are we in moments of crisis or despair? Do we become deeper, truer selves, or life up and away from self, untethered from regular meanings like moths suddenly drawn toward heat or light? Are we better people when someone might  be dying, and if so, why? Are we weaker, or stronger? Are we beautiful, or abject? Serious, or cartoon? Do we secretly long for death to remind us we are alive?

This actually heavily links to the conversations I've been having with my best friend S regarding HBO's Westworld. There is an awful lot to unpack regarding the nature of trauma. If you have not watched Westworld - do not read anything about it! I went in blind and was able to discover and discuss things as I went and it's been very interesting!

Are our trauma's our cornerstones? 

I'd read something recently about the way in which trauma can root certain pathways in the brain, making it more difficult to adapt or change habits. Isn't this a scientific explanation for what we already know? How our wounds remind us, how old habits die hard? Aren't we creatures of narrative, of story? Isn't the story we hear most often our own?

Yuknavitch also has these really bodied moments, that represent those abstract experiences of being alive and sentient but not fully present in our culture and context. Detached. From page 93:

Then he thinks: love is an abstract word coming from a face hole.

I guess the only alienating bit to Lidia's novel is how it's populated by successful artists. Confident in their art. Monied. That's my alien experience. My unknown. Where art is a work, a calling, and not a form of communication and a way of being, of purging that is necessary.

Lidia Yuknavitch interview.

The Lenny newsletter this week has an interview with Lidia Yuknavitch, whom I love, and whose book the Chronology of Water reached me, and moved me. Mainly because she was using language I understood in a way I'd never experienced before. 

Her interview with Suleika Jaouad is great, I'm basically re-posting most of it here:

Suleika Jaouad: In The Chronology of Water, you wrote: “Aspiration gets stuck in some people. It’s difficult to think yes. Or up.” When did that absence of hope hit you the hardest? 

Lidia Yuknavitch: When my daughter died on the day she was born, a traditional definition of hope was sucked out of my body. I’m not saying I’m proud of this, but it just happened. For me, what became important was learning to breathe again in a way that used regular air. The word aspiration has a breathing sense to it. It dawned on me that we have to breathe and to find reasons to stay alive on our own terms. Sometimes that doesn’t come from what we’ve been told our whole lives. 

I believe in art the way other people believe in God. I’m not trying to make a tricky sentence. It’s just true. I have found reasons to breathe again by living in communities of people who choose self-expression over self-destruction. It’s another way to form hope, without hierarchizing it so that you’re looking up toward a God, or someone smarter or more famous than you are. It’s a lateral definition of hope where you just need each other, and you need to stand up and not leave each other hanging. 

SJ: I think a lot about how much pressure there is to be someone who “suffers well.” There’s a mythology surrounding the “survivor’s story” that can be inspiring to some but can make others feel like they’re suffering the wrong way. 

LY: Boy, I hate that narrative so hard, to be honest. The truth is, suffering sucks and it can take you to a place of wanting to kill yourself, and there’s nothing beautiful about that. Suffering is not beautiful. Suffering, from my point of view, is about a real place in a real body where you face the other side of living. How you choose to understand that story probably determines how you’re going to live the rest of your life. I feel kindred with fellow sufferers, and I don’t ever want to romanticize the story of suffering, because then you’re just playing into making it a good story or a sellable story for a culture. 

SJ: You write with so much rawness and honesty about your life, but I’m interested in the experiences you touch on but choose not to delve into, like the specifics of your father’s abuse and your relationship to drugs and alcohol. How do you decide what to write and not write about? 

LY: You don’t have to read very far into my writing to find those things, but you won’t find them literally represented. There’s no scene of actual sexual abuse by my father in my writing. On the other hand, that sort of paternal sexual violence is threaded through every word I write. It’s as if it’s in the language. It’s in my habit of being. It’s a structure of my consciousness. 

You don’t have to always name the explicitness or literalness of a thing to represent the essence of it to a reader or listener. That’s the reason poetry works and it’s the reason painting works. It’s not explicit. It’s figurative, and it gives you the whole soul-body experience without naming it in a literal sentence. I think the work of art is to push for that so that the reader feels it in their body to be true, whether or not the explicit sentence is there. That’s how I work with material, but I am filled with respect and enthusiasm for people who also represent it explicitly. 

SJ: I think of you as someone who rejects tidy narratives and who doesn’t seem to care about the rules. I’m curious about where your outlaw spirit comes from. 

LY: If there’s one phrase that I should probably tattoo on my forehead it is this: “I’m not the story you made of me.” The more people I can convince to hold that mantra, the more I’ll have been of good use in my life. We don’t have to accept the stories we inherit, the ones that tell us who we’re supposed to be. We can stand up and say no at any point, even if we’ve been saying yes our entire lives. It’s never too late. We can always reject the story placed on top of us, and we can always revise and destroy one story and restore another. It’s a never-ending possibility. 

SJ: What are your best words of advice for fellow misfits and aspiring writers? 

LY: I’m trying to help us remember that we invent our own beauty and our own paths and our own crooked, weird ways of doing things, but that they’re not nothing and they matter, too. We’re the half of culture that doesn’t take the paths that are sitting right in front of us. Our song may be a little off-key, but it’s a kind of beauty, too. I know I’m not the person who thought that up, and I’m not the person who invented that as a truth, but I can sure stand up and help remind us not to give up, that we have a song, too.

She's someone I look up to. She's survived and she's living off her art. That's as much of a win as one can hope for. As I could ever hope for.

Withdrawal: an essay.

I had put aside Surviving Psych Med ​Changes and/or Withdrawal: an essay & guidebook for creative minds to read at a later time (today!). The piece, by Luke B. Goebel stuck out for me, since I have intense dis-associative symptoms when I don't take my medication. I didn't take it for a few days once due to forgetting it while on a weekend away and it was brutal. I had to ask my mom to drive since I was hearing "brain zaps" and couldn't focus. It was something I do not want to re-live.

I recommend reading his piece in its entirety. Writing, when you feel insane seems impossible. Trying to properly express the entirety of how you feel when you're manic or down is hard enough, but the experience of being in some kind of fit is so fragmented that the parts of us that are able to use language are often partially disabled. There's also trying to organise the madness of it all. It seems like a cliché to put it that way, but things that one day came and went through you become absolute certainties you fixate on, to your own detriment. So much of who you are seeps out, and so much of something darker takes its place.

Goebel:

So much of it is living without a healed self, without a celebrated empowered identity or persona as an author or person sharing how they healed. I agonize that I am not a packageable brand of salvation I can sell, a story line of resurrection and overcoming of challenges. A Ted Talk. No, I’m still trying to crystalize meaning. I’m still wild. I’m still healing this sometimes hard-to-handle self. And so are the authors I’ve mentioned, many of them, and yet they have their story sorted. I don’t need that to be resolved today. I need my medication to straighten out. But in this state, everything swirls together into madness.

It's a difficult place to come to and to accept: there is no downhill, it's all uphill. There is no snap back into place, you'll have scars, that part of you will never go back to how it was before. You might have some good days, but you'll never be better. In Goebel's case as a writer, I can see what he's facing. I adored Lidia Yuknavitch's memoir The Chronology of Water. I felt she wrote it to me. It floored me. But in all the memoirs I've read by the mentally ill / on mental health, so many ended with a "and I'm better now" ending. It isn't the norm. Or is it? Am I part of the statistic that's forever afflicted?  Regardless, the completion of a narrative in art is a false god.

What is having a sorted story? Maybe Goebel is talking about it as a narrative, about a story with a clear arc. I know for me, I had this sense that eventually I'd get my shit together and eventually life would be easier. But that's not where I'm at. My realisation is that no, things just evolve into something else. I have the language now, I have some tools, but the struggle is still omnipresent. 

I may not be actively suicidal, but I am always fucking worrying about job security now. Always worried about being able to afford myself, afford a life. I'm tired. It's been uphill and the slope is unforgiving. I am now piecing together what it is I do have, and trying to focus on what it is I do want. How do you learn to live a life within a "normal" set of societal set of rules when there are days of your life you vividly remember wanting nothing more than to burn it all down.

This bit, ooooof:

He didn’t seem interested in my crashing. He gave me a prescription to add to the stack: Neurontin. He told me I might want to decide to get back on my medication at full strength. (It was left up to me!) Every doctor and shrink I have talked to since say it is insane to cut Desipramine in half as a starting point to weaning off the drug. Not insane—dangerous. Extremely dangerous. I smelled burning plastic that wasn’t there. I wept. I felt panic. Every day lasted and lasted for what felt like weeks.

It is beyond me, how we're asked to make life-altering, DANGEROUS decisions while possibly manic or going through some kind of panic or psychosis. WHY DOES IT TAKE THE MENTALLY ILL OF US TO POINT OUT HOW THAT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE. I've documented my own experiences in accessing care, and time and time again I've been dumbstruck by how often we're left to our own devices. 

Read Goebel's piece. 

Lidia Yuknavitch: The beauty of being a misfit.

Great talk.

You see, I'm trying to tell you something about people like me. Misfit people -- we don't always know how to hope or say yes or choose the big thing, even when it's right in front of us. It's a shame we carry.It's the shame of wanting something good. It's the shame of feeling something good. It's the shame of not really believing we deserve to be in the room with the people we admire.

Her book, The Chronology of Water, moved me immeasurably.

Sometimes telling the story is the thing that saves your life.

Check out her talk above.

An okay day.

Today is an average day. Montreal is going through some type of heatwave/humidity party so it's hot as shit everywhere, but other than that it's just an average day.

It's always an odd kind of feeling when I feel okay. I always wonder if this is what the neurologically privileged/neurotypical feel like. Those "normals."

I've been thinking lately about possibly working on something with the people in my life, about how I'm perceived, and my reaction to that. I'm still thinking around it, I would need to think about what my intent is, and where I want to go with it as a piece of writing. I was thinking of it featuring a question/answer format, dispersed between personal stories.

I'm not a writer. but these days I feel my writing has value due to how little I come across from the point of view of someone who is struggling and ill. It's a rarity. It's often written from the point of view of a professional writer, who went through something. It's enclosed. It's a piece in time.

It makes me wonder about what makes a memoir about struggle or stories based in experience interesting. For me, it's usually the prose. That's why I loved Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water. She writes beautifully. I also really enjoyed her voice. Her experience. It just spoke to me. Her resolve. Her grit.

If you have ever fucked up in your life, or if the great river of sadness that runs through us all has touched you, then this book is for you. So thank you for the collective energy it takes to write in the face of culture. I can feel you.

It is for me. I can feel her. Granted, I read this book a while ago, but it left an impression, it really moved me. I plan on re-reading it.

You see it is important to understand how damaged people don't always know how to say yes, or to choose the big thing, even when it is right in front of them. It's a shame we carry. The shame of wanting something good. The shame of not believing we deserve to stand in the same room in the same way as all those we admire. Big red A's on our chests.

Shame has been an ongoing discussion with my new talk-therapy person, Ranjana. I have a session with her later today, and she asked that I prepare by thinking about my relationship with shame, and what I think about it, and when it presents itself. It's almost too much. I can barely even begin to think about it and where it comes from and why it lives in me.

This is something I know: damaged women? We don't think we deserve kindness. IN fact, when kindness happens to us, we go a little berserk. It's threatening. Deeply. Because if I have to admit how profoundly I need kindness? I have to admit that I hid the me who deserves it down in a sadness well.

There's also so unsettling about kindness because it's so - alien. And it's a comfort. And there's always that fear that I'll grow attached, and be disappointed. That it'll give me some relief, and sooth me, and be ripped away. So kindness in trickles, in the kindness of strangers and in smiles and nods, is fine. But true loving kindness is terrifying. It just feels like it could be . . . a trap.