Bookmarker tag: project/panopticon-diaries (29 notes)

Consider, for instance, the pros and cons list. I wrote it at the kitchen table on a gray afternoon, as naturally and casually as a shopping list. Transcribing the circular thoughts that had become fixtures in my brain, I put Aaron’s good and bad qualities in two columns. They were around the same length. The pros lavished praise on his tender heart—“generous,” “sensitive,” “affectionate,” “sense of comfort,” “always on my side.” The cons were mostly different ways of pointing out our incompatible interests: “we sometimes have nothing to talk about,” “doesn’t read.” And then, one vague entry, covered over with scribbles: “bad place with sex.”

Aaron found the list one day in our protracted post-breakup period, when, amid the rage and its rebound into knee-jerk intimacy, there was also a deluge of mundane tasks to do, like going through a bunch of boxes together and divvying up the items. When the paper fluttered out, he scanned the list, unsurprised by its content (we’d talked about all these issues to death), but flabbergasted by the date.

“Twenty thirteen?” he exclaimed. “You stayed with me for three more years after this?”

“There were just as many pros as cons,” I replied weakly. But I knew what he was thinking: Why did this woman stay with me for so long if she was clearly miserable?

I realize I was brought up to be the person others wanted me to be, so that they would like me and not be bothered by my presence.

That person was not me.

When I began to be me, I felt that I had more to give.

Life was richer.

I am trying to eliminate all the bad conscience caused by things of no significance that stand in the way of what I really believe in.

Nora says to Helmer: “But I have lived only to be your plaything. And you wanted it that way.”

I love Nora. She is beautiful, and perfectly drawn by Ibsen.

Her need to be accepted. Her fear of presenting herself as she really is.

A woman who says one thing and means something quite different. Who wants to be friends with, and liked by, everyone. Who exclaims, “Don’t be angry with me!” the moment she senses she might have said something that could offend. And who all the while lives her secret life, and with strength and determination conducts financial transactions (unusual for a woman in those days) in order to save her husband’s life.

This woman, who uses and manipulates those around her while at the same time wanting to help and love them, refuses to do something she feels is morally repugnant to her when the decisive moment comes. It is beyond her imagination to conceive of exploiting the situation when Dr. Rank declares his love and begs to give her the money she so badly needs.

Like Helmer, Nora is one of society’s victims. She behaves in a way one would expect of a woman, of a wife, of a doll child.

She plays her part just as Helmer plays his. Neither of them gives the other a chance, because they are always in service to the other’s role.

When she finally sees, she also understands that the anger she feels over everything that is false between them is directed just as much against herself as against him. Her responsibility was as great as his. She hopes that the change will also take place in him—not for her sake, but for his own.

Not because he is threatened by a new Nora, who shows a strength he doesn’t comprehend, and which frightens him, but because he has discovered a new human beirfg whose motives he may learn to understand.

I believe that Nora’s most beautiful declaration and act of love is leaving her husband.

I called Clara and told her I’d like to come see her, and she invited me to lunch, but we didn’t set a day. I said how grateful I was for what she’s doing for us, I repeated, “Let’s hope for the best.” She said that in reality she didn’t have much hope, but that I shouldn’t discourage Michele, because she was still intending to try several paths. “The script has an interesting beginning, don’t you think?” I answered vaguely. I didn’t want to confess that I don’t know anything about it. “Of course,” Clara continued, “it all has to be rewritten, but as it’s been corrected, it might work. The plot, of course, is very dark, very risqué.” I said, “Yes … yes … ” “That’s also its strength, its attraction, I don’t deny it,” she observed. “That man who says he’s a different person to every woman is very successful. And then when he goes to the street with the prostitutes, and the following scene, when he comes home and there’s his wife, who says, ‘I kept dinner warm for you’ … There are wonderful ideas, a great film could be made. But I’m afraid it won’t work, no producer is courageous enough. I advised Michele to lighten it, but he says it’s impossible and ultimately he’s not wrong. Its character is really in that fever, that sexual obsession.” Then she said, “Too bad,” and added that Michele would have had a lot of talent for the cinema, and repeated, “Too bad.”

When Michele came home I didn’t tell him I’d talked to Clara.

I want to tell the truth, confess that the moment Guido asked me to go to Venice, I had decided to accept. I’ve never had the candor to admit it, even in this diary. Otherwise, I would have to acknowledge that the effort I made to forget myself for twenty years has been in vain. I succeeded until the moment when, hidden under my coat, I carried home this shiny black notebook like a bloodsucker. Everything started then; even the change in my relations with Guido began the day I admitted I could hide something from my husband, even if it was a notebook. I wanted to be alone, to write; and those who want to be enveloped in their own solitude, in a family, always carry in themselves the seed of sin. In fact, because of these pages, everything seems different, even what I feel for Guido. I blame his money for the weaknesses that I can’t overcome or accept. I want to delude myself that an outside force drives me to betray my duties, I don’t dare confess that I love him. I really think that the strongest feeling in me is cowardice.

The writer Catherine Lacey once brilliantly described the difficulty of writing about experiences you’re still living as “trying to make a bed while you’re still in it,” but as I read Garner’s diaries, I kept thinking that perhaps not every bed needs to be made. Sometimes we want the unmade beds, with messy sheets and sprawled-out bodies stretching and spooning, the fossils of curled hairs on the pillow, the faint salt of dried sweat.

Far from reading like B-roll footage, these diaries feel magnificent and sui generis, beholden to no rhythms or logic but their own, simultaneously seductive and staggering, a blend of pillow talk, bar gossip, and eavesdropping on therapy. They offer an intoxicating, astute account of the deep emotional movements of Garner’s life over two decades—two marriages and divorces, the flowering of her literary career, and her daughter’s coming-of-age—but they always live in the weeds, built of the grain and texture of her days. No small part of their brilliance stems from their faith that there is no meaningful separation between these realms of inquiry: that reckoning with human purpose and the anguished possibilities of human love always happens within, and not above, the realm of “trivial” daily experience. Which is to say: in their form as well as their content, they reveal where meaning dwells in our lives (everywhere), and how we might excavate it. “In my heart,” Garner has said, “I always liked my diary better than anything else I wrote.”

What is the point of this diary? There is always something deeper, that I don’t write, even when I think I’m saying everything.

V’s proprietary tone when he speaks of the high priests of European literature—‘Yes, they are peculiar titles,’ he says about Canetti’s autobiography—reminds me of the German poet who boasted to me about how he had once sat up all night reading Chekhov’s letters. As if no one else had ever done this.

After dinner the waiter brought L the wrong coffee, was corrected, went away. Time passed. He realised he’d been forgotten and from that moment the evening was lost. He went dark and stiff with rage. Anger spread into the air around him. A grille clanged down between him and the world. I panicked. All the air went out of me. I felt my face drop on its bones. He noticed and said, ‘What’s up?’ I said, in a small voice, ‘I feel sad. And scared.’ ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I just hate it when things like that happen, when people treat you like—’ I wanted to say, ‘He doesn’t scorn you, or hate you—he just made a mistake.’ But his whole ego was bound up in it. My own iron grille came down. I missed the chance to level with him. From then on we were both deep in reticence but keeping the superficial intimacy going. In the morning, a shyness. I like him. I envy his beauty and I hate the way it distorts his life. He is all split and troubled; and his loneliness is as bad as mine. We would wear each other out.

I see that what I am doing, in this diary, is conducting an argument with myself, about these two men, and myself, and men in general.

H: ‘Let’s take out hospital insurance.’

V: ‘Why.’

Pause.

H: ‘I’ve got an idea. Let’s agree not to ask each other why in that aggressive way. Could we avoid that tone? Do you think? For the New Year?’

V: ‘Why is one of the most important words in the language. It’s an absolutely crucial word. It’s a much better word than Let’s.’

Short silence.

H: ‘Do we have to be in competition all the time?’

He makes out he doesn’t know, can’t imagine what I mean. I point out his placing of why and let’s in opposition. He acts as if he’s amazed by this ridiculous suggestion.

I offered to go right back and expunge all—or all unfavourable—mentions of him. He looked sceptical. I said it would be a distortion, but that I’d do it if it was necessary. I also offered not to mention him any more, except procedurally. I said it was the first time I’d had to make a decision between being a writer and being married. He laughed and said I was overstating it. I said I didn’t think I was. This morning we spoke further about it. He expressed his revulsion again, but said he felt ‘awkward’ about seeming to ‘demand self-censorship’ from me. He said I should write an account of this disagreement, and then continue to write as before. This to me is not quite right. But I don’t know what I ought to do instead.

It would be a ridiculous distortion not to write about him at all. There’s no way he’ll ever understand that writing about my life is the only thing that makes it possible for me to live it. I can’t (or won’t) give it up. And I won’t burn the notebooks or leave instructions for them to be burnt when I die: this last is where he’s putting the pressure on. Actually I feel real sympathy for him. It must be awful to know his life is being reported through my eyes. It would be awful to be married to me.

I don’t know what she would make of this but here’s what I think happened: I wanted so much to be loved that I tried to turn myself into the sort of woman I thought I would have to be, in order to be lovable. In the process I falsified myself, lost part of my soul, made myself sick with swallowed rage; I connived, I enabled; and I allowed him to set hard into worse versions of the misogyny he already felt: the little tin god, the artist as superior being whose needs must be met, no matter what it costs or who pays.

In other words, it’s not all his fault.

The Polish philosopher, on the phone: ‘Let’s say you decided to leave V. What would be holding you back?’

Long pause. I walk through our life, as it were room by room. It is very bare.

‘In my heart I know I have to leave. But I’m hanging on. Because I’ve got this terrible need for him to tell me the truth. And because I’m scared.’

‘What of?’

Longer pause.

‘Failure. This is my third marriage. Fear of my failure to sustain intimacy. To sustain a relationship.’

‘Intimacy,’ she says, ‘has to go both ways. And the aim of a relationship is not to sustain the relationship.’

The more I read and watched, the more I wondered what I was doing. What did I need from these stories, or more to the point, what was I avoiding? What feeling or action did they allow me to replace? I believed everything I saw, even though I knew it wasn’t real, or even meant to be interpreted as real. I had a precipitous gullibility that I indulged, allowing myself a passive but committed dive headfirst into a narrative, or a character, or an end. No matter how often these concepts disappointed me by being exactly what they were (narrow, for one; embarrassing as a posture to adopt in real life, for another), I still held out a little hope. Maybe I just hadn’t found the right one yet.

In lots of fiction, divorce is not so much a genre as it is an event. Ending a marriage can be a plot point in a tragedy or farce or any combination of the qualities that make both; it can be romantic or dramatic, tearful or a celebration. On the other hand, there is clearly a small yet prominent kind of divorce narrative that could be called its own genre. The conventional marriage plot reminds us that love stories end with a wedding. Heartbreak stories have slightly more flexibility. They can begin or end with a divorce, or the question of separation can be the conflict that drives the entire story. But I do think that over time a clearer pattern emerges, one that intertwines the question of whether people define the law or the law defines people. Traveling backward from Levy and Gilbert, the contemporaries of divorce writing, to the gossipy novels of the 1970s and the bleak suburban despair of 1950s novels, I sense something that connects them together. I see the same in the glossiness of modern divorce movies that come alongside the pained dramas that reference custody battles or infidelities or other betrayals, to the grainy film stock of auteurs and independents, to the stark black-and-white depictions of toothy dialogue in the comedies of remarriage or the grayscale yearnings of Hays Code–era melodramas. It is a genre that knows blame without fully accepting it, a fiction that says: you cannot possibly fault me for telling you this, because either I have been honest or I have been right.

Most of the movies that we had both seen were divorce movies. Since my husband had moved out six months before, I had been watching and rewatching anything about breakups, endings, affairs—allegorical or realistic, romances and tragedies, I often described these evenings as though I was self-programming a divorced woman’s film festival.

I knew what I was doing here. I even joked about it, suggesting to other people going through breakups that they redirect their hurt and sorrow into organizing their workplace. Into programming a film festival about their experience. Anywhere else but as something kept inside. The night before we were all laid off, I prepared myself for my last bargaining session to negotiate severance, and then I sat on the edge of my bed and wept—really wept—about everything for long enough until it all became a feeling as large and hopeless as nothing.

One night I watched Take This Waltz, a movie directed by Sarah Polley, filmed near the street I used to live on. The movie has that feeling of an afternoon when everyone is on their front porches, watching the neighborhood drama and everything that can happen on a residential sidewalk. A marriage ends, a love affair begins. I worried the movie would make me too sad, as though recognizing where I once lived was too dangerous. Instead it made me feel the opposite of homesick. I was grateful for how far away I was from what I was seeing.

I was reminded of Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of the class dynamics in his chosen comedies of remarriage. He thought that wealth had to remain a given for at least one character: not because the working or middle class can’t spend time inside their sadness, but because their days don’t have the time to maintain the same dedicated interest in it. “This is why our films must on the whole take settings of unmistakable wealth,” he wrote. “The people in them have the leisure to talk about human happiness, hence the time to deprive themselves of it unnecessarily.” A movie or book about that sadness in between shifts would have so many smaller revelations, the single moments alone and unremarked on, but no less deeply felt. Like when I, on one workday, turned the corner in the hallway of my office kitchen and felt myself to be so completely grateful to be divorced. What would that have looked like? Like any other day, which it was.

can’t imagine what it would be like to be together without having children in front of you, it just sounds like a big blank. What are you going to do, travel? To see what? What would you be moving toward? What else would you be living for? Sex? Companionship? Being? Without the forward straining what is there to give you urgency? Just an inevitable end to everything? I’m talking too much, I don’t know why it’s irking me the way it is that she doesn’t want children, who cares, what is it to me? Plenty of my friends and patients don’t want them and it doesn’t put me in this state.

It occurs to me that maybe I’m the one who doesn’t want them.

Love isn’t about straining toward something, she says. Other people try to move you forward. And then I never think I love anyone enough to want to tie myself to them for all eternity, Clémentine says. It never feels like enough. But at the same time once I commit I have trouble leaving. Or at least I’ve had trouble in the past. I worry I might marry the wrong person merely because I couldn’t leave them.

[...] It really feels like things might be changing, like we might actually have a chance at changing the law. (The more he sits there, rigid, the angrier I get. It seems to me, with Henry sitting beside me, still angry that I dared to buy a paper he doesn’t like, that it is men like him who might actually be the problem: officially supportive, but inwardly seething.) I also haven’t forgotten the jokes he made about the three hundred and forty-three women who signed the manifesto saying they’d had abortions but no doubt about it if I got pregnant he’d waste no time finding out what we’d have to do to get rid of it. There is so much he shuts himself off to, because it threatens the way he understands the world; but even Max, who is worldly enough not to confuse ego and politics, is blinkered, doesn’t understand what women are telling him, the body of work we are founding. He doesn’t see that his revolution is incomplete as long as he and men like him are the ones writing it. (I brought this up at our meeting last week and we had to stay an hour later than usual, everyone had something to say about it. I came home late and Henry wouldn’t speak to me, lord knows where he thought I was. Some of the girls were talking about joining Halimi’s group Choisir, if I thought I could pay the dues without Henry finding out I would.)

On the way home I think about my feelings of envy for Claude. I want a baby, but do I really want to be in her place? In her chic suburb with her asshole husband? Still, I do, I envy her. She’s secure enough to do it, in spite of her asshole husband, she is her own supporting wall. That is what I envy. It’s not that she has a perfect life or marriage, it’s that she feels sufficient unto herself. She says she’s going to keep studying, no matter what Jibé thinks, that even if it takes her longer she’ll finish her degree, she’ll do her internships, she’ll be a therapist. She’ll keep coming to our group. The answer is never the husband, she tells me, the group is the answer.

I think maybe I chose wrong, that I followed the heat of those early days into a marriage too quickly, without being sure we wanted the same things. Henry doesn’t want a baby. He is still a baby himself, he says. And I know I can’t argue with that. He goes off to the club with Jibé in Jibé’s hot little two-seater, I know all about it, it’s the source of much frustration for Claude, how are they supposed to get around with a baby when there’s nowhere to put it? He just laughs at her and says he’ll buy her a station wagon, and then she smacks him in the face, because he wants to turn her into a maman, in her unwieldy family vehicle, while he gets to zip around town, a single guy to all appearances, zip to work she says, zip to the club, unzip whatever it is he’s unzipping, zip home again, zip zip zip. He is so modern.

The change from the girlish, charming wife to the radical, courageous heroine setting out alone has always been a perturbation. Part of the trouble is that we do not think, and actresses and directors do not think, the Nora of the first acts, the bright woman — with her children, her presents, her nicknames, her extravagance, her pleasure in the thought of “heaps of money” — can be a suitable candidate for liberation. No, that role should by rights belong to the depressed, child-less, loveless Mrs. Linde and her lonely drudgery. The truth is that Nora has always been free; it is all there in her gaiety, her lack of self-pity, her impulsiveness, her expansive, generous nature. And Nora never for a moment trusted Helmer. If she had done so she would long ago have told him about her troubles.

The habit is to play Nora too lightly in the beginning and too heavily in the end. The person who has been charming in Acts 1 and 2 puts on a dowdy traveling suit in Act 3 and is suddenly standing before you as a spinster governess. If the play is to make sense, the woman who has decided to leave her husband must be the very same woman we have known before. We may well predict that she will soon be laughing and chattering again and eating her macaroons in peace, telling her friends — she is going back to her hometown — what a stick Helmer turned out to be. Otherwise her freedom is worth nothing. Nora’s liberation is not a transformation, but an acknowledgment of error, of having married the wrong man. Her real problem is money — at the beginning and at the end. What will she live on? What kind of work will she do? Will she get her children back? Who will be her next husband? When the curtain goes down it is only the end of Volume One.

In the year leading up to calling off my wedding, I often cried or yelled or reasoned or pleaded with my fiancé to tell me that he loved me. To be nice to me. To notice things about how I was living.

One particular time it was because I had put on a favorite red dress for a wedding. I exploded from the bathroom to show him. He stared at his phone. I wanted him to tell me I looked nice, so I shimmied and squeezed his shoulders and said: “You look nice! Tell me I look nice!” He said: “I told you that you looked nice when you wore that dress last summer. It’s reasonable to assume I still think you look nice in it now.”

Another time he gave me a birthday card with a sticky note inside that said BIRTHDAY. After giving it to me, he explained that because he hadn’t written in it, the card was still in good condition. He took off the sticky and put the unblemished card into our filing cabinet.

I need you to know: I hated that I needed more than this from him. There is nothing more humiliating to me than my own desires. Nothing that makes me hate myself more than being burdensome and less than self-sufficient. I did not want to feel like the kind of nagging woman who might exist in a sit-com.

[...] 'My God!' he said to himself with a sharp feeling of anxiety. 'How ignorant we really are!' He read a great deal, but he had little real knowledge excepting in the field of literature. And even in literature ... Until now it hadn't bothered him — no need for any specialized knowledge to fight in the Resistance or to found a clandestine newspaper. He had believed that that was the way it would continue to be. Obviously he had been wrong. What is an opinion? What is an idea? What power do words have? On whom? And under what circumstances? If you publish a newspaper, you have to be able to answer those questions. And what with one thing leading to another, you eventually question everything. 'You have to decide in ignorance,' Henri said to himself. 'Even Dubreuilh often acts blindly — Dubreuilh, with all his learning.' Henri sighed; he was unable to resign himself to this defeat. There are degrees of ignorance, and the simple fact was that he was particularly ill-equipped for the political life. 'Well, I'll just have to start working at it,' he said to himself. But if he really wanted to extend his knowledge, it would require years of study. Economics, history, philosophy — he would never be done with it! What a job! And all that just to come to terms with Marxism!

Ever since I started keeping my diary of remorse, my remorse has evaporated. The answer to a personality problem or spiritual malaise is to keep a diary of it because then the quantity you are quantifying seems to disappear. Therefore I should go on to keep a diary of other troubling quantities. Such as Diary of Lassitude, Lack of Motivation, Failure to Act, etc.

Well, I’m so broke I’m overdrawn at the bank and it makes me very nervous, especially since I don’t know when the check from the P. G. & E. [cover] is coming in, and I’m just really broke.

This weekend I gained 3 pounds. Friday was Daddy’s birthday so I ate Chinese chicken and cake. Joe Pailburn came to perk me up and, oh, and he kissed my feet. I nearly died.

I saw Neil on Thursday and fell for another of those 15-minute things, so I figured it would be best to get the fuck out of the house for a spell.

I am pretty tired from all the society and haven’t had a chance to read anything. This week I’m staying home and trying to figure out good ideas for collages.

What else. Neil called last night and said that I put him uptight and he really wanted things to be natural and flow. I said why didn’t he come to dinner tomorrow? He said he had to go to San Francisco, and I said, how about Friday, and he said [he would] if he could. He said, what was I doing tonight? And I said I had an appt with Marshall Lumsden, but afterward I would be hungry, so why didn’t he take me out for dinner. And he said he’d call me back at 8 but that I really put him uptight. I said, “What do you expect from a 26-year-old Hollywood spinster?” (which is how I feel around him), and I said, “I’ll give you one more chance” (very flippant). He didn’t call back, so there you are.

Let’s see. What else? I’ve been practicing how to make the perfect omelet. They really taste fantastic with jack cheese surrounded by mandarin oranges. Oh, it’s so good.

I’m reading Julian by Vidal. I read Passage to India by E. M. Forster, which I loved, and Burmese Days by Orwell which I liked. I read Esprit de Corps by Lawrence Durrell and a strange book by Niccolò Tucci called Unfinished Funeral which was more depressing than Burmese Days. Also Snow White.

Well⁠—I’m already 132 lbs, which is very encouraging since I practically starved and exercised all day yesterday and nearly drove myself nuts. However, it seems to be paying off as starving inevitably will.

This giving-up-smoking stuff is really fantastic. I can do everything except make a collage, go to the Troubadour, and lose weight. Although today I’ve decided not to eat anything outrageous, at least till I get back to 130 lbs. Trying to hold yourself together when you’re falling apart all over the place is extraordinarily weird, and most of the time, I feel like I’m about to topple over or faint. My mother says this feeling only lasts for 4 days. Since my mother, [my aunt] Tiby, and Carol gave up [smoking], I figure I can stop too. Before that, the only people I knew who stopped were men. All I’m going to smoke are joints and hash. I won’t have to lug a big purse with me⁠—I can use my little beaded purses. At any rate⁠—I have the feeling I’ll never smoke again. I hate the idea of going to a doctor and having him tell me I’ve got lung cancer. But my favorite thing is that it’s such a novelty to deny myself something. The discipline is really marvelous. Discipline is really great⁠—I love it.