#15: proof of universal mystery
Dear Readers:
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one glory, and one horror. This is the fifteenth one. In the two months I was on baby-having hiatus, I got lots of new subscribers, due to my two appearances on my brother Felix’s absolutely wonderful podcast Chapo Trap House, which probably needs no introduction. Welcome, new subscribers! And welcome back, old subscribers!
Boredom. When I was little, I often pulled books from my parents’ floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and began to read them, but I rarely found one I could finish. The fields of reference in them were for grown-ups—like another language, another alphabet. My eye could read the words, but my brain couldn’t give them meaning. Even at 18, I remember puzzling over the newly published Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow. I don’t remember ever saying to myself, “I got it! I understand now!” but I did feel a sense of satisfaction when I fell in love with Philip Roth the year after I graduated from college, because he was foremost among the grown-up writers who I couldn’t make sense of. The covers and titles of his books looked so interesting—I Married a Communist, Deception: A Novel, Operation Shylock: A Confession, The Great American Novel. What could possibly be inside books with names like that? When I opened them and started reading, I still didn’t know the answer. Not until I was a grown-up.
Horror. In my life as a grown-up, books by or about “mothers” or “parents” gave me nearly the same feeling that those impenetrable grown-up books did when I was a kid. When I see things online about mothers, I impulsively click away, like it’s something that has nothing to do with me. But I am a parent now, a mother. Will I get used to that idea? Who are the people who slide so easily into that identity? My psyche struggles under the weight of understanding myself in this way. I can’t think of anything I’ve ever read that even mentions this terrible psychic weight. But I must have read many books and poems and essays that do; they were another language that I couldn’t read, or didn’t want to learn how. I started Paula Bomer’s Nine Months a few years ago, when it first came out, and I quit in the middle. It’s about a Brooklyn woman, Sonia, who leaves her husband and two young sons when she is seven months pregnant. It seemed so messy and complain-y, and maybe it also seemed irrelevant to my own life. But lately I’ve vaguely remembered some sentences from it, so I read it again. It opens in the moments after the main character, Sonia, has given birth:
The slimy, luminescent cord is proof of universal mystery, this strange device that attached her to her daughter—it’s from inside of her body, just like her daughter, too, the red-faced infant screaming in the doctor’s arms. Her insides came out. It’s the end of the world.
On second reading, I still didn’t like the book. It is messy—like, we learn that a character once visited Sonia in New York, then several pages later, that character has never been to New York before. Also, this is one of probably dozens of books I’ve read where the protagonist is a writer painter. But what a description of birth!
Glory. Another book I read and didn’t connect with before taking on this new identity is The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson, about Nelson’s pregnancy, as her partner, Harry Dodge, prepares for and gets gender reassignment surgery. These plot points are relayed, in Nelson’s characteristic way, within a mishmash of thoughts on literary and critical theory, contemporary art, and pop culture. Even though I’ve taught this book a couple times, I’m not crazy about it; like Nine Months, it seems messy, especially in its engagement with literary theory, like it’s grazing on random theorists without explaining why those theorists, or how and why Nelson came to them. I dislike that quality in some of Nelson’s other books, like Bluets, because it seems like this gorgeous, wonderful literary theory and philosophy is for her to read and love and discover—I don’t think she opens the door wide enough for her reader. But maybe there’s something I’m missing; what if it’s written in that other language? At the end of the book, when Nelson is giving birth, she writes:
If all goes well, the baby will make it out alive, and so will you. Nonetheless, you will have touched death along the way. You will have realized that death will do you too, without fail and without mercy. It will do you even if you don’t believe it will do you, and it will do you in its own way. There’s never been a human that it didn’t. …I wonder if I’ll recognize it, when I see it again.
I thought about that passage while I was pregnant, and while giving birth myself. But the boredom and the horror and the glory is not just death that will do you. Life will do you, too.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Recommended: I Married a Communist, Operation Shylock: A Confession, Philip Roth
Don’t Know: Nine Months, by Paul Bomer, The Argonauts and Bluets, by Maggie Nelson
*This issue is dedicated to the memory of a brilliant reader and extremely kind person, Leslie Jones.