Sarah McCarry's Blog

dear ones! YES A NEW WEBSITE IS COMING, SO HELP ME GOD! things are really scary right now! so here's a good thing! the sublimely brilliant lyric hunter (whose guillotine chapbook is coming out next month; more about that soon!) is editing an herbal by/for african-diasporic folks with production support from guillotine. please circulate the call for submissions widely!!!




B R U J A  B E L L O W

W I T C H E S  B L O O M

C O N J U R E  B L O S S O M



You’re magic-makers, believers, writers, healers, community activists, health professionals, artists. You’re a black woman, you’re queer, you’re transgender, you’re genderfluid, you’re femme, you’re non-conforming. You’re differently-abled, you’re neuro-diverse, you’re thriving.



A traditional herbal is a recipe book that teaches how to recognize, cultivate, and make medicine, from plants. The writing you create in response to the questions below will form part of a creative, contemporary African-diasporic herbal. In this case, the herbal will be a collection of writings exploring both historical and contemporary herbal and spiritual practices intended to heal the body and spirit, in an effort to decolonize mind, body, and soul, and to reclaim healthcare for many people of the African diaspora in the U.S. Contributors whose work is selected to be included in the herbal will be compensated.



If you have a plant-tending, herbal healing, plant-spiritual practice; if your self-care intersects with your writing or art, I’m collecting poems, stories, anecdotes, recipes, rituals, spells, manifestos, analyses, maps, songs, memoirs, dreams--

in short, creative-theoretical-hypothetical-real-magic responses framed by the questions:



Are plants central to, or do they intersect with, your self-care practice?

Where do you find your plant (do you buy it, grow it, or forage for it)?

What does it look like, what are its properties? What drew you to it?

What emotional/spiritual/magical/practical significance does it carry

(how do you use it)? How do you feel when you see it, use it, share it with others?

How do you see the natural world intersecting with black health?



My name is Lyric Hunter and I am a writer from Queens, NY, and a graduate student in the MFA in Writing and Activism program at Pratt Institute. This herbal will be made available and easily accessible to black women and LGBTQ people in New York City.



Email lyric.hunter[at]gmail.com to submit or to ask questions.



Accepting submissions until February 15.

new york still life / happy new year babies

A photo posted by sarah mccarry (@sarahmccarry) on Dec 31, 2016 at 7:07pm PST

Good morning (ish) (afternoon), my treasures, happy Gregorian New Year! I said this on twitter already but I will say it again here, the Persian New Year is not until March 21 if a Fresh Start has eluded you to-day, or you could compromise between the two by celebrating the Chinese New Year on the 28th, or you could be woo about it and celebrate the full moon on the 12th. On the eve of the Gregorian New Year I went for hot pot with my favorite person in the world; we had the plan of walking over the Manhattan Bridge afterward, at midnight, and left the restaurant with just enough time to make it; little bottle of whiskey in my bag, full bellies, full hearts, the cold bright city all around us; but walking down a side street on the way to the bridge we came across an elderly couple who waved at us frantically, holding out a cell phone, and I looked down at where they pointed and a lady had passed out on the sidewalk, one foot still wrapped around the no parking sign that had tripped her, blood on the pavement in dark smear, her face as peaceful as a dreamer’s.

The couple had called 911 already but they didn’t speak much English, and so my favorite person took their cell phone and talked to the dispatcher, and I squatted next to the lady, Hey lady, how are you doing, you still with us, stay with us, okay. She’d whacked her head pretty hard but she was drunk, too, or high. She wasn’t all the way out; she’d nod her head a little when I asked her questions. When it looked like she might throw up I said Don’t throw up on your jacket, that’s a nice jacket—it was a gorgeous jacket, actually, black wool with black lambskin sleeves, beautifully cut, an expensive jacket in which to be lying upon the filth-scummed New York sidewalk about to vomit; underneath it she had on a snow-white shirt with exquisite hand-tatted lace at the cuffs and throat, starred about with tiny rhinestones, if I still read fashion blogs obsessively I could probably tell you what season and runway it came off—anyway, she didn’t throw up.

My favorite person gave the nice older people their phone back and we indicated via pantomime we would stay with the lady until the ambulance came, and we all wished each other a happy new year and they went on their way. The ambulance took a while, New Year’s in New York tends to be rather active. I held the lady’s hand and told her she was doing a great job and was going to be okay, that I was right there, that she was really brave—something I have a lot of practice doing, as it happens—and when I took my hand away she made a little noise and moved her fingers so I took her hand again and held it while the clock moved from that old awful year into a new one, maybe awful too but maybe not; a year still unwritten, still full of the possible; I held her hand until the ambulance came and the EMTs swarmed about her and got her to sit up and talk to them a bit. My favorite person and I walked to the bridge and over it, marveling at the improbable and romantic fact of our being the only pedestrians upon it, until we realized we were in the bike lane. The lady looked pretty okay when we left her; I choose to believe that the lady is fine now. Take care of yourself, okay? I said to the lady as the ambulance pulled up, Can you do that for me? and she nodded, just barely. I choose to believe she heard me.

Right now I am finally reading The Babysitter At Rest by Jen George, which is brilliantly, magnificently weird and hilarious and sad, sort of like if Kelly Link and Lorrie Moore got together and did a lot of acid but still kept hold of their plots. It has a million good reviews and that’s for a good reason (someone else compared it to Leonora Carrington, which I think is apt, and lo and behold Dorothy Project is releasing The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington!!!! with an introduction by KATHRYN DAVIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am DEAD ON THE FLOOR with glee, I tell you what!!!!!!) and I think you will like it. If you like Kelly Link you will certainly like it and if you don’t like Kelly Link you haven’t got good taste in books, sorry. I am having a good time with Lucy Corin’s new book One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, which is also gloriously weird and funny and sad (more emphasis on the sad than the funny for me in this one); I have been a huge Lucy Corin fan for years and years so it is extremely pleasing to have a new book from her and I hope a great many more people read her work and realize what a loopy genius she is. I got myself a SUBSCRIPTION to Deep Vellum Press for a holidays’ present because Eve Out of Her Ruins was so good and am pleased with the results thus far: Claudia Salazar Jiménez’s Blood of the Dawn (oof, brutal, but so good; a little Luisa Valenzuela-y) and Carmen Boullosa’s Before. You should get a subscription, too, and pick one up for Dorothy: A Publishing Project while you’re at it, what do you have to save money for, there’s no future anymore so just read a lot of good books.

I’m working my way through Sarah Gottesdiener’s Many Moons (it’s sold out on her website but there’s a link to get it POD), which is a workbook on teaching yourself Magickal Activities based around the phases of the moon, and Peter Collier’s A Most Incomprehensible Thing: Notes Towards a Very Gentle Introduction to the Mathematics of Relativity, which is, as the title suggests, a workbook for teaching yourself the math required to understand Einstein’s theories of relativity. (“There were two ways of arriving at the truth. I decided to follow them both,” –Georges Lemaître, Catholic priest and original theorist of the Big Bang.) The moon magic book goes by month, so I am still in January, obviously. As far as general relativity goes, I have commenced the first chapter, which is thus far a brisk review of algebra.

I thought the fellow who wrote the book was an Important Scientist but he’s just a fellow who started out watching Leonard Susskind’s Stanford lectures online, had a vague memory of high-school math, and elected to lock himself in a room for a year (I think maybe literally? there are a lot of apologies to his partner scattered throughout) and teach himself to derive Einstein’s equations, and then wrote a book about it so other people can do the same thing without having to spend quite so much time looking things up online. He’s also a startlingly good writer, as it turns out, and has a knack for presenting things in a way that makes you both understand them immediately and then feel tremendously clever for understanding them. I have a number of other projects I am hoping to accomplish this year, but honestly if we get to January 3, 2018, and someone says “Sarah, what did you do in 2017?” and all I can say is “I didn’t die in a nuclear war provoked by the president’s twitter account and I taught myself special relativity,” that will still be a pretty good year.

I feel weirdly chipper about 2017, which is maybe just delusional thinking? But you know what, I’ll take it. There are some fucking great books coming out this year; my beloved Manjula Martin’s anthology of writers on money, Scratch, is out TODAY, THIS VERY MINUTE; my beloved Cara Hoffman’s book Running, which is a dark and flawlessly written novel about teenagers squatting and surviving/not surviving 1980s Athens is out on February 21st; and my beloved Meg Howrey’s glorious adventure through astronauts’ aspirations, family ties, and the human heart The Wanderers is out on March 15th. Order all of these books! I insist! Have I ever led you astray? They’re all spectacularly good. (Also Elif Batuman has a novel coming out in March?!?! why did no one tell me this?!?!?!?! you’re ALL FIRED)

I have been somewhat Absent from the internet of late but another 2017 project is to write about books more regularly on the new goddamn website I swear to god I am going to make myself; maybe then all my posts won’t be such an ungodly length. There is a new Guillotine chapbook coming out in mere weeks!!!! I will tell you more about it shortly. Guillotine needs a new website too. I keep trying to get the cat to do it but she knocks the keyboard onto the floor and yells about her wet food instead. Hang in there, babies; keep loving, keep fighting. You’re doing great. You’re really brave. I’m right here.

xoxox
sarah

❤️

A photo posted by sarah mccarry (@sarahmccarry) on Nov 17, 2016 at 8:43am PST

I won't lie to you: I spent the first days grief-sodden, subsumed by a dense, benthic despair. Crying and or drinking and or unable to get out of bed. In the days after the only thing I could read was a terrible thinly-veiled autobiographical campus novel by a man that was bad with such stunning predictability that I found it strangely reassuring: now the beautiful coed will fall in love with Our Hero, but he will be unable to commit! Now he will speculate speciously on the Fragility of Human Relationships! [Interlude for tedious philippic on Great Literature (Nabokov, Fitzgerald) and its impact on the human soul.] In the end the girl he was in love with the whole time left him for a lesser specimen of a man--a fellow bovine in aspect and temperament, whose animalistic physicality strongly contrasted with Our Hero's noble aspirations and superior intellect--sending him into grievous ruin, surely never to Truly Love Again. I felt rather badly for the author's wife, whose photograph I looked up online, and who has a stunned expression about the eyes. In between chapters I sent text messages back and forth with everyone I love, sometimes things like We need you, I need you, please don't die right now, sometimes things like So help me god they will have to come through me to get to you, sometimes just I love you, over and over again. I love you, I love you, I love you. I cried on the subway, sometimes with strangers; I cried in the street when I managed to leave my apartment; I cried walking the long corridor in Union Square Station that's layered now with thousands of post-it notes, nearly every one a message of love and resistance interspersed with the odd plea to check out someone or other's instagram account. More than one person has told me that New York in the aftermath feels very much the way it did in the days after 9/11. Everywhere you go, scraps of conversation float past you: Did you hear what the Did you Can you believe the registry Yeah I can He said Vader and Dick Cheney--

I read some of Anne Carson's Float before I had to take it back to the library and I read Certain Dark Things, which is a fun book about vampires in Mexico City. I tried to write things and felt stupid trying for a while. Who cares! But it feels a little more now like I might try again. Sometimes when I open the internet I have to go throw up. I go to work, I make food. I’m not sleeping very well. I remember that a lot of people have already been doing this work for a long time. I am reading The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution and Sarah Jaffe’s book Necessary Trouble and the Feminist Press biography of Valerie Solanas and taking notes. I am eating dinner almost every night with people I love. We can't talk about anything else. We say, We don't have to talk about it, and then we talk about it. I am remembering the things I used to do a long time ago, under a different administration, in a different dark time, and stretching those long-unused muscles; I am thinking about who I know and what they're good at, thinking of things that will be useful to have and do, thinking about what to start stockpiling and who might need shelter and who can teach what. Maalox and water. Cheering the protests surging up Fifth Avenue, day after day after day, to where the new-minted emperor perches perilous in his gold-walled skyscraper surrounded by his scabrous cronies. I printed out Jenny's piece and put it on my wall. I made a list of things I can't do if I'm dead to remind myself to stay alive. A couple of nights ago I went to my favorite restaurant with J just a few minutes before they closed and we got the prime spot at the sushi bar in front of the owner, who is in the habit of bestowing various small delicacies on the persons facing him, and refilling their sake glasses with abandon. The table behind us (a little tipsy; I think everyone in the restaurant was a little tipsy; it was eleven o'clock at night) ordered the Obama roll (very tasty, avocado and I think yellowtail and something quite delicious referred to on the menu as "crunch") and when the waitress brought it out the recipient cried out in a plaintive wail OBAMA and everyone left in the restaurant--staff, customers--chorused back OBAMAAAAAA and it was probably the most Brooklyn moment of all time but I am all in favor of collective mourning regardless. I know Obama is problematic, don't worry. Problematic feels extremely manageable right now. As opposed to literal Nazis, for example. As opposed to people for whom internment camps are definitely not off the table. The owner reassured us that the Obama roll shall never leave the menu, not ever, and poured everyone shots. J and I speculated that the Trump roll would be human feces covered in gold leaf. Who would order it? Only monsters dressed in person suits, surely. Except that's not true, of course; that's too easy. The people who ordered it are my family. The people who ordered it look exactly like me.

Right now I am reading Lee Billings's Five Billion Years of Solitude, which is not about revolution or resistance at all; it is a book about the people who are looking for life outside our own solar system, and how they are going about searching. It is not a book one would necessarily expect to be beautiful, or about love and faith, but it is beautiful and in many ways about love and faith all the same. Are we alone in the universe? Maybe. Maybe we are alone right now. Maybe there were people like us or unlike us so far in the past of some other, distant galaxy that we will never come across the signature of their history. Maybe there will be people like us again. Maybe it is the eternal fate of intelligent life to annihilate itself on a timescale that is immense when compared to the span of a human lifetime and an infinitesimal flash in terms of geologic time. The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. Human beings, not so much. Perhaps somewhat predictably, my favorite among the planetary scientists and astrophysicists is Sara Seager, whose early work changed the entire landscape of the search for other Earth-like planets and who undertakes expeditions into the Canadian wilderness in her spare time. Her husband, who she met when she was 22—they spent two months canoeing through the Northwest Territories, a landscape so remote they did not see another living human being for the entire time—died of cancer in 2011, two days after her fortieth birthday. When Billings interviews her at home in Concord, Massachusetts, where she’s a tenured professor at MIT, she explains—over a dinner she’s made herself, after putting her children to bed—the work she is doing now and her single-minded search for a world like ours hurtling through space around some other, distant sun. In between discussing her research partnerships with tech pioneers and billionaires, she does laundry. I probably don’t have to tell you which parts of that passage don’t occur during Billings’s conversations with gentlemen astrophysicists. Remember? A lot of people have been doing this work for a very long time. Am I hopeful? No. But I think, We are a species that chooses many things and one of the things we choose is to ask What is it that makes us alive; what is it, very literally, that makes matter. That matters. We are a species that has taught ourselves to find worlds flung far across our galaxy by looking at the faintest pulses of their stars. We are a species that chooses to make art, tell stories, sing. We make each other dinner and put our children to bed and face down police armed with water cannons in sub-freezing temperatures on the plains of North Dakota, we hide one another from genocidal regimes, we link arms in the streets, we make poems, we build telescopes, fall in love, fight, grieve. We are a species that chooses to go out into the breathing world, find our way through the deep woods, look past the luminous shoals of our own galaxy to the wall of light that marks the birth of the universe we know.

Last night I went to see Arvo Part's Kanon Pokajanen performed at the Temple of Dendur in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was as miraculous as it sounds. For a moment I forgot my horror and sorrow, forgot how terrified I am for the people I love, forgot my to-do list and my resolve and my own self; for a moment I forgot I was human; for a moment I believed, wholeheartedly, in a huge and glorious and all-forgiving god. I was still myself after it ended, only myself remembering how beauty is also an act of resistance in and of itself; how beauty is necessary, because it is necessary to remember why it is we survive. On the train home I happened to sit amongst a group of classic older Brooklyn Jewish ladies in jewel-toned jackets and statement glasses and thick broad Brooklyn accents. There's this tweet going ahrawnd, one of them said to the others, 'First they came for the Muslims and I said Not this time motherfuckers,' and the other ladies agreed that this was a good tweet. They had preferred Bernie but had to admit Hillary had some good ideahrs. You're welcome to join in anytime, one of the ladies said to me. I said, We're going to pull him out of his tower and eat him alive. They liked that, too. I get read as Jewish regularly in New York. Hang in there, honey, they haven't killed us all yet, one of them said to me, cackling, as I got off the train.

We are here and we are still alive. Take care of yourselves and take care of each other. I am sending you all the love in my crooked blackened heart. And remember this: We fight hard. Sous les pavés, la plage.

Mairead sent me a letter and I opened it on the train and spilled sequins everywhere, oops, and everyone looked at me funny and I felt young and silly and full of promise for a moment, the way you feel when you move to a new place for the first time and your heart is an adventure and you are reckless and misunderstood and brave, trailing glitter and ghosts in your wake. Inside the envelope was a three of swords patch, do you know this card? It’s about living with pain and also surviving it; small heartbreaks that build up the scaffolding around that perilous and fruitful muscle, or the huge heartbreak of living as a breathing human in this crumbling world and choosing every day to go to work and be in love and be generous and kind, and understanding that the hurt might never lessen but that is no excuse to let it swallow you whole. Keep loving, keep fighting: that’s the three of swords. It’s not easy. We’re still here.

It is cooler now and I have been reading more serious books, let me tell you about them! Eve Out of Her Ruins just came out in translation from Deep Vellum Press (do you know this press? You should!!! Everything they do is awfully good and I am quite excited about many of the books that are coming out soon as well) and I read it in two huge swallows on the train and then did that embarrassing thing of being so wrecked by a book I started weeping in public and everyone around me politely averted their eyes. It is a hard book, I’m not gonna lie, but also one of the most gorgeous things I’ve read in a long time—I didn’t think of Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy until I read this excellent review, but it does in fact echo both that book and The Bridge of Beyond (have you read those books? well, you need to) in the extraordinary precision of its language and the ways in which it addresses how women, especially young women, navigate the ongoing traumas of colonization and gendered violence. Set in the fictive Mauritian neighborhood of Troumaron (literally: asshole; there are a lot of great language jokes in this book), Eve’s narrative is split between four people—Eve herself; Saadiq, the dopey teen-boy poet who’s in love with her; Clélio, a baby hoodlum, incandescent with rage and thwarted ambition, who’s living for the hope that his émigré brother will come back from France and airlift him out of Troumaron; and Savita, the girl Eve falls in love with. And while the events of the book are straightforward—and often brutal—the masterful interleaving of voices becomes a kind of Greek chorus of trauma and resistance; each narrator is wildly different, and has wildly different perspectives on Eve’s selfhood and strategies for survival, but taken as a whole the book reads as a beautiful and complex chord whose disharmonies combine into something shimmering and fragilely resonant.

I also read Vi Khi Nao’s Fish in Exile, which is probably the funniest and most intelligently magical book about losing a child you’ll ever read (do you know about Coffee House Press? Have you read all their books, too? Well, you should), and which somehow manages to combine Greek myth, duct tape, jellyfish, sleeping with your weirdo neighbors, overwhelming sorrow, and Cheerios into a multilayered masterpiece that does things I had no idea a book could do. It is a hard book to describe well: it is addictive, but for quite some time you have no idea what it’s even about; like Eve its narrative is split and multivocal, and different people have different versions of what’s happening; but it’s not until well into the book that you learn what the central event that underlies its entire trajectory actually is. The language ranges from frank gallows humor to unexpectedly devastating, as if you’re at a party exchanging sarcastic witticisms with a stranger and then she suddenly hits you over the head with a brick—but the book never loses its playfulness with language even in its darkest moments, so that, while it’s about the wild and loopy things people do when dealing with utterly debilitating grief, it never feels like something you can’t carry. And while its construction is often experimental, or fragmented, it has an inner momentum that never leaves you in doubt that the author knows exactly where she is going and how she plans to get there. It is confident and sharp and filled with moments of sparkling genius and maybe it’s weird to say you enjoyed a book about dead children, but I did.

I just started Sherri L. Smith’s Pasadena, which is a little bit Francesca Lia Block and a lot Raymond Chandler if Philip Marlowe were a super cranky teenage girl with a dead best friend, an anger management problem, and a lot of barbed asides about race and class and gender. Catnip, I tell you! Catnip. And I reread my beloved Cristina Moracho’s A Good Idea, which you had ought to put on your list right this minute, because it is coming out in February and it is going to fuck you up. (Spoiler alert: it is actually about very bad ideas.) I am about to start Larissa Pham’s Fantasian and am quite pleased about it, and of course Hidden Figures, and also Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War. Phew! That is a lot to do but I have got a long commute most days so a person needs a lot of books.

Last month a theoretical physicist published a paper about an artificial black hole he created in a laboratory (I know what a Bose-Einstein condensate is now! thank you physics camp) to test Stephen Hawking’s prediction that black holes radiate particles: you think, don’t you, that those insatiable vortices suck everything into their maws, annihilating matter and light and maybe the stuff of dreams. Do you know what he found? His baby black hole sings. Even the strongest darkness is no match for the faintest scraps of hope. Keep living, keep loving, keep fighting, babies; I’ll see you around.

xoxox
sarah

A photo posted by sarah mccarry (@sarahmccarry) on Jul 31, 2016 at 12:30pm PDT

This is a joke! The joke is that the circled equation is wrong to a silly degree. That's why Fermi is smirking at the photographer. I know, it's a pretty obscure joke. Physicists like it.

Hi, it's been a while. I was hot and sad, and then I went to particle physics camp, and then I was hot and sad again. It's still hot and I am still sad, but in a different way now, a way that lets me get more done, and think about fall, and write again, and imagine adventures for myself. Grief Desert keeps going, monotonous to the horizon, but for now I found some shade.

I didn't read much at physics camp because my brain was too full and at night I fell asleep like a rock dropping into a pond, thunk. I had a lot of strange dreams. I cried on the train on the way there, and on the way home; the world felt like moving underwater, cloudy and oppressive, my sweat-soaked clothes sticking to my skin. When does it get better? I don't know. You keep going.

The scientists at physics camp had a kind of joy it's hard to describe: clean and fierce, silly jokes, old eye-rolling arguments with each other about the finer points of theories very few people in the world understand well enough to argue about. I learned enough to realize how much more there is that I don't know than I realized before. Also that particle physicists don't mind so much dopey metaphors about entanglement and many-worlds--the road untaken, the lovers joined across continents, et cetera--as they do quacks and hucksters insisting the quantum allows us to control our destinies and manifest high-yield portfolios and romance, clear our systems of cancers and end up in jobs we like. An observer is anything that interacts with a system to produce a measurable effect: other particles, the wind in the trees, water wearing down stone. Don't mistake science for the divine. A lot of physicists, it turns out, are religious, but they do not mingle uncertainty principles and god. All the writers were worried about fucking up the science in their books but the physicists were quite nice about it. It's more important to give pleasure to your readers, one of the physicists said. I was so impressed I wrote that down. There were published physics papers tacked to a bulletin board in a hallway. I tried to read one, but I have to admit I didn't get very far.

At physics camp I talked to people who had worked on LIGO and people who went to the South Pole to look for neutrinos and people building computers out of particles that exist and don't exist at the same time. The world is so big! And so miraculously tiny! There's so much we know about it! And so much we don't! On the last evening of physics camp a physicist--Nobel laureate, actually, so rather a fancy one--came to talk to us about matter, antimatter, baryogenesis, which is a fancy-science way of saying the origins of matter. (Nobody knows!!!) All theories of quantum measurement are inadequate. All the physicists used the word story. We know the results of experiments; what we don't know, what nobody knows for sure, is the story that goes before the ending. Which is the opposite, I suppose, of living in the world.

Outside while the physicist talked two birds fluttered back and forth under the eaves with bits of sticks and grass, building a nest. You can wander through this burning world with a broken heart and still know that human beings are flinging themselves into the air on the wings of the biggest questions imaginable. A bird is raising chicks to flight. This is love, I thought suddenly as the physicist told us jokes about contested theories of quantum dynamics that no one in the room understood except the other physicists, who chuckled softly among themselves. This is love. When does it get better? I don't know. How do we keep going? I don't know. But here we are, facing down the gathering storm. Here we are, writing stories. Here we are, making poems and learning the language of light. Here we are, in the streets. We do none of these things without the faith somewhere in us that another world is possible. We do none of these things lightly. We do none of these things without love. Maybe there is no ending. Maybe all that matters, in science, in the breathing world, is the story that shapes the way we get there.

A postdoc told me in the spring no science gets done because the physicists' offices overlook the agricultural department and from April to June the fields are lively with new lambs stumbling through the grass. All the scientists gather at the windows for weeks, their data abandoned until summer settles in. As anyone who's seen Jurassic Park can tell you, life finds a way. A different Nobel laureate gave me a little plastic card with the fundamental constants of physics and chemistry. Here are the things we know for sure. They fit in your wallet. You can carry them around in case of emergency. So I do.

I told you I was going to write about Blair Braverman's book and I will, I swear. You should read it now because it might take me a while to get to writing about it. I went mostly for comfort, this last month: I reread The Secret History, and some silly mystery novels, and now I'm rereading The Little Friend, which I only just now realized is a grown-up Harriet the Spy with meth labs. And I am watching Fortitude which is a bit wacky but so far no ladies have gotten raped or tortured, with the special bonus of it being filmed in Iceland. Snow everywhere and tall mountains and remember how lovely it is to be cold. Leather jackets and wool sweaters and big clompy boots. I'll get my brain in order when the temperature drops. Every summer I forget it's like this every summer. Take care of yourselves, dear hearts. I think there will be another Schrödinger Sessions next year and you should definitely go.

Keep loving, keep fighting--
xos

i paid court to the small foolish son of @damsorrow

A photo posted by sarah mccarry (@sarahmccarry) on Jul 8, 2016 at 9:17pm PDT

Hi, how are you? Yeah, me too. You go back and forth from Grief Desert so many times it feels like maybe you should just build a little shack there and learn to live with no water and too much light. On Thursday I went to a protest on accident, coming out of work into the hell-hot swamp morass of New York July, the east sidewalk of Fifth Ave thick with marchers and the west side clotted with tourists going in and out of stores, oblivious, or taking selfies with the marchers as backdrops. Later that night the police went out into Times Square, threw people to the ground and bound their wrists with zipties and put them into city buses rerouted to city jails, but the sun was still high in the sky when I left work. I saw only a handful of cops on the sidewalk, looking hot and bored, not meeting anybody's eyes, not even bothering to intervene when the march blocked intersections and motorists leaned on their horns in futile protest.

All the chain stores on Fifth Avenue still have their decals from Pride, H&M and American Eagle Outfitters and Eddie Bauer and 7 For All Mankind sporting rainbow flag stickers in their windows and here and there a #weareallorlando. I walked a block with the protest and then I started thinking too much about which kinds of mourning are commodifiable now, and which remain unmarketable, unfit for corporate sponsorship, and then I started crying in the middle of Fifth Avenue, and then I went home. I could hear drumming in Union Square from blocks away. I thought it was more protest but it was a free African dance class, more tourists spinning and awkwardly swinging their hips, sweat-slicked, as the police began to gather.

I keep thinking of that Arundhati Roy interview from last week:

"I don't think hope is necessarily moored to reason. Sometimes hope is a small thing. Sometimes I just look forward to the next sentence I write that I can be happy with. There's the macro scenario--climate change, nuclear war and so on... and then there's the micro scenario. When the bleakness of the big picture begins to get to me, I scale down, I become a frog trying to cross a highway full of trucks. It can be done. Look right, look left... Go! Go! Go! And live to fight another day."

All the brave frogs, flinging ourselves toward the promised land, what else do you do. There is no backward travel to a better world. On the way home I thought, as I often do, about what Eve would've had to say about all of this. If even she would've seen bank-sponsored floats in the Pride parade coming; how human rights are assigned, not to human bodies, but to the movement of capital; how bodies are mattered into being counted only when their bank accounts begin to fill. And I thought, for some reason, of a night a long time ago, when I was working overnights at the DV shelter, and a cop called me at three in the morning and said I have a woman here, a woman and her child, they have nowhere to go, I'll bring them to you, and I said It's a confidential shelter, and he said But I know where it is, and I said Well you're not supposed to, and he said I'll meet you, and I said The shelter is full, and he said But they have nowhere to go why can't you make room, and I wanted to scream into the phone because it's fucking broken, you asshole, because the whole thing is fucking broken, but instead I put on my Social Worker Voice and said She can call in the morning and get on the waiting list, and he said, again, But she has nowhere else to go, and I hung up the phone. I lay awake all night on the couch in the shelter office, thinking about that woman and her child, alone on the street somewhere, what did the cop do, did he just walk away. It was a cold night and I could hear the house settling down around me. All those bodies, dreaming in the dark.

I was reading a book by a man that got a lot of good reviews but I got to page 200 and there was only one lady in it other than an off-stage wife, and she didn't have very much to do other than count cards, and I got increasingly anxious that something bad was going to happen to her for plot purposes or to prove that a bad character was in fact very bad. So I took that book back to the library and now I'm reading Fish in Exile by Vi Khi Nao. And I just finished Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube by Blair Braverman, which is so good I'm going to write a whole separate blog post about it, but if you have ever tried to prove yourself as a Tough Girl in a sea of men at the expense of your own humanity/safety/wellbeing I think you will like it a lot. There are also lots of funny parts and some great parts about Norway (let's go there!!!! I just watched The Wave and now I want very badly to go to Norway even though almost everyone in that movie dies) and sled dog racing and glaciers and snow. Snow! I am ready, already, for the summer to be over, but then again I always am.

Be good to your hearts and drink a lot of water, and if you are protesting I love you and I am so grateful for you, and if you aren't protesting I love you too and a good thing to do is donate to bail funds for people who are. It's okay if you gotta peace out of the Internet for a while but you should follow Rahawa on instagram, she's hiking the whole Appalachian Trail right now and her posts are keeping me healthy. You can also follow Lola's dog (pictured above) who I met recently and who is an excellent dog in my opinion. He is soft and dumb and fluffy and if you hold out your hand he will gum it gently, not in a bad dog sort of way but in a Teeth!!!! HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THEM, I HAVE THEM TOO!!! sort of way, and he likes snacks. Who doesn't like snacks! Fools, is who. Keep loving, keep fighting.

xoxo
sarah

A photo posted by sarah mccarry (@sarahmccarry) on Jun 16, 2016 at 3:42pm PDT

Hi! Today is day one on my trip out of Grief Desert and I don’t want to talk about Grief Desert so let’s talk about books. While I was in Grief Desert I read The Sport of Kings although honestly I am not sure “read” is the right word for one’s terms of engagement with a book; “hit by a truck” is more accurate and also "it kept me from getting all the way lost in Grief Desert which is how you know it's one hell of a book." I think you should read it! And then we can talk about it because whooeee.

Before Grief Desert Week I read Sweetbitter and I loved it in the purest freebasing place of my heart: it is a book about appetites and undoing worthy of comparison to both Maggie Nelson and Henry James. It’s also a book about moving to New York when you are young and stupid and brave (and white, yes: race is present in Sweetbitter in a way that it’s not in, say, The Goldfinch, but the narrator’s experience is a particular one that should not be mistaken for universal) and realizing both the magnitude of your mistake (ha) and the possibility of your future, and one of the things you realize when you move to New York is that pretty much everybody who moves to New York really loves books about moving to New York and the ways in which that particular gesture is likely to both steamroll and remake you. (That part is if not universal at least endemic, from my experience.) I have lived here for long enough that I honestly can’t remember if people who don’t move here care particularly about that sort of thing (my guess is no? also ha) but even if The Story Of Moving To New York As A Young (White) Person is (reasonably enough) not your bag there are also great parts about food and sex and drugs and the weird intense claustrophobic family that is working in restaurants and there were parts of this book where I wanted to chew on it, like literally put it in my mouth and chomp down.

There is also a significant plotline that involves Falling For A Hot Tormented Emotionally Unavailable Douchebag (THAT one is universal, no? though for some of us it is perhaps a number of persons, ho hum); in Sweetbitter this character is played by the handsome troubled bartender, “Jake,” and the rise and fall of Tess’s doomed romance is chronicled via a difficult-to-pull-off hat trick wherein Tess’s 22-year-old first-person obsessive “no really, he just needs someone who loves him” is entirely believable even as the novel itself (and the reader) is bellowing NO NO NO NOOOOOOOO RUN AWAAAAAY. (I read an interview with Stephanie Danler where she remarked that women often ask her which real-life bartender “Jake” is based upon, and that is how I know I am officially old, I guess, because reading about the hot tormented emotionally unavailable douchebag did not set me afire with the desire to find his real-life bar but instead made me think ugh, go away.)

That plotline does not often work for me anymore; it works in Sweetbitter, I think, because Tess is 22, because the novel is fundamentally about appetites and one’s discovery of them, and because the relationship is not a stand-in for heteronormativity in general but instead a nod to doing foolhardy shit when you’re young. You get the sense that Tess will emerge from the wreckage of her affair (oh, sorry, spoiler alert, it doesn’t work out) an intact person who might feasibly go on to have successful relationships with people who are not tormented, emotionally unavailable douchebags. I was thinking about Sweetbitter in relationship to Elena Ferrante, actually; like the Neapolitan Quartet, it is a book whose narrator’s inner life is rabidly present-tense and insistently divorced from both history and consequence. In Ferrante’s books you know the narrator’s history; in Danler’s you do not, but while both characters are formatively shaped by their origins they seem almost entirely fixed in the ongoing present. I liked the Neapolitan Quartet a lot when I read it; I tore through the whole thing in a matter of days, unable to put it down, compelled by the novels’ Hunger Games-like demand that you find out what happens next, and then, similarly, when I finished them, I thought, “I don’t ever want to read a book by this person again,” and now I am not entirely sure whether I like them at all. The doomed romance in Sweetbitter made me faintly, gratefully nostalgic; the various doomed romances in Ferrante wore me out, I think because the novels are so relentlessly about the failures of masculinity and of heteronormativity, the ways in which marriages and emotional labor strip out women’s inner lives and artistic possibilities, and yet they do not offer even the faintest acknowledgment of queer possibility.

If your thesis is Compulsory Heterosexuality Fucking Sucks I am certainly not going to contest it, but I might also point out that there are a number of alternatives that quite a few people have been working on for some time now. Which is not at all to say that queer relationships and queer families are inherently liberatory or harmonious or even challenging to heteronormative paradigms, as a great many people who have already astutely written about the failures of a queer project that stops at gay marriage and a white picket fence have noted. But I think at this point in my reading life I am not any more interested in the failures of emotionally parasitic heterosexual relationships when women write about them than I am when men do. (I am also not especially interested in work that suggests friendships between women must be inherently competitive and freighted with poisonous subtext, or that they be mediated via possessive and frequently desperate exchanges of [male, power-wielding, agency-holding] lovers and partners; there are more than enough shitty dudes to go around.)

Watching a woman repeatedly subsume her entire emotional and artistic life to a totally worthless man for years is as exhausting to me in fiction as it is in real life, and while I suppose “we had a healthy relationship! the end” is a pretty short story if I am going to read about straight women I would prefer they be doing something more interesting than being made miserable by men over the course of a thousand pages—because, in the end, that’s not a book about women, it’s a book about dudes. So much of the Neapolitan quartet is about Nino! and let’s face it, Nino really, really sucks. It’s like reading early Margaret Atwood, where for a certain amount of time you’re like OMG yes exactly all men will fail you and then at a certain point you’re like, Lady, just go do something else. To me, certain books seem to suggest that the essential struggles of women’s lives center on negotiating boundaries with emotional labor, with raising children, and with male lovers, partners, and husbands, but that’s an essentialism that also serves to universalize heterosexuality and the nuclear family unit and leaves out whole swathes of other women’s lived experiences and histories and struggles.

All of which is a long route back to Tess! who, although she does waste a lot of time on Jake, also eats a lot of oysters, drinks champagne, does a bunch of drugs, and has a complicated, freighted relationship with a woman of her own that is, while intermittently competitive and occasionally cruel, also fundamentally more emotionally nourishing than any relationship she has with men in the book. Did I mention the oysters? OYSTERS. Yum. There is also a spectacular scene where the health department shows up and one of my favorite dinner party scenes in any book I have ever read and a tremendous amount of bad behavior in bars late at night.

Anyway. I’m gonna try and steer clear of Grief Desert this weekend, and eat some snacks and work on my new book (!!!) and read things that don’t make me think very hard about anything at all, until I work up to rereading The Sport of Kings. I hope you are as far as you can get from Grief Desert too, but if you are still wandering those brutal sands: I see you, I see you, I see you, and I send you love.

xoxox
sarah

v haunting new pin made by @jennabrager

A photo posted by sarah mccarry (@sarahmccarry) on May 25, 2016 at 10:16am PDT

Hi, I’m still procrastinating! I read a lot of books this month, courtesy of Our Lady of Perpetual Delay the Q Train, I didn’t do anything self-helpful, I almost got myself into crow pose in yoga. I mean I did get myself into crow pose, only very briefly, and in a manner of great verisimilitude, which is to say: crows are pretty awkward if you watch them for a minute, and so is nearly six feet of sweaty woman who is 99% limbs and 3% successful motor control. It just got hot in New York and all my outfits are suddenly the wrong outfits and my brain is also suddenly the wrong brain; this happens every summer, and I don’t ever get used to it.

I read Robin Wasserman’s Girls on Fire in pretty much one sitting broken up only by such tedious activities as “leaving the house” and “going to work”; it’s a great, gory, gorgeous acid burn of a teenage-girl story that other people seemed to find “terrifying” (NPR’s Michael Schaub) but I found wildly, devastatingly romantic, like Heathers if Christian Slater were a girl and there were two of him and also if Heathers was about the massive, obsessive way you can fall for someone when you are young, and the ways in which your own choices can spiral into something so far out of your control that catastrophe feels inevitable and sometimes almost a relief: the worst thing that can happen does happen, and then you go from there. NPR also reports that “with its scenes of sex and violence, it’s very, very adult,” which, no disrespect to Michael Schaub, is about the clueless-white-dudeliest thing you can say about female adolescence, a period of time far more sexual and far more violent than anything I have experienced as an adult. It’s a book that’s all teeth and heart and it’s full of blood and I loved it.

I read Gabby Rivera’s Juliet Takes A Breath, which is also about being a teenage girl and falling in love, but from a very different angle: Juliet Palante is a young queer puertorriqueña who leaves her home and family in the Bronx for a summer internship with Harlow Brisbane, famed White Feminist Authoress and Portland denizen. Hijinx ensue. I can’t say enough good things both about this book, which is smart, hilarious, and poignant, and about how necessary it is: when was the last time you read a book that explicitly talked about a young queer Latina woman navigating her way through a minefield of intersecting identities, new politics, and radical ideas about love, community, and family, also while making fun of Portland specifically and well-intentioned but often damaging White Lady Feminist Cluelessness in general, also while getting to have a fun adventure, also while getting to make out with cute girls, also while being allowed a happy ending that is neither saccharine nor tidy? Yeah, me neither. I want to give this book to every young person I know—it is, very literally, one of the most useful step-by-step manuals I've ever seen for queer-girl coming-of-age and thriving and being hella feminist and figuring out who in your life is a true mentor and how to counteract some problematic and outright racist shit, and I want to also give it to everyone my own age that never got to see themselves in stories as a young person, whose only cultural reference points for politicized female queerness were (as they are for Juliet, who is a child of the 80s) Ani DiFranco (god bless her) and the Indigo Girls. It’s just really, really, really good, and it’s one of those books that you finish and think god damn, I am so happy this is circulating in the world. I can’t wait to see what Gabby Rivera does next.

Now I’m reading Maggie Nelson’s The Art of Cruelty and so far having somewhat conflicting feelings about it and it’s making me want to go back to Eve Sedgwick (what doesn’t) and Avery Gordon, whose book Ghostly Matters was much more useful for me personally in working through how to think about and interact with cruelty and cultural trauma and art and pain. I’m not finished so maybe that’s not very fair to Maggie Nelson; but I’m almost all the way through her entire body of work now and there’s something missing for me in her criticism and memoir-hybrid writing that I’m still figuring out how to define precisely. If anything I think her work (other than Bluets, which I love, and which leans much more toward prose-poetry) is kind of a distillation—or maybe more accurately a reduction—of Sedgwick’s, and in places it makes me a little salty: Eve said this so much more perfectly, but Eve’s prose is also infinitely denser and more difficult, more precise but also more demanding, more exhausting—Eve makes you work for your pleasure, but the pleasure is all the more rich for the thrashing you took to get there (pun intended, thanks). But I think it’s useful for people who would never in their lives go near Touching Feeling and its rigors to have access to her ideas, to the central project of so much of her work, which is to suggest that identities and lives and bodies and politics are infinitely complicated and valiantly unpolarizable, and that arguing for orthodoxy, for boundaries, and for binaries is not just futile but in most cases an act of violence—as is the case both theoretically and routinely in practice, as we can see from the eleven states currently suing the government of the United States for the right to police and violate trans people’s bodies (a legal move worthy of Eve’s old nemesis Jesse Helms, whose legacy of homophobia, racism, and misogyny is vigorously alive and well today). More good thinking is always a good thing. But man, nobody but Eve is Eve.

I didn’t plan on reading the Art of Cruelty for Memorial Day weekend but there you have it. I hope you enjoy yourselves, dear hearts, and do yourselves a favor and get your copy of Juliet Takes A Breath sooner rather than later.

xoxox
sarah

ate a smoothie in direct sunlight hope you're happy los angeles #yallwest

A photo posted by sarah mccarry (@sarahmccarry) on Apr 30, 2016 at 1:02pm PDT

I clambered out of the Malaise of the Wrong Book by accidentally reading three rather dark books in a row: Esmé Weijun Wang’s wonderful and macabre claustrophobic gothic fantasia The Border of Paradise, Susan Barker’s brilliant, century-spanning multivocal masterpiece The Incarnations, and now Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts, a memoir/theory hybrid (as is her wont) that combines autobiography, true crime, and an extended meditation on our cultural obsession with sexualized violence against (white, young, pretty, middle- to upper-class) women. Here is an excerpt from The Border of Paradise, which I highly recommend, and a super-smart interview with Wang. The Nelson is rough going (spoiler alert: lots of sexualized violence against women) but so far very, very good. The Incarnations is amazing if you like virtuosic novels that are splendidly written and jump around in time and involve creepy centuries-long obsessive love/hate/revenge stories and reincarnation (maybe) and Lost Love and Crazy Families and the language is so fantastic I am going to read everything else she has written. (It is also pretty gruesome in places, so consider yourself warned; I did okay and did not find the violence gratuitous, and sometimes it’s even funny in a Heathers sort of way, but it’s explicit and a fair amount of it happens to women.)

I also went into a minor self-help k-hole while processing my Wrong Book/Brain Malaise/procrastinating the various things I am meant to be working on, which I am (spoiler alert) doing now as well. When I worked as a bookseller quite some time ago I sold innumerable copies of Julia Cameron’s originally self-published self-help bestseller The Artist’s Way, almost without exception to crystal-festooned white women of a certain age in shapeless garments. I was young and I knew everything and I did not like those women, or their breathy voices, or their craft projects, and I thought that anybody who needed a book to help them write books was probably not very good at writing books. Now, of course, the joke is on me, as I am a crystal-festooned white woman of a certain age, quite fond of shapeless garments, and an inveterate procrastinator of both the books I am supposed to be writing for money and the book that I am ostensibly writing for love, and in the last month I read two essays by writers whose work I quite enjoy on how, as much as it embarrassed them to admit it, they had themselves come to The Artist’s Way and found it useful if slightly silly. So I checked it out of the library.

I opened up The Artist’s Way at a bar I am partial to near my house, on a sunny afternoon, and I have to tell you that I was ready to throw it at a wall within about ten pages. I think it’s fantastic if you like The Artist’s Way! or if it has been useful to you! I am not such a smug little twerp as I was when I was young, not about self-help books, anyway. But its systems are not of great interest to me. To be honest, faith in my own creativity has never been much of a problem for me; if anything I have rather a more robust sense of my own worth than is strictly necessary. My problems are, for the most part, not self-love or lack thereof but time (and lack thereof) and money (and ensuring I am making it). Everyone wants to tell you how to become a writer—Battle despair! Embrace the Universe! Delve into your creative well! You already are one! (this last is true, gentle reader-writer)—but not as many people want to talk about the material realities of being a writer (I quite liked Yasmin Nair’s sardonic and pointed review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, which is basically a more oblivious The Artist’s Way written in a more expensive house, and which I also read and mostly despised last month). How do I retain my Divine Inspiration when I am so broke I am waking myself up with panic attacks at 4am on the dot every morning? (Sell a memoir for several hundred thousand dollars before I even write it, I guess, she said brattily.) How do I behave like a responsible adult if I actually make some money? How do I carve out time for my own work when so much of my energy goes to other people’s? How do I fucking log off Twitter no for real this time no like for real? How do I stop confusing “being depressed” with “being lazy”? And other important questions, which I shall answer someday in a self-help book of my own, once I have all the answers. I'm sure I'll come across them shortly.

I’m still working out how the fuck to be a writer, and I’m three books and thirty-six years in now. I should like to be more regular in my habits and more functional in my output, but I would also like not to be crazy, and to be a millionaire, and to live in a world where all human beings have basic human rights and my taxes go to fund schools and free healthcare and abortions instead of drone strikes on children, so. We work with what we’ve got.

Oh also I read The Nest, which is quite fun, like The Emperor’s Children with a much gentler bite. I forget if I wrote about Hope Jahren’s memoir/science manifesto Lab Girl, but even if I did I loved it so much I’ll write about it again; it is a brilliant book about loving things and being human and thrashing out your own space in a world hellbent on not giving you any (also I saw it in the airport bookstore, which made me quite happy). I got back last week from Los Angeles, where I sat on the beach and drank a ten-dollar smoothie (see above) and ate a sandwich with “raw bread” made from seeds and nuts of some kind and also appeared on some panels, and it was damp in New York until today, and chilly, and I loved it; I can’t help it, it’s how I’m made. Too much sun makes you soft, if you ask me.

If you didn’t see already About A Girl was nominated for a Lambda Award (!!!) and I talked to the always excellent s.e. smith about writing and teen dirtbags for Bitch magazine. For my birthday I am going to a panel about dark matter and I just bought myself a pair of summer boots and that’s about it for me. Happy writing, dear readers; I hope you’re further along than me.

xoxo
sarah

I have a brand-new story at Cicada Magazine; you can read it here.

Right now I am having trouble sticking with anything I’m reading, does this ever happen to you? I am working my way through the special collector's edition of Scientific American, "Physics at the Limits," which is all about dark matter and the beginning of the universe and a lot of really bonkers science (did you know there's a theoretical model now that suggests our entire universe is the three-dimensional event horizon around a four-dimensional black hole? ME NEITHER) and I've started about ten other books I can't seem to finish, not because I don't like any of them, but because something in my brain is restless. I get hung up every now and then on the Platonic ideal of the exact right book and nothing else will do, and no book I pick up is the exact right book, which for me is reading The Secret History for the first time at the age of 15. Which, of course, is not just a specific book but a specific moment in time; just like you can never read the exact right book again for the first time once you've found it, you can never go back to the person you were when you read it. The exact right book is maybe a fourth-dimensional black hole, with the rest of your reading life the flattened shell that surrounds the singularity. Or maybe that's a bit of a reach.

My first yoga teacher was the exact right yoga teacher, and I've been looking for her again too. I didn't know at the time she was the exact right yoga teacher; I'd never done yoga before, I thought it was normal to have your yoga class be a pay-what-you-want (three dollars) gathering of dirty punks stretching gently on the floor, presided over by a woman called Salal (this was Portland in the early aughts, everybody you met was a plant or an animal) who lived in the witch house on Mississippi and taught community yoga once a week at the yoga studio on Interstate. She had heavy bleach-streaked black hair always piled in a mess on her head and she came to class in ratty sweatpants and old band shirts cut into muscle tees and everybody loved her, everybody everywhere in town loved her, everybody went to punks' yoga. What I remember best was the miracle of her voice, a rich deep whiskey-and-ginger voice that washed over you like molasses; lying on the floor at the end of class, eyes closed, Salal telling us that we were like hollow logs in a stream, the water carrying away everything we needed to let go. Every week in yoga class I cried when she said let go and it wasn't just me who cried every week either. And then Salal went to the hills of Humboldt County to grow weed with her boyfriend, Tiger (early aughts, I told you) and I have been looking for her ever since.

There are a lot of wrong books and a lot of wrong yoga teachers. I'm better at yoga now than I used to be and I'm better at reading. Getting older is a hard thing to explain to anyone who hasn't done it yet, which I don't mean in a patronizing way, just a true one: it's a strange thing to be in a position to know so much about what you could have done differently with no way to redo any of it. (Time travel into the past is theoretically possible but unlikely, as you may know already.) I don't mean regret, that's not the same thing, and I don't mean I wish I could go back and give advice to my younger self, because my younger self would find my current self unfathomable--not insufferable, I don't think (I hope) but also not likely someone my younger self could ever imagine growing into, and I wouldn't want to spoil the surprise. For a long time anger was what kept me alive and that's not a thing I regret either, but I'd like to live for joy, too, the most fragile imaginable platform for survival in the world we live in now. Other things I am learning slowly as I get older: patience, and faith. Waiting for the right books to come around again, the right teachers, the right lessons for the person I am still becoming.

We don't know very much about the early infancy of the universe, four hundred thousand years or so after the big bang (they don't capitalize it anymore, at least not at Scientific American) when the universe cooled enough for hydrogen atoms to form and eventually the first stars ignited and coalesced into galaxies. In the 1990s and early 2000s scientists studied quasars, then the oldest known objects in the universe--jets of light that spew from supermassive black holes that formed billions of years ago. The oldest discovered so far, ULAS J1120+0641, is around 13 billion years old and two billion times the mass of our sun; nobody knows how it go so big so fast, but they're working on it. Nobody knows what made the first stars burn bright and huge enough to collapse into anything so powerful. It's easy to forget the past, or to rewrite it, to let go of the things we don't want to remember, but the stellar objects we used to be explain the condensed beings we become whether or not we learn how to untangle the secrets of our early lives. I don't know how I lived so incandescent back then either; I'm happier now with the steady burn than the wild blaze. But it's good to remember the light we can still give off, hot suns flaring to life in the dark, pulling everything into our orbits, making matter out of dust.