Image & Context

One of my favorite blogs is LeslieMILES. Each post is a succession of images, curated according to loose interpretation of a theme. The themes are something between snippets of overheard conversation and aphorisms — not enough meaning for the latter, but too much for the former. Things like: "It was time to stir." "Keep Curious." "Little to no distance between us. Please?"

These themes, along with a soundtrack and a quotation, are the only context offered. Everything to be known is contained in the particular post’s succession of images. There is fame and anonymity, innocence and experience, portrait and landscape: just images, one after another. Their relationship to one another is tenuous, and it always gives me a little anxiety. Am I missing the point? But no, I don’t think that’s what’s being asked of me here: to identify a fixed point. The images create a pattern as they go, with sense emerging and shifting as I scroll through the series. What I like about this is that it’s active; it requires much of me.

If you follow the blog, it doesn't take long to pick up on the curator’s interests, his obsessions. Whatever the theme, certain kinds of images repeat. This curator, whoever he is, loves girls, preferably young, thin, and naked, and preferably Kate Moss. She shows up again and again, as kind of muse, or a god, presiding over the constellation of images. Even when she's absent, you can sense her presence, informing everything.


And it’s not just general themes that repeat — individual images repeat too, weeks or months after they first appear. I can't tell if the repetition is intentional or just curator oversight, but the effect is uncanny. Many of the images have an air of familiarity, but I’m never sure if it’s intrinsic to the image, or if I’ve actually seen it somewhere before—and if I have, is it because it’s a famous image? Or just a repeat on this blog? There is no way to know; none of the images are attributed to anything. They refuse to have back stories. The only story is the one being told here and now, in their convergence.

On precision, briefly.

The other night, I was thinking about good writing, and I decided that it came down to two things: precision and surprise. The surprise will be a topic for another time; today I want to focus on precision.

Precise writing inspires the kind of appreciation one might have for a well-tailored garment. It’s the triumph of a slippery idea, cut from the fray along its contours. It says exactly what it wants to say with just the right words. This justrightness is what separates good writing from bad; the latter can’t quite hit on the idea, so it just keeps shooting. And missing.

Precision means “exactness and accuracy of expression or detail,” but it’s more than this — it’s also an enactment of the aesthetic pleasure it describes. It leaves the mouth like a blown kiss, with lips pursed for the pre. Then comes the chomp of cise, ruthless and exact, claiming its prey before going in for the kill. It’s pure confidence.

It makes me think of incisors, and how trap is another name for mouth, which seems particularly apt here. What is conveyed through the mouth is sensual.

Chess & Infinity

The New Yorker ran a great profile last week of Magnus Carlsen, the 20-year-old from Norway who rose to No. 1 in the global chess rankings last year. It made me think some cool thoughts about the intersection between creativity and the infinite, but it will take me a minute to get there, so bear with me for a few paragraphs while I summarize the article.

Carlsen’s playing style is unusual; most master chess players rely heavily on computers for their training, but Carlsen finds them annoying. “It’s like playing someone who is extremely stupid but who beats you anyway,” he says.

Chess is mind-bogglingly complex; the number of possible moves in a chess game exceeds the number of atoms in the universe. It's easy to see the draw of a computer program that could turn this labyrinth into an algorithm.

But computers’ eagle-eye focus on checkmate offends Carlsen's sensibilities about chess. He loves to win, but chess to him isn't just about winning, it’s also about how you play the game. There are competing schools of thought about how to play chess, but Carlsen’s approach isn’t grounded in any of them; he plays by a logic that is immanent to the game before him. He says he likes to have an "all-over sense of the board," heeding the situation, the mood of his opponent, the temptation of whim. It's an emergent strategy, based on feeling things out.

Computers aren't affected by affect, which is what Carlsen seems to enjoy most about chess. One of his proudest moments comes during a game he didn't even win — near death, he executes a series of moves that closes the game in a draw:

"I just thought I'd never seen this combination before, this theme. There’s no better feeling than discovering something new." ...He had 'created something special,' a small legacy of intuition and feeling that no computer or trainer had forecast for him.

This singular feeling of discovery isn’t limited to chess, of course. What Carlsen is describing is creativity — and the anxiety and thrill of finding a solution where there is no guarantee that one exists. I feel the same thing when I’m writing: what if there’s no answer? There isn’t one. You have to make it up, and when you do, it’s with the pleasure of having created “something special” — something truly new.

But you can't make up just anything. As my middle school English teacher told me, you can say anything you want about a text so long as you back it up with evidence. The possibilities are literally — and limitedly — infinite. An argument can't be random — it has to heed the demands of the text, to feel out the confines of the limited infinity dwelling between the covers.

Chess offers a similar infinity. Each game shapes itself as it plays out by a multiplicity of forces: yes, the possible moves already outnumber the atoms of the universe, but Carlsen has so much more to consider: how many games into the tournament is he? Is his opponent fatigued? Is Carlsen himself bored, and if so, would playing poorly for a few rounds revive him? The article even mentions that during one key game, Carlsen sips orange juice while his opponent drinks tea — as if this, too, mattered.

Being creative feels like sipping from infinite, which sounds like some kind of drug. One that we should all do more of.

Rice Reversal

In my last post, I thought about the part of a person that never changes (the word “part” somehow diminishes my point, but I won’t linger on it). This week, a bowl of rice shifted my attention to the part that does.

Monday night I came home after work and made myself dinner. I didn’t have much food in the house so I made my fallback meal: a bowl of rice. There’s hardly anything I find more comforting than a big bowl of grain topped with plenty of olive oil and salt. And I can put away a surprising amount of rice for my size. At dinner I’m the last one fingering sticky globs of it from the rice cooker, long after I’ve abandoned the half-eaten steak on my plate. It’s not that I don’t like steak—nothing could be further from the truth—it’s just that rice is so easy to eat. I could eat rice forever. I’m a bottomless pit, and a happy one.

But on this particular night, something wasn’t right in my bowl of rice, something that no amount of fancy olive oil or salt could remedy. The rice tasted dirty, it tasted empty, it tasted sour. It tasted like a premonition of itself sitting in my stomach, poorly digested. I poured more oil, sprinkled more salt, but by some black magic the rice refused to accept any flavor. Still, I finished it all, and all night I could taste it from the inside out.

The next morning, stomach still reeling from the aching betrayal of my old standby, I had another problem: what to pack for lunch? I’m a runner; carbs are a mainstay. I felt lost; I longed to fall back on a tried-and-true rice-based meal, something I could assemble by rote. But no—the memory and the sensation of the rice persisted persuasively.

I made bacon and eggs. At the office, I dipped the crispy shards of pork fat into the oozing globes of yolks, and all was well. I made it again the next day, and enjoyed it just as much. And when the bacon ran out, I fried chard in its leftover fat, and poured some heavy cream on top for good measure.

Now, I should stop here for a minute, because I don’t want to sound like one of those nutritional naysayers waxing poetic about deep-fried pork belly in a show of challenging the low-fat dogma. That’s all well and good, but it’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about knowing what serves you—in the Nietzschean sense—and enacting it.

This is not always a simple thing. Rice served me quite well until a distinct moment on Monday night when, suddenly, it didn’t. Perhaps it will serve me well again tomorrow. But I’m not content to just leave it at that, at listen to your body, and it will all work out.

Listen to your body. I’ve always had trouble with this maxim. For one thing, I’ve listened to my body all the way to a couple of stress fractures. Of course, each time I ended up in the MRI tube I berated myself for not listening to my body: why did I go on that long run when my shins were sore? Why did I do that race when I was tired? But there have been plenty of other times when I indulged the urge to run as much as I pleased, and nothing broke.

But the even larger problem with listening to your body is this: how can I listen to what I am? Wouldn’t that make me separate from myself? Isn’t that like saying: listen to the listening?

Listen to the listening. I’m not sure if I mean that as a way to prove that listening to your body is preposterous, or as a kind of zen koan, something that sounds impossible but makes sense on some deeper level.

And that’s all I got.

Some Thoughts on Souls

The awakened and knowing say: body I am entirely, and nothing else—and the soul is just a word for something about the body.
-Nietzsche

The first time I encountered Nietzsche was in this quote, printed as a chapter heading to an anorexia memoir I read when I was 13. I was instantly smitten.

Years later, I’ve still never read the quote in its original context, so forgive me if I’m missing something, but here’s how I read it: The body is limited, yet vast. It’s all that I am entirely, and in case that wasn’t clear: and nothing else. And the soul? Just a word. It makes me think of another beloved quote, this one from Frida Kahlo: “I hope the exit is joyful, and I hope I never come back.” What devotion! What bravery!

It’s possible that the memoirist meant the Nietzsche quote to be a bitter reminder of the warped anorexic reality where body is everything—but I don’t think so. I think she saw in it what I did: a beautiful idea, made even more beautiful for its terrifying consequences.

So for a while, I was very anti-soul: souls are for pussies, I thought. For people who need to believe in something that lives behind and beyond the body—something without the cumbersome limitations of weight and mortality, that goes on forever without memory or desire. I don’t want to live like that: with a body as mere baggage. I prefer a body that I inhabit fully, even if it means I have nothing left when it’s all over.

I remember that the New York Times criticized the memoir for being too bleak, for not offering enough hope. And it wasn’t really offering hope—it was offering reality, which in this case meant exquisitely rendered suffering. But I didn’t find her story bleak, and I don’t find the idea of a soulless body bleak either. Of course, when I think too hard about death, I end up with the same existential nausea as everyone else. But there’s something exciting about embracing that emptiness, so I take my stand with Frida and with Friedrich.

But something I heard on NPR the other day made me reconsider my reading of the word soul. They were interviewing an expert on aging. She said that when people get older, they don’t change—they become more of what they are. If you’re wise at 27, you’ll be wiser at 97. And if you’re a bitter young man, you’ll be a bitter old one, too.

That resonated. I thought of a body drying out as it aged, losing the lubrication of youth and becoming not just more wrinkled, but more saturated. Tasting more strongly of itself.

And I thought of my friend Lexi, an artist in New York who I’ve known since kindergarten. Everything about her shares some common thread of Lexiness. I recognize it in her work, her handwriting, her voice, her walk, in every room she’s lived in, and it hasn’t changed in the 20 years I’ve known her.

People do change. They grow up, get religion, get jaded, get married. But there’s also something that doesn’t change, and personality isn’t a strong enough word to describe it. It’s more physical than that.

What is the thing that doesn't change? Looking back to the Nietzsche quote, I see now that it’s not dismissing the soul so much as offering a different way to use the word. Instead of the soul being a life raft to something beyond the body, it’s a word for something of the body. What about the body? The way it coheres.

This Is What Sex Looks Like

I. TWO CLIFFHANGERS. CIRCA 1994

My family is on a skiing trip in Vail, Colorado. My mom rents the movie Cliffhanger and puts it on the hotel room TV for my two younger siblings and me. In the opening scene, a man and woman are suspended by ripcord over an expanse of snowy mountains thousands of feet below. The woman's equipment malfunctions and she slips; the man grabs her hand. She loses his grip, and is now held only by a rapidly failing plastic clip. She gazes up at him in panic, both of them full aware of her impending doom.

But there are technical problems; the screen goes to static. We call the front desk and they send up a technician. He switches the mode from VCR to cable as he works, and two adolescent figures appear on the screen, boy and girl. They sit on a bed in a darkened room. They kiss. The boy asks the girl if she's ready. She is. He turns a switch, and illuminates a string of Christmas lights over the headboard. They start to undress, pause awkwardly, and turn their backs to each other before they continue.

I am riveted. The actors don't appear much older than my nine years. I know from somewhere deep in my being what is about to happen, and I need to see it. But my mom snaps at the technician to get this pornography off the screen—there are children in the room. He complies, fixes the VCR, and we return to the dangling woman, who is dead in minutes.

II. FARGO. 1996

I am at my grandparents' house. My cousins and I go through the movies our parents have rented that week, and choose Fargo. I'll grow to love the Cohen Brothers, but as an eleven year-old, the humor is lost on me and I'm bored.

That is, until we get to the scene with the hookers in the hotel room: two men, two hookers, two twin beds, one pair in each. Up until now, my idea of sex has been of man and woman embracing one another and rolling around in bed—literally rolling, like a log rolling down a hill. It doesn't occur to me that any dynamism involved, but Fargo is about to show me otherwise. Instead of clamping onto the men and slipping beneath the sheets to commence with the rolling, these women sit upright astride the men, bouncing—bouncing!—up and down. I am slightly disgusted but also enthralled.

* * *

The first sex scene piqued my curiosity but left me unsatisfied. My mom's intervention denied me the opportunity to get a glimpse, and I have a feeling the film wouldn't have been very generous with the details, either; these were teenagers, after all. But I wanted to see what sex looked like—all kids do. My friends and I would look up sex in the dictionary, hoping for a clue, but like another three letter word—God—it points to something so vast that it's almost meaningless.

The sex scene in Fargo took a concept and gave it a body—four bodies, in fact, engaging in the act of sex simultaneously, graphically, unmistakably. This was what I had hoped for during that brief interruption to Cliffhanger. It wasn't about love, or even desire—it was about sex, and what sex looks like.

I don't recall any written sex scenes that made such an impression on me as a kid, which is surprising, since I was a precocious reader and had more access to graphic adult material in books than I did in films. But the sex I encountered in novels was probably couched in innuendo, in metaphor. I'll bet I passed over some of the more artfully constructed sex scenes without even realizing that they were supposed to have been sex scenes at all.

The one written sex scene I do remember—in a book my mom gave me about how to be a writer—didn't actually contain any sex. In the chapter about writing sex scenes, it instructed budding authors to get a little creative with the act. Don't be so expected, so banal, it urged. There was an example of a "good" sex scene (I almost feel like "sex" belongs in quotation marks too). A woman asks a man if he has ever held a raw egg. She breaks one in his hand, and he describes how it feels for the runny white to slide between his fingers. Something weighty and important was being communicated, something that could not be conveyed by a straightforward description of the sexual act. I felt like a joke was being told that I didn't quite get—it was slippery and off-putting, like the egg itself.

While the humor in Fargo might have been over my head, the sex scene was not—there was no mistaking what was going on in the two hotel beds. Those bouncy hookers took my curiosity and shoved it down my throat in a way that almost made me want to gag: there was something repulsive in the way they bounced so nonchalantly and openly, panting alongside one another like animals.

* * *

Now I have a full-fledged sex life of my own, but my childhood frustration with the bigness and vagueness of the word "sex" persists. I don't see how a single word can encompass such conflicting encounters, such cacophony of emotion, and still hold meaning. The word doesn't contain the experiences it references.

I keep a mental (and written) list of everyone I've slept with, and people sometimes tell me this is silly—that a blowjob is just as intimate as intercourse. I think that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Holding hands with my middle school boyfriend while I rode his skateboard down the street was more intimate than the sex I barely remember having on the last night of summer in Yosemite. Should I put that on my list?

I suppose I could make one list for all the intimate encounters, one for all the non-intimate ones, and one for everything in between. But at a certain point, this exercise would render me list-less, with separate accounts of the radical particularity of each encounter. And the list was supposed to show me how these elements hung together as one. In many ways, they don’t.

You could say that this shows the failure of the word “sex” to serve as an appropriate category for my experiences. But this would be denying the ability of language to do more than just categorize—it also performs. The point of the list was not to simply catalogue intimacy but to enact it—to make something out of language that did more than just reference and describe the past. I want to make a list that is as vivid and surprising as the sex it points to. I want to find language that surprises and delights and disturbs and disgusts, that is as viscous and raw as the egg it describes.

On Running into One Another.

I went on a run in the rain yesterday. It was coming down hard, and windy too—the ground was slippery, the sky was dark, and very few people were out braving the streets of Berkeley. Descending Euclid Avenue at the end of the run, the wind picked up and I started to get worried. What if my hands go numb? What if I slip? What if it gets colder? Luckily, I cut this line of inquiry short with another question: am I in pain right now? And honestly, the answer was no.

I ask myself this a lot when I’m running, usually when the conditions are fine and I’m just bored. Is there anything wrong with how I’m feeling right this very moment? Occasionally the answer is yes—like the time I was running intervals around the track and I felt the soul-crushing sensation of localized tenderness in my foot that every runner dreads. But far more often, the answer is no. Most of the time, running feels just fine, and I just have to remind myself that I’m okay.

It’s a practice of genuine self-awareness—not some quasi-self-awareness based on external cues like the weather or what I ate for breakfast. Those things can have an effect, but feeling defies reason. Sometimes it’s sunny and I feel shitty. And on this particular run, it was pouring out and I felt better than ever.

* * *

Sometimes I get jealous of myself. I’ll be sitting at home alone, remembering that night a few weeks ago when I was happily romping around between the sheets with so-and-so. How lucky I was! To have all that unmitigated contact with skin! And kissing! And ear-nibbling! Why didn’t I appreciate it more? And oh, to be doing that right now…

Then I’ll stop myself because, hey, he didn’t call me today. Maybe that means he doesn’t like me. Maybe I was just a conquest, a rebound, a drunken mistake. I shouldn’t set myself up for disappointment. I should pick up a book, cook a meal, go on a run—anything to stop thinking about this.

The tension between the reverie and the worry is enough to make anyone woozy. I can never seem to remember the little trick that comes in handy when I’m running: how do I really feel about this person? When I stop to consider this question, I often find that my memories are more powerful than the experiences they seek to recreate. That it was more about uncertainty than ecstasy. That I looked at him sideways and thought his feet smelled funny and he was too blonde and he talked too much. Or not enough. The point is: I don’t know you very well. And may or may not want to get to know you better.

And why all this anxiety over someone who I might not even like? Why am I thinking so hard about what he wants, and wanting that to be me, when actually maybe I don’t even want him? When you merge too quickly, it’s easy to disappear.

Because when two realities merge, it can be quite jolting. One minute I was complimenting you on your shoes and the next minute you were asking me if I had come. Yes, thank you, but wait, what? Do I know you from somewhere?

That’s pretty much how I always do it, and I’m not very well-practiced in the alternative, whatever it is. Getting to know each other slowly, over time? Like dating, or courtship, or something? It all seems so antiquated. Maybe I should just accept that that’s not how things are done in this day and age.

But the way they are done feels like the time I crashed into a walker when I was running fast on the track. He didn't move out of the way, and he didn't acknowledge what had happened. It was weird. But then, why didn't I acknowledge it either? Because it is really weird, isn’t it? It can’t be just me.