The Abiding Miracle
Or, you're so paranoid, you probably think this essay is about you
The Sunday Letter #35
In light of the times, you may be wondering whether hope is still worthwhile. I am too.
In 2002, the late queer theorist Eve Sedgwick published Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You. The essay famously argues that too many critics and theorists were trained to be constantly suspicious, assigning bad faith to every opponent rather than adopting a reparative, loving worldview in which to relate to others. Sedgwick suggests that their paranoid reading of the world was based on their fear that bad news must “be always already known” in order to pre-empt its pain.
We’re afraid of taking a “reparative” approach, Sedgwick argues, because worldviews based on pleasure and amelioration are seen as less rigorous. After all, the paranoid position is borne from the belief that self-delusion needs to be shocked out of people in order to provoke global revolution. Sedgwick warns against this view, though she admits she frequently adopts it. After all, there can be terrible surprises, but there can also be good ones. Hope, she notes, can be fracturing, and traumatic, but it can also help us to organize the fragments that it creates. Can paranoia say such a thing?
In 2021’s Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, Olivia Laing writes,
“I think the act of bearing witness is an act of love. There’s no need for heaven: the pearly gates, the cherubim and seraphim, the light beyond the sun. It is the protean body, come and gone, that’s the abiding miracle.”
*
Last night at a Halloween party my friend was telling me that she got too stoned recently and found herself crying to a TikTok of AI portraits of Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber in an imaginary future together. She showed me the video, in which Gomez and Bieber pose from Instagram-worthy angles, holding babies and wearing eerie, uncanny valley smiles.
“I know people say AI isn’t really art and I know about paranormal relationships and all that,” my friend says, holding Bieber’s oily eyes in her hand, “But this is just the happiest I’ve ever seen him.”
*
Unlike paranoia, reparation asks us to consider whether the future may be different from the past. Laing writes,
“Is art resistance? Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it’s worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises.”
The protean body, come and gone.
Is AI art really art? It depends. Can AI plant a garden to stop a war? Can AI bear witness? Can AI tend to paradise?
*
I’ve been trying not to think anyone or anything is beyond repair. I’m sure I fail at this constantly. Maybe I extend good faith to the wrong people, people who don’t deserve it. Maybe some would say I don’t deserve it.
The words of Leroy Walker Senior, whose son Joey died in a mass shooting last week in Maine, keep washing over me. In the depths of his grief, he cries out with forgiveness and understanding. How to aspire to the depths of his grace?
*
There’s a massive steel statue of a cougar that looms on the corner of a downtown street. Every time we walk past it, my dog cowers in fear. I think she might understand art better than any of us.
*
You may be surprised to learn that political scientists are trained to write much like fiction writers. A few of the writing rules that I internalized, to varying degrees of success:
Don’t end a paragraph with someone else’s words.
The first sentence of each paragraph should tell you the whole story.
Tell the reader the ending right at the beginning.
It’s okay to admit something’s outside the scope of your argument when you don’t know what to say.
The best critical essay isn’t the one that ridicules its opponent: it’s the one that tries very seriously to understand it.
*
In Before Sunset, Céline says to her soon-to-be lover Jesse that if there is a God, it resides in “this little space between us,” gesturing to the charged air separating the two. Magic, she says, is derived from trying to understand what someone is sharing with you. “The answer must be in the attempt,” she declares. And truly, there is nothing holier than the attempt.
You may be surprised that I will end this essay on someone else’s words, despite that being Rule #1. I don’t always abide by my own rules, nor do I have many answers, which would be outside the scope of my argument anyway.
You may be paranoid and think this essay is about you. Maybe it is. Maybe it’s about me. Maybe it’s about all of us.
I am not perfect in my attempts, failing often and foremost even in my most intimate relationships. To be generous in understanding, to repair with a sense of the future rather than the past. The answer, I suppose, must be in the attempt.
This week’s recommendations
Mixed Feelings on how “the celebrity memoir has not only become a rite-of-passage, it’s become a calculated opportunity for a rebrand.” Should we read Britney’s memoir for the book club???
I could not read Jia Tolentino’s eulogy for her dog Luna without sobbing into my own dog’s fur:
She walked me through the entrance of this edifice of adulthood; she waited patiently for me to figure out its labyrinths. She stayed with us until we had our two children. She taught me the thing that brought me to them—that there was private transcendence in care and obligation. She made me feel that love could always be sure and easy. She got us here, and then she faced her head into the corner, and now we go on without her. How?
Literary It Girl discourse, which was all over Twitter last week when some decried it as a sign of the end times of publishing and/or pretty privilege (?) and others labelled it genius stunt marketing. Would love to hear thoughts on this one. After all, maybe the real ~Literary It Girls~ were the friends we made along the way.
Joan Baez and Jane Fonda in conversation. Two queens gossiping, loving, and reminiscing? A blessing for us all: “By the way, I did not sleep with your ex-husband.”
Congratulations to Gertie the Chihuahua on her well-deserved win of the 25th annual Great PUPkin costume contest. A future It Girl in the making, Gertie’s face is giving I don’t even know why these other girls bother at this point…
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a beautiful post, thank you <3